On the Cultural Significance of Sham El- Nassim

Yesterday we had an unusual banquet at our house, one that particularly smelled horrible! Yes I did say this. It was a celebration for the ancient dating feast of “Sham El Nassim”. While most Egyptians today think Sham El Nassim is an Arabic word (شم النسيم) meaning the “the smell of the Zephyr” because it is celebrated during the spring time, the word was found to be more ancient than one could think of. This feast of Sham El Nassim has ancient Egyptian origins with the word "Shemu" being used in the ancient Egyptian culture during harvest days meaning “the day of creation”. Greek historians of the first century have recorded accounts of ancient Egyptians eating salted fish, lettuce and onions. That’s what I meant by the horrible smell! Egyptians were thought to celebrate the Shemu since 2700 B.C. and surprisingly it is still celebrated to that day with minor changes.

Later on, Coptic Christians in the second century A.D. found that the feast came during the Christian Lent and were not able to celebrate and eat the salted fish during that time, so they moved the feast to the following day of the Easter. The day of Sham El Nassim has to occur on Monday, since Easter has to be on Sunday. It’s also interesting to mention that the ancient Egyptian word “Shemu” developed to the Coptic word “Shom Ennisim” then finally to the Arabic transliteration “Sham El Nassim”.

While this blog post was not intended to be a historical class, it was important to give a brief background to understand the culture behind what we just celebrated yesterday.

You are probably wondering how the feast is supposed to be on Monday while we celebrated yesterday on Friday. Indeed “Sham El Nassim” is celebrated on Monday following the Eastern calendar of Easter which was meant to be on Monday May 6 this year. However, due to some family circumstances and traveling the feast was postponed a little bit.

Let’s just get to the sociology of this ancient feast!

According to the functionalist approach, Sham El Nassim can be seen as an event with its own rituals and practices that brings people together in social solidarity. Sham El Nassim, as a collective celebration, that makes all Egyptians, regardless of their religion; join together to celebrate in the same way. Also, what is more fascinating is Egyptians in Qatar who unite in family groups to celebrate this event. To us, Egyptians, the culture of Sham El Nassim meets the four characteristics of popular culture: being well liked by everyone, is easily recognized by all Egyptians, all classes in Egypt understand the rituals associated with the feast and finally everyone can relate to it in different ways.

The main practice in Sham El Nassim is family gathering either in public parks or in houses. Yesterday, over seven families came and joined our feast at our house. None of these families are direct relatives of ourselves, but they are friends who we relate to when living abroad. Such a family gathering makes us all appreciate the unity it generates and the sense of togetherness.

The main ritual of Sham El Nassim is to eat “Fisikh”, which is an Egyptian dish of salted fish, and onions, as you can see in the images below. However, yesterday I noticed that the table of fisikh was 80% women with only two or three men only eating fisikh. Those who found fisikh distasteful, like me, were mostly men who had another table with other types of food like pastas, kofta and salads.

Even though everyone who attended enjoyed the family gathering on Sham El Nassim, not everyone enjoyed the rituals of eating fisikh. Therefore, I do wonder with Grazian in his book “mix it up” if such a ritual will continue to be passed through the main agents of socialization. And even if it did will it still generate the same sense of social solidarity and unity amongst the celebrating community?

I also noticed the segregation that Fisikh has made, most women sat on the Fisikh table and most men and children sat on the normal food table. It could be because of health or dietary choices, especially because Fisikh has direct correlation to high blood pressure, dehydration and occasionally food poisoning if not cleaned well. But this phenomena of less than 50% eating Fisikh could be also because of the other options that were available that included Italian pasta. Hence, globalization can be a factor that interferes with cultural elements of Sham El Nassim.

Will the feast that survived more than 4700 years be able to survive the 21st century? While, globalization might seem to be destroying the rituals of eating Fisikh on Sham El Nassim, it has given me an escape from eating it so maybe having more options can be good! Yet fisikh lovers like my mother will still love Fisikh anyways.

Who are FEMEN anyway?

