The Presidential Election

It having been so long since I posted, I thought that the day of the Presidential Election results would be a good time, and provide a good topic (in case I’m accused from the start of being confused, this was written yesterday – the actual day of the results!). I don’t profess to know more than you could have found out from the BBC, or any other half-decent news organisation – but I do have the advantage of having followed things quite closely here, which my readers may not have. If you have, then you may find this account a little simplistic; I may even be accused of ignorance in some facts. But please give me your indulgence: this is not a painstakingly researched, intellectual account of events over the past couple of months, but simply the perspective of a vague foreigner with less than perfect Arabic.

On to the topic of today’s post: the election. For a little background, it took place, as in the French system, in two rounds, though here they have been divided by a month. Though by the time you get this, you will probably have heard the final result, I am going to go through events chronologically, as I experienced them, so allow yourselves to imagine that we are in late May. There are quite a few candidates, but most of them aren’t important and won’t get anywhere, and anyway, I don’t know their names. These are the important ones:

Mohamed Mohamed Morsi (this is not a mistake – I refer you back to an earlier post in which I explained the Egyptian system of names), the Muslim Brotherhood candidate. He was the Brotherhood’s second choice, the first having been banned, is not well-known outside of the Presidential race, and is quite uncharismatic.

Abu el-Fotouh used to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but sat someway further towards the political centre than the leadership, was rather vocal in his opposition, and was finally expelled from the organisation when he announced he would run for President as an independent (this was in defiance of a Brotherhood decision not to field a candidate for the Presidency. Apparently, they changed their mind). In contrast to Morsi, he is very charismatic, and had a large following among the Islamist-ly inclined who weren’t affiliated to the Brotherhood. Curiously (being a relatively liberal Islamist) he also had quite a following among the Salafists, after their own candidate was also banned (more on that below). He was considered to be one of two main ‘candidates of the revolution’ – those who had been involved in the revolution itself, and were largely supported by the revolutionaries.

Another candidate in the relative centre-ground was Amro Moussa, the former Foreign Minister and head of the Arab League - he lost some support for being a former-Mubarakite (though I believe that he wasn’t too popular with Mubarak by the end).

The second ‘candidate of the revolution’ was Hamdeen Sabahi a charismatic Nasserite who is particularly popular among the youth (and bearing in mind Egypt's demographics, 'the youth' is quite a lot of people). His policies looked somewhat horrific for the economy – at their most basic, he wanted to legislate for wages to rise and prices to fall, as well as nationalising various industries and introducing new subsidies here and there (the subsidies are already a problem: The Economist noted on 19 May that if Egypt were to abolish its fuel subsidy, its 10% budget deficit would be wiped out – though I’m not sure whether they included in their calculations what happens to the economy when a large proportion of the population can no longer put petrol in their tanks, or gas in their oven).

Finally, among the main candidates, there is Ahmed Shafiq, the ‘stability candidate’. He was Mubarak’s last Prime Minister, a former Air Force general, and is thought (unsurprisingly) to be the favoured candidate of Egypt’s ‘deep state’. He is particularly popular among Christians (who persecuted by official Egypt already, fear Islamist power), the upper-middle class (who did rather well out of the former regime), and many of those who weren’t really bothered by the revolution in the first place, and feel that things have just got worse since.

If you’re wondering why I have gone into such detail on a raft of candidates most of whom didn’t even make into the second round, it is in the hope of providing some background to the tensions that followed for the second. As you probably know, only Morsi and Shafiq made it into the second round, with about 47% of the first round vote between them. Abu el-Fotouh and Moussa, who came fourth and fifth respectively, were widely thought to have a very high chance of making it through to the second round, but ultimately occupied too close a position among the field of candidates, and split the moderate vote.

