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 liberals of the 1920s and 1930s had their moment, flirted with a native capitalist path and parliamentary politics of sorts. But theirs was a fragile liberalism, prone to corruption, outflanked by collectivist ideologies (it was here in this period, in 1928 that the Muslim Brotherhood was formed), a liberalism in the shadow of an occupying foreign power. Then came Nasser's bid, perhaps Egypt's most heartbreaking moment of false promise: import substitution, pan-Arabism, a place in the nonaligned world, a national army that looked imposing and fierce before the whole edifice of Nasserism came crashing down.

Egyptians who know this narrative by heart see all these bids as brushes with success. This is part of the country's self-image. To rule Egypt is to rule against the background of these expectations and disappointments. Pity the air force officer who now presides over a country groaning under the weight of its numbers, scrambling to pay for its food imports, reconciling its claims to greatness with the fact of its dependence on American power and largess. Egyptians are not blind to what has befallen their country. They can see the booming lands in Asia, countries that were once poorer than Egypt, digging out of the poverty of the past. No way out has materialized for Egypt. The dreams of liberal reform, the hopes for revolution from above, the socialist bid of Nasser all withered away. The country drifts. No Lee Kuan Yew has risen here to make the place orderly and efficient even at a price in political and cultural freedom. The economy remains a hybrid. It combines a wild form of laissez-faire capitalism for the sharks and fat cats who raid the place with subsidies for the poorer classes. There is endless talk of economic reform. But the state has chosen the path of least resistance and stays with the status quo. The push for privatization that raised the share of the private sector from 23 percent of industrial output in 1974 to 30 percent a decade later has stalled. Four decades of positioning the country for foreign assistance from the Soviet Union, the Arab oil states, and the United States have done terrible damage to Egypt. A political economy and a mentality of dependence have set in.

THE GENDARME

Chroniclers of the Mubarak regime may look back at his rule as ten good years followed by lean years of trouble and drift.< By his own early accounts and self-portrayal an ordinary man with no claims to greatness, Mubarak appeared to heed the fate of his predecessor. A cautious man, he drew back from the precipice, stitching back together as best he knew how the fault line between the state and the mainstream opposition. He rebuilt bridges to the Arab world burned by Sadat; he gave every indication that the fling with America and the West that had carried Sadat away would be reined in, that a sense of proportion and restraint would be restored to Egyptian politics. He presented himself as a man with clean hands who would put an end to the crony capitalism and economic pillage of the Sadat era.

But Mubarak was no great reformer bent on remaking the political landscape. To begin with, he labored against the background of an adverse set of changes in the economic domain. The 1980s proved to be a difficult decade for Egypt's economy. The rate of annual growth plummeted; in 1989-90 the economy grew a mere two percent, less than the growth in the population. Egypt dropped from the World Bank's group of lower-middle-income countries to its lower-income category; inflation rose and the real income of industrial workers eroded. A regime unable to reverse this decline fell back on its powers of coercion when the Gamaat took on the state.

In retrospect, the choice that mattered was made by Mubarak with his coronation for a third term in 1993. A modest man (a civil servant with the rank of president, a retired army general of Mubarak's generation described him to me) had become president for life. Mubarak had broken a pledge that he would limit himself to two terms in office. Though outsiders may have a romantic view of Egyptians as patient fellaheen tilling the soil under an eternal sky, in veritable awe of their rulers, in fact a strong sense of skepticism and a keen eye for the foibles of rulers pervade Egyptian political culture. No one had the means to contest Mubarak's verdict; a brave soul or two quibbled about the decision. An open letter was sent to Mubarak by Basheer, one of the country's most thoughtful and temperate public figures, questioning the wisdom of the decision. Autocracy prevailed, but a healthy measure of the regime's legitimacy seemed to vanish overnight.

That keen eye for the ruler's foibles now saw all Mubarak's defects. He had hung around too long. An inarticulate man, he had done it without bonding with the country. The national elections he presided over became increasingly fraudulent and transparent. Worse still, Mubarak ran afoul of his country's sense of propriety by refusing to designate a successor or help develop a process of orderly succession. His two predecessors, much larger historic figures with far greater claims to political legitimacy, their personal histories deeply intertwined with their country's, never dared go that far. Supreme in the political domain, Nasser always ruled with a designated successor in place. And Sadat had chosen Mubarak in homage to generational change. Mubarak had no claim to inheritance when Sadat picked him from a large officer corps; it was Sadat's will that made him. In contrast, Mubarak rules alone: the glory (what little of it there has been of late) and the burdens are his. He stands sentry against the armed Islamicists, but the expectations of the 1980s -- modernizing the polity, giving it freer institutions, taking it beyond the power of the army -- have been betrayed. At heart he is a gendarme determined to keep intact the ruler's imperative. Is it any wonder that those rescued from the wrath and the reign of virtue promised by the Islamicists have no affection for the forces of order and feel no great sense of deliverance?

The defects of a political system without an orderly succession in place and reliant on the armed forces as a last arbiter were laid bare last June when Mubarak, in Addis Ababa to attend a meeting of the Organization of African Unity, escaped unhurt from an armed attack on his motorcade. He rushed back home full of fury against the Sudanese whom he accused of masterminding the attempt on his life; he was eager, as well, to tell of his cool under fire, the man of the armed forces who had known greater dangers. The play of things was given away in the scripted celebrations of Mubarak's safety. The men of the religious establishment hailed Mubarak as a just ruler who kept the faith. The military officers renewed their pledge of allegiance and warned that they were there to ward off the dangers to the regime. The minister for municipalities said that the crowds from the provinces who had wanted to come to Cairo would have covered the "face of the sun." The one obvious lesson that was not drawn, the danger that went unexamined and unstated, was the vacuum, the uncertainty, that would have been left behind had Mubarak been struck down in Ethiopia. Egyptians were no doubt relieved to have Mubarak back: that is not the kind of tragedy they would want for him or for themselves. But no staged celebrations and no display of bravado on the Egypt-Sudan frontier could hide the stalemate of the Egyptian political order.

PAN-ARABISM REDUX

A pan-Arab wind, a pan-Arab temptation, has lately emerged in Egypt. It is the return of an old consolation that brought Egypt failure and bitterness. From her pundits and intellectuals can now be heard a warmed-over version of the pan-Arab arguments of the 1960s, a disquiet over the country's place in the region. And for all the vast aid the United States has poured into Egypt over the last two decades, there is in the air as well a curious free-floating hostility to American ideals and interests, a conviction that the United States wishes Egypt permanent dependency and helplessness, a reflexive tendency to take up, against America's wishes, the cause of renegade states like Libya and Iraq, a belief that the United States is somehow engaged with Israel in an attempt to diminish and hem in the power and influence of Egypt. The peace with Israel, we know, stands, but it is unclaimed and disowned by the professional and intellectual class in the country, the pharaoh's peace, concluded by Sadat a generation ago and kept to a minimum by his inheritors.