Order, Chaos, Kindness, and the Desire to be Free: Egypt.

 

 

For the ancient Egyptians, the universe was composed of dualities: fertile and barren, life and death, order and chaos.

Andrew Humphreys, Cairo and the Nile, Eyewitness Travel. 2009.

 

A new museum has been built to showcase Egypt’s ancient artifacts, yet no structure exists to honor our desire to be free.

Noreen Moustafa, “Love and Ruin in Aida” in The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human p 36. 

 

We came to Egypt because a scholar I respect had an apartment in Cairo she was renting out. I was eager to understand this place. The country had been through turmoil in the last 15 years.  I watched from afar as their 2011 Revolution overthrew the seemingly immovable Hosni Mubarak. Democracy Now had Egyptian reporters, and their day-by-day accounts were electrifying. I remember the excitement of this people’s revolution, the crown of the Arab Spring, inspiring freedom fighters from Madrid to Athens to Madison, Wisconsin.

People in Tahrir Square sent messages of solidarity to Madison when tens of thousands occupied the State Capitol to protest cutbacks to schools and other public sectors. In Spain, the Indignado Movement led anti-austerity protests. In Athens, Greece, young and old waged a mass rebellion against wage cuts, pension reductions, and a government circumscribed by the International Monetary Fund.  And then in the fall, Occupy Wall Street spread from New York to cities and small towns across the United States and the world. In 2011, in central squares all over the planet, people demanded a government that cared more for the 99% than the 1%. Egypt led the way.

The euphoria we all had watching an entrenched Egyptian dictator fall did not last. Mohamed Morsi did not deliver on the people’s demands.   When a military commander overthrew him in 2013, there was no popular uprising to save him. Since 2013, Abdel Fattah El Sisi, President since 2014, has dismantled civil society, repressed dissent,  and jailed those related to the Morsi regime and/or the Muslim Brotherhood. El Sisi shored up his power through a cult of personality and military might, rather than providing for the people. The rich who support him and his military cronies get the goods. Safety nets have frayed, and people have gotten hungrier.  How do people survive, thrive, and fight back? People battling new autocrats from the Netherlands to Italy to the United States want to know. 

People on the streets of Cairo greeted us: ‘Welcome to Egypt!’

Outside of pyramids, museums, and Nile Cruises, there were few tourists and very few from the US in January 2025. People would try to guess where we were from: Russia? The UK?”  Everywhere we wandered, we were the recipients of kindness. We were had been told that we should expect people to ask for money with every interaction in Egypt. That was not our experience. We needed help, and everywhere people reached out to help us. 

Mostly, we needed help crossing the street. In Cairo, vehicles of all sorts wove across lanes. Stoplights were dark. There were no crosswalks. To get across the six lanes, you stepped into the stream of vehicles crossing lanes, riding with their horns, looking at their phones. The sidewalks were filled with hot stoves, wild dogs,  water, grease, stones, wires, cars, trees, stalls, and humans sleeping. Exhausted and amazed to be alive, we fell into a heap after every venture. We circumscribed our walking and took rideshares.  We were never afraid of people. It was the chaos and the obstacle course that scared us. People were helpful. Once a man crossed two streets to guide us. As we traversed the highway together, he gave us a list of must-sees and brushed away our efforts to repay him financially.. Another time, a woman in a bright red abaya let us attach ourselves to her as she expertly crossed, multi-tasking on her phone. 

It took me a while to realize there was a method to what appeared to us to be madness. Traffic goes slowly. If you step off the curb and into the street, cars swerve slowly around you. Everyone moves to fill in a space, and the cars, scooters, walkers, motorcycles, tuk-tuks, and horses inch toward where they are going. Horns are not to express rage. They are for communication, I’m moving into your lane, or I’m here, or do you want a ride. By the end of the month, I began to imagine that if I stayed a little longer, I too would learn to swim the river of Cairo traffic without my heart in my throat.

Traffic, while a big deal to us, was inconsequential to Egyptians, compared to the ongoing economic crisis.  What paid rent last month, does not this month. Subsidies—in place for decades—on basic foods like bread, and monthly stipends available to all Egyptians, (a progressive something we can’t imagine in the US) keep getting smaller. Education is de facto privatized. People with money hire tutors for their teenagers to help them pass rote exams.  College professors make so little, that they also tutor instead of teaching in a classroom.

