A Gentle Intellect

On 10 October, 2009, a luminous intellectual and gentle soul passed away. Felled by cancer at the age of 59, Mohamed El-Sayed Saïd was laid to rest yesterday in his native Port Said. Saïd was among a handful of extraordinarily committed, preternaturally courageous public intellectuals and human rights activists who dedicated their lives to making Egypt a more just place. His life is an awe-inspiring string of achievements, spanning intellectual contributions, activist work, and a brief but vital experiment in social justice-oriented journalism. It’s customary for obituaries to list the deeds of such luminaries and mourn their loss, and Mohamed Saïd deserves nothing less. But I find myself first remembering his personal qualities as a wonderful human being.

Those who knew him remember that Dr. Mohamed was an exceedingly nice person--friendly, warm, and genuinely humble. The rough and tumble of public life in an undemocratic country hadn’t coarsened him one bit. He seemed to have swooped into this era from some other time and place, where people were soft-spoken, courtly, even-tempered, a tad shy. He had an air of serenity, unruffled by the constant interruptions of mobile phones and other trappings of the busy-and-important. I often ran into him in noisy public places—a cinema, a downtown street, a public political meeting—and he always seemed enveloped in some otherworldly calm. Once while we were chatting over coffee in his Ahram office, he received three successive phone calls from an irate person who was loudly reproaching him on some personal matter. Dr. Mohamed answered the phone each time and stoically endured the harangue, smiling at me impishly as the agitated person on the other end heaved and screamed.

For someone who had a truly searching mind and considerable erudition, Dr. Mohamed carried his learning lightly. He wasn’t pompous and he didn’t feel the need to dominate every conversation or gathering. He was dead serious about his calling, but didn’t take himself overly seriously. I once teased him about some clunky neologism in his writing (I think it was his literal Arabic translation of “reification”), and he laughed as loud as he permitted himself, blushing endearingly.

In the precincts of al-Ahram where there’s a hyper-awareness of rank and status, with individuals daily seeking to reinforce or augment their social standing, Dr. Mohamed was detached. He seemed embarrassed that he had a driver who ferried him around, and he explicitly refrained from the kind of name-dropping that others think lends them gravitas. Intellectually, he surpassed everyone in that building and far beyond; he was the kind of writer whom you had to read no matter what, because almost always you’d emerge with a new way of looking at an issue, or a clearer understanding of why you disagree with him.

Mohamed El-Sayed Saïd was born in 1950 in Port Said to a father who worked in the Suez Canal authority and a homemaker mother. He took part in the 1968 wave of student and worker protests, and again in the 1972 protests, along with peer Ahmed Abdalla. He was imprisoned in 1972 for his student activism, and in the same year graduated from the Cairo University Faculty of Economics and Political Science. Shortly thereafter he was hired as a researcher at the al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, a professional affiliation that would last until 2007 when he left al-Ahram to head the editorial team of al-Badeel. He pursued higher education and in 1983 received a doctorate in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for a thesis titled “Integration as a Model of Ethnic Conflict Resolution in Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Mohamed El-Sayed Saïd was a thinking person. He wasn’t a clever wordsmith or a peddler of packaged ideas or a researcher in the narrow academic sense, but someone who seemed to be thinking during every waking moment, challenging received wisdom, looking more deeply at things we take for granted, and trying to communicate his mental strivings through writing and activism. As the obituaries are repeating ad nauseam, he was a socialist and a liberal who respected and was respected by all shades of the ideological spectrum, from Islamists to Nasserists to the most dogmatic leftists. A secular socialist he certainly was, but to me he represents the true meaning of an intellectual: someone who is constantly questioning why things are the way they are, and urging alternative readings of seemingly settled issues.

But Mohamed Saïd wasn’t the kind of intellectual who retreats from the world to better analyse it. I’ll lazily invoke the hackneyed phrase because it fits here: he tried to change the world. He made real contributions to two areas of Egyptian public life: human rights activism and the independent press. He was among the founders of the Egyptian human rights movement in the 1980s, both as a leading member of the Egyptian Organisation of Human Rights (EOHR) (and later the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies) and a participant in theoretical debates about reconciling international human rights norms with Islamic principles. Emboldened by their international ties, Egyptian rights groups were the only organisations monitoring the government’s policing, especially during the years-long standoff with violent Islamist groups.

Mohamed Saïd’s human rights work nearly cost him his life. In 1989, the loathsome, vindictive Interior Minister Zaki Badr ordered the violent storming of a steel factory to break up a worker strike (one worker was killed in the confrontation). Dr. Mohamed drafted the EOHR statement expressing solidarity with the workers and condemning the government response. He was rounded up along with colleagues Hisham Mubarak, Amir Salem, and Medhat al-Zahed and subjected to brutal torture. Undeterred, he intensified his human rights work after 1989, and became a valuable source of knowledge about the history, politics, and organisational dilemmas of the rights movement.

In 2007, Dr. Mohamed entered the lively independent press scene. He helmed the fledgling al-Badeel as an experiment in non-partisan, non-doctrinaire leftist journalism oriented to social justice and popular struggles. The newspaper offered superb coverage of domestic politics, from localised cost-of-living protests to national political events, while innovating the idea of opinion pages featuring fresh emerging voices instead of publishing familiar big names serving up their familiar fare. Almost instantly, al-Badeel earned its place alongside al-Dostor and al-Masry al-Youm as daily must-reads, and Dr. Mohamed’s daily column revealed a different side of the public intellectual, a readable, accessible yet no less insightful voice on a far wider range of issues than he had ever commented on in print. During its brief half life, al-Badeel enriched contemporary Egyptian independent journalism and offered a platform for crucial societal debates. In 2008, when his illness became acute, Mohamed Said left the editorship but continued to write occasional pieces. Earlier this year, the paper lost its funding and sadly stopped printing.

The last time I saw Dr. Mohamed was in winter 2007, in the cavernous offices of al-Badeel in Bab el-Louq shortly after they started publication. The place was boisterous, full of energy, excitement, and good humour. Dr. Mohamed didn’t hold court or preside officiously, he darted from room to room, line-editing with journalists and editors, consulting with the website designers, bantering shyly with office staff. He announced a break and herded everyone around a table, a motley crowd of visitors, well-wishers, the newspaper’s funder, journalists, and a few oldtime leftists. We chatted amiably and sipped coffee as the winter sunshine flooded the room. Dr. Mohamed smiled beatifically, alternating sips of coffee with drags on his never-vanishing cigarette. And that is how I shall always remember him.



Photo: al-Masry al-Youm

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Who Should Rule Egypt?

Every summer, Egyptians ritualistically reflect on the July 23 revolution, going through the motions of enumerating its failures and accomplishments. This year is different, as Egypt faces an impending power transition that ironically may bring Egyptian politics back full circle. The ‘Free Officers’ replaced monarchical with military rule, but Mubarak has blocked the military feeder into the presidency and re-instated the hereditary route, albeit without the monarchical claim.

Mubarak’s management of his succession has led to a most unintended effect: a vital public debate about who should rule Egypt. By resolutely refusing to appoint a vice president and then choreographing his son’s political rise, Mubarak unwittingly opened up the question of what (and who) are the most legitimate sources of political authority. Debating such foundational questions is rare for any society; most political discussions focus on politicians’ actions, public policies, sometimes the rules governing the political game. This public discussion that’s been happening in Egypt for years now gets to a much more fundamental question: what kind of political game should we have in the first place? The debate has now crystallized into three camps: advocates of parliamentary rule, hereditary rule, and military rule. But let’s be clear: debates are one thing and who will actually assume power something else entirely. Yet no matter who eventually captures the presidency after Mubarak, Egyptians won’t stop debating the issue until they get to have a say in who rules them.


Parliamentary Rule

Debating who should rule Egypt became a burning issue during Mubarak’s tenure, but it didn’t start then. After 1954 when Nasser and his fellows made it clear that they wouldn’t return to the barracks, alternatives to military rule were imagined, but in the rarefied confines of intellectual salons and obscure legal journals. The issue began to percolate when Sadat pursued his plan of de-Nasserisation, packaged as democratisation. In the summer of 1971, he commissioned a group of experts to draft a “permanent constitution” that would ostensibly codify the rule of law and citizens’ rights. Judge and historian Tareq al-Bishri penned an important critical article flagging the draft constitution’s establishment of an unaccountable presidency. Informed by his deep knowledge of parliamentary politics in the 1930s and 1940s, Bishri alerted readers to the indispensability of a strong parliament to counteract the Egyptian bane of unchecked executive power.

Aided by the constitution, Sadat reinforced the imperial presidency in every particular, even dissolving parliament by fiat when a handful of its members dared to oppose him. In May 1980, a group of 54 intellectuals appalled by Sadat’s domestic policies wrote an open letter denouncing the president’s plebiscitary tactics and calling on him to cease sidelining parliament. Not exactly a resounding call, but its moderate, even deferential tone is a striking contrast to the proposals that would characterize Mubarak’s era.

Mubarak’s measured behaviour in his first term becalmed criticisms of unchecked presidential power, but when he renewed emergency law for the first time in 1988, opposition parties (they weren’t as risible as they are today) took up the call for a parliamentary system. In June 1991, ten opposition parties including the Ikhwan signed a 10-point joint statement calling for a new constitution that would establish a robust parliament with power of the purse. The 1990s saw a cascade of countless parliamentary proposals culminating with an autumn 1999 initiative timed to coincide with the referendum on Mubarak’s fourth term. Journalist-historian Salah Eissa elaborated on this 1999 proposal in his book Dustur fi Sunduq al-Qimama (2001). Like Tareq al-Bishri, Eissa drew on Egypt’s pre-republican political history, specifically the constitution commissioned by the Free Officers in 1953 but then shelved in 1954 when Nasser and his fellows decided to stay in power.

When Kifaya made its debut on the national stage in late 2004 as the embodiment of the anti-tawrith camp, it fused as no movement had before two strands of opposition to Mubarak: elite proposals for constitutional reform and parliamentary rule, and the strident rhetoric and systematic anti-presidentialism of the new adversarial press. Kifaya revised existing opposition proposals for a parliamentary republic, modernising them to incorporate new developments such as the judicial independence movement; one idea proposed that judges should lead a caretaker government that would organise fair elections to a new parliament.

As should be clear, advocates of a strong parliament aren’t just liberals, or Nasserists, or Islamists, or socialists. Debating who should rule Egypt cuts across this conventional and no longer salient ideological ordering. All those who advocate parliamentary rule do so out of the bitter experience of being governed by a president with unlimited powers. Naturally they differ about what type of parliamentary system they have in mind, but they agree that political power in Egypt should no longer be a matter of a few powerholders selecting the one man who will wield unlimited power. Instead, the citizenry should be able to select the few who will rule them (i.e. the few who sit in parliament), and those few should be periodically replaceable.


Hereditary Rule

The first thing to note about hereditary rule is that it began to be implemented and only later did its justifying ideas spread. Second, there is no principled argument for hereditary rule. All justifications emerged in direct service to the Gamal Mubarak project. Should Gamal Mubarak mysteriously evaporate from the scene, those touting his rule would disown their proposals faster than you can drop a scalding potato. I suppose there are those who pine for the pre-1952 monarchy, but they have no presence in public debate.

Designers of the Gamal Hosni Mubarak project knew that it was audacious and highly unpalatable, so first they had to have institutional cover. Thus the National Democratic Party was dusted off and repackaged as a real party, with nifty little organisational structures, specialised secretariats, internal elections, policy papers, oh my. If you have such a gleaming new party, the logical next step is elections so that the party can strut its stuff. So in 2005, Hosni Mubarak announced direct presidential elections and appeared in his shirtsleeves as the candidate of the spanking new NDP, and what do you know, he won.

But the institutional cover of parties and elections wasn’t all. The Gamal Mubarak project also fashioned for public consumption a few ideas for why Gamal Mubarak is a contender for ruling Egypt. A handful of sound bites were methodically repeated: “economic reformer”; “committed to the participation of young people in political life”. The New York Times chipped in with “intelligent handsome policy wonk.”

Among the welter of arguments for hereditary rule are the following, in no particular order: The expertise argument, that Gamal is qualified to be president because of his economic know-how and policy skills. The “devil you know,” notion, that Gamal is better than an unknown entity, frequently paired with a curious claim I heard several times, arguing in all seriousness that Gamal was “raised in a presidential household.” A related claim, packaged as a piece of popular wisdom, is that “Gamal is already sated so he won’t steal too much.” Then too there are the ideas produced by the shifty Gehad Awda, who in a 2004 book cast Gamal Mubarak as “Renewing National Liberalism” and in a 2007 book recast him as a “New Reformer.”

The cornerstone claim for the inheritance model is that Gamal Mubarak is the ticket to civilian rule. Peddlers of this argument frame it as a quid pro quo: accept Gamal as president, and he’ll deliver you from military rule. While advocates of parliamentary rule don’t accept this false choice, others rejoinder with the mirror image of the argument.


Military Rule

The idea that the Egyptian military is the one and only rightful claimant to rule appeared as a reaction to Gamal Mubarak’s steady encroachment on the presidency. In a series of widely-read, much-discussed opinion articles in 2008, analyst-turned-advocate Dia’ Rashwan called on Egyptians to support a military personage for president as the only way out of the inheritance scenario. In a portentous tone and deliberately mystifying language, Rashwan put forward a series of claims: first he set the scene by claiming “something mysterious imminent in Egypt”; then he coined the moniker “solid heart of the state” to refer to the military and to argue for its superior claim to rule; then he staked a position as a clear-eyed “pragmatist” and branded those who disagreed with him to be “noble idealists”; and his final flourish was a plea to the opposition to strike a “historic bargain” with a presidential candidate hailing from the military.

Rashwan ruffled many feathers with his explicit advocacy of military rule, generating insightful criticisms from such edifying people as ‘Imad Attiya, Mohamed El-Sayed Said, Nader Fergany, Farid Zahran, and others on the pages of the sadly defunct al-Badeel. What transpired was a remarkably detailed, frank discussion of what is and what should be the military’s role in politics. Rashwan’s critics didn’t just concentrate on his normative claim that the military should rule, they methodically examined his premises (that the military does indeed rule now but from “behind the scenes”), his rhetorical tactics (why the mystifying terms like “solid heart”?), and his framing of the issue (reducing the question of who should rule Egypt to The Son or The General instead of questioning the same exclusive conception of political power underlying both proposals).

Unlike the parliamentary and hereditary models, whose advocates are still energetically promoting their respective ideas, no one seems to have picked up on Rashwan’s explicit defence of a politicised military. This is puzzling because cryptic assertions that the military is the final arbiter in Egypt are regularly made, despite clear evidence of Mubarak’s methodical demotion of the military as a corporate political actor. Does the fact that Rashwan found no takers betoken public revulsion at his proposal? Perhaps. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea is resuscitated once zero hour arrives, or that a constituency develops around some military maverick, with a nod and a wink from influential third parties like the American administration. American governments have a longstanding fancy for pliable military strongmen running strategically important places.


The Irony

Breathless speculation over who will succeed Mubarak is the order of the day, but what’s the point of all this stale chatter? How on earth can anyone really know who will succeed Hosni Mubarak? The razor-sharp Ibrahim Eissa put it best: the question as posed may matter to the American and Israeli governments. But the question for Egyptians isn’t who’s next in line to be their overlord, it’s how to devise a system where citizens can install and remove their leaders.

Openly debating who should rule the country and how they obtain this power is now a defining feature of the political landscape, here to stay until a publically acceptable system of power transition is worked out. By upending the working system put in place by Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mubarak has basically invited the public to contest not just hereditary succession, but military succession and any other procedure involving a very narrow clique of deciders.

This doesn’t mean that Egypt’s citizens are on the cusp of choosing who rules them. Not soon and not for some time to come, alas. We don’t even come close to Iran, where voters periodically choose the group of elites who will rule them. It does mean that no system of rule is natural nor inevitable anymore, least of all Nasser’s model of officers running the show. Now everything is up for debate, every model of rule is subject to scrutiny, none get a free pass as the “most appropriate for Egypt,” “the most likely,” or whatever. Ironic, isn’t it? It’s the change-hating Mubarak who has ended up shattering the settled conventions for how Egypt is ruled, opening the door to the imagination of alternatives.

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The Other Egypt?

Bilal Fadl’s latest book has an attractive title and a laudable ambition. The irresistibly named The Original Inhabitants of Egypt: Stories about the Genius of the Place, the Idiocy of the Rulers, and the Indifference of the People (2009) promises to “narrate what I have seen and experienced of those human beings whom no one cares about, who harbour all the contradictions in the world and live in hope for a better fate in the afterlife.” Fadl has the credibility to pull this off. He was born into the category of Original Inhabitant of Egypt in 1974, his clever term for Egyptians who are neither rich nor middle class, but somewhere in the vast space beneath, what we alternately call lower-middle class, lower class, underclass, the marginalized, or the horrid “simple folk” (البسطاء). But despite his impeccable street cred, quick wit, and genuine affection for those he’s writing about, Fadl’s book falls flat. Unintentionally, it ends up being a condescending, forgettable series of ruminations about the woes of the little people.

Fadl is refreshingly honest about his “crossing over” to become part of the minority elite category, what he acidly calls The Inhabitants who Benefit from Egypt. He’s also frank about the irony that his embourgeoisement derives directly from his success at depicting the little people on screen. Fadl is now one of the most prominent screenwriters in Egypt, a trendsetter in the genre of ‘youth films’ and ‘shaabi films’, or rather, films featuring over-the-top, stereotypical lower class characters (with the outstanding exception of Wahed min al-Naas, 2006). Before that, he was a leading member of the feisty al-Destour team in its first incarnation (1995-1998), and he continues to be an editor at al-Destour. Indeed, Fadl made his name as an up and coming young practitioner of the Ibrahim Eissa school of journalism, a style characterized by pungent, ‘ammiya-laced prose; unambiguous and uninhibited criticism of rulers and their abuses; and plenty of hilarity to enliven the writing.

Not surprisingly given his current métier, the 29 essays in The Original Inhabitants of Egypt feature several stereotypical lower-class characters who the author presumably interacts with and then reports back to us readers. Inevitably, these caricatures speak in down-home, salty street argot, have wacky names and oh-so-eccentric habits, revel in conspiracy theories, and hold firm to the view that both the government and the opposition are welad kalb. Notwithstanding this unassailable last opinion, Fadl’s Original Inhabitants end up being extremely contrived, two-dimensional archetypes who we’re made to laugh at, not empathise with. They’re appendages of his middle class life, not real human beings with interests, foibles, and aspirations. Fadl regales us to “conversations” with the newspaper seller; his housekeeper Um Hind, who likes to call herself a “housekeeping manager” and yells at the TV screen when Hosni Mubarak is giving a speech (we’re supposed to chuckle on cue here); the fuul cart vendor, the makwagi, the bawaab, his friend’s chauffeur, unemployed patrons of a shaabi ahwa, and on and on down a list of stock figures from the underclass.

Instead of conveying Original Inhabitants’ work conditions or their emotional lives or simply straightforwardly narrating their experience of living a dispossessed life, Fadl parades before us a cast of made-for-TV stereotypes that we’re supposed to feel pity for. I understand that he wants to neither romanticise nor demonise Egypt’s denizens, a laudable aspiration, but surely there’s a better alternative than the mediocre stuff he’s penned here.

And an alternative there is, right in the same book. In a handful of essays, Fadl absolutely shines as a narrator and observer. These are passages where he recalls painful and hilarious experiences that he’s been through, back when he was an Original Inhabitant. One brilliant essay called “Why I hate Rahman Tables,” recalls a harrowing experience during Ramadan when Fadl was a lonely college student far from home. Against his instincts, he decides to break fast in the company of others at a local mosque; his description is one of the most outstanding tragicomic pieces I’ve ever read. It’ll make you laugh out loud while breaking down in tears. Another in the same vein recalls the first day of Eid when Fadl was a child, featuring the same touching mixture of hilarity, pathos, and startling insight.

The book’s last essay is a riveting piece titled “An Account of an Incomplete Popular Revolt in Heliopolis,” describing an incident that Fadl witnessed after Friday prayers one day in the posh Cairo neighborhood. The event itself is insignificant and routine: mosque-goers have a standoff with police who are attempting to confiscate some street peddlers’ merchandise. But Fadl’s beautiful description turns it into an eloquent, evocative allegory, one that ironically gives the lie to the book’s title.

These three pieces alone are nearly enough to erase the sour taste left by the rest of the book’s contents. Would that Fadl had dispensed with the reductive instincts of the pandering screenwriter, and gave free rein to his considerable skills as a participant observer and independent journalist. He could’ve written a perfect book.

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Talk is Cheap

President Barack Obama made some stirring remarks yesterday about the suppression of popular protests against the election outcome in Iran. In respectful and admiring terms, he spoke of the Iranian people’s courage and struggle to decide their own future. He said, “We have seen the timeless dignity of tens of thousands of Iranians marching in silence. We have seen people of all ages risk everything to insist that their votes are counted and their voices heard.” He was at pains to emphasize that “the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs.” For me, these brief remarks made at a press conference are far more significant than Obama’s ballyhooed Cairo speech to the “Muslim world.” I’ll save them to read again during the next major election coming up in the Middle East: the Egyptian parliamentary poll next year. (Tehran, 15 June, Getty Images)


The Cairo speech of 4 June was a ceremonious peace offering thin on policy details and thick with effusive praise about Islam and Muslims. Fine, that’s to be expected. Obama needs to inaugurate his term by distinguishing himself from George Bush’s maniacal and destructive Middle East policies. So he came to Cairo to “reach out” to the Muslim world, assalaamu alaykuming and quoting from the Qur’an. This is why I didn’t understand all the hoopla surrounding the speech, and all the so-called “analyses.” There wasn’t much there to analyse because it wasn’t a policy speech, it was a big group hug.

By contrast, the remarks at yesterday’s press conference are responses to actual events and portend concrete policies. The American president is responding to his domestic critics while at the same time chastising Iran’s rulers and signalling to the whole world that his government supports free and fair elections. Very good. Now he’s going to be held to his unambiguous words, and the upcoming Egyptian parliamentary elections provide the big test.

Recall the last elections in 2005. The first phase proceeded relatively smoothly, as Hosni Mubarak’s government watched carefully to get the lay of the electoral land. When voters spurned the ruling party’s hacks and preferred Ikhwan and other opposition candidates, the guns and tanks rolled out. Opposition candidates were obstructed and their campaign teams arrested. Voters were blocked from reaching polling stations, pelted with rubber bullets, and sometimes live ammunition. Judges counting the ballots were pressured or assaulted. Ballot boxes were energetically stuffed, and failing that, burned or hurled into creeks. Results were brazenly doctored, so we woke up one day and heard that the winners were the likes of Mustafa al-Fiqi, the dastard of Damanhour, and Amal Othman, the fossil from the Sadat age. Eleven citizens died during the elections, nine of them felled by security forces as they tried to vote. (Mansoura, 1 December 2005, AP Photos)

Recall the election aftermath. The whole world gasped and screamed because the Ikhwan netted 19.8% of the seats in parliament. Ya khabar eswed! Mubarak and his government swung into gear to make sure that this never happens again. In 2006, protestors rallying on behalf of wronged judges were brutally beaten and arrested, and variously abused while in detention. Later that year, the Ikhwan’s top leaders and asset-holders were arrested and referred to a military tribunal to deprive the group of its best strategists and bankrollers. In 2007, the government went for the jugular, rewriting the constitution to remove annoying clauses about judicial supervision of elections, minimum guarantees against arbitrary use of government power, and all that stuff. Then they wrote in explicit prohibitions against religious-based political mobilisation.

