Completed in 1972 it has achieved both, but the fertility of Egyptian farming land is now falling as it is cut off from the yearly layer of fresh nutrients brought by the flood.
Flooding used to bring nutrients to the farmlands.
Ajami's heroes are figures such as Egypt's novelist Naguib Mahfuz, the Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibah, and the tragic Hawi--men of integrity imbued with the old, confident spirit of cosmopolitanism and an openness to the Western ideas that led to the Arab awakening in the first place.