Muslim Ramadan Reading and A Tale of Two Cities
When you get to be fifty you have the realization that there are more Ramadan fasts in the rearview mirror than those to look forward to. This means that every Ramadan should be savored, and this is especially the case in America, where our community involvement typically plummets (and most often, our observance), after the month.
An Instagram post on Ramadan has me thinking. Ramadan in Egypt: A Sacred Month or Capitalist Spectacle? I think this poses some serious questions, and not just for Egyptians. The release of Ramadan television serials, night markets, iftar tents, and the popular “Suhur fests” in big American metros catering to young affluent American suburbanites. A lot of socializing, fun, gluttony, and, in the case of Birmingham (UK), apparently a lot of street brawling too. Money is being made, but where is the scaredness and worship? Or is the goal “Ramadan Vibes” for social media content and making money?
A friend sent me an interesting piece from Anthropology News. Cairo Between Dystopia and Umm al-Dunya by L.M. Aybar. The writer documents political repression in Egypt, including state collusion with Chinese and Russian authorities and others, the general political situation in Egypt, and the lack of interest American (and other) international students of al-Azhar University seem to have in the society around them. Aybar presents this as the students seeing Cairo as essentially an Islamic museum piece that is stuck in time and not the dynamic modern metro that it actually is. In this, the students are totally separate from Egyptian society and its problems and typically don’t have friendships with locals. Aybar also noted that, while they ignored Egyptian politics, the neo-trads mixed with were obsessed with partisan bickering with Salafis and often resorted to outdated War on Terror talking points.
I certainly think there is a lot of validity to the points Aybar makes. International students, whether they be from the West, Southeast Asia, the former Soviet Union, or wherever, come to Al Azhar to study. That is the primary purpose of their stay. They develop an idealized version of Cairo in their minds that is rooted in notions of Islamic piety. This is no different than international students at the Islamic University of Madinah and Umm al-Qura in Saudi Arabia. In the midst of this students also become strident and opinionated. At the beginning of the Arab Spring, I remarked that American Salafis in Cairo must be perplexed by the internet outages they awakened to. This is because many don’t watch the news or keep up with current events and defer to the ulama in such matters. Like their Neo-Trad (Akh-Right) competitors, quietist Salafis typically opposed uprisings and movements for social change.
I will counter with the argument with this. These students aren’t that much different from American college students at elite universities. Kids study at Washington University for years and leave with very little knowledge of St. Louis, experience with local politics, and friendships with natives. The same can be said at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Brown, the University of Chicago, and many other urban campuses littered with BLM and “In This Home” signs as the university simultaneously operates as a hedge fund and real estate developer expanding the geographic footprint to remove anyone these signs signal allyship with. There is also the reality that, while some of these students may have beliefs aligning with the authoritarianism of the local government, and this may be influenced by their respective sheikhs, and I would argue there should be localized understandings and not the universalization of Western concepts, these students are there to study. They aren’t there to participate in local politics. Egyptian political movements are for Egyptians. The heavy hand of the West has already been delivered by the US State Department, Pentagon, and NGOs spreading progressive social values (often USAID funded). I would argue that international religious students, who are typically poor, don’t need to get in on the act. But, as humans, they should also experience the full Cairo and attempt to see the city as locals do. I always attempt to interact with locals as much as possible wherever I travel. Cairo is a special city, Egypt is a special place, and I would imagine one could get intoxicated with the beauty of Al-Azhar and the cocoon it provides.
A Tale of Two Cities
The New York Times ran a piece, How Has New York Remade Itself Since the Pandemic Arrived? The answer? The wealthy have returned, the rich have gotten richer, the city continues the shed lower and middle-class households, and households with children, the Black population continues to decline, and the wealthy are served by a rapidly growing immigrant population living and working in poverty. Reminds me a lot of the themes discussed in We Were Never Woke by Musa al-Gharbi. These issues are increasingly common in American cities.
Jacob Barker in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch authored a piece on immigration and population growth in the St. Louis metro. He noted that the metro experienced a very modest growth in population (lower than all other peer cities) and this was due to immigration. Barker referenced efforts to attract refugees from Afghanistan and Central America. The fear is that the immigration policies of the Trump Administration may harm the effort to attract more immigrants, and the region will begin shrinking as the city already has been for decades (and St. Louis County previously was). From my experience, two issues are at play in St. Louis City. Gentrification, the conversion of multi-families into single-family dwellings, and the proliferation of luxury apartments means that immigrants have fewer housing options in the city than was once the case. This is especially true of families with children because such dwellings are largely designed for people without kids. Secondly, once immigrants are established, they tend to leave the city either for St. Louis County or other metros. The reasons most often given for these moves are crime and the low quality of the public schools. Therefore, I actually think St. Louis County and St. Charles County, which are generally more attractive to immigrant families, have more to lose.