Ibrahim Elshamy | Blog

Ramadan Kareem! Happy Ramadan 2012. I have been looking forward to this special month for some time, as a holistic cleanse and detoxification. I wish for all goodness to everyone out there in the weeks ahead.

Ramadan, our Muslim holy month of fasting (daily from dawn until sunset), is fast approaching this year. According to ISNA, the lunar month is set begin (insh’Allah) on sundown of July 19, 2012; thus, the first day of fasting will begin at dawn of Friday, July 20, 2012. Despite what some perceive as the great hardship of giving up a month’s daylight hours without food or drink (or cigarettes, swearing, and other stuff), most Ramadan-observers share a feeling of deep excitement and joy. Sisters and brothers around the world look forward to this special month of separation from worldly comforts, contemplation on the realities around us, and an increased sense of closeness with humanity and our local communities — including those within our communities that are less fortunate, and for whom days without food is an experience far from confined to one month a year.

For many, including myself, fasting for Ramadan often presents challenges in the first few days (the body, mind, and soul getting used to a routine-shift). Yet with each day the physical challenges become easier, and the spiritual benefits increase, culminating with profound feelings of physical detoxification and spiritual cleansing.

However, I think that many people who fast Ramadan make the month harder on themselves in their habits of consumption. In response to discussions with friends over the course of several years, I am writing this short piece that briefly discusses ideas about the physical, dietary, and nutritional DO’s and DON’Ts to maximize the benefits of Ramadan’s daily structure. I am not a nutritionist, but through my own experiences, those of friends, and personal observations of red-flag mistakes, this is one person’s humble attempt to begin the conversation on how to improve the physical aspects of fasting from dawn to sunset. Such strategies are especially critical in these upcoming years where Ramadan coincides with much longer days of the summer months (in New Hampshire, around 17+ daily hours of fasting). My hope is to decrease undue burdens of the physical, such that the spiritual, communal, and charitable blessings of Ramadan can flourish for the benefit of us all.

Continue reading "Ramadan Fasting: Dietary Best Practices"...

As I mentioned in my last post, the two choices in the run-off Egyptian presidential election (Ahmed Shafiq v. Mohamed Morsi), did not represent the two poles of Egyptian political thought, but rather, a narrow slice of the intricate and nuanced spectrum that we see in the current Egyptian political conversation. Juan Cole took this idea a step further and made a “political shorthand” “ballpark” estimate of the citizenry’s five major ideological groupings from the current political climate, which I very much appreciate and find insightful (from Cole’s article, Mursi and the Brotherhood in a Pluralist Egypt):

1. The Labor Left, led by Hamdeen Sabahi (20.17%)
2. Classic liberals, led by Amr Moussa (11.13%)
3. Authoritarian secularists,led by Ahmad Shafiq (23.66%)
4. Muslim liberals, led by Abdul Moneim Abou’l-Futouh (17.47%)
5. Muslim fundamentalist, led by Muhammad Mursi (24.78%)

Continue reading "Plurality in the Egyptian Political Conversation"...

Morsi ‘ala Korsi; in other words, Morsi is on the [presidential] chair. In Egypt, another chapter in the transition-to-democracy drama has ended with the victory of Mohamed Morsi, of the Freedom and Justice Party (the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood), as president of the second Egyptian republic. Symbolically and in terms of several critical factors, this is a victory of people-power and a revolutionary process unimaginable 1.5 years ago. Morsi (perhaps best seen as a figurehead for the Muslim Brotherhood political organization) received a democratic mandate of Egyptians, who have rejected the alternate candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, another figurehead as enmeshed with former leader Mubarak’s tyrannical, oppressive regime as they come. Shafiq pledged to use brute violence to kill protesters disrupting public life, and just all-around a creepy, evil guy — he reminded me, in looks and demeanor, of the Emperor in Star Wars.

Troubling, though, are several things. First off, the ‘caretaker’ military council (SCAF) and a shadowy judiciary have strong-armed several frightening moves in the past few weeks, leaving Egypt with an elected parliament that has been unilaterally dissolved, no lasting constitution to stipulate the permanent powers of the president, and a still highly-corrupt, inefficient, and patronage-heavy political landscape for President Mosri:

Continue reading "Morsi ‘ala Korsi"...

After living in Egypt since September 2011, I’ve now been back in America for four days. My first evening was in New York City, and since then, I’ve been back home in New Hampshire. Many things have struck me, and in no particular order or exhaustive listing:

• Trees. So many trees! The greenery and colors are fantastic, and the sheer amount of green space and vegetation is stunning upon re-entry. America really is a bountiful land (millennia of active stewardship by native peoples may play a significant role in this reality).
• The Internet is so fast! Even the year prior, living on a university campus in Northern Ireland, I rarely attained even a quarter of the reliable speed of the Internet back home. This has an appreciable effect on my own productivity — and scares me when I read about ideas floating around internet service providers about increasing rate caps on Internet usage and access.
• It is a wonderful thing to be able to completely communicate in your own language, including a mastery of embedded meanings and nuances. There are too many instances (most of them ‘invisible’ and hard to even explain) that just feel so good to be able to communicate at a higher level with your fellow human beings. My first day, I couldn’t believe how cheerful it can be — if you proceed with cheer in your own demeanor — to interact with people in public.
• As a converse, I find myself sometimes strangely nervous during some interactions (e.g., trying to return an item at a store, and with a waiter), and my quick thought on this is, perhaps knowing the ‘proper’/'correct’ way to act during certain circuimstances adds a certain normative burden on the entirety of that interaction. E.g., if I don’t answer the waiter’s query within a particular timeframe, I know they will assume something, so I try to prevent that from happening because its not what I want to convey, and so on. Sometimes ignorance to these particularities — or doing a better job ignoring their own creation in my mind — would be of great benefit.
• American media is staggeringly poor, particularly in what stories ‘it’ chooses to focus on. There has got to be a revolution in how we understand events around our communities and the world sometime soon.
• More coming soon…

All in all, its so wonderful to be back home. After living abroad for two years, I am thrilled for the chance to be back in my own country / community and to be able to live, work, and grow amidst the lessons here.

A few days ago I attended a dialogue between Egyptian Students and American Fulbrighters, held at the Cairo University’s Center for Civilization Studies & Dialogue of Cultures, Faculty of Economics & Political Science. Overall it was a cool event — I got the opportunity to meet and chat with several EXTREMELY bright political science students, and spent most of the ‘dialogue’ listening intently to the wonderful opinions from these students.

Yet, I found myself towards the end feeling very — ambivalent — about the whole thing, primarily when the dialogue topics kept getting carried away by American Fulbrighters into ‘red herring’ arguments. For example, at the end of the event we ended up spending 25 minutes talking about the need for leaders in the Egyptian Revolution, which is quite an interesting topic to discuss. However, my problem is that many Fulbrighters kept using a reductive and repetitive argument series that seemed to not ‘hear’ what Egyptian political science students were saying (e.g., “We have leaders”; “We don’t want to have a strong-man leadered movement”; along with criticisms of the American Revolution and its imcomparability to the Egyptian case, etc). Most tragically were these large, broad statements by Fulbrighters that seemed to want to ‘solve’ a very difficult and complex situation by some broad rules: “if only there were leaders, this movement would really be able to succeed, like the American Civil Rights movement!” From where I was sitting, it seemed like this was an idea that just seemed to ‘arrive’ to these speakers on the spot, without prior reflection, as they searched for insights to share.

Continue reading "Dialogue with the Leader(less)"...