Short Posts Archives

Alexandria, Climate Change, and the Mediterranean Narrative

This short essay originally appeared in the Madrid–based Fundacion Alternativas.

Kites flying above the Alexandria corniche. Photo by Amro Ali (2020)

The modern history and contemporary nature of Alexandria is a brew of different identities that give off (or once gave) a distinct resonance: Mediterranean, Egyptian, Arab, African, Middle Eastern, Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Levantine, among others. But the one profile that emerges as rooted in Alexandria’s existential survival is the Mediterranean identity. Within a few decades, rising sea levels will inundate parts of Alexandria in what could be the start of history’s closing curtains on the 2300-year-old city. Along with political and institutional will, it is imperative that Alexandria’s relationship to the Mediterranean shifts its face from past and present towards the future and pushed further into a wider regional narrative.

Ask an Alexandrian what makes up their identity and the first word you will most likely hear is the sea. The sea is central to the popular imagination, literature, films, theatre, escapism, growing up, families, wedding shoots, and a street art that reflects the bond with the sea and its history and myths: mermaids, citadel, centurions, Alexander the Great, and lots of ship-themed graffiti. Right down to the common line “If I leave Alexandria, I will feel like a fish out of water.”

The long stretch of corniche and wave breakers have displaced the beaches as the dividing line, liminal space, and intersection between the public and the sea. Access to the corniche and the ability to see the sea is a continuing battle in light of the privatisation and “development” drive that has, in many cases, cut off the public from viewing the sea, let alone accessing it. Yet pockets of communal respite are to be found. At the outset of the pandemic, the corniche furnished many of Alexandria’s young with the newly discovered hobby of kite flying that became a unifying public spectacle as even street children could get access to cheaply made kites. I had never seen that high degree of elation induced by any activity before on the corniche in many years. Barely a month or so passed and the kites were banned by the government on the official reason that they were behind a series of accidents (which is a legitimate concern but outright banning is different to regulating). The kite had, for a moment, become a hovering icon that connected sky, sea, corniche, and public.

To speak of Alexandria in a regional narrative is nothing new. Since the 1990s, elite efforts have been made to reintegrate Alexandria into the Mediterranean imaginary – albeit a neoliberal one that succeeded its colonial predecessor. The government rehabilitated the façade of the city as several institutes directed energies to crystalizing Alexandria’s role in the Mediterranean world which included the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Anna Lindh Foundation, and the former Swedish Institute, along with various cultural centres and initiatives.

Yet an endeavor needs to expand the notion of the sea from one linked to the past that evokes nostalgia and childhood memories, as well as the present that touches upon romance, enchantment, leisure, and livelihoods, to a future where an apocalypse looms on the horizon. Not to terrify the populace, but rather to deepen civic responsibility – from anti-littering to reconsideration of investment decisions – as part of the fight against climate change that can complement the respective policy on the matter. As well as linking Alexandria to efforts made by other cities in the basin as part of an unfolding story that aims to rescue the historical hubs of the middle sea. However, short of radical adaption measures, it is Alexandria, the only major city in the Mediterranean, that is at the highest risk of being largely submerged by 2050. It is no wonder why popular Google searches for Alexandria in the context of climate change reveal bizarre questions such as “Does Alexandria Egypt still exist?” and “who destroyed Alexandria Egypt?” It is an omen the city can do without.

Time and again, events have shown that Alexandrian public engagement or interest, particularly among the young and students, in their city’s welfare is heightened when they feel the city is part of a regional or global story – whether it be visits by foreign heads of state, clean up campaigns, artistic troupes, or the Africa Cup. It is part of the conscious Alexandrian mode of living to make sense of the fractured present while living in the shadow of multiple ancestral giants. It is the “nature of identity”, individual or city identity no less, “to change depending on time, place, [and] audience.” In this case, the repositioning of Alexandria’s Mediterranean identity can no longer be limited to culture wars, Euro-centric elites, and postcolonial critiques. It is now a question of survival.

