They say light draws more than just moths in the dark.
Cairo, 358 Hijri—what we’d call the 10th century, though
time has a way of folding back on itself in places as old as this. The people
gathered on Taht el-Rab Street, waiting for their Caliph Al-Mu’izz to arrive,
not knowing they were part of something that would echo through centuries.
Funny how history pivots on such ordinary moments, how darkness gives way to
light in ways we never expect.
The order had come down: bring torches, bring candles. Light
the night. Make it shine.
Mike Haloran would’ve called it “tossin’ scraps to the
dark,” the way old-timers in backroad diners talk about things best left alone.
But Mike wasn’t here, and this wasn’t some dusty stretch of Route 66 or a ghost
town off the Mississippi. This was Cairo, ancient and mysterious, where the
Nile flowed black as ink under a Ramadan moon.
The streets filled as sunset approached. People moved like
specters, carrying their small flames wrapped in palm fronds to shield them
from the desert wind that whispered ancient secrets. The wooden bases of their
candles clicked against the cobblestones—click-clack, click-clack—a
drumbeat of anticipation.
“He’s coming!” a voice cried out, and the murmur spread like
wildfire.
Ten-year-old Mahmoud pushed through the crowd, his own small
lantern clutched in grimy hands. His mother had warned him to stay close, but
the energy of the night pulled at him like a current. How could he resist? The
whole city had transformed, darkness peeled back by a thousand points of light.
“Stay back, boy,” an old man growled, shoving him aside.
Mahmoud stumbled, watching the flame in his lantern dance
dangerously close to extinction. If it went out, his father would tan his hide
good. The thought made his stomach twist.
The crowd surged forward, and he lost sight of his family.
Panic bubbled up in his throat—a feeling familiar to children in crowds since
time began—but it subsided as he caught sight of the approaching procession.
He’s just a man, Mahmoud thought, disappointed. Just
a man on a horse.
But the way people reacted—you’d think God Himself had
descended. They raised their lights higher, flames reaching toward heaven, and
the night blazed with a golden glow that pushed the darkness into the narrowest
alleys.
That was the night the fanus was born.
(The darkness remembers, though. The darkness always
remembers.)
---
Hassan Al-Baghdadi sat hunched in his workshop, fingers
bleeding from a dozen small cuts. After forty-three years crafting lanterns,
his hands looked like a road map of pain—calloused, scarred, arthritic. But
still, they moved with precision, folding tin and copper into the familiar
shapes that would light Cairo’s nights during the holy month.
“Too slow,” he muttered to himself. “Too damn slow.”
Outside his shop, the world had changed. Chinese imports
flooded the marketplaces—plastic abominations with flashing lights and tinny
speakers that played mechanized prayers and pop songs. How do you compete with
that? How do you explain to a ten-year-old that your handcrafted fanus
was worth ten times what his parents paid for the Chinese knockoff?
You don’t. You just keep working, keep cutting, keep
bleeding into your art.
Hassan slipped the glass panels into place, colored panes
that would transform the lantern’s flame into emerald and sapphire and ruby
light. The heat of the small brazier made sweat trickle down his spine, pooling
at the waistband of his pants.
His grandson Tariq watched from the doorway, the blue glow
of a cell phone illuminating his young face. The boy was seventeen, with no
interest in lanterns or tradition or the craft that had fed their family for
generations.
“You need to learn,” Hassan said, not looking up from his
work.
“Learn what? How to make something nobody wants?”
Hassan’s fingers stilled. He thought of strangling the boy
for a moment—a brief, vivid fantasy that shocked him with its clarity. Instead,
he reached for another sheet of copper, feeling the cool metal’s edge kiss his
fingertips.
“They want it,” he said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
Tariq snorted and wandered back into the house, leaving
Hassan alone with his lanterns and his thoughts. The old craftsman returned to
his work, but his mind drifted to the stories his grandfather had told him—how
the Caliph had ridden through streets ablaze with light, how women once used
these lanterns to find their way through streets made safe by their glow.
(The darkness waited outside, patient as always.)
---
Sarah Donovan hadn’t expected to fall in love with Cairo.
She’d come to study Islamic art on a Fulbright scholarship, expecting to put in
her year and return to Boston with material for her dissertation. Three years
later, she was still here, living in a flat overlooking Khan el-Khalili bazaar.
Her studio apartment was cluttered with artifacts—not the
valuable kind that got you arrested at customs, but the everyday treasures that
told the story of a living, breathing culture. And her most prized possessions
were her fawanis—Ramadan lanterns collected from artisans across the
city.
“You’re paying too much,” her Egyptian friends always told
her. “They see your white face and double the price.”
Maybe so, but Sarah didn’t care. Each lantern was a story, a
connection to the past that reached through centuries to touch the present.
Tonight, she carefully lit the oldest one, a delicate copper
piece with colored glass that cast prismatic shadows across her walls. The
light flickered, making the shadows dance. For a moment—just a moment—she
thought she saw a figure in those shadows, tall and impossibly thin, watching
her with empty eyes.
She blinked, and it was gone.
Too much work, not enough sleep, she thought, rubbing
her eyes. The lantern’s flame steadied, casting a warm, comforting glow.
Outside, the call to prayer echoed across the city. Sarah
moved to her window, watching as lights appeared in windows and doorways across
Cairo—modern electric bulbs mixing with the traditional glow of lanterns that
had changed little since the time of Al-Mu’izz.
In the street below, a group of children ran by, singing the
traditional “Wahawy Ya Wahay” and swinging plastic lanterns that played tinny
electronic versions of the same song. Their laughter echoed up to her window,
making her smile.
