Masquerade and the Performance of National Imaginaries

Transcription

Journal of Levantine Studies Vol. 1, No. 2, Winter 2011, pp. 31-57
Masquerade and the Performance of National
Imaginaries: Levantine Ethics, Aesthetics, and
Identities in Egyptian Cinema1
Deborah A. Starr
Cornell University
The popular uprising that began in Egypt on January 25, 2011 was characterized by
unity among Egyptians of multiple generations, educational levels, and economic
classes. Also widely noted were the displays of solidarity between Muslim and
Coptic protesters. Copts and Muslims offered one another protection at prayer
times as the state security forces bore down on the protesters. However, these
hopeful signs that transformations in Egypt’s political landscape could provide
a new opportunity for the nation to address inter-communal relations were
bracketed by sectarian violence. Prior to the uprising, on January 1, 2011, a deadly
attack on a Coptic Church in Alexandria took the lives of twenty-three Egyptian
Christians and the months following the anti-Mubarak uprising saw a renewal of
sectarian tensions. Violence broke out again on May 9 in Cairo following rumors
that a Christian woman who had converted to Islam was being held by officials at
a Coptic church; twelve people died, and two churches along with several Coptic
residences were set on fire during the ensuing conflict. These conflicts are not
isolated incidents. Religiously motivated violence has erupted repeatedly in Egypt
in recent decades, calling into question the prospects for sustained inter-sectarian
coexistence.2
Two years prior to the revolution, a high-profile film, Hasan wa-Murqus [Hasan
and Marcus],3 took on the issue of sectarian conflict in Egypt. Hasan and Marcus
unabashedly appeals for Muslim-Christian peaceful coexistence in the face of realworld sectarian violence. In the closing scene of the film, members of a Christian
family and a Muslim family who have unwittingly forged an unlikely friendship join
32
Masquerade and the Per formance of National Imaginaries
hands, and as the music swells, march together as a bulwark of solidarity through a
raging sectarian riot.
The film stars two of Egypt’s most celebrated actors of their generation, Omar
Sharif and Adil
͑
Imam.4 Omar Sharif, the internationally renowned Egyptian actor
from a family of Syro-Lebanese Christian origin, plays Mahmud, a Muslim, who
for security purposes is impersonating a Christian, Marcus.5 Sharif, best known in
the West for his roles in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), has
͑
had a successful acting career in three languages: Arabic, English, and French.6 Adil
Imam, an Egyptian box office magnet, is cast as a Coptic leader, Paulus, whose
controversial views about coexistence have made him the target of extremist violence,
causing him to take cover as a Muslim, Hasan. Imam has a longstanding reputation
for opposing Islamist violence, and is identified with previous roles that deflate
the discourse of radical Islam.7 In al-Irhab wa-l-kabab [Terrorism and the Kebab]
(1992), when Imam’s character vents his frustration at Egyptian bureaucracy, he is
mistaken for a terrorist; the comic plot makes light of Egypt’s security situation.8
In a melodrama released the following year, al-Irhabi [The Terrorist] (1994), Imam
played an Islamist militant who comes to see the error of his ways.9 The Egyptian
viewing public’s associations with the lead actors of Hasan and Marcus serve to
underscore the film’s anti-sectarian, non-violent message.10
Hasan and Marcus also draws upon a preexisting cinematic language of coexistence
within Egyptian cinema. Films from the 1930s through the 1950s reflected the
diversity of Egypt’s populace. In addition to Muslims and Copts, Egypt at that time
was home to sizeable Jewish and Greek populations, communities represented in
Egyptian films.11 Foreigners, immigrants, and members of longstanding minority
communities in Egypt, including Jews and Greeks, played a variety of roles both on
and off screen in the Egyptian cinema industry during these years. The title, Hasan
and Marcus, refers specifically to a 1954 comedy based on Egypt’s contemporaneous
ethno-religious diversity, Hasan wa-Murqus wa-Kohayn [Hasan, Marcus, and
Cohen].12 The plot of the earlier film revolves around the joint business dealings of
the title characters, a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew who own a pharmacy together.
Hasan, Marcus, and Cohen had originated in the early 1940s as a stage play written
by Badi ͑ Khayri and starring Najib al-Rihani.13 Khayri, an Egyptian Muslim, wrote
for stage and screen. Al-Rihani, the son of an Iraqi Christian father and Coptic
mother, ran a popular theater company before emerging as a comic film star. The
products of their decades-long collaboration—first on stage, then on screen—offer
a broad slice of life in Cairo, depicting the ethno-religious diversity of lower class
districts as well as among the petit bourgeoisie and the elite.
Journal of Levantine Studies
33
Hasan and Marcus also references another film written by Khayri and featuring
al-Rihani, Ghazal al-banat [The Flirtation of Girls] (1949)—a film which critic
Walter Armbrust has argued represents Egypt’s multiculturalism.14 Although the
plot of The Flirtation of Girls does not foreground a narrative of coexistence, it stars
a Muslim (Anwar Wajdi), a Christian (al-Rihani) and a Jew (Layla Murad, who
had publicly converted to Islam a few years before the film was made).15 Armbrust
argues that for the Egyptian viewing public, the actors’ ethnic, national, and
religious identities “were subsumed by Egyptian national identity.”16 The Flirtation
of Girls shows up in Hasan and Marcus as a film that the Christian and Muslim
families watch together on television.17 In Hasan and Marcus the characters are
shown laughing together at the comic antics of al-Rihani.
Hasan then turns to Marcus and says, “A great writer composed dialogue for Najib
al-Rihani. His name was Badi ͑ Khayri.”
Marcus: “He was Christian?”
Hasan: “That’s what al-Rihani thought. Khayri’s mother died so al-Rihani went to
pay his condolences. He found the Qur’an, a tent, and people paying their respects.
He said, ‘What is this Badi ?͑ Are you Muslim?’ Badi ͑ answered, ‘Yes.’ Al-Rihani said,
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He said, ‘Because you never asked me.’ Those were the
good old days.” 18
“The good old days” for which Hasan is nostalgic refers to both Egypt’s
cosmopolitan past—its diversity and culture of coexistence—as well as the way that
the cosmopolitan past has been memorialized on film.
In what follows, I trace the narratives of coexistence in Egyptian cinema to
which Hasan and Marcus refers—films from the late 1930s through the 1950s.
This is a period of transformation and consolidation of Egyptian national identity,
a process to which, critics such as Walter Armbrust, Joel Gordon, and Viola Shafik
have argued, Egyptian cinema contributed.19 I maintain that a close examination of
the semiotics of otherness in these films demonstrates some of the shifts underway
in the perception and the place of minorities in Egyptian society more broadly.
Armbrust holds up The Flirtation of Girls as an “authentic” expression of an ethics
of coexistence present in Egyptian cinema. However, I argue that by the time The
Flirtation of Girls appeared in 1949, perceptible changes had already occurred in the
representation of ethno-religious minorities in Egyptian film—changes that I argue
materially affect how films construct an imaginary of the Egyptian nation. My
analysis begins with a discussion of two films from 1937 that articulate “a Levantine
idiom.” This Levantinism is characterized, as I argue in the first section below, by an
34
articulation of an ethics of coexistence, adoption of a visual language of inclusion,
and a construction of a fluid and mutable identity. By the time The Flirtation of
Girls appeared, representations of minorities and ethno-religious difference on
screen had shifted away from the Levantine idiom into a genre of “ethnic comedies.”
Although minorities continued to be a presence in Egyptian cinema on and off
screen through the 1950s, in the years leading up to and following the Free Officer’s
Revolt in 1952, this idiom was already in decline. As I demonstrate in the second
section, although these mid-century ethnic comedies continue to take Egyptian
diversity for granted, the characteristics that had defined Levantine cinema—ethics,
aesthetics, and fluidity of identity—were largely abandoned. In the final section,
I briefly discuss the renewal of interest in discourses of coexistence in Egyptian
cinema several decades later, a shift represented by Hasan and Marcus. Despite its
overt appeal for tolerance, Hasan and Marcus, unlike its predecessors, presumes that
difference breeds discord. In contrast to the broad pluralism reflected in Egyptian
Levantine films and ethnic comedies through the mid-twentieth century, Hasan
and Marcus focuses more narrowly on inter-confessional tolerance.
