The Alexandria of one’s youth

Dalrymple writes that a cosmopolitan city, such as the Alexandria he knew as a young man in the 1890s,

is one in which several nationalities and cultures coexist with some actual knowledge of each other’s languages and sympathetic participation in each other’s customs, not a city in which the citizens of 167 different countries happened to have turned up in the hope of social security and/or a decent job.

There is

a difference between a cocktail and a Mickey Finn; and I doubt that many extollers of cosmopolitanism in Le Monde sense of the word have taken a serious interest in Somali culture, for example, even if there is a large Somali ‘community’ in their city. (I have been to Somalia, and I intended at the time to read the works of a celebrated specialist anthropologist called I.M. Lewis about Somali culture. It is still on my list of things to do.)

The Alexandria of Dalrymple’s youth

The Constantinople of Pierre Loti, writes Dalrymple, was

sophisticated, tolerant and civilised.

Similarly, in the Alexandria that Dalrymple knew as a young man before the war,

national and religious communities interacted amicably, spoke one another’s languages, understood and respected one another’s customs, and participated in one another’s festivals, often while occupying different niches in the economy.

This cosmopolitanism was

harmonious rather than cacophonous, dignified, settled rather than fleeting. It was not drug- and crime-ridden, nor were its youth attracted to low-self-control, high-sensation ghetto culture.