As I have argued before, the Mediterranean is a laboratory with natural demarcations, rich history, trade, and cultural ties that could enable “an overarching new Mediterranean narrative to be written through a series of conferences, symposiums, workshops and accessible publications” with the possibility of contributing to “animating forms of transnational citizenship, a project that builds a Mediterranean platform” that can construct a new narrative and social contract.

Alexandria needs to feel part of the neighborhood story and brought into a mission in which its fate is tied with the same menace confronting Beirut, Tunis, Tangiers, Barcelona, Marseilles, and the rest of the cities dotted around the basin. While many Mediterranean cities will suffer from rising sea levels to hotter temperatures, the menace is eyeing Alexandria with the utmost ferocity and has earmarked a swathe of the city to be turned into one large underwater museum. A rising sea level that will perhaps regurgitate onto the city’s future and permanently flooded streets the thousands of abandoned facemasks and lost kites.

The Modern Arab State: A Decade of Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (book release)

Amro Ali, “Kinetic Karama: Bargaining for Dignity in the Pursuit of a New Arab Social Contract” in The Modern Arab State: A Decade of Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. Eds. Youssef Cherif (Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2021).

The book is open access: ebook

My chapter contribution looks at the triumph of karama (dignity) over sharaf (honour) as a form of ethical logic since 2011 in the Arab world. The text engages with Friedrich Nietzsche, Erich Fromm, and Frantz Fanon in exploring the idea of individual dignity as a legitimizing narrative, in which karama was not reborn as a theoretical concept or an enhanced individual virtue, but a self-contained movement and a story that expands the moral imagination.

Ebook (PDF)

Video promo of the book

Reading E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ in an Era of Digital Gluttony

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.” – E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909).

E.M. Forster “The Machine Stops” (photo by Amro Ali, 2021)

In his farsighted 1909 novella, The Machine Stops (free to read or download at Project Gutenberg), E.M. Forster writes of a future world where people have lost the ability to communicate face to face and are unable to live on the surface of the earth. Each human being lives below ground in a cell while all communication and bodily needs are taken care of by a supreme omnipotent deity known as the Machine. Living on opposite ends of the earth, Kuno frequently argues with his mother Vashti who has long been sedated by technology to the extent that life itself frightens her. Kuno implores his mother to exit her cell and come visit him as he can no longer tolerate talking to her through “blue optic plates”. She is hesitant travel as it would mean she would have to board an airship and risk seeing the land below that she frowns upon, “I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark”. When Vashti does eventually take the flight, the sight of the earth gives her no inspiration whatsoever. Even when she flies over Greece with its innumerable majestic islands and peninsula, and its long glorious past, only to murmur “No ideas here” and closes the window blind. An enraged Kuno who is eager to see the stars from the surface of the earth like his ancestors, says to his mother “We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.”

Forster’s 1909 novella was a counter-argument to H.G. Wells’ successful 1895 novel, The Time Machine, that painted a bright tech-utopian future (rival fictional binaries signaling roadmaps to the future are a fascinating area to explore, e.g. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World vs George Orwell’s 1984). Forster was a visionary in which he looked around and perceived the seeds of immobility in the inertia-driven Edwardian era of his time which saw the introduction or spread of gramophones, radio, telephones, and mass production. The author took this trend to its logical conclusion, giving us more than an inkling of where the future home was headed – from addiction to digital devices to the fetishization of working from home, among many other trends. All in the midst of the terror of the same that turns today’s cities into generic cities that are filled with Zaras, H&Ms, and Starbucks.

The dystopian story was projected thousands of years into the future, except many of its motifs have crystalized in our contemporary world. Techno-fundamentalism puts us at the mercy of algorithms and automatic processes, as well as producing a fatal compulsion to digital devices that shape the sense of being, civil society, and social movements. A digital gluttony, like in the novella, has blurred human relations, and paralyzed the centrality of thinking.

