EGYPT: A PERSONAL VISION

GAMAL AL-GHITANI

In my eyes the Mediterranean Sea has a special dignity. When I hear someone mention the Mediterranean, my mind and my imagination immediately fly there. This does not happen with the Red Sea, the Black Sea or the Dead Sea, or even with the Ocean. The only one that appears to me is the Mediterranean Sea, which has a particular presence unlike any of the other seas I have ever seen, crossed by ship or flown over in a plane. The Mediterranean is the only one I have submerged myself in: I have seen the waves rising up from its depths as I peered out through the small portholes of a military submarine that I travelled on in the days when I was working as a war correspondent, while the soldiers were in training and preparations were being made for the acts of hostility.

From what source do the particular features of the Mediterranean Sea emerge for me? I cannot define it, but I may hypothesise…

Perhaps it is because it was the first sea I ever saw. It happened in the last century, 1961, when I was 16 and a secondary school pupil. Until that moment in my life, the word ‘sea' for me had simply signified the Nile River, though the question is indeed relative, and also it is said that “he who has not seen the tree cannot describe it”. I do not believe this. When I was in the village of Juheyna in southern Egypt, I heard people talking about the sea, but they were referring to the Nile, that ancient, venerable river which floods each year and soaks the land with its waters, renewing life. I once heard someone talk about the Great Sea, but I was never able to see it until I reached the age of 16. My family did not generally go away for the summer holidays, nor did we spend a week or two in Alexandria or Ras el-Barr, the most famous summer holiday spots in Egypt in the 1960s. We lived in one of the neighbourhoods in the old part of the city, and of all the families that lived in the same part of town, there was just one that would spend two weeks in the summer in Alexandria. The wife was white and beautiful and had a special affection for her husband, who was a grocer. I heard that they went to the seaside, that they took their clothes off and put on swimsuits, which I overheard another neighbour say were grotesque. That day, I got on the train heading north for the first time, though I was really going south, towards Said. How often I wished to be able to change direction, to be able to travel towards what we call ‘the direction of the sea' or ‘marina', because in Egypt that is the source of soft, refreshing breezes. For this reason, it is recommended in the construction of buildings that the windows face in the direction of the marina, and the word ‘marina' comes from mare , the Latin for sea, and the sea referred to in this instance is the Mediterranean Sea. I shall never forget that moment when my eyes alighted for the first time on the blue un-ending sea, between Alexandria and Abu Qir. As I looked out of the window of the regional train, my gaze filtered between the houses on the shoreline, on a narrow path that drops and ends there at the sea. As I discovered later, all paths end at the sea, and other paths to different destinations begin. A deep blue, in some places becoming paler, stretches into infinity, until it meets the horizon, touches the heavens, rising to meet them and again descending to the edge of the Earth.

Its sublime blossoming colour renewed my sense of existence and created a sense of non-yearning in me; the indeterminate, the eternal passion for shores unreachable to the eyes. For the first time, my gaze rested on the path that extends away towards infinity, towards eternity, and especially on the colour, a blue born of a far away source, that begins in an unknown place. Just like the seas. Is it possible for man to indicate the point at which the sea begins or ends?

As Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi says in his Masnavi-ye Ma'navi (Spiritual Couplets), “do not ask where the centre of the world is, for you are the centre”.

And the seas, for example, do not have a fixed centre, each point in a sea is a centre, a beginning and an end, a destination and a return. But the colour captivated and overwhelmed me: blue, the colour of life. Does our planet Earth not seem to be entirely the blue of the colour of the waters that cover its surface from far off in outer space?

The blue of the Mediterranean Sea also possesses its own special features. A blue that is born of the same blue, pale and dark; a blue in constant change. I yearned towards it from that very moment, not just with my gaze but with all that I am and all that I possess; with everything I can give and take, and I did not enter into this state until I came face to face with the sea; there is no place at all where my journey is free except within my soul, at the heart of my being, as when I am sitting facing the sea. How many moments of pleasure have I passed like this, sitting directly before the waves, on the sand and the rocks, on a balcony or at a window! But the supreme moment of my awaiting comes with the setting of the sun, when the king star begins his descent, when the colours multiply as he plunges into the endless waters. At Alexandria, I got used to watching the sun set in its natural state, out at sea. When I travelled to the Red Sea for the first time, which was in 1970, during those times of war, before Hurghada and Al-Šati? Al-Tawil became the most famous tourist resorts in Egypt, I was visiting the area as a war correspondent. I was astonished when I watched dawn break over the Red Sea and the sun set in the Sahara. To my mind, sunrise over the Mediterranean has an authority of its own, even though I have seen the sun rise in different and varied places around the globe. I imagine this sunrise in the eyes of a man from ancient times, a man who has not yet learned the movement of the stars, or dangers he exposes himself to as he observes the source of heat and light that is reflected in the majestic waters, fearing perhaps that the sun will never return.

