Pricing and Subsidy

Beginning in 1952 the government initiated a program of price controls that included both indirect taxation and subsidies. The aim was to reallocate resources to serve various goals ranging from industrialization to social welfare, but the effects were mixed. In agriculture, for example, the state set the price of agricultural inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides, and crops, especially cotton and sugar. Some basic consumer commodities, especially food and energy, and services, such as education, were subsidized to make them available for the bulk of the population. In industry, public enterprises paid subsidized rates for energy but had to sell their products to consumers at fixed, low prices.

Price distortions and subsidies were magnified over time, resulting in the misallocation of resources and straining the government budget. For example, in 1987 the ratio of consumer price per kilowatt-hour of electricity to production and distribution costs was less than 0.25. This shortfall, coupled with rising consumption, contributed to a growing government deficit, which compelled the government to reconsider its pricing policy.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

Development Planning

Planning in Egypt remained essentially a blueprint for investment, and the balance between supply and demand was adjusted through quasi-market mechanisms and fiscal and monetary policies. The emergence of Egyptian economic planning could be traced to the creation in 1952 of the Permanent Council for National Production (PCNP). The PCNP initiated partial planning by surveying the country’s basic economic resources and proposing investment projects and budgets. More comprehensive planning awaited the formulation of the First Five-Year Plan (1960-65). The plan was the work of the National Planning Committee, which absorbed the PCNP and other planning affiliates. It sought progress on all economic fronts, following what economists called a balanced growth model, which required heavy investments. It favored heavy industry, electricity, irrigation, and land reclamation–a persistent pattern since then.

Achievements were mixed: GDP grew at a rate close to the target of 7 percent per annum, but other goals were not met. The lack of macroeconomic coordination and implementation mechanisms, as well as the projection of unrealistic targets are cited as reasons for this failure. Furthermore, private-sector investment, which was expected to play a key role, did not materialize, especially after the wave of nationalization in the early 1960s.

A number of subsequent plans were never implemented. It is indicative of the long hiatus in planning that the next plan was also called the First Five-Year Plan (FY 1982-86). (To avoid confusion, this plan is referred to as the 1980s First Five-Year Plan, and the earlier one as the 1960s First Five-Year Plan). It was seen as part of a long-term plan extending to the year 2002. With this plan, the Ministry of Planning began to assume major responsibility for the economic process.

The plan itself had the same thrust as that of the 1960s, emphasizing heavy industry and electricity, and suffered similar problems. Apart from improving the infrastructure, especially in the metropolitan areas, its targets, including an annual GDP growth rate of 8 percent, were seldom accomplished. Before its conclusion, Egypt was feeling the heavy burden of external debt.

The latest plan, the Second Five-Year Plan (FY 1987-91), promised continuity and change. The most prominent investment areas were those of electricity and power, industry, public utilities, irrigation, and land reclamation. It anticipated a GDP growth rate of 5.8 percent per year, which in early 1990 it was already failing to meet. Most noticeably, the plan envisaged that private-sector investment would almost double to 39 percent of the total, from 23 percent in the previous plan. The increase was predicated upon an assessment of the sector’s outlays in the preceding plan, which showed outlays as often surpassing targets, and upon the incentives the government would offer. The government specified other plan objectives, such as increased productivity, rather than added capacity; a shift to exports rather than import substitution; improvement of data gathering by spreading computer usage and training census personnel; and redressing regional disparities through investment in new and previously neglected regions.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

Muhammad Ali’s era saw strong state intervention in the economy; the subsequent century witnessed a passive state and the dominance of private foreign and domestic investors. Yet both failed to achieve economic development or to lift Egypt from poverty and dependence. The Gamal Abdul Nasser regime (1952-70) inherited an underdeveloped economy with great inequalities. A few rich foreigners and nationals controlled the country’s wealth, from large landed estates to manufacturing and commercial firms, while the bulk of the population was poor and disenfranchised. The new regime, borrowing from the debates and programs put forward by various political parties and interests during the 1930s and World War II, undertook the task of economic restructuring.

The process transformed the state into the dominant economic agent in the country and culminated in a new economic system labeled “Arab socialism” in the National Charter issued in 1962. The government implemented a land reform program that aimed at eliminating what it referred to as a “feudalist” stratification of landholding and instead distributing land to small peasants and the landless. By 1964 a huge public sector had evolved, including all utilities, communications, and finance as well as large manufacturing enterprises, transportation, wholesale and foreign trade, some big retail stores, and construction firms. By 1973 the ratio of public to private in the composition of GDP was 58 to 42 in contrast to 15 to 85 in 1953. The government fixed the exchange rate of the Egyptian pound, began development planning, and controlled foreign trade. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and in the early 1960s nationalized about 300 key enterprises owned by Egyptian nationals and foreigners. The private sector came under extensive regulation.

Because of the economic difficulties in the second half of the 1960s, which were exacerbated by the June 1967 War with Israel, the regime began to reconsider aspects of state controls and its attitude toward the private sector. A pronounced shift in orientation, however, awaited Sadat’s takeover at the end of 1970.

A combination of economic problems, political considerations, and his own predilections led Sadat after the October 1973 War, to declare a new policy he dubbed infitah (opening or open door). The main ingredients of the policy were to relax existing government controls over the economy and bureaucratic procedures, to encourage the private sector, and to stimulate a large inflow of foreign funds.

The open-door policy succeeded in generating a large inflow of foreign funds in the form of remittances, foreign grants, and aid, especially from the United States after the signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel. The economy also grew at impressive rates. But the negative side of the policy was that the country was flooded with imports, and the government was compelled several times in the 1980s to reimpose import restrictions. The income gap between rich and poor widened, and conspicuous consumption reappeared.

