Looked at on a map, Egypt is a big country: 386,900 sq. mi., or about the size of France and Spain put together. A satellite photo, which can distinguish between desert and arable land, tells a different story. Viewed from space, the real Egypt—the land that man can live on—is small and lotus-shaped. A thin, two-to ten-mile-wide strip of green, the flower’s stem, follows the Nile north from the Sudan border; then, near Cairo, comes the blossom, the Nile Delta. In that narrow space of 13,800 sq. mi., no larger than Taiwan, live 37.8 million people, or 97% of the country’s population. Almost all the rest of Egypt is brutal, dun-colored desert, unchanged and scarcely touched since the pharaohs. Egypt today is still, as Herodotus wrote 2,500 years ago, “the gift of the river.”
The Nile has molded the country’s character as well as its geography. Men needed organization to cope with the ebbs and floods of the fickle river; thus civilization emerged. They required some means of surveying their tiny plots of irrigated land; thus geometry became necessary. Protected in their green river valley by the desert’s barriers, the ancient Egyptians constructed perdurable institutions, of which the pyramids remain as awesome symbols. With scarcely an interruption, pharaoh succeeded pharaoh and dynasty followed dynasty for nearly 3,000 years before Christ, a continuity of government unmatched by any other people. To appreciate the grandeur of that achievement, one needs to imagine the American republic surviving until the year 4776.
The Persians broke the pharaonic line, and for more than 2,000 years Egypt was little more than a province of foreign conquerors: Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mamelukes, Turks, French and British, who renounced their final claims only 21 years ago, after the failure of the Suez invasion. Through the centuries, however, the Nile flowed on, and the Egyptian, that unique river creature, determined his life by the rise and fall of its waters rather than by the temporary whims of a foreign master.
For most Egyptians the Nile still rules, and a peasant from pharaonic days would find life little altered along much of the riverbank today: land is still divided into tiny plots, and the precious water is still raised from the river by having a cow or blind-folded water buffalo turn a primitive screw or a crude wooden lift balanced by a weight of mud. The ordinary meal of an Egyptian fellah still consists of foul beans; moulekieh, a soup made of the greens that grow among cotton plants, is a dish reserved for special days.
Both history and the river set the Egyptian apart from the desert Arabs, who are Semites. By contrast, a Hamitic strain prevails in the blood of Egypt’s river people. Outsiders often have difficulty distinguishing a Syrian from a Jordanian, or either from a Lebanese. But an Egyptian stands out. His Arabic accent is different, and his speech is peppered with odd words, some dating from the pharaohs, some borrowed from visiting—or conquering—Europeans. Although Egypt is a predominantly Muslim land with a large Coptic minority, its customs differ from those of its Islamic neighbors. In Saudi Arabia, for example, tombs are unmarked, and the dead are quickly forgotten. Cemeteries in Egypt not only have tombs but houses as well, so that the living can spend holidays with their family dead. The Semitic Arabs dote on flowery poetry and high-flown oratory. The Egyptian prefers a good joke; his humor is quick, satiric and biting, often directed against himself.
Other Arabs have grudgingly acknowledged Egypt’s leadership. They send their sons to learn in Cairo, the great teaching center of the Middle East. Al Azhar, founded in the 10th century, is older than Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne; Cairo University, with 95,000 students, is not only the biggest university in the Middle East but one of the largest in the world. Cairo’s four universities, indeed, turn out more graduates than the impoverished Egyptian economy can absorb, and more than 1 million of them now work, often in key positions, in other Arab countries. The remittances they send home, amounting to $500million last year, help trim Egypt’s huge balance of payments deficit.
Although Arab by definition, Egyptians are still Egyptian first—by emotion andinclination. Their history has made them proud, and they are galled to have to wait, like the beggars on their own streets, for handouts from desert oil sheiks or American capitalists. Sadat’s peace initiative was hugely popular with his own people, who have grown increasingly resentful that they have fought Israel in four wars with blood while other Arabs have fought only with words or money. “Given a choice between our feelings for Egypt and our feelings for the Arab world, Egypt will win every time,” says a Cairo philosophy professor. “We do not belong to the Arabs. They belong to us.”
Brave words. In fact, Egypt’s poverty makes it a ward of the rich Arabs. The Six-Day War of 1967 devastated the econ omy; among other blows, the closing of the Suez Canal cost Egypt an estimated $2 billion in vital revenue. Capital investment was diverted to acquire military hardware; arms spending currently absorbs 28% of the Egyptian national budget. After becoming President in 1970, Anwar Sadat began to dismantle Gamal Abdel Nasser’s cumbersome socialist state and once again invited foreign investment. But the response has not even been as loud as a whisper. Last year, in order to pay off short-term debts, more capital flowed out of the country than into it. The balance of trade deficit is now equal to a fifth of the gross national product ($13.7 billion a year). This is something close to an economic impossibility, and Egypt is technically bankrupt. It is kept alive only by massive handouts and loans from abroad, mostly from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the U.S.
