Cairo: Metropolis of miracles

The original Opera House—erected downtown as part of the celebration surrounding the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, for which Verdi was commissioned to compose “Aida”—burned to the ground in 1970 in an act of suspected arson. The new Cairo Opera, constructed on Gezirah Island in the 1980s in a fusion of Islamic architectural styles, mounts an annual production of “Aida” and avant-garde projects such as the staging of “Don Giovanni” in Arabic with Italian mafioso costumes. Tickets are a bargain at less than three dollars. However, the biggest crowds flock to desert stages near the Pyramids, where a Westernized, moneyed elite pays European prices to see performances by the likes of Sting, Shakira, and Ricky Martin.

In 2002, to counter the deluge of foreign pop, Ahmed El-Maghraby, a professor of Italian literature at Ain Shams University, founded the Egyptian Center for Culture and Art to showcase and record endangered forms of Egyptian music. He has tracked down the last players of the arghool, an ancient two-reeded clarinet; the kawla, a long bamboo flute; and the tamboura, a sacred six-string lyre seen in pharaonic tomb paintings. The center, nicknamed Makan, or "Place," occupies a 19th-century printing plant with exposed-brick walls, whose industrial metal mezzanine and banks of computers and mixers form the stage backdrop for live performances of Egyptian gypsies, Nubian drummers, and Coptic monks chanting liturgy.

The most popular entertainers are Zar musicians, members of Cairo's underground culture who offer traditional healing using song, drumming, and body movement to calm people troubled by unseen forces. Ethnologists believe Zar rituals were brought to Egypt by female Sudanese and Ethiopian slaves in the nineteenth century. Hypnotic and compelling even to non-Arabic-speaking listeners, the music shares qualities of oral poetry and jazz improvisation and, importantly, eases social boundaries. On the night I went with a Nubian friend, the audience included expats and wealthy Egyptian students from the American University in Cairo, taxi drivers, and neighborhood doormen in djellabas.

Cairo's rich and poor have always lived in proximity, and one of the capital's defining characteristics is fear of the mob. For all its famed stability, Cairo is spectacularly combustible. Just after Ramadan in 2006, after a movie theater unexpectedly canceled its regular Friday-afternoon showing, crowds of young men rampaged downtown, breaking shopwindows and chasing women to rip off their clothes and head scarves. The violent expression of boredom and sexual frustration shocked the nation, underscoring a generational shift—from people who had been teens in the first promise of Egypt's 1952 revolution, who view downtown with wistful pride, to restless youngsters who graduate with useless university degrees at the rate of 2 million per year and remain at home into their 30s, lacking jobs and the finances to get married. Political commentators lambasted the inability or unwillingness of the Cairo police to protect women from male harassment. Alaa Al Aswany complained in a newspaper editorial that Egyptian security focused too much on guarding political leaders and recommended that rather than shout, "Help," the most efficient way for a woman to get the attention of a policeman would be "to insult the president."

In Cairo, exasperation with urban life translates into nostalgia for the life of the countryside, especially its food. Some of the most famous and beloved Cairene dishes have peasant origins, including koshary, a dish found nowhere else in the Arab world, a hot salad of pasta, rice, lentils, and chickpeas topped with fried onions and served with either vinegar, lemony garlic sauce, or fiery-hot chili and tomato. Abou Tarek, on the corner of Marouf and Champollion streets, is the best place to eat koshary for the sweet crunch of the onion, the nutty density of lentils and chewier chickpeas. The mix of patrons is delicious, too. The three-story koshary-only fast-food outlet sits downtown in a souk for car mechanics, around the corner from the journalists and lawyers syndicates, not far from an abandoned pasha's palace and an old Jewish mansion that houses an art gallery.

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