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 10th anniversary
concert at Sakiet El Sawy, the cultural center perched beneath the 15th
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.