Despite the infitah, the government found itself even more deeply involved in the economy. Subsidies grew from 1 percent of GDP in 1970 to 11 percent in 1979. The state’s contribution to fixed investment remained high, at 87 percent in 1977. In the same year, government employment accounted for 32 percent of the total, but the increased personnel did little to clear up the bureaucratic snarls that blocked development. Private domestic and international investment went primarily to housing and trading companies. Foreign investment remained meager because of the cumbersome regulations, the bureaucracy, the political uncertainty, and insufficient incentives.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

STRUCTURE, GROWTH, AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ECONOMY

By necessity if not by design, the revolutionary regime gave considerably greater priority to economic development than did the monarchy, and the economy has been a central government concern since then. While the economy grew steadily, it sometimes exhibited sharp fluctuations. Analysis of economic growth is further complicated by the difficulty in obtaining reliable statistics. Growth figures are often disputed, and economists contend that growth estimates may be grossly inaccurate because of the informal economy and workers’ remittances, which may contribute as much as one-fourth of GNP. According to one estimate, the gross domestic product (GDP), at 1965 constant prices, grew at an annual compound rate of about 4.2 percent between 1955 and 1975. This was about 1.7 times larger than the annual population growth rate of 2.5 percent in the same period. The period between 1967 and 1974, the final years of Gamal Abdul Nasser’s presidency and the early part of Anwar as Sadat’s, however, were lean years, with growth rates of only about 3.3 percent. The slowdown was caused by many factors, including agricultural and industrial stagnation and the costs of the June 1967 War. Investments, which were a crucial factor for the preceding growth, also nose-dived and recovered only in 1975 after the dramatic 1973 increase in oil prices.

Like most countries in the Middle East, Egypt partook of the oil boom and suffered the subsequent slump. Available figures suggest that between 1975 and 1980 the GDP (at 1980 prices) grew at an annual rate of more than 11 percent. This impressive achievement resulted, not from the contribution of manufacturing or agriculture, but from oil exports, remittances, foreign aid, and grants. From the mid-1980s, the GDP growth slowed as a result of the 1985-86 crash in oil prices. In the two succeeding years, the GDP grew at no more than an annual rate of 2.9 percent. Of concern for the future was the decline of the fixed investment ratio from around 30 percent during most of the 1975-85 decade to 22 percent in 1987.

The post-World War II growth was accompanied by a certain degree of diversification of the economic structure, although not without serious flaws in the diversification. By 1952 agriculture’s share of GDP at fiscal year (FY) 1959 market prices was 33 percent, industry’s (including mining and electricity) share reached 13 percent, and the service sectors’ share amounted to 54 percent. The diversification resulted from the decline of agriculture’s contribution to the GDP and the ascendancy of industry and, particularly, of government services. Agriculture’s share in the GDP dropped by more than half from 1952, stabilizing near 15 percent through most of the 1980s. Industry’s share moved in the opposite direction: from only 13 percent in 1952, it hovered around 35 percent in the 1980s.

Although the industrial sector’s contribution to the GNP rose during this period, that growth was due to the increase in energyrelated activity, especially oil-drilling. Manufacturing stagnated and may even have declined. In 1974 (when data for the subsector became available), manufacturing accounted for 15 percent of GNP, but its share fell to 12 percent in 1986 and remained there in early 1990. The lackluster performance of manufacturing was one of the main reasons for the Egyptian economy’s inability to become self-sustaining, and for its dependence on oil and external financing.

The services (including construction) held relatively steady, comprising around one-half of GDP, a figure that included the contributions of the various subsectors. An important subsector from a developmental viewpoint was the one entitled “other services”–mostly government services. These averaged 14.2 percent of the growth in GDP in the years from 1952 to 1959 and 32.7 percent of the growth in the years from 1959 to 1969. The increase resulted primarily from the expansion in the bureaucracy that followed the 1961 decree guaranteeing government jobs for all university graduates. The trend continued under Anwar as Sadat (1970-79), and slowed, or may have reversed under Husni Mubarak as the state became financially incapable of hiring the many new jobseeking graduates. Although government employment may have encouraged economic growth temporarily, it impeded it over the long run, competing for scarce investment funds and exacerbating the trade deficit.

Infrastructure

In spite of progress in the 1980s, by the end of the decade Egypt still had a long way to go in expanding and improving existing services such as housing, transportation, telecommunications, and water supply. Housing remained inadequate; urban dwellings were often very crowded, and residents lived in makeshift accommodations. Housing was essentially a private activity, and the government tended to underinvest in the sector. The electric grid reached essentially all villages in Egypt by the early 1980s, but blackouts in Cairo and other cities were not uncommon. A major sewage project was under way. It aimed at revamping and expanding the overflowing, antiquated network of sewers, pumping stations, and treatment plants. Some of the work was scheduled for completion by 1991. With help from the United States Agency for International Development (AID), telephone lines doubled at the end of the FY 1982-86 Five-Year Plan.

Because infrastructural improvements and additions were costly and required a long lead time, no relief was anticipated before the mid-1990s. The FY 1987-91 Five-Year Plan allocated more than £E4.1 billion for infrastructure. The problem that faced the government was how to balance the badly needed improvement of the infrastructure against the fact that such investments created only temporary employment and had small impact on industries that served or were served by the infrastructure.

Transportation

Egypt’s road and rail network was developed primarily to transport population and was most extensive in the densely populated areas near the Nile River (Nahr an Nil) and in the Nile Delta. Areas along the Mediterranean coast were generally served by a few paved roads or rail lines, but large areas of the Western Desert, Sinai Peninsula (Sinai), and the mountains in the east were inaccessible except by air. The Nile and a system of canals in the Delta were the traditional means of transporting goods, although freight was increasingly carried by truck or rail. The entire system was unable to keep up with rapid population growth, particularly in the large urban areas, and expansion and modernization of all forms of transportation were under way.

In early 1990, Egypt had more than 49,000 kilometers of roads, of which about 15,000 kilometers were paved, 2,500 kilometers were gravel, and the remaining 31,500 kilometers were earthen. The highway system was concentrated in the Nile Valley north of Aswan and throughout the Delta; paved roads also extended along the Mediterranean coast from the Libyan border in the west to the border with Israel. In the east, a surfaced road ran south from Suez along the Red Sea, and another connected areas along the southern coast of Sinai from Suez to the Israeli town of Elat. A well maintained route circled through several western oases and tied into the main Nile corridor of highways at Cairo in the north and Asyut in the south. Large areas of the Western Desert, the mountainous areas near the Red Sea, and the interior of the Sinai Peninsula remained without any permanent-surface roads, however.

