As the megacity brims with informal settlements, the upper classes are leapfrogging over the urban perimeter for an escapist paradise of luxury desert property. Ursula Lindsey reports.
To drive Cairo’s Ring Road – a 110-kilometre freeway that loops the city – is to sail through an endless sea of red brick. The brilliant green of the Nile Valley appears only in flashes through the expanse of cheap apartment blocks.
The buildings occupy what were once agricultural parcels; like those parcels, they are long and narrow, with only a hair’s breadth of space between them. They crowd right up to the freeway, so close that motorists may glance directly into their bare rooms. From their rooftops sprout unfinished supporting columns – ready for the addition of yet another floor. Their only decoration is bright, mismatched shutters; balconies enlivened by bold geometric patterns – pink and purple lozenges, green and orange stripes; and the bricks that spell, along the upper floors: “Allah.”
These are Cairo’s slums, what experts call its “informal” or “spontaneous” neighbourhoods. Egyptians call them ashwa’iyat – from the Arabic word for “random”, “haphazard”. They are the dense, sprawling answer to Cairo’s population explosion and its lack of affordable housing. Almost six in 10 Cairenes – at least 10 million people – live in informal neighbourhoods, often with limited access to water, electricity, schools, hospitals or refuse collection, and no real roads.
Hoda Hanin, 26, and her daughter Mariam stand in the Bashteel district of Imbaba, where Hoda grew up. "The people here are real," she says, "they're good country people." Dana Smillie for The National
Most capitals are magnets, but the speed with which the Egyptian one has grown in the last century is testament both to a remarkable centripetal power and to a surrounding vacuum of opportunity. Swelled by waves of rural migration, the population of greater Cairo has gone from less than one million at the beginning of the 20th century to about 18 million today – a megacity in the order of Mumbai or São Paulo, with more people than Lebanon, Jordan and Libya combined.
For centuries, Cairo’s expansion has been checked by geography: the city is bounded by a narrow strip of fertile, Nile-irrigated land, with nothing but desert beyond. The migrants who flocked to the city in the last century found there was nowhere to live: they built shacks on rooftops; they made homes out of covered alleys, inner courtyards, and stairwells. Priced out of the soaring formal real estate market, they started building illegally – on the agricultural land that surrounds the city and on the barren plateau that separates it from the desert.
The author Hamdi Abu Golayyel describes the slum in which he lived for six years as "a mongrel of a place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers". Dana Smillie for The National
Cairo has long been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The city teeters under the weight of its multitudes – its public services worn ragged; its air pollution among the worst in the world; its traffic barely managed by freeway overpasses and tunnels, clumsy last-minute bypass surgeries intended to repair its clogged and failing arteries.
Faced with the city’s barely contained chaos and alarmed by the growing slums, Cairo’s elites have begun to dream of escape. Along the Ring Road, billboards advertise exclusive new private developments, with names like country clubs or bad discos – Utopia, Le Reve, Dreamland, Qattamiya Heights, Palm Hills, Belle Ville – and slogans like ““The Egypt of My Desires.” One advertisement, overlooking dilapidated buildings in the centre of town, simply asks: “Why Are You Here?”
Cairo’s future, it seems, lies outside the city’s boundaries, in the desert – where it can be built from scratch. Today the outer edges of the city are one vast construction site, full of subdivisions where empty million-dollar villas stand among the sand dunes, and giant gated communities that promise a luxurious escape from Cairo’s pollution and friction.
What will be the effect of this flight on the city that’s left behind? If Cairo’s future is uncertain, its present is no easier to comprehend. “Perhaps today’s greatest riddle is not so much ‘Where is Cairo headed?’”, notes the writer Maria Golia, “as ‘Where is Cairo at all?’”
Somewhere between the dirt alleys of the slums and the golf courses of the gated suburbs; between the resourcefulness of millions of poor residents and the real estate speculation that has redefined the city’s edges; between the fears that Cairo is becoming one giant “slum” and the fantasy of starting over – the Egyptian capital is taking shape once again.
Hoda Hanin,a 26-year-old teaching assistant, balances her six-month-old daughter on her hip as she heads down a narrow dirt alley to her parents’ home in the slum of Bashteel. She grew up here, back when it was a village on the western bank of the Nile. “It was all farmland,” she says, “then people started clearing it out, selling the land, building homes for their kids.” Today, Bashteel and numerous other nearby villages have been absorbed into the crowded informal neighbourhood of Imbaba.
The average density in Cairo is 90,000 people per square mile; in Imbaba, it’s over 200,000, three times that of Manhattan. Imbaba’s side-streets are unpaved and no more than two metres wide: narrow, endless crevasses between the red-brick buildings. Three-wheel tuk-tuks, imported from India, are the only vehicles capable of navigating the bumpy, rubbish-strewn paths.
For decades, the Egyptian government willfully ignored the spread of the ashwa’iyat. The low-level officials who were supposed to enforce zoning and building laws took bribes to look the other way; on official maps of Cairo, these areas simply didn’t exist. Under this regime of collusion and neglect, the slums grew and grew, providing the masses much-needed cheap housing and allowing the authorities to forgo providing services.
The Talaat Mustafa Group's latest mega-development, located in the desert east of Cairo. Dana Smillie for The National
By the early 1990s, however, Cairo was forced to face its slums. The earthquake that struck the city in 1992 left thousands in the informal neighbourhoods homeless; since then fires and collapses have regularly put one slum or another on the front pages of local newspapers. At around the same time, the Islamist group Jama’a Islamiya took de facto control of Imbaba – creating what the foreign press quickly dubbed “the Islamic Republic of Imbaba”. The government dispatched more than 12,000 soldiers to carry out a six-week siege, round up the Islamists, and reimpose its authority.
After regaining control of Imbaba, the government announced it would spend hundreds of millions of Egyptian pounds to – as one newspaper put it – “Transform Centers of Terrorism into a Civilised Area”. The government set aside LE600 million (about $200m, or Dh402m) for slum upgrades, demolitions and relocations, and further plans for Imbaba are under way – to create more public housing, relocate thousands of street vendors, demolish some buildings and cut major new thoroughfares through the area.
Hoda thinks new, wider roads would be a great improvement. But like many residents here, her complaints about lack of services are tempered by her pride in how successfully, and civilly, Imbaba manages its own affairs. “The people here are real,” she says, “they’re good, country people.” When on our way home we become stuck in traffic in one of Imbaba’s many impassable intersections, she points to the neighbourhood men who are volunteering as impromptu traffic police: “See how they drop everything to help out.” When I ask Hoda where else she might like to live, her eyes grow wide and she says emphatically: “No, no, no! I never want to live outside Imbaba. I know the people here. We’re used to each other.”
“The people in my street let you take pictures there because they trust that I won’t let anyone give Imbaba a bad name,” Hoda tells me, after my visit. “What will you write about Imbaba? Will you write good things?”
Her anxiety over how her neighbourhood will be depicted by outsiders isn’t surprising, given the tenor of most discussions of the ashwa’iyat. Hand-wringing over Cairo’s slums has become a favourite habit of Egypt’s policymakers, artists and public intellectuals. The Egyptian and pan-Arab press abounds with horrified descriptions of these supposedly irredeemable hellholes. An article in Dar Al Hayat newspaper offers a description that is typical in its tone of Victorian shock: the ashwai’yat, the author writes, “are neighbourhoods with no laws and no values and no fixed sources of livelihood … They are neighbourhoods with no peace and security, where crime, selling and taking drugs, prostitution, wanton sex from a young age, take place. Relations are stamped with gangsterism, fighting, revenge, and violence. It’s a life without hope, vision, conviction, or the ability to change one’s destiny.”
More sympathetic depictions of the ashwa’iyat are often no less voyeuristic. A blockbuster 2007 film set in the slums, Hena Maysara, tells the melodramatic story of star-crossed lovers named Nahed and Adel; by the end of the film, Adel has become a gangster, Nahed a prostitute; their illegitimate child becomes a homeless teenage grifter. The slum they inhabit, taken over by extremists, is blown to smithereens in a fiery battle with the police.
The director, Khaled Youssef, called the film “a warning cry”, but in scene after titillating scene of sex, violence and drug use, it gives the impression that the ashwai’yat don’t contain a single law-abiding, gainfully employed resident. The Egyptian Ministry of Housing estimates there are 67 informal areas in Cairo. They range from truly dismal slums to lower-class neighbourhoods that are dense and under-serviced, but hardly dens of vice and desperation. Yet even as they use the ashwai’yat to mount a critique of the Mubarak government, many artists and intellectuals end up stigmatising these areas as dark, dangerous, and radically different places, which threaten the city’s supposed order and culture.
“It’s impossible to distinguish between what’s ashwa’i and what’s not, in Cairo,” says Hamdi Abu Golayyel. Abu Golayyel lived in the slum of Manshiyat Nasr for six years, and described it as “a mongrel place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers” in his 2006 novel Thieves in Retirement.
Abu Golayyel and I head there one night, in a taxi that speeds, for almost an hour and half, south along the Nile. Manshiyat Nasr (“Nasser’s New Town”) is in the industrial suburb of Helwan. It started as public housing for the workers in the nearby state-owned cement factories; but it soon overflowed into the surrounding countryside. A patch of palm trees, stranded between apartment buildings, conjures the fields that stood here just a few decades ago.
Abu Golayyel paid LE 100 a month (about $30, or Dh67 at the time) during his stay there, from 1995 to 2001. He waves towards the stocky little buildings, the small doors and cramped stairwells – these are “living spaces in the most basic sense,” he says. “Spaces to eat and sleep.”
Manshiyat Nasr is a new slum, and it lacks Imbaba’s self-confidence and cohesiveness. Abu Golayyel’s sly, satirical novel depicts a world in which every basis for community is frayed and unstable. But in his novel the slum isn’t the anti-city – it’s the essence of the city.
“I don’t understand what critics mean by the word ‘marginalised,’” says Abu Golayyel, as we leave Manshiyat Nasr. He gestures around him: “This neighbourhood isn’t any more marginalised than the rest of the city. People in Midan Tahrir,” he says, mentioning Cairo’s central square, “have no more power to make political decisions than people here. Mubarak is the core, and the rest of us are all marginalised.”
“It’s the future,” the salesman beside me says matter-of-factly, as we drive across a grey and empty desert plateau, 40km outside Cairo. We’ve finally reached the outer edge of the seemingly endless belt of construction that surrounds the city. Here lies Madinaty (“My city”), an enormous planned gated community, the brainchild of the disgraced tycoon Talaat Mustafa – once close to the Mubarak family, now appealing a death sentence for the hit he ordered on his Lebanese pop singer girlfriend. Madinaty is designed to house 500,000 people, as well as hospitals, universities, malls and a water park. The developer’s website calls it “the biggest all-inclusive enclosed city in the Middle East.” Renditions of the city feature palm-dotted lawns, man-made lagoons, glistening office towers, spotless shopping arcades.
The Egyptian government has long been convinced – since the early 1960s – that the solution to Cairo’s ills lie in expansion beyond its borders. Back then, however, it was the government that did the developing, erecting a series of self-sufficient blue-collar desert cities that drew disproportionate subsidies but attracted few residents. In line with Egypt’s latter-day rapprochement with capitalism, the Mubarak government has taken a drastically different approach, turning over the colonisation of the desert to the forces of private enterprise, selling off vast swaths of state land to developers.
Frenzied real-estate speculation has continued to drive development on Cairo’s outskirts: houses and apartments in the new cities are sold and resold many times over before they’re even built. My salesman, it turns out, lives in another new development called Dreamland, but he also bought an apartment in Madinaty “as an investment”; in the few years since his purchase, it has already doubled in value. So many people have purchased “investment” properties that, in a city with a severe housing shortage, an estimated million apartments sit empty.
We pass the security checkpoint and enter Madinaty’s endless, sweeping driveway. Its main gate is the size of the Arc de Triomphe. The architecture of the duplexes, town houses and apartment buildings inside is internationally bland and rigidly repetitive: red-tiled gables, sun patios, sliding glass doors. The two-bedroom apartments here will set you back Dh370,000; the grand and bland villas cost close to a Dh3.7m.
But what’s here so far is nothing compared to what is coming. I look out towards the horizon at a construction site the size of, well, a small city – row upon row of buildings, rising from the sand like a pastel mirage.
The salesman notes the clean, bracing breeze. Madinaty is on a desert plateau, almost 300 metres above Cairo. Water from the Nile will have to be pumped all the way up and out here – as to all the new cities – by state-built infrastructure. Electricity and roads – a second ring road is now being planned – will also be provided by the New Urban Communities Administration, which has just issued an LE 10bn (Dh6.7bn) bond to fund its efforts.
Relocating Cairo’s wealthier residents will not alleviate the crowding and poverty they leave behind. Though Imbaba has now been “pacified”, across enormous tranches of the city the state is still regarded as an unwelcome interloper, and anger is never far from the surface. When a cliff collapsed in the dismal slum of Duwaiqa, in 2008, killing 60 people and destroying 35 houses, emergency vehicles took hours to arrive. The authorities seemed more concerned with sealing off the area to journalists and aid workers than helping distraught residents who had been digging for their relatives with their bare hands. Then bulldozers arrived to demolish 1,000 homes at risk of collapse. Furious residents threw volleys of stones at the bulldozers and the governor’s convoy. They compared themselves to Palestinians under Israeli occupation. One columnist in an opposition newspaper wrote of “The Intifada of the ashwa’iyat”.
The new enclaves in the desert promise protection from such tensions. A friend knows a lady who bought a home in one of the new private developments. Her house was in the outer row, not far from a nearby public housing project. She decided to switch to a house nearer the centre – because, she said, “when those people rise up,” she didn’t want to be in the front line.
The slums are most often referred to as a “cancer” – and by that analogy, Cairo is already a terminal case. And the better off residents of this supposedly dying city have embraced the new developments as a sort of miracle cure.
I catch a glimpse of their enthusiasm at a five-star hotel overlooking the Nile, where a fashionable crowd – the men in suits, the women in slinky black dresses, not a headscarf in sight – nibbles on canapés while a jazz band plays in the background. I’m attending a reception organised by the real-estate developers SODIC and SOLIDERE to promote their new development, WestTown, located in the desert on the opposite side of Cairo from Madinaty.
I ask a salesman if business has slowed due to the global recession. He assures me that almost all the 175 units on sale – high-end apartments with whirlpools and teak floors, which can be customised in one of three styles: “Urban Chic,” “Natural Zen” and “Modern Islamic” – have been snapped up.
Guests take turns huddling around a maquette of the development. A projector has been mounted on the ceiling above, to create little virtual future residents, driving their cars down traffic-free, palm-lined streets, eating lunch in the cafes of the (closed-circuit-TV-monitored) plaza and diving into the rooftop pools. It is a projection of a perfect life, and it could be taking place anywhere.
Such pristine, self-sufficient communities are in fact a global phenomenon. But in a city where until recently everyone has been forced to endure close quarters, it is a new development. If, in the next few decades, the enclaves in the desert are populated by Cairo’s upper classes, this will represent what one expert on the Egyptian capital calls “a radical reformulation of Cairo’s urban landscape.”
Modern Cairo came into being, 150 years ago, with another “reformulation”, one that bears some striking resemblances to what’s going on today. In the 1860s, Egypt’s ruler, Khedive Ismail, grafted a European façade onto his capital, hoping to impress the foreign dignitaries invited to the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal. A western downtown, complete with an opera house, public gardens, and wide Parisian-style avenues, was erected in the span of a few frantic years.
Ironically, the cost of these public works contributed to Egypt’s bankruptcy and led to the 70-year-long British occupation that would follow. Ismail showed off, then lost the country; but the district he established flourished, attracting the upper classes and the first modern government services. The nearby medieval core of the city, meanwhile, was increasingly seen as a dirty, disorderly relic of the past.
For most of the 20th century, the fault line between these two worlds – foreign and local, modern and “backward”, rich and poor – dominated the real and imaginative landscape of the city. What the anthropologist Janet Abu Lughod has called the “rent in the social fabric” of Cairo featured prominently in work of great Egyptian writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Youssef Idris.
But in 20th-century Cairo, the new and the old city were contiguous, and crossing from one to the other was a fraught but relatively common journey. Today, as spatial segregation and social inequality increase, a much greater chasm seems to be opening.
Or perhaps it would be better described as a vacuum, for Cairo risks becoming a city where no one belongs – a place where the lower classes are blamed for their own disenfranchisement, and from which the upper classes are eager to secede. The preoccupation with the slums shows the malaise most Cairenes feel over the way their city has drifted, seemingly rudderless, over the last half-century.
To stigmatise the ashwai’yat for their poverty and their supposed chaos is politically convenient, but to bemoan them as the apocalyptic end of Egypt’s urban civilisation is far-fetched. The slums of Cairo are the visible symptoms of the shortage and misdirection of Egypt’s resources, of the limits of public oversight, interest and authority. They’re the best that most of Cairo’s residents – left largely to their own devices – have been able to come up with.
The fantasy that leads into the desert and the hysteria over the slums are two sides of the same coin, each one the sign of a deep unease over Cairo’s future and a desire to avoid confronting its present. In the escapism of the gated cities and the horror over the ragged lower-class neighborhoods, after all, there is the same whiff of denial – of a city eager, at least for the time being, to stick its head in the sand.
Ursula Lindsey is a freelance journalist based in Cairo, and writes the culture blog The Arabist Review.
Source: The National: And then Cairo turned itself inside out
Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Saturday, 9 January 2010
Book review: ‘Why did you leave the village?
The narrator of Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s largely autobiographical second novel moves from the countryside to Cairo in search of basic wages and literary accomplishment, Ursula Lindsay writes.
A Dog with No Tail
Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
American University in Cairo Press
Dh84
Migration from the countryside to the capital – leaving a traditional way of life behind and heading to the big city, lured by the promise of a slightly better life – is a common, fundamental experience for many in today’s Global South. So too is the dislocation and precariousness of life as a new member of the disregarded urban underclass. This is particularly true in Egypt, where in the last half-century rural migrants have helped quadruple Cairo’s population to its current 18 million mark. The city’s new residents jostle for space in its densely packed neighbourhoods, where despite a buzz of opportunity they struggle to find homes and jobs, and to make sense of their journeys.
In his darkly funny, deceptively casual and largely autobiographical second novel, the Egyptian author Hamdi Abu Golayyel writes of coming to the capital from one of the many villages where urban migration is a rite of passage, an expected step “once a man has developed the beginnings of a moustache and a sense of self-worth”. And yet, Abu Golayyel tells us, he and his friends “would walk the streets of Cairo but as sons of another, distant, country, to which we awaited the chance to return”.
The distant country is Abu Tahoun, a Bedouin village in the Fayoum oasis; Abu Golayyel’s ancestors were bribed and coerced into settling there sometime in the early nineteenth century by the ruler Muhammad Ali, who hoped to “bring to an end their peregrinations and interminable raids against the granaries and villages of the peasants”. Men like Abu Golayyel’s grandfather Aula – a brawler and a cattle thief who took an insouciant attitude to the officials and rules of the modern state – were the last of their generation. Today, Abu Golayyel tells us, his relatives are “nonentities almost to a man”, living in a village that is “wounded: poor and tiny, set far from the highway and the market and fresh water, and surrounded on every side by the desert.” And yet this village, he writes “is always on my mind”, “the only place where I move free from fear”.
In his first novel, the social satire Thieves in Retirement (2006), Abu Gollayel painted life in the vast, new Cairo slums as an unpredictable, apolitical, amoral free-for-all, a world of casual violence and consistent hypocrisy. A Dog with No Tail is another chronicle of the author’s double alienation – as a member of a community still at odds with the state, and as a new urban migrant. But it is more introspective than Abu Gollayel’s debut: concerned less with understanding others and more with coming to terms with one’s own origins and aspirations.
Starting when he was a teenager, Abu Golayyel began travelling regularly to Cairo to work with construction crews, tearing down, renovating or expanding the tottering residential buildings of the city’s more populous neighbourhoods. This manual labour was a source of both satisfaction – “a struggle between a man and his strength” – and shame, particularly since Abu Golayyel harboured the improbable ambition of becoming a writer. On his visits home, he writes: “I tried my best to convince people that I was, in fact, a pilot in Cairo. For the entire holiday I would assume the mantle of village intellectual. Rising late, towel slung over my shoulder, I would make my way down to the canal bank, with my toothbrush and toothpaste – the proofs of cultivation, culture, and an upwards social trajectory – borne aloft.”
Yet in the years spent lugging sacks of cement, smashing walls, pouring foundations and sleeping in empty buildings at night – building the residences of others without a home to call his own – Abu Golayyel found both material and metaphor. The novel’s resonant title in Arabic, Al Fa’il, is derived from the verb “to do”. It means “the doer”, “the actor” or, used as an adjective, “the efficacious, efficient”. In a grammatical sense, it means “the subject” – but in common parlance the world simply means “the labourer”. The English title is derived from a quip in the story, and works well enough. But the original Arabic title is particularly fitting for a book about the unstable edifice that is identity and the constant act of construction that is writing.
Abu Golayyel alternates his account of his life as a construction worker with stories from his years as an indifferent and intermittent university student, anecdotes about his friends and colleagues in Cairo, and lore from his grandfather’s seemingly more adventurous times. Along the way, he employs the whole bag of postmodern tricks, which have become widespread among contemporary Arab authors. The short stories are told out of chronological order, interrupted, revisited and retold with new details. They take off, midway, in unexpected directions; sometimes they end abruptly, like conversations cut short. There are unexplained gaps and contradictions; the self-referential narrator asserts in the opening pages that he’s no good with beginnings, interrupts his own story to chide himself for his digressions, and tells us in the end that things haven’t turned out the way he wanted.
Yet the reader doesn’t feel like the victim of a wry experiment. There is humour and action in almost every story. The spring behind Abu Golayyel’s writing, the author told an audience at the book’s recent launch in Cairo, is “amazement at what happens to me”, and arresting details are to be found in all his stories, even those about the mundane details of construction work. We learn that 50 Egyptian Pounds (Dh34, US$10) was a generous payment for a man to single-handedly carry 8,400 kilograms – that’s eight tons – of sand up a seven-storey building in one day; a feat the narrator considers “a miracle to this day”. Elsewhere, Abu Golayyel creates dramatic set pieces – an insurrection led by Islamist students at his university; his grandfather’s raids and tussles with the law – and highlights the bizarre: a college named after the bordello next door; an amateur prostitution ring run out of a parking garage; a landlord who eavesdrops so aggressively he falls into tenants’ rooms when they open their doors.
Continue reading The National: Book review: ‘Why did you leave the village?
A Dog with No Tail
Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
American University in Cairo Press
Dh84
Migration from the countryside to the capital – leaving a traditional way of life behind and heading to the big city, lured by the promise of a slightly better life – is a common, fundamental experience for many in today’s Global South. So too is the dislocation and precariousness of life as a new member of the disregarded urban underclass. This is particularly true in Egypt, where in the last half-century rural migrants have helped quadruple Cairo’s population to its current 18 million mark. The city’s new residents jostle for space in its densely packed neighbourhoods, where despite a buzz of opportunity they struggle to find homes and jobs, and to make sense of their journeys.
In his darkly funny, deceptively casual and largely autobiographical second novel, the Egyptian author Hamdi Abu Golayyel writes of coming to the capital from one of the many villages where urban migration is a rite of passage, an expected step “once a man has developed the beginnings of a moustache and a sense of self-worth”. And yet, Abu Golayyel tells us, he and his friends “would walk the streets of Cairo but as sons of another, distant, country, to which we awaited the chance to return”.
The distant country is Abu Tahoun, a Bedouin village in the Fayoum oasis; Abu Golayyel’s ancestors were bribed and coerced into settling there sometime in the early nineteenth century by the ruler Muhammad Ali, who hoped to “bring to an end their peregrinations and interminable raids against the granaries and villages of the peasants”. Men like Abu Golayyel’s grandfather Aula – a brawler and a cattle thief who took an insouciant attitude to the officials and rules of the modern state – were the last of their generation. Today, Abu Golayyel tells us, his relatives are “nonentities almost to a man”, living in a village that is “wounded: poor and tiny, set far from the highway and the market and fresh water, and surrounded on every side by the desert.” And yet this village, he writes “is always on my mind”, “the only place where I move free from fear”.
In his first novel, the social satire Thieves in Retirement (2006), Abu Gollayel painted life in the vast, new Cairo slums as an unpredictable, apolitical, amoral free-for-all, a world of casual violence and consistent hypocrisy. A Dog with No Tail is another chronicle of the author’s double alienation – as a member of a community still at odds with the state, and as a new urban migrant. But it is more introspective than Abu Gollayel’s debut: concerned less with understanding others and more with coming to terms with one’s own origins and aspirations.
Starting when he was a teenager, Abu Golayyel began travelling regularly to Cairo to work with construction crews, tearing down, renovating or expanding the tottering residential buildings of the city’s more populous neighbourhoods. This manual labour was a source of both satisfaction – “a struggle between a man and his strength” – and shame, particularly since Abu Golayyel harboured the improbable ambition of becoming a writer. On his visits home, he writes: “I tried my best to convince people that I was, in fact, a pilot in Cairo. For the entire holiday I would assume the mantle of village intellectual. Rising late, towel slung over my shoulder, I would make my way down to the canal bank, with my toothbrush and toothpaste – the proofs of cultivation, culture, and an upwards social trajectory – borne aloft.”
Yet in the years spent lugging sacks of cement, smashing walls, pouring foundations and sleeping in empty buildings at night – building the residences of others without a home to call his own – Abu Golayyel found both material and metaphor. The novel’s resonant title in Arabic, Al Fa’il, is derived from the verb “to do”. It means “the doer”, “the actor” or, used as an adjective, “the efficacious, efficient”. In a grammatical sense, it means “the subject” – but in common parlance the world simply means “the labourer”. The English title is derived from a quip in the story, and works well enough. But the original Arabic title is particularly fitting for a book about the unstable edifice that is identity and the constant act of construction that is writing.
Abu Golayyel alternates his account of his life as a construction worker with stories from his years as an indifferent and intermittent university student, anecdotes about his friends and colleagues in Cairo, and lore from his grandfather’s seemingly more adventurous times. Along the way, he employs the whole bag of postmodern tricks, which have become widespread among contemporary Arab authors. The short stories are told out of chronological order, interrupted, revisited and retold with new details. They take off, midway, in unexpected directions; sometimes they end abruptly, like conversations cut short. There are unexplained gaps and contradictions; the self-referential narrator asserts in the opening pages that he’s no good with beginnings, interrupts his own story to chide himself for his digressions, and tells us in the end that things haven’t turned out the way he wanted.
Yet the reader doesn’t feel like the victim of a wry experiment. There is humour and action in almost every story. The spring behind Abu Golayyel’s writing, the author told an audience at the book’s recent launch in Cairo, is “amazement at what happens to me”, and arresting details are to be found in all his stories, even those about the mundane details of construction work. We learn that 50 Egyptian Pounds (Dh34, US$10) was a generous payment for a man to single-handedly carry 8,400 kilograms – that’s eight tons – of sand up a seven-storey building in one day; a feat the narrator considers “a miracle to this day”. Elsewhere, Abu Golayyel creates dramatic set pieces – an insurrection led by Islamist students at his university; his grandfather’s raids and tussles with the law – and highlights the bizarre: a college named after the bordello next door; an amateur prostitution ring run out of a parking garage; a landlord who eavesdrops so aggressively he falls into tenants’ rooms when they open their doors.
Continue reading The National: Book review: ‘Why did you leave the village?
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Egypt starts building steel wall on Gaza Strip border
Egypt has begun constructing a huge metal wall along its border with the Gaza Strip as it attempts to cut smuggling tunnels, the BBC has learned.
When it is finished the wall will be 10-11km (6-7 miles) long and will extend 18 metres below the surface.
The Egyptians are being helped by American army engineers, who the BBC understands have designed the wall.
The plan has been shrouded in secrecy, with no comment or confirmation from the Egyptian government.
The wall will take 18 months to complete.
For weeks local farmers have noticed more activity at the border where trees were being cut down, but very few of them were aware that a barrier was being built.
'Impenetrable'
That is because the barrier, made of super-strength steel, has been hidden deep underground.
The BBC has been told that it was manufactured in the US, that it fits together in similar fashion to a jigsaw, and that it has been tested to ensure it is bomb proof.
When we get a political solution, there will be no need for tunnels. I don't think this new wall will affect the smuggling, we are talking about thousands of tunnels
Abed Elrahman al-Assouli, Khan Younis, Gaza
Egypt's Gaza barrier: Your views
It cannot be cut or melted - in short it is impenetrable.
Intelligence sources in Egypt say the barrier is being sunk close to the perimeter wall that already exists.
They claim 4km of the wall has already been completed north of the Rafah crossing, with work now beginning to the south.
The land beneath Egypt and Gaza resembles a Swiss cheese, full of holes and tunnels through which the Palestinians smuggle the everyday items they are denied by the blockade.
But the Israelis say the tunnels are also used to smuggle people, weapons, and the components of the rockets that are fired at southern Israeli towns.
The wall is not expected to stop all the smuggling, but it will force the Palestinians to go deeper and it will likely cut the hundreds of superficial tunnels closer to the surface that are used to move the bulk of the goods.
Source: BBC: Egypt starts building steel wall on Gaza Strip border
When it is finished the wall will be 10-11km (6-7 miles) long and will extend 18 metres below the surface.
The Egyptians are being helped by American army engineers, who the BBC understands have designed the wall.
The plan has been shrouded in secrecy, with no comment or confirmation from the Egyptian government.
The wall will take 18 months to complete.
For weeks local farmers have noticed more activity at the border where trees were being cut down, but very few of them were aware that a barrier was being built.
'Impenetrable'
That is because the barrier, made of super-strength steel, has been hidden deep underground.
The BBC has been told that it was manufactured in the US, that it fits together in similar fashion to a jigsaw, and that it has been tested to ensure it is bomb proof.
When we get a political solution, there will be no need for tunnels. I don't think this new wall will affect the smuggling, we are talking about thousands of tunnels
Abed Elrahman al-Assouli, Khan Younis, Gaza
Egypt's Gaza barrier: Your views
It cannot be cut or melted - in short it is impenetrable.
Intelligence sources in Egypt say the barrier is being sunk close to the perimeter wall that already exists.
They claim 4km of the wall has already been completed north of the Rafah crossing, with work now beginning to the south.
The land beneath Egypt and Gaza resembles a Swiss cheese, full of holes and tunnels through which the Palestinians smuggle the everyday items they are denied by the blockade.
But the Israelis say the tunnels are also used to smuggle people, weapons, and the components of the rockets that are fired at southern Israeli towns.
The wall is not expected to stop all the smuggling, but it will force the Palestinians to go deeper and it will likely cut the hundreds of superficial tunnels closer to the surface that are used to move the bulk of the goods.
Source: BBC: Egypt starts building steel wall on Gaza Strip border
Saturday, 17 October 2009
Fear and clothing in Egypt
A quixotic resolution at the bottom of Cairo’s legislative docket would make the galabiyya the national dress. Maria Golia traces the Egyptian history of who wears what, and why.
When Egypt’s People’s Assembly is in session, the majority of its 454 members wear suits. But at least a third opt for the galabiyya, the same floor-length gown with bell-shaped sleeves worn by the voting males of their rural constituencies. This makes them anomalies among Egypt’s urban males. Many such men have at least one galabiyya in their wardrobes, and might even wear it around the house. You wouldn’t know it, though, from walking around Cairo or Alexandria, where the garment is distinctly out of vogue.
For most urban Egyptians, the galabiyya – long the unofficial uniform of Egypt’s fellahin (farmers) – is inseparable from connotations of poverty and backwardness. On city streets, the gown is mostly seen on building guardians and dispossessed farmers. And, like beards, the galabiyya is increasingly associated with fundamentalism, especially when worn in the ungainly shin-length Salafist fashion. Galabiyya-wearing citizens are refused entry to the city’s opera house (where ties and jackets are de rigueur) and likewise unappreciated in upscale officers’ clubs and five-star hotels – this despite the fact that Gulf Arab visitors are welcome everywhere in the national dress of their choice.
This February, Mostafa El-Gendy, a 48-year-old member of the People’s Assembly, introduced a resolution calling for the galabiyya’s instatement as the national costume. He argued that singling out Egypt’s traditional dress for discrimination not only smacks of self-loathing, but is also unconstitutional. He does not want to make the galabiyya obligatory, only to guarantee those who wear it the same degree of respect afforded men in suits. “If both galabiyyas and suits are appropriate for members of Parliament,” he said, “then the same should go for the man in the street.”
El-Gendy, a prominent tourism investor, won his assembly seat in 2005 on an independent ticket, a rare feat given how few aspiring politicians dare decline affiliation with the ruling National Democratic Party. “Why,” he asked when I visited him in September, “should we hide from our rural origins?” Moreover, in a galabiyya, “you can’t tell a George from a Mohammed” – ie a Coptic Christian from a Muslim – “or a rich man from a poor one”.
Egypt has a long history of clothing-related controversies, all of which reflect shifts in how Egyptians see themselves and wish to be seen by others. Recent consternation over the veil is but one example. Egyptian feminists (Muslim and Copt) cast off their veils in the 1920s, saying “we refuse to be confined to the harem”. In the last two decades, women have cited similar arguments to support their decisions to put the veil back on, giving them greater freedom of movement in a male-dominated society that still wishes they would stay home. Egypt is constantly renegotiating the boundaries of tradition – often, when practices change, it can be difficult to remember their underlying causes.
Indeed, it wasn’t long ago that the galabiyya was acceptable costume for both country folk and members of the up-and-coming urban middle class. Its golden days were the 1950s and 1960s, when Gamal Abdel Nasser’s policies attempted to empower workers and fellahin and close the abysmal gap between rich and poor. Nasser played to the rural masses, Egypt’s largest voting constituency, by boosting their image and self-confidence. Sturdy-looking, galabiyya-wearing fellahin were celebrated on postage stamps and nationally-distributed magazine covers. Traditionally-clad men performed their gracefully martial stick dance on the Opera House stage.
Continue reading-The National: Fear and clothing in Egypt
When Egypt’s People’s Assembly is in session, the majority of its 454 members wear suits. But at least a third opt for the galabiyya, the same floor-length gown with bell-shaped sleeves worn by the voting males of their rural constituencies. This makes them anomalies among Egypt’s urban males. Many such men have at least one galabiyya in their wardrobes, and might even wear it around the house. You wouldn’t know it, though, from walking around Cairo or Alexandria, where the garment is distinctly out of vogue.
For most urban Egyptians, the galabiyya – long the unofficial uniform of Egypt’s fellahin (farmers) – is inseparable from connotations of poverty and backwardness. On city streets, the gown is mostly seen on building guardians and dispossessed farmers. And, like beards, the galabiyya is increasingly associated with fundamentalism, especially when worn in the ungainly shin-length Salafist fashion. Galabiyya-wearing citizens are refused entry to the city’s opera house (where ties and jackets are de rigueur) and likewise unappreciated in upscale officers’ clubs and five-star hotels – this despite the fact that Gulf Arab visitors are welcome everywhere in the national dress of their choice.
This February, Mostafa El-Gendy, a 48-year-old member of the People’s Assembly, introduced a resolution calling for the galabiyya’s instatement as the national costume. He argued that singling out Egypt’s traditional dress for discrimination not only smacks of self-loathing, but is also unconstitutional. He does not want to make the galabiyya obligatory, only to guarantee those who wear it the same degree of respect afforded men in suits. “If both galabiyyas and suits are appropriate for members of Parliament,” he said, “then the same should go for the man in the street.”
El-Gendy, a prominent tourism investor, won his assembly seat in 2005 on an independent ticket, a rare feat given how few aspiring politicians dare decline affiliation with the ruling National Democratic Party. “Why,” he asked when I visited him in September, “should we hide from our rural origins?” Moreover, in a galabiyya, “you can’t tell a George from a Mohammed” – ie a Coptic Christian from a Muslim – “or a rich man from a poor one”.
Egypt has a long history of clothing-related controversies, all of which reflect shifts in how Egyptians see themselves and wish to be seen by others. Recent consternation over the veil is but one example. Egyptian feminists (Muslim and Copt) cast off their veils in the 1920s, saying “we refuse to be confined to the harem”. In the last two decades, women have cited similar arguments to support their decisions to put the veil back on, giving them greater freedom of movement in a male-dominated society that still wishes they would stay home. Egypt is constantly renegotiating the boundaries of tradition – often, when practices change, it can be difficult to remember their underlying causes.
Indeed, it wasn’t long ago that the galabiyya was acceptable costume for both country folk and members of the up-and-coming urban middle class. Its golden days were the 1950s and 1960s, when Gamal Abdel Nasser’s policies attempted to empower workers and fellahin and close the abysmal gap between rich and poor. Nasser played to the rural masses, Egypt’s largest voting constituency, by boosting their image and self-confidence. Sturdy-looking, galabiyya-wearing fellahin were celebrated on postage stamps and nationally-distributed magazine covers. Traditionally-clad men performed their gracefully martial stick dance on the Opera House stage.
Continue reading-The National: Fear and clothing in Egypt
Saturday, 29 August 2009
The exorcist who saves marriages
CAIRO // Throughout the world, every married couple faces a typical set of challenges. Boredom, disagreement, infidelity and lack of sexual interest can all imperil, if not destroy, an otherwise happy coupling.
But for Samaa Shaaban, 24, the problem was as obvious as it was atypical. She believes she is possessed by a demon, or jinn, that prevents her from consummating her two-month-old marriage with her husband, Ayman Salah, 31.
“I’m still a virgin and when my husband approaches me, I see and hear strange things, like snakes or people talking to me. In many instances, I lose consciousness,” said Ms Shaaban, speaking from the small apartment she shares with her husband in Shubra Al Khaima, one of Cairo’s poorest neighbourhoods. “Once, the people who appear and speak to me told me that it’s a magic spell and that only the woman who cast it can break it.”
But Ms Shaaban insists she knows of no one who would try to hurt her otherwise happy marriage, and after several trips to local sheikhs failed to quell the demons, she decided to bridge Egypt’s sometimes tense communal gulf. Two weeks ago, she visited the St Samaan Coptic Orthodox Church in the Cairo suburb of Manshiyet Naser, where Father Samaan Ibrahim performs mass exorcisms every Thursday evening in front of a crowd of hundreds of worshippers.
One one level, Ms Shaaban’s experience belies reports of a growing rift here between Egypt’s Coptic Christians and its Muslim majority, and reveals the tolerance inherent in Egypt’s unique religious sensibilities.
But it also shows a pervasive reality of sexual life here. For many of Egypt’s poorest, the corporeal questions of sex and marriage are as vivid and mysterious as the supernatural world of spirits and demons.
“The Egyptian people, Muslim and Christian, have, between quotes, a deep spiritual life. Every group in its way,” said Joseph Faltas, a Coptic theologian and researcher at Cairo’s Orthodox Patristic Centre.
“As a society here, not in Egypt but in the Middle East, sex and relations between man and woman are the most difficult thing to discuss. We don’t have sexual education in our schools, even in our churches. That is the darkest area in our lives, especially in the lower levels” of society.
To hear Ms Shaaban and her husband describe it, the decision to seek religious intervention outside their Muslim community was an easy one, borne out of obvious necessity and permitted by a universal God.
“We have a lot of Christian friends. We eat in each other’s houses,” said Mr Salah. “Entering a church is exactly like entering a mosque. It’s a house of God.”
While several churches in Cairo offer such exorcisms, Ms Shaaban chose to enter what is certainly the most dramatic. The St Samaan Church is located in a natural cave in the Moqattam Hill outside of Cairo. It sits atop a mostly Christian community of rubbish collectors who live in the shadow of the hill among the rubbish they collect.
At one such session, Father Samaan began with an admonishment to the hundreds of Christians and Muslims who had gathered to witness and benefit from his “healings”.
“I will heal all of you who are possessed by Satan,” he said into a microphone. “Those who are coming to chat, and not to pray, should leave.”
Then, turning his back to the assembly, Father Samaan blessed a few dozen bottles of spring water. “Whoever has a drop of water touch him or her can be certain that Jesus will heal them,” he said. With that, he proceeded into the audience and began to toss water at the crowd.
Source: The National
Continue reading The exorcist who saves marriages
But for Samaa Shaaban, 24, the problem was as obvious as it was atypical. She believes she is possessed by a demon, or jinn, that prevents her from consummating her two-month-old marriage with her husband, Ayman Salah, 31.
“I’m still a virgin and when my husband approaches me, I see and hear strange things, like snakes or people talking to me. In many instances, I lose consciousness,” said Ms Shaaban, speaking from the small apartment she shares with her husband in Shubra Al Khaima, one of Cairo’s poorest neighbourhoods. “Once, the people who appear and speak to me told me that it’s a magic spell and that only the woman who cast it can break it.”
But Ms Shaaban insists she knows of no one who would try to hurt her otherwise happy marriage, and after several trips to local sheikhs failed to quell the demons, she decided to bridge Egypt’s sometimes tense communal gulf. Two weeks ago, she visited the St Samaan Coptic Orthodox Church in the Cairo suburb of Manshiyet Naser, where Father Samaan Ibrahim performs mass exorcisms every Thursday evening in front of a crowd of hundreds of worshippers.
One one level, Ms Shaaban’s experience belies reports of a growing rift here between Egypt’s Coptic Christians and its Muslim majority, and reveals the tolerance inherent in Egypt’s unique religious sensibilities.
But it also shows a pervasive reality of sexual life here. For many of Egypt’s poorest, the corporeal questions of sex and marriage are as vivid and mysterious as the supernatural world of spirits and demons.
“The Egyptian people, Muslim and Christian, have, between quotes, a deep spiritual life. Every group in its way,” said Joseph Faltas, a Coptic theologian and researcher at Cairo’s Orthodox Patristic Centre.
“As a society here, not in Egypt but in the Middle East, sex and relations between man and woman are the most difficult thing to discuss. We don’t have sexual education in our schools, even in our churches. That is the darkest area in our lives, especially in the lower levels” of society.
To hear Ms Shaaban and her husband describe it, the decision to seek religious intervention outside their Muslim community was an easy one, borne out of obvious necessity and permitted by a universal God.
“We have a lot of Christian friends. We eat in each other’s houses,” said Mr Salah. “Entering a church is exactly like entering a mosque. It’s a house of God.”
While several churches in Cairo offer such exorcisms, Ms Shaaban chose to enter what is certainly the most dramatic. The St Samaan Church is located in a natural cave in the Moqattam Hill outside of Cairo. It sits atop a mostly Christian community of rubbish collectors who live in the shadow of the hill among the rubbish they collect.
At one such session, Father Samaan began with an admonishment to the hundreds of Christians and Muslims who had gathered to witness and benefit from his “healings”.
“I will heal all of you who are possessed by Satan,” he said into a microphone. “Those who are coming to chat, and not to pray, should leave.”
Then, turning his back to the assembly, Father Samaan blessed a few dozen bottles of spring water. “Whoever has a drop of water touch him or her can be certain that Jesus will heal them,” he said. With that, he proceeded into the audience and began to toss water at the crowd.
Source: The National
Continue reading The exorcist who saves marriages
Sunday, 23 August 2009
Holy month is not all fasting for Egyptians
CAIRO // Cairo’s streets, bridges, newspapers and television channels are overflowing with advertisements for soap operas, talks shows and, to a lesser degree, religious programmes that will air during Ramadan. Anticipation for the Ramadan-only series has become such a common feature of popular culture here that it is difficult to imagine what the holy month was like before the advent of satellite television.
More than 500 Arabic satellite channels and scores of local channels are competing for the surge in viewers, and advertising dollars, with new programmes ranging from soap operas to social, historical and religious fare.
Advertisements for new shows in the run-up to Ramadan have replaced the ads for oil and other food products that traditionally dominate broadcasts before and during the month.
Many conservative Egyptians point to the irony of an increase in the promotion of entertainment and consumption during a time that is meant to be dedicated to prayer, introspection, fasting and the poor.
“For many, Ramadan doesn’t mean more than abstaining from eating, drinking and sexual desires during the day, which is accompanied by short tempers and traffic violations, then excessive food and staying late at night at Ramadan tents, which contradicts the month of rituals,” wrote Moustafa el-Bassiyouni in the ruling party weekly al-Watany al-Youm on Tuesday.
“I won’t let despair prevent me from saying that the month of benevolence is not a month of TV series and violations, excessive spending and attrition,” he added.
“OK, Ramadan is at the door, and Egypt will be filled with the appearance of religiosity, which doesn’t mean at all that we’re religious people,” said Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the opposition daily al-Destour.
Yaser Ayoub, an Egyptian writer and TV presenter who has been writing a series about Egyptians’ ethics, disagrees.
He argued in the independent weekly al-Osbou on Tuesday that Egyptians are religious despite some saying otherwise.
A cartoon in the state owned Rose el-Youssef daily on Wednesday showed a family looking very serious and distressed, gathering around what looks like a war map, with one of the sons telling someone on the telephone: “I’m busy right now, we’re planning our Ramadan TV watching plan.”
Foreign satellite channels are also competing for Egyptian viewers.
Continue reading: The National
More than 500 Arabic satellite channels and scores of local channels are competing for the surge in viewers, and advertising dollars, with new programmes ranging from soap operas to social, historical and religious fare.
Advertisements for new shows in the run-up to Ramadan have replaced the ads for oil and other food products that traditionally dominate broadcasts before and during the month.
Many conservative Egyptians point to the irony of an increase in the promotion of entertainment and consumption during a time that is meant to be dedicated to prayer, introspection, fasting and the poor.
“For many, Ramadan doesn’t mean more than abstaining from eating, drinking and sexual desires during the day, which is accompanied by short tempers and traffic violations, then excessive food and staying late at night at Ramadan tents, which contradicts the month of rituals,” wrote Moustafa el-Bassiyouni in the ruling party weekly al-Watany al-Youm on Tuesday.
“I won’t let despair prevent me from saying that the month of benevolence is not a month of TV series and violations, excessive spending and attrition,” he added.
“OK, Ramadan is at the door, and Egypt will be filled with the appearance of religiosity, which doesn’t mean at all that we’re religious people,” said Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the opposition daily al-Destour.
Yaser Ayoub, an Egyptian writer and TV presenter who has been writing a series about Egyptians’ ethics, disagrees.
He argued in the independent weekly al-Osbou on Tuesday that Egyptians are religious despite some saying otherwise.
A cartoon in the state owned Rose el-Youssef daily on Wednesday showed a family looking very serious and distressed, gathering around what looks like a war map, with one of the sons telling someone on the telephone: “I’m busy right now, we’re planning our Ramadan TV watching plan.”
Foreign satellite channels are also competing for Egyptian viewers.
Continue reading: The National
Friday, 21 August 2009
In Ramadan, the best dates in Egypt are 'Obama'
By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI (AP) – 7 hours ago
CAIRO — For the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Egyptian fruit sellers have named their best dates of the year after President Barack Obama in a sweet tribute to the American leader for his outreach to the Muslim world.
Dates are a traditional food for Ramadan — which begins Saturday in most of the Islamic world — since the Prophet Muhammad is said to have used them to break the month's sunrise-to-sunset fast each evening.
In Egypt, shops have created a new tradition of naming their best and worst dates to catch attention and boost sales — giving a little reflection of the political mood.
Obama's vault to the top of the Egyptian date-scale comes after he delivered a landmark address in Cairo in June, saying he wants to improve American ties with Muslims around the world. Those ties were deeply strained under his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was widely resented in the Arab world — and whose name was given to the worst quality dates in Egypt in past Ramadans.
"We love Obama and so we named our best dates for him," said Atif Hashim at his busy shop in downtown Cairo.
Huge barrels in his shop were piled with "Obama" dates, selling for just under $2.50 a pound ($5 a kilogram). For an additional dollar, there is an even better date, labeled on a sign as "Super Obama."
Continue reading Associate Press: By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI (AP) – 7 hours ago
CAIRO — For the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Egyptian fruit sellers have named their best dates of the year after President Barack Obama in a sweet tribute to the American leader for his outreach to the Muslim world.
Dates are a traditional food for Ramadan — which begins Saturday in most of the Islamic world — since the Prophet Muhammad is said to have used them to break the month's sunrise-to-sunset fast each evening.
In Egypt, shops have created a new tradition of naming their best and worst dates to catch attention and boost sales — giving a little reflection of the political mood.
Obama's vault to the top of the Egyptian date-scale comes after he delivered a landmark address in Cairo in June, saying he wants to improve American ties with Muslims around the world. Those ties were deeply strained under his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was widely resented in the Arab world — and whose name was given to the worst quality dates in Egypt in past Ramadans.
"We love Obama and so we named our best dates for him," said Atif Hashim at his busy shop in downtown Cairo.
Huge barrels in his shop were piled with "Obama" dates, selling for just under $2.50 a pound ($5 a kilogram). For an additional dollar, there is an even better date, labeled on a sign as "Super Obama."
"We put a sweet date in Mr. Obama's mouth and a message in his ear," Hashim said. "Please help to bring peace to the world. We have a lot of hope in you."
Hashim named his poorer dates after Israeli Foreign Minister Avidgor Lieberman, a hard-liner who is particularly disliked in Egypt for once saying its president, Hosni Mubarak, can "go to hell."
Other low-quality dates were named after Lieberman's predecessor, Tzipi Livni, and after Bush. They all go for about 17 cents a pound (36 cents a kilogram).
In 2006, many sellers in Egypt named their best dates after the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, whose popularity soared among Arabs because his militants battled Israel in a devastating war that summer.
During the lunar month of Ramadan, observant Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from sunrise to sunset. It is believed that God began revealing the Quran to Muhammad during Ramadan, and the faithful are supposed to spend the month in religious reflection, prayer and remembrance of the poor.
It's also a time of celebrations, late nights out with friends and family and elaborate meals for "iftar," the sunset dinner that breaks the fast.
This year, Ramadan starts in August for the first time in 33 years — meaning a long, hot day for those fasting. In a bid to bring up the time for iftar, Egypt went off daylight savings time on Friday.
The fast begins Saturday for most of the Mideast and Asia, although Libya, Turkey, and some Lebanese Shiites began fasting Friday. The month begins when each Muslim country's Islamic authorities sight the crescent moon that marks the beginning of the lunar month — sometimes using only the naked eye, leading to some discrepancies in the timing.
In the West Bank town of Ramallah, Palestinians decorated their houses with lights in the shape of crescents and stars and shops began preparing special pastries and traditional Ramadan drinks like kharoub, made of carobs. The Israeli military said it would keep checkpoints open longer hours to allow more people to cross.
In Hamas-controlled Gaza City, officials hung signs reading "Welcome Ramadan" and provided mosques with large carpets to accommodate the increased number of worshippers.
Associate Press: In Ramadan, the best dates in Egypt are 'Obama'
Shops sold little electric lamps, a traditional children's toy during Ramadan — made in China and brought through smuggling tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border to circumvent the blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel and Egypt after Hamas seized power two years ago.
In Turkey, the mosques were jam-packed and municipalities set up soup kitchens to serve iftar to the poor. Holiday-makers began deserting beach resorts to return home. Newspapers carried recommendations from dietitians and Mehmet Emin Ozafsar, the deputy head of Turkey's department for religious affairs, urged people observing the fast not to use it as an excuse for "aggressive behavior" or abstinence from work.
"Fasting is patience and tolerance," Ozafsar said.
CAIRO — For the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Egyptian fruit sellers have named their best dates of the year after President Barack Obama in a sweet tribute to the American leader for his outreach to the Muslim world.
Dates are a traditional food for Ramadan — which begins Saturday in most of the Islamic world — since the Prophet Muhammad is said to have used them to break the month's sunrise-to-sunset fast each evening.
In Egypt, shops have created a new tradition of naming their best and worst dates to catch attention and boost sales — giving a little reflection of the political mood.
Obama's vault to the top of the Egyptian date-scale comes after he delivered a landmark address in Cairo in June, saying he wants to improve American ties with Muslims around the world. Those ties were deeply strained under his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was widely resented in the Arab world — and whose name was given to the worst quality dates in Egypt in past Ramadans.
"We love Obama and so we named our best dates for him," said Atif Hashim at his busy shop in downtown Cairo.
Huge barrels in his shop were piled with "Obama" dates, selling for just under $2.50 a pound ($5 a kilogram). For an additional dollar, there is an even better date, labeled on a sign as "Super Obama."
