Reprinted by permission of Ray Abernathy. Ray's website is available at: http://www.rayabernathy.com
What a week of surprises! First, Castro resigns after 50 years. Then Obama wins his tenth primary in a row. Oil tops $100 a barrel. And Egypt turns out the be a land of milk and honey, rather than the depressed, decrepit dictatorship we all thought it was.
Last summer when I was traveling in Egypt and interviewing labor leaders and independent journalists, I thought I’d stepped back in time into a feudal society where 80 percent of the people toiled as serfs to the rich and powerful. You can imagine my surprise when I came across a 12-page, four-color insert in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday revealing that in just eight short months, Egypt has become “forward-looking” while “shaking off many of its structural deficits” and “inspiring investor confidence unsurpassed in recent years.”
According to the advertisement, which was written and presented in misleading editorial (advertorial) style, “The news out of Egypt is that sustained reforms are finally paying off. Economic growth in the non-oil sector created a record number of jobs in 2007, when real GDP was up by 7.1 percent. This year, favorable external conditions will edge the GDP even higher to 7.3 percent.” The insert goes on to tout the success of the new Nile Stock Exchange, growth in the banking sector, an increase in “impeccably designed motor yachts,” new developments in oil and gas production, and the transformation of the country’s government-run postal service into a private conglomerate that now delivers an “ever-increasing integrated service of communications provisions and financial services, as well as governmental and e-government services.”
Ironically, this rosy picture of the Land of the Pharaohs is refuted in the same Sunday edition of the Times. In a front-page, above-the-fold takeout headlined, “Dreams Stifled, Egypt’s Young Turn to Islamic Fervor,” Michael Slackman reports things have gotten worse for ordinary people. www.nytimes.com/world
His summation from Cairo is terrifying in its implications: “Here in Egypt and across the Middle East, many young people are being forced to put off marriages, the gateway to independence, sexual activity and societal respect. Stymied by the government’s failure to provide adequate schooling and thwarted by an economy without jobs to match their abilities or aspirations, they are stuck in limbo between youth and adulthood.” He continues: “In their frustration, the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments with them.”
The story is glued together by the woes of 28-year-old Ahmed Muhammed Sayyid, an Egyptian college graduate (tourism degree) who is living with his mother and working as a driver for $100 a month — not enough to live independently, much less get married, but enough to send him seeking the warm embrace of Islam.
Mr. Slackman writes: “With 60 percent of the region’s population under the age of 25, this youthful religious fervor has enormous implications for the Middle East. More than ever, Islam has become the cornerstone of identity, replacing other failed ideologies: Arabism, socialism, nationalism.” He notes that more parents are sending their children to religious schools, more religious content is finding its way into the state educational systems, more youths are observing strict separation between boys and girls, and that the resulting focus on Islam is alienating young people from the West.
Mr. Slackman observes that in Egypt in 1986, there was one mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians, and that by 2005, according to government stats, there was one for every 745 people.
“Like most religious young people, Mr. Sayyid is not an extremist,” Mr. Slackman writes. “ But with religious conservatism becoming the norm — the starting point — it is easier for extremists to entice young people over the line. There is simply a larger pool to recruit from and a shorter distance to go, especially when coupled with widespread hopelessness.”
Last Summer, I interviewed a radical young labor activist/blogger who outlined how the seeds of hopelessness were planted back in 1974 when Egypt became an early pioneer for neo-liberals pushing austerity, deregulation and privatization (the so-called American model) worldwide through the World Bank and the IMF. Many government subsidies were eliminated and poverty skyrocketed. Since that time, more and more basic industries have been privatized, wages have been driven down to about $40 per month, and most all government subsidies have been eliminated. The neo-liberal economic policies that created a widening wage and wealth gap here in the U.S. dug a Grand Canyon of inequality in Egypt.
The widespread, grinding poverty I saw in Cairo is a direct contradiction of the economic happy talk contained in Sunday’s New York Times advertorial and supports Mr. Slackman’s thesis that poverty and hopelessness are driving Egypt’s abundant young people towards radical Islam and, quite possibly, into the terrorist movement. If there is economic advancement in Egypt, the proceeds are all going to the rich. In a telling quote captured by Mr. Slackman, Mr. Sayyid cuts through the hypocrisy: “Nobody cares. What is holding me back is the system. Find a general with children and he will have an apartment for each of them. My government is only close to those close to the government.” So much for the coming conversion of the United State’s principal hod carrier in the Middle East into a bigger breeding ground for terrorism. And the irony is that crackpot American neo-liberal economic ideas are to blame. For more information, visit www.nytimes.com/lede or the archives of www.rayabernathy.com