Women on the Offensive

Some weeks ago I was sitting in a café along the Zamalek corniche with an Egyptian friend when the conversation turned, as many seem to do, to sexual harassment. It wouldn’t be your fault even if you walked naked in the street, she said evenly. Because even when you’re fully clothed, he sees you naked.

This is the essence of one slogan in HarassMap’s recent online ad campaign. One of the many organizations that has recently sprouted up to fight this ugly phenomenon, HarassMap collects details of harassment from the victims via text message and superimposes them on a map of the city. Since most women do not, of course, report incidents to the site, it gives only a rough idea at this point of where the centers of vile activity are located. But at the very least, it gives people a visual.

Here are the new slogans, which aim to tear down the common excuses employed by harassment apologists:

If the cause of harassment is delayed marriage, why does the father harass?

If the cause of harassment is illiteracy, why does the teacher harass?

If the cause of harassment is sexual repression, why does the 7-year-old harass?

If the cause of harassment is the way a woman dresses, why is the woman in niqab harassed?

If the cause of harassment is poverty, why does the CEO harass?

If ignoring harassment makes it go away, why has it not disappeared after years of silence?

The Arabic version of HarassMap's ad campaign

I’ve heard all of these excuses, and recently saw “The reason for harassment is your clothing” (Sabab el taharrosh lebsek) scrawled on the wall of the Gamal Abdel Nasser metro station.

We watched a film in my Arab feminism class earlier this semester called Four Women of Egypt. The documentary records the conversations of four middle-aged women in the mid-1990s: a labor and peasant organizer, an Islamist theater critic, a Christian journalist, and a Francophile novelist. All four are close, if combative, friends, and two met in prison. Watching the film and doing the other readings for my class, most of which date to the 1990s, it strikes me how much seems to have changed for women activists since then. Specifically (and obviously) the Internet has completely changed what kind of coordination is possible, and led to new kinds of projects, like HarassMap, that were not conceivable 15 years ago.

The Internet is also how I found out about International Women’s Day (March 8). Honestly, I’m not sure I knew such a thing existed until I moved to Egypt, and there was far more online buzz about it among my Arab friends than the Americans. The Uprising of Women in the Arab World, the pan-Arab online umbrella site I posted about a few months ago, announced its on-the-ground initiative in 8 countries to celebrate the day. In each participating Arab city, a giant banner was unfurled overlooking a major thoroughfare. Each featured at least one large woman’s face, forcing passersby (as the site said) to look her in the eye. Here in Egypt, the banner on the side of Madbouli Bookstore in Talaat Harb Square read: “I am with the uprising of women in the Arab World because woman is the womb of revolution.”

Women may well be the womb of the revolution, but at the heart of the action assault cases have skyrocketed. An extraordinarily powerful video (see below) was released by the group Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment soon after the anniversary of the revolution this year. It shows the chillingly methodical mass rape of a female protester who is just out of sight of the camera. After this came out, several other women published their own stories of assault in Tahrir during the same two-week period. A couple of these were volunteers with Op Anti-SH themselves, sucked into bloodthirsty mobs while trying to save other women. Were these assaults organized? It seems hard to believe given the chaos of the square, but the strategic precision of the rapists is shocking. But by whom? And why? Some activists say it is to scare women away from political protests, but no one seems to have more details. The responses of the Shura Council, the upper and only current house of Parliament, were appalling. Said one representative: “By getting herself involved in such circumstances, the woman has 100% responsibility.”

Trigger warning: this is a really tough video to watch. But it is also important, and woke a lot of people up to this terrifying phenomenon that began happening with alarming regularity this winter.

Public art like the International Women's Day initiative, "Graffiti Harimi" and Women on Walls is, I think, one of the most promising ways to combat the degrading views toward women that lead some men to participate in this kind of mass assault. Since the revolution, Cairo's streets have blossomed into color with revolutionary graffiti. But women began to notice that they were conspicuously absent. Even when graffiti slogans are meant to discourage sexual harassment, they tend to appeal to men's sense of masculinity rather than empowering or honoring women. "Estargel w ehmeeha" is one slogan I've seen recently: Man up and protect her. But the woman-run projects I mentioned above are part of a truly exciting effort to "reclaim public space", as one participant in Graffiti Harimi claims in the excellent video below, and to reinforce the idea that women will not be bullied into hiding at home. Even the title "Graffiti Harimi," she says, attempts to recast the word "Harimi" (think "harem") -- which has the negative connotation of ownership of women. Likewise, the slogans they use may be traditionally used to cast women in a negative light; they try to pair them with images that transform them into ones that cast women as strong and resilient. 

