GOING NOWHERE - PART TWO
In an atomized political culture like Egypt’s, the one issue that has energized, and enraged, the political opposition today is American foreign policy under George W. Bush. I had dozens of meetings in Cairo—with government officials, religious leaders, opposition figures, intellectuals, students, working people—and nearly every session began with a speech on the perfidy of the Bush Administration. The novelist and editor Gamal al-Ghitani greeted me at the offices of his journal, Akhbar Aladab, the most prominent literary magazine in the Middle East, and showed me the portraits on the wall of his “American icons”—Hemingway, Melville, and Louis Armstrong—and yet within minutes he was telling me that what he feared most in the world was the United States. The faces of American officers in Iraq reminded him of Nazi officers, he said. “I fear that my culture is targeted by a superpower that is acting stupidly.” He was, if anything, mild in his rhetoric. Later, I visited Sonallah Ibrahim, a Marxist novelist who is known for scathing political fictions, like “The Smell of It,” which he published after a term in Nasser’s prisons. Before knocking on his apartment door, I noticed a decal above the bell showing the American and Israeli flags joined by a swastika. He, too, was enraged about Palestine and Iraq, but not only that: everything about the United States repelled him. Ibrahim taught Arabic literature at Berkeley in 1998, an experience that evidently did not suit him. “I despised the total individualism, the control of multinationals, the manipulation of the media over the ordinary person, the values of life, just living to eat, drink, fuck, have a car, and that’s all,” he said. “There are no moral values, no broad-minded attitudes toward life in general or a sense of what is happening in the world, no sense of the role America is playing in trying to control the resources of the world.” Perhaps what irked him most, he said, was “the genuine stupidity of the normal American citizen. He is ignorant. He doesn’t know what his own country is doing in the world. The U.S. is following the same policy of racism as the Nazis. Do I really have to explain something to you that is so well known everywhere?”
Anti-Americanism, routine or virulent, is not new in Egypt. Only its intensity is new—an intensity that is marked not only among opposition figures and literary intellectuals but also among people close to Mubarak.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was the Secretary-General of the United Nations in the nineteen-nineties and now runs a government human-rights agency in Cairo, told me, “In 1992, I had the illusion that the United Nations would manage the post-Cold War world. I was mistaken. The U.S. felt it should manage the post-Cold War world, based on free markets and democracy, with the idea that one democracy will not fight another. But this ideology failed. The new Administration moved from a policy of persuasion to a policy of coercion and preventative war. After the Napoleonic Wars, you had the Congress of Vienna. After the First World War, there was the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. And after the Second World War there was San Francisco and the rise of the U.N. After 1991, Bush’s father promised a new world order. We missed an occasion to have a new system.”
Abdel Moneim Said, who is the head of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a think tank that works closely with the regime, was among many who told me that the American failure so far to establish security in Iraq has decisively undermined the idea of a democratization movement in Egypt and elsewhere in the region. “The United States is in a position that looks like Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties—occupation, resistance, as well as a competition among groups,” he said. “You want Egypt to democratize, to change, but Egypt has drawn the opposite lesson. Instead of creating a liberal model, we see chaos, and the Saudis and the Syrians see the same thing. Now you have arrived at a much more modest sense of a liberal state than you started with.”
“There is a cultural war to change the Middle East, to create a new Saudi Arabia, a new Egypt, a new history,” Diaa Rashwan, an Islamic-movements expert at the Al-Ahram Center, said. “It’s really not very intelligent. In two years, you cannot even build a village. How are you going to rebuild the world?”
Three times a week, the novelist Naguib Mahfouz holds court in a café or bar—sessions that are meant to emulate the noisy camaraderie of bourgeois liberal Cairo a half-century ago. Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, is known for his intimate stories of Egyptian life—“The Cairo Trilogy” is his most celebrated work—and his national prestige is absolute, like Victor Hugo’s in nineteenth-century Paris. He is ninety-two and nearly deaf. In his prime, he was a prolific writer, but now he has pared down his work to fragmentary stories and prose poems. I was invited to meet him one night at the wood-panelled bar of Shepheard’s Hotel. When I arrived, a young hanger-on was sitting next to Mahfouz and shouting into his left ear, reading the text of an adulatory article about him. Mahfouz stared off into the distance, smiling slightly. He wore a dark-blue serge suit of an old-fashioned cut. Others traded the now ancient gossip that another novelist, Yusuf Idris, thought that he had deserved the Nobel. Mahfouz waved this away with a slight, elegant flop of his hand. When he spoke, it was usually to repeat a remark or to make a small joke.
