Any narrative of Egyptian history over the past few decades of necessity has a tentative character. Much of the documentation available for understanding previous eras is missing; the long-term effects of official policies on socio-economic trends in many cases are not yet clear; the perspective afforded by the passage of time is lacking. As a result, this chapter focuses mainly on what can be termed the public history of Egypt during the presidencies of Anwar al-Sadat (1970–81) and Husni Mubarak (1981–). The concluding section attempts to highlight some of the most important features of the Egyptian scene at the close of the twentieth century, and to identify some of the major issues facing the country as it enters the sixth millennium of its long history as a distinct society and polity.

Upon Nasser’s death in September 1970, Vice-President Anwar al-Sadat ascended to the presidency of Egypt. A Free Officer and member of the RCC in the early years of the revolution, Sadat had held various high positions under Nasser prior to his appointment as Vice-President in December 1969. His assumption of the presidency was ratified by popular referendum in October 1970.

Sadat’s position as president was precarious in the early 1970s. With a prior reputation for obsequiousness ("Nasser’s poodle" to some uncharitable critics), and unaffiliated with the clusters of apparatchiks based in the security services and the Arab Socialist Union which had emerged in the 1960s, Sadat was widely assumed to be a transitional figure. In reality, he proved to be a more skilled political operator than many anticipated. Meetings with officers in which he pledged greater support and autonomy for the military consolidated his base of support in the army; the announcement of plans to return some sequestered property to its previous owners signalled his intention to pursue a less socialist path of development to the Egyptian bourgeoisie. For many Egyptians alienated by the radicalism and police-state techniques of the 1960s, Sadat represented a better alternative than the clique of socialist bureaucrats led by his rival ‘Ali Sabri and centered in the ASU. When this cohort challenged his authority over issues of foreign policy in the spring of 1971, Sadat publicly denounced the "centers of power" maneuvering against him, dismissed ‘Ali Sabri and his associates from their official positions, and used the claim of an ASU-based plot to replace him as an excuse to have his major rivals arrested and to begin to dismantle their ASU fiefdom. In the later rhetoric of the Sadat years this crisis of April–May 1971 was elevated into a "Corrective Revolution" nearly on a par with the military’s assumption of power in July 1952.

The transcendent political issue facing Egypt and Sadat in the early 1970s was the ongoing state of war with Israel. The ambiguous state of "no war – no peace" into which the Egyptian–Israeli confrontation had settled by the early 1970s produced great frustration among Egyptians. Student demonstrations denouncing government immobility against Israel erupted in early 1972; in April 1972 leading political figures of the Nasser years called on the government to reconsider Egypt’s dependence on the Soviet Union and its alienation from the West; further student demonstrations occurred in January 1973.

Sadat responded to this ferment with dramatic international moves. Civilian and military resentment over the Soviet presence in Egypt was in part assuaged in July 1972 when, in the first example of the electric-shock diplomacy for which he was to become famous, Sadat abruptly announced the termination of the Soviet military mission and the ousting of Russian military advisors from Egypt. A more startling initiative came a year later. On October 6, 1973 Egypt and Syria mounted coordinated military assaults into the Sinai Peninsula and in the Golan Heights. The military outcome of the three-week war which raged for most of October 1973 was at best ambiguous: initial Egyptian and Syrian advances in Sinai and on the Golan were followed by later Israeli counterattacks which took additional territory from Egypt and Syria before the United States and the Soviet Union, fearing the potential of Middle East war for generating a larger superpower confrontation, imposed a cease-fire in late October. Nonetheless, initial Arab successes in penetrating formidable Israeli defenses, the prolonged fighting which ensued, and the economic and political effects of the war enabled the governments of both Egypt and Syria to present the war of October 1973 as an Arab victory. These effects included a huge increase in the price of oil, augmenting Arab financial power, and subsequent international efforts to arrange peace between Israel and the Arab states on the basis of Israeli withdrawal from territories it had occupied in 1967. In Egypt the date of Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal into Sinai, October 6, 1973, became a national holiday; Sadat now became "the Hero of the Crossing."

The war of October 1973 brought Sadat out from under Nasser’s shadow. His major policies and the mark he put upon Egypt date from 1973 onwards. The overall direction of his initiatives is indicated in a joke circulating in Egypt in the 1970s. Upon Nasser’s death Sadat acquired the various perks of office including the presidential limousine. When driving down the highway one day, the new president and his driver came to a fork in the road; the driver inquired whether to turn to the right (i.e. in a conservative direction) or to the left (i.e. towards more radical policies). Sadat’s response indicates both his initial verbal fidelity to the revolutionary legacy he had inherited from Nasser, but also his eventual divergence from the course Nasser had set for Egypt: "signal left and turn right."

The most sweeping shift away from Nasserism came in foreign policy. Egypt’s international position was transformed over the course of the 1970s. The war of October 1973 marked the beginning of an Egyptian-Israeli peace process. The convoluted cease-fire line resulting from the war – Egyptian forces holding positions on the east bank of the Suez Canal while Israeli forces occupied a bulge on the west bank – was inherently unstable. It offered a unique opportunity for outside mediation between the parties, a role which was quickly assumed by the United States. Between late 1973 and late 1975 American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger engaged in intensive shuttle diplomacy between Egypt and Israel, brokering two successive agreements for the gradual disengagement of Egyptian and Israeli military forces and in the process inaugurating Egyptian-Israeli negotiations towards peace. By 1975 Egypt had regained western Sinai, allowing it to reopen the Suez Canal to shipping. In turn Israel obtained a pledge that Egypt would not resort to force to resolve their differences.

The peace process stalled from 1975 to 1977. It resumed with a vengeance in late 1977 when Sadat, frustrated by recent lack of movement, made a bold declaration of his willingness to go to Israel for face-to-face negotiations towards peace. After decades of only indirect or clandestine contact between Egypt and Israel, Sadat’s dramatic trip to Jerusalem in November 1977 began direct Egyptian-Israeli peace talks. These too were bogged down by mid 1978, but were salvaged by American President Jimmy Carter’s inviting Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachen Begin to Camp David for intensive negotiations. Two agreements were concluded at Camp David in September 1978. One, outlining a process for movement towards Palestinian autonomy on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, never came to fruition. The other, a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli agreement for Egyptian peace with, and recognition of, Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, did. Some final details remained even after Camp David; only in Washington in March 1979 was the formal peace treaty between Egypt and Israel signed. Formal diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel were opened in February 1980. Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai in April 1982. After thirty years of war, Egypt had made peace with Israel; after fifteen years of Israeli occupation, it had regained the Sinai Peninsula.

Parallel to the peace process of the 1970s came a redefinition of Egypt’s relationship with the superpowers. Even before the 1973 war, the dismissal of Soviet advisors in 1972 indicated Sadat’s willingness to move away from dependence on the USSR. Soviet military aid to Egypt continued through the 1973 war but shrunk thereafter. In 1976 Egypt unilaterally abrogated its Treaty of Friendship with the USSR, thereby officially terminating its political orientation towards the Soviet Union.

As Egypt turned away from the east, it looked to the west. Diplomatic relations with the United States, severed in June 1967, were restored in November 1973. The central role played by the United States in the Egyptian-Israeli peace process after 1973 was accompanied by steadily improving US-Egyptian bilateral relations, the most substantial aspect of which for Egypt was American economic and military aid. Egypt received over three billion dollars in US aid between 1974 and 1979. Annexes to the Camp David accords of 1978 provided for 1.5 billion dollars annually in US aid for Egypt, a sum which grew to over two billion dollars in the 1980s.

Possessing a strong sense of identification with Egypt as a distinct and separate historical entity, Anwar al-Sadat did not share Nasser’s commitment to Arab nationalism. Sadat also operated in a different political context, one in which the pan-Arabist enthusiasms of the 1950s and 1960s were giving way to recognition of the reality of the existing regional state structure and of the necessity to work with, rather than against, other Arab regimes. A shifting orientation towards the Arab world was evident as early as 1971, when a new Egyptian Constitution formally changed the country’s name from "the United Arab Republic" to "the Arab Republic of Egypt." Egypt was back on the international map.

