Alexandria by Islam Issa
Alexandria sits on Egypt’s seacoast and remains a big city, one of that nation’s major ports. But in the past, Alexandria was, as Islam Issa’s subtitle puts it, The City that Changed the World. Ask Alexa? The technology was named for the famed Library of Alexandria, the greatest storehouse of knowledge in ancient times.
Issa’s eminently readable narrative covers the city’s 2,500-year history. Geographically well placed to become a cultural meeting point, Alexandria was, he writes, “the first modern city” for being planned and laid out by design. The founder and namesake, Alexander the Great, legendarily chose the location through oracles but relied on ideas from his teacher, Aristotle, for conceptualizing what the city could become.
Alexandria’s summit of importance came early. Under the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander’s death, Alexandria became a remarkable center of learning in all fields, a mecca for scholars and philosophers drawn to the great library. Alexandria was the center for advances in astronomy, geometry, trigonometry and engineering. Supposedly, one of the city’s savants built the first steam engine and another, the first keyboard instrument. One astronomer proposed that the Earth revolves around the sun, contrary to the era’s popular opinion. Also unusual for that time was the prominence of women in academic endeavors.
The intellectual work accomplished in Alexandria during its early centuries became the basis for Islam’s Golden Age and the European Renaissance.
One of Issa’s themes is how ancient Alexandria demonstrates that “it is possible to harmonize different cultures and people.” Greek and Egyptian culture converged in the city, which soon became home to a prominent Jewish community whose numbers included philosophers as well as the translators of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. Buddhists traveled to Alexandria from India, adding to the banquet of ideas.
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It's tempting to say that Alexandria’s best years ended with the Roman conquest, but Issa soldiers on through the remaining 2,000 years, showing that the city remained—until recently—a multiethnic, cosmopolitan culture hub. Before the 1950s Alexandria was home to Greeks, Armenians, Jews and ex-patriate Europeans from many nations. They began to leave as tensions in the region grew, with the Six Day War (1967) marking an end point. The nationalism of Egypt’s dictator, Gamal abdel-Nasser, changed “the nature of Alexandrian identity,” Issa writes. After 1967, “an Alexandrian had to be Egyptian. And if you were Egyptian, then you had to be Arab.”
Issa writes with enthusiasm and love bordering on passion for his subject. The Birmingham City University history and literature professor has long family roots in Alexandria. Even the sight of a Starbucks perturbs him little. He seems to see evidence of 2,500 years everywhere he looks.
Get Alexandria on Amazon here.
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