Egypt

By: Charles Schmitz

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Egypt

Since ancient times, Egypt’s cultural and political significance has extended far beyond its borders. Ancient Egypt, whose pharaohs first came to power nearly 5000 years ago, pioneered one of the world’s earliest advanced civilizations. Ancient Egypt served as a crossroads between the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, and its culture and people included elements from both neighboring regions. During the Twenty-fifth Dynasty (about 770–657 B.C.E.), black pharaohs from the neighboring kingdom of Kush ruled Egypt, and links of trade and migration have linked Egypt with East and Central Africa since prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptians’ distinctive culture, which developed in the fertile Nile River Valley and Delta, surrounded by hostile deserts, provided a model for surrounding peoples, including the Greeks. By the fourth century B.C.E., however, the tide had turned, and Greek-speaking Macedonian invaders conquered Egypt. Repeatedly over the centuries, Egypt has undergone foreign domination and exploitation only to reemerge as a powerful cultural and political center across wide areas of Africa and the Middle East. After three centuries as the center of the powerful Ptolemaic Empire, Egypt was conquered by the Romans, who made it a province of their own empire and appropriated its agricultural surplus to feed Roman soldiers and citizens.

Egypt

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Conquered by Muslim Arab armies during the seventh century C.E.., Egypt became the center of the powerful Mamluk state during the thirteenth century. Subdued by the Ottoman Turks during the sixteenth century, Egypt went on to conquer large parts of present-day Sudan and the Arabian Peninsula under Muhammad Ali after 1805. Virtually a colony of Great Britain by 1900, Egypt emerged as a champion of Arab nationalism under Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1952. Today Egypt’s significance revolves around its cultural and political leadership in the Arab world and its important role in Middle Eastern geopolitics.

Greek and Roman Dominance

In 332 B.C.E., Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. He ended the rule of the pharaohs, which had endured through thirty dynasties for nearly 2600 years before his conquest. Alexander’s conquest initiated a period of Hellenic dominance in Egypt that lasted nearly a millennium. In the struggle for power after Alexander’s death, Egypt became a separate kingdom under the reign of Ptolemy, who had been one of Alexander’s Macedonian guards. The Ptolemaic Dynasty continued for 300 years until the Romans conquered Egypt in 30 B.C.E. and dethroned Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies. Unlike the Ptolemies, the Romans ruled Egypt from afar, while a heavy Roman military presence enforced the export of Egypt’s rich grain to nourish Rome’s heartland in (modern) Italy.

By the fourth century C.E.. most Egyptians had converted to Christianity. The establishment of a new imperial capital at Constantinople marked the beginning of Egypt’s Byzantine period (330–640 C.E..). During this time Egyptians adopted the Greek alphabet for writing the Egyptian language, which had until then still been written in demotic, a form of writing based on hieroglyphics. This final form of the Egyptian language is known as Coptic, the language of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt today.

Emergence of Islamic Egypt

When the prophet Muhammad united the peoples of Arabia under his leadership in Mecca in about 630 C.E.., his Muslim Arab warriors became a potent new force that quickly and easily destroyed the old world order. They forced the Byzantine Empire to retreat north into Anatolia (now part of Turkey), as the Arabs took control of Syria and Egypt, and later North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The Arab conqueror of Egypt, Amr ibn al-’As, defeated the Byzantine forces at Heliopolis in 640. In Egypt as elsewhere, non-Muslim subjects had to pay an extra tax. However, the Arabs allowed the overwhelmingly Coptic Christian Egyptians to live freely. Under Ibn al-’As, Egyptians enjoyed a period of relative prosperity, tolerance, and peace.

Tourism.  Throughtout much of its modern history, Egypt has enjoyed a robust tourism industry, with travelers from every part of the world eager to see the country's historic landmarks. Photo, c. early 1900s.

(Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

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The Umayyad Dynasty (661–750), however, which ruled Egypt from Syria, began to incorporate Egyptians into Muslim society. Arabic became the official language rather than Coptic or Greek, and the empire promoted a new inclusive Muslim identity rather than an exclusive Arab identity. The empire also allowed the migration of Arabian tribes into Egypt to settle. The conversion of a majority of Egyptians to Islam and the replacement of spoken Egyptian by Arabic, however, took several more centuries to complete.

