by Bruce Feiler
Poor Egypt, the past hangs over it like a triangle cloud. Everywhere you go, you encounter some manifestation of the country’s erstwhile glory. The hundred-pound note has the Sphinx on its face. EgyptAir’s logo is the eagle-headed god, Horus. Even Qasr al-Nil Bridge now has two obelisks behind those bronze lions. For every time an American encounters the Founding Fathers in the course of a week, an Egyptian confronts twice as many reminders of ancient Egypt—every day.
Part of this is simply a matter of branding. The trophies of Egypt’s past are the country’s most recognizable symbols. Related to that, part of it is economic. Tourism provides 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and supports at least 20 percent of the population. If you do what Mom says and put your best face forward, Egypt’s best face is the Sphinx. Another part is pride. Egypt was the great superpower of antiquity, and a little reminder of that erstwhile grandeur helps boosts the ego when you’re driving on dirty streets and breathing dingy air. The entire Middle East performs this kind of retroactive confidence grab, from the Saudis with Mecca to the Jordanians with Petra to the Iranians with Persepolis. After the Iranian Revolution, an ambitious general tried to raze the ruins of Cyrus the Great because they were pre-Islamic. Even Ayatollah Khomeini stopped him. Any mark of past glory holds out hope that future glory is possible.
Considering this presence of the past, I was not surprised when Hosni Mubarak was compared to a pharaoh during the revolution. Many posters in Tahrir Square made the connection. Headline writers beat the analogy to death. Even Noor Ayman Nour casually remarked to me that the president’s powers were “pharaonic.” In July 2011, the Economist used the image on its cover, putting Mubarak’s face on the Sphinx, slowly being covered by sand.
But there’s a deeper, even darker legacy to this connection, one that goes beyond glib sloganeering and has more lasting consequences. In his book Moses the Egyptian, Jan Assmann, one of the preeminent Egyptologists in the world, wrote that the biblical story of the Exodus, in which Moses leads the Israelites in a “revolution” against the pharaoh, created what Assmann calls the “Mosaic distinction” in history. In this view of history, Assmann insists, it doesn’t matter whether the events actually happened as described in the Bible and Qur’an. What matters is how the story influenced history. And in that regard, the verdict is clear: “Egypt” in history stands not only for idolatry, but also for a past that has been rejected. “Exodus is a story of transformation and renovation, of stagnation and progress, and of past and future,” Assmann wrote. “Egypt represents the old, while Israel represents the new.”
Nowhere was that more true than in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, in which Mubarak was tagged the pharaoh. He represented everything old, bloated, and outdated in the world. In other words, he was “Old Egypt,” which even in “New Egypt” was considered an insult. It got so bad that my friend, Dr. Gaballa Ali Gaballa, the former secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt and the chief expert we featured in the Egypt portions of Walking the Bible on PBS, said he grew offended. “The pharaohs weren’t half as bad as Mubarak!” he told me one morning in his home. (And he should know; he was appointed by the deposed president.) “If they were, I would have quit my job. I kept thinking, Don’t insult the pharaohs by comparing them to this dictator, for goodness sake.”
“So what lessons should the youthful vanguard of New Egypt take from Old Egypt?” I asked.
“I would tell them the ancient Egyptians were good at their work,” he said. “They were serious. They were creative. They were innovative. Their system of government was not good for us, but their values were admirable: Do your work properly, embrace innovation, and protect your country.
“My generation is the cowardly generation,” he continued. “We were the ones who created this mess, and we lived in fear. I never imagined that these young people could bring down with their hands one of the most notorious regimes in the Middle East. It was a miracle, I tell you. Exactly the kind you read about in the Bible. But they were prepared to face death. They didn’t learn the old-fashioned rules that they were supposed to respect their elders. They broke out of our shell, because they had this wider world that is strange to us. And now, the country is going to be theirs, which is good, because we are the past, and they are the future.”
In other words, for the first time in history, the story was flipped: This time Pharaoh is the one who was kicked out of Egypt. Moses is the one who stayed.
