Labyrinthian structures stacked upon each other. Curving streets running off endlessly into tangential stretches. Open vistas, greens spaces, mini-parks set untidily amidst the tangled network of humming roads. A wide main avenue leads from the airport, punctuated by roundabouts, crossroads, an artery of vast green space bisecting it. Fridays and these spaces teem with life, clumps of families on picnic spreads lace the spaces, filling up each yard. Riotous laughter, joviality, fleetingly viewed through the rear window.
The first impression is of motion — young men in droves, swarms of families with children swanning down the streets, girls, usually accompanied, veiled or not, modern or not, yet well-dressed. Cafes, juice shops, shoe stores and restaurants spill onto the streets. Traffic — a wild maze of cars, hooting, twisting. The crowds wander the streets late into the night, shops blaze with lights well beyond 10pm. The traffic just about slows to a purr in the wee hours. Within this seemingly chaotic kitsch of brick, cement, steel, glass and mortar glides the silently swift Nile with its watery unplumbed depths. Cairo is indeed a city of contrasts.
Back in the 14th century, Cairo made a similar impression on Ibn Batuta, the well-known traveller who stopped en route to pilgrimage. Its vibrancy caught his attention and compelled him to rapturously enthuse: “Cairo, mother of cities and seat of pharaoh, the tyrant mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands, boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour, the meeting place of comer and goers, the halting place of feeble and mighty whose throngs surge as the waves on the sea, and can scarce be contained in her for all her size and capacity. Cairo’s denizens seem to have always preferred open spaces.
“On the bank of the Nile, opposite old Cairo, is the place known as ‘The Garden’, a pleasure park and promenade containing many beautiful gardens, for the people of Cairo are given to pleasures and amusements. I witnessed a fete once in Cairo for the Sultan’s recovery from a fractured hand, all the merchants decorated their bazaars and had rich stuff, ornaments and silken fabrics hanging in their shops for several days.”
Bracing in the variety of experiences it has to offer, this pulsatingly alive city is also a city of the dead. One of the largest graveyards, complete with shrines, houses for the dead and other monuments zigzagged by narrow tortuous streets, stretches for miles and is a city unto itself. Notable shrines include those of Imam Shafi, that boasts one of the most beautiful domes in Islamic architecture. Ibn Batuta records: “The great cemetery of al-Qarafa is a place of particular sanctity and contains the graves of innumerable scholars and pious believers. In the Qarafa, people build beautiful pavilions surrounded by walls, so that they look like houses. They also build chambers and here Koran readers recite night and day in agreeable voices. Some of them build religious houses and madressahs beside the mausoleums, and on Thursday nights they go out to spend their nights there with their women and children, and make a circuit of the famous tombs. On the night of mid-Shaba’an, the market people take out all kinds of eatables.”
Architecturally rich, a meld of legacies from various civilizations, here the vestiges of the Egyptian and Islamic past with Greco-Roman influences rubs shoulders with the modern.
The Islamic section of old Cairo is rich with shrines, offering a portal into another world. The air hangs heavy and still with a clear, milky whiteness that sieves the golden sunshine. The past enclosed within its humid imperceptible enfolds the shrine of Husayn in the hub of the city, and is neighboured by the Khana-i-Khalili bazaar. The dizzying narrow alleys continue their journey bordered by varied shops, intermingled. Myriad tea and juice shops front the market, overlooking the human tide at ebb and flow. Hidden surprises await discovery off these twisted alleys, that squirrel away from the centre — an old mosque and an intricately carved structure.
The al-Azhar looms on one side, the oldest Islamic University and library with an attached mosque. Further away, beneath the fort, is clustered another group of grand mosques splendidly maintained, exuding a majestic aura. A placid calmness pervades their cool interiors.
Ibn Batuta comments: “The mosque of Amr is highly-venerated and widely celebrated. The Friday service is held in it and the road runs through it from East to West. The madressahs and college mosques of Cairo cannot be counted for multitude. As for the maristan, hospital, which lies between the two castles near the mausoleum of Sultan Qalaun, no description is adequate to its beauties. It contains an innumerable quantity of appliances and medicaments, and its daily revenue is put as high as 1,000 Dinars. There are a large number of religious establishments, convents that they call khanqahs, and the nobles vie with each other in building them. Each of these is set apart for a separate school of dervish, mostly Persians who are men of good education and adepts in mystical doctrines. Each has a superior and a doorkeeper and their affairs are admirably organized. Among the many celebrated sanctuaries is the holy shrine where reposes the head of al-Husayn.”
The world of the Sphinx and the pyramids is at another level. The Sound and Light Show reminds you that this was the land of the pharaohs, Jews and the Prophet Moses, traversed by Alexander and Napoleon, the Sphinx watching broodingly silent their footsteps.
Return to the city, the modern obtrudes to break the reverie, tall apartment structures hang above narrow, bisecting gullies scurrying off the main shop-lined boulevards. Grilled terraces piled on each other poke out from the buildings to overlook each other. Markets buzz with commercial transactions, tourists accosted by shopkeepers.
Night unfolds another side to the city, a shiny excitement glimmers off the streets as the roads open wide to receive the assault of the young and the old. Anticipate laughter, loud chatter and bonhomie, the Egyptians are full of joie de vivre expressed in full-bodied terms. With cheap food, an intriguingly rich culture, and an interesting bunch of people, a visit to Cairo is a voyage of discovery, a peeling of many layers.
Labyrinthian structures stacked upon each other. Curving streets running off endlessly into tangential stretches. Open vistas, greens spaces, mini-parks set untidily amidst the tangled network of humming roads. A wide main avenue leads from the airport, punctuated by roundabouts, crossroads, an artery of vast green space bisecting it. Fridays and these spaces teem with life, clumps of families on picnic spreads lace the spaces, filling up each yard. Riotous laughter, joviality, fleetingly viewed through the rear window.
