Friday Prayer in Zamalek
July 3, 2009
Friday is the "day of gathering" when Muslims show up at a mosque to hear a sermon and complete the prayers. When people imagine a "mosque" it is generally an ideal imposing structure that they have in mind. But the most common type of mosque is the tiny room on the ground floor of a nondescript building. This is the local mosque that Muslims turn to when it is time for one of the daily prayers.. and it is here they come on Friday as well. On Friday these tiny mosques expand into the alleys and streets nearby. As the time for noon prayer approaches you see people spreading the green prayer mats and carpets, and the extent of these mats marks the notional mosque.. and people take off their shoes before stepping into this zone.
Walking through Cairo at the time of the noon prayer is like walking through a succession of outdoor prayer meetings. Every five minutes or so you notice a small gathering tucked away up some street.
These have always been a part of my understood landscape of Cairo, but today I tried to document a few of these prayer meetings. Two videos, both taken along 26th of July Street running through Zamalek, were particularly successful. When you think of mosques, this is the image that should come to mind. This is the environment in which a large percentage of Cairenes pray to God.. with cars pushing by and pedestrians passing as well. If you add up all these small mosques in Cairo I'm sure the numer would be in the thousands.
Another element of Islam evident from these videos is the male-dominated nature of public worship. Some formal mosques have an area screened off by wooden panels where women can worship, but in these outdoor prayer centers there's no place for women. When the sermon is over and the prayer begins you can see the men forming parallel lines, in which every person is lined up with each other (this process is featured in the second video below). This brotherhood and equality in the worship is one of the glories of Islam, but it has proven difficult to introduce women into this alignment.
Buried in Cairo
July 2, 2009
Walking through one of the many cemeteries to the south and east of Cairo, I came across the above scene. As with the rest of historic Cairo, there's not always too much left from the past.. as everything has been overrun by the demands of the present. But here was an open grave with a cupola over it. It's the sort of thing I remembered seeing in the Description de l'Egypte:
Looking at representations such as this, one gets the idea that there once existed many more of this style of tomb. With their wooden superstructure, they were clearly vulnerable to time and abuse. But I've at least seen one now!
This kind of wooden standing monument should be seen as a poor man's version of the great stone monuments put up by the elite. These were composed entirely of stone, and they are sprinkled throughout the old cemeteries of Cairo:
These stone tombs have some obvious advantages in terms of staying power. They stick around, but the person who is buried within them is apt to be forgotten. There are lots of these stone tombs that have lost any identifying inscriptions. Their interior is filled with smelly trash.. and the ground water is leeching into the lower levels of stone. In other words, if the goal was to make a memorial for a name, then stone did not succeed any more than wood.
One of the sites I was looking for today was the Sultaniyya complex, which is a large Mamluk burial complex (c. 1350 AD):
You can see the two large minarets and then two large domes in the background. Unfortunately the actual building that once connected these individual elements has disappeared and nobody knows for whom this was built. It's something to think about when it comes to building a grand memorial!
These grand mortuary monuments turned out to be a boon for European artists, who loved their dilapidated and mysterious qualities. David Roberts, whose 19th century work on Cairo is pretty much canonical, made the following image of this same complex:
Roberts had the advantage of a lot more open ground than exists now. This view could not be duplicated today. These are the kinds of images for which Cairo is famous. That funeral procession in the middle ground of the painting reminds us that this landscape is culturally generated.. and not here by some accident of Orientalism. Roberts made his trip through Egypt, Nubia, and the Holy Land in 1838-9, and I often suspect that he had Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians in front of him because that book works as a key to so many of his details. In this case here is Lane on the funeral procession:
The passage is too lengthy to set here in its entirety (see chapter 15 of Lane's book). But after reading the chapter you know something of the sound of a funeral procession as well as the passages from the Qur'an that are commonly read.
A Place to Whirl Away
July 1, 2009
There had been a lecture earlier in the day, and thus all the chairs in the center area, but try to imagine this as an open circle with a polished wooden dance floor. Within this open area the whirling dervishes once did their circling. This is the institutional/structural framework that supported that well-known spiritual practice. There were some pictures on the wall of latter day whirling:
In this picture you can see the dervishes in the center and then the audience ranged outside the low fence running around the circular dance area. There is also room on the balcony for the audience. In addition, the balcony has a small area for the musicians to sit and an enclosed hareem for women. This set up points to use of the whirling as a public spectacle. There were the practitioners who lived in the takiyya or Sufi monastery, but then their spiritual practice was never private, but a performance. You can imagine the performance as a way to attract monastics and donors.
