Egyptian Scribbles: metro

Sunday, 21 October 2007

Cairo Metro

The metro in Cairo was a wonderfully pleasant surprise – it beats London and New York for cleanliness and speed. And it only costs 1 Egyptian pound (around 10 pence in the UK..) What made the ride so pleasant was the fact that there is a women’s-only carriage at the front of the train. Finally I could stare at people to my heart’s content and not get immediately propositioned for sex…!! What a great thirty minutes of freedom!
The carriage was full of women and children dressed in all sorts of colours and to various degrees of conservatism. There were women dressed from head to toe in black, with sheets of material covering their whole body, with only a small slit for the eyes. These women even wear gloves… they made me feel extra hot as I stood in my trousers and shirt and felt beads of sweat trickling down my back.
The majority of women, however, were in a regular hijab – a headscarf that covers all the hair and frames the face. Some of these scarves were bright, decorated in sequins and small beads. Others were very plain and somber. The majority of younger women wearing the niqab had on jeans and tight tops—though the sleeves almost uniformly went to the wrist (a favourite style is a long-sleeved top with a little tank top over the top). The older women, however, tended to be wearing loose tops and long ground-length skirts.
One woman in particular stood out: a strikingly-beautiful young woman in an aquamarine scarf draped only loosely around her head. She was much darker than the other women and almost certainly wasn’t Egyptian. Her hair was in tight braids and her silver jewelry shone against her skin. Egypt is full of refugees fleeing from the numerous civil wars further south in Africa. The majority of cleaners hired by Westerners seem to be from African countries south of Egypt: Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Eritrea (see AMERA, an NGO working in Cairo with refugees, link on the RHS of this blog). I wondered about her story and whether she felt as much of a foreigner as I did, standing amongst chattering families and schoolchildren trying to finish their homework.
Generally, I think it will be hard to meet Egyptian women. Everywhere I go, there are crowds of men, but very few women. But I had so many questions I wanted to ask the women on that carriage: How do they deal with the aggressive Egyptian men? How do they feel when they are covered beneath so many layers of hot material? What do they think when they look at me with my t-shirt and uncovered head? What do they think of President Mubarak? If they had one wish, what would it be?

Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."