The first hurdle to beginning my course at Cairo University was finding where I was to study. The only information we had been given in London was the name of the professor, who belonged to the Faculty of Arts . 'Arts' according to my Arabic dictionary was funuun. I jumped into a taxi and asked for kulliyat al-funuun. This evoked the usual reaction of puzzlement on the part of the driver, and the usual good hearted determination to get the foreigner to somewhere that might not be entirely unconnected with the required destination.
We ground our way to the university campus at Giza, where we
asked mystified students and doorman for kulliyat
al-funuun. Eventually somebody directed us back towards the city and we
turned onto the bridge leading to Zamalek, the posh diplomatic quarter on a
lush island in the middle of the Nile. We stopped outside a garden with high
hedges enclosing a lawn where young students painted at easels. One of them
came to the gate and solved the mystery: funuun
meant 'arts' in the sense of painting and sculpture. The word for the 'arts' of
literature, history and so on was aadaab.
Back we crawled to Giza where the the kulliyat
aadaab was located after all, with
the driver sporting an 'I knew that' expression.
Swinging past a roundabout near the university I saw one of
the traffic accidents that were so frequent in Cairo and yet treated with
apparent apathy: A bus with as many passengers on the outside as inside lurched
into a turn, and a man fell off the back hitting the road like a sack of meat,
where he lay with the traffic streaming round him.
The professor wasn't at work so I went home on the Nile
river bus; I'd had enough of the roads.
The half dozen or so UK students in my group had dribbled
into Cairo over a week or so, and one day we assembled in the Professor's
office to find that the university didn't really know what to do with us. We were
introduced to a group of Romanian students, who sat on the opposite of the room
so that a sort of imaginary Iron Curtain separated us. Some of them wore dark
glasses like Maciek in Ashes and
Diamonds. These were the days of the Soviet sphere of influence, and I
suppose that countries like Egypt and Cuba were often sent fraternal benison in
the form of Eastern European students with poor eyesight.
There being nothing in the way of a course in Arabic for
foreigners, the university decided that we would have tutorials given by some
of its dynamic young academics This
required us to buy copies of the textbooks based on their masters theses -
apparently a normal way of supplementing academic incomes. I only recall one of
these texts, a work on the ancient Arabic epic Sīrat al-amīra D̲h̲āt al-Himma . In
fact I didn't have a clue it was about an ancient Arabic epic. We sat befogged
through our classes with the lecturer assuming that everybody knew exactly what
Sīrat al-amīra D̲h̲āt al-Himma was.
Thinking back, this wouldn't have been much different from me explaining the
life of Worzel Gummidge to a group of visiting Cambodians.
One of the bright spots of the tutorials was the sufragi who brought coffee. Tall and
moustachioed, and wearing a khaki university uniform, he quietly took orders
without writing anything down, and slipped back into the classroom later with a
large trayful of tiny cups. At least this kept us awake during long classes
when we went in a circle translating the lecturers' books aloud a sentence at a
time.
I attended a few mass lectures and was saddened by the
number of poor students with eyes cloudy from trachoma. Such students were
never seen on the campus of the American University in Cairo, where glamorous
pouting girl students were dropped off by men with gold neck chains driving
sports cars.
Graduates of government universities were, I was told,
guaranteed a job. I saw evidence of this in a Bank Misr branch one day when I
exchanged a travellers cheque, and my documents spent forty five minutes being
passed down a row of desks, each manned by a graduate whose task was to read
every word twenty times and initial in triplicate. Wincing with diarrhoea cramps,
I debated jumping into a taxi sans
passport and money and coming back three or four hours later.
Over the weeks of September I got into the routine of
walking from my flat near Tahrir Square to the Nile river ferry stop and taking
the boat to Giza. I always entered the boat through the doorway, but most of
the passengers climbed through the windows, probably an ingrained habit of the
Cairenes given that every public transport conveyance had only a quarter of the
seats required for the passengers. I avoided buses because they were hideously
crowded. One day in Adly Street I saw a tram, a taxi and a bus collide. The
small boys in nightshirts who rode on the bumpers were tossed into the air like
footballs and crashed onto the road in bloody heaps. I dashed into a barbers
shop and screamed at the owner to call an ambulance; he shrugged and carried on
shaving a big stubbled chin. This happened every day.
The day after the war began I went to the university and
found the campus gates locked and a tank parked outside. We never returned to
our classes. It would be unfair to say that our lecturers must have been
relieved that they no longer had to teach the foreigners; the Egyptian forces
suffered ghastly losses and it is certain that our teachers' families would
have been touched by death.
Our professor from London visited us briefly after the
airport reopened. He took us in an army jeep to an avant garde theatre performance about Ancient Egypt where students
- perhaps the ones with the easels - chanted Horus, Horus, Horus for a long time.
Note: I was fortunate enough to be taught in London by Dr
Fouad Megally, a distinguished scholar and a gifted and kind teacher. I learned
recently that he passed away in 2011. His Times
obituary is at http://announcements.thetimes.co.uk/obituaries/timesonline-uk/obituary.aspx?pid=150431487
. A fuller obituary appears in The Glastonbury Review: Issue 120, July 2011.
© Stuart Campbell 2014
Read more about my writing at http://stubooks.blogspot.com.au/
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