Talaat Harb Street

Egypt’s modern history is a familiar tale. First came colonization, then independence. Add in a few decades of straddling the fence between the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War while milking both sides for arms and aid. Finally, in the 1970s: trade liberalization and American neocolonization. Full circle. Pax Britannia to Pax Americana. Score one more for the Free World.

The man with the plan was Anwar Sadat, who took over the presidency in the late 60s with two goals. One. He offered Israel peace in exchange for the return of the Sinai, becoming the first Arab leader to recognize the Jewish state. For this, he got the Nobel Prize- and much later, a bullet. Two. He steered the ship of state right into Washington’s arms. Maybe he looked at Egypt’s Kafkaesque socialist system and saw the writing on the wall. Maybe he just wanted to take his fetish for American cars and music one step further. Regardless, Sadat’s “Open Door Policy” flung the gates wide open and lost the key.

The public sector shrank. Foreign corporations bustled noisily in. The American government flooded the economy with aid, and the American arms industry flooded the army with guns. The state retreated from fostering domestic industries, and Egyptian consumers became dependent on Western imports. On top of that, Sadat continued the decades-long trend of ignoring traditional Islamic institutions and vitality of the Arabic language- he was known to deliberately speak in butchered English at press conference just to avoid the use of Arabic.

It was a whole new world. Egypt was closed for prayer five times a day, and open for business the rest of the time.

And now, Egypt sits in limbo between its millennia-old history- the heritage of the Pharaohs, the moral code of Islam, the legacy of the Muslim dynasties that ended with the Ottomans- and the demands and allure of the free market and America’s brand-name pop culture.

We used to live in a hostel overlooking Talaat Harb Street. It’s Cairo’s main shopping strip, the centre of its nightlife, and the place to go to see Westernization flash its boobs at Islam’s conservative tradition. Talaat Harb is the polar opposite of Soliman Gohar. Every facet of life switches from local to global- and by “global”, I mean “Western”. I mean: The Gap, MTV, McDonalds, Starbucks, Motorola, and their identical local equivalents.

Throngs of teenage insomniacs in flashy European threads crowd the sidewalks, sandwiched between lighted storefronts, roadside vendors, and the long, snaking procession of honking cars. Girls ogle at the plastic bimbos preening the latest fashions from behind glass windows. Guys rifle through packages containing the latest camera, cellphone, and camera/cellphone models.

Stores filled with Converse sneakers or polished leather boots compete for business, flanked by European-style cafes with frothy lattes and autumn-colored furniture ripped from the pages of an Ikea catalogue. Across the street from one of the area’s three McDonald’s is the cinema. Its most popular offering: The Kingdom, starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner. And blared from the staticky loudspeakers of a dozen shops are bouncy Arab pop tunes that sound like an unholy union between techno and the reed pipes of snake-charmers.

Kieran didn’t want to live on Talaat Harb, where he couldn’t go five minutes without someone asking for his business or his charity- in English. “I like to keep away from a certain style of traveling,” he scoffed airily one night over dinner. He was referring to his disapproval for beaten-track travel, where you waste money at shopping malls, go on guided tours to famous tourist-traps, and live only amongst fellow foreigners in Westernized ghettos. That’s not “real” culture. That’s not “Egypt”.

Well, Talaat Harb IS Egypt. It’s Egypt run over by the neon-green freight train of globalization. It’s Cairo’s rowdy, gritty imitation of Broadway or Rodeo Drive; a buffet of Western styles, slang, technology, and attitudes that Egyptian youth wholeheartedly tuck into. It’s a scene I love to hate- watching brown kids in Cairo, yellow kids in Bangkok, and white kids in Rome and Vancouver all consume the same culture cooked up in the boardrooms of American corporations.

The superficial gloss of Talaat Harb hides a lot of uncomfortable realities. Egypt, like most former colonies with deep cultural roots, has spent its modern history thoroughly ignoring them. Successive generations of Western educated elites have spent this century experimenting with the foreign-imposed systems of “democracy”, “communism”, “socialism”, and “free trade”- at the cost of developing a viable “Egyptian” alternative that would update Arabic and Islamic culture and commerce for the modern age.

This sententious argument, which I plagiarized straight off the pages of a textbook on “postcolonial studies” – wait, was it neocolonial studies? – makes one good point: when Western culture was imported along with Western goods, it steamrolled a local culture that hadn’t been revised since the Ottoman Empire. Egypt’s yuppies have learned to see Islam and Arabic culture, while worthy of respect, as archaic- the way you politely greet your great-grandfather and then ignore him uncomfortably for the rest of the family dinner. Meanwhile, they’ve embraced the cultural trappings of the West because they’ve learned to associate it with the financial success and upward mobility that comes with the free market.

Add this to a pair of sobering facts. One. A third of Egypt’s population is under the age of 15, and its population grows by over a million every year. Two. The economy is propped up by huge influxes of American foreign aid. This means that Egypt is breeding more people than its domestic economy can actually support. Without the twin crutches of US aid and the ability of hordes of Egyptians to go abroad as cheap migrant labor, Egypt’s economy might be a ticking time bomb. Some say it already is.

The global market is a fickle god, and despite His diminished presence on the show, Egypt’s other, older god hasn’t quite left the stage. If the economy tanked, I wonder if Egyptian youths’ disillusionment with Western commerce would be accompanied by a backlash against Western culture- and a return to Islam as a vehicle for their frustrations.

This is not a doomsday pronouncement, but a simple observation. The West ignores the concerns and motivations of Arab youth at its peril. There are over a half billion Arabs, and at the forefront are Egypt’s 70 million. Half of them are our age and younger- a trend repeated across the length and breadth of the Thirdworlddevelopingworldglobalsouth.

I think the old white men in Washington and New York had better start asking themselves what their young brown counterparts on Talaat Harb think of their job performances. In the meantime, Kieran and I might try to figure that out on their behalf.

So maybe Talaat Harb ain’t the Pyramids. So it ain’t Al-Azhar mosque, with its marble courtyards and intricate stonework. It ain’t the temples of Luxor, or the oceanfront promenades of Alexandria, or the oases of the Libyan desert, or the fishing villages of the Nile. But that was Egypt then. This is Egypt now.