Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (32 page)

The style of the chanting in St. Mark’s that day would have been familiar to a Greek politician and scholar called Demetrius of Phalerum, who lived in Egypt’s coastal city of Alexandria in the third century
BC
. “In Egypt,” he wrote, “the priests, when they are singing hymns in praise of the gods, use the seven vowels, which they chant in a specific sequence; and the music made with these letters sounds so good that men prefer it to the flute and lyre.” So they do now.
Oh-oh-oh,
the priest and deacons sang, wavering on a sequence of notes, and then
eh
and
ah,
the consonants of the words hardly audible. This chant was the “Pek Ethronos.” It turns from sadness to joy at the prospect of the Resurrection, just as the ancient song on which it is based both mourned the pharaoh who had died and celebrated the accession of his successor. I was hearing the funeral music of the pharaohs in London’s leafiest streets. How it came there, and what that means for Christianity in Egypt, is the subject of this chapter.

—————

CAIRO WAS MY FIRST OVERSEAS POSTING
, in 1997. I was then a language student straight out of London, a neophyte diplomat. “Welcome to the embassy,” the ambassador had said, “and I hope you don’t take it the wrong way if I tell you we don’t want to see you here again. Get out there and spend time with Egyptians.” Our small group of students needed little telling. The city was a revelation. It was a vast concentration of humanity, perhaps eighteen million people, with more arriving every day—leaving behind life in the villages along the Nile River and streaming into the capital by train, by bus, on foot, or in carts, settling in unplanned, chaotic shantytowns on the edge of the existing city, poverty side by side with wealth. I used to walk from my tree-lined street over to the slums and watch knife jugglers and street traders stand amid the raw sewage that trickled down the dirt lanes.

It was also a joyous, chaotic, confusing, overwhelming carnival of noise. I lived in Mohandiseen, a leafy modern suburb. But even there I would hear the mint seller call outside my window with his horse and cart at five in the morning, and the loudspeakers of the mosque at noontime, and then car horns blaring late into the night. I studied at the British Council on the banks of the Nile—made rather less romantic by the fumes of a crematorium that blew ash across the balcony on which I would sit to have lunch. But I could put up with that, and all the other irritations of that polluted, crowded city, because I was in love. Not with a person, not then. I was in love with Arabic. It was my key to a world hidden in plain sight. It admitted me into places where otherwise I could not have gone, let me read books and poetry that dated back over a thousand years—for it had changed little during that time, being the sacred language of the Koran—and opened up conversations I never could have had without it. The language also had an extraordinary system to its design. Take three letters, and it formed a root. That root, like a musical motif, could be treated in one of twelve different ways, each one changing its meaning in a subtly different way. The result was a language as sweetly mathematical as a Bach motet.

To most Westerners, Arabic is the language of Islam. But I found that Arabic-speaking Egypt had more Christians in its churches on Sundays than England. I joined them: each week I took a taxi or rode the Metro, smooth and clinically clean and Japanese-built, up to the slightly shabby, unremarkable suburb of Shubra. To escape expat life, there was no better place. It was almost Egypt’s center of gravity, its definition of middle class with its small shops and one famous restaurant and paved streets. There was grit, there was noise, there was still the sour tang of polluted air—but these things did not seem to trouble my Egyptian friends as much as they did me. In Egypt villages are not places where the well-off choose to live, and the better kind of apartment (so my friends told me) was the kind on the noisy main street, not the quiet dirt roads behind. When one friend visited me in London she complained of the quiet, which had prevented her from sleeping.

No tourists went to Shubra, or do today. They are wrong, however, if they think it has nothing to offer them. It has at least one thing they will not find anywhere else in the Middle East: a station named after a European saint. Boarding the Metro in central Cairo, I would pass through stations named after Egyptian presidents—Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak; I would go through one named after the pharaoh Ramses; and then I would arrive at a station named Sainte Thérèse.

