Their rags-to-riches stories are hardly original, to judge from one Mameluke-era example. In the mid-fourteenth century the Bureau of Songsters, a government agency that also licensed prostitutes and taxed entertainments, paid twenty dinars for an Abyssinian slave girl named Ittifaq—which means Agreement or, more elegantly, Concord. Ittifaq was, enthused the historian al-Maqrizi, “black of obsidian blackness, beautiful of voice, and faultless at song.” She so impressed the sultan of the time, al-Salih Ismail, that he married her. At Ismail’s early death—unusually for a Mameluke sultan, a result of illness, not violence—his brother al-Kamil Sha‘ban wedded Ittifaq on the very day of his accession. She found greater favor and happiness than any woman of the age, wrote al-Maqrizi, such that Sha‘ban built her a palace whose furnishings alone cost 95,000 dinars. “She had forty gowns studded with jewels, and sixteen embroidered with gold, and eighty veils, among them some worth 1,000 dinars, and the least of them 200….”
Ittifaq’s career was just beginning. When Sha‘ban was deposed in favor of his fifteen-year-old brother Hajji (Sha‘ban was later strangled), the new ruler also married her. Hajji abandoned himself to his infatuation. “Ittifaq became his sole occupation, and she took possession of his heart,” wrote al-Maqrizi. Her power increased to the point that she arranged for her music teacher to be given an amir’s fiefdom. But Ittifaq’s success aroused the jealousy of the Mameluke nobles. They forced the boy sultan to expel her from the palace and strip her of all her possessions, including a jeweled diadem valued at 100,000 dinars. Hajji was killed soon after, but Ittifaq’s fame ensured her a soft landing. She married the wealthy wazir Hibat Allah, and when he died, she married again. Her fifth and last husband, with whom she ended her days, was the sultan of distant Morocco.
FEW CAIRENE FAMILIES, even among the ruling class, can trace their ancestry back more than four or five generations. This is because wealth here has usually been fleeting. Islamic rules of inheritance have exerted a centrifugal force on property by breaking estates into like-sized chunks. The city’s snakes-and-ladders political history has constantly readjusted the class structure.
But even without these influences, Cairo’s preference for consumption over saving tends to whittle away fortunes. Presenting a good face has always been considered a prime social duty. Understatement is not heard in Cairo. Loudness is. The oppressive closeness of poverty reinforces the need to flaunt when you can. Flashy clothes, cars, and $100,000 weddings with caviar by the kilo and palm trees made out of shellfish are de rigueur for those who can afford them. Even those who cannot will go bankrupt rather than lose face. A casual invitation to lunch often translates into a sumptuous banquet where the hosts besiege guests with course after heaping course of rich country cooking. Cairenes pay for such excess in high levels of obesity and cholesterol, but they avoid the far worse stigma of stinginess.
The grand houses of the medieval city maintained distinct rooms for public show and for private living. This domestic arrangement persists even in the smaller scale of modern apartments. The large salon with the gilt furniture and silver knickknacks remains, like the inner sanctums of pharaonic temples or Coptic churches, reserved for the initiate. It is unsealed only for display occasions such as receiving condolences and negotiating with future in-laws that need to be impressed. All other activity is relegated to an informal living room made cozy with TV sets, children’s toys, and easy chairs.
Cairene punctilio in dress and speech results from the same distinctions. Eat to please yourself, but dress to please others, advises an Egyptian proverb. Think what you like, but do not blaspheme out loud, echoes Islamic law. Caught by a roving television interviewer, the typical Cairene waxes eloquent on the goodness of his government. Away from the camera, his tune is likely to change to scouring sarcasm.
This is a society where shame is felt to be more of a burden than guilt. Perhaps that is why a sharp line divides public from private behavior, why Cairenes prefer to suspend disbelief, to pay lip service to what they may personally feel is wrong or untrue. All kinds of mischief, meanwhile, go on with a wink and a shrug.