The idea that Moses could inspire revolution is hardly confined to Egypt. If anything, it’s one of the most underappreciated outgrowths in the Bible’s history. This link was especially influential in America, a place that owes much of its revolutionary rhetoric to the Bible’s greatest prophet. For several years after returning from my travels across the Middle East I made a similar journey across the United States, examining the connection between Moses and the story of America, a link completely unknown to me before. From the pilgrims to the Founding Fathers, the Statue of Liberty to Martin Luther King, Moses was America’s most enduring champion of freedom. The fact that this story was born in the Middle East, imported so effectively into America, then reimported, so to speak, back to the Middle East in the twenty-first century, encouraged me to make this latest trip. How had one story inspired so many people to fight for freedom across so many centuries?
Before attempting to answer that question, let’s take a step back and review the basic story. The Moses story opens in the thirteenth century B.C.E. with the Israelites enslaved in Egypt. After the pharaoh orders the slaughter of all Israelite male babies, Moses is floated down the Nile by his mother, picked up by the pharaoh’s daughter, and raised in the palace. An adult Moses murders an Egyptian for beating “one of his kinsmen,” then flees to the desert, where a voice in a burning bush recruits him to free his ancestors. After briefly claiming he is not a leader and is not qualified for this mission, Moses accepts God’s challenge. He becomes the champion of freedom.
Moses marches back to Egypt and confronts the pharaoh, his surrogate grandfather. “Let my people go!” The pharaoh refuses, but after a protracted battle during which God sends the ten plagues, he finally relents. Moses then directs the Israelites across the Red Sea and into the desert, where they will eventually receive the Ten Commandments and prepare themselves to conquer the Promised Land. Though there will be many hardships, setbacks, rebellions, and retributions during the Israelites’ forty years in the desert, Moses is still best known for leading the Israelites out of slavery into freedom. This secures his reputation for all time. He is the world’s first revolutionary hero.
At least you would think so. Though Moses is by far the leading prophet in the Hebrew Bible, the only one God meets “face-to-face,” he was largely overlooked by the religions that followed. Jews downplayed Moses in favor of God in their tradition; he’s even completely ignored in the Passover service, for instance, which ostensibly celebrates his accomplishment. Christians downplayed him even more, saying Jesus was a “new Moses,” who supplanted the first. Muslims did largely the same thing when their time came along. Though Moses is called the “confidant of God” in the Qur’an and is mentioned in a quarter of the chapters, he is less central in the Islamic understanding of the story than the pharaoh, who’s been called “the chief villain of the Qur’an.” The outline of the story is largely the same, but the central theme of the Islamic version is that the pharaoh was unjust, rather than Moses being just. In Islamic tradition, the “pharaoh of Moses” epitomizes the swaggering, arrogant, blasphemous despot.
The downplaying of Moses began to change around the time of America’s founding. Protestants naturally gravitated to Moses because he inspired them in their fight with the Catholic Church. Early American settlers, many of them breakaway Protestants themselves, identified with the Moses story because they felt subjugated by existing institutions in Europe. When the Pilgrims left England in 1620, they described themselves as the chosen people fleeing their pharaoh,
King James. On the Mayflower, they compared themselves to Moses. When they reached America, they thanked God for helping them cross their Red Sea.
By the time of the American Revolution in 1776, the theme of beleaguered people standing up to a tyrant had become the go-to narrative of American identity. The Liberty Bell has a quote from Moses on its side. George Washington was often called America’s Moses. And on July 4, after signing the Declaration of Independence, the Congress asked Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams to propose a seal for the United States. Their recommendation: Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. In the eyes of America’s Founding Fathers, Moses was our real founding father.
This connection grew in the coming decades. In the nineteenth century, “Go Down, Moses” became the national anthem of slaves. Abraham Lincoln was likened to Moses for freeing the slaves. Even the Statue of Liberty had a connection. Sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi chose the goddess of liberty as his model, but he enhanced her with two icons from Moses: the nimbus of light around her head and the tablet in her arms, both from the moment Moses descends Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments.
As Americans grew increasingly secular in the decades that followed, Moses never disappeared as an icon of freedom. Superman was modeled partly on Moses. He, too, was put into a vessel and launched into an unknown world where he was summoned by a higher authority to save humanity. Charlton Heston quotes the Liberty Bell at the end of The Ten Commandments. And Martin Luther King invoked Moses the night before he died. “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he said. “And I’ve looked over. I’ve seen the promised land. And I may not get there with you, but I want you to know that we as a people will get to the promised land.” Every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has likened himself to the biblical prophet.
So, were Americans the only ones making this comparison? For a long time, the answer was yes. But in the twentieth century, the idea that Moses was a paradigm for oppressed people standing up to an oppressor spread to others—from Catholics in Latin America to Christians in Eastern Europe to Jews in the Soviet Union to blacks in South Africa. Still, most observers felt the idea was confined to Jews and Christians. The intellectual historian Michael Walzer, in his influential book Moses and Revolution, credits the Hebrew Bible with inventing this formula for revolution. “Since the late medieval or early modern times, there has existed in the West a characteristic way of thinking about political change,” he writes. “This story has roughly this form: oppression, liberation, social contract, political struggle, new society. We call the whole process revolutionary.” But he quickly adds this caveat: The story isn’t told everywhere. “It belongs to the West, more particularly to Jews and Christians in the West.”
Well, so much for that idea.
The 2011 uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen, all within a few weeks of one another, have clearly shown that Muslims know their scripture—and the formula for how to run a revolution—as well as Jews and Christians. And in terms that Professor Assmann might appreciate: They know they don’t want to be on the pharaoh’s side anymore; they want to be on the side of Moses. The “Mosaic distinction” Professor Assmann wrote about so eloquently has clearly been overturned. Egypt doesn’t just represent everything old and outdated now. Egypt is the cutting edge of new.
And it was Moses, ironically, who helped get them there. As it turns out, the Muslim world has been developing this attachment to Moses for some time. Even before these latest events, the Moses story had been gaining traction in the Islamic world, in part because the region was so dominated by those swaggering, arrogant dictators the Qur’an so demonizes. This link was especially potent in Egypt, whose dictators were among the most swaggering. Sayyid Qutb, the leading theologian behind the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s, drew the parallel between the authoritarian leadership in the Arab world and the blasphemous conduct of the pharaoh in Egypt. He even likened President Nasser to the pharaoh. (Nasser returned the compliment by having him killed.) When Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by an Islamist in 1979, the assassin shouted: “I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death.”
But the most avid exploiter of Moses’s revolutionary potential was none other than Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As early as 1944 the Shia cleric aligned himself with the Hebrew prophet. “It is rising for God when Moses with this staff defeated the Pharonians,” he wrote in an essay about bringing about change. Later, in a message to the Iranian people, he explicitly compared the shah to the pharaoh and interpreted the Qur’an as an injunction to Muslims to confront the strongman. “Hopefully, like Moses, who was brought up in the household of the pharaoh [but] put an end to his oppression, you too will one day under the command of a righteous officeholder cut off these wicked hands and root out corruption and oppression.” By the time of the 1979 revolution, posters depicting Khomeini as the “Moses of the Age” were widespread in Tehran.
If nothing else, my journey back to the Middle East helped me understand a profound similarity among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. We’re all capable of being inspired by the same stories. And though it’s admittedly odd that Moses can be deemed a hero by figures as varied as Benjamin Franklin and Ayatollah Khomeini, Martin Luther King and the Tahrir Square protesters, the connection gives me a reason to hope. It reminds us that Jews, Christians, and Muslims, instead of living on opposite ends of some uncrossable divide, have a shared scriptural heritage and a mutual language of revolutionary change.
But what role had Moses played in the revolutions of 2011? Was he more inspiring to the young, futuristic demonstrators or to the more traditional, religious ones? And was this a spiritual event anyway, or a secular one?
