I'm about to release a new blog post that has been gestating for a while about the struggles of adapting to life here. But, I know that what everyone really wants to know is whether we are all safe given the escalating anti-American protests sparked in large part by a nefarious yet marginal U.S. film insulting Muhammad. First things first, I am safe. Despite the deeply concerning nature of the situation, life marches on as usual in nearly every corner of the city. The exception, of course, is Tahrir and the environs of the American Embassy not far away. Naturally avoiding the area myself, I only came close enough to see columns of gray smoke rising into the smog yesterday afternoon.
I haven't written much since the elections about news events. There was Morsi's attempt to strike out and make for Egypt a new foreign policy more independent from the United States, for example, demonstrated by his early visits to Tehran and Beijing. The US found this unsettling, to be sure, and we read academic articles on it in class, but this did not attract the same kind of widespread public discussion here as the film. Then there was the appearance of the first hijabi woman as a newsreader on state television. Even though the vast majority of women here wear the hijab, it has long been unofficially (and in some cases, officially) banned from those working as flight attendants, newscasters (excluding religious channels), 5-star hotel employees, and the like. This does indeed seem like a puzzling double standard that Morsi seems to be suggesting may no longer represent a tone he wants to set.
Returning to the matter at hand. I first got word about the film and the protests here in Egypt from my roommate, whose Egyptian boyfriend had called her to express his feelings of disgust toward the movie. That was on September 11, and early the next morning we heard that Ambassador Stevens had been killed in Libya. Since then, I have been following events mostly on the New York Times, although we are also receiving security updates regularly from AUC. We discussed the early protests in my Egyptian dialect class on the morning of the 12th. My teacher is Protestant, I think, and mentioned by way of analogy, and condemnation of the protests, that demonstrators had also burned Bibles in Tahrir but that destroying the paper doesn't mean that her religion is any less. That night, I went to hang out with a bunch of my Egyptian friends, all well-educated and engaged in world affairs, and they also expressed disgust with what was going on -- one group of ignorant people stirring up violence over a marginal film produced by another group of ignorant people.
But the next morning on the way to class, we rode with a taxi driver whose take was quite different. He had just come himself from protesting in Tahrir Square, he offered, suggesting that there were 10,000 people outside the embassy when I asked or an estimate. "There will be a millioniyya tomorrow!" he added, meaning a large-scale march that became the norm for Fridays during the revolution. Would he be going? Of course! The prophet Muhammad had been deeply insulted, and this was the natural reaction, just as we would do if Mary or Jesus were insulted in such a way, he said. "You are American?" he asked us somewhere in the middle of this conversation. "Canadian," I said quickly, for the first time since I've been here. Apparently this has not yet been recognized as a euphemism. The man was chatty, agreeing with my friend Sophia that it was good to talk about these things. (Of course, that does not include suggesting that producing the film, however awful and offensive, was within the producer's right to freedom of expression. That is not an opinion that you should voice here at the moment under any circumstances.) The taxi driver expressed the commonly held view here that respect for religion supersedes freedom of expression, condemning the U.S. for promoting freedom but not respecting Muslims' freedom of religion.
We will see today what happens after Friday prayers, when people migrate from their mosques to Tahrir. The past few days, most people protesting have been either soccer Ultras (crazed soccer fans who also played a role in the revolution) or conservative Islamists. You've probably read about the Morsi administration's tepid response to the attacks on the embassy. Paralyzed between calls from within his own Muslim Brotherhood and others within Egypt to defend Islam against American abuse on the one hand and the strained U.S. alliance on the other, Morsi did not reprimand the attackers until last night. This Twitter exchange between MB spokesman Khairat el Shater and the U.S. Embassy has been circulating online:
Khairat el Shater (in English): "We r relieved none of the @USEmbassyCairo staff were harmed & hope US-Eg relations will sustain turbulence of Tuesday's events."
USEmbassyCairo: "Thanks. By the way, have you checked out your own Arabic feeds? I hope you know we read those, too."
