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Edited on Fri Jul-18-08 12:58 AM by onager
I just read the great book Taxi, by the Egyptian writer Khaled al-Khamissi. He calls it a novel, but it's presented as a group of conversations with taxi drivers in the horror that is Cairo.
The book came close to being banned, because of its brutally frank comments about the government, police corruption, religion, etc. All told in the blunt street language of cab drivers.
In one chapter, Khamissi gets into a taxi with a splitting headache, only to be assaulted by a very loud sermon blasting from the radio.
He eventually realized it was a Christian sermon. He asked the cab driver to turn down the radio. The driver refused, and went off on a long rant about how his religion was important and he was being "persecuted," etc. (Gee, that sounds familiar.)
The author then noted that he very rarely hears this kind of thing from his Egyptian Xian friends. In contrast to the Muslims, who are always mentioning how many times they have prayed today, that they are on the way to the mosque, how much they gave to charity, etc. etc.
I've read elsewhere that, among Muslims, this blustery self-righteousness gets much worse during the month of Ramadan.
Last year during Ramadan, a journalist for the magazine Egypt Today wrote a funny article about it. He wrote that, during Ramadan, every Ahmed, Mohammed and Mahmoud on the street feels perfectly free to walk up to a stranger and start berating the person for not being devout/humble/etc. enough during the Holy Month.
The writer got chewed out for talking and laughing while walking with a female. He told his assailant that he wouldn't feel right just ignoring the young woman walking beside him, since she was his sister.
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