Clearly, Cairo’s fascination with the dead had somehow overruled the Prophet’s explicit injunction against showing them undue reverence. In fact, a spectacular revival of tomb-building had followed the arrival of Islam in A.D. 640. And just as the funeral monuments of Saqqara and Giza recorded the city’s earliest incarnations in stone, so were the tombs of the holy men and rulers and chief citizens of the Muslim era to chronicle its fortunes right down to the present.
A MIRROR TO Memphis’s ancient necropolis spreads all around the animal market of al-Khalifa, stretching north and south for five miles along the foot of the Muqattam cliffs. Its mightiest sepulchers are domed, not peaked in pyramids. Denser and more democratic than its pagan forebear and very much alive, this City of the Dead also tells parallel histories: one spiritual, the other earthly.
As one heads upstream, away from the city and deeper into the cemetery, the animal market dwindles to a last few pigeon hobbyists. The beastly babble fades into the domestic patter of a quiet suburb. Order is restored. Streets run straight and dignified between the walls of family tomb plots. Behind wrought-iron gateways are houselike structures of one story, with here and there a dome signifying the tomb of someone more important, such as the ninth-century mystic Dhu’l-Nun al-Misri or the twentieth-century singer Umm Kulsoum. The older tombs are in stone. Newer ones are of fine pink brick, which shows a care for quality that all but rich Cairenes rarely bother with in houses.
Window grills and open doorways reveal interior courts festooned with bright-colored laundry. Women sit circled on mats around TV sets and primus smells, while bare-bottomed toddlers play hide-and-seek among the cenotaphs. No one knows exactly how many people live in the tombs. Estimates range from 50,000 to ten times that number—it is as hard to say, as it is hard to define where the tombs end and the living city begins. The fact is that, like the Memphite necropolis in its heyday, Cairo’s City of the Dead has always been home to a shifting population. Some of the tomb dwellers, especially the paid guardians and their families, have lived here for generations. Others, pushed by poverty, have moved in more recently to take advantage of the graveyards’ open skies and proximity to the modern city center. The number of squatters has swollen as Cairo itself has expanded, its unstoppable growth turning cemeteries that once marked the shore of the desert into islands surrounded by denser human habitation.
Off to the left, a funeral procession shutters in and out of view down successive perpendicular alleyways. It hurries at a murmuring trot: these funerals are speedy affairs, since Muslim custom demands burial before sunset on the day of death. Besides, the burden is heavy. The pallbearers jostle antlike under the bier, whose swaddling of undyed cloth turns it into a monster larva. Volunteers relay forward to shoulder their share. The Koran reader in his dark gray caftan and rounded, blue-tasseled fez scuttles along with the rest. He is preparing in his mind, one supposes, the instructions he will give to the deceased on how to answer the interrogating angels of the grave, Munkar and Nakeer, who will come to torment him after dark. The somber caravan slips past. It is not numerous; the dead man is neither rich nor famous.
Down to the right, into a narrower lane, and a ramshackle flea market is open for trade. Sellers squat against the walls with their wares spread before them: used baby shoes, broken bathroom fittings, a yellowed sheaf of movie posters, a few links of chain, a baby carriage with one wheel. Goods from neighborhood workshops vie for a place in the dust, too: TV aerials concocted from old tin cans, waterpipes jerry-rigged out of fly-spray canisters, shopping bags sewn from plastic fertilizer sacks. A straggle of buyers shuffles and pokes.
Abruptly there are buildings of two and three floors instead of tombs. More people—a crowd, almost—accumulate in the well-shaded footway. The alley opens, debouching into a wide street where a small carnival is under way. Leaning towers of paper cones ring pyramids of yellow lupin seeds mounded on brightly painted wooden pushcarts. Vendors amble about tooting horns and touting plastic toys and tinfoil party hats. A tatterdemalion rocket ride that has been welded out of oil drums cranks slowly into a spin, its cargo of tiny tots squealing delight.
