Cairo's City of the Dead - The Graveyard Neighborhood

        Image AlWaght


This graveyard in Cairo is known as Al-Arafa or City of the Dead. The Cemetery is four miles long. Many of these graves are a thousand years old including the tombs of the Mamelukes. Egypt's King Farouk is also buried here. Some of the tombs are inside covered rooms, some in the open. It isn't only a cemetery any longer. It's a neighborhood.

Many segments of the poor in Cairo cannot afford rent above $5/month and the only 'home' available to them is a 'tomb-room' in the City of the Dead. Most of these tomb rooms don't have proper doors that can be locked at night and the cemetery has a very low fence. The poor residents who live here fear attacks from thugs and other criminals every night. They work hard during the day as street vendors selling food, clothes or mending shoes, and stay awake half the night in fear. The only "neighborly" activity they get to watch is the occasional funeral ceremony when someone rich dies somewhere in Cairo and family and friends bring the coffin for burial.

"An Egyptian woman prepares a meal next to a mausoleum. She has lived in this room in Cairo's City of the Dead for 40 years." - National Geographic.


Many of these graveyard residents have been living here for decades and have begun to like the solitude and serenity it offers. Most of them aren't eager to move to other parts of Cairo. Writes AlWaghat "Children play hide and seek behind the tombs, others maneuver a football to score past the invisible goal line demarcated by two graves. Women hang laundry across strings that extend across rooftops, sometimes from one gravestone to another. Some men bake bread for a living, others enjoy watching TV upon returning from a long day of work. Welcome to the City of the Dead, where among the graves there is life." In 2011 when Cairo's Tahrir Square was bustling with protests, a resident of City of the Dead said about this neighborhood, "Life here is peaceful. Living with the dead is a good thing for an old person. They don’t talk, and they are very still.”

Al-Haj Mohammed Abdel Naeem, a resident of Cairo's City of the Dead in his tomb room with his humble belongings. Image source Medium Corp.


No one in the City of the Dead has a fridge. They say they don't need it. They buy food and cook on a day to day basis, just as much as they need to eat in a single day. They cannot afford to cook extra and there is never any leftover food.

A little 7-year-old boy read on top of one of the old tombs in the City of the Dead. Image source Medium Corp.


However, the humility of these poor residents of Al-Arafa Cemetery cannot be accepted as an excuse for the negligence, dishonesty and insensitivity of the successive modern governments. Since the past four decades, Egypt has been getting an annual financial package of $2b from the US, only to be divided among the brass and the senior bureaucrats. In Egypt's Youth Forum early 2017, President Sisi said "we are very poor, very poor." In the Youth Forum of 2016, he said he had nothing except water in his fridge for 10 years. But for the inauguration of Suez Canal expansion in 2015, the government spent $14 million. Same year, Economic Development Conference in Sharm al-Sheikh cost over $7 million. Needless to mention, millions are spent on motorcades of the bigwigs, their luxury private jets and bulky salaries.

Clever Sisi says "we are very poor" but is silent on the question, who is "we?"

History

Tombs of the Mamluks in the City of the Dead.  From Getty Images.

Difficult as it may sound at present,  in the middle ages Egypt was one of the great Muslim lands, among those that shone the brightest.  The Abbasids (750-909 AD), Fatimids (909-1171 AD), Ayyubids (1171-1260 AD) and the Mamluks (1250-1570) constituted the Golden Age of the Islamic Empire and the most prosperous and educative era of the period in world history for 8 centuries.

For an interesting essay on the City of the Dead visit 

Al-Waght page.