CAIRO – Was having another conversation with a colleague of mine, who made an astute anthropological observation; namely, that Egyptians simply refuse to make a connection between having too many children and the country's impoverishment! One could add, by extension, that the political connection we made – between running amok and overpopulation – escapes the average Egyptian couple. The question is, why? If you look at the ossified discourses of press and academia around here, you find that they still use the outdated but sensationalist demographics of Robert Malthus. It seems the intellectual classes live in one world and normal people in another, and the endless jabber about family planning and population control on TV is not getting through. Then again, TV is part of the whole problem, since it gives mixed signals. Government broadcasts tell people not to have so many kids and private sector adverts promote ‘ambitious' men with too many. In such confusing circumstances, people go with the message that fits their culturally predetermined instincts. But where do those instincts come from? If you read Doreen Warriner's Chatham House 1948 classic, ‘Land and Poverty in the Middle East', you'll find that Palestinians have always had too many children; even before they became refugees thanks to Zionism. So the link usually drawn between political dispossession and Palestinian birth rates is wrong. The Palestinian cause is being ‘used' to reinforce this well- established tradition. My guess is that Palestinians breed too much to have lots of agricultural labourers they don't need to pay and a personal army to fight other farmers over ever-scarcer plots of land. Hey presto! We find ourselves back in Egypt and the inability to connect the dots; with too many people and not enough resources. The average young couple thinks that if they had lots and lots of children, they could afford it because these kids would literally come with their own rizk (lot), as the saying goes. They'd be able to steal land, muscle their way into the marketplace and pay their way as far as their parents were concerned. The fact that arable land or market space is finite is not an issue for breeders, because they're only concerned with how much ‘they' can get their hands on and to hell with everyone else. This may sound terrible, and it is, but you'd be amazed how provincial thought is in the Arab world. Everybody thinks what is right in their country or province applies everywhere else. Arab intellectuals cherry-pick data from other Arab experiences to fit the local problems in their quadrant, while faqihs (religious legal scholars) assume that the consensus in their mazhab (school of thought) is the consensus among all Muslim scholars. Arabs live spatially isolated lives. There is this massive void between them, their individual households and the rest of the world. Society, so far as it exists, is a very hostile and ‘alien' phenomenon. They only feel ‘safe' amongst their own kin. Hence, again, consider how peasants behave when they come to the city or go to other villages. If you watch what passes for Egyptian drama, you can find episodes where a women, who lives in a palace with a very sympathetic mother-in-law, can go literally insane just because she's too far away from her neighbourhood or own family. (The husband doesn't count; he's seen as a ‘stranger' if he's not a cousin). That's also why you get disgraceful love songs, where the singer expresses his bewilderment about falling in love with someone he's not related to. How could he possibly trust her and feel she's like his sister or mother! (Could that be where the Oedipus complex comes from?) It's this kind of spatial, familial paranoia that messed up political life throughout much of our history – from al-Jahiz's persecution of Ibn Hanbal to the falling out between Nahas basha and Makram Ibeid. I genuinely hope the same won't happen to the Tahrir Square revolutionaries. They don't seem to mind living out in the open, they communicate and make instant plans via twitter and Facebook. But this could create another divide between them and the general public. What to do? I'd go with Farouk el-Baz, dump the whole population into the Western desert and let them dig up their own water and soil, so we Nile Valley people can feel secure again and stop having too many kids. I don't know how this could apply to the Palestinians, even if they got their country back. But they don't trust each other, even within a single entity like Fatah or a security service. And their refugee camps are even more crowded than our neighbourhoods. Can you think of a better reason to run amok?!!
