Chaos, Order, 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,” The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human p 36.

 

Echoes of the 2011 Revolution 

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.

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

The euphoria we all had watching an entrenched Egyptian dictator fall in 2011 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 2014, Abdel Fattah El Sisi 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 and their military cronies profited. Safety nets frayed. People got hungrier.

Outside of pyramids, museums, and Nile Cruises, there were few tourists in Egypt, and very few from the US in January 2025. People on the streets of Cairo greeted us: ‘Welcome to Egypt!’ They would try to guess where we were from: “Russia? The UK?” 

We 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. We had been traveling for fourteen months, but we were not ready for Cairo.

Exhausted and amazed to be alive, we fell into a heap after every venture. We circumscribed our walking and took rideshares.  It was the chaos and the obstacle course that intimidated us. We were never afraid of people.  We relied on strangers, and they were there for us. 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 used to express rage like in the US. They are for communication, announcing: I’m moving into your lane,or I can give you 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, did not this month. Subsidies—in place for decades—on basic foods like bread, and monthly stipends available to all Egyptians (something we can’t imagine in the US) kept getting smaller. Education was de facto privatized. People with money hired tutors for their teenagers to help them pass rote exams.  College professors made so little that they also tutored to make ends meet.

The parks and Nile paths that get you close to the water and away from traffic cost a fee. For my female Egyptian friends, it was a worthwhile luxury. Men who harass them on the street were not there. Homeless people were not in these spaces.

For us, the costs were minuscule: 40 cents. But a mom with three children who wants to take her kids to the park would pay $1.60. If her wages are $190 a month (average rate), a family day at the park would be unaffordable.

We paid the price and went with our friend to Al Horreya (Freedom) Garden, a small park with an international collection of statues, most donated by their respective nations. The majority were from Latin America. We put down a blanket by the statue of Jose Marti, not far from a group of women and girls, some in full burqas, others without hijabs. They gave us some nuts. We gave them chocolates.

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, but a major checkpoint with several guards. Inside the complex were large plazas and trees. Being able to walk unimpeded was amazing. Even the air was clearer in this space.  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 worked barefoot, pants rolled up, spraying down the walkways. We stayed until 1 pm, and there were still only a few people there.

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. 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.  Pyramids of strawberries and bananas are sold next to crumbling high-rises. Humans, dogs, horses, and the occasional cow or goat share sidewalks. Convenience stores are aplenty, and you can buy every kind of potato chip or other imported processed foods that won’t 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, which would not be so jarring if not juxtaposed against the neglect of basic infrastructure, the destitution, and the people engaged in jobs that lacked purpose (pushing trash from one side of a bridge to the other).

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 rewarded privatization since the early 1990s. US military and economic aid —a constant since the Camp David Peace Accord of 1979—came 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 an official saying Egypt’s human rights record was concerning. It reminded me of that moment in the movie Casablanca 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, President Trump cancelled all USAID to nations around the world EXCEPT Israel and Egypt and announced that Egypt must open its borders to the people of Gaza. Trump wanted an empty Gaza, so that he and his son-in-law could turn Palestine into his own lovely piece of real estate. El Sisi made it clear Egypt would not become home for the people of Gaza. When the two autocrats met again a week later, Trump’s earlier demand was not mentioned. Trump invited El Sisi to the White House, and El Sisi invited Trump to attend the grand opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum.

We did take in some of the tourist sites in Cairo. The Museum of Muslim Art is stunning. I was enthralled by the tile art. A prohibition of depictions of deities means the designs in mosques and religious works focus on everyday subjects.

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 sheer size of the building and many of the artifacts made me gasp.

So did the pyramids. Our tour guide told us of a 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.

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 probably good. Like many areas that trains pass 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 planting 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 that 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. I saw a string of colored lights at the end of the block and suggested we go there. Maybe someone could 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. Driving across Alexandria 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.  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.

 

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Egypt is a good place to consider the pyramidic problems and possibilities facing humanity. Like: 

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?  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.          

Why are people like Trump and El Sisi in power? How did  Donald Trump win a second time? 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.”

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.

What options do nations under the thumb of the IMF have? We were on our way to Sri Lanka, whose new president won the last election with a large majority. He spoke like a radical and promised 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.

 

This essay about a visit to Egypt in January 2025 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse, David, and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.