By the time of the evening prayer, all is dark and calm: it is the time of the Sufis.
Every evening this group of friends came together. They worked all day long on the land until their hands cracked. They yelled and screamed at their children and their wives, and they beat their animals. They would become blind with rage. But in the evening they put on freshly laundered galabiyas and performed the night prayer together in the main mosque, saying amen from their hearts as they prayed behind the imam. Then they came to the guesthouse.
Now they were kind and wise. They looked at the toil and the pains of the day with composure, and smiled. They regretted the storms of anger at their wives, their children and their animals. But it was the hardship of life and the harshness of the day. It was that great and unfathomable secret hidden in the fertile earth on which they moved about in perplexity, worry, and anger during the heat of the day.
This is why God had created the evening and hidden the sun in the folds of the unknown for an appointed time. For if the world were an unending day and life were ceaseless toil, men would turn into devils who would not know God. There had to be the calm of the evening when they could marvel at the wonders of the parting day, smile at its harshness and question one another persistently about the secrets of growth and withering. . . .
There had to be this calm every evening, when they could open their hearts to each other and talk.1
Lights go on along all the Delta roads. Everywhere are brick buildings with rebar-filled concrete pillars pointing upwards: everywhere bare breezeblock, sometimes enlivened by flowering bougainvillea. But these are the edges of the roads. Within the heart of the old villages, squeezed into the maze of the original core, there are still traditional mud-brick houses of one story, the roof serving as a home to poultry. Sometimes one sees the yellow steeple of a church, but this is rare in the Delta. Often there are the tombs of saints whose ancient squat domes are painted with a white or green chalk wash. And then there are the mosques. Some are sturdy buildings, others of the Ottoman era have slim minarets, and others still have been carefully restored in the nineteenth century with stucco, colored windows, and woodwork. As the population has increased over the last few decades, so has the number of hastily built prayer halls. The central part of the Nile Delta, so astoundingly fertile, has for long been one of the most densely populated regions of the planet. The smallest village can hold ten thousand to twenty thousand inhabitants. To a person flying into Cairo by night, the Delta is a huge constellation of light. Village sits next to village, town next to town, and the roads are filled with the crazy traffic of a throbbing population. Small pockets of dense darkness are punctuated by the neon lights adorning minarets or calmly broken by gentle reflections on irrigation canals and the branches of the Nile. Somewhere in the midst of all this lies Kafr al-Hagg Dawud, a nondescript village where I lived when I was twenty years old. And then there are the bigger canals, the built-up zones, a few signposts that indicate, more or less, the larger of the towns.
In the middle of the Delta sits Tanta, Egypt’s fourth-largest city. The Coptic origin of its name rings loud and clear with its two emphatic Ts and the long final A. Located on a crossroads of both road and rail, the town is halfway between Cairo and Alexandria, and at the midpoint between the two principal branches of the Nile, the Rosetta and the Damietta. October in Tanta is the time of the Great Mulid of Sayyid al-Badawi and of the annual pilgrimage to the tomb of Egypt’s most popular saint. This saint from the thirteenth century is in some ways famous and in others poorly known, and for many long centuries he embodied the very soul of Muslim Egypt. I have spent many Octobers in Tanta. My first mulid at the tomb of Badawi was in 1987, the one I narrate here was in 2002, and the last one I attended was in 2016. I have spent thirty years pondering the mulid of Tanta.
In the world of Delta saints, Badawi is the master. His disciples, his distant successors, his imitators, and even his predecessors follow his rhythm, and the myriad pilgrimages of the Delta are subjects of his empire. These pilgrimages follow the solar calendar, that of the seasons, of the peasants and their harvests, and not the lunar year of the Muslim calendar: the earth has primacy. In the nineteenth century it was still the Nile flood that set off the mulids of Lower Egypt, which were then in spring and summer. When the flood disappeared from the life of the Delta thanks to the first dams, cotton laid down the law and the great mulid of Tanta was shifted to autumn. The massive rural exodus of the twentieth century, the migrations—both back-and-forth movements and more permanent relocations—and the profound upheavals that have struck Egyptian society have not altered this rhythm. When the cotton and the corn are harvested, when the clouds gather and the first rains fall around Alexandria, the great mulids of the Delta begin. The starting signal is given by the pilgrimage of Shuhada’, a town and district of Minufiya, where the martyrs said to have fallen during the Islamic conquest of Egypt are venerated. This important mulid takes place one week before that of Badawi. The pilgrims of Shuhada’ have just enough time to run from one sanctuary to the next. One week after the mulid at Tanta, it is the turn of Ibrahim al-Disuqi, in the northwest of the Delta, where the celebrations take place along the banks of the Nile.
The Tanta mulid is an incessant back-and-forth between two centers: on the one side is the mausoleum of the saint in the Great Mosque, whose domes and minarets dominate the old town; on the other, a good half-hour walk away, over the railway tracks, is Sigar, the pilgrims’ camp. The festivities begin in Sigar, which was once a village and is now surrounded by urban growth. Fifteen days before the official opening of the mulid of Badawi, red banners are hung by Sufis on the railings of the small local sanctuary of Sidi ‘Abd al-Rahim, a Sufi sheikh who died in 1920. His mulid falls one week ahead of Badawi’s. The fields of corn, where the large grounds of the mulid, called the mal’a or the saha, will be situated, have already been harvested and plowed over. An eight-meter-tall mast has been erected in the center of the site, symbolizing the double presence of the saint of Tanta in this field far away from the mausoleum itself. Throughout the duration of the mulid it stands in evidence of his baraka (blessing). A wide open space stretches all around the mast, in which several large tents have already been pitched. The showmen have come in from all over the Delta, from Cairo and Alexandria, and have already erected two big Ferris wheels, swings, carousels, and shooting galleries.
A lively atmosphere reigns in the Great Mosque of Tanta. Every Friday—the day of rest, when one visits Badawi—is a busy, festive day. All year round the peasants come from all over the region to sell their vegetables, do some shopping, and pay a quick visit to the grand saint of the Delta. In the 1980s formidable women selling fruit and trading in gossip used to sit all along the mosque wall, perched upon stalls offering pomegranates, pears, and guavas. The governorate of Gharbiya province, of which Tanta is the capital, decided to send them off to an out-of-the-way market, and then created a vast semi-pedestrian square around the mosque, enclosed by a wall and equipped with a fountain, all designed to limit easy movement. The demands of modern town planning and the requirements of polite society imposed by modernist Islam on religious events have even had a bearing on the cheerful vivacity of the gossipers. The governorate has a lot to do during the mulid: it must take maximum advantage of the considerable resources that accumulate at pilgrimage time, but it must also direct the pilgrims, supply the site with water and electricity, avoid outbreaks of disease and disorder, control the crowds, collect taxes, and watch carefully over the good reputation of the town and its pilgrimage.
Every