The Backstreet Boys sing in Arabic! (sorta)

I can hath cheezburger?

You'd have to be so far beyond a nerd to appreciate this, but I found it hilarious...

For those who don't read Middle-English-spelling, scroll down to see the pictures

Local Imperialism: The Failure of Economic Reform

This is one of those where I write about way too much at once, so bear with me - I'm still relearning English.

One major reason I decided to work in economic reforms in Egypt was that it was a sort of back door into the workings of political reform, since any meaningful economic reform would have to require improving governance in a broader sense and changing institutional cultures and all that good stuff - which is exactly what political reform is all about. And while there was obviously no chance of meaningful political reform in the sense of democratization, I thought there might be a chance of meaningful economic reform, given the excitement over Egypt and other "emerging markets" at the time.

I came away from that experience having noticed a pattern with nearly every economic reform attempt I came across: that they all seemed blindly imposed in a top-down fashion. This was such a consistent pattern that it nearly drove me nuts, while at the same time I never had access to enough evidence to really be able to make an argument in this direction. A new Carnegie Endowment Report on the Political Economy of Reform in Egypt finally makes a very similar case in a systematic, articulate way. It's the best piece on economic reform in Egypt I've read in quite some time, and it draws the connection between economic reform and the building of grassroots representative organizations (i.e. democracy) - you can't have meaningful economic reform without involving all the economic stakeholders in the reform process in a way that defines the rights and responsibilities of each. This requires both confronting classism and developing effective means and institutions for information flow throughout the country, which are both certain prerequisites for meaningful democratization.

I just want to add a few things, drawing from my personal experience here.

The top-down nature of these new projects - committees, initiatives - was despite the fact that these projects generally only involved the government, the business community, and international financial institutions - excluding a majority of the private sector and civil society and basically most of the economic stakeholders in the results of this reform. The end result, unsurprisingly, was the widespread implementation of "systems" without any clue what these systems were supposed to do, which of course means that these systems won't achieve anything.

Governments have imposed top-down projects onto their people for a long time, with predictable results. For just one example (admittedly extreme), I arrived at the Aswan train station last year at 5:45pm with a ticket for the 6pm train to Cairo. The next Cairo train came at 7pm, so I tried to get on, but they didn't let me on because this was the 3pm train. The 6pm train would probably come at 9pm.

Governments impose onto their people, with ridiculous results. Nothing new. What's strange about the top-down nature of the recent economic reforms is that the government wasn't involving the people at all; it was imposing blindly onto itself. It was directly importing institutions from the EU - and doing that part fairly well, I might add - without the slightest consideration of how Egypt's economy is radically different from the EU's.

Welcome, friends, to the foreigner complex, which pervades everything about Egypt to the point where it imperializes itself.

Can someone tell me what's happening in the US?

I haven't been in the US for an extended period for almost two years now, so I really don't understand any of this Iran hoopla. Has everyone really gone psychotically paranoid over some kind of upcoming World War III with Iran?

Meanwhile I'm reading articles like this, and it strikes me as making such obvious points that I find it hard to believe he's responding to real people.

Anyone?

A good Tom Friedman op-ed!

I've very mixed feelings on Tom Friedman, but this recent op-ed is him at his best: making observations which Americans aren't paying enough attention to, and making good, should-be-common-sense points about them with analogies that clarify instead of dumbing down. When he's arguing for common sense, he's very good at it. And his common sense in this article is this: "9/11 has made us stupid." An obvious basic point, but this op-ed draws out the implications and connects it to other important issues in ways you don't usually think of.

He's been on my mind lately for other reasons, though; for my whole time in Egypt, whenever I talk to friends in the US or write on the blog, I've been trying to understand a foreign culture and explain it to friends who don't live here. Tom Friedman made his name explaining the Middle East to Americans, which is exactly what I'm trying to do here. And he's prone to certain... pitfalls that I more and more see myself falling into. More thoughts to come.

A simple link

I've mostly grown tired of following the Egyptian political scene, because as the Iraq war became clearly a loss for the US and Bush resumed the Republican policy of sucking up to dictators around the world, US democratic pressure on Egypt ceased and actually reversed, which killed the political reforms that had been somewhat hopeful earlier, which then killed the economic reforms which depended on openness and transparency and competence, and which basically finally rendered Egypt politically boring, and not too optimistic. Right now is basically an intense crackdown on opposition media, though the labor movement seems to be finally getting somewhere.

Anyway, I saw this article written by a frequent writer for the Muslim Brotherhood, and it's certainly his best article in quite a long time. It's uplifting to see that there are still people promoting political reform here, and making well-reasoned arguments for why American policy-makers should care. As usual, you have to turn to the Muslim Brotherhood for any of this stuff.

Egypt's Constitutional Amendments

For those who've been failed by their own media sources, Egypt is holding a national referendum tomorrow on a number of constitutional amendments that are billed as "part of a reform package" (the ruling party doesn't go into any more detail than that) but will actually remove all judicial oversight from elections, codify presidential "anti-terrorism" powers including arbitrary indefinite detention of anyone for no reason, and just generally wreck any chance Egypt could have of becoming a decent, functioning political entity anytime in the near future. For a general overview of the situation, read this; if you want a more through analysis of the amendments themselves and the threat they pose for Egypt's political scene, read this; if you want commentary on the US State Dept's nearly complete abandonment of pushing Egypt towards any political reform, read through this blog. Also Baheyya is always awesome, but she doesn't write enough.

The reason I'm concerned about the US response is not because of some essentialist conviction that Arabs can't handle democracy and therefore require external pressures and force from abroad. It's simply because with regards to Egypt, the government couldn't possibly operate a functional tax bureaucracy (2 years ago, less than 5% of Cairenes paid taxes at all; recent tax reforms have perhaps doubled this number but it's still like 8% or so; and even then, it's largely due to local branches of foreign companies paying because otherwise they'd get into legal trouble back home), so it's is responsive to its bankrollers - which means US military aid, which comes to about 2% of Egypt's annual GDP. Anywhere in life, where you get your money from is whom you're responsive to. And it's been proven a number of times, in fact, that
the US is the only significant force with any leverage for political reform in Egypt. The democracy push in 2005 brought about all sorts of reforms, albeit most of them token, and US support did embolden democracy activists in the region and provide them all sorts of cover. Political space definitely opened up. Egypt is not a puppet (especially now that the US, having lost two wars, needs to suck up to everyone in the world) but the US does have significantly more influence over the Egyptian government than the Egyptian people themselves do. (It's also always strange thinking, when I get into a scuff with an Egyptian cop, that my taxes pay his salary. And that's before I even factor in how many tourist dollars I bring in.)

So anyway, the referendum is tomorrow (Monday March 26), and most of the opposition has decided to boycott because they know the election results will be fixed, and that they'd just be legitimizing a farce if they voted. But the purpose of having this national referendum is so that the government can claim, for the sake of greater international legitimacy, to have the support of the majority of the Egyptian people (for the same reason every crackpot dictatorship has to call itself the 'democratic republic' of whatever), and so the way to take that way is to have a mass media spectacle protest. Usually these are downtown, in the main Tahrir square, in front of the Arab League building, the Mugamma (civil service bldg, where you go for visas and licenses and whatnot), the American University in Cairo, etc. So today's is about to start.

