Even the most global events, those whose reverberations are felt far beyond their borders, are rooted in the specific and the local. This week's coup d'etat in Egypt, the army stepping in to remove and then arrest the democratically elected president, is no different. The toppling of Mohamed Morsi had a hundred causes, many of them wholly peculiar to Egypt.
A choice example: Morsi wanted to close all shops at 10pm, so that Egyptians would be fully rested in time for morning prayers. That didn't go down well in famously nocturnal Cairo where, as the New Yorker put it, "there are still traffic jams at 2am and where internet usage peaks at 12.45am".
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