Revolution is, in essence, a rejection of our dismal reality for one that is entirely divorced from it. The more viable this desired reality appears to us, the more likely we are to pursue it. And how much more viable would this new reality seem if it had in fact existed before? Revolutionary zeal, in this case, feeds on two of the most penetrating human passions: dreaming of a better future, and longing for a once glorious past. Unfortunately, not every ideological movement has recourse to this inspiring mix. In Egypt, and across the Muslim world, Islamists had so far monopolized the power of nostalgia. When preaching about the future, they enticed their audience with recurrent references to an age that actually existed, the time of Prophet Muhammad and his Rightly Guided successors, a time of prosperity, justice, and predominance. Leftists and nationalists, mostly ashamed of what they have contributed to their post-colonial societies, could not claim the same privilege; their ideal realities, they admit, remain unborn. Liberals were even worse off: their past was a disgrace. What Egyptians, in particular, knew about the decades preceding the 1952 coup was what their schoolbooks told them: it was a time of moral and political degeneration; democracy was a sham; peasants were flogged by evil landlords; social disparities were rampant; and the country was ruled by an indolent, childlike sovereign, living contentedly under the shadow of British colonialism.

With the French-educated, Chicago-trained dentist-turned-novelist Alaa Al Aswany, Egypt’s liberal past finally stood a chance of being redeemed. Nostalgia was the theme of his first novel, The Yacoubian Building. Published in Arabic in 2002, it became an international best-seller, translated into twenty-seven languages; it was also turned into a major feature film. The Yacoubian building itself, which still survives, was a symbol of the nineteenth-century European architecture that has been ‘assaulted’ during the past six decades by the vulgarities of the new officer class and its cronies. Its fate is typical of other buildings in Cairo’s Parisian-designed downtown, built in the 1860s by Egypt’s great Westernizer, Khedive Ismail, who aspired to turn his country into ‘a piece of Europe’—or at least a ‘fellow traveller’—by importing some of its architectural grandeur. The novel’s leading protagonist was also a relic of the past: the grief-stricken Zaki Bey al-Dessouki, the longest-serving resident of the Yacoubian, constantly agonizing over his lost city and its glittering years. The novel’s most memorable scene has him bellowing in the middle of Tahrir Square, the gate to the city’s downtown area, about how the neighbourhood has lost its splendour:

There used to be a lovely bar here with a Greek owner. Next to it there was a hairdresser’s and a restaurant, and here was the leather shop La Bursa Nova. The stores were all fantastically clean and had goods from London and Paris on display . . . See the wonderful architecture! This building was copied to the last detail from a building I saw in the Quartier Latin in Paris.

Curiously, the eager Westernizing tendencies of the liberal age did not serve to diminish patriotism, at least in Aswany’s view. He has Zaki Bey frequently complaining to his young female companion: ‘I cannot fathom your generation. In my day, love for one’s country was like religion.’

In Zaki Bey’s numerous drunken speeches lay all the elements of the not-so-distant gilded age portrayed by liberals: a time when Egyptian society was open and cosmopolitan; when Cairo’s elegant tree-lined boulevards were wide and clean; when its glamorous houses were decorated with Greek statues and Roman pillars, and surrounded by sumptuous gardens with white marble fountains; when the arts flourished and diversity was tolerated; when intellectuals boldly supported enlightenment and freedom. Although it had come to an abrupt end in July 1952, trampled under heavy military boots, it still lies waiting to be revived by a new generation of young liberals. Aswany’s novel was a potent weapon, a means of rehabilitating the past to challenge the present. He understood the gripping power of nostalgia. And he took care to emphasize that the obstacle preventing us from reclaiming our belle époque was political, not cultural: ‘If there were a real democratic system,’ Zaki Bey laments, ‘Egypt would be a great power’.

No novel in Egypt’s modern history has sold so many copies in such a short time: it was reprinted over thirty times in less than a decade—and marketed solely, one must add, by word of mouth. Booksellers instantly recognized Aswany as a phenomenon, a man who made the literature business profitable again. It was quickly made into a motion picture with a star-filled cast. The opening night was exceptionally dazzling, held at the Cairo Opera House, a few yards away from downtown, and attended by a who’s-who of Egyptian society, including the leaders of the ruling party. The author, however, was not invited—and with good cause.

Aswany’s oppositional views per se were not the problem. Opposition leaders dined frequently—and shamelessly—at the tables of the ruling elite. The reason why Aswany was considered a persona non grata was his excessively offensive manner. Unlike other novelists, he had no taste for veiled critiques and parodies. His dictator was not symbolically cast into the mould of a patriarchal father, as in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy; repression was not condemned by reference to sixteenth-century Mamluk Egypt, as Gamal al-Ghitani did in the early 1970s in Zayni Barakat. Aswany pursued his targets directly, and ruthlessly. His first novel exposed state security officers and government ministers, among others, and in his second best-selling work, Chicago (published in Arabic in 2007, and performed onstage in Paris in fall 2011), the list extended to include not only intelligence operatives and their sleazy informers, but President Hosni Mubarak himself, who made a rare appearance towards the end. This was something no author had dared to do before.