Cairo is Africa's most maddening and magical capital, where trees talk, the Virgin Mary apparates, and—perhaps most astonishing—traditional Egyptian civility and tolerance still survive despite de facto dictatorship and mounting Muslim fundamentalism. Susan Hack reflects on the city that Arabs call Umm Al-Dunya, "Mother of the World"

One day last February, near Cairo International Airport, I saw hundreds of people gathered around a tree beside an army watchtower. The crowd spilled into the road, stopping traffic, and drivers got out of vehicles to ask one another what was happening. "Has there been an accident?" I called out from my car to a man on the curb. "No," he answered. "It's something strange. They say a tree is talking."

I was surprised but not very, for many Egyptians embrace the supernatural. A thirst for miracles first sprang from the Nile; its annual flood enabled civilization to take root in the desert. The river's gift was not entirely reliable, and years of either low or excessive flooding could lead to famine, military weakness, and the collapse of dynasties. The completion of the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser reservoir, in 1970, finally guaranteed Egypt year-round water, agriculture, and electricity. Yet life in the thirteen-hundred-year-old capital remains far from secure.

Sprawling east and west from the Nile's green banks, Cairo today is a city on the verge, both megalopolis and village—a patchwork of modern high-rises, nineteenth-century palaces, garbage piles, shopping malls, herds of sheep, thousands of mosques, pharaonic ruins, and mile upon mile of informal brick housing seemingly held together with wire and string. Swelled by immigrants from the countryside, Cairo's population has tripled three times in the past half century and now exceeds sixteen million, the largest urban agglomeration in Africa. Cars park three deep on streets, and daily traffic jams tangle drivers of school buses, taxis, and camel-carrying pickup trucks with commuters driving SUVs from new American-style suburbs and djellaba-clad farmers who grow crops and transport them to market by painted donkey cart as they have always done in the shadow of the Pyramids.

The extremes, especially the gulf between rich and poor, appall and overwhelm. Yet Egypt has a reputation for stability, the hallmark of Hosni Mubarak's presidency, according to his supporters. Mubarak, a pharaonic figure, is now serving his twenty-fifth year in office—the third-longest reign in Egypt's six-thousand-year history. The seventy-nine-year-old president has indicated that he will not seek a sixth term in 2011. He has amended the constitution to allow for multiparty elections and has positioned his forty-four-year-old son Gamal to run for president, if he and Mubarak's military backers should so decide. However, the coming transition is uncertain. There is no vice president, and people are nervous about the future, wondering whether change will occur because of an election, a military coup, or a heart attack. In the past year, judges, teachers, train drivers, and other union workers have been striking, an unusual occurrence and a sign that stability has regressed into stagnation and dissatisfaction in almost every aspect of life. In this climate of malaise and in jealous contrast to Dubai's futuristic rise, many Cairenes look with nostalgia toward their glorious past, though they are divided over which past: the cosmopolitan Cairo of the early twentieth century and its polyglot, Western-influenced elite or the Caliphate—the pan-Arab rule of the Prophet Muhammad's associates and relatives, whose reign of military conquest and scientific discovery (and political rivalry) now seems Islam's golden age.