Top Quotes: “Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution” — John Bradley

Introduction

“The hugely charismatic Nasser, it is true, was worshipped by the Egyptian masses until his death in 1970. In a way, it is not hard to understand why. There were considerable short-term benefits of Nasser’s rule: the final liberation of Egypt from foreign dominance; the expansion of the education system; guaranteed civil service jobs for university graduates; the nationalization of the Suez Canal and building of the High Dam; fairer land redistribution.”

“Egypt has remained under some form of emergency law (which is to say military rule) for all but eight of the years since 1952. According to Amnesty International, eighteen thousand people are at present being held in Egypt without charge. A pledge in 2007 finally to do away with the emergency law was met with universal derision, because the regime introduced simultaneous changes to the constitution that made its worst aspects permanent.”

“That the Egyptian regime continues to depend on the indulgence of America, which since a peace treaty was signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979 has provided some $2 billion in military aid annually (which some see as a bribe for maintaining a Cold Peace with the Jewish state), is an aggravating humiliation for ordinary Egyptians. For a start, they benefit not at all from the money as they see the gap between the rich and poor grow ever wider. Perhaps more crucially in a country where national pride is so deeply rooted, they also resent America’s crude military adventurism in the region and their own leaders’ complicity in it.”

History

“For two hundred years they replenished their ranks through the slave markets, while ruling through tyranny. In the chaos of Napoleon’s departure, a third potential ruling class emerged. Caught up in the rivalry between the Mamluks and the Ottoman government, they were made up of an only nominally loyal Albanian contingent of Ottoman forces that had come to Egypt in 1801 to fight against the French. The contingent was led by Mohammed Ali himself, a mercenary who had arrived in Egypt as a junior commander in the Albanian forces. By 1803, he had risen to the rank of commander. After consolidating his power base, being elected governor by Cairo’s powerful religious sheiks in 1805, and being granted the title of viceroy by the Ottomans, he made plans to eliminate his rivals. In March 1811, he did so in spectacular fashion, having sixty-four Mamluks — including twenty-four beys — assassinated after inviting them for an official ceremony. Thus he became the sole strongman in Egypt, and was afforded a unique opportunity to unite a country teetering on the brink of all-out anarchy.

One of Mohammed Ali’s great ambitions included the eventual detachment of Egypt from the Ottoman Empire. However, he realized that to achieve this goal Egypt had to be strong economically and militarily. He courted the Europeans from the outset, giving away treasures to Paris and London while negotiating first with one power and then the other. The Ramses II obelisk stands in Paris’s Place de la Concorde to this day, as does Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment in London.”

“Thanks to a stoppage of American cotton imports during the 1861–1865 civil war, the price of Egyptian cotton soared as Britain looked ever more anxiously to Egypt to supply Leeds and Manchester. Flush with cash, Ismail began to realize more fully his grandfather’s ambition of launching grand public works: canals, land reclamation, urban structures, and infrastructure. In one year alone he set about building four hundred and fifty bridges, sixty-four sugar mills, and almost one thousand miles of railway. He also established the General Postal Union, and telegraph wires were erected as far south as Sudan; soon Egypt could boast one of the most efficient postal services in the world. The country’s image as a primitive backwater of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by a class of slaves, was finally shed forever, as architects, artists, politicians, and musicians were soon flocking to Cairo and the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria.

Ismail’s visit to the Exposition Universelle in Paris’s Champ-de-Mars in 1867 was a life-changing experience, and had especially dramatic consequences for Egypt. “My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe,” he famously declared soon afterward. He seized the opportunity of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 to build new districts in the European style, with magnificent parks and wide streets and palaces.”

Independence

“Six months before the 1952 revolution, on a day remembered as Black Saturday, anti-British mobs torched Cairo’s Western landmarks, including the Turf Club, major hotels, banks, cinemas, and residences. Ismail’s Cairo was largely reduced to ashes, left smoldering under a thick pall of smoke. Nasser’s Free Officers would hijack the popular unrest to seize power. When they did so six months later, they inherited not only the wealth and corruption of the former elite, but also the responsibility for rebuilding the capital city.”

