This Blogger loves the Egyptian people; they are kind, good natured, and gracious. Made worshipers of fellow humans by incestuous Pharaohs,conquered by Hittites, Nubians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, British, among others, they have survived into graciousness. With their history, graciousness should not be there, but it is, just like the Nile.
Cairo has an infrastructure built for maybe 3 to 4 million people; it must have been fabulous to live there in the late forties and early 1950s, just like Hollywood and Mexico City must have been in those golden years. Cairo had glamour then.
But alas, it is now like the now Mexico City, a great old lady, now too old for her burden.
Today, Cairo’s metro area has a population of about 20.8 million people; Cairo is the 16th most populous metro area in the world.
It is also the most populous metropolitan area in Africa, a lot of people for an infrastructure built to sustain 3 million souls.
One night, this Blogger and his girl, Judy, were assigned a Coptic Christian bodyguard, Hani; he could and did join us for a drink of whiskey. We sat around chatting, watching a wedding reception at the Sheraton Hotel. Hani was hilarious;he had just finished guarding a party of Mormons, and they had decided to convert him, so they had sent him NINE boxes of religious material from Bountiful, Utah. He asked me some questions about Mormons, which I could not answer, so we decided to go visit his uncle in Heliopolis, a cool Cairo neighborhood.
The Uncle was a most gracious man, and he asked Judy and this Blogger to stay to watch some Egyptian films made in Cairo in the late 1940s,when it seems Egypt had a thriving film industry. He had a gigantic collection of old Egyptian films, complete with a makeshift screening room, featuring an antique, no ancient 35mm projector. It was so Egyptian Sunset Blvd. Hani was assigned to change the reels at the appropriate times. Our host spoke wonderfully aristocratic English, from his youth in the Days of Empire.
The film was filmed in and around Cairo;out of nowhere, the gracious host starts crying like a baby, a real breakdown.
He began to mutter: " Oh Cairo, my Cairo, you were so beautiful then. you should have seen it then.”
Hani tried to console his inconsolable Uncle, amid the flickering black and white images mocking the living from the screen. All that was missing was Erich Von Stroheim, with monocle and maybe a fez.
This would be a tragic little vignette if it wasn’t for the fact that all this legendary Cairo beauty of our hosts’ youth was presided over by a fat and corrupt king( a descendant of the Albanian Muhammad Ali). Looking back at it now, the whole scene was cheap nostalgia, discounted from a .99 Cent store. Seriously, how can one summon up nostalgia for the good old times of fifty years ago, in a country that has been there for 5,000 years? Our host was lamenting fifty years past, in a country which has a past history of 5,000 years.
This Blogger made a point of visiting the Cairo Citadel, the site of the Massacre of the Mamelukes, by the original Muhammad Ali, the Albanian thug, mercenary, warlord, Mafioso, and eventual Sultan of Egypt.
Under the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate, young Christian Crimean, Georgian and Circassian boys were kidnapped from their homeland and made into slaves, the Mamelukes( from the Arab word meaning “owned.”). They were forcibly converted to Islam and trained in the martial arts.
The Mamelukes were the Islamic version of the Japanese Samurai class of warriors.
In 870, a Mameluke seized control of Egypt.
The sons of Mamelukes did not automatically become Mamelukes, instead “they constantly replenish their numbers with new slave boys from the fierce tribes of central Asia and the Caucasus.”
The Mamelukes inflicted the first defeat ever on the Mongols of the Genghis Khan Dynasty; they also defeated a French Crusade.
The Ottoman Turks tamed them, but left them in power.
Napoleon defeated them before the Pyramids; but they remained in power.
Until the Albanian Muhammad Ali.
This is what you should know about Egypt, the misplaced permanence of it. Go stand on the banks of the Nile, the Mother of Rivers; then turn around and face West, toward Libya, and just start walking. It is some of the most green,and lush and vibrant land you will ever see. It is so green. it is like Astroturf. You walk for maybe ten miles, a nice hike,through toppled temples, past wrecked Gods, but still green, a green carpet.
Then it ends, ENDS. In its place, directly in front of you, where there was lush green, is a mean, brown desert. It just begins, no gap, no ditch, no gulch, no epic divide, just lush green suddenly stopping and a hard brown desert beginning. It is as if God had laid a thousand mile strip of astroturf on the Mojave; it is a remarkable sight. The green does not even peter out, it just ends. No one should weep for something which happened, on film, when you can walk ten miles and see a green and brown miracle.
There is nothing like the Nile, for the simple reason, IT SHOULD NOT BE THERE. It is the anomaly which humbles you.
Cairo
Massacre of the Mamelukes
The Last Mameluke escaping the Massacre
Cairo has an infrastructure built for maybe 3 to 4 million people; it must have been fabulous to live there in the late forties and early 1950s, just like Hollywood and Mexico City must have been in those golden years. Cairo had glamour then.
But alas, it is now like the now Mexico City, a great old lady, now too old for her burden.
