The Loom of Time, page 16
This person then went on to talk about challenges to the east in the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula. But it was Ethiopia that animated the discussion the most. “Water is life. It’s life and death!” said my source emphatically. Egypt depended on the Nile for 97 percent of its water. And about 86 percent of Nile water during the rainy season comes from the Blue Nile, which rises in the Ethiopian highlands.[41] Now the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, completed in 2018 in northern Ethiopia, threatened Egypt’s water supply, by locking up a good portion of that 97 percent of water inside Ethiopia while it was filling the dam. Whereas Egypt needed Nile water for basic existence, Ethiopia needed it to generate electricity in order to light up the country and establish Ethiopia as a modern state. The issue was especially fraught because even the High Dam at Aswan in Upper Egypt, built during Nasser’s time, has proved insufficient to satisfy Egypt’s water needs—especially as Egypt’s population has increased more than fourfold since the 1960s. The Ethiopians began construction of the Renaissance Dam in 2011, when the regime in Addis Ababa sensed weakness in Egypt on account of the Arab Spring and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt presently required a guarantee from Ethiopia that once the new dam filled up, Egypt would still receive enough water flowing north through Sudan during periods of drought. “It was a red line,” my source said, and consequently al-Sisi was “upping” the rhetoric. “The Ethiopian dam is now the top national security priority for Egypt,” I was told.
Al-Sisi’s team felt besieged and unappreciated at the same time. Its military and security relationship with Israel was extremely active and intense. You couldn’t ask for a better bilateral situation, Western diplomats told me. Yet as my source in the presidential palace complained, the U.S. media continued to treat Egyptian-Israeli relations as a “cold peace,” compared to the normalized relations between Israel and the Arab Gulf states. My source in the palace said: “Egypt offers American ships priority passage through the Suez Canal. Our airspace is open. We have proved for over forty years that peace with Israel is sustainable. We are at the forefront with Israel on cooperation regarding natural gas in the Mediterranean. Without the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf states would have less effectiveness and meaning. We are at the core of geopolitics in the Middle East, even though we are taken for granted.”
Furthermore, what Americans did not appreciate was that whereas the Arabian Gulf had always had little to do with Israel, Egypt had fought four major wars with Israel between 1948 and 1973, and was still connected with it through the never-ending crisis in Gaza. It was an emotionally complicated historical relationship, in which significant numbers of Egyptians had been killed over the question of land and security. You couldn’t expect Egyptians to simply, cold-bloodedly, in the way of the corporate-style United Arab Emirates, orchestrate what amounted to an intimate security merger with the Jewish state.
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In all the talk I heard about the various Egyptian regimes, the name Saad Zaghlul was rarely mentioned. Yet, as the historian and liberal party activist Mohammed Aboulghar told me, the Saad Zaghlul period and its aftermath between the two world wars, with all of Zaghlul’s personal faults, “represented the brightest period in modern Egypt, characterized by a free press and optimism about the future.” The Egyptian film industry—the third largest in the world after Hollywood’s and Bombay’s—the great writings of the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, the singing of Umm Kulthum, and the singing and acting of Farid al-Atrash, which together constituted the golden age of Egyptian letters and popular entertainment, had its roots in the pre-Nasser era of which Saad Zaghlul had been a principal figure. But not only did Nasser and the Free Officers significantly erase Zaghlul’s memory, it was the very overwhelming charisma of Nasser himself that made all that had come before him politically largely irrelevant.