The state-owned Egyptian Railways had more than 4,800 kilometers of track running through the populated areas of the Nile Valley and the coastal regions. Most of the track was 1.435-meter standard gauge, although 347 kilometers were 0.750-meter narrow gauge. Portions of the main route connecting Luxor with Cairo and Alexandria were double tracked and a commuter line linking Cairo with the suburb of Hulwan was electrified. Built primarily to transport people, the passenger service along the Nile was heavily used.

Less heavily traveled routes provided connections to outlying areas. A coastal route west from Alexandria to the Libyan border was being upgraded to allow for increased passenger travel. Tracks along the Mediterranean coast of Sinai, destroyed during the June 1967 War, had been repaired, and service was restored between Al Qantarah on the Suez Canal and the Israeli railroad system in the Gaza Strip. New ferry boats allowed passengers at Aswan, the southern terminus of the Egyptian Railways, to connect with the Sudanese system. A new line intended to export phosphates was under construction from Al Kharijah in the Western Desert to the port of Bur Safajah.

The southern leg of the forty-two-kilometer Cairo Metro, the first subway system in Africa or the Middle East, opened in 1987. This line, built with the cooperation of France, linked Hulwan in the south with three main downtown stations, named Sadat, Nasser, and Mubarak. In 1989 the northeast line opened, extending from downtown to the suburbs. The city planned to build an east-west route across the Nile to Giza (Al Jizah). The government hoped that the subway construction would relieve the extremely jammed streets, buses, streetcars, and trains.

Although Egypt had sixty-six airfields with paved runways, only the airports at Cairo and Alexandria handled international traffic. EgyptAir, the principal government airline, maintained an extensive international network and had domestic flights from Cairo and Alexandria to Luxor, Aswan, Abu Simbel (Abu Sunbul), and Al Ghardaqah on the Red Sea. In 1983 EgyptAir carried 1.6 million passengers. A smaller, state-owned airline, Air Sinai, provided service from Cairo to points in the Sinai Peninsula. Zas Passenger Service, the newest airline and the only one that was privately owned, had daily flights from Cairo to Aswan, Luxor, Al Ghardaqah, and points in Sinai.

Alexandria was Egypt’s principal port and in the early 1990s was capable of handling 13 million metric tons of cargo yearly. Egypt’s two other main ports, Port Said (Bur Said) and Suez, reopened in 1975, after an eight-year hiatus following the June 1967 War. Realizing the importance of shipping to the economy, the government embarked on an ambitious plan in the late 1980s to build new ports and increase capacity at existing facilities, including constructing a facility capable of handling up to 20 million metric tons of cargo just west of Alexandria. Bur Safajah on the Red Sea was being developed to handle phosphate exports, and the first stage of a new port at the mouth of the Nile’s eastern Damietta (Damyat) tributary opened in 1986.

Egypt had about 3,500 kilometers of inland waterways. The Nile constituted about half of this system, and the rest was canals. Several canals in the Delta accommodated ocean-going vessels, and a canal from the Nile just north of Cairo to the Suez Canal at Ismailia (Al Ismailiyah) permitted ships to pass from the Nile to the Red Sea without entering the Mediterranean Sea. Extensive boat and ferry service on Lake Nasser moved cargo and passengers between Aswan and Sudan.

The Suez Canal was Egypt’s most important waterway and one of the world’s strategic links, being the shortest maritime route between Europe and the Middle East, South Asia, and the Orient. Serious proposals for a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea had been made as early as the fifteenth century by the Venetians, and Napoleon ordered the first survey of the region to assess a canal’s feasibility in 1799. After several subsequent studies in the early nineteenth century, construction began in 1859. After ten years of construction and numerous unforeseen difficulties, the canal finally opened in 1869.

The canal extends 160 kilometers from Port Said on the Mediterranean to a point just south of Suez on the Red Sea. It can handle ships with up to sixteen meters draught; transit times through the length of the canal averaged fifteen hours. Passing occurs in convoys with large passing bays every twenty-five kilometers to accommodate traffic from opposite directions. Traffic patterns have changed considerably over the last century, reflecting different global priorities: passenger transit has dropped while the movement of goods, especially petroleum, has increased dramatically. It was estimated that before the 1967 ArabIsraeli War, 15 percent of the world’s total sea traffic passed through the canal.

Communications

In addition to its radio and television facilities, which were well developed, Egypt had a domestic telephone system that in 1984 counted approximately 600,000 telephones, most of them located in Cairo or Alexandria. Although improvement to the system was under way in the early 1990s, domestic service was still unreliable. The quality of international service was better, as international calls traveled over a variety of high-quality links: submarine cables to Lebanon and to southern Europe; radio-relay links with Libya and Sudan; and a ground satellite station just south of Cairo with two antennas for worldwide telephone, television, and data transmissions. Egypt was to be a focal part of the Arab Satellite (Arabsat) communications network linking the various Arab states, scheduled to be inaugurated in 1991.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

The Economy

FROM THE 1850S UNTIL the 1930s, Egypt’s economy exhibited a classic Third World dependency syndrome, the essence of which was reliance on the export of a single, usually primary, commodity. In the case of Egypt, the commodity was long-staple cotton, introduced in the mid-1820s during the reign of Muhammad Ali (1805-49), and made possible by the switch from basin to perennial, modern irrigation. Cotton cultivation was a key ingredient in an ambitious program that the Egyptian ruler undertook to diversify and develop the economy.

Another such ingredient was industrialization. Industrialization, however, proved for various domestic and external reasons to be less than successful, and until the 1930s, virtually no industrial build-up occurred. The failure of industrialization resulted largely from tariff restrictions that Britain imposed on Egypt through the 1838 commercial treaty, which allowed only minuscule tariffs, if any. The isolated industrial ventures initiated by members of Egypt’s landed aristocracy, who otherwise channeled their investment into land acquisition and speculation, were nipped in the bud by foreign competition. The few surviving enterprises were owned by the foreign community. These enterprises either enjoyed natural protection as in the case of sugar and cotton processing, or benefited from the special skills that the foreign owners had acquired, as in the case of cigarette making by Greeks and Turks.

