INTRODUCTION
Egypt appears on the map as a large rectangle at the northeast corner of Africa with Sinai as a small triangular peninsula at the southwest corner of Asia. Through Sinai runs the Suez Canal, which provides the shortest link between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea, while Sinai itself is the only land bridge between Africa and the remainder of the Eastern Hemisphere. Egypt therefore controls a great international crossroads, so that even if it did not share a border with Israel, its geographical position would ensure it a major role in the politics of the Middle East. To this must be added Egypt’s qualities of endurance and stability in a region of conflict and flux – well illustrated by the fact that this paragraph as accurately describes Egypt’s place in the world during the first millennium BC as in our own third millennium AD.
In the course of those thousands of years, Egypt has known many empires that have come and gone – Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, British – so that today it is America which cajoles and courts the ancient nation on the Nile. With the aim of ensuring Egypt’s cooperation in the task of maintaining stability in the region, the United States has been pouring nearly a billion dollars a year into the Egyptian economy since Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, making Egypt along with Israel the world’s largest recipients of American aid – and this is not to mention further contributions from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union and Japan.
Egypt’s desperate need for financial assistance arises in large part from the failure of its bureaucratic state-directed economy, an inheritance from the centralized socialist regime of president Gamal Abdel Nasser during the 1950s and 1960s, and which is only very slowly being reformed. Egypt also suffers from rapid population growth, which strains its ability to provide adequate educational and health facilities and employment to its people, and threatens to exhaust natural resources, in particular the supply of water.
Though nearly twice the size of France and a third the size of the United States, Egypt is an almost entirely rainless country of dry and barren desert where only a few oasis-dwellers and nomadic Bedouins can survive. As the River Nile is the only perennial water source in Egypt, nearly all the nation’s seventy million inhabitants are confined to that three percent of the country taken up by the Nile Valley and the Delta. The very existence of the Egyptian people depends on the Nile – which throughout their history has been both their provider and taskmaster.
Egyptians began recording their history five thousand years ago when King Menes, in one of the earliest examples of writing in the world, commemorated his unification of Upper and Lower Egypt – that is, the Nile Valley upriver from his new capital of Memphis and the Nile Delta downriver to the north. Strong centralized rule organized the resources of a united Egypt and unleashed its potential with sudden and startling effect, so that within four hundred years King Cheops was building his Great Pyramid, still the largest building (by volume) standing on the face of the earth.
Architectural, cultural and political patterns established at the beginning of pharaonic history served Egypt for three thousand years and more, into the period of Greek rule following the invasion of Alexander the Great, and Egypt’s incorporation into the Roman Empire after the death of Cleopatra. During this Graeco-Roman period, it is no exaggeration to say that Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt was the cultural and intellectual capital of the world. In Alexandria, too, with its mixed Egyptian, Jewish and Greek civilization, Christianity was developed and transformed into a universal faith – not least because of Egypt’s contribution of a powerful imagery to the new religion, such as the Virgin and Child and the Cross and the Resurrection, symbols that can be traced back to the earliest notions in Egyptian belief.
The great discontinuity in Egyptian history was the Arab invasion of the 7th century and the introduction of Islam. Through its abjuration of images, its conviction that nothing worth acknowledging preceded the teachings of Mohammed, and by its subjection and persecution of the Copts, the native inhabitants of the country, Islam destroyed much of Egypt’s cultural inheritance. Yet in place of Alexandria, and not far from the crumbling ruins of Memphis, the Arabs’ own foundation of Cairo became one of the great medieval cities, a magnificent treasure trove of Islamic architecture arising amid the rich and exotic caravanserai of trade linking East and West, the fabulous city of The Thousand and One Nights.
From Cairo in the late 1100s, Saladin launched his campaign against the Crusaders in Palestine and Syria, as a century later the Mamelukes rode out from the city to destroy the Mongol hordes that had been ravaging the Middle East and Europe. But Mameluke power weakened when European ships found their way round Africa to India and the Far East, bypassing the trade counters of Cairo, and the Turkish invasion in 1517 reduced Egypt to a provincial backwater of the Ottoman Empire.
The ancient idea of a canal linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea was revived by Napoleon when he invaded Egypt in 1798 with the intention of undermining Britain’s command of the ocean route to India. The encounter marked the beginning of Egypt’s often turbulent relationship with the West, as an impoverished and benighted backwater became forcibly exposed to the modern – if imperfect – world of science, industry, capital and secular thought.
In the last half-century or so, an independent Egypt has moved from a landed oligarchy under a constitutional monarchy to socialism within a police state and now to an increasingly privatized and free market economy under a veiled military dictatorship, which permits a cautious freedom of public expression. Yet if this is progress, it is also true that the Egypt of today is almost unrecognizable from that of even thirty years ago, when secular trends were still paramount. Now Islamic fundamentalists operate within the political system, where they press for the full adoption of traditional Islamic law and work for the complete Islamization of Egyptian society. Their aim is to reinstitute a ‘golden age’ enjoyed during the earliest days of Islam in the 7th century; but to outside eyes, and indeed in the eyes of many Egyptians, they want to return Egypt to something more like the Dark Ages.
Religiosity has always played a powerful role in Egyptian society, not least when it has disguised from Egyptians themselves the great changes their seemingly changeless world is undergoing. As much as Islamization may appear to be a rejection of secular progress, in fact it may be the means by which necessary and inevitable changes are accepted and legitimized in the name of holy law.
About the Author
Michael Haag is an experienced author and freelance writer. He is also the author of the Rough Guide History of Greece.
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