Up above this whirling was a painted dome. The dome was finished somewhere around 1850. It represents the sun at the apex, which could be taken for a symbol of the oneness and life-giving power of God. In the white area around the sun are what at first seem to be a lot of black specks, but on closer examination these are actually flying birds:
It's quite a lovely image. It's hard not to suspect that the birds are an image of the dervish, utterly dependent on God and expressing their joy in God through flight. This kind of metaphorical play is very much in the style of the Sufi poet Rumi, the originator of the Mevlana order.
A little bit more about the history of this order in Cairo: they arrived with the Turks in the 16th century, and in 1607 they were granted a crumbling Mamluk madrasa. Instead of taking over and
conforming themselves to this previous building, they built around and over it. They in effect colonized the Mamluk structure, although it is still possible to see the older building:
The original minaret and mausoleum are still there, but crowded next to them is this alien structure.. the dance hall. The mausoleum also became the burial place for the leaders of the dervish order. There are various examples of re-use in the history of Cairo. Re-use generally includes expansion and additions to the interior. In some cases a mosque may even take on another name. But this is on another order: The madrasa was built upon, not re-used.
The Sufi order built dormitories for its dervishes. Madrasas and Khanqah's in Cairo had long included rooms for their students or monastics, but this looks quite different to me. Then adjoining these dorm rooms is a garden:
The walk way for this garden looks old, so I assume this is a historic garden.. and it's featured on the historical reconstructions on display. I wish more would be said about the historical nature of a garden site like this. It would hardly have been found in the original Mamluk madrasa, so we can assume that the dervishes have taken over ruined ground and dedicated it to green space. That in itself is pretty interesting and worth examination.
I've spent the past couple of days wandering around Cairo looking at and photographing minor mosques. At some point I started to feel punch drunk, and I duly recognize the elements of medieval mosque design. But this Sufi takiyya was different. Its spiritual practices demanded a new type of space.. and it supported a lifestyle that differed in important ways from the Sufi lifestyle already present in Cairo. It's clear.. although I can't explain it entirely.. that new concepts and practices gave rise to unique structural forms. It was also a reminder of why its fun to wander in medieval Cairo.
Most Awesome Guide Ever
June 30, 2009
I am fully prepared to admit that I am a bad person for this, but today I ran into a guy that just really tickled me. He was useful in that he got me into a couple of sites where there was restoration going on.. but then in the middle of taking me through a house he launched into a disquisition on Sufi dance. I immediately got my camera out, even as I was confused as to why we were talking about Sufi dancing.
To understand why I find this video funny, it's important to understand the dynamic between guide and tourist. Every second that this guy is dancing, he's also thinking: big tip, big tip. His job is to add up lots of little things that allow him to make a claim that he gave substantial time and effort to my tour. An animated Sufi dance performance weighs heavily on his side. My job is to limit his assumption of little extras (like carrying my bag) that let him inflate his claim at the end. We both know that a reckoning is coming.. and we are angling for it. Now the dancing caught me off-guard, because, rationally speaking, I knew this was something to stop, since it had nothing to do with what stood front of us. But I was so amused and surprised by this moment, that I let it pass.. and even filmed it! I knew I would pay dearly.
Reconstructing how the Sufi dancing entered our conversation, I believe it had something to do with Sultan Qaitbay and his nightly choosing of one of his four wives. There were four wives, just as there were four mashrabiyyas in this room. The Sultan would sit and each wife would do a Sufi dance.. and one of them he would choose to be his bed companion for the night.
I had reason to doubt this story on a whole bunch of levels, but like much of the work of tour guides, it was best understood as a form of storytelling. Doesn't it just sound like the 1,001 Nights? And this is before the story about the tunnel from underneath this palace up to the citadel.
This guide also had apocryphal stories about Barack Obama's itinerary in Egypt. He had Obama sight-seeing not only at Sultan Hasan Mosque, but also at a fairly unknown Turkish mosque for seven minutes.. where Obama made a joke about having only one wife! The Turkish Mosque in question was on our itinerary today, as you might have guessed.. and it was way too dusty to have been recently visited by Obama. But again, the storytelling is the point. And Egyptians are great at this art. I could hear how Obama's trip would soon be amplified by the various tellers of stories in this city.
