Insha'allah!

You can't go 10 minutes in Cairo without hearing the phrase "Insha'allah" or "God-willing." (It literally means "if it is the will of God"). If you mention anything in the future, or with an uncertain outcome, Insha'allah better trail that answer or you run the risk of jinxing yourself, a bit like refusing to knock on wood.

This article from the International Herald Tribune writes about the ubiquitous word and its cultural significance. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/19/africa/20inshallah.php?page=1

My favorite excerpts are:

Egyptians have always been religious, from Pharaonic times to the present. Any guidebook to Egypt alerts tourists to Egyptians' frequent use of inshallah in discussing future events, a signal of their deep faith and belief that all events occur, or don't occur, at God's will. "See you tomorrow," is almost always followed by a smile and, "inshallah."

But there has been inshallah creep, to the extreme. It is now attached to the answer for any question, past, present and future. What's your name, for example, might be answered, "Muhammad, inshallah."

"I say to them, 'You are already Muhammad or you are going to be Muhammad?' " said Attiat el-Abnoudy, a documentary filmmaker in Cairo.

... (The article goes on to explain the rising importance of religious symbols to both the pious and the secularized people, as Islam becomes ever-more the cornerstone of cultural identity)...

But it is not just about faith in the celestial, that has people invoking God. It is also, at least for some, a lack of faith in the earthbound rulers who run the place. People here are tired — of the rising prices and the eroding wages, of the traffic, of the corruption, of the sense that it is every man for himself.

"In this place, when something works, or you want something to work, you thank God, because it's certainly not the government who is going to help you," said Sherif Issa, 48, a taxi driver in Cairo with a nicotine-stained mustache and a fair size belly. "It's because everything is going in the wrong direction — who can we look up to except God?"

The Vagina Monologues--for Egypt

The Christian Science Monitor recently spotlighted a project put on by a club at AUC to highlight some of the challenges women in Egypt face. Over the past two years, The Bussy Project

"has collected stories from Egyptian women about some of the country's most taboo topics, including street harassment, sexual abuse, divorce, female circumcision, and the confusion that arises in a culture that discourages male-female interaction but makes women's primary social responsibilities marriage and childbearing."

I have mentioned street harassment in previous postings. It is virtually impossible to walk anywhere without having men mumble comments into your ear as you walk past or shout things at you from the other side of the street. These range from "Wow! Wow! Wow! Niiiice!""and "You come with me? I give you 100 pound." I have been told by native speakers that some of the Arabic comments are quite a bit dirtier--I suppose that is one instance in which the language barrier is quite welcome.

I know that foreign women are subject to a bit more harassment than average as we don't blend in and therefore attract more attention, but this problem is by no means limited to ex-pats. However, I was surprised to see it listed here as most Egyptians pretend that it does not exist, or that wearing a head-scarf proves your respectability and eliminates the harrasment. This is not the case, and I'm impressed that this project calls a spade a spade in the face of a lot of cultural pressure to ignore the situation or blame women for creating the problem by being sexually tempting.

The article states:

Project participants say they are tired of women's issues being ignored or pushed aside in Egypt, but are also upset at the way that many in the West think about Arab and Muslim women.

"I'm passive, weak, uneducated, veiled from head to toe, one of his four wives, work in the kitchen all day," says "Muslim Woman." "That's what you think, right?"

"My liberation won't come from the one who has oppressed me – bringing me democracy?" retorts her companion on the stage. "You think you're really gonna send Condi to tell me how to be free?"

While the directors cite The Vagina Monologues as their inspiration, the use of character names like "Muslim Woman" reminds me a lot of the concept behind the Broadway show Avenue Q, with it's confrontation of stereotypes in character names like "Christmas Eve" and "Princeton," and songs with titles like "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist."

Most importantly, though, in a country where 44 percent of the women are illiterate and 90 percent of married women have experienced some form of female circumcision/genital mutilation, feminists still have a lot of progress to make. It's good to see them finding a voice, and great to see international coverage of that fact.

The original article is here.

Sandstorm!

We are having a sandstorm! I would like to post a picture of it but you can't really see anything because it is at night. The wind is blowing so hard that it blew the door of Sarah's bedroom open and wind came gusting through the house, producing a high-pitched screaming through all the cracks--it's still whistling eerily through all the windows. The entire apartment is shaking and vibrating and we keep hearing things knock around outside. Visibility is terrible--normally I can see almost to the edge of Cairo, but today I can barely see across the Nile, which is only about 200 meters from our building!

If it is still going on in the morning, which I think is unlikely (although I am not intimately familiar with sandstorms) I will take a photo!

Interesting slant on the Lebanese peace deal

When we were in Lebanon over spring break, the country was clearly not at ease. The downtown area was breathtakingly beautiful--but disconcertingly deserted because of Hezbollah protests outside of the nearby Parliament buildings. The protests had become merely empty tents as they had been going on for 16 months, and the actual people had returned to their lives. The country had been without a president for some time, and when the next one would be elected was unclear.

The recent wave of violence began about one week after we returned to Egypt. No one could have predicted if, or when, it would occur; hence the country's anxiety for the past 16 months. The political standoff was resolved by a recent agreement in Doha, the capital of Qatar.

A continuing bone of contention between Hezbollah, which began as a resistance organization/militia during the civil war, and the Lebanese government is Hezbollah's continued refusal to disarm despite the conclusion of the civil war in 1990.

The stipulations of the Doha agreement underscore just how tightly the Lebanese government's hands are tied when it comes to controlling Hezbollah, the largest Shiite Muslim political party. Hezbollah has been given the power to veto acts that would even suggest that they disarm, among other concessions.

Hezbollah (see photo of flag) riles against its classification as "terrorist group" by the US, Australian, and UK governments (though, interestingly, not by the European Union), claiming itself to be a legitimate political party. But they will never be legitimate, and Lebanon will continue hurting from their influence, for as long as they use violence as a trump card for enforcing their agenda, even when some policies are fairly and democratically thwarted through an accountable political process.

For a sign of the way US global influence is eroding, skim this article from Lebanon's Daily Star on the peace deal and its lament for Egypt's declining status--which it credits directly to Egypt's close ties to the US.

The discouragingly visionary word of the day

My Gmail has a small bar at the top that shows headlines and other trivia. Occasionally it displays a "Word of the Day." Today's word:

Potemkin village | An impressive facade or display that hides an undesirable fact or state; a false front.

As in:

Unless U.S. imperial overstretch is acknowledged and corrected, the United States may someday soon find that it has become a Potemkin village superpower -- with a facade of military strength concealing a core of economic weakness.

-- Christopher Layne
"Why the Gulf War Was Not in the National Interest"
The Atlantic, July 1991

If only we learned from the past.