There, that should do it, no more opposition from now on. But wait, let’s not forget the 2008 municipal elections. Delayed for two years so that the government get a breather from the blow of the 2005 general election, when the time came, virtually all 52,000 seats went to the venerable National Democratic Party. Why so much fear about lowly municipal polls? Because the 2005 law organising direct presidential elections stipulates that any independent candidate for president must get the endorsement of at least 140 municipal council members.

Given all of the above advance preparations, it’s very likely that the 2010 elections will have none of the dynamism and sense of possibility that marked the 2005 poll. Aborting judicial supervision alone is probably enough to deflate the hopes of independent candidates and voters. Why go through the hard work of running or voting when the Interior Ministry will have control over the process? As we know, Egypt’s Lazoghly makes Iran’s Interior Ministry look like Mickey Mouse.

Still, in light of Obama’s forceful and precise words yesterday directed at Iran’s rulers, at least a portion of whom are actually elected, I’m going to await some equally strong words directed at Egypt’s ruler, who dares not put himself up for a real election. I’ll be looking for the American president’s condemnation of Egyptian police brutality and solidarity with citizens who “insist that their votes are counted and their voices heard.” And when police block roads to polling stations and break up peaceful election rallies so that the opposition doesn’t make gains, I’ll be waiting to hear Obama’s emphasis on “the universal right to free assembly and free speech.”

The credibility of U.S. policy in the Middle East will not be built on elaborate speeches in gilded halls and effusive remarks about Islam’s contribution to civilization. It will be based on American officials’ statements and actions in response to elections and their outcomes. I can’t speak for them, but I’d be willing to bet that most citizens of national states in the “Muslim world” care less about warm statements of cultural respect from American officials, and care a lot more about whether America’s government respects their collective choice in elections. And there’s the rub. When Iranians voted particular individuals into office in 1951, and Palestinians did the same in 2006, American power-holders at the time did not react so well. They preached free and fair elections but practiced brazen subversion because they didn’t like the groups that voters chose to run their government. (25 November, 2005, AP Photos)

The true test of the new American administration’s Middle East policy is whether it will respect the outcomes of elections, even when the winners are not America’s favourites, and even when the winners are against U.S. policies. After all, being against U.S. policies is not a crime and is not “anti-American,” and it won’t do to pretend that all groups who oppose U.S. policies can be put in the same basket as the murderous Osama bin Laden and his vile associates. Obama’s remarks about the Iranian elections are heartening, but the Iran case is too easy, because the American president is supporting voters who picked his preferred candidate. Obama’s words will mean something only when he speaks out for wronged voters elsewhere in the “Muslim world” who pick candidates he may not like.

Let’s see how the Obama administration responds to the upcoming elections in Egypt, where for years, voters have been trying to peacefully unseat some of America’s best friends in the whole wide world.

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Grace

Karima al-Hifnawy’s Diary of a Pharmacist (Dar al-Ain, 2008) is a work of quiet beauty and unusual restraint. Best known for her Kifaya and Karama activism and fearless presence at nearly every street protest over the past few years, Diary reveals another side of Dr. Karima. In print, she’s a light-footed, elegant narrator, relating her experiences as a pharmacist fresh out of university in the 1970s who chose to set up shop in a couple of small Delta villages. When I first saw the book, I quivered at the prospect of yet another elite intellectual regaling us with anecdotes of villagers’ quaint or backward folkways, an abhorrent tradition in Egyptian letters. Thankfully, Diary of a Pharmacist is anything but urbane condescension or didactic “observation.” It’s something far more original, luminous, and humane.

Barely 80 pages long, the book is structured into 19 vignettes, each rarely more than three pages long. They recount Hifnawy’s experiences interacting with village residents from the late 1970s to the 1990s, from her vantage as a medical professional dispensing remedies for all manner of ailments. Part of the great pleasure of the book is its writer’s genuinely unobtrusive presence, neither falsely self-effacing nor insufferably self-promoting. The introduction, just one paragraph long, is a study in the power of writerly economy. Hifnawy describes the book’s contents as “the reactions of an Egyptian woman pharmacist who lived among villagers for long years of her life, and they turned out just like this, with nothing added and nothing missing.”

The first scene-setting sketch, titled “The Train Station”, tells us that the village is the administrative node for seven surrounding hamlets. This privileged position was enhanced in 1979 with Hifnawy’s opening of her pharmacy, and then in 1984 when the village was blessed with a taboona to churn out ‘aish baladi, much to the pride and delight of residents. In a wry tone, Hifnawy relates the story of an enthusiastic elder who used to come by to her pharmacy every day to buy anything: some medicine, a bottle of cologne, baby formula for a grandchild. When she asked him why he encouraged everyone else to buy from her, the man relates a story from his past. As a young man, he banded together with other villagers to relentlessly petition the government for a train station stop at the village.

“We said to officials: we’re seven villages, and we have kids who travel back and forth to schools and universities, and we kept writing petitions and telling them how many people need this service. They told us we’ll build it, but if there’s no revenue from passenger tickets for the government’s treasury, then we’ll shut down the station. So me and all the other young men from the surrounding villages would walk three kilometers to the train station and buy tickets, not to ride the train but to keep the station running.” Different readers will draw different meanings from this story. I read it as a poignant and terse summation of a universal story: humble people’s resourceful extraction of basic services from apathetic governments.

Other vignettes describe various rural conditions, norms, and practices, but not in the remote analytical language of social science. Nor does Hifnawy pretend to “give voice” to ordinary people. Her words and opinions are clearly expressed, her criticisms matter-of-factly and calmly conveyed. I can’t quite describe this stance except to call it human grace. This comes to the fore most clearly in Hifnawy’s interactions with village midwives, women who are privy to residents’ most intimate secrets. Such material is not easily handled without salaciousness or voyeurism, but there’s none of that here, only the stories of women protecting other women from vengeful social codes.

There are plenty of lighthearted vignettes that don’t carry social commentary but simply relate the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, such as Fattheyya the vegetable peddler who must get back to work three days after giving birth to her eighth child, to support her children and disabled husband, a tuberculosis-afflicted shoe shiner. There’s a hilarious encounter between Hifnawy and some villagers after rumour spread that she was a communist, and an extremely moving story about a proud elderly woman who gifted the pharmacist with fresh eggs from her only chicken.

Diary of a Pharmacist recalls two canonical works in Egyptian letters that depict the encounter between the urbane intellectual and the rural poor: Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Diary of a Prosecutor in the Countryside (1942) and Nawal al-Saadwai’s Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958), both fictionalised accounts based on the authors’ experiences. But it is distinguished from these two texts both in form and substance. Hifnawy’s writing is minimalist and almost fragmentary, Hakim and Saadawi’s prose is more elaborate and garrulous. Substantively, Hakim and Saadawi are far more self-centered and self-regarding than Hifnawy, with an explicit project of societal critique and reform. Hifnawy is no less committed to social change, but she has the self-awareness not to grandly insert herself as the enlightened reformer uplifting the hapless natives. Hifnawy loves the villagers and they love her back.

If Hifnawy’s book simply defied the “oh-let’s-pity-the-poor-people” attitude so ingrained in how we speak about poor citizens (when we mention them at all), it will have done an immense service. But it does much more. As a writer, her precise prose is a refreshing reminder of the power of words. As a social critic, Hifnawy is at once respectful of people’s beliefs without necessarily validating the cruel traditions governing their lives. As an activist, Hifnawy doesn’t let anyone off the hook with comforting bromides about “giving voice to the voiceless”, or nationalist bombast aestheticizing poverty as “authenticity.” This little book shows us humans living in unjust conditions, and asks: when will these human beings become full citizens?

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Zeinab al-Segeiny, untitled, oil on canvas

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The Wages of Mubarak's "Realism"

Like many others, I’ve been watching in disbelief as the Egyptian government enables the Israeli destruction of Gaza. This time, Hosni Mubarak and his foreign policy muwazafeen have entirely thrown in their lot with Israel and the U.S., blaming Hamas, admitting that they can’t lift a finger without Israeli permission, and hoping that Israel will get the job done this time and extinguish Hamas once and for all. But as obscene and repugnant as his current stance is, Mubarak’s behaviour is of a piece with his foreign policy posture since he succeeded Sadat. That posture is based on a simple formula: “realism”, which translates into equating his interests with those of Israel and the United States, in exchange for scraps of economic rent; and revamped authoritarianism, which translates into repressing anyone who dares to challenge his realism and imagine alternatives. (Landing in Saudi Arabia, 13 January)

In the early years of his tenure, Mubarak didn’t stray from the substance of Sadat’s policies but did steer clear of his predecessor’s flamboyance and increasingly unhinged demeanour. He tried to appear firm with the Israelis, recalling Egypt’s ambassador in Tel Aviv after the Sabra and Shatila massacre and holding out for international arbitration of the Taba demarcation, which bore fruit and Taba was returned to Egypt in 1988. As is well known, Mubarak worked to roll back Egypt’s isolation after its separate peace with Israel, and in 1989, Egypt was readmitted to the Arab League and became part of something called The Arab Cooperation Council along with Yemen, Iraq and Jordan. But Mubarak was always a loyal follower of the Americans, contributing troops to the first Gulf War and allowing US warships unconditional access to the Suez in the 2003 war. At the same time that he was reintegrating Egypt into the Arab fold, Mubarak was also preaching the American gospel of cautious normalisation with Israel to other Arab rulers and forging coalitions with domestic capitalists eager to enrich themselves through ties to the Israeli economy.

The difference between then and now is one of style and not substance. If Mubarak today has no compunction about openly aligning his interests with Israel’s, this isn’t a sharp break from the 1980s so much as a shift in impression management. Before, Mubarak was just as cooperative with Israel as he is today, he simply invested more energy in rhetoric to hide this fact. Today, he’s lost interest in keeping up appearances, and seems perfectly comfortable being a tinpot autocrat with nothing more on his mind than keeping his patrons happy and his population cowed. A series of developments starting around 2000 have driven Mubarak to this point. Three events in particular are relevant: Hizballah driving Israel out of southern Lebanon; Bashar al-Assad inheriting power in Syria; and the outbreak of the second Intifada.

The regional rise of Hizballah (and later Hamas) and the breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations cast doubt as never before on the supposed futility of standing up to Israel. Refusing to challenge Israel is part and parcel of the so-called moderate worldview embraced by Arab governments, including Fatah, who are willing to make all the concessions on Israel and America’s terms. By contrast, Hizballah’s routing of Israeli forces buoyed the positions of the two Islamist organisations and most of Arab public opinion. This stance is premised on treating Israel as an interlocutor, not an invincible power, and demanding that it make real concessions of its own. For Mubarak, Abdallah in Jordan, the Sauds, and Mohamed VI of Morocco, the Hizballah victory and the outbreak of the second intifada were very bad news, exposing these incumbents’ political dependency and crediting the alternatives promoted by their political rivals.

The reason why Bashar al-Assad’s assumption of power is significant is that it came at a time when the question of succession preoccupied the Mubaraks (Hosni and wife). They became intrigued by the Syrian innovation of republican power inheritance and soon began to apply it at home. As Mubarak (and wife) became more engrossed in engineering the handover of power to the son and preparing the domestic political arena for the transfer, he became less and less able to package his foreign policy as protecting Egypt’s national interests or serving as a credible counterweight to Israel. This is because Gamal Mubarak’s domestic rise went hand in hand with economic and political rapprochement with Israel. Cronies of the Mubarak family signed 15-year deals to sell Egyptian natural gas to Israel, and inked QIZ protocols allowing free access to U.S. markets contingent on Israeli input into the exports. On the foreign policy front, the story of Gamal Mubarak is the story of how the Egyptian government ceased to promote a broadly defined Egyptian national interest and worked to promote a narrowly defined ruling class interest organically bound up with Israeli interests.

Observe Mubarak’s behavior during subsequent regional developments: Sharon’s 2002 reoccupation of the West Bank; the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq; Israel’s 2004 incursion into Rafah; the January 2006 Palestinian elections and subsequent Israeli-American attempts to bring down the Hamas government and foment a Palestinian civil war; the summer 2006 Israeli bombardment of Lebanon; Hamas’ 2007 seizure of power in Gaza to pre-empt a Fatah coup; and Israel’s November 4 attack on Gaza. On each of these occasions, Mubarak took no independent initiative to assert Egypt’s role, remaining resolutely within the acceptable parameters set by the U.S. and Israel. Sure, he recalled the Egyptian ambassador to Tel Aviv in 2000 and emitted feeble gestures of opposition to the Iraq war in 2003, but with the approval of his patrons, who fully understand the necessity of these noises for domestic consumption. Mubarak also ventriloquised the U.S. and Israel, painting Hamas and Hizballah as irrational and reflexively violent surrogates of Iran, seeking to sow destruction in the region. He stepped aside and bunkered himself in Sharm al-Sheikh as other powers like Saudi Arabia (and now Turkey) stepped in to become credible regional mediators.


To be fair, Mubarak did sometimes take initiatives, such as when he makes sure that his police forces beat, arrest, and harass those citizens who dare express outrage at his behavior. (Protest in Cairo, 2 January)

I’ve heard a lot of people say that Mubarak should make a bold move now, like halt the sale of Egyptian natural gas to Israel or open the Rafah crossing to recoup his legitimacy, gain popular support, mend his self-respect, restore Egypt’s regional clout, or what have you. But why on earth should we expect Mr Mubarak to have a conversion experience late in life and do something absolutely out of character? He’s never believed in domestic popular legitimacy, that’s why he hates Hamas so much. And he fundamentally does not believe in contradicting U.S. or Israeli actions, ever, even if this means that hundreds of unarmed Palestinians die in batches every few months because Israel decides to punish them for electing Hamas and not Fatah. Free and fair elections are a very dangerous thing, you see. They bring to power the wrong kind of people, the kind who think they have a choice. (Protest in Amman, 13 January)

*AP Photos

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Cairene Houses

Sawsan Abu al-Naga, Cairene Houses (1988)

oil on canvas

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Ramadan

Mahmoud Said, The Reciter (1960)

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An Eclectic Life

Autobiography is my least favourite literary genre, too easily prone to posturing and self-exoneration, or else heavy woe-is-me tales about the author’s suffering at the hands of a cruel world. Life is already too full of braggarts and whiners to have to be subjected to them in books. I remember only two autobiographies that I loved and learned from: Fathi Radwan’s Sira Dhatiya (written in parts and collated in one volume published in 1994), and Edward Said’s Out of Place (1999). Galal Amin’s autobiography piqued my interest because I’ve always enjoyed his elegant prose, “clear as a window pane,” to use George Orwell’s nice phrase (Orwell happens to be a major inspiration for Amin). So I was pleased to find that What Has Life Taught Me? (2007) is neither disingenuous nor ponderous, but refreshingly honest for the most part, deliciously mordant in parts, bland in others, and frustrating on occasion. Which is to say it’s a worthwhile read.

The book is divided into 19 chapters that trace the arc of the author’s interesting life, from birth in a household headed by one of Egypt’s intellectual luminaries of the first half of the 20th century to higher education at Cairo University’s Faculty of Law, on to England for a doctorate in economics and marriage to an Englishwoman, then a long career in Egypt as a university professor and public intellectual, and finally grandparenthood and a pervasive sense of disappointment after the onset of old age. An appendix contains an arrangement of lovely family photos that tell their own story of the life cycle.

Amin is an utterly charming raconteur and a compulsively readable writer. His autobiography is peppered with fascinating details, evocative portraits, and wonderful sparks of humour. The stories about his mother’s reaction to an Italian abortion doctor and his elder brother Husayn’s headstrong resistance to having his tonsils removed are especially delightful. Occasionally, Amin inserts extracts from his letters to family members over the years, a device that I found to be little more than filler that doesn’t enrich the quality of the narrative.

The most inspired parts are Amin’s descriptions of his parents and older siblings (he is the youngest of eight). His modernist father Ahmad Amin wanted only two or three children but his headstrong mother insisted on more, finding in her many children a refuge from an unloving husband and a perfect provocation to her hostile sisters-in-law. Amin’s chapter “The Seven Siblings” is an insightful study of character contrasts, including portraits of the eldest Muhammad (17 years the author’s senior and the mother’s clear favourite), to the frustrated Hafez (a talented playwright who never achieved the recognition he deserved), to the two sisters Fatima and Na’eema: Fatima is modern and adventurous, constantly butting heads with her father, while Na’eema is conventional and uncurious, with no interest in school and no qualms about marrying a suitor who had initially courted but been rejected by Fatima.

Reviewers have noted Amin’s unusual candour in discussing private family dynamics, particularly the details of his parents’ stable but loveless marriage. His account is indeed frank but also sympathetic, lovingly portraying two people of remarkably different temperaments joined in a curious union. Ahmed Amin, the Sharia court judge, university professor, prolific author, and friend of such luminaries as Taha Hussein and Abdel Razzaq al-Sanhuri, was a man with a highly refined ethical sense and an unwavering commitment to the liberal education of his eight children, but at home he was a distant father and a dour, remote husband. He rarely spoke to his wife, never addressed her by her first name, and in several places in his diary (from which his son quotes verbatim), confided an abiding regret that “my wife is not very beautiful,” writing these words in English to hide the sentiment from his wife in the event she laid hands on the diary.

It’s no wonder that Amin’s mother suffered from a palpable sense of insecurity throughout her life. She coped by tenaciously clinging to her favourite son Muhammad, at one point even enlisting the aid of Taha Hussein to prevent her son’s travel to England for doctoral education. She was also fiscally shrewd, saving up enough to eventually buy the house in which the Amin family lived. And she even started charging her husband rent, which he obligingly paid! Zaynab Fahmy emerges as a spirited and remarkably wilful woman in her youngest son’s affectionate telling. Orphaned at an early age, she went to live with her maternal uncle but ran away when he forbade her to marry her beloved cousin (son of his brother), a loss from which she never recovered. In one of the book’s most moving passages, Amin recounts the coincidental way his mother reunited with her first love in 1956, two years after her husband’s death. A short while after the aged lovers reconnected, they died within weeks of one other.

The writing in the rest of the autobiography doesn’t approach the lyricism of the first few chapters (with the exception of the book’s final paragraph), as the author shifts to more public matters of his professional and intellectual trajectory. Here Amin is keen to enfold personal experiences into broader sociological contexts, the same technique he employed to such good effect in Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? (2000) Thus his experiences as an undergraduate at Cairo University and then a graduate student at the London School of Economics are occasions for sobering reflections on the tragic handicaps of Egyptian institutions of higher learning, compared to their thriving cognates abroad. Amin also contrasts his experience as a faculty member at Ain Shams to his later experience as a professor at the more autonomous, resource-rich American University in Cairo, a comparison that is again extremely unflattering to Egyptian national universities. I really didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at his detailed description of the unbelievable exam marking procedures at Ain Shams University.

The most enjoyable parts here are several well-crafted, very moving portraits penned by Amin recalling famous and not so famous work associates, including Cairo University economics professors Labib Shuqair and Saïd al-Naggar, Ain Shams law professors Helmi Murad and Ismail Ghanem, and UCLA professor Malcolm Kerr (later President of AUB before his assassination in 1984). I also particularly enjoyed reading two choice tid-bits recalled by Amin, one a tragicomic episode on June 9, 1967 featuring Rif’at al-Mahgoub, then a professor of economics at Cairo University and later Speaker of Parliament before his assassination in 1990. And another describing Amin’s run-in with Ottoman historian and Orientalist Bernard Lewis while Amin was interviewing for a position at the University of London (he wasn’t offered the job).

Amin is not classifiable within the conventional currents of contemporary Egyptian thought (Islamist v. secularist, Nasserist v. liberal, Marxist v. capitalist), and an important chapter titled “The Neo-Traditionalists” explains why. For a brief spell in the 1980s, he was a member of an intellectual salon that brought together historian-judge Tareq al-Bishri, late activist Adel Hussein, journalist Fahmi Howeidy and a handfl of others to deliberate on religion and modern life. Each in his own way, these influential public intellectuals began to “provincialise” Western institutions and notions of progress, i.e. contextualise them as products of particular histories that are not universal nor always desirable. The recovery of Islamic heritage is part and parcel of this project, and Amin’s chapter gives a thoughtful rendering of what this entails, with fitting mention of his father Ahmed Amin’s lifework.

Throughout the book, Amin is a congenial, engaging narrator, but he does have a very frustrating tendency to make throwaway claims about serious matters without requisite elaboration. A couple of examples are particularly glaring; on p. 190, Amin says he “doesn’t rule out” that Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 was supported or even backed by the American government, but gives no defence of this statement. On p. 300, he says that university and parental intervention to protest AUC professor Samia Mehrez’s teaching Muhammad Shukri’s novel For Bread Alone was justified, but only pages before Amin had praised the academic life he has chosen for the freedom it allows instructors to teach and write without external interference. In these and a handful of other places, Amin’s refreshing eclecticism turns into stubborn self-righteousness, since he simply announces his opinions but does not defend them.

To his great credit, however, Amin does cast his unsparing eye on himself and not just others. He forthrightly recalls and regrets some of his decisions and past behaviour, and again and again confides his lifelong need for the attentions and approval of others, particularly beautiful women, be they students, acquaintances, or perfect strangers. Amin attributes this to an unshakeable sense of insecurity about his own looks, a disarming confession I didn’t expect from a major public intellectual.

And yet for all his voluble recollections of childhood, Amin is puzzlingly reticent about some central subjects in his adult life. He writes plenty about his siblings and their marriages and offspring, but next to nothing about his own happy 40-year marriage to his English wife Jan and their three children (the book is dedicated to them). Family photos make clear that Amin loves being a grandfather, yet he doesn’t write about his experience of becoming a grandfather (nor a father, for that matter). The autobiography ends on a depressing note, with Amin feeling nothing so much as disappointment and indifference in his autumnal years. While this is refreshingly honest, I had hoped for some more introspection about why he feels this way.

George Orwell opened his withering review of Salvador Dali’s autobiography with the now-famous words, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Galal Amin’s account of his life is much too gentle and self-regarding to meet Orwell’s severe standard, but I think that his straightforward telling of the disappointments and listlessness of late life Orwell would have surely trusted.

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Master Image Maker

When I read the sad news of Youssef Chahine’s passing, a stream of images from his films passed through my mind’s eye, fragmentary and disjointed images that have stayed with me over the years. The scenes are nearly all in black and white; some are hilarious and others sombre, some are central to the drama and others peripheral, some I remember for their sheer beauty and others because they drove me to tears or deep laughter. Since there’ll be many commemorations and obituaries in the coming days, and repeated overviews of Chahine’s oeuvre, here I want to focus on some small details. These are eclectic, personal favourites, my way of remembering a spirited, restless artist who loved his craft and loved Egypt.

In Chahine’s second film Ibn al-Nil (Nile Boy, 1951), shot on location and made when he was only 25(!), I love the panning shot of the young Hemeida racing through fields dotted with gorgeous palm trees to get to the station and watch the train pull out, the defining symbol of freedom and flight from the sleepy village life he hates. In the next scene, the camera moves away from the young Hemeida standing on the platform then moves back in to see the older Hemeida standing in the same place in the same pose. The older Hemeida is played by a youthful Shukri Sarhan in a wonderful turn as the sullen rural boy who grudgingly marries then abandons Zubayda (Faten Hamama) for the big city.

