Faith

I guess as I get older - and, well, I'm really old - I become more and more interested in questions of faith, which is one of the biggest reasons why the junior level Core class that I'm designing based on this Faculty Internationalization Initiative experience will center around Islam (that and the fact that I just think that Americans need to know a lot more about Islam and the Islamic world). While I've travelled to Jordan and the United Arab Emirates several times, as well as Morocco once (and India, for that matter), this was my first visit to Egypt. The differences between the role of Islam here in Egypt and in Jordan and the UAE is amazing. It's not as if those other countries are not devout because they are, but an American visiting Amman or Dubai would not find the experience nearly as jarring as visiting Cairo or Alexandria. That said, there's also a difference between Cairo and Alexandria, just as there would be between those huge cities and a village in the Egyptian countryside. The point is that we in the US tend to view the Islamic world as one huge monolithic entity without any sense of how dramatically different it is around the different corners of that world. When I teach Islam in my Legacy of World Civilization II class I always start off by asking my students which countries in the world have the largest Islamic populations. They usually say Iraq or Saudi Arabia and occasionally one of them will get Egypt, which comes in around number five - following Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The lesson the students learn is that how can they understand the faith when they don't even know where most of the Muslims live - that is, not in the Middle East, but rather in Southeast Asia. Instead, when someone says Islam the obvious visual image is of Arabia, when it's much more complex than that. What amazes me about Egypt is how prevalent Islam is on a daily basis. You are just much more likely to see men kneeling in the street during public prayer in Egypt than you are in Jordan or the UAE. For that matter, I walked into several shops in the Zamalek neighborhood, which is pretty upper middle class and full of embassies, and almost stumbled across a merchant kneeling on the floor during the daily five prayers. On one of the occasions I had one of those moments of clarity that justify this type of travel - the father and owner of the shop was dressed in traditional garb and was kneeling on the floor praying, while his teenage son was dressed in western style clothes and he was the one who took the money and carried out the sale without seeming to pay any attention to his father.