Perhaps They Don’t Hate Our Values

At 11 on a Tuesday night a few weeks back, my colleagues and I were in a crowded barbershop in central Cairo. A television set in the corner of the shop was tuned to “Men Se Va Al Million,” the most popular television program in Egypt. Reputedly it’s the most popular show ever broadcast across the Arab world, which is not surprising, perhaps, given the success here in the United States of the show’s English--language version, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” In a kind of affirmation of globalization, the men watching in the shop included us in the game, holding up their fingers after each question to show us the correct answer.

The pleasant camaraderie of the moment stood in stark contrast to our situation of a few days earlier, when we had been covering the fighting in the West Bank. We had come to Egypt to report on the effect that the Israeli incursion into Palestinian territory was having on Egyptians’ attitudes toward the U.S.

We certainly found in Egypt those rising levels of hostility toward the U.S. everyone’s been writing about. Every day, the newspapers were full of headlines about alleged Israeli atrocities in the West Bank--atrocities that were implicitly our fault. But standing there in the Cairo barbershop, it seemed that before we resignedly accept that a fresh round of anger from the Islamic world is cause for alarm, we should think about what happened during the last round. In terms of current public attitudes, maybe we’re winning that one.

Let’s back up. After Sept. 11, the mainstream view seemed to accept that globalization had shrunk the world to a point where we were constantly bumping elbows with a billion people--the world’s Muslims--who were irreconcilably hostile to our values. There was a great deal written and broadcast about the natural animosity of the Islamic world toward the U.S.--even to the point of attempting to revive Samuel Huntington’s largely discredited 1993 Foreign Affairs article “The Clash of Civilizations,” which predicted inevitable conflict between traditionalist Islamic peoples and the West.

Yet in Egypt, even at militant places like Cairo University where the students expressed considerable anger at the U.S. for its backing of Israel, what really struck me was what the Egyptians no longer seem to be angry about.

What I didn’t hear, even from the angriest students, was that the United States is the enemy of Islam. Nor did I hear the slogan most prevalent in Egypt during my previous visit in 1993, “Islam is the solution.” Back then, Islamic militants were battling the Egyptian government--and denouncing everything American or Western that globalization was bringing to their country.

After a lot of sneaking around behind the backs of our government escorts that trip, I was eventually put in touch with two young Islamic militants. They were middle-class kids, earnest medical students. At a time when Western human rights groups estimated that the Egyptian government was holding at least 10,000 political prisoners, it was a big risk for them to talk to our cameras, even with their faces obscured. But they firmly believed, as they told us, it was “Islam or disaster.”

The fear then among Western foreign policy experts was that a tide of Islamic militancy could create more anti-Western nations in the mold of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They pointed to Algeria and its even more violent Islamic insurgency, with militants murdering representatives of globalization like pop singers and women wearing makeup.

But another force was also coming into play. In 1994, the year after my visit, Cairo got its first McDonald’s, and thousands of Egyptians showed up on opening day. Now there are many outlets around the city where you can get a McFalafel and fries. Global culture, anathema to Islamic militants, doesn’t seem to be an issue. Even the supposedly militant sheik we visited was uncritical of the U.S., except about its support of Israel. “We know that America is a fair country,” he told us. “We need the American people to push their government toward fairness.” And when the topic of “Men Se Va Al Million,” came up, he beamed. “If I were to go on that show, I would win not 1 but 2 million.”

Violent incidents by Islamic militants have declined in recent years, but according to U.S. officials there is no good measure of the relative level of militancy there. On the surface, however, it would certainly appear to have declined. In Cairo’s poor neighborhoods people routinely told us, “There used to be militants here, but no more.” Now the slogan is “Islam can’t fix your car.” The widespread interest in winning a million seems logical.

In a sense, Egypt has indeed become like Iran--but not in the way we feared. The last time I visited Iran, in the summer of 2000, a growing disenchantment with Islamic rule was apparent everywhere, along with appreciation of what globalization brings. Even in Algeria, I found during my last visit, a majority of people seem to reject Islamic militancy--although the killing there continues.

Cairo today seems to be an argument for the proposition that just maybe, contrary to all the post-Sept. 11 coverage, we all do share some of the same values--many of them carried by globalization. But that could also be where the problem lies. Maybe we aren’t sharing them evenly enough. Maybe we aren’t hated for our values but for who gets left behind.

If so, there can be no comfort in looking to the day when Arab rage over the plight of the Palestinians will subside in Egypt, just as Islamic militancy seems to have today. Because it’s easy to imagine that even if the Palestinians get everything they want, Egypt’s real problems will still be there. And so will the real reasons for its anger.

Get off the freeway that connects downtown Cairo with the tourist attractions of Giza and you’ll see vast neighborhoods of three- to six-story brick buildings in various stages of completion. Many seem to have simply popped up without any coordination, oversized shanties in an immense shantytown. The zigzagging, unpaved streets are garbage--strewn. The home we visited there was far shabbier then the one we had visited the week before in southern Bethlehem’s notorious Dahaishe refugee camp.

Afterward, in my hotel room, I watched CNN’s coverage of the Zimbabwe elections. Irregularities in the voting drew worldwide condemnation. Yet, Egypt is arguably less democratic than Zimbabwe--President Hosni Mubarak likes to run for reelection unopposed--and not only does the U.S. not protest, we give him $2 billion a year in aid. Perhaps the Egyptian people have noticed this discrepancy between our expectations for the Islamic world and those for the rest of the world. If so, perhaps their lurking anger toward us has an element of disappointment to it.

Finally, globalization might be bringing us a problem that transcends Egypt. The strongest backlash to globalization might not come from those rejecting its values--as Al Qaeda and the Taliban tried to do. The greater problem might be with those who crave its benefits but despair of ever getting them. And that comes back to the question of who our enemy really is in our ongoing war on terror. If we were fighting Islamic fundamentalism, then it seems as if we’ve won decisively--at least in terms of public opinion in places like Egypt.

But if we were fighting popular anger and resentment over the fact that the Islamic world is one of the least-developed and least-democratic parts of the world, and that the U.S. backs the status quo in three of the main Islamic countries--Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not coincidentally the three countries that supplied the bulk of Al Qaeda members--then possibly we have a longer haul ahead. As the Egyptians’ anger over Israel shows, there are plenty of causes to rally around other than the belief in the need to violently impose strict Islamic government.

Because, finally, now that the whole Arab world is eager to watch “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?” globalization won’t succeed unless more than a few people win.