Discovery Channel wrong about Egypt visitor center

The Discovery Channel recently wrote a story that a new visitor center in Luxor in the Valley of the Kings will in April saying "A new visitor center opening later this month will feature a large plastic model of the valley, showing the location of each of its 63 tombs. Computers and large visual displays will also be available."

Actually the visitor center has been open for weeks. I was there at least three weeks ago. They are completely wrong and it seems they did not verify their facts.

Super Sizing Egypt?

November 2006
Super Sizing Egypt?
News Analysis: Under attack abroad for its contribution to the Western world’s obesity problem, McDonald’s is changing eating and consumer habits in Egypt, too

By Andrew Bossone

DDRIVING SOUTH ON highway I-95 on the United States’ East Coast, it’s easy to tell when you pass a town: The giant golden arches of McDonald’s hover near the road exits. I-95 runs from the northernmost state, Maine, to the southernmost, Florida, with many changes of scenery along the way. But what’s constant in every town is the dominance of fast food chains.

On a trip a few years ago, I counted the number of Waffle House restaurants, 24-hour southern breakfast diners with distinguishably tall, black-and-yellow signs; I stopped counting somewhere around 37.

The remarkable uniformity across thousands of miles and towns has given rise to the nickname ‘the United States of Generica.’ New Jersey is so filled with big highways, gated communities and strip malls that when people say they live there, the next question is not, “Where in New Jersey?” but “Which exit?”

Is the same thing happening here? Uniform housing communities are popping up from Sinai to Sixth of October, from the eastern stretches of the North Coast straight down the Red Sea. A good way to tell you have reached Ain Sokhna from Cairo is when you see the KFC sign in the distance. Heading to the World War II battlefields of El-Alamein? Fast-food eateries welcome you off the desert highway.

The trend is set to become more pronounced: The pending entrance of Burger King, Papa John’s, and Starbucks will inevitably raise questions about Egypt’s national character. Indeed, the question is already asked almost every Ramadan as pundits in the daily press wonder whether the swarms of people in line at fast food restaurants during iftar suggest that the Egyptian family unit is starting to fall apart.

“Egypt can never become generic — the States can,” counters Ahmed El Aawar, chairman of Egyptian Company for Modern Restaurant Management (EMRM), which runs the local chain Wessaya. “I truly believe in my heart it will never become generic. It’s too old, too sophisticated. People are aware of what you are talking about, at least the wise men.”

El Aawar, a veteran of the fast food business, helped open the country’s first McDonald’s in 1992 and worked his way up before heading KFC Egypt. He left KFC to join El-Sewedy Group, whose food division he purchased in June in a rare management buyout.

While El Aawar has undoubtedly contributed to the generification (if you’ll tolerate the term) of Egypt, he did help create Wessaya. Instead of paying fees to a foreign corporation, plus a percentage of sales and a chunk that goes into a shared advertising pool, all the profits stay right here at home. Wessaya is now part of a growing number of local chains that include the more upscale Abou Shakra (which began serving kofta on Kasr El-Aini Street in 1947 and now has a franschisee in Saudi Arabia), as well as sandwich shops Gad and Mo’men.

So the onslaught of chain restaurants is not limited to foreign brands. In truth, there is little danger that fast food restaurants supplant a 5,000-year-old culture as easily as they have an American eating culture that was not even 200 years old when they started sprouting like mushrooms across the landscape. And, in all fairness, Egypt is not the only country that has McDonald’s: The fast food behemoth operates 30,000 restaurants in 100 countries on six continents, serving meals to 46 million people every day.

Today, McDonald’s and KFC earn most of their profits abroad, calling the push into foreign markets “global realization,” according to Eric Schlosser’s groundbreaking book Fast Food Nation.

In the beginning, “my biggest challenge would be to teach the Egyptian to eat at McDonald’s,” says Mohamed Mansour, managing director of McDonald’s Egypt. “It was not part of the culture 12 years ago. Is it part of the culture now? Maybe a bit. Is it where I want it to be? Definitely not.”

The growth of Western food brands and chain restaurants in general might not be a sign that Ronald McDonald will become more important than Saad Zaghloul (although if you showed a picture of the two to most little children, guess which one they would likely recognize), but it could be a sign of what the sociologist George Ritzer describes in his book the McDonaldization of Society. Although critics of McDonald’s sometimes exaggerate the cultural impact of fast food chains, the fact that they are flourishing here may not say as much about the chains’ influence as it implies about ongoing changes in Egyptian culture.

