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39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
INSIDE THE REAL EGYPT, April 30, 2008
This review is from: Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution (Hardcover)
I bought Inside Egypt because I greatly enjoyed John R. Bradley's previous book Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis (2005), and also because I have been living in Cairo for the past 14 months learning Arabic and there's no other book on contemporary Egypt out there. Inside Egypt is creating quite a buzz here in Cairo: you can't pick up an Arabic-language newspaper (the independent ones not run by the government, anyway) without finding a profile of the author and/or a review of the book. It has the same qualities that I liked about Saudi Arabia Exposed: a clever combination of personal anecdote, original reportage, and brief historical backdrop, and the arguments are made in a very readable prose style (I finished this book in two stints over two evenings). Inside Egypt is aimed at the general reader, rather than scholars and experts, and it paints a very grim picture from the ground up of life here as lived by most Egyptians. Those non-Egyptian readers living here who know poor Egyptians will easily recognize the world Bradley depicts - families living on the bread line, young people desperate to travel abroad, Christians facing persecution, the rise of fundamentalist Islam. But the book also debunks myths by explaining, for example, why the Muslim Brotherhood are not very popular, and unearths some shocking facts about the country's seedy sex tourism underworld - two subjects I've not seen discussed elsewhere. There are chapters on Torture and Corruption, and well as the Sufi and Bedouin minorities, and some cracking interviews with well-known Egyptians like novelist Alaa Al-Aswany (The Yacoubian Building) and Gamal Al-Banna (brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood). Bradley concludes that recent Egyptian history shows there have been popular uprising every three decades or so: the 1919 nationalist revolution, the 1952 revolution led by the Free Officers, and the bread riots of 1977. We are now, he notes ominously, three decades after the last uprising, meaning Egypt is due another, although he has no doubt the regime will be able to crush it. It's a measure of his prescience that in the month the book is published there are were two general strikes and food/price riots...
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rich and readable portrait of Egypt, May 6, 2008
This review is from: Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution (Hardcover)
Bradley writes like a novelist, from his own situation and point of view, and fortunately is an intelligent and perceptive observer who writes beautifully. We are with him as he travels up and down the Nile, interviews leading figures in the major political and cultural groupings, and shares the situation of the abandoned middle class in this police state on the verge of collapse. The reader gains the benefit of his long residence in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, his fluent Arabic, his talent for friendship and his evident love and sympathy for the people he meets. This is a fine example of a more realistic reporting than we have been used to in recent years, free from the point-counterpoint and shouting of the mass media.
Bradley lets us see Egypt in the light of its recent history. In the break-up of empires, Ottoman and British, a military clique seized the government and established party rule modeled on European dictatorships. The new home-grown dictators destroyed as much as they could of the structure of civil society and the deep religious and cultural diversity of Egypt, which they identified with opposition and a colonial past. They sought to erase history itself. Like the dictators of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, Egypt's rulers slipped steadily into corruption and terror, and are now challenged by a new, Islamist movement that threatens to repeat the cycle of violence and minority dictatorship. The liberal middle class is being steadily destroyed by pressure from both sides: anyone searching for the reason that educated, middle class youth are becoming suicide bombers and soldiers of intifada will find much of the reason in this book. A horrifying chapter on the multi-billion dollar sex tourism industry gives us a vivid sense of the degradation of Egyptian society and the looting of its cultural and natural resources.
This book is required reading. If Bradley has a fault, it is his optimism: he recommends that the United States use its considerable leverage to force a degree of liberalism upon the military rulers of this uniquely important nation, but given the corruption and incompetence that he demonstrates so graphically it is hard to imagine them climbing out of the hole they have been digging for fifty years. Egypt needs the kind of massive rebuilding of infrastructure that has been undertaken in Ireland and the former Soviet Republics. One would think that from his description, only a true peace in the Middle East, instead of the "cold peace" Bradley describes, that would allow the harnessing of oil wealth and the technical expertise of Egypt's neighbors, and a radically new Egyptian government capable of making use of such aid, would seem to meet the need.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Deep and clear, May 22, 2008
This review is from: Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution (Hardcover)
Well, I found this book special as an Egyptian living abroad. The amount of true information of such a book is huge. Although I did not like the author's point of view about the Muslim Brotherhood. The chapter about the bedouins also lacks the depth of the rest of the book.
Other than this, the book is fine, and I totally recommend it for students who are interested in different cultures, and also to the professors of Egyptology, to see how the grandchildren of the builders of the pyramids are lacking even the basic requirements to live an adequate life.
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