Shifting Sands

by Raja Shehadeh

  However, there were even more difficult questions to deal with. Some of these were historical. When did the revolution end? Did it end with Mubarak’s step-down? With the constitutional amendments? With the parliamentary elections? With the presidential elections? And given that we are constantly attending funerals of friends and loved ones, running from one police station to another looking for friends who have been arrested, and participating in demonstrations and sit-ins to demand the release of our comrades – given all this, did the revolution actually end, or is it still going on?

  Most difficult of all were questions not about when and how the revolution ended, if it ever did, but when it began and where it originated. Was it launched on 25 January, National Police Day, when we took to the streets to protest against the endemic use of torture in prisons and other places of detention? Or did it begin on 14 January, when Ben Ali, the Tunisian president fled his country to Saudi Arabia, inspiring people in Egypt to say, ‘If the Tunisians can do it, then maybe we can too.’ Or was its beginning on New Year’s Eve 2010, when Muslims and Copts took to the streets to protest against what they believed was their government’s complicity in the bombing of churches? Or a few months earlier, with the beating to death of the young Alexandrian activist Khaled Said, who later became the icon of the revolution? Did it start in 2008, when thousands took to the streets all over the country in solidarity with the striking workers in the industrial town of Mahalla? Or were its origins in 2004 with the birth of the Kefaya [Enough] Movement, whose members were protesting, week in and week out, against Mubarak’s dictatorial rule? Did it start in March 2003, when we took to the streets protesting against the US bombing of Iraq and when we occupied Tahrir for a few hours? Or did it begin in March 2000, when the Israeli prime minister paid his ill-fated visit to al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, prompting thousands of Egyptian university students to spill out of their university gates and to demonstrate in solidarity with the Second Palestinian Intifada?

  My colleagues on the committee and I pondered these questions, and even more difficult ones. During the last of his long years in office, were we demonstrating against Mubarak for grooming his son to take over the presidency and effectively transform the republic into a monarchy? Were we demonstrating against the endemic use of torture by the Egyptian police? Were we demonstrating against the debased choice that Mubarak presented us with whereby he was effectively telling us, ‘Either accept my torture chambers or Islamist rule’?

  Or did our revolution have deeper roots still? Was it in fact a revolution not only against Mubarak’s thirty black years, but against the July Regime set down sixty years earlier in the wake of the 25 July 1952 revolution? That revolution offered us another debased choice: giving up our constitutional and political rights in exchange for social and economic rights. Were we rebelling to assert our entitlement to have both kinds of rights: constitutional and political, as well as social and economic? When we took to the streets on 25 January 2011, and when we finally overwhelmed the police by our numbers, determination and tenacity on 28 January, the Friday of Rage, were we doing what we, as Egyptian people, should have done in the wake of the catastrophic defeat of 6 June 1967, when, instead of asking then President Gamal Abdul Nasser to step down and face trial, we actually begged him to rescind his resignation and stay on as uncontested leader of the nation?

  Or was it possible that our revolution had even deeper roots? Were we protesting against the very nature of the modern Egyptian state, a state that was put in place by Mehmed Ali in 1805? When this Macedonian adventurer set about changing the status of Egypt from a mere province of the Ottoman Empire to a special realm that he and his sons could rule for a hundred years, he founded an army that would dominate all aspects of Egyptian life and change the nature of the country for ever. Were we specifically rebelling against the state that was created as a result of establishing this army, an army which enslaved peasants by dragging them against their wishes to serve dynastic interests that made no sense to them, to struggle for a cause in which they did not believe and to die in wars that were not theirs?

  These are the questions that I found myself pondering when I set about chairing the committee that was to document the 25 January revolution. And they made me see that we Egyptians were revolting not only against Mubarak and his cronies, but against this state which, to paraphrase Marx, came dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with dirt and blood. The modern Egyptian state was not founded on the flimsiest notion of constitutionalism or the rule of law. We entered into no social contract that tied us to our ruler, who descended upon us with his cronies like vultures ravaging town and country. This is a state that has repeatedly failed its citizens, is inherently despotic and is suffering from a foundational legitimacy crisis.

  For the past two hundred years, we have not spared any effort in rebelling against this tyrannical state. In contrast to what we are told in our schools, we did not revolt only against foreign invaders, be they French or British. We also resisted this domestic leviathan by every means at our disposal.

  In 1821, and in the wake of higher taxation, more frequent corvée (forced labour) levies, a draconian monopolies policy and, above all, an unprecedented conscription policy, Egyptian peasants revolted in a massive popular uprising in the south, which spread from Qina to Aswan and in which 20,000 men and women participated, resulting in the death of 3,000 peasants. The following year, an equally large uprising spread in the Delta and was quelled by six machine guns commanded by Mehmed Ali in person. In 1844 another large uprising erupted in Menoufiya in the Delta, where government warehouses were set on fire and the pasha’s agents taken hostage. There were also cases where peasants were reported to have uprooted the cotton plants from their fields, despite the fact that, cotton being a lucrative cash crop, this extreme act would have cost them dearly. In 1863 a large uprising again erupted in the south, in the same area as the uprising forty years earlier.