McIftar

Mohammed El-Helwary sits anxiously in front of his food, waiting for the azzan to signal he can break his Ramadan fast. El-Helwary is not surrounded by his family in front of large, steaming dishes — he’s sitting with friends in a fast food restaurant.

“My job, I’m working from 10 in the morning until 2am. I come here to take a break,” says El-Helwary, a journalist with the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.

Reem, a student at the American University in Cairo, likewise has little time to travel out to Heliopolis every night and so spends most iftars near campus.

For these two customers, fast food provides efficiency, one of the four conditions of a fast food restaurant outlined in Ritzer’s book.

“In a society where people rush, usually by car, from one spot to another, the efficiency of a fast-food meal, perhaps even without leaving their cars by wending their way along the drive-through lane, often proves impossible to resist. The fast-food model offers people, or at least appears to offer them, an efficient method for satisfying many needs,” Ritzer writes.

Galal Amin, a popular professor of economics at AUC and the noted author of Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?, has never been to McDonald’s and most likely never will. He remembers a dairy shop a few years ago on the corner of Mohammed Mahmoud Street in Tahrir Square, not a fast food restaurant. Today, the stretch of this street from Tahrir until past the university is a veritable fast food row. There are at least eight branches of chain restaurants and cafés in three blocks.

“Fast food places mechanize eating,” says Amin, whose latest book is The Illusion of Progress in the Arab World: A Critique of Western Misconstructions. “Like any mechanized activity, it makes things easy, quicker, cleaner. With as little fuss as possible. As you know, mechanization attracts the younger people more than the older people. Older people like to take their time. They don’t like to be hurried. They don’t mind the ceremony or the rituals.”

(For more on Galal Amin, see this month’s Face Of Business, starting on page 74.)

Amin finds it more interesting that more people are eating out than ever before — not just during iftar. When the two brothers who started McDonald’s changed their restaurant more than 50 years ago by getting rid of metal utensils and replacing plates with foam containers, they did not know they would change the way people all around the world eat meals. Today, almost all of the food at McDonald’s can be eaten with your hands.

“The nearest thing to the hamburger in Egypt is the fuul and the falafel sandwich,” says Amin. “Even the falafel sandwich now has really become much more mechanized than before. Before, [you went] to a little restaurant to eat a dish of fuul. It was not eating a sandwich. It was sitting down and putting lemon on the beans and all sorts of little spices. Now, more and more, these places are getting mechanized. The same fuul sandwich is repeated over and over again. You know what you are getting.”

This fulfills predictability, a second condition of McDonaldization. When you go to a fast food restaurant, you can expect with certainty that the sandwich and fries you ate the last time you were there will be exactly the same this time. One customer at McDonald’s, Ahmed Hassem, was eating chicken for iftar one afternoon last month. Asked how the food compares to what his mother makes at home, he responded, “No, the food, I like it better here. I feel they are more professional. They grill the best chicken.”

Predictability, however, is not necessarily tantamount to truly knowing what you are eating — at least not when it comes to the ingredients. It is a knowledge of what it will taste like, although the consumer usually equates consistency with knowing the product. McDonald’s goes through rigorous processing to ensure the food stays exactly the same. For french fries, it means genetically modifying the potatoes to add or remove sugars that change the appearance and taste and cooking it in an oil derived from animal fats. For chicken, it means using birds pumped with steroids and then processing them to make a consistent patty, one that only faintly resembles any part of a chicken.

“We ensure the quality of the beef is 100% pure beef. We have no additives in it, which I consider healthy,” Mansour counters. And on one point, he may be entirely correct: “The quality controls we have in the stores and with the suppliers I think [are] maybe the strongest in the market.”

McChoice

Control is the third condition of McDonaldization and might be the professionalism to which Hassem referred. This is somewhat connected to predictability in the sense that the experience is consistent, because walking into a McDonald’s is walking into a very controlled environment.

“The people who eat in fast-food restaurants are controlled, albeit (usually) subtly. Lines, limited menus, few options, and uncomfortable seats all lead diners to do what management wishes them to do — eat quickly and leave,” Ritzer writes.

“They give the idea to the consumers that they have a choice, but they really don’t have a choice,” says Amin. “You know exactly what you are getting. And when you say, ‘I’m going to a McDonald’s,’ you know exactly what you are going to have. There’s not really much variety. You either have some chips beside it or not. You either put some ketchup or not that’s not a fantastically great variety. To throw a piece of cheese in the middle is not a great variety.”

