Fouad Ajami has tried for years to interpret the Arab World to his English readers but has, in my view, failed deplorably. I thought I knew the reason why but am now more confused than ever because he is offering a reason of his own, one that differs markedly from what I thought. He says: “Egyptian history plays tricks with its interpreters.” Yes, my friend, he is blaming it on Egypt. He does this in an article he published in the Wall Street Journal on November 29, 2011 under the title: “Egypt and the Fruits of the Pharaohs” and the subtitle: “The disorder in Cairo is not the result of democracy but rather of a half-century of authoritarianism.” But Egypt is not the entire Arab world, so how can he single out one country and be correct? Could it be that he is wrong today the way that he has been wrong all those years? It seems we have a conundrum here; so let us probe into it.
Right after he accuses history of trickery, Ajami calls Egypt: “This ancient society” then talks about: “Egypt's peasant society” which prompts you to wonder if he believes Egypt has been a peasant society throughout its history -- the ancient part and the modern part of a very long history. If this is what he believes, I have news for him: It is generally accepted that even if the industrial age did not officially start until 250 years ago, the backbone of the Industrial Revolution was put in place nearly 5,000 years ago. This happened the moment that industrial production in the style of the assembly line was launched to manufacture the thousands upon thousands of blocks of granite that were assembled into pyramids – those that have been discovered already and those that are buried under the sand waiting to be discovered.
Ajami then goes on to say that Egypt: “...has been prone to violent upheavals. Order has often hung by a thread, as a proud people alternate between submission and rebellion … We are now in the midst of one of these alternations.” And he says this without giving a single example from the past to illustrate his point. But if you feel uneasy about the way that he came to this conclusion, you also feel intrigued enough by the premise of his thesis that you look forward to seeing it expanded. Sadly, however, he disappoints you when he fails to do so. In fact, instead of elucidating the point that could have merit, he relies on the warn out method of recycling old clichés and stereotypes; most of which are patently false, even libelous.
After that, he takes a few paragraphs to make it sound like Egypt's revolution is different from all the others in consequence of: “...a half-century of authoritarianism. The [current] lawlessness issue out of the lawlessness of the former regime. As crony capitalism had its way ... the officer corps, had to be given its share of the loot.” And this is where you despair because you see that not only he failed to elucidate ideas of his own, he is also borrowing a style of writing that aims to criticize Egypt for doing on a small scale the bad things that other countries do on a much larger scale. And this is an approach that has always been used by the propaganda machine in charge of attacking Egypt. In this instance, Ajami tries to convince the readers that crony capitalism is an Egyptian peculiarity, a system of economics that exists nowhere else.
Even with all this, and for a brief moment, you still want to forgive the man because you think that perhaps he is too busy watching the political developments in the Middle East to check on the economies of the other regions in the world where crony capitalism flourishes in places like the good old USA, the BRIC nations and many other places where their crony capitalism makes that of Egypt look like a socialist utopia. But Ajami surprises you by taking an entire paragraph to mention a few economic numbers that add to your puzzlement. More will be said about this in a moment but first, notice that he goes from that paragraph to the next where he says the following: “This is not the legacy of Tahrir Square but of the 1952 military coup … Nasser … Sadat … Mubarak had … secured obedience through a defective command economy riddled with cronyism.” And this is where he blows your mind. It is that you have a hard time trying to reconcile the idea of a crony command economy and a crony capitalism coexisting in one place at the same time.
We now look at the paragraph where he mentions those economic numbers. He says this: “...Egypt was living dangerously, running through its financial reserves at an alarming rate. Tourism, 10% of GDP, has ground to a halt ,,, the country has wheat reserves of around six months, and cooking oil, sugar and rice supplies that can only see the country through another three months.” Well, let me begin by discussing the matter of food reserves. First, Egypt is an exporter of rice, so I fail to see why it is on this list at all. Second, no country in the world is self sufficient in everything, and neither is Egypt. While the country exports rice, fruits, vegetables, seafood, spices, cut flowers and cotton, it only produces 60% to 80% of the wheat, cooking oil and sugar it consumes, and thus needs to import the balance of these staples.
The record also shows that during some years, Egypt bought more food than it sold; and there were years when it sold more than it bought. In general, however, the country has scored a trade surplus year after year, and this is how it was able to build up a reserve of foreign currencies. The purpose of having such reserves in Egypt and elsewhere is to use them when the country is hit with unexpected hard times, and having a revolution certainly qualifies as being hard times. This is why the country's currency reserves were seen to diminish for a while before they stabilized. In fact, nothing of what happened here is spectacularly out of the ordinary except for what goes on inside the head of the people who wish it was otherwise -- whatever their motives may be.
And like everyone else, Egypt has silos and warehouses where agricultural products are stored. These places are closely monitored; and a report is issued on a monthly basis indicating how much of what they hold is left in them, how much of it is on order from local suppliers and from abroad, how much is on ships sailing toward the country and on ships at the harbor being unloaded. And there is here a point that everyone who writes about economic matters needs to know even if they only write about them in passing. It is this: To have reserves of a commodity for 3 months is ample; to have reserves for 6 months is huge. In fact, this was the first time that Egypt's reserve in wheat had reached the 6 months level. The revelation was a reassuring piece of information not a cause for alarm like Ajami has tried to make it sound.
Let me now take up the subject of tourism and the contribution that the industry makes to the GDP of the country. I begin with this question: Do you believe that someone going through a leisurely day, spending all their time sightseeing and consuming food and drinks, can create 8 times as much economic activity as when they work to produce goods or services that other people would buy? If you answered no, you are on your way to understanding why it is that to say tourism represents 10% of Egypt's economy is to talk rubbish. To see this clearly, you only need simple mathematics and you will understand the example below where I use round figures to make things easy.
The number of foreign tourists who visited Egypt in the last full year before the revolution of 2011 was about 12 million tourists, each of which stayed an average of 10 days in the country. This comes to 120 million person/days which you divide by the 365 days of the year to find that on any given day, there were about 330,000 tourists staying in Egypt. Each day a batch of 33,000 new ones came into the country while 33,000 others left, having stayed in the country for 10 days. These people do sightseeing, eating, drinking and maybe shop for souvenirs also. If you say that these activities represent 10% of the country's economy, it means that 10 times as many tourists or 3.3 million of them being in the country at any time, would create as much economic activity as the entire workforce of Egypt which happens to number 27 million people.
What you do now is divide 27 million by 3.3 million to get the ratio 8, an important number. What it means is that a tourist doing nothing more than eat, drink and be merry creates as much economic activity as 8 working people who may be in the field producing food and cotton, or in the desert mining metals and minerals, or in the factories producing cars and home appliances, or in commercial buildings running a bank or running an insurance company -- and so on and so forth a few million times. Well, my friend, if there exists a place in this world where consumption creates 8 times as much economic activity as production, we should all go there and solve our economic problems once and for all. Alas, there is no place like this anywhere because this is only an optical illusion that was created by people who do not know what they are talking about.
In addition to that -- in case you haven't noticed -- I neglected to take into account the activities generated by the 84 million Egyptians who are the country's consumers. Along with the 330,000 tourists, they too eat, drink and shop for the goods and services produced by the 27 million in the workforce. In reality, therefore, we have here not one ratio but two of them. There is the ratio of 8 we know about, and there is the ratio of 25.5 which you obtain when you divide 84 million by 3.3 million. This means that one consuming tourist generates as much as 8 working people and 25.5 local consumers put together. And what all this adds up to is that we have here what looks like a paradox but really is not. In fact, this is only an apparent discrepancy that can easily be explained. However, this is something that will have to be done in another context at another time.
So then, if you are Fouad Ajami, what do you do after you've made miracles and created optical illusions rivaling the legendary Fantasy Island? Why, there is only one thing to do; you speculate about the gloomy times that promise to mar the future of Egypt. And here is how our esteemed author does it: “The way out of Egypt's impasse is a flawed electoral process … A staggered election … began … and despite expected fraud and intimidation...” By now you are just about ready to give up reading, waiting only for the coup de grace to come and finish off the adventure you started when you chose to read the article. But as surely as there is a Wall Street Journal willing to publish fantasy under the rubric of reality, Fouad Ajami obliges and delivers the coup de grace you have been waiting for.
And here is how he does that. He begins by telling you something that sounds important: “Revolutions always return to their moments and places of brilliance and clarity.” Oh what a nice surprise, you say to yourself, because you always wanted to know if there was something brilliant or clear about a revolution. But expecting him to redeem himself and to brighten your day, you find him saying this instead: “...the protesters returned to Tahrir Square, and in confrontations with the police, 40 people were killed and untold hundreds were wounded.” And this is where you let out a scream of horror that shakes the buildings all around you. And you follow the scream with this puzzled question: Did he just describe as brilliant and clear the death of 40 people and the wounding of hundreds of others? You give up. You don't know what to think anymore except that this man did not brighten your day. He did something else instead; something so horrifying it cannot be described with words.
From there, Ajami goes on to mention a few selected passages out of Egypt's modern history with the purpose of frightening the readers about a political party called the Muslim Brotherhood. And this is an idea that has generated a great deal of fuss in America; fuss that is fed with clichés and stereotypes, themselves concocted to maintain the relationship between Christianity and Islam in a state of perpetual agony. This is how the aim of the Jewish organizations are served, and this is how the ambition of their leaders are fulfilled.
What Fouad Ajami is doing is not interpret the Arab World to English audiences; what he does is enforce the distorted picture that those audiences have of the Arabs. Whether he does what he does deliberately or does it inadvertently is not important because if he didn't know it then, he knows it now and he is not changing.