Muslims claim Egypt has an Islamic identity. Christians claim Egypt was Islamized when Amr Ibn Al-Aas led the Muslim conquest to Egypt and forced Copts to convert to Islam. But, beyond the battle between Islam and Christianity, those who have eyes to see and ears to hear could trace the subtle footprints of our ancestors’ spiritual practices; practices that are perceived in today’s culture as black magic or diabolical.
When I was seven or eight years old, I used to spend the summer holidays at my great grandma’s house in Shoubra, an old neighbourhood in Northern Cairo, also known as the Christians’ ghetto due to its large Coptic, Assyrian, Armenian, and Greek Christian population. The decaying buildings and ancient architecture still held traces of a glorious past of what was once a residential area for royals and Pashas during Muhammad Ali’s ─the Ottoman governor of Egypt in the nineteenth-century reign. Teta, as I used to call her, lived on the rooftop of an ancient four-storied building in one of the narrow back alleys of Shoubra. She was a petite woman from Upper Egypt with tattoos on her chin and arms. She always wore her black galabeya and a silk scarf over her white braids. In the mornings, she would take me to the kitchen where I would watch her prepare her signature Turkish coffee; she would slowly stir medium roast ground coffee, sugar, and water in the copper coffee pot, and put it on the stove on low heat. As we waited for the coffee to boil, she would tear out a piece of old newspaper, take the scissors, cut out a paper doll outline, then grab a needle and pierce tiny holes in the paper doll while reciting prayers: “I ask for the protection of Mirette from the eyes of evildoers, especially the eyes of Nadia and Mervat, our neighbours.”
After finishing the prayers, she would place the paper doll in an ashtray, light a match and watch as the paper doll turned to ashes.
We would go back to the small living room, drink the thick, sweet coffee and after we were done, she would ask me to turn the cup over onto the saucer, swirl it three times, wait for a few minutes until the coffee grounds had dried up and then she would turn over the cup and start reading the symbols etched by the residues of the dark coffee: “I see a bird circling a tree…”
The same woman who read the coffee cup and made voodoo dolls out of newspaper happened to be a devout Christian who prayed the seven prayers of the Orthodox Agpiya every day and had crosses and photos of saints hung all over the walls of her small old apartment. Divination is a common thing in many families in Egypt, even if done in a leisurely spirit. Some read the coffee cups, some read palms, others turn to astrology, while others spread a deck of cards without knowing that the first people to use the tarot for divination were the ancient Egyptians.
I come from a Coptic Christian background. As a Christian living in a Muslim majority country, our Christian practices mark us off with our neighbours: going to church instead of the mosque every Friday morning; reading the Bible instead of the Quran; believing in Jesus instead of Muhammad; wearing crosses around our necks instead of Islamic verses. Yet other practices bring us together; practices that go way beyond Islam or Christianity, dating back to our first ancestors and the ancient Egyptian deities.
One of the most remarkable events where one sees ancient practices woven into modern Coptic Christianity is in the Holy Week. It falls during the harvest season and starts with Palm Sunday, where Copts go out into the streets carrying palm leaves, crosses, and red roses to celebrate Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem. On that day, Christians and Muslims alike hang woven wheat ears on the doors of their houses and shops. This practise dates back to ancient times where wheat ears from the new harvest were dried and hung on the doors as a gift to the God of Harvest to bring blessings and prosperity to the new season. Throughout the week, we eat certain foods on specific days: on Wednesdays, we eat boiled wheat; on Thursdays, black lentils; and on the Good Friday, we eat Falafel and drink vinegar, just like our ancestors did. On Holy Saturday, people in Upper Egypt still line their eyes with Kohl and onion juice, which is thought to protect them. The sad melodies and hymns played in churches during the Holy week are believed to be inspired by ancient melodies of the temples using traditional instruments such as cymbals and the triangle.
It was interesting to learn from my Muslim friends that they too performed some practices during this week, which is considered a Christian celebration. My friend from one of the villages in Upper Egypt told me that his mum used to prepare salted fish on Palm Sunday, boiled wheat on Tuesday, smooth luffa salad on Wednesday, and Mafrouka on Friday which is made of layers of bread soaked in ghee and milk.
We celebrate Easter Sunday with food festivities including all sorts of fine food and drinks after a long forty-four days of fasting. The following day is Sham El-Nessim, an ancient Egyptian festival celebrated by Muslims and Christians, which marks the start of spring. I always spend that day outdoors with my big family, boarding a felukka on the river Nile, and savouring different kinds of salted fish, coloured eggs, and green onions. We wear floral dresses and shirts, shoot fireworks up into the clear skies and dance to the rhythm of the upbeat music. On that day, we celebrate the sun, the blessings of God, Mary, Isis, the present and past ancestors.
When my great-grandma got sick, my mum pledged to give money to one of her favourite saints, St. Absaykhron, every month so that he would intervene and heal her. One time, when she forgot to pay what she had promised, she saw an apparition of him in a dream and hurried to make the payment at his monastery in Old Cairo the next day. When my grandmother passed away, our relatives carried her coffin and walked from her house to the church. As the parade moved ahead, more and more people joined: women wailing and men racing to share in carrying the coffin or clear the way. After her burial, her sons grabbed two big baskets of sweet buns out of the car and started giving them out to everyone in the cemetery; beggars and graveyard dwellers raced to get buns as they recited prayers of blessings and mercy to the deceased.
