In an Antique Land (10 page)

From the very first day of the lunar month the normal routines of the village had undergone a complete change: it was as though a segment of time had been picked from the calendar and turned inside out. Early in the morning, a good while before sunrise, a few young men would go from house to house waking everyone for the su
ûr, the early morning meal. After that, as the day progressed, a charged lassitude would descend upon Lataifa. To ease the rigours of the fast people would try to finish all their most pressing bits of work early in the morning, while the sun was still low in the sky; it was impossible to do anything strenuous on an empty stomach and parched throat once the full heat of the day had set in. By noon the lanes of the hamlet would be still, deserted. The women would be in their kitchens and oven-rooms, getting their meals ready for the breaking of the fast at sunset. The men would sit in the shade of trees, or in their doorways, fanning themselves. Their mouths and lips would sometimes acquire thin white crusts, and often, as the hours wore on, their tempers would grow brittle.

I often wondered whether there were any people in the village who were occasionally delinquent in their observance of the fast. It was true that the most vulnerable people—pregnant women, young children, the sick, the elderly, and so on—were exempted by religious law, but even for those of sound body the fast must have been very hard: those were long, fiercely hot summer days, and it must have been difficult indeed to last
through them without food, water or tobacco. Yet I never once saw a single person in Lataifa breaking the fast, in any way: there were occasional rumours that certain people in such and such village had been seen eating or drinking, but even those were very rare.

In every house as the sun sank slowly towards the horizon, the women would lay out their trays and serve the food they had cooked during the day. Their families would gather around, ravenous now, with cool, tall glasses of water resting in front of them. They would sit watching the lengthening shadows, tense and still, listening to their radios, waiting for the shaikhs of the mosque of al-Azhar in Cairo to announce the legal moment of sunset. It was not enough to see the sun going down with one's eyes; the breaking of the fast was the beginning of a meal of communion that embraced millions of people and the moment had to be celebrated publicly and in unison.

When the meal was finished and the trays had been cleared away, the men would wash and change and make their way to the mosque, talking, laughing, replete with a sense of well-being which the day's denials had made multiply sweet. I would go up to my room alone and listen to the call of the muezzin and try to think of how it must feel to know that on that very day, as the sun travelled around the earth, millions and millions of people in every corner of the globe had turned to face the same point, and said exactly the same words of prayer, with exactly the same prostrations as oneself. A phenomenon on that scale was beyond my imagining, but the exercise helped me understand why so many people in the hamlet had told me not to fast: to belong to that immense community was a privilege which they had to re-earn every year, and the effort made them doubly conscious of the value of its boundaries.

In the evenings, after the prayers, the hamlet would be full of life and laughter. Where at other times of the year the lanes and paths were generally empty by eight o' clock, they were now full of bustle and activity: children going from house to house, chanting and demanding gifts, and people visiting their families and staying up late, gossiping and joking with their friends.

The night before I left for my trip to Cairo and Alexandria, I went to see Shaikh Musa to say goodbye. He and his family were resting after breaking the day's fast. They had eaten well and Shaikh Musa had just returned from the mosque. He was sitting on a mat in his bedroom, puffing on his shusha, a homemade hookah, making up for all the tobacco he had had to deny himself during the day.

He was in high spirits. ‘Welcome, ya Amitab,' he said. ‘How are you, come and sit here, beside me.'

As soon as I'd sat down he pointed at a young man sitting across the room and said: ‘Do you know who that is?'

The room was lit only by the glow of a single oil lamp, but I recognized the young man he had pointed to the moment I saw him. It was his younger son Hasan. He looked very much like the photograph Shaikh Musa carried in his wallet: robust, with clean, chiselled features, and a pleasant, rather shy smile. He lifted his right hand to his heart to welcome me to his house, and we shook hands and exchanged the customary greetings.

‘You have brought blessings.'

‘God bless you.'

‘You have brought light to our house.'

‘The light is yours.'

His face was sunburnt, ruddy, and he was wearing the khaki fatigues of the Egyptian army.

‘He's on leave,' Shaikh Musa said. ‘The army let him go for a
few days so he could visit his family.'

Just then Sakkina appeared in the doorway and handed Hasan a tray with three glasses of tea on it. He took it from her without a word and she disappeared back into the kitchen. Neither she nor Hasan spoke to each other, but it struck me suddenly that they were probably of exactly the same age: as children they would have worked in the same groups in the cotton fields, picking weevils from the plants, and they would have played together in the hamlet's threshing-grounds in the evenings. I could not help wondering about the nuances of their present situation, about how they dealt with each other as stepmother and stepson.

‘He got here this afternoon,' Shaikh Musa said. ‘He's been travelling all morning.'

I asked Hasan where he had come from and he told me that he was posted in Mansourah, a small town a couple of hundred miles away, at the other end of the Delta. His voice sounded tired and when he had finished speaking he leant his head back against the wall.

‘He's not well,' Shaikh Musa explained. ‘He's got a pain in the head.'

I saw then that he had a bandage tied around his forehead. I had not noticed it before for it was largely hidden by his thick, dark hair.

‘He comes home for a day and look what happens to him,' Shaikh Musa said in mock outrage. ‘Shouldn't the government extend his leave, at least?'

In a short while other people began to arrive. Some were relatives who had heard that Hasan was back on leave, and some were friends of Shaikh Musa's from nearby villages. I soon realized that some of them were from Nashawy, and the
moment there was a break in the conversation I asked if there was going to be a feud in their village. They looked at one another in puzzlement at first, and when I recounted the story that Jabir had told me they began to laugh.

