Three months later Sadat was shot down by his own soldiers at 6 October victory celebrations. As it transpired, several of those in the assassination plot had family or friends whose homes had been destroyed by the rayyis’s urban renewal plans. Others had been radicalized by the very Islamic groups that Sadat promoted as a foil against the leftists he mistakenly saw as a greater threat. Sadat himself had released his killers’ guiding ideologues from Nasser’s prisons, yet these people were not thankful. Years of torture and privation had embittered them. They preached that Egypt’s rulers, and indeed society as a whole, had betrayed Islam. It was the true Muslim’s duty to set things straight, they said. And if not by words, then by the sword.
* * *
*1 Bahieddin Pasha Barakat’s villa by the Nile in Giza was torn down, like so much of genteel Cairo, in the late 1980s to make way for a luxury high-rise.
*2 Nearly all the key leaders of Egypt’s Communist movement were Jewish. Several converted to Islam in the late 1940s, to quash charges of communism being a Zionist conspiracy.
*3 Founded in 1945, the Arab League embodied hopes for Arab unity. It has never lived up to them.
*4 In the 1960s the annual maintenance budget for all the 600-odd registered medieval monuments in the city was £600.
*5 In his memoirs, former agent Miles Copeland revealed it was CIA money that funded the tower. Nasser had diverted a $3 million cash bribe to this frivolous purpose as a slap in the face to Yankee meddling.
*6 Nasser’s resignation speech did not in fact reveal the full scale of Egypt’s losses in the Six-Day War. This dawned only later.
*7 Nasser’s mistakes were multiple. In response to other Arab leaders’ taunts that he was a coward, he had dismissed U.N. peacekeeping and blocked Israel-bound shipping. He had believed his generals when they assured him that his forces were fully prepared to withstand any Israeli military response. He had expected Israel to believe him when he said he had no intention of attacking it. And he had allowed his people to be grossly misled about what was happening.
*8 Some 18,000 suspected Muslim Brothers were imprisoned in 1965 alone.
Chapter Nine
The most advanced countries of the world have subjected their systems to practical experiments. After many trials they progress, and the more they progress, the closer they come to Islam.
—Sheikh Muhammad Mitwalli Shaarawi, in Al-Raai al-Aam newspaper, July 1, 1994
All earthly matters must be judged in respect of the interests of the afterworld.
—Ibn Khaldun on the Muslim theory of governance, Prolegomena, c. 1380
IT IS CLOSE by at first, starting with the intimate pock of a microphone and a discreet cough or two. Somewhere in the sleeping city an answering cough stutters. And now, as the local muezzin shuts his eyes and cups a hand by his ear, that first sound takes sudden shape as syllables and words rising strong and clear. An echo follows from far off. Then another in the middle distance, quickly joined by a third, and then more and more and more voices until a mighty chorus is soaring in rounds, relaying the call to prayer clear across the valley from east to west with such amplified force that God would not need to be All-Hearing to hear it. An electric cloud of sound accumulates and holds, suspended over the city for a full minute by the loudspeakers of some 15,000 mosques, before dissolving piecemeal into the twitter of the waking birds.
In this age of fluorescent light and twenty-four-hour TV, many Cairenes stay up too late at night to heed the muezzin’s advice that prayer at dawn is better than sleep. Yet nearly all those late risers will find some way to appease God for ignoring the dawn call. They may add an extra prostration to one of the four remaining prayers that day, say, or pass alms to a beggar, or perform some other small act of piety.
The Egyptians, said Herodotus, were “religious to excess, beyond any other nation in the world.” The focus of Memphis was the Temple of Ptah, not some Roman-style forum or senate. Not only was there no separation of religion and state, the pharaoh himself was man’s direct link with the gods.
