Cairo Post

 

The Egyptian Museum is a clunker warehouse of a building, stocked full of the kinds of artifacts that glitter and carry a $20 of $50 admission ticket in American and European museums. Some of the works do glitter in Cairo - the jewelry of Queen H and of course the fabled sarcophogi of Tutankhamen, in their air-conditioned, guarded rooms, are what a tourist might expect. Crowds of Germans, Brits, Indians, Americans - ‘look at the detailing? it takes a long time just to build a coffin these days’ - move in slow, frustrated bursts, looking at necklaces, King Tuts outer jeweled sarcophogus, then the innermost one - ‘did it really fit in the other one?’ A British woman noticed that she was taller than the boy king, and ‘probably couldn’t fit’ in the sarcophogus with the famous headdress that’s striped gold and blue.

And while the room of the mummies is also air-conditioned, presenting thousands-years old monarchs in typical enough museum setting - quiet, sneaking cell phone photos, temperature controlled glass cases for the bodies of Ramses II, Seti, and others, including one whose long curly black hair does not hide an enormous head wound (he was a warrior) -  the rest of the museum is, well, a warehouse. Seated statues of all sizes are placed in any corner, along with endless rows of sarcophogi, burial chariots, and in one room, the Greco-Roman mummies from the 2nd century AD, the ones with faded, fresco-style face portraits. The faces look remarkably like modern day Egyptians, a friend said, as we also assumed that one dark bearded portrait must have resembled Jesus. The jewelry room of a Queen H is replicated in any fancy jewelry store here in Cairo.

However much clutter there is in this clunker warehouse of a museum - soon to be moved to new digs out in Giza (like Ramses statue a few weeks ago) - it feels singularly Egyptian, whether in the contemporary faces of the Roman portraits, or by the fact that any American museum would case one of these pieces behind top-of-the-line glass, with a useless, interactive video accompaniment. The copy for the mass of arranged artifacts in the Egyptian Museum, if there is a tag at all, seems purposely vague, sometimes no more than a note in pencil, listing the Pharaonic Dynasty of this headdress, but not the year. But in Egypt, perhaps you’re expected to know that.

Last Saturday, after seeing a Fayrouz-soundtracked dance concert on the war in Lebanon (more to come on that), I packed into a cab with 4 others and went to Giza. We arrived around midnight. After a few unpleasant offers - men running alongside the cab and holding the driver’s side door, shouting in that yes, they could give us horses - we were in a back alley, where there was a stable. I have never been on a horse other than pony rides, but soon 5 of us were trotting through narrow alley ways, past one room houses, resting camels, quiet shisha cafes of old men, and a few kids smoking hash sitting on a dumpster. The Pyramids were in sight after we left the alleys, heading up a trail past an old cemetary and up into the sudden desert. There is a high fence guarding in the protected area of the Pyramids, and we cantered along it, then turned more to the open sand. Our horses started a few brief gallops and the Pyramids loomed in the dark on our right, casting twin shadows even in the dark. The lights of Giza and Cairo stretch in dots all around, and the Pyramids are partially lit. Even from a distance, and in 1am desert dark, they were commanding, though not enough to come out in a photo (though my newest roommate took a long exposure shot that I’ll post later).

We stopped for tea at the top of a large, rockier dune, a planned part of the excusion on the part of our guide, who would ride alongside throwing tiny firecrackers or cracking his wip to make our horses gallop. The were a crowd of rocks and a man boiling hot water and extra sweet mint tea for the various horse riders who come out to the desert late at night. We galloped back across the expanse of desert to the alleyways, a 30 min trip, thereabouts. On the return, I was on a different horse who took off - I was 100 yards or more ahead of everyone else, galloping more than I had on the way to the tea, the Pyramids on my left horizon this time. Cantering hurts - I am still a little soar from all the quick ups and downs - but galloping, you flow more, the horse feels lighter, even if it’s dark and the sand is a little shapeless, and you can’t hold your camera for proof.

 

 
American tourists off the bus. The little streets of Khan al-Khalil spread out behind the palm trees at the corner of the plaza.   

