What can I say about the Citadel Mosque? It's one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen, and it was a really fulfilling space for me to be in. After that we went to another pair of mosques that were very beautiful, and right next to each other, which was sortof interesting. One of them has a tomb in the complex, which is a big no-no in Islam, but that's just how humans do things--religion included. The other was actually built fairly recently (like in the past couple hundred years), and featured alot of blue, which I enjoyed.
One thing of critical importance that my pictures cannot really convey is the scale of these worship spaces. Obviously "huge" is terribly imprecise, but it's the best I can do. Don't think megachurch, though, because the feel is very different. The space is open, without pews or risers, and the necessary architecture often blocks lines of sight without actually creating separate rooms. Prayer is an intrinsically private affair that is conducted individually--and yet it happens in an incredibly communal space. Imagine walking into a huge room and gazing up at the most beautiful ceiling you've ever seen--then turning away from it and prostrating yourself on the floor in your own prayer, blind to the ceiling and the people coming and going around you. What could be more profoundly, beautifully devout?
In any case, the whole thing was very emotional for me; I was intrigued and moved by the ceiling-prostration dynamic as well as the mosques in general, and really feeling the loss of my own community in the city and the region as a whole.
That night, we met with the organizers of a major Egyptian youth organization. Their model is essentially project facilitation: people come to them with community initiatives, and they help them with funding and organizing. Thus, they basically represent a collection of projects. It was very interesting, particularly because they asked us at the end for what we knew and could contribute; it was strange being consulted by people who were clearly so successful at things we had only dabbled in. (The mark of real greatness and class, in my opinion, is truly seeking to learn from everyone--so basically, they're awesome.)
In case you didn't know, NGOs and political parties operate under strict regulation in the Arab World. There's a great deal of bureaucracy to jump through in order to register organizations (a must), and paperwork for undesirable agendas and activists is often "lost" or "delayed". It makes for a very different political climate. We were in Egypt right before a railroaded constitutional amendment. What was shocking to us about the whole affair was that no one seemed to know what was even in it, even those who appeared very concerned about its passage; the details were barely disclosed (if they were fully disclosed at all) to the public mere days before the referendum.
Puts things in perspective.
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