Political Musings from Egyptians
Late in the afternoon of the 3rd day in Cairo, I finished entering my grades online and then took a walk around Zamalek. The neighborhood looked much the same, but a huge difference being that people sitting in the cafes, sipping tea or smoking shishas were TALKING. Previously, one usually saw older men sitting alone inhaling the fruit-flavored smoke of the shishas and looking utterly bored. Occasionally, two men would be playing backgammon, sitting silently staring at the board with one or two others sitting backward on chairs leaning on the backs with their elbows and kibitzing with the players. This time, nearly every place was alive with groups of men, arguing politics or listening to one of their number reading in Arabic from the morning newspaper. If there was an occasional individual sitting alone, he inevitably was reading the newspaper.
I stopped at our usual news stand and the owner told me, at 9 a.m., the last copy of the Daily News Egypt already had sold. In fact, the only papers left at the stand were the foreign ones. They were practically sold out of local Arab-language papers, too, even though the neighborhood was upper-class and educated in English. “Before, people never bought the local papers. They were nothing but party propaganda. Most Egyptians couldn’t afford to buy the Western papers (Le Monde, International Herald, Le Figaro, for example) so they sat silently while the television blared soap operas or re-runs of the latest game won by the Zamalek football club.
There was a spirit in the streets of Cairo. I thought about Maguib Mahfouz and how, late in life, he took a cab down to his usual cafeteria just off Tahrir Square and reminisced with the few surviving friends from the days of the 1952 revolution. Under the threatening eyes of a dozen sunglass-hidden eyes of undercover police agents, they argued quietly and in the code of the past, what had caused the revolution to fail so spectacularly. As one educated Egyptian told me this time, it wasn’t the revolution that had failed. Failure came from the leadership who didn’t put into effect the aspirations that led to it. “Before 1952,” he told me, “multi-national corporations owned Egypt—everything from the land and factories to the workers.” He told about watching the Ford offices burn and old Shephard’s Hotel, the symbol of British rule, go up in smoke on one afternoon. “Nasser was a good man. The State seized the factories and Nasser thought they’d be run for the people. But it never worked. Soon, corruption crept in. More and more money went into the army. People starting stealing. The officials demanded bribes for everything.”
I asked why Nasser never tried to change it. And what about Sadat? “Sadat spent his time making peace. If Egypt continued to spend for war, it would be ruinous to the economy.” He took another puff off the shisha. I thought about what Edward Said said in a speech in a jam-packed Gowen Hall at old American University of Cairo, not a block from Tahrir Square in March 2003. Too sick to stand to give his talk, in a reedy voice, he warned that the dictators of the region were perhaps within months of falling, but stressed how it would not be possible if Bush’s America made war in the Middle East. Two days later, in our driver Hassan’s battered Peugeot station wagon en route to Cairo airport, I heard the news that bombs had started falling on Baghdad. The Arab spring was put on hold for decade.
“I think he was murdered,” my friend continued, talking about Sadat’s assassination at a military parade on Oct. 6, 1981, “because he was about to make changes,” my friend suggested. “Was it the Brotherhood?” I asked, reminding him that Sadat had cracked down on all opposition party activities a month earlier. “No. It was the army….They feared for their privileges. And Mubarak made sure they lost none of them.” In 1999, Mubarak decided to privatize everything—and that’s when we got the system of kleptocracy. Some may call it crony capitalism, but Mubarak and his friends ended up owning everything.”
As official reports during the 2011 revolution showed, the leaders of the army owned or controlled 80 percent of Egypt’s industry. The ceramic factories, pumping out tons of pollutants and ruining the air of Nasr City and other planned towns, could dirty the air with impunity because not even the environment minister could touch them. They were 100 percent owned by the army. “And if the army didn’t have to obey the law, why should anyone else?”
