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.

This new version of pan-Arabism, we are told, would be pragmatic whereas the old movement led by Nasser was romantic and loud and strident. Egypt would lead other Arabs, she would help defend the security of the Persian Gulf states (against Iran) and set the terms of accommodation with Israel, but she would do all this without shrillness, without triggering a new ideological war in the Arab world. She would use her skills and her vast bureaucratic apparatus to balance the power of Israel.

In truth, the pan-Arabism that the Egyptian state (and the intellectual class) wishes to revive is a mirage. Egypt's primacy in Arab politics is a thing of the past. Arabs have gone their own separate ways. Egypt was the last to proclaim the pan-Arab idea, the first to desert it. If Egypt succumbs again to that temptation as a way of getting out of its troubles, the detour will end in futility. To borrow an old expression, pan-Arabism will have visited twice: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Egypt cannot set the terms or the pace of the accommodation in the Fertile Crescent between Israel and each of its neighbors. These terms will be decided by the protagonists. The irony was not lost on the Jordanians when the Egyptians began to deride them for their forthcoming peace with Israel. It was under Egyptian command during those fateful six days in 1967 that Jordan lost the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Jordan then had to wait on the sidelines for an entire generation after the Camp David accords as Egypt garnered the wages of peace and the vast American aid that came with it.

Egypt cannot render services that are no longer in demand: her doomed and quixotic campaign, waged earlier this year, against the extension of the Nonproliferation Treaty and the attempt to hold the treaty hostage to new controls over Israel's nuclear capabilities offers a cautionary tale. The campaign rolled together Egypt's panic about its place in the region, the need to demonstrate some distance from American power, and the desire to reassert Egypt's primacy in Arab politics. The regime threw everything it had into the fight. For months it was high drama: Egypt against the elements. But it was to no avail. There were no Arab riders anxious to join the Egyptian posse. The passion had gone out of that old fight.

Nor is there a special assignment for Egypt in securing the sea-lanes of the Persian Gulf or defending the Arabian Peninsula. To balance the two potential revisionist states, Iran and Iraq, the conservative states of the gulf will rely on American power and protection. This is an assignment for an imperial power; it is now America's, as it had been Britain's. In that kind of work Egypt has a minor role, as it did in Desert Storm, providing an Arab cover for American power. There could be gains for Egypt here, but they are at best marginal ones.

Egyptians who know their country so well have a way of reciting its troubles, then insisting that the old resilient country shall prevail. As an outsider who has followed the twists of the country's history and who approaches the place with nothing but awe for its civility amid great troubles, I suspect they are right. The country is too wise, too knowing, too tolerant to succumb to a reign of theocratic zeal. Competing truths, whole civilizations have been assimilated and brokered here; it is hard to see Cairo, possessed of the culture that comes to great, knowing cities turning its back on all that. The danger here is not that of sudden, cataclysmic upheaval, but of the steady descent into deeper levels of pauperization, of the lapse of the country's best into apathy and despair, of Egypt falling yet again through the trap door of its history of disappointment.

Some two decades ago, in the aftermath of the October war of 1973, the influential journalist Mohamed Heikal, Nasser's main publicist, set out to explain to Henry Kissinger that Egypt was more than a state on the banks of the Nile, that it was an idea and a historical movement. Yet that is all that remains. Both the Mediterranean temptation of Egypt being a piece of Europe and the pan-Arab illusion have run aground. To rule Egypt today is to rule a burdened state on the banks of the Nile and to rule it without the great consolations and escapes of the past.

ENDNOTES

1 Sadat's legacy was given its due in a recent work of fiction by Naguib Mahfouz, Before the Throne. In the novella, the country's rulers, from the time of King Mina to Sadat, appear before a panel of judges drawn from their own ranks. The court is presided over by Osiris, chief deity in the Egyptian pantheon, and his wife, Isis. Sadat's rendition shows him as a simple Egyptian who held deep within himself the spirit of patriotism. Akhenaton greets him as a kindred spirit who opted for peace in his time as Akhenaton had done. Amenhotep III sees in Sadat his own love of glory and splendor but pities him because Sadat ruled during a time of poverty. Only Nasser audits Sadat harshly, rails against his shameful peace with Israel, his betrayal of the poor, the rampant corruption of his regime, the breach of faith with the revolution of 1952. The final words, though, belong to Isis and Osiris. Isis welcomes Sadat as a faithful son of the land of Egypt who restored Egypt's independence; Osiris grants him a place of honor among the immortals.

2 The demographic weight of the Copts is one of the great riddles of Egypt. "We count everything in Egypt: cups, shoes. The only thing we don't count are the Copts. They have been two million since 1945. No one has died; no one has been born," political historian Rifaat Said observed. The political Islamicists prefer a low estimate of two million Copts. The number was given to me by Adel Hussein, a noted figure in the Islamic political movement. Other estimates run as high as ten million.