*6 According to a 1995 survey, 72 percent of marriages in Cairo were arranged by families; 40 percent of married women had never been alone with their husbands before their wedding day; 12 percent were married to maternal cousins.
Chapter Ten
HIGH LIFE, LOW LIFE
Delhi is a great place—most bazaar storytellers in India make their villain hail from there; but when the agony and intrigue are piled highest and the tale halts till the very last breathless sprinkle of cowries has ceased to fall on his mat, why then, with wagging head and hooked forefinger, the storyteller goes on: “But there was a man from Cairo, an Egyptian of the Egyptians, who”—and all the crowd knows that a bit of real metropolitan devilry is coming.
—Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Travel, 1908
ONLY ONE CAIRO institution is more common than the mosque: the qahwa or coffeehouse. Statistics are less accurate now than when Napoleon’s army counted 1,350 coffeehouses in the City of a Thousand Minarets, but the ratio of 200 citizens per café has not declined much. By this reckoning the cafés of modern Cairo must number well over 30,000—surely no exaggeration if you take into account the range in scale and grandeur of the city’s qahwas, from cavernous rooms and terraced casinos by the river to makeshift teastalls in the City of the Dead, and if you consider that most men will spend some time in one every day, and probably have to look no further than the nearest street corner to find it.*1 These all-male preserves are Cairo’s main resorts of business and pleasure. They combine what in Western cities would be the functions of park benches, newsstands, shoeshine parlors, local bars, Masonic lodges, and company cafeterias.
As befits a great market city, a place of highly specialized trades, every Cairene qahwa fills a particular niche. At the Deaf and Dumb Café off Tawfiqiyya Square silence reigns, because this is where the city’s hearing-impaired meet to trade jokes in rapid-fire sign language. When movie producers need stuntmen and beefy extras—what the French call comparses—they head straight for the rowdy Qahwat al-Kumbars on Alfi Street. The numerous sidewalk cafés of Muhammad Ali Street serve as agencies for nightclub musicians and belly dancers. The Zahrat al-Bustan Café thinks itself highly intellectual, while Qahwat al Shisha in Bab al Luq attracts connoisseurs of the water pipe. Others offer the finest of hot infusions and cold drinks: hibiscus, ginger, fenugreek, and cinnamon teas in winter; tamarind, almond, and lemon juices in summer.
The peculiarity of the Café of the Sick is harder to discern. Its tall, low-silled windows overlook a narrow, village-scale street near the ‘Ayn Shams University Faculty of Medicine. A few customers sit alone indoors at its dozen rickety tables, caressing their water pipes to a rhythmic purr. But most prefer company to solitude. They huddle in groups to talk politics, clatter dice across boards, or slap down cards in mock aggression. The single waiter bustles like a bumblebee, joking and hollering orders to the back of the room, where the tea boy rinses glasses, stokes charcoal for water pipes, and, when free, stares at a TV set perched high in the corner.
It is the picture of a typical Cairo café. Yet something is wrong. Definitely wrong. To start with, important pieces are missing: here a customer’s limb, there an ear or an eye. Then, odd additions have accumulated, too. Protuberances bulge under robes. A turban becomes, on closer inspection, a disturbingly bulbous bandage.
The mood is relaxed in the Café of the Sick, but there is an alertness to the way chairs are angled, to the way eyes sweep the doorway. These are professional, appraising glances. If the newcomer happens to be an unknown sick person, or one whose ailment duplicates a regular’s, the looks will tell him this turf is claimed. When the man in the doorway wears a white coat, though, all heads swivel and the card games stop, just as if the intruder packed silver spurs and a six-shooter.
“Good morning, Doctor,” shouts a man wheeling forward on a hand-cycle. “God preserve you.”
The white-coated man is not a doctor. He is a lowly orderly from the nearby university hospital. No matter. He ignores the flattery, pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket, and reads in a commanding voice.
“One goiter. One chronic bilharzia. Two dermoid cysts. One right-sided heart failure.”
He stops, scans the room, and addresses the handcyclist, who appears to have some kind of authority here.
“Where’s Omar the Liver?”
“He’s at Dr. Hassaballah’s lesson, ya bey. But he’ll be free at four o’clock.”
“Good. Send him around then.”
Meanwhile, several of the customers have left their chairs. With the amiable weariness of men going to work, they follow the orderly down the street and into an apartment building. There, in some small room rented by a doctor for this purpose, students will examine and question the patients.
The university up the road is ostensibly free, but it is so crowded and ill-equipped that aspiring medics gladly pay handsome fees for such hands-on practice. Their professor pays his “patients” in turn, and this is how the mildly but chronically damaged of the Café of the Sick make their daily bread. It is not a bad living, either, especially for those stars who boast multiple afflictions. (A friend relates that, during examination of a cyst on one old pro’s knee, a student inquired about a peculiar lump on his temple. “Sorry,” said the patient unflappably. “That’s off duty today.”) Other lucky souls present with rare and classic symptoms. Such is the case with Omar the Liver. His perfectly enlarged hepatic organ, waxy pallor, and emaciation make him so ideal a case of advanced bilharzia that instructors find him indispensable. Since the disease is endemic to the Egyptian countryside, his services are in constant demand.
The professionally sick have the pride of professionals. They often learn their specialties better than the students. Even those who cannot read or write their own language can reel off chapterfuls of technical terms in English (which remains, controversially, the language of medical instruction in Egypt). This skill proves its worth at clinical-exam time, when students must diagnose diseases according to the symptoms they find. Unfortunates who fail to slip their test cases a five-pound note bomb the exams. Sound tipping, however, guarantees faultless diagnosis.
“Ask me if I drink a lot of liquids,” the patient might whisper while the proctors are not looking. “It’s typical of diabetes insipidus.”
ON THE SURFACE, Cairo’s ways of coping seem hopelessly tangled and sclerotic. They can be maddening. They can even be cruel to those not armed with money or influence or a sense of humor. By and large, though, the city’s mechanisms work. They employ the unemployable. They feed the hungry: many in Cairo are malnourished, but no one starves. Many are badly housed, but fewer are homeless than in most great Western capitals. Helped by the warm climate, by the handiness of washrooms in mosques, and by the Muslim stigma against alcohol, Cairo’s indigent rarely present a sad spectacle.
In richer cities formal structures, rules, and regulations channel a smooth flow of things. In Cairo informal structures predominate. It is these that fill the yawning gap between claims and facts; between, for instance, the nominal promise of free education right through medical school and the fact that without costly private lessons there is no hope of passing exams; or between the rule that drivers must pass a test before getting a license and the reality that a modest bribe will do instead. In this gap there is enormous room for diddling, for finesse—in short, for enterprise. And foolish people who try to do things by the book, or imagine they can streamline the system, do so at their peril.
Garbage provides an instructive example. Visitors often wonder why Cairo is so dirty. Some say the length of Egypt’s history has so wearied its people that they don’t see the point in removing detritus when it will only reappear. Others say the experience of the Nile flood, which conveniently used to flush the country c
lean once a year, remains deeply ingrained—despite the fact that the High Dam, completed in 1971, stopped it a generation ago. For whatever reason, public cleanliness has not improved much since the citizens of Memphis discarded papyri and broken pots in their streets. (The pharaohs themselves were blasé about trash: excavations at Tel al-Amarna, an Eighteenth Dynasty capital 200 miles upstream from Cairo, show that royal cooks dumped their dross right on the doorstep of the palace kitchens.)
Despite recent government efforts—such as a poster campaign preaching that “Cleanliness Is a Part of Faith”—the Egyptian capital remains gloriously grubby. Its trash-collection system is a scandal—if, that is, getting the stuff out of sight and mind is assumed to be its goal. Change the objective, however, and it becomes a model of efficiency. Cairo’s waste-disposal industry converts most garbage into usable goods, while employing more people productively than that of any other major city.
