by Ahdaf Soueif
‘Sallim silahak ya Urabi,’ Dr Ramzi says in a low singsong.
‘Lessa, ya Bey, lessa,’ Mahgoub demurs, moving his wazir to protect the king.
‘Mafish lessa,’ Dr Ramzi says triumphantly, moving his horse. ‘Kesh malik!’
‘Lek yom ya Doctor!’ Mahgoub says cheerfully, collecting up the pieces, pouring them into their wooden box. He shakes out his cigarettes and offers one to Isabel, who smiles and refuses. ‘Egyptian cigarettes,’ he says. ‘Look!’ He holds the white pack up, showing her the image of the queen. ‘Cleopatra. No?’ He puts the pack down on the table.
‘We have not seen you for a long time, Amal.’ Dr Ramzi smiles. ‘You must wait for an American to come with her?’
‘You know how it is, ya Doctor,’ I say lamely, ‘circumstances.’
‘You are from New York?’ he says to Isabel.
Ramzi Yusuf is around seventy. The thick, smooth hair and dark, gentle eyes that made his philosophy lectures so popular when I was a student are still there. But the eyes, although they seem brighter, are smaller and more deeply set. And the hair is completely white. He has always been fond of women and now he looks at Isabel with unconcealed admiration.
‘Ah, if I was twenty years younger — only twenty years — I would show you an Egypt …’ He shakes his head ruefully.
‘And twenty years from now?’ Isabel asks.
‘Twenty years?’ He bursts into loud laughter and then a slight fit of coughing. ‘I can show you my other home, in the Imam. Or paradise, maybe.’
‘Isabel wants to know how we see the next millennium, ya Doctor,’ I say. ‘She’s doing a project —’
‘I know, I know.’ He waves his hand impatiently. ‘I am the wrong person to ask such a question. I am old —’ he shrugs — ‘for me it is all the same.’
‘Youth is the youth of the heart, ya Doctor,’ Mahgoub says. He works for an airline but he has been suspended for spitting into the drink of a passenger in first class who touched up a stewardess and made her cry.
‘Even the heart too, it grows old,’ Dr Ramzi says. He is silent, gazing into the middle distance. I cannot tell what he sees. ‘But you are young and you will not believe me. For the millennium — everything, it is always the same,’ he says. ‘It will be the same.’
‘How can it be the same, ya Doctor?’ Mahgoub objects.
‘Haram ‘aleik, ya Doctor,’ Deena adds. ‘Ya’ni everything we’re doing will come down on nothing?’
‘Eh!’ Dr Ramzi shrugs. ‘What you are doing, this is because you are young. Young people, they must struggle. If they don’t struggle they think life has no meaning. They feel lost. You see —’ to Isabel — ‘in countries where there is no need to struggle — in Norway, in Sweden — the young people kill themselves.’
‘So we’re killed either way,’ Mahgoub says. ‘Thank you.’
‘Surely that’s too simple,’ Isabel says. ‘Things change. You have great changes happening here —’
‘Toshki,’ Mahgoub laughs. ‘Toshki will solve everything —’
‘Toshki walla ma Toshki,’ says Dr Ramzi. ‘It is all —’ he spirals a hand gently into space — ‘it is all talk in the air.’
A woman hesitates in the doorway, then takes a few steps into the room. People glance up. Deena stands.
‘Arwa!’ she cries and goes to greet her.
‘Who is that?’ Isabel asks.
Arwa Salih, one of the leaders of the student movement of the early Seventies. I remember her from the night of the Great Stone Cake in ‘72, when our comrades were arrested in the university and we staged a sit-in in Tahrir Square and all of Cairo came to join us. That too ended in nothing. We were defeated — or diffused — and she opted out. She chose to work at a press agency, translating the financial news. In the evenings she helps out at a small art gallery in Zamalek. She has married three times and never had kids.
‘She’s stunning,’ Isabel says as Deena brings her over.
‘I don’t want to interrupt —’ Arwa begins, and then she sees me and we go into a big hug. It’s been more than twenty years. Mahgoub brings over a chair.
