Cairo, Page 28

  For bargoers the most immediate menace was the Muslim radicals’ intolerance of alcohol. There were whispers that terrorists planned to slip poison into the vats at the Stella Beer brewery in Giza. For a time Cairene drinkers even worried that the government would ban liquor as a sop to Islamist opinion.

  The anxiety was not unfounded. The regime seemed more concerned with survival than with any defense of secular freedoms. It was clearly prepared to go with the conservative flow, and in the process to sacrifice the occasional writer or film director or university professor, to allow their works to be banned in the name of defending the faith. What the state hoped for was to capture the middle ground by appealing to a milder, more tolerant Islam. Official visits to mosques were televised, and moderate preachers were given prime time slots even as the security offensive pushed militants to ever wilder radicalism.

  But as the years went by, police succeeded in flushing radical gangs out of Cairo’s slums (including one that had come to be known as the Islamic Republic of Imbaba). Slowly but surely the Ministry of Religious Affairs took control of the thousands of private mosques that had mushroomed throughout the city. Fears began to calm.

  The tide of violence had receded from the capital by the mid-1990s (although not from the remoter parts of Upper Egypt). It left behind a residue of bitterness and some clear marks of change. Religion had reclaimed the absolute centrality to Egyptian identity that had been challenged for a hundred years. Secularists hunkered down, hoping their version of sense would, sometime in the future, cease to be taboo. Booze and bawdiness no longer featured at wedding feasts in the popular quarters, as they always had. Most of Egypt’s provinces went dry. Cairo’s bars, however, stayed open.

  I ONCE RENTED a room on one of the lesser Greek islands. It belonged to a widow. Although born and raised in Cairo, Madame Eleni had left in the 1960s after the Egyptian colonels had nationalized her husband’s vinegar factory in Shubra. She was sad, mostly. Portraits of her husband loomed waxily above the heavy sideboard in her front room. But speak of Cairo, the Cairo of her youth, and she smiled.

  “Ah, Cairo!” The long syllable would roll out like a sigh. “The womens of Cairo is so much helegant. She is the most beautiful womens of the world. Always the clothis, the hats, the glovis she is from Paris.”

  Then she would push away her coffee cup and ask, “The womens, what she is wearing in Cairo now?”

  In the Cairo Madame Eleni left behind, quite ordinary shoppers strolled Qasr al Nil Street in bright, sleeveless frocks. Rich girls in Heliopolis flicked through Paris-Match and wondered if they could get away with this year’s even shorter hemlines. Their mothers applied lipstick and clasped pearl chokers over plunging necklines for nights at the opera or the packed monthly concerts of Umm Kulsoum, Nightingale of the Nile, Planet of the East, who strutted the Cairo stage laden with ten-kiloton diamond earrings until her retirement in 1973.

  But now, in the 1990s, Madame Eleni would be shocked. The dominant style is retro seventh century. The arbiters of fashion are stern sheikhs for whom the models of feminine virtue are the numerous purdahed wives of the Prophet. TV reruns of romances churned out by Cairo’s studios during the 1940s and ’50s, or panning shots of the audiences at Umm Kulsoum’s concerts, reveal a lost age of daring: “Shame on you,” tuts a masked lady in a sari to a line of long-legged chorus girls in one 1949 musical hit—and then she drops her disguise to reveal the leggiest legs and skimpiest two-piece of them all.

  The Cairo gossip mags of today—such as al-Nugūm and Al-Kawākib (“The Stars” and “The Planets,” respectively)—report that half the galaxy of old-time starlets have gotten religion now, repented for their sins, and journeyed to Mecca in atonement. Shams al-Barudi, who featured as a prostitute in the most sexually explicit Egyptian film ever made (The Maltese Bathhouse, released in 1973), has publicly renounced her past and donned the veil. According to persuasion, the short skirts and décolletés in old movies now provoke either nostalgia or an outrage akin to what the ancient Hebrews felt for the fleshpots of Egypt.