In The Illusion of Progress, Amin addresses the issue of consumer choice, or what he believes is the illusion of it. He questions the value of globalization and free market economics, saying that state intervention does not necessarily provide less freedom. On the other hand, a free market in which citizens are inundated with advertisements only gives the illusion of choice, he claims.

“The assault of advertisements and hawkers of goods in the mass media, for example, encouraging consumerist lifestyle, which the market system necessarily elicits, could suppress freedom in no less dangerous a fashion than powerful state intervention,” Amin writes. “The point is that the market system, while giving some freedom with one hand, may take other freedoms away with the other.”

The choice is no longer to buy or not to buy, but what to buy. Amin says that freedom of choice essentially disappears when one choice, the West, is put against another choice, the local, because the deck is stacked in favor of the bigger and stronger. “All that is being asked of them is to choose what they regard as the best, or, in other words to assess cultural products the way economists assess projects and to choose the one with the greatest net benefits,” he writes.

Of course, not everyone agrees with Amin, one of the most popular academics on the street — and one of the least popular in the nation’s boardrooms. “With the sophistication of the advertising, the amount of choice you have, nobody can force you to anything,” says El Aawar. “Even the children, at the end of the day it’s your choice. I’m truly, truly against [the notion] that this is an invasion and brainwashing. What’s this brainwashing? Are we animals? We’re not animals, we’re not a type of ape. You make the choice. You like it.”

But El Aawar admits that children often do not really have a say in the matter. They want the toys. They want the playground. “The child is so pure and innocent,” he says. And McDonald’s give it to them, playing on children’s desires by offering these rewards, by putting playgrounds in places where there are none. McDonald’s gets them when they’re young, then tries to keep them for life.

“We build a McDonald’s culture,” says Mansour, who worked his way from scrubbing the toilets of his uncle’s restaurant in Maadi to heading some 50 outlets nationwide. “We have kids come again with their parents. And they come in for the Happy Meal. That’s how we bring them in. Hopefully, these kids that come and eat your Happy Meal; 30 years down the line, they are gonna bring their kids. That’s how you build the culture.

“And that’s how you teach people,” he continues. “And that’s how McDonald’s tries to teach people. The ultimate goal is to reach [the point] where instead of reminiscing about the club you used to go with your father or mother or grandfather, you are reminiscing about how you used to go and sit in McDonald’s.”

McHealth

McDonald’s is often the target of criticism for serving unhealthy food, and whether that criticism is justified or not is still a controversial topic. Fast food restaurants were not the first and certainly will not be the last places that serve food that can be bad for you. The response from the food industry has always been that people have to learn about health and make appropriate decisions for themselves.

“McDonald’s did not invent bad health,” El Aawar says. “It was part of the nature; the oil, the shortening was there. The beef patty was already there, they just put the combination [together.] It’s part of everything that’s going bad. Business ethics are going down the drain. Even food.”

In his book Super Size Me, (and, later, the documentary of the same title), Morgan Spurlock goes on a 30-day McDonald’s binge in which he eats only the foods McDonald’s offers on its menu. He has a few rules: He must eat three meals a day and he must limit the amount of exercise to the same as the average American working in an office setting: about 5,000 footsteps per day.

He visits doctors through the experiment, who give him modest warnings in the beginning that his cholesterol would likely rise, as would his triglycerides, the building blocks of fat in the body. Elevated triglycerides are often associated with heart disease and, sometimes, diabetes.

After 30 days, Spurlock gained almost 25 pounds, his cholesterol went up 65 points, he doubled the risk for heart disease and heart failure and experienced fits of depression and mood swings. And even more unexpectedly, tests showed he was approaching liver failure, the equivalent of going on a long-term alcoholic binge.

“If I sit and I have a Big Mac meal just sitting on my chair, yes I will get fat,” Mansour says. “Do I want that to happen? No. Does that mean I don’t wanna have Big Macs? No, I do. But I do it responsibly. You know, I have it twice a week, once a week, and I exercise regularly. That’s how your body works.”

In the film, Spurlock cites an advertisement from McDonald’s France that quoted a nutritionist saying there is no valid reason for going to McDonald’s more than once per week. McDonald’s brass in America reacted harshly, denying the statement was true.

“For someone to say McDonald’s is not healthy — is not really — it’s not diet food, let’s be honest,” Mansour says. “You’re not going to go on a diet and eat McDonald’s. You can have it once a week in that case. It’s not your everyday type of meal.”