‘Look, ya Setti,’ he says and starts to tell her what Isabel wants. ‘And Dr Ramzi is saying that everything will stay the same,’ he ends.
‘It won’t,’ Arwa says, sitting down, hanging her handbag on the back of her chair, crossing her legs. ‘It will get worse. We’re headed for an age of Israeli supremacy in the whole area. An Israeli empire.’
‘Bravo!’ Mahgoub cries. ‘Arwa goes to the bottom line.’
‘Do you really think so?’ Isabel seems astonished, but then we have never talked about this; I judged our friendship too fragile.
‘Yes. That’s what they’re working for — and they have America behind them. A pax Americana, and within it an Israeli dominance over the area that they like to call the Middle East.’
Arwa has always surprised people: she speaks more directly than you expect of a woman — a beautiful woman with a shy, hesitant air.
‘Surely that’s extreme?’ Isabel says.
‘They’re already talking of Israeli brains and Arab hands,’ Deena says. Deena, with her jeans, her spectacles, her cigarettes, was always expected to be militant, and she is — militant but tired. That is the first thing you notice, I think, when you look at these three women: Arwa and Deena, with faint circles under their eyes, a slight droop of the shoulders, a certain dullness of skin, look worn. While Isabel, shining with health and a kind of innocent optimism, looks brand new.
‘And look at the whole region,’ Mahgoub says. ‘Look at Algeria. Look what happened to Lebanon. Look at the Palestinians. The Sudan. Libya. Look at Iraq. The next millennium? The future being planned for us is a terrible one —’
‘What’s terrible,’ says Deena, ‘is how we’ve taken on the role of the victim, the Done-To. We sit here and say “they’re planning for us, they’re doing to us” and wait to see what “they” will do next.’
‘And what’s in our hands to do?’
‘It is history,’ Dr Ramzi says. ‘The conjunction of certain conditions. After a hundred years the historians will say what happened was inevitable. If we look now at Egypt a hundred years ago we see that what happened was inevitable.’
‘What happened?’ Isabel says.
‘We were a part of a dying Ottoman Empire. Our Khedive Ismail loved modernism and Europe and — le spectacle. He likes the Suez Canal project and so he borrows money. He is not careful where he borrows. He borrows from Europe — from Britain and the Rothschilds and France. At the same time — you see, here is the conjunction.’ The index fingers of his two hands come together. ‘Europe is strong and moving outwards —’ a huge expansive gesture with the arms — ‘colonialism is the spirit of the age. Their old enemy the Ottoman Empire is dying. So they use the Khedive’s debts to expand into our part of it. Into Egypt. The rest is history.’
‘And what about the national movement, ya Doctor?’
‘The national movement did not matter. The British pretended they thought it threatened their money. They made it the reason for the Occupation. But they will have come anyway. They will find a way.’
‘I don’t think that’s fair.’ Deena pushes her spectacles up with a characteristic gesture. ‘The British came in at a crucial point in our history. They froze our development: our move towards democracy, towards education, industrialisation, towards modernity —’
‘Tayyib ya Setti, we have now fifty years — fifty-six years of our own — of national government, and what have we done?’
‘Compare us,’ Arwa says, ‘to our cousins across the border. You think if the British hadn’t helped them, if there had been no Balfour Declaration, there would be no Israel today? There would have been. They wouldn’t have sat back and said, “Oh, but the British won’t help us, the Sultan won’t sell us Palestine, the Arabs won’t go away —”
‘But they were part of the whole colonial movement. They had the spirit of the age b
ehind them.’
Mustafa al-Sharqawi has been standing silently by us, listening. Now Mahgoub turns to him. ‘Why are you so quiet, ya Mustafa? It’s not like you. Tell us what you think.’
Mustafa is a small intense man, with old-fashioned hornrimmed spectacles. If he had worn a beret he could have been at the Deux Magots in the Fifties.
