Thesis progress has come at the expense of regular blogging, but I though I'd check in. A new print edition of AUC's Caravan is out, slightly better than the last. Their feature is an attempt at investigative journalism that reveals that several of the donors who have departments and rooms named in their honor may not be the most ethically upstanding. They took issue with a room being dedicated to the memory of Dr Mine Ener.
Ener was a professor at Villanova University and author of Managing Egypt's Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1890-1952. In 2003, Ener gave birth to a baby girl with Down's syndrome a fact that appeared to have caused Ener to sink further into postpartum depression. Tragedy struck when, gripped by mental illness, Ener killed her child and later, after being incarcerated, committed suicide. Villanova took down a plaque erected to her memory and instead held a symposium on postpartum depression and psychosis to memorialize her. The Caravan's choice of title for the story, "This Room is Dedicated to a Murderer. Who Else Has AUC Accepted Money From?" is sensational and doesn't take it account the role mental illness played. I won't add further commentary to the sanity and misdeeds of others whom the named spaces honor, but you can checked them out and draw your own conclusions.
Other topics covered in the Caravan included an article and a cartoon about the challenges faced by female students interested in student body politics. Charming quotes like "girls are unable to handle the kind of commitment and campaigning it takes to win a competitive election" and alleged threats to the reputations of women who decide to run for office come from male students, showing that for all it's progressive shine, the situation at AUC smacks of the rest of Egypt's pervasive sexism. The Muslim Brotherhood offer us another example, promising to suspend members who requested positions for women in the party's guidance bureau. "Not all jobs are appropriate for women," wisely asserts a member. This of course is not to suggest that the rough gender equality in the US is anything close to perfect.
The online version of the student paper euphemistically refers to the strongly possible canceling of post-'Aid classes as another "H1N1 Break". According to NPR, Egypt's PM has already declared that the four-day 'Aid al-Adha vacation will be extended a further six days for all government-run schools and universities. It's only a matter of time before they demand AUC shutter for this second "swine flu" vacay. The logic for such a class suspension escapes me, yet again.

Other News & Issues

• Abuse of domestic workers in Lebanon leads to mysterious deaths
• Egyptians circumvent rigid relationship proscriptions by seeking love online
• Growing Evangelical popularity puts Coptic Orthodox Church on defensive

Lonely Planet will inform you in the online version of its guide to Egypt that

The incidence of crime, violent or otherwise, in Egypt is negligible compared with most Western countries. Most visitors and residents would agree that Egyptian towns and cities are safe to walk around in during the day or night. Unfortunately, the hassle factor often means that this isn’t quite the case for an unaccompanied foreign woman.

Indeed, it is common for many of us in the foreign student community here to marvel that we can walk around at 3 AM without fear either of theft or violent crime. We all too often paint Egypt as a place where sleazy but ultimately harmless men are but an inconvenience to foreign and Egyptian women alike. The stark and disgusting reality is that marginalized women don't experience this reality. Domestic workers and refugees are On top of this, gender-based violence victims have little access to services here.
Two friends of mine and I were discussing, yesterday, the stories of women they knew in Cairo. One, a veiled Muslim mother of six children whose husband had disappeared following poplution displacements in Eritrea had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by an Egyptian employer. Another, a 17-year-old girl without legal status had been raped several times, the last time brutally with a glass bottle that broke off inside of her body. She was left by the man to bleed out and her family, afraid of being deported because of their status, refused to take her to a hospital. My friend and his flatmate had to go and find and pay a doctor to come to the girl's home. Domestic workers from the Horn of Africa who have to take cabs home from their place of employment are sometimes not dropped off at their destination, but told by the driver's that they'll pay them for the services because "they know it's what they do".
While abuse of domestic workers and irregular migrants happens all over the world, I think the intersection of the general disregard for women in Egypt with the mistreatment of marginalized people is an especially insidious combination.
Not only are migrant women at risk, but Egyptian women as well. Marital rape, as in many other Middle Eastern countries, is not a crime in Egypt. Moreover, for more than 90 years (until 1999), there was a law on the books here that absolved rapists if they later married their victims. A similar law still existed as of last year in Lebanon.
And yet, this flagrant disregard for the dignity of women regardless of their background is minimized, even ignored and denied. The entire spectrum from verbal sexual harassment to rape is often dismissed. A male Egyptian friend couldn't understand why I didn't want to go for a walk downtown with a female friend of mine. I told him the kinds of disgusting things I'd heard with my own ears said to her in the past and he laughed it off and repeatedly told me that sort of thing didn't happen. In the wake of attacks on women by some 150 in downtown Cairo in 2006, the president's wife maintained, in an interview on Al-Arabiya, that "Egyptian men always respect Egyptian women".
Faced with these facts and figures and with the personal anecdotes that I hear all too often, I'm frustrated with my own helplessness to make a difference. While I'm in class reading theory or at some restaurant half the population can't afford, all of this is going on. I really wish I knew what I could do. I can say, though, I won't be complicit anymore in blithely describing Egypt as "safe" while wives and domestic workers are raped with relative impunity. In the end, this is an Egyptian problem that must be solved by Egyptians. Many of them are in the habit of minimizing the problems of their country to outsiders as a matter of pride, but recognize among themselves what's really going on. Perhaps change can come from this kind "internal dialogue". For a society so concerned with honor, one would think that this stain in Egypt's image would be of urgent importance.

