Cab Ride

12:10 PM, Wednesday, February 22, 2012

As I plopped into the front seat of my taxi, I was instantly taken aback by the racy music video that I found playing on top of the glove box in front of me.

“Ay da?!” (what’s that?!) I asked, with an expression of mock-amazement.
“A DVD player!” my cab driver replied. “Do you like it?”
“It’s nice” I responded, turning to look out the window just in time to see a mass of oncoming traffic cascading towards us. Unperturbed (this is a normal phenomenon on Cairo’s streets), I turned back to the driver, who was looking at me with a big grin on his face.

“Are you Catholic?” he asked.

This was a bit of an odd question, not because of its religious element but because of the fact that he asked me specifically if I was Catholic. In fact, asking foreigners about their religion is not an uncommon occurrence on Cairo’s streets and taxicabs, but usually when someone asks me the question they’ll phrase it as “are you Muslim?”

“No, I’m not Catholic.” I responded, “I’m Jewish.”
“You’re Jewish!?” he looked at me with an expression of disbelief, “I’m Jewish too!”

That moment was quite possibly one of the oddest I have had in Egypt. I looked at him, did a double-take, and the first thing that popped into my mind as a response was: “No, you’re not!”

I know for a fact that there are no Egyptian Jewish men still living in the country. About a dozen old women, all of whom are over 70, is what remains of a once flourishing Jewish community. I have attended a few Jewish functions during my time in Cairo (primarily for the food), and the only men in the room are expatriates, the boisterous Egyptian lawyer who does all the legal work for the Jewish community, and a smattering of security guards.

“Yes, I am Jewish!” my driver replied. “We’re from the same religion!”
“Ok,” I said, skeptically, “but you’re Christian, right?”
“Yes, of course!” he replied.

Just as I breathed a sigh of relief at clearing up that issue, he let forth with a second statement that was equally as odd as the first: “I migrated to the U.S. two months ago!”

“You what?”
“Yes, two months ago, I went to the embassy and gave them my documents, you know, all that, and they told me to check back in a few months to see if I could migrate.”
“Oh, I think what you mean to say is that you applied for the green card lottery.” I replied. I didn’t want to sink his hopes, so instead of telling him that he had about a 1 in 200 chance of winning, I simply said “May God be with you” (an Egyptian phrase meaning “good luck”).

“I really want to leave this country!” he declared to me a few moments later.

I had a sense that I knew where this conversation was going. I have had a few Christian cab drivers in the past few months who conveyed similar sentiments: simply put, a large percentage of Egyptian Christians wish that the revolution had never happened. They felt secure in the Mubarak era, happy with a sort of “live-and-let-live” agreement with the largely Muslim – but secular – Mubarak regime. Instead of focusing their efforts on gaining influence in government, Christians occupied themselves with developing a robust network of businesses throughout the country. As a result, they control a disproportionate share of the wealth in today’s Egypt.

“Egypt is going down the drain,” he continued, “all those crazy Islamists have taken power and they hate Christians. I don’t trust them at all! I would even move to Israel if I could!”

Huh. Maybe this cabbie’s assertion that he was Jewish had some unintended nugget of truth to it…I was too dumbfounded to respond with anything other than a bewildered laugh.

“So, who did you vote for in the parliamentary elections?” I asked, although I realized a second after I asked him that there was only one possible answer.

“The Egyptian bloc,” he replied, speaking of the bloc of liberal parties headed by Christian billionaire Naguib Sawiris’ “Free Egyptians Party.” Indeed, if not for the Christian vote, the liberal parties (including the Egyptian bloc) would have almost zero representation in Parliament.

“And do you make any distinction between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis?” I asked. “In my opinion,” I added, “the Muslim Brotherhood is much more pragmatic and moderate than the extremist Salafis.”

“No, all of them are terrible.”

As we climbed onto the bridge linking Giza to Zamalek, the island in the middle of the Nile on which we have classes, the conversation turned back to religion.