Sabahi came third, but won Alex, and about 20% of the total vote. He was very quick to claim foul play, and on the night of the first round result I stumbled into three different protests by his supporters whilst walking around Alex. Other candidates also cried foul, but unlike in the parliamentary elections (in which I heard several first hand accounts of dodgy practices) there didn’t appear to be a great deal of evidence, and the electoral commission dismissed the complaints out of hand. (This is not to say that they were without basis, just that I don’t know, and am sceptical. I probably would have ordered an investigation, had I been the commission – not to do so looked suspicious in itself.) There were two key disappointing outcomes to the first round. The first was the protesting the result. I felt that, especially coming from those who had launched the revolution in order to bring about democracy, to protest the result of a democratic election (as opposed to the policies of a democratically elected leader) because one doesn’t support the winners is hypocritical. However, the second was the result, which left an unpleasant choice for many people (particularly those who had risked their lives to bring about the possibility of an election in the first place). On the one hand, a vote for Morsi was a vote for the Muslim Brotherhood – he is very much a creature of the organisation, and it is feasible that he wouldn’t ultimately be taking some of the decisions supposedly taken by the President. On the other hand, a vote for Shafiq would have been a vote for the old regime, for the army, and specifically for a man with blood on his hands. If he had won (which rather gives the game away that he didn’t), the army and the ‘deep state’ would have viewed the revolution as a brief hiatus in their natural rule – and I wouldn’t have been surprised for there not to have been a free election when the next is due. Of course, the same may be true with Morsi in the Presidential Palace – especially if the army decides that the Brotherhood is no threat to its power.

Between the second round and the result, another unpleasant twist in the drama occurred. The voting took place over two days. At the end ofthe second day the military announced that Parliament was to be dissolved (this was the result of a case in the Supreme Court which challenged the results in a third of the seats, because they were meant to be reserved for independents and were won by party candidates – it was expected that there would be by-elections in those seats, but the military appears to have taken the opportunity the judgement provided), that the constitutional assembly was dissolved, that they were assuming all legislative power, and the power to appoint a new constitutional assembly. In essence, this was a coup (though against what, it’s hard to see – they don’t appear to have done anything illegal, given the powers that they assumed after the revolution), and severely circumscribes the power of the new President. This in itself put people on edge; the tension was further exacerbated by the election results (due last Thursday) being delayed. Initially, it was announced that this was so that the Electoral Commission could address irregularities; then the army said it was to prevent civil unrest. The change of explanation prompted a gut feeling that the delay was in order to rig the vote, and the protests (which were already quite large) grew. I fear that this is essentially the end of the road for the revolution; though with Morsi as President, there will be some remaining pressure on the military to concede its powers back to the Parliament or the President – or to launch a full-fat coup.

The feeling in Cairo today was exceedingly tense. When I went out at ten this morning, things were relatively normal, though the traffic was light. When I returned to the centre of town at two, the traffic was exceedingly heavy, which (though Cairo is usually quite congested) seemed abnormal. And then, by 3pm, there were almost no cars on the street at all until the result was finally announced (after an interminable speech by the monotonous head of the Electoral Commission) when the streets exploded in relief and celebration. Morsi had won by 13 million to 12 million. Those who aren’t celebrating remain indoors. They include the staff of my hostel, who are miserable – but they would have been miserable with either result, and possibly see this as marginally preferable to the other outcome. Those I have spoken to either spoilt their ballot or did not vote in the second round. The younger of my friends in Alex were also deeply unhappy about the choice they were presented with. The older, by and large, voted for Shafiq. Both groups will be disappointed and nervous following the result.

Update: 25 June

Things today are much more relaxed, and pretty much back to normal. The prevailing sense seems to be relief. We shall see how long that lasts…

The "ida'afa"

I initially wrote this post as an email circular on 27 April. I'm not sure why I posted it then. But here it is, for your delectation. Health warning: it contains a fair amount of Arabic grammar.

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The news in brief, since my last post. Significantly, my Korean housemate has returned, almost entirely recovered (apart from lingering pains in the neck, and a foot that doesn’t always do what it’s told). Furthermore, as a result of the accident, he will likely stay longer than he had previously been intending to, to make up for lost time. On the downside, his parents (who were quite happy for him to come immediately following the revolution) are now entirely opposed to his being in such a dangerous country, and have withdrawn his funding.