Overall, positive messages -- "No to harassment," "My body is free", etc. But also the appeal to manliness: "Man up and protect her." (Mohamed Mahmoud St.) 

In my Egyptian film class last week, we watched the 2010 movie 678. It is the story of a shy, veiled young woman who faces physical sexual harassment every day on the bus. She begins spearing the genitals of the men who rub against her with razor blades. Her story then intersects with that of two other women of different social classes who have been violently assaulted, one of whom insists for the first time on bringing her case to court. Our teacher, a woman, told us that it was the first time she’d had the courage to teach this film. The issues were just too sensitive. Mentioning the word harassment was taboo.

If you're looking for a bellwether for social trends (and taboos), look no further than Cairo University. When my feminism professor graduated in the late 1970s, she says, there was not a hijab in sight on campus. Maybe in poor or rural areas -- but not in a university. Today, more than 90% (she says 99%) of Muslim students are veiled. Empirical evidence - a walk around campus with my roommates - confirms this. The old buildings scattered around still have about them a dilapidated grandness: domes, marble staircases, bronze busts of dead poets and scientists. It happened that the day we visited fell in the middle of student government elections, so the grounds were filled with booths representing different student parties. Each party had large poster boards set up along the walkways advertising its candidates with their names and photos. But on the posters for one party, Shabab Bokra ("Youth of Tomorrow"), the women's photos were replaced with identical cartoon avatars (veiled, of course), while the male candidates' photos were shown as normal. Hmm. This smelled of the Salafist Al Nour party tactic in the 2011 parliamentary elections, when all the women's faces -- they were required to run female candidates under a quota system -- were replaced with flowers. 

In contrast with the creeping conservatism I observed at the university, a visit to the Nazra Institute for Feminist Studies proved that ideas are evolving in both directions simultaneously. Along with my Arab Feminism class, I met with the executive directors of the center at their airy, spacious apartment in the appropriately-named leafy neighborhood of Garden City. Nazra was founded in 2005 by young men and women who felt the old feminist groups were too focused on development and not on radical ideas or on politics. When they tried to register as an NGO, the application was sent back by the government, which said that "nesawy" ("feminist"), used in the organization's name, was not a word --  thus they must have meant "nesaa'ey" (adjectival form of "women's"). These days, Nazra uses terms like "gender mainstreaming" to talk about its training programs for female candidates, who must not be affiliated with either the old National Democratic Party (NDP) or with an Islamist Party to qualify. Nazra also talks candidly about sexual assault and especially homosexuality in ways that are extremely rare here. Nowhere else in Egypt have I heard someone say the words "queers" or "vaginal penetration" without blinking an eye; but nowhere else, for that matter, runs "sexuality schools" either. The organization aims to be an open space for dialogue about these sensitive and extremely taboo issues. Although one of the directors seemed very pessimistic when asked about the headway he thought they'd made in changing the public discourse, the very existence here in Cairo of such a place seems a brave mark of progress.

Meanwhile, far away in New York, a showdown was brewing at the United Nations. In mid-March, the UN Commission on the Status of Women brought forth a declaration condemning violence against women and outlining steps to be taken to fight it. In debate, a close advisor to President Morsi named Pakinam Sharkawy (a woman) condemned the document as being out of line with cultural and religious norms. (It undermined the family and took questionable stances on issues like abortion and homosexuality, and wrongly counted marital rape as rape, according to the Brotherhood.) When it came time for the final vote, though, a parallel delegation emerged. Mervat Tallawy, the Egyptian representative to the UN, career diplomat, and decided opponent of the Brotherhood -- decided to contradict her government's wishes and vote in favor of the declaration. A yes vote was needed, she said, in order to fight back against "a global wave of conservatism, of repression against women." And so the two sides continue to duke it out...

