“Young people in the Middle East are less sectarian” than the radicals who currently dominate the news. The way to defeat radical jihadists is to invest in young people and families, so they can choose a “hopeful life over a glorious death.” — U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham.
Given what the perpetrators of violence have been encouraged to believe by leading radical voices in the Muslim community, attacks carried out in the name of Islam should not come as a surprise.
Despite how badly Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi wants to revolutionize the practice of Islam and the country he governs, his government simply lacks the resources necessary to overhaul the country’s educational system to counter the message of hate broadcast by radical imams.
At breakfast recently in Alexandria, Egypt, I struck up a conversation with my waiter, Sherif. He was 25-years-old, about the same age I was when I left Egypt. He had recently graduated from a tourism and hospitality school, just completed his military service and his whole life was in front of him. He said his dream was to become a chef so he could save enough money to marry and start a family. He was willing to work hard for a good life.
Today, the restaurant where Sherif works pays him around 500 Egyptian pounds (less than $64) a month. He spends most of his wages on bus fare commuting back and forth to work from one of the poorest sections of Alexandria. Tips keep him slightly ahead, but during slow times Sherif is forced to borrow money to cover his bus fare.
To make matters worse, the neighborhood in which he lives is a stronghold of the Salafists (also know as Wahhabis), an ultra-conservative Sunni Islam religious movement.
The tsunami of radicalization and the Islamization of Egypt began a few years before I left Egypt in 1979. By the early 1970s, Wahhabism had reached the country, brought there by Egyptians who had been living and working in Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states.