Through the mid 1970s "cooperation" with other Arab regimes – with Syria in the October war; with the Sudan, where Egyptian assistance in 1971 and 1976 propped up a friendly military regime and was repaid by the conclusion of a joint defense agreement; with the newly-affluent oil states of the Gulf in economic matters – replaced the drive for Arab unity of the Nasser years. Although he initially attempted to achieve a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement which would address Palestinian as well as Egyptian grievances, at Camp David Sadat in effect broke Arab ranks and concluded a separate peace agreement with Israel. Egypt paid a heavy regional price for going it alone: the suspension of much Arab aid, the severance of diplomatic relations with most Arab states, and expulsion from the Arab League as well as the larger Organization of the Islamic Conference. Sadat personally paid an even heavier price. Peace with Israel was a central grievance prompting a small band of Islamists to assassinate Egypt’s president on October 6, 1981.

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Sadat’s initiatives in regard to Egypt’s internal politics were not as as definitive as the international volte-face which he carried out in the 1970s. The "Corrective Revolution" of 1971 began a process of moving away from the authoritarianism and abuses of power which had become more pronounced over the Nasser era. Many of those jailed for political reasons in the 1960s were released from prison in the early 1970s. Surveillance and harassment by the security services decreased. A process of desequestration extended over the decade, as new laws passed by the National Assembly gradually returned some sequestered property to its previous owners or provided for the payment of compensation. The primary fiefdom of the later Nasser years, the Arab Socialist Union, was subjected to public criticism, gradually stripped of real power, and in 1980 officially shut down when an amendment to the Constitution declared its abolition. The destruction of the institutional structure of Nasserism was accompanied by an intellectual assault on the Nasserist legacy. A wave of "de-Nasserization" struck Egypt in the mid 1970s, as the publication of exposés of the abuses of the Nasser years written by both former officials and victims of the security apparatus became a growth industry in the media.

Presiding over the transition to a more pluralist political order proved to be a more difficult operation than dismantling Nasserism. Egypt did see greater freedom of expression in the 1970s. Press censorship formally ended in 1974. While their continued operation was precarious, opposition journals of both left and right made their appearance from time to time. The scope of allowable criticism of government policies widened in the early and mid 1970s, before contracting from 1977 onward as growing opposition to Sadat’s international initiatives generated a government counterattack against critics of the regime.

The years from 1974 to 1977 were the heyday of political liberalization under Sadat. In 1974 the government permitted the creation of "platforms" advocating different political approaches under the formal umbrella of the still-existent ASU. By 1975 four such groupings – "right," "center," "Nasserist," and "left" – had emerged. In October 1976 the "center" platform, supporting Sadat’s policies and in turn benefiting from state support, won the overwhelming majority of seats in relatively open National Assembly elections. The highpoint of political liberalization came early in 1977, when the government announced its intention to authorize the creation of formal political parties in Egypt.

Several political parties emerged in the next few years. The most important was the pro-regime National Democratic Party (NDP) established in 1978, a broad but shallow coalition led by state officials, professionals, technocrats, and rural notables, most connected in one way or another with the state or profiting from association with it. National in scope and benefiting from state backing, both overt (access to the media and the ability to deliver government patronage at the local level) and covert (intimidation of opposition candidates and outright fraud), the NDP won decisive majorities in every parliamentary election from 1979 to 1995.

Several opposition parties also emerged in the later 1970s. The most important have been the National Progressive Unionist Party (NPUP), consisting of a coalition [Arabic Tajammu‘] of former Nasserists and leftists championing the economic and social approach of the Nasser era; the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), a center-right body advocating populist and somewhat Islamist policies; and the New Wafd Party, a professionally and commercially-based movement echoing the liberal outlook of the pre-1952 era and calling for more extensive political as well as economic liberalization. Lacking the resources and access to patronage of the NDP and subject to periodic government harassment, opposition parties have been little more than gadflies in the more superficially democratic political universe existing in Egypt since the late 1970s. None have won more than a fraction of the seats in parliamentary elections; many fail to reach threshhold required for inclusion in the Assembly; and some have preferred to boycott manifestly rigged elections.

The trend towards political pluralism of 1974–77 was soon reversed. In mid-January 1977 the government’s announcement of its intention to reduce government subsidies for basic consumer goods set off massive rioting in Egyptian cities. Almost immediately thereafter, the pluralist window partially opened earlier began to close. The Parties Law of May 1977 specifying guidelines for the formation of political parties set stringent requirements for the legal recognition of parties. In 1978 government pressure and harassment compelled the New Wafd, arguably the most popular opposition movement, to suspend operations. The parliamentary elections of June 1979, in which the NDP won 330 of 392 seats, are generally regarded to have been more fraudulent than those of 1976.

Criticism of Sadat became more widespread after the conclusion of Egyptian-Israeli peace in early 1979. Sadat in turn responded with increased repression. A Higher Press Council was created in 1980 to enforce a government-approved code of ethics for the press. A "Law of Shame" of the same year, which imposed an open-ended ban on any speech or activity which would "set a bad example" for youth and which specified criminal penalties for the same, in effect amounted to a government hunting license for use against its critics. By now an international politician, the darling of the Western media because of his pro-Western foreign policy, Sadat himself became more short-tempered after 1979 as domestic and Arab criticism of his policies mounted. His response to a question at a press conference of 1981 – "In the old days, I could have had you shot for that" – demonstrated a grimmer persona than the avuncular image he had cultivated in happier years.1 By September 1981, when the government carried out a massive wave of arrests in which over fifteen hundred critics and opponents of the regime from across the political spectrum were incarcerated, Sadat had forfeited much of the legitimacy his earlier efforts at political liberalization had won for him. This is the local context in which to appreciate the apathy and indifference with which the bulk of Egyptians responded to his assassination in October 1981. Nasser’s funeral had been a genuine demonstration of mass grief by millions of Egyptians. In contrast, Sadat’s was a sombre affair attended by numerous foreign dignitaries, but was unaccompanied by any appreciable outpouring of popular emotion.

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Already by the late 1960s the socialist experiment of state-controlled and directed economic growth was experiencing serious difficulties. Economic stagnation due to the flaws of Egypt’s cumbersome and inefficient public sector was unquestionably exacerbated by Egypt’s international situation; loss of Sinai and its oil resources after 1967, the closure of the Suez Canal, continuing and draining conflict with Israel. The global environment of the 1970s was also significantly different from that of the 1950s or 1960s. The Soviet economy was itself experiencing problems and thus less attractive as a model; closer to home the conservative oil states were accumulating gigantic inflows of capital which presumably could be tapped for regional investment if conditions were favorable. Sadat himself – from a reasonably well-off peasant family and with a definite appreciation for the good things of life – lacked Nasser’s burning sense of indignation against privilege. Domestic imperatives, the global context, and his own predelictions, thus led Sadat in the direction of an "opening" of the formally-socialist economy of Egypt: an opening to the previously marginalized private sector, an opening to Western investment and expertise, an opening to Arab oil money.

Egypt’s new economic approach was articulated especially in a body of legislation passed by the National Assembly from 1974 onwards. The basic framework of what now became known as "the Opening" was set down in Law 43 of June 1974 which eliminated many existing restrictions on foreign investment, which authorized joint ventures between local and foreign businesses, and which gave tax breaks and guarantees against future nationalization to foreign investors. Legislation passed over the rest of the decade fleshed out the new economic approach: foreign exchange controls were loosened; Egyptians were allowed to enter partnerships with foreign companies; the private sector was given more scope to conduct business without government interference; and the sale of shares in public sector companies was authorized. Collectively, the laws of the 1970s on the one hand attempted to make Egypt a more hospitable environment for international capital; on the other, they gave the local private sector more freedom domestically and more encouragement to work in collaboration with foreign enterprises.

The impact of Sadat’s new economic approach on Egypt in the 1970s was appreciable. What the Opening did not do should perhaps be noted first. Most importantly, it did not immediately eliminate the massive public sector which had emerged as the dominant component of Egypt’s non-agricultural economy under Nasser. Most of the enterprises which had nationalized before 1970 remained under government ownership. Nor were the endemic institutional problems of the public sector eliminated; with some exceptions, overstaffing, under-utilization of facilities, and cumbersome bureaucratic bottlenecks, continued to hamper productivity. What did change was the character of public sector operations. The General Organizations which had directed public sector enterprises were abolished in 1975, giving individual public sector firms more autonomy. In effect, public sector companies now operated like private ones, their goal being to maximize profits rather than to realize broader social or national goals; the Egyptian state now became one entrepreneur – the biggest – among many. It was to take until the 1990s before the Egyptian government mounted a concerted effort to dismantle the public sector it had created in the 1960s.

