Cape Town to Cairo to Beirut in 2 weeks

NINETY-SIX South Africans in search of something interesting and sacred uncovered the lure of the Orient. We were on an educational tour of five important Middle Eastern cities from June 29 to July 12. On our journey by bus we touched treasures in Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.

I looked for the presence of the Empire in the Middle East. What struck me first was that I am also, in a sense, an occupier. Being Muslim looking critically at Americans and Israelis in the Middle East does not mean that I am of the people in the Middle East. I am also an alien to their land. Even as a Muslim, I am still non-Arab, non-Arabic speaking, a non-resident and an outsider. I am the outsider looking in, asking questions and probing their lives. They did not invite me to do that. I took the liberty.

So it is my own Orientalism that took me into the streets and lives of the indigenous peoples of Cairo, Sinai, Sharm el Sheikh, Amman, Jerusalem, Damascus and Beirut. It is my own Orientalism that I needed to acknowledge in observing the life of the Arabs.

Two things seem characteristic of life in the Middle East. First, the Orientalism of the west is visible in the paintings and drawings in the corridors of almost every hotel we visited. These paintings, rows of them decorating long passages, evoke a nostalgia of a past showing Islam and Arabs as sensual, irrational and wild. The scenes are very often of European encounters with the Orient, the civilised European meeting the uncivilised Muslim. The Orient, according to Said, is projected in these paintings as a threat that needs to be contained.

Second, the military is visibly present in the streets of every country we visited. Tanks and armed soldiers are part of the urban landscape. They seem not to mar, but to merge with Arab life. Occupied Palestine is different. Israeli soldiers overshadow Palestinian police wherever the latter is permitted to function in occupied territory. The occupier concedes to the occupied a convenient token of power to rein in their own people. Parallels with the labels "good nigger" come to mind. Do the Palestinians have an equivalent?

In Cairo, Hosni Mubarak's military regime fears the threat within. Their immigration intelligence interrogated a member of our tour group, Mohamed Hussein Jassat, for eight hours. His record on file reflected that in 1991 he had met members of the Tabligh Jamaat in Egypt. He was shocked to learn that he had been photographed at that time. When he enquired where they got their information from they said: "Your government."

The eight-hour wait in two tour buses at Cairo International Airport after an eight-hour flight from Johannesburg weighed heavily on the travel-weary passengers, some of whom were old and many of whom traveled as families with young children.

However, Abie Dawjee, the South African leader of the tour group (and a fine model of edutainment), herded the "unwashed lot" to their first stop: a guided tour of the Citadel of Salahuddin Ayyubi and the Muhammad Ali Pasha Mosque. The tour guide seemed eager to teach us the basics of Islam, as if he were speaking to non-Muslims. Yet, there seemed to be an indifference or ignorance of the ethics of modesty in a place of worship. Male tourists in skimpy summer wear were sprawled on the carpet while the women were issued standard robes to conform with the requirements of hijab.

That evening, while the tour group dined on the Nile and shopped at Khan el-Kahlili bazaar I walked the streets of Cairo. Tahrir Square, which is a large public square in the middle of Cairo, is within walking distance from the Shepheard's (sic) Hotel.

Family life in the heart of Cairo is very much a public affair. What we normally consider private time after work, like enjoying a meal with the family, playing with the children or just relaxing with loved ones, happens openly in Tahrir Square. Ball games and family meetings thrive on the lawns. Women in hijab and women without hijab are relaxed and unconstrained in the public space. Old men smoking, young couples walking and children at play are commonplace. But two remarkably contrasting qualities about street life in Cairo remain etched in my mind: the absence of the blatant sordidness of the sex capitals of the world and the manifest presence of armed soldiers and military hardware on the streets.

The seven-and-a-half hour journey from Cairo to Sharm el Sheikh took us from Africa to Asia via the Suez Canal and across the Sinai desert. We crossed the continents via the 1.63km-long Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel under the canal. It connects the town of Suez on the African mainland to the Asian Sinai Peninsula.

Two air-conditioned buses rolling through the sweltering heat of a desert in the Middle Eastern summer seemed surreal. No buildings, just a vast, dry expanse of sand, rock and hills. The one sign of humanity in the desert is a scar: the tarred 400km-long road flanked by unsightly mounds of construction debris wasted decades ago. Another sign is the steel pylons carrying electrical power to Sharm el-Sheikh. A road of tar and towers of steel intrude with stark contrast into the astonishing beauty of the distant mountains glowing in the desert sun. It is in this hostile beauty of a barren landscape that the presence of history and divine revelation are impressed upon the consciousness of the believer. This is the land of the prophets, the barren earth that nurtured the legacy of belief in one God.

We stopped at a place called the Well of Musa. To be continued.

The writer is a Cape Town media activist.

The Brunei Times