Got the Motives:
Where's the Action?
Review by Sheryl Ga Feldman

Inside Egypt:
The Land of the Pharoahs
On the Brink of a Revolution
John R. Bradley
Palgrave Macmillan
256 pp

On our pages People Patient and Patient? Not!, we, like most Egyptians ask why the people have been so slow to challenge the government.  Inside Egypt, an engaging if painful book by journalist Robert Bradley explores the quest in the round.

And while he amply documents the reasons why Egyptians, in his opinion, should revolt, he's much less convincing when it comes to showing that they are likely to produce one.

His real contribution is to supply the texture of politial tension in the country.

First-off, he avoids stock descriptions of a western friendly country threatened by an evil Muslim Brotherhood while trudging, albeit sluggishly, from an authoritarian regime to greater democracy and a free market.

In several fascinating chapters, he tours us through Egypt's complexity; its people of different faiths - Muslim, Christian Coptic and a mix of the two - and cultures - urban, upper Egyptian and Sinai Bedouin.  Strikingly he argues that Muslim Egyptians tend to behave more like Sufis, a more spiritually irented vein of Islam, than politicized Sunnis.

Those who do vote for the Brotherhood, he suspects, do so only because they're the one protest vote (sometimes) avaialble; not because they feel any strong desire for a more Islamic state.  Furthermore, Brotherhood votes (said to be 20% in the 2005 in the 2005 elections) may have been manipulated upwards by a government wanting to keep the United States scared of what would happen should it withdraw support from the current regime.

That said, the true political voice of the Egyptians can only be conjectured.  Is it impossibly distored by the tactics of the current regime, which include torture, which Bradley reports with nauseating detail.

As if

"Egypt after Mubarak", the final chapter of Inside Egypt is less satisfying.  True, Bradley describes the politics that depress hope and lines up the evils of the government's privatization practices, but he fails to show that Egypt is on the "brink of revolution."

The US, he says, should neither invade nor abandon Egypt; instead it should strengthen its support of democracy and political reform. 

Oh well.

See other reviews:

New Statesman
Al Masry al Youm

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