Bomb not the casbah

Police Detective, from Algiers- Arresting Pépé in a place like the Casbah isn’t child’s play. It takes time. Inspector Janvier, from Paris- Time! The Casbah, I’ll go up there tomorrow, to see how the land lies. Detective- How the land lies?…Funny! The Casbah is like a labyrinth. I’ll show you. (Camera pan over a wall map of the Casbah, followed by a newsreel montage of shots taken from rooftops, terraces, darkened doorways and stepped streets). A teeming anthill…stairways like ladders…jumble of mazes…putrid chasms and slimy porticos…overcrowded cafés…a mystery to us…There is not one Casbah, but hundreds. Thousands!

-Pépé le Moko (1937)

Did the Casbah scare me into staying in a hotel one mile away? How unexpected then, having watched Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and seen where the French killed Ali la Pointe, thirteen year old Petit Omar and eighteen others in a house demolition, and having met Djamilah Bouhired who left a bomb (which never detonated) in the Air France office and seen FLN mastermind Saadi Yacef’s hiding place in the Bouhired family home, that I should return to the Hotel Suisse and learn that the Boston Marathon finish line had just been blown up.

Without a jeep, without a hat

I cannot go to the desert alone. I am unfit for it. The desert requires a jeep. It requires a hat and sunglasses and plastic liters of warm water it is no pleasure to drink. It requires a guide. It requires a cell phone.

-Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, Richard Rodriguez

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It doesn’t even require a guide. If you have a camel and a goatskin and a headwrap, if you can squint your eyes and don’t mind being out of touch for forty days, all you need is a Khabīr al-Tarīq, an Expert of the Way. KhairAllah was one. In those days there were others too, but fewer now, and most today carry phones.

Plastic camels

Here, we report the ingestion of anthropogenic waste, primarily plastic bags and rope by dromedary camels…

-The Plight of Camels Eating Plastic Waste, Marcus Eriksen, Journal of Arid Environments, February 2021

Why are the camels wandering around what looks like a dump? And where do they drink? Here, they’re like pigeons or rats. Like GOP voters. My problem is that more people read and comment on an article about Meghan Markle than on this. Well that’s one way to clean up wasted plastic bags, but we’re gonna need a lot more camels.

-Readers Comments of the Washington Post Op-Ed about this article

I sent this article to KhairAllah for his comments, through his son Soliman who can translate and read it to him. I doubt I’ll hear back, but I can imagine what he’d say. Mafrūd Yākulu Shauk, They’re Supposed To Eat Thorns.

you were in the sand

Sir Henry- What did you think about in the desert? Kathy (played by Anna Lee, aka The British Bombshell)- Sand mostly. Sir Henry- Did you ever think of me? Kathy- Yes, you were in the sand. Sir Henry- I’m glad of that.

-King Solomon’s Mines (1937)

I thought of a lot of people from back home when I was in the sand, but they should not have been glad to be thought of out there. Too much of it, enough to grind the camera gears and grit the millet gruel.

That sahara in the sky

He’s leaving, leaving on a midnight train…to that great Sahara in the Sky.

-Gladys Knight, Coming 2 America

After Gladys went back to Georgia, and after his life on the Darb, after his countless camels to Cairo, KhairAllah left Ramsees Station on his last train back to Kordofan, to Dar al-Kababish, the Abode of Sheepkeepers. He now lives in Dar al-Salaam, the Abode of Peace, on the outskirts of Omdurman, Mother of the Abode of Peace, getting up in years, waiting for his last ‘Arba’īn, his last Forty Days, to eat aseeda and sleep rough in that great Sahara in the Sky.

Snort and gnar

Camels somewhere snorted and gnarred, and the music and odour of human beings came across the night towards him…

-Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell

I remember once or twice at night walking away from the campfire and the couched camels to stand far out in the blackness and look back towards the light of the burning juniper logs looking like a small reading lamp lit in an immense darkened room. You could hear the chatter and high pitched laughter of the men, Adam and Ibrahim mostly, both cooks. But the camels were chewing their cud and farting, not snorting and gnarring.

Sudan life is hard

Yesterday my father call me, he say he need help for youngest sons Altegani and Alfatih and daughter Sona for school days to come…Sudan life very hard this time, everything is high…

-email 11/12/2020 from Soliman, KhairAllah’s eldest son

I am in touch with KhairAllah via email with his son Soliman who works as a mechanic in Jabrat al-Shaikh who talks to his father in Omdurman by cell phone. I haven’t seen him in three years but as far as I can tell, KhairAllah’s health is good and he is trying to educate his two youngest sons and daughter. I have no idea if this is true despite Soliman’s assurances. I cannot call KhairAllah on his mobile phone because I do not have one myself and there is no contact between Sudanese cell towers and overseas land lines.