Egypt’s private sector did expand somewhat as a result of the Opening. Relaxed regulations drew some foreign capital into collaboration with dynamic private enterprises either begun or reinvigorated as a result of now having more freedom of operation. Joint ventures between foreign investors and public sector firms also acted to shift assets from the public to the private sector due to the Egyptian partner using its existing plant and real estate as its contribution to the combined operation. The private sector on the whole experienced little structural change. The growth which did occur did so largely in traditional industries (textiles, food production), and even more markedly in what economists identify as non-productive areas of economic activity (banking, commerce, real estate, services, tourism). What an Egyptian analyst has termed "‘commercialism’ – whereby money may change hands but little production is carried out" – became "the dominant ‘economic’ activity" spawned by the Opening in the private sector.2

The primary goal of the new approach was of course economic growth and greater prosperity. Egypt did experience an impressive rate of economic growth – five to eight per cent annually, depending on the year – from the mid 1970s through the early 1980s. However, little of this newfound prosperity was the result of the expansion of the country’s productive capacity. Through the 1970s, less foreign investment than its architects had hoped for materialized under the new regime of the Opening. Egyptian economists estimated that only roughly one-tenth of new investment over the second half of the 1970s could be directly traced to the Opening; one source asserts that "by 1980 infitah projects had produced only twenty thousand new jobs."3

The primary cause of Egypt’s post-1973 prosperity was a surge in the receipt of revenues from external sources. In the 1970s Egypt benefited from the return of its oil fields in Sinai, from the exploitation of new fields, and most of all from the explosion of world petroleum prices which occurred over the decade. The Suez Canal was reopened to shipping in 1975, income from tolls growing steadily thereafter. An estimated million and a half Egyptians were working in other Arab countries by 1980, sending or bringing much of their salaries to their families in Egypt. The global expansion of tourism, a late twentieth century growth industry, also worked to Egypt’s benefit especially as the country’s relations with the West and Israel improved. In 1980–81, Egypt obtained over seven billion dollars in foreign currency from oil revenues, Suez Canal tolls, tourism, and remittances; over two billion dollars in foreign aid further sweetened the pot. Egypt became a dependent economy – both in the narrow sense of dependence upon foreign largesse and in the wider sense of dependence on world prosperity – under Sadat.

The Opening had significant effects on Egyptian society. The import of consumer goods, especially foreign luxuries for a new bourgeoisie profiting from the opportunities which came with economic opening, boomed during the Opening. Where imported consumer goods were about ten per cent of imports in the late 1960s, they accounted for fully one-third in the mid 1970s. New classes of people emerged alongside, and in some cases out of, the previously ascendant state bourgeoisie: "openers" engaged in the import trade, in financial speculation, or serving as middlemen for foreign investors; "suitcase merchants" peddling designer fashions or electronic gadgets on the streetcorners; a new layer of indigenous millionaires being chauffeured in Mercedes and residing in opulent villas near the Pyramids. For Egypt’s now-sizable urban middle class emerging from over a decade of socialist austerity, foreign was ‘in’; for the country’s upper stratum, expensive weddings at the Hilton or Sheraton, at which hundreds of guests were regaled with imported delicacies, demonstrated the host’s manifest success under the Opening. An Egyptian cartoonist’s vision in which two Egyptians admiring the Great Pyramid were prompted to exclaim "Fantastic, it must be imported!", encapsulates much of the ambiance of the 1970s.4

While much of the upper and part of the middle class did well out of the Opening, the same is not true for the bulk of Egyptians at the lower levels of the urban social pyramid. The main culprit was inflation, which reached an annual rate of twenty-five to thirty per cent in the later years of the 1970s and in the process produced great pressure especially on salaried workers whose wages failed to keep up. Part of the slack was assumed by government price subsidies for basic consumer goods, such as wheat, sugar, tea, and cooking oil. Whereas such subsidies accounted for less than eight per cent of government expenditure in 1970, they ate up almost sixty per cent of the state budget by 1980. As noted earlier, a projected reduction in subsidies in 1977 produced Egypt’s most serious round of civil unrest of the decade (the proposal was quickly shelved). With instant fortunes being made at the top and inflation eroding incomes at the bottom, urban social cleavages widened under the Opening.

The same was less true in rural Egypt. The fifty-feddan limitation on landownership was now declared not to apply to reclaimed land, and some state-held land was now auctioned off on the open market. Both measures led to a degree of reconcentration of ownership of agricultural land in the 1970s. But a larger process occurring simultaneously brought significant financial benefits for much of the rural population. The outflow of Egyptian laborers to work in other Arab countries produced a significant shortage of agricultural labor which in turn led to a rise in agricultural wages. The concomitant flow of remittance money to the families of laborers working abroad also benefited rural society. Almost by accident – the spillover of oil affluence from abroad – rural Egypt may have done better than urban Egypt in the Sadat years.

Many observers also found a sleasy quality to the Opening. Much of the prosperity enjoyed by at least some Egyptians in the 1970s was generated by questionably legal or flatly illicit means. Commissions and kickbacks were a normal part of doing business. Corruption permeated all levels of the economy: payoffs to and embezzlement by higher officials, evasion of safety requirements in housing construction (resulting in the periodic collapse of tenements and the death of their inhabitants), the payment of bakshish to government functionaries for the performance of their stipulated duties. In the judgement of one Egyptian analyst, "corruption had to a large extent been ‘institutionalized’ in the seventies."5 The same author’s comparison of the Sadat years to the reign of the Khedive Isma‘il a century earlier, similarly an era of foreign penetration and domestic extravagance, is an apt one.

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The negative social ramifications of the Opening form much of the context for the surge in Islamist activism in Egypt in the 1970s. The contemporary Islamic "revival" in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world is a complex phenomenon. Efforts at Westernization and secularization over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries notwithstanding, loyalty to Islam and adherence to Islamic values remained the bedrock identity of the bulk of Egyptian Muslims. The manifest shortcomings of the secular state from the 1960s onward – economic stagnation and humiliating defeat by Israel (in six days) under Nasser, widening socio-economic disparities, the Coca-Cola-ization of Egypt, and the apparent abandonment of the Arab-Muslim cause of Palestine under Sadat – indicated to many Egyptians that a secular approach modelled on Western guidelines was a failure. Among the Muslim majority, "Islam is the solution" became the slogan of increasing numbers of Egyptians.

Thanks to the greater pluralism of the 1970s, the advocates of religious solutions had also more room for maneuver than they had possessed under Nasser. The Sadat regime initially encouraged the reemergence of Islamic sentiment and activism as a counterweight to leftist trends. Many Islamic activists were released from prison as part of the Corrective Revolution. The relaxation of police controls and surveillance meant more freedom for independent political advocacy and organizing, Islamists included. Sadat himself endeavored to envelop himself in a more religious aura than his socialist predecessor; ostentatious mosque attendance and prayer, the patronizing of popular preachers who would defend his policies, a public persona as "the believer president." The partial liberalization of political life in the mid 1970s continued the process of opening a window for the expression of an alternative Islamic vision of society.

Much Islamist activism was not explicitly or primarily political in character. Egypt witnessed a surge in the building of "popular" mosques erected through private initiative and not under the supervision of the official religious establishment. A number of Islamic banks – investment companies which attempted to follow Islamic strictures against usury – were formed and attracted sizable amounts of capital in the boom economy of the later 1970s. The most pervasive dimension of the Islamization of society was the emergence of a huge network of social service organizations – private schools and adult literacy training programs, religious study groups, medical clinics and hospitals, child day-care centers, women’s counselling offices, and more. In terms of having an impact on the daily lives of millions of Egyptians, this "social Islam" which began to develop under Sadat, and which has expanded under his successor Husni Mubarak, is probably the most important aspect of the Islamic revival.

Many popular mosques and Islamic organizations in turn became recruiting grounds for the welter of politically oriented groups with an explicitly Islamic agenda which emerged or reemerged in the more tolerant atmosphere of the 1970s. Muslim Brotherhood journals resumed publication from the mid 1970s onwards, calling for a more Islamic structuring of Egyptian society but also supporting many of Sadat’s generally conservative initiatives. On university campuses Islamic "societies" [Arabic jama‘at] burgeoned. Providing valuable social services for students (study sessions; the free distribution of lecture notes; transport to campus by which women students could avoid Egypt’s congested public transport), student Jama‘at were dominating elections for some college governing bodies by the late 1970s.

