Eye On Egypt Blog

Obama's Speech in Cairo: Sheryl

If ever there was a speech that said as much about the audiences as the speaker, Obama's Cairo speech was it.

Maybe it was the expectation factor, one aspect of our global gush of hope that America, through this man, would get things right.  Unfortunately, he was found lacking in many ways.    Some wanted apologies for America's invasion of Iraq, others wanted him to renounce America's friendship with Israel or to promise to return the Golan Heights to Syria or to refuse, in the first place, to speak in a country where suspected protesters are routinely rounded up for the duration of politically sensitive moments.

Granted, the speech was a perfectly legitimate opportunity for activists to push their agendas. Unfortunately, agendas can obscure the value of the hook they are hung on.

What I heard
I heard self-introduction.  A new president, with an unusually friendly feeling for humankind, was trying to tell the Muslim and Arab world what sort of spirit was driving his administration.  This was important in itself, being as he followed a president of such a different sort.

It was fair of him, a man with such power, to let others know who he was and how he thought.

His speech was formed by respect.  That he chose to activate his appreciation of the beliefs, values and decisions of others in a multitude of ways - by using their words - salaam aleikum, referencing their holy book, and acknowledging American injustices done to them -- was interstitial proof of his attitude.

His respect revealed something significant about America's future foreign policy:  The man who respects others is less likely to be judging them or telling them what to do.  Not only is this a pleasant correction of America's hegemonic attitude but suggests that Obama has reappraised America's idea of its responsibility; he realizes that other peoples and other nations do and should make their own decisions and guide their own destinies.

So, he had photo ops with President Mubarak, who, like it or not, is president of Egypt.  In acknowledging the  fact, he not only keeps political ties with the country malleable, but he forces Egyptians and others to look at themselves and ask if this is the kind of representation/government they want.  The choice becomes genuinely theirs; not something the United States judges to be good or bad for them.

Maybe it was radically democratic: putting the responsibility on the people.

In the respectful quality of the speech, there was also hidden a mighty, if unspoken, anti-terrorism instrument.  Studies are showing that a primary condition of terrorism is not poverty or sociopathy or imbalance of power, but humiliation.  What makes people disturbed enough to attack civilians or to sacrifice their own lives, is a deep sense of being disrespected by their own governments or by others.

So he may have helped weaken terrorism at the source.

Finally, I would guess that his speech did some healing.  The average Egyptian knows only too well the feeling of being uncounted.  But on that day anyway, on their home ground, they were .   None of this is to say that Obama or America has relinquished its responsibilities in the world, but maybe it is interpreting them differently, adjusting its boundaries.

I hope it says that America has grown up a bit in choosing this particular individual to represent us:  one who understands that the world will not become a peaceful community until we all realize that each other is our equal.                        

 

On Obama's Cairo Speech: Amal

I reacted to Obama’s June 4th 2009 speech at Cairo University with three identities, Egyptian and American and a mish-mash of the two.

First, the Windfall

Frankly, many  Cairenes were more taken up by the logistics of Obama’s visit than by what he might say. Who could blame them? His speech was scheduled in the middle of the University’s final exams. And while 300 students were invited, 200,000 students with their faculties and administrators were locked out. Campuses are one of the few places that people demonstrate

The 4,000 seat auditorium in the University’s Great Hall (see photo) was refurbished; fitted out with new lighting, air-conditioning and sound systems. Its dome was cleaned and polished. The streets in and around the campus were repaved. 450 painters spruced up University Bridge for Obama’s motorcade. The frenzy of cleaning moved some to wish Obama would set-up a speech a month—each in a different part of the city.

 Of course, the security forces were all over the place, blocking swaths of streets along the motorcade route,  ordering shop-keepers to close for the day. Everyone who could stay home planned to do so. There’d be no getting around that day.

Was it worth it?
Obama had to do something to reach out to the billions of people the Bush administration had so badly alienated. But, as far as the Arab world is concerned, he could have given his speech from the White House.

Egyptian: Some of us objected to his not mentioning, if not condemning, the destruction of Gaza and not offering anything more than a call to stop the settlements. Others applauded his respectful tone, so important to people who’ve been abused and humiliated by American foreign policy and its call for more political rights.

Of course, the Arab world would still say “Show us” but, if he’d spoken from the White House, no one would be able to criticize him for supporting, by his presence, an unpopular dictator, which they did.
American:  My reaction as an American was different. I believe that lasting change has to come from us.  We have to rally support for a change in policy toward the Middle East.  Obama had to address us Americans. He had to be a role model in humanizing the people of the Arab. That’s why he had to come to Cairo; to talk to Egyptians, to greet them with the traditional salamu aleikum and quote from the Quran.

I hope he comes often. How about once a month, each time in a different part of the city?

See a video of Obama’s reception in Cairo on the website of one of its most popular newspapers.

Family Sting

  FAMILY STING

 

The children scampered back onto the stage, happy in their very loosely choreographed representation of a child’s life in an Arab village. They danced in circles, shook tambourines, unwary, as children are, of anything but play and their friends.

 

We sat behind a phalanx of mothers.  With loose coverings over their heads and shoulder, they were reassuring hills of comfort.

 

Men in neat grey suits with black and pink striped ties had lulled us with a series of simple songs in the Sufi tradition: music of love, forgiveness and appreciation for the Mohammed’s teaching of kindness toward all others.

 

The children had already made one appearance in the program.

 

 We, mothers ourselves and hardly immune to the charm of children’s performances, stayed as much for their reappearance as for more music.

 

When they finally rushed back onto the stage, the kids - peeking a look for their parents, smiling dutifully, or trying to copy the kid next to them - appeared to be among the lucky children in the world; not rich perhaps, not especially well-educated, but safe, happy and loved. 

 

With the men lined up at their back and their mothers casting proud looks from the front, they paraded around the stage, and began to play; they were joined by a whirling dervish, His face was concentrated, his vast skirt spun in bright multicolors; he’s regular fixture of Egyptian festivals: a paradox of sober spirituality and carnival excitement.

 

It was than I realized that a man was standing in the aisle by my side, a rifle in one hand.

 

I knew he was an actor and that the gun was a prop, but was horrified nonetheless.  But sure enough, men streamed down the aisles and onto the stage, yelling, slashing and shooting.  One by one, the children began to drop; the others screamed too convincingly; they wailed, implored God and lapped the heads of their little fallen friends.

 

It went on forever.

 

Finally, the screams abated and the “dead” were lifted into manly arms and carried in mournful procession off stage.

 

My jaw dropped in disbelief.  I’d been taken back to the sunny afternoons of my own childhood in California.  The closest thing to military I’d witnessed was the 6X6 foot “fort” we’d dug into the hillside behind our house.  And I was appalled that children – all innocents in that moment of my imagination – would be called upon to playact a bloody attack on their play.

 

My Egyptian-American colleague looked at me impatiently, as if to say, “Get used to it.”

 

We had to talk.

 

We eventually set aside the odd  -- and for me – cruel design of the evening:  Lull the audience into a soft, spiritual mood and then crush them with a political reality -- and tackled the big one: Why play out this scene of carnage with children at a family event?  To commemorate the dead? To teach the children? To harden their hearts? To keep everyone on alert? To promote political activism?

 

The vast majority of Egyptians are sympathetic to Palestinians – many of them have Palestinian family members and they are all Arabs and Israel attacked Egypt too.  But the fact is that Egyptians are not being shot down by Israelis at home – and haven’t been for several decades.

 

What the Egyptians said

Still the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel is a continuing trauma for Middle Easterners.  While its violence fades and reappears in the western news, it is alive every day in Middle East, not only because the problem seems no nearer to resolution than it every was, not only because of the deaths and the inexplicable injustices, but because it is, for the Egyptians, another aspect of colonial behavior.  One which treats them as lesser:

 

“Whenever the Israelis strike the Palestinians, the international community and the U.N. turn a blind eye or keep quiet,” said one African Muslim.  “But when the Palestinians launch a counterattack, it is condemned by America, the U.K. and other friends of Israel as a terror attack. That is the problem. It shows that the West is biased in dealing with Muslims.”

 

And that is why my friend was perturbed with me:  Because I was shocked, even after all my time in Egypt, because I hadn’t really understood the trauma that replays endlessly in the wake of assault.

