WORKS CONSULTED - Ross School



THE MIDDLE EAST IN THEGLOBAL ERA:A JOURNEYBy David KanerMentor: Carrie ClarkAcknowledgementsThis project would not have been possible without the patience, support, suggestions and good cheer of the people in my life. On the academic front, I would like to thank my mentor, Carrie Clark, for her enthusiasm, prudent guidance and incredibly helpful constructive criticisms, my outside consultant, Sally Booth, for helping me think like an anthropologist, and the Senior Project Coordinator, Devon Parkes, who kept us all on task. In Egypt, I was lucky enough to have a wonderful host family, the Mokhtars, and scores of new friends Egyptian and American who were invaluable in helping me navigate a new and alien culture. I owe a debt of gratitude to my parents, without whose support I would have never gone to Egypt and been inspired to do this project in the first place, and all the other family members and friends who talked to me about my project and gave me encouragement. Thank you.Table of ContentsIntroduction4The Cityscape of Cairo6Hijab, East and West21The Virtual Public Forum: Media and Democratization in the Middle East 26Works Consulted 31Introduction“You must always know the past,” William Faulkner once said, “for there is no real Was, there is only Is.” It is a true statement, one perhaps exceptional coming from a fellow American. We are a young people, and the weight of history seems light to us, at times nonexistent. We are told to focus on the future, not the past, to not dwell too much, to let bygones be bygones. In our country, we are told, anything is possible with hard work and dedication, so who cares where you come from?That was why, in part, spending a summer in Egypt was such a perspective-altering experience. Six thousand miles away, but even further removed in mindset, Egypt, and the Middle East as a whole, is a place where history is a living, visceral thing with an unmistakable and constant presence. The collective memory is long and runs deep. Relations with the West are informed by events stretching back to the Crusades or even earlier. In the US, it sometimes seems, we act as if our experience with the region and its millions of people started the day nineteen of them crashed jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.Treating 9/11 as the beginning of time is ludicrous, of course, but it speaks to the wide-reaching impacts of the day’s events, which will be with us for years to come. They were a symptom of strained relations between the Middle East and the West, born of resentments rooted especially in European colonialism, the creation of Israel and Western support for unpopular regimes past and present The divide between the two regions on many political and societal issues often seems like a vast chasm. For extremists on both sides, our differences are irreconcilably great.However, part of what is so interesting about this moment in relations between the two regions is that they now arguably share more in common than at any other time in history. Cliché as it is to note, cheap, fast transportation and mass media have truly shrunk the globe. When the United States dispatched its first military mission to the Middle East, in 1801, it took the navy several months at sea just to find the Barbary pirates they had been sent to defeat. A similar trip can be accomplished today in a few hours. With the advent of satellite television, the Arab World now watches many of the same T.V. shows and news networks Americans and Europeans do. Moreover, the last 50 years have seen millions immigrating from the Middle East to the West, while sizable Western expatriate communities have grown up in Persian Gulf financial centers like Dubai, bringing cultures into even closer contact. We are, in many ways, all neighbors now.The Middle East, of course, was never cut off from the rest of the world in the first place. It has been a global crossroads for longer than anyplace else. The various states and empires of the region served as the nexus of trade routes that would come to girdle the Old World from Portugal to China, Scandinavia to Zanzibar. From the 8th through 14th centuries it was the world of Islam that could lay claim to the title of global society, controlling or trading with nearly the entirety of Eurasia and substantial portions of Africa. Europe, then a backwater, benefited greatly from this exchange, receiving everything from the orange to the astrolabe. The valuable ideas and goods imparted by Arab traders spurred the West to innovate, launching it out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. The Arab monopoly on trade with India and East Asia created an incentive for European explorers to find alternate routes, resulting in the discovery of the New World and the vast influx of wealth that followed. It can be said that without the Arabs Europe never would have achieved the level of economic and military success it did. The fall of the Middle East to the colonial powers was, in a sense, that of a victim to its own success. Today, a decade into the 21st century, the Middle East is once again an axis upon which world affairs turn. The Cold-War era conflict between Communism and Capitalism has been replaced with a fight between the forces of Westernization and religious moderation and those of fundamentalist Islam. The verdict is still out on which side is winning. Most Middle Easterners have adopted many of the accoutrements of Western living as their own: the television, the mobile phone, the car. On the other hand, there is anger towards Western governments, especially that of the United States, for their handling (and instigation) of the conflicts in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, their support for dictatorships and perceived lust for oil at all costs. There is also a feeling among the people of the Middle East that the West has extremely negative feelings towards them and towards Islam. The situation is, in short, difficult, the stakes high, the game impossible to understand and nearly as difficult to play.The Middle East is many things (exotic, friendly, threatening, misunderstood, hot), but never dull. In my short time there, during which I lived with an Egyptian family and started learning Arabic, I got a taste of a culture, society and politic fascinating and unique. In the essays that follow, I have strived to use my personal experiences, coupled with research, to shed a little light on the Middle East and its relations with the rest of the world in a relatable, human way. After all these months of work I’m still hard-pressed to make a conclusion about the state of affairs within the Middle East and its place vis-à-vis the world, nor would I trust anyone else to make one. Like the desert itself, the region is one of shifting sands, of mirages.I will say this: it is vital that we attempt to learn more about each other. Whatever our differences, it is worth keeping in mind that we are all human. We share the same Earth, the same dreams, ambitions and needs. The human story has not always been pleasant, but nor has it been entirely depressing or futile. More than anything, it has been one of exchange; of ideas, of goods and of people. We are a richer, better world for our astounding diversity, For all the conflict it causes, differences in belief, opinion and lifestyle have been a defining factor of civilization from the very beginning. Homogeneity has never really caught on with humanity. If everything goes right, if we are wise, compassionate and, yes, lucky, our human family will continue to be around for quite some time. Like any family, we may not always be able to get along. Let us try, at least, to understand one another. The Cityscape of Cairo???????? . Al-Qahira. The City of a Thousand Minarets. Cairo. It is a city of many names, and that is, perhaps, only fitting. More than most metropolises, Cairo has borne witness to, and been buffeted by, the winds of history. From a small settlement, it has grown into one of the world’s largest cities, cultural heart of the Middle East and capital of a nation of seventy-seven million people. Along the way, it has been touched by war and prosperity, empire and revolution. It has served as a grand stage on which some of the proudest and most shameful episodes of global history have played out. Most of all, it has been a crossroads, a place where people and cultures intersect. To know its story, the one told by its buildings and streets, is to understand a little piece of some of the critical questions that need to be answered about the Middle East. Who are its people? In what direction is its society moving? How does its culture fit into a globalized world?I. The NileThere is only one place you can start looking for answers to these questions. The Nile is Egypt, and Egypt is the Nile. The two are inextricably linked by the bonds of nature and history, including at least 9000 years of agriculture. For millennia, the river’s waters have soaked into the ground, the grain has grown, and the people of Egypt have ground it into aish. Bread. Life. The word means both, and each means the other. In the midst of a sea of sand, the Nile boldly cuts a green swath, offering sustenance, safety and civilization. The river was, at times, a cruel benefactor, surging beyond its usual plain during the yearly flood, submerging everything for miles around and wiping the landscape clean. Other years, it failed to rise, the crops would wither, and the desert would temporarily advance. The riverbank dwellers learned how to weather the bad times with great granaries, irrigation and waterworks. When all else failed, there were always their prayers. More often than not, the pleas were answered, and the people prospered. This paradigm has changed little in the modern era. The vision of Egypt from space today, mottled brown bisected by a thin line of emerald, terminating in the great fan-shaped flourish of the delta, is nearly identical to what one would have seen from the same vantage point thirty centuries ago. The borders of the modern nation, straight lines running through depopulated deserts, are nearly discardable pieces of political fiction. The chief psychological border in Egypt, as it was in ancient times, is the line separating the Nile valley, home to nearly all its people, from the expanse of desert. The Ancient Egyptians, whose cosmology was chiefly one of dualities, put great importance on this division. One of their chief gods, Osiris, was associated with the Nile through his status as the source of sprouting crops and the annual floods. Though god of death, he was also god of resurrection, and so represented the ultimate triumph of life, much as the verdant river defied the dry lands that surrounded it. It was he who taught the Egyptians the arts of civilization, including agriculture. His brother, Set, was his polar opposite. Lord of the Desert and of Chaos, god of foreigners, Set embodied the Other. He was responsible for anything that stood in contrast to Egyptian civilization and the river that flowed through it. Though originally seen as a natural and necessary counterpoint to Osiris and his realms, later Egyptians would equate Set, and by extension the desert, with evil.