“The main post-coup problems came from a combination of government legislation and social changes, Rafaat told me, especially in the early 1960s when the crowning socialist law of rent control was introduced. “Supposedly everyone’s lot could improve and there would be housing for all,” he explained. “But few people’s lot has improved, and there still isn’t housing for all. The only clear result is the absolute and total deterioration of our architectural landscape: from the landmarks and way people live to maintenance and appreciation. Would you want to spend money on maintaining a building if you have an up-market villa that will bring in less than $100 a month in rent — the ceiling that was set in the 1950s and 1960s and is still enforced today? Take the Sidki building here in Zamalek, which has about forty apartments. Because of the rent controls, it brings in less than $200 a month. Can you seriously expect the owners to take proper care of it?””

“All of this importantly coincided, according to Rafaat, with what was to be the last flood of the Nile, whose alluvial rhythms had been regulating Egyptian life since time immemorial and whose taming had a dramatic impact on the Egyptian psyche.

“It was like we thought in terms of B.F. and A.F. — Before the Flood and After the Flood,” he said. “It regulated everybody’s behavior. Then Nasser built the High Dam, and we cornered the Nile. It stopped in Aswan, and from there on became a canal. At the same time, we had new regulatory laws that started to govern our everyday lives. Supposedly free education meanwhile led eventually to no education. Free health care and social security led to no health care and no social security. In the midst of all this, creativity became a thing of the past. There’s been an absolute downgrading in every aspect of all the things that could have led to the improvement and maintenance of a city like Cairo. What are we left with now?”

“The crumbling education system, for Rafaat, is now the root of all the problems. Nasser placed great pride in expanding it, boasting that a new school was being opened in Egypt almost every week. That was true. But what use are a million schools if there are sixty or more students in each class who are beaten by the teacher if they ask a dissenting question about even the least controversial of subjects, while the teachers themselves are paid less than the waiter in a local coffee shop.”

“More than 50 percent of Egyptians are poor — they live on less than two dollars a day. Then there is overcrowding, which has a tremendous effect on the personality of the individual. Cairo is the most overcrowded city in the world. Fifty-two thousand people live in every square kilometer. Nothing like this has happened anywhere else. Then there is the high unemployment, and the inability of young people to engage in free expression. Free expression gives you mental health and self-dignity. Democracy offers better mental health, but it has to be real democracy — which means transparency, accountability, and the ability to change the ruling authorities…Egyptians now find there is no transparency in anything in their lives, and there is no accountability. None of the thieves who are ministers or other politicians are accountable to the poor people. We have had the same thing since 1952: The army rules the country.”

“The Egyptian High Court of Appeal found that ninety members elected to parliament in the latest elections are there because of fraud. This shows why Egyptians aren’t bothered anymore who rules them.”

Okasha concluded that this climate of fraudulence has also taken over religion. “Egyptians have reduced religion to rituals, including covering the head, praying, going on pilgrimage…but deep inside, the faith is not strong, because they lie and embezzle and behave unethically,” he said.”

“Ehab’s next eldest brother, Bassam, although trained as a lawyer, worked in a local café, because he could not afford the bribe needed to get a place in a local lawyers’ firm. Anyway, he earned the same wage as a low-ranking lawyer ($2) for a twelve-hour workday, plus a dollar or so tips if he was lucky. But he would be paid only intermittently by the owner, who claimed the coffee shop did not make enough money for him to pay his staff on a regular basis. If that were not bad enough, Bassam was also responsible for settling the check of any customer who left without paying. A gently pious man who prayed five times a day, and in a permanent state of anxiety because the woman he wanted but could not afford to marry was being pursued by a wealthier rival, he told me he was facing a more immediate dilemma of whether or not to continue praying in the local mosque because many customers would wait for the call to prayer and then slip away while he performed his ablutions. There were days when he would have to pay about a dollar deficit in the cash till (a cup of tea or a water pipe sells for about twenty cents); after buying a sandwich for lunch and paying for public transport to and from work, he would therefore often find himself having spent more than he had earned.”

“Ehab was fortunate that his extended family placed a high value on education and, noticing early on that he was clever, had paid for him to take private lessons after school. Sending children to school without having arranged for a private tutor is, it is often said, like denying them notebooks or shoes. Egyptians now reportedly spend about $2.4 billion annually on private tutoring, helping to keep alive a vicious cycle whereby the teachers themselves are often too tired to teach effectively in class because they work as tutors until the early hours of the morning in order to supplement their measly two dollars-a-day income.”

