Inside Egypt Quotes

“The only chance of a rupture is if Mubarak decides to push Gamal toward the presidency despite objections put forward by the military. The reason the military may object is that Gamal, unlike Nasser, Al-Sadat, and Mubarak himself, is not from within their own military ranks. Some point to the possibility of a military coup in such circumstances.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“every fork in the road Nasser went left, Al-Sadat went right, and Mubarak says, "Don't move.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“It was no coincidence that the most spectacular and tragic terrorist attack carried out in the country's recent history occurred in the West Bank of Luxor at Hatshepsut Temple. In 1997, dozens of Egyptians and tourists were massacred at the site.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“Mansour earned the nickname "Al-Turbiny," from the air-conditioned express trains linking Cairo with Egypt's second city Alexandria, whose roofs were the favored location for his crimes. Police said he would to rape, torture, and chop up his victims on carriage roofs before tossing them on to the trackside, dead or barely alive.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“But if Nasser's gift to the Egyptians was their sense of pride, Mubarak's curse is to have created a cultural climate where the only rewarded character traits are shameless opportunism and lack of dignity.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“Tribal custom dictates that women's honor must be protected at all costs, and in the absence of other opportunities for sex before marriage homosexuality is seen as an acceptable trade-off. The golden rule, though, is that it should not be discussed or conducted in ways that might draw attention, and thus create a scandal, and that a boy should be careful not to get a reputation for enjoying the passive role, for if he does he will be considered a slut, lose his own honor and suffer the consequences of his friends thinking they have the right to screw him whenever they get the urge.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“If single Western women travelers have a hard time in Luxor, it is as nothing as compared to what single Western men have to suffer.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“But Egyptian men would do well to learn that they should treat others as they would be treated themselves. For many of them, too, are also steeped in ignorance when it comes to the question of how older Western women normally behave, based on generalizations in light of the relatively small number who are on the lookout for a bit of "touchy, feely.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“But the wider ramifications only begin there: Even Western men who accompany their Western wives to Egypt can find themselves fuming at the unwanted attention directed her way, and not just in Luxor. Egyptians from all over the country, after all, travel to work in the tourist resorts, and the reputation of older foreign females has hit rock bottom throughout the country. Altercations are commonplace. Sometimes, the consequences can be deadly.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“Luxor has long had a reputation as the Sin City of Egypt. Archaeologists from Johns Hopkins University, presently working in the local Temple of Mut, have shown how sex and booze were key aspects of rites carried out by the locals to appease the pharaonic-era gods.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“Luxor, Egypt's best known and historically most popular tourist resort. In recent years, the city has also been transformed into the male prostitution capital of the Middle East.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“An investigative report by the BBC in July 2007 found that thousands of young Egyptian men try to enter Europe illegally every year. Sometimes they set sail from the Egyptian coast aboard fishing boats run by people smugglers. Mostly, though, they undertake the perilous crossing to Italy from neighboring Libya, a country they do not need a visa to visit.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“Of course, it's easy to be overly optimistic when it comes to Egyptian reform. The country has a history of false promises and backtracking dating to the 1970s.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“corruption in Egypt is giant, amorphous, and finally ungraspable.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“The FfP uses twelve indicators to measure state failure, and Egypt scored a stellar nine out of ten in criminalization or delegitimization of the state, understood as "massive and endemic corruption or profiteering by ruling elites, resistance of ruling elites to transparency, accountability and political representation, widespread loss of popular confidence in state institutions, and processes and growth of crime syndicates linked to ruling elites." It rated 8.5 out of ten in "suspension or arbitrary application of the rule of law and widespread violation of human rights." And it rated a relatively modest 8.3 in the "rise of factionalized elites" or the "fragmentation of elites and state institutions along group lines," and the use of "nationalistic political rhetoric by ruling elites.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“This kind of thing is happening here in Al-Ahram all the time. It's very difficult to keep your hands clean. There are journalists in this building who have done just that. I know it for a fact. They get apartments. Not exactly as gifts, of course. But take that apartment for half a million: The journalist will 'buy' it for one hundred thousand, then sell it for the market price and make a huge profit.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“After the attack, it was again the image of the country, rather than the well-being of those who had been caught up in the violence, that seemed to take precedence. Knowing that a picture speaks a thousand words, the government forces, according to eyewitnesses widely quoted at the time, put most of their effort into finding and confiscating camcorders and cameras from everyone in the vicinity, lest an image of one of the acts of butchery carried out by the terrorists—they shot the tourists and then hacked them to pieces—found its way to a Western media outlet, and thus perhaps tarnish Egypt's carefully cultivated image abroad once and for all. Hundreds of tourists had been at the site during the attack. Almost all of them presumably had cameras. But not a single image of the atrocity has since become available, even on the Web.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“All this may seem trivial. But in 1997 such corruption at the bottom end of the tourism industry helped to allow a band of heavily armed jihadists to breeze their way through numerous police and army checkpoints leading to the Hatshepsut Temple, near Luxor. There they proceeded to massacre dozens of tourists and Egyptians before escaping into the desert unhindered. Before the attack, the priority of many local soldiers and cops had been to extract bribes from locals working with tour groups, smoke cigarettes, and sleep away the long hot summer afternoons in the backs of their vans.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“lingering belief in this male-chauvinist society that women who are raped somehow were asking for it, and the inapproachability becomes absolute. Women who nevertheless have braved the intimidation at the all-male police stations have said the experience merely added insult to injury. They report that the first reaction of a thug they encounter, who calls himself an officer, is a snide remark along the lines of whether she would perhaps like to "meet up" later that evening at a fast-food restaurant to discuss the issue further. Her "honor" no longer intact, she is to blame; and so she is now considered fair game.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“The government must rethink its strategy toward the Bedouin, or else those in the area who are armed will turn it into the war that Cairo seems to be pushing for.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“To Egypt's eternal shame—this is, after all, a country that makes it a crime to besmirch its image abroad—nearly the only help is coming from overseas. Worse, some of it comes from the U.N. World Food Program, more often associated with the victims of famine in North Korea and the displaced of sub-Saharan Africa than with booming tourist regions.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“But in northern Sinai, there is hardly any tourism. Tourist villages built by the Egyptian government along the northern coast are effectively ghost towns, and the small Al-Arish industrial zone and the airport are not enough to support the Bedouin families. Promises of new projects and financial aid for housing or employment have, as the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz put it in an October 2007 article, "turned into a joke." As ever in Egypt, there were grand plans and feasibility studies, but in reality no large factories have been built since 2001, and the total number of people employed in the factories that already exist is reported to be less than five thousand.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“in retrospect Nasser's pan-Arabism seems to have given Arabs little to celebrate, it is certain nothing good can come from the Arab world as long as the fanatical Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia are in control. For Egypt, the results of the spread of Wahhabism are already evident. As we have seen, the condemnation by a minority of Wahhabi-inspired zealots of popular moulids as un-Islamic is one. The singling out for discrimination and violence of Egypt's Christian minority, also damned as infidels by Wahhabi doctrine, is another.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“But in 1954 the organization was banned, then almost annihilated by Nasser. He claimed they tried to assassinate him while he delivered a public speech in October that year in Alexandria, the shots heard live on Egyptian radio. The Brothers denied any involvement in the events of that day. Nasser, it should be noted, was not beyond conjuring up such spectacular crises to shore up his domestic support—having likely arranged, for instance, the bombing of the landmark coffee shop Groppi's in the heart of downtown Cairo in a bid to create instability at the height of his power struggle with the first figurehead leader of the republic.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“Given this appalling social climate, the new Library of Alexandria, built at a cost of $230 million in an attempt to revive its fabled ancient predecessor (and resembling nothing so much as a giant satellite dish), has unsurprisingly failed to ignite a renaissance of scholarly acumen.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“Either there will be a coup d'état, or we will have Muslim extremism.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“The only clear result is the absolute and total deterioration of our architectural landscape: from the landmarks and way people live to maintenance and appreciation. Would you want to spend money on maintaining a building if you have an up-market villa that will bring in less than $100 a month in rent—the ceiling that was set in the 1950s and 1960s and is still enforced today? Take the Sidki building here in Zamalek, which has about forty apartments. Because of the rent controls, it brings in less than $200 a month. Can you seriously expect the owners to take proper care of it?”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“Nasser's coup got rid of everything that was good in Egypt, and slowly replaced everything that was bad with something much worse.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“After that fateful day of July 23, 1952, the "Paris Along the Nile," as Cairo was lovingly renamed by the foreigners who flocked to the city and helped to design, build, and run it during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was cast into the proverbial dustbin of history. Quarrels rather than friendships between Egyptians and foreigners became the order of the day. Indeed, the foreigners' property was confiscated. Along with the aristocracy itself, they eventually either chose to leave or, after the 1956 Suez War, were forced to flee. Symbolic of Nasser's rank xenophobia was his expulsion of half of Egypt's Jews, endlessly linked in the regime propaganda machine with the recently created state of Israel. This was one of a number of witch hunts Nasser used (another targeting the Muslim Brotherhood) to deflect attention from his own shortcomings, especially in the area of foreign policy.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs

“Back in Egypt, Nasser, like a petty village leader, promoted his cronies according to their personal loyalty rather than on their merits. Abdel Hakim Amer is the most infamous example. Made Egypt's chief of staff and subsequently Nasser's first vice president, Amer proved incompetent beyond measure. Nasser got rid of him only after his military advice, based on fanciful speculation and an eternal eagerness to please his old friend rather than risk offending him by bringing home ugly truths, led Egypt to defeat in 1967.”
― John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs