A New Dawn In Egypt?

Photo © Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

It's surreal to be at the cusp of starting on a photo~expedition while my country of origin is experiencing an unprecedented massive popular uprising to get rid of the current regime of Mubarak, the Egyptian president....who announced that he would remain as its leader but sack its government.

There are a number of thoughts that come to mind. This is a real organic grassroots popular uprising in Egypt against an extremely unpopular and corrupt regime. The Egyptians participating in the uprising are secular, young, educated and less so, and are technological-savvy. There are no signs of religious ideology, of Islamist influence, in these demonstrations.

I sensed that many of the Western pundits are shocked (and possibly disappointed) that there is no whiff of Islamic extremism in the demonstrations...this pulls the rug from under the Western (and the current Egyptian leadership) interests who would like to characterize the uprising as another Iran.

While Mubarak signaled his decision to stay in power, it's not up to him any longer. It's the Egyptian youth who will decide the course of the nation...as it should be.

It's an unparalleled opportunity for the United States to support the Egyptian people in its quest for democracy, and eliminate all anti-Americanism feelings in the whole region by doing so. Imagine if the US administration unequivocally declares its support for the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt!

Incha' Allah there will be a new dawn for Egypt and its people.

(Posted from Delhi)

Marty Aim: The Zabaleen of Cairo

Photo © Marty Aim-All Rights Reserved

I found Marty Aim's The Zabaleen photo essay to be timely in view of the New Year’s attack on a Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt, that killed more than 20 people.  I saw it mentioned on Facebook, and decided it would jump the weekly queue in being featured.

Marty Aim is a New Zealand-born documentary photographer, currently based in South East Asia. He holds degrees in Visual and Social Anthropology. His clients include the British Museum, Time and the Discovery Channel. He's also an alum of The Foundry Photojournalism Workshop.

The Zabaleen are an occupational community of Christian Copts who have functioned as Cairo's informal garbage collectors for at least 80 years.  In colloquial Egyptian, Zabaleen means "garbage people" or pig-pen operators. The community is spread over half a dozen settlements in greater Cairo, and are estimated to be close to 80,000 people. The largest settlement is Mokattam Village, better known as "Garbage City," which is situated at the foot of the Mokattam Mountains, east of Cairo.

Many sources agree that the Zabaleen have created one of the most efficient recycling systems in the world, which is estimated at recycling up to 80% of all the collected waste. These are good people...the salt of the earth kind of people...hard working and largely self sufficient, but discriminated against in many ways because of their religion and their occupation.

It's funny...I still recall the daily sound of the Zabal's donkey-cart stopping outside my childhood home in a Cairo suburb, collecting the garbage and the trash. Efforts by the Egyptian government to replace the garbage collectors with modern local and foreign companies have essentially failed.

By all means, explore Marty's galleries. I did and was rewarded with the terrific photograph of girls in a Muslim school in Thailand's Narathiwat province. You'll know which one I mean the second you lay your eyes on it....really terrific.

The Coptic Man on "Tiananmen Square"?

Photo © Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

A photograph by Amr Abdallah Dalsh, a Reuters photographer, stopped me in my tracks. It shows an Egyptian young man (presumably a Christian Copt) menacing or hurling a piece of iron at the cowering Egyptian police. This came about as a consequence of the heinous bombing of a Coptic church in Alexandria on New Year's Eve which killed 23 and injured 100.

Egypt is still reeling from the violence, and its government has quickly blamed external Islamist terrorism, promising to bring the perpetrators to justice.  I'm not holding my breath on that eventuality, and neither are the Copts, who have been subject to discrimination at all levels in their very own country.

High on the Copts' grievance list is Egypt's policy to make it extremely difficult for them to build churches.  The country's prime minister recently rejected demands for Copts to be free to build churches, claiming that the government will make sure that there are enough worship places for both Muslims and Christians. A joke.

And this is one of our so-called stalwart allies in the Middle East. Another joke.

But let's go back to the photograph for a minute. A half-naked man confronting a phalanx of well armed, well protected security forces...and seemingly single-highhandedly making them cower like rats. This is truly an example of a picture being worth a thousand words.

Photograph courtesy Reuters Full Focus Blog

NPR: Cairo And The "Disconnected"

This touches on photography/multimedia only tangentially, so unless you're into Middle Eastern-international politics, you may want to skip all the stuff below and just click on the movie.

A number of media outlets are gingerly covering Egypt's political scene due to the imminent parliamentary elections. I say gingerly because Egypt is a so-called major ally in the "war against terror" or whatever it's called these days, so it wouldn't be politic or in our national "interests" to criticize its ossified and corrupt regime. Why the United States aligns itself with despots in the Middle East and elsewhere will always be an anachronism.

NPR has featured a number of short articles and some multimedia for the occasion, and I found this one titled In Cairo Slum, Little Hope For Change to be an exemplar of what the current situation is in Egypt. I say "current" but that's not really correct. It's always been that way, and it'll continue to be that way, perhaps get even wider...a profound disconnect and an immense gap between the poor and the elite. Trust me...I know that for a fact.

An Egyptian investment banker (I'm not sure how he can be one with such an atrocious spoken English) complains that his children are disconnected from the rest of Egypt because they go to American schools, wear Western clothes and barely speak Egyptian Arabic. Well, I've got news for him....the "disconnect" has been prevalent since the Pharaohs.

Every dog has his day as the saying goes...so going back in modern history, it was the Ottomanophiles, then Anglophiles and the Francophiles who were the elite class, and disconnected from the people. Identical to the Tsarist elite in Russian who would only speak in French, the Egyptian elite would live in bubbles of their own making, separated from the "non-elite" and the rest of their compatriots. To a lesser extent, the time for the socialist Nasserites and Sadatites came and went. Now, it's the turn of the Mubarakphiles...the business cronies, the oligarchs, and the corrupt corporate/political alliances who form the recent elite....but these will also vanish when their time comes, only to be replaced by a hungrier demographic. We've been there before, and it's only a matter of time before the cycle repeats itself. A class will just replace another class. And by the way, claiming to have Turkish ancestry (some extremely tenuous and others grossly made up) is currently a de rigueur affectation for many of the newly minted Egyptian wealthy class. Go figure. Having Turkish heritage was once viewed as being regressive, not authentic and even unpatriotic. I know that for a fact as well.

But back to the "disconnected"...which many of the privileged (some would describe them as spoiled) Egyptian youth are. Confused by a brainless embrace of a culture that is not theirs; an embrace made possible because their parents are the current moneyed elite and can buy into an ersatz Americanism; confused by their own dichotomy...seeing no conflict between binge drinking, heavy partying and then fasting Ramadan and claiming religiosity...but unable and unwilling to adopt American meritocratic values, its democratic values and work ethics.

Watch the multimedia piece...then shed a tear for the real people of Egypt who deserve infinitely better than the dismal life they're leading.

Mohamed Hassan: Photojournalist

Photo © Mohamed Hassan- All Rights Reserved

Mohamed Hassan Abd El Aal (Mikko Hassan) lived and worked in Cairo, and graduated from the Akhbar El-Yom Academy with an honor degree in Journalism. He worked as a press photographer in the daily newspaper El-Shorouk El Gedid. Apart from covering political issues, protests and demonstrations, he was interested in documenting the traditional manufacturing processes in Old Cairo. One of these features gleaned him first prize in the 2009 Annual Press Photography Competition of Egypt.

I met Mohamed (aka Mikko) at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul. He wasn't in my class, but approached me, rather shyly, and expressed his pleasure in seeing that one of the instructors was of Egyptian heritage. He told me that although he had seen my name on the roster of instructors, but had taken it for Lebanese. Mohamed participated in Guy Calaf's class, and had been awarded a scholarship.

I reviewed Mohamed's portfolio which, as he wrote in his biography, had photographs of his explorations in the deepest corners of Old Cairo. He did them during his one day week-ends, on his own time, deriving nothing of it except his own pleasure and self-improvement. I sensed his enthusiasm for photography, saw his talent and his eye for composition, and predicted to him that he'd be one of Egypt's best photojournalists.

It was not to be. His trajectory was very sadly cut short because of a fatal freak accident a few days ago. He will be missed by many.

The Foundry Photojournalism Workshop family reacts: Eric Beecroft, the co-founder of the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop, announced that a permanent full scholarship in Mikko's name will be made available, and his work is featured on the FPW's front page.

Masr: Javier Morgade

Masr is the Arabic word for Egypt...and it's also colloquially used for Cairo. So in Arabic, Egyptians are called Masr'yeen...which is confusing for non-Arabic speakers, but that's how it is. Egypt was borrowed from the Latin Aegyptus and from the ancient Greek Aígyptos.

Javier Morgade was filming in Egypt for an airline company, and was left with surplus footage for this short movie. It's a documentary made with a Canon 5d Mark II and a Glidetrack HD. It was edited in Final Cut Pro and graded with After Effects. The song is by a contemporary Egyptian singer and is titled ah men al forak, which loosely translated means "lamenting separation".

In my view (and I should know), Javier managed to capture in this short movie the essence of the Egyptian character, the kindness, humor, hospitality and generosity...even their occasional legendary intrusiveness. It saddens me to see the poverty in the alleys of old Cairo, but as always, it's mitigated by the Egyptian talent for being able to share setbacks, poverty, sorrows, and life troubles. No Egyptian is an island...and while they find enormous solace in their extended families and friends, neighbors and even casual acquaintances...they deserve better.

David Myers: City of The Dead

The City of the Dead is produced by David Myers, a part-time photographer who lives in Maryland and works in Washington DC.

The City of the Dead is a four mile long cemetery (a necropolis would be a better word to describe it) which extends from the northern to southern part of Cairo. It's called el-arafa by Egyptians, and is an area of tombs and mausoleums where people live and works amongst the dead. Its foundation dates back to the Arab conquest of Egypt in 642 AD, and has grown with time until it reached the equivalent of a fully functioning residential suburb of Cairo.

I watched this short photo essay, and it brought back childhood memories when, once a year during the Eid festival, I had to accompany my father to pay respects to our ancestors and forebears who were interred in our family's mausoleum. I still recall it being as large as a couple of basketball courts, with two house-like structures sheltering a number of mausoleums, made of marble or alabaster, and intricately carved with verses of the Qur'an. It is under one of those that my father rests, alongside his forebears. The marble gateway to the mausoleums is carved with the name of my grandfather...which is like mine.

This brought back the smell of dust to my nostrils...the Egyptian dust that is tamped down by hosing it with water...the green-grey color of the palm tree leaves...and much more.

I've been to many Islamic countries and heard the adan in all of them...but few of them come  close to beauty and purity of the Egyptian adan. Perhaps I am biased....

WSJ Photo Journal: Sayyida Zeinab Shrine

Photo © Suhaib Salem/Reuters-All Rights Reserved
Readers and followers of this blog know that I am always interested in religious rituals of all sorts because it's during these rites, festivals and traditional events that devotees are devoid of day-to-day artificiality.

The WSJ Photo Journal recently posted the above photograph of devotees praying at the Sayyida Zeinab shrine in old Cairo commemorating her birthday. Zeinab was the daughter of Ali and the grand-daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. There's a disagreement as to whether she was interred in Damascus in a shrine bearing her name, or in Cairo.

Al Sayyida Zeinab is the patron saint of Cairo, and her shrine is located in mosque that bears her name. It was renovated and rebuilt many times since her death. The mosque is typical of the Mameluke style, and the cenotaph (seen in the photograph) is enclosed within a finely worked bronze grille.

This commemoration has now been added to my list of events to photograph. Hopefully next year in Cairo!