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A CONTENTIOUS COCKTAIL
There’s a saying in Egypt that “once you drink from the Nile, you’ll always come back.” The proverb took on new meaning when the Saudi owner of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Cairo recently imposed a ban on the sale of alcohol in the hotel and ordered that all stocks be destroyed. Sheikh Abdel Aziz Ibrahim, a relative of Saudi Arabia’s king, appears to have had a puritanical impulse to turn the landmark hotel into a dry establishment. Hotel staff say it took 24 hours to pour an estimated LE 8 million worth of beer, wine and whisky down the drain.
Long-term losses for the hotel are harder to estimate. Liquor sales account for a sizeable portion of the hotel’s profits. Serving alcohol may not necessarily attract foreign tourists, but going dry is certainly a good way to keep them away. One local tour operator reported over 1,000 canceled bookings after the hotel imposed the liquor ban. Moreover, the hotel could be stripped of its five-star rating.
Apart from inebriating the Nile’s fish, the owner’s decision to impose Islamic rules on a tourist establishment was a sobering reminder of the rift between secular business and religious conservatism.
Tourism is big business in Egypt, generating 20 percent of foreign currency revenue and providing nearly 2 million jobs. Yet for many pious Muslim Egyptians, it is an industry seen to derive a portion of its profits from drinking, gambling and immodest behavior – and so any income generated through tourism is haram (forbidden by Islam). Extremists have used this reasoning as the basis for attacks on tourists, such as the 1997 Luxor massacre and 2005 Sharm Al Sheikh bombings.
Reconciling economic necessity and conscience is a challenge for many Egyptians. But jeopardizing Egypt’s $9.5 billion tourism industry is not really an option for the government given the country’s high unemployment rate and budgetary constraints. Attempting to strike a balance, it is encouraging development aimed at attracting 14 million visitors a year by 2011, while at the same time tightly regulating liquor, gambling and entertainment licenses. A more liberal attitude prevails in tourist centers such as Cairo, Luxor and the Red Sea resorts, while other parts of the country – in keeping with social norms – are pretty much dry.
Muddying the waters in this dispute between the Grand Hyatt and its owner is religion. But this is not a question of conscience, it is one of business ethics. The sheikh, upon his own volition, entered into a legal contract with Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels & Resorts to manage his property as a licensed five-star hotel. If he later deemed the deal sinful, he should have either allowed the management contract to expire without renewing it, or sold his hotel to someone able to fulfill the terms of the agreement.
CAM MCGRATH
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