MER Article Appropriate Health Technology in Egypt Over the past two decades, public health workers have successfully developed primary health care: basic preventive and curative services that address critical health problems and are available close to people’s homes. Primary health care includes immunizations; maternal care; education for health, h Norbert Hirschhorn • 8 min read
MER Article Medical Education: The Struggle for Relevance A recent World Health Organization report on the state of health practitioners in the Middle East suggests that the region now has a satisfactory number of physicians; some countries even have an excess. Yet health, as measured by standard indicators such as infant mortality, is hardly satisfactory. Cynthia Myntti • 11 min read
MER Article From the Editors (November/December 1989) When the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Washington in September, President Husni Mubarak was on hand to speak about the Third World debt crisis. For more than a year, Cairo has been negotiating a new $500 million agreement with the IMF that would allow Egypt to reschedule $10 The Editors • 4 min read
MER Article Mitchell, Colonising Egypt Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Barbara Harlow • 11 min read
MER Article Bedouins, Cassettes and Technologies of Public Culture Discotheques and taxicabs all over Egypt last January were playing the songs of a new pop star. No one knew exactly where “the Earthquake of ’88” (his biographer’s term) had come from, but everyone seemed to think Ali Hemida was a Bedouin. Some said he came from Sinai; others said Libya. His music w Lila Abu-Lughod • 16 min read
MER Article Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker Ellis Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker: Class and Politics in Egypt, 1930-1952 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). The critique of modernization theory that began in the late 1960s had an especially significant impact on a new generation of Western scholars who rejected Eric Davis • 4 min read
MER Article Egypt: A New Secularism? Arab political and social thought in the 1960s was dominated by secular conceptions, including Arab nationalism, Arab socialism and Marxism. Even after the 1967 war, when the attraction of these ideologies began to wane, the immediate “self-criticism after the defeat” (to cite the title of Sadiq al- Alexander Flores • 12 min read
MER Article Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). This is more than a general treatise about women in Egypt. It is a subtle and adroit analysis of gender and class during the transformation of Egyptian society in the nineteenth century and it is this un Cynthia Nelson • 5 min read
MER Article Sivan, Radical Islam; Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.) Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharoah (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.) Translated from the French by Jon Rothschild. Michael Gilsenan • 4 min read
MER Article Sinai for the Coffee Table Dani Rabinowitz, Ru’ah Sinai (The Sinai Spirit) (Tel Aviv: Adam Publishers, 1987). [Hebrew] Ever since Israel occupied the Sinai desert in 1967, that piece of earth has consistently made Israeli headlines. Its media presence was only enhanced after Camp David and Israel’s withdrawal in 1979 and 198 Smadar Lavie • 13 min read
MER Article The Egyptian Left After the Debacle The debacle suffered by the Egyptian left at the polls in 1987 -- 2 percent of the vote as compared to 4.5 percent in the 1984 parliamentary elections -- provoked a soul-searching debate in Tagammu‘, the legal party of the left. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed • 4 min read