In the Abbasid period (750–945), power over affairs in Egypt vacillated between the centralized authority of the empire in the Abbasid capital of Baghdad (in modern Iraq) and the local rulers of Egypt, who used Egypt’s wealth to raise armies and challenge the authority of Baghdad. During both the Umayyad and the Abbasid eras, the empire used soldier-slaves—often Turkish or Circassian—as an alternative source of military power. They had been bought as young men outside Muslim lands, converted to Islam, trained in the arts of warfare and statecraft, and employed to maintain a loyal military force for the central ruler. These regiments of slaves, rewarded for their loyalty with various favors, became power brokers in Baghdad and often seized power themselves. In 834, Turkish soldier-slaves received the governorship of Egypt in exchange for their military support for the caliph (the Islamic ruler) in Baghdad, and several times Turkish governors became so powerful that they ruled Egypt autonomously. The most famous of these was Ahmad ibn Tulun, who ruled Egypt from 868 to 884.

The next ruling Dynasty was the Fatimids, who belonged to a Shi’ite sect of Islam. They had established a state in present-day Tunisia, and they set out to challenge the Sunni Muslim Abbasids for control of the Muslim world. Their empire eventually expanded west and east to cover all of North Africa, the Levant, and parts of the Arabian Peninsula. In 969 the Fatimids conquered Egypt and moved their capital there; Egypt became the center of an empire again, rather than a mere province and granary. The Fatimids founded al-Qahira, or modern Cairo, as their capital. After two centuries of rule, however, the Fatimid Empire began to crumble. In 1169 the Fatimid rulers in Egypt had to call on the forces of their former Sunni enemies in Syria to repulse the European Crusader invaders. The commander of these forces was Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, known in Western history as Saladin, the leader who expelled the Crusaders from the Middle East. Salah al-Din not only successfully defended Egypt from the Crusaders, but also replaced the Fatimid ruler and founded a brief Dynasty of his own, known today as the Ayyubids.

The Mamluks quickly succeeded the Ayyubids. The word Mamluk means “owned” in Arabic, and the Mamluks were originally the slave armies of the Ayyubid rulers. In 1250 the Mamluks took power from the ruling Ayyubids and formed their own Dynasty, which was to last formally until 1517. The Mamluk era is divided into two periods, that of the Bahri and that of the Borji Mamluks. In the first period under the Bahri Mamluks, Egypt became the center of the Middle Eastern Islamic world. Controlling the lucrative trade routes connecting the Red Sea (by which ships brought the spices and silks of Asia) and the Mediterranean, the Bahri Mamluks grew rich. The Dynasty supported the arts, and the Bahri era was generally one of great prosperity and cultural development. Under the Borji Mamluks after 1382, however, Egypt, racked by natural disasters and repeated outbreaks of the bubonic plague, entered a period of decline.

Competition among leading Mamluk families further devastated Egypt’s ecology and social fabric. The crops the ruling families collected from peasants as tribute or taxes allowed the Mamluks to purchase more slaves and expand their military power, which in turn enabled them to increase their demands on peasants for taxes. However, this practice often forced desperate peasants to abandon settled life and flee into the desert as nomads. In the long run, this overexploitation ruined Egypt’s prosperity. Meanwhile, at the end of the fifteenth century, Egypt lost its vital monopoly over trade from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean and Europe when the Portuguese began using the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. As the infighting among the Mamluks increased, their rule became more chaotic and decentralized, and they were unable to face the rising new power of the Middle East, the Ottomans.

The Ottomans were Turkish tribes originally from central Asia who had gradually conquered the Byzantine Empire. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire, under Selim the Magnificent, turned its attention to Persia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Ottoman forces arrived in Egypt in 1517. They successfully employed the new military technologies that were sweeping both Europe and the Middle East. The use of powerful firearms had changed the techniques, organization, and cost of warfare and contributed to the rise of larger, more centralized states in the western Atlantic and Mediterranean. The Ottomans exacted taxes and tribute to maximize the flow of wealth back to Istanbul, the new name given to the old Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Once again Egypt had become the granary of a distant empire. However, as time progressed, the Ottoman state relied on the Mamluks to govern Egypt. By the end of direct Ottoman rule in Egypt at the close of the eighteenth century, the Mamluks had once again brought the country to the brink of complete ruin. By 1800 the population of Egypt had declined to between three and five million, whereas in the days of the pharaohs it was estimated at thirty million. In comparison, the population of Egypt was estimated at 74 million in 2003.