She didn’t see the tall figure standing in the shadows
between buildings, watching the children with hollow eyes that reflected no
light. She didn’t see how it seemed to drink in the darkness around it, growing
more substantial as night deepened.
(But the lanterns saw. The lanterns always see.)
---
In his dreams, Hassan walked the ancient streets of Fatimid
Cairo. The buildings rose around him, not crumbling and patched as they were
now, but new and strong, decorated with intricate carvings that caught the
light of a thousand lanterns.
His lanterns.
The Caliph approached on horseback, but in the dream, the
Caliph’s face was his own. And the people raised their lights higher,
illuminating the world so completely that no shadow could exist.
“No shadow can exist,” Hassan murmured in his sleep.
Across the city, in her small apartment, Sarah Donovan
dreamed too. She wandered lost through dark alleys where unseen things brushed
against her legs like cats. Or not like cats at all. In her hand, she clutched
a lantern that grew dimmer with each step.
“Please,” she whispered to the dying light. “Please don’t go
out.”
But the flame shrank to a pinpoint, then winked out
entirely, leaving her in darkness so complete it felt solid, pressing against
her skin like wet velvet.
And from that darkness, something reached for her with hands
that had never known light.
Sarah woke with a gasp, heart hammering. Her bedsheets were
soaked with sweat, twisted around her legs like burial cloths. Across the room,
her collection of lanterns stood dark and silent.
All except one—the oldest copper fanus, which still
burned with a single, steady flame she didn’t remember lighting.
Outside, Cairo slept beneath the Ramadan moon, streets quiet
save for the occasional mesaharati making his rounds, drum in one hand,
lantern in the other, waking the faithful for their pre-dawn meal.
The mesaharati paused outside a darkened alley,
feeling a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the desert night. He raised
his lantern higher, peering into the shadows.
“Hello?” he called, voice uncertain.
The darkness shifted, seemed to lean toward the light. The
man took a step back, then two, feeling a primal fear rise in his chest—the
ancient dread of what waits beyond the firelight’s edge.
He turned and hurried away, drum forgotten at his side.
Behind him, something emerged from the alley, moving in a mockery of human
gait, flowing more than walking across the stones of Taht el-Rab Street.
It paused beneath a streetlamp, gazing up at the electric
bulb with something like hunger. After a moment, the bulb flickered, dimmed,
and went dark.
One by one, the lights along the street followed suit.
(Because darkness, you see, has patience. Darkness has all
the time in the world.)
---
The end of Ramadan approached, and with it, Eid al-Fitr—the
feast of breaking the fast. The city hummed with anticipation, markets crowded
with last-minute shoppers buying gifts and foods for the celebration.
Hassan finished his last lantern of the season, a special
commission for a wealthy businessman who wanted something traditional for his
American-educated children. The old craftsman had outdone himself, creating a fanus
that incorporated elements from the oldest designs—the Parliament style,
touches of the Farouk, with glass panels hand-etched with verses from the
Quran.
It was, he thought with quiet pride, perhaps the finest work
of his life.
Tariq appeared in the doorway, no phone in sight for once.
The boy’s eyes widened slightly at the sight of the lantern.
“That’s… that’s really good, Grandfather.”
Hassan felt something warm unfurl in his chest. He nodded,
not trusting himself to speak.
“Can you show me how you did the glass?” Tariq asked,
stepping into the workshop.
Outside, shadows lengthened as the sun dipped toward the
horizon. The final day of fasting was ending, and soon the city would erupt in
celebration—streets filled with light and laughter, lanterns hanging from every
window and doorway.
Across town, Sarah Donovan carefully packed her oldest
lantern in tissue paper, preparing it as a gift for the Islamic Arts Museum.
She’d finally traced its provenance—a direct line back to the workshops of
Fatimid Cairo, possibly even to the very night when Al-Mu’izz entered the city.
As her fingers brushed the copper frame, she felt a strange
tingling sensation, as if the metal had become electrified. For a heartbeat,
the room around her seemed to shift, stone walls replacing plaster, the sounds
of modern Cairo giving way to something older, more primal.
Then it passed, and she was just a woman in an apartment,
wrapping an old lantern in paper.
The light endures, she thought, though she couldn’t
say why.
As the call to evening prayer sounded across Cairo, people
emerged from homes and businesses, carrying lanterns of all kinds—ancient
copper heirlooms, mass-produced Chinese imports, handcrafted works of art from
the workshops of Taht el-Rab.
They moved through streets where their ancestors had walked
centuries before, guided by the same light that had illuminated the path of Caliph
Al-Mu’izz.
And if darkness gathered more thickly in certain corners, if
shadows moved in ways shadows shouldn’t, well—no one noticed. Not when there
was so much light to see by.
The fawanis glowed brighter as night fell completely,
their light steady and true. In Hassan’s workshop, the old man guided his
grandson’s hands, showing him how to cut the copper just so, how to fold it
into shapes that would capture and transform flame into something magical.
“The light keeps us safe,” he told the boy, repeating words
his grandfather had spoken to him decades ago. “It always has.”
Tariq nodded, solemn for once. “From what?”
Hassan smiled, the expression making the deep lines around
his eyes crinkle like ancient papyrus. “From what’s always waiting. From what’s
been waiting since before there were lanterns or caliphs or even Cairo itself.”
(The darkness, patient as always, settled in to wait a
little longer.)
Because some traditions endure not just for their beauty or
their cultural significance, but because they serve a purpose deeper than
memory—a purpose written into the very fabric of existence.
Light and dark. Flame and shadow.
And somewhere in between, the fanus—silent sentinel
against a night that hungers.
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