The Mansion of Riyad Pasha

In December 1892, this site was lit up by the biggest event of that year’s social calendar: The wedding of the son of Mustafa Riyad Pasha.

Riyad Pasha was one of the most important politicians of his time, and his mansion stood here. If you have your back to the remains of the Madrasa al-Bashiriyya, you’re facing what would have been the mansion’s gates. Step through, and you’re in a Nasser-era public housing project: Six apartment blocks massed around a parking lot, bland as barracks but not in the most miserable of condition.

The project buildings stand in what was once Riyad Pasha’s gardens, and the parking lot marks the spot of his lavish European-style mansion (1).

Let’s set the context a little.

At the time of this wedding, it had been 10 years since Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, adding it to its globe-spanning, “We Truly Didn’t Mean To, But Surely We Had No Choice” Empire. Lord Cromer had taken up residence in Garden City as Egypt’s ruler in all but name; hundreds of British officers and bureaucrats had set up shop overseeing ministries and government bodies behind a facade of Egyptian administration; the Gezira Club had been founded so they and their wives could recreate in its grassy expanses well apart from the natives.

Riyad Pasha (or Riaz Pasha, as you sometimes see it spelled) was a member of Egypt’s Turkish-Circassian elite. Decades earlier, he had been part of Khedive Ismail’s circle of modernizing technocrats. Alienated by the massive debt Ismail was building up and by the corruption rife among his officials, Riyad Pasha turned on the khedive and helped the Brits depose him in 1879 in the name of rescuing Egypt from bankruptcy.

By the time of the wedding more than a decade later, Riyad Pasha had served twice as prime minister. Each time, the British installed him, impressed by his fiscal stringency and incorruptibility. Then within months they would be complaining about his “Oriental attitudes” and his stubborn, if futile, attempts to resist British officials as they seized more and more direct control over the levers of power.

Image of Riyad Pasha from “The Homely Diary of a Diplomat in the East, 1897-1899” (1917), the memoirs of Thomas Skelton Harrison of his time as U.S. consul-general in Egypt.

The wedding that Riyad Pasha threw for his son Mahmoud was a dazzling affair that lasted for days.

Electric lights, a new marvel of the age, were strung up around the mansion and the surrounding streets. Carpets were laid out in the gardens to protect the guests’ shoes from ground dampened by a recent rain. The gardens thronged with everyone who mattered in Egypt, tarboushed pashas and beys, military men, politicians and literati, and British officials and European diplomats and their wives.

The hundreds of guests enjoyed lavish dinners and were entertained by awalim dancing girls. A takht, or classical Arabic orchestra with oud and tabla and qanoun, performed. And such was Riyad Pasha’s prestige that he had not one but two of Egypt’s greatest singers of the time on stage, Abdou al-Hamouli and Sheikh Yousef Khafaga al-Manyalawi.

Abdou al-Hamouli, from the 1926 book “Al-Mousiqa Al-Sharqiya w Al-Ghunaa al-Arabi,” by Costandi Rizq

ٍSheikh Yousef Khafaga al-Manyalawi with a group of musicians, including a kamanja and qanoun player. Also from “Al-Mousiqa Al-Sharqiya.”

But we want to focus on one particular woman amid the festivities.

Not the bride (the Most Virtuous Sharifa Hanim, daughter of the late Hassan Pasha). Not any of the wives of pashas or diplomats in attendance. Not one of the dancing girls.

The woman we turn to is an interloper among this Cream of Society — a journalist, Zaynab Fawwaz, who was covering the wedding for “Al-Fataah,” the first Arabic-language women’s magazine.

Largely unknown today, Fawwaz was one of the fiercest and most radical of the Arab World’s early feminists. She was ahead of her time in attacking the Patriarchy in scalding essays published in the many newspapers that were arising in Egypt and around the Arab world at this time.  

Marilyn Booth, of Oxford University, has written two superb books reviving Fawwaz’s legacy, on which I rely for most of this section (2).

Image of Zaynab Fawwaz

Fawwaz came from a Shiite family of modest means in southern Lebanon. After a divorce, she moved to Cairo. There, she began to write.

This was the era of the reformist thinkers of the Nahda, or Arab Revival. Nationalist sentiment was rising. Writers, intellectuals, artists and politicians were reviving and revolutionizing Arabic language, literature and poetry. They were developing the sciences and working to harmonize tradition with modernity.

The movement for women’s rights was also growing. Still, most of these reformers maintained that there was a “natural” division between men and women. Women should work, they said, but only certain jobs that suited their nature. Women should be educated, but mainly because it would make them better wives and mothers. The traditional male-led family firmly remained the basis of society.

