you may have seen the NYT article about how economic pressures are turning the youth in egypt towards religion. the times translated the article into arabic (pdf) and that got young egyptians posting comments about the article (in english) at the NYT web site. as the arabist notes, egyptians seem to be of two minds about the article: they like that it was critical of the egyptian government for limiting their economic opportunities, but don't see the connection to religion.
things like this always interest me; how two different perspectives on the same thing can lead to different conclusions. it always raises the question of which account should be privileged over the other. should what egyptians say about their own society be more viewed more credibly? (after all they live there and should know what's going on) or are things like this only visible by an outsider? does distance give perspective or do you miss important details when you're looking in from the outside?