Dreamland!
June 29, 2009
One central trend in the growth of contemporary Cairo is the movement of cultural institutions and elite residences far out into the barren desert. Of course, once the elite arrive the desert does not remain barren, but magically turns green! This outward shift is evident in the new campus of the American University in Cairo, the construction of the new Grand Egyptian Museum, and in numerous elite housing developments. One of these housing developments is the place called "Dreamland." It has an interesting web presence that allowed me to use it as an example of the changes of globalization in my Cairo class. Now that I am back in Egypt I've been hell-bent on getting here.
The freeway featured a couple of Arabic signs for Dreamland.. the one I got a picture of was in Giza near the pyramids and it pointed to Dreamland six kilometers ahead. The Arabic writing tells you that this is not primarily a tourist destination, but a site for elite Egyptians and others from the Middle East. Now, if one is six kilometers further into the desert from the pyramids, one is in truly barren land. And this is the way things looked for a while:
Not the stuff that dreams are made of.. according to me. But up on that ridge you can see palm trees, and that's a hint of what is to come. I wish I knew where and how the water got out to Dreamland and other such communities. The only possible source is the Nile, but from what is this water taken away to make all this possible?
I almost got bounced from my initial experience of Dreamland. An entrance guard did not let my taxi in since we had no definite place to go. He directed us to "Dream Park".. which is a cinema and amusement park open to everyone. As with many things in Egypt, this amusement park does not really start moving until we get toward evening.. and it was mostly empty when I was there. But I came across this sign for a cafe: the Naguib Mahfouz cafe.
This evocation of central Cairo in a place as far removed as possible from central Cairo is truly weird. Although the impulse certainly has parallels in the US with versions of "mainstreet" in Disneyland.. etc. Naguib Mahfouz set out "classic" Cairo in his descriptions of alley life, and those alleys are the "mainstreets" of Egypt. So they are mimicked out here in the desert.
My taxi driver did manage to get us into Dreamland proper. We found a side road that went from the amusement park directly into the extensive housing project. I took lots of photos from the window of the taxi.. thinking that if I got out with camera in hand someone would stop me before long. There appeared to be two major models for living here. One was an apartment in a vaguely Arabic-style complex (above), while the other was life in a single family villa (below).
With the exception of diplomats and a few other figures, nobody in Cairo lives in single family homes. Here in Dreamland it's possible. That is a clue to the appeal: this is a largely American way of life constructed with eastern motifs and themes. Unfortunately the waste of fresh water and gas that is assumed for this lifestyle is also deeply American.
Spiritual needs were also taken into consideration in the planning of Dreamland. We passed three mosques, each one different in style. This one had the most striking minarets. Nobody who lives here need have a bad conscience. It is all in accord with God and his book. I should also add that there is a well-watered golf course in Dreamland. This attempt at an ideal community aligns Dreamland with similar attempts in the US, the most famous being Celebration, Florida (see Wikipedia article here).
I have a pretty visceral dislike for these types of communities. They are exclusive and inauthentic. They are parasitic on culture. Their emphasis on what is "safe" leads to a sterilized version of the world. But like it or not, Dreamland and places like it are growing in popularity.. at least that is what I judge from the massive and continuing building out here. In America it is possible to see "Celebration" as a weird and sort of scary experiment. In Egypt Dreamland is a representation of the dream land that is being constructed by elites in the region.
The world Dreamland ignores is on view throughout the ride to the desert. Former agricultural villages have been made into rows of unfinished red brick apartment buildings. These extend as far as the Nile valley.. they house the very poor.
This is nobody's dreamland:
Landing at Bulaq in 1800
June 29, 2009
In the French Description de l'Egypte, put together from the work of the scholars who accompanied Napoleon during his time in Egypt from 1798-1801, we get a beautiful plate of the Sinan Pasha mosque in Bulaq. Since Bulaq was the Nile port for Cairo, it was a visual marker for arrival at Cairo. I had never visited this mosque, so today I walked over to it. It is just a little north of the point where the 26th October Bridge connects to Cairo east of the Nile. In fact, I could make out the mosque from the bridge itself:
There it is, sitting behind a large, newish Coptic church. It's a distinctive mosque, with its Turkish style minaret and impressive central dome. But where it once greeted visitors to Cairo as they stepped off the boat, it's now tucked well back into the city. By comparing the image from around 1800 with this one now, you can get a sense of how the Nile bed has shifted slightly.
