For my readers who can read Arabic...

This is the first time I have ever installed a piece of software that has invoked God, The All Beneficent and Most Merciful. Sort of fitting I guess.

Check this out-A comic based on the 99 Names of God.
I may have to pick up a copy, if only for humor's sake. There is an Arabic edition too!
All the character's names are of course based on the إسم فاعل of the various attributes of God's 99 names as per hadith. "Verily, there are ninety-nine names of God, one hundred minus one. He who enumerates [and believes in them and the one god behind] them would get into Paradise."
Of course without the definite article though. To be honest it looks a litte hokey, a little cool, and a little tragic, but who knows? Attempts to make religion relevant through modern music (electronic, rock or otherwise) is usually painful, and linked with comic books, this has the potential to excruciating. It might be even more painful to realize that some Muslims feel that Islam is so maligned to the point that it has to represent itself as so benign as to have a comic book.
It actually sort of looks cool, if only because it is very self-aware and cognizant of Islamic history. Any comic book in which the plot is anchored by the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in the 13th century has to be sort of interesting, no? Plus, while the characters are blatant attempts at hipness, maybe they actually are hip!
"The 18-year-old daughter of a wealthy businessman from the United Arab Emirates, Noora realizes her power after she is kidnapped. As she tries to dig her way out of imprisonment, she discovers a gemstone. The stone allows her to manipulate light and create holograms, and she uses her new powers to escape. She can also now see the "Light of Truth" within others but also their dark side. With her ability to see the ugly side of human nature, she adopts a more nihilistic view of the world and struggles with depression."



Online copies are available here, but I think I am going to see if I can track down paper copies in both Arabic and English. You can download the "Pilot" for free, which I am doing right now, and will have a review of later!


Then again, I've been wanting to watch Cowboy Bebop again, so what do I know?

Currently listening to My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless." I had forgotten what an amazing album this is.

(How on earth did I manage to get OS X, comic books, anime and My Bloody Valentine in one post? Maybe my own attempts at hipness are getting desperate...China would subject me to her usual ruthless half-teasing.)

Second trip to Petra (With my Mom!)

A quick November Roundup

So I started out hot, blogging quite a bit in early November and then I sort of petered out. Some of that is due to school, which has been great. ILI has been well worth it. I am currently taking MSA and an intensive grammar class. The grammar class is actually not quite what I was expecting, as it is oriented more towards Arabic composition. In that sense though it's quite a personal challenge, because I had sort of resigned myself to aspiring to at least be reading level fluent, but certainly not writing level fluent. This is mostly do to the stringent Arabic composition rules that are difficult for non-native speakers to master, but also because I am not a particularly good writer in English! I am starting to think that Arabic grammar in fact does prove the concept of infinity. I have a tangible understanding of infinity due to studying Arabic grammar. Gotta love studying adverbs inside adverbs. I would strongly encourage anyone studying Arabic in Cairo, or thinking about it to look at ILI. I am not sure I would strongly encourage Cairo though!
The really exciting news around here though has been the trip my Mom took to visit me here in Cairo. She actually just left this morning and should be on her way back to the US now via Amsterdam. The entry following this blog will have a ton of Petra photos, as we made a lightning quick trip from Cairo to Petra, crossing three borders in less than an hour. Two times in a row now I've crossed the Israel border without being subjected to a humiliating interrogation. Perhaps a greater wonder than Petra. This trip also marked the filling of my passport. I know longer have room in passport, and will have to apply for additional pages. That or get a new passport, which is probably the better solution given its contents. I have filled a passport in 10 months, and there are only 2 non-Middle Eastern countries in it. Problematic.
So we spent a little time in Jordan, and had a lovely time. It reminded me of just how much I do miss Jordan, and how much more comfortable I was there with the language, the people, the culture, the cars stopping at red lights, etc... We had a wonderful experience going to Petra. We hired a service taxi to Petra and Noga and I wound up talking with our driver some in Arabic. We agreed that he would pick us up at Petra when the gates closed around 5. We arrived there, and realizing we were starving asked our driver if we might stop for a quick snack at one of the non-touristy falafel places. He said sure, and as we drove through Wadi Musa, the tourist town built up around Petra he made a number of calls inquiring as whether there was bread, eggs, etc.. Mildly confused we arrived at his home of all places, where we had an amazing dinner and got to talk to our driver and his family for quite a while. It's just little things like this that reminded me of how wonderful Jordan is. It's not that Jordanians are more hospitable that Egyptians but rather Jordan is just much more accessible than Egypt. Egypt also has a much more firmly established tourism culture that often makes it difficult to interact with people here. Plus I am just biased. I much prefer Jordan to Egypt, but it might also be that the pollution here is giving me splitting headaches. There's no pollution in Amman.
Anyways, this is just a quick update, I am hoping to write more later. I have to go find my cellphone now so I can go to the Egyptian Museum. I actually haven't been there since March or April, and then I went through so quickly so I need another go at it.

