Nibbling at the Net.(Arab countries)

In the narrow streets of old Cairo--in alleys where beggars limp through piles of garbage, where idle men puff on their hubbly-bubblies and chickens beat up dust with their wings--the ancient tradition of the neighborhood scribe lingers. Al-Shaymaa Mohammed, 19, types letters for anyone who will pay. The job used to be done on a manual typewriter. Today she uses a word processor. Two months from now she expects to be hooked up to the Internet. "I've heard a lot about the Internet. People come and they ask for it," she said last week. "I want to learn how to use it, because then I would know a lot about the world." She pauses, thinking about what else the Net might mean. "They say some people find husbands on it."

In the opulent cool of a glass-and-steel office building on the shores of the gulf, Mohammad Al Gergawi exudes confidence. "The world is changing, and a lot of people think this part of the world will be the last to change," he says. "But we are lucky enough to live in a place called Dubai." After the emirate announced the creation of Dubai Internet City in October 1999, no expense was spared to make it happen. Gergawi, who runs the project, boasts that 364 days later it was ready for business, with more than 200 companies set to move in. Among them are large regional operations for Oracle, Microsoft and Canon. Along the roads nearby, each light post bears a banner proclaiming freedom of expression or freedom to create.

All across the Arab and Muslim world, from the poorest countries to the richest, people are clamoring for more access to the communications revolution. The appetite for information has been sharpened by now ubiquitous satellite-TV dishes. The ringing of mobile phones vies with the call to prayer. And wherever the Web is affordable and unrestricted, users and entrepreneurs spring up like grass in the desert after a rain.

As Arab potentates attend a summit in Jordan this week--denouncing the repression of Palestinians and calling for the end of Iraq's decade- long isolation--a few may gently raise the much more fundamental question of how this part of the world can keep pace with globalization. "We are not saying ignore the political," Egyptian Communications and Information Technology Minister Ahmed Nazif told NEWSWEEK; "we're saying give the economic agenda equal weight." But that's probably wishful thinking. Even those regimes that are trying hard to adapt, like Egypt's, are not sure whether the promise of the future is worth losing control over the present. For many, the whole idea of the Internet is suspect, and not without cause. "Hotmail and Yahoo may be the most subversive thing that ever happened to the House of Saud," says one dissident from Jeddah.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that free speech (behind screen names) will win out in the end. The autocrats of the Middle East have a very long tradition of imposing ignorance on their subjects. Five centuries ago Ottoman sultans rejected the Gutenberg revolution that swept across Europe and banned the printing press for 235 years. Arabs have been struggling to close the gap ever since. But many of today's emirs, kings and presidents-for-life are just as suspicious of the Internet as the sultans were of movable type. They're stalling. And with the West moving at Internet speed, Arab leaders could easily condemn the Arab world to the dark side of the digital divide.

That doesn't keep them from talking the talk. Even Saddam Hussein--who prohibited ownership of typewriters in the 1970s and '80s--has recognized the need to open a token, tightly monitored Internet cafe in Baghdad. Syrian President Bashar Assad, who inherited his dictatorship from his father, presents himself as a reform-minded Web surfer. But even if the men at the top were sincere, the region's pervasive secret police would not be ready to surrender their power. Telecommunications monopolies won't easily give up their enormously lucrative franchises either.

And in many Arab countries poverty is a practical barrier to the Internet age. Who can afford a $500 home computer in Sudan, say, where optimistic estimates place the average annual per capita income at around $940? Or in Yemen, where it's $750? International investors, meanwhile, are put off by the dearth of well-enforced commercial law. "There's a lack of proper governance," says Hisham El-Sherif, who started his own telecom company, Nile Online. "You make a deal with me, and the next day you change the rules of the game."