The twin streams of Egypt’s history converge just below the Delta at Cairo , where the greatest city in the Islamic world sprawls across the Nile towards the Pyramids , those supreme monuments of antiquity. Every visitor to Egypt comes here, to reel at the Pyramids’ baleful mass and the seething immensity of Cairo, with its bazaars, mosques and Citadel and extraordinary Antiquities Museum.
It’s equally impossible not to find yourself carried away by the streetlife, where medieval trades and customs coexist with a modern, cosmopolitan mix of Arab, African and European influences.
Cairo has been the largest city in Africa and the Middle East ever since the Mongols wasted Imperial Baghdad in 1258. Acknowledged as Umm Dunya or ” Mother of the World ” by medieval Arabs, and as Great Cairo by nineteenth-century Europeans, it remains, in Jan Morris’s words, “one of the half-dozen supercapitals - capitals that are bigger than themselves or their countries the focus of a whole culture, an ideology or a historical moment”.
As Egypt has been a prize for conquerors from Alexander the Great to Rommel, so Cairo has been a fulcrum of power in the Arab world from the Crusades unto the present day. The ulema of its thousand-year-old Al-Azhar Mosque (for centuries the foremost centre of Islamic intellectual life) remains the ultimate religious authority for millions of Sunni Muslims, from Jakarta to Birmingham. Wherever Arabic is spoken, Cairo’s cultural magnetism is felt. Every strand of Egyptian society knits and unravels in this febrile megalopolis.
Cairo’s genius is to humanize these inescapable realities with social rituals . The rarity of public violence owes less to the armed police on every corner than to the dowshah. When conflicts arise crowds gather, restrain both parties, encourage them to rant, sympathize with their grievances and then finally urge: ” Maalesh, maalesh ” (Let it be forgiven). Everyday life is sweetened by flowery gestures and salutations; misfortunes evoke thanks for Allah’s dispensation (after all, things could be worse!). Even the poorest can be respected for piety; in the mosque, millionaire and beggar kneel side by side.