Egypt
Sadowski, Political Vegetables?
Yahya Sadowski, Political Vegetables? Businessman and Bureaucrat in the Development of Egyptian Agriculture (Brookings, 1991).
Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?
Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (California, 1990).
Egyptian Women and the Politics of Protest
In recent years to veiling of Muslim women has become a common image associated with radical Islamist politics. Yet in Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling and Change in Cairo (Columbia, 1990) Arlene Macleod demonstrates that lower middle-class women in Cairo who wear the hijab (new veil) rarely identify with radical Islam. This outstanding book combines feminist privileging of women’s experiences with imaginative deployment of social theory. Macleod’s approach is akin to that of Ph.D. theses by Diane Singerman and Homa Hoodfar that also integrate women’s testimony with gendered class analysis.
The Egyptian Women’s Health Book Collective
The publication of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s famous and controversial book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1976) created wide repercussions and charted a way for women all over the world to gain personal control, through the possession of objective and necessary information, over their own bodies, health status and lives.
A group of interested Egyptian women started to meet in May 1985, with the idea of finding ways to spread the message of the book to Egyptian and Arab women. They agreed to form a collective to produce a similar book in Arabic.
Egypt from Outside and Inside
In May the group of 17 states known as the Paris Club decided to forgive (in stages) half of Egypt’s $20.2 billion government-to-government debt. Earlier, the US had agreed to write off $7.1 billion of Egypt’s military debt, and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar canceled $6 billion of Egyptian debts owed to them. Washington and its oil-rich Arab allies have thus entered their bid in the post-Gulf war auction for Egypt’s soul.
Choueiri, Arab History and the Nation-State
Marxism in the United States developed on the margin of society. Shunned by organized labor, it has confronted this society as an outsider. Until the 1970s, the most successful American Marxist works of scholarship were macro studies by economists, written as if from a distance and emphasizing economic more than political and cultural aspects of rule and resistance to rule. Then the tableau in political economy began to widen. The writings of Eugene Genovese were an important part of this process. Politics was returning.
Egyptian Political Economy
Robert Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Oxford, 1989.)
Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, 1988).
These two important new books address some of the central questions concerning state/society relations in a Middle Eastern and, more widely, a Third World context. Both are written from the statist perspective found in most contemporary political science, but manage to ask new questions of relatively familiar material.
America’s Egypt
Open almost any study of Egypt produced by an American or an international development agency and you are likely to find it starting with the same simple image. The question of Egypt’s economic development is almost invariably introduced as a problem of geography versus demography, pictured by describing the narrow valley of the Nile River, surrounded by desert, crowded with rapidly multiplying millions of inhabitants.
A 1980 World Bank report on Egypt provides a typical example. “The geographical and demographic characteristics of Egypt delineate its basic economic problem,” the book begins:
Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton, 1987).
Editor’s Bookshelf
Egypt has been central to providing an Arab cover for the US-led military expedition to the Persian Gulf, in addition to Saudi Arabia. As of December 1990, Egypt’s 15-20,000 troops constituted the third largest force confronting Iraq, after the United States and Saudi Arabia itself. Joint military exercises during the 1980s prepared the way for this US-Egyptian military cooperation, whose value is more symbolic than substantial. In The United States and Egypt: An Essay on Policy for the 1990s (Brookings, 1990), William Quandt surveys the development of the US-Egyptian relationship since the early 1970s, examines the strains it may experience in the 1990s and offers some recommendations to policymakers responsible for managing them.
Economic Impact of the Crisis in Egypt
Egypt was facing a severe foreign exchange shortage when the Gulf crisis broke out. Its debt arrears were piling up and it was finding it more and more difficult to obtain new loans. The Gulf crisis threatens to make this situation even worse. Here’s how:
Remittances sent home by some 1 million Egyptian workers in the Gulf amounted to at least $4.25 billion in 1989. About half of these workers have returned home, causing an estimated annual loss of $2.4 billion.
Suez Canal tolls were $1.38 billion in 1989. The government expects a 10-20 percent drop over a year due to the loss of Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil tanker traffic and the decline in shipments of goods to those two countries.
Mubarak’s Gamble
Egyptians pride themselves on their historic endurance and their ability to survive under almost all conditions. But even before the Gulf crisis erupted in August, there had been a great sense of worry and uncertainty regarding the future. The juncture of a new century with a new millennium is noticed in a nation used to counting its age in thousands of years. [1]
In the ongoing debate, one current argues that Egypt’s future rests in its historic stability, political and otherwise. An opposing current questions the “validity” of the political system, declaring that this “stability” is nothing but a dangerous and lulling inertia.
Botman, Rise of Egyptian Communism
Selma Botman, The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970 (Syracuse, 1988).
The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970, one of several recent books that offer new insights on the experience of Marxism in Egypt before and during the Nasser era, provides an extensive account of the membership, organizational structure, theory and practice of the various communist groups which emerged in Egypt during the British occupation.
Rolling Back Egypt’s Agrarian Reform
The publication in 1988 of the fifth Egyptian agricultural census, conducted mostly in January 1982, provides the most accurate and comprehensive description to date of the changing patterns of landholding and ownership of agricultural assets over the 20 years following President Nasser’s land reform decrees of 1961.
The census establishes several trends:
Editor’s Bookshelf
During four months in Oxford last fall, I spent part of my time pursuing the charge of my editorial colleagues to seek out new and distinctively British approaches to the Middle East. My main finding is that British nostalgia for empire, which many North Americans came to know in the popular television series The Jewel in the Crown, has expanded its geographic ambit beyond the Indian raj and encompassed the Middle East as well. The prominent display of large quantities of several new books of this genre in the book shops of Oxford and London suggests that they appeal to an audience beyond Middle East specialists.
Editor’s Bookshelf
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s well-documented, theoretically informed, innovative history of the jute mill workers of Bengal, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), poses this central question: “Can…third-world countries like India…build democratic, communitarian institutions on the basis of the nonindividualistic, but hierarchical and illiberal, precapitalist bonds that have survived and sometimes resisted — or even flourished under — the onslaught of capital?” (p.
Appropriate Health Technology in Egypt
Over the past two decades, public health workers have successfully developed primary health care: basic preventive and curative services that address critical health problems and are available close to people’s homes. Primary health care includes immunizations; maternal care; education for health, hygiene and nutrition; family planning; availability of essential drugs; and first aid. The difficulty now is in making primary health care widely available and of good quality. In most countries high technology hospitals in the capital cities, and exotic, expensive drugs still dominate the expenditures for health care.
Medical Education: The Struggle for Relevance
A recent World Health Organization report on the state of health practitioners in the Middle East suggests that the region now has a satisfactory number of physicians; some countries even have an excess. Yet health, as measured by standard indicators such as infant mortality, is hardly satisfactory. The report suggests that large numbers of physicians may not, in fact, have a positive effect on health. [1] In recent years, a small number of medical educators in the Middle East have become concerned about the persisting poor health among people in their countries and the questionable appropriateness of medical care. They have attributed this state of affairs to the training offered in medical schools.
From the Editors (November/December 1989)
When the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Washington in September, President Husni Mubarak was on hand to speak about the Third World debt crisis. For more than a year, Cairo has been negotiating a new $500 million agreement with the IMF that would allow Egypt to reschedule $10 billion worth of debt payments falling due before December 1990. At one stage Mubarak denounced the IMF as a “quack doctor,” but his government has had to swallow many IMF “reform” prescriptions. (Currency devaluations, for instance, have tripled the Egyptian pound value of dollar-denominated debt contracted in the early 1980s.)
Mitchell, Colonising Egypt
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
