"The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution"

[fiefoe]

As much as I adore Peter Hessler's writing, I have to admit that the audiobook narration by the author himself made the book less vivid, owning to his recessive qualities (which no doubt serve him well as a reporter.)

• He wouldn’t bargain in the proper sense—those numbers never moved. He dropped them like end lines on a football field, and then he left me with all that empty space. Finally I handed him forty Egyptian pounds, the equivalent of six and a half dollars, and he seemed satisfied.
• he worked so attentively that he could always identify a resident by his trash.
• Less than an hour later there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, Sayyid was holding a baby-sized metal fork. “It was with the rice,” he said... This was one reason why residents tended to be generous with their fees: Sayyid functioned as a kind of neighborhood lost and found.
• As a foreigner, my field of expertise came to encompass imported goods, pharmaceuticals, sex products, and alcohol.
• He was the only guest I ever entertained who carried off his empties, because he knew he’d end up collecting them anyway.
• The square itself was overwhelming; the scenes of fighting were so chaotic that I couldn’t begin to understand what was happening. But inside the mosque there was a sense of order. Certain sheikhs led the prayers, and various young activists served as volunteer doctors, pharmacists, and security guards. They organized a lost-and-found department for any item that turned up on Tahrir.
• Such self-organization was a trademark of the revolution... At the clashes, teenagers with motorcycles evacuated people who had been injured or overcome by tear gas, and medical and pharmaceutical students staffed the field hospitals. There were even bands of young men with chisels and sledgehammers who broke up the sidewalks along Mohammed Mahmoud Street so people would have chunks of concrete to hurl at the police.
• The choice is simple: you can watch your daughter’s dowry vanish into a stranger’s home, or you can effectively keep the goods by marrying her into your extended family. As a result, approximately 40 percent of Egyptians are married to a cousin.
• there was an openness to his character, and he was capable of adapting to the expectations of people with different values. This sensitivity, rather than the physical labor, was actually the most demanding part of Sayyid’s job. There was no government oversight of his work, and no system or structure guaranteed him payment.
• When you move to another country as an adult, the language flows around you like a river. A child can abandon himself to the current, but most older people, at least in the beginning, take more tentative steps. Maybe they get their feet wet; maybe they go waist-deep; maybe they occasionally have a few hours in which they’re fully immersed. Along the way, they fish out the words and phrases that seem to matter most,
• There was even a phrase for greeting a person who has recently received a haircut.
• Over time, I came to recognize this tendency for contradiction as part of the national character—it was just as Egyptian as those figures on the temple walls.
• But Dardasha was never shy about bad behavior. This was the flip side to the book’s emphasis on politeness: it illustrated the many ways in which actual life failed to live up to beautiful phrases. Dardasha even included a dialogue of a bizarrely tenacious wrong-number conversation.
• By the time a student learned to say “eleven,” he had already mastered such critical vocabulary as “cute girl,” “engaged,” “marriage registrar,” and “Star of the East,” which is the Egyptian nickname for Umm Kulthum.
• I had never been anywhere in the world where numbers seemed to inspire such discomfort. First of all, it was a shock to realize that the things that I considered Arabic numerals are in fact not standard in many Arab countries, including Egypt.
• Egyptians and many other Arabs use a different system, the Arabic-Indic numerals, which also came from India. As if these terms aren’t confusing enough—Hindu-Arabic, Arabic-Indic—there’s enough overlap between the shapes of the symbols to throw off any foreigner.
• In an Arabic book, words are read from right to left, but numbers move in the opposite direction.
• he noticed students struggling with each of these transitions. In his opinion, it hindered their progress, but he didn’t see an easy solution. It was a remnant of nineteenth-century colonialism, when educators introduced technical subjects in English or French, and over time this became entrenched in the curricula.
• And after China, where bargaining is a national sport, I was trained in all the standard moves: the walk away, the “last price, my friend,” the denigration of goods you hope to acquire, the misdirection of bargaining for A when in fact you intend to purchase B. But to do such things in Egypt was like tackling somebody in a game of touch football.
• The Chinese have a similar concept: guanxi, or “connections.” But guanxi can be developed, learned, and manipulated; it’s a full-fledged social system. At times, it’s terribly corrupt, but it’s also flexible: anybody with skills and savvy can build guanxi. Egyptian wasta, on the other hand, impressed me as far more static. It seemed to reflect social class rather than a constructed and cultivated network, and it had a way of ending conversations—either a person had wasta or he didn’t.
