On the State of Egypt

by Alaa Al Aswany

  Democracy is the solution.

  August 12, 2010

  Does Subservience Protect Us from Injustice?

  The story goes that a peasant laborer acquired a vast fortune and bought a large boat of the kind they call a dahabiya in the countryside. He bought smart and expensive clothes and sat in his dahabiya as it glided across the water. The man who owned the land he worked on, an arrogant and cruel-hearted man, saw him and ordered his workers to storm the dahabiya and arrest the peasant. They brought him before the landowner and the following exchange took place between them:

  Landowner: Since when have peasants been sailing new dahabiyas?

  Peasant: It’s all thanks to your compassion, your justice, and your generosity, sir. This should make you happy because it’s a sign of your grace and goodness.

  Landlord: How can peasants be allowed to imitate their masters and sail dahabiyas?

  Peasant: God forbid that I should imitate my masters. Who am I? I’m just one of your slaves and everything I earn is your property in the end.

  Landlord: If you don’t want to imitate us, why did you buy a dahabiya and why are you sailing it on the Nile as if you’re one of the masters of the country? Do you want the other peasants to see you and think you’re someone of importance and standing?

  Peasant: God forbid, my lord. If you think I’ve done anything wrong then I swear by God and His Prophet that I’ll never sail this dahabiya again. I repent right now, sir. I beg you to accept my repentance.

  Landlord: I accept but I’ll take steps to make sure you never repeat your mistake.

  The landlord gave orders to his servants, who tied the peasant up and dragged him along the ground until his new clothes were covered with mud and ripped to shreds. Then they started to beat him until his knees, his feet, and his back were bleeding. Meanwhile the landlord laughed and said, “That way you’ll never forget your humble place, you peasant.”

  This incident did in fact take place in an Egyptian village early in the twentieth century and is told by the great writer, Ahmed Amin, in his excellent book, Qamus al-‘adat wa-l-taqalid al-misriya (A Dictionary of Egyptian Customs and Traditions). To my mind it reflects a widespread pattern for the relationship between the despot and his victims. No doubt the peasant knew that he had a right to sail the dahabiya because he had bought it with his own money, and that he also had a right to wear whatever clothes he wanted. The peasant knew he had done nothing wrong but he thought it would be wise to apologize to the landowner and repent in public for an offense he had never committed. The peasant was especially servile in order to escape injustice, although if he had stood his ground courageously against the landowner to defend his right to be treated as human being, he would at least have maintained his dignity and the consequences of being courageous would have been no worse than the consequences of being submissive.

  I remember this lesson when I follow what is happening in Egypt these days, because generations of Egyptians have grown up in the firm belief that submitting to injustice is the ultimate wisdom and that bowing and scraping to those in power is the best way to protect themselves from harm. Egyptians have long believed that objecting to the authoritarian system is sheer folly and will never change things for the better. They think that those who resist injustice will have their lives destroyed and be detained, tortured, and even killed. Egyptians have believed that coexistence with the authoritarian regime will save them from the harm it can inflict, trusting that the vast apparatus of repression the state possesses only goes into action to crush those who stand in its way, that the regime will never harm those who bow down and obey and who concentrate on making a living and bringing up their children. On the contrary, Egyptians think the regime will protect and look after them. But now, perhaps for the first time in decades, they are waking up to the fact that submission, failing to speak out for justice, and being obsequious toward oppressors will not at all prevent injustice, but often add to it.

  Khaled Mohamed Said, the young man who was killed in Alexandria, was no political activist and did not belong to any front or movement that aimed to overthrow the regime. In fact he may never in his life have taken part in any demonstration. He was a completely peaceful young Egyptian, dreaming like millions of Egyptians of escaping by any possible means from his oppressive homeland to a country where he could live in freedom and dignity. He was waiting to obtain a U.S. passport like his brothers so that he could leave Egypt forever. On the evening of his death he went to an Internet café to pass the time, again like millions of others. He committed no crime and broke no law, but as soon as he went into the café two plainclothes policemen pounced on him and without a word started beating him brutally. They banged his head on the edge of the marble table with all their might, dragged him out of the café, and took him into a nearby building, where they continued to beat him and banged his head against the iron gate of the building until their purpose was fulfilled. Khaled’s skull was smashed and he died in front of them. Regardless of the real reason behind this brutal murder, and regardless also of the successive statements issued by the Ministry of Interior to justify the crime, all of which have turned out to be untrue, the clear meaning of this murder is that submission is no longer enough to protect Egyptians from repression. Khaled Said was beaten in the same way as young people demonstrating for freedom. There is no difference.

