Gradually, the glory that was Greek classicism dwindled in Alexandria to work that Forster judged “had no lofty aims. It was not interested in ultimate problems nor even in problems of behavior, and it attempted none of the higher problems of art. To be graceful or pathetic or learned or amusing or indecent, and in any case loyal—this sufficed.”
The decline continued into the fourth century AD, when Christians began to shove the Pagans aside. Appalled by what they considered to be the library’s licentious contents, the Christians destroyed the building, burned its books and constructed a monastery on the site.
It was doubtful that these cautionary events dimly occurred to the UNESCO fundraisers and Egyptian cultural mavens who in 1987 decided to reincarnate the “Mother” Library. They viewed their project as a move to put Alexandria back on the cultural map, with the Bibliotheca as “the world’s window on Egypt and Egypt’s window on the world.” An impressive structure of glass and metal, it was shaped to resemble a radiant half-sun shimmering behind an infinity pool. As I approached, a team of men sidestepped up its slanted facade, pushing floor polishers that buffed the library to a handsome gleam.
Inside, the brilliance dimmed, the air was chill and the stacks had curiously few books. It opened in 2002 with shelf space for eight million volumes, but it held just 540,000, most of them in Arabic or English. Only 10 percent were in other languages and none in Hebrew. There were, however, plenty of computer terminals. One local expatriate characterized the Bibliotheca as “just a big Internet café, bloody elitist and too expensive for locals to get in.”1
The conference room reserved for Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s lecture looked out through blue-tinted glass to the greasy harbor and a crumble of biscuit-colored islands. It occurred to me that the metaphor about the library’s being a window on the world and vice versa was unfortunate. Whether you turned outward or inward, there wasn’t much to see.
Justin Siberell, the U.S. consul and director of the American Center, welcomed me to Alex and introduced me to Dr. Sahar Hamouda, deputy director of the Alexandria Mediterranean Center. She invited me to return to the library in two days to talk with her about the city’s Cosmopolitan Era. Then I joined a dozen people sitting at a varnished table, all of them Americans in Egypt on a lightning-like junket sponsored by a cultural initiative called the Big Read Program. Representing the South Dakota Council on World Affairs, Arts Midwest and similar not-for-profit organizations, they had landed in Cairo last Saturday, were spending thirty-six hours in Alexandria and would fly home this weekend.
Apologizing for my ignorance, I asked Regina G. Cooper of Alabama’s Huntsville-Madison County Public Library to explain the Big Read Program.
“We take a book each year,” she said, “and have everybody in the community read it and talk about it. We started off in Huntsville with The Great Gatsby. We figured it helped that Zelda Fitzgerald came from just up the road in Montgomery, Alabama. Second year we read To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s set in Alabama, and Harper Lee lives nearby.”
“So you keep things local.”
“Not at all. Last year we read The Maltese Falcon. There’s no Alabama connection. We thought a mystery might be more popular with men. Next year we’re doing Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner.”
“Why Mahfouz?”
“I don’t know. The National Endowment for the Arts chose the book, not us. That’s why we’re in Egypt.”
When Ibrahim Abdel Meguid entered the room, he didn’t stand on ceremony nor at a dais. He seated himself at the table with the rest of us. Big and fleshy, with curly silver hair, gold-rimmed glasses and an engaging smile, he was a man in his sixties, confident of his ability to win over strangers. Though his English was far from perfect, he never appeared frustrated not to be speaking his own language in his hometown. Friendly himself, he counted on the friendly attention of his audience.
He talked a bit about his best-known novel, No One Sleeps in Alexandria, and recited lines from the Federico Garcίa Lorca poem that was the source of its title. “No one sleeps in heaven/ No one sleeps in the world. / No one sleeps/ No one / No one.” Then he named the foreign writers who had influenced him. Among them he mentioned Durrell, which surprised me.
Set during roughly the same period as the Quartet, Meguid’s novel is generally regarded as a gritty corrective to Durrell’s lush, romantic vision of the city. Narrated from the point of view of poor Egyptians, No One Sleeps in Alexandria mixes realism and magic, religion and profanity, the folklore of northern and southern Egypt, rural and urban myths, Christian and Muslim theology. It quotes the Koran, the Bible, Durrell, Cavafy and Tagore, and in the style of John Dos Passos, it grounds the action in historical context by reprinting snippets from contemporary newspapers.
Inevitably, Meguid discussed the Cosmopolitan Era, which ended when Nasser seized power in 1956, nationalized the Suez Canal and expelled most foreigners. “The city was clean back then,” Meguid said, “and women wore Western fashions and there was café life and jazz music in the nightclubs. Now everything has changed. People come today and don’t find Alex; they don’t find a mythical city like Samarkand. It’s crowded with peasants from rural villages and people who return after working in the Persian Gulf and bring with them Wahhabi ideas. The city has lost its tolerance.”
When Justin Siberell announced that Meguid would answer questions, my instinct was to sink down in my seat. In my experience, Q&A sessions in North Africa can be skin-crawling embarrassments. Once, in Tunis, after I had lectured on Hemingway, a prim young woman in a headscarf stood up in front of a large audience of students and professors, and asked me, “Is it true in the United States, as I have read, that when a black woman has an orgasm she screams, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’?”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know where to look. No Tunisian professor or U.S. Embassy official offered the mercy of intervention. I weakly muttered, “Where did you read that?”
“In a novel called Trailer Camp Women.”
“I’m not familiar with the book. Let’s talk about this later.”
At the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, however, the Big Read group tossed nothing but softball questions at Meguid, and once he grooved his swing, he could have gone on for hours had Justin Siberell not interrupted to say that a bus was waiting to take the Big Readers to the airport and back to Cairo. Profuse in their gratitude, they each gave Meguid a business card. This was a ritual popular throughout North Africa. Everybody handed out cards and expected them in return. When I apologized that I didn’t have a card, people looked at me as if I must be an imposter.
I invited Meguid to join me for tea and more talk about Egypt and literature. He suggested that we meet at the Cecil Hotel, and I assumed he was staying there too. But as we settled at a table in the lobby, he made it clear that he was registered at the Hilton in the Green Plaza Mall. “This place has good tradition,” he said of the Cecil. “But Green Plaza has more life.”
The city’s center of gravity was shifting in that direction, he said, out to the suburbs and the malls and gated communities. Although Meguid’s fiction has always been identified with Alexandria, he hasn’t lived there in decades. “When I publish my first short story,” he said, “I move right away to Cairo. I want to be at the center. I worked thirty years in the Culture Ministry because it gave me time to write.” Like many Egyptian artists, he had been a state employee until his retirement.
Did it rankle him, I asked, that Westerners, when they thought of Alexandria at all, knew the city through non-Arabic writers—Cavafy,
