5 ideas
Changes in Egyptian manners, taste, language and religiosity between the 1950s and 1990s are best explained by the unprecedented speed of vertical social mobility, both up and down. Explanations that invoke moral decay or foreign cultural invasion miss this. Widespread lament about 'declining values' is largely the anxiety of established classes watching newcomers acquire money and visibility on terms the old hierarchy did not set.
Gulf remittances and infitah-era trading and commission income were rent-like. They rewarded access and willingness to migrate rather than credentials. Skilled manual workers and small traders could out-earn salaried professors, doctors and civil servants. This broke the old link between schooling, occupation and status, leaving the salaried middle class with prestige but no money and the newly rich with money but no settled status.
Amin reads the veil less as a theological revival than as a response to mobility. It offered a respectable, affordable uniform that protected reputation and eased class comparison of dress for women moving into mixed campuses and offices.
The newly rich could not claim status through lineage or education, so they claimed it by visibly acquiring goods. Examples include imported appliances, lavish hotel weddings, cars and new resort villas. On this view, conspicuous consumption is a way for people whose wealth outran their recognized social position to buy legibility.
Television reached villages and poor urban districts at the same time as open-door imports. It displayed urban, consumer lifestyles to audiences who had never seen them. Aspirations spread faster than incomes, which intensified pressure to migrate, to earn by any available route, and to spend on display.