I later came to learn that this was an ancient Egyptian practice, where the best flour, butter, and sugar were used to bake sweet cemetery buns as an honour to the deceased. It was believed that whoever eats from these buns would have an honourable and long life. And, just as the goddess Isis used to visit her beloved Osiris in his graveyard every Thursday and Friday, one still finds the cemeteries in Egypt buzzing with life during those two days, where people visit their loved ones and stay by their graves for hours, sharing with them their broken hearts, longings, and stories mixed with tears.
As much as our ancestors were influenced death, they had their mark on birth and new beginnings. Whenever someone had a baby in our family, they would invite us for El-Sebou ─the Egyptian baby shower which takes place one week after the baby is born. It is a rite of passage ceremony where the baby is placed in a big kitchen sieve with a jug next to him if it is a boy, or a clay pot if it is a girl. The eldest woman, usually the grandmother, sits on the floor next to the sieve where the baby is placed and starts banging a copper pestle against a mortar while chanting, “May you always hear what your mama tells you, not what your papa tells you.” Then, the mother is asked to pass over the sieve seven times while saying, “Bismillah.”
The elder woman then comes up, takes the sieve with the baby, and shakes it before it is placed on a table surrounded by bags filled with sweets, popcorn, and coins around him or her for the guests to take away. The children are then given candles and they go around the baby in circles while singing traditional Sebou songs. These practices date back to ancient Egypt, where the sounds and the shaking help to awaken the baby’s senses and drive the evil spirits away. However, some religious priests and sheikhs have recently attacked these practices as being pagan.
New beginnings and new things are sometimes believed to be a target for the evil eye and jealousy. My mum made sure to always sprinkle holy water ─water blessed by a priest to protect one from the powers of darkness on the footsteps of our home and all the rooms every year, and anything new, cars or appliances. The priest would come to our home twice a year, recite prayers, and burn incense all over the house. Water has been known since ancient times as a symbol of purification; our ancestors sprinkled it over the fields to bless the crops, over themselves, and their cattle. The same goes for incense, which was used daily in the worship of Gods in temples. Priests were known to burn frankincense in the morning, myrrh at midday, and kaput in the evening.
To further protect us from the evil spirits, my family used talismans, those miniature books or pieces of paper stitched together with verses or magic words carved in black ink to protect you from the evil energies around you. I found one of those talismans in a plastic bag under my grandma’s pillow alongside photos of Jesus, Mary, and other saints. Blessings and invocation of the protective angels were carved inside. When I told my best friend in school, who was a Muslim, she told me her mum had the same miniature book with verses that she keeps in her bag for protection. Talismans were originally used by ancient Egyptians, buried with mummified bodies after death to protect the deceased and ease their passage to the next world. These talismans were sometimes written, but other times it was miniatures of gods such as Anubis, who protected the grave and the body.
Egypt has always been a centre of strong spiritual energy. You could see it and feel it everywhere. Gods, patrons and saints are the invisible, and sometimes visible, extended family. History documented multiple times where thousands had witnessed the apparition of St. Mary in different locations across the country. It was even photographed and printed in Egypt’s official newspaper in the ‘70’s ─she appeared as a ghostlike figure over the dome of one of Cairo’s biggest churches.
Such stories were common when I was growing up. My mum and dad, my grandmother, and my Sunday school teachers recounted tales of saints, angels and creatures of the spiritual realm. The walls of our house were covered with paintings and ancient icons of those saints ─that my parents treated as our extended family in heaven. My dad spoke of St. George as if he were his closest friend and who stood by his side in times of need. St. Mary was my mum’s second mother, but I never felt any special connection with them. Their stories of purity and infallibility intimidated me; I was expected to follow their unmistakable path, to stop craving the worldly and material things, and aim for what was heavenly. I later came to believe that these stories were myths that were passed down for generations to give false hope to those who suffered in this world.
Yet, all that changed one evening in the summer of 2008, when I received a phone call from a friend.
“Mirette, stop what you are doing and come to St. George church immediately. You have to see this!”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I went there right away because it sounded urgent. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I got there. For two hours I tried to make my way through the mass of moving bodies crammed along Shokolani Street until I found my friend right in front of the church dome. She pointed her fingers up towards the left dome, and there it was, an undefined shining body in the sky, steadily flowing between the two domes of the church, appearing and disappearing. If it wasn’t for the frenzy crowds screaming the name of Mary, I would have thought of it as a reflection of streetlights. I shivered, not knowing whether that was an apparition or just my mind playing games along with the minds of thousands of other spectators. Was I seeing a celestial being with my own eyes?
My mother called me while I was there and told me she was seeing the apparition from Pyramids Street; later on, there were multiple accounts of the apparition all over Cairo. Needless to say, it was only Christians who believed this was St. Mary, while the rest of the country brushed it off as some Christian hocus-pocus.
This event marked the beginning of my initiation on the spiritual path. I came to believe that what we see is nothing but a fraction of the truth, that faith is in the eye of the beholder, that those who have eyes will see and those who have ears will hear what lies beneath the Bible, the Quran, the sound of church bells ringing, and the mosque calls to prayer ─the whispers of our Almighty Gods.
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