Cairo, city of the present

Cairo, like many prominent world cities, has had several lives. What sets Cairo apart, is just how far back these flow, clear into the era long before the dawn of human history. Orthodox Christian tradition has it that Jesus took a swing through here as a young lad with his family. As he came by Cairo, he must have seen the pyramids, hard to miss as they are. It's odd to think that that time, year 0 for western civilization, is much closer to us now than it was to the construction of those pyramids, 2500 years prior.

It's this age that sets Cairo apart from other cities with rich pasts. In Rome, threads of the past can be found which run through, almost unbroken to the present day (The Pope being one, himself a descendant of the Pontifex Maximus, chief bridge builder of the ancient village). In Delhi, believers are worshiping right now in the very same mosque where the builder of the Taj Mahal did the same. In Egypt, the pyramids are tourist attractions, nothing more. I just finished Anthony Sattin’s book The Pharoh’s Shadow, in which he searches for signs of continuities from the ancient past. He writes well, but as he hardly finds any, it’s hard to describe the book as a success.

Signs of Cairo’s thousand-year incarnation as a Greek (or at least Hellenistic) city are also faint. Granted, it was never a very important Roman or Byzantine city. My favourite author, William Dalrymple, merely hops through the city on his tour of important sites of the Byzantine/Eastern Church, as described in his excellent From The Holy Mountain. He makes a few church visits in Cairo, but only to interview the Coptic priests about their current political plight, the severity of which is seen in their evasiveness.

There are still a few million Copts in Egypt, and I visited some of their holiest sites, in what’s known as “Old Cairo”. It’s a shrine-packed area of a few acres around the places where the Holy Family stayed while they were in town. Churches and monasteries stand cheek-by-jowl vying for the attentions of the thousands of mostly Catholic, mostly Spanish tourists. In one of the all-too-common accidents of history of this nature, it’s also the exact site where the Pharoh’s daughter found baby Moses, and so among the churches stands one of Egypts last functioning Synagogues, built to mark the site.

The few remaining Copts and the Jews have been subjected to increasing violence as their numbers have dwindled over the decades since Egypt’s independence. Old Cairo, a World Heritage Site, is thus protected by an over-abundance of Cairo’s already-ubiquitous white-uniformed police. They form a cordon around the outside, and visitors must be searched. Inside, UNESCO and US AID have provided funds for what is a very nice restoration, but the resulting marked difference from the rest of Cairo makes it feel more like an amusement park than a part of history. What little life is left in those stone walls is propagated by the several Christian schools, who pumped out their students on the afternoon of my visit to do battle in noisiness with the legions of tourists alongside me. I donated $20 the Synagogue and hurried out.

Pharonic and Coptic signs are there if you are looking, but it’s Cairo’s third incarnation, as a Muslim capital, which leaps out at you. There are mosques everywhere, more than I imagined would be in a supposedly secular state. Many of these were built as part of elaborate tombs during Egypts 150 year period of rule by the Mamluks, slave-kings who could not leave their wealth to their children, and as such blew it all on monuments to themselves. Islamic Cairo, now renamed “Fatimid Cairo” no avoid any confusion with anything “Islamist”, is a collection of narrow alleyways and mosques of all descriptions. Without the danger of attack its not sealed off from anything, and is very much still alive with market stalls, apartments, kids, barber shops and all the other signs of lower-middle-class metropolis life.

Muslim rule ended, more or less, with the rise of Nasser’s Arab Republic. It’s a strange twist of fate that as official Islam waned, its incarnation among the masses rose, and turned upon the minorities in its midst. Egypt’s cities, both Cairo and Alexandria, entered the 20th century with their heritage rich within them. Pre-war Alexandria was from all I have read the best city in the Mediterranean, with foreign oddballs of all descriptions mixing in effortlessly with the native Jews and Copts, not to mention the Muslims. Today little is left.

It all happened as part of the great sorting out of civilizations which occurred amid the dropping tide of globalization which followed the First World War. The rise of the nation-state and the corresponding military means to improve the purity of the corresponding “nations” was all it took to send each ethnic, religious, or linguistic group in search of itself. There are very few places left where distinct communities live side by side – the only places that comes to mind immediately are Kuala Lumpor or Singapore, with their splendid vibrancy of Malay, Chinese, and Indian cultures.

The re-globalization of the past decade is a weak by comparison – what are trade links and satellite communications compared to the immediacy of next door – but it is something. It has spawned some actual diversification, especially in the business community as represented by people like myself, taking ourselves to new lands in the name of commerce. I’m proud to be part of the rebound of diversity, re-conquering Cairo in the name of my ancestral cousins.