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Life Under the Overpass:
26th of July Street in Zamalek

May 30, 2006

The view across 26th of July Street in Zamalek.. it is also the heart of the neighborhood known as Zamalek, which is an island in the Nile. I lived here during my time in Egypt during the 2002-2003 year.. and it is fun to come back and point things out to Emily. In this case, pictured above, we are standing in the juice stand from which I bought countless glasses of orange and mango juice.

26th of July Street is the main drag of Zamalek, but it is all oddly cast into a shadow by the freeway overpass running above it. After spending time on this street it is easy to forget the road running overhead.. but it is there.

What makes one Cairo neighborhood more desirable than another is naturally the stores that set up in them. Zamalek features two upscale bookstores (i.e. featuring English books) and a passel of trendy restaurants.. not to mention several newstands and clothing stores. The area sidestreets are heavily populated with embassies, so there is a built in foreign (and wealthy) customer base.

No matter where you are in Cairo, you cannot escape the sight of average people going about their lives.. hailing a taxi or getting onto a service. This constant presence of people doing something becomes one of the comforts and pleasures of Cairo.. eventually.

The following are two more pictures of life going on as normal..

Below is a video clip of daily life.. my goal being to supplement the still photos with a brief glimpse of moving life. In this case you see students from the nearby art school walking around.. and at the end watch a girl stop a taxi and get in. It is a ritual that everyone in Cairo who is not getting toted around by air-conditioned tourist buses must experience.

Women on the Move:
Suzanne Mubarak on Women in Egypt

May 30, 2006

The past two editions of al-Ahram Weekly have featured a notice about speeches by Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

In the first ever celebration of Women's Labour Day, which fell on 17 May, Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, head of the National Council for Women (NCW), spoke about the largely unrecognized economic power of women "who are a pillar of the family unit and society as a whole." Speaking at NCW's headquarters, Mrs Mubarak said when women are empowered economically, they are a driving force in improving lives of their families, communities, and nation...

Mrs. Mubarak noted that Egyptian women perform multiple roles in paid and unpaid labour, but that this was not reflected in official statistics of economic activity. Similar to their peers in other developing countries, Egyptian women produce more than 60 percent of the food. ["Where Credit is Due" by Reem Leila, 25-31 May, 2006]

These two paragraphs highlight what I think can be a fundamental misunderstanding of what we mean when we talk about opening up women's roles in a society. There will always be something to praise about the way women conduct themselves in a society. Women are human beings with agency and wit and inevitably they find ways to exercise power and to utilize creative outlets. No matter how repressive a society, whether we are talking about classical Athens or modern Saudi Arabia, women turn out to play important roles.. and much of modern scholarship is about learning to look away from the "official" cultural apparatus from which women are often excluded and instead focusing on the informal roles and non-canonical forms that women utilized to great effect. [Emily's Women Writers Archive concentrates on exactly this project.]

When we speak of allowing a larger role for women in a society or organization, this does not mean expanding their informal role.. it means opening up public and formal roles. The goal is not to make women powerful in their own place, but to give women an actual place in the world of decision making and policy.. i.e. to let them fill roles that men would have filled in the past. When I read the statements by Suzanne Mubarak I sense a lack of willingness to challenge the resolutely private role that Egyptian culture offers to women..

In the other article she was reported as saying:

Mrs Mubarak said she was interested in bridging gender gaps as individuals and as governments. "However, this is a broad and complex subject, and in the final analysis answers will only become available if we address the roots of these inequities," she said. "This task is best left to good research and good policy based upon a real understanding of the problems and the obstacles to gender equity. ["Women on the Move" by Nevine el-Aref, 18-24 May, 2006]

Yes, there are complexities.. but there are also some patently obvious things to be said about the cast-in-stone nature of gender roles in modern Egypt. The note about the need to discover the "roots of these inequities" sounds helpful, but I bet that it will not involve a real criticism of Egyptian social values, but rather a chance to blame outsiders. Sometimes you just have to put the reseach on the shelf and speak out about what is right.

Video Experiment

May 29, 2006

The following is a first attempt at video (taken during our train ride to Luxor on May 14).. If this works, expect more soon..

The Mosque of Sultan Hasan
(1356-61 AD), pt. 2

May 29, 2006

As will hopefully be my practice throughout the following two months, I am going to follow up my visits to sites in Islamic Cairo with a translation of what al-Maqrizi has to say about these sites in his Khitat.

The Mosque of Sultan Hasan

This congregational mosque is known as the Madrasah of Sultan Hasan. It faces the Citadel and is located between the Citadel and the Elephant Pond. Its place used to be the house of the prince Yalbagha al-Yahyawi, which has already been mentioned in the chapter on residences.

The Sultan began this building in the year 756 AH. He made spacious the site and executed it with the largest scaffolding, the best array, and the hugest form, so that there is not known in an Islamic country a place of worship that resembles this congregational mosque.

It was put up in the course of three years, not one single day being wasted. He procured for its expenses each day 20 thousand dirhams, which is something like 1 thousand mithkals of gold. One person reported that he heard Sultan Hasan say that he expended upon the scaffolding on which he built the arch of the large iwan 100 thousand dirhams. This scaffolding was part of what was thrown onto the refuse dump after the completion of the arch just mentioned. This person continued: I heard the Sultan say: If it were not that people would say the King of Egypt lacked strength to complete the building he began, then I would leave off from building this congregational mosque because of the large amount spent upon it.

Inside this congregational mosque are wonders of construction, among them being that the height of the large iwan is 65 cubits. It is said that it is 5 cubits larger than the iwan Kusra which is in the city of Mada'in in Iraq. Among the wonders is also the great domed mausoleum, the likes of which has not been built in Egypt or Syria or Iraq or Maghreb or Yemen. Among its wonders is the marble minbar [pulpit] which has no peer. Among its wonders are also the great doors and the four madaris [schools] which are in the rooms of the courtyard of the congregational mosque.. and there are more wonders..

The Sultan had decided to build four minarets upon which the call to prayer would go out. He had completed three minarets when arrived Saturday, the sixth day of the month of Rabi' al-Akhar in the year 762 AH, at which point the minaret which was over the gate fell and killed underneath it about 300 orphans who were in line at the sabil [public fountain] and some who were not orphans. Six children from among the orphans were unharmed. So the Sultan cancelled the building of this minaret and the building of the fourth as well. Two minarets remain there, standing until today. [I skip some lines of poetry on this event]

The assassination of the Sultan unexpectedly occurred 33 days after the fall of the minaret. The Sultan died before the marble of the congregational mosque had been completed, so one who came after him completed it. The Sultan made for this congregational mosque very large number of waqfs [properties dedicated to support of institution]... [2:316]

The account goes on to relate some later events connected to the mosque, but these are the principal facts. Those two minarets stills stand, remaining after the tragic fall of the third while under construction, and can be seen in the photo from the blog on May 27.

The Mosque of Sultan Hasan
(1356-61 AD), pt. 1

May 27, 2006

We thought we would begin our summer-long exploration of Islamic Cairo with a stop at the most breathtaking of the monuments: the Mosque of Sultan Hasan. The mosque was constructed from 1356-61 AD, and never finished since the Sultan Hasan himself was assassinated in that final year.

The mosque as it is situated today stands right next to a much later (18th-19th century) Mosque of al-Rifa'i. But the important mosque is that of Sultan Hasan, the one shown here. It should be noted that the original dome collapsed in 1661 AD, and according to one modern interpreter:

The present dome of the Sultan Hasan is modern and is a misinterpretation of the original design. [pg. 124, Islamic Architecture in Cairo: An Introduction by Doris Behrens-Abouseif]

As one faces the front of Sultan Hasan, the view directly behind one is that of the citadel.. The monstrous Mosque of Muhammad 'Ali would not have been visible back in the 14th century, but those fortified walls would have been.

Inside the mosque is an internal open court. On each of the four sides is a large arch forming an open space where each of the four Sunni legal schools could teach. In the center is an ablution fountain.

The most ornate part of the mosque is under the great arch which faces the direction of the qiblah. Pictured here is the qiblah itself, the niche which signifies the direction which worshippers must pray in order to be praying toward Mecca. The gold script of course contains verses from the Qur'an.

Running along the wall of this iwan—that is, the one that contains the qiblah—is a decorated stucco band with more Quranic verses. Doris Behrens-Abouseif notes:

There is a similar band in the iwan of the Hanafi madrasa, but there is nothing else similar in Cairo architecture. The style is, however, typical of Quran illuminations of the period, and the architect must have been inspired by these to translate the designs into stucco. [127]

Next to the qiblah is the minbar, or pulpit, from which the Friday sermon would be given. It should be clarified now that the Sultan Hasan Mosque is a Jam'i.. or congregational mosque.. meaning that it functioned as the major mosque for its district and as the setting to which people would come on Friday for the sermon and prayers. This is in contrast to the many smaller mosques dotting the city and serving as places of prayer on a daily basis.