The phenomenon of protesting naked took over the media in the past year. Women who consider themselves free go out in the streets topless to introduce their issues and to bring attention to them. These women are not asking for women right as much as they are asking for their “own” rights. This Neo-Feminist movement started by a group that was founded in 2008 called FEMEN. Their first topless protest was against sex tourists. The FEMEN group started appearing on the media as something wrong, but it inspired other women to defend their own rights. My example here is Alia Al-Mahdi who is an Egyptian girl, and she was the first Egyptian girl to do a topless protest.
Since Egypt is now ruled by Mohamed Morsi - an ex-member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood - , it is not surprising that there are people who are against the Islamic System. While Al-Mahdi was in Europe, Al-Mahdi and her friends went to the Egyptian embassy in Sweden topless holding signs that says “NO to Sharia Constitution”. This a message of a FEMEN Arab about “her” rights for not wearing hijab, and getting her own freedom. Al-Mahdi caused a huge argument among the Arab countries, especially Egypt, with the proposals of some Egyptians to not consider Al-Mahdi an Egyptian after what she did. This new FEMEN move by Arab women are called the "topless jihad".
In Islam, the women rights are equaled with men, but to an extent. For some of the conservative countries such as Saudia Arabia, Women are not allowed to drive or work a decent job. Two days ago, the first Saudi women attorney/activist was registered. This woman did not go out and did a topless protest. From my perspective, it is not freedom if you just take off your clothes. Women who take off their clothes are indicated as prostitutes no matter what their needs/wants were. There is always a way to convey your message to the community.
In my opinion, in the sociology, the three waves of feminism were nothing but a start for what we are seeing these days; women using nudity to ask for their rights. Women should have the rights to work as long as it does not conflict with any religious context (no matter what was their religion). Also it is not the women rights to use nudity and disturb people to get what they want.

Representation of Gender in Egyptian Cinema

If we look at films as the reflection of society, then one of the main themes that should be looked at in a nation’s cinema is the representation of gender roles. In the book Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland tries to define power in regards to women’s empowerment. She divides the notion of power into different types of power. The first type is ‘Power-Over’, which is the classic Weber-ian definition of power. Power-over simply divides power between the powered (master) and the non-powered (subject). The master controls the subject, and in the case of Gender, the man controls the woman as masculinity and manhood are equated to power. There’s also ‘Power-To’ which is the case when one has control over the circumstances of their own life. These power-over and power-to notions that we experience in reality is both portrayed and challenged in films. If we look at Egyptian films specifically, we find that the representation of gender roles has not really changed since the 1960s. Starring Fatin Hamama, Al Bab Al Maftuh (1963) is a melodrama based on a novel with the same title written by Latifa El Zayyat.

 

The film tells us the story of Laila, a smart and enthusiastic young woman who struggles with the patriarchal society she lives in where the traditions are imposed on women in order to please men. In the first scene of the film, Laila challenges the headmistress of her school. When the headmistress says that women’s job is motherhood, while war and struggle is for men only, Laila preaches to the students of her school and says that war doesn’t differentiate between men and women and asks the school to ‘open the doors’. After she leads a demonstration against occupation, Laila returns home and gets beaten up by her father who sees what she did as a scandalous act. Laila’s father has power over her. Throughout the film, Laila is forced to act within the gender roles imposed on her as she gets engaged through an arranged marriage. However, at the end, Laila finally decides to leave her fiancé, run away and jump on the train to Port Said with her lover to join the resistance of the people against the Triple Aggression instead of going to Fayoum with her family.

 

Finally we see Laila getting the power to control her life, however, this ending shows that Laila’s freedom was still dependent on her lover, Hussein, who’s a male figure and that she could not achieve it on her own. If we look at a more recent example, Taymour w Shafika (2007), we find a lot of the similar notions, empowering women throughout the film and dis-empowering them at the end. Taymour w Shafika is a typical romantic-comedy starring Ahmed El-Sakka and Mona Zaki.

 

Taymour and Shafika are lovers and best friends who have been neigbors since their childhood. Since the beginning of the film, we see that Taymour has power over Shafika due to his masculinity. His masculinity is enhanced by his buffed up muscles and his job as a security officer.

 

Shafika gains more and more power as she gets her PhD and becomes the Minister of Environment. Shafika’s power is seen as the problem throughout the film, as Taymour is a conservative, traditional man, who makes Shafika choose between him and her career. After choosing her career, Taymour breaks up with Shafika. By the end of the film, Shafika gets kidnapped after she goes on a business trip to Ukraine, but “luckily” Taymour was on her security team and he rescues her. Shafika realizes that her love for Taymour is worth sacrificing her career and they get married, giving up her power-to as she gives Taymour the power over her.

Anger Day

What is happening in Egypt is big. Though it was expected, no one knew when or how it was going to happen. A few days after what happened in Tunisia, I found an invitation on Facebook sent to me by one of my Egyptian friends and named “Anger Friday.” I ignored it and didn’t even bother to see what the event was. I thought it was one of the silly, pointless invitations that people send on Facebook to invite you to attend a meaningless reunion. It wasn’t until I knew that the internet was cut-off from Egypt, that I decided to go into the event’s page and find out what this “Anger Day" was. 

This Facebook page was the start of the Egyptian conflict. I never imagined that through a social networking site people could organize and commit to a real, important event. Such a social network consisting of individuals connected through a variety of relationships was ironically the reason for this protesting movement to have thousands at the beginning and could’ve been millions, if it wasn’t for the cut of the internet. 

Moreover, the facebook was not the only engine for this revolution;  Ghonim's twitter page was another way for people to instantaneously follow what is happening in Egypt.

 



source: CNN





As Grazian mentioned, “Social networks and their connectors provide the structure machinery for the spread of popular fads, fashion," and in this case revolution. The inspiration of this revolution and the creator of the Facebook page was a person named Wael Ghonim who was "well-connected" i.e., enjoys a large number of network ties. These social networking ties enabled him to gather tens of thousands of people in Egypt united by one demand.



source: Al-Jazeera

 

Source: CNN



However, the invitation did not target a specific gender, age or social class otherwise, no one would've showed up because according to the interactional approach of popular culture,  the people that have the strongest personal ties are very similar to each other and therefore have access to the same information. Ghonim's power as a connector didn't depend on how many people he knew; it was how many different kinds of people he knew. Those weak social ties are more effective than the strong ones because they serve as a bridge spanning to separate social worlds.

The revolution's effectiveness came from the verity of people who were protesting. From every class, age group and different cities in the Egyptian society and who had different reasons to protest.

CUltural Effervecence in Egypt and Beyond

United, in one place, at one time, people in Tahrir Square screamed their lungs out for justice and fairness against the Mubarak regime. Approximately half a million people turned up on Friday, people from all ages and class categories showed up holding hands, after the Muslim Friday prayers.
A week later, Qatar’s ministry of interior gave approval for Egyptian protestors living in Qatar to conduct a peaceful march and protest near the Egyptian embassy located on the Diplomatic street next to the Sheraton, Doha.
On Tuesday the 1st of February, more than 500 people came together in Doha for one cause, for one purpose, which is to be heard by the Egyptian government, and tried to voice their concerns peacefully. Even though, there were Qatari police forces on alert for any riots or violent disturbances in the protest.
It was expected that riots would take place where more than 500 angry human beings are calling out for their oppressed rights. It’s only logical that the Qatari government was trying to secure the area, the protestors and the embassy as well.
But what many did not notice is that there are many other ways to voice concerns and problems effectively other than protesting. One underground Egyptian rapper, Yousif Khalil, made a song about the Egyptian people’s struggle with authority and how he tries to fight the oppressing regime through his voice and his words. This demonstartion is the perfect example of the cultural effervescence.
Now, popular culture plays a crucial role into shaping many of today’s youth’s ideologies and changes how they take action through their verbal skills. Voicing your anger and your concerns through strong lyrical songs is the path this generation chose.
He adapted the western method, that is originally African based, into his own style and culture to broadcast his feelings about what is going on in Egypt.