The twin streams of Egypt's history
converge just below the Delta at
Cairo
, where the greatest city in the
Islamic world sprawls across the
Nile towards the
Pyramids ,
those supreme monuments of
antiquity. Every visitor to Egypt
comes here, to reel at the Pyramids'
baleful mass and the seething
immensity of Cairo, with its
bazaars, mosques and Citadel and
extraordinary Antiquities Museum.
It's equally impossible not to find
yourself carried away by the
streetlife, where medieval trades
and customs coexist with a modern,
cosmopolitan mix of Arab, African
and European influences.
Cairo has been the largest city
in Africa and the Middle East ever
since the Mongols wasted Imperial
Baghdad in 1258. Acknowledged as Umm
Dunya or " Mother of the
World " by medieval Arabs,
and as Great Cairo by
nineteenth-century Europeans, it
remains, in Jan Morris's words,
"one of the half-dozen
supercapitals - capitals that are
bigger than themselves or their
countries the focus of a whole
culture, an ideology or a historical
moment". As Egypt has been a
prize for conquerors from Alexander
the Great to Rommel, so Cairo has
been a fulcrum of power in the Arab
world from the Crusades unto the
present day. The ulema of its
thousand-year-old Al-Azhar Mosque
(for centuries the foremost centre
of Islamic intellectual life)
remains the ultimate religious
authority for millions of Sunni
Muslims, from Jakarta to Birmingham.
Wherever Arabic is spoken, Cairo's
cultural magnetism is felt. Every
strand of Egyptian society knits and
unravels in this febrile
megalopolis.
Egyptians have two names for the
city, one ancient and popular, the
other Islamic and official. The
foremost is Masr , meaning
both the capital and the land of
Egypt - an ur-city that endlessly
renews itself and dominates the
nation, an idea rooted in pharaonic
civilization. (For Egyptians abroad,
"Masr" refers to their
homeland; within its borders it
means the capital.) Whereas Masr
is timeless, the city's other name, Al-Qahira
(The Conqueror), is linked to an
event: the Fatimid conquest that
made this the capital of an Islamic
empire stretching from the Atlantic
to the Hindu Kush. The name is
rarely used in everyday speech.
Both archetypes still resonate
and in monumental terms are
symbolized by two dramatic landmarks
: the Pyramids of Giza at the
edge of the Western Desert and the
great Mosque of Mohammed Ali -
the modernizer of Islamic Egypt -
which broods atop the Citadel.
Between these two monuments sprawls
a vast city, the colour of sand and
ashes, of diverse worlds and time
zones, and gross inequities. All is
subsumed into an organism that
somehow thrives in the terminal
ward: medieval slums and Art Deco
suburbs, garbage-pickers and marbled
malls, donkey carts and limos,
piousness and "the oaths of men
exaggerating in the name of
God". Cairo lives by its own
contradictions.
This is a city, as Morris put it,
"almost overwhelmed by its own
fertility". Its population
is today estimated at around
eighteen million and is swollen by a
further million commuters from the
Delta and a thousand new migrants
every day. Today, one third of
Cairene households lack running
water; a quarter of them have no
sewers, either. Up to three million
people reside in squatted cemeteries
- the famous Cities of the Dead
. The amount of green space per
citizen has been calculated at
thirteen square centimetres, not
enough to cover a child's palm.
Whereas earlier travellers noted
that Cairo's air smelt "like
hot bricks", visitors now find
throat-rasping air pollution
, chiefly caused by traffic. Cairo
out-pollutes LA every day of the
week: breathing the atmosphere
downtown is reputedly akin to
smoking thirty cigarettes a day.
Cairo's genius is to humanize
these inescapable realities with social
rituals . The rarity of public
violence owes less to the armed
police on every corner than to the dowshah.
When conflicts arise crowds gather,
restrain both parties, encourage
them to rant, sympathize with their
grievances and then finally urge:
" Maalesh, maalesh
" (Let it be forgiven).
Everyday life is sweetened by
flowery gestures and salutations;
misfortunes evoke thanks for Allah's
dispensation (after all, things
could be worse!). Even the poorest
can be respected for piety; in the
mosque, millionaire and beggar kneel
side by side.
Extended-family values and
neighbourly intervention prevail
throughout the baladi
quarters or urban villages
where millions of first- and
second-generation rural migrants
live, whilst arcane structures
underpin life in Islamic Cairo. On a
city-wide basis, the colonial
distinction between "native
quarters" and ifrangi
(foreign) districts has given way to
a dynamic stasis between rich and
poor, westernization and
traditionalism, complacency and
desperation. The city's tolerance
has recently been further strained
by natural and man-made calamities.
In October 1992, up to a thousand
people died in an earthquake
, when shoddily built high-rises and
hovels collapsed across the city.
Its image took a worse battering
abroad after the shooting of
seventeen Greek tourists in 1996 and
the firebombing of a German tour bus
a year later - although the tourists
now seem to be making a cautious
return. Every year its polarities
intensify, safety margins narrow and
statistics make gloomier reading.
The abyss beckons in prognoses of future
trends , yet Cairo confounds
doom sayers by dancing on the edge.
Orientation
Greater Cairo consists of two
metropolitan governorates: Cairo ,
on the east bank of the Nile, and
Giza , across the river. The River
Nile ( Bahr el-Nil, or simply
El-Nil) is the prerequisite...
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The City
With so much to see (and overlook,
initially), you can spend weeks in
CAIRO and merely scratch the
surface. But as visitors soon
realize, there are lots of reasons
why people don't stay for long. The
city's density, climate and
pollution...
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