This is the mawlid, or annual festival, of Muhammad Ibn Idris al-Shafi‘i, a Muslim jurist of the ninth century whose great mausoleum is the centerpoint of the tombs of al-Khalifa. This sheer cube of a building capped with a high, metal-clad dome rises austerely out of the festival clutter like a dusty Duomo. But this is no longer the monument Ibn Battuta described as enjoying an immense revenue—“an exceedingly fine piece of architecture and exceptionally lofty.” Like any folk shrine worth its salt, the building has been so over-laid with additions and accretions that little of the initial artistic intent remains. Its potency now is spiritual, not aesthetic.
Or that is what one must guess, surrendering one’s footwear to the quick-fingered shoekeeper at the door and stepping inside, to be swarmed in the sudden gloom by a whispering hush of supplicants. They are women mostly, enveloped in the black shrouds of the poor, fragrant with the musty sourness of close rooms and scarce water and misfortune. Some press up close to the elaborate wooden screen surrounding the saint’s cenotaph, directly under the dome, and mumble prayers for health or forgiveness. Others stalk purposefully around the perimeter in imitation of the circling of the Black Stone at Mecca—and perhaps even in a distant reenactment of fertility rites around the Benben stone at Heliopolis.*1
FOLLOWING A LONG career as a leading jurist of his age, Imam al-Shafi‘i died at Misr al-Fustat in A.D. 820. During his lifetime scholars had worked to fix a legal code for Islam based on the Koran and the sayings and acts of the Prophet. The ‘ulema—the men of ‘ilm or science, which is to say Islamic learning—had reached consensus on some matters of law but differed on others. Al-Shafi’i gained fame by seeking compromises. He argued that, while the school of Malik ibn Anas (a jurist who lived at Medina in A.D. 716–95) stuck too rigidly to the letter of sacred texts, the rival school of Abu Hanifa (who taught at Kufa in Iraq and died in A.D. 767) was excessively free in its interpretation. Shafi‘i proposed instead an amalgam of the two, and this middle path soon developed into a separate school of law. He also systematized the science of jurisprudence. Shafi‘i’s methodology, if not his interpretations, were accepted by all the schools of Islamic law.
Although in modern times the domain of religious law has been limited—in Egypt, at least—to areas such as inheritance and marriage, the moderate Shafi‘ite school still predominates in the city. (This is one reason why there is no hand-chopping, flogging, or lapidation here, as imposed by the Saudis, who are avid followers of Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, the founder of the last, and sternest, accepted school of Sunni law, and who died at Baghdad in A.D. 855.) More about legalities later. The point is that Imam al-Shafi’i is an important figure in the Islamic civilization of Cairo, a man whose credentials for a kind of sainthood are sound. This is more than can be said for many of the 300-odd other Muslim holy men and women whose tomb shrines pepper the traditional quarters of the city.
Take the most popular saint of all, the Prophet’s grandson al-Husayn. The noble provenance, piety, and notable death of al-Husayn are beyond dispute—indeed, his murder, at the order of Caliph Yazid in A.D. 680, became one of the central dramas of Shi‘ite Islam.*2 But it is a well-known fact that the martyr’s body was buried in Iraq. All Cairo can lay claim to is the poor fellow’s severed head, but even that claim is tenuous. The grisly relic was said to have traveled first to Damascus, then to Ascalon in Palestine. Not until 1153 was it whisked to Cairo, to save it from advancing Christian Crusaders. But then at least one medieval source declares that this was not al-Husayn’s head at all, but his grandson’s.
Regardless of doubts, the funerary mosque of al-Husayn remains Cairo’s most venerated shrine. It is where politicians have shown themselves praying on TV and where, once a year and every night for a full week, a million-strong crowd gathers to celebrate al-Husayn’s martyrdom. It may be that the Shi‘ites of Iran mark the saint’s death
by public weeping and self-flagellation, but Cairo’s mawlid devotees, joined by the thousands of country folk who pour into the city to snooze and brew tea in the medieval alleyways surrounding the shrine, come for fun as much as for devotion. The revelry begins after dusk, gaining momentum far into the early hours. Fairgoers jive and joke and test their skill in shooting galleries and trials of strength. Some, drawn by the rhythm of drums and the whine of reed flutes, join ritual dances in the dozens of marquees set up by different Sufi brotherhoods. Others press into the shrine itself to gain the saint’s baraka or blessing, while Brueghel-faced beggars and weasel-featured pickpockets work the throngs outside.