  What would Madame Eleni make of today’s Qasr al Nil Street, where the plaster mannequins sometimes show not even their blue dolls’ eyes? What they display is not so much fashion as Koranic exegesis. There is full defensive cladding for the seriously pious: dark, tentlike garments tipped with Minnie Mouse gloves so that not the tiniest speck of corrupting flesh is revealed. Glasses are worn over the translucent veil when necessary, and this admission of weak eyesight becomes the sole hint of the black ghost’s intimate characteristics. Milder zealots can choose bonnets and turbans and jelly-mold caps in a rainbow of hues, and half veils that expose the eyes. More common is the midlength wimple that pins, nunlike, tight around the face and covers the hair and the arms to the wrist. Then there is the simple head scarf, worn in combination with anything you like, from tracksuits to school uniforms to violet organza ball gowns.

  Most of this headgear is in nylon or polyester, which makes fortunes in the Cairo summer for sellers of heat-rash powders. But ask an armored damsel if she is hot and you get this spitting riposte: “It’s cooler than the fires of hell!”

  There are those who still boldly, and often with elegant aplomb, defy the inferno. Many such ladies can be recognized as Copts by the telltale crucifixes they wear. Some are as Muslim as anyone, but despair of the clerics ever fixing on precise sartorial standards.*5 Others don’t care if they do. But increasingly such people feel like daredevils. On the streets, those who don’t make a gesture to modesty risk stares and allusive comment. They challenge the power of conformity—a power that is peculiarly intense in an overwhelmingly poor society.

  In the cramped confines of the neighborhoods where the vast majority of Cairenes live and struggle for self-esteem, it is a given that what you may lack on the material scale can be made up for on the moral register. For many, the cheap veil solves a closetful of problems. As a public declaration of modesty it appeals to prospective mothers-in-law—arguably the most powerful force in Cairene society.*6 With privacy at a premium, the veil provides a private space of sorts. It is even a liberator, in that in-your-face piety lets women venture where they might not feel comfortable otherwise, such as onto public transportation and into jobs and politics. Indeed, apologists for the veil claim that by neutralizing femininity it neatly abrogates the whole question of gender. And it is true that only with the reintroduction of the veil have a brave few Cairene women taken to the streets as taxidrivers—who are, by the way, just as aggressive and fare-gouging as their toughest male competitors.

  The extraordinary range of female attire is a mirror to Cairo’s complexity. It reflects a compartmentalized society, a society where one person’s divine duty may be another’s perverse masochism. The fact is that for a century Cairenes have felt torn between Paris and Mecca. They have tried on many costumes, struggling to feel comfortable, seeking a middle way but seeing, in their images, extremes as saints or sinners.

  ISLAM IS AMBIVALENT about many habits, including drink. Its clerics curse the vice in varying degrees, and have done so ever since the Prophet commanded that a drunkard who was brought before him should be pummeled with shoes and sticks. But alcohol—the very word is Arabic in origin—has always been the muse of Muslim poets.

  In Cairo, drink is spiked with a tincture of sin. Local bars have the feel of speakeasies. Late every night beer-bellied shopkeepers, two-bit lawyers, pamphleteering intellectuals, and petty gangsters pack downtown dives like the Cap d’Or and the Tout Va Bien. Hawkers ply the zinc-topped tables through smoke pungent with guffaws and beer spill. By closing time Cleopatra butts and lupin shells muffle the floor tiles.

  At the Anglo-Egyptian on Sharif Street the one-eyed barman used to offer a range of sticky local potions, among them Tony Toker Red Label, Chiras Renal, and Goldon’s London Dry Din (the latter in a recycled Gordon’s Gin bottle, with a tame-looking German shepherd replacing the boar’s head on the authentic label). But these outrageous etiquettes were not t
he Anglo’s greatest attraction. Its draw was that Sabri and Shawqi, two jaded old souses with wicked tongues, held court there. This was their club. Anyone who could entertain them was welcome, and, as the gutrot brandy-and-soda lost its bubble in the late hours, anyone who could stomach their rheumy reminiscing was welcome, too.

