GOING NOWHERE
by DAVID REMNICK
In Mubarak’s Egypt, democracy is an idea whose time has not yet come.
New Yorker
Last November, President Bush delivered a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington, spelling out the loftiest of his rationales for the war in Iraq—a determination to remake the political world from North Africa to the Arabian peninsula. It was a radical conservative’s most radical address. The end of the twentieth century, Bush said, had marked “the swiftest advance of freedom in the twenty-five-hundred-year story of democracy,” an advance that began with Portugal, Spain, and Greece more than thirty years ago, spread to South Korea and Taiwan, and then, finally, to South Africa and the entire Soviet imperium. By the President’s accounting, there were forty democracies in the world in the early nineteen-seventies and a hundred and twenty by 2000. Never mind the reassertion of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and elsewhere. For Bush, one region in particular remained stubbornly unfree. “Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty?” he asked. The United States, he declared, had “adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East” that would depend on American “persistence and energy and idealism” but also on the Arab countries—not least, the most populous, powerful, and influential country in the region. “The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East,” Bush said, “and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.”
The logic of that rhetorical instruction was not lost on the Egyptians: just as Anwar Sadat, a quarter-century earlier, had flown to Jerusalem to make peace with Israel, Hosni Mubarak, an unchallenged four-term President, a modern pharaoh, should take the equally bold step of creating a constitutional democracy, even at the risk of surrendering power. Egypt is historically central, a civilization of more than seven thousand years’ standing, and, unlike the sectarian societies of Syria and Iraq or the arriviste dynastic oil depots of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, it is a true nation-state, the center of nearly all currents, intellectual and ideological, in the Arab world. In Bush’s own mind, at least, he was encouraging a revolution from above, an Arabian perestroika. And the revolution, he made plain, ought to begin in Cairo.
There has, of course, been no such revolution in Cairo, and no sign of one. Part of the collateral damage of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war in Iraq is the erosion of American prestige and influence all over the world. Rather than take the democratizing cue from Bush, Mubarak’s regime has offered itself as an example to the United States: Spare us the pretense of an open society, its leaders imply. Your greatest fear, like ours, is terrorism, and the only way to defeat such an enemy is by crushing it. Not long after September 11th, Atef Ebeid, the Egyptian Prime Minister, seemed to give sympathetic counsel to an ally still stunned by its encounter with the capacities of jihad. “The U.S. and U.K., including human-rights groups, have, in the past, been calling on us to give these terrorists their ‘human rights,’” he said. “You can give them all the human rights they deserve until they kill you. After these horrible crimes committed in New York and Virginia, maybe Western countries should begin to think of Egypt’s own fight against terror as their new model.”
Ebeid was referring to a long history. Modern Islamic radicalism was born in the twenties in the villages of the upper Nile and the streets and mosques of Cairo. In communiqués over the years, Osama bin Laden has often referred to that period as one of calamity and humiliation—an allusion, clear to anyone in the Islamic world, to the collapse of Islam’s imperial seat, the Ottoman caliphate, based in Constantinople. In the nineteen-twenties, Kemal Atatürk, a secular revolutionary, banned the caliphate and established the Republic of Turkey. Islamic Constantinople became cosmopolitan Istanbul. At the same time, much of the Arab world was being parcelled out by the strongest powers in Europe, and nationalism came to displace the idea of a greater unified Islam.
In reaction, in 1928 Hassan al-Banna, a religiously educated teacher living near the Suez Canal, established the Muslim Brotherhood. Banna believed in Islam as a complete system, which provides divine instruction on everything from daily rituals, law, and politics to matters of the spirit, and to which all other forms of thought and social organization—secularism, nationalism, socialism, liberalism—are alien. In his essay “Between Yesterday and Today,” Banna wrote that the colonialist Europeans had expropriated the resources of the Islamic lands and corrupted them with “their murderous germs”:
They imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices. . . . The day must come when the castles of this materialistic civilization will be laid low upon the heads of their inhabitants.
