Unrest

Yesterday afternoon I bought two papers. The headline of Horeya wa Adela, the Brotherhood's paper read: "Million-man march at Etihadia Palace: the people support the President's decisions." The photo showed throngs of Egyptians waving posters of Morsi. Meanwhile, Al-Masry al-Youm, a liberal paper, declared: "The Uprising of November 23: Tahrir says to the President - 'Get lost'" and Morsi says to the Brotherhood - 'I will hold those who are out of line accountable.'" These are two perspectives on Friday's events. All week, protests have been heating up and tear gas and rubber bullet skirmishes erupting in the streets of downtown. People were angry about a number of things already, including the fighting in Gaza and an extremely tragic crash between a bus and a train in Asyut last week. And of course the direct impetus for this bout of unrest was the one-year anniversary of the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes. Many were dismayed to see the memorial become something of a repeat, but opponents of the Brotherhood were galvanized on Thursday by Morsi's constitutional declaration seizing additional powers for himself (supposedly just until the completion of the new constitution in a few months). In a situation in which Morsi already holds executive and legislative powers as a consequence of the dissolution of Parliament some time ago, to many the seizure of judicial authority as well seems a step down a dangerous path. An anti-Brotherhood and Mohamed Mahmoud commemorative march to Tahrir from Mostafa Mahmoud mosque in Mohandiseen that was organized before the declaration was attended by the three favorite candidates of secularists, liberals, and moderate leftists: Mohamed ElBaradei, Hamdeen Sabahy, and Amr Moussa. It appears now that they are working to form a political coalition, a National Front, though it's unfortunately late in the game -- if only they could have coalesced before the presidential election, the Brotherhood might never have been in power in the first place.

After the march on Friday afternoon, a sit-in began in Tahrir, with 400 or so still camped out in tents as of Saturday afternoon. Now, Sunday morning, Twitter voices are reporting that despite even smaller numbers, tear gas bombs have overwhelmed the square. On Friday evening, I was on a boat in the Nile, a bit south of downtown, when a friend texted me to report that another friend had just witnessed demonstrators lighting a police van on fire, with all the officers inside. (Eventually they escaped.) Another friend, a reporter who had spent the day in Tahrir, described how police had staked out the roof of a high school on Mohamed Mahmoud St. and were hurling rocks down on demonstrators at regular intervals. In Alexandria and Suez, demonstrators set fire to the FJP's headquarters. Anti-Ikhwan forces have called for another millioniyya on Tuesday. But will people show up? These million-man marches have become fairly regular in Egypt, and as my friend pointed out, sometimes he shows up and there are only 50 people. It's hard to gauge, from my perspective, how much momentum there is, especially without going to downtown to see events for myself.

Regardless, there are definitely two sides this time, and those who support the Brotherhood's leadership in general, and Morsi's declaration in particular, are also willing to go to the streets. While the Horeya wa Adela headline was a numerical exaggeration (everything seems to have become a millioniyya), the Ikhwan's people really do come out and get organized. Supporters say that Morsi's move on Thursday was necessary to protect the goals of the revolution, stabilize the civilian government, and help the country move out of its stalled transitional phase as quickly as possible -- in fact, to get the constitution finished and judges remaining from the old regime out of the courts. At first, even the liberal journalist Shahira Amin (see old blog post) came out in support of Morsi. She posted on Facebook on Friday: "My message to Egypt's liberals: Morsi speaks our language. He is saying exactly what you are saying and has the same goals in mind. If you support him, his message will be even louder and we will attain our goals quicker. Did you not hear him respond to the chants of 'the people want shari'a law' saying shari'a is rule of law, freedom, and justice for all?" (Later, though, she expressed her dismay with Morsi's failure to delineate a timeline for relinquishing his 'temporary' additional powers.)

I'm not sure at this point how the new decree will be applied. This is Al-Jazeera's summary, which is pretty grim:

President says new decree is aimed at 'cleansing state institutions'

Decree allows president to appoint public prosecutor for a four-year term

Morsi gave himself power to enact any law he wants

Morsi's decree effectively sacks the current prosecutor general, which means no authority can revoke any presidential decisions

Morsi has ordered the retrial of officials linked to killing of protesters

Morsi's decree to remain in force until a new parliament is elected

Parliament canmot be elected until a new constitution is in place

Morsi also extended the timeline for drafting the new constitution

Morsi says he has to have absolute power to protect the revolution

Critics have compared Morsi 's move to Hosni Mubarak's autocratic ways and denounced the move as a 'coup against legitimacy'

It's both reassuring to folks at home and frustrating to me that I can be so close to the action -- just across the river at least -- and have very little idea of what's going on. Even passing through Tahrir underground, in the metro station, there are no signs of the chaos above. Early in the week, it was even unclear to me what people were protesting about, because one regional and national crisis flowed into the next. First was Gaza, which enraged Egyptians, not surprisingly. In cyberspace, Egyptians used "we" to talk about Gazans standing up to Israel. "Share hope, we need no sympathy!" wrote one friend on Facebook. Then, even before Morsi had stepped in to negotiate the Gaza ceasefire, another tragedy occurred. In Asyut, a school bus crashed into an oncoming train while trying to cross the tracks. Again there have been conflicting stories about what exactly went terribly wrong: it appears that the warning light system was broken and the watchman who was supposed to stop traffic was asleep on the job. The result was the death of 60 children. Immediately people called for the governor and transportation minister to resign for tolerating such gross negligence (regardless of whose fault the crash was). The government announced the sum it would pay to families of the deceased and injured children. People were outraged that it was so low. When the same was raised, many were still outraged that the government would put a price on the life of an Egyptian child at all. Especially, though, people were outraged that the Prime Minister was in Gaza and the government (as was explained to me) seemed to care so much more about the tragedy in Gaza than the tragedy at home in Egypt. Basically, many Egyptians were furious that a Gazan life seemed to have greater value to the government (for political reasons) than an Egyptian life. People sat on train tracks throughout Egypt in protest, and these protests bled into the streets. And these in turn bled into the commemoration of Mohamed Mahmoud.

Follow the Protests

It has been a tumultuous week in this part of the world. More details coming soon, but in the meantime, you can read about Morsi's constitutional declaration here. While his decision to take over most judicial powers does, in fact, have many supporters, others are already throwing around the nickname "pharaoh". Here's the text of the declaration.

Opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood, especially supporters of liberal and leftist revolutionary groups that clashed with security forces last November at this very time on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, had already planned a commemoration of that event. But with Morsi's announcement today, many of the same people have tailored their message into a protest against this move as well. For a blow-by-blow account of what's brewing downtown (in English), I recommend Al Ahram's blog.

1434 AH

Today is a beautiful day in Cairo. The sky is blue for once, with a few fluffy white clouds and no apparent signs of smog or acid rain. It is the right temperature for a wool skirt and a sweater, but still warm enough (or finally cool enough) to sit outside. So here I am, in the garden of AUC's Tahrir Campus on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, where almost exactly a year ago infamous clashes erupted between security forces and peaceful protesters, including some of my friends. And just this Friday Salafi demonstrators pressing for shari'a in the new constitution spilled over from the square to paint Quranic verses over the revolutionary murals for which Mohamed Mahmoud has become famous. This morning new painters are out, at work on a fresh mural of Khaled Saeed. Downtown is peaceful today: even the KFC (or, "Kenticky" as it's known here) across the street is shuttered for the holiday, and I'm alone  except for two gardeners and a skinny black cat. Today is Islamic New Year, the first day of the month of Muharram and the start of the year 1434 on the Islamic calendar.

It seems an appropriate time for a fresh start. For the past week or so, for the first time in a couple of months, I have started to regret that I have only one month here before I go home for the holidays. I feel like I have finally begun to find a balance between taking on challenges and granting myself the comforts that will make me happy. September and October were rough - illness, theft, breakup, disillusionment, sexual harassment - I had just about had it with Egypt by the time November rolled around. But both the natural passage of time and a few calming getaways (which I will soon describe) have gotten me back on track.

The backdrop for my personal reflections on my relationship with this place and whether or not it has finally taken a turn for the better has been a series of conflicting news items and dramatically contradictory opinions about the state of politics and society five months into Morsi's presidency. Almost categorically, my Egyptian friends hate the Muslim Brotherhood and hate Morsi. Most say he hasn't done much yet, but are deeply suspicious of what he will do. On the other hand, analysts, including knowledgeable expats here, seem to be pretty impressed with the professionalism and expertise and apparently moderate stances of Morsi's team. In society at large, there have been two reports in the past month or so of a munaqaba woman (one who covers her entire body and face except eyes in a loose, usually black, robe) forcibly cutting the hair of uncovered women in the metro, and one case of a teacher doing this to a female pupil. Perhaps the metro snipper is just one person -- I certainly haven't started moving to the other side of the car whenever I'm standing next to a munaqaba in fear that she's harboring a pair of scissors in the folds of her robe.

Then there were the Islamist constitutional demonstrations last week. The night before, I drove through Tahrir with my friend, on our way to meet others for a nighttime Nile felucca. We were coming from a drive-in shisha cafe, where you smoke through your window and waiters hop from car to car stoking coals. It was an odd juxtaposition, then, to see large crowds of men in Tahrir rigging scaffolding and hanging banners with shari'a scrawled boldly across it. There was no violence the next day, but thousands came to the square. Technically, neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor Al-Nour Party (the main Salafi group) participated, although this does not mean their supporters didn't. The current constitution, from the Mubarak era, states that the "principles of shari'a" are the primary source of legislation, but the main demand of these demonstrators was a more literal application. What this would mean in practice is not entirely clear -- stay tuned for updates.

Discussing the growing boldness of the conservatives as we drove through the square on the eve of the demonstrations, my friend recalled a scene from the famous Egyptian film 'Omarat Yacoubian (The Yacoubian Building). Zaki Pasha, a scion of Egypt's faded elite, stumbles drunk into Talaat Harb Square in the heart of the old downtown with a much younger woman on his arm. It's the middle of the night and the square is empty. Zaki looks up in bitter despair at the grand buildings around him and tries to explain to the woman what Egypt was like in his youth. He came back from Paris because Cairo was even better, he says -- new fashions used to come out here before they came out in Paris! But now, he shouts, flailing about in the square, "Ehna fe zaman el-meskh!" It's this line that my friend wanted to teach me, an expression of what he sees as a descent down a slippery slope led by the Muslim Brotherhood, away from the first world and toward the third. According to the film's translator, it means "We are in the time of travesty," but there is no real translation for meskh: it is rottenness, disintegration, a state when, as my friend said, the time when everything good becomes bad and everything bad becomes good.

A taxi driver I rode with a few days ago was particularly fond of a certain metaphor. The people of Egypt are five fingers of the same hand, he told me more than once, and each one has a different fingerprint. Trite perhaps, but it's true that any person you ask on the street probably has a completely different take on what's going on here right now than the next. When I was here in January, the revolutionary climate still prevailed, if with less intensity and fewer diehards than a few months earlier. Now it's much harder to tell where things are going, whether to be optimistic or pessimistic.