Egypt, therefore, suffered a discontinuity in its own understanding of its modern history, Aboulghar explained. Rather than a steady march from the early twentieth century to a more rooted and stable liberal democracy, there had been a sustained period of fragile democracy, followed by iron-fisted military rule mixed with socialist ideology, itself followed by more sterile military dictatorship. That, in turn, gave way to a tumultuous experiment with democracy between 2011 and 2013, influenced by global trends, and which consequently owed little to the earlier period of democratic experimentation, and which ultimately gave way to military rule once more. The key ingredient, according to Aboulghar, for this discontinuity was the Muslim Brotherhood, which arose in the wake of Zaghlul’s death in 1927. The Ikhwan drew its strength from Egypt’s semi-literate and devout peasantry and urban lower-middle classes, and became a force of such power that only the military could control it: thus, the harsh military disruption of democratic progress. As in Turkey, modernism had wrought working classes in the cities that reinvented Islam in more ideological form to meet the challenge posed by mass societies and the anonymity they threatened. Given such tumultuous forces of historical change, of which one must add the odd and decisive Shakespearean element involving individual personalities, how could progress be in a straight line?
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Abdel Moneim Saeed was a leading publisher as well as a director of a Cairo think tank. When I gave him the opportunity to speak on background he told me he preferred to speak on the record. “In this system, you can talk and criticize, as long as you don’t incite.” Whereas Turkey was formally a democracy, I had found that many people there were afraid to talk on the record out of fear of Erdoǧan’s authoritarian methods. Contrarily, Egypt was formally an authoritarian state, where many people I encountered were less afraid.
“It’s hard to be a dictator in the twenty-first century,” Saeed observed. “Because of satellite television, the internet, social media, and the flood of statistics coming from all over about poverty, per capita income, and so on, someone like al-Sisi is constantly under a microscope. Al-Sisi has seen Mubarak and Morsi removed by the street, so he knows it can also happen to him.” Saeed explained that al-Sisi actually operates under several informal checks and balances. “The street, the army underneath him, the immovable bureaucracy, and the rules of international markets all exert pressure on him or limit what he can do. His dictatorship, as you call it, is therefore constrained.”
Saeed was not the first person who told me that al-Sisi was being forced to become a “modernizer.” The Egyptian ruler’s activist style, compared to Mubarak, coupled with the advances of the digital world in the 2020s, was leading him to follow a similar aspirational path as the great Asian modernizers such as Park Chung-hee in South Korea, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, and Mahathir bin Mohammed in Malaysia, all of whom either preceded democracy or at least set a foundation for it by building middle classes and industrial bases. Such men were enlightened or at least dynamic dictators, in other words. Thus, it was not true that Egypt was headed nowhere, as the Washington conventional wisdom had it. To be sure, its path was convoluted, but it was also forward. A more dynamic dictator had followed a less dynamic one, after a democratic false start. And that more dynamic dictator might, in the final analysis, set the stage for a more successful experiment in consultative government. The American elite wanted direct, measurable political progress. But history was far messier, even if it could lead in half circles and zigs and zags toward a better future. “Real change happens in between the big events that the media is obsessed with,” a human rights worker told me. “For example, progress may someday come about from within the military, as a lighter form of autocracy arises out of splits in the ranks.” Such is the indirect way of progress embodied by the Loom of Time.
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Hisham Kassem was a longtime journalist and publisher who did not necessarily contradict Saeed, but did have his own unique perspective. He had been through so much that he was both cynical and passionately committed. He had seen it all. He provided me with a colorful overview of the state of journalism in Egypt over the past century. And he, too, insisted on speaking on the record. Listening to him I realized that even the indirect way of progress is itself particularly convoluted and not so easily accomplished. Indeed, putting Saeed and Kassem together, I realized that the Loom of Time, while not an especially optimistic approach in the minds of Washington’s pro-democracy crowd, might actually be too optimistic for the real world of the Greater Middle East.
“Prior to 1952 there was an independent media,” Kassem began. “It suffered variations in quality and there was always the problem of raising money to start new ventures. It was a mixed bag. But it was free. Nasser, during his first years in power, gradually nationalized the media and disciplined it with intimidation. This was a factor in Egypt’s disastrous counterinsurgency war in Yemen in the 1960s and especially in the 1967 war against Israel. Because there had been no criticism from outside, the military was ruined by a climate of no critical thinking. The military went from constantly claiming great mythical victories and then suddenly being forced to admit abject defeat in the real world.
