Dear ج, These Fulani people like to paint their faces to look pretty for their camels and goats. That’s crazy I think because camels don’t care what you look like as long as you treat them nice and feed them well. I will tell you all about it.
Postcard home n°3
Dear ج, Do you know what is hanging from these palm trees? Dates, sweet and sticky and much better than Halloween candy. Is yours all gone now?
Postcard home n°2
Dear ج, What do you think about these gals? I haven’t seen them yet but I’m still looking. Tripoli has an old medina like Fes but it’s right on the sea so I eat a lot of fish couscous. You would love the Roman latrines at Leptis Magna, like Ephesus, only cleaner. I’m off to the desert tomorrow to see camels and sand and more sand.
Postcard home n°1
Dear ج, This is all that’s left of St. Simeon’s 45 foot high pillar that he sat on for three years with a chain around his neck!! Ask Miss Bleka if she’s ever heard of a penance like that. No donkeys are in the Damascus souk but there are plenty in Aleppo. I interviewed a donkey driver and gave him a tip which made him smile and met a ten year old girl like you who spoke four languages!
KhairAllah and i get photobombed
Photobomb- An otherwise normal photo that has been ruined or spoiled by someone who did not belong.
-Urban Dictionary
In 2011 KhairAllah and I went to a photo studio in El Obeid. After knowing him for twenty seven years, riding with him twice to Egypt, and sending messages back and forth through the Abu Jaib family, it was to be our first picture taken together. I didn’t know the guy who jumped into the shot at the last minute. We’d never seen him before and from then on it’s been just the three of us.
KhairAllah and Me and the Unknown Man
I said Bāl, not rāl
When it comes to the behind, you’re behind.
-Bassem Youssef, Egyptian Comedian, addressing Westerners about their bathroom habits
This brings to mind the old riddle, What does a dog do on three legs and a lady sitting down? The Kababish might ask, What does a camel do when standing and a man when squatting? If your answer is not, Bāl, To Micturate, you’d be wrong…unless you were in the company of a Khawaja who stands when he goes, in which case the correct answer is Rāl in its Intensive Form, Rawwal, as Lane defines, To Slobber or To Discharge Urine Interruptedly or Convulsively, a verb used exclusively for animals, for that is how they probably thought of me when I went.
Turban topplers
…toppling turbans and giddy goings-on…
-The Wilder Shores of Love, Lesley Blanch
Lesley Blanch was writing about the sometimes romantic, moretimes chaotic, and always misunderstood encounters of four Western women and their Middle Eastern paramours. Isabelle Eberhardt met Arab men dressed as a man herself and Isabel Burton met Arab men mostly through the stories of her husband Richard. Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, missing at sea and said to have been kidnapped by Barbary pirates and sent to the Ottoman harem for the Sultan, in fact probably went down with her ship. Lady Jane Digby was four times a bride and uncountably a mistress, marrying and divorcing men from countries progressively closer to the Arab East until finally settling down with a Syrian tribal shaikh, the true love of her life.
But as for the toppling of turbans and other fun goings-on in the desert, I recommend joining KhairAllah on the Darb al-’Arba’īn as a hapless Khawaja and seeing how long you can loaf about the campfire before he says, Khalās, Enough!, Ishā Ya Nāyyim, Awake O Sleeping One!, Irkab, Mount Up!
Musbah's masban
Allah loves those who cleanse themselves
-Surah 9, Verse 108
I first met Fouad and his father Musbah in 2003 when I was in Aleppo to write about the city's ever changing, never changing kaleidoscope of shops in its old and new quarters, whether large stores or small stalls, in the Suq or in Jdayde, in khan or qissariya, on the avenue or in the alley, in the magasin or the makhzan.
Near Bab al-Faraj's Clock Tower was where I found the Fansa family store, its Tanānīr of stacked bars of soap looking like the bread ovens for which they are named. Even the blind, especially the blind, know when they enter certain kinds of shop in Aleppo. Spice shops, perfume shops, bread shops, and saboun shops. Especially saboun.
