Call to prayer in a wheatfield on a windy day: Fayoum, Egypt.
And the fish that was in the river died; and the river stank, and the Egyptians could not drink of the water of the river; and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also, neither would he let the people go.
February 27, 2011
February 26, 2011
In the Army We Trust
Just returned from Midan Tahrir, where the people's trust in the army remains generally unshaken despite last night's events. Although a couple of the protesters we talked to expressed reservations about the depth of the army's commitment to the revolutionary cause, most were quick to shunt the blame for this most recent altercation elsewhere. One protester told us that the men who cleared the square were State Security officers dressed as soldiers, their faces hidden by masks to conceal their identities, who were sent by the Ministry of the Interior to sow discord between the people and the army. He showed us his heavily bandaged arm, telling us he had suffered broken bones after being flung forcibly from the square; a six-year-old boy, he said, had been trampled to death in the melee. Another eyewitness acknowledged that those responsible had indeed been soldiers, but insisted that they had been acting on orders from the Interior Ministry. Yet another claimed the assailants were common thugs sporting stolen fatigues. "Does this change your opinion of the army?" we asked people again and again. Nearly always, the answer was no.
I'd like to coin a word for "blind love for your army" that would accurately convey what I've seen here.
I'd like to coin a word for "blind love for your army" that would accurately convey what I've seen here.
The Army Chases Protesters from Tahrir
In the first clashes of any significance between the Egyptian military and the protesters since the fall of Mubarak, the army last night used batons and tasers to force a crowd of demonstrators calling for the resignation of the Mubarak-appointed prime minster Ahmed Shafiq from Midan Tahrir shortly after the start of the midnight curfew, according to reports by Al Jazeera, Reuters, and other news agencies. We were in a taxi trying to get home from a bar Downtown and found every street into Tahrir barricaded and a heavy presence of soldiers throughout the surrounding neighborhoods. We were stopped halfway to Garden City at a military checkpoint, where a soldier looked at our IDs and went through my handbag, then let us continue. I guess that's what we get for staying out past curfew.
Then this morning, in an apparent about-face, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued a formal apology addressed to the "Youth of the January 25th Revolution" expressing their regrets for what happened last night and reaffirming their commitment to the protesters' cause. The statement, in my rough English translation:
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assures the Youth of the January 25th Revolution of its wish for the realization of the noble goals of the revolution, and that what happened yesterday during the protests of the Friday of Fulfillment resulted from unintended clashes between the military police and the sons of the revolution, and that it will not and did not issue orders of aggression against the sons of this great people, and that it will take all the precautions in its ability to see to it that this is not repeated in the future.
To pose a question that has been often on people's minds during these past few weeks: what's the military playing at?
Then this morning, in an apparent about-face, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued a formal apology addressed to the "Youth of the January 25th Revolution" expressing their regrets for what happened last night and reaffirming their commitment to the protesters' cause. The statement, in my rough English translation:
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assures the Youth of the January 25th Revolution of its wish for the realization of the noble goals of the revolution, and that what happened yesterday during the protests of the Friday of Fulfillment resulted from unintended clashes between the military police and the sons of the revolution, and that it will not and did not issue orders of aggression against the sons of this great people, and that it will take all the precautions in its ability to see to it that this is not repeated in the future.
To pose a question that has been often on people's minds during these past few weeks: what's the military playing at?
February 24, 2011
DAY 6: January 30, 2011
Soft morning light bathed the streets of the city as we made our way through Downtown to meet Chris's translator Seham. At every major intersection, every traffic circle, we came face to face with a tank and its accompanying contingent of soldiers. Many of them, standing half at attention with guns cradled awkwardly, seemed to have no better idea of their purpose there than we did. As we'd been forced to take a more circuitous route than usual to avoid Midan Tahrir, we briefly lost our bearings. I approached a solider who looked younger than I am and politely inquired how to get to Sherif Street, but the fellow, either too shy to talk to a strange girl, or more likely, more foreign to Cairo than we were, mumbled an apology and turned quickly away.
We arrived at Seham's apartment, which had been converted into a makeshift hostel for revolutionary youths resting between stints in Tahrir. No less than four young men were encamped in her tiny living room, watching TV, chewing seeds, and discussing their next plan of action. Seham served us fuul beans and tea on a card table positioned precariously amid the stacks of books crowding every inch of floorspace. Just as we sat down, somebody knocked over the bowl of seeds and they scattered across the carpet, sending her two cats scurrying for cover. As one of the boys started patiently gathering the seeds one by one and returning them to the bowl, a young woman arrived from outside bearing news that the next protest would begin at 2pm that afternoon. The boys mobilized, clearing away the breakfast dishes and making ready to depart.
