Perhaps it was this very unmodern note of religious triumphalism that erased the romance of Baybars from the twentieth-century storytelling repertoire. (Unlike the epic of the Bani Hilal, it is preserved only in writing.) Yet the depiction of Christians as a dangerous fifth column reflects how the story adapted to medieval public demand. It evolved from an official hagiography into a comic strip, a tale laced with all the conspiratorial undertones of working-class Cairo. Its real world was not that of the Citadel and its public affairs, but that of the hāras and marketplaces of the city below. Its heroes were the rabble, not their masters. The real language was not Baybars’s wooden-tongued Batman-speak. It was Osman’s Cairene chaff.
THAT SPLIT BETWEEN high and low voices persists in Cairo today. It begins with the Arabic language itself.
The English poet Robert Graves remarked in the 1920s that his students at Cairo University seemed to have two distinct minds. They switched casually, he said, between what he called “the irresponsible hedonistic café and cinema mind, which tends towards the French, and the grave moralizing bureaucratic mind, which tends towards the English.” Graves did not speak Arabic. If he could have, he would have realized that his students’ native language offered ample scope for both “minds.”
Just as Arabic music’s use of quarter tones allows for a much greater range of subtlety than the Western scale, the Arabic language spans a uniquely immense breadth. Sanskrit has evolved into Hindi. Latin has centrifuged into a dozen tongues. Arabic, however, has kept its polyglossic unity. It has maintained the vertical link to its roots even while branching into myriad contemporary forms. Its scope contains everything from the 1,400-year-old heavenly speech of the Koran to the poetry of thirteenth-century mystics to the argot of Cairo street urchins. It is as if everyday English made use of both the original Greek and King James versions of the Bible along with gangsta rap and Pentagon bureaucratese.
Classical Arabic, the language of the written word, is seen as both immutable and universal. Its purity is institutionally maintained. A full-time staff at al-Azhar University vets every letter of every new edition of the Koran to ensure flawless concordance with ancient models. Protecting the literal word of God is a serious task indeed: theoretically, under Egyptian law, a misplaced diacritic in the Holy Scripture can result in a jail term. Cairo’s Arabic Language Academy, meanwhile, struggles to preserve classical usages by sifting musty texts to find pure Arabic terms for modern things such as computers and radios.
Like its French counterpart in Paris, the academy fights a mostly losing battle. Cairenes persist stubbornly in calling their gadgets al-radyū and al-kumbyūtar. Their spoken language has adapted inexorably to a millennium of outside influence. It has Arabized French and Italian terms for arts and mechanics; Turkish for ranks and professions; English for science and business. “Rubabikiyaaa!” is what any dealer in castoffs will cry as he pushes his barrow through Cairo’s streets, probably quite unaware that he is speaking recognizable Italian: robe vecchie=old clothes. “Alle uno, alle due, alle tre!” goes the countdown of a Cairene auctioneer as he disposes of an iskritwār istīl ambīr—an empire-style escritoire or writing desk, or a tableau romantique, a petit-point tapestry showing a picnic in some glade of eighteenth-century Bavaria such as any self-respecting Cairene mother-in-law would kill for.
Whereas classical Arabic is used sparingly in common speech, colloquial Arabic is rarely written down—except when its punch is needed, as in cartoon captions, song lyrics, or advertising. As opposed to classical Arabic’s vertical integration in time, colloquial Arabic undergoes horizontal variations according to geography. A Moroccan and an Iraqi have little or no hope of understanding each other unless they resort to the literary language—or at very least to the lingua franca of the Cairene dialect, which through music and film and television has projected itself throughout the Arab world.
Because of its scriptural roots, the high end of Arabic embodies an implication of how things should be. It is the language of ideals, of religion and the state: the language of the hero Baybars, in the model of his romance. The low end of Arabic—the speech of the antihero Osman—tends to reflect how things really are. Mostly the two voices stay apart, adding yet another dimension to the division of consciousness Cairo exhibits in its geography and manners. Sometimes the two fuse. A politician, say, will spice his high-blown rhetoric with some pithy colloquial phrase to underline a point. Beggars commonly quote from the Koran—the text that is the inimitable pinnacle of classical perfection—to attract alms.