The beginnings of industrialization awaited the depression of the late 1920s and 1930s and World War II. The depression sent cotton prices tumbling, and Britain acceded to Egyptian demands to raise tariffs. Moreover, World War II, by substantially reducing the flow of foreign goods into the country, gave further impetus to the establishment of import-substitution industries. A distinguishing feature of the factories built at this time was that they were owned by Egyptian entrepreneurs.

In spite of the lack of industrialization, the economy grew rapidly throughout the nineteenth century. Growth, however, was confined to the cotton sector and the supporting transportation, financial, and other facilities. Little of the cotton revenues was invested in economic development. The revenues were largely drained out of the country as repatriated profits or repayments of debts that the state had incurred to pay for irrigation works and the extravagance of the khedives.

Rapid economic growth ended in the early 1900s. The supply of readily available land had been largely exhausted and multiple cropping, concentration on cotton, and perennial irrigation had lessened the fertility of the soil. Cotton yields dropped in the early 1900s and recovered to their former level only in the 1940s, through investments in modern inputs such as fertilizers and drainage.

The fall in agricultural productivity and terms of trade led to a stagnation in the per capita gross national product (GNP) between the end of World War I and the 1952 Revolution: the GNP averaged £E43.0, in 1954 prices, at both ends of the period. By 1952 Egypt was in the throes of both economic and political crises, which culminated in the assumption of power by the Free Officers.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

HEALTH AND WELFARE

Since the 1952 Revolution, the government has striven to improve the general health of the population. The National Charter of 1962 stipulated that “the right of health welfare is foremost among the rights of every citizen.” Per capita public spending for health increased almost 500 percent between 1952 and 1976. As a result of this spending, the average Egyptian in 1990 was healthier and lived longer than the typical Egyptian of the early 1950s. For example, life expectancy at birth, only thirty-nine years in 1952, had climbed to fifty-nine years for men and sixty years for women by 1989. The crude death rate, which was 23.9 in 1952, had declined to 10.3 by 1990. Its main component, the infant mortality rate, declined more dramatically in the same period, from 193 infant deaths per 1,000 live births to 85 per 1,000. Nevertheless, major disparities remained in the mortality rates of cities and villages as well as in those of Upper and Lower Egypt. Although mortality and morbidity data were adequate for establishing general trends, they were not reliable for precise measurements. Egypt’s official infant mortality rate, for example, was probably understated because parents tended not to report infants who died in the first few weeks of life. Corrected estimates of the infant mortality rate for 1990 ranged as high as 113 per 1,000 live births.

Although mortality rates have declined since 1952, the main causes of death (respiratory ailments and diseases of the digestive tract) have remained unchanged for much of the twentieth century. Death rates for infants and children ages one to five dropped, but children remained the largest contributors to the mortality rate. Nearly seventeen infants and four children under five years of age died for each death of an individual between age five and thirty- four. Children younger than five years of age accounted for about half of all mortality–one of the world’s highest rates. During the 1980s, diarrhea and associated dehydration accounted for 67 percent of the deaths among infants and children. Concern about this health problem prompted the government to establish the National Control of Diarrheal Diseases Project (NCDDP) in 1982. With funds provided by the United States Agency for International Development, NCDDP initiated a program to educate health care workers and families about oral-rehydration therapy. NCDDP’s efforts helped reduce diarrhea-related deaths by 60 percent between 1983 and 1988. The highest rates of infant mortality were in Upper Egypt, followed by Cairo, Alexandria, and other urban areas; the lowest rates were in Lower Egypt.

The average Egyptian’s nutritional status compared favorably with that of people in most middle- and low-income countries. Bread, rice, legumes, seasonal fresh fruits, and vegetables such as onions and tomatoes constituted the daily diet of a majority of the population. Middle- and upper-income families also regularly consumed red meat, poultry, or fish. Caloric intake was adequate, although there were indications of widespread vitamin deficiencies. The most recent surveys of nutrition, undertaken in the late 1970s, revealed that approximately 25 percent of public-school children were either malnourished or anemic. The incidence of poor nutrition was highest in rural areas, where nearly 33 percent of surveyed children were malnourished, compared with only 17 percent in the cities; among low-income families, about 50 percent of all children showed indications of inadequate nutrition.

The major endemic diseases in 1990 were tuberculosis, trachoma, schistosomiasis, and malaria. Schistosomiasis, carried by blood flukes and spread to humans by water-dwelling snails, was a major parasitic affliction. Historically, the disease was most prevalent in the Delta, where standing water in irrigation ditches provided an ideal environment for the snails and other parasites. Those working in agriculture were particularly susceptible; their prevalence rate was nearly three times that of nonagriculturists. Debility owing to schistosomiasis could not be calculated accurately; its severity generally varied depending on the infected organs, commonly the bladder, genitals, liver, and lungs. Treatments for the disease are not always effective, and the main medicines have toxic side effects. The government tried to control the spread of the disease by educating the population about the dangers of using stagnant water. According to Ministry of Health statistics, the incidence of schistosomiasis dropped by half between 1935 and 1966. One of the negative health consequences of the Aswan High Dam, however, was an increase in the incidence of schistosomiasis in Upper Egypt, where the dam has permitted a change from basin to perennial agriculture with its continuous presence of standing water.

The Ministry of Health provided free, basic health care at hundreds of public medical facilities. General health centers offered routine medical care, maternal and child care, family planning services, and screening for hospital admittance. These clinics were usually associated with the 1,300 social service units or the 5,000 social care cooperatives that served both urban and rural areas. In addition, in 1990 the Ministry of Health maintained 344 general hospitals, 280 specialized health care units for the treatment of endemic diseases, respiratory ailments, cancer and other diseases, and dental centers. There were about 45,000 beds in all government hospitals, plus an additional 40,000 beds available in private health institutes. The number of trained medical personnel was high relative to most middle-income countries. In 1990 there were more than 73,300 doctors in the country, approximately 1 physician per 715 inhabitants. There were also about 70,000 certified nurses. Medical personnel tended to be concentrated in the cities, and most preferred private practice to employment in public facilities. Fewer than 30 percent of all doctors and scarcely 10 percent of nurses served in villages.

