Africa & Middle East > Egypt > Nile > Luxor > Religion > Articles > Happy Birthday, Abu’l-Hajjaj

“God's blessing on you, ya Sidi Abu’l-Hajjaj.”

Along the Luxor corniche, the morning light was soft and the wake sparkled behind the Mecca, the old iron-hulled ferry, as it made its short pilgrimage across the Nile. On shore, there was more than the usual contingent of hustlers and hasslers, of shoe-shines and bean-sellers, and carriage-drivers shouting 'hello, caleche' in mock-Sandhurst accents. There was more on sale, too, and therefore, there had to be more people around to buy. When I stopped to take in the riverside spectacle, a young man approached me and introduced himself as Mahmoud. Following my eyes to the ancient temple of Luxor and the mosque of Abu’l-Hajjaj that sits on top of its colonnades like a stork in a precarious nest, he offered the sheikh his blessing.

“Have you come for the moulid?” he asked. “Yes, that's why I am here, alhamdulillah.”

A moulid is a feast to honour the birth of a holy man, either Muslim, Christian or Jew. As a feature of the religious calendar these saints’ days are comparatively recent arrivals, perhaps dating back no more than five or six hundred years. But many believe that they have far more ancient origins. For just as every town and village in ancient Egypt had its local deities, worshipped alongside the great state gods, so every town and village in modern Egypt has its dead sheikhs or saints. It was in an attempt to glimpse this connection between past and present that I had come to Luxor. That’s what I told Mahmoud and he in turn offered more blessings. Mahmoud was born and bred in Luxor and had recently finished training as a mohandis, an engineer, at a Cairo university. He had come back to Luxor for the sheikh's moulid.

“It doesn't matter where I am - I could go to the other side of the world - I would still come back for Sidi Abu’l-Hajjaj.”

“Why?’

“Because he was a good man. Because he saved our city, so they say. Also, many good things have happened to people who have needed help and who have asked Sidi Abu’l-Hajjaj. Perhaps we can meet here tomorrow. I would like to show you the procession.”

The great sheikh, al-Sayyid Youssef Abu’l-Hajjaj, would have protested at any parallels being made between himself and the unbelievers who lived in Egypt in the time before the Prophet Muhammad. Youssef Abu’l-Hajjaj was born in Baghdad. A descendant of the Prophet himself, he travelled first to Mecca, then to Egypt. Legend has it that when he crossed the Red Sea a storm blew up and sank the pilgrims' fleet, but that the sheikh, perhaps recalling Moses or Jonah, prayed to God and his boat alone was saved. The sheikh studied with various Sufi groups in Cairo before moving to Luxor. At the time of his arrival, Luxor was a small village set among the grand ruins beside the Nile. It was ruled, so the legend goes, by a strong woman called Sitt (Lady) Towzah. The sitt was far from pleased by the arrival of the foreigner, but Allah be praised, the sheikh walked around the outside of the village, which he bound with a single thread. After that he had the place sewn up and there was nothing the sitt could do to resist him.

Approached from the river, Abu’l-Hajjaj's mosque looked even more perilous than I remembered, hanging above the courtyard of Luxor temple. Strings of coloured lights had been draped around the whitewashed building, which stood like a beacon over the darkened pagan shrines. The yellowed night throbbed with bass notes from music and with incantations and prayers. The corniche was crowded, the pavement slick with discarded bean husks and sunflower seeds. Children in shiny wizard hats came and pestered me - “A foreigner! A foreigner!” - until their parents called them back.

Luxor's waterfront had been given a facelift, but once off the main street I was back into that more familiar Egypt of peeling paint and crumbling houses, of steps swept several times a day, of grit and dust and sagging electric cables. Most shops were still open and several cafes had spread along the streets to cater for the sudden influx of people from around the country. The turn-out was good and money was being spent on moulid toys, on food and drink and sugar dolls. The dolls were cast out of pink sugar and came in two shapes. One was a horseman with his sword raised, modelled perhaps on Antar, a legendary Arab hero, on Mir Girgis, the Coptic St. George slaying his dragon or on the ancient falcon-headed god Horus, who avenged the death of his father Osiris. The other figure was of a woman with a conical base, a tight waist, bulging breasts and hands on hips. She wore a crepe skirt and a head dress of pleated paper, a disc that surrounded her like the moon or a halo.

