The Millennium Experience

Think of Egypt, and pyramids spring to mind. We marvel at their sheer size, at the precision of their design. We speculate about the people who demanded their construction, those who designed and built them, and finally, those who robbed them.

To say the least, the land is rich with temples: soaring lotus-bud columns; enormous stone portals laced with delicate carvings of gods, wars won, people honored; elaborately painted underground tombs; windswept desert monasteries where Christian monks first retreated from the world; and richly decorated mosques with minarets that pierce the sky. It was here that science, architecture, and astronomy first achieved genuine sophistication. And it was here that an unimportant young king’s treasure—that of Tutankhamun, a modest display by the standards of his day—would come to light some 3,300 years after his death and stun the world with its opulence. Indeed, there is hardly a stretch of the Nile Valley from Aswan in the south to the Delta in the north that does not exhibit the physical remains of the 5,000 years of civilization that have clung to life at the river’s edge.

As extraordinary as these sights are, they will probably not be the things that linger in your memory after you return home. It is the rhythm of life in Egypt—from the Mediterranean feel of Alexandria to the electric pace of Cairo to the timelessness of desert villages—that is unforgettable. In a world that seems to get smaller and more homogeneous by the day, Egypt lives defiantly by its own rules. Despite being the recipient of a century’s worth of organized tourism, Egypt, outside a few pockets, is still a place that exists for its residents, not its visitors. As a visitor you will have to learn how to accommodate Egypt and not hope that Egypt, with 5,000 years of momentum behind it, will accommodate you.

Egyptians are keenly aware of the degree to which the world misunderstands them. Cairo is the second safest city in the world behind Tokyo, and Egypt is one of the least violent societies, yet most foreigners come expecting the terrorism and bloodshed that the news media almost exclusively report. Egyptians practice two religions—Islam and Christianity—that preach peace, yet they have been branded as fanatics. And they live in a present that is in so many ways a pale shadow of the grandeur of their past — even though Egypt has been either the capital or the crown jewel of every empire in the region for the past 2,000 years. It has long been the cultural and intellectual center of the Arab world. It has been the home of al-Azhar, Islam’s most prestigious university, for 1,000 years. But today it is a country struggling under the combined challenges of a population explosion, slow job growth, administrative neglect, and a diminished standing in the Middle East.

One of the ironies of the Middle East is that the least populous countries have the most oil. So while fabulous wealth is concentrated in the hands of relatively few Saudis and Kuwaitis, most of the 60 million Egyptians face a more dire situation. In the last two decades, many young men have been forced to leave behind their wives and small children, sometimes for years at a time, to take the jobs in the Persian Gulf that Gulf Arabs, bloated with petrol dollars, no longer care to do themselves. During oil’s boom years, their hard, thankless work allowed them to send back to Egypt money that transformed their villages with new concrete homes, refrigerators, and televisions. Now those boom years are over. The price of oil has fallen sharply, and many Egyptian workers have been sent home.

The latest twist of this economic inertia is that in Cairo, where housing is in short supply, parents will rarely let their daughter marry a man without an apartment. Few men can afford an apartment without a good job, and because a good job is so hard to find, there are legions of single men in their late twenties and early thirties unable to marry.

Enter the perennial Egyptian capacity for adapting and surviving. Far from being a nation of angry, desperate souls, the people not only survive, but they do so with a lingering humanity that is astounding. This might not be obvious from the locals you’ll see hanging around tourist sights like the pyramids and the Khan al-Khalili; they’ve been hardened by the trade. But elsewhere in Cairo, generosity and compassion are more readily apparent. And for all of Egypt’s other problems, there are few of the social ills that plague richer societies: crime is low, drug use uncommon, divorce rare, and only a tiny fraction of babies are born out of wedlock.

Egyptians take great pride in the force of family and communal ties. For many, admiration for the West’s opportunities is tempered by a sense of despair at what they see as our social decay. Looking at us through the distorted lens of American movies and pop culture, Egyptians often say that we have lost God. And if there is one thing that is immediately palpable in Egypt, it is the degree to which religion, whether it is Islam or Christianity, is woven into the fabric of everyday life. It is a touchstone of identity, a source of comfort and hope, a constant presence.

For most people, religion is not a political choice, and does not imply support for fundamentalists who want to overthrow the government. Yet Egypt is a fairly conservative place in other ways. It is a good idea, for example, to try to respect some of the basic social rules, the kinds of things that you would learn by watching how Egyptians themselves behave: men don’t wear shorts (which are seen as underwear), women dress modestly, and no one kisses or drinks alcohol in public.

There is another side to life in Egypt, of course, behind the closed doors of bars and hotels and private parties, where many of these same rules are broken without concern. Learning which rules you can break and where you can break them is one of the many intriguing aspects of Egyptian life.