On the State of Egypt: A Novelist's Provocative Reflections

by Alaa Al Aswany

  I do not have space here to enumerate the dozens of examples of the constant attempts by some Arabs to humiliate Egyptians and denigrate their role and their influence, from the way Egyptians in the Gulf have been subjected to the slavery of the ‘sponsorship’ system, mistreated, and denied their rights; to the way big production companies have often been set up specifically to exclude or marginalize Egyptian talent; and finally to the cultural competitions and festivals held annually at a cost of millions of dollars merely to prove that Egypt is no longer at the forefront of culture and art. All of these are of course desperate, abortive, and ineffective endeavors, first because despite Egypt’s difficult circumstances these petty people cannot detract from Egypt’s status, and second because Egyptians, an Arab people, cannot deny their Arab identity or dissociate themselves from their Arab brothers, whatever the circumstances.

  Third, the Egyptian regime’s cooperation with Israel—providing it with gas and cement and taking part in the blockade of Palestinians by closing the Rafah border crossing—are mistaken and dishonorable policies unacceptable first and foremost to Egyptians, who have demonstrated daily in solidarity with their brothers in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon. In fact many Egyptians have paid a high price for their Arab nationalist attitudes. Most recently well-known journalist Magdy Ahmed Hussein, who traveled to Gaza in solidarity with the Palestinians under blockade there, was arrested by the Egyptian authorities and sentenced to two years in jail by a military court. The Egyptian regime’s position toward Israel does not at all represent the position of the Egyptian people and cannot be used as a pretext to attack and insult Egyptians.

  Fourth, the attack on Egyptians in Khartoum was a form of state terrorism in which the Algerian regime was implicated, abetted by the negligence and corruption of the Egyptian regime and its inability to protect Egyptians. A whole week passed after the crime was committed without the Egyptian regime taking a firm and decisive position. Those who expect President Mubarak to restore the lost dignity of Egyptians will have a long wait. What has President Mubarak done for the hundreds of Egyptians detained in Saudi Arabia? What has he done for the Egyptian doctors sentenced to be flogged there? What has he done for the Egyptians tortured in Kuwait? What has President Mubarak done for the Egyptian soldiers killed by Israel on the border, or for the families of the Egyptians whom Israel admits it massacred in war? The answer is always: nothing. Egyptians have lost their rights at home and abroad. Why did the Egyptian authorities allow the Algerian player, Lakhdar Belloumi, to escape after he committed a horrendous crime in Cairo, seriously injuring an innocent Egyptian doctor? Would Belloumi have been allowed to escape if he had committed the crime in a respectable democratic country? Would the series of Algerian attacks on Egyptians have continued if Belloumi had been arrested in Egypt and put on trial?

  The rights of citizens are enforced only in a democratic system. The only concern of despotic regimes is to retain power by any means and at any price. The ruler who usurps power, oppresses his people, and falsifies the will of the people at election time cannot convince anyone when he talks about the dignity of citizens. The crime of insulting and humiliating Egyptians in this disgusting way cannot be allowed to pass without question or punishment. If the Egyptian regime is unable to hold the criminals to account, it is the duty of us all as Egyptians to put pressure by all means available on the Algerian regime until it makes an official apology to the Egyptian people and arrests the Algerians who attacked Egyptians and puts them on trial. We should never repay one offense with another and we should not confuse the great Algerian people with the despotic Algerian regime responsible for this crime. But the time has come for everyone to understand that from now on attacking Egyptians will not be easy or without consequences, not at all. Insisting that those who offended our dignity be punished in no way contradicts our pan-Arab commitment, because good stories, as the French proverb says, always make for good friends, and fraternal relations between the Algerian and Egyptian peoples can come about only through respect for the rights of all Egyptians and Algerians.

  Democracy is the solution.