“So, tell me, do Jews worship Jesus and the Virgin Mary?” he asked
“No,” I replied, “Jesus and Mary don’t have anything to do with Jewish theology.”
“Really, so then who do you worship? Idols?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Just like his previous statement incorrectly claiming that he was Jewish followed by his expressing a desire to move to Israel, this one also held a nugget of twisted truth. The Jews did, in fact, once worship idols. In the story of the golden calf (which, coincidentally, was my torah portion for my Bar Mitzvah), the Jews – Egyptian Jews, moreover – began to worship a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai while they waited for Moses to return from his communion with God at the summit. When Moses returned with the ten commandments in hand, he flung them down in anger at the sight of his people worshiping an idol.

Given the driver’s complete lack of knowledge about Judaism, however, I decided that it would be best not to point out this irony: “No,” I replied, “Jews worship God, the same one that Christians and Muslims do, but they’re still waiting for his prophet to return.”

“Ah, I understand,” he said with a knowing nod, although I suspect that he still thinks that Jews are some breakaway sect of Christianity.

That was the end of our deep conversation, although I would be remiss if I didn’t mention two more outlandish statements that he made in the last five minutes of the trip. First, after asking me if I had a lot of Egyptian girlfriends and hearing my response that no, unfortunately, I did not, he insisted that he would change that.

“I will bring you dozens of girls from Shubra [a working class neighborhood in Cairo that is home to a mix of Christians and Muslims]!”
“Thank you,” I replied, “may God keep you” (an Arabic expression that basically is a polite way of saying “thanks but no thanks”).

A few moments later he turned to me and said with complete earnesty:
“Michael, I want to go to Israel so badly that I would even become an Israeli spy here in Egypt if they would grant me citizenship!”

I can say with complete certainty that that statement is the single most shocking thing I have ever had someone tell me in Cairo. Talk of Zionist conspiracies and espionage, of course, is one of the favorite pastimes of the Egyptian media, and just as unfortunate is the extent to which many Egyptians – both Muslims and Christians – take what they hear in the media as the pure, unadulterated truth. To understand the absurdity of this comment, just imagine an American coming up to you and declaring that he had a deep-seated desire to move to Afghanistan and join the Taliban.

Weirder than weird. And also completely hilarious. Welcome in Egypt.

A Timbuktu Madrassa

Timbuktu, a town whose name elicits visions of an exotic African paradise, is a decidedly boring town. Although it is only a few miles from the Niger River, the lifeblood of northern Mali, the sands of the Sahara have overrun every inch of the town. Dust devils spring up at random intervals on city streets, mixing trash and sand into a fetid cone, and you cannot walk for more than a few minutes without pausing to empty a pile of sand from your shoes. Given this disconnect between imagination and reality, it is no wonder that Rene Caillie, the first European to reach Timbuktu and return to tell the tale, found himself the object of intense ire in Europe from Europeans who could not fathom that Timbuktu was anything but a heavenly city.

Despite its downtrodden appearance, however, Timbuktu still has a few gems that revealed themselves as I explored the town. The town was a center of trade and Islamic learning in the middle of the last millennium, and a few beautiful mosques and libraries of old manuscripts remain to tickle any traveler’s imagination. Trudging through the sand berms that passed for streets, I stumbled upon the Sankore mosque, a an mud-brick mosque with a pyramid-shaped minaret that dates back to the 14^th century and used to house Timbuktu’s biggest madrassa (Islamic school).

The Sankore Mosque, Timbuktu

Unfortunately most mosques in Mali have signs posted outside their gates that specify that entry for non-Muslims is interdite (forbidden), and Sankore was no exception. Rumor has it that foreigners used to have free access to mosques until Vanity Fair used the Great Mosque of Djenne as the scene for a risqué photo shoot that did not go over so well with Malians. While the profit motive ultimately triumphed over religious concerns in Djenne (my guide there informed me that I could have a look inside the mosque if I forked over $10 to a man sitting in a ambiguously official manner beside the mosque’s rear door), Timbuktu still seemed to be holding out. Sankore was closed and the prominently posted sign next to the front door discouraged me from knocking.

