More Than Manna Falls From the Sky Here

Has the Great I Am (re)alerted the world of his presence by resuming the manna downpour a la the Book of Leviticus? Or is there actual liquid precipitation forecasted to fall upon this barren city? Neither, unfortunately (knowing the actual existence of a deity would be quite nice). Rather, the Great State, personified as our loving father/godhead Hosni Mubarak, has given us an unexpected federal holiday.

Unlike the United States, which schedules its holidays meticulously some fifteen or twenty years in advance (Wikipedia lists the date of Labor Day until 2011), the Egyptian government today (Tuesday) issued an edict that this coming Sunday would be a federal holiday. Though I would cautiously generalize Egyptian society to be a bit more capricious than that of the micromanaging variety found in parts of American society, it's a little inconvenient when the holiday is announced a few days before it actually occurs, especially when it's for a seemingly arbitrary reason (they've moved Armed Forces Day so that it coincides with the landmark "10th Day of Ramadan," which I also don't understand as the day falls about six days before Ramadan concludes). In typical AUC form (see my earlier post about the unscheduled switch to Daylight Savings Time), no one has (officially, at least) informed the ignorant mass of international students about our newly-gifted vacation.

On this same day, 15 opposition and privately-owned newspapers will not publish as a sign of solidarity and protest against the government's crackdown on press freedom. The most prolific arrest of a newspaper editor has been that of Ibrahim Issa, who wrote several articles for al-Dustour which suggested that President Mubarak was in the throes of death. However, 11 other journalists are currently being sentenced by Egyptian military courts for similar charges of challenging the government's authority and inciting domestic turmoil. The upcoming protest is also occurring amidst the context of a 27,000-person strike at Egypt's largest textile mill, whose unrest is over the absence of the trickle-down effect in the Egyptian economy, which the World Bank just named to be the world's most improved for 2007.

In more personal news, my International Politics in the Middle East course devolved (or maybe I should say digressed) from a discussion on orientalism's effects on American foreign policy to a passionate verbal exchange about American national identity. The tables were turned, so to speak, from my experiences at Carleton, where my Arab Nationalism class extrapolated, speculated, and generalized about Middle Eastern or Palestinian or Egyptian identity without any real exposure what so ever to the actual cultures. Similarly, many Egyptian students had an opinion about American national identity, but generally about how muddled it is. Other nations, they explained, have values and principles--something's Lebanese or Syrian or Jordanian. Yet America, other than its penchant for domestic violence (in the Middle East, the sign language "sign" for the United States is a rapidly-firing gun), has no universal value. Perhaps attribute it to the melting pot society we are so proud of, or perhaps to the fact that American culture has globalized into something far beyond its national and state borders. Needless to say, Americans get a little testy when non-Americans voice their opinion about the essence of the United States.

So, to talk about me some more, I've started working at the Arab regional headquarters of the international development-focused qausi-NGO Ashoka. I'm one of two native English speakers in the office of about ten, and our director is, well, intimidating. She's big. At least six feet tall. That's pre-Stilettos. She has the persona of Meryl Streep's character in The Devil Wears Prada; she's far too busy developing the Middle East to have the time to dig around in her purse for a lighter or a calendar, and thus requires a personal assistant to tow these around. More than that, she has a booming voice that could double for a string bass at the Cairo Symphony (which I went to see last week by the way). And she has an ever-so-intimidating mole plonked above her upper lip. I frankly don't know why I'm so fixated on her since I have such little interaction with her. All I do is research (right now I'm beginning a memo on social inclusion and job training programs for mentally disabled Egyptian youth--I can't imagine there's that many programs on such a narrow field) and English press, which means I get to speak with "notable" people such as the NY Times Middle East bureau chief and the Cairo correspondent to the BBC. Anyway, it seems like a good organization, and apparently Bill Clinton just appropriated us a bunch of money, so we'll see where it goes.

UPDATE: Also, my roommate Dave is writing a semi-frequent column for the University of California-San Diego. His first one is available here, but it unfortunately didn't make it through editing unscathed. However, he's a great writer/storyteller, and I think the column is a fairly accurate account of our first week in Cairo.