Notes from the Dizzying Storm

View from my balcony window,
where towers and televisions look skyward.

Wow... it's been a long time since I've written anything.  The first seven weeks of the fall term have flown by in a dizzying storm of Arabic novels, getting to know new people, starting to go to the gym at least three times a week.  You know, new beginnings and things of that sort (note: things of that sort in Arabic is often expressed by the phrase شيء من هذا القبيل which literally means "things of that tribe."  It's these sort of things that make a post-Orientalism Orientalist's heart secretly melt).

Things that have happened

1.  I've moved.  After a brief attempt to live with my closest Egyptian friend fell through, I moved in with a fantastic guy from the same program who lives in Shubra, which is a more working class neighborhood but also a very "old" neighborhood that has a large Christian population.  My metro stop is called "St. Teresa," and the view from my window is a church and mosque with a steeple and minaret standing just a few feet apart, as they are on either side of a small alleyway.  When I had a toothless taxi driver take me home one night from the more upscale area where most of my friends live (can you tell I'm scraping for street-cred here?), he recited to me a dialect poem that he had written called "al-Garas wa'l-Izaan" or "The Bells and the Call to Prayer."  Indeed, you can hear the bells go off about once a day and the calls to prayer at their appointed times throughout the day.

2.  I've read a bunch of Arabic novels.  I have now read a total of six Arabic novels over the past 7 weeks.  One of which, Seasons of Migration to the North, I'd read in Arabic a few years ago.  I've finally read a Naguib Mahfouz novel in Arabic and liked it a lot less than I expected, and read the second Yusuf Idris novel I'd ever read, and liked it a lot more than I expected.  My teacher is a radically disorganized novelist who was also a teacher at Middlebury Arabic school when I was studying and working there.  She's a very good teacher (minus the disorganization) who expects a lot from our writing.  She asked us incredulously one day: Why is that you don't use applicable Qur'anic references to punch up your writing?  Why don't you use popular sayings to add spice to what you say?  This is somewhat like asking fourth graders why they do not weave Shakespearean allusions into their book reports on Misty of Chincoteague.   They probably only know "to be or not to be," and that only becomes applicable in a very limited number of circumstances.  I have been able to use the few Prophetic sayings and Qur'anic phrases that I know... "Actions are according to their intentions" (Prophetic saying), "And perhaps they are actually well aware [though they pretend that they do not]," (Qur'anic allusion).  If only the actual content of the essays were up to the standard of these bold wisdoms.

3.  I've become more cultured.  Cairo, it turns out, has a lot of stuff going on.  Art galleries, music, movies... there are a lot of things to do and yes, they do market to foreigners and Egyptians who are fully literate in European/American culture (the rock concert with the Bob Marley crew rocking out in the corner comes to mind) and often speak perfect English.  But it's been nice to go to lectures, go to galleries, and begin to feel like there are things about Cairo life that allow me to just relax.  This has certainly helped me settle into a groove such that I find life here much less stressful on a day to day basis.

4.  In that vein, I've apparently begun to fit in a bit more.  I've been asked for directions by Egyptians in Arabic without a moment's hesitation about 4 different times.  Being on the metro on the way to Shubra helps because they figure you must actually be from here if you're getting off in Shubra.  Usually it's people from out of town (Alexandria, to countryside) who are trying to find out where Ramsees station is.  Helpfully, the naming scheme of Cairo's metro system does not line up with the naming scheme for its train/bus system, so the main Cairo bus/train hub, which is called Ramsees, is directly above the metro stop formerly known as Hosni Mubarak, now known as Shohada (the Martyrs, ie. of the January revolution).

 Thus, nearly all requests for directions have involved people asking "how do I get to Ramsees?"

- "Well," I tell them, "you get off at this stop that is called Shohada, though on this map it is still listed as Mubarak.  I know it doesn't make any sense. There is no Ramsees Metro stop.  Trust me." (or, usually, "wa-llahi." which is an oath meaning "by God" that is used pretty much all the time by almost everyone I've ever spoken to.  It can also be used as a question: "By God?" to mean... "Really?!")

- "Where are you from?" they ask incredulously, not sure if they should believe this man claiming to be knowledgeable.  It's well known in Cairo that if you want directions, you always ask at least 3 people if you can because everyone wants to be helpful so badly that they'll usually give directions even if they're not quite sure.

- "I'm from America, but I live in Shubra.  You're not from Cairo... where are you from?" Haha!  Turned around that "you're not from here" bullshit right back on ya!

5.  I've fallen in love with the concept of mini-buses and the wacky world of unsystematic but utterly reliable Cairo public transportation options, which is such a complicated matter that I will leave it to another post.  One that I intend to write soon, if God wills it (insha'Allah).

Asad... No, Not that Asad

I've just been reading this fantastic interview with Talal Asad, who certainly thinks more clearly about Egypt and politics than I do.  And also more clearly about a great many other things, such as formations of the religious and the secular/political (see previous posts one and two).


Anyhow, there are some really great sections:


On revolutions:

Maybe one needs to think of the uprising as more than a technique for getting rid of a despotic regime, but as a mode of existence, almost. The novelist Alaa Al Aswani said in an interview with The Independent that being part of this revolution is “like being in love.” I don’t think it’s quite like that. You might say, actually, that it’s more like a religious experience.

On religious parties:

 I can understand why many people would equate the religious right here and the religious movements there. But I don’t think that they’re directly comparable. There is a difference, and I think part of it comes from the savage repression in Egypt of the Muslim Brothers, which the religious right in the U.S. has not had to undergo. This doesn’t justify anything in particular, but it’s something that one has to think about. And, connected with that, there’s the fact that the Brotherhood is a movement that has been resisting what I would call Western imperialism, whereas that isn’t true of the religious right in the U.S., which, on the contrary, very often supports it. Now, I don’t want to be understood to be saying that simply because the Muslim Brothers oppose imperialism they’re beyond reproach. What I’m saying is that it’s more complicated. During the Brotherhood’s rise in the 1930s, it was strongly anti-British. And the United States has been constantly intervening in Egypt after the British left—even supporting Mubarak right until the very end—and that’s not going to be lost on the Muslim Brothers, although it’s still an open question as to whether they and the U.S. government will now regard each other as implacable enemies.