Although public health clinics were distributed relatively evenly throughout the country, their services were generally inadequate because of the shortage of doctors and nurses and the lack of modern equipment. In both cities and villages, patients using the free or low-cost government facilities expected a lengthy journey and a long wait to see a physician; service was usually impersonal and perfunctory. Dissatisfaction with public clinics forced even low-income patients to patronize the expensive private clinics. In rural areas, village midwives assisted between 50 percent and 80 percent of all births. Even when women used the maternal care available, prenatal care was minimal, and most births occurred before trained personnel arrived.

Further improvements in the health of Egyptians required increasing the effectiveness of the primary health-care system and improving public sanitation and health education. In 1990 approximately 25 percent of the total population, including 36 percent of all villagers, did not have access to safe water for drinking and food preparation. Use of unhygienic water was the major cause of diarrheal diseases. In addition, more than 50 percent of all families lived in homes that lacked plumbing. Sewage facilities throughout the country were inadequate. Increasing the level of women’s education would probably help to decrease the infant mortality rate. Studies have found that infant mortality decreases as mothers increase their level of education, even when age and family income are held constant. Surveys undertaken in the 1970s indicated that 78 percent of the infants born to illiterate women survived early childhood. That figure increased to 84 percent for infants born to women who finished primary school and to 90 percent for infants born to women with secondary or higher education.

The government also had established 1,300 social service centers and 5,100 social care cooperatives by 1990. The social service centers provided instruction in adult literacy, health education, vocational training, and family planning. The social care cooperatives had similar services and also provided child care centers for working mothers, aid for the handicapped, and transportation for the elderly and infirm. About 65 percent of the social service centers were in villages; 65 percent of social care cooperatives were in cities. In many villages, the social service centers were associated with the local public health clinic and supplemented the primary health care services. The overall impact of the centers and cooperatives has been limited by the lack of funding since the late 1970s.

The government instituted a social security program in the early 1960s to provide pensions, through forced savings, for employees. Coverage also included unemployment, disability, and death benefits. In 1990 less than half of the work force participated in the program. Self-employed individuals and most private sector workers (including domestics, farm workers, and casual laborers) were not covered by the program. The overwhelming majority of participants were civil servants and employees of government enterprises. Workers in private factories could only participate in social security if their employers chose to make regular contributions to the program.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

EDUCATION

Prior to the nineteenth century, the ulama and Coptic clergy controlled Egypt’s traditional education. The country’s most important institutes were theological seminaries, but most mosques and churches–even in villages–operated basic schools where boys could learn to read and write Arabic, to do simple arithmetic, and to memorize passages from the Quran or Bible. Muhammad Ali established the system of modern secular education in the early nineteenth century to provide technically trained cadres for his civil administration and military. His grandson, Ismail, greatly expanded the system by creating a network of public schools at the primary, secondary, and higher levels. Ismail’s wife set up the first school for girls in 1873. Between 1882 and 1922, when the country was under British administration, state education did not expand. However, numerous private schools, including Egypt’s first secular university, were established. After direct British rule ended, Egypt adopted a new constitution that proclaimed the state’s responsibility to ensure adequate primary schools for all Egyptians. Nevertheless, education generally remained accessible only to the elite. At the time of the 1952 Revolution, fewer than 50 percent of all primary-school-age children attended school, and the majority of the children who were enrolled were boys. Nearly 75 percent of the population over ten years of age was illiterate. More than 90 percent of the females in this age group were illiterate.

The Free Officers dramatically expanded educational opportunities. They pledged to provide free education for all citizens and abolished all fees for public schools. They doubled the Ministry of Education’s budget in one decade; government spending on education grew from less than 3 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 1952-53 to more than 5 percent by 1978. Expenditures on school construction increased 1,000 percent between 1952 and 1976, and the total number of primary schools doubled to 10,000. By the mid-1970s, the educational budget represented more than 25 percent of the government’s total current budget expenses. Since the mid-1970s, however, the government has virtually abandoned the country’s earlier educational goals. Consequently, public investment in new educational infrastructure has declined in relation to total educational expenditures; about 85 percent of the Ministry of Education’s budget has been designated for salaries.

From academic year 1953-54 through 1965-66, overall enrollments more than doubled. They almost doubled again from 1965-66 through 1975-76. Since 1975 primary-school enrollments have continued to grow at an average of 4.1 percent annually, and intermediate school (grades seven through nine) at an average of 6.9 percent annually. The proportion of the population with some secondary education more than doubled between 1960 and 1976; the number of people with some university education nearly tripled. Women made great educational gains: the percentage of women with preuniversity education grew more than 300 percent while women with university education grew more than 600 percent. By academic year 1985-86, about 84 percent of the primary- school-age population (more than 6 million of the 7.2 million children between the ages of seven and twelve) were enrolled in primary school. Less than 30 percent of eligible youth, however, attended intermediate and secondary schools. Because as many as 16 percent of Egyptian children were receiving no education in the 1980s, the literacy rate lagged behind the expansion in enrollments; in 1990 only 45 percent of the population could read and write.

Law Number 139 of 1981, which defined the structure of preuniversity public education, made the nine-year basic cycle compulsory. Regardless of this law, most parents removed their children from school before they completed ninth grade. The basic cycle included six years of primary school and three years of intermediate school. Promotion from primary to intermediate school was contingent upon obtaining passing scores on special examinations. Admission to the three-year secondary cycle (grades ten through twelve) also was determined by examination scores. Secondary students chose between a general (college preparatory) curriculum and a technical curriculum. During the eleventh and twelfth grades, students in the general curriculum concentrated their studies on the humanities, mathematics, or the sciences. Students in the technical curriculum studied agriculture, communications, or industry. Students could advance between grades only after they received satisfactory scores on standardized tests. The Ministry of Education, however, strictly limited the number of times a student could retake an examination.

Various government ministries also operated training institutes that accepted students who had completed the basic cycle. Training- institute programs, which incorporated both secondary and postsecondary vocational education, varied in length and provided certificates to students who successfully completed the prescribed curricula. Teacher-training institutes, for example, offered a five-year program. In the academic year 1985-86, approximately 85,000 students were enrolled in all training programs; 60 percent of the enrollees were women.

