The Holiest of Holiest

The snow was falling on Christmas, a rarity in Atlanta. We raced toward the airport and boarded a plane to Cairo.

"We've stopped boarding. There's a security issue" the flight attendant in New York announced, shortly before all two hundred of us were commanded by the pilot to take our stuff and get off and go through security again because a suspicious item had been found on the plane. What, an extra half once of hand sanitizer, or box cutters? We got off the ground at 12:30 AM, just hours before the airport was closed because of another snow storm.

The sun rose about an hour and a half into the flight and we remained in broad daylight for about nine hours. At 11:00 AM Eastern, the sun set again. All the while, the flight progress indicator kept displaying which direction to Mecca. We were headed right for it.

As I stepped out onto the rolling staircase that someone had pushed up to the plane in Cairo, the first thing I heard was a call to prayer. I looked to my right and saw a very blingy minarette, decked out in blue Christmas lights.

"Taxi! You need taxi?" we were asked by probably our third shady young Egyptian guy while we raped the airport's ATM. "No. That's our guy" my sister indicated, pointing to the man throwing down on his prayer rug in the middle of the airport floor.

I lay awake in the night. I had woken up, feeling rested and relaxed, then realized that I had slept a whole two hours and that it was 2:30 AM in Egypt. I stared out of the window at the bright, blingy purple lighted mosque across the late night haze and twinkling lights of Cairo. It was beautiful. It started to sing. Low at first and then other mosques started singing back at it. By five AM, they reached a shrill crescendo, joined together in the night as they howled across an expansive sleeping city. I stared out of the window, feeling like I was the only person watching the singing buildings as they put on the show of a lifetime in the middle of the night.

I remember my first Muslim street party. I was in India in the middle of the spring and had no idea what was going on when the junky black speakers attached to the telephone pole outside of my hostel window began screeching in the middle of the night and continued for hours. I found it jarring and nerve wracking. These Egypt mosques were suaver, less crackly.

Cairo is a city among cities. Boasting 20 million strong, it sprawls in all directions. A haze hangs over the city, a mix of desert sand dust and wildly unregulated auto emissions that stain both the crumbling colonial buildings and the abundant laundry hanging from them black. Open, strangely rigged wires hang over the streets and out of walls and garbage lays in places it really ought not. Shanties line the rooftops and your snot turns black in matter of hours.

It was beautiful in every way.