In 1994, an Islamist radical stabbed Mahfouz in the neck and he nearly died. At the time, religious leaders, like Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is now in an American prison for inciting the first bombing of the World Trade Center, were on the attack against liberal intellectuals like Mahfouz. Other intellectuals of Mahfouz’s generation were physically assaulted or harangued into fear and silence. The Mubarak regime deplored the violence against Mahfouz, but what little remained of a liberal Cairo had long before been eclipsed.
“Liberal politics has had a bad name in Egypt,” Mohamed Salmawy, a newspaper columnist and playwright, told me. “It’s not discredited, it still exists, but it suffers from being tarnished by the revolution of 1952, when it was equated with corruption under the monarchy’s liberal system. Then came Sadat, who did away with Nasser’s theories and went to a multiparty system and the economic open door. People began to feel that liberalism was a Trojan horse for the West to creep into Egypt and dominate it and endanger its identity. Identity is very important here. We don’t have people like Samuel Beckett, who was born in Ireland, moved to Paris, and is a citizen of the world. We went a hundred and eighty degrees, turning away from the Soviet Union and jumping into bed with Israel and the United States and liberalism.”
These days, intellectuals are more likely to agree with a radical like Sonallah Ibrahim than with Naguib Mahfouz. The business élite, not the universities, has become the bastion of pro-Western opinion. Internationalism has cut both ways in Egypt: those who went to work in Saudi Arabia during the oil boom often came back more conservative, more religious; those who went for the same reasons to the emirates or Europe returned more secular, more politically liberal. Those liberals for the most part keep themselves, and their opinions, concealed, and stick to the business of making money.
Hisham Kassem, the head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and the publisher of the English-language magazine The Cairo Times, is an exception. His jaundiced view of Egyptian politics, and of the Middle East in general, would not be out of place at a conservative American think tank. “In the Middle East, you travel in a time machine,” he told me one evening in his office. “In Libya, you have a complete madman in charge. In Iraq, you had Saddam and now bloodshed. In Yemen, the whole country is doped up on khat and everyone owns a Kalashnikov, as in ‘The Lotus Eaters.’ In Saudi Arabia, you leave Friday prayers and then you’re forced to watch an execution—some woman being stoned for adultery or a head chopped off. In Syria, they used their military to slaughter their own people. Jordan is banal. Not one of the Gulf States is a signatory to the Covenant of Human Rights. There is nothing like it anywhere else. Twenty-two Arab League states, all authoritarian. For decades, the Middle East has been kept in a political deep freeze. People flee from here: the crime, the fundamentalism, the brutality. There is no growth rate, no acceptable governmental or economic management. Nothing short of a military intervention could have exerted any political pressure on the region. It’s the only solution, the only lesser among many evils.”
When I asked Kassem his opinion of the American invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed, he said, “When you look at the intervention itself, you look at the people who will die as a result. Well, a great many more would have died from sanctions and from Saddam than from any intervention. All those arguments about how you can’t bring democracy in on the wings of a B-52 are garbage. The only thing that can bring about a change here is American foreign policy. Egyptian brutality will not change and neither will the apathy of the people. Change in the Middle East will be slow, but we needed the air cover. There was no way we could have done this on our own. We were going nowhere.”
Hosni Mubarak is the longest-serving Egyptian leader since Muhammad Ali, in the early nineteenth century. But Mubarak is seventy-six, and his health is imperfect. In mid-June, he sought medical treatment in Germany—Al-Ahram described it as “possible back surgery and/or physical therapy.” Last year, during an address to the parliament, Mubarak stopped speaking and muttered, “The air-conditioning is too strong in here.” Then he said, “What is happening?” His aides rushed to his side and escorted him from the podium. State television, which had been broadcasting the speech live, went blank. Inside the chamber, a member of parliament asked that last rites be read from the Koran; an imam prayed for the President’s health. It was nearly an hour before Mubarak returned, made his apologies, and said he hadn’t had enough sleep. There is also the persistent threat of a violent end. In 1995, assassins from Gama’a al-Islamiya fired on Mubarak’s motorcade while he was visiting Addis Ababa.