Related

For more on the vulnerability of Eritreans and Ethiopians in Cairo see: "The Insecurity of Eritreans and Ethiopians in Cairo" in the International Journal of Refugee Law. A preview is available here.

Other News & Issues

• BBC: "Why Egypt's young dream of life abroad"
• Not a single Egyptian film to be shown at the Cairo International Film Festival next week
• Female presenters on Egyptian state TV to appeared unveiled from now on

Swine and Turkey

I neglected to blog yesterday because I was busy scraping together plans for an impromptu trip to Turkey. Most of us in the CMRS program have decided to make the best of this swine flu class-cancellation debacle by traveling. I'm not sure I have the money for the trip but, then again, when I do have the money I probably won't be conveniently located in Egypt. So why not, right? I'm bringing along materials to be able to continue to work on my thesis everyday. I shall, insha'Allah, find the discipline to do so somewhere deep within.
In other news, today is the first day of 'Eid. So 'Eid mubarak to all of my Muslim friends! Obama wishes you the same.
Because I have rooms to book and more plans to make, I'll move onto the news.

News & Issues

• Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni leading UNESCO vote despite controversy
• Foreign Ministry defends Egypt's role in Lebanese politics
• NYTimes: "Belatedly, Egypt Spots Flaws in Wiping Out Pigs"
• During holiest month, Egypt faced with questions about sinners and saints

And, recalling gender-based violence during 'Eids past, here's a clip how Egyptian women are fighting back against sexual harassment:

Clearly, living along a river that snakes its way through a vast desert, Egyptians have a certain appreciation for water. Ancient Egyptian culture was deeply informed by a dependence on the River Nile. This is something I'd learned in history class long ago. In college, however, the research one of my professors conducted in water policy led me to understand what a vital role water plays today in international relations and conflict. It was therefore with great interest that I read about Israeli FM Lieberman's visits to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, home to the two most important sources of the Nile. This while Egypt and the other Nile Basin states are attempting to resolve their differences over water use issues. Though I'll refrain from Biblical allusions, it looks very much like Israel is trying to use water as a means of leverage over the Egyptians.
What made me think so much about water today wasn't anything on quite so grand a scale: My flatmate Phil purchased a couple of bottles of Hayat brand water for me before my return to Egypt. He prefers it, apparently, for its taste. I am a Nestlé Pure Life man myself it having been recommended as a reliable clean and neutral-tasting choice. I'd always been a little leary of Hayat. Phil and I debated the finer points of the Egyptian bottled water industry (while we weren't in our rooms, noses to the grindstone, working on our theses) agreeing that Baraka tastes the least pleasant of the major brands. With all of the discussion and my admittedly unsupported claims that my brand was healthier than his, I decided to check into the matter further. Such a riveting topic apparently hasn't warranted much journalist attention or blogging lately, at least not in English, but I found an article from early last year referring to Ministry of Trade and Industry tests. The results (probably interesting only to potential consumers of bottled water in Egypt) were that only seven brands were both fit for consumption and accurately labeled for mineral content, etc.: Aqua, Aqua Siwa, Aquafina, Dasani, Mineral, Nestlé, and Siwa. Schweppes, notably, was considered unsafe. Unsafer still are other sources of water in Egypt. Some 40% of Egyptians drink contaminated water that leads to typhoid outbreaks, kidney failure, and thousands of deaths a year. Recent water shortages across the river in Giza have forced local residents to pump their own water only to discover that it is contaminated with sewage. If anyone finds more recent material on bottled water in Egypt, do let me know.

News & Issues

–Egypt

• The South Cairo Criminal Court has sentenced two US couples to jail in a high-profile illegal adoption case and is expected to hand down a ruling in another major case centered on defective blood products.
• AFP reports on the closure of AUC and other foreign universities and schools suggesting that the measures being taken by the Egyptian government may be in line with WHO recommendations.
• The government has taken an important step in tackling the un-Islamic practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Authorities arrested a 69-year-old man after his circumcision of an 11-year-old girl left her hospitalized.
• A US NGO, Freedom House, is accusing Egypt and others of using their positions in the UN's Human Rights Council to limit the protection of human rights. Find Freedom House's "The UN Human Rights Council Report Card: 2007-2009" here in .pdf format.
• Resurgent 80s fashion trends apparently don't jive with Grand Mufti Gomaa's sensibilities; stretch pants are a no-no, but loose-fitting trousers have been deemed ok in a recent statement following the controversy over trouser-wearing Sudanese women.

–Islam

• Will the real Islam please stand up? Daily News Egypt reprints an article that first appeared in Arab News tracking the multiple forms that Islam has taken in practice in the past century and its possible trajectories.
• Sana from KABOBfest also recently examined the complex relationship between Islam and modernity in her blog noting that the two are far from antithetical.