an example of egyptian code-switching
I overheard an interesting phrase on the bus today. Two girls were talking in Arabic about their course registration for next semester, and one said to the other:
“ba3d ma droppy”
This is an example of code-mixing, a linguistic phenomenon in which bilingual speakers mix the two languages they speak within the same phrase, unintentionally. I hear it often here at the American University of Cairo, for example, in phrases like “ana fi al-class delwa’ti,” which means “I’m in class now.” In this instance, an English noun, “class,” has been inserted into an otherwise completely Arabic phrase, complete with the definite article “al-” in front of the noun.
But in the first phrase (which translates as “after you drop…”), an interesting usage occurs. This is because the inserted English word (“drop”) is a verb, and thus according to the rules of Arabic grammar, needs to be conjugated for the 2nd person female (while in English the conjugation remains the same for all conjugations except the 3rd person). Instead of just inserting the word, conjugated in English, the speaker conjugates the English word according to Egyptian Arabic grammatical rules, suffixing the 2nd person feminine suffix “-y”. So “you drop” becomes “droppy” (in Arabic the pronouns can be left out).
It was a bit strange to hear, but English-Arabic code-mixing occurs frequently around campus, because all the Egyptian students are bilingual and speak a funny kind of Arabic, in which they use English for school, shopping, American pop-culture terms, and other banal phrases and Arabic for conjunctions, prepositions, and greetings. I term this the “campus dialect” or in Arabic, the “lahga AUCiyya.”
aqim salatak commercial
I have seen a commercial on television a few times now that doesn’t advertise a product or an upcoming film, or anything like that. Instead, it is a commercial advocating the Muslim prayer. Actually, as I’ve just recently found out, a series of commercials, broadcast on some major Arab channels. Here are links:
First Part – Second Part – Third Part
It goes something like this: there are three young men in a car, driving through an intersection. All of a sudden, another car slams into theirs. A huge crash. The camera zooms in on the face of one of the young men, unconscious and bloody. His voice, in the background, says: “this was my life.” Then, a new scene. The same young man and two friends are jet skiing near a beach somewhere, zooming around and stuff. In the distance, the call to prayer sounds. The other guy (not the young man in the accident) motions to his friend that he needs to go pray. His friend makes a joke about prayer. The second guy pulls his jet ski off to the beach, lays down his towel, and starts praying. There is randomly another dude in traditional white Arab dress (maybe an angel figure) just standing on the beach. As he sees the jet-skier start praying, a look of satisfaction comes over his face and he mouths the words alhamdu lilah “praise be to god.” Then the praying friend rejoins the first guy in jet skiing. Now, back to the crash. We see that the dead young man is the one who did not pray. The commercial ends with the words aqim salatak, i.e. “pray.”
I’m not aware if there commercials like this in the United States (there probably are, but I doubt on national television…actually international television, because this was on one of the multi-country Arab channels). But I don’t really like the fact that it exists. Let’s analyze why.
The first thing I noticed once the commercial finished was its most obvious, and in my view most disagreeable, point: that if you miss even one prayer (even if you pray fairly regularly, which the young man in the commercial may have done), you will die. You won’t die in a regular, old age, kind of way, because everyone does. Rather, you will die because of something that happens which god could have protected you from which he didn’t protect you from – such as a freak car accident. The implication that proceeds from this is that anyone who is not Muslim (whether Jewish, Christian, atheist, people-ist, or whatever) will thus lack protection and is at risk of bad things happening to them, such as death. I come from America where there are people of every religion and un-religion, and this message wouldn’t fly, at least on a national level, so perhaps my analysis is influenced by that fact and the fact that this is a majority Muslim country and that the commercial is broadcast in majority Muslim countries. But that really does not affect anything, if you think about it from any point of view other than a Muslim-superiorist one, because even a literalist and so-called fundamentalist Muslim who actually reads the Qur’an would read that any person of the so-called ahl al-kitab religions (Jews, Christians, and possibly some others) does not automatically die or whatever because they do not pray the Muslim prayer because they are not Muslim. That is relatively indisputable. So this commercial states that Muslims are better off, safety-wise, than non-Muslims.