The Brotherhood

“Under the emergency law, those from among the Muslim Brotherhood ranks who stand in elections must still do so officially as “independent” candidates. They openly campaign, though, under the most famous of their array of simplistic party slogans — “Islam Is the Solution”-so everyone knows their real affiliation; and in the ground-floor reception of their new headquarters, where I had come to meet the head of the movement’s parliamentary bloc, I was greeted with a poster announcing their more militant credo: “The Koran is our constitution. The Prophet is our leader. Jihad is our way. Death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration.”

A few months after the December 2005 elections took place, I met with prominent Muslim Brotherhood deputy Hamdy Hassan at the new party headquarters in Cairo. Hassan is also the spokesman for the parliamentary opposition bloc. He is a tall, middle-aged, balding man, who dresses (like all Muslim Brotherhood officials) smartly in a suit and tie. He offered a firm handshake and broad smile as I slipped off my shoes. We made our way, over prayer mats, to settle down on a sofa. Why, I wondered, are we meeting in a prayer hall, when there were eight floors in this new headquarters?”

“He ruffled my feathers at the outset by insisting on speaking formal Arabic, despite my protestation that I spoke the Egyptian dialect and so would find it more difficult to follow what he was saying this way. Many Islamists prefer to orate in the more formal version of their language, which is derived from the Qur’an, as they view it as relatively uncorrupted by contemporary trends and fashions — the vulgar — and therefore closer to the language spoken by the Prophet. But almost no other Egyptian is able to speak it fluently, nor do they enjoy listening to others speak it. In fact, they are proud of how their dialect has become the lingua franca of the Arab world, largely because of the historic regional dominance of Cairo’s television, movie, and music industries. It is bizarre that a group claiming to represent the true interest of Egyptians, and that makes so much of its social programs, maintains such a fundamental disconnect from the common Egyptian.”

“Of the many incidents and battles, the case that drew the widest international attention was that of Professor Nasir Hamid Abu Zayid of Cairo University, accused by one of his pious colleagues of blasphemy for a 1992 book that used critical scholarly methods to analyze phrases in the Qur’an. After a series of conflicting decisions in lower courts, a Cairo court ruled that Zayid was indeed an apostate from Islam, about the worst form of deviation within sharia and punishable by death. Indeed, some clerics called on the government to execute him. The judgment of the court, however, was limited to the immediate issue at hand: whether Zayid’s wife, as a good Muslim woman in need of protection, should be forcibly divorced from him; that is, regardless of her own wishes, should the state intervene to protect her good name and honor. And this the court decided was just, ordering such a separation. The couple fled to Europe, where they remain in exile.”

“In the lead-up to the 2005 elections, then, Mubarak was under limited pressure for a brief period from Washington to fast-track a permanently delayed domestic reform program. Would it stretch imagination too much if Mubarak’s regime viewed a larger Muslim Brotherhood presence in parliament at that moment as expedient, an implicit warning to the Americans that should they push democracy too far they should be careful, or fearful, of best intentions going awry? In the background, of course, was the victory of the radical Islamic movement Hamas in the Palestinian Authority in the wake of American pressure for free and fair elections. By granting the Muslim Brotherhood one-fifth of the seats, Mubarak was sending his briefly irritated partners in Washington a message via the back door: If you do not want me, you are welcome to the resurgent Islamists, but their agenda (unlike mine) is militantly anti-Israeli and anti-American.

The Americans could not have their cake and eat it, too, the regime in effect was saying. It, on the other hand, could square the circle: The Muslim Brotherhood’s success at the polls reduced American pressure while Mubarak’s regime maintained the crushing pressure on the group’s base in the same way that all dissenting protest movements are trampled on by the thuggish state security apparatus, who understand only the politics of violence and repression. Unsurprisingly, in subsequent elections, held after the United States backtracked on its “spreading democracy” campaign, the Muslim Brotherhood failed to win a single seat, despite fielding nineteen candidates.

The starting point for any discussion of the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence inside Egypt should therefore be recognition that the number of seats they gain is not necessarily a true reflection of their support; more important is that the vast majority of Egyptians voted neither for them nor for Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. Instead, they cast a plague on both parties’ houses by stubbornly remaining in their own.”

“The last piece in this puzzle is the Egyptian people. Hate Mubarak though they may, he knows that for the most part they hate still more the prospect of an Islamist regime that would violate their private (in addition to their public) spheres of existence — thus giving him yet another excuse to play up their significance.”

“Non-Arab Nubians, who, despite facing an odd combination of sentimental indulgence and crude racism from Arab Egyptians, continue to speak their various maligned languages and keep alive what is left of their unique culture (most of which was lost forever to the depths of the vast lake created with the opening of the High Dam).”

