Research & Commentary Results

In the past ten days Egypt held a first round of parliamentary elections, announced renewed loan talks with the IMF, experienced new clashes with militants in the Sinai, and joined multinational talks to end the war in Syria. These headlines provide current glimpses into the country’s complex and challenging political, economic and security trajectories.

Since the 1990s, the need for streamlined procedures to facilitate business, trade and investment has grown to crisis proportions in Egypt. But the political will to deliver administrative reform was always lacking, not least because it would involve lay-offs and wage reductions; in other words, direct threats to the livelihoods of some seven million state employees and consequently the regime’s popularity. But with the government wage bill estimated to reach USD30 billion next year, Egypt has finally taken action.

In mid-June, just before Ramadan, the pre-dawn calm of downtown Cairo was shattered by the sound of heavy machinery. The municipality had decided to repair the battered sidewalks, a fairly regular occurrence since shoddy concrete tiles are typically used for the job. Truckloads of sand were deposited at intervals along the main boulevards to be spread as a bed for the new tiles, while much of the rubble from the old ones was left piled by the curbs. To avoid the rough new terrain pedestrians took to the streets with the cars.

Italian energy company Eni announced on August 30 that it had discovered a deep-water gas field 93 miles north of Egypt’s Mediterranean coast.[1] The field, named Zohr, holds an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet (cft)[2] of natural gas (NG) reserves, potentially making it the twentieth largest in the world and the largest in the Mediterranean.

Under the threat of an increasingly influential Communist Soviet Union, in the mid-twentieth century the United States became more and more involved in Middle Eastern affairs. Struggling to reconcile its goals of containment, access to oil, and Israeli security, the U.S. government implemented a historic doctrine that pledged increased economic and military aid to the region in exchange for political allegiance.

The 1,667-strong contingent of U.S. and international forces that make up the Multinational Force of Observers (MFO) in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula is in a tough spot. The ongoing failure of the Egyptian government’s war against the ISIS-led rebellion there has shredded the MFO’s mandate to monitor Egyptian and Israeli adherence to their peace treaty. Sinai’s descent into anarchy also puts outnumbered and outgunned U.S. troops in the only location other than Iraq that confronts ISIS in an active theater of war.

Egyptian diplomats rarely have a good word to say about U.S. policies these days. In contrast, they are enthusiastic in their praise of the close relations between Cairo and Jerusalem—centered on counterterror security and intelligence cooperation in Sinai—and effusive in their acknowledgement of Israel’s response to the bloody insurgency there, led by Egypt’s ISIS affiliate in the “Sinai Province,” Ansar Beit al-Maqdis.

“Relations with Israel are great,” observed an Egyptian official recently.[1]

For Egypt’s low-income majority, weddings are the prime source of group entertainment, celebrated like block parties in cramped streets decorated with arabesque tapestries and drenched in colored lights and sound. You won’t hear romantic crooning at these gatherings; in Cairo’s densely-inhabited popular quarters, wedding parties are more akin to raves. The music is raw synthetic beat embroidered with syncopated tabla (Egyptian drum) samples and queasy electronic loops.

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.