You know it's Ramadan in Cairo when you come home after 2 in the morning and you're not the straggler but the party pooper. Everyone else will be out until the muezzin heralds the dawn and the tables that line the streets are packed up, shops shutter, and people crawl back home to sleep. Ramadan this year has been somewhat different for me than last year -- a different set of friends, good enough language skills to watch the mosalsalat, or TV series, that come out specially for the holiday -- but the sense that every day is special is still there. Yesterday was a quintessential day (or, more properly, night) in this other city that never sleeps.
I woke up early for Ramadan, around 10:30, and went for a walk around Downtown. Tahrir Square, as I could see from afar, was still closed to traffic, with tents littering the center and tanks lined up alongside the Egyptian Museum as an imposing deterrent. At the same time, though, Downtown was doing a brisk business: the traffic was impossibly dense, as usual, shops were crowded, and the beggars were out in full force. Emerging from Shorouk bookstore in Talaat Harb Square, I noticed that a giant sign had been strung between two of the graying colonial buildings: Hayzaboon Go Home, it read (Go Home, Ogress), with a picture of the U.S. ambassador, Anne Patterson. I had previously asked a friend why so much hatred is directed at her personally when, after all, she is taking direction from Washington. Although I suspect it's less complicated than this, he said that she is seen as trying to give orders to Egypt, as opposed to simply announcing US positions.
Leaving Talaat Harb, I went to meet my friend Manar and her sister in Sayyeda Zeinab. Alongside the Sayyeda mosque a dizzying market of Ramadan fawanees (lanterns) has been erected in the street. The mosque itself was bustling, and we stepped inside to see the shrine to the Prophet's granddaughter. As is typical, there is a large metal tomb with glass panels that allows visitors to see inside a coffin-like piece covered in fabric. Men enter on one side, women on the other, and they are separated by a wall. The ladies' area was very crowded, with many simply sitting on the floor praying, and others grasping the side of the tomb.
We walked from Sayyeda Zeinab to Ibn Tulun, my favorite of Cairo's mosques. Usually, it's just a few tourists there, but perhaps because of Ramadan carpets had been laid out for prayer. As we sat discussing my friends' decision to wear hijab (late and against their father's wishes until a cousin defied the family custom), a sheikh standing just a few yards away at the mihrab picked up a microphone and began the azan. These days there is no need to climb the minaret -- his voice boomed throughout the neighborhood.
For our final stop, we went to Masr El Qadima, the old Christian quarter. I've been many times in the past year, but this was a first for my friends who have lived their entire lives in Cairo. As we approached the Hanging Church, the bawab at the door didn't glance at me but demanded the identity cards of my scarf-wearing friends. We close at 5, he and another insisted reluctantly. You're too late. But it's only 4:30? my friend pointed out nicely. They hemmed and hawed for a while before letting us in, clearly suspicious of two Muslim girls who wanted to visit a church. It hadn't even occurred to me that this could be a problem in a country that publicly prides itself on religious coexistence.
I walked down the street behind the church to Darb 1718, the artists' space where I have attended many a gallery show and music festival. I was attending my first Egyptian yoga class, a bit late in the game. Lotus Studio occupies a rooftop above a gallery, nestled between pottery studios and glassworks. I took a mat and lay on my back, staring up at swaths of rainbow cloth criss-crossed over strips of blue sky. The sound of ommm from the instructor's CD blended with the voice of a sheikh somewhere down below. Perhaps he was warming up for sundown as he invoked the fatiha - the first verse of the Qur'an. In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, the Beneficent, the Merciful, Owner of the Day of Judgment.... And there was also the occasional drone of a jet passing overhead.
I drifted in and out of consciousness during the class, running through my memories of Cairo. I had come to clear my mind, but it rushed with the people and places I would soon be leaving. It has been a week since I bought my ticket home to America, and since then I've alternated between denial, wistfulness, and resigned confidence that the time has come. In 9 days I'll be back in the States, and in 10 I will be waking up and going to work at my new office. The last two months here, since my purpose for being in Cairo ended, have been especially strange. My friends left and I made new ones. I began a new romance. The president of the country was overthrown. Picturing the very normal kind of moments I had before the sudden political upheaval seemed almost absurd.
