BARQIYYA E

The American University in Cairo
The Middle East Studies Program
Volume 7, Issue 1
February 2003
BARQIYYA
Word From the
Director
E
ver since I've arrived at AUC,
I thought it would be a most
fitting thing for the university
to offer a course on the Nile. This
year this desire was realized. The
Middle East Studies Program was the
sponsor this January of an interdisciplinary
course,
"The
Nile:
Interdisciplinary
Perspectives"-admittedly, a cumbersome title for
the magnificent river. The course
combined both classroom discussion
and field trips, and was taught by six
faculty members, from engineering
and the human sciences. Although
the listing of the course was delayed,
we had nine students, from a variety
of departments.
I will not burden you with technical
details (a course description is available on MEST's website); instead, I
would like to highlight what we saw
on the field trips.
The first trip took us to the Good
Barrages (alqanatir al-khayriyya) and
adjacent institutions. The Barrages
were built by Mohammad Ali in the
early 19th century, at the apex of the
delta. They made possible the diversion of the river's water into major
irrigation canals. They were followed
by others, like Esna and Edfu in
Upper Egypt. These old, stone
Barrages now stand as a historical
monument. Their modern replacements, alas, traded economy and efficiency for beauty and craftsmanship.
Next to the Barrages, you find the
Hydraulics Research Institute, an
apparently successful public sector
enterprise, in part supporting itself
and in part backed by the government. There, engineers build models
of structures for testing before they
are built, do research, and train students from the other nine Nilotic
countries. An equally interesting
place was the nearby Irrigation
Museum. The museum displays an
informative topographical map of the
river, models of nearly all the major
dams barrages, and ancient and contemporary water lifting devices:
Archemides screw, waterwheel
(saqiya), shadof, and hand pumps. In
all, the trip was an invaluable introduction to the workings of the river
system.The Nile now irrigates two
types of land, the old, directly along
the banks, and the new, in the desert
(the desert in Egypt seems to be
defined not according to rainfall, but
whether the land has water at all).
New land in South Tahrir is what we
visited on the second trip. In that area
AUC also runs its own Desert
Development Center. The Center is
meant to serve farmers in the region
through research, technical assistance and sale of seedlings. The
desert land is often cultivated by
modern technologies, drip (trickle)
irrigation and greenhouses, which
may be too expensive for the fragmented holdings of the old land. It is
operated by formerly landless laborers, university graduates, weekend
farmers, agribusiness companies--a
rich social world to study. We were
briefed on the achievements and
problems. We learned, for example,
how a hybrid of the local gamusas
and Holstein cows couldn't survive in
the desert; whereas a mix of gamusas
and dark Australian cows did. Too
much sun for the black-splotched
Holsteins, or so I understood!
Continued on page 8...
DEPARTMEMT
ANNOUNCMENTS
MIDDLE EAST STUDIES
PROGRAM
The American University in Cairo
Cordially Invites You to Attend Its
Twelfth Annual Symposium
on
CULTURE AND THE
ENVIRONMENT IN THE
MIDDLE EAST:
ANCIENT AND MODERN
TEXTS
Saturday March 8, 2003
9:45 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Oriental Hall
Admission is free
If you have any inquiries,
please contact:
Iman Hamdy
Cairo Papers in Social Science
Tel.: 797-6211
E-mail: [email protected]
MIDDLE EAST TALKS
The Middle East Studies Program sponsored in mid-December,
2002 Joel Beinin, professor of history at Stanford University for a
talk on US-Israel relations. Prof. Beinin graciously agreed to write
for Barqiyya his own summary of the comprehensive lecture.
Why does the United States Support
Israel in the Arab-Israeli Conflict?
Joel Beinin
T
he United States did not always support Israel as
came to be the case after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
This support evolved over time and was primarily
due to Israel's alignment with the United States during the
Cold War. In this context, support for Israel was part of a
pattern of support for autocratic regimes (Iran under the
Shah, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines under Marcos,
Nicaragua under Samoza, Chile under Pinochet, Indonesia
under Suharto) who served as clients of the United States in
various regions of the globe.
civil war (Black September) and thus preserved the
Hashemite regime. Consequently US military aid to Israel
increased dramatically to $1.2 billion from 1971 to 1973.
