Dispatch from the Holy Land (Part 2)

In the service taxi on the way from the Hawarra checkpoint to Ramallah, I sat next to a well-dressed Palestinian man named Sami. Sami, who is from Nablus, works in a television station in Ramallah, creating visuals. We struck up a conversation after he informed me, in perfect English, that the service taxi would be an extra 5 shekels per person, due to its having waited at the checkpoint.

Sami’s family lives in the old city of Nablus, not too far from the site of the bulldozed house where Barnaby and Greg’s attempted kidnapping took place. He told me that he had watched as the IDF bulldozed the house while the family, hiding from mortar attack, was still in the basement. He told me that he would have rather died in his own house than spent three days blindfolded and handcuffed in the Hawarra detention camp during the Second Intifada. And with a tone of utter certainty and calm, he told me that he had “no doubt the Third Intifada is coming.”

In that one statement, Sami perfectly summed up the problem. It is a sentiment that permeates every conversation I had; it is an overwhelming sense of resignation, of futility, of desperation. On both sides.

When I would ask an Israeli what were the hopes for peace, they would usually tell me that “we want peace but they do not.” And when I put the same question to an Arab, I would get the same response. Not one person expressed optimism, few used the word hope. When I left Israel, I felt the same way.

It’s hard to search for a resolution to a situation where everyone is at fault and no one is to blame: The IDF and the Israeli government consistently take actions that undermine the peace process. The Palestinian Authority is unable to provide law and order in its own strongholds. Hamas and other organizations ensure that Palestine remains a war zone, propped up by money and aid from foreign governments. The West, though especially the U.S. and Britain are responsible for a post-colonial Middle East that was doomed from the very first slicing up of the region; yet no Western country has made a long-term commitment to a peace process (Oslo came at the end of the Clinton Presidency, the Road Map was virtually abandoned, and now Annapolis comes with less then a year and half left in the Bush presidency).
The other problem is that no one has articulated what peace would actually look like. One thing that is clear is that current visions of peace are often incompatible. While Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, Settlers seek to surreptitiously expand Israel’s future borders (based on the belief that any future UN agreement will draw borders based on the “facts on the ground,” i.e. the number of Jews in any area).

I would like to end this post an “up-note,” but I just don’t know what that would be. I do believe that one day there will be peace in Israel/Palestine; I just don’t know what that peace will look like or how long it will last for. For thousands of years, people have been fighting over this land; this conflict is written on every stone and every olive grove.

Dispatch from the Holy Land (Part 1)

Two Kilometers from Nablus, on the road to Ramallah, stands three, 100 meter long lines of concrete blocks running up to the Hawarra Checkpoint. Named after the detention camp set up there by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) during the Second Intifada, the checkpoint is more reminiscent of a cattle coral than any boarder crossing I’ve ever seen.

As you approach the checkpoint (on foot unless you have yellow, Israeli plates), you are funneled into a line where the IDF checks documents and searches bags. Standing in a 10 minute long line in front of a Palestinian couple who looked as if they were at least in their 70’s, I reached in my pocket and flashed the blue and gold of my U.S. passport. The Israeli soldier motioned for me to come forward. I told him I had been in Nablus to see the Church of Joseph’s Well. He waved me through.

In fact, I had been in Nablus at the invitation of an American I had met on Arab Bus 18 to Ramallah. Beau, a former marketing major and brewer from Rochester, has been teaching English in Nablus since mid-October with Project Hope. The only other non-Palestinian on the bus to Ramallah, we had ended up sitting next to each other, and when I told him I was heading to Ramallah to walk around and get a feel for the city, he encouraged me to come with him to Nablus. It took me about 20 minutes to work up the nerve to say yes.

Nablus is a city about an hour from Ramallah by service (ser-vees) taxi, although its actually only 30 kilometers. Once famous as a major producer of olive oil soap and the home of the Samaritans (a sect of Jews who intermarried with Gentiles about two-and-a-half thousand years ago), Nablus is now better known as one of the worst hit cities of the Second Intifada. It is a city that, until recently, has been outside the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), run by competing “Brigades” of “Martyrs” or “Freedom-Fighters.”

