AUC is a bizarre place that epitomizes the wealth of Cairo in many ways. Cairo does not gentrify in the way other cities do. Take DC, for example. Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant were once the "scary" part of town that no one dared to go to. All it took was a few college kids or yuppies, not to mention a major shopping center or two, to make it a major residential area that exemplifies the way wealth typically enters new areas. Cairo differs from this model greatly. When a new wealthy class develops, instead of finding a part of town like Imbaba or Bulaq where poverty runs rampant (though violence is low across Cairo) and redeveloping it, they move to entirely new districts created by the state. New Cairo and Rehab are stellar examples of the trend.
I take a bus every morning at 7:25 AM to school for my 8:30 class. As I drive out of the city, I take a highway that passes most of the old recognizable mosques in Cairo, namely Masjid Husayn (which, while it is a Sunni mosque, it supposedly holds the head of Imam Husayn, "chief martyr" of the Shi'i faith) and past the cramped streets of Old Cairo. At the edge of the city is nothing but desert for several kilometers until the bus reaches New Cairo. In a few years, the Mubarak regime hopes this will be a major residential area for the city's stratospherically wealthy. As of now, the skyline is dominated by cranes and construction is presumably proceeding at a rapid pace, though I drive out there too early to really tell if anything is going on (after the US credit bubble popped, much construction in Egypt halted entirely). The neighborhood is dominated by wide streets, homogeneous buildings, and posh subdivisions, all of which are a rarity in a city developed before the car and the only "subdivision" was a military district. Even more striking is AUC itself, which dominates nearly half of the currently existing region. While certainly enormous, it is typified more by its student body than anything else.
AUC is an island into itself. All students are required to be able to speak English (though some classes are in Arabic), and most students have developed that skill via education in international schools. Its distance from the city is a decent analogy for the detachment of the campus from the rest of Egypt. It feels like a different world. A school with American-value tuition and where a student in anything other than a Ralph Lauren polo is bizarre in a country where a third of the citizens live on less than two dollars a day. People at AU love to complain about how yuppy its student population is given how social justice-y they are, but that disconnect doesn't have real-world consequences in the way it does in Egypt. In my Egyptian government course, two of the Egyptian students were commenting on how they feel as though they are not governed by Egyptians and have no choice in the matter. I wonder how if these students, who have everything their country can possibly afford, can feel alienated from the state, what must the typical Egyptian feel?
I am living in a country that was not ruled by native Egyptians from Alexander the Great until the Free Officers Revolt in 1952. When you think about it, the country went as follows: the Pharaohs (numerous dynasties, many of which were foreign), Alexander, Ptolemy, Rome, the Byzantines, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Mamluks (Bahr and Burj), Ottomans, Muhammad Ali (Albanian) and his successors, the British and their pseudo-independence, and now military rule. Even under Egyptian rulers, native Egyptians have had no say in the way their country was governed. Egyptians have developed entire parallel institutions that make them wholly independent of the government. As I said earlier, Egyptians go hungry, but do not starve. They litter, but zabbalin pick it up. Traffic makes no sense, but no one drinks and drives. It works, so no one cares that their government will never represent them. It is tragic that Egyptians have felt this way for so long that at this point such feelings are an expectation, not an exception. Apathy has become an institution into itself that is replicated from generation to generation. Skepticism of state authority is so ingrained that I have no idea how many free and fair elections it would take to get anyone to believe their vote mattered.
No comments:
Post a Comment