I was only beginning to realise that I was chewing on more chicken nuggets than I could swallow when a hand belonging to a vaguely familiar, suave, young face began to furiously wave at me. The recollections of my long-lost acquaintance began to filter through the wall of oblivion I had constructed about everything concerning my childhood in Egypt. My elementary school friend and the smell of his French cologne, which was very generously applied, scurried across the abandoned food court to the green, uncomfortable stool that I was awkwardly perched upon.

Passing in front of him was a portly Egyptian lady in her early forties donning the obligatory blue overalls of the Cairo Festival City Mall cleaning crew. We were, of course, on the Kattameya Plateau, conveniently situated north of the furious megalopolis that had — to the great chagrin of the class, which could afford to spend time at the shopping centre — been making the headlines on a daily basis since 2011. More specifically, we were inside Festival City Mall, the most obscene and opulent monument to neo-liberalism to be found in Cairo around which the rest of Cairo Festival City is organised. This area includes the American private elementary school which I had attended with the fellow who had by now arrived at my table and was timidly implying that he would like a french fry.

We sat down at a Starbucks outlet in a different part of Kattameya, Cairo that is part of an outdoor complex barricaded from beggars and troublemakers at all gates by armed security guards. When I explained to him that I had been living in Dubai for the past six years, he responded by assuring me that it was the model of Dubai which Egypt must follow to escape its current crisis, adding that Egypt had progressed immensely, referring to the shopping complexes which had been the backdrop of our reunion. In fact, I didn’t feel as though I had seen much progress since I had last visited. True, the computer-animated sketches of the future Cairo Festival City, displayed on the monumental billboards facing the Cairo Ring Road had indeed been converted into a three-dimensional carbon copy on the plot behind the billboard. And yes, there were more shopping malls, golf courses, and luxury villa compounds with private swimming pools penetrating the formerly barren desert, but I continued to see quite little progress with regards to alleviating the severe poverty of most Egyptians.

On my way home, staring at the concrete walls which hide Cairo’s ramshackle slums from the sight of tourists on their way to the pyramids, I contemplated the irrationality of using Dubai’s ruthless capitalism as a parable for development in Egypt, seeing that this approach ignores the demographic and economic complexities of either system. Since the Infitah, or openness, movement of the seventies, and perhaps even earlier, a transnational Arab right-wing has emerged aggressively pushing for the privatisation of formerly public services, grounding their push for the free market in the triumphalist language of neo-liberalism. For decades, our economic ministers have pacified the masses with the distant promise of the trickle-down effect, but as the recent unrest in Egypt proves, precious little has trickled-down during the previous decades of free market reform. Our government has been far more concerned with labelling organisations which call for the participation of the ordinary Egyptian in political life as terrorist groups, rather than addressing the primarily economic grievances which are at the heart of these popular movements. Whilst I do not believe that Islam should be used as a political idiom in an inter-confessional society like Egypt, I do not share the government’s foolish optimism that these subversive voices will evaporate with the application of disproportionate force.

Moreover, I find that the contributions of observers with strategic interests in the region have been particularly damaging to the conversation on public policy in the Middle East. Take Thomas L. Friedman’s most recent article “Did Dubai Do It?,” for instance, which is presumably a sequel to an earlier inflammatory “article” where he contends that the Arab Spring was inspired by the encounter of young Arabs with Israeli justice. He fails to mention that many of these enlightening encounters have been overshadowed by violence and apartheid.

In his most recent article, structured much along the same lines as his article on the Israeli model, Friedman argues that the Arab Spring’s root cause is a deep-seated desire within Arabs to catch up with Dubai’s capitalist atmosphere of affluence and opportunity. Having grown up between Cairo and Dubai, I am wary of the comparison which is made between the two cities and more specifically the treatment of Dubai as a blueprint for what Egypt could be. I have learned that attempts to universalise the Dubai model are problematic in a society with roughly ten times the UAE’s population and only two-thirds of the UAE’s GDP.

Egyptian neo-liberalism is a failed project, since it can only address the needs of the upper echelons of our society at any given time. Indeed, the middle class, once a growing sector of the population, has all but collapsed under neo-liberalism and Egyptian society has reverted to a binaristic feudal hierarchy consisting of two classes.The trickle-down effect never happened, because the wealth, which, according to the Arab right-wing politicians should have trickled-down, got trapped in places like Kattameya, which hire only a fraction of the people who lost their jobs through the large scale privatisation which made places like Kattameya possible in the first place.

Rather than taking articles such as Friedman’s at face value and pitting the so-called irrational and conservative lower class Arab masses against the liberal bourgeoisie of Dubai and Kattameya, we should look for the points of convergence between these two categories. What we forget is the involvement of Friedman’s Dubai, by which I don’t mean the city itself, but the corporate ideologies which he uses Dubai to stand in for, in creating the impoverishment and violence that continues to plague the region. The two worlds do not exist independently of one another at either poles of a linear trajectory, as it were, but simultaneously. We must wake up to the reality that there is no glistening skyline at the end of the neoliberal road for Egypt’s lower classes but only more redundancies, hunger and misery. Even Friedman’s Dubai, the Arab utopia abounding with opportunities, does not correspond to the realities on the ground. True, many Arabs have excelled professionally and are enjoying lifestyles which are the envy of young people across the region. However, one need only compare the names which crop up in a Dubai business card collection to those found in the indices of Levantine and Egyptian history books to realise that these opportunities aren’t for everyone.