by Peyman Pejman
When Fatma showed up at my apartment three years ago, I thought she was knocking at the wrong door.
She was a 16-year-old school girl. From her composure and clothes, she looked very middle class. Not the kind of person in that social group who would respond to an ad looking for a cleaning woman.
“My father is a technician and we are five sisters and a brother,” she explained. “I have to work to help the family.”
Trivial as the incident might sound, it is indicative of the changing times in Egypt especially within the context of the deep rooted traditions and pride of the Egyptian family structure.
That the country’s stalemated — most people would say worsening — economy would force a young unmarried girl to defy customs and want to clean the house of a foreign bachelor for about 30 dollars a month, would have been unheard of in Egypt only a few years ago.
Indeed, like in many other Third World countries, the economy and its political consequences have been playing havoc with Egypt and the jury is still out on the outcome.
When President Hosni Mubarak took power in 1981, Egypt’s foreign debt was around 50 billion dollars and inflation was running at about 20 percent a year. Both would have surely gone higher, had it not been for the push and shove of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to convince Egypt to go through massive economic reform.
Changes were introduced, but at a price. Lifting government subsidies and the price hikes that followed, have pushed the lower class deeper into poverty and dealt one of the many disabling blows to the country’s thriving middle class.
Ever since the late Gamal Abdel Nasser toppled the monarch in 1956, the Egyptian government has been subsidizing many basic foods and household goods at a cost of more than two billion dollars a year.
In the absence of a sound economy, the government kept borrowing and repaying at high interest rates, in effect bankrupting itself.
President Mubarak’s government remains committed to its agreements with the IMF and the WB to continue the economic reforms. That includes privatization of previously state-owned companies with the probable loss of employment for tens of thousands of people.
The state is the biggest employer in the country although government wages are at best one-third of what the private sector pays for similar jobs.
The Mubarak regime is concerned that immediate full-scale privatization and loss of employment will cause street riots which will undoubtedly become a political liability.
It may be overplaying that fear in order not to succumb to outside pressure, but its basic concerns are not that far fetched.
Though still in the very early stages of privatization, the government’s opponents unfailingly attack it daily for having “sold Egypt” to “Western aggressors” out to destroy the Arab character and Islamic values of the North African Arab nation.
Mubarak’s efforts to cut down the massive and burdening foreign debts and interests on them have succeeded to a large degree — the foreign debt is now less than half of what it used to be — and the government is continuing its efforts to have the rest written off or renegotiated.
But the general public seems to be responding negatively.
The minority-but-vocal political activists are translating their dissatisfaction with the government through Islam and Islamic slogans.
In order to avoid all-out politically-motivated riots disguised to protest economic hardships, the government has allowed hard-line Moslems to gradually spread their social and economic ideals into the generally religious but otherwise tolerant public.
Three years ago, the most popular prime time television program was Knots Landing — an American import. Later, it was The Bold and the Beautiful, dubbed into Arabic.
But with increased Islamic fanaticism, both TV shows were first cut down to a once a week time slot. About six months ago, they were abolished altogether and replaced by a conservative and traditional Japanese show emphasizing family values.
Walking the streets of Cairo, it is becoming more and more difficult to avoid seeing women wearing the traditional Hijab, the generally dark colored cloth covering the body from head to toe.
Bending to pressure, the government last year added a new symbol to the “Islamization” of the country: women-only busses and subway wagons in some of Cairo’s most crowded areas.
To further appease the extremist tide, the government has launched a massive campaign to build new mosques in and around Cairo — a city which once had more Christian than Moslem places of worship.
But efforts to deflate the hard-line movement have been obstructed by the double jeopardy of the government.
“It’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t kind of situation” a Western diplomat observed recently. “If the government goes all out against the Moslem fundamentalists, it will backfire. If it does little or nothing, it will encourage them to keep hitting in some of the places that hurt most,” he said.
And some of that is already happening.
Egypt’s primary source of hard currency, tourism, has been badly hurt by repeated and continuous attacks by the militants in the past two years, shrinking the revenues from the 1992 high of three billion dollars to about one billion last year.
The government has also been forced to spend unspecified amounts of money beefing up security around the country, to the point that armed or unarmed undercover informants are visible on every street corner.
Egypt does not want to become a police state, but the choice of maintaining a stable economy, and a healthy tourist industry are sometimes forcing the government’s hand.
But the decline in revenue from tourism is real and there is little light at the end of the tunnel to see an improvement on that level.
Times are changing, and a lot depends of how long the government can hold on to the middle ground — the balancing act between appeasing the hard-core Moslem flank and fighting the harm it is doing to the national economy and Egypt’s image in the world.
Peyman Pejman is an Iranian-born American journalist who has lived in Cairo for several years and has covered the Middle East.