On the issue of obesity, people have to take personal responsibility on their lives. We cannot gorge ourselves with a pound of fries and meat and a liter of cola and blame the delivery guy. In reaction to Spurlock’s film, James Painter, chairman of Eastern Illinois University’s School of Family and Consumer Sciences, made the documentary Portion Size Me, in which he argues that it’s not necessarily McDonald’s ingredients that are the problems, but the quantities on offer. The film follows two graduate students — one male, one female — who ate fast-food diets for a month. By keeping proportions to an appropriate size for their body weight, both lost weight — and saw their cholesterol numbers improve.

And while Spurlock contends that McDonald’s has to be held accountable for what he says is its role in spreading obesity across the globe, it’s questionable how much one restaurant chain — even one as trend-setting as McDonald’s — can be blamed. A 2002 study found that 47.8% of Egyptian women over the age of 20 are overweight or obese. McDonald’s is not to blame for this, since obviously half the women in the country do not eat there, but it could make it worse as it opens more outlets.McDonald’s isn’t necessarily helping by sending mixed messages: The chain claims to have healthy alternatives, but one Big Mac has the same number of calories as a salad with dressing on top. McDonald’s also sells huge soft drinks loaded with 20 teaspoons of sugar, yet its juice alternative is no better. Then there’s the addictive properties of sugar, caffeine and the opiates found in cheese.

A hamburger is probably not much worse than a shawerma or kofta, but the rapid expansion of fast food could be a warning sign that obesity will continue to rise, as it has in America, where approximately 100 million people — or fully one-third of the population — are overweight.

“If the economic situation improves and the people can afford it, I would like to take maybe 30 or 40% of the fuul and falafel market,” Mansour says. “That’s all my dream. That’s the big idea behind the picture.”

McDonald’s does its best at increasing its market share and happens to be better than anyone else at that, but, at the same, time it could be a major contributor to a number of health problems. In the final of Ritzer’s four conditions of fast food, calculability makes portions big and delivery fast, so people equate size and speed with quality. The idea is to get lots of food right away, without thinking of the consequences, and with the end result of quickly expanding waistlines as McDonald’s grows its market.

Should it stop trying to expand? To say so would be to contradict the pillars of a free-market economy. Unlike cigarettes, fast food will not kill you if consumed exactly in the manner the manufacturer intended.

But an education campaign about nutrition and some work on portion size? Well, that would be a start.

“I think there is a lot of focus on the fast food restaurants because they are mentioned more than virtually all of the other causes in most of the books and articles and studies [on] why it’s a sudden epidemic,” says John F. Banzhaff III, a law professor at George Washington University who was interviewed in Super Size Me because of his work for plaintiffs suing McDonald’s for allegedly causing their obesity. “Again, it can’t be the neighborhood restaurant. We’ve had neighborhood restaurants for hundreds of years. It can’t be the foods we eat at home. We have been eating at home for hundreds of years. Something is very different.”

McBoycott

The food at McDonald’s is not healthy, and many people eat it multiple times per week, adding to the number of ballooning waistlines. But for people here, it’s not the food or marketing that makes McDonald’s controversial, but what the company represents.

McDonald’s, you see, is a painfully easy target. There is no symbol that better represents the West in most Egyptian and Arab minds than the golden arches. When people are angry at America for its foreign policy, McDonald’s becomes the whipping boy for American evil.

It’s particularly frustrating for Mansour Group, which is not only 100% Egyptian, but also owns 100% of McDonald’s here and gets 97% of its products, excluding raw materials, from inside the country.

In 2002, McDonald’s was at the height of its unpopularity here. One of the original partners sold his share to McDonald’s in America, which made it hard for the Mansour Group to defend itself as an Egyptian company, not an American one. So it bought the remaining shares and might, by doing so, have saved the company.

“At the time, that’s what the brand McDonald’s needed — a local partner to handle the local message — and we turned it around basically. Because if it [were now] the way it was then, I’m telling you today there would not be a McDonald’s in the country,” Mansour says.

Today, Mansour says it’s generally easier to explain to people that McDonald’s does not donate to places Egyptians would disapprove of, like Israel. But sometimes, as in the case of the Danish cartoons negatively depicting the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), McDonald’s is on the receiving end of public outrage completely unconnected to the company’s operations.

“I’m sure the rumor mill here is quite rampant, but then there’s stuff like that, that has no basis to be said,” says Mansour. “We don’t get our meat from Denmark. We never have, never will. We are part of a global beef program that gets its beef from Australia or Brazil and, when the law permits, England, let’s say. It really upsets somebody trying to run a company when you’re getting rumors that have no basis to be stated. One text message could reach a million people if the idea was there. Of course it hurts.”

