This morning, on the bus from Maadi
to The American University in Cairo’s new campus, located in posh and remote Katemeya,
I sat next to John, a teaching colleague and buddy. The two of us spent the forty-five-minute
trip—traffic was good and never got snarled, not even once, or we would have
had an even longer conversation—talking about the current political situation
in Egypt.
I prefaced my remarks to him by
saying I thought this little piece of northeast Africa was on the path taken by
Libya and Syria, meaning that it was headed toward a bloody civil war. My friend wasn’t as pessimistic as I was,
though he seemed, as we bounced along on the city’s potholed roads, to find a
lot of what I was saying quite convincing.
For the past five days, Egypt,
especially Port Said, Suez, and Ismailia, right on down to its massive capital,
has been wracked by ugly protests and riots.
The two-year anniversary of the revolution against Mubarak and the court
ruling on last year’s football massacre at a match in Port Said, were the
sparks that got the bonfire raging, but days later now, the anger has become
more diffuse.
Watch Egypt's Morsi Hoped Violence Would Burn Out,
Spreads Instead on PBS. See more from PBS
NewsHour.
The video provides a pretty good
overview. What it doesn’t address is
Morsi’s recent attempt to call for dialogue with the opposition, an offer that
was unceremoniously rejected. Now, the
country, quite literally, continues to burn as the political sides sit and
stare at one another across a great divide.
The Western media is actually
missing a lot of the story. The local Egyptian
TV news coverage is much more immediate and clearly shows the scale of the
unrest. For the past few nights, Azza
and I have been sitting together, in front of our flat screen, and watching events
unfold in real time. We’ve seen it all,
and heard it all too, as a variety of pundits, mostly “liberals,” relentlessly
bash Morsi and his Brotherhood.
Egypt’s failing economy is the
backdrop to all of this craziness. The currency
is being devalued as I write this. (A
month ago, it took 6 Egyptian pounds to buy a dollar, and today, it takes
6.6.) We’ve seen the results of this
devaluation with our own eyes. When we
tried to buy dollars for our Italy trip, we had to go to several currency
exchange shops before we could find any greenbacks in stock. There was panic buying on the street and
black marketers were taking advantage of this mood of uncertainty. My wife, who is a caterer of fine Italian
cuisine and thus a serious shopper, has seen a spike in food prices recently.
Things just feel like they’re spiraling
out of control or coming unglued, whatever metaphor you want to use.
And now, there’s this
sobering pronouncement by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
