Lanternix

13 December 2006

"Hot Hot Hot'' from Bend It Like Beckham

29 November 2006

Scared?

He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress;
My God, in Him I will trust.”

Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler
And from the perilous pestilence.

He shall cover you with His feathers,
And under His wings you shall take refuge;
His truth shall be your shield and buckler.

You shall not be afraid of the terror by night,
Nor of the arrow that flies by day,

Nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness,
Nor of the destruction that lays waste at noonday.

A thousand may fall at your side,
And ten thousand at your right hand;
But it shall not come near you.

Only with your eyes shall you look,
And see the reward of the wicked.

Because you have made the LORD my refuge,
Even the Most High, your dwelling place,

No evil shall befall you,
Nor shall any plague come near your dwelling;

For He shall give His angels charge over you,
To keep you in all your ways.

In their hands they shall bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.

You shall tread upon the lion and the cobra,
The young lion and the serpent you shall trample underfoot.

“Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him;
I will set him on high, because he has known My name.

He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will deliver him and honor him.

With long life I will satisfy him,
And show him My salvation.”

- Psalm 91

08 October 2006

The Yakoubian Building

This movie made me sad sad sad. And angry.
But I loved it. Finally someone spoke about Egypt’s Francophone community (or rather Egypt’s lost Francophone community). And finally someone spoke of the deterioration of Egyptian society as a result of Nasser’s 1952 coup d’état.
I don’t know where to start. Very few movies have ever left me in such a condition. It’s 2:55am and I have work tomorrow, yet I feel a compelling need to talk about this movie.

A lost culture. This is what happened to us, the Francophones of Egypt. La crème de la société égyptienne. Like Zaki Pasha said, we have become a rare breed.
زيي على صغير ماتلاقيش يا جميل. احنا آخر الرجال المحترمين
Our numbers are decreasing, and French is slowly dying in one of its historical strong footholds. Screw you Nasser!

A lost beauty. Zaki Pasha left Paris and returned to Cairo, not out of nostalgia or patriotism, but because Egypt was better than France!

البلد دي كانت أحسن من باريس. الموضه كانت تنزل هنا قبل ما تنزل في باريس. الشوارع كانت نضيفة زي الفل، بتتغسل كل يوم. المحلات كانت فخمة. الناس كانوا مؤدبين. خللي الناس يبصوا على البلد اللي باظت. يبصوا على العمارات اللي كانت أحسن من عمارات اوروبا. دلوقتي بقت مزابل من فوق ومن تحت مسخ! احنا في زمن المسخ!

Those lines tore my heart apart. One act of stupidity by a bunch of Fascists destroyed my country. And I hate to admit it, but I am in love, not with my country as it is today, but as it used to be during that beautiful time.

A lost prestige. Zaki compares Christine, the high-cultured Francophone, and Bosayana اللي من فوق السطوح. I’m not a capitalist and I have nothing against the middle or lower classes. But for the lower and lower middle classes to climb to power all of a sudden destroys any society. And things were clearly much better when each was in its proper place.
بلدي بقت مزبلة

A lost honesty. In liberal Egypt the right was right and the wrong was wrong. Today people use religion to hide their atrocities and to find pretexts for their immoral desires. So along those lines, Azzam who follows God’s laws does not hesitate to remarry in secret, kill his unborn child, and become a drug dealer. And as long as he knows how to survive the country’s political turmoil, mainly by bribing those in power, he continues to survive and thrive. Yet, in front of people he is Hagg Azzam, the well respected and blessed pious man of God. Worse still, he becomes a member of the parliament, thus reflecting the true image of the members of the most important political assembly in the nation: drug dealers, illiterates, farmers and religious extremists.

A lost tolerance. Screw the majority of Egyptian Muslims who happen to be moderate, and screw Egyptian Christians, but some Muslims want it اسلامية اسلامية, neither democratic nor secular nor socialist. And resorting to weapons and violence is the means by which they realize their aspirations.

The last one is about me. I knew the movie had a homosexual character, and being certainly more liberal than the vast majority of Egyptians I had no problem with that. But for some reason the pretexts Hatem gave Abderabou to justify his sexual orientation deeply disturbed me. They were so similar to the crap you hear everyday in the West about God’s love and tolerance and forgiveness bla bla bla. Excuse me, but this doesn’t mean that God approves of wrong deeds. Yes God is loving and He is Love. But He is Love when things are correct. If you want to do something just do it, but don’t climb over the back of religion and try to develop unorthodox arguments to justify your position. You were strong enough to do something that opposes the social norm, so now be brave enough to admit it is in contradiction with religion! I don’t know why I was so disturbed by that. Am I just losing my tolerance.?

For the millionth time: screw you Nasser! May you be burning in hell right now!

3:30 du main. Ça suffit pour le moment. Adieu une Egypte que fut jadis un des plus beaux et un des plus grands pays du monde. Adieu une communauté Francophone et cosmopolite qui battait autreois avec de la vie et de l’amour. Adieu une vie, en rose...