Today, Cairo’s metro area has a population of about 20.8 million people; Cairo is the 16th most populous metro area in the world.
It is also the most populous metropolitan area in Africa, a lot of people for an infrastructure built to sustain 3 million souls.
One night, this Blogger and his girl, Judy, were assigned a Coptic Christian bodyguard, Hani; he could and did join us for a drink of whiskey. We sat around chatting, watching a wedding reception at the Sheraton Hotel. Hani was hilarious;he had just finished guarding a party of Mormons, and they had decided to convert him, so they had sent him NINE boxes of religious material from Bountiful, Utah. He asked me some questions about Mormons, which I could not answer, so we decided to go visit his uncle in Heliopolis, a cool Cairo neighborhood.
The Uncle was a most gracious man, and he asked Judy and this Blogger to stay to watch some Egyptian films made in Cairo in the late 1940s,when it seems Egypt had a thriving film industry. He had a gigantic collection of old Egyptian films, complete with a makeshift screening room, featuring an antique, no ancient 35mm projector. It was so Egyptian Sunset Blvd. Hani was assigned to change the reels at the appropriate times. Our host spoke wonderfully aristocratic English, from his youth in the Days of Empire.
The film was filmed in and around Cairo;out of nowhere, the gracious host starts crying like a baby, a real breakdown.
He began to mutter: " Oh Cairo, my Cairo, you were so beautiful then. you should have seen it then.”
Hani tried to console his inconsolable Uncle, amid the flickering black and white images mocking the living from the screen. All that was missing was Erich Von Stroheim, with monocle and maybe a fez.
This would be a tragic little vignette if it wasn’t for the fact that all this legendary Cairo beauty of our hosts’ youth was presided over by a fat and corrupt king( a descendant of the Albanian Muhammad Ali). Looking back at it now, the whole scene was cheap nostalgia, discounted from a .99 Cent store. Seriously, how can one summon up nostalgia for the good old times of fifty years ago, in a country that has been there for 5,000 years? Our host was lamenting fifty years past, in a country which has a past history of 5,000 years.
This Blogger made a point of visiting the Cairo Citadel, the site of the Massacre of the Mamelukes, by the original Muhammad Ali, the Albanian thug, mercenary, warlord, Mafioso, and eventual Sultan of Egypt.
Under the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate, young Christian Crimean, Georgian and Circassian boys were kidnapped from their homeland and made into slaves, the Mamelukes( from the Arab word meaning “owned.”). They were forcibly converted to Islam and trained in the martial arts.
The Mamelukes were the Islamic version of the Japanese Samurai class of warriors.
In 870, a Mameluke seized control of Egypt.
The sons of Mamelukes did not automatically become Mamelukes, instead “they constantly replenish their numbers with new slave boys from the fierce tribes of central Asia and the Caucasus.”
The Mamelukes inflicted the first defeat ever on the Mongols of the Genghis Khan Dynasty; they also defeated a French Crusade.
The Ottoman Turks tamed them, but left them in power.
Napoleon defeated them before the Pyramids; but they remained in power.
Until the Albanian Muhammad Ali.
Muhammad
Ali was not a Mameluke, but a Muslim
Albanian mercenary serving the Ottoman Empire; he wanted to found his own dynasty
in Egypt, an Albanian Dynasty of Sultans.
He
gathered a group of fierce and loyal Albanians gangsters to his banner, and
invited the Mamelukes to a dinner/celebration at the Cairo Citadel.
There, his
men ambushed the Mamelukes, killing them all save one.
One
surviving Mameluke fought his way out, his stallion leaping over a wall, and rode off into the desert No one knows what
happened to him.
After the massacre, the Mamelukes went the way of the Knights Templar,
ambushed into history. Both killed out to the last man.
Upon reflection, perhaps it is time the United States appointed
an Albanian warlord to run its war against ISIS; for real victory over ISIS, means
extermination to the last man, like it was with the Mamelukes and the Knights
Templar.
The Cairo Citadel reminds us that it can be done.
This is what you should know about Egypt, the misplaced permanence of it. Go stand on the banks of the Nile, the Mother of Rivers; then turn around and face West, toward Libya, and just start walking. It is some of the most green,and lush and vibrant land you will ever see. It is so green. it is like Astroturf. You walk for maybe ten miles, a nice hike,through toppled temples, past wrecked Gods, but still green, a green carpet.
Then it ends, ENDS. In its place, directly in front of you, where there was lush green, is a mean, brown desert. It just begins, no gap, no ditch, no gulch, no epic divide, just lush green suddenly stopping and a hard brown desert beginning. It is as if God had laid a thousand mile strip of astroturf on the Mojave; it is a remarkable sight. The green does not even peter out, it just ends. No one should weep for something which happened, on film, when you can walk ten miles and see a green and brown miracle.
There is nothing like the Nile, for the simple reason, IT SHOULD NOT BE THERE. It is the anomaly which humbles you.
CairoMassacre of the MamelukesThe Last Mameluke escaping the Massacre
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