Peace Kills (14 page)

In December 2001, the big hit from Egypt's pop singer of the moment, Shaaban Abdel-Rahim, was “Ana Bakrah Israel” (“I Hate Israel”). Abdel-Rahim claimed the cassette had sold 5 million copies. In a week's worth of
Egyptian Gazettes
, each edition only eight to twelve pages long, I counted fifty-eight articles involving Israel. The December 12, 2001, issue alone had five, three of them on the front page. One piece, on December 10, cited “rumors that Mossad agents have secretly hidden magnetic strips inside Cleopatra cigarettes.” The story noted that “strong electromagnetic fields are a health risk” and went on to mention “‘lethal' magnetic belt buckles, seen as an Israeli plot to make Egyptians sterile.”

The Egyptian Gazette
, which the
Lonely Planet
guide calls “Egypt's awful daily English-language newspaper,” is an anodyne (and anti-Osama) publication that turns up outside hotel room doors in the morning and is clearly meant to be read by foreigners, some of whom are likely to be Jewish. Much worse things are available from the Arab-language press, as is pointed out by the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, a pro-Israel organization that collects much worse things from the Arabic-language press.

According to MEMRI the following items appeared in the Egyptian government dailies
Al-Akhbar
and
Al-Ahram
from April to August 2001:

Mahmoud Muhammad Khadhr, a cleric from Cairo's Al-Azhar University, posed the rhetorical question “Did Hitler attack the Jews or did their crime deserve even more? … The Zionists were a fifth column in Germany, and they betrayed the country that hosted them.”

Dr. Mahmoud Al-Said Al-Kurdi stated, “The Talmud, the second holiest book for the Jews, determines that the ‘matzahs' of Atonement Day must be kneaded ‘with blood' from a non-Jew. The preference is for the blood of youths after raping them!”

And journalist Fahmi Huweidi described his feelings after a suicide bombing: “I cannot hide my happiness about the martyrdom operation that took place in Jerusalem last Thursday. I won't deny that it liberated me from the sorrow and misery that have overtaken me over the past weeks.”

Fouad Ajami's “narcotic of anti-Zionism” packs a punch.

And maybe so does poetic license. I mentioned that al Qaeda may have a Yeats. It may have worse than that. In
The Dream Palace of the Arabs
, Ajami explains that Arab society puts a great value on poetic expression—a 1950s-Smith-College-girl-with-her-head-in-the-oven value. In the March 10, 2002, New
York Times Book Review
, Judith Shulevitz wrote about Osama bin Laden's recitation of poetry on one of his videotapes (a poem plagiarized from Jordanian poet Yusuf Abu Hilalah). Shulevitz said that this recitation “would burnish bin Laden's reputation in a way that Americans might not readily understand, given the high premium placed in the Middle East on poetic eloquence, even in a political
leader.” And it is hard to imagine George W. Bush cribbing from Sylvia Plath in his post-September 11 address to the joint session of Congress:

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air
.

Ajami quotes the poet Nizar Qabbani, who said that the Arab is the “quintessential poetic being” and that poetry is “written on the forehead of every Arab.” Anyone who has had a similar experience of letting his words get ahead of his frontal lobes knows where this can lead. Maybe, in the calumnies of
Al-Akhbar
, there is a kinship to Plath's poem “Daddy,” in which she addressed her father: “Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—” Otto Plath was a Boston University professor of biology and an expert on bees.

Or maybe what we're hearing in
Al-Akhbar
is prosaic hate. But either way, the reality was that it had been almost thirty years since the last war between Egypt and Israel. Americans in my parents' generation were pretty mad at the Japs. They got over it. And by the 1970s they were driving Datsuns.

I flew to Luxor. Trying to understand a culture by being a tourist is famously useless. But trying to understand Egypt without being a tourist would be worse than useless. Egypt is the cradle of tourism. Herodotus was a tourist here in the fifth century
B.C
. And the First Dynasty of the pharaohs was as far removed in time from Herodotus as he is from us. Tourism was the source of history's original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek
and Roman vacationers in Egypt “never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.” Thus the concept of the “inscrutable Orient,” the idea of the “mysterious East.”