The hand metaphor man was perhaps the paradigmatic Cairo taxi driver, in his jolly yet loud manner but also in his choice of conversation topics.
   Where are you from? Germany?
       No, America.
   What do you think of the Egyptian people? 
      Good people. There are bad and good everywhere, but mostly good.
   Really? Because a lot of Americans think we're all terrorists.
      Well, it's true that there are a lot of ignorant people. But I would not say the majority of Americans believe this.
   I think Americans are respectable people, too. But Islam is a good religion. Terrorists are not real Muslims. Like Osama bin Laden. Anyway, I know Americans and Europeans -- they always ask why Islam says we can have four wives! That's not true. Only in special cases.
       (My friend Lindsey) What are those cases?
    For example, if your wife is sick and can't give you children. You can marry another woman so that   
you don't sin. Or if you want children and you love your wife, but she's sterile. Then it's ok. 
     (Lindsey) Ok, but what if my husband is sterile and I want kids? Don't you think I should be able to  marry a second husband?
    (Good-naturedly) No, no. You should divorce your husband then and marry someone else! 
     (Lindsey) But aren't divorced women here stigmatized? Would you marry a divorced woman?
    Yes, of course! If her husband was a bad man -- if he beat her, for example, which is totally un- Islamic, absolutely. Beating your wife is wrong. If you beat your wife you are not a real man.
     Agreed.
   (Now stuck in traffic on Qasr el-Nil Bridge to Tahrir) But we got off-topic. We were talking about bin Laden. Now, who do you think was responsible for September 11?
     I know what you're going to say...
    You think it was Osama bin Laden?
    Yes.
    Both of you?! Really? Wrong! Then why did all the Jewish businesses in the WTC take a holiday on September 11? They weren't there when the attacks happened! 
    Many, many Jews died in 9/11. Where are you getting your information from?
   [The three of us went back and forth in this vein for a few minutes.]
  Well, the Israelis were behind it. Do some more research about it and you'll see. The hijackers were just put up to it by Israel. That's where the money came from. Do you really think those guys had the money or ability to plan attacks like that?! No way.
    But al Qaeda took responsibility for the attacks. Quite honestly, you're going to lose us on conspiracy theories, but we could probably agree about Israeli policy in the West Bank, for example.
    (At this point we had to get out of the cab.) Yes, yes, okay. You know, there are so many ignorant people out there. They don't read books, they get to college and don't know how to learn. I have a master's.  How much longer will you be in Egypt? It was a pleasure meeting you, take care.
   

The other piece of news that has come up fairly frequently lately is Obama's reelection. Because of the time difference, it wasn't possible for us to throw much of a victory party. (I woke up 15 minutes after the election was called.) When cab drivers brought up the results over the next couple of days, though, they had surprisingly little to say. Whether for my benefit or not, those I encountered gave me a thumbs up and a mabrouk. Perhaps they, like my professors, felt only that he was the better of two evils -- I'm not sure. Generally when I talk to people in Egypt, they have had very mixed feelings about Obama, and feel that he has not delivered at all on the promise he made to reinvent U.S. policy in the Middle East when he spoke at Cairo University in 2009. Still, no one I met had any illusions that Romney would be better. My favorite election moment this year, however, was a t-shirt I spotted while descending into the metro. The t-shirts of the shabab, or youth, are a frequent subject of bewilderment, as the t-shirt companies seem to throw on whatever English words (or even just letters) they stumble across, in no particular order. The gentleman in question was, on Election Day itself, wearing a tight purple imitation Zara brand t-shirt with the following slogan printed on the back: "Paid for by people with deep knowledge of the Romney campaign's strategic thinking." And then a bunch of nonsense words. Where did this come from?!

Obama was not the only fodder for election news of late. As of November 4, Egypt's Copts have a new Pope, Tawadros II, who will be ordained on November 18. Morsi has said he'll attend the ceremony, the first Egyptian president to do so. Initially, electors from the clergy and prominent Christian laymen whittled down a list of possible candidates to 3. Then, as per tradition, a blindfolded child picked the winning name out of a bowl in Abbaseyya Cathedral. Tawadros has said that Morsi is all Egyptians' president, is welcome at the papal enthronement, and deserves love and respect -- but also that Christians will not tolerate a constitution that heeds only the wishes of the Muslim majority. I tried with a few friends to attend the selection ceremony. We arrived at 4:45am, assuming it would probably be packed. In fact, we were the first ones there except for the guards. Turns out we needed to have a special invitation from the church in advance, and no wheedling could persuade them otherwise.


Meanwhile, there is never a dull moment in CASA. Each Monday, the program hosts a lecture, in Arabic, on some topic we've been discussing in class. Last week, it was Shahira Amin, the vice-president of state-owned Nile TV at the time of the revolution. A stylish woman in her early fifties, she spent much of her early life abroad, worked at CNN, and learned Arabic essentially as a second language: her Arabic was peppered with apologetic English. At Nile TV before the revolution, she said, there was little sense of censorship because she worked with foreign language channels whose express goal was to present a positive and open image of Egypt to the outside world. When the revolution came, she and her colleagues were expressly told not to mention the demonstrations on air. Her teenage daughter brought her to Tahrir, though, and after seeing that the people in the square were not thugs at all, Amin announced that she would not return to work at NileTV and was instead on the side of the protesters. She was banned from Maspero and put on a no-fly list. Her former colleagues, furious that she had called them liars for their (non) coverage of the events in the square, permanently broke off contact. Criticized by some for complicity with the regime's media agenda until it was convenient not to be, she told of how she had broken the story of Egypt's sky-high rate of female circumcision in the 1990s, when it was banned from discussion. (Then Suzanne Mubarak picked up the issue.) During the revolution, it was Amin who broke the virginity tests story -- that is, that the police and military were forcibly and invasively "checking" for female protesters' virginity. Since the revolution, she has gone back on air, and explained to us that she is impressed by Morsi's attitude toward the press. So far there has been no crackdown and "Morsi has done more in 3 months than Mubarak did in 30 years." Yet, she said, the current problem is that the ranks of felul journalists have not been purged, especially on national TV. They are used to regurgitating press releases verbatim and not to doing any investigative legwork. Politically, this old guard is still not quite sure what to do with the Ikhwan, and is playing it safe trying to please both the Brotherhood and the army. At the same time, so many new channels have been inaugurated in the last year and a half that the government has tried to put a cap on them. While not all these new journalists may yet have the training to produce top quality reporting, this bodes well for the future.

* * *

In pursuit of a tame adventure for my Eid El Adha vacation the last weekend in October, I headed to the Fayoum Oasis. The capital of this oasis governorate just 100km south of Cairo has gained notoriety in recent years as a bastion of Islamist and particularly anti-American sentiment. On the upside, that's not where we went.  Rather, an impossibly long white Peugeot station wagon with a furry dashboard arrived in Cairo the first day of the vacation to transport us to Zad el-Mosafer guest house in Tunis village. We were inching through Giza traffic, approaching the Pyramids, our jokey driver Eid fiddling with his gray and white keffiyeh, when the impossible happened: It began to rain. At first I was sure it was just air conditioner drip, but when the drops continued, we were like toddlers at Christmas -- sticking our hands out the windows, taking photos of the droplets on the windshield, transfixed by people's reactions in the street. It was the first rain I'd seen in almost five months.

First rain in five months

Ten minutes later it was over. As we left Giza, we passed herds of sheep marked for sacrifice, the main event of Eid El-Adha. After a long stretch of desert, we arrived at Lake Qarun, and followed it to our village. Tunis is known now as a getaway for artists from Cairo, who have begun to build mud villas in a more or less traditional style alongside the villagers' homes. It is especially known for its pottery: there are seven workshops.

The ecolodge consisted of cool, spacious mud and thatch "chalets" encircling tents with comfortable lounge pillows, a green lawn, date palms, and blooming fuchsia flowers. We spent our days reading, playing cards or Bananagrams, and eating fresh-cooked fish from the lake. At night, we saw the stars. The holiday itself was quiet, by which I mean that I heard no squealing sheep. Our buddy Eid, the driver, took us out to Wadi Rayyan on the other side of Lake Qarun for a desert adventure with impromptu offroading in his stretch Peugeot (which, it became clear very quickly, was definitely not a Jeep).

