6/1/2023 0 Comments Sugar Street by Naguib MahfouzThose who did venture beyond the Khan Khalili bazaar and the mosque discovered, here, a garbage dump, flies rising from it in clouds there a police station, its 1950s architecture dingy with dirt as old as the pharaohs, its officers leaning idly on Cold War-era Kalashnikov rifles. It was 1988, a few days after Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature, and as yet few tourists were making their way into his old Cairo neighborhood. The bare bulbs shined weakly, isolated and lost in the cavernous interior. Even in the early afternoon the lights were on. It was the eve of the Prophet’s birthday, and behind the mendicants, visible through the wide, ancient doorways, were double lines of bearded men swaying, praying, dancing themselves into religious ecstasy. One gestured with the leprous stumps of his fingers. Their feet were bandaged, their skin mottled with dirt and disease. Beggars groped for alms outside the al-Hussein mosque in Cairo.
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