I stumbled upon this neat little photo essay in Foreign Policy of what Alexandria looked like at the end of its most liberal, cosmopolitan days in 1959. Today Alexandria is considered a more conservative place in general, as the photo essay's introduction says, but that depiction is also challenged by Alex's growing cultural scene in music and visual art.
The image of Alex as a synonym for "devout, and deeply conservative, Islam" may seem to be reinforced by the fact that Alex was actually the site of greatest resistance to Mubarak's regime--the violence there during the revolution was more intense and more prolonged, and a much larger proportion of the population was continuously turning out in the protests there than in Cairo. Many people tend to position so-called "Islamic" forces against Mubarak's regime, because that was the binary he liked to emphasize (to justify keeping him in power)--but it's more complicated than that. I didn't mean to get in to this when I started this post, but suffice to say, the motives for Alexandrians'--or any other Egyptians, for that matter--involvement in the Revolution should not be simply boiled down to religion.
Anyway, check out the link for the rest of pictures of very affluent looking 1950's Egyptians kicking it at the beach. The pictures certainly do contrast with the markedly more conservative burqinis in the pictures I took at the beach in Alex last fall:
I'm pretty interested in the changing cultural milieu of Alex, so hopefully that's something I'll get to learn more about in the upcoming year.
Oh my god; "Burqinis"! Nice term.
ReplyDeleteI have a comment. Religion in Egypt -and everywhere else- is only a nice wrapping for people's culture. Egyptians' behavior stems from their culture; and that includes their revolution. Religion does have an effect on their behavior, but, they're mainly more motivated by their customs and traditions.
Islam wouldn't survive much in Egypt if it didn't match their culture in the first place. To prove my point (which is that culture manipulates religion not the other way around), look at Islam around the world. You will find that it's customized according to culture. In Malaysia, some veiled girls wear shorts and very revealing clothes. They couldn't prioritize religion over culture.