Nasser on TIME

I’ve been doing some research on foreign press coverage of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s trip to Damascus in 1958 and the declaration of the United Arab Republic. It was his first visit to Syria, and before his arrival the Syrians already declared him their new president. I looked in the archives of Time Magazine, which is available and free, including covers, back in the days when Time was, if not more serious, at least better to look at. The catalog of their covers of Nasser:

Sep 26, 1955

Aug 27, 1956

July 28, 1958

Mar 29, 1963

May 16, 1969

Oct 12, 1970

Filed under: Egypt, Media , Gamal Abdel Nasser, Time magazine

American University in New Cairo

CAIRO – In the desert east of the city, off the highway to the Suez Canal, is the new 260-acre campus of the 90-year-old American University in Cairo (AUC). It opened last fall at a price tag of more than $400 million, a quarter coming from USAID. University administrators and developers hope New Cairo will one day be home to some 2 million people. It’s a model of Cairo’s present and future urbanism, a profitable solution to congestion and overcrowding in one of the world’s largest and most polluted cities. Faculty and administrators are split on the changes.

“We should not immediately approve of this kind of transformation without asking about the wider context of privatization and how a university relates to society,” says Hanan Sebea, an assistant professor of anthropology.

In the face of Cairo’s crowded infrastructure, the development answers for years have looked to the possibilities of building elsewhere. AUC is keeping part of its old, eight-acre campus on Tahrir Square.

“Central Cairo is overloaded with lots of pressures that are beyond the capabilities of its infrastructure,” says Ashraf Salloum, the university architect who oversaw the large design team behind the campus. “If we want to really help the development of the city, we need to give the city space to breathe.”

AUC will be an “anchor for development” in this stretch of desert, he says. But are new, world-class facilities enough, even at the loss of a central urban site?

“Space is very symbolic, but it’s not only about infrastructure,” Ms. Sebea says. “Downtown, presence is very important, and it goes beyond fieldwork. It’s accessibility and the interest of the university to interact with society.”

Another recent story for the Christian Science Monitor.

Filed under: Egypt, Writing , American University in Cairo, Christian Science Monitor, New Cairo

More about Hosni

There is another view, too, one that was published in English, allowing, perhaps for a degree of candor not found in the Arabic news media. Writing in the English-language Daily News, the chief editor, Rania al-Malky, suggested that Mr. Hosny might have done as well as he did because he was Arab and Muslim, not because he was qualified. His defeat, she wrote, should not surprise anyone.

“I will say this at the risk of being branded unpatriotic, but no matter where you stand on the political spectrum,” she wrote, “you must admit that the Egyptian administration did not deserve to win this bid. How can a 22-year minister of a country where culture, education, health and science have regressed to the Dark Ages become the head of Unesco?”

Daily News Egypt Editor Rania al-Malky wrote that a few weeks ago, and was quoted last week in the New York Times. More of the op-ed here:

The real question that few have attempted to answer was: Since when has Egypt been able to influence international opinion on any level, let alone the UN?

It seems that under the floodlit stadiums of the U-20 FIFA championship currently being hosted by Egypt whose young and vigorous team kicked off the tournament with a sweeping 4-1 win against Trinidad and Tobago on Thursday, our collective memory has blotted out our 2010 World Cup bid where we failed to secure a single vote.

For a long time, the scandal which came to be known domestically as “Sifr El Mondial” (The Mondial Zero), was used as a metaphor for all the government’s failings, whether in education, health care, fiscal policy, housing or urban development.

Despite priding itself for playing a key role in achieving Arab-Israeli peace and mediating between Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas, Egypt has been unable to influence the status of both protracted conflicts in any way. At best, the national administration has been able to fend off aggression against it, with the occasional loss of Egyptian soldiers following “accidental” shootings by the Israeli IDF on the border.

