Churches, Synagogues, and Mosques: My Trip to Coptic Cairo

Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. The Mother came to visit about ten days ago and she ran me ragged from dawn till dusk doing everything Cairo has to offer. But she’s left now, and I will have a post coming sometime soon on her visit. But for now, enjoy this one.

“Copt or Coptic?” This is what I woke up saying to myself one morning. I had decided to spend the day in Coptic Cairo but was annoyed that I had neglected to do my research in advance. Feeling weekend-lazy, the only way I could get moving was to excuse myself from doing some advance fact-finding. I decided I’d go in cold and figure out this mysterious district of southern Cairo on the fly. But I just had to know: are they called Copts or Coptics? Surely, I figured, this was the least I could do. But when I began considering going back to bed, I gave up on even this minor piece of information, took a shower, and headed out.

After a brief stop in Islamic Cairo to take some photos, I caught a taxi to Coptic Cairo. I wasn’t sure how to tell the driver where I wanted to go, but my knowledge of the city was good enough that I could get him headed in the right direction while I tried everything from repeating “Kanisa! Kanisa!” (Church! Church!) to genuflecting, to asking him to pull over so I could try to ask an English speaker for help. When all these failed, I was at a loss until I finally saw a church spire, which I pointed to while enthusiastically exclaiming in Arabic, “I want the place with lots of those!” That seemed to get to him, and with a big smile we made the next left and headed off.

Ten minutes later we pulled up to a police road block and I was made to understand that this was the end of the road. I paid my driver, hopped out, and started walking the rest of the way. It was a strange scene. Because no cars were allowed on the road, there was an unnatural calm and civility that was compounded by the fact that all the building were sparkly white. Although all the store fronts were filled with people, there was a tangible calm on this three block corridor to the world of Coptic Cairo.

Entering this strange place, I could not help but realize how defensive the layout of the area is. All of the churches are contained within a twenty foot tall white wall. Moreover, they are all huddled together in a way that reminded me of how the pioneers used to make camp by circling up all of their covered wagons in a defensive posture. Taking it further, the pioneers needed to create for themselves a small circle of harmony that could at least provide the illusion of safety because the outside world was vast and alien and almost always adversarial. This, too, is Coptic Cairo.

The geography of the place is confusing. You might think that once you enter the gates the Coptic world would open up to you. But you’d be wrong. Sometimes a church would be right through a gate along the wall. Other times you’d find churches down a number of turns through tiny alleyways.

I’ve tried throughout my time here to establish some independence from my guide book. I say this mostly tongue in cheek, but I do have to be careful sometimes to try to think a bit independently so that I can have a unique experience, all my own. As soon as I arrived to the first church, however, I decided to take a quick look in the book. At the beginning of the section is a little information box titled “The Copts.” First mystery solved. The bottom line is that the book proved so reliable in helping navigate the twists and turns of the neighborhood, that I used it all the way through. From here on, any history comes from The Rough Guide to Egypt, but the observations are all mine.

The first church was the Hanging Church. Ok, I’d bet that the church was not named that by early Copts but rather by those hoping to bring in generous tourists. Now, if I were a tourist minded fellow, I would be careful not to over-sell on the title if the location itself cannot live up. Entering the gates of the Hanging Church, I had visions of an architectural mystery explained away as divine intervention by centuries of graying monks.

Instead, I saw a perfectly nice church, its perfect white front wall attesting to the care with which it’s been up kept. Ascending the dozen stairs to the church itself, I realized how picturesque and humble it all was. Upon entering the church, I took a look around and got my introduction to the plain style with which the Copts build their houses of worship. The walls were very plain, probably brick or plaster and there were some paintings of holy figures on the walls with candles lit in their honor. The ceiling of the church was wooden with intricate beams criss-crossing and leaving little room for the few stained-glass windows nestled within the maze of beams. The pews were all plain wood. In spite of the physical modesty, there was something grand about the place. Our church in Bangall, New York, for example, is bigger than this one, but the majesty of the two is incomparable. I suppose that what gives it this stature its lasting nature, the idea that it has been around for so many centuries and will be around for many more.

After I had checked it all out, I asked the souvenir saleswoman at the front while they called it the Hanging Church. While her answer was a letdown with regard to the word hanging, something else she said was fascinating. The church was built on two stanchions (that I later saw through a window on the floor of the church), which hold the church fifteen or twenty feet above the ground. The reason that this church was built so high is because the Nile used to flood up to it back in the seventh century when it was built. It was built, therefore, on the two towers of the “Water Gate.” I should point out how dramatic the flooding must have been since the church is several blocks away from the river.

After leaving the church, I followed the outside of the guard wall to the twin pillars of Trajan’s fortress build in 130AD. Because one of the turrets is falling apart, the bowels of thing are exposed and the sophistication of the architecture can be understood.

I also took a quick look into the grounds of the church and monastery of St. George where I saw the grandest and most regal church that Coptic Cairo has to offer. The only round church in Cairo, the Church of St. George defines the skyline of this neighborhood, and its ornate insides are a testament to the importance that Copts bestow on it.

All of these buildings that I’ve mentioned thus far were accessible from the main road outside the gates, but past the cemetery of St. George was a set of stairs, leading to a dark underground tunnel, which in turn led to the heart of the neighborhood. The end of the short tunnel opened up into another strange alleyway which was as narrow as some of those in Islamic Cairo but different in that it was much cleaner and light on commerce. There were some shops and vendors, but there was also a misplaced peace about it.

I took only a quick peek into the Convent of St. George, noticing he sheep and doves in the front lawn, and deciding against following my guidebook’s advice of begging the nuns to wrap me in St. George’s chains for a photo-op.

From here I would meander my way down many an alleyway to look in this or that church. Because many of the churches looked similar in their cimplicity, I’ll spare you the play-by-play, but I’ll note a few memorable moments.

After leaving the convent, I took a couple turns down the alley before ducking under a five foot tall opening in the wall and making my way down yet another road to the Church of St. Sergius, founded in the fifth century. When I walked into the church, there was a rather large tourist family standing near the entrance. I had been in the church for about a minute when I suddenly heard a commotion from where the family was. I looked over to see a Coptic priest, black robes, gold chains, gray beard and all, yelling (and I mean yelling) at a boy in the group who looked about my age. The priest’s Arabic was too fast and furious for me to follow, but at the end of the tirade, the priest reached way back and laid a hard slap on the face of the frightened young man. The priest then chased the family out, and they kept running until they were halfway down the block. The only thing faster than they were… was me. As a confirmed, God-fearing Catholic, I knew to put as much distance as possible in as little time as possible between me and an angry priest.

I checked into a few more churches before trying to find the Church of St. Barbara, which was marked as particularly remote on my map. Wandering around for a while, I finally asked one of the many, many policemen for directions. He sent me off on my way with a few quick instructions, and I made my way to the church, took a quick look around inside, and headed back. The return, however, was not as simple as I had imagined. When I got back to the little gateway, guarded by the policeman who’d given me directions, he appeared from the other side of the entrance and planted himself firmly in my way. My first instinct, that he wanted to try out some English on me, turned out to be wrong. All he said to me was, “Money.” When I didn’t reply, he repeated, “Money,” adding, “I give you help before.” Having faced cops like this one before (I may have even blogged about them already), I was not about to back down. I’ve learned that while policemen feel emboldened to ask for money, their uniform constrains them from pushing too much. Not about to give this guy even the pleasure of a conversation, I said, “No.” With that, he gave me one of this looks as though he was expecting me to finish the sentence with a “Pleeeeaaase. I don’t have a lot of money.” If he wasn’t going to get money from me, he at least wanted a little pleading. “No,” I repeated. This guy clearly didn’t want to push his luck because he backed down and let me pass with a forced smile.

One quick word. I’ve found that everyone in Cairo understands the word “No.” I’ve also found that “No” has a much more confident and effective ring to it that its Arabic equivalent, “La.” Try walking down the street someday when you’re being solicited and just say to everyone, “La, la, la, la.” It doesn’t radiate confidence.

After the incident with the policeman, I realized that I had seen all the churches, so I headed to the only place left in Coptic Cairo: The Ben Ezra Synagogue. According to my guidebook, there are fewer than two hundred Jews left in Egypt. If this is true, then by entering that synagogue, I was witnessing some strange bookends of history. Let me explain. According to tradition, this ornate structure was build on the site that Moses the infant was plucked from the bulrushes on the banks of the flooded Nile by the Pharoah’s daughter. Moses, of course, led the Jews out of Egypt in an escape from their oppressors. With only two hundred Jews left in Egypt, I couldn’t help but feel the symbolism in standing on the site that witnessed the beginnings of the man who would lead the great exodus, and in living in the time, thousands of years later, when that exodus was nearly reaching completion.