Finally, my own foray into controversy. It wasn't at the UN, but it did unfold outside the Presidential Palace and in the pages of a major newspaper. Back in September, I wrote about attending a vigil outside the palace in remembrance and outrage on behalf of a girl who was killed while trying to fight back against her assailant in Assiut. It was organized by the Basma movement (against harassment), and I was invited by American and Egyptian friends who were working with the group. There were not more than 40 of us at the event, perhaps a quarter of us foreign. As usual, I had been wary of carrying a sign, though the Egyptian organizers assured me that it would not hurt their cause: this was an issue that affects all of us, and we were all in solidarity with one another. I was glad afterward that I had gone, as I said then, and I still am. But I had nearly forgotten about it when, in February, I returned from my trip to Luxor with my dad to find my photograph posted to my Facebook wall, the logo of Al Masry Al Youm printed across it. There I was, stern-faced, looking off into the distance, holding a sign that read something like "Morsi, where are you? Harassment is everywhere." My name wasn't listed, nor was my nationality or affiliation. The picture had been paired with an article about an unrelated event -- protests at Egyptian embassies abroad in solidarity with the women assaulted in Tahrir in the early months of this year. At first I panicked about the visibility, but quickly a number of Egyptian friends liked the photo, adding that they were proud to see a foreign friend standing up for their cause. I relaxed. And then I received an e-mail from the administration of my fellowship, informing me that my actions were extremely inappropriate and if any proof of attending a political gathering were to surface again, I would be kicked out of the program in an instant. The e-mail was sent to everyone in the program, snowballing into what made me feel at intervals embarrassed, angry, rebellious, and concerned. You're a foreigner and have no right to talk to the Egyptian president in such an insulting way, I was told. Harassment is a political issue, and you're getting into politics when it's none of your business. Then, It's dangerous and you could jeopardize funding for the whole program! I have thought long and hard -- and written -- about what the proper role is for me here as an American. It's not so difficult to find yourself in the midst of a demonstration (walking out of class, for example -- this has happened), and given the current activities of many young people, you also want to give some kind of support to your friends. Ultimately, I never thought it was right, though, to shout slogans like "Down with the regime" -- or anything at all in an expressly political setting. If we go at all, it's as observers. But when it comes to harassment and assault, we're not Egyptians or Americans, we're women. It's an issue that cuts much deeper for us, and has to be treated differently. 

One Wedding Shobrawy-Style

Egyptian friends have often told me: "Our Friday morning is your Sunday morning." Indeed there is a quiet laziness to Friday mornings here that is more like the idea of Sundays in America than the real thing. The streets are empty, the people are asleep, the shops are closed, and at least in my mind it is possible to hear birds chirping. The Friday prayer, which breaks the silence at noon via speakers positioned to reach every corner of the neighborhood, nevertheless has an oddly lulling quality. The voice of the imam, though loud and rhythmically aggressive, is muffled so that it is hard to make out anything more than a phrase here or there.

This Friday, as I lay in bed half-listening to the sermon, I thought back to the night before. Certainly it had been one of the most memorable experiences of my time in Cairo. I had spent quite some time that evening trying to figure out just what to wear: a tunic with loose pants? a long-sleeved shirt under a dress over pants with a scarf? The latter won out, but in truth we had no idea what to expect. I've written about weddings before, but this one was different. For one, it was the wedding of one of our own: a CASAwiyya. Second, it was to be held in Shobra El-Kheima, the very last stop on the Cairo metro line. In truth, Shobra El Kheima is in a different governorate to the north, and is considered by most in Cairo or Giza proper (many of whom, I found, had never even been there) to be the end of the earth. What will you wear? people asked us anxiously, worried we would scandalize the locals with short sleeves or skin. Just mentioning that I would attend the wedding had a huge shock factor. 

In any case, Sofia, the bride, sent out an e-mail a few days beforehand warning us that her fiance's brothers had printed off hundreds of flyers stamped with the Ultras Ahlawy and Ultras White Knight logos. But thankfully: Molotovs are not allowed, wrote her fiance, Mohamed, on the Facebook event.

We arrived as a conspicuous group of over a dozen, made more so by one guy narrating our journey in a Godfather voice. In order to reach the street where the wedding was to be held, we passed for quite some time through a labyrinthine souk -- not the Khan El Khalili kind, but the practical sort that sells kitchen implements and Mickey Mouse nightgowns and whirring children's toys. If we stopped to ask directions, we didn't need to say anything. The foreign bride? Straight ahead!