Fawwaz was something else entirely. She went beyond reform to dissect how social institutions were used by men to maintain their power and privilege over women. Fawwaz “saw the condition of females as one of gender-defined subordination ... an issue of power, not of nature,” Booth writes.

Fawwaz argued that neither nature nor religion prevent women from taking all the same jobs as men. Differences in gender were enforced by male-led society, not enshrined in biology. Men’s resistance to women’s education, she wrote, was not because education went against women’s natural abilities; it was because men knew it would lead women “to break the rod of obedience and emerge from the noose of bondage.” 

For Fawwaz, traditional marriage, which society cherished as the place where a woman’s true nature was fulfilled, was just as often an institution rooted in misogyny, used by men to keep their women under control. Even worse, it led women to internalize their own repression. 

A woman, she wrote, “knows herself only as a tool in man’s hands, which he steers and directs according to his desires even as he reproaches and mistreats her.” To please an abusive husband, a woman tries with all her might to be a proper wife, “yet in return she receives nothing but his contempt ... She is like someone who tries to write on the surface of water or to grasp hold of the wind.”

All this was years before Qassim Amin wrote his famed 1899 book “The Liberation of Women,” considered a landmark in Arab feminism. The depth of Fawwaz’s vision of equality only highlights the shallowness of Amin’s, limited to calls for an end to veiling and changes in divorce laws (mainly because he considered them an embarrassment in front of the Europeans).

First page of first issue of Majallat al-Fataah, 1892

Fawwaz’s account of this wedding extravaganza in Al-Fataah is titled “Al-Afrah Al-Riyadhiya, “The Riyadian Wedding Celebrations.”

The grandeur kicks off with the bride Sharifa Hanim, her mother and the groom’s mother arriving in Cairo by private train from Alexandria, welcomed at what is now Ramses Station by a military band. From there, a line of 53 stallion-drawn carriages, escorted by police on horseback, carried the bride’s party and baggage across Cairo. All along the way, men and women lined the streets and watched from the windows overhead, cheering “as if it were a holiday,” Fawwaz writes.

Arriving here, the bride entered the gardens behind a procession of dancing girls playing tambourines and cymbals, trailed by her mother and mother-in-law throwing gold coins.

Inside the mansion, the groom’s mother takes Fawwaz on a guided tour of the newlyweds’ chambers and the bride’s trousseau. They pass through stunningly appointed salons and sitting rooms, halls swathed in silk and velvet and lined with luxurious carpets. Fawwaz admires the fine China, the chandelier dazzling with 80 candles, the silver candelabras and lamps of crystal. She pauses to note the groom’s diamond collar clip and bejeweled cigarette case. In the bride’s bedchamber, the washcloths of Indian silk are brocaded with pearls. The bed, like “the Queen of Sheba’s throne,” is ensconced in a red silk mosquito net embroidered with silver. It all shimmers, she writes, “like the light of the moon.”

Overall, Fawwaz’s account is straight-up Society Page material, celebrating the wealth and status of her subject.

Still, as Marilyn Booth points out, Fawwaz’s sensibility shows through. It’s not that her article is overtly feminist; it’s that Fawwaz’s feminist eye sees what others do not.

That becomes clearer by contrasting her account to other newspapers’ stories about the wedding. They focus entirely on the men, of course, and barely notice the women’s presence. They also give strangely little detail on the wedding itself. For the most part, they just spout praise of the wedding’s glamour and gush with admiration for Riyad Pasha. It’s as if the festivities’ grandeur sprang fully created from his skull, a natural emanation of his status.

Fawwaz, on the other hand, goes out of her way to show the hidden work that went into producing such a lavish affair — work carried out by women. This was another common theme of Fawwaz’s writing, how women’s labor, everything from housework to childbirth, goes unseen and unvalued by society.

Everywhere she points out the celebrations’ meticulous organization, the “finely organized” tables where the guests dined, the orchestration of the servants circulating with silver baskets of cigarettes. She describes how the awalim dancers were paid generously beforehand and firmly instructed not to ask the guests for tips, a custom that would have seemed gauche to the more than 200 European ladies in attendance.

The director behind all of this was the groom’s mother and Sharifa Hanim herself, a woman “of such intelligence and fine management, grace and friendliness, worthy of having such a refined evening put into her hands.”

Fawwaz notes with approval how the groom’s mother delegated 70 well-educated daughters of the Egyptian elite to act as companions for the European ladies. Fluent in French, English, Italian and other languages (a nod to the era’s rise in girls’ education), the young women translated for the Europeans during dinner. The diplomats’ wives “were entranced to the upmost” as their young translator-guides explained the traditional dances being performed by the awalim.