How did St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, come to be on the Cairo map? The answer can be found just off the main street of Shubra, in a very remarkable church. The church is named after St. Thérèse because it was founded by French Carmelites, and it is remarkable because the portico of the church is covered from top to bottom in votive plaques, in English and French, Hebrew and Arabic, left by Jews, Muslims, and Christians in testimony to miracles performed by the saint. The church still attracts some Muslim visitors who come to light candles at the back, and even when an Islamic militant came to vandalize the church many years ago, he attacked the cross but left the saint’s pictures alone.

One day I walked into the small, asphalt-paved forecourt of the church and met what would be, for a year, my own community in Egypt. There was huge Atef, who looked like a bouncer but wanted to be a monk; there was Maggie, who was studiously training to be an architect; there was Samih, a self-confident engineer. I noticed among the congregation signs of its pharaonic past, names such as Rameses and Nefertiti. A man called Wael, who had ambitions to be a model, claimed that his features were exactly those of the pharaohs. Regally presiding over everyone was Father Paul, a priest from a Coptic Catholic family. (In the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church set up a Uniate church in Egypt, whose Coptic members could keep their own traditions while accepting the bishop of Rome’s authority. This Uniate church has today more than 160,000 members.) He was a study for me in Egyptian courtesy. This was pretty much at the opposite end of the scale from the understated and distant courtesy of the English; I found myself navigating exaggerated compliments, half-meant invitations, and gargantuan hospitality. One particular exchange that the priest had with a flower merchant summed it up for me. After a lengthy negotiation over price, the flower seller declared: “Of course, I would like you to have them for free.” Nimbler at this than I would ever have been, the priest had an equally insincere compliment ready in reply: “You know, I only came here for the pleasure of seeing you.”

Endlessly generous in showing me around Cairo, the priest was more elusive when I tried to return his hospitality. On the one occasion that he came to my flat, he drank a single glass of water, and when I tried to persuade him to stay longer, he declared, “No: I have honored you enough.” My Coptic friends’ kindness to me, though, never dried up. The church was more than a church. The members of the congregation took holidays together, chatted to each other for hours in the forecourt, and met frequently during the week. They taught me Egyptian dancing and once invited me to join them on charitable visits to Cairo’s poor: people living in makeshift shacks on the rooftops of tall apartment buildings. My new friends also regularly reproached me for the laxness of British Christianity. No wonder. A devout Copt should pray seven times a day, avoid drinking alcohol, and never smoke cigarettes. Copts fast not only during Lent but also during Advent and at other times of the year—210 days of the year in total. Though they are bound to give up meat and dairy products during these times (and fish during Lent), some go even further by eating only fruit, or the stewed beans that Egyptians call
fuul
. Some do not eat anything at all between midnight and sunset each day of Lent. This is more demanding than the Muslim fast of Ramadan. I was tempted to repeat a judgment made by Herodotus, who twenty-five centuries ago was an awestruck visitor to one of Egypt’s great temples, which at one point became so wealthy from donations that they owned a third of the country’s fertile land: “The Egyptians are religious to excess, more than any other country in the world.” (In recent opinion polls, Egyptians have agreed with Herodotus: they believe themselves to be the most religious people in the world.)

I thought this not only about the Copts, but also when I heard the loudspeaker-enhanced sermons of local mosques on Fridays. Every taxi driver seemed to play the Koran on his cassette player, sometimes pointing out, like a connoisseur, the quality of the particular reciter. At a concert of Sufi music the lead singer, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, elicited rapturous applause, and some of his hearers went into a state of trance. This pervasiveness of religion meant that religious differences, too, were obvious. Several times when I was walking through Cairo’s streets, people came up to me and asked which soccer team I supported. A few times they would ask instead—much in the same spirit, it seemed—if I was Muslim or Christian. My Arabic teacher told me that people asked her the same question, though not directly. They would ask her for her name, and then her father’s name. (As a liberal Muslim, she evaded their questions on principle, feeling that people should have a right to keep their religion private.) Copts had their own way of asking the same question. One time at the local supermarket the cashier surreptitiously exposed his wrist to me, showing the tattoo of a cross.