As we walked through the Old City—which is the base for these Brigades—the posters of martyrs and Brigade flags were a potent reminder of just where we were. Beau had given me an official NGO-looking vest to put on and had instructed me not to take pictures, lest I capture the ire of someone wanted by the IDF. After Beau pointed out the place where a predator drone took out a wanted suspect and two men who were with him in early October, we passed the site of a bombed-out soap factory, destroyed to make room for tanks during the Second Intifada (many soap factories were destroyed or closed with concrete as part of the IDF’s economic warfare during the Intifada). Up the road a bit was the place where a house had been bulldozed with the family inside.

Beau didn’t actually take me up there. Which leads me to a funny (kind of) storey. On our way into the Old City, we ran in to a friend of Beau’s, Barnaby—a Canadian with visa problems, running a tour company. Barnaby and his friend Greg, who will be studying at AUC next semester, were held, hands and legs spread, against the wall opposite the bulldozed house for about twenty minutes by a member of one the Brigades. When he went to go get either his gun or his buddies (they are not sure which) a few of the other Palestinians in the square helped smuggle Barnaby and Greg out of the Old City. Later, while sitting in Nablus’s hotel, having a drink, the commander of PA forces in Nablus came in to let them know that the man was “insane,” had been beaten unconscious, and taken to a mental institution in Bethlehem. The man then took Barnaby and Greg back through the Old City—a bit like getting back on the bike.

(That’s enough for one post. I promise another one very soon.)

Edit:
For an update on the situation check out thisBBC article about and IDF incursion into Nablus.

Cultures, Seperated by Metal Detectors

Well finals are rapidly approaching, evidenced by the onslaught of midterms and papers over the past few weeks (yes, in Egypt, midterms are given roughly three weeks behind schedule). And obviously a lot has transpired since my last post.

Perhaps one of the most interesting and informative experiences I’ve had in that time was provided by the American media. A few weeks ago, my friends and I went to see The Kingdom at the Nile City Towers Mall. The mall is a towering behemoth of a building, sprouting two brand new condominium towers capped by gold-lit penthouses. The inside ranges from a Starbucks (coming soon) to stores selling Fendi and Prada bags. In a word, the mall is un-Cairo. To top it all off the theatre featured stadium seating and veritable who’s-who of the Cairo upper class. The other striking feature of the cinema wwas posters for Knocked Up (state censors are going to have a field day with that, I will be surprised if the Egyptian version runs longer than 20 minutes).

But once the movie started, my friends and I became noticeably upset. Beyond the fact that the movie’s depiction of a suicide-bombing operation was fairly graphic, the accuracy with which the movie portrayed the fundamental misunderstandings between these two cultures (the American and the Arabo-Muslim) is astounding.

Studying here, these cultural miscommunications have been something I’ve had to think about a lot, and seeing them on screen, with such violent, and in many ways realistic, repercussions was obviously upsetting. While no one in the theatre did so when we were there, other friends have told me that people cheered at the movie’s depiction of the attack on the World Trade Center. The biggest reaction that I noticed from the Egyptians watching the movie were “tsks” (Egyptian for “you shouldn’t do that,” among other things) during the beheading scene towards the end of the movie. Needless to say, the intermission half way through was a much needed reprieve from the onslaught of upsetting events.

As far as censorship goes, I only noticed one scene which appeared to be missing, probably something sexual, right before the meeting with the reporter in the bar.

While the movie itself was upsetting enough walking out of the mall, past metal detectors and baggage scanners, barricades and men in uniform, I couldn’t help but be reminded of just what is possible when the extremes of these two cultures collide. I’m not talking about a clash of civilizations, if anything the problem is their compatibility.

There are two Cairos, one which has been built on the fertile soil of imported materialism, and the other which is built on desert sands. And it is the fact of these two Cairos, which one passes between daily, that makes the trucks of armed men, the police officers on every corner and the metal detectors that divide inside from outside meaningful.

Ramadan: The Last Gasp

I am sorry it has taken me so long to make a new post. Between the trip to the White Desert, increased work with midterm exams, and the approaching Eid al-Fetr break, it has been hard to find time to myself.

I am currently sitting in an ‘ahua (café) opposite the mosque of Amr ibn al-As waiting for the night prayer to begin. These last three days of Ramadan are considered the most important and the mosque of Amr ibn al-As, the first mosque in Africa, is one of the busiest in Cairo. On the 27th night of Ramadan, widely considered the most important of all, they flew in an Imam from Saudi Arabia (Mohamed Jabril) and there are reports of nearly a million people praying here. Tonight, they are already setting up for spillover into the streets (for reference the capacity of the mosque itself is roughly 5000).