Chris's editor wanted a story about the informal neighborhood watch groups that had formed to protect their communities from looters since the disappearance of Cairo's police force. Seham led us upstairs to the roof of her building, where perhaps a dozen members of a single extended family lived together in a warren of corrugated iron huts. Several of the men, she said, had been on the street last night fending off would-be thieves, and she was sure they'd be happy to talk to a reporter. Sure enough, within a few minutes we were seated on a carpet-covered bench drinking tea while the men recounted their stories from the previous night. The looters had come on motorcycles, they said, many armed with guns. They'd ransacked a local liquor store and had tried to steal from the shops immediately beside Seham's building, but they had chased them away with clubs and knives. At this point one of the men we were speaking with produced his weapon of choice so we could see it for ourselves: a rusty-looking blade as long as my arm affixed to a wooden handle, a tool that looked like it was intended to cut sugarcane, not for use in hand-to-hand combat. One of the marauders had wielded a bigger knife, he told us, but he had been quicker.
After leaving Seham's, we spent the next few hours at the apartment of one of my classmates whose internet service, which came through a minor provider that had either been overlooked or excluded from the blackout, was miraculously still active. I had just finished answering several days' worth of concerned emails from family and friends back home when the air shook with a sudden explosion of noise from outside, so loud it seemed to set the glasses on the tabletop trembling. I ran to the balcony. Two fighter jets were hurtling through the sky in perfect formation, sketching a long loop around Downtown Cairo. Each time they flew overhead the roar of their engines burst anew like a thunderclap. At every window up and down the street scared faces appeared, looking up and around, trying like I had to identify the source of the noise.
The vegetable souq where we stopped on our way back to Garden City was in chaos. With the planes passing by every two minutes no one could finish a conversation, and with everyone anxious to return home before the start of the curfew in less than half an hour, tempers were quick to flare, and people shoved against each other in their eagerness to hand over their money and depart with their purchases.
Chris's colleague from The National, freshly arrived from Jerusalem via Amman, was waiting for us in Garden City when we got back. A photographer would join them from Abu Dhabi as soon as he could find an airline that would take him to Cairo.
We arrived at Seham's apartment, which had been converted into a makeshift hostel for revolutionary youths resting between stints in Tahrir. No less than four young men were encamped in her tiny living room, watching TV, chewing seeds, and discussing their next plan of action. Seham served us fuul beans and tea on a card table positioned precariously amid the stacks of books crowding every inch of floorspace. Just as we sat down, somebody knocked over the bowl of seeds and they scattered across the carpet, sending her two cats scurrying for cover. As one of the boys started patiently gathering the seeds one by one and returning them to the bowl, a young woman arrived from outside bearing news that the next protest would begin at 2pm that afternoon. The boys mobilized, clearing away the breakfast dishes and making ready to depart.
Chris's editor wanted a story about the informal neighborhood watch groups that had formed to protect their communities from looters since the disappearance of Cairo's police force. Seham led us upstairs to the roof of her building, where perhaps a dozen members of a single extended family lived together in a warren of corrugated iron huts. Several of the men, she said, had been on the street last night fending off would-be thieves, and she was sure they'd be happy to talk to a reporter. Sure enough, within a few minutes we were seated on a carpet-covered bench drinking tea while the men recounted their stories from the previous night. The looters had come on motorcycles, they said, many armed with guns. They'd ransacked a local liquor store and had tried to steal from the shops immediately beside Seham's building, but they had chased them away with clubs and knives. At this point one of the men we were speaking with produced his weapon of choice so we could see it for ourselves: a rusty-looking blade as long as my arm affixed to a wooden handle, a tool that looked like it was intended to cut sugarcane, not for use in hand-to-hand combat. One of the marauders had wielded a bigger knife, he told us, but he had been quicker.
