Portland, Oregon, is officially the Rose City- more on that in a minute- but unofficially, it's a toss-up between the Polite City and the Clean City. The streets are of Singaporean immaculateness, as a simple comparison between impeccable Pioneer Square and funky Harvard Square will attest: not even a leaf off a tree seems to be allowed to settle on the ground. That is all the more remarkeable given the number of panhandlers on the streets, both young later-day hippies and genuine older homeless. But even the panhandlers, annoying as they are, are polite: they thank you even when you turn them down. Everyone is mellow and accommodating, even by my Carolina Southern standards.
The honor system is the rule on the TriMet light rail and bus services, and I have yet to see a conductor ask for a ticket. On the Washington Park shuttle that shuttles between the zoo, the Japanese Gardens and the Rose Garden, the driver/conductor welcomes all comers whether or not they hold a ticket.
The International Rose Test Garden that earns Portland its Rose City name is stunning: a vast terraced garden of thousands of rose bushes of every conceivable color, size and configuration, against a majestic background of gigantic Douglas firs and snowy Mt Hood in the distance. I am lucky enough to be visiting when the blooms are at their absolute perfect peak. Whoever said "a rose is a rose is a rose" never visited the Portland Rose Garden. And it is all free and open to the public, who bring children and dogs and picnics.
In contrast to the disorganized over-abundance that is the Rose Garden, the Chinese Garden in Chinatown is a study in design, balance and symbolism: yin & yang, plant and rock, water and wood, enclosed and exposed space, all linked by clever "leak" windows. A miniature imitation of an actual scholar's garden in China, it is designed to encourage reflexion and repose.
Downtown is a mecca of upscale shopping, contrasting rather oddly with the ubiquitous pandhandlers. But if there is a fault to find with Portland, it is that the (impeccable!) sidewalks are rolled up around 8 pm, when the shops close, or 9 pm, when most restaurants stop serving. Even Borders closes at 11 pm!

As of last night, Barack Obama is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. I have mixed feelings for Hilary Clinton: on the one hand, sympathy and admiration, because all the other (male) candidates basically had to do was shave, choose a tie, and show up, whereas she had to appear beautifully turned out and made up, perfectly groomed, perfectly accessorized, and above all fresh as a daisy, day after day, hour after hour of an endless, grueling campaign. As someone said of Ginger Rogers, she did everything Fred Astaire did, only in high heels and in reverse.
On the other hand, there is great disappointment because of the way Hilary Clinton played the race card and the gender card. She is no Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel, rising through the ranks of the party on her own merits; she owes her candidacy to having been President Bill Clinton's wife. There is some hypocrisy there in taking full advantage of her position as First Lady, and at the same time claiming discrimination on the basis of her gender; and contradiction between touting her experience gained as First Lady and at the same time claiming to represent change.
It's also hard to watch what her campaign has done to Bill Clinton's legacy. View the clip of a much younger Bill Clinton making a speech: "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be righted by what's right with America." That was charisma, that was glamor, there was "the natural" communicator. Skinny, big-eared Obama cannot compare with Bill Clinton at his age. It's hard to reconcile candidate Hilary's husband, who shamelessly plays the race card, with that Clinton. Or with the President Clinton whose post-presidency work includes a foundation, The Clinton Global Initiative, that supports so much good in the world, including a risk insurance program to encourage foreign investment in the Palestinian territories.
Speaking of which, I spoke with a very clever woman who is involved in the Clinton Initiative at a party in Massachusetts last weekend; a Hilary supporter, naturally, she told me she had heard that a conference of Arab media concluded that the American presidential candidate "the Arabs" would least like to see in the White House would be Obama, because he agreed to negotiate with Iran. Baffled, I asked her which Arabs she was referring to: Egyptians, Moroccans, Iraqis, Saudis? "The Arabs" speak with as many voices as there are states, and the governments rarely speak for their peoples. It was disconcerting to find my interlocutor, otherwise well-informed, under the impression that "the Arabs", or at least Sunni Arabs, would automatically be averse to direct diplomacy with Iran.
But as of last night, Obama is the nominee, and it is the end of the beginning of the real race to the White House.