I have abandoned my study of a’mir (colloquial Arabic) on the grounds that to study the grammar and vocabulary of fus’ha (formal) and a’mir together was too confusing to be helpful. And for other reasons – more on that below. Against that, however, I have finished my first textbook. This may not mean much to you, so I give the additional information that it is about 400 pages long, and that students at Leeds University (chosen as an example only because I met one of them who told me) take 18 months to do the same. But then, they are studying other things too, as well as having a social life, so are probably more well-rounded and have more friends…

Final piece of quick news is my new teacher. My previous teacher left (most inconsiderately!) to have a baby – but before, she made an arrangement with the manager that I was to be given the ‘best teacher in the school’ (I thought that this was just her trying to make me feeling fine about her leaving, but others have independently verified this fact). My new teacher is, indeed, incredible. My previous teacher was very good, but her skills pale in comparison to my new one. Though she can speak English, I only discovered this after several lessons, when we reached a total impasse in explaining a new grammatical concept, and she had to resort to a couple of words of it. As a result of being forced, for two and a half hours a day, to speak and listen to Arabic only, my capacity has come on in leaps and bounds. There are only two problems: 1) it is fus’ha, which no one on the street speaks (though laughter is a common response – fus’ha often appears in films to mark out a comic character with a geekish nature…); 2) even if they did, my teacher speaks to me very slowly so that I can understand her – most people aren’t so considerate.

Given the length of my ‘news in brief’, the remainder of this post will be brief, and consist (sort of) of a short lesson in Arabic grammar. This will, I suspect, be completely useless to you in your general lives.

There is a strange piece of formal Arabic grammar related to case endings. Basically, nouns and verbs will end with a different sounds (though they’re not spelt differently) depending on whether they’re the subject or object, or come after a preposition, or a host of other factors. This applies to all nouns and verbs (though sometimes it seems only to happen in one’s head – I presume this little trickery will become clearer later), including names. Hence much childish fun was had talking about George-oo Bush-aa, or Tony-oo Blair-aa (or, for that matter, Peter-oo Welby-aa). There seem to be a variety of problems, however, with this whole arrangement. One of these would be that whereas foreign names (of people or places) have this ‘oo-aa’ rhythm, Arabic names have an ‘oo-oo’, or possibly ‘oo-ee’, for a reason that will follow (I’m not entirely clear on when it is what – I tend to guess – and why Arabic names are different. It seems that a lot of the time, Arabic grammar rules come about largely because some authoritative text wrote in the way that the grammar prescribes, and it was the hard job of some unfortunate soul to come up with a reason why…). But a difficulty was hit upon in my teacher trying to explain to me the reason for this structure in names, which is derived from the way that Arabic names follow a set form. Part of the whole problem is that names come into a structure calledidhafa (or, something of the something), as Arabic names follow the structure your-name father’s-name grandfather’s-name family-name (so to take the example of a chap called John, whose father was Michael, and whose grandfather was Charles, he would be John Michael Charles Family-name), which fits into the form name of father of grandfather of family. The family name, to add to the difficulties, is the name of some distinguished ancestor – which led to the plaintive cry from my teacher, when trying to use my name for her example, “but who was Welby?!”. Of course, my middle names didn’t help either – it was quite an effort to convince her that my father was not Douglas. The point of all this is that in an idhafa, the case ending on the second (or final) word is always ‘ee’. Except that it seems from all I’ve just written that this doesn’t seem to quite work for names. And thus I bring this little narrative round in a circle, no further enlightened than I was at the start – and having confused my audience in the process, I fear. Maybe it would be better if we just forgot this whole thing and moved on…