One night, while squeezing through the crowds some distance from the saint’s tomb, I felt a clutching at my sleeve. I looked, and found the blind eyes of a stooped old man beseeching me. In a thick country accent he begged me to lead him to al-Husayn, and as I piloted him through the noise and confusion, he kept repeating, “Ya Husayn! Praise be to God!” When we merged in the fervent crush at the door of the shrine I felt him tremble with anticipation. His hand slipped down to mine, which he kissed and raised to his forehead. “May the Lord preserve your sight, my son,” he cried before vanishing over the threshold like a bird released from a cage.
But why is it that Cairo, whose Muslim faith is solidly of the orthodox Sunni kind, should venerate this Shi‘ite martyr? And, for that matter, how is it that some Muslims have also come to sanctify the tombs of the Prophet’s friends and relations, not to mention sundry jurists and sheikhs and fakirs? The answers lie in the matrix of tensions that have always characterized Islam—between literal and allegorical readings of Scripture, between pristine ideals and less tidy facts, between the demands of the faith and the will of rulers; in short, between the Word of God and the needs of man.
Edward Lane, an English Orientalist and student of this city, reported 170 years ago that even as Cairo’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews abhorred one another’s doctrines, they happily shared each others’ superstitions.*3 Like the earlier creeds, Islam had to grapple with enduring pagan instincts, including a common yearning for physical closeness to the deity. Jews found this, perhaps, in the covenants that God is said to have given them as his Chosen People. Christian belief adapted to preexisting faiths wherever it went, then channeled pagan idol worship into a reverence for icons of its own elaborate cast of martyrs and saints. Abjuring both exclusivism and graven images, Islam sought more personal intervention.
This is what the mawlids are, in essence, about. They revolve around the tomb of a person who, by some sign or other, appeared to his contemporaries to be a wāli—one close to God. To be near one so blessed, even after his death, is therefore to approach the divine. There is a whiff of something very ancient here, as the Egyptologist Sir Gardner Wilkinson noted more than a century ago: “The remark of Herodotus, that the Egyptians could not live without a king, may find a parallel in their impossibility of living without a pantheon of saints. And, notwithstanding the positive commands of Islam to allow no one to share any of the honours due to the deity alone, no ancient or modern religion could produce a larger number of divine claimants.”
Yet some mawlids embrace an element of Bacchanalian excess that seems completely at odds with their declared purpose—let alone what the textbooks of monotheism have to say. To cite an obscure but diverting clue, back in 450 B.C. Herodotus witnessed a festival of Dionysus just north of Memphis. A procession of ladies marched down a village street, each toting an effigy of the god that was fitted with outsized genitals on a hinge. The simple mechanism allowed the ladies to wag the penises provocatively by tugging on a string. Now, earlier in the twentieth century, Joseph McPherson came across a parade in a village just outside the capital. It was the festival of a local wāli, he discovered, and on this day the villagers chose their handsomest lad to lead a parade. Carried stark naked through the streets on a sort of throne, the youth had a cord tied to his penis which an accomplice would jiggle to keep his virile member erect.
Such goings-on have long brought onto mawlids the opprobrium of the orthodox—as well as the skepticism of the educated classes. This is why they have grown increasingly rare. Yet the mawlid of Sayyida Zaynab, the sister of the martyred al-Husayn, and Cairo’s second most popular saint, still maintains a reputation for lewdness. On the big night hundreds of thousands of youths in high spirits cram the wide square in front of her shrine, not far from the city center.