The outer edge of the religious revival was militance. For thoroughly committed Islamists, the overwhelming power of the state and – despite the superficial religiosity of Sadat and his policies – its generally Westernizing and pro-Western character was interpreted to mean that only force could recreate an Islamic order. Egypt witnessed intermittent bouts of Islamist violence directed against state institutions or personnel from the mid-1970s onwards, the most notable of which were a quixotic attack on a military school as a prelude to an attempted coup in 1974 and the kidnapping and murder of a government minister in 1977 in an effort to attain the release of imprisoned militants.

An ominous feature of Egyptian public life in the 1970s was greater Muslim-Coptic tension. Egypt’s Coptic community – between six and fifteen per cent of its population, depending on source – were also undergoing a partial if less thorough communal awakening. In part due to the emergence of new and more politicized organizations, in part in reaction to the Muslim call for an Islamic order which would have the effect of marginalizing

non-Muslims in Egyptian public life, Egypt’s Copts led by a new and more assertive Pope Shenouda III became more vocal under Sadat. Muslim claims of aggressive Coptic proselytization and Coptic complaints of underrepresentation and discrimination in state agencies agitated sectarian opinion on both sides. The flash-point for physical violence between the two communities was often the building of new churches by Copts, which Muslim activists then attempted to pull down while Copts resisted. In Upper Egypt in particular, where the Coptic population is thickest on the ground and where communal tension overlapped with longstanding village rivalries and feuds, Muslim-Coptic animosity and violence was now articulated in the language of religion.

Religious militancy and communal violence eventually led the state to adjust its attitude towards religious activism. Egypt’s unilateral peace treaty with Israel in 1979 was rejected as a sell-out by the bulk of Islamist opinion; correspondingly, it generated greater criticism of the regime from Islamist spokesmen in particular. By the beginning of the 1980s periodic Muslim-Coptic violence led an increasingly short-tempered president to denounce extremists on both sides of the religious divide. Sadat’s massive crackdown on critics in September 1981 included the arrest of both Muslim and Coptic activists (including Pope Shenouda III on the Coptic side) as well as the dissolution of ten Muslim and three Coptic religious organizations.

It was this clampdown on religious activism which brought Sadat’s own assassination. A small cohort of individuals associated with one militant Islamist grouping, the Tanzim ("organization") or Jihad, hastily cobbled together a combined operation for the assassination of the president and an Islamist uprising in Upper Egypt. Where the latter failed, the former succeeded. On October 6, 1981, while reviewing the armed forces on the eighth anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal, Anwar al-Sadat died in a hail of bullets fired by Islamist members of the army which he had led to victory eight years earlier.

A half-generation younger than Nasser and Sadat, Muhammad Husni Mubarak (1928–) was uninvolved either in the core cadre of the Free Officers or the politics of the Nasser years. An air force officer who rose to the post of commander of the Egyptian air force by the time of the October war, Mubarak was designated as Sadat’s Vice-President in April 1975. He became president immediately upon Sadat’s assassination in October 1981. As had been the case with Sadat’s succession to Nasser, Mubarak’s assumption of the presidency was promptly ratified by popular referendum. Additional referenda in 1987, 1993, and 1999 have extended his tenure as President.

A career military officer rather than a political activist, Mubarak’s style of rule is distinctly non-ideological. For most of his tenure in office Mubarak has eschewed bold new initiatives and concentrated on the more prosaic task of maintaining internal stability (and his own position). The Egyptian perception of the thrust of his administration in his early years in office was expressed in a recycled version of the joke about Nasser, Sadat, and the fork in the road cited previously. In the updated version current in Egypt in the mid 1980s, Mubarak was faced with the same choice of turning right (conservatism) or left (radicalism) upon arriving at the fork in the road. His response, delivered after considerable cogitation, indicated a distinct preference for continuity over change: "signal left, signal right, and park." At least until the 1990s, when major new economic departures were initiated, continuity has been the hallmark of the Mubarak era.

The greatest area of continuity has been in Egyptian foreign relations. Egypt’s place in the world in the 1980s and 1990s has largely remained as Sadat reconfigured it. A close linkage with the United States and beyond that with the West have been maintained throughout the Mubarak years. American financial assistance has been a major prop of both the Egyptian military and the Egyptian economy. Lesser amounts of economic assistance have also come from other Western countries and from international financial organizations. Joint military exercises between the armed forces of Egypt and the United States became an annual exercise in the 1980s. The litmus test of Egypt’s relationship with the West came in 1990–91, at the time of the Gulf crisis and war. Firmly committed to a Western orientation and reportedly angered by Saddam Husayn’s mendacity as to his intentions vis-à-vis Kuwait, Mubarak quickly took Egypt into the anti-Iraqi coalition being constructed by the United States. An estimated thirty-five thousand Egyptian troops participated in the military operation which liberated Kuwait in early 1991.

Although unaltered in its broad outlines, Egypt’s relationship with Israel in the 1980s and 1990s has demonstrated more volatility. The formal state of peace between the two countries has never been in question. Diplomatic contretemps notwithstanding, the Egyptian-Israeli border remained open for trade (limited) and tourism (considerable from the Israeli side, less from the Egyptian). A lingering border dispute over Taba, a minuscule chunk of land on the Gulf of ‘Aqaba, disturbed bilateral relations for much of the 1980s until resolved by arbitration in Egypt’s favor. The diplomatic relationship between the two countries fluctuated from warm to cool largely on the basis of the level of tension existing between Israel and other Arabs at different points in time – decidedly cool through most of the 1980s as a consequence of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its ongoing repression of the Palestinians, and progressively warmer in the 1990s as Israel and the Palestinians plodded towards accommodation.

The major change in Egyptian foreign relations under Mubarak has occurred in relation to the Arab world. Egypt was ostracized by most Arab states after its unilateral peace with Israel. It took most of the 1980s for it to be reintegrated into the Arab fold. Mubarak’s less arrogant posture towards Arab critics of peace with Israel facilitated the process. Egypt was readmitted to the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 1984. The main breakdown in Egypt’s regional isolation came in 1987–89, when in the context of the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war and the opening of the Palestinian Intifada most Arab states acknowledged the inevitability of Egyptian participation in inter-Arab politics and reestablished diplomatic relations. Egypt was readmitted to membership in the Arab League in 1989. In the Gulf crisis and war of 1990–91 Egypt and Mubarak were active first in Arab diplomatic efforts aimed at avoiding confrontation between Iraq and Kuwait, later in mobilizing Arab governmental support for the anti-Iraqi coalition. Egypt has continued to play an integral role as counsellor and mediator in the central inter-Arab issue of the 1990s, the unfolding peace process between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. An important exception to the pattern of improving Egyptian relations with other Arab states concerns the Sudan. The ascendancy of a military regime with an Islamic orientation in the Sudan after 1989, and reported Sudenese support for Egypt’s domestic Islamist opposition, generated repeated political tensions between Egypt and its southern neighbor in the 1990s.

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After a surge in prosperity produced largely by exogenous factors in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the mid and late 1980s were years of economic contraction. Thoroughly integrated into and dependent upon the world economy, Egypt suffered from several economic trends beyond its control. The world oil glut and the precipitous decline in oil prices over the 1980s meant less revenue from Egyptian oil exports as well as relative stagnation in receipts from Suez Canal tolls. Declining oil revenues also meant less work for Egyptians in the oil states and a dropoff in the money they sent home. Tourism, hostage to public perceptions of the rise of "terrorism" in the Middle East as a whole, proved an erratic source of income which varied considerably from year to year. The shortfall in revenue had to be met by external borrowing. Egypt’s external debt rose steadily over the 1980s, reaching a sum estimated at about fifty billion dollars in 1990.

With economic contraction came growing privation. Inflation – in the range of twenty to thirty per cent annually over the 1980s – remained a serious problem for the financial wellbeing of the salaried majority of urban workers. While the average wage is estimated to have increased by sixty per cent between 1978 and 1988, prices increased by three hundred and fifty per cent. Government subsidies continued to be an indispensable buffer for the urban population in particular, but were a costly burden for the state. A further economic shock came at the beginning of the 1990s. The Gulf crisis led to an exodus of perhaps half a million Egyptian workers from their jobs in the Gulf states and Iraq, producing an immediate drop in revenue from remittances and adding to domestic unemployment.

