A Season Ends

Whenever I am in an airport, I find myself scanning the departures board and imagining that I am bound for Tripoli or Kuala Lumpur or Ouagadougou – whatever place is the most far-flung. Today, sitting in Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and counting the hours until I am back in the United States for Christmas, there is no destination that sounds more enticing than home.

I spent a week in Paris, convalescing a little and revisiting the places that meant something to me as a study abroad student my junior year of college. As I’ve written before, I had fallen into frequent comparisons between my experience living in Cairo and in Paris – however unfair or unrealistic – during my low months of September and October. It is true that I was extraordinarily happy in Paris. But this week has reminded me that a good part of that was due to the confluence of many good things at the right time: the group of friends I studied with, who are now scattered around the world, the lack of responsibilities, being a college student, etc. It will always be a wonderful place to return on vacation, but Paris is no more my home than Cairo is, and I won’t ever be able to recreate that spring, even there.

Passing through Paris did, however, bring me a sense of contentment: eating ham, seeing people read books on the metro, an abundance of small dogs – as well as the bigger things, like reuniting with my host family in their comfortingly familiar apartment. On my last night in the city, I was waiting on the platform for the 10 train to Gare d’Austerlitz. When it pulled up, the driver, who was wearing a long Santa Claus beard, waved to catch my eye. I saw then that he had posted a sign in the window that read: “Vous êtes sur la bonne voie.” A good omen, I felt.

The day I flew from Cairo to Paris, one week earlier, I awoke before sunrise to catch a taxi to the airport. It was the day of the first round vote on the new Egyptian constitution. The driver, white-bearded and wearing a gray galabeyya and cap, did not discuss it. He hoisted our suitcases onto the roof, a weight that caused the car to sputter and groan, barely lurching forward in the predawn darkness. We drove in silence across Qasr el-Nil Bridge towards Tahrir. There would be activity there later in the day because of the referendum, but we had caught the heart of Cairo at a rare moment of stillness.

At the end of that same day, I was on a rooftop on Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris just after the rain, surrounded by the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower, the Pantheon, and, in the distance, Sacre Coeur.

As soon as I was gone from Cairo, it became very difficult to keep the pulse of events there. Since late November, it had been hard to know what would happen from one day to the next even while I sat in the midst of things. A week after I left, the second round of the constitutional referendum was held and the constitution passed with more than 60 percent of the vote. Morsi then signed it into law, and new parliamentary elections will supposedly occur within two months.

The Journalists' Syndicate 

The week before I left Cairo, though, people were unsure that the vote would go off smoothly, given the increasing polarization of potential voters. One day, I went to an open press conference at the Journalists’ Syndicate downtown, “Martyrs at Etehadeyya.” The syndicate was an imposing building filled with leather sofas a few decades old and clusters of men in suits surrounded by a perpetual cloud of smoke. The hall where the press conference was being held was full, though more people seemed to be loitering outside.

The journalists’ syndicate had organized the event to call attention to criminal misdeeds on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood and its hired thugs during the clashes at the palace that followed Morsi’s constitutional declaration. Even the moderator spoke with accusatory fire about what had transpired. The first to speak was the brother of a man killed in the clashes, apparently by accident as he made his way home from work. A young woman and a man, the leader of a socialist youth group, spoke of being restrained and tortured, and an old woman in the audience interjected to corroborate their account. A prolix ex-diplomat, apparently some kind of Mubarak-era dissident, then recounted how he was arrested and beaten by semi-official gangs of thugs during the demonstrations. A panel of wounded men then took the stand. The first introduced himself as “a secularist and an infidel”, acknowledging how rare it was to hear someone admit that in public. Indeed the man beside him, when it was his turn to speak, made sure to distinguish himself as a committed and god-fearing Muslim.

When I emerged from the official event inside, I realized that the real event was happening on the steps outside. An angry crowd of a few hundred had amassed and was chanting against Morsi and the constitution. A large banner strung across the front of the syndicate read: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The journalists reject the constitutional declaration and the constitution.” I lingered for a few minutes, listening to the now familiar slogans. In the crowd I recognized an elderly dissident poet, Zein Abdeen Fouad, whom I had seen perform in June with Baheya, a group that sings the leftist revolutionary songs of Sheikh Imam. Fouad wrote songs for Sheikh Imam (now deceased) in the 1960s and 1970s, during the last serious wave of liberal political activism in Egypt. Beyond the poetic realm, it’s rare these days to see comparisons between the current revolutionary generation and the previous one. Perhaps it has simply been too long, but today’s youth rarely seem to view themselves as continuing in an older liberal or leftist tradition.