When I left the synagogue, I followed the maze back out to the main road and set off on a small walk to find a taxi. Before I could find one, I saw the hulking structure of a monolithic mosque. Flipping through my guidebook, I found that this was the Amr Mosque, a direct descendant of Egypt’s first mosque. Captivated by the obvious symbolism in visiting a church, a synagogue, and a mosque all in one day, I took off my shoes at the threshold and walked in. All I could hear was the whir of hundreds of ceiling fans. Spread out across the vast colonnade were a couple dozen men lying on the floor, enjoying the shade and the cool breeze. While mosques I would visit on other days would be magnificent in their architecture, this one was plain, build functionally fourteen-hundred years ago to hold the entire Muslim army. I strolled for a while, enjoying the tranquility and the silence. Soon I put my shoes back on and headed out.

As I had my hand raised waiting for a taxi, my mind wandered, as it often does, to this blog. I thought with a good deal of excitement about the post I could write about the day. Visiting a church, a synagogue, and a mosque all in one day is certainly good material given what’s going on in the world today. But I’ve resisted rambling on about that point and will instead leave it to you, the reader, to consider the importance of that, to understand the magnitude of being able to do that in, of all places, Cairo, which is a place not all that far from countries where the privilege of visiting houses of worship of these three religions would be next to impossible.

A Little Slice of Egypt

Egypt struggles with a constant tug of war between the conservative Islamic world and the modern western world. This past week, I have had the pleasure (and at some points, shock) of witnessing the frontlines of this battle as it played out in the world of popular culture. It took about a second and a half after I arrived in Egypt before I first started hearing about the phenomenon of The Yacoubian Building. Written four years ago by an Egyptian dentist, this novel raised some eyebrows and earned moderate sales at the time, but when the region’s most famous actors came together last year to make it into a movie, the book became iconic and explosive, and hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear some discussion of it.

When I went to the American University bookstore a couple weeks ago, I asked the manager what books were the biggest ones in the country at present. He said two things: anything by Naguib Mahfouz and The Yacoubian Building. Aside from it being fascinating that books Mahfouz wrote fifty years ago are still hot, I became enthralled with the whole culture surrounding this other book that everyone was talking so much about. I had heard descriptions of The Yacoubian Building that ranged from “Oh, it’s not that bad!” to “It’s disgusting, some of the things he wrote,” and I realized that this book held a major key to understanding the war over social decency in Egypt.

The book is a series of stories that tells about the lives of ten or so Egyptians. The common thread that binds all of them is that they all live in or work at a large and historically important building in downtown called the Yacoubian Building. The stories are interwoven, with each chapter lasting just a couple pages before leaping to another character’s tale. The beauty of the book is that each story plods along, granting an intriguing look into Egyptian society, until they all reach jarring, but unforced, climaxes at the end.

My first impression of the book, after a sitting in which I read the first fifty pages, was that this was a cheap story over-focused on sex. Everybody at the beginning was having cheap lustful sex plagued with the guilt of defying Egypt’s conservative social norms. But as I read on, I understood the mastery of the writing, that this was an amazing character study that showed how often survival in Cairo meant a betrayal of one’s values.

I want to get into the plot a little here, so I recommend you stop reading this post if you think you might be tempted to read the novel and don’t want the story spoiled.

One girl, Busayna, who lived in the shack-city on top of the Yacoubian Building, was faced with providing for her whole family. A good and modest girl, she was appalled to learn from her friends how easy it was to make a few extra pounds a day by letting her employer take her for ten minutes into the back room. Her initial discomfort turns to easy submission as she realizes how much more she can bring to her family for a few minutes of displeasure everyday.