After the 1973 Arab-Israel war, military aid to Israel took a
qualitative leap to $2.57 billion, including for the first time
an outright grant of $1.5 billion. Israel's military difficulties
in the 1973 war persuaded US policy makers to balance the
alliance with Israel with a relationship with Egypt and whatever Arab states it could enlist. This is the origin of the current structure of US policy in the Middle East.
Both the Soviet Union and the United States supported the partition of Palestine and the establishment of
the state of Israel. But in 1948 and 1949 the Soviet bloc was
a more important ally of Israel. In March 1948 the United
States proposed that the proclamation of the state of Israel
be delayed because of Arab opposition. Czechoslovakia
provided the arms that allowed Israel to prevail in the 1948
Arab-Israeli war. France was Israel's principal source of
arms from the early 1950s to 1967.
In addition to the geo-strategic factors shaping US support
for Israel there are several cultural factors including: a feeling of indebtedness to the Jewish people because the United
States and other western nations did not intervene to stop
the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis; a long history of negative Christian images of Muslims; and the theological support of most evangelical Protestants, who see
the state of Israel as part of God's plan to bring about the
second coming of Christ.
The Eisenhower administration temporarily froze
aid to Israel because of its opposition to Israel's massive
retaliations against civilians in response to Palestinian infiltration and sabotage in Israel. This was one of the factors
that prompted the formation of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most influential
organizations of the Zionist lobby today. Both the United
States and the Soviet Union insisted that Israel withdraw
from the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel
occupied in the 1956 Suez War.
Evangelical Protestants are an important element of the
social base of the Republican Party. They form part of the
Zionist lobby along with organizations based in the
American Jewish community - most importantly the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy - and arms manufacturers who profit immensely from the sale of military
equipment to Israel. This broad social base makes the lobby
a powerful domestic base of support for the policy of
alliance with Israel, although the lobby itself is not the motivator of this policy.
In 1962 President Kennedy approved the shipment
of Hawk ground-to-air missiles, the first American weapon
supplied to Israel. The "Nixon Doctrine" formulated in the
summer of 1969 saw Israel, along with the Shah of Iran and
Saudi Arabia, as the principal US allies in the Middle East.
US military sales to Israel were $140 million between 1968
and 1970. Washington policy makers believed Israel prevented Syrian intervention in the 1970 Jordanian-Palestinian
MIDDLE EAST TALKS
The Middle East Studies Program's Cultural Salon hosted Dr.
Somaya Ramadan during the Fall 2002 semester to speak on "The
Writer, the Self and the World." Ramadan is a writer and novelist
and currently works at the National Academy for the Arts. Her
novel, Leaves of Narcissus, won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize in 2001.
The novel has been translated into English by Marilyn Booth and
published by the AUC Press in 2002.
Lady Behind the Leaves of Narcissus
I
n their report, members of the
committee that selected the
novel said, "Leaves of
Narcissus, like the accounts of
Tawfiq al-Hahim, Taha Hussein,
and Tayeb Saleh, is about a young
Arab student going
West in search of education, but here the protagonist is a young
woman and her destination is Ireland, a part of
the West and at the
same time a victim of the
ravages of colonialism-adding ambiguity to the
traditional East/West
dichotomy. In this
captivating
novel,
Somaya Ramadan displays a rare virtuosity in evoking
and interlacing literary motifsfrom the popular to the learned,
from the folk to
the
mythic,
from
the
Egyptian to the
Irish-and poses
questions
rather
than
answers, questions that hold
a mirror to our
selves".
Following is an excerpt from the
chapter, "The Siren," pp. 107-9:
"Tap, tap tap", "Cockcarrarra",
"mea culpa" and the "beauty of the
music" that robs your soul twice
over. From the memory on the
wall. James Joyce has stopped, to
stand still over my bed in Dublin.
He puts his hands in the pockets
of his loose trousers and looks at
me, a look entirely good and
affectionate, and then, like me, he
looks towards a large
placard on which is
written:
Silence:
General Rehearsal:
The Sirens of James
Joyce. From behind
the
placard
has
appeared a tall man,
his black hair nearly touching his
shoulders with glints of silver here
and there, his lips like those of
Renaissance angels, wearing
lightweight glasses with a
frame the thickness of a
golden wire. When he
smiles his brown eyes smile in
intelligent goodness. When he
reached my spot next to the sign, I
spoke first, as I
never
had
before: "In
sooth"
y o u
did
not
tell me
" W h a t
country,
friend, are
you from" He
answered with a simplicity that captivated me
"Ireland, I was born here,
Ireland": Then he added, after a
pause in which he was getting out
of the way of a bicycle that
almost crushed his foot.