Fawwaz even explains the social labor that the mothers carried out behind the scenes to arrange the marriage in the first place.

The groom Mahmoud Pasha, she explains, had originally been engaged to marry Sharifa’s half-sister, Ihsan, the daughter of Hassan Pasha’s first wife. But Ihsan died suddenly, so Mahmoud’s mother turned to Sharifa as a possible match. At first, Umm Sharifa demurred, worried that a betrothal would offend and hurt her bereaved co-wife. But Umm Ihsan insisted the engagement go ahead. She had helped raise Sharifa and loved her dearly, we are told. As a sign of her consent and affection, she even gave Sharifa gifts from her deceased daughter’s trousseau, including a diamond-encrusted watch and a necklace of four strands of pearls, each strand hung with an emerald the size of a dove’s egg.

I love running into Fawwaz here at this wedding, so unexpectedly. There’s something subversive about it.

While Riyad Pasha’s son arrives to the pomp of a military band and a gunfire salute, while wealthy Turkish landowners puff themselves up before their peers over dinner, while British functionaries roll their eyes, uncomprehending but bemused as a sheikh recites a long poem extolling Riyad Pasha, Fawwaz is quietly circulating. She observes what they don’t bother to. She’s a carrier of ideas and aspirations that would seem ludicrous to them — far beneath the weighty stuff of imperial politics, questions of debt financing and agricultural reforms and the machinations of colonialists and khedives.

But all these elites, the most celebrated of their time, who of them is worth remembering more than a century later? The only one with any significance for today is this woman whose name hardly any of them would have known.

Fawwaz did make a name for herself to some extent in her own time, at least in intellectual circles, according to Booth. She was a sharp debater and wrote stinging, sarcastic rebuttals to other writers. She went on to write two novels, the first published in 1899, making it one of the first novels by an Arab woman (and among the first novels in Arabic.) Her magnus opus was “Pearls Scattered in Times and Places: Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces,” an encyclopedia of biographies of famous women throughout history, ranging from Queen Zenobia and Queen Victoria to American astronomer Maria Mitchell and American suffragette Victoria Woodhull.

Zaynab Fawwaz died in 1914.

The front page of the 1894 1st edition of Zaynab Fawwaz’s “Pearls Scattered in Times and Places: Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces.” (as Marilyn Booth translates the title, الدر المنثور في طبقات ربات الخدور)

The start of an article by Zaynab Fawwaz in the May 6, 1900 edition of the newspaper Al-Moayyad. titled roughly “Lord, What Women Suffer from Men.” In it, she responds to the author of earlier comic article about women’s unfaithfulness to men.

“My learned writer, if I wished to tell stories of men’s betrayals and infidelities toward women, it would fill pages and drain inkpots,” she writes.

Not long after his son’s wedding, Riyad Pasha (3) was brought in for one last stint as prime minister. Once again, he infuriated the British with his obstinacy and was removed after a year. 

(Alfred Milner, a top British finance official in Egypt and one of British imperialism’s biggest cheerleaders, grumbled that Riyad’s opposition to British influence only encouraged “fanatics,” by which he meant anyone who sought self-rule for Egypt, whether it was the “old-fashioned pashas” or “young modernists.”). 

Out of office and power, Riyad lived another 17 years. After his death in 1911, his mansion was repurposed as the new Supreme Sharia Court, part of the judicial branch that under British colonial rule dealt with family law cases for Egyptians.

At some point before 1933, new court buildings were built on the edge of Riyad’s property. The mansion was torn down and replaced with gardens surrounding the court building.

The separate Sharia court system was ended following the 1953 Revolution that removed the monarchy. Sometime after that, Abdel-Nasser tore down the gardens and court buildings and built this housing project in their place, part of his socialist drive to _ for better or worse _ wipe away the era of the pashas and beys and spread benefits to the people.

This detail of the Cairo map published in 1933 shows Riyad Pasha’s mansion in the center, labelled the Supreme Mohammedan Court (It’s cut off by the division between two sections of the original map. The section on the right was surveyed in 1912, when the mansion still stood. The section on the left was surveyed later, after the mansion was demolished, so that corner of the mansion is missing.) It’s surrounded by the walls of the grounds, with a entry portal on the northeast corner at Nur al Zalam Street. On the southwest side are the main court buildings.

The same location today, in a Google Maps satellite photo, showing the buildings of the housing project. The approximate outlines of Riyad Pasha’s mansion, its outer wall, the entry portal and the main court buildings are superimposed in white.