The Brotherhood’s slogan was, and remains, “God is our objective; the Koran is our constitution; the prophet is our leader; struggle is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” The Brotherhood, like many groups that bear its imprint decades later—Hamas, Hezbollah—established charitable organizations, clinics, schools, and underground paramilitary groups to further the cause of an Islamic polity. Initially, the spectacularly corrupt Egyptian king, Farouk, used the Brotherhood as a stabilizing force against a stronger opposition, the Communists and the secular nationalists. And, as the Brotherhood grew in membership, it was able to act with a degree of freedom. But when terrorist challenges to the monarchy began, the government came to see the Brotherhood as a real threat. At the end of 1948, a member of the Brotherhood assassinated Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nuqrashi; in 1949, the secret police retaliated, shooting Hassan al-Banna dead as he was getting into a taxi in Cairo.
“A great shock occurred in the Brotherhood after Hassan was killed,” Banna’s surviving brother, Gamal, told me not long ago, when we met at his apartment on the outskirts of the capital. The strongest ideological voice among the factional leaders in the Brotherhood was also the most extreme—Sayyid Qutb. Gamal said that “Qutb was a man of complexes” who had been radicalized by an extended journey to the United States in the late nineteen-forties. In books of theology and political theory—the most famous of which are “In the Shadows of the Koran” and “Signposts on the Road”—Qutb popularized an interpretation of the Koran that, to this day, is used as a justification for political violence in the name of establishing an Islamic state. According to the Koran, mankind, before the advent of Islam, lived in jahilyya, a state of ignorance and paganism. During Qutb’s travels through America, he saw people living in a decadent swamp of commercial obsession and sexual permissiveness—a modern incarnation of jahilyya.
In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser toppled the monarchy and came to power with promises of socialism and pan-Arab nationalism. Nasser was a hero throughout the Arab world for opposing the West, but Qutb charged that he was just as barbaric as the leaders of the West, and declared him kafir, an infidel. In short, Qutb excommunicated the head of state from the Community of the Faithful and placed him beyond the protection of Islamic law.
At first, Nasser tried to co-opt the Muslim Brotherhood, but in 1954 the government claimed that the group had tried to assassinate him, and it carried out a series of arrests and executions. For the next twenty years, the Brotherhood went underground. Many of its members were forced into exile, and established the group in Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon. Qutb’s brother, Muhammad, edited and published Qutb’s works in Saudi Arabia, and they were soon available in much of the Arab world. In 1965, Qutb was arrested in Cairo, and a year later he was tried and hanged. Yet his influence persisted. Along with Mawlana Mawdudi, the principal leader of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan, and Ayatollah Khomeini, in Iran, Qutb remains one of the founding ideologists of Islamic radicalism.
Nasser died in 1970, of a heart attack, and when Sadat came to power he began to release Islamists from jail as a way of building his political base. Under Nasser, the Egyptians had suffered a humiliating military loss to Israel in 1967, and by 1972 members of the Brotherhood at Cairo University and elsewhere were among the loudest voices calling for another confrontation. The Lebanese-born scholar Fouad Ajami says, in his 1981 book “The Arab Predicament,” that after the shock and despair of the 1967 war Egypt required “solace and consolation” and felt a “nostalgia for purity” that only Islam could provide. But by allowing the Islamists back into the political picture Sadat was making an enormous concession. As Gilles Kepel writes, in his recent historical account “Jihad,” “Sadat gave up the Egyptian state’s monopoly on ideology, as well as the strategy of containing religion on which his predecessor had relied.”
Sadat had hoped to distinguish himself from Nasser by appearing to be a man of prayer and relative liberalism. He allowed the Brotherhood to publish its own magazine, Al Dawa (The Call to Islam); he tolerated the rise of the Gama’a al-Islamiya (Islamic Association), an even more fundamentalist group, which urged the “pure Islamic life” and began to have an impact at the universities in Cairo. He also restored a measure of Egypt’s self-image when the Army crossed the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. Yet when Sadat made his overture to Menachem Begin and signed a peace pact at Camp David, in 1979, the Islamists turned on him. They could not accept the idea of a Middle Eastern political order, an accommodation that would concede Israel a permanent place on what they insisted were Islamic lands.
