Mule

Mount Sinai was a different experience this time around. When I went with John and Ryan in August, we started up at 1:00 AM to watch the sunrise. By the time we were down, there were about 20 tour buses in the parking lot, mostly bringing tourists from Sharm El-Sheikh. But on Wednesday we went up during the day to watch the sunset. It wasn't as impressive as the sunrise, but it had been so freezing cold in August that I didn't really feel like trying it in January, especially since I lost my jacket and thick hiking socks in Dahab in unrelated incidents. We started off at 2:00 PM but barely made it up in time, after getting misleading directions from a Bedouin guy sitting around smoking bango (with my keen sense of direction, I realized that the top of the mountain might be the other way after we had been going down massive stone steps for about 15 minutes).
There were only a few dozen people at the top: a Pakistani-American family from New York praying together, a couple European tourists, and a big group of Nigerian Christians and their Israeli tour guide. When we arrived, the Israeli guide was talking to the Pakistani-Americans, loudly marveling at the diversity and tolerance at the top of the mountain. When we had him take our picture a few minutes later, he asked where we were from, was delighted to discover that Rana was from Iraq (his girlfriend, as it turns out, is an Iraqi Jew living in Israel) and promptly launched into the same speech he had given the Muslim family, almost word for word. We asked him about the group of Nigerians he was with, and he said they were there for a nine-day-long religious pilgrimmage, "three days in the north in Galilee, three days in Jerusalem, and three days here in the south". Notice how he worked in that last part nice and smoothly. When we talked to a couple of the pilgrims themselves, they seemed a little less Zionist, being vaguely aware of visiting "the Palestinian side and the Israeli side in Bethlehem [which is entirely Palestinian]" but it was still disturbing.
On the bus with us from Dahab was another interesting character. I never got his name, but he was a Texan whose parents had immigrated from El Salvador. He had spent three weeks in Egypt and six weeks in Israel, not seeing the usual sights, but touring the monasteries in the region. He was definitely one of the American Zionist Christian fundamentalist breed--when listing the places he had visited "in Israel", he mentioned "a few places in the Judean desert like Bethlehem and Hebron".

To be fair, Sinai does have an identity distinct from Egypt, and many Sinai Bedouins (who tend to cover up heavily, the women wearing hijab and usally covering their mouths with one end of the hijab, the men wearing light blue or lavendar kufiyyas, also habitually tucking it over the lower half of the face) express their preference for Israelis over Egyptians. During the Israeli occupation, from 1967 to 1980 (except for Taba, which the Israelis held on to for another decade), the Israelis, not threatened by the sparse population of Bedouins and not having plans for extensive settlements, pursued a policy of co-optation contrasted with their West Bank and Gaza policy of pillaging and burning. Not surprisingly, it was more successful in winning new friends, and the Sinai became a popular destination for Israeli tourists. Although this has let up since the Taba bombings, the Bedouin speak more Hebrew than English or any other foreign language, and the Egyptian government allows Bedouin elders a wide degree of autonomy in resolving local problems to avoid inciting further anti-Egyptian feeling.

Joanna's now safely in Turkey, trying to get her credit card and ATM card to start working, so check out her posts (link on the left).
I'll be posting about Dahab and Mount Sinai in a day or two, I just got back yesterday.

An article about a recent murder in the Egyptian-American community in Jersey City. Walid's dad works in New Jersey, though I'm not sure where exactly.

I spent Eid with the family in Abu Sir, and a classmate of mine came along. The 'downtown' of Abu Sir around the souq was swarming with teenagers showing off their new Eid clothes and younger kids heavily armed with toy guns bought that morning. Friends and family visiting each give a few pounds to one or all of the kids, so throughout the day they can accumulate quite a fortune. Ali spent all of his money on assorted weaponry and chickpeas as soon as he got it, while Hasna' was saving hers for a trip the next day to the neighboring town of Hamdiya, in the meantime taking delight in counting her LE 18.50 over and over in English and Arabic. Olfat and a girl who lives across the street pooled together their change and traded it with me for an even 50, her logic being that if she didn't have change, it would be easier to say she couldn't give money to the little kids she knew. Ahmad as the oldest of them got the most money, but was also obligated to pass most of it out to the younger ones.

The weather was wonderful, around 70 F, and I was up on the roof with Ali and Hasna' when Um Ahmad showed up with a man wearing a blood-stained white robe. Their sacrifice was to be the goat that lives on the roof, which Ali had always taken pleasure in tormenting and butting heads with. As Ali and Hasna' watched and cheered, they slit the goat's throat and started the hour-long process of draining the blood and carving the meat up.

When I got back to Gamaliya that night, I didn't notice in the darkness at first that the streams of liquid I was trudging through was not yet another malfunctioning water pipe, but was blood flowing downstream from the slaughtering grounds. Around the corner, I encountered a table with two goat heads and a water buffalo head (those things are enormous) on it. Yum.

Happy holidays, sorry if this was kind of a bloody post.

Tomorrow's the first day of Eid Al-Adha, commemmorating Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael for God. Since families that can afford it traditionally sacrifice some large domestic beast (eating a third, giving the rest to the poor), Gamaliya is full of sheep and cows blissfully unaware of their impending doom. I'll be spending the day in Abu Sir with a couple students from CASA. I don't really have much news, break has been generally quiet and uneventful.
There is a wave of friends leaving the country: my former boss Ian goes to teach at Nablus U. in Palestine on Saturday; Saed left for Beirut last week while Serene went to report from Ramallah (each other's hometowns, coincidentally); and Abd al-Basir leaves Egypt for good to return home to Afghanistan in another week.

Coptic Christmas was an interesting experience, even if it didn't work out as planned at all. My friend Sherif, who was gonna introduce us to friends in Sohag (both Charles and I were interested in seeing Sohag in part because it's the poorest, most backwards part of the country), got sick a couple days before the trip and couldn't come, so it was gonna be just Charles and me. He showed up with a huge Tupperware container of food in tow. His maid had cooked up him a batch of chicken and potatoes, which he devoured at the train station cafeteria. A few minutes later we were out by the train tracks, and he was definitely on the wan side. He excused himself to go throw up in the bathroom, and decided not to come along to Sohag after all.

So then I was on my own, scheduled to roll into Sohag at 4:00 AM at best, the only hotel I could get through to said they don't take foreigners because of hassle from the police. I wasn't really sure if I was gonna go all the way to Sohag or not, and at 2:30 AM changed my plans and got off at Asyut, which is maybe two thirds Christian. The next day, Coptic Christmas, I went out to the Monastery of the Virgin for a few hours, where a nun showed me around. Before the trip I had decided to experiment with saying I was American rather than Norwegian, partly because Charles, who speaks Arabic well but almost always speaks English outside the classroom, was with me. Also, a Norwegian identity would have been hard to pull off, since there are more checkpoints and police around in Asyut, and I had my surrender my passport at every hotel. It was generally a positive experience, though the monk at the monastery gate had lived in northern Virginia for a few years and refused to speak a word of Arabic, so I had to slip away from his tour and be guided by a nun, who was also fluent in English but didn't mind speaking in Arabic.

Asyut itself had a lot of police out in the streets, worried about clashes over Christmas, which didn't happen though there was a Muslim killed in nearby Minya. The restriction on building new churches in Egypt referred to in the article were relaxed the day before yesterday after pressure from the Coptic pope. In Asyut, a couple policemen stayed with me pretty much everywhere I went.

Since the first night's hotel was a little pricey LE 40, and found the Asyut Youth Hostel (LE 10). Oh yeah, and over the weekend the pound appreciated against the dollar, rising to $1 is LE 5.90 at official rates (it had been LE 6.22). At the youth hostel I stayed in a dorm room with five friendly Asyut University students from all over the country there were six or eight in the each of the other two rooms. They were a lot of fun, and I didn't even mind being American, even if the engineering majors among them threw in a lot of gratuitous English. The whole hostel took a break from studying and sitting around talking to watch Mission Impossible 2 on Egyptian TV.

I couldn't really get any sleep that night, with all the finals studying going on. Their system, which I remember from Swarthmore as not being particularly effective, was to sleep for an hour, spend another hour slowly getting up and hitting the snooze button on the alarm, then study for thirty minutes before re-setting the alarm and going back to sleep. Tired and a little sick, I decided to go home the next day instead of staying on or going to Minya or Sohag. Unfortunately, with the Christmas crowds there weren't any available train tickets to Cairo that day, so I had to take a six-hour bus ride.

I've been spending a lot of my free time watching Egyptian soap operas from the Arabic Studies office at AUC. There are two recurring religious Islamic stock characters in most of the soap operas, that of the benevolent wise old shaykh and the group of bearded Islamic extremists. The wise old shaykh makes only occasional appearances, but at key moments, when a main character is having a spiritual crisis or is faced with a tough decision. The protagonist is inevitably in an empty mosque late at night and is surprised when he encounters the shaykh reading the Qur'an in a corner. Being wise and old, the shaykh already knows what problems the main character is going through without being told, and pulls out a suitable quote from the Qur'an or hadith that solves the protagonist's problems.
The bearded Islamic extremists, on the other hand, appear in a few consecutive episodes rather than being regular characters, and try to lure a newly religious Muslim astray. Luckily, their incoherent demands that the protagonist grow out his beard and convince his father to give them millions of dollars are easily defeated with Al-Azharesque religiously moderate arguments, whereupon the extremists gnash their teeth and retreat into their corner. In some of the soap operas they kill or try to kill a beloved minor character and are promptly hauled off by the heroic State Security forces.

Good article on the recent trouble with the Copts. I'll be going with Big Charles to Sohag from January 6-10 to check out Coptic Christmas in Upper Egypt.