El-Saraya El-Safra – Rehla fi Mozakerat Mohamed Kamel Bek El-Kholy, Moudir Mostashfa El-Magazib (1916-1953)
The Yellow Sarai: A Journey in the Memoirs of Mohamed Kamel Bey El-Kholy, Director of a Mental Hospital
Mohamed Al-Shama’
El-Masry Publishing, 2022
246 pp
Mozakerat Nashal – Abdel-Aziz El-Nos
Memoirs of a Purse-Snatcher – Abdel-Aziz El-Nos
Ayman Othman
Dar Dawen, 2023
221 pp
Two short, easy-to-read, and certainly entertaining books from the past two years document life on the fringe in early 20th-century Egypt – one by a doctor at the head of Egypt’s most prominent hospital for mental illnesses and disorders in the 1940s and another by a self-proclaimed purse-snatcher famous in the 1920s and 1930s.
One long-forgotten volume from the 1930s, unearthed by Ayman Othman and published this year by Dar Dawen, tells the sad and fascinating story of a famous purse snatcher, Abdel-Aziz El-Nos.
El-Nos supposedly told his story to a journalist who published it in a book that became a part of a trilogy by Hosny Youssef, released in the 1920s and 1930s as “Mozakerat Fetwa” (Memoirs of a Thug), Mozakerat Nashal (Memoirs of a Purse-Snatcher) and Mozakerat Motasherd (Memoirs of a Homeless Man).
Last year (2022), El-Masry Publishing, published the memoirs of Mohamed Kamel Bey El-Kholy who was the director of a mental hospital in Cairo's Al-Abassiya district, known as El-Saraya El-Safra (The Yellow Palace). The title derives from the colour of a spacious palace that was painted in red when it served as a house for a rich man, before becoming the country’s first proper hospital for mental illness at the end of the 19th century.
Both books attracted significant attention during their launches at the 2022 and 2023 editions of the Cairo International Book Fair, reflecting a growing interest in Egyptian society before the 1952 revolution.
El-Kholy’s memoirs, which were first published in El-Mosawar magazine in 1954 shortly after he left his post as director of the mental hospital, and those of El-Nos, which were originally published in 1930, show how the lives of two men, one a doctor and the other a purse-snatcher, were influenced by World War I.
El-Kholy, who was pursuing postgraduate studies in the UK, had to rush back to Egypt due to British suspicion of Egyptians for sympathy towards the Ottoman Empire. Once back home, El-Kholy had to settle for a financially unrewarding job in a rural area before he managed to get a job with the mental illness hospital in 1916.
El-Nos, for his part, tried to abandon his life as a pickpocket and opened a small grocery store. Tragically, economic conditions rendered him penniless and he was forced to return to pickpocketing. As he details in his book, pickpocketing is an art, and its masters form their own underground society in Cairo.
El-Kholy for his part recalls dealing with many thieves much like El-Nos, who feigned insanity to avoid imprisonment.
Also subject to some considerable reflection in both volumes is the status of unprivileged women during the early decades of the 20th century. They were generally perceived as subordinates, with no interest in anything beyond marriage and money.
El-Nos discusses Rasmia, a woman who seduces rich men to steal their money. El-Kholy talks about women who lost their minds due to abandonment by lovers and women who lost their minds for having failed to find the proper suitors.
Both books address the question of the paths people would have wanted to take versus the paths they were forced to take based on their circumstances. Inevitably, both volumes de-demonize and de-stigmatize those who live on the margins of society and blame society for their ill-fated paths.
Each volume offers an interesting insight into the dominant social norms of the time and reveals many of the ailments that were deeply rooted in the society of a country, then under a monarchy. El-Kholy suggests that the ruling family of Egypt suffered from a hereditary mental disorder that could be traced from Khedive Ismail down to King Farouk.
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