The Conflicts of the Arabs, Naima and Necessary Arabic

So this past weekend was mostly reading and housekeeping around our flat, with a pretty awesome Citadel visit mixed in. We cooked our first meal in the flat, as most days we eat with all the people from the program at the MESP villa, where Kareema, an Egyptian woman cooks for all of us. Most nights we are on our own but my flat mates and I almost always go eat at Naima’s. Naima’s is this great little restaurant on the Nile that is ridiculously cheap and serves really good native Egyptian food. When I say cheap, I mean you can get filled up on less than $1 American. So far I have only had a couple of things from there, mainly because the menu is all in Arabic and they all speak only Arabic. So until my Arabic improves I will probably stick to my comfort zone in choosing food items. My two staples here in Egypt at Naima’s have been fuul, which is basically a bread pocket of spicy, salty beans (goes for about 25 cents USD) and kofTa which is basically a Philly cheese steak sandwich without the cheese and with lamb. So not like a Philly cheese steak at all.
We had Arabic this morning and about 3 hours of lectures on Middle East history. As mundane as that may sound, I really love classes and studying all of this stuff. We have a reader on Iran and Egypt, one on Syria, Jordan and Turkey, and one on Israel – Palestine that stands to a total of about 5 inches thick of paper to be read this semester. I am pretty excited and what I have read so far!
Lately we have been focusing on the Arab world as a whole and how un-united it is, even though all the countries seem to have common problems. Oil is a curse, Israel is a distraction and governments are authoritarian. But they seem to have tried everything from uniting the Arab world, applying a European model of Modernism, opening up to free trade, but nothing has worked for them economically. So the new idea standing in the gap with a proposed solution for the Arab world? Islamism