• Anybody could recognize the revolution’s lack of direction, along with the inefficiency of having a legislature without a new constitution or a new president. Parliamentarians were prominent but powerless; they had a platform but no preparation for what they were doing. They were essentially playacting an imported democratic ritual—a neoclassical dome propped awkwardly above a Pharaonic Hall.
• In the 1860s, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, a French sculptor, proposed the construction of a monumental statue in Port Said that would rival the Great Sphinx. Bartholdi’s working title was Egypt Bringing Light to Asia, and he designed the figure of a ninety-foot-tall Egyptian peasant woman, her arm upraised, with a torch in hand. But Egypt’s financial collapse scuttled the project. Bartholdi eventually took his idea across the Atlantic to another promising port, where the Egyptian peasant woman was reimagined as the Statue of Liberty.
• Khasekhemwy is the final king of the Second Dynasty, while his son, Djoser, is the founder of the Third. What’s the difference? Father built the Shuna, and son built the Step Pyramid—the transition from mud to stone deserved a new dynasty, at least in the eyes of Manetho... Some supposedly consecutive dynasties in Manetho’s scheme are now known to have been concurrent, and at least one dynasty, the Seventh, never existed at all.
• But this system is also a reminder that Egyptians have rarely been in charge of their own past. It’s not like China, where dynasties saw themselves as such and chose their own titles: the Tang, the Song, the Ming. Chinese history was first written by the Chinese, whereas Egyptology began as a colonial endeavor. To some degree this remains true today. Many of Egypt’s most important sites are still excavated by foreigners,
• In those days, much of the trash was flammable, and the wahiya’s dual industries functioned in harmony. But inevitably the city’s population grew at a rate that upset the delicate balance between trash and beans.
• In 2006, an article in the journal Habitat International declared, “Over the course of five decades the Zabaleen have created what is arguably one of the world’s most efficient resource recovery systems.” The zabaleen recycled roughly 80 percent of the waste they collected—more
• In 2009, during the worldwide epidemic of swine flu, the Ministry of Agriculture ordered the slaughter of all Egyptian pigs. There was no evidence that the animals were spreading the disease, which in fact had not affected a single Egyptian at the time of the decree. But the government went ahead and killed as many as 300,000 pigs.
• But even if the Islamists had hated pigs more than they hated Mubarak, this hardly outweighed the costs of disrupting the city’s sanitation system. Hundreds of angry zabaleen held demonstrations, and they started tossing organic waste into the streets, because now they couldn’t feed it to the pigs. The declining hygiene of the capital, and the unrest of the zabaleen, contributed to the growing unhappiness that culminated in the revolution.
• Another wahi had been dead for a decade, but his son, a government clerk, retained garbage rights, so he collected a monthly fee from Sayyid... Sayyid kept track of all these relationships, and the tips of more than four hundred residents, by memory alone. There were no formal contracts for anything.
• Most of these things were industrial, machine-made products, but now in Ard al-Liwa they were deconstructed with a kind of premodern attention. When Sayyid sorted his garbage, he picked out all the pull tabs from soda cans, because even these tiny pieces of aluminum had value. Once, I saw him divide dozens of dirty plastic forks and spoons on the basis of opacity: the clearer the plastic, the higher the grade. For the same reason, he disassembled every syringe that was tossed by Mr. Hassan and all the other injection-drug users who lived on my street. Sayyid removed the metal needles, separated the plungers, and placed the clear casings in a pile dedicated to high-quality plastic.
• The government response was to follow rather than to lead. After individuals constructed an illegal building, they typically connected it—also illegally—to government utility lines. Then the government came in, installed meters, and charged for use. In the view of overwhelmed local officials, at least they had saved the cost of hooking up buildings. And in a strange way, the government’s neglect made the city more livable for the poor, at least in terms of location. They occupied relatively central parts of the city, like Ard al-Liwa, and meanwhile the wealthiest residents had self-exiled to the hinterlands.
• an American urban planner who lived in Cairo, he was positive about what the average people had accomplished in the capital. “Cairo provides better cheap housing through the informal sector than any other megacity in the developing world,”
• It should have been easy to alleviate the capital’s notorious traffic problems, but Mubarak’s officials preferred to pretend that the informal areas didn’t exist. They didn’t build Ring Road entrance ramps in places like Ard al-Liwa, and they didn’t connect them to the subway system. The ashwa’iyat followed the same basic pattern as the zabaleen network of garbage collection. If the government had responded to these informal systems with vision and competence, it could have harnessed their energy. But the Mubarak regime was authoritarian without much authority.
