Visited the new campus of the American University in Cairo- or, more accurately, outside of Cairo- for the first time when I was invited to give a talk to a graduate Comp. Lit seminar. Spreading over several acres in the middle of the desert in New Cairo east of Heliopolis, a vast, pristine, bare complex of Islamicate architecture in sand and ochre tones guarded by Fort-Knox level security. I can't make up my mind whether the best, or the worst thing about it is that it isn't Cairo.
In contrast, the Manial Palace, built early 1900's in the middle of Cairo, is a walled complex of shaded gardens and mature trees crowned by an over-the-top late-Mamluke style palace. Its vast gold-trimmed domed "Gold Hall" was the fitting setting for a book signing by Iran's Empress Farah Pahlavi, remarkably well-preserved. Also in attendance and equally well-preserved: Jihan Sadat and Omar Sharif.

A weird thing happened to me yesterday on my way to a ladies lunch at Le Pasha houseboat. I hailed one of the new white cabs- normally I can walk to the restaurant, but I was wearing heels and I was the host and didn't want to risk being late. The cab driver is a young, hip-looking guy wearing a black beret over his long curly hair and sporting an artist's mustache and goatee on his chubby face. Right off he tells me he likes to pick up fares in Zamalek because they are so refined. I notice there is a big black boombox strapped to the front passenger seat and he explains it's a boombox he's taking to a neighbor's wedding. Then he starts to ask me what I think of Mohamed El-Baradei's chances as a presidential candidate, and other pointed political questions. This keeps up as we drive along, with me getting a little impatient because he is driving slowly and I am concerned about being late. Once or twice he asks me to raise my voice because he can't hear me. As we finally drive up the Corniche and pull up before my destination, the houseboat restaurant, he asks me if I watch television, and when I tell him not at all, wondering for a moment if my book reading event two days earlier was aired on "10 PM" last night and he recognized me from it. But then the cab driver goes on to ask me: "Have you heard of a TV program called Taxi Misr? No? Well, you're on it!"
Only then do I realize that I am a victim of a candid camera show, and that there was a camera behind the rear-view mirror, and that the boombox was an amplifier and recording machine. I told him I absolutely refused my permission to be on the show, and jumped out, leaving him his fare on the seat, although he kept protesting that he couldn't accept payment.
To the best of my recollection, I didn't say anything to the taxi driver that I wouldn't have said publicly, and friends reassure me that he can't air the "interview" without permission, but now there are twenty minutes of me on tape in someone's possession, and that tape will surely be shown to the "censors."
Moral of the story: never get into a taxi with a boombox in the front seat.

To begin with, you can't be a control freak about anything in Egypt, let alone a book event. Yes, it was lovely to walk into my local Shorouk bookstore cum Cilantro coffee-shop to find the place packed to the rafters with family and friends- that's the advantage of being a "local" author." Then the organizer- who happens to be an old friend- tells me the book, Love is Like Water, is still sitting on the docks in New York somewhere. But not to worry, I can always read from one of my two other books. She adds that she has a sore throat and can't introduce me, so I might have to introduce myself. After I pull out of the audience another friend who is a deputy minister of Culture and ask her to introduce me, the organizer tells me that the Senior Editor of Shorouk himself has just walked in and will be glad to introduce me.
We sit down at the table, myself between the Senior Editor and the organizer, and I prepare to give my talk in English- I recognize almost everyone in the audience and they are all fluent English speakers- but am informed by the Senior Editor that perhaps I had best do it in Arabic, "for the television." He points to a microphone in front of me and a couple of camera men behind big tripods at the back of the room. The television program in question is "Ten PM", a very popular talk and news show.
I give my talk in Arabic, furiously trying to translate in my head a number of abstract concepts that I am used to using in English. Then I read part of "Muslims in the Cul-de-sac" from Love is Like Water, in English, of course.
It all goes well so far, and then the question and answer session begins. While my supporters smile encouragingly in the background, and two drop-dead glamorous friends of mine fascinate the bookstore employees, I attempt to field a couple of rather hostile questions from a former ambassador among others: "Criticism of Egypt's politics in my books reflects badly on the country in the eyes of foreign readers" (even if it does, I believe in keeping literature and political engagement separate); "The Napoleonic campaign to Egypt and Bush's war against Iraq can't be compared (they can, to compare is not to equate.)
And the television program? Well, I am told the segment might air anytime within the following week, depending on what else in the news pre-empts it, but of course Mohamed Baradei has just landed in Cairo Airport and there is nothing else in the news for a while!

