The Time of Ignorance

. . . and I'm not talking about my own undergraduate experience. Rather, that is the term that Muslims use when discussing the time before the prophet. I guess it came back to me as I spent my last day in Cairo bumming around the older parts of Cairo and sliding into the Islamic quarter, which is an amazing place in it's own right. If I have time I'll expand on this with more detail, although, truthfully, I didn't go to as many souvenir locations as much as I just walked the streets (surviving the heat and traffic - I'm beginning to feel a bit "gritty" like I did in Mumbai) and just stopped for tea and a shwarma and just experienced it. I've talked to a few of my new Islamic friends about their relationship with Egypt's own glorious history. I was thinking that it might be sort of an uneasy relationship because as extraordinary as Egypt as, it was still, by definition, the time of ignorance. Instead they are fairly comfortable with the earlier period and even think that since the Egyptians were the first people in history to come up with the concept of an afterworld they were already beginning a spiritual quest that continues today. They also think that maybe they will achieve the overall cultural and political and economic brilliance of the pharonic Egyptians, albeit in a different form. Rather, their more tortured relationship, their own love-hate relationship, although felt less clearly or intensively as India, is with the British.