In our time a thousand travellers' books and a spate of illustrated magazines and moving
pictures have made a cliche of the East, but in 1798 nothing in Egypt was familiar
to the Europeans. Travellers marvelled at everything they saw, and what they did not
understand they tended to dismiss as decadent, superstitious
and uncouth.
It seemed ridiculous, for example, that the Egyptians, on the occasion of a death in the
family, should turn their furniture upside down; and that they should believe that, with music, they
could charm snakes out of their houses. The music itself was a cacophony to European ears, and the Moslem
prayers a grovelling on the ground. The sheikh, sitting cross-legged by the hour on his divan,
appeared to be merely apathetic and dull.
Yet the Egyptians were not quite so decadent as the West has liked to imagine, either before or since. The French now,
and the English later on, were to exclaim about the lasciviousness of the public dancing girls in Cairo, the prevalence
of brothels, the abominations of the slave trade, the shiftlessness and deceit of the orientals, their hopeless indolence.
But in fact there were strict rules in the midst of this apparent laissez-faire. The majority of Egyptian women were not
dancing girls but wives who behaved with much more decorum than women of the West. Divorce was easy, but marriage while
it lasted was usually sacro-sanct, and family ties were very strong.
Drunkenness hardly existed, drug-taking and sodomy were not common vices, and slaves in Cairo were too valuable to
be maltreated. As for the sheikhs, they were very far from being apathetic and dull: they were the men of law and
religion in the community and they were greatly respected. The Koran which they expounded put the strongest
strictures upon everybody's life, and in the main they were obeyed. Lane lists the seven deadly sins in Egypt,
and very interesting they are: disobedience to parents, murder, desertion during an expedition against infidels,
usury, falsely accusing a woman of adultery, idolatry and the wasting of the property of orphans.
It would be absurd, of course, to make out that the Egyptians were paragons of virtue compared, say, with the invading
French - they lied, they stole, they were superstitiously ignorant, they were always lazy when they had the chance,
and were probably cowards as well, but they also had a certain dignity in their lives, they knew patience and quietude
(which the French did not), and they were graceful, even beautiful, people. Lane describes the women as follows:
'The forms of womenhood begin to develop themselves about the ninth and tenth year; at the age of 15 or 16 they generally
attain their highest degree of perfection.... They are characterized, like the men, by a fine oval countenance,
though in some instances it is rather broad.
The eyes, with very few exceptions, are black, large and of a long
almond-form, with long and beautiful lashes and an exquisitely soft, bewitching expression - eyes more beautiful can
hardly be conceived: their charming effect is heightened by the concealment of the other features (however pleasing the
latter may be), and is rendered still more striking by a practice universal among the females of the higher and middle
classes, and very common among those of the lower orders, which is that of blackening the edge of the eyelids both above
and below the eye, with a black powder called Kohl.'
The other practice of the women - that of tattooing eyelids, lips and chin with a kind of purple ink - was
not so pleasant.
The extreme modesty of the respectable women - outside the harem they went swathed from head to foot in black - made a
strange contrast to the licence of the dancing girls who were often called in after a banquet. Denon, like most of
the European travellers who were soon to follow him up the Nile, affected to be appalled.
`Their dance,' he says,
`began voluptuously and soon became lascivious, displaying nothing but a gross and indecent expression of the ecstasy
of the senses; and what rendered these pictures still more disgusting, was that at the moment in which they kept the
least bounds, the two (female) musicians, with the bestiality of the lowest women in the streets of Europe disturbed
with a coarse laugh the sense of intoxication that terminated the dance.'
Lane makes a distinction between the almehs, the singers and musicians who would be admitted into a respectable
house, and the ghazeeyehs, or common dancing girls. `Some of them,' he says, 'when they exhibit before a private
party of men, wear nothing but the shinityan (or trousers) and a tob (or very full shirt or gown) of semi-transparent,
coloured gauze, open nearly halfway down the front. To extinguish the least spark of modesty which they may yet
sometimes affect to retain, they are plentifully supplied with brandy or some other intoxicating liquor. The scenes
that ensue cannot be described.' But he adds, rather unexpectedly: 'Upon the whole I think they are
the finest women in Egypt.... Women, as well as men, take delight in
witnessing their performances. . . .' Part 1Part 2
Extract from “The Blue Nile”, Written by Alan Moorehead. Westerham Press Ltd Kent, London: 1972.
