Wild Beasts No More
When word got out about a proposed law that promotes reintegrating mentally ill patients into society, the media and public went crazy at the thought of opening the asylum doors. With advances in psychiatric medicine, however, many residents of the nation's mental health hospitals are ready and willing to go home — and have been waiting for decades.
By Manal el-Jesri
ABASSIYA!” Say the word as you hold your hand near your head and shake it a little and every Egyptian —and many Arabs, thanks to the lore of Egyptian film — will know what you are talking about: Crazy. Insane. Not all there. Unbalanced. That’s what it means to say that someone is “Abassiya” as you shake your hand near your head.
In short, it is the popular —if abusive and insensitive —way we have of referring to the mentally ill.
Abassiya. “What’s in a name,” Shakespeare once asked. Abbasiya is not an adjective. It is a Cairo district that used to be located on the periphery of the capital. It gained its infamy when the Egyptian government, under British occupation, chose it to house the first modern hospital for the mentally ill back in 1883. Today, Abassiya lies in the heart of the capital, housing over 1,500 mentally ill patients in its Mental Health Hospital, many of whom have been conveniently forgotten by their families.
Although we live in the twenty-first century, it is still eib (shameful) for people to know that you have a mental patient in the family.
Over the course of visits in recent months, Egypt Today has had the opportunity to meet patients who have been in Abassiya for 20 years or more. They all voiced their hopes of becoming free to see the outside world again one day. Sayyed, who has been incarcerated at Abassiya for the past 20 years, says, “I am suffocating. I want to get my life back. I want to work, to do something useful. If only my brother would get it into his head to let me out.”
Last July, many were shaken out of their indifference to the plight of the forgotten residents of mental hospitals when daily newspapers reported the death of Ne’ma Siddiq, an octogenarian who had been admitted to Abassiya before the July revolution of 1952. For 56 years, Ne’ma lived in Abassiya.
“When she died, nobody came to claim her. She had not been on any psychiatric medication for 20 years. She just had nowhere else to go,” says Dr. Nasser Loza, secretary-general of the Ministry of Health’s Mental Health Secretariat and a prominent Cairo physician who runs a top private-sector addiction clinic. Dr. Loza and his colleagues at the Ministry of Health have worked for the past three years to develop a new Mental Health Act to address many of the problems surrounding the issue of mental illness and mental hospitals.
The new act, which is currently being discussed by the Health Committee of the People’s Assembly, should provide alternatives to the problem of patients being left inside mental hospitals for years simply because there is nowhere else for them to go. It will replace an old mental health law, law 141 for the year 1944, which begins with the words “We the Sovereign King of Egypt” and addresses now-defunct entities such as the mixed-courts (which tried non-criminal commercial and civil cases involving Egyptians and foreigners).
Although it has created controversy in the media and among some members of the community of psychiatric professionals, the new act seems to be a step in the right direction. Written by the Ministry of Health, it has the support of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), a leading independent human rights NGO.
With government, medical professionals and civil society all on the same page for a change, you could be forgiven for asking what the controversy is all about. Sadly, it’s in you and me, in a society that doesn’t exactly look forward to having recently released “mental patients” as neighbors, and in a government that has so far failed to give the state mental health system the resources it needs to treat, rather than to incarcerate.
Restoring Their Rights
The Mental Health Hospital in Abassiya is only one of several public-sector psychiatric hospitals, including El-Khanka, Almaza and Helwan, to name only a few in the Greater Cairo Area alone. It was to Abassiya that we headed because it is the first and largest mental health hospital in Egypt —and also because it has come to be synonymous with the issue of mental health, courtesy of the name association.
To say that Abassiya was the first mental health hospital in Egypt is not exactly true. According to the special study prepared by the EIPR about the new mental health bill, Sultan Qalawun Hospital had its own mental health department back in the fourteenth century. The Sultan paid this department special attention and often visited its patients.
“The hospital provided mental health care services to the poor, and the mentally ill were only isolated from the rest of the patients in exceptional cases,” the study notes. In fact, it was the Arab physician and polymath Abu Bakr Al-Razi who, in the ninth century, first recognized mental illness as an ailment stemming in the brain. Until the fourteen and fifteenth centuries, the mentally ill were not stigmatized, but were treated alongside patients with physical ailments.
The practice of segregating mental health patients from society in high-security hospitals of their own is now being reviewed all over the world. According to the EIPR study, “The explanatory memorandum accompanying the bill [Dr. Loza’s new Mental Health Act] states that ‘The concept of treatment for mental disorders has changed to focus essentially on the treatment of the patient and his/her reintegration in society, and to help him/her lead a productive life; and is no longer targeting his/her exclusion and isolation in a mental institution for long periods of time, as is the case in the current law’.”
Dr. Loza believes the old law was a good one for its time, explaining, “It looked essentially at how people were admitted into hospitals, because in 1944 there were no treatments in psychiatry, so people were expected to stay there for years and years. The old law did not really look at the length of stay. The new legislation sets points in time where if someone is going to hospital involuntarily, then they will be reviewed again after one month, then after three months and then after six months to make sure people are not being forgotten there for years. It also looks at the way patients are admitted and at issues of consent and the right to go out for a cup of coffee or to a lawyer if they need to. The right to appeal is very important.”
The new law, according to Dr. Loza, defines the rights of patients, especially in relationship to the power the treating physicians hold over them.
“If you were to suffer a psychological problem and I was your treating doctor, I would propose treatment, but at the end of the day it is your decision if you will take it or not. You also have the right to choose your doctor,” Dr. Loza explains. The new law will also give patients the right to discuss the treatment, except in the few cases where they represent a threat to themselves or to others. “Even then, there is a procedure that must be followed. I cannot do it alone, and I must get another doctor from outside the institution.”
The law is an enabling law, the secretary-general believes. “It enables doctors in the case there is high risk, and it enables patients who are well enough to leave or to go out for a while and come back. It is a liberal law that sees the mental patient as merely a patient, not a wild beast.”
While progressive for its time, the old law talks about the “arrest” of mental patients, a fact that has helped ingrain the stigma of being a mental patient or having a mental patient in the family. It was not always this way, Dr. Loza believes.
“We were a very liberal society. We believed that the gates of heaven were open to [mental patients]. People loved them and gave them money,” he says. Today, mental patients are abused, the physician says, “and not just inside hospitals. They are abused in the streets and inside police stations. It is an attitude. Something more needs to be done.”
No Place to Go
According to Dr. Loza, 60 percent of all beds in the public psychiatric hospital system are taken up by long-stay patients. Dr. Alaa Eddin Soliman, the chairman of the Mental Health Hospital of Abassiya, says these patients are institutionalized not because they need urgent care, but because there is nowhere else for them to go.
“This stratum is in need of a social solution, not a medical one. Here in Abassiya, 25 percent of all beds are blocked by these long-stay patients. Of over 1,500 occupied beds, 25 percent must be cleared to make space for more urgent cases,” Dr. Soliman says. “These patients want to go out, and we want to release them, but if we do release them we will be releasing them onto the streets, so we just keep them. These are patients who either have no living family members or whose family members have rejected them. They have lost their connections with society.”
These patients, eligible for release should the new law pass, need a place to go, and Dr. Loza says the ministry is now looking into building halfway homes as a key step in the reintegration process.
But it is this clause in the new law that first caused much of the controversy in the media. The stigma against mental patients was never as clear as when newspapers and websites talked about the ‘unleashing of the insane’ onto the streets. Why is the media so resistant to the idea of cured patients going back to society, to their lives and to their families?
“The new law does not limit the time a patient stays in the hospital, if his or her stay is warranted. Even the old law allows an involuntary patient reassessment after one, three then five years. But back in 1944, there was no cure for 70 to 80 percent of all mental illnesses. Medicine is not the same, and psychiatric medicine has come a long way,” says Dr. Loza. “Today, 70 percent of all patients stabilize after treatment and can return to their lives. Just like diabetics and hypertensive patients, they are fine as long as they take their medication. The new law will protect the patients whose situation could stabilize after an average of six weeks from being left inside institutions for years.”
People, according to Dr. Soliman, are ignorant of the nature of mental illness. “They think that once a person is sick, it is over so they must forget about them. Out of ignorance comes fear. And the ignorance was supported by media messages that fed it even more, in addition to the superstitions and wrong-headed beliefs.”
The ignorance must be addressed, and so must the dilemma of long-stay patients. But in the end, everyone must be made aware of a very important issue: Mental institutions are not homes for the homeless.
“We are a hospital. Our job is to offer treatment.” Dr. Soliman says. “Ours is not a social institution. The social services system must be made to shoulder this burden, or at least some of it.”
Insensitive Solution
Dr. Tarek Okasha, a professor of psychiatry at Ain Shams University and executive committee member and scientific meetings secretary of the World Psychiatric Association, points out that a new mental health law is something his father — the renowned professor Dr. Ahmed Okasha (the chairman of the Egyptian Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association) — has called for since the 1970s.
“Ever since the huge leaps in psychiatric medicine, the concept has been to treat the patients and not to house them. Dr. [Ahmed] Okasha has tried to submit a new law four times in the past, the last one being three years ago,” the younger Dr. Okasha says.
Dr. Tarek Okasha says the new law is clearly needed. “A mental health act is required because we are the only branch in medicine where, in very limited circumstances, you can treat patients involuntarily,” he notes. “This makes it somewhat special.”
Yet each time Dr. Okasha senior submitted the law, discussion of the proposal was postponed. This time, the proposed law has made it to the discussion table, but it is a law submitted by the Ministry of Health, not by the Egyptian Psychiatric Association.
Although the association is in favor of many of the clauses of the proposed bill, it has some reservations. “The problem is that the new law is a cut-and-paste of the UK mental health act,” Dr. Tarek Okasha notes. “You cannot apply a law from one country to a different one with different cultural, social and religious values and individual beliefs.”
For instance, he explains, the new law gives social workers the right to approve the admission of a patient. “We do not have an institute graduating social workers specialized in psychology. So what do we do? In a country with a population of 80 million, we have only 250 clinical psychologists and 1,500 psychiatric nurses. Who is going to oversee that the law is applied? You can give us a wonderful law, but then we cannot apply it.”
Here in Egypt, he continues, we have very limited funds available for the mental health system. Dr. Okasha argues that although it is good to want everything, a new law must try to solve actual problems by targeting them. The most urgent issue is the admission of patients in danger of harming themselves or others, and this is what the law should focus on, he says.
“Who is going to be on the committee to review the case of this patient a few months on after the manic or the depressive episode has passed?” he asks. “The chairman of the review board — according to the new law — is the minister of health. How can someone who provides the service be asked to monitor himself?”
Psychiatrists like Dr. Okasha who are not affiliated with the Ministry of Health have also voiced concerns over the penal clauses of the new law.
“It says that if a psychiatrist forges a report, he can be imprisoned or fined. But what do you do when a surgeon forgets a towel inside a patient? Why is the psychiatrist criminalized, whereas other physicians are dealt with via the Medical Syndicate?” Dr. Okasha points out. If such a clause remains in the law, he claims, we would be adding to the problem of stigmatization instead of solving it. “We will have a new stigma — that of being a psychiatrist.”
Dr. Okasha also points out that the new law does not take into consideration the cultural dimension.
“The law must be culturally sensitive. Here in Egypt, a patient’s family or legal guardian is very important. When a 30-year-old’s father orders him to go into hospital because he needs it, is this voluntary or involuntary? When you get a female patient exhibiting manic episodes and promiscuous sexual behavior, do we allow the family to kill her because she has tarnished the family’s name, or do we treat her?” he notes. “Cultural beliefs are very important. In England, where the law originates, the self is very important. The individual is more important than the family. This is why you have to be careful when you import a law.”
Although Dr. Okasha has some reservations, he believes both his association and the Ministry of Health are on the same side.
“The most important thing is to protect the rights of the psychiatric patient,” he says. “The new law is a good step forward, but it still needs a lot of work. Penalties must be taken out, and those who commit crimes must be dealt with in court. The law also needs to be adapted to fit us. In England, they have halfway homes and rehabilitation facilities, a whole healthcare system that we lack. Here, when you release a patient who has been rejected by his family, where will he go? This question has to be answered first.”
Civil Society On Board
The EIPR has backed Dr. Loza’s Mental Health Act, a very rare instance of the NGO backing a government initiative instead of demanding the government take action on an issue.
Dr. Ragia Shawky, EIPR’s health and discrimination project officer, was the primary editor of the study on the new act. She believes the draft to be of the utmost importance.
“The very concept of human rights has changed. The standards for medical practice have changed as well,” she says. “The old law was good for its time because it had clauses that protected the will of the patient. The new draft tries to raise the bar, setting standards that are in accordance with current human and scientific principles.”
From the human rights perspective, a psychiatric patient is very fragile, Dr. Shawky explains. The medications he or she is given can strip them of their power. And even more sensitive is the involuntarily admitted patient. “The power of the attending psychiatrist is great over patients. There must be very specific criteria, and constant supervision is imperative,” Dr. Shawky says. “The draft addresses such issues, trying to put a stop to the abuse and the violations against patients, be it physical abuse or exploitation.”
Shawky is a member of a committee put together two years ago by the general secretariat to visit mental health hospitals and collect the complaints of patients and their families. “Up to that point, no entity existed to collect these complaints, and patients did not even know they could complain,” she says. “Most of the complaints we get are against the nursing, because these are the care-providers who are constantly in contact with patients. Other patients complain that they are better and want to be released but are not allowed to.”
Considering that the draft law will try to address a number of issues to ensure that the rights of patients are not abused, the human rights activist is surprised at the controversy surrounding the new draft. “Why this rejection? Why are the doctors against the idea of a review board, for example? I can tell you why I think they are resisting: It is because for 70 years there was no law, and they got used to it. I mean the law was there, but it was so rigid that it was overlooked. Of course when you install a new law there will be resistance.”
And for a law to be respected, it must have penalties.
“There are some crimes that must be punishable by imprisonment, like harming a patient or forging a report to keep a patient in hospital against their will when it is not required. There are some crimes or transgressions that are specific to psychiatry, and so the general penal law cannot be applied to them,” Dr. Shawky says. “The thing is that physicians are loud, they can get themselves heard. They practice medicine in a patriarchal way. If they applied their own code of ethics, they would not be so shocked by the clauses of the draft bill. Physicians do not tell you what your diagnosis is, which is against their code of ethics. We, who have no mental illnesses, are treated like this by our physicians, and we are so grateful to them that we do not even ask. So what about the very fragile mental patients? There must be a way to protect these patients’ rights.”
Shawky is also very surprised and angered by the claims that the new draft lacks cultural sensitivity.
“Is our mental patient not deserving of protection like the English mental patient? For centuries, we have taken all our medical knowledge from the West, after we exported medicine and sciences during the age of Islamic Renaissance. Should we go back to herbal medicine because it is more culturally sensitive? When they talk about the role of the family, have they not seen the rich families who keep their patient in a hospital for years in order to get their hands on their inheritance? It happens. I think they just want to stir people’s tribal feelings by saying such nonsense.”
Although the EIPR supports the Mental Health Act, Dr. Shawky points out that there are a few areas where it can be improved. She also notes that it should be a part of a comprehensive policy that addresses the psychiatric problems before they become complex.
According to Dr. Shawky, general practitioners are not trained to discover psychiatric problems. In addition, no psychiatric services are available in the primary care health units, a problem that Dr. Okasha also pointed out.
“Being admitted into a psychiatric hospital is the third phase. Patients should have passed through two different levels of care before, but this does not happen because of the lack of service providers,” Dr. Shawky says. “The hospital means seclusion and incarceration. It is difficult to integrate the patient back into society. A whole system must be put in place and shored up. Primary care physicians must be trained. It is wrong to treat everybody in a hospital.”
The human rights expert is also worried that the new law leaves out private clinics. “It is uncalled for. We were hoping a Mental Health Act would protect all the patients suffering from mental illness. It is a mental health not an incarceration act,” she says. “Some involuntary treatments are given in clinics, after which patients become vulnerable and suggestible. Such patients are susceptible to abuse.”
Dr. Shawky hopes the new law will be accompanied by more awareness. “The way Egyptian media has dealt with the topic is shameful. They have used words like ‘unleashing’ and ‘releasing onto the streets,’ as if mental patients were animals. They have called them a security hazard. But all the law does is protect the rights of those citizens who deserve to be part of society.
“There is fear, terror, stigmatization and discrimination against them by the man on the street because of the stereotypes in our heads,” she continues. “If we are so scared, why not be scared of the 1.5 million patients who are out on the streets and who were never treated or admitted. We need to treat those, and we need to make room for them in the hospitals. They just say ‘Alhamdulillah, society is safe because all the crazy people are safely inside hospitals’.”
Crazy or Corrupt?
Dr. El-Sayyed Qotb, the hospital director, says that the last time the staff counted, 1,150 of the patients had spent between one and 30 years inside the hospital. He is surprised at those against the proposed penalties in the law, because he believes if tough penalties existed, doctors would not have allowed the current situation to develop. He believes it is negligence or even foul play that has exacerbated the situation of long-stay patients in the hospital.
