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.