There are many scenes to love in Sira’ fil Wadi (Struggle in the Valley, 1954), again shot on location (in Luxor), but my absolute favourite is the one when Faten Hamama and Omar Sharif first meet (of course). This is the most romantic scene I’ve ever seen on film, effortless, charming, masterfully directed and gracefully acted. An impossibly handsome Omar Sharif (in his first screen role) plays Ahmed, the young agricultural engineer who helps the farmers produce a superior sugarcane crop that bests the harvest of Taher pasha, played by the deliciously evil Zaki Rostom. Amaal is the pasha’s daughter and a childhood playmate of Ahmed. They reunite after an 8-year absence on Amaal’s return to the village; I’ll always remember Ahmad calling out to her “Batates!”, her nickname from their childhood banter. With this film, Chahine not only created the most dashing couple in Egyptian film (and real life), but he gave us some stunning images of the countryside, images that were later echoed by Atef Salem in Struggle on the Nile (1959) and Barakat in The Nightingale’s Call (1959) and al-Haram (1965). One image I can’t forget is the procession of villagers grieving over their flooded crops, put to a haunting score of sorrowful humming and portentous drums.

Inta Habibi (1957) is barely mentioned when people review Chahine’s work, but it’s a comedic and cinematic gem, rivalling Fateen Abdel Wahab’s best comedies while crafting some indelible images of the landscape and people of Aswan. The priceless scene when Mimi Shakib and Serag Mounir enlist the milkman and the manservant to awaken their son Farid has me in stitches every time. Only a year later, Chahine produced the vastly different Cairo Station, a loving rendition of the invisible porters and peddlers trying to survive in Cairo’s teeming train station. This is where Chahine himself memorably played the lonely, limping newspaper boy Qenawi, in love and obsessed with the flirtatious soft drink seller Hanouma (Hind Rostom), who has her eyes set on the virile and aggressive Abu Sri’ (Farid Shawqi).

Directors before and after Chahine have had a love affair with filming in trains and on platforms (my absolute favourite is the final scene of al-Bab al-Maftuh, 1964), but I don’t think anyone came close to Chahine in exploiting trains’ range of aesthetic possibilities. The famous, tragic denouement on the empty tracks is what I remember most about Cairo Station, especially the intervention by the great thespian Hasan al-Baroudi.

I can’t remember any scenes from Chahine’s later films after Eskenderiyya Leih? (I haven’t seen Heya Fawda), probably because I just didn’t understand them. I like inventiveness and formal experimentation, but I was put off by the later films’ excessive allusiveness, campy style, and aggressive didacticism. Chahine’s autobiographical turn after Eskendriyya Leih? struck me as less compelling than his gift at probing Egypt’s landscape and the textured lives of its inhabitants. And he seemed less capable of eliciting excellence from his actors than he had in earlier films (and no wonder, if he was working with the likes of the horrid Nabila Ebeid).

When I was a child and first saw al-Ard (1969), I didn’t understand it but cried during the iconic final scene of Muhammad Abu Swaylam mercilessly trussed up and dragged by a mounted policeman, his bloodied fingers digging tracks into the soil, just as a village notable had ominously predicted in an early scene. When I watched the film again today, I saw a penultimate scene no less powerful. As government troops chase and beat down fleeing villagers, Abu Swaylam stands still in the midst of his field, a spectre of a smile on his stoic face. A close-up shows drops of his blood sliding off the back of his hand and landing on the snow-white cotton plants, the fruit of the earth he refuses to part with.

Youssef Chahine didn’t create the character of Abu Swaylam, that’s Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi’s brilliant doing. But Youssef Chahine embodied this willful, reticent fellah in the peerless Mahmoud al-Meligi, directing him in a masterful, transcendent performance that brought me to tears again. For this and his many other enduring, wondrous creations, we can all be grateful.

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The Quest for Life

Mahmoud Mokhtar, Return from the River
Limestone, 1928

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Four Myths about Protest

It’s now widely recognized that social protest has become a staple of Egyptian politics, what some journalists and researchers have taken to calling an emergent “culture of protest” among an aggrieved citizenry. Opinions differ on when to date the formation of this ‘culture.’ Some date it to 2002 with the pro-Palestine solidarity protests, others to 2004 with labour protests and the birth of Kifaya, still others to 2005 with the mobilisation accompanying the presidential and parliamentary elections. I’m inclined to see it as a grand wave of protest that began in 2000 with several triggers, including the recession and the outbreak of al-Aqsa Intifada. But even more important than the issue of dating protests is interpreting their causes and effects. Since 2005 when pundits dubbed protests a phenomenon, there have been several stock ideas repeated over and over again as if they were self-evident. I want to focus on four that are especially egregious, ideas that are quick to either laud or dismiss protest but are no help in understanding it.

The four myths can be roughly divided into two that are chiefly concerned with the causes of protest and two with its effects. The bad ideas about protest causes assert that: a) the government allows protest as a safety valve and b) that social protest is not about politics, it’s about survival. The bad ideas about protest effects claim that a) widespread protest will topple Mubarak’s regime and b) protest will lead to democracy.

A Grand Wave of Protest

First a few remarks about the current protest wave. It’s not the first such protest surge in the country’s political history, but recalls earlier moments of heightened social conflict in 1946-1952, 1968-1972, and 1977-1980 when various sectors of the population took to the streets to make a variety of claims. What is unique about the current wave is that it’s longer in duration and broader in scope, oscillating between intense peaks and extended troughs. It can be classified categorically, with electoral, rural, industrial, sectarian, cost-of-living, and democracy protests as some of the obvious categories. It can also be broken down into sets of distinct protest issues, participants, and techniques. Spatially, protest is now commonplace in diverse social locations, from campuses to villages to shop floors to marketplaces to schoolyards to train stations, and on the steps of ministries, police stations, courthouses, professional unions, agricultural cooperatives, municipal buildings, and—intriguingly—parliament. This is not counting the street, the public square, and now the highway as commonsense locations for social protest.

We know all this because of the rise of a competitive field of independent media in the past few years that has featured excellent coverage of protest events. Photographs and footage of angry, demonstrating citizens make for juicy teasers that attract more viewers and readers, so editors have their own incentives to cover protest. But increased news coverage has salutary effects: it generates more opinion pieces, more demands on government officials to explain their policies, and more incentives for protesters to clarify (and sometimes escalate) their demands. I’ve always been a news junkie, but reading the independent papers and watching the satellite channels these days is unusually edifying, revealing the extraordinary range of social problems and popular collective action that the government wants hidden or distorted. Consider this random selection of protest events culled from recent news reports: car repairmen amass in front of a police station to protest the municipality’s forcible closure of their workshops; displaced residents of Kafr al-Elw protest in front of parliament to demand compensation housing; three months earlier, Port Said residents had done the same; 300 Basateen families congregate at the Abdeen courthouse to publicise their suit against the municipality for ordering their houses demolished; Beheira villagers erect a road blockade for five hours to protest the killing of a woman and child, blaming a police official for their death; residents of Ezbet Khairallah protest in front of the Cairo governorate building, blaming officials for failing to provide potable water and trash collection.

Fortunately for us press junkies, both the independent and the government media also offer outlets for all sorts of ideas about protest, the good, the bad, and the banal. Let’s focus on the bad.

Bad Ideas

1. Widespread social protest will destabilize or topple Mubarak’s regime. This may be the heartfelt wish of anti-Mubarak activists and the worst nightmare for Mubarak’s rotten shilla, that Egypt will be another Iran circa 1978-1979 or the Philippines in 1986 or Serbia in 2000. It’s especially tempting given that protests characterized Nasser and Sadat’s final years in power, and Mubarak’s succession problem further nourishes the notion that his regime is particularly unstable. For example, both times that demonstrators tore down and destroyed the huge posters of Mubarak (in Cairo in 2003 and Mahalla in 2008), some commentators feared or hoped that this prefigured an actual ouster.

It’s certainly possible for social protests to remove autocrats from power, but it’s definitely not inevitable nor common. It’s doubtful that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi or Ferdinand Marcos were brought down by protests alone. Retrospective accounts may stress the defining role of a tremendous popular revolt, but in reality the autocrats’ downfall was the outcome of a years-long process of regime disintegration, including defection of key regime loyalists, economic and fiscal crisis, and a withdrawal in American support.

There are a host of other problems with this idea, but the worst in my view is the implication that protests are only significant insofar as they affect regime “stability,” anything else is irrelevant. This leads to assertions that either exaggerate or belittle protest events to suit one’s political commitments. Thus, activists see in every public demonstration or worker collective action a direct threat to Mubarak’s survival, and regime supporters ridicule every protest as futile, insignificant and/or dangerous. It’s easy to see how this can devolve into a shouting match or the worst sort of cocktail party political chatter, since it’s impossible to predict when or precisely how a regime collapses except after the fact. In the meantime, all the important but unsexy issues are ignored, such as how protestors articulate their claims, how authorities respond, whether (and what kind of) a compromise is worked out, and whether (and how) protest spreads to more societal sectors. Assessing protest exclusively by its impact on regime stability is the favoured activity of intelligence agencies and “political risk” firms (whatever those are), but is not a serious way to understand any political phenomenon.

2. The government allows protest as a safety valve. A position shared by both pro- and anti-government activists, this common dismissal was routine in 2005 when Kifaya was holding demonstrations nearly every week. When it’s explicitly articulated (and it rarely is), the reasoning goes something like this: Mubarak tolerates limited forms of protest either to stave off greater unrest or to deflect international pressure or as a barometer to gauge societal discontent. All of these are cogent reasons, and there’s no doubt that tolerating certain forms of protest is useful for the Mubarak regime. But the notion that the current protest wave is somehow part of a coherent plan by the regime and has been “allowed” to continue is bizarre. It grants a mythical amount of omniscience and omnipotence to rulers, ignores their repression of the vast majority of protests, and conceals a very important political development during Mubarak’s tenure: the routinised management and policing of protest.

The well-worn image of Central Security Forces and trucks encircling every public gathering has become so normalised that we forget how Mubarak’s police officials have worked to devise an elaborate and standardised set of procedures to deal with protest, from master plans sealing off greater Cairo in expectation of unusually large gatherings (as during the funeral of the Ikhwan Murshid Ma’moun al-Hodeiby in early 2004) to street-level tactics like the horrific corralling and then squashing of demonstrators by CSF recruits. Anyone who’s been at a demo has observed the intricacies of protest management, how police commanders and amn al-dawla officers work the crowd, consulting with their superiors via walkie-talkie, negotiating and bantering with the demonstration’s organisers, coordinating with the hired plainclothes thugs, and giving orders to recruits to attack (or refrain from attacking) protestors. It’s not unusual for the Interior Ministry’s all-important Cairo security chief to go into the field and supervise crowd management himself: recall Nabil al-Ezabi’s frequent shouting matches with Kifaya leaders in 2005 (he was later rewarded with the governorship of Assiut), and Ismail al-Shaer’s hands-on management of the pro-judges’ protests in spring 2006 and the 6 April general strike this year.

I don’t pretend to know the details of protest policing strategies hatched in Mubarak’s fortress-like Interior Ministry, but I know that they exist and are bankrolled by vast sums in the state budget. I would guess that they’re a combination of staple tactics inherited from the 1940s, recent innovations emanating from field experiences, and perhaps even the protest policing procedures of other Arab autocracies (the annual Arab Interior Ministers’ conference must be a fun, fun gathering). I’d also conjecture that techniques differ depending on not just the size and location of a protest event but the kind of participants (worker protests are policed differently than elite pro-democracy protests or student demos), the broader political context (the regime’s assessment of risk and threat levels), and the Interior Ministry’s internal bureaucratic politics (I’d give an arm and a leg to be a fly on the wall during their meetings). If we take the protests of 2005 alone, differences between pre-emptive and reactive police repression is immediately clear. Mubarak’s regime doesn’t “allow” protest then, but it does seek to contain, manage, and defuse it, ironically routinising this form of collective action.

3. Social protest is not about politics, it’s about survival. This idea is repeated over and over again as protest spreads to social groups who don’t routinely engage in it and have good reasons for avoiding it, such as the homeless of Qal’at al-Kabsh, Tebbeen, and Qursaya, or the fishermen and farmers in Kafr al-Shaykh and Gharbiyya protesting water scarcity last summer, or the Mahalla youths last month. A sister notion holds that the recent string of protests by doctors, industrial workers, farmers, and tax collectors embody “parochial” demands about wages and working conditions and therefore can’t be classified as important political events.

This is the one of the oldest canards about ordinary people’s collective action, a hoary myth that refuses to die. Not only is it incredibly condescending toward the human striving for a dignified life, but it basically believes that ordinary people are incapable of sustained political thought. It also involves quite a strange conception of politics.

Who said that politics only includes national structures of political power? Politics has always been about local constellations of power, and bread-and-water issues of survival. Politics is involved in any act that makes demands on the rulers and their agents. When homeless poor people amass in front of a municipal building or parliament to demand housing, or when Borollos villagers block a highway for 12 hours to compel their governor to supply them with potable water, or when Qursaya islanders cling to the soil to resist eviction by the army, they’re not “just” fighting for survival. As is obvious to anyone who pays attention, they’re making concrete demands on state officials, regardless of the specific issues at play. If that’s not political, I really don’t know what is. When workers strike to demand increased wages and food allowances, they’re making demands on management, yes, but they’re also demanding that the state either step in and force management to make concessions or enforce a breached compact or regulate exploitative work conditions. Demanding fair wages and defending other “parochial” interests is just as political as establishing a political party or insisting that Hosni Mubarak step down.

A final thought: I’m not convinced by the oft-made, strained argument that economic protests somehow “spill over” into political protests through some vague process of osmosis or something. Economic claims are already political by virtue of targeting government officials, policies, and interests in some fashion or another.

4. Protest will lead to democracy. Let me confess right away that I have a soft spot for this myth and constantly catch myself revelling in it. The reasoning is that more protest leads to more people voicing demands, which leads to more opportunities for powerholders to be subjected to popular consultation, which constrains their power and therefore promotes democracy.

This is most likely right, but only half the time. The other and probably more common outcome is greater repression and a contraction rather than expansion of democratisation. The key flaw with the more protest equals more democracy thesis is that it wrongly equates protestors’ claims with protest outcomes. However, claims are one thing, consequences are something else. We can’t judge protests by their claims, but by their indirect effects. For example, Kifaya and allied social movements demand that Mubarak step down, refrain from handing power to his son, and convoke competitive, free and fair elections. This has not happened. Do we then judge Kifaya’s impact by its failure to oust Mubarak and install democracy? That would be ludicrous, but it would also be wrong to assume that since Kifaya was a pro-democracy movement, it automatically added an increment of democracy to Egyptian politics. The fact is that the consequences of Kifaya’s protests are two-pronged: on one hand, they effectively set the agenda of public discourse for at least a year and acted as a counterweight to the Ikhwan. One the other, and contrary to movement members’ intentions, Kifaya’s protests increased the regime’s repression of democracy-seeking coalitions and may have improved the government’s capacity to throttle future such coalitions in their cradle. It’s not clear yet which of Kifaya’s effects will prevail, the point is that pro-democracy claims do not unambiguously result in pro-democracy consequences.

It also works the other way round: anti-democracy protest claims may paradoxically result in more democratization, if they spur counter-movements to mobilise, thus bringing more participants into the political space and routinising protest as a form of collective pressure on public authorities. The example of Egypt in the inter-war period comes to mind here, with its diverse set of political-ideological groups all taking to the streets and forming coalitions with parliamentary factions, competing with each other for political standing and influence: Ikhwan, Misr al-Fatah, the congeries of socialists and communists, the Wafd and its factions, and endless splinter groups and underground societies. Some were avowedly pro-democracy and others were vocally anti-democracy, but their combined effect on politics was democratising by increasing the numbers of politically active citizens and forcing government accountability through periodic elections.

Ultimately, the consequences of protest on democratisation is very difficult to gauge, precisely because protest has the dual effects of on one hand expanding political participation and subjecting rulers to popular consultation and on the other provoking popular fear of ‘chaos’ and inviting greater state repression. However, we can see the connection more clearly if we don’t confuse protest claims with protest effects. Important mediating factors always step in, confounding intentions.

A Good Idea

So now that I’ve so arrogantly proclaimed some ideas to be so bad, what, pray, are the good ideas?! For starters, the current protest wave needs to be carefully documented; constructing a comprehensive catalogue of protest events is fortunately now feasible, given extensive media coverage and various research and human rights groups’ tracking of protest incidents for some years now. Once we have the information, we can begin the analysis, looking for salient patterns, identifying the likely causes of protest, tracking changes in its morphology, explaining how it diffuses, and understanding government containment strategies. Regarding causes, we know that privatization has triggered the frequent labour strikes, so we can conjecture that government and/or business resource-grabs such as increased taxation and land appropriation are propelling citizens to protest; think of the remarkable Dumyat mobilisation against the planned Agrium facility, or Qursaya islanders’ mobilisation last year, the Dahab and Warraq islanders’ protests in 2001, or traders’ protest against the sales tax in 2001.

Morphological analysis might include constructing typologies of protest claims, protest targets, and protest locations. It ought to examine innovation and diffusion in specific protest techniques, such as my favourite tactic: the increasing resort to protests in front of parliament. There’s also the spread of the internationally resonant candlelight protest, or the intriguing sash phenomenon, which the judges first started in spring 2006, then the Ikhwan MPs mimicked it in their protests against the Lebanon war in August 2006, then it was diffused to opposition MPs protesting the constitutional amendments in March 2007, then Giza lawyers picked it up when they protested lack of courtroom space last autumn, and who knows who’ll borrow it next?

There are so many ways to describe and interpret Egypt’s protest wave, isn’t it a great shame to keep invoking the same reductive, anaemic ideas, ignoring all the rich empirical information right under our noses? In other times and places, sustained protest waves illuminated the intersection between politics and everyday life, tracked momentous changes in political structures and economic organisation, and midwifed new ways of doing politics. Above all, protest waves always transformed relations between citizens and government agents. Beyond their momentous effects, protest waves are intrinsically fascinating. The phenomena of ordinary people struggling to preserve their honour and dignity, organising to make forceful demands on those who control their fates and livelihoods, activating their citizenship, this is an awesome thing to behold.

*To the memory of CT, with love and grief.

Photos from al-Badeel, al-Karama, Associated Press.

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Sorrow

Mahmoud Mokhtar, al-Huzn
Basalt, 1927

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"We Want a Living Wage"

A broad coalition of blue- and white-collar national forces has called a general strike for tomorrow 6 April to demand decent living conditions and protest all the man-made ills afflicting our society: corruption, nepotism, inflation, torture, poverty, police brutality. The plan is to stay home and not report to work or school, or alternatively to join others in street processions converging on main city squares.

The general strike is the brainchild of the Ghazl a-Mahalla workers, later joined by Kafr al-Dawwar labourers. Kifaya, al-Wasat, al-Karama, the 9 March Movement for University Autonomy and a slew of other collectives have also signed on. The Muslim Brothers have been wholly consumed with the battle to register for municipal elections scheduled for 8 April, but a few days ago they felt compelled to issue a lukewarm statement of support for the general strike.

This latest attempt at civil disobedience emerges from the recent wave of wage revolts sweeping all sectors of Egyptian society, and perhaps for this reason it has received far more attention than last summer’s maiden endeavour. Of course, the government and all its institutions have been mobilising for days to obstruct and ridicule the very notion of a strike. Today, the ever-informative Al-Ahram quoted a judge who reminded citizens that Article 124 of the Penal Code punishes all those who shirk their work obligations with a prison sentence of 3 months to one year, and double that for all those who incite others to strike. Civil servants, teachers, police officers and many others have been given strict instructions to report for work tomorrow, and amn al-dawla has been busy alternately threatening and cajoling workers to abandon or abort the strike effort.

Egypt’s slow-motion socio-political transformation is proceeding beautifully.

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Spring

Salah Yousri, "Spring" (1954)

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The Organiser

Like many others, I’ve been riveted by the Real Estate Tax Collectors’ strike and sit-in. How did these civil servants manage to launch such bold and sustained collective action over a period of months? And if indeed their grievances have been festering since 1974, why was it only now that they took action? Most puzzling of all is how they managed to garner sympathetic media coverage and drum up public support. After all, the Egyptian civil servant is not exactly a beloved figure. Who hasn’t had a bad experience with some obstructionist, misanthropic muwazzaf? (Yes, I’ve been stung a few times). The tax collector especially is richly reviled, perceived as a thief in official garb, extracting revenues for a state that has long ceased to provide protection and services. How is it that tax collectors all of a sudden became sympathetic figures with a just cause? With all of these questions and more, I went in search of an unusual tax collector, a lifelong political activist, and a very endearing man with a wicked sense of humor: the remarkable Kamal Abu Eita.


First I wanted to know how Abu Eita became a real estate tax collector, so we started at the beginning. Kamal Muhammad al-Rifa’i Abu Eita was born on March 1, 1953, one of eight children of a minaret-maker in Bulaq al-Dakrur who went on to establish a contracting business. Kamal enrolled at Cairo University in fall 1972, and like generations of Egyptians before and after him, received a first-rate political education at this storied institution. He became active in campus politics and was a founding member of the Nasserist Thought Club (Nadi al-Fikr al-Nasiri), the student initiative that midwifed the contemporary Nasserist movement. After college, Abu Eita joined the Tagammu’ party until the formation of the Nasserist party in 1992, which he joined but then left for the neo-Nasserist Karama movement in 1999.

Throughout his political career, Abu Eita combined partisan commitment with para-partisan advocacy on behalf of a wide range of causes, from peasants to prisoners of conscience to public sector workers. For his efforts, he has been imprisoned a whopping 19 times. “I’ve been a guest at all of Bulaq’s police stations and nearly all of the country’s prisons!” he chuckles. Especially significant for the December sit-in is Abu Eita’s capacity to enrich his organising with his politics while at the same time not imposing his politics on his fellow tax collectors.

Abu Eita’s unlikely career as a civil servant began immediately after college. Right after graduating in 1976 with a B.A. in philosophy, he applied for a teaching position with the Ministry of Education but was turned down for security reasons. He spent six months as a clerk in the Giza governorate and was then transferred to the Giza Traffic administration, but the office responsible for the security of the Israeli embassy was located there and Abu Eita was deemed a threat (!), so he was transferred back to the Giza governorate and stayed there until 1979, when a friend casually let him know that the Real Estate Tax Authority was hiring with decent salaries. So Abu Eita applied and became a tax official.

Next, the conversation turned to Abu Eita’s tenure in the Authority from 1979 to the present. In 1982, he was instrumental in establishing the first union for Real Estate Tax officials, but did not become a member for fear that his superiors would crush the fledgling experience. Four years later, when the initiative had gathered steam, Abu Eita ran for union elections and became vice president. He continued to contest union elections, winning the highest number of votes in every election and becoming president until 2006, when the government weighed in with all forms of administrative interference and intimidation to ensure pliant unions led by cooperative henchmen. As with the parliamentary elections, the labour and civil servants’ union elections in 2006 witnessed meddling at the vote-counting stage by poll workers, and Abu Eita lost. He now laughs when remembering this: “And I kept bringing them sandwiches and tea all day, those sons of bitches! But it’s ironic, losing the elections actually gave me freedom of manoeuvre to manage this strike.”

So how does one organize government clerks to coordinate a strike and sit-in, and why now? As usual with such collective action, there are important but forgotten precedents and equally important but also forgotten triggers. Abu Eita reminds that the precedent was set in March 1999, when property tax collectors gathered in Tahrir Square to demand benefit raises, then staged a sit-in in front of parliament and the office of the Minister of Finance. Their demands were met, though less than 10% of tax collectors participated in the sit-in. “The government agreed to our demands in 1999 because the economic reform and privatization programs were not as far along and the state’s fiscal crisis wasn’t as severe,” Abu Eita explains, arguing that today the government is more strapped than ever, rendering ministers extremely reluctant to concede to wage increases of the sort tax collectors are demanding.

