Palestinian Solidarity

Cairo, Egypt

Yesterday we received a message from the US Embassy in Cairo that included the following:

May 15 is the anniversary of the Palestinian-Israeli territorial demarcations and is considered to be a significant date in the current Palestinian political situation involving Gaza and the West Bank.

Several Egyptian political groups have announced plans to commemorate this anniversary by staging large-scale prayer and protest gatherings, characterizing Friday as Unity Day. On Friday after mid-day prayers, there are plans for a large demonstration in Tahrir Square, with a number of protesters planning to proceed to the Israeli Embassy near Cairo University and to the Israeli Ambassador’s residence in Maadi....

On Saturday, May 14, political activists plan to converge on Tahrir Square and begin a march toward Suez, where they will link with groups from other Egyptian cities and then continue their march toward the Rafah border crossing.

The embassy probably thought this rally - as opposed to the usual Friday protests - would be of particular interest to Americans in Cairo because it can be a very short couple steps from pro-Palestinian to anti-Israeli to anti-American. As Lara Logan knows well, it only takes one person shouting "Spy!" to make a whole crowd turn on you. It certainly gave me pause.

Fajr Prayers on Tahrir
I was woken up in the wee hours of this morning to the news that thousands had started a Facebook page since yesterday, planning to have pre-dawn prayers for Palestine on Tahrir Square, led by prominent Salafi sheikhs. Since it involved defying curfew, my friend didn't go, but video was on YouTube almost immediately showing at least a couple thousand praying

By the time I did go down to Tahrir Square today, it was the biggest crowds I've seen on Tahrir Square since mid-February, though I understand the crowds were as big on April 9th.

Mixed Messages
In light of the violence and church-burning on Wednesday, there had been a call to make today a rally for Egyptian unity between Christians and Muslims, and there were plenty of signs to that effect. However, calls for solidarity with Occupied Palestine largely drowned out pretty much everything else, and there were plenty of other causes, too.

"The people want the opening of the Rafah Crossing, permanently and completely."

"The people want peace and security,"
i.e. new faces in charge of the Egyptian security forces.

The flag of Bahrain on the left, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as Hitler.

This one's calling for reform of traffic laws!

...and many more!

"Egypt and Palestine, one hand."

Third Intifada?
What concerns me even more amid these protests and calls for a Third Intifada on Sunday, the 63rd anniversary of the first Palestinian refugee crisis, is the ambiguity about who is calling for these actions and why. Egyptians are calling for a Third Intifada in an excess of revolutionary zeal, and I have to admit to a wild hope that Palestinians might have their own success in the Arab Spring, but are Palestinians themselves calling for an uprising? If they are, I haven't heard.

In fact, a spokesman for Hamas said today that it was "not necessary" for Egyptians to come to Gaza. On the one hand, this could be a neat way of avoiding responsibility. On the other hand, though, Hamas has taken bold steps this month to form a coalition with Fatah and work politically and peacefully towards greater Palestinian unity. An Intifada now would undo everything that's been achieved in the last couple years.

(Thanks to Emma for the photos!)

HR 1 and the Future of International Education

The memo below on budget cuts in the US Congress was circulated on Cairo Scholars today. The proposed budget cuts detailed below have profound effects on study abroad, cultural exchange, peace work and critical language teaching in the Egypt, the Middle East and beyond. These reductions effect both American students, professors and scholars seeking opportunities abroad, and also foreign students, professors and scholars wishing to enrich American institutions with their wealth of experience. It also represents a drastic reduction in resources and opportunities for American students starting at the kindergarten level to interact with the greater world.

In this era of globalization, interconnectivity and interdependence, we should be increasing our understanding of the rest of the world. I've seen photos of Egyptians holding placards in solidarity with striking government workers in Wisconsin, and government workers in Wisconsin holding placards in solidarity with Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Bahrain. This is how the world works now, and failing to prepare our youth for that reality will, in the long run, worsen our economic, political and cultural power far more than the deficit it reduces.

Dear MESA members,

Many of you will have been immersed in the news of the extraordinary events taking place in the Middle East over the last month or so. This update is to bring to your attention some important developments happening in the U. S. Congress that could affect programs in foreign language and area studies. A number of programs funded by the U.S government have been targeted for either major budget cuts or complete elimination.

Thinking that area studies specialists may be concerned about this possibility, I pass on information about a few programs particularly relevant to the broad disciplinary interests of MESA members.

Background
The U.S. House of Representatives passed House Resolution 1 (H.R.1) last week. What is H.R.1? It is the 2011 full-year continuing appropriations Act. It would extend the current 2011 fiscal year funding which expires March 4, 2011.The Senate returns from recess next Monday (February 28) to begin work on its version of a budget for the remainder of FY11. Many things can happen in the negotiations between the House and the Senate.

In H.R. 1:

• State Department international exchange programs would receive a 21 per cent cut, or a reduction to $501.3 million from the current funding level of $635 million. Two examples of programs funded under this program (http://exchanges.state.gov/scho-pro.html) are the Fulbright Program for Scholars serving scholars and the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program serving undergraduate and graduate students.
• All funding from the United States Institute of Peace ($42.6 million) would be eliminated. www.usip.org USIP funds have supported hundreds of scholars and practitioners through its Senior Fellows program and hundreds of students through its Peace Scholars program. Its Grant Program has provided over 2,000 awards since 1986, a majority of which have supported the work of individual scholars around the world.
• Funding for the K-12 Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) would be eliminated ($26.9 million). This is the Education Department's only dedicated grant program for K-12 foreign language education.
• Funding for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education--FIPSE (including the International Consortia Programs) would be cut entirely ($58 million).
• $350 million from the National Science Foundation would be cut. This could affect research funds for such disciplines and fields as Anthropology, Election Studies, Geography, Linguistics and Political Science.
• For the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), H.R. 1 provides a FY 2011 budget of $145 million. This figure represents a $22 million (13%) cut from the agency's FY 2010 enacted budget. Examples of NEH grants are the NEH Research Fellowships, NEH Summer Institutes and Seminars for College and University Teachers, Collaborative Research Awards, Scholarly Editions and Translations Awards, etc.: http://www.neh.gov/news/recentawards.html
• Funding for the Grants and Administration portion of the National Endowment for the Arts would be reduced by $20.5 million. NEA has funded Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects.

Finally, although H.R 1 did not propose any changes to the funding levels for The Higher Education Act, Title VI and Fulbright-Hays 102(b)(6), changes may come up in next week's Senate deliberations or in negotiations with the House. Funded at $125.881 million in FY 2010, these programs represent less than 0.2 percent of the U.S. Department of Education’s discretionary budget. A cost-effective investment, this federal-university partnership stimulates substantial additional funding by universities and foundations.

Sincerely,
Amy W. Newhall
Executive Director

Jordanians from Abroad

Amman, Jordan

We had some very interesting conversations with Syrians about their perceptions of Jordanians, and they were not very flattering. In fact, the Syrians we spoke to were downright disdainful of the Jordanians. Frequently we heard "They have no culture" or "They left their tents and forgot their culture."

It's not hard to see where this attitude comes from. Here they are, living in the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, with the citadel and a 9th century mosque that was a cathedral before that, in the seat of dynasties and kingdoms. Just two hours away, we're living in a city that was a village of 5,000 people just 50 years ago.

But in Jordan's defense, and it's been my home long enough that I feel obliged to defend it, I said a number of times that Amman is a totally different country from the rest of the country, and in the villages like al-Mshairfeh where I lived, that history is not so far behind them as the Syrians suggest.

Carter's Revenge

Damascus, Syria

Well, we had a nice, slow vacation day in Damascus yesterday ... finishing up with a nice triple case of food poisoning, which started with me vomitting in the street and being pelted with plastic bee-bees by some local boys. So I guess this is what I get for breaking my promise to Carter not to brave the wilds of Syria ... diarrhea and nausea on the day we're supposed to be driving home from Damascus and dealing with Jordanian Immigration....

Pilgrims and Passion Plays

Damascus, Syria

Wow. What a day. With our fairly early start, we had a nice brisk walk down mostly empty streets to the Ummayad Mosque (once a cathedral). We donned our culturally appropriate cheap polyester robes, and I my hijab (photos forthcoming), and first saw the tomb of Saladin al-Ayyubi, the great noble opponent of King Richard in the Crusades, who eventually united his Kurdish people and the Arabs to their southeast to retake Jerusalem and most of the rest of the Holy Land from the Europeans.

Then we rounded the corner and rejoined a crush of what, judging by the women's abayas and chadors, were several tour groups of Shi'ites. It took a while to figure out what they were doing in Syria, a predominantly Sunni country ... until I read on the tickets that Hussein bin Ali bin Muhammad's head is supposedly enshrined in the Ummayad Mosque. (There are actually three possible locations for Hussein's head, but this is the most likely, since Yazid bin Mu'awiya lived in Damascus, and he ordered the army against Hussein that took his head.)

Hussein was the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, and it is one of the formative moments of Shi'ite Islam when the Caliph in Damascus sends his son Yazin to kill Hussein, whom Shi'ites supported as their rightful Imam and Caliph. When Hussein sent to his supporters in Kufa, they failed to come to his aid in Karabala, and a central theme of Shi'ism is atoning for the failure to protect their God-given leader and his entourage, mostly women and children.

So, intrigued, we followed these Shi'ite tour groups and their mullahs through the mosques, and sat for some time to watch one mullah's abbreviated recitation of Hussein's martyrdom at Karbala and the mourning of Zainab his daughter ... or at least I think so; it was all in Persian. In any case, the intersting part is watching the weeping and wailing and mourning in religious trance, much like what you would see in an evangelical Christian Passion Play.

Then we followed them into the shrine of Hussein's head, and saw them mourning again, including one middle-aged man leaning against the wall and flat-out sobbing so that his whole body shook. It was a very deeply moving experience for me, how these people can feel such a profound personal connection to a 1,300 year old story. And of course evangelicals are known to react similarly to the Passion of Christ, and Jews at the Wailing Wall, but in some inexplicable way, this just felt so much more legitimate....

And then, to top it all off, we went shopping. Oh, did we go shopping! Scarves, scarves, scarves! and jewelry and inlaid boxes and shoes (including some really fun ones for the little girls in the village)! I'm almost ready for Christmas already!

P.S. Apparently, there are quite a few sacred places for Shi'ites in Syria ... going all the way back to the hill where Cain killed Abel! Find out about them here.

Damascus or Bust!

Damascus, Syria

Well, here we are! And it only took us 6 and a half hours on the border and 30 Jordanian dinars (about US$40) to get here.... I feel bad for poor Megan, who, unlike Stephanie and I, already had her visa and was ready to cross the border in an hour....

We got here so late that we haven't really seen much yet, just a few blocks of the modern city. It reminds me a lot of Dresden and East Berlin and Prague, with the architecture of the buildings and the muras of Presidents Hafiz and Bashar Al-Assad in such a socialist-realist style. And of course I visited all those Eastern block cities long after the fall of the Soviet Union, but I can imagine that the security presence must also feel similar. There are military everywhere, whether in little beefeater-style booths painted with big Syrian flags, or just lounging in the street. I didn't notice the kind of weaponry you'd see in Switzerland or Jordn, but the sheer numbers of personnel are sufficiently intimidating ... or reassuring, if you're a tourist like me, worried about last week's car bomb blast....