As of 1990, problems persisted in Egypt’s education system. For example, the government did not enforce laws requiring primary- school-age children to attend school. In some areas, as many as 50 percent of the formally enrolled children did not regularly attend classes. There were also significant regional differences in the primary-school enrollment rate. In urban areas, nearly 90 percent of the school-age children attended. In some rural areas of Upper Egypt, only 50 percent attended. Overall, only half of the students enrolled in primary school completed all six grades.

The enrollment rate for girls continued to be significantly lower than for boys. Although increases in the number of girls enrolled in school were greater than they were for boys in the 1960s and 1970s, boys still outnumbered girls at every educational level. In 1985-86, for example, only 45 percent of all primary students were girls. An estimated 75 percent of girls between the ages of six and twelve were enrolled in primary school compared with 94 percent of boys in the same age-group. Girls’ primary- school enrollment was lowest in Upper Egypt, where less than 30 percent of all students were girls. Girls also dropped out of primary school more frequently than boys. About 66 percent of the boys beginning primary school completed the primary cycle, while only 57 percent of the girls completed all six grades. Girls accounted for about 41 percent of total intermediate school enrollment and 39 percent of secondary school enrollment. Among all girls aged twelve to eighteen in 1985-86, only 46 percent were enrolled in school.

The shortage of teachers was a chronic problem, especially in rural primary schools. Under British rule, educated Egyptians had perceived teaching as a career that lacked prestige. Young people chose this career only when there was no other option or when it would serve as a stepping-stone to a more lucrative career in law. Despite improvements in training and salaries, teaching–especially at the primary level–remained a low-status career. In 1985-86, Egypt’s primary and secondary schools employed only 155,000 teachers to serve 9.6 million pupils–a ratio of about 62 students per teacher. Some city schools were so crowded that they operated two shifts daily. Many Egyptian teachers preferred to go abroad, where salaries were higher and classroom conditions better. During the 1980s, the government granted 30,000 exit visas a year to teachers who had contracts to teach in Arab countries.

Higher education expanded even more dramatically than the preuniversity system. In the first ten years following the 1952 Revolution, spending on higher education increased 400 percent. Between academic years 1951-52 and 1978-79, student enrollment in public universities grew nearly 1,400 percent. In 1989-90 there were fourteen public universities with a total enrollment of 700,000. More than half of these institutions were established as autonomous universities after 1952, four in the 1970s and five in the 1980s. The total number of female college students had doubled; by 1985-86 women accounted for 32 percent of all students. In the 1980s, public universities–accounting for roughly 7 percent of total student enrollment–received more than one-fourth of all current education-budget spending.

Since the late 1970s, government policies have attempted to reorient postsecondary education. The state expanded technical training programs in agriculture, commerce, and a variety of other fields. Student subsidies were partially responsible for a 15 percent annual increase in enrollments in the country’s five-year technical institutes. The technical institutes were set up to provide the growing private sector with trained personnel and to alleviate the shortage of skilled labor. Universities, however, permitted graduates of secondary schools and technical institutes to enroll as “external students,” which meant they could not attend classes but were allowed to sit for examinations and to earn degrees. The policy resulted in a flourishing clandestine trade in class notes and overburdened professors with additional examinations. Further, widespread desire for a university degree led many students in technical institutes to view their curricula as simply a stepping-stone to a university degree.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

Coptic Church

The Copts have remained a significant minority throughout the medieval and modern periods. After the Turks incorporated Egypt into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, they organized the government around a system of millets, or religious communities. The Copts were one of the communities. Each organized religious minority lived according to its own canon law under the leadership of recognized religious authorities who represented the millet to the outside world and supervised the millet’s internal communal life. This form of organization preserved and nourished the religious differences among these peoples. Most historians believe that the millet system prevented the full integration of non-Muslims into Muslim life. The system, which the Ottomans applied throughout their empire, had an enduring influence on the social structure of all countries in the Middle East.

The Copts, an indigenous Christian sect, constituted Egypt’s largest religious minority. Estimates of their numbers in 1990 ranged between 3 million to 7 million. The Copts claimed descent from the ancient Egyptians; the word coptqubt (Egyptian). Egypt was Christianized during the first century A.D., when the country was part of the Roman Empire. The Coptic Church claims to hold an unbroken line of patriarchal succession to the See of Alexandria founded by Saint Mark, a disciple of Christ. Egyptian Christianity developed distinct dogmas and practices during the more than two centuries that the religion was illegal. By the fourth century, when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, Coptic traditions were sufficiently different from those in Rome and Constantinople (formerly Byzantium; present-day Istanbul) to cause major religious conflicts. Dissension persisted for 150 years until most Copts seceded from the main body of Christianity because they rejected the decision of the Council of Chalcedon that Christ had a dual nature, both human and divine, believing instead in Christ’s single, divine nature. is derived from the Arabic word

The Coptic Church developed separately from other Eastern churches. The Coptic Church’s clerical hierarchy had evolved by the sixth century. A patriarch, referred to as the pope, heads the church. A synod or council of senior priests (people who have attained the status of bishops) is responsible for electing or removing popes. Members of the Coptic Church worldwide (about 1 million Copts lived outside of Egypt as of 1990) recognize the pope as their spiritual leader. The pope, traditionally based in Alexandria, also serves as the chief administrator of the church. The administrator’s functionaries includes hundreds of priests serving urban and rural parishes, friars in monasteries, and nuns in convents.

Following Islam’s spread through Egypt, Muslims alternately tolerated and persecuted the Copts. Heavy taxation of Christians encouraged mass conversions to Islam, and within two centuries, Copts had become a distinct minority. By the tenth century, Arabic had replaced Coptic as the primary spoken language, and Coptic was relegated to a liturgical language.

The Ottoman millet system of drawing administrative divisions along religious lines reinforced Coptic solidarity. The dismantling of the millet system during the nineteenth century helped open new career opportunities for the Copts. Egypt’s Muslim rulers had traditionally used minorities as administrators, and the Copts were initially the main beneficiaries of the burgeoning civil service. During the early twentieth century, however, the British purged many Copts from the bureaucracy. The Copts resented this policy, but it accelerated their entry into professional careers.