I've done book readings in Egypt before, of course, but this is the first since the publication of The Cairo House in Arabic. So it poses a different set of questions: should I read from the Arabic version, or from the English? The Arabic version is not in my own words. And if I read in English, should I read from The Cairo House, or from the two new books, The Naqib's Daughter and Love is Like Water? Will the Shorouk bookstore have the new titles available in time? The books may or may not be shipped to Egypt by Sunday the 21st, and, as with everything in Egypt, things are left to the last minute. Will the audience expect me to read in one language and discuss in another? Will there be an audience at all? Most importantly for me, will the air-conditioning in the Shorouk bookstore in Zamalek hold up to the current heat wave, unprecedented for February?

Cruising down the Nile in Upper (south) Egypt. Very sunny, even too warm, we tried to do the touring early or late, and spent the hot middle of the day on the top deck under the awning of our cruiser. No sign of the flooding from a few weeks earlier. One time when we came back from a temple tour, we found the gangplank had been raised and couldn't get back on the boat; we managed to get them to circle around and come for us. Some of the time our boat was anchored right by the shore but most often it was anchored four or five boats away: all the boats line up side by side so they are touching and you actually walk through the four or so other boats on your way from the shore to your own boat. We had a well-equipped cabin for its size, and of course three meals a day provided, very good food, especially by American standards. Indelible images: the sound and light show at the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, transported block by gigantic block from its original site before the High Dam flooded the area. Kom Ombo, the temple rising right up from the banks of the Nile. Taking a horse cab to the temple in Edfu, the best preserved of all because it was buried in the sand. Luxor, the breath-taking forests of immense colums in the stupendous temples of Luxor and of Karnak- impossible to imagine until you stand under the gigantic pillars and experience the actual scale of these edifices. The temples of the south- Aswan to Luxor- are mostly New Kingdom and often added on to in the Ptolemaic period- after Alexander the Great- so relatively "modern" compared to the Pyramids, for instance. So many new tombs discovered on the West Bank of the Nile at Luxor, in the valleys of the Kings and Queens and Nobles. Lovely teas and lunches in the elegant, old-world Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor; the Old Cataract in Aswan, unfortunately, was under remodelling.
The comment of a fellow tourist before the Edfu temple, an unusually philosophical remark for this very worldly woman: "One gets the impression that it's all happened before, what we're experiencing today, this end-of-the-world feeling; the ancients thought it was the end of their world too, and yet here we are, thousands of years later." Or, as Percy Shelley would say: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, etc."

Ray Levy prays in the Cairo Fish Garden

I met Ray Levy for the first time when I was invited to speak at the Cairo Cosmopolitan Rotary Club earlier this week. An octogenarian psychiatrist from London, Levy was on the last day of a nostalgic trip to Cairo to revisit the scenes of his childhood; when a relative of mine told him about my talk, he decided to attend. I picked him out immediately as soon as I walked into the 20th floor restaurant of the Marriott Hotel in Zamalek: he stood out, by his age and his bright tangerine running suit, among the forty or so elegantly attired Rotarians- slightly more men than women, more Egyptians than Europeans, more middle-aged than young- scattered around the large room and enjoying a gourmet breakfast buffet. One of the Rotarians was an old classmate of mine, an immunologist who told me that her daughter was married to an American-born Chinese and lived in Jakarta- there’s globalization for you!- but I digress.
Ray Levy immediately introduced himself and in the few minutes that I sat at the head table before it was time to give my presentation, he started to tell me about his adventure in the Zamalek Jardin des Poissons or Fish Garden. We were interrupted but he promised to finish the story after my talk.
I was introduced by the secretary, Tilly Mulder, and launched into a twenty-minute presentation, in English of course, on Controversies Contemporary and Historical, touching on the mixed legacies of the 1952 Revolution and of Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. This was followed by a question and answer session, and after that I was free to mingle with the various Rotarians who lingered for one-on-one conversations. And that was when Ray Levy related to me his Fish Garden experience.
The Jardin des Poissons, in my day, let alone back in his, was mostly frequented by nannies and their charges from the surrounding elegant homes on the upscale island of Zamalek; toddlers pressed their noses against the glass apertures in the rocky grottos, fascinated by the fish gliding by, while the nannies, often Europeans, chatted amongst themselves. Today in the Fish Garden you are more likely to find courting couples from some of the schools and academies to which students are bussed from other neighborhoods off the island. When Ray visited on the day before the last day of his nostalgic trip to Cairo, he found the same grottos, but with glass so grimy it was hard to see the fish through it. A group of idle adolescent boys, probably playing hooky, approached the elderly foreigner in his tangerine running suit and struck up a conversation in English, as such curious boys invariably try to do.
Hello! You American? You English?
They were surprised when Ray answered in heavily-accented but intelligible Arabic. They immediately plied him with questions. Where are you from? Where do you live? When did you leave Egypt? Why did you leave? And then: Who do you pray to?
Ray Levy answered noncommittally that he didn’t pray.
Not ever? The boys were disconcerted.
Well, perhaps once in a great while, I might pray for my football team to win.
Ah! The boys, rabid football (soccer) fans, could identify with that. Which team do you pray for?
The National, of course. A safe choice, as Levy knew, since the National is Egypt’s most popular football team.
Let’s pray for the National then! The boys lined up, except for one who refused to participate because, as the other boys explained, he was the lone fan of the rival team.
And that is how Ray Levy, on the day before the last of his nostalgic trip to Cairo, found himself leading an ecumenical prayer with some teenagers in the Fish Garden for a win for a football team. There was no time for more of his impressions of Egypt before we parted at the Marriott, but he left me his contact information in London; perhaps I’ll look him up next time I’m there.

Clyde Edgerton Walking Across Egypt- literally

I have to share this eerie coincidence. Here I am in Cairo walking around the venerable Gezira Sporting Club- so named by its British founders because it sits on Zamalek, an island, or gezira, in the middle of the Nile. My family have been members since I can remember, but there was a period in the sixties when we, and others like us, were banned from all clubs and associations by presidential decree; the monitors at the four gates- known as the Stables, the Children’s Garden, the Clubhouse and the Nile- knew us, and turned a blind eye for years.
That was a long time ago, but I still need to show my card sometimes today, since I am abroad so much the monitors don’t always recognize me. Today, though, I sail through the Stables gate and walk along the track toward the old Clubhouse, with a destination in mind: the new Reading Room. The Clubhouse itself is shabby and rather grim, but the relocated Reading Room is spanking new, a wood-paneled space behind gleaming glass doors, guarded by a categorical sign: “Absolutely no members under 16 allowed. Pleased observe silence.â€
Inside, the three grizzled gentlemen slumped in their club chairs barely raise their heads from their newspapers. On the shelves of one wall are the foreign-language books, and on the far wall are the Arabic books. I look over the modest selection of English and French titles. The collection is random, relying as it does entirely on donations, and ranging from leather-bound series inscribed “from the estate of member such-and-such†to dog-eared paperbacks, many of them generations-old copies familiar to me from the shelves in the old reading room back by the stables: Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, George Sand, Thackeray, and- Clyde Edgerton:Walking Across Egypt.
How did it come to be here, in the Gezira Sporting Club of all places? Who could have brought it here? Someone who ordered it, misled by the title into thinking it actually had to do with Egypt? An American tourist, perhaps from North Carolina, who finished reading it and left it behind? How very odd. And what a coincidence that the thin volume should have caught my eye, as out of place and as much a memento of my hometown of Chapel Hill as a Tar Heel poster?
I pick it up; it is missing the front cover, and there is no inscription in it. I feel as if I should take the ragged, thin little book home, as Miss Mattie might do with a scrawny stray dog or orphan. I take it over to the “librarianâ€, a bored young man sitting at a desk in the corner. Books can be borrowed from the Reading Room, strictly on the honor system; let’s just say that the librarians look very surprised when anyone actually returns a book.
But then I think better of it, and put the book back on the shelf. Never mind how it got there. Clyde Edgerton would be pleased, I’m sure, to know that his Mattie and her friends are walking across Egypt, literally.