  Sabri was paunchy, rumpled, and unshaven. Shawqi was tall and stooped, and never failed to wear neckties that gave an impression of neatness but that could have been profitably distilled into Dry Din. Both were classic public-sector types—bright boys from poor families raised to position, self-respect, and a progressive outlook by Nasser’s socialism. They had sailed the optimism of the 1950s and ’60s, then crashed into despair with Egypt’s shattering defeat in the 1967 war. Like that of countless other public servants, their prestige had dwindled ever since, and plummeted when Sadat replaced the old hierarchy of power with a new hierarchy of money—a commodity both men were far too honest and decent to acquire by the usual bureaucratic means. Now they were balding, pickled in self-pity, and shellacked with cynicism.

  By day—which meant the couple of hours he spent at his office—Shawqi was the boss of the neon-signs department at a state-owned advertising agency. (To him Tahrir Square owed such glaring delights as Vitrac Jam’s multicolored fruit display, Milkyland’s blinking cow, and Coca-Cola’s endlessly pouring and fizzing red neon soda.) By night Shawqi was a dreamy raconteur. He subsisted on a diet of bar food: turnips soaked in brine, lettuce, peanuts, and lupins. At one o’clock every morning he tottered home to the apartment he shared with his mother—except during Ramadan. Into this month of fasting Shawqi crammed an honest year’s worth of devotions; during the last week he even camped in religious retreat at his neighborhood mosque. The effort was heroic, but on the other hand—as Sabri would gleefully observe—the Anglo closed for the duration of Ramadan anyway.

  Sabri made a living as an editor at Youth and Sports magazine, an organ of the Ministry of Information’s Radio and TV Union. He was better known—though not well known—as a poet. Some nights Sabri would bring a transistor radio to the Anglo. At ten o’clock he would command silence for the poetry program. As the intro of classical lute music faded and the voice of Farid Reesha oozed onto the air—the mellifluous Reesha having oiled his way to fame by composing saccharine odes to Motherhood and Fatherland—Sabri would open his commentary with a profane broadside. “Son of a whore,” he would say with a hiss, and for the next half hour he would punctuate every one of Reesha’s pregnant pauses, every tremolo swoon and heaving emphasis, with enough vitriol to vaporize the radio.

  Sabri’s virtuoso tongue-lashings revealed generations of unnatural habits among the Reeshas. But for all his contempt Sabri was, like most of Cairo’s disgruntled intellectuals, beholden to the same state control of teaching and publishing and broadcasting that had made Reesha’s moist eyes and diction synonymous, to the mind of bourgeois Cairo, with poetry. The sad fact was that Sabri suffered a nagging fear that his own work—much influenced, he said, by Shakespeare’s sonnets—got published only because he himself was part of the publishing bureaucracy.

  While they agreed that the present was the worst of times, Sabri and Shawqi held opposite opinions on most subjects. The golden age, Sabri believed, had been the rule of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, when Egypt closed itself to the outside world and searched for its soul. For Shawqi it was the presidency of Anwar al-Sadat, when the country reopened its doors.

  Shawqi was something of an Anglophile. He fondly remembered playing soccer as a barefoot boy with British soldiers in front of their barracks by the Egyptian Museum. Whiskey, he always used to say, was the queen of drinks. It was what made the British Empire great, he would say. He would glare at me for a while, as if the exorbitant price of decent Scotch were my fault, then add, “You know how Winston Churchill beat the Germans? He drank one bottle of whiskey every night!”

  THIS REPEATED ASSERTION of Shawqi’s made another version particularly pungent when I heard it sometime later.

  Near the ruins of Fustat, in a district where cemeteries merge with tanneries and slaughterhouses, a joyous crowd gathers on Saturday nights by the shrine of the Prophet Muhammad’s great-grandson Zayn al-‘Abdin. In no time at all they transform the dirt-floored courtyard outside the tomb into an open-air dance hall. The songs that set them into swaying motion are Sufi odes—love songs in remembrance of God and His Prophet. A beaming sheikh, seated on a stage above the fray, belts the words into a microphone, backed up by the beat of a tabla and the whine of reed flutes and two-stringed fiddles. The dance is open to all, so long as the mood catches them. Each defines their own step, their own arc of swinging or twirling. A wide-eyed peasant youth thrashes his torso back and forth, miraculously never colliding with the aging spinster who wheels like a top through the throng. A policeman in white summer uniform hops up and down in a trance, his boots unlaced, grunting to the rhythm. All around, boys and old men and barefoot girls shuffle and twist.

