Eric Trager was the Esther K. Wagner Fellow at The Washington Institute.
Articles & Testimony
Galal Amin's latest book on Egypt resorts to the unfortunate and simplistic tactic of attributing all domestic problems to foreign enemies.
Three years after the mass uprising that ended Husni Mubarak's thirty-year dictatorship, many Egypt observers ask the same question that economist Galal Amin uses for the title of his latest book: Whatever Happened to the Egyptian Revolution? Indeed, the democratic aspirations that the January 2011 revolt highlighted now seem more distant than ever: the successive military, Muslim Brotherhood, and military-backed regimes that followed Mubarak implemented varying degrees of autocracy, while deepening sectarian and political divisions destroyed the national unity that Tahrir Square once exemplified.
But in this collection of essays loosely framed around various postrevolutionary themes, Amin doesn't blame the military, Islamists, or prevalent political and religious intolerance for causing the Egyptian revolution's apparent failure. Rather, he presents them as symptoms of a greater evil: Western domination, particularly that of the United States and Israel, which, Amin insists, stifled Egypt's development for decades. And in making this monocausal case, Amin offers a remarkably simplistic account of Egyptian history, occasionally embracing conspiracy theories that are common in Egyptian cafes but have no place in academic books...
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This review originally appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, volume 46, issue 3, pp. 623-624. Copyright 2014, Cambridge University Press.
