Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
Edward Lane's Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians never fails to feed my nostalgia for the period with which it is concerned. More than one member of the Lane family, in fact, has helped satisfy my curiosity on that front -- I think here of Stanley Lane Poole and Sophie Poole, with The Story of Cairo and An English Woman in Egypt, respectively. Together they provide an invaluable record of an epoch with which we would not otherwise be familiar -- the way our forebears lived. There were others, too, of course: Lady Duff Gordon, Amelia Edwards, Harriet Martineau, all of whom give memorable accounts of the country after it was made accessible to foreign visitors. Yet Lane's book remains the more comprehensive account of life in 19th-century Egypt.
The nostalgia in question is particularly intense on religious occasions like Ramadan and the feasts. It is the big eid -- or, as it is more commonly known, Eid Al- Adha -- that brings it about at present. Associated with the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca, it is also the feast of sacrifice. Lane recounts that it was on the first day of the eid that pilgrims performed the sacrifice -- al-fidaa (the ransom), so called after Prophet Ibrahim's sacrifice of a lamb as a ransom for his son Ismail's life. Wealthy people, Lane says, sacrificed several sheep, sometimes a water buffalo or calf -- and most of the meat was given to the poor. On the day of the feast, Lane goes on, people put on fine new clothes. Early- morning prayers were performed, and an eid present -- eidiya, as it is called -- was given to relations, especially children and servants.
Much of what Lane describes has lived on in the present. In the days preceding the eid, he recounts, flocks of sheep would be driven into the metropolis from the countryside. In Lane's day, unlike now, the sheep and buffalo processions did not cause as much disturbance in the flow of traffic, since cars did not yet exist. Then, as now, people behaved the way they behaved during the small eid (Eid Al-Fitr, which follows the holy month of Ramadan): they visited each other, they exchanged gifts, they celebrated. Yet in the interval, it would seem, some habits have been lost: Lane reports that people, especially women, regularly visited the tombs of their loved ones, holding palm fronds and rihan (sweet basil), which they laid on and around the tombstones. He conjures up the image of numerous groups of women progressing to the cemeteries, with palm fronds in their hands. On reaching the cemeteries they provided the poor with all manner of baked goodies -- a habit that persists at cemeteries to this day.
In those days, according to Lane, there were houses within the burial grounds in which (often female) members of the family would spend the night near the deceased -- sometimes for the duration of the four day feast. Elsewhere in the city, he goes on, citing Bab Al- Nasr as an example of such a venue, dense crowds of people were entertained by street performers, Qur'anic reciters, epic poets singing to the accompaniment of the rabab, and dancers. Thus the sad cemetery rituals were counterbalanced by festive activities around the city gates. Lane also reports on the cuisine of the big eid in his day, which turns out to be more or less the same as it is today: fatteh, a dish made of boiled mutton or other sacrificial meat, cut into small pieces and mixed with broken bread soaked in the meat broth and some vinegar; the dish was, as it often is now, flavoured with garlic and a small amount of melted butter, and sprinkled with a little pepper. Indeed that was the dish that I enjoyed on the first day of the eid this year, my only gripe being that it was not featured in the weekly recipe published in this newspaper. It remains an integral part of the eid.