High Arabic is what is used for news reporting. This gives current events a serious cast that has gone missing in the hyped-up West. “Summit Meeting Achieves Important Positive Results for Arab Solidarity and Bilateral Ties”—so reads a typically soporific Al-Ahram headline. Even the most lurid crime stories undergo a classical bleaching: “Thus I was obliged to deal the foul miscreant a mighty blow, so as to avenge my dear slain brother” is how the testimony of a vendetta murderer is likely to be rendered in print. The elegance of Arabic script adds weight to the simplest of meanings: the exquisite calligraphic medallions stenciled on the scuffed and dented sides of city buses say nothing more than “Cairo Transport Authority.”
The written language imbues official pronouncements with a sense of lapidary permanence. With Cairo’s broadcasting and its major newspapers in the hands of the state, their voice naturally assumes the role played by court biographers in Baybars’s time. They present the official history, the stock version. They order news not according to its significance but in order of the rank of the newsmaker—rather as ancient Egyptian artists always pictured the pharaoh three times the size of mere mortals. Occasionally the tone rises to the level of panegyrics nearly as saccharine as in a text found at Saqqara, which describes how courtiers replied to the pharaoh Amenophis III when he asked for advice on whom to appoint as chief steward of the port of Memphis. “Would we tell Ptah [the god of crafts] how to do a job?” the courtiers replied. “Would we teach Thoth [the god of letters] how to speak?”
EGYPT’S FAVORITE STORY in ancient times—judging by how often scribes copied it as a writing exercise from the Twelfth Dynasty onward—was the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant. It says much about the country’s enduring qualities that this story of a poor, oppressed farmer who talks himself all the way to the royal court of Memphis has never faded from folk consciousness. The biblical tale of Joseph was probably influenced by it. It inspired some of the earliest plays and musicals in twentieth-century Cairo. Even now, a long-running cartoon series in Al-Akhbar pictures a peasant who sits humbly at the foot of the prime minister, but manages to expose government bumbling by masterful circumlocution in preposterously countrified speech.
The endurance of the tale reflects the fact that in an ancient country where power has always been concentrated among a small elite in the capital, words have often been the only weapons in the hands of common people. While Cairo’s kings in every age have showered sycophants with gold, the common people have never shied from heaping rulers with ridicule.
Al-Mutanabbi was the most irreverent, and most beloved, of medieval Arab poets. Born in poverty as the son of a water bearer in the Iraqi city of Kufa, he quickly developed a talent for verse that allowed him to wander across the Arab East from one wealthy patron to the next. He made it eventually to Cairo—or Fustat, as the city was st
ill known in the tenth century. Here he earned his keep as a panegyrist at the court of Kafur al-Zimam.
This African eunuch—whose name, incidentally, meant Camphor, a typically cloying name for a household eunuch, but laughable for a sovereign ruler—had risen to control Egypt in the twilight years of the minor Ikhshid Dynasty, just before the arrival of the Fatimids. Kafur was partial to his court jesters. When, after the great earthquake of the year A.D. 954, one exclaimed that the tremor had been caused by the people dancing for joy because of their ruler’s virtues, he was rewarded by a purse of 1,000 gold dinars. Al-Mutanabbi, too, did well from such largesse. But in time he soured on his master. He accused Kafur of living high on the hog while the city starved. Inevitably the poet was obliged to flee Fustat. He took revenge by firing off this satirical blast:
Before meeting that eunuch, I seem to recall,
I thought thinking took place in the head.
Now I’ve scanned his wits, there’s no doubt at all
That thinking is done in the balls.
