visions périphériques

Ramadan Kareem. It means something like “Happy Ramadan,” although I’m sure the translation is slightly more poetic than that. Ramadan is one of the months in the lunar calendar, which is eleven days shorter than the Gregorian calendar. Because of the lag, Ramadan shifts in relation to the Gregorian calendar each year. Some years, Ramadan comes during winter, when the days are short and cool. Other years, Ramadan falls in the dead of summer. Summer Ramadans are brutal, so I hear. September is not a bad month for fasting. The days are not too terribly long—sunrise at about 5:30 a.m., sunset at about 6:15 p.m.—and the heat is finally starting to break. Yesterday, cool breezes gushed through the streets in my neighborhood, washing away the pollution and humidity. Those breezes are characteristic of this time of year. They come southward from the Mediterranean, which is only two hours away by car, and they bring the freshness of the sea with them. Any type of freshness is welcome in this city. Under an unrelenting sun, Cairo is a stale, fetid place; but when the breezes come, Cairo has the feel of a port city. Suddenly the noise and clamor seem less consequential, less maddening.

Today is the fourth day of Ramadan. I began fasting on the first day, and I plan to continue fasting from sunup to sundown throughout the entire month. I keep asking myself, “what are you trying to prove?” But I’m not trying to prove anything; rather, I’m trying to bring myself closer to the culture in which I’ve found myself immersed. So far, it’s working. There are several reasons why the Prophet recommended a fasting period each year. First, he believed that the discipline involved in fasting and a rigorous prayer schedule (there is an early morning and a late night prayer called during Ramadan, in addition to the five daily prayers called throughout the year) would help Muslims cleanse their spirits and refocus their attention on Allah and the path to piety. The world is a very distracting place, and the body is the world’s most powerfully distracting element, so Mohammad thought it would be good for humans to try, once a year, to put their minds in control of their bodies. The fast requires abstention from cigarettes, food, and water (or any other liquid) during the period between the morning and evening prayer. Muslims are also supposed to abstain from sexual activity during that period. Throughout the month, Muslims are supposed to try to be friendlier and more generous than usual, and they are also supposed to avoid things like coffee and, obviously, alcohol.

Ramadan has another purpose, and one that I find very appealing from a purely secular perspective—fasting helps wealthy people sympathize with the poor. Feeling real hunger each day, the gnawing pain that grows as the day wears on, reminds people from all levels of society that privilege is a blessing, that we cannot take things like food and water for granted, and that we should do our best to help those who are less fortunate. Social welfare is at the heart of Islam, though you wouldn’t know it from the models set by countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the U.A.E. Two of the five pillars of Islam are social welfare-oriented: Ramadan is one; the other is zakat, which stipulates that Muslims should donate a fifth of their income to the poor. Obviously the poor are exempted from the zakat, just as those with physical and mental disabilities are exempted from Ramadan.

Perhaps “cheating the system” is not the best way to describe the way that Muslims get around Ramadan, but it works. First of all, fasting Muslims usually eat at least three meals between sundown and sunup, so they’re not exactly skimping on caloric intake. Iftar is breakfast in the truest sense—it’s the meal Muslims eat after the sun goes down, or after the evening prayer. In the first two weeks, families gather together at each others’ homes to celebrate iftar, and in the last two weeks people branch out, visiting friends, hosting iftar parties, throwing block parties. Sohour is the meal taken before sunrise, or “breakfast” in the usual sense. Families rise around 4:00 a.m. or even earlier, or they just stay up late and go to bed after sohour. Sometimes people eat two sohours, one at around 11:00 p.m. and another before sunrise. Then, if they play their cards right, skilled fasters will sleep most of the day. Businesses open late and close early during Ramadan, because everyone’s sleeping in the morning and rushing home for iftar by 4:00 p.m. By 5:30 p.m., the streets are empty. It’s amazing to see such traffic clogged streets emptied within the span of a half-hour, but these people are serious about iftar. The hour before iftar is thus the best time for cruising around on foot. During the calm, you can walk the streets with little fear of getting mauled by a car (something I fear daily).

Back to the “cheating the system” thing. Doesn’t it also seem that people should not be able to resume bad habits at night, especially cigarette smoking? As soon as iftar comes, the chimneys start fuming again, making up for lost time even. An article in the newspaper a few days ago, designed as a guide for foreigners during Ramadan, recommended showing up to an iftar celebration with a few packs of cigarettes. Bearing such gifts, the author assured, would guarantee an enthusiastic reception. What about other addictions, like television and the Internet? Surely the world’s poor and starving are not poring over online menus and recipes via broadband. Surely they’re not kicked back in front of the plasma screen. Perhaps for me it would be a better exercise to abstain from my addiction to checking e-mail. Luckily my new apartment does not have Internet, so I’m in a state of forced abstention. I’m planning to head to the Internet café in a few minutes to send this e-mail, however. Too bad I can’t eat anything. Or drink anything. Still an hour and a half to iftar.