After leaving Seham's, we spent the next few hours at the apartment of one of my classmates whose internet service, which came through a minor provider that had either been overlooked or excluded from the blackout, was miraculously still active. I had just finished answering several days' worth of concerned emails from family and friends back home when the air shook with a sudden explosion of noise from outside, so loud it seemed to set the glasses on the tabletop trembling. I ran to the balcony. Two fighter jets were hurtling through the sky in perfect formation, sketching a long loop around Downtown Cairo. Each time they flew overhead the roar of their engines burst anew like a thunderclap. At every window up and down the street scared faces appeared, looking up and around, trying like I had to identify the source of the noise.
The vegetable souq where we stopped on our way back to Garden City was in chaos. With the planes passing by every two minutes no one could finish a conversation, and with everyone anxious to return home before the start of the curfew in less than half an hour, tempers were quick to flare, and people shoved against each other in their eagerness to hand over their money and depart with their purchases.
Chris's colleague from The National, freshly arrived from Jerusalem via Amman, was waiting for us in Garden City when we got back. A photographer would join them from Abu Dhabi as soon as he could find an airline that would take him to Cairo.
February 21, 2011
Egyptians: Sensibly Violent
I've been wondering how this revolution would have gone down in a society with different attitudes toward violence -- a society more like, for example, the US.
During the past month Egyptians have proved themselves hesitant, by and large, to engage in large-scale violence. Policemen retaliated against the stones thrown at them by protesters with clubs, tear gas, and more stones, but rarely with live bullets. Protesters, likewise, maintained their staunch commitment to peaceful demonstrations, even after pro-government thugs came at them with Molotov cocktails and horses (Yes, horses. And also camels. But only to a limited extent firearms.). Internationally, human rights groups have lauded both sides for their restraint, and indeed, watching the brutal put-downs of pro-democracy movements in Libya and Bahrain over the past few days, one has to agree that the Egyptians negotiated their revolution with astonishingly little bloodshed.
As anyone who has lived here knows, Cairo is refreshingly free of the muggings, robberies, and other acts of random violence that plague so many American cities, especially those acts involving firearms. According to statistics published on GunPolicy.org, a website hosted at the University of Sydney's School of Public Health that promotes a "public health model of firearm injury prevention", there are only 3.5 privately owned guns in Egypt for every 100 civilians, and in an apparent corollary -- although the survey does not address the relationship between gun ownership and murders directly -- the rate of homicides by firearm in Egypt in 2006 (the most recent data provided) was only 0.17 deaths per 100,000 people. In the US, by comparison, private gun ownership by last measurement stood at 88.8 guns per 100 civilians, and during the same year Americans died by gun homicide at a rate of 3.36 people per 100,000 -- a rate almost twenty times higher than Egypt's.
Yet despite their commendable behavior in recent weeks and their statistically low incidence of gun deaths, Egyptians are not non-violent people. Because most of the violence here does not involve weapons and takes place within the private spheres of the family home, the neighborhood, or the classroom -- encompassing fistfights, domestic abuse, corporal punishment, and sexual assault, but rarely outright homicide -- it is little discussed publicly, and almost never witnessed, much less experienced, by foreign observers. But its very secretiveness, far from negating its importance, has allowed it to become arguably more pervasive; unlike gun violence in America, a much-publicized social ill and one that is the object of nationwide preventative campaigns, violence in Egypt is seldom studied or talked about and thus is broadly permitted to continue.
So despite Egypt's lack of the headline-grabbing brand of violence common in the United States, Egyptians are perhaps, if not more violent statistically, more exposed to violence on an everyday level. This, along with ill-enforced safety regulations, low-quality and poorly maintained infrastructure, unreliable emergency response systems, and the generally perilous living conditions of many Egyptians, means that injury and even death are highly visible phenomena throughout Egyptian society. The cripples and amputees on the street are in-your-face reminders of the fragility of the human body, while death, while it certainly doesn't go un-mourned, is viewed as a natural bookend to a life, not a deviation from the proper order of things but wholly part of it.
Americans, if I can generalize, have a less comfortable relationship with these grimmer sides of reality. The thought of our bodies, those exalted temples at whose altars we as a society offer so much in time, effort, and money, being violated by pain or disfigurement is to many of us a terrifying thought. Death is more frightening to us still; this fear drives our obsession with warning labels and traffic laws, informs a folk culture rife with ghost stories on the one hand and tales of magically endowed immortality on the other, and justifies the billions of dollars that the American pharmaceutical and health care industries spend every year in their ongoing struggle to keep us all alive just a little longer.