The plans of scores of Palestinian Fulbright scholarship recepients were abrubtly dashed when they were prevented by Israel from leaving Gaza to travel to the United States to study. Nothing could be sadder, or do more to reinforce the reality that Israel is turning Gaza into a prison and following a policy of collective punishment. Sad and counterproductive: these students were the hope for much-needed mutual understanding between the beleagured Palestinians and America.

What was it about the year 1968? The May student revolution in France; the "Prague Spring"; anti-war student demonstrations here in the United States, and- as Senator Clinton memorably reminded us- the twin traumas of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. A sort of collective madness that seized the world, and youth in particular.
In Egypt too, the young had their 1968. It followed the shock of the unimaginable, utter and humiliating defeat of the Arab armies at the hands of Israel in the Six Day War of June 1967. A sizeable chunk of Egypt, the Sinai, was now occupied territory. In the months that followed, when it became apparent that the promised reforms were not materializing, that the public was being fed the same pablum as before, students at Cairo university and high school demonstrated and organized sit-ins on campus. Professors, walking into auditoriums to find a few students sitting patiently waiting for the lecture, admonished them to get out and demonstrate with their classmates.
President Nasser cracked down with police barricades and and tear gas and closed down the bridges, effectively shutting down Cairo. I remember being caught in Giza, on the far side of town from my home in Zamalek, and having to cross the bridge on foot to walk to a relative's house in Garden City. I remember stones flying about, and a student gallantly handing me a chair to hold over my head as protection. Students were not so much angry as high on the headiness of revolt, of a breath of freedom, having lived their whole lives under a regime that brooked not the slightest whiff of dissent. But the regime handled the student revolt with unusual restraint, wisely creating no martyrs, and making vague promises of reform. Nothing changed.
That was forty years ago. Egypt regained the Sinai, at the cost of a peace treaty that left the problem of a home for the Palestinians untouched. Today that problem is more intractable than ever, and an ugly wall separates Israelis and Palestinians. But today, as well, an Israeli/Palestinian web start-up has found a way to virtually penetrate that wall and link the two sides, Israeli and Palestinian, of the venture. The more things change, the saying goes, the more they stay the same, but I believe, the same in a different way.

"The Visitor", an independent film in theatres now, treats- with understatement and metaphor- the subject of xenophobia in post 9/11 America. Walter, the protagonist, is a type of American familiar on any college campus: the tall, grey, cold, middle-aged professor who may once have been brilliant but has fallen into a barren rut since being tenured. He is rigidly impersonal and authoritarian with his students, refusing so much as to hear their personal excuses for a late paper.
When his life is disrupted by a young couple- a drummer of Syrian origin and a Senegalese jewelry designer- who make precarious livings on the streets of New York, Walter discovers in himself first compassion, then common humanity. The breakthrough comes when Walter, who cannot seem to learn the piano despite his efforts, finds in himself an instinctive attraction and talent for African drumming, which the young Syrian man, Tariq, teaches him. The drum, of course, is a metaphor for the Third World.
On the day a triumphant Walter has worked up the courage to join Tariq in a drum circle in a public park and they return on the subway, Tariq is arrested, although he has done nothing wrong, and is hauled away to a detention center. He is in the country illegally, his family's asylum request having been rejected several years earlier. The same is true for his Senegalese wife Zaynab, and for his mother, Mona, who comes from Michigan to New York to be near him although she too, cannot risk visiting her son in detention.
Only Walter can visit Tariq, and he does, and even pays for an immigration lawyer for him. But one morning Tariq simply disappears, and Walter is told he has been deported before his immigration hearing. He can learn nothing further, and when he tries, he is given a menacing bureaucratic order to "Step away from the desk, Sir." Walter tries to protest: "We're not children, you know, you can't treat us like this!" But he is helplessa and afraid, and walks away. In this new world order, the film seems to tell us, the most All-American of men can easily find himself powerless and intimidated like any hapless citizen of the Third World.

