MY TAXI CRUISES away from al-Azhar and the House of Zaynab Khatun, high over the cluttered brownness of the Old City, until the overpass drops us into Opera Square. The driver doesn’t know it, but I am traveling not only through centuries of time but also in another of Cairo’s broad dimensions, going from depths of poverty to heights of wealth.
(And what scope this dimension has, I am thinking, recalling a day when I spent the morning in a ragpicker’s hut surrounded by pigpens constructed of corrugated iron, and the afternoon at the luxurious apartment of a distinguished heart surgeon. Sitting on the dirt floor of that tin shack, where a live rat really did run across my companion’s hand, the pretty young householder told us of her heart murmur and how she could not afford the operation she needed, and how she worried about who would raise her three children when she died. And then that same day, before a spectacular view of the Nile, with the ragpicker’s village far off on the smoky horizon, I lunched with the man who, as chance had it, was just the man she needed. How to connect those worlds?)
The taxi plunges into the downtown crush of cars and pedestrians. Haltingly, we move past this week’s signboard at the Cinema Miami. The poster painter has lovingly stroked each ripple of a muscleman’s three-story-high torso in fire-engine red. In the background a damsel in distress inflates her green negligee while floating in midair with a gun and a stretch limo with a Mercedes star.
My driver is complaining. I would, too, if I had to grind through the gears of a vintage Russian-built Fiat, in this buffalo stampede of traffic, for ten hours a day to pay for my six children’s schooling. (In fact, the professional drivers of Cairo preserve a truly admirable cool, considering the odds. Puttering along the Nileside Corniche once in some even cheaper Communist bloc jalopy, I thought it was all over when a thunderous crash and hideous scraping jerked the taxi to a halt. The driver sat stock still. Then his head drooped down to the steering wheel. “Again!” he moaned. It was not the first time, apparently, that the engine had fallen out.) We pull briefly alongside a blue police truck. The suspects boxed inside—religious terrorists?—are thumping on the metal walls and chanting, “God is great! There is no God but Allah!” A motorcyclist trailing storm clouds of bitter two-stroke exhaust cuts in front of us, nicking the Fiat’s fender. My driver screams a profane genealogy out the window, ending in “Son of a whore!” Survival here takes spirit as well as fatalism.
Soon we have crossed the river to the Giza side. A solid wall of high-rises crenellated with satellite dishes lines the shore. Cranes tower over a site upriver. A new colossus is going up where the penthouse is for sale at a cool £20 million. I know this because just last week, at a stud farm near the Pyramids, I met one of the contractors. The Italian engineer’s job was to install an underwater sound system for the building’s indoor swimming pool. The cost? A hundred thousand dollars. The Italian shrugged, distracted by the magnificent Arabian prancing in the corral. “What for I dunno. They wannit, I build it.”
A sleek sedan flashes its high beams and overtakes us. The owner is chatting on the phone, happy in the knowledge that his car is worth more than the lifetime earnings of a whole squadron of traffic cops like the one who has just waved him through a red light. (And by the way, these cops have the highest levels of lead in the blood ever measured among any one profession anywhere in the world.)
Soon after, in a vast lobby paneled in polished granite, a trio of well-packed bodyguards eyes me as I step into the elevator. Up on the twenty-fourth floor a servant in a neat satin caftan opens the door. It is my landlady’s butler, Vegetables. His name isn’t really Vegetables, but that is what Zaza calls him, affectionately, behind his back. She has a way of putting a comic twist on everything: her maid’s code name, also a playfully direct translation of a common Egyptian name, is Emotions; the driver Hamdi is My Gratitude.
I find Zaza pacing in the salon.
“You can’t be serious, Tutu, mish ma‘qūl!” she is saying into the cordless phone, rolling her kohl-rimmed eyes for my benefit. She caps the receiver for a second. Her nails match the emerald on one finger. It is the size of a pigeon’s egg.
“Be a sweetie and make me the usual,” she stage-whispers, gesturing toward the bar in the corner.
By the time I stir up a pair of vodka and tonics, Zaza is flicking off the phone. “God, that woman’s a bore,” she says with her most winsome flash of little teeth. Then, noticing her nails as she fits a cigarette to her holder, she says with a wink: “Isn’t this color absolutely hideous? I love it.”