I have tried to tell people to think of the Muslim Brotherhood as the religious right, but of course, they're different.  My point in doing so is that people have a very weak ability to turn problems around in their head.  They remember 9/11 and think "we were justified in our war against so-and-so" without thinking what people must feel like in countries we've invaded.  There were weeks upon weeks of 9/11's that, for lack of superior firepower, didn't spark an invasion of our homeland.  It always strikes me that the people who shout the loudest about how 9/11 justifies us would be the first to join the terrorist resistance to a foreign occupation of North Dakota.


On Colonialism:

I’m also sometimes irritated by people who would like to explain everything in terms of colonialism. That is just so crude. I also find myself resisting people who say that colonialism has nothing to do with the present situation because colonialism is dead and gone. My own feeling is that what people assert or deny is due to colonialism should be constantly interrogated. In our world, external intervention by strong powers, superpowers, or the superpower, is a fact of life. The United States has been intervening in the Middle East for a long time—it would be surprising if it didn’t!

On being in the midst of revolution:

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

I noted last week that being "in the midst of the revolution" can really be a lot like being in the midst of every-day life.  I was up in the Delta during the storming of the Israeli Embassy this past weekend, and people in town simply didn't know about it.  One tried to tell me that the pictures on TV were from the earlier protests because, well, we hadn't heard that things were on fire right now.

Of Peasantry and Pigeonage

This picture has very little to do
with this blog post

I'm sitting in Qaranshu at 3am, having consumed a nescafe with Egyptian-level sugar contents at about 11.30pm;  The Egyptian government has cracked down on protestors following the storming of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, which you probably heard about (following the killing of at least 4 six Egyptian soldiers by an Israeli border raid that you probably didn't hear about... with others still in critical condition);  I went to an Egyptian wedding on Friday and danced on stage with the groom, whom I had met once before and assured me that it would have been a disgrace if I had not come to his wedding party -- unfortunately, amid the blasting Arabic techno beats blasting from every available speaker, the only word I heard was "disgrace," and was worried for at least 15 minutes that I had entered my worst nightmare and committed some unforgivable faux pas in front of a huge audience of Egyptians;  I learned that the business of being a simsaar -- something like an rentals agent who helps people find apartments to rent -- is akin to a mafia-cartel that would put the hurt on anyone trying to help foreigners get cheaper apartments by avoiding their crappy excuse for service.

And yet, here I am writing about something that has nothing to do with any of the above.  This is probably why the only people who read it are those like me who spend a bunch of time on facebook procrastinating and wishing they had something to read that wasn't the newsfeed.  Blockbuster days for readership on this blog run in the 20s or 30s.  I love each and every one of you for that little jump in the readership chart.

Point is, the Arabic language is wide and deep.  It has long been my position that, were it not for ideological considerations, the different "dialects" of Arabic would be taught as separate languages.  The old linguist's saying being "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

But even within Egypt, the dialect known as "Egyptian dialect" is... wide and deep.  Take, for example, Quranshu.

The town's accent is akin to the Yemeni and Upper Egypt dialect:
    -->  The deep guttural Qaf (a "k" pronounced as far back in the throat as you can manage) with a hard Geem sound (as in "gum").
    -->  The soft Jeem (as in "jam") remains as such in the Qaranshu accent.

Cairenes, by contrast, pronounce the Qaf as a glottal stop (the catch at the back of the throat at the beginning and middle of "Uh-Oh").  For Cairenes, the soft Jeem is pronounced as a hard Geem (as in "gum").

My friend's family will also mention words in conversation that are "peasant" words.  As it was described to me, these words were used "before we had education."  People tend to make sure I know that certain words are "not used" so that I don't make the mistake of going around Cairo using words that would give me away as a peasant-type.

The stereotype of the stupid Upper Egyptian peasant with the loud, non-Cairene accent, Qaf-as-Geem accent is so famous that it was made into a fish-out-of-water comedy: "The Upper Egyptian at the American University."  Something like: "The country bumpkin goes to Harvard." American University is proverbially upper-class, drawing its students from the aristocracy of Egyptian society.

The people who dubbed the disney movie "Bolt" had no problem playing off of the peasant stereotype when they cleverly had the pigeons in New York speak with unmistakeable Upper Egypt/Delta Peasant accents.

The pigeons in the English version have working-class New Yorker accents.

The Arabic version takes this and makes it totally Egyptian in ways that make jokes that were never there in the original (for instance, Bolt corrects the pigeons pronunciation of Cat from "Guṭṭah" to "ʾUṭṭa".

The accent (and thus stereotyped "stupid" behavior) become clear on the first line of dialogue (not in the video below).  It's totally classist, as was the original, but it's a brilliant example of what translation really is all about.

When I pronounced the word "who" in Arabic in a very Standard Arabic manner this past week, my teacher corrected my non-Cairene pronunciation and started doing her best Upper Egypt accent and performed a famous Egyptian television line that likewise mocks the Upper Egypt accent (which is, in many ways, closer to Classical/Standard Arabic pronunciation).

Of course, this kind of accent-based classism is not strange to Americans (though many would claim that it is).  It's certainly easier to see in England where students from Ireland, Scotland, and all sorts of Londoners came together in Oxbridge after losing their accents... this happens a lot less now, but you can still find people who lost their accents on purpose.

Copying Spenser's GSAM messages, I'll close with the following:

Send your favorite accent-based stories, tales of storming the Israeli embassy, and ways that you have violated cultural norms in front of huge groups of people to my inbox.  I'm waiting...

River Days

Downtown Cairo, Illinois, once the stuff of
Steamboat legend.