My analysis pays close attention to how the films under discussion treat
ethno-religious and national identity as performance. As with the dual masquerade
performed in Hasan and Marcus, role play, assumed identities, and sudden,
disorienting class mobility are common features of these films. However, the
valences attached to the comic appropriation of an identity not one’s own, shift
over time in nuanced, but significant ways.
Levantine Cinema
The term “Levantine” permits me to explore Egyptian filmmaking of the 1930s as a
locally situated project reflecting a pluralist ideal. While nationalist discourse shapes
much critical discussion about Egyptian film history, discourses of national identity,
to the extent that they are represented in these 1930s films, are filtered through an
urban localism characterized by its diversity. As the following discussion aims to
demonstrate, when the nation enters the picture, it is articulated in a pluralist idiom.
This pluralist nationalism has roots in the 1919 Egyptian revolution, summarized
by the slogan, “Religion is for God, but the nation is for the people.”20
Even more important for my argument than the films’ portrayal of Levantine
diversity—and the ethics of coexistence it represents—is their construction and
performance of identity in a Levantine idiom. By this I mean that the performance
of identity in these films is fluid and mutable, embracing the vagueness and
porousness of the boundaries of identity inherent in the notion of the Levantine.
35
The term Levant originated as a geographical description referring roughly to
the Eastern Mediterranean region including former Ottoman lands. The Levant
does not have the policed borders of a state. Its boundaries are unruly, indistinct, and
unmappable. Historically, the Levant has been inhabited by a diverse population.
The cities of the Levant have been characterized by the multiple linguistic, religious,
and ethno-national communities that populate them, as well as by the cultural
exchange and admixture between groups.
Geographically, Egypt is situated at the crossroads of Africa and Asia, the southern
and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Yet, Cairo and Alexandria in the first half
of the twentieth century, like the urban areas to their north and east, were home to
diverse populations, including immigrants from other former Ottoman lands. While
some might argue that Egypt lies outside the region known as the Levant according
to the narrowest definition of the term, I adopt a more expansive view.
The term Levantine has been applied to “natives” of the region and cultural
environment known as the Levant.21 Levantine identities are as indistinct as the
boundaries of the region they inhabit. The term has been employed in contexts when
an observer, often an outsider, cannot easily discern from which ethnic, religious, or
national group an individual hails.22 By definition, the contours of Levantine identity
are vague and resist categorization. The slipperiness of Levantine identities has at
various junctures in modern history—modern Egyptian history notwithstanding—
raised doubts about Levantines’ loyalty to or identification with the nation. However,
these same defining characteristics make the terms Levant and Levantine relevant to
a discussion of constructions of identity as indistinct and mutable.
Notably, the way I am using the term Levantine is distinct from the term
cosmopolitan. As I have argued elsewhere, the notion of the cosmopolitan is
inextricable from empire.23 As a philosophical construct, the cosmopolitan emerges
out of imperial contexts.24 With regard to Egypt, cosmopolitan refers to an ethnoreligiously diverse class of immigrants, foreigners, and minorities in Egypt during
a period not coincidentally coterminous with the European colonial enterprise in
Egypt. Further, it is most commonly applied to members of the bourgeoisie who
by and large did not hold Egyptian citizenship and did not identify with Egyptian
culture (lowbrow or highbrow)—most spoke languages other than Arabic and saw
themselves as European.25
By contrast, while the Levantines portrayed on screen in the films under
consideration (like those involved in their production) represent a variety of religions
and nationalities, all are local subjects who speak Egyptian Arabic and are portrayed
as part of the fabric of Egyptian society. Further, the multiculturalism, syncretism,
36
and cultural exchange represented by these Levantine films are most evident among
residents of lower-class neighborhoods.
Below, I explore two comedies produced in 1937, Salama fi khayr [Salama is
͑ bahdala [Mistreated by Affluence],
Fine],26 directed by Niyazi Mustafa; and al- Izz
directed by Togo Mizrahi, 27 that articulate a distinctly Levantine idiom that goes
beyond the mere observation that they both emerge out of and reflect upon a society
of Levantines. I maintain that these films engage with, although do not necessarily
promote, a Levantine ethics of coexistence. Further, they utilize cinematic tools to
construct what I identify as a Levantine aesthetic. Finally, in true Levantine fashion,
the films treat identity as fluid and mutable.
Salama is Fine
Salama is Fine was the first full-length feature film directed by Niyazi Mustafa. Upon
returning to Egypt having apprenticed with filmmakers in Europe, Mustafa was
contacted by Tal at
͑ Harb, the founder and president of Bank Misr, about working
for the new studio he was building. Harb had supported filmmaking in Egypt since
1925, when he established the Egyptian Company of Performance and Cinema
(al-Shirka al-Misriyah lil-tamthil wa-l-sinima). The company initially engaged in
producing newsreel footage promoting the bank and its founder’s nationalist efforts.
By 1932 the majority of film production houses in Egypt used the company’s
facilities to shoot, develop, and print their films.28 A decision was made to expand the
company’s operations with a goal of producing full-length feature films. As a result
Studio Misr was housed in an expansive campus in Giza, which opened and began
shooting its first film in 1935. As Ahmad al-Hadari has documented, Tal at
͑ Harb
and the management of Studio Misr were actively involved in training Egyptian
talent in all aspects of filmmaking.29 Prior to the opening of the studio, Harb sent
several Egyptians to Europe to learn the trade, including Ahmad Badrakhan, who
was later to become a preeminent Egyptian director. Badrakhan and his colleagues,
then apprenticed at Studio Misr, quickly moved up the ranks. Studio Misr’s first
film, Widad, released in February 1936, was directed by Fritz Kramp, a German,
but all aspects of film production soon after passed into Egyptian hands.
Salama is Fine, released the following year, represents the first successful film
effort by the writer-actor comic duo mentioned above, Badi Khayri
͑
and Najib alRihani. The cast of Salama is Fine reflects Egypt’s diversity. In addition to starring
al-Rihani, the film features Stéphane Rosti, whose father was Austrian and his
mother Italian, and Raqiyah Ibrahim (née Rachel Levy), an Egyptian Jewish actress
born in the Delta city of Mansura.30
37
Salama is Fine is a screwball comedy, full of misunderstandings, role-playing
and plot reversals. Salama, played by al-Rihani, has served for twenty-five years as
the assistant to the owner of a large fabric retailer, Khalil Hindawi. Salama is lazy
but displays the street smarts and humor of which Egyptians pride themselves.
Salama is entrusted with a large sum of money to deposit in the bank. He is waylaid
in a fracas, and does not make it to the bank before it closes. He returns to the
store only to find that it closed early in honor of the birth of Hindawi’s son. When
Salama returns home to find a safe place to hide the money, he learns that the
apartment has been robbed. He decides to check into a posh hotel and consign the
briefcase to the hotel safe overnight.
The hotel staff suspects Salama is a troublemaker and they kick him out. As
he is pushed through the door, he falls into the clutches of Prince Kandahar, a
visiting dignitary from the fictional country of Bloudestan. Kandahar, who recently
arrived in Egypt for an unofficial visit, has bet with his Egyptian assistant over
whether women would fall for him if they didn’t think he had power and influence.
Kandahar sets his sights on Nahid, a young woman stranded on the desert road from
Alexandria to whom he provides assistance. He introduces himself as a member of
the royal entourage. In order to play out his ruse, he needs to find a replacement
prince. Salama appears at just the right moment. Thus begins the role reversal and
play-acting that characterize the remainder of the film.
Salama is Fine represents a colorful cross-section of Egyptian society including
Greek neighbors, a Coptic accountant, Egyptianized members of the foreignminority haute bourgeoisie, the local beggar, and a petty school teacher.31 The
interactions between Salama, his wife Satuta, and their Greek neighbors, Umm
Yanni and Kostin, offer glimpses into the intersection between the film’s Levantine
ethics and aesthetics. In their first appearance on screen the Greek characters are
played for comic effect: Umm Yanni chases after a gaggle of squabbling children
and the muscular Kostin attempts to silence the bickering Salama and Murgan, the
pedantic schoolteacher who is Salama’s neighbor and antagonist.
