The Dweiqa rescue operations dominate the headlines, while reflections on 9/11 and an economy sapped by inflation also intrigue the pundits, write Gamal Nkrumah and Mohamed El-Sayed Country crumbles It's not just hills which are collapsing "The American military concedes its failure to fight terrorism," was the official Al-Ahram daily's headline on Friday 12 September. On the same page, the paper's Editor-in-Chief Osama Saraya wrote in his column that Egypt did succeed in containing the terrorist threat. Entitled "Lest we forget how we triumphed against terrorism", Saraya declared that: "[The terrorists] have inflicted more harm on the Muslim nation than all the enemies of the Muslim umma who wreaked havoc during its long history." "Islam and Muslims have been greatly disserved by the terrorist acts of some of Islam's adherents over the past three decades," Saraya explained. "They ride atop the wave of religiosity, the religious bandwagon, in order to achieve their dubious political goals." Saraya notes how in comparison with other countries both in the Muslim world and in the West, Egypt has managed to emerge as a "beacon of hope and an oasis of peace". However, it was the aftermath of the Dweiqa rockslide disaster in the Moqattam hills that continued to hit the headlines. And, while commentators no longer focussed on the shock and horror of the disaster, they were concerned with its long-term ramifications. There was much speculation about how to end the spate of disasters gripping Egypt in the past few years. Writing in the weekly independent Sawt Al-Umma, Yehia El-Qazzaz argued that, "the rockslide in Dweiqa that claimed the lives of [hundreds] of its poor residents epitomised the state of affairs in Egypt. It painted a grim picture of the collapse of the regime which failed in rescuing the bodies of the victims and turned the area into a mass grave." Writing in the same paper, outspoken writer and Editor-in-Chief Abdel-Halim Qandil harshly criticised the government. "The number of Egyptians who die every year in disasters by far surpasses those killed in all Egypt's wars," he argued. "It never happened in Egypt's history that disasters took place sequentially in such short intervals." Indeed, the mood of the commentators appears to be exceptionally pessimistic and grim. In an interview with the weekly opposition Al-Arabi, Mamdouh Hamza was quoted as saying: "I expect more disastrous rockslides in Moqattam hills because of the golf courses [built by mega] real estate developer Emaar there." He argued that, "successive ruling National Democratic Party's governments have failed [in running the country] and there is no clear-cut plan or strategy." In as much as the independent papers highlighted the problems, the official papers were more optimistic, focussing instead on the efforts by the government to remedy the situation. The official newspapers focussed on the measures taken by the government to deal with the issue. "Rehousing the victims of Dweiqa starts", ran the headline of the daily official Al-Akhbar. "Living in new flats healing the wounds of the victims", ran another headline. "The number of dead 65, and rescue operations continue", ran another headline. All official newspapers ran photos of key government officials -- Speaker of the Shura Council Safwat El-Sherif, head of the NDP's Policies Committee Gamal Mubarak, and Chief of the Presidential Staff Zakaria Azmi, while paying a visit to the evacuees camp in Al-Fustat district. Religious edicts and controversies had their share of the headlines. We are, after all, celebrating the holy fasting month of Ramadan. Instead of the spirit of generosity and goodwill, there seems to be a meanness of spirit, a desire for revenge and intolerance of the other. Writing in the daily liberal-leaning Nahdet Masr, Gamal Abdel-Gawad harshly criticised Saleh Al-Luhaidan, head of the Supreme Judiciary Council in Saudi Arabia who issued a religious verdict calling the owners of satellite channels that air soap operas infidels who should be executed. "Calling people infidels and executing them are not new to Islamic extremists. But it is strange to see such a religious verdict issued by a high- profile scholar in the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia," Abdel-Gawad argued. "The Wahabi interpretation of Islam is the root from which extremist groups branched out," he pointed out. "The religious hardline wing in the Saudi regime feels that it is marginalised and its influence diminishing as the ideas and values it preached for decades created an entire generation of extremists." He continued: "This latest fatwa is a desperate attempt by the religious establishment to regain the grounds it lost." It is against this backdrop that pundits reflected on the state of societal morals in contemporary Egypt. Writing in Al-Ahram, Tarek Heggi tried to diagnose the problems facing Arab culture these days. "The Arab culture is restrained by three impediments: first, a number of men of religion who are absorbed in backwardness and nostalgia and who bestow legitimacy on the worst of regimes. The second issue is that of the educational syllabuses which are based on learning by heart, implanting backward values, and hampering critical thinking. Third is the contemporary Arab culture that is unable to realise the values of progress." Heggi harshly criticised Islamic scholars. "They reject the values of progress like the equality between the sexes and women's rights." He urged contemporary Egyptians to understand better gender relations. Morality, sexuality and women's rights, Heggi said, must be understood within this context. "They deserve to be isolated in psychiatric hospitals; their backward, inhumane opinions are not to be taken when enacting laws. I wonder how this [Arab] society listens to those [Islamic] scholars while their talk is fraught with primitiveness and shallow thoughts and knowledge." A key official in the mobile phone operator company Vodafone, was quoted in Nahdet Masr as saying: "Egyptians use mobile phones in a way completely different from the rest of the world. They use the missed-call language which is a purely Egyptian invention. They also use the SMS in sending jokes and funny news items." Last but not least is the whole question of galloping inflation in Egypt which has set off the alarm bells. Egyptian consumers have at least been spared the worst of the international commodity price-spikes. But "Inflation defies the government" was the provocative headline of a full-page feature in Nahdet Masr. "For the first time in 50 years the inflation rate hit 25.6 per cent. The disastrous reasoning by the industrialists and merchants is that they believe that any reduction of commodity prices is a vast loss of revenue as far as they are concerned," the writer of the article, Ahmed Hafez, noted.
