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that freed Italy from foreign tyranny. Ludwig fed his dog, then himself, then went back to the office, just another carabiniere.

Chapter 2
    A Sirocco
    THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD gave the name Hassan, meaning “handsome” or “pleasant,” to his first grandson. According to the hadith , the body of sayings that Muslims attribute to the Prophet, in the after-life Hassan is to lead the children of Paradise. “Osama,” famously after September 11, 2001, is Arabic for “lion.” “Mustafa” means “the chosen one.” “Nasr” was the name of a house of the medieval Saffarid Dynasty in Persia and means “victory” in Arabic. A child born in Alexandria in 1963 and given the name Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr did not want for decoration.
    Alexandria is not what it once was. Founded by Alexander the Great as the port of supply for his Persian campaigns and the new capital of Egypt (replacing Memphis, which returned the snub by refusing to bury Alexander after his death), it became a city of Hellenic splendor and learning and remained so for nearly a thousand years. There Euclid fathered geometry, Herophilos begat anatomy, and Archimedes forwarded his theories on levers and screws. The intellectualism begat tolerance, and people of different creeds lived alongside one another in relative ease. Jews so thrived that for a time the Jewish community was the world’s largest. The Septuagint was produced in Alexandria. Christians were later made welcome, albeit after a rough start: Mark the Evangelist was dragged through the streets until hardly enough was left of him to make a reliquary. (A Coptic church in Alexandria still has what is purported to be his head, but the rest of his remains were smuggled to Venice in 828 to reside in St. Mark’s Basilica.) It is a commonplace in the West that the town degenerated when the Arabs took it in 642 in the great wave of conquest that Muhammad began and his successors continued. But in fact by the time the Arabs arrived, Alexandria’s Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian institutions of knowledge, including its vast library, which was collected by copying the texts of every ship that called at harbor, had already dulled and decayed. The Arabs only accelerated the decline, principally by moving the capital to Cairo. The denouement continued for a millenium, and when Napoleon intruded into Egypt briefly in 1798, staying no longer than a Romantic poet on holiday, he found Alexander’s mighty port a negligible fishing village.
    Alexandria, like all Egypt, dates its encounter with modernity to the Ottoman invasion of 1801 and particularly to the rule of the first Ottoman pasha in Egypt, Muhammad Ali. The pasha’s power knew few limits. Early in his reign, he invited hundreds of Mamluks, the former slave-soldiers who had come to dominate Egypt, to his citadel and, after fêting them, had the lot of them murdered—a precedent for dealing with opponents that later rulers of Egypt would appreciate. But Muhammad Ali was no mere brute. He built foundries and factories, hospitals and schools, canals and ports, bridges and railroads, and he turned the valley of the Nile into an immense cotton plantation. Alexandria became a great port once again, cotton flowing through its harbor to the world, and machines and experts to build a nation flowing in. The trade gave rise to subsidiary institutions, and Frenchmen, Ottomans, and Britons sailed to Alexandria and built resplendent banks and accounting firms and mansions in high colonial style. When the British relieved the Ottomans of their rule in 1882, the flavor of Alexandria became more European yet, and by the turn of the century, 100,000 foreigners lived there. They came for money but stayed for other reasons, like the tolerance that still prevailed among the citizens. Alexandria’s Christian and Jewish communities, although reduced during the Arab and Ottoman reigns, had been well accepted by the Muslim majority, and the ecumenicalism continued under the