Theodore May's Notebook:

Put a ring on it? How about more clothes?

The billboards are everywhere throughout Egypt’s capital. “Beyonce’s I Am…,” they read. America’s pop sensation stands amidst the lettering, a tank top, doubling as the front fender of a motorcycle, tight around her upper body.

“Are you going to Beyonce?” It’s a question I’ve been asked countless times in the past weeks, as the diva prepares to take the stage tonight at the Red Sea resort of Port Ghalib.

I, sadly, will not be in attendance. Nor, it would seem, will the Muslim Brotherhood.

Members of Egypt’s top Islamist party, and largest opposition group, have blasted the government in recent weeks for allowing Beyonce to take the stage in Egypt.

Hamdi Hassan, a Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarian, bashed the event, calling it a “sex party” in a widely distributed letter.

Hassan, along with other members of his party and the public, are using the event to question the government’s commitment to Islam by allowing the show to go on.

And this isn’t Beyonce’s first run in with Islamists. The singer was scheduled to perform a show in Malaysia late last month, which she cancelled at the last minute in the face of growing criticism by Muslims there.

This time, though, Beyonce seems determined to press ahead, with promises from the Egyptian government that security will be tightly managed.

The Muslim Brotherhood has experienced a dramatic rise in popularity in recent years, capturing an unprecedented 20 percent of seats in parliament in elections earlier this decade.

The popular shift towards the Islamists has sent the government scrambling to outflank the conservatives over the past few year. The government has taken a more aggressive stance in banning cultural fare that might be viewed as licentious by its 90 percent Muslim population.

But the government, it would seem, has made an exception for Beyonce.

While countries like the U.A.E. have hosted big names from the western music scene — with Coldplay, Aerosmith, and Beyonce, among others, playing there in the last few months alone —most American acts have left Egypt off their itineraries altogether.

In 1978, The Grateful Dead played 3 iconic concerts in front of the pyramids. After the last show, the band paraded back to the hotel in an entourage of 50 camels and horses, according to Rolling Stone.

Of course, there was no threat that Jerry Garcia would strap on a tank top for the encores.
 

Egypt: The other World Cup host

Rio may be getting all the buzz in the world of soccer this week, but don’t forget about Egypt. The group round of the FIFA Under-20 World Cup, hosted by Egypt, is drawing to a close. And much to the delight of Egyptians, their national team is advancing thanks to a stunning win over Italy on Thursday night.

The event’s success so far is, no doubt, a feather in the cap of the Middle East’s most populous nation, which seems eager to prove it can host a major international sporting event.

President Hosni Mubarak, flanked by other top government officials, presided over the opening ceremonies and victory by Egypt over Trinidad and Tobego in Alexandria.

Advertising for the tournament, it seems, is everywhere. Egypt’s coach, Miroslav Soukup (featured in Jon Jensen’s recent piece on air quality in Egypt), has been featured in several Egyptian TV commercials; Coca Cola billboards with the team’s top players are ubiquitous; and Cairo’s streets empty each time Egypt plays, as Egyptians huddle around TV sets to watch their beloved Pharaohs.

Even the iconic sphinx has gotten a makeover, with tournament organizers replacing its long lost nose on the tournament’s logo.

The Egyptians have played each match to sold out stadiums of fans, their faces painted with the Egyptian red, white and black.

The scene at a cafe during game time, though, is far from the image of drunk, brawling fans we’re used to seeing from European soccer fans.

Last week I took in Egypt’s game against Paraguay from a small cafe in the Giza neighborhood of Mohandiseen.

As I took my seat near the massive projection screen the cafe, one skeptical fan nearby asked me if I was rooting for Paraguay. No, I said, the only team I’d root for over Egypt is the U.S. He looked delighted.

As during a soccer game anywhere in the world, my cafe was jammed with a hundred backseat coaches.

Egypt’s star player, Mohamed Talaat, was having an off night and the fans missed no opportunity to throw up their hands and question why Talaat couldn’t convert any of the shots his midfielders set up for him.

Speaking of backseat coaching, Soukup’s translator has proved one of the most colorful figures in Egypt’s bid to bring home the cup. Soukup, a Czech, who began working with the under-20 national team earlier this year, doesn’t speak any Arabic, so the team provided him with a translator who seems glued to his boss’ side.

When Soukup gets out of his seat at the end of Egypt’s bench, the translator follows. When the coach stands on the sideline, yelling and gesticulating at his team on the field, the translator yells too, closely mimicking Soukup’s gestures. It makes for great television.

Whenever Egypt missed an opportunity to score, my cafe rang out with the usual screams of “Allah!” (“God!”) or “Haram Aleik!” (“Shame on you!”).

Egypt lost the Paraguay game in heartbreaking fashion. The Pharaohs tied the game at 1-1 just before the half. The second 45 minutes lacked any real momentum for either side until Paraguay knocked in the game winner well into injury time.

The situation looked dire for Egypt, which had to win its final game of the group round against Italy—largely considered to be the strongest team in the group—to advance.

Walking back from assignment Thursday night through Garbage City, a neighborhood populated by Egypt’s garbage collectors, recyclers, and mountains of trash, I saw the cafes along the narrow dirt road again packed with spectators.

Egypt went on to win 4-2, vaulting the hosts into the round of 16.

While the Egyptians have rallied around their country’s host status — stadiums for matches between premier teams have boasted decent attendance — the energy here is clearly directed at the Pharaohs, who have yet to disappoint their adoring fans with a dull match.

Win or lose, though, Egypt has embraced this tournament and taken it as an opportunity to demonstrate the kind patriotism that Egypt has been so famous for historically.

Cairo’s black cloud: The back story

As I write this, peering up the Nile, a thin grayish haze has taken permanent residence over Africa’s largest city.

It is the start of rice burning season.

Video producer Jon Jensen put together a terrific video that’s running today on GlobalPost about Egypt’s black cloud, which is due to linger for the next two months.

I did some of the reporting with Jon and figured I’d give you more of the back story.

This is the 10th year of the black cloud over Cairo, which began as a result of rice straw burning in the Delta colliding with a change in meteorological conditions.

Taking in a little soccer

The black cloud coincides with the start of the FIFA Under-20 World Cup, being contested on fields around the country. The event has become the source of much national chest-beating for Egyptians.

For our first bit of reporting, Jon and I headed to the massive Cairo Stadium, where the Egyptian under-20 team was challenging the Venezuelan team in a warm up match.

Although entry was free, there were probably only 100 spectators at the match, and we sipped tea from primo seats. We’d been promised player interviews afterwards. It should also be noted that these impartial journalists were rooting vigorously for Egypt, with the idea that the players would be more apt to talk if they were riding high from a win.

We weren’t allowed to film during the match because, team officials explained, there was a fear of spying.

At the end of the match (Egypt won 2-1), we made it onto the pitch, talking our way around the burly stadium manager, whose primary job, it seemed, was to protect the integrity of the grass.

We managed to chat briefly with Mohammad Talaat, the team’s star, before the stadium managers began shutting off the lights. Fearful we’d soon be plunged into total darkness, Jon managed to capture some killer footage, in an eerie half-light, of Talaat kicking around a ball.

Talaat was soon whisked away to his waiting bus and, our interview unfinished, we were told to stop by the team’s hotel for a press availability in the morning.

Of course, there was no press event. And the team was slated to catch a morning bus to Alexandria.

So we decided to get into the business of wake-up calls. Knocking on Talaat’s door for minutes at a time, we weren’t able to awake this apparently deep sleeper.

Frustrated, we waited in the lobby.

Soon, though, the players began to emerge. We grabbed the coach for a quick chat and finally got in our conversation with Mohammad Talaat as team minders paced impatiently, eager to herd him onto the idling bus.

But it was with the coach and Talaat that the story began to take a turn. We set out to cover how much pollution (and the black cloud in particular) affects Cairo residents. The science was there. We needed the voices.

