ISPAL

After going for a quick cold dip, we sat lounging on the beach in Sokhna, soaking up the deliciously warm sun. ‘Ain el-Sokhna is a coastal town along the Red Sea, separated from Sinai by the thin strip that is the Suez Gulf (خليج السويس). Around 1.5 hours away from Cairo, it is where many Cairenes go for short winter trips. Sina and Rawy were taking turns feeding crows and chasing them away. Ahmed, Mariam, and I were reading our respective books - a leisurely reading session speckled with tidbits of miscellaneous conversations. Cole was alternating between untangling the inevitable Sina-Rawy tangles and joining the conversation. Amina lay on a towel in the midst of us all.

Inevitably the topic of Gaza and Palestine came up. I’m not sure how it started, but at one point I was sharing how I stumbled on a Palestine protest back in October when I was in New York for a short visit. I was sitting on the steps of the New York Public Library that evening when I heard the distant sound of chants and walked towards it. A sea of Kuffiyehs. Without pause, I joined the chanting and was flooded with emotions. Free Free Palestine. Occupation is a crime. The only chant that gave me pause though was allahu akbar – God is Great.

That was the thing Mariam and I were discussing on the beach.

I tend to not join religious chants, especially the allahu akbar chant.  Mainly because I don’t feel it in my bones and it’s rather hard to chant or yell something that I’m not feeling. In general, I am not actually the protest type - whatever that means. My only point of reference is the 2011-2013 Egyptian revolution window before protesting was once again stifled in late 2013.  Although my distaste for Islamically-flavored chants was always there, I was probably more likely to timidly join these chants in the early days.  But that slowly and drastically changed solidifying into a more pronounced ideological aversion.  

The March 19^th 2011 constitutional referendum was the first time I experienced how the MB abused religion for political gains. Shortly after Mubarak stepped down on February 11^th, there was a split on the best plan moving forward. Almost everyone agreed that a new constitution was in order. One of the main sticking points though was when: should the new constitution be written first or should interim parliamentary and presidential elections be conducted first? A Yes vote would have meant elections first – the Islamist bloc plan of choice - while a No vote would have meant the constitution first – a position supported by the liberals. Although there was nothing religious about this divide, the Islamist bloc quickly packaged the Yes vote as a religious mandate (التصويت بنعم واجب شرعي) and labeled the whole affair as an invasion of the ballot boxes (غزوة الصناديق). I remember volunteering at the local mosque among other places and talking to anything with a pulse trying to refute the allegation that a No vote meant a No to Islam. It took a lot of energy to counter a claim that was almost effortlessly hatched by purposefully throwing religion into the mix. My dad too would spend the day talking to his patients at the clinic and we would wearily compare notes at the end of the day. We were both extremely naïve. The referendum passed with 77% voting Yes and the result being explicitly labeled as a win for religion (قالت الصناديق نعم للدين). To that supporters would chant in unison allahu akbar.  

The same religious blend strategy carried over in later elections. After the Islamist bloc won a majority of the seats in the November 2011 parliamentary elections and the MB candidate - Mohammed Morsi - won the May 2012 presidential elections, the same chants would dominate.  Later, when anti-MB protestors were met with pro-MB protestors, the latter would also chant allahu akbar to their faces. Like God was on their side but not ours. So I do not chant along with allahu akbar political chants.

Mariam disagreed. She liked the chant and wished it hadn’t been co-opted by the MB. Crucially, she thought the West solidified that co-optation by associating the chant with a particular brand of Islamist politics. And that we let that happen by not reclaiming the chant as our own. That gave me pause. On the one hand, it was a good reminder that even people who likely fell on the same side of the political spectrum could disagree on something like this. We’re not a monolith. Duh. On the other, it dredged up something else that I’ve recently been stumbling on.  I can sincerely chant allahu akbar and have it resonate with feeling, if I was saying it as part of the daybreak Eid prayers. But I can’t seem to do it as part of any political dissent. Why? Is it because the MB ruined it for me? Or because I recognize that Western culture associates it with an Islamist brand that I don’t want to be associated with? Am I internalizing a Western ethic or is this a stance that I can just claim as my own? Can it be both? This is a theme that I keep running into with all sorts of issues, ranging from preferring organic food to navigating Egyptian classism. It pushes me into this us-versus-them dichotomy that tends to short-circuit my thinking.

The conversation circled back to Palestine. Mariam is half-French and as she was sharing her own experience protesting in France, Cole asked her about what things were like in general in France vis-à-vis Palestine. She explained that although she hasn’t been to France since October, she thinks things are better than they are in the US and Germany. Her metric for that was her mom, who only consumes mainstream TV and seems to come out of it being sympathetic to Palestine.

Ahmed and I were sharing how we were both reading Edward Said. Though we likely read excerpts at college, for both of us this felt like the first time truly engaging Said’s work.  He wrote The Palestinian Experience right after the Naksa, or the 1967 Six-Day war where Israel pulverized a perceived military threat from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In addition to the 78% of historic Palestine that Israel was already occupying since the 1948 Nakba, after 1967 Israel occupied the Gaza strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai. This was the moment that spurred messianic Zionists to perceive the Israeli victory as a miracle and propelled them to commence building illegal settlements on Palestinian territories. In less than 10 years, around 11,000 Israeli settlers were residing in the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights. Today a little under 500,000 Israeli settlers reside in the West Bank alone. The effect of that war was devastating on many levels for both Palestine and the Arab world and this was the first time that I fully comprehended the implications of that. It was no longer just information I knew. I could feel the loss and trauma in my heart. In my bones.

As the conversation reached the fatalistic deadlock it ineluctably reaches, Amina suddenly and quietly asked as she lay on her sandy towel, “what happens if an Israeli man marries a Palestinian woman?” I looked at her, slightly surprised that she seemed to be following the conversation thread. “I’m not sure. We probably need more of that so people can start thinking of different ways out of the current situation”. Amina nodded as she readjusted from her back to her belly, “Like a stitch. They can begin adding another and another to make something new”. I was flabbergasted. And proud. Very proud of my 9-year-old’s insight. One not marred by an us-versus-them streak.

She sealed her nonchalant interjection declaring, “they can all just live together and call it something else. Like Is-Pal”.