Mansour’s response is to hold press conferences, put information on restaurant place mats and hold direct advertising campaigns. Mansour Group stands by the scruples of its company and has tried to be a benefit to the community. It recently gave ten piastres out of every meal sold to the Association of the Friends of the National Cancer Institute, donating more than LE 2 million to the cause. It also sponsored an orphanage with 120 kids throughout year by providing help with food and education.

And after reading an article in Business Today Egypt, Mansour started making plans to help with the problem of street children.

“Egypt is a wonderful country, but at the end of the day there’s a lot of problems,” he says, “and you cannot expect the government to take care of 100% of the problems. Therefore, I think any company operating successfully in the country [should] take it upon themselves to take one issue, one social issue, and try to make the country better.”

So while the rising number of big fast food restaurants means fewer people are eating at home and consumer culture is gaining influence, good things can still happen when an ethical local partner like Mansour Group is in the picture.

“If you find people saying McDonald’s is strong because America is behind it, these people are losers, mostly losers,” says El Aawar. “I challenge you that the people saying this are winners. I challenge you, for a thousand bucks. Get me a winner who nags about big competitors having support. No, because he thinks about what he can do, not how others are.” bt

A brief history of African American Muslims

October 2006
Which Ummah?
From the ‘Nation of Islam’ to the Ummah:A look at Islam and race in America

By Andrew Bossone

It's hardly news that the average American has plenty of misconceptions about Islam, but the idea of Muslims in the Americas can be puzzling to people here, too. The 8 to 10 million Muslims in the United States are, understandably, a diverse group, ranging from recent immigrants, to second- or third-generation American-born citizens (or beyond), to converts of every possible background.

But one group, calling itself the Nation of Islam (NOI), has often earned more attention than the rest put together.

This is not Al-Ummah Al-Islamiyya, the nation of Islam binding Muslims together worldwide. In fact, the NOI only represents a small fraction of American Muslims: Estimates of its numbers are around 20,000, or less than one quarter of one percent of all adherents to Islam. What’s more, this ‘nation of Islam’ is deliberately exclusive: At times it has been rightly considered to be more an arm of the black power movement than a religion at all.

And yet the organization never fails to show up in the public eye, and, until 9/11, the average American had probably learned more about the NOI in school, in movies and in the press than about true Islam itself.

The most recent incarnation of the group was formed by Louis Farrakhan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While most Muslims in America have preferred to practice their faith without seeking attention, Farrakhan has carved a prominent place for himself and the NOI in the American media. Television stations and newspapers receive press releases with catchy phrases announcing Farrakhan’s position on issues of the day. With vituperative speeches and his trademark bow ties, the NOI leader is something of a camera magnet.

Understandably, the silent majority of American Muslims finds this attention troubling, attributing it to media sensationalism. “That’s the problem of media on the national level: Sensation captivates people,” says Mahdi Brey, secretary-general of the Indianapolis-based Islamic Society of North America. “Whether it is Louis Farrakhan or bin Laden, those are the people who get attention. That is our challenge: to be heard, to define ourselves. It is very difficult.”

Particularly since 9/11, with anti-Muslim hate crimes in the States at an unprecedented level, Muslims have had problems reaching out to the mainstream press. Many feel they must attempt to strike a balance between speaking out on behalf of their religion and practicing Islam subtly so as not to attract undue negative attention.

The NOI, on the other hand, continues to hold the public’s eye. Just last year, on the occasion of the 10-year anniversary of the NOI’s Million Man March on Washington, Farrakhan collaborated with public figures including the reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to organize the Millions More March, supporting a number of social causes. It seems unlikely that the group will leave the spotlight any time soon.

The question, for many here in Cairo, is what is NOI and what does it believe?
ROOTS

From its inception, the NOI held beliefs that are contrary to Islam. Early on, the NOI worshipped its founder, Wallace D. Fard, as a near god and prophet of a sort despite the fundamental tenet of Islam that there is no god but God, with Muhammad (PBUH) having been His final prophet.

Fard first appeared on the national radar when he began preaching in 1930, claiming to have come from the holy city of Mecca. One of his most passionate followers, Elijah Poole, the son of a transient Baptist minister, was poised to communicate Fard’s message. He changed his name to Elijah Mohammed and, following Fard’s mysterious disappearance, took leadership of the group, eventually becoming revered as a prophet himself.

Although in due course the group renounced both the deification of Fard and the status of Elijah Mohammed as a prophet, the NOI deviated from traditional Islamic practice in other major ways: It taught from the Bible instead of the Qur’an, celebrated Ramadan during the month of December and went as far as calling white men “devils” and black men “gods.”

