Extreme Pilgrim in the Coptic desert

The Pilgrim of an English pastor, Peter Owen-Jones, in the Coptic Monastery of St Anthony! He spend 3 weeks in Fr Lazarus's cave in solitude. He experiences the solitude monasticism. The interesting part starts at minute 24 and it gets very interesting at the end :) Enjoy ;)

http://blip.tv/file/1762501/

Ayman Nour's release in return of Obama's visit to Cairo

Ayman Nour, the leader of El-Ghad (the Future) libral Egyptian party, who was the only serious contender in the last presidential election and finished in the second place, was released from jail today after being held for 4 years. He was accused with forging 1000 out of the 2005 signatures he provided to establish his party. The accusation was clearly false as he needed only 50 signatures and more than a million voted for him for president, thus there was no need for him to forge them. US pressured a lot for his release but Bush administration was in deep trouble in Iraq and can't afford offending the Egyptian regime that much.

It seems that Nour's release today for medical reasons was under pressure from Obama administration especially that Nour's health was very bad two years ago and his medical release was denied multiple times. We all know that Obama promised to address the Islamic world from an Islamic capital in his first 100 days in office. Cairo seemed a natural fit. The capital of the biggest Arabic state, the heart of the Islamic world and a strategic ally to US. The biggest hardle was human rights. Cairo has a very bad record, It seems that Nour's release was the price tag Washington put on Obama's visit. 

It is definitely good news though :)

Coptic at Harvard

So I started attending this Coptic class at Harvard School of Divinity. The instructor allowed me to attend the class on the condition of doing the HWs and the quizzes. They teach the Sahidic dialect which is the dialect of the ancient manuscripts. It is a bit different form the Boharic dialect which the church books use. From pronunciation point of view it is slightly different from Bohiric and a bit different from the Greeco-Bohiric which is chanted in the church. It is very interesting though. Now I have a better idea how the words originally sounded. Because the Coptic is basically the ancient Egyptian language written in Greek letters, the people of upper and lower Egypt wrote their pronunciation of the words in different ways resulting in two writings for the same word.For example, the word "and" in Bohiric is written "ouoh" but is sahidic it its written "ouw" which tells you that the original sound of the word has a slight "h" in the end of the word. As a result, people from the north wrote "h" and people from the south didn't write "h". I'm so excited about this class :)