In the twentieth century, Copts have been disproportionately represented among the ranks of prosperous city dwellers. Urban Copts tended to favor careers in commerce and the professions, whereas the livelihoods of rural Copts were virtually indistinguishable from their Muslim counterparts. Urban Copts were stratified into groups of long-time residents and groups of recent migrants from the countryside. The latter group was often impoverished and fell outside the traditional urban Coptic community. The former group included many university professors, lawyers, doctors, a few prominent public officials, and a substantial middle echelon of factory workers and service sector employees.

Anti-Coptic sentiment has accompanied the resurgence of Islamic activism in Egypt. Since 1972 several Coptic churches have been burned, including the historic Qasriyat ar Rihan Church in Cairo. Islamist groups frequently and explicitly denounced Copts in their pamphlets and prayer meetings. The increasing tensions between Copts and Muslims inevitably led to clashes in Upper Egypt in 1977 and 1978 and later in the cities and villages of the Delta. Three days of religious riots in Cairo in 1981 left at least 17 Copts and Muslims dead and more than 100 injured. Isolated incidents of Muslim-Coptic violence continued throughout the 1980s and during 1990.

Coptic Pope Shenudah III (elected in 1971) blamed government silence for the increasing violence. He also expressed alarm at official actions that he said encouraged anti-Coptic feelings. In 1977, to protest a Ministry of Justice proposal to apply sharia legal penalties to any Muslim who converted from Islam, the pope called on the Coptic community to fast for five days. As harassment of Copts increased, Pope Shenudah III canceled official Easter celebrations for 1980 and fled to a desert convent with his bishops. Sadat accused the pope of inciting the Coptic-Muslim strife and banished him in September 1981 to internal exile. The government then appointed a committee of five bishops to administer the church. The following year, the government called upon the church synod to elect a new pope, but the Coptic clergy rejected this state intervention. In 1985 Husni Mubarak released Pope Shenudah III from internal exile and permitted him to resume his religious duties.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

Islamic Political Movements

Islamic political activism has a lengthy history in Egypt. Several Islamic political groups started soon after World War I ended. The most well-known Islamic political organization is the Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan al Muslimun, also known as the Brotherhood), founded in 1928 by Hasan al Banna. After World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood acquired a reputation as a radical group prepared to use violence to achieve its religious goals. The group was implicated in several assassinations, including the murder of one prime minister. The Brotherhood had contacts with the Free Officers before the 1952 Revolution and supported most of their initial policies. The Brotherhood, however, soon came into conflict with Nasser. The government accused the Brotherhood of complicity in an alleged 1954 plot to assassinate the president and imprisoned many of the group’s leaders. In the 1970s, Anwar as Sadat amnestied the leaders and permitted them to resume some of their activities. But by that time, the Brotherhood was divided into at least three factions. The more militant faction was committed to a policy of political opposition to the government. A second faction advocated peaceful withdrawal from society and the creation, to the extent possible, of a separate, parallel society based upon Islamic values and law. The dominant moderate group advocated cooperation with the regime.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s reemergence as a political force coincided with the proliferation of Islamic groups. Some of these groups espoused the violent overthrow of the government while others espoused living a devout life of rigorous observance of religious practices. It is impossible to list all the Islamic groups that emerged in the late 1970s because many of them had diffuse structures and some of the more militant groups were underground. Egypt’s defeat and loss of territory in the June 1967 War was the main cause for the growth of religiously inspired political activism. Muslims tended to view the humiliating experience as the culmination of 150 years of foreign intrusion and an affront to their vision of a true Islamic community. Islamic tradition rejected the idea of non-Muslims dominating Muslim society. Such a state of affairs discredited Muslim rulers who permitted it to persist. It was, therefore, incumbent on believers to end the domination and restore the true supremacy of Islam. As part of their Sunni creed, the most radical activists adopted jihad (holy war–the Shia sixth pillar of faith) and committed themselves to battling unbelievers and impious Muslims. During the 1970s and 1980s, Islamists perpetrated a number of violent acts, including the assassination of Sadat in October 1981.

Disruptive social changes and Sadat’s relative tolerance toward political parties contributed to the rapid growth of Islamic groups in the 1970s. On university campuses, for example, Sadat initially viewed the rise of Islamic associations (Jamaat al Islamiyah) as a counterbalance to leftist influence among students. The Jamaat al Islamiyah spread quite rapidly on campuses and won up to one-third of all student union elections. These victories provided a platform from which the associations campaigned for Islamic dress, the veiling of women, and the segregation of classes by gender. Secular university administrators opposed these goals. In 1979 Sadat sought to diminish the influence of the associations through a law that transferred most of the authority of the student unions to professors and administrators. During the 1980s, however, Islamists gradually penetrated college faculties. At Asyut University, which was the scene of some of the most intense clashes between Islamists and their opponents (including security forces, secularists, and Copts), the president and other top administrators–who were Islamists–supported Jamaat al Islamiyah demands to end mixed-sex classes and to reduce total female enrollment.

As of 1989, the Islamists sought to make Egypt a community of the faithful based on their vision of an Islamic social order. They rejected conventional, secularist social analyses of Egypt’s socioeconomic problems. They maintained, for example, that the causes of poverty were not overpopulation or high defense expenditures but the populace’s spiritual failures–laxness, secularism, and corruption. The solution was a return to the simplicity, hard work, and self-reliance of earlier Muslim life. The Islamists created their own alternative network of social and economic institutions through which members could work, study, and receive medical treatment in an Islamic environment.

Islamists rejected Marxism and Western capitalism. Indeed, they viewed atheistic communism, Jewish Zionism, and Western “Crusader-minded” Christianity as their main enemies, which were responsible for the decadence that led to foreign domination and defeat by Zionists. They were intolerant of people who did not share their worldview. Islamists tended to be hostile toward the orthodox ulama, especially the scholars at Al Azhar who frequently criticized the Islamists’ extreme religious interpretations. Islamists believed that the established social and political order had tainted the ulama, who had come to represent stumbling blocks to the new Islamic order. In addition, Islamists condemned the orthodox as “pulpit parrots” committed to a formalist practice of Islam but not to its spirit.