I promised earlier that I would write more about dropping a’mir. There isn’t a great deal more to it than what was stated above – learning botha’mir and fus’ha together is very confusing. It was, however, exacerbated by my teacher having been very apathetic for about three weeks before the decision (as it turned out, she had a good reason – an arranged engagement, with a man she hardly knew, who turned out not to be all that she hoped for. She broke off the engagement, and now seems much happier again). This was not, however, the reason that I gave to the school. It was quite a complicated process: first I went to the administration girls. “I’d like to stop studying a’mir and focus on fus’ha.” Ah, this might be a problem – I’d need to do a placement test to work out where I’d fit in the fus’ha textbook. “No, I’d like to continue studying from the same textbook” (it is essentially a fus’ha textbook in any case, with half a page of a’mir in every ten). This is also difficult, it seems – they call the Director of Students. Oh no, she says, quite impossible – my textbook is for a combination, not for fus’ha by itself. I argue my case a bit further, and am told I need to see the manager. I explain my position to her. “Good idea! Fus’ha and a’mir is too confusing to study together!” I felt slightly aggrieved that she hadn’t told me this in the first place, but I got what I wanted, so I make no complaints…

Walking Through a Riot

I write this sat waiting for breakfast in a hostel in Cairo, after four hours sleep, and at what I hope will be the end of quite a hectic couple of days. In this issue: football riots, without the football, and friends in intensive care after 17 car pile-ups (just one friend, and just one pile-up).

You may have seen in the news that on Wednesday night there were 74 people killed in football riots in Port Said. I watched affairs unfold on the television, thinking it was very sad, but isolated. When I spoke to my teacher the next day, she was full of theories about counter-revolutionary forces trying to bring down the government – I’m not convinced by that, and rather think that it was a fight between ‘ultras’ that got out of hand. The police were attacked, and reacted in the only way that they really know in public-order situations: overwhelming and violent force. My experiences on Thursday rather bore this out.

I was taking a stroll in the evening towards my local supermarket, and noticed a bit of a commotion up ahead of me, followed by a small gaggle of youths running past looking excitable. However, the supermarket is on a busy pedestrian street, and commotions are not uncommon, so I carried on walking. The next thing I noticed was shopkeepers beginning to pull down their shutters. In the spirit of honesty I shall reveal that my brain was clearly not functioning on full capacity: my reaction was simply that it was odd to be shutting up shop so early in the evening, and I carried on. The next thing that I knew was that I was surrounded by a large crowd of youths, carrying steel rods, broken bottles, machetes (and in one, rather curious case, a plastic milk-bottle crate). I was still not firing on full cylinders: I thought I’d walked into a protest, and failed to register the lack of flags and chants, and the excess of weaponry and angry looking youths. I’d also failed to register another crowd of similarly angry and armed youths facing off against them. I was enlightened when the clash started, and beat a hasty retreat into the nearest side-street, where I stood (for lack of anywhere else to go) with a small group of other bystanders who were watching events with a mixture of anger, interest, despair, and plain annoyance at their evenings being disrupted in such a way. I spent ten minutes or so a good deal closer than I would have liked to a guy on the floor viciously being beaten with metal rods, to people hacking at each other with machetes, and to a chap who, still for unknown reasons, was waving his plastic crate around with no apparent purpose – but then the riot disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and I continued my progression to the supermarket.

My shopping was uneventful, until I got back towards the front of the shop and realised that the shutters had been pulled down and there was much excitement among the cashiers. And a minor clue to something going on was the sound of gunfire outside… I had the longest conversation with one of the cashiers in the shop I have ever had (they’re usually very grumpy, with good reason: it is a soulless place), in English. Apparently there were “bad men” outside, who were shooting. However, they had a “secret” back entrance (for emergencies such as this!), and I was ushered back through the supermarket with all my shopping to an inconspicuous door on a back street.