Getting closer to the mosque, I found it surrounded by cars:
I've seen old pictures of mosques in what is now "Islamic Cairo" that look a lot like this.. i.e. they are surrounded by parked cars and seemingly isolated from potential visitors. I got the sense that Sinan Pasha is not on many itineraries. The neighborhood is filled with workshops (welding, metalwork) and a popular clothing market. I could see various structural elements that were old, but the neighborhood could hardly be called "historic Bulaq".. that's gone. What's left is this single building.. and one other fairly early mosque. As is the fate with many historic buildings, they become islands in their shifting landscape.
As you can see, the inside of the mosque is quite beautiful. Note especially the rail and walkway that goes around the dome. I'm not sure I've ever seen that before. The decorations moving in a band around the mid point of the building are also nice.. colored windows and carved figures echoing each other as they alternate. The floral pattern is 100% Ottoman.. in fact, to spot an Ottoman building or addition all you need to look for are floral motifs.
Sadly, this Ottoman style will almost certainly be part of what keeps this mosque from getting any real refurbishment. Looking backwards, the Ottoman time is widely seen as a time of colonization, and buildings commissioned by them tend not to get high priority. That is a reality I've noticed in many other countries: Greece, Crete, Bulgaria, Syria.. Another strike this mosque has going against it is that it is located so far outside the tourist zone for Islamic Cairo. But in a way that should also be its central claim to preservation: this is a historical area that is in danger of totally disappearing.
I will end this post with a quick look to the Nile riverscape as it can be seen today. This is a look back toward Zamalek, and you can see the Marriott and then a series of apartment buildings overlooking the Nile. Boats still ply the Nile, but clearly that is secondary to automobile traffic.. which is extensive even up to the edge of the Nile.
Archeology of Shopping
June 28, 2009
Walking along Mousky Street away from Islamic Cairo I loved the lively crowds. I knew that this street had been a pedestrian thoroughfare for quite some time. It's difficult to follow Mousky all the way to Ezbekiyya these days, but once Ezbekiyya was the transition from traditional Cairo to modern Cairo and its Parisian pretensions. As I walked through this or that popular market.. and saw the shop windows and signs.. I wondered if anyone has a good line on the archeology of all this popular shopping stuff.
For example this scene:
Looking more closely I see some red brick up above and that should mark out this building as fairly recent. But how far back do window displays in this part of Cairo go? And is there any well-preserved store from the 40s or 50s in this area? Cairo is filled with things that nobody ever writes down or takes note of.
That's got to be an old sign.. with its old fashioned light bulbs and "Italian" clothes. But again, I have no way to date something like this.. and I'm not sure anyone else does either except by asking around locally for information.
At one point I came across a real showman selling pants and shirts that he dramatically pulled from their plastic coverings. He was doing a brisk business. This is well worth a watch to catch some of the liveliness of Cairo popular markets:
Welcome to Fatimid Land!
June 28, 2009
For years I've known that a re-working of the central area of Islamic Cairo was coming. I've seen it referenced with different names, one of which is "Fatimid Land" since this area was the center of that dynasty's capital. The Fatimid street Bayn al-Qasrayn ("Between the Palaces") eventually lost the palaces that make sense of its name, but within their structural footprint later Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Turkish rulers built lavish mosques and madrasas. The current project by the Supreme Council of Antiquities is to get this whole area tourist friendly. Not an easy task since the area was colonized by the very poor since 1950 or so.. and making it tourist ready means getting rid of these poor. Let's note the strategies for presenting this area to tourists:
1. benches
Benches are going up everywhere! I always find these humorous because they are such unnatural additions to the cityscape of Cairo. It's fascinating to watch how they go unused by anyone.. except perhaps a white clad security guy who has to be there anyway. As you walk around popular areas of Cairo you will never see a bench on a public street. The benches here in Fatimid land are for tourists.. obviously.. who well know how to make use of them.
What is it about a bench that seems so natural and desirable to anyone growing up in America, but which is odd within Egyptian culture? My idea is that we can see in this question another way in which different notions of private and public make a material difference in the layout of a city.