The parks and Nile paths that get you close to the water and away from traffic cost a small fee. My Egyptian friend, who could afford it, likes it. Men who harass her are not there. The people who live on the streets are also not in these spaces. More comfort and space for those with Egyptian Pounds in their pockets. For us the cost was minuscule: 40 cents. Children have to pay too, so a mom with three children would pay $1.60. If your wages are $190 a month, (average rate) and you have children, going to the park is a luxury.

We paid the price and went with our friend to Al Horreya (Freedom) Garden a small park filled with an international collection of statues of national heroes, most donated by their respective nations. The majority were from Latin America. We laid down a blanket near Jose Marti and across from a large group of Muslim women and girls in all manner of dress, from full burkas to no hair covering. They were having a great time. They gave us some nuts, we gave them chocolates. When we got put to leave they gave us lollipops.

One day, we visited the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo. It is situated in a complex that also includes the Opera House. There was no cost to get in, but a major checkpoint with several guards. There were large plazas and trees in the complex. Being able to walk unimpeded was amazing. Even the air was clearer in this space, big enough to make a difference to the human lungs gasping for oxygen, through Cairo smog. It would have been wonderful, except we were the only people there! The only other humans we saw at 10:30 AM were people cleaning, women with hijabs working barefoot with pants rolled up as they sprayed the plaza down, keeping this place with nobody in it pristinely clean. We stayed until 1 pm, and there were still few people there. I don’t know why.

The Museum of Modern Art was gorgeous, and the entry fee was 40 cents. It provided expressions and critiques of life in Egypt in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, not available in the history museums. The same was true of Reina Sophia, the one place in Madrid where we learned about how people lived under Franco. Art speaks volumes.

Like most big cities, Cairo is divided geographically. There is Old Cairo, where tourists go to see ancient walls, the first Coptic Christian church, and a Jewish synagogue, on the site where it is believed Moses was left in a basket. We visited and admired the ancient painting of Nile life in the Coptic Museum, and sat for a long while in the Synagogue praying for a real just peace in Palestine.

There is New Cairo, with gleaming malls, international conference centers, soccer fields, and modern housing. One day, we hired a driver to take us to the convention center to attend the International Book Fair in New Cairo. There were several thousand people there, including many children. People were excited and happy to be there.  Books were in Arabic and English. Titles spanned the political spectrum. class Children, looking as beautiful as all kids do, sang earnest songs about Egypt on a central stage. Syrian immigrants sold food at designated booths.

And there is Cairo where most people live, where pollution and sand create dust that covers buildings and lungs and beautiful pyramids of strawberries and bananas, sold next to hi-rises, many crumbling, and humans, dogs, horses, and the occasional cow or goat, where you can buy every kind of chip ever processed from potatoes and stuffed in an aluminum bag, at convenience stores that sell imported processed foods that can not ever spoil in Egyptian heat.

As we wandered, we could see the iron hand of El Sisi in the military checkpoints at parks, tourist sights and embassies, and also the government neglect in impoverished Egyptians, crumbling infrastructure,  jobs that lacked purpose, (pushing trash from one side of a bridge to the other), the lack of a garbage system, or traffic rules in this city of ten million.El Sisi is not the only one responsible for Egyptian inequities. There are invisible international entities that tie his hands, neo-liberal pressures in the form of IMF loans that have been rewarding privatization and removing safety nets since the early 1990s. US military aid and USAID—a constant since the Camp David Peace Accord of 1979—comes with strings attached that reward maintaining US interests in the Middle East, at the expense of equity and sustainability in Egypt.

Days before the transfer of power from Biden to Trump, I read that the US withdrew 95 million in US military aid to Egypt and sent it to Lebanon. The article quoted some official saying Egypt’s human rights record was concerning. It reminded me of that moment in the movie Casa Blanca when the officer is “shocked, shocked, to find there is gambling” in Rick’s café. For a decade—under Obama, Trump, and Biden—US military aid supported El Sisi’s military dictatorship at the rate of 1.3 billion a year.

A few days later, new President Trump cancelled all USAID to nations around the world EXCEPT, Israel and Egypt and announced that he expected Egypt to accept the people of Gaza, inferring that he would like to turn that lovely piece of waterfront, real estate into a region of resorts. El Sisi made it clear that wouldn’t happen. When the two autocrats met again a week later the Palestinian forced march was not mentioned. Trump invited El Sisi to the White House and El Sisi invited Trump to attend the grand opening the the Grand Egyptian Museum.