Having completely lost my bearings at this stage, I took a guess as to which direction went vaguely towards my house and set off with purpose. Before long, however, I was surrounded by my friends from before, complete with their various accoutrements (Crate-Man had disappeared somewhere; perhaps to a secure facility), and many of them covered in blood (whether their own or another’s was unclear in some cases). But this time it was apparent that the game had changed, as they were very definitely fleeing from the gunfire that was erupting on all sides, though thankfully not on my street. Although it had finally dawned on my (far too late – never choose me as your guide in a crisis) that the situation was rather serious, I had very little choice but to carry on in the direction I was going. Not quite knowing what street I was on, and given the gunfire seemed to be coming from all points of the compass (though still unseen), one direction was as good as any other, so I walked determinedly, clutching my shopping (it held the makings of a crumble – I wasn’t letting that go to waste!). I finally emerged close to my house without further incident, and resolved that I was stay home for the rest of the evening.

To bring this little story back to its origin, and the conspiracy theories about counter-revolutionaries, it must be noted that the police were nowhere in sight, and the riot looked, in its initial stages, like an organised fight between rival groups. I don’t believe this to be any more than sheer criminality, born of a country which, post-revolution, has had very weak crime-fighting capacity.

There is one aspect of this country that fits in with the rest of the Middle East, and brings me back to the dominant theme of my first Alexandrian Note: the traffic. My housemate, H, was travelling to the airport in Cairo early yesterday morning for a flight to London. I got a call from him in the early afternoon: “have you heard what happened?” (an ominous way to start any conversation). I hadn’t. H had been in the initial crash of a 17 car pile-up in thick fog on the Alex-Cairo road, where cars travel in excess of 90 mph whatever the weather, and whatever the road conditions. He was asleep in the back seat when his car was hit from behind, and had woken up a few hours later in intensive care. My other housemate and I rushed to the station, and got the first train we could to Cairo. Thankfully, the hospital had called an upper-class Egyptian friend of his shortly after he arrived, and he had reassured them about money, and made sure that he was getting proper treatment. This was particularly helpful in H’s case, as he doesn’t have insurance…

My other housemate and I arrived at the hospital at 11pm, well after visiting hours, and blagged our way in by asking to speak to his doctor. The doctor seemed very good and competent, told us all that had happened, and all that they were going to do. He was in intensive care for observation, but he was stable and lucid. He’d had a very bad concussion, and they had to wait until the swelling had gone down a bit before they could tell whether there was any more serious damage. We were then allowed in to see him – remarkably his external injuries were limited to minor cuts and bruises (his Egyptian friend had told me that the car was in pieces). I’m exceedingly lucky to still have a housemate.

I suppose there are two morals to this story. The first is that if one is in this country for long enough, one is almost guaranteed to be in a car accident. Almost everyone I know has been – major or minor. But the biggest is never, ever travel without insurance, especially in this part of the world. Nothing here works without a little currency-shaped lubrication – doctors concerned about payment will not treat, or if they do, they won’t care. If it wasn’t for H’s friend, he’d be in a very much worse situation now.

A final point of interest came on the journey back into downtown Cairo from the hospital. We went through Tahrir square, in my first time there. It looked rather like a fair: if fairs were routinely held in the middle of big roundabouts, and in which people wore surgical masks as a defence against tear gas. The traffic was being directed by protesters, while within the encampment youths sat chatting around big kettles of tea. Of course, it must be noted that this was a protest in its down stage – there were no apparent police around, and it mostly looked like young people having fun. I’m reliably informed that it’s very different at other times… Hence the surgical masks.

Final apologies for the long gap between my last post and now – and the depressing nature of this one. I will try to be more upbeat next time!

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.

Alemein

    As of today I have been in Alexandria for two months, and Egypt a little over that. For this post, nothing outstandingly exciting having happened, I shall simply recount two things that have occurred since my last one.

