The Mawled. The night of all nights.

I'm not sure how it happened. How we got there. Where we even were. The whole night is like a hazy blur in my memory. Were we really there? What did we see? What were we watching? And why!

The night began much like any other Thursday night- a little shisha and stellas on the balcony, listening to the mixes that we were preparing for the next big Mermaid night out. All was normal until Nada said to us, "hey, guys, I don't know if you heard but there's this Mawled that starts at midnight in Bahari. I don't really know what it is, something with Sufis- some sort of festival. You can buy lots of things and its supposed to be really cool."
Sweet. We'll meet you there, kiddo.
So Mae, Katelyn, Jordan, and I hop in the cab heading to Bahari, a neighborhood pretty close by that we're fairly familiar with. We ask the cab driver to take us to the Mawled, and he seems fairly confident that he knows where he is going. "Oh yeah," he says, "the Abu Abas mosque. Mesh mushkela (no problem)."
We arrived at the Abu Abas mosque at around 12:30 to what appeared to be a deserted carnival scene. It really was straight out of a horror movie- old amusement park rides with clowns painted on them rocking back and forth, crazy old men waddling over and staring, little children swinging on the old rides, and donkeys walking through the carnival pulling squeeky carts. We quickly realized that we were not at the right place and decided to get into a cab before this really turned into "Saw 4: Carny Carnage- Egyptian Style."
After getting the name of the real place from Nada, the cab starts driving. And driving. And driving. And driving. And the scene gets more and more Shaabi (authentically Egyptian, I guess. The word Shaab means people, and "shaabi" can mean popular or just referring to anything about real Egyptian people). The roads are less paved, buildings worn down, more men are walking around in very traditional clothing, the coffee shops are packed with men playing dominoes and smoking shisha, we see fewer and fewer women and we keep driving further and further. After about 20 minutes, we drive over a bridge with a river, and we all start to look at each other and wonder, "where is he taking us? could this possibly be right? where in the heck are we going!! when do we start getting concerned!!"
But finally, after about a half hour, the cab pulls up to a giant tent and we can hear music playing. As we get out of the cab, the driver tells us at least three times, "Watch out for yourselves. Be careful."
So at this point, I'm pretty nervous. I look up at the tent and ask my friends, "guys, should we go back?"
They all ignore me.
So we move on. And as we approach the tent, all I can hear is music blaring and all I see are men's heads, all turning to look at us. And we move closer and closer in until we finally walk through. And to our left is a stage with a man singing and in front of him is a crowd of 50 men, several of them twirling and turning and singing and dancing, all in a trance. And we move further and further in and we see crowds and crowds of people, all swaying their arms up in the air, twirling in circles. Some people are wearing festive party hats, like the kind you see on New Years Eve. But most people are wearing traditional galabiyas. Everyone turns and stares at us.
So we move our way through, push our way through the crowd and immediately spot our group of friends, and I sigh with relief. There are 8 of us Americans and 3 Sufi guides with them. They take us to a large tent adjacent to the one with the music and we all remove our shoes and separate boys and girls. A man brings us over tea, and we all start chatting.
We learn that a Mawled is a Sufi tradition (Sufi is a sect of Islam, different from Sunni and Shiite and are famous for practicing mysticism. I am not sure how many Sufis there are in Egypt, but I do know that many of their practices are not accepted by Sunni Muslims who make up the largest percentage of Egypt's population). The Mawled celebrates the lives of saints that have passed away. This particular Mawled was celebrating a Sheikh that was a very respected man in the community and who passed away in 1979. They have these celebrations fairly regularly with the largest one taking place in a town called Desuk in Kofr El-Sheikh (this happens to be the town that my former roommate Eman grew up in, and I cannot wait to ask her all about this!)
So we sit in the tent for about an hour, chatting with the people around us, trying to glean as much information as we can about this festival. In the meantime, children have taken to approaching us, shaking our hands, asking us our names, and men are whipping out their camera phones, photographing the Aganeb (foreigners). When the music started again, we left this little tent and moved onto the larger one.
This was really the incredible thing to watch.
First- the music: At the front of the tent on this same stage, this same man was singing. He had been singing for hours at this point and you could not hear a change in his voice. This music was meant to help the participants get into a trance. I don't know exactly how to describe this sound, but imagine one long, 4 hour song that sounds exactly the same throughout. But about every 20 minutes or so, there is a slight change in the beat, in the rhythm, and it seems like that little change helps build the momentum up more and more. So after an hour of listening, you feel your heart beating a little faster, and your nerves going a little stronger. And you could really feel that if you closed your eyes and concentrated on the music and on the rhythm, it would be so easy to slip into a trance like the rest of the people there.
Second- the dancing. Standing behind the singer was a man dressed in all green. He wore a green turban and a green outfit that was shaped something like the outfits in Aladdin. He even had his face and body painted green. And he stood behind the singer, and he blew a whistle to the beat of the music, and he twirled around and around and around. And all through the audience, people were lifting their arms are twirling and dancing. And at one point, I looked at a stern looking husband move to the center of the crowd, lift up his arms, smile, and twirl.
Third- the people. Or one man in particular. Sitting in front of us was a man with a white beard wearing a white turban and a gray galabeya. He sat with his legs crossed and alternated between shisha smoke and his prayer beads. One minute, his mouth was attached to his shisha, and it was just puff and blow and puff and blow for minutes straight without a break. And then he would pass the shisha to his friend and move onto his prayer beads. And he would push the prayer beads through his fingers, muttering prayers, and the amazing part was that he did this in perfect rhythm with the music. And as the music got faster, the beads would start flying. And at certain points, he would turn around and look at us and we saw that he wore dark black eye liner around his eyes. He was a figure straight out of folklore.
So we stood watching this scene for an hour, in awe at where we were, at what were we watching. We were struck with how little we actually understand about Egypt, about this culture. How, in reality, we will never understand this culture and these people and this place. We could live here for a year or 3 or 7 or 30 and still have no clue. And it dawned on us how difficult it would be to explain this event to ourselves and to our family, and how difficult it is in general to relate Egypt to those at home. We want to show you what we are doing here, what we are thinking about, how we see things. But at the same time, all of our blog posts and emails and facebook pictures tell more about us than the do about Egypt. And it is scary to think that people at home can read our writing and think both that we have a great understanding of this culture, and now too, just by reading Monica and Mae's blog, they understand Egypt. We don't get it and I don't think we will never get it. And the challenge of living here is diplomatically and fairly accurately depicting America to Egyptians and at the same time diplomatically and accurately reflecting Egypt to our friends and family back home. And how can you possibly represent these countries that are so diverse and whose interactions are so complex? And Egypt is one of the most complicated places I've ever encountered. I don't think I will ever have a handle on it.
Anyway, after standing and watching the dancing and singing for an hour, we went and walked around a bit and then sat further away from the speakers. Someone brought us sodas to drink and we again chatted with the people around us. One man started talking to Nada, Fatima, and I about Islam. It was basically a sermon about how our souls are the electricity of our bodies. Lamps cannot run without electricity, and our souls are our electricity, powered by God to help us get through our days. He asked us our impressions of Egypt, talked about Islam and Christianity, and explained that without this Mawled, we never would have met each other, so some things are obviously predestined by God to happen. This Mawled happened for a reason- to bring us all together to talk and exchange our world views.
After this chat, we realized how late it had actually gotten and that it was probably time to head home, considering that this Mawled was going to go until morning. So we said our goodbyes and thank yous, got in a cab and went home. And over a pizza at 4:30 am, we digested the evening's events, trying to piece together what we had seen and learned.