The Sorrows of Egypt: A Tale of Two Men

Fouad Ajami

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1995

Summary:  Egyptians are nostalgic for their bourgeois past, still wanting to believe that their country is not just a state but an idea and a historical movement. But in their odyssey through liberalism, pan-Arabism, nationalism, and Islamicism, their dreams of greatness have been continually disappointed. Today President Mubarak leads a country with an exploding population, a fraying infrastructure, and a violent fundamentalist fringe. The sorrows of Egypt lie not in any one adversity but in the decline under the military regime of a once vibrant civic life. The state is all that remains.

Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

The recent troubles began in 1992 when a small war broke out between the state and the Gamaat Islamiyya, the Islamic groups, as the loosely organized underground of the forces of political Islam call themselves. The armed bands treated the country to a season of wrath and troubles. But the state fought back; it showed little mercy toward the insurgents. It pushed their challenge to remote, marginal parts of the country, provincial towns in Middle and Upper Egypt, the country's poorest areas. There, beyond the modernity of Cairo and Alexandria, away from the glare of publicity, the running war between the police and the Islamicists degenerated into the timeless politics of vengeance and vendettas, an endless cycle of killings and reprisals. The campaign of terror against foreign tourists, the targeting of men of letters, the killing in the summer of 1992 of Farag Foda, a brave secularist commentator, the attempt on the life of the venerated and aging Naguib Mahfouz two years later--all played into the hands of the state. Men of the regime were also targeted by the insurgents. In 1993 there were three separate attempts, over the space of some six months, on the lives of the minister of information, the minister of the interior, and the prime minister.

Thus faced with a relentless campaign of subversion, the regime responded by showing no mercy. The state apparatus was given a green light to root out armed Islamic groups and to do it without the kinds of protections and restraints a society of laws honors and expects. The governors and police officers dispatched to Middle and Upper Egypt, the hotbeds of religious strife, have invariably been men known for their willingness to use force. Massive searches and arrests have been routine there, as they have been, when deemed necessary, in the poorer and more radicalized parts of Cairo. The military tribunals were swift. Nearly 70 death sentences were decreed and carried out.

Tough police work was one side of the response to the terror of the Islamicists; the other was a discernible retreat on the part of the regime from secular politics and culture. Historically the agent of social change, the one great instrument for transforming this old land and pushing it along, the state now seems to have slipped into a cynical bargain with some devoted enemies of the secular idea. It granted these preachers and activists cultural space as long as the more strictly political domain (the police power of the regime, its hegemony over defense and foreign affairs) was left to it.

The custodians of the state drew a line between the legitimate and moderate Islamic groups and the armed Islamicists. While the regime hunted down the latter, it made its peace with the former. A regime anxious for religious credentials of its own and for religious cover bent with the wind. Preachers and religious activists drawn from the ranks of the old Muslim Brotherhood, an organization now sanitized and made respectable in comparison with the younger, more uncompromising members of the Gamaat, were given access to the airwaves and the print media and became icons of popular culture. They dabbled in incendiary material, these respectable sorts, careful to stay on the proper side of the line. They advocated an Islamic state but said they would seek it through legitimate means. They branded as heretics and apostates noted secular figures in politics and culture. (One such influential preacher, Sheikh Muhammad Ghazali, a figure of the original Muslim Brotherhood and its clone, so branded all believers in Western law.) They hounded the Copts and made no secret of their view that the best the Copts, a community of no less than six million people, could hope for in a would-be Islamic state was the protected but diminished status of a subordinate community.2 To all this the state turned a blind eye.

The country's leading center of Islamic learning and jurisprudence, al-Azhar University, has been given greater leeway and authority than it has possessed at any time this century. Where al-Azhar had been on the defensive during the Nasser years as an institution that had to be modernized and reformed, it now speaks with self-confidence on the social and cultural issues of the day. A wide swath of the country's cultural life is now open to the authorities of al-Azhar. The theological alternative has seeped into the educational curriculum. Until the state caught on a year or two ago and set out to reclaim some of this lost ground, whole schools had been ceded to the Islamicists. There the advocates of political Islam, their apparent zeal and devotion a marked contrast to the abdication all around, had gone to work, weaning the young from the dominant symbols and outlook of the secular political order. In schools captured by the Islamicists the national anthem and the Egyptian flag were banned for they were, to the religious radicals, the symbols of an un-Islamic state. "Political Islam had been checked in its bid for power," the shrewd analyst and observer Tahseen Basheer said, "but the Islamization of society has gained ground."

It did not come on the cheap, this victory of the state over the political Islamicists. The country feels trapped, cheated, and shortchanged in the battle between an inept, authoritarian state and a theocratic fringe. The tough response of the state did its work, but important segments of the population in the intellectual, political, and business classes drew back in horror at the tactics. Some of the very men and women sheltered by the regime against the fury of the Islamicists were taken aback by the number of executions ordered and the speed with which they were carried out. "Mubarak orders the executions but loses no sleep over them," a prominent figure of the opposition said to me. It has come down to this because the regime has little else in its bag. It is no consolation to Egyptians that they have been spared the terror visited on less fortunate places like Syria or Iraq or the Sudan. This is a country where lawyers and the rule of law had an early footing, a society with a rich syndicalist tradition and associational life and an independent judiciary with pride in its legacy. The terror had given Mubarak a splendid alibi and an escape from the demands put forth by segments of the middle class and its organizations in the professional syndicates--the lawyers, the engineers, and the journalists--for a measure of political participation. Mubarak had done order's work; it had become easy for him to wave off the tangled issues of economic and political reform.

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

At the heart of Egyptian life there lies a terrible sense of disappointment. The pride of modern Egypt has been far greater than its accomplishments. The dismal results are all around: the poverty of the underclass, the bleak political landscape that allows an ordinary officer to monopolize political power and diminish all would-be rivals in civil society, the sinking of the country into sectarian strife between Muslim and Copt, the dreary state of its cultural and educational life.

A country of 60 million people, the weekly magazine al-Mussawar recently revealed, now produces a mere 375 books a year. Contrast this with Israel's 4,000 titles, as the magazine did, and it is easy to understand the laments heard all around. Al-Ahram, the country's leading daily -- launched in 1876 and possessed of a distinguished history -- is unreadable. There is no trace of investigative journalism or thoughtful analysis on its pages, only the banal utterances of political power. No less a figure than the great novelist Naguib Mahfouz, a product of the ancien régime (he was born in 1911), has spoken with sorrow and resignation about this state of affairs. "Egypt's culture is declining fast," he wrote. "The state of education in our country is in crisis. Classrooms are more like warehouses to cram children in for a few hours than places of education. The arts and literature are barely taught in these institutions, which are run more like army barracks than places where cultural awareness and appreciation can be nurtured." In more apocalyptic terms, the commentator Karim Alrawi warned that the modernizing imperative that has dominated and driven Egypt since the early 1800s after its encounter with Europe is being reversed.

It is out of this disappointment that a powerful wave of nostalgia has emerged for the liberal interlude in Egyptian politics (the 1920s through the revolution of 1952), for its vibrant political life, for the lively press of the time, for the elite culture with its literati and artists, for its outspoken, emancipated women who had carved a place for themselves in the country's politics, culture, and journalism. Some of this is the standard nostalgia of a crowded, burdened society for a time of lost innocence and splendor; some, though, is the legitimate expression of discontent over the mediocrity of public life. Egypt produced better, freer cinema in the 1930s than it does today. Its leading intellectual figures were giants who slugged out the great issues of the day and gave Egyptian and Arabic letters a moment of undisputed brilliance. When the critic and writer Louis Awad, a Copt, a prolific and independent man of letters born in 1915, died in 1990, an age seemed to come to a close. The Egypt of the military has produced no peers for Awad and Mahfouz and their likes.