khyungbird (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} khyungbird) wrote,@ 2008-03-18 00:07:00 |
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Egypt: May 12, 2007
We woke up incredibly early, long before dawn. Jake and I had chosen to go on the optional jaunt to Abu Simbel, far to the south, several hours’ bus ride away. Abu Simbel is an archaeological site which, like Philae, was once submerged by Lake Nasser, the lake created in the 1970s by the damming of the Nile. Before the Aswan dam, the southern Nile Valley was apparently a deep ravine beneath sheltering cliffs; now, after the dam, the Nile broadens into a great lake with cliffs forming its barren, rocky sides. Above the cliffs stretches a seemingly endless desert; blue water meeting tan-colored sand, with almost no vegetation in between. We were so far south that I had almost expected to see some plant life or chaparral, here near the borders of the Sudan; but the Sahara desert extends well beyond Egypt’s southern borders.
It was a long and uncomfortable bus ride, with me curled up trying to sleep with the Koran for a pillow as the sun rose, and I drank the last of my bottled water early on. My stomach hurt from not sleeping enough. When I got to Abu Simbel -- the tourist site being apparently the only inhabited place for miles around -- I was grouchy and thirsty. There is only one place to buy drinks in Abu Simbel, and the cokes and bottled waters were 15 pounds, or about $3, triple what they went for back in Aswan. Out of sheer stubborn stinginess, I foolishly decided not to buy any water. I joined the rest of our party as they ambled along the edge of the cliffs, towards the massive statues of Abu Simbel -- after the Sphinx and the Pyramids, possibly the biggest icons of Egypt. The statues were incredibly impressive, but between my stomachache and my slowly growing thirst, I found myself sitting in the shade of the trees rather than giving them my full attention. I watched some passing cats hiss at eachother and arch their backs. Interestingly, as we left Abu Simbel, I saw what appeared to be a massive tour boat moored in the lake at the base of the sheer cliff 100 feet below. Obviously it was unoccupied, but how long had it been there? Did anyone actually pay to float around Lake Nasser’s Riverworld-like barrenness, or had the tour boat been stranded there since the dam was built?
ABU SIMBEL (Photos)
Back on the bus, with a dry throat and more Koran-reading. I was reading the 1861 translation by J.M. Rodwell, a Western churchman who threw in the occasional dismissive footnote, but mostly did a respectful, sonorous job with the text, from what I can tell. Carl Gustav Horn, who had lived in the Middle East when he was young was the first person I knew who had read the Koran (of course, Carl is deeply versed in religion, having read the Bible, the Koran and tons of Jack Chick comics). For myself, most of my previous knowledge of Islam, and Christianity for that matter, came from Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God, which laid out the basics of Jewish, Muslim and Christian history and the different fundamentalist movements associated with them. It’s an excellent book, but when reading it in early 2002, I couldn’t help but feel that Armstrong’s 2000 conclusion -- “the extremists are getting weaker” -- was outdated. George Bush was in office, fundamentalist Christians were having a blast all around the U.S., and fundamentalist Islam had come back from third place to punch the decadent West in the nose. As someone who went to college during the Clinton years, I had been stupidly unprepared for the right-wing shift of the Bush years, and in particular for the rise of religion. As a longtime atheist and science-fiction nerd, I had always assumed condescendingly -- oh so condescendingly -- that religion would eventually (1) die out, (2) get pacifistic and fuzzy, or (3) be relegated to the status of weird fringe cults about which “smart” people would chuckle and shake their heads, like in Transmetropolitan. The Left Behind books, Mel Gibson, partial-birth abortion bans, and 9/11 were proving me wrong. (For that matter, I hope Patrick Farley finishes his Left Behind parody, Apocamon.) I had never had the slightest interest in religion, but by 2004-2005 I was starting to feel I better pay attention to it, because it was playing a much bigger part in the modern world than I previously thought it would.
I felt a certain caution, however, since I have always been extremely gullible deep down. When I was a little kid I believed anything. ANYTHING. Christianity, astrology, magic, aliens, the Tarot, if I touched the crooked tree on the playground I would turn into a monster overnight -- you name it. At some point around junior high my willingness to believe anything flipped a switch and turned into a wary atheism, but at the core I basically have a primitive pre-scientific comprehension of the universe and I just stick with materialism to keep things simple and because I’m sick of arrogant Wiccans telling me they can use “magic” when they can’t even throw a 5d6 fireball... but I’m not exactly jumping for joy at the thought of oblivion upon death. In fact, I’ll keep my fingers crossed about that one. Only the realization that whatever happens upon death, “it happens to everybody” keeps it bearable. But what if there REALLY WERE certain people who went to Heaven, or retained their existence, and everyone else went to Hell or was wiped out? Oh man! That would be totally lame if you missed out! (Of course, if you are one of the lucky few going to Heaven, I don’t say this wishing to drag you down to join me in destruction just out of spite-- on the contrary! Be yourself! Enjoy!) But at my core, like the doomed protagonist of Brian Caldwell’s Christian end-of-the-world novel We All Fall Down, I have a certain sense of pride and contrariness, a certain romantic “rage against the dying of the light” sensibility, which tells me that I’d rather stick to my guns. And besides, if humanity exists to glorify and obey some other force, rather than carving out existence on its own terms -- well, that sucks so much I won’t even dignify it with a reaction. But I am still gullible and insecure and thirsty for immortality if I can get it somehow -- if James BeauSeigneur’s imaginative big-budget science fiction Book of Revelations novels The Christ Clone Trilogy can make me think “Whoa, this is way better written than Left Behind! Nice try at converting me, James BeauSeigneur! You ALMOST had me!” then obviously I’m still 6 years old on the playground at heart. I had been reading ancient Greek and Roman and Egyptian and Mesopotamian histories for some time now, so on one level, I was just branching out into the monotheistic ancient cultures... but on another level, my goal was to read both the Koran and the Bible (which I still haven’t read, I’ll get around to it eventually, man I was a terrible Episcopalian) without converting and turning incredibly right-wing like Dave Sim. COULD I DO IT?? BTW, did I mention that Scott Bennie’s “Testament” is an excellent role-playing game supplement?
So in short, in 2007, I had sort of settled down about my 2003-2005 Christian fundamentalist freakout, and I was getting interested and wary about the other big fundamentalism that, in the words of Berkeley Breathed, is sweeping the planet: Islam. Most Muslims draw their faith heavily from the Hadith, the oral tradition regarding the deeds of the prophet Muhammad, but the Koran itself is just a record of the actual sermons delivered by Muhammad (which he himself supposedly received from the Angel Gabriel), and it’s a pretty simple and to-the-point book. (To a casual reader like myself, that is -- I’ve been told there’s lots of esoteric readings if you look for them.) Being a series of sermons (the word Koran means “recitation”), the Koran isn’t primarily concerned with telling a historical narrative, like most of the Bible; it’s concerned with explaining the faith, why it’s legit, and why you should convert to it. (In fact, a lot of the stories in the Koran are stories from the Bible, such as the story of Moses and Pharaoh, or Sodom and Gomorrah.) Mainly, the Koran is full of in some cases remarkably modern-sounding, reasonable arguments to use against atheists and pagans and naysayers. What, you say you’re worshiping these idols because it’s a tradition, because your ancestors worshiped them? YOUR ANCESTORS WERE IDIOTS! IF YOUR ANCESTORS JUMPED OFF A BRIDGE, WOULD YOU DO IT TOO? THE IDOLS ARE JUST SOME THINGS PEOPLE CARVED, YOUR GODS DON’T EXIST! Or, maybe you’re wondering what happened to all the people who lived and died before they had the chance to hear the teachings of the true religion? Look, don’t worry about it -- there’s nothing you can do about it -- if God had wanted them to convert, they would have converted. For that matter, if God wants you to convert, you’ll convert -- and if you absolutely don’t want to, well, we’ll never agree, so let’s not bother arguing... “you to your religion and I to mine.” The Koran also doesn’t have any particularly hard-to-believe prophecies about the future, like the Book of Revelations, with its dragons, demon armies, false prophets, whores with “cups of fornication”, multiple-eyed lambs, etc. Instead, it mostly confines its predictions to two things: (1) the world will end eventually and (2) sometime before that happens, the Muslims are gonna spread all over the world and totally be the #1 religion! Lastly, of course, the Koran presents Islam not as a “new” religion, but as the true original form of the religion of the ancient Biblical prophet Abraham, and it states that all the really holy people in the Bible, including Jesus, were in fact Muslims -- the word Muslims just means “those who submit (to the will of God),” after all. So in short, with the exception of repeating over and over this one story about these guys who hamstrung a she-camel, the Koran is a very well-put-together package.