(McDevitt)Thus, it is only natural geographically, theologically and psychologically that Cairo’s heart, as with all Egyptian cities before it, is the Nile. It is constantly crowded with sailboats, barges, police ships and faluka, the touristy motorboats that take passengers on brief cruises of a mile or so. On shore, there seems to always be a crowd on the Corniche, the waterfront promenade extending for miles along both banks. The waterfront is densely packed with skyscrapers, and the Egyptian Museum, the Parliament and Midan Tahrir, the city’s chief public square, are all a stone’s throw away from the water.Between its storied past and its fast-paced present, the river seems to often act as a mirror to the society that lives upon and around it. In its current form, the picture it paints of Egypt is a complex one. Modern innovation has allowed Egyptians, for the first time, to subvert the river to their will, rather than the other way around. In medieval times, the city center was located quite far from the river, keeping it at a safe distance from the yearly flood. Today, the great towers and important governmental buildings of the new Cairo come right up to the water’s edge, built on reclaimed land. The flood, once the source of so much chaos, no longer even occurs. Hundreds of miles away, at Aswan, a great dam now regulates precisely the flow of water. Of course, modernization has had its costs. Though the river no longer brings mayhem, nor does it carry vital nutrients from upstream, forcing Cairenes to import more and more food as local output dwindles. The problem of pollution, a concern throughout the city, is especially striking at the river, given its great symbolic significance. Thousands of years on, the Nile is still treated as a garbage dump, with devastating effects. The water gleams with oil slicks. Boats occasionally must cruise through great patches of garbage like icebreakers cutting though a winter pack. The joke, among my friends and me, was that you would not want to even touch the water; by the time you pulled your hand out, your fingers would have already disintegrated. The Corniche is an excellent example of both the success and failure of Egypt as a modern state. Built in the 1950s under socialist president Gamal Abdel Nasser, it still serves the purpose for which it was constructed: to serve as a social space for all Egyptians. It even managed to get in a dig at the British, who only a short while before had ruled the country. To make way for the promenade’s completion, the gardens of the British Embassy were, to the cheers of the public, leveled. The nightly outings of fathers, mothers, daughters and sons offer a glimpse of the impressive importance Egyptians place on the family.Yet there are also jarring signs of the socioeconomic issues facing the country. The crush of pedestrians in the evening is due not just to the locale’s beauty, but also to the lamentable lack of public space elsewhere in the city. The children begging in the shadow of luxury apartment buildings highlight the deep economic divide that rends the country into haves and have-nots. The hulking pleasure boats and floating restaurants, occupying what is supposed to be public space and blocking views, are one of the excesses of a country that has swung 180 degrees on economic policy, from the stifling socialism of the 50s and 60s to the unchecked, unplanned development of the present day. II. Old CairoThe origins of Cairo, like so much of Middle Eastern history, are ancient, complicated and confusing. Although the area had been settled in ancient Egyptian times, and the nearby city of Memphis, founded around 3000 BCE, held great strategic importance, it would only rise to prominence over a period of centuries. The first major structure still extant, a Roman fortress with the grandiose name of Babylon (stemming, perhaps, from a yet-earlier building constructed by Babylonians around the 6th Century BCE, during the Persian Empire), once collected tolls from river craft crossing the boundary between Lower and Middle Egypt and is today the oldest building in the city. Around its walls grew a town that is now referred to as Coptic Cairo. A crossroads even before the formation of the eponymous Christian sect, the town is said to have played host to the Holy Family during the “Flight into Egypt,” when a young Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, sought refuge from the wrath of King Herod. They were not the only persecuted group to take up residence in Coptic Cairo during its early history. The Christian community that took root in the centuries after Jesus was, as it is today, overwhelmingly composed of Copts, who were seen as heretics and oppressed by the Catholic Church. It also played host to a number of Jews, another group that faced persecution during the Roman and Byzantine periods.(Egyptology Online)It was disgruntled religious minorities such as they who enthusiastically supported the Arab invasion of Egypt in 641. Immediately upon arrival, the Arabs established the fortress city of Fustat just to the north of Coptic Cairo, and thus began the area’s traditional status as administrative capital of Egypt. They established the first mosque on the continent and used the city as a staging point for their conquests of the rest of North Africa. It was during this period that Cairo as an influential and, predominantly, Islamic metropolis began to take shape.Over the ensuing centuries, Fustat would be conquered and re-conquered by a succession of different dynasties. This resulted in the construction of several new centers of power, each slightly removed from the preexisting city, until the Abbasid dynasty’s second conquest of Egypt in 905 returned Fustat proper to preeminence. Under the Fatimid Caliphate in the late 900s, yet another new city was established north of Fustat. In honor of the arrival of the Fatimid Caliph, it was christened al-Qahira, “the victorious”. Though the government would remain in Fustat, the new city, known in English as Cairo, became a great center of learning, home to a library of hundreds of books and Al-Azhar University, the second-oldest degree-granting university in the world.()When, in 1168, Fustat had to be burned to protect Cairo from invading crusaders, the administration was moved to the latter locale. In time, the new capital would lend its name to the amalgamation of all previous cities situated nearby. Though Cairo would finally be fixed as the permanent center of government, the nature of how the city, and the nation, would be administered remained the same: through military might. The next year, the new Sultan of Egypt, Saladin, began construction of the intimidating citadel that, almost a thousand years later, still looms large, visually and psychologically, over the old city. Today, it hosts the National Military Museum, an expansive complex given over to the glorification of the armed forces. Now, as then, the military is chief powerbroker in Egypt.(Lev)Through it all, Cairo continued to flourish and, after the Mamluk dynasty came to power in 1250, even benefited from several centuries of relative geopolitical stability. While Baghdad, crown jewel of the Muslim world, and much of the remainder of the region was ravaged by the Mongol invasions in the 2nd half of the 13th century, the Mamluks managed to prevent a similar fate from befalling Egypt. Subsequently, Cairo would become the cultural capital and most populous city in the Arab World, a status it has retained into the modern era. Its importance was further heighted by its position at the crossroads of the spice trade routes between Europe and Asia. Wealthy and confident, the city expanded and developed into a cultural and economic powerhouse that, by 1340, was home to almost half a million people, more than any city west of China. It is their magnificent mosques, elaborately ornamented buildings and bustling markets that compose much of what is now thought of as Old Cairo. Even today, looking down a richly appointed street or staring up at the soaring al-Azhar Mosque in the old quarter, it is easy to imagine, as the Cairenes of the time must have, that such a successful city had nowhere to go but up. (Shillington)As history tells us, however, Cairo’s splendorous pride of place would be fleeting. In 1348 the Black Death passed through the city for the first time, leaving in its wake 200,000 corpses and a society, like that of Europe’s, no longer so assured of god’s grace. Through the early 16th century, the plague struck more than fifty more times, reducing Cairo’s population to perhaps as little as 150,000. (Shoshan) Meanwhile, Europe, which since the collapse of the Roman Empire had been a backwater, entered the Renaissance and began to progress technologically once more. In one of the first major expeditions of the “Age of Exploration,” in 1497, Vasco da Gama successfully sailed around Africa to India, circumventing the Arab World entirely. The spice trade through Cairo disappeared almost overnight. 