If tax collectors had the 1999 precedent to go on, they were also prodded to action by a more proximate trigger. In 2005 as is well known, the government issued a new law attaching sanitation fees to the electricity bill and entrusting the Electricity Authority to collect the fees. What is less well known is that before the new law, property tax collectors were the ones tasked with collecting sanitation fees, earning a minuscule commission that was nevertheless important given their hardscrabble lives. Added to the persistent corruption and mismanagement of the municipal governments that supervise tax collectors, the new sanitation law was the last straw that galvanised the civil servants to action.

“First, my comrades and I talked to fellow collectors all over the country and found that they were all on our side, not allied with the administration as many were in 1999. When I suggested a one-day protest, they said, ‘Why only a day, why not a sit-in?’ So we tried a sit-in on 2 May, the day after Labour Day. Then we added more actions gradually. On 10 September, we gathered in front of the government complex in Giza for a full day and held up signs that read “My salary equals 2 kilos of meat,” and “My salary is worth one pair of shoes.” The Daqahliyya local picked up the thread and began their own sit-in. All the while, we were constantly sending letters to officials, with no response. In the meantime, collectors in 15 out of the 27 governorates were holding their own sit-ins, and a new motto began to emerge, “And we won’t collect!” Remember that the peak season for property tax collection is October, November, and December. Because of our action, the state lost 80% of its revenues from real estate this year.”

“On 21 October, we headed to the Ministry of Finance in Nasr City and called out to the Minister, “Come down from your ivory tower!” but of course he didn’t because he was busy in America. We then walked in a huge procession to the Cabinet building, but security prevented us from entering to negotiate. On 13 and 14 November, we held our sit-in at the Egyptian Trade Union Federation on Gala’ Street; they locked all the bathrooms and meeting rooms, leaving us only the pavement of the entrance. Then and there we decided to hold another sit-in but didn’t publicise the location until the last minute, and that was the Hussein Higazy sit-in that started on 3 December.” It was at that final sit-in where Abu Eita could be seen carried aloft on the shoulders of his colleagues, innovating catchy, eloquent slogans and waving the keys to the offices and file cabinets that he and his colleagues had abandoned in their walkout.

There was something about the December sit-in that captured the public imagination in a way that surpassed even the massive Mahalla strikes of December 2006 and September 2007. The reasons for this are complex and will not be fully apparent until some time has passed and we gain some distance to analyse, but there’s no doubt that the tax officials’ collective leadership and deft tactics succeeded in making the lowly tax collector a stand-in for the hardworking, downtrodden everyman and woman, ravaged by high prices and hovering on the brink of poverty. Significantly, the civil servants courted both regime figures and anonymous members of the public. Their slogans were careful to appeal to the president and invoke his sense of fairness and to praise the Interior Minister for the discipline of his forces. Their conduct of the sit-in respected the residents of Hussein Higazy Street and sought to minimise disruption to their lives (no bullhorns or slogans after 10 pm, for instance).

The residents were won over. Abu Eita recalls the details of their supportive acts. “They made their bathrooms available to the women and children in the sit-in; they removed the rugs from their living rooms and threw them down to us to cushion the freezing pavement; one resident sent his wife and children to his in-laws and offered up his apartment for the protestors to sleep in.” Opposition papers reported that street residents also refused to file complaints against the sit-in with the city government.

After 11 days of the sit-in, Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali, acting on orders from Hosni Mubarak, informed the collectors that their core demands for affiliation with the Ministry and wage parity with general tax collectors would be fulfilled; that they would receive bonuses equivalent to four months’ pay; and that no tax collector would be punished for participating in the sit-in. This agreement was finalised yesterday, the last day of the year.

So concludes this remarkable episode of the last quarter of 2007, the first time since 1924 that civil servants staged a work stoppage to ameliorate their conditions. As we usher in 2008, I can’t help wondering what comes next in Egypt’s extraordinary cycle of protest.


*Photos courtesy of Hamada Abu Ghali

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Scenes from a Sit-in

Since Monday, thousands of tax collectors from the Real Estate Tax Authority have made a downtown street their home. They've converged on Cairo from all over the country to stage a massive sit-in in front of the Cabinet building. Their demands: wage parity with their better-paid colleagues in the General Tax and Sales Tax Authorities, and transferring their affiliation from the corruption-ridden municipal governments to the Finance Ministry (a demand they've made since 1976). Real estate tax collectors in the provinces are refraining from all revenue collection until their demands are met.

al-Karama's talented Peter Alfred has kindly shared these photos of the strike and sit-in. Peter has beautifully captured the determination, the humour, and the solidarity of these humble public functionaries, their refusal to cave in to the entreaties and threats of amn al-dawla and various nervous official emissaries.



As with the second Mahalla strike in Ramadan, hundreds of women civil servants are out in full force, braving the cold winter air and shattering tired stereotypes; they're camping out day and night alongside their male co-workers. What do state feminists, "women's empowerment" do-gooders, and assorted ladies who lunch have to say about that? Oh that's right, nobody cares what they think.

Also out in full force is the indefatigable Kamal Abu Eita, citizen-activist extraordinaire. Like Kamal Khalil, Abu Eita is a fixture at nearly every street protest in Egypt in the past 10 years. But he does have a day job, and it is in fact as a tax collector for the Real Estate Tax Authority, so this protest hits very close to home. Abu Eita is a walking treasure trove of information and insight about this most unusual and most significant of public protests.

Why is it significant? Because it's probably the largest and most coordinated strike action by functionaries of the Egyptian state in modern times. Because it opens a fascinating window onto the mysterious workings of a mammoth bureaucracy. Because it has the potential to cripple the state's lifeline (no revenue, no state). And because it's part of a grand wave of social protest that has been sweeping the country for nearly a decade.

Stay tuned.

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The Death of Deference

Thursday’s sentencing and fining of four independent newspaper editors is not particularly new or surprising. And neither is the impending trial of Ibrahim Eissa for allegedly spreading rumours about Mubarak’s health. First, the editors have all been hauled off to court before and have either been fined, sentenced, or had their cases settled out of court. Second, the two incidents do not herald an impending crackdown on the press, for the simple reason that Mubarak’s regime has been continuously cracking down on and intimidating independent journalists, from at least the early 1990s to the present. So I would caution against spinning these cases as unprecedented curbs on the freedom of the press. What’s more interesting to me about these recent events is what they reveal about the development of an adversarial press in Egypt.

Last year, I argued that one domestic effect of Israel’s assault on Lebanon was the further emboldening of the independent press in its campaign of diminishing the president through rubbishing his foreign policy. The suit against the four editors which was filed last year was one response to the seemingly unstoppable irreverence and vitality of the independent press. Another was the activation of the government Supreme Press Council to issue critical reports of independent newspapers for allegedly violating the journalistic code of ethics with their trenchant criticism of the president. A third was behind-the-scenes lobbying and pressure to remove Abdel Halim Qandil from the editorship of al-Karama. When that failed, government officials succeeded in drying up ad funds to the newspaper, leading to staff cuts, reduced salaries, and a general sense of besiegement. This compelled Qandil to leave the newspaper this summer, to ensure its survival.

With Qandil finally robbed of a platform, the authorities have now turned their attention to that other dogged muckraker, Ibrahim Eissa, the one-man journalistic phenomenon who has been enlivening Egyptian journalism since 1995 with al-Dustour (and a brief stint on Dream TV before being chased out of that venue). And for good measure, the government is also going after the post-Qandil Karama and the new leftist daily al-Badeel, edited by Dr. Mohamed El-Sayed Said. Last week, the Supreme Press Council fingered al-Dustour, al-Karama, and al-Badeel for alleged violations of journalistic ethics in their coverage of the Mubarak health rumours, and has called on their editors to appear before an investigative committee.


The Changing Print Media Market

To put today’s developments in context, it makes sense to review the press scene in the Mubarak years. The Egyptian press does have a rich tradition of challenging and lampooning public officials, especially during the 1920s (I’m thinking of al-Kashkul), 1948-1954, and the final years of Sadat’s tenure. But in none of these eras was the press as systematically aggressive as it is today, nor as diverse. And if we look at just the Mubarak years, there’s a marked shift in the character of the independent print media at the beginning and at the end of Mubarak’s tenure. Compare the style and content of the leading opposition paper in the early years of Mubarak’s rule (al-Ahali under the editorship of Hussein Abdel Razeq) to today’s al-Dustour and al-Karama. Today’s papers are not only stylistically bolder, using more explicit, even hostile prose and directly targeting the president and his family rather than his cronies and appointees, but the range of issues on which they castigate the president is far broader, encompassing domestic policies, foreign policies, and the open discussion of the regime’s own survival strategies, most especially succession. What caused this dramatic shift?

A slew of factors are at work. First are the eclipse of opposition parties and the partisan press. The decline of opposition parties in the 1990s also meant the decline of their mouthpieces, as the dysfunctional internal workings of these parties inevitably infected their newspaper teams; who reads al-Ahali now or even al-Wafd beyond a core group of partisans? Two prominent exceptions are al-Araby and al-Sha’b, both outlets that managed to carve out a space between party dynamics and the management of the newspaper, until the government shut down al-Sha’b and the Labour party in 2000-01. The decline of opposition parties and their mouthpieces left the field open to a new brand of journalism.

A second cause is structural shifts in how newspapers are produced. The broader economic trend of privatisation has influenced the press, where enterprising independent businessmen and journalists sought to enter the print market, using foreign licenses while still being subject to the state censor (the Cyprus press). This is how journalists like Ibrahim Eissa made their mark with al-Dustour (est. 1995), but the private press also includes shadier characters who produce sensationalist rags such as al-Naba’ and al-Khamis, and assorted businessmen who publish vanity newspapers to promote their wares and undermine their rivals.

A third cause is generational and stylistic: the tone of Egyptian journalism is more biting today than at any time since the 1920s because a new generation of journalists is at the helm. There’s no uniformity among these journalists and they come from starkly different schools and backgrounds, but together they’re a different breed from both the tame fare offered up by the old opposition press and the agitprop of the government newspapers. The new boldness in style is maintained by the mimicry and competition among the new papers: competition for readers, competition for ads, and competition for the social prestige that comes with being a bold regime critic and a good wordsmith.

The dense field of print media now includes a whole range of actors motivated by varying interests. There are high-end government outlets such as al-Qahira, ostensibly independent weeklies with informal ties to state agencies such as al-Usbu, liberal dailies such as Nahdet Masr, independent weeklies of indeterminate political ideology such as al-Fagr and Sawt al-Umma, partisan weeklies such as al-Karama, al-Ghad, and al-Araby, the independent non-partisan daily al-Masry al-Yawm (which deserves a separate study examining how it managed to supplant al-Ahram as the daily newspaper of record), and the most recent addition of al-Badeel, a leftist daily that aspires to buck the sensationalist trend by offering readers concrete policy alternatives and quality investigative reporting.

It’s important to remember that the current government has not “allowed” this press diversity so much as tried to alternately contain and control it. It has done this by making sure that administrative regulations to establish newspapers are as cumbersome as possible, that penal provisions jailing journalists and shutting down newspapers remain on the books, and by attempting to enter the lively print media market with newspapers of its own, such as the NDP’s new al-Watany al-Yawm and the Rose al-Yusuf newspaper (it’s interesting how this latter rag has appropriated the name of the doyen of contentious journalism in Egyptian history). When the tenor of criticisms against Mubarak reached a fever pitch last summer, the government activated the Supreme Press Council to assert its claim as the standard-setter for journalistic ethics and professionalism, accusing independent newspapers of violating professional codes with their criticism of the president. Last but not least, the government also resorts to threats and brute force with particularly intrepid journalists, as when Abdel Halim Qandil was kidnapped in November 2004, beaten and stripped naked, and warned to stop writing about his “masters.”

The Architects of the Adversarial Press


The two editors who more than any of their peers have created and promoted the contemporary adversarial model of Egyptian journalism are Abdel Halim Qandil and Ibrahim Eissa (though I must also recall the pioneering role of Magdi and Adil Hussein in the early 1990s). Both are consciously engaged in a systematic project of accusing, belittling, and criticising public officials, from the most hapless minister to the most powerful public official, the normally untouchable president. In light of the weakness of parliament and the fragmentation of citizen watchdog groups, both see journalism as a useful tool to extract a modicum of responsiveness from an unaccountable, unchecked imperial presidency. And both aspire to make a profound impact on the wider political culture, replacing existing norms of deference and decorum when addressing the powerful with a style marked by irreverence, profound scepticism, and a blunt, salty style. But though they’re fellow travellers in many ways, Eissa and Qandil come from very different backgrounds and are motivated by different impulses.

Ibrahim Eissa is a consummate newspaperman raised on the plucky, lively style of the Rose al-Yusuf school. Read his articles in that magazine from the early 1990s and you’ll recognise the pungency of his prose, the trademark brash style, and an aimless critical thrust that would be harnessed to much better use years later. Apprenticed by Adel Hammouda, Eissa soon outshone his mentor: he is sharper, more daring, and more adept at successfully managing a newspaper team. Journalism is his passion and life’s work. In 1995, at the age of 30, he launched al-Dustour, an entirely new experiment that proved wildly popular and successful, achieving a circulation of 150,000 and creating a new genre of journalism that spawned many knockoffs and imitators. Shut down by the government in February 1998, the newspaper resumed publication in 2005 and then went daily earlier this year.

Eissa’s success is a potent combination of writerly skill, political commitment, and strategic vision. He may be the first editor to put in newsprint how ordinary people talk and gripe about politics. His own writing is warm, playful, and conversational, drawing in the reader and eliciting hearty chuckles. His personal political commitment to social democracy is supplemented by truly catholic tastes that have earned him the admiration and respect of every ideological camp in the country, and have opened the pages of al-Dustour to writers of every conceivable persuasion. And he’s driven by the long-term goal of transforming the press from a passive chronicler to an active participant in the political development of the country. Eissa’s methodical, unrelenting pursuit of the president in print has done nothing less than create a new genre in Egyptian journalism that is likely to outlive its creator.

Abdel Halim Qandil is an old-timer (and hardliner) in Nasserist circles but a newcomer to the world of journalism. A physician by training, he became a household name when he and Abdallah al-Sennawi assumed joint editorship of the Nasserist party’s moribund al-Araby in the early 2000s. Their principled opposition to Mubarak energised the editorial team and transformed al-Araby from a pallid partisan rag to a must-read and sold-out item every Sunday. Unlike Eissa’s folksy writing style, Qandil’s prose is shorn and clinical, composed of short, dagger-like sentences that aim straight for the highest echelons of political power. And though it lacks the humour that leavens Eissa’s writing, Qandil’s prose more than makes up for it with a sense of purpose and precision that for me is a joy to read.

Qandil’s salty columns at al-Araby vilifying Mubarak, his policies, his family, and his foreign patrons (collated in the book Against the President and reviewed here) earned him the admiration of many readers and fellow activists and the undying hatred of the powers that be, hence the 2004 kidnapping and the pressure to eject him from al-Karama. But many were also put off by Qandil’s columns, calling them repetitive, shrill, insolent, and extreme. They turn up their noses in distaste at the violation of norms of decorum. I don’t share this view. I find Qandil’s targeted anger and relentless dressing down of the president (both the person of Mubarak and the office of the presidency) to be a refreshing, healthy alternative to the stultifying deference and enforced politesse of our political discourse, especially when it comes to public officials. In an authoritarian system like ours where public officials lord it over citizens, loot public resources, and muzzle those who dare protest, it is nothing short of indispensable to bring them down to size, embarrass them, perturb them, and compel them to justify their actions in the court of public opinion. If this is done in a shrill, repetitive manner, then so be it.


The Impact of the Adversarial Press


Eissa and Qandil set out to demystify and demythologize powerholders, and judging by the responses of the latter, they have succeeded marvellously. I find this photograph of Hosni Mubarak making a public appearance on 4 September quite revealing for his handlers’ attempt to assert presidential health and power in the face of an increasingly sceptical and irreverent public. See also Suzanne Mubarak’s recent interview in Egypt Today, where she elaborates on her hostility to what she calls “the media” and gushes about her pet projects. The interview is a stunning exemplar of stomach-churning deference; the interviewer shares with readers his opinion that Suzanne Mubarak is “the woman Princess Diana might have resembled in her autumnal years had God granted her the chance.” Quite. And last but not least, read Mufid Fawzi’s paean to the president in Saturday’s al-Ahram; in its desperate attempt to salvage the president’s “stature” and rubbish the new breed of adversarial journalists, it is the best indication of just how influential and effective this new genre has become.

A final word about what the new adversarial journalism and its architects have not achieved. They have not made an appreciable contribution to raising the quality of newsgathering and transmission. They have not worked to create a tradition of solid and hard-hitting investigative reporting, an urgent task that still eludes virtually all Egyptian newspapers. And they have not devoted any space or time to sensitive human interest stories, stories that would illuminate some of the many untapped dimensions of the contemporary Egyptian condition. But I don’t see these as fatal failures. An antagonistic press that disturbs the sleep of venal public officials is a considerable achievement and a real public service. It’s a very risky, overtime job that people like Eissa and Qandil have turned into a calling. I hope it is an enduring achievement, and I’m happy to wait for the other genres to follow suit.

Read On

Alley in Cairo

Hasan Sulayman (b. 1928), Alley in Cairo (1955)

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Remembrance of Readings Past

I was a bookish child, and spent endless hours immersed in fantastic stories, tales peopled with strange and wonderful characters getting themselves into all sorts of ill-advised but oh-so-exciting adventures. On my eighth birthday, Baba bought me a stack of stories from Dar al-Maa’ref’s venerable Awladna series, a collection that has shaped untold generations of young readers. Books in the series include translations of world classics such as Ivanhoe, Don Quixote, and Tom Sawyer; abridged Arabic classics; and generic stories of indeterminate origin such as ‘Am Ni’na’ (Uncle Mint), a charming homily about a beloved neighbourhood stationer-cum-wise man whose shop turns into an agora for the local children to mingle and learn the values of truth, honest hard work, and good citizenship.

Now, riffling through my Awladna books after so many years, I’m struck by the unmistakable Platonic thrust of the series’ founding statement, issued in March 1947: “It is no secret that the life of the mind is the firmest pillar of happiness. Our love for our children compels us to pave for them the paths to this happiness by endearing them to the good book, so that they can seek it out as youngsters and become attached to it as adults, thus building the bonds of a firm friendship that sharpens their sentiments and emotions, refines their tastes, develops their talents, and endows them with a loftiness of soul.” The project of building young minds through stories was entrusted to none other than leading Egyptian pedagogue Muhammad Farid Abu Hadid (1893-1967), Dean of the Education Institute in Cairo and himself a prolific author of historical novels and translator of major works of world literature into Arabic.

I consumed the Awladna stories in quiet corners of my parents’ and grandparents’ apartments, while the rest of the family children played and ignored me. There was one particular story that riveted me entirely, that I read over and over again to revel in its menagerie of wondrous characters and the irrepressible insouciance of its lead protagonist. Pinocchio was like nothing I’d ever read before. It had movement, suspense, and more emotional drama than I could handle. I was enthralled by the story’s talking crickets, chicks, goats, and birds, by Pinocchio’s cap made of dough, and most of all by the kindly and trusting Geppetto. I teared up at all the pain he suffered on account of his errant, ungrateful little tyke. I couldn’t understand how Pinocchio could so blithely hurt his poor old father like that.

I open the book now and the same sense of palpable foreboding washes over me, the constant sense of dread at Pinocchio’s errant ways, from the first minute when he detours from school to see the Marionette Theatre to his ignominious metamorphosis into a donkey to his being swallowed up by the asthmatic shark. But then I remember that the story has a sweet, happy ending. Pinocchio learns his lesson and changes his ways, landing gainful employment and succeeding in the studies he had neglected. As a reward, he turns into a real boy and Geppetto grows younger and returns to his craft of wood carving. And all is well with the world.

For a brief spell, school reading nourished my imagination. Like so many of my contemporaries, I grew up on the two didactic props of the Ministry of Education: the smug Omar and his silly little sister Amal. Amal struck me as pathetic and annoying, imitating everything that her older brother did.

Omar was an insufferable know-it-all who inexplicably wore a skirt to school. I didn’t like how he knew everything and she was the buffoonish tag-along; it offended my sensibility as a serious girl (quite). Still, I was fascinated by their world, and still remember quirky things from the book: their friend’s name “Nargis”, a girl’s name I’d never heard before; their class visit to the consumer cooperative, which I envied because I heard adults talking about buying this or that from al-gam’iyya, but I didn’t know what a gam’iyya was; and their trip to the village, where Omar’s equally smug friend Ashraf informs us that the white egret is “the fellah’s friend” because he eats up all the worms in the fields.

Though the Awladna stories formed the core of my reading, I had catholic tastes. I read anything I could get my hands on to fill the hours of summer ennui, including snippets of newsprint and I consumed the frilly stories of al-Maktaba al-Khadra, but the fairy tales full of princesses and princes dressed up in fussy outfits eventually bored me. I read slim volumes of scriptural stories made for children that supplied the narrative details missing in the Qur’an’s elliptical exposition. I still remember the feeling of horror at the bloodshed in the story of Qabil and Habil; the evocative detail of the notable ladies of the city distractedly slicing their hands instead of the fruit as they sat transfixed by Yusuf’s breathtaking beauty (I kept trying to imagine what he looked like); and the story of Yunus being swallowed up by the whale, which terrified me. I kept wondering how he could breathe in there.

Kamel al-Kilani’s (1897-1959) stories were fun, especially the ones adapted from Alf Layla. I didn’t know anything about the author, except that my father grew up on his stories. I didn’t know that Kilani was a lifelong clerk in the Awqaf Ministry and an avid lover of literature, and that he is now considered the pioneer of Arabic children’s literature. I just liked the alliteration in his name, and the fact that all his books contained diacritical marks, so I could pronounce the words properly. I remember the whimsical, humorous tale of the hapless ‘Umara, a story that unfolds over seven days. ‘Umara is a lazy ne’er-do-well of unbelievable stupidity. He gets kicked out of school, and then his mother threatens to kick him out of the house if he doesn’t secure gainful employment. On his quest, ‘Umara quite accidentally brings laughter to a depressed sultan’s daughter; the sultan of course rewards him handsomely, and ‘Umara marries the princess and eventually assumes the throne, “and he ruled the land with justice.”

I gradually moved on to more contemporary fare, and distinctly remember one summer being entirely taken up with detective stories. My favourite were the five adventurers, a monthly series whose utterly ridiculous premise did not in the least faze me: five upper-class kids from Maadi helping to solve knotty and dangerous crime cases, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the local police station, no less. I obsessively collected their books, visiting the newspaper stand every month to get the latest. Those of a certain age will remember that the quintet consisted of Takhtakh, the portly but really smart ringleader who had superior deductive powers; the siblings Atef and Loza and the twins Noosa and Moheb, and the beloved dog Zangar. In an utterly self-flattering manner, I identified strongly with Loza, the youngest member of the crew and the smartest after Takhtakh. She was energetic, cute, and such an excellent sleuth. Plus, she was brave. When she was kidnapped by some ruthless criminals, she weathered the experience with grit and aplomb.