On that note, from reading the Koran, there are two main things that I don’t like about Islam (not counting the obvious infamous parts about virgin brides, etc.):
(1) the fact that women are officially relegated to second-class status (about which more later... though it’s worth mentioning that I’ve heard that pre-Islamic culture in the region was even more sexist, and it might just be a case of the prejudices of the time enshrined in stone, as it were)
(2) the same thing I dislike about most religions -- the general dissing of all kinds of speculation or imagination about religion, and the dissing of human endeavor in general. The anti-humanism, I suppose. According to the Koran, there’s nothing worse than making up things about God (this wording makes it sound like schoolyard rumors -- “You know, I heard that God’s mother always packs him a peanut butter sandwich”). Of course, this is an element of most faiths -- the truth is not negotiable or embellishable. Then in the Koran there’s the disapproval of representational art, specifically sculptures, which pre-Islamic Mecca was so famous for. God doesn’t like idols or statues, after all, and Islam (like Christianity at points in its history) has a strong iconoclastic tradition. But for myself, I love art, and I love fiction and fabrication. I was reminded of the scene in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce when the artist turns away from Heaven, because he can’t accept the fact that in Heaven and God, there is a beauty that he can’t capture or surpass with his individual creations. He can not, will not, recognize that his own status as a “creator” is ultimately inferior. It must have been frustrating.
So there I was reading the Koran and feeling very proud of myself for being all cultured. At the same time, I was starting to feel really sick -- a strange sickness in my head, a tiredness. By the time we arrived in Aswan I felt pretty bad -- I had minor heatstroke, or heat exhaustion, from my foolish refusal to drink any water at Abu Simbel. Luckily the next leg of our journey was totally easy. After joining our companions who had been chilling in Aswan all day while we rode to Abu Simbel, we went down to the banks of the river, split up and climbed aboard a pair of feluccas. As the boats set off, we lay on mattresses under a shady sail for a cruise down the Nile.
ON THE FELUCCA (Photos)
I myself sat in a lump in the shade, barely able to move. I was separated from Jake, who took the other boat, but I played some card games with some of my fellow tourists. The pilots of the felucca were Nubians, who did all the work while we sat there; at one point when the steering didn’t seem particularly onerous, someone invited the pilot to play cards, but he declined. The boat ambled slowly, ever so slowly, along the green banks of the Nile. Virtually every spot of fertile land was cultivated, but the countryside didn’t seem crowded; we rarely saw people on the banks. Instead, we saw water birds in the shallows. I found myself wondering how much the Nile rose during the inundation, and then wondering again how much *more* it had rose in the past, before the Aswan Dam had been built. The Aswan dam allowed the water level of the Nile to be controlled, preventing the droughts and floods that had plagued Egypt before, but it also trapped most of the fertile silt which came downstream from central Africa. Even now, Lake Nasser was ever so slowly filling with silt, burying the sunken ghost towns, tombs and temples which had not been moved (like Abu Simbel and the Philae temple) when the lake was built. What would it be like to dive in those waters in search of some underwater temple?
The boat stopped near a bridge so people could clamber onto land and pee in the bushes, and then we continued north, mooring in some out-of-the-way place around sunset. The pilots made a fire of dried palm fronds near the water’s edge, and after dinner everyone goofed off and sang and danced again, a little more unforcedly than the previous night, I thought. At some point I climbed up a dune to the border of the desert and, lying back in the sand, fall asleep. When I woke up the party had died down and I went back to the boat and huddled under the blankets under the stars.
We woke up incredibly early, long before dawn. Jake and I had chosen to go on the optional jaunt to Abu Simbel, far to the south, several hours’ bus ride away. Abu Simbel is an archaeological site which, like Philae, was once submerged by Lake Nasser, the lake created in the 1970s by the damming of the Nile. Before the Aswan dam, the southern Nile Valley was apparently a deep ravine beneath sheltering cliffs; now, after the dam, the Nile broadens into a great lake with cliffs forming its barren, rocky sides. Above the cliffs stretches a seemingly endless desert; blue water meeting tan-colored sand, with almost no vegetation in between. We were so far south that I had almost expected to see some plant life or chaparral, here near the borders of the Sudan; but the Sahara desert extends well beyond Egypt’s southern borders.
It was a long and uncomfortable bus ride, with me curled up trying to sleep with the Koran for a pillow as the sun rose, and I drank the last of my bottled water early on. My stomach hurt from not sleeping enough. When I got to Abu Simbel -- the tourist site being apparently the only inhabited place for miles around -- I was grouchy and thirsty. There is only one place to buy drinks in Abu Simbel, and the cokes and bottled waters were 15 pounds, or about $3, triple what they went for back in Aswan. Out of sheer stubborn stinginess, I foolishly decided not to buy any water. I joined the rest of our party as they ambled along the edge of the cliffs, towards the massive statues of Abu Simbel -- after the Sphinx and the Pyramids, possibly the biggest icons of Egypt. The statues were incredibly impressive, but between my stomachache and my slowly growing thirst, I found myself sitting in the shade of the trees rather than giving them my full attention. I watched some passing cats hiss at eachother and arch their backs. Interestingly, as we left Abu Simbel, I saw what appeared to be a massive tour boat moored in the lake at the base of the sheer cliff 100 feet below. Obviously it was unoccupied, but how long had it been there? Did anyone actually pay to float around Lake Nasser’s Riverworld-like barrenness, or had the tour boat been stranded there since the dam was built?
ABU SIMBEL (Photos)
Back on the bus, with a dry throat and more Koran-reading. I was reading the 1861 translation by J.M. Rodwell, a Western churchman who threw in the occasional dismissive footnote, but mostly did a respectful, sonorous job with the text, from what I can tell. Carl Gustav Horn, who had lived in the Middle East when he was young was the first person I knew who had read the Koran (of course, Carl is deeply versed in religion, having read the Bible, the Koran and tons of Jack Chick comics). For myself, most of my previous knowledge of Islam, and Christianity for that matter, came from Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God, which laid out the basics of Jewish, Muslim and Christian history and the different fundamentalist movements associated with them. It’s an excellent book, but when reading it in early 2002, I couldn’t help but feel that Armstrong’s 2000 conclusion -- “the extremists are getting weaker” -- was outdated. George Bush was in office, fundamentalist Christians were having a blast all around the U.S., and fundamentalist Islam had come back from third place to punch the decadent West in the nose. As someone who went to college during the Clinton years, I had been stupidly unprepared for the right-wing shift of the Bush years, and in particular for the rise of religion. As a longtime atheist and science-fiction nerd, I had always assumed condescendingly -- oh so condescendingly -- that religion would eventually (1) die out, (2) get pacifistic and fuzzy, or (3) be relegated to the status of weird fringe cults about which “smart” people would chuckle and shake their heads, like in Transmetropolitan. The Left Behind books, Mel Gibson, partial-birth abortion bans, and 9/11 were proving me wrong. (For that matter, I hope Patrick Farley finishes his Left Behind parody, Apocamon.) I had never had the slightest interest in religion, but by 2004-2005 I was starting to feel I better pay attention to it, because it was playing a much bigger part in the modern world than I previously thought it would.
I felt a certain caution, however, since I have always been extremely gullible deep down. When I was a little kid I believed anything. ANYTHING. Christianity, astrology, magic, aliens, the Tarot, if I touched the crooked tree on the playground I would turn into a monster overnight -- you name it. At some point around junior high my willingness to believe anything flipped a switch and turned into a wary atheism, but at the core I basically have a primitive pre-scientific comprehension of the universe and I just stick with materialism to keep things simple and because I’m sick of arrogant Wiccans telling me they can use “magic” when they can’t even throw a 5d6 fireball... but I’m not exactly jumping for joy at the thought of oblivion upon death. In fact, I’ll keep my fingers crossed about that one. Only the realization that whatever happens upon death, “it happens to everybody” keeps it bearable. But what if there REALLY WERE certain people who went to Heaven, or retained their existence, and everyone else went to Hell or was wiped out? Oh man! That would be totally lame if you missed out! (Of course, if you are one of the lucky few going to Heaven, I don’t say this wishing to drag you down to join me in destruction just out of spite-- on the contrary! Be yourself! Enjoy!) But at my core, like the doomed protagonist of Brian Caldwell’s Christian end-of-the-world novel We All Fall Down, I have a certain sense of pride and contrariness, a certain romantic “rage against the dying of the light” sensibility, which tells me that I’d rather stick to my guns. And besides, if humanity exists to glorify and obey some other force, rather than carving out existence on its own terms -- well, that sucks so much I won’t even dignify it with a reaction. But I am still gullible and insecure and thirsty for immortality if I can get it somehow -- if James BeauSeigneur’s imaginative big-budget science fiction Book of Revelations novels The Christ Clone Trilogy can make me think “Whoa, this is way better written than Left Behind! Nice try at converting me, James BeauSeigneur! You ALMOST had me!” then obviously I’m still 6 years old on the playground at heart. I had been reading ancient Greek and Roman and Egyptian and Mesopotamian histories for some time now, so on one level, I was just branching out into the monotheistic ancient cultures... but on another level, my goal was to read both the Koran and the Bible (which I still haven’t read, I’ll get around to it eventually, man I was a terrible Episcopalian) without converting and turning incredibly right-wing like Dave Sim. COULD I DO IT?? BTW, did I mention that Scott Bennie’s “Testament” is an excellent role-playing game supplement?
So in short, in 2007, I had sort of settled down about my 2003-2005 Christian fundamentalist freakout, and I was getting interested and wary about the other big fundamentalism that, in the words of Berkeley Breathed, is sweeping the planet: Islam. Most Muslims draw their faith heavily from the Hadith, the oral tradition regarding the deeds of the prophet Muhammad, but the Koran itself is just a record of the actual sermons delivered by Muhammad (which he himself supposedly received from the Angel Gabriel), and it’s a pretty simple and to-the-point book. (To a casual reader like myself, that is -- I’ve been told there’s lots of esoteric readings if you look for them.) Being a series of sermons (the word Koran means “recitation”), the Koran isn’t primarily concerned with telling a historical narrative, like most of the Bible; it’s concerned with explaining the faith, why it’s legit, and why you should convert to it. (In fact, a lot of the stories in the Koran are stories from the Bible, such as the story of Moses and Pharaoh, or Sodom and Gomorrah.) Mainly, the Koran is full of in some cases remarkably modern-sounding, reasonable arguments to use against atheists and pagans and naysayers. What, you say you’re worshiping these idols because it’s a tradition, because your ancestors worshiped them? YOUR ANCESTORS WERE IDIOTS! IF YOUR ANCESTORS JUMPED OFF A BRIDGE, WOULD YOU DO IT TOO? THE IDOLS ARE JUST SOME THINGS PEOPLE CARVED, YOUR GODS DON’T EXIST! Or, maybe you’re wondering what happened to all the people who lived and died before they had the chance to hear the teachings of the true religion? Look, don’t worry about it -- there’s nothing you can do about it -- if God had wanted them to convert, they would have converted. For that matter, if God wants you to convert, you’ll convert -- and if you absolutely don’t want to, well, we’ll never agree, so let’s not bother arguing... “you to your religion and I to mine.” The Koran also doesn’t have any particularly hard-to-believe prophecies about the future, like the Book of Revelations, with its dragons, demon armies, false prophets, whores with “cups of fornication”, multiple-eyed lambs, etc. Instead, it mostly confines its predictions to two things: (1) the world will end eventually and (2) sometime before that happens, the Muslims are gonna spread all over the world and totally be the #1 religion! Lastly, of course, the Koran presents Islam not as a “new” religion, but as the true original form of the religion of the ancient Biblical prophet Abraham, and it states that all the really holy people in the Bible, including Jesus, were in fact Muslims -- the word Muslims just means “those who submit (to the will of God),” after all. So in short, with the exception of repeating over and over this one story about these guys who hamstrung a she-camel, the Koran is a very well-put-together package.
