Reflections on water in the Middle East

These Bodies of Water begins dramatically (as befits a book derived from Sabrina Mahfouz’s Royal Court show A History of Water in the Middle East) in a stuffy little room in Whitehall where the author is being interrogated by a man in a beige mac who is vetting her for top security clearance. It all sounds a bit James Bond, except that Mahfouz is more like an ‘Egyptian Guyanese Nancy Drew’, as a boyfriend joked – extremely unusual in the civil service fast stream as a woman, working-class and Middle Eastern (her father is Egyptian, her mother is Guyanese-British). While her peers laugh off questions like ‘Have you ever had sex with an animal?’, Mahfouz finds herself ‘existing purely in opposition’ for the first time in her life. It’s a ‘sudden and vicious shift’. But when the man in the mac asks her about water and empire, she becomes, very fruitfully, ‘obsessed’.

After noting the irony that the Middle East was ‘seen as sand and oil, dry and scorched. But their water had enabled the empire and its legacy’, Mahfouz launches into a mix of polemic, memoir and history lesson. She describes falling in love with the Nile as a child, and then, as a teen-ager, gazing at Cleopatra’s Needle, excited that ‘a woman from the Middle East could turn up in the centre of imperial Britain and take up space as long as she was a queen, and represented by a granite needle’. Later she learns that the obelisk has nothing to do with Cleopatra. Commissioned by the pharaoh Thutmose III, added to by Ramesses II, who inscribed it with his military victories, and given to Britain by Muhammed Ali, ruler of Egypt and Sudan, it took its name from the container that transported it, which happened to be called Cleopatra.