The boy had imagined it, they said. There would be no feud, even though it was true that the man called the Sparrow had died. The police had made a report, and it had been settled between the two families. The Sparrow had been a poor man, none too sound in the head, with very few relatives in the area. The man who had knocked him over was from a big and powerful family. There was no question of a feud: the elders of the two families had sat down and decided on a token payment and that was that, khalas.

Shaikh Musa, listening intently, sighed and shook his head. ‘Nashawy!' he said. ‘There's always some trouble there.'

It was a big, bustling place, Nashawy, with almost fourteen hundred people, fully a thousand more than Lataifa! All those people living crowded together; no wonder they had trouble.

They began to talk about Nashawy, and listening to them I wondered why I had not visited the village yet. It was just a mile or so down the road, and I would often hear the drivers of the pick-up trucks that went past Lataifa shouting ‘Nashawy? Nashawy?' In my first few weeks in the hamlet I had often thought of climbing on for the ride. But now I had heard the name so often that it had begun to sound like a challenge: it had become a place that I would have to prepare for, just as I was preparing myself for Cairo.

A little later, when I got up to leave, Shaikh Musa's guests invited me to visit Nashawy, but Shaikh Musa cut them short. ‘He doesn't have time now,' he said. ‘He's going to Cairo, to Masr.'

He and his two sons came to the door to say goodbye. Shaikh Musa stood in the middle, holding his two grandsons by the hand, his eldest son, Ahmed, on his right and Hasan, the younger, on his left. ‘Come back soon, ya mister,' he said, ‘and tell us about your trip. We want to hear about it, about Masr.'

‘I'll tell you about it,' I said, ‘as soon as I return.'

At the end of the lane, I looked back: Shaikh Musa was still there, the picture of happiness and fulfilment, surrounded by his sons and grandsons.

‘Do you know what they say about Masr?' he shouted after me. ‘They say she's the umm al-duniyâ, the “mother of the world”.'

I
N THE EIGHTEENTH
century, a new breed of traveller began to flock into Cairo, Europeans with scholarly and antiquarian interests, for whom Masr was merely the picturesque but largely incidental location of an older, and far more important landscape. By this time Europe was far in advance of the rest of the world in armaments and industry, and on the points of those weapons the high age of imperialism was about to be ushered in. Masr had long since ceased to be the mistress of her own destiny; she had become a province of the Ottoman Empire, which was itself enfeebled now, allowed to keep its territories only by the consent of the Great Powers. The Indian Ocean trade, and the culture that supported it, had long since been destroyed by European navies. Transcontinental trade was no longer a shared
enterprise; the merchant shipping of the high seas was now entirely controlled by the naval powers of Europe. It no longer fell to Masr to send her traders across the Indian Ocean; instead, the geographical position that had once brought her such great riches had now made her the object of the Great Powers' attentions, as a potential bridge to their territories in the Indian Ocean.

Over the same period that Egypt was gaining a new strategic importance within the disposition of European empires, she was also gradually evolving into a new continent of riches for the Western scholarly and artistic imagination.
From the late seventeenth century onwards, Europe was swept by a fever of Egyptomania: sphinxes and pyramids began to appear in houses and gardens throughout the continent; several operas were written around themes from ancient Egypt; a succession of Popes became interested in the placing of Rome's obelisks, and none other than Sir Isaac Newton took it upon himself to prove that Osiris, Bacchus, Sesostris and Sisac were but different names for the same deity.
Concurrent with this growing interest, the study of Egyptian antiquities passed from being an esoteric and quasi-mystical pursuit into a freshly-charted field of scholarly enterprise, and in the service of the new science several travellers undertook journeys of discovery into Egypt.

It was against this background that the first report of the Geniza was published in Europe. In 1752 or '53, a Jewish traveller, Simon Van Geldern, an ancestor of the German poet Heinrich Heine, visited the Synagogue of Ben Ezra, in Babylon.
The visit appears to have been an unremarkable one: all that Van Geldern had to say of it was that he had ‘looked around' the Geniza and paid five coins. Effectively, the event passed unnoticed. At that time European scholarly interest was focused
on the Egypt of the ancients; the Synagogue of Ben Ezra was too much a part of Masr to merit attention.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Egypt had become the scholarly counterpart of those great landmasses that were then being claimed and explored by European settlers: unknown to herself, she was already well on her way to becoming a victim of the Enlightenments conception's of knowledge and discovery.
In fact, the first detailed plan for the conquest of Egypt was conceived not by a soldier but by a philosopher, Karl Liebniz, as early as 1670. More than a hundred years later, when Napoleon conceived of his invasion of Egypt, it was partly on the model of a scientific expedition.

In the decades immediately after Napoleon's invasion of 1798, Egypt attracted the husbandry of the Western academy in a way that no other place ever had. Yet all through this period, despite the concentrated efforts being expended on the soil around it, the Geniza remained entirely unnoticed: it was then still a part of a living tradition, and the conquering scholars had little interest in the dishevelled and unglamorous inhabitants of contemporary Masr.

More than a hundred years passed after Simon Van Geldern's visit with no public notice being taken of the Geniza at the Synagogue of Ben Ezra. By the time the next reports were published, Masr had passed into the control of the British, and her position on the route to India had become her curse, the proximate cause of her annexation. The visit that first brought the Geniza to the attention of the scholarly world occurred in 1864, and then, soon enough, events began to unfold quietly around it, in a sly allegory on the intercourse between power and the writing of history.