The chief villain, besides war and the threat of war, is a runaway population. Although there are 2,500 birth-control clinics in Egypt, family planning programs in rural areas have been unsuccessful for reasons that are all too familiar in developing nations: lack of education, religious constraints and popular feelings that in large families children are a potential source of income. If the present annual population increase (2.3%) continues, demographers fear that Egypt will have between 60 million and 80 million people by the year 2000. Food production, whichspurted after the completion of the Soviet-financed Aswan High Dam in 1971, has not kept pace with the numbers, and Egypt is forced to divert money from development to buy food from abroad. When the government cut food subsidies as an economy measure last January, Cairo’s and Alexandria’spoor rampaged through the streets in the worst riots since the nationalist upheavals of 1952. The subsidies were quickly restored.
Overpopulation has turned Cairo into a municipal disaster. More than 1,000 peasants move to the capital every day, and the city now swarms with 8 million people. In the worst slums, where the population density is nearly 250,000 per sq. mi., the squalor and degradation match Calcutta’s. Vast numbers of displaced fellahin spend their lives in one room, sleeping on the floor, taking their water from a public faucet and using the street as a toilet. Many go through a whole lifetime without once taking a bath. Infants who play in garbage and excrement are themselves covered with flies, and they suffer from chronic dysentery, as well as lung diseases aggravated by dust and sand filtering into their homes. Despite free compulsory education, only about 25% of the population can read and write.
Although there are only about 216,000 cars registered in the city, they create monumental traffic jams as they try to negotiate the old, narrow streets or push aside carts pulled by horses or donkeys. The poor wait hours for buses, which are so crowded that passengers ride on the roofs and hang on the sides, clinging desperately to any vehicle that moves in the right direction.
There is a light-year’s gap between the living standards of the masses and those of a growing middle class. A low-ranking civil servant in Egypt’s swollen, slow-moving bureaucracy may earn no more than $45 a month; an evening at currently fashionable Jackie’s Disco in Cairo costs $60 per person. Some of the affluent Egyptians who can afford a summer home in Alexandria are uncomfortable about the disparity between their country’s two nations. Says one wealthy, Harvard-educated Cairene: “I feel like a foreigner when I’m with the Egyptian lower class. When I meet my driver every day, I ask him about his family, and that is about all the conversation we can make together. We have nothing in common to talk about, nothing to share.”
The Aswan High Dam, a building project almost as monumental as the Great Pyramids, was once looked upon as a panacea for most of Egypt’s ills. True, it has doubled the country’s electric power output and improved the productive capacity of 900,000 acres of land, guaranteeing water to farmers in upper Egypt. But the dam has made some old problems worse. The Nile’s silt, which enriched the delta through the millennia, is now trapped behind Aswan’s concrete; farmers must buy artificial fertilizer to do what nature in the past provided free. Because of the dam, the Nile waters flow more slowly now. More Egyptians than ever are infected with schistosomiasis, a debilitating disease caused by tiny worms in the river. In the delta, salt water pushing inland from the Mediterranean is gradually destroying some of Egypt’s precious few acres of fertile land. In some areasthe desert, because of present wind patterns, is moving toward the Nile Delta at the rate of eight miles per year.
Despite these potential ecological hazards, Egypt, given a few decades of peace and stability, still has a chance to become a prosperous, viable nation. Two years ago, in a gesture signifying his interest in peace, Sadat reopened the Suez Canal, which had been blocked since 1967. It is once again one of the country’s biggest money earners, bringing in $500 million a year. Sadat also decreed a massive developmentscheme, largely financed by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, to rebuild the cities along the canal, which were almost totally empty for eight years. The ambitious plan included new cities as well as tunnelsto carry Nile water under the canal to the parched Sinai beyond.
Hundreds of test wells have been drilled in the desolate desert west of the Nile, and scientists have discovered what they think is a vast underground network of rivers and reservoirs, possibly with enough water to irrigate half a million acres for 700 years. Egyptian officials call this area “the New Valley” and predict that one day it may rival the Nile Valley itself. One hundred thousand people have already been resettled at the Kharga Oasis, at the southern end of this underground water supply.
More immediate is the promise of oil. Though its proven reserves primarily in western Sinai and offshore in the Gulf of Suez total only 3 billion bbl. (v. 110 billion bbl. for Saudi Arabia), Egypt already produces enough oil to fill its own needs and provide a sizable surplus. This year, the country is again an oil exporter, to the happy tune of $311 million. Sadat predicts that the figure will jump to $1.5 billion by 1980. In addition, Egypt has largely untapped deposits of phosphates and iron ore.
One thing Egypt can always rely on is its own glittering past. The pyramids and temples that awed adventurers from Caesar to Napoleon are irresistible still, magnets for tourist dollars, marks and yen that Egypt must have to help surmount its present problems. “Egypt is a dusty city and a green tree,” said Amr ibn al As, the Arab general who conquered the country for Islam’s warriors in the 7th century. “The Nile traces a line through the midst of it; blessed are its early-morning voyages and its travels at eventide.”
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