Another character, Hagg Azzam, wants to enter the parliament because he feels the genuine urge to give back to the community that had given him so much success. He quickly finds that bosses run the election process and he is forced to bribe his way into office and subsequently pay off his higher-ups to maintain power. Furthermore, Hagg had taken on a second wife, with the blessing of a Sheik, when he began feeling lustful urges that his first wife could not fulfill. He kept this second wife secretly housed in an apartment in Cairo, and she accepted this because of the great income it would bring her family. When she becomes pregnant, in violation of their marital conditions, Hagg insists she have an abortion. When she refuses, he sends people to her house in the middle of the night to forcibly abort her child. This decision was made not for financial reasons but because he knew a child with his secret wife would destroy his social standing and likely get him removed from parliament.

A character named Zaki Bey is one of the novels most gripping characters. He is the building’s oldest tenant, and, as the title Bey denotes, he is a remnant of the pre-Nasser era in which noblemen were seriously respected. Living off his family’s great wealth, the Bey does little with his life other than try to find women to get into bed with. To me, the most amazing, scene in the movie comes when the Bey is stumbling home with his girlfriend from a night of drinking. Hardly able to walk, the Bey stops right in the middle of Midan Talat Harb, a major city center, and looks around at the dilapidated buildings and the dirty streets. He starts screaming to no one in particular about the state of the city. He screams, “Look was has become of Cairo!” His point is that before Nasser’s populist movement took hold, the city was fresh and European; it was clean and thriving until the past fifty years laid it to waste.

Where the Bey represents all that Egypt once was, the doorman’s son Taha represents what the country has become. It is also an interesting argument for how terrorists come to be. Straight edge and well meaning, Taha has fought the social odds and excelled at school. The novel begins with him interviewing for a job to become a member of the police force. The interview goes well and Taha feels confident until the sergeant interviewing him asks what his father does. “Civil servant, sir,” Taha replies. Pressed further, Taha admits that his father is a bowab, or doorman. As soon as the word “bowab” slips from his mouth, the sergeant roars, “Dismissed!” From there, Taha begins his studies at Cairo University where he comes to embrace Islam and meet a radical Sheik who organizes a political protest that he asks Taha to lead. When he’s arrested at the protest, Taha refuses to give the police the name of the Sheik who’s responsible for it all. From there, the author graphically details how Taha becomes violently molested by the police for weeks until, frustrated, they let him go. From there, Taha becomes hell-bent on revenge and joins an Islamist group that trains him in the ways of terrorism. Taha finally gets his chance to enact his revenge, which he does furiously by gunning down the man who had led his interrogation, before being gunned down himself.

The genius of Taha’s character is how, over the course of a three hundred page novel, he goes from desperately seeking admission to the police academy to being a violent terrorist fixated on revenge. Each step in his progression towards terrorism is natural and understandable. The reader can sympathize with each step he takes in that direction, and his demise is agonizing. The brilliance in the writing is that the author forces you to have to keep reminding yourself that Taha is a terrorist and that he does die committing a horrible crime. In spite of all that, all you want to do is root for this character, one who is just another victim of the system.

There were many more characters and stories in the novel. But I won’t bother recounting them all to you for fear of turning this entry into too much of a fifth grade book report! I’m just trying to hit the major ones that give the greatest insight into this enigmatic culture.

And now a few words about the movie….

In order to understand what it was like to see this movie, it’s first necessary to understand a thing or two about Egyptian movie-going. When I went to see what film had done to this novel, I decided to go to the Grand Hyatt cinemas which was the only place showing the movie with subtitles. The small theater with assigned seats was filled with people of all backgrounds: westerners, Saudis, Kuwaitis, liberally dressed Egyptians, and women wearing with full covering. I’m glad that I had read the book ahead of time because apparently nobody gets the concept of silencing his or her cell phones for a movie. And I don’t mean that a cell phone went off a couple of times. Without fail, not five minutes would go by without a ring. Literally. And the ringtones were all Arab pop songs so that I began to feel as though I was in some sort of disco. On top of that, half the people who received calls, answered them and began talking! They made evening plans, checked in with loved ones, etc. This was enough to put me in an edgy and annoyed mood, which the film exploited so that when I left three hours later, I was angry and disillusioned.

There were two insights I gained from watching the film. While in the book all the characters earned somewhat equal billing, the film shifted the focus so that Zaki Bey became the main character. Played by the Middle East’s most famous actor, the Bey stood stalwart as a remnant from the old days, and his was the only story that did not end in Shakespearean like tragedy. While all the other stories were like watching a train-wreck in slow motion, the Bey rose in the face of his tribulations and closed the film with his engagement party to a girl he had grown to love. I thought that this made for intriguing social commentary.

