Cairo: Metropolis of miracles

Fashion is one of Cairo's emotional frontiers. The feminist writer Safinaz Kazem, for one, sees the female body as a battleground between Islam and the West, as politicized an issue as Palestine. "I was like an occupied plot of land," she recently told the Al-Ahram weekly newspaper, describing her upbringing, in which she was taught to wear Western clothes. "The day I took up the veil was the day of my liberation." Islamic fashion has also become a ticket to social mobility. In poor areas, a woman can't go into the streets without an abaya, the long Islamic overgarment, and the hijab, or head scarf; it may seem repressive in Western eyes, but in reality the ensemble enables her to get out of the house, go to university, and work. Cairo's Islamic fashion can be militant but also as frivolous and ephemeral as Paris collections. Girls raised in the era of satellite television combine the head scarf with brightly colored Western items as a way to harmonize Egyptian identity with membership in the global community and to socialize with boys while maintaining a good-girl reputation. In Cairo's see-and-be-seen shisha bars, young women wear leg-hugging low-rise jeans, tight T-shirts or baby doll dresses, high heels, and designer-knockoff handbags—a Paris Hilton as Islamic hottie look rendered chaste by the addition of a long-sleeved leotard to cover the arms (and to highlight their slimness) and a color-coordinated head scarf sold at boutiques with names like Hippie Veil and Cyber Veil.

Since the polarizing events of 9/11, abaya stalls have been supplanting underwear stalls in the Islamic district. Yet Cairo's black abayas can be playful and sexualized, too. Last spring, I saw in the souk a filmy black abaya with gauzy spiderweb cutouts over the back and chest, the strands of web highlighted in sparkly silver thread. At Cairo International Airport, I sat next to a slip of a teen wearing a black gown with English lettering. "Dear Thomas" the back panel read in girlish pink script. "Hi!!! I'm in Paris. Everything is so beautiful. But I miss you so much! Bye! Kisses!!" I imagined Cairo mothers and fathers all over town taking the tone exasperated Americans use with their young daughters: "You're not going outside wearing that!"

Fashion, like all expressions of culture, is never frozen. And yet there are time capsules throughout the city in which Cairo epochs are fixed like scenes in a pharaoh's tomb. On weekends, Egyptian families dress up to dine on the terraces of the Greek Club and the Italian Club, vestiges of the international high society that thrived under Egypt's monarchy. Downtown, the family-owned Windsor Hotel, with its old switchboard, ancient lift, and grand suites with huge marble baths, is an unrestored ode to the days of British colonial travel. On weekends, expatriates seek out the bar for its retro chic, though one of its defining colonial characteristics was the fact that it was off-limits to "natives."

Under British occupation, which lasted from 1882 to 1952, downtown Cairo became a creative boomtown for Egyptian patricians and intellectuals who were raised amid Westerners and their institutions and who yearned to define a modern Egyptian identity. The district began its decline after the 1952 revolution, when nationalization and sequestrations led to the flight of foreigners and aristocrats alike. To glimpse what life was like in the district's heyday, I visited the white villa of Saad Zaghloul, who led anti-British protests after World War I and was elected prime minister in an early flowering of Egyptian nationalism. Now a museum, the villa contains the hero's mother-of-pearl- and ivory-inlaid furniture; his wife, Sofia's, separate bedroom suite; their Korans and silk dressing gowns; and Sofia's mink coats, ostrich feather fans, opera glasses, and black silk pumps from Lord's Cordonnerie, at 66 Qasr al-Nil Street. On the second-floor landing hang two elaborate wire cages, each with a stuffed green parrot. The guide told me the pair had died of sadness three days after the great pasha's death in 1927.

Throughout its history, Cairo, with its whirl of politics, faith, and culture, has produced personalities larger than life. Next to the Nilometer on Roda Island, where priests and tax men once measured rising Nile floodwater with relief or apprehension, I went to the Umm Kalthoum Museum to contemplate the singer's signature diamond-studded black sunglasses in their oversized glass case—a relic more charged than King Tut's golden mask. The daughter of a village imam who taught her to recite the Koran and dressed her in boys' clothing to show off her skill, Umm Kalthoum moved to Cairo at 19 and became Egypt's Edith Piaf, Ella Fitzgerald, and Maria Callas all rolled into one. Some of her songs—about Egypt, loves lost, and the inevitability of struggle—lasted three hours, and it was rumored that she concealed cocaine in her white hankie, her ever-present stage prop, to get herself through marathon concerts. When Umm Kalthoum died in 1975, 4 million people turned out for her funeral, more than for President Nasser's. The museum preserves her Order of Perfection medal from the Tunisian government and some of her gowns, and has an interactive exhibit allowing visitors to hear her most famous songs, which now compete for airtime with Arabic pop tunes on the cassette players in Cairo taxis.

The first Islamic city to have an opera house, Cairo has its own distinctive sound: the shisha pipe's burble, the calls of itinerant bean sellers and rag-and-bone men, and a cacophony of cell-phone ring tones, honking car horns, and the five-times-daily call to prayer by muezzins (amplified by loudspeakers), a few of whom have voices as powerful and melodic as La Scala tenors.

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