CU Abroad – Maurice Chammah

I am sitting in an internet cafe in Casablanca, Morocco, preparing to fly back to New York tomorrow to start playing music in various cities on tour for a month, and I am chatting with various travellers. In the past week, an extended detour through Morocco on my way home, I’ve met many: from Australia, Sweden, England, Hong Kong, and the U.S. They have saved up a sum from working and their trips are all much more ambitious than my own; some are on a 6 month trek throughout the whole world, while others have been going for longer and don’t plan to stop. They seldom spend more than a week or two in any one place, and thrive on the constant feeling of being somewhere new. They make friends for the day wherever they go or find a local to take them around and eagerly highlight their Lonely Planet guides, trading tips on restaurants, sights, and bars.

Four days a week, I actually leave Cairo to take classes at the American University in Cairo (AUC), which is itself kilometers away from the center of the city. The trip, an hour in each direction, leads one to feel both a connection to the city, as countless neighborhoods, juice stands, historical sites, monuments, businessmen, street vendors, and traffic guards pass by, but also disconnected, protected from the heat and wind by the “Family Transport” buses, air-conditioned and constructive of a calm only puncuated occasionally by the honks of the bus itself and the bumps of uneven pavement. Jostled intermittently, one reaches a point between annoyance and complacency as the sterile environment, both inside and outside the dense urban landscape, wrestles through the traffic and the zahma (crowdedness) of the city.
 
On the bus, one attempts a bit to read, or to sleep, as the images speed or trudge by, and the aural environment on the bus illustrates an interesting continuation of the locations it connects: the desert (and deserted) suburb of AUC, New Cairo, and Zamalek, the neighborhood on an island in the middle of the Nile where an AUC residence hall is located.

In all three locations, with varying intensities, one hears a distant drumbeat or singer’s voice emanate from loudly volumed I-Pods, navigating between the private space of the listener’s ear and the public soundscape. One hears a trace hear and there of the adhan (call to prayer), chanted on campus by a student visibly perched atop a high overpass, and in Zamalek, disembodied and calling from a faraway mosque’s minaret. One hears, especially on the bus, bits of conversation either between two individuals or between one and his/her cellphone, sometimes in English, sometimes in Arabic, and most often in the language of AUC, a distinct, vernacular mix of colloqual Egyptian grammar and an English lexicon of university-related nouns (”aindi class dilwati” meaning “I have class now,” or “mafeesh homework naharda” meaning “there isn’t homework today”). 
 
Thus, the busride to campus, important for its sounds but even more important in its the way it shuts out the noise of the outside world mediates a nearly seamless journey between two spaces very similar in their quiet, or at least their attempt at it. They are spaces protected not only from the noise of Cairo, but as well for their inhabitants from the dirt and overall sensory intensity of Cairo, and by extension the visible poverty, crime, and urban decay of Cairo. 
 
In shaabi (working class) microbuses, in the neighborhoods they traverse, and in the shared public spaces of Cairo from the zoo to the corniche of the Nile, there are few I-pods, few recognizably English words, and above all, no pretensions to quiet. The sounds shut out by the AUC bus take on full effect where downtown meets the Nile, as bridges filled with honking cars and grumbling motorcycles mix in with the sound of families and groups of young men enjoying ice cream and strolls down the corniche. This is the loud Cairo of historical accounts and NYTimes reporters’ laments (see the links bar to the right), almost tactile in its aural attack. The comfort with which the majority of these areas’ inhabitants move about, clearly unperturbed by that which would offrend  someone used to the quiet suburban landscape, makes it evident that to the extent we are a product of our surroundings, many different Cairos are producing many different kinds of people.