I also had the chance to discuss the unfolding events with some of the students yesterday in the conversational English class at ReachOut. The day's theme was music, so I had asked each student to bring in the lyrics of a song he or she liked and discuss it with the class. Following a presentation on Celine Dion, my student Mohammed introduced "Worry Ends", a song by British Muslim rocker Sami Yusuf about the importance of faith. I asked why he had chosen it, and he said it was because an American Christian had made a film insulting the Prophet Muhammad. It had made him feel even more strongly the need to defend his own faith, though some, he added, such as those throwing Molotov cocktails at the embassy or who killed Amb. Stevens in Libya, chose the wrong ways to do so. This was the most engaged in class this student had ever been, and the other two young men in the class immediately jumped into the discussion in vigorous agreement. The girls did not want to talk about politics. "Please, tell your people we're not terrorists," Mohammed pleaded with me. The three guys stayed with me for forty minutes after class to talk about the protests. They were angry that the U.S. government would do nothing to prosecute those who had produced the film if it was really true that the perspective of the filmmaker did not represent that of the US government or the majority of the American people. Mohammed 2, the best student in my class, expressed extreme dismay at the American media for a promoting opinions deeply skewed against the Muslim world. At first he just mentioned FOX and I had a heart attack. But then he began reeling off New York Times columnists that he liked and those he didn't, mentioning that he thought the only fair news came from marginal leftist sources like Noam Chomsky and Alternet. He's a thoughtful young man, and admitted when I asked about the Egyptian media that Egyptians also needed to be less easily swayed by domestic propaganda. Still, he said, American media reach a global audience, and so the repercussions of its bias are far deeper. The third guy, who had been silent much of the time, is a Copt, so I asked him whether he thought there would be any backlash against Copts in Egypt because of the apparent revelation that at least one of the filmmakers was an Egyptian-American Copt. He emphatically said no. "We're all like brothers here; we live in peace," he said, with the two Mohammeds agreeing. "I will always come to help my brother." This is the most widely held opinion on interfaith relations in Egypt in my own experience, which may seem puzzling given events like the church bombings in Alexandria just before the revolution or the not infrequent hateful Facebook posts on both sides. I mentioned also that, well, it doesn't feel so great to be an American in Cairo at the moment with people ripping apart American flags and throwing rocks at our embassy. "Please don't be angry that they burned the American flag," Beshoy told me as we all rode the elevator down together. "It's something people do here a lot when they're upset." We stood outside and the conversation changed. "What do you miss most about your home?" Mohammed asked. "The rain," I said. Lately I've been having rain fantasies. He pointed up to the line of air conditioners dripping their contents onto passersby. "Just stand under it, it will feel like home."
I haven't written much since the elections about news events. There was Morsi's attempt to strike out and make for Egypt a new foreign policy more independent from the United States, for example, demonstrated by his early visits to Tehran and Beijing. The US found this unsettling, to be sure, and we read academic articles on it in class, but this did not attract the same kind of widespread public discussion here as the film. Then there was the appearance of the first hijabi woman as a newsreader on state television. Even though the vast majority of women here wear the hijab, it has long been unofficially (and in some cases, officially) banned from those working as flight attendants, newscasters (excluding religious channels), 5-star hotel employees, and the like. This does indeed seem like a puzzling double standard that Morsi seems to be suggesting may no longer represent a tone he wants to set.
Returning to the matter at hand. I first got word about the film and the protests here in Egypt from my roommate, whose Egyptian boyfriend had called her to express his feelings of disgust toward the movie. That was on September 11, and early the next morning we heard that Ambassador Stevens had been killed in Libya. Since then, I have been following events mostly on the New York Times, although we are also receiving security updates regularly from AUC. We discussed the early protests in my Egyptian dialect class on the morning of the 12th. My teacher is Protestant, I think, and mentioned by way of analogy, and condemnation of the protests, that demonstrators had also burned Bibles in Tahrir but that destroying the paper doesn't mean that her religion is any less. That night, I went to hang out with a bunch of my Egyptian friends, all well-educated and engaged in world affairs, and they also expressed disgust with what was going on -- one group of ignorant people stirring up violence over a marginal film produced by another group of ignorant people.
