Cairo, Page 30

  At the national level everything centers on Cairo. If a farmer in Zifta wants to increase his share of irrigation water, the chances are he must apply to the Ministry of Irrigation in Cairo. If a flat-footed conscript from Kom Ombo wants exemption from the army, he must go to the draft office in Cairo. If a mailman’s widow in Wasta has a pension claim, it is to Cairo that she must travel. At some time in their lives, nearly every able-bodied Egyptian will shuttlecock through the Cairene bureaucracy’s maze of dimly lit corridors and dusty offices; will duel with its yawning, grasping officials; will accumulate sheaves of grudgingly stamped documents and consider themselves lucky to escape with their dignity and sanity intact.

  It is an ancient ritual, as a scrap of papyrus found on the floor of a temple at Saqqara proves. In this Sixth Dynasty document, the foreman of a quarry across the river from Memphis complains that he and his crew were summoned to the city to receive their wages, and were then left to wait while the official in charge dithered for six days.

  The accumulation of such trials endows Cairenes with a wariness toward institutions that is hard to shake. It is one reason why million-dollar transactions are, by preference, still made in sackfuls of cash. It explains why redress for wrongs continues often to be exacted in kind: the overburdened courts are so clogged with litigation as to make their justice painfully slow.*4 Mistrust generates an immense feeder industry. Informal fixers and expediters specialize in piloting clients through the bureaucracy’s prickly shoals. Public scribes, sellers of fiscal stamps and forms, photographers and photocopiers crowd the streets around government offices like money changers on the steps of the Temple.

  Perhaps because they are allowed so small a part in making it, Cairenes tend to fear rather than respect the law. They fear the law not so much because it is perceived as just or necessary, but because they worry where it will strike next. A certain Mr. Tunsi of Shubra, for instance, writes to Al-Ahram to complain that when he lost his passport he was denied another on the grounds that his name is clearly not Egyptian but Tunisian. Mr. Tunsi’s case is settled only when his sister chances to discover their great-grandfather’s Ottoman-era birth certificate in her attic. Or take this scene I witness in Tahrir Square: The lead car of a ministerial motorcade strikes a stray pedestrian. He survives. Plainclothesmen swoop down, scrape him off the asphalt, and drag him away—not to the hospital, but for interrogation as a possible terrorist. Such tales are the stuff of casual conversation here: diverting, but absolutely par for the course.

  Cairo is a place where people learn early about the hazards of arbitrary power. Martial drills, grueling exams, and the whack of the cane shape memories of time done in state schools. For most men, three years of military service follow school. Aside from enduring bad food and flea-bitten desert camps that bake in summer and freeze in winter, conscripts commonly find themselves enlisted as drivers, errand boys, and household servants for their officers.

  Women escape the army, but tradition burdens all but those who can afford hired help with a heavy sentence of family service. A mere generation ago traditional conceptions of “honor” tied many women to their homes. That has changed. The proportion of women who enter the workforce has risen steadily since the days when Cairo’s preeminent modern novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, invented Si Sayyid, a character who beat his wife if he suspected she had so much as peeped outside. Yet even today only a fifth of Cairene women work outside the home. The majority who don’t are expected to cook and clean for parents and brothers until marriage, when they must cook and clean for husbands and children. Housewives in traditional quarters prefer not to venture out alone. Even if it is only to go shopping, it is better to bring a child or relative along. That way, nosy neighbors can have no doubts as to the lady’s respectable intentions.

  Islam’s patriarchal code favors husbands over wives, especially when it comes to divorce and custody of children. Families try to even the score by making sure their daughters enter marriage as fully equipped as possible. By Egyptian custom it is the groom who must provide the conjugal apartment and most of its fittings. If prenuptial bargaining is almost always protracted, amazingly detailed—down to the number of teacups—and horrendously stressful for all concerned, it is because this is the prospective bride’s window of opportunity, the moment when she has power to dictate her terms. Often the fiancées who stroll hand in hand beside the Nile are not mooning and flirting as lovers do everywhere, but negotiating issues such as the size of their future refrigerator, bed, and TV set. These things are important. Even if her husband turns out to be no good, the bride will at least have a degree of security and the respect of her peers.

