The Loom of Time, page 15
I told Badrawi that this was the eternal dilemma of the dictator, who creates a bad situation that can only get worse if he leaves office.
“It’s always like that,” Badrawi replied. “We need three things over the long run to escape from this situation: the rule of law, mass education, and sustainable economic policies.”
This led Badrawi to talk about Nasser, the first in the line of Egypt’s secular military dictators, hence Nasserite pharaohs. “Nasser had a chance that nobody else had: to gradually transform Egypt into a democracy that would be the largest market in the Middle East.” But, to repeat, Nasser’s tragedy was his own charisma, which in a country with top-heavy but essentially weak bureaucratic institutions led to dictatorship, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when the third world was in thrall to one-party socialism under the influence of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, and the non-aligned movement, of which Nasser’s Egypt was a leading element. So Nasser, as Badrawi reminded me, “killed the private sector and created monsters” out of public institutions. “I remember my mother hiding her jewelry when the authorities confiscated our property.”
Badrawi continued: “Mubarak started gradual reform, so that the economy was actually growing at seven percent annually at the time of his overthrow.” It is often like that: political upheavals happen not when things are getting worse but when things are getting a little better, and the population is filled with frustrations that are the fruit of rising expectations. The breakneck economic development under the shah that preceded the Iranian Revolution is the most famous and starkest example of this.
Just as Mubarak had predicted, chaos and rule by the Islamists came in his wake. Now the army was back in power with a vengeance. At every major meeting, no matter the subject, the chief of the army or one of his subordinates was present. Al-Sisi saw threats everywhere. After all, there was chaos in neighboring Libya, Islamist guerrilla terrorism in the Sinai Peninsula, the construction of a new dam on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia that threatened Egypt’s water supply. It had been a conspiracy of outside powers, notably the Obama administration, so went al-Sisi’s thinking, that led to the anarchy and extremism of the Arab Spring in Egypt. As for civil society, it was a lax, sagging element as al-Sisi had put it to his advisers, which would lead nowhere. And thus he saw himself as the savior who had gotten rid of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Badrawi repeated: “Rule of law, education, sustainable economic policies that can enlarge the private sector. Only such things will save us.”
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Anis Salem, a former ambassador and high official in the United Nations, was, unlike Ismail Serageldin, a global technocrat whose English was suffused with the buzzwords of the international elite. “What black swans lie in Egypt’s future?” he asked rhetorically about the possibility of unforeseen events. The subject on his mind was the Egyptian military, the state within the state that had ruled Egypt since 1952, except for when the Islamists were in power following the Arab Spring.
“The military has always been Egypt’s premier modern institution that took in vast hordes of lower-middle-class kids, raised them, and educated them. Modernizing militaries take power in weak states where civilian institutions are relatively undeveloped.” This was not a new idea. It had first been propagated by the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in his classic 1968 book, Political Order and Changing Societies. But Ambassador Salem had come to this conclusion on his own, by observing Egypt over the decades.
President al-Sisi, in Salem’s opinion, was the summation of this tendency. The Egyptian president saw the military as the only reliable mobilizing force for developing infrastructure, logistics, irrigation systems, desalinization plants, nuclear power, and so on. This made him more dynamic than Mubarak, who according to a widely held view here moved by inches for thirty years while Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and other countries were developing by leaps and bounds.
The problem, however, according to Salem, was that the military was an extremely inflexible, hierarchical force in a world where flattened hierarchies were best positioned to take advantage of the new digital age. Al-Sisi was only a finite thinker, more at ease with engineers and others who build things than he was with intellectuals and all manner of political types, quite a few of whom snobbishly looked down at the officer corps as the kids not smart enough to get into university. Nasser tragically had had the opportunity to rein in the military and didn’t take it. Nasser ran a country of 25 million whereas al-Sisi had a harder task: to govern over 100 million people, the majority of whom were poor and uneducated. So what to do? For al-Sisi, the answer was wasteful and grandiose infrastructure to unleash development. Build a new capital in the desert. Think of a better superhighway between Cairo and Alexandria, and so on. There was a certain nostalgia in this tendency, a throwback to the nineteenth-century construction of the Suez Canal and the urban planning of downtown Cairo under Mohammed Ali and the khedives. The problem was that the first decades of the twenty-first century were an age of complexity, where a state could only go so far without an educated population and a free media in order to debate and test ideas. Decentralization required efficiency, which Egypt lacked. Salem concluded that in this historical moment, when new technologies were revolutionizing politics worldwide, Egypt had seen the return of the hard, top-down state, with the equivalent of listening devices all through society, willing to go to extremes of repression, unable to enforce even minimum standards of human rights.
I thought of the heavily mobilized military regimes in Iraq and Syria in the early days of Ba‘athist rule. All the differences between those countries and Egypt notwithstanding, it seemed that in the 2020s Egypt was hurtling back into the 1960s and 1970s, but without a political program, and governed less by hope than by fears of an Islamic insurrection. The Arab world, with the extremely tenuous democratic exception of Tunisia for a number of years, had only two types of states, those run by the military and those run by a family.
