Frank Pasquale @FrankPasquale "forces in Cairo all hold to a misguided notion that Egypt's challenges are relatively fixable, superficial abuses"http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/25/the_revolution_continues_egypt_arab_spring?page=0,1 … Followed by Joel Phillips Collapse Reply Retweet Favorite Buffer More 10:57 AM - 28 Jan 13 · Details The Revolution Continues Egypt is witnessing the slow-motion collapse of a stagnant and brutal political order. BY CHARLES HOLMES | JANUARY 25, 2013 The failure of Egypt's education system has a dramatic political impact. Egypt's leaders have cynically created factories that produce unimaginative, uninquisitive recruits for their vast military and civil service bureaucracies. The intellectual class, whose efforts initially helped to conjure Nasser's Egypt into existence, has increasingly been squeezed and hounded into silence by a paranoid regime that hears whispers of dissent at every turn. The struggle of secular liberals to find their feet in the last two years is an indirect consequence of Egypt's intellectual rut. The result of Egypt's decaying academic institutions is an absence of ideas and a near-total lack of political vision. It is telling that Mohammad ElBaradei, arguably the most prominent member of the secular-liberal opposition, spent almost his entire career outside of the country. Meanwhile, a parallel deterioration in Egypt's mainstream religious institutions -- most notably Al Azhar University, which was once the preeminent global seat of Islamic learning -- has paved the way for the rise of foreign Islamist ideologies. Egyptian politics has not only become less secular, but Islamist politics has become more radical and less inherently "Egyptian." The limping legacy of the Nasserist state is also evidenced in Egypt's bloated public sector. Poorly functioning government...
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