After I had circumambulated the mosque, I came upon a small group of low-slung mud buildings where, lo and behold, I heard a language that sounded a lot like Arabic. As I moved closer to investigate, I found myself peering into a classroom filled with students listening intently to a teacher lecturing them in Arabic as he gestured at pictures on a chalkboard. I paused for a few seconds outside the window to listen, but in that short period of time the attention of the entire class had shifted from the teacher to me (the large white man at the window). Not wanting to distract them, I decided to keep walking. After I had taken a few tentative steps, however, I stopped and thought to myself, “this is an opportunity that you should not pass up.”

“Salaamu aleikum,” I said to the teacher as I appeared at the door to the classroom, “can I sit for a few minutes in your class?”

“Please, here you go,” He responded with a mixture of surprise and bemusement as he pointed me to an empty desk in the front row, but he was able to pick up his train of thought immediately after I sat down.

The lesson of the day was about reptiles. The teacher had written out all of the material on the chalkboard, and he led the class through it in a sing-song voice.

“What types of reptiles are there?” he asked rhetorically in flowing, formal Arabic. “Some have legs, like the turtle and the lizard, and others, like snakes, just slither.”

To emphasize key points, he would take a statement that he had just made and turn it instantly into a question, expecting that the students would answer in unison.

Teacher: “Most lizards live in dry, desert-like climates. Where do they live?”

Students (in unison): “In dry, desert-like climates.”

Before attending this class, I had not realized that some Malian madrassas taught more than just how to read the Quran. In Djenne, for example, madrassa students begin their lessons at the crack of down and finish a few hours later so that they can head off to their conventional schools. They study Arabic primarily through the Quran, and as a result most students can read and understand Quranic Arabic but have no practical mastery of the language. This school in Timbuktu, however, was clearly different. As I learned from the teacher after the lesson ended, these seventh graders had been learning in Arabic since kindergarten, and they were expected to speak it in class as well.

Mali, like almost every other country in sub-Saharan Africa, must navigate some rocky terrain when it comes to language and education. The affairs of state are conducted in the colonial language, French, but two Malians speaking to each other on the street are much more likely to use a local language – “mother tongue.” Bambara, the most prominent of the mother tongues, is widely spoken in the southern part of the country, but it becomes less common as you head north. In Timbuktu, for example, you are just as likely to hear Tamashek (the language of the Tuareg nomads) or Songhai (the descendants of the great Songhai Empire that ruled Mali in the 15th and 16th centuries). This mixture of languages poses a serious pedagogical dilemma: should students learn in their mother tongue, the language that they speak with their family and on the street, or should teachers throughout the country use French as a unifying language? In fact, the Malian educational system seeks to find a middle ground: in government schools, students learn in the dominant mother tongue of their particular region for their first three years, after which all lessons are taught in French.

Unfortunately, this language dilemma has no perfect solution. The problem with the current arrangement is that children whose parents do not speak French find it very hard to connect what they learn in school with what they do at home. Ideally, a positive learning environment at home can reinforce the knowledge that a child picks up at school, but in rural Mali (and to a lesser extent in the cities), school and home are two different worlds.

The students at the Sankore madrassa also learned French, further strengthening their status as true polyglots. Their French skills enable them to navigate the world of Mali’s capital Bamako, and their Arabic enables them to communicate with their neighbors to the north (although they have to cross the desert in order to do so). But as residents of Timbuktu, their education still sells them short: if the leaders of tomorrow still conduct official business in Arabic or French, what hope is there for the vast number of people who will never make it past primary school? As long as this language dilemma persists, the prospects for comprehensive economic and social development remains slim.