Ramadan is the closest thing Egyptian society has to the time period between Thanksgiving and Christmas in the United States, what we refer to as “The Holidays,” a phrase we can get away with since Kwanzaa and Hanukkah are sandwiched in there somewhere as well. Little kids play with Ramadan lanterns, cheap plastic toys with gaudy decorations that broadcast Qur’anic carols from built-in music boxes. Lanterns of this sort are strung from one side of the street to the other all through town, making Cairo look more like Chinatown than the capital of the Middle East. In the middle of the night, a man walks through the streets banging a drum, waking people up for sohour. The job predates medieval times. People give the drummer a few pounds at the start of Ramadan so that he’ll remember their names, so that when he walks down their streets he’ll yell, “Wakeup Sleepyhead, wakeup Ahmed, it’s time for sohour.” Not such a tough task in a town like Cairo, where the drummer can repeat a chorus of about six names and get just about everyone on the block. “Wakeup Ahmed, wakeup Mahmoud, Wakeup Mohammad, Wakup Fatima, Wakeup Ismail, Wakup Hussein.”

To address the dilemma posed by a multiplicity of Mohammeds, I’ve started labeling them in my cell-phone according to their occupation. Right now I only have “MoSimsar,” a Mohammad who works as a “simsar,” or apartment broker. I’m anticipating a few more. Mohammad is the name of my “bowwab” as well, that’s Egyptian for “door guy.” I met Mohammad through Theo’s bowwab, whose name is also Mohammad. Both bowwabs live on Ismail Mohammad Street.

Finding an apartment was quite an ordeal. There’s an e-mail listserv called Cairo Scholars, organized by a professor of Middle East Studies from University of Texas. Students and young professionals use the listserv to post housing announcements and to pose questions to other expats about things like setting up internet, getting a haircut, processing a visa, etc. I contacted four or five people from Cairo Scholars and went to look at their apartments. Nothing wowed me, and the prospective roommates wowed me even less, so I decided I had better hire a simsar. Simsars, like Real Estate agents, work on commission. They know the buildings in their neighborhoods and they have good relationships with all of the bowwabs around, so they way it works is you just follow the simsar around and he takes you to all of the open apartments in the neighborhood. And when that fails to produce a winner, the simsar starts talking to random bowwabs to ask them if there are empty apartments in their buildings. I worked with three simsars and saw about ten apartments total. Two of them were great, one was even in Theo’s building. The two that were great got snatched out from under me. Each time the simsar called the owner to say, “Hey, I have someone who would like to lease your apartment,” the owner would reply, “Oh, that’s too bad because someone else just signed the contract.” Of course the call to the owner would always take place after the discussion—read: heated argument—about rent, simsar fee, and advance.

Luckily Theo’s bowwab came through. He had been talking to the other Mohammad down the street, and when he heard that I hadn’t found anything after a day of searching, he leapt at the opportunity to make a quick cut of the simsar fee. You should’ve seen the guy—he was jumping through hoops, running up and down the street to get the right key, looking for the other Mohammad, putting on a smile from ear to ear, showing off all of the apartment’s amenities with sign language because obviously I don’t speak Arabic. It was quite a show, bless his heart. Theo couldn’t get him to come up and fix the sink the other day when it wouldn’t stop running, but the second Mohammad knew there was a chunk of money to be made, he was bouncing off the walls.

So here I am sitting in my new apartment. It’s got two bedrooms, so I had to find a roommate. Nathan moves in later tonight. He’s studying Human Rights Law at A.U.C. on a grant from Rotary International. He just graduated from a dual degree program in law and political science last Spring. I wrote him an e-mail the other day—I’d gotten his address from an A.U.C. housing spreadsheet—asking if he’d found a place. He called yesterday to say he’d just arrived in Cairo the day before, asked me if I’d found anything, I said I had, he came and looked, voilá. The place is pretty run down, but all the important things are working. The shower floods the bathroom, but there’s a nice squeegie. The knob to the front door comes off when you pull the door open, but if you just use it to twist the latch and then pull on the lock instead of the handle, it all works out okay. The decorations are hilarious. There are two plaques on the wall: one says “Happy Birthday: If wishes were flowers in bloom/ I’d pick the loveliest one just you/ Have a wonderful day”; the other says, “My Friend: The road of life is made smoother when traveled with someone we love.” These poems are comforting to me, even though it’s not my birthday.