Based on archival research, the Arabic press, and artist memoirs, this presentation argues that the origins of a popular entertainment district in Cairo can be traced back to elite investment in a curious building. Ordered by an elite Ottoman Egyptian, Muhammad Ali Celal in 1896 from the architect A. Lasciac, the Club des Princes housed a stage, relaxing rooms, and administrative offices. The building and the territory around it was bought and united with the waqf of Zeynep Hanım by the private administration of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II. This caused one of the most intriguing court process in the history of modern Egypt because Sait Halim Pasha, a rival of the khedive, was the administrator of that waqf. Legal history aside, the elite investment and common ownership made possible the creation of ‘Imad al-Din street which from the 1910s was the principle artery of Cairo entertainment. Around the Club theatres, casinos, revues were established catering to the rising Egyptian middling classes in Cairo. This also involved the move of fashionable nightlife from Azbakiyya to Tawfiqiyya. Next to the Club, the Ramses Theatre of Yusuf Wahbi and the theatre of Rihani were rivals from the 1920s and tried to cater art to the upper middle classes. This story demonstrates the dynamics of capitalist economics behind urban entertainment.

At the end of the Second World War some Egyptian architects, such as Sayed Karim, sought commissions from high-ranking patrons in order to recover from several years of professional uncertainty as the war raged. The Khedive Ismail issue of al-ʿImara architectural journal (1945) opens with a letter addressed to King Farouk. The letter boasts of Ismail’s enlightenment, long-term vision and his patronage of modernization projects. Sayed Karim’s presentation of Khedive Ismail’s role in modernizing Cairo was deeply informed by the contemporary moment from which Karim was writing. In defense of Ismail, Karim writes, “Critics of the Cairo Ismail built have focused on the appearances of things and have missed the core of his urban accomplishments that laid the ground for a modern city that will function for centuries to come.” The critics Karim speaks of are Europeans who have dismissed modern Cairo as merely "an eastern city dressed in western clothing." Writing in 1945 at a time when Cairo was in need of a new wave of urban modernizations and reforms, Ismail’s Cairo presented Karim with a tangible historical precedent for what he sought to achieve. By listing the particular urban interventions carried out nearly a century earlier and pointing to their benefits on the city’s development, Karim began to develop his own list of possible interventions in 1940s Cairo. Ismail’s Cairo provided Karim with a prehistory for his urban design aspirations.

In Kamal al-Shaikh’s 1954 suspense film, Hayat aw Mawt, a pharmacist mistakenly dispenses a poisonous compound rather than the medication a young girl had been sent to collect for her father. The camera follows the child and the pharmacist’s emissary on different routes through Cairo with a rising sense of urgency rooted in the city chemist’s shop: who will reach her father first to kill or to save him? Pharmacists or chemists became more prominent as urban figures with the founding of medical schools in early 19th-century Cairo and the move of the College of Medicine from Abu Zaabal to Qasr al-Aini, and the increasing power of chemical compounds to kill or save elevated the position of the pharmacist, though to a lower level than the heroic doctor. In terms of everydayness, however, it was not the doctor’s office but the pharmacist’s shop, with its vitrine displaying the sparkling clean, scientific interior of the new apothecary, that most people saw as they moved around the city. By the 1890’s, foreign chemists were joined by Egyptian pharmacists in spreading the gospel of science over superstition. The centuries-old city habit of going first not to a doctor, but to a traditional botanist's shop, was transferred to pharmacies through public education in schools, print, and images about the benefits of new “scientific” compounds. Part of a larger project on the transition from botanical to synthetic chemical pharmacology in Europe, Ottoman territories, and Egypt through the 1920’s, this paper examines pharmacists as transitional figures in popular understandings of medicine, as embodiments of a new masculinity based in scientific expertise, and as cosmopolitans of science featuring in the modern display culture of downtown Cairo. Analytically, the paper engages recent work by Nancy Gallagher on the intermingling of foreign and local goods in Egypt’s marketplace; Eissenstadt’s and downstream ideas of multiple modernities; Marwa el-Shakry’s exploration of a universal language of science expressed in local venaculars; and work such as Wilson Chacko Jacob’s and Lucie Ryzova’s on Egyptian masculinities. Evidence is drawn from curriculum and textbooks of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the College of Medicine, professional publications of instructors and practitioners, advertisements and feature articles in illustrated magazines, coverage in The Lancet, still and moving photography, travel guides, and comparative empirical work done in these sources for Beirut and Istanbul.

