CU Abroad – Maurice Chammah

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.