This was all very attractive and convincing to me, apparently, and I whiled away the hours consuming the fast-paced, thrilling adventures of the fabulous five. They spent their summer vacations pursuing dangerous criminals and sophisticated organised gangs (gasp!), while I spent summer vacations filled with crushing boredom. They put themselves in real danger, going undercover as street children and thugs to consort with the shadowy figures of the Maadi underworld. And they amassed valuable clues simply by engaging in systematic, logical thinking (the unsubtle moral of all the stories). In their downtime, the sleuths had a love-hate relationship with the grouchy Shaweesh Ali, who found them annoying (who wouldn’t?), but they enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Inspector Sami, an influential detective who always wore dark glasses and said things like “What I admire about you is that you are bold adventurers and diligent students at the same time.” Not only that, but Takhtakh had unmediated access to Inspector Sami, often phoning him on his direct line to offer clever advice and tips.

I flip through the books of my childhood, and find that they still grip, delight, and stimulate me. They taught me the beauty of words, the magic of imagination, the virtues of concentration, and the love of all that is quirky, unlikely, astonishing.

Read On

The Art of Ibrahim Aslan

Since he emerged on the literary scene in the mid-1960s with his elliptical, allusive, deceptively simple short stories that deeply impressed culture mavens Naguib Mahfouz, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Salah Abdel Sabbour, Ibrahim Aslan has been elaborating and perfecting a genre all his own. Mixing fiction with autobiography, short story conventions with novelistic forms, poetic economy with dramaturgical composition, Aslan’s art is a precious, wondrous creation. He has the poet’s ear for language, the painter’s feel for texture, the composer’s sense of movement, the layperson’s love of humour, and the photographer’s knack for finding the magic in the mundane.


Aslan’s latest work, Shay’un Min Hadha al-Qabil (Something like That), is a collection of the author’s terse and evocative columns in al-Ahram and al-Karama written in the past two years. Reading them once a week among the grim fare of news and opinion was like a breath of fresh air, a momentary flash of mystery and beauty amidst mind-numbing ugliness. But reading them in succession in a single volume is a more intense, absorbing experience, inviting contemplation of just what it is that makes Aslan’s writing perennially fresh, profound, and pleasurable.

Aslan is by far my favourite writer among his contemporaries. While very readable, Sonallah Ibrahim’s work is highly cerebral and lacks beauty (with the exception of his latest oeuvre). Baha’ Taher has become too transparently didactic and self-conscious in his writing, Khairy Shalabi’s storytelling is exuberant but unrestrainedly verbose and showy, Gamal al-Ghitani’s prose is too opaque and impenetrable, and reading Edwar al-Kharrat is grim work, what with all of his avant-garde philosophising. Mohamed El-Bisatie’s writing comes closest to Aslan’s poetic power and economical style, but his fixation on village life over-relies on predictable themes and characters.

Like his contemporaries, Aslan conceives of writing as a medium to communicate with and prod the reader, but unlike many of them, his writing has a very light, ethereal touch while still making a profound impression. He does not moralise or philosophise, nor does he use writing simply to experiment with technique or engage in word play. He doesn’t write to shock or condemn or complain. He writes for the same reason a painter puts brush to canvas or a composer puts pencil to music paper: to give form to some inchoate thought or inspiration and to share it with others. From his first published collection of short stories Buhayrat al-Misa’ (Evening Lake, 1971) to his present collection of vignettes, Aslan’s sources of inspiration have been Melete and Mneme, the muses of meditation and memory.

As with his vignettes in Khulwat al-Ghalban (Poor Man’s Hermitage, 2003), the 34 meditations in Shay’un Min Hadha al-Qabil (the title comes from an obiter dictum on p. 63) draw on Aslan’s memories from childhood and his early working life, as well as his quotidian interactions with peers, acquaintances, and neighbours. There are sketches of cultural figures Yahya Haqqi, Naguib Mahfouz, Mohammad Auda, and George Bahgoury, visits to St. Petersburg and Dostoevsky’s house, and everyday encounters with neighbours, Aslan’s car mechanic, a loquacious taxi driver, an exhausted old man, a besotted young newspaper seller, the author’s third grade English teacher, and a rural migrant to the city who’s written a real letter to God that Aslan surreptitiously filched from the undeliverable mail bin back when he worked at the postal service. None of these scenes are more than 2-3 short pages long, and the first five in the book are particularly revelatory of Aslan’s graceful melding of memory and meditation.

Of course, Imbaba serves as a sort of hidden motif. As is well known, the neighbourhood where Aslan was born and has lived all his life has featured centrally in his two novels, Malek al-Hazin (The Heron, 1983) and Asafir al-Nil (Nile Sparrows, 1999), and his short story collection Hikayat min Fadlallah Uthman (Stories from Fadlallah Uthman, 2003). But here, evocations of his beloved natal quarter have a special poignancy. As the author mentions, he has moved from Imbaba to a new domicile in Moqattam, an experience whose logistical and psychological dimensions are most beautifully explored in these etudes.

In small, precise gestures, this collection reveals much about Aslan’s life and art. We learn that one of his inspirations for becoming a writer was reading Anton Chekhov’s “The Death of a Government Clerk.” We learn that he wrote his first novel “out of pure coincidence.” That it troubles him that he can never remember his dreams. That reading every day is a reflex and compulsion of quasi-religious significance. That melancholy and humour commingle in his writing as they do in life. We learn the art of noticing, of living as fully sentient beings, in perpetual contemplation.

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To Drink, Perchance to Live

Talented photographer Amr Abdallah at al-Masry al-Yawm has kindly shared his photos of citizens' daily struggle for water, here in Giza. I'm in no mood for comment. What's there to say? Who isn't outraged by this suffering and deprivation, and who isn't enraged by the responses of Gamal Mubarak's ministers and his father's governors?

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The Civil Disobedience Project

On Monday, 23 July, stay at home and raise Egypt’s flag.

That’s the initiative adopted by Kifaya and a half dozen other groups to inaugurate a long term, incremental, and very patient civil disobedience campaign to signal public disgust with Hosni Mubarak, his son, their government, and its policies. The idea is not to stage a symbolic, one-time performance but to begin working seriously and creatively to transform widespread disaffection with the Mubarak regime into concrete, coordinated, relatively risk-free acts that strip the regime of any residual vestiges of legitimacy.

The notion of organising a national civil disobedience campaign has been percolating for some years now, pre-dating the current spectacular wave of protests. In fall 2004, it gained the valuable intellectual and moral imprimatur of retired judge and historian Tariq al-Bishri, who wrote a lucid defence of non-violent resistance as the only feasible and effective method of engaging the increasingly violent and personalised rule of Hosni Mubarak. Reading it again, I’m struck by how much has changed since al-Bishri penned his words. The fragmentation and dearth of collective action that he lamented three years ago are unrecognisable today, replaced by incessant societal movement, to wit: the electoral mobilisation of 2005, the pro-judges’ protests of 2006, the innovative campus organising of 2005 and 2006, the workers’ uprising of 2006-07, and the more recent spate of ordinary people’s street action.

By civil disobedience, al-Bishri meant precisely the kind of street-based collective demand-making and reclaiming of rights that is now sweeping the country, spearheaded by labour unions, craft guilds, professional associations, student unions, and ordinary people. Kifaya et al’s recent initiative goes well beyond this mode. It ventures into the most challenging, the most difficult terrain: seeking to activate societal sectors unused to expressing opposition of any kind, whether street protest or dissent in salons and political parties or writing letters to newspapers or joining a block association or any of the myriad other ways that politically aware citizens air their views.

The stay at home initiative targets those who cringe from making any sort of visible statement about public affairs but are by no means indifferent about current events. It seeks to tap into the intense and ambient sense of anger at the authorities that has settled over the entire country like a thick, low-hanging cloud, the subject of every household conversation and office chatter. It attempts to normalise dissent by weaving into the rhythm of everyday life, whittling it down to a simple, doable, and above-all risk-free act of staying at home (what we all love to do anyway) and hanging the flag from a window or balcony, an eminently respectable and patriotic gesture tweaked just enough to make a bold but non-threatening statement.

It’s no surprise that the idea has generated heated, entertaining discussion on the Internet, independent and opposition newspapers, and satellite television programs. Reactions run the gamut from enthusiastic support to puzzlement to derision. Some laud the novelty and the brilliant simplicity of the idea, for how can State Security punish people for staying at home and raising the flag?! Others don’t see how staying at home constitutes any kind of proactive gesture, for isn’t it the height of passivity and indifference? And don’t people stay at home anyway on a national holiday? Still others are attacking the whole idea as silly and contrived. As for the rulers, I can only imagine how worried they must be right now. Anything that smacks of coordination and aims to enlist the latent energies of millions of citizens is a nightmare for them, especially right now when so much discontent is enveloping the country. So they’ve already mobilised their mouthpieces in the media to belittle and ridicule the initiative.

Personally, I think it’s a brilliant idea and a fascinating experiment. Not only is it simple and logical (a must for any kind of novel political act), culturally resonant, and accessible to all classes of the population, but it holds the potential to be extremely threatening to the authorities. True, the rulers and their agents would like nothing more than atomised families staying in their homes watching television instead of demonstrating in the streets or occupying public space. But if the home-staying is calculated and coordinated by independent groups acting together to make one peaceful oppositional statement; if it brings together the intellectual, the homemaker, the worker, and the farmer to take a simple stance against a corrupt, unjust government; if it is difficult to monitor and punish; if it gathers steam and midwifes more such acts; and above all, if it punctures citizens’ rational reluctance to oppose an ugly, repressive regime, then we’re talking about something more threatening than armed insurrections or a thousand street protests.

The organizers of the stay-at-home say that it’s a dry run for more civil disobedience campaigns to come, perhaps similar actions on work days, perhaps a few consecutive days instead of one, maybe other acts entirely. But the basic idea is to minimise the risk while maximising the impact, always making sure that actions ‘fit’ into the rhythms of everyday life and make sense to those who would otherwise shun or fear them. That’s a tall order for any political organiser, more challenging than orchestrating a street protest, factory sit-in, election rally, silent vigil, petition drive, public procession, or any of the dozens of other well-worn tools of political expression.

Borg al-Borollos villagers block the highway to protest their chronic lack of potable water, 3 July 2007. (Photo from al-Karama).

I don’t know what will happen on Monday, but I can’t wait to see. I’m sure there’ll be lively post-mortems pronouncing the stay-at-home as either a failure or a success, or maybe a non-event. Whatever the outcome, I can’t help but feel that we’re living in momentous times, not because of some purportedly impending regime change, but because we get to watch in real time as a complex society experiments with old-new political forms, grows more assertive and persistent in reclaiming rights, and struggles to craft a more representative and just government. Now some might think this is about as interesting as watching grass grow, but for pedants like me, this slow-motion political transformation is the stuff of riveting drama.

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From Remonstrance to Rights

Egypt is so rife with protest these days it’s difficult and crucial to keep track. On any given day, at least one group of citizens takes to the streets to press demands, air grievances, and claim recognition. Sometimes, miraculously, they win. Take the example of the recently concluded strike by al-Azhar schoolteachers to protest their exclusion from the new wage schedule. In a rare display of collective resolve, the teachers refrained from marking thanawiyya exams, refusing to cave in to government threats, empty promises, and protest fatigue. Their brilliantly timed work stoppage in the thick of thanawiyya ‘amma season compelled Hosni Mubarak himself to intervene and decree their inclusion in the new wage structure. But protest by teachers and other professionals is nothing new, going back to 1919 if not earlier. Judges and parliamentary deputies have now also added street action to their tactical repertoire. And protest is the stock-in-trade of students, factory workers, and democracy activists. What’s striking about a recent spate of street action is the leadership of ordinary people.

These reflections are prompted by three recent instances of ordinary people’s collective action. First are the Qal’at al-Kabsh residents (above), whose homes were decimated by a conflagration in March. They immediately marched to the gates of parliament in protest, demanding alternative housing and action from their parliamentary deputy, none other than the venal Mr Fathi Sorour. The spectacle of homeless women and children fearlessly occupying prime pavement reserved for high officialdom was extremely threatening. Riot control were despatched to encircle the citizens and forcibly remove them. Second is the collective action by North Sinai residents against years of government neglect, discrimination, and police brutality. In response to police shootings of two Bedouins in April, Sinai denizens took to the streets in protest, staged a two-day sit-in, drew up a list of demands, and threatened an open-ended sit-in if those demands were not met. Third is the spectacular act of protest by Borg al-Borollos villagers on 3 July, when they blockaded the coastal highway in Kafr al-Shaykh for 12 hours to call national attention to their plight: the chronic lack of potable water for weeks and months on end. Residents are forced to purchase jerry cans of water at the scandalous price of £E40 per week, and the purity of this water is dubious since many cans were previously used to transport petrol.

Street action by groups of ordinary people isn’t new, but it’s far less documented and celebrated than similar action by workers, tradesmen, students, and other organised social sectors. Unlike these groups, ordinary people rarely distribute pamphlets or carry placards that survive as records of their action. Its sporadic character and focus on basic needs (food, water, housing) is often taken to mean that ordinary people’s protest is somehow less significant, less political than ‘real’ protest. By contrast, the press is currently portraying ordinary peoples’ protests as portending an impending national revolt and regime breakdown. Notwithstanding their excellent coverage, al-Masry al-Youm’s editors have inexplicably christened the water protests in Kafr al-Shaykh, Gharbiyya, Daqahliyya, and Giza as the “Revolt of the Thirsty,” implying that widespread popular wrath will inevitably translate into political upheaval and ‘chaos’.

But alternately downplaying and hyping citizen protest is a poor substitute for actually understanding it. There are several remarkable features of recent citizen protest that deserve recognition and more careful attention. First is the fact that there’s protest at all, in more than one locale and concerning more than one issue. What compels ordinary, powerless women and men to take extraordinary risks and confront those who have immeasurably more power and prestige than they? Wrath doesn’t explain it, since that’s ubiquitous and constant. For ordinary people to translate their anger into action is rare and remarkable, not just here but anywhere. It’s even more remarkable given citizens’ experience with the police state’s response to any kind of public assembly.

Then there’s how protest is conducted. All three instances of protest involve ordinary people peacefully but assertively taking over public space, space that is obsessively guarded and regulated by the government as markers of its power, ownership, and complete control. Consider the daring acts: Sinai residents blockading roads by burning tyres (above), Qala’t al-Kabsh women and children planting themselves on the pavement in front of parliament and refusing to budge or leave without a fight, and Borollos folks shutting down traffic for hours on a major highway. Let’s not forget the recent incident of al-Marg residents intercepting a ministerial motorcade to gain an audience with the housing minister about the recurrent problem of sewage flooding their streets. The boldness of these acts should not go unnoticed. These are not the acts of desperate people indiscriminately expressing wrath or engaging in some aimless ‘revolt.’ They’re acts directed at specific targets, seeking specific goals, and couched in specific claims.

It doesn’t take a genius to observe that high-ranking government officials are the unmistakeable objects of the recent citizen protests. These afflicted citizens are not beseeching religious figures or other social eminences to intercede on their behalf. They’re not wasting time on municipal government officials, because they know only too well that they’re useless or downright complicit in their plight. And they’re not attributing their problems to general injustice or resigning themselves in the manner of ‘things have always been like this.’ It’s because of the chronic, collective nature of their problems that they’re boldly demanding the involvement of high-ranking government officials. The recent spate of ordinary people’s protest targets specific government officials, includes coherent attributions of blame, advances detailed proposals for solving the problems at issue, and is couched in a clear, crisp language of citizenship rights and entitlements.

I think what we’re seeing is more than simply the extension of the street action repertoire to ordinary citizens who do not belong to nor know much about political parties, trade unions, or pro-democracy groups. We’re observing a structural shift in the way ordinary people deal with public authorities. A quick list: they’re more assertive in making their demands, so that rather than plead and grovel with some petty bureaucrat in a grimy government office, they’re choosing the streets so that the media pays attention and transports their grievances to the whole nation. They’re determined to reach high-ranking officials, so that rather than rely on the petty bureaucrat or even his boss, they’ll deal with no less than a governor or parliament speaker, knowing full well whom they answer to. And they present their demands as a matter of rights that are owed them than privileges that are bestowed on them. As Qal’at al-Kabsh and Kafr al-Shaykh residents have said, “Don’t people like us have the right to be treated as human beings and be compensated, even if it’s only with a one-room apartment?” And: “We are humans who deserve better treatment. We are citizens of this country. We should not be forgotten.”

If it’s true that ordinary people are innovating new ways of dealing with the government, why is this happening? The erosion and near-collapse in the infrastructure of basic services (sewage, potable water, irrigation water) is a key factor, but even more aggravating to citizens is that they’re still required to pay fees for services that they don’t receive. What’s more, the services they’re being deprived of are the very minimum required for human survival. We’re not talking about affordable healthcare, decent schooling, or subsidised alimentary goods, things they’ve long ceased to expect from this government. We’re talking about clean water, for God’s sake! We’re talking about the right not to suffer routine police brutality, as in the case of North Sinai’s residents. We’re talking about the right to have alternative housing when the government decides to “upgrade” the neighbourhood you’ve lived in for 50 years by clearing you out.

Another factor that may be causing ordinary people’s street action is the inefficacy of existing representative structures. Ordinary citizens have a long and bitter experience with unresponsive or corrupt municipal officials, so they’ve realised that they must surpass these ineffectual intermediaries and make a beeline for the national symbols and holders of political power. A third factor may be the changing nature of protest itself. Ordinary people may have noticed that street protest is now a common and well-worn method used to advance all manner of collective interests, whether by poultry farmers or unemployed university graduates or citizens opposed to the construction of mobile phone towers or families of disaster victims or congregants after Friday prayers. They see these groups advertising their grievances and they mimic their tactics.

If ordinary people are more assertively and more directly targeting top government officials, what’s been the latter’s response? Overall, they’ve been unusually amenable. Most Qal’at al-Kabsh families have been allotted housing; those who’ve been excluded are fearlessly and relentlessly claiming their rights. Fearing more instability in Egypt’s least controllable province, State Security caved in to Sinawis’ credible threat of an open-ended sit-in on 1 July and began releasing detainees held without charge in indiscriminate sweeps since 2004. As for the Borg al-Borollos villagers, their extraordinary action and their refusal to be hoodwinked by the usual palliatives meant that water was restored to the village, but it’s unclear for how long. In the meantime, the utterly loathsome Salah Salama has been peddling his line in the media that “the land mafia” incited the protest with the aim of ousting him because he’s apparently been bravely facing down their “corruption.” Salama also asserted that he refused to meet the protestors, “or else their demands would have increased and maybe they would have called for the presence of the Prime Minister or the President.”

That response is very telling. I’m convinced that government officials harbour a deep fear of ordinary people’s collective action; it’s unpredictable and novel and therefore less tractable than street action by students, workers, and professionals, sectors whose protests the government has a long history of managing and defusing. Just this once, the terror-stricken Salama is right: he refused to meet with Borg villagers because they were in no mood to remonstrate, plead, beg, and politely petition, the customary repertoire of action used by the powerless when confronting the powerful. Today, something else is afoot. Ordinary people are engaging in public, collective demand-making targeted at the highest state officials and couched in the unimpeachable language of citizenship and basic human rights.

Time will tell if this is a brilliant but ephemeral spark, or a new template for political action in Egypt.

*AP Photos

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Respite

Arty Topalian, Seated Fellaha (ca. 1950s).

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A Parliament to Watch

In what I think is a first in Egyptian political history, on Sunday 18 March, 102 opposition legislators began a boycott of parliament’s plenary sessions. The sessions are devoted to swiftly passing what the Mubarak regime is calling “amendments” to the 1971 constitution. In reality, the alterations augment executive powers and constitutionalise the exclusion of Mubarak’s challengers. Naturally, what gave the protest its heft was the presence of 88 Muslim Brother deputies, but equally significant was the active participation of Hamdeen Sabahy and Saad Abboud from the Karama party, noteworthy independents such as Gamal Zahran and Alaa Abdel Moneim, and maverick Wafdist Mohamed Abdel Haleem, among others.

Under a blinding high noon sun, the deputies stood swaddled in black sashes protesting the “constitutional coup” and carried bright-yellow signs announcing the death of the constitution, the end of personal liberties, and the extinction of free elections. Some wore black ties in mourning. Ikhwan MP Mohsen Radi brandished the constitution and called out, “Here’s the constitution that the NDP wants to destroy.”












As prominent deputies made fiery statements to an army of jostling reporters and cameramen, I couldn’t help pondering a couple of glaring ironies. First, Mubarak’s tampering with the constitution has transformed a flawed and musty document into a significant contract of basic rights worth defending. Second, the regime’s attack on the last vestiges of constitutional freedoms is unintentionally fostering coordination and collective action by the parliamentary opposition. For the past several days, independent deputies have been deliberating round the clock to weigh various courses of action, including collective resignation. Ultimately, that option was dropped because (a) lack of time to investigate the full legal and political ramifications of such a momentous decision, (b) the regime would like nothing more than to be rid of the high percentage of opposition deputies and to engineer new, better controlled elections, and (c) the boycott proposal was floated by a dubious source: the revolting and utterly untrustworthy Mustafa Bakri, State Security’s point man in parliament (who of course was not among the 102 boycotters).

Obviously we’re still a very long way from a real parliament capable of both checking and bargaining with the executive and forging durable extra-parliamentary coalitions. But I can’t shake off the feeling that what happened Sunday portends something new, perhaps even the spark that may ignite the parliamentarisation of Egyptian politics. The group of 88 are complicating business as usual under the rotunda. Recall their stand against the extension of emergency rule last spring, their participation in the pro-judges’ protests, and their tireless challenges to Fathi Sorour. If coordination between them and other opposition deputies continues on a variety of issues, then we may have to start taking parliament seriously.




For a few hours on Sunday, the grounds of parliament were overrun by the authentic representatives of the people, not the overfed, under-qualified cronies of the ruling regime. Parliament security guards, administrative staff, and buffet personnel gaped in awe at the independent deputies and the media menagerie they attracted, recognising that they had done something new and important. Passers-by lingered to stare and listen. An elderly woman smiled and wondered out loud to no one in particular, “Today is your day. Is this going to be on television?”


This here is Hussein Abdel Hafeez. He was on his daily round of errands in government buildings when he saw the colourful protest, so he decided to watch what’s going on. He had no idea what the protest was about and didn’t care that much, but he did care that it took him entire days to get basic services from the government bureaucracy. He said the MPs looked like good people who would listen to ordinary people’s problems, so he joined in to support them in whatever it is they’re demanding.

But then again, public support is trifling compared to what was heaped on judges last spring. Parliament is still very much perceived as the home of crooks, charlatans, and crazies, an institution best dismissed and mocked, and always steadfastly avoided. I can’t imagine Egyptians taking to the streets to rally around their legislators. But I also can’t stop wondering when and how the People’s Assembly will turn into a real institution. When will parliament make a real claim to represent the people and check the executive branch? I have no idea, but I’d bet on the role of independent MPs, regardless of their political affiliation. Their burgeoning collective action, the linkages they forge with constituents, and their ability to annoy and perturb the ruling regime and break up its power monopoly are the real building blocks of representative democracy.

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The Perils of Succession

There are few more profoundly grotesque and unjust practices in Egypt’s republican history than presidential referrals of civilians to military tribunals, civilians who have done nothing more than peacefully express their political beliefs. Each of Egypt’s three presidents has tried and failed to defeat his challengers by using this faux-legal instrument. Nasser referred communists and Muslim Brothers to trial, Sadat referred our beloved bard Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm to a military court (because he couldn’t handle being mocked by the great one), and since 1995 Mubarak has sent to trial the most effective cadres of the Muslim Brothers, usually in the run-up to elections. Sadly, his 6 February referral of 32 members of the Muslim Brothers to trial is nothing new, and neither is the crackdown that has netted the group’s leaders and economic assets. What has changed this time around is the political context.

