Haiku for Microbus Drivers

I am going to go out on a limb and presume that the haiku has essentially no currency here in Egypt. Nevertheless, I rationalize the lack of posts over the last month by providing this little poem to the microbus drivers of Cairo. Please note that a midan (pronounced "mee-dahn") is a square, or a large intersection. Not all haikus are 7-5-7, I admit most are 5-7-5. (I was recently told I had an "inverted" haiku.)



Pressing now into the fray
your crumpled cash hand
sorts traffic at the midan




Happy 2007 to all on the Roman calendar!

Pinochet Dies

The former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died on December 10. Here's an interesting obituary from National Public Radio, USA.

Greg Palast writes here on Pinochet and Milton Friedman, who also died recently.

No online reference to Pinochet can be complete without the obituary from the D.C.-based National Security Archive. There are some interesting tidbits here about US responsibility for Chile's "regime change." Rome wasn't burned in a day, you know. It took classified assessments and memos first, and fastidious denials later.

Fall Break in Cyprus

My friend Kavita's yawn became the stuff of postcard photography during this sunset in Agia Napa.


The ancient ruins of Apollo's Temple near Limassol. Cyprus also figures prominently in Greek mythology for being the place that Aphrodite emerged from the Sea.


Irish Car Bombing activity was reported at our table. Grimacing, I later decomissioned my glass.


A typical street in the old section of Nicosia at night.


The colors of streets were really wonderful in Cyprus. I liked the blue shutters I kept seeing, in this case in Larnaka.

Cyprus, the two governments and the EU



















Here are a couple of photos of the UN Green Line between the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" and the Greek-oriented "Republic of Cyprus." Crossing today is quite easy and they will stamp you in and out on a separate sheet of paper to ease your travel in other places. We visited a tiny little Turkish town near Nicosia, not knowing really what we were going to see there. After about half an hour of curiosity seeking among government housing developments, and modest commercial buildings and a coffee shop, we shrugged and returned to the more tourist-oriented Greek side. When we returned to our rental car, we realized we had parked near cement machine-gun fortifications, grown over with plants. They call it Cyprus coffee in the south, but you can imagine that they definitely call the muddy, thick espresso Turkish in the north.

This website for the capital Nicosia not surprisingly pushes political buttons by pronouncing Nicosia "The Last Divided City in Europe." Other signs of competing political claims are preseneted to tourists like myself, from newspapers, billboards, brochures, roadsigns and even maps themselves, pointing out the areas that are "under foreign occupation." A juice bar owner in Agia Napa, in the south, said that there was "nothing" to see in the north. He said, "I don't know about you, but when someone comes to my country, I only want to tell them to see what there is to be proud about. Save your time and stay in the Free State." A Greek Cypriot friend of mine had a sister advised me not to spend any money in the north that would undercut "the boycott." On the other hand, a Turkish-American friend has told me that the Turkish Cypriots are the victims of colonialism in this standoff and the EU is just using the Cyprus issue to marginalize Turkey.

Having spent almost all of our time on one half of an island, even though we did not get much of the Greek narrative down, we heard almost nothing of the Turkish one. And as I began to see in the past while living in Northern Ireland, I have to imagine there is a spectrum between the hard line opinions with a more complicated and interesting history that could be the basis for a shared future in a unified power-sharing arrangement. Easy for me to say, I know. Regardless of our interest in human rights and politics, Christian, Hania, Kavita and I were just basically hanging out on the beach, driving around, occasionally taking pictures of pretty things.

Thanksgiving in Sinai

Abdullahi An-Na'im on Shari'a Law

This week, Abdullahi An-Na'im came to AUC to deliver a few lectures. He points out some interesting possibilities in the political sphere for forwarding emancipatory religious and human rights agendas in the Muslim World. Far from being an advocate of a Bush/Rice vision for the Middle East (which could go unstated if only they'd stop invoking human rights), he criticizes both the imposed colonial discourse and the post-colonial Islamist discourse on these matters. Since I don't feel competent to sum up his work, I'll put a few links up.

Take a look at An-Na'im's project, The Future of Shari'a Law, and his own website at Emory University in Atlanta, USA, which features several downloads of his work.

An-Na'im left Sudan after his mentor, the Islamic reformer Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, was executed by the Sudanese government in 1985. You can read about the Republican Brothers and their interest in Shari'a reform, among other projects, in several places, including:

New Perspectives Quarterly
Alfikra - The Republican Thought
World Peoples' Blog
The Sudanese Thinker