The other point is that no matter what one is doing, any good Muslim would stop and pray at the appropriate time. Now, while all the prayers are assigned a recommended time, it is realistically not always possible to pray them at that time. So, Muslims are allowed to “make-up” the prayers by praying them at their convenience, or if possible, at one of the times assigned for extra prayers. The implication is that if you do not stop what you are doing to pray, then you are not a good Muslim, even if you do pray. So being a bad Muslim, you are therefore subject to the lack of divine protection from fatal car crashes that is also allotted to non-Muslims.
But the message of this commercial is, like stated above, not only to slack Muslims. It is, by extension, to non-Muslims as well. And as there are a considerable amount of them in Egypt (despite the mistaken belief of some Egyptians that there are not) and other Middle Eastern countries, the commercial goes against what we think of as freedom of religion by putting religious pressure on them. Which, while Egypt is officially an “Islamic country,” is a right guaranteed to all citizens.
folk etymologies
A lot of times, we never wonder about what names mean. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently, since no one ever translates Arabic names, even when it would make sense for them to be translated:
(where butagaaz means a gas cooker)
But other times when you do wonder, you get some funny results. According to my uncle, the name of the Libyan city of Ghadames is really two words: “ghadda” and “ams,” which together mean “yesterday’s lunch.” He said that in school, they used to make fun of the students from Ghadames because of that.
And there is a district near where I live called “Embaba,” which could just mean “my mother’s father.” Which is an interesting name for a city district, but not much more weird than, I suppose, “the Engineers” or “Door-Hearth.”
al-Ahly and al-Zamalek redux. guess who won? al-Ahly. was there a riot? most certainly.
Tonight the egyptian soccer club al-ahly won the African Club Cup or something like that. I do not really follow egyptian soccer, but the way home from school was extra crowded and people were extra honking their horns like mad tonight so I asked my uncle what was up. I had been on campus or else I would have noticed, like I did the last time, how the entire city stopped what it was doing to watch the final match.
Of course now al-Ahly will go play in the World Club Cup in Tokyo and lose to everybody, because despite soccer being more or less the national sport of Egypt and the street game of any kid anywhere, the Egyptian league is actually pretty bad.
But I was walking to a coffee shop to do a little reading, there were tons of people selling al-Ahly flags and banners and hats, scattered all throughout the streets and between lanes of traffic. Cars were honking like mad, driving all over the place because the had covered their windows with al-Ahly flags, and kids were hanging out of windows screaming. A mob on one of Mohandeseen’s main streets had acquired two camels from someplace, draped a huge, red al-Ahly flag over their humps, and painted their long necks in red with the words “al-Ahly”. Then they marched down the street leading their camels while screaming and making other hooligan-like noises. One of those unique sights you’d only see in Egypt, I suppose…
Quite over-celebratory if you ask me, because al-Ahly wins everything. If you cheer for al-Zamalek, which no one does, you automatically lose. Which is why no one does. But celebrating when al-Ahly wins is like living because you breathe air: a perfectly normal state of affairs. Perhaps the madness was because an egyptian team has advanced to the World Club Cup. I don’t know how long it has been since that happened, but probably not that long, because from what I’ve seen, the other national leagues in African countries are pretty bad, too.
Any excuse for a riot, I suppose, and at least rioting under the banner of a soccer club can get out some of the frustrated, pent-up riot juices that flow in the veins of middle and lower class Egyptians in a socially and legally safe environment without resulting in government police action
a bite of arab hospitality…
Most are familiar with the Arab and Bedouin reputation for hospitality, if at least from various fictional or eighteenth-century travel accounts and the like if not from experience. There is a saying “al-dayf, dayf allah,” meaning “the guest is the guest of god,” meaning to treat every guest as hospitably as possible. Which you might roughly translate as “force feed as much as possible.” This kind of thing is on my mind because today my uncle and I were invited to the house of another Libyan for dinner (which they called lunch, even though we did not finish eating until about 6pm). Among the seven of us there, we consumed an entire sheep. That is a lot. And that is because whenever someone’s plate became near empty, the host would pick up a huge chunk of meat and drop it on his plate. The recipient of this hospitality of course protested the entire time – which is the polite thing to do – and then ate the food whether he actually had more hunger or not. This happened to me more than the others because being the only younger person there, I am supposedly still growing and in need of more food than older people. That may theoretically biologically be true, but does not make it any easier to eat a whole sheep leg and shoulder by myself. Plus rice, plus ice cream and macadamia caramel cake, plus three glasses of tea and two of juice. This is why it is an Arab custom to take a huge nap after lunch (dinner). This may also be why nothing ever gets done by Arabs during the day. Thus the fasting month of Ramadan, in which it is made official that no one should do anything during the day, really just makes official what is already the case year-round.