"And you?" The voices
were louder than usual.
They deafened me, and so
I did not answer: "Lord, impose
not on us that which we have not
the strength to bear. Pardon us
and absolve us" -"God is merciful
to those who know their true
worth".
Welcome,
welcome,
you
have
f i n a l l y
arrived my
darling.
Finally, you
have come
to
know
that we are
all of us born thus. And that your
bewilderment was completely
legitimate. How does one know to
what family of sirens one belongs,
if they have told one
all of those
tales, and then
have forbidden
one to write? How
does one know to
what languages one belongs if
they have said: "Read", in all
languages, but then
do not say
"Write!"
my
Favorite
By Sean Anthony
O
ur age is the age of victimization on massive scales.
Victims surround us everywhere we walk: victims of poverty,
victims of injustice, victims of violence, victims of natural disaster,
victims of chance, victims of love,
etc. In an age of such uncanny
victim consciousness, there is a
considerable amount of competition over who gets to be the
favorite victim. Nothing feels better than being able to show solidarity with victims while remaining
immune to their actual suffering.
This way, we can feel self-righteous without pain, and dissect the
faults of others while forgetting our
own ugly, festering sores. As the
most prominent anthropologist of
violence, René Girard, observed,
"The victims most interesting to us
are always those who allow us to
condemn our neighbors."
And who is more our
neighbor here than Israel-the
proverbial modern Satan of the
Middle East? The act of cataloguing the Palestinian victims of the
conflict against this victim has literally achieved the status of an
act of devotion-all confirmed by
the hallowed idiom through which
the dead are spoken of as martyrs. However, only the most callous and cynical cannot be
repulsed by the propagandization
of Palestine and Palestinian sufferings, how animosity has led to
the hatred and de-humanization of
all persons and things Jewish,
and how the nations profit, both
politically and economically, by
victim
the commodification of the conflict. And, worst of all, must we not
bemoan how pulpits have become
sites for hate-mongers and how
religion instead of becoming an
instrument for liberating the mind
from hate has rather become a
force that fuels further violence,
hatred and de-humanization.
Academics obsessively
attempt to place all things in their
respective historical, social contexts. But have we not done
enough of this? This 'remembering everything but learning nothing'? This act resurrects the old
stalemate of the haunting memory
of the holocaust as a quasi-justification for the intransigent Zionist
insistence on there being a
Jewish state versus the atrocities
committed in the name of
Palestinians against Jewish civilians-also being quasi-justifiable
as a product of the daily, continual
humiliation and murder of
Palestinians. Is not the context
obscuring what is ultimately at
stake rather than bringing it to
light?
Each and every one
seems to be keen on documenting their own favorite victim to
push forward their own agendawhether it be Zionism, statism,
Islamism, or whatever. And no
one loves more than to gain the
right to act with impunity as a victim-is this not what America has
done post-9/11? A prominent cultural
theorist
wrotes,
"On
September 11, the USA was given
the opportunity to realize what
kind of world it was part of. It
might have taken this opportunitybut it did not; instead it opted to
reassert its traditional ideological
commitments; out with the feelings of responsibility and guilt
towards the impoverished Third
World, we are the victims now!"
Only the USA as victim can
delude anyone into thinking that
Iraq is of larger concern than
Palestine. Is not Israel doing the
same as its tanks besiege and
destroy the infrastructure of the
PNA
while
simultaneously
screaming, "Stop the attacks!" Is
this not a veiled way of saying,
"Please, attack us, so that we [as
victims] may crush you!"
To avoid further decline
[Where to? A Balkanization of the
Middle East patrolled by NATO?],
we must make efforts to de-contextualize the sufferings of this
conflict. Tragedies must no longer
be either Jewish or Arab but must
become
human-defying
the
racism and sectarianism permeating the discourses of both sides.
This is the possible 'impossibility'
that is important just because it is
'impossible' in the current cycle;
for its emergence would mark the
end of this cycle.
Sean Anthony is currently a graduate student in the Middle East
Studies Program.
On the Poetic Front....
Prose Poem
THE BOMB
THAT FELL
ON ABDU'S FARM
Poem by Greg Orfalea
The phantoms approached, we were told,
Like warps in the sky, like gossip
Gone real, aimed in steel
At the eyes of the village.
