Amman to Aqaba to Nuweiba to Cairo

So I started out taking a bus to Aqaba from Amman. The bus was air conditioned, I slept most of the way, and arrived in Aqaba to ridiculious heat and a bunch of crabby taxi drivers. 5 JD (Jordanian dinars) one says, and starts to pick up one of my bags before I assent. Then another guy swoops in, picks up another bag and yells "3 JD!" I move to go with him and a huge tug of war ensues with the first guy cursing the second profusely and then trying to wrench my bag from his hands. I finally get in the second taxi and we go to the ticket office and then to the port. There were no tickets at the port, which I think, in retrospect, he knew, so we go to the main ticket office and I buy a ferry ticket. He then drops off his other passenger and ends up by taking me to a nearby lodge for the night, as the fast ferry has already left for the day. Meanwhile he is smoking (claiming he can't stop because too many "beautiful ladies at the beach") and blaring Ciara and some Arab disco-trance monstrosities over the sound system. He charges me 11, yes 11 JD for the ride, claiming each trip back and forth cost 3 JD plus 2 JD to the lodge. Sigh. I gave in.
At the lodge, the price/per night the driver quoted me of 15 JD has gone up to 45 JD. The manager is trying to claim its because it "includes breakfast". When I say I won't be eating breakfast because of fasting, he gets interested. "Are you Muslim?" "Do you swear on your God that you are Muslim?" I decline to swear but offer to recite al-Fatiha, which he accepts. He lowers the price to 20 JD and invites me for iftar.

After a beautiful air-conditioned sleep, I wake up for iftar. At iftar, one of the guys asks me if I know of Hamza Yusuf! LOL....the world is getting smaller everyday.

The beach at Aqaba is quiet and beautiful and the stars had started to come out, so I went and sat and watched the waves for about an hour. Very restful. Went to sleep early after swimming some laps in the pool.

The next morning I get up and go to the ferry. In the customs line, I speak a little Arabic to the officer, telling him I was studying Arabic in Amman. The guy next to me is tall, bald, and diesel in the extreme...looks like Israeli army off duty. They question him a bit longer than me, as he went through Israel. Outside, attempting to strike up conversation, he asks me: "Are you actually Muslim or do you just dress like that for protection?" (I happen to be wearing a kufi). Sigh....its Ramadan so I humor him. "Yep I'm really Muslim"....Turns out he is some Italian businessman on holiday. He spends most of the boat ride trying to chat up two striking Afghani girls from Germany.

On the boat, an Egyptian guy, his sister and her four kids sit near me. The kids are hilarious...we have a good time messing around. The guy's name is Mahmoud. "Will you be my friend?" he asks. This happens a lot to me actually...random strangers desiring to be my friend. It takes some getting used to. When he finds out I'm from Chicago he asks, "How is Chicago? kweis? (good?)" When I answer in the affirmative, he continues, "but Chicago...niggers." Its a one word statement of his twisted view of reality, a depressing distillation of white supremacist ideology...writ global. So many things go through my head...Dubois, pan-Africanism, Arab racism, American tv...where the hell did he even learn that word with his halting English?
And finally we arrive in Nuweiba on the Sinai Peninsula. From there I buy a bus ticket to Cairo, for a bus "leaving in half an hour". 2 hours later we finally depart. The air conditioning creaks and barely works, the dust on the seats fills my lungs and the world outside as we move from the port becomes like the landscape of an ancient planet...rock formations with geological time mapped onto their contoured layers, walls of sand blown against the rocks, red and black and brown earth stretching for miles without any sign of human habitation.

We stop for iftar at some highway restaurant. I eat kifta which tastes like it has rocks in it and go to the bathroom to wash my hands for prayer. As I come out a kid is collecting money at the door. Everyone in front of me gives, so I feel compelled as well...but what am I paying for? I give him a 5 pound note and change is not forthcoming until I demand it. Welcome to Egypt.

At 11pm we arrive in Cairo and its a different world....overpasses and billboards and wall to wall traffic. Again I manage to negotiate a decent taxi price (although the first driver pawns me off on a second one who tries to ask for a higher fare) the driver, although he protests, is relatively straight up once I make it clear what the deal is.

And just like that I'm in Garden City...a beautiful neighborhood of gates and walls and trees and long curving avenues. Its so quiet and peaceful at night. My friend comes and scoops me and my looong journey is over.

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Religion and Approaches to History (A Peoples History of Monotheism?)

