On February 17, 2008 the New York Times published an article by Michael Slackman under the title: "Stifled, Egypt's Young Turn to Islamic Fervor."
Reading the article you certainly get the impression that this is what the writer was seeing but in fact he was experiencing an optical illusion. The young in Egypt as everywhere else are turning to religion not because they are stifled but because the world is changing too fast before their eyes, and the ground is shifting under their feet. They look for answers to their many questions but the media such as the New York Times are not providing them because they are just as confused themselves.
Let me digress for a moment before I get back to that article. When the old Soviet Union broke up there was a bigger jubilation among the American pundits than there was in all of Russia not because the Americans had become more patriotic about Russia than the Russians but because of a more selfish reason.
The American pundits were seeing visions of the Russians recreating their own version of the Federalist Papers. The pundits foresaw their own American history coming back to life as if they were about to go back in time and live through such precious moments as they could only read about in the history textbooks.
Well, this did not happen in Russia but something bigger is happening in Egypt right now which the New York Times is missing because it cannot find a better reporter to send there. What is happening in Egypt is the transformation of the most ancient society on Earth from an agrarian one to an industrial one.
Over and over again in the New York Times as in other publications the reporters are told by an Egyptian "Nobody is helping anymore." Instead of stopping here and probing what this means, the reporters let it slide and keep on thinking inside the same old box without realizing that what they just heard was the uneasy expression of someone yearning for a simpler time. That was a time in Egypt when you could not let out a whisper of distress without seeing everyone rush to offer their help to you.
In essence then, those young people in Egypt are not stifled because the economy is stagnating, they are entranced, almost paralyzed by the speed of the change that is taking place around them. The Industrial Revolution which took two hundred years to mature in Europe is being rushed through at ten times its natural speed in Egypt and the people don't know how to keep up with it. They look around for help but see that everyone else is swept by the same current including the government and all its departments.
Perhaps it is because of the experience that the pundits in America have had with the Russian transformation or perhaps because the Industrial Revolution does not mean as much to them as the Federalist Papers but to neglect to chronicle the redoing of the Industrial Revolution is a dereliction of journalistic duty.
The local journalists cannot do this job as well as those who grew up in a society that has already industrialized, and it is a shame that a publication such as the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle waste paper and ink to report on the shallow and the trivial while missing out on something as valuable as the live re-enactment of history.