There were too many for comfort on a recent visit, so I looked for diversion in the alleys and side streets. Peasant families huddled here around gas lamps and charcoal braziers, inviting all and sundry to join them for tea or a meal or just a chat. Wider spaces were filled by color-patterned marquees put up for the occasion by varied orders and lodges among the seventy-odd Sufi brotherhoods registered in Egypt. Every tent housed its own band and singer of dhikr—odes in love of God. The overall noise may have been a clashing, amplified chaos that could be heard for miles around, but inside each tent the dervishes concentrated solely on their own guide and rhythm and music. A few wore city clothes—some suits and ties, even—but most, having traveled here from all across Egypt, wore country galabiyyas. Eyes squeezed tight in trance, the dancers hurled their shoulders this way and then that, back and forth in time with the beat, some swaying, some thrashing, some hopping as if on coals, their ecstasy mounting higher and higher as the tempo quickened.
Sellers of popcorn and party hats plied the pushing crowds gathered outside, and around the shooting galleries and boat-shaped swings that whooping daredevils rocked into continuous, dizzying whirls. A magic show occupied a trailer that was camouflaged under lurid signboards showing lightning bursting from a dwarf’s fingertip, a turbaned impresario with voodoo eyes, and a scantily dressed dame reclining voluptuously in minaret-high levitation. The barker, a languid youth in a Ronald Reagan T-shirt, paced up and down with a mike, packing in kids with a seamless harangue promising sights never seen before and Susu the talking head.
The next marquee was a mystery. There was no sign of what the show might be, but the raptest jamboree of adolescent boys I have ever seen thronged the narrow entrance like a swarm of hornets, craning and shoving to get in and get close. An enthralled, musk-laden urgency seemed to charge their faces. The squirming then stopped abruptly, and the boys stood still, as a tenor wail wafted through the flimsy canvas walls. The voice moaned and undulated, heaved and panted, sighing through pitch after pitch in a spectacular and apparently endless crescendo of oohs and ahs. As the spine-tingling caterwaul went on and on, it slowly dawned on me that the entertainment these youths had paid a rial for was a kind of aural pornography. What held them in such utter and unaccustomed reverence was nothing less than an impersonation of the wildest cries of female arousal.
IT WOULD BE misleading, however, to imply that mawlids are simply a relic of pagan forms of worship.
Although Cairenes had venerated Muslim holy men from the earliest age of Islam, the big boost for sainthood did not come until 350 years after the Arab conquest. Until then Egypt had been a province of the Abbasid Empire, whose seat was
in distant Baghdad. Cairo—or Misr al-Fustat, as it was still known—was merely a provincial capital, an industrial town lacking the splendor of a court.
In A.D. 969 a new and radically different dynasty swept in from Tunisia and wrested Egypt from Abbasid control. In contrast to the caliphs of Baghdad—Sunni Muslims whose legitimacy sprang from their descent from the Prophet’s uncle Abbas—the upstart dynasty claimed a purer provenance, direct from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. The so-called Fatimids were Shi‘ites, and so believed that one man in each generation of a certain line of descent from the Prophet held a semidivine authority to interpret the will of God. Conveniently, this infallible imam was none other than the reigning Fatimid caliph.
Thinking to seclude their court from their subjects, the Fatimids founded a royal precinct a few miles north of Misr al-Fustat. The walled, one-and-a-half-mile-square city was to be an exclusive zone of palaces and parade grounds and private gardens—a sort of precursor to the Kremlin or to the Forbidden City of Beijing. Heeding the advice of astrologers, they called the place al-Qahira, after the planet Mars the Triumphant. (Italian traders, with that inability to pronounce that has so often recurred here, soon garbled the name into Cairo.)*4 This was the beginning of the city’s golden age. Fustat still prospered, but over time it became a mere satellite of ever-expanding Cairo. For 500 years, under the Fatimids and their successors, Cairo would be the capital of an empire that embraced the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem—an empire whose ever-changing borders nudged at one time or another the Taurus Mountains in the north, the Tigris River in the east, the Yemeni highlands in the south, and the coasts of Sicily in the west.