Performing Islam in Cairo

July 10, 2007

I am about half-way through Edward William Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. It is a masterpiece.. and there are few cultures that have received as comprehensive and lively a description as the one given to 19th century Egyptians by Lane. Which is not to say it would be confused with an account by a modern anthropologist.. but modern academic works do not generally strive to really put life into an ethnography. Lane is all life and clarity.

Reading the Account I remembered an essay by Derek Gregory ("Performing Cairo: Orientalism and the City of the Arabian Nights"). Gregory emphasizes that "Lane's descriptions amounted to an intensely physical anatomy of the day-to-day practices of ordinary Egyptians." More than you probably think possible, Lane talks about the hand motions, the stock phrases, and the habits that make up everyday life in Egypt.

The following is one example out of many:

Every person, before he sits down to the table, or rather to the tray, washes his hands, and sometimes his mouth also, with soap and water; or, at least, has some water poured upon his right hand. A servant brings to him a basin and ewer..., of tinned copper, or of brass... and the water, being poured upon the hands, passes through this cover into the space below; so that when the basin is brought to a second person, the water with which the former one has washed is not seen. [142]

Reading exact descriptions such as this I find myself wondering if a similarly detailed one could be made for life in the US. To some extent I think it would be possible. After attending two weddings since the beginning of the summer, I could write a fairly detailed description covering generic elements. With a little thought I could think of some stock phrases and physical motions.

Something would be lacking in that effort to describe modern American customs. American life does not fall into so many physical and verbal scripts. This is one aspect of learning Arabic that I always found difficult: the many phrases that must be used in certain situations. It is a language that is rich with scripts, as Lane notes: "The ordinary set compliments in use in Egyptian society are so numerous, that a dozen pages of this work would not suffice for the mention of those which may be heard almost every day". The physical movements of daily life have a similar script-like quality.

My point is in contrast to Gregory's essay.. which would tend to see Lane's treatment of the manners and customs of the Egyptians as a result of the idiosyncrasy of Lane himself. His description of Cairo would therefore be more a matter of narrative style. Cairo is being viewed as a stage, and Lane is describing performances. But it seems to me that Lane is catching something that was actually there: a highly scripted physical culture. This kind of exact description would not work as well when it came to describing, say, American street life or marriages because the social scripts are not as strong.. leading to more variation.

Why all these scripts in Egyptian life? One obvious source is the hadith of the prophet Muhammad. The following is a single hadith on the topic of ablutions:

I saw 'Uthman bin 'Affan asking (for a tumbler of water) to perform ablution (and when it was brought) he poured water from it over his hands and washed them thrice and then put his right hand in the water container and rinsed his mouth and washed his nose by putting water in it and then blowing it out. Then he washed his face thrice and (then) forearms up to the elbows thrice, then passed his wet hands over his head and then washed each foot thrice. After that 'Uthman said, "I saw the Prophet performing ablution like this of mine..."

One way to approach the hadith is to see them as a storehouse of social scripts.. which end up creating a performance oriented culture. That is, a culture whose individuals have internalized a set of concrete actions and words. In such a script-loving culture, even actions that get no mention in hadith pick up a normative script.