Americans' attitudes toward violence are, of course, part and parcel with their understanding of injury and death. When violence equals firearms, injuries are severe and death is probable, leading many Americans to fear violence with the same outsize terror they hold for its consequences. Others, in awe of its ability to inflict these worst of all outcomes, fetishize it, claiming its power for themselves imaginatively through video games or practically by keeping guns in their homes. In either case there is an element of mythology involved.
This mythologizing of violence, according to my hypothesis, would inevitably have played a crucial role in the revolution had it been carried out by Americans. Let's picture it this way: those who fear violence would have stayed indoors, prioritizing safety over liberty, while those who fetishize it would have been quick to take to the streets with guns blazing, certain that violence was the only solution; the revolution would have been over before it started, the pro-violence faction going down in a hail of police gunfire while the anti-violence majority watched on TV from the security of their living rooms.
Egyptians, neither afraid of violence nor enamored with it, took neither of these tactics, and thus succeeded where Americans would have failed.
What do you think? If you don't agree, leave me a comment.
During the past month Egyptians have proved themselves hesitant, by and large, to engage in large-scale violence. Policemen retaliated against the stones thrown at them by protesters with clubs, tear gas, and more stones, but rarely with live bullets. Protesters, likewise, maintained their staunch commitment to peaceful demonstrations, even after pro-government thugs came at them with Molotov cocktails and horses (Yes, horses. And also camels. But only to a limited extent firearms.). Internationally, human rights groups have lauded both sides for their restraint, and indeed, watching the brutal put-downs of pro-democracy movements in Libya and Bahrain over the past few days, one has to agree that the Egyptians negotiated their revolution with astonishingly little bloodshed.
As anyone who has lived here knows, Cairo is refreshingly free of the muggings, robberies, and other acts of random violence that plague so many American cities, especially those acts involving firearms. According to statistics published on GunPolicy.org, a website hosted at the University of Sydney's School of Public Health that promotes a "public health model of firearm injury prevention", there are only 3.5 privately owned guns in Egypt for every 100 civilians, and in an apparent corollary -- although the survey does not address the relationship between gun ownership and murders directly -- the rate of homicides by firearm in Egypt in 2006 (the most recent data provided) was only 0.17 deaths per 100,000 people. In the US, by comparison, private gun ownership by last measurement stood at 88.8 guns per 100 civilians, and during the same year Americans died by gun homicide at a rate of 3.36 people per 100,000 -- a rate almost twenty times higher than Egypt's.
Yet despite their commendable behavior in recent weeks and their statistically low incidence of gun deaths, Egyptians are not non-violent people. Because most of the violence here does not involve weapons and takes place within the private spheres of the family home, the neighborhood, or the classroom -- encompassing fistfights, domestic abuse, corporal punishment, and sexual assault, but rarely outright homicide -- it is little discussed publicly, and almost never witnessed, much less experienced, by foreign observers. But its very secretiveness, far from negating its importance, has allowed it to become arguably more pervasive; unlike gun violence in America, a much-publicized social ill and one that is the object of nationwide preventative campaigns, violence in Egypt is seldom studied or talked about and thus is broadly permitted to continue.
So despite Egypt's lack of the headline-grabbing brand of violence common in the United States, Egyptians are perhaps, if not more violent statistically, more exposed to violence on an everyday level. This, along with ill-enforced safety regulations, low-quality and poorly maintained infrastructure, unreliable emergency response systems, and the generally perilous living conditions of many Egyptians, means that injury and even death are highly visible phenomena throughout Egyptian society. The cripples and amputees on the street are in-your-face reminders of the fragility of the human body, while death, while it certainly doesn't go un-mourned, is viewed as a natural bookend to a life, not a deviation from the proper order of things but wholly part of it.
Americans, if I can generalize, have a less comfortable relationship with these grimmer sides of reality. The thought of our bodies, those exalted temples at whose altars we as a society offer so much in time, effort, and money, being violated by pain or disfigurement is to many of us a terrifying thought. Death is more frightening to us still; this fear drives our obsession with warning labels and traffic laws, informs a folk culture rife with ghost stories on the one hand and tales of magically endowed immortality on the other, and justifies the billions of dollars that the American pharmaceutical and health care industries spend every year in their ongoing struggle to keep us all alive just a little longer.
Americans' attitudes toward violence are, of course, part and parcel with their understanding of injury and death. When violence equals firearms, injuries are severe and death is probable, leading many Americans to fear violence with the same outsize terror they hold for its consequences. Others, in awe of its ability to inflict these worst of all outcomes, fetishize it, claiming its power for themselves imaginatively through video games or practically by keeping guns in their homes. In either case there is an element of mythology involved.