Such biting repartee surfaces over and over in the annals of the city. It was after Cairenes began to chant similar rhyming insults that the Mameluke sultan Baybars al-Jashankir had 300 tongues cut out. (He was soon overthrown.) A further small example: five centuries after al-Mutanabbi, the historian Ibn Taghribirdi wrote of a corrupt governor of Cairo that if a shoe were to smite the nape of his neck the shoe would protest, “For what sin am I being struck?” Sir Richard Burton recognized the same scoffing tone while translating The Thousand and One Nights. That amalgam of tales, he said, betrayed its Cairene influence with “a rollicking Rabelaisian humour underlaid by the caustic mother wit of Sancho Panza.”
To this day, nothing is so admired in Cairo as sharpness of wit. No trait is so despised as having what Egyptians call “heavy blood,” which is to say no sense of humor. The general hilarity can be grating: the jiving and joshing in any Cairo market street will strain the patience of anyone but a Cairene. But taken in the right spirit it is just plain fun—and certainly more so than the sullen mind-your-own-businessness typical of the West. A sharp sense of the ridiculous commonly spices the simplest exchanges. Where else would a taxidriver leap out of his cab, kneel down on the asphalt, and kiss the white line at an intersection? This happened once in front of me. “See, ya bey,” the cabbie shouted to the cop who was about to ticket him, “the white line isn’t angry anymore.”
With the same ease that Roman strangers discuss fine points of cuisine or Londoners the weather, Cairenes break the ice by cracking jokes and coining puns. The whiplash of humor can be heard at any café, capped by a round of belly laughs rising into peals of sheer delight. The best of Cairo’s casual comics can snap punch lines back and forth for hours on end until they exhaust themselves with laughter. Most often the butt of humor is the unfortunate Sa‘īdi or country bumpkin from Upper Egypt. A sample tale: An Alexandrian, a Cairene, and a Sa‘īdi are stranded in the desert. A jinn appears and grants them each one wish. “Stretch me on the beach at Maamoura surrounded by girls in bikinis,” says the Alexandrian, and vanishes. “Put me on a prayer mat in the Mosque of al-Husayn,” says the Cairene, and vanishes. The Sa‘īdi looks miserable. “I’m so lonely,” he says at last. “Can’t you bring my friends back?”
Not just Sa‘īdis suffer; Cairene humor holds nothing sacred. Within hours of President Sadat’s assassination in 1981 the city reverberated with the crackle of freshly minted jokes. Sadat, many had noticed shortly before his death, had developed a telltale “raisin”—the patch of puckered skin on the forehead that is a mark of excessive ardor in prayer. Few regarded his piety as sincere. When street sweepers cleaned up the fatal reviewing stand, I recall one café jokester saying on the very evening of the rayyis’s assassination, they found the presidential “raisin” on the floor.
The art of withering satire was once so highly developed that any matron of Cairo’s back alleys could, if provoked, savage a rival with an extended diatribe in rhyming prose. This unique form of verbal abuse, known as radḥ, was initiated by a gesture of contemptuous abandon as the assailant spread her milāya on the ground. Her speech was then delivered swaggeringly, with one hand crooked on the hip and the other cocked at the eyebrow. The salvo might go something like this:
You lowest of the low,
No lower can you go.
You rusty needle.
You dirty doormat.
You’re cheaper than a picture from a photomat.*2
CAIRENES MAY STILL be merciless jokers, but the ritual taunting of radḥ is more likely to be performed on television these days than live on the streets. On the small screen, the mud-slinging of alley housewives may be pictured as undignified and unfeminine or, more cuttingly, as a quaint custom from a bygone age.
Radio and television are powerful mass acculturators everywhere. Their homogenizing influence is particularly potent in a city such as Cairo, where only a slim majority can read and write. It is especially strong when the forces that control programming see themselves as engaged in a civilizing mission, and when few families have either the money or the physical space at home for other forms of entertainment. Even Cairo’s knack for resisting authority has not stopped it from succumbing to the medium’s conformist pressure. In today’s city, attitudes and aspirations are increasingly framed by television’s orthodoxies—by its presentation of mainstream religion and consumerism and by its particular reconstruction of Egypt’s past. In this way the heavy tones of high Arabic are making steady inroads into the carefree realm of the vulgate.