To help answer that question, I drove one night to the heart of Cairo’s biggest bazaar. Amid the brassy, smoky crush of camel-leather stools, constellations of gold necklaces, and abundant belly dancing outfits, chess sets, and mounds of saffron, I walked into an open-air café. It had worn wooden chairs, a cheap linoleum floor, blinding fluorescent lights, and all the mysticism of a thirty-year-old Dairy Queen.
But leaning up against the wall with an ample belly and a walrus mustache, and wearing a brown cardigan sweater, was one of the more mystical men I have met in some time. His name was Ali Darwish, and he is something of a Sufi sage, a writer, an utterer of cryptic pronouncements, a political gossip, and a St. Nicholas–like hero to the poor. Over the next few hours, as he drank multiple cups of tea, rubbed wooden beads, and ignored his buzzing phone, he doled out dozens and dozens of coins, ones, twos, and threes, to bent-over beggars, men with no teeth, and kids with missing legs. It was an extraordinary display of generosity. Within minutes of sitting down, I was reaching for coins in my pocket and unfolding bills from my wallet just to refill even a small trickle of what poured from his outstretched hands.
“Fifty percent of my income I give to the poor,” he said matter-of-factly. “Honestly, this is what I can do. If there is poverty around you, and you have some money, could you refrain from helping them? It’s against my belief as a human being, and as a Sufi.”
Sufism is the forgotten third wheel of Islam, the more internal, more spiritual, more inclusive offshoot of the faith, more focused on repairing the world and connecting with God than its sometimes more legalistic, more dogmatic cousins in the Sunni and Shia branches. Darwish bluntly called Sufism “wiser,” and said practitioners enjoy more freedom and display more tolerance. He estimated that around 10 percent of Egyptians are Sufi.
I asked him whether he thought Egypt’s revolution was a political or a spiritual event. He didn’t actually rub his belly as he contemplated his answer, but given his tone and demeanor, he might as well have.
“Most Sufis believe this was an impossibility for Mubarak to fall,” he said. “The collapse of the system is a miracle, in every dimension. The man had absolute power. He had the army; he had the Republican Guard; he had the intelligence service. He had everybody.
Yet within two weeks there was no Mubarak, and the system was finished. This, for us Sufis, is the doing of God. He is the one who gives power, and if you mishandle it, he is the one who takes it away. This is exactly what happened in Egypt.”
“When you see a miracle like this, what does it remind you of?” I asked.
“In the Qur’an, they narrate the story of Moses and the pharaoh,” he said without my prompting. “Moses was asked by God to go and meet the pharaoh and tell him, ‘You are on the wrong track. You are not a god.’ And the pharaoh said, ‘No, I am a god.’ Then the pharaoh fell. He drowned and died. Moses lived. When I see what just happened here, I think Mubarak was the pharaoh, but I think the whole Egyptian people were Moses. Not one figure, but all the young people who came out and said, ‘We want equality. We want opportunity. We want freedom.’ ”
He spread out his arms with incredulity. “The people were asking for the minimum,” he continued. “They weren’t saying, we want to be rich. Just equal opportunity and a better standard of living.”
“So what’s the lesson of the story of Moses and the pharaoh?”
“You should never make yourself a god. Pay attention to what’s happening around you, care for the needy, and don’t neglect the poor. The pharaoh treated the Israelites in a terrible manner; they were slaves. Mubarak was the same. He had no sympathy for the poor; he made most people poorer. We have a saying among Sufis: ‘The poor and the weak are the children of God.’ Only the pharaoh thinks he’s greater than God.”
“But what about the people who say this was a secular revolution, not a religious one?” I asked. “All these young people on Facebook, Twitter, and Skype who don’t care about God. All they want is a better life, no?”
“If there was no religious meaning,” Darwish said, “why did they pray in the square? Why did they hold noonday prayers and Sunday Mass? Why did they kneel in front of the water cannons and issue blessings on top of the tanks. There was certainly a spiritual dimension to what happened. If anything, I am worried that it might become too spiritual.”
