Search Results

This chapter describes the evolution of competition between the secular Egyptian government and the Muslim Brotherhood. It discusses the ways in which repression has inspired the Muslim Brotherhood to provide social services the state has proven unable to provide. Initially welcoming the Brotherhood's retreat from violence and politics, the government has come to fear the organization's growing political power. The chapter stresses that the war between the Brotherhood and the Egyptian state evolved during the Mubarak era so that the two groups, who were once locked in violent conflict, have increasingly come to compete as visible providers of human security.

Public education in Egypt in the aftermath of World War I was a crucial part of the Egyptian nationalist movement, and the expansion of public education was one of the most important goals of the Egyptian government. This chapter highlights the concern of Egyptians for socioeconomic reform and enfranchisement. It argues that although Nasser-era policies regarding free public education and a unified primary curriculum receive much attention, the roots of these approaches emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Discussing parliamentary, press, and professional pedagogical debates about equality of educational opportunity and the use of education to lessen socioeconomic gaps, this chapter also shows the striking diversity of opinions, while it reminds the reader of the dynamism of professional pedagogical expression as well as the Wafd's role in these debates.

This chapter examines the governance and political aspects of Cairo, Egypt. It attempts to understand why most of the political apparatus dealing with Cairo simply doesn't work in the ways intended, and how, nevertheless, the city continues to function and evolve. It also analyzes the structure and functioning of the Egyptian government and suggests that Cairo should be considered a minimalistic city, one where only urban essentials are required to work, and the rest remains largely irrelevant.

This chapter looks at the preoccupation of the Egyptian government with creating new towns and other settlements in the desert (twenty-two and counting), and the failure of these new settlements in attracting even a small fraction of their intended target populations. Issues addressed include real estate speculation and urban development in the desert.

This chapter argues that municipal government has little more than the “power of propositions” as they draw up plan after master plan to improve the city but actually have limited financial resources and authority to implement such visions. Its point is not to draw a complete and exhaustive picture of the administrative and political management of Cairo, but rather to highlight the political and administrative origins of this crisis of local government. It specifically demonstrates that the Egyptian government refuses to reform its local administration effectively because it refuses to accord political power to the local government and to allow for citizen participation. This refusal is part of a complex trend toward informal and apolitical decentralization. In addition, it investigates why the Egyptian state continues to privatize rather than “politicize” local government, and the social unrest and administrative paralysis that arises from this trend.

This chapter investigates the Egyptian government's decision to relocate the wholesale fruit and vegetable market from Rod al-Farag to a “modern”, gleaming, new market seven times bigger and located more than twenty kilometers away, near Cairo's international airport. It is not only explains the neoliberal logic that was behind the market's ultimately violent closure, but it also reveals in stark detail the failure of neo-classical models to understand the workings of the Rod al-Farag market. It is very instructive for its appreciation of the social construction of knowledge and the ways in which abstract categories such as “the market” or the “the free market” are deployed to legitimize and implement neoliberal policies. In the summer and autumn of 1994, Cairo experienced tremendous price hikes for fruit and vegetables. Isolated changes in marketing infrastructure are hardly enough to dissolve existing power relations in real markets.

This chapter serves as a brief overview of Egyptian society. It describes the significance of the land, agriculture, and religion to the Egyptian way of life; and more importantly how Egypt as we know it today has been tied up with the Nile sustaining the ancient Egyptian population amid a vast desert inhabited solely by nomads. As agriculture was the principal occupation of the ancient Egyptian population, the chapter shows how the inner workings of the state and the schedules of the general population were reliant on the Nile's inundation cycles. Another significant part of ancient Egyptian life was its religion which, like Islam, was likewise bound up in in a way of life, making it very difficult to separate out the sacred and the profane. In addition to these, the chapter also briefly explores Egypt's state institutions, administrative divisions of land, and population demographics.

This chapter details the administrative functions, religious symbolisms, and other such historic intricacies of the Egyptian monarchy. At the pinnacle of Egyptian society sat the king. Below him were the layers of the educated bureaucracy, comprising nobles, priests, and civil servants, and under them the great mass of the people, largely living an agricultural life. The ancient Egyptian monarchy lasted in a recognizable form for over three thousand years. Although many changes occurred during that time, almost all of the fundamentals remained in being. The chapter also notes the difficulties of current historical sources for vocalizations and chronologies for the monarchical information since reconstructed.