CAIRO - Although the professional relation between superstar belly dancer Fifi Abdou on the one hand and the longest serving People's Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour and former Finance Minister Youssef Boutros Ghali on the other was remote, there used to be sharp competition among the three during Ramadan. The charity banquets they held in the holy fasting month which offered free meals to break the fast, attracted large numbers because of the high quality and variety of dishes served throughout the fasting month. Street banquets or tables of mercy, as they are popularly known, have been for a few decades an integral feature of the holy month in Egypt, although their roots go back to the days of Prophet Mohamed, albeit in a different form. It was, however, the Ottoman prince Abdel-Rahman Katukhda who first held those iftar banquets in streets outside people's homes in the 18th century. He assigned members of the ruling elite to stand at each table to see that the people were being well served. More recently, the Nasser Social Bank held from 1967 iftar banquets, in their modern sense, financed from zakat (alms) money. The most famous of these were the tables of mercy in the vicinity of Al-Azhar mosque at which 4,000 people used to eat daily. However, with the rising star of businessmen and politicians in the 1990s and onwards, that witnessed a marriage between power and money, lavish banquets started to find their way to streets. Entire families as well as passers-by knew where to go as these charitable tables were set in the same places every year. Sorour's banquet, which used to extend for a few hundred metres, offered all the delicacies that a fasting person would dream of having after l3 or l4 hours of fasting. As a parliament deputy representative of the populous Cairo constituency of Sayida Zeinab, Fathi Sorour never missed a year since l991 and his banquet was a major feature of the famous Sayida Zeinab Square. Sorour seemed to have grasped the then rules of the political game, as his annual banquet together with personal services, he offered potential voters in the constituency, granted him an uncontested seat in parliament. Today, after the revolution the square is void of Sorour's table although a modest one is being held in its place, which still receives a number of passers-by. The former parliamentarian, who is currently detained pending trial in a case of ill-gotten gains, was extravagant with the poor. According to Sayid el-Nawawi, who has supervised many of the iftar banquets held in the Sayida Zeinab area, Sorour's banquet was so highly in demand that people booked their seats as early as the asr prayer (afternoon prayer three hours before the iftar). “Despite the tiring work and the effort we had to exert to lay and prepare the tables and clean them afterwards, the daily pay we got and the boxes of leftovers distributed to the banquet workers were very rewarding”, he told Sabah el-Kheir Arabic magazine. Sorour, said he was keen to remind us that we had strong competitors like Youssef Ghali and Fifi Abdou, for which reason he sought high standards of service and food. While Sorour is behind bars and Ghali is being tracked down by the Interpol for accusations of political corruption, the poor people of their respective districts are missing their banquets. Beneficiaries of the tables of mercy have noticed that the five star banquets have decreased in number this year because of the extraordinary economic circumstances resulting from the repercussions of the January revolution. The modest iftar meals, available in the streets of Cairo today, are more or less fulfilling of the benevolent spirit of a month where the race for Divine reward is paramount.
