Democracy

This photo was taken earlier this evening at approximately 7pm as I was passing through Midan Tahrir en route to visit a friend in another neighborhood in Cairo. I saw the word "Democracy" spray-painted on The Wall and quickly snapped a photo on my iphone. People were scalling The Wall and sitting on top of the AUC buildings in order to watch the fighting on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Clashes broke out in and around Midan Tahrir on Saturday after a peaceful sit-in was violently dispersed earlier in the day.

While much of the graffiti in Cairo is in Arabic, it isn't uncommon to see graffiti in English. I have always been befuddled by this. The language of Egypt is Arabic afterall and not everyone can read English, let alone speak it. Furthermore, not everyone is literate! The cleverness of so much of the graffiti is that anyone can understand it-- you don't need to know how to read to understand a picture of Mubarak with a bullet in his head.

The word "Democracy," however, is particularly interesting word.

In Arabic the word democracy is democratiya, very similar to the English word. Both words derive from the Greek word, "Demos" meaning people and "Kratos" meaning rule. While it might seem as though the Arabic word was merely translitered from the English word, let's remember that the works of Aristotle and Plato were translated into Arabic as early as the 8th century AD.

I am nevertheless reminded of a passage from my favorite book, The Posionwood Bible, by Barbra Kingsolver,

"When a government comes crashing down, it crushes those who were living under its roof. People like Mama Mwanza never knew the house was there at all. Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you’re a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain."

The people in Midan Tahrir know what Democracy means in English, but I'm not sure they yet know the meaning in their native tongue. Democracy is certainly a complex word in a foreign tongue. But is this really the language of the enemy? I don't think SCAF knows the meaning of the word either.

Mulling over these thoughts, I descended into the depths of the Sadat metro station under Midan Tahrir and caught a particularly potent whiff of tear gas. As it stung my eyes, my body's natural reaction was to flush out the chemicals-- and so it was, in that moment, that I shed my first tear for Egypt. For a country with so much promise, for which too many innocent lives have already been lost. Inshallah, Egypt, you will know the meaning of democratiya.