Surviving in the Crevice: Chinese Prayers in Cairo

The Chinese are known for gathering in “enclaves” whenever they migrate to an exotic city and Cairo is no exception. Across the street from the Abdou Pasha station of Cairo Metro Line 3, there is an underground Chinese community. The Chinese in Egypt call it “the students’ town” since it attracts current and potential students of Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious educational institute in the eyes of Chinese Muslims who follow the Sunni branch of Islam.
Back in China I belong to the dominant Han ethnic group but here I am part of the minority. I am not a Muslim and have no affiliation with Al-Azhar University. There are however two things that link me with this unique community. Some of the members had read my interview of a high-ranking Chinese Imam conducted when I was a journalist based in Shanghai, and others had treated me as a recipient for their services targeted at the Chinese community. Therefore, when I was on the verge of homelessness wandering through the streets of Cairo last October, I was warmly welcomed into the ‘students’ town’ and thus, was also given a window into this community.
At first, Chinese Al-Azhar students were graduates from the top religious university in China, The China Islamic Institute based in Bejing. The China Islamic Association and Chinese government sponsored and supervised a group of twenty students per year.
However, during the past two decades, the number of self-funded Chinese students increased exponentially. This is partly because of free tuition, and partly because the richer Chinese could afford the accommodation and living expenses associated with studying abroad. In 2015, the number of self-funded Chinese students accepted by Al-Azhar reached 478, while last year the number of Chinese applicants was over 1000. This led the Chinese embassy in Cairo to introduce an urgent policy, which dictated that Chinese students who hold tourist visas, landing visas or other temporary visas would not be issued an identification paper.
The aim was to shrink the number of Chinese applicants. Within Islamic theology there are heated debates, often dominated by overseas-educated talents. These debates could however be used as a seedbed for extremist doctrines and this is this is the reason the government finds it necessary to control this phenomenon at its origin.
Thousands of Chinese students and their families congregate in ‘the students’ town’, around El-Abaseya and Masoud streets. Egyptian residents in the area generally do not speak to their Chinese neighbors, despite seeing them everyday. The main reason for this is not that the Egyptians are xenophobic, but that the Chinese community tends to be introverted, as being invisible in a chaotic environment usually makes them feel safer.
Studying religion and practicing Islamic rituals are their primary motives for coming to Egypt. It’s much easier to find a mosque close to their house to complete their five daily prayers in a Muslim country. Muslim women feel free to wear a scarf here, something they found more difficult in China, given the secular nature of Chinese society.
Many female Chinese Muslims start wearing a niqab, a black garment that covers everything but the eyes, as soon as they arrive. At first, I felt a bit shocked, as I knew that they had grown up in a society founded on the basis of capitalism and modernization, which had exposed them to commercial advertisements. Out of curiosity, I tried to show my politeness and praised their faith, while trying to read their mind carefully. They always responded with pragmatic reasons, like preventing harassment and damaging UV rays from the sunlight. With few exceptions, most of them are wives of male students.
However, almost every student goes through a phase of disillusionment one or two years later. Obtaining a bachelor degree from Al-Azhar University is a long and tedious process. Due to the rigorous educational system, only those who persevere and make arduous efforts for around ten years are awarded their degree.
The process goes as follows. After arriving at Cairo, the newcomers spend one-year preparing for the Al-Azhar entrance examination. At this stage, they usually take a preparatory course or choose a language institute to strengthen their Arabic. After passing the entrance examination, they might be appointed to the first or second year of middle school. The prerequisite for undergraduate admissions at Al-Azhar includes three years at middle school and three years at high school. During this stage, they have two opportunities to skip a level.
It is obviously extremely tough and bitter complaints from international students have arisen. It is said that last year Al-Azhar set up a special class to condense three years to one year for those who finished high school courses in their home country. However, it doesn’t always work.
My landlady, Fatma, a 28-year-old Huizu Chinese from Gansu province who got this privilege in her second year in Cairo, didn’t seem as optimistic and excited as I expected. After two months of painfully intensive classes, she felt a deep sense of ennui.
