So the farmers by the millions move to Cairo, and between the remaining baked-earth homesteads rise the weekend villas of plutocrat Cairenes. The villas would do credit to any gated community in Boca Raton. But the villas are the product of a path to success unfamiliar to Boca (if not to Mereruka). “Who can afford these places?” I asked Peter, who has a Ph.D. in Egyptology, as does his wife. They struggle to support two kids.
“Officials,” he said. “And belly dancers.”
Other paths to success are steeper. Peter took me to one of the numerous “carpet schools” along the Memphis-Giza road. Here children age ten and up were engaged in—pedagogical alibis and apprenticeship hooey aside—child labor. Also, some of the children looked more like eight than ten.
There was nothing Dickensian about the well-lit, swept, and airy ground floor full of looms. The manager said that the boys and girls were paid “to give them encouragement” and that “maybe they’ll be able to get a job in the company’s factory,” although I had a feeling this was the factory. He assured me that his charges received academic instruction similar to that in the government schools. And maybe they do. Scribbled on one weaving frame was graffiti in English that read, “I will always be looling you.” I watched little-kid fingers move with blurring speed among warp and woof and saw little-kid faces puckered in grim expertise. I’ll never buy a handmade rug again.
Although I bought one. Small, expectant eyes were upon me. “September eleven is like a black day to us,” the manager said. Is rug weaving really any worse than PlayStation 2? Maybe not; but since I got back from Egypt, wall-to-wall carpet made on automatic machines by unionized labor is looking better—the orange shag kind included.
To blame al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt’s is, as I had told Rhona on the BBC, a slur on the poor. The September 11 attackers were taking flying lessons in America, not rug-weaving lessons in a village on the Nile. Yet there must be some economic, or political-economic, roots to the burning—flaming, bursting, exploding—bush of current events. Fouad Ajami, the author of The Dream Palace of the Arabs and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has written, “Atta struck at us because he could not take down Mr. Mubarak’s world, because in the burdened, crowded land of the Egyptian dictator there is very little offered younger Egyptians save for the steady narcotic of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.”
Narcotics aside, this “very little offered” raises a question about Arab culture. Why has Egypt—and the whole Arab world—made relatively little economic progress? Even the oil-flush Gulf states have not become rich the way we understand rich in the West. Kuwait is little more than an oil spigot with people sitting on top, and all they have to do is turn the tap. But Kuwait’s per capita GDP is $15,000, while utterly resourceless Luxembourg’s is $36,400.
Egypt of yore may have been economically sclerotic, but modern Egyptians can’t really blame their ancient civilization. At least they had a civilization, which is more than we did—or, to judge by daytime television, do yet. And Islam didn’t destroy that civilization any more than the Persians, the Ptolemites, the Romans, and the Byzantines had before. The capitulation of Egypt to the Arabs was brokered by the Christian patriarch of Alexandria in 642, on condition of security for persons and property and with religious freedom guaranteed in return for payment of tribute.
The Arab world began with a number of economic advantages besides tribute. It had a common language, a unified government, and territory that sat athwart the trade from the Orient to the Mediterranean—Z’s “strategic land bridge.” To move goods by any other route was to risk—between the Mongols and the deep blue sea—getting very wet or dead. The obligation of pilgrimage to Mecca stimulated commerce and encouraged the general public to travel the way nothing else would until the invention of frequent-flyer miles and Disney World. A measure of law and order existed, unlike in Europe, where there was none, and in China, where there was too much. And Arabs had absorbed the learning of Greco-Roman civilization centuries before Europeans, in their Renaissance, began to pick scraps of it out of the ruin they’d made of Greece and Rome. Also, the Islamic religion has the right attitude. In the Koran, Sura II, verse 275, states: “God hath permitted trade.” The Koran orders the use of honest weights and measures, the fulfillment of contracts, and the payment of debts. And one of the sayings attributed to Muhammad makes him not just the Prophet of Allah but the prophet of Adam Smith: “Only God can fix prices.”
But something went wrong. How did the Arabs fall behind Europe, America, and now the Far East? It was probably nothing so air-filled as ‘The experimental model and European rational thought,” or “the Protestant work ethic,” or “Confucian values.” Civilizations, like people, trip over smaller things. The answer may be as boring as a real estate title search (a title search, it may be noted, of real estate in the same neighborhood where the early Zionists were intent on buying).