All the farmers and farmers' boys ran
To the rooftops and watched,
For it was terrifying
And beautiful to see a wedge
Of silver up from the South.
And they began to fall with a
Vengeance, under the anti-aircraft that ringed Damascus and the
villagers whooped for there seemed
A magic field around their fields.
Until a cow-shed flew in to the red sky.
And a mother milking collapsed
In her milk. The milk ran pink.
Next door, in my great-uncle's newlyIrrigated fields, a bomb fell.
The mud smothered it. The mud
Talked to it. The mud wrapped
Its death like a mother. And
The bomb with American lettering
did not go off.
Water you're your gardens always. Always.
From Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American
Poetry. Edited by G. Orfalea and Sharif S. Elmusa,
1987 and 1999.
THE NILOMETER
by Sharif Elmusa
S
o many people, smoke stacks, tourist boats, hordes of
highrise buildings, highways, bridges, speedometers.
In the midst of this delirium, the Nilometer has
become an old temple without offerings to the gods, a dome
painted black, walls of dusty sandstone and girders from
the cedars of Lebanon (where have all the cedars gone?) If
you drop a stone down the shaft, you hear the echo of time.
Sixteen cubits, drought: the soil was beaten by the heat of
the sun, cracked. Nineteen cubits, flood inundated the
dykes. Drought or flood, the granaries filled with wind, no
tax flowed to the treasury. Men looted, and hunger celebrated heyday. In between flood and drought, plants and
animals rejoiced, the breasts and belly of Hapi swelled, and
perfume was pasted on the shaft. Nineteen sixty four,
Hassan recalls, was the last time the trumpets propagated
the roar of the flood in the countryside. The stony dam, the
great tranquilizer in the South, stilled afterward the wild
mood swings of the river. We flood the Nile.
Hymns of a Lost Faith
Bloody faces. Warn, splintered hands. The echos of a
mother’s cry drum agaisnt the walls of my head... her
music audible across the stars... harsh screams of
despair. Small feet, bare and cold, carefully stepping
through the hot rubble of houses, stripped of thier walls
like a woman stripped of her clothes. Odd bodies; stray
limbs, tatters of material and the remains of innocent
things. Phantoms embrace the living and smile in the
faces of the damned. The breath of the solid, black
enemy; hot, foul and hazy. Faces twisted against its
stench, bodies cringing from its touch. Trembling
hands lift remains from the earth, fingers plucking a
tune from pulled strings. Trembling lips utter the hymns
of a lost faith.
Magda Elsehrawi
Listen
to the People,
By Robert Kamin
W
ar rhetoric continues to pour out of the White House.
Ms. Condoleeza Rice claims to be saving a supposedly
endangered world by commencing a war that this world
does not even want. Apparently she knows what is best. Anger
continues to arise on every continent, producing more divides and
greater turmoil. And once this war begins, one can't even imagine
what the costs will be to the stability of the Middle East or to the
future of international cooperation. Yet, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld
confidently speaks of being solely interested in eliminating what
he considers to be the largest threat to world peace, namely
Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction. In
truth, the discourse of George W. Bush and his people has
become so distanced from the political realities of the present that
cartoons depicting the current international crises are no longer
difficult to draw. There are so many obvious reasons not to go to
war, including but in no way limited to the massive casualties
expected on both the Iraqi and American sides, the lack of evidence against the Iraqi regime, and the failure to exhaust all other
avenues to bring about a peaceful resolution. Yet there are only a
few reasons to push on forward, namely the politics of oil and
Bush's unrelenting machismo.
What is interesting at this moment, however, is that an enormous
number of people in the world are aware of what is going on. This
was made clear on February 15, 2003 when citizens from all over
the globe took to the streets to protest the Bush administration's
policy on Iraq. According to the New York Times, between
100,000 and 400,000 demonstrators convened in downtown New
York, and smaller demonstrations occurred in U.S. cities such as
Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Sacramento,
Detroit, San Francisco, and Milwaukee. In explaining why she and
her group, the Columbia University Antiwar Coalition, participated in the New York demonstration, Angela Tsang stated, "We see
the war against Iraq as unjust. We don't believe Bush's rhetoric."
And in the words of a 53 year-old New Jersey teacher, "People are
informed, people are passionate. […] They just want to be heard."