‘What do I think? I think we’re a nation of cowards,’ he says bitterly. ‘I hate to say it, especially in front of a — guest. But we live by slogans. We take comfort in them: “The Great Egyptian People.” “The peaceful, patient Nation, that when it is aroused shatters the World.” Shatters the world? Tell me, when in all of history did the Egyptian people rebel? When? When Urabi spoke up for them, they sold him out. They ran away and let the British in. You’ll say 1919, but 1919 wasn’t a revolution. It was a few demonstrations and it changed nothing —’
‘Slowly, slowly, ya Mustafa. 1919 —’
‘Fifty-two? That was not a rebellion of the people. It was an army movement which rode the people and told the people that it spoke with their voice. The people have no voice.’
‘What are we then?’
‘We’re a bunch of intellectuals who sit in the Atelier or the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people. The people don’t know we exist.’
‘The people know more than you think,’ I say. ‘They watch television. Out in the villages they have satellite dishes.’
‘Good. And what do they watch on television? They watch censored news. They watch soaps — emasculated because television needs to sell them to our masters in the Gulf. They don’t watch you —’
‘What about the fundamentalists?’ Isabel asks. ‘Where do they come into all this? Would you say that they spoke with the voice of the people?’
‘The fundamentalists are nothing,’ Dr Ramzi says. ‘They just need some food and a place to live —’
‘They are the ones on the ground,’ Mahgoub says. ‘Can anyone explain how they’ve managed to occupy the amount of space they have?’
‘All the other parties have been hit,’ says Deena. ‘We’ve had fifty years of an absence of democracy —’
‘They’ve been hit as much as any other party,’ Mustafa al-Sharqawi says. ‘They’ve been forced underground and they’ve come back. Their leaders were killed and they got new ones. Their economic projects turned out to be a fraud and their credibility survived. Their young men are killed every day and they recruit new ones. They will not go away. They’ve even taken the political platform — the idiom — of the left: they talk of social justice —’
‘They have an Idea,’ Arwa says, ‘and their Idea appeals to the people because it reinforces who they are. It says hey, you don’t have to become the dumping ground of the West. You’re worth something. It appeals to those thousands of young men and women who go through school, through university, and then find the road blocked in their faces —’
‘Have you heard the one about the lamp?’ Mahgoub says. ‘This young man is engaged and he can’t find a flat to get married in. His girl is threatening to leave him and marry a rich Arab. As he’s walking around one day hanging his head, he sees ‘Ala ed-Din’s lamp lying in the gutter. He can’t believe himself; he picks it up and rubs it and the jinni comes out: “Shobbeik lobbeik, Khaddamak bein eidek, what do you desire?” “A flat, ya’ni, just a little flat: a bedroom and a hall and a little bathroom and kitchen.” The jinni looks at him in disgust. “And if there was such a flat,” he says, “would I be living in this damn lamp?” ’
Everybody bursts out laughing and I — with misgiving — translate the joke for Isabel, who nods and laughs.
Ghazali comes in with coffee for Dr Ramzi. ‘Anybody ya bahawat wants sandwiches?’
‘Yes. What do you have?’ Dr Ramzi says.
‘Ya’ni what would he have, ya Doctor?’ Deena laughs. ‘Cheese and roast beef. For thirty years he’s had cheese and roast beef.’
Am Ghazali smiles. ‘Today we have chicken as well.’
‘Tayyib, I’ll have chicken. Mind it’s not rotten.’
We give our orders and Mustafa al-Sharqawi says:
‘Am Ghazali, where will we be in the year two thousand?”
‘We’ll be under the protection of God by His grace.’
‘There you are. See,’ he says when Ghazali has gone: ‘a cliché. It stops him having to think.’
‘It stops him having to answer you,’ Dr Ramzi says.
‘That’s the ground the Jama’at are using. The ready-made pieties,’ Mustafa says.
‘Ya akhi, no,’ says Mahgoub. ‘No. The pieties speak against killing and bombing. It all comes back to economics.’
‘And government policy,’ Deena says. ‘They have been allowed space. Encouraged even. When Sadat wanted to destroy the leftist movements, he encouraged them —’
‘And not just Sadat,’ Arwa adds, although she hated him. ‘Who gave them the big push they needed in the Eighties? Who funded them and armed them in Afghanistan?’
‘Would they come to power in free elections?’ Isabel ventures.
There is a silence. A long silence. A man who’s been shouting into the phone looks around in surprise and drops his voice. Then Deena says, ‘Probably yes. They’re organised. And funded. And they have a ready-made publicity machine in every mosque.’
‘And then what?’
‘And then they’d string us all up.’
‘Would they really?’
‘They’d be in a mess. They have no political programme beyond “Islam is the solution”. Ask them any detailed question and they don’t have an answer —’
‘Do you realise,’ Dr Ramzi says, smiling broadly, ‘when you speak of a political programme, that your programme now is the same that Mahmoud Sami al-Baroudi’s government tried to establish more than a hundred years ago?’
‘Is that right?’ Isabel says.
‘Yes. Yes, for sure,’ Dr Ramzi says. ‘Listen: the ending of foreign influence, the payment of the Egyptian debt —’ he counts them off on his fingers — ‘an elected parliament, a national industry, equality of all men before the law, reform of education, and allowing a free press to reflect all shades of opinion. Those were the seven points of their programme. These young people —’ the wave of his hand takes in the group — ‘they still ask for this.’ He shrugs. Ghazali balances his tray on one hand and starts unloading it with the other.
‘Do the fundamentalists want this too?’
‘Possibly,’ Mahgoub says. ‘But they won’t want the free press. And they’ll put their own conditions on who can stand for parliament —’
‘We went up to Minya a few days ago,’ I say.
‘Who went? You didn’t take your guest with you, did you?’
‘Yes. We went to our village. The number of barricades on the road was incredible. And on one of them we saw three young men, ordinary fallaheen, being arrested. They were tied with ropes. On their arms and necks.’
‘It’s become a war. Especially in the Said.’
‘But I don’t think those young men were terrorists, or even Islamists particularly —’
‘When you set the police loose on people, khalas, they do anything.’
‘The thing is, it’s now getting mixed up with the land laws,’ Deena says. ‘If someone is close to the authorities and he wants people off his land, he can use the “terrorist” issue and get rid of them. We are documenting cases but it’s difficult to convince a fallah to start a legal action. But some are doing it.’
‘They closed down our school,’ I say. ‘And I got someone to speak to the Governor and he said we could open it if we gave him a list of the people who’d be teaching there. It’s only a couple of classes where the kids come to study in the evenings —’
‘You can’t give lists of names to the Governor,’ Deena says, ‘and nobody’ll give you such a list anyway.’
‘Centuries of mistrust,’ Dr
Yusuf says. ‘You cannot get out of your history.’
‘I know,’ I say.
‘Ya Doctor, history can be changed,’ Deena says, ‘it’s people who make history. The problem is that we are allowing other people to make our history —’
‘But it’s people with power who make history,’ Arwa says, ‘and we have no power. At least when there were two superpowers in the world, we could negotiate a path in the space between them. Now there is no space.’
‘We do have power,’ Deena says. ‘We’re being told we haven’t — but we have. But to use it we have to have the will. And we can’t afford to be rich against poor, Copt against Muslim —’
‘I believe the Islamists could be defused if we had a true democracy,’ Mahgoub says. ‘If everybody, and they too, were allowed to speak publicly. To debate the issues in front of the people. Put them on television, in a proper free debate with Muslim intellectuals, with the Sheikh of al-Azhar —’
‘People will switch off,’ Mustafa says. ‘Salamu aleikum. None of this will come to anything. I have to go.’
‘What’s the rush?’ Mahgoub says. ‘Stay with us.’
‘No, I’m going. I’ll leave you to put the universe right.’ And raising his arm in a general salute, he leaves.
‘The government won’t do that anyway,’ Deena says. ‘It opts for the security solution and it tries to outbid the Islamists in the religious stakes: we’re more Muslim than you. And so it plays their game.’
‘What popularity they have is because the people need an Idea. In Nasser’s time — for all its drawbacks, all the mistakes — there was an Idea. A national project. Now what do we have? The Idea of the Consumer? Trying to hang on to America’s hem —’
