CAIRO, EGYPT -- We have heard much of the theocratic temptation that lures Egypt into the arms of those who would render it an Islamic utopia. Almost weekly, we hear of students in Egypt's crowded universities rising up to protest some new offense to the faith. The government, desperate to maintain order, throws the Islamic troublemakers in prison, and when that fails to quell the dissent, concedes inch by inch to their demands. (In May, when students at Al-Azhar railed against a novel in which a character says something unflattering about Islam, the government jailed the protesters as well as the editors of the offending book.) A perennial traveler to that complicated land, I notice an inexorable slide into piety: more religious content on television and in the magazines; more bearded men in and around the increasingly ubiquitous mosques; more women who take the veil.
But it would be wrong to assume that political Islam alone grips the minds of Egypt's 60 million people, that the Islamic state is only a matter of time. A Western seduction beguiles the country, bearing dreams of prosperity and modernity. The spell of the West -- of America, really -- can be seen in the fast food restaurants that one finds on every Cairo street corner; in the growing numbers of girls with bare midriffs in the style of American teen musicians; in the faces of the young Egyptians who daily mob the American Embassy hoping for a visa to the promised land.
Ever since Napoleon's armies marched through Cairo 200 years ago, Egypt has looked Westward in fear and admiration. Its leaders have sought the secrets of success in Western ways: From Mohamed Ali, the wily founder of modern Egypt, who tried to order his country in the manner of the efficient European armies he so admired; to his grandson, Khedive Ismail, whose building spree endowed Cairo with a Parisian veneer and plunged the country into debt, all so that he could declare, "My country is no longer in Africa, we are now part of Europe"; to men of the current regime, Nasser and Sadat, who steered the country alternately on the paths of socialism and capitalism.
Today's Egyptians may bite into hamburgers and shake their bodies to the yelpings of Britney Spears and Michael Jackson (yes, he still has a following there), but Western popular culture will not bring Western prosperity. Democracy, freedom, the notion of individual rights -- these, even in their imperfect application, make the West what it is, but how will Egyptians attain them? After all, there is no well-lit path from McDonald's to the Bill of Rights.
*****
On a recent trip to Egypt, I made it my task to find those who would clear that path, who would lead the country to the liberal society. I went looking for them in what seemed to me an obvious place: the American University in Cairo. Its very name suggests itself as a place where Egyptians might be exposed to the Federalist Papers and the U.S. Constitution, where they would learn that the message and culture of the West consist of more than just its consumer goods. The downtown campus looks every bit the intellectual and cultural oasis, with its high walls enclosing verdant quadrangles. Outside is the bustle and din of Cairo, the polluting motorcars, the jostling crowds, the jarring juxtapositions of the ancient and the modern -- faithful women sheathed in seventh century garb (armor against the lustful eye) walk alongside career women in miniskirts and pumps. Everywhere the contorted visages of fed-up pedestrians testify to the decreasing civility of Cairo life -- the once-forgiving city is losing its patience, built for two million people, it now holds 13 million. Inside the (heavily guarded) gates of that American enclave lay sanctuary and deliverance, not only from the racket of modern Cairo, but, I hoped, from the repressive politics that doom the country to either dictatorship or fundamentalism.
I arrived on the American University's campus when it was very much in the news. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a professor of sociology and the founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Developmental Studies, had been arrested a few days before, on June 30th, and was being held without bail. (He has since been released and is awaiting trial.) His photograph was splashed across the newspapers, each of which carried a different account of his crimes. One said that he had been pocketing foreign grant money intended to fund research at his center. Another accused him of forging ballots to be used in Egypt's upcoming parliamentary elections. Still another charged him, incredibly, with passing state secrets to the Israelis. But this was all, in the parlance of the Egyptians, kalaam garayid -- newspaper talk -- to be taken with more than a few grains of salt. Ibrahim was a critic of Egypt's authoritarian government, its concessions to political Islam, its discrimination against Coptic Christians, and it was for this reason that he now languished in a jail cell.
I was certain, then, that I would find the campus outraged at this violation of academic freedom, furious that one of their own had been hauled into jail like a common criminal for simply speaking his mind. But instead I found the tranquility of that place undisturbed. Students lounged on deck chairs, smoking cigarettes and making small talk, some just a few feet from the imprisoned professor's abandoned office. These were Cairo's beautiful people, the rarefied few who could afford the University's hefty price tag. I asked one student if there had been any protest against Ibrahim's arrest, and he said there had been none. "Professor Ibrahim was not popular on campus," he told me. What did that mean? Was he a bad lecturer? A harsh grader? But this young man would not elaborate; I could see that he already regretted talking to me.
One person who would talk to me was a professor of economics, a man who had been commended to me as a "product" of the American University in Cairo, someone who had imbibed liberal values and believed in the wisdom of democracy. Dr. Abdel Aziz had attended the University in the lean years of the sixties and seventies, when it catered to students whose families would have sent them to Cambridge or the Sorbonne had Nasser not stripped them of their wealth. They came to the American University already exposed to liberal ideals at British-run secondary schools like the Gezira Preparatory School and Victoria College, vestiges of colonialism where students learned English history, sang Anglican hymns, and read the Magna Carta. But that generation has passed on, he told me, squeezed out of existence by Nasser's anti-elitist reforms and replaced by a nouveau riche that made their fortunes under Sadat selling spare parts and mending leaky faucets.
Today's students (and there are about 4,500 of them) come to the American University for the prestige conferred by that degree -- much the same way driving a big, shiny, American car through Cairo's narrow alleyways confers prestige on the driver. According to Dr. Abdel Aziz, the only liberalization that interests this new elite is economic -- they want more opportunities to make money. A political opening holds no appeal for them, for it can only upset the pleasant order of things. And so the contented students of the American University are perfectly happy to let the state imprison men like Saad Eddin Ibrahim if it means that matters will proceed undisturbed.