Muhammad Ali and the Emergence of Modern Egypt

Ottoman power reached its zenith around 1600. Over the next two centuries, rising European powers managed to turn back Ottoman expansion. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 shook the Ottoman world. Napoleon attacked Egypt to establish French dominance there and preempt any similar move on the part of the British. His modern armies, supplied with the new weapons of the nascent industrial era in Europe, easily routed the Mamluk forces.

Official visit.  President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat during the latter's visit to Washington, DC, April 1980. Among the most important statesmen in modern Middle-Eastern history, Sadat was the first Arab leader to officially recongnize the state of Israel.

(Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

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In a pattern that has been repeated to this day, Egypt became a theater of European geopolitical designs. The British aided the Ottoman rulers in ousting the French and reestablishing Ottoman control over Egypt. The British had decided that the Ottoman Empire should serve as a buffer state against Russian expansion. The vulnerable Ottoman Empire gained renewed vitality by virtue of its strategic location between two rival imperialist powers and on the major communications and trade routes with British India and the Far East.

However, local interests disrupted the best-laid imperialist plans. In Egypt Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman military commander sent by Istanbul in 1801 to evacuate the French, had designs of his own. Muhammad Ali recognized the importance of the industrial revolution happening in Europe. He worked to industrialize Egypt and, in particular, to industrialize its military. In order to finance imports of European factories and advisers, the government exported first food grains and later sugar and long-staple cotton. Egypt’s resulting military strength allowed it to conquer parts of the Arabian Peninsula during the 1810s and much of present-day Sudan during the 1820s.

Muhammad Ali’s regime sought economic as well as military power. It organized Egypt’s farms into one large state enterprise run by state administrators. The state also monopolized trade. To maximize state revenues, Muhammad Ali banned Europeans from trade within Egypt. Egypt dealt directly with European traders only at the Mediterranean port of Alexandria. This trade monopoly angered British and French merchants, and neither London nor Paris looked favorably upon Muhammad Ali’s military and economic ambitions. When the British prompted the Ottoman rulers to enforce special trading privileges for European merchants throughout the Ottoman Empire, they forced Muhammad Ali to relinquish his trade monopolies, withdraw his troops from Anatolia, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula, and reduce the size of his army. In return, in 1841 he received the hereditary title Khedive of Egypt. While still nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt became, in fact, a modern Dynasty of Muhammad Ali and his descendants, lasting until 1952.

Muhammad Ali’s son, Said, and his grandson, Ismail, continued their forebear’s drive for modernization, but their relationship with the European powers differed significantly. Unlike Muhammad Ali, his son and grandson accepted foreign loans and granted concessions to European contractors. Their financial inexperience and the unscrupulousness of international lenders brought financial troubles and eventually the loss of political autonomy.

Said and Ismail vastly expanded the physical infrastructure of Egypt. They commissioned railroads, irrigation schemes, ports, and other communications and transport facilities, but their investments left the Egyptian government deeply indebted. The Suez Canal typified their predicament. The French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps manipulated the Egyptians into providing the land and labor and borrowing most of the capital for the project, in return for which the Egyptians received almost nothing. The canal was completed in 1869; by 1875 the British government under Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had bought the indebted Egyptian government’s majority share of stock, and the Egyptians lost control over this vital communications and commercial link, built with Egyptian funds on Egyptian territory.

The increasing contact with Europe also brought new cultural trends. Said and Ismail founded schools to train Egyptian personnel capable of administering the rapidly modernizing economy. Religious thinkers who had always seen Islam as the highest achievement of humanity tried to understand the new precarious position of the Muslim world in relation to European domination. They championed a return to the scriptural roots of Islam. Their call for pan-Islamic resistance to European dominance sparked the first of the modern Islamist cultural movements. The movement spread among the urban elite of the emerging national community of Egypt. At the same time, there were those who attempted to marginalize the influence of religion in daily life and to adopt the more secular attitudes of contemporary Europe.

