The Parisian

hammam.

In October 1919, the unrest in Egypt was still simmering. Britain had denied her request for independence at the Peace Conference, and when the leaders of the resistance were exiled to Malta the women of Cairo marched in protest. But the general strike had at last been called off and trade was returning to healthy levels between Egypt and the Levan

Travel was again possible between cities; Jerusalem was electrified, and under the new lamps and to the tunes emanating from the shiny phonographs, modern nightlife arrived in the Holy City.

And as the city developed its industries of soap and textiles, this became a common occurrence: the leisure time of the new capitalists expanded as their working hours decreased, and gossip started its ruinous motor into the salons of the wealthy. With such wealth came unhappiness, and with unhappiness intrigue, and the circulation of bitter jokes,

One tier below the landowning families were the ulema, scholarly families like the Hammads, who had begun to dominate politics as well. And below them were the newly rich mercantile families, who encroached now on the hard-won territory of those political ulema. There were mixed feelings towards this new set, the Kamal family among them, who were i

Then came victory in the Hejaz, and finally, the Ottoman Empire fell. Emir Faisal came to Paris for the Peace Conference, and what had been speculation, mere banter in high rooms off a boulevard, now these questions of nation or not were on the very threshold, and the blissful years of exile and indeterminacy were coming to an end.

Haj Taher’s grandfather began his business carting crates of Nabulsi soap on mules down through Gaza and into Cairo, returning after weeks with huge rope-bound bundles of fresh Egyptian cotton, which he sold in the Nablus khan, using the profits to buy more soap, travel to Cairo, and repeat the circuit. When Haj Taher’s father inherited the busines

He had fallen so easily into the compromise available in Paris, this type, by an embrace of otherness that at first he had admired in Faruq but which now appeared in his mind a skewed, performed version of what it was really like to be in a place but not of it, not to know it truly.

Zawata,