Beliefs may have changed since Herodotus visited Memphis, but religion still permeates the life of Cairo as it does that of few other great cities. At the grand scale there are the 100,000-strong congregations that pray in public squares every year to mark the end of Ramadan. They, like the vast majority of Egyptians, will have fasted by day for the full lunar month. The common effort of devotion will have turned the rhythm of the city almost upside down, with shops and businesses staying open into the small hours and daytime work dragging almost to a halt, and with an expectant hush falling over the valley at dusk until the precise moment when a cannon shot from the Citadel declares the day is done and the feasting begins.
Each Friday at noon, most Muslim men will endure considerable discomfort, packed cross-legged on the mats that spill outside mosques, blocking streets and sidewalks, to absorb the sermon that follows the weekly congregational prayer. All year long, Radio Cairo’s Voice of the Noble Koran will bring the word of God to housewives peeling potatoes and truckers hauling them alike: it is the most popular station here, just as the books of TV preachers such as Sheikh Muhammad Mitwalli Shaarawi outsell most other literature.
At a narrowcast level, fathers will whisper the Fātiḥa—the opening verse of the Koran—into the ears of the newly born. Children will compensate for naughtiness by scribbling graffiti that says, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet.” Clerks and students and even police officers filing reports will inscribe “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate” at the top of every foolscap page. They will do so simply because the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be blessings and peace,*1 is recorded as saying that no task should be begun without mentioning the name of the deity.
And say not of anything: Lo! I shall do that tomorrow,
Except if Allah will.
Similarly, everyday questions such as how to keep clean, what to wear, or whether to divorce one’s spouse will find their answer in scripture. Even unconscious habits are often rooted in the Sunna—the exemplary actions of the Prophet as recorded by his Companions. If the city boasts a surprising number of endearing stray cats, it is largely because people feed them out of respect for the Prophet, who is said to have cut a piece from his cloak so as not to disturb a cat sleeping in his lap. Dogs, meanwhile, are shunned as pets because Muhammad scorned keeping them for any purpose but guarding or hunting.
Overt piety is nearly universal. Not just Muslims but also the million Coptic Christians of Cairo are fervent believers by and large. Not content that their religion is stamped on their identity cards—and is also usually evident from their biblical names—many Copts tattoo crosses on their wrists as a brand of faith. Not just monks and sundry ascetics but also many dutiful laypeople fast for nearly half the year. They shun animal products throughout Lent, of course, but also on Wednesdays and Fridays and for forty-three days before Christmas, for fifteen days before Ascension Day, and so on in a complex calendar of devotion. Icons of saints and of Pope Shenouda III, the 117th patriarch of the Coptic Church, are ubiquitous in Christian homes. Services in the city’s 500 churches are usually packed—even those in the 10,000-capacity Cathedral of St. Simeon, a cavernous amphitheater blasted out of the Muqattam cliffs during the 1990s. On Thursday nights a vast throng, bused in from across the city, gathers here to belt out hymns to the accompaniment of synthesizers, electric guitars, and a light show that projects the image of the crucified Savior onto a giant screen.
The institutions of both faiths work hard to maintain their place. Nearly every Coptic church holds Bible lessons. Al-Azhar runs an entire education system in p
arallel to the state’s, including hundreds of primary and secondary schools across the country. Its Islamic university has expanded far beyond the confines of the tenth-century mosque at its heart, branching from its academic roots in theology, grammar, rhetoric, and Islamic law into modern disciplines such as science and medicine. With 160,000 students in all—including 12,000 from abroad—it is Egypt’s largest university. In state schools religious studies are compulsory. State television broadcasts 46 hours a week of Islamic programming (but a mere two papal speeches a year—at Christmas and Easter—which is a sore point for Copts). A third of Cairo’s 3,000 private charities are religious in nature. The richest literary prizes in Egypt are given not for works of fiction but to winners of an annual contest for memorizing and reciting the Koran sponsored by the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
Foreign laws and fashions have made inroads in the past two centuries, yet traditional religion is still the window through which most Cairenes view the world. The populist brand of socialism pursued under President Nasser never challenged the tenets of faith—so long as faith did not interfere with the regime’s political control. Cairo’s secular universities did produce large numbers of left-leaning intellectuals from the 1950s to the 1970s, but their ideas rarely penetrated beyond a small circle. This mild secularizing trend lost credit along with the rest of the Nasserist project, and then was further diluted from the late 1970s onward as crowding began to transform universities into diploma factories rather than places of learning.