Against a background of tulips in full bloom across the April-green quads of Duke University last weekend, an international cohort gathered for the second annual conference on "Marketing Muslimwoman". The term, and the conference, are the brainchild of miriam cooke, Arab and Islamic Studies professor at Duke. "Muslimwoman" refers to the politicized, stereotypical image of women of Islamic heritage in the media, academia, literature and politics. The "Muslimwoman" is both subject and object of marketing: the image of the woman in the burqa is used to sell everything from books to political positions; and on the other hand marketing is directed to Muslim women, whether it be fashion in Gulf State glamour magazines, or Indonesian billboard ads for pocket-sized prayer robes that fit as easily into a woman's bag as her blackberry.
Conference speakers included international feminist figures from as far afield as Egypt and Iran, and the topics were varied, but the focus on image unavoidably led to the circular discourse of the veil. The irony cannot have been lost among this hyper-selfconscious cohort of academic intellectuals that, good intentions notwithstanding, a conference on Marketing Muslimwoman does just that.

Shirin Ebadi, Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Prize winner, was the keynote speaker at a conference on human rights at Duke University last Friday. The venue, White Auditorium on the lush East Campus, was packed beyond capacity, with an overflow crowd of students, faculty and community members, including Iranians, sitting on the floor along the aisles. Ebadi is a small and undramatic woman who speaks no English. She launched into her speech in Farsi, ably interpreted by an elegant Iranian woman of about the same age. Ebadi impassively recited a long and occasionally shocking litany of human right abuses by the mullah regime, particularly against women. But it was towards the end of her speech that Ebadi's voice and gestures suddenly became emphatic and she practically pounded on the podium; before her interpreter had time to translate, a roar of applause broke out from the Iranian contingent in the audience. The rest of us had to wait for the translation: We love Iran, Ebadi was saying, and we won't allow anyone to invade Iran under any pretext, including human rights. This time, it was the entire audience who cheered.

At a Duke University screening of the documentary "US vs Al-Arian" by Norwegian film-maker Line Halvorsen, one theme emerged, from the film itself but also from the panel discussions with director Halvorsen, the Arian family, and civil rights lawyers. The documentary chronicles the case of Palestinian-born Florida University professor Sami Al-Arian, who was arrested on charges of allegedly "supporting terrorism" (through his support of a Palestinian organization considered terrorist by the US,) and who was then held in solitary confinement for two years, tried and acquitted by a Florida jury, had his acquittal reversed by the judge and is still being held in jail two years after his trial ended.
To Al-Arian's supporters, and more crucially, to the jury that examined the evidence and acquitted him, the case is a First Amendment case of freedom of speech, and whether or not an alleged or potential "thought crime"- as in the movie "Minortiy Report"- should be justification for incarcerating a man indefinitely- even in the post 9/11 Ashcroft-fueled atmosphere.
The heartening answer, from the Florida jury and from the many ordinary citizens who demonstrated on Al-Arian's behalf, is a resounding no. A no, unfortunately, that is being ignored by the administration.
One striking remark by Nahla Al-Arian, the professor's wife, is worth repeating. She lamented the fact that the Muslim-American community is afraid to help the Arians for fear of being associated with terrorism, but that it has been the Christian church groups and the African American civil rights groups that have been most supportive. Asked about the reaction of the Jewish community of Tampa- her husband had been a harsh critic of Israeli policy- Nahla Al-Arian volunteered: "There are many beautiful people among the Jewish community who want to help us, but they are silenced by the loud voices of some of their leaders." She added: "One of the jurors in the film, Than, a recently converted Jew, told us she asked her Rabbi what she should do, and he told her she should follow her conscience and do the right thing. That juror voted for acquittal."
It is indeed true that the Muslim American community has been silenced and paralyzed- not least by the example of the fate of Sami Al-Arian- and that it will need to turn for help, in protecting its civil rights and those of all Americans, to right-minded Americans of all faiths, Christian and Jewish especially.