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely: Journalists reject the constitutional declaration and the constitution." A sign at the unofficial rally outside the press conference. 

We read and dissected the constitution that same week in class. It is, on the whole, quite predictable. The preamble cites the slogans of the revolution, the role of youth in leading it, and the role of the security forces in supporting it. It announces the intention to build a “modern democratic state” based on a long list of principles, including popular sovereignty, personal and national dignity, freedom of thought and opinion, equality, rule of law, national unity, security, etc. Many of the articles that follow are very specific – outlining the role of Al-Azhar, for example, or the representation of tradesmen in their unions and syndicates. The vast majority is not controversial. Two points that are, however, deal with women and religious minorities. Concerning women, Article 10 says that “the family is the basis of society, religion, values, and patriotism…” and that it is the state’s duty to protect the family, and to anchor its moral values. Although later articles guarantee the home as a private space free from government interference, many feminists and liberals in general are, not surprisingly, alarmed at the ways in which Article 10 might be interpreted by a conservative regime – that is, whether it will allow the state to establish laws limiting women’s freedom outside the home. As for religion, the constitution defines Islam as the state religion and the basis of law but guarantees Muslims, Christians, and Jews (ahl al-kitab, or, “people of the book”) the right to practice freely. Despite explicit assurances of freedom of thought, those who fall outside the three main monotheistic religions, such as the Baha’i, are not guaranteed the right to practice. This seems to have drawn less attention than Article 10 within Egypt, but is concerning to those outside.

Thanksgiving

In the last month or so before I left Egypt, I began reevaluating my personal relationship with city and the society, which I think will always be characterized by conflicting emotions. My friendships with the other Americans deepened, as did my friendships with a core group of Egyptians. The week of Thanksgiving, a friend from Princeton also came to stay with me for a week. Showing a guest around caused me to see my life in Cairo a bit like a newcomer again, or at least to feel a sense of pride in how I’ve come to know many parts of it quite well. When my friend rushed to take pictures of things like the metro station or the donkey carts, I was reminded of how the exotic has in many cases become mundane. I felt contentment and confidence in my mental map of the city, my comfort level so far from home, my understanding of how to hop microbuses or navigate the alleys around Khan El-Khalili. It gave me the chance to step back and see how I had come to belong, in some way, to my neighborhood (albeit a rather gray and nondescript one), with the toothless doorman Ibrahim who greets me every morning with the nickname asaleyya (honey-like), or “Half”, the pint-sized juice man at City Drink, or the grinning, round-faced grandmother squatted with her tissue boxes outside the bakery next door.

Thanksgiving itself was one of the loveliest days I have had in Cairo. It was a day when many of my favorite parts of two cultures came together, with good friends and good food. I spent the morning with Krisia, my college friend, at Khan El-Khalili, where she wanted to buy souvenirs for her family. Both the skies and the streets were strangely clear, both rare conditions for this overcrowded and overpolluted city. We managed to find a place in the women’s section of El Hussein mosque, which lies at the entrance to the bazaar. I vividly the remember the first (and only other) time I set foot inside El Hussein, when I was 16 and visiting the interior of a mosque for the first time. Then, I had fussily arranged the pink and lime green scarf I had bought just for this occasion, worried that a wisp of hair might escape the side and terrified of walking in front of a prostrated worshiper, which we had been warned against. Six years later, I was the guide, leading my friend through the passage from which believers can view the supposed tomb of the Prophet Muhammad’s nephew.