It was these internal and external stresses which compelled the Egyptian government to bite the bullet of economic reform. It did so only incrementally. An effort to reduce subsidies began in 1986; by 1991 it was announced that the bill for direct subsidies had been reduced from thirteen to six per cent of GDP over the preceding five years. A limited effort at privatization – reducing the size of the inefficient public sector through the leasing or sale of government-owned enterprises to private operators in the hope of stimulating greater efficiency – also commenced in the late 1980s. The spur to the effort to cut subsidies and privatize the public sector was largely external, specifically pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for major structural adjustments which would create a leaner public sector, a smaller budget deficit, and a more open Egyptian economy. Prolonged negotiations between Egypt and the IMF towards restructuring debt repayment stretched on through the late 1980s, the IMF demanding greater commitment and more rapid movement toward reform and Egypt resisting because of fear of the adverse social consequences of accepting the IMF package. Economic liberalization remained halting through the 1980s; a "search for soft spots" rather than a wholehearted commitment to significant structural reform.6

Movement towards economic liberalization accelerated in the 1990s. Egypt’s participation in the anti-Iraqi coalition during the Gulf crisis and war was promptly rewarded by Western debtors, forgiving fourteen billion dollars of Egypt’s foreign debt. In May 1991 a major agreement on debt restructuring which wrote off half of Egypt’s debt to the "Paris Club" of creditor nations, and which restructured repayment of the remainder on terms more favorable to Egypt, was concluded with the IMF. Egypt’s foreign debt was reduced to manageable dimensions in the early 1990s.

The price for debt restructuring has been a greater Egyptian commitment to the liberalization of its state-controlled economy. There are several components to the economic reforms which have been introduced or accelerated in the 1990s. One is eliminating most currency controls and making Egypt’s currency almost fully convertible in foreign exchange markets. Another is the deregulation of economic procedures internally to allow more scope for both private sector initiative and foreign investment. The government has continued its efforts to reduce its budget deficit through various means, the most important of which has been the further reduction of both direct and indirect subsidies.

The centerpiece of structural adjustment is privatization of public sector enterprises. Along with cuts in subsidies, privatization is one of the more politically sensitive aspects of economic liberalization. For state bureaucrats it means insecurity, possible redundancy, and a more uncertain future; for workers in public sector firms it portends a loss of jobs in leaner and more efficient enterprises as well as a reduction in the social benefits which they had been guaranteed under Arab Socialism. Privatization has been resisted by both groups, more subtly by bureaucratic back-room politics within officialdom, more actively by direct labor agitation and protest against cutbacks and the loss of prior entitlements. As a result privatization proceeded slowly through the early 1990s, gaining momentum only in the second half of the decade. Much of the privatization has involved the sale to private investors of part rather than all of the assets of state-owned firms. Over half of a total of 314 public sector firms selected for privatization were reported to have been wholly or partially privatized by 1999, and the Egyptian government has announced that the private sector will account for eighty per cent of the Egyptian economy by 2000.

It is too early to draw firm conclusions about the results of Egypt’s economic liberalization of the 1990s. A preliminary assessment indicates that structural reform has been a two-edged sword. On one side, Egypt’s macro economic performance over the past decade has been a robust one. The country’s external debt is a much smaller percentage of GDP than the burden it had become in the 1980s. Revenue from external sources also improved over much of the 1990s. Receipts from tourism have normally ranged from three to four billion dollars annually in the late 1990s, depending on political conditions; Suez Canal tolls brought in almost two billion dollars and petroleum exports were worth almost $1.5 billion in 1995; foreign aid remained steady in the three billion-dollar range for most of the 1990s. As a result of a smaller burden of debt repayment, rising external revenues, and the cutback in subsidies, Egypt’s budget deficit was reduced from around twenty per cent of GDP at the beginning of the decade to the vicinity of one per cent at its close. Inflation, which according to official estimates stood at over twenty per cent in 1991, had dropped to nine per cent in 1993 and may have been under five per cent annually by 1998. The annual rate of economic growth has been five per cent or better for much of the decade (slightly lower in 1998, due to low oil prices and a huge dropoff in tourist revenues due to Islamist violence). Reported per capita GDP (always a slippery indicator in a developing country where wages may be low but the price of basic necessities and services is also low) doubled over the 1990s, from $600 in 1990 to $1290 in 1998. A 1999 survey of Egypt in The Economist opened by proclaiming Egypt to be "the very model of a modern emerging market, the International Monetary Fund’s prime pupil."7

But there is also a darker side to economic liberalization. Unemployment has remained high through the decade; officially in the ten-to-fifteen per cent range, in actuality almost certainly higher. Because of inflation and the resultant wage-price gap, the real wages – i.e. the buying power of salaries – of workers has declined since the 1970s. On a national level salaries and wages, which were about fifty per cent of GDP in 1970, had fallen to less than a third by the early 1990s. The situation is most serious for public sector workers. In the effort to make public sector companies a more attractive investment for private investors, the drive to privatize has meant less hiring in public sector enterprises as well as a slowdown in public sector wage increases. By 1992 the real wages of government employees had declined to about one-half of what they had been at the start of the Opening in the mid 1970s, and it is questionable if the deterioration in wages reversed itself when economic liberalization accelerated thereafter. The theory behind economic liberalization is that a rising tide lifts all boats. Through most of the 1990s there was little indication that this process began to occur in regard to the vessels in which most Egyptians are compelled to row.

Perhaps most serious for many people is the reduction of government subsidies since the late 1980s. By the end of the 1990s the bulk of subsidies on basic necessities had been scaled back or eliminated. Subsidies on basic consumer goods were scheduled to consume between five and six per cent of government expenditure in 1998–99, a far cry from what they had accounted for through the 1980s. What was a blessing for the state was hardly such for its citizens. The same Economist survey, cited above, calculated that "half the food eaten by the poor doubled in price in two years" largely due to the termination of subsidies, and went on to note that "services that had been free since the 1952 revolution are becoming less so."8 The Nasserist welfare state has partially evaporated in the 1990s.

* * *

The texture of Egyptian internal politics has witnessed less change than the recent shift in the country’s economic posture. Allowing for generational attrition, many of the same high officials as had served Sadat have filled the key posts of state under Mubarak. By the 1990s some observers were commenting on what amounted to regime gerontocracy, an entrenchment in office by a cadre of aging officials whose service in high posts reaches back into the early Mubarak years. Egypt’s Prime Minister from late 1987 to the end of 1995, Dr. ‘Atif Sidqi, had an uninterrupted tenure as premier longer than any other prime minister since independence; the Prime Minister in office at the close of the 1990s, Dr. ‘Atif Muhammad ‘Ubayd, had been a fixture of Egyptian cabinets since 1984.

Political parties demonstrate the same continuity. The National Democratic Party remains Egypt’s preferred and dominant party, the victor by a wide margin in every National Assembly election of the 1980s and 1990s. The cast of main opposition parties remains much the same as had emerged under Sadat in the later 1970s; the National Progressive Unionist Party (Tajammu‘) on the left, the Socialist Labor Party to the center-right, and the New Wafd and the Muslim Brotherhood espousing liberal and Islamist agendas respectively.

The sectarian genie let out of the bottle in the Sadat years was by far the major problem perturbing Egyptian domestic politics under Husni Mubarak. The overall orientation of the regime – adhering to and eventually broadening an economic opening internally, maintaining a pro-Western outlook and peace with Israel externally – has largely remained within the same parameters which under Sadat had contributed to the articulation and spread of Islamist opposition. The regime’s economic policies especially in the 1990s have widened rather than narrowed the socio-economic disparities which fuel lower class alienation from the established order and provide the foot-soldiers for Islamist militancy. In short, rather than mitigating in intensity, many of the socio-economic causes behind the growth of the Islamist trend have acquired greater salience under Husni Mubarak. As a result, Islamism itself has flourished. The central dynamic of Egyptian internal politics in the 1980s and 1990s was the contest between the secular state and organized Islamism.

Mubarak initially presided over a more relaxed political atmosphere than that which had existed during Sadat’s final years in power. While the Islamist militants associated with the assassination of Sadat and a subsequent attempt at popular uprising in Upper Egypt were hunted down and brought to trial, the numerous non-violent critics of Sadat who had been jailed in September 1981 were soon set free. A well publicized crackdown on corruption, which included the arrest, trial, and incarceration of Sadat’s brother Ismat, was another way in which Egypt’s new president attempted to distance himself from the record of his predecessor. The 1984 parliamentary elections are considered to have been one of the freer electoral contests of recent decades. Together opposition parties gained over one-quarter of the reported vote; a New Wafd-Muslim Brotherhood coalition won 59 seats in the Assembly and emerged as a vigorous opposition voice to the compliant NDP.

