This little vignette I found via the pratike link,

Praktike had a long conversation with the driver in Arabic as we blasted our way through Cairo’s homicidal maniac traffic. Clearly his Arabic studies were coming along. I can easily give taxi drivers directions in Arabic, but I can’t hold down conversations. The problem, if that is the word, is that almost everyone speaks English in Beirut. Learning Arabic there not only isn’t unnecessary, it’s almost impossible. Locals won’t speak Arabic with foreigners unless the foreigner is already fluent or the local doesn’t speak English or French. A British expat friend of mine has lived in Beirut for almost ten years, is married to a Lebanese Druze woman, and has two half-Lebanese children - and he still can’t speak Arabic. A Lebanese-American friend of mine who studied Arabic in the U.S. says his Arabic gets worse the longer he stays in Beirut.

It's called laziness and lack of discipline.

Although to be fair, one can not merely pick up Arabic like that, above all in expat heavy environments.

“Here we are,” Praktike said as he paid the driver. The total fare wasn’t even a dollar.

The neighborhood looked grim and depressing, not at all what I expected from a place that hip young people had colonized. But I didn’t say anything.

“You have to revise your expectations downward in Cairo,” Praktike said, as though he knew what I was thinking. “This probably looks Stalinist to you.”

“It isn’t that bad,” I said. “Libya is Stalinist, and this is better than that. But it’s not pretty.”

What to say about this. Libya is hardly Stalinist. It's weird, but Stalinist it is not. On the other hand the man Pratike clearly doesn't know the chic outer burbies.

He led me into what counts in Cairo as a nice restaurant. The floors were orange tile. The chairs were made of wicker. A mild feeling of gloom hung over the place like a cloudy day just before rain. It was not even remotely like what you can easily find in Beirut’s fashionable neighborhoods.

Odd that Totten's clueless idiocy and facile Beirut snobbery almost makes me want to defend Cairo, a city I loathe.

Rather obviously Cairo does have better restaus than ones with bad wicker chairs and orange tile.

I worried that I would be bored and alienated into depression if I lived in Cairo after I saw all the sights. Going from Beirut to Cairo was like descending into a poorly lit basement. Some Americans who would visit Cairo and expect to like it won’t go anywhere near Beirut. This is incredible to me. For one thing, far more people have been killed by terrorists in Egypt than in Lebanon over the past fifteen years. Forget its reputation: Beirut is culturally, intellectually, economically, and politically more advanced by an order of magnitude. It’s unfair when Lebanon is described as Third World. Egypt, though, without question is Third World.

And Totten is unquestionably a facile idiot.

Beirut is not Lebanon (indeed it is very much a Potemkin village city), and all one need do is look at Leb Land national stats to understand Lebanon is indeed "Third World" although I suppose if you're a clueless idiot like Totten hanging around among fashionable spoiled rich Lebs in Beirut (that fine tribute to corrupt debt financing) it would be easy to think the country is in fact wealthy when it is not.

How far the mighty do fall. Fifty years ago Cairo was a relatively wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan jewel of North Africa and the Middle East.

Yeah. So was Beirut, but neither says much about the country.

Don’t even think of blaming Islam for its present wretched condition. Gamal Abdel Nasser and his secular Free Officer regime demolished this place with intellectual, political, and economic bulldozers. Hosni Mubarak’s ridiculously named National Democratic Party, which is really just a euphemism for the calcified military regime from the 1950s, has done absolutely nothing to improve things in the meantime. Wall Street Journal reporter Stephen Glain aptly described Egypt as a “towering dwarf.” I don’t think the description can be improved on.

Well, hard to say this is wrong. Badly written but not wrong.

Moving on to observations, well, much is not particularly interesting but some mockable things here.

“There are 21 political parties,” he said. “But 16 don’t really exist. They are newspapers, not parties. Their reporters aren’t really reporters. They have no handle on policy or ideas whatsoever. Some of them even sell access. If someone wants to smear a businessman, for instance, space can be bought for that in their pages.”

Fine, although Pratike's characterisation, if it is indeed his, of parties as newspapers is silly. Parties as influence peddling machines, yes. Newspapers? Of course parties do have newspapers attached, so one can look at them as being political influence peddling machines with a bit of newspaper optionality for your odd need to put issues out in the zone of public discourse. Issues not in the policy wonk nerd sense, of course.

Well, that's an insight.

The two main liberal opposition parties, the Wafd and Al-Ghad, are tiny, disorganized, and woefully unprofessional. They are more like fringe parties than broad-based popular movements. It’s not that the Muslim Brotherhood truly represents everyone else – they don’t. It’s mostly because the liberal parties have not been around for as long and they have not been free to operate normally or build themselves up. They have no idea how to build grassroots support for their positions in a country where a one-party dictatorship controls or co-opts just about everything. The Muslim Brotherhood is Mubarak’s most powerful opponent by mere default.

Complete and utter rubbish.

The liberal parties represent ideas and positions that simply have little popularity, and frankly Wafd has been around for a bloody fucking long time. Indeed, Wafd goes back to the early 20th century "liberal" flourish (although being banned for a good 20 years obviously was not helpful).

Idiotic comment. Hopefully Totten's own extrapolation.

How extreme is the Muslim Brotherhood, really? That’s the argument that never ends in Egypt right now. That’s precisely what the Brothers want. They cleverly don’t reveal their thoughts and positions on political lightning rods. Would they actually ban alcohol if they came to power? Who knows? They won’t say. Will they force women, even foreign women and Christian Egyptians, to wear the veil? Your guess is as good as mine.

