THE GRAND MONUMENTS have largely lost their functions, however. The fountains, endowed to the city by the pious and once filled daily by water carriers, are dry. Excepting al-Azhar, all the old colleges of Islamic law are defunct, replaced by the law faculties of modern universities. Having aged beyond utility, most of Cairo’s old heart has gently crumbled. The destructive rumble of constant traffic and occasional earthquakes has been compounded by leaky plumbing that sends corrosive liquids to be sponged up into ancient walls of porous limestone, which then crack, flake, and pop off decorative panels of polychrome marble at an alarming rate. Concrete apartment blocks peer down into adjacent lots of rubble from freshly collapsed houses. A double-stacked overpass loops around three sides of a fifteenth-century mosque. In the markets, plastic and aluminum have largely supplanted leather and brass.
The decay may be sad, but in compensation the place is alive. It is a city in progress with nothing of the pickled, sterilized quality of many a European Altstadt or the resurrected cuteness of colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. The Old City prefers to entice and conceal rather than display. To the first-time visitor there is still a sense of discovery in stumbling across, say, the ruins of the colossal fourteenth-century palace of the amir Yashbak, where bats lurk in the basement next to a Ford Model T that has somehow ended its days here; or in seeing, from the balcony of a minaret, the sun set among dusty domes and smoke-shrouded spires.
There remains a sensible antiquity to the rhythm of the Old City, to the worn texture of every surface and the intimate scale of public space. The narrow lanes away from the main streets may no longer be overhung by the traditional tiered upper floors that closed out the sky and brought welcome shade in the summer, but they are still no wider than the medievally prescribed breadth of two laden camels, and they are still largely pedestrian. Aside, that is, from the beasts of burden that have replaced the once-ubiquitous donkeys, which is to say diminutive Suzuki trucks rigged with Taiwanese sirens that play the “Lambada” tune. (No wonder the Prophet said that the most hideous of sounds is the braying donkey.)
Instead of downtown Cairo’s gone-to-seed department stores, here there are closet-sized dukkāns massed in highly specialized marketplaces, their goods stacked in tantalizing pyramids. There is a street of sewing machines and a street of television sets, an alley of clocks and watches, a cul-de-sac of buttons, a bazaar of hand tools, with passages of screws and nails running into a whole district devoted to plaster dolls and dishes and bonbonnières for lavish weddings. Toward the Nile at Wikalat al-Balah, what started as trade in World War II army surplus has bequeathed a teeming market where used clothes rub worn elbows with parts scavenged from old cars. By the old eastern walls there was, until the narcotics squad cracked down a decade ago, a district of drug dealers where young toughs weighed out loaves of hashish on trestle tables, and shriveled old men squatted in the alleys on Friday afternoons waiting for the young son of Hagg Mustafa Marzouk to deliver a charity ration of opium from his father’s copious stores. There are also streets where a sort of unordained assembly line can unfold, like one that evolves from the wholesale wood market to sellers of stuffings and brocade and clamps, to shapers of frames and carvers, to the sudden shock of the completed goods: glorious gilt Louis XVI thrones and sofas in purple velvet that look almost obscene in their ripe smugness as they bask along the earthen pathway.
Above all, there is a feeling of age-old territoriality to the Old City—of neighborhoods in miniature built around a particular trade, a mosque, a café, a grocer, and the tomb of some sheikh. The unit here is no longer the quartier or the borough framed by some topographic feature or great boulevard, but the homely ḥāra, the alleyway extolled in the novels of Naguib Mahfouz.
Once upon a time each ḥāra was practically autonomous. At the second hour after dusk, right after evening prayers, the neighborhood bawāb would close the ḥāra gate and seal its inhabitants from the troublesome world beyond. When Napoleon’s army captured Cairo two centuries ago they found a honeycomb of fifty or more háras separated by walls and gates. The first thing they did was to remove the barriers—a decision whose wisdom was proved when the people of Cairo rose against the invaders and had to be blasted into submission by artillery fire.