A bench along a public street in America represents the possibility of private space within public place. When I sit down on a bench along Main Street in some generic American city, I am for a moment creating a private world. In Egyptian culture I sense a definite line between these two spheres.. and difficulty in creating that kind of private bubble. Now there are parks here in Cairo with lots of benches.. but these are private parks.. i.e. where the private world is encouraged. The street is a public zone that one uses to finish one's work and move on to a private space as quickly as possible. The idea of a public bench is thus strange.
2. paved streets
This is a scene from in front of the Mosque of Sultan Qala'un. Three years ago when I was here this area was being dug up and the mosque was covered in scaffolding for refurbishment. The mosque looks beautiful now and a nicely curving paved street has been added. You can also see the white security booth sitting guard. As I walked down the street from this point it was strangely empty.. and of course I ran into all those benches lining the road.
Again the choice has been made to pamper tourists. This road is comfortable and allows the medieval mosques to show themselves to good effect. They also cancel out what used to be one of the first things a visitor noticed: how narrow and crowded the streets are as one comes into Cairo. As the central market street, this street would not have been quite as narrow as the side streets, but it was not a place for an easy stroll. These mosques were imagined as being situated in a tight, crowded, and above all commercial area. The commerce is still present.. if by that one means tourist goodies like water pipes and jewelry, but real Egyptian life has moved elsewhere. That has always been the central critique of the models for this area: they make no attempt to preserve the life that flowed in and around these beautiful buildings.
3. green space
I am the last person to complain about green space. And I took a seat under the shade of these trees just this afternoon. But such green space was not a priority in historic Cairo.. and its introduction into the city now is difficult to justify. There was green space outside the city toward the Nile.. and a medieval Cairene could walk in that direction. But the concept of a public urban "park" as we know it would just not have computed for medieval Egyptians. This again goes back to stark public/private divisions. Also, the place of the park was more or less filled by the mosque, which was open and allowed easy escape from the crowded city. Much of what we in America associate with a public park is wrapped up in the medieval mosque (although such public space was only for men).
Tracts Inside al-Azhar
June 27, 2009
Three years ago I covered in a more formal way the Mosque of al-Azhar (see here). This time I was especially paying attention to any ephemera that I might find in the mosque. I noticed an odd stand off to the far side of the interior part of the mosque:
It was a booth of some kind.. and a young guy was sitting next to it. Upon closer approach I could see that it was a small booth for proselytizing:
In the upper left corner you see the notice: "no tips".. so the books are free and there will not even be a plea for baksheesh! Then there is the tantalizing question: "What is its secret?" Islam is growing fast and here you can learn why everyone everywhere is joining up. One easily understands the impulse behind this. Al-Azhar is a much-visited site and that presents an opportunity to tell people about Islam.. and perhaps get someone interested in learning more.
As soon as I approached this booth the young guy stood up and asked me where I was from and started pulling out tract after tract of stuff for me to read. Here are the titles of what he gave me:
A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam
The Qur'an and Modern Science: Compatible or Incompatible?
I am a Muslim
Women in Islam versus Women in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition
The Concept of God in Islam
Muhammad the Messenger of Allah
The Life of the Prophet Muhammad (DVD)
So yes, it was quite a stack of tracts.
I might have refused them and saved some paper, but I was curious how al-Azhar would represent Islam. In other words, out of a hundred possible approaches, what would be the chosen approach here at al-Azhar? With this question in mind I asked the young guy which of these books he would recommend I start with, and he pointed to A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam.
It turns out that this tract is available online in its totality (here). Its basic task is to develop a comprehensive argument as to why Islam should be accepted by any reasonable person. Unfortunately it fails utterly in that task because of its insistence on linking scientific facts to obscure Quranic expressions. This leads to absurdities such as the notion that God threatens to take a sinner "by his lying sinful forehead" because the prefrontal area of the brain is where plans and language develop. Another such example is in the Qur'an's language about the unborn foetus. At one point the Qur'an apparently uses the term mudghah which means "chewed substance." The book then provides the following hilarious picture:
That is a scientifically labeled picture of a foetus lined up with a piece of gum that has been chewed and has one clear line of teeth imprints left in it.