On that note, from reading the Koran, there are two main things that I don’t like about Islam (not counting the obvious infamous parts about virgin brides, etc.):
(1) the fact that women are officially relegated to second-class status (about which more later... though it’s worth mentioning that I’ve heard that pre-Islamic culture in the region was even more sexist, and it might just be a case of the prejudices of the time enshrined in stone, as it were)
(2) the same thing I dislike about most religions -- the general dissing of all kinds of speculation or imagination about religion, and the dissing of human endeavor in general. The anti-humanism, I suppose. According to the Koran, there’s nothing worse than making up things about God (this wording makes it sound like schoolyard rumors -- “You know, I heard that God’s mother always packs him a peanut butter sandwich”). Of course, this is an element of most faiths -- the truth is not negotiable or embellishable. Then in the Koran there’s the disapproval of representational art, specifically sculptures, which pre-Islamic Mecca was so famous for. God doesn’t like idols or statues, after all, and Islam (like Christianity at points in its history) has a strong iconoclastic tradition. But for myself, I love art, and I love fiction and fabrication. I was reminded of the scene in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce when the artist turns away from Heaven, because he can’t accept the fact that in Heaven and God, there is a beauty that he can’t capture or surpass with his individual creations. He can not, will not, recognize that his own status as a “creator” is ultimately inferior. It must have been frustrating.
So there I was reading the Koran and feeling very proud of myself for being all cultured. At the same time, I was starting to feel really sick -- a strange sickness in my head, a tiredness. By the time we arrived in Aswan I felt pretty bad -- I had minor heatstroke, or heat exhaustion, from my foolish refusal to drink any water at Abu Simbel. Luckily the next leg of our journey was totally easy. After joining our companions who had been chilling in Aswan all day while we rode to Abu Simbel, we went down to the banks of the river, split up and climbed aboard a pair of feluccas. As the boats set off, we lay on mattresses under a shady sail for a cruise down the Nile.
ON THE FELUCCA (Photos)
I myself sat in a lump in the shade, barely able to move. I was separated from Jake, who took the other boat, but I played some card games with some of my fellow tourists. The pilots of the felucca were Nubians, who did all the work while we sat there; at one point when the steering didn’t seem particularly onerous, someone invited the pilot to play cards, but he declined. The boat ambled slowly, ever so slowly, along the green banks of the Nile. Virtually every spot of fertile land was cultivated, but the countryside didn’t seem crowded; we rarely saw people on the banks. Instead, we saw water birds in the shallows. I found myself wondering how much the Nile rose during the inundation, and then wondering again how much *more* it had rose in the past, before the Aswan Dam had been built. The Aswan dam allowed the water level of the Nile to be controlled, preventing the droughts and floods that had plagued Egypt before, but it also trapped most of the fertile silt which came downstream from central Africa. Even now, Lake Nasser was ever so slowly filling with silt, burying the sunken ghost towns, tombs and temples which had not been moved (like Abu Simbel and the Philae temple) when the lake was built. What would it be like to dive in those waters in search of some underwater temple?
The boat stopped near a bridge so people could clamber onto land and pee in the bushes, and then we continued north, mooring in some out-of-the-way place around sunset. The pilots made a fire of dried palm fronds near the water’s edge, and after dinner everyone goofed off and sang and danced again, a little more unforcedly than the previous night, I thought. At some point I climbed up a dune to the border of the desert and, lying back in the sand, fall asleep. When I woke up the party had died down and I went back to the boat and huddled under the blankets under the stars.