As a result, religious discourse remains so dominant that few Cairenes question the teachings of Scripture. Such things as the theory of evolution are generally dismissed as absurd: that history begins with Adam and Eve is not a matter for argument. Cairenes are quick to frown on unorthodox religious practics, too. But even sophisticates resort to seers and healers and other holy men. Belief in miracles and heavenly signs runs deep.
For instance, in April 1968—ten months after the disastrous Six-Day War—a Muslim bus driver walking home late one night in the suburb of Zaytun, close to ancient Helipolis, spotted what he thought was a woman about to throw herself off the roof of a church. He ran to wake up the priest, but when the two men rushed back outside and looked up, they understood that the ghostly female form they were seeing was not a suicide but an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin of Zaytun became the talk of Cairo. Night after night that spring, so many miracle-seekers thronged the square in front of the church that the government was obliged to rent out chairs. It was only two months later, after fifteen people were killed in a stampede when a similar reported sighting at the Church of the Archangel Michael in Shubra brought 10,000 Cairenes rushing to witness the Virgin, that the fervor began to wane.
ISLAM IS A legalistic faith. Its messenger may not be deified like the Christian Messiah (whom Muslims also revere as a prophet); but Muhammad is a lawgiver as well as a teacher. His revelation assumes added force from the fact that the Koran is taken to be the literal word of God as spoken in Arabic. This makes the tone of Scripture imperative, not allegorical. When a mosque preacher cites the Koran he prefaces the quote with the phrase “And God, may He be exalted and praised, said…”
The time before Islam is known to Muslims as the Age of Ignorance, in that man was ignorant of the commands of God. There is no longer any such excuse for such ignorance, nor has there been since Muhammad’s revelation closed 1,400 years ago. To obey God is both a duty and a precaution against punishment in the hereafter. Given the level of detail in the divine instructions, it is not surprising that Cairo, the Muslim city par excellence, should bear their imprint in every walk of life.
If medieval Cairo lacked a single great congregational mosque such as every Muslim town of importance had, it was only because the city’s size meant no mosque could possibly contain enough people. Instead, each neighborhood had its own house of worship. The interiors of these mosques—quiet, cool, and clean, with their precise ordering of space and geometric channeling of the imagination—exalted religion by counterpointing the random, wanton nature of the street outside. They suggested a realm of perfection, an ordained perfection attainable by correct guidance, by obedience, and by common effort. Beyond their walls the rituals of devotion, the formulas of speech, and the knowledge that the law of the land derived from the word of God Himself secured a comforting reassurance that if all was not well in this world, it would be so in the next.
The fact that Islam posits a single, divine source for laws has tended to embed opposition to change (which is why authorities have often expressed change in terms of a return to a purer, more authentic interpretation of God’s will). Yet Islam has adapted to changing times. Tobacco, for example, was scorned by clerics when it arrived in Cairo 300 years ago. The vice soon grew too popular to resist—at least until 1997, when the grand mufti, who is chief religious adviser to the Egyptian judiciary, again ruled smoking sinful, on the grounds that a Muslim should not knowingly harm himself. The ‘ulema of sixteenth-century Cairo also declared coffee unlawful. Sufi devotees, however, praised its use for prolonging their séances. Merchants found it so lucrative a commodity that Cairo became the major entrepôt of the international coffee trade. In the face of such pressures, pious opposition dissolved. Similarly, many clerics resisted the abolition of slavery in the 1870s by refusing to marry freed slaves without the written permission of their former masters. Yet by the turn of the century only the very grandest houses still kept their aging African eunuchs as status symbols.
