The Loom of Time, page 13
Max Rodenbeck, a journalist for The Economist, writes, “After 5,000 years of civilization, Egypt’s political system remains pyramid-shaped. Cairo sits indomitably at the pinnacle.” Its irrigation ministry decides how much water farmers get for their crops. Its religious affairs ministry decides who is to deliver sermons and what they can say. Its interior ministry chooses the mayors for thousands of villages. On top of them all is the president.[18]
And as always, it begins with the Nile.
“The Nile not only begets the land, the trees, the animals and the people, it also begets the laws and the first sciences,” writes Kazantzakis. Because the Nile’s overflow was not always benevolent, people needed to organize themselves into communities. “And because one province is dependent on the other and its prosperity depends upon the properly regulated distribution of water, the Nile compelled people to accept an austere hierarchy.”[19]
From antiquity to now, from the pharaohs to the dictator of the moment, President and Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt has constituted a steep, crushing tyranny for thousands of years. Though modernism wrought stirrings for more representative rule, it is a tortured legacy. And it always, ultimately, foundered on the struggle to maintain order over a densely packed and miserably poor population living along the Nile, a population which in 1976, the year of my first arrival in Egypt, had a literacy rate of 38 percent.[20]
Unlike in India, which in the 1970s was equally poor and illiterate, autocracy has always been particularly convenient to Egypt: for rather than a sprawling subcontinent of different groups and languages like India—disunited by river valleys rather than united by them—Egypt is much more linguistically and ethnically uniform, with everyone living along a narrow, easily controllable corridor of life and commerce. Cairo may appear unmanageable, but Egypt is a categorically coherent state utterly defined by geography, and thus governable. Governable, that is, if history is any guide, by a remote autocracy. And whenever it wasn’t, anarchy loomed at the edges. Cairo, in and of itself—so overwhelming to the senses—presents a challenge that, thus far, only autocracy has been able to master.
The past is instructive.
* * *
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Between the Second Century B.C., when the Greek Ptolemies defeated the last pharaoh, until the middle of the twentieth century, when the Free Officers Movement led by Major General Mohammed Naguib and Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser toppled the last Turco-Circassian king, Farouk I, Egypt was generally ruled by foreigners. Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Hejazi Arabs, and Ottomans tyrannized the Nile for thousands of years. The modern era had its beginnings, Kazantzakis notes correctly, with Muhammed Ali, an Albanian who was born in the now-Greek city of Kavala, and who became the Ottoman Pasha in 1805, in the wake of Napoleon’s conquest and subsequent withdrawal from Egypt.[21] Muhammed Ali gradually wrested de facto control of Egypt from the Ottoman Empire, and ruled until 1848, near his death, establishing a dynasty that would not be toppled until 1952. He designed much of downtown Cairo, built schools and palaces, restructured the army, initiated industrialization, and developed the cotton monoculture. Muhammed Ali’s successors governed as khedives, or Ottoman viceroys. In 1882 the British invaded khedivial Egypt in order to collect on the vast debt that had accumulated, as well as to protect both their own investments and the Suez Canal, the lifeline of British India. The British would grant Egypt a fair measure of independence in 1922, henceforth restricting their interests to protecting both the canal and the rights of the minority communities.
For thirty years thereafter, until the 1952 coup, a rivalry ensued between an elected Egyptian government, a British-supported Turco-Circassian king, and the British themselves, who continued to yield significant authority. The Egyptian-American scholar Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot calls this period “the liberal experiment.”[22] It was a highly imperfect arrangement, to be sure, given imperial Britain’s interference: plus the fact that because of the unexpected carnage and expense of World War I, Britain transferred some of those financial hardships to Egypt. But the three-decade period was nonetheless telling, since it is the only modern, long-term example of any kind that we have of the Egyptians’ efforts to govern themselves without resorting to outright dictatorship. During the Arab Spring of 2011, when many of the world’s leading journalists flooded Cairo’s Tahrir Square, feverishly interviewing young Egyptians pining for democracy, there was insufficient mention of this critical period in the early and mid twentieth century. An assumption in 2011 was that the world was new, that history would now begin from scratch, uncompromised by what had happened before. Tahrir Square back then “was like touching something holy,” reported the Egyptian scholar M. Cherif Bassiouni.[23] But the abject disappointments of the Arab Spring in Egypt have their echo in what transpired between 1922 and 1952, when the British, for all their faults, truly gave Egypt a chance at democratic self-rule, and tried in vain to locate a stable Egyptian government with which to conclude a final treaty. Though the British certainly threw their weight around back then, there was real debate and pluralism, so that Egypt in those years achieved a degree of multiparty democracy previously unknown in the Arab world.[24]
The signature personality of this period, a time that was originally so full of promise, was Saad Zaghlul, a lawyer and politician whose brilliance at debating, combined with an earthy upbringing in the rural Nile Delta, made him a formidable populist-style leader, and thus a daunting challenge to the British. Zaghlul was a disciple of the late nineteenth-century Islamic modernizer Mohammed Abduh, an Egyptian scholar who believed that Muslims had to use reason in order to adapt the Koran to the changes wrought by industrial life. Zaghlul, inspired by Abduh, believed that it was possible to construe the need for constitutional government directly from the writings of Islam; and that it was only a matter of finding a balance between the two.
Alas, personality matters as much as intellect, and by many accounts Zaghlul was marked by a “complete want of tact” that made him difficult to work with.[25] He had an “authoritarian style” and almost always could not hide the fact that he was the smartest person in the room. Naturally, such a spellbinding manner made him the premier politician in early-twentieth-century Egypt, garnering him a political party, the Wafd, and many supporters, not to mention a secret terrorist apparatus. Zaghlul, a true leader and at times a rabble-rouser, was Egypt’s first democratically elected prime minister, and each time the British exiled him (to Malta, to the Seychelles, Gibraltar) Cairo erupted in riots. After all, while the morality of the issue was that Zaghlul and his delegation should have been able to appeal for Egyptian independence to the international community at the post–World War I Paris Peace Conference, the realities of power dictated that this was an imperial question which Zaghlul would just have to settle with the British.[26]
Keep in mind, however, that Zaghlul’s Wafd was somewhat less of a party centered around specific ideas or ideology than a movement designed for Zaghlul himself to achieve power. And whereas the Wafd was a movement, the other parties were really factions made up of clusters of individuals, replete with animosities and jealousies, utilizing their connections with the palace and the British.[27] This unfortunate phenomenon was not exclusive to Egypt, but was common in newly modernizing and underdeveloped societies the world over, where institutions were weak and personalities perforce dominated. I even observed it in Greece in the middle and late twentieth century. But democracy has to start somewhere. And as Barrington Moore’s thesis makes clear, each country has to find its own way to stable and liberal governance, a process that can take centuries, even in the West. For the moment, however, what that meant in Egypt in the years immediately following World War I was domination by a charismatic political chieftain who would sadly achieve little beyond his own survival.
The result was increased public disorder, featuring assassinations, street violence, and anarchy, sometimes instigated by the paramilitary wings of the various political parties, including the Wafd. Parliaments were dissolved and governance occurred by decree, as the British looked on from the sidelines. This all became a desultory element of political life in Egypt at a time when the population was growing dramatically and the cities kept expanding, making the country in any case more difficult to rule. Arguably, the unrest was inflamed by Great Britain’s failure to let go of Egypt altogether, so that the politicians and the king were able to play the British off against each other, making solutions and agreements even harder to come by. And yet without the British security presence the situation might well have deteriorated further. One could claim, as the Iraqi-born British Middle East scholar Elie Kedourie does, that Britain’s policy was too soft, as it abandoned the country to unsavory local politicians, Zaghlul among them, “to milk and misgovern.”[28] Though Zaghlul died in 1927, he had “inaugurated” three decades of parliamentary turmoil “under the specious title of free institutions,” as Lord Cromer, the former British colonial administrator of Egypt, had cynically put it.[29] Unstable minority governments were the order of the day. In fact, the original British sin might have been to help impose an essentially foreign political system on Egypt rather than let one organically and gradually arise from local traditions, even as the British colluded with one local politician after another for their own purposes. Imperialism, often born in chaos, often ends in chaos.
In any case, the Free Officers coup of July 23, 1952, deposed and exiled the king, obliterated the governing institutions, and broke up the political parties, consigning the whole thirty-year experiment in democratic self-rule and all of its many little dramas to oblivion.[30]
And as we know, the process would be repeated in 2013 following the Arab Spring, when the Egyptian military extinguished two years of rapturous liberal hopes and incipient anarchy, amid the incompetent, democratic rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in effect merely resurrected the tyranny of the Nasserite pharaohs. As New Yorker writer Peter Hessler observed, the Free Officers coup in 1952 and the Tahrir Square movement in 2011 “were narrowly political events in a country that needed deep social, cultural, and economic reform.”[31] Truly, Tahrir Square, as intense and intoxicating as it was for those who were there in 2011, was still more of an “outburst” than a program for developing an alternative power structure.[32]
Of course, at the root of all these failures lay the matter of Islam. “Islam always has an answer for us,” an Egyptian journalist in Cairo told me almost forty years ago, in a discussion about the country’s modern history.[33]
It was the frequent appeals to religious passions that had in the period between the two world wars pivotally undermined Egypt’s first democratic experiment—just as it would undermine the second experiment. Zaghlul and others, despite their professed belief in constitutionalism and reform (as inspired by the example of Mohammed Abduh), could not avoid mixing Islam and politics. There is, as it happens, no secularity in the Arab world, as an American diplomat in Cairo told me in the mid-1990s, since religion plays a role in daily life to a degree that the West has not known since the days when it was called Christendom.
Islam as a religion was born in the Arabian peninsula, but Islam as a modern and organized political movement was born in Egypt in the late 1920s with the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, under the leadership of the young Hassan al-Banna. Raised like Saad Zaghlul in the rural Nile Delta, al-Banna was also intellectually formed by the teachings of Mohammed Abduh. But rather than engage in the political process like Zaghlul in order to merge it with Koranic precepts, al-Banna, the rural migrant to the city, worked outside of the system, alienated as he was by the decreasing respect for tradition and morals in a rapidly modernizing country that was being undermined by a noxious attraction to Western secular culture. The Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) actually was more innovative as a class-based, bureaucratic organization than as a theological and philosophical one. Its urban, middle-class origins engendered an economically based hostility to the Coptic Christian and Jewish business communities in Cairo and Alexandria, even as it built a very hierarchical and ultimately effective political structure through a system of five-man cells, similar to early communist and fascist organizations.[34] Again, as in Turkey, we have the phenomenon of modernism—in part, the letting go of rural traditions—as Islam became angrier and more austere as a reaction to urbanization and the mass society it engendered. The networks formed around mosques in poor urban neighborhoods were crucial to this development. This is a detail that Barrington Moore would have rated highly.
It was this bureaucratic structure that made the Muslim Brotherhood a rising force during the country’s first democratic experiment, so that when Nasser and his fellow officers took power in 1952 and wiped out the entire multiparty apparatus, they nevertheless were forced to remain tolerant of the Ikhwan. But the relationship quickly soured because of an Ikhwan assassination attempt on the Egyptian leader in 1954, and as it became obvious that Nasser was unwilling to share power with anybody: for Egypt had returned to its age-old pharaonic system of remote central authority.
Events helped Nasser in this endeavor. After the Suez Crisis of 1956–57, in which he nationalized the Suez Canal and survived an invasion by Israeli, British, and French forces, Nasser—abetted by his down-to-earth, emotional appeal—became the towering face of Arab nationalism and the most popular pan-Arab leader in modern history. Nasser’s tragedy was that driven forward by his own overwhelming charisma, he was compelled to act the part of the Arab savior who would soon liberate Palestine, even as he manifestly lacked the military means to do so. This contradiction in Nasser’s strategy allowed the Israelis to lure him into a war in 1967, in which Egypt lost much of its air force and the entire Sinai Peninsula. Nasser died of a broken heart in 1970, and was replaced by his fellow officer and vice president, Anwar Sadat. Sadat loosened up Nasser’s police state, releasing from prison many of the Muslim Brothers, who then went on to profit from Sadat’s economic liberalization as the new Egyptian leader moved away from the military and ideological reliance on the Soviet Union. Sadat came into his own as a leader worthy of Nasser when he launched a surprise military attack on Israel in 1973 and regained the Suez Canal and part of the Sinai Peninsula. But it was Sadat’s 1977 trip to Jerusalem, followed by his 1979 peace treaty with Israel, that fated him to become an enemy of the Ikhwan. In 1981, a group of radical Muslims assassinated Sadat while he stood on the reviewing stand of a military parade celebrating the 1973 war. Sadat’s replacement, Vice President and Air Force Commander Hosni Mubarak, had the perpetrators arrested and executed, and afterward followed a policy of brutally crushing Islamic radicals. But Mubarak later gave the more moderate elements of the Muslim Brotherhood the freedom to organize and take part in Egypt’s politics—to the degree, that is, that politics existed under Mubarak’s police state.
Nasser with all of his charisma governed Egypt for almost two decades, dying as a failure. Sadat with all of his bold moves—attacking Israel in 1973, making peace with it in 1979—governed for eleven years, before being assassinated. Mubarak with neither Nasser’s charisma, nor Sadat’s imagination and bold moves, nor any charm or political creativity whatsoever, governed for thirty years. Under Mubarak, Egypt discovered a deadening, praetorian stability that eventually shaded into political and economic calcification. Mubarak’s supreme goal and accomplishment was to die peacefully in his bed, without being assassinated. And survival left little room for innovation. When Mubarak was forced to resign in the course of the Arab Spring, the demonstrators at Tahrir Square roared in celebration, as if a great weight had been lifted off their backs and they and their country could breathe again.
But all the while, precisely because it was so well organized and disciplined compared to the spontaneous demonstrators in Tahrir Square, the Muslim Brotherhood was planning how to take advantage of the leadership vacuum that had emerged with Mubarak’s removal.
The Tahrir Square demonstrators got their wish. Democracy returned to Egypt after a hiatus of sixty years. In June 2012, eighteen months after the start of the Arab Spring uprising, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected president of Egypt. But the Ikhwan, though better prepared to wield power than the young idealists in Tahrir Square, was still not ready to govern a country of 86 million people at the time. As the Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoǧlu would discover to his horror upon holding discussions with Morsi, the new Egyptian president was barely qualified and in way over his head. Morsi was stubborn, uninterested in the economy, and gave himself extrajudicial powers. Anarchy started to erode what used to be a completely controlled country, some of it arguably stoked by opponents of the Ikhwan, including the military, who wanted the Ikhwan to fail. There were shortages of water, electricity, and gasoline, even at the airport. Demonstrations now featured broken windows and tear gas. There were gunfights and looting. Vehicles were set afire. Coptic churches were burned. The word azma, “crisis,” became commonly used. “It was hard to believe that two years out of five thousand [in Egypt’s history] could feel so long,” wrote Hessler of The New Yorker.[35] From 2011 to 2013, between Mubarak’s rule and that of his fellow military man al-Sisi, the world media covered Egypt obsessively, believing until near the end that Egypt, despite all the chaos of a political transition, despite the violence, had finally turned a decisive page in its history, bringing a good part of the Arab world along with it. Yet, as we know, Egypt, which lay obscured beyond the media spotlight for decades before 2011, was destined to return to obscurity again. The two years that seemed so exciting and pivotal for close observers of Egypt were merely an interregnum between one pharaonic tyranny and another.