The ongoing digital revolution requires a human counter-revolution grounded in socio-geographic practices that disciplines the encroaching technology from becoming central to thinking and displacing the human condition and its relationship to the collective good. Techno-fundamentalism is more than the worship of technological use and innovation. It can be as subtle as the belief and hubris that we have the right tools. While methods of capacity building were a feature of past activism, it is now assumed that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the likes are readily available to be harnessed. It removes the once necessary years of preparation, organizing, slow trust building measures, in order to quickly scale up the movement. A Martin Luther King jnr in the twenty-first century would instantly become known internationally, rather than his fame gradually budding after a prolonged duration while the civil rights movement slowly built up and took form.

For techno-fundamentalism to be addressed it needs to be understood in light of what drives it. Belief in the progress fallacy and the technological neutrality myth is harmful as it lends immunity to technology to never or rarely be questioned. Perhaps because it showcases itself to be the norm and empty’s political language of meaning, that it becomes difficult to recognize it as the default mode of thinking. On an individual level, this can be negligible, but a collection of individuals in a digital civil society and social movement will surface larger problems. Oblivious to the global backlash, tech experts are not catching up with the social weariness and “techlash,” and may in fact be emboldened by the pandemic that has given them the upper hand. It is an age when Zoom and video communication tools are being groomed as the new orthodoxy in the evolving models of the world’s political economies.

Thinking against and with techno-fundamentalism requires a return to earth, by staking the weightless and fluid digital order in the solid terrestrial order of consequential political practices, thus making abstractions more palpable. Otherwise, the fleeting digital swarm overwhelms civil society, social movements, and publics with a scourge of shapelessness that subverts voices for a mass of noise and echo-chambers – “no ideas here.”

The above is a short modified extract from my paper, “Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism,” published in the European Institute of the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The journal article is open access. Also, you might be interested in another short post from the article, What a sideway map of the Mediterranean reveals.

What a sideway map of the Mediterranean reveals

*“Mediterranean Without Borders” Sabine Réthoré, 2011 (Arabic).*

The “Mediterranean Without Borders” map was produced, in the political euphoria of 2011, by Paris-based artist Sabine Réthoré. Its profound simple 90-degree rotation not only underwrites an artistic streak, but can also largely impact one’s perspective. The end result is that the question is no longer about north-south as much as it is about parity and closeness. In the context of Mediterranean geopolitics, refugees crossing and drowning, fortress Europe, colonial history, skewed markets, condescending north to south (top to bottom) attitudes, post-colonial stagnation and so forth, means the simple rotation of the map is a big political statement with humanizing tendencies that make transnational ties look more intimate. That is an artistic statement in itself. This does not mean it will work for all maps, but it does so with the Mediterranean basin given the weight of its contemporary politics and long rich history.

*“Mediterranean Without Borders” Sabine Réthoré, 2011 (French).*

The map was shown at an event in Brussels in November 2019, where I was invited to speak to EU and MENA youth, the opening was made by Marseille-based writer Mary Fitzgerald who presented this curious map of the Mediterranean rotated 90 degrees to the right. Fitzgerald provoked a lively discussion and the audience related more to the alternative map than its standard appearance. When I shared the image with others, it elicited various responses from it looking like a fantasy map to the humorous old woman trying to avoid stepping into the mud. Intimacy was a key response to the map. When I posted it to Twitter, geographer Joshua S. Campbell responded “Amazing how rotating a map changes your perspective. Maps tend to ossify spatial relationships in your mind…tweak the map, break the pattern. Also why spatial thinkers are useful, they possess the ability to rotate spatial relationships in their mind.”

What Réthoré’s artwork also does is furnish a metaphysical canopy to Gianluca Solera’s idea of transnational Mediterranean citizenship and breathes life into the dying political imagination. Solera argues

“the Mediterranean could become again a cradle of a new Renaissance if conditions were put in place for a project of transnational citizenship. A shared political initiative, putting together the various experiences of resistance, protest and popular alternatives, and building a Mediterranean platform for a new social contract, so urgent in times of profound crisis both in Europe and in the Mediterranean” (Solera, 2017).