This mythologizing of violence, according to my hypothesis, would inevitably have played a crucial role in the revolution had it been carried out by Americans. Let's picture it this way: those who fear violence would have stayed indoors, prioritizing safety over liberty, while those who fetishize it would have been quick to take to the streets with guns blazing, certain that violence was the only solution; the revolution would have been over before it started, the pro-violence faction going down in a hail of police gunfire while the anti-violence majority watched on TV from the security of their living rooms.
Egyptians, neither afraid of violence nor enamored with it, took neither of these tactics, and thus succeeded where Americans would have failed.
What do you think? If you don't agree, leave me a comment.
February 19, 2011
DAY 5: January 29, 2011
A temporary calm, more a sense of exhaustion than of resolution, had descended over the city by morning. Qasr al-Ainy Street looked like it had been hit by a war. Charred skeletons of burned vehicles smoked amid piles of rubble, trash, and broken glass; a gas station halfway to Tahrir had been plundered by protesters, its petrol siphoned out to fuel the fires. The Egyptians seemed as stunned as we were by the transformation that had taken place over night, and like us inspired by a voyeuristic desire to record the wreckage, all of us perhaps seeing ourselves reborn as conflict-zone photographers, documenting disaster for the eyes of those elsewhere.
Tanks squatted at each entrance to Tahrir, many tagged with anti-Mubarak graffiti that echoed the slogans scrawled on every wall and storefront. Down with Mubarak. God is great. Long live the revolution. Soldiers checked our passports, then waved us through.
Inside the square the scene was much the same. The Mugamma, the hulking, labyrinthine edifice at the heart of Egyptian bureaucracy, was untouched, but the manicured lawns around it had been flooded, turning one side of the square into a murky lake whose oil-slick surface bobbed with trash. At the opposite end, flames still licked through the gutted remains of the NDP headquarters, sending a thick plume of smoke overhead that darkened the sky and stung our eyes.
We proceeded cautiously around the central median, taking pictures, trying to understand how we ought to feel about the scene before us. Destruction is sad, even when it's a necessary precursor to the creation of something better.
There was a commotion on the opposite side of the square. We couldn't see what had happened -- had a group of overenthusiastic protesters gotten too close to a tank? -- but suddenly the sky was whistling with bullets. Tear gas exploded right beside us. The crowd panicked, and we were swept in a rush of frantic moving bodies to the edge of the square. We broke free and moved toward a side street at a jog, shielding ourselves first under the awning of the nearby KFC, then beneath the overhangs of a row of papyrus shops and travel agencies. Finally we turned a corner, slowed to a walk, and began the search for an international phone line.
With mobile service and the internet still down, Chris hadn't been in touch with his editors since the previous evening. We tried a string of Downtown hotels, all shabby establishments that cater to backpackers and other less well-heeled travelers with an appetite for their gloomy, faded colonial charm; finally, forty minutes later, we ended up at the Four Seasons, where Chris was able to use the facilities in their business center to contact Abu Dhabi. On our way out, my cell phone rang -- service had been restored, although text messaging would remain unavailable for another week.
We returned to Tahrir, where the mood was as relaxed now as it had been tense two hours earlier, to gather quotes for Chris's latest piece. A group of young girls in headscarves told us they were hopeful that the events of the previous night would show Mubarak how serious Egyptians were about wanting him gone. When I asked them what they thought of the hundreds of soldiers now deployed throughout Downtown Cairo, they expressed absolute confidence that the army would stand by the people no matter what. Personally, the guns, heavily armed tanks, and other signs of military might now visible on every corner made me nervous -- how rapidly could those guns be turned on the people, and with what devastating consequences, was a scenario that would cycle frequently through my imagination in the weeks that followed -- but to the protesters they were a visible pledge of solidarity. One point on which everyone we talked to was adamant, once they learned we were American: this was their revolution, and if America thought her long fingers had any business meddling in it, well, she was very much mistaken.