“We are an as-if society,” a physician at Qasr al-‘Aini Hospital once explained to me. “We speak of rules as if we intend to follow them. Our government acts as if it were a democracy. Some of my colleagues got medical degrees by hook or by crook, but they behave as if they were learned practitioners, because they sat through exams as if they had not bribed the examiners.”
EVEN THE CITY’S geography reflects this behavioral gap.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Cairo had two distinct parts: an Old City of meandering lanes and a New City of straight carriageways. There was no physical barrier between the two, but, as one Egyptian memoir pungently recalls, the contrast between the smell of frying food on one side and the smell of Greek bakeries and Swiss patisseries on the other was as sharp as barbed wire.
At the end of the twentieth century the city has sewn itself a complex quilt of similar divisions. West of the river, for instance, the main railway line to Upper Egypt stitches a border between the neatly laid-out streets of Muhandisin and the higgledy-piggledy burrows of Bulaq al-Dakrur. Both districts have grown up in the last generation, but whereas the former is purposely built to the scale of the automobile, the latter sprouted spontaneously in pedestrian proportions little different from those of the medieval town. Muhandisin has trendy chain outlets, supermarkets, and air-conditioned offices; Bulaq al-Dakrur has corner stores and open-fronted workshops. Muhandisin has hospitals performing heart bypasses and cosmetic surgery; Bulaq has cut-price clinics, herbalists, and midwives. Muhandisin boasts trees, some modest parks, and high-rises built of reinforced concrete. Bulaq has no public open areas to speak of, and tenements made of brick that cram Muhandisin’s horizontal density of people into a fraction of the space vertically.
Districts such as Muhandisin give the city a convincing facade of boulevards and modern buildings, of streetlights and signs. Yet only a minority of Cairenes inhabit the “formal” town, the one which is seen from tour buses and official limousines and therefore is recognized and properly serviced by government. At least two-thirds live in unzoned, unplanned “Popular Quarters.” Perhaps more: one housing survey has found that 80 percent of new construction is in the Popular Quarters. The term covers a range of habitats, from country villages engulfed by the city—such is the case of Bulaq al-Dakrur—to the premodern parts of Cairo proper, to squatter communities on the city’s fringes that one day will become urban spaces as dense as the old quarters.
Life in the Popular Quarters can be hard. The absence of privacy, the confining of wives and unmarried daughters in tiny apartments, and the lack of playgrounds for children create conditions for explosive family quarrels. The causes are often petty: dirty water dripping on someone’s washing line, arguments between children, neighbors who clutter communal stairs with their junk. The chief of police in Imbaba—a poor district just north of Muhandisin—tells interviewers from Al-Ahram that his station registers at least a hundred fights a day between neighbors. A typical scuffle, he says, broke out after a housewife spilled water on the stairs in her building and a neighbor’s child slipped. Fifteen people were hospitalized after the ensuing brawl.
Yet the inhabitants of places such as Imbaba seldom look on their neighborhoods as slums. Sewage may be leaky or nonexistent, electricity sporadic, but the Popular Quarters boast a congenial intimacy that is rarely tainted badly by urban blights such as crime and juvenile delinquency. Considering the depth of poverty in some parts of the city, the overall level of public safety is remarkable. Perhaps this is because, despite Cairo’s size, most of its people still live in village-scale compartments. They know their neighbors. They care for their family reputations. They look on their small world as real. The formal, planned living arrangements across the tracks may be enviable—particularly for the greater level of privacy they afford their inhabitants. For the majority of Cairenes, however, they are easier to dismi
ss as alien.
In the thirteenth century, the Granadan poet Ibn Sa‘id wrote that Cairo was a city within the means of the poor man. This was due, he said, “to the abundance and low price of bread, the existence of concerts and entertainments within and outside the city, and the easy fulfillment of his desires: he does as he pleases, dancing in the markets, going about naked, and getting drunk on hashish and other products.” At the end of the eighteenth century a renegade Turk accompanying Napoleon agreed that poorer Cairenes seemed to have more fun: “Sellers, porters, donkey boys, artisans, pimps, and prostitutes—in brief, the dregs of the populace—were delighted with their occupations because of the freedom they allowed.” At that time, Napoleon’s savants estimated, two-thirds of Cairo’s artisan class were regular consumers of such things as opium and “honeyed hashish balls.”
