The overcrowded and messy city that is Cairo has a large number of cats and dogs on its streets. Many are clearly nobody’s pets, though most look in good health.
The city’s hot and dry climate probably helps – the humidity in Malaysia makes infections and infestations common, and our street animals generally look much the worse for wear because of it.
There are probably as many dogs in Cairo’s streets as there are cats, which was a surprise to me, coming from Malaysia where the dynamics of cats and dogs is quite different. I wouldn’t dare to generalise about other Islamic countries, though I doubt it’s just an Egyptian thing, either.
Cairo’s street animals certainly look better than their caged brothers and sisters in the pet shops, which is such a cruel abomination (adopt a stray, people!). And in the craziest of all city traffic, where I’d have expected the roads to be littered with dead animals (and people), I didn’t see any in the many days I was there.
Loving animals in my books means loving all creatures great and small, beautiful or ugly. Actually, the very idea of beauty (or lack of) is totally irrelevant when it comes to animals. Animals are animals, and even a slug or a snake or a crocodile is beautiful in its rightful place in nature.
God’s own
Islam believes all animals are God’s creatures that submit to Him, which by definition makes them Muslims, as a Muslim is one who submits to God. And even as Islam commands that we may eat some and not others, it doesn’t make any of them any the lesser in the eyes of their Creator.
I’m however partial to cats. We share many things in common, such as my belief I can be fat, lazy and stubborn, spend my days sleeping and eating and yet on random occasions instantly transform to be as fast as Achilles, as strong as Superman and as handsome as, well, me! Cats do that so easily, though I must admit I do it with a bit more difficulty.
I love dogs too: you don’t have to be binary about this. I don’t keep any because of the rather difficult anti-dog bias of Malay society. But the main reason is I’m much more comfortable with the independent ways of cats. Dogs know you’re their owners – cats know you’re their servants. I’ve given in to that reality long ago.
Shaggy dog story
Once, when my kids were small, they breathlessly came home with a puppy that they insisted had followed them home all by itself. I was sure, however, that somebody somewhere, an owner or perhaps its mummy, must be missing it, so I released it where it was supposedly found.
I then backtracked on the route the kids and the puppy took – well there’s no way the puppy would’ve made it to our home by itself without some serious human help and intervention along the way. It definitely couldn’t have just “followed” them back home!
I’ve always felt the antipathy many Malays feel about dogs has a lot to do with our perverse racial dynamics: dogs are identified as aligned with Chinese and un-Islamic; regardless of whatever our religious teachings on the matter (and this may differ somewhat depending on which school of Islam you believe in), many feel it’s their duty to hate dogs.
This leads to many instances, including one only days ago, of dogs being mistreated, often with despicable cruelty and often at the hands of those supposedly carrying out their public duty, by many of the same people who wouldn’t lift a finger to do their everyday job but suddenly felt energised to go the extra mile in being cruel to dogs.
‘Turning Malay’ through cats
I can’t claim to speak for God, but I’m pretty sure He isn’t up there granting extra merit points to those who are so perverse as to harm His creatures. Granted, dogs can be dangerous: thousands of people around the world die every year from dog bites, whether rabid or not. But, like other dangerous animals, there are humane ways of dealing with them.
I have a Chinese friend whose ageing parents went from being dog people to, late in life, being all into cats such that she has to plan her vacations and downtimes to cat-sit for her parents. This includes the time when they holidayed in the cat capital of the world, Istanbul, and filled up their camera memory cards full with cat pictures.
As if to prove that the cat-dog dynamics goes both ways, she said a relative remarked on how her parents are turning “Malay” by being cat lovers! So, even if this can be explained as an obvious reaction to how Malay-Muslims treat dogs in the first place, both sets of attitudes are bad, and wrong.
Our Malay attitude against dogs prevented many from keeping them, either for pleasure or for service, such as guard dogs or service dogs for the disabled. And it prevents many Chinese from the pleasure and the beauty of the most majestic of household animals, felix catus.
When a ‘hotdog’ is too hot
This antipathy towards dogs has been taken to extremes by our religious leaders who’ve even banned the term hotdog from being used for what are just chicken sausages. For God’s sake, and I mean that literally, it’s just a name, and it’s an insult to Muslims to think they are being done a favour with this ban.
Our own household has lost a few cats, including a 10-year old tom and a kitten, my guess is to the wild dogs that roam our streets. The dogs themselves are generally friendly and docile, and while a dog would lose to a similar-sized feline, a pack of them against a much smaller cat is just too big and odd.
I once saw the dogs up close – and while I did think of calling for the dogcatchers, I didn’t have the heart to do so because I knew the dog would be cruelly treated, as events have repeatedly shown.
In this instance, one of them was actually a mother still suckling its young. Nature has taken its course sadly, but unless the dogs become dangerous to people, I’m happy to let them be.
Joy and comfort
The Egyptians have a live-and-let-live attitude with street cats and dogs. I saw many kindly people leaving scraps of food for them, probably accounting for why they generally look quite healthy. While many Muslim Egyptians may agree there are some religious prohibitions against dogs, they don’t have the hysterical attitude against them that the Malays have.
And in the rest of the world, where race and religion don’t get into the cats-and-dogs debate, these pets are widely and almost evenly distributed in households. They bring joy and comfort, all just by being themselves, something which us supposedly superior humans haven’t quite figured out how to do yet.
Prophet Muhammad, Praise Be Upon Him, loved cats, though he was also reputed to have said that a man, and on another occasion a prostitute, who saved a dog dying of thirst deserved paradise. A story goes that one day he cut a piece of his robe off rather than disturb one of his cats that was sleeping on it.
Many of us, cat and dog lovers ourselves, know the feeling!
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