I remembered my visit to Port Said with my roommates in mid-June. We had gone mostly because of the city's history -- both recent and distant. It was a Friday and we'd taken an early bus from Cairo, arriving just around prayer time. So we had sat at a seafood restaurant on the beach, watching families arrive with their swimming gear and umbrellas. People seemed charmed and surprised that a few tourists had made it up to their city. Since the soccer stadium massacre in February 2012, and the ongoing civil disobedience campaign that followed, Port Said has been seen by many in Cairo as a potentially dangerous outpost. Of course, it didn't used to be that way. Rudyard Kipling once said: "If you truly wish to find someone you have known and who travels, there are two points on the globe you have to but sit and wait, sooner or later your man will come there: the docks of London and Port Said." We had taken the ferry across the Suez Canal from the Port Said side of the city to the Port Fuad side, where we wandered among the old Canal Authority buildings -- neat brick rowhouses for employees, painted in lovely pastels. I found them, like other half-kept shadows of the colonial era in Egypt, a bit eerie.
Then I remembered the week my friend Nav and I ironically adopted the motto YOCO - you only Cairo once. In this vein, we had taken a gay Bruneian Al Azhar student (yes, apparently these exist) and gone to the Graffiti nightclub in the Four Seasons. There were, indeed, aquariums inside, but no cover on Tuesdays. It was a strange mix of rich teenagers in Ralph Lauren and 40-year-old hotel guests nursing cocktails alone at the bar. A day or so later we had gone to the Agricultural Museum, a campus of seven or so century-old buildings laid out around a scruffy lawn. It covers topics ranging from "pharaonic agriculture" to "cotton" to "Chinese-Egyptian cooperation." This last one really threw us for a loop because it was just a collection of photographs of happy Chinese people and pieces of jade. But the main scientific museum was fascinating. Giant wooden panoramas depicted life in an Egyptian village -- in the 1950s or earlier. Statistics referred to agricultural production during the United Arab Republic, which, it should be noted, was dissolved in 1961 (though Egypt used the name for 10 more years). A yellowed placard identified a balloon-like specimen as a camel stomach, and containers of yogurt produced by the Faculty of Agriculture probably in the Nasser era looked unmoved behind glass.
As the omm continued in the background, I fast-forwarded to the days just before June 30. Everything in Cairo was still in its place, people went about their daily business whether or not they planned to overthrow the government within the week. The night before the protests broke, I was on the set of the Ramadan series Al-Da'eya (The Preacher). Magdy, who was acting in it, had arranged for me and a few friends to tag along. We drove with his buddies to the outskirts of Giza, where the city ends and the villages begin. The studio, alongside one of the canals that irrigates the farms of the Delta, had erected a sha'by wedding tent (like that of my friend Sofia) -- only this one was filled with hundreds and hundreds of local extras. Styrofoam trays of fake hashish and empty Stella beer bottles were laid out before them. We were perched just outside the tent, watching the action on a monitor alongside the director. Through a crack, we could see two of the actors at a table. Eight or ten times we watched the scene repeated, the climax coming when Magdy went to the front, took the microphone, and denounced the wedding of the woman he loved to another man. However, we couldn't actually hear the dialogue: it's recorded separately, afterward. An assistant brought us mango juice, and then, when the filming was over, Magdy took us inside the tent to meet his fellow actors and a crowd of mahraganat singers in baggy jeans, baseball caps, sunglasses (one with American flag print), and lots of hair gel (remember my post about my favorite song, Haty Bosa ya Bet? This is those guys...).
Bent over and grasping my knees, the yoga teacher told me my mind was wandering. I was thinking of the voice of Fairuz drowned out by the sound of jets overhead in the days after the military took over. Cairo had an emptiness then, even when people were out in the streets. It was Ramadan that changed this, and brought Cairo back to a real sense of normalcy. I ate the first night of Ramadan with Magdy's family in Maadi. His mom had prepared an Algerian specialty, sweet beef soaked in the juices of apricots, pears, and prunes.
I thought of the Muslim Brotherhood protests that had marched past my window in the last two weeks, now and again, usually not more than 75 -- but most recently as many as 300. The men marching separately from the women. I would be Skyping, or packing, and hear shouts outside. The signs are in English, as Seeko noted, things along the lines of No to the coup! He said this was because they were appealing to the outside world, not to Egyptians.
