My guidebook doesn't even mention Mohandeseen, the Cairene district where I am staying during my five weeks in Cairo. In 1960, this district, like all of those on the west side of the Nile, did not exist. But the city grew from 2 million to the current 20, along with it the Egyptian middle class for whom this district was built. My apartment, which I share with two other students from the International Language Institute (where I'm distinguishing myself as a particularly inept student of Arabic), has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a pleasant kitchen, a comfy living room, floor space in all not much smaller than my home in California. The cable TV has a couple of English-speaking stations that broadcast CNN, Al Jazeera, "Grey's Anatomy" and "24." We have wireless Internet access. Nothing in the apartment comes to American middle-class standards--the bathtub is too narrow, the beds too hard, the heater too anemic. The picture on the left is of an apartment building just catty corner from my own. To avoid homework, I can watch "Law and Order" and putter around on my favorite car forum on the Internet (Lotustalk.com). Grab a couple of chocolate chip cookies from the story across the street. It feels just about like home.

But that's not why I came here.

My my first three weeks now, had not gotten much of a sense of the city, Cairo, El Kahira in their own language. Not much sense of the Egyptians, or any thing particularly Islamic, so, on Friday, I went into the old city to find some of the important old mosques. At one, a man with only one tooth began to talk to me in the way touts and tour guides do, and before long I had hired him, and he led me for two hours not so much to the the sights in the guidebook (though he did often stop to tell me about this madrassa and that harem and the Mamluk mosque) as through the alleys and workshop and food stands and shops. There was the shop where fez hats are handmade (they use chicken fat, right off the chicken bone, as an adhesive), and there where the coffee is roasts ("Here, eat just two beans. Two beans. You will feel like you had two cups of Turkish coffee), there where a man stands on a long-handled iron to press clothes, here where the artisan carves the bone of a camel into a scarab. Unshaven, a dark mark on his head (I see a lot of men with this) that I'm guess comes from the prayers when Muslim men bow there heads to the floor, wiry and quick, veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur war and survivor of and accident in1998 that knocked out most of his teeth and left him in the hospital for three months (the driver was American), fluent in English, French, Italian, and German, with a smattering of Turkish, and of course the Arabic. With the missing teeth, he will never be a leading man, but one can see he could be handsome, but one can also see that he is poor.

Then on Saturday, he led me through the City of the Dead, the grave yard east of central Cairo where one million people are reported to live among the grand mausoleums of the Mamluk rulers and the most brick mausoleums of living families of Cairo. I ran into a friend from the language student who asked me what sites there were to see, but I could not give me an adequate answer, because the reward of the tour had not be sites but weaving in and out with this man among the gravestones as he teased me about being slower with the camera than the "National Geographic" photographers he'd toured through Egypt before his terrible accident.

I was invited to lunch the next day, this Sunday just passed. The apartment was very clean, perhaps 10 feet by 40 with roughly three rooms--one in front where people ate, watched TV and the parents slept, another on the opposite end where the three children slept, and a third area in between that housed the kitchen and bathroom, though it was hardly a kitchen and hardly a bathroom. For example, no bath or shower. The stove consisted of three burners, the antique in style, set on a rickety impromptu assembly of wood. Moshen (the tour guide's name) asked on behalf of his wife if she could have an American dollar--as a kind of keepsake--and after I gave it to her, I thought I'd give her a collection (I'd already slipped Mosen one of my few remaining 100s), so I gave her my last $5, a $10, a $20 and a $50. After she'd gone with the children to sit with his aging mother, he told me she had thanked Allah for providing the money through me (I"m not catching this right--it's the idea of asking a blessing upon me for being Allah's instrument in this instance) because now she had half the money to buy a new stove set with an oven. It will take her a month or two to save the rest of the money. She wants an oven. And the middle burner is a little wiggling and Mosen fears it is possible for it to leak gas and cause an explosion.

But the things to do for this family are endless. At one point, Moshen t over from a pain in his groin. He was in this condition for about 15 minutes, and would relieve the pain by pouring cold water on his groin, as advised by his doctor to relieve the pain. He tried to describe to me the condition. It sounds as if air/gas gets lodged in his groin area. The operation to relieve this condition is very simple and safe, and would cost, he says, about 2000 pounds, or maybe $500, but he says he has better things to spend it on like his rent and his children. There's no complaint when he says this, and once he feels better and after I relate to him my recent incident with a kidney stone, he said that when this happens to me, I should say "Ham du llah," something like "Thank God," because this is just a minor pain, a little twist of the ear from God for my sins when I really deserve to be slapped down. Thank God it is only a kidney stone and not a brain tumor. There's no guile nor preachiness when he says this, and I know it's pretty mainstream church talk, but he really says it ("hamdulah") when he's in this pain.

This is not worn on the sleeve, but it is worn.

I think he is really very, very sharp. But he is just a man. The boy, the woman, the two girls and he himself make up just a family. And so, from perhaps my first day in Turkey two months ago, on this journey to learn something of Islam, all that I can see is that these people practicing this other religion are about like anyone else I've ever met, and that the problems that divide them from us are much more deeply rooted in money than in religion.

When Jill, my step-daughter, graduated from Azusa Pacific University, I remember the APU president remarking at her commencement that when in a few years these graduates begin earning as little as $30,000 a year, they will have joined an elite consisting of seven percent of the world's population. I don't believe people like me have too much, but I know Moshen has too little.