One quick word-I installed Leopard and while it isn't so far above Tiger that it's mindblowing, it's an upgrade. What on earth are you windows users doing? I can understand the money thing, the hardware is expensive. So build a hackintosh, or run Linux. Honestly, Windows is just painful to use. Not only that, but Quicksilver and Provoc might make OS X worth it in and of themselves. That and the new Safari is pretty good. Opera is still better though! On that note, the reason why the photos in the following set is horizontal only is because I haven't installed photoshop yet to flip the photos. Sorry!



Listening to:
Delphium-Aphex Twin
The Suffering-Coheed and Cambria
The White Stripes-A Martyr For My Love For You
Muse-Butterflies and Hurricanes
Rise Against-Worth Dying For
I have gotten reobsessed with podcasting after losing interest for a long while.

A Smart Cookie

Mahmoud Abbas, the democratically elected
US selected President of the Palestinian Authority is threatening to resign should the coming Annapolis conference fails.

Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence believes that the U.S-sponsored summit is likely to fail, and that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas might step down as a result.
Abbas reportedly views the Annapolis conference as the last opportunity to resuscitate the peace process. If he does go home in the wake of a failure of the talks, without a successor acceptable to Fatah, Abbas' departure would create a lacuna in the Palestinian leadership and increase Hamas influence.

Two things. First, good use of the word "lacuna." Props to Haaretz for busting out the SAT vocab.
Second. Abu Mazzan is bluffing. It's that simple. Why on earth would he step down when he has fought for the last year for his position both domestically and internationally? He's been propped up by the interntional community and Israel ever since the specter of Hamas became too scary, and Israel knows they've got no one around except maybe, just maybe Marwan Barghouti or someone else who might have the personal charisma to keep Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Brigades in check. Sounds like wishful thinking on my part though.
Mahmoud Abbas is an anachronism, but it is in everyone's best interests to prop him up in order to try to keep Hamas under control in the West Bank, and giving Israel free reign to do what it wishes in Gaza. So the question is does Israel recognize that they need to make concessions to give Abbas a boost on the home front, with a nudge and wink towards him, or do they keep this line that they are pushing, that they expect the talks to fail? I fully expect them to fail, but then again I've been waiting for a full-scale invasion of Gaza since July so maybe I'm just a little too over the top.
Now Syria is demanding that the agenda at the conference include the return of the Golan Heights, which is an inevitable move. It can be precluded forever. Syria seems to think it has some leverage though in its support of various groups, and hope to use that as a lever for their own interests. Should an invitation be extended to Syria, which is damn well should be, there could be a real chance to make some very specific changes in policy, particularly in Lebanon. But if Israel is damning the conference from the outset, of course it won't succeed.

Chintzy Kitschy Religion?

Reading this article I was struck by how similar the products they are describing are to a certain lighter my father used to have, and may still have for all I know. It was a red lighter from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, that when flicked open, would play a well-known revolutionary theme for you while you lit your cigarette, or your capitalism destroying molotov cocktail. I remembering thinking in my teenage years how absurd this all was, how on earth was this obviously tacky little lighter going to compel you to support the revolution and state all the more fervently. It seemed like a caricature of itself; an ordinary object imbued by this revolutionary theme it played with such a unseemly power. I had to laugh at it.
I had the same reaction to that article on Islamic consumer goods that I had to my father's Mao lighter and all the tacky Jesus merch I've been surrounded by growing up in Catholic Minnesota. Nothing quite cheapens the meaning of a religion or revolution like cheap plastic crap.
I actually had never run into stuff like this until today, when I noticed opening and closing the doors elicited an "Allah Akbar" from a speaker somewhere in the car. Or after the article I knew to listen for stuff like this.

Putting Koranic verses and prayers into electronic format can be a fraught enterprise, however, as a number of manufacturers discovered in 2005 when Egypt's Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa condemned the use of verses as ring tones.

Gomaa, one of the highest authorities for Sunni Islam in Egypt, described it as "a devaluing of the sacred book."

The other issue I've heard in this regard is the prayer as a ring tone has to be played completely, so you can't answer your phone until the prayer is over.

Many see the gadgets as part of the public piety that increasingly pervades Egyptian society, where the vast majority of women wear religious headscarves and an increasing number of men sport the "zebiba" -- a prune-like bruise on the forehead that supposedly comes from vigorous praying.

Dalal al-Bizri, a columnist for the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, sees the devices as evidence of the importance of appearances in contemporary Islam.

"It's a religion whose followers seem to need to touch, to feel the beyond -- much like the pagans they once condemned," she said, adding that such outward displays betray "an insistence on belief, as though some deeper conviction was lacking."

I can certainly agree that the zebiba has become more common, and it's sort of grotesque. Not to put too fine a point on it. It's a step down from self-flagellation or snake handling, but a public display of physical pain as proof of prayer is sick no matter what religion it is.

The sociologists are probably right though:

Sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, on the other hand, thinks the trend is more indicative of the "naivety of the consumers and the intelligence of the merchants."

"It also says a lot about how quickly the Chinese economy reacts and adapts to the desires of the consumers -- whoever they are," he said with a smile.

