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June 13, 2009
trip to rural egypt
Thursday was my first field assignment on the job, which meant going down 100km of industrial cement factories, then the farming villages of the Nile fluvial plain until making it to the two villages of Atfih and Deir al-Maymun in order to interview the local priests about their respective church construction projects. Technically speaking, all church construction and repair in Egypt (no matter how small and local) need to be approved through a central agency. Needless to say, this highly centralized system often leads to hurt feelings. My job for Thursday then was to follow my boss around, ask questions, and write a forthcoming report (including local history and sacred history), which I will post a link to here as well once it is completed.
1) Atfih: The Deir al-Rasul church in Atfih was heavily damaged in the 1992 earthquake, rendering the building structurally unsound. The renovation permit was quickly given by the government; however, as it is a building well over a thousand years old, the necessary renovations were well outside of the means of the small Christian community in Atfih. This is often the case in Egypt with historic churches; their costly renovations cannot be afforded by the local community. For Atfih, this meant that the community appealed to the Egyptian government, claiming the building as an antique site of national interest (primarily based in its association with Saint Paul, a 3rd century ascetic who inhabited the structure). While the government agreed to this claim (as is also often the case), the work order was not forthcoming. By 1997, the community was still without a place of worship, leading the local community to quickly erect a new church before the state could interfere with the construction as it was done without a permit. Adjacent to the original church, a new building was erected in two days which housed the congregation. As of the Arab West Report's last visit, the old church was still in a state of disrepair, and in constant threat of collapse.
This visit then was a pleasant surprise. The state has picked up the ball, just a little too slowly according to most people's opinions (again, as it often the case), and has begun to restore the building. It is scheduled to open next year, and is currently braced and no longer in danger of collapse. Indeed, it is structurally-sound enough that we were allowed access to the haikal (in Coptic churches, similar to Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, the altar is screened by an iconostasis. The area behind is known as the haikal, or sanctuary, which is sacred ground) in order to access the room where St. Paul lived.
2) Deir al-Maymun: An anomaly of Egyptian villages, Deir al-Maymun is overwhelmingly Christian (there are less than a handful of truly Christian villages in Egypt) village 100 km south of Cairo. The city's population works mostly in agriculture (mostly family plots, with a shortage of available useable land due to the narrowing of the fluvial plain of the Nile in this area, which is not only the sole irrigation source, but also without which the land is infertile sandy desert) and a local quarry (for those without access to land, this makes up most of their work, although the stones mined are primarily used in local village construction, so that it too is not a lucrative field). Some younger men from the village have begun taking factory jobs as far as Helwan, a Cairene suburb about two hours away. In this context, the local priest has begun a project to turn the two local churches of Saint Antony and Saint Stifin into pilgrimage and tourist sites. We will see where this plan leads, but it has seen local movement since the Report last visited. The priest has asked us to offer his name and contact information in case any foreigners are interested in assisting the village with this program. I will provide the contact information in a future post to honor that request.
For those interested, photos are available of these two villages here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2128072&id=1013451&l=649710dd73
Posted by Alexander Steven Wamboldt at 07:02 PM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2009
Golden Cellphones Get Psychoanalyzed by 10 Shaykhs (because Sunday's a Workday)
My Pope Shenouda III project is well underway. As in, I have spent the last five days of work (meaning Friday and Saturday are excluded; Sunday is a workday here) going through the entirety of the Report's collection of articles from 2008 cataloguing anything that deal with Pope Shenouda III. Once you look through hundreds of articles that are categorized not by topic but by date (i.e. weeks 1-43 of 2008), you start to realize just how weird newspaper articles and media scandals can be (let alone those in a foreign culture). With that frame in mind, I present a slightly more light-hearted post: the best Egyptian headlines of 2008 (weeks 1-43):
- "10 Shaykhs Psychoanalyze the Pope" (in which 10 Muslim scholars of al-Azhar are solicited for their opinions on Pope Shenouda's character, or the beginning of some bizarre, as of yet, unwritten joke).
- "cĪd Labīb denies that the Abū Fānā reconciliation agreement collapsed because of a golden mobile phone" (in which cĪd Labīb, a prominent Copt, denies that his anger over Pope Shenouda re-gifting a golden cellphone that he had given him to a member of parliament caused him to stop working on a peace treaty between the Monastery of Abu Fana and the local Muslims. I suppose all political scandals are this weird when you think about them hard enough).
- "Brothers you thought were your shield while they were your enemies" (okay, technically not about Pope Shenouda. This is actually about Sunni-Shi'a relations, but the name just made me think of the title of a movie about a fraternity gone horribly awry).
- "Equality between Jews and Muslims" (innocuous looking, true, but the contents, "A recent survey has shown that people who hate Jews also hate Muslims," is a rather odd, if sadly true, way of demonstrating equality).
- "Dr. Yūsuf Zaydān: Christians are creative" (this is one of those weird instances of positive stereotyping that, despite advocating for a positive description, still rub me the wrong way. Anyhow, this article continues to be about how the Church shouldn't censor writers).
Anyhow, this is what happens to my brain when it looks at thousands of articles in one week; it starts finding this sort of thing amusing.
Posted by Alexander Steven Wamboldt at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)
June 03, 2009
There's that whooshing sound of free-time escaping...
My days of having nothing to do (but what a nice four days they were) are very much over. I have started my work for the Arab-West Report, and the last three days have kind of been a blur as a result. Though to be fair, some of that might be the fact that it was 110 today.
Life at the Arab-West Report has been interesting. A small operation, the entirety of the Report is within one second floor apartment (although we're taking over the third). That said, a lot happens there. There are two main functions being served at any given time: first, the translation and summarization of Arabic Egyptian press articles each week that deal with religion, freedom of speech, government, corruption/wrongdoing, sectarian violence/conflict, discrimination, and perceptions of foreign events. Secondly, these same stories and editorials are analyzed, fact-checked, investigated, and researched for trends in coverage, bias, and tropes within their style for certain issues, which is then reported on. So, to use a rather random, but simple example, of a story I came across today from the spring of 2008 on a fatwa issued by a Sheikh of al-Azhar (the premier center for Sunni Islamic scholarship and religious decisions) that Muslims should keep their prayers during work to ten minutes. This column would have been translated by team one, and put into the Arab-West Report online ( http://www.arabwestreport.info ). Later on, someone looking into how, say, fatwas are treated in Egyptian media would then have flagged this story along with others on fatwas, probably interviewed journalists, editors, and sheikhs (ideally, the ones involved in the stories and others) about the issue, and checked relevant information (e.g. Egyptian law, the Qur'an, et cetera), and then compiled a paper with a title like, "The Coverage of Fatwas in the Egyptian Print Media in 2008," which would be added to the online Arab-West Report as well (again, http://www.arabwestreport.info ). In this process, my job has become the latter portion of the organization.
My specific research task at hand? I have been asked to work with the media coverage of Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church within the recent years (I have a huge amount of articles available, and will probably be putting some chronological cap on which I am using to reduce the amount). This can literally be as many as thirty articles per week, and I have at least twelve years available to me easily should I choose to use them. It is a phenomenal data set to be working with, and I have already been drawn into the interesting field of Egyptian papal reporting. At this point, I've mostly been familiarizing myself with the articles themselves (a task I imagine will take most of June, if not more as there are well into the thousands of them), before getting ready to schedule interviews with journalists, editors, Coptic bishops and priests, and laypeople (Copt and non-Copt). It is a sizable task, and I am incredibly excited to be working on it.
Just one more shameless free advertising space to the Arab-West Report – http://www.arabwestreport.info – seriously, I advise looking at the website. It is really interesting and there is a lot to look at there.
Posted by Alexander Steven Wamboldt at 01:23 PM | Comments (2)
