Middle East

If you are looking for Egyptian antiques in Cairo – and by antique I mean something from around fifty or one hundred years ago, not something from King Ramses’ bedstand in 1292 B.C. – you can find some among the shops like the one above at the Khan el-Khalili bazaar.

Egypt has experienced dramatic change in 2011, change that has been well documented and seen around the world. But a peek into a Cairo antique shop is a reminder that at every moment less dramatic change occurs too, in Cairo and every other city. How we make phone calls, how we play music, the way companies advertise their products – these things change. And so sometimes do the kinds of people who walk the streets. If Cairo in 2011 is not the same as Cairo in 2010, imagine what Cairo eighty years ago would have been like. For help in imagining this, here is a paragraph from Max Rodenbeck’s book Cairo: The City Victorious:

Cairo no longer aspired to be cosmopolitan; it already was. According to the 1927 census a fifth of its people belonged to minorities: there were 95,000 Copts, 35,000 Jews, 20,000 Greeks, 19,000 Italians, 11,000 British, 9,000 French, and uncounted numbers of White Russians, Parsees, Montenegrins, and other exotica. (By contrast, all colonial India in 1930 was home to just 115,000 people classified as “whites.”) The city’s population surged past 1 million in the 1930s as landless peasants began to arrive in significant numbers, along with a rich clutter of Europeans fleeing Hitler. Thirty thousand cars jammed streets where sleek apartment buildings pushed ever higher. Billboards touted a range of Cairo-made goods: “Shelltox—The Insect Executioner”; “Exigez les Eaux Gazeuses N. Spathis!”; Dr. Boustani’s Cigarettes; Bata shoes; and movies shot in Cairo studios, such as Layla, Girl of the Desert, a costume drama starring Bahiga Hafiz.

Some things are found just about everywhere in the world. Tossed-aside plastic bags are one, and in some deserts they far outnumber cacti or its equivalent -- a disheartening environmental fact. Another thing, however, is prayer, in its myriad forms, and it is often very beautiful. See and hear, for instance, a sunset puja on the Ganges River in Rishikesh, India. 

The sound and scene of a Muslim prayer is also striking. Particularly in very large gatherings, the swooshing sound of thousands of individuals descending to their knees grips the ear, as does the silence that immediately follows. Even smaller congregations, such as the one in Bethlehem's Manger Square (above), gives the outside viewer pause. The sound may be less, but the communal nature remains.

In Eric Weiner's very readable book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World, he takes note of the communal aspect of Muslim prayer, and theorizes on its power -- and the power of camaraderie in general.

Muslims pray five times a day. This is what the Koran ordains. Why five times? Why not four or six? Only Allah knows, but when Islam sprouted in the Arabian desert some 1,400 years ago, one function the new religion served, intentionally or not, was to bring people together. The mandatory prayer got people out of their own tents and into bigger, communal tents and, eventually, mosques.

Some 1,300 years later, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre metaphorically spat on the notion of communal bliss by declaring, "Hell is other people."

Sartre was wrong. Either that, or he was hanging out with the wrong people. Social scientists estimate that about 70 percent of our happiness stems from our relationships, both quantity and quality, with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. During life's difficult patches, camaraderie blunts our misery; during the good times, it boosts our happiness.

On Wednesday I sat in the Milligan College dining hall in spring-time Tennessee and, while munching salad, scrolled through headlines on my laptop. Clicking one that said "photojournalists killed in Libya" I read the first paragraph, which made my food lose its taste. By the time I reached the bottom of the article the world itself felt different, like a chunk had just been hacked out of it, violently and irrevocably, and knocked into oblivion. Chris Hondros was dead.

Funny thing is, I didn't know Chris personally, and the only words I had spoken to him were kind of dumb. In the chaos of Cairo's Tahrir Square on February 2, I saw a photographer crouched by a curb who i think was Chris. He was photographing a weary man who had just been bandaged up after having a rock slam into his face. "Good idea," I told the quiet photographer as I waited to also photograph the man. As Chris got up and I got down, our eyes met for a second. And that, I think, is the extent of my encounter with a man whose work I had appreciated for years and who was now dead in the Libyan city of Misrata, his body to be loaded onto a ship bound for Benghazi and then eventually shipped back home.