Cairo 2010:
Giving a talk on "Controversies Contemporary and Historical" to the Cairo Cosmopolitan Rotary Club on the 20th floor of the Marriott Hotel in Zamalek, Cairo, I looked around at the mix of Egyptians and Europeans, an elegant, courteous group of professionals, who turned out in double the usual number for the Monday breakfast meeting, according to the organizer. There were some guests as well, including London-based octagenarian Raymond Levy, on the last day of a nostalgic pilgrimage to revisit the scenes of his childhood in Zamalek.
Looking out from the 20th floor of the Marriott restaurant, you could see a haze of fog, or more likely smog, over the city. But pollution not withstanding, this year, in marked contrast to last year, Cairenes who had bought and built dream villas in the pristine new suburbs are now turning back to central Cairo and desperately trying to sell their McMansions. The downturn in the economy is not the main factor: rather it is the realization that living in the exurbs means being stuck for hours commuting, but even more, that Cairenes by their very gregarious and restless nature feel cut off and depressed when they cannot be bustling around the hub of central Cairo neighborhoods. So, in the same lemming-like fashion that saw the exodus to the new suburbs over the past decade, there is now a reverse flow back into the scarce choice real estate in town, and the real estate market is a roller-coaster.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina just received a gift of half a million French books, all recent publications, which makes the French collection the largest in the Library, outstripping even the Arabic. Hurrah for the Euro-Med cooperation initiative! France is keen on maintaining the cultural role it has played in Egypt ever since Bonaparte's expedition. And for me personally, I am delighted at the prospect of doing research at the Library while I am in Egypt.

I presented a paper on Egyptian Women in Bonaparte's Cairo at the Middle East Studies Association conference in Boston on Sunday. It was based on some of the research I did for The Naqib's Daughter. The conference venue was ideal: the Marriott Copley Place; I've always loved Boston's downtown Back Bay ever since I lived in that part of the country years ago.

Yesterday I had the revelatory experience of participating in analyzing my novels with a group of psychiatrists and writers: the Humanities faculty working group at the Global South Center at UNC in Chapel Hill. The topic was Far Away and Deep Within: how the far away past, with its traumas and imprints, lies deep within the psyches of transplanted novelists like me and is expressed in their writing. In preparing for the presentation, I realized the parallels between two chapters, one in The Cairo House, and one, "Muslims in the Cul-de-sac" in Love is Like Water, that represent the Egyptian past and the American present respectively. Also how guilt runs like a leitmotif in both books...Fascinating group of people, I'm looking forward to attending future sessions where someone else's inner working are laid bare.