There have been a lot of changes lately.  A new apartment, Anya heading back to DC to start her new job, a new semester (with new classes, meeting people I didn't know last term).  Even the Arabic I'm speaking is different because I have to get back in the habit of speaking a standard Arabic after spending the last month doing nothing but speaking Egyptian (and reading the standard).

I've taken another visit to the Delta town mentioned in my last post.  I will be going again this coming weekend, if God wills it.  I'll also be reading a novel, something I've done before in Arabic but never before in a single week while also doing other work.  It will be interesting.

Things are pretty quiet right now, though things are supposed to start heating up between now and Friday with big protests planned for Friday.  The government is still cordoning off the central piece of land in Tahrir and cordoning off bits and pieces of other areas, so the protests will start outside Tahrir and then... well... we'll see what happens.  I haven't been following much in politics recently, absorbed in my life and its changes (as are, really, most people in Egypt, it seems to me).  That is, perhaps, one of the stranger things about revolutions... it's not really what most people are talking about (though, of course, January was presumably a different story).

In the meantime, I'm dumping some links and some music about the Egypt region of Illinois, which inspires several lyrics and titles in Josh Ritter's album "The Animal Years."  I was reminded of those lyrics when I read this little article on Grant, whose Western years I don't recall hearing much about in the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War... most accounts of that war from a "generalist" perspective focus on the eastern seaboard, but it was interesting to read this piece and to remember just how crazy important rivers are.

So from my Nile to yours, here's Josh Ritter "Monster Ballads."

"I was thinkin bout my river days/
I was thinkin bout me and Jim/
Passing Cairo on a getaway/
Every steamboat like a hymn."

Egyptian Countryside Hospitality

The view from the 2nd story
looking out back.

   I just got back from a village called Qranshu, which is the hometown of my friend Ahmed.  He works nights, so Anya and I met him early Friday morning to hop on a series of four mini-buses that took us from Maadi to Tahrir, from Tahrir to the northernmost limits of the Cairo metro system, from there to Tanta, and then from Tanta to Qranshu.  It was a quick trip without much traffic at all, largely because it was Friday morning.  Fridays, being the Muslim Sunday, don't get busy until after noon.  The noon prayer is the one that has the most important weekly sermon.

   It was a testament to the way that Egyptian public transportation works.  Trains and metros are all fine and good, but they are limited in their scope and tend to move relatively slowly.  The flexible, cheap system of minibuses acts as an alternative to the slowly developing or aging metro-train systems.  At the same time, these minibuses are subject to the whims of traffic and the roads can be suddenly blocked for seemingly inexplicable reasons and then cleared away just as suddenly.  On the way back from Tanta, we were stopped for so long that several men got out and started smoking cigarettes on the side of the road.  The cry to get back on the bus went out, and, just as quickly, the minibus started moving as then smokers clutched their cigarettes in their teeth while jumping into the moving vehicle through the open, sliding-door.

Riding the Mare around the yard

    The trip there was also a preview of the kind of hospitality that we were to expect.  Ahmed refused to let us pay for our travel, and he produced reasonable facsimiles of anger when we insisted, to the point that we gave up.  This game went on in at each stage of the journey.  He also told us that he would cut his break short to come back with us on Saturday night.  I finally convinced him on our second day in Qranshu that we could get back on our own.

    We arrived around noon on Friday, and despite the fact that everyone is fasting between about 4am and 7pm, we were given a lunch of freshly-made bread, cheese, eggs, and fresh honey from the backyard beehive.  We were taken on a tour of the barn in the backyard, which consisted of a small shed with cows and chickens.  There were a few goats penned to the mare-drawn cart.  Then there was the mare.  Ahmed had told me about the mare and showed me a picture of him riding her, and when they brought us outside to see her, she had her saddle on and the main animal handler (an in-law of the extended family) was ready to put us on the saddle.  It was quite an interesting experience.  She was pretty finicky, and I wasn't really that great at steering.  Whenever she wanted to turn around and go home, she would, and whenever I tried to get her to turn around at a particular point, she wouldn't.  Sort of the rusty-supermarket-handcart business.  The women of the house tried to get Anya to ride the mare with her long skirt on, insisting that this was normal enough, but she changed into jeans before giving it a sporting go.

this was very much NOT our idea...
we tried to do Egyptian Gothic...
but we couldn't stop grinning 

   The rest of the weekend was spent sitting around the house and the yard, playing the darts game that Ahmed brought back from Cairo as a gift that week, and eating amazing food.  Anya spent a good deal of her first evening going around the village with the wives, aunts, and female cousins of the extended family.  I spent my time walking around the village or the rice fields and sitting around the second-floor living room.

    Most of the family, including me (but not including Anya), stayed up until the village Misaḥḥaraati came to the house just before 3am to wake the household.  He beat his drum as he approached and then yelled the name of one of the household members.  Once he heard someone from upstairs respond to his call and thank him, he walked away.  I was told that if he didn't hear anyone respond, he would ring the doorbell and call again to make sure that the family was awake to eat their last meal before fasting began again.  After the meal, we all went to sleep until the late morning.  Hours during Ramadan are very different.

Anya learning to bake

    It was a fabulous weekend, but it was also exhausting.  There is much less privacy in a rural Egyptian home, and being around people non-stop tends to wear on me.  In this case, it meant being around people and speaking Arabic non-stop, and at a certain point, being tired takes its toll on my language production/comprehension skills.  Nevertheless, people were very patient with me, and Ahmed would very often re-tell the jokes in more plain Arabic (many Arabic jokes are told quickly, and both joker and audience enjoy assonance and rhythm that affects word-choice, which means the joke uses unusual vocabulary that I don't know).

    I was told by every member of the family separately that any time I wished to come back, the door was open.  They made a point of saying that I could come visit with or without Ahmed, which seemed to be their way of saying "we like you because of who you are, not because you are our son/brother's friend."  The invitations were utterly sincere, and the gesture was incredibly kind.  Ahmed and I will definitely be going back to take breaks from the Cairo bustle over the coming year, God Willing (Insha'Allah).

Ahmed's Mom and Sister-in-Law
baking at the outdoor clay oven.

Postscript: While writing this blog post, Ahmed called me on his way from Qranshu to Cairo.  He asked  me to meet him on his way to work.  I was naturally a bit concerned that maybe we were about to be advised about some etiquette that we had failed to follow or that something terrible had happened.  Instead, he handed me the bugspray can that we had left there.  I thought it was perhaps a bit strange that he insisted on meeting up to give me a can of bugspray, but I thought that maybe he had just hoped to grab a coffee and chat before work.  Then he extricated a HUGE bag of his mother's bread from his bag.  Not only is "Mother's Bread" proverbial in Arabic for the care and love of the mother's home, but the country bread that we had in Qranshu was ten times better than what we get in the state-run bakeries in Cairo.  It was truly a beautiful gift.

Theological and Political: Redux

I posted a few weeks back about the theological-political issue where Islam is designated as that particular religion where religion and politics cannot be separated.  I came across this article from 2003 while looking up works cited by Giorgio Agamben.

It seems very interesting and thoughtful while still claiming:

thus [Europe's] specificity in regard to other civilizations - is found in its political secularism, and that this secularism has its roots precisely in Christianity.

 It also reinforces the distinction with Islam:

This refusal is, in large part, an appropriation from Christianity, which introduced into history - with much greater clarity than Judaism and especially Islam - the distinction between religion and politics.

But then insists that the European constitution (this is back in 2003, mind you) ought not simply to mention the Judeo-Christian heritage.

The reference to Judaism and Christianity leaves out only Islam from among the great religions of the Mediterranean basin. Apart from the fact that this is politically inopportune, it seems to me fundamentally unjust: around the end of the first millennium Europe acquired a debt toward Islam that the following centuries of conflict were not able to cancel....For all these reasons, if it is thought opportune to modify the second clause of the preamble of the future European constitution (which now reads, "Inspired by the cultural, religious, and humanistic heritage of Europe..."), one could consider a formula of this tenor: "Inspired by the heritage constituted by the Greek and Roman civilizations, by the Jewish and Christian religious traditions, in fertile dialogue with the Muslim tradition, by the philosophical currents of the age of the Enlightenment..."

I'm not sure I understand this correctly, but the author asks us to recognize the specificity of the Christian contribution to secularism and then to acknowledge the shared dialogue with the Muslim tradition.  It seems a reasonable compromise for someone writing from within the Catholic tradition.  While I might not agree with him about the "clarity" of the Christian tradition on the separation of church and state authority, and while I might not agree with him about the particular circumstances of what he calls a "dialogue," this is one of the more thoughtful approaches to the "Christian roots" argument.

At the same time, as a certain Cambridge professor once noted to me, issues of origins are at bottom issues of ownership.

Ramadan Nights

"Ramadan Kareem" - Standard Ramadan Greeting 

    So, it's Ramadan in Egypt, which I am assured is better than any Ramadan that can be found in any other country.  Several Egyptians have assured me of this fact. It's definitely a different atmosphere.  The month of Ramadan requires that Muslims do not eat, drink (even water), smoke, or have sex between sunrise and sunset for a full lunar month.  In addition, a lot of people tend to try to be better Muslims during this month, giving to the poor more, being nicer to people, etc.

    The culmination of Ramadan is a feast and a party called Eid al-Fitr, but every single day the meal that breaks the fast -- called Iftaar -- is perhaps the most joyous time of day.  It happens around 6.45 right now, and so starting at 6.30 or even 6.15, the streets start to empty as people head home.  Charity tables are laid out for the poor, and every pan-handler on the street that I've seen has received a free meal from one of the local shop owners.  And it's often a good meal, too, with chicken (modest food around here tends to be vegetarian, meat comes at a premium).  It is also tradition to break fast, as Muhammad did, with dates.  For people who can't get home right away, do-gooders can be found standing by the side of the roads in any district in Cairo handing out bottles of water and bags with a few dates to hold you over until you can get to where you're going.

   My favorite store-owners and employees are filled with smiles even more than usual, and one invited me to come break the fast with them (there are many people who, as in Yemen, if they see you in a situation where they are eating and you are not, they will offer you their food before continuing... I'm pretty sure this is another Prophetic precedent, though I'd have to look it up).

   Although people are much nicer, the harassment has definitely not gone away.  Many people claim that, at least during the day, people refrain from their whistling and cat-calls.  The problems for Anya have definitely lessened, but they're still there.  And once night rolls around, and everyone is out on the streets smoking and eating with a vengeance, I'd say it's even worse.  There are things that seem to "become licit" in Ramadan nights... the women's cars on the metro, for instance, seem to have lost the magical spells that keep men out until about 10pm.  I was actually grabbed from behind while joining Anya on a women's car that was full of men.  The man earnestly explained that the car I was about to alight on was for women only.  I didn't have time to explain that there were about 25 men on board, and I wasn't going to abandon Anya to a mixed metro car during a Ramadan evening.

   Speaking of riding the metro at night (which I do more often now because most everything happens at night now), I love taking the evening metro because I can always pick up the evening edition of the Arabic language newspapers.  It's a good way to pass the time on the ride home, and it earns me a lot of appreciative-ish stares.  Reading Alaa al-Aswany or appearing to simply be "not from around here" earns me stares.  Not to mention that most upper-class/Americanized Egyptians refuse to ride the metro because it is a class marker, so the idea that foreigners would do so is at least somewhat novel, I think.

    More later...

Wust El Balad and Hijabs

    Last night, Anya and I went with some friends to see a free concert downtown by Wust el Balad, an Egyptian band that can only be described as something like hipster-softrock-Arabic-fusion.  Or, as someone once described it to me before I heard their music, the Arabic Guster (to extend the metaphor, they have a bongo drummer, and he gets mad applause from here to Ramalla).  You can actually find their music on itunes or on their website for free downloading.  There's also a song about the revolution written by their lead singer that you can watch with subtitles on youtube.

   It was a great concert, marred only slightly by the creepy middle-aged man who didn't bother hiding that he was staring at the women in our group.  The voices live are really fantastic, and they're a great group of musicians.  They even played a good number of my favorite songs from the album "robabekya" that I listened to non-stop for about 9 weeks when I was bound by the Middlebury language pledge not to listen to any English.  Back then, as a total Modern Standard Arabic addict, I didn't really understand their lyrics. It's been a while since I've listened to their albums, but this time around, I actually understood what they were singing!

  The crowd was full of liberal-leaning youth/20-somethings.  Liberal-leaning, I say, because the between-shows act took a poll, and the vast majority said they would be voting for al-Baradei, a liberal candidate and Nobel laureate... think Al Gore).

   I think a majority of the hipster Egyptians were there... all the "I will wear thick-rimmed large-frame glasses" crowd, including one with big, white plastic frames that he seemed to wear without any apparent irony.  When two television personalities came on between the opener and Wust El Balad, they talked politics with the crowd, encouraging them not to be afraid of other strains of thought in the political discourse (read: Muslim Brotherhood/Salafists who were not present).  They cited American politics and the fact that our political leaders never seem to be capable of following through on their slogans.  Ie. Barack Obama was supposed to make America a truly liberal country, and look at him... has it changed all that much? No.  It's odd to be in a big group of people where that observation brings hope and potentially assuages fears.

   Anyhow, apologies for being so incredibly bad at posting.  I feel bad for leaving that angry-at-the-NYTimes post at the top of my blog for so long.  Their foreign editor recently posted a really good piece on Islamophobia in Europe.  Good instincts, my friend, but there's just so much amazing graffiti around that the photo irritated me to no end.

    In other news, I saw one of my favorite Hijab (trans: headscarf)-related styles today.  I went to a hair-cut place about a 20 minute walk away, and the place was closed.  I popped my head in next door to ask what their schedule was because there was nothing posted on the door, and the woman inside was sporting a hijab, which was holding her cellphone to her ear.  Hijab == hands-free technology.  She was also holding the store's wired phone in her hand, which really threw me off.

   Hopefully more coming soon.  Gonna try to keep it more Cairo-focused, which will generally require me to *do things in Cairo*.  Still working on that.  Buried in the 9th century Arabic reading at home and the Foucault-reading at the coffee shop.  But *definitely* observations on Ramadan to come.

Confirming long-held suspicion, NYTimes doesn't actually care what things in Arabic actually say

I mean, we all knew this.  The articles that seemed based on cab conversations with your translator, or the amazingly parodied recent articles over at Inanities. (One and Two)... the apparent ignorance of basic facts on the ground... the insistence on giving the impression that what are actually extensively planned protests were actually just random acts of anger that pop up all over the place after Muslims pray (this little gem from the Guardian reminded me of the NYTimes).

So now it turns out that they don't actually care to make reasonable associations between Arabic photographs and English subtitles.

This poor photographer thought he was photographing pro-Mubarak graffiti.  The graffiti reads, "I am sorry, Mr. President."  This was one of the slogans of the Mubarakistas.  But of course, the New York Times just thought that it was a great picture of graffiti that must be expressing the one thought that Egyptians have (ie. I hated Mubarak), AND it has a woman wearing a veil in front of it.  How awesome!

Then they just made up a caption... about anti-Mubarak graffiti.

I really just love imagining what the caption writing department is like... where they're just sort of free-associating with pictures and headlines in a building that has no connection whatsoever to the NYTimes writers, editors, translators (please, God, tell me they have those), and staff.  "Egypt, Egypt... Mubarak... Veil... Graffiti... Anger.... I've got it!  They use different forms of expression to say the same thing until I get bored of this story-line!"

Life as I Know It

I have not written very much about what's going on here in my life other than to post a few pictures of my apartment.  Just about a month and a half have passed since my arrival, and I'm almost done with the first term, albeit the shortest one, of CASA.  CASA being the program in which I am enrolled right now, which includes about 4 hours of Arabic class a day.  We have one week left, and then I have a month in which I'm planning to finally catch up on reviewing grammar and vocabulary accumulated from the past few months/years.  I'm also hoping to read a few novels and other assorted reading materials I have with me.  Then Anya and I are off to some coastal vacation before I plunge into the fall.

So....  I live in Maadi, which is about half an hour south of central Cairo and Tahrir Square by train, which is also where class happens to be.  Fortunately, I live very, very close to the metro line, which also means I live in the "less nice" area of Maadi.   "Less nice" for Maadi still means very nice by Cairo standards.  There are trees, and the upscale shops are a short walk away.   Maadi is a region known as being an enclave for expats and Egyptians who live very American-style upper class lifestyles.   Owning a dog, for instance, would be a sort of unthinkable act for most ordinary and middle class Egyptians, but I have seen more than a few dog-owners or dog-walkers giving their large St. Bernards and German Shepherds walks.  Dogs in Egypt are much too closely associated with dumpster-diving street-animals... and animals in general are treated pretty poorly in the streets here.

Anyhow, there is a divide between "those who live closer to the metro line" and "those who live closer to the ring road."  I feel like this is roughly transcribable to "those who must take public transportation" and "those who think taking public transportation in below them."  Believe me, these people do exist.  Taking the metro costs 1 Guinea, which is a little less than an American quarter dollar.  It is supplemented by a dizzying array of mini-buses, micro-buses, buses, shared cars, and the like that are entirely the subject of local knowledge.  That is, there are no published routes or fares that I have seen, but the information is known.

Nevertheless, we live very close to Street 9, which is one of the "cool places" in Maadi.  It has the foreign coffee shops, nice restaurants, and the like.  There is another street with good shops that is near the ring road end of Maadi called Street 233 where I just ate decent Tex Mex food.  All the streets in Maadi are numbered in a way that might lead you to think that there is some sort of order or coherence to the way they have been numbered.  If there is, I have not discovered it.  There is a rough attempt at bunching numbers and making adjacent numbers run parallel, but there is no larger scheme that I can discern.