While the book described many of the sex scenes in graphic detail, the movie was cautious to not over-expose the scandalous scenes. For example, the cameras would cut in just as sex had finished or would cut out just as sex was beginning. While suggestion was strong, the filmmakers played to the more modest sensibilities of the Egyptian moviegoers. But what was so shocking was the gruesome detail that the filmmakers include in the scene where Taha is shot dead while taking his revenge. While they wouldn’t let you see a moment of sex, the filmmakers slow the film down to agonizingly slow motion to show Taha get pumped full of bullets and his blood flying everywhere as he staggers to his death. The last you see of Taha is as he’s lying on the ground, body riddled with bullet holes and blood trickling into the nearby gutter. This is a scene that would have been graphic by American standards, but it is in which the makers of the movie spared no expense in showing Taha’s slow death.

One final observation. One major character who I have not yet mentioned is Hatim, the gay editor-in-chief of one of Cairo’s major newspapers. Hatim makes a habit of wandering the streets in search of one-night stands. He practices a more sophisticated form of prostitution, showering his would-be lovers with gifts and wine until they are flattered enough and drunk enough to get into bed with him. Neither the book nor the movie really give good insight into popular opinion of homosexuality. Rather, it was the movie going experience that said it all. Hatim finds himself a boyfriend, Abduh, and is very happy for most of the movie until Abduh’s baby son becomes sick and dies at the hospital. Hatim comes home to find that Abduh and his wife have vacated the room that he had given them on top of the Yacoubian building, and that they left no note telling where they were going. In a dramatic moment, Hatim opens the door to the tiny rooftop room to find it completely empty of Abduh’s possessions, and he starts bawling at the realization that he’s just lost someone he loves. What was so incredible was that as soon Hatim started crying, the audience in the movie theater began to howl with laughter. They roared on for several minutes as Hatim pours all of his emotions out in heaving sobs. I, along with the other Americans who I was watching with movie with, all exchanged bewildered glances as the hoots of laughter continued on. This, I thought, was the most telling scene in the film. The Arab movie goers found it uproariously funny that the gay man would cry at the loss of a lover, and I completely understood what Arab perception of homosexuality was.

This movie-book combo did as much for my understanding of the Egyptian world as any day spent out on the streets. It showed to me Egyptians’ accepting of death and terrorism and their discomfort with sex and homosexuality. It showed me that at the heart of Egyptian culture is a certain pressure to betray one’s values to get ahead. It showed that the system in place is easily exploited and that there is a need to take advantage of that. It showed me the existence of the old Cairo that still believes in the days when the Nile flooded and noblemen ruled the land. Most of all, it showed me that at the heart of this culture, there is something far darker and more complex than I had expected, and that I’m much further from understanding this place than I could ever have imagined.

Talking Politics... Reluctantly

The last thing I ever try to do is start a political conversation with Egyptians on the street. But somehow, I feel as though I’ve had more than my fair share. I’m careful with who I engage in politics; discussing Israel and Lebanon, Iraq, or George Bush is intensely emotional for Egyptians, but it is a conversation I want to have because I have a lot to learn about the Egyptian mind and heart, and politics is a big part of their makeup. So I enter carefully, discussing only with my teachers, my landlord, and a few other select people who I can trust to discuss rationally.

But then there are those conversations I didn’t bargain for, the ones that are thrust upon me, and they are the ones that really keep me up at night as I struggle to piece together the sum of my knowledge and experience in the region, which, by the way, is an impossible and yet thrilling task. While I am often approached by strangers who want to discuss America and Bush with me, I should note that there is almost always context to these conversations. People do not approach me out of the blue, but rather they are waiters, taxi drivers, sandwich stand owners, and store keeps with whom I do business. They speak clearly from an Arab point of view (and all that implies), but I found the tone to be generally that of disappointment with the United States, rather than anger. Many people also make the point of distinguishing between their problems with the U.S. government and the American people. Still, these conversations are always a little jarring to me because these people speak more from the heart than the brain, and this is something I’m not used to.