20 years after losing its economic preeminence, its political sovereignty disappeared with the 1517 Ottoman conquest. For the first time since the destruction of Baghdad, Cairo was merely a second city, this time subservient to Istanbul. Though still culturally important, and with a certain degree of economic vitality remaining through the trade in coffee and textiles, the Ottoman city was in many ways a mere shadow of its former self. Tellingly, its story as a mere provincial capital during the period is considered a rather inconsequential time, during which Egyptian culture and society remaining relatively static. (Tour Egypt)III: The Early Modern EraThough it remained under the Ottoman yoke for hundreds of years, Egypt retained a separate identity. Arabic continued to be the language of daily life, and native customs survived most attempts at encroachment by Turkish ones. The Mamluks, the previous rulers, continued to be a privileged military caste, holders of most of the country’s land and, thus, its wealth and power, as personal fiefs. Within a century of the Ottomans’ arrival, the Mamluks would once again wield political power, nominally at the behest of their Turkish overlords. By the 1760s, the Mamluk beys, or rulers, had driven the Ottoman governor from the country, effectively reclaiming Egypt’s independence. The new leadership would open the Port of Suez to shipping, repositioning the nation as an important link in the network of world trade. (Metz)Egypt’s growing wealth did not go unnoticed by the expanding empires of Europe. Of special importance was the country’s strategic position, between the Mediterranean and Red Seas and, therefore, Great Britain and her most economically vital colony, India. The nation got its first taste of European control in 1798 when, in a bid to cleave that link, the French, under Napoleon Bonaparte, invaded. Within a month, the Nile Delta and Cairo fell, the Mamluks having retreated to Upper Egypt. Nevertheless, the French position was precarious, as they faced the enmity of the Mamluks, the Ottomans (who still claimed sovereignty over the country) and the British. In October of that year, the people of Cairo rioted. Though the French claimed, as they did elsewhere in the Napoleonic period, to have delivered the people from oppressive local rule rule, their presence was still seen as an occupation, made especially onerous by the fact that the French were not even fellow Muslims. The religious element of the protests was made clear by their rallying place, Al Azhar Mosque and University. The mosque’s leaders, who by that time were the preeminent moral authorities in Sunni Islam, thus began to take on a political role. The transformation of the mosque into a place of worldly influence continues into the present era, where the rulings and proclamations that echo through its loudspeakers reverberate throughout the Muslim world, and form an important part of Islamic jurisprudence as it addresses the new challenges of the 21st century. By mid-1801, despised by the locals and defeated by an Anglo-Ottoman army, the French had left Egypt for good. Internally, the occupation’s impact was be limited by its short duration. Externally, however, it gave Europeans their first real glimpse at the country, thanks to the observations and discoveries of the scientists who accompanied Napoleon. The “Egyptomania” their writings and sketches stoked in the West generated continued interest in the country. For the moment, however, Egypt remained free from foreign rule. The power-struggle in the aftermath of the French occupation resulted in the downfall of both the Mamluks and the Ottomans. Muhammad Ali, leader of the Albanian contingent of the Ottoman force in the country, managed to play both sides off one another until, by 1805, he had become the leader of the nation. The decaying Ottoman Empire was in no position to resist. In 1811, his only real rivals, the Mamluks, were defeated by a swift and total assassination campaign. Ali dedicated the rest of his rule, which lasted until 1848, to transforming Egypt into a modern, industrialized state, earning him the title of “Father of Modern Egypt.”Ali was successful at constructing weapons factories and shipyards and cultivating a cotton industry that, in later years, became one of Egypt’s most -353060-68516568580049530Four views of Cairo. Preceding page (from top): Cairo in 1847(Baur and Szultz), Cairo in 1888(Thuillier), Cairo in 1933(Nicohosoff), Satellite image of Cairo today(Google, TerraMetrics)important. Notwithstanding, his impact on Cairo’s cityscape was, with one exception, quite modest. This was due in part to stagnant population growth over the course of his reign, a result of epidemics and competition from rapidly developing Alexandria. Furthermore, salary growth in rural areas, amounting to a quadrupling in farm wages during Ali’s rule, kept people in their native villages. The exception, however, was a stunning one. The Mosque of Muhammad Ali, commissioned in 1830 as the ruler’s state mosque and not completed until 1857, is today the most prominent structure in Cairo’s citadel. Its soaring white domes and slender minarets are visible for miles around and serve as a symbol of the city. The building is a political statement as much as an architectural one, as the style of its minarets and domes were reserved for mosques built by the Ottoman Sultan. This implied Ali was a leader on par with the one in Constantinople and Egypt was, therefore, an independent state. In contrast to Ali’s relatively light imprint on the city aside from the mosque, his grandson Ismail was directly responsible for downtown Cairo as we know it. Ismail (r. 1863-1879) ruled during a time of rapid change for both the city and the nation. When he came to the throne Cairo had already been connected by railway to Alexandria, and thus Europe, for a decade, allowing a flood of European visitors and immigrants into the city. During the early years of his reign the economy grew tremendously thanks to the American Civil War, which forced Britain to look from the American South to Egypt as a supplier of cotton, the engine of England’s textile industry. Demand surged, more than tripling the crop’s export value between 1862 and 1864.Flush with cash and confidence, Ismail was invited to the Paris Exposition of 1867 as a special guest of Emperor Napoleon III. Like the other visitors, the Khedive of Egypt marveled at Paris’ distinctive, beautiful and brand-new urban environment, consisting of wide avenues, formal parks and ornate department stores, which rapidly became the template for a modern city. Baron Haussmann, the architect of the new Paris, even met personally with Ismail and his entourage, no doubt heightening the interest of a ruler who wanted his country to be the equal to Europe in all matters. He returned home determined to create a similar city, at the cutting edge of industrialism, rationalism and design. Furthermore, he did not want to wait the nearly two decades it took for Hausmann’s plans to be carried out. He wanted it done in just two years, in time for the opening of the crown jewel of Egypt’s economic progress, the Suez Canal.Thankfully, Ismail chose not to overlay his new city on top of the old, as the Parisians had done, but rather chose to lay out whole new neighborhoods west of the city’s old core, right along the banks of the river. Like Haussmann’s Paris, the streets were laid out in straight lines, with roundabouts for intersections. The land alongside was subdivided into plots for apartments and villas. Though the European expatriate community complained that the essential character of the city was being destroyed, they could not refuse the deal Ismail, desperate to meet his deadline, offered: free land to anyone who would build a structure worth at least 30,000 francs within 18 months. Thus, the new neighborhoods began to fill up quickly. As there were few Egyptians trained in architecture or engineering, they were primarily designed and built, as well as owned, by Europeans. Many of the professionals and laborers were Italian, and so Cairo is home to many Italian Renaissance-style buildings, complete with Tuscan columns. The preeminent aesthetic influence, however, was French. The city has hundreds of structures that, with their baroque styling and wrought-iron balconies, would not look out of place on one of Hausmann’s boulevards. A few of the streets and squares in the downtown are still lined with the block-long, wall-like series of buildings with similar facades Parisians call immeubles haussmannien. Before long, Cairo acquired all the amenities of a wealthy modern city. It had a new train station and gasworks, grandiose commercial buildings and palatial hotels. Barillet-Deschamps, architect of the Champ de Mars park in Paris, created a grand French-style pleasure garden, complete with exotic trees, a lake, tea rooms and a photography studio. Nearby, the Khedive himself had an opera house constructed in just five months using forced labor. He even commissioned Verdi to write the opera “Aida,” originally to inaugurate the opera during the celebrations marking the opening of the Suez Canal. Unfortunately, the costumes were not ready, and so “Rigoletto” was performed instead. It is a testament to the sheer force of human ambition that this was the urban landscape that welcomed visitors to the canal-opening fête, whereas a mere two years before the area had not even been part of the city. The royalty of Europe and their large entourages descended on Cairo, and were put up in style, often in the Khedive’s own palaces. If one was rich, the entire year was “one big festival of balls, banquets, theaters, operas and horse races.” (Fox) The locales created to host the crowned heads of state were so luxurious many have stayed in continuous use to this day; the palace the Khedive constructed for the Emperor and Empress of France, for instance, is today the Cairo Marriott, and its surrounding neighborhood, the mid-Nile island of Zamalek, is presently the most up-market residential area in the entire country. Though Cairo had been transformed into a glittering metropolis, it would, in the end, come at the cost of both its architect and his country. When the cotton boom burned out as the American South recovered from the American Civil War, the Khedive began to raise Egypt’s already high taxes, fomenting great public discontent. Even this could not pay off his huge debts. In 1879, his European creditors informed him that his lavish spending had resulted in a national debt of 100 million pounds. Given the exorbitant arrears owed to them, British and French governments insisted upon, and received, advisory power over the Egyptian treasury. That June, the British and French counsels visited Ismail and demanded he surrender his estates and become a constitutional monarch. With neither economic leverage nor popular support, he was forced to comply. When, that same year, a nationalist movement gathered steam under the leadership of Colonel Ahmed Urabi, Ismail failed to oppose it, at first because he thought it could free him from European oversight and, later, because it had simply grown too strong. Concerned the revolt would weaken their influence over the country, Britain had Ismail deposed and replaced by his more pliable son, Tewfik. When Urabi’s revolt showed no sign of diminishing, the British invaded and crushed the rebellion. For the next seventy years Egypt would, in effect, be a colony of Britain. After the start of the British occupation at the dawn of the 1880s, the cotton market recovered and Cairo continued with its breakneck pace of expansion. The turn-of-the-century introduction of trams allowed suburbs and satellite cities to grow up around the core. One of the earliest and most successful was Heliopolis, established in 1905 by the Belgian architect and banker Baron Empain. Built on a plot of desert 15 km from Cairo as a pleasant residential area for wealthy Europeans and Egyptian aristocrats, the new settlement was linked to downtown Cairo by a tramway, the city’s first. Empain also constructed a sporting club, horse track, amusement park and the Heliopolis Palace Hotel. Then the most extravagant hotel on the entire continent, it fell into disuse in the 1960s and 1970s, but today serves as the Presidential Palace. Though the city’s buildings (at least in neighborhoods frequented by the wealthy) continued to lean heavily on France stylistically, certain elements of native art and design began to creep into the vernacular, both within Egypt and abroad. This was spurred especially by two important archeological discoveries that reinvigorated the world’s fascination with ancient Egypt. The bust of Nefertiti, discovered in 1912, became the most copied piece of Egyptian art and significantly influenced the 20th Century’s new standard of beauty. The 3300-year old tomb of Tutankhamen, unearthed in 1922, triggered a craze for all things Egyptian. The artifacts found inside, with their luxurious appearance, use of lustrous materials like gold and lapis lazuli, strongly contrasting colors and geometric and animal motifs, became some of the principal sources of inspiration for the emerging Art Deco style in Europe and the United States. The transfer of Ancient Egyptian style then came full circle; after being unearthed in its native land and reinterpreted by the West, it returned in the form of the Art Deco buildings constructed in Cairo during the 20s and 30s. In the latter decade, the architecture became more explicitly Egyptian, with many architects openly embracing “scarabs, cobras and other pharaonic motifs.”