Indeed, it may appear that we are a long way from this, but the grim reality of securitization, refugee crisis, and a pandemic overturning the world as we know it, can eclipse the years that saw thousands of initiatives taking place, stories, theorizing, training, in what Solera has deemed a Mediterranean “Shadow government.” Moreover, the region is moving towards a thinking in which the social contract will require rewriting as it faces the pressures of epidemiological threats, climate change, alarm at the dominance of big tech, to the receding of the long-haul flight in favor of local and regional travel, a travel bubble in some cases.

This is crucial if civil society, social movements, and transnational Mediterranean responsibility is to take on meaningful qualities towards how the digital order and terrestrial order are to be negotiated. Italian sociologist Franco Cassano noted:

“Unbridled technology does not signify the abandonment of earthy grittiness, but its perfecting it through the will to power. Mediterranean man, instead, lives always between land and sea; he restrains one through the other; and, in his technological delay, in his vices, there is also a moderation that others have lost. The unbridled development of technology is not tied to the crossing of land and sea, but to the oceanic lack of moderation, the chasing of the sunset by the sun, the absolutization of the West.” (Cassano, 2011).

In other words, the Mediterranean world is a philosophical gateway to deconstruct fundamentalisms as it has the “capacity to transform our limitations in a common benefit, a tragic memory in the fight against all forms of fundamentalism” (Cassano, 2011). Be it techno-fundamentalism or else.

What is Techno-Fundamentalism?

This is a short extract from the paper “Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism,” published in the European Institute of the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The article is open access.

Techno-fundamentalism is the belief that technology is “not only the means and will to triumph over adversity through gadgets and schemes, but the sense that invention is the best of all possible methods of confronting problems” (Vaidhyanathan, 2006). At its essence, techno-fundamentalism sidesteps politics in favor of taking on social problems and translating them into technical solutions. When technological thinking becomes central to political thought, it draws high risks to civil society and social movements that now become “arranged around platforms and abstractions” while weakening the link between politically-aware citizens and “locally rooted action” (Bartlett, 2018).

It can be argued that the digital technological realm is generally pursued by civil society and social movements for the securing of freedom for society, through organizing, coordinating, garnering public attention, and evading censorship; while governments often pursue the digital technological realm for securing society from freedom – through control, surveillance, censorship, upholding neoliberal modernity or diversion from civic questions… Techno-fundamentalism produces and thrives in a foggy and spectral environment where real world realities and online abstracts bleed into each other, the latter forming a digital swarm that lacks “internal coherence,” as it is fleeting, unstable, and volatile, and can come across less as a voice than noise (Han, 2017). Thus, when the digital order subverts or skews the terrestrial order, it undermines the abilities of civil society and social movements to give name, shape, and form, to the world they are seeking to make a better place.

This paper explores what drives techno-fundamentalism, arguing that having become a default mode of thinking, more so in the era of the pandemic and likely to hold sway long after, it empties political language of its meaning, disfigures human-technology relationships, expedites the progress fallacy and the mistaken belief that technology is a neutral affair. As a fundamentalism, it has been blind to notice the growing global backlash against technology – an obliviousness that can be observed repeatedly at tech conferences prior to the pandemic. At best, it is considered a sub-point worthy of discussion, such as “the right to disconnect”, as long as it acquiesces to the big progress machine. The literature is awash with the toxins of digital activism, from narcissism to security surveillance. However, this paper will focus on the practical realities of how civil society and social movements are constructively affected by digital technologies, and eventually stumble upon the law of diminishing returns that adversely works against their activism as in the case of scaling and polarization.

The hype of innovation stimulates the onward march of digital technology which has been underpinned by the age-old logical fallacy of argumentum ad novitatem (appeal to novelty), also known as the progress fallacy that says the new or recent is better than what came before it. The new is good without giving substantial analysis of the social and ethical implications of the new technology. The argument is further reinforced by tech protagonists, and everyday society, with a variation of this cliched line: ‘Technology is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, it is how you use it.’ Technology is anything but neutral. The popular line I frequently hear is that a knife can be used to cut vegetables or stab a human being, but this weary trope overlooks the subliminal reality that the mere sight of a knife, let alone holding it, has already altered the moral climate in a room. The knife’s very presence is already biased, the thought of a knife is heavily loaded with potential consequences. Similarly, social media is not neutral in a world of algorithms that push politically charged content and echo chambers that purge pluralistic voices from the discussion. Martin Heidegger would argue the neutrality thesis in technology poses ‘the highest danger’ as it puts us at risk of seeing the world through technological thinking, misleads us to believe that technology is an instrument rather than a worldview, and technology being a human activity rather than a grave matter developing beyond human control (Heidegger, 1977)

The rest of the article can be read here.

Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century

The edited book, Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century, by Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera, is out now with the University of California Press. I have a chapter that explores the positioning of Mohammed Salah and moral codes within Egypt, the Middle East, and the world. I’m honoured to be with such a great lineup of names.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Localities, countries, and regions develop through complex interactions with others. This volume highlights the global interconnectedness of the Middle East—both ‘global-in’ and ‘global-out’. It delves into the region’s scientific, artistic, economic, political, religious, and intellectual formations and traces how they have taken shape through a dynamic set of encounters and exchanges.

Written in short and accessible essays by prominent experts on the region, the volume covers topics ranging from God to Rumi, food, film, fashion, and music, sports and science, to the flow of people, goods and ideas. It tackles social and political movements from human rights, Salafism and cosmopolitanism, to radicalism and revolutions. Students will glean new and innovative perspectives about the region using the insights of global studies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

Global Middle East – Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera

PART TWO – NATIONS WITHOUT BORDERS

God – Ebrahim Moosa

Algebra, Alchemy, Astronomy – Robert Morrison

Rumi, the Bridge Builder – Fatemeh Keshavarz

On Nations without Borders – Hamid Dabashi

PART THREE: HOME AND THE WORLD

Reflections on Exile – Edward Said

Mo Salah, a Moral Somebody? – Amro Ali

Gamal Abdel Nasser – Khaled Fahmy

PART FOUR: FOOD, FILM, FASHION, MUSIC

Circuits of Food and Cuisine – Sami Zubaida

Pictures in Motion – Kamran Rastegar

Musical Journeys – Michael Frishkopf

The Kufiya – Ted Swedenburg

PART FIVE – GEOPOLITICS OF GOODS

Water of Vulnerability – Jeannie Sowers

Cycle of Oil and Arms – Timothy Mitchell

Cotton, Made in Egypt – Ahmad Shokr

Ports of the Persian Gulf – Laleh Khalili

PART SIX: HUMAN FLOWS

Touring Exotic Lands – Waleed Hazbun

Outsiders of the Oil States – Ahmed Kanna

The Levant in Latin America – John Tofik Karam

PART SEVEN: POLITICS AND MOVEMENTS

Global Tahrir – Asef Bayat

Islamizing Radicalism – Olivier Roy

Global Movement for Palestine – Ilana Feldman

Human Rights, Indigenous and Imperial – Lori Allen

Cosmopolitan Middle East? An Interview with Seyla Benhabib – Linda Herrera

Contributors

Index

Do you still remember him?

Do you remember him? That boy? do you remember the video? That date of 30 September 2000 when if you didn’t cry for the Palestinians before, you learned to cry then.

Muhammad Al-Durrah? The 12-year-old Palestinian boy shot dead in his father’s arms and over his lap by Israeli gunfire in Gaza? The boy that became an icon for the Intifada, the boy who made the world slowly realise that maybe there were no “two sides”, that there was an occupier and an occupied.

I will not take up space repeating what happened nor the contested claims of who killed him. That has already been done, nor will I entertain Israel’s obfuscation of the issue.

At a time when the world still desperately grasped onto the mesmerising millennium hangover and its promise of a new dawn, this tragedy snapped us back to deal with a disturbing omen.

We praised the cameraman from the France 2 network at a time when cameras couldn’t stretch themselves wide enough to capture the ruining of Palestine. We hoped the camera would from now on hold the oppressor to account. But we were deceived.