Debt led to two significant developments: European control of the country and the advent of private property in agricultural land, previously owned by the state. When Egypt began to default on its loans to European bankers, a joint French-British agency intervened in 1876 to oversee government tax collection and the fulfillment of Egypt’s financial obligations to European bankers. Private property came into being when the government attempted to raise domestic revenue by granting private property rights in exchange for current payment of future taxes. However, Ismail’s modernization of the Egyptian military had created an Egyptian officer corps that increasingly resented European encroachment on Egyptian sovereignty. When one of these officers, Ahmad ‘Urabi Pasha, led a revolt against the Europeans and their Egyptian allies, the British used the opportunity to begin a military occupation of the country in 1882 that was to last until 1954.

Egypt under British Domination

The British exercised increasingly effective control over the affairs of the country, although they allowed the khedive to remain as the nominal ruler of Egypt and left most government offices in the hands of Egyptians. However, a British adviser oversaw each Egyptian government ministry. The British blocked efforts by Egyptian nationalist intellectuals and khedive Abbas Khilmi, who came to the throne in 1892, to resist British rule. In 1898 Egyptian and British forces jointly reconquered Sudan, which had declared its independence in 1885. Meanwhile, the British administration streamlined the Egyptian economy into an efficient agricultural export machine. A new class of wealthy Egyptian landowners supported the British in the development of the cotton and sugar export economy. In 1907, however, these Egyptian landowners began to demand more control over the economy through the establishment of a national bank. This would become part of the institutional basis of modern Egyptian nationalism.

At the onset of World War I (1914–1918), when the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany, the British declared that Egypt no longer belonged to the Ottomans. The British declared Egypt a protectorate in 1914 and ruled through martial law during the war. Though the 1918 Versailles Treaty and the new League of Nations promoted the concept of individual nations’ right to self-determination, the League actually helped perpetuate European Colonial rule over Africa and Asia. The European victors at Versailles granted a mandate over Egypt to the British. Such paternalism deeply offended Egyptian nationalists, who formed a committee to travel to London and Paris to ask for a seat at the League of Nations and to claim their right to self-determination. In response, British authorities arrested the Egyptian leaders and deported them to the Seychelles. This British act of repression provoked a mass outpouring of nationalist protest and unrest in Egypt. In response, the British backed a 1922 declaration of “independence” that limited Egyptian sovereignty and preserved British control of the military, the Suez Canal, and the Sudan, which they then jointly ruled with Egypt. The British retained this control by exploiting internal political divisions in Egypt, particularly the competing claims of the royal family, who sought to retain a role in Egyptian politics, and the nationalists, who wished sovereignty to lie only with the Egyptian people. The British helped devise a constitution granting extensive powers to the new king (the former sultan), including the power to dismiss the nationalist-dominated Parliament. Thus during the 1920s and 1930s there were frequent dismissals of Parliament and ensuing protests.

Egyptian industrialization and urbanization accelerated during these decades; these processes gave rise to class divisions and mass politics. During the 1930s in particular, new mass organizations contrasted with the more elitist parties that had previously dominated the Parliament. The most significant of the new organizations was the Muslim Brotherhood. It was established in 1928—not by a member of the religious establishment, but by a lay state schoolteacher—in order to spread institutions supporting Muslim morality. The Brotherhood built schools, student associations, and social organizations to aid the poor. Though not formally a political party, the Brotherhood was to become a powerful force in Egyptian society.

At the same time, the currents of Arab nationalism were developing throughout the Arab world. This movement sought first and foremost to overcome European imperialism, but it also held a larger humanist vision combining social equality, rationalist social planning, and cultural modernism. Arab nationalism promised economic progress for the wide segments of society excluded by the elitist economic and political structure of much of the Middle East until then, and it would inspire the coup that deposed Egypt’s British client monarchy.

Arab Nationalism and Postcolonial Egypt

During World War II Egypt played an important role in the Allied war effort; after the war popular demands grew for true political independence from the British, and, more important, for social development. A few very wealthy landowners and industrialists monopolized political and economic power in Egypt. These elites engaged in petty strivings for personal power and ignored the economic and political concerns of the Egyptian people. With popular frustration mounting, the ineptness and defeat of the Egyptian army in the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 finally triggered the collapse of the old order.

Two political currents were capable of challenging Egypt’s entrenched elites: the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab nationalists. Arab nationalist soldiers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, seized the moment in July 1952 and toppled the monarchy in a coup d’état. At first the Brotherhood and the nationalists maintained an uneasy alliance, for though many of their ideals and goals coincided, they had some fundamental philosophical disagreements, particularly around the issue of religion. By 1954 relations between the two groups had soured, and Nasser, who became prime minister in April 1954, began a campaign of repression against the Brotherhood.

The Second Library of Alexandria.  An Egyptian fishing boat sails past the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 2001, shortly before the library's official opening.

( Amr Nabil/AP Images)

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Nasser’s legitimacy depended on his ability to overcome the social, economic, and political problems that the former regime had been unable to resolve, one of which was the occupation of the Suez Canal zone by British troops. Nasser negotiated a British evacuation in 1954. In 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal after the United States and the World Bank refused to help finance the Aswan High Dam. In response, the French, British, and Israelis mounted an attack on Egypt that the Egyptians could not repel. The attack, though successful, provoked a worldwide reaction against what was clearly an imperialist war. Both the United States and the Soviet Union demanded that the attacking forces withdraw. The result was a resounding political victory for Nasser and the Egyptians.

In retaliation for the attack, Nasser confiscated the property of British and French firms operating in Egypt. These initial confiscations were clearly political in nature and not part of an overall economic strategy. However, as the Cold War spurred the superpowers’ involvement in the Arab world, Egypt increasingly turned to the Soviet Union, both as a patron and a model. By the early 1960s Egypt was building a state socialist economy. The state undertook extensive industrial development, and, though markets still functioned, the state controlled prices for most products. In agriculture, the state confiscated the land of the very wealthy landowners and leased it to landless peasants; it set up cooperatives to raise agricultural productivity and channeled the surplus into urban industrial investment. The government introduced laws that protected peasants from eviction even when they could not pay rents, and made rental agreements hereditary on both private and state land. All of these measures aimed to improve the livelihoods of the middle and lower income classes upon whose support Nasser relied.

However, Nasser’s Arab nationalism suffered a humil-iating setback. In 1967 growing tensions between Israel and the Arab nations of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria erupted in the Six-Day War. The Israeli army seized Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and other Arab territories. Following Nasser’s death in 1970, his successor, Anwar al-Sadat, decided to reposition Egypt geopolitically by spurning Soviet aid and aligning with the United States. Sadat hoped that U.S. mediation could resolve the conflict with Israel and that U.S. aid would help Egypt to grow economically. As part of this realignment, Sadat traveled to Israel in 1977 at the invitation of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to begin peace negotiations. Sadat’s perceived betrayal of the Palestinian and Arab nationalist cause sparked outrage in the Arab world, and Arab leaders expelled Egypt from the Arab League.

Sadat turned away from state-led industrialization and moved to liberalize the Egyptian economy. He removed controls that prohibited foreign multinationals from operating in Egypt; he also lessened restrictions on foreign commodities and opened Egyptian markets to multinational competition. Still, the government has been slow to abandon the state-owned industrial structure, and the agricultural laws protecting peasants from eviction were only effectively repealed in 1997. Because of Egypt’s strategic importance, the United States has tolerated Egypt’s hesitation to privatize and deregulate its economy; it has not forced Egypt to follow a strict structural adjustment program, even though Egypt receives the second-largest share of U.S. foreign aid.

Meanwhile, another force was rising in the Middle East: a reorganized Islam-based (or Islamist) political opposition. Most of the Arab nationalist regimes adopted secularism and socialism. Islamist ideology fundamentally opposed these secular tendencies and the reliance on Western, albeit socialist, visions of modern society. Saudi Arabia and its major Western ally, the United States, had supported and funded the Islamist political opposition during the 1960s and 1970s, and Saudi support for some groups continued into the 1980s and possibly later. The power of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) oil cartel and the incredible flow of wealth into the Arabian Peninsula after 1973 further shifted power within the Middle East away from the Arab nationalist regimes and toward U.S.-aligned Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

