Beer, Bibles and Condoms

It's not quite sex, drugs and rock and roll, but it's moving in that direction. If you can take a country's social temperature by the billboards along its major highway, then Egypt seems to be changing. Driving to Alexandria and back today, I noticed three new sets of massive advertisements that might not have been so prominent a while back.

Al Ahram Beverages has launched a campaign to sell Stella beer, its basic brand, using rustic types instead of the jetsetters you might expect in a country where alcohol advertisers have usually targeted the upper middle class. Heineken, which al Ahram brews locally under licence, has had large advertisements for a while but the imagery is very discrete (the word Heineken is in tiny print, for example) and the text is all in English, so the devout Muslim who happens to be passing would hardly notice them. Now we have Amm Abdu the Upper Egyptian peasant, in white galabia and turban, brazenly swigging it straight from the bottle. Another ad in the series has a group of his friends, perhaps at the circumcision party for the village chief's baby son, having the time of their lives. I say circumcision party because some years back, stranded in the Upper Egyptian town of Baliana (near the Abydos temple) for the night, I ended up at just such a party. The Stella flowed, a thick cloud of hashish billowed out of the tent and the village chief was just about able to stand to do his stick dance with the bellydancer, well past her prime, that they managed to rustle up. A good time was had by all.

Durex, the British condom maker, also has advertisements, not so surprising perhaps since few Muslims have ever been puritanical about sex for pleasure and family planning is government policy. The slogan, if I recall correctly, was "Pleasure We Wish", in English, and the image included the faces of a man and a woman, smiling at each other.

The third advertisement, in Arabic, struck me as truly novel -- promoting the reading of the Bible (al-ingil). The exact wording escapes me but it played on the rhyme between ingil and gil ('generation'). Something along the lines of "The Book for Every Generation". The advertisers are an institution called Dar al-Kitab al-Muqaddas (the Holy Book Establishment), which I then noticed runs a book stall selling bibles and other Christian literature at the highway resthouse half way between Cairo and Alexandria. I understand that the stall has been there a while but the adverts are new.

Talking of beer, I noticed the number of Egyptians drinking the stuff openly on the beach this year. Some of the bins contained many empty cans. In the United States, you'd be hard pressed to find any public beach where you could drink a beer without some officious busybody telling you there's a law against it. In the United States, there's a law against everything. In Egypt, the police assume there's a law against anything but can usually be persuaded otherwise.