Because transportation beyond the end of the metro is exclusively by tuk-tuk, we passed a number of those parked alongside the dirt streets. It was around 10pm when we finally reached glowing lights and the entrance to a a tent, all strung up between a few apartment buildings of 3 stories or so. Most appeared to be single (extended) family homes: Sofia and her husband, fiance, will now live in one such house in an apartment about his parents'. In Egypt, the bride moves to her husband's apartment, which he must ready before the wedding -- usually having bought it quite a while before, as owning an apartment is usually a prerequisite to a girl agreeing to an engagement. "The apartment" thus takes on all kinds of broader meaning, most importantly the husband's ability to provide for his wife.

The two perpendicular alleys in which the wedding took place were covered over in old Oriental carpets. Bright red and yellow fabric was draped from the apartments to create a tent feeling inside, criss-crossed by strings of lights, and round tables were set up -- primarily, it seemed, to facilitate the passing out of copious amounts of green apple Fanta. The bride and the groom hadn't arrived yet, and in fact friends of the groom were still at work constructing the platform where the couple would sit on a white couch to greet guests. We watched as they hammered and erected a beach scene backdrop, subsequently covered in white gauze.

At last the bride and groom appeared on the TV screen rigged up in front of us, and everyone rushed toward the entrance of the tent to welcome the couple. Cheb Khaled's blockbuster hit C'est La Vie was blasting as they made their way up our makeshift aisle, the bride's father (the only one in a suit - weddings are casual in these parts) danced behind them. Sofia, my friend, was wearing a white lace dress with long sleeves and a turtleneck, as well as a sort of cap that Muslim women wear under their veil -- a kind of wedding hijab. She recently converted to Islam and her new husband is a political activist who trained at Al Azhar and hopes to be a reformist preacher. Look at her makeup! said an Egyptian woman to me, She is masreya masreya now! (100% Egyptian).



For a short time, we heard the sound of fake guns going off, and worried in passing if our other friends' ominous warnings about security had been warranted. But it was just to add to the festive mood, like the fireworks. As for the rampant hashish we'd been cautioned about, I saw only a few young guys smoking outside the tent when I slipped out to find a bathroom. A middle-aged lady standing on her stoop nearby invited me in to use hers. It was a hole in the ground with a spigot and wooden box. I couldn't have cared less given the circumstances, but she seated me down in a white plastic deck chair in the linoleum-tiled hall and apologized: Sorry it's not like your nice bathrooms downtown!! she told me, in the same breath asking me to stay for tea. Manawwareen, manawwareen! she kept saying, a gracious way of saying "welcome" that literally means - You are lighting up the place.

Back in the street, the dancing was picking up, with a mob of mostly teenage girls in one circle and a mob of young guys in another. Once I was in, there was no going back. The girls grabbed my hands and gestured to copy their moves. Seeing a foreigner enthusiastically engaged in "shaaby" dancing, as it's called (see previous: "Haty Bosa ya Bet" video) was hilarious to the girls, and one of them even asked me to dance with her husband. Another woman foisted her baby off to me (see below). Another was waving something in the air as she danced, then handed it to me. I followed suit, only to realize that it was a knife. We looked behind us to see the boys, some shirtless and drenched in sweat, crowdsurfing across a sea of strangers.






When I tried reluctantly to leave for the metro, the girls kept grabbing me and pulling me back in to dance. At last we all blew kisses goodbye and I started to make my way toward the exit. Partway there, I encountered a little boy, maybe 7 years old, who challenged me wordlessly to a dance-off. Drugged into shaaby wedding nirvana by the loud music and a couple hours of spinning, I accepted. To this day, I am not sure who won, but the photographic evidence is here:

What remained between me and the door was a sea of rowdy youth. Asking to get through would be fruitless, so I just began to dance my way through the crowd. The seas parted and the youth clapped as I threw my hands up and made a dramatic exit.

Two Taxis, April 13

11:50AM. 26 July St. En route with Robin from Dokki to Zamalek.
-Germany? From where?
-La, Amreeka.
-Obama!
-Aywa, Obama kwayyes. (Yes, Obama is good.)
-La, mosh kwayyes! (No! Not good!)
-Ah, okay. 

Surely he doesn't like US foreign policy...

-'Alshan aswad. Black. (Because he's black.)
-Naam? (Uhh, yes?)
-Black mosh helw. (Black is not pretty.)

Well, this just got awkward. More importantly, is this a joke? Our driver is definitely black by all reasonable measures. However, we got the feeling he would be pretty offended by that. He kept going...