The social origins of Islamists changed after the 1952 Revolution. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood had appealed primarily to urban civil servants and white- and blue-collar workers. After the early 1970s, the Islamic revival attracted followers from a broad spectrum of social classes. Most activists were university students or recent graduates; they included rural-urban migrants and urban middle-class youth whose fathers were middle-level government employees or professionals. Their fields of study–medicine, engineering, military science, and pharmacy–were among the most highly competitive and prestigious disciplines in the university system. The rank-and- file members of Islamist groups have come from the middle class, the lower-middle class, and the urban working class.

Various Islamist groups espoused different means for achieving their political agenda. All Islamists, however, were concerned with Islam’s role in the complex and changing society of Egypt in the late twentieth century. A common focus of their political efforts has been to incorporate the sharia into the country’s legal code. In deference to their increasing influence, the Ministry of Justice in 1977 published a draft law making apostasy by a Muslim a capital offense and proposing traditional Islamic punishments for crimes, such as stoning for adultery and amputation of a hand for theft. In 1980 Egypt supported a referendum that proposed a constitutional amendment to make the sharia “the sole source of law.” The influence of the Islamists temporarily waned in the aftermath of Sadat’s assassination in 1981, but the election of nine members of the Muslim Brotherhood to the People’s Assembly in 1984 revived Islamists’ prospects. In 1985 the People’s Assembly voted to initiate a procedure for the gradual application of the sharia, beginning with an indefinite education period to prepare the population for the legal changes; the next step would be to amend all existing laws to exclude any provisions that conflict with the sharia. Moves to reform the legal code received support from many Muslims who wanted to purify society and reject Western legal codes forced on Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

Contemporary Islam

Prior to Napoleon’s invasion, almost all of Egypt’s educational, legal, public health, and social welfare issues were in the hands of religious functionaries. Ottoman rule reinforced the public and political roles of the ulama (religious scholars) because Islam was the state religion and because political divisions in the country were based on religious divisions. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, successive governments made extensive efforts to limit the role of the ulama in public life and to bring religious institutions under closer state control. The secular transformation of public life in Egypt depended on the development of a civil bureaucracy that would absorb many of the ulama’s responsibilities in the country.

After the 1952 Revolution, the government assumed responsibility for appointing officials to mosques and religious schools. The government mandated reform of Al Azhar University beginning in 1961. These reforms permitted department heads to be drawn from outside the ranks of the traditionally trained orthodox ulama. At the same time, the government established a number of modern faculties, including medicine, engineering, and commerce. The media periodically campaigned against the ulama as old-fashioned members of a “priestly caste.”

As of 1990, Egyptian Islam was a complex and diverse religion. Although Muslims agreed on the faith’s basic tenets, the country’s various social groups and classes applied Islam differently in their daily lives. The literate theologians of Al Azhar University generally rejected the version of Islam practiced by illiterate religious preachers and peasants in the countryside. Most upper- and middle-class Muslims believed either that religious expression was a private matter for each individual or that Islam should play a more dominant role in public life. Islamic religious revival movements, whose appeal cut across class lines, were present in most cities and in many villages.

Today devout Muslims believe that Islam defines one’s relationship to God, to other Muslims, and to non-Muslims. They also believe that there can be no dichotomy between the sacred and the secular. Many devout Muslims say that Egypt’s governments have been secularist and even antireligious since the early 1920s. Politically organized Muslims who seek to purge the country of its secular policies are referred to as “Islamists.”

Orthodox ulama found themselves in a difficult position during the wave of Islamic activism that swept through Egypt in the 1970s and 1980s. Radical Islamists viewed the ulama as puppets of the status quo. To maintain their influence in the country, the ulama espoused more conservative stances. After 1974, for example, many Al Azhar ulama, who had acquiesced to family planning initiatives in the 1960s, openly criticized government efforts at population control. The ulama also supported moves to reform the country’s legal code to conform to Islamic teaching. They remained, nonetheless, comparatively moderate; they were largely loyal to the government and condemned the violence of radical Islamist groups.

Egypt’s largely uneducated urban and rural lower classes were intensely devoted to Islam, but they lacked a thorough knowledge of the religion. Even village religious leaders had only a rudimentary knowledge of Islam. The typical village imam or prayer leader had at most a few years of schooling; his scholarly work was limited to reading prayers and sermons prepared by others and to learning passages from the Quran. Popular religion included a variety of unorthodox practices, such as veneration of saints, recourse to charms and amulets, and belief in the influence of evil spirits.

Popular Islam is based mostly on oral tradition. Imams with virtually no formal education commonly memorize the entire Quran and recite appropriate verses on religious occasions. They also tell religious stories at village festivals and commemorations marking an individual’s rites of passage. Predestination plays an important role in popular Islam. This concept includes the belief that everything that happens in life is the will of God and the belief that trying to avoid misfortune is useless and invites worse affliction. Monotheism merges with a belief in magic and spirits (jinns) who are believed to inhabit the mountains.

Popular Islam ranges from informal prayer sessions or Quran study to organized cults or orders. Because of the pervasive sexual segregation of Egypt’s Islamic society, men and women often practice their religion in different ways. A specifically female religious custom is the zar, a ceremony for helping women placate spirits who are believed to have possessed them. Women specially trained by their mothers or other women in zar lore organize the ceremonies. A zar organizer holds weekly meetings and employs music and dance to induce ecstatic trances in possessed women. Wealthy women sometimes pay to have private zars conducted in their homes; these zars are more elaborate than public ones, last for several days, and sometimes involve efforts to exorcise spirits.

A primarily male spiritual manifestation is Sufism, an Islamic mystical tradition. Sufism has existed since the early days of Islam and is found in all Islamic countries. The name derives from the Arabic word suf (wool), referring to the rough garb of the early mystics. Sufism exists in a number of forms, most of which represent an original tariqa (discipline or way; pl., turuq) developed by an inspired founder, or shaykh. These shaykhs gradually gathered about themselves murids, or disciples, whom they initiated into the tariqa. Gradually the murids formed orders, also known as turuq, which were loyal to the shaykh or his successors. The devotions of many Sufi orders center on various forms of the dhikr, a ceremony at which music, body movements, and chants induce a state of ecstatic trance in the disciples. Since the early 1970s, there has been a revival of interest in Sufism. Egypt’s contemporary Sufis tend to be young, college-educated men in professional careers.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress