Shoping Malls, Consumer Culture and The Reshaping of Public Space in Egypt - Abaza

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Shopping Malls,
Shopping Malls, Consumer
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Mona Abaza
Mona Abaza
Theory Culture
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2001 18:
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DOI: 10.1177/02632760122051986
DOI: 10.1177/02632760122051986
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Shopping Malls, Consumer
Culture and the Reshaping of
Public Space in Egypt
Mona Abaza
Figure 1 Wonderland Mall, Medinat Nasr
‘Malls’ in its original meaning refers to the tracts for strolling. Now most of
the malls are shopping malls, tracts to stroll while you shop and to shop while
you stroll. The merchandisers sniffed out while you stroll. The merchandis-
ers sniffed out the attraction and seductive power of strollers’ habit and set
about moulding them into life. Parisian arcades have been promoted retro-
spectively to the bridgeheads of the times to come: the postmodern world
islands in the modern sea. Shopping malls make the world (or the carefully
walled-off, electronically monitored and closely guarded part of it) safe for
life-as-strolling. (Bauman, 1996: 27)
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98 Theory, Culture & Society 18(5)
YPERSPACES SUCH as stations, airports and shopping malls have

attracted increasing attention from urban sociologists in recent years
(Shields, 1989; Joseph, 1996). These public spaces, similar to those
the French sociologist Isaac Joseph (1996) defines as ‘éspaces de passage’ or
‘lieux-mouvement’, have inspired urban sociologists to re-think the notion of
space as a sphere of communication and meeting. Isaac Joseph asks us to
study such spaces from a micro-sociological or Goffmanian interactive soci-
ology perspective. Another fascinating study, which looks at British shop-
ping malls. is Shopping, Place and Identity (Miller et al., 1998). Miller et al.
argue that shopping does not merely reproduce identities, but provides an
active and independent component of identity construction. The study pro-
vides new insights about how to theorize and link ethnicity and consump-
tion through the different use of public space. It also provides a stimulating
overview of the history of the study of consumption. It points to the fact that
consumption has become a world of its own. It also highlights the import-
ance of space and place for consumer identities as well as the cultural prac-
tices of shopping. Moreover, it reminds us how these new geographies are
constantly creating new forms of shopping and lifestyle. It also emphasizes
the need to look at shopping malls from the perspective of shop workers and
how shopping influences sexuality and social relations (Morris, 1993).!
Inspired by the works of the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli,
Ricardo Ferreira Freitas (1996) produced a monograph in which he com-
pared various shopping centres in Brazil with the Parisian Forum des Halles.
Freitas often uses the notion of ‘imaginaire’ about the internal reshaping of
the space. The shopping centre, according to Freitas, symbolizes the ideal
city. This space is protected from pollution and nature. As a simulated space,
notions such as the ‘copy’, the ‘recycled’ or the ‘virtual’, become significant.
Paralleling the rise of violence over the last two decades, shopping centres
have increased in Brazil from one in 1980 to 19 in 1995 as a way of providing
non-violent monitored space. In Rio, they talk about the Barrashopping
(73,906 square metres) as the largest shopping centre in Latin America, as
a place associated with ‘humanizing’ space against violence (Freitas, 1996:
95).
Zygmunt Bauman (1996) reminds us that it was Walter Benjamin who
invented the fldneur as the symbolic figure of the modern city. Through
associating the new space of the malls with fléneur-ing, Bauman (1996: 27)
tells us that shopping malls make the world — ‘carefully walled-off, elec-
tronically monitored and closely guarded’ — ‘safe for life-as-strolling’. The
names of Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel constantly reappear in the
literature of the city, emphasizing the stranger and loneliness as the inspi-
ration for the reinvention of spaces; they initiated discussion of wandering
in modern cathedrals and empires of consumption. Mike Featherstone
(1998: 910) reworks Benjamin’s concept of fldneurie through its multifarious
dimensions and argues that the fldneur is not just a stroller in the city, his
or her fldneurie is also a ‘method of reading texts’ and ‘for reading the
traces of the city’. Benjamin tells us that the traces of the city which need
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Abaza — Shopping Malls in Egypt 99
investigating are hieroglyphic signs, signs and broken images which draw
attention to gendered spaces, such as the grands magasins, dominated by
women (Featherstone, 1998; Bech, 1999). Thus, shopping can be seen as
another form of fldneurie, a mobile gaze closely associated with women, in
contrast to the suggestion that the subject of the city is exclusively male
(Bowlby, 1985; Friedberg, 1993; Bech, 1999). The process of the feminiza-
tion of the fléneur can be linked to the rise of the department store, which
was an attempt to move the street into the interior. This work builds upon
the important writings of Janet Wolff (1985), Elizabeth Wilson (1992, 2001)
and Mica Nava (1996, forthcoming), who discuss and dispute the nature of
the emergent women’s public sphere in 19th-century England and France.
Mica Nava, in particular, strongly emphasizes the ways in which women
developed their own form of cosmopolitan public space in department stores
such as Selfridges in London.
How far are Bauman’s observations appropriate for understanding the
changes taking place in the Third World? Could unexpected uses of spaces
in the Third World by youth and women be a new field for social investi-
gation? There is much theorizing about how consumer habits and forms of
socializing have taken place in the Western world. There have also been
debates in recent years about the multiple and alternative modernities of
non-Western societies. This would suggest the need for further reflection
about the variegated and differential impact of consumer culture on Third
World societies. Certainly, in recent years there have been a large number
of studies concerned with the impact of consumerism, relating it to identity
construction and globalization. One could mention Jonathan Friedman’s
work on Congolese appropriation of French fashion, referred to as la sape
(from the French verb se saper), and the impact of dressing elegantly and
lifestyle among youth in Bacongo (Friedman, 1994). Consumption and
Everyday Life is another work which discusses the issue of appropriation of
consumerism among both the European working classes and in different
Third World countries such as Trinidad (Mackay, 1997).
Landscapes Compared
The reason why I have chosen to study shopping malls in Cairo relates to
the fact that I spent two years in Singapore (1990-2) and one year in
Malaysia undertaking field research in Kuala Lumpur (1995) on contem-
porary Islamic discourse and the networks Malaysian intellectuals devel-
oped with Middle Eastern centres of learning. My stay was marred by having
to spend long hours walking in Asian shopping malls. To escape the terri-
ble heat and horrible traffic jams, it was natural to make appointments to
meet in such places. The stroller in Kuala Lumpur quickly realizes that the
Malaysian jungle is withering away; trips out of the city take hours. I
returned to Cairo in 1998 after a long absence to observe developments very
similar to those I had seen in Kuala Lumpur before the Asian crisis. The
flow of cash had increased among certain classes. With increasing consumer
appetites, shopping malls — such as the World Trade Centre (WTC) and the
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newly opened (2001) Arcadia mall next to the WTC — had proliferated in
various areas of Cairo. The recently constructed district of Madinat Nasr,
dominated by the emerging middle classes who accumulated wealth through
migrant work in the oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia over the past
30 years, has seen five giant shopping malls built recently, in an architec-
tural style that emulates that of Singaporean and Malaysian malls.? The
largest of these is the Geneina mall, consisting of 12,000 square metres,
integrating a huge ice-skating rink and parking spaces for 400 to 800 cars.
Large numbers of malls were erected during the 1990s, such as the Horeyya
Mall in Heliopolis, the Maadi Grand Mall in Maadi district, the two malls of
Hilton Tahrir and Ramses, the Yamamah Centre in Zamalek district, the
First Mall in Guizeh district, and the recently built huge Sainsbury complex
in the district of the Pyramids.
When referring to the reshaping of landscapes through globalization,
Arjun Appadurai (1990) provides us with a stimulating outline of complex,
overlapping and disjunctive landscapes. Inspired by Appadurai’s visions on
globalization, it might be interesting to look at both Cairo and Kuala Lumpur
from a comparative perspective as cities where such disjunctions occur and
various ‘scapes’ are being reshaped and remodelled.
Kuala Lumpur today is a fast-growing metropolis with skyscrapers
including the two twin Petronas, the tallest towers in the world, and the
longest supermarkets in Southeast Asia. The town is eating the jungle. Jokes
about Mahathir’s vision allude to the phallic symbolism of such an endeav-
our. Flying over Kuala Lumpur, the town looks like an endless construction
camp with vast expanding new housing estates and condominiums. The
feeling of eternal construction camps extends to the countryside, where the
effects of logging seem devastating. The government boasts of Kuala
Lumpur’s new twin towers as the symbol of Asian success. This is a point
which Mahathir also brings into play, especially since the financial crisis, to
symbolize Malaysia’s quick recovery (Landler, 1999).° The lavish, post-
modern five-star hotels become spaces in which to escape the heat, suffo-
cation from car exhausts, and the hardship of hunting desperately for taxis
(especially during monsoon rains). Inventive architecture can also be found
in Islamic institutions (for instance, the national mosque, the Pusat Islam
{Islamic Centre], the Bank Bumi Putra and the main post office), all of which
have been designed in a grandiose Islamic style.
Through the reshaping of landscapes, flaneur-ing in the open air, which
is one of the attractions of any town, becomes nearly impossible, with the
growing number of cars and highways. In Malaysia, trees are constantly
chopped down and the jungle is rapidly disappearing. Cool, fresh air is avail-
able only in shopping malls. On weekends, extended middle-class families
of all ethnicities — Malay, Chinese and Indian — in their ethnic clothes
(Islamic attire of all varieties, saris, sarongs and the robes of Buddhist
monks) fill these spaces, mingling with people wearing mini-skirts, shorts
and sandals. The crowds frequent the Deli France, Kentucky Fried Chicken,
McDonald’s and Chinese restaurants. They enjoy shopping, window
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shopping or the movies. Huge screens with video clips of violent scenes‘ are
displayed everywhere, children’s games and performances like the Chinese
Lion dance during the Chinese New Year and other dances take place in
these shopping malls. These spaces can contain extremely noisy crowds of
young people.° The breaking of the fast during the month of Ramadan among
young Malay couples might take place in a McDonald’s. Dates are eaten first
to mark the breaking of the fast, following the tradition of the Prophet
Muhammad. Dances and celebrations of the Chinese New Year take place
in the shopping malls and Malay, Indian and Chinese festivities are also cel-
ebrated in these super-modern settings. One could interpret these events as
an aspect of ‘folkorization of culture’ (Zubaida, 1989: 117) © which goes hand
in hand with the growing ‘état-ization’ of Malaysia.
A New Public Space?

American shopping malls have kept sociologists busy from the mid-1980s
on. Many would argue that the topic has become old-fashioned, especially
as American shopping malls are suffering a significant decline. Dead shop-
ping malls are described today as littering the landscape; nearly one out of
every five US malls standing in the 1990s will be out of business by the end
of next year. We are also reminded that in 1960 there were 3000 shopping
centres in the United States, whereas there are now nearly 40,000 malls
(International Herald Tribune, 3 January 2000). As Meaghan Morris (1993)
. noted in her study on Australian shopping malls, it is change in the city, the
managing itself of change and the changing role of shopping centres which
is worth attention.
The Southeast Asian and the Egyptian cases tell us that shopping malls
are today increasingly flourishing and expanding. In this context, we should
perhaps be reminded that the Mahathir government in Malaysia has boasted
for years of the fact that it has built the largest shopping malls in Southeast
Asia. I would argue that shopping malls in Egypt will become a new field of
sociological investigation. In the shopping malls, an interesting hybridiza-
tion of tastes, and entirely different conceptions of space and ways of spend-
ing leisure are in the making. Although shopping malls are an American
invention, they do not necessarily fulfil the same functions in the Middle
Kast or in Southeast Asia. Featherstone tells us that shopping entails a multi-
plicity of operations ‘ranging from shopping for necessities, to shopping
around (window shopping) to recreational shopping (spending time in the
city, walking in the streets taking in sights, moving in and out of department
stores, shops in public spaces)’ (Featherstone, 1998: 916). In Egypt, for
instance, because of the shortage of public gardens, the newly built malls
might not be spaces for shopping, but rather for youth to socialize and mix
in groups. The government has recently encouraged the construction of
public gardens but, to the disappointment of everyone, these green spaces
are all fenced off and forbidden to the public on the pretext that Egyptians
are unable to behave in public and cause no end of littering. Shopping malls
could represent a new space for the study of youth culture in Cairo. In a
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country where 65 percent of the population is under 30, youth and youth
culture have become more visible.’ That malls are gendered spaces is a
recurrent theme in consumer studies, but that malls could be viewed as
offering social mobility and access to cash for lower-class, young sales-
women, through diffusing an image of the ‘modern’, presentable and fashion-
able salesperson, needs further research. It is the contrast, coexistence and
fusion between Islamic attire (albeit already Westernized, turned fashion-
able) and Western dress that is of interest.
Youth, Sexuality and New Spaces

The issue of youth and the perceived ‘sexual perversities’ of the younger
generations seem to fill a significant space in the official discourse. Sexual
perversion, we are told by officials and religious preachers, has spread in
recent years through pornography, available now through satellite television.
The invasion of ‘Western cultural’ values, we are told again, is corrupting
youth. This discourse goes hand in hand with an increasingly strict moral-
ity pertaining to public conduct. This is certainly related to the growing
Islamization of the society which has been taking place since the 1970s. The
press is on a witch-hunt, infantilizing women and youth, who are thought to
be easily perverted and therefore have to be constantly watched. Egyptians
have acknowledged that they are facing a serious crisis concerning their
sexual habits and the institution of marriage. The spread of ‘urfi (unregis-
tered) marriage among students in preparatory level, high schools and
universities has become a preoccupation of the national papers (Abaza,
2001).8 Along with illicit unions, concerns over sexual harassment seem to
take on a magnified importance in the press. The conduct of youth, together
with unbridled sexual behaviour in public spaces, has become an obsession.
Still, if official discourse tends to express intolerance and witch-hunting,
everyday practices of youth reveal that there is a ‘relaxation of norms’ within
the confines of the Islamization of society. Young lovers in Cairo find that the
veil is no hindrance to kissing and holding hands as they walk along the
river banks. The intermingling of mass culture and the reshaping of public
space here become an interesting field for investigating a new hybridity in
the behaviour and culture of youth.
Indeed, it seems that the major concern of the security staff in all shop-
ping malls in Cairo is how to gauge whether the young men and salesmen
standing at the fringes of the malls are any danger. The flowering of bowling,
billiard centres and popular coffee houses within clean, air-conditioned
spaces has provided a crucial outlet for the consumer-oriented younger
generation. Air pollution in Cairo has surpassed the limits of acceptable
standards in the West and is a serious hindrance to the walker. However, if
the shopping mall is a recent phenomenon, consumerism dates back much
earlier and owes much to the birth of the Egyptian department store. Here,
it would astonish no-one to state that the lifestyle of the Egyptian upper
classes has been strongly affected by European influences.
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Figure 2
Les Grands Magasins: Forgotten Early Egyptian