(Fox)IV: The Post-Colonial EraThe sociopolitical foundations on which Egypt rested during the first half of the 20th century were anything but firm. While the European community lived in modern opulence, most native Egyptians had a far lower standard of living. Politically, the masses, including the growing middle class, felt oppressed. The British had complete control over political life in the country, and sought to curb dissent as much as possible. After a widespread, violent revolution in 1919, Britain unilaterally declared Egypt an independent constitutional monarchy, with the sitting heir to Muhammad Ali, Sultan Fuad I, as king. This failed to quell popular discontent, as the British still ruled the country behind the scenes, while their occupying army and officials continued to be present. After WWII, with an anti-imperialist Labor Party government in power in Britain, British troops were withdrawn to the Suez Canal Zone, but further negotiations stalled over the long-contentious issue of Sudan, which was an integral part of Egypt to Egyptian nationalists, but a distinct nation deserving full sovereignty in the eyes of the British and Sudanese. Meanwhile, the monarchy, already unpopular for its ties to the British and aura of corruption and decadence, lost further support over King Farouk’s (r. 1936-52) incompetent handling of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In 1951, the crisis came to a head when parliament unilaterally abrogated the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, which governed relations with the United Kingdom and guaranteed a continuing British military presence in the Canal Zone. The next year, rioting broke out in Cairo, resulting in the destruction of hundreds of British-owned establishments and other symbols of the Western presence. With neither the King nor any party in Parliament capable of channeling the populist anger, a third group seized the opportunity. The Free Officers, a group of young military officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a hero of the ’48 war, overthrew King Farouk in a coup d’état on July 23rd, 1952. Within a year, the monarchy was formally abolished and the Arab Republic of Egypt was born. The ensuing decade was marked deeply by Nasser’s socialist policies and his warm relationship with the Soviet Union. At the same time, Egypt’s nationalization of Western assets, especially the Suez Canal, strained ties with the West and even led to armed conflict with France and Britain during the Suez Crisis of 1956-57. Urbanization, industrialization and better living conditions for the poor were all high priorities of the government. As more peasants moved into Cairo looking for higher-paying jobs, its population ballooned into the millions. To house all the newcomers, the government began an ambitious program of housing construction, blanketing the city with Soviet-style tower blocks. During the same time period, Cairo began to acquire the trappings necessary for a fully independent state. A British barracks building by the Nile was torn down and replaced with Midan Tahrir, or Liberation Square, which became the city’s new focal point. Situated at the intersection of several busy streets a block from the Nile, the square is dominated by tall commercial buildings, including the Cairo Hilton, one of the oldest large Western hotels in the city, dating to just a few years after the revolution. Other anchors of the area include the downtown campus of the American University and the red-hued edifice of the Egyptian Museum. Just down the street is the headquarters of the Arab League, a testament to Nasser’s Pan-Arabist ideology, one of the most important schools of 20th century political thought in the region. Most imposing, however, is the Mugamma (office complex) Al-Tahrir, a Stalinist behemoth that looms like a grey battleship over the square. True, it was conceived and constructed in the early 1950s, the twilight years of the monarchy, but it is Nasser’s Egypt, with its huge, inefficient bureaucracy, that the building would become synonymous with. Within its warren of 1400 unmarked rooms are the offices of several ministries and the municipal government of Cairo. Though seemingly spacious enough to host the work of even the largest government, Nasser’s policy of guaranteed employment for college graduates swelled the ranks of the civil service to the point that many employees came by just once a month, to collect meager paychecks; there were not enough chairs for everyone to actually sit and work. The 18,000 or so who managed to fit inside were not known (and still are not) for their efficiency. Under Nasser, secretaries could often be found peeling potatoes or knitting sweaters. Even today, long lines are obligatory and Cairenes know one should either arrive early in the morning or not bother at all. (Farag)My own personal sojourn there, to have my visa renewed, began at 7 in the morning and lasted until 4 in the afternoon, when my second visa application was processed after the first was rejected for being in red ink. The interior was even more depressing that the outside, almost to the point of being impressive. It is dark, dingy, hot and crowded with thousands of weary citizens. It is a testament, perhaps, to the languid relationship Egyptians have with time that there is no screaming, no cries of frustration. It is all very orderly, very deadening and very much like a Kafka novel.If the Mugamma epitomizes the worst things about the new régime, another centerpiece of the downtown, the Cairo Tower just across the river in Gezira, is a reminder of the real progress the country made post-Revolution. The 187 m tall tube of latticework concrete (almost 50 m higher than the Great Pyramid) was built in the early 60s to convince the world of Egypt’s technological prowess as it attempted to build the Aswan Dam. The dam itself, completed in 1970, is a point of intense pride for Egyptians, an engineering triumph that defends against both flood and drought and that, upon completion, doubled the nation’s electrical output and allowed many villages access to electricity for the first time. The tower, for a long time the tallest structure in Egypt and, even today, Cairo’s most recognizable landmark, is a beguiling mix of ancient and modern motifs. The form itself is meant to evoke a lotus, an important flower to ancient Egyptians, while socialist-realist mosaics celebrating the people, industry and technology dominate the lobby. From its observation deck, one gets a rare treat: a beautifully unhindered perspective of the city, stretching for miles in every direction and covered in haze. Its no wonder Nasser often chose to dine at its rooftop restaurant and enjoy the view from the observation deck.The pervasive smog blanketing is but one symptom of the economic growing pains Egypt has experienced as an independent nation. Though growth occurred under Nasser, his successor, economic reformer Anwar Sadat (r. 1970-1981), managed to expand the GDP even faster. Expected by many to have a brief, caretaker presidency dwarfed by the shadow of his predecessor, Sadat instead surprised his critics by purging the government of the most ardent Nasserists and making sweeping changes to the highly bureaucratic, centralized command economy developed under Nasser. Under Sadat’s intifah, or “Open Door” policy, the economy was decentralized and diversified, with the goal of boosting trade and attracting foreign investment. In some respects, the changes worked; while the GDP grew 85% in the last decade of Nasser’s rule, it more than tripled in the 11 years Sadat was president(World Bank). On the other hand, inflation skyrocketed, inequality deepened and the removal of price controls led to food riots. The air quality problem is due largely to the biggest change to Cairo’s landscape over the last four decades, suburbanization. The growing middle and upper classes, tiring of the cramped quarters of the inner city, increasingly chose to live far from downtown. The government, concerned about urban encroachment onto scarce agricultural land, obliged by funding road construction and opening up state-owned land to development. Highways like 6th October Bridge, which after 30 years under construction now soars over the downtown and carries a staggering half of the city’s traffic everyday, pushed the edges of the city miles into the dunes. The demand has yet to abate: flying over the area, one can see miles of streets sketched out with lines in the sand, crisscrossing the desert with as-yet unfulfilled ambitions. Once a city of trams, Cairo, with a skyrocketing number of drivers, became one of the most notoriously traffic-choked places on earth. Even the construction of a metro system in the 80s and 90s, which now ranks as one of the world’s busiest, carrying 700 million riders per year despite running on a mere 40 miles of track (Montreal, with the same track mileage, manages just half the ridership), hasn’t alleviated the congestion problem. Interestingly, dealing with hours-long traffic jams has had a noticeable impact on society’s relationship with time. Meetings are set not for 6 o’clock, for instance, but rather, vaguely, “after the evening prayer.” The time Cairenes say they have to be somewhere is often, in fact, the time they leave the house. The other major effect of post-Nasser economic reform, coupled with the country’s shift from the Soviet to Western sphere of influence and peaceful relations with Israel after the 1979 peace treaty, was a blossoming of tourism. Arguably one of the world’s oldest (the pyramids appear in most of the classical world’s lists of wonders, predating Lonely Planet and Frommer’s by 2,000 years), Egypt’s tourism industry was significant during