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

reese elrich checks in on egypt.

listen here or at making contact.

apologies for poor audio quality.

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‘.

enjoyed hearing about this ramadan’s expected hit tv show in egypt based on the ‘i want to get married blog.

100LIVE ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL
CAIRO – 2010
14th/15th May 2010
Live electronic music + Live video

ARTISTS:
adham hafez / yara mekawy / ola saad
jan jelenik / telepoetic / mahmoud refat / ahmed saleh
iqbit / ahmed basiony / john kannenberg
ahmed sabry/ nermine el ansari / mohamed allam / eleonora / wensh.

ADDRESS :Kasr El Sham3 Street ,Al Fakhareen – Old Cairo – Behind the Hanging Church and Amr Mosque Tel.: +2 23 610 511 http://www.darb1718.com

[Organized by] 100COPIES MUSIC / CAIRO http://www.100copies.com

[100COPIES MUSIC / CAIRO]
www.100copies.com
www.100radiostation.com

100COPIES is a music label based in Cairo/Egypt, releasing music from Egypt, the Arab world and International.100COPIES is focusing on experimental music, sound and jazz related. The main intentions of the label is creating a platform/network for the independent music scene in Cairo. As well as introducing international artists and independent music from other places to the Egyptian music scene. A limited number of 100 copies will be out for sale inside Egypt. Another limited number will be produced for international distributors from each release.
—————————————————————————————————-
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[DARB 1718]
www.darb1718.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=43270774592&ref=search&sid=1663254969.2200041353..1

Darb 1718 is a registered non-profit organization.
It is the latest addition to Cairo’s art and culture scene. Right In the middle of Old
Cairo, in El Fustat area and just next to the Hanging Church and Amr Ibn Al Aas
Mosque, emerges a new heart for contemporary art and culture.
Darb 1718 is a culture promoting centre, art exhibition space, programs and
initiatives facilitator and education and community service site. It is a hub connecting
Egyptian artists from several walks with the local and international art and culture
scene.
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telepoetic were of my favorites last year there was a youthful tenderness to them.

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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