On May 12, Egypt joined South Africa in its International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide. As one of the first countries to recognize the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, Egypt has continually occupied a close position in this ongoing catastrophe; the nation opposed Zionism in the 1930s and accepted tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the Nakba but, in more recent decades, the government has worked to covertly “normalize” relations with Israel. This seeming contradiction culminates from the complex, multi-cultural, and syncretic history of the region, in which Jewish and Muslim peoples lived with intertwined fates, and it is that increasingly implausible reality which the French writer and psychologist Tobie Nathan explores in A Land Like You, an absorbing, panoramic narrative of Egypt in the twentieth century. In the following essay, Moumita Ghosh looks at how the nation of Egypt formed out of an overarching Ottoman unity, and how Nathan’s stirring novel of this tumultuous period can inform our understanding of the region today.
We live beside the Arabs the way a man might live beside his innards. Our tales fill their Qur’an, their tongue fills our mouth. Why aren’t they us? Why aren’t we them?
—Tobie Nathan, from A Land Like You (translated by Joyce Zonana)
In Ottoman Brothers, Michele U. Campos writes about how objective distinctions between empires and nations are often murky, especially as demonstrated in the late Ottoman context. In the years before the First World War, the rise of ethno-nationalist sentiments such as Zionism and Arabism were essentially in negotiation with the responsibilities of imperial citizenship in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Muslim empire. Rather than separating from the Ottoman empire, there were attempts to preserve its existence. As familiar calls for a two-state solution re-emerge in Palestine, now undergoing a second Nakba, this history of collective identity and a shared homeland in the Middle East—though short-lived, incomplete, and within the context of imperialism—has gained a new relevancy.
In the wake of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the collapse of the old Hamidian absolutist state, the new epoch of democracy linked the individual Ottoman citizen—irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or mother tongue—to the reforming constitutional state, and citizenship to the “Ottoman-nation” became a distinct socio-political identity. Palestine, even under rule, somewhat differed from the other Ottoman provinces in terms of being a site of worldwide religious devotion, as its daily life involved a mutuality whereby local Muslims, Christians, and Jews came together—especially in Jerusalem—to execute the vision of a “modern” urban city.
Sephardi Jews in particular were grateful to the Ottoman Empire for being their historical saviors, and were consistently mediating between the ideological commitments of multicultural, civic Ottomanism and the European import of particularistic Zionism in the years following the 1908 revolution. Shaped by cultural Hebraism, the Sephardi Jews of Palestine believed in the compatibility of Ottomanism and Zionism; they thought that the socio-cultural and economic rebirth of the Jewish community would be enriching for the Ottoman Empire and, most importantly, that such a revival would be taking place within the Ottoman body-politic. However, such views were not free of contentions—especially due to the continual forces of territorial colonialism.
Meanwhile, there was also a cultural Arabism which differed from Arab nationalism in the sense that it never advocated a separation from the Ottoman empire, but did resist against Turkification and demanded reforms within the empire—the most important incarnation of which was the demand to recognize Arabic as an official language. Palestinian Jews, already acculturated in Arab society, were not excluded, but with the presence of cultural Hebraism and newly emigrated Ashkenazi Jews, matters took a complicated turn, and Arab-Jewish culture faced a certain denial. Until now, a shared homeland of civic responsibility did not rely on a shared language, but it was that very criterion, among other things, that came to be a contested element of the empire. Ultimately, multiple and irreconcilable “citizenship discourses”, coupled with the disappointment of Ottoman citizens at the lack of administrative decentralization, led to ethno-nationalist sentiments gaining hegemony. As a result, the years after 1908 were spent claiming, contesting, and ultimately failing to achieve a neat definition of Ottoman citizenship.
With Israel’s continual violation of human rights in Gaza, the world has become broadly aware of Zionism’s imposition on Palestinian territories while Arabism and Islamism thrives in Egypt—a nation haunted by the ghost of Jewish-Muslim coexistence. Unlike the Palestinian experience summarized above, Egypt, under the rule of Muhammad Ali, eventually converted from being a province (eyalet) to an autonomous tributary state (khedivate). Straddling dramatic phases of power dispute, various elements of Ottomanism remained strong in Egypt until at least the First World War, or until the reign of pro-Ottoman Abbas Hilmi (who held the last Khedive post when Egypt ceased to be a part of the Ottoman Empire)—after which a direct British Protectorate was established over the country. However, modern technologies of communication and travel, as well as a multilingual press and its dynamic journalistic activity, continued to function, and Egypt largely remained a part of the radical Ottoman public sphere.