But after Salama disappears, the comic possibilities of ethno-national and
religious difference are downplayed as the friendship and camaraderie between
Umm Yanni and Satuta emerge. While Salama is living it up as a prince, his wife and
mother-in-law fret about his whereabouts. In one scene, Umm Yanni, accompanied
by her young daughter, keeps vigil with the women in Salama’s family. This scene
contains two group shots of these four female characters that are constructed to
inscribe Umm Yanni within the family unit. On the left of the screen, Satuta’s
elderly mother, Umm Yanni, and Umm Yanni’s daughter sit in a row along a bench.
38
The two women drink coffee while the girl drinks juice out of a glass. Satuta, on the
right of the screen, sits facing them on a chair [Figure 1].
Dialogue in this scene both underscores the depiction of Umm Yanni as an
individual close to the family and offers an example of Levantine syncretism. In a
highly ritualized exchange, when the distraught Satuta appeals to Sayyidah Zaynab
for intervention, Umm Yanni responds with her own appeal to Husayn.32
The visual composition of the group shot including Umm Yanni alongside the
female members of Salama’s family is mirrored during the climactic scene when
the three women wait outside Hindawi’s office seeking an audience with him to
inquire about Salama’s whereabouts. The three women are pictured together on the
left of the screen, confronting first a secretary, than Hindawi himself. They present
a unified front, with Umm Yanni taking her turn to make an appeal on behalf of
the family.
But beyond the film’s multicultural display, as a comedy of mistaken identity,
this film raises issues about the distinctions between self and other. In what follows,
I will unpack the semiotics of otherness presented in the film, and explore how they
contribute to the production of a Levantine idiom. Even before the dual masquerade
begins, before the prince passes himself off as a member of the royal entourage, and
before he selects Salama as his stand-in, he is mistaken for someone he is not. Having
arrived in the port of Alexandria, Kandahar and his Egyptian adviser are traveling
along the desert road to Cairo. They see a broken-down car and offer a ride to a
stranded young woman, Nahid. She is a maid to the family of Rustum Pasha who
Figure 1. Umm Yanni
and her daughter,
middle left, have coffee
with Satuta, right, and
her mother, far left.
Screenshot, Salama is
Fine, 1937
39
resides in Alexandria. Informed at the last minute of the prince’s arrival, the members
of the family, on vacation in Cairo, request that Nahid deliver formal attire to their
hotel. Lacking other options, Nahid reluctantly accepts a ride to Cairo.
Kandahar, who studied in Cairo, speaks an elevated, dignified, if somewhat
archaic Arabic—literary Arabic, inflected with Egyptianisms. Nahid, guard up to
protect her honor, pays no attention to Kandahar’s unusual manner of speech nor
his odd form of dress—Kandahar and his assistant both wear ornate capes. As she
reveals during the course of this scene, she initially takes both men to be Egyptian.
The recognition of the men’s otherness is ultimately triggered by a threat of
violence. In the middle of the desert the car inexplicably comes to a screeching halt
on the side of the road. Nahid is confronted with the power differential between
herself and her rescuers when the guard in the front seat flashes a gun and grunts
in a guttural language. After Kandahar dismisses the guard’s request and the car
resumes its journey, he puts Nahid at ease by explaining that the guard was seeking
permission to shoot a deer he had spotted by the side of the road. Confronted by
this otherness, Nahid, who had been ignoring Kandahar, begins to ask questions
about his language and country of origin. When Kandahar reveals that he is from
Bloudestan, Nahid blurts out, “Where is that, the North Pole?” In her joke, Nahid
swings from an assumption of similarity—that the other passengers were Egyptian
like herself—to an assumption of radical otherness.
Kandahar is indeed a foreigner, although he is familiar with the local language
and customs. It is noteworthy that his fictional kingdom is located within the
Islamic world, and not in the Arab world or the West. In 1937 when the film was
released, Egypt was still under the British sphere of influence. For several decades
Egyptians had been forging a national identity through the anti-colonial struggle.
When one speaks of otherness in Egypt, particularly in the first half of the twentieth
century, one is generally addressing the Orientalizing gaze of the colonial other.
By contrast, in what I would refer to here as an articulation of a Levantine idiom,
Salama is Fine posits an alternative construction of otherness—an other who is
familiar yet recognizably different—one who embraces the slipperiness of the
Levantine identity, donning and doffing his identity at his convenience (and for the
sake of comic effect).
The Levantine possibility Kandahar and his double, Salama, represent, is cast
into relief during a scene portraying a receiving line to welcome the prince. Wealthy
Egyptians and foreign dignitaries come to pay their respects. Salama plays the
prince, while Kandahar acts as his adviser, trying to fend off gaffes that could lead
to an international crisis. The “prince” is greeted by an American pilot, a wealthy
40
Egyptian businessman with interests in Bloudestan’s gas reserves, and Rustum Pasha,
a retired Egyptian diplomat who served in Iran. Following the introduction of a
famous Russian explorer who begins to address the “prince” in Russian, the scene
dissolves into a series of disorienting fades and double exposures, accompanied
by the muddled sound of voices speaking all at once in multiple languages. Faces
superimposed on the image of Salama’s increasingly distraught and exhausted
expression reflect a broad diversity of humanity. Foreign dignitaries in Cairo from
around the globe have come to pay their respects to the visiting prince. In the face
of this confrontation with radical otherness, Salama swoons [Figure 2].
By contrast, for Salama, Kandahar represents a familiar other and not a radical
other. The difference between Salama and the real Prince Kandahar is marked by
linguistic register (a signifier of class and education), not language. Salama’s honest,
unfiltered, plain-speaking Egyptian dialect contrasts with the dignified speech
of royalty. Yet Salama and Kandahar ultimately speak the same language. Their
speech is mutually comprehensible.33 Radical otherness is signified by language
difference—the languages other than Arabic spoken to Salama/Kandahar by his
supplicants.
The disorienting and defamiliarizing potential of language is further underscored
in a later scene as the film moves toward its climax. Murgan, Salama’s antagonist,
discovers the ruse and makes several attempts to reveal Salama/Kandahar’s identity.
He shows his neighbors a photograph of the visiting “prince” from the newspaper
that bears a striking resemblance to Salama. They alert Satuta, and all congregate at
Figure 2. Salama as
Prince K andahar (Najib
al-Rihani), left, receiving
a guest. Screenshot,
Salama is Fine, 1937
41
the Nefertiti Palace Hotel to intercept the would-be-prince. Satuta sees Salama exit
a posh car and cries out his name. Salama makes a face and lets loose a stream of
nonsense words, in which are embedded the Arabic words for “wife” and “motherin-law” (“maratī” and “ḥamātī,” respectively). Salama turns his back on the crowd
and continues up the stairs accompanied by the royal entourage, leaving his wife
and neighbors scratching their heads. Despite the obvious physical similarity, Satuta
rejects the idea that the passing dignitary could be Salama in disguise because he
addressed her in “Italian.”
This scene also multiply upturns family relations and the solid family unit.
Most apparent is Salama’s public spurning of his wife and mother-in-law. This
confusion of relations carries over into the reaction of the crowd. In addressing
her husband, Satuta resorts to a common expression of familiarity; she cries out,
“Salama, Salama, ya akhūya” [“Salama, Salama, my brother”]. In the context of the
film’s narrative of mistaken identity, one cannot overlook the slippage of familial
relations—from husband to brother—embedded in Satuta’s expression. An elderly
neighbor, convinced the passing dignitary was indeed Salama, addresses the group
with a familiar form of address, “ya akhwātī” literally, “my brothers.” Like with
Satuta’s expression, while the term of address need not signify kinship, its presence
in this scene is nevertheless significant for the ways in which it contributes to the
confusion of social and familial relations in the film. As Salama, Kandahar, and the
rest of the royal entourage proceed up the steps of the hotel, Kandahar asks about
the identity of the crowd. Salama responds, identifying them as family in Arabic and
Italian, “al- ā’ila,
͑
il famiglia (sic).” While those gathered represent the closely knit
social fabric of a popular neighborhood, the assortment of friends and neighbors do
not, strictly speaking, constitute kin. We can see in this confusion an articulation of
Levantine fluidity. Identity is constituted through familial and social relations that
are constantly in flux, contingent, negotiated and multiply defined.
Unlike other prince and pauper narratives, the prince does not adopt the identity
and lifestyle of the pauper; he rather opts to play a member of the royal entourage.
