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.