    My first story is related to school, and my difficulties rather akin to dyslexia in reading and writing Arabic. The problem is apparently common in those learning the language: in both reading and writing, though I know the spelling, I substitute letters that for the one I need. For example, the letters ‘ب’ (ba) and ‘ن’ (noon) look very similar (despite appearances – when one writes Arabic letters by themselves they look different compared to when they’re in a word), and I will frequently read or write one when I mean the other. This also happens with ‘ت’ (ta) and ‘ث’ (tha); ‘ص’ (saad) and ‘س’ (seen) (which sound similar), and so many other letters that I don’t know why I’m choosing any in particular as examples… It happens frequently enough that my teachers don’t tend to say anything except to point out that it’s wrong. As I wrote in my last email, my fus’ha teacher’s daughter is just learning to read and write as well, and makes many of the same mistakes I do. (In fact, she makes one rather impressive mistake that I haven’t made: she’s learning French as well as Arabic, and E (the teacher) told me that she’s started writing her Arabic from left to write. She brought in an example, most easily read by holding it up to a mirror!) One example of my usual error cropped up in my homework this week, however, that caused my a’mir teacher to collapse in fits of giggles. I asked her what it was. “You’ve forgotten the dots,” she gasped. I protested that this was a common occurrence, and not really cause for such mirth. “No, but with this word you’ve written something else!” I asked what it was. “I can’t tell you, it’s a bad word.” She giggled again, then “no, I’ll tell you exactly what it means. It means… it means…” At this point she apparently lost her nerve: “It means a very bad woman!” I’m unconvinced as to quite how ‘exact’ this definition is…

    There is shortly going to be a change of personnel at my flat. D is to return to England (he’s been here a year now, and says that is quite enough. This seems to be a common reaction to prolonged residence among expats that I’ve met, though as I found in Yemen, a large proportion of such expats can’t bring themselves to leave either!), and in his place H and I have asked E, a Swede who also studies at our school to join us. As part of the getting-to-know-you process we all (including D) went on a trip to Alemein on 5 November.

    Meanwhile, D had been very keen to celebrate bonfire night in semi-traditional fashion, by making and burning a guy (something I had never done). So on the fourth the four of us got an old shirt and ripped trousers, stuffed them with newspaper, and knitted them together with paperclips in lieu of pins, and resolved to take him into the desert during the trip the next day and burn him. H posted a picture of the evening on Facebook, with the caption “Upside of living with the Brits: the chances are that you’re going to see something you’ve never seen or heard of every other week”.

    The next morning our driver got a bit of a shock when I walked out holding a life-size dummy in my arms, and asked him if I could put it in the boot. We rather failed to dispel his initial impression of our being rather strange as the day went on… The journey to Alemein from Alex is about 90 minutes, along the main coastal highway that essentially stretches all the way across North Africa. It’s through the desert, though on the coastal side there are continuous resorts all the way to Alemein and beyond – as far as we could see, mostly deserted. Our first stop was a museum that appeared to be about the whole war in the Western Desert. The displays seemed to be quite interesting, though it was hard to tell what they contained, as the English descriptions (where they existed) were incomprehensible. The management of the museum clearly were also of the view that any foreign language translation of the Arabic descriptions would do: so some displays had English, some German, some French, some Italian and, bizarrely, some Chinese – but no display had more than one of those languages.

    Our next stop was the Commonwealth Cemetery. As with all Commonwealth War Graves Commission controlled cemeteries that I have visited, it was hauntingly beautiful. As one enters the gate one can see nothing but desert, both immediately in front of one and, as the ridge that the gate is on drops away, in the distance. Then one moves forward, and sees the memorial gate rise up as if out of the ground as one does so. Inside the gate (a big, light-coloured sandstone affair that blends very well into its surroundings) are engraved 13 000 names of those whose bodies were never identified or recovered. This is put into perspective when one reads that there are 8000 graves in the cemetery (not solely from the Battle of El-Alemein, though largely), and many of them are ‘Known Unto God’. On the far side from the gate is a very large cross, and half way between an altar below which had been laid a freshly picked wreath of local flowers. In fact, the place was full of flowers, though the soil was very sandy, and clearly very well cared for. It compared favourably with the cemetery at Silent Valley in Aden, where the cross has been shot down by an RPG.