But something told me that Dr. Abdel Aziz was not entirely correct, that there was something else at work here besides the nonchalance of the rich. I recalled the fellow who had earlier commented on Professor Ibrahim's unpopularity, and I wondered if the students were indifferent to their teacher's fate because they disagreed with his ideas. After all, they had been aroused to demonstrate in the past. In December, 1998, for example, hundreds of students took to the streets to protest the U.S. air strikes against Iraq, until riot police with long batons forced them back onto University grounds. In fact, political activism at the American University is no different from what one would find at Egypt's other universities: the same anti-Israeli sentiments, the same denunciations of American imperialism. It is no wonder, then, that students there would be unmoved by the plight of a professor who periodically lectures in Israel and preaches American-style democracy.
And though I had thought the American University free from the taint of political Islam, I found it there too. The once avowedly secular university bowed years ago to Islamic pressure and set up a mosque on campus, but it has yet to provide a place of worship for Coptic students -- who easily make up 10 percent of the student body. (One professor candidly told me that the prospect was unthinkable.) In 1998, Muhammad, a classic biography of the prophet of Islam by the French scholar Maxime Rodinson, was banned from the curriculum because students and their parents objected to its implication that the Qu'ran is not the word of God. Now a committee vets course materials to ensure they do not transgress the faith.
At the height of the Rodinson episode, a columnist for al-Wafd launched a salvo at the American University, declaring that it was trying to infect its students with corrupt Western ideas, that it was trying to create "an entire generation that renounces Egyptian society, [that] believes what the [University] says is true and what society says is false."
He needn't have worried. That cautious place will not challenge the prevailing order. The University is so eager not to offend Egyptian sensibilities that it will not even participate in exchange programs with Israeli institutions until Egypt's national universities -- large bureaucracies for whom change is anathema -- do so first. The American Unversity has no desire to lead the way, no American pioneer spirit, no sense of duty -- common at American colleges and universities -- to change its surroundings for the better, to do more than just train computer scientists and journalists and engineers. In fact, as I left that campus, I could not help thinking that there was very little that was American about the American University in Cairo.
*****
I had been on a fool's errand. I had thought that Egypt's future might be found among those who had drunk deep of what America had to offer, but I found that they sipped from a shallow well. What little hope that existed was to be found elsewhere. In 1995, 3,000 students at Ain Shams University demanded free and fair elections. Their wish remains unfulfilled, but those are the people I should have been talking to, not the chic habitues of the American University's walled gardens.
The Egyptian desire for democracy crops up in unlikely places. A couple of times during my stay in Cairo, I drove through that city's equivalent of Broadway -- and here I must admit that it is a poor man's equivalent, given to bawdy musicals and insipid melodramas. Marveling at the garish, hand painted billboards -- each of which unfailingly sported an oversized pair of female breasts -- I noticed that two of the comedies on offer were called, "Me, My Wife, and Monica," and "Kimo and the Blue Dress." Both were clearly poking fun at the scandal that had so recently consumed the United States, but I could not help detecting an element of envy, too -- a sense that the greatness of America lay in the fact that its leaders could be called to account for even the most trivial of missteps. Or maybe I was reading too much into a couple of theatre marquees.
I spent my last day in Egypt in my family village in the Nile Delta. I sat on the veranda of our old house, surrounded by relatives. We talked about what we always talk about: America. They do not know of Michael Jackson and McDonald's -- these have not yet reached the hinterland -- but it does not escape them that every few years a new American president is elected while Husni Mubarak reigns over Egypt for 20 years. They are aware of the dignity and freedom and ease of American life, and they wonder why these things cannot also be had at home. One of my cousins, an accountant, offered an answer, "In America, they practice true Islam. They are better Muslims than we are." His evidence was the state of the roads. "In Egypt," he said, "the roads are riddled with craters the size of water buffaloes." Each day on the drive to work, he told me, he sees automobile accidents caused by these monster potholes.
"What are the roads like in America?" he asked.
"Good," I said. He was on a roll: "You see, in America they care about their people. America is true Islam. Sheikh Shaarawi said so."
Sheikh Muhammad Mitwalli Shaarawi, Egypt's late television preacher par excellence, was not known for being a fan of the United States, so it was difficult for me to imagine him declaring America to be the finest example of the Islamic state. I had watched the old man give his Friday lectures on Islam -- often his Qur'anic exegesis was nothing more than veiled vituperation against the West and, particularly, Israel. (He was such a vocal critic of the Jewish state that it was rumored -- mainly among his fans -- that the Israeli ambassador, unable to bear the weight of the damning truths the sheikh exposed, had demanded that Shaarawi be taken off the air.)
But my cousin was right. A few years before his death, Shaarawi had indeed pointed to the West -- if not specifically America -- and declared it, with all its progress and modernity and freedom, to be Islamic. "The most advanced countries of the world [and to the Egyptian this could only refer to America and Europe] have subjected their systems to practical experiments," he said in 1994. "After many trials, they progress, and the more they progress, the closer they come to Islam."
I like to imagine that Shaarawi peered into the future and saw that Egyptians would one day be forced to choose between the path of Islam and the path of the West. I like to think that the wizened cleric realized the bankruptcy of political Islam and the endless possibilities offered by liberty and democracy. And I like to think that he wanted to tell Egyptians that it was okay to adopt those things that make the West great, that in doing so they would not be blaspheming against God, but actually fulfilling His will. It seems that he was heard by those 3,000 students at Ain Shams University, by the writers of farces for the Cairo stage, and by my cousin the accountant. The question is: will he be heard by the rest of the country as well?
