Saturday, July 06, 2013

Saturday, July 06, 2013

About a year before the fall of Hosni Mubarak, former President of Egypt, Beverly and I traveled to the Mid-East and toured Israel and Egypt.  It was a fascinating and life-changing trip that we were grateful to have made, especially as it became apparent that casual trips by Americans to Egypt were going to be put on hold for a while.  We saw the pyramids and the Sphinx and most of the popular tourist sites like the Valley of the Kings and Memphis and Karnak and Luxor and Cairo.  We spent about a week on a whirlwind visit and last night I reviewed the pictures again.  What the ancient Egyptians accomplished 4,000 years ago without heavy equipment is still a construction marvel.  One of the highlights was a walk Beverly and I took through Cairo, only a mile of so from the pyramids at Giza.  We met a young man, probably 18 or 20 who walked with us.  He spoke good English and volunteered to be our guide.  We had been there long enough to understand that he had an ulterior motive, but he was still a personable fellow that we enjoyed talking with.  Visitors to Cairo are inundated with very sneaky solicitations to buy gold and silver jewelry, essential oils, papyrus artwork, and rugs. Guides from travel agencies or those you hire on the street will have a relationship with shops in one or all of these trades and will stop at those shops whether you want to or not to give you the opportunity to buy their goods.  We wandered into a papyrus-art shop on our own one evening and somehow our travel-agency guide got wind of it and demanded of the shop owner a cut of the sales.  The vendor was angry since the guide had nothing to do with our visit and refused to pay her.  We talked to him for quite a while and he finally told us that between the guide and the agency, he would normally pay them 50% of the sales total.  Anyway, our young friend had a “brother” that sold essential oils and he eventually guided us to the shop where we sat through a long lesson on oils and actually bought some (surprise!)  Background on Egypt:  Mubarak was Egypt’s 4^th President and was a largely benign influence to US interests.  Growth occurred under Mubarak, but most of the money (maybe 75%)  that should have gone to the poor wound up with those higher in the socio-economic strata.  He apparently enriched himself as President and was overthrown in violent protests on February 11, 2011.  The Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate was Mohamed Morsi who was elected with 51.7% of the vote on June 24, 2012.  The Brotherhood has long been involved in Egypt’s politics, having unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate the second President, Abdul Nassar in 1954.  Morsi has just been overthrown by widespread protests and Adly Mansour, former chief of  the Supreme Court, is now acting President.  The unrest, in conjunction with news reports of rape and murder of western visitors has made Egypt a less-than-ideal tourist destination.  This is a great misfortune to the average Egyptian, because tourism is the #1 source of income, with taxes on Egyptians working outside the country #2, the Suez canal #3, and oil and gas revenues #4.  With all of the media-time that Islam has gotten in the past several years, we begin to assume that the average Moslem is quite devout.  In Egypt anyway, that was not the case.  In talking with our young guide and observing the populace at large, we began to realize that in Islam, just as in Christianity and Judaism, much of the population is not devout.  There was a range of devotion which in Egypt which one could see by observing the dress of the people.  A woman particularly might be seen in a full burqa covering her entire body except for a transparent veil over the eyes riding on a motor scooter behind her husband, or she also might be seen dressed like western women everywhere, unaccompanied on the street and working on her own.  Our guide was engaged to a Christian woman and was looking forward to marriage.  We asked him how this would work and he said that it wasn’t a big deal in Egypt.  With Sharia law invoked, however, it would become a big deal, and you can begin to see why the general population rose up in the world’s biggest protest to give Morsi the boot.  When Mubarak was overthrown, we were so grateful that we had had the opportunity to visit when we did, because we understood that it might be years before westerners would again feel safe in Egypt, and we felt very sad for the people in general, because as in so many poverty-stricken countries in the Third World, they would be the ones who would  suffer.