This whole approach to thinking about the Qur'an is disconcertingly common. It can be found all over the web and I would just invite you to examine the following video clip from a series entitled "Miracle of Qur'an" (7 parts):
There is much that the Qur'an has to offer the world today, but trying to make it into a science textbook is a misstep. Tariq Ramadan situates the Qur'an as a text that sets meaning and value in the midst of a technically advanced but hollow world. That allows the Qur'an to gain a spiritual and moral position and does not force it to address contemporary scientific discoveries.
But despite my sense that this scientific proof approach is the wrong way to go.. it is nevertheless immensely popular in the Middle East.. and I am sure more broadly. This and other tracts have been translated into numerous languages:
But this is not a type of apologetic literature that is really talking with the outside world (what the best apologetic literature does). It is instead a kind of fantasy dialogue with the outside world, adopting the forms of secular authority (emphasis on Dr.s and institutions) but sharing nothing of the process of inquiry. I would love to see a more challenging interpretation of the Qur'an take root.. and become what visitors are confronted with upon visiting a-Azhar. As Tariq Ramadan has shown, the Qur'an really can be a challenge to modern society. But not in this form.
Sermons on Tape
June 27, 2009
Walking around al-Azhar mosque I came across a small store that sold tapes and CDs of sermons or readings from the Qur'an. In the video clip above I try to give a sense of the store and its stacks of sermon tapes. In the background you can see the stone wall that is the back of al-Azhar. I had struck up a conversation with the young guy manning the store, and he allowed me to take some pictures. He also put in a sermon by a popular preacher, Shaykh Abd al-Hamid Kishk. This is a sermon on the hijab, but somehow it manages to mention the Jews (yahud) a couple of times in this brief selection.
In understanding the contemporary Islamic world it is important to see a shadow globalization at work. The globalization that we know is connected to McDonalds and the Internet, but at the same time there is a spread of a homogenized and popualar version of fundamentalist Islam. This shadow globalization is spread by technology, but often not the technology that is most current. The presence in this video of a wall of tapes is an example of this. I don't even have a tape player any more! I wil need to talk to the tech people at Lawrence to borrow a tape player if I am going to listen to the two tapes I bought here.
Lots has been made of the ability of Islamic terrorists to make use of the Internet.. and for networking and communication that is undoubtedly important. But less is made of the ability of religious values and ideas to travel in our world by non-Internet means.. and the audio cassette is a great example of how this works.
A work I am hoping to go through this summer is The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics by Charles Hirschkind.. whose title promises that the book will cover some of this ground.
The Mosque of Husayn
June 26, 2009
The Mosque of Husayn is the spiritual heart of Cairo. Husayn was the grandson of Muhammad and is venerated by the Shi'as. Egyptian Muslims, though, are Sunni. So what's the deal with Husayn here in Cairo? It all goes back to the Fatimids who founded Cairo and ruled it from 969-1171 AD. The Fatimids were Shi'as (Isma'ilis, to be exact) and although their brand of Islam did not catch on, they established the popular sacred landscape of Cairo. When Salah al-Din took over leadership of Cairo in 1171 AD he did not tear down the Shi'a shrines, but simply incorporated them into the new Sunni system. So Husayn stayed and to our own time is a center of popular piety.
It's impossible to read much in the way of Egyptian literature without running into this mosque. In Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz there are some beautiful descriptions of the experience of visiting the mosque of Husayn. The following runs through the mind of the youth Kamal:
Although his high regard for al-Husayn... derived from al-Husayn's relationship to his grandfather, the Prophet, Kamal's knowledge of the prophet had not provided him with what he knew of about al-Husayn and the events of his life, nor did it explain the way his soul always hungered to have the saga of al-Husayn repeated, so he could draw from it the finest stories and the deepest faith. [53]
See how Mahfouz specifies that Kamal's devotion stems from his relationship to the prophet.. and not from his position as Imam, as the Shi'as would have it. But while technically orthodox in his veneration, Kamal's devotion also takes on a life of its own.
The importance of this shrine is clear even in 1183 when the Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr makes his visit to this shrine the center of his account of Cairo. The medieval shrine is now gone.. and what remains is decidedly modern.. but this is no recently established spiritual center.
The final video below is quite funny. I track a young guy filming himself at the mosque of Husayn. He is especially interested in getting a video of himself praying within the shrine.
It was a reminder to me of the way technology is quickly incorporated into religious practices. I am using my tiny Flip video camera to observe, but for pilgrims it takes a more positive role.
