Ballots and Bullets

So it has been weeks since I last posted. I was tempted to defend my tardiness using averages: I have been in Egypt now for 13 weeks, and this is my fourth update, so I left it so long to make an average of one every 3-4 weeks. Shame it isn’t true – I’m afraid that life has become, in most senses, normal, and so I have to dig deeper to find things to write about. One thing that I don’t have to dig deeper for, however, is the general situation in Egypt, and now that things have largely settled, that is what I’m going to write about today. (Apologies to the School of Politics and International Relations at Nottingham University for stealing the title of this post from their blog.)

It all started three or four weeks ago, and revolves around the role of the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – collectively acting as a Presidential Council until a new president is elected at some vague point in the future. The idea is that this will happen in the summer of 2012, or by the start of 2013 at the latest. Don’t hold your breath…) in the ‘New Egypt’. The parliamentary elections were due to be held (and, indeed, were) on 28 November; one of the jobs of the new parliament was to be to select a constitutional council to write a new constitution. A couple of weeks prior to the election, the SCAF, in its infinite wisdom, decided to publish a draft constitution that would have exempted the army (and its budget) from civilian oversight. Now tensions had been rising over the weeks prior to this, anyway, for a variety of reasons, but this pushed things over the edge. People suspected that the SCAF had greater designs that simply keeping the seat warm for Egypt’s future democratic leadership. And, as they had learnt in January that unelected governments can’t resist popular and public pressure forever, they took to the streets.

I’m unclear on the exact order of how things happened from then on, but it is quite evident that the SCAF took a dim view of protestors in the run up to elections, and responded with force (whilst making threatening noises about those who wished to disrupt the transition to democracy). Tens of people were killed in Cairo, and a few in Alex. Events were very local – they tended to focus on large public spaces, or on security headquarters – so most of the time I knew no more, and probably less, than was known in the UK simply by watching or listening to the BBC. A few times a protest would march past my house (one time quite a large one went past) but most of the time that was all I knew of it. There were big protests in the centre of Alexandria two Fridays before the election: the most I saw of that were two boys, aged about 14, carrying Egyptian flags as they headed into town on the tram. My school is in town, so occasionally I would hear protestors during my lessons. One group marched past chanting something along the lines of “State Security, State Dogs” – as chants go, the translation rather lets it down. State Security (my teacher’s translation – I don’t know what they’re called in the foreign media) is the name of the secret police, an organisation disbanded after the revolution in January, but, think the protestors, up and running again (being ‘secret’, there is no official announcement).

One Friday my housemate and I decided that we would wander up the road to take a look at the protests at the police headquarters for the city. I have been informed by many sources that this was foolish. My mitigating plea is that to live in a country undergoing such political upheaval without venturing out to experience the situation would be something of a wasted opportunity. As it turned out, foolish or not, we chose the wrong time to go protest chasing – it was too early in the day, and the protest was gathering, but no more. Every few minutes a small group would arrive from different parts of the city, waving flags or beating drums, but (foolish as we are) as we weren’t keen on getting too close this was the height of the action that we saw. Instead, we were intercepted by a friendly paramedic – he may have been trying to stop us getting too close, but given the level of activity at the time, I’m more inclined to believe that he was simply bored, and wanted a chat. He didn’t speak English, but with a mixture of sign language and my limited Arabic we managed to get by for about 45 minutes. Our cue to leave was some doctors arriving to set up a medical station: an indication, we felt, that things were expected to get more serious shortly afterwards. According to the news, they did – but by then my housemate and I were safely back in our house.

That was really the limit of the excitement, as far as I was concerned. The elections duly went ahead on the 28^th, with run-offs on the 5^th of this month. Unsurprisingly, the Muslim Brotherhood came out on top; perhaps more surprising was that the salafist party al-Noor (“The Light”) came second. It seems that the vote was pretty free and fair – certainly the SCAF wasn’t too impressed, as they described the result as ‘unrepresentative’ (using this as their justification for retaining ultimate control over selection of candidates for the Constitutional Council). If it was unfair for any particular group, it will have been the Christians. My landlady reported having her ballot paper taken from her before she could put it in the ballot box, by a man offering to help her – but this is the only anecdote I have heard, and it’s quite possible that this was an error due to the novelty of the affair rather than a deliberate act.

Meanwhile, my Arabic is improving greatly. Since I last wrote, I have given two five minute presentations in front of the other students and staff (all the students do it): one in formal Arabic, and one in Egyptian colloquial. (The formal one was about my family, and included a picture of Auckland Castle with reference to my father. A new English friend, who’s just started at the school, gave his colloquial presentation a couple of weeks later about his family, including a picture of Ampleforth Abbey, where he went to school. The staff and students now appear convinced that all English people live in castles.) I was made ‘Student of the Month’ for my first presentation, as an example of how far one could improve in two months. It made me feel a complete fraud – I had learnt both presentations off by heart, and one could no more judge the quality of my Arabic from them than one could judge the quality of Mel Gibson’s Aramaic from the Passion of the Christ. On the other hand, it has encouraged me to work much harder, if only to make sure that I’m not later accused of dramatic regression…

Not wanting to tax your patience any further, I shall leave this here. As I will not be writing again until January, I shall wish all of you a very happy and joyful Christmas.

