Naguib Mahfouz
I’m not as literary a person as I ought to be, but even I know the work of Naguib Mahfouz, who just died. His name came up a number of times during our conference in Cairo. This morning I read an appreciation of Mahfouz in Slate and was struck by an insight of great import:
Muhammad wonders if the real question is not what went wrong for the Arabs, but what the historical processes were that went right for the West. I figure that whatever the questions are, at least a few of the answers to the world’s problems are somewhere in Muhammad’s ashtray.
When walking through old Cairo and seeing the squalor, the piles of garbage, the serious poverty of the vast majority of the people, the ramshackle housing, with illegal apartments built on top of illegal apartments (well described by Hernando de Soto in The Mystery of Capital), and the omnipresent police, I remarked to a friend that this is what Europe would look like if liberalism and the industrial revolution had happened in the Middle East (generating easily exported technology, such as electricity), but not in Europe.
Some people in the Arab world understand well what the late Peter Bauer knew: poverty needs no explanation — it’s what exists naturally; it’s wealth that has to be explained.
A Gratuitous Photo from my Trip
Photo taken by my friend from Baghdad, Mohammed
Cool picture Mr. Palmer! I wish I was in your shoes.
Stop staring at me sphinx!
Dr. Palmer, you are a very handsome fellow! What a combination of brains and beauty.