Egypt Culture

In Egypt, whatever the doctor says, the patient does. That's not always the case here, eight Egyptian physicians have found out as they train with UC Irvine doctors in family medicine. After seeing a patient at UCI's Family Health Center challenge a doctor's advice, one visiting physician asked whether the patient was permitted to say no. "My reply was, 'It's a free country,' " Dr. Thomas Bent, UCI's director of residency in family medicine, said, laughing.

It's midnight at the oasis, and there's no camel to send to bed. Instead, Arabic pop music is blasting from a fluorescent-bright shop serving icy sugar-cane juice. At the sweltering coffee shop across the unpaved lane, robed men pass the night playing dominoes and puffing on water pipes as a TV screen flickers nearby. Trucks and motorcycles rumble past; the sound of grinding gears mixes with the barking of dogs and the braying of donkeys.

What the devil has gotten into the Egyptians? Devil-mania has been the order of the day in Cairo since police swooped into homes on the night of Jan. 22, rounding up scores of upper-class teenagers and young adults. The crime? They were accused of losing their religion and worshiping the devil.

Sixteen-year-old Marwa Mohammed Kamal, a good student with a bright future, had just stepped from her apartment in a working-class neighborhood when she saw the man whom she barely knew but with whom she had recently broken off an arranged marriage. He raced toward the tall, striking young woman, flinging a foul-smelling liquid on her face, arm and back. She collapsed in searing agony--the victim of what is becoming an increasingly common attack here. She had been burned with sulfuric acid.

How do they honk? Let us count the ways. They honk to warn pedestrians to stand back, or to pass another car, or if another car is veering close to them. They toot defensively coming into intersections. They toot while stuck in traffic jams, which is most of the time. Drivers in this overcrowded city of century-old street mazes and three-abreast traffic down two-lane highways venture forth with their hands on the horn, engulfing Cairo in a never-ending cacophony.

The revolution of Islam wears two faces in Egypt now. Schoolgirls walk the Nile River canal banks, their eyes shadowed under head scarves, or what they call "the veil." Alongside, young men cruise the Corniche highway in shark-shaped armored assault vehicles of the Egyptian state security apparatus, their eyes looking down oiled barrels of machine guns. The one face of revolution is as quiet as the scarf, patient, tolerated by officials and even encouraged.

For the lowly marshmallow--whose normal fate is to be impaled on a coat hanger and immolated in a primitive, ritualistic sacrifice--1988 offered a brief flicker of glory. The hallowed Olympic flame, hand-carried from Greece to Canada, had been left within easy reach of the masses. Swept up by the grand and solemn tradition of the Games, spectators approached the fire and--in a moving display of reverence--roasted marshmallows over it.