Cairo: City of Sand (Topographics)

Cairo City of Sand

Maria Golia

Cairo

topographics

in the same series Fragments of the European City Stephen Barber

The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur Ziauddin Sardar

From Berlin Armando

Extreme Europe Stephen Barber

Some Cities Victor Burgin

Airspaces David Pascoe

The Ruins of Paris Jacques Réda

Intercities Stefan Hertmans

Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930 Joachim Schlör

Romania Borderland of Europe Lucian Boia

Robinson in Space Patrick Keiller Tokyo Donald Richie Tel Aviv: From Dream to City Joachim Schlör Liquid City Marc Atkins and Iain Sinclair At the Edge of the World Jean Mohr/John Berger

Bangkok William Warren Macao Philippe Pons Zeropolis The Experience of Las Vegas Bruce Bégout Warsaw David Crowley Cambodia Michael Freeman

Cairo: City of Sand Maria Golia

reaktion books

For my brothers: Christopher, David and Frank

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street, London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2004, reprinted 2004 Transferred to digital printing 2006 Copyright © Maria Golia 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: Golia, Maria Cairo: City of Sand - (Topographics) 1. Cairo (Egypt) - Description and travel 2. Cairo (Egypt) - Social life and customs - 21st century I. Title 962.1’6’055 isbn-13: 9 781 86189 187 7 isbn-10: 1 86189 187 3

Contents

Preface 7 i

Vanishing Point 13

ii Artifice and Edifice 47 iii

The Guests 95

iv

Listening 139

v

Ensemble 169 References 215 Select Bibliography 230 Acknowledgements 231 Photographic Acknowledgements 232

Kamal Shimi balanced on Mohammed Shimi’s arm atop the Great Pyramid of Khufu, Cairo, 1960.

Preface

Some of us wonder, watching Cairo teeter between a barely functional glide and an irretrievable nosedive, what keeps this plane in the air? How goes the city, when it looks and acts like it’s held together by rubber bands? The intention behind this book was to try to make sense of how and why, given some of the most gruelling, incongruous conditions imaginable, Cairo retains its allure and its people their sanity. If it were a matter of thermodynamics one might eventually sort it out. In fact, Cairo is an essay in entropy, which is a measure of the degree of disorder or randomness in a system. Here, like the rest of the universe, energy is subject to dissipation and everything runs downhill, but order is nevertheless maintained, if barely. To readers in other world cities, some aspects of life in Cairo will no doubt sound familiar, while some may strike them as strange. Cities, like people, share the essentials, but each has a combination of qualities that is distinctive and recognizable. One of Cairo’s attributes is grace under pressure, and that is mostly what this book is about. Another distinction is the pride of place and influence the city enjoys vis-à-vis Egypt. Egyptian geographer Gamal Hamdan went so far as to call his country a ‘vast suburb of Cairo’, but he said it ruefully, knowing that Cairo’s prestige has come at the expense of the rural provinces. Indeed, a significant portion of Egypt’s population lives in the capital or its environs; it is the country’s administrative, political, religious, cultural and media centre. A book about Cairo is in some ways a book about Egypt, but this book focuses as much as possible on the capital and its people. The literature on Cairo is vast. Many books concentrate on its past, which is long, so that historicity has become one of the city’s defining qualities. A number of academic treatises study aspects of Cairo’s social or urban fabric, sometimes from an anthropological viewpoint, or else statistical studies to make projections for the 7

Central Cairo and the Nile, facing northwest.

future, usually grim. Cairo’s broader present moment, its giddy equilibrium and unfolding contemporary nature, is less frequently explored. With that in mind, Cairo comprises five interlocking essays. Part One, ‘Vanishing Point’, explores the given circumstances, Cairo’s living conditions and people’s attitudes of response. Part Two, ‘Artifice and Edifice’, is a brisk historical overview describing Cairo’s layered texture and narrative. Part Three, ‘The Guests’, surveys the city’s relationships with its significant others, from foreign occupations to current influences like Western consumerism, Gulf Arabs and refugees. Part Four, ‘Listening’, tunes into the city’s subtext, examining linguistic memes, jokes, grandiloquence and the art of dissimulation. Part Five, ‘Ensemble’, steps inside the interactions, discussing family, marriage and death, and the perceptions of community emerging between the cracks in a time-worn paternalist bureaucracy. One way of seeing a city is as a metaphor for an individual life, but with all a life’s possibilities, its triumphs, downfalls and trans8

Cairo and the Nile island of Zamalek, facing northeast.

figurations, stretching into time and space. Maybe knowing a city, or trying to, is a way of knowing oneself, or more accurately, what one learns or chooses to learn is self-revealing. In that case, Cairo has taught me many things, my capacity for being wrong not the least of them. So much to say that any factual errors found here are my own. As for perceptions and misperceptions that I hope are never offensive to individuals or to the truth, this is an interpretative work, and my wish has been to open or pursue lines of inquiry, not arrive at fixed conclusions.

9

a note on transcription When Arabic words or expressions appear, they have been transliterated and italicized following a fairly standard academic format. Those who know Arabic should note: fi = the letter ayn. √ = the glottal stop when it is not the letter qaf. q = the letter qaf or a glottal stop in today’s Cairene dialect. Where names and Arabic terms that have become accepted into the English lexicon are concerned, English standard practice is followed, with all the inconsistencies that this may imply.

The visible world is a trace of the invisible one, and the former follows the latter like a shadow. al-ghazali, THE NICHE OF LIGHTS

Rooftop billboards overlooking the Sixth of October Bridge crossing the Nile at the heart of Cairo.

i Vanishing Point

I swear by the city, and you yourself are a resident of this city, by the begetter and all whom he begot: We created man to try him with affliction. QUR√AN, sura 90:1 ‘the city’ On 2 May 1997 at three o’clock in the afternoon, a troubled sky over Cairo congealed to virulent crimson before it went dark as night. The city gasped and held its breath. A number of distressed individuals ran pell-mell in the streets shouting ‘Judgment Day! Judgment Day!’ (yom il qiyama). Their voices were lost in the wind as a rolling mountain of sand swallowed Greater Cairo. Advancing from the deserts of Libya and Egypt’s southwest, an 80-kilometre-per-hour gale delivered a wall of sand that wreaked havoc for 30 minutes. If you happened to be standing atop Cairo’s highest elevation, the Muqattam Cliffs, you might have seen the storm coming before everything just disappeared. After a muted night, at dawn Egypt’s capital re-emerged, pearlescent and draped in the settling sand. Most people were relieved to find themselves no closer to heaven or hell (or justice, for that matter) than they’d been the day before, but not everyone was as lucky. Twenty-three deaths were attributed to this unusually voracious sandstorm. The resulting dust cloud rose on a warm air current and rode all the way to Miami, Florida, where the sunset was particularly purple, spiced with the sighs of sixteen million Cairenes.1 Cairo is accustomed to an annual spate of sandstorms, the khamasin (the Fifties), so-called for their arrival 50 days before Coptic Easter and their duration of around 50 days.2 A more atmospheric etymology says the khamasin recall Cain’s 50-day desert trek with his murdered brother on his back, looking for a place to bury the body. On a good day with a little wind, Greater Cairo receives tons of sand and dust precipitation. During the khamasin, the air is thick enough to turn scent to substance, trapping car exhaust and kebab smoke, 13

incense and cologne. Every breath is laced with grit and the stifled sun casts a disapproving glare over 350-square kilometres of urban ant heap.3 Virtually surrounded by desert, the people of Cairo have stuck together so long they’ve become agoraphobic. Milad Hanna, an Egyptian intellectual and a housing expert, describing how ‘nature and climate affect the psyche of human groups’, observed that ‘the desert with its infinite space stimulates imagination and awakens fear of the approaching stranger’.4 Whether the fickle desert horizon is to blame, Cairenes live unimaginably close to each other, bound by constraints and propensities inextricably shared. Theirs is a 1,400-year-old city of one-thousand-and-one contingencies, improvizations, renewals and debacles. Cairo is a millennial model of entropy and it looks it, a dilapidated brown conflation of cubes, domes and spires, glorious in the incongruity of its daily survival. London and Paris are built on solid sedimentary rock. Chicago has as its foundation a massive coral reef. Cairo, by contrast, was founded on mud, six million years’ worth of alluvial deposits from a river 160 million years old.5 Ah, the Nile, what hasn’t been said of it? A thin blue vein of geographical fate, once worshipped, now abused, yet the source of all life for Egypt, and of growing contention between the countries obliged to share it. Cairo, parched and pulverized, its inhabitants increasing like merry amoebae, lies near the end of the river’s 6,818 kilometre line.6 Observe Egypt from the outer edge of earth’s atmosphere and admire the lotus-shaped Nile, the triangular blossom of its delta open wide to the Mediterranean, its impossibly slender stalk extending deep into African soil. Cairo occupies the throat of the flower and it is strangling it. In 2001 the French research organization cedej sponsored a satellite image study to map Cairo’s land use digitally with unprecedented precision, things like formal (licensed) and informal (slum) housing, utilities buildings and green space.7 The Egyptian government was reluctant to acknowledge cedej’s dire findings, perhaps in the belief that the city, like any sacred cow, would not bear too close a scrutiny. Facts, in Egypt, are hard to come by, even when they’re staring everyone in the face. Cairo’s administrators are wizards of obfuscation. What difference does it make, they seem to be asking, how many people live in a single room or how many kids occupy a single classroom, as if it 14

was nobody’s business but their own. This cavalier attitude towards statistics may be the mark of enlightenment, for the real question is indeed not ‘how many’ but ‘how at all’, not to mention ‘why’. The Roman Stoic Seneca might have been describing Cairo’s implausibility when he wrote: You say: I did not think it would happen. Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it is already happened . . .? 8 Outrageous fortune is familiar to this city, where streets are inscribed with sagas and where the pressures of life and people’s equanimity approach the supernatural. It’s hardly surprising that a large segment of the population believes in magic, a swathe so wide it cuts across classes. Egypt’s monarchy purportedly relied on the talents of astrologers and soothsayers. Some say, with pride, that belief in magic is an inherited trait from the Pharaohs, and they may be right. Talismans decorate Cairo’s streets and households: the eye of Horus, the Hand of Fatima and the colour turquoise blue. Exorcists are in demand along with dream interpreters and fortunetellers who read everything from coffee cups and bowls of water to hands, feet, foreheads and backs. The Cairene brand of magic is, however, less esoteric than pragmatic. Many people consult practitioners for their health, preferring a trip to the neighbourhood healer than to one of the derelict, statesubsidized hospitals. Magic is a socially acceptable refutation of unpleasantness, hence a man without a job or a couple without children engage practitioners to remove the curses that have fallen on them. A woman seeking to resist the advances of a loutish husband may find herself possessed of a djinn (one frequently of another faith, i.e., Christian versus Muslim), rendering her person untouchable until purified. Magic serves Cairenes as an excuse for the perennial dysfunction of every ill-conceived thing around them. Djinns, for example, who often announce their arrival by a bad smell or loud noise, notoriously dwell in bathrooms, a fine comment on the state of the local art of plumbing. Magic is a last resort, a court of higher appeals in matters perceived beyond one’s powers, which, these days can be quite a lot. This feeling of helplessness is but one side effect of paternalism, that wearisome evolutionary glitch that informs every aspect of the 15

Beneath the Munib Bridge that bisects Dahab Island in south central Cairo.

city’s life. If it was not born in Egypt, then patriarchal rule was institutionalized and enshrined here so confidently that people still travel great distances to gawp at its bones. Tyranny, Egyptian-style, is the rote response to a given circumstance: one river, originating outside the country’s sovereign borders. Controlling water, ensuring its adequate distribution, is a matter of life and death, and the consummate tool of power for the state. Water is subsidized in Egypt, as are food staples and rail transport, baqshish (tips) for putting up with poor education, scarce jobs and housing and lack of participation in decision-making processes. The militaristic Emergency Law, enforced since President Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981, throttles civil society and poisons every sort of initiative with fear. That Cairo remains one of the world’s safest cities is due to the nature of its people, not its police. People prefer to avoid the attentions of a government they equate with setbacks rather than help. They find ways of working around the authorities, of making do and approximating the forms and functions of their households and their lives. Everything and everyone is multi-use, its value negotiable, a methodology at vibrant 16

odds with the western model of consumerism. Recycling is a vocation, its creative manifestations endlessly ingenious. Against all odds, and perhaps because of them, Cairo is radiant with life and adamant in its self-assertion. Cairenes tend to be outgoing types who love nothing more than laughter, a lively conversation or clever retort. ‘Prosperity’, Seneca tells us, ‘fosters bad tempers’. Egypt’s ruling class has done its best to keep the people happy.9 Following a presidential address in November 2002 on Egypt’s development, the state-owned daily Akhbar al-Yom (Daily News) went on record as follows: We tell the Egyptian president, in whose era 26 million new Egyptians were born and for whom he is responsible, that we are with you in your suffering . . . 10 If President Hosni Mubarak, in office since 1981, is in need of consolation, he’s certainly not alone. Half of Egypt’s population leaps to mind, who are nineteen years old or less and have never known another leader, nor been much acquainted with the process of choosing one. The youth factor is critical in a city like Cairo, swarming with students attending overcrowded schools in two to three shifts throughout the day. Young men line the streets looking for jobs or tourists to assist, or else setting up shop on sidewalks to hawk everything from shoelaces to Chinese kitchen appliances and knock-off designer perfume and clothing. At night a new middle class of adolescent hopefuls crowd air-conditioned shopping malls, while a growing number of child runaways sleep al fresco downtown. Malls and street children were rare phenomena before the 1990s. Meanwhile, young people find it increasingly difficult to marry, an expensive undertaking that requires a fully equipped household as part of the contract. ‘Cairo’, in the words of a teenager from the city’s medieval quarter, ‘is becoming more and more’. The capital is saturated with humanity, half of Egypt lives or works within its relatively prosperous 100-kilometre radius. 11 Density levels vary across town, from an overall average of 385 people per hectare to 1,000 per hectare (ten square metres per person) in some of the older quarters. 12 Few studies exist of the informal communities, but in at least one of them, Manshiet Nasser, 17

beneath the Muqattam cliffs, densities reach 2,000 people per hectare.13 Cairo’s population and residential growth is highest in these informal areas, where houses fill as fast as they are built.14 There’s a classic Egyptian joke that obliquely describes the national attitude towards living in such close proximity. It’s about the safiidi (doltish Upper Egyptian farmer) who comes to Cairo with a toothache. Tapping the offending molar, he tells the dentist angrily: ‘Take out all the other teeth and leave this son of a dog by himself.’ For the average Egyptian, solitude is punishment and privacy an obscure concept. Even the posh, gated communities in Cairo’s desert outskirts feature giant villas no more than a hair’s breadth apart. The state-operated Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (capmas) nevertheless claims that there were 1.1 Cairenes ‘per room’ according to its 1996 census, which, given the city’s area and population implies both a verticality and optimism of stratospheric dimensions.15 Egypt is in fact among the most densely populated country on earth, its 70 million inhabitants clinging to the Nile and a few oases amidst a sea of sand. Arable land is precious, yet Cairo’s informal brick slums consume around three-and-a-half million square metres of it per year. The demand for low- to mid-income housing has long outdone government efforts to supply it. Those who can afford a legal bit of land and a building permit must endure six to fourteen years of hellish bureaucracy to get them.16 Consequently, nearly 60 per cent of the city’s people live in under-serviced, illegal dwellings. 17 Nor is building-code enforcement an administrative strength, a fact well known to unscrupulous contractors and their suppliers. Gravity is murder in Cairo, where buildings collapse regularly, taking their toll in lives.18 According to facts disclosed for the first time in 2002 by Cairo’s governor, Abdel Rahim Shehata, 25 per cent of the city’s buildings were about to collapse while 40 per cent didn’t meet health standards and 850,000 were condemned. Nevertheless, Cairo’s housing budget was reduced from le120 million in 2001 to an insignificant le22 million in 2002.19 The municipality is unprepared to deal with catastrophic building collapses, despite their frequency. In February 2002 the Al Ahram Weekly, a state-owned newspaper, reported that a woman trapped with others in the rubble of their home managed to call a rescue squad on a mobile phone and was instructed to call back on the landline. In all fairness, Cairo’s exigencies would tax the most 18

Kasr al-Aini bus stop in summer.

enlightened teams of virtuous experts; no wonder the city outwits the fractious mix of military men, socialist-educated elders and parvenu survivors entrusted with its care. While there are surely dedicated individuals in Cairo’s bureaucratic maw, they are just as surely outnumbered. As Cairo’s governor, appointed by the president in 1996, has said in regard to the city’s management: ‘Only God is all-powerful.’ 20 Cairo is an architectural pastiche of whimsical artistry, cheap functionalism and unflinching kitsch. Rows of government-sponsored shoeboxes and multi-storey brick piles are interspersed with monuments of sublime proportion and texture. A third of the world’s antiquities are in Egypt; the Cairo governorate alone claims responsibility for restoring and maintaining 500 historic sites, many comprising multiple monuments.21 The work is executed by foreign and local agencies using a variety of techniques, from the meticulous to the criminal. Despite the lofty rhetoric lauding Cairo’s patrimony, the official attitude regarding maintenance resembles that of spoiled offspring towards their invalid elders: monuments are the source of noisome 19

demands or potential income rather than the central features of community life. There is a worrying trend to isolate historic buildings from the people for whom they constitute generational landmarks, a strategy involving forced evictions designed primarily with tourists in mind. Officious justifications – that people don’t know how to care for cultural sites – ring hollow given the haphazard state of the city at large. The palaces and villas of Cairo’s recent monarchic and colonial past are nearly extinct; at least 2,000 have been destroyed to make way for high-rises that could only have been erected with government-issued permits.22 Following the 1952 revolution, many belle époque buildings were converted to state-owned facilities, a fate worse than demolition, as they’ve been mostly left to decompose. Children attend school in some of the wrecked palaces, acquiring an early lesson in contempt for property. Yet Cairo still boasts remnants of empires – Roman bastions, early Christian churches, Mamluk mosques, Ottoman water fountains (sabil), European fin-de-siècle residencies, not to mention the Pyramids and the Sphinx, all standing ground against an encroaching forest of rectilinear monstrosities. The question is, for how long? Given the seasonal sandblastings and corrosive pollutants, even the marble towers of the nouveau riche swiftly acquire an unasked for patina of age. As for the gimcrack constructions with which Cairo is rife, they look old and broken before they’re even occupied. Cairo is expert at making things and people age before their time. Indeed, nowhere is the process of erosion so eloquent as in Egypt, which is made of sand, the final stage of rock before it enters the atmosphere as dust. Cairo is a sound museum, an aural diorama of transistor radios, farm animals, satellite tv and mobile phones. Officially, there are around 10,000 mosques, but there are tens of thousands more zawaya, prayer corners, some no more than a microphone and a few green mats on a sidewalk or in a vestibule. Most of the communal prayer places issue a hyper-amplified call to prayer five times a day, beginning at the crack of dawn. On Fridays, Cairenes are treated to a barrage of khutab (sermons), pious weekly admonishments delivered at punishing volumes. There are church bells and bellowing street vendors, not to mention the multi-lingual chatter of millions of born talkers, shouting and coughing amidst a cacophony of horns. 20

Although neighbourhoods vary widely in character and mood, sound levels often breach what is considered permissible (80 decibels). If there’s such a thing as unbearable, Cairenes have yet to agree on what it is. Construction work, flat renovations and street repairs are performed at all hours of the night. Wedding celebrations and funeral services (the latter involving amplified Quranic recitals) are both loud enough to raise the dead. ‘All outdoors may be bedlam’, said Seneca, ‘providing there’s no disturbance within’. The people of Cairo seem fairly calm, but it’s a safe bet many are hard of hearing, a condition that is both the consequence of, and reason for, earsplitting auditory stimuli. In a 1995 study, a sample of 2,300 individuals identified the main sources of noise pollution as overcrowding, cars and microphones – in other words, themselves. No wonder when asked what they would do about noisy neighbours, 86.5 per cent said ‘nothing’ or that they would ‘speak to [the offenders] politely’. The seven per cent who said they’d consult the police represent a bellicose minority. Three per cent handled the situation more diplomatically ‘by complaining to the neighbours’ relatives’, a circuitous strategy none the less preferred to ‘getting angry and quarrelling’, the option adopted by only one per cent.23 Under the circumstances, the indignant category is probably greater than people are bound to admit. In the heartfelt words of a gentleman interviewed by the Cairo Times: Noise pollution is my worst nightmare. It’s everywhere and it gets on my nerves especially since I have a quick temper. When I hear a loud noise I feel like dashing to the street and killing whoever is responsible for it, [an impulse that] makes me edgy all day . . . 24 Complaints, at best, can only interrupt the din, which is a fact of life, especially in close quarters. It’s impossible to scold the author of every insensitive racket, so people just raise their own volume to outdo it. Forbearance makes a lot of noise, but who can afford to be fastidious? Sound is life asserting, especially in a mass of humanity so dense it threatens to overwhelm itself. Like most crowded cities, Cairo has traffic problems, but, unlike in other cities, the worst thing to do is walk, which most people are obliged to, absent sidewalks notwithstanding. 25 Pedestrians are unloved by drivers and the municipality alike, as if their failure to 21

South central Cairo, with Dahab Island to the left.

achieve greater mobility was somehow embarrassing. The city is an obstacle course, its cracked snatches of pavement mined with metal protuberances or patches of slithery marble. Danger lurks at every turn: pipes poking from storefront awnings, intrusive phone booths occupying narrow passages, gaping holes, mountains of sand and pools of freshly mixed cement. In shows of prowess, drivers graze street-crossers caressingly with their fenders – just the flick of a matador’s cape. The city would be littered with bodies except that space is too tight to gather speed and people take little for granted. Cairenes possess an occult ability to dodge obstacles, a diffuse but panoramic attention that warns at the last instant to avoid perilous objects, some of which may be hurtling from decrepit balconies or building scaffoldings towards their very heads. Fortunately, people have several affordable transport options in addition to their feet, including privately operated microbuses and taxis, or public transport buses and the metro, each with its idiosyncrasies. The city’s behemoth buses, for example, do not properly stop for passengers. Catching one is a trapeze act between those hanging from the crammed vehicles and those trying to hop on. Microbuses have the advantage of taking only twelve people and are 22

slightly more expensive than the bus. Their drivers, however, are notoriously reckless and accident-prone. The metro, opened in 1988, is the best bet for those who live along its limited lines, and its cleanliness and generally smooth functioning are sources of civic pride. Smoking and littering are strictly forbidden and everyone respectfully obeys, but the metro security guards have been known to act overzealously, on at least one occasion issuing a fine for whistling. 26 Cairo’s taxi drivers are more lenient, transporting everything from live animals to living-room furniture while offering plenty of garrulous advice en route. Cairo’s streets witness over 14 million so-called ‘person trips’ or movements daily.27 Since the 1980s, dozens of flyovers increased capacity on major arteries by adding a second storey, chopping adjacent buildings in two and exposing inhabitants on upper floors to traffic a few unholy metres from their windows. Cairo is scarred with partial and often tragic solutions to grand-scale problems. Unsightly high-rise garages replace elegant centennial buildings judged too far-gone for restoration. A bridge was added to the Nile in the late 1990s, just south of the city’s centre. It brutally bisects the exquisitely green agricultural island of Dahab, farmed for generations to provide vegetables for the surrounding city.28 Having dismembered countless neighbourhoods, a portion of Cairo’s traffic was directed underground in 2002 via the al-Azhar Tunnel, designed to ease circulation through the heart of the medieval quarter. While it is wise to protect major tourist destinations, there are other pressing concerns. Only one in five families can afford to own a car, yet public transport (metro and bus) handles but a fraction of their needs. The microbuses, which made their appearance in the early 1980s, are an improvization on the theme of getting there, one of many ways of making do, an occupation for which Cairenes have developed considerable flair. In January 2001 the authorities debuted a traffic law obligating drivers of four-wheel vehicles to use seatbelts and motorcyclists to wear helmets. Fines were liberally issued for infractions, provoking a rash of improvised headgear, including helmets from the 1973 October War. Similarly, as the cost of sturdy, imported seatbelts soared exploitatively to several hundred Egyptian pounds per set, taxi drivers purchased lengths of belt fabric they confidently draped across their shoulders and laps, asking passengers kindly to do the same. The contrivance 23

was soon refined, the strips of cloth equipped with plastic buckles and adhesive to attach them to car doors. These efforts satisfied many of Cairo’s traffic cops, a remarkably easygoing bunch despite blood-lead concentrations so high they could probably set off metal detectors. Sales on ersatz belts received an even bigger boost when word got around that the expensive, legitimate ones were manufactured in Israel and contained an alloy that would render their (Egyptian) wearers infertile. Egyptians love a conspiracy theory, and the male of the species fears impotence more than death. Prices on the allegedly toxic imported belts bottomed out, traffic cops relaxed their attention and even the fake belts grew knotted and gathered dust. Car owners are fond of accessories, things like stuffed toys, prayer beads, the usual amulets and cds that dangle from rear-view mirrors, because they’re shiny and thought to bring good luck.29 People need all the luck they can get, especially if they’re looking for a parking place, the demand for which has tripled in the last twenty years. Cairo’s two million vehicles each occupy space (around 15m2) rivalling that of human beings. The minadi profession, Cairo’s citywide valet-parking service, was the spontaneous response of thousands of otherwise unemployed people to a glaring need for creative parking solutions. The city’s self-appointed minadis would fold cars up and put them in their pockets if it meant earning an extra pound or two. A top-form minadi artfully manoeuvres rows of densely packed vehicles, extracting them on demand by main force, steering while pushing. Unimpressed by the minadis’ labours, the Cairo governorate decided in 2002 that what downtown needed most were parking meters. The meters are sophisticated mechanisms with led panels that, considering local wear and tear, have a shelf life of a couple of years at most. The meters use special magnetized cards, on sale nearby from men and women dressed in yellow plastic aprons. The disenfranchised minadi eye the meter maids and their little receipt books with disdain, in the certain knowledge that a meter cannot push or clean a windshield. ‘What can we do except become criminals?’ one erstwhile minadi exclaimed. Those old enough to remember Cairo when its meter-less boulevards were lined with trees, pick their way with difficulty along today’s fractured streets. Their eyes are glued to the ground for booby traps, which is why some complain of getting lost, but it’s also because 24

Mechanic rebuilding a car in Herafiyeen City, northeast Cairo.

Ramses Square after rain.

things keep changing. There’s even talk of moving the 90-ton monolith of Ramses ii from his place by the train station that bears his name. The statue left its home in Memphis (one of Egypt’s ancient capitals, just south of Cairo) in 1955, on the orders of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Having reclined in the Temple of Ptah for over 3,000 years, Ramses was made to stand up and take top billing in the tumultuous Ramses Square. If current plans are carried out, the statue will have the chance to lie down again in a calmer place near the pyramids. Meanwhile, a flyover whizzes within a few metres of Ramses’ right ear and he looks pinched beneath a cloak of brown velvet grime. Cairenes, it must be said, are not fussy about appearances. Cars are unabashedly scraped, clothing is casual and just about everything is a magnet for the city’s dust, which is sticky and vaguely narcotic. As part of its unceasing effort to spruce things up, the Cairo Sanitation and Beautification Authority dutifully sends forth a listless army of green-clad men. They push plastic wheelbarrows and homemade witches’ brooms fashioned from crooked sticks and the twigs of a species of palm. Trees, alas, are scarce, in many quarters. In some upscale parts of town, smaller-than-life plastic palms have been 26

installed in patches of garden. At night, they oscillate hypnotically in red, yellow and orange neon. After 5,000 years of watering trees, it must be fun just to plug one in. Some might even call that progress. Cairo’s transformation from belle époque to burlesque is complete. For the purposes of a 1997 environmental survey, a sample composed predominantly of Cairenes was asked to define what was understood by ‘nature’. Answers like air, weather and sunshine, or the countryside and farms, comprised the majority. Only fifteen per cent of the sample defined nature more spiritually, as related to God and creation. Responses provided by still smaller groups included ‘beauty and tranquility’, ‘safety, good people and cooperation’ and ‘life in general’. Aside from these rather disparate conceptions, the researchers deemed a number of other responses ‘unclassifiable’, and a further portion of those surveyed left the question unanswered.30 Groping for the meaning of nature, Cairenes are like the blind describing colour, visualizing something unfamiliar and external to themselves. This ambiguity is perhaps unsurprising where green space is so rare that people picnic on scraps of grass separating lanes of busy traffic and on the pedestrian parts of bridges.31 Although many families have rural antecedents, they have never looked back, unless the current fad for psychedelically hued plastic houseplants is a sign of nostalgia. Aesthetically, modern Cairo betrays a passive–aggressive detachment from nature, at odds with Egypt’s austere and verdant grace. According to Berndt Lotsch, an urban ecologist: An intensive involvement with Nature can reduce stress, increase powers of concentration, harmonise blood pressure and mood as well as relax tension. The landscapes of national parks contribute to reducing the ‘mental starvation’ of industrialized man . . . The German photographer Ehlert supplies hospitals with posters from the last European wildernesses . . . and the doctors observed a marked positive effect upon the patients.32 The same therapeutic knowledge may be behind the frequently encountered wall-size posters of the gardens at Versailles that decorate the homes and shops of Cairo. People seem to know what they’re missing, but have settled for less, and have taken the city on, warts and all. 27

Sensible homeowners choose cheaper synthetic over natural materials even when it comes to plants. Meanwhile, city administrators have neglected to provide greenery for the public and continue to squander what little is left. Perhaps Cairenes have abandoned nature and its aesthetics because of associations with a rural past they’d rather leave behind. Indeed, Cairo’s growth and prestige has arguably come at the expense of Egypt’s agricultural provinces, the atrophied limbs of a slender body with the capital its unwieldy head. The Nile went unnoticed in the above-cited understandings of nature, because it’s a given and not worth mentioning. The Egyptian sense of propriety regarding the river is legendary, and solidly based on the riparian rule of ‘first in time [historic use]; first in right’. Every scheme ever hatched for the country’s development involves the Nile and boldly ignores the nine other Nile Basin countries that get to it first. Eighty-five per cent of Egypt’s water comes from the Blue Nile originating in Ethiopia, the country that coincidentally supplies the nutrient-rich silt that’s fed Egypt for millennia. Egypt is Ethiopia in these material ways, yet that country has been consistently excluded from grand designs of Nile Basin management concocted by British hydrologists during the occupation (1882–1952) and their Egyptian counterparts today. According to a 1959 Treaty with Sudan, Egypt gets 55.5 billion cubic metres of water annually, Sudan gets 18.5, and everybody else gets mad about them taking the lion’s share. Egypt relies on civil war and political rivalries in neighbouring lands to contain the threat of developmental demands for water. In Cairo, alarmed experts gather for water conferences, deliver papers and go home, while governmental rhetoric on the issue is little more than a river of denial. The Cairo Water Authority decants six million cubic metres of vintage Nile daily. Divided among sixteen million inhabitants, that should mean 375 litres per person per day, or 136 cubic metres (1m3=1000 litres) per year.33 Availability, however, is actually far less for many people. The Water Authority admits to losing 35 per cent of its product to pipe leakage prior to 2002, a figure allegedly reduced by half through subsequent maintenance. Whether this is the case, estimating average water use is further complicated by the fact that Cairo’s 15,000 kilometres of pipeline are fair play for informal communities, whose thirsty inhabitants pool their resources to pirate pipes off the main lines. A portion of these clandestine exten28

sions (serving around one million people) were metered and incorporated into the municipal system, an on-going effort saving money, face and product for the Water Authority. But at least a third to half of the city’s households do not have direct access to water. Subsidies cushion 80 per cent of the cost of water production and distribution, but many taps remain dry because they lie beyond the reach of an overburdened municipal water grid.34 Water has been the ballast of legitimacy for Egyptian governments throughout history, and Egyptians believe that Nile water is their sacred right. Nevertheless, they must go to backbreaking lengths to obtain it. A 1997 usaid-sponsored study states that people without a water connection spend five times as much (and expend 28 hours per month of labour) for water as those who have it piped in. 35 Many must observe the time-honoured tradition of buying water from mule-drawn carts, these days offering 20-litre jerricans at around 0.35pt to 0.75pt. Others make deals with their neighbours and carry water home, or else draw it from outdoor communal taps. Even in serviced areas supply is sporadic, so water is hoarded at night in bathtubs and sloshed around throughout the day. Water distribution varies wildly between neighbourhoods. Some Cairenes enjoy swimming pools and golf courses; others manage with sponge baths and a small cup of thick coffee. The Egyptian geographer Gamal Hamdan was fascinated by what he called the ‘social ecology’ of the Nile, referring to the interaction of human and geographical phenomena. He rightly observed that ‘people will relinquish their freedom in exchange for water and justice’.36 But what happens when they get neither? The flipside of drinking water is waste water, another sticky problem citywide, from the informal settlements to the older quarters, as well as in the hastily built new ones. In the late 1970s, 64 per cent of Cairo’s households did not have a sewage connection. Twenty years and 1.3 billion usaid dollars later, many still don’t because the city has never stopped growing. Cairo generates around three million cubic metres of domestic sewage daily. Add to that 200,000 cubic metres of industrial effluents plus almost a ton of heavy metal waste, all discharged into the nearest Nile-fed canal.37 The canals are often smothered in a carpet of water hyacinths, known locally as the ward il-nil (Nile flower). Pollution facilitates the spread of this fecund parasite that guzzles a litre of precious Nile water every 24 hours and reproduces itself in twelve days. But even 29

the prolific hyacinths can’t beat the Cairenes; a new one of those is born every minute and a half.38 According to a seemingly ancient tradition still recorded in the 1980s, Egyptian women who give birth at home throw the placenta in the Nile, although a canal will do, or even a toilet or drainpipe, so long as the mother smiles while performing the act. Researchers could not identify the origins of the practice, whose benefits were variously described by several mothers in Cairo. Some said this precaution would ensure ample breast milk. Another mother believed that whatever her child’s eventual ills, they would be cured with Nile water. Still another told researchers that the afterbirth was disposed in water so that the child’s life would flow ‘like the Nile’.39 The river’s life-giving flow, despite the Aswan High Dam, is still subject to capricious Nile floods, like those that tested its mettle during the record-breaking lows and highs of the late twentieth century. Although the timing of the annual flood is always reliable, its volume never is, depending, as it does, on a web of variables affecting rain in the Ethiopian highlands. In the 1980s it became clear that the Lake Nasser reservoir could run dangerously low, while Cairo tasted the shortages that squeeze ever harder as the city grows. The Egyptian government’s Statistical Yearbook tells us that the Nile is the world’s second-longest river.40 Well it’s not, it’s really the longest, yet who should know better than those before whose eyes it is vanishing? The Nile is a ‘strange attractor’; a term employed in chaos analysis referring to a phenomenon with well-defined parameters whose behaviour is nevertheless unpredictable. This unpredictability, the river ’s floods and droughts, have served history as protagonists, ensuring the longevity of governments in times of stable water supply and rebellion and downfall when the supply is too much or not enough. Cairo was and remains a whim of the river, its morphology determined by the western shift of the Nile banks and the gift of a series of islands. Seneca sounds almost Egyptian when he says ‘Fortune gives us nothing we can really own. Nothing whether public or private is stable; the destinies of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.’41 Most of Cairo’s inhabitants are Muslim. Those who pray the prescribed five times daily are the minority, but millions more pray at least once a day, especially on Fridays. Each act of prayer requires a preliminary, so-called minor (wudu) ablution, the washing of 30

hands, face and feet. Mindful of the water this consumes, the Prophet Muhammad recommended rinsing each body part no more than three times, admonishing that ‘whoever goes beyond three transgresses’. Realizing that water shortages could interfere with prayers, he allowed that sand be used for ablutions and advised the faithful to ‘proceed to an elevated land, the soil of which is pure, fine and soft so that it is easily blown into dust’. Ritual cleansings are but one item in the manual of Islamic hygiene and grooming compiled by the twelfth-century Sufi scholar al-Ghazali. In his Mysteries of Purity we learn that the Prophet was a stern advocate of dental health: ‘Why do you come before me with yellow teeth? . . . Use the toothpick. It is a purifier for the mouth and well pleasing unto God.’42 The Prophet was also particular about grooming, saying ‘He who has but one hair on his head, let him honour it.’43 Conversely, armpit and pubic hair were supposed to be removed altogether every 40 days, by plucking or shaving. The women of Cairo (rather more than the men) obey tradition en masse, using a depilatory made of sugar and lemon juice (halawa) on the sensitive areas, as well as legs and even forearms, since hairless skin (and, who knows, an infantilized mons veneris?) is considered attractive to the opposite sex. Cairene coiffeurs not only style hair, they get rid of it, but whether performed in a salon or at home, depilation is considered a chance to socialize, a pleasant afternoon or evening with the girls, having the short hairs yanked out at the roots. Men enjoy the more soothing ambience of the barbershop for regular facial shaves and clips. ‘Barbers’, said Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson in his The Ancient Egyptians: Their Life and Customs, ‘may be considered the offspring of civilization’, referring to a boy’s first shave as a rite of passage into manhood. ‘So a people’ he enlarges, ‘until they have adopted the custom of shaving, may be supposed to retain a remnant of early barbarism’.44 Wilkinson would have found Cairene barbers to be especially civilized. At least until the mid-eighteenth century, they performed surgery, extracting teeth, excising cataracts and removing gall-bladder stones. It’s alarming to note that one of the oldest traditional barber-doctor services is circumcision, still considered cutting-edge in some quarters of the city, a practice that lends fresh anxiety to the request for ‘a little off the top’.45 31

The Egyptian approach towards health has always been pluralistic, a combination of traditional remedies, scientific innovation, religious invocations and magic spells. This is most obvious in the capital, where people consult healers for their aches and pains despite the long-established presence of Western medicine. Privately operated clinics offer decent options to government health facilities, but few can afford them or a proliferation of alternative therapies, such as Reiki, yoga, acupuncture and homeopathy. The first medical school in the Arab world was founded in Cairo in 1827 on the orders of Muhammad Ali, who hired a French surgeon named A. B. Clot to train Egyptians in Western methods. The school still functions alongside a public hospital, where a derisively underpaid staff copes with overcrowding and substandard equipment, not to mention inadequate education and supervision. A further symptom of institutional malaise is the nursing profession, degraded in terms of training and recompense, also considered, for restrictive cultural reasons, a disreputable occupation for women. Egyptian medical practice has seen better days. According to Homer, ancient Egypt ‘produced the greatest number of medicines, many of them good mixture, many of them potent. Every man is a doctor there and wiser than men elsewhere.’46 Homer’s high opinion seems to be shared by a number of local wise guys. The city experienced a rash of quack exposés in 2002, including that of the assistant general manager of one of the city’s best-known hospitals, as well as a busy obstetrician and a respected neurologist, who all turned out to be frauds. The neurologist was nevertheless the author of 28 books, including The Psychology of the Modern Egyptian Woman, a subject on which he had evidently gathered significant data. In the course of his ten-year practice he received as many as 40 patients per day, charitably declining to take payments from the poor.47 Allowing self-styled specialists to operate does little for the image of the Ministry of Health, likewise widely reported incidents of gross medical neglect, things like towels left in abdominal cavities, a broken pen undetected in a child’s brain, and a nipple that was somehow lost during a breast reduction procedure.48 Lack of confidence in local health care has its basis in unfortunate fact, for example in the revelation that a vaccine for bilharzia, administered in the 1960s and 1970s with unsterilized needles, has resulted in a catastrophic epidemic of hepatitis C.49 Also disturbing was the accidental infection of seventeen people with the hiv virus from 32

contaminated blood issued by a Cairo blood bank in 1997. In 2002 the case went to court; doctors were fined, but the blood bank’s responsibility was never called into question. The number of people suffering from hiv, incidentally, is uncertain, since testing can end in deportation for a foreigner and, for Egyptians, in public disgrace. Nevertheless, the incidence of aids is low compared to other African countries, probably because conservatism and overcrowding conspire to reduce the opportunities for its transmission.50 A more prevalent problem is cancer, which goes by the euphemism ‘the cunning disease’ (il marad il khabis). The superstitious are careful when describing someone else’s cancer not to touch the corresponding parts of their own bodies, believing this will render them vulnerable. Many are reluctant to consult doctors for unusual symptoms; should a woman, for example, be diagnosed with cancer, her husband may divorce her and take the children in the belief that the disease is contagious. Illness is feared for the pain and stigma it brings but also for the financial hardship. Perhaps this is why people tend towards optimism when describing their health, unwilling to confront the ramifications of sickness on top of everything else. In a 1997 study performed by the authors of People and Pollution, 74 per cent of the sample said they felt their health was good or excellent, yet a quarter had had surgery for some ailment, and a quarter reported having been sick in the last two weeks, their complaints covering rheumatic, liver, kidney, gall-bladder, chest and high-blood pressure disorders, in other words, the works. One in ten of the households questioned had a child who’d recently suffered from diarrhoea, and nine per cent reported respiratory illness in the family, usually children. Between the low standard of health care, poor nutritional habits and off-the-scale pollution, millions of baby Cairenes are in for a long hard haul.51 The treatment of choice for most illness is denial, but people are willing to take the advice of pharmacists. Mistrust of doctors and lack of funds are behind the reliance on pharmaceutical medicines, often ill-advised cocktails more damaging than the problem they’re meant to treat. Those who would consult a doctor but cannot afford it number in the millions, and the government is understandably wary of denying them access to subsidized medication. The local drug manufacturing industry reaps healthy profits while excessive 33

use of antibiotics promotes pernicious infections that sweep the city with impunity, their spread facilitated by tight living conditions. Another side-effect of easy over-the-counter drugs is addiction to tranquilizers and painkillers. But the fact that pharmacists must now fear for their lives if they deny drugs to addicts, some of whom are looking for a heroin substitute, signals an unpleasant new reality for Cairo. Heroin was an unknown substance on Cairo’s streets until the early 1980s. Aside from a small trade in opium, the drug market was monopolized by hashish from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley sold citywide at user-friendly prices. The hashshash (smoker of hashish) is a Cairene type, a familiar character of many attributes, the high side of which are visionary thinking, spirituality and congeniality. In the words of the nineteenth-century French physician and connoisseur Jacques-Joseph Moreau: The hashish user is happy not in the manner of the glutton, . . . or even of the hedonist who gratifies his desires, but in the manner, for example, of the man who hears news which compounds his joys.52 The low side of hashish use, denigrated in jokes and newspaper cartoons, is confusion, dreaminess and delusion. President Anwar Sadat’s reputation as a hashshash of the visionary, spiritual variety added to, rather than detracted from, his early popularity. During Sadat’s tenure, hashish traffic was largely unhindered by what was perceived on the streets as a wisely sympathetic government. Drug raids were perfunctory, and the kingpins were left in peace. In the medieval quarter, behind the Fatimid mosque of al-Azhar, lies the neighbourhood called Batniyya (from batin or ‘hidden’), a marketplace where vegetable stands once mingled with tables piled high with pyramids made of bricks of hashish. Cairo was a city of hashshashin, and popular odes were sung to intrepid dealers. A large segment of the adult male population gathered in discreet cafés to puff water-pipes filled with molasses-soaked tobacco and topped with small discs of hash. Some women smoked too, but in the privacy of their homes. Alcohol was never as popular as hashish in Cairo, where people look down on the belligerent behaviour it provokes. The hashshashin, by contrast, enjoined a social ritual as genteel as four o’clock tea, full of zestful conversation interspersed with contemplative silence. 34

Whether Sadat was a hashshash or not, within twenty-four hours of his assassination, a tank appeared in Batniyya Square, signalling the passage of a man, and as it happens, a more congenial era. Despite the current administration’s success in rendering hashish scarce and therefore expensive, lower-priced Sinai-grown marijuana is a hot commodity and heroin addiction destroys more and more lives. Until the end of the last century Cairo did not know violence as it has long been known and accepted elsewhere. It knows it better now. Drugs are behind most crimes, and murder, once primarily a crime of passion, is often drug-related too. According to a former assistant to the Minister of Interior quoted in the state-owned Al-Ahram Weekly, the victims are frequently the nearest at hand, the young addict’s mother or father, incredulous relics of a kindlier society that is failing, under the circumstances, to perpetuate itself.53 In a city where the frontiers of well-being are under constant assault, physical and mental stress accumulates and manifests itself variously. The local dread of impotence suggests the pervasiveness of the malaise as well as the pressures involved in caring for a family, a task involving two and sometimes three poorly paying jobs. One of the best-known actors in the Arab world, Egyptian Adel Iman, starred in a film about impotence that could only have been made in Cairo. Where else, to defuse the tension, would an epidemic of erectile dysfunction be portrayed as a comedy? Iman is a police chief who discovers he’s not alone in his marital distress as his headquarters fills with quarrelling couples and the city erupts in riots. A more realistic and poignant account of a man in the throes of doubt was written by one of Egypt’s best-known authors, Yusuf Idris, a short story called ‘You Are Everything to Me’. The protagonist is Sayyed, an ageing traffic cop who, following another frustrating night with his wife, is feeling vulnerable: When he met Abu Sultan, his greeting was curt and he avoided his eyes, hurrying along the sooner to get out of sight. It was the same with Abdel Razek, the newspaper boy, and Hagg Mohammed who sold beans and everyone else he knew or did not know. Every movement betrayed his secret; every word was a calculated jab; in every smile he saw irony. 35

Sayyed tried everything: He consulted the writings of old. He went to the wise and learned, he visited the shrine of every holy man in town, and he ate the pigeons and mangoes provided by [his wife] out of her own savings. He sucked the acid tops of sugar cane and he swayed to the beat of the tambourine when a zar [exorcism] was held in his honor. Many times he was up at dawn in order to throw the charms written for him into the river. Obediently he ate the pies his wife baked for him, kneaded with her own blood, and he drank all the potions the herbalist concocted especially for him. Nothing worked. Then he made his way to the vd hospital . . .54 Finally, an emotional rapprochement with his wife and the sudden recognition of his son as an inviolate seal of manhood restores Sayyed to himself where religion and magic had failed. It should be remarked that Islam does not condone the use of magic. It does, however, uphold belief in angels and djinn, whose powers are items of faith. When it comes to healing, the line between pious pleas for intervention and remedies like charms and spells is seldom drawn. Today, men suffering from impotence have recourse to the same therapies that Sayyed tried, and some say that health problems, especially virility and fertility-related ones, provoke the majority of visits to magic practitioners. The manufacture and sale of herbal and other aphrodisiacs (tiny tubes of cream in boxes featuring crocodiles, vamps and hippopotami) is an enduring cottage industry, but today’s wounded male is apt to turn to science. Viagra (‘a pill that treats impotence by helping you have an erection’) took Cairo by storm shortly after its usa release in 1998. An ecstatic black market sold the little blue pills for a big le60 (livres égyptiens or Egyptian pounds). It took four years for the Ministry of Health to ‘undertake the necessary studies into its properties and side effects’, that is, to figure out how best to capitalize on a large captive audience. According to research conducted by the Qasr al-Aini Teaching Hospital following the appearance of Viagra, around 30 per cent of married men in Egypt suffer from impotence. It was elsewhere reported that Egyptian households spent the better part of their disposable income on after-school tutoring for their children, and Viagra.55 36

Until its licensing for local production in 2002, Viagra smuggling was a lucrative pursuit and stories made the papers about thwarted efforts, like the Syrians who were caught with a thousand pills hidden in their lunch. The event might have inspired the Cairo restaurant that briefly offered a ‘Viagra sandwich’ made of fish, shrimp and lobster, all believed to stimulate the sex drive. Unfortunately, everyone had a harder time than expected: 36 customers contracted dysentery, and the restaurant owner was arrested for spreading food poisoning. Another food said to have restorative powers is gargir (rocket) a bitter green leaf that freshens the breath, costs just a few piastres and features prominently on daily menus. For protein, concerned wives and mothers serve their men plenty of eggs, ‘the poor man’s meat’, fried in quantities of ghee. Real meat, alas, is a sometime thing and an object of desire. ‘It makes men rise’, said an enthusiastic taxi driver, an opinion that is widely shared. The average annual meat consumption of twenty-one kilos, however, amounts to a skimpy five grams per day, mostly consumed at feasts and on the occasional Friday. Despite government subsidies, meat is dear, and families augment their supply by keeping animals at home. A 1999 study revealed that in low-income quarters, 30 per cent of the households raise duck, geese, chicken or goats on their roofs, balconies, stairways and landings. Aside from the special meals it provides, livestock is barter for quick cash in case of a minor household emergency.56 No matter how tough things get, people manage to put puffed spheres of fresh wheat bread (fiesh baladi) on the table, purchased at five piastres apiece and sold from government kiosks and street vendors everywhere.57 A disc of this versatile bread serves simultaneously as plate, dipping utensil and nourishment, and its consistency fosters strong teeth and healthy gums. Even old and rock-hard, fiesh baladi, reanimates beautifully with heat and a bit of moisture, mirroring the resilience of its eaters. When warm and perfectly turned out, it’s a joy whose price, size and availability are intimately linked to the city’s well being. Bread is the single largest source of caloric intake in Egypt, which is nevertheless a wheat-poor country and the biggest wheat importer in the world. In 1977 riots broke out when Sadat tried to lower bread subsidies and bring prices up to market speed. Once the uprising was quelled, and bread back on the streets, the president remarked that ‘democracy has sharp teeth’. Egypt spends over le3 billion per year 37

to keep prices low and deliver the daily bread, a cosy arrangement that prevents people from starving and allows the government to indulge in comforting illusions of patriarchal beneficence.58 Cairenes eat around three discs of bread per day, often accompanied by a bit of fresh water-buffalo cheese and perhaps a spring onion, tomato or cucumber. Every neighbourhood has one or many vegetable sellers, stocked daily with a bounty of muddy but succulent produce year round. Ingredients are abundant, but Egyptians eat to live and not otherwise. The scarcity of cooking fuel in a desert country may account for the lacklustre development of the local culinary art. The bean dominates the average diet. Fava bean paste (ful) is a staple, along with fried bean balls (tafimiyya) served in fiesh baladi with a bit of pickled carrot or radish on the side. Another popular dish is kushari, a starch fest of rice, pasta, chickpeas and lentils topped with fried onions and a garlicky tomato sauce. Fruit, although plentiful, is a luxury purchase in Cairo. There are small sweet bananas, bursting pomegranates, fat figs, fragrant apricots and peaches, but yellow apples are the height of exotic delicacy for the average Cairene. Mid-summer is mango season, when fruit-juice shops churn out a cloying drink of mango pulp, an alternative to sugar-cane juice, another local favourite. People dine in the streets beside their workplace, leaning on a car or sitting in a café. Most meals end with a glass of strong sugary tea, ‘the poor man’s dessert’, and in some cases his breakfast and lunch too, which helps account for the ubiquity of street cafés. Cairo’s café society is hardly glamorous but it has the virtues of affordability and familiarity, perfuming neighbourhoods with cardamom-scented coffee, herbal and black teas, apple-flavoured tobacco and the charcoal used for water pipes. The offer of coffee or tea is an inducement to conversation, or negotiation, or simply the reminder among friends and acquaintances to take time out and relax. Peoplewatching is a favourite café pastime, and Cairenes are good at it. Character assessments form the subject of as many conversations as do politics or economics. Women, needless to say, are another hot topic. The café atmosphere is calmly convivial, seldom intrusive, always leisurely and almost exclusively male. Cairo is warm for nine months of the year; for three of them it’s stupefying. Stepping outside is like walking into a wall, the sun slaps and the streets hold the heat like a cauldron. The human body has three 38

million sweat glands, which do their best to prevent aestivation, a state of extreme torpor in which the metabolic rate is drastically reduced. Cairenes need no doctors to tell them that prolonged heat dims the consciousness and melts the edge of purpose and intent, rendering one astute at distinguishing what appears to be necessary from what actually is. According to metro passengers interviewed by the Cairo Times during a heat wave in 2002, ten days and nights of over 45º Celsius had reduced them to ‘a frightening state of laziness’ and ‘total incapacitation’. In summertime the Ministry of Health issues this helpful advice: ‘avoid direct sunlight, crowded areas, badly ventilated rooms and food prepared outside the home’; in other words, die, and be reborn somewhere else. A more feasible solution is the use of fans and air conditioners, which not everyone can afford but are apparently numerous enough to strain Cairo’s electricity grid. Blackouts are lapses in the municipal attention span. When power cuts occur, whatever you are were doing, you probably can’t anymore and must try something else. Depending how long outages (blackouts) last, food may rot in the fridge, water won’t make its way upwards without the assistance of electric pumps, and life becomes just a tad more irritating, especially at night. One source of comic relief during blackouts is the Ministry of Electricity itself, who blames the power cuts on ‘people putting their laundry out to dry on high voltage pylons’. It was later relayed that the cause for cuts in the summer 2002 was a child’s kite made of aluminium caught in high-tension wires above an informal community. In response, a café owner from the area remarked on behalf of his neighbours: We would like someone to come to talk to us. Then we would tell them that while they are upset about a few hours outage, we suffer power cuts all the time, every day. We have no sewage, no potable water and no schools for our children.59 The heat is on in Cairo, where economic and population pressures are so great that each day that passes without havoc and rebellion is a sign of either sublime fortitude or exhaustion, and probably both. It doesn’t help that the air is a witches’ brew, containing ten times the who’s permissible levels of suspended particulates, three times the hydrocarbons and five times as much sulphur dioxide as advisable.60 In some parts of town, like Shubra al-Kheima, lead emissions are 24 times the level permitted by Egypt’s Environmental Law.61 39

Breathing is not easy but that doesn’t stop half the male population from smoking. The most popular cigarette brand is Cleopatra, one of the world’s cheapest, the manufacture of which is one of the few profitable businesses in the state’s portfolio of lumbering nationalized industries. More women smoke these days, to signal rebellion and individuality. Despite advertising bans, smoking is also attractive to underprivileged kids who assume responsibilities early, and take up cigarettes to mimic grown-ups even before the age of ten.62 People are aware of the damaging effects of smoking and pollution on their health. In fact half of Cairo’s doctors and teachers smoke. Nevertheless, there is a strong public consensus that this behaviour, indeed, living conditions in general, are unwholesome and harmful. People feel that ‘environmental problems [are] primarily related to health and cleanliness, rather than to nature, as in the West’. It’s also believed that the government is lax and unlikely to improve.63 Cairenes follow their noses when it comes to identifying pollutants, naming first sewage and garbage followed by air quality and finally noise. A 1996 report issued by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (eeaa) cited 15–20,000 deaths annually in the city due to air pollution, a modest figure, all things considered. Blood lead levels are high in Cairo and respiratory disease, especially among children, is commonplace. Since 1999, a rank lid of smog roosts over the city for a period at the onset of every autumn. Blame for the so-called ‘black cloud’ was pinned on hapless rice farmers in the nearby Delta, accused of burning massive amounts of rice husks. Identifying the phenomenon’s actual cause led to madcap bungling on behalf of the government and wild speculation from every corner, as described in People and Pollution: Two days into the crisis, the Minister of State for Environmental Affairs borrowed a helicopter from the Minister of Defense to conduct a survey of possible sources, and reported that burning garbage, industrial waste and automobile exhaust appeared to be the main sources. Meanwhile the Minister of Information mentioned ‘factories, foundries and car fumes.’ The head of the Cairo Sanification and Beautification Authority denied, implausibly, that there could be any burning garbage in Cairo. More fancifully, some rumors identified other possible sources such as an explosion in a chemical factory, a nuclear leak, the ongoing 40

Egyptian American military maneuvers or even the change to a new prime minister . . . It was reported that the prime minister, for his part, ‘met with ministers of agriculture, information, environmental affairs, interior, transport and local development as well as the governors of Cairo, Giza, Qaliouba, and Sharqia and the chairman of the Egyptian Meteorological Authority.’ As if that were not enough, the Minister of Higher Education stepped in to head a scientific committee, which came to this conclusion: ‘When the air contains a particularly powerful cocktail of pollutants and there is no wind for several days, smog appears.’64 The black cloud made at least one thing clear; Cairo was looking more and more like a conflagration and something had better be done about it. So decrees were passed, fines were issued, poor people harassed, and some farmers taught to build houses out of rice husks instead of burning them. Still the malingering cloud winters in Cairo. In the absence of adequate waste management, trash is left to pile and rot. Summertime, and the spontaneous combustion’s easy. If it weren’t for one of Cairo’s most exemplary communities, the city would be buried in heaps of compost. The zabbalin (trash collectors) number around 20,000 and have for generations made it their business to collect garbage and live off what they recycle. The work involves the entire family; men do the hauling while women sort the garbage at home, mostly by hand. The zabbalin find value in everything, identifying sixteen categories of trash, including types of metal, paper, glass, cloth, organic waste (fed to animals), bones (used for glue) and naqda, odd articles like ‘toys, vases, artificial flowers, cutlery and miscellaneous objects run by small motors.’ Finally, rabish is the residual stuff that goes to the municipal dump, the real garbage. Egypt boasts one of the highest waste recovery rates in the world, 80 per cent, because of the courage, skill and resourcefulness of the zabbalin.65 Sanitary landfills are lacking, so rabish ends up polluting the nearby desert. Through their efforts, the zabbalin save landfill space and keep many neighbourhoods functional. They do, however, prefer to collect from areas with recyclable-rich garbage, thus leaving much of the city on its own. Cairo generates 6,000 tons of trash daily, and the zabbalin handle half that amount. People in poorer formal and informal quarters must find other solutions for 41

waste disposal. Windows are the answer for quite a blasé few who toss great parcels into the air as if they would disappear before hitting the ground. Others surreptitiously deposit their garbage bags down the road near other people’s homes, a ‘very early morning mission’ timed to escape the wrath of neighbours.66 City-dwelling Egyptians generate an average of 0.7 kilos of trash per day, relatively modest compared to the American average of 2.5 kilos.67 ‘Lucky is he who dreams of garbage’, goes the adage that associates wealth with having something to throw away. Today, the unlucky zabbalin must contend with government-contracted wastemanagement companies. These foreign firms have been welcomed into the market even though they’d overlooked one of the most efficient, low-tech recycling industries in the world and consequently failed to incorporate it meaningfully into their plans. It rains sometimes in Cairo, brief sprinkles or sudden downpours that clear the air and bathe the city in a shy sparkling candour. Yet no one welcomes the rain, or cool weather for that matter. People are confused by cloudbursts and run for cover with their arms above their heads shouting and lamenting at the storm. It must be said that Cairo rain is often a chemically-altered mud that splotches glass like bird dung, stings skin and stains clothing indelibly. Streets without drainage pipes puddle queasily and drivers without windshield wipers balk and reflexively sit on their horns. The city is paralysed when it rains. Before beasts of burden were prohibited in the early 1990s, Cairo was more pastoral. But the bray of asthmatic donkeys may still be heard, along with the cry of disoriented roosters announcing dawn from rooftops throughout the day. Flocks of sheep infiltrate neighbourhoods prior to religious feasts and the sidewalks are strewn with green alfalfa left by their owners to fatten them up. Sadly, the herds of camel that once beguiled traffic while loping across the Giza Bridge have been detoured to a market outside the city. The sacred ibis, symbol of essence-Egypt and of Thoth, the god of wisdom, has been extinct here for a century. In the skies over Cairo, predator hawks like kestrel and kite and large white owls, circle and glide, waiting to spot a likely rodent rummaging in refuse on the ground or on rooftops.68 The pigeon flocks that animate minarets and domes have been a feature of the city since its beginnings, when homing pigeons were 42

used as airmail messengers to far battlegrounds. Pigeon eating has long been believed to enhance sexual performance. A ninth-century treatise describes the birds’ amorous behaviour, from kissing to lovemaking and how pigeons may be used to provide instruction and inspiration for young wives.69 Thousands of Cairenes raise the birds on their roofs, in some cases to eat, but also to exhibit in contests for prize-money. Training pigeons is an art and trainers know their charges well. One enthusiast lost a bird that only found its way home after three years. Asked how he could be sure it was the same one, the trainer replied, ‘If a friend comes to see you after three years, will you have forgotten him?’ Falcons can be messengers too, as in the case of an Egyptian soldier who sent a love letter to his fiancée in a small town on the Israeli border in 2001. ‘We will meet on 15 July when the moon rises . . . I await my beloved . . . light of my life’, said the note, according to Israeli police who captured the bird when it flew off-course.70 Bats love Cairo, especially in summer at dusk. The pyramids attract the Naked Bellied Tomb Bat while the most common inner city bat is Kuhl’s Pipistrelle, a beneficent insect-eater.71 Bats gorge on Nile mosquitoes, which are languorous and menacing, an airborne version of Portuguese men o’ war. Cairo’s geckoes, transparent lizards with suction-cup toes, eat bugs too, including the pesky flies that are thought by some to contain mischievous djinn. Insects are especially irksome in summer when several indomitable species of ant proliferate and some members of the cockroach family grow ponderously large. The rapacious weasel is another denizen of Cairo, a long slinky varmint that hides under cars and is unafraid to grapple with animals twice its size. Weasels perforate the night with their clicking call and delirious squeals when in battle. They are not, however, admired for their courage or contributions to rodent control. Their name in colloquial Egyptian (fiirsa) is used to describe shifty, cowardly people, perhaps because the weasel appears boneless when it squeezes in and out of cracks in walls or sidewalks. In all events, a potent charm guaranteed to bring luck to one’s home involves the weasel’s burial, alive, in front of the threshold. Many who would take this sort of precaution prefer the less demanding practice of hanging large stuffed lizards or baby crocodiles above their doors. 43

Cairo is a habitat where many life forms and lifestyles adapt side by side with greater or lesser ease. Gamal Hamdan, who wrote of the social ecology of the Nile, described the history of governmental tyranny resulting from reliance on one river. ‘Irrigation’, he argued, ‘is equivalent to organization, a centralized organization’ that evolved to distribute life-sustaining water, but has, over time, ‘created in the people a spirit of idleness, indolence and passivity’. Yet Hamdan also observed tyranny’s opposite, a ‘latent, original and far reaching element of socialism . . . and cooperative socialism to be precise.’72 Both assessments of Cairo’s social ecology are valid: people have been obliged to reduce their expectations of government and perhaps themselves, but life nevertheless requires effort. Cooperation arises of necessity when everyone is subject to the same unavoidable constraints and must agree on ways of dealing with or getting around them. These cooperative strategies require shared understanding and actions to mitigate harsh and limiting circumstances. This flexible reality is at odds with the perception of a passive, downtrodden people. When physicist Niels Bohr observed ‘with profound truths the opposite is equally true’, he was presumably referring to the properties of matter, not human paradox. But truths, after all, are only human, and it is through their affirmation and contradiction that people define and reveal themselves. Cairene contradictions are many, including optimism in the face of failing health and general socio-economic decline. At times, people seem to astonish themselves with their own fortitude, and take heart in the astonishment. A woman named El Hajja Fawkia Gabri eloquently describes the feeling in a short treatise in Arabic, The Big Collapse, written for the benefit of a journalist investigating the high incidence of collapsed buildings: The story defies logic but still it makes sense. Consider it like Cairo traffic – you can never grasp how it functions, but still you maneuver to establish workable rules to survive it. Our life is no different. We have a home, but it’s a daily challenge to get there; not due to bad traffic but simply because we have no staircase. Still, I can proudly declare that we have an elevator. Never mind that it doesn’t work. Stairless as we are, it’s nearly impossible to bring home groceries, since I can barely pull my own weight up [the remains of the steps] to my apartment. But we’re never starved. And even though we don’t have a proper sewage 44

system, the dishes get done by the end of the day. Last, but not least, we expect the building to collapse any minute. But we still watch the Comedy channel.73 People are stalwart at the prospects of poverty, sickness, death and even apocalypse, yet tenderly hopeful in a collective future. Indeed, survival is the one group activity at which Egyptians unarguably excel. Denied the expression of power via property or participation in politics, excluded from these essentially symbolic institutions, people invest more interest and attention in each other, in real life, so to speak. Forbearance and repetition, especially of mistakes, are understood to be the sum of the human equation, wherein every person is a small but significant variable, capable of moving mountains or creating as monumental an inertia. Mutual understanding helps make life bearable, but it is accepted that people are essentially on their own and they had better be up for it. A premium is placed on character, which translates as the ability to shoulder one’s particular burden lightly. Not everyone’s an expert, but Cairenes may be counted among the most sociable and least whiney, contentious or tragic of peoples. If cities are human experiments, then this one is a 1,400-year-old model of living together under extreme circumstances. Technique, not technology, is Cairo’s speciality.

45

The citadel, with Fatimid Cairo in the upper left and the southern cemetery in the foreground.

ii Artifice and Edifice

The most unprofitable thing that eateth up the wealth of the Believer is building. prophet mohammed1 Cairo’s history is a kind of orthodoxy replete with sacred texts and prodigies, a veritable catechism of attributes and anecdote. Fourteen-hundred years of transmissions clamour for attention, many of them baroque accounts festooned with exclamations like ‘save us from the outrage of the Franj!’ 2 There are lists of palace kitchen savouries and the perfumed contents of caravanserais, of viceroy’s gifts and assassins’ warnings. Sources can be so dense and serpentine that at times one is tempted, like the mutinous guard of a Fatimid caliph, ‘to make slippers of the precious leather bindings and bury the books in a mound of sand’. One emerges at last with the discovery that intimacy with Cairo’s historic concatenations is no guarantee of enlightenment. Communing with this city requires a leap of faith. Today it’s easier to imagine Cairo abbreviated in the mind’s eye, than it is to see it from a height and grasp its enormity. It was never conceived or organized as a whole, because its bursts of growth and present size were unimagined. The city arose and exists largely by virtue of interactions of varying degrees of spontaneity, synergies of necessity, creativity and the presence and absence of power. Cairo is oddly personal that way, coyly responsive to the observing eye, giving only as much as the viewer desires, always holding something in reserve. Cairo’s narrative sheds light on what lies behind its multifarious facades, lending nuance to character the way humour and wisdom grant beauty to a face lined with age. The city’s memes and dreams add understanding to knowledge because Cairo’s story is one of desires, responses to options and acquired tastes, more than plans. Although the urgent pressures of life continuously shape and 47

reshape the city’s present, history awards its past to individuals easily traced via an anomalous genealogy. Cairo’s family tree has arresting characters entangled in its branches, beginning with the Prophet Mohammed. Cairo’s early history, corresponding to the Arab Conquest, belongs to men stirred by a voice so confidential and convincing that they risked their lives for what it promised in this world as much as the next. Conquest, after all, meant wealth. Mohammed came from the Quraysh tribe, settled in the oasis of Mecca. They were largely merchants, a people to whom acquiring the goods to furnish a relatively austere existence became a way of life. Approximately 50 tribes gathered to form the Arab army, some more settled or nomadic than others. They shared the understanding that cities served to increase, consolidate and administer wealth. Cairo owes its formative centuries to the marriage of spiritual and material pursuits. Orphaned soon after birth in 570, Mohammed was a desert tradesman in his youth, accustomed to travel and the comforts of camels’ hair tents. He was 40 years old when he experienced his first revelation, in a mountain cave of the Hijaz. His announcement of a unitary deity attracted both adherents and the antagonism of pagan tribes that precipitated his exile to Medina in 622. While planning and executing raids on his Meccan opponents, he built a house, a small mud-brick enclosure with a portico of palm trunk columns and frond-roofed rooms set around an open courtyard. Ten years later he died, and was buried in his Medina home, having subdued and converted most of Arabia. His house served as a model for the first mosque in Egypt and all of Africa, a rustic construction that expressed continuity of purpose and embodied, albeit naïvely, traditions that evolved in time. Limitless sands, palm groves, a star-filled sky, the full moon: if there is such a thing as a desert aesthetic it derives thereof and the mosque makes neat proof with its volumes of open, luminous space, shady groves of columned arcades, lofty domes and wooden screens that animate shadow and light. The desert dwellers’ symbiotic relationship with their surroundings is self-evident, and the desert’s sublimely harsh nature, along with the importance accrued to water, are variously evoked in architecture, literature and religious concepts. Likewise, the story of the Conquest comprises characters 48

A portion of the northern cemetery with Mamluk domes, photographed in the 1920s.

and scenarios that, however idealized, colour the city’s founding. The Conquest is flavoured with the smoke and dust of milling campsites, images of horsemen gathering momentum on the move, ablutions performed with sand in the absence of water, the humbling privations of desert campaigns, not to mention valour in battle. Acting on behalf of the Umayyad caliph (deputy) Omar, General Amr Ibn al-As advanced with his troops from campaigns in Syria and Palestine to Babylon, a Roman fortress at the throat of the Nile delta. The siege lasted seven months, ending in April 641 with an Arab victory and the seeds of a new capital for Egypt, a place where the Arabs could express themselves fully. The offer of fair terms (i.e. capitulate, convert and be treated as equals; capitulate, refuse conversion and be treated kindly as inferiors; or else fight to the death) so as not to sour future relationships, was a valued strategy, and history is at pains to portray the tolerance with which Amr approached the founding and settlement of Fustat. The story goes that while decamping to take Alexandria, Amr found a dove and her brood nesting in his tent. Rather than disturb the fledgling doves, Amr’s tent stayed put and Fustat was founded on that spot. The first star in Cairo’s urban constellation, fustat (tent 49

or entrenched camp) was situated just north of the Babylon fort, commanding the Nile axis and the black-silted delta, with the Pyramids inspirationally looming west and the limestone cliffs of the Muqattam rising protectively to the east. After seven centuries of Roman exploitation, the Egyptians were not averse to change and there were converts to Islam, the Arabic word for submission. The new faith required a distinctive structure to accommodate worship centring on communal prayer. This is an intricate ritual of bowing, prostrations and cupping of the hands before the face as if reading an absent book or contemplating these instruments of power, symbols for the will. In Syria churches were adapted to mosques; their steeples as well as the remnant towers of Roman temples foretold minarets. These structures greatly facilitated the call to prayer, an innovation on the Hebrew’s horn and the Christian’s bell. In Egypt Amr built a mosque like the Prophet’s home, with palms and mud for walls and roof, and a scattering of pebbles on the ground where the faithful knelt to pray. Amr died in 663 and was buried at the foot of the Muqattam in a tomb of which all traces are lost. In 670 his mosque was enlarged and endowed with minarets, a word derived from the Arabic manara that means ‘the place of fire’, a name also used for the lighthouse of Alexandria.3 Fustat was a sprawling medley of tribal enclaves, the mosque its centre of devotional, educational and civic interactions. Gradually the campsite transformed from clusters of billowing tents into permanent dwellings. Streets evolved that followed pathways between houses and intrinsic destinations: the river and the mosque with its adjacent markets. The city’s growth was random with an organic logic and vitality far removed from the predictability of the grid. A port took form on the river and grew for centuries until absorbed by surrounding urbanization. The size of Amr’s mosque multiplied again and again, a sign of Fustat’s growth. In its present form, although entirely rebuilt, the building marks the city’s birthplace.4 Most of Fustat’s remains now lie buried beneath mounds of landfill so high they’ve created a new vantage point from which Cairo may be surveyed. The Fustat Gardens, a government-owned amusement park, is set atop the city’s millennial trash heaps. Cairo’s birthplace is its belly, a tract of land strewn with mounds of smouldering compost, the place where it digests itself. 50

When the Abbasid dynasty wrested power from the Umayyads in 750, the caliphate moved from Damascus to Baghdad and Egypt’s capital underwent a similar shift. Egypt’s new governor founded a city a few kilometres north of Fustat to advertise the Abbassid accession and identity. In pointed contrast to Fustat’s modest beginnings, al-Askar (the cantonment) was said to be a grandly appointed administrative centre, 40 years in the building, the seat of Egypt’s rule for over a century. Unfortunately, nothing remains but the reports of medieval historians and the name of a governor’s pleasure pavilion, ‘the Dome of the Winds’, set on a spur of the Muqattam. Al-Askar ’s scale and style nevertheless established building standards and upped the ante for the next contributor to Cairo’s foundations, Ahmed Ibn Tulun. Ibn Tulun’s military career was launched in Samarra, where the caliph recognized his talents by appointing him governor of Egypt (r. 868–84). In defiance of his benefactor, Ibn Tulun took autonomous control of Egypt after ten years, founding al-Qatai (the wards) on the hills above the Nile floodplain north of al-Askar, as an act of independence. The project’s scale, including the largest mosque of its time (879), invited the rumour that a conveniently unearthed trove of Pharaoh’s gold had financed it. Ibn Tulun is said to have dreamed of his city all bathed in light, except for the great mosque, which was disturbingly hidden in shadow. A dream interpreter described the light as ‘God’s splendour before which all must fall’, saying that only the mosque would withstand it. Although this cautionary tale advises a wariness of ambition that Ibn Tulun did not necessarily feel (and more hindsight than clairvoyance on behalf of the legendary dream interpreter), it illustrates al-Qatai’s ephemeral fate while reinforcing Ibn Tulun’s image as pious and prodigious. Ibn Tulun was in fact generous and resourceful; he hosted communal meals in the town square (midan), distributed alms and used slave market profits to fund an innovative public hospital. Ibn Tulun’s son Khumarawayh (884–96) was made of different stuff. To militaristic rule and the dutiful, religious existence that had so far absorbed the capital, he added the virtue of pleasure, albeit his own. Following his father’s death, Khumarawayh transformed the midan into a menagerie and gardens, filled with rare birds and blossoming trees, their trunks dressed in silver and gold. Miniature palms formed low-hanging groves where dates drooped within 51

reach. He kept a lion that dined and slept beside him and a stylish army of African guards: ‘Heads bound in black turbans, their breasts covered by iron cuirasses over which were worn black tunics, they passed in review like a black ocean rolling by.’5 Khumarawayh’s most endearing extravagance was the pool created for his nocturnal use that was filled with mercury. He floated atop the rippling quicksilver on an aircushion connected by silk cords to the banks, where the coordinated tugs of lovely girls imitated a gentle current to lull him to sleep. History’s gesture of respect to Khumarawayh’s father was to assign this inspired bit of landscaping to a court physician’s prescription for insomnia. Al Qatai remained the seat of the short-lived Tulunid dynasty until 905. Abbasid emissaries from Baghdad, anxious to reclaim Egypt following its spell of independence, razed the town leaving only Ibn Tulun’s mosque, just as he is said to have dreamed. The hills where al-Qatai once stood have since dissolved in the groundswell of generations, but the mosque defied time and several earthquakes and remains the oldest intact one in Cairo. Sheer-rising walls sever the structure from its surroundings. The interior is an airy place of grounded strength, reflecting the deft assurance of power, a place, perhaps, to dream of looking-glass lakes. Claiming descent from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, the Fatimids were Shia Muslims of the Ismaili sect who contested the Sunni (orthodox) authority of the Abbasids. The Fatimids originated in Syria, but founded their first dynastic city, Qayrawan, in 915 on the Tunisian coast, thus staking their claim as a rival to Abbasid Baghdad. The fourth Fatimid caliph, al-Mu√izz, took an interest in astrology and was accustomed to watching distant stars. In Spain, he observed, an Umayyad pretender had founded another rival emirate. Baghdad glittered on al-Mu√izz’s horizon like a shattered mirror and Egypt beckoned, especially Fustat, whose port seethed with commerce. Counselled by stars and spies, al-Mu√izz chose the year 969 to conquer Egypt, sending his General Jawhar (‘jewel’) to see to the details of building a city from which he could overcome the Abbasids and rule the world. At the head of his troops of horsemen, Jawhar entered Egypt virtually unopposed. He chose a site just north of the Ibn Tulun Mosque, with the Muqattam on the east and the khalij, a canal built 52

by Trajan, bordering the west. He ordered the entire perimeter, about a kilometre square, to be encircled with ropes furnished with dangling bells. Soldiers were stationed all around it, ready to simultaneously break ground at the command of court astrologers. The oft-told tale of a crow landing on the rope and precipitously sounding the bells, may be the comment of a people to whom such esoteric pains were somehow suspect. Nevertheless, on 6 July 969, the ascendant planet was Mars, called in Arabic, al-Qahira (the conqueror), and so the city was named to suit its promised destiny.6 The industrious Jawhar soon walled al-Qahira’s perimeters and installed its main axis, the Qasaba (now al-Mu√izz street) that connects the north gates of Bab al-Futuh (Gate of Conquests) and Bab al-Nasr (Gate of Victory) with the southern one, Bab Zuwayla, named for a Berber tribe that assisted the Fatimid conquest and settled there. Jawhar then built a mosque, named al-Azhar (the radiant, 972), still the centre of Islamic teaching. A palace was constructed within the enclosure, a royal complex whose buildings faced each other across a midan called Bayn al-Qasrayn (between the palaces), large enough to hold 10,000 horsemen. Al-Mu√izz ’s arrival in 973 gave the city its defining moment. The caliph’s arrival coincided with the feast following Ramadan, and alMu√izz offered a sermon so piously eloquent that it elicited both sobs and suspicions as to its sincerity. He left al-Azhar and grandly mounted his horse, escorted by four sons in armoured regalia with elephants at the head of their procession, inaugurating two centuries of brilliant theatre. Among his rich furnishings, al-Mu√izz packed the bones of his ancestors, whose ceremonial reburial rendered alQahira the Fatimid dynastic seat. According to Ismaili doctrine, the caliph was an absolute ruler, god’s hand on earth. The Fatimids already controlled most of North Africa, so Egypt’s Sunni majority adopted an attitude of guarded acceptance, resigned by tradition to ‘remain patient under the king’s banner, whether a tyrant or a just man’ and to attend prayers ‘whether conducted by a pure man or a libertine’.7 This attitude, so patently Egyptian, amounts to the tacit acceptance of the gulf between the state’s interests and those of the people, an attitude that persists to this day. The Fatimids set about seducing their subjects with feasts. They celebrated everything, Christian and Muslim holidays and Pharaonic rituals like anointing the Nilometer on Roda Island with 53

The Pyramids and the Nile flood plain in the early 1930s.

oils of saffron and musk, all amid extravagant pageantry involving multiple costume-changes by the caliph. Music sounded nightly at the palace and al-Qahira’s gates, marking royal arrivals and departures. For medieval merchants and travellers, these were mythic portals beyond which lay a city so vibrant that reports of its riches bordered on the delirious. The distance between truth and hyperbole was the thickness of the city’s walls.8 Al-Qahira owed its wealth to Fustat’s commerce, and the tariff placed on pilgrimages to Jerusalem. It was an open city with Fustat its emporium, where goods moved freely and efficiently. Fourteen camel-loads of snow arrived daily from the mountains of Lebanon to serve the palace kitchens. When al-Mu√izz desired the trunk of a rare Yemeni tree for his funerary bier, a Meccan contact announced its arrival from an Aden agent within two months. The Fatimids traded with India, China, Byzantium, and Western Europe (via Italy) as well as the Islamic world. Following al-Mu√izz’s death in 975, his son al-Aziz (975–96) ruled in a relaxed, prosperous atmosphere. Legend places al-Hakim, al-Aziz’s eleven-year old heir, in a fig tree when summoned to hear of his father’s death. If al-Hakim had qualms regarding his precociously acquired rank, they vanished as 54

swiftly as his orders were obeyed. His edicts were alternately inspired, contradictory and vicious. An exasperated and voluble public attributed the caliph’s real and imagined excesses to ‘a dryness in his brain’. He forbade the consumption of mulukhiyya and gargir (favourite local vegetables) as well as raisins, shellfish, beer and wine. He ‘turned night into day’ by causing all business to take place after sunset; women were forbidden to leave their homes or, indeed, to wear shoes.9 At the age of twenty, al-Hakim founded the Dar al-Hikma (house of knowledge), a magnificent library culled from the Fatimid palace collection, while rumour accused him of dismembering infants for black magic rites. Under al-Hakim’s patronage, the astronomer Ibn Yunus elaborated the trigonometry of the sphere; Ibn al-Haitham, famous for his Treatise on Optics, wrote about the distance of the Milky Way, about rainbows, mirrors, sunlight and magic squares; and ophthalmologist Ammar ibn Ali pioneered techniques for cataract treatment.10 In 1012 al-Hakim completed a mosque begun by his father near Bab al-Futuh, calling it al-Anwar (the brilliant) in reference to alAzhar, and perhaps to his luminous self. 11 In 1019 he declared himself divine, sparking destructive riots in the city. In 1021 while riding in the desert one night, as was his habit on his favourite donkey named ‘Moon’, the 36-year old al-Hakim disappeared. Although believed murdered, his body was never found and members of the Druze, a Shia sect, still await his return. The rule of al-Hakim’s grandson, al-Mustansir (1036–94), was long and troubled. Al-Mustansir ’s Sudanese mother introduced a Sudanese palace guard, causing violent antagonism with the established royal guard of Turkish slave troops. Incompetent regents and wazirs (ministers) contributed to the caliphate’s deterioration, as did famine so dire that children were sold or stolen for food and hapless individuals fished with hooks from balconies with the same purpose. Badr al-Jamali, Armenian governor of the Syrian provinces, rescued al-Mustansir in 1074. He established order, enlarged the city enclosure and rebuilt its walls against the advancing Seljuk Turks.12 His stint as wazir aided the recovery of Fatimid affairs, but poised between the Seljuks (converts to the rival Sunni faith) and the Crusaders, the empire would soon loose its footing. The caliphs were weak, spoiled and unconcerned with defence, their ministers often unscrupulous. 55

William of Tyre, a Frankish ambassador, ecstatically describes his 1167 visit to the last Fatimid Caliph, al-Adid. In the sumptuous labyrinth of the Great Palace, he passed through rooms of increasing intricacy of décor, finally reaching the throne room where a gold embroidered curtain dripping with pearls was swept aside to reveal the caliph, ‘a swarthy youth emerging from boyhood’. He dwells on the originality of palace art, describing it as ‘ardent and revolutionary’.13 Fatimid patronage had in fact nurtured the coalescence of a style brought to bear by a cosmopolitan array of artisans. New architectural forms emerged from the myriad influences (Byzantine, Coptic, Persian, Mesopotamian and North African) that prefigured the city’s fabled aesthetic. Avid for luxury and discerning of taste, the Fatimids’ artistic appetites extended to every medium: metalwork engraved with infinitesimal arabesques, textiles with delicate patterns wrought in silver and silk, rock crystal cunningly fashioned into ewers and cups. The Fatimids favoured human and animal motifs that eventually disappeared in accordance with the belief that art should not presume to imitate the Creator ’s hand. Despite their beauty and because of their lush wealth, many Fatimid buildings did not survive the piety of those who considered their embellishments heresy, or coveted their central location to erect their own buildings. In 1168 Almaric, Crusader King of Jerusalem, invaded Egypt. In desperation, the caliph appealed to the Sunni Prince of Damascus, Nur al-Din, sending the shorn locks of his wives’ hair as a symbol of their great distress. Nur al-Din answered with his best general, a Kurd named Shirkuh who insisted on a nephew’s presence for the campaign. This serious, sensitive 29-year-old was Salah al-Din Ayyub (Saladin), who soon found himself heir to the Fatimid dynasty. At their height, the Fatimids had ruled North Africa, Sicily, Palestine, Syria and the Red Sea coast of the Hijaz from their Egyptian capital. The Mongols would extinguish Baghdad in less than a century, but al-Qahira endured, as if born to conquer time itself. Three deaths catapulted Saladin to power. Having rid Egypt of the Franks, his uncle Shirkuh died following enthusiastic participation in an otherwise triumphal banquet, leaving Saladin wazir. The sickly young Fatimid Caliph was next, followed by Nur al-Din, struck down by angina in Damascus. Saladin seized the day, claiming Syria as his own along with Egypt, and requesting the Abbasid Caliph in 56

Baghdad to legitimize his rule. Meanwhile Almaric succumbed to dysentery before executing a planned Crusader invasion of Egypt and the Seljuks obligingly neutralized the threatening Byzantine army. This relentless good fortune surrounded Saladin in a mythic aura that was enhanced by his purported penchant for humility. He had initially refused to accompany his uncle, pleading a ‘state of financial embarrassment’, but finally acquiesced, ‘like a man being led to his death’. Saladin’s generosity and lack of interest in finance concerned his collaborators, whom he silenced saying that for some people ‘money is no more important than sand’. His distrust of wealth sealed the fate of al-Qahira’s Fatimid palaces. Their riches were dispersed to build schools for the reinstated Sunni doctrine and to build an imposing citadel. Saladin let his wazir, the eunuch Qaraqush, handle the construction of the fortress, while he continued his quest for Jerusalem. During his 24 years in power, Saladin spent only eight in alQahira, ‘the mistress who tried in vain to separate me from Syria, my spouse’.14 Nevertheless, to secure the Egyptian capital, he ordered an immense fortification designed to wed the areas of Fustat, al-Askar, al-Qatai’i and al-Qahira within a stone embrasure twenty kilometres long. Set on the Muqattam, where the Dome of the Winds once stood, the citadel construction was executed by a corvée of Crusader prisoners, using blocks from the Abu Sir pyramids of Giza and limestone quarried on site. The combined length of the walls and towers of the northern enclosure (the military portion of the citadel) was nearly seven times vaster than the Crac des Chevaliers in Syria, the grandest fortress of the time. Work began in 1176, one of the monumental aspects of which was a well (Bir Yusuf), pierced through 90 metres of solid rock. Halfway down the well was a cistern filled by ox-driven water wheels; a second set of wheels brought water to the surface. The beasts that turned them spent their lives in the dark and were only removed from the shaft when they died.15 Much of the citadel’s northern enclosure wall still stands, as do Saladin’s towers and those built by his Ayyubid descendants. A foundation inscription dated 1183 is visible near the entrance of Bab al-Gadid: The building of this splendid Citadel, overlooking Cairo the Protected, on the terrace, which adds use to beauty and space to 57

strength, for those who seek the shelter of his power, was commanded by our master, Salah al-Din . . .16 Lauded in the East, their master’s name rang throughout Europe as well, thanks to the chivalry with which Saladin conducted his victorious end of the Crusades. So anxious was Christendom to claim him, that the story was concocted of his deathbed conversion, a redemptive tribute to his mother, a mysterious countess of Ponthieu shipwrecked in Egypt. The queen of France, wife of Philip ii (1180–1223) was said to have fallen in love with Saladin, ‘the affair [being] pursued under the guise of theological discussions’.17 Dante was kind enough to exclude Saladin from hell, assigning him to the limbo reserved for virtuous pagans, along with the likes of Aristotle and the Queen of the Amazons.18 Although it was meant as his residence as well as that of his garrison, Saladin never lived in the citadel. His dynastic heirs, the Ayyubids (1171–1250), completed the southern enclosure and occupied the residential palaces. The fortress walls, nearly four metres thick, extending like sheltering arms from the Muqattam to the Nile, were still under construction 45 years after Saladin’s death in Damascus.19 Their presence, crowned by the citadel, unified and delineated the city’s field of action for the coming millennium. Saladin may have been married to his work in Syria, but he gave the city of Cairo a valiant heart. Thirteenth-century Cairo was a growing, cosmopolitan entity with over six hundred years of urbane past. The militaristic rule of the Mamluks would make the city the centre of the Islamic world. Mamluk means ‘owned’, but ‘possessed’ better describes the furious energies that shaped their empire. They were slaves, purchased as boys, trained to fight.20 While the Mamluks’ heavy-handedness did not please the people (whose labour helped finance their purchase and careers via taxes), there was much to be said for security in an era beset by Mongols and Crusaders. The Mamluks, sometimes called the ‘slave-kings’, were coincidentally prodigious builders of grand residences and grander mosques, so that the city’s tradesmen and craftsmen prospered in their employ. Because of these essential interdependencies, the needs for security and employment as well as finance for the purchase and training of more Mamluks, the roles of slave and master were perfectly confused. 58

The shift from an army composed of conquering tribes to one comprised of slave troops acquired and trained by the caliphs began with the Fatimid’s use of a Sudanese palace guard. Saladin had replaced them with Turkish Mamluks, especially from the Kipchak tribe, a preference maintained by his descendants. Saladin’s last heir, Negm al-Din al-Salih, built a barracks on the Roda Island for the Mamluk corps (called bahri or ‘river’ Mamluks), with whose help he had temporarily regained Jerusalem. 21 The Bahris were mostly culled from migrating Turkish tribes driven west by the Mongols, or as prisoners from conquests in the eastern provinces. Believed to possess a ‘warlike nature’, these youths were drilled to master spear-lancing, swordsmanship and archery on horseback. The logic of their employment was that, bereft of family, their sole allegiance belonged to their master. However, multiple owners (called emirs, or princes who had the right to own ten, 40 or 100 Mamluks and to command up to one thousand in battle) resulted in group rivalries, which accounted for endless disputes and the emergence of a Mamluk rule in its own right. Islam forbade the enslavement of Muslims, so only non-believers could be purchased as slaves, but only Muslims could exercise military authority. The conflict was sidestepped by the Mamluks’ admission to the faith upon reaching manhood, when they were awarded freedom and a healthy salary. The realm of war belonged to this military elite, its theatre lying far enough beyond the borders of everyday life to seem another world to Cairo’s inhabitants but real enough to merit their docile dependence. This reliance encouraged ruthlessness in the Mamluks, whose feuding factions clattered through narrow streets on horseback, terrorizing a population that experienced the benefits of Mamluk power and wealth largely as an afterthought. Forbearance was not misplaced, since the Mamluks subdued the Mongols – something that half a world, from China to Baghdad, had failed to do. Baghdad was sacked in 1258, but Cairo remained inviolate thanks to Mamluk martial prowess in Ain Jalut (1260). The Mamluks systematically rid the Holy Land of Crusaders and reigned as far as the Euphrates, dominating an Islamic world that had at first subjected, then absorbed, and finally was absorbed by them. They carried their exhilaration home to the city where many of them had begun as lost boys and where now they built their homes and mosques. No wonder the Mamluks felt that Cairo belonged to 59

them. Having vanquished so many foes, the only worthy adversaries they had left were themselves. The rise of the Mamluk meritocracy marked the end of the Ayyubid dynasty. The first Bahri to establish and hold power as sultan was a Kipchak Turk named Baybars al-Bunduqdari (1260–77). He had been purchased in Aleppo for a lowered price because of the cataract that veiled one of his blue eyes. For seventeen years Baybars (aka Prince Panther) built the Mamluk empire, dividing his time between crushing Mongol and Crusader interventions while keeping his rivals in Cairo at bay. He died after drinking a poisoned cup of fermented mare’s milk, the Kipchak beverage of choice.22 Consensually drawn from the ranks of the emirs, the sultan was first among equals, the ultimate reward for a cocktail of merit, seniority, intrigue and murder. The attendant glory was mitigated by the promise of violent death, which inspired the Mamluks’ fervour for building mosques and mausoleums as twin claims of piety and posterity. Islam’s requirement that the faithful dedicate a portion of their incomes to the poor also influenced the city’s growth. Rich patrons built public buildings whose maintenance was financed from the income of farmland endowments. This system of waqfs (holds, or pious endowments) evolved to circumvent restrictive heredity laws: providing the property was designed for charitable purposes it could be left to whomever one chose as the manager of the waqf. Children could not inherit Mamluk status, however (though exceptions were made in the case of sultans), so fresh slaves flowed from the east to fill the Mamluk ranks. These sons of shamanistic nomads were grafted onto Cairo, where they acquired a new language, faith and identity. They shaped the city with their strivings, imbuing it with restless vigour, a thirst for refinement and a passion for triumph. The Mamluks expressed all this in their buildings and the flavour of their wilfulness still lingers. Their works give substance to the praise of medieval travellers and are living outposts of the city’s past. Following Baybars, another Kipchak named Qalawun (1279–90) became sultan. Nicknamed al-Alfi (the thousander) for the unusually high price his looks commanded on the auction block, he was 60 when he took power and successfully repelled another Mongol invasion. On his victorious return he started work on a complex that included a strikingly modern hospital, a madrasa (school) and his 60

own splendiferous mausoleum. 23 Qalawun’s third son, al-Nasir Mohammed, would contribute far more to the city. Al-Nasir’s early reign was perforated with intrigue that made him the pawn of a pair of contemptuous regents. At 25 the young sultan took revenge. One of the former regents, Salar, was left to starve, and the other, Baybars Jashnakir, was strangled in al-Nasir’s presence. These sentences, coincidentally, were considered honourable among Turco-Mongol tribesmen, presumably since they cause no blood to be spilled.24 Al-Nasir’s cruelty, as well as his extraordinary memory for every detail of his work, became legends in their time.25 Under his administration (1293–1340) Cairo expanded in all directions as Egypt flourished astride international trade routes. Al-Nasir dedicated significant resources to repair damage from the earthquake of 1303. Fifty-four mosques and madrasas were erected, several under the supervision of the sultan, whose love of architecture was only matched by his attachment to his stables of thoroughbred horses. Curiously, despite (or because) of their near adoration of horses, the Mamluks had an appetite for horseflesh and at important feasts consumed horses by the dozen.26 Al-Nasir revived a hippodrome (built by Ibn Tulun) at the foot of the citadel where the Mamluks trained and played polo. Eleven daughters served to bind him through marriage to a coterie of emirs. They followed his example of noble patronage, building mosques, caravanserais and palace residences around and within the citadel that was greatly enlarged and equipped with an aqueduct to meet its growing needs.27 Al-Nasir ’s heirs ruled for over 40 years, but their times were marred by catastrophe. Subject to the Nile’s caprice, Cairo’s inhabitants knew famine and epidemic too well, but the Black Death of 1348 was like nothing they had ever experienced. Plague struck the city at its demographic and financial height, suffusing its dense quarters like a virulent sigh. A third of the population perished in five months.28 Al-Nasir’s seventh son, Hassan, was sultan (1347–61), and the gargantuan mosque he raised was either an act of bitter defiance towards the inexplicable scourge, or a monumental plea for mercy. The city’s dead were so numerous that inheritances funnelled through as many as five family members’ hands straight into the sultan’s coffers in the course of a single day. Financed by calamity, Sultan Hassan’s masterful mosque and madrasa was never completed, its drain on the moribund country too great. Cairo’s decimated, grief stricken population faced major floods in 1354, another 61

outbreak of plague in 1374–5, accompanied by severe famine and yet another wave of plague in 1379–81.29 This string of disasters contributed to a shift in the ranks from Turkish to Circassian Mamluks, instituted by the reign of Barquq (1382–99), during which the city struggled to recover, with some success.30 Economic activity warranted a new wikala, a wholesale trade centre, and an emir named al-Khalili chose the prime location of a Fatimid cemetery off the Bayn al-Qasrayn to build one. In a gesture emblematic of the times, he disinterred the skeletons and tossed them on a trash heap to make way for the Khan al-Khalili, a fourteenth-century prototype of the air-conditioned mall that thrives today. By most accounts, the Circassian Mamluks were temperamental, and cultivated a ghoulish brutality that appalled Cairo’s beleaguered citizens. Barquq’s coup was accomplished by mass murder; his son and successor, Faraj (1399–1412), drank to excess and had one hundred Mamluks suspected of treason sliced in two and hurled from the citadel. Suspicious of infidelity, Faraj beheaded his own wife, having first chopped off the tips of her hennaed fingers. 31 Faraj’s assassination was not long in coming, and al-Mu√ayyad (1412–20), the author of an earlier unsuccessful revolt, was removed from prison and installed as sultan. He ordered the prison demolished, replacing it with a mosque whose two minarets are attached directly to the city’s southern gate, Bab Zuwayla. Bab Zuwayla was the Mamluks’ favoured city portal because of its easy access to the citadel. Around it, one could visit food-vendors, consult astrologers, learn stick fighting, buy musical instruments and enjoy storytellers’ recitals from the One Thousand and One Nights.32 Bab Zuwayla also had a reputation as a gathering place for ‘libertines and other unsavoury characters’, but its most lurid attractions were public amputations and executions. The heads of traitors were displayed on Bab Zuwayla’s spiked gate, doubtless to the edification of the Mamluks still in one piece who passed by. During a ‘celebratory procession’, a captive prince wearing an iron collar was ushered to Bab Zuwayla along with his retinue, all chained and nude on camels, amid the sound of flutes and drums. The prince ‘was hung on a hook in the middle of the gate for a day and half. After which he was buried and the flags and decorations taken down’.33 Mamluk arrogance flared following the siege of Cyprus, commanded by Sultan Barsbay (1422–38). A Florentine named 62

Northern cemetery in the 1920s, with the domed mausolea of Mamluk sultans Barsbay (centre) and Farag ibn Barquq (far right).

Felice Branacci, described his audience with Barsbay at the citadel. After much delay, and walks through endless vaulted corridors lined with rows of shouting and lance-clashing Mamluks, Branacci finally entered the great hall in which the sultan sat beneath a canopy of gold brocade. Musicians and singers added to Branacci’s distraction: ‘I whose eyes were dazzled and whose ears were deafened and who had moreover to kiss the ground with each step, renounce trying to give an orderly description . . .’. 34 Branacci’s interpreter hardly had time to state the purpose of their visit, before the sultan abruptly stood up and left without saying a word. Barsbay’s victory in Cyprus would be one of the Mamluks’ last, and his decline due to mental illness mirrored the downward spiral of vicious politics that contributed to their undoing. Alert to his precarious condition, Barsbay engaged the best physicians, but when they failed to cure him he had them sawn in two. His tomb complex was completed several years before his death, its stone dome carved according to his wishes, with an arabesque of stars.35 63

Thirty years passed before a ruler of merit emerged, Qaytbay (1468–96), a formidable politician and exceptional patron of the arts. Mamluk Cairo was a world city, its impressive buildings displayed influences from Andalusia to China. Qaytbay had Cairo’s streets widened, a necessary adventure since buildings mushroomed randomly and half of the city’s tight winding alleys were dead ends. Shop-owners’ goods spilled into streets thronged with people, peddlers, tens of thousands of camel water-carriers and donkey taxis. Popular literature flourished, the One Thousand and One Nights were set down in writing, and aside from building, poetry was for a while the fond occupation of the elite. Qaytbay wrote verses in Arabic and Turkish, but several buildings commemorate him best. His sabil (fountain) incorporated a school for learning Qur√anic verse (kuttab) in its second-storey loggia.36 Designed in accordance with the Prophet’s dictum that the worthiest of acts are the offers of ‘water for the thirsty and knowledge for the ignorant’, this highly ornate and innovative public facility was much imitated. It is a wonderful paradox that Islamic decorative art, having once contrived to conceal the living form, finally succeeded in capturing its vitality with an intricate, almost cellular intimacy. The point is well made by Henri Focillon: These combinations are produced by mathematical reasoning. They are based upon cold calculation, reducible to patterns of the utmost aridity. But deep within them, a sort of fever seems to goad on and to multiply the shapes; some mysterious genius of complication interlocks, enfolds, disorganizes and reorganizes the entire labyrinth. Their very immobility sparkles with metamorphoses. Whether they be read as voids or solids, as vertical axes or as diagonals, each one of them both withholds the secret and exposes the reality of an immense number of possibilities.37 This description of a virile art may be superimposed over the entire urban matrix to illustrate an organism on the verge of its next convulsion. Streets like veins and arteries link the citadel (the city’s head) with its heart (Fatimid Cairo), their tendrils stretching towards the river as well as north and south. Yet plague, burdensome taxes and insurrections weakened the dynamic entity from within. The ‘immense number of possibilities’ inherent in the city of the 64

‘possessed’ dwindled to one: defeat at the hands of the Ottomans, who had already toppled the thousand-year-old Christian capital of Constantinople, in 1453. The last notable Mamluk Sultan was al-Ghuri (1501–16), an elderly man whose artistic sensibilities overshadowed matters of state.38 More poet than equestrian, he had the hippodrome of alNasir transformed into a garden in which he hosted massive banquets. On the Muslim New Year in 1510 he presented each of his emirs with a rose. Aware of the Ottoman advance, al-Ghuri installed cannons in the citadel, a questionable addition since the cavalry would have benefited more from mobile field weapons. But the Mamluks deemed these ‘arms for women’, preferring the challenges of horsemanship, bows and swords, anachronisms that cost them an empire. On a plain near Aleppo the Mamluks encountered light artillery for the first time. Their reckless bravery may well be imagined, as may their shock at the greatly expedited proceedings of battle. AlGhuri accompanied the campaign against the Ottomans but he fell from his horse and was trampled to death, his body lost in the carnage. A few months later his successor, Tumanbay, was hung from Bab Zuwayla. The gallows rope broke twice before he died, a gruesome fait divers that was nevertheless swiftly incorporated into street entertainment, in this case, a shadow puppet play. An enthusiastic spectator tipped the play’s director handsomely and invited him to Istanbul to stage the play for his son. The appreciative audience member was the new Ottoman Sultan, aptly named Selim the Grim.39 Portrayals of Ottoman Cairo are often tinged with dismay. The city once celebrated by fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun as ‘the metropolis of the universe, the orchard of the universe, beehive of nations, gateway of Islam and throne of royalty’ was reduced to a provincial capital, one of 32. The ensuing three centuries do lack romance; the decades dissolve in a litany of bland pashas (governors) and their tedious bureaucratic exploits. Bereft of the royal presence, Cairo was no longer the stage for its munificence or whim. Yet it was precisely this absence of overweening power that the city required to become itself.40 For 300 years, under an administration anxious to reap the rewards of Egypt’s economic well being, Cairo’s population stratified to produce a variegated social fabric. Some members of the 65

Ottoman infantry (janissaries) intermarried and built houses, as did merchants, from the modest to the princely, along with caravanserais and public drinking places (sabils). Nor had Cairo seen the last of the Mamluks, as the Ottomans employed a number who had survived the power shift thanks to wits or wealth, a decision the Sublime Porte in Istanbul had cause to regret following several Mamluk comebacks. The emirs maintained opulent households that rivalled those of janissary lieutenants (katkhuda) and a panoply of tradesmen, so that the city grew as members of an ambitious bourgeoisie scrambled to outdo each other. Wealthy Ottoman households resembled those of their Mamluk predecessors; both owed their style to practical considerations, peace and quiet foremost among them. Tall facades with grand portals enclosed a world of spacious luxury far removed from the raucous streets. The height of the rooms, often in excess of ten metres, fed the proprietors’ sense of grandeur and offered a respite from Cairo’s suffocating heat. Wall hangings, carpets and cushions adorned the interiors whose wood-pillared balconies opened onto inner courtyards replete with gardens and fountains that were the centrepiece of every large household. Since merchants wished to live close to commercial areas, Cairo’s Fatimid centre swelled to bursting and the overflow helped weave the city’s outer edges into a greater whole.41 Considering that the Ottomans began as nomadic frontiersmen of a mystical bent, they swiftly developed an almost maniacal flair for urban administration. In Cairo, fifteen judiciary courts operated within a tangled range of jurisdictions. Aside from the military hierarchy there was a High Council and an Ordinary one to advise the pasha. Trade guilds had spokesmen to protect their interests, with different ethnic groups controlling specific activities. Market inspectors (muhtasibs) checked weights and measures in shops to ensure fair play. Interestingly, the punishment for cheating suited the crime; if a butcher was caught shortchanging his customers, a slice was carved from his backside, a pastry maker made to sit on his hot pans. There were religious councils of scholars (fiulama√), and individual sheikhs who oversaw tax collection and street repairs in the various neighbourhoods of Egyptians, Syrians, North Africans, Turks, Palestinians and others. With over a quarter of a million inhabitants spread over eight square kilometres, the necessity for control imposed itself. Law and 66

order was the province of the state, whose primary method of crime prevention consisted of harrowing, but well-attended public punishments, including ‘fierce and picturesque’ customs such as impaling.42 Private groups handled municipal functions like street lighting, water supply, transport and trash collection, collecting payment from their customers. Nothing was more important than water. The city was removed from the Nile banks because of seasonal floods. Camels and donkeys delivered water directly to inhabitants, but also to public bathhouses and cisterns established by rich patrons. During the Ottoman period over 300 sabils (many of them with kuttabs) were erected, emblematic of the ruling class’s urge to do and look good. The buildings combined the beautiful with the beneficial, providing water and an elegant way for the wealthy to wash their hands of a teeming proletariat with whom they wished little contact. One such jewelled structure was endowed by a woman named Nafisa al-Bayda in 1796 and still stands near Bab Zuwayla.43 A slave from Anatolia, Nafisa had both beauty and wit, which attracted an elderly emir, who married her and died shortly thereafter. She inherited his estate and was soon remarried to Murad, another powerful emir, who helped establish Egypt’s temporary independence from the Ottomans. Murad’s and Nafisa’s combined resources made them Cairo’s most influential couple, and despite outbreaks of plague, famine and civil unrest, their fortunes multiplied. The romance ended unhappily with the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte. In July 1798 the French landed near Alexandria. Days later Murad led 10,000 Mamluks to a plain east of the Pyramids to meet three times as many well-armed Frenchmen in battle. Murad’s troops were massacred and he fled to Upper Egypt, where he eventually succumbed to plague. Nafisa negotiated hard to hold on to their property, inviting General Bonaparte to her home and lavishing him with Cairene hospitality. He was appreciative enough to extract a ruinous tribute in gold dinars. Cairo’s days of relative seclusion and rule by Ottoman nonentities were over. The city was about to become modern, that is to say, subject to the machinations of the West. Bonaparte (in Egypt from 1798 to 1801) introduced the first Arabic printing press to Cairo, using it to issue a proclamation regarding his intentions towards the citizenry. The rhetoric was calculated to imitate Arabic’s flowery formalism and play on what its authors 67

perceived as the population’s frustration with the Mamluk usurpers. An indicative portion reads ‘if Egypt is a Mamluk fiefdom, let them produce the title deed that God conferred on them’. 44 One can imagine the mixture of puzzlement, suspicion and admiration with which this mass-produced document was met. The proclamation was the subject of careful study by Cairo’s fiulama√, who found the phrasing vulgar and numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes. As for the Revolutionary motto of ‘liberty and equality’ that headed the page, the French weren’t fooling anyone. Cairenes were used to duplicity and they knew an invasion when they saw one. Al-Jabarti, Egyptian chronicler of the French occupation, provides us with a closely observed alternative view of Bonaparte’s expedition. His sarcasm is at times hard to miss: ‘When a Frenchman has to perform an act of nature he does so wherever he happens to be . . . and goes away as is without washing. If he is a man of taste and refinement, he wipes himself with whatever he finds, even with a paper with writing on it’, al-Jabarti tells us, underlining the fiulama√’s distaste for French hygiene and perhaps the fate of a quantity of Bonaparte’s pamphlets.45 The French fancied themselves at the vanguard of modernity, and the Egyptians as quaintly barbaric. The latter viewed Bonaparte and his retinue of geographers, mathematicians and scientists through the narrowed eye of a complex and illustrious history. When Bonaparte invited the fiulama√ to witness examples of chemical transformations and ‘electrical commotions’, the sheikhs remained unfazed. One of them asked whether the chemist ‘could make me be in Morocco and here at one and the same moment’, a minimum requirement for any respectable Cairene metaphysician. 46 This nonchalance is at odds with popular European portrayals of Bonaparte’s impact, for example, Victor Hugo’s poem Lui: Victor, enthusiast, bursting with achievements, Prodigious he stunned the land of prodigies. The old sheikhs venerated the young and prudent emir. The people dreaded his unprecedented arms; Sublime, he appeared to the dazzled tribes Like a Mahomet of the Occident.47 Within months of Bonaparte’s arrival, the people of Cairo rose in protest, spreading incendiary anti-French propaganda from the 68

minarets in place of the call to prayer. Bonaparte crushed the insurrection and ordered daily beheadings to remind the people that he wasn’t too modern to speak the language of oppression. Bonaparte felt obliged to strike hard. The British had destroyed his fleet and his forces were marooned, a fact that elicited sedition in the ranks of his plague-ridden troops. The French had failed in their objective to loosen Britain’s grip on the land route to India, and a British-Ottoman incursion ended their occupation in 1801. Cairo greeted the Ottoman army with a mixture of relief and trepidation; indeed the re-conquerors were hardly conciliatory. Despite their short stay, the members of Bonaparte’s scientific entourage had succeeded in compiling 23 volumes full of detailed drawings and observations. The publication of the Description de l’Egypte (1810–29) marked the birth of Egyptology, launched a wave of Egyptophilia in Europe, and served as an enticement to travellers.48 Although Bonaparte’s Egyptian adventure left less obvious a mark on Cairo than on the furnishings of Parisian salons, the repercussions of his visit were profound. Aside from establishing Egypt as a point of active contention between the French and British empires, Bonaparte, with his scientists and superior weapons, infected the capital’s new ruler-to-be with envy and discontent. Leader of an Albanian militia stationed in Egypt by the Ottoman Porte, Mohammed Ali (1805–49) rose to power amid conflicts between pillaging janissaries and persistent Mamluks. His ability to restore order earned the population’s appreciation, while the Ottomans’ absorption with a janissary uprising in Istanbul left the Egyptian field open to his ambitions. Recognizing France and Britain as far greater threats to Egypt’s future than the Ottomans, Mohammed Ali yearned to compete on the high ground of modernity. If asked what that word meant, he would have said guns and factories. Illiterate until the age of 40 but aware of the effects of disease on the efficiency of troops and labourers, he might have added schools and doctors, too. In the coming years, this gifted, unfaltering leader would see to it that Cairo had all four. Mohammed Ali once famously remarked, ‘My history shall not commence until I can rouse this land from the sleep of ages’. He approached the task of awakening Egypt with severity. First, he invited the city’s 24 surviving Mamluk emirs and their entourages of 69

over 400 men to a banquet at the citadel. On their way out, he had them shot en masse. So much for the Mamluks. Next he attacked the economy, reclaiming vast tracts of arable land with new, year-round irrigation systems and introducing cotton crops that greatly augmented Egypt’s revenues (especially when Civil War in the usa disrupted its cotton trade) and helped finance the Suez Canal. Mohammed Ali hired French military officers to equip and retrain his army, and with the help of French engineers, he built arms and textiles factories.49 Europeans also helped design an educational system with engineering, military science and language curricula. Promising students were awarded scholarships in France. Mohammed Ali gave Cairo its first publishing house, the Bulaq Press, to translate and print manuals and textbooks. In response to outbreaks of cholera and plague, he commissioned the world’s first international quarantine board; his Western-style school of medicine was the first in the Middle East.50 Mohammed Ali dramatically modified the citadel enclosure where he resided, destroying historic buildings to erect audience halls, a national archive (the world’s second archives, after France’s), diwans or ministries, and a voluminous mosque. In 1824 the French government sent him the gift of a horse-drawn carriage, but only one of Cairo’s streets was wide enough for it to pass. He accordingly slashed the city’s fabric to make connective boulevards.51 Stern, decisive tactics, such as forced labour, heavy taxes and the appointment of officialdom composed largely of foreign (TurcoCircassian and European) advisors, were not calculated to win Egyptian hearts. Nor had Mohammed Ali intended to create a local intelligentsia exposed to foreign travel, education and industrial techniques that would question the mechanisms distancing them from the rewards and responsibilities of self-governance. Their disenchantment, along with that of conscripted Egyptian soldiers rising in the ranks, would soon form the basis of a nationalist revolt.52 Mohammed Ali’s citadel mosque with its silvery domes hovers above the city like a sentinel, dominating so many visual perspectives that it is difficult to imagine Cairo’s skyline without it. Yet its style is drawn entirely from Istanbul and bears no trace of local tradition. Given its scale and location, the citadel mosque symbolized Mohammed Ali’s ascendancy over the city and over Egypt, and may have also been interpreted as the concretization of his claim for independence from the Ottomans. 70

Whether Mohammed Ali’s architectural pretensions in Cairo displeased the Sublime Porte, a series of successful military expansions gravely alarmed both the Ottoman sultan and the British, who attacked his positions in Syria, obliging him to withdraw. Britain placed the force of empire behind its preference for an ineffectual Ottoman sultan rather than a revitalized, expansionist Egypt, and so aborted Mohammed Ali’s quest for autonomy. His army dismantled, Mohammed Ali was forced to relinquish rich, state-owned monopolies to the Europeans and was patronized for his compliance with the assurance that his heirs would continue to rule in Cairo as Ottoman governors. That Britain should presume to grant him what was his, made defeat the more bitter. In Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage Lord Byron describes the ruler’s years in the magnificent palace of Shubra, buried beneath what is now one of Cairo’s densest quarters. In marble paved pavilion where a spring Of living water rose, Whose bubbling did a genial freshness fling, And soft voluptuous couches breathed repose, Ali reclined, a man of war and woes.53 Mohammed Ali’s grandson Ismail continued the work he had begun, devoting himself to building his own version of a modern Egypt, beginning with the capital, his Galatea. Ismail’s wish to imbue Cairo with a European persona created a vain but seductive simulacrum. His modernization efforts, including the Suez Canal, had paradoxically rendered Egypt a more coveted prize for the powers he’d wished to flatter through imitation, and greet on equal terms. Ismail’s (1863–79) most telling gift to Cairo was the first bridge uniting the Nile’s east and west banks. Transforming this architectural allegory into a cultural reality was an elusive goal beyond his means, though he spared no expense to pursue it. Educated in Paris and Vienna, inured to Ottoman luxury and a familiar of Europe’s royal courts, Ismail was a confident, sophisticated leader. He surrounded himself with the trappings of occidental and oriental affluence while directing a feverish entrepreneurial focus towards attracting finance to reinvent Egypt and its capital. His progressive politics and prodigious building reflected as much his desire to 71

Portrait of the Khedive Ismail, c. 1860s.

impress as to improvise a new urban whole whose (Western) value would exceed the sum of its (Eastern) parts. What he succeeded in producing was a divided city, two worlds living side by side across a gap too wide for a bridge to span.54 72

Lady of the court (c. 1880s) in front of a palace built by the Khedive Ismail for Empress Eugenie on the occasion of her visit for the Suez Canal opening ceremonies. The palace is now part of the Marriott Hotel.

Ismail acquired Egypt’s greater autonomy from the muchreduced Ottomans by doubling the annual tribute. His title of khedive (a prince above provincial governors) was part of the bargain. Free to act, he banned slavery and built schools by the hundreds, including the first ones in Egypt for girls. He founded a library, a museum of Pharaonic antiquities and a geographical society to encourage the mapping of Africa.55 He enhanced Mohammed Ali’s industrialization programmes, improved agricultural output, established a postal system and extended telegraph and railway lines. The khedive’s most lauded and closely watched project was the completion of the Suez Canal, as grandiose a scheme as that of refiguring Cairo as Paris on the Nile. 56 Ismail understood the importance of appearances, and the two projects were intimately linked. The opening of the Canal in 1869 was a masterfully orchestrated public relations event, combining opulent pageantry and hospitality. Enough of the new Cairo was in place to win choruses of praise from Ismail’s influential guests and heads of state, a necessary prelude to their support for an Egypt free of its withering Ottoman attachment. 73

Opera Square in the 1920s.

Considering the twelve hundred years of rambling that constituted Cairo’s erstwhile expansion, Ismail’s detailed urban plan was revolutionary.57 Implemented by the ministry of public works under the highly competent direction of Egyptian engineer and educational reformist, Ali Mubarak, it involved a huge tract of land between the existing city and the Nile’s east bank. The new city was designed along the lines of Haussmann’s Paris, with a grid of squares and radiating boulevards. Crisp new streets, lit with piped-in gas, equipped with water lines and swept three times per day, extended from the edges of the old city like a bright beaded fringe from a fusty shawl. It was a monumental endeavour that demanded international participation. Businessmen, architects and engineers flocked to Cairo in their thousands, where they watched elegant blocks of neoclassical residences rise from the dust on the outskirts of the chaotic medieval quarter. Twenty-seven newspapers were published in Cairo at the time, in Arabic, French, Italian, Greek and Turkish. The Ezbikeyya gardens to the north of the new quarter rivalled the Bois de Boulogne. There was a grand opera house, inaugurated during the Canal opening ceremonies with a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Magnificent banquets and balls illuminated the long, stately Italianate façade of Ismail’s Abdin Palace, that stood with its back to the old city, looking out towards the new. Ismail joined his guests beneath chandeliers as large as trees in champagne toasts to 74

Egypt’s future, while interest on national loans accumulated insidiously in European banks.58 In 1870 Ismail’s strongest backer, Napoleon iii, fell from power in France, heralding the beginning of the end. Although work on the new city continued sporadically until 1875, Ismail was overextended and desperate enough to ransom his country’s future. Having sold majority shares in the Canal enterprise to the British, yet still unable to satisfy his creditors, Ismail’s Egypt was bankrupt. The British foreclosure on the Canal was a great stride towards occupation. The French and British governments forced the Ottoman sultan to strip Ismail of his powers, and austerity measures were applied to the population. Ismail saluted his son Tewfiq as the new, diminished khedive in 1879 before departing in exile to Italy.59 Humiliation whets a people’s appetite for dissent. An Egyptian army officer named Ahmed Urabi led the first nationalist military revolt in 1881, protesting against foreign manipulation and the ostentatious behaviour of the ruling elite. Britain responded to the turmoil with characteristic alacrity and its troops met the Egyptians in the Canal Zone. The engagement lasted under an hour. In 1883, Evelyn Baring (later Earl of Cromer) was appointed British consulgeneral in Cairo (1883–1907). The khedive was reduced to a figurehead under the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan. With solemn and perhaps sardonic deference the Cairenes soon referred to Baring as al-Lurd (the lord). Cairo entered the twentieth century a colonial city under the strict ministrations of the British, whose ‘temporary’ presence lasted 72 years. Following the Urabi revolt, Egypt’s flirtations with self-governance were checked by the bestowal of the chaste status of ‘veiled protectorate’. At the outbreak of the World War i, the veil fell, as did all pretensions of Ottoman authority, when a quarter of a million British Commonwealth troops mobilized to defend the Suez Canal. Over the next decades, several forces combined to add impetus and direction to the city’s growth. The monarchy, trapped by their aspirations between two worlds, was not one. Installed by the British to quell a nationalist uprising in 1919, Ismail’s son Fuad became constitutional monarch in 1923, the perfect autocratic foil to deflect the conflict between British interests and those of a dangerously coherent nationalist party. Aside from the impressive Fuad University, the royal family built little for the public, devoting them75

King Fuad on his throne at an opening session of Parliament, c. 1920s.

selves largely to the maintenance of existing mosques and a regal lifestyle.60 In the midst of two wars, against the background of an uneasy three-way political standoff, British garrisons filled the citadel and a new barracks by the Nile. The British administrative and military community, close knit, largely middle-class, and in wartime very young, played a role in the city’s development. The work begun by Ismail was completed, while the picturesque old city was left as a curiosity, a charming medieval counterpoint to British preeminence. It was this self-absorbed conviction that reshaped Cairo, along with 76

Kasr al-Nil Bridge in the 1920s.

the first Aswan Dam built under British supervision in 1902, and the arrival of the automobile in 1904. With Nile floods more contained, the riverbanks stabilized, drawing the city’s development westwards. Three new bridges helped weave the Nile islands of Roda and Gezira into the urban fabric. Once the site of a Khedival palace, Gezira became the home of the Sporting Club, where the elite played polo and golf. Grand residences, including several royal palaces, sprung up around this verdant bastion of colonial mannerisms. Likewise the island of Roda was gentrified and the expansion continued in Giza, where Ismail’s phantasmagoric botanical gardens and royal menagerie (once part of his Harem Palace) were converted into public parks and a zoo.61 During the occupation, the suburbs of Maadi and Heliopolis (the latter founded in 1906 by the Belgian Baron Empain) arose to the east of the Nile. Also on the east bank, Garden City was created in close proximity to downtown, a lushly landscaped residential community dotted with villas. Beside it, the British Residence was a monument to colonial amour propre. Its rolling lawns stretched straight to the 77

Nile, obliging the constant stream of riverside traffic to take the long way around. By 1931, Cairo had over 24,000 motor vehicles and the street system expanded accordingly, though the old city remained entangled in medieval alleys that only a trio of arteries passed through.62 Barely serviced by the municipal water system, its souks eclipsed by the new western business district, with population density ever rising, the old city could look back on the Ottoman days with nostalgia. Downtown Cairo had banks, boutiques, bookshops, cinemas, department stores with liveried guards and the Groppi Tearooms where people danced in the afternoons to the music of live orchestras.63 The Shepheard’s Hotel was a favourite gathering place for foreigners, its terrace alive with travellers, army officers, entrepreneurs, dragomen (guides) and adventurers. There were wide tree-lined boulevards and multi-storeyed apartment buildings, their prow-shaped facades facing circular midans like ships sailing into harbour. They only differed from their European counterparts by virtue of a smattering of neo-Pharaonic or neo-Mamluk whimsy, the odd sphinx or lotus, the occasional keel-shaped arch. The buildings contained spacious flats with high ceilings, shimmering parquet floors, tall shuttered windows and storage areas on the roof that were later converted to living quarters for servants or the poor. Meanwhile, to the north beside the Nile, a cluster of factories fuelled the growth of Shubra and Bulaq, whose working-class inhabitants enjoyed few Industrial Age amenities. Cairo’s population tripled in the first 50 years of the occupation, with the majority concentrated in the older, more affordable areas. Influx from the countryside, as well as lower mortality rates due to improved sanitation and health, inflated Cairo’s population from 374,000 in 1882 to 1,312,000 in 1937. By 1960 the number of inhabitants would more than double yet again.64 The pressures of life, compounded by the thankless task of supplying food and labour for the world’s largest army base, had begun to fray the Egyptians’ resilient nerves. Disgust and disappointment with an ineffectual, self-serving monarchy, a cabinet embroiled in intrigue and the socio-economic and legal disparities that favoured a foreign elite, darkened the overburdened Cairenes’ morale. In 1936 Cairo was a city of over one million people, most of them hungry for the good news that the unloved Fuad’s death and the 78

Wedding portrait of King Farouk and Queen Farida, 1938. Farouk was eighteen and Farida sixteen at the time.

coronation of his sixteen-year-old son Farouk (1936–52) seemed to provide. The precious only boy in a family of girls, Farouk grew up in Egypt and spoke Arabic, unlike his father, and on him the people pinned their specious, tradition-bound hopes. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty signed in the same year gave Egypt command of its own army and appeared to be a nationalist triumph that would break Britain’s hold. The outbreak of World War ii, however, delayed the treaty’s full implementation. Over 170,000 Allied troops overran Cairo and its environs, infusing the city with excitement and trepidation. 79

The aftermath of Black Saturday, 26 January 1952: Shepheard’s Hotel.

By that time King Farouk had begun to grow alarmingly stout, spending more time in Cairo’s nightclubs than suited his station. The British ambassador, and Egypt’s administrator during the war, Sir Miles Lampson, had never bothered to conceal his contempt for the young king (referring to him notoriously as ‘that boy’ while Farouk called Lampson gamusa basha, ‘water-buffalo pasha’), but his high-handed, clumsy attempt to force Farouk’s abdication in February 1942 was widely condemned. At the end of the drama that began with tanks rolling into Abdin Square at night, the king was humiliated but still king. Wafdist party leader Nahas Pasha was installed as prime minister, a ‘nationalist victory’ engineered by the 80

British. The army felt cheated of the chance to protect Farouk and Egypt’s honour because of Lampson’s covert tactics. And finally the Islamists, who along with the king had nurtured Axis sympathies, were also dismayed. When Farouk allowed his beard to grow in 1943, some said that this symbol of piety had pan-Arab significance and that Farouk was plotting to reinstate the caliphate. Others said he’d stopped shaving because it was one of the few things he could do without asking permission. Farouk later declared he’d grown his beard because it was the most binding thing a Muslim could swear by, and following an intrigue that linked the much admired Queen Farida with a British portrait artist, he swore by his beard he’d divorce her. This he did in 1948, and his popularity plummeted, while Egypt’s defeat in the first Israeli war left the country overwhelmed. In October 1951 Egypt abrogated its treaty with Britain, a blunt ‘farewell’ that Britain chose to ignore. Tensions accumulated until 25 January 1952, when British troops attacked a police station in Ismalia (said to be the headquarters for anti-British harassments) where 60 Egyptians lost their lives and many more were wounded. The next day, while Farouk feted his only son’s recent birthday, Cairo imploded. Gangs armed with gasoline stormed the streets of downtown and anywhere else in the city they perceived ‘foreign’ influence, setting it all aflame. Hundreds of buildings were damaged; Shepheard’s Hotel was destroyed, as was the British Turf Club where six foreigners died, some of them lynched. A military coup followed the events of 26 January 1952. When the ashes settled, Egypt had a president and a new constitution placing the future in its own hands. Farouk abdicated and was sent off from the port of Alexandria, where the new military leaders offered him a twentyone-gun salute. He lived in exile in Italy until the age of 44, when he died in a restaurant, choking on his food. Royalists still suggest he was poisoned.65 Following the 1952 coup, the Revolutionary Command Council headed by Generals Mohammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser had control of Egypt. Nasser soon ousted Naguib, and became president in 1956 under a new constitution. The 34-year old Nasser was perceived as the first native son to rule since the pharaohs, a fact that places in context, but cannot adequately convey, the love Egyptians initially felt for him. It was an exultant 81

love, absolving the pain and redeeming the hopes of a proud but weary people. In 1956 the last British troops left the country, although they returned with French and Israeli support in a surprise military attack designed to prevent Egypt from controlling the Suez Canal. The United States under Eisenhower upbraided the authors of ‘the tripartite aggression’, and United Nations’ intervention awarded victory to Egypt’s nationalists, lending Nasser’s rule a heroic, international dimension. Deep emotions imbued the new Republic with a sense of drama, not least of them the loathing of those on the wrong end of Nasser’s Robin Hood-esque socialist policies. Many foreigners and Egyptians who could afford it left the country and, with them, a wealth of much needed expertise. As the historian al-Maqrizi once noted, ‘such is the custom of kings that they efface that which came before them’. So it was with Egypt’s Nasser. Across the country, buildings, factories and utilities were nationalized, and many elegant downtown Cairo residences emptied of their inhabitants and occupied by government companies. The gardens of the British Residence were clipped so that traffic could finally circulate, and an immense plaza was installed on the site of the razed British barracks, renamed Midan el-Tahrir, Liberation Square. Near the train station another square was levelled and a pedestal built to support an ancient red granite colossus of the pharaoh Ramses the Great (1304-1237 bc), founder of the 19th dynasty, a great conqueror of humble descent, not unlike Egypt’s modern-day hero.66 People swarmed to Cairo from the countryside to taste the revolution’s promise so that the city could barely hold them, nor could the government build low-income units fast enough, although it tried. Likewise industry could not create sufficient jobs, however much emphasis was placed on its importance for Egypt’s economic future. People needed work and one expedient way to provide it was through employment directly under the government’s increasingly all-embracing wing. New ministries were constructed, blandly officious beehives whose concrete-box style reflected a frantic desire to cheaply contain the burgeoning national enterprise and its civil servants. Even before 1956 the Suez Canal conflict (locally known as the ‘Tri-partite aggression’) ruined whatever chances for cooperation that existed between the Western powers and Egypt’s new govern82

The monolith of Ramses ii in a warehouse for repair, including the provision of a pair of legs to replace the missing originals.

ment, Nasser had turned towards the Eastern Bloc for inspiration and support. He needed finance to build the Aswan High Dam, his revolutionary overture merging the themes of electrification for industry, urban development, perennial farming and, above all, modern man’s triumph over nature, as embodied in the taming of the Nile. Nasser ’s provocative new alliance with Russia helped achieve these aims, while colouring Cairo an unfortunate shade of 83

Cold War grey. In Midan al-Tahrir the grim hulk of the Mugamma building, housing a warren of governmental offices, still conjures bleak images of wintry Muscovite institutionalism. In 1961 a 187-metre-high landmark was added to the city’s skyline, the Burg al-Qahira (Cairo Tower), Egypt’s Eiffel, its Empire State, the tallest freestanding concrete structure of its time. Designed to evoke the lotus flower, the tower looks more like a giant, decapitated palm. It stood out from the villa-studded gardens of Gezira like a cheap souvenir on an heirloom dressing table. Indeed, wherever the eye falls in the contemporary city, aesthetics and good housekeeping seldom appease it. An understanding of the demographic cataclysm that transformed the city in the half-century following the revolution is enough to make one marvel that it wasn’t ground to dust. In 1956 urban planners predicted that Cairo’s population would reach 5.5 million by the year 2000. In 1965 there were already 6.1 million inhabitants in Greater Cairo.67 To this, add socialism’s principle of state ownership that theoretically placed everything in the hands of the people. This ‘all and nothing at all’ proposition perplexed Cairo’s inhabitants, who experienced their new and abstract ownership in a predictably human way. They took possession of the city like a large, active foot in a tight but game shoe. Although construction began in several areas to the west of the Nile slated for development, it could not keep pace with rampant demand.68 Responsibility for the maintenance of individual buildings and the city overall, was perfectly diffused between a state consumed with pan-Arab dreams, and a people to whom ownership meant being the complacent guests of a close but lukewarm relative. The decay of the city and its inhabitants’ relationship with their new landlords could not fail to follow. Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war with Israel exposed a painful new reality. The revolution was apparently little more than a military coup brought to bear by the same men who had managed to lose the war. The wealth liberated from the past was not enough to secure a future. The new government lacked follow-through; they were bad managers. Everyone’s expectations had been perhaps a little too high. The real revolution, in terms of Cairo’s explosive growth and transfiguring expansions, would be the people’s work. Their daily needs and limited means of achieving them became a force as inexorable as wind and rain. 84

Nearly two million people mobbed Tahrir Square to mourn Gamal Abdel Nasser, who died, exhausted, in 1970. The new president, Anwar Sadat (1970–81), to his great distress, would never elicit the unconditional trust his predecessor had briefly inspired. Pride resulting from the Sadat-led victory over the Israelis in October 1973 would barely mitigate the subsequent misgivings caused by his treaty negotiations with the mistrusted American and inimical Israeli governments. While feted in the West as a peacemaking hero, Sadat’s dance with the enemy and his ostentatious lifestyle aroused scorn at home, especially among the Islamists. Sadat’s shift of alliance from the Soviet East to the Americandominated West was meant to distance him from the political past and set the country on a forward-thinking and internationally engaged economic track. In reality, his policy of ‘liberalization’ amounted to a rhetorical prosperity, powerful enough to attract people to the capital but inadequate to shelter and employ them. The Camp David peace talks opened the floodgates of subtly intrusive foreign aid, whose immediate benefits eluded the average citizen in favour of a handful of government and private sector cronies. Despite Sadat’s histrionic posing as a pious and concerned patriarch, indeed, despite his exceptional charisma and occasionally visionary politics, the people knew they were on their own. The earthly attractions of Cairo’s vast Islamic burial grounds had long been apparent to squatting families squeezed from the old quarters by poverty and mishap. In 1937 the population of the toorab (Arabic for cemetery and dust) exceeded 50,000; in 1986 it was 179,000.69 Situated along the base of the Muqattam Cliffs, the sandy expanse of the City of the Dead is scattered with the concrete tomb markers of the poor but also with thousands of cut-stone mausolea of the millennial well to do. Many of these mausoleums comprise spacious courtyards and enclosing walls; some have water, trees and even gardens, since they were designed to accommodate the families of the deceased whose visits often extended overnight. Unlike most of Cairo, the cemetery is organized on a grid with wide avenues and connecting lanes, reflecting the sentiment that the only thing worth planning for is death. The funerary buildings of varying size and quality ended up offering an often splendid refuge to generations of inhabitants for enjoyment in this world no matter what might happen in the next. In 85

the 1970s and ’80s the number of people living in the tombs swelled, many of them recent émigrés from the countryside, whose large families and small animal herds lent the cemetery a strangely bucolic air. The term absentee landlord acquired new meaning in the City of the Dead; left to their own devices, the tenants grew confident. They pirated telephone and electricity lines, operated informal transport and added mud and baked brick wings to their tombs. Entire freestanding buildings, several storeys high sprung into being and these days between the living and the dead it’s hard to say who has gained the greater ground. Another unlikely city stratum came alive during the Sadat years, namely the rooftops. Downtown buildings in particular boasted invitingly wide-open spaces comprising storage rooms that were soon inhabited by building guardians (bawwabin) and their very much extended families. The roofs also inspired an irresponsible building trend spurred by high living densities coupled with greed. New floors were piled precariously on top of existing buildings, which gave birth to another still current trend: collapse. Unscrupulous contractors worsened the problem by choosing cheap materials and bribing officials to cut quality-control construction costs.70 Meanwhile, Sadat travelled between his new villas in Cairo and around Egypt in a sleek Westland helicopter he had received as a token of Richard Nixon’s affection. One can imagine him flying over Cairo, surveying his sprawling house of cards. Enamoured of American history, particularly the settlement of the ‘Wild West’, Sadat envisaged the same exodus for Egypt’s spiralling Nilo-centric population. From his scientific advisor, Sadat learned of huge ground water resources in Egypt’s remote southwestern desert that could open a new corridor of land for farming and habitation.71 His visionary mega-project would not be acted on until the 1990s, but in his lifetime Egypt’s capital looked west in more ways than one. Foreign companies responded to Sadat’s ‘open door’ policy, and the employment they provided helped launch a new middle-class, future consumers of Western goods. On the Nile’s west bank, highrise office and apartment buildings began to replace the emerald green alfalfa fields of Giza. Mohandeseen (Arabic for ‘engineers’) developed its commercial and residential mix around pockets of old, still rural, communities, while the nearby upper-class community of Dokki took shape beside an upscale Shooting Club. On the opposite 86

side of the river, in Garden City, the American Embassy began a series of expansions that would make it the largest us diplomatic installation in the world. An urban master plan devised in 1970 called for satellite cities in the desert around Cairo to absorb catastrophic projected growth figures. Several of their names (the Fifteenth of May City, Tenth of Ramadan City and Sixth of October City) are dreary tributes to Sadat’s political exploits, although one stands out from the rest. The Sixth of October War, a surprise attack on Israel that regained the Sinai Peninsula, was Sadat’s greatest triumph. Cairo’s biggest bridge, spanning the Nile from downtown across Zamalek to the west bank, is also called the Sixth of October. The date would be remembered for darker reasons after 1981, when on the eponymous national holiday Sadat was assassinated while reviewing his militia at his Victory Day parade. The assassination struck a fine note of historic symmetry since 6 October fell that lunar year on the great Islamic feast of sacrifice (Eid al-Adha). The October War had coincidentally been launched on Yom Kippur, a major Hebrew feast, by an Egyptian surprise attack. The Eid al-Adha marks the end of the Islamic month of pilgrimage (hajj) and involves the dawn slaughter of sheep or cattle by those who can afford it, who then distribute the meat to the less fortunate. On 6 October 1981, the usually joyful proceedings were enveloped in an ominous cloud. Under the circumstances, Vice-President Hosni Mubarak’s ascension to power was received by a subdued and wary city with even deeper ambivalence than the arrival of Sadat. During the construction of the Cairo Metro in the 1980s, downtown looked like a patient on an operating table. There were gaping holes everywhere, telephone cables trailed coloured-wire nerve endings, gigantic water pipe arteries were severed and left to dangle and ooze. By the time the first Metro line was inaugurated in 1985, Greater Cairo’s population was nudging the nine million mark and needed more than an air-conditioned subway to cool things off. The new Opera House in Zamalek, with its Museum of Modern Art and surrounding greenery, demonstrated the new regime’s broadminded dedication to culture and learning. The Opera House, elegantly designed in neo-Islamic style, was a gift of the Japanese as was the opening performance of a renowned Kabuki theatre troupe that somehow left its audience unmoved. More successful was the 87

new administration’s emphasis on infrastructure development in Cairo’s newer quarters as well as the satellite cities. In the 1990s, reform policies of the Sadat era were given more legislative impetus to attract investment and free private investors to act. A tidal wave of construction, mostly upscale and Western-style, spread from the capital to the sea coasts, and American fast-food franchises sprang up like weeds. Soon many quarters would boast a shopping mall with cinemas, amusement parks and even iceskating rinks. These postmodern souks failed to supplant traditional markets in the older neighbourhoods and, as long as they refuse to bargain or offer credit, they probably never will. Nevertheless consumerism is having its way with Cairo, branding meandering slums and high-rise abodes with glaring billboards and blindingly lit storefronts. In 2004, with a population of around sixteen million, Greater Cairo fits Giordano Bruno’s description of the universe: the centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere. Commercial and residential establishments are so thoroughly and repetitively intermingled that each quarter, indeed, every city block, is a world in itself. Downtown’s remaining older buildings are atomized, each apartment fractured into office space, gracious old flats split into threes. A single building’s frontage may support a dozen semi-legal sidewalk vendors’ enterprises, propped up against its walls or built directly into façade niches and windows. Many ground floors have been converted into nightmarish clothing or shoe-shops and the paths between buildings transformed into makeshift souks. In every available space there is action, sustained at a varying pitch over 350 square kilometres of surface.72 Yet the city continues to fill and overflow, flooding out into the desert and devouring the Delta. An estimated 60 per cent of Cairo’s housing is informal, cheaply built without licence or expertise, most of it (85 per cent) on precious agricultural land. The building bricks are made from stripped layers of topsoil, so that instead of farming the rich soil, people are living inside of it, reaping a harvest of ramshackle houses instead of food. Informal dwellings built flank-to-flank fill the cracks in and around the ‘formal’ city, their roofs bristling optimistically with steel reinforcement bars, left exposed so that more miserable floors may one day be added on. Varying in size from a small room to several storeys, these houses climb the Muqattam cliffs behind the City of the Dead and spill into the clefts of desert at 88

Shuruq City housing development in the desert east of Cairo, 2003.

their feet. They spread west on the plains of Giza, so that, driving along the new Ring Road, the Pyramids appear incidentally on a foreshortened horizon like another unusually tall and orderly pile of bricks. The controversial Ring Road, billed as an anodyne for Cairo’s traffic ills, encircles the city and provides access to the satellite cities on its periphery. It also pens in the Pyramids while trespassing the possibly treasure-rich plateau that surrounds them, a World Heritage Site under the protection of unesco. Following the death of the Ring Road controversy, a brief period of respect was observed before nocturnal building sessions on the highway began anew. However necessary the road, indeed, however certain its absorption into an ever-widening urban web, it might easily have been situated to allow the monuments and their visitors the honour of space and perspective. The Pyramids plateau is thus a zone of dispute, where the claims of archaeological glory barely contain a mob of greedy expansionists craving a ‘Pyramids view’ to publicize as one of the features of their new villa or hotel. For now, a few Pharaonic bones and the odd sarcophagus are all that hold them at bay. Of the several ‘first generation’ satellite cities, the Sixth of October is the most successful, its development eerily reminiscent of the science fiction colonization of outer space. At 25 kilometres west of central Cairo it is somewhat more accessible, but not long ago the Sixth of October ’s desolate desert location resembled nothing so much as a slightly more beige Mars. Intrepid investors snatched up plots at dirt cheap, subsidized prices and all projects were granted a 10-year tax holiday. Today, an estimated 1,000 factories operate (or are under construction), and there are rows of glum government-sponsored housing units for workers, although many employees are still bussed in daily. There are thousands of middle-class apartment buildings, built by individuals to live in and rent out, although only a portion of each is so far inhabited and current population figures number around several hundred thousand.73 Two universities and a major medical facility have opened, as well as the Media City complex for film and tv production. But by far the most Olympian addition to the Sixth of October is a pantheon of gated residential communities, whose names embody the new mythology of Cairo’s satellite cityspace age. 90

A roll-call of the new communities sounds wistful and ingenuous: Green Land, Tree Land, Gardenia Park, Belleville, Royal City, Palm Hills, Beverly Hills and the evocative Moon Land. While it is perfectly natural that a new elite should desire something they never had, the architecture in the communities, often designed by American firms, is as alien to the local setting as the lifestyle it represents. Indeed, there are only two things that link the new compounds with the city that spawned them. One is the fact that in this incalculable expanse of desert, the huge pastel villas with their turrets and cupolas are built practically on top of one another. The other corollary is that they occupy an area well removed from the ragtag constructions of individual families and the governmentsponsored housing blocks. Built by a handful of powerful investors, they recall the walled palatine cities of Cairo’s early founders. The largest and most extravagant of the compounds provides a case in point. Covering ten square kilometres, Dreamland, its cheapest property selling for le100,000, will remain just that for the vast majority of Egyptians. Perhaps that’s what Dreamland investors had in mind when they equipped it with a public amusement park (42 rides), a Shopping Resort (with an indoor artificial lake), a 27-hole golf course (largest in Egypt) and an ‘affordably priced’ neighbourhood called Equestrian City ‘featuring some of the finest stallions in Egypt’.74 It doesn’t hurt to dream – or does it? While it seems inevitable that Cairo’s galactic growth will subsume the desert cities, for now, those who can afford it are reluctant to leave their friends and relatives behind. A gregarious, family and tradition-oriented people, Cairenes tend to prefer the inner city’s earthly straits to the promised pleasures of the parallel universe. According to David Sims, urban planning consultant, ‘in 1996, after twenty years of promotion, the total population in all the new towns in Egypt represented less than the increase in Greater Cairo over a six-month period’.75 The city crowds as close as it can to its icons in Giza, nearly overwhelming them. Approaching the Pyramids from downtown Cairo, one travels the Pyramids Road, a jumbled street-front mixing shops, third-rate hotels and fast-food joints with the foyers of standardissue concrete high-rise apartments. Between this and the parallel artery of Faisal Street, everything that less than twenty years ago was farmland is covered in cheap housing. Hard by the monuments, 91

Nezlit al-Samman (Quail Landing), a village said to have been settled by the Pyramids’ builders and once remote from the city centre is now a prosperous and fully integrated neighbourhood in the voracious Giza Governorate. The compact but ornate villas of stable owners, as well as gold and perfume merchants, are surrounded by their places of business. Modest souvenir stalls decorate their entries with spangled scarves and plaster statuary of the animal-headed gods. The town, with its bazaars, papyrus sellers, camel drivers and stable hustlers reaches to within whispering distance of the Sphinx, whose head is much smaller than the rest of its body, as if it had shrunk from exposure and longed for the days when it was still sensibly covered to the neck in sand. Perhaps today’s greatest riddle is not so much ‘Where is Cairo headed?’ as ‘Where is Cairo at all?’ Is it in the old quarters, or the remnants of belle époque downtown, or in the new middle-class areas on the west bank, or in the satellite cities of the desert? Or is the real Cairo to be found in the myriad hovels in which most people actually live? If so, then what of the city’s persistent allure and the loyal pride of those who live here? Does a collective hallucination sustain the image of an ancient and venerable city when it is in fact disfigured with slums and crass consumerism? Can Cairo’s dust, deprivations and decay vanish in a mirage of history when most of the inhabitants are barely acquainted with its past? The glories of fourteenth-century Cairo prompted a traveller to comment that ‘what one sees in a dream surpasses reality, but all that one could dream about Cairo would not come up to the truth’. Today, what most beguiles is what is unseen but perceived through the doors to past and future that the city so unselfconsciously leaves ajar. It is impossible to say how much of the past can be gathered from the cues of edifice and historical narrative. A sense of language, legend and custom surely aids understanding, but the city’s people add far more, possessed as they are of a tincture of culture, even while acting as its solvent. Cairo is a city poised on the fulcrum of history and its obliteration. Whatever their connection to a variegated past or to the generations yet to come, Cairenes have one thing in common: they are a people fated to endure in a city destined to outlive itself. In the arc of fourteen centuries, against a background of ongoing change, Cairo’s longevity and continuity belong to what the poet 92

and inventor John Allen calls ‘the human constant, an infinite world of potential actions’.76 The cumulative choice of actions, as well as the surrounding field of potentiality, amounts to a culture whose attributes, or memes, are transmitted as artlessly as humans reproduce and as inescapably as death. Cairo, with its relics of the past, and moving evidence of a more immediate and monumental survival, is an elaborate memento mori. It is a city of paradox because it lives on its ruins, these days so defiantly that people rebuild not for posterity, but as if to hasten decay, and so to build again.

93

Samurai at the Sphinx, c. 1860s.

iii The Guests

We’re all guests in this life. egyptian proverb For the average provincial Egyptian, a trip to Cairo is an unforgettable, once in a lifetime event. Cairenes, for their part, fortunate to dwell at the centre of the world, take the adage ‘Who leaves home, lessens his prestige’ quite literally, leaving their neighbourhoods only if necessary for work or the odd excursion. Many will visit the Pyramids but once or twice, nor are the great temples of Luxor and Karnak at the top of the list of places to see. The hajj, or pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, is a coveted destination for many Egyptians, to whom the idea of owning a passport would be otherwise unlikely to occur. The economist and social commentator Galal Amin quotes his father’s description of being assigned a teaching position in Tanta, just 100 kilometres from Cairo in the early 1900s: If, at the age of sixteen . . . a young man would hear today that he is to travel to Singapore or Tokyo or Malaya, he would not feel the anxiety that I felt about my trip to Tanta. I . . . said good-bye to my family and spent the journey crying. Amin goes on to describe his mother’s reaction to the news, in the 1940s, that his brother had received a scholarship to study in England: [She] was stricken with grief . . . She tried everything to make him give up the idea . . . but was unsuccessful. She spent several months before her son’s departure sobbing and wailing and we would sometimes be woken in the middle of the night by her crying and screaming while she described the flame that was eating up her heart at the thought of being separated from her son.1 95

Soliman Pasha Boulevard, c. 1950.

The 1970s oil boom sparked unprecedented migrations of job seekers to the Arabian Gulf and enterprising Cairenes comprise a significant portion of those countries’ professional and semi-skilled workers. Yet despite the financial rewards, even those who can emigrate eastwards do so halfheartedly. Arrivals and departures, even for relatively short trips within Egypt, remain emotionally charged events. There is a certain angst attached to the prospect of leaving home, inadvertently captured by the name of a downtown Cairo tour agency called One Way Travel, suggesting an exclusivity its owners surely did not mean to imply. Aside from the wealthy who have always enjoyed greater mobility, Cairo’s youthful population nurtures a desire for exploration and escape unknown to previous generations. For them, satellite tv, Hollywood films, pop music, the internet, as well as the tantalizing presence of American commercialism and a flamboyantly visible upper class, have awakened a longing akin to that defined by Heidegger as ‘the agony of the nearness of the distant’. They long for other schools and other lives in places like Europe, 96

Canada, even the United States, despite alienating post-9/11 events – any place, in short, that might have them. Unfortunately, the closest most young people will come to their dream are the visa lines at the embassies. Consequently, people’s knowledge of the ‘other’ derives primarily from observations and surmise regarding an unremitting stream of visitors, alongside reports from friends and relatives who managed to travel, and exposure to the virtual realities of foreign environments. The Cairene perception of foreigners and foreign lifestyles is formed through these interactions, illumined and at times obscured by traces of the foreigner ’s historic presence in the city. Foreign influences are real, because foreigners and remnants of their past as well as current activities in the city exist. But influences are also imagined, in that they are subject to post-colonial propagandist spins, and ever shifting, under social and political pressures. Even if a Cairene never meets one personally, it is known that income from tourists assists in keeping Egypt afloat, which helps account for the deference towards foreigners that is never so much forced, these days, as fatigued. Perceptions and interactions are moreover shaped by a powerfully enduring tradition of hospitality that, in addition to frank curiosity, characterizes the people of Cairo. The Sufi notion that ‘Knowledge of the stranger is knowledge of the self’ may not be a conscious motivation for Cairene hospitality, but the city’s persona is abundantly revealed through its manifold roles as host. The impact of a particular group’s presence on Cairo seems to form a negative correlation with the duration of their stay. The French stayed for four years, the British for 70, the Turks for 300, yet Cairo’s romance with the French is in greatest evidence. ‘The best visits are the shortest’, as the saying goes. French is the lingua franca of a dwindling old-world elite and more broadly esteemed as a language of expression associated with culture and the arts, whereas English is the language of business and the nouveau riche. In matters of décor, Cairene taste runs to Louis Farouk, a pseudo-style instated by the monarchy, blending French Empire with Ottoman Baroque, exemplified by the interior of the Mohammed Ali Mosque and the bulky, gilded home furnishings that Egyptians love and find grand. The British are more prosaically recalled: ingilizi is a colloquial adjective describing someone possessed of the rare and suspicious virtue of punctuality. Then there is the name of the currency (the pound) and the joyless annual 18 June celebration of Evacuation 97

Day. This is not to say that Cairenes dislike the British. They may be the villains in televised soap operas about the monarchy and Egypt’s independence, but all is forgiven, the details of the occupation goodnaturedly blurred or forgotten, to the extent that many a tv viewer takes these cheaply staged historical dramas for fiction. Foreign actors suitable for the British roles are hard to come by, so that fairhaired East Europeans or Russians often play the colonialist heavies, a caricature enhanced by the actors’ scant facility with Arabic, resulting in uniformly stern, taciturn portrayals. Turks suffer a similar oversimplification in the historical imagination. The power of the royal family and ruling class was linked to Turkish descent so children now learn how the Turkish language infiltrated and corrupted Egyptian Arabic and how the Turks kidnapped Egyptian crafts and culture to Istanbul. The Ottoman rule is described as a time of stagnation and decline that persisted until the 1952 officers’ revolt restored Egypt’s ‘Egyptian-ness’. Today, a common association with modern Turkey is the film turki, meaning a soft porn film, a genre most Egyptians encounter via Turkish satellite tv. No matter how unusual or abrasive a foreign behaviour may seem by local standards, Cairenes tend towards tolerance of others’ eccentricities, preferring to accommodate rather than censor activities that may well turn out to be profitable, entertaining or, at least, the subject of heated moralizing. In World War ii, for instance, when the city roiled with Allied troops, Egyptians supplied a quality of food and lodging for the occupier they often could not afford for themselves, in addition to anticipating the soldiers’ varied needs. According to Artemis Cooper, author of Cairo in the War: hawkers tried to sell them fly-whisks, razor-blades or dirty magazines called Zip, Laffs, Wam or Saucy Snips . . . young pimps called, ‘Hi George! You want my sister? Very nice, very clean, all pink inside like Queen Victoria.’ . . . Sex-starved troops coming in from the desert turned Cairo’s oldest profession into a major service industry, focused on the run-down quarter of Clot Bey . . .2 The British called Egyptians wogs (wily oriental gentlemen), an acronym that back in the time of Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring) referred to local clerks ‘working on government service’. This relatively inoffensive title was offset by the dismissiveness with which it 98

was used. The British played derisive games like knocking the tarbushes (fezes) from the heads of Egyptian men, hijacking taxis and mugging civilians. With the same combination of arrogance and exasperation, Miles Lampson, Egypt’s wartime administrator, played golf at the Gezira Sporting Club armed with pistols he used to kill irksome birds. ‘His targets were the scavenging kites that floated over the city for which he had a passionate hatred because they stole his golf balls in the mistaken belief that they were eggs.’3 In the summer of 1942, word went around Cairo that the Germans were headed for the capital. Lampson’s response to ‘the flap’ was to order the British Embassy’s railings repainted and go shopping with his wife. The threat was nevertheless real enough to have quantities of sensitive files burnt on 1 July, a day that, among the British ‘became famous in Cairo as Ash Wednesday’. So great a quantity of files were incinerated, Artemis Cooper tells us, that ‘The air was thick with smoke. The heat of the fires blew some papers high in the air before they had been properly burnt; and, days later, peanut vendors were still making little cones out of half-charred and strictly-classified information.’ Local feelings about the possibility of yet another European invasion ranged from fear to yearning, but regardless of politics, the ‘tired and beaten’ British troops who flooded the city in truckloads from the desert, ‘prompted the kindness of the local people, who gave them soft drinks and cigarettes’.4 The remains of the beautifully wrought villas that once surrounded the British Embassy, as well as the neo-classical residences in the adjacent downtown, all bear the marks of a half-century of government stewardship and the accompanying dust and disillusionment. Yet people still come from all parts of Cairo to stroll and shop downtown, perhaps because the streets are more welcoming and the buildings, however defaced, more evocative, suggesting how people once lived in a generic ‘over there’, that comprises both the West and the past. Some critics contend that Cairo was disfigured when the Khedive Ismail built the western quarter to make his foreign guests and financiers comfortable about investing in Egypt. Ironically, the travellers were probably less interested in Cairo’s version of modernity, than the city’s unfamiliarity and their own Arabian Nights-inspired expectations. The unwitting guests are thus also accused of creating ‘the exotic orient’, and conspiring to keep Cairo steeped in the past 99

At the citadel in 1996, celebrating the feast of Eid al-Adha.

so that it might be visited for entertainment, as one would a theme park or a zoo. It’s true that residents of the medieval quarter no more consider their faulty sewage oriental, than office workers crowding fractured downtown flats mourn the passage of the belle époque. People do, however, tend to find the new exotic and even beautiful. 100

That’s how plenty of Egyptian males feel about Scandinavian girls, but they can scarcely be blamed for inventing blondes. What is objectionable is the condescension characterizing so many interactions that influenced and continue to influence local history, attitudes of unquestioning superiority that the information age has done little to inform. If Cairenes are wary of a diffusely foreign influence they see as domineering and even threatening, the view is not unfounded. Countless rivalries played themselves out with Cairo as backdrop, oblivious to the inhabitants’ needs or desires. In World War ii Cairenes were stagehands in Europe’s theatre of war; in the 1990s the Gulf War created economic hardships requiring years to overcome. The intifada in 2000 didn’t help business, nor did the American-led Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003. People are jobless as the city is invaded by goods either too expensive to afford (made in the usa) or too cheap to manufacture competitively (made in China). The men in charge, meanwhile, seem to mimic the despised colonialists, posing with a self-importance they mistake for authority and understanding. Of the many paradoxes that characterize Cairo’s relationship with its past and the role of foreigners therein, there is one to which several monuments exist. These are Cairo’s museums, ostensibly built to celebrate and preserve evidence of Egypt’s, and therefore humanity’s, achievements. How strange that the museums’ European founders should exclude Egyptians from their development and administration. Yet, if the outsiders hadn’t tried to appropriate history, Egypt may not have hastened to claim it. The ruins of the past created an unexpectedly inviting canvas on which the differences between peoples and their intentions could be drawn. The French, having witnessed Pharaonic achievements with eyes unclouded by expectation and sharpened by technical appreciation, conceived a passion to decode the past, hoping to find in that greatness some measure of their own. Egypt held so many secrets, the truths about shared beginnings that might have served to close the gap between explorer and explored. Instead, the early adventure of Egyptian archaeology belonged to Europeans, while ‘Egyptians flickered in the shadows as trusty foreman, loyal servants, labourers, tomb robbers, antiquities dealers, obstructionist officials and benighted nationalists’. 5 The word egyptology (from égyptologue, 101

coined in 1827 by Champollion) referred exclusively to Pharaonic history, leaving those who would study Egypt as a wider subject short of an appropriate noun. Three of Egypt’s four museums are located in Cairo, the Pharaonic, Islamic and Coptic, but only the lastnamed was founded by an Egyptian. 6 Administrative control of museums and excavations did not come fully into Egyptian hands until 1952. Until the mid-1800s European consular emissaries stocked their own national museums by mining Egyptian antiquities. To gain a measure of control, Mohammed Ali issued a decree in 1835 forbidding them from exporting monuments, since he himself relied on antiquities as barter for foreign services and expertise and may have been worried about running out. The decree called for the creation of a ‘depot . . . to display [the monuments] for travellers’ and to spare no expense in their maintenance, but this resolve seems to have slipped his mind by the following year, when he considered quarrying the Pyramids to build a dam.7 An Armenian engineer had even visualized a railway to facilitate the dismantling. Fortunately, the French Consul-General, Jean-François Mimaut, issued a public cri de cœur, calling the Pyramids ‘the most venerable monument of the ancient human race . . . a trust which the ancient world has left on the soil of Egypt’. Mohammed Ali changed his mind, and a gratified Mimaut relieved the soil of Egypt of a portion of the Abydos temple. Collecting antiquities was a gentlemen’s sport and an imperialist contest, especially between the French and British, who fought over the Rosetta Stone and competed to be the first to decipher it. Champollion, who broke the code in 1822, felt that removing antiquities was a virtuous act of salvage, so long as they were for display and not profit, the prevailing view being that the Egyptians were incapable of appreciating them. An examination of Arabic texts (dating from the tenth, thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) suggests otherwise, where several enthusiastic historians described monuments in some detail, but the Europeans were more interested in hieroglyphs and, of course, the loot.8 The French and the British bickered over who had the better obelisk as a gift from Mohammed Ali. So complacent had they become about their right to harvest Egypt’s past that the British refused to pay for their obelisk’s shipment, whose transport was finally arranged (by an Englishman) in 1877 and now stands on the Embankment beside the Thames. The French put their obelisk in 102

Paris’s Place de la Concorde, and if it wasn’t for a budding French Egyptologist named Auguste Mariette, the Sphinx itself might have emigrated.9 In 1858 Mohammed Ali’s successor, Said, re-launched the national museum project in earnest when he awarded Mariette the exclusive right to dig in Egypt. Mariette, a keen and proprietary organizer, put an end to the antiquities free-for-all. He deployed 7,000 corvée workers at sites throughout the country to dig for the future contents of Egypt’s first museum. The workers may have preferred a decent wage to the honour of contributing to their cultural heritage; the only ones paid were the foremen (rais) who took bribes from wealthy rural villagers so they wouldn’t have to join the corvée. Sometimes the foremen tricked Mariette by seeding statuary in dud sites to keep them digging near a particularly lucrative village. Life on the farm was rough, but it was a picnic compared to the desert corvée. In 1863 Mariette and Ismail (Said’s successor) inaugurated Cairo’s first museum, a neo-Pharaonic structure in Bulaq on the Nile corniche. Nearby, in 1869, Ismail and the multi-talented Ali Mubarak (variously minister of public works, education, communication and railways), founded Egypt’s first school of Egyptology (‘the school of ancient tongues’ in Arabic), placing a German named Brugsch in charge. 10 Five years passed before Mariette’s differences with Brugsch caused the school to be closed, its usefulness undermined by Mariette’s opinion that graduates were not adequately qualified to work in his museum. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that Ahmed Kamal (died 1923) became Egypt’s first Egyptologist, quite an accomplishment in the midst of the British occupation. To Lord Cromer ’s mind, Egyptians weren’t civilized enough to manage their own history, nor was he anxious – by providing access to education – to be proved wrong. The fact that Egypt’s monumental past could act as a rallying point for its growing (anti-British) nationalist movement was one of al-Lurd’s legitimate concerns. Pharaonic achievements had been evoked at various times to strengthen a shared sense of identity, notably by Rifaa al-Tahtawi, an al-Azhar educated reformist, author of historical works about Egypt, the Arabs and the French, whom he visited on a scholarship from Mohammed Ali. In Paris Tahtawi witnessed the July Revolution of 1830 and wished to introduce the concepts of patriotism and social 103

justice back home. Thanks to him and a handful of others, the ensuing three decades are referred to as the nahda or Awakening, largely associated with Ismail’s reign and the founding of a variety of scientific, cultural, communication and educational enterprises, mostly in the capital.11 Foreigners may have had unseemly control of some institutions, thanks to the management priorities of Mohammed Ali and his heirs, but they were still hired hands in Cairo at the ruler ’s behest. The British occupation in 1882 represented a dramatic derailment in terms of self-determined development. The image of Gamal Abdel Nasser, his broad-shouldered back to the camera, standing tall before the colossi of Abu Simbel, became an icon of the 1952 coup that placed Egypt in charge of its past. If the results of this recently acquired stewardship appear mixed, a realistic assessment must encompass not only artefacts and their management, but attitudes towards them, indeed, towards history itself. The geographer and historian Gamal Hamdan wrote that ‘continuity is the genuine trait in the personality of Egypt’, a characteristic often portrayed in the West as plodding sameness.12 The short history of Cairo presented here is ample illustration of the contrary, that change is the only constant in a plot full of twists and turns, many of them the product of outside interference and ambitions to own history. Egyptians are different; they possess their past with the detached assurance of a woman who keeps a box of mementos beneath the bed to admire from time to time. Perhaps the very breadth of the past, perforated as it is with intrusions, helps account for the perception of ‘history as outsider’ that manifests itself so clearly in governmental practices that reduce a vibrant, complex narrative to a dead letter. These include the narrow scope of educational curricula, the clichéd distortions and stultifying restrictions imposed on popular historical representations (in tv, film, etc.) and the jealous secrecy with which documents relating to the revolution, or anything else for that matter, are withheld; all tactics that distance people from history, as if too much might be bad for them. But paternalism aside, who would have thought that something so incidental to the present as the ruins of the past would sustain such unflagging, widespread interest? Or that after thousands of years, Egypt would look to the crumbs of their ancients’ tables for sustenance? Or that this surplus, this intrinsic generosity, 104

Schoolchildren welcome Prince Charles to Cairo in 1997.

would make an industry of hospitality? Owning history may have an advantage or two after all. When the Minister of Tourism, Mahmoud El Beltagui, says that Egypt hosted four million guests in the year 2000 and expects a whopping nine million by 2012, he sounds as self-satisfied as if he’d picked them all up at the airport himself. His triumphant recital conjures bus and buffet logistics and the incalculable contingencies associated with so many guests, so that one thinks, Good God, how does he do it? Likewise, post-9/11, when he announces that Egypt recovered approximately 3.5 million guests despite the ‘conditions’, we applaud and count our blessings. What he’s not telling us is that France receives 76 million tourists annually, Spain nearly 50, and the uk 25; in fact, Europe captures half the world’s tourist market, while the entire history saturated Middle East barely manages a measly two per cent. Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London gets almost as much action as all of Egypt.13 Conditions hereabouts are admittedly daunting; the Gulf War, a massacre in the temple, a vicious occupation up the road, Baghdad sacked, the threat of more of the same; all coupled with the rote misconceptions of a largely unsympathetic world press. A notional 105

geography places Egypt in an amorphous Arab (read terrorist) place, too close to conflict for comfort. Marketing, some say, is the answer, look at what ‘I love ny’ did for Manhattan, or what ‘Paris is for lovers’ did for the French capital. Cairo’s millennial motto – ‘The mother of the world’ – is outdated and invites facile profanity. Why couldn’t they come up with something snazzier? Then one day, a provocative poster made its appearance in the first-class cars of the Cairo–Alexandria express train, a picture of the Sphinx, illuminated at night with a caption reading: ‘Egypt. There for a Thousand Years’. Was that the best they could do? And why a thousand? Perhaps because the word for Egypt (misr) doubles for Cairo and was mistranslated, but even Cairo is 1,400 years old. But is it really enough to just be there for so long? The government seems to think so, viewing everything from marketing to efficient services as infra dig, something akin to bribing the character witnesses. Cairo, like a rich heiress, wants to be loved for herself.14 Luckily, guests are unlikely to be seduced by appearances. Although plenty skip the city and head straight for Luxor, Aswan or the beaches of Sinai, Cairo is still the port of call for the bulk of Egypt’s visitors, and the airport (opened in 1963) looks it – in fact, it looks as if all three million were there at once and have been for some time, sharing the same bathrooms. Even the wing called Terminal Two, completed in the 1980s, after a few years’ usage acquired a melancholic air, reminiscent of hand-operated Chinese kitchen appliances. But if Cairo appears shabby to its guests, it’s worth asking how the guests look to Cairenes. The short answer is they look lost, slightly dazed, and to many entrepreneurial types ‘like they’ve got sucker written on their foreheads’. As far as Cairenes are concerned, tourists dress funny, as if they’d confused the desert city with a beach resort. They wear hats and socks, carry water bottles and read books while walking, which seems overnice to the gregarious dust warriors of the capital. And when gaggles of skimpily clad visitors appear, the quantities of shimmering flesh on display can distract even the most diffident city dweller, who may frown at the lack of decorum while struggling to contain the pinch impulse. And if he succumbs, who can blame him? He’s probably just checking to see if it’s real. There is a wealth of literature describing the wishes and desires of tourists; far less regarding their hosts’ perceptions and discomfitures. In the latter category we have ‘Doxey’s Irritation Quotient’, 106

which plots the course of host perceptions from ‘euphoria’ through ‘apathy’ ‘annoyance’ and ‘antagonism’, like a romance gone sour, offering little advice to the lovelorn. In the more lucrative ‘tourist motivation’ department there are sensitive typographies, earnestly complied by market research firms for mega-clients like American Express. They identify ‘explorers’, ‘drifters’ ‘indulgers’, ‘worriers’ and the mysterious ‘pyschocentrics’, outlining the consumerist tendencies of each.15 Travel industry pundits would profit from a seminar uniting the senior members of Cairo’s khirtiyya, the band of latter-day dragomen who can spot a tourist and name his or her nationality, temperament and sexual preferences at fifty paces, in addition to determining the contents of their pockets with uncanny precision. The downtown khirti differs somewhat from his Khan al-Khalili and Pyramid counterparts, but most can exchange pleasantries in three to seven languages, including Russian and Japanese. The tourist is generally invited into a souvenir shop, offered tea or Turkish coffee, then mildly fleeced and left feeling like he or she has struck a hell of a bargain. Sometimes the khirti will become a tour guide, occasionally a husband; flexibility’s the key, and Cairenes are nothing if not flexible. Urban tourism is not exactly Egypt’s forte; it’s a stretch to envisage sweltering, cacophonous Cairo as a ‘leisure product’ like Brussels or Amsterdam. Yet in a world where everything is known, where exploration itself has become a niche market in a global industry, navigating Cairo still smacks of the expedition where surprises and mutual misapprehensions await at every turn. It’s easy for Cairenes to forget that tourists are on vacation, a concept without much currency amongst the poor. They see the visitors as pampered and bemused, their scanty dress suggests a morality to match. Curiosity and admiration for the guests’ heightened possibilities are leavened with disdain, since Cairenes value endurance and sharp-wittedness (not to mention virginity) as proofs of character. Few pause to imagine the visitors’ daily routines, their financial struggles and minor triumphs. Tourism nurtures illusions such as these, on the one hand of wealth and freedom, on the other of ‘authenticity’ and discovery. In an attempt to describe the phenomena of contemporary travel, sociologists tell us that ‘a reaction to the harshness of modern mass-produced life has been the belief that “authentic” life is occurring elsewhere in the world’. Travel, therefore, offers ‘a transient 107

opportunity to capture’ some of this ‘authenticity’ that presumably exists just beyond one’s reach. Today’s travel urge is characterized as ‘a wanderlust not for other places but for other lives . . . for new, more satisfying self-images’.16 A similar sentiment was conveyed in the last tale of the One Thousand and One Nights by Ali, a merchant from Cairo, who said: ‘The world is show and trickery, and in the land where no one knows you, there do what you like’. Authenticity is more desirable and less accessible than ever before; like exoticism, the demand extinguishes the supply. So tourists are milked, although seldom aggressively, a practice institutionalized by the government that charges foreigners higher rates for domestic flights and cultural sites than the locals. Every dollar or euro is atomized among middlemen, a mist so fine it evaporates before it hits the ground.17 Egypt’s overlords never stopped to ask ‘What’s a city for, to make bucks or to live in?’ That would be out of character and a waste of precious time. Nile-side real estate goes to the highest bidder, massive towers that consume prime locations in order to serve members of a migrant population that only spends a few nights of their lives in the city. The attempt to incorporate the new buildings harmoniously into the urban fabric is nil. Thus, the shortest visits have the most lasting impact, convulsing entire neighbourhoods, most of whose inhabitants will only see the inside of the upscale buildings if they happen to work there. Whatever authenticity Cairo may possess, the developers of its five-star hotels do not admire it. Although relatively few in number, tourists contribute around four billion us dollars to Egypt’s bottom line and provide jobs, directly and indirectly for approximately two million people. Tourism is therefore a social and economic force, one of whose farreaching effects is to justify, by virtue of their investment, the developer’s greed and poor taste. Gulf, especially Saudi, developers are big winners, holding fat chunks of tourist real estate thanks to government officials who treat the city like a game of Monopoly. The Egyptian relationship with the Saudis is one of exceptional tensions and constraints, in which profiteering, religion, cultural variants and sour grapes all play a part; the attachment draws its breath from tenderly incubated enmities lying beneath a coverlet of regional co-operation. Egyptians generally perceive themselves as more cultured than their Gulf neighbours, whose joy and astonishment at the oil boom of the ’70s they did not share. Local sentiments may be understood 108

by imagining how Cinderella would have felt if the prince married one of her ugly sisters. The coup de grâce is having to work for them, to bear the brunt of childishly cruel experiments with newfound power and wealth. Unsurprisingly, the reports of Egyptian workers regarding Gulf employers are lurid and legion.18 The grudge runs so deep that whenever Cairo suffers a heat wave, people complain that it comes from the Gulf, or as popularly expressed, ‘from one of the mouths of hell to the east’. Although antagonism is officially downplayed as quarrels among cousins, annual family reunions suggest otherwise. Since Egypt is not subject to the severe religious restrictions enforced by Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf countries, each year during the fasting month of Ramadan, thousands of Gulf tourists flock to Cairo like migratory birds, their women fully veiled and gloved, wearing beaked masks, the men in flowing white galabiyyas and kufiyyas (headgear). In the summer, to cool down, they come again, so that June through August is known as the ‘Arab season’, a time when Gulf pockets are plucked like ripe fruits and the humiliation of formerly Gulf-employed menial workers (often cab drivers) is assuaged.19 Although visitors from some Gulf countries are treated with respect, in the eyes of the average Cairene, the Saudis and Kuwaitis are many karmic lives short of redemption. The Kuwaitis are considered arrogant and held responsible for the decline in Egyptian tourism related to the 1992 war waged on behalf of their so-called democracy. Blame is laid at the Saudi door for untoward religious proselytizing. Some say they’re making a bid to re-establish the caliphate, and that, susceptible to Saudi religious rhetoric, more girls are taking the veil and more people are becoming intolerant of the generally relaxed attitude towards religion for which Cairo has long been known and appreciated. The Saudis’ religious pretensions, or ambitions as they may be, are undermined by the fact that Gulf guests crowd the casinos, restaurants and bars of Cairo’s five-star hotels, drinking freely. Gulf visitors are not your typical tourists. Rather than visit the monuments, they love to go to movies, to walk the thronged streets or else drive up and down them in sports cars showing off. The closest most get to the Pyramids are the belly-dancing joints on the Pyramids Road, where they carouse and stuff the dancers’ sequined bodices with dinars until dawn. It is known, though not much discussed, 109

that some Gulf Arabs acquire Egyptian women during their vacations, usually young ones, by means of the urfi, or temporary Islamic marriage contract, which is one of convenience for the male. There are also hints of a darker connivance, the prostitution of underage girls and boys. For worldly-wise Cairenes, this can only amount to one appraisal, that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and for the Gulf Arabs, it’s affordable. There’s a joke about Saudi King Fahd discovering Aladdin’s lamp. He rubs it and a genie appears who asks what the king desires. The king rolls his eyes and says, ‘Get lost, genie, I have everything.’ Hence the colloquial expression describing Arab affluence, ‘They live above the djinn’ (fiayshin foq il-ginn), even though many Gulf visitors dispose of the same hard-earned means as any other tourists. The perception of unassailable wealth is magnified by the fact that Gulf Arabs appear to live above the law as well as the djinn. While Cairenes can look forward to the firm hand of martial law for offences both real and imagined, Saudi nationals flaunt their connections, as in the notorious case of Prince al-Turki bin Abdel Aziz and his wife, Princess Hind Shams al-Fassi. The princess was convicted of grand theft in February 2001 for neglecting to pay for a million dollars’ worth of jewels. Sentenced in absentia to three years jail with hard labour, she has yet to be apprehended, despite the fact that her address is quite well known. Along with a small army of bodyguards, the al-Turki family occupies the top three floors of the Ramses Hilton, a dingy postmodern castle keep overlooking the Nile in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Former chief of Saudi intelligence, Prince al-Turki is King Fahd’s brother, and fourth in line for the Saudi throne. He left his country in the early 1970s, shortly after marrying his strikingly attractive Moroccan wife. While the prince purportedly languishes under her spell (as well, some say, as tranquillizers) Hind rules their videomonitored kingdom with sensational malice. In November 1998, two Egyptian servants suspected by the princess of stealing were beaten and imprisoned on her orders, without food or water. They attempted to escape by climbing from the 29th floor on knotted sheets, an act of action film-inspired desperation, during which one of them broke his back, yet the charges against the al-Turki family were eventually dropped, a settlement presumably arrived at. In 1999 an Egyptian police lieutenant allegedly did not clear the way quickly enough for the Prince’s retinue to enter the hotel coffee 110

shop. He suffered a detached retina when one of Hind’s relatives whacked him in the face with a walkie-talkie. The lieutenant’s lawyer told the Cairo Times that the al-Turki entourage was involved in 50 incidents of assault and torture against hotel employees, servants and bystanders during the ten years of their ongoing residence. Following an incident where Hind herself thrashed an errant bodyguard about the face and head with a wire clothes-hanger, his colleagues (several of whom stood by and watched) weighed the pros and cons and decided she’d gone too far. The entire group mutinied but was quickly replaced. Privy to a wealth as esoteric as the traditions of her father, a Moroccan Sufi sheikh, Hind al-Fassi is a neotype, the Arab villainess, a bandit queen trapped in her own high-tech tower. Cairenes follow the details of the al-Turki drama with understandable avidity. It confirms what’s easiest to believe about Gulf decadence and about their own government, which must bow before Saudi influence and wealth. When Cairenes refer to offensive Gulf visitors as arabs, it is to distance themselves from something they look down on, the same way African–Americans may refer disparagingly to unappreciated members of the community as ‘nigger ’. Egyptians use the term arab without a trace of irony, because they consider themselves apart, rooted in a rich heritage they share willingly enough with their various guests, safe in the knowledge that it belongs to them alone, indeed, is the one thing that no one can take away. From its inception Cairo was cosmopolitan, comprising diverse peoples and influences. This remains true at the turn of the millennium, with European, Levantine, Arab, Turkish, Central Asian and African citizens as well as tourists, refugees, expatriates, students and business people of every background, inhabiting or transiting the capital. Cairo’s cosmopolitan character may be worn-at-the-heel but it holds its ground, albeit barely, against the great levellers of poverty and entropy. In recent decades, a third force entered the fray, less pervasive but arguably as relentless: commercialism, American style. Cairo owes its early evolution and many-faceted brilliance to the fact of its being a great emporium, a place to exchange goods and ideas. The new consumerist wave is different, a mephistophelean arrangement whose products are superficial, their benefits shortlived. As a nation sworn to the cause of capitalism, Egypt’s leaders 111

have provided the people with some of its ways, but less of its means. They don’t call it ‘fast food’ for nothing. At the vanguard of American tastes and entertainments was Mickey Mouse, who arrived in the late 1950s via Dar al-Hilal, a Cairene publishing house. At a time when children’s publications were few and fleeting, the Mickey Magazine supplied middle-class kids with an enticement to read. The Disney-generated stories were translated into classical Arabic and characters duly adapted: Donald became Battut (Ducky), Uncle Scrooge, fiamm Dahab (Uncle Gold), Goofy was Bunduq (Hazelnut) and Minnie dubbed Mimi. Mickey stayed Mickey, though in Egypt he’s not the character with the most fans. According to Effat Nasser, managing editor for Disney publications from its inception to 2002, and probably the first Egyptian woman to act as intermediary with corporate America, ‘Mickey is a know-it-all, so kids find him boring’. Storylines in which Battut is the protagonist are more popular, she says, ‘because he’s simple-minded and makes mistakes, and his clever nephews (three ducklings) get to correct him. Egyptians identify with the nephews.’20 A number of adjustments were required to make Mickey and his friends more consistent with local values and expectations. Donald and his fiancée Daisy tended to kiss overmuch. These frames were cut, as were entire stories that had to do with snow. Uncle Scrooge’s top hat was systematically erased in the ’50s and ’60s, since it evoked the dress of the colonial overlords.21 In the ’70s more insidious characterizations were suppressed, like the plots featuring a trio of villainous bearded Arabs that were popular back in the States. Meanwhile, Mickey the cover-mouse appeared in full Pharaonic gear like King Tut, and a galabiyya and skullcap like Egyptian farmers. The magazine was distributed throughout the Arab world and featured 25 per cent local content. This included the serialized lives of the prophets Moses, Jesus and Mohammed and stories from Arabic literature adapted for kids, written by renowned Egyptian authors. The weekly edition sold for three piastres from kiosks all over town. An inspired vendor calling himself Uncle Pigeon (fiamm Hamam) circulated the new middle-class neighbourhood of Mohandeseen on a bicycle, shouting out the headlines of the new adventures of Mickey to the delight of a generation of upwardly mobile kids. Distribution peaked at around 100,000 copies per edition regionally, the bulk of which were sold in Egypt. The magazine still exists in a diversified market that it helped, antago112

Fast food, on the 26th of July Street, in 1997.

nistically, to create. Despite the quality of its local content and the attention paid to screening the foreign content, Mickey came under fire during the Nasser era, and was suspected of ulterior motives. The nationalists were afraid Mickey would teach Egyptian youths to forget their culture and become American. Actually, it was the kids who taught their parents to buy what they’d read about in Mickey, which is almost the same thing. The Nasserists can be forgiven for misreading Mickey’s intentions. They hadn’t heard of merchandising, which hit Cairo in the 1980s, in the form of Disney books, toys and apparel. Cairo was awakening to the new consumerism. In the 1980s imported goods were scarcely available in Cairo, except through the black market, where everything from Swiss cheese to French perfume could be had for a price. In normal stores there was little variety, the same monotonous foods, the same dour Soviet fashions and household goods. Eating a hamburger was an experience reserved for nostalgic expats and a handful of adventure113

some Egyptians. Between them, they managed to keep one forlorn branch of Wimpy’s in something resembling business. But by the early 1990s, in response to new economic legislature, the floodgates of foreign goods opened wide. In 2003 there were at least 200 fast food outlets in Cairo, where McDonald’s alone has 32 locations. ‘Take-out’ and ‘home-delivery’ are nothing new in a city where hundreds of thousands of kerbside food vendors and closet-sized restaurants service people without the wherewithal or kitchen facilities to prepare their own meals, nor is fast service the big draw for the franchises, because it isn’t all that fast. It’s air-conditioning, piped-in music, consistency of presentation and the welcome absence of a variety of gut-wrenching bacilli that contribute to their popularity, as does the prestige associated with taking the family out for a little taste of America. No wonder the public greeted the arrival of the McFalafel sandwich in mid-2001 with puzzlement. Falafel (or tafimiyya as it is commonly known in Egypt) is a workaday staple of the Cairene diet, a fried ball of ground beans and spices, available on practically every street corner. McDonald’s introduced their version (a thick patty, served on the inevitable bun) during a mad cow disease scare, coincidentally nine months into the Palestinian intifada, a time when people needed a good reason to spend money in what many perceived as the enemy camp. The McFalafel was a third cheaper than a hamburger at le1.50 but still three times as expensive as ordinary tafimiyya sandwiches. The Egyptians operating the McDonald’s franchises decided to advertise, hiring a popular singer named Shaban to promote the sandwich with a McFalafel jingle aired on local tv and radio. The corpulent Shaban, famous for a song entitled ‘I hate Israel’, thus sang the praises of a phony falafel for the benefit of Israel’s greatest ally. People were even more confused when the singer brazenly claimed he thought he was promoting ta fimiyya for tafimiyya’s sake, and had no idea it was for McDonald’s. His public discomfiture was relieved by none other than the omniscient American Jewish Congress, who complained about the likes of Shaban being allowed to advertise for the company at all. The ad was pulled from the airwaves faster than you can say Western hegemony. Coca-Cola, Cairo’s beverage of choice, celebrated its 60th anniversary in Egypt in 2002, not counting the Nasserist interlude during 114

which it was replaced by a less muscular local cola, called Sport. Coke dominates the Egyptian soft drink market, accounting for more than half the sales in this thirsty city and employing, by the way, around 10,000 Egyptians. That’s why people became nervous in mid-2000, when the rumour circulated that the Coca-Cola logo read backwards in Arabic announced ‘No Mohammed, No Mecca.’ It’s uncertain where or why this rumour originated, but the Cairo municipality took it seriously enough to authorize the removal of Coke signs from stores along a centre-city boulevard. The immense Coke billboard that’s been pouring red neon cola onto Tahrir Square since 1993 could have been next, were it not for the Grand Mufti of al-Azhar who examined the Coke logo and issued a statement that it was designed in Georgia, usa, in 1886 by a chemist with no knowledge of the Arabic language, a pronouncement that did not prevent thousands of Cairenes from holding their bottles up to a mirror just to make sure. The Grand Mufti was involved in the controversy regarding another pillar of American consumerism, this time to its detriment. Advertising bans affecting the tobacco industry in first world countries are slow to reach places like Egypt, where a cigarette and a cup of sugary tea is as good as a meal for a large demographic segment. Although the legal smoking age is eighteen, adolescents and preteens argue that if they’re old enough to work for a living, they’re old enough to smoke. Egypt’s youth-skewed population represents a massive potential market for tobacco sales, as do women, for whom smoking has been traditionally unacceptable. Marketing campaigns launched by Philip Morris use slogans like ‘Set off on the road to adventure’, or contest fliers featuring a cowboy puffing away beside a pristine stream. To enter the contest, all you need is proof of purchase of five packs of Marlboro red or white. The text reads: Change the Tempo! Ten days await you in a world pulsating with the rhythm of nature! Come to Marlboro Country! Be free in its vast space. Discover nature that is like magic . . .22 This is a particularly mean tack, considering that Cairo is the city that Mother Nature forgot and the only thing free or vast that is available to its citizens is the business end of governmental, or, in this case, market-driven cynicism. 115

The sibyl of the Fishawi Café, sitting beneath the mirror in 2000.

Enter the Grand Mufti, citing Qur√anic verses about preserving one’s health, declaring smoking haram (forbidden), and even encouraging women to divorce their husbands if they refuse to quit. These religious injunctions may exercise some minor constraint on the would-be Marlboro man, but there are other, more urgent ones, like the lack of cash (imported cigarettes cost more than four times as much as the local Cleopatra brand) and associations with real-life cowboys who ‘smoke [Arabs] out of their holes’.23 Boycotts on American goods began in response to the Palestinian intifada of 2000, to protest the Israeli occupation and American foreign policy in the region. Aside from the average person’s feeble buying power, the boycotts have difficulty gaining momentum because like every other grass-roots movement in Egypt, the Emergency Law impedes their organization. More importantly, following some of the largest impromptu demonstrations in Cairo in recent memory, when American franchises were pelted with stones, the Press pointed out that these were Egyptian-owned enterprises, employing Egyptians and utilizing a significant amount of Egyptian 116

goods. The demonstrations and ongoing boycotts serve to vent anger, but it is ultimately self-directed anger, since it is most often Egyptians who suffer, as powerless people do, inflicting harm on themselves in an attempt to convey a message. The boycotts have, however, focused public attention on the extent to which American interests are present in people’s lives. Cairo’s American Chamber of Commerce represents 600 companies either owned or in partnership with us firms that employ nearly a quarter of a million Egyptians. Aside from the us oil firms that dominate Egypt’s petroleum industry, multinational corporations like General Motors, Union Carbide, Microsoft, Nestlé and Xerox turn a tidy profit, thanks to low labour costs, tax breaks and other incentives. If people needed a reminder of Uncle Sam’s sway, they have only to admire the us embassy, the hulking barracks that ate Garden City; with its 350 staff, it is the biggest American embassy in the world. Re-established in 1974, following the seven-year hiatus prompted by Nasser, the embassy’s reopening marked the beginning of what seemed like a beautiful American friendship, sweetened by a us$250 million aid-package to Cairo. President Sadat began the process of weaning his arms purchases away from Russia in favour of the us, also instituting the practice that persists to this day of acquiring the bulk of Egypt’s wheat from the new allies. Today the usaid offices administer over a billion dollars in military aid and another us$655 million in developmental programmes. There are fbi and dea branches in Cairo. The American community itself numbers around 20,000, most of them living in the greener quarters of Zamalek and Maadi. In 2002 Cairenes were angry and frustrated, not just with Israel for the occupation and America for its backing, but with their own government for kowtowing and dithering. A typically symbolic reprisal of a government walking the thin line between us interests and a popular uprising, was to change the name of the street where the Israeli Embassy is located to ‘Mohammed Dorra’, so that each time the Israelis speak or write their local address they’re obliged to mention the Palestinian boy whose death, cowering beside his father, was captured on video and became a rallying point for the intifada. Yet how can Egyptians complain, when they too are reduced to symbolic actions, like choosing one product over another, or doing without a fancy falafel? One of the first American products to be hit by the boycotts was Proctor & Gamble’s Ariel clothes detergent. Although 117

the brand name was likely meant to evoke something along the lines of The Tempest’s ‘airy spirit’, Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon contributed connotations usually associated with Lady Macbeth. And so it goes. Cairenes hunt for ways to come to terms with new consumerist appetites that there are more reasons to deny than possibilities to satisfy. A common solution is imitation, dressing the city in a second-hand globalism, a chintzy reinvention that is nonetheless game and self-assured, with an eye-poking aesthetic. Shop façades look like b-film spaceships with their curved glass and plastic façades; and they’re blindingly lit, because light, megawatts of it, is integral to the Cairene vision of global chic. Indigenous burger joints are called McDonna, clothing knock-offs labelled Cretin Dior, the locally produced Johnny Walker is re-christened Toni Talker, and the label of the Gordon’s Gin replica replaces the image of a wild boar with that of a German shepherd and the caption Dry Din. Kiosks and shops blare Saudi-sponsored recordings of Qur√anic verse in the morning and the latest Arab pop release at night. Music and incense flow freely through the streets where shop names offer a poetic sign of the times. Witness the boulevards of downtown, where the belle époque is breezily evoked by the older boutiques like Mondiana, Miramar, Studio Venus, Da Vinci, Le Louvre, Le Berceau, Petit Poupée, Grazia, Fantasia, Socrates, Salon Vert, Kismet and Le Jour. Step inside the new mall in the same neighbourhood and the mood is different, edgier, more brisk and serious. Teenagers swarm around stores called Big Boss, Gravel, Cruiser, Rocket, Bravo, Shock, Slash, Body, Zenith, Top Secret and Escape. Only one is in Arabic: Khatar, it says in chrome script, which means ‘danger’. The music is, in fact, painfully loud, ricocheting off the glossy marble, glass and mirrored surfaces where bevies of girls furtively eye themselves and each other, dressed in platform shoes, tight jeans and headscarves pinned neatly at the temples and crown. There’s an Egyptian saying that, delivered with a shrug, encapsulates many a Cairene’s attitude towards outsiders: nothing is strange but the Devil (ma gharib illa√ il-shitan). Tolerance, suggests Milad Hanna, an octogenarian Copt, is a national trait, though no one would blame him for thinking otherwise, having been imprisoned under Sadat in 1981. In 1995, unesco’s ‘Year of Tolerance’, Hanna tellingly translated tolerance as ‘forgiveness’ and later revised that 118

to ‘acceptance of others’ in essays on the state of that art in Egypt. Hanna advocates what he calls a ‘world mosaic civilization’, of which he feels Egypt embodies certain prototypal qualities; he’s a lover of diversity, a humanitarian. In Hanna’s opinion, Acceptance of the other at the personal level is a useful matter and it cannot cause any harm. I have learned from traditional maxims that ‘people’s love is a treasure’. Whenever you accept the other as he is, with his merits and drawbacks, he will accept you. After that, he will be at your fingertips. You will have a wider circle of friends and acquaintances which is a big gain anyway. It will be up to you after that, to choose . . . .24 Hanna asks the question ‘What are the factors that shape collective human emotions?’, in the belief that an emotional understanding between individuals and groups is the key to mutual appreciation, a remedy for prejudice. He also cites ‘generalizations, which are commonly said to express collective emotions and people’s traits’: Vague but common propositions come out of research. For example, it is said that the English are usually calm and act according to cold logic on the basis of scientific thinking. The French are known to be more sentimental and romantic . . . The Germans are severe and grim . . . In Egypt it is said that the Egyptian is patient and endures suffering. He does not protest except after he has lost his patience. If this happens he becomes like a violent camel in a fit of anger . . . These statements and general traits, whatever we might think of them, did not come from a void. They have their roots and are the products of long experiences and observations. They do not conflict with the peculiarity of individual emotions, i.e. the psychological and mental make-up of each of us. Otherwise we would [be] like statues made of [stone].25 Hanna’s avuncular sensibility, the marriage of wisdom and artlessness, the good-willed but opportunistic sociability, the implicit invitation to the other to ‘Go ahead and be, or rather try to be different, if you like, we will always find ways of knowing you and reasons to forget – or recall – our differences’, is quintessentially 119

Cairene. If Cairenes exercise prejudice in dealing with others, it’s often supple, responsive to kindness or the compliment of attention. Richard Nixon’s visit to Cairo and his reception by Anwar Sadat in 1974 provides a case in point and helps illustrate shifts in Egyptian perceptions of the West. Thirty years ago ‘the West’ was the United States, since European influence was something that Cairenes had a right to feel they knew and had even assimilated. America, on the other hand, was the subject of much speculation. The only exposure people had to its lifestyle was a handful of Hollywood films and a relatively few professionals who had fled the country under Nasser but maintained family ties. Nixon was the first American president to make a state visit. He came in June, after the 1973 war with Israel, when it was public knowledge that the Phantom jets that lambasted the Suez Canal and Suez City were provided courtesy of Uncle Sam. Nine months later Nixon arrived to the ‘huzzas and hossannas’26 of millions of Egyptians, who lined the road from the airport into Cairo to catch a glimpse of the impressive presidential motorcade. Nixon and Sadat made the journey waving and perspiring lightly, standing in the back of a Cadillac convertible limousine. The prestige of welcoming a powerful head of state on equal footing was not lost on Egyptians, despite the potentially destabilizing reservations some groups had regarding Sadat’s dealings with the Israelis. How gratifying for Sadat, who, like everyone else, knew that Nixon (and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) moved under the shadow and impetus of impeachment proceedings in America. The need of these Americans to make friends when their own had turned against them served to increase the charm of their visit, which continued with a trip to Saudi Arabia, where the oil embargo engineered by King Faisal had only just loosened its grip. Sadat fêted his guests royally, refurbishing Cairo’s Kubba Palace, a former residence of Farouk, for the guests’ 48-and-a-half-hour stay.27 With his wife, Jihan, Sadat accompanied Nixon and Pat to the Pyramids, where the ladies negotiated the rocky terrain in fashionably insensible shoes. At night there was a party featuring one of Cairo’s more accomplished belly-dancers, billed for the occasion as ‘the ambassadress of love’. Nixon answered in kind, promising Egypt a nuclear reactor (for peaceful pursuits), and Sadat sealed their pact with a priceless bronze statue of Isis, goddess of fertility and rebirth. Reflecting on the warmth of his Egyptian welcome and, 120

no doubt, on the problems awaiting him at home, Nixon extemporized for the benefit of his beaming host, ‘There’s an old saying, Mr President, that you can turn people out, but you can’t turn them on’. For Nixon’s departure, a sign at the Cairo airport mounted by appreciative Egyptians read ‘See you later Dick!’ 28 Unfortunately for Nixon (and Egypt’s shot at atomic power), an indignant America was also waving him goodbye. Egypt’s honeymoon with the usa, however, had just begun, and no one was more infatuated than Sadat himself, seduced as much by America’s well-marketed exuberance as by his own new-found celebrity. Sadat entertained widely, offering special guests lavish gifts, and the Egyptian Museum was his favourite department store. He gave Tito and Brezhnev statues of Horus. For Giscard d’Estaing and the Shah of Iran, he chose Thoths. Sadat played host to actress Elizabeth Taylor, then married to a senator from Virginia who prevailed on the president not to embarrass him with too much generosity. Sadat complied with difficulty. He greeted the actress with the words ‘Welcome, oh queen’, in reference to her role as Cleopatra, and placed bodyguards and a helicopter escort at her command.29 Sadat loved Frank Sinatra. In 1979 he invited him to sing at a charity gala at the foot of the Pyramids, scheduled, not so coincidentally, on the anniversary of Nasser’s death. Frank brought the crowd to its feet with an encore of ‘My Way’, a song the president could mistily relate to. In all of this Sadat identified utterly with Egypt, whose image, as judged by the treatment of its guests, he felt compelled to enhance. That is why he invited the exiled Shah of Iran to take permanent refuge in the Kubba Palace, causing fickle Britain and the us to emit a puff of relief. For Sadat, the archetypal Egyptian host – part fabulist, part tyrant, mingling childish delight with palmchafing calculation – it was a matter of hospitality, not politics. Sadat may have been a spendthrift and a sell-out to the West, but that didn’t stop millions of Egyptians from tuning in to the weekly telecast of the American soap opera Dallas, an exciting alternative to state tv’s coma-inducing talk shows, ribbon cuttings and presidential appearances. Dallas was Sadat’s gift to the people, their bread and circuses. It was also a friendly mass introduction to American pie, and Cairenes ate it up. People with no televisions of their own thronged the cafés and shops sporting small black-and-white tv sets to simultaneously condemn and celebrate free enterprise. Pummelled with rhetoric regarding the new ‘liberal’ economy, underwhelmed 121

The Sixth of October Bridge crossing Zamalek in 2003, with the Cairo Museum to the left and the Ramses Hilton tower on the right.

Cairenes drew the obvious parallels. Cairo’s wealthy clique of entrepreneurs only differed from their Dallas counterparts in the ratio of blondes to brunettes. The foibles of chisellers and vamps, people marvelled, were apparently the same all over the world. The Dallas melodrama coloured many youths’ visions of America, which amounted to a combination Disneyland, Times Square and cattle ranch. Sadat, who understood the power of the media, would have been disenchanted by the coverage of his own assassination, which like Kennedy’s in real-life Dallas, usa, signalled a loss of innocence. Cairo is a city disinclined to violence. Following the events of 6 October 1981, people were stunned and incredulous, like survivors of a natural disaster. Rather than any meaningful commentary on history, the passage of the man, or the intentions of his successors, television aired multiple, graphic replays of the shooting that took place during the Victory Day parade. There were endless repetitions of the parade of ramshackle tanks, jets flying in formation in the blue skies above, and of Sadat, seated in his tribunal with his entourage, gazing heavenwards, and looking 122

mightily pleased. In his hand he grasped a gold-enamelled staff with a lotus on the top, of the kind usually seen in temple friezes and, alas, sarcophagi. The droning soundtrack of planes and bland commentary of the newscaster was suddenly perforated with popping sounds followed by a growing murmur of commotion. The camera swerved and revealed the tribunal, now chaotic with chairs flying, people scattering and screaming, men crawling pathetically under the chairs for shelter. People learned the video sequence by heart. They recorded it at home and, watching it compulsively again and again, shouted warnings to Sadat’s close-up, telling him to ‘run’ and ‘beware’, thus, in a coup de video, relegating his death to both history and fiction. In subsequent years, under the Mubarak administration, while Egypt walked hand in glove with us interests, people turned to tv for solace and for distraction from money woes and political unease. They found it in the infamy of American children shooting each other in beautiful schools, drug wars, bombers, perverts and psychopaths, events and characters glorified in American films. Cairenes follow the news closely and are interested in world politics, not as strategists but for how politics, like theatre, reveals the inner life of man. In the 1990s people were torn about Clinton. His public humiliation for exercising what most Egyptian males would argue was an inalienable right, made some wince. Yet they watched him stand trial with wistful admiration, imagining some more familiar faces they’d have loved to see on the witness stand, brought to justice for having sold them so low. Cousins and neighbours who made it to America, reported back to their families and friends. It’s tough, they said, and the winters are cold. The elections are botched, the corporations ruthless, so why bother leaving home? It was demoralizing, in 2000, during parliamentary elections in Cairo, to observe that while at least four Egyptians died trying to cast their vote (a vast improvement over previous elections), in America, following obscenely costly presidential campaigns, half the voters did not bother to turn up at the polls. Post 9/11, the United States is not ‘the West’ anymore, it’s just America, shot full of holes. As Egyptians returned in late 2002, following months of illegal detention in us jails, Cairenes noted that the treatment of the detainees abroad was not much different than what they might expect in Egypt. The curtailing of civil liberties and 123

due process is nothing new to them. People wonder why Americans refuse so obstinately to see things as they are, but if they insist on their myths of government-by-the-people, a classless society, free elections, etc., fine, Cairenes know what it’s like to be fooled. Disappointment has distanced them from authority, and it can harden to the contempt people often feel for American policymakers, as well as their own. This is not the inchoate emotion implied by the question ‘Why do they hate us?’ The answer is, they do not. ‘Hate’, as Schopenhauer said, ‘is a question of the heart; contempt is a question of the mind’. Egyptians tend to reserve their contempt for power, and rarely commit the grossièreté of confusing ‘people’ with ‘government’. They accept the rift separating them from power, for several reasons, among them that conveyed by Milad Hanna, because acceptance widens rather than narrows the field of action. The process of acceptance may be longer than the lives of those who propel it, but it is none the less valid. For how can we change what we cannot first accept? Egyptians are more likely to see themselves as part of a process rather than some definitive result of one. ‘A person who is not free is poor ’, said Nader Ferghany, lead author of the controversial Arab Human Development Report of 2002, but so are those who do not know how to be free, and those who discount their freedom.30 America under the administration of George W. Bush is seen by many as an impoverished society, still preferable in many ways to their own, but damaged and dangerous. People are quick to wag fingers at America’s lack of self-critique, perhaps because they’re short on it themselves. The American mantra ‘With us, or against us’ seems nevertheless harsh, in a world that to most Egyptians is made of ‘us’. Indeed, democracy has long been held as the last hope of a voiceless people. It is one of history’s reversals that America, once unassailable as a stronghold for the democratic process and associated human rights, is now perceived as democracy’s worst enemy. Although susceptible to sympathetic dialogue, Cairenes have learned to be wary of propaganda, no matter where it issues from. The ‘shaping of cultural sentiments is a specialized industry’, says Milad Hanna, a regret widely shared by a people who consider getting to know each other one of life’s few pleasures.31 Cairenes are dismayed by America’s stabs at ‘letting [Egyptians] get to know us better’, as if they didn’t know enough already. Launched in March 124

2002, Radio Sawa (‘Together’) is the brainchild of Norman Pattiz, a member of the us Broadcasting Board of Governors. With a start-up budget of us $30 million, Radio Sawa broadcasts a blend of Arab and us pop with ten minutes of news in Arabic on the hour, ‘paid for by the United States of America as a public service to the Arab people’. The station’s raison d’être is to ‘go after the hearts and minds you can get’ and to ‘deliver’ the truth to misguided Arab youth about the American way of life. Ayman El-Amir, former director of the United Nations Radio and Television in New York, wrote in response, in the Al-Ahram Weekly: We must stand up and postulate the outrageous assumption that in order for us to know the American people, appreciate their ideals and value systems, they, too, will have to know the same about us, the Arabs. Otherwise the result will be a lopsided knowledge, a case of unrequited love.32 In choosing the radio waves as its agency of deliverance, the us follows the unfortunate footsteps of the Axis. During World War ii, the German Arabic Service was popular in Cairo, a city whose soundtrack, then as now, was the sonic overlap of a million transistor radios. The German-run station broadcast Arab music on accessible wavelengths and featured a slick announcer who presented Germany and Italy as the best friends an Egyptian nationalist could ever have. The higher-brow bbc had a hard time keeping up, so the British developed alternative methods for fighting the Axis propaganda machine, which had at one point succeeded in convincing some Egyptians that Hitler was a Muslim. The publicity section of the British embassy called corrosive voices working for the Axis the Whispering Gallery. An attempt to counter this campaign . . . was begun by Laurence Grafftey-Smith, a diplomat who knew Cairo and the Middle East well . . . [He] knew that people are far more likely to believe – and repeat – what they have been told in the strictest confidence than what they read in the newspaper. He built up a corps of 350 Egyptian agents . . . who spread pro-Allied rumours and arguments. Among them were a number of fortune tellers and holy men who sat outside mosques to dispense wisdom and prophesy . . . and for a small fee they could be ensured to predict a future favourable to the Allies.33 125

Such subtleties belong to an era when knowledge of each other, whether gained by friendship or stealth, had an irreplaceable intimacy, the ambience within which Cairenes operate best. If nothing is strange but the Devil, then nothing but familiarity can keep him at bay. In January 2001, during a weeklong religious holiday, the Pyramids and surrounding area, perfect for a desert picnic and promenade, were closed. The entry closest to the monuments (at the end of the Pyramids Road) was reserved for foreigners only, who stood by nonplussed while locals, many of them arriving with families in tow via public transport, were directed to a new entrance some four kilometres away. The injunction and the new entry routes were the work of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, whose secretary general is Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, former overlord of the tombriddled Giza Plateau, now responsible for archaeological sites nationwide. In compensation for the distance from which they were obliged to view the monuments, Cairenes were given ranks of wooden benches where they could sit and a platoon of dustbins that they could fill. Hawass, in the International Journal of Cultural Property, egregiously elaborated the reasoning behind this move: The majority of visits conducted by Egyptians to the site, the plateau, are for fun rather than culture or education. It is unfortunate that Egypt’s own people are a source of site pollution.34 Responding to criticism for an arrangement that saw thousands of Egyptians turned away from the Pyramids while foreigners were welcomed, Hawass grew strident: ‘People have to understand that it is a sacred divine place, not a venue for parties, dancing and singing’. 35 Cast as errant sun-worshippers who must defer to plateau-crats and antiquity-loving foreigners, Cairenes could not help recalling the squash contests, car rallies, operas and musical concerts, all state-sanctioned and expensive, that take place regularly beside the monuments. Despite protests, on holidays and at police discretion, Egyptians are none the less directed to the Pyramids’ back door. Unsurprisingly, Cairenes respond to randomly encountered foreigners with lively curiosity as to what could be the source of the excitement. A typical interaction between a guest and a local begins 126

with a commercial exchange in a shop, café or taxi, and involves several perfunctory questions regarding one’s nationality and length of one’s stay, followed by marital status, number of children and religious persuasion. This may come in the form of a guessinggame that the sharply observant Cairene often wins. A comment on the foreigner’s Arabic comes next, followed by remarks, depending on one’s nationality, on that country or the name of one of its famous or infamous people. If you happened to be an American in Cairo post-9/11, there were condolences, conspiracy theories, curses and many accurate predictions. Rarely will a Westerner suffer a greater aggression than these catechisms or some presumed understanding. Here and there, it happens that children throw stones. An American journalist was hit by one bull’s-eye in the forehead while visiting a stable near the Pyramids. A nearby Egyptian hastened to the rescue, wiping the journalist’s wound solicitously with the spit-moistened hem of his galabiyya. Underlying these interactions, however fleet or superficial, are sinuous currents of feeling, but how much does the average Cairene really care about foreigners? Probably nowhere near as much as foreigners dwell on Egyptians’ perceptions of them. It is both foreign residents and upper-class Egyptians who postulate the khawaga complex (foreigner complex) they attribute to Egypt at large. The khawaga complex is theoretically provoked by peoples’ insecurities regarding the west and its intentions, and a lack of confidence because of substandard education, a slow economy and rhetorical democracy.36 The khawaga complex is a kind of post-colonial trauma, a side effect of globalism, that state of overwhelmed resentment at not being able to ‘keep up’. While there is truth in these observations with regards to the conditions of life they portray, it is unlikely that an inferiority complex is the cause for them. As a theory explaining social ills, the khawaga complex merely substitutes psychological barriers for quantifiable, and actionable, constraints. The term ‘imperialist oppressor’ (which barely had time to fall into disuse before its unfortunate post 9/11 revival), however vehemently employed, nearly always hides a grudging esteem. No matter how hypocritical or menacing first world nations may be, they have cities with proper schools and parks, and governments who serve the people at least once in a while. Likewise with regards to the strangers in their midst, the wealthy Egyptians, no matter how pretentious, the fact that they travel and that their children are 127

healthy and well-educated does not escape the average Cairene’s notice. Interest in the perennial other, whether foreign by birth or lifestyle, is a matter of self-appraisal and definition, a weighing of pros and cons, a granting of concessions to reality. The Cairene conceit, arrived at through comparison, is a practical one: ‘We’re better people, but they’re better off.’ The official attitude is less frank. However avid for the perceived benefits of capitalism, accommodating to foreign interests on economic issues, or susceptible to foreign models of so-called modern life, the line of demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is conspicuously drawn in laws relating to marriage. Women who eschew their compatriots as spouses were once obliged to relinquish their nationality. While this is no longer the case, they still cannot pass Egyptian citizenship on to their children. Although born and raised in Egypt, children of foreign fathers will always be treated as outsiders by a vindictive bureaucracy as punishment for their mothers’ lack of discrimination.37 By contrast, when an Egyptian man marries a foreign woman, the latter is typically granted an Egyptian passport (having supplied the requisite ream of paperwork) within a year or two of request, suggesting that feelings for foreigners cut both ways. Many Egyptians describe local feelings towards foreigners as envy’s admixture of love and hate, and the contingent desire to emulate and absorb the other. We’ll absorb you gladly, is the message sent to the foreign lady, because you’ve shown such fine judgment in choosing us. The impulse to emulate foreigners is evident in popular perceptions of beauty. Far from idealizing the attractions of the dark-eyed and honey-hued, favour attaches to the so-called Caucasian type generally associated with foreigners and upper-crust Egyptians. Some Cairenes may recall that several centuries of their city’s history belonged to the original Caucasians, the ones from the Caucasus (Circassian Mamluks and Turks of Circassian extraction), whose features include light skin and light-coloured eyes. 38 Whether associated consciously or not with the old ruling class, there is a marked preference for so-called Caucasian attributes. Many young brunettes lighten their hair; a larger number regularly endure the ordeal of straightening it. Middle- and upper-class girls can purchase disposable coloured contact lenses at any number of pharmacies. 128

Light skin is unabashedly marketed; billboards for Fair and Lovely, The World’s Number One Fairness Cream dot the city. Television commercials for the same product feature high school girls about to audition for the play Kais and Leila, a romance from classical Arab literature. The class vedette wants the lead role, but her schoolmates warn her that Leila was ‘beautiful’ whereas she is ‘dark’. The girl hastens to buy bleaching cream and, several timelapsed shades paler, gets the part and appreciative looks from her male classmates. Naguib Mahfouz describes the mixed attractions of the fairskinned in an early historical novel, Thebes at War, relating the Hyksos threat to the pharaohs as a thinly disguised allegory for the British occupation. Mahfouz tends to depict the male invaders as red-faced and pasty-skinned with matted beards. The novel’s protagonist, the handsome future pharaoh Ahmose, is nevertheless much taken with the female of the species, the lovely Hyksos princess with ‘blonde locks straying around her forehead’. Mahfouz allows the Hyksos Chamberlain to express his opinion about the Egyptians in a conversation that takes place on the Nile, on the way to Thebes. Sailing along, they observe a local fisherman, a young man with sinewy forearms, wearing nothing but a wrap round his waist, his skin burned by the sun. In amazement [one of the Hyksos men] said, ‘These southerners look as though they had grown from their own soil!’ ‘Wonder not!’ the chamberlain responded sarcastically, ‘Some of their poets even sing the beauties of a dark complexion.’ ‘Indeed! Next to ours their colouring is like mud next to the glorious rays of the sun.’ 39 Mahfouz’s irony towards the condescending foreigners does not extend to the smitten Ahmose, whose feelings for the fair princess, however genuine and courtly, are also erotic. The foreign princess is the forbidden fruit, furthermore, she is the enemy. The book ends with Ahmose renouncing his impossible love for the sake of Egypt. Many popular songs, as Mahfouz suggests, acknowledge more homespun attractions, extolling the beauty of the dark lady and dark man. One classic is Asmar ya Asmarani (‘Dark one, oh my dark one’) sung by a variety of Egyptian icons. A more recent expression of the same sentiment is Habibi lon il shukulata (‘My love is the colour of 129

chocolate’), a big hit for Nubian singer Mohammed Mounir. As Gamal Nkrumah, commentator on African affairs for the Al-Ahram Weekly, points out, the Egyptian opinion that ‘black is beautiful’ predates the slogans on the ’70s civil rights movement in America. He cites Gamil wi Asmar (‘Black and beautiful’) by Mohammed Qandil, whose lyrics ran ‘so what if he is dark, that is the secret of his beauty’. Son of a light-skinned Egyptian woman and the former president of Ghana, Nkrumah has more than a passing interest in the subject. ‘Sadly’ he is obliged to admit that ‘this fondness for darkness in popular songs in not reflected on the streets’ of Cairo.40 The fact is that the ‘dark one’ mentioned in the songs is brown like chocolate or café au lait but never really black. When it comes to skin colour and getting along in Cairo, lighter, despite and because of its associations with foreigners, is better. The proverb ‘We’re all guests in this life’ is a reminder of the temporary nature of our stay as well as a respectful nod to the host. We’re all guests, all right, but some of us are more welcome than others. Cairo’s burgeoning population of refugees from Egypt’s war-torn neighbouring countries provides a sad illustration of the inequities. Estimates vary widely as to the number of asylum seekers, from the tens to the hundreds of thousands. 41 This variance is due to the definition of refugee adhered to by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (unhcr), the fact that not all illegal immigrants have applied for or will receive refugee status, and that as an essentially underground community at pains to steer clear of the authorities, accurate counts are impossible. What is certain is that hordes of displaced people keep arriving, often by train, mostly from Sudan, where some two million humans have lost their lives since civil war began in 1983 between the Muslim north and Christian south.42 For many immigrants from the austere Nuba mountains in the west or the marshes and savannah of southern Sudan, the deafening morass of traffic and humanity that awaits them outside Cairo’s Ramses Station will be their first taste of the city, a brutal welcome, harbinger of hardships that may beg the question of whether war was preferable to refuge. A refugee is defined as someone who has left home because of a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’, someone whose life is endangered because of race, religion, nationality or political beliefs. An ‘economic migrant’, on the other hand, has left his or her country 130

due to loss of income, but in theory at least, can return home and so is ineligible for any eventual refugee benefits. Urban devastation and war-exacerbated famine and drought would seem as compelling causes for flight as persecution by hostile governments but it is the unhappy task of the unhcr to draw such distinctions. The Egyptian government washed its hands of the job, making Cairo’s unhcr the sole agency that may decide whether individuals are eligible or not for the organization’s meagre financial assistance. unhcr’s Cairo staff of around twenty is responsible for processing thousands of applicants from Sudan as well as Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Yemen, Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, some of whom bear the scars of torture, others who were recruited as child soldiers and many who have suffered the violent deaths of their loved ones.43 Less than a third of the applicants will receive refugee status and a chance at resettlement elsewhere, in Europe or North America, a process that before 9/11 took two to four years. Post 9/11, even agreed upon resettlement quotas are ignored by obdurate us security officials. Many illegal immigrants never summon the courage to state their case, perhaps preferring to harbour a slim hope than harvest a damning refusal. Those who are refused by the unhcr become ‘closed files’, shadow people, forced to fight for last place with Cairo’s poorest, usually agricultural workers from Upper Egypt fleeing the squalor of their neglected rural communities.44 It wasn’t always this way for the Sudanese, of which Egypt has a standing population of an estimated two to three million, an integrated element of local culture, beneficiaries of the Wadi el Nil Treaty of 1975 granting them the right to live in Egypt ‘as brothers’ without residency visas. President Mubarak withdrew the treaty in 1995 following an assassination attempt authored by a radical Sudanese Islamist faction. Rather than benefiting from the existing ties between Egypt and Sudan, the immigrants are somehow set apart. Aside from the fact that many are from the unfamiliar south of Sudan, as opposed to the Arabized north and Khartoum, the refugees’ situation seems to excite an impulse for cruelty in otherwise kind Cairenes, as if too close a sympathy with such abject need was somehow contaminating. African immigrants will pay higher-than average rents for housing in the capital, rates so far beyond their means that it is normal for twelve people to share small flats in the city centre, 131

sleeping in shifts. Some must opt for single rooms without water or electricity in Cairo’s informal shanty towns. Should they find work, they will be paid slave wages for hard labour (two to six us dollars per day), the men in factories or on construction sites in summer, the women as maids and nannies.45 Sudanese children, although officially welcome in Egyptian schools, will never enrol, since they lack the Catch-22 paperwork as well as funds for the numerous expenses entailed by Egypt’s version of free education. Egyptian health care facilities do not extend their subsidies to asylum seekers, who often fall prey to unscrupulous medical practitioners and charlatans. Cairo’s public-sector hospitals are notoriously insalubrious, and the Sudanese community is not alone in complaining of unwarranted caesarean sections to save doctors’ time, or of organs like kidneys going missing during routine interventions. These tales of dismemberment, along with frequent accounts of uninvestigated murder (usually women working as maids with salaries pending) are widespread in the refugee community. Incidents of petty discrimination, name-calling and more vicious aggression are not uncommon. So much for oriental hospitality. In 2000 the social anthropologist Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond, founder of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, started a similar programme at the American University in Cairo (auc).46 A fierce advocate for asylum seekers’ rights, Harrell-Bond is as lionized by the refugee community as she is unappreciated by host countries and aid regimes whose methods she loudly condemns. The world aid community, she argues persuasively, acts on the basis of detrimental assumptions; for one, that people will not survive without them. Refugees are not ‘helpless individuals’, but resourceful, inventive survivors and potential assets to their host communities. Harrell-Bond’s critique of unhcr methodologies (including fund allocation, screening processes, resettlement choices, etc.), however severe, is a necessary challenge to the status quo.47 ‘Doing good’, she remarks, ‘is the hardest thing in the world to do well’. Identifying the problems of the asylum seeking community is an important focus of the auc programme, thanks to which more people are studying Refugee Law, and more Cairenes are coming forward to volunteer humanitarian assistance. Meanwhile, Christian charities are at the forefront of the relief effort, operating clinics and several schools, but their means and facilities are limited. 132

Cairo has one of the highest refugee populations in the world. It is the regional centre for donor agency offices, and its position as a portal between the developed and developing worlds, its location on the edge of several conflicts, and its prestige as the largest city in Africa and the Middle East, guarantees that Cairo will continue to attract migrant peoples for the foreseeable future. What will be the outcome? A more fragmented, isolationist, racist society or a richer, more culturally African one? The answer may lie in an informal quarter to the north of the capital known as 4.5 (arbafia w√ nuss), where some 500 Sudanese families of both Muslim and Christian backgrounds attempt to live side by side with low-income Egyptian families. So-called for its distance from the bus station of Almaza in Nasser City, 4.5 is a sprawling, informally developed area set on a hilly tract of desert that enjoys a slightly higher elevation than its surroundings. In another world it would have been an attractive suburb, boasting cleaner air and wider streets. As it is, 4.5 houses at least half a million people who make do with limited electricity and no running water or sewage. Many of the buildings are nevertheless multi-storeyed, looking forward confidently to the day when they will be equipped with proper plumbing, and become rent-generating assets, providing they don’t fall down first. In fact, the city’s growth promises to subsume 4.5 just as it has other previously isolated stretches of desert. It’s only a matter of time. The inhabitants of 4.5 refer to their brick-bound neighbourhood as the fiizba, or the farm. The original owners purchased the land 25 years ago for virtually nothing from the areas’ camel-mounted police who one day embarked upon the lucrative business of selling sand to poor people. Today the unpaved streets of 4.5 wind up and around a desert bluff, much of which is under construction. Some houses have forecourts with a dusty tree or vine. There are two mosques, a church, and a tiny rudimentary school for refugee children sponsored by Cairo’s Sacred Heart Church that also acts as a gathering place for the Sudanese. The 400 students in attendance are taught by asylum seekers, some of them up for resettlement, others closed files. The younger kids learn the alphabet, the Sudanese national anthem and their prayers. The older ones, who attend the afternoon shift, are taught maths and more English. The schoolteachers hail from different tribes and different parts of Sudan. They’re happy to speak of their experience in Cairo that they 133

generously characterize as mixed. ‘People are not one’, they concede in Arabic, their shared language, meaning that some Cairenes have been helpful and others not. With the disapproving dignity of a proudly traditional people, they observe their hosts, how Cairene women are at liberty to hector their men for money, how Cairenes have no time for each other, for respectful greetings and proper visits and the neighbourly assistance so integral to their lives back home. They speak of the cleanliness they miss and the insects that plague them in their Cairo lodgings, of being taken advantage of and marginalized. However willing to admit to some degree of local goodwill, they are hard pressed to provide specific examples. When asked for what, if anything, they may thank their hosts, some said, ‘for teaching us to stay together’, that is, despite the tribal differences that may have separated them at home. Yet in response to unacceptable living conditions, the Sudanese and Egyptian inhabitants of 4.5 sometimes act together, petitioning the authorities for electricity (and receiving partial coverage) and sharing small sidewalk businesses. Abandoned by the authorities, a community of sorts is taking shape wherein the outsiders have a tenuous place, perhaps little more uncertain than that of their struggling Egyptian neighbours. Elsewhere in the city, people labouring under a hat trick of prejudice often perceive the Sudanese as oddities: the foreigners are (minority) Christian, culturally African (versus Arab) and unmistakably black. There is little sense of neighbourliness, since Cairenes are reluctant to admit that Egypt is a part of Africa at all. The immigrants will endure gratuitous chiding, skirmishes among school children and altercations amongst adults, sometimes violent ones. There will be lampoons in films, popular theatre and printed matter, as well as snide remarks from educated locals who should know better but still behave with a cheap noblesse oblige. Yet the Cairene brand of prejudice is unlike Western variants. If characterized as racists, Cairenes protest loudly and with reason, saying that Egyptians display the gamut of human complexions, that there are as many open-minded people as those who would make a cutting remark, and that many of the latter, if pinned down, would be ashamed to admit that they had caused someone pain. As Gamal Nkrumah points out, ‘Racism, as an institutionalized political and economic phenomenon, never existed in Egypt’. 134

Although this is true enough, the absence of discriminatory legislation does not preclude racist attitudes and practices. Openmindedness regarding race is one of the Cairene’s fondest conceits, especially considering a peaceful multi-racial coexistence and a past replete with many-hued heroes, in comparison to the American experience of racism, with its lynchings and ghettoes. Consequently, racist behaviour is a subject that few Cairenes have patience for, and the reason why, particularly with regards to asylum-seeking Africans, it is on the rise. Cairo is becoming provincial in mind-set thanks to rural migrations, limited education and the growing tendency of city dwellers to form a few close ties and lay low. In the opinion of many of Cairo’s poor and underprivileged, to be black is to be the victim of yet another of god’s little jokes, and fair play for those who managed to escape his humour. Beyond this parochialism, however, lie the remnants of a genuine tolerance that has survived Cairo’s transition to megalopolis, a tolerance derived from a traditionally broad, less ethnocentric understanding of history than the current one. People recall with pride that, until less than a century ago, Egypt was part of a caliphate encompassing every race. In Mecca, Muslims enjoin a ritual whose style of observance (and iconography) underline the concept of a crucible of nations, a whirlpool of humanity converging upon a single, agreed upon point. Nationalism, as a response to the other and the process of becoming a cohesive, distinct and ultimately competitive ‘other’, is new and tricky, a self-defining and therefore self-limiting exercise whose introduction marked the end of enlightenment. Harkening back to the Mohammed Ali dynasty’s plan for ‘awakening’ Egypt, when citizens of diverse backgrounds were educated abroad and encouraged to take part in the country’s future, people complain that colonialist interventions halted a tentative but self-originating process, creating virulent reactions and artificial hierarchies. Neither the colonialist project nor subsequent attempts at self-governance have made life easier or set higher examples of how to act as a community. When it comes to dealing with the world of outsiders, many Cairenes end up opting for a philosophical approach, illumined by fatalism and summarized here by Milad Hanna: Man, any man, is born without having wished it. Neither has he 135

planned the course of his life. He has not anticipated his successes or his failures and does not know the time and manner of his death. Man may be born with a complexion or features that indicate his race or ethnic origin. He may be black with a flat nose or brown with average Mediterranean lineaments or white with sky-blue limpid eyes and golden hair. No one can claim merit for his ethnic origin.48 In 2004 Cairo’s rapport with its guests remains an anomalous mix of the large-minded and the provincial, the naïve and the cynical, the instinctively generous and reflexively mean. The city is, in fact, a testing ground for humanity’s deepest hopes and fears about itself and its chances for survival. Diversity, that hallowed ground from which we hail, will always mean salvation if only since it saves us from ourselves. 49 Yet there are few rewards for diversity and individuality in Cairo’s despotic machinations, and the very definition of ‘outsider ’ has grown to encompass the disenfranchised and disenchanted, regardless of race, nationality or creed. Cairo’s orphans and runaways, like its artists and asylum seekers, are thus outsiders. Wealth, languages and academic achievement also work to set Cairenes apart from each other and from the possibility of a shared discourse in a confident, participatory community. There is a final category of guests that must be mentioned, for they are a peculiar phenomenon in this most irreducible of cities. It is the army of foreign artists and academics who make Egypt their home and Cairo their subject, painters, photographers, writers, urban planners, engineers, architects, sociologists, geographers, historians, linguists, anthropologists, theologians, economists, archeologists, environmentalists and others. Their residencies may last years or decades, during which time they produce works of great particularity and surpassing intimacy with the city and its workings, often focusing on a single aspect of its life. They are students of the urban organism, its past, present and possible futures. Some become experts in Cairo’s growth, that is, the science of poverty. Cairo as laboratory continues to generate this fervent and varied interest, its students adding to the complexity they are here to understand, the city drawing strength from their interest. In fact, whoever is interested enough in Cairo to live here, for study or enterprise, by choice or as a last resort, is afforded a status 136

suitable to a variety of purposes, and the dictates, as well as the limits, of hospitality. They are the intimate strangers, alternately embraced and adulated, disdained and dismissed, and they are in the city, even up to their necks in it, but not of it.

137

The citadel area rooftops in 2002, where a man raises pigeons for racing.

iv Listening

If the sun drowns in a sea of sorrow and darkness washes over the earth and sight dies in the eyes and seeing, and the path is tangled amidst lines and circles – you whirling, wandering know-it-all, you’ve only the eyes of the words as guide. ahmed fuad negm1 In Cairo, when the doorbell rings or someone knocks, the question ‘Who’s there?’ is met with confused silence. No matter who the visitor happens to be, further inquiry as to his or her identity produces the same perturbed response: ‘It’s me’ (ana). In a city as casually occupied as a family living room, familiarity is second nature and Cairenes are unaccustomed to identifying themselves. Doors open first, questions are asked later. Receptivity is a feature of the Cairene regard; eyes are gladly met, smiles a valuable currency, facial expressions relaxed, curious, rarely wooden or contorted with forced solicitude. Since interactions form the substance of nearly every waking hour, techniques emerge to regulate their flow, to gauge the levels of potentiality inherent in the exchange. Each verbal transaction holds the promise of gain (if only as diversion) or loss (if only of time), and receptivity is the fulcrum of negotiation. Cairene sociability is a product of necessity, born in tight quarters and nurtured on sharing. If Cairenes appear the most agreeable of yea-sayers it’s because ‘no’ implies confrontation, or worse, disappointing the interlocutor. This is a culture where the art of determining what others want or need to hear is inculcated, perhaps compassionately, from birth. Egyptians are past masters at bending truths to create soothing speeches. Whether it’s the prime minister assuring a careworn public that the sand castle economy is actually thriving, or a plumber minimizing the danger of a bowed and sodden ceiling, false assurances work as much to cushion truth’s 139

blows as to induce a kind of enchantment, spells to make the hard facts disappear, or at least lose their power to overwhelm. Wishful speaking is one aspect of Cairene dissimulation, an acquired skill that acts as a natural defence. Feeling is channelled into formula, formula into abstraction, rendering Cairene modes of expression at once seductive, heartfelt and oblique. Dissimulation is the lesson of forced intimacy; ‘proximity’ in the words of the Sufi Ibn al-Arabi ‘can be as great a veil as distance’. However social a being, the human needs space and occasionally peace, precious commodities associated here with wealth. In its absence, people build inner rooms, buffer zones, places of greater ease and freedom. To this end, the fatalism that infuses language and lives, arguably liberates and limits in equal degrees. The most common phraseologies relinquish the burden of fate to god. Entering a taxi and informing the driver of the desired destination, the standard reply is ‘god willing’ (insha √allah) a formula that replaces a firm ‘yes’ or ‘no’. God wills all, so that insha √allah becomes a condition of any action or inaction. Insha √allah is the hour of all Cairene appointments (2 o’clock insha √allah), the essence of the doctor’s prognosis (‘You’ll be fine’, insha √allah), as well as a significant source of finance for most household and child rearing necessities. Granted, it doesn’t always work but there’s a counter formula, another pillar of Cairene existence, that is, ‘Never mind’ (mafilesh). Mafilesh serves to diffuse disappointment and the emotions of annoyance, anger or sorrow resulting from events as diverse as a broken glass, promise or neck.2 Whenever a task is embarked on, whether a great endeavour or the opening of a stubborn jar, it begins ‘With god’s permission’ (bizn √illah) or ‘In god’s name’ (bismillah). Likewise, ‘Go your way and trust in god’ (tawakkal fiala√ llah) is a common equivalent of ‘Good luck’. When heaven delivers, the response is ‘Praise be to god’ (il-hamdu√ lillah) also the stock reply to the question ‘How are you?’ no matter how dire one’s actual straits. When things go progressively wrong, there’s the comfort of the oft-repeated wish ‘May our lord make it easy’ (rabbina ysahhil) and that he ‘forgets no one’ (allah mabyinsash hadd). When the style of remembrance seems particularly harsh or perplexing, one is reminded that ‘No one knows where good is’ (mahaddish fiarif il kher fen), which prompts the (awaited) response of ‘god knows’ (allahu afilam), usually delivered with an upward glance. 140

Fatalism reduces stress by circumscribing realms of action and chances for success. Everything comes with a built-in mafilesh, a minor balm for the wounds incurred in attempting even the simplest task. As a form of dissimulation, such formulations contribute cause and effect to the erosion of daily truths and possibilities. Resignation to the machinations of an inscrutable god and a mulish bureaucracy maintains a status quo littered with obstacles and deceptions. Yet for the average citizen to fully acknowledge the constraints of martial law, a floundering economy and burgeoning population, would be to surrender to paralyzing despair. Cairenes mistrust extremes, preferring a myriad minor mutinies to all-out revolt, and acceptance to despair for the latter ’s lack of faith, or worse, its lack of humour. This pervasive ambivalence, sometimes mistaken for Egypt’s ‘mystery’, may be due to the fact that between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ stands a god who’s not necessarily talking. Like the response of the unnamed visitor knocking at the door, the only admission is ‘It’s me’. When a tragic or momentous event occurs, such as the death of a child or the against-all-odds saving of a life, Egyptians draw an index finger across the forehead (where one’s fate is inscribed) saying ‘It is written’ (maktub). Fate can indeed provide ideal outcomes, especially if one believes that every outcome is ideal whether you like it or not. Fatalism may be the poor man’s ‘best of all possible worlds’, but a steady diet of false assurances, cosmetically altered facts and thwarted optimism breeds a sceptic, in the case of the doggedly idealistic Cairene, an exasperated one. As the Egyptian proverb has it: ‘The prince dies of accusations, the rich of desire, the sage of regrets and the poor at dinnertime.’ Cairenes are sceptics because they know too well how much truth is withheld, and idealists because in their hearts they hope that somehow god will make it easy. Somebody’s got to. It’s not likely to be the government, whose idea of transparency is a televised ribbon cutting ceremony and whose voice when addressing the public is often either patronizing or dripping scorn. A typical response to national tragedies is an a priori denial of irregularities and an avowal to get to the bottom of things, whatever it takes. Typically, as in the case of the train disaster of 20 February 2002, when 400 third-class passengers were incinerated en route to Upper Egypt on the eve of the Eid al-Adha, what it ends up taking is 141

the arrest of a handful of minor functionaries, swiftly banished to one of Cairo’s several dungeons. Nor does high officialdom miss an opportunity to blame the poor for their misfortune, as if they had invented misery and death. In an extraordinary October 2002 ruling, the Giza Criminal Court dropped charges against the scapegoat defendants in the train fire. The decision was greeted by thunderous applause and shouts of allahu akbar (god is great). Senior officials responsible for transport conditions, however, have yet to be brought to account. The cynicism radiating from the halls of power is illustrated by the fact that relatives of the train fire victims were obliged to rummage unassisted through charred bodies stacked on the floor of an antediluvian morgue to identify their loved ones for burial. Those who failed to do so because of the condition of the remains, received no death certificate, or the accompanying entitlement to a recompense of approximately us$600 for the loss of a family member’s life. The scenario is unfathomable unless one recalls that the authorities are also Egyptians. Based on experience, the average Cairene sceptic doubts that humanity can attain high ideals, or else believes they belong to God alone – so why bother? Egypt’s power coterie is way above average. The Egyptian style of government is a greed-driven enlargement of the theme of the unattainable. That scepticism should be a hallmark of the Cairene psyche is hardly surprising, since the workings of their leaders often beggars belief. In this land of sceptics, the misanthrope is king. Little wonder that the city’s exasperation quotient resounds in figures of speech. The oft-employed expression ‘You human being!’ (ya bani adam) is no compliment. Used in frustration, its intended meaning translates as ‘You thickhead’ or ‘brute’. In the face of unremitting annoyances one can exclaim ‘My soul will come out of my nose’ (ruhi hatitlafi min manakhiri) or warn others of extreme agitation by declaring ‘The blue demons are dancing before my eyes’ (il fiafareet il-zurq bititnattat quddam fiineyya). The popular expression of rage, ‘Between madness and myself lies only a hair’ (beni w- ben il gunoon, shafira), may be abbreviated under duress, which explains why some people, cry ‘Hair! hair!’, when upset. This distracted state could provoke the comment ‘He quarrels with the flies on his face’ (biyitkhani√ mafia dibban wishshu) meaning someone’s about to blow. Not that anyone particularly cares, given which they might say, ‘May you pop’ (inshallah ttaqq). 142

A feisty tongue is preferable to the more anaemic form of exasperation displayed by an alarming number of Cairenes, especially wan young women. ‘I have no desire’ (ma√fish nifs), they’ll sigh, in a voice whose groggy breathlessness occupies the uneasy ground between coquetry and torment. ‘Nifs’ is a word that doubles for ‘appetite’, and ‘nafas’, derived from the same root, means ‘breath’. Men and women alike are winded and wary. ‘Who burns his tongue on the soup will blow on the yoghurt’ as the saying goes. Daily life is a matter of cautiously feeling one’s way forward. Patience (sabr) as any Cairene will tell you, is ‘the key to success’ (muftah il farag), ‘beautiful’ (gamil), and ‘long’ (tawil). Fatalism is poison and antidote, generating all manner of selfperpetuating group-patterned behaviour. As corroborators, Egyptians share a seemingly infinite ability to assimilate contradictions. They exhibit both world-weary assurance of the ‘rightness’ of their lives (as manifestations of god’s will), and a quivering vulnerability to the vicissitudes of a fate they can only conceive as it reveals itself daily. The result is a profound capacity for loss. There is fear, of scandal, injustice, even annihilation, but not of death, since it’s reliable. On Cairo’s traffic-clogged streets, the generally accepted practice is to ignore ambulances and fire engines. Even when there’s a modicum of space to give way, these vehicles receive no priority, perhaps because one’s fate is written on one’s forehead and a half hour to the good or the bad can change little or nothing. Life at close quarters in a traditional society means that family, extended family, as well as friends, colleagues, neighbours, building guardians (bawwabin) and local tradesmen become observers, and consequently arbiters, of each other’s lives. Depending on their motivation, interactions are clothed in degrees of intimacy, from the subtle to the intrusive. The Cairene talent for combining both approaches in a single phrase or gesture is inimitable; the contradiction resolves itself in the understanding that subtlety and intrusiveness are the qualities of the voyeur. Excluded by a paternalistic government from the duties and rights associated with civil society, denied a public life by martial law, the average Cairene enjoys the same freedoms and expectations as a juvenile delinquent in reform school. Looking at life from the outside in, peering through chinks in the walls of autocracy, class distinction, poverty and illiteracy, the only participatory power that remains is interaction, even if it means just to watch. 143

A repertory of titles of address provides openings for discourse while establishing baseline parameters for the exchange. For example, the titles ‘beh’ and ‘basha’ are throwbacks to the Mamluk and Ottoman ruling classes. When used by a parking attendant, delivery person or bawwab to address a well-to-do Egyptian or foreigner, the meaning varies from conditioned or guarded respect, to false deference, to a thinly veiled request for baqshish (a tip). Addressing a mechanic, electrician or plumber as ‘engineer’ or ‘chief engineer ’ (muhandis, bashmuhandis) may likewise serve to either improve the quality of service or inflate the fee. The titles ‘professor’ (ustaz) and ‘doctor’(duktur) are democratically employed to attract the attention of civil servants, shopkeepers or anyone wearing eyeglasses. Cab drivers, waiters and ticket takers are jocularly referred to as ‘captain’. The frequent ‘Your presence’ (hadritak), lends an air of courtly formality to transactions, whereas ‘Oh sir’ (ya sidi) is considered casual but respectful. Calling ladies madam and girls mazmuzil usually entails an often pointed estimation of age as well as marital status. Elderly men and women in traditional dress may be called ‘father ’ (abuya) and ‘mother’ (fiummi) or hagg and hagga, informal terms of respect also used as recognition of those who’ve made the pilgrimage to Mecca. An adult is always introduced to a child as tant (aunt) or fiamm√ (uncle) and children are affectionately referred to as baba and mama. People call each other ‘sister’ (yakhti) and ‘brother’ (yakhuya) especially when driving home a point. Women may be hailed politely as ‘oh woman’ (ya sitti), nearly reverentially as ‘elder sister’ (abla) and ‘lady’ (hanim), or the warmer and oft-employed ‘oh mistress of all’ (ya sitt il-kull). Depending on the speaker, addressing a girl or usually younger woman as ‘moon’ (ya √amar), ‘honey’ (ya fiasal) or ‘sugar’ (ya sukkar), produces various effects, from the avuncular or maternal to the flirtatious. Flirtation is an art undergoing transformation, due in some part, to the greater exposure to Western customs of a largely youthful population. Appreciative men still hail women with impromptu snatches of love songs but events do not always take such a lyrical turn. The poetically complimentary ‘oh minaret’ (ya manara) or ‘oh gazelle’ (ya ghazal), is replaced these days by things like ‘oh sweet potato’ (ya batata) and ‘oh duck’ (ya batta). A departure from the discreet old ways is evident in a list of adventurous euphemisms for breasts that includes ‘handles’ (ayadi), ‘lanterns’ (fawanis), ‘playthings’ (lifiab), 144

‘hubcaps’ (tasat), ‘doorknobs’ (ukar bab), ‘balloons’ (ballunat), ‘luggage’ (shunat), ‘melons’ (shammam), ‘pumpkins’ (arfiat rumi), ‘handlebars’ (gadunat) and ‘hotplates’ (sakhkhanat kahraba). Such expressions represent but one aspect of the inventive lingual labyrinth of Cairene slang. Characterized by its specificity, slang serves as an identifying code between intimates of the same profession, neighbourhood, school, club or clique. Egyptian colloquial Arabic (fiammiyya) is itself an idiom reserved for conversation, cinema, and popular (as opposed to ‘serious’) theatre. The media favours a ‘modern standardized’ version of classical Arabic that is also the vehicle for most literature, as well as religious and governmental rhetoric. In the case of the latter, lapses into colloquial betray anger, contempt or vulgarity, the mastery of classical Arabic representing an ideal mode of discourse and erudition. Colloquial may likewise be deployed rhetorically by power figures as a gesture of paternal intimacy towards the public. The patois of the upper class and Western-educated is peppered with phrases in English and French, evidence of wealth and worldliness. The insidious invasion of English words into both colloquial and modern standard Arabic is seen by some as the demise of the language, blamed variously on poor education, insecurity, upward mobility and Western hegemony. The (colloquial) verb yistamrik derived from amrika (America), is aimed mockingly at those who’ve let imitating Westerners go too far. In the words of economist and social commentator, Galal Amin: Several female television announcers seem to take pride in the fact that they cannot pronounce Arabic words properly, apparently believing that it points either to her overwhelming femininity, or to the fact that she is immersed up to her ears in a foreign milieu. Interlocutors on television or radio programmes seem to be quite willing to let foreign words slip into their speech from time to time, pretending they have done so unconsciously or reluctantly . . . Writers in newspapers and magazines, even popular ones, just like university professors, seize every opportunity to use the foreign equivalent for an Arabic term, even if the Arabic is clearer and more precise than its foreign counterpart. Thus an Egyptian economist might write the words ‘prosperity’ and ‘wealth’ next to their Arabic equivalents, as if the Arabs had never, in their history had any experience of prosperity or wealth.3 145

The Fishawi Café in Khan al-Khalili in 1997.

Foreign niceties like ‘sorry’, ‘merci’ and ‘pardon’ (bardon) have long denoted a slightly coy politesse. The word ‘shoes’ (shooz) recently entered their ranks, replacing the Arabic gazma when it comes up in conversation, ‘gazma’ being a popularly employed insult directed towards someone perceived as obstinate or stupid. The word ‘business’ (bizniz) has a predictably wide currency as does ‘tension’ (tanshana) and ‘nervous’ (nirfiz), which are also conjugated as verbs. ‘So far’ (soffar) and ‘already’ (alriddi), are commonly used by young people, as is ‘sure’ (shur), firish (‘fresh’, ‘upbeat’) and ofar (‘over the top’, ‘too much’). The phrases ‘take it easy’ (tikitizi) and ‘it’s up to you’ (idzubduyu) bear the influence of the tourism industry, an inducement for a wide swath of the population to acquire an unlikely smattering of English. Hotel schools breed their own idiom gleaned from the textbooks of the trade, hence the casual inquiry, ‘what is the purpose of your visit?’ or the admonishment to ‘have a nice accommodation’. Aimed at soliciting sales, street banter is often playful. In the souvenir souk of the Khan al-Khalili one may hear ‘Looking for 146

me?’, ‘You’re late’ or ‘How can I take your money on this fine day?’, along with the usual ‘What are you looking for?’ A polite ‘Nothing, thank you’ may prompt the unexpectedly philosophical retort: ‘We’ve got Nothing special’. Likewise an old papyrus vendor, inured to refusal, uses the sales pitch ‘Think about it’. Singing the praises of goods for sale is an age-old custom that persists in Cairo. Street hawkers carrying baskets or driving horse or donkey-drawn carts trawl the city, stopping at intervals to cry out their wares. ‘Milk . . . the milk that intoxicates . . . milk with cream!’ (laban, laban yiskir, laban bil √ishta) advertises unpasteurized waterbuffalo juice. ‘Red and sweet!’ (ahmar wi hilw) announces the arrival of watermelon, ‘Crazy tomatoes!’ (magnuna ya quta) refers to their fluctuating price; ‘Figs with the gnats still on them!’ (bi namusu ya tin) and ‘Cucumbers with canal mud!’ (bi tinit il tirafi ya khyar) indicate freshness. At times melodic, or a nasal bark or delivered with the penetrating top-of-the-head resonance of the muezzin (men who chant the call to prayer), the voices slice through traffic and are audible many storeys above the street. In the early morning as shops and makeshift kiosks reanimate, vendors frequently tell potential customers to ‘Help me to open the day [with a sale]’ (istaftah bik). Following the first purchase, a vendor may take the money, kiss it and touch it to his or her forehead several times in quick succession, a gesture mingling hope (for more business) with thanks. The same combination of prayer and pragmatism is evident in the act of kissing the tips of the fingers on first the inside then the outside of the hand, welcoming and dismissing fate’s whims in a single gesture. Refusal of a service or an offer of food or drink, is shown by patting the breast with an open hand, suggesting one’s completeness as well as thanks. Pointing a finger to one eye then the other in response to a request for a favour or a service, is a promise that the request will be duly granted, along with a plea for trust: Your wish is as dear to me as my eyes (fiineyya). When used by tradesmen to answer a client’s insistent demands, the gesture can also mean ‘Just leave me alone and let me do my job’. Cairenes kiss when greeting members of the same sex, men hug and hold hands and schoolchildren walk arm in arm. An affectionate familiarity extends to strangers on public transport where one often finds oneself happily nestled in someone’s lap or vice versa. Cab drivers extend their arms across one’s person to professionally slam 147

or unlock a reluctant door. Entering a movie theatre, the (large, jovial, predominantly male) crowd rushes the (too small) entry like party crashers, even with seat-assigned tickets in hand. Pushing and shoving are urban sports without malice or necessity, reflecting an apparently insatiable desire for contact. As population densities rise, however, the once exotic concept of personal space is gaining ground. A significant portion of women and girls who wear headscarves or flowing veils, do so to earn a few additional centimetres of respect in a crowd. Polite conventions such as giving way in a queue, relinquishing seats, opening doors for women and the elderly, are nevertheless prevalent and sometimes rewarded with the comment ‘You’re all manners’ (kullak zo√), that doubles as a sarcastic rebuke when courtesy is lacking. Most admonishments for rudeness are themselves insults. ‘You have no origin’ (no class, mafiandaksh asl) is delivered with elevating indignation towards the author of a slight. ‘His blood is a slap’ (dammu yultush) is the damning description of an offensive person, who may also be called ‘That blight of a man’ (ragil aafa) or ‘Sir shit’ (si khara). An importunate remark towards a woman could elicit an angry ‘Poison!’ (simm); yet the same word hissed softly welcomes further importunity. To say that someone’s ‘face is dark’ (wishshu dilim) is to consign him with disgust to the ranks of the ill humoured. Likewise ‘Oh tedious one’ (ya mumill), used by someone whose patience is tried, conveys with delicacy and disdain the sentiment ‘you bore me to tears’, as if nothing could possibly be worse. Among girls, ‘Oh open one’ (ya maftuha, or currently, ya obin) is an accusation, suggesting questionable virtue. Mothers, held sacred in this paternalist society, are nevertheless heavily implicated in insults, the most frequent example being ‘Your mother’s cunt’ (kuss ummak), also used by way of saying ‘Buzz off’. The exclamation ‘ahha’ (exhaled, with accent on the ‘ah’ followed by a nasal snort) mimics the putative sounds of a (loose) woman in the throes of pleasure, a vulgar response to distasteful behaviour. ‘I’ll rid you of your mother’s religion’ (hatallafi din ummak), that is, take what is dearest to you, is a classic and bitter oath. ‘May He make your house collapse’ (yikhrib betak) is especially unkind, because houses often do. The notion that a dog is a man’s best friend would puzzle the average Egyptian, for whom ‘dog’ is a slur, as in ‘son of a dog’ (ibn kalb), ‘son of sixty dogs’ (ibn sittin kalb) and an age-old euphemism 148

for the Egyptian ruling establishment, ‘those dogs’ (il kilab dol). The latter also bear the sobriquet ‘those thieves’ (il haramiyya dol) or ‘the band of thieves’ (shillit il haramiyya). ‘Haram’ means ‘thief’ but also ‘forbidden’; haram is a standard equivalent for ‘shame on you’, ‘how dare you’ and occasionally ‘have a heart’. Arab classical music ideally embodies several circular principles that likewise apply to communication and styles of interaction. First, the role of the listener is paramount. Second, improvisation is an index of virtuosity, elaborated within a formal (modal) framework characterized by repetition. A phrase, word, or even sigh, may be sung a hundred times but each iteration reveals fresh meaning to the receptive ear. Third, a musician or vocalist’s improvisational art is inextricably bound to the audience, so that each performance is only as great as the highest expectations of the closest listener. In the words of musical genius Umm Khalthoum: I remember one of my earlier concerts at al-Ezbekeyya Theatre. There was a blind person sitting in the last row. I felt his exuberance running through me and was thrilled by the chemistry between us. That night I sang as if he were my only listener.4 Umm Khalthoum studied Qur√anic recitation and the ideals associated with that form surely influenced her subsequent work. The concept of ‘huzn’ encompasses those ideals; although translated as ‘sorrow’ or ‘grief ’, huzn has to do with a quality of voice that suggests weeping, but more particularly the emotional state that elicits tears, not of sorrow but ecstatic awe.5 In a typical recording, one detects the sternness of the proud sufferer in Umm Khalthoum’s voice, underscored by admonishing violins and the nay (reed flute) that wafts through overtures and codas like a fragrance. The composition progresses in a spiralling crescendo, the singer circling the song’s meaning until reaching the centre and sounding an emotional chord that reverberates through artist, orchestra and audience. Anyone who’s heard these recordings or seen them on tv will recall the sound of the crowd roaring like a crashing wave, as people stand or stretch out their arms to embrace the ephemeral, abandoned to a joy that is barely distinguishable from agony. Such intimacy holds a transformational power that has its way with artist and audience alike. Umm Khalthoum, referred to by 149

admirers as ‘the celestial body or planet of the east’ (kawkab Al-sharq), retraces the path from her early career: Then, I was a student trembling in front of the examining committee – even though I’d learned my lesson by heart. As days passed and concerts too, the tables turned. I became the professor, the audience my students. And what joy do I derive from observing them, sometimes examining their unique personalities while they listen to me . . .6 Umm Khalthoum’s disciplined intensity was such that the bulk of her audience, though unschooled in the complexities of classical Arabic poetry with its obscure vocabulary and phrasing, could nevertheless grasp the essence of her words. Her songs, whether simply (colloquially) framed or magisterially lyrical, gave voice and credence to a world of unarticulated strivings, imparting a sense of deliverance and redemption. Her funeral in 1975 was the greatest communally enacted epic in the history of Cairo. Over two million people thronged Tahrir Square, thousands of whom succeeded in diverting the singer ’s coffin from the city centre, several kilometres away, to the al-Husayn Mosque in the medieval quarter. Their intention, spontaneously conceived and executed in a rapture of grief and love, was to enshrine the artist beside the head of the Prophet’s grandson, believed to be buried in the mosque. It was the closest they could get to presenting her to God themselves. After nearly thirty years Umm Khalthoum’s live recordings are bestsellers, a daily radio programme is dedicated to them and the Egyptian who has not committed at least some of the lyrics to memory is rare. Although contemporary artists have not approached her achievements, the titles of their songs reflect the transcendent joy-in-sorrow that holds wide appeal. Most songs speak of distance, fire, tears, wounds and forgetting and of course ‘my heart’ (√albi) and ‘my eyes’(fiineyya). A taste for poetry and the awesome must derive in part from the average person’s familiarity with Qur√anic language, whose lyricism is evident in a sampling of the ninety-nine names of Allah: ‘the pure one’ (Al-Quddus), ‘the source of peace’ (Al-Salam), ‘the compeller’ (Al-Jabbar), ‘the shaper of beauty’ (Al-Musawwir), ‘the subduer’ (AlQahhar), ‘the sustainer ’ (Al-Razzaq), ‘the opener ’ (Al-Fattah), ‘the 150

constrictor’ (Al-Qabid), ‘the abaser’ (Al-Khafid), ‘the subtle one’ (AlLatif), ‘the loving one’ (Al-Wadud) and ‘the all-hearing’ (Al-Samifi). The names of individuals often echo these concepts: Fadl (virtue), Tawfiq√ (success), Bahgat (splendour), Amal (hope), Yusra (ease), Nadir (rare), Hamid (praiseworthy), Rafi (sublime), Munir (brilliant), Mumtaz (chosen), Salim (sound), Murad (will), Ridwan (god’s pleasure, without which no one can enter paradise) and Fitna or Afet (affliction, in the sense of a torture to live without) and Nihaya (the end, for the last of many children). Common names include Amira (princess), Dunya (world), Nagma (star), Shams (sun), Badr (full moon) and Niseem (breeze). Some boys’ names commemorate famous heroes but their original meanings have been forgotten. The widespread Hamza for instance, is the name of the Prophet’s uncle, but its original meaning is ‘bean’. Political leaders’ names are often adopted, but the parents of a set of triplets called Gamal, Nehru and Tito arguably took the thing a bit far.7 What is most moving when one examines the sweep of Islamicorigin names, whether austere, whimsical, glorious or ironic, is their expressiveness, the desire to capture in a word the miracle of a child’s birth and the mystery of its destiny. Poetic formulas of speech cover everything from awakening to death. The day begins with a salvo of greetings: ‘good morning’ (sabah il kher√) is answered with ‘morning of jasmine’ (sabah il full) to which one can reply ‘morning of light’ (sabah il nur). If willing to savour the day and prolong the back-and-forth exchange, the ante can be upped to a ‘morning of cream’ (sabah il √ishta), ‘a white day’ (naharak abyad) or a ‘morning of flowers (sabah il ward). Following a bath or a haircut one hears, ‘may you feel comfortable’ (nafiiman). When someone receives a gift or good news, companions will offer ‘blessings’ (mabruk); the reply being ‘may the blessings be (shared) with you’ (allah yibarik fik). Guests compliment their hosts with ‘may your bounteous table endure’ (sufra daymah), implying the wish to always be welcome there. The host’s response is ‘may your good fortunes endure’ (yidum fiizzak), that is, ‘may you continue to enjoy my (ability to offer) hospitality’. When someone dies, the expression of condolence for relatives and friends is ‘may the rest of his life be yours’ (il baqiyya fi hayatak). If this sounds less than desirable, the intended meaning is that nothing is wasted and the sum of all life is shared. A frequently used equivalent for ‘thank you’, is ‘long may you live’(tifiish). 151

Cairenes are expansive, as evidenced, for example, on a tv quiz show one New Year’s Eve, when winning contestants were treated to a viewing of their favourite vintage film or music clip, and allowed to dedicate it to anyone they liked. The dedication invariably went out, not to individuals, but ‘to all the people of Cairo and Egypt’ (li kull il masriyyin). The name Masr refers to the capital as well as the nation, indicating the power of Cairo’s identity with regards to Egypt as a whole, and a reminder of ensemble, that we’re in this together. In a similar fashion, the word baladi, translates according to context as ‘my town’ (village) or ‘my country’. A phonetically identical (but morphologically different) baladi is a common adjective describing something quintessentially Egyptian, with the connotation of ‘basic and unsophisticated’. Interestingly, baladi can denote both admiration and distaste. For example, baladi bread (fiesh baladi) is hearty and satisfying whereas baladi manners (zoq baladi) are considered lacking in refinement. A baladi chicken, usually raised on a roof and slaughtered at purchase, is superior to the mass-produced frozen variety. In fact, all baladi food is thought to be wholesome, but to call an individual, or group of people baladi, is to imply that they are coarse and undesirable. As a people to whom dissimulation comes easily, Cairenes tend to calculate expressions of emotion for greater effect. High-pitched sentiment often betrays a trademark tinge of melodrama, something deliberately over the top or else absurdly understated. If cars bump in slow-moving traffic, drivers will leap out shaking their fists and swearing mightily, only to exchange insults, attract a placating crowd and return, edified, to their vehicles. Huffiness, that wordless but withering reply to an insult, reaches great heights, especially among ladies, perhaps because of the active participation of at least one hand perched on an assertive hip. A seemingly explosive argument can metamorphose into laughter and backslapping camaraderie in the blink of an eye. Slapping is big in Cairo. People slap their faces to signal sorrow, their thighs for exasperation, and each other, sometimes just for fun. Emotional displays tend to be stagey, calling to mind the declamatory techniques of old-guard actors, parents and politicians. It’s as if every shade of feeling had been so thoroughly explored and variously portrayed, that in order to communicate these days one need 152

only use a shorthand of emotional clichés. Egyptian colloquial, with its sardonic, deadpan delivery, is an accomplice to the mise-en-scènes, affording interactions a demonstrative, almost Brechtian theatricality. One hears things like ‘they ate his face’ (humiliated him, kalu wishshu), ‘he made my neck long’ (made me proud, tawwil raqabti), ‘he’s got no blood’ (is unfeeling, ma√lush damm), ‘he ate my mind like a candy’ (sweet talked me, kal fiaqli bi halawa), and ‘he ate the girl’ (had her, kal il bint).8 The mutterings of cab drivers, who consider pedestrians as personal affronts, offer more of the same. People attempting to cross a street (and obstruct traffic) may be called ‘garbage’ (zibala) or ‘dust – like you wipe from a floor’ (zayy il-turab, timsahu min fial balat). The same estimation of life’s relative value is evident in the remark of a parking attendant, motioning a client from a garage onto the street, where a fat man stands blocking the way. The grinning attendant waves the driver forward regardless, hollering, ‘there’s plenty more where he came from’ (fi kitir zayyu), i.e. run him down, he won’t be missed. Women are prone to histrionic expressions of dismay that seem wrenched from the pages of gothic romance: ‘oh wringing of my heart (ya hasrat √albi), ‘oh thwarted hope’ (ya khebit amali), ‘oh downfall’ (ya kharabi), ‘oh distraction’ (caused by anger or bewilderment, ya lahwi) or ‘oh black news (ya khabar iswid). ‘Oh white news’ (ya khabar abyad) signifies astonishment but is also used as a euphemism for ‘black news’ by people who consider the word ‘black’ unlucky. Like most theatre people, Cairenes are shameless flatterers. Greetings incorporate compliments like ‘you bring light’ (inta bitnawwar) or ‘what beauty is this?’ (eh il gamal da). In the course of a brief interaction with relative strangers one acquires the status of ‘darling’ (habibi). It’s not unusual for acquaintances to refer to each other as ‘my soul’ (ruhi). A loved one is ‘my life’ (hayati) and ‘my world’ (dunyiti) or the ‘light of my heart’ (nur qalbi). Terms of endearment are phrased to confound subject and object: ‘I dissolve with(in) you’ (you make me melt, ana badub fik) and ‘I die with you’ (you kill me, ana bamut fik). When someone is content, they are ‘as happy as the whole world’ (farhan qadd il-dunya). The newly met are not merely pleased to make one’s acquaintance, they are ‘honoured’ (sharraftina). If in a public setting one apologizes for blocking another’s view, one may be informed that ‘the flower has no back’ (il ward malush dahr). 153