Winding through the Khan, we at last emerged at Moezz St., the gem of Islamic Cairo. Moezz teems with the colors and smells of modern Cairene life, which seamlessly coexists there with restored Mamluk mosques and madrasas and Ottoman fountains and merchant homes. Motorbikes whizz through the crowds that stand ogling the ancient buildings, while craftsmen nearby patter away on their brass crescents (for topping off your local mosque) or on life-sized shisha pipes. The end of Moezz leads to the mosque of Hakim bi-Amr Illah, refurbished in the 1970s entirely in gleaming white marble. It was at this unusually serene spot where we were leapt upon by a gaggle of uniformed school girls, gleeful at their discovery of the exotic species of blue-eyed and fair-skinned female. After many photos, they convinced me to give them my Facebook page, and within a few hours I had friend requests from a dozen anonymous high school girls. All used bizarre pseudonyms and posted no photos of themselves, presumably to hide their accounts from concerned parents, though effectively making them entirely anonymous. (The sociology of Facebook in Egypt deserves its own post another time.) In a city accustomed to tourists for centuries, I always find it strange when I receive this reaction. But it is not uncommon.

Thanksgiving Day marched on, and by late afternoon we were feasting on a real whole turkey (catered from our favorite Syrian restaurant Dar Gdodna) at my friend Lindsey’s apartment. I had made cranberry sauce for the occasion, having acquired cranberries through friends from the embassy’s commissary. My friends similarly strove to recreate a real American Thanksgiving, producing apple and pumpkin pies, mashed potatoes, sweet potato balls, and green beans. This was the very moment when the Mohamed Mahmoud St. protests, later to blossom into the constitutional declaration protests, were erupting anew. Against this backdrop of mounting anxiety and insecurity, we all felt especially grateful for spending the day in safety with such wonderful friends. After the meal, while most napped, Kevin and Krisia and I made our way to a balady café elsewhere in Zamalek in an attempt to teach Krisia how to properly smoke a shisha (much to the amusement of the other patrons). Then we made a spontaneous decision to catch Cairokee band’s 10^th anniversary concert at Sakiet El Sawy, the cultural center perched beneath the 15^th of May Bridge, where the Nile laps at the sides of the hall. Cairokee, which sings Western-style rock in Arabic, reached the pinnacle of fame with its revolutionary song “The Voice of Freedom” (Sout el Horeya), whose music video was filmed in Tahrir during the 18 Days. Many of the band’s songs evoke the emotions of the revolution, and singing them together seemed to infuse the crowd with nostalgia for that time – as well as perhaps anticipation for the building conflict. Singing along with songs like “Wanted: A Leader” (Matlob Zaeem) and “Stand Your Ground” (Esbat Makanak), I, too, felt like I was recapturing some of the patriotic spirit that still lingered when I visited last January.

At Sakiet El Sawy, waiting for Cairokee to come on.  

Thanksgiving ended with a return to America, figuratively speaking. Some friends hosted a college-style “Drinksgiving” party, proudly featuring red solo cups and nostalgic games like Kings and beer pong. The day reminded me that I have been happiest in Cairo when I don’t try to hard to “go native”, as some expats seek to do, or, at the other end of the spectrum, to isolate myself in an enclave of other foreigners.

When friends visit Egypt, it's time to head to the Pyramids and, naturally, rent a camel. 

Ibn Tulun mosque from above, one of Cairo's finest sights.  

Ismailia

That same week, I took a bus with several friends to Ismailia on the west bank of the Suez Canal. Though a very pleasant small city, it is not much of a tourist destination these days. Built in the 1860s by Khedive Ismail, it is one of the three great Canal cities, along with Suez to the south and Port Said to the north. Because of the canal business, it was for a long time a leafy European enclave – though it was also the city where the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928.  The center of the city was quiet, with an abundance of slightly overgrown parks that seemed out of place in Egypt. Certain blocks are still lined with neat green and white wooden-shuttered cottages that once belonged to British and French expatriates. 

We were the only visitors that day to the small, dusty museum, which was guarded by an identical trio of stout gray cats. The pharaonic statuettes and coins, the Neolithic jewelry and cabinet of garishly retouched mummy masks, bore yellowed labels typewritten in some other era. Emerging from the museum late in the afternoon, we went on foot to the Suez Canal. A colorful painted gate close to the water read: “The Suez Canal is the artery of goodness and the spring of prosperity.” A police officer stopped his car to offer his help, should we need any: it was not so busy a day in quiet Ismailia. At one point, the canal opens into Lake Timsah – a slightly swampy green landscape one rarely encounters in Egypt. Two old fishermen sat on the edge of the lake, but no fish came. At the narrower part of the canal, we stood for some time watching the car ferry cross back and forth from Sinai. A giant freighter chugged past, making the rowboats of the fisher boys casting their nets far below look like toys. Sinai, across the canal, was empty except for what appeared to be an enormous silver knife – a memorial, we discovered, to the 1973 War. On our walk back to the bus station at the end of the day, we saw something completely unlike anything we’d experienced in Cairo: scores and scores of men and women jogging along the waterfront. Tracksuits and Nikes of every color dotted the sidewalk, while more conservative women ran in loose coats and scarves. With fond feelings toward sleepy but sporty Ismailia, we returned to Cairo.

Cats reign supreme at the Ismailia Museum. 

Boys fishing on the Suez Canal.  

The artery of goodness and the spring of prosperity: Ismailia heartily welcomes us to the Suez Canal.

Academics

My fall classes were winding to a close. One weekend we were sent to the Fustat Traditional Crafts Center in the oldest part of Cairo, just outside the Coptic quarter and beside the mosque of Omar Ibn el Aas, Arab conqueror of Egypt. We found only one artisan, a friendly Ahmed, still at work, though it was only early afternoon. He walked us around the center, showing us the traditional crafts and Islamic patterns that it strives to keep alive.  There is wood furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, carved gypsum backed with colored glass to let the light shine through, quilts, brass work, and pottery. Ahmed is a potter, and so he brought us to the wheels and the kilns. I sat with him and a couple friends in the workshop where he and the other potters – mostly women – paint designs on their fired plates and vases. Most customers are foreigners, he explained; they are the ones willing to pay good money for well-made handicrafts done the traditional way. He and the other artisans search through books of Islamic art to find authentic designs. Ahmed, who is about 30, left for the day when we did, and we all rode the metro together from Mar Girgis. He explained then how he had begun college, but had visited the center, then new, with his father and decided to become a craftsman instead. His father, too, was an artist, he told us, and didn’t mind that his son had chosen such a career. His grandfather, he added, had been a secretary in the court of King Farouk. What did he do in 1952? I asked, referring to Nasser’s coup and the fall of the monarchy. Oh, it was time for him to retire, said Ahmed.

Ahmed shows us how it's done at the pottery painting workshop. 

Around the same time, I gave my final oral presentation in one of my classes on Heba Kotb, the first Islamic tele-sex therapist. Sometimes referred to as the “Dr. Ruth of the East”, she has hosted several television shows that focus on improving spousal relations and preparing clueless brides and grooms for marriage. Episodes concentrate on things like pre-wedding grooming, “women’s pleasure”, and what to do on a honeymoon. She takes questions on her website with frequent references to the proper Islamic point of view, and though women’s rights activists and liberals tend to laud her for educating a populace about topics rarely discussed in public, some of her more controversial “advice” has included offering cures for homosexuality. In a fairly typical question on her website, a man writes in panic that he’s unsure his girlfriend’s hymen is intact, as he is unsure where “this thing whose loss is the dearest of all she has” is located. In Kotb’s response, while offering some facts on the hymen and its importance, was sure to admonish the questioner for “un-Islamic intimacy” – where, after all, the third one present is Satan. He is there to sow strife and discord, and is the only one who profits in the end from such behavior. Kotb’s shows have met with great popularity, finally answering many of the questions girls (especially) are far too shy and ashamed to ask. (Still, she’s controversial, and many conservatives are very dismayed by these discussions, however much she may emphasize that she is speaking to married couples.) At the end of our class discussion on Kotb, our teacher – a fairly conservative woman in her sixties – brought up the double standard for men’s and women’s behavior before marriage. While the vast majority of parents and girls still place immense value on an intact hymen (and proof thereof), men are tacitly encouraged to have “experiences”, as they are referred to, before settling down. Mothers, said my teacher, a mother and grandmother herself, are often proud when their sons have premarital sexual relationships with girls, though those girls themselves are almost always branded as unmarriageable sluts (even by the same men). It’s worth noting that sexual mores vary somewhat across urban-rural, religious, and above all class divides, with upper classes tending, not surprisingly, to be somewhat more permissive; however, these observations are those of my urban, intellectual professor, not a country bumpkin.  