Ever since, the fabric of the Old City has frayed. The Greeks abandoned the ḥāra of the Greeks, the Jews the ḥāra of the Jews—though a smattering of churches and synagogues still molder, neglected, on back streets. The rich moved to newer, more spacious quarters with electricity and decent plumbing (or so they thought), abandoning tall mansions that were air conditioned by means of tree-filled courtyards and high wind-catchers and splashing fountains. Those great houses not rescued by conservationists were oozed into by country immigrants. The newcomers tethered goats to brass doorknobs. They washed their clothes in the fountains and defenestrated latticework panels for kindling. From being places where differing fortunes mingled, the old hāras became not quite slums but solidly, proudly working-class.
It has been said that, while the rich create fashion, the poor maintain tradition. The Old City remains the repository of timeless Cairene habits. Folk dress—the full-length galabiyya for men and the black, wraparound milāya for women—is suddenly more in evidence. It is here that a dwindling few ambulant vendors of liquorice drink, wearing their traditional baggy trousers with satin cummerbunds, ply their trade. They clink their brass cups like castanets, puncturing sounds of scolding and laughter, and in the tinsmiths’ street compete with a tinkling cacophony of hammers like a gamelan running amok. Incense burners wander from shop to shop, swirling their censers and muttering prayers in exchange for a few piasters’ tip.
During the holy month of Ramadan, Cairenes, drawn by some atavistic need for the Old City’s intimacy, flock to the cafés and food stalls around the Mosque of al-Husayn. After long nights of feasting and revelry, the public waker makes his rounds before dawn, tapping a drum, rousing the faithful so they can have a last bite or sip or cigarette before the daylight hours of fasting. Boys raise pigeons on the rooftops. Teenage girls fill water jars at the corner standpipes and sway homeward, delineating their curves in complicity with the café loungers across the way.
THE ASFOUR WAS a classic Old City café. Straw-bottomed chairs and spindly brass-topped tables cluttered the tiled floors of its interior. A stern-looking ma‘allim or boss in a pristine white galabiyya ruled here as proprietor, bouncer, and referee of his clients’ backgammon and card games. Outside, his proud grapevine shaded a row of wooden benches overlooking the street.
It was here that I met Ashraf. I was sitting propped against the wall of the Asfour, assuming the role of a local voyeur with the assistance of the water maidens across the way, and with an excellent hubble-bubble for an accessory. I hardly noticed the stocky gentleman next to me, except to appreciate that he left me alone with my thoughts—an unusual luxury in Cairo.
After a time I finished the first of a pair of clay pipes stuffed with ma‘assil, that sticky concoction of chopped tobacco stewed in molasses which is one of Cairo’s finer inventions. Pleasantly buzzed with nicotine, I pincered the hot coals one by one onto the water pipe’s collarlike brass saucer, removed the old pipe, and twisted the new one into place. But before I could top it with coals, my neighbor leaned across and pinched a dark sliver of something onto the mixture. He said nothing, just sat back and grinned encouragement. Our eyes met for a second. I had to smile back. To refuse this capricious intrusion would have been a betrayal, an affront to the mood of Cairo, to my own Oriental fatalism, and to this beaming Cheshire cat of a stranger.
The stuff was rich and resinous, a chocolate gas.
As I was to discover, Ashraf always carried a shilling’s weight of hashish tucked in the elastic of his sock. A discreet flick of the toecap could drop the piece to the ground should the need arise in the form of a nosy plainclothesman. I was to find that for a son of Ashraf’s ḥāra there was nothing unusual in this. If anything, to smoke hashish was a
sign of manliness, of respectability. It was part of a gentlemanly parcel of attributes—unfailing neatness in dress, assiduousness at prayer and fasting, disdain for politics, courtliness and firm generosity, independence and modesty, and physical strength (Ashraf was short but had immense shoulders)—which together brought Ashraf the respect due to a true ibn balad or son of the soil.
We saw each other often over several years. Sometimes it was at Ashraf’s business, a closet of a workshop where he and an assistant and a child apprentice assembled electric sugarcane juicers—roll presses like the mangles on early washing machines—to the accompaniment of a transistor radio. At five o’clock all the workshops of the ḥāra—no, of the whole city—would tune to the same station, and you could float for miles on a single, hour-long ballad of longing sung by Cairo’s great diva Umm Kulsoum. Later we would retire to Qahwat al-Asfour, where Ashraf introduced me to his circle of friends: Rida, a great rowdy ox of a butcher, Hagg Ibrahim the goldsmith, Mansour the mechanic. And sometimes Ashraf would invite me back in the evenings, to the local mawlid or to a wedding like his brother Fouad’s, where to my surprise the climactic entertainment was a porn video played on a machine in the center of the ḥāra, whose housewives shouted louche witticisms from open windows above while the menfolk seated below watched in awed silence.