Sitting alone in this ‘ahua with the approaching Eid holiday, I have a chance to sit back and take in the whole experience of Ramadan in Egypt. It has been a truly eye-opening one. I have never felt more welcome or more comfortable in any city, let alone a foreign one than I have here. The openness and kindness have been, at times, overwhelming, as Arab hospitality often is.

For the first ten days of Ramadan, while I was still fasting (yes I gave up, eating and drinking during the day is just too enjoyable) I felt I was truly an insider, a "one of us." Never has such a simple act, when I revealed it to others, caused faces to light up the way my fasting did. True, it has also resulted in some questions about why I haven't converted yet, but given the sincerity of faith here, the question has not been off-putting in the least.

Last weekend, I went with Hossein, one of my "Egyptian brothers," Corey, Georgia and Erik to the Mosque of ibn Tulun and the City of the Dead (an old Islamic cemetery now inhabited by those displaced by the 1992 earthquake). After a beautiful falouka ride on the Nile just before sunset, we all went back to my Egyptian family's home. They live in a poor village not particularly well served by the Egyptian government, in a building (townhouse makes it sound much too grand) in which the whole family lives together. When I say whole family, I mean four brothers and their respective wives, their children (I counted three with one more on the way), their two sisters, and their mother and father. Despite the simple, though delicious, food it was by far the best iftar I have had all Ramadan. We ate fatteh (a conglomeration of most of the carbs you can think of and tomatoes) simple roast chicken, and salata baladi; but it wasn't the food that was so satiating, it was being in such an incredibly closely knit, loving, and welcoming household.

This is perhaps the most telling example I can give. When I arrived at iftar with a selection of cookies from a bakery near my apartment, the reaction of disappointment I received was both totally unexpected and totally revealing. Ibrahim asked me, "why did you do this, we are family, we don't want you to spend your money on us." While at first I felt as if I had let them down, I quickly realized the level of affection these words carried. Only in this place, only with these people could friends I made a little more than a month ago have truly made me part of their family.

So I say again, now that Ramadan is coming to a close: Kul al senat wa anta taib. All the year and you are well.

Ramadan Kareem!

I apologize if I have kept my fans waiting, as my father contends; but I do, in fact, go to school here. I have been meaning to write this post for a few days, so hopefully the time I’ve taken to mull over exactly what I am going to say will pay off in more a more concise prose.

First, I wanted to confirm that my fasting is going strong and the father of my “Egyptian family” told me that this is because I have a “strong heart.” Most foreigners don’t make it more than a few days, if they even make it one, he told me. Thankfully, though, I am traveling to Alexandria this weekend, which gives me a reprieve from fasting as it is a journey of more than 86 (some say the minimum is 89) kilometers.

Before I started fasting, I never really understood the traditional Ramadan greeting: Ramadan kareem, “Ramadan is generous” (to which one responds allahu akram, “God is the most generous”). I couldn’t understand how being deprived of food every day for a whole month could be seen as generous. Obviously there is the argument that Ramadan is generous because it is the month in which Mohammed was first told, “Recite!” by the angel Gabriel. But the way people’s faces light up when saying Ramadan kareem betrayed a more immediate, material meaning to the phrase. It was not until I was invited to iftar (break fast) at the house of the family of my Egyptian friend (Mohammed, the lieutenant in charge of security for the hotel across the street from my building) that I grasped just how generous Ramadan can be.

Upon arriving at his family’s apartment, just past Ma’adi, we were ushered to a table and seated backs against the wall to prevent what would eventually become a much-desired escape. With just a few minutes until the call to prayer, the table began to fill with platters of chicken, rice, and potatoes (all lined with potato chips), bowls of soup, molekheya (a gelatinous sauce made from a plant known as ‘Jews’ mallow’), pickled vegetables, eggplant stuffed with garlic, cucumber and tomato salad, baskets of bread, glasses of date juice, karkedeh (hibiscus tea/juice), and kamr aldeen (a cloying yet delicious juice made from dried apricot leather). Instead of napkins, we were given towels. What made this even more impressive was that this meal was prepared twice, one for the men and one for the women, who ate hidden from our view.

As soon as the first refrain of the call to prayer (Allahu akbar, “God is the most great”) was audible we dug in. The food was delicious, but after a day of fasting, it can be hard to eat very much, with every bight, I could feel my stomach un-clinching. Slowly but surely, I got my appetite and managed to eat my share of the spread, and did more than my share on the delicious rice. Rice which Erik was also enjoying greatly until I confirmed my suspicion that the chunks of meat in it were kidneys and liver, and to my surprise heart (but that didn’t stop me from having one more helping). I was uncomfortably sated.

As I stood up—barely—I was ushered to the couch where I thought that maybe I could have a reprieve from food. But no. Next came plates full of grapes, guavas and dates, and large pieces of kunafa (imagine frosted mini wheat meets custard pie). After obligingly attempting to force something down my throat and washing it down with some tea, we leaned back and watched an exciting episode of Alias, followed by the fourth call to prayer live from Mecca. After a few hours of digesting and discussing politics with Mohammed’s father, a former general in the Egyptian army, we pried ourselves off the couch and headed home.

Just three hours later Erik and I were being ushered to Mohandeseen for an overly filling suhur by four of our Egyptian friends. But right now, I’m too hungry to describe any more food.

My point is that during Ramadan, the already ebullient, in-your-face, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer Arab hospitality is magnified ten times. It is a time when everyone is welcome to eat for free at restaurants spilling into the middle of major thoroughfares. It is also a time when zadaq (alms, one of the five pillars of Islam) is widely distributed, and when even the most secular of Muslims strives to keep the faith as best they can.

Ultimately, what “Ramadan kareem” has taught me is that God may be the most generous but Egyptians are pretty high up there on the list.

Kul al senat wa inta ta’ib!

Part 1

Well, Ramadan has finally arrived. I say finally because for the past few days Cairo has been a mess. As my friend from Wes, Nishita, put it, it’s the “storm before the calm.” Every shelf of every supermarket has been thoroughly scavenged; one would think there is some kind of looming natural disaster about to befall Cairo. And I’m beginning to think they all know something I don’t.

Our first mistake was placing our order from Drinkie’s (Egypts largest purveyor of spirits, bottled exclusively by al-Ahram bottling company, whose working motto is “at least its not rubbing alcohol”) at around 10:00pm last night. We ordered 2 cases of large cans of Heineken, 2 bottles of “Cubana” rum, one bottle of “London” gin, and one bottle of “dark” whiskey from Drinkie’s call center (dial 19330 from any Egyptian telephone) for a grand total of LE.516. Despite promising on numerous occasion that our order was just minutes away, it appears that Drinkie’s ran out of alcohol before closing its doors for the month. Thankfully, Mena has promised to take me on a date to the duty free store to buy FOREIGN LIQUOR when she returns from the wedding in Boston. This is a trip we have actually already attempted once only to learn too late, much too late, that one only has 48 hours in the country before the full roughly LE.6000/bottle (yes that is more than a thousand dollars) tax is tacked on. Despite the four bottle per person per trip limit on alcohol, I’m confident that we will find a sufficient supply to slake our thirst worked up over this month of fasting.

Which brings me to my next point: I am indeed planning to fast for the month, though I may be forced to drink some water on the first day or so. A surprising number of my friends also plan to follow the injunction against anything passing the lips between 4:00am and Iftar (breakfast) at sunset. Tonight after a long conversation with my Egyptian family, including a discussion of the highly controversial topic of just who did build the pyramids (by the way, the answer is definitely not the Jews), I had my first Shuhur (meal before the 4:00am call to prayer) consisting of a sandwich of bitingani (marinated eggplant) and tahina and Erik had three tamiya (falafel).

To celebrate my first day of Ramadan I am also going shopping for a Quran for my Quranic Studies course. While finding a Quran in a Muslim country should seemingly be easy, it has actually proved to be a bit of a challenge. The AUC bookstore sold its only copy of the text containing both the Arabic and the English so my options seem to be the large English-language book store on 26th of July st. or else the book market at Soor al-Azbekaya.


Part 2

The first day of Ramadan has come and gone, and as quickly as Metro’s shelves were emptied, they were restocked. I guess this isn’t their first time.