“This is a hospital. It is not a home. It means that a patient comes in, gets treated and leaves. Why is it that some patients have been here for decades? Only one percent of the patients have no families,” Dr. Qotb notes. “Does this mean that all the families are bad, or is it a situation where the culprits are the staff, doctors, nurses and administrators? They must be gaining something out of this. There is corruption going on. We can see the transgressions clearly. This calls for severe penalties.”
When plans regarding the new law were first announced, people thought the Ministry of Health was going to put a limit of six months on hospital stays, after which a patient will be discharged even if it is onto the streets.
“We are not going to throw anyone out,” Dr. Qotb explains. “But with modern medication, within six weeks the most active symptoms abate in the most severe conditions. This leaves us two and a half months of rehabilitation. Once the patient is ready to be discharged, we have three ways to keep monitoring him or her. We have an outpatient clinic, we also have a day center where patients can come and stay for the duration of the day, every day. The third option is to send doctors to patients’ homes to check up and dispense treatment for free. Should the patient need to be re-admitted, then he needs to be re-admitted.”
Voices in Your Head
As Dr. Soliman pointed out, the draft mental health act has made people talk, which gives responsible media an opportunity to dispel ignorance and to educate. It also gives patients like Nabila, Madiha, Hanaa, Aisha, Sayyed, Ihab and Hussein — all patients Egypt Today had the opportunity to meet at Abassiya —the chance to be heard.
All the patients we spoke to were not manic. They were calm, quiet and made a lot of sense. They spoke from the heart, which is why their words resonated. They all wanted to be out, with the exception of Ihab, who believes both inside and outside are the same. Under the principles of universal human rights, only patients in danger of hurting themselves or others are to be kept in a mental hospital against their will. According to the EIPR study, “Research showed that the therapeutic impact of the mental asylums was minimal and that, in fact, the prolonged isolation of patients sometimes exacerbated their illness or led to new problems and disabilities.”
The study also cites the example of countries such as Italy, where “a 1978 act to reform mental health care demanded the closure of mental hospitals, replacing them with a comprehensive network of community care services. A number of developed and developing countries have shifted from dependence on the asylum system of exclusion and isolation to providing treatment within the community and at home, through outpatient clinics, general hospitals, emergency departments, mobile medical services, daycare centers and support for families and caregivers.”
But as Dr. Okasha asks: Where are the community centers and halfway houses that will take in the discharged patients who are ready for rehabilitation and reintegration into society?
“It is heaven, of course, to have a mental health act. But will you apply it? Will you have the means to apply it?” he says. “We have this ongoing problem in Egypt that we have no funds, no space and no trained personnel.”
This is indeed the case. The EIPR study notes, “In sum, all studies and reports agree that Egypt is extremely deficient in financial and human resources allocated to mental health, and thus the provision of mental health care services falls far short. Mental health hospitals continue to be the main providers of most mental health care services, which are thereby restricted to big cities. Primary health care services do not include mental health care, and primary care practitioners do not have the knowledge to refer those in need to mental health professionals or to provide essential psychiatric medications. There is also weak collaboration between the official health sector and other community sectors, including civil society organizations.”
Dr. Loza is ready for the challenge. He doesn’t seem daunted by all the negativity, saying he believes that a mental health act is only the first step towards change. “The law is only the beginning,” he says. “Beyond the law is awareness, training, application. Funding will always be an issue, and it is a good idea to have more money. We have been loud and we were given more money, but part of the law is to create a separate fund for mental health.”
Nobody knows when the law will be approved, but once it is, it will be a step towards actively changing the stigma mental patients have shouldered for too long.
And please, the next time someone says Abassiya and shakes his or her hand, pretend you do not understand
FINDING THEIR VOICES
Kept in isolation for years, the patients of mental health hospitals have become invisible and voiceless in our society. Had they voices, this is what they would say:
Nabila
Should it pass, the new Mental Health Act may solve the problem of patients such as Nabila, who has been a resident at Abassiya for the past 22 years. Now in her 40s, Nabila comes to meet us outside the work-therapy room. She is panting as she looks for a place to rest. The hospital is huge and she was told to come find us here, so she came fast. It is a chance for her to get her story out. Nabila is all smiles, although her story is a bitter one.
“My aunt brought me here, but now my brother is keeping me inside,” she says. “He is afraid for me, but I am very upset with him. I will never forgive him. He won’t even let me out for [a] 15 day [pass]. I am imprisoned here. I need a change of air.”
Nabila’s hometown is Sharqiyya. She likes to tell her story from the very beginning, on that fateful day 21 years ago when she had an accident and ended in up in a coma inside a Sharqiyya Hospital.
“I woke up to find myself in a tattered galabiyya. I only had one slipper on. A woman working in the hospital recognized me and gave me some money to get home. When I got home, the landlady told me that my husband had left all my furniture in my mother’s room. He had left me. The next day my aunt and my sister brought me here. I got electric[-shock] therapy and I became fine. I take very little medication now,” Nabila says. “My relatives keep telling me they are afraid for me. They are afraid men will take advantage of me if I got out. I keep begging them to take me back. I beg my mother to take me, and my brother too. They visit me twice a year. My sister has not been to see me in some time. I called her the other day, but she said she was sick and getting injections so she could not come. I would like to get out, but I do not have an ID card. I cannot live on my own. I would be too afraid on my own.”
Article 14 of law 141 for 1944 allows a patient’s family to choose to remand a relative to the custody of mental hospital, which is why people like Nabila are institutionalized for years without much hope of one day being released:
Article 14: If the institutionalized patient is cured, the hospital director shall immediately send a registered letter to the person who admitted the patient to the hospital, the patient’s caretakers or any other party assigned by the patient, asking this person to collect the patient within seven days. If any of the aforementioned refuses to collect the patient, the patient shall be discharged immediately. In such cases, the government shall bear the expense of transferring the discharged, poor patient from the governmental hospital to anywhere within Egypt. In all cases, the hospital shall notify the administrative authority with which the discharged person is affiliated. If the patient is no longer in the condition stipulated in article 4, the hospital director shall end institutionalization. In such a case, the patient or any of the patient’s guardians or caretakers may ask for the patient to stay until fully treated. [Emphasis added]
Madiha
The stigma cuts across classes. Madiha, who has been inside the Abassiya hospital for 15 years, comes from a wealthy background. She remembers that her mother owned a building on Qasr El-Aini Street. Her brother is an officer who works in a distant governorate.
“I am very sad. He does not visit me, except when he is here on leave. He refuses to allow me out. I am not going to speak to him. But even if they all want me to get out, I will never leave without Nabila. She is like a sister to me. We two are inseparable. I want to get out and live with her in my apartment. We will take care of each other. Heya habibti.”
Sayyed
Sayyed is 56, but looks much older. He seems like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. His one dream is to get out and start working again:
“I have been here for about 20 years. My brother brought me here. I was a little ill, we were having problems at home. He got two nurses and they took me away. I got better here. A doctor made him take me home. It was about two years ago. He let me stay for two weeks, and then told me we had to come here for the medication. Suddenly, I found him telling them at the gates that he wanted me kept here. He paid LE 260 and left. I want to work. I do wood varnishing. I do not understand why he insists on keeping me here. I take very little psychiatric medication. I am being treated for my ulcer and my chest problem.
“My brother is staying in our family home. It is small. He is married now and has five kids. When I stayed with him for two weeks, he made me sleep on the lower bunk of his children’s bed. It was not so bad. I did not mind. His wife is a very kind woman. She gave me my allowance every day. It was money I made singing in the theater here.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Friday, June 5, 2009
Azazil Once More
Azazil Once More
Manal el-Jesri
It was with a lot of trepidation that I picked up Azazil (Beelzebub); the book not the devil. The controversy around it had reached its peak and had started to wane when I started reading Azazil, Dr. Youssef Ziedan's second novel, earlier this year. I felt like I was the last person in Cairo to read it. It was a case of intellectual snobbishness that I sadly confess to, and that would have cost me dearly. Merely because I am usually skeptical about best-selling books and books that stir so much controversy, I would have missed the pleasure of reading one of the best books (and I use the wider term, not just 'novels') that I had come across in recent years, and in any language.
I will spare you the story of the religious controversy surrounding Azazil, if you promise to take this controversy out of your mind as you read these lines. What we want to do here is take an alternative look into what makes Azazil the wholesome intellectual and emotional repast that it is, and which contributed to its winning the IPAF (International Prize for Arab Fiction), better known as the Arabic Booker last March.
The first thing that draws the reader into this work is the ease with which Ziedan uses the Arabic language. A difficult language to master, the Arabic language has been compromised in the past couple of decades, partly due to the quality of school education in this country. Novels that have topped best-seller charts in the past few years and have been translated into various languages use a language that is weak, unappealing and at times offensive. One such novelist recently confessed in an interview that language is nothing but a vessel, a medium through which to convey his ideas. I am certain greats like the poet al Mutanabbi and even the late Laureate Naguib Mahfouz turned in their graves at such blasphemy. This is not the case with Ziedan. A professor of Islamic Philosophy and a Sufist with numerous published books critiquing the subtleties of Sufi poetry, Ziedan uses a language that borders on poetry. Sentences can be taken out of context and studied for their beauty and depth, something that is rarely as enjoyable when dealing with prose. Take this sentence, for example, a favorite of mine: "There are no straight lines except in our illusions, or in the papers on which we put down our illusions. As for life and the universe, everything is cyclical, going back to what it started from, submerging into what it connected with." It is Sufi language, the perfect choice for a story of a religious nature. Here language is not merely a medium; it is one of the novel's characters. It is also one manifestation of the author's dogma: as an Islamic thinker writing about the roots of Christian beliefs, Ziedan displays his belief in the continuity and concentricity of religions.
The language, as a character, draws the reader closer to Hepa the monk, the narrator and main protagonist. Hepa's identity as a Christian monk of the 5th century is one of the first tricks Ziedan plays on us. Hepa is not just a monk. He is not a two-dimensional character, that monk or saint we see in icons adorning Orthodox churches, with his eyes cast towards the heavens and his hands turned outward and up in supplication. And do not get me wrong, Hepa is indeed that seeker of religious grace. But he is also a human being, a lover, a poet, an intellectual, and most importantly, a skeptic. Hepa is a character that you can pull out of Azazil and place in any era. He is the human being who was denied his mother's love. He is the lover who succumbs to temptation of the flesh, who falls in love and like us all makes wrong choices that cause him to waste one opportunity after the other. He is the poet who extols God's graciousness and beauty, the writer who is prompted by his inner demon to put his thoughts down to paper. He is also the skeptic who questions everything, which makes him a modern character that we direly need in our own reality, where even celebrated intellectuals are ready to take pre-packaged ideas and beliefs for granted, and are also ready to pass judgment on those who dares think outside the box.
And Hepa would not be Hepa without the women in his life. The female protagonists in Azazil make ephemeral but effective entrances in the novel. And each time one of them makes a presence, Hepa's life is turned upside down. The women here act as the catalyst that sets Hepa's world in motion. The writer paints them with a lot of love and attention, for they are all the manifestations of the ultimate female. She shows four of her manifestations here; the cruel mother, the wise scientist and philosopher, the sensual lover, and the potential partner. This female presence is reminiscent of Ziedan's first novel, Dhell el-Af'aa (The Snake's Shadow), in which the writer tackles the extremely controversial issue of the sanctity of the female before the dawn of religions.
Hepa, then, who I see as one of the most comprehensive characters in Arabic literature, is Ziedan's human being. He is inside each one of us. He is the person on a quest, the center of the game that we call life. And his inner demon, Azazil, keeps him going, seeking more answers, reaching out for absolution and freedom. It is one way of looking at the devil. As Ziedan believes that we bestow holiness on what we hold sacred, we also bestow evil characteristics on what we regard as base or too worldly. We create our own demons by refusing to be true to ourselves, Ziedan tells us. So yes, Azazil is a controversial novel, but not because of the Christian controversy it represents, because that religious controversy regarding the nature of Christ did take place and Ziedan merely writes about it with historical accuracy and faithfulness. What makes Azazil a remarkable contribution to world literature is its depiction of that eternal existential human dilemma.
Manal el-Jesri
It was with a lot of trepidation that I picked up Azazil (Beelzebub); the book not the devil. The controversy around it had reached its peak and had started to wane when I started reading Azazil, Dr. Youssef Ziedan's second novel, earlier this year. I felt like I was the last person in Cairo to read it. It was a case of intellectual snobbishness that I sadly confess to, and that would have cost me dearly. Merely because I am usually skeptical about best-selling books and books that stir so much controversy, I would have missed the pleasure of reading one of the best books (and I use the wider term, not just 'novels') that I had come across in recent years, and in any language.
I will spare you the story of the religious controversy surrounding Azazil, if you promise to take this controversy out of your mind as you read these lines. What we want to do here is take an alternative look into what makes Azazil the wholesome intellectual and emotional repast that it is, and which contributed to its winning the IPAF (International Prize for Arab Fiction), better known as the Arabic Booker last March.
The first thing that draws the reader into this work is the ease with which Ziedan uses the Arabic language. A difficult language to master, the Arabic language has been compromised in the past couple of decades, partly due to the quality of school education in this country. Novels that have topped best-seller charts in the past few years and have been translated into various languages use a language that is weak, unappealing and at times offensive. One such novelist recently confessed in an interview that language is nothing but a vessel, a medium through which to convey his ideas. I am certain greats like the poet al Mutanabbi and even the late Laureate Naguib Mahfouz turned in their graves at such blasphemy. This is not the case with Ziedan. A professor of Islamic Philosophy and a Sufist with numerous published books critiquing the subtleties of Sufi poetry, Ziedan uses a language that borders on poetry. Sentences can be taken out of context and studied for their beauty and depth, something that is rarely as enjoyable when dealing with prose. Take this sentence, for example, a favorite of mine: "There are no straight lines except in our illusions, or in the papers on which we put down our illusions. As for life and the universe, everything is cyclical, going back to what it started from, submerging into what it connected with." It is Sufi language, the perfect choice for a story of a religious nature. Here language is not merely a medium; it is one of the novel's characters. It is also one manifestation of the author's dogma: as an Islamic thinker writing about the roots of Christian beliefs, Ziedan displays his belief in the continuity and concentricity of religions.
The language, as a character, draws the reader closer to Hepa the monk, the narrator and main protagonist. Hepa's identity as a Christian monk of the 5th century is one of the first tricks Ziedan plays on us. Hepa is not just a monk. He is not a two-dimensional character, that monk or saint we see in icons adorning Orthodox churches, with his eyes cast towards the heavens and his hands turned outward and up in supplication. And do not get me wrong, Hepa is indeed that seeker of religious grace. But he is also a human being, a lover, a poet, an intellectual, and most importantly, a skeptic. Hepa is a character that you can pull out of Azazil and place in any era. He is the human being who was denied his mother's love. He is the lover who succumbs to temptation of the flesh, who falls in love and like us all makes wrong choices that cause him to waste one opportunity after the other. He is the poet who extols God's graciousness and beauty, the writer who is prompted by his inner demon to put his thoughts down to paper. He is also the skeptic who questions everything, which makes him a modern character that we direly need in our own reality, where even celebrated intellectuals are ready to take pre-packaged ideas and beliefs for granted, and are also ready to pass judgment on those who dares think outside the box.
And Hepa would not be Hepa without the women in his life. The female protagonists in Azazil make ephemeral but effective entrances in the novel. And each time one of them makes a presence, Hepa's life is turned upside down. The women here act as the catalyst that sets Hepa's world in motion. The writer paints them with a lot of love and attention, for they are all the manifestations of the ultimate female. She shows four of her manifestations here; the cruel mother, the wise scientist and philosopher, the sensual lover, and the potential partner. This female presence is reminiscent of Ziedan's first novel, Dhell el-Af'aa (The Snake's Shadow), in which the writer tackles the extremely controversial issue of the sanctity of the female before the dawn of religions.
Hepa, then, who I see as one of the most comprehensive characters in Arabic literature, is Ziedan's human being. He is inside each one of us. He is the person on a quest, the center of the game that we call life. And his inner demon, Azazil, keeps him going, seeking more answers, reaching out for absolution and freedom. It is one way of looking at the devil. As Ziedan believes that we bestow holiness on what we hold sacred, we also bestow evil characteristics on what we regard as base or too worldly. We create our own demons by refusing to be true to ourselves, Ziedan tells us. So yes, Azazil is a controversial novel, but not because of the Christian controversy it represents, because that religious controversy regarding the nature of Christ did take place and Ziedan merely writes about it with historical accuracy and faithfulness. What makes Azazil a remarkable contribution to world literature is its depiction of that eternal existential human dilemma.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Historian Raouf Abbas
Breaking Taboos
A leading historian’s memoirs, targeting the nation’s youth, spark debate about how national identity is constructed and about academic politics
By Manal El Jesri
DR. RAOUF ABBAS’S MEMOIRS, published under the title of Mashaynaha Khota (We Have Tread Its Ways), have stirred loud debate in the nation’s sometimes stagnant intellectual circles since their publication last December. Stripped of detail: The historian / history professor / renowned public intellectual / chairman of the Egyptian Society for Historical Studies has said what only few dare to say.
The list of taboos he managed to break is exceptionally long, starting with allegations of corruption in academic circles, moving on to prejudice against the nation’s Coptic Christian minority and even alleged corruption leading to a former first lady becoming a university professor.