Misadventures and the Kindness of Strangers in Alexandria

I lost my phone on the train from Cairo to Alexandria—left it on the seat—so I lost photos of that trip, which is maybe good. Like many areas where rails ride in the US, we saw the backside.  It is hard to know how to respectfully document people living in rural Egypt in towns with roads made of dust and garbage, amongst rows of beautiful green cabbages, and fields with flocks of birds following farmers sowing seeds.

In Alexandria, we had a misadventure, taking a taxi in the wrong direction, dropping us off at a coffee shop attached to the Alexandria library. Operating with one dying phone and a Google map that told us to continue in the wrong direction, it looked like a walkable two miles. We were thrilled to walk along the water and see what public access to nature does to humans. Hundreds of people, young and old, were taking selfies and family portraits by the sea. Booths sold corn and chestnuts. People seemed happy. 

We walked inland and entered a neighborhood with many crumbling buildings. It is hard to describe. I can tell you that in the evening, when I was looking at pictures of people returning to their destroyed houses in Gaza, following the six-week ceasefire, I thought, “I saw something like this today.”The sun set, and we were on a street corner, thinking we were outside our place, but unable to find it, stuck with a dying phone. I saw a string of colored lights at the end of the block and suggested we go there. Maybe someone can help us. In a corner coffee shop–one table inside, one table outside, and a few extra chairs— a man insisted we sit down, take off our backpacks, have some tea, and plug in our phones. We were there for an hour, relying on his hospitality, taking up half his chairs. We were able to contact the host.  We were far away from our apartment. They called a ride for us. It was another two hours before we arrived, after a ride across Alexandria that made Cairo traffic seem sane.

We had a list of tourist sites to visit in Alexandria. We went to none of them, just rested and recovered in a twelfth-floor apartment in a middle-class neighborhood where all the shops sold ice cream and coffee, and the beach across the street was private. We walked to a posh restaurant area that jutted into the Mediterranean Sea and watched.  We read about the Ceasefire in Gaza, looked east, and imagined the World Food Program trucks sitting on the Egyptian border at Rafah for months, entering and feeding the people.

 

Ancient Egypt.

We did take in some of the tourist sites in Cairo. The Egypt Museum, the brand new billion-dollar Grand Egyptian Museum, and a tour of the pyramids. All of them were awesome.   We almost did not go to the GEM because I thought, couldn’t the billion dollars be better spent? But the money is international, the Egyptians pay a fraction of what visitors pay, and it will be there for generations to treasure. The building is a space to get in miles and the exhibits made me gasp.

So did the pyramids. Our tour guide told us of the recent revelation that those who built the pyramids were not slaves, but well-paid workers engaged in a national project. In fact, the pyramid project required a sense of community and social cooperation that led to other benefits and nation-building. He emphasized the science that went into hauling, designing, and building the pyramids, adding, Today if you want to get an education in the sciences in Egypt, you have to leave the country.

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Egypt is a good place to go to consider the problems and possibilities of humanity.

1. If the ancient Egyptians did not enslave the people who built the pyramids, but instead treated them as elite workers building for the common good, what kinds of people-centered governments are possible today? What do we want from the government? When I asked friends on social media this question, people focused on representation. While I was in Egypt, I wanted governments to provide green spaces for the masses, a good garbage system,  dignified wages, mass transit, and solidarity with neighbors. Freedom to speak my mind moved into second place. Either way, El Sisi fails,  as does the current president of the United States. 
2. Why are people like Maloni, Trump, and El Sisi in power? El Sisi won the last election by a landslide. Sure, he jails and suppresses his opposition. But people also like him. My friend, who voted for him, tells me that women like him because he appeals to their emotions. “I need you,” He says. “Egypt needs you.” More mysterious: how did  Donald Trump win a second election?
3. What options do nations under the thumb of the IMF have? We are on our way to Sri Lanka, whose new president won the last election with a large majority. He speaks like a radical and promises redistributive reforms. But he, too, must negotiate with the IMF to keep his nation afloat. The task for those of us from the Global North is to get the international financial entities our governments control off the backs of the Global South. 
4. Why is xenophobia such an international phenomenon right now? In Egypt, like the United States, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Greece, and Turkey, blaming immigrants for social ills is a powerful tool for autocrats seeking popular support. And El Sisi in Egypt is no exception. In early 2025, it was Syrian refugees who paid the price.