“Sadat was different,” said Kassem, warming to his subject. “In 1972, by expelling the Soviet advisers, Sadat effected the biggest defection of the Cold War, with Egypt switching sides from the Soviet Union to the United States. But now aligned with the West, Sadat felt he had to open up the society a bit so he abolished censorship. There were now political parties and each party had a publication. It was something like the pre-Nasser era of the early twentieth century.
“Sadat’s assassination in 1981 handed the country over to Mubarak. Mubarak was the caretaker, the chargé d’affaires. He promised himself to hand the country over to the next guy exactly as he had found it. That was his understanding of duty. By the mid-1990s, he had allowed his cronies to publish weeklies. There was also a satellite television channel here, a newspaper there. It was all garbage. Nothing really substantial had happened in the Egyptian media since the decades before the 1952 revolution.
“Then came George W. Bush. In 2004–05, Bush, to his credit, put real pressure on Mubarak for democratic reforms. But the problem was still financing. Influential people still wanted to control media organs.” An enlightened, objective mass media was still far away, Kassem observed.
Kassem explained that the Muslim Brotherhood, which rose to power in the 2011–13 Arab Spring, was just as hostile to a free press as its authoritarian predecessors. “The Muslim Brothers had a short fuse and they were unsophisticated.
“In 2013, in the midst of total chaos, a new and ambitious ruler entered. This guy [al-Sisi] was like a drill sergeant. A critical, undisciplined media was bad for morale, he thought.” Kassem compared the early years of al-Sisi, before al-Sisi became a bit more sophisticated in a public relations sense, to the style of Latin American dictators, “Galtieri, Pinochet,” with his dark sunglasses and uniform.[*5] As for the media, al-Sisi offered media publications a choice. If you didn’t let the intelligence services buy you out or take control, they crushed you.
“Very little of our media now is outside the hands of the various intelligence services,” another source told me. “Worse, there is no criteria for how a journalist can get into trouble or not with the authorities. No rules. So you live in fear. The media, the human rights situation, it’s all disastrous: disappearances, torture, prison sentences. Al-Sisi is reverse engineering the Arab Spring uprisings. He has no ideology, but is a hard worker.” Nobody sleeps at night until we dig that ditch.
The economy was the weak link in this scenario. Nasser stayed in power by controlling the economy. Sadat had the Americans and Saudis to prop him up with money. And for a long time, the Americans propped up Mubarak, too, because Mubarak was loyal to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. But al-Sisi has less and less of that level of support, since for the Americans he is simplistically designated as a human rights embarrassment and little more. As for Egypt’s 5 percent-or-so annual GDP growth, it is artificially induced by government spending rather than by the private sector, and in any case is partially offset by the 2 percent annual population growth. Kassem explained that the real culprit is just how low Egypt rates in international surveys about the ease of doing business in a given country. Only the giant firms that can get meetings with the president or prime minister are able to operate in Egypt with relatively little hassle, because the bureaucracy at the lower and middle levels “is awful”—another aspect of the inadequate educational system.
“The only way out,” Kassem concluded, “is to liberate the economy from top-down military control,” which of course is the last thing al-Sisi would be expected to do.
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Saad Eddin Ibrahim was eighty-two when I met him at his house in a distant suburb of Cairo. Even with a cane, he walked with severe difficulty, and clearly had other health problems, most of which began during his several years in prison in the early 2000s. Ibrahim was the grand old man of democracy and human rights in Egypt: a prolific author and longtime professor at the American University in Cairo; a famous dissident intellectual against the stagnation and brutality of the Mubarak regime. Meeting him and listening to him talk about his country with piercing insight for several hours recalled to me my talks in the 1980s in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, with the great anti-Communist dissident Milovan Djilas, who had predicted the collapse of his own country years in advance of it happening.
