Cairo

A cafe in Old Cairo, from a photo essay by Patrick Donovan (thanks, Patrick!) at UrbanPhoto

When J. was in Damascus with his father some years ago, he wrote me letters every night. One of the things he described most vividly were his visits to cafes like this, where the patrons - almost entirely men - go to drink strong Arab coffee, talk, and smoke narghilas (sheeshas, hookahs) - the water pipes my father-in-law calls "hubble-bubbles." J. brought one back with him -  of blue glass with gold designs on the surface - and once in a long while we used to set it up in the late afternoon on our back porch in Vermont and lazily smoke the sticky apple-soaked tobacco while gazing out at the garden. We never quite got the proper hang of keeping the fire going so the pastime was not as relaxing as it was supposed to be. In a cafe like the one shown above, you order the kind of tobacco you want and the narghila is brought to your table; the attendants periodically come around with fresh hunks of charcoal that they manipulate with little silver-colored tongs, fiddling with the fire in each narghila, while the patrons drink endless little cups of thick coffee and discuss their world...

There are a few authentic Middle Eastern cafes like this in Montreal, but so far we haven't visited one, probably because neither one of us really likes smoking or being in smoky atmospheres, but they are an intrinsic part of the fabric of all Middle Eastern cities - as Patrick's beautiful photographs show so well.

Al-Ahram Weekly, from Cairo, has always been one of the best Middle Eastern newspapers, and I like reading it online, for its cultural articles as well as its political reporting. The last issue had two pieces I wanted to pass along here - a first-person account by Hadeel Al-Shalchi of her first-ever visit to the Cairo Book Fair - the largest event of its kind in the Middle East, and a review of a new book by Zahi Hawass, Mountains of the Pharaohs: The untold story of the Pyramid Builders, from The American University in Cairo Press (2006) that I thought looked like a fascinating and new discussion of a very old topic.

But the book in review that appealed to me most was Other Routes: 1500 years of African and Asian Travel Writing, by Tabish Khair, Justin Edwards, Martin Leer & Hanna Ziadeh, eds., from Oxford: Signal Books, 2006. The review suggests that the book is too long and would have benefited by sharper editing shears, but the idea of a volume aimed at a non-European view of world travel seems very appealing to me. This one apparently ranges from the Arab journals of Ibn Battuta and the wandering Japanese poet Basho to many lesser-known travelers. The review itself is quite interesting, and begins with this poem, attributed to Imam al-Shafi:

Travel! Set out for pastures new
Life tastes richer when you have road-worn feet.
No water that stagnates is fit to drink,
For only that which flows is truly sweet.

Comments

[Jean]

Your link to the photo-essay isn't working, though I went to the blog and found it anyway, irresistibly drawn by the first photo. He captures so wonderfully the atmosphere and colours I remember perfectly from my only visit to Cairo many years ago. I was interested to actually see a couple of veiled women in the cafes pictured. No veils when I was there. But no women at all in the cafes either.

I must look for that travel book - a travel book that includes Basho, wow! Just been reading the Granta issue on travel from last year, which I somehow buried and didn't read when it came out. Terrific stuff, but such a desperate striving for originality, a new angle, post-modern self-questioning - I was wondering if it's really necessary. Most of still will never visit many parts of the world and would just like to hear about them through sensitive eyes and in eloquent and poetic voices.

[beth]

Jean, thanks, the link is working now. I'm glad to hear about your memories of Cairo, since I haven't been there myself and would like to go. J. was there once, but a very very long time ago. Let me know if you find that travel book - maybe Hatchard's has it? What you say about the essays in Granta is the way I feel about much of what's being written for journal publication now - and it's too bad.

[Hadeel]

thanks for linking to me. hope you come to my blog sometime :)

[beth]

Dear Hadeel - Thanks so much! I left a comment on your blog - I really enjoyed reading the current posts and will come back to read more. Hope you'll keep reading mine too.