As I prepare to enter the historic Gamaleya district in Cairo, I realise that Amir Al Gyosh Al Goani street is blocked by a donkey cart. The cart seems at first to be carrying a mountain of large, unusually shaped bread loaves. But they are luffas, skeletons of a vegetable that in the Nile Delta grows to gargantuan size, used as sponges for everything from bathing to car washing. You can see why every Cairo governor has tried to ban these road-blocking carts, but they experienced a bit of a comeback after the Egyptian pound suffered a steep devaluation in March and the cost of fuel went up. One governor in the city of Giza is said to have refused to ban donkey carts while they continue to adorn the 20 pound note. Donkey carts on a money note? I pull one note from my pocket. The drawing is of a pharaonic military chariot, the light-weight vehicle that once revolutionised warfare, enabling the Egyptian pharaohs to build a vast empire.
Dominated by its mediaeval mosques and minarets, poor, often squalid, Gamaleya has the reputation of being its own world, separate from the rest of the universe. The novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who was born here, built his novels like a dreamscape, immune to some extent to the changes of modern life: a testament, he once said, to “the past beauty of the well-civilised centuries.” Perhaps there is something to that. One young woman working on a local project to revive the old Islamic crafts of the district tells me she has never been to the pyramids, a mere one-hour drive away, even less if the traffic allows. “The way I think is that they have been there for 50 centuries, will be there for 50 centuries more,” she explains. “So I have time.”
One late afternoon I am suddenly approached by a hawker, as hawkers in old Cairo are prone to spring up with little notice. He wants to show me something. A building, it seems, in one of the side alleys. I follow him, convinced at first that he is taking me to some corner where, as usual, a mixture of antiques and assorted things for sale will be spread out on a carpet. But not this time. He wants money to show me a kuttab, a school created by some local benefactor for the education of poor children and usually found in the higher floor of a public fountain or kiosk, where in times past an attendant would distribute water to passersby. I like kuttabs, with their rich ceiling decorations, and here is a long-abandoned one in a derelict building in a mud-splattered alley far away from the main streets. The only problem is that I need to climb a rickety wooden ladder and enter through the window, about two stories high.
Climbing the ladder is torture. I want to go up but quit after an initial, feeble attempt. I would have given up entirely, were it not for the hawker, who laughs at my fear. Somehow I trust him, so when he holds the ladder firmly in place, I slowly make my way up ten, 20, maybe 30 steps. I enter through the window.
In Cairo there are obvious rewards to these imprudent exercises. The kuttab is in much better shape than the half-collapsed building it resides in. You can imagine the students sitting on the floor a few decades ago, facing the mihrab, praying, or listening to their Koran teacher. The view of the Gamaleya skyline from the opposite window alone is worth the effort. But there are risks as well, as I quickly discover when returning to the ladder, ready to descend, only to find out it has disappeared.
I stick my head out the window with what I would like to say is amusement, but panic would be more accurate. I hear some movement down the alley. My guide returns, dutifully carrying the ladder, which he must have hidden from prying eyes, rivals with an interest in his line of business.
I have mentioned the donkey carts. There are bulldozers too. From my car I see one of those machines advancing towards a defenceless mediaeval mausoleum, ready to devour it. By the next day, the mausoleum is gone, the second time I witness a magical disappearance in this city of deities and spells. Something immense is happening to Cairo. The new envelops the old. Where does all the money come from? New Cairo. New Giza. New Capital. Newest Cairo? “Naturally new,” proclaims a billboard, in what seems like a contradiction. “European lifestyle,” reads another, describing a development that is an exact replica of the Dubai International Financial Centre. The farther you go towards the Suez or towards Alexandria, the more fantastic the names for the compounds: Omega, Infinity, Azure, Loop. They sound like cryptocurrencies.
These days some of the most likely grounds to spot a bulldozer in central Cairo are in what’s known as the City of the Dead or Qarafa, the vast necropoles north and south of the Citadel housing some of the city’s most imposing mausolea. Built for famous statesmen and holy men, it is also home to a multitude of graves belonging to the destitute. Cairo needs new roads and bridges and in many cases these are being built at the expense of the city’s Islamic cemeteries, amid protests from the public, heritage preservation groups or descendants of the dead. Many times the graves being destroyed belong to Syrian or Turkish families that have long left Egypt.
But the City of the Dead is also, implausibly, a city for the living. You can easily meet a poor merchant in a market downtown who when asked where he lives will answer nonchalantly: “Qarafa.” Some say a few million people now live there. Just a sample of what I saw walking in its northern section: a post office, a gas station, a charity-endowed refectory for the slum’s poor where every morning the lines grow around the block, supermarkets, teahouses, tall apartment buildings and small hovels, open-air vegetable markets, and “pigeon houses” – timber towers for breeding pigeons, an Egyptian delicacy – as tall as a skyscraper. The pigeons are let out and about in the city. At dusk their owner will climb the tower and call them back, his voice echoing the Cairo skies like the adhan heard from the minarets.
Here, on the southern edge of the northern necropolis, is a little square of small houses and leafy trees. On the ground floor of these houses, there are old graves hidden by a curtain, men and women consigned to different rooms. The floor above is occupied by families. Old women sit by the door. Children play nearby. But are the living and dead related to each other? I am told this never happens. It would not be good for them. “For them who? The living or the dead?” My interlocutor, a resident of Qarafa, laughs heartily. “The living, of course.” The dead, after all, have a lot more power to make life miserable for the living than the other way around. Your dead relatives might turn your waking and sleeping hours into a living hell with their complaints, requests and entreaties, and there is little you can do to them in return.
Outside the orb of this little square, the bulldozers prowl, nibbling away. What I would never claim is that those motorised machines represent the living. The living live in harmony with the dead. Nor can the bulldozers be counted among the jinns, the invisible or shapeshifting creatures which in Cairo share the city and its riches with their human cousins. The machines are not alive but they are also not the dead who once lived and continue to live among us. The bulldozers are the dead who have never lived.
[See also: Letter from Beirut: a deadly week for a city on the brink]
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