Mubarak himself had orchestrated Ibrahim’s imprisonment and exile, as well as the frivolous court cases and smear campaign against him. Mubarak’s hatred of Ibrahim was hot-blooded and personal, since Ibrahim had once been a friend of the Egyptian leader’s family, who had taught Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne, and his son Gamal, at the American University in Cairo. To Mubarak, Ibrahim had betrayed his family. It was that simple. “That stupid man,” Mubarak reportedly said in reference to Ibrahim’s persecution, “he could have had anything he wanted.” That is, if Ibrahim had only been loyal. It was the same situation with Djilas, who had been Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito’s World War II comrade in arms and postwar heir apparent, yet broke with his boss over moral and political issues. Tito, a brilliant Communist leader, at least understood Djilas’s decision, even as he imprisoned and otherwise tried to crush him for it. But Mubarak, a dull and narrow, long-term caretaker of a ruler, had no understanding of why Ibrahim wanted to give up his position and comfortable life situation merely for the sake of principles. And it wasn’t as if Ibrahim in the early 2000s was advocating for Mubarak’s overthrow. Back then, Ibrahim only wanted Egypt to liberalize and become a place of enlightened authoritarianism, like Oman for example.
What had specifically got Ibrahim in trouble was an essay he had published in a Saudi weekly on June 30, 2000, in which he speculated that Mubarak was quietly grooming his son Gamal to succeed him. Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad had died only three weeks earlier, and had been succeeded by his son Bashar. In a way like Syria, Ibrahim argued, Egypt would become half a republic (jumhuria) and half a monarchy (almalakia), that is, in an Arabic word Ibrahim invented, a jumlukia. The regime quickly dispatched Ibrahim to prison.
Ibrahim coolly assessed Mubarak’s rule for me. “Mubarak did a great service to the country during his first decade in power [1981–91]. He calmed a nation that was on the brink of conflict after Sadat’s assassination, and got the economy back on track. His second ten years there were lots of promises but no delivery, and his last ten years were a disaster, when Egyptians became humiliated on account of the stagnation.”
It was a typical story. A dictator at first contemplates liberal change. In the early period of his rule, Mubarak had even dispatched Ibrahim to Mexico to study how that country was transitioning to democracy. But as the dictator realizes just how much risk such liberalization entails, he retreats back into his authoritarian shell. As he ages, it dawns on him that there is no trustworthy mechanism for a succession—one that would protect his family and their wealth—so he decides eventually on a pseudo-monarchy. “Any president of Egypt does well at the beginning—Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak, al-Sisi. But given enough time, no ruler does well,” Ibrahim said.
The Arab Spring that eventually toppled Mubarak would itself prove a disappointment, a betrayal even. Ibrahim explained that it is actually quite common for revolutions to be hijacked. The Russian Revolution was hijacked by the Bolsheviks and the Iranian Revolution by the Islamic clergy. The French Revolution had its reign of terror and later military rule by Napoleon. The American Revolution was really an evolution that owed much to British constitutional practices of the century before, thus it was spared this fate.[42] So it did not come as a great surprise to Ibrahim that the Arab Spring in Egypt would be hijacked, too.
It was the Arab Spring that brought Ibrahim back to Egypt from exile in the United States. On the plane from New York to Cairo the pilot announced that Mubarak had just stepped down. The Egyptian passengers surrounded the dissident hero Ibrahim and erupted in cheers. But as he later surveyed Tahrir Square in person he became worried. “There were no leaders, no platform. Enthusiasm is no substitute for rule.” Hence, he wrote a column about the danger of the revolution being hijacked. A decade after the Arab Spring, with the Islamists followed by the dictator al-Sisi in power, Ibrahim told me:
“The Muslim Brotherhood never dissolves. It is always in reserve, a civilian army with the same disciplined hierarchy as the military. What keeps the military in power now is not so much the memory of Ikhwan rule, but the memory of the anarchy that accompanied it.”
