ISMAILIYA 's schizoid character is defined by the rail line that cuts across the city. South of the tracks lies the European-style garden city built for foreign employees of the Suez Canal Company, extending to the verdant banks of the Sweetwater Canal. Following careful restoration, its leafy boulevards and placid streets of colonial villas look almost as they must have done in the 1930s, with bilingual street signs nourishing the illusion that the British empire has just popped indoors for cocktails.

North of the train tracks you move into another world of hastily constructed flats grafted onto long-standing slums , and a quarter financed by the Gulf Emirates that provides a cordon sanitaire for the wealthy suburb of Nemrah Setta (Number Six). This Janus-profile reflects the city's twentieth-century history , when two disparate sons of Ismailiya had a lasting effect on Egyptian society. Hassan el-Banna created the Muslim Brotherhood that was the bane of the British, and has vexed Egypt's rulers since independence. Two generations later, Ismailiya became synonymous with Osman Ahmed Osman , a self-made millionaire contractor whom Sadat appointed as Minister of Housing and Reconstruction in 1975. As Gulf investments poured into the Canal Zone, billboard-sized pictures of Osman began to outnumber those of his patron, who finally agreed to opposition demands for an audit. By the time it was discovered that millions had been stashed in Swiss banks, Osman had fled the country. Subsequent investigations into his political connections proved inconclusive and he is now back in business.