Some of the most elaborate craftsmanship is located above the various doorways. The above picture is from a door leading out of the central court of the mosque to some rooms on the side.

This picture is notable not only for the beautiful barefoot figure in the foreground, but also for the glimpse it affords of the intricate marble flooring of the Sultan Hasan.

Directly behind the iwan with the qiblah is the mausoleum.. placed directly beneath that inferior dome mentioned at the start of this blog. Encountering a tomb in the Mosque of Sultan Hasan, one naturally expects it to be the tomb of said Sultan Hasan.. but no. The young sultan was assassinated and his body never found. So, the ambitious mausoleum holds someone else..

Although only the mosque and mausoleum are currently open to the public, it is important to remember that much more would have gone on in this large public space. The mosque was built to house 400 students, who would have been connected to the various legal schools housed within the mosque. This corridor, leading away from the central court, looks like a narrow city alley.. and undoubtedly students would have had rooms attached to each of these windows. In other structures I hope it will be easier to get images of these living quarters.

The Sultan Hasan was built in this location since it was:

...overlooking the square where the hippodrome and horse market were located, beneath the royal residences of the Citadel. It was thus one of the most prestigious sites in Cairo, and the centerpiece of the panoramic view from al-Qasr al-Ablaq with its huge gilded window grills. [123]

But now it is hardly in the midst of prime real estate. A visitor must always mentally correct for the changes over time to neighborhoods and status..

Displaying a Coffin:
Preservation, pt. 2

May 26, 2006

In my daily grind of translation for the Maqrizi chapter on the pyramids, I came across the following passage, excerpted by Maqrizi from a work called the Gift of Understanding (Tuhfah al-Albab) by an author known as al-Qaysi:

I entered inside [the pyramid] and I saw a large domed chamber, square at the bottom, but circular at the top. In its center was a well whose depth was 10 cubits and square. One person descended into it and found in each side of the squared well a door leading to a large room. In these rooms were the dead from the sons of Adam, Upon them were great winding sheets, more than 100 individual cloths on each one, which had disintegrated and blackened because of the length of time. Their bodies were like ours and not tall. Nothing was missing from their bodies nor from their hair. Among them there was not one old man nor anyone whose hair was white. Their bodies were sturdy, by no means anyone being able to remove any of their limbs. But they were light to the point that they became like refuse, because of the length of time. In that well were four of these rooms filled with dead bodies. In it were also large bats.

The story seems fantastic, but it is also hard not to be struck by small details which were drawn from tangential knowledge of genuine Egyptian antiquities. We easily recognize the dead in their thick layers of cloth as mummies. In the Egyptian Museum one can still marvel at the state of preservation for these ancient bodies. A look at a model of the Great Pyramid of Khufu also shows some parallel details. There is indeed a central Grand Gallery, and from the entrance of this gallery leading there is something conventionally called a "well".. a passage descending sharply to a subterranean chamber. The description is mistaken in many points, but that it also reflects a dim understanding of certain aspects of the pyramid.. and we know that medieval Arabs had gotten inside the Great Pyramid.

After a short paragraph on animal burials, the passage continues:

In this domed chamber inside the pyramid was a door leading to the high point of the pyramid. There were no stairs in it; its width was about 5 spans. It is said that it was ascended in the time of al-Ma’mun. It led to a small dome in which was an image of Adam from green stone like dahnaj (?). Then it was taken out to al-Ma’mun so that it was intact. When it was opened the body of Adam was found in it, upon it being armor of gold decorated with different kinds of gems. On his chest was the blade of a sword of inestimable value. At his head was a red ruby about the size of a chicken egg shining as a flame of light. Al-Ma’mun took the stone. I have seen the idol from which that dead man was taken, encountering it at the door of the residence of the king in Egypt in the year 511 AH.

Again there is a fascinating level of verisimilitude, as the highest point in the interior passages of the pyramid is the King's Chamber. The "armor of gold" sounds remarkably similar to the kind of golden and bejewelled anthropoid covers in which kings could be buried. I am not sure that this came from the pyramid, which was probably robbed and emptied of anything of value long before the Arabs came along.. However, something allowed them to come up with this description.

Most tantalizing of all in this passage is the first-person note that someone has seen this "idol" (which I assume to be an anthropoid coffin which held a mummified body) outside the door of the residence of the king of Egypt. If this is correct, then a Muslim ruler displayed an Egyptian antiquity in a prominent place, providing at least temporary preservation.

There is nothing in the passage that praises preservation as a value. When the rich coffin is described there is not a hint that this is something which should be carefully preserved for others to see.. even though it is described as being the body of Adam! The first reported action is al-Ma'mun snatching the egg-sized ruby for himself., and there is no reproach from the narrator. Nonetheless the curiosity value of the coffin has led to its display.. not in a museum, but as an item that increases the king's prestige. I wonder if before the time of Western museums, this kind of prestige display in the residence of palace of a king would be the place to look for the preservation of antiquities?

The Egyptian Museum

May 25, 2006

A view of the museum from a construction zone next to Tahrir Square. They are planning to move the collection to the Grand Egyptian Museum to be located somewhere on the Giza plateau, so sooner or later this building will be closed.. perhaps they will make it into a museum for the city of Cairo?

Almost as interesting as the actual ancient Egyptian remains are the tourists, who arrive in crowded buses. Nothing could be more wrenching than the difference between clothing styles inside this museum and those outside on the streets of Cairo. But most of these people are simply transferred from one tourist stop to the next..

Reading Outsiders:
A Note on Islamic Historiography

May 25, 2006

This last year one of the other Mellon fellows was from the history department at Emory. His topic was the history of race theory in 19th century America. To write on this subject he had to engage with all the popular and influential books and tracts on race that were published at that time. Now, I take one look at the material he has to read and think to myself: I would rather do bodily harm to myself than have to read through all this boring stuff. Give me Thoreau.. give me Twain.. or give me death. But that illustrates the difference between the academic approaches that for shorthand we might call "historical" and "literary." Historians have a hard time looking outside their own methodology.. but nothing is more annoying and limiting than when a historian incorporates a major thinker such as Thoreau into a survey of general thinking on a subject. The inevitable result is to make a unique and complicated voice small. Literary scholars tend to be more interested in bringing out the complications that are present in a an essay by Thoreau, ignoring the flatter dialogues that are taking place elsewhere.

Islamic Historiography by Chase F. Robinson is a wonderful overview of the growth of the Islamic (Arabic) tradition of historical writing. But its tendency is to see things as a historian and not as a literary scholar. I thought this was most telling in his treatment of al-Mas'udi, the 10th century historian who wrote a universal history that blends geography, history, and curiosities. Robinson has the following to say about him:

Now it is true that there were alternatives to this traditionist historiography. Al-Mas'udi (d. 956), who was deeply antipathetic towards traditionists in general, did not use isnads, and it may not be coincidental that he, virtually alone amongst practising historians in this period, seems to have regarded historiography as a 'well ordered and firm science'... But however much we may value al-Mas'udi's approach, especially his catholic and urbane tastes, the later tradition expressed its own preferences by steering clear of his work... [36]

For many, historical knowledge, as before, would be produced through the transmission of discrete accounts, and no attempt would be made to rebuild the tradition atop the rationalism proposed by al-Mas'udi. Like it or not, his was a dead end... [98]

I could have entitled this blog "In Praise of Dead Ends." If the goal of a work is to tell the mainline history of Islamic historical writing, then an outsider such as al-Mas'udi cannot be given too much importance. It is far more valuable to dive into the endless prosopographies and popular siras of the prophet than to stop and examine someone whose text did not go anywhere. But on the other hand it is hard for me to think of a text from any tradition that is more theoretically curious than the work by al-Mas'udi. His work is worth settling upon and examining.. a scale of effort which would not be rewarding when it comes to the histories that Robinson would label "traditionist." I would be the last to say that we do not need practitioners of the historical approach.. but I also think something is lost if the multiple dead ends of cultural traditions do not win dedicated scholars.. after all, it will often be the dead ends who have the most to offer us now.. just as our contemporary dead ends may have the most to offer to the future.

Lane's Arabic Influences

May 25, 2006

Last night we went to a lecture at ARCE, located over near the American embassy. The speaker was a man named Jason Thompson who is finishing up his ARCE fellowship for the year. He appears to be the expert on the life and career of Edward William Lane, the 19th century orientalist who was responsible for a popular book on the customs of modern Egyptians as well as his great Arabic dictionary to which every student of classical Arabic is indebted.

