The Order of the Blind Camel

Abstract

M y work takes me to Cairo’s slums, the shantytowns where the bulk of the city’s population of around twenty million lives. These so-called “informal quarters” were built in the last twenty to thirty years without license or expertise, mostly on precious agricultural land, and they’re still spreading, an endless expanse of red brick boxes sprouting three to ten precarious stories high. The Egyptian word for slums is ’ashwa’iyyat, whose root meaning is “chaos,” “randomness,” or in this case “unplanned,” but the etymology goes a step further. ’Ashwaa’ is what the Arabs called an old camel that has lost its eyesight and stampedes around the camp wreaking havoc. Picture it: an aged beast still proud and fierce, destroying the only scene of relative comfort it has ever known. This image of a bestial disorder lies just beneath Cairo’s venerably chafed hide. Order, once the raison d’etre of Egyptian civilization, is a shimmering mirage, a see-through concept worn thin with age. Sayyid is my research assistant, a wiry man in his mid-twenties who lives in a slum near the Giza Pyramids and works part time hustling tourists. His sinewy arms are covered in cutting scars, dozens of short horizontal slashes inflicted while under the influence of sedatives and painkillers. He says he quit pills eight years ago as a promise to his girlfriend. He shows me pictures of Zeinab, who is very pretty and “dying to meet me.” Sayyid only needs 4,000LE ($660US) to be formally engaged (to buy the required gold jewelry) but can’t save enough cash. Yet Zeinab has waited for him, he tells me, for eight years, refusing other suitors. So I agree to accompany him to her house in a slum a short drive from the Pyramids. En route, Sayyid says he hasn’t seen Zeinab in The Order of the Blind Camel