1 million people live in ancient Islamic cemetery

ANSA ^ | 2008-12-09 | Cristiana Missori

[forkinsocket]

Clean air, green surroundings, silence, calm and wide streets...sounds like a residential area in a big city, right? In fact this is the City of the Dead, situated in the east of Cairo on the foot slopes of the Moqattam mountain. The City of the Dead is the oldest Muslim cemetery in all Egypt that is still operational, and today it is home to around one million people, living people.

Why have such a high number of people chosen to move to a cemetery, and what kind of relationship has been established between the land of the living and that of the dead? These are the questions which an Italian anthropologist, Anna Tozzi Di Marco, sets out to answer in her new book 'Il giardino di Allah' (The Garden of Allah), just released by the publishing house Ananke (pp. 160).

Thanks to the support of the Italian Foreign Ministry and the Egyptian Ministry for Education, the scholar has been able to research this phenomenon by living in 'Medinat al Amuat' (the City of the Dead) from 1998 to 2005.

"I spent a lot of time in the cemetery", says the researcher, "observing, taking part in lives of its inhabitants, from weddings to exchanging visits to funeral rites". The City of the Dead is an enormous area measuring 12km, criss-crossed by large and fast-flowing roads and subdivided into various zones. "Some of these zones are completely urbanised, with running water, electricity, schools, a doctor's surgery for women and their newborn and a pharmacy", explains the anthropologist.

Despite what many people (erroneously) believe, it is not only poor people who live amongst the Fatimid, Mameluke and Ottoman graves, where holy Sufi, sultans such as Qaytbey and Barquq, and important imams have been buried.

"The occupation of these burial grounds", continues Tozzi Di Marco, "began in the 1950s, when many people moved from the countryside to the capital city. The high demographic pressure, the poor state of the workers' housing, and more recently the exponential increase in housing prices were also root causes". Those who count themselves as inhabitants of the burial ground include herdsmen, workers, professionals, traders, Muslims and Christians, who have turned these tombs into real homes.

"Traditional tombs", claims the anthropologist, "include a room for the dead, one or two adjacent rooms and/or a closed courtyard, allowing relatives of the dead to visit their loved ones for long periods".

"Muslims", she concludes, "spend a lot of time at the cemetery, and above all the women who hold the family's memory". The Cairo graveyard is today home to around one million people. Among its residents there are some whose families have lived their for three generations, without finding a stable living situation.

For the Egyptian authorities, this area of the capital is one of the many uncomfortable truths they must face which explicitly shows how the government's housing policies have failed. The sad thing is that for many people in Cairo, this immense area (which is shown on maps as a white space, as if it was nothing even there) is a matter of disgrace, something that should never even be talked about.

[forkinsocket]

.

[philled]

1 million people live in ancient Islamic cemetery

Not surprising considering millions of Islamists still live in the seventh century.

[rfp1234]

Efforts to raise taxes on residents met with stiff opposition.

[JennysCool]

One for the list?

[Oratam]

The neighbors are quiet.

[NathanR]

This thread is useless without pictures.

[Ueriah]

People are dying to move in.

[annalex]

1 And they came over the strait of the sea into the country of the Gerasens. 2 And as he went out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the monuments a man with an unclean spirit, 3 Who had his dwelling in the tombs, and no man now could bind him, not even with chains. 4 For having been often bound with fetters and chains, he had burst the chains, and broken the fetters in pieces, and no one could tame him. 5 And he was always day and night in the monuments and in the mountains, crying and cutting himself with stones.

6 And seeing Jesus afar off, he ran and adored him. 7 And crying with a loud voice, he said: What have I to do with thee, Jesus the Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not. 8 For he said unto him: Go out of the man, thou unclean spirit. 9 And he asked him: What is thy name? And he saith to him: My name is Legion, for we are many. 10 And he besought him much, that he would not drive him away out of the country.

11 And there was there near the mountain a great herd of swine, feeding. 12 And the spirits besought him, saying: Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. 13 And Jesus immediately gave them leave. And the unclean spirits going out, entered into the swine: and the herd with great violence was carried headlong into the sea, being about two thousand, and were stifled in the sea. 14 And they that fed them fled, and told it in the city and in the fields. And they went out to see what was done: 15 And they came to Jesus, and they see him that was troubled with the devil, sitting, clothed, and well in his wits, and they were afraid.

16 And they that had seen it, told them, in what manner he had been dealt with who had the devil; and concerning the swine. 17 And they began to pray him that he would depart from their coasts.

(Mark 5)

[SunkenCiv]

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[apillar]

In fact, it’s so popular that people are just dieing to get in...

[RichInOC]

They can’t even afford to die? Now that’s poor.

[ReneeLynn]

It’s real estate to die for.

[Fred Nerks]

CITY OF THE DEAD.

"Egyptians dont call the sprawling cemetery at the eastern edge of Cairo 'City of the Dead.' Only Westerners do. Cairenes prefer to call it simply the arafa, the cemetery,. But what better name than City of the Dead to describe the four-mile-long walled necropolis that now houses thousands of families and countless small businesses? Video stores, car repair shops and tile factories line the main arteries of the cemetery, and cramped buses deliver hoards of commuters at the end of each work day. Furniture makers ply their craft inside tombs and streams of uniformed children parade to and from school, stopping for a quick soccer game between the cenotaphs. The arafa is a necropolis turned metropolis, where the needs of the living have far outpaced the sanctity of the dead. Here, survival takes precedence over superstition, and the impact of overpopulation and overcrowding wears a human face.

The cemetery is filled with refugees from Cairo's housing shortage who became homesteaders in a landscape of tombs and mausoleums. Today, some 50,000 people live in tombs while between 500,000 and a million more are cramped into tenement houses where tombs once stood. These people staked their claim in the cemetery when no place else could absorb them, and subsequently they came to prefer the silent company of the dead to the harsh conditions of urban living. Many claim they wouldn't leave even if they had the chance. Today, tombs that were designed to house a single family teem with bare-bottomed children, chickens and goats. Soccer balls fly where the relatives of the deceased used to pay their respects every week, and tattered laundry floats between the cenotaphs, obscuring the names and prayers engraved on weather beaten surfaces. Where horse-drawn carriages used to deliver weekly visitors, sooty buses honk their way down paved roads, and on a once contemplative lane between the tombs, a Friday junk market overflows with the refuse of modern society looking to be reborn.

[nralife]

http://www.satellite-sightseer.com/id/6983

[NathanR]

See the post 13 above. Also you can follow this link.

http://childrenofthealley.blogspot.com/2008/03/city-of-dead-cairo.html

[Fred Nerks]

So, the mohammadans overran and plundered Egypt, and now they are living in the tombs of their ancestors?

[Irene Adler]

While I was teaching on the university level, I knew an Egyptian woman professor fairly well. She and her family were Catholics. She once described looking at a house to purchase in town that backed up on a cemetary. She said that she would not purchase a house in such a location and that people in Egypt and the Middle East would NEVER choose to live near a cemetary, and also that cemetaries in the Middle East would have a high wall around them in areas that were near housing. She kept saying, “It’s a cultural preference.” I attributed her preference to the tradition of the dead being “unclean” and the related practice of burying the dead very quickly. She was quite vociferous about this belief in the Middle East so this article puzzles me.

[bigheadfred]

Don't let the article puzzle you. It is "dead" on.

She is/was just full of sh**

I don't see no high wall around these tombs and there are what, 15 million people living next to them.

Culture my a**

[Ken H]

Why are people making jokes over this? It's a grave situation!

[wildbill]

Same thing goes on in the United States. Except they are called Democrat voters.