We now got our wish of having crimes filmed, but it left out the desired response of accountability and accompanying moral questions. Every fortnight in this age, the camera captures a Palestinian killed by an Israeli soldier, but such videos will not get international condemnation, but it will get a retweet, subtweet if someone really cares. This is not including the invisible Palestinians who die daily and away from the camera’s lens.

Al-Durrah was killed at a time when the Israeli government could at least partake in a charade that it gave a damn for the innocent killed and would address the matter. A time when traces of a moral crisis could be seen in then Prime Minister’s Ehud Barak’s words. When the IDF could actually apologise, even if they would later retract it. We knew the Israeli state was lying, but they had to make an effort to lie, they had to make an effort to explain to the west why they were still part of the west, they had to explain why torture was legitimate. Now the world accepts this as normal, and therefore no need for further explanations from Israel. It’s raw unadulterated brutality.

In fact, Israel can even deny the reality when its officialdom came out in 2013 and proclaimed the whole tragedy was “staged.”

The Palestinian death toll since 2000 has reached 9511 as of 26 September 2017, out of that figure, 2167 have been children. That is, 2167 Al-Durrahs who will not be remembered because pie charts and bar graphs do not sing nor weep to the human heart.

The hyper-wired world has driven societies toward outrage fatigue, and Palestinians pay the price. Again.

But we continue to raise our voices and hope for the tone-deaf cries to cave into, and be subsumed by, a resurgent and dynamic voice of justice that reanimates the moral landscape. Because the current state of indifference can only mean the self-inflicted shattering of our souls.

We march on.

The Vanishing Videos of Arab History (and what can be done)

I have noticed over the past year that archival footage on Egyptian history and post-2011 videos on Egypt’s events are (mysteriously?) disappearing from YouTube, even when the issue could not be one of copyright. Similarly, the vanishing act is reportedly happening to content produced in other Arab countries. A video that is deleted is an assault on our collective memory and our post-2011 quest to build an unfettered archival culture (despite how contested archives can be).

*The mythical river of Lethe, that appears in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, caused forgetfulness when drank from (Painting by Salvador Dali). English poet John Milton described Lethe as the river of oblivion that “whoso drinks forgets both joy and grief.”

We have long taken for granted that a video on YouTube was left untouched unless it violated copyright rules like a song, TV program, or film. It was always assumed that historical footage, even the most mundane type to the authorities like 1950s village life, would be unharmed given it posed no political threat. However, even these videos are fading. We can no longer take for granted that such videos will remain in perpetuity.

The four possible reasons for this that I can think of include:

Egyptian authorities or pro-regime trolls are misleading YouTube into thinking an Arabic video in question is violating copyright. Perhaps the content’s language barrier would stifle YouTube’s ability to verify the claim.
Such ambiguity enables videos to be deleted and because of “multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement” which also raises a question as to who owns a Nasser speech given at a stadium in 1962 or a protest video from 1950s Alexandria uploaded by a former Greek resident?
Certain YouTube users have been identified by officialdom and are being threatened into deleting their content.
YouTube Users are removing any digital traces for safety reasons (Similar outcome to the third point, but I find this one highly implausible as the termination message often shown is the user being suspended or deleted for some violation, not “user no longer exists”).

Irrespective of any reason, the end-result is the same and fits a pattern: The authoritarian attempt at drowning Arab publics in the mythical river of Lethe (forgetfulness).*

How can the situation be resolved? For the time being, and I say this with a sense of urgency, if you think a video is worth saving for posterity, then it would be wise to download such videos through this link: http://www.clipconverter.cc

It’s quite a simple three step process. This is the most important step even if you don’t carry out the next steps. In any case, you will probably require these videos in some personal or work capacity in the future.

The next step is to make it accessible by uploading it to Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox etc, and setting access permissions for that specific folder or video to public. Then notify the web by sending out the link and using the hashtag on social media: #SaveArabHistory (Or any universally agreed hashtag).

This is an ad-hoc approach until there is a concerted, organised and collective way to preserve, catalogue, and offer video access for offline and online use. But once they are gone, they are gone! There is no guarantee that the original user (who may have passed away) will upload them again or can be contacted. If there are already existing initiatives doing this, then they are welcome to advise and get involved.

