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.

A generation after that day of October 6, 1981, when Anwar al-Sadat was struck down, a strange bond has been forged between Sadat and his assassin, Khalid Istanbuli. A place has been made in the country's narrative for both men. The history of Egypt, her very identity, is fluid enough to claim the wily ruler who swallowed his pride to deal with Israel and the United States, and also the assassin appalled by the cultural price paid in the bargain. In a sense, Sadat and Istanbuli are twins, their lives and deeds one great tale of the country's enduring dilemmas and her resilience amid great troubles, about the kind of political men Egypt's history brought forth when her revolutionary experiment of the 1950s and 1960s ran aground.

It is not hard for Egyptians to recognize much of themselves and their recent history in Istanbuli, the young lieutenant who proclaimed with pride that he had shot the pharaoh. He was in every way a son of the Free Officer Revolution of Gamal Abdel Nasser, of July 23, 1952, when Egypt cast aside her kings and set out on a new, nonaligned path. Istanbuli was born in 1957, a year after the Suez Crisis, during what seemed to be a moment of promise in the life of Egypt. He was named after Nasser's oldest son. His father was a lawyer in a public-sector company that was a product of the new, expanding government. He was ten years old when calamity struck Egypt in the Six Day War, and the Nasser revolution was shown to be full of sound and fury and illusion. The country had been through a whirlwind and Istanbuli's life mirrored the gains and the setbacks.

He had not been particularly religious; he had attended a Christian missionary school in his town in Middle Egypt. Political Islam entered his life late in the hour, not so long before he was to commit his dramatic deed of tyrannicide. An older brother of his, a religious activist, had been picked up in a massive wave of arrests that Sadat ordered in September 1981. All sorts of political men and women had been hauled off to prison: noted men and women of the elite, from the law, journalism, the universities, former ministers, Muslims and Copts alike. The wave of arrests had been a desperate throw of the dice by Sadat and it had backfired. It broke the moral contract between Sadat and his country. In taking revenge, Istanbuli did what normal society could not do for itself. "Khalid," an admiring author wrote in tribute to the assassin, "I spoke and you did, I wished, and others wished, and you fulfilled our wishes."

But Sadat too has a place, and an increasingly special one, in the country's memory. Sadat, it is true, had died a loner's death. Presumably victorious in October 1973 in the war against Israel, he was yet judged a lesser figure than his predecessor, who was defeated in 1967. But a certain measure of vindication has come Sadat's way: he had broken with Arab radicalism, and the years were to show that Arab radicalism's harvest had been ruin and bankruptcy. He had opted for peace with Israel; the Palestinians and other Arabs, so many of them shouting treason and betrayal, had followed in his footsteps. The crafty ruler, to his fingertips a wily man of the countryside with a peasant's instinctive shrewdness and wisdom, was able to see before it was evident to others that the Soviet Union was no match for American power.

It has not been lost on his people that Sadat had foreseen American primacy and had placed his bets on American power, making the sort of accommodation with America that his proud predecessor would have never been able to pull off. Then there is of course the gift he bequeathed his country: the liberation of the land that his legendary predecessor had lost in 1967. Indeed, ten days after Istanbuli was put to death with four of his fellow conspirators on April 15, 1982, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian sovereignty.1

This tension in the psyche and politics of Egypt will persist: between Sadat's world, with its temptations and its window on modernity, and Istanbuli's world, with its rigors and its furious determination to keep the West at bay. A fissure has opened, right in the heart of Egypt's traditionally stoic and reliable middle class. A wing of this class has defected to theocratic politics. The rest are disaffected and demoralized. There is no resolution in sight for this dilemma.

But we misconstrue Egypt's reality and the nature of its malady if we see it as another Islamic domino destined to fall, if we lean too hard on the fight between the regime and the Islamicist challengers. For all the prophecies of doom and the obituaries written of the Egyptian state, the custodians of political power have ridden out many storms. This is a country with a remarkable record of political stability. Only two regimes have governed modern Egypt over the last two centuries: the dynasty of the Albanian-born Muhammad Ali, the soldier of fortune, who emerged in the aftermath of the chaos unleashed by Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of the country in 1798, and the Free Officer regime of Nasser and Sadat and their inheritors. The sorrow of Egypt is made of entirely different material: the steady decline of its public life, the inability of an autocratic regime and of the middle class from which this regime issues to rid the country of its dependence on foreign handouts, to transmit to the vast underclass the skills needed for the economic competition of nations, to take the country beyond its endless alternation between false glory and self-pity.

THE THEOCRATIC CHALLENGE

We must not exaggerate the strength of the theocratic challenge or the magnitude of the middle class' defection. In our fixation on the Iranian Revolution--the armed imam chasing Caesar out of power--we have looked for it everywhere and grafted its themes and outcomes onto societies possessed of vastly different traditions and temperaments. There never was a chance that Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian preaching fire and brimstone in Brooklyn, would return to his land, Khomeini-like, to banish the secular powers and inherit the realm. Even the men who gunned down Sadat were under no illusions about their own power in the face of the state. No fools, these men knew the weight of the state, the strength of all they were hurling themselves against. They sought only the punishment of "the tyrant," sparing the lives of his lieutenants (Hosni Mubarak included), who stood inches away on the reviewing stand. Sadat's inheritors, the assassins hoped, would be humbled by what they had seen; they would refrain from playing with fire and from the kinds of violations Sadat (and his wife Jihan) had committed against the mores of the land.

Nor should we project Algeria's descent into hell onto Egypt. Look at Algeria with its terror and counterterror: armed Islamic groups campaigning against all perceived Francophiles, secularists, and emancipated women, reprisals by the state and its "eradicationists" who pass off their violence as the defense of modernity itself, state-sponsored killer squads, the ninjas with their ski masks. This politics of zeal and cruelty, so reminiscent of Argentina and Chile in the 1970s, is alien to the temperament of Egypt. The chasm between the Francophiles and the Arabo-Islamicists at the root of the terror in Algeria has no parallel in the experience and the life of Egypt. Contempt for the government there is aplenty in Egypt today, but the political and cultural continuity of the place has not ruptured. No great windfall was squandered by the Egyptian elite the way the nomenklatura in Algeria blew the oil revenue of the last three decades. Most important, unlike the shallow roots of the Algerian state--a postcolonial entity that rose in the 1960s--central authority in Egypt reaches back millennia.