The lecture was interesting to me primarily as a sketch of the contours of Lane's life. Jason Thompson, a historian of English history from the University of Chicago, seemed particularly at home when it came to Lane's Victorian companions.. his "circle" of friends. What was lacking, however, is a sense of Lane's intellectual indebtedness to Arabic intellectuals. As Thompson described Lane's writings and drawings, I was struck by the similarity in their aim to the Khitat of al-Maqrizi.. and as I asked about this connection afterwards, it turned out that Lane owned one of the best manuscripts of that work. But is it too much to say that this monumental work must have influenced his portrayal of Cairo? One interesting approach to Lane would be to see him as a translator of this descriptive tradition into English. His dictionary project is liable to a similar approach.. I would bet that the great Arabic-Arabic dictionary known as the Lisan al-Arab (The Arab Tongue) exercised a profound influence on his work. But neither of these connections were brought out by Thompson, who despite a professed interest in the Middle East does not actually engage with the Arabic world and its influence on Lane.

Environmental Change in Cairo

May 23, 2006

In American life and letters the environment is largely static. There are disasters, of course.. earthquakes and hurricanes come and do their damage. But the narrative goes on and things get rebuilt. Rivers flow in the same places and forests remain forests. An attempt to buck this pattern of representation will likely result in a writer getting labeled as "environmental".. one of those categories that severely limits the potential audience for a writer.

An important aspect of medieval Arabic historians is their seeming comfort with the idea that natural things change. I find this especially evident in the work of the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, whose book on the "districts" (Khitat) of Egypt in general and Cairo in particular could be called the "Old Roads" of medieval Egypt. Al-Maqrizi specifically sets aside the idea of telling the story of a nation through its generations of elites or scholars and takes up the task through a description of specific places and their history. My work here in Egypt centers on a chapter from this book, but throughout the summer I will be doing my best to see the physical remains of Cairo through the eyes of this 15th century historian.

The following is a brief passage in which environmental change figures as an important historical factor.

When 'Amar ibn al-'Âs conquered Alexandria, for his first conquest he settled down beside this fort (Babylon in old Cairo) and laid out a mosque known both as the "Ancient Mosque" and as the "Mosque of Amar ibn al-Âs." The tribes of the Arabs were arranged around this mosque. The city became known as al-Fustat and people settled there. Then in the year after the conquest the water of the Nile receded from the ground opposite the fort and the Ancient Mosque. The Muslims would let their pack animals stop there. Then they laid out in it homes little by little. The shore of the land became the place which is known today in Egypt as the Stairs and it ran to al-Kawm which is on the left of the person who enters at the Egypt Gate. In the area of al-Kawm were residences overlooking the Nile! The shore passed from the Egypt Gate to the place where the Garden of Ibn Kaysan was, known today as the Eunuch's Garden at the start of Maraghah and all the areas known today as Maraghah. The area in width from al-Jarf to al-Khalij and in length from the Aqueduct to the market of the Stairs was inundated with the water of the Nile until the water receded from it after the year 600 AH. This area became sandy and then princes laid out [estates] near where al-Malak al-Salih Najam al-Din Ayyub built the stronghold of Rawdah, and one also laid out a storehouse until Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun erected his mosque, known as the New Mosque of Nasir, outside Cairo. Then what is around it was built up. But at the conquest of Egypt all [these areas] were water. [my translation, vol 1, pgs. 286-7, Dar al-Sadr publisher]

Al-Maqrizi is engaged in using place names from the 15th century to explain the places where the water of the Nile once reached. To get this translation really right I would need to know more than I do about the medieval districts of Cairo. But the basic sweep of the narrative is clear: the water moves—quite suddenly, it seems—ever further to the west, and the new land that is thus opened up is quickly developed and made into residences.

In this telling the history of the city of Cairo is intimately connected to environmental change. And at times the reader can even feel the amazement of al-Maqrizi as he explains that residences in a certain neighborhood used to look out over the Nile. I think Americans would be loathe to allow the environment so much influence over our history.. and to be fair, the Nile will not be going anywhere in the near future, controlled as it is by the High Dam in Aswan and the concrete banks constructed for it as it passes through Cairo. The Nile has in many ways ceased to be the instigator of change. And that tends to be our modern goal, doesn't it?

The Population in Egypt

May 22, 2006

It is hard to believe I am back to reading the Al-Ahram Weekly, the Egyptian state-financed English language newspaper that can be frustrating as hell. There was recently an article on population growth in Egypt.. a concern since Egypt's modest economic growth is perpetually diminished by the expanding numbers of people which need a share of the pie. This article caught my eye because of its sketch of the historical changes in population growth:

Our numbers have doubled from 2.5 million in 1800 to 5 million in 1850, then to 10 million in 1900, and again to 20 million in 1947. This means that the Egyptian population has doubled once every fifty years over one and a half centuries (1800-1950). It took a mere 30 years for the number to double the fourth time around: from 20 million in 1950 to 40 million in 1978. The increase resumed again until the population reached nearly sixty million, according to the 1996 census. Finally in January, 2006, Egypt's population had reached nearly 71.348 million inhabitants and is expected to continue rising throughout the 21st century. ["No Strength in Numbers", by Maged Osman, Beyond Quarterly (Spring 2006), distributed in al-Ahram weekly 11-17 May, 2006.]

The writer is using these figures to look forward and sketch some of the problems that Egypt is facing over the course of the next century, but they also serve to highlight the problems in accessing the pre-modern past. It is almost impossible for me to even imagine Egypt with only 2.5 million people.. or even anything below 17 million, which would mean that the population of present-day Cairo is spread through the entire country. But that is exactly what one must do in approaching the vast body of medieval literature from Egypt.

With a few less people the pre-modern reports about lush gardens and estates along the Nile start to sound possible. It also begins to be possible to imagine the great Islamic city of the dead and its monuments.. not crowded with people, but standing empty outside the city. The whole city starts to make more sense. To see the past the whole urban mess of contemporary Cairo must be set aside.. whose problems now are important, of course, but have nothing to do with medieval Cairo.

Similarly, the issues surrounding Islamic fundamentalism can be helpfully viewed with these population figures in mind. The extreme growth of urban centers has created new demands.. and in many cases the most effective response to these demands has been from Islamist groups. But the actual intellectual stance of these groups cannot be read back into earlier times.. they too must be left behind if one is to access the medieval world.

Population often gets ignored as an agent of change in our world.. But it is a factor which is actively remaking the world, through forced change in living patterns, environmental degradation, and simplification of religious and cultural systems.

The Fellahin of Upper Egypt:
A Review

May 21, 2006

In my blog for May 14 I mention my curiosity about life in all these tiny villages in Upper Egypt. On Friday I had yet another occasion to think about this topic as we made the same 10 hour train ride.. this time returning to Cairo. Again the palm trees and brick houses and canals endlessly trolled past the windows. This time I spent a fair amount of time reading an anthropological study by Winifred S. Blackman.. originally published in 1927 and entitled The Fellahin of Upper Egypt. "Fellahin" is the Egyptian word for peasant.. and the landscape between Luxor and Cairo is Upper Egypt (especially as Blackman includes the Fayum in her study). I hoped the book would illuminate what was directly outside my window.

Blackman's work even makes reference to my window gazing:

The villages of Egypt, as seen from the railway-carriage or from points of vantage in the cultivation, present a most picturesque appearance. They are generally surrounded with palm-groves, often very extensive, while palm-trees also grow actually among the houses, affording a welcome shelter from the heat. These palm-girt villages are dotted about all over the cultivation. [26]

That description could be matched by the omnipresent view:

I would venture, though, that the level of "picturesque" scenes has diminished as the towns and cities have exploded in size and garbage piles up along canals.

Her book is organized according to the divisions one might expect from an anthropological study. Its interest is clearly drawn to the structural makeup of life.. and this means special attention to the rituals and beliefs connected to life's stages. Chapter titles include: Personal Decoration and Ornament, Marriage and Divorce, Fertility Rites, Death and Funerary Ceremonies, Agriculture and Harvest Rites, etc.. I sometimes found that these large topics interfered with what was most delightful about Blackman's writing: her ability to narrate stories about daily life drawn directly from her extensive time in Upper Egypt. In fact as important as birth, death, fertility, and the harvest are, I wished for simply a sense of what a normal day in a village felt like.

Blackman hits her stride as she describes events that happened to her:

The first year that I lived in an Egyptian village I fell ill two or three times with fever. The villagers had never come into close contact before with any Englishwoman, and so every article of my dress was noticed and commented on, as well as my eyes, the colour of my cheeks, and so on. When riding through the village many kindly and complimentary remarks were made: "See, she has the eyes of a cat" —a great compliment, the minds of the villagers— "How beautiful is the colour of her cheeks!" etc. When I fell ill the second time my attendant, a most faithful and devoted man, was convinced that it was entirely due to some one having cast the evil eye upon me. He therefore harangued the villagers, and told them that they were, of course, quite right to admire me, and that all they said was true, but that in future such remarks were not to be made without one at least of the protecting phrases mentioned above [used to protect from the evil eye]. The consequence was that the next time I went out riding I was followed by a whole concourse of people, men, women, and children, all ejaculating as I passed, "Ma sha Allah, ma sha Allah; Salla 'a 'n-Nebi, salla 'a 'n-Nebi," as fast as they could speak. [220-1]

That delightful and simple story comes in the chapter on "Superstitions".. and obviously it deals with ways to avert the evil eye. The book is also filled with her own photographs.. which naturally is a soft spot for this amateur blogger, as she seems to have actively tried to document the life that was going on around her.

In her preface to the work Blackman almost seems to apologize for her personal tone:

When my work is more nearly complete my intention is to produce a large an strictly scientific volume on the beliefs and practices and the social and industrial life of the modern Egyptians. [9]

One wonders what this would mean.. and I suppose if I had a better feeling for the timeline of anthropological studies I could take a strong guess. I can't help but think that this "strictly scientific volume" would contain less in the way of personal stories and colorful anecdotes.. and I am against anything in any discipline that cuts down on anecdotes. In fact I wish Blackman would have gone further in this respect and really narrated the story of her time in Egypt.. letting us meet her informants and get a feel for the landscape.. and even what she ate.. all informed of course by systematic anthropological studies, which is the expertise (combined with her language skills) that will separate her account from that of a tourist.

For my current project, this book is surprisingly helpful. I can immediately see parallels between the peasants reverence for ruins from the ancient past and the descriptions collected by al-Maqrizi in his Khitat.

Great efficacy is attached to the Pyramids, and childless women will repair to one of them and walk around it seven times, believing that this perambulation will assist them to become mothers. Women sometimes beg to be allowed to remove small portions of the decorated walls in ancient tomb-chapels to assure their bearing children. It appears that ancient things in Egypt are credited with great potency in this respect... [99]

And there are further interesting comments about Coptic priests with mysterious books that show treasures buried in the area. Several times the sources quoted by al-Maqrizi make reference to Coptic books and the stories they contain about the pyramids. From the stories collected by Blackman it is clear that the goal should not be to theorize about the source of these details in ancient sources.. but to rather think more about popular local stories that have been elevated into written historical texts.

Going to the Supermarket in Cairo

May 20, 2006

Getting home from a week-long trip meant going to the supermarket to restock. Our stop of choice now is the Alfa Market on the Corniche, the main road running beside the Nile. Alfa Market, along with the similar Metro stores, caters to American expectations in grocery shopping.. although plenty of Egyptians also do grocery shopping here. [I got in trouble for taking this picture. As soon as I had snapped the shot an Egyptian policeman was running over to tell me I cannot take pictures there. So this is the shot that the Egyptian government does not want you to see!]

Here is Emily picking up some vegetables.. OK, lots of vegetables. Let's see: a tray of eggplant, another one of red peppers.. and why not a third of onions? All these little trays are amazingly inexpensive by American standards.. generally less than a dollar.

There is even a small health food section at Alfa Market.. not quite Whole Foods, granted. We have also found a "House of Health", a little store that sells tofu and brown rice and other healthy foods.

This is a view inside the Alfa Market. At the right is the sweets stand, with a girl lazily reading something. Shoppers push around metal-wired carts.. as one would expect.

Here are two girls stocking shelves. I often wonder about the economic background of the people working at westernized businesses in Egypt and the Middle East broadly. My sense is that they are from well to do backgrounds.. and that these jobs represent an easy first job.. something they may well have landed through family connections. Whereas in the United States the McDonalds and grocery store workers tend to be filled by middle class youth and lower class workers.. We have a service class, marked by ethnic or racial divisions. Those divisions are present here too.. but the westernized businesses are high enough on the economic totem pole to draw people from above the service classes.. preferably young bright well-to-do young people.

Coming Restaurant Reviews!

May 18, 2006

Occasionally really exciting news gets broken in this blog.. and now we have another such scoop. Emily Bowles-Smith has decided to write restaurant reviews. The pages are being designed.. so look soon for a link to descriptions of the restaurants of Egypt. Now, it may well be that there is an emphasis on plates like this one.. the Musakaa (eggplant and tomato mix) at the Jamboree Restaurant in Luxor. But it is felt that this will meet a real need: the explanation of how vegetarians can thrive in Egypt.

Multiple Operating Systems

May 18, 2006

For me the eternally fascinating thing about Egypt is the way multiple traditions have been written onto the landscape. These traditions knew about the earlier versions and in some ways built upon that past. It is as if there is a succession of major operating systems.

Luxor Temple embodies the ways that these successive traditions wrote themselves onto the landscape. To begin with, of course, the temple represents New Kingdom Egypt (1550-1069 BC) at its zenith. Not that it is the complete creation of any single king.. but a general continuity is evident.

The next picture gives a sense of further operating systems. The slender columns in the foreground represent the remains of the Roman fort that once stood here. The mosque in the background.. which was built into the ancient Egyptian ruins.. represents the Islamic period. In the 19th century paintings of Egypt by David Roberts this mosque (the Mosque of Abu al-Haggag) is visible.. and it seems to go all the way back to the 14th century. It now appears from inside the ruins as if the mosque is hanging in the air, but that is only because excavations have brought the floor in the Temple of Luxor down below street level.

Inside the Luxor Temple early Christian worship is also evident, marking another distinct operating system. At the very back one comes across an apse flanked by two slender columns.

It may seem odd to hold a Christian service surrounded by carvings of ancient Egyptian gods.. and evidently the ancient Christians would agree, as they covered those gods with plaster and painted their own scenes. Some restoration work is beginning to be done on this plaster, and at one place they have managed to make a pair of faces stand out clearly.

Luxor Temple is hardly unique in its attraction of a series of religious/cultural traditions.. but in many other sites this is hidden by archeological work that tends to erase levels of the past that are held to be less valuable. The result is ancient Egyptian monuments cleansed of the multiple operating systems that 1) often allowed these ruins to continue to exist relatively unharmed, and 2) provide a window into the way the ruins were experienced through the centuries before the current tourist regime took over some time in the 19th century.. or perhaps even earlier.

Notes on Medinet Habu

May 17, 2006

Medinet Habu poses some challenges to interpretation, every bit as much as a novel or symphony. Any cultural product experienced in time makes demands on the mind: how do the assorted details cohere and make a unity. Faced with a book of random newspaper clippings, the mind may well give up in its effort.. but shy of that the mind will strive to gather any sequence of experiences into a unity. The design of a temple, as much as for a novel, calls for an ability to use details to link together the experience of a visitor.

1. Medinet Habu.. the mortuary temple for Ramesses III.. begins with a striking architectural exception. The visitor encounters a model Hittite castle:

The castle turrets and and the towers will not be found anywhere else in Egypt but here. Ramesses III was celebrating his victorious battles, and one way to do that was to introduce a heterogeneous structure. It is something of a curveball thrown at the visitor. In its overall effect it reminds me of the faux-news documentary opening to Citizen Kane. In that case too, a larger work has incorporated and used a form that is borrowed from outside the usual stock of film scenes.

2. Once inside Medinet Habu the visitor comes across a much smaller temple that is actually a stand-alone Middle Kingdom temple that has been swallowed by the much larger New Kingdom creation of Ramesses III.

This smallish temple (compare the slender column here with the huge columns used in the mortuary temple proper) was apparently constructed by the earlier rulers Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III.. in honor of the god Amun. The larger mortuary temple by incorporating this earlier temple within its boundaries seems to beg us to interpret it by means of this smaller structure. The mortuary temple of Ramesses III may be much larger, but its meaning is linked to this obviously significant structure, which was not simply razed to the ground to make way for the new, but physically included in the new structure. We could compare the quotation of a poem within a long novel.. a case in which an author is overtly trying to borrow a little literary authority and resonance for his or her own work.

3. Both in Medinet Habu and in the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir al-Bahri, I thought I detected the use of color as a way to give unity to a large structure. This is difficult to see sometimes because so much of the originally vibrant colors are gone, but on occasion the colors are clear.

I do not mean simply the coloring of the large figures portrayed on the walls, or the stars against a deep blue ceiling.. but the use on the lowest level of colored stripes which are repeated at the same level on columns and on the walls. What goes on above these stripes can be anything, but as long as this lower layer is present, the whole will obviously be part of the same structure. Even more fascinating is the fact that the Temple of Hatshepsut adopts a slightly different, but still consistent, color scheme running along the walls.

In this case the distinctive red over yellow stripe runs along much of the structure. In any experience of a large scale work one hopes for more unity than simple stripes or other color patterns, but while larger thematic themes are the goal, simple stylistic devices can be effective at alerting us that something coherent is taking place.. egging us on to consider more carefully the larger structure.

4. An unsung element of interpretation is metaphoric parallelism. Straight ahead narrative is one way to build a large structure: this happens, then this happens, then this happens.. and finally this takes place. But the parallels between distinct parts of that larger narrative will be signaled by metaphors. In other words, if a novelist tells a multi-generational story of a family, and wants the reader to see a certain pattern in the choices of the various characters, then either the novelist breaks in and tells the reader about the pattern, or the novelist develops verbal and metaphoric parallels that allow the reader, on his or her own, to make those connections. The larger "meaning" for a cultural product will often lie exactly in these metaphoric parallels.

On the outside wall of the mortuary temple, facing the mud brick palace that links with the temple, we ran into the above pictorial representation. It is a scene in which the king (outside the picture to the left) is hunting in the marshes. A large bull charges ahead through the stalks of papyrus, while different fish and even a duck crowd together haphazardly in the right corner. It is a scene that almost exactly mirrors the scene within the temple in which the king is shown riding into a crowd of enemy troops, who are also messily thrown together. In both cases the idea is that the king is mastering places of disorder.. bringing his rule. These portrayals of disorder quickly give way to the usual well-ordered Egyptian hieroglyphic lines, deployed neatly and confidently. If we can speak of a meaning to this mortuary temple, then it will arise as we locate these metaphoric parallels.

Emily Goes Baladi

May 17, 2006

Emily has been slowly discovering the food here in Egypt.. and one of the more surprising discoveries is that she likes the more "country" foods better than the expensive stuff. The nicer restaurants set out white bread rolls.. and Emily turns up her nose. But give her some good cheap (and whole wheat) peasant bread and she is happy.

So today after our morning seeing ancient Egyptian ruins, we decided that it was time to stock up on some bread.. and we get into a taxi and I instruct the driver to help us find some "aish baladi".. that is, "country bread." So we get a ride to the open market, where a group of countryish women.. wearing their head scarves.. sat presiding over a big pile of fresh country bread. We rolled down the window and asked to see some of that stuff. A young girl brought over a loaf of it and handed it through the window.. like an illicit drug deal. The bread got into Emily's hands and she pinched a side of the bread to test its whole wheat value.. It was deemed good, and we took four large round loaves of the stuff.

The taxi brought us to our hotel, and we had to walk a bit. Emily carried her piled up loaves in front of her. Several Egyptians (who work in shops next to the hotel) commented on the bread.. and then we had to walk through the busy hotel lobby, where more people got to see this American girl who obviously liked good country bread. And in the mornings, Emily ignores all the nice European white breads set out for our breakfast buffet, and eats a big piece of her country bread.

[short addendum: The next day as we stopped at a restaurant next door to our hotel, the young man gave us a seat looked at Emily and said: "Are you the woman with the bread yesterday?" So we figure the news has gotten around about her tastes.]

The Creation of a Primary Text:
The Temple of Hatshepsut

May 16, 2006

The Temple of Hatshepsut is nestled into a bay of cliffs. It is a rare monument that manages to both accentuate the surrounding landscape and yet remain a wholly individual structure. The temple gently stands out, adding a hint of human (or divine) order to the rough desert. I was struck on this visit by how non-martial this temple is.. especially in comparison with the temple down the way, Medinet Habu.. where the pictorial details portray Ramesses III routing enemies and braining them with a club. The Temple of Hatshepsut, alternatively, portrays a journey to the land of Punt, and the bringing back of exotic spoils.. and everything from exotic trees to lion skins to a living giraffe find a place among the carvings on the wall.

In its perfection the temple seems to have simply stood here for the past 3500 years.. with a few breakages here and there, of course. But this would be to misunderstand the history of this monument. The temple often gets referred to as Deir al-Bahri.. and since "Deir" is the Arabic word for a monastery, it is no mystery what was here before the end of the 19th century when some careful reconstruction took place. The date for this reconstruction is noted on a stone inset into the middle of a ramp.

This same ramp, viewed from the opposite side, gives a clear visual measure for how much reconstruction has gone into this architectural gem. The new stones stand out clearly on top of the ancient stones.. which may or may not have been in the correct position when found.

It would be interesting to compute the percentage of original to reconstructed materials. With practically every column it is possible to glimpse the work of archeologists working to fit the puzzle pieces of ruins together into some coherent whole. In the picture below the fragments from the head of Osiris are places on pedestals, allowing the visitor to conceive that once every column was fronted by a large statue of Osiris.

With respect to the representations on the walls, sometimes the pictures are cemented together seamlessly:

Other times a considerable amount of ingenuity has gone into figuring out how diverse fragments go together. In at least one case the archeologists have even taken a few scattered clues and taken the liberty to draw in the way they believe the figures must have looked. (The following fragment is from the upper level which I believe to have been completed later than the other parts.)

The visitor is confronted with a masterpiece in the Temple of Hatshepsut.. but it is a masterpiece which is obviously heavily reconstructed.. and even re-imagined. And it seems to me that this is an unsung aspect of scholarship: it does not simply comment on primary texts, but often it creates primary texts. Everything that is present on the ground in stone at Deir al-Bahri could have been theoretically drawn out on paper.. and this masterpiece would then have lived in books accessed by Egyptologists. Articles would have been written, and papers delivered. In this case, however, they have delivered up a complete text..

This kind of careful recreation is no easy task. It involves being able to think after the original creators.. and to connect design features into a single structure. This kind of scholarship is intensely creative.. and its results are obvious.

If I were to write out an academic program, this kind of re-creation would be high on my list.. Not only to generate secondary comments, but to deliver primary texts that are new, but feel to everyone as if they have been around for centuries.

Experiencing Ancient Thebes

May 15, 2006

Luxor is the Europeanized version of the Arabic al-Uqsur, meaning "the palaces." This city was known by quite a different name in ancient times.. one with a little more resonance: Thebes. This was the capital of New Kingdom Egypt, and the successive rulers and high officials added building after building, grave after grave, to the landscape. Even within a single structure such as the immense Karnak temple, what remains for tourists to walk through is the result of additions and alterations. I would love to be able to give a specific meaning to the experience of walking through the temple.. but there are many meanings here.. and overlapping meanings..

A visit to Luxor resembles a visit to present day Washington DC.. where one is also confronted with a dense symbolic landscape. Washington does not either offer a single interpretive key for its monuments and museums.. its cultural landscape. We know that America has changed over its brief two centuries of history. America in the 30s was not the same as it is today.. nor were either of these the same as America at the end of the 19th century. Yet each of these epochs are represented in Washington. That is easy enough for us to understand.. since it is our own history. Although ancient Egyptian society was conservative, change was nevertheless constant.

I think the comparison with Washington also foregrounds some of the choices that a tourist can make when experiencing these ruins. If the American that presents itself in Washington is multiple, then a person has the chance to pick and choose the elements that he or she finds most interesting. The ruins of Thebes offer a tourist some similar options.. a similar chance to selectively view an ancient city.

One element not to be underestimated in Egyptian art is the presence of aggressive war motifs. Here is a large representation from a pylon at Karnak of a king smiting his enemies.. whose heads are joined by a forelock of hair. Victories on the battlefield were a confirmation of a king's greatness. That greatness is translated into monumental representations of the king.. the embodiment of the state and society.

This monumental quality in Egyptian representations is surely a major reason for the continued fascination with its remains. Huge images of the king overlook an entrance. Huge stone columns, larger in diameter than any tree I know of except sequoias or Redwoods, tower over the visitor. The modern tourist likes to be awed and to imagine the wealth and time it took to construct something.

The details also bear looking into though.. and I think if ancient Egyptian art were just huge, it would still not hold the same wide interest. We like the hieroplyphs, and the unique visual language that developed in here long ago.

And occasionally there are beautiful and unique scenes that catch the attention. There are pictures of dancing girls in a private tomb, there is the care with which braided hair has been rendered in stone.. and sometimes even scenes of natural beauty. The above picture of birds and bushes came from an enclosure in the rear of the main Karnak temple.. and I promised myself that I would find out more about this room and why it received such delicate carvings of natural subjects.

In my own way I am arguing for two things. First, for a piece of art to be interpreted, it requires knowledge of the historical context.. a difficult but by no means impossible task when it comes to New Kingdom Egypt. Who built the structure or addition.. and what were the political concerns that could lead us to understand its contemporary significance? The individual representations above can make sense.. be given an historic meaning.. only after this work is completed. —An effort glided over by the tour guides.

At the same time, there is a place for simple enjoyment. The girl whose photo heads this blog is a wonderful example of the simple pleasure that can come from looking at Egyptian art.. and represents the process of selection at work. The question becomes: what is the Egypt that appeals to me? And the answer may not be what the ancient kings, with their deeply inscribed hieroglyphic names, would have liked. What appeals to someone may in fact be the bottoms of those imposing columns, with their repeating patterns and designs. I almost think that if these ancient kings had known that we were less interested in their names and deeds than their simple designs.. they might have erased everything but their names.. "there, now you must look at me!".. but such was not the case. It is one of the joys of ancient art that we can look wherever we please.

The Train to Luxor

May 14, 2006

I sometimes forget how punishing a 10 hour train or bus ride can be.. and then I inevitably sign up for another one, thinking: this won't be that bad. Of course it is.

The reason I am a sucker for such long trips is that I like to see the countryside.. to get a feel for the monotonous look of the land. It is about nothing that makes for good pictures, since it is simply the repetition of houses and fields that I am looking for. This repetition speaks volumes for the way of life of a country. In the case of the trip between Cairo and Luxor one is treated to an absolutely unique spectacle: a pastoral landscape of green sitting in a land that gets no rain. It is all fed by the Nile of course.. and there are the piles of sawdust, the narrow strips of wheat or corn or alfalfa, the canal running alongside the tracks for miles at a time.. then the water buffalo and the little donkey with its oversized load. And that is before we get to the ubiquitous garbage and other signs of crowded living conditions.. the unfinished brick houses with steel rebar sticking up from the roof and the endless crowded minivans carrying people to set destinations.

But what are people out there thinking? Above is a picture I took from the train as we chugged past a station for minivans.. and some guy, in an orange shirt, sits there looking out at the train. What is life like for a young man like this? Or what is it like for the women bending over and working in the fields? I can't help but think that anthropology has let us down.. by not filling in this world more clearly, and allowing these individuals to become realities in our imaginations. But why do I pick on anthropologists? Novelists are also guilty of choosing to write about characters that are a lot like themselves (and us).. and thereby abjuring the harder task of making a foreign world clear.

I realize that this is quite a difficult task.. quite as hard as discovering and writing about past worlds. These little shit-holes rarely see Westerners come through, let alone Westerners who stop to live with them and ask questions. And the Egyptian government is itself strict about not letting outsiders see what is going on in these lost places. I left the train ride determined to see what had been written that could make these lives less obscure to me.

Most of the tourist trade is designed to keep you away from such scenes.. the one above will never make it onto Egypt's television commercials advertising the Sinai or its ancient sites. But here is the endless labor and the dusty roads and the poor brick houses (though not without a satellite dish for television).

If we turned our eyes away from the passing world outside our windows.. this is what we saw. A few newspapers being read.. no books in view.. and occasionally people standing and talking. I often think that the upper class Egyptians know as little about the life outside those train windows as I do.. only they are less curious to know anything about it.

The Maktabah al-Mutanabi:
Buying Arabic Books

May 13, 2006

Today was my single largest one-day purchase of Arabic books. The trip to the bookstore had been planned for months. I guess it can be viewed in a couple of different lights: either as graduation present, as preparation for the position at Lawrence this coming year, or as a chance to replace many of the books that I lost in New Orleans. I knew exactly where I wanted to go: The Mutanabi Bookstore, which during my last trip had turned out to be the most reliable place for finding medieval Arabic classics.

As with many bookstores, the space inside is quite narrow, and the shelves lined with colorful titles. Browsing is not encouraged, and someone always comes up and asks to help you find something. The idea seems to be that one comes into the shop wanting to find something, and they help you. Arabic is big on multi-volume sets.. something that I think hinders translation projects, since we want everything to fall into nice Penguin-sized editions. The spines, when put together in the right order, often spell out the title of the volumes and the author.

I am always cognizant of just how ridiculous a figure I cut as I walk into a bookstore.. in this case especially, with my camera active. Here I am, asking for some major monuments of Arabic literature, but only marginally able to talk with these people in the Egyptian dialect. It must feel strange to be exchanging so much of their cultural past for (in this case) a thick mixture of Egyptian pounds and American dollars.

The books I acquired are as follows (the number of volumes in the set is noted in the parenthesis, and an asterisk marks that these are volumes to replace ones lost in New Orleans):

Muruj al-Dhahab, Masudi (4 vols., *)
Risalah, Ibn Fadlan (1 vol., *)
Khitat, Maqrizi (2 vols., *)
Tarikh, Ya'qubi (2 vols.)
Mu'jam al-Buldan, Yaqut (7 vols., *)
Tarikh Baghdad, Khatib al-Baghdadi (25 vols.)
Kitab al-Aghani, Isfahani (25 vols.)
Tarikh Tabari (6 vols.)
Tafsir Tabari (12 vols.)
Kitab al-Mughazi, Waqidi (2 vols.)
Risalah, Qushayri (1 vol.)
Sirat al-Nabi, Ibn Hisham (4 vols., *)

So you can gather it was a pretty big day for this small bookstore. Below you can see the guys packing them all up in boxes. [I realize that those titles will mean nothing to non-Arabic speakers.. but rest assured that in the years ahead these will make appearances in the blog..]

The booksellers in Arab countries is a curious creature. I recognized almost all the people in this store from my time in Egypt three years ago, which shows that they are not students working at a bookstore until they find a better job, but people who have taken up bookselling as a profession. They have never struck me as knowing a whole lot about medieval Arabic literature.. no one smiles and communicates that he loved reading such and such a book.. which we expect from a bookseller in America. They do not seem to have a whole lot in the way of formal education either.. at least that is my impression. Their job is to find a certain type of book for their customers.

Today, their professional decorum was somewhat breached by my large purchase, and here they are loading up the taxi with my books (that white box contains my set of the Kitab al-Aghani, and another large box was still to come).

Right now I am thinking I will need one more large trip to the bookstore.. and I was already asking them about titles for next time, some of which they have, others they will look for.

Going to the Khan al-Kalili

May 12, 2006

Emily yesterday got her first taste of bartering in the Middle East. She wanted a little jewelry box and an Egyptian carved cat, and we looked around at various shops. We found a place that had what she was looking for and we got around to asking about price. Keep in mind we had a small inlaid box and a blue cat that is about five inches high. The guy did some calculating and told us that the price would be 600 Egyptian pounds.. a special price because we were his first customers and had become his friends. That amount is a little over $100. My counter offer was for 60 Egyptian pounds.. about $10.. and we got the two souvenirs, after a couple of walkouts, for 90 Egyptian pounds ($15). That gives a sense of the kind of fabulous mark-ups that one must combat. As usual I found this process highly amusing, coming as it does with a number of standard lines and tactics. I am telling Emily that by the end she needs to do her own bargaining!

Wireless in Egypt

May 12, 2006

During my time in the Middle East I have never lacked e-mail capability. The routine was simple: keep an eye out for internet cafes where I could pay a small fee and be able to write e-mails and read the news. These internet cafes have ranged from the palatial to the squalid.. but they all got the job done. This regime of internet cafes was in place during my first trip to the Middle East when I lived in Fez, Morocco during the summer of 2001.. and remained strong when I spent the summer of 2004 in Damascus (during those two months Emily and I racked up 180,000 words of correspondence over the computer.)

For the first time I have begun to see cracks in this regime. Most telling is the fact that Emily and I have not even looked for an internet cafe during our time here.. We have instead kept an eye out for places that have wireless connections, where we can sit down and use our own laptop computers. This form of connection to the internet makes unnecessary any investment in actual computers.. one simply needs that little black broadcast box sitting somewhere to allow visitors to communicate. Nearly all the western-style cafes seem to offer wireless connections.. and even the McDonalds here in Maadi has a prominent sign in English announcing its free wireless connections.

It gets better. For about $30 a month we can get DSL service in our apartment. This is the breakthrough that we are eagerly awaiting.. at which point we will have non-stop access instead of having to wait for an afternoon visit to a local cafe. That will be yet another nail in the coffin of internet cafes, which will undoubtedly survive in poorer areas, but their western clientele will slowly disappear..

As Emily used the computer I contemplated the little orange sign on the left: "No Wires, No Worries, No Frontiers." This is the kind of odd English usage that always tickles me in the Middle East. "Frontiers" is obviously wrong in this context. The company wants to advertise a lack of borders or boundaries.. but hit upon "frontiers" instead, a word which connotes expanse and exploration to us.. certainly not something to be escapes from (like "worries"), but something inviting. That misuse however made me think about just how difficult a word like frontier would be to explain to someone.. it is not a border, but it is a border.

Our Apartment in Maadi

May 11, 2006

Anyone who has spent time in Cairo grows familiar with the names of the separate neighborhoods. Zamalek and Maadi and Garden City and Dokki and Muhandiseen.. and a number of other less prominent ones.. start to fly off the tongue. To connoisseurs of Cairo, each word conjures up an atmosphere.. some more purely Egyptian.. others strikingly western. Maadi is the most far flung of these neighborhoods that one regularly encounters.. and that is where we have acquired the apartment in which we will live for three months.

The nice thing about this fellowship (with ARCE) is that I have no obligation to spend a certain amount of each day sitting in someone's library or taking classes. I must of course finish my project and have something to show for myself at the end of my time here.. but I can do this work largely on my own, and I expect that our apartment will be my primary work space. Since this was the case, it did not make sense to skimp on living accomodations.. and we wound up with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and, more importantly, good air conditioners.

Emily's dad has advised us that when we look for a house we have to visit the house at different times during the day.. because one never knows where sources of noise or other annoyances will come from. Well, we visited our apartment in the late afternoon, and we knew there was a school out there. But those little Egyptian kids are loud! And in the morning there is a steady stream of cars coming to drop off their childen.

That is the view of our street in Maadi at about 8am, looking down from our fifth story apartment. Luckily, the school year should be winding down at the end of May, and there ought to be a drop in the noise level.

But the inside of our apartment is most important to us.. with its marble floors and couches. No desk.. but the dining table will double as such. No bookcases.. but the television stand provides some space for books (you can see them reflected in the picture below).

We do not actually have access to the above glasses.. which are listed as "antiques" on our lease.. but they are there in a cabinet for us to look at. The usual Egyptian taste in everything from jewelry to formal dinner plates runs a solid two steps ahead of American taste in terms of gaudiness.. But I find this part of the pleasure of being here.. and certainly my favorite part about my apartment in Zamalek a few years back was the run-down baroque feeling it gave.

Visiting the Pyramids

May 9, 2006

The pyramids were a natural first stop for our stay in Egypt. I know: they are practically everyone's first stop. But they happen to be the topic of the translation project I will be working on while here.. a translation and commentary on a chapter from the Medieval Arabic historian Maqrizi on the subject of the pyramids. If you listen to guides today talking about the pyramids, you will get a mish-mash of archeological facts processed by the popular imagination. But the ostensible goal is always to describe what the pyramids meant to those who built them. My idea is that the pyramids meant something different to people in different time periods. These later stories are also a part of the pyramids as they show how these huge man-made structures were incorporated into different religious and cultural systems.

The first two pictures above feature Emily taking her first camel ride. And the last picture is Emily emerging into the burial chamber for one of the Egyptian queens.. this is inside one of the small pyramids subsidiary to the largest one. Emily is emerging from a long tunnel giving access to this tomb. Nothing is there but a big empty room..

Visiting the pyramids means running the tourist gauntlet. Those tourists come from lots of different nations. Everyone tries to take pictures that make it look like they are the only people there.. but this is never true.. and has not been true since ancient times. The pyramids are perhaps the first real tourist site in the world, and so we should be proud to fall into this time-venerated practice.

It is hard to get good pictures of us together. Here we are both more worried about the Egyptian man trying to take the picture than anything else..

Getting Back to Cairo

May 8, 2006

When you visit a place for a week, you get right out and sight see.. when you will be there for three months, your first few days are spent getting living and working arrangements settled.. and that is what we have been doing. Upon arrival we were able to stay at the Maadi apartment of a friend from Emory who is here with her husband and finishing up her year in CASA. This afternoon we decided to rent a fancily furnished apartment, also in Maadi. Tomorrow it will be cleaned and we will move in.

What a difference a few dollars make. When I was here for CASA in the 2002-2003 school year I had to live on a stipend that came to 325 USD. Certain restaurants I bypassed because of the cost; my living arrangements were decidedly grad-student appropriate. When I traveled I tended to do so by public transportation or hired a private taxi after ruthless bargaining for a decent price. With the ARCE stipend the heat is off with respect to the cost of living.. come June I may even have a television on which I can watch World Cup games! And this is part of a personal goal this time around.. not to get close to a Hilton or Sheraton, but to allow myself (and Emily) some leisure and comfort as we see Egypt and work on our projects.

The above two pictures were taken during our taxi ride from downtown Cairo back to the suburb of Maadi. It is fun to be back in the throng of people. If there is anything it is easy to underestimate about Egypt in general—and Cairo in particular—it is the crush of people everywhere.. waiting for the service or bus.. walking along the sidewalks.. sitting in traffic in their cars. You can go for miles and everywhere there are people. There is not one place in Cairo where you can experience the blissful emptiness of a quiet American neighborhood.. Maadi is as close as one can get to that—and it is a long ways away.

For me the real treat this time is the presence of Emily. We walked onto the urban campus of the American University in Cairo, set on Midan Tahrir, and I got to point out the places I remember.. the "garden" where I played Nadav at chess, the building where I sat for Arabic classes most every week day of the 2002-2003 school year, the bookstore where I purchased novels to keep me going. It is a part of my life which I have often talked about with Emily, but which now she gets to see at first hand. And since it is all new for Emily, it is as if I get to experience Cairo again for the first time.. although naturally with more attention to gender issues. Emily has a way of making everything new.

Skipping Bob Dylan

May 6, 2006

That is a picture of the scaffolding going up on Emory's quad. Eventually that metal skeleton will contain a stage and the grass will be lined with several thousand folding chairs. It happens every year, but what will be different about this one is that I am graduating.. and this will be my graduation ceremony. Only I won't be there.. Emily and I will be in Egypt at the time of the ceremony.

When I think of graduation ceremonies I think of "Day of the Locusts" by Bob Dylan:

Oh, the benches were stained with tears and perspiration,
The birdies were flying from tree to tree.
There was little to say, there was no conversation
As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree.
And the locusts sang off in the distance,
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody.
Oh, the locusts sang off in the distance,
Yeah, the locusts sang and they were singing for me.

If I remember right, I think Dylan got an honorary degree from Princeton or some such institution in the early 70s.. and this song reflects that experience. Although to me it seems like a statement about calling. The narrator is obviously out of place picking up the degree: "...little to say.. no conversation." The action is out there in distance, where the locusts are singing.. and that musical world has little to do with the academic setting of a graduation. The last stanza makes clear the need to get out:

I put down my robe, picked up my diploma,
Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive,
Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota,
Sure was glad to get out of there alive.
And the locusts sang, well, it give me a chill,
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody.
And the locusts sang with a high whinin' trill,
Yeah, the locusts sang and they was singing for me,
Singing for me, well, singing for me.

That could be us.. except the diploma will come in the mail, and instead of the "black hills of Dakota", we will be flying to the gray sandy hills of Masr. But we are definitely leaving Emory, and definitely "glad to get out of there alive." For Dylan this whole experience ends with a statement and restatement of the locusts singing.. as if signifying that true experience is outside the academy. And there is something to that.. something not to forget.

This invocation of Dylan comes the morning after we skipped Dylan's concert at Chastain up in Gwinnett County (near Atlanta). And it would not have been too tough for us to see him in Birmingham, Alabama or Jackson, Mississippi either. Kind of strange, I guess, since we have driven to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Lexington, Kentucky to see him in the past. But as we looked at his recent set lists, we were struck by the fact that he seemed to be repeating himself.. not a lot of new songs were getting into the rotation. And surely the current political situation calls for something more.. something clearer than another replaying of "Masters of War."

I was convinced not to see Dylan when I read about his performance in New Orleans for the annual Jazz Fest at the end of April. His song list could have been drawn from almost any other night of his tour.. and there appears to have been not a word about the tragedy of the city. How different from Bruce Springsteen's performance, which included songs chosen for the occasion and references to what he had seen in New Orleans. It doesn't seem that hard..

My sense (which I will enlarge on in the future) is that Dylan has painted himself into a conceptual corner. Love and Theft was brilliant in its vivifying of the American past.. and infusing the language of the blues and folk with personal meaning. But there is also an accompanying sense that the public meaning of these words is lost. Listen again to the refrain of his concert standby "Summer Days":

Summer days, summer nights are gone
Summer days, summer nights are gone
I know a place where there's still somethin' going on

Now hear that as: "The Sixties are gone/The Sixties are gone/ But right here there are still some remnants you can enjoy." Dylan often has that twilight sound in his lyrics.. and even "The Times They Are A-Changing'" sounds like it is being sung in reverse these days: "I won't criticize what I can't understand." Dammit: criticize:

What good are you anyway, if you can't stand up to some old businessman?

A CASA Student Gone Wrong

May 4, 2006

Sometimes events place a horrible responsibility upon this blogger.. and it becomes necessary to report the fall of a former fellow CASA student. Scott as we all remember him was intent on peaceful solutions.. in fact I recall that time in Egypt when I took him down to the floor in a wrestling match. It was all in good fun and I let him up after he cried out for mercy.. but there was no question of Scott using force to impress his own ideas on others.

Something has gone horribly wrong. Perhaps growing up out of that feeling of powerlessness that he acquired in our wrestling matches, he began to frequent martial arts bars.. and not the kind to which people send their children to get fun black belts.. This was serious Jiu-Jitsu. Slowly.. inexorably.. Scott gathered a group of brutal thugs around him. In this exceedingly rare picture, we find Scott surrounded by his group of trained killers. Scott, you may or may not be able to see in this reproduction, sits with a smirk on his face, as if to say: "Let Martyn try to take me down now.."

Scott loves his anonymity.. indeed nothing else can explain his ability to steer clear of the law for so long. In this picture only his central location betrays his position of power. He also refused to take off his shirt, for fear of revealing the identifying tattoos that have been stitched into his skin, one of a pair of palm trees surrounded by the cryptic statement stands out on the left side of his chest: "I live for Wild Palms." Right along the collar of his short is another message: "Creedence Clearwater and Masudi Forever." I note this simply for your curiosity, knowing full well that if you are close enough to read those statements, you are probably dead.

It is also rumored that Scott will be getting married soon, up in Madison, Wisconsin. It is unknown just how he convinced a nice girl like Hannah to marry him, but it may have something to do with the art of Jiu-Jitsu, which is all about getting someone to lie on his or her back. There may have been a threat involved: "Marry me or I will release my little band to wreak havoc in your hometown." It is also entirely possible that Hanna does not know about Scott's dark doings.. and it is also possible that she will talk him into Yoga, or at least Twister.

Scott's outlook on life has gotten much brighter since seeing this promising advertisement.

Watching Brick

May 4, 2006

Yesterday Emily and I went to see Brick, a film which performs a remarkable feat of genre blending: noir meets and mingles with the high school film. A noir film could theoretically have any kind of setting.. a retirement village in Florida would work fine.. the audience simply has to believe that it represents a closed social system. There are a handful of elements that tend to be included in a noir film:

A central detached protagonist who lives according to a personal code. This person is often a detective-like figure, but can also be a criminal.
The characters inhabit a world which is ambiguous as to the nature of good and evil. The cops are not the "good guys" nor is every criminal a "bad guy."
A viewing experience marked by plot switchbacks and sudden surprises. The aim is often to keep the viewer confused as to the motives that are pushing the characters.
A beautiful woman that exudes sexuality, but whose motives are hidden.. who often turns out to be a femme fatale.
An ending that lends a sense of irony to the preceding plot twists.
The film style will be daring and emphasize fantastic angles and off-beat compositional schemes.
Thematically there is a tendency to emphasize the inability of human beings to get a new start in life.. the past is always there to grab them.

These elements in Brick are transposed to a high school setting. There are no cops, but there is a vice-principal who is willing to cut a deal that allows the young detective to go underground and penetrate a criminal student network. The beautiful woman now becomes a high school beauty. The entire network of events and characters revolves around high school life.. and the detective's informants are a classical nerd and a high school drama queen. It is all rather clever, and the lateral transpositions from standard noir into a high school environment are bound to raise some smiles.

An interesting addition brought about by the high school setting is a semi-rhymed lingo. This is what we expect for the closed world of a high school, but it helps to build a sense of ambiguity as viewers strain to keep up with what the characters are learning. And in noir, anything that builds up confusion over the nature of character motives is good.

Proudly Raising Young Conservatives:
Emory's Clairmont Campus

May 3, 2006

Since being displaced by Hurricane Katrina last August, we have been living in an apartment at Emory's Clairmont Campus. It has always been difficult to explain our mixture of thankfulness at being given a place to live and our frustration that the place happened to be here at the Clairmont Campus.. a conglomeration of apartments that is a glorified college dorm. The apartment was by no means cheap, but all year long we wished that we could have used a fraction of the money for a cozier and more open apartment.

A lot of attention has gone into the entrances to these apartment buildings. We must use a special key to get into these gated doors. The multi-level parking lots are blocked by both a metal gate and a wooden arm.. the gate slides away and the arm raises when the bar-code on our car passes by the electronic sensor. Everywhere one looks, there is nothing but metal bars.. even the windows in the hallways have bars (to block suicides?).

Just try to break in! And if you want to take a swim in the Olympic-sized pools, well then you had better enter by means of the palm-print reading scanners at the student center.. unless you want to jump over some more black metal bars. Are we in prison here, or what?

In all the argument and counter-argument that marks current political debates, one question that never gets asked is what kind of values our surroundings create. The fight for liberal values is not simply about a set of political doctrines.. it is a way of life.

And what way of life does the Clairmont Campus foster? The primary message is security. No one comes in except those with proper keys.. or at least the proper palm-prints. Just behind security is the message of privilege. I imagine wealthy parents walking around, sizing up the exclusivity of the campus for their sons and daughters.

Above is a view of Clairmont Avenue running just outside Clairmont Campus (note the black metal fence running along the sidewalk). For a campus whose visual code speaks security, one might easily wonder: security from what? It is not as if urban life spills onto the campus.. quite the opposite. The campus is located along a main traffic artery which is hardly pedestrian friendly. It resembles an island heavily fortified to withstand some unknown assault.

An annoying aspect of Clairmont Campus is the occasional attempt at humor. I suppose that instead of 15 mph, the speed has been listed at 13 mph.. from the spooky influence of that skeleton with a top hat, Dooley. I can imagine the dull office setting in which someone came up with this idea.. and the developers and administrators probably loved it because it communicated something off-kilter or funky. It must have been in line with the image they wanted to project. But has there ever been a community run with less humor?

Not a lot of "funky" in that picture. But maybe I should be looking at all the curved concrete paths..

Note the manicured and controlled landscaping. No danger of getting lost here.. and in a way that is exactly what I miss: a place where one could get lost. Not in the emptiness of the corridors, but in any experience that is not so completely controlled and constructed. And I also miss whimsy that is deep and pervasive.. not vaunted on signs that regulate mph.

So what kind of student will be produced through this kind of living experience? I don't know what their party affiliation will be.. But whatever political persuasion, they will be well conditioned for their next exclusive housing environment. I imagine you leave here and move into some urban townhouse or luxury apartment complex.. and after a few years and a few promotions move to a home in a gated community. At no point does anyone at Clairmont Campus learn to live in a city.. that is, rubbing shoulders with people from many walks of life, from many income brackets. And this seems to me a recipe for making young conservatives.

At the center of the community is the tower. Any guesses as to how much it costs to live in a room that has access to one of those balconies? Well, that one bedroom apartment will cost you $3,314 per month. Remember, those will all be college students.

International Man of Mystery:
Welles' Mr. Arkadin

May 2, 2006

Mr. Arkadin (1955, recently released on DVD by Criterion) is important because it represents the climax of a style that Welles had long been striving toward: the international thriller. The story in this case centers on a young American named Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) who is hired by wealthy financier named Gregory Arkadin (Orson Welles). The job for Guy is to investigate the past of his mysterious employer. How exactly did Arkadin wind up in Zurich, Switzerland with a stash of money from which he made his vast fortune? Arkadin claims to have forgotten everything about his earlier past, but in fact is only using Guy to cover his tracks. The investigation of Arkadin stretches to many sites in Europe.. a castle in Spain, Paris, Amsterdam, and Munich.. and even reaches Tangiers and some coastal city in Mexico. For someone interested in making a film on a tight budget, Orson allowed himself a wide canvas.

Putting aside the Magnificent Ambersons.. often regarded as the most personal of Welles' films.. we can see a peculiar love for globe-trotting characters. The Stranger (1946) is almost entirely rooted in a small town in Connecticut, but has an opening.. simply confusing as it stands.. that contains material expanded in Welles' original film, showing an international search for an escaped Nazi. In The Lady from Shanghai (1948) we get a more fully developed international thriller, featuring Welles as the Irishman Michael O'Hara who gets signed up to work on a long sea voyage.. visiting Mexican coastal sites and winding up in Chinatown in San Francisco. There was also his production of a stage version of Around the World in 80 Days in 1946 and an even earlier attempt to make a film in Brazil.. which for various reasons got him into trouble.

At various points in these blogs I have mentioned the book of interviews with Peter Bogdanovich: This is Orson Welles. One odd aspect of these interviews is their disparate locations. We find chapters labeled: Rome, Guaymas, New York, Van Nuys, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and Paris. Granted, three of those are in Southern California.. but nevertheless the feeling is that Welles rather enjoyed the sense of being an international man.. at home in many countries. And it is important to recognize that a part of the intrigue that settles around Welles is exactly in the sense that he belongs in many parts of the world. Leave it to a director such as John Ford to mythologize a place by returning to a landscape over and over. Orson Welles seems skittish about ever setting a film in the same landscape twice.

One way to further get at this fascination on the part of Welles is to think about his Shakespearian adaptations. These could be considered as a retreat from his international pretensions, but that is to forget the international stature of Shakespeare.. that most universal of English poets. His productions are also not of the kind to Englishize the plays.. whether one thinks about his "Voodoo" Macbeth or his Mediterranean Othello. His treatment of Kafka's The Trial is another example of this yearning to set specifically "World Literature" to film. Again, the only real exception to this proves to be The Magnificent Ambersons, which is largely a return to the setting and myth of his own childhood.

So a further question would be: what do we get out of this self-consciously international aesthetic? I don't mean that as a question to which I have the answer.. but as one about which I will have to think. A timid first answer would be that Welles has grasped film as "world film". This means, of course, that his intended audience is spread out into many different countries.. (which can help an American audience realize why Welles may have been uncaring about matching dialogue with mouth movements at some points in Mr. Arkadin: he is expecting the film to be dubbed or watched by those who don't know English). Working toward "world film" also seems to push Orson Welles toward universal themes (which should not be confused with "popular" themes). In both practicalities and thematic elements Welles is pushing us away from a national cinema and toward something.. well, universally human..

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