In the spirit of the above, I want to post here an extended quote from a very interesting travel book that I am reading. Written by Ahmed Hassanein Bey, a high-up member of the Egyptian government during the 1920s and 30s, The Lost Oases covers his year-long journey through the Libyan and southwestern Egyptian deserts and his discovery of two oases at the corner of Egypt, Libya, and Sudan that had not been visited in many decades previous and had been thought ‘lost’.
“I realized to the full that day, the perils of Kufra. Rohlfs almost lost his life here by violence; I almost lost mine by kindness. I lunched prodigally at El Abid’s, as usual, and the meal was followed by coffee, three glasses of tea, with amber, rose-water and mint, and three glasses of milk enriched with almond pulp. Then Sharrufa insisted that I should come to his house, and offered me three glasses of perfumed tea, followed again by three glasses of almond-flavored milk. I reflected that to refuse was to offend, and gulped down the beverages, which, by now, had become somewhat nauseating. The end was not yet. Shams el Din hauled me off to his house and set before me biscuits and nuts and a huge glass of sweet syrup. It was almost more than flesh and blood could endure, but – to refuse was to offend. There followed three glasses of coffee, but I stalked forth with all the dignity of a man going to the gallows or the Spartan boy with the fox gnawing at his vitals.
As I lay down in my room to recuperate, many thoughts surged through my brain. Would that the Bedouin, whoever he was, who selected “three” as the mystic number to characterize desert hospitality, had died unborn! But it was lucky that he did not hit on seven instead of three. I came to the desert perfectly prepared for destruction by the hand of Nature or hostile men, but the idea of perishing through indigestion did not commend itself to my sense of the fitness of things.”
when in…egypt…
I was thinking the other day about things that someone who just arrived, or has only stayed for a short time, in Cairo would notice – things that I no longer concern myself with. This thinking was in part initiated by my friend John who noted, as we were drinking some “sobia” (coconut-sugar cane milk) at a juice shop, that a lot of newcomers to Egypt refuse to drink juice from these places for cleanliness reasons (despite the highly alluring looks of the fruit bundles hanging in the entrance). We agreed that such attitudes rob one of a great many “cultural” experiences, not to mention delicious juice.
In fact, juice shops are among the cleanest of “street-food” type places that one can find: they are cleaned almost continuously and the fruits are meticulously washed. But that is beside the point of this post. Well maybe it is not, really. Foreigners who are scared of those kind of things here need to get over it already! It is a complete waste of being here to not do (almost) all the things that a normal Egyptian would do. Such as ride the minibus.
Which I never did last summer. So this time around, I had not really intended to either, mostly because I don’t really know how to use the system and figure out where the buses go. Note that only some of the buses have actual labeled routes and actual bus stops. The rest have a little kid or a teenager hanging out the open door yelling the bus’s destination as it speeds by. You’ve got to wave it down and jump on while it slows down if you want to ride it. Good thing about it though: dirt cheap. I paid one pound to ride from Mohandeseen all the way to the Gardens of al-Azhar (which is probably a 15 mile ride and would cost 20 LE in a taxi).
I think a lot of people are scared of the autobus/minibus system, and rightfully so actually. They drive at breakneck speeds and careen down crowded streets, rapidly changing “lanes” (i.e. swerving around). They are definitely the biggest challenge to crossing any major street because of their speed and unpredictability. But once you’re on, it gets you where you’re going (extremely fast, obviously) and is ridiculously cheap.
More on this topic later as I think of things, I guess. Bottom line…use minibuses? It will reduce pollution in Cairo!! Although not at all noticeably, the only way to do that would be to remove all of the air and get new air.