Most of this is achieved without fanfare by a highly organized network of private collectors who trundle about in donkey carts and haul their loads back to the ragpickers’ colonies ringing the city. The zabbālīn, as these people are called, may leave behind a lot.*2 Their children may spend more time sorting rubbish than at school. The zabbālīn may live surrounded by trash and be shunned because they smell bad, but they have self-respect and job security for generation on generation. They even earn a decent income. And they form a vital link in the city’s economy, supplying thousands of little workshops with recycled raw materials for everything from plastic flip-flops to car parts to television antennae. Discarded clothes turn into multicolored rag rugs. Biodegradable stuff feeds flocks of chickens and ducks and herds of goats and sheep. Even pigs grow fat on Cairo’s waste—since most of this industry happens to be run by Coptic Christians—and produce very tasty pork indeed.
There was a moment when some minister decided that the zabbālīn were an eyesore. He persuaded the American government to fund a project that would put them out of business. Uncle Sam flew in teams of high-paid experts who devised a new system. Large bins were to be placed on street corners. Giant Mack trucks would patrol. Their pneumatic arms would snatch up the bins and shake their contents into the trucks, which would then drive the waste into the desert and out of sight. This was the civilized way of doing things.
Cairo trashed the plan in no time flat. To begin with, its garbage was not like the fluffy, styrofoam American kind. It was rich and wet and heavy; and so, one by one, as the bins soared up and tipped their loads, the axles of the costly imported trucks snapped beneath them. The trucks themselves became trash, and their charred skeletons now littered the spontaneously combusting dumps. The bins, too, were badly designed. Their wheels were too small to roll over Cairo’s rough streets. The garbage men couldn’t manipulate them into reach of the trucks, so the bins overspilled and rusted on corners. They became scrabbling grounds for alley cats. In the end, when these receptacles grew so noxious as to be mish ma‘qūl, teenage ragpickers came with palm-fiber baskets and cleaned them out.
THE SIGHT OF a grubby little girl heaving a basket of refuse between honking Mercedes fails to shock Cairenes. This is not to say the city’s people are heartless. Far from it. Spontaneous generosity is not the exception here, but the rule. The Ramadan charity campaign of one children’s hospital regularly raises a million Egyptian pounds a day. And on a city bus I once witnessed a bidding frenzy erupt after a lady found she had left her purse behind. “But how will you get home?” asked a woman carrying a tray of eggs. “What will you do if you get hungry?” asked a gentleman as he fished deep into his galabiyya for his wallet. The lady tried to explain that it was all right, she was just going to meet her husband, but the passengers would not hear of it. Half a dozen hands pressed varying sums of money on her so insistently that she backed off the bus in embarrassment some way short of her destination. But then a young man ran after her, slipped money in her bag, and skittered away before she could thank him.
No, Cairenes are far from unkind. Yet daily experience, backed up by history, has taught them that life is not generally very fair. There has always been a sharp divide between rich and poor here. Money has always swayed justice. People with power have always abused it.
Reliefs in a tomb chapel at Saqqara, for instance, record a case of legal knavery from 1300 B.C. that could have come straight from yesterday’s proceedings at the South Cairo District Court. The scene depicts Mose, a treasury scribe at the Temple of Ptah, standing triumphant before the judges of Memphis. He has won the last of five court cases, ending years of bitter litigation over title to an estate south of the city. A generation before, the hieroglyphic text explains, Mose’s conniving cousin Khay had swindled the land from Mose’s mother by bribing an official at the Heliopolis records office to forge the deeds in his name. Mose must have considered his success rare indeed, or he would not have made it the high point of his tomb.
Legal devilry persisted in medieval times. The annals abound with tales of corrupt judges and paid witnesses, and of rulers who simply bypassed the sharia courts to dole out punishment by whim. In the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun was repeatedly forced from his judgeship for trying to limit the pervasive influence of professional witnesses. “He ignored the requests of high officials and refused to hear the appeals of the rich,” wrote the historian Ibn Taghribirdi, “so they began to speak against him until the sultan dismissed him.”
