Modernity Discovers the Oasis

It’s midnight at the oasis, and there’s no camel to send to bed.

Instead, Arabic pop music is blasting from a fluorescent-bright shop serving icy sugar-cane juice. At the sweltering coffee shop across the unpaved lane, robed men pass the night playing dominoes and puffing on water pipes as a TV screen flickers nearby. Trucks and motorcycles rumble past; the sound of grinding gears mixes with the barking of dogs and the braying of donkeys.

Alas, real life in a Sahara oasis at the end of the 20th century is not the idyllic paradise of song and film. Yet there is still something magical about these remote dots of green in the desert--the “islands of the blest,” as they were called by the Greek historian Herodotus.

Watching the blacksmith of El Qasr at work, for instance, is like stepping into the Middle Ages.

Mohammed Hamoudi pumps an antique leather bellows that heats the homemade charcoal in his furnace to a pale orange. A metal bar goes onto the glowing mound and he pounds it into a flat crescent. When the bar has cooled, his thumb presses the metal against a worn stick. With a file in his other hand, he deftly cuts 100 tiny saw teeth. The result is a neatly turned sickle ready to be attached to a wooden handle and sold to his neighbors.

Hamoudi is proof that the self-reliant traditions of life still endure in the oases of Egypt’s western desert. But for how long?

Oases, those rare and precious places of sweet water and verdant palm groves in the midst of parched sands, have long captivated the popular imagination. From Rudolph Valentino’s celluloid desert sheik to Maria Muldaur’s tune “Midnight at the Oasis,” they have come to symbolize serenity, romance and escape.

But they’re changing. Newly opened to the outside world by television, modern telecommunications and paved roads built as part of Egypt’s push to modernize and extend infrastructure across the country, the real-life oases in Egypt and elsewhere are undergoing an epochal transformation.

After centuries of isolation, inhabitants of places such as El Qasr have been fast-forwarded into the future. TV soap operas, plastic garbage bags and pickup trucks are supplanting storytelling, frugality and camels. Asphalt roads now follow the age-old caravan routes, and buses link Egypt’s oases to the Nile Valley more closely than once possible.

Oasis youths travel out to earn more money, while increasing numbers of backpackers and tourists with different ways trickle in.

Government officials in Egypt say this is good--oasis dwellers are now enjoying the benefits of progress in the form of health care, schools, a more diverse diet, modern appliances, transportation and building techniques. They also see the oases as a partial answer to Egypt’s overcrowding, and they’re encouraging more Egyptians to leave the Nile Valley for the oases to work on new agricultural projects, part of the state’s push to make the most use of its limited arable land.

But many environmentalists, archeologists and oasis dwellers fear that a cultural and natural paradise is being lost, that development is wiping out the unique customs and social fabric of the oases. There are even warnings that poorly conceived water-drilling and land-reclamation projects could destroy the oases themselves.

“I think bad things are happening, but maybe because I want to keep these people in a museum to fit my romantic view,” said Amr Shannon, an Egyptian desert traveler, tour guide and rally racer who has been visiting the oases for 25 years.

“They have the right to get spoiled as we are. To them, development is good--to go to Cairo, to get plastic and to have television.”

Settlements May Date Back to the Stone Age

In the western desert, which stretches from the Nile Valley to Libya, there are five major inhabited oases: Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla, Kharga and Siwa. The largest, Dakhla, is dozens of miles wide, encompassing hundreds of wells and providing water to numerous villages. Their populations range from 15,000 in Siwa to about 75,000 in Kharga.

Scientists believe that Egypt’s oases have been inhabited since the Stone Age--but they remained places of isolation and mystery.

Pharaohs and kings and religions rose and fell. But for centuries, these oases knew little change. Surrounded by desert, reached only by camel, they were self-reliant horticultural communities, growing dates, olives and fruit and making almost everything else they needed--pottery, tools, baskets, mats, clothes and jewelry.

Electricity didn’t come until Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Aswan High Dam project in the early 1960s. The real turning point was the completion of the asphalt road network a decade ago. Suddenly, a journey that once required days could be made in a few hours.

The blacksmith Hamoudi, 41, is typical of the transitional generation in El Qasr, on the edge of Dakhla Oasis, 350 miles southwest of Cairo. Television did not arrive here until he was 26. He can remember when there were no lights, indoor plumbing or telephone service.

El Qasr has all of these conveniences today. But as more and more of its people move to new concrete houses, El Qasr’s old town, inhabited since ancient Roman times, is slowly collapsing. The concrete homes are hotter in summer and colder in winter than the traditional mud-brick ones inside the old town’s walls, yet they are seen as cleaner and more modern. Hamoudi said he would move too, away from the shambling pile of mud homes, medieval minarets and narrow, shaded passageways, if he could afford it.

Occasionally, government preservationists come by to shore up walls in danger of imminent collapse, and a few tourists traipse in to see the old mosque and water wheel. But the old town’s alleys are half-empty, with doors of abandoned houses hanging open. Despite all this, Hamoudi sees mainly pluses in the transition to the modern world.

“We didn’t know anything,” he said, “and the television helped to open people’s eyes.

“I’ve got a television set, and I love it,” he added.

Hala Barakat, a Cairo University botanist who works with archeologists studying the diets of ancient civilizations, witnessed the rapid social changes now taking place. As she recounted, she was probably the first woman from Cairo ever seen by the inhabitants of Dush village in the Kharga oasis when she arrived in 1980.

At the time, she was struck by how congenial their small community was.

“I discovered a different type of life altogether,” she said. “I found people very poor, but with clean houses, very generous and very kind, who knew a lot of things. This tiny village, 150 inhabitants, was perfect, everything you could want.”

Her impression was different when she returned in 1997.

“In a way, my paradise is lost,” she said. “The people now have electricity, water and butane gas, but they are sitting there all day in front of their TV sets. No one is making their beautiful mats anymore. They have much more garbage than they used to.

“They don’t know what to do with it. They used to wash their plastic bags to use them again. Now they throw them away or burn them. People are still poor, and probably feel poorer than before.”

Each of the main oases is distinct. Bahariya--closest to Cairo--is the most developed. Farafra is isolated, with just one town and a few extended families. But it now is becoming something of a tourist attraction because of its proximity to the spectacular White Desert, a badlands of wind-eroded white limestone formations.

Dakhla is a quiet farming area. Its residents wear hats made from palm fronds, and it encompasses many archeological ruins, some not yet fully explored.

Kharga, a frontier town and administrative center, has already lost its innocence. Garbage blows through depressing streets where high-rise Soviet-style apartment blocks have been built for the influx of Nile Valley farmers who were brought to Kharga in the 1970s and ‘80s as part of the government’s ambitious “New Valley” desert-reclamation scheme.

Siwa, the only Egyptian oasis where a form of the Berber language rather than Arabic is spoken, is near the Libyan border. It is culturally unique, with the women covered in public in a distinctive embroidered blue cloak that they clasp closed with their teeth. In ancient times, Siwa was famed for its oracle; Alexander the Great braved the desert to consult the seer.

Oases occur when a natural depression or fissure allows underground water to reach the desert surface, through natural springs or man-made wells, so that plants, animals and humans can survive.

Tapping Deep Into ‘Fossil’ Waters

The western desert, also called the Libyan desert, covers about 272,000 square miles, including part of the vast Great Sand Sea, whose rows of sand dunes tower hundreds of feet in the air. The desert was not always dry. Periodically during Earth’s history, what is now the Sahara has had substantial rainfall, and an unknown quantity of that water remains, trapped in aquifers under the desert.

Now these “fossil” waters are being exploited much more rapidly than in the past, with new technology allowing wells to reach a depth of three-quarters of a mile or more, drawing water that comes to the surface piping hot.

But some critics believe that these water schemes are doing the oases more harm than good.

In Siwa especially, rampant expansion and a frenzy of well-digging by private investors who have moved in from Alexandria and the Mediterranean coast in recent years have resulted in about 2,000 wells in an area of only 35 square miles.

The result is too much water. Some foreign experts fear that the entire Siwa oasis, including priceless antiquities and its medieval capital, Shali, could be drowned in 30 years. Right now, the rising outflow of these wells is gradually filling the Siwa depression, 142 feet below sea level, because the water has nowhere else to go.

In Dakhla oasis too, new wells have created a liquid surfeit with surprising results. During a March sandstorm, a reservoir overflowed. No one had ever foreseen a flood in the middle of the Sahara, but it happened: Nearly 200 families lost their homes.

Increased irrigation, meanwhile, is raising soil salinity and in some cases ruining the land for further cultivation. This happens because the underground water is slightly saline; during evaporation, the salt gets concentrated and a crusty salt deposit gets left behind.

Alluding to such problems, Sharif Baha Din, an Egyptian naturalist and environmentalist, suggests that perhaps there are better uses of the oases than officials’ dreams of implementing large-scale farming.

“Instead of having agriculture where it doesn’t really belong, you could actually do the most obvious thing, maintaining things in their natural order for recreation and tourism,” he argued. “Some of the agricultural schemes are really on the optimistic side.”

But the government-appointed mayor of Farafra, Mohammed Raafat Moomen, believes differently. Parts of the desert and town should be preserved, he said, but Egypt in general must keep expanding the oases to relieve overcrowding in the Nile Valley.

“We have 800,000 more mouths to feed every year. We have to do something,” he said as he served dates, apricots and hibiscus tea, all products of his oasis, in his concrete-block house.

Besides, he argued, there is the equivalent of 1,000 Nile Rivers under the Sahara. “It will last for a long, long time.”

The oases are changing in ways both obvious--the new concrete buildings and roads, the rise in litter from store-bought packaging--and subtle, such as residents now staying up later because of electric lights and television. Consequently, they sleep in and start their day’s work later too.

Meanwhile, the younger generation is dropping what it regards as the “hokey” dialect of its grandparents in favor of the Arabic the youths hear on Cairo TV, said A.J. Mills, a British archeologist leading the Dakhla Oasis Project, a regional study looking at the changes in the oasis through the millenniums.

One linguist trying to record the local dialect has had problems because of young people interrupting to correct their elders’ speech, Mills said. One former resident of Siwa, Leonardo Leopoldo, said the television-induced changes have even affected the Siwans’ body language, the way people stand and hold their tea.

Remembering the Old Days

Araby Hilal Zayed, a 32-year-old cook and restaurant owner in Dakhla oasis, offered his recollections. When he was a boy, he said, people in Dakhla were still using barter instead of cash to conduct commerce. His father would travel to Kharga, 150 miles to the east, by camel.

Outsiders were so rare that the children were frightened of them and ran away. Electricity was such a novelty that when his father got a radio in the early 1970s, the whole village gathered to hear a broadcast performance by the famed Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum--and some older people were peeking behind the box to try to see who was talking.

Similarly, when they first saw bottled water in Dakhla, “we were afraid to touch it [because] maybe it’s alcohol.” Now, he said, seated in his small but immaculate restaurant with its menu board written in flawless English, all this has changed.

“People, if they don’t drink from the refrigerator,” he said, “they don’t drink at all.”

“If someone left 15 years ago and came back, they would be very surprised,” said Dakhla Mayor Farouk Sayed Nashwany, a native of the oasis. He spoke proudly and at length about the new schools, health clinics, apartments and telephone lines that the government has inaugurated. Then, turning reflective, he admitted that he is not sure that all the changes have been for the better

“It’s a difficult question. How would you prefer it? It’s easier and simpler in day-to-day living and survival. But enjoyment? Personally, I was more comfortable before. You had time for everything and everybody.”

Hamoudi, known in his village simply as Mohammed the Blacksmith, agrees that something has been lost.

“Everyone used to look out for each other. There used to be a respect between generations. We didn’t have money but we were satisfied,” he said. “Now greed has appeared. When money started flowing, we all started looking for how to move up.”

In Farafra, where the land-reclamation projects are expanding, the old oasis families are divided, said Hamdi Abdel Aly, who has a small hotel catering to visitors to the White Desert.

“More than 80% don’t want this,” he said. “But at the same time, as anywhere, if the government wants to do something, you can’t stop them.”

He added a rueful thought: “I sometimes wish I could wake up in the morning and find all these new wells have gone dry. And then all these people would leave.”