Discovering Maadi: The Early Residents
Ezz Al-Turkey
Between 1907 and 1913, Delta Land Company sold 41 lots in Maadi to people with names like Angelo, de Cramer, Crawford, Whitman, MacDonald, Pilavachi, Bondi, Joanovitch, and Veloudakis. Even though the British were the majority of the early occupants of Maadi, this was not always the case. These were all "resident foreigners" in Egypt, frequently but not always Europeans, who were shielded from Egyptian law by a system of "capitulations" that brought them under the jurisdiction of the legal systems of their home nations.
There were 74,221 foreign residents in the Egyptian capital, coming from twenty-eight different nations. Greeks were the most common foreign nationality to dwell in Egypt. Of these foreign residents, almost 5,000 were originating from the British Isles. The smaller French, German, Russian, Austrian, and Armenian groups accompanied these bigger contingents.
Maadi became known as an exclusive international enclave as a result of the influx of foreigners. This started to change in the aftermath of World War I when the neighborhood accommodated an Australian military camp. By the early 1920s, Maadi was drawing residents from Egypt. The Maadi Company's goal was to "maintain adherence to the cahier des charges" while transforming the suburb into an upper-middle-class space that elite Cairenes and European and Egyptian elites might come to see as home in the wake of the War's disruptions and Egypt's ensuing political changes.
Not insignificantly, Egyptian nationals were now able to join the Maadi Club and started to hold more positions on the Company board. During the 1920s, the Club evolved into a shared, multicultural space, and the restrictions on admission became less severe. The 1930s saw a dramatic decrease in the number of foreign immigrants due to political and other upheavals, while Cairo's population increased by 5.9% due to increased indigenous population growth and rural-to-urban migration.
The suburb enjoyed an Indian summer in the years before the War of 1948, but many of its foreign residents, especially the British, were leaving, and prominent figures in Maadi society were dying off, including Faris Nimr Pasha, the founder of the Al-Muqattam newspaper, who was born in Syria, and Henriette Devonshire, who led tours of Islamic Cairo well into her eighties.
The Company gave up on its first cahier des charges when new neighborhoods like Hada’iq al-Maadi and Maadi Digla were established in the 1940s and 1950s, and Maadi evolved even more to resemble the one we know and dwell in now.