Working-class Cairenes still indulge more freely than their “betters” in drug-taking, flirting, joke-making, and general tomfoolery. While weddings in the Popular Quarters fill alleys with minicarnivals packed with spontaneous revelry, the costly ballroom affairs of the rich are monotonously staid. Swooshing up to five-star hotels in their zalamukkas, budras, and fagras—as different models of Mercedes are popularly known*9—the rich in all their duds are destined to sit for hours enduring an interminable sequence of crooners and belly dancers. They are too busy being respectable, too wary of their reputations to get up and dance.
PERHAPS IT IS also a comfort to Cairo’s poor that time is probably on their side. One day, if history is destined to repeat itself, the spacious quarters of the rich will be theirs. The fact is that the city’s multiple avatars have all been born as exclusive zones for the elite but have ended their days in the hands of the people. If there is one trait that has always marked this city, it is this eternal, restless shifting.
Archaeologists speculate that the reason why Memphis’s remains are so scant is that the ancient capital was a sort of movable feast of a city. The pyramid-building pharaohs probably built palace complexes next to their tombs. The great house (or per-ra‘ in the ancient language—which is the root of the word “pharaoh”) would serve as the temporary capital of the country. It would attract a generation of servers and hangers-on, all of whom would have to move as soon as the succeeding pharaoh chose a new site for his tomb and court. But rather than fall completely vacant, the disused royal buildings were often taken over by the poor. Excavations at the valley temple associated with the Pyramid of Mycerinus at Giza, for example, have revealed that squatters had built mud huts inside the temple courtyard soon after the pharaoh’s departure. It became, in the words of the authoritative pyramidologist Mark Lehner, a kind of sacred slum.
Muslim rulers, too, repeatedly abandoned older quarters that had grown too dense for courtly luxury. In the eighth century, Egypt’s Abbasid governors founded an administrative quarter at the northeastern corner of Fustat. They called it al-‘Askar, or The Soldiers’ Precinct. A mere hundred years later, the governor Ahmad Ibn Tulun found al-‘Askar too overgrown for his liking. He built an even more ambitious compound farther north. Al-Qata‘i—The Cantonments—was said to have housed 10,000 troops in comfort, as well as palaces and pleasure gardens complete with menageries and—so later legend assures us—a pool filled with quicksilver where the ruler floated on silken cushions towed to and fro by slave girls pulling on silver chains. Ibn Tulun grew powerful enough to declare independence from the Abbasids: he coined dinars in his own name. But his dynasty was to be short-lived. In A.D. 905 an Abbasid army reconquered Egypt and leveled al-Qata‘i—all except for the central mosque, which had been built to a scale grand enough to provide praying room for the renegade governor’s entire army.*10
But the clearest example of Cairo’s elite trying to escape the crush of the city was the founding of al-Qahira, The Victorious, in A.D. 969. In an assertion of aloofness from mundane affairs, the Fatimid caliph al-Mu‘izz li Din Allah followed his predecessors in walling off empty lands to the northeast of Fustat. But within three centuries the parade ground between his two palaces here had become the Qasaba, the donkey-trampled main thoroughfare of medieval Cairo.
In modern times, dizzying population growth has combined with disregard of building codes to render many “formal” districts too dense to attract the middle class. The nās, or respectable folk, have moved out, and the sha‘b, or masses, have taken over. Even new districts such as Muhandisin have succumbed to degentrification. Their streets are now so crammed with cars and shops that, for want of parking, rich Cairenes have begun to head for the desert hills. Breaking a millennial taboo, speculators have snapped up land east and west of the valley. At the end of the twentieth century they are busy mapping out new walled cities for the privileged. Bawābs—modernized by security guard uniforms—now patrol suburban theme communities with names such as Dreamland, Beverly Hills, Greenland, English Village, and Golf City. TV spots and color spreads in the papers advertise the new resorts’ pillared and porticoed villas as a gracious alternative to urban squalor. “Everyone dreams of living here,” gloats one advertising plug, “but not everyone can afford to.”