As the representation of human and animal figures is forbidden by the Koran, the custom of making these sugar dolls is thought to be pre-Islamic. Their forms suggest an ancient Egyptian origin. I picked up one of the women.

“Twenty-five pounds,” the trader said. The sum was outrageous.

“Who is it?”

“The arusa, the bride of Abu’l-Hajjaj.”

“But who was she?”

“Twenty-five pounds.” I offered a quarter of the price and we haggled until we were both able to part with dignity intact. The crowd was thick and I had difficulty carrying the arusa without getting her broken. “Look, ummi,” a child said to her mother, “the foreigner has an arusa.” Her brother giggled. Old men looked away.

From Souq Street, I went to pay my respects to the sheikh, having first wrapped up my arusa and hidden her in a bag for fear of upsetting the great man's feelings. A full moon hung over the celebrations, various Sufi orders were rocking and chanting in their tents outside the mosque, children were still playing in the gardens nearby. The crush became more painful as a town official - the governor, perhaps, or one of his deputies - pushed through the crowd in his blacked-out Peugeot on his way to visit one of the ceremonial tents, his bodyguards and police escort forming a human screen around him.

The passing car pushed us together like sand into a bucket, forming the crowd into a solid unit that moved as one towards the sheikh's tomb. I was pushed along, up the steps, past the beggars and petitioners, to our first stop in front of a door that didn't open. The door of the soul, it was called, the secret door through which Abu’l-Hajjaj and the celestial saints could pass. It reminded me of the false doors of ancient tombs where offerings were made and through which the soul of the dead person passed.

“God's blessing on you, ya Sidi Abu’l-Hajjaj.” The chamber beside the saint's tomb was filled by a group of worshippers, a Sufi brotherhood I assumed from their ritual chanting. I watched them from the corridor, entranced by the rows of men and a few women rocking and chanting in unison, calling on the sheikh, extolling his virtues, recounting his deeds, recommending him to God, the leader's voice high-pitched and strained, the reply from his followers a deep, earthy, unified grunt. Allahu. I was reminded of images I had seen on western television news reports, accompanying stories of Muslim fanaticism. In a way it was fanatical, extreme, taken to the limits. It also stirred me as few things in my life.

Here was the tomb of the great sheikh Sidi Youssef Abu’l-Hajjaj in all its glory. Beneath us was part of the temple of Luxor, unexcavated out of respect for the saint; between the end of paganism and the coming of Islam, Christians had used the temple as a church. I was in one of those places and experiencing one of those moments when religions merge. In the name of Allah and His Prophet Muhammad, in the name of the Father and His Son Jesus, in the name of the great divinity, of Amun, Mut and Khonsu, the trinity of Thebes, prayers had been offered there, bread broken, flowers and images brought, animals slaughtered and the sick brought in the hope of cure for as long as we humans have recorded our actions. As I sat watching the Sufis, the crowd walking up to pray for the Sheikh and to receive his blessing, I remembered the words of a Muslim sheikh in Cairo who had insisted that this sort of devotion was unIslamic. Just then I was sure he was wrong, that this was Islam, and Christianity, and Judaism, and all the pagan cults that came before them. This was some essential human response. And what it suggested was that throughout the millennia, whatever the creed, Egyptians had held on to a fundamental belief: that they could call upon the spirits of dead holy men to improve their lives on earth.

I met Mahmoud, the young man I had talked to on the corniche, the following day, before midday prayers. I wanted to visit Luxor Temple and suggested that he come with me.

“You think I am tourist?” he asked, amused. “This is my home.”

A hundred years ago, the temple was cleared of accumulated silt and debris and all the buildings that obscured the glory of the pharaohs were done away with. All except the mosque of Abu’l-Hajjaj. As Mahmoud and I walked towards the inner sanctuaries of the temple, we passed beneath the mosque hanging over the temple wall, above the roof, its old door opening now onto thin air. If I was a photographer I would have been shooting film just then because nothing I had seen in Egypt more perfectly expressed the way in which things are built over each other, the way cultures absorb traditions - the Bible written over Herodotus, and the Koran over that.