An interesting question, but when it comes down to it, the important question is how well they might govern.

Forcing all women to cover their hair with a scarf is just not a big deal.

Banning alcohol? Well, they might, but probably not for hotels and Christians. Might be a good business opp for your Xian smuggler.

Islam is the solution is their rallying cry. But they say they want to build an Islamist state democratically.

And the concept is popular with large numbers of Egyptians.

They also claim, at least sometimes, that they are not sectarian – a rather difficult thing to believe considering that they want an Islamist state. “I went to a Muslim Brotherhood rally,” Praktike said. They chanted “Muslims and Christians, we are all Egyptians.”

Totten again reveals his juvenile understanding of the region.

From a Brotherhood perspective, I do not doubt that the urbane leadership and a good percentage of their followers do not consider themselves "sectarian" in their sense. Certainly on many issues Xian and Muslim Egyptians have shared interest, including many social issues. Copts have not adopted the Leb Slut Maroni culture of Beirut, I might add.

Certainly from the Ikhouani perspective, the better educated understand minorities have protected rights, and in a modern state context as one sees in Iran, that means generally equal civil rights.

That’s nice to hear. The problem Christian Egyptians have (and they make up between 10 and 15 percent of the population) isn’t that the Muslim Brotherhood won’t recognize their right to live in Egypt and be Egyptians. They worry about losing some of their already-diminished rights and being forced to live by the code of another religion.

This is rubbish. The Ikhouane have never indicated they desire to expel the Copts, indeed nothing besides overseas-Copt extremist shrieking would lead one to such a conclusion. That is not to say that a good percentage of the hard core Islamists would not want to pressure for a return to medeival Islamic dhimmi codes (as redefined through the less flexible lens of the modern Salafi loons). nor that Copts do not face discrimination and even violence (although this is very much an issue of inter-communal fight over resources rather than primarily religious). They do, but that is not the same as expelling Copts. Of course living under the Code of another religion is what minorities have to do..... But then Totten has spent his time lapping up Maroni agitprop, so what can one expect?

It's called patronage and pandering my dear ignoramus Totten; secularism has rarely guaranteed religious minorities access per se. See the United States and discrimination against Catholics, Jews.

That said, the issue in Egypt is formal, but I would say that (i) not being in the Egyptian Bureacracy has been a boon to Copts as they tend to be wealthier, and as the economy privatises, they are the ones best situated to take advantage, (ii) I personally see a strong correlation between the "secular" state lack of legitimacy and its need to buy off the majority with cheap discrimination.

In a country where huge swaths of the economy are controlled by the government, that’s a serious problem.

Not really. It has meant the Copts are the entrepreneurs of the economy, and that they are not trapped in the sclerotic state sector that is merely staggering along.

There also is the matter of constructing churches. If you want to build a mosque, go right ahead. If you want to build or even repair a church, expect years of bureaucracy and being told repeatedly “no” from regime apparatchiks.

Oddly an Ottoman era rule that has been continued. I would suggest a regime that was seen as legit will have less challenges removing this idiotic law than a corrupt sclerotic vampire regime.

If the Muslim Brotherhood ever ascends to power, Egypt’s Coptic Christians have every reason to believe the already-existing discrimination against them from the secular state will only increase under the rule of an Islamist state. Christians don’t have the numbers, the political clout, or the organization, to fend off Islamist oppression if it ever arrives. Only liberal and moderate Muslims can do that.

What a nice little truism from our pea brained Totten.

I would suggest rather the contrary. Liberals (here we are using, I presume, the word in its proper meaning, not as a stand in for Left) are weak and will remain weak for any foreseeable future.

A weak secular regime will not improve or protect.

Nor need one conclude that the reasonable middle section of Islamist will have an interest in gross discrimination.

In short, while it is possible that the Ikhouane coming to power will result in discrimination against the Copts, it is hardly a fait accompli in that case, and it's simply magical thinking that the tiny and ineffectual liberals are the real "saving" grace for the Copts.

Indeed, the Copts might well do well if they're politically smart in the case of an Islamist putsch and do deals with the right people.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not armed. They are not a wing of Al Qaeda. They are a right-wing religious conservative party. And it’s hard to say how far they would go if given the chance.

Fair statement, of course it is true of any "fringe" party never before come to power.

Surely it depends on how they come into power, he explained, if it ever happens. If they violently seize control, as the Ayatollah Khomeini did in Iran, the odds that Egypt’s future will be democratic are probably miniscule. If, on the other hand, the Muslim Brotherhood is ever elected to power under a constitutional system and the rule of law, they will be all but forced to make compromises with liberal and moderate Egyptians who will field their own successful candidates at the same time.

A fair if obvious statement.

It looks to me like the Muslim Brotherhood will have a powerful impact on Egyptian politics one way or another. They already are the most popular movement opposed to the hated regime.

And after stating the obvious we get to this.

Mubarak has three options. He can do nothing but maintain the status-quo, which is his quarter century-long specialty. He can slowly cede parliament to the Muslim Brotherhood while empowering, rather than attempting to destroy, the liberal democratic opposition in order to soften the Islamist slide. Or he can damn the consequences to his country and his soul and turn Egypt into a full-blown Stalinist state to buy himself just a little more time.

Hardly the only three options, but it's rather clear Mubarek is playing his usual divide and conquer, as the usual Arab President game.