I wrote an awesome post today, but I wasn’t sure if it was blog appropriate so I ran it by Josh before posting. My instincts were right. He thought it wasn’t fit for public consumption, so I guess it will have to marinate for a few years until it becomes part of Chartier family lore before sharing it publicly. I’m not saying that to tease, but so that you know I’m not slacking in my job.
So what can I talk about? How about famous Tahrir square? We could see the square from our hotel room and on April 6th there was a big demonstration. It looks like there were a lot of people, but these numbers are nothing compared to the million plus that sometimes gather there. We weren’t sure what was going on — Josh thought it might have been the April 6th Youth Movement (since it was April 6th), but it turned out to be a group a little more extreme than that.
We had plans to go to Maadi that day and meet up with friends. The only problem was that the Metro station is in the area of Tahrir square. Since we’ve been advised to stay away from all large gatherings of people, we ended up catching a cab to stay out of the fray.
It turns out that that was a good choice since the group that was in the square turned out to be supporters of a super conservative presidential candidate Abu Ismail. We’ve seen his face plastered all over cars and billboards downtown and I asked Josh if he was one of the Muslim Brotherhood guys and he replied, “He’s way more conservative than that — way, way right.” Who knew there were groups that were further right than the MB? I guess they don’t cover that stuff on TMZ. According to Josh, this guy thinks that all women should wear a veil/hijab. Awesome. That’s just what Egypt needs. Talk about tanking tourism . . . Ironically, Josh says they call themselves the Noor party which means “light.”
I found some articles online that were talking about the protest. Here’s a photo from that day on the square. These guys are all wearing cardstock masks of a Abu Ismail’s face. Creepy, huh? |
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| Photo credits (this and photo above): arabist.net |
His group also wears these stickers with this logo on them. It’s a hand with the thumb pointed down and the pointer finger stretched out — I’m not sure what it means, but it looks like it’s saying, “thumbs down with you.” Not the most welcoming looking logo.
When we got home from visiting friends we found out that the reason the group was in the square was because they were protesting their beloved candidate’s probable disqualification. Why was he being disqualified? Because according to Egyptian law, you can’t be president if either of your parents are citizens of another country and it was just discovered that dude’s mom was a dual citizen of Egypt/America. Oops. It’s pretty safe to say most of the people in that demonstration were not loving on America at that moment. It’s a good thing we steered clear.
Other than being a little nervous about being near Tahrir square (me, not Josh — I’m sure he’d want me to make that clear to you all), we didn’t encounter any anti-Americanism. Everyone was very friendly, wanted to know where we came from, and welcomed us to Egypt enthusiastically. Thankfully we’ve found that even if people don’t like America’s policies, they like us as Americans, especially all of our kids.