The juice in Egypt is delicious - fresh mango juice from a shop, or the bottled stuff from the grocery store. Coffee usually goes with sugar here, same with the mint tea - really anything hot goes with two sugars it seems. Yesterday I was back at Bab’Zuwweila — one of three remaining gates into Fatamid Cairo and the one from which the last Mamluk sultan was hung when the Ottoman Turks took over the city. Under the gate now is a garment market, and the up the road is Khan al-Khalili, the very famous market that competes with the Pyramids and the Citadel for tourist sights and that imagination for Arabian nights. I was in Khan al-Khalili last week, where we went to the Naguib Mahfouz Cafe a day or two after his funeral in Cairo. The menus told the story of Khan al-Khalili, how the tiny, partially covered streets crammed with shops had fascinated visitors for centuries. It had vintage photos of the Khan in the 20s. There was an American woman, perhaps an academic or some kind of government-tourism promoter, talking to some Egyptian business-types. I could make out a few bits on how productive it was for tourists to be here, to get away from the newspapers and actually walk around the Khan, you know, buying things and seeing Egypt. But she didn’t speak any Arabic, not even basics to the waiter. She spoke very deliberately to the waiter in the slow, rude English that people speak in foreign countries - I’ll haave a diet Coke, pleease."

I saw another American woman today at breakfast in another cafe, sitting with her Arabic-speaking, presumably Egyptian boyfriend. She was looking increasingly pissed off, flustered, that combination you see in people when they look like they’re about to explode at the waiter, quietly. Her American pancakes were without syrup, and enough butter, and he juice hadn’t been brought out yet. The boyfriend did the requisite complaining in Arabic, while she huffed. The syrup arrived; it was too hot, she needed a spoon. The boyfriend folded his napkin and showed here how to pick up a hot dish, like we do with the kettle here. She seemed to calm a little, pouring the syrup with her makeshift mit. The juice never came, more butter did, and instead of juice, a bottle of water. She would say thank you in Arabic, but not before waving her arms, pointing with her knife at the plate from a distance like there was a dead animal on it. More butter. Where’s the juice. I ordered more butter. Shuu’kran.

I read a lot of David Berman here. This won’t come as a surprise to some. By a lot of David Berman I mean Actual Air, rereading "Classic Water" or "Self-Portrait at 28" and discovering the ones I used to pass over, like "The War in Apartment 1812." I told a cab driver I was from London yesterday, and learned what he had to say of London - "number one" - and then I fumbled something in Arabic about London and Cairo both being very large cities. But usually I learn more about Cairo and Egypt here talking to people than I do about the places I tell them I’m from, unlike this bit from "Self-Portrait at 28."

"It’s one of the little disappointments
that makes you think about getting away,
going to Holly Springs or Coral Gables
and taking a room on the square
with a landlady whose hands are scored
by disinfectant, telling the people you meet
that you are from Alaska, and listen
to what they have to say about Alaska
until you have learned much more about Alaska
than you ever will about Holly Springs or Coral Gables."

Those little disappointments are absent here, then. But I’ll keep telling people I’m from London, or Toronto, or maybe just Boston or New York, to see what I can learn.  

This is important.

Last week, the US military in Iraq recorded 2,974 casualties - one more than the number of people killed on 9/11.
    Some 19,773 Americans have been injured during the so-caleld war against terrorism. Of that number, 8991 are so badly wounded that they can never serve their country in uniform again.
    These figures were presented by the US chief of staff in his testimony in Congress.
    In other words, the Bush administration is not good at protecting Americans lives. Instead, thousands more are being sent to their deaths…

    Bush has committed countless sins under the pretext of the war against terrorism. However, the biggest sin is his failure to define terrorism and confuse terrorism with liberation movements against foreign occupation.
    The greatest false claims is that the war he has launched is not merely a military conflict, but also an ideological struggle of the 21st century.
    Bush then insulted Muslims when he described Islam as "fascist."
    Bush’s war against terrorism has given the terrorists a broader scope for their activities in places that had never experienced terrorism.
    Bush’s aggressive policies and the murder of thousands of civilians have fueled the terrorist ideology and made it more attractive to those who believe that killing Americans is the shortest way to paradise.

Nabil Zaki, "US Killing Machine," in Al-Ahal (described as "leftist opposition daily"), reprinted in The Egytpian Gazette, Monday, September 11, 2006. The article was printed under the op-ed page’s "alternate view" header.

I’ve read two op-ed pages of The Egyptian Gazette so far- the staff editorial runs in the top left corner in bold print and maybe three times the font size as the other articles. I read a pretty straight-forward editorial against Israel’s destruction of Lebanon last week. Here’s today’s 9/11 editorial:

Five Years Later

FIVE years after the september 11 attacks, neither the US nor the world feel safer than before. Vulnerability is the keyword. Bin Ladenism has thrived on US foreign policy blunders.
    The sympathy generated post 9/11, especially in the Muslim World has been dissipated by Americans misdeeds in the Middle East. Whether deliberately or not, US president George W. Bush has antagonised first by terming his country’s ‘war on terror’ as a crusade. The term has agonising implications in the Muslim memory. About a month ago, he talked about determination to fight what he called Islamofascism. His talk came against the backdrop of Israel’s devastating war in Lebanon.
    Bush’s lexicon has reinforced the notion widely held among Muslims that the US sees in Islam its new foe now that the Soviet Union has crumbled. This lends credence to the so-called clash of civilisations.
    Adding to this perception is the US administration’s obstinate obsession with militarism as the Key to uprooting global terrorism. This approach has proven myopic and counter-productive. Iraq is a glaring example.

The garment market near Bab’Zuweila.

I told the cab driver "Al Gazira al Wusta" but once we crossed the 6th of October Bridge into Zamalek, I didn’t give any directions. Mostly because I still forget left and right in Arabic, but also because I wanted to see how he’d go. The usual is to go up the right side of the island, up the narrow road along the Nile with fancy apartment buildings with names like "Nile View" and "Soloman House" in Art Deco type. This cab driver went up the left side of Zamalek, first past the Gezira Club - the country club of Zamalek (the former gardens of a queen whose palace is now the Marriott). We turned through narrow streets left and right. I knew we were going north, and I recognized the main road on the left side of Zamalek, along the Nile by Ismail Mohammed, where an ATM stole some of my money last week.

Once we drove past the Vodafone shop and Radioshack, I knew we were close, and finally we passed the little corner floweshop that overcharged me for a big plant I put in my room the other day. I suppose I ignored the price while trying to talk to the flowerman in broken colloquial, with the greetings and biographical questions. "Mr. Frederick" he said, and he gave me a rose. Of course, then again that is standard procedure to a customer who won’t haggle and is about to overpay for a potted plant.

Earlier yesterday I knew it was an especially hot day by the haze/smog out the apartment windows and the totally still Nile. No breeze today. In taxi cabs with only one back window that opens, often, that breeze is help.

I signed up for a class in Middle Eastern Studies with no stated topic or time, professor, location, because I just wanted to get out the International Student Services Office with a schedule intact. Surprise, I was the only one to register for mystery class, which was cancelled to begin with. Quickly jotting down possible courses from a library computer, I found a History seminar on Jordan and the Palestinians. Conversations, signatures, and another pushy meeting in the ISSO, and I was in the class. There is a class trip to Jordan planned for October.

Illuminating copy in the caption, and very biographical: "Away from town, not everything depends on oil."

The New York Times thinks you should go to Dubai. I was sold on the idea in earlier spreads in the New Yorker and in Vanity Fair, really, but look! - we can be eco-tourists in Dubai, in reaches of desert where "not everything depends on oil." !!!!!!

Go, traveler, to Dubai, for the docile, earth-kind Orientalist fantasias of a not-very-hot-at-all-for-the-desert-really desert vacation. And one that is eco-friendly, in-sha’allah.