Abbas brushes off his critics by insisting he merely said what had to be said. “The average life expectancy of an Egyptian male is 60-something. I have passed that age, so I have little to be afraid of. What I wrote is just a sample of what people know, but cannot say to get it off their chests,” he says.
Born in pre-revolution Cairo, Abbas and his entire generation were deeply moved by the turbulent politics of his youth.
“I lived through the end of the royal era,” he says. “As children, my colleagues and I used to go out to demonstrations, demanding independence and an end to imperialist oppression. We got hurt, but still insisted on marching with the others.” The point, he adds, in case the interviewer missed it, is that ever since his childhood, his generation has had something to fight for, while “youth today have nothing. Everything has been watered down,”
The average life expectancy of an Egyptian male is 60-something. I have passed that age, so I have little to be afraid of. What I wrote is just a sample of what people know.
Much of that has to do with a sense of national identity. “During the royal era, we were raised to think of ourselves as being Egyptians. History lessons, literature and just about everything else concentrated on an Egyptian identity. Then came the revolution. It emphasized an Egyptian identity for a while, something that, for example, saw the statue of Ramses I moved to what was once called Queen Nazli Square (Bab ElHadid), but which was renamed Ramses St. But after 1956, [former President Gamal Abdel] Nasser realized that what was actually happening in Egypt has actually resulted in the opening of new horizons for all Arabs. Thus we saw the spark for the idea of pan-Arabism and action to free the Arab world. Then came Anwar Sadat, who announced that ‘Egypt is for the Egyptians.’ The only problem is that Egypt turned out to be a haven for thieves. Young people are not to blame [for the loss of identity],” he says.
Although what was going on in Egypt during Abbas’ childhood and youth affected his entire generation, Abbas frankly discusses in his book the personal influences that shaped him into what he is today, including a very difficult childhood, in which poverty coupled with constant toil were the main characteristics.
“A lot of people were shocked because I spoke about my childhood in such detail,” the historian explains. “The norm is to either say a few words and move on, or pretend to have come from a rich family. But I wanted to reach out to young people and show them that no matter how difficult life may be, if one has hope, one can accomplish anything.”
Hoping to make his memoirs accessible to younger readers, Abbas made a clear decision to steer way from academic jargon when he wrote them. The stakes, he suggests, are so high that he couldn’t risk his message being ignored or misunderstood.
“The nation is torn like it has never been torn before,” he begins. “This is very dangerous. When national issues are absent, we tend to think in terms of Muslim, Christian and Jew. I tried to illustrate, in my book, that Egyptians dealt with each other as Egyptians, not as Christians or Muslims. It was as if there was an unwritten pact between all Egyptians that no one is to go near other people’s beliefs. This turned Egypt into a melting pot for all races,” Abbas says.
He still remembers what an old Englishman once told him: “I was looking at the Egyptian royal-era documents in London, and this man who worked there asked me why no two Egyptians looked alike. He noted that some are brown, some white, some have red hair, etc. I told him, ‘Because we never ask people about their origins. We just take them as they are’.”
Back to the memoirs: When Abbas finished his high school education, he wanted to go on to university. His father refused, saying he thought it was time for Abbas, as the eldest son, to work and share the family burden with him. “It was normal for people my age to insist on getting a good education. Education was the door to social advancement. Nowadays, education means nothing. Having money has replaced education as a value,” he says.
Abbas believes he was lucky to have had the chance to enroll at Ain Shams University. “The university was in its beginnings. My class was only the tenth to graduate. Professors at Ain Shams were trying to prove their competence,” he remembers. Some people, whom he says “just read one line of the book,” attacked him for speaking so favorably of Ain Shams, at the same time making grave allegations about corruption at Cairo University.
“They fail to understand that I speak about the past. Today, Ain Shams may be even worse. [Mediocrity and corruption] are part of the system. Look at university text books. They [the professors] write trashy books that they then force students to buy. They even tamper with students’ grades for the benefit of privileged students,” he points out.
After receiving a degree in modern history from Ain Shams, Abbas went on to do his master’s. At the time, he had started working at the Egyptian Financial and Industrial Company in Kafr ElZayat. Although his job had nothing to do with history, he was lucky in that he was introduced to the idea of workers’ syndicates and workers’ rights.
“I decided to do my master’s on the Egyptian workers’ movement. God was kind to me in leading me to my professor, Dr. Ahmed Ezzat Abdel Karim, who was broad-minded enough to accept my data-gathering methods,” Abbas remembers. For the first time in Egyptian history, a master’s thesis was completed based on oral reports of witnesses of a historical movement.
A few years after he received his master’s degree (he had started to teach at Cairo University in the meantime), Abbas was invited to join a research group to study social and economic development in Egypt and Japan during the 19th century. After what he says was a rich and moving experience, Abbas came back from Japan with many memories and a book he had translated and printed, but that no publisher wanted to distribute.
The book, Hiroshima Diaries, was the diary of the director of the Transportation Hospital in Hiroshima. Beginning on the day Hiroshima was bombed at the end of the Second World War and ending the day the hospital was turned over to the Americans, the book reveals some frightening facts.
“It shows that Japan was used to test the effect of the nuclear bomb. The United States hit Japan at a time when the Japanese were secretly negotiating a surrender. After they hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they sent in a team of American doctors who happened to speak and read Japanese fluently. This means that they had been preparing for this since the beginning of the war,” Abbas alleges. “In the man’s [the Japanese diarist’s] town, they had turned his home into a museum, and I saw 17 translations of the book. The Arabic translation was number 18,” Abbas says.
When Abbas took the book to Al-Ahram to have it distributed, the man in charge told him, “This is not the right time. The world is not ready for such a book opposing the United States.”
“I insisted, so he said, ‘Suit yourself.’ Weeks later, Al-Ahram received verbal orders to stop the book from circulating, so a truck delivered all copies to my home. When I took the book to bookshops, I was told: ‘Is this the Hiroshima book? It is banned.’” Abbas never saw any written orders banning his book.
“Even Libya, Algeria and Syria [who then formed a front against imperialism] refused to let the book in. They screamed about elimperialiyya wel mahalabiyya, but it was all a show,” he says.
Abbas believes regimes in developing nations often interfere with ‘what can be said.’
“Can you write today about the big lie of the constitutional amendments? Can you say it is nothing except an answer to external pressure? You probably can, but no one will dare publish it,” he says. “Of course, each regime has those who promote it. On the other hand, he who always says what his conscience dictates never attains great positions.” He cites the example of a historian from Andalusia, who spoke his mind and was hated by rulers. “Despite that, they were all afraid of him,” Abbas says.
If not everything can be told, should we trust what we find in the history books, especially when it comes to what students are taught in schools? According to Abbas, the answer is “Not all the time.”
“Take Islamic history, for example. It is presented in a way that relies on legends more than an analysis of culture. They talk about the Ptolemaic era in two lines, and then they jump to the Arab invasion of Egypt, leaving behind a very important period the Coptic era. Their excuse is that there was never a Coptic state, but rather a Byzantine one. History should be taken as a whole. They do not teach students, for example, that the Ancient Egyptians invented religion and that all divine religions came and said the same thing,” he says. “Gamal Hemdan said that if you find an Islamic Egyptian script, scratch its surface and you’ll find a Coptic script. Scratch some more and you’ll find a Pharaonic script.”
Despite the faults he finds with history school textbooks, Abbas believes it is imperative for students at all levels to study history. In fact, the Egyptian Society for Historical Studies had held a seminar last month on history curricula, and recommended that the study of history be mandatory.
The move came after the Ministry of Education proposed making history an optional subject in secondary schools, prompting vicious criticism from the Shura Council and a minor media firestorm.
“The United States would rather all Third World countries stopped teaching national history,” Abbas grumbles. “This is their way of achieving dominance in the age of globalization. They do not want us to form a national identity. At the same time, they foster national education in their own schools,” he says.
Unfortunately, the historian points out, the nation’s textbooks do nothing to help youth develop an awareness of history or national identity. “Take the battle of Hittin, for example. They give the students innumerable details, overlooking the essence. Muslims and Christians fought side-by-side for two and a half centuries against the Crusaders. Every regime comes with its own priorities and consequently the textbooks are changed accordingly. The result is textbooks devoid of meaning,” he says.
Abbas’ explosive memoirs have probably irked a lot of people. He remembers an old Egyptian motto, explaining why he decided to publish his memoirs today: “The Egyptian proverb tells you, ‘If you are afraid, don’t say, and if you say, don’t be afraid’.”
A leading historian’s memoirs, targeting the nation’s youth, spark debate about how national identity is constructed and about academic politics
By Manal El Jesri
DR. RAOUF ABBAS’S MEMOIRS, published under the title of Mashaynaha Khota (We Have Tread Its Ways), have stirred loud debate in the nation’s sometimes stagnant intellectual circles since their publication last December. Stripped of detail: The historian / history professor / renowned public intellectual / chairman of the Egyptian Society for Historical Studies has said what only few dare to say.
The list of taboos he managed to break is exceptionally long, starting with allegations of corruption in academic circles, moving on to prejudice against the nation’s Coptic Christian minority and even alleged corruption leading to a former first lady becoming a university professor.
Abbas brushes off his critics by insisting he merely said what had to be said. “The average life expectancy of an Egyptian male is 60-something. I have passed that age, so I have little to be afraid of. What I wrote is just a sample of what people know, but cannot say to get it off their chests,” he says.
Born in pre-revolution Cairo, Abbas and his entire generation were deeply moved by the turbulent politics of his youth.
“I lived through the end of the royal era,” he says. “As children, my colleagues and I used to go out to demonstrations, demanding independence and an end to imperialist oppression. We got hurt, but still insisted on marching with the others.” The point, he adds, in case the interviewer missed it, is that ever since his childhood, his generation has had something to fight for, while “youth today have nothing. Everything has been watered down,”
The average life expectancy of an Egyptian male is 60-something. I have passed that age, so I have little to be afraid of. What I wrote is just a sample of what people know.
Much of that has to do with a sense of national identity. “During the royal era, we were raised to think of ourselves as being Egyptians. History lessons, literature and just about everything else concentrated on an Egyptian identity. Then came the revolution. It emphasized an Egyptian identity for a while, something that, for example, saw the statue of Ramses I moved to what was once called Queen Nazli Square (Bab ElHadid), but which was renamed Ramses St. But after 1956, [former President Gamal Abdel] Nasser realized that what was actually happening in Egypt has actually resulted in the opening of new horizons for all Arabs. Thus we saw the spark for the idea of pan-Arabism and action to free the Arab world. Then came Anwar Sadat, who announced that ‘Egypt is for the Egyptians.’ The only problem is that Egypt turned out to be a haven for thieves. Young people are not to blame [for the loss of identity],” he says.
Although what was going on in Egypt during Abbas’ childhood and youth affected his entire generation, Abbas frankly discusses in his book the personal influences that shaped him into what he is today, including a very difficult childhood, in which poverty coupled with constant toil were the main characteristics.
“A lot of people were shocked because I spoke about my childhood in such detail,” the historian explains. “The norm is to either say a few words and move on, or pretend to have come from a rich family. But I wanted to reach out to young people and show them that no matter how difficult life may be, if one has hope, one can accomplish anything.”
Hoping to make his memoirs accessible to younger readers, Abbas made a clear decision to steer way from academic jargon when he wrote them. The stakes, he suggests, are so high that he couldn’t risk his message being ignored or misunderstood.
“The nation is torn like it has never been torn before,” he begins. “This is very dangerous. When national issues are absent, we tend to think in terms of Muslim, Christian and Jew. I tried to illustrate, in my book, that Egyptians dealt with each other as Egyptians, not as Christians or Muslims. It was as if there was an unwritten pact between all Egyptians that no one is to go near other people’s beliefs. This turned Egypt into a melting pot for all races,” Abbas says.
He still remembers what an old Englishman once told him: “I was looking at the Egyptian royal-era documents in London, and this man who worked there asked me why no two Egyptians looked alike. He noted that some are brown, some white, some have red hair, etc. I told him, ‘Because we never ask people about their origins. We just take them as they are’.”
Back to the memoirs: When Abbas finished his high school education, he wanted to go on to university. His father refused, saying he thought it was time for Abbas, as the eldest son, to work and share the family burden with him. “It was normal for people my age to insist on getting a good education. Education was the door to social advancement. Nowadays, education means nothing. Having money has replaced education as a value,” he says.
Abbas believes he was lucky to have had the chance to enroll at Ain Shams University. “The university was in its beginnings. My class was only the tenth to graduate. Professors at Ain Shams were trying to prove their competence,” he remembers. Some people, whom he says “just read one line of the book,” attacked him for speaking so favorably of Ain Shams, at the same time making grave allegations about corruption at Cairo University.
“They fail to understand that I speak about the past. Today, Ain Shams may be even worse. [Mediocrity and corruption] are part of the system. Look at university text books. They [the professors] write trashy books that they then force students to buy. They even tamper with students’ grades for the benefit of privileged students,” he points out.
After receiving a degree in modern history from Ain Shams, Abbas went on to do his master’s. At the time, he had started working at the Egyptian Financial and Industrial Company in Kafr ElZayat. Although his job had nothing to do with history, he was lucky in that he was introduced to the idea of workers’ syndicates and workers’ rights.
“I decided to do my master’s on the Egyptian workers’ movement. God was kind to me in leading me to my professor, Dr. Ahmed Ezzat Abdel Karim, who was broad-minded enough to accept my data-gathering methods,” Abbas remembers. For the first time in Egyptian history, a master’s thesis was completed based on oral reports of witnesses of a historical movement.
A few years after he received his master’s degree (he had started to teach at Cairo University in the meantime), Abbas was invited to join a research group to study social and economic development in Egypt and Japan during the 19th century. After what he says was a rich and moving experience, Abbas came back from Japan with many memories and a book he had translated and printed, but that no publisher wanted to distribute.
The book, Hiroshima Diaries, was the diary of the director of the Transportation Hospital in Hiroshima. Beginning on the day Hiroshima was bombed at the end of the Second World War and ending the day the hospital was turned over to the Americans, the book reveals some frightening facts.
“It shows that Japan was used to test the effect of the nuclear bomb. The United States hit Japan at a time when the Japanese were secretly negotiating a surrender. After they hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they sent in a team of American doctors who happened to speak and read Japanese fluently. This means that they had been preparing for this since the beginning of the war,” Abbas alleges. “In the man’s [the Japanese diarist’s] town, they had turned his home into a museum, and I saw 17 translations of the book. The Arabic translation was number 18,” Abbas says.
When Abbas took the book to Al-Ahram to have it distributed, the man in charge told him, “This is not the right time. The world is not ready for such a book opposing the United States.”
“I insisted, so he said, ‘Suit yourself.’ Weeks later, Al-Ahram received verbal orders to stop the book from circulating, so a truck delivered all copies to my home. When I took the book to bookshops, I was told: ‘Is this the Hiroshima book? It is banned.’” Abbas never saw any written orders banning his book.
“Even Libya, Algeria and Syria [who then formed a front against imperialism] refused to let the book in. They screamed about elimperialiyya wel mahalabiyya, but it was all a show,” he says.
Abbas believes regimes in developing nations often interfere with ‘what can be said.’
“Can you write today about the big lie of the constitutional amendments? Can you say it is nothing except an answer to external pressure? You probably can, but no one will dare publish it,” he says. “Of course, each regime has those who promote it. On the other hand, he who always says what his conscience dictates never attains great positions.” He cites the example of a historian from Andalusia, who spoke his mind and was hated by rulers. “Despite that, they were all afraid of him,” Abbas says.
If not everything can be told, should we trust what we find in the history books, especially when it comes to what students are taught in schools? According to Abbas, the answer is “Not all the time.”
“Take Islamic history, for example. It is presented in a way that relies on legends more than an analysis of culture. They talk about the Ptolemaic era in two lines, and then they jump to the Arab invasion of Egypt, leaving behind a very important period the Coptic era. Their excuse is that there was never a Coptic state, but rather a Byzantine one. History should be taken as a whole. They do not teach students, for example, that the Ancient Egyptians invented religion and that all divine religions came and said the same thing,” he says. “Gamal Hemdan said that if you find an Islamic Egyptian script, scratch its surface and you’ll find a Coptic script. Scratch some more and you’ll find a Pharaonic script.”
Despite the faults he finds with history school textbooks, Abbas believes it is imperative for students at all levels to study history. In fact, the Egyptian Society for Historical Studies had held a seminar last month on history curricula, and recommended that the study of history be mandatory.
The move came after the Ministry of Education proposed making history an optional subject in secondary schools, prompting vicious criticism from the Shura Council and a minor media firestorm.
“The United States would rather all Third World countries stopped teaching national history,” Abbas grumbles. “This is their way of achieving dominance in the age of globalization. They do not want us to form a national identity. At the same time, they foster national education in their own schools,” he says.
Unfortunately, the historian points out, the nation’s textbooks do nothing to help youth develop an awareness of history or national identity. “Take the battle of Hittin, for example. They give the students innumerable details, overlooking the essence. Muslims and Christians fought side-by-side for two and a half centuries against the Crusaders. Every regime comes with its own priorities and consequently the textbooks are changed accordingly. The result is textbooks devoid of meaning,” he says.