Two days ago I returned to Cairo having spent two weeks traveling through Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, and I have been reflecting on how my experience as a tourist in these countries, having thought of Cairo as a sort of “home base,” differed from how I would have seen them coming straight from America. In all four places, which are all in a constant cultural conversation with Cairo, the U.S. and Europe, I encountered many tourists who had come, I suppose, seeking a different, exotic, experience. Istanbul is advertised for stunning historical mosques, rich food and music, and “Middle Eastern flare.” Israel is advertised as a religious pilgrimage site (Jerusalem) coupled with a wild, abandoned nightlife (Tel Aviv). Jordan and Palestine, struggling to attract tourists, alternate between all of these lures of the foreign and the historic. For those with whom I traveled, however, these countries were a bit more like going home.
Put with painful generalization, where coming from Europe might make Istanbul look more Middle Eastern, coming from Cairo makes them look a lot more European. What follows are some impressions:

Turkey: For a lot of commentators, I think, Turkey is a lesson in what Egypt once aspired to be: European, cosmopolitan, and enforcedly secular in the public, and especially urban, realm. Turkey’s clean cobblestones and obsessively maintained tourist attractions sometimes seemed in direct antithesis to the dusty, decaying quality of Cairo’s inner-city tourist sites, so decried by the Americans and upper class Egyptians I have met here. The Turkish middle class seems to dominate the capital city while in Egypt, a country with barely any middle class, the elite are fleeing to suburbs in the desert and the poorer classes are left to the historic Cairo, the object of scorn for tourists who wish the mosques were better kept and the streets were cleaner. The face of Turkey’s national icon, Mustafa Kemal (or Ataturk, father of the Turks) is found in every restaurant and pub, on plates and mugs and lighters, and even carved into a cliff in Izmir. In Egypt, Nasser and Mubarak’s faces are certainly quite visible, but it feels forced, uncelebrated, and cold, and the Pharoahs are clearly the objects of pride. I have no ability to historicize why these two countries have followed such different trajectories, and comparison can be as useless as it is appealing, but nevertheless it was fascinating to see how they are compared by tourists, backpackers, and other visitors whose  impressions mold our impressions of Middle Eastern countries in Europe and the U.S.

Israel, Palestine: My traveling friend Caitlin and I floated between the two cities that are often used to show the main disjuncture in Israel society of secular and religious identity; respectively, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In the latter, where I had lived last Summer, I was struck by her question of “when are we going to meet any Israelis?” because from the border guard to the average Old City wanderer, nearly every voice emitted clean, unaccented American English. Much of Jerusalem, at least on an impressionistic level, has literally been overtaken by Americans who claim it as their own.

In Tel Aviv, on the other hand, we witnessed the form taken by the national sanctification of the Holocaust, as on 10am on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Rememberance Day), every Israeli stands deadly still for two minutes as air raid sirens fill the air.

While these cities seemed so different, they were unified for the both of us by our one day in Ramallah. As I learned last summer, going to the West Bank shows how Israel, for all its diversity and inclusiveness for American Jews, is made possible by exclusion. Qalandia checkpoint, separating Ramallah and Jerusalem and described by Caitlin as deeply dehumanizing, reminded us that all thriving developed nations need to keep someone out for various reasons, and this both mars and complicates their romantic, rich diversity. In Turkey this is certainly true. In Egypt, however, this is not the case and I look forward to exploring how the complicated way inclusion and exclusion play out here.

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On some days, as I leave the metro at Midan Ataba, I pass televisions sputtering the latest pop music videos, and on others,  they are tuned to one of the many Qur’anic recitation channels. Ascending the steps, I enter the space of the midan (square), where street vendors hawk shoes, tapes, and books, competing in the air for the ear of the passer-by, who would not usually stop, but may if a particularly good price catches their ear. I sidestep a table, upon which is perched a megaphone attached to a wire, speaking the disembodied voice of a garbled, fuzzy prayer sermon. Finally making it out to the street to hail a cab, I participate in the noise by shouting for a cab, while soliciting honks from passing cars who already have passengers and want me out of the way, and whose drivers skirt past me with adrenaline-inducing swooshes and screeches.

The traffic honks, a sprayed, fragmented multiplicity of pitches, chords, and an occasional arpeggio (some of the horns like this hover between creativity and annoyance), continue as I step into a cab, asking for the Al-Azhar mosque, behind which I take my oud lessons. In the cab, two 5-inch speakers sit behind me, their days of clean voices, if they ever existed, now long gone. Every ten seconds or so, I can make out “Allahu Akbar” (God is most Great) spoken and then vocalized by two different voices, the intervening moments impenetrable in their quick, distorted exclamations. About once every minutes, another vehicle’s honk makes a claim to space so close to us that I am jolted from my seat, my oud knocking against the car door, but the driver hardly seems to notice. The sermon is replaced by a radio broadcast call to prayer, and as I begin to ponder where it could be coming from, we arrive at Al-Azhar and my question is answered. The radio carries the official Azhari adhan to this taxicab, and there must be hundreds, if not more, cabdrivers who tune in from the far flung neighborhoods. This is nothing like the barber, who upon sending a newly shaven, older Egyptian man out and seating me in the same chair, turned the radio from the Qur’an to Tina Turner, either to his own relief or my casually assumed preference. In the taxicab, I am far more anonymous, another moment in an constant drive with a constant soundtrack, fascinating yet impenetrable to my linguistic barriers.

I pull my hand recorder out of my backpack and turn it on. Several days before, in my attempt to conduct an interview about the call to prayer at the local mosque, I had refrained from using it. In that moment, it became a political symbol; the silent, spying microphone that symbolically brings together the state censor, the police interrogator, and the prodding Westerner all into a little metallic box, which clearly would have made my subjects uneasy. As I turn it on to capture public space instead of private speech, I wonder if and how this moment may be different. I wonder whether the notebook and pencil escaped these troubling connotations. I wonder what the difference is between spying, learning, studying and interrogating, and if/how my anonymous individuality in public is different from my private interaction with individuals. 

As a student in a country with a bustling tourism industry like Egypt, you inevitably reach a point in between the tourist and the expatriate resident. You’re haggled by shop owners, but you already know the tricks they use to get you to their shop. You’ve ridden the metro and the microbus, but still get charged foreigner prices. You’re comfortable speaking Arabic at the juice stand, but still might drink a beer in a hotel bar.

It is, of course, a situation produced by one’s having lots of expendable cash and a desirable passport, but the feeling of being a tourist/non-tourist has lead to a lot of fun insights. The past two weekends I’ve done some very typical excursions to the Western Desert and Mt. Sinai. Both were marked by disarmingly intense experiences with the natural world, with the mushroom rock formations that give the former an otherworldy desolation and the religious connotations that give Sinai’s sunrise such epic proportions.

This all occurred to me as I was riding a camel with several bedouin guides up the side of Mt. Sinai. It was evening, though the hour was much earlier than it felt out in the middle of nowhere, and the quiet clicking of the camel hooves accompanied my brief, romantic flirtation with how similar to the ancient tradition my journey felt. Up ahead, my friend Caitlin was trying to figure out why her camel was named “Mars,” pondering which Arabic words she had learned like it or if bedouins knew about Roman gods. When mine turned out to be “Snickers,” the candy bar reference made sense just as we got to the rest stop, halfway up what is still called Mount Moses, where both were for sale.

A “Mawlid” (related to the Arabic word for birth) is a festival that occurs several times a year in Cairo to celebrate the birthday of important historical figures in Islam, as well as Sufi saints. Today thousands of Egyptians, many foreign Muslims, and a few tourists filled the streets of Islamic Cairo for the birthday of the prophet Muhammad. I witnessed a very partial version of the typical holiday, as most people here gather for large meals with their extended families, but the public spectacle was nevertheless overwhelming.

At 4pm, a procession from one major mosque to another proceeded with countless members of various Sufi brotherhoods gathered around their banners. Some were dancing, others were singing devotional songs through crackling megaphones, and some simply strolled along. This was followed by another interruption that showed the partial nature of my experience as everyone went to pray.

We killed several hours in various coffeeshops and went back to where we had been told we could find the main celebrations late in the evening. Along the side of one of the main mosques, six or seven tents had been set up and one in the middle was packed tightly with searingly loud music echoing off the side of the building into the entire neighborhood. Following the sound, we ended up in this tent, surrounded by crowding, pushing, and shouting as hundreds of men swayed to crackling medeeh music.  Out of speakers careened heavily echoing voice and a violin so distorted by volume that it sounded like a cross between an electric guitar and organ. Backed by five drummers (perhaps more, I couldn’t see), these two men traded lines of music for at least 3 hours. The crowd of men, who ranged from crew cuts and tucked in shirts to flowing robes and dreadlocks, slowly getting more and more entranced until they fell into each other either from exhaustion or brotherhood.

Just as interesting as this group of mystified dancers were the other Cairenes surrounding them. Many men were inside and outside of the proceedings, filming or taking pictures with their cell-phones and scrambling for the best angle of the most rapturous dancer. It felt more like a spectator-spectacle situation than common members of a group sharing in a moment.

When we left the middle of the chaos, I climbed up a metal gate to get a better view. I was joined by two teenage Egyptian girls who spoke English and who alternated between disgust and cautious enjoyment as they looked on to a scene clearly as foreign to them as it was to me.  

Finally, I met a student who wanted to explain the festival to us in the sort of outsider, academic register an anthropologist, completing a series of moments in which I came to see that we often take for granted the unity of big celebrating crowds, and often people are spectators of their own culture.  

Malls are not a typical feature of the musings of American students abroad. They are the places we go to be reminded of home, to drink Starbucks and take a break from the more adventurous seeming experiences. The City Stars mall in Heliopolis, about a half hour from downtown Cairo, certainly reminds one of America, but by no means represents a “break” from adventure. Attached to towering hotels for foreign shoppers and flanked by gauche fountains and golden statues, the mall is a swirling maze of stores and restaurants that present globalization in all of its nuanced absurdity.

One Egyptian student told me of the mall’s climate in the summer, which they call “Saudi season,” for all the Saudi tourists who come to Cairo to shop and enjoy the awkwardly powerful air conditioning. They drive for many miles in SUV’s and Hummers to spend thousands of dollars on clothes and jewelry, and to be silently derided by Egyptians while contributing to the economy. Combined with the many Muslim Egyptians who find a lifestyle of embodied piety and American-style mall shopping (whether or not there is a paradox here is the subject of great debates far above my head), City Stars is an overwhelming greeting to Egypt’s bustling consumerism.

Near the central ATM’s and bathrooms sit rooms from prayer, which must be cordoned off from the stores because most of the shoppers who want to pray will not do so in front of images. The images, plastering nearly every surface, advertise Mexican food at a restaurant called “On the Border,” Chinese food at “Panda Bear,” every clothing store imaginable transplanted from Europe and the U.S., and perhaps most surprisingly, Egyptian tourist souvenirs. The souvenirs—pharoanic chess sets, sparkling belly-dance costumes, and slightly too lavish jewelry—are located in an imitation of the Khan al-Khalili market (the real one is forty minutes away in Islamic Cairo) that even features street signs, “authentic” coffee shops, and the ceaseless rhythm of craftsmen pounding precious metals into copper goods. It is just like the real market, only designed by an architect, cleaned by a janitor, and lit by fluorescent bulbs, without the centuries of grime and history that make the original so appealing to so many travelers.

Walking through Khan al-Khalili’s imitation was even more striking only three days after a grenade, killing one and wounding many, was thrown at a group of tourists in the original Khan. No official group has claimed responsibility for the attack, which created a ripple in the normally still waters of the Egyptian tourist economy. As much as Americans come to experience Cairo, it is still a place of heated emotions and political tension for a variety of reasons well beyond us, and so we cherish a safety and an authenticity that don’t always overlap.

It’s not even so much that the real Khan can be completely deemed “authentic.” The Egyptian government regularly pours money into the area to spruce it up for tourists, leaving a few beggars for ambience, but actively kicking many of them out in some quarters. Many historical sites are being renovated hastily, with fresh paint cracking off already from the frequent use that reminds one that this a neighborhood as much as it is a tourist attraction.

So my same questions remain…Is Cairo to be found in the renovated, real Khan al-Khalili or the imitation in City Stars? Would the Egyptian government rather the real look like the imitation? What are we being asked to consume?

Every week I spend approximately eight hours on a bus, travelling from Zamalek, near the center of the city, to the campus of the university, located in the suburb of New Cairo. Clustered with Americans, Egyptians, and others on a ride that can take up to an hour and a half, I literally experiene the the expansion of the city outwards, from dense to spacious, from loud to quiet, and from smog-ridden to clear.

In the past decade, the Egyptian government has teamed with Western developers and Saudi-funding to leave the inner-city alone, with all of its poverty and structural decay, and promote a movement quite similar to American “white flight.” The new suburbs, alternately called “satellite cities” and “compounds,” go by names as striking and openly referential as Dreamland, Utopia, and Beverly Hills. Houses are built with an overblown, dramatic sense of design, with coliseums, fountains, and intricately carved woodwork erupting out of the otherwise dead landscape of the desert. The houses are crammed together, as if space were an issue, and frame European public squares, sidewalks, swimming pools, golf courses and massive fountains. Bright swaths of green grass unfold out of the endless sand, catching one’s view but never looking comfortable in their surroundings.

 If my tone of of cynicism is not clear by now, then suffice it to say that many Americans on the bus actively deride these erupting cityscapes, pointing out the opulent monstrosities as a clash of Hollywood and “Arabia”. If Aladdin gave a false impression of the Middle East, then that impression has returned with force, for the architectural designs feel like a disney set: overdone, out of place, and most of all temporary.

The feeling of temporariness pervades the campus of AUC as well, when USAID stickers peel from the new machines with cheap adhesive, and tables collapse in every class because screws are missing. The A4-sized paper doesn’t fit in the new 8.5 by 11 inch cabinets, and the whiteboards are already stained black after one semester of usage. These moments are tiny, and we giddily shout “Welcome to Egypt!” every time something doesn’t work right, feeling culturally superior in a setting that attempts to mirror our experiences back home but never quite succeeds. 

The cultural-superiority complex, or simply elitism, is hardly surprising, and it would be futile here to just criticize it. Why is this the situation, though? Why does Cairo look like this at its margins: shiny, bright, new, and yet haphazard and disjointed? What makes downtown and the old Islamic areas feel more “authentic”?

Many Egyptian students in my classes are from the satellite cities (they are the ones who refer to them as compounds). Some who are sociology-majors are well aware of the reasons their neighborhoods came to be and continue to be built, and feel guilty for participating in a system where, as they see it, the rich flee the decaying inner city for the open desert. 

And so I inhabit this bizarre situation, making the migration every day out of the city that feels so authentic to suburbs that feel so fake, and it makes me question what any of us Americans were looking for when we came to Cairo. What is the real Cairo that we seek?

I have just begun a semester abroad at the American University in Cairo, an outsider in a university that is itself outside of Egyptian society. My hour-long rides on the bus to the outskirts of the city, where the brand new campus is located, bring to mind its inaccessibility to the vast majority of Egyptians and its official status as an oasis of free thought and intellectual endeavor (in addition to being something of an elite playground).

On Saturday night I arrived home to the dormitory to see a handful of students watching an unusually loud television in the main foyer, which was broadcasting the inauguration of the new campus, located in the elite outskirts of the city. On this day only those specially invited were even allowed on campus, and Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt’s first lady, made the following declaration (in impeccable English, it is worth noting):

“It is imperative that we work astutely with young people to address comprehensively the social, natural, cultural and ethnical contracts of our times. We need to prioritize securing human rights, from food to peace and to diversity. We must do more to promote dialogue and understanding across our nations, and highlight our common values and aspirations.”

On Sunday morning, I was greeted on campus with flyers and a general buzz surrounding Philip Rizk, an Egyptian-German dual citizen and AUC graduate student who had just begun the semester when he was abducted by state security forces. Without charges or allegations, he was whisked away to an undisclosed location, and now his parents don’t even know where he is. According to Aida Seif al Dawla, the head of a group who counsels torture victims, “he is in the custody of State Security, which means illegal detention and a high probability of torture and ill treatment.”

Rizk had been organizing various demonstrations and political moves in support of Gaza, criticizing the Egyptian government’s actions during the Israeli incursion. At the time he had been working \to raise awareness of this issue within the town of Qalubya, north of Cairo, when he disappeared. He was last seen by the other demonstrators leaving the police station in a small, nondescript bus.

Despite now regular demonstrations on campus demanding that the AUC Board of Trustees use their influence to find him and secure his whereabouts, the general feeling on campus is both one of apathy among the general population, and awareness among his friends and colleagues that this is a firm warning against students who are thinking of getting involved in politics.

While the paradox of Suzanne Mubarak’s words and the actions of the police-state she represents seemed immediate and infuriating to an outsider like myself, it has been greeted with resignation by the majority of AUC students I have met. Many of Philip’s friends are in my classes, and one mentioned having told him of the risks of such work, suggesting that perhaps AUC should warn students about getting involved in the Palestinian issue. Our professor fired back “but how can we know where to draw a red line? Who could have predicted this?” It was clear that this professor, as well as others, have great sympathy for Philip, and like many are trying to negotiate the academic call to critique power and promote various freedoms in the context of a country like Egypt.

My initial temptations to ascribe this situation to an easy binary in which America is a “free country” and Egypt is a “Middle Eastern dictatorship” have not been satisfying. The university’s failure to adequately criticize the government for actions like Philip’s abduction are part of a larger dynamic, wherein Egypt’s human rights abuses, Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, and American support of both are all bound together, with AUC and students like me awkwardly positioned in the middle.

When a school that has “American” in its name allows the First Lady, the soft face of a dictatorship, to invoke American notions of freedom in its mission statement, how is it then implicated in illegal and abominable actions like Philip’s abduction? How are we as Americans implicated? What is our obligation to voice what our government supports abroad? What does our freedom within the U.S. demand that we do? My only answer was to write this post, and my ambivalence is excruciating.

One of the most fundamental sources of difference between my home and this new place is in how people relate to their cultural past. In Egypt, ancient history seems to be everywhere, displayed in sterile glass cases in countless museums, and on maps that spill out from tour agencies. Just as the pyramids rise up out of the suburban sprawl of government housing developments, the grandeur of ancient death cults exerts an unmistakable allure for Egyptians and outsiders alike, interlaced in daily life and yet representative of people’s inability to grapple with a belief system so primitive and archaic and yet so present in their landscape.

Ancient history weighs heavily upon many Egyptians. The tourism industry uses foreign fascination with ancient Egypt as a support for the modern economy. Hotels claim artifacts for lobby decorations and men on the street hawk mock papyrus wall hangings. Even cell phone stores have statuettes in their display cases, juxtaposing the spiritually mysterious with the electronically advanced. Sometimes one feels like Egyptians on the street are consigned to their roles in Indiana Jones and The Mummy: brokers for a culture not really their own that ceased to be thousands of years before them.

But I’m unable to choke up this “ancientophilia to fundraising alone. The Citadel of Qaitbay in Alexandria, where the entrance fee is three dollars for foreigners and seventeen cents for Egyptians, is swarmed daily with hundreds of domestic tourists. Egyptology is a reasonably popular subject of study for university students here, and Pharoanic influence is seen everywhere from the modernist sculptures of Mohamed Mokhtar to Coptic Christian liturgy, which claims affinities with the traditions of the pharoahs.

Several people have made sure to explain that the military coup of the early 1950’s was the first time since before the ancient Romans that Egypt had been ruled by ethnic Egyptians. The many foreign rulers that governed Egypt represent a cherished set of influences, some Egyptians say, but nothing is as important as “self-rule.” Egypt is thus defined as both worldy and proudly nationalistic, with many finding an awkward fit in between.

Walking around the antiquities museum below the Alexandria library this became clear when a tour guide showed us the oversized bust of Augustus and proudly declared that “we hate the Romans here; Ancient Greece respected our religion, but the Romans just abused us.” My Palestinian friend Yacoub quickly interjected: “but I think the Romans had a pretty impressive civilization too!,” a comment that illicited frustration from the guide, who quickly retorted “yes but look how they ruined Egypt!” I wasn’t sure what exactly to “look” at.

I quickly realized just how ambivalent this Ancient history is for some in the modern Middle East who care to engage with it. The guide, clad in a hijab, was clearly Muslim and not a believer in ancient Egyptian mythology, and yet she could not help but highlight the ideas of “respect” and “glory” attached to her affinity for her perceived ancient ancestors.

I then tried to find common ground, but then I remembered that not even colonial-era America, only a bit past two hundred years ago, elicits any sort of antagonism against the British of that era. We may glorify our ancestors and their fight against outsiders, but at the end of the day we don’t really care that much about it.

For Egyptians, even if they don’t think about these issues, they have to confront the fact that many outsiders see their home more as an archaeological dig site than a modern nation. Their collective “glory” is in the deep recesses of the past, ancient, Islamic, colonial or otherwise, and this can’t be an easy situation to inhabit.