Schisms have developed in recent years over such diverse issues as contraception, the practice of female circumcision, and the propriety of banking interest. In nearly every case, practical considerations have triumphed over rigid tradition. Recognizing the danger of unchecked population growth, al-Azhar sanctioned birth control in the 1940s. In the 1990s the grand mufti reiterated the ruling that fixed interest rates were not equivalent to usury, thereby silencing conservatives who claimed that modern banks infringed Islamic law. As for the cruel custom of female genital mutilation, the mufti declared it was a mere folk tradition without a firm textual basis in Islam.*2
Because God’s commands are held to be unassailable, those who profess to interpret His words exercise tremendous power. Governments have always sought to control this power. Dissidents have always contested their claim. But by hook or by crook—by threatening or pampering the religious Establishment—temporal rulers have usually managed to make spiritual leaders toe the line.
Like today’s governments, Cairo’s medieval sultans mostly achieved their ends through control of appointments to lucrative posts such as judgeships and the bursaries of prestigious endowments. Occasionally they resorted to subtler means. For instance, in 1469 a controversy broke out over whether the popular Sufi poet Omar ibn al-Farid (1181–1235) merited veneration as a wāli. Most clerics believed he did not. Ibn Khaldun himself issued a fatwa—a scholarly judgment—condemning the poet’s verses as “monist” and calling for their destruction. The keeper of ibn al-Farid’s rich waqf, however, happened to be a friend of Sultan al-Ashraf Qayt-bay. To settle the matter, the sultan wrote to a respected sheikh asking for his opinion. In requesting a fatwa Qayt-bay cast himself as a humble supplicant, but his note was couched in terms that made it bluntly clear what the sultan wanted: “What do you say about those who claim that our lord and master, the sheikh, the gnostic of God, Omar ibn al-Farid, may God protect him with His mercy, is an infidel?” The veiled threat worked. Two hundred years on, the Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi could claim that some 200,000 people celebrated ibn al-Farid’s annual mawlid at the foot of the Muqattam cliffs.*3
Even Napoleon, the first non-Muslim to rule in Egypt after the coming of Islam, tried to make allies of Cairo’s clerics. “Oh ye ‘ulema, sharifs and imams,” read one of his proclamations, “tell your folk that he who stands against me acts in error, for verily he will find no refuge. Nor will he escape the Hand of God, for he stands in opposition to the destiny decreed by God, may He
be exalted and praised. The man of sense knows that our deeds are His will….”
Napoleon’s ploy failed. It was the clerics of al-Azhar who led the Cairo uprisings against him. Yet his instincts were right. Throughout Cairo’s history, religion had been a channel of communication between rulers and the ruled. It had been the frame for both consent and dissent. The men of the sword in the Citadel knew that to lose favor with the men of the pen down below was to risk inciting the mob.
BY THE LATE 1980s Cairo had bulged into a megacity, complete with smog and skyscrapers nudging nearly to the paws of the Sphinx. Public services had come under immense strain. Municipal water pressure had dropped to the point where every building had to install its own pump. A hundred separate neighborhoods lacked sewage altogether. A million cars clogged the streets. Pundits predicted a crisis, an explosion of popular anger.
But the rayyis who was now in charge was a man of good sense. At the fateful reviewing stand where his predecessor was assassinated on October 6, 1981, Hosni Mubarak had ducked out of harm’s way when the killers opened fire. The new president was a stolid manager, not a visionary. He made few false promises. He shunned grandiose projects and focused instead on fixing Cairo’s shoddy infrastructure. Traffic and sewage soon flowed more efficiently along new conduits and bypasses, as did gossip down the rewired telephone circuits. A tree-planting campaign reversed two decades of urban desertification. Even the riot-provoking problem of bread subsidies was solved: the government played the old candy bar trick and simply reduced the size of loaves. Massive doses of foreign aid—a reward for Egypt’s regional peacemaking—spruced up the city’s main arteries. France built a Metro line. Japan donated a grand opera house to replace the old one.*4 China contributed a world-class conference center. While less than half of Cairene households had running water at the beginning of the 1980s, at the end of the decade three-quarters were linked to water mains. The proportion connected to the official electricity grid rose from one-third to 84 percent.