One opinion that all the people I met held, despite their differences, was that the most positive development in the Middle East at the moment was the dramatic secularization of society ongoing in Saudi Arabia under the auspices of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, which they believed would dramatically dilute the regional menace of extremist political Islam. That is, the educated elite in Egypt saw a hero in a man whom the educated elite in the United States saw as a villain, on account of the barbaric murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of the Saudi crown prince. As one prominent Egyptian warned me, Mohammed bin Salman was liberating Saudi society with one hand while closing it down with the other, adding whole new layers of repressive control. The suffocating national security state was indeed alive and well in the Arab Middle East.
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My interlocutors had been in the main talking of vast impersonal forces reshaping history: technology, demography, hierarchical military orders, confident dictators, and so on. But just as often there is the critical Shakespearean element that shapes history, revolving around the most intimate of family dramas. So it was with Hosni Mubarak.
A longtime Egyptian friend with the best of connections to the Mubarak regime told me this story:
“Every afternoon, Mubarak had set aside an hour to play with, and be with, his beloved grandson, Mohammed. The boy was the light of the Egyptian leader’s life, who was allowed to call Mubarak on his private cell phone. Being with the boy relieved the stress and tension of ruling Egypt for decades on end. The boy returned from school one day with a splitting headache. Then he started to vomit. He was rushed to the military hospital in the suburb of Maadi, south of Cairo. He stayed there only a few hours before being taken to Paris for medical treatment. But he died two days after getting sick, at age twelve, from a brain aneurysm, on May 18, 2009. Mubarak was absolutely devastated. He retreated into himself, utterly distracted, losing interest in his job, as different factions of aides and high officials began to run the country from day to day, while Mubarak spent more time alone at his vacation home in Sharm el-Sheikh. It was as if Egypt suddenly had no president. Thus, the country was drifting. It went on like this until the Arab Spring, nearly two years later.”
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Throughout my stay in Egypt, I deliberately sought out older people because they had visited the past and thus had memories with which to put the current moment of history in perspective. Each encounter was a surprise. I expected to hear one thing and heard another. I expected the conversation to go in one direction and it went in another. Reading before my journey, then layering one conversation atop another was the way that I had always learned. The repetitions were as revealing as the differences in what people said. The combination of books read and voices heard constituted my intellectual adventure. I listened and occasionally argued. But I tried not to judge anyone.
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I hadn’t planned on meeting Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the secretary-general of the Arab League, whose headquarters were in Cairo. But a friend recommended I see him and a meeting was quickly arranged. He was seventy-eight at the time of our encounter, but his voice was crisp and booming, dominating a vast and palatial office, in which several of his aides sat beside him. Aboul Gheit constituted a challenging and formidable life force that put you on your guard. He had seen it all: Nasser’s War of Attrition following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Sadat’s negotiations with Henry Kissinger, Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977, the Camp David Accords, and everything afterwards in which he had had a diplomatic front-row seat.
“Never before in my life have I seen such regional chaos as now,” Aboul Gheit began. “It all started on August 2, 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Then we had a holding action for thirteen years [with the American no-fly zones over Iraq]. But in 2003 came that very, very unwise American military intervention in Iraq, which handed Iraq to Iran on a silver platter. The U.S. is partly responsible for everything bad in the Middle East since then. The Mashriq [Levant]—Syria and Iraq—has been destroyed, the Arab world shattered.”
He went on:
“The Arab Gulf states are what is left. They have money. But they are scared. They need an insurance policy.” His point was that with Syria and Iraq (as well as Libya and Yemen) finished as states, with the Americans less reliable than in the past, with oil diminishing in value because of new energy technologies, and with the future of war concentrated on the cyber-digital realm, the Gulf sheikhdoms discovered an alliance with Israel, a cyber-digital powerhouse, as a partial solution.
But he also asserted with a voice that cut through the room, “It is not true that the Palestinian issue has been sidelined.” I thought momentarily that as Arab League secretary-general he represented all the member states of the Arab world, which still demanded a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and thus he was a prisoner of his bureaucratic position. But it was more than that, I realized, as he continued to lecture me passionately. He just could not foresee a stable region while millions of Muslim Palestinian Arabs remained under Jewish army occupation. It was that simple.
Aboul Gheit returned to the destruction of the Mashriq, which had opened the door to Iranian and Turkish imperialism. He grabbed a Koran and held it in front of my face. “The Koran is not Marxism. This is why there will be no counterrevolution in Iran as there was in the Soviet Union.” Iran, as he saw it, was the danger far into the future, and this spokesman for all the Arab states blamed the United States for allowing Iran into the Mashriq in the first place. (This was before the mass uprising, secular in nature, against the Iranian regime in the autumn of 2022.) As for Turkey, it was the conscious twenty-first-century embodiment of the Ottoman and Eastern Roman empires in his eyes.
Then there was the Arab Spring, which had hit the secular republics of North Africa, Yemen, and Syria harder than the traditional monarchies, because, as he explained, the traditional monarchies had inherent legitimacy so could afford to be less repressive with their populations.