Justice could be swift and pitiless. Thieves were hanged. Rebels were beheaded or flayed alive. Murderers were sliced in two at the waist—after which procedure, according to Leo Africanus, the victim’s top half could survive for as long as twenty minutes, still talking. Baybars al-Jashankir, a short-lived Mameluke sultan,*3 had 300 tongues cut out after hearing a popular rhyme making fun of his name. The pious fourteenth-century amir Shaykhun, who endowed Cairo with the lavish mosque and dervish hostel that face each other on Saliba Street, also introduced a novel torture. He had henchmen bore holes in one rival’s shaved head. Cockroaches were inserted in the holes. A brass cap was applied and slowly heated so the insects would eat their way into the man’s brain.
Perhaps that victim was guilty. Such was not always the case. Passing through Cairo in 1435, the Spanish traveler Pero Tafur was perplexed to see three merchants executed at Bab Zuwayla for the “crime” of failing to prevent their neighbor, a money changer, from being robbed. “There are very many of us, and God increases our number daily,” Tafur’s translator explained. “If we did not punish both the criminal and the spectator, we could not live.”
Noting that Cairo’s main courthouse was always jammed with litigators in 1840, Sir Gardner Wilkinson commented that nowhere was justice so far from the reach of a poor man as in Egypt. His description of court officials remains apt:
The most efficient recipe for stimulating the torpid clerks is bribery….So impatient are they of neglect in this particular that the moment they think some attention to court etiquette ought to be paid, they put forth every difficulty as a delicate hint. Whenever the simpleminded applicant, trusting to the evident justice of his cause, appears before them, they are far too occupied with other papers of long standing to attend to him: a particular person, whose attendance is absolutely required, is not to be found, or some official excuse is invented to check the arrangements of the business, and he is put off from day to day….On the appearance of these marked symptoms, a sweetener should, in doctorial language, be immediately exhibited in a sufficiently large dose to allay the symptoms; and it is surprising to observe how the gladdened face of the man-of-law expands on taking the welcome potion.
When the Post Office introduced a savings bank, observed the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie a century ago, Egyptians reacted with astonishment. Who would be so foolish as to entrust their money to the government?
Today’s Cairo is, in theory at least, fully fitted with modern systems of law, finance, and administration. Government is big here—unnaturally, inflatedly so. The range of ministr
ies, agencies, authorities, councils, and higher councils is so complex that no one really knows where their purviews begin or end. Layers of national government overlap provincial and municipal and local authorities. A bewildering array of security forces keeps public order: traffic police, emergency police, transport police, antiquities police, tourist police, morals police, secret police, and the even more secret State Security Investigation Department. Police districts dovetail into parliamentary districts that imbricate with tax districts and school districts and forbidden military zones. The city as a whole spreads across three governorates, each with its own presidentially appointed governor. There is no elected mayor of Greater Cairo; instead, the governor of Giza manages the third of the city that lies on the west bank of the Nile, Cairo Governorate oversees most of the city proper, but many of the rapidly growing northern suburbs fall within Qalyubiyya Governorate.
Not surprisingly, given this muddle, workmen digging the first line of the Cairo Metro in the 1980s kept stumbling on water mains and electric cables that motley authorities had laid without regard to anyone else’s plans. Tangled administration is also a chief reason for the decay of Cairo’s historic core. The varied agencies in charge of building codes (the Municipality), water (the state-owned Cairo Water Company), sewage (the Ministry of Housing), traffic (the Ministry of the Interior), and the maintenance of ancient monuments (the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Religious Affairs) rarely cooperate. “Every minister has a finger in this city,” complains Milad Hanna, a former chairman of the Housing Committee in Egypt’s parliament. “They build what they like. There is no overall plan.” The city is fated to be mismanaged, he believes, until such time as it can elect the people who run it. That has never happened in the city’s history. It is unlikely to happen soon: given the importance of the capital, an elected mayor of Greater Cairo would inevitably challenge the power of whoever ruled Egypt.