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Al-Azhar mosque

So Obama is planning to speak in Egypt on June 4, a choice some are saying is a signal that America wants our "autocratic ally" to be a model for other Arab nations. He's rejected the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh in favor of Cairo, a move that is considered bold, since anything in Cairo will be harder to secure.

Now the question is finding a venue within Cairo, and there's talk that it may be Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world and Egypt's center of Islamic learning. Pro: Al-Azhar can hold 1,000 people. Con: What to do with all the shoes?

I doubt this will be the final choice, but I'll be interested how the media in both countries will respond if it is. In Egypt Al-Azhar is the center of state-sponsored Islam; Sheikh Tantawi is known as a mouthpiece of the government, always giving Muslim cover for Mubarak's policy decisions. Obama speaking there would be an endorsement of Mubarak, not the Islamists. But would that be understood in the U.S.? Or would it just be read as Barack HUSSEIN Obama speaking at a mosque?

Class Dismissed in Swat Valley: A 15-minute video about the closing of girls' schools in Swat, the region of Pakistan that has been taken over by the Taliban.

Everything about this is heartbreaking, but I was especially moved by the girl who gave a speech about the political situation and had to cover her face to hide her identity. She's only 12 or 13 but already fearing personal reprisals for speaking out in favor of something as basic as her right to go to middle school.

More about the video at alt.muslim

There was an earthquake this morning. The epicenter was on the island of Rhodes, in Greece, but it was a 6.4 and I felt it here. My instructor and one other woman in my class did, too. Everyone else slept through it.

My instructor said it was the strongest and longest she'd felt since 1992. The earthquake of 1992 is to Cairo as Katrina is to New Orleans in a lot of ways — it was a moment when the government committed epic fail. Hundreds of people were killed while the administration basically stood around and said, "Gee, that's unfortunate." The Muslim Brotherhood stepped in, providing tents and food and water for people in poor neighborhoods, and the moment became a kind of catalyst or rallying point for the Islamist movement for the next five years or so, the closest Egypt's come to having a revolution since Mubarak's been in power.

Last night I went to the restaurant/pub around the corner and spent a couple hours talking to two journalists, both in their twenties, working for the foreign press. One of them said he wakes up every day and wonders how this city works at all.

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Another bombing in Egypt.

This time in Dahab. Dahab is (or least was?) a hippie "resort" on the Sinai Peninsula. I never went there, but I had so many friends who did, most of them Egyptians. Dahab had hotels that were basically thatched roofs on poles, with sandy floors. For two dollars management would give you a bamboo mat for your bed; bring your own water. In the mid-90s one guy I knew wrote an article for Cairo Today about whether the concept of Generation X applied to Egyptians. Fittingly, he did all his research in Dahab. Egypt's only tattoo artist also lived and worked there. After a few years he quit tattooing women, a concession to his mother on her deathbed. Wish I remembered his name.

Maybe it sounds annoying from afar, but I always saw that city as a rare example of cross-cultural melding that didn't, for once, involve the crushing ubiquity of corporate interests. I understand the politics of hippie tourism can be just as problematic as the regular kind, and maybe I'm biased because the only folks I knew who went there weren't foreigners. But the idea of it, the way my friends talked about it, embodied something I liked, a lot, about Egypt. That and Siwa are the two places I regret skipping.

Bush: I would accept Islamic Iraq

Mr Bush told the Associated Press in an interview that he would accept such a result if elections were open and fair.

"I will be disappointed. But democracy is democracy," he said during an interview given on Air Force One.

"If that's what the people choose, that's what the people choose," he said. Free elections are expected in the country next January.

Speaking as he travelled between campaign stops, Mr Bush said the US would leave Iraq "once we've helped them to get on the path of stability and democracy".

He added: "It's very difficult for me to predict what forces will exist although I will tell you that Iraq's leadership has made it quite clear that they can manage their own affairs at the appropriate time."

Correspondents say Mr Bush's comments appear to clash with earlier remarks from his administration which rejected calls soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime for the creation of an Islamic state similar to that of its neighbour, Iran.

This already happened, more than ten years ago: in Algeria. In 1992 the Islamists won the first round of democratic elections and looked ready to win the run-off when the ruling party, the FLN, declared the elections void, launching the country into a civil war. France supported the FLN but the U.S. under George H.W. Bush stayed neutral, refusing to endorse either the prospect of an Islamic government or the anti-democratic alternative. Of course they had the freedom to shy away from that question because Algeria was and remains a French problem. In Iraq they won't have that privilege.

But be very clear. The point of "regime change" in Iraq is to install a cooperative puppet, one responsive to U.S. business interests in the region. A theocracy poses no inherent contradiction to that objective: witness our friends on the Arabian peninsula. If anything a theocracy is more likely to squash dissent, thereby ensuring that the country is "secure" for the free flow of capital. America's main worry in the case of Algeria was that it would not repay its debt, but this is not an issue in Iraq; whatever regime gets set up there will be beholden to American interests one way or another, and in case they have doubts over such a situation we'll have troops on the ground to remind them.

An Islamic win in Iraq would be a PR disaster for Bush, but only in the short term, and anyway, if there's anything we've learned in the last four years, it's that Bush doesn't care much about public relations. He has other priorities.

Who is whom in the Iraqi opposition:

There are 11 secular nationalist opposition groups, most important of which are the Iraqi National Congress (INC) headed by Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi National Accord (Al-Wifaq), the Iraq Communist Party, the Constitutional Monarchy movement led by Al- Sharif Ali Bin Al-Hussein and the Free Iraq Council headed by Said Saleh Jabr. There are five Islamist movements, most important of which are the Al-Da'wa Al-Islamiya led by Mohamed Baqr Al-Sadr and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) (Al-Majlis Al-Ala lil Thawra fi Al-Iraq) which is the main Shi'ite opposition movement. There are five national officers' groups consisting of army officers who have defected from Iraq during the 1980s and 1990s. The most prominent of them are the Free Officers Movement led by Brigadier- General Najib Al-Salihi and the Higher Council for National Salvation (HCNS), a Denmark-based group led by Wafiq Hamud Al-Samarra'i.