"A bearded Tahrir"

This was supposed to be a post about food. Yesterday I had plans to eat out with friends at one of the handful of Uighur restaurants in Abbasiya, near al-Azhar university (in the northeast corner of the city).  Students who came to study at the university missed their regional cooking and opened these holes in the wall. The secret's out, and now they're just as popular with western expats as the Uighur community. Everything is cheap ($1.75-$2.50 per humongous dish) and amazing. I have been there before with my old roommate and a friend of his.

Beef and noodle soup (closest thing to pho in Cairo!) and stir fry noodles

Garlic green beans

Hand-pulled noodle soup and stir-fried red cabbage

Unfortunately, our plans were thwarted by the protests in Tahrir, which have become a weekly occurrence. Some weeks the gatherings are barely a blip on the radar, and some weeks, like in November, they flare up into violent clashes. This week there were no reports of violence, but several hundred thousand people gathered in the square to protest a variety of things. My friends live in Garden City, and for me to get to them to meet up or for us to eventually get out of downtown and head towards Abbasiya would have been tough to impossible with the traffic diversions and crowds.

It was a crazy week for politics in Egypt. The three main front-runners for president (elections are supposed to take place in a little less than a month) were all disqualified for various reasons.

 The ultra-Conservative Islamist candidate Hazem Abu Ismail was disqualified in what is basically a birther controversy - no candidate or their family members can hold citizenship of any other country, and it was discovered his mother obtained American citizenship before she passed away in California.

Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's former boogeyman/head torturer (actual title - "Intelligence Chief") was disqualified on a technicality of gathering just a few dozen signatures shy of the 30,000 necessary to qualify for candidacy.

And the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate, multi-millionaire businessman Khairat al-Shater was disqualified because he was a political prisoner under Mubarak, and there is a rule on the books that must have been free from prison for at least 6 years before declaring candidacy.

Supporters of all three candidates converged in Tahrir to protest these disqualifications. Because 2 of 3 were from Islamist parties, the protestors were overwhelmingly of the conservative, Salafist flavor. The article covering the protests in this morning's paper ran with the title "A bearded Tahrir promises less unity than hoped" (in general, many conservative Muslims in Egypt keep a beard as a sign of piety).

The article describes general chaos as divergent political and social groups all shouted at simultaneous rallies in the Square. The rallies from Islamist parties took on a decidedly anti-Western, anti-American tone. This is nothing new - Mubarak had long been seen as selling out Egypt to the West throughout his dictatorship (er, presidency), and the Islamist parties he suppressed gained a sizable underground following by promising to reverse the foreign policy course and stand up to the West and in particular America. This is all coming to fruition now that these parties have the legal right to organize and possibly control Egypt's future. Whether the SCAF, which is currently running the show, will ever cede enough power to allow this to happen is debatable depending on where you fall on the conspiracy theory spectrum.

Regardless, this is an interesting time to be here. I noticed a blip in one of the Cairo papers last week (but now can't find it) noting that Egyptian officials visited France to observe presidential election proceedings this week - presumably to learn how to properly conduct a national election. This is the first time many Egyptians will have ever voted in a legitimate presidential election - several of my colleagues in their 40s and 50s had never voted in their lives.

Of course this is all going to go badly at first - when has democracy ever been a smooth transition? And in all honesty, this is all going to be complicated by the fact that we (America) have our meddling fingers (i.e. military funds) in the pot. But then again, when is politics not a circus? Anytime someone complains about the shenanigans going on in US politics currently, I direct them to this video Egyptian Parliament:

I could really go for some noodles.
Maybe next week, inshallah...