The political pendulum swung in the other direction from the mid 1980s. Now represented in parliament, Islamist spokesmen and groups mounted a public campaign for the immediate implementation of Islamic law in 1985. Although the Assembly rejected the demand, it did nod to Islamist sensibilities by watering down previously passed legislation of the Sadat era which had restricted a husband’s right to polygamy. Muslim-Coptic confrontation once again appeared in public life, more benignly in the form of a "stickers war" in which adherents of the two faiths displayed their communal loyalties through putting bumper stickers with verses from Qur’an or Bible on their autos, but more ominously in a renewal of Muslim-Coptic violence in Upper Egypt. A brief but frightening bout of rioting in February 1986 by the poorly paid and miserably treated members of the regime’s Central Security Services required army intervention to reassert order. Reports of attacks on video stores distributing immoral material, of clashes between police and Islamists outside mosques and on university campuses, and of Islamist attacks on government installations and attempts to assassinate high officials, were a recurrent item in the Egyptian press in the later 1980s.

This turmoil in turn produced a movement towards political closure. Government efforts to control the activities of popular mosques, and periodic police sweeps of Islamic militants, increased. Despite their results in which opposition parties gained a reported thirty per cent of the vote and ninety-one seats in the Assembly, the parliamentary elections of April 1987 saw more government manipulation and intimidation than those of 1984.

The constriction of political opportunity continued into the 1990s. Three features of the domestic and international scene during the decade all pushed the Egyptian government towards a more authoritarian stance: a major regional crisis in which the anti-Iraqi and pro-Western stance of the Egyptian government was considered controversial with various segments of Egyptian opinion; new economic initiatives which involved greater popular privation and consequently fed alienation from the regime; most importantly an ongoing civil war between the government and the extreme fringes of the Islamist movement. Emergency laws giving the security services extensive powers of detention and providing for the trial of civilians in military courts, that were first enacted in the wake of Sadat’s assassination in 1981, were repeatedly extended through the 1990s. The parliamentary elections of late 1990, conducted in the tense atmosphere of the Gulf crisis, were boycotted by the main opposition parties save the NPUP in protest against electoral restrictions. As a result, all but twenty-nine of 444 contested seats were won by NDP candidates or "independents" affiliated with the party. New legislation of the early 1990s brought election to office in professional syndicates under greater government regulation in order to prevent occupational bodies from becoming centers of opposition. A well publicized national "dialogue" mounted by the government in 1994 turned into a purely cosmetic exercise when the government excluded the Muslim Brotherhood from participation and the New Wafd in turn boycotted its deliberations.

The parliamentary elections of late 1995 are generally evaluated as the most fraudulent and violent since the political opening of the 1970s. They were preceded by an extensive security crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and a lesser one against other opposition parties. The elections themselves were marked by official intimidation, blatant fraud, and an unprecedented level of local conflict (an estimated fifty-one dead and 878 injured, according to the Independent Commission for Electoral Review). The results followed suit: the victory of 316 NDP candidates, 115 "independents," and only thirteen representatives of opposition parties. Shortly after the election, ninety-nine of the 115 "independents" promptly joined the NDP, giving it over ninety per cent of seats in the National Assembly. Subsequent to the election Egypt’s highest court, investigating complaints about the conduct of the contest, recommended voiding the election of over 200 of the winning candidates on grounds of irregularities. The Assembly took no action on the court’s recommendation.

Simultaneous with this shrinkage of the scope of legitimate political activity, Egypt experienced a low-level Islamist insurgency against the regime in the 1990s. Why then? The recession of the 1980s and the state’s partial abandonment of its social contract with its population in the 1990s (e.g. the provision of basic necessities in exchange for political passivity) provide the material context for state-Islamist confrontation. The social makeup of Islamist militance also seems to have evolved over time. Now drawing more heavily from the urban lower class living in the shanty-towns or belts of poverty surrounding greater Cairo, from the pauperized provincial cities of Upper Egypt, and from rural communities where adherents bear ancient grudges especially against their Coptic neighbors, Islamist extremism gradually became more proletarian in composition, more Balkanized in structure, and more indiscriminate in strategy. A nebula of clandestine and ephemeral Islamist groupings with floating memberships and transitory alliances formed and reformed, compounding the difficulties of state penetration and control. The main militant groupings were the Jihad, a Cairo-based outgrowth of the movement which assassinated Sadat in 1981, and the "Islamic Societies" or Jama‘at Islamiyya, a coalition of largely-autonomous militant cells drawn particularly from the Upper Egyptian provinces. The overall strategy of the militants of the 1990s also seems to have shifted from a primary focus on assaulting the commanding heights of the state (e.g. the assassination of Sadat) to one of seeking the gradual destabilization of society and the eventual collapse of the system through the sustained use of violence against a wider range of targets.

In the early 1990s Egypt experienced an exponential increase in attacks on government officials (eventually including President Mubarak) and installations, against secular intellectuals, and against foreign tourists. At the local level, militants were sometimes able to establish bases in some of the sprawling shantytowns surrounding greater Cairo as well as in various urban quarters and villages especially in Upper Egypt, communities which they temporarily turned into no-go zones under militant control. In localities in Upper Egypt, renewed Muslim-Coptic violence was a concomitant of the Islamist militance of the 1990s. The height of Islamist violence appears to have been between 1993 and 1995. In 1993 alone, an independent source estimated over 250 attacks on government officials and facilities, video shops and cinemas, Coptic churches and communities, and foreign visitors to Egypt.

The government responded to Islamist insurgency with repression. Massive security sweeps brutalized the populations of entire quarters or villages. Thousands of Egyptians were detained often without charge or trial; when in custody some were subjected to systematic torture. Military courts heard the cases of those accused of complicity in violence and issued death sentences which had no appeal. A 1993 report by Amnesty International spoke of the "frightening brutality" of the security forces, concluding that they had been given "a license to kill with impunity" and terming the military courts "a travesty of justice." As the authorities responded to Islamic violence with indiscriminate repression, the pool of alienated potential recruits of the Islamic alternative grew. A vicious cycle of violence-repression, repression-violence, persisted in Egypt for much of the 1990s.

Islamist insurgency had both human and economic costs. The toll of dead grew through the early 1990s, rising from over 100 killed either by militants or security forces in 1991 and 1992 to well over 200 in 1993 and 1994. By 1997, well over a thousand people – Egyptians and foreigners – had died in the struggle between Islamists and state. The financial consequences were also appreciable. Tourism to Egypt dropped off significantly in the mid 1990s, depriving the state of foreign currency and cutting into the incomes of Egyptians dependent on the tourist industry.

The tide turned from 1995 onwards. However brutal, government security operations gradually bit into the base of Islamist militance. In time attrition took its toll on militant leadership; some were killed in gun battles with the authorities, others apprehended and executed, others forced into exile. Although there was appreciable violence from 1995 through 1997, the frequency of Islamist attacks slowly diminished in comparison to the years from 1992 to 1994. By 1997 the leadership of the main Islamist movements involved in the insurgency were splitting over strategy, some calling for a truce with the authorities while others maintained the need for continued struggle. The single most tragic episode of the violence of the 1990s, the massacre of fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptian police near Luxor in November 1997, appears to have been a desperate operation by a movement now on the run. By 1998–99 Islamist-inspired violence had diminished greatly and the government was declaring victory in its war against "terrorism." Given that it is questionable if the social disparities and economic privation which fed Islamist alienation and insurgency decreased over the course of the 1990s, it is too early to judge if the claim is correct.

* * *

While Egyptian Islamists appear to have lost the physical battle against the secular state, on a deeper level Islam may be winning. In contrast to its repression of anti-state Islamist activism and violence, other actions by the Mubarak regime have gone a long way towards reinforcing and deepening the broader trend known as "social Islam" in Egypt. A gradual and peaceful Islamization of Egyptian society has occurred under Mubarak, partially with the acquiescence and encouragement of the state.