Abbas’ explosive memoirs have probably irked a lot of people. He remembers an old Egyptian motto, explaining why he decided to publish his memoirs today: “The Egyptian proverb tells you, ‘If you are afraid, don’t say, and if you say, don’t be afraid’.”
Without A Trace
Without a Trace
While the authorities are doggedly tracking down disappearances associated with crime, thousands of missing person cases go unsolved each year as the law, the media and academia turn a blind eye to cases with scarce details or a missing motive. For families with missing children, just knowing would soothe years of mourning.
By Manal el-Jesri
MAHMOUD AHMED MOHAMED and Omm Ahmed live in Warraq, a low-income district near Mohandiseen packed with families, each with its own little joys and miseries. But Abu Ahmed’s home has seen little joy since Ahmed went missing almost four years ago. His younger brother, Moustafa, now 11, has written Ahmed’s name in large colored letters on the inside of the tiny flat’s front door.
“Ahmed, Akhuna, Habibna,” (Ahmed, Our Beloved Brother), the door reads. Ahmed, who would be 17 today if he is still alive, is believed to have been kidnapped, but police have not uncovered any new information about the case since he disappeared on July 20, 2001.
Although the Ministry of Interior is not in the habit of giving out figures, the problem of missing people is believed to be a significant one. Cases with scarce details are so common that journalist Mourad Sobhi, the editor of Al-Ahram’s crime page for the past 23 years, finds nothing to stir his curiosity when faced with another missing person report.
“We get them daily,” the seasoned journalist says. “In fact, we receive several reports of missing people every day. We cannot publish all of them; in fact, there would be no space left for the other stories. We choose one or two every few days.”
According to the annual report of the Ministry of Interior’s General Juvenile Affairs Administration, 2,686 reports of missing juveniles were filed in the year 2001, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Voices Loved, idealized voices Of those who have died, or of thosefor us as lost as the dead
As for adults? There are no figures to speak of, at least not publicly available ones. The figure for minor children emerged from the depths of the library of the National Center for Sociological and Criminological Research (NCSCR). The kindly librarian, Mme. Saneyya, pointed out that the issue of missing people has somehow slipped the minds of the center’s worthy researchers. Although she procured all kinds of indexes (in which the lonely figure was found) that might help develop these cases, there was not a single research paper available at the center, which usually covers everything that has to do with society and crime.
“You will find nothing here. I’m very sorry, darling,” she says.
The Al-Ahram archives shows signs of a similar lack of organization or urgency. Although the newspaper receives countless missing people reports, some of which it publishes, there is no unified file allowing convenient access to reports in the otherwise rich archives. The paper spends resources developing only those cases with enough information to classify as other crimes, including murder, theft, rape or kidnapping.
“We file none of the missing persons reports,” the archivist says, as, with a loud dusty thud, she deposits a huge file marked “Kidnapping in Egypt” on the visitors’ table.
Similarly, the Ministry of Interior’s media center likewise suggests it is not able to provide figures on missing people or dedicated missing people’s bureaus in the nation’s police stations.
What is it about missing people? Is it the sheer size of the country, packed with 72 million people, that makes it intimidating to even consider looking for someone who has been swallowed by the monster? Omm Ahmed and Abu Ahmed are not afraid. They are still looking for their lost boy.
The problem is, according to Abu Ahmed, no one has helped them find him, not even the police.
Following the clues
General Fady El-Habashy, one of the capital’s most prominent lawyers and a retired chief of the Ministry of Interior’s Cairo Criminological Unit, is quick to point out that “of course the Ministry of Interior has a missing people’s department. There is one in every station, and in every sector, and then there is a centralized department that the smaller departments report to.”
El-Habashy, who worked as an investigator for 28 years, points out that missing persons reports are standard forms. Detectives, he says, don’t fuss over them unless they catch the scent of a crime among the particulars.
Usually, a family files a report at the police station if someone has been missing for more than 24 hours, El-Habashy explains. “Be it a child, grown-up, or a mentally disabled person, the family gives the person’s physical description, what he or she was wearing, whether they had something of value on their person. The report is then sent to other departments,” he says.
Sobhi, the Al-Ahram crime page editor, explains that police stations often deal with missing children’s reports as a matter of course. “No investigation is possible when a child is lost. Who do you ask if a child is lost in a place like Ramses Square?” he asks. “You cannot ask the passersby. Children are often lost because of the carelessness of their parents, which is why when they are found, the government charges the mother with negligence.”
Most of these kids, according to Sobhi, belong to low-income families.
According to El-Habashy, missing person’s reports are of utmost importance in identifying anonymous bodies. “When the police find a body, someone who died of natural causes or was killed, they take a picture of this body,” he says. “The picture is then sent to all departments, with the body’s fingerprints. If we find a match, we ask the family to identify the body, and then forensic work starts to determine the cause of death. If the cause is criminal, we start our investigations.”
He remembers a perfect example: “A Bedouin woman found a decapitated body while herding her sheep in a desert area on the Cairo-Suez Road. It was a male’s body, and it was completely naked. We had nothing to identify him with.”
Using police dogs, El-Habashy’s team was able to find the head and neck, which were buried in the same area, albeit at some distance. “We picked up the head, washed it very well with water and then took it to the morgue, where the body was waiting. The doctors were able to sew the neck to the body. Afterwards, we photographed the body, and sent a report to all departments,” he says.
Right away, the body was identified. The man’s family had filed a missing person’s report some time ago and made a positive identification of the remains.
“That was the point where we moved from part one to part two of the [process]: finding out who had killed him. That was quite easy. After questioning the last person who had seen him alive, his best friend, we discovered that it was this friend who had killed him. He wanted to steal his ring, but then had taken the murdered man’s clothes off and separated his head from his body to [prevent] anyone [from] identifying him,” El-Habashy remembers.
He calls this case a model missing person’s case. “The missing person’s bureau [helped]; we used the missing person’s reports to find the family. If there hadn’t been a report, we would not have been able to notify the family or find the murderer,” he points out.
Ahmed’s missing report has graced the walls of Egypt’s police stations since July 2001. No one has had any luck in finding him yet.
“I want my son. Bring him to me dead or alive,” is his father’s mantra. He simply wants to know.
Into thin air
Journalist Mohamed Abdel-Bari, crime editor of Al-Ahram Al-Masaii newspaper since it first rolled off the presses in 1990, has seen many cases of missing people during his 15-year career covering crime.
“I am in a constant state of amazement at the intricacies of the human psyche,” Abdel-Bari says. “Each case brings something new, and each is a world apart. Hundreds of crimes take place everyday, but since each person is unique, so is each crime.”
He is quick to add, however, that not everyone who has gone missing is missing because a crime is involved. Like any good investigative reporter, Abdel-Bari can usually sense whether a crime is involved or not. He classifies missing persons into different categories.
“The first category includes those who disappear voluntarily,” he says. “This takes place a lot amongst teenagers, both male and female. Between the ages of 14 and 21, youths develop a heightened sense of self. If they feel unhappy or dissatisfied with their social surroundings, they decide to leave the house and go somewhere else.
“The second category involves people who go missing involuntarily. Many of these individuals are mentally disabled. According to the last figure released by the NCSCR, 1.5 percent of Egypt’s population is mentally disabled. Children also belong to this category,” he says.
Abdel-Bari remembers the case of a little girl who was found on the beach in Damietta. The chief of police took her in, and the newspaper’s Damietta correspondent sent the girl’s story and pictures in to the Cairo office.
“We were able to find her parents, who had been looking for her. The tragedy of a lost child is a great one, and is repeated daily. In Egypt, we have mulids [celebrations, which take place in every governorate]. And an inherent element in every mulid is the tragedy of lost children. Salah Jahine, the great poet, even wrote about it in his famous operetta El-Leila El-Kebeira (The Big Night),” he says.
A third category of cases, Abdel-Bari continues, are those who disappear because of coercion victims of kidnappings. Sobhi, Abdel-Bari’s colleague from the mother newspaper, points out that kidnapping children is not uncommon, although the issue cannot be called a phenomenon.
“Children are often kidnapped to join beggars’ bands, or to help traffic drugs or smuggle goods. These children are often terrorized into staying with their abductors,” he says.
Although the cases are relatively few in number, Abdel-Bari explains, “kidnapping, from what I see, is often just the beginning. It usually leads to other crimes, such as murder, rape or both. And because the cases are few, they cause a stir on the streets.”
This is why the police pay extra attention to cases of abduction, Sobhi explains.
“Such crimes make people fear the streets. They fear for their womenfolk, their honor. This is an oriental society, and honor is of the utmost importance. It is for this reason that the police do their utmost to solve these mysteries,” he says.
One of the most recent cases is that of Fatma Ali Hammouda, 21, who was kidnapped from a busy Nasr City street in January. On the twenty-first of that month, her mother, Zeinab El-Sayyed Abdel-Hamid, filed a report that her daughter had failed to return home and that she had received a phone call from someone asking for LE 200,000 in ransom in exchange for her daughter.
“The mother knew right away that her old driver was probably behind the case. Something in the phone call alerted her to the possibility, so when she told this to the police, they started investigating and were able to bring the girl back after three days,” Abdel-Bari says.
El-Habashy calls kidnapping for ransom a crime like any other. He is reluctant to give it too much attention and believes the media should stop making an issue of the infrequent cases that are often solved within days.
“Kidnapping is not a problem in Egypt,” El-Habashy says. “Our police are too clever. They are better than the biggest criminal investigation units in the world.”
Abdel-Bari agrees, and points out that the police often pay a lot more attention to cases of missing people when there is a possibility of criminal intent, and especially when the missing person is wealthy.
In such cases, the crime is summarily solved and the person is found.
Hanaa’s dilemma
Sometimes, though, only the murderer is found and never the missing person. Take the case of Hanaa Abdel-Naeim’s husband, for example. The wealthy contractor left his home one night in 1999 and hasn’t been heard from since. Hanaa is currently serving the fourth year of a life sentence, having been convicted of murdering him and hiding his body with the help of her lover, the downstairs greengrocer.
Hanaa, 40, used to be a well-off Nasr City physician. Today, she is a convicted murderess, despite the absence of a body. The social worker at the Qanatir Women’s Prison says that the popular belief is that Hanaa used her medical know-how to dispose of the body.
“She dissolved him in acid. This is why no trace of him was ever found,” she suggests.
Hanaa, on the other hand, denies the accusations hotly as her tears flow freely. A tall woman, Hanaa keeps her dark glasses on at all times, although they have become crooked. She wears her white scarf differently from the rest of the inmates, which gives her the look of a hospital matron. Despite the moving way she tells her story, Hanaa’s looks don’t help her. Despite the tears and the blotchy face, there is something hard as nails about this prisoner.
“I did not kill my husband,” Hanaa begins. “We had been married since ’88, and we have one son. My husband was a general manager in a cement company and he had many enemies. One day six years ago, he received a phone call and had to go out. He never came back. I looked for him everywhere, and when I lost hope I rented out our flat. I needed money to pay for my son’s private school. I also applied for an exceptional pension.”
“Three years and one month later, and eleven months before it was possible for my son to claim his inheritance, my in-laws accused me of having killed my husband,” she continues. “I was taken to Almaza [police] station, where I was kept for a few days. No one knew anything about me. They wanted me to confess to having poisoned and buried my husband.”
“They also questioned the guy from the fruit shop downstairs. They wanted him to confess to having been my lover,” she alleges. “They said they had tapes, but no one heard them. The guy was only 20, almost half my age, and they made him confess that I had asked him to bury my husband, but that he was too scared to do it.”
Hanaa’s bawwab told the police he had seen her help her husband, who was in great pain, into the car, and that she drove back without him.
Sometimes they speak to us in dreams; Sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.
Hanaa alleges that both the bawwab and the greengrocer were frightened into testifying against her. The grocer, she says, showed the police a place in the desert, where he says she told him to help her bury her husband’s body. “The police took me to the location and kept saying: ‘Just you wait, we’ll find a bone or some hair now.’ They could not find a thing. There was no body, none of the witnesses showed up at the trial and I did not confess to murder,” Hanaa continues.
The judge told her, she claims: “Hanaa, we sent your papers to the Mufti [for a ruling on whether capital punishment was warranted in the case] but the Mufti ruled against your execution. He says there is no proof that you killed your husband. We are giving you a life sentence.”
“I believe my husband’s family bribed a lot of people to get me here,” she alleges. “They want to get their hands on my husband’s LE 500,000 apartment in Nasr City. They do not care about him or about his son, who has had to [leave] his private school now that I’m here.”
Although El-Habashy cannot recall Hanaa’s case, he is amazed that she got a life sentence despite the fact that her husband’s body was never found.
“There must be a body for there to be a sentence. Without a body there is no crime,” he says. Hanaa, detained in the murderer’s ward at Al-Qanatir, is constantly hoping the prosecutor general will look into her case again and order a retrial.
Her husband is still missing.
Legal Lessons
Had Hanaa’s in-laws waited a few more months, she would have been able to obtain a judge’s decree declaring her husband legally dead. According to El-Habashy, a legally missing person is someone about whom “nothing is known He is someone whose whereabouts are unknown, and whose life or death cannot be determined.”
The lawyer explains that those who are lost in battle, or lost in plane crashes or shipwrecks belong to a different category.
“In this case, the person is considered dead after one year from the date he first went missing,” he says. “The Prime Minister or Minister of Defense issues a decree declaring the person officially dead. As a consequence, the person’s estate can be divided accordingly. His wife is considered a widow.”
A missing person, on the other hand, who disappeared under normal circumstances, is declared dead after four years.
“According to Article 22 (amended) of Law 103 for the year 1958, a judge, the Prime Minister or Minister of Defense can issue a decree declaring the person dead after sufficient investigations are carried out to ensure that this person has most probably perished,” El-Habashy says.
What Happened to Ahmed
In three months, Ahmed will have been missing for four years. But in this case, no one is in a hurry to declare him dead, his parents least of all.
“The police station once sent for us to look at a picture of a body they found. God rest his soul, his face was all gone. He was thin, and really tall. He was also very dark. It wasn’t Ahmed. Ahmed is short, like his father,” Omm Ahmed says. She points to a mirror, trying to show the real height of her missing boy. “Ahmed always complained about this mirror. It had a shelf, here, you can see the traces. He kept bumping his head on the shelf.” She bursts into tears as she says, “He would tell me ‘Remove this thing!’ as he jumped up and down in pain.”
Although Ahmed has been gone for years, his parents have not lost hope of one day finding him. “You don’t know what happens to me whenever it rains, or whenever it is too hot? I wonder how Ahmed is doing. He was sick, he had a chest allergy. I brought him chest medications every month. My son was kind, he never hurt anyone,” Omm Ahmed says.
Living in an area overlooked by the state, where streets are not paved and buildings have no numbers, leaning against each other like a scary set of dominoes, one more lost kid means nothing except to the people directly involved in the tragedy.
Ahmed’s parents, his brother Moustafa, his married sister Ghada, 19, and his new nephew Ahmed (his namesake) all live in a tiny two-room apartment, never giving up hope for any news of Ahmed. A section of the only closet in the house is kept for Ahmed’s things.
“I don’t wash his clothes. It is the only way I have of keeping his smell in the house. Once, his brother reached for Ahmed’s jeans suit. I screamed and snatched it out of his hands. His sister remonstrated that I should not do this. They are brothers after all. She does not understand. If I were to let him wear it, I would have to wash it. What will I have then? Nothing,” she says.
Omm Ahmed wears mourning clothes. “I know he is not dead. I am sure of it. If he were dead I would feel it. But I wear black because I’m sad. I am not able to fill my eyes with the sight of him, am I? For whom shall I wear colors?” she asks.
The last time she saw him was on July 20, 2001.
“It was the day right after his birthday. He had just turned 13. He went down to buy a bag of chips, and never came back,” Om Ahmed says.
And, with their sound, for a moment returnSounds from our life’s first poetry Like distant music fading away at night.
His father, Mahmoud Ahmed Mohamed Bayyoumi, picks up the story here. Abu Ahmed, as he prefers to be called, works as a car surugy (upholsterer) in Wekalet El-Balah. Short and thin, Abu Ahmed seems to survive on his anger, which he keeps fueled by remembering what happened to his son. Although he does not cry like his wife, whose eyes are seldom dry, Mahmoud’s eyes speak volumes. You can see the loss and pain he has gone through from the minute you set eyes on his tense frame. Obviously a gentle person, Abu Ahmed’s voice turns to shouting at times.
“I came back from work at 10pm on Friday, July 20th. Mostafa and Ghada were alone, I asked them where Ahmed and his mother were, and they said, ‘Mother is looking for Ahmed.’ They said he had not come back since the afternoon. A little later, Omm Ahmed came back. She was screaming and crying. I went out to look for him, and a kid’s neighbor said he had seen him with a boy called Hani.”
At this point, the story becomes too difficult for Abu Ahmed. “I hate saying this boy’s name. His name is Devil, Damned Devil,” he says. Om Ahmed agrees: “He is a bad kid. He sleeps on sidewalks.”
The family had never heard of the boy before. A newcomer to the area, he lived nearby with his mother. On going to ask him about Ahmed, Hani (14 at the time) denied he had seen him.
“We kept looking, and found nothing. The next day we went to Hani’s house again,” Abu Ahmed remembers. After much cajoling, Hani told the father and his neighbors that Ahmed had drowned in the Nile. It was then that Abu Ahmed went crazy, fainting and then waking up crying. “I slapped my own face like a woman. We went to the police and started looking for his body,” he remembers.
Ahmed’s mother cries as she remembers that difficult moment. “Ahmed never swam in the Nile. He never even strayed away from home. He and Moustafa used to play downstairs near the house. The boy [Hani] was lying,” she says.
For five days, police and the river authorities looked for Ahmed’s body, thinking he had drowned.
“On the fifth day, my wife’s nephew came running to us. He said he had received a call from Ahmed. He swore Ahmed had told him he had been kidnapped,” Mahmoud says. Omm Ahmed continues: “My nephew was in the last year of college, studying commerce. He is not a child. He refused to believe Ahmed at first, telling him that Ahmed is dead. Ahmed told him my name, and the name of Khaled’s [the nephew’s] mother. Nobody knows our names. They know me as Omm Ahmed.”
The family rushed to the telephone centrale, where they urged the person in charge to trace the number that had just called the uncle’s line. He refused, they allege, demanding an order from the Public Prosecutor’s Office before doing so.
Then they rushed to Hani’s house and took him to the Warraq Police Station.
“After many threats, the boy confessed he had sold Ahmed to a man called Mohamed Khalil for LE 20,” Abu Ahmed claims. According to them, Hani was asked by Khalil, who sold tissue paper boxes by the Imbaba railways, to get him a clean boy who went to school. He needed someone to help him, Hani claimed. It took Hani three days to befriend Ahmed and convince him to take that fateful walk.
“The man took Ahmed, and when Ahmed called out for help, asking Hani to stay with him, the man beat him up, threatening him with a pocket-knife,” Omm Ahmed says.
The idea was, obviously, to catch the man and find Ahmed.
“The police force went to look for him at 2 am. He was gone by then, so they told us to wait for him. The police officer said, ‘You are investigators now. When you see him, call me,’” Mahmoud remembers. At dawn, the accused came to assume his spot. “We called the station, but the officer said wait. I couldn’t wait. I went to the station to urge them to come, but they told me ‘No, we will go at night.’ It was as if they wanted him to escape. I couldn’t wait. My neighbors, relatives and I picked him up ourselves. We took him to the officer.”
Hani and Khalil were confronted with each other, but the man kept insisting he had nothing to do with Ahmed’s disappearance, and Hani kept insisting he was the right guy. “At that point, Hani broke down and said the man also used to do bad things to him for LE 5. I went crazy. Is this why they took my son?” Abu Ahmed says.
Khalil was kept in custody for four days, during which Ahmed’s parents talk of four lawyers driving expensive cars who kept visiting the prisoner, and of a rich lady wearing lots of gold who came to visit Khalil laden with a big bag of canned food and cigarettes.
“Nobody asked why this man, who sold tissues for a living, had such rich connections,” Abu Ahmed says. Omm Ahmed remembers how shocked she was that anyone would want to defend that criminal. “I went in and held each lawyer by his clothes, asking them ‘Did this man steal a television set? No, he stole my son. How can you defend him?’” she asked.
The man was released after four days, and the police officer told Abu Ahmed to follow him around.
His burial, the poorest possible, took place here.A few hours before dying he whispered somethingAbout ‘home’, about ‘very old parents.’But nobody knew who they were.
“He said that he may be able to get me my son back.” Mahmoud alleges. “So I stayed near him. I waited around as he worked, and noticed how he wore different expensive clothes every day. I bought him cigarettes and tea, and waited to see my son. When all failed, I went to the district police. They picked him up again, and they got that devil Hani too. But when questioning them, they did not lay a finger on the man. They then wrote their report, in which they said that, according to their investigations, Hani was a bad student who had escaped because he hated his job. They mentioned nothing about the man.”
The police officer, they allege, was later suspended when he was accused of accepting bribes, a case that has nothing with Ahmed. “We saw him with handcuffs around his wrists,” the mother remembers.
The parents say they were lucky because the case was turned over to the district prosecutor, Sherif Tawfik, whom they call a great man.
“He refused to take the police report for granted. He re-questioned Hani and Khalil,” Abu Ahmed remembers. Khalil was kept in custody for nine months, but was left to go free when the investigations led to nothing.
Abu Ahmed claims he has kept an eye on Khalil, although the man is not staying with his family in Rod El-Farag anymore. Three months ago, Abu Ahmed filed a complaint in the office of the Prosecutor General Maher Abdel-Wahed, who ordered a re-opening of the investigations.
“Two months ago the new district attorney told me to stop going to people in high places. I said, ‘Whom do you mean there is no one higher than God the almighty.’ He also told me to stop talking to the press. He asked, ‘What do you want?’ I said I want my son. I want him dead or alive. He said, ‘Wait for just one month.’ We’ll see, I am going to him this coming Tuesday,” Abu Ahmed says.
Abu Ahmed has lost faith in the system. This is why when some crooks pretended to be psychics and promised to show him Ahmed, he and his wife believed them.
“They wanted LE 7,000. I went to my brothers and asked for money. They said let them show us Ahmed first, and then we will give them his weight in gold. I sold my gold bracelets. They took Abu Ahmed to a café and told him to wait, then they said Ahmed ran away when he saw him,” the mother says.
Despite her black clothes, Omm Ahmed lives in the hope of seeing her son one last time.
“But I have a feeling I will not see him again. I believe he will be found after I die. Every time some of these crooks give us some hope, I change my clothes to colored ones. I say, ‘My life will be happy again.’ I wait for him. Once, my legs became paralyzed, because once again our only hope was crushed.”
Abu Ahmed is sure his son is alive, too. He vows he will not believe the crooks again.
“We believe in God, we really do. He alone can bring Ahmed back,” he says. The father believes his son to be a victim of some gang. “It is either drugs or human body parts,” he theorizes. He often dreams of his son too: “I get good signs; something to do with the number three. He will come back, maybe after three weeks, or three years. I just know he will come back. May God rest my mind!” he shouts.
While the authorities are doggedly tracking down disappearances associated with crime, thousands of missing person cases go unsolved each year as the law, the media and academia turn a blind eye to cases with scarce details or a missing motive. For families with missing children, just knowing would soothe years of mourning.
By Manal el-Jesri
MAHMOUD AHMED MOHAMED and Omm Ahmed live in Warraq, a low-income district near Mohandiseen packed with families, each with its own little joys and miseries. But Abu Ahmed’s home has seen little joy since Ahmed went missing almost four years ago. His younger brother, Moustafa, now 11, has written Ahmed’s name in large colored letters on the inside of the tiny flat’s front door.
“Ahmed, Akhuna, Habibna,” (Ahmed, Our Beloved Brother), the door reads. Ahmed, who would be 17 today if he is still alive, is believed to have been kidnapped, but police have not uncovered any new information about the case since he disappeared on July 20, 2001.
Although the Ministry of Interior is not in the habit of giving out figures, the problem of missing people is believed to be a significant one. Cases with scarce details are so common that journalist Mourad Sobhi, the editor of Al-Ahram’s crime page for the past 23 years, finds nothing to stir his curiosity when faced with another missing person report.
“We get them daily,” the seasoned journalist says. “In fact, we receive several reports of missing people every day. We cannot publish all of them; in fact, there would be no space left for the other stories. We choose one or two every few days.”
According to the annual report of the Ministry of Interior’s General Juvenile Affairs Administration, 2,686 reports of missing juveniles were filed in the year 2001, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Voices Loved, idealized voices Of those who have died, or of thosefor us as lost as the dead
As for adults? There are no figures to speak of, at least not publicly available ones. The figure for minor children emerged from the depths of the library of the National Center for Sociological and Criminological Research (NCSCR). The kindly librarian, Mme. Saneyya, pointed out that the issue of missing people has somehow slipped the minds of the center’s worthy researchers. Although she procured all kinds of indexes (in which the lonely figure was found) that might help develop these cases, there was not a single research paper available at the center, which usually covers everything that has to do with society and crime.
“You will find nothing here. I’m very sorry, darling,” she says.
The Al-Ahram archives shows signs of a similar lack of organization or urgency. Although the newspaper receives countless missing people reports, some of which it publishes, there is no unified file allowing convenient access to reports in the otherwise rich archives. The paper spends resources developing only those cases with enough information to classify as other crimes, including murder, theft, rape or kidnapping.
“We file none of the missing persons reports,” the archivist says, as, with a loud dusty thud, she deposits a huge file marked “Kidnapping in Egypt” on the visitors’ table.
Similarly, the Ministry of Interior’s media center likewise suggests it is not able to provide figures on missing people or dedicated missing people’s bureaus in the nation’s police stations.
What is it about missing people? Is it the sheer size of the country, packed with 72 million people, that makes it intimidating to even consider looking for someone who has been swallowed by the monster? Omm Ahmed and Abu Ahmed are not afraid. They are still looking for their lost boy.
The problem is, according to Abu Ahmed, no one has helped them find him, not even the police.
Following the clues
General Fady El-Habashy, one of the capital’s most prominent lawyers and a retired chief of the Ministry of Interior’s Cairo Criminological Unit, is quick to point out that “of course the Ministry of Interior has a missing people’s department. There is one in every station, and in every sector, and then there is a centralized department that the smaller departments report to.”
El-Habashy, who worked as an investigator for 28 years, points out that missing persons reports are standard forms. Detectives, he says, don’t fuss over them unless they catch the scent of a crime among the particulars.
Usually, a family files a report at the police station if someone has been missing for more than 24 hours, El-Habashy explains. “Be it a child, grown-up, or a mentally disabled person, the family gives the person’s physical description, what he or she was wearing, whether they had something of value on their person. The report is then sent to other departments,” he says.
Sobhi, the Al-Ahram crime page editor, explains that police stations often deal with missing children’s reports as a matter of course. “No investigation is possible when a child is lost. Who do you ask if a child is lost in a place like Ramses Square?” he asks. “You cannot ask the passersby. Children are often lost because of the carelessness of their parents, which is why when they are found, the government charges the mother with negligence.”
Most of these kids, according to Sobhi, belong to low-income families.
According to El-Habashy, missing person’s reports are of utmost importance in identifying anonymous bodies. “When the police find a body, someone who died of natural causes or was killed, they take a picture of this body,” he says. “The picture is then sent to all departments, with the body’s fingerprints. If we find a match, we ask the family to identify the body, and then forensic work starts to determine the cause of death. If the cause is criminal, we start our investigations.”
He remembers a perfect example: “A Bedouin woman found a decapitated body while herding her sheep in a desert area on the Cairo-Suez Road. It was a male’s body, and it was completely naked. We had nothing to identify him with.”
Using police dogs, El-Habashy’s team was able to find the head and neck, which were buried in the same area, albeit at some distance. “We picked up the head, washed it very well with water and then took it to the morgue, where the body was waiting. The doctors were able to sew the neck to the body. Afterwards, we photographed the body, and sent a report to all departments,” he says.
Right away, the body was identified. The man’s family had filed a missing person’s report some time ago and made a positive identification of the remains.
“That was the point where we moved from part one to part two of the [process]: finding out who had killed him. That was quite easy. After questioning the last person who had seen him alive, his best friend, we discovered that it was this friend who had killed him. He wanted to steal his ring, but then had taken the murdered man’s clothes off and separated his head from his body to [prevent] anyone [from] identifying him,” El-Habashy remembers.
He calls this case a model missing person’s case. “The missing person’s bureau [helped]; we used the missing person’s reports to find the family. If there hadn’t been a report, we would not have been able to notify the family or find the murderer,” he points out.
Ahmed’s missing report has graced the walls of Egypt’s police stations since July 2001. No one has had any luck in finding him yet.
“I want my son. Bring him to me dead or alive,” is his father’s mantra. He simply wants to know.
Into thin air
Journalist Mohamed Abdel-Bari, crime editor of Al-Ahram Al-Masaii newspaper since it first rolled off the presses in 1990, has seen many cases of missing people during his 15-year career covering crime.
“I am in a constant state of amazement at the intricacies of the human psyche,” Abdel-Bari says. “Each case brings something new, and each is a world apart. Hundreds of crimes take place everyday, but since each person is unique, so is each crime.”
He is quick to add, however, that not everyone who has gone missing is missing because a crime is involved. Like any good investigative reporter, Abdel-Bari can usually sense whether a crime is involved or not. He classifies missing persons into different categories.
“The first category includes those who disappear voluntarily,” he says. “This takes place a lot amongst teenagers, both male and female. Between the ages of 14 and 21, youths develop a heightened sense of self. If they feel unhappy or dissatisfied with their social surroundings, they decide to leave the house and go somewhere else.
“The second category involves people who go missing involuntarily. Many of these individuals are mentally disabled. According to the last figure released by the NCSCR, 1.5 percent of Egypt’s population is mentally disabled. Children also belong to this category,” he says.
Abdel-Bari remembers the case of a little girl who was found on the beach in Damietta. The chief of police took her in, and the newspaper’s Damietta correspondent sent the girl’s story and pictures in to the Cairo office.
“We were able to find her parents, who had been looking for her. The tragedy of a lost child is a great one, and is repeated daily. In Egypt, we have mulids [celebrations, which take place in every governorate]. And an inherent element in every mulid is the tragedy of lost children. Salah Jahine, the great poet, even wrote about it in his famous operetta El-Leila El-Kebeira (The Big Night),” he says.
A third category of cases, Abdel-Bari continues, are those who disappear because of coercion victims of kidnappings. Sobhi, Abdel-Bari’s colleague from the mother newspaper, points out that kidnapping children is not uncommon, although the issue cannot be called a phenomenon.
“Children are often kidnapped to join beggars’ bands, or to help traffic drugs or smuggle goods. These children are often terrorized into staying with their abductors,” he says.
Although the cases are relatively few in number, Abdel-Bari explains, “kidnapping, from what I see, is often just the beginning. It usually leads to other crimes, such as murder, rape or both. And because the cases are few, they cause a stir on the streets.”
This is why the police pay extra attention to cases of abduction, Sobhi explains.
“Such crimes make people fear the streets. They fear for their womenfolk, their honor. This is an oriental society, and honor is of the utmost importance. It is for this reason that the police do their utmost to solve these mysteries,” he says.
One of the most recent cases is that of Fatma Ali Hammouda, 21, who was kidnapped from a busy Nasr City street in January. On the twenty-first of that month, her mother, Zeinab El-Sayyed Abdel-Hamid, filed a report that her daughter had failed to return home and that she had received a phone call from someone asking for LE 200,000 in ransom in exchange for her daughter.
“The mother knew right away that her old driver was probably behind the case. Something in the phone call alerted her to the possibility, so when she told this to the police, they started investigating and were able to bring the girl back after three days,” Abdel-Bari says.
El-Habashy calls kidnapping for ransom a crime like any other. He is reluctant to give it too much attention and believes the media should stop making an issue of the infrequent cases that are often solved within days.
“Kidnapping is not a problem in Egypt,” El-Habashy says. “Our police are too clever. They are better than the biggest criminal investigation units in the world.”
Abdel-Bari agrees, and points out that the police often pay a lot more attention to cases of missing people when there is a possibility of criminal intent, and especially when the missing person is wealthy.
In such cases, the crime is summarily solved and the person is found.
Hanaa’s dilemma
Sometimes, though, only the murderer is found and never the missing person. Take the case of Hanaa Abdel-Naeim’s husband, for example. The wealthy contractor left his home one night in 1999 and hasn’t been heard from since. Hanaa is currently serving the fourth year of a life sentence, having been convicted of murdering him and hiding his body with the help of her lover, the downstairs greengrocer.
Hanaa, 40, used to be a well-off Nasr City physician. Today, she is a convicted murderess, despite the absence of a body. The social worker at the Qanatir Women’s Prison says that the popular belief is that Hanaa used her medical know-how to dispose of the body.
“She dissolved him in acid. This is why no trace of him was ever found,” she suggests.
Hanaa, on the other hand, denies the accusations hotly as her tears flow freely. A tall woman, Hanaa keeps her dark glasses on at all times, although they have become crooked. She wears her white scarf differently from the rest of the inmates, which gives her the look of a hospital matron. Despite the moving way she tells her story, Hanaa’s looks don’t help her. Despite the tears and the blotchy face, there is something hard as nails about this prisoner.
“I did not kill my husband,” Hanaa begins. “We had been married since ’88, and we have one son. My husband was a general manager in a cement company and he had many enemies. One day six years ago, he received a phone call and had to go out. He never came back. I looked for him everywhere, and when I lost hope I rented out our flat. I needed money to pay for my son’s private school. I also applied for an exceptional pension.”
“Three years and one month later, and eleven months before it was possible for my son to claim his inheritance, my in-laws accused me of having killed my husband,” she continues. “I was taken to Almaza [police] station, where I was kept for a few days. No one knew anything about me. They wanted me to confess to having poisoned and buried my husband.”
“They also questioned the guy from the fruit shop downstairs. They wanted him to confess to having been my lover,” she alleges. “They said they had tapes, but no one heard them. The guy was only 20, almost half my age, and they made him confess that I had asked him to bury my husband, but that he was too scared to do it.”
Hanaa’s bawwab told the police he had seen her help her husband, who was in great pain, into the car, and that she drove back without him.
Sometimes they speak to us in dreams; Sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.
Hanaa alleges that both the bawwab and the greengrocer were frightened into testifying against her. The grocer, she says, showed the police a place in the desert, where he says she told him to help her bury her husband’s body. “The police took me to the location and kept saying: ‘Just you wait, we’ll find a bone or some hair now.’ They could not find a thing. There was no body, none of the witnesses showed up at the trial and I did not confess to murder,” Hanaa continues.
The judge told her, she claims: “Hanaa, we sent your papers to the Mufti [for a ruling on whether capital punishment was warranted in the case] but the Mufti ruled against your execution. He says there is no proof that you killed your husband. We are giving you a life sentence.”
“I believe my husband’s family bribed a lot of people to get me here,” she alleges. “They want to get their hands on my husband’s LE 500,000 apartment in Nasr City. They do not care about him or about his son, who has had to [leave] his private school now that I’m here.”
Although El-Habashy cannot recall Hanaa’s case, he is amazed that she got a life sentence despite the fact that her husband’s body was never found.
“There must be a body for there to be a sentence. Without a body there is no crime,” he says. Hanaa, detained in the murderer’s ward at Al-Qanatir, is constantly hoping the prosecutor general will look into her case again and order a retrial.
Her husband is still missing.
Legal Lessons
Had Hanaa’s in-laws waited a few more months, she would have been able to obtain a judge’s decree declaring her husband legally dead. According to El-Habashy, a legally missing person is someone about whom “nothing is known He is someone whose whereabouts are unknown, and whose life or death cannot be determined.”
The lawyer explains that those who are lost in battle, or lost in plane crashes or shipwrecks belong to a different category.
“In this case, the person is considered dead after one year from the date he first went missing,” he says. “The Prime Minister or Minister of Defense issues a decree declaring the person officially dead. As a consequence, the person’s estate can be divided accordingly. His wife is considered a widow.”
A missing person, on the other hand, who disappeared under normal circumstances, is declared dead after four years.
“According to Article 22 (amended) of Law 103 for the year 1958, a judge, the Prime Minister or Minister of Defense can issue a decree declaring the person dead after sufficient investigations are carried out to ensure that this person has most probably perished,” El-Habashy says.
What Happened to Ahmed
In three months, Ahmed will have been missing for four years. But in this case, no one is in a hurry to declare him dead, his parents least of all.
“The police station once sent for us to look at a picture of a body they found. God rest his soul, his face was all gone. He was thin, and really tall. He was also very dark. It wasn’t Ahmed. Ahmed is short, like his father,” Omm Ahmed says. She points to a mirror, trying to show the real height of her missing boy. “Ahmed always complained about this mirror. It had a shelf, here, you can see the traces. He kept bumping his head on the shelf.” She bursts into tears as she says, “He would tell me ‘Remove this thing!’ as he jumped up and down in pain.”
Although Ahmed has been gone for years, his parents have not lost hope of one day finding him. “You don’t know what happens to me whenever it rains, or whenever it is too hot? I wonder how Ahmed is doing. He was sick, he had a chest allergy. I brought him chest medications every month. My son was kind, he never hurt anyone,” Omm Ahmed says.
Living in an area overlooked by the state, where streets are not paved and buildings have no numbers, leaning against each other like a scary set of dominoes, one more lost kid means nothing except to the people directly involved in the tragedy.
Ahmed’s parents, his brother Moustafa, his married sister Ghada, 19, and his new nephew Ahmed (his namesake) all live in a tiny two-room apartment, never giving up hope for any news of Ahmed. A section of the only closet in the house is kept for Ahmed’s things.
“I don’t wash his clothes. It is the only way I have of keeping his smell in the house. Once, his brother reached for Ahmed’s jeans suit. I screamed and snatched it out of his hands. His sister remonstrated that I should not do this. They are brothers after all. She does not understand. If I were to let him wear it, I would have to wash it. What will I have then? Nothing,” she says.
Omm Ahmed wears mourning clothes. “I know he is not dead. I am sure of it. If he were dead I would feel it. But I wear black because I’m sad. I am not able to fill my eyes with the sight of him, am I? For whom shall I wear colors?” she asks.
The last time she saw him was on July 20, 2001.
“It was the day right after his birthday. He had just turned 13. He went down to buy a bag of chips, and never came back,” Om Ahmed says.
And, with their sound, for a moment returnSounds from our life’s first poetry Like distant music fading away at night.
His father, Mahmoud Ahmed Mohamed Bayyoumi, picks up the story here. Abu Ahmed, as he prefers to be called, works as a car surugy (upholsterer) in Wekalet El-Balah. Short and thin, Abu Ahmed seems to survive on his anger, which he keeps fueled by remembering what happened to his son. Although he does not cry like his wife, whose eyes are seldom dry, Mahmoud’s eyes speak volumes. You can see the loss and pain he has gone through from the minute you set eyes on his tense frame. Obviously a gentle person, Abu Ahmed’s voice turns to shouting at times.
“I came back from work at 10pm on Friday, July 20th. Mostafa and Ghada were alone, I asked them where Ahmed and his mother were, and they said, ‘Mother is looking for Ahmed.’ They said he had not come back since the afternoon. A little later, Omm Ahmed came back. She was screaming and crying. I went out to look for him, and a kid’s neighbor said he had seen him with a boy called Hani.”
At this point, the story becomes too difficult for Abu Ahmed. “I hate saying this boy’s name. His name is Devil, Damned Devil,” he says. Om Ahmed agrees: “He is a bad kid. He sleeps on sidewalks.”
The family had never heard of the boy before. A newcomer to the area, he lived nearby with his mother. On going to ask him about Ahmed, Hani (14 at the time) denied he had seen him.
“We kept looking, and found nothing. The next day we went to Hani’s house again,” Abu Ahmed remembers. After much cajoling, Hani told the father and his neighbors that Ahmed had drowned in the Nile. It was then that Abu Ahmed went crazy, fainting and then waking up crying. “I slapped my own face like a woman. We went to the police and started looking for his body,” he remembers.
Ahmed’s mother cries as she remembers that difficult moment. “Ahmed never swam in the Nile. He never even strayed away from home. He and Moustafa used to play downstairs near the house. The boy [Hani] was lying,” she says.
For five days, police and the river authorities looked for Ahmed’s body, thinking he had drowned.
“On the fifth day, my wife’s nephew came running to us. He said he had received a call from Ahmed. He swore Ahmed had told him he had been kidnapped,” Mahmoud says. Omm Ahmed continues: “My nephew was in the last year of college, studying commerce. He is not a child. He refused to believe Ahmed at first, telling him that Ahmed is dead. Ahmed told him my name, and the name of Khaled’s [the nephew’s] mother. Nobody knows our names. They know me as Omm Ahmed.”
The family rushed to the telephone centrale, where they urged the person in charge to trace the number that had just called the uncle’s line. He refused, they allege, demanding an order from the Public Prosecutor’s Office before doing so.
Then they rushed to Hani’s house and took him to the Warraq Police Station.
“After many threats, the boy confessed he had sold Ahmed to a man called Mohamed Khalil for LE 20,” Abu Ahmed claims. According to them, Hani was asked by Khalil, who sold tissue paper boxes by the Imbaba railways, to get him a clean boy who went to school. He needed someone to help him, Hani claimed. It took Hani three days to befriend Ahmed and convince him to take that fateful walk.
“The man took Ahmed, and when Ahmed called out for help, asking Hani to stay with him, the man beat him up, threatening him with a pocket-knife,” Omm Ahmed says.
The idea was, obviously, to catch the man and find Ahmed.
“The police force went to look for him at 2 am. He was gone by then, so they told us to wait for him. The police officer said, ‘You are investigators now. When you see him, call me,’” Mahmoud remembers. At dawn, the accused came to assume his spot. “We called the station, but the officer said wait. I couldn’t wait. I went to the station to urge them to come, but they told me ‘No, we will go at night.’ It was as if they wanted him to escape. I couldn’t wait. My neighbors, relatives and I picked him up ourselves. We took him to the officer.”
Hani and Khalil were confronted with each other, but the man kept insisting he had nothing to do with Ahmed’s disappearance, and Hani kept insisting he was the right guy. “At that point, Hani broke down and said the man also used to do bad things to him for LE 5. I went crazy. Is this why they took my son?” Abu Ahmed says.
Khalil was kept in custody for four days, during which Ahmed’s parents talk of four lawyers driving expensive cars who kept visiting the prisoner, and of a rich lady wearing lots of gold who came to visit Khalil laden with a big bag of canned food and cigarettes.
“Nobody asked why this man, who sold tissues for a living, had such rich connections,” Abu Ahmed says. Omm Ahmed remembers how shocked she was that anyone would want to defend that criminal. “I went in and held each lawyer by his clothes, asking them ‘Did this man steal a television set? No, he stole my son. How can you defend him?’” she asked.
The man was released after four days, and the police officer told Abu Ahmed to follow him around.
His burial, the poorest possible, took place here.A few hours before dying he whispered somethingAbout ‘home’, about ‘very old parents.’But nobody knew who they were.
“He said that he may be able to get me my son back.” Mahmoud alleges. “So I stayed near him. I waited around as he worked, and noticed how he wore different expensive clothes every day. I bought him cigarettes and tea, and waited to see my son. When all failed, I went to the district police. They picked him up again, and they got that devil Hani too. But when questioning them, they did not lay a finger on the man. They then wrote their report, in which they said that, according to their investigations, Hani was a bad student who had escaped because he hated his job. They mentioned nothing about the man.”
The police officer, they allege, was later suspended when he was accused of accepting bribes, a case that has nothing with Ahmed. “We saw him with handcuffs around his wrists,” the mother remembers.
The parents say they were lucky because the case was turned over to the district prosecutor, Sherif Tawfik, whom they call a great man.
“He refused to take the police report for granted. He re-questioned Hani and Khalil,” Abu Ahmed remembers. Khalil was kept in custody for nine months, but was left to go free when the investigations led to nothing.
Abu Ahmed claims he has kept an eye on Khalil, although the man is not staying with his family in Rod El-Farag anymore. Three months ago, Abu Ahmed filed a complaint in the office of the Prosecutor General Maher Abdel-Wahed, who ordered a re-opening of the investigations.
“Two months ago the new district attorney told me to stop going to people in high places. I said, ‘Whom do you mean there is no one higher than God the almighty.’ He also told me to stop talking to the press. He asked, ‘What do you want?’ I said I want my son. I want him dead or alive. He said, ‘Wait for just one month.’ We’ll see, I am going to him this coming Tuesday,” Abu Ahmed says.
Abu Ahmed has lost faith in the system. This is why when some crooks pretended to be psychics and promised to show him Ahmed, he and his wife believed them.
“They wanted LE 7,000. I went to my brothers and asked for money. They said let them show us Ahmed first, and then we will give them his weight in gold. I sold my gold bracelets. They took Abu Ahmed to a café and told him to wait, then they said Ahmed ran away when he saw him,” the mother says.
Despite her black clothes, Omm Ahmed lives in the hope of seeing her son one last time.
“But I have a feeling I will not see him again. I believe he will be found after I die. Every time some of these crooks give us some hope, I change my clothes to colored ones. I say, ‘My life will be happy again.’ I wait for him. Once, my legs became paralyzed, because once again our only hope was crushed.”
Abu Ahmed is sure his son is alive, too. He vows he will not believe the crooks again.
“We believe in God, we really do. He alone can bring Ahmed back,” he says. The father believes his son to be a victim of some gang. “It is either drugs or human body parts,” he theorizes. He often dreams of his son too: “I get good signs; something to do with the number three. He will come back, maybe after three weeks, or three years. I just know he will come back. May God rest my mind!” he shouts.
Fathy Salama
This is Not the Note
Fathy Salama overlooked locally despite Grammy
By Manal el-Jesri
YOU MAY HAVE heard about Fathy Salama whose album Egypt, which won the Recording Academy’s Best World Music Album for 2004 at the 47th annual Grammy awards. The disc features the vocal talents of the famous Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour and the musical talents of Salama in a massive collaboration between 60 Egyptian and 30 Senegalese musicians.
But have you heard the album itself? Probably not: It’s not only unavailable on the local market, but it hasn’t been released anywhere else in the Arab world, either.
Try going into a record shop anywhere in Egypt and asking for any album by Fathy Salama; you’ll most likely come out empty-handed.
“I think the big companies are more interested in the jumping girls [you see in videos]. Nobody approached me after the award. They tell you ‘Great, great, but I cannot sell this here.’ Everyone I know, even my bawab, comes and listens when I play this album. They really like it. Yes, they do not understand the language [wuluf, an ancient Senegalese language] of the lyrics, but they still love it,” says Salama.
It’s simply that no one seems willing to sell it.
What’s more, N’Dour and Salama’s work has received scant attention in the domestic press, even after the Grammy. But the artist, founder of the Sharqiat group and workshop, takes it all in stride after all, he works for the fun of it. And fun is the first impression one gets when listening to the album (we received our copy from Salama): You can sense the delight of people thoroughly enjoying themselves.
Although the lyrics contain references to Islam Sufi chantings that may have come from the distant past they are not composed to be didactic or controversial. It remains celebratory and at times ventures into the spiritual.
The collaboration between the two artists is relatively young, dating back only to 1999.
“[N’Dour] invited me to work with him,” Salama says, explaining that the idea was to represent the true message of Islam to the West, to paint a picture of faith that is rooted in peace and tolerance. “Back then, I would record Youssou’s voice [in Dakar] and come back here with just that recording and a click track, which goes pum pum pum. Here in Egypt, I worked with musicians to arrange the music and allot instruments. Then I would go back to Dakar for more work and to record African music,” he says.
A fan of West African music, Salama likes to point out that Egyptians often forget that Egypt is in Africa.
“They know very little about African culture. There is no connection somehow. They also forget that many African countries are Islamic countries. Senegal is predominantly Muslim over 90 percent of their population. Islam reached them through us. So there is a connection between the two peoples. In their language, you discover a lot of Arabic words, which must have come from the Qur’an,” he says.
Salama also discovered N’Dour is a fan of Omm Kulthoum. “Our musical forms are not alien to them. In two of the tracks, N’Dour sang in Bayati and Rast maqamat [Arabic musical forms]. The Egyptian musicians here were amazed. They told me, ‘You must have taught him this.’ I said, ‘No, I taught him nothing. They have this in their culture as well’,” Salama explains.
Although they finished Egypt in 2001, the September 11 terror attacks prompted the two artists to delay the album’s release.
“It was not the right moment,” Salama says. “Nobody would have believed us at the time. Now, I guess, is a good time. I think people are ready to listen, and I think the album helps the situation. It is currently the only spoken word of peace that the West knows of,” he says.
What about Mohamed Mounir’s attempt, a song entitled “Madad” (Supplication), which was released after Sept 11. Salama says the primary difference is in the size of the production. “Youssou N’Dour is a big man. He is a producer and has worked with big groups like the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He is well-known around the world,” he points out.
Egypt is an amazing mix of African and Egyptian musical traditions, a fact Salama believes is why the album won the Grammy. “It signals a meeting between two cultures. None of this has been done musically at least. Many may attempt to merge a mix between two musical traditions, cooking them together in the safety of a studio. But that’s not it. Just because two pieces are in the G or C keys doesn’t mean that they mix. The taste and the flavor may not fit. When the two forms fit, they lead, in the end, to a third thing. It’s like they say: the whole is larger than the sum of all parts,” he says.
This, he explains, is what Sharqiat, his musical group and workshop, has been about since its inception in 1989.
“What we aim for is a kind of ongoing education, an open workshop. It is intended for musicians from all over the world to learn from each other and to work together. This is how you sometimes find rural Egyptian musicians working with musicians from France, India or America. They teach each other, which is the whole idea. This is how people worked in the past, it’s how it should be. They had more time, and gave their work more time, not just presented the public with work from a fridge,” he says.
Sharqiat, popular with younger music fans, held its first concert in Berlin. It was years later that the group was invited to perform at the Opera House, where it has been amassing a steadily growing following since.
“We should not wait for youth to start accepting new forms of music [a notion with which production companies disagree]. What about creativity? I prefer to do something I like, and which people I work with like. If we’re passionate enough about it, then maybe others will like it too. If we think about [the market] first, we present a fake product,” Salama says.
Although he admits he was one of those behind the birth of modern pop music in Egypt with hits like Mohamed Mounir’s Shababik (Your Youth), Amr Diab’s Mayyal (Impressionable), Anoushka’s Habbeitak (I Loved You), and Ali El-Haggar’s Saleina El-Fagr Fein (Dawn Prayers) to his credit Salama explains that he bailed out when the scene had nothing new to offer.
“I refuse to make clones, even clones of my own work. Nowadays, all they want is to exactly emulate MTV. I have nothing against that, but if you like Britney so much, for example, learn from her and then do your own thing,” he says.
None of his pop-star acquaintances supported Salama when he decided to look for something new, he claims. Not that it bothers him he’ll keep working on what he started. And he won’t mind it when Egyptian TV uses his music in its programs, without any form of recognition or even permission.
“I don’t mind. Even though you cannot buy my records here, they are available everywhere else in the world. And in the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt for people to listen to the music on television, even without the credit. It’s a good way to reach listeners,” he smiles.