Picking up where A. Thompson left off in his insightful discussion of monotheistic religion: One thing all religions need to do, above all, in order to make themselves more relevant and less reactionary, is to avoid making essentializing statements about their history. Notwithstanding the enormous positive impact Christianity and Islam (to name the two major examples) have had on world culture and world society, there is an almost unbearably facile tendency on the part of some of their adherents to engage in a complete whitewashing of the more 'unsavory' aspects of that history. The violence and corruption of the medieval church, the at times rapacious conquest of the early Muslims--these histories are either conveniently forgotten or, if they are mentioned at all, made external to the faith, i.e. they were just a few bad apples. This tendency was aptly described by Wilfred Cantwell Smith:

"This process [of recovering lost history] turns disruptive only when, as has sometimes happenned, the grip of the need to defend is tightened to the point where this delight in greatness, this compensatory self-satisfaction, becomes the compulsive cause rather than the honest result of historical reconstruction. Historiography is then designed alsmot explicitly to nourish and to support one's predelictions. It seeks not to analyse or to understand the past, but to glorify it; that is to glorify oneself. The purpose is not investigation but aggrandizement, not intellectual accuracy but emotional satisfaction."

Smith, as usual, has a penetrating insight here. There is a certain approach to religion and history which sees religion as being 'under attack' by secular forces (Although such charges are usually trumped up, since religion did far more to indict itself than secularism ever could, the motive power of the perception is nevertheless real) and thus rushes to write a history absolving X religion, showing it to be the perfect way, the answer to all our problems, WAAAY better than those other religions, and what would we do without it? While I cannot accept the ignorant rantings of such blowhard atheists as Christopher Hitchens, I equally cannot accept these canards employed in religion's defense. Bottom line, since I cannot accept either approach, I need a new method. Simply defending religion through idealizations and essentializations of its quite checkered history is not only intellectually dishonest, it is bad for the soul.

I define religion as a way of getting closer to God. This obviously includes a great deal under its umbrella. The difficulty comes when X religion claims Y religion just 'doesn't get it'. They are infidels or kaffirs, or they worship cows, or they drink the blood of Christ, or they are going to hell because they don't have the right belief ABOUT God. The sincerity with which these views are propounded do not lessen their incredible shortsightedness. Christians claim Islam is the 'religion of the sword'. Muslims accuse Christians of deifying Christ without bothering to understand what the faith of a Christian might mean for him/her personally. Jews and Christians also battle it out over the divinity of Christ. Now there is nothing wrong with believing in something and standing to defend it. But such an approach has a law of diminishing returns. Instead of trying to get closer to God, many religious adherents are frantically trying to convince everyone else how naturally great and superior their own belief is! And in doing so, they strain logic and credulity.

As a convert to Islam, I wondered for a long time what it truly 'meant' to be Muslim in an ultimate sense. And the best and most general idea I could come up with, after considering all the evidence, both internally and externally, is that Islam is a joyful response to a Divine Reality. I have my own reasons why I consider it 'better' than other religions in this respect, but these are mostly private and personal. Nevertheless, in actual fact, there is a practical tension between Islam as an inner response and Islam as a public cultural matrix one shares with and participates in. Thus the most forward thinking intellectuals now working in the Islamic tradition are those who propose that a distinction should be made between the nucleus of the Islamic revelation (the Meccan revelations), and those rules (the Medinan revelations) which were brought to the early community, and thus constitute an integral part of the social milieu of the Prophet.

The need for this approach becomes clear if we compare the ideals of an Islam touted by its public boosters (The "Islam is the solution for everything" people) and the actual treatment of human beings under modern day Islamic state experiments. Without engaging in an essentialization of Western values, I think it is safe to say that the three foremost examples of Islamic state implementation today--Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran--have an absolutely horrible record with regard to the treatment of religious minorities, not to mention women. All obfuscations aside then, if Islam is in its essence aiming for what is supremely right and completely just, then it cannot justify such things as the penalty for adultery, the equivalence of a man's testimony with that of two women, slavery, the status of the 'other' under shari'a, and so forth.

Now apologists will argue in response that we cannot ignore context, and it is certainly true that the penalties outlined in Quran and hadith were not always applied. It is true that manumitting a slave was considered an eternally meritorious act in Islam, unlike the on-the-ground reality of the institution of chattel slavery in the West. It is true that at the time of the Prophet, Islam actually improved the rights of women in that society. But it is the height of foolish arrogance to assume that, for all times and places, implementing these legal penalties and rules as a legal code in will result in the emancipation of women or the establishment of God's justice. Islamic countries, even those where shari'a is implemented through the judicial code, have outlawed slavery, admitting that the Prophet's pronouncements about it were aimed at its eradication. This is patently a social and contextual judgment, so why is it so difficult to undertake the same move when it comes to rights of women or other ideas?

Getting back to my original statement, it is obvious that Christian and Islamic histories have distinct and unique approaches to politics and political theory. Their histories overlap significantly but, as Carl Brown has explained, they developed into world religions out of vastly different social situations. Along the way, power became an emblem to implement Divine Reality, and Divine Reality became the de facto and often de jure explanation for an excercise of political power, however arbitrary. In the process the two were thoroughly confused. Therefore one step towards removing the confusion and telling an accurate history of religion is to untangle the two. Let the Divine do its work, as it continues to do, in the lives of people across the globe. Inshallah, if religious people can learn to think more historically they will recognize what M. Kane called "A Peoples History of Monotheism". That is, the histories of those who opposed rigid dogma, corrupt authority, and worship of idols. Those who eschewed violent conquest for power's sake, but promoted active resistance to authoritarian government. Those who felt compelled to respond to a Divine calling, something irresistible which called them, not to withdraw from the world, but to engage it in the most wholistic and organic way they were capable of.

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Taratibu ya 'Chai'

Waiting in Addis Abbaba airport for my flight in DC, and there is much to reflect on these past few days. However, my mind is very cloudy--I feel angry and worried for no reason at all, and I think my mind is trying to digest something which I can't get my head around yet. This afternoon Dotto and his cousin Elyya took me to the airport where I expected some delay because of the change in my flight plan. (I was originally scheduled to leave from Zanzibar) However, I was treated very rudely by the woman at the counter, who then started talking to her colleague about me, not realizing I understood Swahili. She was frusturated because at first my ticket would not issue. Then after she had checked in with all the passengers, she, along with her supervisor, issued me the ticket with much grumbling. Then they asked me for the 'airport tax', which I thought was odd, since no one else in front of me in line had been asked to pay such a 'tax'. After they threatened to take my name off the flight register I finally relented and went outside to withdraw money. Everyone was very suspicious (including Dotto and his cousin) of this 'airport tax' but when I asked for a receipt that's when the 'shit hit the fan'. They brought me a hand-printed markup on a blank Ethiopian Airlines boarding pass. I lost my temper, which in retrospect was a bad idea. More threats were exchanged, but finally I went my way.

Other than this minor argument, I had a very good trip. I got to see Dotto and Mama Rose again, and I finally got beneath the surface of the tourist industry to see another side of life in Zanzibar. It started with a conversation with Musa and his friend Nasr at Marine Restaraunt where I had stopped to eat. Musa found out I had converted to Islam and he invited me to his house where I met his wife, father-in-law, brothers-in-law, and one-year-old daughter. We walked around past huts of concrete block and corrugated tin, a maulidi performance group singing for a village wedding, small garden plots, and then an open field where goats grazed along with boys playing soccer. Musa talked of how he could come to the USA, and his young-brother-in-law, 16 year old Hussein, talked with me in his flawless Classical Arabic. These scenes of village life could have been many places in Africa, and I had seen them before, in various permutations. Something visceral struck me about the material poverty around me, as I remembered a visit a few days earlier to the palatial beach resorts at Nungwi. Here I was among the solid and silent backbone of Zanzibar's history, the sons and daughters of ivory porters and copra farmers, recipients of a revolution whose idealism--still proclaimed in government office posters emblazoned with 'serikali ya mapinduzi'--was flickering.

My letter from the Ministry never arrived to the archives. Instead, on my last day there, the secretary sent her colleagues out to pray (it was Friday), and we sat alone in the study room. After a few minutes, she began to say she would probably close up earlier than usual. She hoped I had found everything to my liking, after all it was she who had allowed me access to the archives. "How will you help us, now that we have helped you?" she asked. I inquired as to what she thought was appropriate. "Mimi mwenyewe sijui," she answered. (Me myself I don't know)

I looked in my wallet, pulled out $20, and gave it to her. She was very grateful, and then instructed me, "not to tell the others." She had nothing to worry about. I considered myself fortunate given that 1) I was able to get into the archives and 2) The regular research fee is $70-$100. My Swahili teacher calls this 'chai.'

Inasemakana kwa Watanzania maisha ni mgumu, kweli. (It is said by Tanzanians, "Truly, life is difficult.") Some reading this might take affront to this obvious example of official corruption. All I can do is relate a conversation Dotto and I had driving through the streets of Dar. We were talking about albino murders in Tanzania and the shadowy deals of a certain international entrepeneur who was arranging exclusive deals to sell used power plants to TANESCO, the Tanzanian public utility. Somehow we started talking about the economy and the challenges of boarding a dalla dalla. Dotto said, quoting his father, "When you wait four hours for one bus to come and when it comes its full, then you wait another four hours, and the next one gets filled before you can board, no matter how polite you are, you ARE gonna push and shove to get on that next bus."

I thought about this alot in relation to my experiences in Zanzibar. Any annoyance I had at the petty corruption of the official bureaucracy, paled before the visceral nature of poverty, especially if and when you KNOW you are poor; the country's best real estate gets built on for tourists and you depend on these people to survive. Uhuru? Bado. (Not yet)

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