Education Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

There is a quiet sleight of hand in Mahfouz's phrasing: he begins with "as the tension eases", as if political crisis is just weather passing, then redirects the reader toward the safe nouns of state-building - agriculture, industry, education. These are unimpeachable aspirations, the kind that sound apolitical precisely because they are presented as practical. The line works by offering development as a pressure valve: stop arguing about power, and start talking about bread, factories, and schools.

But the final clause - "toward democracy under Mr Mubarak" - gives away the bargain. Democracy is framed not as a contested practice, but as something that can be administered from above, appended to a leader's name like a policy portfolio. "Under" matters. It implies supervision, limits, a managed transition in which the state decides how much participation is safe. Mahfouz isn't naive; he's an artist who spent his career anatomizing the bargains Egyptians make with authority. Here he sounds like someone negotiating with reality, trying to carve out space for incremental progress inside an authoritarian order.

The context is the Egypt of Mubarak: a regime selling stability after upheaval, modernizing enough to claim legitimacy while keeping politics on a short leash. Mahfouz's intent reads as pragmatic persuasion - an appeal to channel public energy into long-term capacity rather than immediate confrontation. The subtext, though, is more ambivalent: if "tension" must ease before democracy can arrive, then tension becomes the regime's favorite excuse to postpone it indefinitely.