There was a time in Egyptian-Israeli relations, only a few years ago, when "normalization" seemed like an attainable ideal: Egyptians and Israelis- or at least their governments- would exchange commerce, tourism- and culture. One of the more bizarre footnotes of the normalization policy of those years is that Egypt sent its foremost belly-dancer, Fifi Abdou, to represent Egyptian culture in Israel.
The Israeli film "The Band's Visit" revisits those years and tells the story of an Alexandrian police band sent to play at a cultural event in Israel, who get lost and end up in a tiny Israeli town in the middle of nowhere. The generous restaurant owner, Dina, takes them in for the night, and the scene is set for the predictable cultural friction. The Egyptians are formal and dignified to the point of humorlessness and the Israelis are laid back and free-spirited. Religion is unrealistically absent: not a Jewish skull cap or a Muslim prayer rug in sight.
But this is a film with its heart in the right place; the Egyptians and the Israelis bond, after a fashion, for a few brief hours, leaving the viewer nostalgic for the more optimistic days of "normalization."
The film is shot in an almost documentary style, with very little music in the soundtrack, smewhat disappointing for a film about musicians. The cinematographers are Israeli; some of the actors are Arab, if not actually Egyptian. Well worth watching.

In theatres in the US at the moment: Caramel, a film by Lebanese director Nadine Labaki, who also stars as Layale, one of four women hairdressers in Beirut. Each of the women is going through a personal crisis: Layale is carrying on an affair with a married man whose wife, a customer of the hair salon, is inconveniently likeable. Nesrine is engaged to be married to a man she loves, but dreads confessing that she is not a virgin. Rima is gay and sentimental about another customer. Jamal is getting old and worries about her small-time career in television advertising. Tante Rose, a tailor, must choose between her last chance at romance with Monsieur Charles and caring for her crazy sister. The men- the never-seen married lover, the policeman who is in love with Layale, Nisrine's fiance, are window dressing. Like an Almodovar movie, this film is all about strong women in an ensemble cast, living lives "on the edge."
In fact the most obvious critique that might be aimed at this enjoyable film is that it could be dubbed in Spanish and no one would know the difference. Lebanon, with its brutal civil war and Islamist revival is absent. Religion is never mentioned, but it is clear that all the women are Christian, except for Nisrine, who is the one worried about admitting to her groom that she is not a virgin on her wedding night- unconvincing in the context, given that there is nothing remotely conservative about her fiance's behavior.
The film is engaging, but at no point is the viewer left in any suspense as to the eventual happy resolution to all the women's problems. And any sign of the civil war is absent, except for the periodic power outage. Even in a scene where Nisrine's fiance gets into a shouting match with a police militia, the consequences are comic rather than dramatic.
But the justification for this rose-tinted film lies in the dedication by director Labaki: "To My Beirut". It is very much one woman's Valentine to her city, and as such, a relief from the Beirut of disturbing headlines.

A New York Times article (March 9) by Nicolas Kristof is stunningly frank about the U.S. electoral campaign: "..the most outrageous bigotry in this campaign is not about either race or sex. It's about religion. The whispering campaigns allege that Mr. Obama is a secret Muslim planning to impose Islamic law on the country...These charges are fanatical...They are less a swipe at one candidate than a calumny against an entire religion. They underscore that for many bigoted Americans in the 21st century, calling someone a Muslim is still a slur."
Very much worth reading.

Went to yet another wedding two days ago, this one at the Four Seasons Nile Plaza. I noted some anomalies: there is no longer a traditional "zaffa"- the equivalent of a walk down the aisle with bellydancers and musicians. The bride came down on her father's arm to the sound of Abba's "She's the Dancing Queen." She then proceeded to prove it by dancing non-stop with her bridegroom from 10:30 pm to 2:30 am, along with a horde of young friends. (In my day, bride and groom were condemned to sit on gilded thrones for most of the wedding.) The bride had been to Paris to buy her lovely lace strapless wedding gown, but being conservative, she wore it with a white body-stocking underneath.
The guests were served massive amounts of "appetizers", with the result that, although no one went hungry before the buffet was inaugurated at half past midnight, most of the guests were too full to partake of the lavish dinner, or had already left by then. This happens so regularly at weddings now that there is a "food bank" that collects the leftovers from the hotels and distributes them among the poor.
Yesterday evening, I attended an "intimate" (60 or 70 people) family dinner for the families of two young fiances at the girl's grandmother's house. The groom's father is the current prime minister, and that brought up a small matter of protocol: politics is the default topic of conversation among Egyptians, and the presence of the PM, otherwise delightful, put a damper on the customary political carping.