Caliphs and sultans did not bestow feudal lands on a hereditary nobility. Fiefs were generally temporary. Land was given to a particular person for a certain time in return for military or other services. Agricultural estates were your salary. You got a raise by squeezing everything you could out of them. And you had to do it quickly, before you lost your job. There was no incentive to invest in the land, much less in the people who tilled it. This was a carnival concession. You were never going to see these rubes again.
The dearth of private land in the Islamic world is of a piece with the excessive government centralization that has always plagued the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent. Farming in much of the area requires irrigation, a horribly communal activity like being trapped in an endless Amish barn raising. Then the people of the region went and invented writing. Writing is the enabler of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy leads to government on the Department of Motor Vehicles model, with patronage jobs, wire pulling, and a political hack of a boss.
The Muslim conquerors of the Fertile Crescent may have come from independent and roughly democratic Arab tribes, but they quickly glommed on to state power, as did their Seljuk and Ottoman Turk successors. Despite the laissezfaire prescriptions of the Koran, and the Prophet’s warnings against price controls, the Islamic state proceeded, like its predecessors, to interfere grossly with the economy. The preeminent Western historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, estimates that Middle East agricultural yields began a decline in late Roman times that has continued almost to the present day. As for commerce, Lewis has written, “Governments seemed to have reasoned that if they could earn so much a year by taxing the pepper trade, they could earn even more by taking it over entirely.” This works so well in Cuba. Lewis argues that Islamic commercial wealth was not destroyed by European innovations in ocean shipping. Rather, Europeans were driven to the sea lanes because, in the 1400s, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt nationalized the spice trade and forced the Kmart of nutmeg-and-ginger caravans into receivership.
The economic decline can be measured by the number of people the economy was able to support. The Egyptian historian Afaf Marsot believes that the population of Egypt at the time of the Arab conquest was 20 to 30 million. By the late 1700s it was about 3 million.
Mamluk sultan-ish behavior persisted into the modern era. Gamal Abdel Nasser ruled Egypt from 1952 to 1970, and his political slogan said everything that can be said about centralization: “We are all Nasser.” He nationalized banks, insurance companies, and other major enterprises. Land ownership was limited to around forty acres, about the size of the plot on which the average fellaheen was starving. Imports were radically reduced, and a broad program of “import substitution” was effected. I’ll have a McGoat and a large order of papyrus fries. Marsot says of the Nasser regime, “The real administration was carried out through exceptional decrees, through patron-client relationships, through appeals to individuals in power.”
Sounds like Enron to me. But Alan Greenspan says America’s economy is doing fine. And so, to some extent, is Egypt’s. Reforms and privatizat
ions were begun by Anwar Sadat and have continued under Hosni Mubarak. Egypt’s GDP grew by an average of 5.05 percent a year from 1997 to 2000. I had dinner with some Egyptians in the steel business. Their business talk sounded like any business talk. When they discussed the downturn in structural steel demand resulting from global recession and the September 11 attacks, they may have meant “We are all Nasser,” but what they said was “We are all broke.” Though considering the size of the restaurant check they picked up, they didn’t really mean it.
Shopkeepers, although glum about the current situation, did not seem to be in a mood of permanent despair. I spent a pleasant hour in the Khan al-Khalili bazaar lounging atop rolls of brilliantly striped Egyptian canvas talking to a maker of drawstring pokes and backpacks. He was interested to hear about the L.L. Bean boat bag and how there are people called WASPs in America who can’t so much as send a kid and the nanny to the beach club without employing three or four of these stiff cotton sacks.
I had lunch with an Egyptian who had been born in the United States. When he was in high school, in suburban Chicago, he became serious about religion and observed Ramadan with rigor. Then he went to Egypt to work as a journalist, and now, in Ramadan, he was having lunch. “My sister is a Christian fundamentalist,” I said. “She wouldn’t crash a plane into the World Trade Center, but she might land pretty hard on somebody teaching evolution in school.”
“A lot of people don’t make that connection,” the Egyptian journalist from Chicago said.
