19 - 25 April 2001
Issue No.530
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 April 2001 Issue No.530 |
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Gift of the Nile
What is it that enables society to form, the state to be instituted and the nation to emerge? How might the nation preserve its triumph over nature, disciplining the elements and learning to build rather than destroy?
With regard to Egypt, at least, Herodotus was partly right. Without the Nile, the kind of civilisation that accomplished all this would not have been possible. Yet the Nile alone does not explain the existence of civilisation here. And some historians disagree with that ancient Greek traveller. In one version, the Nile valley initially comprised swampy marshes, and it was the people who dug into the earth, creating a river. But in either case, it is collective consciousness that counts: unified, people can create civilisation; separated, they can't. And the longer lasting a public celebration, a feast, the more likely its festivities are to capture something of that unified and timeless spirit.
The oldest holiday surviving continuously from ancient times is the feast of spring, Shamm Al-Nessim. The word is so deeply ingrained in Egyptian consciousness that, though it is derived from an ancient Egyptian term that describes the annual rebirth of the world, it has also come to mean simply what it says transliterated into Egyptian Arabic: inhaling the breeze.
Egyptians have changed languages, religions, allegiances, separating into classes and factions and frequently reinventing their identity. But they have never stopped celebrating Shamm Al-Nessim, and they do so as one. That it is a pagan festival that should not be celebrated by true adherents of the faith therefore seems like a terribly absurd contention, particularly because it is on occasions like this that the Nile's truest gift -- civilisation -- is forcefully reasserted. Let the flowers remain in bloom.
* This week's Soapbox speaker is the editor-in-chief of Al-Qahira, the Ministry of Culture's weekly newspaper.
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