Lee Smith who writes on Middle Eastern and Islamic affairs for Slate has covered some of the same ground in this article about the rising generation he calls the "trust-fundamentalists."
Then there is David Remnick's piece in the new New Yorker, which covers much of the same ground, but benefits from some on the scene interviews with Egyptians, most of whom express utter contempt for America and American foreign policy. A sample:
Later, I visited Sonallah Ibrahim, a Marxist novelist who is known for scathing political fictions, like “The Smell of It,” which he published after a term in Nasser’s prisons. Before knocking on his apartment door, I noticed a decal above the bell showing the American and Israeli flags joined by a swastika. He, too, was enraged about Palestine and Iraq, but not only that: everything about the United States repelled him. Ibrahim taught Arabic literature at Berkeley in 1998, an experience that evidently did not suit him. “I despised the total individualism, the control of multinationals, the manipulation of the media over the ordinary person, the values of life, just living to eat, drink, fuck, have a car, and that’s all,” he said. “There are no moral values, no broad-minded attitudes toward life in general or a sense of what is happening in the world, no sense of the role America is playing in trying to control the resources of the world.” Perhaps what irked him most, he said, was “the genuine stupidity of the normal American citizen. He is ignorant. He doesn’t know what his own country is doing in the world. The U.S. is following the same policy of racism as the Nazis. Do I really have to explain something to you that is so well known everywhere?”I have a broad range of emotional and intellectual responses to this. The moral decline he decries rings bells on both left and right here at home. And as a teacher, well, it is perhaps true that the younger generation that he would have been teaching (at Berkeley no less) might not display great depth or passion. And the grim reports in this piece come not just from the increasingly irrelevant old guard intelligentsia in Cairo, but also from the younger elites--those wealthy twenty somethings who went to the American University, speak fluent English, and are quite at home with Western culture.
One knock on Remnick's piece: obviously he does not speak Arabic (nor is it necessary in order to write knowingly about these issues), and the transliteration of Arabic into English is messy business but there are certain key terms that one needs to get right. In this case, in providing a quick overview of Islamist ideology, Remnick introduces the concept of Jahiliyya, but gets it wrong: "jahillya." If one said "jahillya" to a Muslim or an Islamic studies nerd, it would appear amateurish and or sloppy. Perhaps it was an error on his part, or maybe just a typo, but someone should have caught it.