Home sweet home at the ecolodge

Street in Tunis village with artists' homes

We hired a fisherman and his three young sons to take us out in their rowboat to watch the sunset on Lake Qarun 

Wadi Rayyan, with Lake Qarun in the background

Just a few days later, I went on a CASA trip to a hotel of a very different kind: the Hurghada Marriott on the Red Sea. It would be wrong to say I did anything but swim in the sea, swim in the pool, gorge myself on breakfast and dinner buffets, sweat out toxins in the steam room, and don my snorkeling gear (always a struggle for me) for a look at some unbelievable fish. The coral seemed pretty dead (but how would I know), but those 3-foot eels and pencil-shaped purple fish with the long snouts were worth the trip. The strange part of Hurghada is how it truly seems to erupt out of nowhere, an improbable metropolis in a vast no man's land. We drove for five hours or so along the Red Sea, south from Ain el Sokhna, and passed only one village (an oil town/rest stop). Not so much as a pit latrine for hundreds of miles. Word has it there are desert bedouins camped out in the Eastern Desert somewhere, but we didn't see any.

On the Marriott beach, Hurghada 

Snorkeling in the Red Sea off the coast of Hurghada. I'm the one with the green snorkel in the very front.

* * *

Postscript:

I found myself sitting tonight at one of the cheap, outdoor cafes of the Borsa, surrounded by a trio of Egyptian poets and their friends. I listened in as each took a turn reciting one of his poems to the group, the others snapping or nodding to acknowledge the best verses. At one point, a wandering crazy man, getting on in years, came up to us and prepared to belt out a tuneless melody for us in exchange for cash. But when he realized the hushed group was listening to poetry, he, too, shut up, and bent over us to listen in. When the reciter was finished, the man -- in a dirty gray galabeyya and white turban -- took his turn. He grabbed the youngest of the poets by the arm and recited in near perfect fus7a a poem of his own choosing. When finished, he turned to me and said with a grin, "I love you," then marched off. 

Coming Soon to Theaters?

Yesterday, a man posted a notice on the all-purpose expat listserv Cairo Scholars that a friend was looking for foreign extras to appear in Egyptian TV series. Ever since I met the British and Syrian-Kurdish girls who did this for a living at my first bizarre Cairo expat party back in June, I had been waiting for my big break. My roommate Sarah confirmed that she was also down for an adventure, so I e-mailed the recruiter, Gamal. He requested our photos, and confirmed that he was excited to meet us because he has an American and an Indian roommate. I asked what this TV series was. No response. (Were we unwittingly signing ourselves up for an Egyptian porno? We hoped not.) We agreed to meet Gamal anyway, on a street in Mohandiseen. He walked us to an apartment building nearby, but our fears were allayed when we saw the sign that read Clakeet Casting Agency (or, alternatively, Clakeet Casting Agince). People of various shapes, sizes, and ethnic origins were gathered in the small waiting room. On one wall was a giant collage of Egyptian film posters, ranging from the hilarious classic Hassan wa Markos to the rather more melodramatic (it seemed) Gonoun el Hobb ("Crazy Love"). On the other wall were dozens of mug shots of (mostly foreign female) recruits, pasted into the image of a film reel. Sarah, Miriam, and I were called immediately into a side room, where a wiry man in a Castro-style hat was waiting behind a camera. Beside him (his assistant?) was a thirty-something woman in a tight black miniskirt with long, black tresses. I was first to be interviewed, suddenly feeling pretty dumpy in my jeans and bulky red sweater: we weren't expecting to make an appearance on camera. First in English, I recited my name, age, and height for the camera. Then the cameraman asked me to let my hair down and do a slow turn. I obliged. I posed with one profile, then the other. Then I repeated the procedure in Arabic.

When that was done, Gamal escorted me one room over. Three middle-aged casting bigshots were waiting. Two, the round ones, just sipped their Nescafe and watched. One sat behind a desk and scribbled my information once again, once again switching languages to test me. How long would I be in Egypt? What languages did I speak? Within five minutes, I was sent on my way. When my Indian roommate wasn't called, Gamal mumbled something about needing blondes. Strange, I'm not blonde either -- but I could be I suppose. Not much older than us perhaps, Gamal took our numbers and promised to call if any parts came up. We could be silent extras for 250 LE a day -- or, there was a faint chance, cast in a speaking role in an Egyptian drama. Until then, I can only dream.