No sooner does the Eid arrive than I start thinking of the neighbourhood of Gamaliya, that beautiful section of Fatimid Cairo in which I was born and spent my childhood. It was in Gamaliya, after all, that I had my first experiences of the Eid. Every aspect of my perception and of my intellectual awareness, in fact, was formed in Gamaliya. The world, my world, was for a long time circumscribed by that neighbourhood and even though I had no historical awareness at the time, and certainly not enough knowledge of any other part of Cairo with which to compare my home, the atmosphere of the place seeped into me.
Eventually, of course, historical awareness developed, to the extent that when I saw my neighbours undertaking their day-to-day tasks -- and in those days lives seemed much more simple than they do today -- they appeared to me to be historical figures from the Fatimid capital.
The buildings, the minarets, the very atmosphere recalled Jawhar Al-Saqqali, who built the capital of Fatimid Egypt, and Badr Al- Jammali, who established the neighbourhood in which I was born. When my family moved to Abbasiya I would often return to the district of my birth, and such occasions were always emotionally loaded.
I can see it to this day: the prospect of that quiet little square through the mashrabiya in our house, where children celebrated the Eid without any fear of being hit by a passing car.
No sooner does the Eid arrive than I start thinking of the neighbourhood of Gamaliya, that beautiful section of Fatimid Cairo in which I was born and spent my childhood. It was in Gamaliya, after all, that I had my first experiences of the Eid. Every aspect of my perception and of my intellectual awareness, in fact, was formed in Gamaliya. The world, my world, was for a long time circumscribed by that neighbourhood and even though I had no historical awareness at the time, and certainly not enough knowledge of any other part of Cairo with which to compare my home, the atmosphere of the place seeped into me.
