A Travelogue, Part One: Immersed in Egyptian Culture
Editor's note: While on sabbatical, M.A.R. Habib, Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and Communication, chronicled his international travels, where he was invited to give multiple university guest lectures and collaborate on research abroad. Rutgers–Camden Faculty Blog will publish excerpts of his accounts, along with the images he took from the places he visited, as part of a multi-part series.
Our flight here from Newark Airport was about 10 hours long. As soon as we landed in Cairo, we stepped out into a different world.
We were plunged suddenly into the warm climate of an ancient culture. The atmosphere here and the layout of the roads and houses reminds us much of Kuwait with its huge villas, sometimes divided up into multiple apartments.
We are especially fortunate in this trip in having a very dear friend, Magda, who is a professor at the women’s college of Ain Shams University.
We met her first in 2022 when we came to Egypt and she kindly introduced me to scholars at the prestigious University of al-Azhar. Since then, she has visited us in America, we have been to conferences together, and she has become a most valued friend, full of kindness and laughter.
Magda lives in Obour City, about 30 minutes from Cairo, where she and her lovely family have a beautiful house. They kindly arranged for us to stay in a studio apartment at the top of the house. The apartment opens out into a huge courtyard from which we can see the streets, the traffic, and the people in every direction.
Magda’s husband Hesham is a cardiologist, a very kind and humorous man, and her daughter Amira is a very talented young lady who achieved national recognition in table tennis; she helped me to join a local gym, where the people are very friendly.
I have two Arabic tutors in Cairo, who have been teaching me on Zoom for a while. I finally got to meet Heidi, who very patiently teaches me Egyptian Arabic; and we met up again with Montasser, who helps me with classical Arabic. We plan to visit him in his village sometime.
Every day here brings something new; we have had amazing food, been to several markets, and met many interesting characters.
The real highlight of our trip so far was a reception arranged for my wife Yasmeen and me by Magda’s English Department at the Women’s College. Her colleagues are like a big family, and they presented Yasmeen with flowers.
I gave a presentation on some of my latest work. I read out a couple of my poems, which Magda is translating into Arabic. The audience was spellbound as she recited her Arabic version. The English majors are very creative and industrious; I was given two literary journals they had produced, very professional and artistically talented. One of them told me that she had found me on Instagram in 2016 and has been a fan of mine ever since! Needless to say, this made my day!!
Another student told me of the conflict she was experiencing between her leanings toward existentialism and her religious beliefs. What is amazing about intelligent students is that they often open up vistas of imagination that one had never dreamt of before; and this young lady made me realize – quite tentatively – that there is a mode in which existentialist authenticity might be commensurable with the acquisition of religious knowledge, if this is done in earnest through various stages of actual learning and self-development as opposed to the inauthenticity of “receiving” one’s creed ready-made.
Correlatively, instead of viewing God as an object, as something fixed and predefined eternally, God would here be conceived of as absolute subjectivity, ever living and dynamic, ever interacting with human subjectivity, in an ever deepening hierarchization of reciprocity where the latter undergoes kenosis in the former.
I will be presenting in a graduate class at the prestigious University of al-Azhar, which will be a great honor for me. I can’t wait to see what the students are like; I have I have already seen the buildings, which are magnificent. I’ll include more pictures in my next post.
In Part Two: Academic talks and gatherings in the month of Ramadan.
