Quotes from John R. Bradley

best soldiers to the southern Arabian tribal country and thus leaving Egypt defenseless in 1967, was not only a tactical military miscalculation; it was also strikingly hypocritical, coming from a man who had railed against foreign interference in his own country, and who would place pan-Arab unity at the top of his foreign policy agenda.

This is the story everywhere in the wider Muslim world. Students go to the Middle East on generous scholarships and study Salafi or Wahhabi doctrine, and they learn there that jabbering on at top volume about martyrs and violent jihad is a highly effective way of whipping up religious fervor. In the home country, hardline religious schools spring up, like the one I visited in Thailand, and spread their obsession with ritual, code, dress, and other apparent trivia.

The simplistic nature of Islamism means that it thrives on victim narratives and clearly identifiable enemies. When there is no such simple, immediate outside threat against which sentiment can be rallied, and when peaceful coexistence is self-evidently in people's day-to-day interest, it finds it much less easy to gain traction.

But the wider ramifications only begin there: Even Western men who accompany their Western wives to Egypt can find themselves fuming at the unwanted attention directed her way, and not just in Luxor. Egyptians from all over the country, after all, travel to work in the tourist resorts, and the reputation of older foreign females has hit rock bottom throughout the country. Altercations are commonplace. Sometimes, the consequences can be deadly.

But Egyptian men would do well to learn that they should treat others as they would be treated themselves. For many of them, too, are also steeped in ignorance when it comes to the question of how older Western women normally behave, based on generalizations in light of the relatively small number who are on the lookout for a bit of "touchy, feely.

Fundamentalism only ever deepens public hypocrisy, not public morality.

If single Western women travelers have a hard time in Luxor, it is as nothing as compared to what single Western men have to suffer.

the way Islamism has infested the political system, again a warning for the Middle East. Perhaps the most striking example is the treatment of the minority Ahmadiyya sect, which finds its parallel in Egypt and Tunisia with the renewed persecution of Jews, Christians, and Sufis there.

That constriction of discourse cannot be unconditionally accepted, but the problem in condemning it at the present time is that the group most determined to bring about change is also the one it is most difficult to have any sympathy with: the Islamists.

But if Nasser's gift to the Egyptians was their sense of pride, Mubarak's curse is to have created a cultural climate where the only rewarded character traits are shameless opportunism and lack of dignity.

To Egypt's eternal shame—this is, after all, a country that makes it a crime to besmirch its image abroad—nearly the only help is coming from overseas. Worse, some of it comes from the U.N. World Food Program, more often associated with the victims of famine in North Korea and the displaced of sub-Saharan Africa than with booming tourist regions.

The government must rethink its strategy toward the Bedouin, or else those in the area who are armed will turn it into the war that Cairo seems to be pushing for.

Egypt is now a deeply conservative country that, over the past two decades, has so pervasively succumbed to the Wahhabi customs promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood that, in some cities, you might as well be in Saudi Arabia. After the revolution, a poll in Egypt suddenly reported that 75 percent of the people support the Muslim Brotherhood.23 That seems an implausible conversion rate from a mere 30 percent before the revolution.

despite having a thriving gay prostitution scene, Damascus is unlike just about every other Middle Eastern city I have visited in not having any adolescent rent boys.

Not that anyone needs much of an excuse to stay away from Cairo, with its chronic traffic congestion, choking pollution, and legions of touts who have a very well-earned reputation for ripping off all and sundry, but especially Gulf Arabs.

September 2011 Salafis were calling for the covering of Egypt's pharaonic monuments because they were an affront to its Islamist identity.

Few of the women I saw on the streets of Damascus wore head scarves, and the men were as open-minded, at least in their conversations with me, as any I would find in London or New York.

The local men who cruise with other men told me that everyone understood they were free to do whatever they liked, and without hassle from the authorities, if under-eighteens were not involved, to the extent that those who preferred adolescent rent boys are known to travel to Beirut or Istanbul, where word on the street is that they are available in abundance (for the right price).

After all, there is in more stable, developed countries like the United States and Britain a quantifiably more vicious culture of child abuse. A report released in January 2010 by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics made clear that sexual abuse in juvenile detention is a national crisis. Some 12.1 percent of 26,550 children represented in the survey by a sample of 9,000 who were interviewed said they had been sexually abused at their current facility during the preceding year,

Mansour earned the nickname "Al-Turbiny," from the air-conditioned express trains linking Cairo with Egypt's second city Alexandria, whose roofs were the favored location for his crimes. Police said he would to rape, torture, and chop up his victims on carriage roofs before tossing them on to the trackside, dead or barely alive.

Indeed, if they had read Moubayed's article, what might have struck them most is that they appeared only as a supporting cast, their safety and well-being hardly given a nod to. The thrust of the argument was that prostitution should be accepted because it benefits men. Nor was Moubayed's flip remark to me about the material obsessions of "nagging" women an Oscar-winning moment.

The irony lost on all, though, is that the Syrian regime is quietly keeping alive the traditions that Moubayed lamented had vanished, if not through his preferred method of legalization, then at least by refraining from interfering in the private daily conduct and morality of its citizens. Moubayed told me that the regime, despite the furor caused by his article, had not reacted to it at all, either positively or negatively.

It was no coincidence that the most spectacular and tragic terrorist attack carried out in the country's recent history occurred in the West Bank of Luxor at Hatshepsut Temple. In 1997, dozens of Egyptians and tourists were massacred at the site.

they were, it is now obvious, a tiny minority, who had neither the ruthless political skills nor the popular support they needed to triumph. The vast bulk of the protestors knew nothing of political ideology. They were brought into the streets, not by a burning desire for free and fair elections, but by the dire economic circumstances