Cairo is an absorbing place and the only thing that can get you out of it quickly is the need of a gulp of fresh air. The desert’s dust is everywhere: it shades the sun, and its thick layer covers the fur of cats and dogs sleeping on car hoods in the evening. There are several metro lines in the city, yet most of the four million people commuting from the suburbs to work each day take minivans – a steel river reeking with underburnt diesel fuel – and taxis filled with smoke from ubiquitous cigarettes.

Since April 2013, I have visited Cairo many times, mainly seeking music. During one of the visits, I realized that zar culture is not an old disappearing tradition but is doing surprisingly well in the dynamically transforming modern Egypt. The only thing I had to do was to wait patiently for the first encounter… It was evening. Salty peanuts sold by weight and local tobacco products on a windowsill covered with pigeons’ shit. Downtown district, bearing a slight resemblance to Paris, located on the eastern bank of the mighty Nile river, with its wide linear gridded alleys and high buildings, is an icon of the nineteenth century Egyptian modernists and nationalist aspirations to shift the streets and the entire society towards rationality, order and the idea of progress. The best of French architects were selected to plan the grandiose Downtown project. Ismail Pasha – the grandson of Muhammad Ali Pasha – explained the general idea bluntly in his statement given in 1879:

My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions.

In the colonial era, the label “savage” always justified ruthless exploitation. Many African countries had to undergo enormous political change and social shift to cope with the Western hegemony. Modernist elites and newly emerged nationalist political circles also became interested in the perspective of total socio-political reform. This is the story told by the currently crumbling buildings of Downtown Cairo sliding into decay as times changed and the rich moved to Zamalek, Heliopolis, Maadi and other districts of the city. The social project that originated in the nineteenth century had a huge impact on Egyptian culture and religion and the fact that ecstatic zar and subversive sufi saints festivals remain vibrant traditions right in the heart of the capital city, did surprise me a lot.

 Sometimes we are touched by the beauty of life. What moves us? Sometimes we lose our temper or are taken over by a mad ecstatic joy. What are we carried by? Sometimes we are nothing but an ocean of sadness. At the same time, we are ourselves and we are the ocean… Are these behaviours and states deliberately chosen by us? In Arabic this state is called nadha – a divine touch, a mystical cry. Many religious traditions of Africa and Middle East give answers to this question by attiring them in particular forms. Holy men, jinns, and zar spirits are irrational ways of perceiving reality and oneself. A zar spirit is at the same time a stranger and our inner self.

COMMUNITY

But let us put the poetry and prose aside and jump for a while into the land of a greater concentration of thoughts. I would like to explain the phenomenon of zar a bit more, perhaps even to correct some misunderstandings. First of all, the word zar is used in two meaning. Depending on the context, it means a cultural phenomenon or a certain type of spiritual being in Middle Eastern folklore. Zar culture has been fascinating and disturbing the Western world for over a hundred years, yet it usually has been described in a one-dimensional manner, depending on the implications of a researcher or a traveller. An exotic psychotherapy, a space of women’s emancipation, or a liberal social structure struggling with the control apparatus of a modern state – all of them are functional models, images of the phenomenon that cannot be limited to a single frame. I deliberately omit the interpretation of zar as an exorcism. Early reports by Christian monks were totally inadequate. The zar spirits – just like the Guardian Angel – cannot be expelled.

This complex phenomenon becomes slightly more clarified by the report of Hager el Hadidi, an extraordinary scholar from California State University Bakersfield who dropped her academic approach focus during her own initiation and bound herself to a zar community for the rest of her life. El Hadidi describes her experiences in hadras of the Cairo medina:

When I stopped observing and recording zar, I started experiencing zar techniques beyond rationality. While rationally I can not acknowledge the supernatural and its grip on our lives except perhaps in an abstraction, the experience of zar rites and rituals touched me from within.

Her complete report is distinguished from other available studies. The use of analytical tools by a cult member provides a unique insight and guarantees the reliability of the report. El Hadidi involuntarily became the spokesman of the community, telling a slightly more subtle story. Zar described by El Hadidi is, in the first place, a path of development of a profound intuition and of using it in everyday experiences; of listening to your feelings and of using your imagination boldly to interpret the world. Each new member of the community undergoes a slow alchemical process. Successive stages of initiation, intertwined with rituals, are connected with studies of the interpretation of dreams and signs that appear. The group helps the initiated persons to develop trust in their own feelings and supports them in building a deep relationship with themselves. Just like in the Sufi practices, the basic principles of zar are honesty and purity of intentions. The inner integration, growing on this foundation, along with the entire zar entourage provides matter for a flexible and non-dogmatic spiritual path, designed on an ongoing basis and according to individual needs. Wisdom gained on this path is experienced by a follower’s body rather than mind. Symbols and signs are selected and rearranged in response to the needs of a particular person, often creating completely new meanings.

HISTORY

 Like the spiritual path of each participant, the phenomenon as a whole is also flexible. In the West and in Arab countries one can hear that zār has Ethiopian roots. The first ink-inscribed record on zār comes from seventeenth century Abyssinia and was written in the local liturgical language, Ge’ez. The first account given by Christian missionaries active in this region comes from 1839. However in Ethiopia it is believed that the origins of this tradition are Arabic. What seems significant, zār is everywhere described as coming from outside and from afar, and in fact the Hebrew word zar means ‘foreign’. Perhaps it is true that the name of the phenomenon was given by Jewish jewelers who usually distributed amulets made of carnelian and ritual jewelery throughout the region.