Continue reading Associate Press: By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI (AP) – 7 hours ago
CAIRO — For the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Egyptian fruit sellers have named their best dates of the year after President Barack Obama in a sweet tribute to the American leader for his outreach to the Muslim world.
Dates are a traditional food for Ramadan — which begins Saturday in most of the Islamic world — since the Prophet Muhammad is said to have used them to break the month's sunrise-to-sunset fast each evening.
In Egypt, shops have created a new tradition of naming their best and worst dates to catch attention and boost sales — giving a little reflection of the political mood.
Obama's vault to the top of the Egyptian date-scale comes after he delivered a landmark address in Cairo in June, saying he wants to improve American ties with Muslims around the world. Those ties were deeply strained under his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was widely resented in the Arab world — and whose name was given to the worst quality dates in Egypt in past Ramadans.
"We love Obama and so we named our best dates for him," said Atif Hashim at his busy shop in downtown Cairo.
Huge barrels in his shop were piled with "Obama" dates, selling for just under $2.50 a pound ($5 a kilogram). For an additional dollar, there is an even better date, labeled on a sign as "Super Obama."
"We put a sweet date in Mr. Obama's mouth and a message in his ear," Hashim said. "Please help to bring peace to the world. We have a lot of hope in you."
Hashim named his poorer dates after Israeli Foreign Minister Avidgor Lieberman, a hard-liner who is particularly disliked in Egypt for once saying its president, Hosni Mubarak, can "go to hell."
Other low-quality dates were named after Lieberman's predecessor, Tzipi Livni, and after Bush. They all go for about 17 cents a pound (36 cents a kilogram).
In 2006, many sellers in Egypt named their best dates after the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, whose popularity soared among Arabs because his militants battled Israel in a devastating war that summer.
During the lunar month of Ramadan, observant Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from sunrise to sunset. It is believed that God began revealing the Quran to Muhammad during Ramadan, and the faithful are supposed to spend the month in religious reflection, prayer and remembrance of the poor.
It's also a time of celebrations, late nights out with friends and family and elaborate meals for "iftar," the sunset dinner that breaks the fast.
This year, Ramadan starts in August for the first time in 33 years — meaning a long, hot day for those fasting. In a bid to bring up the time for iftar, Egypt went off daylight savings time on Friday.
The fast begins Saturday for most of the Mideast and Asia, although Libya, Turkey, and some Lebanese Shiites began fasting Friday. The month begins when each Muslim country's Islamic authorities sight the crescent moon that marks the beginning of the lunar month — sometimes using only the naked eye, leading to some discrepancies in the timing.
In the West Bank town of Ramallah, Palestinians decorated their houses with lights in the shape of crescents and stars and shops began preparing special pastries and traditional Ramadan drinks like kharoub, made of carobs. The Israeli military said it would keep checkpoints open longer hours to allow more people to cross.
In Hamas-controlled Gaza City, officials hung signs reading "Welcome Ramadan" and provided mosques with large carpets to accommodate the increased number of worshippers.
Associate Press: In Ramadan, the best dates in Egypt are 'Obama'
Shops sold little electric lamps, a traditional children's toy during Ramadan — made in China and brought through smuggling tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border to circumvent the blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel and Egypt after Hamas seized power two years ago.
In Turkey, the mosques were jam-packed and municipalities set up soup kitchens to serve iftar to the poor. Holiday-makers began deserting beach resorts to return home. Newspapers carried recommendations from dietitians and Mehmet Emin Ozafsar, the deputy head of Turkey's department for religious affairs, urged people observing the fast not to use it as an excuse for "aggressive behavior" or abstinence from work.
"Fasting is patience and tolerance," Ozafsar said.
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
What Egyptians want from Washington
Egypt is set to use its president's visit to Washington to trumpet its position as a key US ally and major regional player.
Hosni Mubarak and Barack Obama, the US president, are expected to discuss a number of regional issues including the pivotal Palestinian-Israeli peace process, Iran's nuclear programme, stabilising Iraq, and fighting armed Islamist groups throughout the Middle East.
But many ordinary Egyptians, who once cared about their country's foreign policy, may no longer be interested in such talks.
Abdullah al-Ashaal, a professor of international relations and law at the American University in Cairo, says Egyptians will tune out because they believe the meetings in Washington on Tuesday will follow "an elitist agenda that has no direct link to the ordinary Egyptian citizen".
Al-Ashal, a critic of Egyptian foreign policy who describes himself as an independent political intellectual, said: "The most important item on Mubarak's agenda in Washington is to visit the White House. The man has in the past lost hope in visiting the White House and he has been dreaming about this visit."
Five-year absence
Mubarak has not visited the US since 2004, when the administration of George Bush, Obama's predecessor, pressed the Egyptian government on political plurality and democratisation.
Bush, left, visited Cairo often, but Mubarak has not been to the US since 2004 [AFP]
At that time, Bush pressed some of Washington's traditional Arab allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to create multi-party political systems and hold free elections.
But he quickly backed away from this once it became clear that such elections had led to the rise of Islamist groups in Iraq, Egypt, and the occupied Palestinian Territories.
The Obama administration has applied a more realistic approach towards the region.
It has been seeking the help of Arab governments in securing Iraq and pushing forward the peace process with Israel in return for turning a blind eye to political repression and media crackdowns.
Obama's strategy is a boon to Cairo which shares Washington's interest in minimising the influence of Iran and Islamist groups in the region.
In the meantime, Egypt continues to reject domestic and foreign pressure to democratise.
To Keep reading click on Al Jazeera: What Egyptians want from Washington
Hosni Mubarak and Barack Obama, the US president, are expected to discuss a number of regional issues including the pivotal Palestinian-Israeli peace process, Iran's nuclear programme, stabilising Iraq, and fighting armed Islamist groups throughout the Middle East.
But many ordinary Egyptians, who once cared about their country's foreign policy, may no longer be interested in such talks.
Abdullah al-Ashaal, a professor of international relations and law at the American University in Cairo, says Egyptians will tune out because they believe the meetings in Washington on Tuesday will follow "an elitist agenda that has no direct link to the ordinary Egyptian citizen".
Al-Ashal, a critic of Egyptian foreign policy who describes himself as an independent political intellectual, said: "The most important item on Mubarak's agenda in Washington is to visit the White House. The man has in the past lost hope in visiting the White House and he has been dreaming about this visit."
Five-year absence
Mubarak has not visited the US since 2004, when the administration of George Bush, Obama's predecessor, pressed the Egyptian government on political plurality and democratisation.
Bush, left, visited Cairo often, but Mubarak has not been to the US since 2004 [AFP]
At that time, Bush pressed some of Washington's traditional Arab allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to create multi-party political systems and hold free elections.
But he quickly backed away from this once it became clear that such elections had led to the rise of Islamist groups in Iraq, Egypt, and the occupied Palestinian Territories.
The Obama administration has applied a more realistic approach towards the region.
It has been seeking the help of Arab governments in securing Iraq and pushing forward the peace process with Israel in return for turning a blind eye to political repression and media crackdowns.
Obama's strategy is a boon to Cairo which shares Washington's interest in minimising the influence of Iran and Islamist groups in the region.
In the meantime, Egypt continues to reject domestic and foreign pressure to democratise.
To Keep reading click on Al Jazeera: What Egyptians want from Washington
Monday, 17 August 2009
A Message for Mubarak
By Michele Dunne
Monday, August 17, 2009
When President Obama receives Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Oval Office on Tuesday, I wonder whether the two will sense that something is missing from the meeting. That would be the interests of Egypt's 83 million citizens, whose collective hopes and aspirations have disappeared from U.S. considerations since President George W. Bush's freedom agenda flamed out years ago. American citizens are also not invited to the party; Congress is out of session, and Mubarak will make no public appearances.
Relations between Washington and Cairo have settled back into the comfortable pre-Sept. 11 pattern, in which the only people who count are presidents and foreign ministers and the only important agenda items are Israeli-Arab peace and containing regional bullies. That is ironic, considering the ability Obama demonstrated to reach the Arab public directly during his June 4 speech in Cairo.
The problem now is that, while Washington is trying to turn back the clock on its Cairo policy, Egypt is moving toward a leadership transition that we cannot ignore. Egypt will elect a new parliament next year and a new president in 2011. By then, Mubarak will be 83, and even if he decides to run again -- after 30 years in power under a state of "emergency" that allows him to suspend laws -- it is likely to be a few years at most before change comes.
Recent developments suggest that the 2010 parliamentary elections will be even less free than those of 2005, which were far from perfect. Mubarak's son Gamal has been training to succeed him for a decade, but he remains largely unpopular in Egypt. While the Obama administration should avoid direct involvement in or public comment on succession issues, the president should encourage Mubarak to use this transition period to move toward a more inclusive political process and improved human rights practices.
It is especially important for Obama to deliver a pro-democracy message to Mubarak. It will be relatively easy to do so now, during a quiet period, without the tension of immediate elections or succession, and in a climate of renewed goodwill between the United States and Egypt.
But it is also important to correct the idea -- prevailing in Cairo -- that the United States no longer cares about democratization in Egypt. Egyptians have gotten that impression from Obama's rhetoric, which is softer than that of his predecessor, and particularly from a drastic cut in funding this year for U.S. democracy promotion programs in Egypt. A July report by the Project on Middle East Democracy found that while the Obama administration has increased its request for democracy funding in the Middle East overall, it has cut such funding for Egypt by more than half and cut aid to independent civil society organizations by more than two-thirds.
Why is the Obama administration backing off democracy promotion just as Egypt faces critical elections and a likely leadership change? It appears to be worried that Mubarak will withhold cooperation on regional peace and stability if Washington annoys him by expressing concern for the rights of Egyptians.
But Obama can have Mubarak's help without having to pay for it with his silence. Mubarak shares Washington's interests in preventing the emergence of a permanent Hamas state in Gaza, in promoting a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israel, and in containing Iranian nuclear ambitions. He will work toward those ends for his own reasons and cooperate with the United States accordingly -- as he did even at the height of the Bush administration's democracy promotion rhetoric in 2004 and 2005.
Obama should work with Mubarak on Arab-Israeli issues and Iran, and listen to the Egyptian leader's counsel. But he should also ask Mubarak how he plans to address rising demand for the rule of law and free political competition in Egypt. The U.S. administration should reconsider its disengagement from Egyptian civil society and find a way to establish partnerships with the many institutions and organizations that can play constructive roles in a transition toward a more open system.
Then Obama will have shown his respect not just for our man in Cairo but for 83 million Egyptians as well.
The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and editor of the Arab Reform Bulletin.
Monday, August 17, 2009
When President Obama receives Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Oval Office on Tuesday, I wonder whether the two will sense that something is missing from the meeting. That would be the interests of Egypt's 83 million citizens, whose collective hopes and aspirations have disappeared from U.S. considerations since President George W. Bush's freedom agenda flamed out years ago. American citizens are also not invited to the party; Congress is out of session, and Mubarak will make no public appearances.
Relations between Washington and Cairo have settled back into the comfortable pre-Sept. 11 pattern, in which the only people who count are presidents and foreign ministers and the only important agenda items are Israeli-Arab peace and containing regional bullies. That is ironic, considering the ability Obama demonstrated to reach the Arab public directly during his June 4 speech in Cairo.
The problem now is that, while Washington is trying to turn back the clock on its Cairo policy, Egypt is moving toward a leadership transition that we cannot ignore. Egypt will elect a new parliament next year and a new president in 2011. By then, Mubarak will be 83, and even if he decides to run again -- after 30 years in power under a state of "emergency" that allows him to suspend laws -- it is likely to be a few years at most before change comes.
Recent developments suggest that the 2010 parliamentary elections will be even less free than those of 2005, which were far from perfect. Mubarak's son Gamal has been training to succeed him for a decade, but he remains largely unpopular in Egypt. While the Obama administration should avoid direct involvement in or public comment on succession issues, the president should encourage Mubarak to use this transition period to move toward a more inclusive political process and improved human rights practices.
It is especially important for Obama to deliver a pro-democracy message to Mubarak. It will be relatively easy to do so now, during a quiet period, without the tension of immediate elections or succession, and in a climate of renewed goodwill between the United States and Egypt.
But it is also important to correct the idea -- prevailing in Cairo -- that the United States no longer cares about democratization in Egypt. Egyptians have gotten that impression from Obama's rhetoric, which is softer than that of his predecessor, and particularly from a drastic cut in funding this year for U.S. democracy promotion programs in Egypt. A July report by the Project on Middle East Democracy found that while the Obama administration has increased its request for democracy funding in the Middle East overall, it has cut such funding for Egypt by more than half and cut aid to independent civil society organizations by more than two-thirds.
Why is the Obama administration backing off democracy promotion just as Egypt faces critical elections and a likely leadership change? It appears to be worried that Mubarak will withhold cooperation on regional peace and stability if Washington annoys him by expressing concern for the rights of Egyptians.
But Obama can have Mubarak's help without having to pay for it with his silence. Mubarak shares Washington's interests in preventing the emergence of a permanent Hamas state in Gaza, in promoting a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israel, and in containing Iranian nuclear ambitions. He will work toward those ends for his own reasons and cooperate with the United States accordingly -- as he did even at the height of the Bush administration's democracy promotion rhetoric in 2004 and 2005.
Obama should work with Mubarak on Arab-Israeli issues and Iran, and listen to the Egyptian leader's counsel. But he should also ask Mubarak how he plans to address rising demand for the rule of law and free political competition in Egypt. The U.S. administration should reconsider its disengagement from Egyptian civil society and find a way to establish partnerships with the many institutions and organizations that can play constructive roles in a transition toward a more open system.
Then Obama will have shown his respect not just for our man in Cairo but for 83 million Egyptians as well.
The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and editor of the Arab Reform Bulletin.
Sunday, 26 July 2009
Egypt debates true meaning of faith
CAIRO // Egyptians of all faiths take pride in their religiosity and according to a recent Gallup poll are the world’s most religious people. But critics in Egypt – secular and religious – believe today’s love of religion is superficial and is in fact responsible for a decline in values throughout Egyptian society.
“I tried a lot to prevent myself from writing about this thorny issue because I know what it means to criticise the widespread apparent and superficial religiosity among us Egyptians,” Emad Sayed, a blogger, recently wrote on a website called Masriyoun, or Egyptians.
“We all know the weak points that we and our society are suffering from, but we severely attack anyone who talks about them and try to cover up and deny they exist.”
According to the Gallup poll, 100 per cent of respondents said religion plays “an important role in their daily life”.
Since the report was issued in February, many here have been trying to explain the meaning of religiosity and how it can exist in a society so riven with corruption.
“We are the most religious nation in the world, that’s what the Gallup poll says,” Egyptian TV presenter Khairy Ramadan said on The House is Yours, the prime talk show on Egypt’s state TV. “Our religiosity is evident: just listen to us when we talk, all our sentences are preceded by ‘God willing’ and ‘Thank God’, while reality says that we are among the nations who work least, while bribes, nepotism, hypocrisy and corruption are abundant.”
Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the opposition daily Al Destour, agreed, but he put the blame on the rise in religious observance in recent decades.
“In the 1950s and the 1960s, when Egypt was not veiled and was not claiming to be religious and people were not greeting each other with religious greetings, people were more merciful and compassionate with each other,” he wrote recently.
“Now all Egypt is claiming to be religious, and cosmetic religiosity is everywhere, and more than 80 per cent of Egyptian women are veiled, at the time when illegitimate street children number one million across Egypt.”
An estimated 10 per cent of Egypt’s 80m population is Christian, mostly Coptic.
“Muslims and Christians are worship addicts,” said Rev Ikram Lami, from the Evangelical Church. “Churches and mosques are full with worshippers … But they don’t know the true meaning of religiosity. The chaos of Egyptian streets is proof that Egyptians are not religious at all. Newspapers are full of crimes of incest, murder, and theft.
“Egyptians resort to religion in order to escape from the problems and their inability to cope with modern civilisation,” he said.
The symbols of religion are everywhere in Egypt. There are tens of thousands of mosques and churches across the country, most Muslim women are veiled – and there is a growing number wearing the niqab, or the veil that covers the face except the eyes – and many men are growing beards long in order to emulate the Prophet Mohammed.
“I don’t believe in the results of the poll or the apparent religiosity and double standards around us,” said Amany Haidar, 25, a marketing executive. “The poll should have tried to make sure of the sincerity not appearances of religiosity.”
“We are lacking good role models, even many preachers are not sincere, and using religion as a profession, which is misleading many youth, and spreading an inauthentic religiosity,” said Mohammed Taha, 54, a training manager at a private company.
“I don’t agree that 100 per cent of Egyptian society is religious, but I also disagree with those who are denying that there is sincere religiosity among many in the society, young and old, rich and poor, regardless of the negative aspects in our lives,” said Dina Hamed, 35, a veiled housewife. “There is no society of angels, even during the Prophet’s time.” Analysts and religious figures have struggled to explain the current phenomenon of religiosity.
“We didn’t need the Gallup poll to discover that we are the most religious in the world,” said Samer Soliman, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo. “That is what we have been witnessing since the late 1960s. The problem is that the leaders of the religiosity process in Egypt based their prescription that Egypt and Egyptians were lacking religiosity to reform their morals.
“I guess they are, like us, suffering from the results of their intensive remedy: more moral deterioration, lying, selfishness, sexual harassment, prostitution etc … The question is when are they going to admit that they were wrong?”
Hoda Zakariya, a sociologist at Zagazig University north-east of Cairo, attributes the apparent religiosity to the waves of Egyptians who went to work in the more conservative Gulf states in the 1970s and returned with a stricter brand of Islam.