When I assign my sociology students certain videos to watch but it turns out the respective videos have perished, then it not only means my students have been partially deprived of a comprehensive understanding of their subject matter (which is worrying enough), but the way we deal with technology, in an era that is seeing censorship and blocked websites slowly normalised, needs to change.

Alexandria’s anti-Fellah problem

Caricature mocking the less privileged visitors to Alexandria

It’s that time of year, the “let’s dehumanise the Fellahin” season (or any rural visitor for that matter), as they escape the villages for some summer relaxation in Alexandria. The above-circulated caricature feeds into all the vile remarks made daily about the Fellahin, and echoes their ill-treatment on the corniche.

Let’s just go through three of the tired and misleading statements that Alexandrian residents frequently make.

1. “Fellahin make a mess of the beaches and the city.”

Because Alexandria is generally clean the rest of the year? The issue here is a lack of rules being applied and the shrinking public beaches that forces them to squeeze into tinier plots of public beaches. This is a governorate problem.

2. “Fellahin are the worst sexual harassers.”

Because Alexandrian sexual harassment is more refined? Nothing beats winter sexual harassment? By making such accusations, the responsibility is shifted away from the rule of law being applied equally to all, in order to fight harassment, and pushed, rather towards a particular group. This is a governorate problem.

3. “As soon as they arrive, I’ll leave Alex” or “they need to put a fee of 50 pounds at the city’s gates to reduce the numbers coming into Alex.”

The obvious bigotry and classism aside, putting blame on the citizen for over-population and lack of public space will continue to give a green light to the businessmen and mafia who keep eating up what is left of the city’s spaces. Once again, this is a governorate problem.

Don’t forget that similar insults were hurled at middle-class Cairenes who came in the summer up until the 1980s, that is before they gradually decided Sahel, Ain Sokhna etc were more fitting. It seems allowing rural visitors and the poor to access the sea, often for the first time, is beyond many to even contemplate.

Perhaps this denial of their rights can be put in perspective. The below photograph shows two middle-aged Ṣa’īdi men seeing the sea for the first time in their lives. They slowly entered the water with a profound curiosity and glee, and when I asked them how it felt, one turned around and shouted with a big smile: “meya meya!” (a hundred out of a hundred).

With all the economic misery and hardship that Egyptians, especially the poor, are enduring, do you really want to be complicit in the web that worsens their plight? By denying them their right to view, touch and enjoy the sea? To deny them access to the last remaining strongholds of beauty that has already been mostly privatised?

Two middle-aged Ṣa’īdi men seeing the sea for the first time.

Alexandria’s Church Bombing and the Mourning After

Following yesterday’s horrific bombing in Alexandria, life is attempting to go on
as normal in the coastal city but with a (more than usual) broken spirit and tinge of despair. The men at the coffeehouse in front of my place are smoking their shesha without conversation, at times looking at the ground; customers are calmly buying their ful and falafel breakfast without the usual jostling; the fruit sellers are not yelling to market their produce; the signature smiles across the bakers’ faces have been temporarily erased. No visible public argument or fight (so far) has taken place on the street in a very long time. Melancholia is deepening its claws.

However, a spirited hope and gratification is never far. I’m blessed to live between a Coptic Orthodox Church and a Catholic Church, both stand strong and resilient, and as a powerful reminder that this is, and what will always be, beautiful about Egypt. The sound of church bells is a message to the forces of fanaticism and sectarianism (and even to the smug non-Christian who deems Christians as second-class citizens) that churches, as well as the human Christian life and evocative prayer chants within its heart, will not be silenced.

As a Muslim, these churches are my churches, they complete my identity, worldview, and an understanding of my faith. Any harm that comes to them, its worshippers, and those who protect them, is a savage assault on my very being.

I wish I had clear answers to give. I don’t, and I feel terribly helpless. I can only, along with others, ask questions, and keep asking questions, in the hope that the sinister matrix that oppresses human lives in different manifestations – in Alexandra, in Egypt, in the Middle East – is eventually and somehow unravelled.