The North Carolina Literary Festival was last weekend: three glorious Fall days on the gorgeous UNC campus in Chapel Hill, with keynote speakers John Grisham (practiced), Kathy Reichs (hilarious), Anna Deveare Smith (mesmerizing), Elisabeth Strout (cool and low-key), on top of readings, musical performance and author receptions at which the household names and the hopefuls mingled. My own latest book, Love is Like Water, arrived literally on the eve of the festival, so it was launched at my reading on Sunday morning. Sunday morning is a notoriously tricky time-slot in the church-going South, but my friends, bless them, showed up in force. And that was a good thing, because it was also my launch as a North Carolina author. I've called the state home now for twenty years, and that is as long as I've lived in Egypt, and much longer than I've lived anywhere else. But although I wrote my novels while living in Chapel Hill, I wrote about Egypt, about London, about France, about the frozen north of the U.S., about Boston- about anywhere but North Carolina. It was my quotidian but not part of my imaginary; some essential sense of distance or perspective was missing. In Love is Like Water, I finally write about the South, and so I am now a North Carolina writer in the complete sense of the world. The later chapters of the book are set in Chapel Hill, and the last three I wrote- sometimes in one sitting- in the weeks immediately following 9/11. I found it surprisingly difficult to talk about those chapters at the book reading, even so many years later, even with so many friendly faces in the audience.
The next festival will be in two years time; but I wonder if I will be on the same program as John Grisham again. His daughter just graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, and his wife is graduating this year, so perhaps it won't be as easy to lure him down here next time around...

Thrilled that copies of my latest book, Love is Like Water, just arrived, in the nick of time for my reading tomorrow at the North Carolina Literary Festival at UNC-Chapel Hill!

President Obama hosted an iftar, the breaking of the fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, for ambassadors of Muslim countries, a few cabinet and congressional figures, and some members of the American Muslim community. But then, so did George W. Bush for all eight years of his administration. President Obama's was politically significant though for two things: he honored an American schoolgirl who won the right to wear hijab (a headscarf), affirming America's freedom of religious practice in contrast to France's banning of the headscarf in schools and discrimination against the niqab (face veil) in public.
The other thing I found remarkable was a description of the menu listed on the a website that tracks the Obama's White House meals: the iftar started with dates and nuts, then salad, chicken with potato-leek puree- but no mention of dessert! What, no baklava or konafa? Or my favorite Om Ali? I hope it was just an oversight of the website, not the kitchen.

Watching President Obama's address to the Muslim world on the occasion of Ramadan encourages one to believe in a day, hopefully not too far into the future, when Islam and its practices will be understood and accepted along with other religions in America. His reference to the concern of Muslims over the spread of swine flu during the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca in a couple of months brought to mind the efforts of the French to contain the outbreak of plague in Egypt during Bonaparte's occupation in 1798-1801. The French imposed severe measures that saved lives but were at first viewed with suspicion by Egyptians: isolating the sick from his family, burning his beddding and clothes, banning funerals and mourning. And, for fear of the epidemic spreading during the Haj, the pilgrimage caravans from Egypt were banned entirely. Hardest of all, perhaps, was the cancelling of the Feast of the Sacrifice, one of the five pillars of Islamic practice, and quarantining the sheep traditionally marked for slaughter.
President Obama alluded in his address to the concern about a shortage of swine flu vaccine for the potential three million Muslim pilgrims. The French in Egypt too had to grapple with limited resources. Only Europeans and Syrian Christians were treated at the three hospitals set up by the French in Cairo, and no pharmacist could dispense the drugs used against the plague to Egyptians except by special prescription from a European physician.
But the most draconian of all measures taken by the French was the warning that any Egyptian prostitute caught soliciting the troops would be executed; in spite of that deterrent, thirty prostitutes were drowned in the Nile in a single day for defying the order!
History repeats itself, as I found out in my research for The Naqib's Daughter- but thankfully, there are limits to the parallels!

Walter Cronkite took courageous, contested stands right through his career, but his last stand was the one so controversial it is pointedly ignored in the elegies that greet the news of his death today. Cronkite was against the Iraq War. Sadly, his legendary stature was inadequate to weigh in the balance against the headlong rush to war.

There is an even more disturbing aspect to the Dresden court killing of the young Egyptian woman, Marwa El-Sherbini, who was in court to testify against the German man who had harrassed her on a playground and called her a terrorist and a slut. The man, "Axel W.", attacked her in court, stabbing her to death 18 times, and stabbed her husband, who came to her defense, several times. Then the husband was shot in the leg by the police, who assumed that he was the attacker. The Egyptian genetic engineering scientist, 34, is now in hospital in critical condition, unable to travel to Egypt to bury his wife.

