Tahrir Square (Deleted Scene)
I’ve spent a lot of time in Cairo. When I was on my personal mission to fix U.S.-Middle East policy, I spent time there almost every year.
It is a weird sensation to be in love with a city you hate. Cairo is big, crowded, dirty, and full of rude people. I visited so many times, though, that it became a part of my everyday life and imagination. It became a place that I missed and looked forward to revisiting.
One of the things you’ll find in my book is that I am frequently catapulted or drawn into a new place. Rather than hopping off an airplane and deliberately moving myself into a new city, I get whisked away at breakneck speeds into an uncertain future. Every time I left the isolation of my fundamentalist friends in Nasr City, it felt like I was being sucked into Cairo via her most important landmark—Tahrir Square.
In this deleted scene, I wanted to share a perspective on Cairo that doesn’t quite make it into the book—her allure.
Part of the beauty of Cairo is that you can’t truly know her. Just when you think you’ve discovered every alley around every fast food restaurant or Western-style hotel, you find a new shop or piece of shoreline that completely redirects your path to another unknown reality. It forced me to constantly reassess my relationship with her.
The energy started a few miles outside the Square when you made the transition from the suburbs to the outskirts of Cairo. The scenery changed suddenly from wide boulevards to a twisted array of concrete and steel. There were so many roads and bridges going into the city that in my mind now, it mimics a collection of thick gray snakes writhing amongst themselves. All of the cars and people moving in every direction at varying speeds of ‘very fast’ gave the impression that the bridges themselves were in the process of slithering over and through the roads they entangled. I frequently found myself sitting on the flip-down seat just inside the open, side door of a bus. There was a sense that the road and the wind and the people in the cars around me were being wrapped up and sucked into the Square, not propelling themselves intentionally in that direction.
Everything that was being pulled towards the Square just relented. We all accepted our fate and barreled our way in its direction as if we had control over our bodies. Even those of us who weren’t so sure that we wanted to be moving at those speeds were willingly accepting our fate. There were places we could have hopped of those buses, but once you hit the concrete snakes, that bus would stop for no one until it had reached the Square. It felt nothing like driving on I-76 outside Philly. No matter how fast I drove on my trips home, I could not recreate the sensation similar to descending on Cairo. In Philly I knew where I was going and I knew multiple ways of getting there. There was no such thing as getting lost because I knew where all of the major landmarks and roads were. I never felt like the Ben Franklin bridge was in charge of me or that it was moving me in its own direction, I was just driving to Jersey or wherever.
Even when I moved to D.C., if I went out late at night in the middle of the week so I could drive as fast as my car would take me. Or in the middle of rush hour when the volume of vehicles was the highest. Even then, in the middle of the Mixing Bowl, where almost every major highway in the region climbs over, around, and through one another, I couldn’t recreate the same feeling.
Part of me assumed it was because the doors on my car were closed. Another part of me figures that common American decency limited the average speeds in observance of the laws. But the biggest part of me believes that it has something to do with that city. Even though I never liked Cairo, I had respect for its power to drag people in and satisfy them so consistently that they resisted the thought of leaving.