This sort of delicacy elicits cautious appreciation; just because someone is always saying ‘I’m your slave’ (ana khaddamak) or ‘order me’ (u √murni) doesn’t mean they’re serious. When asked the price of an item or a fare, wily shopkeepers or cabbies may disingenuously respond ‘nothing is hidden from you’ (kullak nazar), that is, ‘it’s up to you (to be generous)’. Likewise, attempts to pay people are met with a gesture of refusal and the expression khallih or ‘keep it’. This largesse usually issues from those who need, want, and have every right to expect something, but will nevertheless refuse several times for form’s sake. Indeed, the form and tone of the interaction counts far more than its content. Requests for street directions, for instance, involve much excited exchange but very little information. Drivers will ask someone the way, then immediately disregard what was said and ask someone else. Those asked for directions will unhesitatingly propose fictional ones rather than refuse the request or admit they haven’t the vaguest idea where they are. In Cairo, phatic communion (using speech to establish a sense of sociability rather than convey data) is a way of life, so much so that counter-formulas exist to verify what might otherwise be construed as idle politesse. The expression itfaddal means ‘you’re welcome’ in the sense of ‘please join us’, for a meal or an outing. This invitation is extended so broadly, even to perfect strangers, that the saying ‘this is not a boatman’s invite’ is used when necessary to underline its sincerity, that is, this invitation is for real, not extended from someone inaccessible (out to sea) so you’re not expected to refuse. Cairo’s taxi and microbus drivers, numbering at least half a million, provide a barometer for the city’s mood and a glimpse of its group mind. Taciturn cabbies are rare; most want or need to talk. One hears distressingly intimate stories about sick children and wives with no sexual appetite, about aching backs and the rash that is likely to form on a sweaty bottom from sitting too long on the same hot seat. Cabbies advance philosophies, elaborate conspiracies, offer advice, contribute to the expanding vocabulary of curses and insults, spread rumours and tell jokes. Cairenes not only love a good joke, they invent dozens daily that travel via cars and cafés to every nook of the city. Jokes are the ongoing dialogue between the people and the deaf realms of power; they are commentary, parable, condemnation and 154

dismissal. Once opinion finds its expression in humour, it’s a diffused bomb that can be kicked around fearlessly. In the minefield created by poverty, illiteracy and a variety of void social contracts, humour is a sport few can afford not to play. While censorship has effectively staunched the flow of comic critique that might issue from tv, film and theatre, it has done so at the expense of credibility. When they’re not gnashing their teeth, people laugh at bureaucratic ineptitude and propagandist dross. It takes at least one brain, after all, to wash another. If a medium designed to communicate ideas becomes a means of obscuring them, there is an inevitable loss of inspiration, engagement and quality of the end product. Such has been the fate of Egyptian entertainment, including the once fertile field of comedy.9 A strange and disturbing symptom is the ubiquity on screen, stage and tv of the grotesque cross-dresser, too often an ageing and obese man in a fancy outfit, a red slash of lipstick and matching false nails. This parody of the female as gargoyle and seductress is good for a cheap laugh. But the funniest thing is that some fool of a man always falls for the female impersonator, making the audience an accomplice to a dilemma that perhaps only a (threatened? terrified?) male-dominated society can truly appreciate. Laughter, as a poet once said, is the confusion between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Most of the jokes circulating the streets are about politics, the economy and current affairs, but favourite subjects include religion, sex, Gulf Arabs, the blind, the cross-eyed and the afterlife. Small boys and girls approach cars at intersections with boxes of tissues they’d like to sell. If you refuse they’ll offer to tell a joke (and earn a tip), usually a one-liner so as not to hold up traffic, delivered rapidly with a sigh while the child clings to the side of the car. Did you hear the one about the cross-eyed guy whose mother died? He buried his father. A cross-eyed guy is crying and the tears come out of his nose. Not so funny, but the kids don’t expect much, a grizzled half-pound note will do. The most persistent protagonist in Egyptian jokes is the safiidi, the farmer from Upper Egypt who embodies the qualities of naiveté and physicality, usually portrayed as an idiot. Did you hear about the safiidi who wanted to murder his wife? He put a knife in her soup. What about the safiidi who wanted to walk to the sun even though we told him he’d burn to death? Ha, he says, did you think I was going in the daytime? 155

Following the train fire of 2002 and the lack of discernible action to address dangerous travelling conditions, the joke went around about the safiidi who goes to Ramses Station to purchase a ticket for Upper Egypt. ‘Do you want that fried or grilled?’ asks the ticket seller, a reference to the condition of the victims’ corpses. The fact is, most Egyptian jokes are not funny in a straightforward or lighthearted way. They are instead wry, scathing or downright melancholic but people always laugh. And if they laugh a great deal, when they recover from their mirth they’ll say, ‘God preserve us’ (rabbina yustur), lest too much glee attract bad luck. The spirit world with its djinns (ginn) and demons (fiafarit) is a vehicle for many jokes, and Aladdin’s lamp (fiala√ il-din, a name meaning ‘religion’s heights’) is relentlessly polished, with mixed results. For instance, Hosni Mubarak, George Bush and Ariel Sharon find a lamp and free a genie who awards them each a wish. Bush gets to go first and requests that America’s power exceed that of any empire known to man. The genie promises it will be done but only in two hundred years. Bush, in despair of witnessing this dream come true, begins to cry. Next, Sharon demands the genie to ensure the triumph of the chosen ones over the world entire. The genie agrees, but confesses this will take three hundred years, reducing Sharon to frustrated tears. Finally Hosni Mubarak states his claim for Egypt to surpass its own Pharaonic past and reign supreme once and for all. The genie considers this request and starts to weep himself. In the same vein we hear of the parents of a girl with a chronic drooling problem. They take the child to an fiarrafa (a knower, female practitioner of ritual magic) to be cured. She gives her a talisman, a bit of paper with a spell on it that the girl must wear around her neck.10 A few days later the drooling stops. Amazed, the parents unfold the paper to read the spell and are shocked to find a picture of President Hosni Mubarak. They return to the fiarrafa to ask what this means. Her response is the punch line: if he can ‘dry the saliva’ (yinashshif ri√, i.e. make hoarse from complaint) of 70 million people he can certainly handle one little girl. If the bureaucracy is the butt of jokes, it’s often well-deserved. Governmental grandiloquence, underscored by the high-handed formality of classical Arabic and filtered through the mouthpiece of a sycophantic media, doesn’t help. One can imagine the reception of the following rant, penned by Samir Ragab, editor of the stateowned newspaper, Al-Gomhoureyya (The Republic) as a warning to 156

Egypt’s under-17 soccer team before a preliminary tournament match: We hope that the youth of our national team will win against Finland tonight, because this is their last chance. Therefore I truly hope that the players and their coach read this article so that they are clear that our hearts are with them and we support them fully. But if they take it too easy and let us down, we will not stand before them with our hands tied under any circumstances. This, gentlemen, is the reputation of a nation that must not be violated in any way. Yes, soccer is about winning and losing, as they say, but this principle only applies to those who win at least sometimes and on other occasions are defeated. But those who get used to exiting international tournaments in the first round ought to face a harsh reckoning. Success has a sweet taste, but failure has the curse of God upon it until Judgment Day.11 Touchy, isn’t he? Unfortunately, the opposition cant is no better. Although the president brooks no direct critique, the vituperative texts aimed at his ministers provide ample opportunity for venting and plenty of laughs. Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni caused a scandal during the millennium preparations, when he proposed that a massive gold-leafed tip be placed atop the pyramid of Khufu just as the clock struck twelve. Only ‘Zionist infiltrators’ could devise such a subversive ‘Masonic’ plot, said Al-Shaab (The People, a Labour Party paper), to damage the greatest symbol of Egyptian history. Admitting the gold tip was perhaps extravagant, not to mention vaguely suggestive and a logistics nightmare, the minister backed down. Al-Shaab gloated, ‘With God’s blessing and favour our campaign has triumphed and our nationalist victories will continue in confronting crimes against Egyptian rights’.12 Public figures have a gift for understatement when describing the nation’s shortcomings and hyperbole with regards to achievements. Following criticism of public hospitals, the Minister of Health, Dr Ismail Salam, described Cairo’s al-Khanka health facility (a latter-day Bedlam) as ‘a five-star hotel’ sparking widespread speculation as to where he spends his holidays.13 Likewise, the president’s comment that ‘all Egyptians live under the same conditions, more or less’, elicited public concern for his eyesight.14 The Minister of Education, evil step-parent to some 24 million Cinderellas, aired his views on the 157

Downtown rooftops in 2003.

future of education in a book called Nationalism in a World Without Identity. The minister ’s belief that ‘there is no great nation in the world that has united completely under one ruler as has Egypt’ left many a reader wondering exactly which world he was referring to.15 Pouring oil on the fire is a bureaucratic specialty but caustic wit abounds in the same newspapers that parrot the polemic. A cartoon published in Al-Arabi (17 June 2001) features a bureaucrat and citizen facing each other across a desk where lies a spiked club inscribed with the legend ‘emergency law’. The caption reads: ‘We’re living in a democracy. Everyone has the right to say “no” but it is better to say “yes”’. 16 A cartoon appearing in Al-Wafd (10 February 2002) during a campaign to promote exports bears the motto ‘Buy Egyptian’ and depicts men cheerily holding out their plates to a ful (bean) seller, a quintessential staple of the Cairene diet, the only thing they can afford. When the ‘black cloud’ of smog envelops the city, fingers are pointed at the Delta farmers burning rice husks. But people living beside smoldering garbage heaps remain unconvinced, as apparent in a cartoon that appeared in Al-Wafd featuring a ministerial type 158

pointing smugly to the image of a flatulent demon squatting over Cairo emitting a noxious cloud. The caption reads: People are accusing the government of not knowing the reason [for the smoke over Cairo] . . . It’s just the opposite. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but we managed to use infra-red radiation to get an image of this demon whose stomach is bothering him and has silent gases. And here you have a picture of the demon. The announcement that each ministry would hire a public relations representative, presumably to better convey their mysterious ways, was met with derision in Al-Gomhoureyya (19 April 2000). A cartoon shows a man behind a desk and another, anxiously presenting his qualifications for the pr job. The caption reads, ‘What Bachelors? What Masters? I want a certificate from two street corner hustlers that you’re a qualified con artist and can play three-card Monty’. Egyptians know how the deck is stacked but that doesn’t keep them from dealing with a smile, a least so far. Moshe Dayan, former Israeli Minister of Defence, once remarked, ‘I would not fear the Egyptians even if they possessed nuclear weapons, but I will begin to feel nervous if they stop making jokes about themselves and about others’.17 Dayan was considered a serious man, the kind about whom is said ‘his blood is heavy’ (dammu t√il), that is, heavy-hearted, humourless. The inverse expression describes someone with a sense of humour, which is how Egyptians like to think of themselves, that is, ‘their blood is light’ (dammuhum khafif). The Egyptian use of Arabic embraces the real, in the spoken, colloquial language, and the otherworldly, in the classical language reserved for prayer, rhetoric and some art forms. Although colloquial is more true-to-life as a style of expression, novelists and intellectuals tend to use classical Arabic, eschewing colloquial as inappropriate for serious matters, too clichéd and class entrenched. Nevertheless, the colloquial is an appreciable vehicle for critique, thanks to its quality of relentless retort. Because of its immediacy and use of stark metaphor, the literary possibilities of colloquial Egyptian seem great, yet they remain largely unexplored because of convention.18 When, as Clifford Geertz suggests in his Interpretation of Cultures, language is ‘as much a symbol as a medium’, there are embedded truths awaiting rediscovery and expression.19 159

Past its function for communication, language influences ways of thinking, and many believe that classical Arabic is less suitable than English for elaborating and teaching some disciplines, notably science. According to Egyptian writer and Hebrew scholar, Saeed Okasha, ‘there’s too much of the afterlife in it’, meaning the sacred, the unalterable. But what Professor Geertz calls ‘the famous linguistic schizophrenia of Arabic-speaking people’, the bifurcation of vernacular and classical, is not necessarily a shortcoming. If language is a worldview and a frame of reference, it may help these days to have more than one. Since over half of Egypt is illiterate, ideas and feelings are likely to be explored in conversation, rather than reading or writing.20 Language becomes a sixth sense, another way of knowing, its possibilities not confined to the written word. Speaking of the Middle Ages (one of the Arab world’s cultural zeniths), a time when mnemonic prowess was a favoured intellectual pursuit, Robert Irwin points out (in Nights, Horses and the Desert) that ‘literary men were walking books. Writing was not a necessary vehicle for literature and a number of important poets were illiterate’.21 Literacy, then as now, as Irwin points out, is not the only game in town, but it is interesting to note how the value for memorization has turned against itself. Rather than an exercise designed to preserve language and narrative, memorization, widely deployed in Egyptian schools, teaches children to forget. Young people learn to dislike books, and indeed have a hard time reading, because they’re forced to drum large chunks of inert text into their heads to spew out whole for exams, only to be replaced and forgotten the next term. Even those who can read are not overly fond of books, and the local relationship with the printed word is wrought with conflict. Reasons vary. Aside from teaching methods that condition aversion, the book is anti-social, it costs money; avoiding it is a protest of the duplicity characterizing too much of what is written. In all events, print runs are small, a publication is successful if it sells just three to five thousand copies. Religious books tend to do well, suggesting that the afterlife is rather more engaging than what writers make of this one. By far the most frequent book one sees in Egyptian hands is the Qur√an, which, more than an ideal or the word of God, proposes an interactive experience of the divine. The Qur√an is ideally communicated though recitation and listening, which is perhaps why many of its readers do so aloud, even if alone, just under their breath.22 To 160

read or recite the Qur√an is to reenact its revelation; ordinary books can hardly compete. The first word of the revelation was ‘read!’ (iqra√), also interpreted as ‘recite’ and ‘proclaim’, a thrice-repeated injunction transmitted by the Prophet Mohammed who was, at that time, illiterate. Disciples set his utterances down in writing. Memorizing the Qur√an, through repeated recitation, perhaps established a precedent for the importance still attributed to learning by heart. Only five per cent of all Egyptian publications (numbering around 12–15,000 annually) are literary, the majority comprised of textbooks and political and religious tracts. The only way for most fiction writers to see print is to self-publish and distribute their own work. Ibrahim El-Moallem, head of the Arab Association of Book Publishers commented, ‘some people say we have more novel writers than novel readers’.23 One wonders if this is such a bad sign. Yet a surfeit of writers appears to be what the authorities fear and seek to prevent through censorship and scant education. Like other misguided strategies, perhaps this one too, is turning into its opposite. Meanwhile, novelist Gamal Al-Ghitani complains that writers operate in an ambience of ‘government tyranny, odious and opportunistic extremism and widespread ignorance’.24 Nobel prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz laments the short-run editions and consequent extinction of many valuable contemporary Arab publications: The book is no doubt a commodity, but it is not a short-term ordinary commodity, one that can be consumed and then discarded. Rather, making works available should be regarded as a long-term intellectual and cultural service, available at all times . . . [The reader asks] for a title they want only to be told that the book is old, that it was published in the 1960s and is not, therefore, available. Can you imagine the same thing happening with Marguerite Duras in France or Arthur Miller in America . . . ? In Egypt, though, the book appears to have an expiry date . . .25 The official attitude towards books places itself at odds with this portrayal. First Lady Suzanne Mubarak was awarded honours from unesco for her efforts to make inexpensive books and libraries available to the public; the 1990s were dedicated to a campaign to eradicate illiteracy. The General Authority for Literacy and Adult 161

Education was established and placed under the auspices of a group of retired military officers as befits, one supposes, a ‘campaign’. While the results may not have had the impact reflected in official figures, the issue of literacy became the subject of intensified rhetoric, which in Egypt is the parent and sometimes, alas, the grandparent of change. The annual Cairo Book Fair, a government-sponsored event since the late 1960s, attracts tens of thousands of enthusiasts during its two-week run. Books, however, are not necessarily the main cause for enthusiasm. Scheduled during the mid-term school break, the book fair offers a rare opportunity for a free family outing in a ‘cultural’ context that cuts across class distinctions. With music blaring throughout the chaotic exhibition halls and food stalls doing a lively trade, the fair has been described as a carnival or a mulid (popular feasts celebrating the birth of religious figures). Aside from symposia and debates featuring poets, writers and bureaucrats, the 2002 book fair boasted the presence of nearly 3,000 publishers from 92 countries, exhibiting some four million publications. A characteristic ambivalence pervades the bloated proceedings. In 2002, eighty-three well-established Arab publishers were prevented from exhibiting their works. The books were held up in customs following the alleged discovery of ‘sex books placed inside the covers of the Qur√an plus . . . a number of unlicensed books such as Sex in the Qur√an and Sex in Paradise’; theories varied as to the author of this offence, from the shippers, to greedy customs officials demanding payoffs, to competing local publishers.26 The crates were returned to their countries of origin unopened. Another dubious aspect of the fair is the much vaunted ‘public forum’ when citizens are given the opportunity to air their views before members of government. At one such gathering in 2001, organized around the theme of freedom of expression, a young man asked the Minister of Education why a particular publication was banned. A spokesperson took the microphone from his boss and set the tone for the discussion, stating that ‘the minister is not here to answer personal questions’. Despite its reluctance to do so, the education ministry has a great deal to answer for. Since the highest teacher’s salary is less than 100 dollars per month (le400), private lessons emphasizing crucial exam material have become the mainstay of their livelihood and children cannot hope to pass tests without tutoring. Not that they 162

would be kept back, since there is no room. High scores are nonetheless necessary for children to enter the professional faculty of their choice, the dearest wish of most families for their children. Cheating is endemic, often forgiven by parents desperate to see their kids at least through high school, a goal they were themselves unable to achieve. Up to a third of the average Cairene’s household income is absorbed by education, including lessons, books, clothes and supplies. Between the teacher’s coercive tactics regarding private lessons, and the sense of obligation towards family sacrifice made on their behalves, children find little joy in learning. Textbooks are shoddy, curricula outdated; memorization and the slap of a ruler on an open palm are the primary modes of instruction. There is little coordination of programmes and methodologies aimed at cumulative learning. Each new term is a tabula rasa. The peak of the Sisyphean cycle is exam time, when a wave of education-related cartoons appears in the newspapers, and jokes make the rounds to diffuse the tension felt by parents and children alike. A teacher asks three students for their opinion about eating meat. The first student inquires ‘What do you mean by meat?’; The second asks ‘What do you mean by eating’?; the third ‘What is an opinion?’ Another joke tells of a boy who attends his test with the answers inscribed on his shirt-collar and cuffs. When asked the name of the first president of the republic, he finds the answer on his right wrist. To answer the question ‘Who is the current president?’ the boy is obliged to consult his collar. Van Heusen, he copies from the label. The joke underlines the futility of education as Egyptians experience it and the fact that no one under the age of twenty has known a president other than Hosni Mubarak. Since the late 1950s, when Nasser began to build the public school system, the Ministry of Education has become second only to the military in number of employees. Although five per cent of Egypt’s gdp is slotted for education (le20.4 billion), budget allocation is obscure, subject to the vagaries of ministerial mismanagement and spurious fact-reporting. Aside from around three and a half million teachers, there are again almost half as many bureaucratic personnel, yet teachers are still allotted administrative duties. Teacher morale is understandably nil. Many are forced to handle classes of up to 90 students, though official figures place class densities at an average of 42. 163

Many inner city schools work in shifts, as many as three per day. Faculty is obliged to share inadequate, substandard bathroom facilities with thousands of children. No wonder teachers struggle to send their own kids to private schools. Public ones often lack the amenities of light bulbs and cleanliness. The condition of schools is a lesson in itself, one of contradictory values, of getting along somehow with each other and the ‘system’.27 Just as rote memorization teaches children to forget, so the collective memory, as represented by Egypt’s National Archive, suffers from government-induced amnesia. Documentation from the city’s distant past is abundant, but the files thin out towards the twentieth century, until 1952, when time appears to stop. Following the revolution, documents were sequestered by a variety of ministries who have the right to withhold them as they please, placing the country’s academicians in the awkward position of being unable to write their own contemporary history. Journalists are caught in a double bind, facing imprisonment for slander without proper proof of governmental misdeeds but requiring permission often from those same authorities to publish it. Obtaining documents is a test of professional and physical stamina. Files are piled haphazardly on floors and in bathrooms throughout Cairo, busily breeding sub-tropical insect life and even, reportedly, snakes. Researchers attempting to locate and consult archive files have likened their task to ‘heroism’ and ‘spying’. 28 Although founded in 1829, just 30 years after the French Archives National, Egypt’s ‘palace of files’ (Daftarkhana) was created by Mohammed Ali for the purpose of control more than open public record. But at least he ran a tight ship. Reticent civil servants were given a hundred lashes for not promptly submitting their documents. Those were the days. If you had asked the first three or four millennia’s worth of Egyptians if they thought pharaoh might some day bite the dust, they may have replied ‘Sure, when the Sphinx speaks’ (lamma abu l-hol yintaq), which means never. The Sphinx’s nickname, abu l-hol, translates as ‘Father of awe’ or ‘Father of overwhelming terror ’, implying that nothing is quite as frightening as silence. Yet at long last, the cult of secrecy nurtured by Egypt’s successive hush-hush cabals is being undermined. In 1998 Egypt tethered itself to the space age with the launch of its first communications satellite, 164

NileSat101. Three years later the government launched NileSat102, selling transponder rights to private-sector investors at three million dollars per year. Locally produced content on several channels like ‘Dream tv’ can be controversial. The Egyptian talk show, (local tv’s favoured cheap and chatty format), features hot topics like impotence and fiurfi marriages and even a smattering of political critique. But there are tacit restrictions; the red lines of sedition and pornography are unlikely to be crossed by those who wish to stay on the air. Then came the internet, whose guiding principle of free exchange is so ofar for info-starved Egyptian youth, they cannot help but find it wildly firish and motivating.29 Think how many cryptic keyboard functions a young man will absorb to reach the naked houris (beautiful virgins) of virtual paradise. Probably quite a few. Indeed the enticements of cyberspace overcome language barriers, and kids, whether literate or not, are thrilled to get online. Nor is the net’s attraction confined to leisure or idle curiosity. Information technology is one of Egypt’s few industrial and service sectors enjoying steady and promising growth. Internet access and email service via private-sector servers began in the mid-1990s. Free internet was granted on 1 January 2002 when the number of users was already 1.2 million and rising at a brisk 130 per cent annually.30 The Ministry of Education reports that half of Egypt’s 24,000 schools are connected to the net and beginning to offer computer training. Girls in secondary school may now spend their mornings memorizing eleventh-century Arabic texts about the responsibilities of an obedient wife, and afternoons assigning meaning to Arabic transliterations of computer English, verbs like ‘hang’ and ‘save’ (hannig, sayyif). In 2002 the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology launched programmes providing computer training and net access at existing internet cafes and ngos to whoever happens to stop by.31 Teens who ordinarily work in a fruit juice shop or garage can test-drive a computer and visualize new possibilities in a language based on commands and choices about how to interact or not. It’s up to them for once. The internet proposes a customized language involving memory skills with visual rewards, eye to hand coordination, and equal parts absorption and observation. It’s as if people wished they could just skip the book and found a way to do it. The internet is the genie in the lamp. 165

Online content in Arabic and Arab audience-targeted English covers a variety of news, commercial and proselytizing functions. At www.islamonline.net, for instance, one can visit the ‘Fatwa Corner’ or ask questions about medication that blocks menstruation (an impure state) for women making the hajj. Online in a variety of Egyptian chat rooms, conversations flourish between people of different countries and different quarters of Cairo about knotty subjects like religion and sex. In a place where gaining family approval to date can involve life-threatening drama, it’s nice to communicate so privately and directly at such a safe distance, the kind that encourages intimacy but can be terminated with the click of a mouse. Conversely, websites of English language newspapers like Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly and Cairo Times (plus numerous sites like www.cairolive.com with Arabic headline news in translation) provide alternative viewpoints to a new wave of virtual visitors. The conflicts in Palestine and Iraq sparked intensified dialogue with the international community, and many believe that the underwhelming ability of Egypt (along with the rest of the Arab world) to do its own multi-faceted image justice can be somewhat rectified online. Perhaps Egypt finds it difficult to counteract media-born misperceptions because it never had to. Everyone always came here readily, drawn by Egypt’s known attractions, by the monuments and the Nile. Few peoples have relied so utterly on a place and their sense of it to describe and explain themselves. Context is the Egyptian pride and chain, its tyranny and redemption, its river in the desert. Cairo’s seductions are encoded in speech laden with multiple entendre, illumined with humour and redolent with the poetry of a gone world. The lyricism of everyday expression adds a poignant refrain to the city’s embattled landscapes, where emotions are so close to the surface they’ve become the very skin of things. When dreams go undreamt, resiliency steps in, an organic determination to endure, reproduce and resound defiantly. In an ambience charged with feeling, dissimulation has indispensable applications. It is at once the art of disarming the interlocutor, of relegating to form that which requires no discussion, and of framing discourse within lines only trespassed at the peril of well-being. Fatalism, with its tenet of acceptance incessantly iterated in turns of speech, is the formidable, and perhaps ultimate, line of defence, 166

but these formulations never flatten experience, or discount it. On the contrary, ordinary speech with its vernacular and classical repertoires is roundly equipped to convey vehemence and subtlety, tenderness and cruelty, wisdom and artlessness, easily, without pretension. Poetic inclinations and high sentiment are as frequently and cogently expressed as gritty pragmatism and bitter cynicism. Words get quite a workout in Cairo, where language has overt and covert functions, but the truth is available for whoever pays attention, especially to what is unsaid. ‘The mind is for seeing, the heart is for hearing’, says an Egyptian proverb, underlining the emotional penetration afforded by listening, which is only one of its advantages. As with Arabic classical music, listening can have an improving effect on the speaker’s performance, not to mention influence what is said in less positive ways. The Egyptian government, for example, knows that Cairo is all ears, which provokes the unfortunate impulse to gloss, a tactic that has paradoxically served to make people immune to deception. Cairenes are adept at dealing with situations and sifting truths. They play the game of interaction for its own sake, and the play is intricate and lightning swift. An acute sense of ensemble can transform mere survival into joie de vivre or, then again, to hell on earth. Tradition offers a loose script; characters are interchangeable. Interactions arise within a matrix of group improvisations whose consensual shifts may register as subtly as a mood, or as palpably as mayhem. The linguistic memes related here are the equivalent of a literary canon, but one of surpassing variety; they may also be understood in the sense of a musical canon, a composition with many different parts taking up the same theme. Rather than being fixed in print, interactions and the consequent scenarios are aligned along an axis of sharing, and ever fluctuating between the poles of necessity and delight.

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A demonstration in Tahrir Square in 2003 against the US-led Coalition’s invasion of Iraq.

v Ensemble

I am here because of you and you are here because of me. mullah nasr al-din There’s a word in colloquial Egyptian whose meaning once embraced not only the feel of Cairo, but also how Cairenes felt about each other and themselves. The word is mazag, literally ‘mixture’ or ‘blend’. Mazag is more commonly understood as a mood, humour or ambience, procured either for oneself by some simple pleasure, or in company, and often enough by virtue of it. Mazag is therefore an individual as well as a group pursuit, a sought-after state of mind, a kind of attunement. On one’s own, it’s serenity or a reverie, and with others, conversation and playfulness. One did well to gauge a person’s mazag before asking for a favour, to determine their disposition. Likewise, one would only interact having seen to one’s own mazag, that is, having gotten in the mood. Mazag is also associated with altered states, particularly that produced by hashish. But a cup of cardamom-scented coffee is just as good an example of mazag, as might be a water pipe of cantaloup-flavoured tobacco if that’s your fancy, or listening to a favourite piece of music alone or with friends. Mazag was an oftrepeated utterance in Cairo, its underlying principle, the ritualistic offering to oneself and others of a moment of considered time, seemed to characterize the city at its most illumined and illuminating. Mazag was the Cairene version of dharma yoga, its state of grace. The word’s usage, alas, in its greater meaning, has fallen out of vogue. These days, mazag works mostly as a slang term for getting high, or else as a flattened out concept forming the local equivalent of ‘cool’ (ya mazagak). Many, like playwright and professor of drama at the American University in Cairo, Mahmoud El Lozy, lament the passage of mazag as: 169

a dying frame of mind, once very much a part of a more leisurely pace of life when people could take time to do certain things, however trivial, in a certain way . . . Mazag [activities] have value and meaning in and of themselves, irrespective of any specific result. Mazag is not measurable or marketable; therefore it [no longer has a] right to be . . . The old mazag may be a scarce commodity, but can a people so inured to ‘mixing and blending’ really lose the knack? Cairo was always remarkable for its palette of moods that varied daily and according to the neighbourhood and hour, an indication of the power of mazag to create a tangible ambiance. A walk through the city was like perusing a whimsical menu. One could experience a buffet of ambient tastes, rendered by the same art that allows musical compositions to convey by turns the moods of poignancy, heroism, fury, comedy, horror, eroticism, transcendence and the marvellous. Acting in concert, people and city transformed themselves from something frayed to something wrought. By an unspoken emotional dexterity, using a few simple props – a transistor radio, twinkling Christmas lights strung across alleys beneath stanzas of fluttering sheets, the perfumes of incense, coffee and grilled meat – hardship was redeemed of itself, replaced with a sense of the epic. The attention once devoted to the deliberate act of inducing mazag has perhaps been absorbed by the demands of everyday life, but it has not disappeared so much as become sublimated. Indeed, the talent for sustaining a baseline mood of good humour is what makes coexistence under particularly trying conditions possible, and therefore should not be underestimated. Equanimity is a victory wrenched from the jaws of defeat, because if nothing else, it augurs survival and continuity. These are touchstone concepts for Egyptians, to whom the idea of a process is more congenial than that of results. In his essay Self-Reliance, Emerson framed it thus: ‘Life only avails, not having lived.’ Survival is not the sole measure of a culture or a people, but it helps. Longevity suggests the ability to roll with the punches; the question these days in Cairo, is how bad a beating can one take, and for how long? To know the strength of the city’s stuff, it’s best to examine the seams, the junctions between individuals, family and community, between people and government, Muslim and Copt, rich and poor. The brief inspection offered here reveals an interactive fabric that 170

however frazzled in spots, hangs together, shaped by connective boundaries where open rifts might have been found. It’s not unusual to catch people talking to themselves on Cairo’s busy streets, anything from a flicker of sub-vocalization to selfabsorbed muttering. This behaviour does not suggest instability so much as Cairo’s informality, how people feel free to enjoy the privacy of thoughts that may sometimes reach their lips. The authentically deranged are considered ‘touched by god’, and if reduced to poverty, usually afforded charity in their neighbourhoods. Someone who simply acts in an excessive way, out of anger or some other passion is magnun, ‘touched by the djinn’ or it is said that the ‘djinn has licked his or her brain’ (mukhkhu malhus). The djinn are descended from Iblis (Satan), and made, like him, from fire. Djinn have a place in religious belief while colouring the popular understanding of emotional states from rage to infatuation. Everyone is said to have a personal djinn, the qarin, a spiritual double (usually of the opposite sex) that exists in ‘the other world’ (il-dunya il-ukhra) a sort of parallel universe. Irritable people have rambunctious qarins, while jovial types have calm ones, but it is believed that the qarin, like weaknesses of temperament, can and should be mastered. Indeed, qarins, djinn and other demons are all here to test us, to see how well we behave when the chips are down. Qarins, like djinn, are not subject to the same time-space constraints as humans and can thus travel from place to place in the blink of an eye, or contact their fellow qarins at will, phenomena said to account in their human counterparts for random thoughts of distant loved ones, for premonitions and synchronicities. Twins share the same qarin, another reason for their special empathy. A mother feels ill when her son is unwell because their qarins are related. Aside from qarins and a colour-coded hierarchy of demons (fiafarit, of which red are the most vicious), the other world is populated with angels, malayka, who were fashioned from light. Everyone has two angels in their spiritual entourage, one on the right shoulder to record noble deeds, and one on the left, to keep track when we err. Angels are the keepers of the books, the divine civil servants, otherworldly scribes. The djinn and the angels, once equal, parted ways over the issue of humanity; when God wished to raise Adam to their level of attainment the beneficent angels accepted while Iblis refused. In vowing to place the powers at his disposal to remind 171

humanity of its tragic flaws, Iblis sentenced himself and his ilk to an eternity of sharing them. Unlike djinn who indulge in the same activities as humans, angels do not eat, drink, excrete or fornicate. Only the djinn are doomed to replicate human frailty, to mimic birth, marriage and death – albeit on another plane.1 This vision of a spirit world that mirrors our own (a reversal of the principle ‘as above, so below’), amplifies the importance assigned to societal order and authority. The business of conquering one’s demons occurs within the individual, but as a member of a family, a dutiful wife, daughter, husband or son; and as a member of society, whose patriarchal format and incumbent bureaucracy is itself an iteration of the family. By considering these narrative overlaps, this exponential emphasis, one approaches the pervasive significance of family and bureaucracy to life in Cairo. They hold the city in thrall and chaos at bay. This is not to say that families are harmonious or that bureaucracy operates smoothly; on the contrary, both act as protagonists, generating the conflicts that propel daily life while slaking a thirst for drama, for living more fully by living through others, experimenting with others’ possibilities and shortcomings. One of Egypt’s most popular tv shows features scenarios based on letters written by viewers describing real-life personal problems. The show begins with an enactment of the problem. For example, a woman’s husband travels to the Gulf for work and sends no word for several years. While assisting her search for the missing spouse, her husband’s best friend falls in love with her. What should she do? The camera goes to the streets of the capital to ask individuals for advice. Crowds gather instantly and the polemic flies. This is Cairo, a city of sixteen million agony aunts where everybody has problems but the best ones are somebody else’s. After the family come the neighbours, the doormen, local shopkeepers and street vendors, as well as co-workers or schoolmates who supply the chorus, the commentators and analysts of every triumph and pratfall that occurs within a neighbourhood or circle of interest. Nearly every conversation, following the formalities, turns to a statement along the lines of ‘I saw so and so yesterday’ and a casual account of what they were doing, where, and with whom. There is surprisingly little anonymity, considering the size of the city; it seems that nothing and no one goes unnoticed. People share a building-by-building knowledge of their neighbourhoods, 172

minute topographies replete with details regarding present and past inhabitants.2 That Cairo retains a village flavour is not solely due to the rural provenance of so many of its inhabitants. It is a symbiotic involvement, a belonging, regarding which no Cairene, however detached or disenchanted, is apathetic. Amira Ghazalla, a woman of Cairo, describing the rapport between the city, its people and Egypt, says ‘the whole personality is interwoven . . . as a child I firmly believed that if I laughed in the morning the laughter would travel up and down the Nile and reach everyone by evening’. The idea of ineffable communion is widespread, yet rarely translates into the sort of community-mindedness that compels people to act together deliberately towards some formulated goal. The Cairene sense of community is more an acknowledgement of being together, for better or worse. At the heart of the city’s informality and the familiarity characterizing interactions between Cairenes, lies this fundamental recognition. That together, is how we are. Every spring the Ministry of Social Affairs and Insurance presents its awards to the ‘best mother’ and ‘best father’ in Egypt, chosen from a series of model parents selected in each of the country’s governorates. The Cairo Times reported on the criteria for contestants and the winner of ‘best mother in the land’ 2002: All winners had shown an ability to provide for and educate their children, and a willingness to participate in the community around them – preferably [in the eyes of the judges] whilst overcoming financial or health difficulties. But trumping them all was Zeinat Hamed Hussein from Aswan, who not only did this, but donated her own kidney to her ailing son as well. Her face, reproduced in the state press, looked calm, pleasant and a little pale.3 In this state-sponsored idealization, sacrifice is the sinew of motherhood, but it remains so in real life. Mothers are hostage to their sons, who repay by nurturing an interdependence that often lasts a lifetime. When a son is born, women may be called by a new name, that of umm (mother), followed by the name of the son (i.e., umm Mohammed). During Ramadan, the month of fasting, state television airs a programme called ‘this woman is my mother ’ (il sitt di ummi). 173

Celebrities as well as average Egyptians submit written requests to the broadcasting authority to recognize their mothers’ achievements, themselves included. Many a tear is shed while the interviewer requests the son or daughter to recall instances of maternal kindness. Cairenes are sentimental, especially when it comes to the familiar spectacle of long-suffering motherhood. Sometimes the camera goes to the family home, often a one-room affair where we hear tales of adversity relieved only by the child’s hard-won success in such things as reading or career advancement. Fathers, per se, receive less airtime, their relationship with their children is more formal and authoritative, yet ideally also ennobled by sacrifice. The award for Best Father is based on his achievement as ‘family guardian’, someone who sees to it his children are educated even if he is not. As in other traditional societies, elders are treated with deference. A generation or two ago, it was customary for children to kiss their parents’ hands when greeting them or taking their leave. If a family member falls ill, clusters of relatives stand guard by the invalid’s bedside in consecutive shifts, so as not to add the insult of solitude to injurious sickness. Siblings share responsibility for aging parents, the heaviest lot falling to whoever happens to be unmarried, usually a sister, who is expected to stay home until the parents die. The certain knowledge of ending up in their children’s hands may or may not keep things honest, or inspire parents to shape their children’s future in the hopes of a comfortable retirement. In all events, caring for one’s parents in their dotage is a social responsibility and a symbol of familial dignity. The first nursing homes have begun to appear on Cairo’s outskirts, but aside from being an option for the well-to-do few, these institutions are frowned upon and their inmates pitied. People sent to nursing homes are seen as abandoned by their kin, or according to a popular expression ‘chopped from the tree’ (maqtufia min il-shagara). The fact is that people rarely die or live alone. Infancy in Cairo starts with a bang. Many families still celebrate the subufi, or one-week anniversary of the child’s birth. The baby is admonished to always obey his parents, while a mortar and pestle are used to produce clanging sounds just beside its head, presumably to frighten off djinn and pound in the wisdom of filial loyalty. Before an infant is a month old it will have passed like a baton between the hands of every member of the extended family. Later it 174

will straddle its mother’s shoulders, clinging to her hair or veil for balance, or else slung in the loose cradle of her arms. The baby carriage that could withstand Cairo’s sidewalks (or the jeers of passers-by) has yet to be built. Children are initiated early into the pedestrian art. Entire sidewalks slow to a two-year-old’s crawl to participate in the ritual. One of the reasons why Cairo’s streets are rarely hectic is that families with toddlers are numerous and hamper movement. Children roam freely in public places like restaurants and waiting rooms and it is perfectly normal to keep an eye on a strangers’ child or engage them in conversation just as their parents would look after yours. Nor is it unusual, on public transport, to be handed a newborn while an overburdened mother situates herself and her parcels. Parents pray that their children ‘will win people’s hearts’, since sociability is more than a personal attribute, it’s a survival tactic. From an early age siblings and cousins care for and are protective of each other; the tenderness displayed towards children by other children may not be unique to Cairo, but it is wonderfully conspicuous. As for adults, the affection they lavish on children within their extended families knows no bounds. Despite the obvious pride people take in their offspring, compliments are discouraged, as they may bring bad luck. If a child’s appearance or behaviour causes someone to forget restraint and say, for example, ‘what a darling’, the mother will instantly remark that baby is not particularly attractive or very smart, to deflect the unwanted attention of mischievous djinn. Sons are especially prized, and some families still follow the tradition of dressing them like girls for the first several months until they are less vulnerable to the evil eye. When the time comes, mothers play the decisive role in their children’s choice of marital partner, and first or second cousins are the prime candidates. Thirty-two per cent of the marriages in Cairo are endogamous, in the family.4 Usually the two families know each other well and present less of a risk to each other than strangers. When things go wrong, however, it’s tribal warfare. Engagement and marriage are the inevitable set pieces in life’s drama, intricate social and interpersonal contracts fraught with conventions, suspense, intrigue and tough negotiations between the families of the betrothed. The groom must offer a home to his prospective bride, and a portion of its furnishing while she supplies the balance of whatever is needed for the household. People marry 175

A wedding in 1999 on the Kasr al-Nil Bridge.

in their late twenties or early thirties, whereas their parents married some ten years younger, an indication of the difficulties now associated with setting up a home. Engagements can last for years, during which time the character of potential daughters and sons-in-law is subjected to relentless familial scrutiny, a trial not all couples will survive. The wedding itself, financed primarily by the groom and his family, is not so much the beginning of a new life as life’s climax, and therefore involves as many participants and spectators as possible. The word for wedding in Arabic, farah, also means ‘joy’. Weddings are frequently celebrated on Thursday night, the beginning of the weekend, and lower class families host them in small tented-off areas on the street near their homes. Entire neighbourhoods tremble before the onslaught of orchestras rich in percussion, piercing accordions and flutes and the pitiless rant of the master of ceremonies, a hired fixture of weddings. His job is to shout exhortations to the newlyweds and their families at the top of his lungs while encouraging the audience to give (cash) and give generously until he loses his voice, which may take many painful hours. 176

There will be singers and belly dancers, some food and water pipes, tea and coffee and maybe a few beers. Female relatives burst spontaneously into choruses of ululation. The bride and groom preside onstage, seated upon rented gilt and red-plush thrones, surrounded by bouquets of flowers whose beauty is considered enhanced by an artful spritzing with silver or gold spray-paint. Before the ceremony, wedding parties drive through town in flower festooned cars, horns blaring, stopping on the Kasr al-Nil Bridge in the city centre for a snapshot and a glimpse of the river. It’s also a chance to be admired by throngs of strolling passers-by, to whom the vision of a white-gowned bride is said to bring good luck. The queen for a day will have spent the previous evening with a bevy of lady friends and relatives extracting every hair that’s not on her head or brow and having her body tattooed with filigree designs of henna. She will be coiffed and lacquered and coated in a mask of face paint so stylized as to render her unrecognizable. The dress is a riot of flounces and trails, a lampshade confection in the centre of which glows the bride, slightly stunned, perspiring and, if she knows what’s good for her, a virgin. In case she isn’t, she can have her hymen repaired prior to the big night at any one of a number of Cairo clinics. The practice of examining the nuptial sheets endures in many quarters, and once the bloodied sheet has been displayed, it’s sometimes torn into strips so that pieces can be tacked to the front door and distributed among family members. The rich, of course, do things a little differently. The nuptial sheets may stay on the bed but the girl is still expected to be a blushing bride. Weddings among the wealthy are phantasmagoric, bankbreaking mise-en-scènes. Like the humbler variety of celebration, they are ear splitting and as blindingly lit as an operating theatre. This last feature (in both up and down scale weddings) is related to the mandatory video recording of the event. In the case of the rich, video documentation is one of many production features that can be handled by the staff of the five-star hotel of choice, since these are the favoured venue for flashy weddings. The marriage industry helps keep many of Cairo’s fancier hotels alive, especially when regional conflicts affect tourism. Competition for big weddings is stiff, as indicated by the text of one hotel advertisement: Over the past three years an amazing 1095 weddings have been celebrated at the M— Hotel. Our public relations department has 177

conducted a study that revealed several astonishing facts. For example, not one marriage at the M— Hotel resulted in a divorce, all newly wed couples have now become mommies and daddies, and 15 new families have had twins! At the weddings of the wealthy, only top talent, the hottest dancers, musicians and singers, will do for entertaining hundreds of guests until dawn. After midnight, guests are treated to sumptuous buffets featuring prawns (a pricey delicacy) in addition to dozens of Eastern and Western dishes, not to mention ice sculptures, garlands of imported blossoms, more prawns, and carpets of honey-dripping oriental sweets. The hosts’ goal is to dazzle friends and acquaintances with their munificence and savoir-faire. One example of brilliant hospitality was that of a wedding in 2001 where a high-tech laser light show, deployed to heighten the dramatic tension of the cake-cutting ceremony, temporarily blinded several guests. Ostentatious weddings are not unique to Egypt, but they stand in sharp contrast to the bureaucratic functionalism of the socio-religious marriage contract. Officially, marriage consists of little more than registering the man and woman’s name in a book, overseen by a functionary called the ma√zun (of which there are many throughout the city), in his office or in one’s home along with two witnesses. This is Egyptian bureaucracy at its very best. Whereas most procedures like obtaining drivers’ licences, birth certificates or a variety of permits require reams of stamped, notarized and carbon copied forms, at least two photographs and interminable hours in lines and drab offices – marriage takes about five minutes. Divorce is even easier, for men, that is, since the wife needn’t even be present. The one process that approaches this expediency is death and burial, which according to Islamic custom must occur within twenty-four hours of each other. Perhaps Egypt’s officialdom values efficiency so highly, it’s only employed when deemed absolutely necessary. In terms of physical attractiveness, youth, health and beauty are often interchangeable and a combination of all three usually considered most desirable. But in Egypt this isn’t so, otherwise films and magazines would feature lean and ruddy farmers instead of kittenish dumplings and paunchy toupeed males. In the 1990s, a flurry of young actors and actresses wrenched the screens from stars who’d put a bold face on the portrayal of playboys and vamps well 178

into their sixties. Female audiences were finally offered the refreshing sight of biceps and relatively flat abdomens. But while the new divas’ shapely breasts and tight buttocks (revealed by formfitting clothes) may have startled the male public into appreciative attention, such attributes do not inspire the same widespread devotion as big busts and thoroughgoing behinds. Ideas of beauty are changing in Cairo but the bulk of the population isn’t ready to let go of the love handles just yet. Gone are the days when women would stuff themselves to plump up for their husbands, but they’re not that far gone. A lifestyle centred on a cramped home along with a carbohydrate and ghee-rich diet is enough to make most women effortlessly fat. One of the dilemmas that confront Cairenes daily is the paradox of the mature, veiled woman and the risqué lingerie shop. The proliferation of boutiques in Cairo selling scanty nightdresses, feathered and sequined panties and battery-operated g-strings that sing ‘I love you’ is noticeably great. The number of stout matrons swathed in dense and gloomy polyester is likewise exceedingly large. The law of supply and demand forces certain unpleasant conclusions upon us. Perhaps the penchant for secret frills is a reaction to the dismal drapery so many women feel obliged to adopt. Not long ago Egyptian films featured girls in bikinis, good, wholesome girls, having a nice time. Now two-piece bathing suits are sold in Cairo’s popular clothing markets like contraband and women wade in swimming pools fully dressed. The reasons for this are several, with religion not necessarily foremost. Jealously protective males are certainly one cause, unwilling to have their wives appear as unprincipled as Westerners who flaunt their bodies casually. As for the women, especially the tradition-bound ones who plunge headlong into the business of caring for homes and families to the exclusion of themselves, their bodies are uncharted territory, something best kept under wraps. Younger ladies, however, even those who choose to cover their heads with scarves, are more trim, less garishly made-up than previous generations, and smartly dressed in fitted clothes. Taking the veil does not interfere with fashion sense, nor is it necessarily related to self-effacing modesty. In fact, some girls wear a headscarf because they feel it gives them ‘a special glow’ and is not only a fashion statement, but a statement of character, that says ‘you see, I have religious values but I still like to look good and draw attention 179

to myself.’ Like elsewhere, the attention girls are looking for is from their female peers as much as prospective boyfriends and husbands, but in Cairo there may be a greater urgency to please the latter. Women are considered spinsters at 28, but as recently as the 1950s they were expected to marry in their teens and sixteen remains the legal age for marriage. In the eyes of many Cairenes, unmarried men and women undermine society, since sexual energies are undirected and the need for intimate companionship unanswered. ‘Marriage’, according to Islam, ‘is half of religion’. Nor should women be too choosy, as per the saying ‘A shadow of a man is better than the shadow of a wall.’ Unmarried 30-year-old women are treated with the pained kindness reserved in less traditional societies for the handicapped and terminally ill. Single young adults who choose to live alone are viewed with suspicion as to their morals and intentions. Since it is customary to live in the family home until marriage, only a small percentage of young professionals would choose or could afford to get their own flat. Parents discourage such bids for independence in a variety of subtle and unsubtle ways, but social conventions are as much the cause as protectiveness and attachment. Young adults living on their own, especially daughters, imperil everyone’s reputation, not to mention making mum and dad feel unloved. Single people are apt to keep the fact of living alone a secret from their colleagues, and they tend to visit home regularly. Parental concern regarding marriage and sexual conduct is sharpened by the recognition that theirs is a society undergoing transition sparked from within, in response to social and economic restrictions, but also from without, as exposure to international media tests the mettle of local precepts and self-perceptions. Premarital sex is perhaps more prevalent across classes than it once was but most courtships remain relatively chaste for logistical reasons. Finding the right time and space for physical intimacy requires persistence, coordination and strong nerves. Unmarried Egyptians are not allowed to stay at hotels together even if they can afford it; most homes are crowded, friends with their own flats or cars, rare. Etiquette does not allow public displays of affection. People kiss each other’s cheeks in greeting, but not their lips. There is a great deal of handholding between girls as well as between men, but couples walking hand in hand or arm in arm do so in a courtly way, without any undue squeezing or rubbing. No wonder a certain 180

amount of friction occurs covertly, between strangers, in Cairo’s inescapable crowds and on public transport. Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim’s narrator in The Committee describes a familiar scenario on a Cairo bus: I was standing next to a plump, middle-aged woman. Almost plastered against her back was a giant in a shirt partially unbuttoned so as to show off his chest. He was looking out the window, feigning absentmindedness. The woman moved ceaselessly in an effort to keep away from him, which made her bump against me. I made as much room as I could for her in the crowd. I watched – as did most of those around us – the minute space between his leg and her behind. He had bent his knee forward a little to aggravate her. I could only raise my eyebrows in complete disapproval. I am the first to admit I have a thing for that protruding part of the female body and am an aficionado of stolen moments in a crowd. From my point of view, this behaviour, which some may condemn and which arises from our reality and independent character, is nothing other than an Arab substitute for Western dancing in which people pursue such business face-to-face. But our national substitute fulfils a more complex role than the mere release of repressed desires. It is a successful way of fighting boredom arising from overcrowding and frequent long delays in streets jammed with private cars. Likewise, for me, it is an important means of releasing tension and one method of acquiring knowledge.5 Ibrahim’s irony is generously distributed between the city’s mores and the narrator’s earnest voyeurism, his talent for eavesdropping on himself and his socially calibrated justifications. A measure of the propriety to which a large segment of the city aspires, was the branding of a tv talk show hostess as the ‘porn presenter’ by local and regional press for discussing masturbation on a privatelyowned satellite station in 2002. The talk show guests suggested that masturbation was ‘on the rise’ because of the high cost of marriage.6 Repressed desires lie behind much of the casual homosexual activity in Cairo, according to those who view it as a practical substitute for more complicated relations with women. But it is also true that a new generation of gay men from all classes pursue their sexual preference with determined self-awareness, despite the risks of 181

arrest by zealous vice police. The detainment and subsequent conviction of a group of men arbitrarily arrested at the Queen Boat nightclub in 2001 awakened international controversy about discriminatory treatment towards gays. Homosexuality is not illegal in Egypt, so the men were penalized according to laws prohibiting promiscuity and prostitution. In a country where human rights like due process and freedom of speech are rhetorical matters, the freedom to express an alternative sexuality may have to wait its turn. Meanwhile Cairo’s gay (and straight) lovers soldier on, arranging trysts when they can or trusting to chance and dark corners.7 So long as homosexual activity precedes and does not interfere with eventual marriage, the families and neighbours of those involved may put up with it. But public opinion is unsympathetic with regards to a practice that foregoes marriage and childbearing while threatening perceptions of Egypt as a virile society. A sampling of Cairenes interviewed at the time of the Queen Boat incident felt that prison sentences of several years were far too light.8 The importance of marriage and family is underlined by all manner of attitudes, prejudice and convention, yet the role of wife somehow escapes the idealistic treatment reserved for mothers. Perhaps the canonization of motherhood is a consolation prize for withstanding and perpetuating the patriarchy. In any case, women enter marriage with several serious legal constraints. Aside from highly discriminatory divorce laws, women must negotiate the right to travel without their husbands’ permission prior to signing the marriage contract, or else be subject to his will. Yet as more women are educated, as economic conditions oblige them to contribute income, and as their resourcefulness is recognized as crucial to family survival, women are challenging expectations of submission and dependence. Alert to the perils of bus riding, for instance, they’ve armed themselves with hairpins and small portable sirens, although the weapon of choice remains the time-honoured shoe. Men tend to use their hands when disciplining wives, a practice that substantiates the Arab proverb ‘Beat your wife each day; if you don’t know why, she will.’ It’s hard to imagine an Egyptian film without the obligatory slapping scene, the dishevelled tearful woman usually ending up on a bed in a torn negligee cowering before a spectre of male wrath. Wife beating may not be more prevalent here than in similarly configured societies, but women have little legal and community 182

support. Those who dare show the police their black eyes and broken ribs are likely to be scolded and sent home. Perhaps for these reasons, domestic violence is beginning to be answered in kind, and the press frequently reports vociferous marital arguments where men do not always come out on top. A woman in a popular quarter, for example, was arrested in 2000 for taking a bite out of her husband’s thigh when he insisted she serve him breakfast. Some wives go a lot further. A film called The Woman and the Axe (1996) dramatized a real-life case of husbandkilling and dismemberment. Actress Nabila Ebeid, in the role of the murderess who deposited her abusive spouse into a number of trash bags, exclaimed ‘If he came back to life a hundred times I would kill him one hundred and one.’ State-owned tv and a weekly tabloid called ‘Crime News’ (Akhbar al-Hawadith) carry lurid accounts of husband killing, usually provoked by abuse and/or the discovery of an adulterous affair. In the matter of adultery women are treated to more legal backhand. Men can only be prosecuted if caught in the act in their own homes, whereas women can be penalized for misbehaving anywhere. Despite a constitution (as well as shar√ia, religious law) that stridently proclaims equality of the sexes, adultery convictions result in maximum prison sentences of six months for men, for women, two years. The best part is that a married man found visiting a prostitute is not guilty of adultery, but may serve as a material witness against the prostitute herself. No wonder husbands are getting chopped up and put into plastic bags. And let’s not forget polygamy. The practice of taking additional wives has long since declined due to financial constraints, but fiurfi, a simplified common law marriage (performed by the couple signing a contract in the presence of two witnesses) provides a carefree, legal way of taking a lover. Divorce is just a torn sheet of paper away. The fiurfi arrangement is useful these days for young couples who can’t afford to marry properly in the eyes of their families and society yet seek some binding arrangement, but it is also a convenient way to take a mistress without occasioning a visit from the police or incurring any financial responsibility. A man can take a second wife (or third and fourth), but he’s obliged by law to tell the previous one his intentions. Not everyone bothers, nor do they always provide for their previous wives as expected by law and society. Easy divorce makes regular marriage, as 183

well as fiurfi marriage, an opportunity for exploitation, as evidenced by the case of a wealthy Cairene businessman named Ragab Suweirki. This serial polygamist married twenty times before he was brought to court by one of his wives for wedding more than four at once. Suweirki was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2002.9 Lower-class girls may be offered in marriage to wealthier men, a loosely sanctioned way of selling them. Suweirki, for example, then in his fifties, married a fourteen-year-old whose father had doctored her birth certificate so she would appear sixteen and legal, an apparently mild offence that cost the enterprising dad a le100 fine. 10 Marriage to a young virgin is a demonstration of virility, as per the classic joke about a withered and warty old monsieur consulting his doctor. The doctor warns his aging patient that marriage to a sixteenyear old could kill. The old man replies that if she dies he’ll find another. Such unions aren’t really funny, especially for the first wife. Prominent lady lawyer, Tahani el-Gabali, tells of a case argued on behalf of a 70-year-old woman. When the woman’s husband said he would take a second, younger spouse, she killed him rather than be abandoned after some 50 years of marriage. The coup de grâce is the issue of divorce. For men, nothing could be simpler. All they have to do is say ‘I divorce you’ and it’s over. A visit to the ma√zun to notarize the matter is legally required but not enforced. A woman, on the other hand, has three uneasy options for exiting a marriage. She must either convince her husband to divorce her (since without his consent it’s impossible) and lose all financial support; or seek divorce without consent via the courts, a process that may take more than a decade of humiliation and that she may well lose. Finally, she can apply for a khul (extraction) divorce, an amendment to the so-called personal status law in 2000 that awards no-fault divorce in six months without a husband’s consent. The woman loses her half of the household but keeps the right to child support. Since a request for divorce is an insult to the husband’s manhood, wives bear the brunt of the disgrace and the accompanying financial hardship. Amicable divorces are mighty rare. The judiciary has been spitefully slow to implement khul cases, forcing women to wait over a year and closing an eye when child support goes unpaid. 11 As Tahani el-Gabali remarked to the AlAhram Weekly, ‘some [male] judges are resistant to the spirit of the law’. Few know better how resistant they can be. El-Gabali was appointed Egypt’s first female judge in 2003. When asked how she 184

felt about her new position she observed drily that if 51 per cent of Egypt’s law professors are women, ‘how can they be less qualified than their students?’12 Thanks to her efforts and those of another outstanding female attorney and activist, Mona Zulfiqar, the establishment of Cairo’s first family court for divorce and other marriage related issues was underway in 2003, amid promises that more women would be appointed to preside. A joke reflecting irritation with divorce laws may not have originated in Cairo but it circulated in 2002 in the midst of the khul controversy. It’s about a woman who stumbles on a genie in a lamp. The genie says she can have three wishes, with the proviso that her husband gets ten times as much of whatever she requests. The woman asks for beauty, wealth and a mild heart attack. For now and for the foreseeable future, the paternalist bent of the judiciary and every other branch of bureaucracy ensures subordinate treatment for women. Lording it over the ladies, however, comes at a price. The Egyptian Gazettte announced in 2001 that ‘frustrated with male domination, women are resorting to sex as a lethal weapon.’ A cartoon from the daily Al-Akhbar (11/12/02) showed a man spying on a skimpily clad neighbour through a window while phoning George W. Bush to report that ‘there are weapons of utter mass destruction in the house across the street.’ The state of alarm with regards to women’s self-assertion may be caricatured, but it acknowledges a shift in the traditional balance of power that is winding its way into law. In The Personality of Egypt, Gamal Hamdan remarked that centralized government and bureaucracy in Egypt is ‘as old as the Pyramids’, and indeed it may be older.13 The enterprise of building the Pyramids would have required the organizational and logistics support of a fairly established administrative infrastructure. Likewise, measuring and recording the annual Nile floods was a necessary administrative practice for people wholly reliant on a river’s whims. As Nile scholar Robert O. Collins tells us: ‘the records offer a vibrant and unique chronicle spanning thousands of years, an achievement unequalled by any other civilization in history’.14 Scribes were the record keepers and clerks of the pharaohs, a coveted profession for ambitious young men. In a text called The Satire of the Trades, written in the Middle Kingdom (1938–1786 bce), a father offers this advice to his son: 185