Honestly I think they might just be status symbols in a society incredbily enamored of them. I need to spend more time in America to see if I am just hyper-responive to the status symbols here, but proportional to income the status symbols here seem absurd. The article states that a 1200 pound electronic Quran is out of the reaches of most Egyptians, and that should be true. Except everyone I see has an absurdly expensive cellphone. The cop getting paid 300 pounds a month has a 1800 pound cell phone. 6 months worth of his salary. Ok, so it's probably a bribe from a patron, but nonetheless, cellphones here are the status symbol for the class that can't afford cars. So maybe Islamic merch is the status symbol for the devout? It's probably just tacky though.

I just can't imagine wanting to hear call to prayers more than 5 times a day from poor quality speaker. I'm going to be watching for stuff like this more often, if nothing else because I love kitchsch. Noga still won't let me put up my absurd posters of Bashar al-Assad. Probably has something to do with the sworn enemy of her country thing. Oh well.

This and That

You can make out the pyramids in the distance.



Doing battle with our overzealous freezer!



Interesting Links:
A Good Look at the Debate over Israel Lobby
Noga's Aunt at NYU
The Case for Polytheism
Digitizing the Entire Canon?
It's articles like this that make me glad I'm learning Arabic so I can go watch it for myself and not rely on FoxNews for their version of things.

A Quick Trip to Sudan

Last night, on the recommendation of several Sudanese refugees Noga and I decided to try to find the Khartoum Restaurant that has been around for over 20 years. We knew very little about where it actually was, only that it was downtown, near Medan Opera and Medan Ataba. Which, like all of Cairo, is an enormous area to try to find a restaurant. Googling it though, much to our surprise actually did turn up a single result, a Daily Star review of the restaurant. Armed with their vague at best directions, we set out only to find they were completely misleading and next to useless.

Getting there is quite a challenge, however. Matam Al-Khartoum is located just off Midan Opera in Downtown Cairo, across from Abdeen Palace. Turn left unto a small, nameless dirt alleyway marked by two trees, and at the end of it, turn left. The restaurant is right there.

These useless directions ensured that we wandered all around Midan Opera and Abdeen looking for the restaurant. Medan Opera and Abdeen Palace are a pretty good ways away from one another, and certainly NOT across from Abdeen Palace. Don't follow the Daily Star directions. After wandering for a while, and engaging in a good deal of racial profiling in asking everyone we saw who looked Sudanese where the Khartoum Restaurant was, we found it in the absolutely most unlikely place. The only accurate thing about the Daily Star review was the nameless dirt alley part, near Medan Opera. It truly was a nameless dirty alley. We had checked every alley between Opera and Abdeen, and perhaps the only alley we didn't check because it seemed too unlikely was the alley it wound up being in. I wish I had pictures, the alley truly just looked like a mound of dirt.
We finally made it to the restaurant, where we caused something of a stir. We were probably the first non-Egyptian or Sudanese patrons in a while. We asked for a menu, which felt a little weird. The word "Menu" is used in Arabic colloquial, which is of course from French, who took it from minutus in Latin. Globalization, good times. The menu of course was in Arabic, but handwritten, so it took some deciphering to figure out the characters, only to realize we had no idea what any of the dishes actually were once we were able to read the names. Chagrined.
We went with the recommendations of the Sudanese and ordered Wayka and Aseeda, not sure how it's spelled in English, as well as the Beladi Bitaglia.

But the best dish was the Beladi Bitaglia (LE 5), a lamb stew with vegetables in a peppery unctuous broth. The lamb was so tender you could actually cut it with your spoon. And for those heat-seekers out there, one of the spiciest sauces I can remember was served on the side, refreshing in not only its blasting heat, but also in the fact it remained full of flavor, not succumbing to just plain pure spiciness like many other hot sauces.

I picked around the meat, and the Beladi Bitaglia was maybe the most delicious thing I've had in a long while. I also wholeheartedly agree with the Daily Star reviewer on their side hot sauce, it was simply fantastic. Next time I go back I am going to see if I can purchase some of this sauce in a bottle or something, it was delicious, although not as spicy as they make it out to be. I ordered the Aseeda, which as near as we can tell is Wayka, which is the sauce, and then flour and water mixed together into a gelatinous blob. It doesn't look very appetizing but it's absolutely delicious. Full of flavor from the sauce, and incredibly filling. I think I am very definitely adding Sudanese food to the list of favorites, along with Thai and Indian. I would have put Ethiopian food on the list, but Sudanese food has bumped it off the list, although I am sure Sudanese food has been heavily influenced by Ethopia and vice-versa.
As for the place itself, it was filled with Sudanese men, a few woman earlier in the evening, who left as time went by.
What this restaurant reminded me of, more than anything however is just how vibrant and diverse a city Cairo is. There are so many refugees, immigrants, western ex-pats and Egyptians that the melange sometimes is irresistible. Being able to be a westerner eating Sudanese food in Cairo is just exciting.