    We went from there to the German memorial, which is an imposing castle-like structure built to look as if had been hewn whole out of the rock. It stands on top of a hill which stretches down to the sea. Inside, however, it felt dark and claustrophobic, with large, cast iron, gothic lettering, and great sheets of iron with the names of the dead packed so small and close together that it was almost impossible to read. The caretaker told us that the ashes of the dead were interred below the memorial.

    The Italian memorial was a similarly imposing affair, though much lighter. From the road one has to walk up a long straight drive, uphill, for about half a kilometre. At the top is a very dramatic marble tower that wouldn’t look out of place in The Lord of the Rings. Inside, however, it was very moving. The ashes of the dead are interred inside the tower, each one separately, with a plaque with their name on. The walls are covered with these plaques up to about three metres, and then there are a series of rooms off the main tower that are also full of them. Particularly striking were two rooms full where there was only one word on every plaque: ‘Ignoto’.

    So ended our battlefield tour. We were all feeling rather sombre, and were rather relieved when our driver, who’d been talking to a policeman, told us that we’d have to drive about half an hour inland to get to somewhere suitably uninhabited to burn our guy. We decided that this was too much effort and went home, where with some savagery he was hung, drawn and quartered, with a blunt and rusty Bedouin knife…

    Meanwhile, in Alex, the winter is setting in. It has been tipping it down today, and apparently will again tomorrow. ‘So what?’, I hear you say with some derision – well it doesn’t rain here very much, and the system isn’t very good at coping with it. The roads flood, and rainwater is the least of what one might be stepping in!

The Archbishops on House of Lords reform

I've been reading the Archbishops’ submission to the Parliamentary Joint Commission on House of Lords reform (found here). Generally it seems good: the gist is “we believe an elected House of Lords would be damaging to the proper function of Parliament, though some reform is necessary. However, if you insist on having an elected House of Lords, here’s what we think about the proposed legislation”. A couple of points to note:

1 – They refer to the ‘political consensus reflected in the 2010 General Election manifestos’ (paragraph 7). This fails to see a crucial argument against an elected Upper House on the basis of the manifestos and the Salisbury Convention[1]: the voters were not presented with a choice at the 2010 election, as all three main parties included it in their manifesto. Thus, whilst the 2010 General Election demonstrated a party political consensus, it did not demonstrate a general political consensus. It seems a bit odd to speak of the necessity of those who help to make our laws being democratically elected when advocating a policy that has not, in any meaningful sense, been put before the public.

2 – They miss an opportunity to strengthen the general case for an appointed Upper House by opening themselves up to accusations of self-interest. I happen to support the place of bishops in the House of Lords, as strengthening the general spiritual discourse of the country at a time of increased secularisation. However, I would be perfectly happy to sacrifice the bishops if it meant keeping an appointed Upper House, and I believe that they should be willing to do that too. The effective functioning of a bishop is not dependent upon their membership of the House of Lords; the effective functioning of our parliament does require an appointed House of Lords, as the Archbishops’ arguments help to show.

3 – Finally, and perhaps least contentiously, I was very pleased to see the key point in paragraph 12: if the role of the Upper House in relation to the Commons is seen as desirable, then “the argument that such a chamber can only be effective and have proper legitimacy if it is wholly or mainly elected is no more than an assertion”. Nick Clegg, in introducing the draft bill in the Commons on 17 May made the statement that it is a fundamental principle that a body that has a role in making laws must be democratically elected to be legitimate as if there could be no further argument to such an obvious statement. Not true: the statement is not obvious, and even if Clegg is right, there is plenty of scope for argument. I happen to think he’s wrong (apart from anything, we don’t elect our judges, but one doesn’t hear many mainstream complaints there), and that so long as the dominant body of government has democratic accountability, efficiency and expertise should be the driving factors in the other bodies.

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[1] Attempts by the government to argue the Salisbury Convention here also fail to note the Lib Dem objection to the Convention itself. See page 6, here.

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!