Fathy Salama overlooked locally despite Grammy
By Manal el-Jesri
YOU MAY HAVE heard about Fathy Salama whose album Egypt, which won the Recording Academy’s Best World Music Album for 2004 at the 47th annual Grammy awards. The disc features the vocal talents of the famous Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour and the musical talents of Salama in a massive collaboration between 60 Egyptian and 30 Senegalese musicians.
But have you heard the album itself? Probably not: It’s not only unavailable on the local market, but it hasn’t been released anywhere else in the Arab world, either.
Try going into a record shop anywhere in Egypt and asking for any album by Fathy Salama; you’ll most likely come out empty-handed.
“I think the big companies are more interested in the jumping girls [you see in videos]. Nobody approached me after the award. They tell you ‘Great, great, but I cannot sell this here.’ Everyone I know, even my bawab, comes and listens when I play this album. They really like it. Yes, they do not understand the language [wuluf, an ancient Senegalese language] of the lyrics, but they still love it,” says Salama.
It’s simply that no one seems willing to sell it.
What’s more, N’Dour and Salama’s work has received scant attention in the domestic press, even after the Grammy. But the artist, founder of the Sharqiat group and workshop, takes it all in stride after all, he works for the fun of it. And fun is the first impression one gets when listening to the album (we received our copy from Salama): You can sense the delight of people thoroughly enjoying themselves.
Although the lyrics contain references to Islam Sufi chantings that may have come from the distant past they are not composed to be didactic or controversial. It remains celebratory and at times ventures into the spiritual.
The collaboration between the two artists is relatively young, dating back only to 1999.
“[N’Dour] invited me to work with him,” Salama says, explaining that the idea was to represent the true message of Islam to the West, to paint a picture of faith that is rooted in peace and tolerance. “Back then, I would record Youssou’s voice [in Dakar] and come back here with just that recording and a click track, which goes pum pum pum. Here in Egypt, I worked with musicians to arrange the music and allot instruments. Then I would go back to Dakar for more work and to record African music,” he says.
A fan of West African music, Salama likes to point out that Egyptians often forget that Egypt is in Africa.
“They know very little about African culture. There is no connection somehow. They also forget that many African countries are Islamic countries. Senegal is predominantly Muslim over 90 percent of their population. Islam reached them through us. So there is a connection between the two peoples. In their language, you discover a lot of Arabic words, which must have come from the Qur’an,” he says.
Salama also discovered N’Dour is a fan of Omm Kulthoum. “Our musical forms are not alien to them. In two of the tracks, N’Dour sang in Bayati and Rast maqamat [Arabic musical forms]. The Egyptian musicians here were amazed. They told me, ‘You must have taught him this.’ I said, ‘No, I taught him nothing. They have this in their culture as well’,” Salama explains.
Although they finished Egypt in 2001, the September 11 terror attacks prompted the two artists to delay the album’s release.
“It was not the right moment,” Salama says. “Nobody would have believed us at the time. Now, I guess, is a good time. I think people are ready to listen, and I think the album helps the situation. It is currently the only spoken word of peace that the West knows of,” he says.
What about Mohamed Mounir’s attempt, a song entitled “Madad” (Supplication), which was released after Sept 11. Salama says the primary difference is in the size of the production. “Youssou N’Dour is a big man. He is a producer and has worked with big groups like the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He is well-known around the world,” he points out.
Egypt is an amazing mix of African and Egyptian musical traditions, a fact Salama believes is why the album won the Grammy. “It signals a meeting between two cultures. None of this has been done musically at least. Many may attempt to merge a mix between two musical traditions, cooking them together in the safety of a studio. But that’s not it. Just because two pieces are in the G or C keys doesn’t mean that they mix. The taste and the flavor may not fit. When the two forms fit, they lead, in the end, to a third thing. It’s like they say: the whole is larger than the sum of all parts,” he says.
This, he explains, is what Sharqiat, his musical group and workshop, has been about since its inception in 1989.
“What we aim for is a kind of ongoing education, an open workshop. It is intended for musicians from all over the world to learn from each other and to work together. This is how you sometimes find rural Egyptian musicians working with musicians from France, India or America. They teach each other, which is the whole idea. This is how people worked in the past, it’s how it should be. They had more time, and gave their work more time, not just presented the public with work from a fridge,” he says.
Sharqiat, popular with younger music fans, held its first concert in Berlin. It was years later that the group was invited to perform at the Opera House, where it has been amassing a steadily growing following since.
“We should not wait for youth to start accepting new forms of music [a notion with which production companies disagree]. What about creativity? I prefer to do something I like, and which people I work with like. If we’re passionate enough about it, then maybe others will like it too. If we think about [the market] first, we present a fake product,” Salama says.
Although he admits he was one of those behind the birth of modern pop music in Egypt with hits like Mohamed Mounir’s Shababik (Your Youth), Amr Diab’s Mayyal (Impressionable), Anoushka’s Habbeitak (I Loved You), and Ali El-Haggar’s Saleina El-Fagr Fein (Dawn Prayers) to his credit Salama explains that he bailed out when the scene had nothing new to offer.
“I refuse to make clones, even clones of my own work. Nowadays, all they want is to exactly emulate MTV. I have nothing against that, but if you like Britney so much, for example, learn from her and then do your own thing,” he says.
None of his pop-star acquaintances supported Salama when he decided to look for something new, he claims. Not that it bothers him he’ll keep working on what he started. And he won’t mind it when Egyptian TV uses his music in its programs, without any form of recognition or even permission.
“I don’t mind. Even though you cannot buy my records here, they are available everywhere else in the world. And in the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt for people to listen to the music on television, even without the credit. It’s a good way to reach listeners,” he smiles.
Atiyat el-Sayyed
Still Lives
Atiyat El-Sayyed’s latest exhibition at Khan El-Maghraby gallery brings still lifes to life
By Manal el-Jesri
EVER SEEN A chair that is not a chair? Or a duck that is not quite a duck; a garlic clove that is not a garlic clove, or a shisha that isn’t exactly a shisha? You may have seen all these creative manifestations in your imagination, or maybe in a dream. Try seeing them through the insightful eyes and caring brush of artist Atiyat El-Sayyed.
Working for years as an illustrator at Al-Gomhuriyya newspaper, El-Sayyed’s name was synonymous with her journalistic art. It was only a few years ago that a much more creative side of the artist was allowed to shine through to art lovers.
Joining her husband, son and daughter-in-law in a family group exhibition, El-Sayyed’s talents came as a revelation to many critics. Her ingenious representation of inanimate objects around her home, like her sewing machine, for example, was refreshing. After years of looking at post-modern representations in artworks that in many cases offered no connection to viewers or artists, the sheer simplicity and clarity of El-Sayyed’s works baffled and pleased.
Gentle and soft spoken, El-Sayyed exudes maternal charm. And like all good mothers, she loves her home, down to every little object in it. This is where her genius as an artist lies, and this is what is evident in her latest exhibition.
A perfect example is the collection of eid el-hone (mortars used for crushing garlic), which is probably some of the best works in this exhibition. In these works, the artist takes the mundane everyday object out of context. We see it through her special lens, which distorts the proportions and the lines, rendering them softer. They are more pronounced in some areas, and less so in others. And in so doing, the hone attains human qualities. Suddenly, you realize why this is so: The receptacle and the mortar are the archetypal male and female, receiving and giving in an endless dance of life.
The lines, on the other hand, belie the softness of the subject of male vs. female love. They are strong, sure lines. There is no hesitation there. El-Sayyed is part of the love-triangle; she becomes part of her artwork through her comfort and certainty. But then again, the colors come in to bring all El-Sayyed’s femininity and softness back into the work. In this set of paintings, El-Sayyed uses rich earth colors, with flashes of yellow or blue shining through.
In one particular work, the artist decides to play with two sets of hone. At a first glance, the viewer believes they are looking at an abstract representation of two human figures. The main color in this painting is red. You can see it in the background and in the set domineering the foreground of the painting. But another set, painted in steely cold blues and grays, is right there in the middle ground. Look at it again. It is a painting of two sets of lovers. One past and one present. One enjoying passion, the other has put passion behind. And somehow, you feel there is respect between the two, albeit some traces of animosity are felt.
Another favorite is El-Sayyed’s armchair series. Although less numerous than the hone works, the armchair paintings are just another example of this artist’s originality and familiarity with inanimate subjects. In one, there is that familiar tray that lies next to every mother’s favorite chair, replete with her cherished coffee cup. In another, here is that stack of books that she promises herself to get through next vacation.
These are not just cold depictions of an inanimate object: Her selections are soft, lived-in objects; they are loved and understood, and even respected. Her style shines through this collection, with the now familiar distorted proportions, strong lines and soft colors.
Again, a particular work takes the fancy. At the first glance, it is very difficult to tell whether this is a painting of a flower, or simply a strong and passionate abstract work. Look again. It is one of El-Sayyed’s favorite armchairs. Done in profile, the plush planes of the back and arm yearn to be used. You just want to step in and receive a hug from this magical chair. But despite the inviting lines, the colors here are strong, hot, passionate colors. We see vibrant reds and dark blues dominating the work, with the occasional flash of green or yellow.
El-Sayyed has also worked on ducks and roosters, a new subject for her. The works are interesting mainly due to her approach to lines and colors. She also tackles people, and does a few works in black and white. And time and again, she proves herself to be a master of tight composition and strong, sweeping lines. The exhibition is truly marvelous, and certainly worth a lingering visit.
Atiyat El-Sayyed’s latest exhibition at Khan El-Maghraby gallery brings still lifes to life
By Manal el-Jesri
EVER SEEN A chair that is not a chair? Or a duck that is not quite a duck; a garlic clove that is not a garlic clove, or a shisha that isn’t exactly a shisha? You may have seen all these creative manifestations in your imagination, or maybe in a dream. Try seeing them through the insightful eyes and caring brush of artist Atiyat El-Sayyed.
Working for years as an illustrator at Al-Gomhuriyya newspaper, El-Sayyed’s name was synonymous with her journalistic art. It was only a few years ago that a much more creative side of the artist was allowed to shine through to art lovers.
Joining her husband, son and daughter-in-law in a family group exhibition, El-Sayyed’s talents came as a revelation to many critics. Her ingenious representation of inanimate objects around her home, like her sewing machine, for example, was refreshing. After years of looking at post-modern representations in artworks that in many cases offered no connection to viewers or artists, the sheer simplicity and clarity of El-Sayyed’s works baffled and pleased.
Gentle and soft spoken, El-Sayyed exudes maternal charm. And like all good mothers, she loves her home, down to every little object in it. This is where her genius as an artist lies, and this is what is evident in her latest exhibition.
A perfect example is the collection of eid el-hone (mortars used for crushing garlic), which is probably some of the best works in this exhibition. In these works, the artist takes the mundane everyday object out of context. We see it through her special lens, which distorts the proportions and the lines, rendering them softer. They are more pronounced in some areas, and less so in others. And in so doing, the hone attains human qualities. Suddenly, you realize why this is so: The receptacle and the mortar are the archetypal male and female, receiving and giving in an endless dance of life.
The lines, on the other hand, belie the softness of the subject of male vs. female love. They are strong, sure lines. There is no hesitation there. El-Sayyed is part of the love-triangle; she becomes part of her artwork through her comfort and certainty. But then again, the colors come in to bring all El-Sayyed’s femininity and softness back into the work. In this set of paintings, El-Sayyed uses rich earth colors, with flashes of yellow or blue shining through.
In one particular work, the artist decides to play with two sets of hone. At a first glance, the viewer believes they are looking at an abstract representation of two human figures. The main color in this painting is red. You can see it in the background and in the set domineering the foreground of the painting. But another set, painted in steely cold blues and grays, is right there in the middle ground. Look at it again. It is a painting of two sets of lovers. One past and one present. One enjoying passion, the other has put passion behind. And somehow, you feel there is respect between the two, albeit some traces of animosity are felt.
Another favorite is El-Sayyed’s armchair series. Although less numerous than the hone works, the armchair paintings are just another example of this artist’s originality and familiarity with inanimate subjects. In one, there is that familiar tray that lies next to every mother’s favorite chair, replete with her cherished coffee cup. In another, here is that stack of books that she promises herself to get through next vacation.
These are not just cold depictions of an inanimate object: Her selections are soft, lived-in objects; they are loved and understood, and even respected. Her style shines through this collection, with the now familiar distorted proportions, strong lines and soft colors.
Again, a particular work takes the fancy. At the first glance, it is very difficult to tell whether this is a painting of a flower, or simply a strong and passionate abstract work. Look again. It is one of El-Sayyed’s favorite armchairs. Done in profile, the plush planes of the back and arm yearn to be used. You just want to step in and receive a hug from this magical chair. But despite the inviting lines, the colors here are strong, hot, passionate colors. We see vibrant reds and dark blues dominating the work, with the occasional flash of green or yellow.
El-Sayyed has also worked on ducks and roosters, a new subject for her. The works are interesting mainly due to her approach to lines and colors. She also tackles people, and does a few works in black and white. And time and again, she proves herself to be a master of tight composition and strong, sweeping lines. The exhibition is truly marvelous, and certainly worth a lingering visit.
The Art of Zar
Mazaher
Tired of misrepresentation and stereotypes, the Mazaher group redefine and explain the art of Zar as they know it
By Manal el-Jesri
HASSAN AND RAAFAT sit around a small table sipping their tea. Omm Sameh, also known as Madiha, sits next to them, enjoying a quick smoke and her afternoon Nescafé; she doesn’t want to begin the interview before she finishes her smoke.
It’s been a long ride to Saad Zaghloul Street; the traffic was moving at a snail’s pace, they all agree. They feel right at home here at Makan, Dr. Ahmed El-Maghraby’s recently established space that houses the Egyptian Center for Culture and Arts.
A professor of Italian literature at Ain Shams University and former Egyptian cultural attaché in France, El-Maghraby has been actively promoting the revival of traditional Egyptian music and, in the case of Omm Sameh and her group, trying to save a form of expression from extinction.
Together with Hassan and Raafat, Omm Sameh now performs as part of Mazaher; together, they are among the last remaining Zar musicians practicing in Egypt, doing what they can to preserve their dying art form.
In its original form, Zar is a ritual where a small circle of people gather to communicate with unseen entities or spirits. It’s one of the few healing ceremonies performed mainly by women for women in an attempt to pacify the spirits and win some measure of inner harmony.
Traditional Zar music originated in Africa. Poly-rhythmic, rich and complex in melody, it is distinctively different from other Egyptian musical traditions. The underground culture was not originally intended to be a performance art and is shunned by the religious establishment, the state and the orthodox cultural elite.
The result: In recent decades, practice of the ritual has died out and ancient songs have been forgotten, helped along by the popular misconception that Zar is all about exorcisms.
For participants, it is most often a cathartic experience often leading to an altered state of consciousness, or in some cases, trance.
According to El-Maghraby, only 24 Zar performers exist today, although Madiha begs to differ: “If you count the Tamboura [musical tradition] and the sittat (women) performers, you will find there are only 14 or 15 of us. The Abul Gheit Zar is not like ours, so we don’t count them. They are more into zikr (a Sufi ‘remembrance’ tradition),” she tells me later on.
Zar music can be found all over the Arab world, in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and also in Kuwait, where they treat it like folk art. But here when people hear Zar, they say “ya sater ya rabb” (may God protect us).
Shrouded in mystique when they perform, the four artists behind Mazaher come across as average Egyptians, although all admit to Sudanese roots, as they sit sipping their hot drinks. Madiha is wearing a tarha (headscarf) around her head, but her shiny golden hoop earrings are visible through it. Her ample body is swathed in a dark dress, and her movements are smooth and fluid enough to give away her connection to the world of rhythm and music. Hassan and Raafat are more reserved in their movements, probably owing to an inherent shyness around strange women (this writer being the culprit).
Their apparent ordinariness is in stark contrast to three sets of ancient eyes that have seen other worlds.
Having finished her cigarette, Madiha signals we can start talking.
Madiha: I began working at the age of 11. We all began very young, and we all come from families that have Zar performers. Zar is like a bug that gets into your blood, so not everyone whose parents work in the Zar would want to do it. My mother was a rayyesah (leader), and I followed her around, while my sister was never really interested.
(A number of Hassan’s family were leaders and sangaa’s (male Zar leader), Madiha points out.)
Hassan: We used to have a hadra (Zar venue) every Saturday at home, and on each Saturday I would stay home. I loved to hold the tamboura (ancient lyre instrument), so my parents made me a special one my size. You see we come from Ismailia, where the semsemiyya (another lyre instrument) is famous. The tamboura is similar, but much bigger.
ET: What is the hadra? Is it what you call the performance itself?
Madiha: No, the hadra is a set place where you have Zar, say every week, for example. The performance is called leila (night).
(Taking their work and terminology for granted, the performers are finding this journalist a little ignorant. Madiha is explaining things slowly, as she would to a child.)
Raafat: My father used to be a sangaa too, and I was attracted to his work. It just enters one’s blood, and then it is difficult to get rid of it. It is not just a job. I learned the tamboura by watching my father, and then one day he was too tired to go. I was 19, and they asked me to go instead. It was a difficult first time, but then I got more interested, and started becoming professional.