I met a few Egyptians in the United States in the weeks leading up to my trip here. Everyone had handfuls of advice, and so I found it most useful to really focus in on those tidbits that seemed common throughout many of the conversations. One of the most common suggestions I received was that Egyptians are very frank and straightforward people and that I should expect an earful from some of them, but that the key was to listen because not only would I learn a lot, but I would earn the respect of those I talked to as well. And I became pretty good at that; I listened thoughtfully, threw in maybe an observation or two, but I really left the talking up to them.

But yesterday I broke my own rule of thumb, and it’s been really nagging at me ever since. On my way home from school yesterday, at about four in the afternoon, a well-dressed (this is especially important in Egypt where being well dressed really is a sign of status) man talking with his two friends turned sharply on me as I walked by, saying, “Hey, you American?” When I told him that I was, he asked me pointedly whether or not I agreed with the U.S. stance on Lebanon-Israel. Annoyed by his tone, I was tempted to keep walking, but I didn’t and I answered his question in a careful manner, “No, I don’t agree with my country’s policy towards Lebanon.” He shot back, “Well why don’t you do anything about it then? Why don’t your people do anything to destroy very very bad government?" Instead of staying calm and giving him a stock answer, I felt all the blood rush to my face and in a moment of anger, I retorted, “What are you saying? That every time I disagree with my government I should tear it down? That I should just rip it all up? That’s a philosophy I see an awful lot over here, and it hasn’t done anybody much good.” I had done it. Not only had I expressed my disagreement, but I had done so through a criticism of his people and with an angry tone. After this, he reiterated some of his complaints, shook my hand, and that I plodded home.

Retrospectively, I’m not pleased with how I handled the situation; my temper got the best of me and the words just slipped out. But I do want to go to my main point, which was weighing very heavily on my mind when I made those comments to the Egyptian. My biggest difficulty here is in my ability to express my dissatisfaction with certain U.S. government policy, while simultaneously making it clear that I love my country and wholeheartedly support the governing institution that runs it and that there is a clear distinction between my stance on “Bush” and my stance on “America.”

Many of the Egyptians I’ve talked to are cagey, trying to wedge me into a corner in which I criticize my country when I really only intend to criticize policy. I have avoided tiptoed carefully and have therefore avoided the fate of being attributed rhetoric that I try to steer clear of. I find it frustrating to say to someone, “I don’t agree with U.S. policy towards Lebanon,” and in turn get the response, “Yes, a bunch of Jews control your country, and that’s why the policy is that way.” I don’t even know how to begin to respond to that. They usurp a discussion that I want to have on certain terms and take the rhetoric to such intense extremities that we cannot continue the conversation because I feel compelled to rebut their last comment with a defense of my country rather than going on and discussing the heart of the matter.

A better example was when I told someone in moderate terms of my view towards Iraq, and they responded by saying, “Yes, your country does horrible things.” Again, this is a conversation I cannot continue because it turns me from making a critique of Bush to pursuing a defense of America.

The difference in the rhetoric between our two cultures is substantial. Sometimes when I take a step back I realize that I have to adjust my whole radar when I come over here because if placed in America, some of the comments I hear would be grounds for serious repercussion. And maybe that’s part of the problem with U.S.—Middle East relations: we don’t talk the same talk, literally, and more importantly, metaphorically. There’s a desperation here that doesn’t lend itself to moderation, and that’s what makes being a foreigner here so intriguing and, on occasion, so painful.

Return to the Alley

No, don’t worry, this blog is not becoming the “Midaq Alley Show,” but due to popular demand (thanks, Peggy) I returned to the Alley today to take some photographs.

When I got to the major street, I was pretty surprised that I remembered so well how to get back there. Stopping only for photos along the way, I headed through the spice market (first photograph) and took a right into the smaller and shaded alley (second photograph). To my surprise, the entrance to Midaq Alley was filled with office supplies for sale (third photograph) that were not there when I made my first trip a week ago. But through the canyons of notebooks, I could see the unmistakable café that guarded the entrance to Egypt’s most famous alley. It takes a while to get to the alley from my house, and I was reluctant to just take a handful of photos and then leave. Instead, I sat down for tea and shesha at some tables outside the café. A quick word on shesha, which is one of the major cultural elements of Egypt…. On pretty much every block you will find a café in which mostly men congregate daily to smoke tobacco from large water-pipes. I have two of them within two blocks of my house, and throughout the city they act as gathering points for the masses. The tea I drank is also amazing; it’s called Arousa, and you drink it with fresh mint leaves. Having never liked tea before, I’m quite happy letting tea assuage my coffee binging tendencies. But back to the Alley….

