When I looked up literacy stats, I noticed that a higher percentage of women in Wahhabist-dominated Saudi Arabia are literate than in Mubarak's Western-allied Islamist-suppressing Egypt (70.8% to 59.4%).
Saudi Arabia!
I've noticed that the people who are most fond of proclaiming the superiority of their own culture (especially on internet message forums) are never those who have actually contributed anything to said culture. Instead, they "mistake being born on third base for hitting a triple", enjoying what other people have built for them long before they were born and then having the gall to take credit for what they enjoy simply because they were lucky enough to have been born to the right parents and in the right place.
Egyptians are trying to do a very difficult thing right now: build an actual functioning, governing democracy from scratch, in a country that has never really had such a thing before and in the face of sociohistorical and religious forces pushing back against the very notion of such a thing, and which sadly make their chances of success dim at best.
But they are far, far better people for striving anyway, for fighting to build something even in the face of almost certain failure, than are the kind of people who do the cultural supremacist equivalent of bragging incessantly about what awesome drivers they are from the back seat of someone else's car.