And that is the disturbing aspect that is fueling so much anger in the Arab and Muslim world. One German's act of fanatical race killing can perhaps be explained as just one man's problem, not an issue with broader societal implications. But the fact that the police not only didn't intervene in time to save the woman, and then assumed that the husband was the attacker and shot him, rather than the bloody knife-wielding German, is more disturbing.

Moreover, the perception that there was little coverage, let alone ourtrage, in the German media- and none to mention in Europe or the US- is exacerbating the outrage in Egypt and beyond in the Middle East. It's very sad.

This morning, a news item on BBC radio set me to thinking that it's time to stop demonizing the Islamic headscarf. An Egyptian woman was stabbed to death in a Dresden courtroom by a German against whom she was testifying for insulting her as a "terrorist" earlier, apparently because she was wearing a headscarf. Her husband, an Egyptian academic, was critically stabbed in his attempt to defend her, and shot in the leg by mistake by a German policeman trying to subdue the attacker. The couple's three-year-old son was in the courtroom and witnessed the murder of his mother. She was thirty years old, and three months pregnant with a second child. The German man had come up to her in the playground earlier and called her a "terrorist" for wearing the hijab. She reported him, and he was given a stiff fine, around a thousand dollars. He appealed, and in the court of appeals in Dresden, he attacked the woman and stabbed her to death, and her husband critically, before he was subdued.
Amr Moussa, the Secretary General of the Arab League, made an emotional statement about the failure of the efforts to overcome the clash of civilizations. In the BBC interview, he was challenged to defend his statement.
For those of us- and I confess I am one- who are ambivalent about the wearing of the hijab by Muslim women, particularly in Western countries, this incident is something of a wake-up call. We need to stop demonizing the hijab. Seriously. We need to stop saying Muslim women in hijab will be unwelcome in France, as Sarkozy has. We need to disassociate what a woman choosed to wear on her head from terrorism. It's time. Before there are more murders in European courtrooms. Before the Arab League's Secretary General's emotional overstatement becomes a fact.

This July 4th, I'm thankful I can wear my Ralph Lauren flag-print aerobics top for the first time since the Iraq war turned it into an (unwitting!) symbol of militarism. This July 4th, I'm more than ever thankful for my liberal hometown's patriotic parade, and living close enough to ride a bike downtown to watch it. I'm thankful for the costume contest, the pie-eating contest, the local bands, and the firework display over the university stadium at night. This July 4th, I'm taking it all in.

Douthat's lament over America's loveless unions joins the voices, like Cristina Nehring's, that claim that marriage and passion are mutually exclusive. Safe is the opposite of sexy. Americans either live in drab but responsible and productive marriages, or take fatal risks to have wild illicit affairs on the side, like Governor Sanford and the long list of scandalous public figures whose indiscretions end their marriages and their careers.
But certain sophisticated civilizations, like the French, have long had a tradition of having it all: the ideal marriage, with companionship, a healthy child-rearing environment, career and social-status enhancement; and also the romance and the passion of an affair. Monogamy is not a natural state, that attitude maintains; the solution is simply to separate the roles of spouse and lover. As long as this arrangement is conducted in a mature, civilized and consensual manner, it works.
In fact, public men often complicate their lives further: from Louix XIV with Madame de Pompadour to President Mitterand whose mistress and illegitimate daughter attended his state funeral, they often maintain simultaneously an "official" mistress while conducting a series of lesser affairs.
From that pragmatic perspective, the spectacle of American politicians with their humiliating public confessions and embarrassing displays of sturm and drang, is incomprehensible.
The difference between the French model and the harem model, traditional in eastern civilizations from China to Morocco, is crucial: the harem model sanctions only men's right to multiple sex partners, whereas the French model accommodates the wife's equal right to seek an alternative to ennui in her marriage- although she usually has to be more discreet. There was nothing discreet about Cecilia Sarkozy's openly shopping for an apartment in New York with her American lover while married to the president of France!