“It was a total aberration from universal Islam,” Brey says.

Abdur Rahim Mohammed of the Islamic Cultural Preservation and Information Council, which is unaffiliated with the NOI, explains that the NOI’s practices differed from traditional Islam from the start because most of its converts were Christian and that the group presented the religion in an American, Judeo-Christian context.

Practicing Ramadan during the month of December was a way to steer African-Americans away from celebrating Christmas, while also taking advantage of the short daylight hours, making it easier to fast. As for teaching from the Bible, “[Elijah Mohammed] taught that the Qur’an was the holy book of Muslims. He just didn’t teach from it. We all had it. We were told to keep it high up and respect it because it is God’s word.”

“There was little literature and few Muslims,” Brey explains. “It was tough, so they defined Islam in narrow Afrocentric terms.”
A MATTER OF PRIDE

The NOI began primarily as a reaction to racial oppression and discriminatory and segregationist laws directed at African-Americans — not as a religious movement. Discrimination against African-Americans can be traced back to the days of slavery, but while they eventually gained their freedom, laws reinforced their position at the bottom of society. Public places such as restaurants, restrooms, trains, buses and schools separated blacks and whites — all with the sanction of the US government.

In the early twentieth century, a number of black nationalist movements, some with loose connections to Islam, rose in response to the racism of many white Americans. When Fard formed the NOI, he told his followers that they were descendants of the lost tribe of Shabazz, which, he said, was made up of the first humans to explore the Earth, before finally settling in Mecca and the Nile Valley.

The connection to a prestigious history attracted many African-Americans who knew little of their heritage. Followers were encouraged to drop their surnames, which had usually come from slave masters, and replace it with the letter X. Under Elijah Mohammed’s leadership, pride became a central focus of the organization.

“[Elijah Mohammed] was a messenger to the black man in America,” says Abdur Rahim, who also runs the New African Center, a museum for African-American Islamic history. “The mentality and mindset of black people in America was such that we had no knowledge of ourselves, no inkling of our history as a people. We were just a whole body of people destroyed — [that’s how] the negroes were left after slavery.”

The New African Center is in a poor neighborhood in West Philadelphia, surrounded by abandoned buildings, but the two rooms of the Center, with high ceilings and hardwood floors, still bear the scent of fresh construction. One wall features images of black slaves who retained their Muslim faith, despite forced conversions to Christianity by their masters. One rebellious slave, Ibn Said, is said to have written such beautiful Arabic script on the walls of his jail cell that visitors traveled from miles around just to see his graceful calligraphy.

For the most part, however, “We had no connection with Africa, no connection with our cause,” says Abdur Rahim. “[Elijah Mohammed] tried to connect us.”
THE MODERN COMMUNITY

Following Elijah Mohammed’s death in 1975, he was succeeded by his son, Warith Deen Mohammed, or W.D. Mohammed. The new leader made broad, sweeping changes to reconcile the NOI with traditional Islam. He renounced the deification of Fard, eliminated the notion of black superiority and worked to align the group with the larger community of Muslims.

His actions created a rift: In 1981, traditionalist elements led by Farrakhan publicly announced the reconstitution of the NOI, guided by the original teachings of Fard and Elijah Mohammed. The divide has been bridged in recent years, however, with Farrakhan recanting the notion of Fard’s deification and denying that Elijah Mohammed was a prophet, calling him a “messenger.” Farrakhan and W.D. Mohammed publicly embraced in 2000, officially announcing the movement’s “unity.”

The Muslim Journal, W.D. Mohammed’s newspaper, is headquartered in a building on the outskirts of Chicago. Inside the front door hangs a large poster of W.D. Mohammed with the late Pope John Paul II. The editors of the Muslim Journal say one of W.D. Mohammed’s missions has been to eliminate contempt for Christianity within the organization. This contempt was partly rooted in the perception that the common ‘white’ image of Jesus Christ supported the concept of racial inferiority of blacks.

“What would happen to little white kids if they were made to sit before a black image and worship? They would look at the image of God and then in the mirror and they would feel inferior,” says Ayesha Mustafaa, the journal’s editor.

Today, the majority of African-American Muslims are Sunni, although a large number are still students of W.D. Mohammed. Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an African-American and the head of the Muslim Alliance of North America, who does not follow the NOI, speaks before his congregation of diverse ethnic backgrounds at Masjid Al-Taqwa (literally, The Piety Mosque) in Brooklyn, New York. Wahhaj, who more than 10 years ago became the first Muslim to invoke prayers in front of US Congress, believes that most African-American Muslims do not consider themselves a part of the NOI; nor do most of the new converts.