In addition, hundreds of thousands made their voices heard in the
cities of Paris, Barcelona, Rome, Manila, Tokyo, Seoul,
Johannesburg, Melbourne, Brussels and Cape Town. Even Winnie
Mandela, the wife of former South African President Nelson
Mandela, has volunteered her body as a human shield in the event
of an U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Faced with a clear global movement of outrage and human empathy, Bush unfortunately decided to look away, to hear what he
wanted to hear, and to close his heart to what so many were trying to tell him. He stated on February 19, to let the protests and
anti-war rhetoric deter him would be "like deciding ... policy based
upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based
upon the security - in this case, the security of the people."
Can he not see that invading Iraq would put the U.S. in greater
peril than ever before? Does he not understand that to ignore the
rule of law makes America a childish bully who is more interest-
Mr. Bush
ed in profit than protecting the values enshrined in international
humanitarian law? Does he not feel the historical importance and
the great symbolism of this upcoming war?
An undeniable truth in this whole mess is that Bush has failed to
realize that his push for war in Iraq has become an emblematic
moment in which America's policies and behaviors around the
globe have transformed from grudgingly acceptable to completely intolerable. The bloody, awful wars in Vietnam, Central and
South America, and Africa were supposedly necessary in order to
combat communism. The 1991 Gulf War was done in the name
of human rights, to protect Kuwaitis from a neighboring tyrant.
At the behest of Western, particularly American, banks and governments, the IMF and World Bank pushed for policies that were
and remain detrimental to many "Third World" countries. Their
harmful programs, however, were justified by a promise of eventual economic stability and growth. Coke and McDonald's have
been accused of homogenizing cultures. Yet, national populations
are always left with the choice not buy and many have "localized"
these establishments, i.e. the McFalafel. And Israel gets U.S. aid
and political support because it is a self-proclaimed victim of terror. In the above examples, the United States, including its politicians, banks, lobbies, and businesses, has been able to push these
policies that it benefits from by accompanying the latter with some
sort of "legitimate" or moral claim: communism is bad, human
rights are universal, people truly want to drink Coke and taste a
Big Mac, Israel like every other state has a right to protect itself,
and transparent economies do the best. But in the case of Iraq,
and particularly after Colin Powell's failed attempt to convince the
UN of the imminent danger Iraq poses to the world, there is no
moral or legitimate claim that can successfully sell a war against
Iraq. People are simply not buying it. Without any real evidence on
the table, the fear produced by warnings of weapons of mass
destruction and terrorism are greatly overshadowed by the anger
that has already been brewing against Washington's hypocrisy and
American actions that ignore human suffering. Thomas Friedman
said it best when he wrote, "Too many people today no longer
accept America's strength as a good thing." In short, the balancing act between coercion and consent has been significantly shifted toward the former, leaving the fate of the American Empire
uncertain.
Please Mr. Bush, listen to the people in the streets of Manhattan,
Cairo, and Berlin. Focus on domestic policies that are in need of
repair, such as the economy and social services, and remember
that any action involving guns and bombs should be the last
recourse. Furthermore, the less you anger people around the
globe, the less money you will have to pay for security. Don't create another unnecessary divide in the world that will only produce
more hate. If you do, it will invariably bring a more unstable world
that our children will be forced to inherit.
The
H
Voice...
aving a perfect view of
Mohamed Mahmoud (MM)
Street from the AUC Press
office balcony, I stepped out
on the day of the 'Dignity'
protest (24th February) to watch things
from above. I don't want to say I was saddened by what took place. More like
angered. Frustrated. Helpless.
It was a shock, firstly, to behold what had
happened to the street itself. In contrast to
the white, cloudy gloom was an abundance
of men dressed in black uniforms and helmets, holding batons and shields. They
blocked off the entire street, from the beginning of Tahrir Square all the way down
Mansour Street and Bab-el-Louk, like
solidified men made of metal. One had to
marvel at the pure symmetry of how these
men stood, side by side, backs rigid and
faces twisted into frown, elbows touching
so as to make a perfect, human fence. The
entire surface-area of MM Street was bare,
except for the policemen that wandered up
and down the asphalt, talking wildly into
their walkie-talkies as if they were preparing for a war to start. A war indeed…
Students began to walk into the street…
perhaps about one hundred or so, some with
the Kufiyya around their shoulders or heads,
some with their hands held high in the air
making signs of peace. They were then literally pushed onto the sidewalk by the
police. The sidewalk, being less than two
meters in width, was where these students
voiced their protest. An entire empty street;
every form of life outside the area sealed
off; Cairo traffic held hostage on both sides
to the point of explosion; huge areas of
space available and waiting for eager feet to
step in and scream for justice… all denied
to the students of AUC, who were instead
given the two-meter sidewalk as a ground
for expression. Literally herded into the
sidewalk like a flock of sheep. I nearly wept.