There is unquestionably a coercive dimension to the contemporary Islamization of Egyptian society. It is most obvious in the use of violence by militant Islamists in an attempt to silence secularist voices (the murder of the outspoken secularist champion Faraj Fauda in 1992; the assault upon and wounding of Egypt’s Nobel Prize-winning author Najib Mahfuz in 1994). But coercion need not always involve violence. Egypt’s official religious establishment, centered around al-Azhar, has long been dominated by the state and pressured into giving support to its policies. Recently it has become more assertive in censoring the expression of Egyptian opinion relating to religion. While continuing to endorse the state’s struggle against militant Islam, the shaykhs of al-Azhar have also assumed a more active public role by calling for the banning of books and films which they view as "un-Islamic." Partially dependent upon the moral sanction of the religious establishment for its own legitimacy, the regime has concurred in this process. In 1994 Egypt’s State Council, the body which evaluates the constitutionality of laws, recognized al-Azhar’s authority to monitor cultural production in Egypt. Another tactic of Islamists in the 1990s was the use of Egyptian courts to intimidate secularist authors and artists. Basing their actions on the Islamic principle of hisba – the injunction for believers to command the good and forbid the evil – Islamist spokesmen have hauled "apostate" writers, film producers and distributors, and performers, before the courts and demanded the banning of their works. Faced with constant badgering, some secularist spokesmen have left the arena of public contestation; others have tempered their publicly expressed positions.

But at base Islamization is the consequence of religion becoming more popular within civil society. Numerous features of the contemporary Egyptian scene testify to the appeal of Islamic symbols and referents to the Muslim majority of Egyptians. Enrollment in the religious faculties of al-Azhar increased at a higher rate than enrollment in arts and humanities faculties of secular universities in the 1980s. The proliferation and expanding social outreach of Islamically oriented social service agencies first visible in the 1970s has continued; already in the 1980s one study found some three thousand such organizations in operation in Egypt. There is no indication that this popular demand for religious resources has diminished in the 1990s.

Given the manifest appeal of Islamic subjects and symbols to the public, the regime has been compelled to compete on turf which is perhaps not of its own choosing or to its best advantage. In the process of doing so, it reinforces the Islamic current flowing within civil society. The enlargement of the curricula of the state-run school system to include such themes as "Islamic Society" or "Faith, Morals, and Social Solidarity" reinforces the religious orientation of Egyptian students; the annual "Religious Awareness Caravan" jointly sponsored by several state agencies continues to do the same for youth during the summer recess; the publication of religious journals such as "The Islamic Banner" or "The Little Muslim" by the ruling NDP serve to promote an Islamic outlook on the part of both children and adults. The rhetoric of government officials has increasingly assumed a religious coloration, simultaneously attempting to persuade Egyptians of the "Islamic" bona fides and character of the regime, and at the same time soberly warning against the dangers of religious "extremism." At the same time as combatting militant Islam, the state is also complicit in the gradual Islamization of society.

To draw on the perceptive analysis of Gregory Starrett, three factors together – the popular reorientation towards religion, the Islamist turning of some of the institutions of the secular state against secularism, and the regime’s attempt to demonstrate its own Islamic credentials to a more religiously inclined public – have worked to transform what was previously an Egyptian trend into an Egyptian context. By the 1990s Islamism was "pervasive, persistent, and normal, an immense counterculture" within Egyptian society: Islam had become "the language in which cultural and political battles are fought by the vast majority of interested parties."9 The generally secular course of development which marked Egyptian public life since the nineteenth century has not been totally reversed; but it has certainly been overlaid by a counter-current emphasizing the continuing relevance of Egypt’s millennial Islamic heritage.

Egypt faces numerous problems at the beginning of the third millennium. With a population in the range of sixty-five million in 2000, human pressure on finite resources is enormous. Land reclamation efforts from the 1950s through the 1980s brought the area of cultivable land to over eight million feddans by 1990, and ambitious further reclamation projects – the al-Salam canal intended to carry Nile water to Sinai and to reclaim almost half a million acres of desert, the Toksha canal which will bring water from Lake Nasser to the oases of the Western Desert and hopefully reclaim an even larger area for habitation and agriculture – have been inaugurated in the 1990s. From these and other projects, the government hopes to add another two million feddans to Egypt’s usable land area by 2010.

Yet Egypt is no longer mainly an agricultural country. In the late 1990s agriculture accounted for one-sixth of GDP, industry for one-third, services for fully half of national output in financial terms. Until recently the country has depended primarily on the productivity of its hitherto relatively uncompetitive industrial and overregulated commercial sectors, and on revenue from exogenous sources (petroleum exports, Suez Canal tolls, remittances from Egyptians working abroad, tourism, foreign aid) to stay afloat. Its economy, gradually being deregulated and privatized in the 1990s, has demonstrated appreciable improvement in its macro economic performance over the past decade. Whether that improvement will sustain itself in a global environment in which Egypt competes with many other countries for markets and investment is an open question.

Recent economic liberalization has also carried a heavy social price. Direct state subsidies for basic consumer goods have been cut. The social safety net put in place under Nasser (job security and fringe benefits for workers in public sector firms, rent controls and protection against arbitrary eviction for tenants in the agricultural sector) is being eroded in an effort to improve productivity. Government expenditure on social services such as education and health facilities now consume a smaller share of the state budget than in the past. The patron state is gradually relinquishing responsibility for both the management of the economy and the social welfare of its citizens.

There is no doubt that, in terms of basic statistical indicators, Egypt has experienced considerable "progress" in recent decades. Reported per capita income doubled over the 1990s (income distribution, where trends are less favorable, will be discussed later). The expansion of the educational system has improved literacy; whereas over three-quarters of Egyptians beyond childhood had been estimated to be illiterate in 1947 (seventy-seven per cent), the figure had dropped to under half by 1997 (forty-eight per cent). Increased life expectancy resulting from the control of epidemic diseases, the provision of clean drinking water, and the extension of health care to poorer Egyptians through the construction of state-supported clinics is perhaps the most telling single statistic. Whereas life expectancy had stood at forty-one for men and forty-four for women in the 1950s, it had risen to sixty-five for men and sixty-eight for women in the late 1990s.

Quantitative indicators alone are an inadequate guide to qualitative realities. In the countryside, where something over half of the population still resides, it appears that more continuity than change prevails in spite of a half-century of revolution, opening, and structural adjustment. Change, and indeed major change, there has been, to be sure: new schools make primary and secondary education available to many village children; health care is better and life expectancy improved; electronic access to a wider world is gained through radio and television. The temporary migration of millions of Egyptians to work abroad and the remittances they have sent home have resulted in the construction of new red-brick rather than mud-brick houses and a greater dissemination of manufactured consumer goods in rural areas.

Yet fundamental structural conditions in the countryside seem to have changed less than material ones. The revolution of 1952 gave land to a minority of peasants but did not mean the end of social stratification in the countryside. Farmers in what used to be the middle range of ownership between ten to fifty feddans, possessing enough land to support their families and to rent or hire labor to work part of their holdings, have replaced the former large landlord class as the rural elite. Government programs have not eliminated patronage and clientage, nor the subordination of the landless or the land-poor to the landed. At best land reform replaced "patron monogamy" (a peasant’s dependence on a single large landlord) with "patron polygamy."10 Kinship bonds and obligations remain strong, the extended family or clan acting as a social body (intermarriage), an economic unit (patrons finding tenants and hiring laborers from within their clan), and a political entity (voters favoring relatives in local or national elections; village feuds and vendettas).

Urban Egypt has different social cleavages and stresses. Almost half the country’s population (forty-five per cent) was estimated to be living in urban areas by 1998. The overcrowding and urban difficulties existing in Egypt’s main metropolis, Cairo, are legendary. At a hundred thousand residents per square kilometer in some older quarters, population density in parts of Cairo is amongst the highest in the world. Traffic is both jammed and chaotic. The concept of the lane has yet to make its way to Egypt; the horn is its functional substitute. In the 1980s and 1990s the government made a concerted attempt to improve the urban infrastructure through the construction of new roads and a metro system, as well as through updating telephone and sanitation services. Whether these efforts are keeping pace with growth is problematic.

While formal education is now available to most urban as well as rural children, urban population growth and the inability of the educational budget to keep pace with enrollment has resulted in a decline in the teacher-pupil ratio and severely overcrowded classrooms (over a hundred students per class in some urban primary schools). As a result, a parallel privatized educational system in which teachers supplement their low income by offering tutorial sessions for pay has emerged. The tutorial system has deleterious national consequences; corruption in examinations, recently a reported increase in the school drop-out rate due to the inability of parents to pay for the necessary private lessons.