As I sat there drinking my tea and smoking my shesha, I noticed that everyone in the Alley started looking at me strangely. Of course I attributed this to the fact that they weren’t used to having foreigners come for tea in their little alley. It was difficult to ignore the handful of Cairenes sitting in the café tossing strange looks at me and engaging in conversation that was clearly about me, but I did my best. After about five minutes I began feeling uncomfortably hot. Engrossed in a book, I hadn’t realized how much I was sweating. And so, like any smart kid my age, I moved my chair three feet over into the shade. And with that, I heard an eruption of giggles from within the café. I looked up and saw all the men having a good laugh and a bunch of them were giving me the thumbs up. “Very good, very good,” said one. I had forgotten that it was so much in their nature to avoid the sun whenever possible, and that it was strange when someone didn’t. Walk down the street any afternoon, and you will find one side virtually empty, while the shady side is nearly paralyzed with pedestrians. So, after giving those Egyptians their little laugh for the afternoon, I headed up to the rest of the Alley.

At the end of the main entrance to the Alley, where the café is, stood a spice shop which had been closed the previous week. Wondering whether this was a sign of more life to come up the stairs, I pushed on.

Rounding the corner, I headed up the stairs (fourth picture). At the top of the stairs is a big landing (fifth picture) that goes back a ways, filled with trash and seemingly without purpose. I turned left to face the Alley again, and I was a little disappointed to find that the spice shop below had not served as on omen, but rather as an anomaly since the shoe shop was the only sign of life (sixth photo). I had felt a certain embarrassment about taking photos below with so many Egyptians lounging in the lower part of the Alley. Here, though, I snapped away with all the confidence in the world just because I could. And upon my return home, I plugged my camera into my computer to find that all fifteen, or so, photos of the Alley looked just about the same.

This return visit was amazing to me in that I was able to focus not so much on getting there, but on being there. It was really incredible to me to take such a small chunk of earth, visit it twice, and get to know it fairly intimately. Its colors, its smells, its garbage all became familiar because there wasn’t much to have to get to know. Amazing, too, that it, as a piece of land, a piece of property, is worth so little but that the spirit invested in it by one man’s writing is something that cannot be priced.

Anatomy of a Protest

I don’t visit Islamic Cairo on Fridays. Every Friday for hundreds of years, devout Sunnis have assembled in any one of the dozens of mosques spread across Islamic Cairo to listen to readings from the Qur’an and hear the various Sheikhs deliver their sermons. In the past four weeks, the services, which begin around 12:30 and last for about an hour, have spilled out into the streets in the form of intense anti-Israeli protests. I avoid these protests, especially, because of the direct religious connection they have and because they are known to be among the biggest protests in the city. I am still waiting to hear news as to whether there was another round of protests today following the services that ended less than two hours ago. The size, duration, and intensity of these protests are somewhat of a gauge of sentiment in the city.

While I avoid these protests, there is enough civil unrest in the city that continued avoidance is practically impossible.

In the middle of last week there was a pretty major protest in Midan Tahrir, the city’s central plaza. Surrounded by the likes of the Egyptian Antiquities Musuem, the Nile Hilton, the Mugamma (a massive government building), the AUC, and the beginnings of some of Cairo’s most major streets (like Talat Harb and Qasr il-Nil), this really is the heart of the city. On my way to meet some people at the American University in Cairo, I took a taxi to within a couple blocks of Midan Tahrir and elected to walk the rest of the way given the Midan’s infamous traffic. About two blocks from the Midan, I passed a brigade of riot police. This only raised my eyebrows a little bit because in Cairo I am used to and appreciative of seeing massive police forces. Oftentimes in the city, I’ve seen a confluence of forces and have passed without ever understanding their purpose. The only thing that brought about suspicion was that these police seemed on high alert, instead of the lazy ambivalence of the forces who know that they’re probably superfluous.

