Page 40 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

26 Dubai & Co.

and lower cost of employment places them in a favorable position
to receive much of the work that the MENA region’s service sector
is outsourcing.

NORTH AFRICA: VAST AND POPULOUS

Within the North Africa cluster, Egypt is the preeminent economy.
With a population of over 80 million (a third of whom are below the
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age of 15), Egypt’s consumer base is more than twice the size of the
entire GCC. Egyptians refer to Cairo as Umm al-Dunya, or “Mother
of the World,” a reference to the importance they place on Egypt’s
contributions to global civilization. Aside from its remarkable
ancient civilization, which prospered due to the abundant resources
of the Nile delta and Egyptians’ sophisticated society, Egypt was
the seat of the Fatimid and Mamluk caliphates for several centuries.
In the tenth century CE (two centuries before Oxford University
was founded), the Fatimids established Al Azhar University, which
has been one of the finest seats of Islamic knowledge ever since.
Egypt is about 90 percent Muslim and 10 percent
Christian, making it more religiously diverse than the indigenous
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populations of the GCC countries. Egypt is renowned as the center
of Arabic culture, producing not only the region’s most popular
films and entertainment media but also a rich and deep literary tra-
dition that turned out writers like Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
Under Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led Egypt from 1952 to 1970, the
country was the center of Arab nationalism—a postcolonial ideol-
ogy asserting the independence and strength of Arab civilization.
Although Nasser’s aspirations for pan-Arab unity were not real-
ized, his perceived strength in standing up to foreign powers (par-
ticularly during the Suez Canal crises of the 1950s) made him a hero
in the Arab world and among newly independent nations every-
where. Egypt at present is enjoying the fruits of the modest eco-
nomic reforms that have been enacted in recent decades, but true
prosperity remains elusive. Egypt in many ways remains a poor
agricultural economy.
Sharing some common characteristics is a group of other
North African states—Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—all of which
were French colonies, use French in educated circles to this day, and
have a significant expatriate community in France. Like their