• Whenever Sayyid received a message, he had to approach a literate person in the neighborhood. Wahiba’s texts served two purposes: they conveyed messages, and they could also shame Sayyid in front of his friends.
• After the revolution, this suddenly became a possibility, although not because of some new democratic process or improved access to officials. Actually, it was the opposite: residents realized that the government was in such disorder that officials might not notice the construction of two illegal access ramps.
• None of the leaders whom I spoke with seemed to grasp the significance of what they had done. Untrained men had played the role of law enforcement, bringing back memories of the Islamist militias of old. For more than half a century, the Brotherhood had tried to purge itself of this early history, and the organization had successfully maintained a stance of nonviolence through nearly thirty years of Mubarak’s repression. But it took only five months in power for the Brothers to break this principle.
• By now, after almost two years of the Egyptian Arab Spring, the revolution was like a portable kit: all the key pieces could be packed up and reassembled anywhere in the city at a moment’s notice. Around the palace, vendors quickly appeared, selling the staples of revolutionary activity: sweet potatoes, bread, sunflower seeds. Old women dragged butane burners down the street and hawked hot tea and Nescafé. Others sold gas masks, chemistry-lab goggles, and high-powered green lasers that were made in China.
• there weren’t high-level textbooks for Egyptian. The language has a weak literary tradition,
• Early scholars of Arabic had a similar instinct to draw on the past. They wanted to codify the language in ways that corresponded to the Quran, but they lacked the wealth of historical material that had been available to more literate cultures like the Chinese. So the Arabs went to the desert instead. They sought out Bedouins, who were believed to speak a purer form of Arabic than city people did. The elite sent their sons to live with nomads so that they would learn to talk correctly, and grammarians employed Bedouins as referees in language disputes.
• During the tenth century, a lexicographer named al-Azhari was so blessed—al-hamdulillah!—that he was kidnapped by a Bedouin tribe. This experience allowed him to produce a dictionary called The Reparation of Speech. The book’s introduction, in a kind of grammatical Stockholm syndrome, effusively praises the kidnappers: “They speak according to their desert nature and their ingrained instincts. In their speech you hardly ever hear a linguistic or a terrible mistake.”
• In response, scholars moved in the opposite direction, developing a beautifully logical but extremely difficult version of the language. This form of Arabic had great status, and it was seen as the language of the Quran, but it might have never been spoken in everyday life.
• But fusha remained remarkably stable. It was like the Nile that flows through Egypt—a river without tributaries. Nothing entered fusha, because it wasn’t an everyday language; it was used for Friday sermons, academic lectures, formal speeches, and writing.
• pressures of colonialism and modernization intensified, some intellectuals advocated for writing in the colloquial. They believed that such a change would improve literacy rates while making it easier to incorporate modern terms and ideas. But traditionalists feared further damage to a culture that had already suffered so much foreign incursion.
• But this change was politically and culturally easier for the Chinese than it would have been for the Egyptians. The Chinese language was effectively limited to one country, which hadn’t been damaged by colonialism to the degree of the Middle East. Most important, classical Chinese wasn’t tied to a dominant religion or a divine text.
• Without established parties and other organizations that handle the give-and-take of governance, the result is a series of clumsy maneuvers by inexperienced players. In a praetorian state, there’s no essential difference between activists gathering petitions, or protesters taking to the streets, or a court canceling a parliament, or a military staging a coup. Huntington wrote, “Each social force attempts to secure its objectives through the resources and tactics in which it is strongest.”
• Even those who seem powerful may in fact have limited options. As the Egyptian conflict deepened, it was clear that Sisi had two choices: he could do nothing, or he could do everything. He didn’t belong to a party, and he had no formal structure for participating in politics. He had never even cast a vote in his life. He could issue warnings and entreaties, as he had done during the fight over the constitution, but nobody had listened back then. The communiqué was meaningless without action, and any action on the part of the military was likely to be blunt, because it essentially had only one tool.
• In Sayyid’s community, men and women had little contact, at least in public, and their inequality meant that problem-solving tactics diverged widely. It reminded me of Huntington’s description of the praetorian state: “Each social force attempts to secure its objectives through the resources and tactics in which it is strongest.” For men, power often came from money or violence, while women turned to words: gossip, insults, text messages. An educated woman could also use the law or the government bureaucracy as a means of defense.