Consumerism
Recent theories of globalization tend to regard consumer culture as a recent
phenomenon. Consumer studies generally focused on the impact of mass
culture upon the European working classes in the 1960s and 1970s in
Europe and the United States. Cultural studies has been interested in issues
of mass media and the impact of American mass culture on European
working classes from a neo-Marxist point of view. It could be insightful to
apply cultural studies debates to earlier colonial upper-class lifestyles. In
fact, very few such studies have been undertaken. It is often forgotten that
European lifestyles and fashions were introduced to Egypt in the middle of
the 19th century. Max Rodenbeck reminds us of the fusion and interactive
aspects of the khawagat culture of Cairo,° by stating that by 1910 an eighth
of the city’s seven million people were foreigners (Rodenbeck, 1999: 176).
At this time, we are told, ‘the “rich Cairene” lived like a Parisian’. It is no
coincidence that the emergence of these new lifestyles paralleled the birth
of department stores which ‘catered to the new tastes with the latest fashions
from Paris and the catalogues of Christophle, Louis Vuitton and Mappin and
Webb’ (Rodenbeck, 1999: 184).
For many older-generation Cairenes, department stores evoke nostal-
gia for refined taste and images of fashionable, upper-class women being
attended to by skilled saleswomen and men. The staff became known for
their good manners. The experience of shopping in such stores was in itself
a form of elevation. Astonishingly, the creation of department stores in Egypt
coincides with the period of their birth in Europe in the last part of the 19th
century. If the department store owes its existence to the changes in the pro-
duction system whereby the factory produced more goods more efficiently,
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as argued by Richard Sennett, the birth of Egyptian department stores is

closely linked with the flowering of Egyptian Jewish capitalism. Some of
these stores in Cairo already existed in the 1880s. Les grands magasins and
commercial houses carried names like Chemla, Hannaux, Levi-Benzion,
Cicurel, Orosdi-Back, Simon-Artz, Chalons, Cohenca Pontremoli, and
Rivoli. Almost all belonged to the Jewish grande bourgeoisie. The only
exceptions were the Sednaoui brothers who were Syrians. Samaan and Selim
Sednaoui settled in Egypt at the end of the 19th century. They came to Cairo
via Damascus, but were originally from Sadenaya and Maaloula. The Sed-
naouis, we are told, in contrast to the other stores which were in the centre
of town, constructed their department store away from the centre in Sharia
Khazindar. The magasin was meant to be a replica of the Galeries Lafayette
of Paris (Raafat, 1997, see Fig. 3). As for the Cicurel stores, what distin-
guished them was the European character and the extensive number of
Jewish staff who spoke French (Beinin, 1998: 22). French signs are still to
be found in elevators and in advertisements. The founder Moreno Cicurel
migrated from Izmir in the mid-19th century. The Cicurel family held Italian
passports. The department store was opened in 1909, in the centre of the
European section which is today the 26 July Street. Beinin, in The Disper-
sion of Egyptian Jewry (1998), insists on the fact that Egyptian bourgeois
Jews, in spite of their cosmopolitanism, seem to have adapted very well to
the Egyptian nationalist discourse. Beinin maintains that Jews were per-
ceived as ‘different from’ Muslims and Christians and yet ‘the same as’ their
non-Jewish neighbours. Concerning the Cicurel department stores Beinin
says that:
To protest the rearrest and deportation of Sa’d Zaghlul to Seychelles, the Wafd
called on Egyptians to purchase only at ‘national stores’ in 1921-22. The
Cicurel Department store near Cairo’s Opera Square was specified as an
approved shop. In a 1948 memorandum submitted to the ministry of Com-
merce, the Cicurel Form described itself as ‘one of the pillars of our Egypt-
ian national economic Independence’. (Beinin, 1998: 21)
After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 a massive migration of Jews took

place. With the nationalization policies of Nasser, many foreign communi-
ties left, ending the era of cosmopolitanism that was oriented towards Euro-
pean culture. Chemla, the last private department store to be constructed
before the 1952 revolution, was opened in 1951. The department stores like
Hannau and Salon Vert were Egyptianized. Of the surviving Egyptian
department stores in today’s down-town Cairo, are Omar Effendi and Salon
Vert, which seem still to be faring well and catering for a large middle class.
Sednaoui’s Ataba and Chemla have both been recently stylishly renovated.
Today, globalization has become the catch-word, replacing the older
notion of cosmopolitanism. One clear manifestation is the proliferation of
Chinese, Indian and Argentinian restaurants, while international and Asian
food and imported goods from all over the globe have become available in
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Egyptian stores and supermarkets. Sainsbury’s!® chains in Cairo certainly

homogenized tastes through introducing Egyptians to new consumer styles
via the supermarket. But many had doubts about Sainsbury’s chances of
success in adapting to Egyptian taste. One year after having opened huge
complexes of supermarkets, Sainbury’s decided to withdraw from Egypt.
This was due to much protest, as rumours spread that the owners were Zion-
ists, a rumour which was circulated by smaller dealers who feared the
monopoly of Sainbury’s. Some interpreted the incident as Egypt’s struggle
against the evil forces of globalization. The pessimists, however, interpreted
Sainsbury’s retreat from the Egyptian market as a wise step since they pre-
dicted the recession.
Figure 3 Sednaoui Today
Cairo via Kuala Lumpur

Egypt underwent in the late 1990s a process of structural adjustment guided
by international financial organizations which led to further privatization and
liberalization of the economy. This coincided with the birth of a new busi-
ness class and tycoons, who are restructuring Egypt’s economy. Is the Middle
East heading towards an Asian model of development and would it be
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consummated by a similar financial crisis? In the Egyptian discourse on

development, admiration of the Asian model seems to be central. Egyptian
intellectuals ask whether the Middle East can follow a model of develop-
ment like that of the Asian tigers. The Egyptian Marxist political scientist
Mohammed El-Sayed Said is quite pessimistic; commenting upon the last
change of the cabinet he stated:
We want to imitate the Asian model, but we lack the traditional Asian virtues
of self-discipline, strict precision and rigid austerity. We frequently boast our
heritage and authenticity, but eagerness to learn, the desire to build and the
appreciation of collective work are beginning to decay. (Said, 1999)
Whether Egypt will emulate the Asian tigers is beside the point. What is of
interest is precisely the analogy and the constant comparisons with the so-
called Asian renaissance discussed by both leftists and Islamist intellectu-
als. ‘Why we will never be like them’ is an idea that dominates debates in
Egypt.
Some economists have argued that Third World countries undergoing
structural adjustment suffer from an increase of impoverishment (Fergany,
1998). Recent reports are rather alarming, as the triumph of neo-liberalism
takes place at the expense of the poor. Since the structural adjustment pro-
gramme implemented by the IMF in Egypt, we are reminded by Asef Bayat
(1997: 3) that rural poverty doubled and urban poverty increased more than
1.5 times between 1981 and 1991. Timothy Mitchell (1999) argues that real
wages in the public sector have dropped by 8 percent and that household
expenditure surveys reveal a significant decline in real per capita con-
sumption between 1990-1 and 1995-6. Mitchell remarks that a sign of
increasing poverty is the reappearance of soup kitchens in Cairo. He adds
that ‘the proportion of people below the poverty line increased in this period
from about 40 percent (urban and rural) to 45 percent in urban areas and
over 50 percent in the countryside’ (Mitchell, 1999: 32). Bayat, on the other
hand, says that more than half of Cairo and adjacent Giza were classified as
poor and ultra poor. Egyptian society seems to evidence a paradoxical
phenomenon; on the one hand observers have been studying the growing
Islamization of the whole society from the top to counteract Islamic protest
movements, while parallel to that is the creation of an expanding world of
consumerism and Americanization of society and culture. If malls in the
West are associated with the spread of high incomes, the majority of the
Middle Eastern countries are still characterized by low-income households.
Cairo strikes everyone with its incredible population density, car pollution
and the growing visibility of the poor masses who are marginalized from the
modern sector. Statistics indicate that in the area of greater Cairo, there are
40,000 persons per square kilometre (Bayat, 1997: 3). A unique feature of
Cairo is that its cemeteries host a large population of marginalized poor. Life
and death in a state of deprivation intermingle.
The second paradox is that, despite an acute economic crisis, Cairo is
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witnessing a boom in the construction of shopping malls. The monopoly of

wealth in the hands of the few resulted in the construction of condomini-
ums!! and swimming pools in newly reclaimed desert land; beach resorts,
and ‘gated communities’, inspired by either the American or Asian model,
or featuring an invented Islamic architecture, attracted the large savings of
the middle classes. Beverly Hills and Dreamland are the models for some
of these ‘gated communities’. A certain homogeneity between Cairo, Kuala
Lumpur or Jakarta in reshaping landscapes is arising with the effects of
globalization. These observations were made before both the Asian crisis
and the recession that hit Egypt’s economy in 1998-2000. The most visible
outcome of structural adjustment has been land speculation, which led to
the enrichment of property owners while increasing social inequalities and
poverty. Statistics reveal that in 1991, 35 percent of Cairenes lived below
the poverty line, fixed at 1,114 dollars per year for a family of 4.6 members
(Denys, 1996: 8).
There has been a reshaping of public space to merge shopping with
leisure (movie houses, billiard rooms, discotheques, ice-skating rinks).
These spaces often include modern offices housing a large stratum of pro-
fessionals daily. A new lifestyle in forms of dress, and the phenomenon of
carrying mobile phones, has changed perceptions of public space. Archi-
tecture was noticeably transformed, and hybrid styles and fusions between,
say, ‘oriental’, ‘Islamic’ or ‘Asian’ and modern Western architecture became
fashionable. The cathedral-type mall incorporates many functions; its main
advantage is being open and transparent to the public. Advertisements in
both English and Arabic newspapers became sophisticated, spreading the
new lifestyles. One can find a certain homogeneity in malls all over the
globe. They look similar, whether they are in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia
or Cairo. This holds true on the surface. However, the local variations
between each individual case and the economic situation of each country
provide a different setting.
The Discourse on ’Ashwaiyyat

One cannot look into the government’s conceptualization of the reshaping of
the city of Cairo without looking into the dominant discourse of ‘ashwaiyyat
(unplanned construction, the squatters and slums). ’Ashwaiyyat simply
means the slums. The press has in recent years focused on the growing
significance of the ‘ashwaiyyat. In official discourse, ‘ashwaiyyat became the
equivalent of chaotic and ‘uncivilized’ relations. The term has been used in
different contexts, for example in relation to unregistered and therefore illicit
forms of marriage. It is an attribute of the poor and has entered the official
discourse of the state as a label for anything which is not ‘ordered’. The
government has often linked the expansion of the ‘ashwaiyyat with rampant
crime and violence. The ’ashwaiyyat became synonymous with the violent
acts of Islamist terrorists. State discourse associated the rise of violent
Islamist activities with the phenomenon of the uncontrolled growth of the
‘ashawaiyyat. The poor quarter of Dar al-Salam, a district of Greater Cairo,
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the most densely populated area in the Middle East, is an example of such
poor areas.!? There are around 400 areas or regions of unplanned housing
in Egypt, with a population of seven million (al-Hiddini, 1999), while some
sociologists estimate that the population reached between 10 or 12 million
in 1995, which is 25 to 35 percent of the total population (Ibrahim, 1996:
87). The magazine Nisf al-Dunya published recently an alarming report on
the squatters in Cairo, accompanied by horrifying pictures depicting masses
packed in inhuman conditions. Whole areas are being inundated by sewage
and garbage, and basic sanitary conditions are lacking. The report stated
that Egypt had 1172 areas classified as ‘ashawaiyyat, which included 11.5
million people (Mufid et al., 2000).
With regard to shopping malls, there is the case of the Cairo World
Trade Centre, which was constructed through the cleaning up or pushing
away of the popular quarter and getting rid of the ’ashwaiyyat surrounding
it. This logic could also be observed in the way the Hilton Ramses Hotel and
shopping complex has eliminated the popular quarter to create the annexe
mall; and the land the World Trade Centre stands on was sold cheaply by
the state and bought up by the new tycoons since it was located in a popular
area. This process goes hand in hand with a massive restructuring of the
whole of Cairo, in a process of ‘gentrification’ similar to that in many Euro-
pean towns in earlier periods. The current Minister of Culture Faruq Husni
launched a campaign to restore old monuments and gentrify popular
quarters. Supporters see this as improving cleanliness and embellishing the
city. Pessimists view it as an elitist move undertaken at the expense of hiding
away and dislocating the poor who occupy such areas. Facades are painted
in white but the antiquated sewage system remains and water shortages
prevail. In short, nothing has changed inside these renovated areas. The old
warshas (informal sector small shops) have been removed or renovated, and
the economic activities related to them have withered away. Many see such
an action as a way in which government can contain and control small-scale
business, as in the case of the popular quarter of al-Darb al-Asfar, in the
Bazaar area of old Cairo.
Popular versus ‘Chic’ Malls

The different Cairo malls attract very different customers. If the World Trade
Centre caters mainly for middle-class housewives, students and emerging
Egyptian yuppies parading their mobile phones, the Bustan Centre, which
was meant to be mainly a parking place for down-town and also turned into
a shopping centre, hosts mainly lower-middle-class youth. The mall has a
variety of Egyptian-style coffee houses, with loud Egyptian music and with
dark corners for secret lovers’ encounters. Gangs of young boys and girls
regularly hang out in such malls. Cheap, popular coffee shops, Internet
coffee shops and large bowling or billiard centres have become available for
the lower-middle-class youth, who wander about in the afternoons and
evenings. It is no coincidence that most of these ‘malls’ have been con-
structed near a popular market, as is the case of the Bustan Centre which is
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adjacent to the Bab al-Luq traditional vegetable market, whereas the World
Trade Centre is close to the popular Boulag market. Khan Azzam is a new
shopping mall which has been planted in the heart of the traditional Bazaar
of Khan al-Khalili. The effect of such an intrusion into the market place in
the centuries-old Muslim part of Cairo is disturbing. Inside it resembles a
Parisian grand magasin, and this contrast is indeed offensive in relation to
the streets of the popular sug (market) lying a few metres away. Khan Azzam
mall is still not open, and many wonder if it will be a success in view of the
current economic crisis. Constructed in the style of a Western covered
market, with wooden mashrabiyyah (Islamic style wooden carved windows)
and Islamic style columns, it again displays the fashionable hybrid taste.
Can one speak of a possible interaction between these two different markets?
Could there be a dialogue between modern and traditional sectors or spaces?
It seems that two different populations are simply being juxtaposed and that
what is being represented is rather the non-exchange or divorce between,
say, the traditional market networks of cloth and second-hand goods and the
modern joint-venture commodities sold at the WTC.
It is possible to speak of a certain cultural specificity in the concep-
tion of what is understood among Cairenes as a shopping mall. Certainly any -
European would have doubts as to whether the Bustan Centre should be con-
sidered a mall or just an annexe to the largest parking place for down-town.
The Yamamah Centre in the quarter of Zamalek, owned by Prince Bandar,
a close relative of the Saudi royal family, is an entirely different type of mall.
Erected in 1989, it was the first mall ever constructed in Cairo and is the
symbol of the Saudi financial presence. The centre consists of nine floors
with escalators and covers an area of 4000 square metres. It is run by Egyp-
tians. Its location in Zamalek is ideal for the students of the various facul-
ties of applied arts and music which are located nearby. A few years ago
there was a coffee house in the passage between the Yamamah Centre and
the next building. It was closed down when it became a meeting place for
students who, after classes, gathered to smoke water pipes and, reportedly,
hashish. During the winter, the hall usually becomes a busy meeting place
for the students between noon and four o’clock. As in all the malls of Cairo,
there are tight security measures. Secret cameras are everywhere, security
guards are to be found on each floor. The major problems, according to the
manager, are petty thefts, shop-lifting and sexual harassment, which
increase in summer with the flow of Saudi Arabian visitors to Cairo. Sexual
harassment seems to be the major concern in case Saudi women are the
target. The manager stated that this might lead to serious trouble with the
Saudi owner. In winter, visitors to the mall are mainly window shoppers, and
the dangers of petty theft become the obsession of the administrators of this
space. During the month of Ramadan performances of Arabic music take
place in the hall and attract a large audience. During this fasting month,
Cairenes spend long nights in the streets and in public places and such malls
are packed until late at night. The Yamamah mall provides for specific tastes
like high-heeled shoes, glittering clothes and children’s games, attracting
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mainly Saudis. The quality of the products seems to cater to the needs of
Gulf visitors who enjoy Cairene summers. In other words, the standards of
taste are what upper-class Zamalek residents would qualify as baladi or bi’a
taste (popular, with the connotation of vulgarity).!? The most striking obser-
vation is that the mall attracts Egyptian women dressed and veiled in the
Saudi style. Also, many such young women, one can guess from their accent,
seem to be Egyptians who have been married to Saudis or men from the Gulf
as part of the traffic of Egyptian poor women who are often ‘sold’ as cheap
brides by their families. Each of these malls attracts customers differing in
terms of class and in their consumer demands. But if the Bustan and
Yamamah malls are regarded as catering for common and ‘vulgar’ masses,
labelled as bi’a, the recently opened First mall in the district of Guizeh, in
one of the most expensive and lavish buildings of Cairo, illustrates how
classy ones do their best to keep the masses away by tightening their security
and introducing expensive restaurants and coffee shops that will exclude the
poor.
Baladi Qahwas in Malls
Only one Cairo institution is more common than the mosque: the gahwa or
coffee house. Statistics are less accurate now than when Napoleon’s army
counted 1,350 coffee houses in the city of a Thousand Minarets, but the ratio
of 200 citizens per café has not declined much. By this reckoning the cafés
of modern Cairo must number well over 30,000. (Rodenbeck, 1999: 263)
Max Rodenbeck’s observation reminds us how crucial the coffee house has
been as a traditional institution for socializing, gossiping, playing back-
gammon and grouping people according to profession. But it has also been
a crucial front-stage space in popular quarters where people sat comment-
ing upon passers-by and where the news of the quarter was exchanged. The
coffee house has been for many years exclusively a male space. The coffee
house as a locus for commenting upon the physique of passing women, is a
repeated theme in novels and Egyptian films.
The lovers of the city of Cairo boast about the special cultural milieu
of down-town intellectuals, painters, writers and essayists, which has seen a
revival during the 1990s. They meet in the same places (coffee houses and
bars) nearly every night to drink, joke, exchange news, ideas and infor-
mation, gossip in politics, art or the latest scandal. The most famous land-
marks of this scene were: the gahwat al-Bustan, also called the gahwat
al-muthagqafin wal fananin (the coffee house of intellectuals and artists), the
Greek club, which is located on top of the historic Groppi coffee house, the
Grillon and the Odeon bars, the Estoril restaurant, the bar of the Windsor
hotel and the famous Café Riche which recently re-opened. Can one con-
clude that coffee houses in today’s malls are becoming the cultural counter-
part of the long-standing down-town bars? Are these bars and local down-town
coffee houses hang-outs for a new counter-culture counterposed to the
aggressive consumer culture in shopping malls? It is most unlikely that one
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Abaza ~ Shopping Malls in Egypt 111
will replace the other. But these observations need further reflection and
elaboration. For students of consumerism, it is extraordinary to observe the
incorporation of modernized Egyptian coffee houses within the space of
shopping malls. Currently, many malls like the Ramses annexe and the
Yamamah Centre, have created an Egyptian gahwah where one can smoke
water pipes in the air-conditioned space of the mall. Quite often, a typical
Egyptian street-seller’s cart sits nearby with popular (sha’bi) food like ful
(beans), chickpeas and oriental salads. Some coffee houses have artistic
ambitions, such as the coffee house on the ground floor of the Yamamah
Centre in Zamalek which incorporates a gallery. This coffee house has
become a meeting place for young writers and painters. This is where young
boys and girls meet to flirt. It has become a place where one can smoke the
shisha (water pipe), discuss art and exhibit paintings that are for sale. There
is a noticeable folklorization of culture through the flourishing of tourism in
such public places, like baking popular baladi bread in the Marriott and
Sheraton hotels, installations of tents with belly dancers and popular singers,
a kitschy mimicry of Bedouin life. In the malls, the smoking of water pipes,
display of ambulant food carts, selling ful and ta’miyyah (vegetarian rissoles)
— originally the diet of the poor and the lower classes — have become fashion-
able with the revival, celebration and purification of popular traditions. The
Geneina mall in Medinat Nasr offers, in a tent restaurant inside the mall,
pastries (fitir) and kushari, a popular dish which consists of rice and noodles
topped with a rich tomato sauce with onions. The Tiba mall, also in Medinat
Nasr, attracts youth from the popular quarter of Manshiyyat city, which is
considered today as another squatter area. The Tiba mall has become the
place to play computer games. The Grand mall of Maadi is another fasci-
nating place to study the various nationalities. On weekends, female maids
from the Philippines gather at the bowling centre to play and chat.!> Besides
Americans, the Korean, Japanese and Southeast Asian communities frequent
this centre because they can purchase Asian goods now available in Egypt.
The World Trade Centre in Cairo

I would like to discuss the case of the World Trade Centre in Cairo which
was constructed by the Sawiras family. The Egyptian World Trade Centre is
today considered a success story, symbolizing the triumph of the new class
of tycoons in Egypt. The Sawiras family emerged during the Mubarak
regime. Such family capitalism brings to mind American families like the
Rockefellers or the Fords. Inflated stories about this family’s origins and
success are fed with rumours that they accumulated wealth through having
obtained loans from the World Bank and US aid. The Sawiras family owns
Orascom, which is a holding company. It also controls 11 subsidiaries
(Mitchell, 1999: 31), ‘including Egypt’s largest private construction, cement
making and natural gas supply companies, the country’s largest tourism
developments (funded in part by the World Bank), an arms trading company
and exclusive local rights in cell phones, Microsoft, McDonald’s and much
more’ (Mitchell, 1999: 31).
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The emergence of such a concentration of wealth in the hands of few

families is in fact the logical continuation of the open-door policy which was
introduced by Sadat. First founded in New Orleans in 1968 to encourage the
expansion of world trade through the World Trade Centre concept, the WTC
Association has grown to become a network of over 220 member WTCs in
over 190 cities worldwide. The World Trade Centre in Cairo was founded in
1990 through a joint venture supervised by the architects Owings and Merril
Skidmore from Chicago and Ali Nour el Din from Egypt. The English pam-
phlet inviting the Egyptian middle classes to the new world of consumption
advertises the place as follows:
Welcome to the World Trade Centre Mall
Dear Shopper,
Welcome to the World Trade Centre Cairo shopping mall. A unique retail
environment unlike any in Egypt, the exceptional architectural design of the
Mall reflects and combines the old touch of Egyptian Islamic bazaars with
ultra-modern European galleries. Ensuring the shoppers’ convenience and
comfort, WTC Cairo mall is designed to render a wide range of services and
facilities, e.g. escalators, elevators, air-conditioning, parking . . . etc. WTC
Cairo mall houses over 75 shops offering a wide variety of top-of-the line prod-
ucts and recreation facilities ranging from clothes, accessories, furniture, art
galleries, cafés, restaurants, night clubs, discothéques . . . etc.
The WTC Cairo provides office space, housing apartments, retail centre and
recreational areas. It offers its members and tenants a wide range of facilities
and services, information services including computerized communication,
extensive database and library facilities covering world markets, trade oppor-
tunities, government regulations, tariffs, business topics, trade research ser-
vices, trade missions, meetings or conference facilities and exhibit space. The
WTC is divided into three main areas: the residential and recreational area,
the offices and the commercial complex.
Located in the popular area of Boulaq, in Cairo, the World Trade Centre
which was created in 1990 was erected, together with other towers (the
Conrad and Hilton hotels) at the expense of an abrupt elimination of one of
the oldest and most architecturally rich quarters of Cairo. The quarter
underwent an incredibly fast transformation. Boulaq was conceived during
the last century as a refined bourgeois quarter. It is today one of the most
densely populated areas of Cairo and has been known for retail, textile and
car-repair shops, and second-hand markets in wekalat al-balah. Boulaq was
also famous for its first printing house al-mataba* al-ammiriyya which has
disappeared. Sharia al-Mataba’ is today populated by large shops selling
cloth and textiles, both Egyptian and imported. It is interesting to observe
that a large number of these shops belong to Copts who display icons,
mosaics and pictures of the Virgin Mary. These markers have gained sig-
nificance with the growing Islamization and the confessional tensions that
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have affected Egyptian society between 1980 and 2000. Small shops belong-
ing to Copts (the eastern Christian minority) sell second-hand material from
the army such as tents, parachutes and army uniforms. In Sinnariyyah Street,
an old hammam (public bath) has survived not far from the Sinnariyyah
mosque. What a contrast — a few metres away from the imposing ultra-
modern mall, the Boulag Friday market provides lively scenes of packed
masses, with haggling and strong baladi women (popular, dressed in long
mostly black garb). The popular market is known for selling second-hand
clothes in sug al-kanto. Not very far away, the stroller will end up at the
famous large Sabtiyya market specializing in iron and second-hand metals.
It is striking to see the juxtaposition of these two different worlds and
markets, but the new Egyptian capitalist class is fast pushing away the
popular quarters. Traditional coffee shops and popular street life have sur-
vived the change, but for how long? Near by, on the same river bank, the
Ramses Hilton has constructed another mall, which is also expanding at the
expense of the back-street popular quarter. The people of the quarter I spoke
to expressed resentment and fear of the government. Everybody knows that
the days of the popular quarter are numbered and eviction is soon to come.
The population seems to be resigned to accepting the meagre sums given by
the government for dislocation. They are aware that these two towers take
the lion’s share of water and electricity, which contributes to shortages in the
quarter.
Back in Cairo, I felt a sense of déja vu in relation to my Kuala Lumpur
experience. Descriptions of consumerism and architecture in Southeast Asia
can easily be applied to Cairo. The World Trade Centre, for instance, incor-
porates a new conception of space for leisure (cinemas and discotheques,
shops, fitness centres, computer games with communication facilities and
housing apartments). A new way for the middle classes, of occupying space
and spending time, is in the making. This huge complex, with some hun-
dreds of shops, restaurants and cafeterias, is meant to integrate the resi-
dential with the recreational, business and commerce with fldneur-ing. The
offices of international organizations such as the United Nations, UNDP
(United Nations Development Programme), UNIWFP (United Nations World
Food Programme), the International Office for Migration, Thomas Cook, the
African Export Import Bank and many others are all located there. The
Conrad and Hilton residential towers sandwiching the WTC consist of 26
floors each. Each tower has a large lobby and each floor consists of four
apartments of two to four bedrooms, which cost US$1500 per month for 200
square metres.
The customers keep changing through the day: women, fashionably
veiled or not; families wandering and window-shopping; gangs of youth
playing computer games; young couples holding hands; hotel guests from the
Gulf countries; Egyptian yuppies; regular customers of the night clubs and
the billiard halls; expatriates working in international organizations. The
Mobinil, one of the largest mobile phone companies, is based there. In
summer, visitors from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia rent flats and studios from
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the Conrad and Hilton hotels. They all seem to frequent this space. Security
measures are extremely tight and taking photographs, for instance, is strictly
forbidden. Designed symbolically in the form of an Islamic wekala (covered
popular market), with wood carvings similar to mashrabiyyahs, a so-called
Pharaonic entrance and fashionable European tiles, the atrium is a central
open space with public visibility; it gives the feeling that it could be any
mall in Europe or Asia. Rumours run that the space was originally meant to
be used as a stock exchange market, but the project never materialized. At
Christmas, the Hilton provides decorative Christmas trees. During the
fasting month of Ramadan, large banquets are set in tents, located in the
open space of the entrance. They bear a similarity to the mawa’ed al-rahman
(the public banquets for the needy). It would be ideal if the poor and the rich
could fuse in the joy of banqueting, if only one could overlook the charge for
the fitar (breaking of the fast) per head in the World Trade Centre. Surely,
exclusiveness has become fashionable in Cairo, for such fitars are terribly
expensive. The obsession of the rich of Cairo today is to push away the
unwanted poor as far as possible. All these malls, be they the Yamamah
Centre, the WTC or the Ramses Hilton annexe mall, maintain strict security
measures and video cameras monitor the public.
Consumer Culture and Hybridity

It has been argued that globalization implies the ‘promotion or invention of
difference and variety’ (Robertson and Khondker, 1998). Robertson and
Khondker raise the point that for many Third World intellectuals, globaliz-
ation has been synonymous with Americanization. Since the late 1980s, a
large body of literature, concerned with global versus indigenous knowledge
and about the interaction and intricate dialectical relationship between the
global and the local, has developed and expanded (Albrow and King, 1990;
Featherstone, 1998; Robertson, 1990). Whether the particular emerges
against — or is complementary to — the universal and whether the weight of
‘local truth’ may be part and parcel of the global cultural condition, have
been themes well elaborated by Roland Robertson (1990). On the other
hand, Pieterse (1995) saw that quite often globalization can be seen as a
process of hybridization which needs to be theorized rather than celebrated
(cited in Caglar, 1997). The case of Egypt teaches us that what we are wit-
nessing is a process of hybridity in consumerism whereby a McDonald’s, a
shopping mall or a consumer brand is recycled according to local tastes. A
Wimpy or a McDonald’s in Singapore is Asianized and adapted to local culi-
nary tastes and in Cairo it is Egyptianized. It is the creation of something
new, having to do with an imagined representation of an American culture
fusing with invented Egyptian artefacts. This is not a novel argument. What
interests us is how the hybridization of tastes and reifications of Egyptian
cultural symbols are marketed locally. For instance, one often observes the
phenomenon of misspelt American names and consumer goods. Recycling
a consumer good means to adapt it to local tastes. One can mention as an
example here Baskin-Robbins at the World Trade Centre in Cairo which
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sells under this brand entirely different goods. This often produces a cacoph-
ony of tastes. The fashion of using Western names that are then Arabicized
and misspelt dates back to the late 1970s and 1980s.
Hybridity might be an interesting concept when applied to consumer
culture. In fact, it is appealing if one looks at consumption from a mullti-
cultural perspective (Caglar, 1997: 182) Here Egyptian or Southeast Asian
shopping centres become a fascinating anthropological laboratory. This is
where everything is recycled, piled up, metamorphosed and put together in
a new form. It is possible to argue that Southeast Asia and Egypt have been
witnessing a form of hybridity in mass culture and the everyday habits of the
rising middle classes, which coincides with a discourse about purity. Most
interesting are the recent sociological studies undertaken by Southeast
Asian scholars on hybridity in food in Singapore. Beng Huat and Rajah
provide a stimulating study about the hybridization of food that ‘may be seen
mistakenly as pure cuisine’ (1996: 4). They point to the changing percep-
tions towards what is considered as either pure or hybrid in Fujian and
Guangdong, Peranakan and Indian food. Furthermore, they observe the
fusion of Chinese cuisine with Malay food, and relate it to the Islamization
of Chinese food. The process of ‘imagined cuisines’ became associated with
ethnic identities and the markers entailed in language dress and food.
Although this invention of cuisine in the Singaporean case owes a lot to the
external impact of tourism and the promotion of a cosmopolitan and friendly
image of the island, it seems to have developed its own dynamic (Beng Huat
and Rajah, 1996).
Moreover, Chua Beng Huat’s intelligent reflections on consumer
culture in Asia are useful in helping to re-think the impact of consumer
culture from a new perspective. Beng Huat argues that consumerism for the
youth in Asia may be a generational form of resistance in relation to their
parents, who were brought up to be frugal and to save. Beng Huat’s writings
on consumer culture stimulate the comparative perspective. As an intellec-
tual exercise, [ searched for the equivalent literature on consumer culture
in Egypt and found that it is still influenced by Marxist and dependency
theories, which can be illuminating for explaining macro-level change rather
than the effects of ‘glocalism’, or cases in the Third World. Galal Amin’s
recent book, Matha hadatha lil-masriyying? [What Has Happened to Egyp-
tians?], which won the State prize in 1998, is relevant in this context. Amin,
who is an economist, endeavours to explain recent changes since the infitah
(open-door policy, economic liberalization) which led to Egypt’s shift in
loyalty from the Soviet Union to the world capitalist system. In fact, inter-
disciplinary studies are what is most lacking in Egypt. Amin’s study is a
semi-autobiographical nostalgic account of how he experienced his own
childhood and youth in contrast to the decadent present. Amin recalls the
alterations in lifestyle, the changes which maids, housekeepers, women and
the members of his family have undergone, to generalize and quite often the-
orize about the major structural changes which occurred in the 1980s and
1990s. Amin’s style is witty and his observations are certainly very insightful
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in understanding transformation in today’s Egypt. Nonetheless, what is dis-

turbing in Galal Amin’s analysis, is his moralistic tone and especially his
nostalgia for a golden past. Amin seems to be most concerned about the
‘frightening’ social mobility and class transformation due to the infitah
policies and migration. This one can only agree with, but perhaps somewhat
disturbing is the way he passes harsh judgements on the rising classes. Amin
interprets the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption of the Egyptian
middle classes as attempts to conceal their ‘real’ class origin. In this he
seems to be in accord with the discourse of the previous declining upper
classes, who called the classes that emerged during the Nasser regime ‘par-
venus’. Interestingly enough, the condemnation of the parvenus seems to
have filtered through and become a floating category. Everyone in Egypt
today has an obsession about these unnamed ones who stole privileges. Simi-
larly, it has become a sport for the nouveaux riches in Egypt to buy and appro-
priate houses and furniture from the socially declining old class, to dress
and decorate houses in pre-Nasser revolution style, to claim that they belong
to good families, and to accuse others of being parvenus. It has become
fashionable in Egypt to talk about the rampant ‘riff-raff? as implicated in
one’s own declining economic standards and as a self-defence mechanism.
This accusation against the parvenus, so present in Amin’s tone, is very
similar to the discourse of the decadent, old, so-called aristocracy and their
lament for their paradise lost. It seems that Amin is worried about social
climbing, the spread of decadent culture (al-fan al-habit),!© and decaying
moral and social norms. In this he joins religious preachers’ condemnation
of youth. According to Amin, this decadent culture has led to the flowering
of unproductive investment, such as the proliferation of ugly brick houses
with inadequate water supplies and sewerage, and taxis (an individualistic
solution for unemployment that does nothing to improve productivity) in the
countryside. Amin forgets that one of the paradoxes of infitah and peasant
migration, is that it has allowed peasants, for the first time in history, to
obtain passports and thereby possess both formal identity cards and pass-
ports. True, migration was undertaken under appalling conditions, but it
gave peasants mobility and access to the cash economy and liberated them
from the old bonds of the ‘/zbah system (the equivalent of the Latin American
hacienda). One can only agree with Amin’s alarming predictions concerning
culture, his critique of individualism and Americanization. But his vision is
tainted with a strong bias against the newly rising classes as nowveaux riches
which, although true, nonetheless requires further reflection. He comments
on the spread of the notion of fashion and the Western style through market
economy, to condemn open-door policies, ignoring the fact that Western
fashions were introduced more than a century ago in Egypt. His condemna-
tory tone is disturbing in that it entails a nostalgic vision of the past as
beautiful and ordered versus the present as decadent and invaded by social
climbers. The old upper classes, according to Amin, were more refined and
human; again, this may be true, but is a statement that presents problems
for a social scientist who, rather than condemning decadent art, films or mass
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culture, attempts to understand what is popular and what is état-ized or

