Soapbox:

Land of opportunity

By Samir Sobhi

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Ancient Egyptians gave the world chemistry, physics, sculpture, monotheism, and what else? One would need a few PhDs to grasp the full impact of Egyptian civilisation on the world. But I know someone who made a career of figuring it all out.

Fame came to him late in life, indeed posthumously for the most part. Gamal Hamdan, professor of geography at Cairo University in the 1950s, was an academic genius that rarely left his house. His home wasn't his castle so much as his monastery, as his publisher, the writer Youssef Abdel-Rahman, used to quip.

Hamdan treated geography as a field of philosophy, and sought to see through it the invincible march of history. Is Egypt the gift of the Nile? Or is it a bundle of contradictions? Does its greatness reside in the solidity of its ancient monuments, or something less perceptible?

A great river runs into an expanse of desert, the wrong way, as foreigners used to say. A land of intrigue and paradox: hard to decipher, easy to misread. For Hamdan, its contradictions were both a source of strength and weakness.

Egypt is a land of infinite possibilities and hard decisions. Look in any direction and what you get is a choice waiting to be made. Look south, and you'll see Africa, a continent we often forget is there. Turn around and you get the West, both inspiration and perceived threat. Look to the east and you find the Gulf and Asia behind, with unlimited opportunities and a few misgivings. As for North Africa, have we been in touch of late?

This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram.