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In the English literature class a Sonnet by Shakespeare was written in chalk on the blackboard. The teacher was a wiry woman with a head-scarf and glasses.
The Nubian Khushite King Piye took control of Egypt in 750 BC and established the XXV Dynasty. These “Black Pharaohs” ruled for the next 75 years. A case in the museum exhibited a replica of wooden black Nubian soldiers in military formation found in a tomb in Asyut, Egypt.
The dominant influence of Egypt in the Lower Namibia, as the Aswan region is called, had caused the Nubian elite to embrace the cultural and spiritual customs of Egypt, venerating its gods, and wearing its clothes. This was illustrated in the bust of “King Taharka” the most important of the Black Pharaohs in the museum. As the sign under it said, it showed “him idealized to conform to the Egyptian canons.
We visited an English literature class, a Chemistry class, and a Math class, for the second and third year high school students. The class size was about thirty. Students wore uniform. The boys had white shirt and pants.
Another showed various versions of Islamic scripts, penning Mohamed, the name of the Prophet. They included sols, naskh, kufi, farsi, but not the tughra script.
They wore shapeless grey pants and tops that covered all their bodies, and white head-scarves that covered their hair and fell on their shoulders. I noticed two who were not wearing head-scarves. “They are Christians,” the teacher explained, but added “some Muslims also don’t wear head-scarves.”
Aswan was an important center of the Ismailis whose reign continued in the person of a local amir (Kanz al-Dawla) for sometime even after they lost power in Cairo. The vast Cemetery is mentioned in the guidebooks as a major tourist attraction in Aswan.
They were in various states of disrepair. The shrine of Zainab here did not fare much better, although it is named for the daughter of the Shiite first Imam, a most venerated woman who the Ismailis deem to have been the first to issue summons to the Shiite community (da’wah) upon the martyrdom of her brother Hussein in Karbala.
We went through the halls of the school’s three-story building. The walls were covered with sayings, mostly in Arabic and many from the Qur’an, extolling the virtues of learning.
On the day I visited, it had no other visitors. The mausoleums over the tombs were distinct in architecture with their domes built on a square shaped structure.
The contemporary head of the worldwide Ismaili community, however, maintains a park across the Nile where his predecessor and grandfather Aga Khan III, and his wife, Begum are buried.
Coca cola provided the awning for a convenient store run by a pretty woman, whose last customer was an equally handsome guard.
Not far away was the big Coptic church in Aswan. The Copts were also conspicuously visible and active where Western tourists stayed. My big hotel and its upscale stores were run by them.
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