City Mouse in the Country

Cairo is home to a quarter of Egypt’s 80 million inhabitants. It is the industrial capital, the seat of government, and the cultural and commercial heart of the nation, a sprawling metropolis known affectionately to Egyptians simply as ‘Masr,’ the same name they use for their country as a whole. Yet Egypt is a big place: 1 million square kilometers of desert and arid mountains dotted with towns and cities, most of them perched on the coast (Mediterranean, Gulfs of Aqaba and Suez, Red Sea) or hugging the long, sinuous twist of the Nile River.

In the twelve months I have lived here, I have spent little time in the vast swathes of the country outside of Cairo. So when a friend of mine invited me to spend a day with him at his home in Beni Suef, a city of about 200,000 that lies two hours south of Cairo along the road to Luxor, it was with an eye toward correcting this deficiency that I boarded a crowded microbus at eight a.m. on a Saturday morning—bolstered by a breakfast of hot fuul sandwiches and a banana—and embarked on my first real visit to ‘the rest’ of Egypt.

My friend Mohamed met me on the main road through central Beni Suef and we went immediately to a juice shop for glasses of fresh orange juice, pressed while we waited and served to us room temperature while we sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk just outside. A pair of preteen girls, curious at the sight of a Western girl unabashedly sipping juice in the sleepy Beni Suef sunshine, approached us, giggling, and asked Mohamed if he was Egyptian. His nationality was obvious; what they really wanted to know was by what stroke of luck he came to be sitting with one of the only American females they had ever seen in their city. Was I a chat-room bride whose precious U.S. passport would be his ticket out of Egypt? Or a hapless tourist who had stumbled off the train to the Valley of Kings six hours too early? That we could simply be friends—of different sexes, from different countries, and speaking different languages, yet neither of us trying to exploit the other—was an idea they couldn’t fathom.

Our next stop was the Monastery of the Virgin Mary, a solid whitewashed complex built on the spot where Mary is said to have stopped to rest during her flight out of Egypt. A devout Muslim and a lifelong agnostic, we prowled as respectfully as two non-Christians could through one of the holier sites of New Testament lore, perusing pamphlets of Coptic doctrine in the bookstore and tiptoeing among the pews in the crumbling, weather-beaten old church. On holidays, the still-active nunnery at one side of the complex plays host to pilgrims from Cairo and local worshipers alike, and in the evenings the Coptic youth of Beni Suef congregates on the outdoor patio overlooking the Nile to drink tea and soda and socialize. Christians account for about a tenth of Beni Suef’s population, roughly the same percentage as in Egypt as a whole, and I got the impression from Mohamed that his tolerant attitude toward them and their holy places is somewhat of a rarity among the Muslim majority in the city. The antipathy goes both ways, too: as long as we were in the monastery grounds, I made sure not to call Mohamed by name, for fear that the hospitality of the people working there would evaporate when they discovered his religious background and we would be asked to leave. A Christian named Mohamed? Not likely.

After paying a fisherman five pounds to row us across the river in his boat and spending an hour hiking through fields of wheat and strawberries on the other side, we caught a cab to Mohamed’s family’s apartment, where his mother had kindly prepared a generous lunch for us of boiled potatoes and beef, an assortment of grape leaves, zucchinis, and peppers stuffed with spiced rice, soup, bread, and a cold salad of tomatoes and parsley, topped off with fresh strawberry juice for dessert. In typical Beni Suef style, we ate sitting on the floor, using the pieces of chewy, whole-wheat pita to scoop up the food instead of silverware. His younger sister and his parents seemed pleased to have me, his father, a law professor, telling me repeatedly how much he’d enjoyed visiting Washington, D.C. on his sole trip to the U.S. thirty years ago and his sister shyly trying out her English on me to ask, of all things, if I’d voted for Clinton or Obama in the primaries. Her own preference was for Obama, whom she refused to believe is not in fact a Muslim no matter how earnestly I tried to persuade her otherwise (according to a friend of mine in Haifa, the Israelis are also convinced that Obama harbors Islamic sympathies, and for that reason are actively campaigning among the Americans living abroad in Israel to vote for Clinton—for once the Middle East is waging its wars by proxy through our politicians instead of the other way around).

I caught a train home later that evening, and a mere hour-and-a-half later was back in Cairo among the screeching car horns and pushing throngs of Cairenes, having already begun to miss the urban life.