I had hosted my own eftar on Monday night. For the first time, there were only three or four Americans, and perhaps a dozen Egyptians. I had tried to make grilled fruit kebabs, with only marginal success. My Egyptian friends were horrified: You never experiment on people who are fasting! they told me.
At the end of my yoga class, I rolled up my mat and walked out into the poor neighborhood that surrounds the workshop. Skinny dogs prowl the mounds of trash that line the unpaved road. But it was dusk, and this lent the street a beauty that it rarely sees. A crescent moon had risen to its place behind the mosque across the street and people of various shapes and sizes were already seated at the long tables that wealthier people or restaurants set up outdoors during Ramadan to serve the poor. The food lay before them -- they were just awaiting the voice of the muezzin. Haram aleeky! whispered a man fixing a car, We're fasting! This is the kind of toned down verbal harassment one gets in Ramadan from men who know they should be focusing on God instead of girls.
The metro platform at Mar Girgis was nearly empty. Just the odd shuffler hurrying to food before the call to prayer. Then came the sound of the azan, and even though I wasn't fasting, a sigh of relief came over me. A train pulled up in the opposite direction - headed for Helwan. Through the windows, I saw each passenger put a plastic cup to his lips nearly in unison. They drank juice - apricot, mostly, or tamarind. As the train chugged away, a trail of plastic cups flew from the windows, floating to rest on the track.
I made my way back to Dokki for a final Yemeni dinner with my friend Chris, who is leaving for vacation in Italy. I tried to make a list of places I would miss here, and this restaurant was near the top of my list. But the night had just begun. Back in downtown, I went for the second time to a concert of the Tanbura band (see a post from February or March) -- the voice of the boisterous canal workers of Port Said. At midnight, we headed for a felucca, the sailboat kind, which drifts southward from its dock outside the Four Seasons without blasting music or flashing neon lights. Cairo looks most beautiful from a felucca by night, when both its traffic and its grime disappear.
It was an early sohour last night, before 2am, from Abu Ramez El-Soury the shawarma dealer in Mohandiseen. Seeko was weighing whether he should participate in the protests planned for today, Friday. Both sides were expected to be out, though in different places. The problem, he said, was that unlike Tahrir, the area surrounding the Ikhwan sit-in at Rabaa El Adaweya (more than two weeks now) is residential. And those residents are fed up with people eating, urinating, and throwing their trash in the streets around their homes. If they get angry enough, this could be a pretext for the military to intervene and clear everyone out. If that happens, who knows what is next. For the Brotherhood, this is the final battle, he said.
I woke up early for Ramadan, around 10:30, and went for a walk around Downtown. Tahrir Square, as I could see from afar, was still closed to traffic, with tents littering the center and tanks lined up alongside the Egyptian Museum as an imposing deterrent. At the same time, though, Downtown was doing a brisk business: the traffic was impossibly dense, as usual, shops were crowded, and the beggars were out in full force. Emerging from Shorouk bookstore in Talaat Harb Square, I noticed that a giant sign had been strung between two of the graying colonial buildings: Hayzaboon Go Home, it read (Go Home, Ogress), with a picture of the U.S. ambassador, Anne Patterson. I had previously asked a friend why so much hatred is directed at her personally when, after all, she is taking direction from Washington. Although I suspect it's less complicated than this, he said that she is seen as trying to give orders to Egypt, as opposed to simply announcing US positions.
Sign in Talaat Harb telling the US Ambassador to leave
We walked from Sayyeda Zeinab to Ibn Tulun, my favorite of Cairo's mosques. Usually, it's just a few tourists there, but perhaps because of Ramadan carpets had been laid out for prayer. As we sat discussing my friends' decision to wear hijab (late and against their father's wishes until a cousin defied the family custom), a sheikh standing just a few yards away at the mihrab picked up a microphone and began the azan. These days there is no need to climb the minaret -- his voice boomed throughout the neighborhood.
With Manar at Ibn Tulun
For our final stop, we went to Masr El Qadima, the old Christian quarter. I've been many times in the past year, but this was a first for my friends who have lived their entire lives in Cairo. As we approached the Hanging Church, the bawab at the door didn't glance at me but demanded the identity cards of my scarf-wearing friends. We close at 5, he and another insisted reluctantly. You're too late. But it's only 4:30? my friend pointed out nicely. They hemmed and hawed for a while before letting us in, clearly suspicious of two Muslim girls who wanted to visit a church. It hadn't even occurred to me that this could be a problem in a country that publicly prides itself on religious coexistence.