And even if I could get a direct line through to him, my Sudanese Arabic comprehension is poor unless I can read simultaneous body language. KhairAllah spoke to me most expressively with his eyes and hands. Khalās, It’s Enough, or Khilis, It’s Over, he might say when it was time to break camp, wiping his two hands clean in the air, or Yimkin Bukra, Maybe Tomorrow, he would respond to my question, When do we arrive in Egypt?, raising his eyes from me to the sky and in fact having no idea of how to answer a Khawaja. Allah huwa ‘Ālim, God Knows.

Alo, Alo...Ramadān Karīm

Alo, Alo. Bismillah al-Rahmān al-Rahīm. Luwīs. Kayf al-Hāl?….Hello, Hello. In the Name of God, The Merciful, The Compassionate. Louis. How are you?…

-First Words of KhairAllah’s Ramadan Greeting, Received in a M4A audio file by email from his son Soliman’s account, April 15, 2021

I had to download an app to play this audio file when I opened Soliman’s email. I listened to KhairAllah’s voice and didn’t understand much so I played it over the telephone to a Sudanese friend living here and he translated the gist of it. About buying seven sheep, sending three children to primary school, and wishing the best for my Walad, Bint, and Madame during this holy month.

I had previously sent him a recorded message via Soliman, hoping that he was healthy and not travelling far from home to buy his livestock as he did in the past. He assured me that he was buying animals in the Omdurman market where prices are higher than in the countryside. Even so, I am sure he can make a profit. KhairAllah is a shrewd buyer and seller of sheep.

Gazma gazing near giza

And taverns, gambling-dens, and houses of ill fame. And parading the sidewalks, numerous Levantine damsels who seek by their finery to imitate their fellows of the Paris boulevards. This then is the Cairo of the future, this cosmopolitan fair. Good heavens!

-The Death of Philae, 1909, Pierre Loti

Seventy years after Loti was horrified by Cairene damsels strutting their finery, we joined the young ladies outside the Shoe (Gazma in Arabic) store windows on Tala’at Harb and listened. Ooo’s and Aah’s, Bahibbhum’s (I love them’s) and Yu’gabūnī’s (They delight me’s), Awī’s (Very’s) and Kitīr’s (Lot’s and Lot’s). But Cairo’s sewers were overburdened and often overflowing, so strappy heels and open toes were not practical. Better to go barefoot like a Fellah and rinse your feet in the Nile.

Pierre loti wets his feet

We have first to traverse the old town of Cairo, a maze of streets still full of charm…But nevertheless, what ruins! What filth! What rubbish! How present is the sense of impending dissolution! And what is this, large pools of black water in the middle of the road!…But the good Arabs, patiently and without murmuring, gather up their long robes and with legs bare to the knee make their way through…

-The Death of Philae, 1909, Pierre Loti

Loti complained about the loss of Old Cairo’s lamp-lit charm on his way to New Cairo’s “sham elegance and Semiramis Hotels” where he could take a clean bath. In my later visits I liked to stay at a dilapidated pension in the shadow of the Semiramis InterContinental. The Garden City House had mostly shared bathrooms and some of the water heaters worked by a blue gas flame burning under the pipe connected to the tub but not to the sink. You bathed in hot water but had to shave in cold.

Mamur zapt no°1

Cairo, 1908, the heyday- or was it past the heyday?-…It was a country ripe with ambiguities. A country bright with sunlight and dark with shadows. And in the shadows, among the ambiguities, worked the Mamur Zapt.

-The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet, Michael Pearce

The Mamur Zapt (from Ma’mūr Dābit, Commissioner of Secret Police, with the letter D of Dābit pronounced in Egypt as Z and the word Anglicized as Zapt, using the letter P which does not exist in Arabic and cannot be pronounced correctly by Arabs- thus the Christian name Butrous, for Peter) is my favorite series of Detective novels (Night of the Dog, Snake Charmer’s Daughter, Death of an Effendi, Spoils of Egypt, Mouth of the Crocodile, Last Cut, etc.), all making Cairo come alive again to those who knew the city. Mouski Street, Ezbekia Garden, Shepheard’s Hotel, Opera Square, Tawfiqiyya Red Light District- all there.

Mamur zapt no°2

“I’m not jealous,” Zeinab assured him, “if you want her, you can take her.” “She may have her own views about that.” “Are you taking her to the Moulid?…Have you ever been to a Moulid?” “Not this one.” “Ah. Then you must take her..” “Perhaps I will.”…“Some of its features, notably the phallic ones, have crept into the Moulid…” “A bit of a mixture, eh?” “Like Cairo, like Egypt.”

