Walking into the heart of Khedive Ismail’s district of Ismailia, (today’s Cairo’s city center), you will notice two landmark edifices that played a vital role in Egypt’s social fabric of the early twentieth century; Club Mohamed Ali (The Egyptian Diplomatic Club) and Café Riche. The two edifices, flanking Solaiman Pasha Street (now Talaat Harb), emerged during the first decade of the twentieth century to provide a specific class of the society with a meeting point; an escapade and a comfortable environment for intellectual dialogue.
Club Mohamed Ali was a members-only private club, a gentlemen’s club, and certainly one of the most prestigious of all social clubs founded in Cairo. It followed the “Clubbing” phenomenon developed in Europe and England towards the nineteenth century in its protocol, refurbishment and exclusivity. It provided Egypt’s royal family members , the aristocrats, wealthy pashas, politicians and members of parliament, with a private environment, where they discuss key political issues over coffee and lunch. It also welcomed European intellectuals, ambassadors, archeologists as Howard Carter, and key foreign politicians into Cairo’s aristocratic arena.
Similarly, Café Riche, a non exclusive coffee shop, opening its doors to the passers-by, attracted the writers, poets, journalists and intellectual Egyptians and foreigners living in Egypt. It provided this “literati” upper middle class patrons with a comfortable and informal surrounding that enriched their participation in Egypt’s intellectual and political sphere. Among the clients that frequented the Café were prominent writers as Naguib Mahfouz, Tawfiq al Hakim, Yusuf Idris, Taha Hussein, and poet /artist Salah Jahin ; each expressing their own views and ideology.
Both establishments played a role in the socio-political life of Egypt. Club Mohamed Ali was the site of many cliques and cabals that determined policies and influenced government nominations & Parliament seats in pre-1952 era. While Café Riche is known to have housed an underground tunnel for emergency, while leaders of the 1919 revolution met and planned their strategies. In April 5th, 1921, clubbers and costumers of both establishments came out into Soliman Pasha Street, watching and cheering the procession of Saad Zaghlul Pasha’s historic return from exile. This instant was captured by the cameras of key newspapers, depicting Zaghlul’s motorcade on its way to Bayt El-Ommah .
Social clubs did not take over the role occupied by coffee houses in Egypt. They both emerged and flourished in parallel, providing their clients with a comfortable environment to relax, eat and socialize, at the heart of the metropolis. And likewise, the clubbers and customers, “liked to read the same newspaper in the same chair in the same place, to write their letters at the same table, to lunch at the same time and to have their dinner served by the same waiter at the same hour in the same corner of the room.”
With their obvious difference, the exclusive Club Mohamed Ali and the intellectual Café Riche both played a substantial role in the formation of Egypt’s 20th century collective memory.