-Wa Clinton, Clinton kan kwayyes. (But Clinton was good!)
-Mhmm.
-Wa Bush!! (And Bush!)
-La, Bush msh kwayyes. (No, not Bush.) 
-AYWA, KWAYYES! Kwayyes awy. (Yesss, good! Very good!)

What?! Not a single human I've ever met in the Middle East has praised George Bush, not one. Puzzling over what to make of this odd interaction, we arrive at our destination and never find out.


* * *

11:50PM. En route from Zamalek to Dokki.
I stand waiting for a cab at the corner of 26 July and Shagaret El Dor in Zamalek, outside a glowing benzina (gas station). As I start to walk, a groaning white jalopy pulls up beside me. I peer inside to get a good look at the driver. If he's over 45, I'll take it. He's at least ten years over my minimum, so I get in. He has a heavy aquiline nose and a rugged but sagging face topped by a close-cropped tuft of gray.

-Dokki?

He nods.

-Medan El Mesaha, inshallah.
-Inshallah ya madame.

We ride without speaking across the 15 May Bridge. The windows are down and a cool breeze laps at my face.  Umm Kolsoum is on. Her crooning fills the silence. The driver lights a cigarette and holds it against the steering wheel between his thumb and pointer. The tip of that cigarette is the only light inside the car. Outside, the neon signs marking the Nile dinner boats light the dark Corniche. Anyone here will tell you that Cairo is best seen at night, but I'm almost never alone enough to feel it. Umm Kolsoum crescendos. This is the Cairo I don't want to leave. We reach Maglis El Dawla and the driver turns toward the Medan. I see the white Cilantro sign glowing a few blocks ahead.

When we reach the square, I address the driver for the first time since I got in.

-Momken taleff keda? I gesture to turn toward my building.
-Araby is very good, madame. 
-Allah yekhaleek. Alshan 'aisha hena. Thank you -- it's because I live here.

We arrive at my door.

-Ma' el salama ya madame. It means goodnight. Ma el salama, ma el salama. 

I get out and the car putters off into the dark.

Am I Staying or Going?

Summer comes early in Egypt, and sometimes I have trouble remembering whether spring ever happened at all. As temperatures climb toward the 90s, I am reminded more frequently that CASA is actually winding to a close. A few more weeks of classes, a spring break, final exams, and then a brutal thrust into the real world of unemployment. For the time being, I feel in some sense that I am treading water, unsure whether I should be laying down deeper roots here or picking up the loose ends and getting ready to move on. I've never had this degree of uncertainty in my life before -- that is, not knowing what I will be doing 8 weeks from now, much less in a year. As I work on figuring out what comes next, I alternate between two sentiments. Sometimes, I think of the long, long summer ahead, a thirsty Ramadan under the July sun, an indefinite period of traffic jams on the Corniche and feral dogs and shouting matches with taxi drivers and sandwiching myself onto the metro as the sweat drips down my pant legs and the matrons ogle my arm hair. At those times, I am not ashamed to say I miss America and am maybe ready to go home. Yet I think just as often with fondness of the relationships I've formed here and the communities I have become a part of. At those times, I don't feel ready to leave.

One such time was the recent end-of-year awards ceremony for my social studies students at St. Andrew's. All grades gathered together with their parents to recognize the top students in each subject area, watch a slideshow of the year's highlights, and feast on cookies and soda. I was afraid before I went that I would feel out of place: I was only a part-time teacher and felt I didn't know many people around the school. I also felt like a failure because not a single one of my students had passed the final exam -- a real GED test intended to simulate the one we had hoped they would take in June. The highest grade was a 42. I worried that my students would feel incredibly discouraged. In fact, the same results were seen across the board, and the high school students who did come to the ceremony didn't seem fazed in the slightest. Grades in hand, they came up to shake my hand and pose for photos. They seemed pleased that I had come. The mood was jubilant as the student DJs blasted Jai Ho and, peculiarly, Barbie Girl, giving the elementary kids a chance to break it down.

I thought back then to the impending doom I had felt as we approached the final exam. I knew that only four or five students would be selected to take the actual GED, but they didn't. A few questions in particular stuck out. My lesson on supply and demand, involving an extended comparison of Chloe's Car Company and Velia's Car Company, had gone surprisingly well. A day or so later, a sample test I gave them asked an easy question about the effect of price increases on the demand for toasters. I felt good: I knew they had supply and demand down pat. But one hand went up, then another and another. What's a toaster? each student asked. Therein lay the crux of (one of) the big problems we were up against. State lottery revenues, teen driving laws, toasters. These were the questions that were supposed to be easy for any half-grown American with his eyes open, but they were the hardest for my students. So there I found myself, drawing pictures of toaster ovens on the whiteboard. Teaching American history made me feel alternately patriotic and foolish -- the former when my students oohed and aahed over Albert Bierstadt's paintings of the American West or when a few produced moving commentaries on the iconic photos of the Civil Rights Movement. The latter came about when I had to apologize for awkwardly propagandistic instances of cultural bias. One sample question featured a photo with soldier returning from battle and the stars and stripes waving behind her. What American value does this photo represent? it asked. A teaching moment for all of us occurred when I assigned a few sample questions related to an excerpt on Manifest Destiny. One question asked:
Which of the following beliefs from the 1840s has been discredited?
a. Democracy is a form of government that appeals to many people.
b. Native Americans are incapable of self-government.
c. The United States should promote freedom throughout the world.
d. Individuals should have the opportunity to improve their lives. 
e. Economic development helps the United States prosper.

Obviously, the correct answer as per the test is (b). Almost every one of my students chose (c). I tried to use this to segue into a discussion about the world balance of power after World War II, but in the end I found myself just telling my students that they should try to pretend they are the US government when they take the test. Standing in front of 27 16-year-old refugees from Sudan, that sounded pretty ridiculous.

A few days later, though, I had planned a lesson on analyzing political cartoons. The GED loves them, but I was panicked because cartoons are incredibly culturally specific. All but 7 students skipped class that day, yet those who attended came alive. They were very well versed in current events, and laughed raucously as I passed a few images around. As we discussed a cartoon of an ostrich with its head in the sand roasting in the sun like a chicken (global warming), I joked that I'd never eaten ostrich. But one of my students had. Yeah, it's easy, just grill it, he said, making a matter-of-fact grilling motion. Another cartoon showed Ahmadinejad as Pinocchio, lying about nuclear weapons. That same student launched into a discussion of Iran's right to nuclear weapons if everyone else was going to have them. Except, he explained, it's very bad with Sudan. Ahmadinejad was selling nuclear technology to Bashir [President of Sudan, not so popular among these kids for obvious reasons]. Yes, this was very bad. 

When the semester ended, we agreed that in May I would start bootcamp for the 4 students selected to take the real GED. The rest will do another year of high school and hopefully pass the Sudanese national diploma next year. Getting them from 40 to passing - not just in social studies but in every subject area - will not be easy. But for a lucky one or two, the GED offers a way out -- hope for a scholarship to study abroad. Of course, many other hurdles also stand in the way: the TOEFL, the SAT, the admissions process. But there are a few precedents, and my students hold on to this possibility.

The day after I celebrated the end of the school year with my St. Andrew's students, I left Cairo for a CASA-sponsored weekend on the Red Sea. We arrived in El Gouna via a red-eye to the nearby Hurghada airport. When I stepped out onto the balcony of our adobe villa at dawn, I discovered that I was on a manmade island paradise. Around me were canals with little footbridges and all sorts of desert flora.

The view from my balcony in El Gouna: an island playground

As I quickly learned while walking outside the resort down to the Abu Tig marina, El Gouna is a kind of elite desert Disneyland. It was developed only in the 1990s by a family of telecom magnates as an alternative to its somewhat tackier neighbor, Hurghada. The spotless streets are lined with tasteful villas evocative of Hassan Fathy's New Gourna, with SUVs and fluffy puppies parked in the front yard. We walked through the streets in short skirts without a single whiff of harassment. Of course, it is a completely artificial place, the kind I might have pooh-poohed back home. But as a brief refuge from Cairo's din and chaos, this artificiality was a welcome relief.

Our first night in town, a group of us wandered around the marina (very quiet, perhaps the season or perhaps the tourism crisis, hard to say), where a number of shiny yachts were moored. We wound up at the same place as, it seemed, everyone else: Mood's, an outdoor dance club with tiki huts and a DJ spinning house beats. Most of the others there were Europeans dressed lavishly for the occasion. It was a toned-down version of the kind of evening I expect people have in Ibiza and places like that: music pulsing across the coast, colored strobe lights searching the horizon. In Egypt, I didn't expect it.

 

The thrill of showing some leg - much taken for granted 

The CASA contingent after a few days in the sun

The next day was water aerobics class, with a very muscly Egyptian instructor and a pair of fleshy middle-aged Brits. From there we moved on to snorkeling, though this time the water was really rough (there had been a sandstorm the previous night). Later that night, after squirreling plate after plate of smoked salmon appetizers from the open buffet, we gathered on a moored pirate ship that serves as a beach bar by day. We clung to our last moments of peacefulness by spending our last day sprawled on the "Relaxation Beach". That night, dining at an Indian restaurant, the contestants in the Top Model of the World competition walked in. These were ten or so girls, all over 6 feet tall, wearing evening gowns and sashes bearing the names of their countries. The champion was to be decided right there in Gouna later in the week. Then arrived the men with whom they were to be taking photos in the restaurant (where they did not, apparently, actually consume any food) while making scintillating conversation. Within 20 minutes, they had all left.

Back in Cairo, I answered a call online to translate a screenplay for an up-and-coming local actor/director/screenwriter. I had never done any formal translation, but the simultaneous interpretation class I'm in has shown me that I really enjoy the creative puzzle of recreating a speech or story in another language. Most of what we translate in the soundproof booths in class is in the category of official political discourse (UN, Arab League, Mubarak's surrender, etc.). But even in the most basic ways - capturing a turn of phrase in Arabic in an equally elegant English expressing, for example - there is room for creative imagination. There's also the cultural interpretation element. A formal speech in Arabic typically begins and ends with "As-salaamu aleikum w rahmat allahi w barakatu" - Peace be upon you with God's mercy and blessings. Saying this in English would be absurd, so we were instructed to ad lib something like "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us." When it came to the screenplay I was translating, there was even more space for me to interpret: it needed to sound natural in English more than it needed to be perfectly accurate. Much of the dialogue was youth slang that demanded a careful repertoire of expressions like "hey, dude!", "you'd be nothing without me, man", and "can you chill out, please?".  The hope is that the screenwriter/director will win a grant to produce the film, which portrays issues like an at-home abortion that are pretty wildly taboo here. One of the things that is great about the independent arts scene here is that it's kind of a small and tight-knit community. It is easy to come in and meet pretty important up-and-comers.

Meanwhile, in political news, warrants were issued for the arrest of wildly popular TV satirist Bassem Youssef (often called the "Jon Stewart of Egypt", since he modeled his post-revolution political satire show El Barnameg on The Daily Show). Accusations were brought to the general prosecutor by independent lawyers that Youssef had insulted Islam and and the Presidency. Youssef posted bail a couple of weeks ago, and as of today, Morsi has asked the claims to be dropped. But even the threat of such action against a comedian is an ominous sign. The best English-language summary of what happened can be found, as it happens, on The Daily Show.

Not knowing how much longer I'll be here, I'm also trying to make an effort to get to corners of the city I still haven't seen. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Lindsey organized a hiking expedition to Wadi Degla, on the eastern outskirts of the city. Who knew there was hiking to be done in Cairo? Unfortunately, the ticket gave us false hope that there would be flora and fauna. Instead we found ourselves trekking across scorched canyons, feeling something like post-apocalyptic Indiana Joneses. We offered a collective prize to the first person to spot a non-human living creature. Nobody claimed the prize. (Not that it wasn't cool: desert scenery is awesome until you run out of water.)

Hiking in Wadi Degla 

Not long afterward, my good friend Caroline from Princeton arrived to spend a week taking in the sights. This gave me the chance to flex my tour guide muscles again. Among the highlights for me were returning for the first time to two places I visited on my first trip to Egypt so long ago. One of these was Al Azhar mosque, the global power center of Sunni Islam. The seminary-university attached to Al Azhar attracts students from all over the world, and this internationalism can be felt inside the mosque as well. Not only were the visitors very diverse, but we dropped in on lessons (Islamic finance for instance) in a few of the side rooms and found Africans, Asians, and Arabs listening intently.

Al Azhar, then and now:

Here I am in 2006, Crocs in hand and my infamous fuchsia & lime green headscarf (with LINC friends Mary and Ashley)

And now in 2013 with Caroline

After winding through the khayameyya (tentmakers' market), one of my favorite somewhat lesser visited parts of historic Islamic Cairo, we suddenly found ourselves at the back side of Azhar Park.

