A City of God and Tameeya by Dana Slayton
No place on Earth could replace Cairo. There is a special kind of serenity that can only be born when millions of people are living in the same total chaos at the same time. It swaddles the streets in a blanket of collective ambivalence and sings them a lullaby, while car horns and unintelligible shouts of rage hum along. This kind of serenity is only born when all hope for order dies. You cannot afford to be angry that you’ve only moved three feet in the past ten minutes. You make friends with the chaos, and after a while you cease to care that it has been decided you will never make it to your destination. Or that you will make it, but only inchallah (God willing), a statement which means next to nothing once you realize that Cairo traffic probably killed God. But these streets are saturated with divinity. For all its cosmopolitanism, breakneck chase of modernity, and precarious alleyways, Cairo is a holy city. Cairo traffic tries to kill God, but the Cairene drivers refuse to let him die. He reveals himself in between endless rows of sputtering Toyotas as they inch along the highway, a new brand of the Second Coming announced only by extremely elaborate stickers on grimy windshields that proclaim “Jesus is Lord,” “Remember God,” and “There is no God but God.” He peeks through the gauzy curtains of a barbershop, from his throne of honor atop a mirror with the Egyptian president at his right hand and the Virgin Mary at his left. He sings from the tops of ten thousand minarets in cacophonous unison five times a day. And when my taxi arrives at the foot of Mokattam Mountain, its engine gasping and choking after a breathless climb through the labyrinthine streets of Manshiyet Nasr—the 6
neighborhood responsible for processing all of Cairo’s waste and consequently dubbed “Garbage City” in Arabic—even the high hills race to claim the ground for God. “Blessed be Egypt, my people,” reads the mountain. The inscription is etched into the rock face in graceful Arabic, like a sticker on the grimy windshield of the city itself. The mountain and the smog are the only things separating Cairo from the heavens here. The mountain, the smog—and the falafel, that is.
There is a special kind of serenity that can only be born when millions of people are living in the same total chaos at the same time.
If Mokattam Mountain is the bridge that God walks to enter the streets of Cairo, then falafel is the gatekeeper of the city, the intermediary between the heavens and the earth. God would have no standing here without falafel, which is called taameya in Egyptian Arabic. This variation on the street
PHOTO: @dascalvisual UnSplash
Landing at Cairo International Airport after over a day’s journey from the United States is incredibly disorienting to say the least. There is a peculiar feeling of jet lag-laced dread that permeates the aircraft a few minutes before touchdown. No one is immune. The man sitting beside you stops snoring, glances out the window, and makes some kind of vague, one-word comment about what is about to happen, like, “hm, clouds” or “hm, weather” or “hm, the pyramids” or—perhaps most terrifyingly—just “hm.” Babies start to cry. The dread that hangs heavy in the airplane air moments before landing is nothing more than a stark, sobering appreciation of silence, the last true moments of quiet before Cairo invades us all—mind, body, and soul. When you exit the flight, the “hm, clouds” will become “hm, traffic” as you navigate the claustrophobic chaos of the arrivals terminal to hail a taxi and dive into the fray.