In Frederick Buechner's book Godric, the main character says of a dead loved one: "It's like a tune that ends before you've heard it out." That's how I felt about Chris' death -- and that of Tim Hetherington, who had also died in Misrata. I respected their work, the stories they wanted to share with the world, the images they brought home to us. I mean, look at this image of an Iraqi girl, and hear Chris tell the story behind it.

The world is not whole. Ask the man in the photo who got hit by a rock in a downtown square where others would die of their injuries. Ask Chris, if you could, and he'd tell you about child soldiers in Liberia, or a mother with hacked-off hands holding her baby in Sierra Leone. Ask Libyans living in Misrata right now, or those who carried the bodies of two dead photographers to a ship.

What is the world? Here's a partial answer: It's a place with chunks ripped away, and where many tunes end before we've heard them out.

For a little more about Chris Hondros and his images, see the New York Times Lens blog's "Parting Glance: Chris Hondros".

The Egyptian man above, who works in Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt, is smoking a cigarette in the Great Hypostyle Hall. Many, probably most of the foreign travelers who step into the hall are here on short holidays. They likely entered through a climate-controlled airport rather than through a more messy land border. They probably wouldn't have needed to do laundry since leaving home. They're on a visit, and they know it will be brief.

None of this is bad, but it does have its disadvantages. As Paul Theroux suggests in his book Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, through this kind of travel we may return home with a less developed understanding of the relationship between "Here and There". He writes:

I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease and speed with which a person could be transported from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

About an hour before Friday prayers began, while walking through Cairo’s crowded Tahrir Square, a man named Mahdy grabbed the sleeve of my shirt and said, “Hey, where you from?” He had a beard (that’s him in the center), a strong, confident voice, and when I said “America” he said, “Oh, which state, I used to live in Texas, in Dallas.” Come to find out, Mahdy had even spent three days in Tennessee. “A nice state,” he said.

Like many other people I had met in Tahrir over the previous ten days, Mahdy quickly left me dumbfounded by his passion, articulateness, and courage. Cairo was in the midst of historic upheaval and Tahrir Square was the epicenter. Mahdy was one of hundreds of thousands who at some point had stood in this square since January 25, demanding change in Egypt.

He told me many things in the 15 minutes we were together, a righteous anger burning in his eyes, and at times I imagined I was listening to Patrick Henry at the Virginia Convention. Here’s a sample of what he said:

• We are eating ful and tamaya; Mubarak and his people are eating shrimp!”
• “I’m not one of the Muslim Brotherhood, but they are my brothers.”
• “Fear is dead. Nobody is going to back down even if they die.”
• “I wasn’t in the square yesterday…my health isn’t good and I needed to rest. But I definitely was coming today. I came prepared to die if I must.”
• “In the U.S. I’ve been questioned by the FBI but they treated me with respect – I even get emails from them sometimes asking me how I am doing. Here the police never treat you with respect. Sometimes when I arrive in the US the immigration official stamps my [American] passport and says, 'Welcome Home.' In Egypt they look at my beard and pull me aside for questioning. And they're not even sensible questions!”
• “My wife is American and my children have U.S. passports. Whenever they go out I make them take their passports. That way if the police stop them they won’t abuse them. But from now on, in this new Egypt, my children will leave their passports at home.”

As he spoke, another Egyptian in the crowd, a stranger, wiped the sweat from Mahdy’s brow. Sometimes Mahdy paused our conversation to translate what he was saying to those around us. The crowd nodded their approval or, in the case of his joke comparing U.S. and Egyptian FBIs, laughed. There was fire in Hamdy's voice. Like so many others in Tahrir he had a vision for his country and his children, a vision for which I am certain he would have given his life this day if indeed it had been required.

