Common skies divided horizons: aviation, class and modernity in early twentieth century Egypt

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2008 by Yoav Di-Capua

Introduction:

One day in 1929, at the age of thirty, a bored employee at Bank Misr named Muhammad Sidqi decided to replace his wooden office chair with a posh leather seat in an airplane cockpit. Resigning his position, he enrolled in a German aviation school. A few months later, in December 1929, he purchased a modest monoplane with a 45-hp. engine and an overall weight of less than 250kg. With the enthusiastic cooperation of the Egyptian authorities, on December 15th he left from Berlin, and, via Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Venice and Malta, made his way to Libya. With him in the cockpit was a small crocodile that was presented to him in Berlin as a gift for the Cairo Zoological Gardens. (1) In January 26th, 1930, more than a month after taking off from Berlin, Sidqi was scheduled to land in both Alexandria and Cairo. (2)

On that day, while Sidqi was still en route, a crowd of several thousand gathered at the airstrip of Heliopolis Cairo to welcome the hero. For a rare moment, a heterogeneous coalition of political and social elements was united in tense anticipation. The aerodrome, as airports were once called, was packed: The Prime Minister and his cabinet, the German ambassador to Egypt, eminent financiers and bankers and an impressive gallery of journalists, doctors, engineers, lawyers, politicians, teachers, workers, students and various women's organizations, were all there. Chairs were scarce. Blocked by the police, several thousand students and teenagers crowded the entrances to the aerodrome. After hours of nervous anticipation, at about fifteen past three in the afternoon, the crowd spotted a small dot in the sky. Immediately, the spectators broke down the gates, toppled police barriers and swarmed the airstrip. The police were helpless. Sidqi circled the aerodrome for a salute and the crowd shouted "Bravo." The instant the airplane touched the ground, the cheering crowd kidnapped Sidqi, and, carrying him on their shoulders, deposited him in a car and drove him triumphantly through the streets of Cairo. Over the next few days poets poured out lines of admiration while the headlines of the British-oriented daily, the Egyptian Gazette, read: "Mobbed by Delirious Crowds" and "Egyptian Airman's Ordeal." (3) Not a word was written on the fate of the small crocodile that had bravely accompanied Sidqi on his perilous journey back home.

More than the train, the car and the telephone, the airplane represented a superior mastery of how nature works. No other machine drew so impressively on advances in mathematics, physics, instrumentation, engineering and cartography in order to defy the forces of nature and subdue them to the human will. Sidqi's perilous journey home through severe weather and challenging terrain proved that the modern Egyptian too could defy these forces and persevere. (4), As the crowds waited hours on end for his much-anticipated landing, they were pushed to think of geographical space in terms of time. Most likely this was the first occasion that such a sizable crowd of Egyptians stood still for hours with their faces toward the heavens perhaps causing them to ponder the changing relationship between hitherto two entirely separate natural spheres. By physically flying from the heart of Europe to Egypt, the hub of the Arab East and the "key to Africa," Sidqi made an invaluable cultural statement about the unity of geography and the essential equality of modern modernising cultures. The urban classes, and especially the "delirious crowds" of the middle class which "kidnapped" Sidqi upon his landing, came to think and talk of him as a transcendental figure (5) Indeed, it was not Sidqi the person as much as Sidqi the phenomenon, for his flight marked a high point in an ongoing technological craze--particularly evident in a fascination with speed--that gripped early twentieth-century Egypt. However, as time went by and even women began "taking the stick into their hands," civil aviation in Egypt shifted to more mundane and earthly concerns. In fact, much of the drama occurred not in the air but on the ground and under it, in the subterranean trenches of social warfare as it was there that the struggle over the appropriation of this new technology took place.

Because the airplane, arguably the archetypal form of "high technology", has no organic connection to the technological and scientific history of the Arab East, it is necessary to investigate the process of technological translation from "Europe" to pre-revolutionary Egypt, a semi-colonized country of multiple political, social and cultural cleavages. By examining who brought the airplane to Egypt and how it was "consumed" locally, we substantiate our understanding of "technological translation" and map the outlines of the non-Western aeronautical tradition. As historian of science David Arnold put it, speaking of South-East Asia, "A history of science in India must also be a history of India, not merely a history of the projection of Western science onto India. (6)