  November 22, 2009

  The Importance of Being Human

  Imagine you’re a westerner from Sweden, France, or the United States. Would you rather spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve at home or would you like to spend it lying on the asphalt in the streets of Cairo? The first option is the natural choice because every human being likes to spend the holidays in comfort and respect with his family. But the second option is what fourteen hundred peace-loving foreign activists from forty-two different countries around the world chose to do. They came to Egypt to declare their full solidarity with the Palestinians under blockade in Gaza, bringing them all the food and medicine they could carry. At first the Egyptian authorities agreed to allow the activists in, but when they arrived in Cairo the authorities suddenly decided to stop them from going to Gaza. When the activists protested, the government tried to distract them by offering them free tourist trips. The activists turned these down and insisted on sending the food and medicine to the Palestinians. At that point the Egyptian police attacked them, dragged them along the ground, and beat them brutally. These unfortunate events are significant in more than one way.

  First, these foreign activists are intellectuals, writers, artists, and professionals. Each one of them enjoys a dignified life in his or her own country, and some have reached old age, a stage of life when they need rest. But they all share an active humanitarian conscience that makes them refuse to stand by and watch the intentional starvation of a million and a half Palestinians in Gaza. The Israelis’ tight blockade has lasted more than two years, having been set up after a massacre in which Israel used internationally prohibited weapons to kill fourteen hundred people, most of them civilians. These chivalrous people who came from their countries to defend the rights of our people in Palestine are merely a sample of those in the West who love peace and justice. They are the people who demonstrate against racism, the brutality of capitalism, globalization policies, and the destruction of the environment by big industrial companies. They are the ones who came out in their millions to protest against the U.S. attack on Iraq. Even if they have not yet succeeded in influencing the decision makers in their governments, they are part of a broad movement that is growing in strength and popularity day by day.

  Second, the lesson these activists teach is that our primary duty is to defend the oppressed anywhere and that our sense of being part of humanity takes precedence over any other affiliation. The question here is: Do any of us feel primarily Muslim, Christian, or Arab, or do we consider ourselves to be humans before anything else? The true answer is not contradictory because all religions aim to defend the major human values—justice, truth, and freedom—but the moment we consider ourselves superior to others on grounds of religion or race we quickly descend into hatred and chauvinism. In the same week that these foreigners arrived with aid for the children of Gaza, extremists in Egypt made several deplorable statements warning Egyptian Muslims not to join their Christian compatriots in Christmas celebrations. This illustrates two incompatible views of the world, one tolerant, defending the rights of all humanity without discrimination, and the other extremist, hating and despising those who are different and refusing to recognize their rights. Most of those foreign activists were Christians, and some Jews, but they strongly opposed Israel’s criminal policies. An eighty-five-year-old woman in a wheelchair by the name of Hedy Epstein was among them—a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. In spite of her old age and her deteriorating health she insisted on herself carrying food and gifts for the children of Gaza. Perhaps this noble example of human solidarity should make us pause before we are carried away by the extremist idea that all Christians and Jews, without exception, are the enemies of Islam and of Muslims.

  Third, the brutal attack on these activists by some Egyptian policemen was filmed by dozens of cameras and can now be seen across the world on the Internet. I myself sa
w a video recording in which an Egyptian officer is seen pulling a European woman along the ground by the hair, then beating and kicking her with his fists and his feet. In this way the Egyptian regime proves that it will no longer hesitate to commit any crime in order to please Israel so that Israel puts pressure on the U.S. administration to accept President Mubarak’s son, Gamal, as his successor. The Egyptian media is still repeating lies to justify the crime of the steel wall along the border with Gaza, a wall that will eliminate the Palestinians’ last chance of getting food and medicine. Every day sycophants from the ruling National Democratic Party come out and tell us that the steel wall is essential and that the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza are used to smuggle drugs and Russian prostitutes (!). This pathetic line no longer convinces anyone. The reputation of the Egyptian regime, in the Arab world and internationally, has never been worse than it is now. The phrase “the Egyptian government’s connivance with Israel in the blockade of Gaza” now rings loud in the international media, and the attack on the foreign activists shows that Arab governments are completely in the grip of Zionist influence. If these foreigners who were dragged along the ground and beaten in Cairo had been assaulted in any way under normal circumstances, their embassies would have sent representatives and lawyers immediately and would have done everything they could to assert their rights. But this time they were engaged in overtly anti-Israeli activities and so their embassies in Cairo kept their silence. In fact, western governments, which make such an outcry when demonstrators are suppressed in China or Iran (or in any country that adopts anti-western policies), did not utter a single word as their citizens were dragged along the streets of Cairo, for the simple reason that the activists were protesting against Israel, which no western politician can upset with impunity.