invented tradition. One can only wonder why Amin, who is a professor at the
American University in Cairo — a foreign ‘implanted’ institution — adopts
such attitudes. Is it some kind of self-justification for his privileged status
as an intellectual?
In fact, the phenomenon of brick houses in the countryside could
indeed be seen as a form of what the German sociologist Norbert Elias would
define as a ‘civilizing process’ for Egyptian peasants. Put aside the extremely
ugly!” and unhygienic way red brick construction is taking place regarding
sewage and running water, it has, nonetheless, unintended ‘modernizing’
effects. Amin’s righteous tone about consumerism, forgetting that, it might
be a way out for working-class youth to express protest. Consumerism, but
also, strolling in clean, modern and air-conditioned spaces, it could be
argued, provides a sense of elevation. The economist Amin appears to be
trying to become interdisciplinary, but despises the field of sociological
investigation in the domain of cultural studies, despite its rich insights about
consumer, mass and popular cultures.
Concluding Remarks
Western intellectuals have expressed concern that shopping malls have little
to do with, and are not developing towards, what Richard Sennett has advo-
cated in his work The Conscience of the Eye, that is, the return of the ‘humane
city’. Third World cities are today becoming infernal places, with growing
pollution, poverty and overpopulation problems. Cairo has the record as one
of the world’s most densely populated cities. I am far from being an apolo-
gist for the frantic consumerist lifestyles of the new Third World bourgeoisie,
but it seems that the resistance of the poor takes forms that are difficult to
grasp in an atmosphere of harsh repression of human rights and the preva-
lence of political correctness among intellectuals on the one hand, and the
decline of Marxism on the other.
The mall has become a new space for social interaction, for shaping
lifestyles and needs for consumption, a space for youth and the new pro-
fessionals. Restaurants, shops and the service sector have absorbed large
segments of youth. This certainly affects ways of ‘dressing’ and looking
modern in order to go to work. I recall a scene I often witnessed in shopping
centres. Women removed their head scarves or ‘Islamic attire’ when taking
up their function as cashiers, waiters or saleswomen and put them back on
when going home. This masquerade says a lot about how young women have
to negotiate between different lifestyles. The same thing could be noticed
among young girls who change their dress or their school uniform according
to place. This duality and constant changing of attire, in order to adapt to
the two worlds, the inside/outside — the dense, highly socially controlled,
poor, popular quarters versus the modern public spheres of work in malls —
needs further study. It is thus possible to argue that what makes malls inter-
esting in Cairo is not shopping, but rather that they are a locus and meeting
place for groups of young girls. Malls are ideal places for mixing, for flirting
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between sexes and for strolling. They provide an outlet where the crowd finds
warmth and friendliness. The mall is the place where the crowds are formed.
It is the place of entertainment which replaces gardens and public spaces,
which are scarce in Cairo. One might even speak of their democratizing
effects, through the accessibility of the space to all classes, despite the
abrupt elimination of popular quarters and the economy of survival exempli-
fied in the informal sector.
Social scientists have pointed to the fact that, in recent years, Egypt-
ian society witnessed a growing Islamization in political and everyday
spheres of life. Observers argued that ‘public religion’ has gained visibility
in Egypt as well as in the Middle East generally in the last decades of the
20th century. This is not an erroneous argument. It is, nevertheless, a one-
sided point of view. My observations lead me to think that the Islamization
of public space in the 1990s coincides with survival strategies taking the
form of a ‘relaxation of norms’ among youth, within an Islamic frame of refer-
ence. One might interpret the phenomenon of ‘urff (unregistered and thus
illegal) marriage among youth as a circumvention that effectively resolves
sexual tensions among youngsters. The attire labelled ‘Islamic’ can become
a protective mechanism, to allow further mixing of the sexes, and which
allows young women to be left in peace. Islamic attire becomes here a pro-
tective mechanism, allowing youth to smoke cigarettes or water pipes in
public, and allowing flirtation in the intimate spaces of the coffee houses.
Indeed, the younger generation, through meeting in coffee houses, seems to
have gained some previously unknown liberties. While the 1970s witnessed
a growing policing and segregation of public space, which coincided with
the ascendance of Islamism, the 1990s witnessed a growing availability of
such reshaped spaces and a new form of ‘mixing’ of norms and tastes.
I would like to conclude this article with a scene I experienced in the
annexe of the billiard room of the Hilton Ramses. I went there last year to
start my project on malls with a female photographer. In the large billiard
room there were only two women, who were smoking and playing billiards.
Both wore jeans, but one wore a head scarf. My friend and I were intrigued
by these two women because they seemed so self-assured with their game.
Besides that they were very good players. When we approached them and
explained my interest in malls, they did not mind being photographed. They
were happy that the four of us understood one another and that we would
highlight women’s changing role in the public in the article we were prepar-
ing. It turned out that one was a medical practitioner, while the one who wore
the Islamic attire was an independent businesswoman and a dealer on the
stock exchange. They came to the Hilton once a week for relaxation and
seemed to have found an enjoyable partnership in playing together. Their
independence and self-confidence say something about women today in
Egypt. It seems to me that women are increasingly conquering public space
without the need for a male presence to protect them. Certainly, Islamism
does not do any favours to the feminist cause, but everyday reality tells us
that there are always survival strategies invented by women. It is the art of
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circumvention that can tell us a lot about how women continue to remain
visible in the public sphere.
Notes
This article was first presented at the First Mediterranean Social and Political
Research Meeting, Florence, 22-6 March 2000. I wish to thank Dina al-Khawaga
and Eric Denys (CEDEJ), Cairo, for the lively discussions we had on our unforget-
table trip from Paris to New York in November 1999. Eric Denys supplied me with
abundant literature and ideas on urban sociology. Hoda el Sadda’s critical reading
was crucial in rewriting the article. I wish to thank the anonymous reader for his/her
comments. I also would like to thank the students of the course on Development in
the Third World, winter 1998-9 AUC, Cairo for their rich discussions and obser-
vations on shopping malls in Cairo, in particular Rasha Mehiar, Noha Ismail and
Mohammed Siam. I am grateful to Mike Featherstone for his extensive comments
and for pointing me to literature on consumer studies. Finally, I would like to thank
Jennifer Robertson from Michigan University for sharing ideas. Some findings of
this research were presented at the MESA (The Middle East Studies Association)
conference in Washington, November 1999.
1. For a gendered spaced perspective, with the focus on the notion of woman walker,
see Meaghan Morris (1993).
2. Such as the al-Aqad, Geneina, el-Serag, Teeba and Wonderland malls.
3. This point was raised in relation to speculations about Malaysia’s possibility of
overcoming the crisis.
4. During my stay in Kuala Lumpur in 1996, the films of James Bond and Batman
were on the market. I regularly frequented the shopping mall Jaya Jusco, in the area
of Bandar Utama. It was stunning to observe the constant, non-stop repetition of
clips of films which lasted for hours in the halls of the mall. Certainly, such pictures
attracted large numbers of families and children.
5. The same phenomenon of youth and consumer culture could be observed in
Indonesia, with the difference, however, that social unrest seems to be more likely
in Indonesia than Malaysia.
6. I borrow this term from Sami Zubaida (1989: 117).
7. According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, 1996
census, youth aged 0-19 represent 49 percent of the population and 20-9, 16
percent.
8. Recent massive press coverage of what has been abusively coined as ‘urfé
marriage seems to bear witness to evolving sexual norms in Egyptian society today.
A customary matrimonial institution which has resisted the centralized registration
policies of the modern nation-state by surviving alongside the Personal Status Law,
‘urft marriage, which is acknowledged by Islamic law, requires two witnesses and a
third party to oversee the contracting of marriage. Not exactly null and void from a
legal standpoint as long as no problems arise, ‘urff marriage generates social and
legal problems the minute conflicts appear, since neither spouse can file a lawsuit
to prove the marriage if the other denies the relationship, nor can women file for
divorce or claim alimony or any of their marital rights.
9. The term khawagat is used by Egyptians to define foreigners living in Egypt. It
included Levantines, Greeks and Italians of Egypt. It contains a touch of irony.
10. Sainsbury’s opened in Egypt in 2000. Sainbury’s recently declared that it is
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withdrawing from Egypt after a strong campaign was launched against its presence
there. Rumours spread that the owners were Jewish. It has been argued that these
rumours were probably disseminated by smaller companies which felt threatened.
This coincided with demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinian intifada, in
which Sainsbury’s was portrayed as a symbol of Western, Zionist ‘invasion’ (see al-
Hayat, 14 April 2001).
11. The best example is El-Gouna beach resort and the new, 250-room five-star
hotel designed by Michael Graves. Graves’s architectural firm has been commis-
sioned by the Egyptian conglomerate Orascom to construct the largest tourist resort
in Egypt today. El-Gouna Magazine (July-August 1996) interviewed Graves about
his architectural conception which is worth our attention; it puts forward a view on
hybridization of tastes: Graves’s emphasis on classical Arab-style domes and vaults,
repopularized by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathi, gives ‘El-Gouna Hotel IIT a
definitive regional flavour. Domes and vaults serve as natural cooling systems in
desert climates.
12. Official statistics state that the population of Dar al-Salam reached 96,844 in
1996. These numbers should in reality be doubled.
13. The term bi’a literally means environment, but Cairenes started using it to
replace the word baladi. Baladi literally means ‘country’ or ‘local’ as opposed to
foreign. For long decades baladi was used by so-called middle or upper classes to
show contempt for the ‘vulgar’ taste of inferior classes. Today bi’a is meant to define
the bad taste of lower classes, a taste which is even more despicable than baladi,
thus popular. Those described as bi’a are also imagined as smelly. It is possible to
link the term bi’a with the growing disgust with the culture of ’ashwaiyyat.
14. The same applies to the Geneina mall in Madinat Nasr where one frequently
observes young girls smoking water pipes.
15. This reminded me of a similar observation in Singapore, where Filipino maids
met on Sunday, in the main shopping road of Orchard Road in shopping malls.
16. Here al-fan al-habit could be popular music, theatre shows and popular
singers.
17. It is possible to conclude that a whole tradition of peasant mud brick housing
is disappearing in the countryside in favour of ‘modern’, unfinished, red brick multi-
storey buildings, which are destroying agricultural land.
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Mona Abaza is currently Associate Professor, Department of Sociology,

at the American University in Cairo. She is also a Research Fellow at the
International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, Holland. Mona Abaza
has undertaken research in Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore and
is interested in the transmission of religious networks between the Middle
East and Southeast Asia. She is also working on consumer culture, sexuality
and youth in Egypt.
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Shoping Malls, Consumer Culture and The Reshaping of Public Space in Egypt - Abaza

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Figure 1 Wonderland Mall, Medinat Nasr

YPERSPACES SUCH as stations, airports and shopping malls have

A New Public Space?

Youth, Sexuality and New Spaces

Les Grands Magasins: Forgotten Early Egyptian

as argued by Richard Sennett, the birth of Egyptian department stores is

After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 a massive migration of Jews took

Egyptian stores and supermarkets. Sainsbury’s!® chains in Cairo certainly

Figure 3 Sednaoui Today

Cairo via Kuala Lumpur

consummated by a similar financial crisis? In the Egyptian discourse on

witnessing a boom in the construction of shopping malls. The monopoly of

The Discourse on ’Ashwaiyyat

Popular versus ‘Chic’ Malls

The World Trade Centre in Cairo

The emergence of such a concentration of wealth in the hands of few

Welcome to the World Trade Centre Mall

Consumer Culture and Hybridity

in understanding transformation in today’s Egypt. Nonetheless, what is dis-

culture, attempts to understand what is popular and what is état-ized or

Raafat, Samir (1997) ‘Sednaoui’, Cairo Times 29 May.

Mona Abaza is currently Associate Professor, Department of Sociology,

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