A Few Conversations

I had a number of things that I wanted to write about, but I had to keep putting it off because posting always takes at least an hour and I havn't been able to sit down and write non-school things in a while. Unfortunately, at the moment I can't remember all of them.


One of my teachers had a few interesting things to say about the majority of students at AUC. Somehow we had gotten on the topic of monthly salaries in Egypt. In America, one would associated the professions of doctor, lawyer, or engineer with high salaries or a comfortable lifestyle. In Egypt, this is not the case. A doctor employed at a goverment hospital might make 500 LE a month, whereas a doctor employed in private practice could make a couple thousand pounds per month. Whether one gets work in a goverment institution or in private practice depends on one's connections. This brought our conversation around to the Egyptian students at AUC. AUC costs around 10,000 USD per semester, a pretty average tution by American private university standards, but extremely steep by Egyptian standards. Obviously, the Egyptians attending AUC are the wealthiest of the wealthy. My teacher nearly went so far as to say that they weren't actually Egyptians. According to her, they had all been raised abroad or lived in westernized enclaves such that they may as well have been raised abroad anyway. They did not live the lives every-day Egyptians. Moreover, this elite class has the connections necessary to obtain the best jobs in Egypt. Hard work and success in school does not ensure financial stability; one needs the connections that accompany the wealthy and the socially elite, and thus the reason everyone wants to come to America. I hate sounding like and uber-patriot, blindly extolling the virtures of America, but at the end of the day it is one of the few countries in the world where dedication and hard work can result in success; where success is not a matter of connections and the having the means to bribe the right people.

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My philosophy teacher is routinely 10-15 mintues late for class, so some of the students in my class have begun to sit and talk in the sun near the benches outside the classroom door so that we don't have to waste time sitting inside the classroom waiting. Last time, our pre-class conversation took an intersting turn when one my classmates, an aspriring documentarian, began discussing a documentary he was trying to make on Islam. He had a simple premise: he would interview people at Al-Azhar, the epicenter of Sunni Islamic learning, and ask "what is jihad?" The problem was that conducting interviews was a major was no simple process. The government made him jump through hoops in order to obtain the interviews; he had to file forms, submit his interview questions in advance, and encountered other such inconveniences. But the most interesting part was that once he was able to pose this question, he never got the same answer. He said there was not supposed to be room for varying personal interpretations of this concept, and yet no one could define it the same way.

Another of his observations dealt with the state of Islam in Egypt today. He felt that it was growing ever more into a cult of personality around Muhammed, turning towards worship of the prophet and not of God. He cited the prohibition ofnrepresentations of Muhammed as a rule that was supposed to prevent the ulama from worshiping the prophet.

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We have many interesting conversation at St. Andrew's, especially with Dambik and Madit. They are from the Dinka tribe of southern Sudan, and they are 19 and 18 years old, respectively. It was interesting to learn that many sub-Saharan Africans do not consider Egyptians to be African. Rather, they are Middle Eastern or Arab. This makes Sudan an especially interesting country since it has sizeable populations of both black Africans and Arabs. This same point was brought out again during last night's African League football match between Egypt and Zambia. Many sub-Saharan countries root against Egypt, no matter who is playing them, and Algeria receives even more boos than Egypt.