But the next morning on the way to class, we rode with a taxi driver whose take was quite different. He had just come himself from protesting in Tahrir Square, he offered, suggesting that there were 10,000 people outside the embassy when I asked or an estimate. "There will be a millioniyya tomorrow!" he added, meaning a large-scale march that became the norm for Fridays during the revolution. Would he be going? Of course! The prophet Muhammad had been deeply insulted, and this was the natural reaction, just as we would do if Mary or Jesus were insulted in such a way, he said. "You are American?" he asked us somewhere in the middle of this conversation. "Canadian," I said quickly, for the first time since I've been here. Apparently this has not yet been recognized as a euphemism. The man was chatty, agreeing with my friend Sophia that it was good to talk about these things. (Of course, that does not include suggesting that producing the film, however awful and offensive, was within the producer's right to freedom of expression. That is not an opinion that you should voice here at the moment under any circumstances.) The taxi driver expressed the commonly held view here that respect for religion supersedes freedom of expression, condemning the U.S. for promoting freedom but not respecting Muslims' freedom of religion.
We will see today what happens after Friday prayers, when people migrate from their mosques to Tahrir. The past few days, most people protesting have been either soccer Ultras (crazed soccer fans who also played a role in the revolution) or conservative Islamists. You've probably read about the Morsi administration's tepid response to the attacks on the embassy. Paralyzed between calls from within his own Muslim Brotherhood and others within Egypt to defend Islam against American abuse on the one hand and the strained U.S. alliance on the other, Morsi did not reprimand the attackers until last night. This Twitter exchange between MB spokesman Khairat el Shater and the U.S. Embassy has been circulating online:
Khairat el Shater (in English): "We r relieved none of the @USEmbassyCairo staff were harmed & hope US-Eg relations will sustain turbulence of Tuesday's events."
USEmbassyCairo: "Thanks. By the way, have you checked out your own Arabic feeds? I hope you know we read those, too."
I also had the chance to discuss the unfolding events with some of the students yesterday in the conversational English class at ReachOut. The day's theme was music, so I had asked each student to bring in the lyrics of a song he or she liked and discuss it with the class. Following a presentation on Celine Dion, my student Mohammed introduced "Worry Ends", a song by British Muslim rocker Sami Yusuf about the importance of faith. I asked why he had chosen it, and he said it was because an American Christian had made a film insulting the Prophet Muhammad. It had made him feel even more strongly the need to defend his own faith, though some, he added, such as those throwing Molotov cocktails at the embassy or who killed Amb. Stevens in Libya, chose the wrong ways to do so. This was the most engaged in class this student had ever been, and the other two young men in the class immediately jumped into the discussion in vigorous agreement. The girls did not want to talk about politics. "Please, tell your people we're not terrorists," Mohammed pleaded with me. The three guys stayed with me for forty minutes after class to talk about the protests. They were angry that the U.S. government would do nothing to prosecute those who had produced the film if it was really true that the perspective of the filmmaker did not represent that of the US government or the majority of the American people. Mohammed 2, the best student in my class, expressed extreme dismay at the American media for a promoting opinions deeply skewed against the Muslim world. At first he just mentioned FOX and I had a heart attack. But then he began reeling off New York Times columnists that he liked and those he didn't, mentioning that he thought the only fair news came from marginal leftist sources like Noam Chomsky and Alternet. He's a thoughtful young man, and admitted when I asked about the Egyptian media that Egyptians also needed to be less easily swayed by domestic propaganda. Still, he said, American media reach a global audience, and so the repercussions of its bias are far deeper. The third guy, who had been silent much of the time, is a Copt, so I asked him whether he thought there would be any backlash against Copts in Egypt because of the apparent revelation that at least one of the filmmakers was an Egyptian-American Copt. He emphatically said no. "We're all like brothers here; we live in peace," he said, with the two Mohammeds agreeing. "I will always come to help my brother." This is the most widely held opinion on interfaith relations in Egypt in my own experience, which may seem puzzling given events like the church bombings in Alexandria just before the revolution or the not infrequent hateful Facebook posts on both sides. I mentioned also that, well, it doesn't feel so great to be an American in Cairo at the moment with people ripping apart American flags and throwing rocks at our embassy. "Please don't be angry that they burned the American flag," Beshoy told me as we all rode the elevator down together. "It's something people do here a lot when they're upset." We stood outside and the conversation changed. "What do you miss most about your home?" Mohammed asked. "The rain," I said. Lately I've been having rain fantasies. He pointed up to the line of air conditioners dripping their contents onto passersby. "Just stand under it, it will feel like home."
Thoughtful, wonderful writing, Chloe. As always, you are looking at the world around you with a critical eye, and this kind of honest commentary is very much a privilege for your readers in the US. Thanks for taking the time to think about these issues and to share your opinions with us.
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