  Constraints like these, compounded by poverty, deal out a hard hand to most Cairenes. Take the case of Umm Ahmad, a fifty-two-year-old mother of four.*5 She was married at age sixteen and widowed at twenty-five. Swindled out of the property she had inherited because she couldn’t read the sale contract, she was forced to work as a housemaid. Umm Ahmad still supports three of her children—she earns more as a maid than her daughter can make as a qualified doctor in a government hospital. The two women share one bed, and her sons take turns in another. In a single week two of her neighbors died. One perished when a bus plunged off a Cairo bridge, killing forty-seven passengers. The other, an unmarried woman of twenty-four who was treated like a servant in the two-room apartment she shared with her two brothers and their wives, was driven to such despair that she doused herself in kerosene and struck a match.

  Her case was extreme but not all that rare. A 1995 household survey found that more than a quarter of married women in Cairo had been beaten at least once by their husbands. More shockingly, three-quarters believed husbands had a right to beat them, and half said that refusing sex was an adequate reason. Still, in such respects Cairo was far ahead of other parts of Egypt,*6 a fact that reflects the impact of better education in the city.

  In 1996, 26 percent of Cairenes were officially classified as poor—that is, their annual income per person was less than the £E1,323 ($390) the government’s statistical agency said was needed for basic sustenance. (But even among the better-off 74 percent, spending per person averaged only £2,820, or $830, which is poor by any Western standard.) Yet Cairo’s disadvantaged seem strangely averse to mounting organized efforts to improve their lot. This is partly explained by the historical lack of democratic institutions—a lack that is currently reinforced by laws that make it difficult to organize political parties, independent trade unions, and even social clubs. The laws are backed up by what is probably the largest police force in any city in the world.*7

  Its latent coercive power seldom needs to be put to use, however. Cairenes—rich and poor alike—may have little sense of civic duty, but they have a strong sense of moral duty. This means that when a street fight breaks out, onlookers rush to separate the antagonists, pacify them, smooth their ruffled feathers. The crowd’s reaction is so reliable that tempers can be allowed a healthy release in the full knowledge that no real damage will be allowed.

  If official community organization is largely absent, and if even spontaneous mass action such as rioting is rare, nevertheless Cairo’s poor have developed unique ways of coping. Most housewives, for instance, join friends in a gama‘iyya or savings pool. By chipping in with a small monthly payment—typically £E100 ($30) or less—they gain periodic access to a lump sum that may allow them to pay for, say, a washing machine. In poor quarters, most families supplement their income by raising animals at home. In a typical two-room walk-up in a North Cairo housing project, for instance, a social worker found a sheep on the balcony, chickens in pens in a corner of the kitchen, and pigeons—a delicacy in Egypt—under a bed.

  In the spring of 1996, a single raid on the slum district of Dar al-Salam netted 800 cases where citizens had illegally tapped the government’s electricity lines. It was a classic example of what Asef Bayat, a sociologist at the American University in Cairo, describes as “quiet encroachment.” This strategy of acquir
ing by stealth what you cannot gain otherwise, he says, may represent the key technique that Cairo’s poor use for dealing with state authority. Residents of public housing projects, for instance, commonly convert public space to private use. Open areas between housing blocks serve as animal pens, plant nurseries, and marketplaces.

  An estimated 200,000 ambulant vendors ply their trade in Cairo, selling everything from toy cellular phones to fūl—the slow-cooked fava beans that are Egypt’s staple breakfast. “Almonds!” is what the fūl seller on Muski Street calls out, to suggest how sweet and delicious are his beans. But at the warning cry of “Al-ḥukūma!”—“the government!”—hundreds of fellow street hawkers scamper off the busy street into the adjacent alleyways with their unlicensed trays of lingerie or watches or other goods for sale.

  Street vendors join the 45 percent of the city workforce that a Cairo University study defines as “informal,” which is to say nontaxpaying. This vast pool of labor may account for as much as a third of the city’s economic output, the study found. Its members include not just itinerants but also most workers in Cairo’s thousands of one-room workshops. The average “informal” industrial establishment was found to have just four employees, often including children. A separate study found that 34 percent of the workforce in the city center’s aluminum industry were under fifteen. Twelve percent were under nine years old.