“This kind of religiosity is not being translated into a constructive force or better morals, because this version of religiosity is fake and destructive to the mind and religion at the same time,” Ms Zakariya said.
“Egyptian society has no choice but to escape this dilemma or die.”
“I tried a lot to prevent myself from writing about this thorny issue because I know what it means to criticise the widespread apparent and superficial religiosity among us Egyptians,” Emad Sayed, a blogger, recently wrote on a website called Masriyoun, or Egyptians.
“We all know the weak points that we and our society are suffering from, but we severely attack anyone who talks about them and try to cover up and deny they exist.”
According to the Gallup poll, 100 per cent of respondents said religion plays “an important role in their daily life”.
Since the report was issued in February, many here have been trying to explain the meaning of religiosity and how it can exist in a society so riven with corruption.
“We are the most religious nation in the world, that’s what the Gallup poll says,” Egyptian TV presenter Khairy Ramadan said on The House is Yours, the prime talk show on Egypt’s state TV. “Our religiosity is evident: just listen to us when we talk, all our sentences are preceded by ‘God willing’ and ‘Thank God’, while reality says that we are among the nations who work least, while bribes, nepotism, hypocrisy and corruption are abundant.”
Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the opposition daily Al Destour, agreed, but he put the blame on the rise in religious observance in recent decades.
“In the 1950s and the 1960s, when Egypt was not veiled and was not claiming to be religious and people were not greeting each other with religious greetings, people were more merciful and compassionate with each other,” he wrote recently.
“Now all Egypt is claiming to be religious, and cosmetic religiosity is everywhere, and more than 80 per cent of Egyptian women are veiled, at the time when illegitimate street children number one million across Egypt.”
An estimated 10 per cent of Egypt’s 80m population is Christian, mostly Coptic.
“Muslims and Christians are worship addicts,” said Rev Ikram Lami, from the Evangelical Church. “Churches and mosques are full with worshippers … But they don’t know the true meaning of religiosity. The chaos of Egyptian streets is proof that Egyptians are not religious at all. Newspapers are full of crimes of incest, murder, and theft.
“Egyptians resort to religion in order to escape from the problems and their inability to cope with modern civilisation,” he said.
The symbols of religion are everywhere in Egypt. There are tens of thousands of mosques and churches across the country, most Muslim women are veiled – and there is a growing number wearing the niqab, or the veil that covers the face except the eyes – and many men are growing beards long in order to emulate the Prophet Mohammed.
“I don’t believe in the results of the poll or the apparent religiosity and double standards around us,” said Amany Haidar, 25, a marketing executive. “The poll should have tried to make sure of the sincerity not appearances of religiosity.”
“We are lacking good role models, even many preachers are not sincere, and using religion as a profession, which is misleading many youth, and spreading an inauthentic religiosity,” said Mohammed Taha, 54, a training manager at a private company.
“I don’t agree that 100 per cent of Egyptian society is religious, but I also disagree with those who are denying that there is sincere religiosity among many in the society, young and old, rich and poor, regardless of the negative aspects in our lives,” said Dina Hamed, 35, a veiled housewife. “There is no society of angels, even during the Prophet’s time.” Analysts and religious figures have struggled to explain the current phenomenon of religiosity.
“We didn’t need the Gallup poll to discover that we are the most religious in the world,” said Samer Soliman, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo. “That is what we have been witnessing since the late 1960s. The problem is that the leaders of the religiosity process in Egypt based their prescription that Egypt and Egyptians were lacking religiosity to reform their morals.
“I guess they are, like us, suffering from the results of their intensive remedy: more moral deterioration, lying, selfishness, sexual harassment, prostitution etc … The question is when are they going to admit that they were wrong?”
Hoda Zakariya, a sociologist at Zagazig University north-east of Cairo, attributes the apparent religiosity to the waves of Egyptians who went to work in the more conservative Gulf states in the 1970s and returned with a stricter brand of Islam.
“This kind of religiosity is not being translated into a constructive force or better morals, because this version of religiosity is fake and destructive to the mind and religion at the same time,” Ms Zakariya said.
“Egyptian society has no choice but to escape this dilemma or die.”
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Egypt divided by film of beaten wife
CAIRO // In a poignant moment in one of this summer’s most talked-about films, the host of a TV programme that focuses on the rights of women appears on screen covered in bruises.
“I just survived being beaten to death. I’m the programme’s oppressed and beaten guest. I never imagined that I, who tell people’s tales, could become a tale myself,” the TV presenter, Heba Younis, says in the final scene of Tell it, Scheherazade.
The film addresses women’s rights, their dreams and their suffering, contemporary topics in such a male-dominated society as Egypt, but it has drawn criticism from reviewers and on the internet, with most of it directed at the actress Mona Zaki, who plays Younis.
The criticism started when a trailers of the film showed Zaki being kissed on the neck by her on-screen husband.
“We adored Mona Zaki, her art, bashfulness and her respect for us. She was the model of clean art, therefore our disappointment and anger are huge because we loved her so much,” wrote Mohammed Adel on a Facebook group against the film.
“We lost you, Mona,” lamented Mahmoud Amer, another former fan on Facebook.
Zaki, in her early 30s, had been hailed as an icon of “clean cinema”, in which there is no kissing, show of intimacy between sexes or revealing clothing and which has appealed to the largely conservative society here.
But the film critic Magda Khirallah said the criticism was unfounded.
“Mona Zaki is an actress not a saint,” she said.
Ahmed Helmi, Zaki’s husband and also an actor, was even forced to phone The House is Yours, a prime-time TV talk show, to refute rumours that he and his wife had split because of the film.
The movie was written by the populist scriptwriter Wahid Hamed and directed by Yousry Nasrallah, more of an art house director who has been addressing women’s issues for more than 15 years but until now has received little popular acclaim.
It is the first co-operation between the two and nearly three weeks into its release, Tell it, Scheherazade is already a box office hit. According to Cinema Chamber, which is in charge of cinema incomes, the movie has taken in six million Egyptian pounds (Dh4m) since it opened June 24, which is high by Egyptian standards.
“Yousry Nasrallah, one of Egypt’s greatest filmmakers, has crafted not only this year’s best Egyptian film of the year so far, but one of the most important movies of the decade. A brilliantly provoking, fierce and audacious cinematic document about Egyptian women,” wrote the film critic Joseph Fahim in the Daily News Egypt recently.
The film focuses on the relationship between Younis and her husband, Karim Hassan, played by Hassan al Raddad.
The young, beautiful, rich and successful couple seem to have it all. But that begins to change when Younis starts to discover things about herself, her husband and their relationship through her interviews with other women.
At first she presents a political programme, but is forced to change focus after complaints from the bosses at the government-run newspaper where her husband hopes to become editor. So Younis shifts to social and women’s issues and interviews three women whose stories open her eyes to her own relationship.
The first story is of Amany, a middle-aged, middle-class, dreamy idealist who refuses to marry except for love and who is shocked to discover that many marriages are based not on love but on an agreement, which entails compromises by women just to have the title of being married.
She lives, by choice, in a psychiatric hospital “where everyone plays their own tune, without disharmony,” she tells Younis in the interview.
The second story, which is based on fact, is about three lower-income sisters in their 20s and 30s who live together after they inherit their father’s shop.
Each sister, unbeknown to the others, becomes intimately involved with their young employee, who in turn promises to marry each one. When they finally discover the deception, the elder sister kills the employee and subsequently spends 15 years in prison.
The third story is of Nahed, a dentist from a well-to-do family who falls in love with a businessman who manipulates her into sleeping with him before their official wedding. Although they are already married on paper, the businessman leaves her when she gets pregnant and demands a payment of three million pounds for a divorce.
Nahed has an abortion and takes the businessman to court, gaining a divorce without having to pay him anything.
“Actually they are four, not three, stories, as with every interview Heba Younis discovers that her marriage is falling apart and that she doesn’t have much in common with her husband, who only cares about his career and doesn’t appreciate hers or her compromises to save the marriage,” said Nasrallah, the director.
When Hassan is overlooked for the editor’s role at the paper he blames it on Younis’s “silly programme” and starts to beat her.
Younis, having become mentally stronger through her interviews, hits back and does not hide her bruises when she next appears on television.
One audience, mostly women, were mixed in their reaction.
“I came to the movie to watch Mona Zaki,” said Christine Nagy, 30, who is single and a manager at a medical office. “But unfortunately, I’m surprised that the whole movie is about sex and spinsterhood and that women are only concerned with these two issues, which is not true. I don’t know what the aim of this movie is.”
Nagwa Atwa, 60, a veiled housewife and mother of three, said she loved it.
“I really liked how it handles sexual issues, and that if sex is not based on real love, even between married couples, it could be destructive.
“I loved the message and the type of women that the film portrayed. They all, including the TV presenter, managed to overcome their weaknesses, and with their strong will, were able to start anew. I like that.”
“I just survived being beaten to death. I’m the programme’s oppressed and beaten guest. I never imagined that I, who tell people’s tales, could become a tale myself,” the TV presenter, Heba Younis, says in the final scene of Tell it, Scheherazade.
The film addresses women’s rights, their dreams and their suffering, contemporary topics in such a male-dominated society as Egypt, but it has drawn criticism from reviewers and on the internet, with most of it directed at the actress Mona Zaki, who plays Younis.
The criticism started when a trailers of the film showed Zaki being kissed on the neck by her on-screen husband.
“We adored Mona Zaki, her art, bashfulness and her respect for us. She was the model of clean art, therefore our disappointment and anger are huge because we loved her so much,” wrote Mohammed Adel on a Facebook group against the film.
“We lost you, Mona,” lamented Mahmoud Amer, another former fan on Facebook.
Zaki, in her early 30s, had been hailed as an icon of “clean cinema”, in which there is no kissing, show of intimacy between sexes or revealing clothing and which has appealed to the largely conservative society here.
But the film critic Magda Khirallah said the criticism was unfounded.
“Mona Zaki is an actress not a saint,” she said.
Ahmed Helmi, Zaki’s husband and also an actor, was even forced to phone The House is Yours, a prime-time TV talk show, to refute rumours that he and his wife had split because of the film.
The movie was written by the populist scriptwriter Wahid Hamed and directed by Yousry Nasrallah, more of an art house director who has been addressing women’s issues for more than 15 years but until now has received little popular acclaim.
It is the first co-operation between the two and nearly three weeks into its release, Tell it, Scheherazade is already a box office hit. According to Cinema Chamber, which is in charge of cinema incomes, the movie has taken in six million Egyptian pounds (Dh4m) since it opened June 24, which is high by Egyptian standards.
“Yousry Nasrallah, one of Egypt’s greatest filmmakers, has crafted not only this year’s best Egyptian film of the year so far, but one of the most important movies of the decade. A brilliantly provoking, fierce and audacious cinematic document about Egyptian women,” wrote the film critic Joseph Fahim in the Daily News Egypt recently.
The film focuses on the relationship between Younis and her husband, Karim Hassan, played by Hassan al Raddad.
The young, beautiful, rich and successful couple seem to have it all. But that begins to change when Younis starts to discover things about herself, her husband and their relationship through her interviews with other women.
At first she presents a political programme, but is forced to change focus after complaints from the bosses at the government-run newspaper where her husband hopes to become editor. So Younis shifts to social and women’s issues and interviews three women whose stories open her eyes to her own relationship.
The first story is of Amany, a middle-aged, middle-class, dreamy idealist who refuses to marry except for love and who is shocked to discover that many marriages are based not on love but on an agreement, which entails compromises by women just to have the title of being married.
She lives, by choice, in a psychiatric hospital “where everyone plays their own tune, without disharmony,” she tells Younis in the interview.
The second story, which is based on fact, is about three lower-income sisters in their 20s and 30s who live together after they inherit their father’s shop.
Each sister, unbeknown to the others, becomes intimately involved with their young employee, who in turn promises to marry each one. When they finally discover the deception, the elder sister kills the employee and subsequently spends 15 years in prison.
The third story is of Nahed, a dentist from a well-to-do family who falls in love with a businessman who manipulates her into sleeping with him before their official wedding. Although they are already married on paper, the businessman leaves her when she gets pregnant and demands a payment of three million pounds for a divorce.
Nahed has an abortion and takes the businessman to court, gaining a divorce without having to pay him anything.
“Actually they are four, not three, stories, as with every interview Heba Younis discovers that her marriage is falling apart and that she doesn’t have much in common with her husband, who only cares about his career and doesn’t appreciate hers or her compromises to save the marriage,” said Nasrallah, the director.
When Hassan is overlooked for the editor’s role at the paper he blames it on Younis’s “silly programme” and starts to beat her.
Younis, having become mentally stronger through her interviews, hits back and does not hide her bruises when she next appears on television.
One audience, mostly women, were mixed in their reaction.
“I came to the movie to watch Mona Zaki,” said Christine Nagy, 30, who is single and a manager at a medical office. “But unfortunately, I’m surprised that the whole movie is about sex and spinsterhood and that women are only concerned with these two issues, which is not true. I don’t know what the aim of this movie is.”
Nagwa Atwa, 60, a veiled housewife and mother of three, said she loved it.
“I really liked how it handles sexual issues, and that if sex is not based on real love, even between married couples, it could be destructive.
“I loved the message and the type of women that the film portrayed. They all, including the TV presenter, managed to overcome their weaknesses, and with their strong will, were able to start anew. I like that.”
Friday, 5 June 2009
Hosni Mubarak's Reign in Egypt: The Pharaoh's Legacy
Hosni Mubarak has enjoyed unlimited power in Egypt for the past 28 years. Today, however, there is increasing resistance against his autocratic reign. Many Egyptians are wondering what the future of the Nile republic might look like after Mubarak's death. Amira El Ahl reports from Cairo
"L'état c'est moi" - for 28 years President Hosni Mubarak has enjoyed unlimited control over Egypt based on emergency laws and a powerful security apparatus | Anyone trying to enter the Western Delta will have their patience seriously tested a few kilometres outside Cairo. There is only one road across the river here: the old river weir in Qanater, which was built at a time when only a few donkey carts wanted to get to the other side of the Nile each day. There was one lane in each direction.
Today, thousands of cars, trucks, mopeds and even still a few donkey carts try to push through this bottleneck, creating an unholy chaos that the wildly gesticulating traffic cop is hard put to master.
This is the road that leads to Quesa, Kafr al-Musalha and Shibin al-Kom, straight into Hosni Mubarak's past. Here, in the still-verdant, fertile delta some 60 kilometres northwest of the capital, is where Mubarak grew up.
He was born in Quesa, which has in the meantime grown into a small town. The house, painted yellow, is today almost a complete ruin. Only the large solid wood door stands witness to the fact that people once lived here who, unlike most of the farmers in this region, did not have to live from hand to mouth. Mubarak's father was a judicial officer and the family belonged to the lower middle class.
A good family background
"He came from a good family", says Mahmoud Omar. The 79-year-old still remembers the young Mubarak well. They were neighbours back then, in Kafr al-Musalha, where Mubarak grew up. Omar sits on an old wooden chair on the dusty street before his house.
Right next door is the small villa where the Mubarak family used to live. Here as well, time is wearing down the walls, but wind and weather have also left their traces. The villagers are proud of their town's famous son, but there is no panel or museum here to commemorate him.
"He hasn't paid a visit to the village since he was vice president", says Omar, sounding a bit hurt. The mosque and the school were named after another famous village resident, not head of state Hosni Mubarak. His name adorns only a bridge and the sport club.
He was a sportsman, is what everyone recalls when asked about Mubarak. "He played hockey at school and at the sport club", Omar remarks, "and he was a very good pupil." Both areas would play a vital role in his later career.
"He dreamt of becoming a pilot", Makram Ahmed remembers. The journalist and editor-in-chief of the weekly paper "al-Musaur" is a close confidant of the president. This fine gentleman with snow-white hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses has been part of the regime's inner circle for decades.
From pilot to president
When Anwar Al Sadat was assassinated by Islamists at a military parade, Hosni Mubarak was standing next to him. He was unharmed and became president of Egypt on 14 October 1981 | Mubarak had everything it takes to become a pilot: a good education, intelligence, ambition, discipline and a high level of physical fitness
For Hosni Mubarak, a career as pilot opened the door to a new life, to a part of society that had up until then remained barred to him. "It enabled him to marry into 'High Society'", says Makram Ahmed. Mubarak's rise was meteoric. His discipline and determination to get ahead soon paid off.
After his military career as fighter pilot and pilot trainer, former head of state Gamal Abdel Nasser appointed Hosni Mubarak chief of staff in 1969 and later made him commander-in-chief of the Air Force. Mubarak fought in the 1973 October War as lieutenant general, and in April 1975 Anwar al-Sadat named him vice president.
When Sadat was assassinated by Islamists at a military parade, Hosni Mubarak was standing right next to him. He was uninjured and became state president and minister president of Egypt on 14 October 1981. Ever since then, he has ruled Egypt in accordance with the rules applicable in a state of emergency – a state he has continually reconfirmed and extended. In January 1982 he gave up the office of minister president.
Today, Egypt is characterised by explosive population growth, as a result of which resources are becoming scarce, a weak economy, unemployment and a growing gulf between the rich and the poor.
Economic collapse
"The economic decline is serious", says Abdelhalim Qandil, a journalist who is editor-in-chief of the opposition newspaper "Saut al-Umma", a Nasserist and speaker for the opposition movement "Kifaya".
Qandil doesn't mince words when it comes to his rejection of Mubarak. "In 1973 the Egyptian economy was still on a par with South Korea. Today South Korea is in tenth place, and we are number 122." In Qandil's opinion, Egypt has slipped downward to the level of a nation like Burkina Faso since Mubarak took the helm.