  Lastly, the embarrassing question remains. If these foreigners have traveled thousands of miles and left their comfortable lives behind in order to save the children of Gaza from the blockade, what have we Egyptians done? It is true that all Egyptians fully sympathize with our brethren in Gaza, but the reaction in the streets of Egypt falls far short of what it should be. Why don’t millions of Egyptians go out on the streets to press the regime to break the blockade of Gaza? There are several reasons, and the first is oppression. In democratic countries people have the right to demonstrate to express their opinions. Demonstrations there receive police protection. But in Egypt, a country ravaged by despotism, anyone who demonstrates is liable to detention, beatings, and torture by State Security.

  Another factor is that many leading opinion makers in Egypt are in connivance with the government or afraid to upset it. So when the foreign activists were being beaten by riot police and shouting “Freedom for Gaza,” Egyptian opposition parties kept a telling silence and the Muslim Brotherhood confined itself to condemning the wall in parliament without organizing a single protest in the street. It seems that for the Muslim Brotherhood, organizing a demonstration is an extremely difficult operation subject to complex considerations that no one can any longer understand. Egyptians have been surprised by official rulings that building the steel wall to strangle the Palestinians is legitimate under Islamic law coming from members of the Islamic Research Institute, the grand sheikh of al-Azhar, the mufti of the republic, and the minister of religious endowments. As for the sheikhs of the Salafist groups, they have expressed full solidarity with the people of Gaza but strictly forbidden their followers to demonstrate. They say that demonstrations would be of no use because they would not change anything, and because they would include women not wearing the hijab. This defeatist logic, with its confused priorities, explains why the Egyptian regime is always lenient toward the Salafist sheikhs, who are always so strict about the details of worship and physical appearance but know their limits well in political matters. Egyptians, like the Palestinians, are completely surrounded by a steel wall of despotism, injustice, and repression, a wall that is strangling them and depriving them of their most basic human rights. The wall is the same, the distress is the same, and the deliverance is also the same.

  Democracy is the solution.

  January 5, 2010

  Who Killed the Egyptians on the Religious Holiday?

  In 1923 a committee was formed to draw up the first Egyptian constitution, but the Wafd (the majority political party at the time) announced it would boycott the committee because it had been set up by appointment rather than through free elections. The committee nonetheless included some of the best minds in Egypt and witnessed an elevated political and intellectual debate about the articles proposed for the Egyptian constitution. Some people argued vociferously in favor of proportional representation for the Copts, so that Copts would always have a certain percentage of the seats in parliament and on local councils. This proposal soon became a major national issue. Those who favored proportional representation wanted fair treatment for the Copts and hoped to avert the possibility of British intervention in Egypt on the pretext of protecting minorities. Those who opposed it refused to view the Copts as a religious minority rather than as Egyptian citizens who should be judged solely by their ability.

  The surprising thing is that most of those who opposed proportional representation were Copts. Besides Dr. Taha Hussein, a Muslim, the opponents included Salama Mousa, the intellectual, Professor Aziz Merhom, who collected the signatures of five thousand Copts opposed to the proposal, Father Boutrus Abdel Malik, the chairman of the Church’s General Congregational Council, and the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church and many other Copts. In the end the proposal was defeated and Copts won one of the greatest battles in our modern history by refusing to accept sectarian privileges under any guise. I recalled that battle when I was reading about the horrific Nag’ Hammadi massacre in which seven Copts were shot dead as they were coming out of church at Coptic Christmas. The question is: Why, seventy years ago, did Copts refuse to accept any sectarian privileges and why are they now being massacred on Christmas Day at church doors? In my opinion these are some of the reasons for the crisis:

  First, Egyptian history shows that sectarian strife spreads during times of national frustration. At the beginning of the twentieth century Egyptians went through a phase of despair because of the British occupation and this soon turned into a shameful bout of sectarian conflict (British fingers meddled, as usual), which reached its peak between 1908 and 1911. But as soon as the 1919 uprising happened, everyone united behind it. In fact some Copts, such as Father Sergius, had been advocates of conflict but at the time of the uprising became the fiercest defenders of national unity. There is plenty of frustration, repression, poverty, and injustice in Egypt now, and all these factors push Egyptians toward sectarian hostility, just as they push Egyptians toward violence, crime, and sexual harassment.

  Second, in 1923, when Copts rejected sectarian privileges, despite the British occupation Egypt was fighting to set up a democratic secular state in which all citizens would be equal before the law. There was a tolerant Egyptian reading of Islam, the foundations of which were laid by the reformist imam, Mohamed Abduh (1849–1905), who was able to liberate the minds of Egyptians from superstition and extremism. Egypt witnessed a true renaissance in all spheres of activity, such as education for women, theater, cinema, and literature. But since the end of the 1970s, Egypt has come to know another understanding of Islam: the extreme Salafist Wahhabi ideology that Egyptian jurists have termed “the law of the Bedouin.” Several factors contributed to the spread of the Wahhabi ideology, primarily the rise in oil prices after the 1973 war, which gave Salafist organizations unprecedented financial resources that they used to propagate their ideas in Egypt and the rest of the world. Then millions of Egyptians went to work in the Gulf states and came back years later steeped in Wahhabi ideas. This ideology also spread under the proven sponsorship of Egyptian state security agencies, which always treated Salafist sheikhs with great tolerance—the opposite of the severe repression to which they subject the Muslim Brotherhood. The reason for this is that Sa
lafist Wahhabism helps to underpin despotic government, as it urges Muslims to obey the ruler and forbids rebellion against him as long as he remains Muslim. The problem is that Wahhabi ideas convey a vision that is hostile to civilization in the true sense of the word, because if they prevailed, art would be haram, along with music, singing, cinema, theater, and literature, too. The Wahhabi ideology imposes on women seclusion behind the face-veil or the Turkish burka, which Egyptian women threw off a hundred years ago. It states clearly that democracy is haram because it means government by the people while the Wahhabis want to apply God’s law (in the way they want, of course).

  The gravest aspect of the Salafist Wahhabi ideology is that it completely undermines the concept of citizenship. In Wahhabis’ eyes, Copts are not citizens but dhimmis (protected non-Muslims), a defeated and subordinate minority in a country conquered by Muslims. They are also seen as infidels and polytheists prone to hating Islam and conspiring against it. It is forbidden to celebrate their religious holidays or help them build churches because these are not places of worship but places where polytheism is practiced. In the view of the Wahhabis, Christians cannot hold office or lead armies, which implies that they have no loyalty to the nation. Anyone who follows the portrayal of Copts on dozens of satellite channels and Salafist websites is bound to be saddened. These forums, followed by millions of Egyptians daily, openly declare their hatred of Copts and contempt for them. Often they call on Muslims to boycott them. There are countless examples, but I will cite here what I read on the well-known Salafist website, “Guardians of the Faith,” which devoted a whole article to the subject, “Why Muslims Are Superior to Copts.” “Being a Muslim girl whose role models are the wives of the Prophet, who were required to wear the hijab, is better than being a Christian girl, whose role models are whores,” it says. “Being a Muslim who fights to defend his honor and his faith is better than being a Christian who steals, rapes, and kills children,” it adds. “Being a Muslim whose role models are Muhammad and his companions is better than being a Christian whose role models are Paul the Liar and the whoremongering prophets.” As this enmity toward Copts spreads, is it not natural, even inevitable, that it should end in attacks on them?