Building Blocks

Bismillah

The more time I spend in Cairo, the more I learn more about myself, the country I'm from, and the city I'm in. Before I got to Cairo, I thought about things in all or none terms. I don't know Arabic, I just need to go to Cairo, and bang, Arabic. Process of diffusion at it's best. More and more though, I realize that things do not happen all at once. We need to build little blocks every day. It's not as easy as the sudden messiah transformation approach, but I think it's the correct one.

Living in Cairo is like living between two camps. One camp is the wealthier, younger, middle class Egyptians, who have just enough of the West to die to be like them, and the other is the older, poorer class who will do anything to hang onto the old ways; as a result, Islam itself is obscured with customs and practices not neccesarily part of it. It reminds me alot of a poem I studied in Speech:

"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold.

Ah, love, let us be true/To one another!
for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.