My landlady is the daughter of one of the more eccentric pashas. The noble Turkish blood shows in her parchment-pale skin, jet-black hair, and utter lack of artifice. Her French and English are flawless, the product of many youthful sojourns at Gstaad, the George V, and the Dorchester. Her taste in clothes runs to the trendiest of Japanese designers. Twice married and twice divorced, she has never worked a day in her life, thank God, as she would say.
With an army of cousins in high places, Zaza is also the source of the juiciest society gossip. Tutu is one of these cousins, I gather, and has been regaling Zaza with the story of another cousin’s marriage to some nouveau-riche industrialist.
“Can you imagine,” my hostess purrs, settling onto a chaise longue, “the wedding invitations were engraved silver trays! I mean the trays were the invitation cards. A thousand of them. And the buffet!”—she downs another gulp of vodka—“you won’t believe it. It was supposed to be on some kind of Out of Africa theme, you know—coconuts and grass-skirted waiters. And they served the saumon fumé—this bit just kills me—on the bald heads of soldiers!”
She pauses for effect before explaining.
“The groom’s uncle is a general, you see.”
I still don’t get it.
Zaza waves a trail of impatient green nails: “He ordered a whole brigade or whatever to shave off their hair, and shipped them in for the evening. You know, they had them sitting under the table with their heads sticking out through holes in the top, and the guests peeled the smoked salmon off their sweaty bald pates.”
She giggles, ending with a wince.
“We never had anything so tacky before the revolution, even if Papa did have the servants bury the leftovers in the garden so the peasants wouldn’t see them. It’s enough to make me take the veil!”
There is little likelihood of that, I think.
“Of course,” Zaza adds, “Tutu thought the wedding was absolutely marvelous.”
LATE IN THE NIGHT, a Sri Lankan servant clicks open another bottle of Black Label. We are in the drawing room of a high-society decorator. The room has been done in Orientalist Baroque: aspidistras in brass urns, Bedouin carpets, divans studded with mother-of-pearl and draped with rugs from Persia and the Caucasus. It is a costume party. But if the few dozen guests are in fancy dress, the mood is somber. News is out that a religious extremist has stabbed and severely injured the doyen of Egyptian letters, the octogenarian Naguib Mahfouz.
Out on the terrace overlooking the Nile, a Lebanese heiress in full biker’s leather is telling a silk-turbaned maharaja—a titled Belgian diplomat in reality—that force is the only thing that these bloody terrorists understand. They should hang them all, she insists.
The doorbell chimes and the host, who is in outrageous drag as Edith Piaf, sweeps through the party, Scotch in hand. The door bursts open. Two bearded intruders in long white robes charge into the room, yelling “Allahu Akbar!” and spraying the guests with machine-gun fire from their toy Kalashnikovs. The stunt is a success. It is carried off to shrieks and peals of laughter, and everyone is taken with the irony that one of the fundamentalist gunmen is the cousin of a Coptic minister in the government. The ice is broken, and as the dawn call to prayer approaches unheeded, the host is performing his famous spoof of that darling of Cairo’s Roaring Forties, Tahiyya Carioca, the slinkiest, sexiest belly dancer of all time.
* * *
*1 The 1996 census shows about 15,000 cafés in Greater Cair
o—but it counts only those that pay taxes.
*2 Ten percent of garbage never gets removed at all, according to a 1994 study. The zabbālīn dispose of 50 percent and municipal services the rest.
*3 Not to be confused with the great Baybars, who founded the Mameluke state, this Baybars usurped the throne briefly from 1309 to 1310 before being overthrown and executed. His name, al-Jashankir, comes from the Persian word for his rank at court before his rise to power: chief taster to the sultan.
*4 In 1996 alone, Egypt’s 5,000 judges dealt with an astonishing 11,688,000 cases involving 44 million people, according to the Ministry of Justice. They rendered judgments in only 9.5 million of these, which explains why there were nearly 20 million lawsuits pending, or 1 for every 3 Egyptians.
*5 Traditional Egyptians believe a woman’s real name should be veiled from the public. To prevent intrusion on their privacy, working-class mothers adopt the names of their firstborn: Umm Ahmad is “Ahmad’s Mother.”
*6 The government’s 1995 Demographic and Health Survey found that 92 percent of married rural women thought husbands had a right to beat them. In the Upper Egyptian countryside, 83.4 percent said husbands would be justified if their wives refused them sex. That said, it should be noted that the survey was criticized for the small size of its sample. Also, wife-beating is traditionally associated with pride and masculinity and protectiveness; women who said they approved of the practice may have been expressing how strong the ideal husband’s passion for his wife should be.
*7 The Ministry of the Interior is wary of releasing statistics, and estimating the number of police is difficult because of the variety of overlapping forces and branches. To hazard a guess, though, there are probably 50,000 to 100,000 policemen in Cairo, enough for the city to still deserve its medieval epithet al-Qahira al-Mahrusa—Cairo the Well Guarded.
*8 This was the least of al-Maqrizi’s protests. Here is what he wrote of the morals of Cairenes: “Most are marked by lewdness and abandonment to pleasure, by a preoccupation with trifles, by credulousness, by weakness of will and resolution. They are skilled at cunning and deceit…and amuse themselves with it.... They are wanton and careless. Our sheikh, Master Abu Zayd Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, may God have mercy on him, told me the people of Egypt behave as if they were released from the Day of Judgment….Ibn al-Arabiyya said they were the slaves of conquerors; the smartest of youths and the most ignorant of dotards.”
*9 The names mean, respectively, Chicken’s Ass (for the high rear end of one model), Powder (for the fact that only drug dealers can afford them), and Slut (for the wide, rounded eyes of the headlights). Earlier Mercedes models were known as the Crocodile and the Pig—all of which reveals a great deal about what ordinary folk think of those who drive them.
*10 Ibn Tulun’s mosque is still the largest in Cairo. The great double walls ringing its huge courtyard have protected the building from later misuse as a caravanserai and a madhouse, and have even held off the recent tide of intense urbanization.
Chapter Eleven
THE VOICE OF CAIRO
City suspended on words.
The alleys vocal chords,
Silence the scapegoat.
—Edmond Jabes, Les Clefs de la Ville, 1951
O what a tongue we have:
—Ahmed Fouad Negm, colloquial poet, c. 1970
“NOT EVERY SCRIBBLER is a poet, nor every hummer of tunes a singer. Not every fellow with a turban on his head is a learned sheikh, nor any man on a horse a knight. And not everyone who listens understands.”
The rhythmic chant lulled the audience from the first word. But that final phrase, delivered in a rising pitch with a sly glare that dared them to join in the spirit of the telling, was a challenge. These were the 1990s, and this was an audience more attuned to Mozart and Molière than to folk tales told by an adenoidal fellah in a galabiyya and country shawl. But Izzat al-Qinawi, one of the last master storytellers of Egypt, held the Cairo Opera House in his spell.
This evening’s tale was a single episode in the life of Abu Zayd, the legendary hero of the Arab tribe of Bani Hilal. The full epic would take far more than these thirty nights of Ramadan to tell—to tell how Abu Zayd’s father disowned his firstborn because the baby boy was black; how the young Abu Zayd endured exile to grow into a fearsome warrior; how he fought and nearly killed his greatest foe without realizing the man was his father; how the two were reconciled and Abu Zayd then led the Bani Hilal to victory over the kings of Tunis. Izzat al-Qinawi rode the story as if it were a stallion, trotting briskly in prose, sallying wildly into verse, and then shuffling down to a complicitous whispering narrative. From time to time the storyteller would stop dead, scan the crowd, pick out one listener, and demand to know if he was following. Just as Homer lavished punctilious detail on describing the shield of his hero Achilles, so did this modern minstrel elaborate his picture of Abu Zayd’s miraculous sword in a flourish of superlatives. And just as the blind bard of ancient Greece would have accompanied his voice with a harp, Izzat al-Qinawi sawed a reedy tune from his two-stringed fiddle. A drummer kept the beat, and a rustic chorus echoed the catchiest phrases.
The story ended, of course, on a note of high suspense: would Abu Zayd slay his own father? Were this not the staid Opera, al-Qinawi could have commanded a tribute of coins to reveal what happened next. Instead he got a standing ovation, and reviews in the next day’s papers that proudly contrasted his native art with the crassness of that more current form of serial drama, the TV soap opera.
LIKE ALL GREAT folk epics, the legend of Abu Zayd al Hilali is rooted in historical fact. The Bani Hilal were a nomadic tribe who migrated westward out of Arabia sometime in the eleventh century. They threatened Cairo, but the Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir paid off the marauding tribesmen, dispatching them to wreak havoc far away in the rival state that is now Tunisia. The story of their raiding then passed down orally from master storyteller to apprentice, gathering mythic nuances and plot twists through centuries of Bedouin memory until long after the Bani Hilal had settled or dispersed.
The legend of Abu Zayd was a perennial favorite in medieval Cairo, where storytelling was a highly specialized art. But tastes in narrative eventually changed, and then radio and television chased the old-time minstrels from city coffeehouses. If it were not for the astoundingly capacious memories of a dwindling handful of professionals in the remote Upper Egyptian province of Qina—who happen to belong to the gypsylike remnants of the Bani Hilal tribe—the story of Abu Zayd would have vanished.
In the Cairo of 1830 Edward Lane counted fifty reciters of the epic of Bani Hilal alone. But the city’s coffeehouses offered a broad repertoire in those days, ranging from tales of the Prophet to bawdy fantasies from The Thousand and One Nights. With thirty devoted practitioners, according to Lane, the romance of the Mameluke sultan al-Zahir Baybars rated second to Abu Zayd’s in popularity. Whereas Abu Zayd battled in distant deserts among forgotten tribes, Baybars’s exploits largely took place in the streets of late thirteenth-century Cairo. This epic’s origins lay not in folk tradition but in official propaganda.
As the founder of the Mameluke state—a state that was both internally unstable and perpetually at war—Baybars sorely needed to ensure the loyalty of his subjects. With the idea of promoting a cult of personality, he commanded court scribes to compose heroic accounts of his life. The sultan probably paid reciters to broadcast these tales of his piety and valor—much like the Ministry of Information’s newsreels, with their rousing martial music and adoration of official occasions, that prefaced showings in Cairo movie theaters until a few years ago. But over time Baybars’s biography warped out of all recognition. What filtered down to Lane’s coffeeshop listeners had blossomed magnificently into fable.
The less flattering medieval chronicles describe Baybars as a Mameluke slave who cleaved his way to fortune through ruthless soldiering and cunning politics. The storytellers’ version presents him differen
tly—as the orphaned son of a king who swashbuckles to fame, overcoming enemies and their plots to arrive in Egypt’s capital as a respected amir. But at this point the demands of the Cairene audience appear to take over; fact and fiction diverge completely. Baybars hires a native stable boy named Osman, and this appealing rogue elbows his master out of the story. Baybars the great warrior, whom history would record as the defeater of Christian Crusaders and Mongol hordes, from now on takes a backseat to this sidekick invented by the storytellers’ imagination.
Osman is a classic urban character. Sassy and streetwise, he talks in Arabic rhyming slang to fool plodding Turkish-speaking officials. His Cairo is far removed from the courtliness of romance. The city he calls his “milch cow” is infested with gangsters and blackmailers, thieves disguised as sheikhs, crooked judges and bent secret police. Up in the Citadel, the reigning sultan is a hopeless drunkard.
Osman becomes the amir Baybars’s guide to the Cairene underworld. His master, the ostensible hero, comes to represent the silent force of the state and is reduced to the status of a masked executioner. When he speaks, it is in the heavy cadences of classical Arabic. The real protagonist—the one who gets all the best lines—is Osman. By a combination of blundering detective work and leadership of a motley gang of beggars, the stable boy delivers criminals to the law. He exposes the head of the secret police and the chief judge as uncircumcised infidels. In the end Osman traps the godfather of Cairo’s underworld, a nattily dressed pimp and racketeer named Muqallad. Baybars dispatches all these wicked Christian impostors with his sword.