ET: Can anyone learn the tamboura?
(The answer is emphatic. I seem to have asked another ignorant question.)
Raafat: You must have the talent.
Madiha: You must be talented because the tamboura echoes the words we say. You know, like when a singer sings, her band goes along with her.
Raafat: It is like the oud.
Madiha: Exactly. When the tamboura player begins, we know what he wants us to sing and we sing along.
(None of their respective children are interested in joining them either, although Hassan points out that “[his children] like it, and enjoy listening, but do not have the dedication [it takes].”)
Madiha: It is something that either takes your fancy or doesn’t. You cannot find it in books or papers. It is material we have inherited from our ancestors. It’s not something just anyone can do or say.
ET: Why does someone go to a Zar?
Madiha: If a woman is tired, or not feeling well.
Hassan: The family decides if someone needs Zar. They believe in it because their parents or grandparents did too.
Madiha (talking over them): Or if a woman had slept right after a fight and woke up upset or sick.
ET: What about women who cannot conceive?
Madiha: No, of course not. This is all in the hands of God.
Hassan: But when doctors decide a woman suffers from no physical condition stopping her from conceiving, they may tell her to come to us.
Madiha: It is mostly people with psychological problems who come for help.
ET: What about the stuff we see in films?
Madiha: That’s all a sham.
Hassan: I have been in films before. I do my work as I usually do it, but then the director adds material to make us look bad and backward. They do this behind our backs because if we had known what the directors were up to, we would not do [the scene].
Madiha: This is our livelihood, it is the job our ancestors left us, so do you think we would purposely show it up?
Raafat (joining in the debate): Films have not always misunderstood Zar. In a very old Ali El-Kassar film El-Saa Sabaa (It’s Seven O’Clock), there was a Zar and afterwards the visitors said, “What a lovely party.”
ET: So traditionally, is it only sick people who attend the Zar?
Hassan: No. A lot of people just love to come to the Zar and listen to us. We performed in Paris [through El-Maghraby’s efforts] three times, and people loved us even though they couldn’t understand what we were saying.
Madiha: Yes. They moved in their chairs and enjoyed themselves. Even here in Cairo, when we perform at Dr. Ahmed’s place, people enjoy our work, without being sick or anything.
ET: Have you traced your work, do you know where it comes from?
Hassan: No, it was here long before we were born.
ET: What are your main instruments?
Madiha: There is the tamboura, and its special drums, there are the mazaher [large, shallow drums], which are mainly held by women, and there are the finger cymbals, the rattles, and the mangour [jingly belt worn around the waist]. Each one specializes in one instrument, but we can use them all if needs be. Traditionally women do not wear the mangour, but if there is a leila where no men are allowed, or if the mangour-wearer is sick or away, I’d wear the mangour and shake to the music of the tamboura.
ET: In films, we see women falling down during the Zar, and everybody cheers because she’s been cured. Does this really happen?
Madiha: No, not in this sense. Some may feel dizzy, just because they are sick and through no fault of the Zar. We might spray her with some rosewater, and that’s that.
ET: What are your most famous adwar (songs)? (They do not use oghnia because they believe Zar to be functional, not just a performance.)
Madiha (who is more willing to answer questions): There is “Yawra” and “Rakash”. In Yawra we say: Yawra Beh, Ya Gamil Ya Beh (O Yawra beautiful Bek). We just speak of someone we love. You know this all is historical. We are not talking about djinn (spirits) or anything. Long ago they believed in djinn. You have to know our job has nothing bad in it.
Hassan: The movies make us look bad.
Madiha: People hold Zars to show hospitality. You prepare good food, and then you provide entertainment.
Hassan: That’s true, and you also provide good incense. Zar music can be found all over the Arab world, in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and also in Kuwait, where they treat it like folk art. But here when people hear Zar, they say “ya sater ya Rabb” (may God protect us).
ET: But now you’re a band. Did you agree to Dr. Maghraby’s proposal to form a band right away?
Hassan: We did. And he sent us to Paris.
ET: Do your performances at Makan differ from ones you give at a Zar party?
Madiha: The Zar is the same anywhere. But here it is better. It is not as crowded as in a hara (alley) or in a home. We have time to enjoy ourselves.
Hassan: We also get to remember adwar that we had not said in years.
(Omm Hassan, another Rayyesah, walks in at this point. She had been delayed by traffic. Darker-skinned than Madiha, she is also much thinner. She has an incredibly kind face, a charming huge smile and sparkling goldcaps. Tracing her roots back to Sudan and the Hijaz, Omm Hassan explains that she comes from a family of Zar artists, but is currently the only remaining performer, along with her younger niece.)
Omm Hassan: She is not that young, though. None of the young are interested in Zar anymore. They do not know how to say what we say.
ET: Are the words difficult? Tell me some more of your lyrics.
Madiha: There is “Rakash;” Rokousha hanem ya rokousha, shaila el-Arousa ya rokousha. It is like you’re cajoling a little child. Don’t you promise your children candy so they would do what you want?
ET: Is your job a difficult one?
Madiha: Here, touch my hand. Don’t be scared. (Her fingers are chapped, with thick corns from all the drumming. Omm Hassan shows her fingers too, which are swathed in band-aids.)
Hassan: People don’t understand our work. Although old people do. They either know us, or know our work, and can sometimes join our adwar.
ET: Do people still believe in the healing benefits of Zar? Can you tell me any good healing stories?
Omm Hassan: The stories are many. When my mother was still alive, a woman came to us on a stretcher. Men carried her in, and she could not move at all. As soon as we started, she started signaling that she wanted water. By the time we were finished, she was on her feet, and went home walking, using her mother as a crutch.
Madiha: I know someone too whose leg hurt; the doctors couldn’t tell what was wrong with her. After the Zar she was cured. She holds Zar every year, still walks on her two feet and frequently goes to Hajj.
ET: Is there anything special that should be prepared for the Zar, like a special food?
Madiha: No, it depends on your means. But if someone is sick, something must be slaughtered during the leila. Of course it is also a chance for all the poor to be fed.
ET: Apart from working here, do you still work as much as you once used to?
Hassan: No. Things are expensive today.
Madiha: Some people are apprehensive.
ET: Are you ever hassled?
Madiha: Not exactly. But neighbors may complain about the noise and call the police.
ET: Has working here changed things?
Madiha: We are happy that Dr. Ahmed is trying to compile our work. And we are also becoming known. People who attend our performances here like us. They move with us and enjoy themselves.
Hassan: And we’ve performed at the Opera House, the Italian and French cultural centers, and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Madiha: And in turn, we enjoy ourselves too. We work from the heart. Once we start working, we forget everything else, even if we are tired or sick. We love what we do, even though when we die, Zar is going to die with us.
Tired of misrepresentation and stereotypes, the Mazaher group redefine and explain the art of Zar as they know it
By Manal el-Jesri
HASSAN AND RAAFAT sit around a small table sipping their tea. Omm Sameh, also known as Madiha, sits next to them, enjoying a quick smoke and her afternoon Nescafé; she doesn’t want to begin the interview before she finishes her smoke.
It’s been a long ride to Saad Zaghloul Street; the traffic was moving at a snail’s pace, they all agree. They feel right at home here at Makan, Dr. Ahmed El-Maghraby’s recently established space that houses the Egyptian Center for Culture and Arts.
A professor of Italian literature at Ain Shams University and former Egyptian cultural attaché in France, El-Maghraby has been actively promoting the revival of traditional Egyptian music and, in the case of Omm Sameh and her group, trying to save a form of expression from extinction.
Together with Hassan and Raafat, Omm Sameh now performs as part of Mazaher; together, they are among the last remaining Zar musicians practicing in Egypt, doing what they can to preserve their dying art form.
In its original form, Zar is a ritual where a small circle of people gather to communicate with unseen entities or spirits. It’s one of the few healing ceremonies performed mainly by women for women in an attempt to pacify the spirits and win some measure of inner harmony.
Traditional Zar music originated in Africa. Poly-rhythmic, rich and complex in melody, it is distinctively different from other Egyptian musical traditions. The underground culture was not originally intended to be a performance art and is shunned by the religious establishment, the state and the orthodox cultural elite.
The result: In recent decades, practice of the ritual has died out and ancient songs have been forgotten, helped along by the popular misconception that Zar is all about exorcisms.
For participants, it is most often a cathartic experience often leading to an altered state of consciousness, or in some cases, trance.
According to El-Maghraby, only 24 Zar performers exist today, although Madiha begs to differ: “If you count the Tamboura [musical tradition] and the sittat (women) performers, you will find there are only 14 or 15 of us. The Abul Gheit Zar is not like ours, so we don’t count them. They are more into zikr (a Sufi ‘remembrance’ tradition),” she tells me later on.
Zar music can be found all over the Arab world, in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and also in Kuwait, where they treat it like folk art. But here when people hear Zar, they say “ya sater ya rabb” (may God protect us).
Shrouded in mystique when they perform, the four artists behind Mazaher come across as average Egyptians, although all admit to Sudanese roots, as they sit sipping their hot drinks. Madiha is wearing a tarha (headscarf) around her head, but her shiny golden hoop earrings are visible through it. Her ample body is swathed in a dark dress, and her movements are smooth and fluid enough to give away her connection to the world of rhythm and music. Hassan and Raafat are more reserved in their movements, probably owing to an inherent shyness around strange women (this writer being the culprit).
Their apparent ordinariness is in stark contrast to three sets of ancient eyes that have seen other worlds.
Having finished her cigarette, Madiha signals we can start talking.
Madiha: I began working at the age of 11. We all began very young, and we all come from families that have Zar performers. Zar is like a bug that gets into your blood, so not everyone whose parents work in the Zar would want to do it. My mother was a rayyesah (leader), and I followed her around, while my sister was never really interested.
(A number of Hassan’s family were leaders and sangaa’s (male Zar leader), Madiha points out.)
Hassan: We used to have a hadra (Zar venue) every Saturday at home, and on each Saturday I would stay home. I loved to hold the tamboura (ancient lyre instrument), so my parents made me a special one my size. You see we come from Ismailia, where the semsemiyya (another lyre instrument) is famous. The tamboura is similar, but much bigger.
ET: What is the hadra? Is it what you call the performance itself?
Madiha: No, the hadra is a set place where you have Zar, say every week, for example. The performance is called leila (night).
(Taking their work and terminology for granted, the performers are finding this journalist a little ignorant. Madiha is explaining things slowly, as she would to a child.)
Raafat: My father used to be a sangaa too, and I was attracted to his work. It just enters one’s blood, and then it is difficult to get rid of it. It is not just a job. I learned the tamboura by watching my father, and then one day he was too tired to go. I was 19, and they asked me to go instead. It was a difficult first time, but then I got more interested, and started becoming professional.
ET: Can anyone learn the tamboura?
(The answer is emphatic. I seem to have asked another ignorant question.)
Raafat: You must have the talent.
Madiha: You must be talented because the tamboura echoes the words we say. You know, like when a singer sings, her band goes along with her.
Raafat: It is like the oud.
Madiha: Exactly. When the tamboura player begins, we know what he wants us to sing and we sing along.
(None of their respective children are interested in joining them either, although Hassan points out that “[his children] like it, and enjoy listening, but do not have the dedication [it takes].”)
Madiha: It is something that either takes your fancy or doesn’t. You cannot find it in books or papers. It is material we have inherited from our ancestors. It’s not something just anyone can do or say.
ET: Why does someone go to a Zar?
Madiha: If a woman is tired, or not feeling well.
Hassan: The family decides if someone needs Zar. They believe in it because their parents or grandparents did too.
Madiha (talking over them): Or if a woman had slept right after a fight and woke up upset or sick.
ET: What about women who cannot conceive?
Madiha: No, of course not. This is all in the hands of God.
Hassan: But when doctors decide a woman suffers from no physical condition stopping her from conceiving, they may tell her to come to us.
Madiha: It is mostly people with psychological problems who come for help.
ET: What about the stuff we see in films?
Madiha: That’s all a sham.
Hassan: I have been in films before. I do my work as I usually do it, but then the director adds material to make us look bad and backward. They do this behind our backs because if we had known what the directors were up to, we would not do [the scene].
Madiha: This is our livelihood, it is the job our ancestors left us, so do you think we would purposely show it up?
Raafat (joining in the debate): Films have not always misunderstood Zar. In a very old Ali El-Kassar film El-Saa Sabaa (It’s Seven O’Clock), there was a Zar and afterwards the visitors said, “What a lovely party.”
ET: So traditionally, is it only sick people who attend the Zar?
Hassan: No. A lot of people just love to come to the Zar and listen to us. We performed in Paris [through El-Maghraby’s efforts] three times, and people loved us even though they couldn’t understand what we were saying.
Madiha: Yes. They moved in their chairs and enjoyed themselves. Even here in Cairo, when we perform at Dr. Ahmed’s place, people enjoy our work, without being sick or anything.
ET: Have you traced your work, do you know where it comes from?
Hassan: No, it was here long before we were born.
ET: What are your main instruments?
Madiha: There is the tamboura, and its special drums, there are the mazaher [large, shallow drums], which are mainly held by women, and there are the finger cymbals, the rattles, and the mangour [jingly belt worn around the waist]. Each one specializes in one instrument, but we can use them all if needs be. Traditionally women do not wear the mangour, but if there is a leila where no men are allowed, or if the mangour-wearer is sick or away, I’d wear the mangour and shake to the music of the tamboura.
ET: In films, we see women falling down during the Zar, and everybody cheers because she’s been cured. Does this really happen?
Madiha: No, not in this sense. Some may feel dizzy, just because they are sick and through no fault of the Zar. We might spray her with some rosewater, and that’s that.
ET: What are your most famous adwar (songs)? (They do not use oghnia because they believe Zar to be functional, not just a performance.)
Madiha (who is more willing to answer questions): There is “Yawra” and “Rakash”. In Yawra we say: Yawra Beh, Ya Gamil Ya Beh (O Yawra beautiful Bek). We just speak of someone we love. You know this all is historical. We are not talking about djinn (spirits) or anything. Long ago they believed in djinn. You have to know our job has nothing bad in it.
Hassan: The movies make us look bad.
Madiha: People hold Zars to show hospitality. You prepare good food, and then you provide entertainment.
Hassan: That’s true, and you also provide good incense. Zar music can be found all over the Arab world, in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and also in Kuwait, where they treat it like folk art. But here when people hear Zar, they say “ya sater ya Rabb” (may God protect us).
ET: But now you’re a band. Did you agree to Dr. Maghraby’s proposal to form a band right away?
Hassan: We did. And he sent us to Paris.
ET: Do your performances at Makan differ from ones you give at a Zar party?
Madiha: The Zar is the same anywhere. But here it is better. It is not as crowded as in a hara (alley) or in a home. We have time to enjoy ourselves.
Hassan: We also get to remember adwar that we had not said in years.
(Omm Hassan, another Rayyesah, walks in at this point. She had been delayed by traffic. Darker-skinned than Madiha, she is also much thinner. She has an incredibly kind face, a charming huge smile and sparkling goldcaps. Tracing her roots back to Sudan and the Hijaz, Omm Hassan explains that she comes from a family of Zar artists, but is currently the only remaining performer, along with her younger niece.)
Omm Hassan: She is not that young, though. None of the young are interested in Zar anymore. They do not know how to say what we say.
ET: Are the words difficult? Tell me some more of your lyrics.
Madiha: There is “Rakash;” Rokousha hanem ya rokousha, shaila el-Arousa ya rokousha. It is like you’re cajoling a little child. Don’t you promise your children candy so they would do what you want?
ET: Is your job a difficult one?
Madiha: Here, touch my hand. Don’t be scared. (Her fingers are chapped, with thick corns from all the drumming. Omm Hassan shows her fingers too, which are swathed in band-aids.)
Hassan: People don’t understand our work. Although old people do. They either know us, or know our work, and can sometimes join our adwar.
ET: Do people still believe in the healing benefits of Zar? Can you tell me any good healing stories?
Omm Hassan: The stories are many. When my mother was still alive, a woman came to us on a stretcher. Men carried her in, and she could not move at all. As soon as we started, she started signaling that she wanted water. By the time we were finished, she was on her feet, and went home walking, using her mother as a crutch.
Madiha: I know someone too whose leg hurt; the doctors couldn’t tell what was wrong with her. After the Zar she was cured. She holds Zar every year, still walks on her two feet and frequently goes to Hajj.
ET: Is there anything special that should be prepared for the Zar, like a special food?
Madiha: No, it depends on your means. But if someone is sick, something must be slaughtered during the leila. Of course it is also a chance for all the poor to be fed.
ET: Apart from working here, do you still work as much as you once used to?
Hassan: No. Things are expensive today.
Madiha: Some people are apprehensive.
ET: Are you ever hassled?
Madiha: Not exactly. But neighbors may complain about the noise and call the police.
ET: Has working here changed things?
Madiha: We are happy that Dr. Ahmed is trying to compile our work. And we are also becoming known. People who attend our performances here like us. They move with us and enjoy themselves.
Hassan: And we’ve performed at the Opera House, the Italian and French cultural centers, and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Madiha: And in turn, we enjoy ourselves too. We work from the heart. Once we start working, we forget everything else, even if we are tired or sick. We love what we do, even though when we die, Zar is going to die with us.
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