My plan was to interview shopkeepers selling at retail, reselling what they bought from others, and those selling at wholesale, what they made themselves. The article was titled 4,000 Years Behind the Counter, recognizing that Aleppo's commercial history was longer than any other in the world.
For one to speak of Aleppo's sellers, one must first speak of what they sold, products made no place but here, products identified with this city as closely as people identify Damascene steel and Damask silks with Damascus.
That is how Khaldoun Fansa, one of Aleppo's leading practitioners of architectural preservation, after he had guided me through the old Suq to meet his friends- sellers of Aleppine brocaded textiles, Aleppine tent trappings, and Aleppine bric-a-brac from the French colonial period- led me to the Bab al-Faraj to meet his cousins, makers of Aleppo's best bath soap.
Saboun Maghribi, Western Soap, according to Lane, is an inferior variety, "not well made", "like cooked starch", "the washing of the head with it hastens hoariness". Aleppo soap on the contrary is Eastern soap, and so much the better. Lane defines Saboun al-Humūm, Soap of the Blues, as a metaphor for wine, with which you clean your mind of the blues. Saboun al-Hammām, Soap of the Bath, is not so different, because with the Fansa soap you clean your body of the blues.
Khaldoun had been eager to show off the Old City's private mansions whose architecture he had saved, by rebuilding and rededicating them for new civic purpose. One such mansion belonged to the qanun player Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss whose musical ensemble played and recorded classical Arab maqām under a sonically pure dome.
Julien's group was named for the Iraqi polymath Al-Kindi who in the 9th Century added a fifth string to the oud and thereby gave its plucked sounds a far more complex resonance...just as the addition of berries from the laurel tree, Laurus nobilis, gave a more complex olfaction to soap made from olive oil alone.
I remember one of Musbah's anecdotes about Tasbīn, a noun derived from the verb Sabbana, To Lather, and how his customers boast in the hammām of their Fansa soap. "Why," I asked him, "are the soap bars of Aleppo so large, the size of a brick? Why are they not smaller, fit for the palm of your hand?"
Musbah answered with a smile, "You do not understand Aleppine pride. When we bathe in public, we want everyone to see the maker's mark on our soap, as a way to show that we buy only the finest, most expensive brand. Thus we grip the bar in the hand so that our family stamp does not rub off, so we make Tasbīn only from the other side."
I cannot go into the details of the work of the Fansa Sabbān, Soapmaker, because at the time of my visit it was a closely held secret, but Khaldoun did take me to their Masban, Place of Soap(making). And just as the domed room gave Julien's music-making an extra sonic richness, so too did the domed rooms of the Masban in an old caravanserai lend an extra aroma to Musbah's saboun-making.
The rooms were quiet and empty when I visited the Masban. All the soap had already been sold and shipped. The floors were clean, polished and waxed. Using them as soap making surfaces will do that, even to tiles dating from the Middle Ages. But there was one thing I still did sense, something like an oud’s resonating fifth string. Not a sound but rather a scent. It was the hint of laurel oil, and the smell alone left me abuzz and feeling clean.
Tanta wasn't Cairo
We banished her [Firdus, a famously beautiful Cairo brothel keeper whom McPherson had arrested in delicto flagrante] to a town she expressed a loathing for in the Provinces where she was kept under police supervision in a circumscribed area kept for women of her profession. Tanta was the place but the name was kept secret because all the young officers would want to go there to pass their leave if it was known, and that is the last I know of her. [Postscript dated 17.7.1921] Not quite the last. Three years later my eye fell on this in the Egyptian Gazette. “The well known Tanta women murder case. The accused is charged with having wilfully murdered by suffocation and strangulation Bahia Ibrahim known as Firdus and robbed her of her jewelry and valuables.”
