ONE of the little rituals that characterise my life involves my interaction with our family cat, Kiera. We usually keep Kiera inside at night, partly as a way to protect her from unwarranted attention of any stray Toms, and partly to protect the birds which nest in the trees in our garden from her stealthy attention!
So Kiera sleeps inside. She has a few favourite places to sleep but most of the time she decides to take her “nap” on our bed. Quite often she would end up sleeping over my foot and as I wake up I would have to somehow move it without disturbing her. This may sound somewhat odd to non-cat lovers who may respond that I ought to just kick her off! However, from my perspective, Kiera has done me no harm and deserves not to be unceremoniously booted off the bed.
A while back I was reading some of the writings of Annemarie Schimmel who was a famous and celebrated scholar on Islam and Sufism. I have several of her books and essays, including Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam and interestingly enough her Introduction to Lorraine Chittock’s book Cats of Cairo. In this introduction, Schimmel writes: “When the British orientalist E. W. Lane lived in Cairo in the 1830s, he was quite amazed to see, every afternoon, a great number of cats gathering in the garden of the High Court, where people would bring baskets full of food for them. In this way, he was told, the qadi (judge) fulfilled obligations dating from the 13th-century rule of the Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars. This cat-loving monarch had endowed a ‘cats’ garden’, a pious foundation where the cats of Cairo would find everything they needed and liked. In the course of time, the place had been sold and resold, changed and rebuilt; yet the law required that the sultan’s endowment should be honoured, and who better than the qadi to execute the king’s will and take care of the cats?
“The tradition continues. To this very day, every visitor to the Islamic world is aware of the innumerable cats in the streets of Cairo — and of Istanbul, Kairouan, Damascus, and many other cities. Virtually everywhere, one is reminded of the saying popularly attributed to Prophet Muhammad: “Love of cats is part of the faith.”
Schimmel provides us even more insight into this fascinating topic of cats in her book. I am sure Kiera would be interested to know that according to Schimmel, “popular belief” has it that “the cat is the lion’s aunt, or else she is born from her sneezing’. Furthermore, Schimmel relates the story of Abu Huraya’s cat. She writes:“There are variants of the story of how Abu Huraya’s cat, which he always carried in a bag, saved the Prophet from an obnoxious snake, whereupon the Prophet petted her so that the mark of his fingers is still visible in the four dark lines on most cats’ foreheads, and, because the Prophet’s hand had stroked her back, cats never fall on their backs.”
Curiously just as I started to write this piece, Kiera jumped up on my desk and proceeded to sit down and watch the computer screen intently. She has a habit of doing this, but unlike other times where she proceeds to put her paws on the keyboard and construct all manner of indecipherable hieroglyphics on my document, this time she appeared quite content to simply sit and observe.
I looked at Kiera and told her that according to some stories she was a lion’s aunt! Upon my saying this, Kiera proceeded to yawn and jumped down from the desk. It was if she was saying in a rather nonchalant way: “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Well, I cannot say if Kiera is a lion’s aunt or not. Nor can I comment with any authority on whether she was born from a lion’s sneeze, however, I can say that I am often reminded of that larger of felines when watching her lie on our carpet. More importantly though, I found reading Schimmel helped confirm in an interesting and poignant way what for most of us is something we intuitively understand. We ought not to treat our pets with disrespect. I think Kiera deserved the effort I made not to disturb her in her sleep. There is more in this earth than I know, but our care for animals may reveal far more about us and our place in the world than I had at first thought.