I walked down the street behind the church to Darb 1718, the artists' space where I have attended many a gallery show and music festival. I was attending my first Egyptian yoga class, a bit late in the game. Lotus Studio occupies a rooftop above a gallery, nestled between pottery studios and glassworks. I took a mat and lay on my back, staring up at swaths of rainbow cloth criss-crossed over strips of blue sky. The sound of ommm from the instructor's CD blended with the voice of a sheikh somewhere down below. Perhaps he was warming up for sundown as he invoked the fatiha - the first verse of the Qur'an. In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, the Beneficent, the Merciful, Owner of the Day of Judgment.... And there was also the occasional drone of a jet passing overhead.
I drifted in and out of consciousness during the class, running through my memories of Cairo. I had come to clear my mind, but it rushed with the people and places I would soon be leaving. It has been a week since I bought my ticket home to America, and since then I've alternated between denial, wistfulness, and resigned confidence that the time has come. In 9 days I'll be back in the States, and in 10 I will be waking up and going to work at my new office. The last two months here, since my purpose for being in Cairo ended, have been especially strange. My friends left and I made new ones. I began a new romance. The president of the country was overthrown. Picturing the very normal kind of moments I had before the sudden political upheaval seemed almost absurd.
I remembered my visit to Port Said with my roommates in mid-June. We had gone mostly because of the city's history -- both recent and distant. It was a Friday and we'd taken an early bus from Cairo, arriving just around prayer time. So we had sat at a seafood restaurant on the beach, watching families arrive with their swimming gear and umbrellas. People seemed charmed and surprised that a few tourists had made it up to their city. Since the soccer stadium massacre in February 2012, and the ongoing civil disobedience campaign that followed, Port Said has been seen by many in Cairo as a potentially dangerous outpost. Of course, it didn't used to be that way. Rudyard Kipling once said: "If you truly wish to find someone you have known and who travels, there are two points on the globe you have to but sit and wait, sooner or later your man will come there: the docks of London and Port Said." We had taken the ferry across the Suez Canal from the Port Said side of the city to the Port Fuad side, where we wandered among the old Canal Authority buildings -- neat brick rowhouses for employees, painted in lovely pastels. I found them, like other half-kept shadows of the colonial era in Egypt, a bit eerie.
Ultras graffiti (for Port Said's Masry team)
Canal Authority houses in Port Fuad, in front of the modern flats
Then I remembered the week my friend Nav and I ironically adopted the motto YOCO - you only Cairo once. In this vein, we had taken a gay Bruneian Al Azhar student (yes, apparently these exist) and gone to the Graffiti nightclub in the Four Seasons. There were, indeed, aquariums inside, but no cover on Tuesdays. It was a strange mix of rich teenagers in Ralph Lauren and 40-year-old hotel guests nursing cocktails alone at the bar. A day or so later we had gone to the Agricultural Museum, a campus of seven or so century-old buildings laid out around a scruffy lawn. It covers topics ranging from "pharaonic agriculture" to "cotton" to "Chinese-Egyptian cooperation." This last one really threw us for a loop because it was just a collection of photographs of happy Chinese people and pieces of jade. But the main scientific museum was fascinating. Giant wooden panoramas depicted life in an Egyptian village -- in the 1950s or earlier. Statistics referred to agricultural production during the United Arab Republic, which, it should be noted, was dissolved in 1961 (though Egypt used the name for 10 more years). A yellowed placard identified a balloon-like specimen as a camel stomach, and containers of yogurt produced by the Faculty of Agriculture probably in the Nasser era looked unmoved behind glass.