 

Sheryl Feldman

Spring 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cause and Defect

CAUSE AND DEFECT

 Maybe the housekeeper comes.  You ask her to vacuum the carpet.   She rumbles back and forth, readily moving heavy chairs and sofas to get underneath, carefully rewinding the cord and putting the machine away when she's done.

 You pass by, noting the telltale wheel marks on the carpet and next that they are layered over the threads, crumbs, and cat hairs that were there when she started.

  So the vacuum was bust.  She says she'd  noticed that.  In an all too typical Egyptian fashion, she done what she'd been asked and done it thoroughly, for that matter.

    It's not passive/aggressive anything (except when it is); not stupidity either. Something else is going on here and it bedevils the patience of westerners - Americans especially - who are as deeply outcome oriented as she is obedience oriented.

  When you live in Egypt, you have plenty of time to ruminate....while your waiting for the plumber or carpenter or electrician to come back for a second or third try at a job:   How come this keeps happening?   In school, children learn by rote.  They don't learn analytical, critical and any other kind of “....cal" thinking. They get it upside-the-head when they break the rules, however ridiculous the rules might be.

• Teachers are evaluated by rote.  No quarelling about standardized national tests wasted here. Inpsectors visit school to make sure that teachers are literally on the right page number for that day.
• In the bureaucracy, a lot of people, educated as above, work by rote.  Keeping everyone employed (see hypertrophy of the teriary sector) means make-work, make work means there's are so many squadrons of copiers, reviewers, stampers and other repeaters that responsibility is flushed away in a flood of repetition.
• Government (authoritarian for the last five thousand years), insiders do what they can get away with and they're not called to task.
  
• As a result the people have learned that it doesn't make any difference what you do, the system remains the same.
  
  

    Are you getting an idea of how silly it is for the West to want democracy on demand?  Better to buttress every empowerment program in operation, dedicate aid money to hiring better educated teachers (many now are paid only $20 a month), sponsoring cool educational programs on television and jam every school, church and mosque with books, television sets and computers.

Sheryl Ga Feldman
Spring 2009  

We Strangers

WE STRANGERS

It was summertime in Alexandria. I was nine years old. My father had accepted a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Wisconsin; my mother was sewing snowsuits for a Madison winter and singing to the rhythm of her Singer sewing machine. “I had a mule, her name was Sal; fifteen miles down the Erie Canal.”

“What’s that song about?” I asked.

“It’s like Hella Hubba Hella; something boatmen sing when they’re pulling at the ropes.”

Boatmen with their long galabeyas tucked between their legs pulling boats through a canal, I could imagine. But singing in English? Impossible. Boatmen speak Arabic. Only educated people speak English or French. 

Apparently America was going to be different  -- and not just because it snowed.

I am strange
It was.  Madison in the 50s was white and Lutheran. My third-generation California mother was exotic—an Episcopalian married to a Muslim Egyptian. The kids in school and most of their parents were convinced that, because I came from Egypt, I used to live in a tent and go to school on a camel.

When I said, ‘No, my mother drives us to school or a cab comes for me” it didn’t seem to change their impression much. I exhausted myself explaining what my life was really like. Sometimes, I just let them think whatever they wanted .

The split in perceptions hasn’t shrunk much since I was a kid; I feel like I’ve spent fifty years straddling it.

A Human Condition
I’ve traveled and studied; written dozens of papers, given hundreds of lectures ,talked to thousands of people, All over the world, I realized, people have limited knowledge about the context in which others live; what’s more - and innocently enough, people apply home standards of behavior to places where they truly make no sense

It is true that most Arabs knew more about America and Europe than the other way around. Some of this due to TV and movies, but there’s something else going on too:. The weaker party is almost always more keenly attuned to the stronger as a matter of survival.

In any case, Egyptians tend to feel deeply misunderstood or just plain ignored.   It’s not good for anyone.

Helping Ourselves
We  Egyptians must do more to make ourselves known and understood.

 So, www.myeyeonegypt.net.

I’m hoping other Egyptians will join us on the site in telling the rest of the world who we are. And  I hope Westerners will read, ask questions and add their knowledge.

We’re living in a communication revolution;  it’s the best chance we’ve ever had to walk in each other’s shoes .

Amal Sedky Winter--2009