Bad moon rising : a chronicle of the Middle East today

140 Pages·2003·1.374 MB·English

by  Gilles Kepel

To Michel Marian
Homme d’Esprit
semper fidelis
Gilles Kepel
BAD MOON RISING
A Chronicle of the M iddle East T oday
Translated from the French by
Pascale Ghazaleh
SAQI
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
ISBN 0 86356 303 1
© Gilles Kepel 2003
English translation © Pascale Ghazaleh 2003
Originally published as Cbronique d’une guerre d’Orient
© Editions Gallimard, Paris 2002
This edition first published 2003 by Saqi Books
The right of Gilles Kepel to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
of 1988
The book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as part of
the Burgess Programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the
Institut Fran^ais du Royaume-Uni.
The book is published with the co-operation of the Ministere fran^ais
charge de la culture — Centre national du livre.
Saqi Books
26 Westbourne Grove
London W2 5RH
www.saqibooks.com
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Contents
Chronicle of an Oriental War 7
A Brief Chronicle of Israel and Palestine 99
Journey Through an Imperious, Wounded America 121
Index 137

Chronicle of an Oriental War

Saturday 13 October 2001
I had not been back to Cairo in four years. As the evening flight
glides over the city before landing, I recognize the streets of
Heliopolis: the luminous Arabic sign of Omar Effendi, the
department store; the green neon lights hung on minarets,
whose night-time presence can only be guessed. I shall cross the
airport’s threshold, and a breeze laden with the particular
perfumes of this land will strike me, a fleeting impression that
familiarity will soon dispel. Egypt unfurls its seasons according
to an intimate olfactory calendar, bound up since eternity with
the ebb and flow of the Nile. Whenever I returned from abroad,
tasting the air, eyes closed, I could distinguish between spring
and autumn, and knew without fail that I had arrived. Egypt is
smelled. The great feast that brings Muslims and Christians
together, when spring returns, is called Shamm al-Nissim —
‘sniff the breeze’. Only radical Islamists boycott it: it would
distract believers from the exclusive adoration of God. But even
GILLES KEPEL
their curses cannot stop the month when the fragrance of
crushed sugar cane fills the air, nor the preceding months of
guavas and their suffocating perfume, of ripe mangoes, of the
fresh alfalfa that drives the water buffaloes wild. I try in vain to
remember which aromatic gust will envelop me in its eddies
when I emerge from the airport on this warm evening. I’ve been
away too long.
I notice no apparent deployment of security forces in the
arrival hall, despite Bin Laden and all the tension of the Middle
East one imagines from Paris. I am out so soon indeed that my
friend Abu Skandar, who has factored in plenty of time for
customs and police formalities, is not yet there, and I remain
alone in the night, smelling an odour I do not recognize. The air,
saturated with petrol fumes, is thick with a sort of gray fog; it
makes haloes around the headlights of the old Polonez, which
arrives at last, and into which I climb. This smell was unknown
before, my friend explains; this is the heavy, oppressive smoke
from the burning of rice straw. Agriculture was liberalized three
years ago in the Nile Delta, and the fellahs fell upon the
profitable planting of rice. Then they burn the straw, to plant in
its stead fava beans, clover, wheat. Government prohibitions,
the straw-compacting machines they were offered — they care
nothing for these. And every autumn they calmly asphyxiate the
city’s inhabitants. We spend entire days in this gray, sickly sweet
mist that makes Cairo resemble a ghost city, waiting until the
peasants are done.
10