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

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.

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.

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.

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?

Zeinab al-Segeiny, untitled, oil on canvas

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

Cairene Houses

Sawsan Abu al-Naga, Cairene Houses (1988)

oil on canvas

Ramadan

Mahmoud Said, The Reciter (1960)

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.

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.

The Quest for Life

Mahmoud Mokhtar, Return from the River
Limestone, 1928

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.