According to Article 82 of the Egyptian constitution, when the President cannot fulfill his duties he is to be replaced by a Vice-President. Mubarak, however, has always refused to appoint one. To a degree, he recalls the sort of dictator who begins his speeches, “If I die . . .” For the past few years, there have been rumors that members of Mubarak’s team were grooming his forty-one-year-old son, Gamal, as a successor—a plan that seemed to take its cue from the father-to-son succession in Syria. Gamal, who is called Jimmy by his friends, has worked as a banker in London, and, as a key figure in the ruling National Democratic Party, he is surrounded by pro-Western technocrats. Unlike his father, Sadat, and Nasser, he does not come from the military. Some members of the Egyptian élite believe that Gamal might be able to preserve political stability and yet reform a stagnant economy marked by forty-five-per-cent illiteracy and a per-capita income ranked a hundred-and-eighteenth in the world. Last New Year’s, however, the elder Mubarak dismissed the rumors as “nonsense.” Earlier, he had said, “We are not a monarchy. We are the Republic of Egypt, so refrain from comparing us to other countries in the region”—a clear reference to the Syrians.
Although the rumors persist, several sources close to the President told me that Mubarak would almost certainly seek a fifth term next year—unopposed, as usual. If he were unable to continue, however, the list of pretenders to the Presidency begins with a series of severe, colorless military and security chiefs—including Omar Suleiman, the head of intelligence—who hardly promise democratic reform. What’s more, those in power are not in the mood to take direction. “We do not need any pressure from anyone to adopt democratic principles,” Mubarak has said.
Not long before leaving the city, I went to the American University of Cairo and met with a young graduate named Hazem Kandil, who was looking forward to pursuing a doctorate at New York University. Hazem was training, it seemed, for membership in the Egyptian political élite. At the A.U.C. campus, the courtyard is divided into an area full of kids in jeans and T-shirts and a smaller area where Islamic dress—particularly head scarves for the young women—is in vogue. “Beirut” and “Tehran,” some call it.
As we sat in “Beirut” and looked over at “Tehran,” Hazem said, “We’ve tried the socialist agenda, we’ve tried the non-agendas of Sadat and Mubarak, which were mixed, and both failed miserably. We’ve exhausted the socialist and capitalist leanings. But people see that we have not exhausted the Islamic possibility. This worries me. It’s very plausible that we’ll take the Islamic road. A lot of what the U.S. is doing implies to people that this is your real motivation. Also, when the United States pushes for democracy without really supporting liberalism in the Islamic world in an adequate way, support for the Islamists grows. In this part of the world, too, conspiracy-thinking is part of the mood of thinking. Liberalism is being linked with American aggression.
“The Islamist influence will grow and will dominate, even without an Islamic President,” he went on. “When people start suffering under that, maybe they’ll listen to a more liberal agenda, but not before. What’s scary is that if we don’t deal with these people they’ll re-launch themselves. I see people at A.U.C. tilted toward the jihadist cause more and more. They’re watching satellite television, they’re watching Saudi-financed channels, they’re listening to the cassette tapes of fundamentalists that are sold on every street corner, they’re reading Islam Online and lots of other Web sites like that. The Islamic discourse is concentrating on the West. Under Sadat and Nasser, the Islamists were oriented toward moral issues in Egypt. Now the word is: ‘We are fighting for our lives.’”
One morning, at a café called Cilantro, near the university, I met with a recent graduate who was now writing articles—fairly incendiary articles—for an Islamic Web site. Because he wanted no trouble from the police or, more likely, immigration officials if he ever decided to travel to the West, he asked that I not use his real name. “We’ll stick with Tariq,” he said. Tariq has very short hair, stylish rectangular glasses, and an emerging beard. At first, I was sure that he was American, so fluid was his English and so slight his accent. He laughed when I mentioned it: “I guess you could say that my accent is the result of cultural imperialism. I got it from Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and satellite television.”