As promised I fasted today, having only a glass of water upon waking up. Usually I have not been particularly hungry until the mid-afternoon here, however the thought of being unable to eat until just after 6:00pm seemed to make my stomach especially grumbly today. I felt pretty good about things until about 5:00pm when on my way back from an unsuccessful trip in search of Yousouf Ali’s translation of the Quran I thought I would have to give in. The thing that was most tempting was walking down the streets and seeing the long communal tables set up for Iftar. But I stuck it out and broke fast with a nice cold orange Marinda and a piece of bread. We had our real Iftar at a Lebanese restaurant in Garden City (The area of Corniche el-Nile abutting the Four Seasons) called Tabouleh.

The most interesting thing about the first day of Ramadan was not my own experience with fasting but rather the way in which the city and its inhabitants have magically changed. The streets of Cairo were stunningly quiet. Normally the traffic is unbearable, which is understandable seeing as a city with an infrastructure designed for 3 million people has 6 million cars. However today, my usual nightmarish midday trip from Zamalek to the American University in Tahrir Square was downright pleasant.

Also shocking was seeing business closed. They say New York is the city that never sleeps, but Cairo is the city that never closes. Stores open at around noon and stay open at least until midnight and many restaurants and‘ahua (cafés), and most supermarkets stay open 24 hours. The other thing about stores here is you can have anything delivered; pretty much if a store exists (anywhere in Cairo) it will deliver to your door. But yesterday, many stores were not open until after Iftar, if they opened at all, and those that opened early mostly closed their doors just before the 4:00pm call to prayer.

Now that I’ve had my Suhur and heard the call to prayer echoing across Cairo, its time for me to go to sleep. But I promise more (hopefully shorter) posts soon insha’allah.

Ahlan wa-Sahlan!

So, I’ve finally found the time to write my first blog post; which is to say I finally have homework. Despite the feeling of endless summer engendered by orientation (apparently all across the world), I am excited to get down to work. But for now, let me fill you in on what I have been doing for this last few weeks.

Within my first few days in Cairo, I learned some fundamental facts about Egypt and Egyptians. The first thing I learned was that summer in Africa is hot, incredibly, oppressively, cook-the-egg-and-the-chicken-on-the-pavement hot. The second thing I learned was that the beauty of Egyptian “efficiency” will leave you standing in this heat for a very long time. Despite the combined difficulties of dealing with Alitalia and Egyptian airport officials, I did eventually receive my luggage in installments over the next three days.

Despite the frustration, which one always expects when traveling in the third world, I immediately saw Cairo’s charm. But more importantly, I discovered how incredibly hospitable and kind the Egyptian people are. When trying to meet my landlord (a slight misnomer as he is really just a middle-man) he directed me to meet him at the “lovely bazaar.” So on exiting the hotel, I asked the security guard manning the metal detector where I could find a “soukh gemila” (literally a beautiful market). While he attempted to shepherd me into a cab to take me to the Khan el-Kelili (Cairo’s most famous market located in the heart of old Cairo) I noticed a man waving at me to come over to the store across the street, the name of which was “Lovely Bazaar.” The family that owns this store (Mohammed and his sons: Ibrahim, a recent graduate of law school; Husayn, a former driver for a tour company; and Ali) immediately announced themselves to be my “new Egyptian family.” They have become some of the only Egyptians working in the tourism industry that I trust (in the next post I will tell you about our trip to the pyramids with Husayn).

Almost every Egyptian who approaches you on the street seems to be running some kind of tout. They always seem to open with the line “welcome to Egypt” and proceed to compliment your Arabic or tell you that you look like a real Egyptian. The touts have ranged from men trying to take us to stores so that they can take a 50% commission on anything we buy to the offer LE. 60 (roughly LE. 5.75 to the Dollar) photographs with camels.

Besides touts, one is also faced by the daunting task of keeping ones wallet full of the small bills necessary for the bakshish which makes the wheels of Cairo go round. Bakshish (pron. bak-shEEsh) is a cross between a bribe, a tip, and charity. One gives bakshish for everything from getting the car through the security checkpoint at the pyramids at Saqqara or taking pictures inside Phaoronic temples, to bathroom attendants, to the guy who runs up and asks you what floor, then pushes the elevator button for you.

As my new Egyptian family taught me, because as they say, “now, you are Egyptian,” the best way to avoid touts and bakshish from draining your wallet is to flex some linguistic muscle. A simple la shukran (no thank you; pron. laa shOOkron) or a more advanced laes indi foulous (I have no money) is enough to convince them that you know what’s going on and its not worth it to waist their time on you.

Expect more updates soon.