School - 17 October 2011

As of this morning, I have completed my first module of Arabic (only twenty three to go!). So I thought that this might be an appropriate time to write a little of what I’m doing here.

My course is for a rather vague mixture of Arabic called Modern Standard. Though this is mostly fus’ha, or classical Arabic (as one will find on the news channels, in books, newspapers, or any religious or educative context), it is also partly a’mir, or Egyptian colloquial Arabic (as one will find on many entertainment programmes, or spoken on the street). They have a partly shared vocabulary, but they pronounce certain letters differently, and the grammar is also slightly different. I attend school for five days a week, of which three are fus’ha and two are a’mir, with different teachers. The vocabulary is really the sticking point in all this: at the start of the module, I was being given around 60 words a day to memorise for fus’ha, and another 30 or so for a’mir. Of course, they all sound Arabic, so of those that I did learn (I confess to not managing them all…) I was constantly mixing them up, and using the wrong ones in the wrong classes. This doesn’t particularly matter when one is using fus’ha vocabulary in an a’mir context – most people will understand fus’ha, even if they don’t speak it. It matters much more when using an a’mir word in a fus’ha context: though Egyptian a’mir is useful, due to the dominance of Egyptian satellite channels across the region, it is not spoken outside Egypt (every country has their own a’mir, and some have several).

I’ve done pretty well with my teachers. My fus’ha teacher (E, one daughter, age five, whose homework seems very similar to mine!) is very good, and quite demanding in what work she wants me to do, but friendly too. My a’mir teacher (N) is also good, and has a degree in linguistics, which is quite helpful for learning the sounds of the letters. They do as much of the lessons as they can in Arabic. At the moment, ‘as much as they can’ is frankly very little, though it has increased marginally over the past month. They have their peculiar characteristics in teaching too. There are certain words that prove very difficult to remember (with no apparent logic in which words they are), and I stumble frequently when I reach them. E’s response is generally something along the lines of “you haven’t forgotten this again! I will kill you!”. This can sometimes be quite menacing… N, on the other hand, doesn’t change her demeanour at all, but simply makes me repeat the word over, and over, and over, and over. It remains to be seen whether my death will be by irate teacher, or sheer boredom.

So, enough of the lessons themselves: time for a story.

I should start by stating that my teachers, when they express a view at all, tend to be quite moderate and careful not to offend: one of the things that makes what I’m about to recount worthy of note. The other is that this story covers two separate conversations, with different teachers, on different days, which led to them both expressing very similar views. The first conversation was with N. We’d finished a lesson, and she was asking me whether I had yet visited the Library of Alexandria (a very impressive building, with approximately the same selection of books as your average village library). She told me that when I did I should be sure to visit the Anwar Sadat exhibition, which included such things as the blood-stained clothes that he was wearing when he was assassinated (indeed, there is nothing I like more than to see a blood-stained shirt…). I asked her what she thought of Sadat, to which she was initially evasive: “Well, some people think he is a hero, and the people that assassinated him were traitors, and some people think that he was a traitor, because of the Treaty [with Israel], and the people that assassinated him were heroes”. I pressed her. “Well I think at least he was a leader, whether you agree with what he did or not. Mubarak wasn’t a leader, he was just a thief.” I asked her whether she agreed with what Sadat did. There was a long hesitation, then: “I’m going to tell you what I really think. They say [I’m not sure who ‘they are…] that we shouldn’t talk about politics with foreigners, but I want you to know what we really think. Israel is our enemy. Israel will always be our enemy, and I hate them”. She responded by asking me what I thought; I made some non-committal answer about having Israeli friends, but understanding that there were injustices on both sides. As non-committal answers go, it was clear from her face that I had fallen far short of the mark! She felt she needed to explain further: “The thing is, Muslims believe that one of the signs of the last days is a big war between Muslims and Jews, and the Muslims will win. So they must always be our enemies: how could we make peace with them? But”, she smiled wryly, “if the Muslims will win, at least we know that the last days are a long way off!” I did some asking around: it seems that this ‘sign’ comes from the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet, and other early Islamic leaders). The person I asked said that whether this particular saying was genuinely from the Prophet was a contentious issue. It is, however, hard to tell if I was just being told what it was thought I wanted to hear…

The second conversation was the next day, with E. We were looking at a map in the textbook, naming countries (this is the kind of exciting thing that learning Arabic can bring you!). Israel is almost always labelled Falestine on Arab maps; on this map, however, it was labelled Izreel-Falestine (the textbook is American). E made a disapproving noise when I read this. I looked at her questioningly. “This is usually a good textbook, but I don’t like using it because of this.” She paused. I asked her what she thought of the whole issue. “I hate them as my enemy. I hate the country, not the people.” Another pause. “No, I hate the people and the country. My friends tell me I should be generous in my thoughts, and I should not hate the people, but I cannot help it. I hate them, and what they do.” My impression is that this is a pretty common feeling.

It may be worth noting that in history lessons all children here are taught of Israeli aggression since Israel’s foundation – and incidentally, they’re taught of the great Egyptian victory liberating the Sinai in the Yom Kippur War, with no mention of how that war ended.  For those who worry about the limited breadth of history that is taught in British schools, be thankful that things aren’t generally taught that never happened.

I was going to write about the excitements of getting my visa, but I fear that to add that to an already long post would try your patience. Maybe next time!