Yesterday I bought some almomd macaroons- pistachio, coffee, chocolate- from Fauchon, the iconic Paris patisserie, and had tea- scones and clotted cream and jam- at Le Richoux, the landmark tea shop known to every tourist who ever visited Harrods across the street in London. But I wasn't in Paris or London, I was in Cairo. The great purveyors of luxury are opening branches in this city of 16 million, where the appetite for luxury, and the disinclination to travel for it, are creating a niche market.

The New York Times runs a video-article on "Egypt's Youth, stifled by poverty, turns to Islamic fervor", nothing original there, but the report makes the argument that marriage is unaffordable for the majority of youth, who cannot afford apartments or weddings, and are forced to postpone marriage till their thirties or not at all, creating a troubling social limbo often assuaged by seeking relief in religion. Fair enough, but if so, should not postponed marriage lead to fewer children per couple? Where is the dividend in population reduction?
Musharraf loses big- democracy actually works in Pakistan. Despite the assassination of Bhutto and expectations of rigged elections, democracy actually works in Pakistan, as it does in Turkey, perhaps better than in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Worth noting in the context of the ongoing debate about whether Islam is incompatible with democracy.
Richard Brooks in today's NYT begins an article about Obama-mania by citing three cities he uses as shorthand for the liberal outposts of the nation: Berkeley, Cambridge and Chapel Hill, where I live-and coincidentally, where John Edwards does as well. Not for nothing did the late Senator Jesse Helms of N.C. suggest fencing Chapel Hill off from the rest of the red state like a "zoo"- a distinction Chapel Hillians tend to wear as a badge of honor.

Mexico City now runs women-only buses, a measure to protect women from the groping and sexual harrassment to which they are subjected in the body-to-body crush of public transport. In Egypt, that principle has long been applied in women-only queues (at government offices, train stations, even check-out registers) and women-only cars in the Metro and women-only buses. This policy is uncontroversial, welcomed not only by Egyptian women but also by the men in their families; but to Western eyes it can seem regressive and sexist and, in a word, "Islamic." Now, however, Mexican society seems to have discovered segregated transport as a good accommodation between modesty and machismo.

Pundits and philosophers have pondered the insanity that descends on the human spirit in pack mode: what is it that makes men- and some women- paint their faces, wave flags, scream their loungs out, and- in the Southern part of the world- honk in tune for hours on end? But there it is: March Madness in the U.S., and February madness in Africa, where the Africa Cup in football (soccer to Yanks) just played its final match today in Ghana: Egypt vs Cameroon. If you were anywhere in Cairo today, even if you tried your best, you couldn't avoid knowing when the Egyptian team scored a goal: a muffled roar rose from the city. Egypt won the Africa Cup, a couple of hours ago, but the interminable celebratory honking in the streets shows no sign of abating. No one gets to sleep tonight.
Everyone watches football in this country: the Sudanese chauffeur pleads a toothache to take the day off; the cabinet minister at one dinner party I attend insists his hostess serve dinner during half-time, at the risk of ruining her Beef Wellington.
But then again, I live (most of the year) in North Carolina, home of the legendary Duke/Chapel Hill basketball rivalry, where students light bonfires in the street and leap over them post-game, while the police watch.
There is something, perhaps, about the simplicity of sports, the finality of the outcome, that satisfies the soul in a world of complexities and irresolution. Hence, perhaps, the sympathy with which the Iraqi victory in the Asia Cup was greeted.
After February madness comes March madness, but they are nothing as to November madness, when the real contest takes place, out there in the real world of U.S. electoral politics, where nothing is simple, not even, sometimes, the outcome.