The government has sworn not to allow any protests or demonstrations, that they must be prevented from "delaying, opposing and stalling the democratic process". So the lines have been drawn...

I just passed through Tahrir a few hours ago, on the way back from a class at Al Azhar, and it is FILLED with beltagayya (plainclothes thugs), like tons and tons standing in formation waiting for protesters to come by. I've never seen that before... typically they wait in police trucks and occasionally microbuses and only come out when protesters are getting significantly out of hand. This is even with major protests that they've been expecting for ages - the judges last May, Lebanon over the summer, etc. Also these beltagayya look much more like normal people than usual - usually they have black boots and carry police clubs. Now it's jeans and, like, tennis shoes. The gist is: they're really playing it both ways. Egyptians all know that beltagayya are the ones to be afraid of (normal cops never hit you, because they fear the media attention), and the regime is just sticking them out there, daring a response. They're even in formation, so they're not even pretending, not even trying to deceive the Egyptians. But they're wearing more normal clothes than usual, because enough readers/viewers of foreign media ( i.e. the regime's foreign bankrollers) will be so stupid as to think that protesters are just being random and violent and beating each other up, and that the referendum is actually democratic and meaningful.

We'll see how it actually goes. But what saddens me the most is, the plainclothes thugs could beat the crap out of tons of Egyptians, probably rape the women (according to precedent), and then the fixed referendum could move along smoothly.

And they'd get away with it.

I can totally imagine a statement from the Interior Ministry to the effect of "We are not responsible for injuries caused by rowdy chaotic anti-Islamic terrorist protesters who don't represent the silent majority of peace-loving Egyptians losing control of their passions and beating each other up". And they'd get away with this. Especially because protesters in the US sometimes actually are rowdy chaotic terrorism-supporters who lose control of their passions and beat each other up.

Sigh. I'm not optimistic about life right now.

Arabs Tell Egypt To Learn From Israel

Read Orientalism and whatnot, and then see news stories like this . Arab Israelis calling upon Egypt to "Learn from Israel what human dignity means. Human dignity is a primary value in Israel."

When Arabs themselves find it so hard to avoid Orientalist stereotypes, might it be presumptuous to tell them they're wrong?

Terrorism and conspiracies

A piece from the Guardian (sent to me by Karim) about how terrorism works. Note the word "terror": the goal is not to kill, but to terrorize. It's a media strategy much more than a military one. 9/11 could have killed far more people if the attack took place a bit later in the day, when more people would have been in the building. The point was to grab a whole day of media attention, and make sure the phrase '9/11' was forever burned into the national consciousness.

Many people see Arabs and Muslims as having a conspiratorial mindset, of always looking for conspiracy theories to explain things. We joke that when it rains in Cairo, people blame the Israelis. There are stupid people everywhere, but insofar as that's true about Egypt, it definitely has a lot of different causes, such as some attitudes towards information. We have:

• a government that constantly lies to its people, prompting massive popular mistrust (I've read reports that the Ministry of Information wants to open a rumor control office; wouldn't it be more effective if the rest of the government just stopped lying so much, or at least got smarter about it?)
  
• the utter lack of authoritative information sources, making it hard to verify information, even about things like recent legislation or the spelling of a Minister's name
  
• official bans on information gathering (AUC profs have been threatened with deportation for conducting basic economic research, which is why I don't even trust most GDP figures; this also prohibits investigative journalism, preventing any independent verification of official information and rendering it therefore more suspect)
• you can't start an opposition without newspapers and other unifying mass communications, but you can't conduct independent investigative journalism on a level that would allow you to compete with official sources in terms of information, so you have to sell papers and all you can really use are theories and speculation
• as a result, it's pretty hard to trust any media source; most Egyptians certainly never become familiar with, or even have the opportunity to develop any trust for, systems of information verification that would ensure a media source's continued reliability; If I grew up in Egypt (of course depending heavily on social class and whatnot), I would be unlikely to trust any media sources on a regular basis
  
• a bargaining culture that makes bluffing almost essential in daily interactions, making most statements much harder to take at face value
• a need for face-saving that causes people on the street to make up directions because they can't admit they don't know
• a frequent hoarding of information because it's a source of authority and power, presumably because information is scarce and therefore valuable

All major difficulties; when you have questions and can't trust the answers, you'll make up some sort of answers.

But there's another side: why do the same questions keep coming up? Egyptians could be focusing conspiracy theories on a million different things.

I think a lot of the questions behind these conspiracy theories, and their particular urgency, are prompted by something simple: incompetence. One example: why did the US military in Iraq secure the oil fields in Baghdad while not stopping the rioting and looting? My best guess: when you stupidly expect to be greeted as liberators with flowers and a red carpet, it's going to be alot harder to pacify a population than it will be to secure inanimate oil fields. But it takes a lot of stupidity to be in that situation, and I'd really like to believe Americans are smarter than that.

Another example: when Israel and the US have precision GPS/laser-guided missiles that can target within 5meters any location on earth, why so many civilian casualties? My guess: they're not so precise as they claim; precision targeting requires much more information than is generally available in the middle of a military operation; precision weapons are obscenely expensive; it's more risky for nearby soldiers because they have less confidence that the target has been hit; perhaps, some military goals are more easily achieved by appearing slightly indiscriminate ("shock and awe" does not attempt to invoke precision targeting); and they figure that the losses in military effectiveness are not always worth the civilian lives saved. Still, Americans have obsessed over the loss of even one of their lives, as Israel has over the capture of 2 soldiers, so this disregard for human life seems a little strange.

So another question, going back to the article linked above: Why would the US administration capture Bin Laden quickly when they could drag this out and profit off it for years to come? I don't even know an answer to this one that doesn't rely, at some point, on simple trust. Bin Laden is hard to find, we thought it would be easier, unreliable partners in Pakistan, blablabla.

A major difficulty, it seems, is that America and Israel are both known for being incredibly competent. Israel, albeit with tons of money and expertise imported from abroad, has made the desert bloom, after all. American business is still the envy of the world in many ways. Ambitious Egyptians frequently look up to American expats for management and technical expertise, seek work in multinational corporations, want to associate with Americans.

So the question becomes: in this incredibly important and risky foreign policy enterprise, why are they suddenly just crap?

Clearly, there must be some other reasons! Secret hidden intentions, or something.

No, they might actually just not be as good as everyone thought they were.

Not sure what policy recommendations come out of this, although sucking less is one option.

Back to blogging

Sorry everyone that I've been AWOL for so long... I've just moved to a new apartment in Dokki (on the west side of the Nile: residential and much more boring than the historical east side, but quieter and a much better place to study) and as soon as I get unpacked and settled, I'll post about my trip home, Istanbul, Upper Egypt with Greg, this whole Lebanon mess, and what the hell I'm doing with my life. I just wanted to quickly post this brief piece from the July/August Yale Alumni Magazine:

"You Say Hillel, I say Halal"

Two more Egyptian jokes

Both are courtesy of Osama. Draw your own conclusions.

Mubarak, Bush, and Queen Elizabeth were burning in hell after dying, and Queen Elizabeth wants to call her people on Earth to see how they're doing. She asks the devil for a phone, talks for 5 minutes, and is then shocked to learn that the bill was $5million. Unable to do anything else, she sucks it up and pays the bill.

Bush also wants to call his people, so he talks for ten minutes and is shocked to see a bill of $10million. Again, he's unable to do anything else, so he pays the bill.

Mubarak realizes, "I should call my people! I may not have been the best president, but I was a president, and I want to call my people". He talks for 20 hours and receives a bill of $1 .

Bush and Elizabeth ask the devil, "why was his call so cheap?!"

"It was a local phone call."

I don't know what to make of that one.... so here's another, a little shorter and simpler:

75 million people gathered outside of the presedential palace to kick Mubarak out of power.

When Mubarak heard the noise, he asked one of his advisors what was going on. His advisor wanted to break the news to him softly and so he said, "They're gathering here to say goodbye to you."

Mubarak asks, "Why? Where are they going?"

Why Egypt Works

There's way too much to cover regarding the protests and the beatings - the thugs are still getting more media-savvy, this time waiting until most of the media had left before they kidnapped and beat people - so instead, here's a great piece by Ahdaf Soueif.

Another Thursday in Cairo

More protests in solidarity with the judges, on the one-year anniversary of the amendment allowing for "multiparty" "elections". MB is rumoured to be bringing out up to 10,000 protesters. I don't think that's possible, but I'll catch whatever I can catch of the protests later today.

From Freedom For Egyptians:

• International support is being rallied to show and express support for Egypt’s democracy and freedom tomorrow through pro-reform and democracy Egyptian Judges Club (Syndicate).
• Egyptian Judges are calling upon all Egyptians to come and confirm their commitment to Egypt’s freedom in front of Cairo’s Supreme Court, down town. More details here.
• International support is rallying everywhere in the world. This is really a cute map for all demos around the world. It does not include South Korea’s protest though. Cairo’s protest is extended to Beirut, London, Paris, Athens, The Hague, Seoul, New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Toronto and Montreal and the list keeps growing.
• On the eve of May 25, a protest is planned at Tahrir square, Cairo’s largest and main square in preparation for the big day.
• Cairo lights will be turned off from 9-10 PM in solidarity with Egypt’s judges.
• At the American University in Cairo, a protest is planned at the Greek Campus. The University is located at Tahrir Square.
• Egypt’s popular movement Kefaya (Kifaya)‘s coordinator George Ishak is sending a message to all activists abroad who are showing their support to Egypt before May 25.
• Protest of university professors in front of main hall of Cairo University calling for the release of detained faculty and students at 11:30 AM.
• Another main protest in front of the Judges Club is planned at 1:30 PM.
• The International Campaign in Solidarity with the Egyptian Judges has the timeline for all world demonstrations.

Protests around the world.... London, Washington DC, Paris, San Fransisco...

For more info: Rantings of a Sandmonkey, Shayfeen..

Poetry?

Noting my incessant inability to actually write anything myself, I have to find other ways to contribute.

Egyptian humor

Two Egyptian jokes that I like better every day.

The first is about election fraud:

In 2000, Bill Clinton is afraid concerning the upcoming presidential elections. He's been impeached, the country seems to be moving to the right, he's afraid of a resurgence of religious politics...

So he calls up Mubarak: "You're good at this, can you send someone over to take care of the elections here?" Mubarak promises to send his most trusted advisor, and assures Clinton that he has nothing to worry about.

So the election goes the way it goes, and Clinton calls up Mubarak, furious. Mubarak hasn't talked to his advisor yet, and so is confused, but he apologizes to Clinton and says he'll look into it.

Mubarak's advisor returns and Mubarak asks him, "What happened? Clinton just called me, furious!"

His advisor replies: "Congratulations, Mr. President. The United States is now yours."


The next one is about Egyptian passivity:

Mubarak wants some civil unrest so he can show his foreign supporters that they need him, or else Egypt will be in total chaos. So he gathers his cabinet and asks them, "We already beat them and steal their dignity, so what else can we do to provoke a revolt?"

His advisors are confused for a while, but eventually they realize: "We only beat them a few times a year, so let's do something that affects them every day."

They decide to put a toll on the 6th of October bridge, which everyone in Cairo uses daily. 5LE.

A few days later, Mubarak asks, "Are the people complaining?" "Nobody has said anything."

They increase the toll. 10LE.

Nobody says anything.

Mubarak is getting frustrated.

50LE, which is a week's salary for alot of people.

A bit of grumbling. But nobody says anything.

Now, Mubarak is desperate. His supporters are visiting soon and if he doesn't show some civil unrest, he might not get the emergency funds he needs. So he takes all the soldiers from all the embassies and puts them on the bridge, and tells them to rape anyone who wants to cross the bridge.

A few days later, he asks his advisors, "Are they complaining yet?"

"They humbly request if you could put more soldiers on the bridge, because now they're late for work."

Some Responses to Protests

Fortunately, both judges (who were being sacked for criticizing election fraud) were acquitted, yet Ayman Nour's appeal was rejected. The judge involved for Nour's appeal is a total crackpot. Occasional good editorials on this.

Some media coverage misses a few points though. BBC reports:

"Many of the beatings were administered by pro-government thugs backed by riot police. They were seen plunging into crowds of demonstrators and beating people to the ground."

Almost makes it sound like the thugs were freelance supporters of the government.

Hell no. The thugs were government employees, who came out of troop carriers (the same trucks that riot police came out of, the same trucks the army travels in) and looked completely conspicuous. Put simply, they looked ridiculous, with stupid-looking "plain clothes" (3 layers of denim on a hot day) and were easily identified with a second glance.

The US response to all this was tepid and meaningless ("we know they believe in freedom and democracy, the brutal beatings were just a mistake on their part, plus we're glad that there are protests now! so we're not going to even talk about the billions of dollars, 3% of their GDP, we give them every year so they can buy fighter jets and then pay their soldiers to harass women and masturbate on the street"), so Egypt feels no pressure in any way, and Mubarak still feels bold enough to rip on the US for it (I miss the days, just a few years ago, when the US deserved, and got, some respect from the world), and now there's all this talk about strains in the US-Egypt relationship.

Mubarak keeps bringing out the stupid line of 'reforms must be gradual' (even if it's true... meanwhile, you fix elections, and beat people for standing on the street, and imprison everyone you don't like?) or else Egypt will be in chaos (Egyptians might just be too lazy for this to be a problem). Yet judges are probably the single best chance for gradual reform that Egypt has.

Sigh.

Protests in Cairo

This morning, protesters gathered outside the High Court building and along Talaat Harb St. to protest the hearing of the same two judges as last week's protest, who criticized the elections as fraudulent and were therefore suspended. The judiciary has become a focal point for many of the human rights groups and other protest movements in Egypt, and this is the latest flashpoint. Kifaya (enough) and the Muslim Brotherhood were the main groups in these protests, and many other human rights organizations joined in as well.

Apparently, the police learned well from last week. They had been caught off guard once, because they didnt know what to expect, and the police ended up beating, pretty badly, several Arab journalists (a alJazeera reporter got it worst), dragging a friend of mine through the streets, and just lots of random people, including women.

This time, they knew what they were doing a little better. They got the beatings in early, before alot of the media was there, and were more deliberate and unhesitating. They didnt allow the protesters a chance to regroup, either, because they kept flanking their movements. Afterwards, they didnt need to use so much violence. At one point, plainclothes thugs (who are responsible for ALL the violence - the riot police just stand there not moving, and theyre actually the safe place to stand in these demonstrations) encircled a bunch of us, including several MPs from the Muslim Brotherhood, and just tried to lock us in place, pushing us into a felafel restaurant or something (I couldnt see). No beatings. Yet they managed to control the crowd and dissipate the protest, and arrest who they wanted to arrest.

After playing such childish games with the elections and Ayman Nour's trial, the government is finally learning some tactics! I'm proud of them. They're growing up.

More protests tonight...

Visiting home

I'm visiting home! Flying into NYC June 3rd, Zarah's graduation on June 8th, LSAT on June 12, visiting Istanbul from June 15th-19th, and then back to Cairo June 20th.

I can't even speculate about what it'll be like. I won't be able to cross the street. Things that take up all day in Egypt will take 10 seconds, and then I'll be clueless about what else to do. Meanwhile, cramming my brain into being superlogical (400 pages of exercises in the past two days, and I'm already frying my brain), and then coming back to Egypt?

Civic Power in China

One thing I'm coming to believe in fairly strongly, and I've no clue why, is in the power of competent organizational practices to foster democratic cultural and therefore political change. Tocqueville's points about civil associations fostering democratic political habits, creating public involvement in the public life. Elections, at the very least, require administrative competence, which is sorely lacking in most bureucracies in the world.

If these effective organizational cultures have to come from multinational corporations, so be it - near everyone in Egypt wants to work for Vodafone anyway, so who am I to criticize them based on some aesthetic nonsense about globalization? They just don' t want to waste their lives away sitting on their asses listening to bosses yelling about nonsense all day.

So here's an interesting article about a similar effect taking place in China:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/world/asia/11china.html

We've always wondered when economic growth would come to bite China's government in the ass. It's surprising, because China's government is one of the most effective administrations in the world today, but I suppose

In any case, this is the main appeal of democracy: Democracy means COMPETENCE.

Given that, all things considered, the Bush administration may have done more lasting damage to the cause of democracy promotion than any recent world trends or events.

Good day!

So this morning my roommate asked me if I could be home early because a handyman was coming by to fix every last remaining annoyance in the apartment. So yay on the home front.

And then at work, we have a staff meeting (finally!!) and actually start talking about things. I have a bunch of things to work on now, and some real direction. Committees are where the meaty stuff is for a business association (for any NGO, in my experience...), not the big names who say the same thing every time. Focusing on select sectors of the Egyptian economy, exploring and discussing what's holding it back, preparing meetings and agendas and similar materials.

And my boss is surprisingly cool about a few things. We were planning our next staff meeting and I was the only one objecting to a Sunday 9am time. At first, they were making fun of me, 'oh hello Chairman, sorry we can't all adjust to your schedule', and then I say "I have Arabic classes in the morning" and suddenly it's "Wow! That's so cool! Sure, we can reschedule the meeting, we're flexible. We can help you out with Arabic too! Just come in and we'll talk in classical Arabic every so often every day"

So I'm actually procrastinating way too much just by writing this, since I have some 5 documents to write in the next hour, but wow! A good day at work!

Just had to write that down.

Salaam Program Interviews

I can’t say that much about these interviews because I’d expect a certain level of non-disclosure regarding anything I said in an interview, so I can't repeat any of the more interesting things we heard. It was interesting interviewing friends, though; I actually drilled them harder than the others because a)I knew they couldn't lie to me and b) this was a chance to find out interesting things about them that they wouldn't tell me otherwise.

But conducting Salaam interviews gave me a new sense of why I came to Egypt, and why I came through AIESEC rather than Peace Corps or Fulbright. How you evaluate others is always when your values really come out: in this case, who do I want going to the US on an exchange program? And of course, when you ask people that question, you wonder, “why did I want to go on an exchange program”?

We were interviewing Egyptians who wanted to work in the US for 3 months to a year. There are many obvious reasons why an Egyptian would want this: actual meaningful work experience, a tremendous increase in salary, free availability of liquor and attractive loose women, American life makes sense, to improve their English, see what the “Great Satan” is all about… So of course we had to filter through that and make sure their reasons were legitimate: people who would further the aims of the exchange opportunity, and not try to stay in the US after the program ended. This comes down, largely, to their ability to take advantage of opportunities. My favorite question was the ‘AUC question’: “Since you’ve had so much exposure to the US, why should we give you this opportunity rather than to someone who’s had less exposure? We don’t want to waste this on you.”

I think of interviews as having two types of questions: questions where you try to trip them up, and questions where you give them an opportunity to shine. I was pretty sure the above question was of the latter type: it’s a chance to talk about how, with your limited exposure, you’ve gained a keen interest in something American and so you know what to look for. Impress us that you’ve made something of your limited exposure.

Alas, it was not to be, for the same question ended up as more of a testing question. It was like a lot of people hadn’t thought about that before.

What? You’ve spent years in the US, and you never thought we’d ask what you had done with that experience that made you worthy of another one?

But in addition to seeing amazingly frequent pitfalls, there were some shining moments, that made clear why I went on Salaam in the first place. Why go for work experience rather than academic experience? Why be so excited about an exchange program when you have no clue what job you’ll end up in?

This summer, I wrote:
“I decided a while ago that I wouldn't make any major career decisions while at Yale simply because I felt I needed real world experience first. Law school will come in time, but I know enough former lawyers that I need to be sure of why I want to go, and what I hope to do with a law degree. Studying abroad, while enlightening and incredibly valuable, is still in an academic environment. AIESEC and the Salaam Program are great because they put a great deal of emphasis on involving you in the culture: instead of spending your nights wandering around the city with Americans, you very much become a part of the local social scene. The Peace Corps, as far as I understand, seeks to improve relations by focusing mostly on the volunteer work that Americans do to build communities, helping with education or improving health care in foreign countries. Social support seems to vary greatly in different countries and positions. Salaam offers similar work as well, but puts a lot more emphasis on simply meeting and talking to people. Not only is this a great social experience and a great opportunity for self-discovery, but it helps with my academic interests: to delve into political, religious, legal theory, it helps to know how people in different cultures approach and think about similar life problems: their attitudes towards concepts like freedom, equality, respect, authority; the importance they attach to work vs friends and family; what or how much they expect from religious institutions, legal systems, various social groups.”

This kind of cultural involvement you only get from engaging the business environment: not simply as an onlooker, but trying to work it out and be productive in this environment.

I’m not expecting brilliant theoretical insights, but here are a few things I have learned:

1) I don’t respect rules either when they make no sense. I used to think democracy and rule of law should be advocated separately, but I’m realizing that rule of law requires, first of all, good laws, and without feedback from the populace, I’ve no idea where those good laws would come from.

2) Tocqueville was right in emphasizing how many habits and thoughts of power and authority derive from civil associations. In Egypt’s case, it’s business culture that sets the tone of the political culture: obsession with titles and seating arrangements, single central authority figure with no clear assignments for what anyone else does, very little upward communication, relaxed and not very professional. There are appealing things about the business culture here, especially in that it’s a much friendlier environment, but none of these benefits translate to politics.

3) Multinational corporations have a much bigger role to play than I realized earlier. It seems everyone here wants to work for Vodafone; if not, for some other multinational. Hell, half the people I ask (middle-class and up) say their 20-year goal is to be CFO of a multinational. It’s a question of management systems: people want a management system that brings out their skills and potential. Economic reforms are effectively just bringing in new multinationals, and trying to learn management systems from them.

4) There must be a renewed respect for the social sciences, and this includes everything from management to sociology. It’s always been an interesting trend that Muslim extremists are frequently engineers or doctors or something in the physical sciences: science is the pinnacle of Western enlightenment skepticism, positivism, and ultimately glory. Plus, these people are well educated, presumably not ignorant, and at the tops of their societies in many ways. Partially, it’s that every Egyptian (and Pakistani, for that matter) parent wants their kid to be a doctor or an engineer. Engineering is so respected that even MRS degrees are often in engineering. But this means that there are a ton of Egyptian engineers and lawyers and doctors making almost no money, since there’s no demand left and no way to manage them effectively anyway. Are we surprised that they’re frustrated?

5) “Modernization” in Cairo seems much more blatantly Western and anti-Islamic than it is in the US: similar to the concept of secularism, which means atheism here, but means free exercise of religion in the US. It's mostly a problem of how modernization is managed: foreigners are where all the money is, so Egyptian businesses want to appear more Western and less ‘radical’, so many of them act anti-Muslim. Damn suck-ups.

6) As a result, practicing Islam is in some ways easier in the US, because being religious is less of a barrier to other things you want to do. Upper classes seem much more scared of it here.

7) Egyptians often insist that they love Cairo, but it’s hard to see, as a foreigner, exactly how many of them express this love. Still working on that. Not too many civil associations or movements to fix this or help that or abolish this other thing. Might be a similar effect to the Africa Cup final, where Mustafa Mahmoud Square was still full of people 7 hours after the match ended. Take every chance you have to feel pride.

8) I’m going to miss things not making sense. If there was an expectation for things to make sense, so much else of Egyptian life would be simply unbearable. As it is, it’s quite enjoyable.

9) It's not surprising that Egyptians don't trust international media... all media in Egypt is... unreliable. Business magazines don't seem to fact check, sometimes even getting the names and positions of Ministers wrong. This is damn basic information. Even asking for directions can be a mess, as you keep getting conflicting information from everyone you ask, including cops stationed in the area. Information availability, in general, is so bad that the only thing you can trust is something you've witnessed personally, or heard from someone you trust deeply. Of course distant media produced from halfway around the world, and that says something unfavorable about your religion or ethnicity or country, isn't going to be trusted. Not sure what this means for American PR efforts.

12) Egyptian life just flows. It’s awesome. Everyone else should learn from this. And Egyptians could be prouder of this.

The Africa Cup

This was really an amazing experience. I saw a lot of matches, but there are two worth mentioning: the first, and the last.

In Egypt, movie tickets have specified seating, while football games don’t. So we had to line up hours in advance to make sure we could all sit together. (It might have to do with Egyptians being late all the time: it makes sure everyone goes way early to a football match so they can get good seats; but at movies, people will come late anyway, so you need to impose some order on that)

The first had an amazing intro, which even Mubarak attended:



but the match itself, Egypt vs Libya, was such a rout that there weren’t even any photographers at the Egyptian goal. This is what makes soccer so boring: there’s no minimum level of action.

Nevertheless, it was remarkable simply because of the sheer energy from the crowd. I find football mostly a pretty slow game, and this one was just dull, but I found myself cheering and shouting and going crazy.

But overall it was a crappy day because the match actually sucked and I lost my Razr phone, a graduation gift from my uncle (first time I’ve lost something significant in 10 years) so instead let’s talk about the Final.

It was pretty surprising that Egypt made it that far, but after an upset or two (the one good thing about soccer: because it doesn’t require constant performance in the same way as tennis or basketball, upsets are common and much more sudden), we were watching Egypt in the final:



The match itself was one of the most tense and exciting I’ve ever experienced in sports. SO many close calls, and it even came down to a shoot-out at the end. Yet the Cairo crowd response was what made it really memorable, even the subject of numerous international news reports:







This all made very little sense to me. So many people in the streets “celebrating”, but a lot of them actually standing around doing nothing. Hell, I can understand rushing the field, and mob violence, because there’s some action there, but standing around in Cairo just waving a flag weakly for hours?

Makes more sense when you realize that this is one of very few chances that Egyptians take advantage of to really feel proud of their country. They could have a lot more…

Danish Cartoons 3: The Importance of Free Speech

Somehow, this issue has turned from “don’t insult us” to “free speech is anti-Islam” and “free speech must be restricted to exclude offense to religion”. It's one thing not to appreciate insult; it's entirely another to make up this bullshit about free speech.

First of all, Islam has thrived under free speech; it's what allowed Islam to grow so fast in the Prophet's (S) time. The Treaty of Hudaibiyah, between the Muslims in Madinah and the pagans in Mecca, was unfair on its face to Muslims in every way. But the Prophet (S) accepted it because it allowed him to preach Islam freely. Islam grew SO fast then, faster than it ever had before, that the pagans had to break the treaty because they realized how much weaker they were getting. This is how Islam gains from an atmosphere of freedom of speech.

Second, freedom of speech is meaningless if it doesn't protect offensive speech. Nobody will ever censor things like 'flowers make me happy' or 'peace is good'. The only ideas that are ever censored are offensive ones: criticisms of government, major institutions, other organized groups. Things like "China shot students in Tiananmen Square" or "Mao Zedong was the biggest mass murderer of the 20th century". Chinese nationalists can get pretty offended by those. The whole point of freedom of speech is so that you can attack people, and groups, and beliefs, without fear of physical retribution.

Mutual respect is important, but it has to come through open and honest discourse. Otherwise, you just end up with a situation where everyone secretly hates each other. I ran an interfaith group for 2 years and at one point, we would have to start each discussion with everyone openly insulting each other just so we could actually talk about the issues. Abandoning freedom of speech for the sake of fake tolerance just makes the same racism, which already exists, deeper and stronger. That's a recipe for disaster.

The purpose of freedom of speech, and democracy, and so forth, is not to eliminate conflict. That's not possible. The purpose is to focus that conflict into something productive, into a dialogue or debate where meaningful communication can take place. And sometimes it takes offense to kickstart that communication. I routinely have amazing conversations that start off by openly insulting another person's beliefs. The medieval interfaith discussions that we look back to with fondness today were often pretty insulting. That doesn't mean they disrespected each other; it just means that they strongly believe their positions.

Why can't we respect people enough that we don't fear them taking offense at every provocation? If people actually believe their beliefs, they should be able to take it. Just try to insult a missionary. You'll get frustrated and give up way before they even flinch. Most people can't stand missionaries, but I find some of them (those that say more than “you're all going to hell" the easiest people to talk to. They actually say what they believe. As it is, we have to assume everyone is so fragile that they're not worth talking to anyway. You can never get a meaningful discourse out of this; it'll just perpetuate misunderstanding, distrust, and hatred.

This principle is amply demonstrated throughout Islamic history. After all, the Qur'an states that "Truth stands out clear from error" (2:256, Yusuf Ali translation). What better argument for open discourse can there be? The history of Islam is full of other examples of thriving public debate: theological debates in Baghdad, Christians in Ottoman Courts, letters among scholars like Maimonides and Averroes. They would actually say what they believe, and the discussions resulting were astonishing in their candidness, sincerity, and capacity to bring understanding. Why are we surprised that we don’t understand each other, when we don’t actually say what we believe?

Now, you may ask: if Islam is so strongly in favor of free speech, why did the Muslim world go nuts and start burning embassies?

My sense is that many of the violent protests (most of them, I’m not trying to capture every single person’s motivation) were fomented by secular (if not fully secular, then at least impious enough to manipulate the faith of honest believers for personal political gain) elites, pressured for democratic reforms by the West while pressured for more Islam from growing opposition at home. Here was a golden opportunity: a chance to discredit democracy while strengthening their own reputation as defenders of the faith. Two birds with one stone! Why wouldn’t they jump at the opportunity?

Never mind the total tampering with the original cartoons, fabricating new cartoons to circulate with the Danish ones. What shocks me most in this whole thing, which is already enough to make me despair for all of humanity, is the idea of a supposedly devout imam drawing a picture of Muhammad (S) having sex with a camel in order to blame that on Denmark. How deranged do you have to be to do something like that? Is Islam getting anywhere by this?

Truly religious people are secure in their own beliefs and don't fear free speech. It’s mostly Islamist groups who push for free speech and democracy in Muslim countries. They can handle this, and though they feel offended, they respond with principle. It's corrupt secular elites who have the most to fear from free speech.

But why were secular elites (or clueless ignorant imams) so able to manipulate religion and create such frenzy?

It’s nothing new for Muslims to be susceptible to this. Hell, Saddam Hussein threatened Israel in the first Gulf War and suddenly became the hero of the same Muslim groups he had persecuted to shreds. It’s because Islamic cred has much more to do with “defending the faith” than with actually practicing it. And once someone else “defends” Islam, you have to measure up, and soon it’s a race to the bottom.

The problem lies in secular or nonreligious Muslims who try to be 'defenders of the faith' to assuage their guilt of abandoning all the ethical principles of Islam. Naturally, all their defending of the faith also abandons all the ethical principles. So of course they’re going to be susceptible to movements trying to 'defend the faith' since they’re insecure about their religious credentials. But it’s ironic, ridiculous, and sad. Defending the name of the Prophet while totally ignoring all of his teachings: who's blasphemous now?

It’s almost more distressing seeing so much of the West bend over backwards trying to appease this jahiliyya behavior by Muslims. Scrambling past each other to talk about how well they understand Islam, telling us that ‘Muslims don’t depict the Prophet’ and how blablabla is offensive. First of all, depictions of Prophet Muhammad (S) are everywhere, from the US Supreme Court to even some mosques and Sufi shrines. They’re frowned upon, because of fear they could lead to idolatry, but they’re really not a big deal. Second, Muslims don’t do a lot of other things common in the West, but you didn’t even see Muslim protests over torture in Abu Ghraib! How can anyone take this response seriously? Burning embassies and killing people over some damn cartoons? Shame on those who would appease such ignorant nonsense.

Why don’t liberals stand up for their own values? Free speech is about as fundamental a liberal value as you can get, the bedrock of a set of principles that have enabled an unprecedented growth of knowledge and progress in so many fields. There’s a rich liberal tradition that includes, in addition to enormous scientific and organizational development, such ethical accomplishments as the elimination of slavery and the general prohibition of torture. Note liberalism’s faults, but there’s a lot to be proud of here.

What the hell is wrong with people? Bullshit begets bullshit.

Danish Cartoons 2: What would Muhammad (S) do?

Prophet Muhammad (S) himself, as did all prophets, encountered enormous resistance, ridicule, harrassment, and insult during their lives as they sought to spread religion. In one story commonly told to children, and which I heard many times growing up, a woman would throw sheep intestines at him every morning on the way to the mosque. He never said anything, he never changed his route, he simply kept walking every day, and she would simply throw sheep intestines at him every day. One day he was walking and she wasn't there. Instead of burning her house, or attacking her, throwing things, he asked around to see what happened to her. He found out that she was sick, and he visited her with food and water.

She converted on the spot.

This is how Islam spread so fast in its early years. The Prophet showered his enemies with kindness, and you can imagine how the recipient of that kindness must have been amazed. What could inspire someone to endure so much and still return with kindness and concern for her well-being? Muslims see the Prophet as a role model for everything, and it's sad to see almost everyone abandoning this lesson of the Prophet in this controversy.

The violent responses, the flagburning, and even the boycotts are not shows of strength. Anyone can burn a flag or march in the streets. They show weakness and insecurity, not strength. This insecurity is understandable, a result of decades of humiliation and encroachment by the West, but it's an abandonment of the Prophet's teachings. As Islam emphasizes time and again, and as even Nietzsche has recognized, mercy is the ultimate show of strength: it shows security, that you don't need to respond, that the offense doesn't even matter. Muslims should be bigger than this. Stereotypes are not going to go away on their own, and by responding crazily to a stupid cartoon, Muslims can only appear weak, unreasonable, and just silly. All-powerful, All-knowing Allah doesn’t need us to defend Him from insult.

The American Muslim group CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) has had an impressive response to this. They've emphasized how the Prophet (S) responded to personal attacks with kindness, condemned violent responses, and encouraged Muslims to be examples of good character in response to abuse, while still expressing concern and anger that the cartoons were printed in the first place. They’re now using this as an opportunity to educate about Prophet Muhammad’s (S) example. CAIR is usually one of the more combative American Muslim groups, but they certainly follow when they find clear Prophetic guidance.

Put simply, Muslims should not have been lured so easily into a clear trap. Islam wins through virtue, patience, and conviction. If we abandon those principles, we've done far more damage to Islam than any cartoons could ever do.

Danish Cartoons 1

"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear," - George Orwell.

If there’s any good that came from this, it’s that I became significantly more religious as a result, upon discovering so much inspiring about Muhammad’s (S) example, and finding the beauty of what Muslims should have done in response.

But there's alot to be said.

First, I think it’s important that people know what they’re talking about if they’re going to say anything. So here’s a link a Wikipedia page showing the cartoons. And perhaps more important, here's a letter from the editor of Jyllands-Posten explaining why he published those cartoons.

I decided against simply posting the cartoons for one reason: if you’re serious about your faith, always struggling to improve it, then you have reason not to want to see the ads. Insults to the Prophet are nothing new, and you have better things to worry about. It’s an admirable attitude, in many ways... but it does mean that you're not in a place to comment on this issue.

If you want to say anything about them, if you’re getting whipped up into a frenzy over this, you better look at them first and get your facts straight.

I’ll leave it to you to decide about their offensiveness, but I post a link to make one essential point: The original cartoons were not deliberately provocative. They were published to protest the intimidation of European authors and thinkers by extremists. That’s an important point to make. The newspaper tried to publish a biography of Muhammad’s (S) life and every illustrator they contacted was scared out of his wits. If they declined to depict the Prophet (S) out of respect, I’d be happy. But illustrators felt this effective death threat against anyone who dared depict the Prophet (S). That’s not ok, and the Prophet (S) himself would never sanction that. A secular newspaper decided that death threats were more important than not drawing certain pictures. So they, at serious personal risk, devised a cartoon contest to highlight the problem of intimidation. There was no point publishing cartoons of Jesus a few months earlier: there’s no intimidation problem to protest.

In any case, the global “Muslim” response is a lot more interesting, not least because many of them are proving the cartoonist’s point.

I finally have housing!

It took a little while to get housing together. First I was staying temporarily in this apartment:



but sleeping here:





Then for a while I was sleeping here:



And then finally I moved into my current apartment, clean and nice and with an actual bed:



I guess this means I'm not a tourist anymore?

Wedding Crashers - January 13

If you want to party in Cairo without being totally surrounded by foreigners, weddings are one of the best places to be:









Amazing food, intense dancing, decent music, pretty ladies, everything you could want. I’ve never seen muhajjaba dance so energetically before. Egypt really does have everything.

We were also the funny foreigners trying to dance. At one point, they pulled us into the middle of the circle and looked at us, waiting for us to start moving. I’m not going to be nervous, I just start dancing! (i.e. moving my body randomly) I guess maybe they were trying to make fun of me, but since I wasn’t fazed and just kept dancing, they got bored and the crowd moved around and somehow we ended up on the outside. I have no idea how. Every time we tried to get back in, same result. Never felt so constantly outmaneuvered before…

Eid ul-Adha - January 9

My first Eid in a Muslim country (as far as I remember) From the stories, I expected the streets to be running with blood. That wasn’t too far off:









Most stunning thing about this: as far as I understand the rules for Eid slaughter, hardly any were followed followed them! At the very least, you have to use a clean and sharp knife, and you have to recite a prayer before cutting. So many of the slaughters outside butcher shops, as in the picture above, were done so fast there was simply no time for a prayer recitation.

The purposes of halal slaughter rules, which are made stricter for Eid slaughter, is to ensure the animal feels is killed quickly, with as little pain as possible, and to ensure that humans recognize this as a gift from God, and a sacrifice of His creation. Killing an animal is not something to be taken lightly. There’s a whole holiday recognizing this.

Eid is usually a time of religious bliss for me – even when I have exams, they don’t take me away from this – so this might have been my first demoralizing moment about Egyptian Islam.

Yet still a very good day. Spent the day at Yasmeen’s house with her family. For one thing, they got the slaughter right, and we spent the rest of the day preparing food, relaxing, reading a bit. Dinner was AMAZING:



In the end, good food and good company makes everything awesome.

Dahab for New Years

Unlike the overdeveloped Sharm el Sheikh, Dahab is still a vaguely backpacker town on the Sinai Coast:



This was everything a vacation should be. Pictures:





We spent probably 3 whole days lying at one café, smoking shisha and occasionally ordering. Incredibly good food for a decent price, something I haven’t found so easily in Cairo, which has a lot of overpriced shit.

There’s something just amazing about a camel safari and then scuba diving:





It’s totally surreal, a world I’ve never experienced before. Sure, I read about Jacques Costeau and saw his videos sometimes, and maybe I read the Magic School Bus, but I never really thought much about underwater life. It’s much different from life on land. Much more colorful, MUCH more 3-D (so many times, you turn your head and knock a fish out of the way), and teeming to a degree you simply don’t find on land except maybe in a rainforest. It also has a steep learning curve, which is surprising but reminds you of mankind’s origins. My first dive lasted 25 minutes, 10 of which were spent equalizing pressure, and I used up 80% of my air since I was hyperventilating so fast. Second dive, equalizing was instantaneous, total dive time 25 minutes long and felt like 5 since it was so awesome, and I had ridiculous energy while using only 30% of my air. Breathing underwater was actually far easier than breathing in Cairo.

Supposedly at New Years, I had a lot of energy:





I don’t remember that so well, but what can I say? It was a blast, and I’m sad that Dahab didn’t last longer.

BEBA

Work is sorta a daily thing, so it’s a lot harder in hindsight to capture my first impressions. First, an intro to what the place does. The British Egyptian Business Association promotes trade and economic cooperation between Egypt and the UK. It’s a business association, so it’s an NGO and has member companies, including all the big multinationals and all the prominent locals, too. It also has access to prominent Ministers in the Egyptian government. It promotes trade by a number of activities: lobbying for economic reforms; organizing events for networking; educating businesses about regulations and opportunities like financing options, tax laws, and regulatory bodies; creating economic infrastructure like certifying authorities and export promotional materials.

I'd like to mention my role in all this, but I don't know what that is. Not always a problem - in some ways, it's liberating, because you can create your own role, learn about all sorts of different operations in an organization.

Lots of potential, right? Economic reforms, right there with Ministers and Ministry officials! Pretty significant development work. I could make a difference here.

Well, not yet. The first week, I did nothing at all. Coworkers are chill and helpful, but there was simply nothing to do. Naturally, we all got along. Being Muslim helped, we started praying together, etc. But it was just boring. I played so much Freecell that I had to delete it from every computer I came across.

The second week the boss came, and put me to work writing the annual report. It's something tangible and it helps me get to know the place, and she certainly gave me enough time for it.

Another new co-worker too, who’s really cool. Former head of Seeds of Peace Egypt. What a coincidence! She’s also kind, helpful, cares about people and things. Seeds ran out of money so now she’s Assistant Executive Director at BEBA, though she feels more like a glorified secretary. Unclear how long she can stay in this situation.

You know what's frustrating? Working some 6 months as a computer consultant, and then having to work on a computer that was bottom-of-the-line 7 years ago. And then, not even having admin access. My computer is probably worth $10. What kind of management wouldn’t double a worker’s productivity for the cost of a day’s salary? Most people don’t start organizations purely so they can save on costs. Organizations are also supposed to do something. An NGO can’t stay in a begging-for-money position forever. At some point, they need strategy or direction or activities or something.

Throughout all this my hands are numb because it’s so cold in the office. Egypt isn’t a relatively cold place, but everyone here is afraid of heating making them sick so I’m just sitting on my hands. Nobody else even knows how to type, so of course it doesn’t bother them. I’m not prissy about a perfect environment - I won’t whine if it’s cold outside - but if I’m trying to actually do something, and have the means to make the place comfortable enough to focus, wtf?!

But I’m new here, I’m still getting my bearings, I’m not in a position to raise a ruckus or cast myself as a consultant. Plus, another trainee is arriving soon, after new years. I’ll worry about this later.

Pyramids and the Egyptian Museum – Dec 9, 2005

First few days were mixed. Days were doing nothing at home, a little too scared to venture out because a) I didn’t have a key b) I would get lost. Lots of reading. Still a lot of settling to take care of (no permanent housing yet, didn’t go to work yet, couldn’t find my way around), so that anxiety prevented me from really reflecting on Cairo, or writing anything down about it. AIESECers in my LC mostly claimed to be too busy with exams to help much, so aside from some phone calls and rides with personal buddy Mayar, I stuck mostly to myself and roommates.

Nights were awesome. Mike Williams took me to a few parties, met some awesome people. It was kinda funny: even though I was mostly sitting in the corner or maybe a barstool not saying anything, people were asking how I got so connected so fast. “Man, I was crying in the corner my second day in Cairo.” I met Karim for the first time at a ‘French party’ (a regular expat event, thrown by French expats on high foreign salaries who can spend a lot on alcohol). Got along so well that Eva remarked that it seemed we’d known each other for ages, jokingly adding that we must be soulmates. ‘No, we just met each other now’.

So after a few days, I’m feeling pretty confident. Housing will be taken care of soon, I’m adapting to Cairo nightlife bizarrely fast, no jetlag, and I’m feeling surprisingly at home in a variety of ways. I’m feeling like I connect with people surprisingly quickly, which is, to say the least, not a feeling I’m used to. So I meet someone, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, who’s in town for a week and wants to see the Pyramids, and sure, I’ll go along. I can handle the smooth-talkers, I’ve got my guidebook with Zahir’s post-it comments inside; plus, I’m not doing anything else all day.

First I pay too much for a taxi there. Not surprising: it’s my first time taking a taxi by myself, I know neither the going rates nor how to negotiate; plus, the Pyramids will necessarily be much more expensive. We plow through the crowd around the Pyramids and successfully get to the ticket booth. First surprise: entry fees are twice what the guidebook claimed. It’s not unthinkable that the tourist ministry would double fees that they know people will pay anyway, but my confidence was shaken. No trustworthy source! Everything comes crumbling down. Is this really the tourist ministry? Did the guard change the sign so he could pocket the difference?

So this guy following us around offers a camel ride to and around the Pyramids for only 50LE. According to the guidebook, entry was 20LE and camels were 30LE/hour, and this was without a guide or tour or anything. Now I find out entry is 40LE, so this camel offer seems like a good deal. But through a combination of trickery and deceit, we ended up paying 100LE each. And since I’m extra gullible today, after there’s one crack in my confidence of knowing exactly what I’m doing, I end up paying 50LE of hers. And then there’s also the matter of tip to the tour guide, his entire income, which that 100LE doesn’t include.

The tour itself was amazing, so to some degree I don’t regret the price all that much. Pictures:








I’m contending with millennia of literary clichés by talking about the Pyramids, but obviously they look better in real life. To quote a camel owner, they’re “VERY big. VERY old.” And that’s honestly the best summary I can give. That’s what strikes you: they’re not intricate, they’re not brilliant, they’re not really special in any other way. What struck me while gazing upon them, walking up closely to them, is simply the awesome power of divinity to inspire peoples and civilizations to accomplish some awe-inspiring things that are, frankly, pretty pointless. I would also realize, in time, that ancient Egypt had more advanced management and organizational principles than modern Egypt.

From the Pyramids to the Egyptian Museum

Impressive in the opposite way. Here the artistic details come out, with astonishing detail. I swear I saw a Phillips screwdriver somewhere in there. Everywhere you look, there’s another Pharaoh. Yet it’s the worst-presented place I’ve ever been to. The Egyptian sections of the British Museum and the Louvre were much better, not really for content (King Tut is a lot more impressive than the Rosetta Stone) but simply because they actually LABEL things! Maybe 20% of the items in the Egyptian Museum even had names, and most of those labels were pretty useless (“head mask”). The single most important thing there, a double-sided palette commemorating the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt ~3100BC, isn’t even remotely prominent. These things were all probably better presented in the tombs themselves than in the Museum!

Ah well: it’s a chance to play archaeologist.

Not a bad microcosm for Egypt more generally: So much potential, so much activity, yet nothing is maintained or organized properly. But it’s more than that: it’s a sign that a country doesn’t respect itself, that it doesn’t respect its own amazing and glorious history. Foreigners are so idolized that’s there no attention on developing Egypt and Egyptians in a sustainable way.

But there's so much to be proud of...

Arrival – Dec 6, 2005

Not much to say here – just another flight. The pilot gave us an aerial tour around the pyramids, which was really nice, as it let me say upon landing that I’d already seen the pyramids. They were sorta confused what to do with me then, so we chilled at a café, with tea and shisha and so forth. Pretty good shisha, but a little disheartening to learn that my smoke rings weren’t working. It was a blast meeting everyone in the LC all at once, but also overwhelming because of the names I had to remember. I think they found me pretty boring though, since I didn’t arrive expecting all Egyptians to live in tents and ride camels to work. I was taking it in pretty slowly, a bit too slowly probably, so mostly just quietly sipping and smoking. Maybe hitting the ground running would be more fun, but I thought I’d try a more relaxed culture.

Finally getting my blog up

Well, I was supposed to have a blog up some 3 months ago, and I stupidly let some things get in the way…. so here goes, accounting for 3 months in rapid succession… expect the blog tone to be a little different when I start updating regularly

The title is inspired by an email from my uncle:

“I hope you are safe and sound and on your way to be victorious like Julius Caesar. It is a land of Cleopatras and there must be many of her younger sisters still available for future conquerors.”

His follow-up email added:

“For a young warrior like yourself, it is all un-conquered land and the sky is the limit. But be aware of the mosquitoes because if Alexander the Great had the common sense to use a mosquito net around his bed, he might not have had to die from malaria at the age of 32.”

But my title also reflects the sheer amount of potential this country has, and just how inaccessible it all is. An inefficient market, as an economist would say, and not just for meeting people of the opposite sex.

In 3 months, that’s my main conclusion. This country has potential. That’s it.

And now, to set the tone, to make sure nobody expects too much from me, I will inundate this blog with total nonsense:

cleopatra is a true gentlemen's motor yacht in classic style
cleopatra is £13
cleopatra is a greyhound puppy available for adoption from
cleopatra is precious
cleopatra is to caesar as cleopatra is to marc antony as
cleopatra is let down by a lacklustre
cleopatra is a true gentlemen's yacht in classic style and technically in up
cleopatra is a true gentlemen's motor yacht in classic style available from yacht charter uk
cleopatra is echt iets voor in een studentenhuis'
cleopatra is the only thing to come out of ae?
cleopatra is in her mausoleum but she's still alive
cleopatra is made joint ruler with her 12 year old brother ptolemy 12
cleopatra is een gezellige en eigenzinnige studentenvereniging waar je met uiteenlopende mensen kunt lachen
cleopatra is a four
cleopatra is available in both english and spanish
cleopatra is one of the most provacative of shakespeare's characters utilizing her physical charms to obtain her political pursuits
cleopatra is said to be slated for a june
cleopatra is more than able to seize this opportunity and seduce
cleopatra is a story of love
cleopatra is a young girl of sixteen; however
cleopatra is determined to prove he is a god