30 September 2006

Amour

"Même pas un seul jour ne s’est passé sans que quelque chose ne la lui rappele!"
Un parfum,
Une coiffure,
Une langue,
Un visage,
Une timidité,
Une chanson,
Une couleur,
Un pays,
Un poème,
Et surtout... un sourire, au son duquel le monde dansait et les fleurs s’épanouissaient...

- Réflexions hazardeuses influencées par le roman El amor en los tiempos del cólera (L'amour aux temps du choléra) par Gabriel García Márquez

28 September 2006

Cantique de Jean Racine par Gabriel Fauré

Enfin après des années de recherches sur l’internet pour le Cantique de Jean Racine Op. 11 par Gabriel Fauré, je l’ai trouvé! Evidemment je n’avais pas eu de succès auparavant puisque je le croyais Forêt, mais c’était pas Forêt, plutôt Fauré!
Ce cantique m’apporte tant de beaux souvenirs de la chorale Saint Marc et des messes de minuit à Noël. Et je connais qqn qui sera aussi heureux que moi de l’avoir trouvé :)

Verbe égal au Très-Haut
notre unique espérance
jour éternel de la terre et des cieux ;
de la paisible nuit nous rompons le silence
Divin Sauveur, jette sur nous les yeux;
répands sur nous le feu de ta grâce puissante
que tout l'enfer fuie au son de ta voix ;
Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante
qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois ;
O Christ sois favorable à ce peuple fidèle
pour te bénir maintenant rassemblé;
reçois les chants qu'il offre
à ta gloire immortelle
et de tes dons qu'il retourne comblé.

11 September 2006

Happy New Egyptian Year

Nine eleven has come to be associated in our minds with the 2001 attacks on the WTC. Yet, for us Egyptians, 9/11 marks the beginning of the Egyptian New Year.

Today the Egyptian New Year’s celebrations are almost exclusive to the Copts, since almost all Muslims are experiencing a withdrawal into the Arab and Islamic identity, and trying their best to distance themselves from any Egyptian associations. As Mahdi Akef, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood organization has put it, Egypt is not a nation, but rather a province of the Islamic Khilafa, which encompasses all Islamic countries. This is rather unfortunate, and was certainly not the case 200 years ago, when the entirety of Egypt used to gather and celebrate this joyous occasion, in the same way our Ancient Egyptian ancestors used to.

Today, the Egyptian New Year’s celebrations are called Neyrouz. The word is derived from the Coptic term niiarwou (ni-yarouou), which means the rivers, since the New Year’s celebrations are actually celebrations of the rising of the Nile waters to inundate and fertilize the lands. When the Arabs invaded Egypt in the seventh century, they confused the term niiarwou with the Persian term of Nourouz: the celebrations of the Persian New Year, and this is how the Egyptian New Year has come to be known as Neyrouz.

There are 2 systems of counting the Egyptian years. Based on the Ancient Egyptian years, this year starting today is the year 6248. It is calculated starting at the year 4246 BC, which is the earliest date ever recorded in history. In Coptic years, today is the beginning of the year 1723 AM (Anno Martyrum). The Coptic years begin in the year 284 AD, that is the year Diocletian became Roman Emperor. The Copts start their calendar accordingly because his reign witnessed the harshest persecutions of Egyptian Christians ever recorded in history, with hundred of thousands of martyrs all across the land of Egypt.

Happy New Year!

10 September 2006

The Independent Copt is here

The Independent Copt monthly magazine, issued by the Free Copts, is finally here.
To download it in .pdf format, please click here.

Here is this month's Editor's Note:

We welcome you to the third edition of the Independent Copt, issued by the Free Copts. As you may already know, every year the month of September witnesses the beginning of the Egyptian civil year, also known as the Coptic year. Known as the martyrs’ feast, the Coptic New Year is above all a celebration of Egypt’s Christian martyrs throughout the ages. In this month’s Independent Copt we thus read about the origins of the Coptic Calendar and about some of Egypt’s ancient and modern martyrs. Moreover, by reason of the Copts’ suffering since the Arab invasion of Egypt, a significant portion of this edition is allocated to Egypt under the Islamic rule, between the 7th and the 19th centuries.
From 19th century Egypt to modern day Egypt, Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the internationally renowned political sociology professor, gives us an analysis of Mubarak regime’s domestic troubles. Through this enlightening article, we learn about Mubarak’s wars against Egypt’s judges, the Bedouins of Sinai, and of course against the Copts, whom Dr Ibrahim considers to be “the original Egyptians”. Along the same lines, two other political articles tackle the problems faced today by the Egyptian society in general and the Coptic community in specific. Eng. Youssef Sidhom, the chief editor of Egypt’s only Coptic newspaper Watani, writes about the mountainous difficulties Copts face to build or even repair churches. Moreover, the Israeli author Barry Rubin tells us about Egypt’s reformist opposition group, Kifaya, and its efforts to expose corruption in Egypt.
As to complement this edition’s principal article about Egypt in the Islamic era, two more articles relate to Islam. The first, written by the famous Lebanese political analyst Dr. Walid Phares, is about salient questions raised by the forced conversion to Islam of two Fox News journalists in Gaza. In this article, Dr. Phares speaks about the history of forced conversions to Islam by extremist groups, and about the role Hamas played in the story. The second article, contributed by the Most Rev. Charles Chaput the Archbishop of Denver, is entitled Understanding Islam and gives an account of the historical conflicts between Muslims and Christians since the rise of Islam.
More on the Coptic side of things, the third issue of the Independent Copt brings you a biography of the 10th century bishop of Ashmunien Severus Ibn Al-Mukaffa, a brief column about the Egyptian minister of finance Dr. Youssef Boutros Ghali, and of course a section about the Coptic language where you can learn the Coptic alphabet.
Last but not least, please remember to join us on September 29th in mourning and observing 3 minutes of silence and prayer at noon time to remember the Arab invasion of Egypt. In this occasion, we ask you to print out the Coptic flag on the last page of this month’s edition and to share it with your friends and family.
We wish you a happy Coptic New Year celebration and we remind you that you can always contact us with your feedbacks and comments. We also encourage you to join our web community at http://www.freecopts.net/forum for more articles and discussions.
The Free Copts

31 August 2006

Naguib Mahfouz, RIP

Today (technically yesterday, but I haven't gone to bed yet), the Egyptian Literature Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz passed away. He was 94.
Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 in Cairo, and was named after the internationally renowned Coptic doctor Naguib Mahfouz who supervised his delivery. He began his career writing novels with themes taken from the Ancient Egyptian life and mythology, such as Radopis and The Struggle of Thebes. Later he shifted gears and began writing about 20th century Egypt. He is considered in many ways the father of modern Egyptian novel writing.
Throughout his lifetime, Naguib Mahfouz was fiercely attacked by Muslim fundamentalists for what they viewed as transgressions against Allah and Islam in Mahfouz's works. His most controversial work is Awlad Haretna or The Sons of our Alley, which was banned by Al Azhar, although it was published a number of times by Egyptian newspapers.
In 1988, Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize in literature, thus becoming the second Egyptian Nobel Prize winner after Anwar El Sadat. He is the only writer ever to receive a Nobel Prize for works in the Arabic language.
Naguib Mahfouz maintained an excellent health until October 1994 when he was attacked on the street by an Islamic fundamentalist who, objecting to Mahfouz's daring writings, attempted to cut his throat. Mahfouz's life was saved but his health continuously deteriorated until he passed away yesterday, 12 years after the incident.
Mahfouz was very loved and appreciated in Egypt. He was an icon; like a father and grandfather to all Egyptians. We will certainly miss his humble and happy character. And although his body left us yesterday, his works will survive with us forever.
Naguib Mahfouz, Rest In Peace!

30 August 2006

O King of Peace

From The Coptic Heritage, Hymn entitled O King of Peace

To view the Coptic text, please download the Coptic Fonts from this Website

` Pouro `nte ]hiryny @ moi nan `ntekhiryny @ cemni nan `ntekhiryny @ ,a nennobi nan `ebol

Jwr `ebol `nnijaji @ `nte ]ek`klycia @ `aricobt `eroc @ `nneckim sa `eneh

Emmanouyl Pennou] @ qen tenmy] ]nou @ qen `p`wou `nte Pefiwt @ nem Pi`pneuma e;ouab

` Ntef`cmou `eron tyren @ `nteftoubo `nnenhyt @ `nteftal[o `niswni @ `nte nen'u,y nem nencwma

Tenouwst `mmok `w Pi`,rictoc @ nem Pekiwt `n`aga;oc @ nem Pi`pneuma e;ouab @ je (ak`i) `akcw] `mmon

25 August 2006

Farwell Ramses the Great

Ramses II
Lord of the Two Lands, Living in Truth, King of Upper and Lower Egypt
The Horus, Strong Bull Son of Khepri Appearing in Thebes
The King of Upper and Lower Egypt, User Maat Ra, Chosen of Ra, the Golden Horus
Mighty in years and great of victories, the Son of Ra
Ramses, Beloved of Amun, who came forth from the womb to receive the crowns of Ra who created him to be sole Lord of the Two Lands
He of the Two La Goddesses
Enduring of Kingship like Ra in heaven, Bodily son of Atum
Men Kheper Ra, Beloved of Atum
The great god, together with his Enneat
Granted all Life, Stability, and Dominion like Ra for ever
The noble youth, beloved like Aten when he shines on the horizon
One serviceable to Ra and granted life like Ra
"O Pharaoh Ramses the Great - life, health, strength be to you!"