In a case that is typical of Cairo’s erratic planning, the developer of one such estate found that a low-income housing project abutted his planned acreage of ranch-style villas. To protect his clients’ swimming pools from prying eyes, the clever fellow bought all the six-storied tenements overlooking his property. He plans to tear them down.
The aesthetic defoliation reaches into older parts of the city, too. In once-gracious garden districts such as Maadi, Heliopolis, and Zamalek, high-rises have supplanted villas as fast as sledgehammers and piledrivers can pound. In downtown Cairo—the old Ismailia Quarter—the air of prewar Europe that lingered mustily even a decade ago in such establishments as Weinstein Stationery, the Café Riche, or the Groppi Tea Rooms is slowly expiring. The sense of space has changed. Mosques, street vendors, and parked cars have conquered sidewalks intended for strollers. Advertising and remade storefronts obscure neopharaonic moldings, Art Deco doorways, and swirling Art Nouveau railings in wrought iron. The style and habits of the old “native” quarters, mutated by the modern scourges of mass production, amplified sound, and neon, have made such deep inroads here that the khedive Ismail’s stately boulevards have more the feel of a bazaar than of the Paris they were designed to emulate. The eminent Cairene journalist Kamil Zuhayri recalls that Gadallah, the most elegant bootmaker on Qasr al Nil Street in the 1950s, used to put a single beautifully crafted shoe in its window. Now, like all the others on the street, its display is crammed with enough footwear to shoe Cairo Stadium.
Nevertheless, the boundary marked by Gumhuriyya Street is tangible. The thoroughfare stretches north to south, from Ramses Square to the former royal palace of Abdine. Khedive Ismail’s neo-Parisian boulevards extend west from Gumhuriyya Street. But to the east, the imposed order of the “Occidental” city, with its sidewalks and traffic lights, fades. The organic order of the “Oriental” quarter takes over.
This one-and-a-quarter-by-three-mile zone is what remains of the town that grew up around the royal enclosure built by the Fatimid caliph al-Mu‘izz. At a mere thousand years of age, it is far from being the oldest part of Cairo; there had already been Memphis across the river, and ancient Heliopolis to the north, and the early Muslim capitals to the south. But this Old City, which Egyptians call the Cairo of al-Mu‘izz, is the largest premodern quarter to have endured, its street plan substantially intact, down to the present. It is also one of the most densely used and populated bits of the metropolis. Little workshops cram eve
ry alleyway, turning out everything from auto parts to stuffed toy camels for the tourist trade. Narrow storefronts pack every inch of street frontage, while vendors’ stands and barrows and donkey carts clutter the roadways.
Six-hundred-odd listed medieval monuments have been propped up or properly restored amid the bustle here, enough to make the Cairo of al-Mu‘izz an open-air museum of Islamic architecture. Other ancient cities may boast relics of a single great dynasty, but here they range in style and age across the spectrum of Islamic history, from the ninth-century Mosque of Ibn Tulun to the nineteenth-century palaces and fountains of Muhammad Ali Pasha. The splendid mosques and schools of the Mameluke era, with their spacious courts, exquisitely curving carved stone domes, and three-tiered minarets modeled on the vanished lighthouse of Alexandria; the public fountains and the baths and caravanserais of the Ottoman period; the mansions of great merchant families with their marble marquetry and intricate latticework screens—all these noble buildings still reflect the glorious time when Cairo was the most princely capital in the world. Striking in scale and austere elegance, their facades pack long stretches of the Qasaba, the former processional way that is the spine of the Old City.