the colonial era, but had shriveled after the revolution. Friendship with the Soviet Union may have brought Egypt military and economic assistance, but the people of the Eastern Block were not prolific tourists. After the ideological and economic shift of the 1970s through the present era, however, tourism became a mainstay of the local economy. In 2007, 11 million foreign arrivals provided jobs for over 1.5 million people and generated 16.3% of GDP.The tourist presence in Cairo is both large and narrowly focused. In the core of the downtown, where the large luxury hotels are, westerners seem to be everywhere. On Midan Tahrir, dining options tend less towards ful and koshari and more towards Big Macs and KFC. Every day, hundreds swarm into the narrow alleys of Khan el-Khalili, where they delude themselves into thinking they are skilled hagglers as they walk off with items they were still charged double for. Arabic is seldom heard; shopkeepers shout instead in English, French, German and Spanish. In their neat uniforms, the tourism police stand ready nearby to assist any troubled traveler.Then, of course, there are the Pyramids, ground zero of the neat, orderly, Disneyfied Egypt of the Western traveler. If you have never been there yourself, perhaps you are imagining the structures among some pure desert vista, solitary and awesome in their grandeur. There is a camel in front of them, perhaps a palm tree, and little else. Now that you think about it, there would be other tourists, you suppose, but in your mind’s eye it has always been just you, the sand and the stones.Here is the reality. Each day, thousands of tourists clamber into air-conditioned busses, not caravans, and make the pilgrimage to Giza. Not Giza the outpost in the desert. Giza the sprawling suburb of an extremely large city. The subdivisions and shops end a few hundred feet from the Pyramids. The site is now a cul-de-sac of desert, with homes and businesses on three sides. Looking south, one still gets the pristine, endless landscape they were looking for, and it is perhaps only this satisfying intersection of imagination and reality that stops developers from paving over those dunes, too. The Sphinx is even worse; at its paws lie seating for a laser light show and, just beyond that…guess! A bazaar? Some pasha’s palace? No? Give up? A Pizza Hut. Of course, it is unfair to judge too harshly. The Pyramids, for all the jarring unexpectedness of their context, lived up to my personal conception of them better than most historical sites have. They really are man-made mountains, and contemplating how such monuments could have been created with nothing but primitive tools and willpower still boggles the mind. Though discovering that the Pyramids are a massive commercial enterprise can be disappointing, Egypt does have a right to profit off of them. Garish as they may seem, the souvenir hawkers and knickknack stands near the pyramids are injecting desperately needed money into a country where half the population lives on $2 per day. If a few postcard stands are staving off poverty for a family then, surely, their presence is worth it. After all, even the largest annoyances are still dwarfed by the grandeur of the monuments. Tourism is so crucial to the economy, in fact, that it has become a battleground in the war between Islamic extremists and the government in Egypt. Starting in the early 90s, foreigners started getting killed in the crossfire, mostly in small incidents usually aimed at strategic domestic officials and institutions rather than visitors. Then, in 1997, the violence ratcheted up tremendously. Gunmen from al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a group dedicated to turning Egypt into a theocracy, stormed the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, systematically killing more than 60 with guns and knives before mutilating some of the bodies. The attack horrified the world and was met with great sadness and mortification by most Egyptians. Not only did the attack deal a blow to their most important industry, but it also ran counter to the nation’s renowned welcoming spirit. For Egyptians, as for most Arabs, the way in which a person (and, by extension, a nation) treats its guests is one of the most important measures of virtue. Regardless of ideological differences, making a visitor’s stay as comfortable and pleasant as possible comes first. This might explain, for instance, why one of my fellow travelers in Egypt was hosted by a family that treated her with genuine warmth and generosity even as they admitted admiring Osama bin Laden. It is not cognitive dissonance that allowed them to reconcile these two roles, hosts for an American and Al Qaeda sympathizers, but rather the absolute seriousness with which Arab culture treats the concept of hospitality. Epilogue: Al-Azhar Park, Cairo, 9:10 pmWe stand at the wall, all eight or nine of us, looking out at the city from Al-Azhar Park, a verdant oasis clinging to a rise above the old city. It is a comfortable night, our last in Egypt. We want to make it last. Down below, millions of lights twinkle, a little diffused by the ever-present haze. A few yards away, couples talk in whispers beneath trees. Off to the left, someone has brought a radio blasting tinny pop music, and young people dance. It is odd, being on that hill, part of the city and yet above it, beyond it. Then, the calls start. First just one, faint and far away. It is joined by another, and then one more. Soon they begin chiming in by the dozen. The whole city reverberates with the evening call to prayer from its thousand minarets, chanted by muezzins each following slightly different clocks. The dancers shut off the radio; to have music playing during prayer time is rude, almost gravely insulting. A slight hush falls over the crowd, as if it must whisper so as not to disturb the devout. After a few moments, the call stops echoing and the sounds of the park return to the din of a few minutes before. People chat on cell phones and take pictures with digital cameras. Their photos, of friends and family against the glowing backdrop of the skyline, will probably end up on Facebook. Were it not for the sound of Arabic in the air and the ancient mosques silhouetted against the velvet sky, it was a scene that could have easily been taking place anywhere in the Western world. This was, in essence, the central conflict of the modern Middle East, playing out in front of me. On the one hand, the region feels the pull of a rich and glorious heritage, one responsible for many of the advances that made the modern world possible. Part of that heritage is a religion, Islam, that a small minority has corrupted into an extremist form that shuns the modern world as decadent and corrupt and seeks to roll back the tide of globalization. On the other, the region is but one part of a rapidly transforming planet, home to an emerging shared global culture based largely in Western values and norms. From the internet to blue jeans, the overwhelming majority reflect this shift in their consumption habits, if nothing else. The relationship between these two forces has been highly volatile and often violent. The present moment is, by all accounts, a watershed moment for the Middle East, in which it must decide what political and cultural course to choose. Though this narrative of conflict is compelling, it is not a new one. For centuries, Cairo has been a place where faiths, ideas, cultures and peoples collide and combine. Its residents are a mixture of African, European and Arab. They dress like westerners, shop at malls and watch Hollywood movies. They also maintain many of their customs, foods and celebrations. As this brief overview has, hopefully, shown, the city itself mirrors the hybrid nature of Egypt and its people. Medieval mosques bump against glassy skyscrapers and colonial villas. It is, in general, a peaceful coexistence, with one era smoothly transitioning to next.As one walks its broad avenues and crooked alleyways, the question of the future often lies heavily on the mind. In a city with such a long and storied history, the realities of the present and indications of what is to come always seem to lie in the past. What does the city say to the modern observer? It suggests Cairo will continue to be a dynamic place, a cultural and economic powerhouse. Critically in this age of intercultural conflict, the cityscape reminds us of a tradition of heterogeneity stretching back to the city’s origins. Cairenes continue to live, and Cairo continues to exist, at the convergence of many different cultures. Though this can and has led to conflict, then as now, this characteristic also clearly enriches the city and its people. The existential crises of the modern Middle East are, indeed, worrisome, but the city is a proven survivor. The mosques of the old city, survivors of a thousand years of struggle, continue calling the people to prayer each day. The Europeans’ ornate buildings and elegant avenues maintain their grandeur, long after their builders left. The Mugamma, for better or worse, has weathered the transition to capitalism and a half-century of intense public hatred. The Pyramids, already ancient when Cairo was founded, still dominate the area and no doubt will outlast most other works of mankind. Whatever fate throws its way, the record shows, Cairo will, as it has so many times before, live up to its full name. Medinat al-Qahira. The City Victorious.Hijab, East and WestA few days after I arrived in Egypt, a young pharmacist named Marwa el-Sherbini returned to her native Alexandria, several years after immigrating to Germany with her husband. Her journey back to Egypt began in Dresden, where she stood across a courtroom from Alex W., a 28 year-old stock controller. A year earlier, she had asked the man to move off of a swing for her toddler. Her religion apparent due to her headscarf, she was met with screams of “terrorist and “Islamist whore.” The accused, an immigrant from Russia, had appealed the court’s decision to fine him 780 Euros for insulting and abusing her. Though his aggressively racist sentiments had been made clear, there was no extra security for the appeal hearing. This made it easy for Alex W. to smuggle in a knife. He strode across the courtroom and plunged it eighteen times into the pregnant Sherbini as her 3 year-old son looked on. As her husband ran over to help her, he was shot and critically injured by a police officer, who mistook him for the attacker. By the time the plane carrying Sherbini’s casket touched down, the press had already dubbed her “The Headscarf Martyr.” (Connolly)Perhaps no issue sums up the friction between East and West, and between different elements of Middle Eastern society, quite like the question of Islamic dress. From being banned in France to being imposed in Iran, hijab has played a central role in the discussion on what, exactly, should