Migrations of people from one shore of the Red Sea to the other, from Arabia to Yemen and Abyssinia, the transfer of slaves from Ethiopia and Sudan to the north under Anglo-Egyptian rule, the Hajj from West and North Africa to Mecca – these are just some of the population movements observed in the region over the last several hundred years. It is certain that the Egyptian zār originated from the same source as the Bori cults of the Hausa people, inhabiting the border regions between Nigeria and Niger, derdeba ceremonies of the Gnawa ethnic group in Morocco, and Tunisian stambeli. In the same vein, we can assume that zār shares a lot of common elements with the spirituality of the ahl-i hava (People of the Air) from Balochistan, the Sidama and Gurage peoples in Ethiopia, the ancient Vodun culture of Yoruba, and even trance rituals on the island Mayotta (which we will discuss soon).

Zar has always wandered with its practitioners and evolved, responding to socio-political transformations. It is a living structure that comes from everywhere and from nowhere, a patchwork in which the history of many communities has been recorded. The pantheon of spirits, songs, symbols and language make up an ever-re-emerging conglomerate with great potential for adaptation. Zar songs have always contained borrowings from popular culture, melodies from Nubian weddings, religious chants or even from still appreciated recordings of Umm Kulthum, a prominent Egyptian singer. When no one sings an ancient song, the spirit to which it was dedicated has to die. However, this place does not remain empty for a long time, so the cult stays fresh and meaningful for its practitioners.

POSSESSION

According to the popular concept of the world in Islam, humans were created by god from earth and water, while jinns were created from fire and wind (reeh). The word zar refers not only to the cultural phenomenon itself but also a peculiar kind of jinn placed somewhere below saints and prophets in the hierarchy of the local pantheon. Zar spirits are like reflections of people in another dimension: they accompany us but their nature is entirely different. They create their own social contexts, hierarchies and even families. Their world permeates with ours in abandoned dark places, in doorways of houses, in stairwells, near water sources, in cemeteries or in places labelled as impure. In Egypt it is believed that there are sixty-six zar spirits altogether but not a single zar sheikh or sheikha (male/female group leaders) is able to name them all. The overwhelming majority of this spirits are guardians and guides of humans. Those most commonly encountered are not particularly evil or harmful, though they happen to be very whimsical, revengeful and jealous. Possession may result from many everyday human behaviours: in consequence of stepping on an invisible spirit in the doorway, consumption of sacrificial meat by an uninitiated person, exposure to evil eye or any other form of sorcery.

Yawra Bey is the main zar spirit of the pantheon of all Cairo and Delta-based groups and the chants devoted to him are heard most often. He usually appears in the company of his daughter Rakusha, because zar spirits always appears as female-male couples. He takes the form of a handsome dark-skinned officer of the nineteenth-century Egyptian army, dressed in a red sash and fez, smoking a cigarette or a water pipe. His attribute is a high gilded chair in rococo style – a symbol of state, power, elite status and Western standards that inspired socio-political reforms at the turn of the nineteenth century. Yawra Bey appeared in the Cairo pantheon around that time. A dandy and a gentleman in one, he seduces the most beautiful young girls and he is very jealous of them. This makes them reject admirers one by one – or causes that their beaus cease to like them. Sexual problems in marriage and homosexuality are also his domain. In his case, instead of “possession”, terms like “infatuation” or “love” are used.

The Sudanese female zar spirit Salila is also a foreign figure, coming from afar. Chants dedicated to her describe her attributes: grace and beauty. Persons possessed by Salila during a dance usually act out a bathing scene, play with a mirror, braid and unbraid their hair, and when their process becomes more intense, they pour water on themselves and the surrounding people. During the ceremony in Abul Gheit, one of the older women possessed by Salila while in a trance sprinkled her long loose hair and all other participants with beer from a can in her hand. A moment later she fell on her knees and piercingly screamed in the ecstatic finale at the end the recording available below.

More about the music, trance and experience of zār in the next post. An album with songs and recordings of rituals of various variants of the zār cult from Cairo and the Nile Delta is in the process of being prepared.

Luka Kumor, February 2019.

Translated from Polish by Andrzej Wojtasik. 

SOURCES

Gerda Sergers, Woman and demons: Cultic healing in islamic Egypt, International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology, Leiden – Boston: Brill, , 2003.

Hager El Hadidi, Zar. Spirit Possession, Music, and Healing Rituals in Egypt, Cairo, New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2016.

Setargew Kenaw, Knowledge Production and Spiritual Entrepreneurship in Zar: A Study of Spirit Mediumship in Northeastern Ethiopia, Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag, Dr. MullerGmbH & Co. KG, 2011.

G.P. Makris, Changing Masters. Spirit Possession and Identity Construction among Slave Descendants and Other Subordinates in the Sudan, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000.

John G. Kennedy, Nubian Zar Ceremonies as Psychotherapy, „Human Organization” Vol. 26, No. 4 (Winter), pp. 185-194, 1967.

Magda Saleh, Dance in Egypt, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Vol. 6, New York and London: Routledge, 2002.

Andreas Gossling, Voodoo. Bogowie, Czary, Rytuały, Kraków: Wydawnictwo WAM, 2010.