Filed under: Egypt, Media , Daily News Egypt, Farouk Hosni, UNESCO

UNESCO’s possible censor-director

Most of the flap about Farouk Hosni becoming Director General of UNESCO comes from anti-Semitic remarks about not allowing (no, burning) any Hebrew texts in the new library at Alexandria. (A curious position to take not only because the place could stand to house a few more books; current expansion plans reportedly revolve around a McDonalds). Reporters Without Borders has more reasons:

President Hosni Mubarak’s culture minister since 1987, Hosni has been one of the leading protagonists of government censorship in the Arab Republic of Egypt during this period, constantly seeking to control both press freedom and his fellow citizens’ right to freedom of information.

Any attempt to found a newspaper in Egypt has to be endorsed by not only the High Press Council, which is headed by the president, but also by the Cabinet and by the various security services. A newspaper can be closed at any time if it is deemed to have published an article posing a threat to national security.

At the same time, the government owns 99 per cent of the country’s newspaper retail outlets and has a monopoly of newspaper printing. This allows it to censor a newspaper at any time.

Even if privately-owned opposition and independent newspapers are on sale in newsstands alongside the government press, there are risks attached to being outspoken. A total of 32 articles in different laws – including the criminal code, the press law, the publications law, the law on state documents (which forbids journalists to access certain official documents), the civil service law and the political parties law – stipulate penalties for the media.

Hosni has been successful in bringing Egyptian writers and literature in general widely under the government fold. Festivals, prize and money from the government are a way, he’s proved, to cut out criticism from those, the literary set, who might offer the most eloquent and convincing. Another nod then to Sonallah Ibrahim, who said simply, while on a stage with Hosni as he rejected a government prize: “We no longer have theater, cinema, or scientific research; we just have festivals, conferences, and false funds.”

Filed under: Egypt, Media , censorship, Farouk Hosni, UNESCO

Sonallah Ibrahim

The new issue of Bidoun is out, its theme Interviews. In it is an interview with Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim, by Ahmed El Attar. In 2003 Ibrahim famously rejected a literary prize funded by the Egyptian government, the Supreme Council for Culture’s Novelist of the Year. The then-66 year old, part of the “sixties Generation” of revolutionary writers, walked slowly to the stage of the Cairo Opera House, built by the Japanese in the eighties, where he gave a scathing, sober indictment of the government.

In his speech (reprinted in many papers), Ibrahim—darling of the leftist set that has dominated the Arab novel since the 1960s—said: “I have no doubt that every Egyptian here is aware of the extent of the catastrophe facing our country. It’s not just the real Israeli military threat to our eastern borders, the American dictates, or the weakness showing in our government’s foreign policy: It’s all aspects of life. We no longer have theater, cinema, or scientific research; we just have festivals, conferences, and false funds. We don’t have industry, agriculture, health, or justice. Corruption and pillage spreads. And anyone who objects faces getting beaten up or tortured. The exploitative few have wrested our spirit from us.”

But he left the pièce de résistance to the end: “All that’s left for me is to thank those who chose me for this prize but to say that I won’t be accepting it because it is from a government that, in my opinion, does not possess the credibility to grant it.” The hall, according to press reports, erupted in shock and support, as Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni was left trying to call to order a jubilant literary pack. [World Press Review]

I’ve been googling Ibrahim all evening, trying to read more about him and “the Opera incident.” A month after his’s rejection, Mona Anis wrote in Al Ahram Weekly of a “last act” in light of the evening’s late, last-minute dedication to the recently late Edward Said.

Ending what we had supposed was an acceptance speech with an indictment of the Egyptian government and its cultural institutions Ibrahim walked out, leaving the cheque and trophy on the podium, many of those sitting in the front rows angry, and at least half the auditorium applauding. It was a moment I would have wanted to write to Edward Said about.

In his interview, Ibrahim is asked about that night, and how such confrontation went against his usual stand away from the limelight, just writing. [The novelist wrote a short piece about his rejection of the prize, as El Attar says in a question: "You chose a clear political posture and social stance during the Opera incident, and then you wrote a small piece about it. When I read that piece, I wanted to cry. It was unprecedented. Intellectuals, artists, and writers tend to talk too much without really saying anything. Your words were so categorical and so precise. You simply said, "What's going on?" PLEASE any help on where to find a copy.]

Why did Ibrahim confront the government that night? Long-serving Culture Minister Farouk Hosny, long gunning for the UNESCO head job, was on stage that night in 2003, and apparently had to try and hush applause, blue-faced. Ibrahim’s answer:

In the past, I was always putting off conflict. But I feel that the situation has reached a breaking point, and that we’ve been placed under an unbearable degree of stress. It has inspired rebellion in people for the first time, an emerging vitality of the “other” point of view. When I think back, it’s true I didn’t feel like I could go and receive the award and go through all those congratulatory formalities, which I can’t stomach very easily anyway — but at the same time, I saw it as an opportunity to speak my mind. So I decided not to decline. I went in order to let it out, to say and project all that people wanted to say but could not.I believe that i was a successful initiative from one perspective, from the perspective that my appearance was as surprise for them. They didn’t anticipate that I’d actually come. So they weren’t able to react fast enough, and that’s why I escaped arrest.

Filed under: Egypt, Literature , Ahmed El Attar, Bidoun, interview, prize, rejection, Sonallah Ibrahim

‘Bill Clinton is Syrian’ and other tales of Obama’s speech from Damascus

The traffic flowed through Damascus last Thursday, peaking as always in the early afternoon. There was little buzz about President Obama in Cairo, and given all the packed taxis and microbuses clogging the street, it was a typical day in Damascus – and no special arrangements to watch the speech.

“Of course I know,” taxi driver Adnan replied when asked about Obama’s visit to Cairo University. “He was in Saudi yesterday.”

The oil-rich kingdom is hardly popular here, owing to its mass accumulation of crude cash, its support for Sunni fundamentalism, and its closeness with America.

“Obama goes to Saudi, he goes to Egypt. He goes to Turkey and soon enough he’ll go to Israel,” Adnan complained. “But he doesn’t come here.”

Before an American ambassador returns to Damascus, before US sanctions are lifted, average Syrians will likely continue to ignore gestures of American oratory and reconciliation.

More of my recent HuffPost.

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Filed under: America, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Syria, Writing , Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Cairo, huffington post

Azem / Hijaz

The Azem Palace in the 1880s. Built in 1749-51 by Assad Pasha al-Azem, one in a line of Ottoman governors of Syria tapped from the various Azem families. “At the end of this Suq [Bezouria], is one of the most splendid houses in Damascus,with seven courts and saloons,gorgeously decorated; it still belongs to his descendant,” gushed Isabel Burton, wife of Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer who was made consul in Damascus in 1869. [MidEastImage]

And today:

Meanwhile the Hijaz Station (1908-1913), which today functions as a temporary bookstore and the eventual facade to a large commercial development (rumors of a large shopping mall/transit terminal), was in its heyday the grand traveler’s entrance to Sham. It was also designed by a Spaniard. A photo circa 1914-1918:

The architect Fernando de Aranda (1878-1969) also built the trade building al-’Abid in Merjeh Square and anticipated, in Stefan Weber’s estimatation, “the orientalizing colonial-style.” Which reminds me of Cairo: the al-Rifai mosque across the street from the 14th century madrassa of Sultan Hassan. Al-Rifai was built between 1869 and 1912, its design supervised by an Austrian, Max Herz, head of the Khedive-appointed, foreign-dominated Committee for the Conservation of Arab Monuments in Cairo. For more about all that, check out Paula Sanders book.

The Hijaz station in 2007, on my first trip to Syria:

Filed under: Egypt, Photos, Syria

Free Philip Rizk!

UPDATE: Yesterday Philip Rizk was released. The Germans are asking more questions. The Egyptians still detained and always detained, alongside this recent arrest, suggest a ratcheting up of dissident crackdown, not only on Mubarak’s national politics, but their broad attack on any who question their policy with Israel, Hamas, and Fatah.

CAIRO — State security came for Philip Rizk on Friday night. He had just finished a six-mile protest walk with about 15 friends to raise support for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip when he was detained for hours and then hustled into an unmarked van and driven off. He has not been seen or heard from since.

From Michael Slackman in the NYT. Go here for all updates on Philip Rizk, including more photos from the recent AUC protest. Also here and here.

Philip’s blog Tabula Gaza is excellent. Just one quote from notes of a conversation he had with a doctor in Gaza during the war:

The numbers of death and injured reported in the media are far below reality as the media is not able to cover incidents as they unfold. I know of cases where homes were surrounded by the Israeli army and people inside gave themselves up and were shot anyway when they exited.

When bakeries open there are thousands lining up to get their share of breadA clinic near my hospital was hit by an Israeli missile earlier today

What is taking place is a massacre, more than a massacre

Almost all the cases I saw today at the hospital were civilians, many women and children. This is not an attack on Hamas, it is on the most innocent of people in Gaza

6 ambulance staff members have been killed. Two ambulances were hit. Nothing is safe, nowhere is safe. No moving vehicle is safe. We are afraid for our lives. There is no differentiation between Hamas and Fatah or anyone else

We have witnessed weapons we have never seen before in our lives. Some explode in the sky and scatter bombs all over. Sporadically. I have smelt smells from some of the burns and wounds that I have never before witnessed

Filed under: Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Media , Philip Rizk

“These images were taken as early as 1850″

If collecting photography is collecting the world, here are two worlds: sepia and digital color; late 19th and early 21st centuries; Damascus and Cairo in old and current photographs. Right now I’m delighting in MidEastImage.com.

ABOVE: The Treasury, Omayyad Mosque Damascus, undated (late 19th century?).

ABOVE: The Treasury on my first trip to Sham, April 2007. 

ABOVE: “Photograph by Tancred R. Dumas, Italian in origin, studio in Constantimople and later in Beirut, photographed late ninteenth century. The photo is of the northern gallery of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.”

 

ABOVE: Omayyad Mosque earlier this fall, looking toward the northern gallery. 

ABOVE: Souq al-Hamidiyeh, Damascus, early 20th century.

ABOVE: Souq al-Hamidiyeh today.

And because Cairo is always close…

ABOVE: Ibn Tulun Mosque, “by Bonfils, 1870s.”

ABOVE: Ibn Tulun in June 2007.

Filed under: Egypt, Media, Syria , Cairo, Damascus, Ibn Tulun Mosque, Omayyad mosque, photography, Souq al-Hamidiyeh

marketing

haggling in the souq al-joumaa is tame when i think of going to market in cairo. the souq al-joumaa, halfway up jebel quasioun, north of the embassy district and strangely near upscale residential neighborhoods, is the cheapest place in town for soap and brooms, fruits and vegetabales, plants and dvds. going to bab zuweila in cairo for rugs and pillowcases, or bundles of oranges, always required extensive haggling. part of the game. even in cairo’s souq al-joumaa (“al-goumaa”) which spreads underneath a highway a little south of the citadel, near the old mameluke tombs that guidebooks call the “city of the dead,” haggling is still required to come away with treasures like dusty old coin and cigar boxes and state  posters of past presidents. at the souq al-joumaa here yesterday, haggling was minimal. it isn’t only the low price for a kilo of grapes or a tray of new glasses for the kitchen. it’s the calm of so many interactions here that might be embodied in the sing-song local dialect, always lilting. i didn’t have to haggle for my first plant yesterday; the price was, and sounded, good. it’s a small leafy potted thing (clearly i am a botanist) that sits on my balcony now. filling up an apartment with greenery in cairo inevitably meant the occasionally aggressive back and forth, arabic’s soft “ja” replaced with the force of egypt’s “ga,” until you’d made away with a few palms for half the price.

i may get a small cat soon. university classes don’t start for another week and half. i have a membership to the danish institute’s library. the institute is housed in a beautifully restored beit arabi (arab house). unlike one recently opened boutique hotel here in another beit arabi, which replaced the fountain in the central courtyard with a lap pool, the restoration of beit al-aqqad, the home of the danish institute, preserved the building’s past integrity for the sake of the present. there is a large volume on the work available at the institute. step one of research.

Filed under: Egypt, Syria , Damascus, souq al-joumaa

Amman to Sinai

This may or may not be the tallest flagpole in the world.

This is the ferry dock in Nuweiba, Sinai. Egypt, finally.

This is a weird German colony beach camp with soft sand north of Nuweiba. The local kids were playing soccer.

And this is the fastest swimmer in Ramallah.

More photos on the Flickr bar on the left.

Filed under: Egypt, Jordan, Photos , Amman, Egypt, Jordan, Nuweiba, Sinai

to Amman, to Sinai and back again

This time last week I was sleeping at the Holiday Inn near JFK. “Flight 93″ was playing on TNT earlier that night; the hotel was full of Jordanians and other Arabs, many with brand new biometric American passports like the new one I finally have. Royal Jordanian delayed the Sunday night flight, because of a hurricane we heard. Which one? The one that had mildly hit the northeast two days earlier, making Rafa Nadal wilt in swamp weather in Flushing? Or the one coming in two days?

Either way I landed in Amman early Tuesday morning. By Wednesday morning I was in a bus south to Aqaba to catch the ferry to Nuweiba in Egypt. “You want speed?” a ticket man asked me at the crumbling port building in Aqaba, which shares coastline with Eilat in Israel and Taba in Egypt. There are two ferries that run between Jordan and Egyot; the fast one is only supposed to take one hour, plus the casual but unclear waiting before leaving and after hitting port on the other side of the Gulf of Aqaba.

Amman and Aqaba share claims to possess the world’s tallest flagpoles. However I heard in the days since getting here and since seeing both flagpoles (impressive) that in fact Turkmenistan has the world’s tallest. And Azerbaijan, or perhaps Kazakhstan is about to out-do that. Sort of like the supertall skyscraper rivalries in Dubai, only a little thinner.

Returning to Egypt invited immediate haggling. Jordanian cabs use a meter and the drivers, besides each having unique knowledge of the best hotel in town (surely better and cheaper than the one you ask them to take you to), seem to share little with their surly Egyptian counterparts.

In a shared taxi ride from Aqaba to Amman last night, at a rest stop on the side of the highway for tea somewhere north of Kerak, the driver told me that he used to work in Baghdad. “I was a driver for KBR in Baghdad for four years. I was a driver between Amman and Baghdad for twenty years.”

I confessed I didn’t know much about KBR. He looked surprised, then annoyed, then was silent. We looked at each other and I asked if he was from Amman. He was. KBR is the major Ameican contractor in Iraq, building housing for soldiers. The driver said they work as police through the American army, and he was explaining this to the man from Madaba sitting shotgun next to him. He seemed stung that I didn’t ask him more about Baghdad, and I was embarassed that I didn’t know that KBR, among other things, employs more American private contractors and holds a larger contract with the U.S. government than does any other firm in Iraq.

Filed under: Egypt, Jordan, Writing , Amman, Aqaba, Egypt, ferry, Holiday Inn, JFK, Jordan, Sinai, taxi

Cliff collapses on Cairo slum

“Up to 500 people are feared to have been buried in their homes after a mountain landslide crushed a town on the outskirts of Egypt’s capital.”

Video from Al Jazeera English.

Filed under: Egypt , Cairo, cliff, collapse, landslide, moqattam

How I got home, 2006-2007

Classes are over and once again I’m standing in the street downtown near Tahrir, or Liberation, Square, trying to hail a cab. For a while none will stop. Those that do will refuse to go to Zamalek, just across the Qasr al Nil bridge, because it’s five or six and the traffic up the island is total gridlock. Eventually one stops, but the driver demurs when I insist on five pounds.

“No. Ten pounds.”

“By God, ten pounds?”

I’ve been trying, probably to the delicious amusement of Egyptians like this cab driver, to pick up the local tongue. Lots of exaggeration and gestured proclamations tinged with “by God”s and “God willing”s.

“Five pounds, my friend.”

He mutters another “khalas” – enough – and starts to pull away.

“Seven pounds?” I yell looking at the license plate of this old Fiat, which then stops.

“Tayeb. Yalla.” Okay. Let’s go.

Filed under: Egypt, Writing , cabs, Cairo, Tahrir, traffic, Zamalek