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.