Thus, Prince Kandahar does not experience the life of the lower classes, and is not
exposed to the plight of the masses. It is not a consciousness-raising experience.
Out of a sense of personal obligation, he comes to Salama’s rescue when things
go awry. This non-threatening aspect of Levantanism does not represent a radical
social reordering, nor would one expect it to. The promise of the Levantine option
lies in the challenge it poses to parochialism, and particularly parochial nationalism,
not to the economic nor the social order.
42
Mistreated by Affluence
Mistreated by Affluence was written, directed, and produced by Togo Mizrahi,
an Alexandrian Jew with Italian nationality. After graduating with a certificate
in commerce in Alexandria, he earned a PhD in economics in France.34 During
his studies in Europe, he became interested in cinema, and upon his return to
Alexandria, applied his cinematic training and business acumen to establishing
a studio, Studio Togo Mizrahi35 and production company, Shirkat al-aflam alMisriyya (Egyptian Film Company), that produced many popular and successful
Egyptian films.36 Studio Mizrahi was the most productive studio during the years
it was in operation; between 1931 and 1946, the studio released thirty-six films, of
which Togo Mizrahi directed thirty-three.37
Mistreated by Affluence stars a Jewish comic actor, Chalom, who appeared in
several of Mizrahi’s films playing a Jewish character also named “Chalom.” Unlike
al-Rihani’s early efforts (prior to Salama is Fine) to bring to the screen characters
developed for his longstanding comic theater productions, Chalom’s comic persona
first made his appearance on screen in Togo Mizrahi’s films, Cocaine (1930) and 5001
(1932).38 Chalom (the character) lives in a popular district, barely scraping by as a
seller of lottery tickets.39 Mizrahi’s 1934 film al-Manduban [The Two Representatives]
introduces Chalom’s friend and sidekick, Abdu,
͑
a Muslim, who works as a butcher’s
assistant, and their respective love interests Esther and Amina.40
Togo Mizrahi’s Mistreated by Affluence offers a literal representation of
coexistence —the opening scene of the film shows the shared living quarters of the
film’s impoverished main characters, Chalom and Abdu,
͑
who are asleep side by
Figure 3. Chalom, left,
and Abdu
͑
wak ing up
in their apar tment.
Screenshot, Mistreated
by Affluence, 1937
43
side [Figure 3]. Over the course of the film, each receives an unexpected windfall,
which he shares with the other. With their newfound wealth, they decide to buy a
bank. Woefully and comically unprepared for their new responsibilities, Chalom
and Abdu run the bank into the ground. The temptations of the good life create
a rift between the two protagonists, which is only repaired when they lose their
investment and return, happily, to life in the old, popular quarter.
As Viola Shafik has noted, the opening scenes of Mistreated by Affluence further
underscore this narrative of coexistence by featuring joint preparations for the
popular Egyptian festival of spring, Shamm al-Nasim. Chalom, Abdu,
͑
and their
future in-laws celebrate with a picnic on the beach. In Shafik’s reading, this “first
common meal” offers “an expressive image of coexistence,” an articulation of
the film’s endorsement of “a national unity concept.”41 In this scene the ethics of
coexistence is paired with an aesthetics of coexistence—the establishing shot of the
holiday feast shows the entire group seated together on the beach in Alexandria in
front of a bank of beach cabanas.
Characters in the film are given names which identify their religious affiliations,
but other distinctions between the Jews and Muslims in the film are negligible.
Chalom and Esther’s wedding celebration—a typically Egyptian affair—is depicted
without reference to religious ceremony. The film stresses unity—local unity with
national undertones—and resists the impulse to exploit religious difference for its
comic potential.
Near the beginning of the film, Chalom visits Abdu
͑
at the butcher shop to
procure meat for the collective feast on Shamm al-Nasim. The camera pans along
the street, showing a sign for “Boucherie Hassan Aly Youssef ” next to an empty
storefront, shutters closed, plastered with “for rent” signs in Arabic and French.
In this passing shot, viewers also catch a glimpse of an advertisement on the door,
also in Arabic and French, for Togo Mizrahi’s 1933 film Awlad Misr [Children of
Egypt].42 In the context of Mistreated by Affluence this self-promotional gesture can
be read as a further articulation of the film’s ethics of coexistence. In case the viewers
missed the point of the collective feast, we are reminded that Abdu and Chalom,
Muslim and Jew, are equally “awlād miṣr,” children of Egypt.
The film Children of Egypt is a social melodrama, featuring a love story between
a poor student and the daughter of a wealthy man. The protagonist overcomes
class distinctions through his academic success.43 Reference to this intertext
further underscores the Levantine fluidity of identity—in the case of Mistreated
by Affluence, a movement across classes and erasure of all but nominal distinctions
among Egyptians of different religions.
44
Mistreated by Affluence highlights the way the characters’ fortunes, and
financial markets in general, rise and fall on chance. When the film presents a
series of scenes that show how all levels of the bank’s operations are made by the
roll of a dice, followed by the inexplicable fall of the Bourse, it suggests that the
distinction between gambling and investment is reducible to the class affiliations
of its practitioners. Indeed, this distinction is prefigured earlier in the film in
Chalom’s means of supporting himself through the sale of lottery tickets. When
Abdu
͑
inherits the butcher shop where he had worked as an assistant, Chalom, with
Abdu’s
͑
assistance, opens a stand next door. In Arabic, the sign on Chalom’s stand
reads: “Chalom Office for the Sale and Redemption of Lottery Tickets.” In French,
the sign ambiguously reads: “Chalom Agen d’echange” [sic.]; a French speaker
might mistake Chalom for a money changer rather than a seller of lottery tickets.
This comic narrative of (failed) social mobility affected purely by chance, with
reference to a drama of successful social mobility (Children of Egypt), in the context
of the coexistence narrative can, like Salama is Fine, be read as an articulation of a
Levantine ethics.
Salama is Fine and Mistreated by Affluence represent a distinctly Levantine idiom.
These films not only represent Egypt’s diversity in their adoption of a Levantine
aesthetics, but also construct what I have called a Levantine ethics. In the vision
of Levantinism articulated by these films, identities remain unstable, mutable and
vague.
Post-war Ethnic Comedies and the Normativization of Identity
A subtle shift occurs in the representation of minorities and foreigners in Egypt
in the years following the end of World War II. Emerging out of and reflecting
upon a multi-ethnic and religiously diverse Egypt, the genre of “ethnic comedies”
shares some obvious characteristics with Levantine cinema. Like the pre-war films
discussed above, ethnic comedies represent Egyptian society as multi-ethnic (and
multi-lingual). These films even share some of the same personnel, notably writers
and actors; members of minority and foreign-minority communities continued to
have a presence in the Egyptian cinema industry in the post-war years both onand off-screen. For example, one such film, Hasan, Marcus, and Cohen (1954), as
mentioned above, originated as a stage play written by Badi ͑ Khayri and starring
Najib al-Rihani—the writer and star of Salama is Fine.44 Other films of this genre,
such as Fatimah wa-Marika wa-Rashil [Fatima, Marika, and Rachel] (1949)45 and
Hasan wa-Marika [Hasan and Marika] (1959)46 patently draw upon the formula of
the successful play Hasan, Marcus, and Cohen.47
45
The premise of Hasan, Marcus, and Cohen, as Eyal Sagui-Bizawi has noted,
functions like the set-up to a joke—“a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew jointly manage
a pharmacy…”48 Yet, as Sagui-Bizawi’s reading would suggest, in ethnic comedies,
unlike the films I designate as Levantine, ethno-religious difference is employed
as a gimmick, a joke, necessarily based on a construction of identity that is fixed
and immutable in a distinctly anti-Levantine manner. In other words, despite
the apparent similarities, I maintain that post-war ethnic comedies eschewed the
Levantine ethics and aesthetics I have argued were present in Egyptian cinema of
the 1930s.
By way of example, I will analyze the construction of ethno-religious difference
in the earliest of these three films, Fatima, Marika, and Rachel. The protagonist, a
cad named Yusuf, indiscriminately flirts with women of all backgrounds, proposes
to them and disappears on the day of the wedding. During the course of the film,
Yusuf courts the three women named in the title: a Muslim, a Christian (Greek)
and a Jew.49 In the title song of the film Yusuf croons: “Fatima, Marika, and Rachel.