Finally, there were the great powers. “The Chinese and Russian leaders and their delegations come regularly to visit the Arab League, the Americans almost never.”
And the Chinese, he implied, were now helping Egypt return to influence by way of infrastructure development. “We have been weakened, but with the strong hand of [al-Sisi’s] leadership we will return.” Nobody here wanted to hear American lectures about democracy.
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Despite the presence of President al-Sisi on billboards all over Cairo, despite the rules of Mubarak and Sadat that had preceded al-Sisi, many of the people with whom I spoke still had an obsession with talking about Nasser. They couldn’t get Nasser out of their heads. Nasser, though he had died over a half century ago, was present in Egypt in a way that his successors were not. Dr. Ahmed Sameh Farid, a physician and former health minister who had grown up under Nasser, explained the phenomenon to me.
Nasser, he said, offered a fully developed ideology and interpretation of history in a pre-internet age when the Egyptian population was closed off from other political values. In psychological terms, Nasser’s Egypt was near to constituting an East European, Cold War Communist experience. Today, contrarily, there was merely the military in power without an ideology and with other values available online. Nasser’s political ideals, rather than strictly Egyptian, were pan-Arab and anticolonial. Thus, the country was psychologically reoriented from Europe and the West to the Arab world and the East. People had lined the streets to get glimpses of this magnetic leader, “like children waving little flags at Communist Chinese and North Korean rallies.” Nasser truly was the pharaoh. He had given his countrymen dignity. He was rather tall, had a very powerful handshake and absolutely mesmerizing eyes. Crucially, though he first came to power at thirty-four and was dead at fifty-two, he always looked older and more experienced than his years. When the Egyptian masses cried at his funeral in 1970, they were mourning the end of Nasser’s dream of Arab and third world liberation, following the disastrous Six-Day War with Israel three years earlier.
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about a third of all Egyptians lived in poverty and were functionally illiterate, with another 40 percent or so existing in grim, working-class conditions. Thus, al-Sisi felt he had no choice but to drive modest change, partly through taxation, helped by digitalization. Because of the digital revolution, the government had more of an ability to track you, and tax evasion would become more difficult. With the rich and superrich beginning to pay more taxes as they should, al-Sisi was trying to engineer a wealth transfer with slums being eradicated and infrastructure at all levels being improved. This approach was inspired by the Chinese model, which had originally been the Singaporean model. Surveillance was about making internal threats minimal, even as the horrific experience with the anarchic rule by the Muslim Brotherhood inoculated the population against attempting further revolts as in 2011. As one former foreign minister angrily told me, explaining the population’s tolerance for authoritarianism:
“America caused anarchy in Iraq in 2003. America caused anarchy in Egypt in 2011 by supporting the removal of Mubarak and the election of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the name of what? Democracy? We will not risk anarchy again!” More than a decade after the Arab Spring, he and many other Egyptians with whom I spoke still blamed Obama for “naivete toward political Islam” and for treating the 2011–13 period “as just another political crisis that Egyptians would have to work out,” whereas for a large, moderate element of the population, as another diplomat told me, “the crisis was existential and a matter of survival.”
“Egypt today, still in the wake of the semi-anarchy of 2011–2013, is becoming modernized, systematized, more controlled,” a leading businessman described to me. “Al-Sisi is in fight mode, conscious of a race against time; as if he knows that to relax would make him another turgid Mubarak. He is more confrontational and more of a risk-taker than Mubarak. Mubarak committed the fatal error of letting his circle of advisers age alongside him, rather than gradually replace them with younger people and discover new talent. With al-Sisi if you don’t produce, if you’re not sharp, you’re out of his circle. He has no qualms about replacing people close to him. He wants results.”
The American media divides leaders in the developing world into two simplistic categories: dictators and democrats. That misses the point, for there are vast differences between one military strongman and another, as Egypt demonstrates. For much of Washington, Egypt was simply an autocracy going nowhere and of fading relevance. But perhaps that wasn’t altogether true.
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I interviewed a person in al-Sisi’s inner circle for almost two hours, who had an office in the presidential palace. This is some of what that person said:
“The U.S. view of the world is mind-boggling. It says it wants human rights. But in 2011 it supported a fascist organization—guilty of the assassinations of two prime ministers in the late 1940s—that saw women only in terms of reproduction and told schoolchildren to have nothing to do with Coptic Christians. Every notion of cosmopolitanism in Egypt was undone by the Muslim Brotherhood. But the U.S. is driven by a ‘name-and-shame’ so-called human rights mentality towards its friends…
“Egypt is threatened at every corner of its borders. Our border in the west with Libya is almost seven hundred miles long. And Libya has been in chaos [thanks to U.S.-led intervention against the dictator, Muammar Gaddafi]. To the south for many years there was the Islamic Front in Sudan, which tried to assassinate President Mubarak in 1995 in Addis Ababa [the capital of Ethiopia]. To the south of Sudan there is even more chaos in South Sudan…”
