North Africa

In the year since being elected to the presidency, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has consolidated a ruling coalition, restored economic growth, and brought back considerable stability to the country after four years of turmoil. But this has come with a harsh crackdown on dissent, a decline in freedoms and human rights, and abuses by the police and judiciary. In the short term, the combination of nationalism, modest economic growth, and highlighting the war on terror is politically sustainable among a broad cross section of the population frustrated by years of uncertainty and economic decline.

Inaugurated in 1987, Cairo’s Metro was Africa’s first inner-city underground and the embodiment of Hosni Mubarak’s promise to modernize Egypt’s infrastructure. It is hard to think of a Mubarak-era project that was better planned, more efficiently executed, or has had such a functional impact on so many people’s lives. Serving four million passengers daily, the Metro is the fastest, cheapest means of navigating the traffic-congested urban behemoth.

The literature on democratic transitions from the last 50 years has emphasized the process of transforming an authoritarian state into a democracy. Much has been written about negotiations between ancien regimes and democratic forces, particularly the bridges that must be made between elements of old and new regimes. Most studies on democratic transitions also examine the competency or democratic nature of such countries’ institutions.

In this MEI Policy Paper, Ross Harrison asserts that a new regional order is emerging out of the conflicts of the Middle East. The relationships among the pillars of this order–Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran–are crucial, as they will largely determine “whether the future of the Middle East will be a continuation of the current chaos and destruction or a more positive transition toward stability and prosperity.” Harrison argues that global powers must concentrate on creating conditions conducive to cooperation among the pillars.

What Egyptians call the azmit al-iskan—the housing crisis—is exemplified by the 1986 movie, Karakon fi-l-Shari‘a, or Prison in the Street. The film depicts a typical middle class family that, evicted from its condemned home, must resort to living in a horse-drawn caravan because a regular apartment is unaffordable. The “prison” in the title is a reference to the father’s numerous altercations with the police, who deem his attempts to make a home quasi-legal—not illegal, but also not legal.

In the 1930s, several groups of Muslim students from China arrived to study at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. They were destined to play an important role in the history of modern Chinese Islam. These 35 Chinese Azharites, all but two from the Sinophone Hui community, helped China to establish lasting links with Egypt and other Muslim countries in the Middle East. They also left a considerable cultural legacy, including translations of crucial texts from both the Islamic and Chinese traditions.

As the urban historian Lewis Mumford pointed out, “When a city has reached the megapolitan stage, it is plainly on the downward path: it needs a terrific exertion of social force to overcome the inertia, to alter the direction of the movement, to resist the immanent processes of disintegration.”^[1]

Last week U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra, an experienced diplomat, concluded bilateral consultations that focused on regional security and Algerian economics. The United States endorsed Algeria’s efforts to resolve the conflict in Mali, and the two countries pledged to work closely on counterterrorism. The United States also voiced support for Algerian efforts to diversify its economy and attract new investment, and the two countries will continue to build their bilateral cooperation in education.

President Obama’s decision to lift the freeze on delivery of military aid to Egypt was the right thing to do to shore up a key strategic alliance in a region where risks to U.S. security are multiplying rapidly. The United States needs Egypt’s help in confronting terrorist and conventional threats in the region, in maintaining Arab-Israeli stability, and as a key player in Arab diplomacy and coalition building.

In March, Egypt’s Supreme Administrative Court suspended the country’s long-awaited parliamentary elections,[1] originally scheduled to begin March 21.

Egypt is not out of the dark, but there is reason to be hopeful. The nation’s energy market reforms and consistent debt repayments have won the attention and approval of international energy companies and investors in the form of significant investment in the Egyptian energy sector. New upstream (exploration and production) oil and gas contracts, a recent increase in renewable energy ventures, and dozens of additional preliminary agreements in both the hydrocarbon and utility sectors are proof of the improved investment climate.

At face value, the targets of the Bardo Museum attack on March 18 in Tunis were Tunisia and the West, the former as the sole survivor of the “Arab Spring,” a country that has been successful in bridging the transition toward a democratic order, and the latter as the foe that radical Islamism seeks to defeat and supplant. A more extreme secular reading of the event may even see in it a punishment for Tunisia for having denied Islamist parties the coveted electoral victory and a reminder that, even from the margins, Islamism will dictate the course of the nation.