Cairo: Metropolis of miracles

Islamic dynasties and sects have waxed and waned in Egypt since the Prophet Muhammad's death in A.D. 632 and the arrival of the first Arab army in 641. Today the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia, is growing more influential. Starting in the 1970s, Egyptians flocked to Saudi Arabia for jobs as teachers, construction workers, and household servants. Their remittances are now the second-biggest source of Egypt's hard currency, ahead of Suez Canal receipts and after tourism. Millions of migrants bring back not just money to build and furnish houses that are the envy of their neighbors but also the custom of veiling wives in black abayas and the habit of criticizing those less demonstrative in their faith. The Wahhabi phenomenon has dovetailed with Egyptian political Islam, which arose in the 1940s under the guidance of the Muslim Brotherhood partly as a reaction to British colonialism and centuries of foreign occupation, and which gained strength following the 1952 revolution and the failure of President Gamal Abdul Nasser's secular pan-Arab socialism to solve Egypt's problems.

To quell Islamic opposition, the Mubarak government has banned political parties based on religion. At the same time, to enhance its own religious legitimacy, it encourages social Islam through the sheikhs of Al-Azhar University, the Arab world's oldest academy, who are continually issuing fatwas on dress and behavior. Cairenes besiege their offices and Internet sites with requests for rulings on whether kidney dialysis and liposuction are "un-Islamic," and the sheikhs often find themselves in ever more convoluted arguments about the compatibility of Islam and modern life: Last spring, a scholar issued a fatwa urging female office workers to breast-feed male colleagues to make them "blood relatives" and thus circumvent Islamic rules of sexual segregation. The irony of this puritanical climate is that Cairo has a reputation throughout the Arab world for a garish joie de vivre. In summer, tens of thousands of Saudi citizens vacation here to enjoy social freedoms, and many partake in entertainments banned at home, including casinos, belly dancing clubs, alcohol-serving restaurants, movie theaters, and mixed-gender hotel swimming pools.

“The Yacoubian Building” resonated with readers who know that Cairo's rooftops constitute a parallel city. They provide alternative housing for the poor and offer space for soccer fields, pigeon coops, extra living rooms, temporary art galleries, refuse dumps, and fields of satellite dishes that turn like sunflowers to catch episodes of “Desperate Housewives,” Italian porn, Al Jazeera newscasts, and a Saudi channel which, like an Islamic version of MTV, broadcasts clips of the superstars of Koranic recitation.

In Fatimid Cairo, rooftops served as pleasure gardens within the protected Islamic fortress. The Fatimids were 10th-century Shiite conquerors from Tunisia who supplanted the Baghdad-based Abbasid rulers of Egypt and gave Cairo its name, Al Qahira, or "The Triumphant." Their dynasty endured for two centuries, and their royal city became legendary for scholarly libraries, public hospitals, and opulent palaces. Buildings stood as high as 14 stories, and landlords kept banana trees on their roofs as well as bullocks to draw up water. After two glorious centuries, a cycle of poor flood years that led to famine and plague finally ushered the Fatimids out and the Ayyubid dynasty of Saladin in.

The Mubarak government has been busy restoring Cairo's most famous Fatimid thoroughfare, Sharia Al-Mu'izz Li-Din Allah, a newly declared daytime pedestrian zone stretching for a mile between the surviving stone gates of Bab Al-Fotouh and Bab Zuweila. There has been controversy, of course, about the use of cement on some of the grandest buildings, such as the mausoleum of the 13th-century Mamluk Sultan Qalawun, and about imposing a uniform patina on edifices centuries and dynasties apart. But the cymbal-clanking men carrying vats of licorice juice and the organization of markets into souks pull the past into the cell phone–carrying present.

Some of the most beautiful surviving buildings in the Islamic quarter are called sabil-kuttab, a combined public fountain and Koranic school and an architectural form of charity unique to Cairo. A room of inlaid marble with a painted timbered ceiling would stand over an underground reservoir. Thirsty passersby reached with cups through flowery wrought iron gratings as the sounds of trickling water and the chanting of young boys memorizing the Koran flowed into the street. You come across a sabil-kuttab every few blocks in old Cairo. One of my favorites is the early-19th-century sabil-kuttab built by Muhammad Ali and dedicated to the memory of his eldest son, Tusun Pasha, who contracted the plague during his military campaigns against the Wahhabis in Arabia and died in 1815 at the age of 24. Turkish poems about the beautiful gesture of giving water in death are carved in marble around the exterior and contain wonderful lines such as "The moon envies the silver cup's rim." The government has earmarked the complex for an Islamic textile museum, opening this month.

The religious and the secular intersect in the sexy underwear souk that for years ran along Sharia Muski and continued on Sharia Al-Mu'izz Li-Din Allah, between the Madrassa of the Mamluk Sultan Al-Ghuri and the sabil-kuttab of Muhammad Ali. At first I found it shocking to see abaya-clad women fingering fire engine–red teddies with nipple cutouts near two of the holiest sites in Cairo—the mosques of Al-Azhar and Sayidna Hussein. Islam condones tender sexual pleasure between man and wife, however, and the market is patronized by brides shopping for trousseaux, though as one pushcart seller told me with a wink, "Not everyone who says she is a bride really is one."

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