Review: Maadi: The Making and Unmaking of a Cairo Suburb 1878–1962

Abstract

In Maadi: The Making and Unmaking of a Cairo Suburb 1878–1962, historian Annalise J. K. DeVries details the economic, social, and political history of the creation of the district of Maadi, a leafy residential area seven miles south of central Cairo. Hatched as a “garden city” by expatriate financiers in the late nineteenth century, the neighborhood was an affluent retreat from the hustle and bustle of the capital city for the majority of the twentieth century. As Cairo expanded exponentially to more than twenty million inhabitants, the luxurious villas of the past were demolished or transformed into apartments for middle-class Egyptians. DeVries provides a meticulous account of the planning, construction, maintenance, and overhaul of this residential area. Architectural historians may be somewhat disappointed, as the book is light on description and analysis of architectural styles and focuses more on the complex financial, social, and political networks that brought the suburb into being. The book’s substantial contribution is its exploration of how the Ottoman Empire’s legal and financial system of Capitulations wrought major architectural and urban design projects that persist to the present day.The book is organized into eleven short chapters in four parts, which proceed chronologically from the inception of the district in the late nineteenth century to “demolition” in the postcolonial era. In part 1, “Foundation,” DeVries recounts how the Egyptian Delta Land & Investment Company designed the district based on Ebenezer Howard’s garden city model and funded it through “a regional network of foreign merchants and entrepreneurs domiciled in Egypt” (27). These wealthy foreigners included British families who lived in the Levant for generations, Jewish Egyptians with foreign passports, and Greek financiers, all heavily involved in banking in Egypt in the late nineteenth century. Their foreign citizenship afforded them substantial economic privilege. The Ottoman Capitulations and the Mixed Courts exempted foreigners from local taxes and maintained a separate legal system for expatriates from 1876 to 1948, preserving their distinct status even after the Ottoman Empire’s end (3).Part 2, “Construction, Phase One,” explores how Maadi first attracted people with “cosmopolitan tastes” to this “semirural retreat” (45) and also how the district became a base for Australian soldiers during World War I. Delta Land, which created and maintained the district, included a cahier des charges in each deed of sale that outlined strict ordinances for homeowners, such as a villa’s maximum height and width and the requirement of a green hedge border. DeVries explains that during this period, the names of owners were mostly not Arabic; rather, Delta Land aimed to attract the expatriate community. The genteel environs were disturbed by World War I, which brought rowdy Australian troops and a violent prisoner of war camp to the area. After the war, Delta Land refocused its efforts on drawing more of the upper-middle-class Egyptian effendiya to Maadi. In the last chapter of part 2, DeVries recounts “the goat incident,” in which Thomas Dale, the director of Delta Land, discovered a young Egyptian boy tending a herd of goats, violating the cahier des charges prohibition of farmyard animals (82). However, the goats belonged to a prominent government official with significant political clout, and thus Dale was unable to enforce the rules of the company’s handbook. This anecdote sets the stage for the rising power of the local government as well as the expansion of the municipality of Cairo—two phenomena that would ultimately end Maadi’s semi-independent status after World War II.After a 1945 flood destroyed the ‘Izbit al-Basri village just outside Maadi, the Red Crescent Society invited the modern Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989) to design new homes for the village’s two thousand displaced working-class inhabitants. Drawing from Fathy’s book Architecture for the Poor (1973), DeVries describes how he borrowed techniques and forms from Nubian architecture in Aswan, Upper Egypt, to design the new village.1 He made a prototype home, including “vaulted ceilings, two large rooms, sleeping alcoves, built-in cupboards, a large loggia, and a courtyard” for the low cost of 164 Egyptian pounds (135). Shortsightedly, the Red Crescent committee chose a more conservative (and more expensive) plan and, sadly, destroyed Fathy’s prototype. This example, from part 3, “Construction, Phase Two,” exemplifies how while Maadi’s national effendiya class was rising, a more conservative community remained tied to the colonial past. In these three chapters, DeVries’s tone is adulatory of the multiconfessional, multinational community that existed in “harmony” (a word she uses