  In some respects, informal workers can count themselves lucky. Unlike many university graduates—who account for many of Cairo’s unemployed, because they find it hard to get prestigious office work appropriate to their degrees—they have full-time jobs. In fact, the Cairo University study found that the informal sector’s tax-free wages averaged three times starting salaries in a government office. And even if they had to endure sixty-hour working weeks, in often dangerous conditions and with no social insurance, workshop laborers had the advantage of escaping government meddling. Survey respondents thought this an important plus: Distrust of the state was so strong that when the Cairo University team began surveying around Ma‘ruf Street, a warren of car-repair shops in the city center, foremen simply pulled down the metal shutters on their shops. Persuading locals that the researchers were academics, not government inspectors, took weeks of patient explanation.

  Cairenes seem to regard resistance to power as an art form. In 1996, for example, police tried to abolish jaywalking in Ramses Square by imposing spot fines. With its convergence of Metro, train, and bus routes pouring out an endless stream of commuters, it was predictable that the square should produce no fewer than 2,500 fines a day. But even after a month of diligent effort, police still were ticketing one wayward pedestrian every twenty-five seconds during business hours.

  The common belief that driving codes can all be bypassed with a toot of a horn makes for deafening noise levels on Cairo’s streets. (Which brings to mind the Mameluke-era law that allowed only nobles to have private bands. The permitted number of musicians rose with rank, so that the amount of noise you could make reflected social status.) The cacophony is, however, only the most blatant sign of a much more generalized flouting of rules. Cairo’s bureaucracy is as hopelessly snarled as its traffic, for example, but there is always a fast track smoothed by the right connections or money in the right palm.

  In a witty account of years spent in Egyptian government service at the beginning of this century, Lord Edward Cecil recalled that it was considered bad taste to remain as minister of religious affairs for longer than six months, so lucrative were the possibilities of filching from Islamic waqf endowments. Official posts are still held like franchises—even at very high levels. The occasional corruption scandal makes it into the papers. There is an outcry, followed by a clampdown, followed by a relapse into old ways.

  THE JOB OF bawāb—the keeper of the bāb or door—is one of the most ancient and enduring of Cairene professions. In medieval times it inspired a whole literary genre. Condemnation of the bawāb was a standard poetical form that allowed poets to sigh at being denied access to lovers. Much of the opprobrium fell on African eunuchs, who were the bawābs of choice in great households because they could be trusted to preserve the chastity of the harem.

  Every respectable apartment building in Cairo still maintains a bawāb. The doormen still tend to be African—or rather Nubian, because the Egyptians’ upstream neighbors, many of whom moved to Cairo after losing their country behind the High Dam, have a reputation for honesty. But the modern bawāb seldom wields enough power to inspire plaintive verse. In return for a room in the basement and a token wage supplemented by tips from residents, his job is to clean, guard, and oversee basic maintenance.

  Like most bawābs, Uncle Muhammad in my building has a family to support and few means to raise his meager income. He excels at one method, however: flattery. Two paydays after I moved in he had already promoted me from ustāz to bey, which is to say from “mister” to “sir.” With his end-of-Ramadan bonus I graduated to an honorary duktūrship. Currently I seem to be a pasha.

  Uncle Muhammad’s exaggerated respect is a genial affectation, mostly. My pashalik, I know, is bestowed with a large dollop of innuendo. As is so often the case in Cairo, the subtext to his form of address is more potent than the literal message. “If you want to be thought a pasha,” Muhammad is really saying as he mock-salutes and presents arms with his toothless broom, “then reward me as a pasha would.” (Which reminds me of a story a friend tells of his grandfather, who was a real pasha. The pasha rode a carriage home one day, and paid the coachman two piasters. The coachman protested that the pasha’s son always paid five. “But I,” said the pasha with a shrug, “am not the son of a pasha.”)