In my heart they are a cocktail.” In the view of Ahmad Bahjat, this song weaves for
its three female characters and the ethno-religious communities they represent a
“coherent web within the framework of Egyptian society.”50
In contrast to the congenial relations between ethno-religious communities
in Salama is Fine and Mistreated by Affluence, in Fatima, Marika, and Rachel the
women who represent Egypt’s ethno-religious diversity are cast as adversaries, vying
for Yusuf ’s affections. In contradistinction to the Levantine aesthetics in which
placing characters of different ethno-religious backgrounds in the same frame
signals harmony and coexistence, in Fatima, Marika, and Rachel when two of the
three women appear in the same scene, the characters are being set up for conflict.
In the Levantine film Salama is Fine, masquerade serves to undermine fixed
notions of identity, while in Fatima, Marika, and Rachel, masquerade rather reifies
existing constructions of identity. In the course of his seductions, Yusuf adopts a last
name that reflects each woman’s ethno-religious background: to the Jewish Rachel he
introduces himself as Yusuf Hazqiyal (Hezkiel) and to the Greek Orthodox Marika
as Yusuf Kyriaki. Yusuf ’s masquerades are predicated on assumptions of endogamy.
Yusuf, despite his well-honed evasion techniques, cannot escape his fixed,
socially sanctioned identity. Yusuf ’s father and his neighbor in the village, Wasfi Bey,
Fatima’s uncle, have agreed to wed their charges to cement a business relationship.
Both Yusuf and Fatima resist the union. On the date they are set to meet, they
deceive one another by adopting fake identities. Yet the two nevertheless fall in love
on their own. On the day of the arranged marriage, Fatima and Yusuf attempt to
46
elope—a transgressive act evacuated of its transgressive signification. The families
capture them and drag them away. But when they arrive at the site of the wedding,
Fatima and Yusuf are happily reunited, and they marry according to tradition,
witnessed by their families and friends.
Hasan and Marika takes this conceit even further, playing up the comic potential
of both masquerade and ethno-religious stereotypes. The film follows the unlikely
romance between an Egyptian Muslim man named Hasan Hummus (Ismail Yasin),
and Marika Yanni, a Greek cabaret singer.51 In his efforts to woo Marika, Hasan
attempts to pass himself off as Marco Kyriaki, a suitor from Athens, and when that
fails—the real Marco and another would-be Marco blow his cover—he dresses in
drag and offers his services as a maid to the household. These antics of high camp,
common to Ismail Yasin’s films, do not serve to disturb constructions of identity
or gender. Rather, the film neatly resolves the problematic of exogamous romance
when near the end of the film it is revealed that Marika is really an Egyptian Muslim
named Bahiya who had been left in Yanni’s care as a young child.
As appealing and humorous as the ethnic comedies are, they lack the sensibility
of Levantine fluidity. The power—and threat—of Levantine identities are their
mutability. The Levantine cannot be ascribed a single fixed identity. In Egyptian
ethnic comedies of the late 1940s and 1950s, while members of different ethnoreligious communities interact, and even fall in love, it is under the pretext of fidelity
to one’s communal identity. In this way, these films’ expressions of coexistence do
not transcend a self-other binary (or a self-other-other triad).
Critics have also noted the reliance upon unsavory, exaggerated ethnic stereotypes
in these films as the basis of comedy. In her discussion of representations of minorities
in Egyptian cinema, Viola Shafik draws a distinction between comic stereotypes from
earlier farcical representations of Egypt’s diversity on stage that entered the cinematic
idiom on one hand, and ugly, discriminatory stereotypes on the other. For Shafik
the multiculturalism of Fatima, Marika, and Rachel is marred by the film’s portrayal
of the Jewish characters as greedy, the reflection of an internalized European antiSemitic trope.52 Eyal Sagui-Bizawi attempts to parry such criticism, suggesting that
the characterization of minorities is in line with exaggerated affectations central to
comedy. In his reading of Hasan, Marcus, and Cohen, he argues that the presence
of the minorities on the Egyptian screen demonstrates their situatedness within
Egypt’s social fabric.53 However, the situatedness Sagui-Bizawi presumes is premised
on fixed communal identities inconsistent with a Levantine idiom.
The shifts in Egyptian national identity that achieved full expression in the
1950s were already underway in 1949 when these ethnic comedies began to appear.
47
Following the 1952 revolution, Egyptian national identity coalesced around the
ideals espoused by President Gamal Abdel Nasser—socialism, anti-colonialism, and
pan-Arabism. Over the course of the decade following the revolution, the number of
Levantine foreign minorities in Egypt also dwindled. As film historian Joel Gordon
has demonstrated, the 1950s also saw the rise of a new idiom in Egyptian cinema
that privileged melodrama as the vehicle for engaging in social critique.54
Violence, Nostalgia, and the Rise of Coexistence Narratives
Over the course of his lengthy career, internationally renowned Egyptian writer,
director, and producer Youssef Chahine repeatedly explores themes of coexistence
in his films. Al-Nasir Salah al-Din [Saladin the Victorious] (1963), for example,
portrays the just leadership of the Muslim warrior who captured Jerusalem from the
Crusaders. Chahine notably refuses to cast the eleventh-century conflict as purely
sectarian—one subplot involves a Christian adviser to the Muslim Saladin who
woos a female Crusader. Most critics read this film as a thinly veiled tribute to
Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and thus, by extension, the film could
be said to reflect upon Christian-Muslim unity in post-colonial Egypt during the
Cold War.55 Another historical drama, al-Masir [Destiny] (1997), set in twelfthcentury Andalusia, depicts the richness of societies that value freedom and cultural
exchange and the stifling consequences of religious intolerance.56 The protagonist,
the philosopher and judge Ibn Rushd (Averroes), finds his tolerant humanism
under attack by a fundamentalist vanguard. He falls out of favor with the Caliph
and his books are subsequently burned. The film responds to the contemporaneous
rise of Islamism in Egypt, and specifically to two events that took place in 1994: the
stabbing of Egyptian Nobel Laureate, Najib Mahfuz, and the attempt by Islamists
to censor Chahine’s film, al-Muhajir [The Emigrant], for depicting on screen Joseph,
the Biblical figure and a prophet of Islam.57
In his autobiographical quartet of films, Chahine more overtly explores
Egyptian history and national identity through narratives of his own identity and
identifications. These films, particularly the first installment, Iskandariyah…lih?
[Alexandria…Why?] (1978), reflect a Levantine ethics and aesthetics.58 This film
features a friendship between three boys, a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew. Set in
Alexandria during World War II and the immediate post-war years, the film rejects
ethno-religious nationalism (Islamic fundamentalism and Zionism alike) in favor
of a pluralist nationalism.59
These films lay the groundwork for the emergence of coexistence films in Arab
cinema in the late 1990s, a movement that finds its voice in Egypt in the first
48
decade of the twenty-first century. Some coexistence films nostalgically depict
the long-departed Levantine populations, while others articulate the possibilities
of interfaith coexistence in the face of contemporaneous sectarian strife. Like
the Levantine films and ethnic comedies that precede them, these films feature
a national imaginary characterized by diversity. Emerging in part as a response
to regional sectarian conflict, in these films religion supersedes other markers of
difference possible in earlier eras in contradistinction to Levantine films and ethnic
comedies.
In his 1999 film, al-Akhar [The Other], Chahine critiques the underpinning
ideology of coexistence films.60 In this film Chahine demonstrates how narratives
of coexistence are capable of promoting distinctly non-Levantine idioms. The film’s
villain is the conniving, controlling, money-hungry Margaret, an American woman
married to an Egyptian man, Khalil. Together the couple owns a chain of hotels
in Egypt. In the wake of the outbreak of Islamist violence in Egypt, Margaret and
Khalil seek international support to construct an interfaith center in Sinai. 61 They
play on the naïve sympathies of the prospective investors, bringing them to the site
of the proposed center and asking them to pray for the success of the project in their
own language and according to the tenets of their own religion. Together they share
a vision of the buildings rising by faith and force of will from the sands of the desert.
The star of David, cross, and crescent at the top of each building glimmer, cynically
winking at the viewer who has already been informed of Margaret and Khalil’s plot
to abscond with the money [Figure 4].
