Egypt Day 11

This evening, my host brother and I rode a microbus to a neighborhood perhaps a mile or two away to try to get my international cell activated, and then walked back home. I love walking here at night, when it's cooler and the streets hum with activity. Along the way, we passed a beautiful old mosque. In the garden in front of it, children were playing soccer and families were lying in the grass relaxing. It was a delightfully peaceful, idyllic scene. Across the street, my host brother noted, was a huge cathedral, one of the oldest in Egypt. He added he could take me to the "religious area" of Old Cairo, where one can find the first mosque ever built here, along with numerous other Muslim, Christian and Jewish places of worship.

    This made me think back to a few nights ago, when my brother and I went into an Islamic-Period mosque just a few minutes from our home that I had marveled at my first night here but had yet to visit. The outside of the building, though beautiful, looked like a fortress, something not so unusual for religious buildings of the Middle Ages. Inside, it was a strange mix of the ancient and modern, serene and disruptive. Going through the door, I found myself standing on the side of a large room, covered in beautifully patterned carpets, on which a handful of men were praying or talking in hushed tones. In front of me were lines of shoes, which worshippers must cast off before entering to pray.

    A tall, dignified looking man in a gallabiya (traditional Egyptian dress, a common sight in Cairo but more universally worn in rural Upper Egypt) finished his prayers and greeted my brother. In Arabic, he asked about who I was, what I was doing in Egypt and whether I had studied Islam in school. This seems to be a topic of some interest to Egyptians, and I've occasionally been met with surprise that I know anything about Islam at all. I think we have a lot of work to do to show we have some (if nowhere near enough) understanding of the complex cultures of the Middle East.

    After they finished their conversation, my brother led me down the hall, to where it once opened up on the courtyard. Instead of trees and grass, we were greeted with the sight of bulldozers moving dirt around a construction site. The mosque was in desperate need of repairs and, therefore, work had commenced to shore up and restore the priceless piece of heritage. To my surprise, it was not the mosque itself or the local government funding the work. Having heard Egypt could not afford to save the building, the government of Kazakhstan had stepped in with the money. I don't think I had ever heard of a government doing that before. It was clearly a nice gesture from one Muslim nation to another, and maybe a savvy political move.

Such a gesture would not go unappreciated. Religion is an incredibly palpable part of daily life here, in the sights and sound and language, far more so than in any place in the West. It's an influence so alien to those of us from liberal, secular societies that it must be experienced to understand fully. Case in point: When I got home, around 10, I noticed loud, beautiful chanting emanating from the street. It was filling the whole neighborhood with sound. I asked my younger host brother what it was. Verses from the Quran. Somewhere in the darkness, a few winding streets away, at one of this cities seemingly infinite number of mosques, a funeral was beginning.