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The Old^World Oriental Life of Cairo 43
The coppersmith, the brass-worker, and the weavers of
matting and baskets have time-honoured ways ; the basketmaker
and the basin-maker alike hold what they are making
with their toes, so as to have both hands free. With baskets
this does not seem so unnatural : a monkey might be taught
to make a basket ; but to hold a brass vessel with your toes,
while you hammer it into curves like a mosque's dome, and
chisel it into arabesques, is a work of art in itself.
It is barbaric rather than mediaeval, I suppose, to iron
the washing with your feet, using such a very large iron
and to stand under the thing you are sawing, drawing the
saw towards you.
The primitive crafts, which make photography so extravagant
at the Market of the Afternoon and the two country
markets near the Pyramids, must be described in their own
setting. So much for trades.
There is nothing in which medisevalism dies so hard
as in religion, and the law is mixed up with the prophets
among Arab populations ... It adds greatly to the pictu-
resqueness of the streets when an earnest Mohammedan says
his prayers in them. But Mohammedans who are strict in
this matter are becoming rare in Cairo.
The whole life in the mosques is romantically mediaeval.
The people you see there praying or reading the Scriptures,
with their shoes and their water-bottle beside them, look as
if they might have been there for a thousand years. When
you have looked at them you feel that this is none other
than the House of God.
In the chief mosque of El-Azhar, which is the central
University of all Islam, the teaching has changed little in
its thousand years of existence ; it is still the Koran and
what is necessary for the teaching and understanding of
the Koran. No attempt has been made to bring it into
line with modern institutions. And I understand that the
administration of the law^ in the Kadi's courts and the
' In this very year of grace one of the Grand Mufti's excuses for refusing to
sanction the execution of the murderer of Boutros Pasha was that the revolver
(with which the murder was committed) was not mentioned in the Koran.