I was about to tuck into a tuna salad at a Prêt À Manger in London last week when I chanced to read the message printed on the paper serviette: “This napkin is 100 per cent recyclable (Prêt's sustainability department is militant, we're making headway). If Prêt's staff get all serviette-ish and hand you huge bunches of napkins (which you don't need or want) please give them the evil eye. Waste not want not.” In Egypt no one takes the evil eye so lightly, and certainly, I hope, no one would dream of cursing a waiter for flouting the environmental guidelines we all take so seriously nowadays. Inshaallah. Yet these phrases that slip so easily into our everyday speech and mannerisms meant a great deal a generation ago. In China people paid the doctor only as long as they were well. The doctor's duty was to cure them when they were sick and make them well again; until then he would have to do without an income. Elsewhere we seem to have got it back to front: we pay the doctor when we are sick. But what happens when you have no doctor, no hospitals, no modern diagnoses and no handy recourse to treatment? Before universal healthcare came into existence in Egypt people had to draw on their own resources for help. These included time-honoured remedies and old wives tales, prayer and seeking help from a magician, sheikh or sheikha. Even if medical help were available it might not be possible to raise the funds to pay for it, and in many cases consulting a doctor might be seen as a last resort. Moreover the causes of illness were not always understood, and it was often simpler to blame the evil eye than to address any underlying health issues. By the time I began travelling around Egypt in the mid-1970s, some of these attitudes were changing. Most people had access to doctors and pharmacies, and almost everyone would visit a doctor on sign of illness, resorting to a sheikh or priest only if orthodox efforts failed. It was still common to see children with flies clustered round their eyes, but trachoma, one of Egypt's most prevalent diseases, was easily treated with eye drops and their mothers no longer took them to the sheikh in the village market who would treat the disease by rubbing their eyes to remove “grubs”, as recorded by Winifred Blackman in her book The Fellaheen of Upper Egypt, her account of the time she spent as a rural medical practitioner in the 1930s. However, a visit to a spice merchant's in the Khan Al-Khalili or any other souq (bazaar) in Egypt proves that folk medicine is not forgotten, even today. Among the merchandise is a sack of “Mary's rose”, a dried flower that brings luck and good health. A merchant would make up a charm of a few blue stones and red beans, which he called the “devil's eye”. He stocks items similar to those found, in a more refined state, in a Western health store: beans to be infused and drunk during pregnancy to ease delivery; sticks rich in calcium to be ground into powder and drunk after childbirth; and other prescriptions handed down by the merchant's father and grandfathers for generations. He sells dried hamda, a small, wild melon that grows in the Eastern desert after a rainfall. This is used in several ways, one of which is to cut it in half, soak it in water and place a half under each heel of anyone suffering from rheumatism to ease the pain and give them a good night's sleep. Snake and scorpion bites were cured by a visit to a hawi (snake charmer). If there was time the hawi opened up the wound and sucked out the venom, but sometimes he made a small incision on the forehead through which, he said, the poison would flow with the blood. In one Upper Egyptian village I came across an interesting treatment for anyone who had been bitten by an animal and suspected it might be rabid. Whether the victim was a Copt or a Muslim, he or she hurried to the nearby Coptic monastery to be given a loaf of consecrated bread (these are very different from the communion wafers taken in the West; they are smooth, leavened loaves about the size of an English muffin and stamped with an elaborate cross, which are broken and handed out at the Eucharist). The victim divided the bread into seven pieces and ate one each morning for a week. The villagers assured me that no one who had taken this precaution had ever contracted rabies. Of course, just as it was important to protect people, it was also necessary to protect the livestock on which their livelihood depended. Camels had elaborate geometric patterns shaved on their coats. Horses and donkeys were decorated with red tassels and brass hands. Domestic animals were usually branded on the thigh in Coptic letters — a throwback, like the use of the Coptic agricultural calendar, to the Egypt predating the Islamic invasion. All these embellishments were both cures and prevention for sickness. Animals were corralled in windowless sheds to prevent a neighbour casting the evil eye on them, a fact the eminent architect Hassan Fathi overlooked when he designed the original New Gourna village on Luxor's west bank. His idea was to house the family livestock in outbuildings made airy by attractive claustra (open brick-work) patterns set in the outside walls, but when the human residents moved into the village they promptly blocked up these holes to prevent outsiders looking in and bringing their animals bad luck. Tattooing was used on people with a similar idea in mind, although less often than it used to be (older Copts may bear on their arm the tattooed date of their pilgrimage to Jerusalem). A common cure for many ailments, especially those with a psychological cause, was for a sheikh to write a verse of the Quran on a scrap of paper which was then soaked in a glass of water until the words had dissolved. The patient then drank the water, thus imbibing the words. In the past such verses were inscribed inside the brim of special small brass bowls and passed their words of power into the water in the vessel. These bowls are now rare, but an interesting collection was to be seen in the Gayer-Anderson House adjoining the Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo. With some cures or charms, the sheikh requested the patient to bathe in the infused words. The left over paper was not to be burnt or placed with the garbage but should be scattered to the wind in the desert, or otherwise entrusted to nature. Some of the so-called holy men to whom people came for help appeared to be genuine, but if the effect was only temporary then the “healer” might be suspected of using a jinni. Sometimes, however, I came across a method of healing without