Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla y Centro Cultural Islámico de Sevilla®
Story by Hafiz Luqman Nieto, vice-president of the Seville Mosque Foundation, about Cairo, the city where he has been perfecting his Arabic and Taywid of the Koran for months.
This story is published on his blog, www.luqmannieto.com It is originally written in English. (Translation by Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla.)
Cairo: the inconsiderate friend you can’t help but love.
Hafiz Luqman Nieto
Cairo is a big, very big city. It’s a chaotic city, where most things don’t work as you’d expect. It’s a city where the predominant colors are browns and grays, it’s like you’re watching an old movie on an old TV, where the vividness of the colors isn’t what we’re used to on our phone screens nowadays.
Cairo, at first, is also rude and does not apologize for it. It can end up irritating you if you are used to the good manners of European cities.
Cairo is like that friend we all have, the one who works his own way, who doesn’t seem to care at all what people think of him, to the point of being inconsiderate. That friend who will make you wait for an hour and not show up; the one who when you try to call him doesn’t pick up the phone. The friend who is unapologetic about who he is and is sometimes arrogant.
But he’s the friend we can’t do without because if you go beyond that “I don’t care what you think” appearance, he has a big heart. And you can’t help but love it. Despite the numerous times you swear that it’s the last time, you always end up forgetting about it; Because there’s something about him that’s weird: he’s genuine.
Cairo is like that.
It is a city where fifteen million people live and millions more go to work every day, but it is not prepared for that human stress. And it stresses her out. Traffic jams are the norm and not the exception, people seem to be on the edge every morning and driving is only for the bravest.
Public services are almost non-existent and everything becomes a challenge if you try to do something bureaucratic. People struggle every day to make ends meet. And let’s not talk about politics… A subject reserved for the confidentiality of our own thoughts.
But if you can get past this, the dusty air, after all, is built on a desert; overcome soft colors, such as pastel; the traffic, the crowds of people, the difficulty of doing something relatively normal in many other places, the nervous people and driving like a jungle; the appearance that everything was built a century ago and has not been taken care of. If you do, you will find that Cairo is alive; And that’s more than can be said for many other places. And Cairo has a big heart, like that friend.
With a little patience and perseverance, you’ll discover that Cairo has many secrets. Beautiful places on the banks of the Nile or popular cafes in old Cairo where you can smoke a shisha for hours, just watching the people passing by. Walk around and see how the people here enjoy their own city, which, despite everything, they appreciate. Watch the children playing in the streets. Listen to the Adhan coming from a thousand minarets – Cairo was called the city of a thousand Adhans. Have a conversation with a taxi driver or anyone else you meet. You’ll be surprised.
Dig deeper and you will see that it has a story to tell, a long and arduous story, all the more interesting for that. You’ll meet people who carry the weight of thousands of years and people whose forms seem to have been taken from an old novel. You can find the latest and oldest, all in one place.
And at the heart of it all, knowledge. Hidden; only for those who seek and want it. A knowledge that will help you find yourself, and what other knowledge could you want?