  In 1879–82 Egyptians from a wide range of social, economic and political backgrounds rose up in a nationwide revolution under Ahmed Urabi with the aim of subjecting this leviathan state to constitutional rule, defining the rights and responsibilities of the Khedive, the monarchial ruler, separating his purse from the public purse and putting limits on his power. The revolution was on the cusp of succeeding, before it was aborted by blatant European intervention. On 11 July 1882 the British navy, answering the Khedive’s call for help in confronting this constitutional movement, bombarded Alexandria and succeeded in defeating Urabi’s troops, thereby inaugurating a military occupation that would last seventy-odd years.

  The British occupation dissipated our revolutionary energies and we now found ourselves having to fight for constitutional rights and for independence at the same time. Three and a half decades after the defeat of Urabi’s army and the landing on Egyptian soil of British troops, we rose in one massive revolution in 1919, asking for both independence and a constitution. However, the much-anticipated liberation from occupation fell far short of the revolution’s expectations, for in 1922 the British handed Egypt a truncated independence that allowed British troops to stay on Egyptian soil and deprived Egypt of the right to shape its own foreign policy. More seriously, the British interfered in the constitution-writing process, with the result that the 1923 Constitution was tilted towards the palace and gave the crown significant powers that enabled it to dominate parliament.

  The so-called golden age of Egypt’s liberalism, 1923–52, was neither golden nor liberal. With the British maintaining their grip over our country, with a king using constitutional licence to dissolve parliament at will and with political parties failing to develop strategies to defeat either the colonial occupier or local tyranny, the moment was ripe for us to take to the streets and for mass politics to surface.

  This political stalemate was eventually broken in 1952, when Gamal Abdul Nasser and his junta staged a coup that abolished the monarchy, suspended parliamentary politics, persecuted all major politi
cal players of the ancien régime, rounded up thousands of communists and sent them to remote prisons, and arrested tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members and subjected them to horrifying torture. Those of us who were not tortured, imprisoned or exiled found ourselves marching in unison behind our leader straight to a dark abyss. Following the June 1967 War, we rose again and protested against the lenient sentences that those responsible for this catastrophic defeat had received. A couple of years later, our universities burst at the seams with demonstrations against a seemingly indecisive policy towards our erstwhile foreign enemy, Israel. In 1977 we took to the streets again in massive numbers against the government’s economic austerity measures. Nine years later, our brethren in the Central Security Forces rose in one massive uprising against the draconian conditions of their conscription. And fourteen years later we took to the streets in large numbers protesting against Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s visit to al-Haram al-Sharif, bringing us back full circle to the immediate causes of the 25 January revolution.

  Far from being a Facebook phenomenon, a foreign conspiracy or an insurrection staged by a handful of street urchins, as members of the current regime insist in their phantasmagorical delusions, our revolution has a long and venerable pedigree. We the people have been in a state of constant rebellion for the past two hundred years, and 25 January was but the latest phase of our struggle to force the tyrannical state to serve us, instead of we serving it.

  Why has it proved so difficult for us to end our status as subjects in our own country and to force our state to treat us as citizens? Five reasons stood, and still stand, in the way of democracy in Egypt and indeed in the whole of the Arab world.

  First, our colonial past and post-colonial present show that, despite their deafening rhetoric, Western powers have not spared any effort to thwart our struggle for democracy. As noted above, the British not only crushed our first constitutional movement in 1881–2, but also made sure to distort our second attempt when they intervened in the writing of the 1923 Constitution to tip the balance in favour of their pliant client king and against the nascent parliament. When Britain’s moment in the Middle East came to an end and the United States took over as the global superpower, Washington did not miss an opportunity to support our dictators, just as it did in neighbouring countries.

  Second, not only has the century-long Arab–Israeli conflict sapped our energy and diverted precious resources, but our despots have also used it cynically to postpone indefinitely democratic reforms. ‘No call to top the call for battle’ was a slogan deployed domestically to silence all calls for accountability, transparency and civic participation. Moreover, our struggle with Israel necessitated the expansion of the military, and when this military failed in its mission at the borders, it diverted its energies to the domestic sphere and transformed itself into a mighty economic and political player that rightly saw democracy as inimical to its interests.

  Third, the scourge of petro-dollars meant that the oil-rich despotic regimes of the Gulf could interfere in our country and support anti-democratic forces. The success of the counter-revolution following 30 June 2013 could not be understood without factoring in the billions of dollars that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE paid the new Egyptian regime under General Sisi.

  Fourth, the tragedy of our current revolution also lies in our inability to look back to our modern history and choose a moment that we would like to resurrect. We have no ‘reset button’ that we can press to jump-start our history; no one specific dark moment that we can simply wish away; no isolated anomalous period that we would like to suppress; no imagined golden age in which we can claim we shaped our destiny and to which we want to return.

  Fifth, and to make things even more difficult, the tragedy of our country now, and indeed of other Arab Spring countries, is that in attempting to tame this domestic leviathan, we in Egypt, Libya and Syria find that we have opened another Pandora’s box, that of political Islam. For we find ourselves asking not only what the role of the army in the state should be but also what role religion should play in politics. This, in turn, has opened up all kinds of deep existential questions that we as Egyptians and Arabs have been struggling with for the past hundred years.

  Despite these deep problems, I remain confident that the future is ours and that our revolution will prevail. This may not happen next month, next year or even in the next decade. Given how deep are the roots of and reasons for this revolution, it would be naive to expect its victory overnight with one decisive knockout blow. Nevertheless, and despite the recent gains by the counter-revolution, I am firmly convinced that the future is ours and that we are now witnessing the beginning of the end of this tyrannical state.

  My optimism derives from two simple but profound facts. The first is that we the people have asserted our presence in our own country. We have a will; we have a voice; and we have agency. We acted in history and affected a radical change – never before in our long history that extends far back to the pharaohs have we managed to topple a leader from power. In the January revolution we did that, and we thus asserted our right and determination to shape our own destiny.

  We have also prised open the black box of politics. Politics is no longer what government officials, security agents or army officers decide among themselves. It is also no longer what university students demonstrate about, what workers in their factories struggle about or young men in mosques whisper about. Politics is now the stuff of gossip in coffee shops, of housewives’ chats, of metro conversations, even of pillow talk. People now see the political in the quotidian. The genie is out of the bottle and no amount of repression can force it back in.

  CRACKED CAULDRONS: THE FAILURE OF STATES AND THE RISE OF NEW NARRATIVES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  Tamim al-Barghouti

  IN THE ARAB MIDDLE EAST, colonially created modern nation-states have failed in performing their most basic functions, the Hobbesian imperatives for which humans invented states in the first place, preventing civil war or foreign invasion, let alone fostering economic development, social welfare or human rights. In the past few decades, their resounding failure has led to the emergence of new forms of political organisation, based on sub-state and supra-state identities where narratives are replacing structures, networks are replacing hierarchical pyramids, conviction is replacing obedience, improvisation from the peripheries is replacing central planning, and ideas, for better or for worse, are replacing leaders.

  This fading away of the colonially created modern Arab nation-state, and its replacement with ethnic, religious and ideological identities, is a process that can express itself in terms of peaceful democratic uprisings, as in Egypt and Tunisia, or in sectarian or tribal civil wars, as in Libya and Syria. The likelihood of civil war increases if the concerned Arab society is divided along ethnic or sectarian lines and if there are regional and international interests supporting both sides of such divides. Yet these are wars of attrition in which no one party can claim definite victory. Eventually, after civil wars exhaust their parties, the political drive to unite divided societies will enhance the calls to face the historical common enemy, hence recreating a unifying discourse/narrative/identity. Therefore, one can safely argue that, if no peaceful resolution is found to the Arab–Israeli conflict, within the coming two decades a major war between Israel and an array of Middle Eastern entities, state and non-state actors alike, is likely to take place.

  Modern Arab states failed on their own terms; they did not reach the benchmarks they set for themselves. Regime after regime, leader after leader, ruling party after ruling party, claimed that they had to sacrifice democracy for economic progress, individual human rights for collective independence, and political change for peace and stability, yet they ended up without stability, peace or independence, instead wallowing in foreign domination, domestic despotism, civil war, poverty, underdevelopment and a painful loss of dignity at all levels of human existence. The image of the mighty military dictator waving to the cheering c
rowds has become nothing more than a real-life caricature seen by the whole world except by the dictator himself. The dictator’s confident sunglasses, his exuberant brass medals and the headgear that expresses his identity crisis as it varies from the traditional keffiyeh to the European hat to the military peaked cap adorned with gold no longer conjure up the intended awe. Instead, they remind the spectators of sixty years of military defeats against Israel, of the hundreds of thousands of infants who died during the American twelve-year-siege and subsequent occupation of Iraq, of the Lebanese, the Syrian, the Algerian, the Sudanese and the Yemeni civil wars, of ragged beggars in the streets of Egypt and the bloodstained walls in Egyptian torture chambers.

  This failure of the modern Arab states is structural. It is my argument that the reasons for such failure lie in their colonial origin. It is much less costly for an invading power to control a colonised territory through the collaboration of a group of natives than to control it directly. To perform this duty, this native elite must have two qualities: legitimacy among their own people and the desire to collaborate with the foreign colonial power. So native leaders must be national heroes for their treason to be of any value. If they lacked legitimacy, they would have to rely on sheer force, just like the foreign colonial invaders, thus losing their comparative advantage; if they lacked the will to collaborate, there would be no point in employing them to secure colonial interests. The native elite running the colonially created state thus finds itself in a predicament: it has to acquire domestic legitimacy by opposing the colonial power and has to achieve international recognition by collaborating with that power. To solve this contradiction, the native elite commits itself to securing colonial interests with native hands; the international treaties documenting such commitments then constitute the legal basis for independence. Thus dependence becomes the precondition for independence and servitude the precondition for sovereignty.