Considerations of the Future of Egypt

  I have already detailed the various factors engaged in the potential new government of Egypt.  I have also noted that it is an essential portion of the Middle East to the U.S. government, and likely to the West as a whole.  The Pew Research Center survey of the people within that nation provides some understanding of what direction Egypt might go.  As with most polling, there is an opportunity for the pollers to conform their findings to their desires.  This particular poll seems to confirm the fact that no one has a chance in hell to assume what will happen in Egypt.

   I will write directly from the article in Time Magazine:

"When the Pew Research Center surveyed the Arab world last April, it found that Egyptians have views that would strike the modern Western eye as extreme.  "Pew found that 82% of Egyptians support stoning as a punishment for adultery, 84% favor the death penalty for Muslims who leave the religion, and in the struggle between 'modernizers' and 'fundamentalists,' 59% identify with fundamentalists.

"That's enough to make one worry about the rise of an Iranian-style regime.  Except that his is not all the Pew surveys show.  A 2007 poll found that 90% of Egyptians support freedom of religion, 88% an impartial judiciary and 80% free speech; 75% are opposed to censorship, and, according to the 2010 report, a large majority believes that democracy is preferable to any other kind of government."

   How does one make sense of these findings?  The primary data indicates that Egypt is as lost in the past as are the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx itself.  One must questions the survey itself, in either case, and suppose that it held a different demographic or survey area in each instance.  Or, perhaps, one might believe that as the concept of revolt grew, the freedom of expression was unleashed, and the survey reflects that.  It sounds asinine when one looks at the years of the data taken, right?  Any survey has its faults, so let us not take too much comfort in the idea that those Egyptians from 2007 were more ready for a revolt than in 2011.  There were three year plus timeframe between polls, and dependent upon the survey area, there is a chance that the results suggest that surveyors were responding as they desired within a totalitarian atmosphere.

  Whatever the case, one must assume that Egypt is a highly-divided society, and that vacuum is created by a society that is an amalgamation of many different cultures that have come, that have sometimes conquered, or otherwise have visited and traded with this ancient area of land.  Over 5,000 years, so many different ideas exchanged within the populace, and so many different forms of government have created the true idea of a "cosmopolitan city" of the Ancient World that is is the zeitgeist of such people to to continue to draw upon different ideas from across the nations and governments of the world.

  Let us hope that the spirit of those people, the culture that has spanned the original Pharoahs, the Roman Legions, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, the British Empire, and the two World Wars will nourish and lead them.  If history teaches anyone, it will teach the Egyptian people.  Maybe then, the West can garner some of that edification.  That would be the greatest of East-West exchanges.