5) The number of women that wear the niqab
Men here very rarely have beards because it is an easy way for the police to identify them as fundamentalists. There is an immense fear of being connected with them (at least publicly) due to a sort of sarcastic disdain for far right religion here that combines with an understandable fear of Egyptian police and military authority to make public displays of faith a little uncouth, at least among men. Thus most of the people you see handing out religious pamphlets are women. Frequently, they wear the full niqab. Women rarely perpetrate acts of violence here, so there is less reason for the state to expend resources on cracking down on fundamentalism among them. Furthermore, this is not only among the poor. Most of the women I have seen wearing the niqab have been in Downtown and Maadi.
4) The prevalence of shame over guilt
It's easy to think in the West that the only driver of moral behavior is a negative reaction to guilt of the possible feeling thereof. At least here in Egypt, this is not the case. If one is deterred from a particular line of behavior, it is not because one will feel guilty but because it falls out of line with public expectations if a certain action is or isn't performed in response to an outside stimulus. For example, I saw two fights break out at various points in the day yesterday. These were not one-on-one affairs. Usually a crowd would build up that would watch for a period of time. There were usually two options at this point. Often the people are family, who become involved along familial lines and support whomever they are related to. The other option is how fights usually end. The goal of a fight isn't necessarily to achieve a concretized end. Rather, it is to maintain public face. As a result, fights will continue to escalate until a third party intervenes to tell everyone to cool their heels. For example, last night my real estate agent and boab (doorman) got into a shouting match over payment for services until a random bystander approached them both to tell them to calm down, at which point they both walked away. Backing down without this would have made someone look weak, and as a result outside mediation is both expected and encouraged.
3) The sheer size of the Egyptian support system
Max Rodenbeck points out in Cairo: The City Victorious that many people go to sleep hungry here, but no one ever starves. This has definitely been the case in my limited experience here, especially during Ramadan. Religion, like anything else, certainly has its plusses and minuses. Here, Islam creates an immense spirit of charity in which there are no questions asked regarding helping the poor or less fortunate. There are free iftar dinners everywhere and there is an expectation that one will tithe a portion of one's annual income to the poor, even if you yourself are struggling. No one chafes under this system, and it gives a society that would otherwise deal with crushing poverty a safety valve that channels away grievance.
2) Deference to authority
Most Cairenes chafe under excessive authority, though they rarely speak out against it, especially for abstract concepts like democracy and electoral representation. You're a lot more likely to see a protest about power outages or hashish shortages than taxation. You aren't going to see a revolution against the Mubaraks or Omar Suleiman any time soon due to a mixture of apathy and an unwillingness to stir up the pot in public.
1) The fact that the city functions at all
People here throw their trash everywhere, so the city has produced a class of people to pick it up (the zabbaleen). Poverty is an issue, so people give money to the poor. Traffic is awful, but somehow it functions and people get from point a to point b. I don't really know how or why it happens, but somehow the city pulls it together and works.
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