  Half a century after Egypt’s socialist revolution, Cairenes retain a need to categorize, to place people in their station. Poor folk still speak of their “betters.” The rich, meanwhile, tend to think of their good fortune as a sign of heavenly favor. Thus deference is not only accepted but also expected. Woe betide lowly students who neglect to address their professors as “duktūr”: not to do so could be taken as an excuse to fail them. In one case I know, a teacher flunked a student for the unintended sin of showing disrespect by crossing his legs in the great man’s presence.

  In a society where seniority, not achievement, is still the chief qualification for advancement, students are not encouraged to ask questions. Preserving the hierarchy of authority is generally seen as more important than the pursuit of knowledge. At any of Cairo’s universities it is not uncommon to see students trailing after their teachers carrying their briefcases, just as in medieval times they would have vied for the honor of carrying an Azharite sheikh’s slippers.

  Cairenes themselves often take a dim view of this kind of sycophancy. Even 600 years ago, al-Maqrizi chided his fellow citizens for “amusing themselves” with what he called cunning and deceit. “They excel at smiles and flattery more than any other people, such that they have gained fame for these traits,” the historian lamented.*8

  To people from more egalitarian societies—including most Arabs—Cairo’s extremes of verbal obeisance verge on the ridiculous. Respects such as “Your Presence,” “Your Ladyship,” and “Your Happiness” are common. It would be perfectly normal, say, for a munādi—one of the self-appointed parking “valets” whose services are vital on the city’s clogged streets—to speak to a client thus: “O Your Happiness the Pasha, I am at Your Lordship’s command. Does Your Presence’s car wish to be washed?”

  The language reflects a deeply ingrained sense of hierarchy. It is a sense that harks back to the days when each office of the Mameluke court had its own special headgear and when the dress of ordinary citizens reflected their confession as well as their profession. Perhaps it goes back even farther, to a time when the pharaoh was the living link between man and the gods and when proximity to earthly power meant closeness to eternity. “I was more esteemed by the king than any other servant” is the proudest boast that Ptahshepses, a Fourth Dynasty high priest of Ptah, thought fit to
inscribe in his tomb at Saqqara. “His Majesty permitted me to kiss his feet, for His Majesty did not wish that I should kiss the ground.”

  Five thousand years later, Cairo’s social pyramid remains sprawling at the base and slender at the top. Those at the bottom assume, as they always have, that the only way to gain power is to associate themselves with the lucky few who actually wield control. Institutions are usually dominated by a single boss whose strength of character enforces results. Business empires tend to spread across a range of activities, because entrepreneurs know that the speediest route to fortune is not technical skill but skillful exploitation of personal contacts in government. In the noncommercial world—even inside political parties—democratic practice is rare, and so commonly manipulated as to inspire little respect.

  Even the police force runs by reverse gravity. (It always has done—in ninth-century Fustat it was characterized by a few top officials and a mass of low-paid agents and spies.) I once protested when my taxi turned, Cairene-fashion, down a narrow street clearly marked “No Entry.” The driver didn’t flinch, not even on finding an entire troop of uniformed foot patrolmen marching toward us. He was right. The cops parted ranks to let us pass. There was not an officer among them, I realized, which meant they had no authority to do anything.

  “How many policemen does it take to equal one officer?” I asked the driver.

  He thought a while. “An infinite number, I guess,” he said at last.

  DESCRIBING A PERIOD of unrest at the end of the third millennium B.C., a Heliopolitan priest named Neferrehu evoked calamity with these words: “The country spins like a potter’s wheel. Thieves become masters. Ladies of high rank are thrust out of doors….”

  Throughout history the people of this city have seen the breakdown of hierarchy as the worst sign of disorder. Yet the evidence is that Cairene society has never once stopped reconstituting itself. Classes here have always been porous, not impermeable, like Indian castes. The simple fact of having money or power has usually been enough to assure upward mobility. Within a generation of the military coup in 1952, for instance, children of army officers had widely married into the old landed gentry. One of the wealthiest industrialists in the city today started off as a private exam coach. Prominent showbiz stars, property magnates, and all four presidents of the Egyptian Republic emerged from humble origins.