But the movement of Egypt’s material culture into middle-class prosperity is not happening fast enough to simply turn them into us. (And since I began watching American daytime television, I’m not sure I want it to.) Also, a small item in the December 10, 2001, edition of The Egyptian Gazette indicates that the fatal bull’s-eye of centralization remains pinned to the Egyptian economy. “Minister of Planning Othman Mohammed Othman,” the item read, “said the government was unable to manage the economy alone.” In addition, Egypt continues to suffer from the corruption that’s bred when profit lies down with politics. Transparency International’s 2001 Corruption Perceptions Index rates Egypt 3.6 on a scale of 10, with 10 being the least corrupt. Finland is 9.9. Drug-lord-beleaguered Colombia, at 3.8, is less corrupt than Egypt.
Five millennia of economic tomfoolery is bound to leave Egyptians confused about economic principles. On the subject of free trade, M. Ali Ibrahim, who writes the front-page “Tell Me More” column for The Egyptian Gazette, can sound like Pat Buchanan on a bad-chest-hair day. “Immediate restrictions must be introduced to drastically reduce imports,” Ibrahim wrote on December 5, 2001. “We waste millions of dollars on provocative imported commodities, dog food, nuts and ice cream.” Ibrahim cited the work of Mahmoud Bazaraa, “an economics expert” who claims “that a liberal economy doesn’t mean opening wide the doors for imports.” A few days later Ibrahim’s column was titled: “Tell Me More … About imported prayer beads, how they’re bankrupting local merchants.”
* * *
“In the United States,” I said to Peter, “we’re worried about Egyptian Islamic extremism. So what’s with all the crosses on the Cairo skyline?”
“I’m Christian,” Peter said. The owners of his tour company were also Christians, as were most of its employees.
“How many Egyptians are Christian?” I asked.
“Many,” said Peter, “but I don’t know how many.”
Most Egyptian Christians are members of the Coptic Church. Fouad Ajami writes, “The demographic weight of the Copts is one of the great riddles of Egypt.” Ajami quotes the political historian Rifaat Said, who says, “We count everything in Egypt: cups, shoes, books. The only thing we don’t count are the Copts.” Copts make up 6 percent of the Egyptian population (the official estimate) or 10 percent (the historian Afaf Marsot’s estimate) or 12 percent (the estimate from the American organization, Center for Religious Freedom, in Washington, D.C.). Only 11 percent of Swedes go to church. Egypt may be a more Christian country than Sweden.
Copts believe that the nature of Jesus Christ was completely divine. Other Christians believe that the nature of Jesus was both divine and human. This used to be something you could get killed over. And it still is. Muslims believe that the nature of Jesus was just plain human. Islamic-extremist violence has been aimed at fellow Egyptians as well as at foreign tourists. In January 2000, in the town of Al-Kosheh, anti-Copt rioting resulted in the deaths of twenty-two Christians.
But Afaf Marsot claims that the Copts were treated better by their Muslim conquerors than by their Byzantine overlords, who considered them heretics. Copts were incorporated into the Arab government. Bernard Lewis says that as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Muslims were complaining that Copts were running the administration. They’re still there. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a Copt, was Mubarak’s deputy prime minister for foreign affairs before becoming secretary-general of the UN.
Peter took me to the Coptic quarter of Cairo. We saw a welter of Christian worship going on—although it was a weekday—and more than a few Santa decorations. Peter showed me where Pharaoh’s daughter found Moses floating in a basket. The basement grotto was flooded, so this may have been the spot. No, I’m getting mixed up in my notes. The flooded grotto was the place where Jesus and Mary and Joseph—when Herod the Great was killing all those babies—sought shelter on their flight into Egypt. I hope they brought galoshes. The Church of Saint Sergius, one of the oldest Christian churches in Egypt, was constructed over the grotto in the fifth century. To support one end of a door lintel in the church, a Roman column was used with its capital flat on the floor—in case you think it’s only Muslims who turn civilization upside down.
The place where Moses was found is in the Ben Ezra Synagogue, which is no longer used for daily worship. “Fewer than a hundred Jews are left in Egypt,” Peter said. “All of them are over seventy. There are maybe twenty synagogues in Egypt. Only one is open.”