One year before his death, the prominent Egyptian intellectual Lewis ‘Awad (1915-1990) published his memoir entitled Awraq al-‘Umr. In a shocking confession style, ‘Awad gives a detailed account of his visits to the brothel in downtown Cairo while he was a college student in 1930s. Born in al-Minya province and educated in Cairo, Cambridge and Princeton universities, ‘Awad was the first intellectual of his stature to speak openly about his experiences in the brothel as what downtown Cairo offered him and his generation of provincial young men who came to the capital city seeking modern education in the newly restructured Ahliyya University, Cairo University now. Taking Lewis Awad’s autobiography as a starting point, this paper studies downtown Cairo as a site for both moral and nationalist clashes in colonial and post-colonial periods. Based on memoirs, archival research, and the contemporary press, this study explores the underworld of downtown Cairo brothels through the eyes of students and provincial young men in the last century. It discusses how having downtown Cairo as a destination for entertainment and leisure time contributed to a subculture where particular sex-workers won the nickname sadiqat al-talaba, or the friend of students. The nickname meant attracting young inexperienced men to receive sexual services in safe inexpensive brothel. Meanwhile, the concentration of licensed brothels in downtown adjacent to foreign-owned businesses and hangouts turned the area into a site of clashes between young nationalists and foreign soldiers in the colonial period. Yet, when the state outlawed sex-work altogether, the Downtown Cairo area continued to host illegal sex-work in the memories of ‘Awad’s generation and according to state security reports.

Efendi masculinity emerged in the first half of the twentieth century through distinctive social practices, one of which was urban mobility. Most of efendi families lived in what we may call the “middle city” of Cairo. This area stretched from 'Ataba in the north to Sayyida Zaynab in the south, and included the area formerly known as Darb al-Gamamiz, as well as Lazoghli, Hilmiyya al-Gedida, Birkat al-Fil and others. Some of these areas were old but rapidly changing, others grew on virgin land through the drying of the Khalig al-Masri canal and neighbouring swamps, or through the sale of private land (dairas) for urban development. The Middle City was socially heterogenous. It included upwardly mobile efendi families alongside traditional merchant and artisan families, migrant students, the urban poor, but also middle and lower-middle class foreign minorities. Different kinds of urban mobilities connected this Middle City with the upscale Downtown and other areas. This is where many salespersons and service workers staffing Downtown businesses lived. Most of lower and middle level clerks who staffed government offices in al-Dawawin lived in Darb al-Gamamiz and Sayyida Zaynab. The first part of my paper discusses the emergence of this Middle City as the physical location of a nascent national middle class culture. The second part of my paper looks at one particular type of urban mobility that connected these new middle class spaces with the heart of the colonial metropolis: notably, leisure. Young efendi men and boys frequented the upscale avenues of Downtown. Such visits often entailed cinema-going or visits to theatres, but more often consisted of simply strolling, hanging around, and window shopping. These leisure outings were always done in small groups of peers, and can be thought of as particular urban rituals of efendi youths—yet their non-cosmopolitan class position included them only ambiguously into the category of “flaneurs.” This paper is based on over a dozen autobiographies, here subjected to a collective spatial reading describing classed, gendered and generational patterns of urban mobility; novels; and anonymous private diaries. Last but certainly not least, I will use photographic albums created by young efendi men and boys in this period, which not only “illustrate” the spatial patterns (centred on Downtown) observed in autobiographies, but rather make visible the way in which these particular ways of consuming the city worked to produce an efendi masculinity that was inseparable from its spatial dimension.