Since I have seen those who have been beaten, it is to writings that you must set your mind. Observe the man that has been carried off to the work force. Behold, there is nothing that surpasses writings! They are a boat on the water . . . As for a scribe in any office in the Residence, he will not suffer want in it.15 At the distance of millennia, the predilection for governmental employment persists, despite abysmally low salaries and token pensions. According to a widely quoted saying, ‘If you cannot have a government job, then grovel in its dust.’ Prospective husbands earn decisive points in the eyes of their fiancées’ families if they hold some bureaucratic position, however stagnant, because government jobs are considered the most secure. Civil servants are in fact nearly impossible to fire. The trend to seek jobs in the private sector has admittedly grown along with international investment and the presence of multinational corporations. Additionally, the informal sector absorbs unsung millions of smalltime entrepreneurs. But nearly half of Egypt’s jobs (42 per cent) are still provided by the government, whose megalithic hub is Cairo.16 By some estimates, at least 35 per cent of the people occupying battered desks in ledger-jammed offices are ‘surplus to requirements’.17 Many more spend their lives performing menial, repetitive tasks without using a fraction of their talents and with little hope of advancement, earning derisive sums that shrink with time and inflation. Cairo is thus a sinkhole for the foiled energies of millions, many of whose jobs rely solely on their ability to show up. In fact, being there or being a relative or friend of some higher-up, seem to be the sole qualifications for a multitude of jobs. Yet it’s not enough to point to Cairo’s ungainly bureaucracy and say that people are inefficient or incompetent. Perhaps they make the best of an exercise in futility by rendering each chit-counting process in their charge interminable and opaque. Egyptian bureaucracy is at times the equivalent of rebellion, its tangled knots tied with the malice of disappointment. The inner-life of this seemingly drudging, obeisant work-force nevertheless reflects people’s wish to prosper, not thanks to their jobs, but in spite of them. In the warrens of Cairo’s Mugamma’ (governmental affairs complex in Tahrir Square), we find women doing needlework or selling cosmetics and men hawking household goods and other sundries to their colleagues. In the words of Mahmoud el Lozy: 186

People there don’t actually work for government, they’re affiliated. Civil servants are mediators between you and the authorities. Say you have to pay a fine for a driving infraction. You negotiate the fine with the person in charge, bargaining from an outrageous starting price to something more reasonable, depending on your bargaining skills. To show your gratitude for the reduced price, you’re expected to give money to the civil servant (or police officer as the case may be). Yet these gifts are not bribes because you’re not asking for anything illegal, you’re just paying people’s real salaries. The government pays them to come to work, but you pay them to do the job. It’s private enterprise operating on a person-to-person basis within the bureaucratic apparatus, which is the only thing that makes government jobs halfway feasible. In order to optimize meagre earnings, many workers join savings pools (gamfiiyya) with their colleagues, whereby members of the pool contribute a portion of their monthly salary and have the right to take turns at the kitty every so many months. This gives access to relatively large sums once or twice a year for important purchases. People prefer to save with each other because it’s the only way they can lay their hands on small loans, but also because they don’t trust the (state-run) banks, a fine example of familiarity’s contempt. Government employees feel no particular allegiance to state institutions, because they’re not asked for their opinions, only to obey orders. Servitude in some ministry or municipal authority is the closest many get to participatory political or community life. Meanwhile, the government continues to overstaff, placing a semblance of power (some fragment of a procedure) into the hands of as many citizens as possible, figuring the best way to keep them quiet is to hire them. Given the tissue of resentment underlying the relationship between people and government, along with the fact that Cairo’s survival relies on the functions of dozens of state-run organizations, it’s a miracle that anything gets done. Yet things do work. Meters are read, papers processed, bills calculated and distributed, and voila, numerous light switches yield results, water faucets produce water, licences and permits are issued and life grinds on. Systems are obscure and obstructive but they operate so long as you’re not in a hurry, know the rules, have a pocketful of spare change and are 187

prepared, at all times, to fail. Baqshish, the tips or tokens of appreciation, bribery (rashwa), the greasing of larger palms, and the exercise of influence (wasta) through personal connections, all work to silence squeaky wheels. In fact everyone seems to operate under the proverbial premise, ‘There isn’t a tree that hasn’t been swayed by the wind.’ From petty graft to grand larceny, it’s all a matter of knowing how to bend. Corruption in the swamplands of officialdom raises scandals, but only when someone gets caught, i.e., is targeted for punishment. Sporadic crackdowns on greedy administrators detract attention from the familiar treachery, the daily outrage of neglect in underserviced homes, schools and the workplace. High officials nevertheless see themselves as patient fathers, the jealous guardians of public well-being. Confusingly, nothing succeeds in attracting patriarchal wrath like success. Resourcefulness is not rewarded in Cairo, indeed, it’s treated like sabotage. Opening even a small business is a bureaucratic nightmare; should an enterprise somehow manage to get off the ground a procession of minor functionaries will milk it dry or badger it to death. Bureaucratic greed has slaughtered a gaggle of promising geese rather than make way for the golden eggs. When asked for the rationale behind such behaviour, a seasoned Egyptian entrepreneur remarked archly but not without insight, ‘self-loathing’. The compulsion to control every detail of public life is evident in the treatment of non-governmental organizations (ngos) and the restrictive laws providing for state supervision of management and funding. Bureaucratic obstacles prevent many ngos from officially registering, like the Egyptian Centre for Human Rights, that operates anyway at its own considerable risk. The high-profile trial of sociology professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim, accused essentially of treason for having conducted a voter awareness programme, was a glaring example of the tactics the state can adopt in the name of ‘protecting Egypt’s reputation’. Examples of this self-destructive protectionism are sadly rife. Following the earthquake of 1992, the Muslim Brothers (an outlawed political entity that nevertheless runs community activities from neighbourhood mosques) wanted to help. The 5.3 Richter scale quake hit Cairo hard. The city’s geology of gravel and mud amplified the movement, causing a major shakedown that destroyed 6,500 buildings in the central quarter of Bulaq alone, and 188

thousands more elsewhere, leaving 541 dead and nearly 7,000 wounded citywide.18 While the government dithered, the Brothers set up relief centres offering first aid, food and blankets to the wounded and homeless. They were rewarded with arrest, their centres shut down. Some say that the subsequent terrorist attacks in Upper Egypt were linked to this gratuitous display of power that robbed traumatized quake victims of what little assistance they might have received. Perhaps, as some suggest, the state hates to be shown up by more effective organizations. Or perhaps they’re simply loathe to spoil the public with too many sweets, to whet people’s appetite for kindness. In seeking to be the sole public benefactor, the state obstructs secular and non-secular community-service initiatives that otherwise might make the city more livable, not to mention lay the groundwork for civil society. People’s response to random, often harsh controls is mild given the frequency of affronts to civil and human rights. Arrest and detainment is common under the Emergency Law, and fearsomely unpredictable. The law prohibits more than five people from gathering publicly, literature can be banned, and ‘offenders’ tried in parallel courts without appeal. Flogging, a form of prison punishment, was officially abolished in 2002, but even the state-owned press carries accounts of torture and beatings that occur in prisons and police stations citywide. Executions (by hanging for civilians and firing squad for the military) are announced, if at all, as fait accompli. The renewal of the Emergency Law that entered its 23rd year in March 2003 was accomplished at a sparsely attended evening session of parliament, several months before its scheduled docket. The stealth was unsurprising given the incendiary atmosphere preceding the us-led invasion of Iraq and people’s frustration with their inability to make their voices heard. The Emergency Law is publicly regarded as an instrument of abuse, employed to ‘de-politicize society’, especially useful during elections for detaining opposition supporters and preventing rallies. People will also admit to more corrosive effects of martial law, such as the growing unwillingness to help each other, to assist in car accidents or intervene in street incidents like theft or quarrels for fear of being detained. But this apparent bowing to power aside, there are few Cairenes who either vocally or in their hearts are not opposed to 189

their government on a variety of grounds, the demeaning, often brutal displays of paternalist discipline not least of them. It is a testimony to Cairene sanguinity, not to mention sentimentality and the wish to lay claim to greatness, that death redeems their leaders, however derided they may have been in life. Even those who were bitter about Sadat’s peace with Israel, for instance, were apt to get misty-eyed in the wake of his assassination. Given his neo-Pharaonic posing towards the end of his rule, it seems appropriate that Sadat was officially commemorated with a squat pyramid across from the tribunal where he was shot. But there is an unmistakable pungency to the location of his museum homage, in a tourist trap called ‘Dr Ragab’s Pharaonic Village’ on the western banks of the Nile. Located downstairs from exhibits about mummification, pyramid building, Napoleon and Copts, Sadat’s museum features photographs with his family and Jimmy Carter and portions of the Camp David correspondence. There are pairs of socks and shoes, a set of pyjamas, a toothbrush and toothpaste, two pipes and a can of Nat Sherman Highstone Tobacco. Sadat’s ornate, self-styled military uniform is on display, with its gold embroidered lotuses on the collar. There are framed and mounted lists of the president’s friends and heroes as well as his personality traits: decisive, courageous, intelligent, charismatic, philosophical and contemplative, and a lover of nature. There is a saying that tartly underlines the socio-religious tenet of thinking well of the dead: ‘When he died, they put a sugar cube in his ass’, in other words, now he can do no wrong. The sugar cube reference has to do with the Muslim practice of inserting a bit of cotton into the rectum as part of the body washing ceremony that precedes burial. In popular parlance, we take nothing from this world but the proverbial qutna, a bit of cotton (mish wakhdin minha illa qutna). Why long for riches? The shroud, as the saying goes, has no pockets (il-kafan ma√lush geb). Why waste energy crying for what one cannot own or cannot change? Cairenes are inured to loss, their buoyancy the product of a culture that refuses to dwell on it. When someone dies, burial is accomplished within the day, mourning lasts officially for a year but people get on with their lives as soon as they can, almost immediately. Prolonged grieving is regarded as self-indulgence. 190

Every quarter has its so-called ‘health office’ (maktab sihha) staffed by a doctor whose job it is to swiftly ascertain the cause of death and, providing it was natural, issue a death certificate. The body-washing takes place in the home of the deceased (or hospital, if they’ve died there) and is performed by a mughassil, a self-appointed member of the community who incurs special spiritual rewards for his or her work of washing, shaving and wrapping the body in a white shroud. The ceremony, attended by family and close friends, encourages intimacy with death while providing a solemn backdrop for the cementing of alliances. Individuals encounter death’s expediencies repeatedly via their extended family and friends. According to custom, the husband or wife of the deceased is the only relative forbidden from seeing the body washed, because the marriage contract is technically void at death and the body is that of a stranger. This seemingly callous directive is perhaps absolved by the wisdom of sparing the surviving spouse an image more hurtful than instructive to the healing process. ‘The living before the dead’ is an oft-repeated maxim that contains the expression of grief, while encouraging life’s resilience. Religious rituals, as well as customs and procedures regarding death, all reinforce its position as a fact of life that ironically should not interfere with it. There’s a sign on the road to the Saqqara pyramid just outside of Cairo that reads ‘Good Life, Immortality and Happiness are found in Egypt.’ And who can deny, travelling west with the city to your back, through silvery palms and reverberating alfalfa, that life has its moments? As for immortality, Egypt has inarguably done its part, not only in elaborating the concept, but enduringly documenting it, and even distributing its benefits amongst the populace. The afterlife was once reserved for pharaohs only, an exalted eternity on the solar boat parading each day across the skies. It took several dynasties for funerary accoutrements, and presumably the pleasures of a downscale heaven, to become available to a wider public. According to the ancient cult of the dead, one could look forward to the ‘fields of the blessed’, a modest paradise of pastoral bounty that resembled nothing so much as everyday life in the verdant Nile Valley. The above-mentioned road sign is more than a quaint stab at self-promotion, it echoes the bottom-line contentedness people tend to feel about their lives, and the rootedness this 191

content implies. Individual lives may go wrong, but continuity in terms of group survival is a kind of immortality. In an attempt to understand how people feel about each other and themselves, one cannot ignore the baseline pride derived from Egypt’s place in history. One may even call it the pride of achievement, since a long history encompasses overcoming, as a group, endless hurdles and catastrophes. Indeed, there’s an assurance and self-knowledge behind the kindness, humour and hospitality that still distinguish Cairo from other cities, at least in the eyes of many observers. Yet Cairene attitudes towards each other seem less confident and appreciative than disappointed. During a 1997 survey, the authors of People and Pollution found that the majority (88.6 per cent) of their sample agreed that ‘people are less cooperative than they used to be’. The bulk complained that ‘there is no close contact or love among the people’; others cited economic hardship and the rapid pace of life as causes for estrangement. It’s striking how agreeable everyone was, and generally is, about being uncooperative. Also striking was the idiosyncratic mention of ‘close contact’ and ‘love’ as if nothing less would do as the basis for cooperation. But perhaps the most indicative point raised by this survey is the researchers’ conclusion that ‘all these answers’ [i.e., reasons for being uncooperative] reduce to pointing out the individualism that many people believe marks contemporary Egyptian life.’ 19 Individualism, referred to here as the isolation resulting from repression and exclusion, is indeed at work here in Cairo, and understood as the cause for the new selfishness and alienation that many observe. Cairo’s size has made ‘close contact and love’ difficult outside of one’s neighbourhood and family. But individualism notwithstanding, there is evidence of a broad consensus regarding important issues that suggests cooperation of a significant order. When asked to rank the problems in their neighbourhoods, respondents to a 1995 survey placed poverty and inflation on top, followed by pollution, family-related difficulties, population growth and wars. Fear of crime and death by accident were perceived as the least pressing concerns, a notable perception in a city that is literally tumbling down upon the heads of its struggling poor. 20 At the distance of nearly a decade it is likely that people would respond similarly, except for placing war somewhat higher on the list. Crime, in this city of sixteen million, is not a major issue. 192

Although the figures are impossible to verify, the state’s Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (capmas) released its first-ever chart of Egypt’s crime rates in June 2002.21 While homicides are presented as fairly rare, drug-related crime is notably high, a new phenomenon, accounting for 80 per cent of all criminal acts and most murders according to former assistant to the Minister of Interior, Hani Ghanam.22 The city has undergone substantial change since 1992, the start of a so-called economic reform programme whose benefits, mostly upscale commercialism and elitist wealth, are scattered around the city but largely inaccessible to the shafib, the people. Unemployment is around 17 per cent according to the Al-Ahram Weekly, but it is probably higher and, what is worse, work for a half million annual job market entrants, many of them young and unskilled, is not forthcoming.23 Looking forward has never been so hard for so many and, government statistics aside, many Cairenes feel that crime is on the rise. Nevertheless, the relatively peaceful coexistence they still enjoy must be attributed to a shared character that is shy of violence, and subject to several inherent deterrents. First, guns are expensive, difficult to acquire, and in all events hold little fascination for the average Egyptian. There is no cult of weaponry here, nor is one encouraged. Gun scenes are not necessarily rare on Egyptian tv and in films, but the weapons usually appear one at a time, are clumsily handled and, as often as not, brandished without being fired. Second, people provide their own security because of their number. Witnesses abound. When a crime is committed it’s usually solved rapidly, and would-be criminals know that the chances of escaping undetected are slim. Third, people maintain strong family ties. The institution of family is tied to socio-religious obligations of good conduct and mutual caring. People believe that what goes around, comes around. How they think about themselves is exceedingly important, as is how they wish to be perceived within a society that is ever observing and judging. Cairo is an essentially sane place where the terror of random, psychopathic aggression is practically unknown. Murder is usually the outcome of some thwarted passion, addiction or theft, an argument among family members, a settling of accounts. Serial killers, snipers and letter bombers are not big in Cairo, the city’s old fashioned that way.24 193

By far the most frequent crime, according to capmas, is ‘deception’ (fraud), numbering over a half million incidents nationwide in 2000. Cairo is the backdrop for many an artful ruse, like the pickpockets who distracted people exiting banks by disguising themselves as a tv crew filming episodes of ‘Candid Camera’. Over a seven-month period they bagged a reported le1 million.25 In 2001, police apprehended another band of tricksters who convinced victims they could change Egyptian pounds into us currency with the help of a Pharaonic djinn. At least le 150, 000 vanished in a cloud of incense along with the thieves before the credulous speculators realized they’d been had.26 These fait divers elicit smiles, but little scepticism, because they illustrate a familiar, almost rhythmic gullibility, the fatal trust that Cairenes abjure yet constantly fall back upon and occasionally exploit. The word for fool in Arabic, ahbal, can connote a simpleminded goodness, not just a lack of intelligence, and it’s possible that the word traces its origins to Abel, who died for having loved and trusted his brother Cain too well. The transgression that seems most threatening to this society is not fraud, theft, drug abuse or even an obscurantist government, but self-deception. People are prepared to believe and ignore a great deal rather than suffer blows to pride or admit that things may be far worse than even they, an imaginative bunch, had imagined. When a rumour about a taxi driver on a killing spree swept the city in 2003, the controversy did not centre on the 28 purportedly ghoulish crimes, but about whether such a thing was possible in Cairo. Many embraced the denial issued by the Ministry of Interior, convinced that if so many women had really been murdered, it would have been impossible to conceal.27 ‘Word’, that is, the word of the people, would have got around. But how reliable is that word? In the haste to disavow any real or perceived nastiness, blame is apt to be shrugged off or deposited on some scapegoat’s doorstep. Egyptian political commentator Hani Shukrallah, describes the local context as fertile ground for conspiracy theories, because it is characterized by ‘authoritarianism, a debased and sensationalist media and the near total absence of political space in the consciousness of the masses’.28 In the face of momentous events, people devise explanations whose logic appeals to them, or that vindicates their amour propre. ‘Conspiracy theory’, according to one Cairo lawyer, ‘is the most popular theory in town’. 194

Following the crash of Egypt Air flight 990 in October 1999 the authorities produced evidence suggesting the pilot had crashed the plane deliberately, killing all its passengers, because he wanted to kill himself. Egyptians blamed the crash on a stray missile, since suicide is considered aberrant. 29 When Suad Hosni, a beloved film star, jumped from a balcony, people believed she was pushed. Likewise, the tragic deaths of other celebrities have been ascribed to intrigue, often involving the Israeli spy agency Mossad. In the wake of 9/11, many Cairenes reflexively blamed the Mossad, but a freethinking cabbie reasoned that the destruction of the World Trade Towers was Al Gore’s revenge for having been cheated of the presidency. Hani Shukrallah examined two far-fetched stories that made the rounds in 2003, noting that some conspiracy theories: are more erudite when viewed as reflections of the truth . . . Take my barber’s suggestion that Osama Bin Laden and Ariel Sharon went to the same school [evidence, in his view, of the Al-Qa√eda leader’s Mossad connections]. As a fact it is patently absurd. As a metaphor underlining the similarities between the two thugs it could not be more apt . . . No less interesting is a theory that . . . both Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are us agents. Factually . . . the conjecture is laughable. As a metaphor, it reveals a host of truths. One need not ascribe to conspiracy theories to recognize that Bin Laden and Hussein have been heaven sent in so far as us’s post-Soviet imperial ambitions are concerned.30 Conspiracy theories may reflect and certainly deflect unpalatable truths, but they also reveal a compulsion to question authority, a refusal to believe what one has been told. For their part, Egypt’s authorities have done little to inspire trust. Following Prime Minister Atef Ebeid’s insistence in 2003 that only three per cent of Egyptians suffer from poverty, it was no secret to the opposition press or anyone else that he was fibbing.31 Suspicion, especially when it comes to governmental proclamations, is the wisdom of experience. Max Rodenbeck explored the issue for The Economist: Take more or less anywhere in the Middle East. The very borders of countries such as Syria, Jordan and Lebanon are a product of the 1916 Sykes-Picot accord, a secret agreement between Britain 195

and France to divvy up the region between themselves, despite earlier British pledges of statehood to Arabs . . . Half of the governments of the Middle East trace their origins to coups. In a sense, conspiracy is the region’s only form of politics . . .32 Herein lies a paradox or two. Cairenes exercise their right of scepticism to the utmost and know exactly what to expect from the authorities, and yet they rely on government for everything that matters, for bread and water, clean streets and air and proper schools. This reliance is sometimes described as a conditioned response to authoritarianism that has, according to Gamal Hamdan and others, ‘suffocated . . . the spirit of initiative, creativity and ambition’.33 This seems severe, considering the level of creative energy required for daily survival, but where people seem most slack is in the self-critique department, the willingness to accept responsibility, as individuals, for the deterioration of their communities and violation of their rights. This is the local brand of individualism at work, which translates as the freedom to neglect collective responsibility and to act exclusively in one’s own interests since there is no one to uphold the law and ensure one’s rights. Yet while people distrust authority, and often choose or are obliged to fend for themselves, they do not love anarchy. Egyptians are attached to the idea of a strong government, wishing only for a set of agreed upon and workable rules, enforced consistently throughout society. Denial is a distorting lens with a narrow focus, but it creates patterns that in time become apparent. In 1882, when the British squelched Egypt’s first nationalist uprising, Bedouins were charged with having betrayed Ahmed Orabi, leader of the revolt. In 1948, when Egypt’s effort to prevent the establishment of an Israeli state failed, it was the fault of defective weapons. When the Israelis trounced Egypt in 1967, Nasser never used the word defeat, only ‘setback’. Likewise, when the us-led Coalition ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003 it wasn’t due to crushing military force, but because Saddam, too, had been betrayed. It is as if people were prepared to be weak in every way but this: the admission of weakness. Yet there are signs that this once unapproachable corner may soon be turned. One of the outcomes of America’s preemptive war on Iraq in 2003 has been the political awakening of a generation of urban youth who debated the conflict and its many perspectives among themselves, via the internet and by massive attendance at protests held in Cairo 196

and Alexandria. Hundreds of demonstrators were beaten and detained, many of them innocents testing their right of expression. Ironically, America’s efforts to democratize Iraq may spark democratization in Egypt, ‘not’ in the opinion of Hani Shukrallah, ‘by force of American example, but in opposition to it’: the Arab masses’ profound sense of national humiliation at Western imperialist hands is interwoven with their status as disenfranchised and abused citizens in their own countries. Their anger at one set of oppressors is . . . of the same order as that directed towards the other set.’34 Whether or not a shared sense of outrage can translate into sustained action addressing societal weaknesses remains to be seen. Meanwhile, one thing is clear: the citadel of contentedness that Cairenes once inhabited is under siege of robust doubt. Cairo is a city of two religions, Sunni Islam and Coptic Christianity, the latter accounting for about ten per cent of Egypt’s population.35 Milad Hanna has written much on the subject of religious tolerance, and refers to Islam and Coptic Christianity as ‘the two legs’ on which Egypt’s culture stands. This is evident in the capital, where the traditions and talents of individuals of both persuasions have shaped the city since its founding. Hanna perceives an essential harmony between Muslims and Copts, while admitting that ‘acceptance of the other was not all butter and honey . . . or cani wa zalabani as they say in Pharaonic’. In this reference to ‘Pharaonic’, Hanna wishes to reminds us that the Coptic language (used now only for religious rites) is philologically linked to that of Pharaonic Egypt; and that the Copts are ‘indigenous Egyptians’.36 Despite the ratio of Muslims to Copts, the latter do not see themselves as a minority because they were here first, the Arabs second. Aside from the Pharaonic legacy, the Copts proudly count themselves among the earliest converts to Christianity, to which they contributed the monastic tradition, first elaborated by St Antony in Egypt’s southeastern desert towards the end of the second century. With roots running deep in the Nile Valley, many Copts were landowners, some of whose wealth brought them to Cairo where they have for generations formed a solid branch of the bourgeoisie. Not all Copts are well off, indeed, some are among the city’s poorest, 197

but they claim a certain ascendance in several quarters where steeples mingle freely with minarets.37 The fidgety millennial coupling of the crescent and the cross, as it manifests itself in Cairo alone, is an intricate topic beyond the scope of this book. But for the purpose of discussing religious tolerance in the city, one may note that the line between secular and religious (Islamic majority) politics, theoretically drawn by the 1952 Revolution, has often since been blurred. When Sadat made peace with Israel he made enemies amongst extreme Islamic factions. Sadat’s rapprochement with the West opened Egypt to what some perceived as menacing influences and alliances. A Nobel prize-winner in the West, Sadat was viewed with suspicion at home. Alert to the art of image building, he packaged himself as the ‘believer president’, one who prayed to God and tv camera, seeking absolution in the hearts of an audience who only accused him of posturing. Under Sadat, Egypt’s constitution was revised with emphasis on shar√ia Islamic law, an appeasement to his pious critics but an abhorrent prospect for Christians as well as others.38 Mohammed Heikal, Egyptian journalist and author of Autumn of Fury, describes the effects of Sadat’s political-religious tightrope act: new religious forces managed to penetrate much of the secular establishment in a way that had not been seen before. They were to be found inside the bureaucracy, the political parties and the universities and even in the armed forces. As religion had become the only channel open to dissent, this was hardly surprising, but it meant that the delicate balance between religious and secular which had been maintained in Egypt for so long, not always without difficulty, was now tipped towards religion.39 Sadat died at the hands of soldiers, young, middle class, and not uneducated, who believed they were bringing down a tyrant and acting in God’s name. The next administration, under Mubarak, came down hard against religious extremism, but also against the political participation of more moderate religiously oriented entities. A history of indiscriminate arrest dating to the secularized Nasser era alongside what is perceived as the government’s courting of the West have nurtured the seepage of religious conformism into daily life, notably via schools and universities. 198

Once upheld as a civil institution devoted to inquiry, the education system is a place where students can encounter unseemly doses of dogma, encouraged at times by faculty, but also by members of the student body to whom religious conformism is an assertion of identity, of status and political dissent. Christians aren’t the only odd ones out, so are youths perceived too liberal, that is, not up to the religious standards of judgmental peers. In society, a variety of cues favour conformism. Take, for example, the young woman who, having worn the veil for a year or two, decided she was just as good a Muslim without it. Several of her veiled colleagues, all of them educated professionals, decided to boycott her wedding in protest. Since the Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, the women’s car of the Cairo Metro has become the scene of improvised prayer sessions, to the dismay of Christian and doubtless other Muslim passengers. In an environment of heightened ideological awareness, as well as political and economic tension, the Coptic community has taken pains to strengthen its historic identity from within while demanding greater recognition as citizens of Egypt. In less complicated times, the city’s Muslims and Copts had little trouble accepting each other, since both are ‘people of the book’. The value placed on tolerance, as an index of each group’s spiritual commitment, was high, more than a matter of pretence, or of politics. Muslims and Christians have lived together in Cairo with relatively little friction, at least when viewed from the summit of fourteen centuries of history. Copts are not well represented in government, but neither are they excluded. Coptic professionals complain that they are sidelined in their professional lives in favour of Muslim colleagues, but there are signs that this inequity is being acknowledged and redressed. Meanwhile it is true that people find more opportunities for work or socializing within their own communities. Inter-religious marriage is difficult, subject to technical and societal constraints, but friendships are not uncommon. In the wake of 9/11, however, an oblique association with Bible-belt America tainted the Christian community in the eyes of some Muslims. Unfortunate remarks issuing from the zealous Bush administration in America have served to conflate local variants of Christianity with their fundamentalist Western cousin, doubly suspect for that group’s friendship with the Zionists. This sort of perception does not exist among the educated, but acts as a wedge between the poor in parts 199

of Cairo, where survival demands every foothold, and sometimes steps on faith. From an interpersonal point of view, almost everyone is aware of cases of discrimination and the prickly treatment reserved for Christians. One example is that, until recently, new churches could not be built without presidential decree, and restorations or even banal repairs on existing ones still require a maddening array of rubber stamps. The situation is well portrayed in a joke that places Hosni Mubarak, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar and Pope Shenouda on a plane plummeting to earth with two parachutes between them. The president’s life is inviolate, the other two will have to compete for the last parachute. Mubarak says he will determine the winner by asking each a question. He asks the sheikh by what name the city of Algiers is famously known. The sheikh readily offers the response familiar to all Arabs: ‘The city of a million martyrs.’ Hosni then turns to Pope Shenouda and asks for the martyrs’ names and addresses. Occasionally, the government takes an enthusiastic approach to the promotion of Coptic history, especially when its interests are served. While school textbooks gloss over Egypt’s Coptic past, the bi-millennial anniversary in June 2000 of the Holy Family’s flight through Egypt was used to stage a celebration of national unity. With an eye firmly fixed on international tourism and pilgrimage potential, historic Christian sites in old Cairo and throughout the country were given a much-needed facelift. The state produced a televised extravaganza with the Nile as backdrop that featured filmic enactments of the events leading up to the Holy Family’s exodus, as well as ecstatic embraces between real-life Islamic clerics and Coptic priests. Beneath the surface of the spectacle, however, ran a current of exasperation. ‘For three decades all we’ve had is a dominant Islamic discourse and it’s been a struggle for Copts to assert their point of view’, said Anwar Moghith, Copt and philosophy professor at Helwan University; ‘it’s finally taken a financial motive to get [it] across’.40 As a tourist lure, the Holy Family did not score as highly as expected, especially after 9/11, but the turn of the millennium did shine a light on Coptic Egypt, in the form of international exhibitions of Coptic antiquities, restorations of numerous churches and monasteries, a number of valuable publications, and several corollary media-related events. 200

The Pyramids’ plateau and the encroaching city in 2004.

In January 2001 a tv serial titled The Blooming of Flowers, focusing on the relationships between Muslims and Copts, was aired during Ramadan amid heated controversy. Many Copts complained it was an inaccurate, romanticized dramatization, aimed at promoting unity at the expense of truth, but others were grateful for the opportunity to air their differences. Later that year a scandal exploded with the appearance in the tabloid press of racy pictures billed as a monk bedding a woman in a monastery. In fact, the man had been defrocked years before, and the pictures were taken from a video filmed in the home of his mother. Angry demonstrations in front of Cairo’s Coptic cathedral calling for the shutdown of Al Nabaa, the offending newspaper, were understood to reflect an accumulation of grievances and frustrations. The newspaper was closed, its editor in chief jailed. In a similarly conciliatory vein, Coptic Christmas (7 January) was declared a national holiday in 2003. That same year saw the establishment of a curriculum of Coptic studies at the American University in Cairo. When asked for the defining qualities of the Coptic community, Marie Assad, organizer and participant in community service initiatives for over 50 years, said that ‘Copts feel very rooted, very strong . . . they have persisted because of the tenacity and spirituality that is symbolized by the monks of the desert’. The tenacity of which she speaks is evident in the largely Coptic zabbalin (garbage collectors) quarter near the base of Cairo’s Moqattam cliffs, a Stygian hamlet whose trash-clogged alleys form the bowels of the city. The zabbalin community is a tumultuous, festering place, where tons of trash are gathered, sorted and hauled away daily to be replaced by still more. The people working there are dwarfed by their task yet unrelenting in its pursuit. Just a few metres up the road lies a tall gate; passing through it one exchanges apocalypse for an immaculate desert calm. Beyond the gate lies an astonishing open space, to the left the jutting cliffs of the Moqattam, to the right, the city, just distant enough to be dominated and diffused. Beneath a massive shelf of limestone nestles the cave church of the zabbalin’s patron saint, Sam’an the Tanner. Inaugurated in 1974 as a tin hut with a reed roof, the church is now an amphitheatre hollowed out of rock, able to hold 5,000 people, its construction an expression of faith on behalf of the zabbalin community.41 A source of contention for Copts is what they perceive as onesided efforts for understanding between themselves and Muslims. 202

Although Copts are aware of Muslim rituals and practices, indeed, surrounded by them daily, it is felt that Muslims have little reciprocal knowledge of Coptic achievements or traditions that are sometimes ridiculed or dismissed as arcane. What is perceived as Muslim aloofness may be a reaction to the Christian reputation for proselytizing and its missionary or evangelical activities that are not as prominent or institutionalized in Islam. Muslims likewise look askance at the Christian belief in miracles, like the apparitions of the Virgin Mary whose most recent appearances were in the town of Assyut in 1997 and in the Cairo quarter of Shubra in 1986. For their part, Christians deplore the growing stridency of Muslim forms of worship. Islam, with all due respect, is these days rather loud. The amplification and multiplication of mosques and zawayya (prayer corners) has filled the city with clamour, and is hard at times, not only on the ears but on the mazag. The call to prayer, marking dawn and morning, midday, afternoon, sunset and night, is the city’s cyclic soundtrack, a reminder of the passage of time. Some mosques offer sensitive, at times magisterial prayers, rendered with pious virtuosity by devoted muezzins and delivered at modestly amplified volumes, but they are rare. The call to prayer is too often the province of the hoarse and inarticulate, shouting amid earsplitting spurts of feedback. Friday sermons, once consisting primarily of inspirational readings of the Qur√an and contemplation thereof, turn with greater frequency to politically oriented fire and brimstone harangues. Grievances aside, it may be that pride is all that lies between Cairo’s Muslims and Copts, serving at times to separate and at others to unite them. If politics are divisive, they can also prompt expressions of overriding nationalism. Pope Shenouda iii (Coptic patriarch since 1971) voiced a sentiment shared by many when he said ‘Egypt is not a homeland where we live, it is a homeland that lives in us.’ This sort of rhetoric is attractive because it suggests a belonging that transcends religion and even patriotism, lying somehow nearer to the heart. There is a tendency, in public and private discourse, to focus on a long-term peaceful coexistence rather than conflicts when they occur. This approach appeals to the pride of Christians and Muslims alike, many of whom feel grounded in their historic continuity and in the import Egypt holds for both religions. If the sound of Islam is sometimes jarring, religious practices can transfigure the city in other ways, as during Ramadan, the lunar 203

month when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. All forms of sustenance, liquid or solid, are proscribed as well as smoking and lovemaking. When Ramadan falls in summer, it takes fortitude to last the day without water, particularly in the sweltering city, that slows to a near halt. Almost everyone is late for work, comes home early and sleeps as much as they can. At the end of the afternoon, the city is spent, suspended in a spell of preternatural silence, broken by the sunset prayer heralding the first, drink, bite, smoke or caress of the day. Streets that only moments before were frenzied with people rushing home for iftar (breakfast), are suddenly deserted. Thousands of Cairenes sit quietly at rows of sidewalk tables awaiting communal meals known as ‘the banquets of the all-merciful’ sponsored by neighbourhood benefactors and extended to all passers-by. When the prayer sounds, millions of right hands raise bits of bread or sips of liquid simultaneously to millions of expectant mouths. At night, after resting and watching special Ramadan tv programming, Cairenes take to the streets to stroll, for a juice or an ice cream or to sit in a café. The city thrums with voices and movement against a background medley of cassette-tape vendors in competition. Each day is choreographed in much the same way, the majority of Cairenes obeying synchronized rhythms of prayer, fasting, eating and outing. In many quarters people are awakened for the pre-dawn meal (suhur) by the misahharatiyya (singular, misahharati), self-appointed human alarm clocks who walk the streets beating drums. Some misahharatiyya rouse their neighbours by name, calling out to many hundreds from beneath their windows: ‘Wake up! Praise the Eternal One! Greet the month of goodness.’ For their labours, misahharatiyya earn religious points and contributions of money and food from the neighbours. The drum may be no more than a tin box beaten with a stick, or a more traditional instrument made of donkey skin, ‘taken from the thigh’, says a veteran misahharati, ‘because it lasts longer’.42 During Ramadan the streets and peoples’ houses are decorated with lanterns made locally from tin and coloured glass. Lately, however, there’s a preference for battery operated plastic lanterns made in China and marketed in Egypt with great alacrity. Some lanterns contain small plastic models of the Dome of the Rock and play a classic anthem to Jerusalem called ‘the flower of cities’. Others play the theme from the movie Titanic, and there’s a genie lantern that flashes and speaks. 204

The several-day long feasts at the end of Ramadan (Eid al-Fitr), as well as the one following the month of pilgrimage (Eid al-Adha) are celebrated with the slaughter of an animal whose meat is distributed among the poor. On the eve of the sacrifice the city is filled with the bleating of defeated sheep, dispatched en masse at dawn. Children may take part in the sacrifice, wetting their hands in blood and applying palm prints to adjacent walls, a protection charm that seems to echo the events of the Passover.43 The practice of sharing food adds to the feasts’ importance as community events, and some Cairenes will only eat their fill of meat as a result of Eid-related charity. But financial constraints have limited the ability to sacrifice, once held as a pious duty in even modest households. People now find themselves unequal to the purchase of both sheep and the new set of clothes expected for feasts. In 2003, livestock sales for the Eid al-Adha, were down some 40 per cent over previous years. At the uneasy start of a new millennium, Cairenes have been forced to tighten their belts, no matter how snug they were in the first place. Dire economic straits, along with living conditions and inflammatory regional conflicts, have left casualties in terms of lives and values. It wasn’t long ago that time and money were considered topics unworthy of attention or conversation in Cairo. While the former remains a subject of little concern, money, or the lack of it, has become the talk of the town. When it comes to class, and how differences are perceived, people might once have looked to urban versus rural antecedents. But since families with a generational history in Cairo are sometimes as down at the heel as more recent arrivals, pride of place alone does not obtain. Anyone perceived as connected to power, however, through ancestry, family or career, enjoys an elevated status whether rich or not particularly, and even if the relationships with power are long defunct. Egypt’s recent socio-economic history and the rise of its current entrepreneurial caste (whose fortunes date mostly to the 1970s) has redefined, to some extent, the expression of wealth in the city. Suffice to say that many of Cairo’s rich haven’t had money for long and are not quite sure what to do with it. It must be mentioned that in private business, as elsewhere, family is key, not only for the connections to power extended families 205

may possess, but also in terms of the management of businesses, with many senior corporate positions held by brothers or close relatives. Families comprise hierarchies determined both within the group and with regards to other elite family cliques. Since the economic boom of the ’90s, which brought forth a new crop of nouveaux riches, the wealthy seem to be of two minds; at times flaunting their riches, at others shielding their candle diligently from the wind. The size of one’s bank account is not the sole criterion for success and respect. Someone who can make ends meet with a single job is already rich as far as many people are concerned. The issue of class often boils down to rich and poor, a bit of ‘them’ and a great big ‘us’. In Cairo’s teeming buildings and neighbourhoods, class or status does not rest on income or education, people being accustomed to little of both. It is instead a restless quest for assertion and affirmation of self-worth, where value is assigned to every trinket, turn of phrase and gesture. People read each other like stock reports, sifting details of appearance and behaviour, an accent or usage of a word, all betrayals of one’s origins and means, schooling and profession. Appraisals are nearly instantaneous, and with them come attitudes of greater openness or formality. The word for ‘poor’ (ghalban) once meant ‘wretched’, but these days it may be used to sympathetically describe someone who is modest and unassuming. Cash shortages along with other shortcomings are accepted norms, because everyone draws on the same diminished fund of options. If the rich man will no sooner enter paradise than a camel pass through the eye of a needle, then most of Cairo is already halfway to heaven. Poverty is a common denominator that people seek to accommodate in group-patterned ways, rather than wrest themselves from it collectively. Success is understood as existing in finite quantities, available to some but not others. The dreams of the ambitious do not reflect strivings for the greater good so much as the desire to buy into the status quo, to wield power and money, to push instead of being pushed. Rights are commodities, not won by popular demand but purchased or inveigled. Nor, for their part, are the rich anxious for change. Even those who wince at the rabble feel that a system that supports their privilege may not be so bad. And if the poor are too busy staying alive to educate themselves or better their lot, then they have only themselves to blame. 206

This is the paradox of poverty and change, or as it is sometimes called, ‘development’: on the one hand, survival leaves no room for thoughts of the future, and therefore steers straight on its drudging course; on the other, absorbed in survival, people are spared thoughts of a future that may be hostile to them, and in gaining time, become change itself, albeit an unsought for one, unintended by those caught up in it. There is an epigram attributed by Gamal Hamdan to al-Maqrizi, the fourteenth-century historian, about the vanity of power and its nemesis: I’m going to Syria, said Reason. I’ll come with you, said Rebellion. I’m going to the desert, said Misery. I’ll come with you, said Health. Abundance said, I’m going to Egypt. I’ll accompany you, said Humiliation.44 The coupling of reason and rebellion is a comment on the futile but enduring strategy of sustaining power by withholding education or information. Matching misery to health is an endorsement of austerity, a better medicine than excess. But wedding humiliation to abundance is the masterstroke, not because of its warning to wealth, but because history has outdone itself in presenting Egypt as living proof that plenty, on its own, is not enough. Egypt was once the epitome of bounty, thanks to the wealth bestowed by the Nile, the multiple crops afforded by climate, the riverine trade route into Africa, the country’s architectural marvels and, at the time al-Maqrizi wrote, an illustrious, 700-year-old capital. Such abundance could not help but attract opportunists, as it did, arguably, until the British left in the mid-twentieth century. But whereas ‘humiliation’ once implied military defeat or manipulation by predatory powers (and although scapegoats of the genre still abound), humiliation is these days understood more intimately, as a social bankruptcy in which rich and poor are accomplices. Everyone, even those momentarily gorging themselves on privilege, is starving in the midst of plenty, squandering a harvest of energy and enthusiasm, especially when it comes to Egypt’s youth. 207

Nearly half of Egypt’s population is under the age of twenty; 36 per cent of the total are younger than fourteen. A significant proportion of these children squeeze into Cairo’s schools in several shifts daily and will have little to show for it at the end of the handful of years they manage to complete. Economic hardship plucks many from the classroom and drops them into an abysmal workplace. Children obliged to perform menial labour to help feed their families are not an uncommon sight in Cairo. Many had to quit school because their families couldn’t afford to pay for private lessons, without which children are likely to fail their exams. Although the number of students attending university more than doubled between 1992 and 1998, this is an indication of the overcrowding and deterioration of these institutions, rather than an index of improvement with regards to education’s net effect on society. The vast majority of Egypt’s unemployed are in fact educated, having completed secondary school and sometimes college. Egypt’s demographics are skewed towards the cradle while the country’s administrators are staring at the grave. Many of those in power have monopolized it for term after insensate term, a demonstration of tenacity matched only by the people’s in putting up with them. The bureaucracy, as a system, is old and dissolute. As for its managers, given the conditions as they found them, compounded by progressively distorted values and ossified ways of thinking, not to mention the scale of the tasks at hand, they did all that could be expected of them. Meanwhile, it’s the rare young man or woman who comes to power. Whether this is owed to deference or loyalty, or sheer manoeuvring on behalf of the elders, the latter cling to power so long as they can breathe. Interestingly, the young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who have managed to find work have found it for the most part (70 per cent) in the private sector, the first signs of departure from the preference for government employ, as well as another sign that the bureaucracy is over-saturated and sinking fast, and that new opportunities if they are to appear, must originate with the people. What do the young look forward to? What are they thinking and dreaming? What sort of future do they visualize for their city and themselves? Nobody’s asking, or hardly anyone, although a study performed back in 1997 provided a few hints. The following are several indicative responses culled from a nationwide sample of nine thousand youths aged 10 to 19: 208

Number one benefit of education: increased social status. Least important reason for going to school: to make more money. Teens who watch tv in their spare time: 97 per cent. Teens who read books in their spare time: 15 per cent. Least common leisure activity: anything that costs money.45 So where’s the teen angst, rage at autocratic authority, or even the frustrated consumerist longings? Not here, that’s for sure, even allowing for the care that was doubtlessly taken in composing the sample. However great the exposure to Western consumerism, via tv, films, the internet and local transplants like fast food chains and malls, most of the young people who work do so to help their families, not for pocket money. What’s more, there is little apeing of pop culture figures, unlike the West where teens fall into categories according to their music or video game preferences, a phenomenon called ‘cookie-cutter diversity’ by Tarek Attia, American-educated Egyptian editor for the Al-Ahram Weekly. Youth has its language, dress, music and shared values, but the latter include insubstantial things like ‘wit’ and ‘confidence’. When asked to name their ‘most popular role model’, one is not sure whether to applaud or weep for the majority of surveyed youths who answered ‘I don’t know’. Nearly all claimed to have open lines of communication with their families, saying they express their opinions to them and are respected for doing so, a reflection perhaps of the amount of time spent at home or visiting relatives in the absence of other group activities. But perhaps the most marvellous thing about this survey, or rather about the young people who participated in it, is their optimism; both ‘well-off’ and ‘poor’ said they ‘see a brighter future’. What’s more, only two per cent said they were unhappy with their lives. Egyptian poet and aphorist Yahia Lababidi describes an idealist as ‘a near-sighted lawyer who can’t see his client, Life, confessing her guilt’. Are these kids idealists or are they blind? The institution of family, as we have seen, is pervasive and one of its attributes is the imaginary safety it bestows on the young. Children rely on their parents for a great deal, often to the detriment of their own initiatives, a reliance that does not cease with adulthood, or their own parenthood. In this reliance, the family mirrors the paternalist bureaucracy as sole benefactor and protector, and encourages laissez-aller in children, who stop bothering to question 209

authority in the knowledge that they have no real say. The relationship of children to parents is like that of the rich to government: it is in their interests to obey. Families, both well-off and modest middleor lower-class families, all struggle to keep children from working as a matter of pride, even young teens who could use the experience and exposure. Many kinds of jobs, including factory work, are considered beneath their dignity, both by young people and adults who nevertheless need the money. Perhaps what saves the young from an almost toxic naïveté with regards to the realities that await them is the fact that most are intensively socialized from infancy. No matter what the child’s temperament or possibilities, he or she will learn something about people if they learn little else. If a sense of rapport and a sunny disposition were sufficient equipment for life, these young people would be all set. Under the circumstances, the ‘brighter future’ they expect will cost more effort than they have been prepared to expend and more painful self-critique than that demonstrated by their elders. If this book has often dwelt on the high side of Cairene attitudes towards the city, themselves and others, noting sanguinity and humour, sense of place, inter-connectedness and continuity, it is because these attributes are often discounted or trivialized, or simply unseen. There is little need to underscore the low side of life in Cairo because it speaks for itself, is shrilly present in every poorly made or half-functioning thing, from tools themselves to shoes to homes, schools and systems at large. There is a stubborn defensiveness behind the complacency regarding everything from the primitive level of manufacture in a city not long ago renowned for its craftsmanship, to the ludicrous quality of service that has become the accepted standard. Carpenters show up without a hammer; electricians without a fuse. Even doctors maintain practices in unkempt premises, too weary or indifferent to offer an example of cleanliness to their patients. The very concept of work has been reduced to the merest approximation of itself. People assume titles on the basis of their willingness to engage in a profession, not their readiness. No matter the task, people are often uninstructed and unskilled, rarely if ever assessed by competent superiors and in all events poorly rewarded financially. There are of course exceptions, but these ‘high-performers’ reflect 210

lowered standards, for why should someone who simply does his or her job reasonably well be considered exceptional? The greatest source of distress is youth’s willingness to accept the randomness of things, to make excuses for it, to defend a lack of knowledge or ability with the same reflexive and feebly improvised justifications as the authorities, rather than admitting something isn’t right or could be better. In all of this neglect, of standards and common sense, one perceives both rebellion and surrender. Cairo is like an overstacked cart being dragged uphill by an ill-shod donkey. It gets there, but only having lost a wheel or two, not to mention half its load. Egypt is not alone in having sacrificed its self-absorption to modernity’s intrusions, to global trade agreements, geopolitics and war, but to surrender self-regard has proved a price too dear. ‘The thoughts we choose to act on, define us to others; those we do not act upon, define us to ourselves.’ 46 This aphorism is apt for any people of conscience, but it is doubly so when people cannot hide themselves from each other, because they partake in the same lifesustaining illusions. A city’s character is concretized by people’s thoughts in action, the buildings, customs and lifestyles that advertise the city’s choices. But in Cairo, unacted-on thoughts are just as visible. It might even be said that Cairenes have treated their city in such a way as to see what illusions about self-regard can look like and feel like to live in; to read the truth, as it were, in the rubble. It is not difficult to visualize Cairo’s physical future; it will become, in the lapidary opinion of one architect, ‘less itself’. In fact, it already has. But does the same fate belong to its inhabitants; have they too become ‘less themselves’? Egyptian conceptual artist and writer Hassan Khan had this to say on the subject of self-perceptions: The Egyptian identity is false and constructed. I can say that there is an awareness of the space you’re born into, awareness of the heritage that exists in that space, that psychic space which is cultural, but at the same time this is not a fixed thing made out of stone. It’s a dynamic, ever changing, fluid entity . . . Khan’s ‘fluid entity’ is the old continuity, but one that reveals the contours of abiding change. This understanding of continuity, in terms of a people and their character, is not static, but has a ground, a context, a field of action and potentiality. Evaluations of Egyptian 211

society as stagnant or passive fall short because they fail to see the movement in it. It’s the cultural equivalent of the optical illusion that confers motionlessness on something observed from afar. On the ground all is flux and ever was. Cairenes may not enjoy participatory civil life and self-governance, but they are ensemble in the manifold English, as well as French meanings of the term, the latter deriving from the Latin insimul, ‘at the same time’. It is wonderful to walk the streets in the late afternoon and hear many radios tuned to the same station, the ‘Voice of Cairo’ (sot el-Qahira) that plays classic recordings of singers like Umm Khalthoum, Mohammed Abdel Whab and Abdel Halim Hafez. These are often melancholic, elaborately orchestrated poetic laments that mourn the loss of love, or speak of distance and the pain of remembering. The music’s insistence, issuing from cars, shops and flats, seems at times the listeners’ plea to be left alone to look inward, to heal the wounds suffered at the hands of everyone who’s ever failed to understand or appreciate them. It’s as if these charmed refrains could sweeten not only the present, but summon a gentler, more familiar future. People have not lost the talent for transmitting moods and creating moments of considered time; mazag is still at work in Cairo beating some pretty tough odds. It may even be that mazag, in its fullest meaning, resolves the dichotomy of the individual versus the group, often viewed by Cairenes as mutually exclusive concepts, but in fact so intertwined they cannot be told apart. Mazag is a reminder of the individual’s position in a group, of reciprocal and beneficial consideration, the hallmarks of individuality.47 Culture and circumstance have primed Cairenes for a lifetime of layered interactions, with each other and with their uniquely implicated surroundings. Not only do they grapple daily with esoterica like pride and vanity, people simultaneously produce and absorb the shocks of growth that has exceeded its limits but is unable, indeed, unwilling to stop. The city’s great and undiminished beauty is humanity, at once immersed and enthroned in contradiction. It takes strength to hold contradictions together; you sense that tensility in Cairo. The city is a high-wire act whose missteps and flashes of grace-in-recovery so brilliantly illumine the abyss. If Cairo is an indication, a city is a process, a human project for maximizing potentialities, one that follows both the golden paths and fault lines of culture. 212

We cannot know the fate of our cities or count the centuries they may endure, but we can chart their directions, noting what the tempest has tossed and what has survived the shipwreck. It is in places like Cairo that one may learn the most about what can go wrong, but also about what can stay right and the knowledge that may be acquired when people live peaceably in one place for a very long time. There are treasures to be culled from the enterprise of cities, some less apparent than others.Yet each city embodies the mastery of a thing or two that is vital to us all. These diverse qualities are the legacy humanity leaves to itself, to be acknowledged, shared and built on.