The past ten days have witnessed alarms in Egypt on two unconnected fronts. First Hamas bulldozered down the barriers between Gaza and Egypt, and thousands of Palestinians poured across, starved for every conceivable goods and necessities. The reflexive sympathy for their plight among the Egyptian masses became tinged, as the days wore on, with the beginning of paranoid alarm: three thousand Palestinians, it was reported, had made their way to Cairo and had melted into the teeming millions of that city; what if this continued? Most of all, there was resentful refusal to be trapped into taking over Israel's responsibility to supply the citizens of Gaza. The agreement reached between the various parties seemed to relieve that alarm.
But hot on its heels came the sudden troubling failure of the internet networks, soon explained by the cutting of two undersea internet cables in Egyptian waters and one off Dubai. None of the explanations seemed convincing: surely such cables were built to withstand bad weather, and there was no record of any ship in Egyptian waters at the time that could have accidentally cut the cables with its anchor. The third possibility, a deliberate act of terrorism, floated about. The cables, it was said, would take two weeks to repair, and alarm grew at the prospect of disruption of services and news. But the speedy restoration of nearly full service- thanks to the cooperation of the undamaged networks- calmed spirits and dispersed paranoia- until the next alarm.

An Egyptian film that is much discussed in Egypt today is "The Chaos": a rambling two-hour social critique cum tragicomedy cum soft porn, it follows the unrequited passion of a graceless, greedy hustler of a police sergeant for a lovely, pure young girl, his neighbor. When she refuses his advances in favor of a handsome, pure young prosecutor, the brutish police sergeant abducts and rapes her. The allegorical reference is clear: the thuggish policeman represents the corruption of the police state, and the pure young girl is Egyptian society, brutalized by government thugs. The censorship board allowed scene upon scene of gratuitous nudity and even simulated sex in the film, but balked at several sentences of dialogue, presumably of political criticism, which it excised clumsily and brutishly with rumbling white-out sound. So much for the priorities of the Egyptian state censors...

Yesterday I had some traditional Ashoura barley pudding with nuts and raisins, and it reminded me why Ashoura is such a contradictory commemoration. For Shiites around the world (15% of Muslims), it is the day to lament and atone for the killing of Imam Hussein, the Prophet's grandson, at Karbala, in Iraq; his martyrdom marks the founding story of the sect. For the overwhelming majority Sunnis, it is a day to celebrate the salvation of Moses and the Israelites from the army of Pharaoh. When the Prophet Mohamed migrated to the city of Medina, he found among the inhabitants Jewish tribes that celebrated that occasion by a grateful fast; Mohamed declared that Moses was a prophet to Muslims as well, and they also would celebrate by fasting, and feasting on barley pudding. Both traditions, the fasting and the barley pudding, persist among Sunnis to this day, whereas for Shiites, the commemoration of the day is superceded by the killing of Imam Hussein, fifty years after his grandfather Prophet Mohamed declared it a day of celebration.

Head east from Cairo on the new super highway to the Red Sea resorts, and within minutes you find yourself in the stark desert, flanked on each side by forbidding fjords of sheer rock, no life form for mile upon mile, under the malignant glare of the sun even on a January day. Suddenly you feel oppressed, as insignificant, as vulnerable, as an ant, with nothing but a tank of gas between you and certain death. The desert, like the ocean, inspires a spirituality born of awe; you begin to understand why mystics, prophets and madmen seek the unknowable in the nothingness of desert.
Two hours and change from Cairo along the desert highway, you see the Red Sea, a cobalt blue, and you come upon the first of a string of resorts with names like Porto Sokhna, Stella de Mare, Laguna Beach(!) Resort after resort after resort, all the way to Hurghada, feeding the bottomless appetite of Cairenes for vacation homes on the Red Sea. The desert has found its match.