• Cairenes sometimes joked that the massive migration of Upper Egyptians and other rural people to the capital had turned the city into a giant village. I often thought about how different the dynamic was in China.
• The Chinese outcome was the opposite: the cities transformed the migrants into urban people. Again, some of this could be explained by simple geography.
• Turnoffs were rare as trees. Some exits led to provincial capitals like Minya or Sohag,
• A century later, Robin Fedden compared the view to “the cleanliness of a country under snow.” He wrote, “You have the impression of looking upon places so stark and fresh that they can never have been seen before. By seeing them you create them; they owe their existence to you.”
• Around the year 1346 BC, in Upper Egypt, the pharaoh Akhenaten founded a new capital on a previously uninhabited shelf of desert above the river’s eastern bank.
• In three thousand years of Egyptian history, there’s no direct evidence that any marriage ceremony ever took place.
• In 1905, the Egyptologist James Henry Breasted described Akhenaten as “the first individual in human history,” because the king stands out so brilliantly against the patterned past.
• His image was embraced with equal enthusiasm by both the Nazis and the Afrocentric movement.
• Akhenaten had temples constructed without roofs, to make sun worship more direct.
• Heldenplatz. In Akhenaten’s new city, court officials erected garden shrines with pictures of the royal couple, the same way that Mubarak’s portrait would someday hang on the walls of bureaucrats’ offices. Kemp writes, “Akhenaten’s kingship provides an unintended caricature of all modern leaders who indulge in the trappings of charismatic display.”
• This campaign of damnatio memoriae was so successful that Akhenaten disappeared from history for thirty-one centuries. But by the time his name was rediscovered by foreign archaeologists, in the mid-nineteenth century, the world had caught up with the ideas of the rebel king.
• “The ultimate irony is that what Ramesses thought he was hiding away is now exposed. How could you hide it better than putting it in the foundation of a temple? But we know more about Akhenaten’s temples than we do about Ramesses’s.
• The sites are nearly two hundred miles apart, but in imaginative terms they make a natural pair. Amarna is on the eastern side of the river, while Abydos is on the west. Each has the feel of a natural theater, with cliffs rising behind a stagelike site. Every morning, the sun rises from behind the dry Amarna mountains, and every afternoon it sets beyond the barren cliff walls of Abydos. One site is a necropolis and the other is a city. Together they intimate other pairings: death and life, eternity and moment, monument and gesture. Abydos is forever—even now, more than five thousand years after the first king was interred, locals still bury their dead there. But the city of Amarna lived for only a fleeting instant.
• Since the coup, the new constitution had been prepared rapidly by a team of law professors and others. The preamble began with a simple sentence—“Egypt is the gift of the Nile for Egyptians and the gift of Egyptians to humanity”—and then, in translation, it flowed for another thirteen hundred words.
• In the early phase of the revolution it had been common for the poor and the working class to travel to better neighborhoods in order to participate in marches and meetings. But as time passed, they stayed home. Geography was one reason why the revolution tilted toward the elite—most events happened in places where it was difficult to engage the poor.
• Without civic rituals, and without civic spaces, people were left with whatever the mosques provided: Friday sermons and prayer halls that were usually restricted to men. To at least some degree, the Islamization of Cairo politics had been encouraged by poor city planning.
• the Chinese radio reporter at the Morsi trial, who had remarked that in China a political case would be controlled and kept secret, as if this reflected a kind of decency. But even without moral decency, there was some value in coherence and predictability. In China, there was an actual system of governance, as well as a system of repression; it was venal, but at least people generally knew where lines were drawn. This was one grim lesson I had learned in Egypt: unstructured authoritarianism is even worse than structured authoritarianism.
• Most of this legal action, though, seemed to be directed at conflicts between family or neighbors; it rarely involved deeper questions of social and economic rights. Sayyid was perfectly comfortable working a job without any contracts,
• Egyptians often used the law in indirect ways, in part because the system was so incoherent. The influence of traditional Islamic sharia remained strong, especially with regard to family law, while codified laws in other areas were based on European models.
• The law wasn’t really a foundation; other traditions of family and faith ran much deeper. The legal apparatus often functioned more as a kind of parallel structure, and individuals used it as a way of bolstering other strategies.
• Whenever I sat in China Star, observing the Egyptians and Chinese interact, I couldn’t imagine two more different cultures. But somehow these contrasts were perfect for the exchange of lingerie. The Chinese lack of physical presence made it easier for them to stay out of the way while Egyptian women looked at intimate garments.
