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."