frequently) between the two world wars. In chapter 7, “Confessional Intersection,” DeVries discusses the simultaneous 1930s construction of St. John’s Anglican church, the Meyr Biton Synagogue, and the Faruq I Mosque, but unfortunately, she does not include images of these three extant buildings. As more effendiya Egyptian residents arrived, the expatriates and the Egyptian Jewish families remained, drawn together through the Maadi Sporting Club, which provided leisure activities for the neighborhood’s residents.However, “ultimately, Maadi lost its autonomy,” writes DeVries (139). The end of the Capitulations in 1949, the Free Officers coup in 1952, and the Suez Canal crisis in 1956 fundamentally unsettled the affluent families who resided in Maadi. Part 4, “Overhaul,” details the intersection of economy and politics in the postwar period that ultimately led to Maadi being absorbed into the metropolis of Cairo, marking the “end of Maadi’s garden city existence” (142). DeVries focuses in particular on the experience of Maadi’s Jewish Egyptians, who left Egypt in large numbers after the creation of Israel in 1948 and in response to the pressure of “the mounting regional conflict” (175). She tells the stories of a few families, based on interviews, and notes that nostalgic “remembering the Muslim-Jewish harmony” was common among former Maadi residents (152). One famous Maadite was Edward Said, who was a member of the Sporting Club and attended Victoria College during his childhood. Victoria College itself represented a new direction for Maadi, as it was built in a modernist style by P. W. Poltock (163). Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab Socialist government eventually nationalized Delta Land in 1962, part of a project that also included major land reforms that stripped many Maadi residents of their sources of wealth. Chapter 11, “Demolition,” does not fully bring the book to the present day, but it gestures at the “dilapidated” villas that are no longer sustainable without the wealth and hired labor of the Capitulations classes.DeVries’s sound archival research is significant for the field of modern Egyptian history, and her writing is clear and easy to read. The major contribution of this book is its granular illustration of the ways in which the Capitulations legal system caused major material and physical transformations of urban and suburban spaces. These changes were led by wealthy families who did not fit easily into the binary of colonizer and colonized, such as the major Egyptian Jewish Italian banking families that DeVries describes. What disappointed me was that while DeVries beautifully presents archival and ethnographic evidence, she does not go the extra step to tie this research together into a larger claim about modernity in Egypt. I was left with many engaging questions, such as: How does Maadi’s construction and architecture fit into the larger story of modernism in Cairo, Egypt, and North Africa? How does this detailed economic and social story complicate our understanding of colonialism and decolonization? I visited Maadi often during my Cairo residency in 2011–12, and, despite a few dilapidated villas, it remained much greener and more affluent than most other areas of the city. Unfortunately, DeVries does not fully explain why this might be so, leaving out the half century between the nationalization of Delta Land and the Maadi of the twenty-first century.Moreover, as an art historian, I yearned for more and higher-quality images as well as more analysis and explanation of Maadi’s architecture. A more thorough architectural examination would have contributed much to scholarship on Egyptian architecture of the twentieth century, an understudied era. I encourage readers of this book to consult the “Maadi” section of Mohamed Elshahed’s recent Cairo since 1900, which details seven extant buildings in the district, including a modernist villa designed by Egyptian architect Sayed Karim (1911–2005).2 The intricate history that DeVries tells certainly gestures toward larger historical trends, but the book misses an opportunity to claim Maadi as a prime example of something bigger.This direct, clearly written account of the creation of the Cairo suburb of Maadi carefully explores the complicated financial, political, and social networks that contributed to the development of suburban space. As opposed to relating a strictly nationalist story of Egyptian elites, or a purely colonialist narrative of British administrators, DeVries tells a tale of affluent expatriates and Egyptians with foreign passports, charting the complexities of identity, wealth, and privilege in semicolonial early twentieth-century Cairo. DeVries’s book is a rich resource for those interested in how the privileged financial status of foreigners in colonial capitals shaped the modern built environment that remains today.