Dinner Conversation

Last night at dinner, I recognized the guest lecturer from Egypt and asked him the question about the children in Egypt with pens. He answered me (see posting below), but we invited him to eat with us. This is an example of the type of opportunities for conversations that pop up on a cruise. We talked for about an hour…about politics, religion and customs in the Middle East. Here are points and stories that I found interest.

The lecturer is a Muslim from Egypt. He was in another Arabic country once with his wife, and they were going to the Mosque together. He was holding her hand, and that would have been entirely acceptable in Egypt. The natives got upset and yelled at him. When he answered in Arabic that he was doing nothing wrong, the natives said it was even worse because as an Arab, he had to know that holding hands this way in public was an act of sex that was unacceptable for a Muslim.

He and his wife left the Mosque to diffuse the situation. His point from this experience is that nobody now knows anymore what the basic Muslim religion is. Each area has injected it with local culture, and the people practicing it cannot tell what parts are the Muslim religion and what parts are permutations based upon local culture. Each assumes that those items that they have infused into their version of the religion is part of the basic Muslim practices.

One of his two daughters “covers up.” (I’ll use this term to describe the burke and the other variations that have different names.) In Egypt, more Muslim women cover up today that did a decade ago.

Our friend said this did not necessarily mean a move toward religious conservatism in Egypt. His daughter views it as a practical choice. If the other women at work are covering up, then she feels exposed if she does not. Further, it is much easier to get ready in the morning. You do not have to fix your hair and put on makeup if you are going to cover up. You even do not have to worry about dieting to maintain your figure if you are going to cover up in a garment that completely masks your shape. (If this idea gets out, I can picture many of the female passengers switching to this “cover up” dress style.)

He said that the rule that permits a Muslim man to have up to 4 wives may seem strange to us, but it has many practical aspects. First, the man has to have permission to take a second wife from his first wife. (I cannot picture how this conversation would go.) But, it may be due to illness in the first wife…the husband still loves the first wife, but want to maintain an active relationship. Infertility is another practical reason.

Our friend insisted that to fully understand this, we have to realize how much the woman is respected and given advantage within the Muslim religion. The woman gets a dowry. She also may have inheritance. The husband is not to know how much she has. His money is to finance their life; her money remains hers. If they separate, her money is all hers.

The woman can divorce the husband. One legitimate ground is that he is not satisfying her sexually! This is considered a failure on the husband’s part to provide for her needs and is grounds for divorce…simply on her say-so.

The clan is most important in this part of the world. Western democracy will not work. If there is an election and a member of your clan is a candidate, then you vote for him or her, even if you know he is incompetent and corrupt. Clan is more important than country. If you live in Egypt and clan members live in Libya, then you ignore the country boundary.

Our friend encouraged us to look at a map of the Arab countries in the Arabian Peninsula and in northern Africa…many of the boundaries are in straight lines. This makes no sense for countries of nomadic tribes. His point was that the British set much of this up while sitting at a desk in a conference room when they left the area. His point: “the British really screwed up this area of the world.”

Some of this may be only one person’s perspective, but it is interesting that we can have this type of conversation. We’ve probably met and talked with more Buddhists, Hindu, and Muslims in the past 5 weeks than we have in the prior to this.