Here, interfaith contact is transformed into a commodity, global capitalism
in the guise of tolerance. Intermarriage, like that between Margaret and Khalil,
is portrayed as a union to maximize profitability. The film reveals a malevolent
side to the bumbling blindness of faith-based communities’ desire to help
Figure 4. Mirage of
the inter faith center
emerging out of the
deser t. Screenshot, The
O ther, 1999
49
others. “Coexistence” in The Other is nothing like Levantine intermingling and
indeterminacy. The artificial center for dialogue Margaret and Khalil propose is
fleeting, phantasmagorical—no substitute for the organic (if not always peaceful)
coexistence of the Levantine world. The film also reveals the ways in which, as
Wendy Brown has articulated, tolerance functions as “an international discourse of
Western supremacy and imperialism.”62
The cynicism of The Other can be read equally as a criticism of an ethics of
coexistence prevalent in European co-financed Arab films. Chahine, who himself
had to fend off domestic criticism about his European art-house sensibility and
his films’ engagement with Western culture, is sensitive to the nuances in the
problematic posed by foreign financing.63
As critic Randall Halle contends, co-financing has unmistakably shaped the
topics and themes addressed by third-world films to conform to the expectations of
a European audience:
External European coproductions seek to offer insight into a type of person, if not an
entire people. From the perspective of European values, the films provide the viewer
with the grounds for a critical intervention in that foreign society. The coproduction
strategy thus runs the risk of instituting a cycle of Orientalism.64
This trend, Halle argues, represents a “post-colonial politics of the transnational.”65
In appealing to an international audience, co-financed films are at risk of alienating
local audiences. Critics and viewers in the Arab world are often suspicious of cofinanced films, quick to object to any traces of cultural imperialism. Millennial Arab
coexistence films rely heavily upon an ethics of coexistence that reifies difference
and uncritically adopts Western universalist discourses. In inviting or embracing
European gaze, such coexistence films reinscribe rather than subvert a colonial/
neo-colonial construction of Levantine subjectivity. Further, as Walter Armbrust
has noted, the inclusion of taboo topics or nudity, features that appeal to European
audiences, can severely restrict circulation of co-financed films in the Arab world.66
Among Arab cinema industries, the coexistence idiom appears earliest in those
most reliant upon European co-financing, such as the Tunisian film Halq al-wadi
[Summer in La Goulette] (1995),67 the Lebanese Bayrut al-gharbiyya [West Beirut]
(1998),68 and only later finds expression in Egyptian cinema.69
This coexistence idiom is evident in two Egyptian films that overtly oppose
sectarian violence: Imarat
͑
Ya qubiyan
͑
[The Yacoubian Building] (2006)70 and Hasan
and Marcus. Both films were produced by the Egyptian media company, the Good
News Group, and did not involve European co-productions.71 Nevertheless, the
50
production company has made no secret of its desire both to reach an international
audience with its films, and to collaborate with European and American studios and
production companies.72 These films, as a result, share with internationally co-financed
coexistence films an overly simplified universalist ethics of intercommunal contact.
In The Yacoubian Building, vestiges of Cairo’s cosmopolitan past remain—the
building of the title along with foreign-educated Egyptian characters and a Greek
café owner, Madame Christine. The cosmopolitanism of the past contributes to the
only hopeful vision of the future that emerges out of a bleak landscape of decay,
corruption, and violence. The film ends with the marriage of the long-standing
bachelor, Zaki, an aging, French-educated lawyer who represents the universalist
values of the old Wafd and its vision of pluralist nationalism. His youthful bride,
Buthaina, rejects the underhanded dealings that represent the status quo and also
spurns the appeals to purity, simplicity, and truth offered by Islamist movements.
Zaki and Buthaina’s marriage maps a road by which Egypt can emerge out of the
shadow of corrupt government and the onslaught of Islamist violence through a
renewed and updated return to an outward-looking universalism.73
As noted above, the narrative of Hasan and Marcus purports to advocate for
interfaith tolerance and coexistence. In a nod to the film’s namesake, Hasan, Marcus,
and Cohen, Hasan and Marcus, the title characters of the contemporary film,
embark on a business together. Subsequently, their children—Hasan’s daughter
and Marcus’s son—fall in love. However, despite these trappings of the coexistence
narrative prevalent in the mid-twentieth-century ethnic comedies, Hasan and Marcus
implicitly endorses the assumption that Muslims and Christians in contemporary
Egypt cannot and do not get along.
Although from the start both Paulus/Hasan and Mahmud/Marcus are portrayed
as honorable and reasonable, each is fundamentally wary of members of the other
faith. The ploy of the dual masquerade alone permits the two families to forge their
interfaith friendship. Each family living under cover acts toward the members of
the other family as if the other’s religious identity is fixed and transparent. It is this
dynamic that permits the youngsters to believe that their budding romance might
succeed. So when Imad, the apparent Muslim, reveals that he is actually Girgis, a
Christian, he expects the object of his affection, Maryam, to be delighted. Instead,
she, too, reveals that she has been living under an assumed identity, and that she
is really Fatima, a Muslim. To their horror, they confront the impossibility of a
future together. In this film, as in Fatima, Marika, and Rachel, the dual masquerade
functions as a double negative, deflating the power of masquerade to disrupt
and subvert normative identities. Masquerade in Hasan and Marcus lacks the
51
subversive potential of role-playing realized in Salama is Fine. By contrast, the film’s
employment of masquerade reveals the superficiality of its purported endorsement
of an ethics of coexistence.
Near the end of the film, prior to the revelation of the dual deception, the two
families find themselves forced to share an apartment in Alexandria. Two sequential
scenes in Hasan and Marcus show the families sharing communal space in the
apartment. In the first scene they sit around a table to share a meal, and in the second
the two families sit in the semicircle created by couches in the shared living room to
watch television together. Yet, close examination of the scenes in the apartment in
which cohabitation is intended to function as a transparent analogue to coexistence
reveals rifts in the façade of unity. By comparison, the scenes in the shared apartment
lack the homosocial intimacy of Chalom and Abdu’s
͑
shared sleeping quarters in
Mistreated by Affluence and of Satuta’s sitting room in Salama is Fine.
Although the families break bread together, the act’s unifying symbolism is
undermined by the violence with which it is carried out—Hasan pounds his fist
on a loaf to break the crust. And, although the food served is ecumenical—the
distinctly Egyptian stew mulūkhīyya and an okra dish—the discussion about the
dishes’ preparation divides rather than unifies. In praising his wife’s cooking, Marcus
relates how her mulūkhīyya captured his heart, prompting him to ask for her hand.
The term he uses for engagement is Coptic, used only by Egyptian Christians, a
reminder of the acts of deception being played out at the shared meal.
The visual language employed to present the scenes in the shared apartment
underscores the unbridgeable divide between the families rather than establishing the
connection between them. The blocking of both scenes prevents the camera from
identifiably including all characters in a single frame—a technique used in the 1930s
films to signify what I have called a Levantine aesthetics. In the establishing shots to
both scenes one or both of the female characters are absent from the frame, and in
both scenes, Imad/Girgis’s back is to the camera. The conversation at the dinner table
is rendered by a series of shot-reverse-shots of the two couples. The same technique
is used to depict the flirtatious glances shared across the living room between Imad
and Maryam. In the living room scene, Hasan, his wife, and his son sit on one side
of the room, while Marcus, his wife, and his daughter sit on the other—a division
underscored by the camera work. At one point the camera pans from the love seat
on the left to the couch in the center. But, rather than complete the pan, the camera
comes to rest on Hasan and Marcus who share the couch, but sit a comfortable
distance away from one another. These visual breaks set the viewer up for the rupture
of relations in the following scene when the characters’ identities are revealed.
52
Coexistence in Hasan and Marcus is represented as a thin veneer barely concealing
the roiling sectarian conflict below the surface. While in the film’s closing scene, the
two families melodramatically overcome the rift between them, their unity is forged
as the repressed sectarianism erupts into violence. As Coptic and Muslim youths
attack one another on the street, the two families link hands and together wade
through the morass.
This film has traveled some distance from the aesthetic, ethical, and ideological
possibilities of the Levantine idiom in inter-war Egyptian cinema. Post-war comedies,
despite their reification of identity and their employment of ethnic and religious
stereotypes, reflect a presumption of tolerance of ethnic and religious difference.
Although Hasan and Marcus refers to earlier ethnic comedies, the film offers dim
prospects for intersectarian tolerance in Egypt. Further, while masquerade can serve
as a destabilizing gesture—as I argue it does in the Levantine films discussed above—
it can also be reduced to a gimmick, deflated of its subversive potential.
Notes
1 I would like to thank the participants in the “Re-thinking the Levant” Workshop at the Van
Leer Jerusalem Institute on June 7-8, 2010 for their insightful comments and lively discussion
on an earlier draft of this piece: Amir Banbaji, Samir Ben-Layashi, Yuval Evri, Yochi Fischer, Gil
Hochberg, Amal Jamal, and Eyal Sagui-Bizawi. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to
Anat Lapidot-Firilla for inviting me to participate in that forum and for her feedback throughout
the development of this article. I am also, as ever, grateful to Elliot Shapiro for his support as well
as his comments and critique.
2
Anthony Shenouda, “Reflections on the (In)Visibility of Copts in Egypt, Jadaliyya, May 18, 2011.
3
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1624/reflections-on-the-%28in%29visibility-of-copts-in-egypt.
Hasan wa-Murqus, DVD, directed by Rami Imam (2008; Cairo: Lord Video Film). For ease of
reading, after the first mention, I refer to films by their titles as translated into English. For the
same reason, I Anglicize names of characters in the films.
In the case of internationally known individuals like Omar Sharif and Youssef Chahine, I use
the commonly accepted spelling of their name in English. I also use the commonly accepted
orthography in Latin script for people involved in the Egyptian film industry whose names are
not originally Arabic, such as Togo Mizrahi and Stéphane Rosti.
The Egyptian viewing public would likely know of Sharif ’s Christian origins, as well as his
conversion to Islam in the 1950s to marry his leading lady, Fatin Hamamah. Youssef Chahine
also claims credit for discovering Sharif.
Both Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago were directed by David Lean. In 2003, after over
a decade out of the limelight, Sharif was cast in the leading role in a French coexistence film,
Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran, directed by François Dupeyron.
Walter Armbrust, “Islamists in Egyptian Cinema,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (Sep.,
2002): 927.
4
5
6
7
8
9
53
Al-Irhab wa-al-kabab, VHS, directed by Sharif Arafa
͑
(1992; Seattle: Arab Film Distribution). For
a more in-depth analysis of this film, see: Walter Armbrust, “Terrorism and Kabab: A Capra-esque
View of Modern Egypt,” in Images of Enchantment: Performance, Art, and Image of the Middle East,
ed. Sherifa Zuhur (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998), 283-299.
al-Irhabi, DVD, directed by Nadir Jalal (1994: Cairo: Lord Video Film). For more on this film,
see: Armbrust, “Islamists in Egyptian Cinema,” 922-931.
10 The film is also an Imam family affair: one of Adil
͑
Imam’s sons, Rami Imam, directed the film
while his other son, Muhammad Imam, appears as Paulus/Hasan’s son, Girgis/Imad.
11 For more on the modern history of these communities in Egypt, see Gudrun Krämer, The Jews
in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989) and Alexander
Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt 1919-1937: Ethnicity and Class (Oxford: Ithaca Press, 1989).
12 Hasan wa-Murqus wa-Kohayn, VHS, directed by Fu’ad al-Jizayirli (1954; Cairo: al-Doqqi Video Film).
13 Al-Rihani died in 1949.
14 Ghazal al-banat, DVD, directed by Anwar Wajdi (1949: Ocean, NJ: Atlantic Outlet Sales Co.).
15 “The Golden Age before the Golden Age: Commercial Egyptian Cinema before the 1960s,” in
Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, ed. Walter
Armbrust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 299.
16 Armbrust, “Golden Age,” 299.
17 As Eyal Sagui-Bizawi has noted, the absence of Cohen, the Jew, in the latter-day film is
acknowledged by the inclusion of a song from The Flirtation of Girls performed by Layla Murad,
the popular musical film star of Jewish origin. “Kohen kvar lo gar kan,” Haaretz, Dec. 12, 2008,
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=1045799. Jews left Egypt in large
numbers following the 1956 Suez Crisis. Few Jews remain in Egypt and they no longer play a role
in Egyptian narratives of coexistence. To the contrary, when Jews appear in more recent Egyptian
films, they are usually villainous Israelis. For a reading of the Israelis in Egyptian cinema, see
Walter Armbrust, “Political Film in Egypt,” in Film in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Josef
Gugler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 233-238.
18 All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
19 Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); Joel
Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt (Chicago:
Middle East Documentation Center, 2002); Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema (Cairo: American
University in Cairo Press, 1998) and Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation (Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 2007).
20 Badi ͑ Khayri and Najib al-Rihani were closely identified with the the 1919 revolution, Ziad Fahmy
demonstrates that nationalistic songs written for their theater troupe gained broad popularity
and helped to shape a national identity that was forged through the collective experience of
mass protests. Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 122-166.
21 Oxford English Dictionary; In this matter, the French and English terms “Levantin” and “Levantine”
are similarly defined: “Natif des pays du Levant,” Academie Français, 1694.
22 For example, a study of modern Turkey published by Stanford economist and geographer Eliot
Grinnell Mears offers the following description of Istanbul: “By the Golden Horn, one may note
a group of merchants from Pera or Galata, probably Armenians, Greeks, Jews, or that vague
54
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
nationality, the Levantine.” Modern Turkey: A Politico-Economic Interpretation, 1908-1923 (New
York, Macmillan, 1924), 32.
Deborah Starr, Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, Empire (London: Routledge,
2009).
See, for example: Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies
of Modernity,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds. Pheng Cheah and
Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 265-289; and David Harvey,
“Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 529-564.
Robert Mabro, “Alexandria 1860-1960: The Cosmopolitan Identity,” in Alexandria, Real and
Imagined, eds. Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing,
2004), 247-262.
Salama fi khayr, DVD, directed by Niyazi Mustafa (1937; Cairo: Rotana Distribution, 2002; and
Seattle: Arab Film Distributors, 2006). The DVD releases list the English title as Everything is Fine.
I have adopted Viola Shafik’s translation of the film’s title from Arabic into English. The French
title of the film at the time of its release was Les Deux Banquiers [The two bankers].
Ahmad al-Hadari, “Istudiyu Misr…Madrasa sinima’iyya fi al-thalathiniyat,” in al-Sinima alMisriyya: al-Nash’a wa-al-takwin, ed. Hashim al-Nahas (Cairo: al-majlis al-a ͑ lā lil-thiqafa, 2008),
130.
al-Hadari, “Istudiyu Misr,” 129-151. Harb’s role in the development of the Egyptian cinema
industry is also addressed in Ilhami Hasan, Muhammad Tal at͑ Harb: Ra id
͑ al-sinima al-Misriyya,
1867-1941 (Cairo: al-Hayʼa al-Misriyya al- amma
͑
lil-kitab, 1986).
30 Rosti plays the role of Rustum Pasha and Ibrahim plays the role of Jihan, a wealthy opportunist
who pursues the fake prince.
31 Madgy el-Shammaa dismisses this film as “a play on ethnic, religious and class stereotypes”
even though he discusses it in the context of the complexities of Egyptian national identity as
represented in inter-war Egyptian cinema. Magdy El-Shammaa, “Shadows of Contemporary
Lives: Modernity, Culture, and National Identity in Egyptian Filmmaking” (PhD diss., UCLA,
2007), 61.
32 Zaynab and Husayn were both children of Ali
͑ ibn Abi Talib, the first caliph of Islam, and
Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. In Cairo there are mosques that are believed to
contain tombs of Zaynab and Husayn. There are popular annual festivals honoring these saints
in the streets around the mosques, and individuals visit the tomb shrines to pray and appeal for
intercession during times of trouble. As Umm Yanni’s comments reflect, in Egypt, and in other
parts of the region, this form of saint veneration cuts across religious traditions.
33 As a result of the proliferation of Egyptian cinema and other media through the twentieth century,
the Egyptian dialect became nearly universally comprehensible across the Arab world. While this
film and others contribute to this phenomenon, it becomes even more evident after the advent of
television across the region.
34 “Alex Cinema: Cinematographers,” Bibliotheca Alexandrina, http://www.bibalex.org/alexcinema/
cinematographers/Togo_Mizrahi.html.
35 Established in 1929, the studio was initially located in Alexandria and relocated to Cairo in 1939.
36 In addition to his popular Arabic films, Mizrahi was also involved in the production of several
films in Greek intended for the Greek audience in Egypt.
55
37 El-Shammaa, “Shadows of Contemporary Lives,” 46-47. According to Munir Muhammad
Ibrahim’s accounting, Mizrahi’s production company, the Egyptian Film Company, produced
eleven films in the 1930s. Asya’s Lotus Films and Condor Films, the production company of
Ibrahim and Badr Lama, each produced nine films during this decade. The Egyptian Company
of Performance and Cinema, the production company of Studio Misr, produced seven films,
starting with Widad (1936). Ibrahim, Al-sinima al-Misriyya fi al-thalathiniyat (1930-1939) pt. 1,
Cairo: Wizarat al-Thaqafa, Sunduq al-Tanmiyya al-Thaqafiyya, 2002. 71-78.
38 Mahmud Ali
͑ Fahmi, “Sinima Tuju Mizrahi (1930-1946) dirasa naqdiyya” in al-Sinima alMisriyya, ed. al-Nahas, 160.
39 The first shot of Salama in Salama is Fine shows him discussing his lack of luck with a lottery
ticket seller. See more about the significance of the lottery ticket seller on screen in Fahmi, “Sinima
tuju mizrahi,” 163.
40 Fahmi, “Sinima Tuju Mizrahi, 164-165.
41 Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema, 31.
42 Magdy El-Shammaa reads this self-promotional gesture as a purely commercial venture, discussing
it in the context of Mizrahi’s use of product placement to finance film production—an innovation
which, according to el-Shammaa, Mizrahi pioneered in Egypt. El-Shammaa, “Shadows of
Contemporary Lives,” 49, n 71.
43 I am relying here on the plot summaries provided by Ali
͑ Nabawi Abd
͑
al- Aziz,
͑
“Dawr al-jaliyat
al-ajnabiyya fi sinima al-Iskandariyya,” Amwaj 7 (June 2001), http://www.amwague.com/
amwague/7/derasat.asp; and Fahmi, “Sinima tuju mizrahi,” 158-159.
44 Layla Nasim Abu Sayf dates the first production to 1943, while Eyal Sagui-Bizawi dates it to
as early as 1941. Abu Sayf, Najib al-Rihani wa-tatawar al-kumidiyya fi Misr (Cairo: Maktabat
Madbuli, 2002), 268; Sagui-Bizawi “Demut ha-Yehudi ba-kolno’a ha-Mitsri ha-mukdam:
antishemiyut o humor Mitsri?” Ha-Mizrah ha-hadash 50 (2011), 98.
45 Fatimah wa-Marika wa-Rashil, VHS, directed by Hilmi Raflah (1949; Cairo: Gamal Elleissi
Films).
46 Hasan wa-Marika, DVD, directed by Hasan al-Sayfi (1959; Cairo: Rotana Distribution). The
Jewish community of Egypt emigrated in significant numbers in the years following the 1956
Suez Crisis. The representations of a local Jewish community were supplanted by the adversarial
portrayals of Israeli Jews following the rise of the Arab-Israeli conflict. See Armbrust, “Political Film
in Egypt.” In the title of this film we witness the loss of the third term, the Jew. It is also worth
noting that the Greek suitor whom Hasan is trying to displace has arrived from Greece and is not,
like Marika, a Levantine Greek-Egyptian. In this way, too, this film reinscribes the relationship
between nationality, national identity, and citizenship in distinctly non-Levantine ways.
47 The screenwriter of Fatima, Marika and Rachel, Abu al-Sa ud
͑ al-Ibyari, revisited ethnic difference
in two films with which he was involved the following year. He wrote dialogue for Yasmin [1950,
Anwar Wajdi, director] and co-authored the screenplay for Akhlaq lil-bay [Morals
͑
for Sale, 1950,
Mahmud Dhu al-Fiqar, director]. Ahmad Ra’fat Bahjat, al-Yahud wa-al-sinima fi Misr (Cairo:
Bahjat, 2005), 227. According to Bahjat, at some point in its production Morals for Sale bore the
title Amina wa-Katina wa-Sarina [Amina, Katina and Sarina]. Bahjat, al-Yahud wa-al-sinima fi
Misr, 233.
48 Sagui-Bizawi, “Kohen kvar lo gar kan.”
56
49 Marcus in Hasan, Marcus, and Cohen is Coptic while Marika in both Fatima, Marika, and Rachel,
and Hasan and Marika is Greek Orthodox. Contemporary coexistence films, as discussed below,
reflect a response to Coptic-Muslim inter-sectarian violence.
50 Bahjat, al-Yahud wa-al-sinima fi Misr, 228.
51 If the self-referentiality to other ethnic comedies was not sufficiently apparent, Isma il͑ Yasin who
plays Hasan, also played the similarly named Hummus, Yusuf ’s sidekick, in Fatima, Marika,
and Rachel. Rounding out the cast are the Palestinian-Lebanese comic actor Abd
͑
al-Salam alNablusi as Hasan’s friend and competitor for Marika’s affections and Stéphane Rosti as Marika’s
father, Yanni Papadopoulos. Marika is played by singer Maha Sabri in her first film appearance.
In addition to his role in Salama is Fine, as discussed above, Rosti also played Cohen in the film
version of Hasan, Marcus, and Cohen.
52 Viola Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation (Cairo: American University in
Cairo Press, 2007), 33.
53 Sagui-Bizawi, “Demut ha-yehudi,” 92.
54 Joel Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt (Chicago:
Middle East Documentation Center, 2002).
55 Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 158-162.
56 Al-Masir / Destiny, DVD, directed by Youssef Chahine, (1997; New York: New Yorker Video, 1999).
57 Fawal, Chahine, 178-179. Al-Muhajir / The Emigrant, DVD, directed by Youssef Chahine (1994;
New York: Kimstim).
58 Iskandariyah…lih? / Alexandria…Why?, directed by Youssef Chahine (1978; New York: Fox
Lorber, 2000).
59 For more, see Starr, Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt, 75-105.
60 Al-Akhar / The Other, DVD, directed by Youssef Chahine (1999; New York: Kimstim).
61 A critique of Islamist violence and its impact on Egyptian society is another important theme in
the film. Indeed, Margaret’s ultimate collusion with an Islamist cell suggests parallels between
their respective interests and motives.
62 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006), 7.
63 Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine, World Directors Series (London: British Film Institute, 2001).
64 Randall Halle, “Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as
Neo-Orientalism,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl
Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 304.
65 Halle, “Offering Tales They Want to Hear,” 304.
66 Walter Armbrust, “The Golden Age before the Golden Age: Commercial Egyptian Cinema before
the 1960s,” in Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond,
ed. Walter Armbrust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
67 Halq al-wadi / Summer in La Goulette, DVD, directed by Férid Boughedir (1995; New York: Kino
International, 2011).
68 Bayrut al-gharbiyya / West Beirut, VHS, directed by Ziad Doueiri (1998; New York: New Yorker
Films, 2001).
69 As Armbrust has articulated, other limiting factors have shaped Egyptian commercial cinema—
dependent upon the secondary home video market, Egyptian films generally conform to Saudi
morality codes. Armbrust, “Islamists in Egyptian Cinema,” 927.
57
70 Imarat
͑
Ya q͑ ubiyan / The Yacoubian Building, DVD, directed by Marwan Hamid (2006; Culver
City, CA: Strand Releasing, 2008). The film is based on the 2002 novel of the same name by Ala
͑
al-Aswani.
71 The Yacoubian Building was its first feature film.
72 See, for example, Ali Jaafar, “Egypt Business Has Good News,” Variety, Feb 10, 2007, http://www.
variety.com/article/VR1117959148?refCatId=1445. The Yacoubian Building did make a certain
splash outside Egypt; it was entered into competition at the São Paolo Film Festival where Adil
͑
Imam won the International Jury Award for best actor, and was the Egyptian entry in 2006 to the
Academy of Motion Pictures to be considered for nomination for best foreign feature.
73 For a more extended analysis, see Starr, Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt, 45-46.

Masquerade and the Performance of National Imaginaries

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