In Cairo, and in Upper Egyptian towns such as Asyut and Minia, the radical heirs of Sayyid Qutb began organizing cells and issuing calls to overthrow Sadat’s regime. One of the radical sects, under the leadership of a young electrical engineer, Abd al-Salam Faraj, declared Sadat “an apostate of Islam fed at the tables of imperialism and Zionism,” and in 1981 Sadat was murdered while attending a military parade. Faraj wrote a pamphlet, “The Hidden Imperative,” consistent with Qutb’s guidelines of justifiable political murder. At the trial, one of the assassins declared, “I am guilty of killing the unbeliever, and I am proud of it.”
Sadat was succeeded by Hosni Mubarak, the commander of the Air Force, who was a far more cautious figure and had no ideological ambitions. For twenty-three years, power and its maintenance has been Mubarak’s obsession. Ever since the assassination of Sadat, he has maintained a state of emergency to justify a war against religious radicals. Over the years, tens of thousands of Islamists and other political opponents have passed through the jails, usually without trial or charge. According to both Egyptian human-rights groups and international organizations like Human Rights Watch, torture is “widespread and systematic”: beatings, electric shock, isolation. And Mubarak has always proved himself ready to employ maximum force to quell protest or unrest.
In time, Mubarak wore down the Islamist movement in Egypt, a fact that was all but admitted when, in 1997, the two main radical groups declared that they were ending all violent operations. There was an incident later that year, when terrorists killed seventy people in Luxor, but since then there has been nothing.
A squat, middle-aged lawyer named Montasser al-Zayat has been a public face of radical Islam in Cairo for many years. He is the principal attorney for Gama’a al-Islamiya and promotes a notion of law very different from that of the relatively secular Egyptian constitution. A sign outside his office door reads, in Arabic, “Only God Rules.” He has been jailed four times and counts among his prison friends Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian Jihad leader who is Osama bin Laden’s chief ideologist and lieutenant.
“Definitely, the Islamic groups in Egypt are suffering a period of weakness,” he told me. “They’ve been beaten down by prison, attacks, torture, interrogations. Most of the leaders were killed. There are large numbers still in prison. Those who have been released are in search of a future, trying to find a way to combat what the regime has done to them. But the Islamic state of affairs in general is still strong. The people feel endangered, and they are moving toward Islamic groups, more so since the American attacks” in Afghanistan and Iraq. “This sense of a threat to our national security, to our identity, is having a profound effect on people.”
In radical circles, the Muslim Brotherhood is considered to be passive, generationally divided, and far too accommodating to the regime. Its demonstrations are invariably orderly, its platform for an Islamic state purposefully vague. But Zayat said he thought that the Brotherhood was the one “dissident” organization in Egypt that had a chance to displace the current regime. “Although I’m not a member of the Muslim Brothers, I believe they are the political future of Egypt,” Zayat said. “In the event of true reform and elections, they are trained and competent and ready to take the reins of power.”
In all corners of official Cairo—at government offices, at the newspapers—that was the word: the radical groups were in eclipse (or hiding or exile), and the Muslim Brotherhood was, in an authoritarian state, the shadow opposition. Its members hold sixteen of the four hundred and forty-five seats in the parliament, and are prominent in the professional associations. In 2002, when one of the Brotherhood’s leaders died, two hundred thousand people turned out for the funeral. A recent article in Egypt Today wondered whether the Brotherhood might someday take power and resemble the moderate Islamic parties that now rule Bosnia-Herzegovina and Turkey.
But when you enter the offices of the Muslim Brotherhood, after taking off your shoes at the door, it is hard to reconcile its reputation for competence and even power with the listless scene before you: a shabby warren of rooms in which a few dozen men stand around chatting, drinking tea, and shuffling papers. I made two visits, and both times everyone was unfailingly polite. An elderly assistant gave me glasses of cool lemon squash and translated the posters on the wall. One showed a portrait of Sheikh Yassin, the Hamas leader who was killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. The old man squinted at the caption and told me, “It says, ‘Sheikh Yassin: Congratulations on Your Martyrdom!’”
When I met with Mohamed Mahdi Akef, the new Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, I could only wonder what Hosni Mubarak had to fear. Akef belongs to a generation in its seventies and eighties that, almost to a man, spent years in prison during the Nasser regime. He is broad-bellied and has close-cropped white hair and a white beard. He gestured with his hand around the offices as if to acknowledge their modesty: “What can I say? We live and work to assist our religion, and despite these limited resources we do what we can to press the greatness of Islam and to reform life in all of its aspects.”
I said that it probably didn’t help that the Brotherhood is officially banned and the emergency laws are still in effect.
Akef smiled. “We no longer think of ourselves as banned,” he said. “We just don’t compete with the government.”
Not surprisingly, almost no one in Cairo today has anything good to say about the American invasion of Iraq—people are convinced that the U.S.’s purpose was to seize the oil fields, protect Israel, and gain a permanent foothold in the Middle East—and so I began with what I thought would be a less lecture-provoking question. I asked Akef how he had reacted to the attacks on September 11, 2001.
“The incidents of September 11th were criminal, and only a professional criminal would have done such a thing,” he said. “That is why, until now, there’s been no clear evidence of who did this. Talk of Mohammad Atta and Al Qaeda is all lies, an illusion. Al Qaeda is an American illusion. Is there any power on earth that can stand up to the United States of America and its power? Whenever America claims there is another power to challenge it, it is an illusion used to serve other purposes. For example, the United States wanted to invade Afghanistan in order to ship its oil by pipeline across that country. The U.S. wanted to plant its bases there and ship the oil. So they claim there is a Taliban there with Al Qaeda functioning there, too. But how much power does the Taliban really have?”
In the nineteen-sixties, Sayyid Qutb said that the Jews were behind “materialism, animal sensuality, the destruction of the family, and the dissolution of society.” As for the West, he said, “Should we not issue a sentence of death? Is this not the verdict most appropriate to the nature of the crime?” The intervening decades have not much changed this aspect of ideology within the Brotherhood, at least among the reigning elders. Akef saw Sadat’s treaty with the Israelis as a grievous heresy and, again, turned conspiratorial when it came to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. “In the West, they wanted to get rid of the Jews, and so the Europeans and the United States implanted the Zionists in the Holy Land to get rid of them and their evils,” he said. “At the same time, they implanted this evil in the Middle East so the Muslims could busy themselves with it. The Europeans and Americans knew that Israel would never survive. Israel cannot stand before one and a half billion Muslims. This is temporary. Israel has no future! And I am not the only one saying this. There are scholars saying this.”
The Muslim Brotherhood leadership, even the younger generation, is realistic about the Brotherhood’s current inability to compete for power. Its public position is that through its community organizations it will slowly change the values of Egyptian society, and build a legal party; Islam will flourish and public opinion will eventually put pressure on the regime, either during Mubarak’s reign or after. For now, senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are kept out of sight, banned from speaking at universities and appearing on state-run television.
“Mubarak fears that if he widens the margins of democracy things will happen,” Essam al-Eryam, one of the Brotherhood’s most prominent middle-aged leaders, told me at the Brotherhood’s headquarters. “There will be democracy here, sooner or later. It requires patience, and we are more patient because we are, as an organization, seventy-six years old. You have already seen some countries—Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran—describe themselves as Islamic regimes. There’s a diversity of models, even among the Sunni and the Shia. Egypt can present a model that is more just and tolerant.”
The Mubarak government’s policy is simple: finesse—periods of tolerance followed by crackdown. Ali Heilal Dessouki, a Cabinet minister, met me at his office one afternoon and reeled off the decades-long history of Islamist violence directed at various government leaders. “Whether it is the Muslim Brotherhood or Islamic Jihad, the goal in the end is the same: the establishment of a Muslim state,” he said. “When the mujahideen returned from Afghanistan in 1989, 1990, the level of military professionalism among the Islamists had increased. Somewhere in 1990, 1991, the strategy of reconciliation showed itself to be a failure. For us to say ‘Come share with us’ was considered a sign of weakness. So the government got tough.”
Actually, nearly all the Islamists who committed terrorist acts in the early nineteen-nineties were members of groups more radical than the Brotherhood, but the government does not spin it quite that way. Fouad Allam, who was Egypt’s chief of intelligence under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, until 1988, when he retired, compared the Brotherhood to the Italian Red Brigades and the German Baader-Meinhof gang. “They are the most dangerous organization in the Arab world,” he said. “In reality, they created terrorism in the region. Despite this, they claim they are not a terrorist organization. When you ask them about the assassination of the Prime Minister under Farouk in 1948, killing people in movie theatres, the assassination of other government officials, the robbery of the Bank of Egypt, putting explosives in police stations, blowing up certain Jewish shops—there have been six hundred crimes since 1928—when you ask them, they say these are isolated, individual acts. They declare themselves innocent of any wrongdoing. What I respect about Jihad and Gama’a al-Islamiya is that they operate in the open. The Muslim Brothers are liars, even today.
