More photos from recent journeys

Heading to Jordan

Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,
A rose-red city – half as old as time!

Those are the last two lines of a sonnet by a minor Victorian poet named John William Burgon, and those words, about the ancient city of Petra, won him the coveted Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford University in 1845.

Though Burgon never visited the rose-red city he writes about, I will be going to Petra this weekend. I’ll also spend a few days in Wadi Rum, the backdrop for David Lean’s epic “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Will tell you all about it when I return.

When Pyramids Bend

Here’s a photo of the so-called “Bent” pyramid of Dahshur. The theory behind the bend is they started on too steep a slope to finish the pyramid and corrected themselves half way up. And the steep walls are also the reason the limestone is still on the outside and hasn’t been pilfered over the years for other buildings (like the original limestone exteriors of the pyramids of Giza).

I’ll post more photos of this and the red pyramid (and tell you why my legs and butt are sore today — and that I’m not alone). In the meantime, check out Marie‘s note about what we discovered deep inside the tomb chambers of the red pyramid and why our muscles are so sore today.

Drink Me

After surviving a dust storm in the desert today while visiting the red and “bent” pyramids at Dahshur, I had a post-lunch coffee in a cup almost as big as my head. (moment captured by Jake)

Cameras and Action

My students are full of pleasant surprises. Now that I’ve finally hit my stride, and my classes are going strong, I am bowled over every day by what I’m hearing and seeing from these budding documentary filmmakers. In the five-week professional course, the ten students are doing four short pieces that went into production this week.

Earlier in the week, one team focused on one of the top oud (a middle eastern lute) players in Egypt, who also happens to have been blind since birth. Yesterday, I shot with a team doing a film about the El Hosary Home for Orphans in 6th of October City, a suburb of Cairo. The founder of the center is a former pop singer who stepped out of the spotlight and channeled her energy and money into charity. She is an angelic presence at the home, the mother to all the kids and staff there, and loved by all.

The 43 children live in groups of four in small apartments, each including a bedroom (with four crib beds), a playroom and a full-time “mother,” a woman who spends nearly every day and night with them when they’re not in school. The kids were excited about the visitors with the camera, and were climbing all over me as I tried to shoot. The boys, especially, were thrilled to get some attention and affection from the three visiting men.

Today, another team worked in an area of town where thousands of Iraqi refugees are making their homes away from home.

Next week, another group will meet up with a former soccer star turned school headmaster.

And that’s just one of my classes. I’ll tell you about the amazing projects my graduate students have in the works in a later post.

Rough Tough Dough

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately addressed: Dear Duff. Just this morning, a student reporter, who said she would be “honored to write a profile on you” started her e-missive with “Dear Duff.” People are being polite, not informal. It’s a common mistake in a place where so many people have the first name of Mohamed, and many take their surnames to identify themselves.

But reading “Dear Duff” puts me in mind of Banquo’s line in MacBeth:

“Dear Duff, I prithee, contradict thyself, and say it is not so.”

To which, my favorite reply would be from Walt Whitman:

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Or, as the spokesman for Duff beer says: “Duffman says a lot of things. Ooh Yeah!”

New Online Journal: Arab Media & Society

My colleagues at the American University in Cairo made the following announcement today:

Arab Media & Society Launched

Online journal will cover changing media, political and cultural landscape

The Center for Electronic Journalism at the American University in Cairo and the Centre for Middle East Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, are pleased to announce the launch of their new electronic journal Arab Media & Society at www.arabmediasociety.org.
The online publication is the successor to the highly-regarded Transnational Broadcasting Studies (www.tbsjournal.com), which has been covering satellite broadcasting in the Middle East and broader Muslim world for the past decade.
The move is recognition of the changing nature of the Arab media and social landscape.
“When TBS Journal was founded two years after the launch of Al Jazeera, satellite TV was the story. Newspapers were moribund. Internet penetration was negligible. Media deregulation was an alien concept,” publisher and co-editor Lawrence Pintak writes in the first issue. “The impact of the pan-Arab satellite revolution is today felt at every level of Arab society – and in every form of media.”

The journal will publish quarterly with frequent updates of timely articles from scholars, researchers and journalists.
“The Arab media scene and Arab society as a whole are changing rapidly. The shift from a combination of print and online to a pure online approach means we are able to offer thoughtful insights into developments as they occur, produce more frequent thematic issues, and include a mix of interactive features,” Pintak says in his column.

For example, the first issue includes:

• A package of six stories on blogging in the Arab world, led by an article from Marc Lynch of Williams College, accompanied by an interview with two Egyptian bloggers in a streaming audio format.
• A set of articles on last summer’s Lebanon war, including a piece on women war correspondents by Magda Abu-Fadil and an article by Paul Cochrane on how Hizbullah’s al-Manar managed to stay on the air
• Print interviews with the head of the BBC’s new Arabic news channel and a Tunisian online magazine editor, along with an audio interview with Daoud Kuttab, who is pioneering community radio in the Arab world
• A piece on the fate of US government broadcasting by former official of VOA Alan Heil, Jr.
• Interactive book reviews that invite reader comment and debate
• And much more

The site also contains real-time summaries of the Arab media, resources such as major reports on the development of Arab media, and links to a variety of other interesting content.

For further information or to discuss writing for the journal, contact Managing Editor George Weyman at ams@aucegypt.edu.

Sights at the Citadel

Though I have often seen the Citadel — the fortress on the hill overlooking Cairo, with its commanding towers and the domes and minarets of the impressive Mosque of Mohamed Ali — I had never before been inside its walls. I first stood outside it when shooting a documentary here in 2003. At that time, I was most interested in vistas that would give me a panorama of Cairo with the minarets in the foreground. Today I joined a tour with other faculty from AUC, led by the Historian Dr. Chahinda Karim. She took us inside the sprawling complex — now partly converted into military museums — and led us on a chronological journey of what was the home for Egypt’s rulers spanning 700 years. She began with the remnants of the earliest buildings on the site, first developed by Saladin in 1176. The tour traveled in time through the Ayyubid dynasty of Saladin, to its overthrow by the Mamluks, who added additional palaces and walls, though only one building, a mosque (built in 1318), remains.

Then on to the Fatimids, and after that, the Ottomans, including the mosque of Suleiman Pasha (1528), with its brightly painted walls and ceilings and a crypt with peculiar grave markers modeled as hats to denote the rank of the individuals buried there. The children on our tour jumped and ran in the little courtyard between the mosque and the crypt. From there, we wandered through the renovated gardens and barracks turned into museum buildings.

Finally, we entered the grand mosque of the ruler Mohamed Ali (completed after 18 years of work in 1848), a building modeled after the blue mosque in Istanbul. Inside, its alabaster walls lead up to beautiful domes with radiant green ceilings. You can see the French influence of the European-trained builders of the mosque, which is why it’s referred to as a “Church Mosque.” Inside, school groups mingled with tour groups. A young couple took a picture of their recently born child in front of the mosque’s mihrab (an altar where the imam stands).

But to my wanna-be-photographer’s eye, the most striking thing today was the clouds, sketched in almost impressionistic blotches, drifting in formation, giving the deep blue sky an added dimension not normally captured in my photos of Islamic sites. It made me get all artsy and stuff.

 

Brain Egyptian Exlant

Taher Tourism Restaurant is in downtown Cairo about two blocks from the American University campus. I’ve been assured they don’t serve the brains and livers of real Egyptians (kind of like how Girl Scout Cookies are not made from real Girl Scouts).

Melody and Wanderlust

It was like a punch in the gut.

And it came from a 60 year-old woman, one of my students who has spent a lot of time in America, but who now wears the hijab and long skirts of the most conservative women of her Muslim sect. Though we’re quite different, we usually get along pretty well.

Last week, she crossed the campus to find me before our class joined a screening of a documentary film.

“Craig, I’m glad I found you,” she said, winded after rushing up two flights of stairs. “I need to ask you. Is this a film about music?”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s about a group that plays the instrument called the Simsimiyya.”

“Oh. Then I’m not allowed to watch it.”

“What? Why?”

“Because some consider the making of music to be haram [the Arabic word for ‘forbidden’].”

I was stunned, but managed another question: “So what do you do when you hear music in the soundtrack of the other films we’ve watched?”

“I try not to listen to it,” she said.

Before I go further, I need to tell you that this student’s strict views are shared by only the slimmest minority of Muslims, and are not a commonly held tenet of Islam. Clearly, in Egypt, music is a great part of a culture with a long history of musical stars from Om Kalthoum to Amr Diab.

When I was in Lebanon, the young protestors in the Hezbollah section of the camps who’ve commandeered the downtown of the Capital, danced and played drums to pass the time.

The Oud. The tabla. The flute. All of these instruments are widely played and enjoyed throughout the Islamic world.

But I went into the screening of the documentary that day in a bit of a daze. Had I really just had that conversation?

In a world where music-making is haram, clerics would wrestle the baton from Simon Rattle before he could lead the Berlin Philharmonic on the stage at Carnegie Hall. There would be no Italian Opera. No talking drums. No Tuvan throat singers. No Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. No Peter Gabriel. No Ella Fitzgerald. No Elvis. No Beatles.

Not a world I’d want to live in.

It would all be over if the Fat Lady can’t sing.