So far, there had been a logic to what my friend, a long-time silenced observer of Egypt life, had been saying. His next few statements surprised me. “So, my friend, Egypt has been under colonial rule, under socialism, under military dictatorship, under unbridled crony capitalism. We suffered six months of anarchy right after the revolution. Everyone did whatever one pleased. Streets were a mess with traffic going everywhere. You couldn’t go into the streets because gangs of 12-year-olds would steal your money, take the clothes right off your back or even kill you.” He continued, “And last summer, no tourists. People were frightened and, finally, decided to reject corruption, reject baksheesh, and reimpose regulation, but this time, enforce them, too.”
If this is true, I asked him, why can’t that continue? He contended that it would continue and the conduct of the elections was the proof. “Have you met anyone who didn’t vote?” he asked. “No. And I asked everyone,” I replied. “Everyone not only says he/she voted, but almost always tell me what party they supported.” “And how many said they favored the Salafists?” “None I spoke with,” I replied. “And why should they? All the Salafists hold for them is dictatorship behind another veil. Egyptians are too smart to buy that,” he assured me.
“But that isn’t the case with the Muslim Brotherhood?” I asked. “They are a POLITICAL movement, not a religious one,” he said. “Egypt will not tolerate rule by mullahs.”
I decided to test my friend’s thesis. Mohamad, who works as a waiter in an American-owned hotel, admitted to me that he voted for the Freedom and Justice Party—the party of Muslim Brotherhood—because in his words, “All of those years, they took care of the poor people. The government wouldn’t do it. The rich handed out gifts during Ramadan, but otherwise looked the other way when people starved or suffered.” He said the Muslim Brotherhood helped him during a crisis in his younger days when his apartment house was one destroyed in an earthquake. “They gave me a place to sleep, some food, a chance to heal,” he said without specifying the nature of his injury. “Where was the government? They were nowhere.” He reflected for moment and amended the statement. “They were out there begging Reagan and Bush for more money to buy tanks and putting that money into the generals’ pockets and buying their families new homes at Sharm,” (the Egyptian resort town on the Red Sea at the tip of the Sinai). “The people got nothing.”
These stories came from many sources—our leather merchant in the Khan who voted for Freedom and Justice, the taxi driver who told me, at 7 p.m., at the Khan that I was his first paying rider since 11 that morning. On reflection, how different was the Muslim Brotherhood in these neighborhoods from relief societies in American cities in the 19th century or big-city machine politics from that era? They took care of the people, but in return, if there ever was to be an election, they expected only one thing back—the vote.
Throughout many of these conversations came the fact that inherent inequality destroyed the regime. While the apparatus of the secret police, the millions of informants and the fear of speaking played a huge role, beneath all of it was one common denominator. Egypt got the way it did because the rulers systemically kept the people in ignorance. The few public schools paid teachers less than they could earn at night driving a cab or selling cheap papyrus at the pyramids.
One waiter told me classes in the sole public school in his “neighborhood” (actually a district of more than a million) were as large as 100 or more students in classrooms designed through US AID consultant programs to educate 25-30. Where did the students sit? “Not on the floors—not enough room,” he said, “Students learned standing in two rows around the classroom.” As for the extremist Islamists, their “madrassas were so good…We want our children to learn to succeed in the world and not go back to the 10th century.” (He admitted that Saudi Arabia funded most of the madrassas and the “teachers” had to follow the Saudi line, teaching with textbooks furnished by the Saudis).
As one cab driver later told me, the Salafists all had “bad minds—you can’t tell people how to think.” The same man admitted he had voted Freedom and Justice. “The liberals argue about ideology and debate whether or not a Parliament should be elected every year or every two years. I don’t care about that. I want to know what they plan to do about buta-gas prices, now five times higher than last spring, and bread costing three pounds now (from one pound a year ago).” But he hastily added, “If the Freedom and Justice party forget their promises and try to make women cover or ruin our music or take away our cellphones and censor our television, we will vote them out.” I asked, “But what if they won’t allow another election?” He immediately shot back: “Then there’s always Tahrir.”