“It’s been a long time since they last committed a terrorist act,” he continued, “but every now and then a clandestine cell is discovered. I can’t say whether they have renounced terrorism or they are dormant, like a volcano. But why are they still forming clandestine cells?”
In mid-May, the government carried out the most extensive crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in a decade, making more than fifty arrests, closing down twenty companies aligned with the group, and shutting off its Web site. According to Al-Ahram, a newspaper that tends to reflect the government line, intelligence officials had come to believe that the Brotherhood was escalating recruitment and sending the recruits to Iraq, Chechnya, and Palestine to get the training they would need to overthrow the Egyptian government. The Brotherhood denied all the charges.
Not long after the arrests, prison officials called Brotherhood leaders to say that one of theirs, a forty-year-old engineer named Akram Zuheiri, who suffered from diabetes, had died while being transferred between detention facilities. Would they kindly come and pick up the body? The Brotherhood and human-rights organizations blamed “clear and grave negligence” for Zuheiri’s death and said that other prisoners swept up in the recent dragnet were being interrogated and tortured. According to Al-Ahram, a “common interpretation” of the arrests is that they are a signal from Mubarak to the public that the Muslim Brotherhood “will never be part” of government reform in Egypt. The only point of agreement between the government and the Brotherhood is that American policy in the Middle East is radicalizing more and more young Egyptians.
The Mubarak regime has a natural interest in exaggerating, for foreign consumption, the strength and the potential menace of the Muslim Brotherhood. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist who studied the Islamist movement and then was jailed by Mubarak for three years, told me, “Mubarak has a low I.Q., but, politically, he is a survivalist. He has used the Islamists as a fear-arouser for the West. He wards off the pressures for a more open system by pointing to their presence. He uses them as a deterrent: ‘Do you want me to open the door to another Iran or Algeria or Afghanistan?’ This frightens the Egyptian middle class and the United States. It is a very skillful bluff, and the Muslim Brothers recognize the bluff.”
Egypt under Mubarak is a system of safety valves and controls, an autocracy that in some respects simulates civil society. Political opponents cannot compete for real power, or make frontal attacks on the President in the press, but they can talk in apartments and cafés, they can run for seats in parliament and join the professional unions and the like. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, conduct religious study groups, and run charitable programs for the poor, but they no longer embarrass the government, as they did in 1992 when they were much quicker and more effective than the state bureaucracy in aiding the victims of an earthquake. In other words, they are given strict limits; should they exceed those limits, their last remaining freedom is to join thousands of others in prison.
And yet, if a political dissident or group wants to express opposition to or hatred of Israel, the Jews, or the Bush Administration, there are hardly any boundaries at all. This is part of what makes the Egyptian media seem “lively.” In 2002, state television broadcast a forty-one-episode series based on the anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The Muslim Brotherhood had a rare opportunity to get a representative on television recently when it protested the broadcast of the Harrison Ford movie “Air Force One.” And the newspaper columnist Rifat Sayyid Ahmad felt no hesitation in calling Dick Cheney “a super-racist Jew” or in comparing Guantánamo to Auschwitz.
One of the leading moderate Islamists in Egypt is the newspaper columnist Fahmy Howeidy. In his office one afternoon, Howeidy told me that he held out no hope of Mubarak’s instituting real democratic reforms and that, at this point, U.S. pressure would be counter-productive. “The only thing that will bring it about will be the people’s will, their readiness to pay a price for it,” he said. “Democracy will not be a gift from Mubarak or Colin Powell.”
Howeidy and many others I spoke to said that it was difficult to gauge what sort of Islamism could emerge in a democratic Egypt. “It’s hard to say how powerful the Muslim Brothers are,” Howeidy said. “We have no polls, no transparency. They have power in the society, but to what extent I don’t know.”
END OF PART ONE |