I have been granted the privilege of seeing the Mediterranean Sea and its blue from various and different places where it is revealed, from the Egyptian coast at Port Said, Marsa Matruh and Al-'Arish, or from Tunisia at Hammamet, Susah and Gabes, from Algeria, from Tangier, from Montpellier in France, from a small nearby town called Gabes, from the beautiful small cities along the French coast, from the waters that bathe the shoreline here in Spain, from Genoa in Italy, from the Greek islands, from Adana in Turkey, from Latakia and Tartus in Syria, Beirut, Tripoli, in these waters that caress the Mediterranean coast. I saw them in Marseille and I am convinced that they come from Alexandria or that they make their way there. We cannot control the direction of the water with our gaze. Perhaps it is moving away from us or perhaps it is travelling towards us. Perhaps it is going, or perhaps it is coming.

The oddest thing is that when I reached the coast of the Adriatic, I did not have the sensation that I was standing before the Mediterranean Sea, even though it is an extension of the Mediterranean, as we can see if we look at a map. The same thing happened to me as I passed through the Dardanelles, or in Varna in Bulgaria, or in Sochi in the former Soviet Union, both of which look out onto the Black Sea. It is not just the power of the name; there is something special about the Mediterranean, it has a particular nature that impels a contemplation and study. There is a hidden something reflecting in its waters, in the features of the people and in their character, their food and along their shores. The solid pillar of these civilisations is the civilisation of ancient Egypt, which found its contemplation in the Nile Valley, which formulated the laws of the world, which discovered the existence of hidden forces that govern the visible universe, and which made contact with other civilisations and peoples across the Mediterranean. Cedar wood from the Lebanon was essential for building the sacred barques with which the Sun crosses the dark, veiled night. The boat was a fundamental symbol in ancient Egyptian thinking: in their ships, the Egyptians crossed the Mediterranean Sea, but did not bring back cedar wood or Phoenician silk; instead the crews returned with all kinds of ideas and observations. Across the Mediterranean came Alexander the Great, and the Greeks took up occupation in the Egyptian temples and famous library overlooking the sea. There they learnt the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians and the knowledge of the ancestors; they translated ancient Egyptian books and works into Greek and communicated the reasoning held within them, and so the ideas spread from the Nile Valley to Athens, and Europe.

Navigation across the Mediterranean was a common skill in ancient Egypt, and the legend of the most marvellous thing that ever happened to us came to be written as a result of these voyages. The story tells of the circumstances that led to Sinuhe, one of the pharaoh's men, being exiled on an island in the Mediterranean, perhaps Cyprus or Crete. When Sinuhe felt the imminence of death, he began to write pleading letters to the pharaoh, asking for forgiveness, for what ancient Egyptians feared most was dying and being buried in another land, not in the land of Kemet , the name given to Egypt in ancient times.

The island of Crete is the first land I saw through the aeroplane window when I was flying westward across the Mediterranean, one hour after taking off from Alexandria. I saw the high rocky peaks of the island, with which the Egyptians have been familiar since days long gone by. When the weather is pleasant and the air pure, I can see the waters of the sea, and contemplate its waves. I wonder about the day when we will be able to delve into its memory and read its symbols, for the waters have a memory, as does the solid earth, and perhaps the memory of the Mediterranean Sea is the oldest and most profound that the Earth of recollections has ever known. The crossing between its shorelines is ancient, as are its trading fleets and its wars, the Silk Route that began in China and ended in the city of Venice. When I saw the windows of the Doge's Palace in Venice, I perceived traces of Arabic art in their design, as though I were looking at tapestries hanging from a courtyard, and tiles and ceramics. In Sicily I saw cupolas, of Islamic appearance from the outside and inside churches; paintings on the walls with a variety of arabesques and the Greek and Byzantine unities. Sicily was an exemplary place of interaction and peaceful co-existence, just like al-Andalus, where religions existed side by side and ideas allowed themselves to be influenced by each other. The spiritual fundaments that have shaped the modern world spread from this eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea, of which we are a part. From here ideas and hopes emerged. It is from all the inventions of mankind living around its shores that this sea has obtained its particular traits, and it is this that allows me to differentiate its waves and its blues from those of the rest of the seas on the planet.