and should not be worn by Muslim women. In this debate, one can see a microcosm of the broader issues affecting both sides: immigration, religion, identity and women’s rights. In the United States, Islamic dress is perceived as a foreign issue. Comprising just 0.6% of the population, a little more than Hindus and a little less than Buddhists, and generally considered more assimilated than comparable populations in Europe, Muslims in America usually seem to barely register on the nation’s social consciousness. Under the stringent protections of religious practice prescribed by the first amendment, a woman’s right to wear hijab in the United States is effectively universal. Almost all legal cases dealing with the issue of whether the scarf is permissible, in contexts as varied as a jail, a Navy training program, America Airline’s hiring policy and a 6th grade classroom in Muskogee, Oklahoma, have been found in favor of the wearer. (Headscarf Headlines)The situation in European countries, whose immigrant communities are often more isolated from the rest of society, is markedly different. The debate over dress was stoked by the 2004 ban on religious wear in public schools in France, a nation that is 6% Muslim, the highest proportion in Western Europe (Miller). To its proponents, the ban, which also applies to crucifixes and yarmulkes, was necessary to protect both the secular nature of the French Republic and women and girls forced into religious conformity. To its critics, the ban is at best an affront to the rights of free expression and free religion. Some even go as far to say it is a codification of anti-immigrant hostility rooted in racism. (What are the issues, Human Rights Watch)Since much of the politics surrounding hijab in the Middle East are a reaction to Western criticism of it, noting the status of hijab in various locales outside the region is helpful to an understanding of its status within it. Attitudes toward Islamic dress have changed markedly over the last few decades, part of a broader regional trend away from the relative secularism of the decades after WWII. Thus, even as its use has been restricted in some Western European countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, as well as France, the wearing of hijab has undergone a resurgence in its birthplace.Therefore, when I arrived in Egypt, almost a decade into the 21st century, I came across far more women wearing hijab than I would have forty or fifty years earlier. As I walked down the street with my host brother on my first night, I could not help remarking on a woman covered completely from head to toe with a garment that only had a slit for her eyes.“This is not so common in Egypt,” Mahmoud said, “Here women can dress as they like. It is about half who wear the hijab and half who do not. But it is rare for women to dress in the Afghan way. The Grand Mufti has only said women must dress modestly and wear the headscarf.” My host brother, I would come to see, was playing down the prevalence of the niqab, the full head-to-toe covering. Although certainly in the minority, I saw women wearing it every day. He also clearly misrepresented the proportion of the population who wore headscarves. I would estimate upwards of 90% of Muslim women in Cairo wear them. Although he did not say so explicitly, I think my brother may have been minimizing the issue of the headscarf because he saw Westerners as having a negative perception of it.So why is it that so many more Egyptian women are wearing headscarves today? It is not necessarily that the modern Egyptian woman is more conservative than her mother, who likely grew up in an era in which Egypt may have looked more westernized in matters of style. If the number of women sitting with boyfriends on the Nile Corniche is anything to go by, the new generation has more liberal attitudes when it comes to conduct. The trend has much to do with identity politics. As one Middle East expert explained, it is akin to the fashion trends of the 1970s, when African Americans responded to racism by being, as he put it, “blacker than black,” leading to the age of the giant afro. For many women, according to this expert, hijab is a way of asserting one’s Muslim identity in the face of the westernizing and, to many people, explicitly anti-Muslim pressures exerted by Europe and the United States. (Dorph)However, increasing religiosity in many sectors of society has played an important role in hijab’s rise in prevalence. Modesty in dress is a key cultural touchstone of the Islamic Revival, the aforementioned region-wide movement towards greater religious influence over civic and social life. The revival began in the 1970s with a quadrupling of oil prices, which gave Saudi Arabia immense financial resources. The country’s ruling House of Saud dedicated much of the windfall towards spreading its conservative, fundamentalist strain of Islam, known in the West as Wahhabism, to the broader Middle East. Meanwhile, the 1979 revolution in Iran toppled an American-backed government and replaced it with an Islamic theocracy. The rapid, stunning events in Iran, culminating in the 444-day long hostage crisis at the US Embassy, called into question the power of the United States. As a result, a growing number of Middle Easterners joined what was once the religious fringe in questioning whether Westernization was either desirable or inevitable. Of course, any pan-national movement looks different in each country. In Egypt, the success of Islamic Revivalism has much to do with the failure of the government to live up to the expectations of the masses. The first leader of the Egyptian Republic, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who came to power soon after the 1952 Revolution overthrew the monarchy, was a secular, pan-Arab nationalist. His successors, Anwar el Sadat (president from 1970 to 1982) and Hosni Mubarak, the current president, held similarly unenthusiastic attitudes towards Islam that put them out of touch with the increasing religiosity of the people. Meanwhile, the state of the economy grew progressively worse over the course of the 70s, 80s and 90s, to the point where, today, the number of unemployed tops 7 million (compared to 200,000 in 1960) and more than 20% of the country lives on less than a dollar a day. (Unemployment in Egypt, Reuters). The political situation also fomented discontent, as promises for political reform came to naught (the country has yet to have a free and fair election). Nothing triggered anger against the Egyptian regime more than its assignation, after the 1973 Yom Kippur, or October, War, to a peace treaty with Israel. Israel is, it almost goes without saying, a country Egyptians universally disdain. Two years after the 1979 signing, the man responsible for Egypt’s consent to the treaty, President Sadat, would be violently assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists during Armed Forces Day celebrations. By then, the great hopes of the early years of the republic, when Egypt was the undisputed leader in the region and chief defender of Arab nationalism, had clearly faded. Disillusioned Egyptians turned in large numbers to the opposition, an Islamist, arguably extremist, group that has been the populist underdog since the days of British rule: The Muslim Brotherhood. From a schoolteacher and six employees of the Suez Canal Company in the late 20s, an era also rife with resentment toward Western imperialism, the Muslim Brotherhood has grown to a transnational movement that functions as the opposition across much of the Arab World. It seeks to unite all Muslim nations into a single caliphate, governed by the social and political dictates laid out by the Quran. As per its interpretation of Islam, it also strives for social justice and the eradication of poverty and corruption, which has led it to operate a large system of charitable organizations throughout the Middle East. Though officially nonviolent, the organization has long been suspected of engaging in assassinations, bombings and other destructive acts, include the fires that swept the haunts of Cairo’s local and expatriate elites in 1952, an event that “marked the end of the liberal, progressive, cosmopolitan direction that Egypt might have chosen.” (Wright)Although outlawed, the group’s popularity, with the working class especially, has nevertheless caused the Egyptian president to go to great lengths to out-pious the pious. Recently, this effort was directed at the pig, an animal that, while vilified as unclean in Islam, has long served as the primary means of waste disposal in Cairo. Thus, when I arrived, the streets were even dirtier than usual; mere weeks earlier, the government had ordered, based on no scientific evidence, the slaughter of every pig in the country in an effort to prevent the spread of “Swine Flu”, the H1N1 virus. Though the decision made a bad sanitation problem worse for all Cairenes, it was a complete disaster for the pigs’ owners, members of the already-embattled Christian minority. It was, clearly, a policy based on religious and political, rather than scientific, concerns. (Clashes)The religious revival movement the Muslim Brotherhood is a part of, whose followers believe the Quran is clear in calling for women to cover their hair with the headscarf, has increased social pressure on women to wear the veil. An anonymous email circulating in Egypt contains illustrations comparing a woman in proper Islamic dress to a wrapped piece of candy, and a woman in provocative Western dress to an unwrapped piece, covered in flies. The message below reads :“A veil to protect, or eyes will molest.” Sexual harassment is, indeed, a problem in Egypt, and many supporters of the headscarf capitalize on the issue by arguing that hijab can actually be liberating, deemphasizing one’s physical appearance. It engenders respect and also provides a feeling of protection in a society plagued by rampant sexual harassment. There is, however, also the counter-argument that covering hair actually makes a woman more alluring. Given the fact that, of the 83% of Egyptian women who say they have experienced harassment, 72% say they were wearing the veil at the time, this argument may have merit. At a bare minimum, the statistic suggests veiled women are no safer than the unveiled. (Knickmeyer)Clearly, there are many reasons a woman may wear the headscarf, and making a blanket assumption equating the headscarf with oppression is incorrect. However, the Middle East also has much to do in advancing the cause of women. In most rankings of gender inequality, the Middle East falls at or near the bottom compared to other regions. The literacy rate for women in Egypt is only 71% of that of men. (EarthTrends) Egyptian feminists say that, although the general attitude towards women has improved, the privatization of the economy, and the subsequent rise in unemployment, has