Last night I watched TV in a coffee house in Sayeda Zeinab, a Peace News show with old highlights from Camp David and then Live Broadcast from the South Lawn, they jeered when Begin put on his yarmulke to pray and hooted when Sadat kissed Rosalynn, he’s got a reputation of being an old goat…afterward I went to the Moulid of Sayidna Hussein- tonite is the last and biggest night so I must go back- with massive crowds of peasants and street people, hash and incense mixing with wild Sufi music sawed on two string viols, dancers twist and shake and fall into each other’s arms, gasping, shoulder to shoulder with wailing, flailing women, candy vendors and noisemakers and paper hat sellers, whores were working the crowd, the first I’ve seen obvious street walkers in Cairo…all this coming just hours after Jimmy Carter asked us to pray for peace, these people were obviously praying for something else. In Sayeda Zeinab I’d been wondering where everyone was. This is the answer.
-Letter Home, March 1979
The Moulids of Egypt by J.W. McPherson (1866-1946) was my Sufi bible that year, truly the best underground guide to some funky Egyptian stuff. As he wrote about the Hussein moulid, Dancing girls called Ghawazee seem to have been much in evidence and their modern successors had a meteoric revival reaching their zenith in 1934, when however they did not perform nor accost pilgrims or visitors in the precincts of the mosque but rather in the booths and tents. I beg to disagree, in 1979 the Ghawazee were still going strong, accosting pilgrims and visitors in the open, Jimmy Carter’s prayers be damned.
Sayeda Zeinab Mosque lit for its Moulid