Luxor is the site of the ancient sacred city of Thebes, 419 miles upstream from Cairo. The Temple of Luxor is downtown, and nearby are the Colossi of Memnon, Karnak Temple, Hatshepsut's Temple, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, and the Ramesseum, with the gigantic shattered statue of Rameses II that inspired Shelley to write “Ozymandias.”

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and

despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck other than ticket

booths, soda-pop stands
,

souvenir stalls, dozing guards, and

200 men in galabias asking
,

“WhereyoufromYoubuypostcardokay?”

At the Sheraton Hotel in Luxor a few tourists were braving the geopolitics—some Europeans, a couple of Japanese, and a scattering of doughty American retirees of the type who can't get along without L.L. Bean boat bags. I heard a voice in the Sheraton bar saying, with a plummy English accent, “The reason I got fired …”

My guide in Luxor, Ibrahim, was one of those people—rare among tour guides—who are impelled to tell the truth. His description of the mummification process was sickening.
I asked Ibrahim about the war on terror. “Egyptians support America's actions in Afghanistan,” he said, and paused. “Most do. But I must tell you the truth, others do not. Maybe thirty percent do. I am Christian. All Christians support America's actions.” He paused again. “But maybe ninety percent of Egyptians are opposed.”

Luxor's tombs and temples were interesting—briefly. Ibrahim
would
recount the attributes, the ancestry, and the avatars of every mythological figure portrayed. He came to a brief, embarrassed halt only at Min, who is represented with a healthy erection. And so Min might well be represented, given the lissome and un-burka'd female deities on the tomb and temple walls. The ancient Egyptian pantheon seems to have read the Amazon.com best-seller
Look Great Naked
in an earlier edition.

But the mild thrill of anachronistic eroticism wears off, the gimmick of puppy-headed gods palls, and a satiety with ritual mumbo jumbo sets in. Too much Egyptian art in a day produces moods that go rapidly from Hobbit-jaded to childwizard-bored to the feeling of being in a vegetarian restaurant with a blind date who's talking feng shui. Ibrahim took me to just such a restaurant near the Valley of the Kings, although it became vegetarian, for me, only after Ibrahim suggested I look in the kitchen.

From the restaurant's terrace I could also look up and down the Nile. The land of Egypt is nearly seven hundred miles long and, for most of that distance, effectively about seven miles wide. How did this affect a culture? Did people try to make their lives long and narrow? The funerary monuments around Luxor are a huge pharaonic Keogh plan meant to fund an eternal hereafter just like the therebefore.

I could be wrong. What will be left of our civilization five thousand years hence? Probably the ruins of our interstate highway system. The tourists of some future age will wonder, as I wondered at the Valley of the Kings, “Why were these people so obsessed with where they were going instead of where they were?”

But our rest stops won't present the same opportunities for looting. (“A New Jersey Devils snow globe!”) All the ancient Egyptian tombs were robbed, many by contemporaries of the deceased. Even the famed trove of Tutankhamen was picked over not long after it was sealed. Suspicions arise of an inside job. A pharaoh's kids had motive, means, and opportunity. They'd been bilked of their inheritance, knew where the tomb was, and were paying the salaries of the guards.

“Didn't Grandpa have a set of solid-gold dinner plates just like this?”

“Finish your papyrus fries.”

Nowadays the tombs are well protected. And so are their visitors. After the 1997 terrorist attack at Hatshepsut's Temple, the corps of black-clad elite Tourist Police was expanded and given special training. I saw one of them sitting in a squad car with a Furby hanging from the rearview mirror.

The Tourist Police were present in force at the Karnak temple complex. Karnak covers almost as much ground as Disneyland. The Great Hypostyle Hall alone has space enough for a heck of an Ancient Egyptian Adventure ride—whizzing among the 134 gigantic stone pillars. Indeed, visitors once came to Karnak with a more Disney-fied attitude. In tintypes of nineteenth-century tourists, we see that there's
room for a hundred men to stand on the capital of one of these columns. This was the kind of culturally insensitive thing tourists used to do. Now they're herded into sound-and-light shows.