Tobie Nathan’s A Land Like You, published by Seagull Books in 2023 and translated by Joyce Zonana, begins at this pivotal moment, as the Middle Eastern theatre of the First World War unraveled. General Edmund Allenby had won the Battle of Megiddo in Palestine, chasing the Turks from the region, and the Ottoman empire would eventually fall in Palestine and beyond. By the time the British were formally awarded a mandate to rule Palestine, Egypt was moving towards its own independence, and A Land Like You is a historical rendition of such events—but it is also, much more, a testament of a multicultural homeland that no longer exists. Taking place within a Jewish-Muslim world that faced erasure due to ethno-nationalist forces, Nathan presents a multifaceted narrative of Egypt through its two main characters, Zohar and Masreya. In their story, animated with imagination and immersed in the factual events of history, a pulsating plurality beautifully forms a collective identity, nurtured by the Nile and its valley.
Transgressing community boundaries by secretly “serving strange gods”, Zohar’s mother from Haret al-Yahud, the ancient and underprivileged Jewish quarter, eventually conceives her first child after seven years of marriage. When Zohar finally arrives in the land of the pharaohs, however, his mother is unable to produce milk, and he is instead nursed by a Muslim peasant who had just given birth to a girl-child, Masreya. Both blessed by a rabbi’s amulet crafted in Aramaic, the Jewish and the Muslim milk-twins have an undeniable affinity for each other, which eventually gives way to a forbidden relationship—haram. They share their first kiss at eleven (on the same year Farouk I is enthroned), and together, the twins navigate not only their own fates, but also that of their nation. Going on to find tremendous success in their respective professions—Zohar as a founder of a distillery business during the Second World War (a time of prohibitive measures and meagre exports) and Masreya as a celebrated singer and dancer—they both eventually reach the zenith of Egyptian echelons, and come in contact with the emperor himself.
King Farouk, of the Muhammad Ali dynasty, is described to readers just as contemporary tabloids had presented him: a ruthless kleptomaniac, Nazi sympathizer, womanizer, and gambler, obese and bulimic. He drives fancy cars at the speed of shaytan and mocks British officers and their tommy guns, but is also an individual who remains deeply haunted by the weight of leadership. As Zohar articulates: “In Egypt, from the time of the pharaohs until the end of History, the king, whether called Pharoah, Prime Minister or President, was the land. . . .” Yet, as one moves through the text, one realizes that instead, Zohar is Egypt.
Born a Jew, his mother Esther had believed that he was conceived with the help of Muslim zar rituals, in which she had participated at Bab al-Zuwayala. Initially posed to arrive in the world feet first with the umbilical cord around his neck, Zohar was finally birthed safely after twenty-four hours of painful labour, and nobody knew who should be thanked: the god of the Jews, or the lord worshipped by the Muslim priestess of the zars. As a result, his family offered to placate both. Nathan paints a world in which Zohar’s birth could have been made possible by his mother’s faith in Muslim afrits, and when Zohar’s own instinctual belief in these same spirits—as well as in the life-worlds of Bab al-Zuwayala—leads him to seek refuge in a charm claw, the text clearly paints the possibility that such faith is what helps him survive the anti-Jewish riots of 1952. Yet, Zohar is also an individual who remains deeply attached to his Jewish roots, finding solace in his father’s recitation of the Song of Songs in moments when he finds himself distraught. So naturally, when Zohar finds himself torn between his two friends—one a Zionist, another a communist (who later goes on to convert to Islam and join the Muslim Brotherhood)—and their exclusivist political ideologies, Zohar does not identify strongly with either one of them. He solely recognizes the fact that Egypt is his womb, even though on the official records, he remains a stateless Jew from the alleys of old Cairo.
Such sentiments are perhaps ingrained in Zohar because he was born during a time in which Egyptian nationalism was more liberal than limiting. Furthermore, with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate, new prospects emerged of an end to British rule and an adoption of the Egyptian Constitution. There was tremendous political change in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century; during this time, Western concepts were adapted to suit local contexts and modernity arrived within the contours of territorial nationalism, leading to a national identity marked by a secular genre of culture. This secularity was made possible by the definition of authentic Egyptian identity—irrespective of religious orientations—as a shared Pharaonic heritage, centred around the environment and history of the Nile Valley. The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb and its otherworldly treasures further reinforced the brand of Egyptian identity, espoused by the Westernized elite, as an ancient and vanished civilization was resurrected on the global stage. It is no coincidence, then, that as Howard Carter finally opened Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1925, Zohar is born on the same day. The Great Sphinx of Giza, who had displayed only its giant head, was gradually being unearthed.
Zohar (also called Gohar, as per the Arabic intonation of his name) seems to represent the secular ethos of the territorial nationalist movement, wherein a largely Muslim Egypt coexisted in harmony with its minorities; all were children of the Pharaohs. However, by the mid-1930s, the twins of Arab and Islamic nationalisms were eventually made to mould Egyptian identity in a different, more neo-traditional genre: that of Islamic-Arab culture. This reorientation, which came to both reject and achieve hegemony over the “Western model” of nationalism, sought to achieve a kind of modernity anchored exclusively in Arabism and, at other times, more radically in Islamism.
Masreya, a Muslim whose name literally translates to “the Egyptian woman”, is Egypt as well. Arriving illegitimately and denied recognition by her birth father (who happened to be a pasha), she carries within her a kind of generational endurance. Pursued by many notable men of her nation—including King Farouk—she only ever gives herself to them superficially, and though she eventually marries one of those same notable men, she remains in love with the Jew whom she calls Gohar. At one point, she is featured in an “indecent” advertisement of Coca-Cola: a drink which enamoured both the likes of King Farouk and Gamal Abdel Nasser, and which, at that point, represented the promise of economic modernization within the contours of neo-traditional nationalism. Egypt would eventually witness de-coca-colonization following the company’s continual expansion in the state of Israel and its consequent association with Western imperialism, but that would not happen until 1967. However, when Zohar spots Masreya’s advertisement for the first time in 1952, the British had been almost driven away from Egypt, and there were other contenders for power: the Muslim Brotherhood, the Free Officers, the Wafd Party who had returned to the government, and finally, King Farouk—whose destiny of being dethroned had already been chartered. Most importantly, it was also a time when the anti-Jewish sentiments were at their heights, in the wake of the civil war in Palestine and the First Arab-Israeli War. In Zohar’s imagination, Masreya’s image seemed to murmur to him: “Go, light of night, child of the alleys. You were not made to suffer.”
Zohar and Masreya both become metonymic terms for the Egyptian nation, and their lives traverse across a fantastic range—from the alleys of old Cairo and a village of the Delta to the villas on the banks of the Nile and the plush buildings of the grand avenues. Ultimately, however, they remain helpless; just like the Egyptian land, its many common people, its saints and spirits, their destinies are governed by the whims of political powers. At some point, when such whims require being an Egyptian and being Muslim to be synonymous, the milk-twins separate but remain bound together by the same source of life—whether that be Jinane’s breast milk; the community of mothers in the Jewish hara who wash, massage, and cradle both infants in their earliest days; or the Jewish amulet crafted in Aramaic, requested by Aunt Tofa’ha to protect the newborns.
At Bab al-Zuwayla, Nathan introduces the figure of Sett Oualida, the Muslim priestess who invites Zohar’s mother to participate in the rituals, connects her to the kudiyas—women who can communicate with spirits, and helps in the process of parturition by bringing her fresh lotus blooms. She massages Esther’s pregnant belly with lotus essence, and finds Masreya’s mother to provide the infant with sustenance. In Zohar/Gohar especially, the readers witness the confluence of a multicultural nation through its mothers, nurses, and magicians; even when he is forced to flee, his memory remains a testimony to that shared heritage.
Amidst the worsening humanitarian crisis in Palestine where death looms large, one finds, in Tobie Nathan’s historical rendition of Egypt, a tale of Jews and Muslims dovetailed by the women who are immersed in rituals of giving life. Kinship ties, both real and fictive, become synonymous to territorial ties, and in the process, the primacy of one’s shared homeland/motherland is reestablished as a marker of identity. This, weaved together by memory and the individual sense of belonging, remains much stronger than the ethno-nationalist sentiments of the nation-state.
One is reminded of Ghassan Zaqtan’s haunting dream-like vignette in Describing the Past, where the narrator’s Muslim father visits his native village in Palestine—which had been abandoned during the Nakba—and finds it populated with nothing but cacti. However, he eventually returns with an uncrushed pomegranate fruit from the sole surviving tree, and the fruit almost becomes a representation of a womb, birthing memory as the father starts recounting his earlier life. Just above the pomegranate, the narrator’s Christian mother had kept a picture of Saint George—venerated once by Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. Zaqtan writes: “At night, when the pomegranate began to breathe and Saint George dismounted his horse. . . it was then that hundreds of heads and eyes and windows and balconies and minarets came down from among the cactus forest and descended the road, towards the house. . . .” In the wake of displacement’s trauma, memory becomes a medium to worship the sacredness of a shared homeland.
In the writing of this essay, I have consulted Michelle U. Campos’s Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Aimee Israel-Pelletier’s On the Mediterranean and The Nile: The Jews of Egypt (Indiana University Press, 2018).
Moumita Ghosh is a Kolkata-based freelance writer and researcher.
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