Picnic games against the Cairo skyline, Al Azhar Park 

The second place I revisited with Caroline in tow was the Garbage City (Medinat El Zabaleen). It is the place that made, I think, the greatest impression on me in high school, and when I think about how my relationship with Cairo has been tempered by realism I often reflect back on my first experience of Garbage City. Then, in 2006, we drove in on a coach bus... Some years ago, I wrote in an internship application:

"There was a lurch, then a wave of gasps, and I suddenly found myself sitting peculiarly sideways. Outside our ill-fated bus, which had tried to navigate the narrow, unpaved alleys of Cairo's Garbage City, a mob of curious children had already gathered. Five minutes later, my friends and I were on foot, jostling with donkey carts piled high with teetering stacks of watermelons..."

Indeed, the experience of walking through a neighborhood centered around garbage -- its collection, sorting, and recycling - symbolized to me at the time my coming out of my comfort zone and exploring the unknown. The neighborhood is an amazing example of human resilience and ingenuity, of people filling the gaps left by nonexistent municipal services. That is more what struck me this time around, though: the first time, I was more drawn to the cacophony -- the teetering watermelons, the near collision with a donkey cart, the colorful political slogans scrawled on the walls, the skinned and headless cows hung by their tails from the butcher shops. Then, I found the neighborhood's colorful poverty both fascinating and shocking. I had never seen anything like it up close. These days, I'm sometimes troubled by the knowledge that a key element of Cairo's original allure was the exoticism of its poverty. Looking now at the Garbage City, it struck me that it might be the most organized place in the entire city. Without any idea how the residents actual organize themselves, it is a marvel that they are able to get the plastic bottles or the cardboard boxes of 17 million people into a single place.

Buried inside Garbage City, an overwhelmingly Christian neighborhood, is the Church of St. Simon the Tanner. Garbage City is built onto a plateau called Mokattam, and St. Simon is a Coptic Orthodox saint said to have moved the mountain in the 10th century. Although there has been a holy site associated with this incident for hundreds of years, about 25 years ago the Coptic Church decided to chisel a giant open-air church into the mountainside. These days, it seats 5,000 people. When we arrived, there were a lot of Christian school groups visiting and even a stand where you can get your cross tattoo (which all Copts here have on the inside of the wrist).

Inside St. Simon the Tanner's cave megachurch 

With Caroline at St. Simon's 

The final stop on this week's spiritual journey through Cairo was a viewing of the new documentary Jews of Egypt. For some months, authorities were censoring the film, but finally the ban was lifted and it is now in the ritzy Nile City Renaissance cinema. The audience was of mixed ages, but was overwhelmingly chic, with a heavy percentage of foreigners. I had heard that there weren't more than a couple dozen Jews left in Cairo, and knew that there had once been quite a sizable population. (Indeed, maps we looked at in my Ottoman Egypt course showed entire Jewish quarters in Cairo, just as they exist in most cosmopolitan cities in the Middle East.) But I didn't know how it had happened. Of the people interviewed in the film, only one was both still living in Egypt and still Jewish, and he only nominally. He was a radical communist organizer who happened to be in jail for his political activities at the time Jews were stripped of their Egyptian citizenship and expelled from the country in 1956. He had actually converted to Islam as a formality in order to marry his Muslim wife, but a law put in place in the Nasser Era legally negated the conversions of any Jews that occurred after a certain year. The poignant stories of most of the other interviewees were told in French, from France: they had been teenagers at the time of the expulsion and their mostly fond childhood memories of being Egyptian had blurred with time. Even in the 1940s, few recalled much animosity. The film took pains to demonstrate that Egyptian Jews felt, for the most part, far more Egyptian than Jewish, and did not sympathize with Zionism at all. (Anecdotal evidence suggested that most went to Europe in 1956 rather than Israel, but the question was not addressed head-on.) Still, as historians noted, in the 1910s the Zionist movement had an office downtown that was open to the public, and in fact some of its members were aligned quite amicably with the Egyptian nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul. After 1948, and especially in the 1950s, however, relations deteriorated rapidly. It was the Suez Crisis that gave Nasser the pretext to expel Egypt's Jews once and for all. You can still visit a few of Egypt's historic synagogues today, in Cairo and in Alexandria, but they are empty.

Spring flowers in Masr El Qadima