Those differences expressed themselves violently from time to time while I lived in Egypt. The embassy forbade me to visit parts of the south of Egypt, and especially the city of Minya, because of Islamist terror groups that were attacking the security forces and local Christians there. In September 1997, when I was in Alexandria with friends from St. Thérèse, I saw on the television that German tourists had been gunned down in Tahrir Square. It was my first encounter with terrorism. “Don’t be alarmed, Gerard. It is fate,” said Samih. “We must all die on our appointed day.” I was not comforted. Two months later, sixty-two people were killed in a massacre at Luxor, carried out by terrorists armed with guns and knives. A five-year-old child was among the victims. A note praising Islam was found afterward in the disemboweled body of one of the victims.

Yet interspersed with these terrible events were occasional reminders of a more humane form of coexistence. Take, for example, the attack in Tahrir Square, which so alarmed me when I saw it on the news at Alexandria. The men who carried it out escaped afterward, or so I read, to a neighboring district called Bulaq Abu’l Alaa. The people of the district shielded the killers. It happened that I knew this place. It was one of my favorite areas to walk in, where welders’ magnesium flares garishly lit up once-elegant colonial-style buildings and the dust and dirt of neglected roads between them. Yet the priest in this area, a huge man in a huge Italianate church, told me the Muslims there were his brothers; he had no trouble from them, he said. Copts came and went to the church without ever being harassed. As I walked back out of the neighborhood, I passed through a street market selling clothes. Here were people of all kinds: men in turbans, men in suits, in jeans, in coveralls; women wearing veils, women without veils, and one woman, too poor perhaps to afford a veil, who had fitted a cardboard box around her head to protect her from the sun; and a girl with long plaited hair teaching her little brother how to make the sign of the cross.

I left Egypt in 1998 and went back only rarely and briefly. Then in 2011 I saw that Tahrir Square was in the news again. The Egyptian people had gathered there to topple a president. Christians and fundamentalist Muslims stood shoulder to shoulder. Paid thugs attacked the demonstrators. President Hosni Mubarak resigned. An army council took over. There were outbreaks of fighting between Christians and Muslims. Some churches were attacked. Several Christians were killed. I had planned to go to Egypt anyway, for this book, and the trip seemed more relevant than ever.

—————

AS THE PLANE LANDED AT
Cairo in March 2011, I looked out at a well-remembered city. I could see the mansions of the rich, in the serene northern suburb of Heliopolis; I could see where the poorest of Cairo’s poor, the Nile River dwellers who have no homes except their little uncovered skiffs, are rocked each evening by the backwash of luxury cruise boats. The road from the airport took me past a huge grand military barracks with murals showing the victories of Egypt’s pharaonic armies; turning into a giant overpass, it sped me over the grimy edifices of the state, its ministries, and the principal train station. It passed by the domes of the Coptic cathedral, and next to it a mosque—in solidarity? Or competition?

My hotel, on an island in the Nile called Zamalek, was a shabby but cozy relic of Cairo’s elegant past. A retired architect had installed himself eccentrically on a faded chair in the lobby and appeared to be dictating various letters, usually of complaint, to an obliging member of the staff. Outside the hotel, a group of young women in
hejab
s were painting a mural representing people power. As I walked along the street I noted the signs on the shops and walls. One advertised in English the Libyan currency at its new low rate as Western and Arab allies threatened war: “Libian dinar buy 2 sell 3.65.” Another said in Arabic: “In the name of God: there are many honorable policemen. Let us celebrate our police.” A third, on the door of a shop, was starker, with just one word in bright letters: “Viagra.”

The island of Zamalek appeared on the Nile just over a century ago, a composite of the silt that used to be washed down the river year by year, and which gave the Nile Valley its fertility. (After the Nile was dammed in 1970, the silt stopped flowing. For that matter, the “rising of the waters”—the annual ebb and flood of the river—ended, too.) Zamalek attracted the upper classes, who built on it palaces and parks that now have become frail and faded. I rode a taxi across the bridge to the older parts of Cairo, which are on the eastern bank of the Nile. As we crossed the Nile, the taxi driver proudly pointed out the burned-out shell of the former ruling party’s headquarters, squatting on the river’s edge. A presenter on the radio declared: “Corruption in society—we can talk freely about this now!”