The caliph's legacy

By Youssef Rakha

The man who sits cross-legged at the entrance of his warsha (workshop) murmurs to me casually while his hand toys ceaselessly with the soldering-iron. It seems that we are right behind the Sayeda Zeinab Mosque, but the journey to Usta Salah's business address has taken me through such a maze of interlocking backstreets and alleyways that it is practically impossible to tell. The only stop that remains clear in my mind is Al-Sitt Street, where thousands of fawanis hanging on both sides of the road form a passage-way of glittering light. "Yes it's all handmade, except for the presses. You see those presses over there," Usta Salah points to the warsha's interior, a tiny door-less space surrounded by stone walls. "They're all the machinery we use.

"A fanous direct from the workshop will cost you LE2-3." Usta Salah sounds suspicious. "Well, LE8-10, honest to God, and in the shops they're sold for LE12-15. Of course, we sell in bulk. Sometimes the really special ones go up to LE30, even LE40, and we keep going. We work in [the Islamic month of] Shaaban and maybe the first half of Ramadan. By the middle of Ramadan we'll have wrapped it all up, though sometimes we keep going till the end of Ramadan too, depending on what the market is like, demand and supply and all that, then we go back to our steady jobs. Of course, we don't just make fawanis."

Usta Salah looks at the few young men inside, who have continued to work without budging. "This guy here, Fathi, he's a tinsmith; that other guy I don't know what; I work at a metal foundry, so does Mohamed here. As you can see all our jobs are in the same sort of area and we use more or less the same skills at the warsha, but we only come here once a year, in the Ramadan season. It's a seasonal profession, you could say. So we've got no regular workers at the warsha. We all work on and off. When the season's over and we're done making fawanis we go back to our full-time jobs. It may seem like a useless job, this, you know. People might think what's the point of these things anyway?"

One story has it that, during the reign of the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim Bi-Amr Illah, women were never allowed to leave their dwelling places except during the holy month, but even then they had to be preceded by a little boy carrying a copper lantern. The purpose of the fanous was to announce the eminent arrival of a woman in the vicinity and thus caution the men in the streets to move away. In this way, the women could enjoy their precious outings while still remaining invisible to men. Eventually, the story continues, the laws were softened and women were permitted to go out as they wished, but people liked the lanterns so much they had children carry them in the streets every Ramadan...

"Whatever people may think," Usta Salah goes on, "I inherited this profession from my father, my father from his. I'm not sure exactly how far back it goes, but I can assure you it's a long enough history, extending all the way to the greatest of my great grandfathers." Usta Salah stops momentarily, as if to savour his own display of expertise. "In this profession of ours there are maybe six or seven ustawat [masters] in Cairo, that's all. Of course, they train a great number of young men, a whole lot of them, but if you go out looking for the original ustawat, only six or seven of them remain."

Usta Salah looks away as he attaches a piece of scrap iron to the half-finished fanous on his lap and, with an effortless tug, forces it in place. "That's right. Some day it was all done in real copper, but, honest to God, I didn't witness anything of the kind. The way it was done when I started as a little boy was like this: just the scrap iron and a bit of plain coloured glass, and you lit the whole thing with a candle. People would tie the fanous with a bit of string so the heat wouldn't burn the children's hands. It was that simple. People had plenty of fun and nobody worried much about fire and that. Then people got bored with the plain colours so we invented these multi-coloured patterns here to decorate the glass, and then the shape of the fanous became more elaborate and people got excited and we sold so many.

"Then again things happen," Usta Salah says in a gloomier tone. "Life must go on. Nowadays as you can see it's a different business altogether. Most of the business at the moment centres on plastic fawanis that you light with batteries, all the big factories and the stuff they import. But those you light with the candles are still popular, I mean you could say they are. People still come and order them especially. As for the really big ones you see hanging everywhere, it goes without saying that they're lit with proper light bulbs, neither candles nor batteries. I guess they're the main thing that keeps us going, financially I mean. If not for the necessities of living I would do nothing else in my life, but you know what it's like. In the past it was only scrap iron and now we have plastic to deal with," Usta Salah complains without bitterness. "Who knows what we'll have tomorrow?..."

photo: Osama Mahfouz