ARAB SPRING. The current issue of Poets and Writers (March/April 2013) has a fascinating article by Stephen Morison about the Arab Spring ("The Revolution"). He begins (and ends) with an interview with Karam Youssef, who runs a bookstore in a suburb just south of Cairo. She and her husband participated in the events of the 2011 Arab Spring, the protests in Tahrir Square which caused the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Interviewing other writers, he sees optimism, even after the more current events.
In 1985, my husband, his mother and I took a tour of Israel and Egypt, which was an unforgetable experience. Arriving in Tel Aviv, I was first startled at the number of armed security personnel. Then again, when we crossed the border into Egypt, we were made aware of the precarious relationship between the two countries. The Israeli tour guides sent us across the border unaccompanied, to meet the Egyptian tour guides on our own. Eqypt was totally unexpected. We experienced the "modernity" of Cairo and then the Egyptian past at Luxor. What most impressed me was the memorial to Sadat, the "Empty Pyramid" I called it in the poem that appears in Flame Dancer (2011). That poem ends on a very optimistic note, one that seemed unjustified when in the next few years, tourists were gunned down at one of the very sites we had visited. So it is with great interest that I read Morison's article.
He discusses a number of Egyptian authors, only one of whom I have read: Naquib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988. He was a victim of a personal attach by the fundamentalist Islamists, because of his westernized views.
What will happen now under President Morsi is still a work in progress. But Karam Youssef remains hopeful, in spite of the tendencies of the Brotherhood. "This country cannot be ruled by Muslins," she says. "We willl not be Saudi. We will lnot be Pakistan. We have a big diversity." That is the note on which Morison's article ends, quoting Youssef: "We will accomplish our revolution no matter how long it takes." I applaud her optimism.
In 1985, my husband, his mother and I took a tour of Israel and Egypt, which was an unforgetable experience. Arriving in Tel Aviv, I was first startled at the number of armed security personnel. Then again, when we crossed the border into Egypt, we were made aware of the precarious relationship between the two countries. The Israeli tour guides sent us across the border unaccompanied, to meet the Egyptian tour guides on our own. Eqypt was totally unexpected. We experienced the "modernity" of Cairo and then the Egyptian past at Luxor. What most impressed me was the memorial to Sadat, the "Empty Pyramid" I called it in the poem that appears in Flame Dancer (2011). That poem ends on a very optimistic note, one that seemed unjustified when in the next few years, tourists were gunned down at one of the very sites we had visited. So it is with great interest that I read Morison's article.
He discusses a number of Egyptian authors, only one of whom I have read: Naquib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988. He was a victim of a personal attach by the fundamentalist Islamists, because of his westernized views.
What will happen now under President Morsi is still a work in progress. But Karam Youssef remains hopeful, in spite of the tendencies of the Brotherhood. "This country cannot be ruled by Muslins," she says. "We willl not be Saudi. We will lnot be Pakistan. We have a big diversity." That is the note on which Morison's article ends, quoting Youssef: "We will accomplish our revolution no matter how long it takes." I applaud her optimism.
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