Ashraf gave me new eyes to see the city, and it became a very different place for a time. Back in his ḥāra, the world may have been circumscribed by poverty and tradition, but it was complete. Tastes were simple but refined. People took pride in eating the best fūl, in smoking the cleanest water pipes, in being the most generous and gallant companions. Their links with the past were unbroken. Life revolved to the rhythm of the five daily prayers, of the fasting of Ramadan and the feasting of the pilgrimage season, and of the neighborhood mawlids. Duties rather than needs framed behavior: you could not be disloyal to friends or family, you could not remain unmarried, which meant you could not relent in saving the capital to buy and furnish the conjugal apartment; and then you could not remain childless. As for the city at large, it was almost irrelevant except when it intruded in the guise of bureaucrats and police. Local gossip was far more pertinent than the affairs of Cairo. The greater city was seen as a temptress—wicked and wanton and possessed by others.
When Ashraf came across town to my side he was never quite at ease. There was a stiffness to his movements in my realm of wide, impersonal streets, of elevators and armchairs, of books and alcohol, and of female acquaintances who were neither veiled nor related to me by family yet who seemed to think it normal to mingle casually with strangers. I inflicted inadvertent embarrassments, such as asking Ashraf to write his address without realizing he couldn’t write; such as forgetting that my bathroom was inadequately equipped for pious Muslim use. (How uncouth is mere paper compared to the spritzes and sprayers required by Islamic toiletry!) My surroundings, I realized, lacked the gravity of convention. Where were the formulas of speech, the mention of God, the standard praises and condolences, the gestures of hospitality? Where was the display that should have accompanied my good fortune: the glass cases filled with knickknacks, the gadgets and the gilt?
It was through Ashraf that I came to realize how wide the gap between the two worlds of Cairo remained.
Ashraf had a cousin—or rather his mother’s sister’s son, in the precision of Arabic—who was doing a degree in art history at Cairo University. There were books that the cousin had to understand in order to write an important essay, and they were in incomprehensible English. For some reason I cannot now recall, I took upon myself the task of helping Ashraf’s cousin to translate these books.
Feeling like an impostor, I made the late-afternoon rendezvous at Ashraf’s workshop. The cousin looked too carefully dressed. He was prone to giggling, which was not encouraging. You could tell that, unlike Ashraf, this was someone determined to escape from the ḥāra, and so was filled with unease. His interest in the history of art, it transpired, was institutional, not intellectual. He confessed that he had wanted a useful degree—in commerce, for instance. But, because a single nationwide exam determines what Egyptians can study at a college or university (top scores are slotted into medicine and engineering; the dross into law and the arts), Ashraf’s cousin had to suffer being assigned to art history.
The books were at the cousin’s house, so we set off together through the alleyways on his Vespa, weaving through foot traffic and slowing for potholes until we came to a stop before the open doorway of an old house. The cousin pushed the scooter into a narrow courtyard with a dirt floor. Upstairs, a lady who had been hanging out washing clapped her shutters closed. Chickens tousled a pile of refuse in a corner. A startled pye-dog scooted out between my legs.
My host led me into an oblong room off the yard that was just big enough to fit a bench and a grossly outsized TV, complete with VCR. This was the showpiece, and Ashraf’s cousin hovered around it as if for protection from the surrounding squalor. Would I like to see a film amerikani? Sure, I said, and instantly regretted the politesse, because the movie was an utterly appalling splatter flick. As far as I could tell from the screams and thrashing over the next hour, it was about an ax that comes alive and lops off half the teenage limbs of Texas. Each time my eyeballs abandoned yogic efforts to escape the massacre, ketchup squelched against the screen.
To complete the horror, the cousin’s subject turned out to be abstract expressionism. He flipped through a book about Jackson Pollock, frowning at the illustrations, then resigned the heathen text to me and waited for my exegesis. But how to squeeze even the stubborn oxymoron of abstract expressionism into my limited Arabic, let alone the wider contexts of Western painting or art or philosophy, about which, it soon became clear, my pupil hadn’t a clue? Or how to extract sense from the hyperbole about the artist’s discovering that his drip technique “sowed arcs and whorls of virile color” and that “this was freedom at last.” It was a cultural short circuit. The only thing I could get across was that a man in America randomly dribbled paint on large canvases, and that certain pilgrims then worshiped these objects at museums and paid colossal sums for them. Even to me it sounded as fanciful as flying carpets. I think he believed me, though, if only because it was written in a book, and there were pictures, and perhaps because it tallied with a general notion of inexplicable Western excess.
Days later, when I had recovered from my headache, Ashraf’s cousin sent me a present. It was a small wooden box encrusted with a geometric inlay of ivory and mother-of-pearl—or rather artful plastic imitations thereof. A certain Eastern, Old World reproach seemed to lurk in this useful and pleasing object. I still have it somewhere, though chips of inlay have come unglued.
And then after several years I heard that the cousin had joined that immense drain of degree-holding Egyptians to the oil sheikhdoms of the East, and was driving trucks in Saudi Arabia. The money he sent home financed the building of a six-story tenement in the ḥāra, filling the site of a house that had collapsed. (No casualties: the only people there at the time were making love on the second floor, and by some bizarre fluke their old brass bed slid to safety clean out the window and onto the alleyway.)
NOT FAR FROM Ashraf’s neighborhood, behind the millennium-old Mosque of al-Azhar, stands a great fifteenth-century mansion known as the House of Zaynab Khatun.
Just a few years ago two brothers from the impoverished Egyptian South—men of the very stock that, subsisting on a diet of bread and onions, have built and demolished succeeding Cairos—were laboring at the restoration of this house. One day when the foreman wasn’t watching they pulled up a flagstone, and lo and behold there flashed a chink of gold. The brothers scrabbled in the black earth. The cac
he was huge, its value inestimable: some long-forgotten inhabitant, fearful of marauding Mamelukes perhaps, had stashed hundreds and hundreds of gold dinars in the ground.
The brothers divvied up the treasure, swearing an oath of secrecy. Cunningly, they continued to work as day laborers while selling off the coins and salting away the cash. But then one day their own folly, their own fiery Upper Egyptian temper, betrayed them. Suspecting that the goldsmith who was fencing his share was cheating, one of the brothers got into a heated argument and tried to strangle the tradesman. Police arrived, looked at the merchandise, and immediately clapped both men in irons. Most of the cache was subsequently retrieved and housed in the Islamic Museum. The Upper Egyptians were thrown in prison. But, saddest of all, the tale set off a craze for ripping up floors and bashing at walls all over the Old City, much to the despair of conservationists.
The house is now a museum. Its imposing shape fills a corner made by a wiggle in the street behind al-Azhar. In the medieval style of the city, its first stories are in cut stone, the upper ones of brick. The exterior walls are bare, so as to deter the tax man, except for protruding mashrafiyyas—high windows of patterned latticework from where Zaynab Khatun could watch the outside world unveiled and still preserve her honor. The entrance passes under a low arch, then zigzags through a vaulted passage for greater security before emerging in a courtyard paved with flagstones. This is what Cairenes of the time aspired to: ownership of their own piece of sky, with a raised porch facing north across the open space to catch the cool Delta breeze.
It was just here, under this very block of pharaonic granite which makes a princely threshold to the courtyard, that the treasure was found, so the grizzled workman I find sitting alone here tells me. He is suspicious at first. Who am I? A police informer? A foreign agent? Or perhaps I know something he doesn’t. But as he retells the story, reserve turns to rage. He plucks at his ragged vest and drawers. His Adam’s apple jerks up and down as he rants in a thick Upper Egyptian dialect. “A curse on the government! Look at me. I want to eat meat. I want shoes. A curse on my family! My own brother’s sons, the greedy bastards, never let on about the gold. They kept it all for themselves! And now what? The government feeds them in jail, for no work. Their children eat meat at home. And me, what about me? I eat nothing but bread and onions. A curse on them all!”