In Egypt, Sadat’s political maneuvers also fostered the growth of Islamist political movements. Nasser’s regime had imprisoned many Islamist political leaders in order to curtail opposition, but this repression, in fact, bred more strident opposition. Sadat attempted to use the Islamist opposition for his own political ambitions by abandoning socialist policies and releasing many of Nasser’s political prisoners. Ironically, his attempt to court the Islamists proved deadly for him. The infusion of jail-hardened leadership strengthened many Islamist groups, and they began to mobilize against the Sadat regime after its accommodation with Israel and the United States and its failure to follow an Islamist program. Perceiving a threat to his regime, Sadat arrested 1,300 opposition leaders in September 1981. Angered by the arrests and his rapprochement with Israel, radical Islamists assassinated Sadat the following month.

Egypt under Sadat’s successor, President Hosni Mubarak, has faced increasing pressure from populist Islamist groups who often represent those dissatisfied with the absence of true democracy and the lack of substantial economic progress, particularly among the poor. The regime has faced military attacks by political Islamist groups throughout the nation, and Mubarak has relied primarily upon the military to defend his regime. In 1992 a series of attacks in southern Egypt provoked a large-scale military crackdown. The military failed to suppress the militant opposition completely, and in 1995 attacks resumed, this time at popular tourist sites. Tourism represents one of three main sources of foreign exchange for Egypt, aside from foreign aid; the others are worker remittances and oil. Hence, the attacks on tourist sites aimed to destroy the economy and bring down the regime. The worst such attack, in Luxor in late 1997, showed that the military strategy has not been able to root out such groups.

Under Mubarak the Egyptian regime has undertaken partial democratization, though limited by the fear of religiously inspired opposition groups. Political parties are allowed to operate in Egypt, but only those few approved by the regime. Upon coming to power President Mubarak promised to accept the constitutional limit of two terms; however, during his second term he urged Parliament to amend the constitution so that he could legally remain in power. He is currently the longest-serving leader in Egypt’s modern history. The largest Islamist political group is the Muslim Brotherhood, which is still legally prohibited from political work. The Brotherhood represents a moderate form of Islamist opposition, and it exerts its power through participation in other, legal political parties. During the 1990s, Mubarak’s continued reliance on the military and his ban on Islamist political opposition threatened his regime’s stability, particularly when ordinary Egyptians continued to face economic hardship. The September 11 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. further diminished tourism revenues, adding to Egypt’s economic challenges. Citing the lingering economic crisis and political corruption, in 2003 the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition groups unleashed scathing criticisms of the Mubarak government, the worst criticism the president has faced since taking power. Turning around Egypt’s slow economy may depend on the development of a gas export market.

In recent years, Egypt has come under new scrutiny for reported human rights violations, especially those related to the torture of nominal enemy combatants in the so-called War on Terror. A 2008 report from Amnesty International found the entrenchment of governmental powers “that have been used systematically to violate human rights, including prolonged detention without charge, torture and other ill-treatment, restrictions on freedom of speech, association and assembly, and grossly unfair trials before military courts and special emergency courts.” To date, however, such criticism has failed to affect any substantial change in Cairo’s policy regarding detention and the treatment of prisoners. Meanwhile, terrorism in Egypt—much of it fueled by Islamic extremism—continues to be a problem. A series of attacks in 2005 struck Sharm el-Sheikh—killing eighty-eight people and injuring more than 150 others—as well as Cairo. A year later, several explosions wracked Dahab, a resort city on the Sinai Peninsula, killing two dozen.

Despite this, in the early twenty-first century, Egypt continues to be the cultural center of the Arab world. Egyptian television, videos, and music are seen and heard throughout the Arab world, and intellectuals from throughout the Arabic-speaking world congregate in Egypt, especially Cairo. Egypt plays a leading role in Arab regional politics as well as in international diplomacy. Egypt, or “the mother of the world” in local parlance, thus maintains its role as a vibrant political and cultural center in the modern world, a role it has played repeatedly since ancient times.

See also African socialism; Alexandria and Grecian Africa: An Interpretation; Cold War and Africa; Crusades; Egypt, Ancient Kingdom of; Egyptian Mythology; Islam in Africa; Kush, Early Kingdom of; Libya; Slavery in Africa; Structural Adjustment in Africa.

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