the use of spells, magic or written charms. One healer that I knew of was a hermit monk who wandered alone in the desert and appeared with no regularity at Coptic monasteries where, when the word got round, people of whatever faith would flock for a laying-on-of-hands, asking him to heal them or their relatives. The wali (holy man) was revered by both Muslims and Copts, and was much loved by the monks who gave him what sustenance he needed, although they maintained that he asked for no more on each visit than a handful of dates. Belief in the saintliness of such men probably dates from time immemorial, and similarly superstition is attached to physical relics from the past. I was told that people had no faith or interest in reproducing Pharaonic amulets, but ancient amulets were highly valued. To test whether an object such as a scarab was old, you should squeeze some lemon juice on a marble slab and put the scarab on it. If it was old, it would “walk” (or rather slide) on the juice, motivated by the hieroglyphs on the base. If they could get them women, especially in Upper Egypt, would wear Pharaonic beads or scarabs — preferably coloured green — for baraka (blessing). An old scarab worn as a ring would ward off flies and protect the wearer from knife wounds. It also made plants and crops cultivated by the wearer grow and brought money. Beads were also worn as baraka and to ward off the evil eye; glazed blue Mamluk beads were very popular for this. Protecting the household from harm was a major issue, and doors and doorsteps had to be protected to prevent luck running out and misfortune coming in. In Lower Egypt corn dollies or fish were typically hung over doorways; in Nubia (south of Aswan) horns were hung. In Kom Ombo I saw Arabic inscriptions in blue paint and dead pigeons, sometimes a brace — one fresh and one withered and dried — and once a bat. In Tanta I noticed that the starfish commonly nailed on doors along the Red Sea Coast were replaced by stars with multiple points (not to be confused with Stella beer stickers). One had to be doubly aware when outside the home. Street corners could be especially dangerous, as was the first thing one did or that one's eye fell on after leaving the house. Tripping up; passing under a stair; seeing dogs or cocks fighting; an empty pot. Sweeping the floor when a family member had just left or returned was unlucky; so was sweeping the street after sunset; returning a gift of bread or milk; any Thursday of it fell on the fifth day of the month; travelling on a Wednesday, especially the last Wednesday in the month; getting married in the month of Moharram; an upturned shoe; sewing after sunset; meeting someone new at a funeral; being called by someone from behind; stepping on garlic or onion peel or on eggshells. As if you didn't spend most of your life treading on eggshells. Amongst all the things to fear there had to be some optimistic signs, and indeed there were. Travelling on a Friday or a Monday; a crescent moon; the moon uniting with Scorpio; and placing a pot of water next to your field were all good signs. Villagers with mental disabilities were usually treated as special within the community. They were blessed, people told me, because their “minds were with God” and they were this “chosen”. The tombs of famous and local sheikhs were the focus of people of all faiths wanting to plead for success, a cure, or a baby, and then to give prayers of thanks. Pilgrims often tied messages or tokens at the tomb — just as their forebears did in ancient Egypt. The mediaeval wooden gate at Bab Zuweila was famous as Cairo's universal tooth fairy, and after extraction an offending tooth was subtly pressed into a groove in the gate. In my last article (“Taking an eye off the children”, Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue 1139) I looked at the role of the daya (midwife) in the community. A comparable service for men was provided by the halaa seha (health barber) — or in urban areas the halaa issaf (first-aid barber). While a high value was placed on formal medicine, in some circumstances it would have been unthinkable to visit a doctor so it was the barber who was called on to give primary care. The health barber would have learnt his skills from his teacher, often, as with the daya, an older family member. Although the main tool of his trade was the razor and he was accustomed to dealing with all manner of physical conditions from lancing abscesses to circumcising little boys, he also had a knowledge of herbalism and as such his ideas might be almost surprisingly well thought through. In her paper Rural Heathcare in Egypt (IDRC, 1980), Nawal Al-Messiri Nadim provides this telling quotation from a halaa seha: “Ever since the use of chemical fertilisers, traditional herbs are not effective any more. The human body, after eating food that is chemically treated, will not respond to herbs that grow naturally. The body needs medicine that is also chemically treated.” The halaa seha treated eye diseases, making up his own recipes for eye drops. He knew cures for ear troubles, and for skin diseases and rashes. He was skilled at stitching cuts and wounds, and gave injections prescribed either by himself or a doctor. In villagers where there was no pharmacy he could be relied upon to have a store of medicines and dressings. Health barbers were ready to diagnose and treat simple ailments, but readily took more serious cases to a doctor. Nadim reported that a doctor might give the barber a commission of 20 per cent of his patient's fee. As well as the halaa seha, the daya, the saint and the magician, there might be a local folk healer to whom patients could turn before they sought orthodox medical help. These folk healers were usually elderly women with a lifetime's experience of treating common ailments. While some might specialise in sprains and bad backs — very common among labourers who carried heavy loads and even children who carried younger siblings — others might be renowned for curing skin or fungal infections, sunstroke or fainting. The “cures” were sometimes anything but orthodox — such as massaging the heart area with honey or tying a cloth very tightly round the head to cure a headache — but patients often recovered simply because they believed in the cure, and the treatments were usually, at worst, harmless. Better healthcare means that few people nowadays rely on the old methods, but in these days of uncertainty the spiritual guidance many of these healers offered their rural communities might well have brought solace to troubled minds and bodies.
