Trevor Mostyn - Coming Of Age In The Middle East

Coming of Age in the Middle East

Trevor Mostyn

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Trevor Mostyn 1987

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

Set in Bembo by Columns of Reading

ISBN 13: 978-0-71030-208-3 (hbk)

To Ann Mary Fielding, the novelist who inspired me to write

When I was a child, I spake as a child ;

but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly.

(I Corinthians 13:11-12)

I wish to offer my warmest thanks to Peter Hopkins who inspired me to write this book over lunch in a Riyadh hotel, and to Carol Gardiner who edited it not only with meticulous care and personal concern but also with a great feeling for the story and a great acumen for the issues involved. I am extremely grateful to Albert Hourani for reading the proofs.

This book does not aim to make any political statement. A simple record of my travels in the Middle East over a period of twenty years, it is intended faithfully to reflect the region as a catalyst to the development of my own life from carefree youth to maturity and marriage. It is not intended to praise or condemn any country although it will, I hope, reflect the love and respect that two decades of familiarity have bred in me for the Middle East and for so many of its peoples. As an Orientalist, I have attempted to describe these countries as I would describe England, my own country. Many of my closest friends, within this book and without, are Arab or Iranian and those who understand that friendship involves criticism and even healthy banter will, I know, forgive me for treating the region with honesty rather than flattery. What I have written is influenced by a certain feeling of belonging to the Middle East and by a sadness over the breakdown of values that its sudden exposure to the West has sometimes led to.

I flew into Cairo, a penniless student, on a bustling summers night in 1969. Egypts year-long war of attrition with Israel had turned the city into a place of gloom. There was an attempt at almost total blackout at night. Shops, hotels and public buildings were protected by anti-shrapnel brick walls which were clumsy obstacles to the boisterous crowds gabbling their ways through the rush-hour streets at dusk. My flight from Tobruk in Libya had left me with about 10. The rest of my Edinburgh University grant had been spent on my journey.

Just off Sulaiman Pasha Square is Sulaiman Pasha Street, now Talaat Harb Street. I saw a crooked sign in yellow above an anti-shrapnel wall with the simple words Golden Hotel written. Like all the buildings in central Cairo it was Rococo with crumbling, blackened stucco. Cairo was still a Victorian city, laid out in symmetrical squares and boulevards. It reflected the wish of the Khedive Ismail to make Cairo a copy of Paris after he had visited the International Exhibition there in 1867.

Ismail was the descendant of Mohammed Ali, the Albanian Ottoman officer who was to create a new Egypt and a dynasty which ended with King Farouk and Colonel Nassers revolution of 1952. He had taken one look at Haussmans Paris and decided to turn Cairo into a replica of it in two years to impress the crowned heads of Europe invited to attend the hedonistic celebrations to inaugurate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Ismail was, in particular, obsessed with the beauty of the Empress Eugnie, the wife of Napoleon III, and had a palace, the Gezira Palace in Zamalek, built for her by German architects. He also built an exquisite wooden opera house beside the Ezbekiya Gardens which were laid out by the Parisian landscape gardener Barillet-Deschamps. The opera house was supposed to be an exact copy of Milans La Scala and Verdi was commissioned to write Ada to be performed in it for the canals inauguration, but the score did not arrive in time and Rigoletto was performed instead.

Ismails dreams were in vain, for his spending led to Egypts bankruptcy and his own abdication which was followed by British rule under Lord Cromer. Nor was his infatuation with Eugnie, a notorious virgin, reciprocated. When Louis-Napoleon had asked the way to her bedroom in Paris she had promptly replied, By the chapel, sire, and to bed her he had been obliged to marry her and make her his empress. The Khedives relationship with the pious woman clearly remained platonic.

I was attracted by the simple name of the hotel and went behind the wall and inside. A tall Nubian bawwab or door-keeper, in striped and dirty gelebiah and with a beautiful, visionary face, leant against the heavy, metal-studded wooden door. At the top of the steps was a decayed wooden lift of the Belle Epoque. I went into the office on the left and saw the shiny bald head of an old man with big ears, bowed over a desk.

He glanced up from his paperwork and smiled a mischievous, winking smile. He wore a suit, tie and collar, all extremely grubby. I asked him for a room. He replied in an impeccable Oxford accent and with a paternal smile, Im sure we can arrange something for you. The cost of the room with shower was E2.50 (about 1.50). His name was Fares Seraphim and he has remained a close friend to this day. He had studied at Keble College, Oxford, and umpired the college cricket team. His family, an old Coptic one, had owned extensive lands around Minya in Lower Egypt as well as most of the buildings of which the Golden Hotel was one. Nasser, he explained, with a philosophical smile, expropriated us of nearly all our estates but thanks to bureaucratic bungling they forgot this building. I dont want to make a profit. Running this hotel is my hobby. I want this to be a happy family. In the Golden Hotel I was to find myself the only non-Arab. Almost all the guests were Palestinians. Some were members of Al-Fateh. By the end of the year several had been killed on raids into Israel, then still officially known on maps as Occupied Palestine.

Mohammed the bawwab and another Mohammed, the cleaning man, who had a squint eye, took me to my room. It was a dingy, smelly room and a naked light bulb dimly lit up the stained yellow walls. Cockroaches scampered around the floor of the shower. In those days I was used to much worse and I was delighted with the hotels cosiness. A mouse appeared in my room so I began leaving a piece of cheese by my door each day. The mouse recognised the concordat and collected its daily cheese but never annoyed me by running around the room or jumping on my bed.

During the first weeks of that baking summer I spent much of my time with two English friends from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. We were naive about Egypt. The Cairenes were friendly but the general atmosphere under Nasser was that of East European gloom. You could barely buy a razor blade in the shops and although I never saw the poverty I had seen in India the policy seemed to be one of bringing everyone down to an equal level of tolerable poverty. The poverty that came in the 1970s seemed more terrible. The gorgeous weddings at the Hilton that became common in Sadats era, and reminiscent of the corrupt period under King Farouk, were unheard-of under Nasser. The rich were keeping a very low profile.