No sooner did the French try and take over Egypt in 1798 than Mohamed Ali Pasha centred his empire in Cairo. Ottomans and Mamelukes -- the latter notoriously massacred in the Citadel -- both gradually disappeared, and advances on the other side of the Mediterranean, glimpsed in Bonaparte's presence, were fast capitalised on. Under the Pasha a new kind of creature was born: the European-educated effendi; generations of suit-donning, more or less secular intellectuals have since assumed the often trying position of conscience of the nation. By the end of the 1940s, with the country under British occupation and Mohamed Ali's progeny weaker and more ineffective than ever, it was left to the young military men to wage a coup that would soon grow into a revolution -- and a fully independent Egypt to be ruled by the fellahin emerged for the first time. For his part Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the pivotal character in this story, was influenced by Tawfik El-Hakim's novel 'Awdat Al-Roh (Return of the Spirit, 1933), in which the leading dramatist and thinker prophesied the resurrection of a strong and sovereign Egypt, quoting the ancient Book of the Dead to drive his point home. 'Awdat Al-Roh had been a beautifully written and deeply entertaining work of narrative in which the future of the country figured only in the most fleeting manner, but in 1972, within two years of the death of Nasser, El-Hakim wrote his notoriously revisionist political memoir 'Awdat Al-Wa'i (Return of Consciousness), in which he contended that through the (admittedly dictatorial) Nasser years (1954-1970), Egyptians had lost their consciousness, following a string of illusions of grandeur and suffering horrendous defeat in the July 1967 war with Israel. El-Hakim was criticised principally for having not had the courage to object to Nasser's policies until the death of the latter, and the fact that (like almost every intellectual at the time) he was ostensibly a supporter of the regime. Nasser's achievement on the cultural front was paradoxical. Intellectuals had not supported the Revolution until the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in the wake of the Tripartite Aggression in 1956, when left-leaning figures like the lyricist and cartoonist Salah Jahin, the short story writer Youssef Edriss, the painter Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar and the filmmaker Youssef Chahine -- among many, many others -- became staunch supporters of Nasser and, working within the framework of a fully centralised and controlled apparatus, sung the regime's praises whenever possible. But in expressing their support for the regime intellectuals were co-opted; the Islamist opposition was crushed brutally, and a Soviet-brokered deal eventually neutralised the communists. The 1960s, which climaxed horribly in 1967, were among the darkest years in the history of Egypt from the point of view of political freedom, but with generous patronage from the government and an essentially sincere belief in Nasser on the part of great figures like the diva Umm Kolthoum, they were also a golden age for the arts. By 1970, when Nasser died, the picture was about to radically alter. President Anwar El-Sadat's Open Door Policy and his insistence on peace with Israel sharply polarised intellectuals: while some welcomed the free market economy and what little more freedom it brought to the cultural sphere, others felt Sadat had betrayed the noble nationalist principles of the Revolution. Others still deplored the rise in religious fundamentalism encouraged by Sadat to counter the influence of his left-wing detractors. After Sadat was killed -- ironically by the very Islamists whom he gave free reign -- the Revolution gradually turned into a multifaceted legacy open to interpretation. Despite a growing feeling that it was a mistake from the start, July 1952 remains an inspiration for everyone: those who criticise it, and those who deplore the erosion of its principles after Sadat. Like Hemingway's Paris, it is a movable feast: an unavoidable reference point with as many aspects as those who look.