The Karnak
son et lumière
began with Wagnerian music and male and female recorded voices bouncing back and forth between widely separated speakers in the manner of sound-effects records from the early days of stereo. I forget what the female voice was pretending to be. The male voice was AmonRa—a Middle Kingdom syncretism of Ra, the sun deity, and a local goose god, the Great Cackler, who laid the cosmic egg.

The language of the performance was as poetic as anything that bin Laden was snapping his fingers to in the coffeehouses of the Shah-i-Kot Valley. “I am Amon-Ra,” said the male voice. “The waters of the Nile sprout from my sandals.” The
lumière
part consisted mostly of plunging us into darkness while we hung around in the supposedly spiritual ruins. Some of the tourists took flash photos of the opacity. “Yes, definitely spirits,” I heard one woman tourist say.

A Ramadan service was being broadcast over the loudspeaker of a mosque outside the Karnak walls. The
son et lumière
producers turned up their volume. The Muslim clerics turned up theirs. The producers responded in kind. So did the clerics.

If the pious Muslims had had Ibrahim translating the
son et lumière
into Arabic, there might have been more than a war of words. “I am the father of fathers, mother of mothers,” announced Amon-Ra very loudly indeed. “… the salvation of Amon, the salvation of Ra, also the salvation of the crocodile, offered equally to all the compass points of earth and to you, new pilgrim to Thebes.”

I was reminded of nothing so much as my dad in a fez, headed out for a night with the boys. Dad was a Thirty-second Degree Freemason and a member of the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. It's hard to imagine a worse case of cultural misunderstanding than the cultures of Egypt and Arabia represented by Dad on a midget motorcycle in the Fourth of July parade. Or maybe Dad knew more than I thought. During the late nineteenth century Egypt's King Tawfiq was a member of a Masonic lodge, as were many of Egypt's reform-minded liberal elite.

The next night I visited the Temple of Luxor, mercifully in silence. Luxor was consecrated to the “Thebean Triad”: Amon-Ra; his earth-mother consort, Mut; and their moongod kid, Khonsu. The temple was constructed about 1300
B.C
. and restored by Alexander the Great, who built a new sanctuary for Amon-Ra. “In the wrong place,” said Ibrahim. “Properly it should be in the last room of the temple, not here in the antechamber.” Alexander's sanctuary stands just inside the antechamber's original walls. One set of hieroglyphs and reliefs was carved a thousand years later than the other.

“You see the difference,” said Ibrahim.

I didn't. There is a supposed dynamism to ancient Egyptian art. According to Cyril Aldred, “It is often possible for the expert to date a specimen to within a few years by its stylistic features alone.” So the expert says. But the ancient Egyptian language, Aldred himself points out, “has no genuine active tense.” He notes that the ancient Egyptians did not adjust their calendar with the addition of an extra day every four years. They just let it slide for a millennium and a half until it got back into phase. When it came to art, I think the ancient Egyptians had a look going and decided to hang with it for three thousand years.

“Notice how the quality of decoration degenerated,” Ibrahim said. An important part of cultural understanding is to understand that not all cultures progress.

Ibrahim and I went across the street and had dinner at McDonald's, where the quality of decoration had degenerated much further.

To mark the December 2001 hundredth anniversary of the Nobel Prize, Francis Crick, Nadine Gordimer, and José Saramago “in consultation with an extensive group of Nobel prize winners”—as the press release put it—issued a call to
do
something. The statement was signed by 103 Nobel laureates. It is printed in full below, with parenthetical exegesis by someone too dumb to ever get a Nobel, or even a MacArthur genius grant.

The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed.

(According to Nobel statement coordinator John C. Polanyi [Chemistry Prize 1986], the laureates' pronouncement
was written before September 11. Don't rely on tips from Nobel laureates to win the Super Bowl office pool. And “irrational” is an interesting word choice. Aren't Nobel Prize winners supposed to understand how rationalization works? Maybe they mean “bad.”)