Religious Diversity

“Throughout Egypt, multifaceted festivals known as moulids are held in honor of holy men and women, both Muslim and Christian (and, until recently, Jewish, too). The objects of veneration include the Prophet and his descendants, the founders of Sufi orders, and dozens of lesser-known sheikhs celebrated mostly in remote rural communities. The biggest moulids, like the one in Cairo held in celebration of Hussein (the second son of the fourth Caliph Ali, whose murder is lamented by the Shia during Ashura, draw crowds of more than a million people. According to the Egyptian Ministry of Awqaf (Islamic charity), there are officially more than forty such annual commemorations, with Christians also celebrating their own holy men in huge festivals that similarly can attract hundreds of thousands from across Egypt and the wider Arab world. The Sufi Council in Egypt lists eighty other festivals for lesser-known founders of Sufi orders. The upshot is that at least six million men in Egypt — about a third of the adult male Muslim population — are members of one Sufi order or other; and at least twice that number of men — and countless millions of women and children — participate in the actual festivals the Sufi orders organize. That these figures are likely to surprise outsiders is proof of how the coverage of Egypt in the Western media has tended to favor analyzing developments almost exclusively in relation to the Muslim Brotherhood, to the detriment of other more moderate and mainstream Islamic trends. The Muslim Brotherhood condemns moulids as un-islamic, and that is one of a number of reasons why they can count such a small number of members in their rank and file — at most about half a million. Praying to holy men and women, even celebrating Muhammad’s birthday, is akin to idolatry, according to these Sunni fundamentalists. The sheikhs of Al-Azhar agree with them. However, as the Christian Science Monitor noted in October 2006, try as they might, the combined efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Azhar to discourage expressions of popular Egyptian Islam “have gained very little traction” among the masses.”

“While moulids may mark a saint’s birthday, they are just as likely to be held on a day allocated for other, nonreligious reasons. In Upper Egypt, moulids can even mimic ancient pharaonic rites and calendars. They have thus evolved into a kind of all-embracing carnival, and many Egyptians casually accept that their participation in them has less to do with their religious belief than having fun. That is why many Christians hang out with their Muslim friends at Sufi moulids, and many Muslims hang out with their Christian friends at the latter’s festivals. Islam has traditionally been practiced in this way by Egyptians, characterized by a tolerance for others, an intense personal spirituality, a strong emphasis on commerce (the moulid is a great opportunity to make money), and — perhaps above all else — a sense of enjoyment.”

“When I asked my friend whether there had ever been any disturbances between the two communities in the village, he let slip that a few years back there had indeed been considerable tension because the Copts had briefly asserted on their right to build a church (they presently have to make do instead with a converted house).

“Would that really have caused so much trouble?” I asked.

“Yes, it would,” he said. “This is a Muslim country.”

“What would have happened if they had insisted on building it?” I wanted to know.

The coldness of his reply was chilling: “We would have beaten them.”

The limits to the communal “friendship” were clear:

Coptic Christians were treated with respect, so long as they accepted their status as second-class citizens. That these limits came from “moderate” Muslims whose own popular festive traditions — the moulid drew almost all of the Muslims in the village out of their homes that evening — were under threat from hard-line Sunni Islam indicated that the Copts were right at the bottom of the local pecking order.”

Bedouins

“The Jibaliyya are not even Arabs, but rather are thought to come from Macedonia, sent to Sinai by the Ottomans to ensure security. There they converted to Islam and are now identified as Bedouin, but they maintain their separate identity through an incongruous attachment to the monastery of St. Catherine.”

“An estimated seventy-five thousand Bedouin have no citizenship at all: The government has at most granted some of them Sinai identification papers. Among the tribes ignored by the government, according to various reports, are the Al-Rashida in Halayeb and Shalatin, who originally came from Qatar and moved later to Sudan and Egypt, where they settled around the Nile, southern Egypt, and parts of the Red Sea; the Al-Tafilat in southern Sinai; and the Malaha in Rafah on the Gaza-Egypt border. One tribal leader told the newspaper Al-Khamiss that the complications surrounding citizenship went back to the days of the first Taba Treaty of 1906. “The treaty said all those who live in Egypt must hold Egyptian citizenship, and when the English army did the first census in 1924, all the tribes were given identification papers” —except, that is, for those who were not.”