Farewell (for a while) 

The last week before I left Egypt for the holidays was filled with dinners out, potluck brunches (or, as they’re called here, “dish parties”), and frantic scurrying to buy Christmas gifts for everyone back home. CASA hosted a holiday brunch for us, on a day suddenly warm enough to walk all the way from my apartment in Dokki; the teachers sang the Arabic version of Jingle Bells by Fairuz – “Laylat Eid.” This day was emphatically an exception: yes, Egypt gets cold. It’s a cold that doesn’t last many months, but that cuts at your bones. Indoor heating is virtually unheard of (perhaps because Egyptian engineers are as much in denial about their country having a winter as we are?), so the inside is at least as cold, and usually colder, than the outside. People have coped with this by purchasing expansive fuzzy bunny suits and fleece pajama sets.

One night, Nada and Seeko took me and my roommate, Sarah, to dinner at the Shooting Club. I’ve mentioned Cairo’s social and sporting clubs, the safe havens of the moderately well connected and well-to-do on up. The Shooting Club is one of the oldest, a vast expanse of green lawns and blue pools fenced off from the general public between the urban neighborhoods of Dokki and Mohandiseen. After spaghetti and meatballs (fried chicken and spaghetti count as “club food”), we wandered over to the shooting range for which the club was named. Established by a royal decree from King Farouk in 1940, it now costs 150,000 LE to join (and there are, I have read, 60,000 members), but membership is passed down from generation to generation for a nominal yearly fee. Once you’re in, you’re in. The shooting range was dark for the night; the action had moved to the cafes, lounges, and minimall. So we combed it for brightly colored cartridges, as my friends said they had done as kids, pocketing them for souvenirs.

A day or so later, in a last-ditch attempt to find appropriate gifts, I found myself in the alleys behind Al Azhar, where butchers and bookbinders coexist in harmony.  My friend Robin and I had gone in search of the khayameyya – the tentmakers’ market. We discovered it tucked behind the crumbling edifices of Islamic Cairo, beyond a teeming slum contained just out of sight of the masses that come to bargain for belly dance costumes at Khan El Khalili. Another year, there might have been scores of tourists, of the more intrepid variety, who made it to the khayameyya. But in this post-revolutionary Egypt, we seemed to be the only ones. The craftsmen there still do their work by hand, though they’ve migrated from tents to wall tapestries, pillowcases, and tablecloths. I sat down for hibiscus tea with one vendor as he explained to me the intricacies of constructing a quality quilt, stitching designs from one piece of fabric instead of many. He was especially proud, though, that he had recently been to Michigan to exhibit his quilts (where they sold for many hundreds of dollars apiece). Though business had screeched to a halt in the Cairo market where these men have been for perhaps hundreds of years, foreign business (for those who could get there) was thriving.

After purchasing a quilt, I strolled over to El Hussein at the entrance of Khan El Khalili to wait for Nada. I sat and watched people moving through the plaza: tourists boarding their buses, salesmen of sphinx figurines hot on their trail, men with trays of bread stacked on their head, kids chasing each other. Aside from a persistent Saeedi shoeshine, the salesmen didn’t try to sell me anything this time. This was strange and inexplicable. I observed, though, as a young man cornered a group of teenage Ugandan tourists (yes, tourists from Uganda exist these days!) and begged the girls to buy his cheap silver necklaces. (They had already dismissed the pharaonic costume man.) When they demurred, he turned and noticed me smiling to myself about his pitch and struck up a conversation. Nobody’s buying these days! the salesman complained. I know, I know, there are so few tourists now, I agreed. But what am I supposed to do?! He grinned, flinging his arm up and looking scornfully at the ugly necklaces. I’m 27 years old and I can’t get a job and I can’t make any money. And still, nobody wants these. He wandered off across the square. I was facing the neon lettering of a restaurant called Abu Mazen, where I have never eaten. What struck me at that moment, though, was how identical the scene before me was to a photo I had taken six years earlier from that very spot. The plain characters of the Abu Mazen sign had caught my eye, then unaccustomed to the dots and loops of the Arabic alphabet . The man with the bread on his head became the subject of a painting I did a few months later in my high school art class. I had felt then that the square at El Hussein was the epicenter of the picturesque yet history-laden exoticism that enthralled me in Cairo. Pacing the square on the eve of my departure this time, I wasn’t sad or disappointed (as I sometimes have been when I compare my emotions toward the city then and now). But I did feel subdued as I imagined a scene more familiar from my photos than any distinct memories transposed six years into the future, and into my new Cairo.