Cairo’s Establishment is used to imposing its own image on the rest of Egypt. The critic Lewis Awad neatly expressed the city intellectuals’ attitude to commoners thirty years ago when he declared it their duty to “rescue” their fellows from what he called “the hellish coarseness lurking around them like a ghoul waiting to ambush them and swallow them up.” What Awad had in mind was what he saw as the need to guide traditionbound Egyptians to more modern, secular notions of citizenship. Yet his sense of mission—and his fear of the ignorant mob—reflected a sense of distance from the masses that was little different from that assumed by Memphite nobles or medieval Mamelukes.
The government took its civilizing mission all too seriously after the 1952 revolution. It assumed a full monopoly of the press and the airwaves. News-papers that had reflected party or financial interests, and even more so television, which began broadcasting in 1962, became mouthpieces for government. With modernizing, socializing intent, censors sterilized films, plays, and even songs. They produced a list of sixty-four images that could never be filmed. Everyday sights such as donkeys, street vendors, and beggars were deemed too “uncouth” for public viewing. Scenes like strikes and demonstrations were “destabilizing”; in the celluloid version of Cairo, such events simply did not happen.
The state has relinquished many controls since, particularly regarding the printed word. Today, opposition journals cram Cairene newsstands with views from extreme left to far right. But whereas 73 percent of respondents in a 1997 survey said TV was their main source of news, only 8 percent said they relied on opposition newspapers. And whereas 90 percent of Cairo households own a television, barely a third of adults are high-school graduates.
Moreover, the government has kept its monopoly of the airwaves. The broadcasting industry it controls is huge in scale. Some 30,000 people work on thirty floors of studios and offices at the Ministry of Information’s mammoth Nileside headquarters. From here Radio Cairo beams forth the Voice of the Arabs, the Voice of Palestine, the Voice of the Valley (aimed at Egypt’s upstream neighbors in Sudan), the Voice of Cairo, and shortwave broadcasts in tongues from Amharic to Zulu as well as local programs in French, German, English, Italian, Greek, and Armenian. State television carries three channels in Cairo alone in addition to a satellite channel. In-house production fills nine-tenths of TV airtime—a significant feat in a world increasingly dominated by Hollywood. One recent Ramadan—the fasting month be
ing prime viewing season, since Egyptians tend to collapse in front of their TV sets after their sunset breakfast—the Ministry of Information launched no fewer that eighteen serials. They ranged from a kitsch costume-drama version of the now-fashionable epic of Bani Hilal to sitcoms to sociopolitical sagas.
Popular serials draw 20-million-strong audiences and stretch to more than 100 episodes. Some, like the 1993 series Layali al-Hilmiyya, which traced three generations in the life of one of the older quarters of the city, tackle social questions realistically. On the whole, though, Cairo’s TV fare is stodgy and didactic. This is perhaps inevitable given the alliance between the government’s propaganda needs and the superior class attitudes of most producers and directors. The prim tastes of the conservative Arab oil monarchies impose a further constraint, since these countries constitute the major export markets for Egyptian TV dramas. Morality guidelines in Saudi Arabia, for instance, forbid a female character from appearing alone in a room with a male character who is neither her husband nor a close relative.
The cooks in the Ministry of Information kitchens keep Cairo’s information diet bland, but they are not the only bawābs of public taste. With the excuse of maintaining cultural standards in music, a body known as the Listeners’ Committee must approve all songs broadcast on Cairo radio. The stuffy committee rarely approves of innovation, relegating popular sounds to the bootleg cassette circuit. The pop singer Ahmad Adawiyya, who sold millions of tapes during the 1980s, has never had a single one of his innuendo-laced hits broadcast, because the committee considers them too “base.” (Faced with a similar ban, one performer printed his cassettes with the address and phone number of the state censor.) Theater and movies suffer restrictions, too. Film directors must submit both screenplays and finished prints to the government’s Bureau of Artistic Content. And, although they have cultivated ad-libbing into a fine art, Cairo’s stage actors can still face prosecution for departing from approved scripts or otherwise offending “public morality.”