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References

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Greater Cairo refers to the area and population of the Cairo governorate along with the urban bulk of the Giza and Qalyubiyya governorates to the west and north respectively. Population estimates vary according to source from twelve to sixteen million. Sandstorm information gathered from conversation with Dr Mohammed Eissa, general director of information, Egyptian Meteorological Authority, 20 January 2003. The storms are also calculated with relation to Sham el Nessim (sniffing the breeze), an Egyptian national holiday falling on the Monday following Coptic Easter. Sham el Nessim celebrated the harvest in Pharaonic times and now is associated with Spring. According to the Greater Cairo Atlas (published in 2000 by a division of the Ministry of Housing in cooperation with the Centre d’Études et de Documentation Economique, Juridique et Social (cedej), Cairo’s built-up area reached 350km2 in 1990. Milad Hanna, Acceptance of the Other, trans. Ahmed A. El-Sherif Hammad (Cairo, 2001), p. 26. Robert O. Collins, The Nile (New Haven and London, 2002), p. 12. The mud is nutrient-rich Ethiopian silt, deposited for the last 8,000 years atop six million years’ worth of coarser dirt, sand and gravel; Collins, The Nile, p. 11. ISIS: Information System for Informal Settlements, A Cooperation Project in Urban Research, a Participatory Urban Management Programme, involving the Ministry of Planning, German Technical Cooperation (gtz) and the Observatoire Urbain du Caire Contemporain (oucc of cedej); Report prepared by Eric Denis and Marion Séjourné, April 2002. By permission of the authors. ‘Consolatione ad Marciam, ix.5’, quoted in Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (London, 2001), p. 89. ‘De Ira, ii.21.7’, in De Botton, Consolations, p. 84. Akhbar el Yom columnist Ahmad Al-Garallah, translated by Andrew Hammond for the Cairo Times, 28 November–11 December 2002. Mandy McClure, managing editor, The Egypt Almanac: The Encyclopedia of Modern Egypt 2003 (Cairo, 2002), p. 27. One ha = 10,000m2; ISIS report, p. 3. Density figures for the Old City from the Greater Cairo Atlas, p. 49. Participatory Urban Development of Manshiet Nasser Project, Draft of guide plan documents, gtz and Cairo Governorate, 2001, courtesy of David Sims.

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The population and residential growth rates in informal settlements is 3.4 and 3.2 per cent respectively (ISIS report, p. 4); ‘The increase in informal settlement built up area is not a classical sprawling, it maintains its density; showing the intensity of the demand and its capacity to attract it immediately’ (ISIS report, p. 12). CAPMAS Statistical Yearbook, 1994–2001, p. 21. Actually, living space is even tighter than reported since a significant portion of the city’s built-up area is unused. According to the ISIS report (p. 22), 1.27 million housing units stand empty, 46 per cent of them (mostly unfinished due to shortage of funds) in the informal sector. Much of the balance has been empty for years due to outdated rent and mortgage laws, preventing most people from obtaining purchase loans. A significant portion of the empty units are upscale dwellings too highpriced for anyone but the rich to afford. David Sims, ‘Mortgaged Hopes’, in McClure, The Egypt Almanac, p. 124. ISIS report, pp. 3, 8. A small sampling of housing collapses includes, in 1999, a four-storey building in Sayyedda Zeinab, killing three elderly people; sixteen people dead in May 2000 in a building in the same quarter following ‘repairs’; in December 2000, eight people dead beneath a three-storey building in Giza (all reported in the Cairo Times). The Al-Ahram Weekly reported four collapses in the same week in September 2002, and in May 2003 seven people dead in a collapse in the popular quarter of Shubra. Azza Khattab, ‘And we all fall down’, Egypt Today, May 2002. Fatemah Farag, ‘Conquering the Beast’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 2–8 December 1999. Ibid. Omnia Abukorah, ‘Massacreurs de Palais, Élus Corrompus et Défenseurs de L’Histoire: La destruction des palais et villas à la une des journaux’, Observatoire Urbain du Caire Contemporain (oucc), Lettre d’Information. no. 49, January 1999, p. 53. Nicholas S. Hopkins, Sohair R. Mehanna and Salah el-Haggar, People and Pollution: Cultural Constructions and Social Action in Egypt (Cairo, 2001), pp. 43, 139. This fascinating book presents and analyses research focusing on people’s attitudes towards environmental problems and is used here interpretively. The majority of the people questioned for the purposes of the studies live in Cairo, a small portion in a farming town just outside the city. ‘Voice of the Metro’, Cairo Times, 20–26 July 2000. Celam Barge, ‘The Big City is Bursting at the Seams’, in McClure, The Egypt Almanac, p. 42. ‘Subway sins’, Cairo Times, 1 June 2000. Celam Barge, ‘Le Premier Tunnel Routier du Caire’, Observatoire Urbain du Caire Contemporain (oucc), Lettre d’information Electronique, no. 1, January 2001. The islands of Dahab and Warraq (known as ‘Cairo’s lungs’) were nearly sequestered by governmental decree in 2002 for the ‘public benefit’ despite having been declared environmentally protected areas in 1988. Facing eviction, 12,000 inhabitants rose in protest amid outraged media who blamed the decree on private investment schemes and successfully delayed its enforcement. Meanwhile, a few kilometres upriver, a new, artificial island is taking shape, the identity of its builder held secret by the government, despite persistent

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public inquiry as of June 2003. According to some African traditions, jewellery and shiny objects sidetrack malevolent spirits who might otherwise make mischief for their owners. Hopkins et al., People and Pollution, p. 73. According to the Greater Cairo Atlas, p. 35, Cairenes have 1.2m2 green space per inhabitant; by comparison, the inhabitants of London and Rome dispose of 9m2 each, Parisians get around 12m2. Berndt Lötsch, The Biology of Beauty (Vienna, 2001). By permission of the author. According to the United Nations Developmental Program (undp), a country suffers ‘water stress’ when its inhabitants dispose of less than 1500 cubic metres (m3) per year, and ‘water scarcity’ when the amount is less than 1000m3. This amount, however, represents a total entitlement to water, including a share of what is necessary for industry and agriculture. Domestic use in Cairo accounts for around 13 per cent of the total amount allowed per person in ‘water scarce’ countries. Conversation with General Hassanein el-Shahawwi, director of the Cairo Water Authority, 23 January 2002. A family of five living in downtown Cairo pays under 3ole every two months for the average usage of around 130m3. John P. Hoehn and Douglas Kreiger, ‘Estimating the Economic Benefits of Water and Wastewater Investments: Residential Demands in Cairo Egypt’, Water Resources Update, 109 (Autumn 1997), pp. 34–41. Gamal Hamdan, The Personality of Egypt, trans. Laila Abdel Razek (Cairo, 2001), p. 41. Hopkins et al., People and Pollution, p. 38. Estimates for the early 1990s. Heavy metal waste estimate from McClure, The Egypt Almanac, p. 37. Estimate based on government-issued figures from March 2003, when an Egyptian was born every 23.7 seconds. Greater Cairo comprises around a quarter of Egypt’s population. Marie-Josie Janicot, ‘Avoir un Enfant en Egypte: Enquête sur les Rites et Comportements’, Dossiers du CEDEJ, 4 (1988), p. 72. CAPMAS Statistical Yearbook, 1972 and 1994–2001. ‘De Ira, 2.10.7’, in De Botton, Consolations, p. 91. Al-Ghazali, The Mysteries of Purity, trans. Nabih Amin Faris (Lahore, 1991), p. 30; ‘toothpick’ refers to something more like a toothbrush, a tree twig with a frayed end, preferably from the aromatic arak (Salvadora perisce) tree. Ibid., p. 45. Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson, The Ancient Egyptians, Their Life and Customs (New York, 1988), ii, p. 327. Laverne Kuhnke, Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth-century Egypt (Cairo, 1990), p. 27. Book 4, lines 229–32. Mona El-Nahas, ‘The doctors’ dilemma’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 20–26 June 2002. The first two incidents were reported in the Cairo Times, the third related to the author by an employee of the injured party. Christina Frank, Mostafa K. Mohamed, G. Thomas Strickland, Daniel Lavanchy, Ray R. Arthur, Laurence S. Magder, Taha El Khoby, Yehia AbdelWahab, El Said Aly Ohn, Wagida Anwar, Ismail Sallam, ‘The role of parenteral

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antischistosomal therapy in the spread of hepatitis C virus in Egypt’, The Lancet, 355, issue 9207 (11 March 2000), p. 887. According to a June 2002 report, the who cited 8,100 cases of aids in Egypt. Abdallah Hassan, ‘Spotlight on aids’, Cairo Times, 6–12 December 2001. Hopkins et al., People and Pollution, pp. 108–11. Mike Jay, Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2000), p. 101. Amira El-Noshokaty, ‘Off drugs’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 16–22 January 2003. Yusuf Idris, The Cheapest Nights (London, 1983), p. 6. Fatemah Farag, ‘Ready for Viagra’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 13–19 June 2002. François Ireton, ‘La sustentation du Caire’, Observatoire Urbain du Caire Contemporain (oucc), Lettre d’Information, no. 49, January 1999, p. 64. Baladi is a colloquial Egyptian term from the root balad, meaning both ‘city’ and ‘country’. Dena Rashed, ‘Modern bread?’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 2–8 January 2003. Fatemah Farag, ‘Meltdown’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 1–7 August 2002. American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, Solid Waste Management and Plastics Recycling in Egypt (1996). Mahmoud Bakr, ‘Clearing the air’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 29 May–4 June 2003. Hala Sakr, ‘Anti-smoking scores’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 13–19 2002. Hopkins et al., People and Pollution, p. 1. Ibid., pp. 19–20. The Informal Solid Waste Sector in Egypt: Prospects for Formalization (Cairo, 2002), a study by Community and Institutional Development (cid, a Cairo management consultancy firm working in cooperation with the Ford Foundation and Institute of International Education (iie), usa. Hopkins et al., People and Pollution, p. 54. American Chamber of Commerce Report, p. 3. Richard Hoath, Natural Selections: A Year of Egypt’s Wildlife (Cairo, 1992). Excerpts from Al-Hayawan (‘The Animals’) by al-Jahiz, trans. Mandy McClure for the Cairo Times, 27 April–3 May 2000. The word for pigeon, hamam, derives from the same root as hamim (intimate friend). Hamam is also an Egyptian colloquialism for penis. Cairo Times, 6 July–1 August 2001. Hoath, Natural Selections, p. 132. Hamdan, The Personality of Egypt, pp. 46, 62. Azza Khattab, ‘And We All Fall Down’, Egypt Today, May 2002. El-Hajja Gabri lives in Dokki, a central quarter, on the west side of the Nile.

ii artifice and edifice 1 2 3 4

Quotation attributed to Ibn Sa√d by K.A.C. Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (Cairo, 1989), p. 4. Franj, meaning Franks or Frankish Crusaders. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, p. 16. On Cairo’s Islamic monuments (641–1848) see Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Islamic Architecture, An Introduction (Cairo, 1989).

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Gaston Wiet, Cairo: City of Art and Commerce (Norman, ok, 1964), p. 5. Al-Qahira is variously translated as ‘the dominant’, ‘the victorious’, ‘the triumphant’, the subduer’ and ‘Mars’; 6 July was declared a holiday, Cairo Day, in 2000. André Raymond, Cairo: City of History (Cairo, 2001), p. 44. Quotation from al-Maqrizi, a fourteenth-century historian. Passing through Bab Zuwayla today, ‘one walks at the height of an eleventhcentury camel-rider’, according to Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious (London, 1998), p. 121. Bab Zuwayla was beautifully restored by the American Research Center in Egypt (arce), its minaret reopened to visitors in 2003. The orchestra loggia is still visible above Bab Zuwayla’s noble but diminished archway. Al-Maqrizi, Khitat, ii, pp. 285–9. Islam from the Prophet Mohammed to the Capture of Constantinople, Volume One: Politics and War, trans. Bernard Lewis (New York and Oxford, 1987), pp. 46–59. Wiet, Cairo: City of Art and Commerce, pp. 32–3. Saladin, who reinstated Sunni Islam, made al-Hakim’s mosque into a stable. In the late 1800s it served as a repository for pharaonic antiquities. According to a sign once posted outside the monument, Napoleon stored munitions there in 1799 and Nasser used it as a school for boys. Al-Hakim’s mosque has lately been restored by an Indian Ismaili group. We owe the extant city gates to Badr al-Jamali. Wiet, Cairo: City of Art and Commerce, pp. 22–3. Saladin, quoted by Ibn Athir, a twelfth-century chronicler, in Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Cairo, 1990), pp. 177–83. Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 88. William Lyster, The Citadel of Cairo: A History and Guide (Cairo, 1993), p. 12. Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (London, 1988), p. 23. Inferno, Canto 4, ii. Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 91. In the Qabus-nameh, considered one of the greatest works of Persian prose, the eleventh-century author Kai Kaus offers advice on many subjects, including the purchase of slaves: ‘the buying of men is a difficult art, a branch of philosophy [since] the most difficult form of knowledge concerns human beings, of whom a single blemish may conceal a world of good, while a single virtue may conceal myriad faults.’ James Kritzeck, ed., Anthology of Islamic Literature (Penguin Books usa, 1964), pp. 171–8. On Bahri Mamluks see Robert Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Bahri Mamluk Sultanate, 1250–1382 (Beckenham, Kent, 1986). Baybar’s mosque, the earliest extant royal Mamluk mosque in Cairo, is now a shell located north of the Fatimid walls. According to a sign on the premises it was used as a barracks during the French occupation and was subsequently transformed into a soap factory, a bakery and a slaughterhouse. King Fuad turned it into a garden, of which a few palms remain. Qalawun’s mausoleum on the Bayn al-Qasrayn is currently undergoing questionable restoration. What remains of the hospital still operates as an eye clinic. Baybars Jashenkir is buried in a combination mausoleum and khanqah (sufi

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school) on Gamaliyya street, parallel to Bayn al-Qasrayn, the oldest (1310) surviving institution of its kind in Egypt. Mnemonic prowess is a trait well noted in Robert Irwin’s anthology of classical Arabic literature, Night and Horses and the Desert (London, 1999), pp. 353–4. Aside from the compulsory memorization of the Qur√an, scholars learned lengthy works for recitation. The tenth-century wazir, author and polymath Ibn ‘Abbad vowed to ‘only receive literary men who had committed to memory at least 20,000 verses composed by Arabs of the desert.’ Robert Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages, pp. 115–16. Al-Nasir’s citadel mosque is largely preserved, as is his madrasa on the Bayn al-Qasrayn beside his father’s tomb. His brother Khalil looted the madrasa’s Gothic door from a Crusader church in Acre. The minaret, with its finely wrought web of stucco arabesque, is Andalusian in style, while equally fine work around the mihrab is attributed to craftsmen from the Mongol court of Tabriz. According to varying estimates, 250,000 to 500,000 people lived on Cairo’s two square kilometres in 1348, as compared with Paris’s 80,000 on 4.5km2 in 1328 and London’s 60,000 on 2.8km2 in 1377. Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 137. Intermittent outbreaks continued into the seventeenth century, at which time Cairo still had not attained previous population levels. Circassian Mamluks gained ascendancy from 1382 until 1517 when the Ottomans invaded. Acquired from the Caucasus, they were also called Burgi (tower Mamluks), as they were garrisoned in the Citadel. Barquq’s mosque and madrasa (next to Nasir’s) joined the imposing array of buildings that replaced the Fatimid palaces on the Bayn al-Qasrayn. Barquq and Faraj share the same khanqah mausoleum complex in the city’s northern cemetery at the head of a boulevard lined with the beautifully domed tombs of their successors. Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London, 1994), p. 127. Wiet, Cairo: City of Art and Commerce, pp. 101, 111. Ibid., p. 147 Barsbay’s tomb is near Barquq’s in the Northern Cemetery. Qaytbay’s recently restored sabil is on Saliba Street near the base of the citadel; his combination mosque and mausoleum in the City of the Dead is small but lavishly decorated, gracefully proportioned and crowned with a stone dome carved with exquisite stylized floral arabesques. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. George Kubler (New York, 1989), pp. 41–2. A portion of his religious-funerary complex on the corner of Mu√izz and alAzhar streets is now used as a cultural centre. Wiet, Cairo: City of Art and Commerce, pp. 156–7. On Ottoman Cairo, see Raymond, Cairo: City of History, pp. 191–291. Well-restored examples of Ottoman residences include Bayt al-Suhaymi (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on Mu√izz St; as well as Bayt al-Harawi (1731), Bayt Zeinab Khatoun (originally Mamluk, 1468) with Ottoman additions (1713), both behind al-Azhar. The Beshtak Palace (1334–39), also on Mu√izz Street, provides a fine example of a grand Mamluk household.

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Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 240. Nafisa’s sabil was well restored by the American Research Center in Egypt (arce) in 1998. On the French invasion seen from both sides, see Shmuel Moreh, trans., Napoleon in Egypt, Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798 (Princeton, nj, and New York, 1993), p. 26. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., from the memoirs of Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, private secretary to Napoleon, pp. 133–67. Moreh, Napoleon in Egypt, Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle, p. 171. The Institut d’Egypte founded in 1798 by ‘Citizen Bonaparte’ (its first vicepresident) is still an active research centre, located just off Tahrir Square. A French lieutenant named Joseph Sevè was awarded the name and title Soliman Pasha by a grateful Mohammed Ali. Sevè’s granddaughter became the mother of King Farouk. See Laverne Kuhnke, Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth-century Egypt (Cairo, 1990). Completed by his son Ismail, Mohammed Ali Street cuts a swath from the base of the citadel to what became Cairo’s western quarter, now referred to as ‘downtown’. Despite Mohammed Ali’s objections, his son Ibrahim, army commander in chief, conscripted locals largely in response to a shortage of slaves in the then Russian-controlled Caucasus. By the end of the nineteenth century the army was primarily Egyptian. In 1881 Colonel Ahmed Urabi led the first military nationalist revolt. Lord Byron, Childe Harolde, Canto ii. The Khedive Ismail Bridge (opened in 1871) connects downtown and the island of Zamalek (previously Gezira). King Fuad rebuilt it between 1931 and 1933. Its post-1952 revolution name is the Kasr al-Nil Bridge. Ismail’s heirs inaugurated the present antiquities museum in Tahrir Square in 1902. The Royal (now ‘National’) Geographic Institute is still in its 1875 founding location, around the corner from the Institut d’Egypte. For images of downtown Cairo at the end of the twentieth century, see Paris on the Nile, a photo book by Cynthia Myntti (Cairo, 1999). Between 1863 and 1882 the city’s surface doubled to reach 1,260 hectares. The combined length of streets increased from 58 to 208 kilometres; Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 317. The opera house was destroyed by fire in 1971. Abdin Palace is an underused government building, most appreciated for the soccer-playing space it provides in its vast forecourt. Ismail travelled by the royal yacht al-Mahrousa (The Protected) to Naples as a guest of King Umberto. In Giza, on the west bank, renamed the University of Cairo. A fragment of the original Ezbikiyya gardens, as well as the reduced Sporting Club, Botanical Gardens and Zoo, are the last strongholds of greenery in a solidly urbanized central Cairo. Overall street surface increased from around 200 kilometres in 1882, to over

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1,300 in 1900 and 3,400 in 1927; Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 324. Both Groppi Tearooms still exist, one on Adly Street, one in Midan Talat Harb (formerly Midan Soliman Pasha). Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 318. His body was returned to Egypt in 1975 and buried beside Fuad’s in the majestic neo-Mamluk Mosque of Rifai√i, built between 1869 and 1912. Ismail and his mother, who founded the mosque, are entombed there as well. The Shah of Iran (married to Fawzia, one of Farouk’s sisters who died in Cairo), joined them in 1980. In February 1955 the statue was transported by flat-truck from Upper Egypt in several pieces, including a crown that weighed three tons; Samir Rafaat, ‘Ramses returns home’, Cairo Times, 7 August 1997. Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 350. The suburb of Madinat Nasser (Victory City) established in 1959 in the desert south of Heliopolis, is now a solidly populated middle-class quarter. On the west bank Mohandeseen was laid out at around the same time, and is now densely developed with commercial and residential buildings. Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 344 The earthquake of 1992 did more to solve the problem than legislation, since many questionable buildings simply fell down. Thanks to better housing authority surveillance following several high-fatality collapses in ‘good’ neighbourhoods, added-on floors are less frequent. Dr Farouk el-Baz, remote sensing expert responsible for plotting the first lunar landing sites for nasa, advised the president. According to André Raymond, as of 1993 the city extended 65 kilometres from the west (October City) to east (Badr City) and 34 kilometres from the north (Shubra) to south (Hilwan); Raymond, Cairo: City of History, p. 343. Eric Denis, ‘La Face Cachée des Villes Nouvelles, dossier des villes nouvelles de al-Gumhuriyya (September-October 1998)’, Observatoire Urbain du Caire Contemporain (oucc), Lettre d’Information, no. 49, January 1999. A quotation from a Dreamland sales brochure. Estimates vary, but of approximately 60 projects of varying size, only a handful (8–10) financed by Egypt’s sturdier entrepreneurs have sold at least 70 per cent of their units. All projects are still under construction to a greater or lesser extent. Prices for villas and ‘palaces’ range from an average le500,000 (us$100,000) to several million Egyptian pounds. David Sims, ‘Mortgaged Hopes: Does Egypt have a housing crisis?’, in McClure, The Egypt Almanac, p. 124. John Allen, ‘Ethnospherics: Origins of human cultures, their subjugation to the technosphere, the beginning of an ethnosphere, and steps needed to complete the ethnosphere’, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, 30 April 2003, pp. 7–24.

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Galal Amin, Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? (Cairo, 2000), p. 93. Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War, 1939–1945 (London, 1989), pp. 114–16. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., pp. 195–6. For an excellent history of Egypt’s museums and overview of archaeology in Egypt since the eighteenth century in the contexts of imperialism and nationalism, see Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? (Cairo, 2002), p. 7. The Egyptian (Pharaonic) Museum was founded first in Bulaq in 1863, and on the present site in Tahrir Square in 1902; the Islamic Museum was founded in 1881 in its present location in Bab il-Khalq, at the edge of the medieval quarter near Abdin; the Coptic Museum was founded in 1908 by Marcus Simaika under the auspices of the Coptic Patriarch in its present location, beside the remnant bastions of the Babylon Fortress. The Greco-Roman Museum (1892) is in Alexandria. Reid, Whose Pharaohs?, p. 21. Ibid., pp. 30–31. The first contemporary Arabic account of Egypt’s ancient history was written by the al-Azhar and French-educated Rifaa al-Tahtawi and published in 1868. The last obelisk to leave Egypt (in 1879) is in Central Park, New York City, Ismail’s tribute to the American Civil War veterans who served in his army. Located near the present-day Television Building, nothing remains of either the first museum or the school. A sculpture entitled ‘The Awakening of Egypt’, featuring a tall, stern woman standing beside an alert sphinx, was executed by Egyptian artist Mahmoud Mokhtar and unveiled on 22 May 1928. It is located in Giza, near the entrance to Cairo University. Gamal Hamdan, The Personality of Egypt, trans. Laila Abdel Razek (Cairo 2001), p. 171. Post-9/11, Egypt had a half million more than Madame Tussaud’s 3,000,000 visitors in 1998; Gareth Shaw and Alan M. Williams, Critical Issues in Tourism (London, 2002), p. 255. In the summer of 2002, to help Egypt recover from devastating losses due to reduced tourism post-9/11, a marketing campaign was introduced in Europe describing Egypt as ‘The land of smiles’. Gareth Shaw and Alan M. Williams, Critical Issues in Tourism, pp. 100, 78–84. Ibid., p. 21. Tourism contributes around 10 per cent of Egypt’s gdp (in 2001 revenues were just under us$4 billion). Every million dollars spent by tourists creates around 330 local jobs. There are currently around 1.5 million Egyptians working in Saudi Arabia alone. In the summer of 2002, 76,000 tourists arrived from the Gulf, an increase of some 20 per cent over previous years, seen as a response to 9/11. Conversation with Effat Nasser, 17 July 2002. Colonial types were derided in a revolution-era ditty that ran ‘We’ll till our five feddans, plant hot peppers in our land, and throw in the hat-wearers, too’.

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Linda Waverly Brigden, ‘Tobacco Marketing: Where There’s Smoke There’s Deception’, Science From the Developing World, 31 July 2002. George W. Bush, 15 September 2001. Milad Hanna, Acceptance of the Other, trans. Ahmed A. El-Sherif Hammad (Cairo, 2001), p. 82. Ibid., pp. 25–6. ‘A Triumphant Middle East Hegira’, Time Magazine, 24 June 1974. Later the residence in exile of Rheza Palavi, Shah of Iran. Time Magazine, 24 June 1974 Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, Autumn of Fury (New York, 1983), pp. 175–8. Gihan Shahine, ‘The Arabs at a crossroads’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 11–17 July 2002. Hanna, Acceptance of the Other, p. 85. Ayman El-Amir, ‘Filtering the Propaganda’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 16–22 May 2002. Para quotes from same article. Cooper, Cairo in the War, p. 101. Zahi Hawass, ‘Site management at Giza Plateau: master plan for the conservation of the site’, International Journal of Cultural Property, ix (2000), pp. 1–22. Omayma Abdel-Latif, ‘A Long and Winding Road’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 4–10 January 2001. Khawaga is a noun and title of address used for Western foreigners or Egyptian Christians. The Arabic word for complex (fiuqda) translates literally as ‘knot’. The law denying citizenship to children of foreign fathers was upturned by presidential decree in September 2003. As of December, 6000 people had applied for citizenship although approximately 400,000 are eligible. Few members of the Caucasian race are aware of the reason for their being named after a Russian mountain range. The late Stephen Jay Gould, in The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1996), p. 401, elucidates: ‘J. F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), the German naturalist who established the most influential of all racial classifications, invented the name in 1775, in the third edition of his work, On the Natural Variety of Mankind. Blumenbach’s original definition cites two reasons for his choice – [his personal estimation of] the maximal beauty of the people from this small region, and the [then current theory] that humans had first been created in this area.’ Naguib Mahfouz, Thebes at War, trans. Humphrey Davies (Cairo, 2004). Gamal Nkrumah, ‘A question of color’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 8–14 August 2002. Two colloquial sayings having to do with women’s desirability illustrate the same opinion: il samar nuss il gamal, il bayad il gamal kullu (dark skin is half of beauty, white, all of beauty) and bayda uskut, samra iwsif (if she’s white, that’s enough; dark skinned, tell me more, describe her). According to the unhcr, in June 2002 there were 8,794 refugees registered; the number of current applicants (and appeals) for refugee status was 14,500. unhcr’s mandate does not cover Palestinian refugees, but the organization states that there were 70,000 Palestinian refugees registered by the Egyptian government as of June 2002. According to some unofficial estimates, there are a quarter of a million ‘illegal immigrants’ from a variety of African and Arab countries in Cairo. Characterized as a sectarian conflict, the Sudanese civil war is about oil and

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water, a power struggle in which Egypt has high stakes. It is the world’s longest running civil war. The underfunded unhcr seems reluctant to reveal the exact number of staff (in addition to the fixed staff) responsible for interviewing refugees, perhaps because of criticism regarding the delays associated with obtaining an interview and receiving refugee status. unhcr’s ‘overall recognition rate for all nationalities’ for 2002 was 26 per cent of applicants, according to figures published in November of that year. While rejected applicants may appeal, their chances of changing status, especially considering unhcr’s case load of new applicants, are slim. Asmaa Waguih, ‘Informal sector embraces migrants’, Business Monthly Magazine, September 2002, p. 30. Unskilled Egyptian workers are paid little better, but the Sudanese are often overqualified and hired particularly in summer because, in the words of one contractor, ‘They work under the heat better than Egyptians.’ In 2002, 85 students sat for exams in the programme with 100 enrolled for the next session. unhcr seeks to provide relief to some 20 million refugees worldwide, 4.2 million of which are in Africa and 4.9 in Europe. Donors often earmark funds for specific recipients to the exclusion of others (i.e., former Yugoslavia versus Africa). In 2001, unhcr’s budget was us$850 million, of which us$1.5 million was allotted for Egypt, down from nearly twice that amount in 1996 despite the growing number of applicants. Hanna, Acceptance of the Other, p. 69. Gould, in Mismeasure of Man (p. 400), seeks to trace the science-related social discourse and misconceptions that feed racism, as well as the arguments that fostered the value of diversity. He quotes Sir Thomas Browne, a seventeenthcentury English physician, author of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (A Plethora of False Truths): ‘We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature.’ As Gould points out, Browne ‘could not have known the uncanny literal accuracy of his words’ since current theories place the origin of man in Africa.

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Ahmed Fuad Negm, The Complete Works (Cairo, 2002), p. 475, translated from colloquial Arabic by Amr Khadr and M. Golia. The only word heard as frequently as mafilesh or insha √allah is yafini, ‘I mean’, variously used to qualify a statement, as in ‘that is to say’, ‘that is’, or when framed as a question, ‘What does that mean?’ (yafiani √eh?). Galal Amin, Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? (Cairo, 2000), p. 87. Azza Khattab, ‘Lady of Song’, Egypt Today, 21 May 2000, pp. 72–9. Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur√an (Cairo, 2001), pp. 52–100. Khattab, ‘Lady of Song’, pp. 72–9. The Egyptian government established a small but beautifully situated Umm Khalthoum Museum in 2002 beside the Nilometer on Rhoda Island. Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Names (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 3, 17.

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Euphemisms for the sexual act include oddly mechanistic terms like, ‘the bicycle’ (il-fiagala), ‘sewing’ (khiyata), ‘stamping’ (rafita) and ‘changing the oil’ (ghayar il-zet). For an engaging look at Egyptian cinema with its cultural and political subtexts, see Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge, 1996). The word for ‘spell’ is hegab, the same as the word for ‘veil’. Translated by Andrew Hammond for the Cairo Times, 28 June–4 July 2001. Translated by Max Rodenbeck for the Cairo Times, 23 December–5 January 2000. A cartoon in Al-Wafd, 7 July 2001, featured tattered Egyptians begging to be admitted to the hospital. Egyptian Gazette, 27 October 1998. Andrew Hammond, Cairo Times, 23–29 March 2000. Hussein Kamal Bahaeddin has been minister since 1991. Based on official figures, 36 per cent of Egypt’s population of 67 million is 14 or younger. The emergency law in effect, since Sadat’s assassination in 1981 is widely acknowledged as the source of many civil woes, not to mention the longest emergency in written history. It empowers government to make arrests and administer due process as it sees fit. Saeed Okasha, ‘That’s not funny’, Cairo Times, 31 August– 6 September 2000. A few contemporary poets and writers, notably Ahmed Fuad Negm, do work in colloquial, and an (Arabic) anthology of colloquial literature is under production, edited by Madiha Doss and Humphrey Davies. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), pp. 109–19. Official figures place illiteracy levels for people of ten years and older at 24 per cent for males, 45 per cent for females and 34.2 per cent overall. The actual overall rate may be conservatively estimated at 55 per cent, women comprising the majority of about 65 per cent. Robert Irwin, Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (London, 1999) p. 354. Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur√an (Cairo 2002) , p. xiv. Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Book-starved in a land with a literate past’, The New York Times, 16 June 2001. In the 25 June 2002 edition of Akhbar Al-Adab, a literary journal of which Al Ghitani is editor in chief. Naguib Mahfouz, ‘Books as commodities’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 6–12 June 2002. Quotation from AkhbarAl-Yo, 26 January 2002; import fees on book crates unaccountably rose from le40 per crate in 2001 to le250 for 2002, which was eventually negotiated down to le100; these costs are eventually absorbed by the reader. Paul Schemm, ‘We want to learn’, Cairo Times, 14–20 June 2001. Mona El-Ghobashy, ‘Shredding the past’, Cairo Times, 19–25 April 2001. Attempts to police the net are sporadic. Homosexual entrapment via gay chatrooms worked once or twice before word spread via the net throughout the gay community to beware. In 2002 the website manager for the Al-Ahram Weekly was arrested for running his own website that included a political

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poem couched in erotic language written by his deceased father, Naguib Surour, in the 1970s. Sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in June 2002, the young man left Cairo for Moscow. Customers pay only the local dial-up rates. User growth fell post-9/11. Sessions cost a token le1 per hour. By mid-2002 the programme sponsored 350 outlets nationwide and was witnessing high demand from willing hosts and users alike.

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Djinn are not immortal, but can live to a great age. For a prototypal case in point, see the last tale of the One Thousand and One Nights, and the chance encounter of Ali the Merchant and Ma√ruf the Cobbler in a faraway land: Ali: Where are you from, my brother? Ma√ruf: I am from Cairo. Ali: What quarter? Ma√ruf: Do you know Cairo? Ali: I am of its children. Ma√ruf: I come from the Red Street. Ali: Do you know Sheikh Ahmed, the druggist? Ma√ruf: He was my neighbour, wall to wall. Ma√ruf goes on to describe Sheikh Ali’s sons, one of whom, coincidentally, was Ali the merchant. ‘Mother was special’, Cairo Times, 28 March–3 April 2002. For an in-depth study of marriage, birth and other interactive aspects of life in Cairo, see Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Cairo, 1995), p. 78. Mary St Germain and Charlene Constable, The Committee, trans. Sonallah Ibrahim (Cairo, 2002), p. 144. Andrew Hammond, ‘Sex with someone you love’, Cairo Times, 31 October– 6 November 2002. The gay community uses internet chat-rooms to initiate encounters, despite several instances of entrapment engineered by net-savvy vice police. At www.gayegypt.com, a London-based site supporting gay rights for Egyptians, one can learn about Cairo’s gay hangouts (with an accompanying warning about the police), as well as read stories like ‘I was a Taliban sex slave’ and ‘How we know that Saladin was homosexual.’ ‘Voice of the Metro’, Cairo Times, 22–18 November 2001. Dalia Dabbous, ‘The man who loved too much’, Cairo Times, 30 August– 5 September 2001. Abdallah Hassan, ‘The king of conjugal visits’, Cairo Times, 31 January– 6 February 2002. Between March 2000 and March 2002, 8,000 women sought khul in Cairo and after the first year only 4.5 per cent had been granted a verdict; Mariz Tadros, ‘The third option’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 31 October–6 November 2002. Amina Elbendary, ‘Tahani el-Gabali: A question of judgement’, Al-Ahram

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13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Weekly, 15–19 February 2003. Gamal Hamdan, The Personality of Egypt, trans. Laila Abdel Razek (Cairo, 2001), p. 62. Robert O. Collins, The Nile (New Haven and London, 2002), p. 17. William Kelly Simpson, ed., The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions and Poetry (New Haven and London, 1972), p. 330. The instruction ends with the admonishment to ‘honor father and mother who have placed you on the path of the living.’ Khalil Ashraf, ‘The Shape of the State’, in McClure, The Egypt Almanac, p. 108. Ibid., p. 109. Annik M. Lussier, ‘Ready for the next big one?’, Cairo Times, 10–16 October 2002. Bulaq collapse figures from Greater Cairo Atlas, p. 59. Hopkins et al., People and Pollution, pp. 92, 133. Ibid., pp. 80–81. The capmas yearbook covers 1994 to 2001, and presents a confusing table regarding nationwide crime on page 152. For each type of crime there are two sets of figures: one under the heading ‘pursuer’, the other under ‘condemned’. The former number may refer to those apprehended and awaiting prosecution, and the latter to convictions. Under ‘Intentional Killing’ in the year 2000 there are 438 ‘pursuers’ and 3463 ‘condemned’. Incidents of rape for the same year reportedly numbered 693 ‘pursuer’ and 1935 ‘condemned’; incidents of theft, 868 and 2,184 and drug related crime 17, 013 ‘pursuer’ and 25,867 ‘condemned.’ The fact that the state was willing to report so many drugrelated crimes may suggest that there are more. On the other hand, figures may be inflated to frighten people into awareness and action. Amira El-Noshokaty, ‘Off drugs’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 19–22 January 2003. Fatemah Farag, ‘The young and the unemployed’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 12–18 September 2002. Ninety-five per cent of first-time job market entrants are unemployed. Youths aged 14 to 24 comprise the bulk (74 per cent) of the unemployed. Egypt’s most famous mass-murderers were sisters named Raya and Sakina, who killed 30 young women in Alexandria in 1921 to steal bits of gold jewellery. The case was interpreted for the stage as a comedy and has become a popular theatre classic. Cairo Times, 7 December 2000. Ibid., 10 December 2001. Nevine Khalil, ‘Cairo ripper, virtual or real?’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 28 February– 6 March 2002. Hani Shukrallah, ‘Conspiracy theory’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 15–21 May 2003. There was some evidence of truth behind this opinion; see Elaine Scarry, ‘The Fall of Egypt Air 990’, New York Review of Books, 5 October 2000. Hani Shukrallah, ‘Conspiracy Theory’, Al-Ahram Weekly. Average annual income per Egyptian is le2,592, equivalent to less than 500 euros as of mid-2003; McClure, The Egypt Almanac, p. 112. Max Rodenbeck, ‘That’s what they want you to believe’, The Economist, 19 December 2002. Hamdan, The Personality of Egypt, p. 62. Hani Shukrallah, ‘Conspiracy Theory’, Al-Ahram Weekly.

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35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

Cairo’s Christian community includes adherents to the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions. Milad Hanna, Acceptance of the Other, trans. Ahmed A. El-Sherif Hammad (Cairo, 2001), p. 132. According to capmas, there are 288 churches in Greater Cairo. Neighbourhoods with a predominance of Christians include Abbaseyya, Shubra and Mar Girgis, the latter the site of several Coptic churches that predate Egypt’s first mosque, the Mosque of Amr (ad 641), that is located close by. The revised constitution introduces the word ‘democratic’ to describe Egypt; article 77 provides for life-long presidential terms, a self-awarded benefit Sadat did not live long to enjoy. Mohammed Heikal, Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat (New York, 1983), p. 217. Mahmoud Kassem, ‘All in the family’, Cairo Times, 8–14 June 2000. The site also houses a kindergarten, school for the deaf and dumb, literacy and vocational courses and a hospital. Yasmine El Rashidi, ‘Amm Hussein Al-Hadari: A limited existence’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 28 November–4 December 2002. A curious survival, if indeed it is one. The Passover is a Jewish feast, commemorating events leading to the Jews’ escape from Egypt. It seems that God warned Pharaoh that if he did not let the Hebrews go, he would kill the ‘firstborn . . . both men and beasts’ in every household. To ensure that Hebrew homes would not be touched, they were warned to mark their doors with the blood of a lamb, so that the angel of death would pass them over. Hamdan, The Personality of Egypt, p. 46. McClure, The Egypt Almanac, pp. 110–11. Yahia Lababidi, Signposts to Elsewhere (forthcoming); by permission of the author. George Katsiaficas draws the distinction between individuality and individualism as follows: ‘The former refers to a harmonious relation between the single human being’s inward life and outward relationships to others while the latter denotes the individual as an isolated monad held in check by repressive groups (in which he/she may or may not claim membership).’ George Katsiaficas, Ibn Khaldun: A Dialectical Philosopher for the New Millennium, from a paper presented at the Pan African Congress in Philosophy in Addis Ababa, December 1996, published in full in Perspectives in African Philosophy, Claude Sumner and Samuel Yohannes, eds. (Addis Ababa, 1997).

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Select Bibliography

Galal Amin, Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? (Cairo, 2000) Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge, 1996) Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Islamic Architecture, An Introduction (Cairo,1989) Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War, 1939–1946 (London, 1989) K.A.C. Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (Cairo, 1989) Gamal Hamdan, The Personality of Egypt, trans. Laila Abdel Razek (Cairo, 2001) Ahmed A. Milad Hanna, Acceptance of the Other, trans. El-Sherif Hammad, Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (Cairo, 2001) Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat (New York, 1983) Nicholas S. Hopkins, Sohair R. Mehanna and Salah el-Haggar, People and Polution: Cultural Constructions and Social Action in Egypt (Cairo, 2001) Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London, 1994) —, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Bahri Mamluk Sultanate, 1250–1382 (Beckenham, Kent, 1986) —, Night and Horses and The Desert (London, 1999) James Kritzeck, ed., Anthology of Islamic Literature (Penguin usa, 1964) Laverne Kuhnke, Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cairo, 1990) William Lyster, The Citadel of Cairo: A History and Guide (Cairo, 1993) Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes (Cairo, 1990) Shmuel Moreh, trans., Napoleon in Egypt, Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798 (Princeton, NJ, and New York, 1993) André Raymond, Cairo: City of History (Cairo, 2001) Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? (Cairo, 2002) Max Rodenbeck, Cairo, The City Victorious (London, 1998) Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (London, 1988) Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Names (Edinburgh, 1989) Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Cairo, 1995) Gaston Wiet, Cairo: City of Art and Commerce (Norman, ok, 1964)

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Acknowledgements

In the course of writing a book about interactions, I enjoyed quite a few, and must thank a number of old friends and new for their conversation, insights and assistance: Naguib Amin, Marie Assad, Tarek Attia, Negar Azimi, Farouk el-Baz, Anna Boghiguian, Cynthia Brandenburg, Roman Bunka, Abdu Dagher, Issandr Elamrani, Sherif Elazma, Sherif Fadhalli, Hisham Fahmy, Karim Francis, Paul Geday, Pisso Bhutros Ghali, Amira Ghazalla, Mostafa el-Gendy, Mona el-Ghobashy, Neamatalla Guenena, Mahmoud elLozy, Andrew Hammond, Laila Iskander, Risa Kato, Amr Khadr, Amr Khalil, Karima Khalil, Hassan Khan, Huda Lutfi, William Lyster, Martin McInally, Mohammed Metwalli, Mohammed Mansour, Samir Morcos, Mohammed Mounir, Effat Nasser, Steve Negus, Kristina Nelson, Saeed Okasha, Maria Pastore, Mahmoud Sabet, Pierre Sioufi, Samir Rafaat, Youssef Rakha, Max Rodenbeck, Nigel Ryan, William Wells, Alan Wright, Grace Yoon and the √Amm Avenger. I’m indebted to Samy Moshrif and his family in the Old City; to my downtown neighbours, especially Leila Louli, Madame Habiba and √Umm Hamada and their families; as well as to my landlord, the late, great Edgard George Kher. I’m especially grateful to Lara Baladi for setting this project in motion, and Humphrey Davies for seeing it through. Thanks to Professor George Scanlon and Robert Irwin for their help with history and Eric Denis, Marion Séjourné and David Sims for sharing fresh information about Cairo. Mohammed Fuad I thank for his humour and knowledge, both broad; and Andrea Belloli, Juliet Coombe, Diana Digges, Rebecca Porteous and Steve Sherman for their timely encouragement. John Allen, Kathelin Gray, Mark Nelson and all my friends at the Institute of Ecotechnics are present in this endeavour, as is Yahia Lababidi whose presence has made the journey the more vivid. Thanks to Magad Farag and Eduard Lambelet at the Lehnert and Landrock Bookshop for the perusal of their image archives; to Khaled el-Fiqi for his aerial shots of Cairo, and Randa Shaath for her photographs and much appreciated mazag. Finally, I bow at the hip to the three indomitable Shimi brothers, Mohammed and Kamal, who grace the frontispiece of this book, and Mostafa, who took their picture atop the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

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Photographic Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it: Photos © Khaled el-Fiqi: pp. 8, 9, 22, 46, 89, 122, 201; photos from the Archive of Maged Farag, Cairo: pp. 72, 73, 75, 79, 80, 83, 94; photos © Lehnert and Landrock, Cairo: pp. 49, 54, 63, 74, 77, 96; photos © Randa Shaath: pp. 12, 16, 19, 25, 26, 100, 105, 113, 116, 138, 146, 158, 168, 176; photo Mostafa Shimi, courtesy of the Shimi Brothers, Cairo: p. 6.

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