“Urban expansion on traditional grazing lands and drought caused by erratic weather in recent decades have led to the loss of much of the livestock of those Bedouin who still herded it — in some cases of entire tribal herds — who are the poorest and most marginalized. But the Bedouin are equally “locked out” of the tourism boom. During the last fifteen years, all building plots in the Red Sea resorts were allocated to Arab Egyptian and foreign firms investing in tourism, while the Bedouin were, through government programs, packed off to the desert. Unemployment rates among the Bedouin are extremely high, and most are denied the education and skills to start small businesses catering to tourists. In 2002 alone, one hundred and ten hotels created between ten and thirty thousand direct jobs; but nearly every one went to Egyptians from elsewhere. To ease the unemployment in Cairo and the crowded cities of the Nile Delta, the state is actively encouraging workers to move from there to Sinai, where they enjoy better pay and living conditions; and the Bedouin they push out have to look for alternative ways to make a living, which prove almost nonexistent in the area — at least legal ones. According to the ICG, of the two hundred and fifty employees of one five-star hotel all are from the Nile Valley — with the exception of two sailors on the boat staff, who come from the governorate’s administrative capital of Al-Tur. The Bedouin are now even prohibited from working as tour guides on desert roads.”

“The rural Bedouin not registered as citizens have no access to public education at all. According to development agencies, illiteracy is as high as 90 percent among some sectors of the Bedouin population. And if they do find access, it is centered as in all Egypt – but quite irrelevantly to the Bedouin – on the pharaonic heritage and the central state. If there has been one project the government has pursued with some zest, it was to establish a pharaonic museum in Al-Arish: Given the area’s nonexistent heritage in that regard, it seems nothing more than an attempt to impose the state’s stamp on a town that until then had a thriving Bedouin museum. And when parents privately teach their children about their Arab heritage, they are sometimes reportedly called in by the teachers.

On the political front, the regime’s mistake has meanwhile been to imagine its own military structure reflected in the tribal setup: Get a handle on the man in charge, its reasoning has been, and you have a handle on the whole. Thus state security has started playing a role in how tribal sheikhs are chosen, which was traditionally done by tribal consensus, just as Cairo now insists that all imams must be government employees. In reality, the new imams have no credibility among the masses, and the new chiefs no credibility among the tribes, and the weakening of their influence in both instances has left a vacuum that could be filled by extremists.”

Torture

“”They do this all the time,” he replied. “They have a quota system. They just pick up twenty or thirty guys from the street every day, and then they frisk you inside the police station to see if you have any drugs or anything else illegal on you. If you don’t have anything, you wait for them to check your file on the computer, to see if there are any outstanding warrants for your arrest. If there aren’t any, they let you go.”

So if I had just left him there, would he have been released anyway?

“It can take a day or two,” he explained. “In the meantime, you’re not allowed to call anyone to let them know where you are or what’s happening. And you are thrown into a little room with so many others. The officer is happy just to get lucky with two or three arrests a day from the dozens he picks up. Then he can tell his boss he’s fulfilled his quota for arresting criminals.””

“Such a reputation do police stations have among ordinary Egyptians that these days they are loath to report even serious crimes, lest they get on the wrong side of a surly officer or, worse, are found to be filing a complaint against someone who has “connections” and who can then make the claimants’ lives a living hell by placing a few calls to influential individuals in power. Women who are victims of sexual violence especially almost never report the crimes, women’s rights organizations have said.

You do not have to look very hard to discover why. Since the officers themselves routinely employ rape as an interrogation technique or perhaps just for fun (even, it is alleged, with a frail, thirteen-year-old boy like Mohammed, merely accused of stealing a packet of tea, they unsurprisingly turn out to be far from sympathetic listeners; add to this the lingering belief in this male-chauvinist society that women who are raped somehow were asking for it, and the inapproachability becomes absolute. Women who nevertheless have braved the intimidation at the all-male police stations have said the experience merely added insult to injury. They report that the first reaction of a thug they encounter, who calls himself an officer, is a snide remark along the lines of whether she would perhaps like to “meet up” later that evening at a fast-food restaurant to discuss the issue further. Her “honor” no longer intact, she is to blame; and so she is now considered fair game.”

“It would be tempting to conclude that Ali’s acquittal shows that the system has not completely failed. But not very much, as it happens, since his defense lawyer, Al-Sadat, was himself sentenced under a different case to a year in jail, in November 2006, for that gravest of crimes: “insulting the army.” It is difficult not to believe that this was in some way payback for his exposure of their criminality and brutality, not to mention utter lack of even superficial credibility, in helping Ali to get an innocent verdict.”