Housing is perhaps the most pressing problem for Egyptian urban dwellers. Rent controls have until recently discouraged new urban residential construction. The inability to find an affordable flat is a major life dilemma for many younger Egyptians in particular, often resulting in multi-year delays in marriage plans. When residential construction does occur it is sometimes illegal and substandard. Collapsed apartment buildings erected (or added to) by shoddy construction techniques are a periodic scandal. Huge new squatter communities, populated partially but not exclusively by rural migrants, have emerged on the outskirts of greater Cairo as a result of the housing shortage, one survey estimating over six million people living in such "spontaneous communities" by the late 1990s.11 To alleviate overcrowding in Cairo, since the 1970s the government has put considerable capital into the construction of planned and theoretically more attractive new cities on the edges of the desert. Many of these, however, remain devoid of the necessary infrastructure and remain largely unpopulated.

The economic conditions in which many urban Egyptians live are deteriorating. The salaries of many if not most workers in the public sector have long been inadequate to meet living expenses. As a result many urban dwellers are compelled to find second or even third jobs often in the huge, unregulated, and poorly paid informal sector of peddlers, handymen, and service personnel which has blossomed in recent decades. Studies of urban income distribution indicate that the percentage of urban income received by the poorest segments of the urban population have declined from the 1970s into the early 1990s, while the share obtained by the top layers has – with occasional plateaus – increased over the long term. Surveys of the level of urban poverty offer slightly different estimates depending on their definition of "poverty," but concur that the number of Cairenes living below the poverty line has increased from the 1970s into the 1990s. One such survey found fully one-third of Cairenes living below a poverty line of $1114 per year for a family of 4.6 members in 1991.

The current situation of Egyptian women is a huge topic which can only be briefly addressed here. The main impact of the state upon women has been through the provision of formal education and better health care. Reported school enrollment statistics show a steady rise in female primary and secondary school enrollments. By the end of the 1980s four-fifths of girls of the relevant age groups were enrolled in primary school and three-fifths in secondary school; over one-third of Egyptian university students in 1990 were women. The female illiteracy rate decreased from seventy-one per cent in 1976 to sixty per cent in 1998, but still is well above that of men (forty-three per cent in 1976, thirty-five per cent in 1998). State and private family planning programs have gradually encouraged a sizable minority – possibly now close to a majority – of Egyptian women to adopt the use of birth control methods, producing a decline in the rate of population growth from near three per cent annually a few decades ago to an estimated 2.1% in the late 1990s.

Studies of Egyptian rural society indicate a slower pace of change for women in the countryside than in urban areas. Save for education and health care, rural women have remained largely outside the scope of state-initiated efforts to improve rural life over the past half-century. The land redistribution efforts of the 1950s and 1960s generally gave ownership of land to men. Local studies show women’s inheritance rights under Islamic law sometimes being usurped by male relatives. The family remains the dominant corporate unit, structuring much of life for both its male and female members. Its patriarchal character continues to invest formal authority (although not necessarily all influence) for family affairs in the hands of men. Labor migration by Egyptian men to work in other countries has had appreciable side-effects for rural women, both increasing the participation of women (and children) in the labor force because of the shortage of male labor and giving wives a greater role in family decision-making due to the temporary absence of their husbands.

In urban Egypt women now span the spectrum of civilian occupations – everything from domestic service through secretarial work and factory jobs to employment in professional specialities (doctors, lawyers, teachers) for educated women. Although equal wages for equal work are guaranteed by law, in practice women in many non-professional occupations often hold less skilled or demanding jobs, and thus receive less pay than men. In the urban economy women are concentrated particularly in service jobs in the private sector; in teaching, clerical, and health care positions in the public sector; and in commerce in the booming informal sector. One-sixth of Egypt’s industrial work force was female in the late 1980s. This percentage declined with the structural adjustment of the 1990s. Women have been more vulnerable than men to lay-offs when firms reduce redundant staff and, as "expensive labor" with guaranteed maternity leave, tend not to be hired for new openings. Preliminary estimates of the effects of structural adjustment also indicate that real wages have fallen most severely in the lower-level, or unskilled, positions that are held disproportionately by women.

It is difficult to say if womens’ place in Egyptian public life has altered appreciably in recent decades. A smaller percentage of women than men have traditionally voted in Egyptian local and national elections since women obtained the franchise in the 1950s. Women continue to be represented in token numbers in parliament (the 1990–95 National Assembly had ten women members) and in political parties. Genuinely independent womens’ organizations appear to have suffered the same periodic harassment and marginalization as has been experienced by many non-establishment bodies in the fitful and contracting pluralism of the 1980s and 1990s.

Women have both participated in, and been influenced by, the Islamic trend of recent decades. The assumption or reassumption of "modest" or "Islamic" dress – depending on the individual, the covering of the hair, the limbs, sometimes the face – by Muslim women is arguably the most visible indicator of the growing rise of religion in Egypt. Islamist social service agencies of course reach out to women and often perform valuable social services for them. Autonomous women’s organizations – Qur’an study groups for women, day-care centers, counselling groups – have been a sub-set of "social Islam" which have expanded womens’ horizons and life-opportunities. On the other side, the Islamist agenda includes items which portend the restriction of womens’ social space and ability to make independent life choices (emphasis on woman’s primary duties as being in the home; the designation of some types of work, and sometimes all work outside the home, as unsuitable for women; strident opposition to abortion).

Amending Egypt’s personal status law to give women greater say in marriage and divorce was the occasion for an extended public controversy in the 1970s and 1980s. Impatient with parliament’s inability to move forward on what was a hotly debated issue, in 1979 Sadat by presidential decree amended Egypt’s sixty-year-old personal status law to require greater court supervision of divorce proceedings, to make a husband’s taking a second wife sufficient grounds for the first wife to obtain a divorce, and to give the first wife the right to possession of the family residence in cases of divorce occasioned by polygamy. Popularly known as "Jihan’s law" because of the advocacy of the initiative by the President’s wife, the measure generated repeated protest over the next several years by conservative spokesmen and Islamist organizations. When in 1985 the court declared the decree invalid because of its implementation by presidential fiat, a substitute measure enacted by parliament significantly reduced a wife’s rights in divorce by mandating that injury be proved (rather than assumed) in cases where a husband took a second wife, and by eliminating the first wife’s automatic right to the family residence. The gradual Islamization of society since then has in effect placed a lid on substantial change in the legal status of Egyptian women.

What of the political arena? Contemporary Egyptian politics seem to have reached a state of what might be termed low-level equilibrium. An aging political leadership, entrenched in office and increasingly unresponsive to external input, soldiers on in power. From the outside, frustrated critics in opposition parties and independent intellectuals of various stripes call for "radical constitutional and political reform" (the words of a manifesto issued by several opposition parties and intellectuals on the eve of the referendum giving President Mubarak his fourth term in office in late 1999); but they are unable to budge the establishment. At the mass level a declining rate of participation in national and local elections seems to testify to a popular loss of faith and interest in a manifestly manipulated political process. In the words of one recent study of Egyptian local politics, for most people "the state has reduced politics to the issue of distribution;" how the average Egyptian can obtain, by hook or by crook, access to the material resources controlled by the state apparatus.12

Yet the structure as a whole appears quite stable. Several factors combine to make it so. The uneven prosperity of the 1990s has given some – although by no means all – Egyptians a positive stake in the system and a reason for supporting its perpetuation. Perhaps more significant is the massive weight and thus staying-power of the state and the public sector; still largely intact, still controlled by the establishment, and still the source of the livelihood of much of the population. A comparatively privileged military and (at its upper levels) an adequately compensated bureaucracy have done relatively well out of the system and consequently remain loyal to it.

A lack of viable alternatives also plays a role. Secular opposition parties are fragmented, have only limited appeal on a mass basis, and lack the power of patronage available to supporters of the system. The Islamist alternative is similarly fractured, has been contained by force, and more recently appears to have been discredited with much of the public due to the tactics of its militant edge. Equally importantly, with the popular growth and official tolerance of social Islam, Egyptian public life in general is gradually assuming a more Islamic coloration. These factors rather than any inherent Egyptian proclivity to "fatalism" or "resignation" provide sufficient explanation for the durability of a political order which, although much criticized by its most politically articulate citizens and viewed as a reservoir to be exploited for personal benefit by the rest of the population, continues to creak along.