Snip As the proceedings begin, some 200 people have settled into their seats and more chairs are summoned to accommodate late arrivals. It is a diverse audience, with both sexes and age groups represented in roughly equal measure. Each panelist is given 15 minutes to make his pitch, beginning with the liberal. A well-known television personality, he wears a blue blazer and a white shirt opened at the collar. In deliberate fashion and without notes, he rails against the evils of monopoly and privatization. Public utilities should be controlled by the state, he says. Capital markets are founts of corruption, and as such, must be subject to strict regulation.
Next comes the Islamist, a functionary of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s most prominent fundamentalist group. Having once built vast empires on foundations of lightly regulated commerce—the World Bank, after all, once celebrated the 14th-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun as an apostle of privatization—Islamists are generally free-market minded. This particular specimen, however, is not above trimming his message to suit a crowd where covered women and bearded men are a minority.