Corruption

“When some thirty-eight pieces reportedly went missing from the cellars of the museum itself in 2004, officials denied any such thing could happen. Hawass himself said making an inventory would take at least five months, while the process of overhauling the basement would take a year, by which time the missing thirty-eight pieces, he hoped, would probably turn up. Those in charge of developing the basement promptly found, though, that 70 percent of the antiquities decaying there had never been registered at all.

In such circumstances, it is frighteningly easy for pieces to disappear. Indeed, one worker was reportedly caught trying to sell three priceless pieces that he had hidden in bags of dust he was carrying out of the building in a minor clean-up operation. Some officials blamed a decrease in the number of caretakers, each of whom is now responsible for overseeing between ten- and forty-thousand antiquities. According to Hawass, no inventory had been made of the Egyptian Museum for fifty years or more, because everyone was afraid of being held to account if the stores proved incomplete or the antiquities were found to be unregistered. In fact, until 1983 Egyptian antiquities were officially sold at auction and passed openly through airports; and this is unlikely to have stopped altogether after the country officially outlawed their export. Although there was an ambitious project adopted in 1994 by one of Hawass’s predecessors, Abdul-Halim Nour Al-Deen, to inventory all sites, stores, and museums, backed by a ministerial decree, the project ground to a halt once he left office. Al-Deen said an inventory had been made of many of the antiquities, and that he laid down a plan for making inventories of small museums and sites once every year and of big museums once every four years. In fact, Hawass believes, only 10 to 15 percent of Egyptian antiquities were ever subjected to an inventory, meaning that up to 85 percent were not, and could therefore possibly disappear at any moment without a trace.”

“Talk about tarnishing the reputation of Egypt: Caught by foreigners smuggling the national patrimony, antiquities, was a prominent businessman and member of the ruling political party to boot. This clearly stood as an indictment of the regime.”

“Al-Wafd newspaper cited ample testimony from people that there had been compulsory vaccinations carried out at the time, and not just in the village but in Cairo as well. They said the officials would simply go around the houses and inject children, who would later come down with a high temperature, vomiting, and diarrhea, with some of them having to be hospitalized. Al-Arabi Al-Nasseri newspaper claimed that the reason was that the drugs were spoiled.

According to the Kifaya report, the Central Auditing Bureau found that one vaccination company had imported some $4 million worth of expired vaccines, while some 370,000 bottles of the vaccine valued at roughly $500,000 were sitting in the company’s stores without a production or expiration date on the packaging. Plasma and blood derivatives were stored for three years although the shelf life was no more than one year, and were imported from the United Kingdom although Egypt bans such imports from there. If true these are obviously serious accusations with very serious consequences.”

The Youth

“In the 1990s, about two or three in every ten Egyptians I met spoke of their desire to live elsewhere. By 2007, virtually everyone I met was expressing a burning desire to emigrate, often within the first five minutes of our conversation.”

“In recent years, Luxor has also been transformed into the male prostitution capital of the Middle East.

Luxor has long had a reputation as the Sin City of Egypt. Archaeologists from Johns Hopkins University, presently working in the local Temple of Mut, have shown how sex and booze were key aspects of rites carried out by the locals to appease the pharaonic-era gods. According to the archeologists, the rituals involved getting drunk on barley beer and then “traveling through the marshes” (a euphemism for having sex) before passing out and rousing themselves the next morning just in time for religious services. A more uncomfortable combination of booze, sex, and religion still largely defines life here — at least for the foreign visitors and the 90 percent of local males who work in the tourism industry, which completely dominates the local economy.”

“On the East Bank, where I spent almost all of my time, I was used to seeing older Western women (usually in their fifties or sixties) walking hand in hand with local young studs, typically in their late teens or early twenties. I had assumed they were enjoying “holiday romances.” But it appeared from what Alaa was saying that many actually lived here on the West Bank. Later I checked out the official figures: According to the Ministry of Justice, some thirty-five thousand Egyptians have indeed married foreigners, nearly three quarters being cross-cultural marriages involving Egyptian men and women. That figure probably does not include orfi, or temporary, marriages, which are shunned as a form of legalized prostitution by Egyptians, but provide legal cover for the overwhelming majority of relationships between Egyptian men and foreign women. It means they can live together in an apartment, for example, without having to worry about the police banging on the door and thus ruining the reputation of their family by being accused of having sex out of wedlock. It also offers an implicit reassurance to the Egyptian women the men usually also marry, in addition to the Western women, that theirs is the “real” thing, as opposed to the marriages to foreigners, which are undertaken only for financial gain.

“But if they’re married, there’s no difference really,” I told Alaa that evening. “They’ve got to marry someone, and if the woman has money, then all for the good.”

“It makes a big difference,” he retorted. “I see my village changing for the worse every day. Some of these women slept with half the men in Luxor before they settled on marrying one.”

“Young people in Upper Egypt rarely date or spend time alone with one another prior to marriage. Instead, couples are paired up by matchmakers at early ages, with some girls being engaged by the age of nine or ten (though marriage under the age of fifteen is prohibited). Such matchmakers, along with parents, often choose a wife for a young male from his own family, where the woman’s reputation, social status, and financial standing are clear. Cousins often marry on the condition that the male cousin is from the father’s side, guaranteeing the continuation of the family name.”

“The Asharq Al-Awsat article failed to mention are young Egyptian men trying to get out of compulsory military service, which lasts between six months and three years (depending on their level of education) and can pay as little as ten dollars a month. Egyptians married to foreigners are exempt from military service, again because of the perennial fear of “spies.””

“Tribal custom dictates that women’s honor must be protected at all costs, and in the absence of other opportunities for sex before marriage homosexuality is seen as an acceptable trade-off. The golden rule, though, is that it should not be discussed or conducted in ways that might draw attention, and thus create a scandal, and that a boy should be careful not to get a reputation for enjoying the passive role, for if he does he will be considered a slut, lose his own honor and suffer the consequences of his friends thinking they have the right to screw him whenever they get the urge.”

“Since he is assumed to be the active partner in the relationship with the self-defined “gay” foreigner, or at least not the passive partner, the boy suffers no stigma as a result of his admission, and as an outsider the foreigner is not expected to conform to local norms and values.

Locals even refer to the older foreign women as “gay” because, for them, the label is given only to an individual— male or female — who takes the passive sexual role.

So there is no Western-style gay bashing here, and no organized persecution, because among the locals there is no Western-style concept of being exclusively “gay” in the sense of choosing to “live a gay lifestyle” — something completely anathema even to the most enthusiastic local boy enthusiasts because it threatens the all-important tribal hierarchy. As long as his older Western friend is in town, the only pressure the boy will face is constant pleading from friends to take them with him to the foreigner’s apartment, or to liberally spread his newfound wealth around.

While older foreign women in relationships with young men have the legal cover of an orfi marriage, the gay Westerner has the social cover of “friendship” in an exclusively male environment to justify his entanglement with the youth. Not that he will be asked to justify himself. What they get up to behind closed doors is nobody’s business. As long as the locals are not children, who are fiercely protected and adored, it would be shameful (and illegal) for a local to try to make an issue of the relationship, and if he insisted on doing so he would likely create an eternal feud between the youth’s family and his own. Discretion, then, is the name of the game.”

“Such Western men, historically attracted to the Arab world partly because they find the gay-liberation-era ghettos in the West reductive and stifling, are often introduced to the families of their kept youths, where they are referred to as his “uncle.” A number of such friendships in Luxor have lasted a great many years, continuing even after the boy has grown up and gotten married.”

“Sit in a coffee shop where you are not known, and within minutes you will be surrounded by local youths wanting to know if you are married and, if they discover you are not, asking whether you would like to take one of them back to your apartment. Go to the local public swimming pool and the teens walking past will gesture at their lower bodies with a filthy smirk: an invitation to give them a blow job, for the right price. Tuned into the latest tourism trends, they all know about the gay-themed Web sites and the places preposterously listed on them as “gay cruising areas” (as though there is anywhere in Luxor not a gay cruising area). If you happen to pass by one of these venues, it is immediately assumed that you are looking for a pickup. Even if you tell the leering and jeering boys to take a run and a jump in Arabic, at least one (and usually more) will follow you for what feels like an eternity in the hope that sooner or later you will turn and make conversation. If you rent an apartment, you had better tell the doorman on the first day that under no circumstances is he to let anyone in who claims to be a friend, otherwise there will be a constant thundering on the door from a succession of youths, each trying his luck.

The authorities seem to spring into action only when pornography is involved, literally threatening as it does to “tarnish Egypt’s image abroad.””