Tariq does not come from a fundamentalist family, but he said that he had become more and more observant and politically radicalized. “A lot of things did it,” he said: the Russian bombing of Chechnya, American support for Israel, and the “despicable” leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The news of September 11th, Tariq said, gave him a “sense of joy,” a sense of the possible. “Two years later, I’ve met people in the Egyptian bourgeoisie who are happy every time they hear that the Islamists have hit a soft target in the West. With Palestine and Iraq, the militant perspective is making more and more sense.”
Tariq said that when he graduated he had thought about going to law school in the United States. But he quickly realized that he didn’t want anything to do with that life style. He began to study the Koran and attend a mosque led by a radical young sheikh in one of the poorer neighborhoods. “When I grew a beard, my family worried. Initially, they were really tense. But over the past two years they are gaining a newfound sympathy for me.”
Young men and women—politicized, intelligent, fluent in English and European languages—get their information, it seems, from every source imaginable except the Egyptian papers, which, as Tariq put it, “are propagandistic crap.” Instead, Tariq reads the leading British and American papers on the Internet, checks into political chat rooms, and watches satellite television. Even in lower-income neighborhoods in Cairo, the rooftops sprout satellite dishes. Like anyone in Egypt with an education and an interest in politics, Tariq may despise American foreign policy, and see the American press as slavish to the Administration, but he believes completely the harsh reports on Egypt provided by U.S.-based human-rights organizations. “Egypt has an atrocious human-rights record,” he said. “And yet your President called my President a builder of open societies.”
As an Islamist, he said, he saw only one solution: “An ideal Egypt would have an Islamic government. The framework for that is very broad—it can lean more toward capitalism or socialism, even toward an Islamic monarchy, or even a council of guardians, as in Iran. There are many varieties. But the public image is always the Taliban. I didn’t approve of some of their practices; they had some serious problems. Preventing women from studying medicine and preventing women from seeing male doctors, well, that is a recipe for killing women. But they were isolated and coming to power after twenty years of civil war. Secularism has no future here. Secularism is a product of the West.”
Tariq smiled disdainfully at a mention of Bush’s speech at the National Endowment. “The nightmare for the West is that they advocate democracy and then they find that these countries elect Islamic governments,” he said. “Islamists have gained a lot of legitimacy through their social work, even in their jobs as engineers or doctors. They have a certain status.”
Tariq and I arranged to meet at the Al Rawas mosque, which is in the neighborhood called, for good reason, the Butchery. In the car heading to the mosque, I saw dozens of carcasses—sheep, lambs, and chickens—hanging in the cool evening air. When I arrived, Tariq was finishing prayers, along with thirty or forty other men. He introduced me to Sheikh Ragab, who is in his thirties and blind, and we all headed downstairs to a small office.
“The Egyptian government, like all other Arab governments, is a puppet regime, an agent of foreign powers, particularly the United States, which controls the world now,” the Sheikh said. “But if democracy were implemented and there were freedom of expression, Islam would rule and rule all aspects of life, including for non-Muslims. Some non-Muslims, especially in the West and the States, believe that if Islam rules it will massacre all non-Muslims. The Jews lived under Islamic rule in Medina in the time of the Prophet, and it was the best life they ever had. The same with the Christians. Whereas under Roman rule they were treated brutally.” The Sheikh also said that he and everyone he knew was firmly convinced that “the Jews” were behind September 11th, the invasion of Iraq, globalization, and just about everything that he might label “pernicious” in the course of our conversation. “Jews are like that,” he said.
Since Tariq had said that he was pleased by September 11th and “admired” Al Qaeda, I asked him if he could see himself engaging in such acts. After all, he’d said that the Muslim Brotherhood was “far too moderate” for him, and he hadn’t said a contrary word about the use of violence. “We are all capable of acts like this,” he admitted. “It depends on how far you are pushed. I’m a firm believer in the concept of belligerent reprisal.”
By now, we have become accustomed to calm young men assessing the wisdom of crashing planes into office towers or setting off bombs in a crowded train station. What was more disconcerting was Tariq’s confidence, his serene sense that the United States had faltered, that it had lost its influence in Cairo as well as in Baghdad, and that the future was his. “A clash of civilizations,” he said, “is a war that the West cannot win.”
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