The well-known Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, a native of Alexandria and author of the “Alexandria Trilogy”: No One Sleeps in Alexandria, Birds of Amber, and Clouds Over Alexandria, has said that Lawrence Durrell had a “passing view” of Alexandria that was based on the communities with which he interacted in that city.

Meguid’s comments, which include a response to earlier criticism of Durrell from a leading Egyptian historian, Assem El- Desouky, professor emeritus of modern history at Helwan University.

El-Desouky had claimed that Fakhri Labib, the famous Egyptian activist and writer who translated the Alexandria Quartet into Arabic, had done so in order to expose Durrell’s “lies” about Egyptian society. Meguid’s remarks, and those of El-Desouky and Fakhri, offer compelling insights into Egyptian–and particularly Alexandrian–attitudes toward Durrell, and reflect that fact that there is a continued fascination with him, even if they are not always positive. Durrell and the Quartet are still very much part of the cultural conversation in Egypt, at least in Alexandria.

In comments to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Seba’a in February 2023, on the anniversary of Durrell’s birth, Meguid responded to El-Desouky’s criticisms and argued that the problem was actually the approach of historians to literature. Megiud said that historians were treating literature as if it were historical facts, when it is “primarily art and imagination.”

Meguid went on to touch on the issue raised by some critics, including Egyptian critics, of Durrell’s Quartet, namely his alleged racist attitude towards Egyptians:

Meguid commented that in the Quartet Durrell had written, for example, “And we went down to the Al-Attarin neighborhood, and we saw black or brown people.” Here, according to Meguid, “Durrell did not mean any insult to the Egyptians in this sentence, if we consider that he was British and lived with white people.”

To give you a flavour, this video shows what Al-Attarin street looks like now.

Meguid also said that Durrell’s view did not differ much from the Greek Egyptian poet Constantin P. Cavafy. Durrell saw Alexandria as “a global city, with tremendous fruits, a city that transcends time, and he was sympathetic to its people. Cavafy saw it as his city, as is the case with the Greeks who see themselves as those who made the city.”

I looked up El-Desouky’s remarks on the Alexandria Quartet, which are reported here in Arabic. The remarks were made at a symposium in 2017 at the Cairo International Book Fair, on the late writer, translator, leftist, and activist Fakhri Labib (February 7, 1928 – December 25, 2016). I mentioned Labib in an earlier post here–he famously translated the Alexandria Quartet into Arabic. El-Desouky says that Labib had claimed he translated Durrell’s works to expose that author’s lies about Egyptian society.

El-Desouky added that, based on Fakhri Labib’s interest in the problems of Egyptian society, “he translated works that focused on the social framework, and this is where his translation of “The Alexandria Quartet” by Lawrence Durrell came from, despite Durrell’s criticism of Egyptian society. When Fakri was asked about the reasons for the translation despite what the novel contains, he said: I translated it so that people would know what this man said about [Egyptian society].”

Labib was a fascinating character. You can read about him in a lot more detail in this piece here by the Egyptian literature professor and translator Hala Halim, who actually interviewed Labib about his translation of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet for her book Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013) which “interrogates how modern Alexandria was nominated as the cosmopolitan Middle Eastern city par excellence.”

(In case you are wondering, Halim is also critical of the Durrell, and according to Richard Pine, regards him “primarily as a neo-colonialist; the Quartet “effects a […] transition from twilight-of empire […] to long-distance neocolonialism” using a false sense of Alexandria as a “cosmopolitan elite” and positing it as a hybrid: “neither solely as an extension of Greece/Europe nor as an ‘Oriental’ city”.)

NB I apologize for the formatting of this post. I have yet to get to grips with WordPress’s new block editing system which in my view is far inferior to the old system of just using HMTL.