What distinguishes Mubarak’s current manoeuvres from both his own earlier tactics and predecessors’ actions is the extraordinary degree of uncertainty surrounding his regime’s future. This does not mean that it will collapse any day now. It means that the regime is on the cusp of a very risky succession. With Hosni Mubarak’s rapidly advancing senility and Gamal Mubarak’s incremental supremacy, the moment of power transfer is imminent and its direction appears clear. But there are so many wild cards and possible eleventh-hour developments at this juncture that the only certainty is that extraordinary uncertainty will accompany the process of succession.

A Risky Proposition

Succession is always a tetchy matter for undemocratic regimes, but the danger is even more acute in this case where the man in charge has hogged power for 26 years without cultivating a successor other than his own dull and despised offspring. To thicken the plot, the succession scheme appears to involve elections as both the mechanism and the legitimation of the power handover. How else to interpret the engineering of new constitutional rules to disqualify the regime’s most effective electoral opponent (the Ikhwan) and defang effective electoral monitoring (by the judges)? But as we know, elections are an extraordinarily complicated, exhausting project involving intricate coordination between many sites and very high levels of uncertainty. It’s as if Mubarak’s regime picked the most risky successor possible and planned to install him using the riskiest method possible.

If we adopt the logical though not inevitable scenario that Gamal is the heir apparent, what Mubarak and his newly nuclear son have going for them is the tacit endorsement of foreign patrons, principally the Americans, the self-interested enthusiasm of a circle of crony businessmen, and the co-opted top officials of the sprawling bureaucracy. That leaves organized sectors of the domestic public to be neutralised and/or crushed. As for the preferences and proclivities of the rest of the population, that is a total enigma.

Thus, the official retaliation against university students for organizing free and fair parallel elections; the crackdown on the Ikhwan for making trouble in parliament and generally acting like a real political force; the ostensibly legal throttling of the Karama and Wasat parties; the low-intensity battle against recalcitrant judges waged by the new strongman Minister of Justice, and of course the brazen plan to doctor the 1971 constitution. These strikes are needed not simply because many of these sectors are deeply opposed to a Gamal Mubarak presidency, and not simply because all are campaigning for honest and fair elections, but because the regime feels the need to signal toughness. It fears that its opponents will catch whiffs of its vulnerability during this transitional phase and attempt to use it to their own advantage. Like an ageing neighbourhood bully who lives by the credo of force, Hosni Mubarak’s regime is all about projecting strength.

Signalling toughness is especially critical given the steady stream of crises over the past year. There’s the cascade of transportation disasters starting with the February 2006 al-Salam 98 ferry sinking and the August Qalyoub train collision; the socio-economic fallout from the avian flu outbreak, the spring 2006 pro-judges’ street protests; the remarkable string of labour strikes in 2006 and 2007; bloggers’ and independent newspapers’ broadcasting of citizen torture in police stations; protests over the construction of mobile phone towers, and the recent scandal over collusion between the Health Ministry and a Gamal crony in disseminating contaminated blood bags.

For the most part, these are separate incidents, but their rapid cascade and government agents’ entanglement in each heighten the ambient sense of an embattled regime unable to control society. To make matters worse for the architects of succession, Egyptians have been a very contentious lot for some time now, yelling and screaming and complaining in a most unbecoming manner. They’ve been downright impudent and grabby, wanting rights and dignity and independence and fairness and so forth. And they’ve been organising to get those things. That can’t be allowed to stand.

Crushing the Ikhwan

Embarking on an electoral-hereditary succession means eliminating your most potent electoral rival. Hence the regime’s current crackdown on the Ikhwan. But there’s just one annoying kink: the Brothers are stronger today than at any time during Mubarak’s tenure. This is because of their relative success over the past ten years in building bridges with key actors: voters, nationalist and secular intellectuals and competing political forces, foreign parties, and their own sprawling membership base. Before and after their stunning performance in the 2005 elections, the Ikhwan put considerable effort in a reputation-building project aimed at normalising their position in Egyptian political life and transcending the silly but real constraint of their nominal illegality. They built effective, regularised links to constituents, courted secular rivals and assuaged their fears, and piqued the interest of foreign governments, whose agents began to probe the possibilities of engagement with the officially banned group. Equally important, the Ikhwan in the last few years have been working on their internal organisation. They have tried to re-establish ruptured ties between the leadership and rank-and-file, and worked to manage ideological, generational, and personality conflicts among their top decision-makers.

It doesn’t take a genius to see why this would constitute a nightmare for Hosni Mubarak. The Ikhwan’s capture of 88 seats in the 2005 vote was very inconvenient, causing the shaken regime to postpone municipal elections to avoid a damaging repeat, and to gain some breathing space to cook up the succession scheme. At first, the counter-mobilisation against the Ikhwan was predictable, reinforcing the group’s plucky underdog image and increasing public sympathy. In spring 2006, hundreds of Ikhwan were arrested for months for participating in the pro-judges’ protests (including Essam al-Eryan and Muhammad Mursi). Then, in a repeat of the 2005 vote, the government came out in full force to block the group from participating in the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce elections.

In April, to prevent professors affiliated with the group from holding faculty club elections, Alexandria University administrators locked the campus gates; professors had to convene their general assembly in the open air on the corniche. Meanwhile in parliament, the Ikhwan’s 88 deputies have been complicating the regime’s command and control tasks in this important arena, constantly sparring with Speaker-for-life Fathi Sorour and pressing parliamentary investigation of such inconvenient issues as very high-ranking official malfeasance in the Salam 98 sinking.

But it was an incident that took place on 10 December that was the regime’s real opportunity to roll back Ikhwan gains. On that day, Ikhwan students at al-Azhar were protesting their university administration’s obstruction of student union elections. During the protest, a contingent of students performed martial arts exercises, their faces swaddled in black, Hamas-style. Seizing this heaven-sent gift, the regime orchestrated a highly organised campaign in all of its publications and broadcast outlets designed to repel and frighten public opinion, just when it had gingerly begun to accept the group. The regime’s agents (from the president of al-Azhar University to State Security investigators to the lowliest government scribe) successfully portrayed the Ikhwan as a sinister, secretive organisation methodically infiltrating all critical societal institutions with the intent of taking over the country and turning it into an Islamic caliphate. Naturally, the specific context of the students’ act was obliterated to sow indiscriminate mistrust and fear, especially among those segments of the public that had always eyed the Ikhwan with some suspicion.

The spectre of the group’s 1940s violent wing was craftily invoked, in one fell swoop erasing years of work by the Ikhwan’s members to fend off claims that they’re nourishing militant underground cells ready to strike at the right moment. It was only a logical step for the government to then round up the organisation’s best cadres and send them to a military tribunal that would reliably put them behind bars for at least three years, thus depriving the group of critical skills and assets and fomenting internal dissension and confusion.

Abetting the regime’s offensive was the flustered response of the Ikhwan’s leadership. First they wrote off the martial arts exercise as a harmless skit, then they pooh-poohed it as a silly act by immature students, then they compelled the students to issue an ‘apology’ (thus reinforcing government claims of a militant organisation run by a handful of shadowy decision-makers), then they said they would form an official political party, then they backtracked and denied this. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Hosni Mubarak’s regime has wrought permanent damage to the Ikhwan’s carefully built political reputation. What the regime has done is recoup some of its own reputation for effortless control. This need to project strength is vital when considering the government’s unexpectedly non-violent response to striking workers.

Caressing Labour

The last thing the regime wants is a labour mutiny on its hands when all its energies need to be devoted to engineering succession. So aggrieved labourers need to be neutralised. I don’t think anyone has failed to notice the comparatively ‘soft’ manner in which Mubarak’s regime has handled the series of worker strikes at textile and cement factories and the national railways. This is noteworthy not just because of the contrasting gruffness with which Muslim Brothers and judges have been treated, but because of Mubarak’s past handling of organised labour action: the 1984-1987 wave of worker protest was met with swift police violence, mass arrests, and grave legal reprisals: in 1986, striking train drivers were referred to a High State Security court (it eventually acquitted them).

There’s one obvious reason why labour is treated differently: the regime’s security agents calculate that it would be suicidal to put down thousands of very angry labourers radicalised by years of substandard work conditions, maimed by avoidable workplace injuries, and steeped in a culture of collective action and protest. Putting down a few dozen white-collar demonstrators in the centre of the capital is easy, but wading into a sea of livid blue-collar protesters is another story entirely. Violent suppression at one plant could unleash a hellish cycle of copycat strikes, increased public outrage, more violence, and real instability that could seriously threaten regime survival.

There’s another important element in this wave of strikes that distinguishes it from past waves and gives the regime pause. Workers are not only demanding fair wages, payment of delayed bonuses, safer working conditions, and more benefits. And they’re not just blaming management anymore. They’re making concrete moves to recall their local union officials by organising massive petition drives for votes of no-confidence, and failing that, they’re threatening to simply withdraw from local union membership. Why does this matter? Because for as long as they’ve existed, the local unions have served as critical levers of state control over labour rather than as mechanisms for the representation of workers’ interests. The present wave of worker strikes is intimately connected to workers’ struggle for real representation.

Last year, workers began their collective action in the run-up to trade union elections to gain some leverage during a vote they knew would be cooked. When, as expected, independent candidates were barred from running and the same old cronies were elected, workers resumed their strike action. Their goal is to overhaul the structures that ostensibly represent their interests but in reality work to monitor their behaviour and abort incipient collective action. This is deeply threatening to the regime: a gathering mutiny against local union officials strikes at the heart of the state’s control and command structure over the critical sector of labour.

Thus, in a manner not seen in other areas of Egyptian politics, high-ranking officials have personally and publicly intervened to negotiate with and cajole striking workers, promising to deliver their unpaid bonuses and incentives in hopes of snuffing out grievances over representation. Everyone from the chairman of ETUF to the Minister of Labour to provincial governors have waded into the midst of the strikers, laden with conciliatory words and promises and a generous smattering of paternalistic discourse, as when Aisha Abdel Hady volunteered the information that Hosni Mubarak cannot sleep at night if he feels there is a single unhappy worker. Madame Abdel Hady has also recently exhibited a strong allergy to the term “civil disobedience.” During a parliamentary discussion of a possible wave of societal disobedience led by striking workers, she firmly averred that “civil disobedience” is not part of the make-up (khameera) of the Egyptian worker.

Containing Judges

Mubarak’s regime knows that we know that it has conceded to worker demands, and that this knowledge might provoke other forces to engage in collective action to gain concessions from a regime that has built its reputation on never negotiating. So it is of critical importance that it apply maximum toughness with the one other sector that can make a credible bid at negotiation: judges. Indeed, one reason why Minister of Justice Mahmoud Abou el-Layl was removed was that he showed too much readiness to negotiate and give and take with judges. His replacement is a perfect embodiment of the credo of non-negotiation.

Mamdouh Marei’s personal style and professional background are all about issuing orders: as a person, he’s brusque and bossy. Professionally, he does not practice collegiality but is condescending and supercilious, qualities he acquired from years at the helm of the judicial internal affairs department in the Ministry of Justice. Let’s not forget that his recent term of service as Chairman of the Presidential Elections Commission (PEC) drove a huge wedge between him and thousands of reformist judges. All in all, he is the perfect candidate for the job of quashing the movement for judicial reform and clean elections.

Marei and his bosses know from last spring that a PR campaign to discredit reformist judges will carry no weight with a public that adores and idolises leaders of the judicial independence movement. So Marei has cunningly selected an alternative, much more effective plank: judicial modernisation. Under this general rubric, Marei will focus on three tracks: judicial training, services and support, and the induction of women into the profession. How will these fragment and weaken reformist judges?

First, Marei will hitch onto the genuine problem of the abysmal training judges receive to push the idea that judicial supervision of elections should be at the bottom of judges’ priorities. Judges belong on the bench, not in the polling station, goes the technically correct argument. Instead of being drawn into the exhausting minutiae of electoral disputes, judges should focus their energies on professional development and the Ministry will help them do that. Judges who insist on “one judge for every ballot box” will appear to be ignoring their duties and ‘becoming involved in politics.’ The judicial training argument has real potential to divide the clean elections movement because it resonates with a strong current of opinion among judges.

Marei’s second strategy is to erode the mobilising potential of judges’ Clubs, particularly in Cairo and Alexandria. To this end, he has already started installing all sorts of critical judicial support services within courthouses (especially primary courts) so that judges won’t ever need to go to their Clubs for bank services and loans, housing and mobile phone benefits, and a host of other auxiliary services. At the same time, earmarked Ministry of Justice funds to the Clubs are being dried up or cut off altogether, and public utility companies are instructed to cut off or scale back water and electricity service. However, reformist judges are very alert to this strategy and have counteracted Marei’s actions by unanimously voting to raise individual monthly dues to their Clubs from £E2 to £E20.

The third strategy portrays the regime as the progressive, courageous champion of women’s rights valiantly resisting sexist, exclusionary judges who preach democracy and reform but refuse to allow women entry into the judiciary. Women’s accession to the judiciary in Egypt has been a hot button issue among judges for at least 10 years, eliciting very strong feelings, with a minority of ardent supporters and a majority of variously motivated detractors. Marei has already selected 124 women legal officers for qualifying exams and training in the National Center for Judicial Studies in preparation for their admission into the profession. By playing the woman card, the regime burnishes its own reputation, casts doubt on the integrity of its judicial critics, and drives a wedge between pro- and anti-women judges within the judicial reform movement that the regime hopes will block further collective action.

It’s far too early to call Marei’s strategies unequivocal successes or failures. So far, he has managed to bring together the conventionally separate administrative judges with the rest of the judicial corps in unified opposition to his policies and tough guy persona. The cynical bid to appear as the champion of women’s rights is waved off by judges as Marei’s toadying to Suzanne Mubarak’s wishes, and of course Suzanne’s imprimatur is a political kiss of death. Whether the regime will attain its real objective of wresting electoral supervision away from the Judges Club and entrusting it to a pliable central Commission remains an open question.

Savouring the Irony

Would Mubarak’s regime be crushing the Ikhwan, containing judges, and managing labour unrest if it wasn’t embarking on a delicate, very unpopular, and sure to be undemocratic succession? Absolutely. The difference that succession makes is that all of these manoeuvres become matters of political survival rather than garden variety political management. By raising the stakes, the regime unwittingly invites political challenges, unforeseen alliances, unexpected mobilisation, and acts of political adventurism and risk-taking unlikely in normal times; think of Ayman Nour’s gamble for the presidency that catapulted him from a small-time politician to a heroic national figure and international cause célèbre. Even if the succession proceeds smoothly, the post-succession days, weeks, and months promise to be full of turbulence as the heir works to consolidate his rule in the all-important early phases.

How ironic that in attempting to secure his regime’s survival, Mubarak is actually ushering in one of the most uncertain political junctures in Egypt’s republican history. It’s just like when his amendment of Article 76 to transfer the presidency to a handpicked successor actually turned into multiple opportunities for political mobilisation and societal protest. I’d like to think that the perils of succession might also hold the possibilities of an incrementally more democratic politics, with new actors plunging into the fray, old actors reinventing themselves, new alliances struck, and more competition in the political arena. Prescience or wishful thinking? I can hardly wait to find out.

*All Photos from AP.

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Bookbag

It’s January, and that means Book Fair time. Here I’ve plucked only three of the most prominent features this year, two worthwhile new novels and a marvellous book lifted straight from the texture of daily life. All of them are wonderful (and quick) reads, easy on the didacticism and heavy on the lived experience of ordinary people.

Sonallah Ibrahim has become that rare novelist whose every new work is eagerly anticipated and turns into a literary event of note. His politics and his courage are only partly to account for this. It’s his knack for innovation and experimentation with new themes, new styles, and new methods for composing a novel that give Ibrahim a vitality rare among his contemporaries. Though all of his novels are written in an extremely shorn, reportorial prose allergic to any embellishment, and everything he writes involves some facet of human alienation from oppressive socio-political structures, his subject matter and methods have varied. That Smell (1966), The Committee (1981), and Zaat (1992) explore individual human alienation under political authoritarianism and capitalism; Star of August (1974) and Warda (2000) are more frankly political novels about concrete political struggles; Honor (1997) and Oases Diary (2005) chronicle the prison experience based on Ibrahim’s incarceration with other Communists from 1959-1964; Beirut Beirut (1984) and Amrikanli (2003) transcribe the rituals of daily life against the backdrop of civil war in Lebanon and late capitalism in America.

Ibrahim’s latest novel, Sneaking (2007), is his most intimate work yet, mining the author’s unconventional childhood to explore the fundamental human emotion of yearning: yearning for maternal love, for lost youth, for the simple creature comforts of domesticity. The novel is essentially a fictionalised account of the author’s childhood; the cover photograph depicts Ibrahim and his father, a very expressive image embodying the close-knit relationship between an ageing father and his growing son. It is this co-dependent, claustrophobic, yet touching relationship that forms the centrepiece of the narrative.

Born in 1937, Ibrahim was the only child from his father’s second marriage to a much younger nurse hired to tend to his ailing first wife. The 16-year-old nurse kept the husband company, read the newspapers, and talked with him about politics. The respectable, high-ranking civil servant fell in love for the first time in his life and married the nurse in secret. When the first wife died and Ibrahim’s father told his grown children of his second household, they became extremely upset and were cold and unwelcoming toward their half-brother, punishing him for his mother’s modest origins. These and more details unfold in the novel. Particularly remarkable is Ibrahim’s vivid reconstruction of his childhood feelings toward his snooty half-sister, a heartbreaking mixture of eagerness for love and acceptance and fascination by her comfortable bourgeois household.

In several ways, Sneaking bears Ibrahim’s trademark imprint: extremely short, clipped sentences that resemble note-taking more than narrative prose; an extraordinarily detailed, clinical rendition of the minutiae of daily life (down to the bedbugs plaguing the nine-year-old child); and a backdrop of momentous events, in this case the 1947-1948 ferment on Egyptian streets against King Farouq, the Zionist control of Palestine, and bickering political party leaders. But in its lyrical tone and familial setting, the novel is quite a departure from Ibrahim’s previous work. Returning to his childhood, the novelist delves into territory he has never mined (until the very recent Oases Diary).

As might be expected, Ibrahim’s take on childhood is original and unsentimental. There’s no nostalgia here, no rose-colored rendition of time and place, no attempt to juxtapose an idealised past against a grim present. Instead, there’s a gripping, child’s-eye view of the world by a child exceptionally attuned to the moods, habits, and silent yearnings of the adults around him. This child glides through life surreptitiously listening in on adult conversations that he’s not supposed to hear, adult behaviour he’s not supposed to see, adult longings he’s not supposed to understand. So listen, peek, and sneak he does. Indeed, the word talassus (sneaking) is peppered throughout the novel like an idée fixe, signalling the young child’s coming-of-age and induction into the adult world. By sneaking about in his own and others’ apartments and peeking from behind locked gates, the child sees and overhears adults napping, copulating, depilating, flirting, bathing, menstruating, cooking, cleaning, and performing other life cycle rituals.

Ibrahim has adopted a hallowed genre but given it a creative twist, writing a very quirky, intimate, offbeat, yet strangely affecting bildungsroman. Unlike the conventional form, however, his bildungsroman is as concerned with old age as it with youth. As the child’s eyes are opened to the wide adult world, the elderly father grows keenly aware of his own mortality and gradual receding from life. Like an old man, he ruefully reflects on his waning faculties and maintains a strict regimen of fussy rituals (including a hilarious scene where he imposes on the child a series of superstitious exercises designed to improve the latter’s performance on exams). One of the most touching scenes in the novel involves a conversation between the father and his randy friend Ali Safa in which Safa shares his obsession with his 16-year-old neighbour girl. The child, pretending to be lost in sleep, listens on in fascination as Safa relates his fantasies and bemoans his lost youth and his father tenderly recounts his love for his second wife and his joy at experiencing the true taste of fatherhood at a late age. While overhearing both men voice their longings, the child is prompted into his own reverie, remembering fragments of his happier past, of both parents joyfully singing together in a warm house filled with the comforting smell of frying food. The moving scene twines the deep desires of both young and old for feminine warmth and companionship, the theme that Ibrahim has identified as the dominant motif of his new novel.

The intensity of their longing is fuelled by the father and son’s cramped life on the father’s limited pension, renting out rooms in their apartment to save money and living together in one squalid, freezing room infested by bedbugs. The mother has disappeared from their life; the narrator hints that she is confined to a mental institution or has died. Both cope with her absence by clinging to and caring for each other while constantly yearning for a soft female presence. During their holiday visits to his uppity half-sister in Heliopolis, the child is fascinated by the cleanliness of her house, the softness and clean smell of her bedding, the tastiness of the food prepared by her cook. Everything around them reminds impoverished father and son of their emotional and material deprivation. Even when they return to their inevitably dark alley and draughty room in Abbasiyya, they encounter signs of others’ domestic comforts, overhearing their lodgers the constable and his young wife in their room laughing and singing along with love songs on the radio, empty plates of home-cooked food piled up on the dining table.

Stylistically, the novel includes several features that distinguish it from the previous Amrikanli’s mere transcription of daily life. The author signals the child’s longing with portions of bold text that describe his daydreams, vivid memories of his mother, and childhood ditties that remind him of happier years when she was present and his father was happy. Juxtaposing these portions from the past with the father and son’s present spartan existence is especially powerful in conveying the boy’s feelings of loneliness and longing. Words and images recur throughout the text to underscore central motifs and lend the novel structural coherence: the repetition of the word talassus; the inevitably dark alleyway to their house; their claustrophobic, fetid room with the hard bed pillows and ratty mattress.

Sneaking begins and ends with the father and son going about their daily rituals: buying their meagre groceries on credit, working together on the boy’s composition homework. The bond between an aged father and his nine-year-old son is the real subject of Sneaking, Sonallah Ibrahim’s most introspective work yet. This is not a novel about the combustible politics of the late 1940s, nor an account of the ravaging effects of capitalism on individual lives. It is a novel about the emotional world of ordinary people living in a particular time and place, pining for the small creature comforts that make life worth living.




“You’ll read it in a day and come back and buy copies for all your friends,” the bookseller said about Khaled al-Khamisy’s Taxi. He’s right about one thing: the book is impossible to put down (my friends will have to buy their own copies). It's a simple yet profound idea gracefully composed and artfully executed. At first, I cringed at the potential for condescension and cliché when collating the stories of Cairo’s cab drivers. The idea is brilliant, the product could be disastrous. I expected pages of patronising, hackneyed “analysis,” or moralising preaching, or superficial fare the sole purpose of which is to showcase the author’s brilliance. But from the first few pages, screenplay writer and political scientist Khaled al-Khamisy makes it perfectly clear that he’s an excellent listener and a faithful transcriber, with a fine ear for the comical, poignant, and tragic in the stories of the taxi drivers. In other words, the author thankfully does us the favour of withholding his judgment and refraining from lecturing as he conveys undoctored conversations brimming with humour, pathos, and startling insight.

