In vogue: Faux nostalgia

This video is supposed to show the progression of love songs directed at a male from a female from roughly the turn of the twentieth century to the present time. The moral we are expected to derive is that the classiness, the lyrics, and the melodies have all deteriorated horribly.

This photo is being exchanged as an example of how classy people were in royal Egypt. We are supposed to compare it to a modern Cairene coffee shop and come to the aforementioned conclusion.

This photo is, according to the person sharing it, a picture of students in King Fouad University (modern day Cairo University) in the thirties. Again, we are expected to contrast their progressiveness and wealth to today.

All three are but the tip of the iceberg in a years long trend of sharing pictures from the past in a nostalgic yearning to eras most people haven't even lived. The political undertone of the message is shared between all: There once was a golden age. However, the nostalgia is faulty. People are yearning back to times that never existed, using pictures to prove facts that were never true. 

The first video, for example is clearly comparing apples and oranges. Picking the ultimate classics from each decade, and then intentionally comparing them to the bottom drawer of pop-music in 2013. Counter-examples can be very easily formulated in which cabaret music from the twenties or monologues from the forties with nauseating lyrics are compared to wonderful exercises in classical and innovative Egyptian music from the present. But the comparison had to be drawn in a certain way to prove a certain point.

The photo of the coffee shop, Groppi, is another exercise in misleading. In fact the photo is a devastating indictment of royal Egypt and of modern audiences. The patrons of the coffee shop are obviously all non-Egyptian. Whether expats or naturalised, there isn't an ethnic Egyptian to be seen in sight. Even the waiter is most probably Nubian and is dressed in overstated quaint garb to give “ambience.” That modern Egyptians find inspiration in a picture that very obviously represents a colonialist system designed to segregate them is very telling.

The third picture is so misleading that it isn't even impressive. What is purported to be a picture in a public university in the thirties, is in fact a picture in an exclusivist private university in the sixties. Facts be damned.

So why are Egyptians doing all this? What’s the motive behind this campaign of self-deception? As I mentioned earlier, the aim is to search for a golden age. The myth of the Egyptian upper and upper middle class is that there was once a golden age in which everything was dandy and from then on everything went downhill. Internal conflict stems from when that golden age was. Was it royal Egypt? Nasserist Egypt? Sadat’s rule? But never Mubarak’s era. Mubarak has to be the downfall! Thus the proliferation of lower middle classes with their habits and behaviours on the beaches is not a sign that said class now has the capacity and the spending power to afford a vacation, it is rather a sign of how everything has deteriorated. Classism disguised as nostalgia.

But what the royalists, Nasserists, and Sadatists are missing is that they are all reminiscing about the same thing. Why is there a newfound and growing trend of yearning back to the eighties or even the early nineties? These are Mubarakist years that we should despise. What’s common between all the pictures of days bygone?

The answer lies in observing the trend. These nostalgic bouts come in bursts. The trend starts, grows, and then dies. It always starts the same way: photos of women looking extremely glad, wearing beautiful colourful dresses, without veils and with gorgeous hair. It doesn't matter what period the pictures are from (except the 80’s where they are unveiled but the hair isn't gorgeous) the focus is always on how the women look and act. Then voices seep in, subconsciously or consiously, intentionally or unintentionally the trend turns into pictures of panoramas, scenery, and generally human being-free vistas.

The conclusion is obvious. Egyptians are not yearning for a golden age of plenty and wealth, that never existed by the way. What they are reminiscing about is an era when society was free from the pressures and effects of political Islamism. People demand a time when they were truly happy, and truly safe, because society had not yet given in to clerics that turned women into violable sources of sexual gratification. Except most of the women sharing the pictures are veiled themselves and can’t for the life of them face the fact that they wish they could wear a dress in the street. So everyone gives in to the nudging of Islamists to go on a tangent and share pictures of Cairo skyline, damning Mubarak for wasting Egypt’s golden age of plenty.