We returned to the Four Seasons that evening so that Chris could file his story via fax from the business center. At the hotel we ran into two other students from my Arabic program, and while Chris wrote the piece on his laptop, we had drinks at the hotel bar -- $14 cocktails served by black-suited waiters, which we sipped sitting in leather armchairs beside a plate-glass window overlooking the darkening curve of the Nile River. Across the water, an unknown building was smoking. Just below us, knots of people moved along the corniche. Some brandished clubs, and seemed to be headed for another altercation with government forces. Others seemed in a hurry to get home; a lone taxi appeared, and was immediately waylaid by a dozen people clamoring to be let in. In the bar, American jazz played softly, and the waiters pressed us with more complimentary nuts, pretzels, and olives. I overate, as though storing up strength for the days ahead.
 |
| Burned cars on Qasr al-Ainy Street. |
Tanks squatted at each entrance to Tahrir, many tagged with anti-Mubarak graffiti that echoed the slogans scrawled on every wall and storefront. Down with Mubarak. God is great. Long live the revolution. Soldiers checked our passports, then waved us through.
Inside the square the scene was much the same. The Mugamma, the hulking, labyrinthine edifice at the heart of Egyptian bureaucracy, was untouched, but the manicured lawns around it had been flooded, turning one side of the square into a murky lake whose oil-slick surface bobbed with trash. At the opposite end, flames still licked through the gutted remains of the NDP headquarters, sending a thick plume of smoke overhead that darkened the sky and stung our eyes.
 |
| Midan Tahrir: A tank inscribed with anti-Mubarak graffiti; the NDP headquarters smolders in the background. |
We proceeded cautiously around the central median, taking pictures, trying to understand how we ought to feel about the scene before us. Destruction is sad, even when it's a necessary precursor to the creation of something better.
There was a commotion on the opposite side of the square. We couldn't see what had happened -- had a group of overenthusiastic protesters gotten too close to a tank? -- but suddenly the sky was whistling with bullets. Tear gas exploded right beside us. The crowd panicked, and we were swept in a rush of frantic moving bodies to the edge of the square. We broke free and moved toward a side street at a jog, shielding ourselves first under the awning of the nearby KFC, then beneath the overhangs of a row of papyrus shops and travel agencies. Finally we turned a corner, slowed to a walk, and began the search for an international phone line.
With mobile service and the internet still down, Chris hadn't been in touch with his editors since the previous evening. We tried a string of Downtown hotels, all shabby establishments that cater to backpackers and other less well-heeled travelers with an appetite for their gloomy, faded colonial charm; finally, forty minutes later, we ended up at the Four Seasons, where Chris was able to use the facilities in their business center to contact Abu Dhabi. On our way out, my cell phone rang -- service had been restored, although text messaging would remain unavailable for another week.
We returned to Tahrir, where the mood was as relaxed now as it had been tense two hours earlier, to gather quotes for Chris's latest piece. A group of young girls in headscarves told us they were hopeful that the events of the previous night would show Mubarak how serious Egyptians were about wanting him gone. When I asked them what they thought of the hundreds of soldiers now deployed throughout Downtown Cairo, they expressed absolute confidence that the army would stand by the people no matter what. Personally, the guns, heavily armed tanks, and other signs of military might now visible on every corner made me nervous -- how rapidly could those guns be turned on the people, and with what devastating consequences, was a scenario that would cycle frequently through my imagination in the weeks that followed -- but to the protesters they were a visible pledge of solidarity. One point on which everyone we talked to was adamant, once they learned we were American: this was their revolution, and if America thought her long fingers had any business meddling in it, well, she was very much mistaken.
We returned to the Four Seasons that evening so that Chris could file his story via fax from the business center. At the hotel we ran into two other students from my Arabic program, and while Chris wrote the piece on his laptop, we had drinks at the hotel bar -- $14 cocktails served by black-suited waiters, which we sipped sitting in leather armchairs beside a plate-glass window overlooking the darkening curve of the Nile River. Across the water, an unknown building was smoking. Just below us, knots of people moved along the corniche. Some brandished clubs, and seemed to be headed for another altercation with government forces. Others seemed in a hurry to get home; a lone taxi appeared, and was immediately waylaid by a dozen people clamoring to be let in. In the bar, American jazz played softly, and the waiters pressed us with more complimentary nuts, pretzels, and olives. I overate, as though storing up strength for the days ahead.
February 18, 2011
So we don't forget too soon...
...what the power of the people looks like. Especially as the news these days fills with accounts of protesters in other parts of the Middle East being beaten, silenced, disappearing, let's not forget that here, in Egypt, they succeeded. Living proof that such a thing as overthrowing a government really is possible.
Cairo, Feb. 11, 2011
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