But several hours later, in an announcement that sent a deafening roar through Tahrir and all of downtown Cairo, we learned that Mubarak had resigned. Mahdy would return home to his wife and children, a proud Egyptian.

For more of my images from Tahrir Square and Cairo, visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcarillet/sets/72157626017436034/with/5436239812/

The woman in this photo is, her family told me almost a year ago, 110 years old (give or take a year). She outlived two husbands, takes an aspirin a day, and lives in a quiet backstreet in Luxor, Egypt. She has seen a lot of history -- even, perhaps, in the last several days. For a few great images of events in the Middle East this week, check out the always captivating Big Picture blog at "Protest spreads in the Middle East".

It has happened again: after several months on the road, walking and photographing throughout the day in the less-than-moderate Middle Eastern heat, I’ve lost weight. I've lost so much, in fact, that on some days I feel a little frail, a little bit like I'm disappearing. And I can't say that I like that much, because I want to be whole.

But here's what I do like about my partial disappearance: in looking at my body—in seeing my scrawniness, my sagging pants, the ripple of a beating heart visible on the surface of my chest—I identify with the weak. I have joined their ranks, in a sense, and I share their brokenness. When I see the fit and strong, people whose pants aren’t sliding down and whose arms are connected to full shoulders, or whose faces are rounded by smooth and pampered skin, I feel an outsider. I even feel envy, and at times embarrassment and shame.

I also feel something very much like rage. Rage at the emaciation, the poverty, the disgusting imbalance that blights history and our own time. Rage at the lack of wholeness in people’s lives. Rage at broken bodies, at the audible sounds of hunger (if we pause to look and listen), at the hands on Wall Street and Main Street, in South Carolina and Syria, that move more to fatten themselves than to nourish the weak. Rage at the way that, just this afternoon, I witnessed a helpless old woman being abused by strong young men. She had cried out as they harassed her, yanking on her headscarf and mocking her, and the last thing she said to me was, “I’m sorry you are seeing this.” But I wasn’t sorry I saw it, for in seeing it my rage only grew, and there are things for which it is better to be enraged than ignorant.

It is partly because of rage that I do what I do, even though it costs me some of my own strength and mass. And what do I do? Though sometimes even I forget, when I see a weak woman abused on the street it comes back to me with the force of a slamming door in a hurricane. I photograph and write about our world, and I do it not because it pays well but because every street on Earth has people aching, and sometimes downright screaming, for wholeness. I do it because the Earth is full of the emaciated.
 
Photo taken and text written in Deir Ez-Zur, Syria (June 2010)

Tucked away in the rocky hills of southern Lebanon is the town of Qana. It is a place where, while buying a bottle of juice in a tiny store, a conservatively dressed Shia woman and her children may come up and ask where you are from, and then tell you about their uncle in Dearborn and how happy they are to have you visiting Qana. It is a place where you walk out of a store feeling welcomed.

In the modern era Qana is best known for tragedy. Long ago, however, it was better known for a wedding miracle. Carvings in rock on the edge of town indicate that early Christians believed this to be the site where Jesus turned water into wine. The fourth century church historian Eusebius seems to have considered this the place too (there is a competing site in the Galilee region of Israel). The area is beautifully kept, with a pretty path and flowering plants, and on the day I visited it was the epitome of peacefulness.

There was, however, this sign you see in the photo above. It marked the entrance to the path, and it seemed a little...well, overstated. Did sacredness really not begin until sometime in the first century? (It's a sad thought if true.) And does sacredness really require some spectacular act? At least on this day, for me, sacredness began a few hours earlier, when I was interacting with the Shia family while holding that fruit juice, smiling and sharing, connecting through words and a mutual reaching out. I felt a joy and wonder there, and I experienced a kind of love that enlivens the soul and leaves you ready to risk all.

So while I recommend a visit to this site, I don't think I like the sign much. And I wonder if Qana, with its miracles and massacres and kind mothers at the store, might want to consider putting up a line from Wendell Berry's "How To Be a Poet" instead:

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

You wouldn’t know it from the photo, but the girl and guy above don’t care for each other much. The scene is the West Bank village of Bil’in, and the protestor (probably from Europe or the U.S.) is trying to take a shield away from an Israeli soldier. The picture almost seems gentle, and so it is not representative of what was actually happening. On the other hand, it reminds me of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” and so maybe it actually is representative of what was happening. What do the Sistine Chapel and the outskirts of a Palestinian village have in common? They are places where hands create.

Speaking of hands, just a few miles from Bil’in and many centuries earlier we’re told that Jesus, during a confrontation of his own, used his hands to create. Face to face with religious leaders and an adulterous woman they had cornered, Jesus listened as they said, “In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

What the men said was true; the law commanded that a stone, perhaps many stones, fly at this woman until she was a bloody corpse. In response Jesus bent down and used his finger to write in the earth. Straightening up a moment later he said to the leaders something like, “If any of you have lived a pure life, go ahead and hurl a rock at her.” He then bent back down and continued writing. We’re never told what he wrote, but when one by one the religious leaders had walked off and only he and the woman remained, he asked the woman, “Has no one condemned you?” No one had, and so Jesus continued, “Neither do I. Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Throughout the ages and in every place, the movements of hands—and sometimes their stillness—have left lines in sand, in history, and on people’s faces. Like the soldier and the protestor, or Jesus and the adulterer, all of us are participants in an ongoing creation, which is to say that there is a little Michelangelo in all of us. Or maybe there is a lot?

In any case, our hands create, and they are at their best when connected to a mind and heart that cares. Just ask a 2,000-year-old adulterer.

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For an image of a man throwing a stone, this one a Palestinian in the village of Bil'in, click on "Anger"

Walking through the Nablus Casbah, or Old City, was an eerie undertaking in late 2006.  The reasons for this are too complex to flesh out in a photoblog, but suffice it to say that here, in the West Bank’s largest city, six years of the second Palestinian intifada and Israel’s response—on top of four decades of abusive military occupation—had left the city tense and broken.  The years of violence made the air heavy, and the ingredients for the next storm—a shooting, a kidnapping, or a lethal military raid—could be felt on one’s skin.  One local man bemoaned that Israel had imprisoned or killed all the “clean” fighters.  Now there was no real resistance, he said, and those gun-carrying Palestinians you did see during the day were more about showing off for girls than anything.  When Israeli solders entered town, they always melted away.

This photograph, taken in the heart of the old city, shows a memorial to recent “martyrs,” including men who had been involved in terrorist operations against Israel.  An armed man initially refused my request to take a picture but then agreed, so long as he was not included in the frame.  For numerous reasons I didn’t like this memorial.  For one, the multi-dimensional humanity of the dead had, to me, been obscured by a one-dimensional glorification.

But even more I didn’t like it because it said nothing about peace, and when you are visiting a city like Nablus you yearn for things that give hope for peace, which includes (to say the least) an amount of moderation in the celebration of death, killing, and brutality.  This memorial was part of a spiral, whirling around with its counterparts on the Israeli side, driving deep into the gut of one who walks streets in both Israel and Palestine.  The acceptance and even extolling of violence plagues both communities.  The Israeli writer David Grossman, for example, recounts in his book The Yellow Wind the following conversation with a fellow Israeli in the late 1980s:

Once, when I was on reserve duty, there was a terrorist attack in the Old City in Jerusalem, near the Rockefeller Museum, and we set up a detainment area for Arab suspects in the police headquarters.  We picked up all the Arabs we caught.  We brought entire truckloads.  How I beat them that night!  There was another reservist, a young guy, with me, and I saw that every Arab he catches, he bites hard on the ear.  Actually takes a piece.  I ask him why he did it, and he answered me: “So that I’ll know them next time we meet.”

And in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz earlier this year there was an article that included this paragraph:

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques—these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

If interested in the multi-dimensional, check out the film Paradise Now, which was released in 2005 and is actually set in Nablus.  Click here to see the Paradise Now trailer.