They are only guaranteed to upgrade to undergraduate level if they pass the final examination, which covers all contents of an ordinary three-year high school course. In addition to the burden of their tough studies’, Chinese students are at a disadvantage in Arabic compared to their classmates from other Arabic countries like Syria. “Though I had learned fusha (Modern Standard Arabic) for several years in China, my mind goes blank when all the teachers speak amiya (Egyptian dialect),” said Fatma looking at me with a helpless expression. “We can’t compete with Syrian classmates who are able to speak with teachers on specific topics and go into details, while we don’t understand anything of what they are talking about.”.
Moreover, the arrangement of the course schedule is problematic. Students have to sit in the classroom from 8:30a.m.-2:00p.m. with no breaks, cramming knowledge from three rotating teachers, who remind them of the spoon-feeding educational system that has recently been abandoned by China. “We are suffering in the long road of learning with little hope and at the same time feeling frustrated when faced with our family’s nagging as they keep on asking when we will graduate.”
Chinese society still encourages a uniform life course. Graduation is the first step and the bridge to a good job, followed by getting married and raising children. It’s a strictly time serial process. Even though I obtained my degree, I’m under the same social pressure of going astray from the common (often read as “right”) life track because of being single.
The gap between being the role-model back at home and becoming slow students here at Cairo is the root of this ennui. The students have to do something to fill the gap, redirect their attention, energy, and if possible, retrieve the significance of their lives. Retreating back to China without an achievement, which would only shame their parents when rumors spread in a closed and connected society, is not an option.
Opening a small business in Cairo has therefore become the top priority for these young Chinese students. Among those businesses are the currency exchange business (“换钱”huanqian) and the manual shipping business (“背货”beihuo). They have both become the dominant businesses because of their relatively high profits and large market demands.
Originally, large traders monopolized the currency exchange businesses. Egyptian merchants need to import Chinese goods and Chinese merchants need to import marble, ironstone and other raw materials. US dollars are the global settlement currency. They give up channels of banks and make deals secretly, exchanging Egyptian pounds for Chinese yuan directly, in order to get rid of the foreign exchange and to circumvent governmental regulations. Thus, a black market emerged in order to do that.
As such, Chinese restaurant owners, who receive large amounts of Egyptian pounds from guests, urgently exchange them to Chinese currency because of the pound’s devaluation.
At the outset, students of Al-Azhar University work as translators for larger traders. Gradually, they accumulate their own network and personally carry large amounts of Egyptian pounds and work more like brokers. They then expand this market to ordinary individuals and in turn the increasing Chinese immigrants make it prosperous. Now it is assumed that almost every Chinese is involved in this market, but it remains impossible to draw a whole picture of the networks.
Taking myself as an example, I completely relied on the black market to get Egyptian pounds as it’s more convenient and I could compare different exchange rates given by different brokers and choose the most profitable one. If I want to exchange Egyptian pounds in a legal and official manner, I have to carry U.S. dollars when coming to Egypt, then exchange them into Egyptian pounds in Egyptian banks because the banks of both countries don’t provide direct currency exchange service for individuals. I cannot remember who introduced me to my first broker whom I abandoned quickly since I became embedded in more groups on social media and developed personal channels to exchange money, buy Chinese sauces and ingredients and order dumplings.
I even tried once beihuo (manual shipping) service last December to get my winter clothes from China. This service involved a lot of teamwork. They gave me an address in Beijing and I asked my mum to send my clothes to this address. Two days later someone carried my clothes with other goods they had collected in Beijing to fly to Cairo. Apparently, they take advantage of free allowance luggage and cash in on it. My package was 7 kilos and they charged me 1000 Egyptian pounds (63usd). The weight limit is two pieces of checked in luggage of 23 kilos each, and one-piece of carry on luggage of 8 kilos. They could make 7700 pounds (481USD) and double for a round-trip. A student could be legendary if he is able to take 7–8 round-trips a month.