But Egyptians have a tradition of what might be called a maalish culture, maalish being the all purpose Arabic word for no big deal.

Starting with the coach and Talaat, we found Egyptian after Egyptian unconcerned about the poor state of air quality.

So our story took a turn.

A Chat with the Government

We took our investigation to the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency. We got an appointment with Ahmad Abou Elseoud, the government’s air quality guru.

Abou Elseoud admitted to us that Egypt did suffer from an air quality problem, but when presented with scientific evidence from the World Bank that Cairo ranks as the worst city for particulate matter, he delivered the real shocker.

“What you are seeing is based on rumors. That Cairo is a polluted city,” he said.

The government, it seemed, was willing to admit that things weren’t great, but it wasn’t about to endorse the most damning evidence.

Immediately after, we took our cameras to the National Research Council, the massive government-sponsored research center.

Academics, we figured, would give us the real picture.

We chatted with one researcher, who suggested up front that there was some daylight between his findings and the government line.

But as soon as the camera came out, he clammed up. We got nothing. And he didn’t make it into the story.

It took Jon heading out to the American University in Cairo for a professor, not beholden to the state, to open up about the air quality crisis.

A Reality Gap

Jon spent hours interviewing people around town. Bouncing from one neighborhood to another, he chatted with a number of regular Egyptians, many of whom said the same thing: that they were not worried about air quality.

Jon also had a moment that ranks high on the irony scale. He drove to the top of the Moukkatam cliffs that tower over Cairo on the east. His aim was to shoot the pollution over the city.

Arriving at sunrise, he waited for his shot. But it never came. The pollution was so bad that he was never able to get a clear enough shot to record video.

This story, which took two weeks to complete, took so many twists and turns that we spent days shooting and interviewing before our angle began to emerge.

The only constant throughout this process was that the black cloud was coming.

Jon and I were up in the Nile Delta on Wednesday working on a different story. It seemed that around every turn, farmers were burning their fields. The scene seemed to oddly validate the work we’d been doing.

Egyptian candidate for UNESCO top job loses out to Bulgarian

Egypt’s controversial culture minister, Farouk Hosni, has lost his bid to lead Unesco, earning 27 votes to Bulgarian Irina Bokova’s 31.

The vote comes as a major upset since Hosni was the early frontrunner for the post, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had launched a major diplomatic campaign in support of Hosni. Media reported that the Egyptians had been confident they had the number of votes needed, 30, to end the campaign after one round of voting.

As GlobalPost reported last week, Hosni’s candidacy ran into serious trouble when reports surfaced that he had told an Islamist lawmaker in Egypt that he would burn Israeli books if he found any on the shelves of Egypt’s libraries.

But Egypt’s diplomatic push for Hosni was so determined, that the Israeli government later announced it would not oppose Hosni’s candidacy.

Though it garnered less international attention than the Israeli book comment, the minister’s legacy of censorship domestically drove Egyptian intellectuals to speak out loudly against him.

The voting that took place in Paris late Tuesday marked the fifth round of ballots, the most that Unesco rules allow. The field had started with nine candidates, who gradually dropped out as the rounds progressed.

While losing, Hosni still had a strong showing in his attempt to become the first Arab to lead Unesco. He earned 23 votes after the first round, more than twice his next nearest competitor, according to media in Paris.

Many commentators had said that many countries had only pledged to vote for Egypt in the first round, leading to speculation that Hosni could suffer as a result. But he won 24 votes in the second round and 25 in the third, inching closer to the 30 he needed.

The fourth round of voting, conducted Monday, resulted in both Hosni and Bokova winning 29 votes, an even split of the 58 voting delegates. Commentators have said that Bokova was able to pick up votes as other European contenders dropped out, leaving the European delegates to rally around her.

The 24 hours between votes were fraught with allegations of bribery attempts, though it was unclear which side was being accused.

In the day before the last vote, Bokova was able to sway two delegates, but it was unclear which two because the voting is conducted by secret ballot.