-The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog, Michael Pearce

He found Cairo an inexhaustible treasure house of interest and delight, and when alone wandered for hours exploring till utterly lost, knowing that any arbugy, donkey boy or person could take him or explain the way to some well known spot …the post of Mamur Zapt necessitated frequent access to the interiors of palaces and huts, even at times the penetralia of harems.

-The Moulids of Egypt, J.W. McPherson, writing about himself

J. W. McPherson was the Mamur Zapt. He policed all of Cairo’s Moulids, Birthday Celebrations of Sufi Saints, and wrote a book about them. Who might he have arrested at a Moulid? Hash dealers, whores, pickpockets, Effendis (according to Wehr, Gentlemen in Western Clothes Wearing the Tarboosh) acting badly. Hādir! Present!, a waiter at a Cairo restaurant might say when he came to your table. I was Hādir at many Moulids too but never arrested.

Mamur zapt no°3

An eccentric figure, McPherson would go about Cairo lost in thought as if leaving his purpose and direction to the white mule which carried him through the streets, a vision which helped endear him to his Egyptian neighbors who decided he was a seeker and a seer.

-Alexandria: City of Memory, Michael Haag

Owen wondered if they would have to move but at the last moment the mule was twitched aside…

-The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet, Michael Pearce

In Sadat’s Egypt we used to laugh at the bumbling incompetence of the Amn al-Dawlah, State Security, whose paranoia filtered so far down the chain of command that you could be arrested by a rural policeman if you photographed a donkey crossing a wobbly foot bridge over a stinky irrigation canal out in the countryside. Mamnou’ Tasawwar, Photography Forbidden, he would say, By order of State Security.

Mamur Zapt no°4

It was the middle of the afternoon and the Street of the Camel was unusually quiet…Even the donkey-boys had been driven into the shade…

-The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey Vous, Michael Pearce

…that nightmare full of weird interest and more incident than any other two years of my life…we visited clairvoyants, alchemists, spiritualists, Druzes, Chaldeans, Persians, weird people from all sorts of weird places, but never elicited the smallest explanations.

-The Man Who Loved Egypt: Bimbashi McPherson, an autobiography by John McPherson, describing his two years of service as Mamur Zapt

Boris Karloff, as Ardath Bey- Excuse me…I dislike being touched…an Eastern prejudice.

-The Mummy (1932)

McPherson must have been happy to leave Edwardian England to roam the back alleys of Khedival Cairo looking for hash dealers, Sufi plotters, and reawakened Pharaonic murderers who made The Mummy read like a kindergarten story. Sixty years after the Mamur Zapt policed those alleyways on his white mule, Dā’ūd, Samwa’īl, and I were thankful that he left a few of those malefactors free to sell their best stuff to us.

Mamur zapt no°5

On to the sand? On to the sand…Easy, except that the accomplices on camels had had to ride across hundreds of miles of desert to find the unmarked spot…

-The Mamur Zapt and the Mouth of the Crocodile, Michael Pearce

Accomplices. That is a strange thing to call Rabih, Masood, Ibrahim and the others. To me they were Zumalā’, Travelling Companions, or according to Lane, Those Who Follow One Behind Another or Ride One Beside Another on Camels, or Men Engaged in Work on Camels, cf. Rufaqā’, Men Not Engaged in Work on Camels, which Rabih, Masood, Ibrahim and the others were most certainly Not, the Darb being all Work and no Play, except for the Khawajas. Just ask KhairAllah. And it is also strange that Wehr gives Rufaqā’ the variant meanings of Comrades (in Marxist terminology), Partners…and Accomplices.

Basbousa in the hemorrhoid ward

Tonight Muhammad the Ironing Man and I went to see Ahmad the Bawāb in Qasr al-’Aini Hospital, he’s had a bout of hemorrhoids, after seeing him there I consider myself lucky for being operated at Agouza, he was in a huge dirty ward eaten by flies, hadn’t seen the doctor since his operation three days ago, says he has pain but gets no attention, he may have been acting for my sake but he still looks bad, his false teeth missing, face sweaty, sheets dirty, we brought basbousa but he’s not allowed to eat so Muhammad and I finished it though I should have learned my lesson last time when I went out for kebab, then had sweets which gave me tremendous sulphurous belching and the runs.

-Letter Home, October 24, 1978

That compassionate visit to Ahmad put me in good stead with him for the duration of my stay in his building. In his mind, you go to the hospital only to die so maybe he thought my coming to his bedside resurrected him from the dead. He didn’t mind that Muhammad and I had all his basbousa, he wasn’t allowed to have anything by mouth anyway. Plenty more where that came from and he had the rest of his life to eat it, by the kilo.