disproportionately affected women. Many employers are unwilling to pay for “extra” expenses women employees can incur, such as maternity leave. (Moll)The American girls in our group experienced a little of what life as an Egyptian woman was like firsthand. Some of them chafed at their host families’ requirement that they be home by seven or eight while their male classmates could stay out until twelve or later. They also had trouble adjusting to a family structure wherein their host brother, three or four years their junior, could tell them what to do. They were much more restricted than the boys were in terms of dress and conduct. Worst of all, many experienced the catcalling, looks and unsolicited conversation that has earned Egypt a reputation as one of the worst countries for female foreign travelers in terms of harassment; one can only imagine the effect of having to put up with it for an entire lifetime.What Westerners need to avoid when approaching women’s lives in the Middle East is what our media has done: paint with a broad brush. The status of women in the region varies wildly by class, family and location. In the last year, Kuwait elected several women to Parliament (four years after women won the right to vote) (Kuwait) and Sudan sentenced a woman to a lashing for wearing pants. Even Saudi Arabia, practically a byword for religious conservatism, has a broad spectrum of views and conduct. Saudi women go about their day-to-day lives in full-body veils, but on a flight from Riyadh or Jeddah to liberal Beirut, before landing, a sea of black becomes a rainbow of fashionable shirts and jeans. At home, behind the cloth, many Saudi women lead active lives in medicine, education and other fields Westerners might not expect to see them in. (Gaouette)The women I met in Egypt were a group as diverse as any. Almost all the host mothers in our group were homemakers, but many had held jobs before starting families. The Egyptian volunteers included several female college students; one was even majoring in Hebrew and Israeli studies. I met several women who worked as professionals, including a relative of my host family who practiced medicine. These women were smart, educated, and could stand up for themselves. They also faced greater restrictions on their behavior and severe employment discrimination. Women only make up 25% of the labor force in Egypt, and have in the last four years experienced an unemployment rate of as high as 25%, three to four times as high as the rate for men, depending on the year (World Bank). Although the situation of women in Egypt cannot be categorized as the worst in the world, I did get the feeling that much of the country’s potential was being squandered because of the unfair hurdles that women had to negotiate. When I returned to the United States, it would be several weeks before I saw a woman in a headscarf, at a supermarket in Queens. She strolled nonchalantly down the aisle, taking things off the shelf and putting them in her cart. Around her swarmed dozens of people from different countries, chatting with their families in more languages than I could recognize. No one looked up in surprise at the woman’s dress. There were no shouted slurs defaming her religion. We were in the middle of the most ethnically diverse county in the United States and, yet, save for the multitude of dialects being spoken, the scene would not have been out of place in any store in the country at that moment, busy with people doing their Sunday shopping in more-or-less peaceful coexistence. It was, in many ways, quintessentially American. This got me thinking about the place of hijab, both here and abroad. When my parents were my age, seeing a woman in Islamic dress in the United States would be a rare event. It was only a few years earlier, in 1965, that Congress had done away with the national-origin immigration quotas that had kept America an overwhelmingly white, Christian nation. What has emerged in the decades since is a far more diverse, pluralistic society, one in which global issues have become local ones. The Middle East is no longer so far off. The question of where women’s rights fit within the context of both Middle Eastern culture and Western cultures experiencing immigration from the region has become one for societies worldwide. It is a question I ask not just because it affects me as a citizen of the world, or even as a citizen of the United States, a country now projected to be home to a Middle Eastern immigrant population of 2.5 million (Center for Immigration Studies). I ask it because, among the millions of women who wear hijab each and every day, are now a few I am proud to call friends.The Virtual Public Forum:Media and Democratizationin the Middle EastWhen I first arrived in Egypt, I made the assumption my host family weren’t big TV watchers. After all, the box in the living room had sat completely unused in the days immediately following my arrival. It was only well into my first week, as I walked into the room for dinner and saw a repairman hunched over the set with his tools, that I realized what was really going on. Soon enough, he had finished his work and turned the set back on. It was just before midnight. The shops were still busy and I could hear the shouts of playing children echoing from the street. Primetime.That night, and for many nights afterwards, I found myself transfixed. It was not due to any pre-existing television addiction on my part. American television could never compete with Arabic satellite television in terms of holding my fascination. Here, thousands of miles from home, it wasn’t just entertainment flooding the room with light. It was the collective consciousness of an entire region. Maybe, just maybe, there was also, embedded in what I was watching, the seeds of something else, tentative and fragile: a revolution.It was not so long ago that the media landscape of the Middle East had been very different. When television arrived in the 1960s, it offered little in the way of diversity. First and foremost, it served as an official mouthpiece for the people in power, playing up their accomplishments and ceremonies in newscasts. Any other programs were pure entertainment, devoid of even the weakest critical eye towards government and society. Shows imported from abroad were, though standards differed from country to country, universally subjected to censorship.Then, in the 1990s, CNN arrived on the screens of the small number of people with satellite dishes, just in time for the 1991 Gulf War. For societies that had virtually no previous access to international news coverage, what followed was a revelation. Audiences across the region were spellbound by the spectacle of a current event being shown in real time. More importantly, CNN, as a Western network, was unbeholden to the government of any Middle Eastern country and at no risk of having its operations shut down by an autocrat. Therefore, it could show events and have on-air discussion uncensored, with coverage in accordance with modern journalistic standards. Once the public had gotten a taste of what television could be, their appetite for it was unquenchable. With that demand grew a number of entrepreneurs eager to profit from the growing market and, in the process, gain strategic power over public opinion.(Wide Angle)These events created a perfect storm of technology, consumer demand and available capital, resulting in rapid changes to the media landscape. In September 1991, while oil wells still burned in Kuwait, a Saudi businessman launched the first privately owned station in the region, the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC). It was also the first to broadcast in Arabic and be staffed almost entirely by Arabs, a stark contrast to the already extant international news networks, mostly based in the United States and Europe. Since it was transmitted by satellite, it could be headquartered in London, where it would be free to broadcast uncensored news and opinion, and beamed into countries whose governments would have shut it down had it been a terrestrial station under their jurisdiction. Other stations quickly followed, and within a few years roofs from Morocco to Masqat would be blanketed in the now-ubiquitous satellite dish. By that point, even some Middle Eastern leaders were interested in making money off of the satellite boom. From our vantage point more than a decade down the road, we can affirm the prudence of their decision to invest. While oil supplies dwindle, media has seen near-exponential growth as a sector of the local economy. Spending on advertising, for instance, increased nearly 25% in 2007 and more than 22% in 2008, besting the rest of the world by far. The market is evolving so rapidly that even in 2010 and 2011, predicted to be “minor recovery” years for an industry strongly affected by the global economic crisis, ad spending in the Middle East will still see percentage-point increases in the double-digits(Traffic Online Media Solutions). Thus, Al Jazeera, the first 24-hour Arabic news network, launched in 1996, bankrolled by the emir of the relatively liberal nation of Qatar, where the network is based. Al Jazeera’s success was in large part due to its unedited debate shows, which often including a call-in component to allow for viewers to join the discussion and cover a broad swath of cultural, political, societal and economic issues. For the West, such a format is old and tired. For the Middle East, it was, at its inception, radical. The idea first introduced by Al Jazeera rapidly propagated amongst the many networks. The newfound freedom of public expression through talk shows was, for an Arab World home to not even one full-fledged democracy, irresistible. Despite flying in the face of the climate of censorship and conformity that had long been the status quo, governments were largely unable to hold back the push for openness. The nature of satellite technology put them in a bind. Satellite TV systems are set up to receive the signal from a specific satellite, or group of satellites, mostly carrying content aimed at the same region. In the Middle East, therefore, when one buys a dish and a box with the Arabic chip installed, one is effectively purchasing access to every Arabic-language channel in existence, in addition to a smattering of international channels such as CNN International. There is no way to block some channels while permitting others. The only way governments could avoid having their populations being exposed to content they don’t want them to see would be to ban the satellite dish entirely. Although this has happened in a few extreme cases, such as the Taliban’s reign in Afghanistan, most governments have not taken such a step, probably fearing the immense popular backlash it would no doubt trigger.Thus, a sort of proxy democratic society, existing purely on the airwaves, took shape over the course of the 1990s. Viewers everywhere could, for the first time, see, hear and, critically, discuss issues while thousands of mile apart. Topics long held as taboo, from criticism of the government to sexuality, became topics of conversation. Such conversations were unrestrained by boundaries; if it was being discussed on the most liberal talk show in Lebanon, it could be viewed in the most conservative household in Saudi Arabia. The satellite TV revolution also helped unify a region where shared history and culture were ignored by arbitrary, European-imposed borders, leading to much of the division and strife seen today. Two hundred and fifty satellite channels, hailing from every country but concentrated especially in the media hubs of Beirut, Lebanon; Cairo, Egypt; Doha, Qatar and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, now knit together the region. With the increasing number of shared cultural goods, from shows to movies to cultural icons, made possible by TV, the Arab World is arguably closer than ever before to the ideals of Pan-Arabism. Had that movement’s halcyon days of political favor in the 1960s coincided with the technology-fostered unity of today, the geopolitics of the Arab World might look vastly different.The question, invariably, is whether the virtual society Arabs have been participating in for almost two decades with their phone calls (and now their text messages) is effecting change in the real world. By some measures, it unquestionably is. The viewing public is now, through the myriad talk and call-in shows, accustomed to the idea of freedom of expression. By shining a light on societal and political ills, news programs can foster and increase momentum behind the forces of change. By making freedom, balance and diversity of opinion the norm, the satellite networks are prompting even the staid state-run channels to raise journalistic standards in order to avoid irrelevancy. Though few have ever cast ballots in a free and fair election, the very concept of voting is no longer alien; millions of votes now pour in by text message to competitions like Star Academy and Super Star. However, there is also cause for pessimism. For all its promise, the leap from telecommunications to democracy has, from Chinese dissidents and their fax machines in the ‘80s to twittering protesters in Iran last summer, often failed. Despite the aforementioned progress in public discussion, the on-the-ground reality of flawed governance has remained roughly the same. Freedom House, a non-profit organization that studies democracy and political freedom, identifies only two nations in the Middle East as electoral democracies: Turkey and Israel. Both nations are considered cultural, ethnic and political outliers in the region. In its 2009 Freedom in the World report, which measures a country’s level of freedom based on metrics drawn largely on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Israel was the only country in the region identified as “Free.” A handful of nations were ranked “Partly Free”, while the majority of nations, including regional powerbrokers Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, were ranked “Not Free”. (Freedom House)Furthermore, there is an argument to be made that widespread availability of satellite TV and Internet service can actually entrench dictatorships. “Authoritarian deliberation”, as it is known in political science, refers to the strategy being adopted by many regimes within the region, and globally, of actually allowing debate to occur. Though counterintuitive at first glance, doing so offers the government several advantages. A free discussion allows those in power the strategic advantage of hearing and seeing opposition opinion and its propagators, who would otherwise be underground and harder to follow. Information can therefore be gathered quickly and, especially on the internet, where people are linked through blog posts, Facebook and the like, associations between dissidents far more easily understood. Often, governments will not only allow, but also encourage, discussions and ideas with the false promise that they will be considered in the decision-making process. This charade not only placates the masses, by giving them the illusion that they can influence government, but also makes it easier to share the blame with them if something goes wrong. Last but not least, it confers a legitimacy upon the government that heavy-handed tactics cannot (TED Conferences). Though I knew during my time in Egypt that getting a safely private connection to the internet was impossible, the fact that, once on, I could easily access dissenting opinions nevertheless dulled the unease I felt at being in a dictatorship. This was, clearly, authoritarian deliberation at work. To dwell only on the news aspect of television in the Arab World would do a great disservice to the fascinating breadth of programming. The main reason I became interested in the topic, after all, was because of the incredible ability I had while watching TV to easily sample cultural products from dozens of countries. I could watch overly fashionable divas belt out love songs in Lebanese music videos on one channel, and listen to taciturn Saudi imams deliver sermons on the next. Reality shows provided spectacle, but so, too, did overwrought soap operas and hard-fought soccer games. Most of the time, at least when my host brothers were watching TV, I didn’t even have to worry about the language barrier. Unlike my host parents, who generally watched movies and talk shows produced locally, my host brothers mostly watched American shows and movies with Arabic subtitles. Many of the programs my host brothers watched regularly, predominantly sci-fi, mystery and action shows, were only vaguely familiar to me, obscure also-rans in the ratings race at home. They seemed to enjoy far more popularity in Egypt, reincarnated with Arabic subtitles, than in their country of origin. Perhaps, I surmised, these low-rated programs were cheaper to license. One the other end of the spectrum, a few channels down and a million miles away ideologically, was Al-Aqsa TV, the official station of Hamas. Nothing brought home to me how different the media landscape in the Middle East was compared to that of the United States more than the fact that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah could, and did, have their own television networks. It was both fascinating and, I must admit, a little disturbing to see first-hand programming from one of the world’s most prominent terrorist organizations. Al-Aqsa might be familiar to a western audience as the home of Tomorrow’s Pioneers, the children’s show that attracted widespread global condemnation a few years ago for being co-hosted by a hate-spouting Mickey Mouse-lookalike. The character, named Farfour, was broadcast across the world saying things like “you and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists!” In the face of the firestorm of criticism for using a beloved (read: copyrighted) character to spew hate speech, the writers killed Farfour off-literally. After his martyrdom at the hands of an Israeli official, who beat the mouse to death for calling him a terrorist (Episode 5: “Farfour and the Jew”), Farfour was replaced in quick succession by Nahoul the bumblebee, who died a martyr’s death after being unable to leave Gaza for medical treatment, and Assoud the suspiciously Bugs Bunny-like hare, who ends up martyred in an Israeli attack. Nassur, the current co-host, is a brown bear/mujahedeen(Staff Writers)(Associated Press). It would be almost comical, were it not for the fact it is, indeed, a real show, with a target audience the same age as that of Sesame Street. I was appalled but, to an even greater degree, saddened.The ideological landscape of television is by no means as black and white as the examples I gave. 500 channels leaves plenty of room for endless shades of gray. The picture that emerges is one not of polarization, but of complexity. Shows may use formats recycled from Western originals, but the content is totally native. Music videos borrow equally from MTV and local tradition, so that even the most fashionable performer is often accompanied by indigenous instruments such as the oud or the simsimaya. TV is usually a hybrid, sometimes uneasy and sometimes quite smooth, of outside influence and centuries-old tradition, just like Middle Easterners themselves. In short, television in the Middle East can be said to be much more than the sum of its parts. It’s a microcosm of the region. For a place as diverse and vast as it can be, I can think of little that could serve as a better encapsulation of the feelings and aspirations of its people. There’s a wonderful dynamism to this new nation of picture and sound that, unfortunately, doesn’t feel present in the world of bricks and mortar. Someday, I hope, participatory democracy in the region will be robust enough that retreating to a simulacrum of it will no longer be an attractive option. Until that day, television will continue to be an important story for the contemporary Middle East-and the phones will keep lighting up. WORKS . Cairo Timeline. 2009. 24 November 2009 < Jazeera. Timeline: Tourist attacks in Egypt . 24 September 2008. 13 December 2009 < Press. "Farfour Mouse dies in last episode." 29 June 2007. The Jerusalem Post. 8 November 2009 <, Tarek. The Final Bridge. 6-12 May 1999. 08 December 2009 <, M. and Szultz. "Plan general de la VILLE du KAIRE et des Environs, Topographie Medical du Caire, Munich, 1847.". 1846.Dunn, Jimmy. An Overview of Egyptian Tourism. 24 September 2004. 13 December 2009 <, Natalia. Cairo: Suburbanizing the desert. 22 October 2009. 7 December 2009 < Online. Coptic Cairo. 2001. 24 November 2009 < Britannica . Guide to Nobel Prize. 2009. 10 December 2009 <, Fatemah. 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June 2005. 7 December 2009 <, Dena. "Celebration of a Suburb." Al-Ahram 21-27 April 2005.Shillington, Kevin. Encyclopedia of African History. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005.Shoshan, Boaz. Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo. New York: Cambbridge University Press, 2002.Staff Writers. "Hamas TV unveils Jew-eating bunny." 13 February 2008. .au. 8 November 2009 < Conferences. Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids Dictatorships. July 2009. 25 October 2009 <, V. "Le Caire, Itinerare de l'Orient, Egypt, Dresse par L. Thuillier, Paris Hachette, 1888.". Paris, 1888.Tour Egypt. Egypt: History-Ottoman Turk Period. 2005. 24 November 2009 < Online Media Solutions. The Changing Landscape of Middle East's Media Consumption. 27 October 2009. 11 November 2009 <, Sharon. History of Tourism. 2006-2008. 7 December 2009 < Angle. "Handbook: Satellite Television in the Arab World." 31 July 2007. Dishing Democracy. 7 October 2009 < Bank. 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