I found what I was looking for on the processional colonnade built in honour of Amun in the 14th century BC by the strong pharaoh Amenhotep III.

“What are they doing?” Mahmoud asked.

“You haven't been here before?”

“Of course I have. But no one has ever explained what this was.”

“This is a description of the great feast of Opet.” He had clearly never heard of it. “Opet was one of the most important feasts for the pharaohs, when the god Amun, his wife Mut and their child Khonsu - the three gods of Thebes - left Karnak to visit Luxor Temple.”

The carved reliefs were added a couple of decades after Amenhotep's death, during the reign of Tutankhamun. They showed the boy-king at Karnak temple praying in front of the gods' ceremonial boats. The boats were then raised on poles and carried, with much singing and clapping, to the temple gate. At that time Karnak was linked to the Nile by a canal and the ceremonial boats were put on river boats and towed to Luxor by sailing boats, helped by a crowd who pulled ropes along the shore. From the riverbank at Luxor, not far from where Mahmoud and I were standing, the gods in their ceremonial boats were again carried by priests. Dancing girls led the way. It was a festival of renewal, celebrated half-way through the Nile's flood, a celebration of fertility. Mahmoud was open-mouthed in front of the carvings.

“What are you looking so surprised about?” I asked.

“I have just realised what this reminds me of,” he said. “Let's go to the procession and you will understand why.” A crowd of Egyptians, eight or ten deep, lined the streets around the mosque and temple.

“Where are all the foreigners?” Mahmoud asked. “Don't they care about Sidi Abu’l-Hajjaj?”

“Maybe not. Or maybe it has something to do with the tourist office telling them that the festivity would start at four o'clock.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Security?”

“There are no terrorists here.”

“How do you know? They have said that they think moulids should be stopped.”

“Let them try,” he said angrily. “We will always honour Sidi Abu’l-Hajjaj. No one can stop that.”

After midday prayers the crowd filled out and spilled into the street. The security forces soon lost control of the proceedings and the devotees began to block the processional route. Then there was an even greater noise and a pushing from behind. “Quick,” Mahmoud said, as if I had somewhere to go, “here they come.” The crowd pushed forward, the black-uniformed police blew their whistles, the crowd blew theirs, voices were raised, there were cheers and the procession began to move, floats and tractors, trucks and jeeps, all decked out in honour of the town's patron saint. Then a tractor turned the corner pulling something with a sail.

“Look,” Mahmoud said triumphantly. “There they are. The boats we carry around the town. Just like in those drawings you showed me in the temple.” He was pointing to a wooden boat, complete with sail, a slightly scaled-down version of the lateen-rigged Nile boat, which has been in use since the time of the pharaohs. Raised up on wheels, it was being towed towards us. Behind it I could see two more boats. In them, in the place of the Theban trinity of Amun, Mut and Khonsu, there rode children from Luxor. Sweets were thrown.

There was cheering and much blessing of Abu’l-Hajjaj. The next float to pass carried a transvestite, a man in a dress and bad make-up who pouted and preened, pulled up his skirt and juggled enormous breasts. He was trying to stir up the crowd: forget Islamic decency, I was reminded of Amun of Luxor, the fertility god with his enormous penis. The transvestite called out to people in the crowd, ground his hips and thrust out his groin. Some of the girls responded. One near me forgot herself for long enough to follow his lead. She plumped up her breasts, pouted, even shouted back at him until her friends laughed her back home. Just as I was putting the sheikh's procession down on my list of confirmed survivals - as convincing, I thought, as the fertility rites and as people I had met living in the cemetery - another tractor came round the corner pulling another boat. That made four. No one ever mentioned four boats in the sheikh's procession. Did this call into question whether this was a surviving pharaonic practice? Even Mahmoud was beginning to have his doubts.

“Ya Anthony,” he announced almost apologetically, “I can see another boat.”

“Five boats, Mahmoud? How can this be?” He thought about it for a moment and then, somewhat stoically, he reached his conclusion. “This is Egypt. We are growing, always growing, so nothing stays the same. Last year there were three boats. This year five. And Allah alone knows how many boats will honour Sidi Abu’l-Hajjaj next year. But of one thing - and only one thing - I am sure. That there will be boats, as there always have been, and that there will be people to cheer them in honour of the sheikh."

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