Farouk Hosni has long been considered one of Egypt’s cagiest politicians. He is the country’s longest serving cabinet minister, having held onto the post for 22 years.

This is remarkable because Mubarak is known to appoint and fire people in the upper reaches of the government in a way that will insure his own political survival. For one thing, Mubarak has never appointed a vice president, making him the first president of the republic not to do so. This way, many say, nobody can challenge his hold on the presidency.

The president has also been known to remove cabinet ministers he things have strayed from under his shadow. Sometimes he scraps the cabinet entirely, and rumors in the local press are growing that he will do so again later this year.

It is in this political atmosphere that Hosni’s longevity at the culture post seems so remarkable.

Egypt, which boasts a robust rumor mill, has churned out a conspiratorial account of why Mubarak pushed Hosni’s candidacy for culture minister so hard.

As one member of the opposition put it, Suzanne Mubarak is dying to get her hands on a Nobel Peace Prize. With Hosni in Paris, the theory goes, the Mubaraks would have a full time lobby in place.

That said, there is little more interesting and less trustworthy than the Egyptian rumor circuit.

What Israeli warships in the Suez mean for Iranian nuclear ambitions

American op-ed pages have been littered for months with recommendations to U.S. and Israeli policymakers over what to do with the Iranian nuclear problem.

Allow me to catch you up on some of the latest. Marvin G. Weibaum, penning a piece for World Politics Review, argues for working to take the military option off the table. John R. Bolton recently said in The Washington Post that Israel should bite the bullet and hit Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Time’s Joe Klein, meanwhile, has advocated a policy of wait-and-see. These examples but represent the range of punditry on one of the world’s most explosive issues.

With all the chatter, though, about what the west should do over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, one piece of news that has gone under-reported in the west this month gives insight into what Israel may do.

Two Israeli warships and an Israeli submarine have, in the last month, passed through the Suez Canal, bringing the Jewish state’s military apparatus within striking distance of the Shia state. This isn’t the first time that the Israeli navy has teamed up with Egypt to send some of its naval fleet through the waterway. Rather, this piece of news is remarkable because it’s the first time Israel seems to be publicizing it. Egyptian and Israeli officials alike have spoken to the press, emphatically confirming that the operation had taken place.

Israel has long been in a quandary over the logistics of a possible strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. To pull off an air strike, Israel would have to get permission from allies to use their airspace. Near the end of his administration, then-President George W. Bush reportedly denied an Israeli request to fly over Iraq.

Then there was chatter that Israel’s best chance would be to get permission from the Turks. But that, too, never seemed to get off the ground.

Instead, Israel launched a series of well-publicized military exercises in which it rehearsed in-air refueling, signaling its ability to get to Iran the long the way around. But the latest partnership with Egypt represents the first time that Israel has a clear shot at Iran.

While it’s questionable that the passage of Israeli ships through the Suez means that Israel is preparing for an imminent attack on Iran, Israel seems to have solved its biggest strategic hurdle.

And if, as has been widely speculated, the Israeli submarine is armed with nuclear weapons, Israel may now be tactically capable of an even more devastating attack on Iran.

The move also adds another layer of intrigue to the secondary question of where the Arab world stands on the Israel-Iran conflict and how it would react to a cold war turned hot.
Iran and the Arab world have long been at odds, and many in the region view a nuclear Iran as a major threat to Arab interests. Some have speculated that Arab leaders would be quietly pleased if Israel were to do the dirty work and eliminate the threat. Others say that Arab leaders fear Israeli preemption because the consequences of an Israeli attack would result in a dramatic destabilization of the region, with Iran’s Arab allies — Hamas and Hezbollah — called into action against Israel.

Egypt’s allowing Israeli ships, and possibly nukes, to pass through the Suez speaks to the former argument, at least in Egypt’s case.

So let the op-ed writers opine, but the facts are clear. Israel has now found a tactical way to strike Iran. And the Arab world’s most populous nation seems to be nodding its head.

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