THE grass is cut as finely as ever on the Katameya Heights golf course, and cigars are still being smoked discreetly in the clubhouse. Glancing around the lobby, one could be forgiven for thinking nothing had ever disturbed this gated citadel of Cairo luxury; indeed the ladies’ day Valentine’s tournament is to go ahead as scheduled.

There is just one tactful nod to the turmoil that has shaken Egypt to its foundations in the past fortnight: a short letter to members, pinned to a noticeboard by the fountain. “Welcome back — we hope you and your families are all safe,” it reads. “The 18-hole operating hours are as follows.”

Barack Obama claims this country “is not going back to what it was”, but in New Cairo — a satellite city to the east of the capital, home to dozens of high-walled residential compounds — life, on the surface at least, seems to have barely changed at all.

“Things are back to normal: food is in the shops, the gates are secure, all the cafes are open,” says Wael Hassan, a 34-year-old marketing manager who lives in Al Rehab, one of the oldest private communities in the area. “Naturally people were inconvenienced by the troubles, and no one likes instability. But thankfully things are OK now.”

Yet as Egypt’s pro-change uprising enters its third week, a return to normality in places such as New Cairo is exactly what those camped out 25km away in Tahrir Square desperately want to avoid. Carved out of the desert in piecemeal fashion over the past two decades as part of an ambitious and highly controversial urban expansion programme, this elite neighbourhood for many symbolises everything that is wrong with the Mubarak regime.

“The corruption and crony capitalism that New Cairo was built on goes to the heart of this government’s contempt for the Egyptian people,” says Hamdy Fakharany, an activist lawyer who has been challenging land sales in the area through the courts.

Last year he won a landmark victory after proving that desert plots in Madinaty - a 33sqkm New Cairo compound worth £1.9bn developed by a company with close ties to the Mubarak family — was sold by the Egyptian government at a fraction of the market price.

Now judges have ordered the sale agreement to be annulled, threatening similar development contracts with the same fate and throwing the entire district’s future into chaos.

“When they sold off our public land to their friends, they did it because they knew they could get away with it — they were not afraid of the people,” says Fakharany, who believes that up to 26,000sq miles of desert land has been misappropriated in Egypt over the past few years, the cumulative size of five nearby Arab countries.

“My court cases, and now this revolution, means they can’t be that complacent anymore.”

The nepotism that marked New Cairo’s astonishing growth in recent years is not the only reason it has come to symbolise Egypt’s perceived backsliding under Mubarak. New Cairo also stands as a glaring example of the growing divide between rich and poor.

— The Guardian, London