interesting bbc interview ith leila ahmed about her book on the veil – a quiet revolution and fp article by her.

What’s coded intelligence?

If you make something, it’s an artifact. It’s something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything … I’m looking at a tall Starbucks cup right now. The amount of thought that went into getting that Starbucks cup to look exactly the way it is, as it sits on the bedside table next to me, it’s an enormous amount of information. You could write a book, a thick book, about how that cup got to be there. I’ve always been, for whatever reason, very conscious of the world of things. In a way, the Internet of things, as the current expression goes.

Terrorism.

If you’re a terrorist (or a national hero, depending on who’s looking at you), there are relatively few of you and relatively a lot of the big guys you’re up against. Terrorism is about branding because a brand is most of what you have as a terrorist. Terrorists have virtually no resources. I don’t even like using the word terrorism. It’s not an accurate descriptor of what’s going on.

From the first atrocity on, the little guy is building his brand. And that’s why somebody phones in after every bomb and says, “It was us, the Situationist Liberation Army. We blew up that mall.” That’s branding. By the same token, you get these other, surreal moments where they call up and say, “We didn’t do that one.” That’s branding. That’s all it is. A terrorist without a brand is like a fish without a bicycle. It’s just not going anywhere.

No one in Zero History seems to be from anywhere, and indeed could be in London or Paris or New York and it didn’t really matter — just that they were in urban areas. Are we losing the concept of home and the notion of being from a specific place?

I’m happiest with people who’ve gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism. I’m happiest in wildly multicultural post-national environments, which most large world cities now are. I’m writing about places I like.

So if someone is born now into this global world, do you think they even have a native culture?

If you’re born now, your native culture is global, to an increasing extent.

Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion.

You’ve taken to Twitter [GreatDismal].

The people I’m following work for me as a sort of conglomerate aggregator of novelty.
Really, the Twitter I’m always raving about is my Twitter.

buy zero history.

naguib mahfouz, mahmoud saeed, ghassan kanafani, sahar khalifeh and others are discussed in the article and podcast january 2010 new yorker. most books seem worth seeking and kanafani, elias khory and saeed especially sound great.

a self-confessed secular democrat, khoury is one of the few arab writers to recognize the holocaust as part of the moral equation in the middle east.

he [kanafani] also portrays israeli settlers sympathetically—perhaps for the first time in modern arabic literature

remember though that ‘that stories are not to be trusted‘.

combined with the dust that blows ceaselessly off the desert, heavy use gives the city a cosy patina  of age. it burnishes knobs and handrails to a greasy smoothness, cracks tiles into shards, and tints walls to a uniform dun colour that ignites into gold in the soft, slanting light of the late afternoon. sidewalks buckle under the weight of feet. staircases in grand beaux arts buildings sag, their marble steps eroded into slippery hollows. advertising tattoos every surface with arabic’s elegant squiggle. neon spangles rooftops, mingling with antennae and the upturned domes of satellite dishes.

max rodenbeck loves (or at least did at the time of writing this book) cairo. his feelings infect the whole of the beautifully written cairo: the city victorious which is showered with warmth affection.

his personal journey started off:

when a friend urged me to write a book about cairo, i said tsk and went back to my water pipe.

he went from wondering whether another book on cairo was needed and what format it could possibly take to realizing that he ‘must write this book’, that he somehow ‘owed it as an offering, however flawed of this city which had given him so much‘. balancing the increasingly ugly faces of modern cairo ‘far removed from other cairo’s he had known’ with the city’s captivating past was a concern:

if cairo was, in the words of its great novelist the nobel laureate naguib mahfouz, like meeting your beloved in old age, then was i to tell her about her wrinkles, her bad breath and worse taste, and her unfortunate habit of shouting at the servants?

as you would expect from one of the world’s oldest cities, vast riches of source material and narrative dramas to draw on are on offer. obsessions of time, eternity and the after life are some of the city’s constant themes:

ancient conceptions of time were sophisticated indeed. the idea of eternity so preoccupied the egyptians that their language expressed subtly distinct forms: while d–t (the lack of vowels in hieroglyphics renders pronunciation speculative) described absolute changlessness, the term n–h–h signified cyclical recurrence. river, sky and desert were eternal, but so in their way were the works of man.

and throughout the book, max connects these and other recurring themes across mellennia to the modern age:

if a single trait can describe cairo’s people, it must be their enduring, life-giving nonchalance. and where does it come from? one drowsy denizen of a cairo bar, a psychiatrist by day, assured me that obsession with the afterlife – even to the exclusion of daily travails – explains all the city’s mysteries. ‘everyone here, you see, lives inside his coffin,’ he said. ‘we are all mummies … and half gods!’

one of the most fascinating parts of reading the book (and i had very little knowledge of cairo’s or egypt‘s history beforehand) is how disingenuous cairo’s modern identity seems to be. this can probably be traced to nasser’s revolutionary education policies that had:

the school curriculum sanitized, a whole generation grew up ignorant of its own past, believing that egypt before the revolution had been a sorry place of oppressed peasants lorded over by imperialist lackeys and wicked feudalists.
cairo forgot itself.

cosmopolitan cairo

the rises to greatness throughout cairo’s sinuous history usually comprised a flocking to the city of foreigners who transformed (often at the expense of the locals at the time – who in turn were descendants of previous foreign migrants) the city with their entrepreneurial innovation.

al-ahram was founded by syrian chrstians the takla brothers who pioneered arab journalism. incidentally many of the modernizing foreigners at this stage had fled their native beirut because the american misisonaries there had denounced them as darwinists.

khawagat, the egyptian the term for foreigners is derived from a persian word meaning ‘lord’, referred in egypt originally to greek and italian merchants, particularly slavers. by the twentieth century it embraced all europeans, and had come to have a mildly pejorative sense akin to the mexicans’ gringo.

i reviewed a book called cairo cosmopolitan last year that focused on the recent past’s so called belle epoque era, and it was interesting to have rodenbeck put the internationalism of the city in its proper historical context. this is especially important in the context of today’s domestic calls to lessen the influence of the outside world on egypt.

the cosmopolitan periods of greatness were usually followed by bouts of supressive conservative, lazy, authoritarianism with leaders over-extended their power, usually by overtaxing the ever suffering common man leading to revolution of some sort or another. [see john bradley's inside egypt for when the next one is due].

always a megalopolis

one of the greatest joys of reading the book is realizing how little things seem to have changed over the city’s 5,000 years. cairo was probably the world’s first megalopolis and has stayed relatively large enough to remain one since.

whether muslim pilgrims, jewish scholars or christian traders, medieval travelers agreed on one thing: the scale of cairo was incomparable.

between 1930 and 1950 cairo’s populaition doubled to 2 million… the country was ruralizing the city

hedonism and religiosity

edward lane on cairene religiosity:

cairo has always been deeply religious and wildly decadent often simultaneously. throughout cairo’s history religion had been a channel of communication between rulers and the ruled. those lamenting the purer more pious days of yore may be surprised by the contemporary sounding complaints of sheikh badr al-din al-zaytuni writing of medieval cairo:

the eater of opium found constant delight…
while the mirth of the drunkard was its height.
goblets brimmed beneath the full moon
while poets sang to the gentlest of tunes

now time has erased these haunts…
o eyes, shed tears of grief, o heart endure!
and god’s favour bless those days of joy when cairo was secure.

records from the cairo religious courts in 1898 show that there were three divorces for every four marriages in that year

vice taxes were significant revenue generator’s for cairo:

taverns lined the leafy banks of the khalij. pleasure boats cruised the many seasonal lakes around the city, which were favorite haunts for lovers of music and imbibers of hashish, opium and wine. though spurned by the pious, such vices brought hefty revenues to the state. in the early fourteenth century taxes on wine and prostitution – another strictly reglulated industry – brought in a reputed 1,000 dinars a day. for a time the governor of cairo himself controlled the city’s prostitution rackets. indeed, complained al-maqrizi, so greedy were the mamluk state’s tax collectors that women of ill repute resorted to ambushing potential customers and holding them to ransom. the trade flourished particulalry in the western suburbs near bab zuwayla. by the sixteenth century the district of bab al-luq alone could boast some 800 ladies of the night. a turkish tourist of the time assures us that they excelled in uttering voluptuous, raucous cries and in making coquettish motions ‘like an arabian horse that has slipped out from under its rider’.

drink was the least of the vices foreigners brought: by the 1920s, cocaine and heroin were supplanting hashish and opium as the drugs of choice.
plus ca change.

except that by the mid 1980s even sex was effectively denied many, since egypt’s strict conventions demanded marriage, and marriage required money for dowries and furnishings and apartments.

modern nationalism and nasser
in the early 20th century cairo was going through an existentialist crisis, the british has used the country primarily as a business and neglect was boiling over. coming to terms with european modernity and fishing around for an identity and a response. some egyptians

said that nationalism – passionate and even irrational – was the source of western power. egyptian schoolchildren, too, could learn to sing anthems and salute the flag. they could be made to feel egyptian first, not muslim or christian, rich or poor. this was to be the strongest trend of all, subsuming and absorbing the work of feminists and reformers, liberals and traditionalists in the fight against foreign dominance. nationalism was one theme around which all could unite, and the did so to great effect…

under nasser, the ratio of techers to students at cairo university went from 1:6 in 1950 to 1:60 in 1962
of course the absolute number of students increased dramatically over that period
from the late 1970s onwards, crowding began to transform universities into diploma factories rather than places of learning.
and yet there were positive advance in this period too:

the economic and social decline of cairo meant that may of those who could leave, did so in search of economic betterment abroad:

in 1996, the wall street journal could report that egyptian-born americans were the most highly educated of 110 immigrant groups identified in the united states: 60 per cent had university degrees, a quarter of them at postgraduate level. this erosion of talent was to have devastating effects on cairo.

sadat’s open door policy failed to alter the situation although apparently

rodenbeck’s pondering on egypt’s future, its struglle for a modern identity are still as valid today as they were in 1999 when the book was first published in cairo:

the attempt … to bring together heritage and intellect, heart and mind, remains the overriding challenge for egyptian intellectuals.

against the continued backdrop of lackluster economic growth, stifling socio-politics and probably the largest police force in any city in the world (can that really be the case?).

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• Cairo correspondent on the city’s best (cnn.com)
• Cairo views (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Cairo’s Jewish medieval manuscripts (theworld.org)

from the economist’s review:

and of course looking forward to this:

bonus podcast at lab out loud.

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• The God Gene (nytimes.com)
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KAFEYA!

Brian Edwards profiles a new generation of writers in a special portfolio on literary life in Cairo today in the new issue of APS. With new work by Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Mohamed El-Fakhrany, Ibrahim El Batout, Magdy El Shafee, and more.

“These writers are a generation that came of age with (sometimes after) the massive arrival of the Internet and digital technologies in Cairo, and in the wake of the shift in global discourse about big words like democracy, Islam, and war. And while many of the topics they address in their work seem much smaller—a sexual liaison, street children stealing fruit, women calling on each other for tea, two boys playing a video game—these are not writers unconcerned with the social or the political. Rather, their work is conceived differently in relation to the big questions. Perhaps it is the enormity of Cairo, expanding at asymptotic rates via apparently uncontrollable urbanization, or the response to its social and political zahma; or perhaps they echo others in their generation internationally who have become cynical about what art and writing can do and seek something different. But the big pronouncements here are more muted or ironic… and sometimes they are even refused.”

the topic has proven to be fertile conversation fodder since.
place and time (age) as pointed out by the guests on the show are everything.

pet shop boys’ actually and introspective introspective were the first albums i can remember getting excited about (i think they were sold as one cassette album by pirates thompson tapes- no doubt familiar to you dubai kids). the double (in dubai) lp marked the moment that music crossed over from background to foreground. my relationship went from passive to proactive to obsessive where it has generally remained since. so even though i haven’t listened to either album in over a decade or maybe even two it retains a strong claim to life-changing status.

nevermind, ten, strange cargo IV, automatic for the people, eazy-duz-it, bitches brew, oh mercy, tragic epilogue, caroline lavelle, headz, passion- all epochal.

but there’s no doubting what my choice would be if necessarily narrowed down to one:

achtung baby was manifoldly life-changing. it was instrumental to the deepening of perhaps the most influential relationship of my life – a friendship with my high-school geography teacher. it also served as the beginning of years of sonically exploring eno, lanois and flood soundscapes. the lp marked the shift from a surfacey, literal, lyric-based reading of music to one steeped in the vibrations and science of sound. the zooropa tour was also one of the best live shows i have been to (in a way that is only possible when you’re sixteen) – i was at the one at wembley where salman rushdie was the guest of honor coming onstage with mcphisto and all like i ain’t scared of you mother fuckers. the experience was heightened by the south american couple next to me who were actually having sex standing up while being squashed by the 90,000 fans behind us.

god has mellowed

today’s god is gentler and morally superior to yahweh who in turn was gentler and kinder than the hunter-gatherers’ god.

it sounds like an optimistic book (the premise is extrapolated into the future). paul bloom in his ny times review says

Wright argues that each of the major Abrahamic faiths has been forced toward moral growth as it found itself interacting with other faiths on a multinational level, and that this expansion of the moral imagination reflects “a higher purpose, a transcendent moral order.”

wright dismisses the search for an inherent moral character of the monotheistic religions, instead claiming that

Cultural sensibilities shift according to changes in human dynamics, and these shape the God that people worship. For Wright, it is not God who evolves. It is us — God just comes along for the ride.

bloom:

But God still has some growing up to do, as Wright makes clear in his careful discussion of contemporary religious hatred. As you would expect, he argues that much of the problem isn’t with the religious texts or teachings themselves, but with the social conditions — the “facts on the ground” — that shape the sort of God we choose to create. “When people see themselves in zero-sum relationship with other people — see their fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people, see the dynamic as win-lose — they tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.” The recipe for salvation, then, is to arrange the world so that its people find themselves (and think of themselves as) interconnected: “When they see the relationship as non-zero-sum — see their fortunes as positively correlated, see the potential for a win-win outcome — they’re more likely to find the tolerant and understanding side of their scriptures.” Change the world, and you change the God.

i side with wright’s view that we are moving towards a society more inclined to empathetically inclusive interpretations and interrelations of monotheistic religions and away from the more common contemporary exclusive self-centeredness that surrounds us.

wright builds on god’s evolution and contemplates the evolution of divinity:

If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe — conceivably — the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.

bloom disagrees, he’s more inclined to see a god usurped than evolved as am i but i look forward to reading wright out.

he is interviewed in the ny times’ book review podcast:

wright writing in the april issue of the atlantic displays the optimism that a globalized increasingly interconnected world will result in a happy ending:

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Evolution of God by Robert Wright (kottke.org)
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• No Smiting (nytimes.com)
• No Smiting (nytimes.com)

zena el khalil

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I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley from Book Videos on Vimeo.

some of these even make me want to read the books (jami attenberg’s the kept man and sloane crosley’s i was told there’d be cake)

my favorites are the lo-tech-home-made-y types.

is it just a matter of time before we have trailers for everything.

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• Own a Piece of Book Promotion History! [Sloane Crosley] (gawker.com)
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• Living With Music: Sloane Crosley (papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com)