Welcome to Cairo

Al-Azhar Mosque in Islamic Cairo was established in 972. It is supposed to be the oldest university in the world and it still functions as an Islamic university gathering Muslim students from all around the world. The mosque itself was beautiful but as the ultimate religious place in Egypt women need to wear a veil.

We thought we were well prepared for Egypt with our three guidebooks, a recent travel story “Down the Nile” by an American woman, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, “Sinuhe the Egyptian” set in the times of Akhenaton by Mika Waltari and another novel by Ahdaf Soueif “A Map of Love” using as its setting both Egypt’s colonial period and contemporary Egypt. However, one month in Egypt was full of cultural adventures and nothing could have prepared us for the ubiquitous bargaining and haggling. We made it though, sometimes annoyed or feeling cheated, a few times angry, but also every now and then positively surprised.

As for the Islamic society, I was very surprised of the enormous role Islam plays in Egypt. Our 10 years old guidebook for Cairo said that the majority of women do not wear veils in Egypt, this had however completely changed during this last decade as a woman without a veil was an exception and they could only be spotted in the richer areas of the city or in the Coptic (Egypt’s Christians) neighbourhood. The first day in Cairo, a hot day, I was wearing only a knee-long skirt, and the people were staring at me constantly, the next day I decided to wear trousers even if I was quite irritated that I was thus submitted to a culture so demeaning to women. When Florence Nightingale was travelling in Egypt in the 19th century she was also horrified by the status of women and wrote in her letters: "She is nothing but the servant of a man; the female elephant, the female eagle, has a higher idea of what she was put into the world to do, than the human female has here."

Rosemary Mahoney wrote about an Egyptian guy in her book "Down the Nile": "Foreign women who dressed in scanty clothing he did not respect. 'I would try to touch them and make sex with them', he said. 'When I see foreign men and women friends greeting each other with huggings and kissings here in the market, I think they are like animals making sex in the street. Egyptian people would never do this.'" The last sentance is partly true, you never saw people openly showing their affection. Only in a little park in Cairo we saw young couples holding hands. However, men were touching each other quite a lot, male friends walking even hand in hand in the streets. When the Egyptian men had the opportunity, they tried to touch my skin as well.

View from our Downtown hotel. The room was next to a mosque so at 5 o’clock in the morning we woke up with the muezzin calling the Muslims for a prayer. We, the infidels, were thus ready for tourism with the sunrise. The neon green lights illuminating the minaret seemed to be very fashionable, reminding of the past Christmas, they were all over Egypt.

Hundred years ago, Cairo must have looked like Paris, but now with 18 million inhabitants and millions of old Ladas and Peugeots on the streets, the beautiful facades were under a layer of black dust. It is said that Cairo is one of the most polluted cities in the world and I don’t doubt that for a second. It must be intolerable during the summer but even in January you have a feeling as if you were constantly smoking cigarettes. Outside the city centre, there are hundreds of unfinished buildings for the poor people moving from the countryside to the biggest city in Africa. It is chaotic, exhausting and dirty city but somehow it has its own charm.

Buildings next to Ibn Tulun Mosque in Southern Islamic Cairo. Morning haze or pollution makes the air grey. Buildings are half finished or half destroyed, rubbish everywhere but the minarets make the skyline beautiful.

The Islamic neighbourhood (well, it’s all Islamic but there is an old Islamic centre) is full of beautiful mosques more than thousand years old and if you continue a bit further from a touristy spot, you’ll find yourself in an unpaved road with chickens running around and you wonder if you are in Afghanistan. Here, the people are so unfamiliar with tourists that you actually pay the same for a cup of tea as the locals, around one pound (10 cents) – and I guess there are not many places in Egypt where they don’t know how to take advantage of the rich Westerns. Afterwards, in the big Khan-el-Khalili market, you really feel like robbed when you have to pay 15 times more. But this is Egypt, the tourisms is one of its greatest sources of revenue so they are trying to make everything out of it in the micro level as well. It is annoying but finally it is still cheap.

Our little café. Only men go to these places, you see women outside when they are shopping. Men smoke sheesha and drink tea all night long while women are taking care of children and housework. The two worlds of men and women are clearly separated in Egypt. It's very sad, also because the tourist has very few opportunities to meet and speak with women.