The dish “is in the crosshairs of certain city dwellers who look upon shawarma vendors with a jaundiced eye, as forerunners of a foreign invasion. Their reactions speak volumes about the crises in the Middle East and their repercussions in Cairo, but also about regional geopolitics, migratory streams, the refugee problem, the economic crisis plaguing the country and the fervent nationalism which is surfacing again as a result. Shawarma “has become a symbol of xenophobia and rampant nationalism. ”
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51