-The Man Who Loved Egypt, J.W. McPherson, recounting his service as Mamur Zapt
But this was another thing they both found puzzling, that the body should be boxed up and sent to a Pasha. Wasn’t that the last thing you would do if you murdered somebody?
-The Bride Box: A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce
Tanta isn’t so bad a place. During the 1978 moulid I bought cotton candy and a tin horn and paper hat. McPherson himself went there to keep an eye on the festivities in 1920 and got up early to watch the Zaffa al-Sharāmīt, Procession of the Prostitutes. He didn’t say if he’d been looking for Firdus.
This mulid is Mulid!
So what does a mulid look like then? To an outsider, the initial appearance is utterly chaotic…a mixture of Sufi pilgrims, roaming youths, families, amusements, trade, ecstatic piety, and solemn commemoration, all framed by colorful lights and very loud music…evoked by the exclamation “Mulid!”.
-The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt, Samuli Schielke
The crowd was brilliant, spotted with primary colors. The air rippled with tambourines, while here and there in the lags of silence that fell over the shouts and chanting there came the sudden jabbering of the long drums…horses moaned…a cart filled with the prostitutes of the Arab town in colored robes went by with shrill screams…and the singing of painted men to the gnash of cymbals and scribbling of mandolines: the whole as gorgeous as a tropical animal. “Nessim,” she [Justine] said foolishly. “On one sole condition- that we sleep together absolutely tonight.”
-Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell
Durrell had to consult his personally inscribed copy of McPherson’s Moulids of Egypt in order to get his description right. Schielke the anthropologist only had to throw himself into the festivity head first. He found that the parade of prostitutes at the Tanta moulid had been suppressed in the early 20th Century and that public circumcision booths were outlawed. But not so fast on the policing of morality…he also found that the spiritual retreat ritual of Khalwa, in which unmarried male and female Sufis pair off for intimate encounters, was still going strong on the moulid’s concluding Laila Kabīra, Big Night. Just ask Justine.
Bukra boris
Many of the lady visitors to Cairo are pretty hot and one wonders sometimes whether they are attracted most by the antiquities or by the iniquities of Egypt. On Christmas night we saw in the moonlight in the sand a colossal bedouin and from beneath him appeared a little feminine attire, so little that it would not have betrayed its wearer, but that a little voice said in English, “Mind tomorrow night?”
-The Man Who Loved Egypt, J.W. McPherson
(In Cairo) Boris Karloff, as the heavily disfigured Egyptian gentleman Ardath Bey, the reincarnated Pharaonic scribe Imhotep- Have we not met before, Miss Grosvenor? Miss Grosvenor (daughter of the Governor General of Sudan, recognized by Ardath as the reincarnated Princess Anck-es-en-Amun whom he loved 4,000 years before)- No, I don’t think so. I don’t think one would forget meeting you. Boris Karloff- Then I am mistaken… (Later as Imhotep, having put Miss Grosvenor in a trance and dressed her as a belly dancer) You will not remember what I show you now yet I will awaken memories of love…and death.
-The Mummy (1932)
Western women going East. Lesley Blanche wrote about four of them in The Wilder Shores of Love. Rosita Forbes was married back home but went there solo. Lady Anne Blunt travelled there with her husband to buy stud horses. Dorothy Eady, Omm Sety, went after bumping her head when a girl and came to thinking herself the reincarnation of Bentreshyt, a consecrated virgin in the Temple of Seti at Abydos where she lived the rest of her life. When I visited Abydos in 1978 I must have seen her lurking about in Egyptian mufti but she wasn’t easy to recognize.
Some of my classmates that year wanted to study more than the language, I remember one who returned from Christmas vacation far up the Sudanese Nile with stories of dancing naked around a Nuer fire by moonlight. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist of Nilotic people and McPherson’s good friend, would have called her a participant-observer in little feminine attire.
Hashīsh in majuscule
Shortly after we found a little group of Hasheesh smokers all more or less under the influence. I am making a second attempt to send some Hasheesh cigarettes to Charlie, the first lot with the Hasheesh pipe, etc having been destroyed by the customs people, for Hasheesh is under a terrible ban here. Under its sway people assume sometimes an apparently second nature suggestive of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These people we met were merely “Magnun” (idiotic) and sang and danced in a weird way, and all seemed absolutely unconscious of our presence. It requires many months steady smoking to induce the proper Hasheesh condition…
-The Man Who Loved Egypt: Bimbashi McPherson, J.W. McPherson
…gives one a superb first hand glimpse of the low life of Egypt.
- Lawrence Durrell, in the Preface
I am glad to see that Bimbashi (Major) McPherson capitalized the word Hashīsh in his letters home, and only three months after arriving in Cairo knew where to get high and how to outwit the narcs. And I am sure that when he learned to write in Arabic he saw no need for the upper case, because its alphabet has none.
Shouia, if god has willed
Slimane- C’est déjà écrit. Shouia. Slowly. Pépé- And if I kill you first? Slimane- Inshaa’Allah.
-Pépé le Moko (1937)
Al-Maktūb Maktūb. The Written is Written. Déjà. My first year teacher Abraham Udovitch said that a lot to us when he passed out our weekly tests. Sometimes he asked us to conjugate the verb Shā’a, To Want, To Wish, or in the case of Allah, To Will [to Happen]. And from that same triliteral root comes the noun Shay’, A Thing (not to be confused with Shāy, Tea), and in its diminutive feminine form, Shwayya (which Slimane pronounced as Shouia), a workhorse word with many meanings in Colloquial Arabic. A Little, Less, Slowly, Easy Does It, Softly.
The Sand eats the pen
…written partly in the saddle and partly in the tent…
-Palmyra and Zenobia, from the Preface, William Wright, 1895
No, it is impossible to put down a single legible word in a camel saddle, and I had no tent. I wrote my trail diary seated on the open ground, often with my back to the wind or my face to the fire light. In pencil because, as KhairAllah would say, the sand Yākul, Eats, the pen. He didn’t say if it would also Yishrab, Drink, its ink.
Cairo is a sitt
…if towns have a gender then Cairo is a lady…Its mood is gay, rather flashily romantic in the evening, shrill and ugly in the morning. By instinct, I am afraid, the lady was a prostitute.
-African Trilogy, Alan Moorehead
People applauded and called out “Allah!” and “Ya Sitt!”
-The Voice of Egypt: Um Kalthum, Virginia Danielson, describing her concerts when she first began to sing
Al-Qāhira, The Victorious One (f.), Mother of the World, Masr simply put, Egypt herself. In Arabic you say, Ya Rājul!, O Man!, but there is no polite way to address the distaff. You shouldn’t say it crudely and literally, O Woman!, so you say, Ya Sayyida!, O Lady!, which in Egypt gets garbled, as usual in the vernacular, as Ya Sitt!, and to be additionally polite, Ya Sitti!, O My Lady! Ya Qāhira, Ya Sitti, Ya Kawkab al-Sharq! [O Orb of the East!, as Um Kalthum was known- and Egyptians don’t mean it as one half of the way she was built up top.]
Hashāshīn on the way
…the cafetiers, pastry-cooks, restaurant keepers, the gamins, camelots, and old women who hawk [drugs] on the streets… We got much fun out of the raids we organized and kept our dope hounds busy and content…
-The Man Who Loved Egypt, J. W. McPherson, describing his anti-narcotics work in old Cairo
I remember the coffee house waiters, basbousa makers, fūl vendors, street boys, and black sheet-wrapped Sitts selling hash in Cairo’s old quarter known as Darb al-Ahmar, the Way of the Red, all playing mouse to the narcs playing cat. But camelots? No idea what McPherson means there.