Fatma told me the largest underground organization called “Sino-Egypt Express”, which, dissatisfied with purely labor ship profits, developed an international trade business on small goods like skin plasters and Egyptian skincare. Benefiting from flourishing online shopping services in Mainland China, these goods are quickly sold out.
With the profits of selling goods, a one-way flight might earn someone as much as 20,000 Egyptian pounds while the cost of one flight ticket is only 2000 (last year). Driven by interest, more and more students in “the students’ town” tested the water and earned their first income. Some chose to keep on studying, but many of them quit and devoted themselves to this trade.
Everything is done under the table. Those young speculators are in tense competition with each other, but the primary threat comes from both governments. In Fatma’s words, they survive in the crevice.
However, the situation deteriorated last year as the value of the Egyptian pound dropped dramatically in a few months and as the Egyptian government cracked down on those underground businesses. Last September I exchanged 1 yuan for 1.2 Egyptian pounds, five months later, I could get 2.8.
The turning point was November 3, the day when Egypt devalued its currency by 48% to clinch a bailout from the IMF. During that period, dozens of Chinese students were put in jail because they were shipping goods for sale on a large scale without paying any value added tax. Fatma told me an anecdote: when officials from the Chinese embassy went to the airport to confirm students as Chinese citizens, they apparently felt embarrassed and asked them why other foreign students could focus on study but only Chinese students are busy with manual shipping.
At the same time, Egyptian policemen targeted the Chinese black market and Chinese illegal immigrants. They followed an entrapment strategy and sneaked into Chinese social media groups, making currency-exchange deals with Chinese brokers. Once those brokers fell into the trap, they were detained and the large amount of cash that they stored up was confiscated.
They also began checking for invalid visas. Many Chinese immigrants, including me, only hold a 15-day tourism visa when landing in Egypt and are only able to get an extension of up to three months.
But if you want to stay longer than three months, you have to get a student visa, working visa or residential visa. That’s why those potential Al-Azhar students often self-mocked the fact that each Al-Azharer has an illegal immigrant history since they all have to wait at least a year to be a regular student and get a student visa. Last November, Egyptian policemen not only detained several Chinese immigrants with expired visas, but also uncovered a largescale illegal transaction of student visas from Al-Azhar University and other universities in Egypt.
The discovery produced a lot of drama. An Egyptian factory in Maadi was reported to steal electricity from another factory and Egyptian policemen went to investigate but they couldn’t find the Egyptian factory. A Chinese worker gave them the wrong address and guided them to a Chinese factory. The policemen found Chinese labor workers in this factory holding student visas bought from the illegal transaction market. The average price is 5000 Egyptian pounds for one student visa.
This was just the tip of the iceberg. Corrupt Egyptian officials with Chinese speculators never get short of creative ideas. One widespread story is that an Egyptian official in an immigration office gave Chinese passports official stamps after his official working hours. However, the most notorious case was that of a Chinese businessman, neither student nor Muslim, who had carved official seals and sold those fake visas to the Chinese. It is said that he is still in prison and only eats Eish (bread) for each meal.
One month later, I moved out of ‘the student’s town’ and relocated in Rehab where a group of Chinese men who were Al-Azhar students in the 1990s were plotting their business investment in Egypt. They are successful examples for those Muslims in Cairo who change their roles from students to businessmen. In their 40s, they play pivotal roles in Sino-Egyptian trades.
None of them had obtained a degree from Al-Azhar University, despite registering an uncharacteristic flicker of schadenfreude at their classmate who kept on studying and restrained himself in ‘student’s town’, which they believed led to his psychological problem. They also sneered at those Al-Azhar graduates who had lost the real passion for religious research in state owned universities. They were forced to drink wine and not able to practice regular prayers when surrounded by Chinese businessmen.
These young speculators in “the student’s town” reminded them of their youth, boring courses and frugal lives. They repeated told me: we have no choices but to survive.
*It has been published by a Chinese media:http://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1647002