The book includes conversations with drivers from April 2005 to March 2006, a year when the author relied almost exclusively on cabs to move around the city. This exposed him to the extremely diverse human pool that now constitutes the capital’s modern coachmen. Anyone who uses taxis and pays any attention knows that there is no such thing anymore as the prototypical taxi driver (if there ever was). High unemployment and underemployment, skyrocketing costs of living, and a 1990s law allowing any aged vehicle to be turned into a taxi have all conspired to dramatically increase the number and diversity of taxis and their drivers (80,000 cabs in Greater Cairo alone, al-Khamisy says). Drivers now run the gamut from white-collar professionals to blue-collar workers to moonlighting civil servants to college students. They’re of varying age groups, from drivers in their late teens who’ve just secured a license to septuagenarians who started driving in the 1940s. A fair portion of drivers have postgraduate degrees, and all have stories to tell.

After a brief, nimble introduction, al-Khamisy proceeds to recount 58 encounters with drivers from all walks of life (including a creepy yet all too believable exchange between a cab driver and the author’s 14-year-old daughter taking a taxi alone for the first time). The stories are textured, atmospheric, and very diverse, ranging from descriptions of the bitter struggle to earn a few pounds driving a taxi in extremely adverse conditions, to drivers’ evocative memories and personal stories (especially touching is the film buff who had not stepped into a movie theatre for 20 years), to social critique and analysis (especially remarkable here are the driver who dissects the hidden function of television commercials, and the driver who has a stunningly insightful analysis of the eclipse of street protest in Egypt since 1977), to drivers’ poignant hopes and aspirations (the driver who daydreams about an African cross-continent trip).

One of the most remarkable, hilarious, and insightful set of stories are those about politics, especially those conversations that deal with Hosni Mubarak and his presidential elections. It is to al-Khamisy’s great credit here that he faithfully transcribes both those opinions for and against the perennial president, and by doing so he makes a subtle point: it is very misguided to generalise about Egyptian public opinion from a few dozen examples, or to treat taxi drivers as somehow “authentic” voices of “the street.” Mercifully, this kind of essentialism and faux-populism or whatever it is is completely absent from the book. For every foreign correspondent and “analyst” who thinks he’s located the “pulse of the Egyptian street” by exchanging a few words with his cab driver, al-Khamisy’s book is a powerful rebuke. Indeed, one of its great virtues is to rescue taxi-driver opinions from over-analysis and rescue taxi-drivers themselves from the burden of representing some hallowed, comforting, but nonexistent “everyman.”

A textured book takes you on a roller coaster of emotions. Reading Taxi makes one teary-eyed with laughter in one chapter and teary with anger in the next. Particularly enraging are taxi drivers’ stories of their harrowing encounters with predatory and corrupt police officers, and the related nightmare of being stopped for hours when Mubarak’s motorcades are passing through. In unforgettably straightforward detail, one driver relates his experience of being stopped for four hours on the Salah Salem road: “That day, I dropped off the taxi to its owner, gave him all I had, and promised to give him the rest the next day. I went home and I swear to you, we all slept without dinner. My wife and kids were waiting for me like every night for dinner, but I came back empty-handed. My wife cried and put the kids to sleep, and I sat by the window listening to Qur’an to calm myself down.”

Lest the reader think al-Khamisy presents a one-dimensional view of taxi drivers as downtrodden, wronged beings, there are also plenty of encounters with drivers who are liars, bigots, crooks, and jerks. There are unscrupulous drivers who spin tall tales to garner sympathy and extract a higher fare; aggressive, preachy drivers who blast religious sermons at maximum volume; and drivers who prey on their weak, poor, and/or female customers. One of the most haunting vignettes in the book is an interaction between the author, a gruff cab driver, and a shoe shiner that still sends shivers down my spine every time I re-read it.

As anyone who makes heavy use of taxis knows, this mode of transportation is often occasion for unusually intimate, unintended, fleeting encounters, encounters that can be intensely regenerative or extremely upsetting. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that al-Khamisy begins and ends his book with two riveting, purgative encounters that carry loads of inexpressible meaning. The book opens with the story of an antique driver who has been driving a taxi since 1948, and ends with an absolutely magical encounter ten minutes before Ramadan iftar that prompts al-Khamisy to pen some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in a long while: “He left me with the taste of sugar in my throat, and the scent of night musk in my soul, and he made me break my fast unhurriedly for the first time in a long time, contemplating everything around me…”

I can’t come up with a better descriptor for Taxi than Galal Amin’s blurb at the back of the book that “it’s like a refreshing breeze on a hot day.” Yes, the book is about the resilience of the human spirit, it is a powerful chronicle of the Herculean struggle for survival and dignity, it does document increasing social inequalities, and it does faithfully record the pungency and power of everyday speech. It’s an urban sociology, an empathetic ethnography, a collection of valuable oral histories, and a morphology of ordinary people’s language all rolled into one.

But the book is a lot more than the sum of its parts. It tells us much that we already know and edifies us about much that we don’t, and it does more. It plucks startling beauty and poetry out of the cacophony of everyday life. It arranges it for us to contemplate and appreciate, not as a way to elide the injustices and indignities that permeate life, but as a necessary yet all too rare counterpoint. Khaled al-Khamisy reawakens our dulled sense of wonder, outrage, and sorrow, and that is an awesome achievement.



Like his first novel, Alaa al-Aswany’s 450-page second oeuvre is consciously designed to be a page-turner, and therefore it’s extremely readable, briskly-paced, and includes lots of details on sex, friendship, hatred, ambition, defeat, and other well-worn aspects of the human condition. Like ‘Imarat Yacoubian, Chicago is full of plausible, well-drawn characters whose lives intersect in a unifying locale, this time the University of Illinois in the American city of Chicago. The second novel also features the same narrative devices Aswany used in Yacoubian: a blunt denouement and bittersweet ending, an omniscient, sympathetic narrator, and more than a few bits of melodrama packed in at the end. As in Yacoubian, in Chicago Aswany carefully eschews any hint of formal experimentation, linguistic artistry, symbolism and metaphor, or any other literary devices. And perhaps that’s just as well if his laudable aim is to lure the layman to fiction reading and rebuild a novel-reading public (Chicago was first serialized in al-Destour). But Chicago lacks the blunt, resonant social critique that gives Yacoubian its edge and makes it such a phenomenon. In everything else, however, both novels tread the same ground in the same style.

In Chicago, Aswany trains a more analytical eye on his subject matter. The novel begins with a compelling, all-too-brief history of the city, from the massacre of Native Americans by European settlers in the 17th century to the devastating 1871 fire. Appropriately, the novel’s first words are an explanation of the city’s name: “Chicago” is the Algonquin word for “strong smell” that the city’s natives gave to the onion fields that covered its terrain. To signal the motif of human reinvention and survival running throughout the novel, Aswany’s introductory urban history highlights the resilience and recovery of the “Windy City’s” inhabitants after the Great fire, a conflagration that claimed 300 lives, rendered 100,000 people homeless, and destroyed $200 million worth of property. Admiringly, almost proudly, Aswany relishes the speedy, determined recovery of “Chicagoland,” “Second City,” “City of the Big Shoulders,” “City of the Century.” He then delves into his engrossing narrative of Egyptians, Egyptian-Americans, and Americans fumbling for meaning in the giant metropolis, a city the novelist knows well from his days of graduate study there in the late 1980s.

It’s not a coincidence that the novelist begins (and ends) with Shaimaa Muhammady, the very Egyptian name he gives to the very Egyptian, 33-year-old medical student from Tanta studying for her doctorate in histology at the University of Illinois. Shaimaa gets the lion’s share of the narrator’s affection, and perhaps for this reason is one of the most well-crafted characters (though not without some annoying made-for-TV clichés here and there). Like Buthaina al-Sayed of ‘Imarat Yacoubian, Shaimaa is an archetype of the driven, resilient Egyptian woman, a kindly creature struggling to survive in an inhospitable world. Shaimaa, however, is subjected to subtler pressures than Buthaina. The extremely hardworking, plain, muhaggaba medical student goes straight from Tanta to Chicago, mostly to escape social pressures at home in the form of relatives and colleagues who frown upon her academic excellence and unmarried status (Aswany draws a link between the two).

But moving to Chicago is no relief, as Shaimaa experiences harassment and isolation in post-September 11th America. She copes with her crippling homesickness by intensifying her studiousness and reproducing comforting Egyptian rituals at home. An unfortunate but hilarious kitchen accident leads her to meet fellow Egyptian histology student Tareq Hasib, a wiry, surly, equally hardworking graduate student who’s devised his own rituals to cope with loneliness and his awkwardness with women. Their tense first encounter blossoms into romance and intimacy, a potentially maudlin subplot that Aswany uses to effect convincing transformations in both characters. To his credit, the author also uses the unlikely relationship to raise important questions about Egyptian marriage customs, particularly the dynamics of class and status.

As with Yacoubian, Chicago has a large cast of central and peripheral characters crafted with varying levels of depth and psychological insight. Ra’fat Thabet is a handsome Egyptian émigré professor of Histology and baseball enthusiast who has acquired all the trappings of the American dream: American wife Michelle, brand-new Cadillac, large house in a fancy suburb with dog. Thabet deeply disdains all things Egyptian yet can’t shake off some residual cultural traits. His internal contradictions burst to the surface when his only daughter Sarah runs off with a self-styled artist named Jeff and becomes a crack addict. By contrast, Thabet’s departmental colleague Muhammad Salah is gripped by a powerful nostalgia for his native country after a seamless 30-year sojourn in the U.S. He abandons his American wife Chris and retreats into his memories, gingerly establishing contact with his firebrand college sweetheart Zeinab Radwan.

Thabet and Salah’s colleague John Graham is an ageing, wise Hemingway look-alike and former radical from the 1960s who lives with a much younger African-American woman named Carol and her five-year-old son Mark. Dennis Baker is the department’s most senior and distinguished professor, a towering scholar of few words who supervises a third Egyptian graduate student: Ahmed Denana, the head of the Egyptian Student Association in the U.S. A fourth Egyptian student, leftist Nagi Abdel Samad, has a passionate but short-lived relationship with Jewish-American Wendy Schor. The affair ends partly as a result of the interference of Safwat Shaker, the intelligence attaché in the Egyptian embassy who works closely with Denana to monitor Egyptian students studying in the U.S. During his American sojourn, Abdel Samad meets and immediately dislikes John Graham’s friend Karam Doss, a brilliant Coptic heart surgeon who emigrated to Chicago in the 1970s to escape discrimination in Egypt. But Doss rises above the experience in almost angelic fashion; he pipes in Umm Kulthum’s voice in the operating room, and when his bigoted former adviser seeks his help 30 years later, he graciously complies. By the end of the novel, Doss and Abdel Samad’s initial mutual dislike evolves into a close, conspiratorial but not altogether convincing friendship.

As much as he indulges and empathises with nearly all of his characters, Aswany heaps bilious contempt on Denana and Shaker, two agents of the corrupt Mubarak regime. The author seems to relish depicting them as a fraud and predator, respectively. Denana is a failed student who owes his academic standing to his lifelong collaboration with State Security officials; he’s a cheapskate, a liar, and treats his wife Marwa horribly to boot. And Shaker is a womanizing sadist who preys on the poor, broken wives of the Islamist activists that he persecutes and imprisons. To drive home the point, Aswany is keen to portray both men’s base natures by ascribing to them revolting sexual habits.

Aside from a handful of obvious political commentaries, Chicago has few social messages. It eschews preaching and didacticism in favour of a compelling portrayal of contemporary American life, with all its triumphs and failures. The land of opportunity that rescued Doss from discrimination excludes its own citizens, as the subplot involving Carol makes clear. The values of the land of freedom that Thabet praises also frown upon his instinctive protectiveness towards his daughter. And the land of licentiousness routinely condemned by Egyptian conservatives is the setting for a touching romance between Tareq and Shaimaa that would scarcely have been possible in Egypt. Aswany’s narrative also invites subtle connections between characters ostensibly belonging to different worlds and cultures. For example, Denana’s Egyptian wife Marwa and Salah’s American wife Chris have more in common with each other than with their presumptive peers. And as if to pre-emptively counter the reflexive, unthinking charge that Chicago is “anti-American”, two of Aswany’s most honourable, likeable characters are the Americans John Graham and Dennis Baker.

It’s clear that Aswany has ambitions other than the writing of serious literary fiction that nobody reads. His neorealist style avoids The Big Ideas in favour of the small dramas that animate everyday life. His narrative energy spurns highbrow symbolism and complicated structural devices in favour of straightforward, old-fashioned storytelling. In fact, both of Aswany’s novels read very much like screenplays. But so what? If this increases novel readership among the public and returns the novel to the centre of cultural life, bringing on film adaptations, public controversies, and imitation by younger writers, then Aswany will not only have breathed new life into a flagging neorealist genre. He will have created a new genre straddling the stuffy bastions of highbrow art with the cacophony of lowbrow entertainment.

But to avoid slipping into mass-market mediocrity, Aswany will have to start crafting more complex characters. He ought to resist the urge to continue to invent one-dimensional soap opera personages with no compelling inner lives, and instead plumb the rich tradition of afflicted, conflicted characters in the best works of Taha Husayn, Naguib Mahfouz, Tawfiq al-Hakim, and Yussef Idris.

Read On

Party Politics

One of the many political absurdities left behind by Mr Anwar Sadat is something called “The Political Party Affairs Committee.” This thing, composed exclusively of NDP members, gets to cherry pick the regime’s opposition (see Law 40/1977). This means that we have opposition parties headed by the likes of Shaykh Ahmad al-Sabahy, president of al-Umma Party (right). Shaykh al-Sabahy includes among his many preoccupations the mandatory return of the fez, the intricacies of dream interpretation, and the mysteries of astrology, all veritable burning issues in Egyptian politics. During the presidential elections campaign of 2005 in which he served as one of the principal contestants, al-Sabahy simply could not contain his admiration and support for President Mubarak, and vowed to vote for him on election day. Yes. Shaykh Ahmad al-Sabahy presides over a legal opposition party in Egypt, but Islamist Abul Ela Mady and Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahy (no relation to Shaykh Ahmad) are repeatedly and unequivocally turned down when they avail themselves of established channels for forming legal opposition parties. What’s wrong with this picture?

On Saturday, when Sabahy and Mady were turned down by the Political Parties Court for the second and third times, respectively, they greeted the news with a nonchalance that verged on the triumphal. Mady and members of his Wasat party unfurled pre-made banners that condemned the verdict; they had arrived hoping for the best but expecting the worst. Wasat member Essam Sultan (top) made biting remarks to the media: “This verdict today means that all young people in this country are barred from entering politics to make room for one person only and his name is Gamal Hosni Mubarak.” Al-Karama party’s Hamdeen Sabahy was similarly blunt: “This is a clear message from the regime to all Egyptians: forget about forming real political parties.”

Indeed, it is no small irony that the verdict came days after Hosni Mubarak’s proposed constitutional amendments. Mubarak’s rationale for re-amending Article 76 is to “activate our political life and bolster pluralism and political party activities, leading to strong political parties capable of enriching the democratic experiment.” Apparently, the Wasat and Karama would-be parties are not deemed the right kind of parties to “enrich the democratic experiment." Just like Ayman Nour’s Ghad party, after an initial green light in October 2004, was also deemed unfit to enrich.

It’s fair to wonder why real politicians with real constituencies such as Sabahy and Mady appeal to the farcical Political Parties Committee in the first place. Why go to the government and ask: can I please oppose you?! Who in their right mind would go to the likes of Safwat al-Sherif, Kamal al-Shazli, Habib al-Adli, and other Committee members and ask them to pretty please allow some opposition?! And who in their right mind could take seriously a process that ends with Committee members handing down a report inevitably rejecting new political party applications as not “distinct” enough from existing parties?!

Would-be party leaders offer several good reasons why they engage in this bizarre charade. For a long time, the Political Parties Court proved more independent and serious than the Committee, overturning the latter’s decisions and allowing several parties to see the light of day. Thus it made sense to bank on the Court, even though it is an irregular body composed of senior administrative court judges but also “public figures” (a trusty tool to pack the court with regime loyalists and assorted nobodies). Saturday’s verdict, however, put an end to any lingering hopes that the Parties Court can carve out some autonomy and efficacy separate from the Parties Committee.

Another reason offered is that playing by the regime’s absurd rules exposes the fraudulence of its democratic claims. Following all instructions, filling out all application papers, and meeting all deadlines but still getting turned down enables opposition party leaders to call the regime’s bluff, demonstrating to domestic public opinion and influential foreign parties that the regime has made zero progress on political reform. A third reason is that going through the cumbersome legal process allows opposition parties to carve out a margin of manoeuvrability; they can profitably use the “under construction” label to begin work as a de facto political party, recruiting members, contesting elections, and developing internal party organs.

The most interesting aspect of Saturday’s verdict is not the Court’s complete rejection of 13 party projects, but what the leaders of Karama, Wasat, and other real would-be parties will do next. The rationales they have been working with so far are no longer compelling. The Political Parties Court has for some years now lost what sliver of autonomy and credibility it had accrued. Exposing the regime’s repression and political manipulation no longer carries the same rhetorical and material force that it did when Mubarak’s reform pledges were still credible. And seizing the political opportunities offered by the “under construction” status are no longer as attractive given Kifaya’s example of working openly without any government sanction.

A festive air hung over everyone arrayed on the court steps on Saturday after the court verdict. Heartfelt greetings, jokes, and congratulations were exchanged. Curious passers-by and motorists slowed down to gaze at the puzzling spectacle, only to be firmly rushed along by police and State Security officers. Courthouse secretaries giggled as they navigated around the assembled men to descend the steps and move on to more pressing domestic matters.

The coming months will demonstrate whether these creative, committed political activists will leave the court steps and join the public on the streets to form real, representative political parties. Perhaps like students, engineers, and workers, they will resist government repression by establishing alternative organisations legitimised by the general will of their electors. Only then will we see real opposition parties emergent from the ground up, without the Mubarak regime’s blessings, without the patronage of the Americans and Europeans, and without the geriatric leadership throttling existing opposition parties.

Read On

Three Elections, One Principle

I’ve been watching with intense interest and much fascination three elections that have once again pitted members of the Muslim Brothers against members of the ruling regime. These are the internal elections for parliamentary speaker and deputy speakers, the trade union elections, and the student union elections. The press and assorted commentators have rightly noted similarities with the parliamentary polls, especially widespread thuggery and intimidation of opposition forces, broad administrative interference to block opposition gains, and the utter disregard for court rulings suspending faulty elections. But the common tendency to reduce these elections to the age-old contest between Ikhwan and regime captures only half the story, and the less intriguing half at that.
(Photo courtesy of Alltalaba.com).

The other half is the struggle for undistorted, unabridged representation. The MPs who made a symbolic bid to unseat chronic parliamentary speaker Fathi Sorour, the resourceful workers who energetically exposed their institutions’ unfree elections, the brave students who organised parallel elections—all were activating the fundamental democratic principle of representation. I don’t mean some rarefied concept in political theory, but the demand to be consulted on decisions and practices that affect one’s life. I mean a mechanism to organise binding consultation, a procedure for the management of conflicting interests, and a process that holds the potential to modify existing interests. Barring direct democracy, the principle of democratic representation is the only legitimate bottom-up selection mechanism to manage the affairs of complex collectivities. It would thus be a grave misreading to reduce recent sub-national elections to nothing more than a contest between the Ikhwan and the regime. If we get past such sensationalism and unthinking parroting of the obvious, it is clear to me that the elections revolve around the struggle for adequate representation, a battle that is at the core of the drama of democracy.

Fiercely contested sub-national elections have been a consistent and lively feature of the post-1952 Egyptian political landscape. Internal elections to every sports club, faculty club, chamber of commerce, professional association, student union, actors’ union, and some public sector boards are heated affairs, much more ‘real’ than parliamentary elections and therefore of paramount importance to the regime. Far from being staged rituals orchestrated by the ruling regime as a serviceable safety valve, sub-national elections are real contests involving real issues that all Egyptian regimes have tried to control and obstruct. Recall the phalanxes of riot police and security forces during the Alexandria Chambers of Commerce elections this past May. And remember the security forces’ blockage of all Alexandria University campus entrances in April to prevent the faculty club from convening its long-suspended internal elections. Undeterred, 800 professors convened their general assembly in the open air on the corniche sidewalk and freely elected a governing board. Now this is what democracy looks like.

The Persistence of Sub-National Democracy

Egypt's contentious lawyers assemble on the High Court steps to demand new elections, January 1989.

For more perspective on the significance of the recent elections, let’s reach back even further than last spring and recall some salient facts. Nasser manipulated the internal by-laws of professional associations to pack their voter rolls with his supporters, and went further by not-so-subtly endorsing handpicked candidates. When judges defied his regime and issued their March 1968 statement, Nasser gave the green light to mobilise massive regime resources to interfere in the Club’s March 1969 elections and oust the reformists, installing a much more government-friendly board. Sadat did the same: when social protest at his domestic and foreign policies peaked, he dissolved the board of the ever-contentious bar association and handed down a draconian new law that decapitated the national student union movement, the notorious ’79 charter.

Mubarak is no different and has gone even further: he rammed through parliament an entirely new law crippling robust internal elections in the professional associations (Law 100/1993) and placing them under government receivership. A year later, he issued a law that replaced decades of bottom-up faculty election of university deans with top-down appointment by university presidents, all of whom of course are appointed by him (another law replaced election of village ‘umdas with appointment). After a protracted legal battle ably steered by the proud attorney Fatma Rabie’, lawyers successfully threw off the yoke of government receivership and resumed their suspended elections in 2001. Engineers and doctors are still battling to do the same. For those professional associations that escaped receivership (the Judges’ Club and the Press Syndicate), Mubarak was keen to see government-friendly incumbents hog all leadership positions. That old order was spectacularly overthrown when the general will of fed-up electorates ousted the rotten incumbents and voted in independent reformists in May 2002 and December 2005 (judges) and July 2003 and October 2005 (journalists).

Let’s remember that Nasser and Sadat were not battling Islamists in these institutions, but an assortment of leftists, liberals, nationalists, Islamists, and independents. That today the Islamists are at the forefront of the battle for associational autonomy should not obscure the fact that what is at stake is institutional autonomy and undistorted representation. If today the Ikhwan were replaced by leftists as the major electoral and political force, would the regime back off and let them carry on? Absolutely not. Just look at the regime’s multi-tiered involvement in the journalists’ and judges’ associations, two institutions where the Ikhwan historically have had and continue to wield very little clout. So while it’s comforting to dismiss the recent elections as yet more staging grounds for Ikhwan-regime competition, it would be entirely missing the point.

For the regime, elections in any sub-national institution pose an acute quandary. One the one hand, elections can perform useful functions. They can incubate tractable new elites, quash useless old ones, and provide a robust barometer of the moods of critical publics such as middle-class professionals, workers, and students. On the other, elections are extremely destabilising. They can incubate intransigent new elites, quash trusted old hands, and infect broader swathes of the population with dangerous new moods and demands. Above all, any elections are bound to activate demands for adequate, bottom-up representation. Whether it’s the determined voters of Damanhour and Doqqi, the enthusiastic electors in the professional unions, workers in the trade unions and businessmen in the cambers of commerce, the desire to elect representatives responsive to constituents is unwavering and arguably intensifying.

This is precisely why the ruling party dares not hold internal elections, and also why we see fierce NDP intraparty competition during the opportunity window opened up by parliamentary elections. If there were real elections within the NDP, would Gamal Mubarak and his cronies be where they are? Perhaps, perhaps not. And there’s the rub. The regime fears two things: the sheer uncertainty of the free play of interests, even if its own interests are triumphant. And the constant threat that its interests will be thwarted or challenged by rivals. Both fears fuel a multi-pronged strategy of engineering, manipulating, obstructing, rigging, and suspending sub-national elections. Such fears are also behind the decision to postpone municipal elections until 2008. More than simply fear of the Ikhwan, it’s these elections’ enormous uncertainties and real opportunities for popular mobilisation that drove the Mubarak regime’s deferral decision.

What’s New?

So if real democratic enclaves have always existed in this undemocratic regime, what’s new about the recent elections? Let’s review in ascending order of magnitude. The Ikhwan and independent parliamentarians’ symbolic bid to challenge Fathi Sorour’s endless tenure as parliamentary speaker was new, since everyone knows that all parliamentary leadership positions are jealously hogged by the very National, oh-so-Democratic Party. The attempt to reinvigorate the principle of internal parliamentary representation is significant; the closest that non-NDP MPs had come to such a manoeuvre was Ayman Nour’s running for deputy speaker after the 2000 vote (he received a surprising 169 votes). To be sure, no one expected the sticky Dr. Sorour to be dislodged from his favourite perch, and even if by some miracle he had been ejected, no one expected parliament to turn into a real creature forthwith. The democratisation of parliament and the parliamentarisation of Egyptian politics is a very long way off. But the Ikhwan’s move betokens renewed resolve to activate the principle of representation. Who’s to say that five or ten years down the line, we won’t see real, unpredictable elections for the post of parliamentary speaker? When it happens, we’ll likely look back at the maiden attempt in 2006 and ponder its long-term consequences.

Next, the trade union elections. I can’t remember the last time that these elections offered anything meaningful to write about, so why is this year different? Again, most accounts point to the Ikhwan’s new participation in what for the group so far has been mostly terra incognita. But there’s much more to it than that. Demands for real representation have long been brewing on Egyptian shop floors, fuelled by rapidly deteriorating work conditions and the dangerous erosion of the state-sponsored social safety net of yore. Over the past 15 years, the industrial labour force has been squeezed by soaring costs of living and unfair work conditions without a corresponding increase in official tolerance for worker collective action (much less collective bargaining). The rotten labour aristocracy that is the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) has given up all pretence of worker representation and has instead embraced its role as first and foremost a state adjunct that polices workers and quashes any bottom-up attempts at independent representation.

A wave of labour protests all over the country in 2006 against declining or stagnant wages, forced early retirement packages, and other pauperisation policies set the stage for last month’s elections. Workers began mobilising to push for real representation to protect their increasingly threatened interests. Sensing this, the government took pre-emptive measures starting back in August, administratively disqualifying independent candidates and establishing a tight-knit infrastructure of procedural obstacles. Workers immediately appealed to the administrative courts and secured countless rulings verifying myriad election violations, but the regime of course ignored the rulings and elections went ahead anyway. Many pro-regime labour aristocrats were thus ‘elected’ or retained their posts uncontested. Credible, independent worker rights groups such as the Helwan-based Centre for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS) have copiously documented election irregularities and violations.

Up to this point, the story would be a sad but familiar echo of nearly every election in Egypt. But events then took a dramatic and highly unexpected turn. Early this month, 20,000 Mahalla textile workers staged a sustained and massive work stoppage against management’s decision to renege on election-related promises to pay two months’ worth of bonuses. Workers went head to head not just with management but with Ministry of Manpower Aisha Abdel Hadi and high-ranking State Security officers. They adamantly refused several compromises brokered by Abdel Hadi and resisted State Security’s transparent divide-and-rule strategies. Above all, Mahalla’s workers (including 7,000 women) managed to valiantly weather credible threats of violence and reprisal, arming themselves with tree branches and sleeping in shifts to be able to respond to any sudden crackdown. Consciously and deliberately, Mahalla’s workers jettisoned the politics of remonstrance and demanded full and unabridged citizenship rights. Remarkably, they won. The regime relented and management agreed to pay the full bonuses. Significantly, the strike ended with a worker petition drive that has so far collected 20,000 signatures for a vote of no-confidence in the recently “elected” company union. The struggle for real representation continues.

Egyptian Student Power, Redux

Cairo University students protest the 1979 Charter and State Security interference, April 2005 (AP Photo)

Amr Hamed is an articulate, serious, doe-eyed student in his penultimate year of medical school at Cairo University. On a blindingly sunny day, he sits on a low campus wall shaded by outstretched, leafy tree branches, fighting off an annoying cold while being greeted by friends and well-wishers. Unlike other students buried in reading for their exams, medical school students have some leeway before their brutal examinations start in the spring. So the Qasr al-Aini campus is abuzz with voluble conversation and warm sociability; students munch on biscuits and sip soda pop, chatting for hours. Medical residents walk in twos and threes in their pristine white coats and stethoscopes; haggard nurses gossip about pesky patients; professors park their spiffy cars and disappear into the Dean’s building. And Amr Hamed ponders the recent turn of events that crowned him secretary-general of Egypt’s first nationwide student federation since 1979.

The story has a long history; let’s start in the heyday of student power after the protest wave of 1968-1972. Students were arguably one of the most influential societal sectors in the mid-1970s. In February 1976, at a national student union conference in Shibin al-Kom, students demanded a new charter and gave the president a one-month ultimatum until March 22, after which they vowed to stage a nationwide general strike. On March 21, as Sadat was travelling abroad, his vice-president Mubarak signed into law a charter that contained very robust measures of financial and decisional autonomy for student unions. Cairo University students’ weekly magazine al-Tullab became a key opposition outlet, well before the ‘platforms’ and then opposition parties issued their own newspapers. But after skyrocketing domestic opposition to Sadat’s foreign and domestic policies, Sadat revoked the ’76 charter and issued a new one in 1979, which decapitated the student movement by abolishing the national student union federation. Student unions were now confined to their individual campuses, with no nationwide coordinating structure. The '79 Charter also reinstated the requirement of a faculty guardian who supervised each union and had the power to veto its decisions and withhold its funding.

Mubarak’s control of Egyptian campuses reached deeper. Not content with sundering the links between campuses, for the past ten years security forces have routinely intervened in individual campus elections. They exclude all independent, leftist, and Islamist candidates to clear the way for the pathetic candidates of the pro-regime campus union, “Horus” (even their name smacks of illegitimacy). This is in addition to the various other indignities suffered by college students, from inadequate course materials to abysmal dormitory conditions to a general and rapid decline in the quality of all campus services. This long train of abuses finally led Egyptian students to organise parallel elections in November 2005, when 15 universities held elections for a Free Student Union (FSU).

The initiative was repeated this year. Students organised a completely independent, parallel process from A to Z. They stipulated a four-day candidacy registration process, a three-day campaigning period, and a full day of balloting. They put together homemade transparent ballot boxes from plastic wrap and masking tape (I love it). They invited faculty members and human rights groups as poll watchers and ballot counters. And they invited uninterested, apolitical students to join in the ballot count.

In response, State Security hired thugs to intimidate students and faculty who participated in the FSU elections in Ain Shams, and the administration of al-Azhar University suspended students who ran and won in the FSU elections and referred them to disciplinary tribunals. Undeterred, students took matters a notch higher with the organisation of the first elections for a nationwide student union federation since 1976. Students from 12 universities participated (two elected student union leaders from each university for a total of 24 electors). The Muslim Brothers at the bar association hosted the election after the administration of Cairo University naturally refused. The Brothers of course have a vested interest since their fellow members are the overwhelming majority of elected student representatives on each campus, but as both Brothers and others emphasise, the FSU is a collective effort that includes Coptic, liberal, leftist, and Nasserist students, and several students with no set ideological commitments.

Amr Hamed (left) from Cairo University’s faculty of medicine was elected as national secretary-general while Amr Abdel Bari from Mansoura University’s faculty of pharmacology was elected as assistant secretary-general. Asked why he thinks he got elected, Hamed is disarmingly modest, explaining that the symbolism of his university and the historic weight of his faculty within the university determined his fortunes. But watching him interact with his peers on campus tells a different story. Amr Hamed is first among equals. He does not carry himself with the arrogance of a leader or the strutting of a big man. He blends in with his constituents. He’s soft-spoken and focused, warm and congenial, and very very busy, gracefully fielding endless calls, discussions, and queries. The noon call to prayer sounds and his peers come to collect him to pray. I watch them walking off briskly and think, this is what democracy looks like. “The principle of appointment rules all across the country now,” he says, “that’s why this is significant.” (Photo courtesy of Alltalaba.com).

The Spectre of Democratisation

Ballot boxes in the Egyptian bar association, July 1989.

A spectre is haunting Egypt, the spectre of real representation. From 2000 to the present, parallel to the return of routinised street protest, there have been significant stirrings for genuine representation among the country’s vital sectors. Lawyers took back the bar in 2001 and 2005, judges elected a bold new leadership team in 2002 and 2005, journalists did the same in 2003 and 2005, Kifaya did serious representation work in 2004 and 2005, actors elected a more representative chairman and board in late 2005, industrial workers defied repressive rules and increasingly resorted to strikes, and university professors formed the March 9 movement for university autonomy. Egyptian physicians and engineers are mired in a dogged struggle for the right to elect their representatives, as are independent and opposition parliamentarians. As is their wont, Egypt’s ever-resourceful students took it all a step further, not simply activating moribund institutions but setting up free, functioning, parallel institutions, and bringing back the nationwide student union federation for the first time since 1979. That’s amazing, mish keda?!

There remains the thorny question of how all this sub-national democracy interacts with the national autocracy. Seems to me that the relationship is symbiotic. The mobilisation accompanying national elections can filter down to energise sub-national polls by emboldening competing forces and raising the stakes of previously marginal contests. The outcomes of sub-national elections can percolate up to the national level by providing trained cadres and spreading a zeitgeist of participation among voters. It’s also possible though not likely that there is no diffusion either up or down, and it’s probable that autocratic practices at the national level do filter down to sub-national institutions; no clearer example of this can be found than in the Mubarak regime’s placement of professional associations under government receivership to punish their electorates for their democratic choice.

Egyptian political history contains ample evidence of cross-pollination between national and sub-national elections. There are also many many examples of cross-fertilisation between sub-national elections: journalists watch carefully how judges vote, engineers watch closely how lawyers vote, everyone watches how students vote, and the regime monitors everyone and works overtime to control the representation fever gripping the population. As elections gain currency and pull in more contestants, observers, and voters, we can expect to see more struggles for associational autonomy, more hard-fought battles for associational diversity (especially among workers), more bottom-up initiatives of genuine interest representation, and in the very very long term, the democratisation of the Egyptian polity.

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Social Science in the Public Interest

The Marxist intellectual, prolific development economist, and stringent perfectionist Ismail Sabri Abdallah passed away on 6 November, 2006, at the age of 81 (photo courtesy of al-Masry al-Youm). Abdallah harboured many ostensible contradictions. He was a scion of patricians who devoted his life to redistributing economic and political power to the poor. He was a deeply knowledgeable, even zealous follower of Karl Marx’s ideas while being equally brined in the profundities of Arabic thought and history (especially poetry). He fused a deep familiarity with and respect for southern Egyptian folkways with a charming, uncontrived Francophile streak. He spoke and wrote precise and lucid prose in Arabic, French, and English. His adult life oscillated between membership in underground Marxist organisations, long stints in prison, equally long stints as a decision-maker in the highest echelons of government, and collaboration with a wide network of international development organisations.

Ismail Sabri Abdallah was one of a nearly extinct class of public intellectuals who also doubled as public servants, and were highly esteemed in both capacities. Toward the end of his life, he told me, “I’m still a Marxist until this moment because I haven’t found a better method to analyse social events. I’ve been in prison and in power and I still haven’t changed my mind!” Continuously since the 1950s, he worked to apply social science to real-world problems, to use conceptual tools to mobilise broad swathes of the public rather than enlighten only narrow segments of the elite. He was a rare gem in an intellectual field cluttered with irrelevant theorists, sycophantic yes-men, and a stultifying, generalised air of mediocrity.


Abdallah was born in 1925 to a family of rural notables that hailed from Upper Egypt. His cultured, erudite father invested much in his children’s education. Ismail’s sister was one of the first to attend a boarding school established by Nabawiyya Musa, the pioneer advocate of women’s education. Ismail’s early intellectual strivings were nurtured by his father’s extensive library, particularly rich in the classics of Arabic literature. Ismail then enrolled at the Law Faculty and immersed himself in the heady politics of Egyptian communism of the 1940s, when various communist factions alternately competed and cooperated with one another and with other ideological formations to recruit adherents. In a conversation with me toward the end of his life, Abdallah recalled that it was during this formative period that he understood that electoral democracy was meaningless without a bedrock of economic redistribution.

After graduating from law school in 1946, Ismail could not pursue serious study of economics in Egypt since there was no Economics faculty (the Economics and Political Science Faculty would eventually be established in the early 1960s), so he traveled to the University of Paris, where he earned a doctoral degree in economics in 1951 (he wrote his dissertation on the theory of money). But Abdallah’s time in Paris was not confined to the university library. He mingled in French leftist circles, where he met his future wife, Gulpérie Aflaton, a free-spirited Egyptian woman from an aristocratic family, the sister of equally spirited socialist-feminist activist and painter Injy Aflaton.

The couple returned to Cairo and married in 1951, and Abdallah took up a post as a lecturer in Alexandria University. In November 1954, the bright young economist was recruited to become an economic adviser to the president’s office, but less than a year later, in June 1955, he was arrested, charged with membership in an illegal communist organisation, and tortured in a military prison before being released by an irregular tribunal. The abrupt oscillation between elite technocrat and political prisoner would not end there.

After the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the Egyptianisation of banks and foreign businesses, Nasser’s regime created the Economic Institution (al-Mu’asasa al-Iqtisadiyya) in January 1957 as a public holding company to manage all existing public enterprises that were formerly British and French assets. Abdallah was appointed as head of the Institution’s Economic and Financial Division, a post that entailed considerable access to the president. For the Economic Institution was not only a source of unfiltered technical expertise, but an attempt by Nasser to check other state institutions, especially the Ministry of Industry led by the ambitious Aziz Sidqi.

But only two years later, on New Year’s Day 1959, Abdallah was rounded up again along with 200 other socialists and communists, including the recently departed and much-missed Ahmad Nabil al-Hilali. They were tried by military tribunals and sentenced to three- and five-year gaol terms. Abdalla and his colleagues are pictured in the dock on 6 September, 1959.

Abdallah was a key figure in the remarkable world created by Egyptian leftists during their desert prison confinement from 1959-1964. His death is a serious loss for any attempt at reconstructing an oral history of this defining moment in Egyptian political annals. Abdallah recalled fondly and very vividly the rich educational and cultural activities of the prisoners, including lessons in everything from astronomy to mathematics to the staging and production of plays by two theatre troupes. Abdallah taught international politics, Abdel Azim Anis taught mathematics, and Ahmad Youssef al-Guindi taught Russian. But when Abdallah embarked on a translation of Das Kapital (Part One), the prison administration confiscated his papers, he remembered with a raucous laugh. For Gulpérie Aflaton, this period was particularly trying, as both her husband and her sister were imprisoned, an experience that she recounts in her memoir La ballade de geôles (2002).

In yet another startling and abrupt transformation, after their release in 1964, the former prisoners of conscience were appointed to leadership positions in the state’s cultural institutions, essentially managing the Nasserist state’s remarkable patronage of the arts. Abdallah became chief editor of the venerable publishing house Dar al-Ma’arif. At the same time, he was on the editorial team of an entirely new and creative experiment, the leftist monthly review al-Tali’a (the Vanguard). When Gamal Abdel Nasser made a quick appearance at their inaugural editorial meeting, accompanied by Muhammad Hasanein Haykal, Abdallah (seated to Nasser's right) and al-Tali’a editor Lotfi al-Kholi (seated to Haykal's left) expressed surprise that the president would not sit down for a conversation. So Abdel Nasser sat down, and a sophisticated discussion ensued.

Reflecting on the man whose regime both violently harassed and dramatically promoted him, Abdallah’s tone held an unmistakeable hint of admiration, “He’s really a Shakespearean character: when he was powerful, he was not intellectually mature, but when he matured after 1967, he was no longer powerful.”

For about 10-15 years, al-Tali’a was one of a handful of the most important publications in Egypt, featuring pieces by leading public intellectuals such as Adil Hussein, Tariq al-Bishri, Fu’ad Mursi, Abu Seif Youssef, and a legion of unsung political economists. It was very much an effort to employ social science in the public interest, to air provocative findings and chart important trends for the benefit of both policy-makers and the general public. The pages of al-Tali’a are especially intriguing after 1968, when Nasser began to experiment with new policies and political structures, partly in response to sustained societal criticism of his regime after the 1967 war. And throughout the 1970s, I’d say the profile of the journal was heightened even further, as it turned into the leading forum to air candid and credible critiques of public policies, most especially Sadat’s Infitah.

Abdallah’s career as a public servant continued in the Sadat years. He was a member of the committee that drafted the Constitution in summer 1971, and was particularly instrumental in the inclusion of the clause in Article 18 that insists that the state “provide for the independence of universities and scientific research centres.” As the Director General of the Institute of National Planning (1969-1977) and Minister of Planning (1971-1975), Abdallah led a team of economists that sought to articulate a strategic vision for Egypt’s economic development based on a robust industrial policy and a cautious approach to integration in the international economy. But those visions were increasingly at odds with Sadat’s conception of Infitah, and so Abdallah resigned his ministerial portfolio when the new Mamdouh Salem government was installed in April 1975 to root out all obstacles to Infitah, including public officials with socialist commitments.

Naturally, Abdallah was among the 1,536 intellectuals and activists ordered arrested by Sadat on 5 September, 1981. In his collection of essays, Tabareeh Gareeh, journalist Salah Eissa wrote a very moving description of this prison stint, including anecdotes about their lively political discussions, and oral poetry competitions that the prisoners organised to pass the time. As Eissa tells it, Abdallah won every time, so deep and erudite was his stock of memorised extracts from the classical canon.

From the 1980s onward, Abdallah continued to apply the vocation of social science to the cause of social justice, but now outside the halls of government for good. He helped to direct the venerable Egyptian Society for Political Economy, Statistics, and Legislation, and then started the Third World Forum, whose mission statement reads, “Intellectual self-reliance is a cornerstone to assure the success of Third World struggle for development. Its work involves and is addressed to mass organizations, scientists, intellectuals, academicians, technicians and politicians. It promotes problem oriented theoretical and empirical analysis aiming to provide real options for policy makers and organized social groups.” The forum's signature project, Egypt 2020, builds on Abdallah's early work in Images of the Arab Future (1983), an attempt to map out an endogenous, strategic plan for Arab development that the Arab Human Development Report would later echo, though without the emphasis on the development of specific, alternative futures scenarios.

To me, Abdallah’s legacy is manifold and wide-ranging: His commitment to praxis, his fusion of sophisticated modelling techniques with careful attention to the peculiarities of the Egyptian case, his commitment to maintaining autonomy from “The Prince” while training his expertise on the content of public policies, his relentless energy and productivity, his critical stance on prevailing orthodoxies, his accuracy and precision. I know that I and perhaps many others will continue to be inspired by Abdallah’s core political judgements: his faith in popular mobilisation, his insistence that Egyptian policy-makers do have the choice to carve out independent, reasoned policies, his deep suspicion of attempts to romanticise Egypt’s monarchical past as some putative golden age of pluralist politics, and his clear-eyed assessment of how to overcome Egypt’s deeply rooted, undemocratic legacies.

Abdallah’s endearing personal qualities are no less evocative for me: he hated mediocrity and resisted it in his daily life. He was punctual to a fault, dapper but never ostentatious, gregarious but never babbling, truly modest but without a hint of falsity. He was exasperatingly stubborn and dogmatic about rival political factions, most especially the Islamists, the only issue in which his clear thinking gave way to what I think was really political envy more than anything else.

As those who knew him know well, Ismail Sabri Abdallah went to work every day in a nondescript office in begrimed building No. 36 on chaotic Dokki St., the kind of building that reeks of history, where the stairs sag under the accumulated weight of the years, the stairwells are pitch black, and the patterned tiles have taken on a dull, grey hue. His desk was perpendicular to the desk of his lifelong fellow traveller, Ibrahim Saad Eddin; the two looked like two ancient civil servants poring over administrative memoranda. While Abdallah was gregarious, Saad Eddin was the quiet scribe who softly interjected reminders or corrections to the occasional visitor who interrupted their quiet work routine. The tea always came in a chipped teacup and mismatched saucer, the chair was uncomfortable and downright evil, and the conversation was never anything but edifying, stimulating, and challenging.

Adieu, Doktor Ismail Sabri Abdallah.

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Sociability

Wabur Gaz (1981), Adel Thabet Attalah (1943-)

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Sustenance

al-khobz (bread), Muhammad Nagy (1888-1956)

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The Magnificent Sharafantah

Though he never played a leading role, and he never attained much fame, I will always love Muhammad Kamal al-Masri (1886-1958). In every film I’ve seen him in, he acts his supporting roles with such gusto, skill, and evident fun that it’s impossible not to be taken in by his charm and naturally comedic face. The first time I saw him was in his final film, ‘Afreetat Ismail Yassin (1954), where he played the loony eccentric who dons furniture covers as capes to keep his clothes clean, with little ribbons running down the front of the cape (for style, naturally). I laughed out loud, envying such an absolutely ridiculous and brilliant idea!

The Cairene al-Masri was a born performer. He started acting at an early age, and later joined the theatre troupes of Salama Hegazy and Sayed Darwish. This vaudevillian milieu, so rich in turn of the 20th century Egypt, was nicely portrayed in Habib al-‘Umr (1947), where Masri plays an entertainer with the lively troupe led by Farid l’Atrache. “Sharafantah” is the name of a theater character that al-Masri once played on stage, a name that he would later adopt as his professional moniker.

Something about Sharafantah’s malleable face makes me giggle, and it’s not just the curled moustaches. It must be how swiftly the face morphs from serenity to wild anger, as it did in Miss Mama (1949), when a perfectly cordial barbering session ends with the irate Sharafantah threatening the terrified Muhammad Fawzi with a very sharp knife. But predictably, my favourites are the two classics, Salama fi Khayr (1937) and Si Omar (1941). Before this brilliant collaboration with Naguib al-Rihani, the two were actually on very bad terms. But luckily for devotees of Egyptian cinema, reconciliation ensued and spawned an unforgettable comedic duo.

The two films are based on identical gags, where the put-upon simple clerk played by al-Rihani is mistaken for a prominent and monied personage. Sharafantah, of course, plays the suspicious snoop who calls the bluff. As with so many flicks of that era, both films are conservative, crude morality tales about the perils of class mixing, at a time when political ferment and social transformations were unsettling the established order in Egypt.

But as comedies, they work beautifully. I enjoy Salama fi Khayr slightly more than Si Omar, mostly because of how much Salama (al-Rihani) and his uptight schoolteacher neighbour Bayoumi Morgaan (Sharafantah) revel in hating each other. It all starts when Salama, sitting down to a warm meal prepared by his kindly wife (a young Fardous Mohammed), is outraged by a huge chunk of ceiling that falls smack in the middle of his soup, courtesy of the incessant banging in Bayoumi effendi’s upstairs apartment. It’s all downhill from there, as both trade the most—how shall we say?—candid and pungent epithets (“you lowly dog!” “you shameless liar!”) Clearly, it’s much funnier in Arabic.

So during this Ramadan, which in its Egyptian version has come to mean not simply heightened spirituality but also cultural appreciation, I’d like to remember and esteem the great Sharafantah, for all the joy and laughter he brought to so many generations of film-lovers, for all the energy he brought to his roles, and for his positive inimitability.



*Poster of Si Omar found here, photo of Sharafantah from Mustafa Darwish, Dream Makers on the Nile (1998).

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