If all this seems a big insane and hard to get your head around, you're getting an idea of Cairo.  I've taken a few cabs in the past couple of days with drivers who complain about the busy streets, lack of order, and general difficulty of getting around without something getting in your way.  After awkwardly sympathizing (it seems relatively impolite as a foreigner to join in Cairo bashing with Cairenes in earshot), I always ask:  "So, where are you from originally."  All of them have said, with pride, somewhere other than Cairo.  Whether it is Aswan, Sa'id, or the Delta, they explain that people there are nicer and things there are much calmer.

Most of my days, I get up and grab the metro just before 8 AM when it is already hot enough that I find shade to stand in while waiting for the metro.  Then 2 hours of standard Arabic, then 2 hours of dialect, and then I get the cheapest pasta or bean-sandwich lunch I can get my hands on at the local places downtown.  Then back to Maadi for homework, dinner and watching a show or something with Anya, and then maybe a coffee shop.  I'm looking forward to the break when I can just relax a bit more, read and write, and let the hottest month of the year roll past in the most air-conditioned room possible.

Theological and Political

People with PhDs writing about Islamic thought often begin by making the distinction between "Western" thought that makes a clear distinction between politics and religion.  As a sort of sick curiosity, I went to see the post-1980s Bernard Lewis give a talk where he cited as the defining characteristic of Western though regarding religion as "render unto Caesar."  Either ignorantly or cynically, he ignored the many historical considerations that would undercut any notion that "rendering unto Caesar" was a widespread phenomenon in Europe... y'know, ever.  And it's not just Lewis.  This seems to be one of those things that people feel the need to explain whenever talking about "Muslim politics" or "Islamic thought" or "Medieval Islamic thought about politics" or whatever.

Not only does this kind of talk seem to reify and generalize about Islam and Christianity, but it also separates the theological and the political in artificial ways.  Fortunately, this separation between theology and politics is breaking down in the humanities.  This new Taylor book (interview linked here) is something that I hope to look into when I get back.  I read Badiou's book on St. Paul last summer, which was an atheist's take on establishing a faith-based national community (rather than one based on race or history...  the Pauline idea being that faith means that there is neither slave nor free, greek nor jew, that kind of thing).  The faith, in this case, would not necessarily consist of a doxological statement but rather some unprovable statement.

The bottom line is that political thinking is theological in its structure, whether Pauline or otherwise.  Theological thinking is also necessarily political.  The result, then, is that "Islam makes no distinction between religion and politics" becomes even more nonsensical than it had been.

theological and political thinking belong to one another in some striking new ways. In other words, thinking about religious beliefs (the theological), and about power and its organization in society (the political) are being re-thought from the ground up. In contrast, political and public theology have all too often thought, “Well, we have theology, we know what it is, now we need to address some political or public issues.” We have our Christology, for example, now let’s spell out its meanings for the public order.” That’s clearly insufficiently complex for our more turbulent and tangled present, in which theology and political theory are engaging one another afresh.

The Qibla is Just a Little to the Left

The sign hangs on a tree outside the mosque that abuts the Maadi metro stop.  I get off there sometime to drop by the supermarket, a place where prices are rarely listed underneath the items that are on the shelves, and where everything from juice to eggplant is found in a different place than it was before.  I still can't figure out why the yogurt is not with the cheese but rather around the corner, past the sandwich meats, and in a refrigerated display all its own.  Even then, I had to ask around in the best dialect I could muster what exactly had happened to all the regular yogurt tubs.  I was finally brought 5 small tubs from the back room. Shopping, even at the best Americanized grocery store there is in Egypt -- they were playing a twangy Thompson Square, "You Gonna Kiss me or Not" over the speakers when I arrived -- is an inexact science.

The qibla, for you unlucky non-Islamicists out there, is the direction of Mecca.  I've seen it indicated by pasted stickers on the ceilings of hotel rooms.  I've seen it indicated in an airplane while in flight with an ever-updating swinging arrow that shifts ever so slightly as the journey goes on.

But nothing quite so much captures the feeling of prayer as the sign posted to a tree... "the direction of your prayer is just a little to the left."  Inexact, debatable, but utterly inevitable.

Counter-Revolution

"I am against the Revolution"

I noted a couple of days ago that I saw a metro map where the new, official "Shohada" (Martyrs) had been crossed out.  Well, the blog Inanities (which is in English, very informative, and totally hilarious) covered an event about a week ago in support of Mubarak.  The writer has some things published in al-Masry al-Yowm's English edition.

By 5 p.m. a huge “We Are All Mubarak” poster had been erected on stage but numbers remained low – some 300. Asked why this was, Imad said that many of them were women and girls “and afraid to come” and also pointed out that it was an extremely hot day, “unlike when they did their revolution and they had the advantage of it being winter”.

A speaker reassured the tiny crowd before him. “We are millions. We are the silent majority”.

Well, I have to say that the summer revolution of July 8th is turning out well over 300.  And temperatures were very high - high 90s F - with a punishing sun.

Football and Politics in Egypt - AMAZING Guardian Video

I just posted this link on facebook, but I've got to add this to the blog.

One commentator in the video notes that membership in Ahly or Zamalek being one of the things that stood in place of political parties after the 1952 abolition of political parties in Egypt.  The images of political parties and Ahly fans overlapping at the beginning really do give you a sense of the overlapping senses of solidarity that the two call to mind. I remember reading Terry Eagleton's comments on the similarities between religion and soccer fandom.  There's definitely something to be said for that.

I was out at a Cafe in Hussein (the medieval area of Cairo with Mamluk mosques, Fatimid walls, etc.) watching the Ahly-Zamalek.  It was a very friendly atmosphere, but on the way back some "Ultras" (see video) from Ahly kept our metro train in one station for over 10 minutes by blocking the doors open.  Not sure what the goal of that was...

Hiatuses - Blogging More Politics

"Friday, July 8th.
The Revolution First: A Real Purge,
A Real Trial, A Real Government."

So there's been a bit of a hiatus in blogging, for which I apologize.  I blame an increase in social obligations and homework at the same time.  Both have been beneficial for my dialect, but I still have problems with pronunciation.  Being white means that your pronunciation has to be spot on because for the first 4 or 5 sentences, people tend to expect english rather than Egyptian-with-an-accent.

Anyhow, I'm going to post a little bit about the Revolution.  For those of you not keeping up with developments here, July 8th is a big day for Egypt.  About a million protestors have gathered in Tahrir Square to renew the demands of the January 25th revolution.  This is the biggest protest since January and reflects a feeling that things have not really changed:  trials of people who fired on protestors, of people who tortured prisoners and protestors, and of people like Hosni Mubarak himself have been incredibly slow.  At a talk given by Alaa al-Aswany, a political activist, dentist, and author of The Yacoubian Building, he basically accused the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and current rulers of Egypt) of being involved in a counter-revolution.

The protests today were originally the work of non-Muslim Brotherhood parties who have rallied behind the slogan "Constitution First," which they raised to challenge the unfair advantages accruing to the Muslim Brotherhood by holding elections under the old constitution and then giving that elected body the power to write the new constitution.  (The perception is that the MB would win those elections handily and the SCAF + MB would have free reign to block out other parties, give Islam an official place in the constitution, etc.  I heard a really interesting discussion of whether or not the laws of Egypt's new government should be based on Islam or not while wandering around a bookshop in Talaat Harb downtown yesterday.  It sounded remarkably like the American discussions of whether or not we're a Judeo-Christian country.)

However, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) agreed to join the July 8th protests after the organizers agreed to drop "Constitution First" from the demands of the July 8th protest (named "The Friday of Persistence").  The new slogan is "Revolution First," and the official demands have been narrowed to focus on demanding more accountability for the government and a speeding up of the trials for those responsible for the worst crimes against the January revolution.

The Muslim Brotherhood has asked its supporters to leave Tahrir by nightfall.  Camping out downtown (as people have been doing for a few days, though in very small numbers) is technically illegal.  If a crackdown happens, then, it will happen after the rule-abiding MB supporters leave.

More posts soon.  All the best to the protestors and safe passage to my friends who are down there today.  I'll be sending my solidarity-vibes from Maadi today.

Sadat Scratched: Picture Time!

Sunday I ended up on the same metro that I was on the other day.  Unlike other metro cars where you only find Mubarak Station scratched out and replaced, this particular metro car has both Mubarak *and* Sadat station names crossed out.

In their place, we have the usual "al-Shuhadāʾ" (The Martyrs), which replaces Sadat.  Needing a different name to replace Mubarak, this particular writer chose to up it to "Damm al-Shuhadāʾ" (The Blood of the Martyrs.)

Sacred Geographies: Part IV - Contesting the Revolution

New sighting:  A new official metro map (something I have yet to post a picture of because it's at the "end" chronologically) with the official Arabic name for the station, al-Shohadāʾ (The Martyrs) crossed out in blue ball-point pen.  Overtop was hastily scribbled "Mubarak."

I've never seen an empty metro.  Granted, I've never been around on the earliest train, but to give you a sense, there's a metro on my line every 5 minutes or so throughout the day, and these are big trains.  TONS of people use these metro lines and it's hard to imagine being alone on one.  I imagined (perhaps wrongly) that much of the scratching out had occurred during the heady days of the revolution... or something.  Or when only people who were brave enough or crazy enough to head down to Tahrir despite all the dangers would have been riding the metro anyhow.  But the graffiti war continues.

I mean, I knew that people had their doubts about the revolution.  Some people I've talked to aren't too happy with the military regime or aren't too terribly concerned with anything but whether or not prices can be kept down and jobs can be found.  But that isn't the same as wanting Mubarak back.  There are certainly those who liked the old regime, but I just didn't imagine that they rode the metro... more the "have a nice car/exile-getaway in Europe" kind of people.  Not that I'm any more than a casual observer of Egyptian politics.  Though I did find the NYTimes version of the Muslim Brotherhood rifts amusing - "Election Reveals Rifts in Muslim Brotherhood."  If they had been bothered before that, they would have known that there were plenty of rifts and differences in that broad umbrella, and not just because a bunch of guys at the top all want to be President.

Sacred Geographies: Part III - Sadat gets the Scratch

So I was headed up to AUC in Tahrir Square today to get on a tourbus and see some ancient pyramids (from 2800 BC!) when I remembered to check the subway map.  Lo and behold there was something there I had never seen before!

Both Mubarak Station and Anwar Sadat Station were scratched out.  Not only that, the scribbled names were absolutely clear in black permanent marker.  Sadat had been replaced with "al-Shuhadāʾ" or "The Martyrs," while Mubarak Station was replaced with "Damm al-Shuhadāʾ" or "The Blood of the Martyrs."

Another subway artist added "ʾĀl"in front of both in a different color and hand, making it "The Family/Clan of the Martyrs" and "The Family/Clan of the Blood of the Martyrs." (Not exactly sure whether he meant the group of martyrs or whether he meant to honor the families of the slain protestors.

I was excited to see a new and unusual renaming project, so I reached into my bag to get my camera, which I had brought along to take pictures of the pyramids and tombs of Saqqara and Memphis.  Aaaaand... I forgot my camera.  Fortunately, others on the trip were happy to take photos for me, coming soon.

Sacred Geographies: Part II - Mubarak Replaced

So another week of CASA has flown by.  The apartment is still a bit of a cooker, but it's bearable during the day with the A/C and then bearable again at night with the cross-breeze.  I'm not sure what we'll do when it gets hotter in July and August.  I guess we could always just hope that climate change has reached us here on the African continent.

I haven't been taking my camera with me as much on the metro, but I have managed to pick up a few more interesting photos of the metro maps.  This is installment two, which is focused on pictures where stickers have been placed over the name of the station.  The most frequently-used sticker is a long, white sticker with thick, red letters.  It dedicates the station to "the Martyrs of the People's Revolution."  I've also seen a variation that simply says "Martyrs" and also transliterates it "al-Shohada" so that it can be placed over the English transliteration of "Mubarak" (not shown below).

I've also stuck in a picture of the first clear alternative that I've seen to naming the station after the martyrs (which has certainly taken hold).  The third picture down has "The Revolution" written in black permanent marker with the rest of what had been written scratched out.

Sacred Geographies: Part I - Mubarak Erased

I was wondering what would be done about the Mubarak metro stop, and the first time I was on the metro I saw at least part of the answer.  The stop formerly known as "Hosni Mubarak" had been scratched out and scribbled over.  Much of the scribble had then itself been scratched out, though I've seen both "al-shaʿb" (the People, ie. of the People's Revolution) and "al-Shuhadāʾ" (the Martyrs, ie. the Martyrs of the Egyptian Revolution on what people are calling "the days of blood").

Since then, I've seen several other attempts at renaming, all the way to official government-installed maps.  I've been taking my camera with me on the metro recently, and I'll be posting the different states of the ex-Mubarak Metro in what I take to be chronological order.  Part I: Mubarak Erased.

If anyone can make out what's scribbled here and then scratched out, please let me know!  Most of these look like they could be "al-Shuhadāʾ" but I've also seen a clearly written "al-Shaʿb," and they both start with the same letter...

The Revolution Continues...

On our first few nights here, as Anya and I looked for apartments, we ran into or heard a few protests. Amusingly, one of the simsaars (rental agent) took us to look at an apartment that he said was "behind the Turkish embassy," which is a polite way of saying "overlooking the ministry of the interior." In March, protesters ransacked the ministry of the interior, which had run domestic surveillance and torture in Egypt under Mubarak... later in March, parts of the ministry were set on fire. As we walked to this apartment to take a look, we passed by the burned out cars.

Later that same week, we were heading back from the apartment hunt in Maadi (where we eventually found an apartment), and the Metro got unusually crowded for a weekday night. To avoid a potentially problematic harassment situation on the Metro, we hopped off early and walked the rest of the way to our apartment, which brought us past the interior ministry. Low and behold there was a small protest in front of the ministry. Apparently someone died in police custody recently (a sign that extreme torture took place), and so protesters unsatisfied with the direction of change under the new military order demonstrated in front of the interior ministry.

We've also heard chanted slogans from afar and passed by small soap-box speeches in the subway station. Each was well-attended by police.

Yesterday (Friday), Anya and I headed down to Tahrir Square to help out the project "Tahrir Documents." It was a pretty calm day with different political parties marching in circles around the Tahrir traffic circle or holding small rallies. I picked up a handful of documents, often not from the people who were handing them out but from Egyptians who had come to listen or participate in the rallies themselves. After a while under the sun, we headed to a coffee shop to chat with some very nice young guys whom we met in the square, one was a high school student and the other a 30ish guy who wanted to talk all about Islamic geography with me.

It's really fantastic to see all this political participation going on. From what I read in the pamphlets I picked up and from my conversations with people in Tahrir and elsewhere, the main concerns are economic and about getting a government in place that can produce a job opportunities for everyone, though there's also plenty about Egyptian unity (between Christians and Muslims), about Democracy, etc.

The apartment

The apartment is nice enough, though it's on the fifth floor with big windows, so it gets a bit hot. There's AC, but we're trying to conserve electricity. At night, we can get a cross-breeze, and the Cairo nights are really quite nice. Day-times, however, are scorching hot, and it's only going to get worse in August. Interestingly, some Caireens use the numbers of the Gregorian months rather than the names. (I asked a taxi driver as we sat in blistering heat in Cairo's rush hour traffic about whether August would be even hotter, and he didn't understand what I'd asked. But when I rephrased the question, he affirmed that the 7th and 8th months would be worse. My Arabic instructor also used the numbers rather than the names, which I initially thought was because it the dates were written in numerals on the handout we were using.)

Views out the 2nd bedroom window. The AC in this room sounds like a large truck engine.

The kitchen: No AC and very little ventilation... but quaint enough.

The livingroom with the greenhouse windows. Most of my time at home is spent in front of the AC in this room.

Internet! Huzzah!

We have an apartment now (since Wednesday)! And internet (since about an hour ago)! Both were a bit of a struggle with various false-starts and side-winding adventures. Anya and I are now located in a district called "Sakanat Maadi," which is a nice tree-filled suburb south of the city center. The areas further away from the Metro are very "liberal"... there are a lot of foreigners living there, and both the foreigners and the Egyptians have a very different dress code (shorts seem acceptable for guys and tanktops of various kinds acceptable for girls). There's also a lot less harassment. Just as I found in Medinat Nasr two years ago, the fact that there's no chance that a tourist would ever visit the area means that people assume you're a resident. Life is certainly more pleasant here, and the metro ride is very manageable.

In any case, I now have a chance to catch up on the blog, which I will do bit by bit to avoid super-long blog posts. For now, it's picture time! Thanks to Stacey, my new friend from the trip who is now in Kazakhstan doing research, I have pictures from our foray into Istanbul. Istanbul now ranks as one of my favorite cities, and I'm definitely going back. It's like San Fransisco with medieval architecture!

This last shot is the "San Fran" one... except there's a beautiful out-door teashop that goes along this hill.

Jetlag (reposted from Tumblr)

(originally posted on June 4th-ish)

Jetlag causes me to wake up insanely early and surf the internet… which brings me to…

I’m tempted to sympathize with the historians who, hundreds of years from now, will pore over documents relating to the ride of Paul Revere, many of which are of later provenance… poems, made-for-Texas-schools renderings, and now this from everyone’s favorite fabricator:

* Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin offered a novel take on the famous ride of Paul Revere during her trip to Boston yesterday: “He who warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town, to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure, and we we’re going to be free and we were going to be armed.” For history’s sake: Revere rode to warn allies that British troops were headed to Lexington and Concord. Later in life, Revere became a bellmaker, but no bells were involved in the secretive ride.