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Culture
The Cairo Opera House (tel: (02) 341 2926 or 739 8144; website: www.operahouse.gov.eg) is the city’s main venue for drama, dance, film and music. It is located in the Gezira Exhibition Grounds on Gezira Island and has excellent acoustics and two halls – the main one seating 1200 people and the smaller holding 500.
There are numerous cultural centres, which have very varied programmes incorporating lectures, films, music, exhibitions and other cultural events. Details are available in the monthly magazine Egypt Today (website: www.egypttoday.com) and in the newspapers Al-Ahram Weekly and The Middle East Times (website: www.metimes.com). The main cultural centres include the American Cultural Centre in the US Embassy, 5 Amrika al-Latiniya (tel: (02) 355 8927), the British Council, 192 al-Nil (tel: (02) 303 1514), the Canadian Cultural Information Centre, 5 al-Saraya al-Kubra (tel: (02) 354 3110), the Centre Français de Culture et de Coopération, 1 Madrasat el-Huquq al-Faransiya (tel: (02) 354 1012), the Egyptian Centre for International Cultural Cooperation, 11 Shagarat al-Durr (tel: (02) 341 5419), the Goethe Institute, 5 ‘Abd al-Salam’ Arif (tel: (02) 575 9877), the Japanese Cultural Centre, 2nd floor, Cairo Centre, 106 Qasr al’Aini (tel: (02) 355 3962 or 794 9432), the Middle Eastern Cultural Centre, 17 Mar’ashli (tel: (02) 341 4053), and the United Arab Emirates Cultural Centre, 9 Qambiz (tel: (02) 349 9166).
Cairo has a healthy art scene, with numerous galleries spread around the city. To discover what is going on, the Atelier du Caire, 2 Karim al-Dawla (tel: (02) 574 6730), acts as both gallery and a meeting place for artists.
There is no city-wide ticketing organisation. For tourists, the best way to buy tickets is from their hotel concierge or a local travel agency, such as American Express (tel: (02) 370 3411), Misr Travel (tel: (02) 393 0010) or Thomas Cook (tel: (02) 356 4650).
Music: Classical performances at cultural centres and at the Cairo Opera House (see above) are more usually of Western classical music, although classical Arab music can be heard as well. It can also be heard at the Sayed Darwish Concert Hall, Sharia Gamal al-Din al-Afghani (tel: (02) 561 2473), in performances given by the Umm Kalthoum Classical Arabic Music Troupe, during the winter months only.
Theatre: The seven-storey Cairo Opera House (see above) has both international and local performers. There are two indoor concert halls and an open-air theatre. Visitors should note that in the main hall men must wear a jacket and tie.
Dance: Dance is not a major art form in Cairo, unless you count the folk dance shows that many hotels incorporate as part of the entertainment packages for their guests. There are performances by visiting dance companies, including an annual visit by the Bolshoi Ballet, and by the Cairo Opera Ballet Company, at the Cairo Opera House (see above). The cultural centres listed above also put on dance performances. Other options range from belly-dancing to Sufi dancing. The former can be seen in Las Vegas-style productions at the Cairo Sheraton, Midan el Galaa in Dokki (tel: (02) 336 9700), and the Nile Hilton, Midan Tahrir (tel: (02) 578 0444). Sufi dancing, more commonly known in the West as the dance of the whirling dervishes, can be seen on Wednesday and Saturday evenings at the Ghurriya Cultural Centre in the Madrassa of al-Ghouri, Sharia al-Azhar (tel: (02) 909146).
Film: Cairo was once known as the Hollywood of the Middle East because of the number of Arabic films made here, but no longer, although a new movie studio was recently built outside the city. Cinemas tend to show Hollywood blockbusters with Arabic subtitles but there are also limited runs of some arthouse films in the various cultural centres around the city. Two proper cinemas that do show arthouse films are the Cairo Sheraton, Sharia al-Giza (tel: (02) 760 6081), and a two-screen cinema at the Ramses Hilton (tel: (02) 574 7436).
Visitors should be prepared for the fact that movie audiences can be as noisy as a sports crowd and that, for security reasons, no-one is allowed to leave the cinema until the film is over.
Others that show English-language films include the Horeyya, with two screens on the sixth floor of the Horeyya Mall, Sharia al-Ahram in Heliopolis (tel: (02) 452 9980); the Tahrir, 122 Sharia Tahrir in Doqqi (tel: (02) 335 4726); and the Cosmos, 12 Sharia Emad ed-Din (tel: (02) 574 2177).
Cultural events: Egypt has more feasts and festivals than most countries in the world, mixing Coptic, Christian, Islamic and ordinary secular holidays. It also uses three different calendars (Western Gregorian, Coptic and Islamic Hejira). Most religious feasts are calculated using the Islamic calendar, 11 days shorter than the Gregorian calendar, and these events occur roughly 10-12 days earlier each year in the Western calendar.
Ramadan is the principal religious feast that visitors must be aware of. During the month of Ramadan (starts on 25 October 2003 and 14 October 2004), devout Muslims allow nothing to pass their lips (food, drink, cigarettes) during the hours of daylight. They also abstain from sexual activity completely. Some people choose to sleep longer in the afternoon than at night, and so some shops and offices will have erratic opening hours. It is considered impolite to eat or drink in public while the fast is taking place, so visitors must use discretion although they are not expected to observe Ramadan themselves. Tourist hotels will be largely unaffected but some restaurants may close for the entire month.
Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan fasting with three days of feasting, and the slaughter of sheep and goats and occasionally cows. There will be fewer people in Cairo then but their place is taken by vast numbers of animals, frequently tethered in pens in the streets as they await their fate.
Eid al-Adha is the other great Islamic feast, held 70 days after the end of Ramadan. It lasts for four days, and on this occasion only sheep are slaughtered as the feast celebrates the prophet Abraham slaughtering a sheep in place of his son.
Literary Notes
There is one towering literary figure in Cairo and that is Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. His books teem with Cairo life and have been compared to the novels of Dickens and Balzac. The Cairo Trilogy is his masterpiece, acclaimed in Egypt when the three books were first published in 1956 and 1957, and again when finally all three were translated into English in the 1990s. The novels (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street) are a historical family saga set principally in the Islamic quarter of the city, where Mahfouz himself was born in 1911. Other notable works include The Thief and the Dogs (1961), an impressionistic psychological novel that marked a change of style, and Midaq Alley (1947), set in a poor back-street also in the Islamic quarter. His novels show a sympathy for the underdogs of Cairo life, and depict in vivid detail a side of the city that the average visitor will seldom even glimpse.
One of Cairo’s leading women writers is Nawal el-Saadawi, who was born just outside Cairo and worked in the city as a doctor and psychiatrist. She founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association and has written plays, short stories and social studies as well as novels. Her feminist and socialist beliefs pervade her work and she has not always been popular in her own country; she was even imprisoned under the Sadat regime. More recently, she has left Egypt to teach in North American universities. Woman at Point Zero (1979), a novel dealing with the killing of a pimp by a woman who is then condemned to death, has been banned in Egypt, while her most famous book The Hidden Face of Eve (1977) is a non-fiction book dealing with women in the Arab world.
Cairo has always held a particular fascination for British authors and both Olivia Manning (The Levant Trilogy, 1978 onwards) and Penelope Lively (Oleander, Jacaranda, 1994) have used the city as a background for their fiction.
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General
