Egypt
Sex Tourism in Cairo
She doesn’t look like a classic madam. About 50 years old, Hagga lives in a simple flat in the chic Cairene quarter of Muhandisin. Her black abaya (cape and headscarf) evince a more traditional outlook. Even her language is full of religious references. “Tomorrow you can have two girls, God willing. For the furnished flat you have to pay extra. May God make it easy for us.”
Summer is the peak season for the business of furnished fiats, complete with a “housemaid” who can come at any time of the day or night and in any shape, color or size. That is when the khaligiyyin — the Gulf Arabs — invade the city looking for cool air and a hot time.
Worlds Apart
Ayman wanted a job in tourism. But he did badly on his high-school language exams and spent two years at a school in Luxor, across the river from his village, struggling to master enough rudimentary English and German to get into the hotel school at Qina. His most vivid memory from his two years in Qina was the night when he and the other front-desk trainees played the role of guests in a restaurant for the final exam of the student waiters and cooks.
Egypt’s New Labor Law Removes Worker Provisions
After prolonged negotiations, the Egyptian government has drafted a law to diminish dramatically the state’s role in labor affairs. Expected to go before Parliament this spring, it gives both private employers and public-sector managers far greater leeway to hire and fire, and to set wages and benefits for future employees. In an explicit quid pro quo for the “right to fire,” the law also legalizes strikes, which have been banned since 1952. It signifies the government’s formal withdrawal from the Nasserist “moral economy,” in which Egyptians came to expect the state to guarantee job security and a living wage in exchange for their contribution to national production.
Report from a War Zone
From the outside, they give a friendly impression, the villages around the small Egyptian city of Mallawi, four hours by train south of Cairo. The Nile waters flow serenely to the north. Only the chatter of the colorfully dressed women doing their laundry together on the riverbank breaks the silence of the countryside. On the unpaved village streets enormous water buffaloes and scrawny cows spend the day, only occasionally frightened off by one of the service taxis.
Egypt’s Factory Privatization Campaign Turns Deadly
The Egyptian government’s campaign to sell off the cream of its state-owned factories to private investors took a violent and murderous turn after some 7,000 evening-shift workers at the Kafr al-Dawwar Spinning and Weaving Factory staged a spontaneous sit-down strike on September 30, 1994. Security forces quickly sealed off the plant to prevent other shifts — the factory’s work force totals around 22,000 — from joining the strikers who were protesting recent firings and cuts in bonus and incentive pay.
Column: Funding Agents
During World War II, the British ambassador in Cairo, Lord Killearn, complained about the sudden influx of American experts into the country under the auspices of US Lend-Lease assistance. Inquiries into the exact size of railroad track gauge in the Egyptian countryside, he was convinced, were a thinly disguised effort to seize economic control of Egypt (from Great Britain) after the war. Egyptian nationalists launched similar attacks on American research and assistance projects in the 1950s, compelling Gamal Abdel Nasser, at an early point in his 18-year rule, to insist that Egyptians get over their “complexes” about foreign aid.
Terrorism, Class and Democracy in Egypt
During April 1994, armed actions of the radical Islamist opposition in Egypt achieved a new level of lethal efficiency. One Gama‘a Islamiyya (Islamic Group) hit squad killed Maj. Gen. Ra’uf Khayrat, who was responsible for conducting undercover operations against them; another assassinated the chief of security of Asyout province, the Islamist stronghold in upper Egypt; a third shot at a train transporting tourists to the Pharaonic monuments of upper Egypt; and two or three ordinary policemen were shot each week.
Demographic Change in the Arab World
Two of the most populous Arab countries, Egypt and Morocco, lie far apart in geography, in their histories and in the size of their populations. Egypt has 57 million inhabitants, more than twice as many as Morocco’s 25.5 million. [1] One thing they do share is a dramatic long-term rate of demographic growth. In the nine decades of this century, the populations of both countries have multiplied more than fivefold (from around 10 million in Egypt and less than 5 million in Morocco).
Autonomy and Gender in Egyptian Families
The Egyptian family is changing in significant ways, modified by the social and economic realities of everyday life which are in turn affected by changes in the local and international economy. Extended family living arrangements are declining in favor of nuclear families, which now account for 84 percent of all households.
Gender, Population, Environment
Miryam lives with her family in Manshiyat Nasir, originally a squatter settlement at the foot of Cairo’s Muqattam hills, now largely a brick-built community of small apartment buildings and box-like single family homes. Most now have piped-in water and electricity. Her family is one of the thousands of zabbalin (garbage collector) families comprising a large Christian minority among Manshiyat Nasir’s mostly Muslim residents. They live in a two-story, warehouse-like structure perhaps 25 feet high and about 20 feet square. Off to the side of the main living space, a narrow room has just enough space for a loom; a walled-in area behind the house is home to the family’s 18 pigs.
“Silencing Is at the Heart of My Case”
When a group of Islamist lawyers filed a suit this summer to divorce a Cairo professor from his wife, against the couple’s wishes and without their knowledge, on the grounds that he was an apostate, the story got attention even in the Western media. But little attention was given to the intellectual work of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, associate professor in the Arabic Language and Literature Department at Cairo University, which prompted this incredible move.
Studies of Structural Adjustment
Bent Hansen, Egypt and Turkey: The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth (World Bank, 1991).
Heba Handoussa and Gilliam Potter, eds. Employment and Structural Adjustment: Egypt in the 1990s (AUC, 1991).
Mustafa Kamil al-Sayyid, “Privatization: The Egyptian Debate,” Cairo Papers in Social Science 13/4 (Winter 1990).
Secularism, Integralism and Political Islam
“The sheikh of al-Azhar should thank God profusely that the shari‘a is not in force in Egypt, for it it were he would certainly be in for a good flogging in punishment for smearing virtuous people,” wrote Farag Fawda in March 1988 — thus contributing to a debate that had been raging since the beginning of that year.
Islam and Public Culture
Walk the streets of Cairo or village lanes in Egypt any early evening and you will see the flicker of television screens and hear the dialogue and music of the current serial (musalsal). Read the newspapers and you will find articles and cartoons that can only be understood if one is following these televised dramas. The serials, usually composed of 15 episodes aired daily, seem to set the very rhythms of national life. Extensive access to television and limited broadcast hours and channels mean that the audience can sometimes include a majority of Egyptians.
Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation
Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (California, 1990).
The era of the nation-state has increasingly put into question pastoral nomadism as a way of life and as a distinctive cultural identity. In Saudi Arabia, Bedouin pastoralists have become ranchers who transport their herds to pasture in Toyota pickups. Jordanian Bedouin preserve their identity by soldiering for the Hashemite monarchy. The Bedouin may be central to the nationalist ideologies of states like Libya, but the free herders and warriors of the desert, always something of an idealization, belong to an ever more remote mythical past.