One reason for this decline, according to the journalist, is the one-party system. The "Mafiocracy", as Qandil calls it, has driven Egypt to ruin. "We have not only been ruled by a single party, but also by a single family for the past 28 years."
| Bild: Abdelhalim Qandil (photo: AP)
Bild vergrössern Many opponents of the regime, such as Abdelhalim Qandil from the "Kifaya" movement, describe the country's economic decline and the dictatorship of Mubarak as "the worst era in Egypt's history" | Father Mubarak, Mother Suzanne and their youngest son, Gamal, are guiding the fortunes of the country, says Qandil. The first-born, Alaa Mubarak, is not politically active, but he is influential as a businessman in the Nile republic.
Abdelhalim Qandil describes the current state of affairs as "the worst era in Egypt's history". All political opposition is repressed; never in Egypt's history have there been so many political prisoners, and so many others who have disappeared, he says.
Mubarak is isolated, Qandil says, and only the upper class, which has profited from his reign, is on his side – along with the gigantic security apparatus Mubarak has created. "We have almost two million security officers but only 460,000 soldiers", says Qandil. "Today the Egyptians are under battle by Egypt."
In the clutches of the security apparatus
Mubarak needs these security forces to safeguard his power and to repress the dissatisfaction of the populace. 80 percent of Egyptians live on less than two dollars a day, and everyone's big dream is to get out of the country. No matter how.
"Do you know of any other country in the world where all the citizens want to leave?", asks Abdelhalim Qandil. Many Egyptians used to go to Iraq, Libya or Europe to work. But now they have been forced to flee from Iraq, and Europe hardly lets anyone in legally anymore.
"That's why people's resentment is growing louder; they are becoming politically active and the number of demonstrations is increasing", comments Qandil. One thing is for sure: the economic crisis poses a threat to Mubarak's regime. Income from tourism and the Suez Canal is dwindling, and there are fewer people working abroad and sending money home.
What's in store for the country? Even in his 28th year of rule, the Pharaoh, as many call him, still shows no signs of being weary of his high office. Many enemies doubt that Mubarak will ever step down, despite his advanced age.
But why has he still not appointed a vice president who could take over as head of state in an emergency? Rumour has it that a Sudanese fortune-teller told Mubarak even before he became vice president that he would one day be president of Egypt.
However, the soothsayer continued, he would die the moment he named a vice president. This is why the "Pharaoh" doesn't dare to anoint a successor, claim superstitious Egyptians.
Everything stays the same?
Realists see things differently. "Mubarak does not want to be the one to select the next president of Egypt; it should be up to the people to choose", says Makram Ahmed. But in the process his failure to decide is plunging Egypt into a state of great uncertainty.
| Bild: Makram Ahmed (photo: AP)
Bild vergrössern Makram Ahmed: "Mubarak does not want to be the one to select the next president of Egypt; the choice should be up to the people", says Makram Ahmed | No one knows what will happen to the country when Mubarak is no longer there. Anarchy, free elections, an Islamic republic based on the Iranian model, or merely a handing on of the business of government to the younger Mubarak, so that everything stays the same?
"The parties are weak, so it will be the military that has the last word on this issue", predicts Ahmed. The head of the Secret Service, Omar Suleiman, might make a fitting candidate for successor. He is a wise man, the journalist says, who has Mubarak's trust.
This is one point on which the government-supporting Ahmed and the regime critic Qandil can agree. "When Mubarak dies, the army will be out in the streets keeping the peace", Abdelhalim Qandil is sure.
Egypt as powder keg
Unlike Makram Ahmed, however, Qandil can also foresee an utterly different scenario: "When Mubarak dies, all of Egypt takes to the streets and celebrates." For the author, who caused a sensation with two books critical of Mubarak, Egypt has become a powder keg. "Just a single match could ignite the whole country."
Opposition to the Mubarak regime has grown much louder and stronger in the past two years. The government is today no longer battling against only the rebellious Muslim Brotherhood, which is represented in parliament by 88 candidates, or against journalists like Abdelhalim Qandil, who stir up sentiment against Mubarak and his retinue in their oppositional newspapers.
The State must increasingly also deal with demonstrators and with primarily young critics who make skilful use of the new media. Spearheaded by numerous bloggers who attack the regime on their websites, 'Facebook' and 'YouTube' have also become platforms for the resistance.
An appeal for a general strike was posted on 'Facebook', for example, and a video shown on 'YouTube' compared Mubarak with a donkey and portrayed him alternately as monarch, pharaoh or Hitler.
"Our society is on the brink of an explosion, a national uprising", warns Abdelhalim Qandil. The economic crisis will only amplify this trend, and the journalist predicts that the coming two years could prove to be the most dangerous in Egypt's history. "In 2010 everything will be over."
Qandil can also imagine a development similar to what took place in Turkey: a changeover to a democratic system backed by the army.
Will Gamal Mubarak be crowned?
Although the government has made all the necessary preparations to pave Gamal Mubarak's way to the top post – through amendments to the constitution, among other things – most don't believe that the junior Mubarak will take over.
"He has only one chance: if his father puts him in office before he dies", says Qandil. The problem is that the army is evidently against Mubarak's youngest son. Only Israel and the USA would have an interest in a government led by Gamal Mubarak.
If Mubarak senior should die before making his son president, Gamal would have no future in Egypt. "Then Suzanne and Gamal Mubarak will be the first to board a plane heading west", Qandil thinks. But perhaps it won't come to that.
"I'm afraid that Gamal could die before his father", says Qandil, and quickly follows up with a joke: Mubarak gets a turtle as gift from a friend. "These animals can live as long as 200 years", says the friend. Mubarak replies: "We'll see about that." Mubarak's mother supposedly lived to 104. And she died in a car accident.
Amira El Ahl
"L'état c'est moi" - for 28 years President Hosni Mubarak has enjoyed unlimited control over Egypt based on emergency laws and a powerful security apparatus | Anyone trying to enter the Western Delta will have their patience seriously tested a few kilometres outside Cairo. There is only one road across the river here: the old river weir in Qanater, which was built at a time when only a few donkey carts wanted to get to the other side of the Nile each day. There was one lane in each direction.
Today, thousands of cars, trucks, mopeds and even still a few donkey carts try to push through this bottleneck, creating an unholy chaos that the wildly gesticulating traffic cop is hard put to master.
This is the road that leads to Quesa, Kafr al-Musalha and Shibin al-Kom, straight into Hosni Mubarak's past. Here, in the still-verdant, fertile delta some 60 kilometres northwest of the capital, is where Mubarak grew up.
He was born in Quesa, which has in the meantime grown into a small town. The house, painted yellow, is today almost a complete ruin. Only the large solid wood door stands witness to the fact that people once lived here who, unlike most of the farmers in this region, did not have to live from hand to mouth. Mubarak's father was a judicial officer and the family belonged to the lower middle class.
A good family background
"He came from a good family", says Mahmoud Omar. The 79-year-old still remembers the young Mubarak well. They were neighbours back then, in Kafr al-Musalha, where Mubarak grew up. Omar sits on an old wooden chair on the dusty street before his house.
Right next door is the small villa where the Mubarak family used to live. Here as well, time is wearing down the walls, but wind and weather have also left their traces. The villagers are proud of their town's famous son, but there is no panel or museum here to commemorate him.
"He hasn't paid a visit to the village since he was vice president", says Omar, sounding a bit hurt. The mosque and the school were named after another famous village resident, not head of state Hosni Mubarak. His name adorns only a bridge and the sport club.
He was a sportsman, is what everyone recalls when asked about Mubarak. "He played hockey at school and at the sport club", Omar remarks, "and he was a very good pupil." Both areas would play a vital role in his later career.
"He dreamt of becoming a pilot", Makram Ahmed remembers. The journalist and editor-in-chief of the weekly paper "al-Musaur" is a close confidant of the president. This fine gentleman with snow-white hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses has been part of the regime's inner circle for decades.
From pilot to president
When Anwar Al Sadat was assassinated by Islamists at a military parade, Hosni Mubarak was standing next to him. He was unharmed and became president of Egypt on 14 October 1981 | Mubarak had everything it takes to become a pilot: a good education, intelligence, ambition, discipline and a high level of physical fitness
For Hosni Mubarak, a career as pilot opened the door to a new life, to a part of society that had up until then remained barred to him. "It enabled him to marry into 'High Society'", says Makram Ahmed. Mubarak's rise was meteoric. His discipline and determination to get ahead soon paid off.
After his military career as fighter pilot and pilot trainer, former head of state Gamal Abdel Nasser appointed Hosni Mubarak chief of staff in 1969 and later made him commander-in-chief of the Air Force. Mubarak fought in the 1973 October War as lieutenant general, and in April 1975 Anwar al-Sadat named him vice president.
When Sadat was assassinated by Islamists at a military parade, Hosni Mubarak was standing right next to him. He was uninjured and became state president and minister president of Egypt on 14 October 1981. Ever since then, he has ruled Egypt in accordance with the rules applicable in a state of emergency – a state he has continually reconfirmed and extended. In January 1982 he gave up the office of minister president.
Today, Egypt is characterised by explosive population growth, as a result of which resources are becoming scarce, a weak economy, unemployment and a growing gulf between the rich and the poor.
Economic collapse
"The economic decline is serious", says Abdelhalim Qandil, a journalist who is editor-in-chief of the opposition newspaper "Saut al-Umma", a Nasserist and speaker for the opposition movement "Kifaya".
Qandil doesn't mince words when it comes to his rejection of Mubarak. "In 1973 the Egyptian economy was still on a par with South Korea. Today South Korea is in tenth place, and we are number 122." In Qandil's opinion, Egypt has slipped downward to the level of a nation like Burkina Faso since Mubarak took the helm.
One reason for this decline, according to the journalist, is the one-party system. The "Mafiocracy", as Qandil calls it, has driven Egypt to ruin. "We have not only been ruled by a single party, but also by a single family for the past 28 years."
| Bild: Abdelhalim Qandil (photo: AP)
Bild vergrössern Many opponents of the regime, such as Abdelhalim Qandil from the "Kifaya" movement, describe the country's economic decline and the dictatorship of Mubarak as "the worst era in Egypt's history" | Father Mubarak, Mother Suzanne and their youngest son, Gamal, are guiding the fortunes of the country, says Qandil. The first-born, Alaa Mubarak, is not politically active, but he is influential as a businessman in the Nile republic.
Abdelhalim Qandil describes the current state of affairs as "the worst era in Egypt's history". All political opposition is repressed; never in Egypt's history have there been so many political prisoners, and so many others who have disappeared, he says.
Mubarak is isolated, Qandil says, and only the upper class, which has profited from his reign, is on his side – along with the gigantic security apparatus Mubarak has created. "We have almost two million security officers but only 460,000 soldiers", says Qandil. "Today the Egyptians are under battle by Egypt."
In the clutches of the security apparatus
Mubarak needs these security forces to safeguard his power and to repress the dissatisfaction of the populace. 80 percent of Egyptians live on less than two dollars a day, and everyone's big dream is to get out of the country. No matter how.
"Do you know of any other country in the world where all the citizens want to leave?", asks Abdelhalim Qandil. Many Egyptians used to go to Iraq, Libya or Europe to work. But now they have been forced to flee from Iraq, and Europe hardly lets anyone in legally anymore.
"That's why people's resentment is growing louder; they are becoming politically active and the number of demonstrations is increasing", comments Qandil. One thing is for sure: the economic crisis poses a threat to Mubarak's regime. Income from tourism and the Suez Canal is dwindling, and there are fewer people working abroad and sending money home.
What's in store for the country? Even in his 28th year of rule, the Pharaoh, as many call him, still shows no signs of being weary of his high office. Many enemies doubt that Mubarak will ever step down, despite his advanced age.
But why has he still not appointed a vice president who could take over as head of state in an emergency? Rumour has it that a Sudanese fortune-teller told Mubarak even before he became vice president that he would one day be president of Egypt.
However, the soothsayer continued, he would die the moment he named a vice president. This is why the "Pharaoh" doesn't dare to anoint a successor, claim superstitious Egyptians.
Everything stays the same?
Realists see things differently. "Mubarak does not want to be the one to select the next president of Egypt; it should be up to the people to choose", says Makram Ahmed. But in the process his failure to decide is plunging Egypt into a state of great uncertainty.
| Bild: Makram Ahmed (photo: AP)
Bild vergrössern Makram Ahmed: "Mubarak does not want to be the one to select the next president of Egypt; the choice should be up to the people", says Makram Ahmed | No one knows what will happen to the country when Mubarak is no longer there. Anarchy, free elections, an Islamic republic based on the Iranian model, or merely a handing on of the business of government to the younger Mubarak, so that everything stays the same?
"The parties are weak, so it will be the military that has the last word on this issue", predicts Ahmed. The head of the Secret Service, Omar Suleiman, might make a fitting candidate for successor. He is a wise man, the journalist says, who has Mubarak's trust.
This is one point on which the government-supporting Ahmed and the regime critic Qandil can agree. "When Mubarak dies, the army will be out in the streets keeping the peace", Abdelhalim Qandil is sure.
Egypt as powder keg
Unlike Makram Ahmed, however, Qandil can also foresee an utterly different scenario: "When Mubarak dies, all of Egypt takes to the streets and celebrates." For the author, who caused a sensation with two books critical of Mubarak, Egypt has become a powder keg. "Just a single match could ignite the whole country."
Opposition to the Mubarak regime has grown much louder and stronger in the past two years. The government is today no longer battling against only the rebellious Muslim Brotherhood, which is represented in parliament by 88 candidates, or against journalists like Abdelhalim Qandil, who stir up sentiment against Mubarak and his retinue in their oppositional newspapers.
The State must increasingly also deal with demonstrators and with primarily young critics who make skilful use of the new media. Spearheaded by numerous bloggers who attack the regime on their websites, 'Facebook' and 'YouTube' have also become platforms for the resistance.
An appeal for a general strike was posted on 'Facebook', for example, and a video shown on 'YouTube' compared Mubarak with a donkey and portrayed him alternately as monarch, pharaoh or Hitler.
"Our society is on the brink of an explosion, a national uprising", warns Abdelhalim Qandil. The economic crisis will only amplify this trend, and the journalist predicts that the coming two years could prove to be the most dangerous in Egypt's history. "In 2010 everything will be over."
Qandil can also imagine a development similar to what took place in Turkey: a changeover to a democratic system backed by the army.
Will Gamal Mubarak be crowned?
Although the government has made all the necessary preparations to pave Gamal Mubarak's way to the top post – through amendments to the constitution, among other things – most don't believe that the junior Mubarak will take over.
"He has only one chance: if his father puts him in office before he dies", says Qandil. The problem is that the army is evidently against Mubarak's youngest son. Only Israel and the USA would have an interest in a government led by Gamal Mubarak.
If Mubarak senior should die before making his son president, Gamal would have no future in Egypt. "Then Suzanne and Gamal Mubarak will be the first to board a plane heading west", Qandil thinks. But perhaps it won't come to that.
"I'm afraid that Gamal could die before his father", says Qandil, and quickly follows up with a joke: Mubarak gets a turtle as gift from a friend. "These animals can live as long as 200 years", says the friend. Mubarak replies: "We'll see about that." Mubarak's mother supposedly lived to 104. And she died in a car accident.
Amira El Ahl
Thursday, 4 June 2009
The justifications of the torturer
A discussion with an Egyptian State Security officer raises questions and suggests a few answers.
By Alaa Al-Aswany
May 31, 2009
Writing From Cairo --
Some years ago, I was invited to a relative's wedding, and at the wedding, I sat next to one of the bridegroom's relatives. He introduced himself to me by saying: "My name is such-and-such, police officer."
The man was in his 40s, very elegant, polite and quiet. I noticed a prayer mark on his forehead. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, and I asked him, "In which department do you work?"
He hesitated for a second, then he replied: "State Security."
We both kept silent, and he turned his face away from me and started to watch the other guests. My mind was torn between two conflicting options: Should I resume the previous polite conversation, or should I express my opinion candidly on the State Security Investigations department? In the end, I couldn't help but challenge him, and I will reconstruct the conversation that followed to the best of my ability:
"Excuse me. You are religious, it seems," I said.
"Thank God."
"Don't you see any contradiction between being religious and working in State Security?"
"Where would the contradiction arise?"
"People detained by State Security are beaten, tortured and raped, though all religions prohibit such practices."
He started to get emotional and said: "First, those who are beaten deserve to be beaten. Second, if you study your religion thoroughly, you will find that what we do in the State Security department is fully compatible with Islamic teachings."
"But Islam is a religion that safeguards human dignity."
"That's a generalization. I have read Islamic jurisprudence, and I am well aware of its provisions."
"There's nothing in Islamic jurisprudence that makes it legitimate to torture people."
"Listen to me until I finish, please. Islam has nothing to do with democracy or elections. Obedience to a Muslim ruler is a duty for his subjects, even if he has usurped power, is corrupt or unjust. Do you know how Islam punishes those who rebel against their rulers?"
I kept silent.
He continued enthusiastically: "They face the haraba punishment, which is amputation of the left hand and the right foot. All those we detain at State Security have rebelled against the ruler, and by Islamic law we should cut off their limbs, but we do not do this. What we do is much less than the Islamic punishment."
Our discussion went on for a long time. I told him that Islam was revealed essentially to defend truth, justice and freedom. I said that the haraba punishment was applicable only to armed groups that kill innocent people, steal their money or rape them. It should by no means be applied to Egyptian political dissidents.
He remained insistent on his opinion and ended the discussion by saying: "This is my understanding of Islam. I am convinced of it, and I will not change it. I will be responsible for it before God."
After I left the wedding, I asked myself how this educated and intelligent officer could be convinced of such an erroneous interpretation of Islam. How did he extract from Islam such perverted ideas? How could he imagine for one moment that God approves of us torturing people? These questions remained without answers until, some months later, I read a paper titled "The Psychology of the Executioner."
In it, the researcher argued that torturers can be divided into two groups. The first group are psychopaths, who behave aggressively without any moral restraints. The second group -- and these are the majority -- is made up of ordinary men who are psychologically normal and who, once they leave work, are upright and lovable, with good morals.
But to be able to torture people, two conditions are indispensable: submission and justification. Submission means the police officer carries out the torture in response to orders from his superior and convinces himself that he is compelled to obey. Justification comes about when the officer convinces himself that torture is ethically and religiously legitimate, usually because he believes his victims to be agents of the enemy or enemies of the nation, infidels or criminals. In his mind, that justifies torturing them to protect society and the country. Without this justification, the police officer would not be able to continue torturing his victims because, at some point, he would be unable to cope with his pangs of conscience.
I remembered this when I heard about the arrest in April of two university students, Omnia Taha and Sarah Mohammed Rezq. Campus security at Kafr El Sheikh University in the Nile Delta arrested the two young women and handed them over to State Security because they had incited their colleagues to go on strike. The prosecution accused them of plotting to overthrow the government and ordered that they be remanded in custody for 15 days for questioning. But honestly, how could two women less than 20 years old try to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak's regime simply by talking to their colleagues?
Moreover, calling for a strike is not in itself a crime because Egypt has signed dozens of international conventions recognizing the right to strike as one of the basic rights of Egyptians. But what is really saddening is that I learned from colleagues of the two girls that at State Security they were violently beaten and tortured and that the man who beat them and ripped off their clothes was a senior officer. It's not so terribly surprising -- bloggers, leftists and Islamic activists are all arrested and tortured on a routine basis in Egypt, often spending years in prison without being charged -- but it's horrifying nevertheless.
How could a police officer, who was probably a husband and a father, beat with such brutality a student so like his own daughters? How could he face his conscience and look his wife and children in the eye? Didn't this senior officer feel ashamed of himself as he beat a young woman who could not even defend herself?
As President Obama prepares for his trip to Egypt this week, the Mubarak regime is facing unprecedented waves of social protest because life here has become intolerable for millions of Egyptians, who now have no choice but to take to the streets to proclaim their demand for a life fit for humans. Today, between 40% and 50% of Egyptians live below the poverty line; Egypt has become two different countries -- one for the poor and one for the rich.
As for the regime, it is now completely incapable of serious reform, so it pushes the police to confront, repress and torture people, overlooking the simple and important fact that police officers are, first and foremost, Egyptian citizens and that what applies to Egyptians in general applies to them too. Most of them suffer in the same way as other Egyptians.
I often recall the discussion I had with the State Security officer at the wedding. And I reflect that a political system that relies for its survival on repression always fails to see that the apparatus of repression, however mighty it may be, must be operated by individuals who are part of society and whose interests and opinions generally conform with those of the rest of the population. As repression increases, a day will come when those individuals can no longer justify to themselves the crimes they are committing against people. At that point the regime will lose its power to repress and will meet the fate it deserves. I believe that we in Egypt are approaching that day.
Alaa Al-Aswany is the author of the novels "The Yacoubian Building" and "Chicago."
By Alaa Al-Aswany
May 31, 2009
Writing From Cairo --
Some years ago, I was invited to a relative's wedding, and at the wedding, I sat next to one of the bridegroom's relatives. He introduced himself to me by saying: "My name is such-and-such, police officer."
The man was in his 40s, very elegant, polite and quiet. I noticed a prayer mark on his forehead. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, and I asked him, "In which department do you work?"
He hesitated for a second, then he replied: "State Security."
We both kept silent, and he turned his face away from me and started to watch the other guests. My mind was torn between two conflicting options: Should I resume the previous polite conversation, or should I express my opinion candidly on the State Security Investigations department? In the end, I couldn't help but challenge him, and I will reconstruct the conversation that followed to the best of my ability:
"Excuse me. You are religious, it seems," I said.
"Thank God."
"Don't you see any contradiction between being religious and working in State Security?"
"Where would the contradiction arise?"
"People detained by State Security are beaten, tortured and raped, though all religions prohibit such practices."
He started to get emotional and said: "First, those who are beaten deserve to be beaten. Second, if you study your religion thoroughly, you will find that what we do in the State Security department is fully compatible with Islamic teachings."
"But Islam is a religion that safeguards human dignity."
"That's a generalization. I have read Islamic jurisprudence, and I am well aware of its provisions."
"There's nothing in Islamic jurisprudence that makes it legitimate to torture people."
"Listen to me until I finish, please. Islam has nothing to do with democracy or elections. Obedience to a Muslim ruler is a duty for his subjects, even if he has usurped power, is corrupt or unjust. Do you know how Islam punishes those who rebel against their rulers?"
I kept silent.
He continued enthusiastically: "They face the haraba punishment, which is amputation of the left hand and the right foot. All those we detain at State Security have rebelled against the ruler, and by Islamic law we should cut off their limbs, but we do not do this. What we do is much less than the Islamic punishment."
Our discussion went on for a long time. I told him that Islam was revealed essentially to defend truth, justice and freedom. I said that the haraba punishment was applicable only to armed groups that kill innocent people, steal their money or rape them. It should by no means be applied to Egyptian political dissidents.
He remained insistent on his opinion and ended the discussion by saying: "This is my understanding of Islam. I am convinced of it, and I will not change it. I will be responsible for it before God."
After I left the wedding, I asked myself how this educated and intelligent officer could be convinced of such an erroneous interpretation of Islam. How did he extract from Islam such perverted ideas? How could he imagine for one moment that God approves of us torturing people? These questions remained without answers until, some months later, I read a paper titled "The Psychology of the Executioner."
In it, the researcher argued that torturers can be divided into two groups. The first group are psychopaths, who behave aggressively without any moral restraints. The second group -- and these are the majority -- is made up of ordinary men who are psychologically normal and who, once they leave work, are upright and lovable, with good morals.
But to be able to torture people, two conditions are indispensable: submission and justification. Submission means the police officer carries out the torture in response to orders from his superior and convinces himself that he is compelled to obey. Justification comes about when the officer convinces himself that torture is ethically and religiously legitimate, usually because he believes his victims to be agents of the enemy or enemies of the nation, infidels or criminals. In his mind, that justifies torturing them to protect society and the country. Without this justification, the police officer would not be able to continue torturing his victims because, at some point, he would be unable to cope with his pangs of conscience.
I remembered this when I heard about the arrest in April of two university students, Omnia Taha and Sarah Mohammed Rezq. Campus security at Kafr El Sheikh University in the Nile Delta arrested the two young women and handed them over to State Security because they had incited their colleagues to go on strike. The prosecution accused them of plotting to overthrow the government and ordered that they be remanded in custody for 15 days for questioning. But honestly, how could two women less than 20 years old try to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak's regime simply by talking to their colleagues?
Moreover, calling for a strike is not in itself a crime because Egypt has signed dozens of international conventions recognizing the right to strike as one of the basic rights of Egyptians. But what is really saddening is that I learned from colleagues of the two girls that at State Security they were violently beaten and tortured and that the man who beat them and ripped off their clothes was a senior officer. It's not so terribly surprising -- bloggers, leftists and Islamic activists are all arrested and tortured on a routine basis in Egypt, often spending years in prison without being charged -- but it's horrifying nevertheless.
How could a police officer, who was probably a husband and a father, beat with such brutality a student so like his own daughters? How could he face his conscience and look his wife and children in the eye? Didn't this senior officer feel ashamed of himself as he beat a young woman who could not even defend herself?
As President Obama prepares for his trip to Egypt this week, the Mubarak regime is facing unprecedented waves of social protest because life here has become intolerable for millions of Egyptians, who now have no choice but to take to the streets to proclaim their demand for a life fit for humans. Today, between 40% and 50% of Egyptians live below the poverty line; Egypt has become two different countries -- one for the poor and one for the rich.
As for the regime, it is now completely incapable of serious reform, so it pushes the police to confront, repress and torture people, overlooking the simple and important fact that police officers are, first and foremost, Egyptian citizens and that what applies to Egyptians in general applies to them too. Most of them suffer in the same way as other Egyptians.
I often recall the discussion I had with the State Security officer at the wedding. And I reflect that a political system that relies for its survival on repression always fails to see that the apparatus of repression, however mighty it may be, must be operated by individuals who are part of society and whose interests and opinions generally conform with those of the rest of the population. As repression increases, a day will come when those individuals can no longer justify to themselves the crimes they are committing against people. At that point the regime will lose its power to repress and will meet the fate it deserves. I believe that we in Egypt are approaching that day.
Alaa Al-Aswany is the author of the novels "The Yacoubian Building" and "Chicago."
Egypt Needs Democracy and Term Limits: Mubarak competes with Ramses II for time in office.
By SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM
Egyptians have traditionally thought of their country as the "Mother of the World." President Barack Obama says he wants to change the world. Egypt may very well be a good place to start.
Egyptians at home and abroad have been clamoring for change. Kefaya, which literally means "enough," is a slogan, an outcry, and a grassroots movement that has been organizing to reform our antique regime. Over 1,000 acts of civil disobedience have taken place all over Egypt in recent months. Participants have included the Bedouins of Sinai, the Nubians of Aswan, and even the Coptic monks of Upper Egypt.
Obviously, an American president elected on a platform of change is music to Egyptians' ears, and Mr. Obama will be a welcome guest. He is universally popular with Egyptians, Arabs and Muslims. But will average Egyptians really connect with him, let alone get a chance to meet him? With only 10 hours in the country, his visit will be carefully choreographed. Security forces will understandably separate him from the eager Egyptian crowds. Mr. Obama should consider scheduling a town meeting with representatives of Egyptian civil society. He had such a meeting when he visited France.
Mr. Obama will meet an Egyptian president who is still grieving over the untimely death in May of his 13-year-old grandson Mohammed. Despite the special bond between the two, Hosni Mubarak did not appear at the boy's funeral, or at that of the prime minister's wife a week earlier. This has led to widespread rumors about his health. Yet no native reporter dared to raise a question about the matter, as it is against the law to do so.
Mr. Mubarak is the third-longest serving Egyptian ruler in the country's last 2,000 years of recorded history. He has refused to step down or even appoint a vice president. There is widespread apprehension that he is grooming his son Gamal (46) to inherit the "throne." Over 60% of Egypt's population was born during Mr. Mubarak's tenure and have not known any other ruler. Many of them want "change" and are waiting anxiously for someone to help them bring it about.
Let's hope that whatever else he may have pressing -- Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan -- Mr. Obama will try to be that change agent. One remarkable thing he can do for Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world is to offer American help in making governance more sound. He should promote the rule of law by promoting democratic elections and term limits for democratically elected presidents.
This may appear to be long shot. Mr. Obama's advisers will likely argue against it to avoid offending his host. But such a bold move would win him the hearts and minds of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims forever. With his legendary gift for communication, Mr. Obama should find a way to propose the idea and offer a Marshall-like plan of financial incentives. He can then call on Egyptians and other Muslims to do the rest.
Mr. Ibrahim, an Egyptian sociologist and human rights advocate, was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime. He has lived in exile since 2007 and is currently a visiting professor at Harvard.
Egyptians have traditionally thought of their country as the "Mother of the World." President Barack Obama says he wants to change the world. Egypt may very well be a good place to start.
Egyptians at home and abroad have been clamoring for change. Kefaya, which literally means "enough," is a slogan, an outcry, and a grassroots movement that has been organizing to reform our antique regime. Over 1,000 acts of civil disobedience have taken place all over Egypt in recent months. Participants have included the Bedouins of Sinai, the Nubians of Aswan, and even the Coptic monks of Upper Egypt.
Obviously, an American president elected on a platform of change is music to Egyptians' ears, and Mr. Obama will be a welcome guest. He is universally popular with Egyptians, Arabs and Muslims. But will average Egyptians really connect with him, let alone get a chance to meet him? With only 10 hours in the country, his visit will be carefully choreographed. Security forces will understandably separate him from the eager Egyptian crowds. Mr. Obama should consider scheduling a town meeting with representatives of Egyptian civil society. He had such a meeting when he visited France.
Mr. Obama will meet an Egyptian president who is still grieving over the untimely death in May of his 13-year-old grandson Mohammed. Despite the special bond between the two, Hosni Mubarak did not appear at the boy's funeral, or at that of the prime minister's wife a week earlier. This has led to widespread rumors about his health. Yet no native reporter dared to raise a question about the matter, as it is against the law to do so.
Mr. Mubarak is the third-longest serving Egyptian ruler in the country's last 2,000 years of recorded history. He has refused to step down or even appoint a vice president. There is widespread apprehension that he is grooming his son Gamal (46) to inherit the "throne." Over 60% of Egypt's population was born during Mr. Mubarak's tenure and have not known any other ruler. Many of them want "change" and are waiting anxiously for someone to help them bring it about.
Let's hope that whatever else he may have pressing -- Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan -- Mr. Obama will try to be that change agent. One remarkable thing he can do for Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world is to offer American help in making governance more sound. He should promote the rule of law by promoting democratic elections and term limits for democratically elected presidents.
This may appear to be long shot. Mr. Obama's advisers will likely argue against it to avoid offending his host. But such a bold move would win him the hearts and minds of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims forever. With his legendary gift for communication, Mr. Obama should find a way to propose the idea and offer a Marshall-like plan of financial incentives. He can then call on Egyptians and other Muslims to do the rest.
Mr. Ibrahim, an Egyptian sociologist and human rights advocate, was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime. He has lived in exile since 2007 and is currently a visiting professor at Harvard.
Friday, 1 May 2009
Empty feeling
The Egyptian writers who rose to prominence in the 1960s cast a long shadow over decades of Arabic fiction. Youssef Rakha considers the vexed legacy of a generation.
Hunger: A Modern Arabic Novel
Mohamed el Bisatie, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
American University in Cairo Press
Dh90
In July 2007, I met the novelist Gamal al Ghitani in Cairo to discuss the Egyptian State Merit Award, which he had just received (too late, he felt). We agreed that the group of writers known in Egypt as the Generation of the Sixties – a politically engaged, predominantly working-class group of poetically-inclined writers who made their names in the late 1960s and early 1970s – remain the principle reference point for much contemporary Arabic literature. Al Ghitani said that the Sixties’ achievement comprises only two kinds of writing. “One draws on the news and other immediate manifestations of history to take realism to its logical conclusion; it is represented by Sonallah Ibrahim. The other, which is inspired by old books and uses the old storytelling to comment on the present, is my own.”
It seemed unnecessary to disagree at the time, but I thought to myself that there was a third Sixties contingent, one typified by Ibrahim Aslan and Mohamed el Bisatie. Their work is even more typical of “the movement” than either Ibrahim’s brand of hyper-realism or al Ghitani’s heritage-orientated approach. It embodies all the qualities that come to mind when you think of the Generation of the Sixties: it focuses on collective rather than individual experience. It works through evocation and insinuation, is often almost too subtle to understand, and prioritises style over storytelling. It asserts the importance of the lower-middle and working classes, which were more visible under the Nasser regime than they had ever been before.
What sets Aslan and el Bisatie – the former a postman-turned-editor, the latter (like Naguib Mahfouz) a lifelong civil servant – apart from their generational cohort is their almost exclusive emphasis on the experience of marginalised groups, rather than all of society or the ebb and flow of history. Their short stories – always short, sometimes rambling – are Faulkneresque in their focus on small communities and their vernaculars. Aslan has the Nile-side Cairo slum of Kitkat, el Bisatie an unnamed small town overlooking Lake Manzalah in the north-eastern Nile Delta. Like Ibrahim, both authors engage broad themes like sex, religion and politics, but only indirectly, only to the extent that they play out in the lives of the disinherited, and generally in a more personal register. Like al Ghitani, they situate their narratives in an explicitly historical context, but only on behalf of the small, poor communities in question.
In addition to his numerous short stories, Aslan has only produced two novels – Malik al Hazin (Heron, 1983) and Asafir al Nil (Nile Sparrows, 2000). Recently, in an unprecedented move for a Sixties Generation writer, he has branched out into literary non-fiction. El Bisatie, on the other hand, has spent the last three decades steadily producing short novels of starkly uneven quality. To a greater extent than Aslan, he has failed to remedy the shortcoming inherent in much of the new writing celebrated in the 1960s and 1970s: a lack of strong characters or gripping storylines. The power of language to convey an intimately observed environment – particularly one where common people live – was thought to be enough for literature. But it rarely is; now that the Sixties’ political points are no longer fresh, their style frequently seems stale as well.
“Hunger” is the idiomatic translation of both Al Ju’ and Ju’: the definite and indefinite forms of the word, respectively. El Bisatie’s choice of the latter as the title of his latest book (since published as Hunger by the American University in Cairo press) reflects a particular humility of the Sixties: the belief that, when the title of a book is a one-word abstraction, the definite article is too presumptuous to include. To call the book Al Ju’ (so goes this absurd argument, advanced by a whole range of Sixties critics) would imply that the author is laying exclusive claim to the concept of hunger (this is the rough opposite of how it works in English).
Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger – another recent book about poverty in the third world, one that recognises the age-old literary virtues of character and storyline – I was reminded of many such Sixties hang-ups (all of which Adiga transcends). They include a paradoxical combination of commitment to “the people” and a lack of concern for accessibility, a tendency to prioritise flashy language over storytelling, and commitment to the unwritten commandment “Thou shalt not make context clear or state the facts”. These qualities occasionally combined to produce an exquisite short story or novella (and are much less pronounced in al Ghitani and Ibrahim than in Aslan or el Bisatie), but they restricted the scope of much talent, alienated many readers and effected a huge drop in novel sales, which had reached a peak in the mid-1960s with the works of journalist-novelists like Ihsan abdul Quddous and Fathi Ghanem; contemporary Arabic literature has had serious trouble building a readership ever since.