I walked on and was further surprised to see two more brigades on alert. They took up vast chunks of the sidewalk and were lined up in unusually strict formation. Each man was wearing a black uniform (unlike the usual white uniforms donned typically by police officers), and each wore a helmet with a large clear face guard, and each carried a wooden club.

When I arrived at the Midan, everything became clear. On one of the big islands between several of the many major roads cutting through the Midan, there was a vast gathering of men waving signs and chanting, sometimes in unison and sometimes in disarray. While many of these men held signs and banners, almost all of them waved the Lebanese flag, with the unmistakable cedar tree in the middle, as a show of solidarity with the people of Lebanon. These people, a thousand strong at the height of the protest, were the nucleus of the whole circus show.

Surrounding the protestors was a thick layer of riot police. I imagine that one strategy employed by the government is to contain the protestors to such a point that they cannot move. I saw how the riot police had formed a ring around the band of flag waving men and were pushing up close so as not to give them any breathing room. This layer of police was about four men thick. Rather than being given an area, the protestors take an area and the riot police seem to use the full strength of their numbers to contain people within that area.

Beyond the riot police is a nebulous area that envelopes the protest. It is filled with members of the regular police force, who control the car traffic, as well as the infamous plainclothes thugs that work for President Mubarak. These thugs turn away would-be protestors in order to insure that protests never become too big. They also push and shove those who stop to watch the spectacle, telling them to move on in order to keep the sidewalk traffic flowing. I have heard that these thugs often become violent, smashing cameras and crushing toes when they need to. Because of their apparently high status in the security forces apparatus, the regular laws of decency don’t apply to them.

Beyond this layer is an amazingly well choreographed interplay between the various brigades of the riot police. On the outskirts of the Midan they move quickly purposefully around, sometimes relieving the police who are up against the protestors, other times merely repositioning to stay prepared for every eventuality. I must have seen a dozen of these brigades, each thirty or so men strong, moving, shifting, preparing. This is a really well-oiled machine.

As I approached the AUC, I was still a bit away from the protest. As I closed in on the last couple dozen feet before the entrance, an unusually kind policeman stopped me to suggest that I go around the back way to the University. As he and I were in mid-conversation, a man who was no less than 6’3” tall and weighed no fewer than 250lbs. came up in his standard slack and button down shirt and stood next to the policeman. His crossed arms and his angry gaze were enough to persuade me to turn around and zip into the other entrance at AUC.

When I returned to Midan Tahrir on Monday, there was another protest going on, and the same interplay between all the various cogs seemed to be exactly the same.

Protests in Cairo have a strange feeling about them. In many ways, they’re just like any other protest anywhere in the world, but there’s something about a protest in a police state that gives pause to foreign onlookers. There’s something amazingly organic about protests in free countries; ten or twelve years ago, when the Cuban side of my family headed downtown in New York to protest outside Fidel Castro’s hotel, there was something very real about it, even if nobody expected a great change in policy to result from our efforts. In Buenos Aires last year, when protestors stormed the theater where we had come to hear the first lady of Argentina speak, there was something refreshingly spontaneous and intense about it. But here in our police state in the northeast corner of a continent filled with police states, there seems to be that certain spark missing from these frequent gatherings.

In the United States, our right to protest is protected by the Constitution, in part because it expressly grants us that right and in part because it puts checks on the powers of our leaders to prevent them from trying to curtail that right. In Cairo, a protest is allowed to proceed at the pleasure of the President. The protests in Cairo have not only been anti-Israel, they have also been anti-Mubarak. There is a strong feeling in the streets that Mubarak is failing to represent the interests of the Egyptian/Arab people in his stance on the Israel-Lebanon conflict. The local newspapers I have read detail the anti-Mubarak elements of the protests, describing the signs and chants in which people denounce him.

And herein lies the strange element of Egyptian protests. That in an authoritarian state, members of the national security force will pile in layers upon layers to allow people to criticize the government, creates a strange sensation of falsehood for the whole spectacle. In a sense it seems that Mubarak allows the protests just as a way of releasing a little steam from the kettle. Give the people a little bit of state run, highly controlled protest, and they’ll feel as though they do have freedom and it will prevent the kettle from exploding. But to an outsider looking in, these protests seem to be another big movie set, arranged by the government, and staffed by enthusiastic but hopeless activists.