When Ben Ezra was restored in the nineteenth century, thousands of manuscripts were discovered, dating back to the eleventh century. “It is the habit of the Jews all over the world,” Peter said, “to write the story of their lives and hide these writings in certain places.” I was thinking of Anne Frank, but I don’t believe Peter was. He talked about “the closed society of the Jews” and said, “We do not forget the help the Jews gave the Hyksos.” These were the pharaohs of the Fifteenth Dynasty, apparently of Semitic origin, who ruled Egypt after the fall of the Middle Kingdom, 3,650 years ago. Peter was still irked. “The Jews came to Egypt three times,” he said, frowning, “with Joseph, with Ptolemy, and in 1492.” (And with baby Jesus in A.D. 1.) By the way, the Jews were moderately well treated on each occasion—although there seems to have been a flare-up of ill feeling about the time of the Exodus. And now, of course.
In December 2001, the big hit from Egypt’s pop singer of the moment, Shaaban Abdel-Rahim, was “Ana Bakrah Israel” (“I Hate Israel”). Abdel-Rahim claimed the cassette had sold 5 million copies. In a week’s worth of Egyptian Gazettes, each edition only eight to twelve pages long, I counted fifty-eight articles involving Israel. The December 12, 2001, issue alone had five, three of them on the front page. One piece, on December 10, cited “rumors that Mossad agents have secretly hidden magnetic strips inside Cleopatra cigarettes.” The story noted that “strong electromagnetic fields are a health risk” and went on to mention “‘lethal’ magnetic belt buckles, seen as an Israeli plot to make Egyptians sterile.”
The Egyptian Gazette, which the Lonely Planet guide calls “Egypt’s awful daily English-language newspaper,” is an anodyne (and anti-Osama) publication that turns up outside hotel room doors in the morning and is clearly meant to be read by foreigners, some of whom are likely to be Jewish. Much worse things are available from the Arab-language press, as is pointed out by the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, a pro-Israel organization that collects much worse things from the Arabic-language press.
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p; According to MEMRI the following items appeared in the Egyptian government dailies Al-Akhbar and Al-Ahram from April to August 2001:
Mahmoud Muhammad Khadhr, a cleric from Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, posed the rhetorical question “Did Hitler attack the Jews or did their crime deserve even more? … The Zionists were a fifth column in Germany, and they betrayed the country that hosted them.”
Dr. Mahmoud Al-Said Al-Kurdi stated, “The Talmud, the second holiest book for the Jews, determines that the ‘matzahs’ of Atonement Day must be kneaded ‘with blood’ from a non-Jew. The preference is for the blood of youths after raping them!”
And journalist Fahmi Huweidi described his feelings after a suicide bombing: “I cannot hide my happiness about the martyrdom operation that took place in Jerusalem last Thursday. I won’t deny that it liberated me from the sorrow and misery that have overtaken me over the past weeks.”
Fouad Ajami’s “narcotic of anti-Zionism” packs a punch.
And maybe so does poetic license. I mentioned that al Qaeda may have a Yeats. It may have worse than that. In The Dream Palace of the Arabs, Ajami explains that Arab society puts a great value on poetic expression—a 1950s-Smith-College-girl-with-her-head-in-the-oven value. In the March 10, 2002, New York Times Book Review, Judith Shulevitz wrote about Osama bin Laden’s recitation of poetry on one of his videotapes (a poem plagiarized from Jordanian poet Yusuf Abu Hilalah). Shulevitz said that this recitation “would burnish bin Laden’s reputation in a way that Americans might not readily understand, given the high premium placed in the Middle East on poetic eloquence, even in a political leader.” And it is hard to imagine George W. Bush cribbing from Sylvia Plath in his post-September 11 address to the joint session of Congress:
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Ajami quotes the poet Nizar Qabbani, who said that the Arab is the “quintessential poetic being” and that poetry is “written on the forehead of every Arab.” Anyone who has had a similar experience of letting his words get ahead of his frontal lobes knows where this can lead. Maybe, in the calumnies of Al-Akhbar, there is a kinship to Plath’s poem “Daddy,” in which she addressed her father: “Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—” Otto Plath was a Boston University professor of biology and an expert on bees.
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