********************************
El Bisatie devised his technique of a collective narrative voice in two 1978 novellas, Al Maqha az Zujaji (The Glass Cafe) and Al Ayyam as Sa’bah (Hard Days): simple, sad evocations of the lives of geographically isolated town-dwellers. In these books, as in the bulk of el Bisatie’s subsequent work, the narration is either delivered by an amorphous “we” or by a rapidly shifting blend of individual voices – in both cases, it as if el Bisatie’s small town itself is telling its own tale.
It is a technically impressive mode of writing, one el Bisatie employed to brilliant effect as recently as 1994, in Sakhab al Buhairah (Clamour of the Lake), a prose poem-cum-foundation myth of life in the rural space between the lake and the sea in the governorate of Domyat. But none of the collective voice’s potential poetic power (often squandered by sloppiness and repetition) makes up for a lack of absorbing drama or vivid individual characters. This helps explain why Ju’ is such a slow and dreary read.
The book opens with a woman named Sakina sitting by the doorstep of her rough-and-tumble, mostly mud-brick family house, her headscarf in a bundle between her legs. Her perpetually unemployed husband, Zaghloul, uses a piece of straw to clean his teeth – his way of telling her that she had better borrow a reghif or two of bread from the neighbour who baked that morning. Inside the house, their sons (Zaher, 12, and Ragab, 10), barely awake, caress their tummies. Dialogue between husband and wife is intermingled with their respective internal monologues, all rendered in a language somewhere between dialect and standard Arabic. El Bisatie’s usual poetic intensity is replaced by a more true-to-life, mundane idiom that is neither absorbing nor (as the intention sometimes seems to be) comic.
From the start, it is hard not to recall far more powerful depictions of the subjective experience of hunger (in Mohammad Choukri or Knut Hamsen, for example). You race through the next few pages, hoping for some more compelling situation or scene. But having taken in that first image, it turns out you have taken in the whole book: paper-thin characters on the lookout for food, only food, and not thinking much at all.
Ju’ is built around four anecdotes recalled without any indication of when they occur or how (or if) they relate. First, Zaghloul takes to eavesdropping on a group of young men from the town who are studying at university in Cairo. Home for the holiday, they are meeting at the cafe around which Zaghloul hovers (hoping against hope for a free drink, perhaps?). “Oh Sakina,” he later recalls to his wife, “education is so sweet... Sitting on the mastaba by the wall, I hear them talking. And, oh, what talk! I understand bit, I don’t understand a bit... They say that one shouldn’t work everyday like a water buffalo tied to a water wheel, one has to have time to think. But, people, think about what? They did not say. I wanted to ask them but I was silent.”
The encounter, far from influencing Zaghloul one way or the other, acts only to dehumanise him for the reader, to solidify him as a caricature of the sub-proletariat. Likewise, in the second anecdote he blasphemes: “God in His glory created the world and the people and everything, and ordered them to worship Him. I say to myself, if He created all this, what does He need their worshipping for ... If He in His glory wants them to worship him, why doesn’t He appear in whatever form He likes and say ‘I created you, worship Me!’ Then nobody will say no.” This is a silly caricature of shallow atheism – neither interesting in its own right nor useful in developing Zaghloul’s character, which remains opaque and stereotyped: the poor man with poor thoughts who invariably ends up being beaten by the imam.
The third anecdote involves Hagg Abdur Rahim – a man who “returned home from foreign countries” to the village with as much new money as new weight, which renders him immobile. Zaghloul works for Hagg Abdur for two months, bringing his family a rare stretch of financial stability. In the fourth – and perhaps the most interesting – anecdote, Sakina is similarly subcontracted as a servant by the two female teenage servants of Hagg Hashem, another affluent member of the community. When she moves into Hashem’s house, she brings along her husband and children, who feast on the household’s supplies. But once again, the protagonists reveal no individuality, enacting their destiny (acquiring what food they can) like shadow puppets, two-dimensional and skin deep.
Ju’ ends with Zaher being beaten up by the father of his relatively affluent friend Abdalla, who has been providing him with much-needed snacks. “His father,” who does not want him to mix with such rabble, “was a teacher at the primary school and he had not one but four galabeyas, he wore an undershirt and had three meals a day.” Zaghloul accepts a few meters of fabric as compensation, but when Abdalla’s father hands Zaher a galabeya to replace the one that was torn during the beating, Zaher throws the garment on the ground and walks away. In The White Tiger, Adiga has his poor man protagonist, Balram, rebel – and transform himself with a brutal murder. In Ju’, el Bisatie has Zaher make a feeble, hackneyed gesture, without the slightest indication of whether or how the rebellion will improve (or worsen) his lot. Perhaps a gesture of this type is in character for Zaher; we never know him well enough to say.
********************************
Perhaps what al Ghitani was getting at (consciously or unconsciously) in our conversation was not that the Sixties produced only two kinds of writing but rather that only two kinds of writing have survived since. Aslan and el Bisatie’s mode, arguably the most characteristic of the Generation, is fast dying out, just like the predominantly deferential, ineffectual characters it depicts. Today, the Zaghlouls of Egyptian fiction are more like Adiga’s Balram: upwardly mobile heroes who at least try to change their lives. The heirs of the Generation of the Sixties (prose poets-turned-novelists some three decades younger, often referred to quite aptly as the Generation of the Nineties) have turned the principles of their forebears upside down. Writers like Mustafa Zikri and Ibrahim Farghali – however else you evaluate their achievement – have traded the collective for the individual, the musical swirl of the “we” for the developed narratives of the “I”. As a vehicle for conveying modern reality, el Bisatie’s collective voice sounds less and less convincing – like the echo of an echo, no longer beautiful twice removed. It is doubtful that the poetic style he perfected in Shakhab al Buhairah will live on much longer.
Early on, partly in response to the Sixties Generation’s obsession with “the people”, the Nineties writers avoided social and political engagement altogether, and edged away from the vernacular towards a dynamic, thoroughly contemporary standard Arabic designed for finding the magic in the quotidien. As a result, they are realists only insofar as they use everyday contemporary life as their starting point. They write about foreigners and rich people with fully developed and convincing personalities – and about ghosts, psychotic breaks, unrealistic and fantastical turns of events. Their styles borrow from across high and low culture. Most importantly, they show at least as much interest in plot and character development as style. They tell stories of love, death, hunger and the full range of specimens who experience them. In doing so, they offer the reader so much more than the Sixties version of reality which, through relentless, obstinate insistence on being true to the grassroots vernacular of its time (and nothing more), already appears unreal.
Youssef Rakha, a regular contributor to the Review, is the author of Beirut shi mahal (Beirut Some Place) and Borguiba ’ala madad (Borguiba Reluctantly). He lives in Cairo.
Hunger: A Modern Arabic Novel
Mohamed el Bisatie, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
American University in Cairo Press
Dh90
In July 2007, I met the novelist Gamal al Ghitani in Cairo to discuss the Egyptian State Merit Award, which he had just received (too late, he felt). We agreed that the group of writers known in Egypt as the Generation of the Sixties – a politically engaged, predominantly working-class group of poetically-inclined writers who made their names in the late 1960s and early 1970s – remain the principle reference point for much contemporary Arabic literature. Al Ghitani said that the Sixties’ achievement comprises only two kinds of writing. “One draws on the news and other immediate manifestations of history to take realism to its logical conclusion; it is represented by Sonallah Ibrahim. The other, which is inspired by old books and uses the old storytelling to comment on the present, is my own.”
It seemed unnecessary to disagree at the time, but I thought to myself that there was a third Sixties contingent, one typified by Ibrahim Aslan and Mohamed el Bisatie. Their work is even more typical of “the movement” than either Ibrahim’s brand of hyper-realism or al Ghitani’s heritage-orientated approach. It embodies all the qualities that come to mind when you think of the Generation of the Sixties: it focuses on collective rather than individual experience. It works through evocation and insinuation, is often almost too subtle to understand, and prioritises style over storytelling. It asserts the importance of the lower-middle and working classes, which were more visible under the Nasser regime than they had ever been before.
What sets Aslan and el Bisatie – the former a postman-turned-editor, the latter (like Naguib Mahfouz) a lifelong civil servant – apart from their generational cohort is their almost exclusive emphasis on the experience of marginalised groups, rather than all of society or the ebb and flow of history. Their short stories – always short, sometimes rambling – are Faulkneresque in their focus on small communities and their vernaculars. Aslan has the Nile-side Cairo slum of Kitkat, el Bisatie an unnamed small town overlooking Lake Manzalah in the north-eastern Nile Delta. Like Ibrahim, both authors engage broad themes like sex, religion and politics, but only indirectly, only to the extent that they play out in the lives of the disinherited, and generally in a more personal register. Like al Ghitani, they situate their narratives in an explicitly historical context, but only on behalf of the small, poor communities in question.
In addition to his numerous short stories, Aslan has only produced two novels – Malik al Hazin (Heron, 1983) and Asafir al Nil (Nile Sparrows, 2000). Recently, in an unprecedented move for a Sixties Generation writer, he has branched out into literary non-fiction. El Bisatie, on the other hand, has spent the last three decades steadily producing short novels of starkly uneven quality. To a greater extent than Aslan, he has failed to remedy the shortcoming inherent in much of the new writing celebrated in the 1960s and 1970s: a lack of strong characters or gripping storylines. The power of language to convey an intimately observed environment – particularly one where common people live – was thought to be enough for literature. But it rarely is; now that the Sixties’ political points are no longer fresh, their style frequently seems stale as well.
“Hunger” is the idiomatic translation of both Al Ju’ and Ju’: the definite and indefinite forms of the word, respectively. El Bisatie’s choice of the latter as the title of his latest book (since published as Hunger by the American University in Cairo press) reflects a particular humility of the Sixties: the belief that, when the title of a book is a one-word abstraction, the definite article is too presumptuous to include. To call the book Al Ju’ (so goes this absurd argument, advanced by a whole range of Sixties critics) would imply that the author is laying exclusive claim to the concept of hunger (this is the rough opposite of how it works in English).
Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger – another recent book about poverty in the third world, one that recognises the age-old literary virtues of character and storyline – I was reminded of many such Sixties hang-ups (all of which Adiga transcends). They include a paradoxical combination of commitment to “the people” and a lack of concern for accessibility, a tendency to prioritise flashy language over storytelling, and commitment to the unwritten commandment “Thou shalt not make context clear or state the facts”. These qualities occasionally combined to produce an exquisite short story or novella (and are much less pronounced in al Ghitani and Ibrahim than in Aslan or el Bisatie), but they restricted the scope of much talent, alienated many readers and effected a huge drop in novel sales, which had reached a peak in the mid-1960s with the works of journalist-novelists like Ihsan abdul Quddous and Fathi Ghanem; contemporary Arabic literature has had serious trouble building a readership ever since.
********************************
El Bisatie devised his technique of a collective narrative voice in two 1978 novellas, Al Maqha az Zujaji (The Glass Cafe) and Al Ayyam as Sa’bah (Hard Days): simple, sad evocations of the lives of geographically isolated town-dwellers. In these books, as in the bulk of el Bisatie’s subsequent work, the narration is either delivered by an amorphous “we” or by a rapidly shifting blend of individual voices – in both cases, it as if el Bisatie’s small town itself is telling its own tale.
It is a technically impressive mode of writing, one el Bisatie employed to brilliant effect as recently as 1994, in Sakhab al Buhairah (Clamour of the Lake), a prose poem-cum-foundation myth of life in the rural space between the lake and the sea in the governorate of Domyat. But none of the collective voice’s potential poetic power (often squandered by sloppiness and repetition) makes up for a lack of absorbing drama or vivid individual characters. This helps explain why Ju’ is such a slow and dreary read.
The book opens with a woman named Sakina sitting by the doorstep of her rough-and-tumble, mostly mud-brick family house, her headscarf in a bundle between her legs. Her perpetually unemployed husband, Zaghloul, uses a piece of straw to clean his teeth – his way of telling her that she had better borrow a reghif or two of bread from the neighbour who baked that morning. Inside the house, their sons (Zaher, 12, and Ragab, 10), barely awake, caress their tummies. Dialogue between husband and wife is intermingled with their respective internal monologues, all rendered in a language somewhere between dialect and standard Arabic. El Bisatie’s usual poetic intensity is replaced by a more true-to-life, mundane idiom that is neither absorbing nor (as the intention sometimes seems to be) comic.
From the start, it is hard not to recall far more powerful depictions of the subjective experience of hunger (in Mohammad Choukri or Knut Hamsen, for example). You race through the next few pages, hoping for some more compelling situation or scene. But having taken in that first image, it turns out you have taken in the whole book: paper-thin characters on the lookout for food, only food, and not thinking much at all.
Ju’ is built around four anecdotes recalled without any indication of when they occur or how (or if) they relate. First, Zaghloul takes to eavesdropping on a group of young men from the town who are studying at university in Cairo. Home for the holiday, they are meeting at the cafe around which Zaghloul hovers (hoping against hope for a free drink, perhaps?). “Oh Sakina,” he later recalls to his wife, “education is so sweet... Sitting on the mastaba by the wall, I hear them talking. And, oh, what talk! I understand bit, I don’t understand a bit... They say that one shouldn’t work everyday like a water buffalo tied to a water wheel, one has to have time to think. But, people, think about what? They did not say. I wanted to ask them but I was silent.”
The encounter, far from influencing Zaghloul one way or the other, acts only to dehumanise him for the reader, to solidify him as a caricature of the sub-proletariat. Likewise, in the second anecdote he blasphemes: “God in His glory created the world and the people and everything, and ordered them to worship Him. I say to myself, if He created all this, what does He need their worshipping for ... If He in His glory wants them to worship him, why doesn’t He appear in whatever form He likes and say ‘I created you, worship Me!’ Then nobody will say no.” This is a silly caricature of shallow atheism – neither interesting in its own right nor useful in developing Zaghloul’s character, which remains opaque and stereotyped: the poor man with poor thoughts who invariably ends up being beaten by the imam.
The third anecdote involves Hagg Abdur Rahim – a man who “returned home from foreign countries” to the village with as much new money as new weight, which renders him immobile. Zaghloul works for Hagg Abdur for two months, bringing his family a rare stretch of financial stability. In the fourth – and perhaps the most interesting – anecdote, Sakina is similarly subcontracted as a servant by the two female teenage servants of Hagg Hashem, another affluent member of the community. When she moves into Hashem’s house, she brings along her husband and children, who feast on the household’s supplies. But once again, the protagonists reveal no individuality, enacting their destiny (acquiring what food they can) like shadow puppets, two-dimensional and skin deep.
Ju’ ends with Zaher being beaten up by the father of his relatively affluent friend Abdalla, who has been providing him with much-needed snacks. “His father,” who does not want him to mix with such rabble, “was a teacher at the primary school and he had not one but four galabeyas, he wore an undershirt and had three meals a day.” Zaghloul accepts a few meters of fabric as compensation, but when Abdalla’s father hands Zaher a galabeya to replace the one that was torn during the beating, Zaher throws the garment on the ground and walks away. In The White Tiger, Adiga has his poor man protagonist, Balram, rebel – and transform himself with a brutal murder. In Ju’, el Bisatie has Zaher make a feeble, hackneyed gesture, without the slightest indication of whether or how the rebellion will improve (or worsen) his lot. Perhaps a gesture of this type is in character for Zaher; we never know him well enough to say.
********************************
Perhaps what al Ghitani was getting at (consciously or unconsciously) in our conversation was not that the Sixties produced only two kinds of writing but rather that only two kinds of writing have survived since. Aslan and el Bisatie’s mode, arguably the most characteristic of the Generation, is fast dying out, just like the predominantly deferential, ineffectual characters it depicts. Today, the Zaghlouls of Egyptian fiction are more like Adiga’s Balram: upwardly mobile heroes who at least try to change their lives. The heirs of the Generation of the Sixties (prose poets-turned-novelists some three decades younger, often referred to quite aptly as the Generation of the Nineties) have turned the principles of their forebears upside down. Writers like Mustafa Zikri and Ibrahim Farghali – however else you evaluate their achievement – have traded the collective for the individual, the musical swirl of the “we” for the developed narratives of the “I”. As a vehicle for conveying modern reality, el Bisatie’s collective voice sounds less and less convincing – like the echo of an echo, no longer beautiful twice removed. It is doubtful that the poetic style he perfected in Shakhab al Buhairah will live on much longer.
Early on, partly in response to the Sixties Generation’s obsession with “the people”, the Nineties writers avoided social and political engagement altogether, and edged away from the vernacular towards a dynamic, thoroughly contemporary standard Arabic designed for finding the magic in the quotidien. As a result, they are realists only insofar as they use everyday contemporary life as their starting point. They write about foreigners and rich people with fully developed and convincing personalities – and about ghosts, psychotic breaks, unrealistic and fantastical turns of events. Their styles borrow from across high and low culture. Most importantly, they show at least as much interest in plot and character development as style. They tell stories of love, death, hunger and the full range of specimens who experience them. In doing so, they offer the reader so much more than the Sixties version of reality which, through relentless, obstinate insistence on being true to the grassroots vernacular of its time (and nothing more), already appears unreal.
Youssef Rakha, a regular contributor to the Review, is the author of Beirut shi mahal (Beirut Some Place) and Borguiba ’ala madad (Borguiba Reluctantly). He lives in Cairo.
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