  Last time I was there, the modest café to one side of the impromptu show was doing a raging trade. Revelers who fell out of the dance in exhaustion would revive themselves here with a hot, sweet infusion of ginger or cinnamon, then bound back into the melee for an encore. I was sitting with friends as temporary guests of a gang of boisterous neighborhood toughs. They barraged us with questions, and in good-natured mischief encouraged us to join in the dance. Had we not heard about Tahra, the American lady who danced here every week? She was highly spiritual, they nodded. Her name itself meant Purity. Perhaps, if we waited, we would have a chance to see her.

  And indeed, after some time a pale face bobbed its way in our direction. It could only be Tahra the Pure. She wore a filmy green shawl over a long black robe. She had Birkenstock sandals, bangles on her arms, and a Mexican-Bedouin headdress of beads and coins.

  “Hi, guys,” she called out, and collapsed into the chair next to mine. Her mascara was leaking.

  “Oh, Christ,” she said, clapping a hand to her beaded forehead. “I’ve got such a hangover.”

  Her name was actually Tara, and she was from Marin County, California.

  “Isn’t this great?”

  With that she leaped up and hurled herself into the dance.

  A short distance away, amid the dark courts and cenotaphs behind Zayn al-‘Abdin’s tomb, we found a large tent of canvas draped over a tall wooden frame. A gas lamp lit the interior, the rush matted floor of which was filled with cross-legged fellahin. One of them rose and beckoned us in. His eyes bulged as if he had seen an afreet.

  The Sufi disciples silently made way, shifting their weathered feet and sinewy calves, directing us to a red curtain at the back of the tent. It parted, and we were ushered through wafts of frankincense into a smaller space where a dozen black-cowled women sat in a circle around their sheikh. His beard was dyed with henna; his Rasputin eyes were rimmed with kohl. He motioned us graciously to sit on his right, and continued his labors.

  The sheikh held a small square of paper in the palm of one hand. He closed his eyes and muttered a while, then scribbled letters and forms on the paper. He folded it carefully into a tight triangle, kissed it, touched it to his forehead, and passed it to the woman nearest him. The spell disappeared into her bosom, and like a conjuror’s trick reemerged as a five-pound note. The sheikh’s client pressed this into his hand. He in turn passed it to a little blind boy I hadn’t noticed who sat just behind him.

  Tea appeared as the sheikh turned to us. He questioned gently. What was our religion? From which land had we come? Then he spoke for us, and everyone listened.

  “There was a great fighter before you were born, and he was the rayyis of the Inglīz. This man was not a believer, but he was a wise man and a strong man. The Inglīz in his times were fighting a war with the Almān, whose rayyis was Hitler. It was a very long war, which cost many lives. It was such a big war that they called it the World War. The rayyis of the Inglīz—his name was Winston Churchill—won the big war. And aft
er he won he wrote a book. And in this book, he told of his secret power. And his secret power was this: every night before sleeping, Churchill would read one chapter from the Koran!”

  It is not the Cairene way to challenge such beliefs, even if you know them to be untrue. And so I let it pass.

  * * *

  *1 Strictly speaking, Muslims should pronounce this formula of praise after any mention of Muhammad. It is so common that for convenience Arabic keyboards shrink both this phrase and the word “Allah” to single keys.

  *2 Sadly, the vast majority of Egyptian women still submit to the ancient practice. Religious reactionaries—including His Eminence Sheikh Gadd al-Haqq, rector of al-Azhar until his death in 1996—continue to support it.

  *3 The mawlid of ibn al-Farid faded out in the 1960s, only to be revived in the 1980s.

  *4 The original Opera House, built for the opening of the Suez Canal, burned down in 1970, just before a scheduled inventory-taking. The multistory parking garage erected on its site reflected sadly on the priorities of the 1980s.

  *5 While the ‘ulema concur that Islam requires modesty of dress, the question of degree remains open to interpretation. Reformers say the Koranic verses in this regard refer only to the Prophet’s own wives, and insist, moreover, that the seventh-century terminology of female coverings cannot be presumed to have twentieth-century equivalents. Some Islamists suggest that men, too, should be forced to dress with prescribed modesty.