Cairo: Metropolis of miracles

In the days following the traffic jam, amid stories about Iraqi violence and Egypt's constitutional referendum, Cairo newspapers ran accounts of the talking tree on the road near the airport. Some details differed. A soldier in the watchtower had heard the tree praising Allah, and overnight, words written in fire had appeared on the trunk, accompanied by a pleasant odor of musk. A passerby heard murmuring and noticed blood dripping from the bark and saw the words Allah Muhammad Taha, one of the 99 names of God, suddenly appear. Everyone agreed that the tree was quickly becoming a place of pilgrimage, to the dismay of the authorities. The notion that a tree can vocalize "is ridiculous," the Islamic intellectual Gamal al-Banna scoffed in the Egypt Daily News. "If this was a revelation, God would tell us through the angel Gabriel." A committee of scientists sent to investigate the phenomenon inspired more curiosity and made the traffic jams worse. When the Cairo prosecutor's office was reported to have requested that the police chop down the tree to put a halt to the public disorder, more people rushed to the site to kiss the trunk, tear off leaves as souvenirs, and take pictures of the miracle with their cell phones before it disappeared. Anti-government commentators, meanwhile, accused the regime of misusing state media to propagate "irrational thinking" as part of a conspiracy to undermine the country's democratic evolution.

Whether or not it actually talks, a tree that upsets a government and its opposition is unusual, to say the least, so I drove back to investigate. The tree, a eucalyptus, was still standing, and the words Allah Muhammad were in plain sight on the right branch of its divided trunk, though it looked to me as if they had been carved years ago, for bark now bulged around them like a scar. The Arabic letters were charred, as if someone had highlighted them with a blowtorch.

The tree was silent, but not the people around it. "The words appeared overnight," a man standing next to me insisted when I said it seemed they had been there for some time. "It is a miracle. God is telling people they must pay more attention to him."

"Once I saw God when I cracked open an egg," interjected a pretty 18-year-old girl named Hind, who wore brushed blue jeans, a long-sleeved cotton blouse, and a black head scarf that framed her heart-shaped face. Hind had traveled by taxi from the delta governorate of Minoufia, and I believed her when she told me that she had seen the name Allah on one-half of a cracked eggshell. Flowing Arabic script can mimic forms in nature, and I once saw Allah "written" in two polished halves of an agate geode on display in a curiosity shop; the owner considered it a miracle and refused to sell. Hind confessed that she had come to the tree three times to find a potential husband who, like her, believed "God is in everything." Tito, an eighteen-year-old working at a Cairo photo shop, had come to make money. He was selling pictures of the miracle tree for 40 cents and had had 35 customers that morning.

When I went back a few months later, the tree had survived but the crowds had disappeared. Yet I had begun to notice a curious thing: All over Cairo, trees were "talking." When I looked for it, I saw many examples of the name Allah and its variants carved on tree trunks—including one in a driveway across from my apartment building, which I had never noticed in the years I had been living there. Sometimes the words appeared newly inscribed, but many had been there for a long time, the letters growing and distorting with the growth of the tree into which they were cut. Whether you believed in miracles or talking trees or Islam, it was obvious a message was spreading.

I've lived in Cairo for most of the past decade, have sailed up the Nile, snorkeled in the Red Sea, and camped in the desert. To me, Cairo is Egypt's ultimate adventure and enigma. After all this time, I feel I have only scratched the surface of the city that the Arabs call Umm Al-Dunya, "Mother of the World." These days, her character seems more dysfunctional than nurturing.

Brigitte Lacombe / CondeNast Traveler Menkaure's pyramid, Giza

Beloved for its cinema, Cairo is the Arab world's aging movie star: seductive, repulsive, complex, and compelling. A young generation of well-traveled, well-connected entrepreneurs has commenced a face-lift, building luxury hotels, restaurants, shops, and nightclubs (the Cairo branch of Buddha Bar opened just this fall) that are adding global chic to one of the world's most layered cities; its unmatched architectural patrimony stretches from before the construction of the Pyramids through more than a thousand years of Islamic history, and its cultural and ethnic stream blends Persian, Roman, African, Arab, Ottoman, and Western influences. In anticipation of a deluge of tourists—a record 12 million projected this year—the government, for its part, is busy expanding airports and restoring and rearranging the storerooms of heritage. In the coming years, King Tut's treasures will move from the dusty century-old Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square to a massive state-of-the-art facility on the Giza Plateau; the royal mummies will be transferred to a Museum of Civilization on the site of the Tulinid capital, Fustat, founded in A.D. 642 on a Nile promontory overlooking the earlier Coptic settlement; and a Museum of the City of Cairo will rise within Al-Azhar Park, the green lung reclaimed from a Fatimid-era garbage dump just east of Cairo's Islamic core. This year, the Museum of Islamic Art will reopen after a five-year, $15 million renovation, with the participation of curators from the Louvre and French designer Adrien Gardère.

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