I don't want to make fun of the Egyptian
police, or the uniformed men that actually
held hands and ended up trotting around the
students like dancing pre-school children,
pushing students back into their limited
sidewalk when they wanted to step into an
already sealed-off and bare street. But I
want to think out loud about the logic
behind it all, about why the police have to
use such extremes measures at every single
protest to suffocate passionate young students who want to use their voices, to say
something they as humans have every right
to say, in every respect. I want to think
about our so-called democracy. About why
the police went bezerk. About how much
space we really have to make an evident
change in the world, to catch someone's
attention, to break free of our own chains,
to reach the world and potentially change it.
To simply use our voices, our pens, our
songs and our paintings to make a statement
and show ourselves and the world the truth
of our feelings. Is it so wrong, to want to be
//////////////////////////////////////////////
heard?
One girl, in the middle of the small studentcrowd, started screaming, "SAY NO, SAY
NO!" She was pushed forward, towards the
main campus, where the protest was to continue away from the public eye. She was
nearly in tears, screaming "No! This is
wrong, this is WRONG!" Bustled by fellow
students and policemen, she was eventually
pushed out of my sight. But she was right…
it was so very wrong. Wrong, because in
this march for 'Dignity', and every other
march we have for that matter, our dignity
was trampled. Wrong because countries
around the world gathered and screamed for
justice to come to the region, while in the
region itself, voices were suppressed. Who,
around the world, will know of what happened here at AUC? Who will know that
people here are passionate if no one can
hear them? How is anything ever going to
change?
An Australian singer sang once about the
importance of voices. His name was John
Farnham, and he said "You're the voice;
make it clear. We're not going to live in
silence, we're not going to live with fear."
Fear and silence are boundaries that have to
be crossed if the changes we want to see
will ever happen. We are the Voice after all.
And voices are there to be used. Our dignity becomes a farce if we don't.
Magda Elsehrawi
Word From the Director continued from page 1...
At the end of the course, we delved into the ancient
history of Egypt, the gift of the Nile and labor, in a
4-day cruise between Luxor and Aswan (in retrospect we should have done this earlier). This is the
land of grand temples monuments. In relief after
relief, you could appreciate how the Nile was at the
core of Egyptian mythology and history. On the
lower part of each pylon, Hapi, the androgynous god
of the Nile, is depicted with a conspicuous belly and
ample breasts. The winged sun bounded the upper
margin. Between the unabashedly material and the
loftily spiritual, the rest of the gods and humans
played their games. Men and women presented the
gods with votive offerings from the Nile's yield. In
exchange, the gods gave them life (often symbolized
by the ankh), purified them with water and bestowed
the symbols of power-- flails and scepters-- on kings
and queens.
In Aswan, we inevitably had to visit the High Dam,
with Lake Nasser behind edged by a most enchanting landscape. The turbulent political history of the
Dam, the impassioned controversy about its indispensable contributions and the damages it visited on
the Nubian communities and the river itself are well
known, and I don't need to repeat them. I had visited the Dam previously, but this time I learned about
the continuity of the Nile's centrality, not just in economic life, but in the historical narrative of Egypt as
well. This is evident in the reliefs on the interior
walls of the enormous lotus-shaped tower that overlooks the Dam and Lake Nasser. The reliefs depict in
modern form the promise of the Dam and the Nile in
bringing prosperity and learning to Egypt. Hapi in a
secular mode!
I must say though, that as the boat cruised and I
watched the rare beauty of the endless rows of palm
trees along the banks of the river, the meticulously
and intensively tilled earth, I felt that the next time I
would have to see more of the villages and get a
sense of how people who make this earth good live
and feel.
Still, to truly grasp the Nile and the life it sustains,
you would have to walk 16 kilometers a day for 14
months along its banks, from the Ethiopian
Highlands to the Mediterranean Sea.
Map showing the course of the Nile and Cairo,
Kitab-i bahriye of piri Reis, 16th Centuary.
(Biblotheque Nationale, Paris)
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