  Repression in Egypt no longer distinguishes between demonstrators and people taking part in sit-ins on the one hand and people sitting in cafés and sleeping at home on the other. The murder of Khaled Said in this brutal manner and the fact that the killers have escaped punishment plainly indicate that any police officer, and even any plainclothes detective, can kill whomever he wants and the apparatus of despotism will step in at once to exonerate the killer. They have ample and effective means to do so, thanks to the emergency law and the fact that the judiciary is not independent of the presidency. The millions of Egyptians who wept when they saw the picture of Khaled Said with his skull smashed, his teeth knocked out, and his face mangled from the beating were not weeping only out of sympathy for Khaled and his poor mother. They were also weeping because they imagined that the faces of their children might tomorrow be in the place of Khaled Said’s face. The picture of Khaled Said’s military service certificate, published in the newspapers alongside the picture of his mutilated body, reflects the saddening truth: Egypt is now doing to its own people what Egypt’s enemies have not done.

  Any Egyptian might suffer the same fate as Khaled Said. In fact it has already happened to hundreds of thousands of them: those who drowned on the ferries of death, those buried under collapsed buildings because of building licenses obtained corruptly and substandard building materials, those who died of disease because of rotten foodstuffs imported by big merchants, those who have killed themselves in despair at their future, and the university students who tried to flee the country to clean toilets in Europe but drowned aboard the sinking ships of death. All of these were completely peaceful citizens and it never occurred to them to resist despotism. In fact they believed, just like the peasant in the story, that they could coexist with the regime, bow down before the oppressor, and then set up their own small safe world for themselves and their children, but they all lost their lives because of the regime they were afraid to confront. In other words what happened to them as a result of submitting was exactly what they feared might happen if they protested and rebelled.

  The wave of protests sweeping Egypt from one end to the other today is essentially due to the fact that life for millions of poor people, which was already hard, has become impossible. The more important reason for these vehement protests is that Egyptians have realized that silence about justice will not protect them from injustice. For thirty years, Egyptians have tried the individual solution. Egyptians used to escape hell at home by going to the Gulf countries, where they often faced another kind of humiliation and subjugation. After a few years they would come back with enough money to live a c
omfortable life, far from the general context of Egyptian suffering. These individual solutions no longer work and Egyptians are now under siege in their own country. They have finally learned the lesson the peasant in the story did not understand: that the consequences of courage are never worse than the consequences of fear, and that the only way to escape an oppressive ruler is to confront him with all our strength.

  Democracy is the solution.

  June 22, 2010

  Does Mistreating People Invalidate

  the Ramadan Fast?

  Some years ago I used to take the subway from Sayyida Zeinab every day and in front of the station there were peddlers who would spread their various wares on the sidewalk. One of them was a quiet and courteous old man of more than sixty who always wore a gallabiya and an old jacket and offered padlocks, screwdrivers, plastic tablecloths, glasses, and other such simple things. One morning in Ramadan I saw the police carry out a raid on the peddlers to move them off the streets. Most of the peddlers picked up their goods, ran off at top speed, and escaped, but the old man was unable to flee in time. The police confiscated his goods and when he started shouting and calling for help the officer in charge launched into a tirade of vicious insults. When the old man continued to shout, the policemen gave him a vicious beating, arrested him, and took him off. The strange thing was that the faces of the policemen who beat him were pale from the effects of fasting. I thought about the fact that those who mistreated the old peddler never had any doubt that their Ramadan fasting would count from the point of view of Islamic law. I found myself wondering: How can we fast for Ramadan and abuse people at the same time? Isn’t abusing people one of the things that invalidate one’s fasting?

  I referred back to books on Islamic jurisprudence and found that seven things invalidate fasting: eating and drinking; acts similar to eating and drinking; sexual intercourse; masturbation; deliberate vomiting; the cupping of blood; and menstruation and bleeding after childbirth. So all the things that invalidate fasting are related to one’s body, even though the Prophet Muhammad said, “He who does not give up uttering falsehood and acting according to it, God has no need of his giving up his food and his drink.” Based on this hadith, some jurists have said that some noncorporeal acts can invalidate fasting, such as lying and mistreating or slandering people, but the majority has confined acts that invalidate fasting to physical acts and believes that improper conduct deprives one of the reward for fasting but does not in itself invalidate fasting. So someone who vomits deliberately automatically breaks the fast whereas those who lie, are hypocritical, mistreat people, or deprive them of their rights have not invalidated their fast.

  With this strange concept of fasting we find ourselves face to face with a mistaken reading of religion. In many cases rituals have become an end in themselves instead of a means to improve and chasten oneself. The road to piety has become a series of defined and invariable steps as though we were dealing with the process of setting up a commercial company or having a passport issued. For many, Islam has been transformed into a package of measures a Muslim has to complete without this necessarily having any effect on his or her conduct in life. This disconnect between dogma and conduct has coincided with a period of decadence in the Islamic world; in fact it is the primary reason for that decadence. If you want to make sure of that, all you have to do is head to the nearest police station, where you will find people being beaten and humiliated, all by people who are fasting and do not have the slightest doubt about the validity of their fasting. In Egypt there are tens of thousands of Islamist detainees who have spent long years behind bars without trial. Many of them have obtained court orders for their release but the orders have remained mere pieces of paper, unimplemented. Those responsible for wrecking the lives of these wretches and their families are Muslims who are rarely without calluses on their foreheads from regular praying and who never feel that what they are doing makes them any less religious. It is even more amazing to see what happens on security premises where detainees are tortured to extract the required confessions. In these human slaughterhouses, which belong to the darkness of the Middle Ages, there is always a prayer room where the torturers can perform their prayers at the appointed times.

  Is anyone more zealous about their religious observance than the leaders of the ruling National Democratic Party, who have rigged elections and plundered, impoverished, and humiliated the Egyptian people? This mistaken understanding of religion is what has turned the month of Ramadan, which was once a divine occasion to set at rights the behavior of mankind, into a massive carnival where we all yell and shout, pray and fast, generally without any impact on the way we deal with other people. When I see thousands of Muslims flocking to mosques every night for special Ramadan prayers I feel a mixture of joy and sadness. I rejoice because I can see that Muslims are committed to their religion and nothing can deter them from fulfilling their religious obligations, and I am sad because these thousands upon thousands of people have missed the true message of Islam, that the ultimate jihad is to speak truth to tyrants. Many Muslims see Islam as just wearing the hijab and the full face-veil, praying, and going to Mecca. These people rise up in vociferous protest at the sight of a naked actress and lead violent campaigns to ban beauty pageants, but in the face of despotism and oppression they do not utter a single word. In fact they bow down in submission to the tyrant’s injustice, with never a thought of rebellion.

  These Muslims, in their deficient understanding of Islam, are the victims of two types of cleric: the government’s clerics and the Wahhabi clerics. The government’s clerics are civil servants who receive their salaries and perquisites from the government and hence select from Islam everything that supports the wishes of the ruler, however corrupt or oppressive he may be, while the Wahhabi clerics assert that to disobey a Muslim ruler is unlawful even if he is corrupt, and that obeying him is obligatory even if he has stolen from Muslims and has had them whipped unjustly. The Wahhabis distract Muslims with everything that is secondary in religion. In Egypt there are dozens of Wahhabi television channels, financed with oil money, with daily appearances by sheikhs who receive millions of pounds a year for preaching sermons to Egyptians, half of whom live in abject poverty. Sheikhs of this kind appear on screen alongside advertisements for washing machines, refrigerators, creams for removing skin blotches, and depilatory products for women. They preach to Muslims about everything other than what they really need. You will not find a single one of them speaking about torture, election rigging, or unemployment, or warning Egyptians that the ruler might bequeath them to his son like a herd of beasts. Some of these sheikhs have no qualms about cooperating openly and fully with the security services and some of them have ruled that demonstrations and strikes are forbidden to Muslims. In other words, they not only fail to speak out for justice but also assist the ruler in oppression when they prevent people from demanding the restoration of their rights.

  This superficial piety, which is the fundamental reason for our backwardness, was described a hundred years ago by the great reformer, Mohamed Abduh (1849–1905), when he wrote:

  Muslims have neglected their religion and have become obsessed with the service of verbal forms. They have abandoned all the virtues and good qualities their religion contains, and have passed nothing on. God does not heed these prayers that they pray and does not accept a single one of their prostrations: they just go through the motions and mouth words without understanding what they mean and it does not occur to any of them that they are addressing God Almighty, glorifying him, acknowledging His divinity, and seeking guidance and succor from Him and Him alone. It is extraordinary that jurists from the four main schools of law, and maybe others too, have said that praying without presence of mind and submission to God counts as performance of the obligation to pray. What kind of talk is that? It is nonsense.

  These words, however harsh they may be, affirm once again the forgotten fact: the essence of Islam is the call for truth, justice, and freedom and e
verything else is less important. Passionate religiosity in Egypt is real and sincere but it rarely follows the right course. The main issue in Egypt is as clear as the sun: an appalling situation of corruption, oppression, and injustice that has lasted thirty years and has driven many Egyptians to suicide, crime, or emigration at any price. Now that the president has stayed in power for thirty years without a single real election, the stage is being set for his son to inherit power, as though great Egypt were just a poultry farm the father might bequeath to his sons. Isn’t that the height of injustice? When we realize that injustice invalidates fasting and that winning back our usurped rights is more important than a thousand prostrations we make at special Ramadan prayers, only then will we have reached a true understanding of Islam. True Islam is democracy.