“Some people are like, ‘You should be following Warith Deen Mohammed.’ Why? We have these great scholars that have legitimate differences that base their differences upon their understanding of the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, which makes for dynamic conversation and interaction,” Wahhaj says.

“We’re not here to become rigid soldiers,” he says. “We’re thinkers.”

Recently, one of the most important concerns of the American Muslim community has been discrimination since the September 11 attacks. Wahhaj often draws parallels between the struggles that Muslims are going through now and those of African-Americans in the past.

“When I rehearse history to Muslims who are foreigners or immigrants, I say, ‘It happened to black people, it happened to Jews, it happened to Italians and almost everyone had that kind of discrimination and scrutiny.’ For us, it’s patience,” he says. “It’s not going to be like this forever. There [are] too many verses in the Qur’an that teach us patience.”

Wahhaj, who was born in America and converted to Islam with his parents, travels to connect with Muslims across the country. He recently visited three different cities in one weekend and claims that at each airport, officials told him he had been “randomly selected by the computer” for security inspection.

Despite the discrimination, many Muslims see a bright future for Islam in America. Muslims who once remained in obscurity are becoming vocal about their faith — and they are not afraid to practice Islam in American society, which they say is committed to allowing them religious freedom and embracing diversity. But to bring change, Muslims in America will probably have to do it on their own.

“You should pray as if everything depends on God,” Wahhaj says, “but you should work as if everything depends on you.” et

Wedding goes on despite bombing

GAT Magazine
May/June 2006

Three devastating terrorist bombs in Dahab could not stop Anak Aldin and Kerstin Aldin-Hellman from getting married. Their wedding was scheduled at 8 o’clock at the Jasmine Restaurant, 45 minutes after the bombs exploded. They still held the wedding, albeit a couple of hours late, and under the most extraordinary of circumstances.

“When the bomb went off I was in the Bedouin camp doing make up and fixing hair,” says Kerstin, 27, from Sweden. “I asked the women around me about it and they said, ‘Don’t worry,’ and then [Anak] called a few minutes later and said, ‘are you alright—we’ll come get you,’ and the phone lines were busy so I didn’t hear anything after that.”

“Everyone was going this way and I had to go that way,” says Anak, a former fisherman from Iceland, 39. “I couldn’t get there and the driver said, ‘Everything is working out, it’s the Egyptian way.’ After one hour and a half I thought, ‘it’s not ok.’”

Instead of riding camels from the desert to the Red Sea, they walked hand in hand through the town as cars passed by—full of tourists escaping the tragedy. She wore a traditional Bedouin dress, with her hair twisted up in braids and her arms and legs covered in henna tattoos, while people fleeing the town stared at her and her groom .

“I walked to find her. I came there and I found this goddess. And we walked back—and I though t, ‘I have to go [to the site of the bomb,]’” says Anak. “I said, ‘alhumdulillah, I’m getting married.’”

Police did not let them enter the barricaded site of the bombs, so they continued through the emptying streets on their way to the Jasmine Hotel, located on the other side of town. Meanwhile, Gamal El Din, manager of the hotel, waited with coworkers for the couple to arrive.

“We thought [the first bomb] was a gas explosion. It was quite small at first,” says El Din, 22. “We all ran [to the bomb site] and then the second and third happened. We saw a lot of people die. I came back and I was very shocked. I saw heads without bodies or some bodies without a stomach. I couldn’t stay long.”

The hotel staff had arranged everything for the wedding. The restaurant was decorated, the music was organized, and a video photographer was booked. Instead, the staff wore solemn faces, the music was cancelled, and the photographer never showed.

The couple met only three weeks before coming to Dahab, on April 1st. They fell in love immediately and decided to take a vacation shortly thereafter.

“We looked into each other in the eyes, heart to heart; you just know. We’ve been together since then 24hours a day. We started talking and we just said, ‘How should we get married?’ It wasn’t, ‘should we get married; it was how should we get married?” says Kerstin.

They agreed to get married while eating dinner one night at the Penguin. “We were at the restaurant. Allah decided, my heart decided,” says Anak.

The couple did not have any friends or family in Dahab, but invited everyone they met in town. “People started talking about the clothes and the make up. We let the people organize for the dinner and we invited all the people we know. The chef came and said, ‘we can fix a goat for you.’ They made Bedouin food. It was a big ceremony. They worked all night making the food,” says Kerstin.

When they finally arrived, the staff was ecstatic. It was the only highlight in an otherwise heart wrenching evening. El Din brought a lawyer to make the contract and complete the marriage. “There was going to be big party, but the music wasn’t playing after that. We stopped everything, but we wanted to make them happy. “

“The bombing will not stop love. This is the way of Allah. The thing I can see out of all of is to open the heart, believe in love and don’t doubt. That will affect the town,” says Anak.

The town was eerily quiet the morning after the explosions that killed 21 and injured 85. After sunrise, several journalists were setting up cameras and taking photos of the shards of glass on the ground and stains of blood that had only recently dried.

There was so much blood and glass that people were standing in piles without even noticing them. Within a few hours, workers began pouring soapy water on the blood and scrubbed away the remnants.

A few doors down from the worst explosion, Mahmoud Abbas, the manager of the Spicy Man spice and oil store, was standing outside his shop. Only five minutes before the first bomb went off the night before, he served a customer from France. He was filling out paperwork for the order when he heard the first bomb. He saw people running down the street and he followed. He felt the next two bombs rattle his body.

“My God gave me a new life,” he says.

As tears nearly filled up his eyes, he recalled a friend that died 10 meters in front of his shop.

The bombs went off in the center of town, at 7:15pm, right as people were going out for dinner and shopping after a day at the beach. Each bomb exploded one after the other, all within a few hundred meters.

Abbas does not know what he will do next; the shop was destroyed in the blast. He worries tourism will be ruined. Either way, he has decided to stay. Other Dahab residents have mixed feelings about what will happen to tourism, the economic lifeblood of the town. Although the exodus was quick, many people decided to stay. Some of the hotels were still near full capacity.

“No one left, says El Din. “Our guests mostly live in Cairo. But four reservations didn’t come.”

“They never go to Dahab and not come back. Some people come nine or ten times. I don’t think new people will come now. A lot of people left today. Three big buses in the morning took people to travel, which is more than usual,” he says.

The Penguin Hotel, where Anak and his wife were staying, lost about 15% of their customers.

“Four left just because,” says Mohamed Inab, manager. “Some people just panicked. Two just arrived and left in a few hours. I tried to calm them down and tell them it’s safe now but they have an 8-year-old boy. We appreciate that [other guests] stayed. But they understand. They tell us, ‘If I ride a bus in London or Paris, that can happen.’ Tomorrow people are taking an excursion in a jeep in the desert.”

Inab expected tourism to go down anyway, since there is usually a dip in the summer. The town recovered quickly from the terrorist attack in Sharm El Sheik last July, as hotels were full in January, a few months later. But no one really knows what the long-term effects will be.

“One year from now [tourism] will be less. June was supposed to be slow. The World Cup comes soon, which is good because it will help people forget,” he says.


Nine guests from the Penguin Hotel were injured, three Egyptians and six foreigners. Three were seriously wounded and two of those were from Egypt. The last Inab heard, they were transferred from a hospital in Sharm El Sheik to Cairo.

“There’s no good hospital in Dahab. The hospital is very bad, so on the way to Sharm they probably died. There is only one car for the hospital; the rest [transporting injured people] were service cars,” says El Din.

If any attack or accident ever happened again, Inab says the government has to do something to address the lack of health care in town. Inab also says there needs to be better checkpoints on the roads and security in town.


“Security is doing nothing,” Inab says at his hotel, far from the site of the blasts.


Tourism Terror

It was apparent that the attack had the specific intent of disrupting tourism. There is very little in Dahab not connected to tourism, if anything at all. The bombs went off at the most active time of day, in the most crowded area and on one of the busiest days of the year.

"This incident is addressed to the whole of Egypt, there is no reason for it other than an attempt to destroy the economy of Egypt by attacking tourism," said Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif outside a hospital in a Sharm el-Sheik, where many of the victims were treated.

This bombing presents yet another challenge for the Egyptian government. In this year alone the cabinet has dealt with bird flu, the ferryboat accident in the Red Sea and now this.

Like the other two bombings on the Sinai Peninsula, this one was on a national holiday that brings extra tourists. The bomb in Taba and Ras Shitan that killed 34 in October 2004 was the day before a holiday to mark the start of the1973 Arab-Israeli war. The bomb in Sharm El Sheik last July 23 that killed 64 people was on Egypt National Day. The explosion in Dahab went off hours before the Sinai Liberation Day and also a day after the Coptic Easter.