On a bright, spring day about 30 years ago, in a village 20km north of the Valley of the Kings, I was sipping sweet, hot tea in the home of my friend Sheikh Abdallah. The house was at the end of a straw-strewn cul-de-sac, with the rooms opening directly onto the street. The mandara (reception room) was small, with space only for two cane benches draped with rag rugs. Sheikh Abdallah, Adel the translator and I sat on one bench, while opposite us sat Ahmed, our driver, and two of the sheikh's disciples, both of them his nephews. I was glad of the breeze through the open door to waft away the smoke from the Marlboros we had brought as a gift, but which the sheikh had insisted on exchanging for Cleopatras. We were discussing the pros and cons of the Aswan High Dam, which in those days was still presenting farmers with adjustment problems, when there was a minor commotion in the street outside and a young girl showed her head round the door to tell Sheikh Abdallah that he was needed at the mosque. So we set off in a small procession with the sheikh, Adel and me at the head, followed by Ahmed and the nephews with the girls who had brought the message. We arrived at the mosque, which was not so much a mosque but a mud-brick wall enclosing a square courtyard with a few sycamore trees and a large tomb. A throng of women waiting at the gate sprang into action as we approached. They were passing a small baby in a red jersey with an over-large white scarf tied round its head from one to another. The baby was fidgeting and cried. The sheikh sat on a mastaba (bench) outside the gate with two of the women to one side of him, the baby between them. The younger woman was very handsome. She wore a black dress and a pink scarf knotted high on her head to reveal her lustrous hair, parted in the middle. On her feet were yellow shoes with very high heels. The older woman, clearly her mother, wore a conventional black dress and voluminous shawl. Sheikh Abdallah pressed the fingers of his right hand on the girl's temple. He then laid his hand on the older woman's forehead, and on the baby's. A nephew told me that the younger woman had previously suffered a miscarriage, and this small ceremony was to thank the sheikh for helping to ensure the safe delivery of this baby and ask his blessing for the future. After this we proceeded into the courtyard, where more women were waiting. We all seated ourselves on the sand in front of the tomb while the older woman walked round it, ululating. Sheikh Abdallah was now talking to another pretty girl with huge gold earrings, who was telling him that she had been married for 18 months and still had no child. Some of the women began to scuffle for the sheikh's attention, but he shook them off and led the childless woman outside. I jumped up after them, but by the time I had retrieved my shoes the two had disappeared. One of the nephews then appeared at my shoulder and led me round a corner to a place where, by stretching my neck to an unglazed window in the wall, I could see a very old woman who was pacing around a tree. I soon realised with some dismay that she had stopped pacing and was beckoning me. I managed to hurl myself through the window and drop to the sand on the other side. The old woman at once removed my bag and my shawl and made me lie flat on the ground. I had absolutely no idea what was coming, or why, but the nephew had vanished from sight and there seemed to be little I could do to prevent whatever indignity was coming. She removed my shoes, and then she pushed me, over and over, down the high slope. Suddenly recalling the stories I had heard about this fertility treatment, but being afraid to blow my cover, I obligingly hurtled myself along, while the old woman shouted at me to go faster and occasionally tugged down my rising shirt (she must have been outraged at the absence of the usual full-length pantaloons). When I reached the bottom of the slope I lay still. The sky reeled. I felt sick and dizzy and faint. But she was there, hauling me to my feet. I fell down. She dragged me back to where we had started and forced me to sit tailor fashion with my head down, and it dawned on me that this was only a brief respite before the next roll. This time it was worse. But when I opened my eyes I saw Ahmed looming over me. “You must do it again,” he said. He looked concerned. The old woman was bewildered by my protests, and shooed him away. I did it again. Then I crawled up and tried to stand, and crashed into the wall. The nephew and Ahmed propped me up, and reminded me to find 50 piastres to pay the old woman. “What was that for?” I spluttered. “So you'll have another son,” Ahmed said. To make me feel better, Ahmed patted my head with a piece of red rag that Sheikh Abdallah had once blessed and that he kept in his pocket to wipe round the steering wheel of his taxi. Sick, dusty and dishevelled, I stumbled back into the mosque to find Adel writing in his notebook. “Where were you?” he asked. “Did you see what happened?” Adel was writing down what had taken place between the sheikh and the young woman just round the corner from where I had been rolling so painfully and so fruitlessly on the ground. The sheikh had asked her to step three times over an old bone and a casket. “I wish I'd had that option,” I grumbled. “You should only talk to Sheikh Abdallah when he isn't surrounded by these women,” Adel replied reasonably. “They get the wrong end of the stick.” That Sheikh Abdallah had asked the young woman to step three times over the bone was interesting in itself. In most circumstances, the requirement was seven. It has been said that at one time the Middle East was a hotbed of sevens. This obsession may have started with the seven stars of Ursa Major (the Big Dipper), which were seen as hugely significant. As Joshua marched seven times around the walls of Jericho, so, as I was told by someone who knows Luxor well, “if a woman wants a baby she goes first to the mullah for advice. If this doesn't work she goes to the nearest pharaonic temple and walks round it seven times, and as a last resort she tries the Coptic priest.” Egyptians love children and value them highly. Children contribute to the family income and care for elderly family members, so having no children is viewed as a handicap. If a couple are childless, or even if the woman produces only one or two children or if she only gives birth to girls, it will be regarded as the woman's fault. In the Egyptian countryside, farmers still depend on large families to help in the fields. In the past, when there was usually enough to go round, living without a large extended family group was unthinkable. Each couple within that family would go on to have multiple births, but by no means all would survive. At the time of the 1952 Revolution (when the average life span in Egypt was 39) almost one in five babies died during or shortly after birth, but that figure halved over the next three decades, which also saw a decrease in maternal death rates. With increased life expectancy for family members, coupled with increased costs of living and education, family dynamics faced great social and economic change. It has taken time, however, for these new patterns to become an accepted part of the social fabric. It is only in recent decades that overcrowding and the rapidly increasing population has led younger parents to think of reducing the number of children they will raise. Change has come so rapidly to Egypt that it is not surprising people have been slow to adapt. Their customs go back a long way. In Magic in Ancient Egypt (British Museum Press, 2006) Geraldine Pinch points out that, “even the poorest peasant would probably have tried to purchase magical assistance in the crisis of infertility.” Ancient papyri attest to spells and remedies for infertility, miscarriage, protection of newborns and even family planning (when necessary for the mother's health). The forces to contend with in any of these cases, Pinch suggests, were natural or medical; threats from deities and demons; female ghosts, particularly jealous ones; and the Evil Eye. To counteract any of these causes there were prescriptions for herbal remedies, or an appeal for religious/magical intervention such as a visit to a temple, supplication to a deity or a gift of offerings. One can't help noticing links to the past. Sheikh Mohamed, whose house was not far from the village of Old Gourna, which sprawls on the hillside over the tombs of the Nobles, told me: “Women know it's wrong to go to the temple, but they are so afraid of being barren, which might lead to their husband divorcing them or taking another wife, that they will do anything to get a baby. They've been visiting temples for thousands of years.” One special place of pilgrimage for women in the Luxor area was Medinet Habu, the spectacular complex of temples near Old Gourna. Here, at sunset, a barren women accompanied by a friend would make her way inside the enclave of the temple to the sacred lake, its walls fallen in and misshapen. As the sun went down the women stood near the lake, and when it was quite dark the friend moved away and suddenly threw a rock into the water. The hope was that the fright would encourage her to conceive. In other cases the would-be mother would step seven times over a few pharaonic bones, or some incense, or, if she lived by the sea, the blood of a turtle. It was always seven times, so Sheikh Abdallah's three (and he was not alone in using this number) may have indicated that he was distancing himself from the past. Sometimes a barren woman believed that a jealous woman had paid a magician to cast a spell to prevent her pregnancy. Most magicians were keen to undo the work of a rival and reassure his or her client. They might divine where an object was hidden and tell the woman to search in her house or garden or look under her doorstep for a charm, which could be made with a few strands of the victim's hair or clippings from her fingernails and one of her garments or a scrap of fabric cut from her clothing, perhaps fashioned into a doll, or a scrap of paper inscribed with a magic charm. Unfortunately, neighbours were frequently suspicious and jealous of one another, especially when envy or a romantic conflict came into the picture. Only in some cases might the cause be thought of as physical. One cure for this was to use a halved hamda (a small, wild desert melon) as a suppository to cure the “blockage” preventing conception. Bad luck could also be accidental: if you crossed over the legs of a girl you must repeat the step seven times in case she later became barren. Of course, not all women welcomed a pregnancy. Some wanted to limit the number of offspring to reduce the strain on themselves or the family budget, especially as education was becoming more valuable — and costly. Until recently family planning clinics were culturally unacceptable and thus almost non-existent, but women might use home-made prophylactics which included chewing caster oil seeds or coffee beans, or inserting a lemon as a contraceptive cap. Nevertheless the most common method of contraception was induced abortion. It was not uncommon for a woman to have seven or eight abortions, and women told me this was still “easier” than contraception. There could be no accurate statistics on abortion since only some of the cases that went wrong reached hospitals. The methods to induce abortion that women most commonly used were inserting a stick of molokheya (mallow) into the uterus; throwing herself downstairs; carrying heavy weights or rough housing with a collection of children and encouraging them to climb on her back. The sheikhas I spoke to all hotly denied assisting with abortion, but other women told me that such women commonly prescribed herbal beverages or charms to induce miscarriage. Sometimes they told women to drink a purgative drink made with kerosene or boiled onion leaves. Once she did conceive, the mother-to-be moved to a stage when she would need to devote attention to taking precautions to protect her baby and herself from harm. In addition, they thought that accidental misfortune might beset their babies. If the mother craved a certain food and was denied it, the baby might be born with an image of that food as a birthmark. If she looked at beautiful things her baby would be pretty, but if she chanced on a terrible sight it was bad omen. She should not attend a funeral, and heaven forbid that she set eyes on a corpse. Our lovely maid, Nabila, was convinced that if she looked at me long enough her baby would have blue eyes. Sadly, Nabila's first baby was just another statistic, one of the one-in-10 that didn't make it in the 1980s. She spent her few days of life in a Cairo hospital where she died of gastro-enteritis, proof that modern medicine did not yet possess all the answers.