• As far as Lin was concerned, Egypt was still waiting for a real revolution. “It’s a waste of talent here,” he said. “Look at my family—you see how my wife works. We couldn’t have the factory without her.
• Her husband often made similar remarks, referring to the couple’s low suzhi. But every time I visited, I thought: Here in Egypt, home to more than ninety million people, where Western development workers and billions of dollars of aid have poured in for decades, the first plastic recycling center in the south is a thriving business that employs thirty people, reimburses others for reducing landfill waste, and earns a significant profit. So why was it established by two lingerie-fueled Chinese migrants, one of them illiterate and the other with a fifth-grade education?
• Rifaat prepared a telephone dialogue for class. It was titled “At Your Service,” and it combined two of his favorite things—Arabic politeness and Egyptian sarcasm:...  B: At your service, sir. Would you like Central Security Forces, ambulances, and emergency police with your protest? A: Just the Central Security Forces, please. We are already full. B: (Laughing.) It’s sweet like honey, sir! Would you like water with your protest? Or do you want tear gas and nightsticks, because they are free? A: May all be good with you, by God. But one likes to return home dry. B: Do you want snipers, bird shot, and thugs with your order?
• Part of the dynamic was that it reversed the usual direction of gratitude in a democracy. The candidate didn’t need to thank his supporters; instead, the supporters thanked the candidate for agreeing to run. And the responsibility for change was effectively theirs.
• And it reversed another pattern of electoral politics: now it was the voters, and not the candidate, who made empty campaign promises. Shabola sang, We will wake up at five o’clock, no laziness from now on, If we eat only one meal, as long as it is with you it will be like honey, A condiment with you is tastier than a kebab, We’ll live in peace and love, no more terrorism.
• Numbers meant power—to me, that seemed obvious. But now I realized that my assumption came from a perspective that was narrowly Western and democratic. Sometimes it was more useful to think in material terms, like an archaeologist. Real power comes from scarcity; abundance is something that one can afford to waste. In Egypt, youth was cheap.
• I wondered what the Gulf Arabs, with their traditions of honor and vengeance, would make of the Chinese: here were a people whose idea of retaliation involved manufacturing white pieces of cloth for export.
• “No, we’re friends again,” Wang said. “He makes ghotras, too, but they’re lower quality. I make the higher-quality ones, and he makes the cheaper ones. So we’re not in competition.” It was a happy ending: in the Chinese factory world, no conflict is so big that it can’t be solved by market share.
• A gardener told me that his crew had planted a thousand palm trees, most of which died because of lack of water. Egypt was full of grandiose and misguided desert projects, both ancient and modern, but TEDA was one of the strangest: a lost Chinese factory town in the Sahara, where Ozymandian dreams had been foiled by a simple failure to get women out of their homes.
• But the Chinese perspective might have been clearer. Their country and culture had experienced truly revolutionary change throughout the span of the twentieth century, for better and for worse, and they believed that the Egyptians had never committed themselves to such a wrenching transformation.
• During the first phase of the Egyptian Arab Spring, Westerners usually believed that they were witnessing the rise of a powerful social movement, whereas the Chinese tended to see the collapse of a weak state.
• Fusha, on the other hand, has not been used in daily life for at least a thousand years, and in fact it might never have been anybody’s mother tongue. Even scholars of Arabic can’t speak the language spontaneously without making mistakes,
• “There is no linguistic reason why Egyptian Arabic could not be a written language, only political reasons.”
• In Doss’s opinion, the tragedy was that this attempt to protect Arab culture had only served to push Egyptians toward other languages. Now the country had reached a point where an education in Arabic was effectively a sign of low class.
• In a sense, it was the political equivalent of the ashwa’iyat. Without any structure or institution shaping the elections, people figured out their own system, and for a foundation they turned to the organization they knew best: the family.
• One by one, he passed the god-kings: Thutmose II, Amenhotep II, Seti I, Ramesses the Great. Once upon a time, each pharaoh would have been called by the series of royal titles: Horus, Horus of Gold, He of the Two Ladies, He of the Sedge and the Bee. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Now their faces were black and withered, with yellowed teeth that jutted out from open mouths, as if in pain. They lay beneath smudged glass, where the scent of their bodies offended the garbageman.
• From my perspective, this was one of the greatest failures of the revolution. Despite all the turmoil, the vast majority of Egyptians had never been forced to reconsider the roles of women and young people in their society.
• And I knew that while individuals can impress and inspire, systems and environments matter most of all.