CU Abroad – Maurice Chammah

A “Mawlid” (related to the Arabic word for birth) is a festival that occurs several times a year in Cairo to celebrate the birthday of important historical figures in Islam, as well as Sufi saints. Today thousands of Egyptians, many foreign Muslims, and a few tourists filled the streets of Islamic Cairo for the birthday of the prophet Muhammad. I witnessed a very partial version of the typical holiday, as most people here gather for large meals with their extended families, but the public spectacle was nevertheless overwhelming.

At 4pm, a procession from one major mosque to another proceeded with countless members of various Sufi brotherhoods gathered around their banners. Some were dancing, others were singing devotional songs through crackling megaphones, and some simply strolled along. This was followed by another interruption that showed the partial nature of my experience as everyone went to pray.

We killed several hours in various coffeeshops and went back to where we had been told we could find the main celebrations late in the evening. Along the side of one of the main mosques, six or seven tents had been set up and one in the middle was packed tightly with searingly loud music echoing off the side of the building into the entire neighborhood. Following the sound, we ended up in this tent, surrounded by crowding, pushing, and shouting as hundreds of men swayed to crackling medeeh music.  Out of speakers careened heavily echoing voice and a violin so distorted by volume that it sounded like a cross between an electric guitar and organ. Backed by five drummers (perhaps more, I couldn’t see), these two men traded lines of music for at least 3 hours. The crowd of men, who ranged from crew cuts and tucked in shirts to flowing robes and dreadlocks, slowly getting more and more entranced until they fell into each other either from exhaustion or brotherhood.

Just as interesting as this group of mystified dancers were the other Cairenes surrounding them. Many men were inside and outside of the proceedings, filming or taking pictures with their cell-phones and scrambling for the best angle of the most rapturous dancer. It felt more like a spectator-spectacle situation than common members of a group sharing in a moment.

When we left the middle of the chaos, I climbed up a metal gate to get a better view. I was joined by two teenage Egyptian girls who spoke English and who alternated between disgust and cautious enjoyment as they looked on to a scene clearly as foreign to them as it was to me.  

Finally, I met a student who wanted to explain the festival to us in the sort of outsider, academic register an anthropologist, completing a series of moments in which I came to see that we often take for granted the unity of big celebrating crowds, and often people are spectators of their own culture.