Adventures in Black and White by Philippa Schuyler & Tara Betts

Author:Philippa Schuyler & Tara Betts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, culture, world affairs, music, arts
ISBN: 978-1-940939-89-6 (epub)
Publisher: 2Leaf Press
Published: 2018-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Assault at the Pyramids Around Turkey

On a Scooter, A Concert for Men Only

Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan: 1955, 1958,

I KNEW THE ISLAMIC WORLD was rich in poetry.

Reading the unexpurgated Arabian had filled me with rapt visions of romantic lovers, jeweled palaces, fantastic tale tellers, exotic verse.

The luxurious Abbasside days of Haroun Al-Rashid, genii, and the silver streaking splendor of giant rocs, intrigued me.

When I flew to Egypt in October 1955, I expected miracles to happen.

The trip began badly. After Nice, the plane jolted horribly as the lighting slashed the dark, formless clouds and the rain beat on the ghostly windows. It aroused the most morbid fancies into one, and they were not dispelled when we arrived, at last, at the cheerless Heliopolis airport that serves Cairo.

There was nothing romantic about the bus drive into Cairo.

A bedraggled taxi took me to the Semiramis Hotel. The dark-skinned bell-boys wore baggy red trousers and embroidered red and gold jackets. The desk was much lighter in color.

The next when I awoke in my grey and depressing room, I ordered breakfast, which took nearly two hours to arrive. Then, it was unappetizing, for the green oranges were hard as golf-balls, and the yellow yogurt tasted like rancid camel’s milk.

I went out to lunch, to the home of some friends of a vague Hungarian acquaintance of mine. The disintegrating, moldy apartment house, though fairly new, had the secretive air, and musty, crumbly look of so much of Cairo.

My host, Sayed Jamhuryat, was slight, wiry, with a narrow face that seemed all nose. The water he gave me to drink was unboiled, a fact he did not deem necessary to tell me until I had three glasses.

Back at the hotel, I was sicker than ever.

I wandered through the sumptuous dining and reception rooms of the hotel, until I met an Egyptian I had once known in New York. Hussein Bakry Saad, was extremely undersized, thin in his vaguely cut brown suit, and had a hooked nose, brown eyes and pale skin.

Not being a Muslim, he had acid remarks to make about the followers of Islam. “Don’t believe Muslims when they say they have no race prejudice. A good white Lebanese family would not let them marry a Sudanese. And the dark-skinned Sudanese are prejudiced against the lighter-skinned one of Egyptian origin. I applied for a job in a Khartoum firm once, and was told contemptuously, ‘We do not want you! You are too pale! You are a red man!’”

Sipping from a cup of thick strong coffee, he paused, and continued, “And Islam is riddled with sects, schisms, divisions. While North and Northeast Africa have known Islam for over millennium, West and South Guinea, the Volta and the Southern Sudan were not influenced by it until the nineteenth century. In West Africa, the Islamic veneer is frequently a thin overlay over a more or less animistic base, so it is hard to tell whether people are animistic Muslims, or Muslimistic animists.”

“Is it true that Islam offers conflict than Christianity with African modes of thought?” I asked.

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