“Perhaps there’s a woman in the case,” suggested someone. Fairclough, who was a lifelong bachelor, snorted and peered into his tumbler. “Unlikely,” said someone else. “The only female he lets get anywhere near him is that damned donkey of his.”
-The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind, A Suspense Tale of Old Cairo, Michael Pearce
We learned in our Arabic class about the Islamic marriage law concept of mahr, a sum paid by the groom to the bride at the time of their wedding or at a future fixed date, either in cash or in kind, in which case as something easily monetized like jewelry. Jewelry was preferred because it could be personalized as belonging to the bride and to the bride alone, not something that could be mixed up as common household property and then stolen by the husband later, and its value would be obvious for all to see all the while the bride, even when eventually she became upstaged as surely she would be, could show it off as her fine every day adornment.
When times were tough for the whole family, or if she were to be left penniless in a divorce, she could sell it off piece by piece.
And I began to think how mahr might work for donkeys. Cairo’s working donkeys were often gaudily tacked with polished brass fittings, rings and chains and hooks and grommets and even a hamsa, or Hand of Fatima, dangling from the bridle’s browband or cheek pieces. I wondered if when times were tough for the donkey, it might pawn or sell a bit of brass to help make ends meet.
I saw plenty of donkeys pulled up in front of public bread bakeries where prices were so heavily subsidized that a loaf of ‘aysh baladi, literally meaning “village life”, because Egyptians use the same word, ‘aysh, for “bread” as they do for “life”- in Egypt both often being very coarse and containing more chaff than grain, cost less than a penny.
The donkey driver would buy ten or twenty loaves and throw them to the donkey to eat right there on the street. And I wondered if the donkey ever tired of ‘aysh baladi and wished instead to eat ‘aysh shami, a finer and more expensive bleached flour variety. And if his owner would not pay, if the donkey then wished he could just tear off a brass ring or chain from his bridle and pay for it with that. He was after all a city donkey, not a village donkey