How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

As Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian Nobel Peace Prize winner, said after the January uprising, his country “is on the list of failed states,”10 and the Arab world is “a collection of failed states who add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education.”11 Even that glum assessment, though, does not capture the intractability of Egypt’s backwardness. According to a World Health Organization study, 97 percent of Egypt’s married women have suffered genital mutilation, and 70 percent stated their intention to arrange the similar mutilation of their daughters, even though the Egyptian government outlawed the practice in 2007.12 It is not simply that more than 40 percent of Egyptians are functionally illiterate, or that half the population lives on $2 a day or less. Most of the country is immured in a traditional society so rigid and remote from the modern world that modern political structures are as alien to it as quantum physics. Even Islamists have to eat. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, beholden to foreign providers for nearly half its total food consumption. Food comprises almost half the country’s consumer price index, and much more than half of spending for the poorer half of the country. This will get worse, not better.