Decades-old camel stomach on display at the Agricultural Museum
Beautiful display of useless information -- pests banned from Egypt in the 1960s
As the omm continued in the background, I fast-forwarded to the days just before June 30. Everything in Cairo was still in its place, people went about their daily business whether or not they planned to overthrow the government within the week. The night before the protests broke, I was on the set of the Ramadan series Al-Da'eya (The Preacher). Magdy, who was acting in it, had arranged for me and a few friends to tag along. We drove with his buddies to the outskirts of Giza, where the city ends and the villages begin. The studio, alongside one of the canals that irrigates the farms of the Delta, had erected a sha'by wedding tent (like that of my friend Sofia) -- only this one was filled with hundreds and hundreds of local extras. Styrofoam trays of fake hashish and empty Stella beer bottles were laid out before them. We were perched just outside the tent, watching the action on a monitor alongside the director. Through a crack, we could see two of the actors at a table. Eight or ten times we watched the scene repeated, the climax coming when Magdy went to the front, took the microphone, and denounced the wedding of the woman he loved to another man. However, we couldn't actually hear the dialogue: it's recorded separately, afterward. An assistant brought us mango juice, and then, when the filming was over, Magdy took us inside the tent to meet his fellow actors and a crowd of mahraganat singers in baggy jeans, baseball caps, sunglasses (one with American flag print), and lots of hair gel (remember my post about my favorite song, Haty Bosa ya Bet? This is those guys...).
On the set of Al-Da'eya, with Magdy and DJ Sadat
Bent over and grasping my knees, the yoga teacher told me my mind was wandering. I was thinking of the voice of Fairuz drowned out by the sound of jets overhead in the days after the military took over. Cairo had an emptiness then, even when people were out in the streets. It was Ramadan that changed this, and brought Cairo back to a real sense of normalcy. I ate the first night of Ramadan with Magdy's family in Maadi. His mom had prepared an Algerian specialty, sweet beef soaked in the juices of apricots, pears, and prunes.
I thought of the Muslim Brotherhood protests that had marched past my window in the last two weeks, now and again, usually not more than 75 -- but most recently as many as 300. The men marching separately from the women. I would be Skyping, or packing, and hear shouts outside. The signs are in English, as Seeko noted, things along the lines of No to the coup! He said this was because they were appealing to the outside world, not to Egyptians.
I had hosted my own eftar on Monday night. For the first time, there were only three or four Americans, and perhaps a dozen Egyptians. I had tried to make grilled fruit kebabs, with only marginal success. My Egyptian friends were horrified: You never experiment on people who are fasting! they told me.
At the end of my yoga class, I rolled up my mat and walked out into the poor neighborhood that surrounds the workshop. Skinny dogs prowl the mounds of trash that line the unpaved road. But it was dusk, and this lent the street a beauty that it rarely sees. A crescent moon had risen to its place behind the mosque across the street and people of various shapes and sizes were already seated at the long tables that wealthier people or restaurants set up outdoors during Ramadan to serve the poor. The food lay before them -- they were just awaiting the voice of the muezzin. Haram aleeky! whispered a man fixing a car, We're fasting! This is the kind of toned down verbal harassment one gets in Ramadan from men who know they should be focusing on God instead of girls.
The metro platform at Mar Girgis was nearly empty. Just the odd shuffler hurrying to food before the call to prayer. Then came the sound of the azan, and even though I wasn't fasting, a sigh of relief came over me. A train pulled up in the opposite direction - headed for Helwan. Through the windows, I saw each passenger put a plastic cup to his lips nearly in unison. They drank juice - apricot, mostly, or tamarind. As the train chugged away, a trail of plastic cups flew from the windows, floating to rest on the track.
I made my way back to Dokki for a final Yemeni dinner with my friend Chris, who is leaving for vacation in Italy. I tried to make a list of places I would miss here, and this restaurant was near the top of my list. But the night had just begun. Back in downtown, I went for the second time to a concert of the Tanbura band (see a post from February or March) -- the voice of the boisterous canal workers of Port Said. At midnight, we headed for a felucca, the sailboat kind, which drifts southward from its dock outside the Four Seasons without blasting music or flashing neon lights. Cairo looks most beautiful from a felucca by night, when both its traffic and its grime disappear.
It was an early sohour last night, before 2am, from Abu Ramez El-Soury the shawarma dealer in Mohandiseen. Seeko was weighing whether he should participate in the protests planned for today, Friday. Both sides were expected to be out, though in different places. The problem, he said, was that unlike Tahrir, the area surrounding the Ikhwan sit-in at Rabaa El Adaweya (more than two weeks now) is residential. And those residents are fed up with people eating, urinating, and throwing their trash in the streets around their homes. If they get angry enough, this could be a pretext for the military to intervene and clear everyone out. If that happens, who knows what is next. For the Brotherhood, this is the final battle, he said.
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