Quotes from John R. Bradley

The goal of any self-respecting human being tolerant of others is to favor anything that increases a person's ability to control her own fate, and at the very least maintain sovereignty over her own body.

The only chance of a rupture is if Mubarak decides to push Gamal toward the presidency despite objections put forward by the military. The reason the military may object is that Gamal, unlike Nasser, Al-Sadat, and Mubarak himself, is not from within their own military ranks. Some point to the possibility of a military coup in such circumstances.

Unlike in Tunis, prostitutes can be found in all middle-class districts of Cairo, but especially those that are home to the Egyptian elite and holidaying Gulf Arabs, and I know from my years of living in Egypt that they are given to wearing the niqab (a garment covering the whole face with two eyeholes and severely discouraged in Tunisia).

If the Assad regime in Syria were to fall, the likeliest outcome would be a prolonged and bloody civil war. The last thing the Syrian army would be considering, either, as it battles to keep in power the regime it rules in partnership with, is a foreign war. If the Assad regime survives, on the other hand, it will be business as usual: lots of talk and absolutely no action. If anything, domestic unrest has made Israel policy an even lower priority for Damascus.

every fork in the road Nasser went left, Al-Sadat went right, and Mubarak says, "Don't move.

However, "with the right intentions," she has said, "misyar can serve the noble purpose of helping divorced and widowed women financially."58 Zeinab Shahine, a professor of sociology at Egypt's Ain Shams University, agrees. According to Al-Ahram Weekly, there are certain conditions, Shahine believes, when

The Arab Spring has been a dismal failure. All indications are that what comes next will be significantly worse than what existed before, in Tunisia and everywhere else, and the traumatic events up to now have already caused untold havoc and violence and made the lives of innocent ordinary people even more miserable than they already were. Socially and economically, the Arab Spring has put back countries like Tunisia, Yemen, and Syria by decades.

Nasser's coup got rid of everything that was good in Egypt, and slowly replaced everything that was bad with something much worse.

This kind of thing is happening here in Al-Ahram all the time. It's very difficult to keep your hands clean. There are journalists in this building who have done just that. I know it for a fact. They get apartments. Not exactly as gifts, of course. But take that apartment for half a million: The journalist will 'buy' it for one hundred thousand, then sell it for the market price and make a huge profit.

corruption in Egypt is giant, amorphous, and finally ungraspable.

Either there will be a coup d'état, or we will have Muslim extremism.

Given this appalling social climate, the new Library of Alexandria, built at a cost of $230 million in an attempt to revive its fabled ancient predecessor (and resembling nothing so much as a giant satellite dish), has unsurprisingly failed to ignite a renaissance of scholarly acumen.

Given that there is no factual evidence to support the neo-Patais' argument that sexual deprivation causes terrorism, it might be more useful to look at what Arabs and Westerners have in common, rather than what sets them apart.

Tourism Minister Zoheir Garranah has been quoted as saying that hassle is a bigger threat to Egypt's tourism industry than the bombs of militants, and has acknowledged that many tourists, frustrated at being accosted by touts, leave the country "with a bitter taste and vowing never to return." Even for an Arabic speaker, peeling them off can prove a Herculean task, the last resort being a threat of violence.

Of course, it's easy to be overly optimistic when it comes to Egyptian reform. The country has a history of false promises and backtracking dating to the 1970s.

Growing numbers of Western gay sex tourists have discovered that Luxor is billed as a gay hotspot by gay-themed international Web sites. Ostensibly promoting the alien Western concept of "gay rights" in a country where only a tiny, Westernized, urban "gay" elite can or would ever want to relate to it, the Web sites concentrate more heavily on providing up-to-the-minute information to Western gay men looking for paid sex with locals.

An investigative report by the BBC in July 2007 found that thousands of young Egyptian men try to enter Europe illegally every year. Sometimes they set sail from the Egyptian coast aboard fishing boats run by people smugglers. Mostly, though, they undertake the perilous crossing to Italy from neighboring Libya, a country they do not need a visa to visit.

Luxor, Egypt's best known and historically most popular tourist resort. In recent years, the city has also been transformed into the male prostitution capital of the Middle East.

Luxor has long had a reputation as the Sin City of Egypt. Archaeologists from Johns Hopkins University, presently working in the local Temple of Mut, have shown how sex and booze were key aspects of rites carried out by the locals to appease the pharaonic-era gods.

While a man is limited to four wives under a full marriage contract, there is no limit to how many temporary wives he may have, though, as ever, the unmarried women allowed to enter into sigeh partnerships are limited to one temporary husband at a time. The man can also divorce his temporary wife at any time during the contract, whereas the woman cannot.

reminded Al-Aswany of this before I read back to him what he had said about Egypt in the same interview with Egypt Today in response to a devastating survey of the country by Mondial, a leading U.K. provider of advice for foreign companies investing in Egypt and for those seeking travel insurance. The survey had produced a wave of soul-searching in the Egyptian media, and not a few knee-jerk reactions, after it ranked the country's service and tourist sectors a flat zero.

Nasser taught the Egyptians to be cowards, opportunists, and hypocrites.

Malaysia, then, offers an example of what happens when socalled moderate Islamists are appeased by the liberal elite. They provide cover for their more extremist allies to transform society, so it eventually looks like a crude imitation of Saudi Arabia (a totalitarian country, incidentally, whose gross human rights abuses Islamists elsewhere of whatever stripe never dare to criticize). The parallel, as I have said, is most strikingly with Tunisia.

Saudi Arabia, we should remember (as we turn to Indonesia and southern Thailand), in addition to flooding postrevolutionary Egypt with cash and hijacking the political process in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, is also pushing for Jordan and Morocco to join the Gulf Cooperation Council, giving rise to the nightmare scenario of a sort of Greater Wahhabi Kingdom from the borders of Israel to the Atlantic. Just