 

 

For a long time Robert Fisk has filed Middle East stories for The Independent you wouldn’t find in any mainstream American paper. This summer as he documented the Israeli destruction of Lebanon better than most, he reiterated the line that Hizbullah started the war. Not surprising to read in a newspaper, where it’s most often history that gets cut during copy. But Fisk went farther, as Jonathan Cook points out in this critique:

The problem is in his constantly aired statement that “Hizbollah provoked this war by capturing two Israeli soldiers and killing three others on 12 July” (16 Aug 2006). Left as a simple statement of fact, it could be allowed to pass without comment. But Fisk repeatedly adds a series of further insinuations: that Hizbullah wanted Israel to attack, that it planned the war (not just that it planned for the war), that it knew precisely the scale of destruction Israel would unleash, that it was following Syria’s orders, and that by implication Syria — and possibly Hizbullah — wanted Lebanon’s destruction.

I haven’t been watching Fox News here in Cairo. I do at home now and then, mostly with my sister, when we want to reevaluate our Boston isolation, or more often just laugh depressingly at the slick deception of Rupert Murdoch’s programs. I don’t know if O’Reilly’s been quoting Fox correspondents saying similar things. Maybe.

But Fisk’s reporting usually stands out from the glut of articles written with a State Department glossary and a copy of Muslim Rage. What’s going on?

Surely, after the apparent inconsistencies in Fisk’s own commentaries over more than a month of reporting, his readers deserve a profounder summation of his views than this. How and why did two hostile sides — Syria, and Israel and the US — both plan a war, much at the same time, whose outcome was the certain destruction of Lebanon?

We can speculate about Israel’s interests in doing this. It may have hoped to provoke a civil war in Lebanon, much as it is trying to do in Gaza, to weaken its neighbor. It may have believed that by terrifying the general Lebanese population from the south, it could permanently reoccupy the area. It may also have hoped that, if it were winning such a war, it could drag in Syria and Iran.

But why would Syria want Lebanon destroyed? A fit of pique at being expelled from Lebanon last year according to US designs for a Cedar Revolution? Is that Fisk’s conclusion?

Read the rest of Cook here.

 

This evening’s sunset from the balcony. Those low houses on the bottom are houseboats, on the bank of the Nile. I’m told the Muslim Brotherhood started in this neighborhood, across the Nile.  

I’ll start with the huge dragonflies outside the window during the day. I thought there was dust on the window when I was going over some of my photos, but they are the packs of dragonflies that twirl outside, seven stories up during the day (see day photos below). The Nile runs to the right below. Since it’s always sunny here the river is always flickering. The dragonflies in the day are always buzzing. Cairo is always busy.

My view in Zamalek is very particular. Quite isolated on the island, being given the ex-pat, embassy, green leaf impression of Cairo. Tahrir Square, where the AUC campus sits split into three, is not far from Zamalek - across to the other bank of the Nile - but the cabs, traffic, smell, and noise seem far away behind my big window to the Nile.

So classes started today - a history course on State and Society in the Middle East: the Ottoman Empire, 1699-1914. A little wide perhaps. Tomorrow morning I’ll go to After Empire: Nationalism and Socialism in the ME from 1914 to the present. I should have the whole period covered, then. Tomorrow I’ll also go to Mod. Standard Arabic and International Politics of the Middle East - the courses don’t here really go for the sexy punch, like at Vassar: "War Talk," "Revolutionary America," "The Environmental Imagination." My final course is only specified "Specific Topic in Mid East Studies," topic, time, and location TBA.

I am nearly done with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The romance and rumbling of 1950s Saigon, with the grizzled Brit reporter Fowler clashing with the quiet American idealist Pyle over ideologies and a Vietnamese women are far from Cairo life. Yes, yes,  I know. But Greene’s novels - well, this and reading The End of the Affair in Spain two and half years ago- express at least what I could imagine the most romantic of ex-pat life to be like. Green was good at that. The love, the cynicism, his genuine connection and precise image of a foreign place - reading Greene while traveling, though I am no Roman Catholic, is a trip.

At the end of the day, in a cab back across the Nile.