Cairo: The City Victorious by Max Rodenbeck Picador £20 in UK
At a cocktail party in Cairo many years ago, I came across the radio announcer who told Egyptians during the 1967 war that their air force had destroyed more than a hundred Israeli aircraft. In reality, they did not shoot down a single plane. It was the Israelis who had destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground.
So how, I asked the now retired radio anchorman, could he bring himself to tell such a bare-faced lie? "Mr Robert, you have to understand what we were going through at the time," he replied. "The truth was that we deserved to have shot down a hundred Israeli planes!"
And how many times, grinding through the Dickensian, foetid slums of downtown Cairo - ambushed in equal measure by the oven-like heat and the stench of overflowing sewers - has my taxi driver waved a hand in the direction of the cauldron-grey, cracked apartment blocks and declared in all seriousness that his city was "just like New York"? Maybe it was, back when the first 1930s American movies arrived in the Cairo picture houses, when New York was smaller and dirtier and when the Egyptian capital was cleaner and less crowded and still had trees lining its hot pavements.
Egypt's ability to delude itself is part of its charm and part of its tragedy. Societies which have hope are sure to flourish - and doomed to suffer. Cairo's antiquity seems to have locked the city into this unique combination of energy and illusion. A doctor explains to Max Rodenbeck in his history of Cairo that Egyptians live in an "as if" society. "We speak of rules as if we intend to follow them. Our government acts as if it were a democracy. Some of my colleagues got medical degrees by hook or by crook, but they behave as if they were learned practitioners, because they sat exams as if they had not bribed the examiners."
There is an element of theatre in all this. President Anwar Sadat would appear on Egyptian state television in a western-style jacket and tie, puffing contentedly on a pipe. But in the Nile Delta village where he was born, he could be seen in peasant robes with worry-beads in his hand. Which was the real Sadat? President Mubarak will lecture journalists on the democracy which Egypt supposedly enjoys, but sees nothing odd in the 96 per cent or 97 per cent of the vote he regularly gains in elections.
True, things used to be a lot worse. Rodenbeck, who lived in Cairo for more than a decade and worked for the Economist, has some pretty hair-raising tales of law and order in Mamluk Cairo. "Thieves were hanged. Rebels were beheaded or flayed alive. Murderers were sliced in two at the waist - after which procedure . . . the victim's top half could survive for as long as twenty minutes still talking." The 14th-century Emir Shaykhun devised a new torture: "He had henchmen bore holes in one rival's shaved head. Cockroaches were inserted in the holes. A brass cap was applied and slowly heated so that the insects would eat their way into the man's brain."
Human rights have improved a little since then. But Rodenbeck, who presumably wants his book to go on sale in Cairo, is a bit soft on Shaykun's successors. Although there are references to screams from the headquarters of Egypt's state security police cells and mass hangings, Mubarak is gently - almost grovellingly - described as "a man of good sense", "a stolid manager" who has "made few false promises" but has instead concentrated on solving Cairo's infrastructure problems. This is a bit like reading the state-run Al Ahram newspaper which once called me - after I had questioned the integrity of presidential elections - "a crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt".
At the risk of provoking the paper's wrath once more, I should add that Mr Rodenbeck does not mention the extrajudicial executions by the police in upper Egypt - "Islamist" militants shot in the head, Saddam-style, in front of their families - nor the treatment of radicals in prison. Former inmates have described to me how prison guards routinely give them women's names and then force the prisoners to rape each other as punishments.
But Rodenbeck doesn't romanticise the history of modern Egypt. In the 1940s, he reminds us - during Britain's supposedly benign rule - half of Cairo's children died of diarrhoea and malnutrition before the age of five and only one in seven Egyptians could read. Alas, only a small majority can read and write today; which is why Egyptian television is so all-powerful, the readership of serious literature so small. Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz earns more money from translation rights to his novels than he does from domestic publication of his work.
There is a wonderful moment in this book when the author tries to explain the work of the American expressionist painter Jackson Pollock to a desperately enthusiastic but utterly uninterested Cairo University student - he needs a degree, but has no interest in the subject. "The only thing I could get across was that a man in America randomly dribbled paint on large canvasses, and that certain pilgrims then worshipped these objects at museums and paid colossal sums for them. Even to me it sounded as fanciful as flying carpets." But if Rodenbeck can comprehend these cultural short-circuits, he seems unable to break free of the ever more suffocating journalistic vice of cliche.
I have written before in an Irish Times review about the cliche plague that seems to infect so many modern works of non-fiction, and even wondered whether a computer churns them out for the authors. While not literally true, I suspect the speed which the computer now allows the writer may be partly responsible. The faster you can compose words on a screen, the faster you write; and the faster you write, the greater the temptation to use facile, used-up words.
And this book is a particularly awful example of what happens to such an author. The early 19th-century Ottoman ruler Mohamed Ali was - heaven spare us - "a major player". Egypt's late 19th-century railway network - there were trains between Cairo and Alexandria before Sweden and Japan laid tracks - "expanded by leaps and bounds". Egypt's subsequent finances were a "hot potato". "Fun-loving" King Farouk was "cosseted by yes-men" when the British ambassador "rolled tanks" (why, for God's sake, do tanks always "roll"?) up to his palace. But Cairo "swallowed its pride".
There is more - much more - of this. Rommel retreats "helter skelter" after El Alamein, just as Cairo's traffic flyovers were later erected with "helter skelter" disregard for beauty. Farouk married a plump 16-year-old "as if his summer binge were not enough to keep tongues clucking". Nasser was "soft spoken and bookish" but "no lily-livered Candide". Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim, it turns out, is also "soft-spoken" (though this time with a hyphen). Kemal Ataturk, needless to say, is a "hard-drinking dictator". "Hard-headed" cops leave it to others to "smooth the ruffled feathers" of those involved in Cairo street fights. Commenting on Cairo's artistic talent, Rodenbeck praises the "slick virtuosity" of one musician, the "honeyed smoothness" of another. Beirut, of course, once had a "freewheeling lifestyle". And so it goes on. And on.
If this piss-poor stuff is going to continue turning up in books of this kind, then it's the end of journalism - as well as a supreme insult to every reader. Rodenbeck accuses the Egyptian press of soporific headlines and overblown reporting. He can talk.
Robert Fisk is Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent