The Egyptian Dream: Egyptian National Identity and Uprisings 9781474403207

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The Egyptian Dream

The Egyptian Dream Egyptian National Identity and Uprisings

Noha Mellor

© Noha Mellor, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0319 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0320 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0932 2 (epub) The right of Noha Mellor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Preface vi

Introduction: Weak State – Weak Society

1

1 Mother Egypt: The Gift of the Nile

15

2 Ibn al-balad: The True Son of Egypt

37

3 Misri Effendi: The Squeezed Middle Class

59

4 The ‘As if’ State

76

5 Tools of Mass Persuasion

95

6 Language of Division or Unity?

106

7 The Intellectuals’ Identity Crisis

121

8 When Egyptians Revolt

141

Conclusion

159

Bibliography 165 Index 188

Preface

I was immensely moved, as many others were, by the scene of Egyptians taking to the streets in January 2011 demanding more freedom, and witnessing the end of an era of corruption and oppression. I felt so proud of the changes that had been made in just eighteen days, and the peacefulness and perseverance of so many young revolutionaries; in fact, a protest on that scale was unimaginable for many Egyptians of my generation. I have wanted to write about the uprisings since then, and I have keenly accessed many resources, both in Arabic and English, as can be seen from the extensive bibliography. I have also followed hundreds of television programmes, zapping from one Egyptian channel to another, to watch events as they unfolded; indeed, the pace of change was so fast: ministers, prime ministers and even presidents frequently came and went within the space of three years. It was difficult to structure an informed discussion about the Egyptian uprisings while changes constantly disrupted the political scene. The topic of this book emerged from scores of discussions with Egyptian friends and acquaintances about our Egyptian identity. It is an identity that we have taken for granted but the premise of which we have been unable to define. We have wondered if, historically, we have shared a national ethos or an Egyptian Dream. This volume contributes to the debate about Egyptian national identity, and I invite comments and critiques from readers, wherever they are in the world. vi

pref a ce | vii I see this book about national identity as an extension of my previous work about Arab journalism and media (Mellor 2007). This subject has already been discussed in numerous academic works, but national identity underpins the symbols and representations circulated by mainstream media, which can play a major role in fostering a certain image of that identity. All forms of communication, in fact, including objects such as the Egyptian flag, help instil a sense of national loyalty. This volume is in honour of that nation, and dedicated to all Egyptian youth, who have shown great resilience and determination to challenge and deliberate – against all odds – in their desire to realise the Egyptian Dream.

Introduction: Weak State – Weak Society

President Obama praised the Egyptians for delivering their historic revolution in his speech broadcast on 12 February 2011: ‘The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard’, he said, ‘for the spirit of peaceful protest and perseverance that the Egyptian people have shown, can serve as a powerful wind at the back of this change’. However, what began as an admirable, peaceful collective action or, as Obama described it: ‘the power of human dignity’, subsequently turned into violent outbreaks, attacks on public facilities and collective sexual harassment inside Tahrir Square; such violence is perhaps what prompted the CNN to ask whether the Arab Spring was worth it (Haddad 2012). The question itself, argues Haddad, reduces the uprising to a spectacle for the developed world to watch and judge whether the Arabs can catch up with the process of adopting democracy after centuries of colonialism. The revolutionary Egyptian voices seem to have missed the pitch, as the nation is literally divided between diverse ideological camps: liberals, Muslim Brotherhood, ultra-conservative Muslims (Salafists), leftists, Black Bloc and Nasserites, to mention but a few; in order to support these camps, a new wave of newspapers and TV stations unleashed immediately after Mubarak’s ousting were launched as platforms for both the anti-­ government and anti-opposition voices. The Media Production City, where many satellite talk shows are broadcast, was under sporadic sieges and even direct attacks by some Salafist groups 1

2  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m opposing what they regarded as pro-Mubarak propaganda. Labour strikes soared to a record high: the number of such strikes, including sit-ins, road blocks and demonstrations reached 1,969 in 2012, compared to only 530 in 2010. Angry citizens who felt victimised by the police forces launched sporadic attacks on police stations and, in March 2013, over sixty police stations across Egypt went on strike to protest against the policies of the Ministry for the Interior. Universities, too, launched demonstrations, calling for a new democratically elected president and broader reforms in the higher education sector (Rashwan 2011). In Port Said, what began as a clash between rival football fans of the Port Said club, al-Masry, and Cairo’s Al-Ahly club, ended with seventy-four people dead in the Port Said stadium on 2 February 2012. The event raised many questions regarding the role the police played: many security officers stood by and watched while people were killed. The court ruling on the case sentenced twenty-one defendants to death, but Port Said residents were furious about the verdict and took to the streets to express their anger. They called for civil disobedience, thereby defying the state of emergency imposed on the whole city. People raised city flags and banners saying ‘Republic of Port Said’ stressing their desired separate identity from the rest of Egypt, particularly from the capital, Cairo (Maqbool 2013). Lawlessness prevailed in the streets, and the army leaders warned of State collapse amidst the continuous social unrest. Once regarded as a dominant state and weak society, Egypt was now becoming ‘a weak state and a weak society’, warned Ghada Moussa, director of the Governance Centre in the National Management Institute (quoted in Howeidy 2013). In 2012, Egypt ranked thirty-first in the Failed States Index, up fourteen places compared to 2011 (Howeidy 2013). The youth, celebrated as the driving engine of the 2011 uprising, and other Egyptians were far from agreeing on how best to represent the Tahrir Revolution. News media had become hesitant in labelling any Tahrir activist as ‘revolutionary’, preferring instead to refer to them simply as protestors, lest they offend any of the many groups who claimed to be the true revolutionaries; indeed, one of the central problems in Egypt in the post-independence era was the inability of its leaders to construct a coherent and solid ideology that could appeal and unite the majority of Egyptians. This ideology is what constitutes ‘a nation’, and national identity is understood as shared

i ntroducti on | 3 values used for mobilising the majority of Egyptians. The sources of national identity depend very much on the social construct of what constitutes this identity, as interpreted by the custodians of collective memory: heads of state, religious leaders and educators or media professionals. Given the authoritarian nature of the regime in Egypt, at least prior to the 2011 revolution, it is noted that a change of president triggered a new wave of interpretations of what constituted Egyptian national identity. Beginning with the 1919 revolt against British rule, all social classes in Egypt were behind the Wafd party and its leader, Saad Zaghloul, who embodied the true modern Egyptian, educated and versed in Western culture. The 1952 coup d’état depended very much on the image of peasants and workers as the authentic representation of Egyptian-ness. President Nasser (1954–70) used to draw on this image in an attempt to gain the Egyptians’ support for his conflicts with Israel, but that support faded when Egyptian forces were defeated in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. President Sadat (1970–81) exalted the middle-class functionaries and small entrepreneurs as the true representatives of modern Egyptians, and his foreign policy depended very much on the rhetoric of openness and wealth. Thousands and even millions of unskilled and semi-skilled Egyptians, previously regarded as the underclass, poured into the oil-rich Gulf States in the mid-1970s, seeking better-paid jobs, in what sociologists call ‘the revolution of rising expectations’ (Amin 2000: 97). The ousted President Mubarak (1980–2011) exalted the business tycoons and entrepreneurs, and, under his rule, Egyptian identity was very much linked to entrepreneurship as well as their fahlawi (adaptable) personality – ability to adjust to different surroundings. His foreign policy rather reduced Egypt’s role to a mere observer, while some Gulf States rushed to fill Egypt’s role as mediator. Mubarak’s Egypt was a society with a highly stratified class structure, in which one class controlled the political-economic-military complex, accumulating economic, political and cultural capital at the expense of the Egyptian masses. Mohamed Morsi’s short-lived presidency (2012–13) marked a radical turn to the redefinition of nationalism through the lens of religion, and his term was characterised by extreme polarisation among Egyptians, as well as a shift in the nationalism discourse of ‘us’ (pious) versus ‘them’ (traitors), discussed in Chapter 8. The 2011 revolution was regarded as a rupture from this multi-­ dimensional social injustice and a rebellion against a weak state, incapable of

4  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m uniting all social groups or even establishing public order. In fact, politicians attempted to construct a unified Egyptian identity or unity during the period between 1950 and 1990, sometimes labelled as ibn al-balad (Son of Egypt) and other times as Misri effendi (Mr Egyptian), referring to the working class and middle class, respectively. Class here is based not only on economic capital but also on cultural and social capital; however, due to the increasing ‘de-statisation’ of the Egyptian nation, or the weakening of the state, society has now become more and more fragmented. Civic associations, although seeming to penetrate well into Egyptian society, have been unable to confront the State with its short-sighted policies and its failure to lead social change; instead, these associations have helped enforce the status quo by preserving the so-called ‘as – if’ state, or a state that is incapable of providing adequate amenities such as education and health care. Moreover, the spoken language constitutes a cultural problem in Egypt (as we shall see in Chapter 6), which further enforces the socio-cultural gap between various groups. Supposing that the Egyptian Revolution of 25 January 2011 is best remembered by its slogan, ‘The people want to bring down the regime’, it is important to point out that far from denoting a homogenous group, the word ‘people’ is a label given to diverse factions, each with a different voice; although during the revolution millions of protestors agreed on one objective, to oust Mubarak, they did not necessarily agree on one perception of their role or identity as protestors. It is true to say that the eighteen-day revolt in 2011 reflected a temporary unity of all social groups, helped by the fact that the military chose not to intervene and support Mubarak’s regime, but, since then, the challenge has been how to re-kindle this unity around a more sustained political and social agenda. This book argues that the fragmentation in the political scene reflects the increasing social division as an outcry to (re-)define Egyptian national identity. It tells the story of Egyptian-ness as constructed by statesmen, intellectuals and Islamic thinkers. The argument here is that statesmen failed to unite the nation around one set of values, while the intellectuals preferred to lay the blame on either the weak State or the silent majority (the public). Meanwhile, religious groups like the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated the cultural space and civil society, but their efforts culminated, ironically, in enforcing the socio-cultural status quo; this is one reason why their regime

i ntroducti on | 5 failed to restore order or strengthen the post-revolutionary State. Central to this discussion is the shift in narrative regarding true Egyptian-ness or Egyptian national identity. Constructing Egyptian-ness Social and national identities are constructs that depend on the presence of an Other for their significance. Rather than seeing identity as signified and signifier, and hence with a meaning that is fixed in one spatial-temporal context, this identity should be seen as a construct with no fixed truth in the public domain, nor a centre from which it derives its meaning; instead, such a concept is dependent on, or subordinated to, other concepts and thus, its meaning oscillates from one label to the next. Consequently, in order to construct the meaning of Egyptian-ness, a differentiation must be made from other labels, such as British, Palestinian, and so on. The aim is an analysis of the concept of Egyptian-ness within Egyptian society, therefore, a comparison must be made with similar relationships of dependency where it is difficult to pin down one stable meaning or attribute of true Egyptian-ness. This corresponds to Hegel’s ([1807] 1977: 15) idea of consciousness in which self-knowledge and self-consciousness is binary: one perceives self as an object that sees, and a subject that is seen. It follows then, that whether power or ideology in the Egyptian society are analysed, it is not possible to claim that Egyptians produce one hegemonic understanding of the self, without including a representation of how others see Egyptian-ness: the representation is based on people’s ability to see themselves and how others see them; in so doing, an infinite circle of meaning-making is entered, in which the definition of self keeps shifting and expanding as the meaning of self is constantly redefined and expanded in relation to others. Identity is also constituted through the processes of similarity and difference (Jenkins 2000; Laclau and Mouffe 1985); accordingly, for the relationship to be identified by shared traits requires it to be defined against an Other-identity in order to gain a foothold. Actors then strive to ‘fix’ these identities ‘locked into a specific relationship to the others’ (Phillips and Jørgensen 2002: 25). The position assigned to each actor is in tandem with a set of rules and expectations of what to do or say; as actors are ‘fragmented’ by simultaneously possessing diverse identities such as woman, educated and nationalist, this gives rise to

6  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m conflicting discourses. This identity is based on the ‘dialectic of identification [emphasis in original text]: how we identify ourselves, how others identify us, and the ongoing interplay of these in the process of social identification’ (Jenkins 2000: 7). An integral component of this national identity is consequently reflected in Egypt’s relationship with other nations: the Egyptian national identity has usually been defined in the context of Egypt’s hostile relations with Israel and the USA. This national identity can be unpacked through an exploration of how both collective and social identity are formed. Social identity is a construct based on how people perceive themselves belonging to a certain group, based on specific characteristics such as gender, race, religion, class or ethnicity. Therefore, one person may hold multiple identities: for instance, a male Christian worker from Upper Egypt may feel part of the Sa’idi community (Upper Egyptians), may show solidarity with co-workers and be affiliated to the Coptic Christian community. The crux of the matter is that this individual must feel a sense of belonging to a community sharing the same (religious) beliefs, concerns or traits. Social identity is an overall term that includes markers of ‘social statuses, roles, positions, relationships, and institutional and other relevant community identities one may attempt to claim or assign in the course of social life’ (Ochs 1993: 288). Social identity refers to an individual’s perception and knowledge of his or her membership of a social group that shares certain values and emotional significance (Tajfel 1981). This membership can be based on descriptive categories used by group members in order to distinguish their group from others. Social identity, then, is not a single static construct, but created collaboratively and through interaction with other individuals and groups. There are also certain features that may contribute to the construction of one’s social identity, including symbols used to assign positions in the social structure, or naming each other in an attempt to position one another as members of the group (Stryker et al. 2000); not only that, social identity can also refer to ‘collective identity’, meaning that its markers indicate collective feelings such as belongingness, respect, understanding and agency (Bernd and Klandermans 2001: 321). In this way, it can affirm one’s belonging to a specific social world, marking solidarity and moral support while being distinct from other groups.

i ntroducti on | 7 The analysis of group identity, or how group members not only feel part of a group but are also responsible for this group, is equally important here. Group members are bound by similar norms and they are keen to abide by them (Power 2004); indeed, group identification is an important component of collective action (Brewer and Silver 2000); group members need to simultaneously identify with one another (inclusion) and differentiate themselves from other groups (ibid.). Collective identity is expressed in cultural elements such as rituals, clothing and narratives: the ‘cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution’ (Polletta and Jasper 2001: 285). Collective identities can also be artificially constructed (ibid.), for instance, when the cultural, legal and education institutions in a given society force people to identify with a certain outside group. Egyptians, for example, have been interpolated into national, regional and international media, as part of the Arab world, and hence, such discourses have fostered their sense of belonging to a pan-Arab community. Collective identity is based on shared cultural beliefs and practices, which create a system of meaning. This system contributes to the feeling of inclusion (as part of one group) as well as exclusion (from the same group). These identities are therefore far from fixed and static, but dynamic and changing, subject to constant re-evaluation; individuals often aim to nurture, enhance and defend their sense of identity (Bloom 1990: 37). The process of identity-building is adjacent to the process of nation-building, particularly in post-independence states such as Egypt, in which collective identity is indispensable for shared mobilisation within the post-independence state (Norman 2006: 33). This process not only utilises policies pertaining to language, citizenship and school curricula, but extends to organising national and patriotic events (ibid.). Religion, and particularly Islam, has long been celebrated as the glue that binds the majority of Egyptians to a large, worldwide Islamic community. Several scholars (Chouerri 1996; Esposito 2000) see a sign of Islamic resistance to the Western cultural presence in the recent Islamic revival within the Arab world. This revival, which began in the nineteenth century, has sought to recreate a new sense of identity as a basis for the progress and development (Nahda) of the new Arab and Muslim world; as a result, it is a natural consequence of centuries of colonialism, and an outcry for enforcing a new,

8  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m distinct identity for Egyptians as part of the Muslim world, which took the cultural heritage of Egypt, before it underwent the influence of British and French colonial rule, as its main source of inspiration. Asserting this Islamic identity, however, has not been easy, as Egypt has plunged through seas of different identities throughout its history: Pharaonic, Coptic, Islamic and Arab. Since the twentieth century, Arab and Islamic identities have profiled very strongly as markers of the true Egyptian identity; however, this does not mean the death of the cultural Pharaonic and Coptic heritage, which are still revived in the writings of commentators and intellectuals in an attempt to distinguish Egyptians from the rest of the region. The true Islamic identity, for many intellectuals, did not necessarily mean a true separation from Western modernity; on the contrary, the true mission has been how to marry Western development with Egyptian Islamic heritage and traditions. The basis of these traditions, according to the leading thinker Mohamed Abdu (2002: 55), is the moral conduct deeply entrenched in Islam not only as a religion but as a way of life. It is argued in this book that there is now an acute need to focus on national identity and how it may contribute not only to producing and re-producing social division, but also to reproducing an authoritarian ruling system. The aim is to illustrate how Egyptian-ness is based primarily on ‘relationality’ or seeing Egypt vis-à-vis other Arab states within the same region or beyond; even within the Egyptian identity, there exists rhetorical and social strategies of inclusion and exclusion, thereby dividing society into those who are regarded as true representatives of Egypt, versus others who may constitute an emotional, economic, political or social burden. They can be an emotional burden if their tragedies trouble the hearts of other groups; they can be an economic burden, if they are in constant need of charity and financial support; they can be a political burden if they are regarded as a foolish mob that contaminates the political processes by making objectionable and illogical decisions; and they can be a social burden if their actions are deemed immoral, and hence, harmful to society’s ethical dispositions. The sense of collective identity must rest on a shared historical memory and past tales with culturally identifiable values and morals; such narratives contribute to recognising the features of the collective identity which

i ntroducti on | 9 delineate boundaries between what are considered socially acceptable and ­unacceptable. This point, the features of the true sons and daughters of Egypt, will be further discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. These features, however, are far from inert, but have proven to be plastic and in constant transformation; thus, what was once a representation of true Egyptian-ness, could later become the source of evil and decadence and therefore detrimental to the whole nation. The Cornerstones of National Identity Egypt faced a series of struggles in constructing three cornerstones for its new identity, during its process of decolonisation: system of rule (state), knowledge (education) and social cohesion (national identity). However, Arab states, argues Ayubi (1995: xi), are feeble when it comes to exercising their power in collecting taxes, introducing laws within all sections of society, or consolidating their status in the moral sphere. They are ‘over-stretched’ states in that they aim to ‘pursue developmentalist and welfarist policies at the same time’ (ibid. p. 3). The state in the European tradition is different from the Arabic word dawla (state) which denotes ‘circulation and reversals of power and fortune’ (p. 15). The current form of state in the Arab world is borrowed from the West: it did not arise from natural evolution within Arab societies and, as such, it lacks public will as it has ‘remained alien in relation to society’ (p. 25). This phenomenon applies to Egypt, and the power of the public is confined to toppling the ruling regime, at best, while keeping the fundamental social divisions intact: Egypt has become a tripartite state (Kandil 2012a), wherein the state is protected by either the army or the police, thus forming a discrete part of society, isolated from the rest. State-building in a post-colonial nation such as Egypt is also closely linked to its education plans: education features highly as the bedrock of human development, in terms of social, intellectual and economic fulfilment; however, education is not directly conducive to wellbeing, for it can also be used as a stratifying system that discriminates against people due to their social class or gender, thereby guiding certain social groups towards selected positions in the labour market. Education can also serve as one of the main channels of disseminating the true sense of Egyptian-ness through the teachings of history, religion and language; indeed, education is an important

10  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m mode of persuasion, integral to the structure of power in any state (Ayubi 1995: 27); nevertheless, education in the Egyptian case has been a source of division not cohesion, as shall be seen in Chapter 5. For instance, the history curriculum in elementary education changed so that the term ‘the Umayyad dynasty’ was replaced by the term ‘Islamic State’, which, for some commentators, according to Gomaa (2010), is proof that the political motivation behind such change was to curtail Turkey’s role in the region; likewise, the term ‘Arab–Israeli conflict’ was replaced by ‘the Palestinian–Israeli conflict’, following the Camp David treaty (ibid.). The State here fills a welfare function, primarily targeting the impoverished and working classes, but not necessarily the middle class. The latter group usually leads civil society whose role, for the major part, is dedicated to charitable organisations that support the less privileged members of society. The failing state services for these working and impoverished classes offers the opportunity for benevolent groups to fill the gap with their general support, including financial assistance from the middle classes. The impoverished classes are viewed as both a threat and beneficial to the middle classes; they are a threat in that they are considered to be a source of crime and violence against the middle classes, but are important for large rebellious movements as they are easy to mobilise. For instance, during the 1919 revolution, Egyptians chanted ‘Egypt for Egyptians’ in their protests against British rule (Pollard 2000: 50), while the revolutionary leader, Saad Zaghlol, depended on being able to mobilise poor Egyptians and workers. In the national image, the latter groups were still seen as a blemish on a nation that was desperate to put forward a progressive representation of its subjects in a post-colonial era. Western manners were regarded as ‘good manners’ and an indispensable part of building the nation: the intellectuals’ struggle was to pass these on to the impoverished groups. A course textbook from 1910 on the upbringing of children taught them that the learning of manners was important for nationbuilding and that ‘the behaviour of ignorant people is vile and is by no means the kind of behaviour that will serve the nation’ (quoted in Pollard 2000: 57). A passage of it reads as follows: The Nation consists of a group of families. And if the families that make up the nation are enlightened, refined, rich, strong, then so too will the nation

i ntroducti on | 11 be all of those things. And if those families are possessing of fallen morals, if they are poor, if they are uneducated, then the nation, like those families, will be corrupt, poor and backwards. (p. 57)

The same rhetoric about the poor and uneducated has prevailed since the 1952 coup, in which the disadvantaged were seen simultaneously as a curse and a blessing: a sign of a backward past, but a necessity in order to mobilise the nation in times of trouble. In the history of Egypt, the impoverished classes have never been promised social and political rights (except perhaps for a brief period during the Nasser era); instead, they were promised ‘national dignity’, an abstract term which glosses over the discourse of equality and the re-distribution of wealth and rights. This rhetoric is prominent in public speeches and commentaries, and is usually highlighted in statements about Egypt’s international relations, particularly with Israel and the USA. The most quoted statement from former President Mohamed Morsi’s speech on 29 December 2012 is: ‘Egypt will never go bankrupt, will never give up or kneel down [to other nations]’. This is reminiscent of the rhetoric of previous presidents – Sadat emphasised national dignity when he was defending his decision to wage war against Israel in 1973: ‘I refused the easy and empty solution. I chose the difficult path because it was the right path. My decision, from the very first moment, was that I must carry on and the Arab nation along with you, from the defeatism, disruption and loss in which we lived, to dignity, cohesion and victory’ (speech before the People’s Assembly, Cairo, 14 March 1976). This rhetoric is based on a number of assumptions such as the belief that a certain emotional state is valued higher than concrete political or economic rights; it is also a relational rhetoric in that it does not address Egyptians as individuals but as part of their communities. When the Egyptian national dignity is upheld, it is a victory for the whole nation, not merely for a few individuals. The plight of the impoverished groups is what has been disseminated as the main motive for the Arab uprisings in Western media. The Arab Spring was claimed to begin with the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-yearold citizen and vendor from Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia; this incident sparked the massive protests across the whole of Tunisia, and was also said to have sparked the Egyptian protests ‘in direct response to events in Tunisia’ (Dabashi 2012:

12  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m 18). However, self-immolation and self-harm have repeatedly occurred in Egypt over the past few decades, without spurring a similar uprising. A worker in one of the tourist sites in Hurgada threw himself in front of a train, after being sacked; another dismissed worker threw himself and his daughter from the sixth floor of a building, as an expression of his inability to provide a living for himself and his daughter; others in similar desperate situations threw themselves into the Nile or committed suicide; one final-year student in the Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, committed suicide and left a note saying, ‘I killed myself because I am a failure and I cannot keep up with this world’ (Al Mirghani et al. 2009: 52, 100). Class conflict in itself is not a guarantee for revolutions: it can actually impede them. Parsa (2000: 7) argues that revolutions depend on class coalition and state breakdown: Parsa’s review of three revolutions in three developing countries argues that the coalition between students, clergymen, workers and capitalists shows the absence of the Marxist proletarian consciousness, or a militant anti-capitalist ideology. In the Egyptian case, there has been a radical change in its social fabric, with the formation of the middle classes in the wake of the 1952 coup, as shall be seen in Chapter 3. The colonial discourse has discounted people in its claim that they are less capable of progressing without the leadership of the military and robust heads-of-state. The post-1952 elites judged the majority of Egyptians as being less disciplined and less capable of developing the nation, unless control remained in the hands of the military and police forces; their aim was to maintain their power and the ability to regulate the decision-making process, and to re-organise and redistribute wealth and rights. The State, however, remained (and remains) a failing and weak state, in that it lacks the capacity to effectively enforce its legitimacy and its legislation for the benefit of the whole of society. The Western assumption that a strong civil society could correct this failure by balancing state coercive power has indeed, proved wrong – civil society, largely controlled by the middle classes, has unintentionally enforced the status quo. It is argued here that the weakness and absence of a well-organised Egyptian state is not only apparent in the deterioration of its public services, such as health and education, but also in its inability to manage conflict amongst social groups. The main thesis here is that the prevalent state

i ntroducti on | 13 rhetoric encourages more social fragmentation, which not only weakens the Egyptian national identity, but also destabilises the already fragile state. The remedy, it is argued, lies in strengthening the state and re-assessing the role of civil society, in order to help Egyptians define and assert both their political and social rights. A strong state is defined here as one that is able to effectively implement legislation and penetrate society, based on a mutual understanding (or a contract) with the citizenry, which is, in turn, knowledgeable of its rights. In order for this to happen, Egyptians need to discover and enforce the components of their national identity, such as language, education, rights and values, otherwise Egyptian society will continue to re-produce the current oppressive discourse, which may legitimately sacrifice individual rights and freedom in the name of authenticity (Pratt 2005). The gain of the 2011 revolution is perhaps not only in toppling a corrupt regime, but also, more importantly, the revival of debates regarding national identity and patriotism. It is now vital to identify the tenets of Egyptian nationalism and its underpinning values. Are the Egyptians those described by neighbouring nations as fahlawi (adaptable), or politically apathetic, as they were during Mubarak’s regime? Do Egyptians agree on what makes a ‘good Egyptian’? Do Egyptians see themselves as Arabs or descendants of Pharaohs? How do Egyptians reconcile their rich history with contemporary reality? Do Egyptians feel that they share a common ethos and one national project or dream? The proposed answers are laid out in three stages: firstly, contemporary attempts by Egyptian sociologists and historians to define Egyptian identity will be discussed in Chapter 1. Chapters 2 and 3 continue the discussion with special focus on the so-called awlad al-balad, the ‘Sons of Egypt’ (the peasants and impoverished), once celebrated as the true authentic face of the nation, rather than the educated middle classes (Chapter 3), celebrated during Nasser’s era as the new driving force behind the Egyptian development plan. Secondly, statesmen’s efforts to define the national identity and how it suits their political interests is explored (Chapter 4), and how these efforts materialised and can be traced through the education sector (Chapter 5), which, instead of disseminating one coherent national identity, contributes to cementing the social division in society, including the use of language (Chapter 6). Thirdly, a discussion regarding the intellectuals’ as well

14  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m as Islamists’ efforts to define the Egyptian national identity crisis will be made (Chapters 7 and 8 respectively), while reflecting on the recent uprisings. Understanding Egyptian national identity is intrinsic to comprehending the recent uprisings in Egypt, which occurred because ‘certain changes must already have taken place in the living conditions, customs, and more of a nation, and prepared men’s minds for the reception of new ideas’ (Kuran 1989: 66); in order to understand these changes, it is important to reconstruct the ideology underpinning it within its specific ‘episodic context’, or ‘the broad socio-economic, political, and cultural conditions’ which underpin changes in the dominant discourse in society (Moaddel 1992: 360). The following chapters examine important changes and episodes in Egypt’s history, focusing on the constant social struggle to define true Egyptian-ness, and the particular social challenges affecting Egyptian society during these events.

1 Mother Egypt: The Gift of the Nile

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is a present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. (Ernest Renan 1990: 19)

Introduction The 2013 constitution, which amended the previous constitution issued under the Muslim Brotherhood’s (MB) rule, begins by describing Egypt as ‘the gift of the Nile and the gift of Egyptians to humanity’. Egypt as ‘the Mother of the World’ is a common saying in Egypt. The fact that Egypt is represented as a female (mother) is no coincidence if consideration is given to the words referring to nation, land, territory and country all being in feminine (rather than masculine) forms in Arabic. Paradoxically, this gendered system of representation ends up alienating Egyptian women from participating in the political process, and hence, in the process of nation-building; consequently, nationalist discourse about Mother Egypt may bestow on women a symbolic power of being the source of reproducing the nation, while institutions behind this discourse may strip women of any actual political power (see Baron 2007). Mothers give life and protection to their sons, who in turn, 15

16  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m should honour and defend them, when they are older and stronger. The sons here are the guardians of their mothers’ chastity and honour. This is perhaps why nationalist rhetoric depends on the concept of honour, or national honour, especially during times of conflict, which links women’s honour to that of the nation (Baron 2007: 42). Such nationalist discourse is based on the love for the place, the land and the territory, and not necessarily on a creed or a set of values. Egypt here is the ‘mother’ figure whose place is exalted among all other (female) nations and constantly coveted by invaders. It is for that ‘mother’ that many Egyptian poets and singers have chanted their songs and recited their poems; they were used to agitate public opinion during the uprisings, beginning on 25 January 2011. Songs would usually depict Egypt as worthy of her sons’ and daughters’ sacrifices, even at times when one’s love for her was questioned, such as in Mohamed Mounir’s song, Ezzay (How), celebrated as the revolution’s song: How do you accept this for me, my love [Egypt]? To be in adoration of your name When you continue to confuse me And you don’t even feel my goodness, how? I have no motive in my love for you But my faithful love has brought me no salvation How can I be the one to hold your head up high When you continue to hold my head down low How? (Sanders and Visona 2012: 225–6)

The image of Egypt as a mother will reappear in the following chapters, but the focus of this chapter will be a discussion of Egyptian scholars on the evaluation of Egypt’s status and national character, whether it is Pharaonic, Islamic, Coptic or Arab. This character, as shall be seen below, is full of contradictions: while some scholars agree that Egyptians are characterised by their peacefulness, the recent uprisings have been accompanied by several acts of violence. The ordinary Egyptian, who is seen as apathetic (see Chapter 2), is at times considered to be a rebel; if scholars and commentators agree on one thing, it is the need for ‘unity’ amongst all Egyptians, regardless of their ethnic or religious backgrounds, but unity is difficult due to the competing discourses regarding national identity and its roots (Pharaonic, Islamic, Coptic

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 17 or Arab), and the underpinning values and ideologies (religious or Islamic, liberal or Nasserite). These discourses are disseminated by two main institutions: the media and education via language, which will be further discussed later. Suffice to say here that the State discourse about national identity is in itself in constant flux, and effectively changes each time a new regime enters the stage. Meanwhile, intellectuals, Islamists and activists pull public opinion in different and opposing directions, forming a natural organic resistance to this discourse of a changing State. Undoubtedly, any attempt to unravel these complex layers of identity is a tall order, consequently, this chapter provides a far more modest aim in presenting an overview of these competing discourses that surround national identity, moving from an Islamic identity, enforced by the Islamic conquest through subordination during the Muslim Ottoman Empire, to a national identity, characterised by a unique sense of Egyptian-ness enforced by the European conquests, and ending with a pan-Arabist identity, prescribed by the collapse of the monarchy in 1952. While the discussion does not rest on a rigorous historical analysis, there will be references to key historical events which are crucial to understanding the development of Egyptian national identity. The argument here is that this identity is based on concrete attributes such as territory, and not necessarily on any one creed, and certain values or culture (including language, as will be discussed in Chapter 6). National Identity and the International Scene Identity is not static but dynamic, and it cannot be claimed that because people are said to share a specific history that their identity is unchanging (Wodak et al. 1999: 11). Nationality identity is often said to be based on ethnic, cultural and civic dimensions (Smith 1991; Peters 2002: 4). The ethnic dimension refers to common genealogy and history, while the cultural bond refers to common customs and traditions, and the civic aspect refers to the legal and governance system which binds a certain group of people together, all of which help to form one nation. Applying this model to the Egyptian case is not helpful, as Egypt has hosted several civilisations and histories, from Pharaonic to Arab. The rich, diverse history points to the Egyptian identity as based on ‘relationality’, or the relationship between the people as a nation, and others beyond the borders; indeed, national identity is an intrinsic factor

18  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m in the analysis of foreign policy and international relations (Bloom 1990) as it can contribute to the definition of state interests as well as strategic future vision. The causal link between national identity and foreign policy is illustrated in the ‘discourse of danger’ (Campbell 1992: 75) in which a secure state identity is linked to avoiding threats located outside its territories. This discourse is in continual development and can contribute to the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, or a safe, internal identity rather than an external danger that threatens the stability of this internal safety. A state identity then rests on two dimensions: internally linked to the cultural beliefs and values usually disseminated by the political and intellectual elites and an external dimension linked through the representation of the state vis-à-vis other states. The ruling regimes in Egypt had drawn on different discourses since independence in 1952, in an attempt to redefine state identity in the eyes of the world and other nations, and this necessitates a redefinition of the way the nation is represented internally. The internal dynamics in defining and shaping the national identity within the Egyptian State are at the heart of this volume, although references to the external representations will also be briefly discussed in order to illustrate this causal link; in the Middle East, generally, both state identity and national identity are perpetually changing because of the existence of competing regional and religious affiliations such as pan-Arabism and panIslamism. The national and regional identities have often coexisted, rather than one being subordinate to the other; as Fred Halliday argues, ‘There remains a coexistence of pan-Arab and state-centred nationalism; it is not a question of it being resolved one way or the other, in the direction of a full political wahda [unity] or, conversely by the end of the pan-Arab dream, but rather shifts from one plane to the other’ (Halliday 2000: 50). Each Arab state has its own foreign policy, often distinct from other states, despite the presence of qawmiyya (Arab nationalism). This panArabism was revived and thrived in the hands of Nasserism in Egypt and Ba’athist regimes in Syria and Iraq, but it had developed well before that, as a counter-discourse to the hegemony of the Ottoman authorities. It is true that pan-Arabism has declined since the death of Nasser, the launch of the Open Door policy and the rivalry of Islamic discourses. Therefore, it follows that Arab foreign policies have become more pragmatic, aiming to secure the

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 19 regime’s survival and to maintain the status quo; for the State of Egypt, the political and intellectual elites have acted as agents involved in articulating a national discourse, and justifying this discourse amongst their followers, in order to reduce internal or external tensions. The competing sub-identities can be mobilised (as suggested by Bloom 1990) if citizens psychologically identify with the nation in relation to the international environment; thus, if the national identity is perceived as being threatened, citizens would rally to defend it: the scale of mobilisation would depend on the degree of psycho-social identification. This form of national identity dynamics is usually triggered by symbols such as the metaphor of nation as ‘mother’, in the case of Egypt, or the invocation of national prestige such as Egypt’s central role in global politics, or the notion of national pride, not only in times of crises, but also in times of internal tension; relations as well as conflicts with other nations play a pivotal role in developing a collective national identity. These tensions and conflicts promote self-knowledge amongst citizens: they become more aware of their particularity as a nation. The national rhetoric in times of conflict may draw on the concepts of good and evil, in order to demonise and exclude certain nations, or even prodigal groups within the same society; for example, after toppling the MB, private and state media institutions depicted the MB as the true enemies of Egypt, blaming them for every explosion or act of violence that happened on Egyptian territory. The Housing Minister at that time, Ibrahim Mahlab, commented on an explosion in Mansoura city on 23 December 2013, and charged the MB as the perpetrator, calling it the enemy who sought to ‘slaughter Egypt’ (Youm7 2013). Likewise, the activist Medhat Qulada questioned the MB’s loyalty to Egypt by pointing out its attempts to threaten state institutions, in what others called the ‘Brotherhoodification’ of those institutions (Qulada 2013). Egypt as the Guardian of Religions Religion as well as nationalism play a major role in creating a sense of social and national cohesion and shared symbolic systems. Religious nationalism then rivals secular nationalism, which was dispersed during colonial rule and adopted by the educated elites. Religious nationalism depends on the collective moral values within society, and it may be a reaction to the failure

20  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m in applying Western models of development (Juergensmeyer 1993: 194–5). Religious nationalism, moreover, blurs the borders between public, religious and private spheres: public and private realms should conform with the religious values and teachings in order to ensure social justice and freedom (Lapidus 1983). An integral part of development discourse, on the other hand, is the assumption that modernisation is synonymous with secularisation, thereby relegating the concept of religion to the background in the process of constructing a national identity: for Egypt, and indeed for many other developing nations, such simplistic binaries as religious versus secular cannot contribute to the analysis of the national identity, based on a complex relation between State and religion, not only in terms of religious practices (regulating mosques and churches) but more importantly, in defining a set of moral values, indispensable to this national identity. One example here is the Egyptian constitution, amended twice since the 2011 revolution, and often debated regarding Article 2, dating back to the 1971 constitution, which established the Sunni Islamic jurisprudence as the basic guideline for legislation, followed by two articles added to the 2012 constitutional amendment made by the Brotherhood during its brief tenure: one giving the al-Azhar institution the power to define Islamic law and the other, which included all Sunni jurisprudence since Islam’s founding as the basis for legislation. These two articles have been deleted from the 2013 constitution, but Article 2 remains the same. The heated debate was accompanied by tense discussions about the role of religion and religious teachings in defining how the Egyptian State should work. Egyptian Muslim movements such as the MB wanted to renew the Egyptian identity through its Islamisation in an attempt to rid Egypt of the influences of Western cultural imperialism (Chouerri 1996). Some learned Muslims such as Mohamed Abdu (d. 1905), sought a new Islamic enlightenment as an alternative to Western secularism, while others sought a total break from the Western notion and a complete Islamised society, in the belief that religion is the basis for moral conduct; therefore, if modernisation spurs nostalgia for the past as a direct reaction to the rapid modern social changes, it also gives rise to religious resurgence such as the so-called re-Islamisation. For several learned Muslims, Western modernisation had failed Egypt and was largely responsible for political corruption and social injustice (Abdo

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 21 2000: 13). Islam has become a political instrument, thanks to two parallel processes: ‘objectification’ in regarding Islam as the object of knowledge, and ‘functionalisation’ or naturalising religious discourse and education to fulfil the utilitarian duties of the state (Starrett 1998: 8–9). Religiosity has been associated with piety and morality, as often shown in comparisons made between Egyptians and Europeans. The learned scholar Rifaa Tahtawi (1801–73), one of the leaders of the Nahda (renaissance) period from the nineteenth century, once praised Muslim husbands for being jealous, in contrast to French men: ‘One of [the] Parisians’ bad habits is that they allow the moral decadence of many of their women, whose men are rarely jealous, unlike Muslim [men]’ (Tahtawi 1993: 153). Christians were also seen as part of the Egyptian ignorant masses, and hence distinct from European Christians. Tahtawi argued, ‘Parisians are different from many of our Christians in that they are smarter and sharper, unlike Copts who are naturally ignorant’ (1993: 153). Underpinning this religious revival, is a fundamental conviction that Egypt’s status is that of the guardian of monotheistic beliefs, usually illustrated by several references to Egypt in the Qur’an (Al-Maddah and Hassanien 2000: 19) and which many learned Muslims regard as proof of Egypt’s unique position in Islam. Below are examples of these verses featuring the word ‘Egypt’: We revealed to Moses and his brother: ‘House your people in Egypt, and make these houses places of worship; keep up the prayer; give good news to the believers’. (Surat Yunus [Jonah], verse 87) And when they entered upon Joseph, he took his parents to himself and said, ‘Enter Egypt, Allah willing, safe [and secure]’. (Surat Yusuf [Jonah], verse 99) And Pharaoh called out among his people; he said, ‘O my people, does not the kingdom of Egypt belong to me, and these rivers flowing beneath me; then do you not see?’. (Surat Az-Zukhruf [Ornaments of Gold], verse 51)

Egypt was also said to be reported in the Prophet’s sayings or Hadith: ‘When you conquer Egypt, treat its inhabitants well. For there lies upon you the responsibility because of blood ties or relationship (with them)’; in other scripts, it was reported that the Prophet recommended his disciples to recruit

22  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m Egyptians into their armies, because Egyptians are some of ‘the best fighters you can find’. Moreover, the respected Sheikh Shaarawi (1911–98), whose widespread popularity earned him the title of ‘Preacher of the century’, had a famous saying about Egypt, which has been played on national and private television, particularly in times of internal tension; his words were regarded as appropriate in defence of Egypt’s status as the guardian of religion: We must be vigilantly prepared to face the evil and conspiracy against Egypt, the land of kinaanah [Land of the Quiver], about which the Prophet (pbuh) said: ‘its people are united to the Day of Resurrection’. Who could say that Egypt is an infidel nation? Who are the Muslims then? Who are the believers? It was Egypt who exported the studies of Islam to the whole world and even to the country from which it descended. Look at history: who fought the barbaric Tatar and Mongol raids? It was Egypt. Who fought the Crusades? It was Egypt, and Egypt will remain Egypt in spite of all the spiteful, envious, exploiter or exploited or any paid opponents of Islam – here or abroad.

The role of religion was foregrounded in the political sphere, such as in the early 1960s, when Nasser attempted to gain the people’s support, especially MB sympathisers. Nasser drew on the Brotherhood’s religious rhetoric in his public speeches, in which he likened the political mission of the Free Officers to the Islamic jihad; he distinguished between lesser and greater jihad, where the former finished with the end of colonialism, while the latter referred to the subsequent work in rebuilding the country (Abu Zeid 1994: 55). Nasser sought to utilise the same religious rhetoric following the 1967 defeat, as a soft weapon to win mass support and regain public trust; during that time, guidelines for imams (mosque leaders) were issued, the emphasis being on the role of the imam as a soldier: ‘the imam is a soldier in the army of Da’wah [invitation to faith], and his role is as important as that of a soldier in the battlefield. The latter fights with weapons and the former fights with faith; both soldiers fight for the sake of one nation and the same principles’ (quoted in Abu Zeid 1994: 38). Nasser sought to gain public support for his socialist ideology, claiming that Islam itself is based on socialist principles, referring in particular to the Prophet’s Hadith: ‘Muslims are partners (or

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 23 associates) in three things: in water, pastures and fire’, thereby illustrating public utilities and property. Moreover, social justice was seen as an integral component of Islam, which sets a balanced relationship between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’: the former commit to help the latter through altruism such as Zakat (donations) and alms-giving (Abu Zeid 1994: 226–8). Sadat realised the powerful influence of religion in securing public support, and he relied on the Islamic institution Al-Azhar verdicts to promote his policies (Barraclough 1998). One of his tactics was to gain the support of the MB by releasing several of their detained members and allowing them to set up headquarters in Cairo. Sadat’s ally, the entrepreneur, Othman Ahmed Othman, had strong links with the MB, and he drew on these links to guarantee its support in Sadat’s fight against left-wing activists in universities and trade unions (Kandil 2012a: 167). The 1970s saw an upsurge in the construction of new mosques, whether state-owned or privately owned by entrepreneurs, including actors and actresses. Sadat made full use of religious rhetoric as illustrated in his political speeches, where he would begin with the Bismillah or ‘In the Name of God’, often ending the speech with a Qur’anic verse (Abu Zeid 1994 192). It was also during his rule that the government undertook the project of consolidating Islamic moderate discourse in the youth’s hearts through education and Al-Azhar reforms, especially in the wake of the 1977 massive protests. New television programmes were also launched to teach the public about shari’a (Muslim law) (Abu Zeid 1994: 29). However, Sadat’s attempts to appeal to the religious right wing failed, including his ban of alcohol sales in 1976, because his Open Door policy not only allowed alcohol consumption for those who could afford it, but also the purchase of foreign goods: 35 million Egyptian pounds (circa USD 5 million) was spent on imported private cars in the period between 1972 and 1975 (Lachine 1977: 6–7). During the 1980s and early 1990s, faith clashed with politics when militant Islamist groups attacked stores that sold alcohol and pornography, as well as a number of stores owned by Coptic Christians (Dorman 2009: 426); on the other hand, they sought to recreate a society within society by offering welfare services in poor areas (ibid.). The Egyptian media tended to depict the perpetrators of violent Islamist attacks as uneducated and deprived young people such as those involved in the assassination of the Egyptian professor

24  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m and human rights activist Farag Foda in 1992, or attacks on Copts and tourists (Al Sayyid 1993: 240); since then, numerous films and TV series have depicted hardcore Islamists as a source of Egypt’s backwardness and a bad image for Egypt as a modern state and regional leader. The State’s efforts to secularise Egypt may prove unfruitful, warns the Islamist thinker Mohamed I’mara (Emara 2013) who asserts that Egypt will never be a secular state, despite linking violence to the Islamists. The reason for this, according to I’mara, is that Egyptians are religious by nature and Islam penetrates their daily lives, be it in culture, business, legislation, economy, art and even architecture. He even calls for the liberal Egyptians to establish a dialogue with the Islamists in order to discover ‘the true face of Islam’ (Emara 2013). Egyptians or Arabs? Egypt faces the binary discourse of Arab versus Egyptian identities, and how unique the latter is, in addition to the religious versus secular dialogue; despite decades under colonial rule, Egypt is claimed to have preserved the purity of its unique national identity from any foreign influences. Following the French occupation (1798–1801), for instance, Egypt was said to have fought Napoleon’s troops, killing Kléber (1753–1800) and convincing General Menou to convert to Islam and marry an Egyptian woman (Ahmed Fouad 1998: 205). Egypt was not then influenced by French culture nor, for that matter, did it adopt the English language during the British conquest (1882–1952), although it was fascinated with English culture (Ahmed Fouad 1998: 205). Several Egyptian scholars (see Hegazy 2000) agree that the French conquest was the spark that ignited Egyptian national identity. Napoleon propagated the values of the French Revolution by empowering the people, while demanding the Egyptians surrender to their rulers, relying on his unique interpretation of the Qur’an and how it encouraged this form of subordination, which he presented ‘as a divine order’ (Maghraoui 2006: 40). Napoleon’s addresses to the Egyptians included terms such as ‘the Egyptian nation’, in contrast to the terms used by intellectuals such as Al-Jabarti, who referred to the people as ‘subjects’ or ‘sons of Arabs’; this triggered the intellectuals to question their unique Egyptian identity and its separation from its long-standing loyalty to the Ottoman authorities

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 25 (Hegazy 2000: 27). Archaeology also emerged as a new science following the French occupation and attempts were made to interpret hieroglyphic signs (Hegazy 2000: 346). The argument is that Egypt learned about nationalism through the French occupation, and Egyptians learned about European progress and the large gap between the developments achieved by Europe against the ‘backwardness’ recorded in Egypt. This pushed Egyptians to articulate the need for new reforms; some learned Egyptians such as Hasan El-Attar and Yacqoub Hanna went to Paris in search of a different future for Egypt, prefacing the broad reforms launched by Mohammed Ali (Hegazy 2000), during whose rule and that of his successor, Ismail, several Egyptian scholars, teachers, engineers and public officials were sent to Britain, France and Italy to be educated in European schools (Maghraoui 2006: 44). Mohamed Ali (1769–1849) pursued his reforms inspired by the French regime, evident in his rebuilding of towns and villages, and organising the army as well as public schooling (Maghraoui 2006: 42). Two ideological trends prevailed during that period: one calling for a pan-Islamist identity, championed by Jamal Al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97), and another highlighting the unique Egyptian identity, including the Coptic minority, championed by people such as Abdualla Al-Nadim (1843–96); both, however, emphasised the role of Arabism and the Arabic language in order to sustain the national identity as part of a broader regional alliance, and both criticised Ottoman despotism, blaming it for Egypt’s lack of development and sophistication (Maghraoui 2006: 45). Rifaa Tahtawi (1801–73) wanted to shift loyalty to the nation, not to Islam embedded in the Ottoman Empire. He also drew attention to the specific history of Pharaonic Egypt, while other figures, such as Ali Mubarak and Hussein Marsafi, wanted a new unique Egyptian identity; the fruits of their efforts were reaped years later, in 1922, when a new Egyptian nationality law was issued, following the relative independence of Egypt (Hegazy 2000: 255). Furthermore, journalism was important at that time, for propagating new ideas about the progress in Europe (Hegazy 2000). The press held a pivotal role in spreading nationalist discourse from the period following the British invasion in 1882, until the first Egyptian revolution in 1919. It was columnists and writers who discussed the idea of Egyptian identity and ‘Egypt for Egyptians’ (Hegazy 2000: 27). One important nationalist figure, fighting against the British invasion during the early

26  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m years, was Ahmed Urabi (1841–1911) who called himself ‘Al-Misri’ or ‘the Egyptian’, demanding reforms that would hold the khedive and his government accountable to the people (Maghraoui 2006: 51). Egyptian intellectuals began focusing on forming and consolidating their national identity, following the formal independence from Britain (Maghraoui 2006: 2). Liberal discourse, rooted in European liberalism during the 1920s and 1930s, gained ground in Egypt, and several Egyptian liberals promoted historical links between Egypt and Europe; on the other hand, historical links with the Arabs were down-played, stressing instead, Egypt’s Pharaonic past ‘as a bridge to link the Egyptian nation to Europe via the Greek heritage’ (Maghraoui 2006: 73). It was during this period that Egypt witnessed the renewed belief in its unique past, or what was known as neo-Pharaonicism, defined as ‘that body of opinion which postulates the existence of a unique and durable Egyptian national essence persisting from the Pharaonic era to the present’ (Jankowski and Gershoni 1986: 164). The Egyptian journalist and pioneer of socialism, Salama Musa (1887–1958), asserted the link between Egyptian and European history in 1928, Perhaps the main cause of our disputes with the Europeans is our illusion that we and the Europeans are complete strangers with no blood ties and a different descent. But the truth, as scientific research has shown, is that the people of the Mediterranean (with its four regions) are descendants of the same origin, and that the ancient Egyptians and ancient British are from the same descent. It is our goal to let the reader know about what has been written on the subject with the hope that this will create an atmosphere of harmony and good-will between the Orient and the Occident. (cited in Maghraoui 2006: 78)

Another scholar once wrote in the Al-Balagh newspaper, Whether or not Egyptians intermixed with the Arabs [in the past], the present people of Egypt are radically different from the Arabs in every way. The Egyptian is Arab neither in his [external] form, his mentality, his grasp of moral values and social life, his temperament, nor his customs; the Egyptian nation possesses a self-contained personality which springs from its own environment and long history, which pre-dates Arab history by thousands

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 27 of years. The Egyptian nation’s existence is independent of the Arabs, the Muslims, the Christians, and the entire world. (cited in Maghraoui 2006: 73)

Even the Arabic language was seen as distinctively different from the Egyptian vernacular (as will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6); however, this liberal discourse failed, argues Maghraoui (2006: 144), because it excluded the majority of Egyptians while redefining the nation’s historical and racial roots. Ahmed Fouad (1998: 250) argued that the majority of Egyptians converted to Islam following the Islamic conquest, as proof that Muslims in Egypt were not originally Arabs but Copts. Asking Egyptians themselves to define their identity, Khedr Saleh concluded his survey on a sample of Egyptians by arguing that they preferred to define their national character as based on humour, followed by emotionality, tolerance and submissiveness; moreover, Egyptians had clearly shown a preference in defining themselves as Egyptian rather than Arab (Khedr Saleh 2005: 43). However, contradictory trends have also been recorded: one survey found that the majority of the participants believed that Egyptians had been brave in resisting all forms of imperialism throughout modern history, and yet they also described the national character as submissive. Another study found that Egyptians represented in literature were often depicted as apathetic, dependent, emotional and disordered, arguably due to decades of poverty and oppression (Abdel Rahim 1990); on the other hand, old sayings portray Egyptians not only as sarcastic, religious, tolerant, peaceful and emotional, but also as fahlawi (adaptable) (Ezzat 1996). Habib examined the Egyptian character illustrated in the fine art representing the various Pharaonic, Greek, Roman, Coptic, Ottoman and AraboIslamic heritages. He concluded that all these civilisations shared similar characteristics, proving their united roots, but Greek and Roman features were alien to the Egyptian persona, which, for Habib (1997: 12), proves that Egypt is not Mediterranean but Arab. Others see Egyptian identity rooted firmly in the Mediterranean and European identity, as shall be seen in the debate regarding the Egyptian language (Chapter 6). Not all scholars, however, were divided about Egyptian history: although some historical elements from the Pharaonic, Coptic and Arabo-Islamic

28  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m c­ ivilisations were contradictory, they were still a part of Egyptian identity. Gamal Hamdan dedicated four volumes to describing what he called ‘Egypt’s character’ and the brilliance of its geographical location; for Hamdan, this was a land of anomalies: ‘Pharaonic forefathers, Arab parents, and both shar[ing] the same root’ (Hamdan 1994: 45). The rich and diverse history was seen as evidence that Egypt was a productive land: ‘the fact that Egypt combines opposites as well as contradictions, multiple elements, many rich, fertile and broad dimensions only confirms the role of Egypt as the “Queen of Compromises”’ (pp. 34–5). Hamdan, however, preferred the Arabo-Islamic history as being the most dominant feature in Egypt’s character; according to him, ‘Arabs without Egypt is like Hamlet without the Prince’ (p. 46). This view was reinforced by the rise of Nasserism and Ba’athism and the emergence of pan-Arabist ideology, which supported socialism, nationalism and was anti-imperialism. Nasser’s regime highlighted Egypt’s new role, not only in the Arab world but also towards Africa and the Muslim world, in what was known as Nasser’s ‘three circle theory’. Prominent thinkers such as Al-Sayyed Yasin (1983) promoted the notion of one unified Arab identity, arguing that Arabs shared a single identity based on their common history, culture and language (written Arabic). The Arabism ideology gained more ground following the Suez Crisis of 1956, which was seen as a victory over Western imperialism; however, the 1967 defeat by Israeli forces, marked a sudden blow to this pan-Arabism (see Chapter 7). Despite the efforts of scholars such as Hamdan, who called for Egypt not to capitulate: ‘Egypt cannot possibly bow or surrender to the enemy under any circumstances’ (Hamdan 1994: 46), surveys conducted on Egyptian citizens in rural areas during the late 1960s revealed an increasing political apathy and a lessening of confidence in collective action, coupled with more dependence on public services than on individual and community efforts (Habib 1997: 38). The impact of this defeat was considerable, not only with regards to Egypt’s seemingly leading role in the region, but also concerning how Egyptians felt about their own national identity. The 1967 setback had a significant effect on the Egyptian psyche: up until that moment, it had been moulded by Nasserite policies, based on citizens’ allegiance to a ‘leader’ rather than to a ‘nation’ (Farouk and Farag 1998: 11). The defeat in battle exposed Nasser’s regime by changing a once authoritative and powerful administration into a crushed casualty, after

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 29 only a few hours’ battle. There followed a period of self-discovery – but it did not last long, as Sadat introduced a new alternative to the Nasserite ideology, namely the ‘Open Door’ policy (infitah) or ‘openness’ to private investment and a new alliance with the USA. The first six years of Sadat’s rule issued more than 124 laws pertaining to the re-regulation of the financial sector. The increasing alliance with the USA and new treaties with Israel were having an impact on Egyptian national identity; after decades of believing that the real threat was Israel and imperialism, it seemed that a new actor had entered the stage; even the widely celebrated 1973 victory1 was nothing but ‘a false victory of Crossing’, aimed at relieving Egyptians of the decades-long dream of fighting imperialism in order to entice them to adopt the new capitalist dream of wealth. However, the new policy resulted in converting the Egyptian citizen from believing in a collective identity into believing in selfish individualism (Farouk and Farag 1998: 15–21). Egyptians then adopted a new vision, dubbed ‘Aladdin’s Petrodollar Dream’, realised by the increasing labour emigration to oil-rich Arab states in pursuit of another dream – wealth accumulation (ibid. p. 46). The number of Egyptians working in the Gulf and other Arab states leapt from 462,000 in 1973, to more than four million by 1988; however, the decline in oil prices during the 1980s forced the Gulf States into a recession and many Egyptians lost their jobs: by 2006, the Egyptian labour force in the Gulf region reached more than three million, the majority of which was working in Saudi Arabia. Many Egyptian workers were employed in construction in Saudi Arabia during the 1970s, but now the majority of Egyptian migrants are scientists and technicians: only a small percentage of production workers remain. It is worth noting that remittances made by Egyptians now account for more than USD 9 billion annually in foreign exchange revenue. The economic shift to open market policy has often been used as the main excuse for moral deterioration; for example, increased sexual harassment was often blamed on the late marriage age, due to rising marriage dowries and expensive housing units, not to mention the ubiquity of sex scenes in film and TV (Farouk and Farag 1998: 33). Incidents of abduction, sexual assaults and child mutilation have become widespread during the past decade (Osman 2010). This led to the ‘Crisis of Egyptian identity’, as the sociologists Farouk and Farag (1998: 127) argue in their book of the same

30  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m title; according to them, the political crisis in Egypt during Mubarak’s era led to ‘social desertification’, or a false social consciousness, and the expansion of unpatriotic small capitalist groups who only pursue individual rather than national interests. The authors (p. 128) warn that if the crisis of belonging continued, it would only lead to the rise of neo-Fascist systems, whether under Islamist or military rule. Surveys among Egyptians showed how they felt isolated and that their sense of collective identity had diminished, as they cared more about individual rather than collective interests, with the majority suffering from ‘moral panic’ which magnified the presence of social evils in society (Zayed 2009: 171). The Egyptian psychiatrist, Mohamed Al-Mahdi (n.d.) sums up Egyptian traits in his argument that the Egyptian character has been influenced by a number of factors, such as the 1952 coup and the prevalence of an oppressive regime, which laid the foundation for the so-called fahlawi or adaptable personality to penetrate the Egyptian value system. Another factor was the 1967 defeat, which led to the sense of submissiveness and surrender, followed by the Open Door policy and the emigration of labourers to the oilrich Gulf States. He argues that the dominance of the fahlawi trait has made the Egyptians prone to submit to authority in public spaces, but to defy it in private spaces. The feelings of isolation and frustration prevail among large segments of the population, and the metaphor of ‘the people’ and their right to power, which prevailed after the Free Officers’ coup (Alexander 2007: 194), had lost its appeal. ‘The people’ was a label which encompassed trade unions, students and youth who followed the leadership of an individual ‘above trends and inclinations’ (p. 195). Any protest against state policy then, was seen as a major threat to national security and would be met with coercive force; thus, in public, it is not unusual for an Egyptian citizen to publicly praise an authoritative figure, while cursing him (her) behind closed doors. Al-Mahdi refers to the protagonists in Naguib Mahfouz’s novels, especially the thug or baltagi to whom his people showed allegiance although they despised him. Al-Mahdi (n.d.) however, praised the Egyptians – whom he had previously accused of an inability to demonstrate teamwork – for their leadership during the 2011 revolution, when men organised local patrols in their communities to compensate for the absence of the police force and volunteered to control the traffic flow in the crowded streets. This

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 31 organisational skill, claims Al-Mahdi, only seems to emerge in times of crisis: for example, when a strong earthquake hit parts of Cairo in 1992, it forced Egyptian communities to work together to help those who had lost their homes, while the government offered little or no help. The 2011 uprising was then seen as a symbol of liberation, not only from Mubarak’s reign, but from dependency on other nations, as Egyptians decided their fate for themselves; however, the accelerated economic changes, coupled with the monopoly of political power in the hands of a few groups, resulted in the feeling of alienation and political apathy among young Egyptians. A study among Egyptian youth published in the 1980s, showed that only 6.6 per cent of youth was politically active (Farouk and Farag 1998: 53). That figure was anticipated to increase dramatically in the wake of the 2011 revolution, but a recent poll by the Egyptian Cabinet claimed that only 12 per cent of their sample investigation attended demonstrations, 99 per cent was not affiliated to any political parties, and only 12 per cent intended to do so in the future (IDSC 2011). Egypt at the Peak of Youth Involvement Political factors such as suppression of freedom of speech, movement, and so on, as well as the wars involving Egypt, led to a heightened sense of identity crisis amongst the youth in particular (Hegazy 1985: 66). Prior to the 2011 revolution, Egyptian youth was often described in the media as being vulnerable to Western cultural values, which would probably corrupt them (Abaza 2001, 102). Following the 2011 revolution, state media discourses centred on the role of the youth who had received training in Western countries, particularly the USA. One of the 6 April activists, Muhammad Adel, for example, was trained at the Centre for Applied Non-violent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS), which was an exported model of an activist movement against Milosevic (Murphy 2012: 19). The youth were regarded as true patriots when they joined the eighteen-day uprising in 2011. The Ultras, or football fan clubs, comprised largely of young men under the age of thirty, and supporters of the two main Egyptian clubs, Ahly and Zamalek, joined in the rallies of January 2011 in Tahrir Square ‘to protest not only the corruption of the regime but the brutality of the police which many football fans knew first-hand’ (Totah 2012).

32  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m Young people in higher education were historically the cohort responsible for ‘introducing new forms of political expression: strikes, demonstrations and uprisings. From the first modern political mass demonstration, perhaps the 1908 funeral parade of Mustafa Kamil in Cairo, to the 1987 Palestinian intifada, students in this age group [under thirty years] were the leaders in the area of political transformation’ (Erlich 2000: 49). Youths usually rebel against state authority when it restrains their freedom of expression or their ‘right to criticize official politics’ (Meijer 2000: 4), such as the youth revolt in Egypt following the 1967 war. The 1930s generation, ‘mostly middle classoriented young students, adopted a new integralist interpretation of nationalism which was predominantly pan-Arab, combining elements of Islamic political revivalism and non-parliamentarian authoritarianism’ (Erlich 2000: 51). It was the young generation of 1935, such as the Egyptian Free Officers, who shaped the politics of the last century, following the independence of Arab states. With the decline of the traditional role of the family, coupled with challenging the State’s authority, young people were influenced by the impulses on the street ‘whether in the form of the Islamist movement or alternative cultural expressions’ (Meijer 2000: 8). The youth who once served as the bedrock of socialist ideology, in the wake of the 1952 coup, shifted to adopting neo-liberal individualistic values, thereby moving from being the generation of thawra (revolution) to the generation of tharwa (wealth). The study of Taha et al. (2011) of a small sample of Egyptian youth showed that the majority of respondents had a holistic view of their identity, with some seeing their Egyptian identity as a melting pot from which different sub-identities emerge. They also acknowledged a deep sense of identity loss, with many failing to recognise the pillars of their Egyptian identity due to the pressing political and socio-economic conditions and the choices available to Egyptian youth. Urdal (2006) suggests that youth ‘bulges’ or the increase in youth cohorts is associated with the risk of internal national conflicts. He also suggests that if this factor is accompanied with economic decline there could be a risk of terrorism. Murphy (2012) accounts for three ways of framing Arab youth: as a demographic bulge; as a target for public policy, particularly with regards to education and employment, as a constructed identity as victims of

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 33 Westernised culture; or as a source of disquiet. The Arab youth have been the casualties of failing state education and rising unemployment in the global economy (Murphy 2012: 8); even after the recent uprisings, there is limited evidence that the Arab youth have faith in the capacity of their states to implement the necessary political reforms (p. 14). Egyptian youth have been historically distrustful of politics, and the majority was not even registered to vote (Bayat 2010: 130). The ‘Generation in Waiting’ project (Dhillon and Yousef 2009) analysed the situation of young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine in the Middle East. The project documented the frustration of this generation with the education services in their countries, compared to the free education, guaranteed public service jobs and state support which the previous generations had enjoyed; with the rise of unemployment, the new generation has suffered the worst labour market outcome with nearly 11 per cent jobless. The delay in finding jobs means a delay in marriage and establishing families. According to a survey by the Egyptian Population Council in 2010, the unemployment rate among youth aged 16–29 was around 16 per cent, highest among the females; although the majority of employed young people worked in the private sector, Egyptian youth predominantly preferred working in the public sector, and a low percentage was interested in entrepreneurial activities. The survey also depicted a picture of these youth as disinterested in building their nation; instead, many of them expressed interest in leaving their homes, the majority of which aspired to migrate to work in the Gulf countries. These youth also expressed disinterest in joining youth centres or political parties, particularly female groups, with only 2 per cent of all youth showing interest in voluntary work. Recent surveys on Egyptian youth showed that the majority were inactive politically, abstaining from joining trade unions, political parties or civil society associations, and were even unable to name the correct number of political parties in Egypt (Sika 2012). It was not, therefore, a matter of acquiring the necessary social capital such as education and networking in order to engage more actively in the political scene, as even those who did not lack this capital showed distrust and disinterest in political life (ibid. p. 195). It is worth noting that around 21 per cent of youth between ten- and twenty-one-years old had not received any or very limited education (IDSC 2013).

34  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m Moaddel’s (2012) survey of a sample of 3,500 Egyptians showed how they rated their participation in the Egyptian revolution of 2011 on a scale of one to ten. His data showed that circa 59.5 per cent of his sample did not participate at all in the January uprising, while only 8 per cent classified their commitment as total participation (p. 20). This study also showed that the participants in the January uprising were far from being monolithic groups that shared similar values and beliefs, although social theories tend to characterise revolutionaries as sharing similar feelings of empowerment and moral outrage (p. 30). Conclusion The debate about national identity often rests on a set of binaries, in defining Egyptians as either Arab or descendants of Pharaohs, religious or liberal and secular, peaceful or violent. Mainstream media have contributed to this polarisation by rejecting certain traits as un-Egyptian. This is illustrated in the media coverage of a violent clash between two tribes in Aswan in April 2014, in Upper Egypt, after school boys from the Nubian Dabodeya tribe wrote offensive statements about girls belonging to the Hilail tribe on the walls of a preparatory school; in retaliation, four members of the Dabodeya tribe were killed by the Hilailians, resulting in intensified street violence involving both tribes, bloodshed and disfiguring of the victims. Even after reaching a truce, brokered by Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayyeb, the two tribes resumed their violence against each other in late June 2014; although more than 150 people from both tribes were issued with warrants of arrest, half of that number was classified as fugitives. The whole event bemused many Egyptians in big cities such as Cairo and Alexandria, who had hardly ever heard of events involving tribalism in Upper Egypt. Mainstream media blamed the State for having neglected the needs of the Nubian community for years, and many television talk shows drew on that event as a sign of the failing state, which could not enforce laws in that part of Egypt. One of these shows was Men al-Akher, presented by Tamer Amin, on Rotana Masriya channel. Amin dedicated one third of the episode on 8 April 2014 to discussing the repercussions of the events in Aswan and on Egyptians’ understanding of their own national identity. He referred to the incident as a ‘wakeup call’ and urged people to notice the drastic changes that had occurred in the

m ot her eg ypt: the g i f t of th e n il e  | 35 Egyptian character, oscillating from the state of peacefulness to violence. He invited two experts to discuss this dramatic change, one of them was Dr Hoda Zakariya, Professor of Sociology, who said that the Egyptians may have faced military defeat, but had never lost sight of their self-perception: ‘our strength,’ she said, ‘has been in the collective we and not in the sense of individualism. Our enemies,’ she added, ‘have managed to target this sense of collectiveness by highlighting sectarian differences which had never previously concerned Egyptians’. The other guest, Major General Sayyed Mohamedeen, a security specialist and a former Minister of Interior assistant, said that Egypt was going through the so-called fourth-generation-war, based on igniting sectarian differences to start internal clashes. There was a USA plan, he claimed, to divide the region into small states, and Egyptian border cities such as Aswan were easy targets for such a strategy. Both experts agreed that there was a foreign plot to divide Egypt, and that the State was unable to impose its authority in Upper Egypt where youth showed allegiance to the local sheikhs rather than state authorities. Egypt’s relations with the outside world, whether regionally or internationally, have undoubtedly played a crucial role in redefining, and sometimes reinventing, the Egyptian identity. Under Nasserite ideology, the Egyptian identity was characterised by its leading regional role and the need to consolidate the close ties it had with neighbouring countries; since the 1980s, however, Egypt’s pragmatic foreign policies and links with the USA and Europe took centre stage. State institutions used national security as an excuse to crack down on young activists and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), accusing the latter of conspiring with the West and betraying their duties towards Mother Egypt. It was enough for representatives of such NGOs to have visited a Western country, exchanged correspondence with a Western organisation, attended a conference abroad or received any form of funding from the West, to attract the scrutiny of state security for plotting against Egypt. Western donors are usually seen in a negative light, not only for pursuing their self-interests rather than those of the Egyptians but also working towards weakening the Egyptian nation: while governmental institutions are freely permitted to accept foreign funding, NGOs and young activists are usually condemned for accepting such funding. This view is based on regarding state institutions as inherently working for preserving an ­undefined

36  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m ‘national interest’, while individuals working for NGOs are pursuing their own interests by allowing themselves to become foreign donor channels (Pratt 2001: 148); furthermore, some of them have even been accused of having links with Zionism and foreign intelligence services. Youth protests, whether against foreign powers – the call for the boycott of American products such as Coca-Cola in 2002 – the Egyptian AntiGlobalisation Group or the National Campaign against War on Iraq (Bayat 2010: 218), or street protests against Mubarak’s regime, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) or the Muslim Brotherhood, reflect the youth’s desire to re-articulate power relations. Power here is not something that some individuals have which is similar to that of a sovereign or a police officer; rather, it is embedded in the relationships enjoyed by certain individuals and groups. Power, therefore, is a system facilitated by knowledge and individuals who circulate this knowledge, such as those who propagated modernisation in terms of adopting a free market policy. Power relations do not exist in some abstract sense, but become intelligible and subject to analysis through individuals (and groups) engaging with each other, and even excluding and excommunicating rival groups within the same nation, as shall be seen in the following chapters. Note 1. http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/alarabiya-studies/2013/10/12/Thestory-of-Egypt-s-military-victory-in-October-1973.html.

2 Ibn al-balad: The True Son of Egypt

The French public are different from our public in many ways: the French are more sophisticated, better educated . . . the French layperson has freedoms that guarantee his [sic] rights although these rights can be a disadvantage for those who are not adequately educated . . . this is because the layperson, no matter how sophisticated, is short-sighted and can join any crowd or party . . . the real influence is that of the elites who are more ­intelligent and more resourceful. (Jurji Zaydan 1923: 37–8)

Introduction Western media reported on the January 2011 uprising as the revolution of the youth and the rebellion of the masses (often referred to as the ‘Arab Street’), which is associated with chaos and irrationality. Khalil (2012) attempts to trace the term ‘Arab Street’ to the nineteenth century writing of Gustav Le Bon in his famous thesis, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, published in 1895. Le Bon’s idea is that the crowd reflects an irrational mob that could exert a destructive power. Khalil (2012) extends Le Bon’s argument to include Western media’s coverage of the so-called ‘Arab Street’ with its derogatory depiction of irrational mobs. This view is no longer associated with the Western concept of ‘mob’, as Abrahamian (2009: 13) explains: ‘Although the stereotypical view has been widely discarded for European 37

38  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m crowds, it continues to be alive and well in Western perceptions of the Middle East’. Bayat (2003: 11) emphasises the same point when he argues that ‘Arab Street’ is usually not seen as a genuine expression of local public opinion. The image of the ‘Arab Street’ in Western media is often that of a volatile mob, a rabble that reacts violently and irrationally; according to this image, the ‘Arab Street’ may wish to topple Arab governments, but it is seen as lacking the focus, intelligence, organisation and discipline to actually accomplish this. It is not conceived as the voice of the people who are engaged with a legitimate stake in the future of the Arab world; instead, it is seen as an unruly and irresponsible force that must be carefully restrained. Furthermore, in Egypt, the word ‘street’ has also come to correlate ‘with crime, vagrancy and deviance’ (Bibars 1998: 201). The masses used to be regarded as a potential threat to social order and angry crowds embody this threat. The French Revolution was a clear example of mass movement and the rise of crowd psychology. Early debates about crowd psychology (see Sighele 1892) argue that individuals are equipped with a set of rational standards and an ability to control their behaviour in facing violence; however, a temporary loss of these standards can lead to the uncontrolled behaviour of joining collective action with a large crowd. Mazzarella (2010: 697) sums up this debate in his argument that crowds are now liberally termed ‘multitudes’, according to the context: ‘if we want to suggest that the immanent potential of a collective are politically progressive we call this collective a multitude, whereas if we want to cast it as regressive we call it a crowd’. ‘Crowds’ then is inherently pejorative and related to ‘something crude and stupid’ or sometimes referred to as ‘mobs’ (ibid.); while crowds may threaten the status quo, multitudes liberate the collective, ‘the crowds and mobs take shape and flourish in the atmosphere of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where they express the raw potentials of mass democratization and the collective dangers of urban anonymity’ (Mazzarella 2010: 699). The multitudes, on the other hand, thrive in a structured society in which differences are controlled and network organisations have flourished. The two concepts now stand polarised: ‘it would not be an exaggeration to say that the coherence of the figure of the multitude . . . depends on its opposition to the figure of the crowd’ (pp. 700–1). The crowds are not seen to possess the knowledge necessary to ­understand

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  39 diverse matters in politics, economics and society, therefore, the State is assisted by a group of experts who possess such knowledge and they can guide both the public and politicians towards the right decisions: ‘The population was to be helped, but all too often [it was] seen as a mass to be improved rather than as the originators of political change’ (Hind 2010: 74). This view was critiqued for being elitist and for allowing the concentration of power to be in the hands of an enlightened minority: The population is denounced for its lack of interest in descriptions of the world produced by the serious media, even though these descriptions repeatedly turn out to be based on absurd fantasies. Allegedly serious commentators and critics worry about the mental incompetence of the masses, while they themselves mouth one non sequitur after another. (Hind 2010: 122)

This chapter focuses on the so-called disadvantaged crowds in Egypt who are not necessarily those who do not own the methods of production, but those who are regarded as a misrepresentation of the right image of Egypt, even if they possess sufficient economic capital. These groups then include those who have received basic education, craftsmen and manual workers, as well as those who cannot keep up with the competitiveness of the new liberal economy due to their lack of education, connections and hence, the necessary cultural and symbolic capital. The Rise and Fall of Ibn al-balad The liberals in the early twentieth century saw the main problem in consolidating a liberal Egyptian national identity resting on the backward masses that needed guidance on how to eat, dress, behave, believe, celebrate and even think (Maghraoui 2006: 88). Institutions such as the police, schools and hospitals enforced strict practices to help those masses abandon what was seen as improper traditions, such as superstition (pp. 89, 113). One writer lamented in the pages of Al Balagh newspaper about the tendency of peasants’ sons to desire to take up legal studies: the sons of merchants, peasants, and manual workers . . . all want to study law. In this way, the country is being deprived of a very good quality, which

40  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m is prevalent in the West, where sons adopt the profession of their fathers. We find, for example, the sons of doctors study medicine, the sons of architects study architecture, and so on. What will happen to Egypt if the sons of peasants, merchants, and workers want to become doctors, lawyers, and architects? The country will be deprived of factories, fields and markets because nobody will want to perform those kinds of jobs anymore. (cited in Maghraoui 2006: 111)

As such, those liberals seemed to depart from the ideology of liberalism and individual freedom in forming their own future, bringing to memory the words of the Lebanese, Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), quoted at the beginning of this chapter, after his visit to France and his comparison of Arab and French masses. Peasants in rural Egypt were seen as superstitious believers of demons and jinn; for instance, the leading figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist author Sayyed Qotb, recalled that this region ‘was populated by demons (‘afarit), saintly wild men (magazib), and superstitious villagers seeking to mollify the evil intentions of the spirit world’ (El Shakry 2007: 89). The peasantry had been depicted as incompetent to receive and understand knowledge and instructions, as communicated in an article in 1899 by Piot Bey, the director of veterinary services on government estates; according to him, they were seen as ‘a childlike people ill-equipped for reason or judgement, the result of moral decadence and a continual retrogression of intellect . . . ignorance left the peasants susceptible to superstitions beliefs and practices: the use of amulets and the belief in major jinns’ (ibid. p. 97). The peasantry was regarded as part of a collective, the village, rather than as individuals. The village then was a mass or ‘a homogenous hive-like mass’ and the peasant was seen as totally dependent on his (her) place in the collective (p. 100). The peasantry was also regarded as an object of social reform: as a microcosm of Egypt, it needed social uplift which depended on education to show civility and progress in order to eliminate ‘vice, depravity, wretchedness, and general decline’ (p. 115). It was not peasantry that was seen as a social problem, women as well were regarded as ‘objects of moral and ­material improvement’ (p. 149). The masses – peasants and workers – served occasionally as the emblem

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  41 of the national identity in modern Egypt, although they had been despised by the elites for centuries. An example of using the peasantry in the nationalist discourse occurred in 1906, in the Dinshaway incident, when several British soldiers accidently set fire to a field while pigeon-hunting. This provoked the owners’ anger and two British soldiers were beaten, which led to the arrest and trial of more than fifty villagers. The Egyptian tribunal ordered the execution of four peasants and the arrest of many others, and the trial ignited the nationalist movement, led by Mustafa Kamel, who saw the peasants as ‘national martyrs’ (El Shakry 2007: 92). The Egyptian anti-colonial nationalists, such as Saad Zaghloul, sought to mobilise the Egyptian peasantry as an integral part of their movement by depicting the peasantry as ‘the true sons of Egypt, the repository of national cultural values, but also localised them as a sphere of backwardness to be uplifted and modernized’ (ibid. p. 90), in their fight against the British colonial powers during the early twentieth century. Elite figures such as the last king of Egypt, Farouk (1936–52), and the Wafdist leader of the 1919 revolution, Saad Zaghloul, declared their peasant origins, celebrating the peasantry as the true and authentic image of Egypt (Selim 2004: 1). The 1919 revolution, staged by peasants and workers and orchestrated by the Wafd party, marked a turning point in Egypt’s relations with British colonialism and the beginning of the modern state of Egypt (Goldberg 1992). What ignited that revolution was the order to exile four national leaders, including Saad Zaghloul, after their resolve to gain recognition as a formal delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. The constitution of 1923 was one direct result of this revolution and, in 1924, Saad Zaghloul became the first elected Prime Minister. The peasantry participated in the 1919 revolution which proceeded in two phases: a violent stage in March 1919 in which the peasantry were suppressed by British military action, and a non-violent stage with the participation of students and professionals in April 1919. The revolution, however, ‘did not aim at the radical transformation of the social structure or class relations, but rather at the assertion of territorial nationalism’ (El Shakry 2007: 93). The participation of the peasantry was motivated by their desire to restore their economic position and end the large landed estates (izab), a result of the Ottoman agricultural reforms in the nineteenth century, and the rise of a new agricultural middle class of landowners (p. 94).

42  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m The Egyptian intellectual elites still feared the masses, however: ‘the militate, promiscuous, diseased urban riff-raff and the persecuted, restive, landless rural peasantry – invading the city in ever-increasing numbers – that threatened the material interests of the new bourgeoisie, and by implication, the prosperity and progress of the nation itself’ (Selim 2004: 8); indeed, ‘within the same historical career of the modern state both colonial and nationalist politics thought of the peasantry as an object of their strategies, to be acted upon, controlled, and appropriated within their respective structures of state power’ (cited in El Shakry 2007: 89). The mission of the intellectuals was to guide Egypt to modernity and this role could not be fulfilled with the presence of uncontrollable masses that threatened the elites’ plans for modernising the nation; thus, the elites, ‘as a class . . . stood over and above the teeming, chaotic, dissipated mass of Egyptians in urgent need of correction’ (Selim 2004: 9). The masses serve two contradictory roles within society: in times of stability, they are looked down upon as a threat and a ticking bomb that menaces social stability, whereas in times of rebellion, they are regarded as the allies of the political elites and the authentic representatives of ibn albalad – the true Egyptian character is often coined ibn al-balad (Son of the Land), or someone who converses in Cairene vernacular, has good humour and is fatalist – who believes in destiny (El Messiri 1978: 3). The word balad often refers to the countryside in the Egyptian vernacular, and is used to epitomise the true Egyptian identity. During the rule of Muhammad Ali and his son (1862–79), a new class of Egyptian effendi emerged, referring to the bureaucrats working in the state apparatus who also served as a bridge between the Turkish elites and the Egyptian masses (El Messiri 1978: 5). This class tended to emulate Western culture and they usually gained secular, not religious, education, rejecting what is baladi (local), although many of them originated from rural areas; however, the baladi classes, referring mainly to humble workers, craftsmen and the peasantry, continued to play a role in Egyptian politics. Gamal Abdel Nasser, for instance, promoted himself as an example of ibn al-balad, one who aimed to rule with justice and who came from a modest background, with which many of the working classes could identify. He was also an effendi in the sense that he worked in the state apparatus (military). The 1952 coup thrived by putting emphasis on the shaab or

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  43 people, and even the term ‘popular neighbourhoods’ (ahyaa shaabiyya’) came into vogue after the coup (El Messiri 1978: 56). Gamal Abdel Nasser, in fact, stressed the significant role of fallah or peasant in his speeches, such as the speech given during the celebration of the new land reform on 2 May 1954, in which he said: The fallah, peasant, is the first pillar in this country. He must be liberated and we have therefore limited land ownership in order to free farmers from slavery and exploitation. The first objective of this revolution lies in one word: freedom.

Nasser’s Social Contract Discontented with British dominance, popular protests erupted in the early 1950s, culminating in the burning of Cairo in 1952 and the Free Officers’ coup, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Mohammed Naguib, in July of the same year. The newly-formed government ended the monarchy and embarked on the long-term project of modernising Egypt (Sedra 2011) based on the principles of socialism but in a unique version. This ideology allowed private enterprises to exist side-by-side with the nationalised factories, with the State controlling essential services such as housing and education. Nasser’s government profiled itself as the protector of workers’ rights while suppressing any movement other than the State’s own Socialist Coalition party. Nasser’s philosophy of socialism was distinct from Marxism: There is a difference between us [Socialists] and Marxists. The latter do not believe in private property whereas we divide it into two categories: one that exploits and one that does not exploit. We are against the exploiting enterprise. Thus, mode of production should be nationalised and be under the total control of the people. This means that the public sector should have the lion’s share of the production . . . in our Arab Socialism, we did not erode private property. So in our land reform, we did not nationalise the lands, but gave it back to the peasants. We took it from the landowners and gave it to the peasants as their own property. This is so different from the Communist ideology which calls for eroding land ownership altogether, and confining it to either state-owned land or collective ownership. This applies to housing as well: we did not nationalise housing, but we built state

44  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m houses and sold them to the people. We give those with limited resources the opportunity to own their flats. (quoted in Al Shelby 2004: 144)

Johnson (1972: 4) argues that Nasser’s Free Officers banned any political activities and political parties in order to prevent any forms of class struggle and in the name of consolidating national unity as one important gain of the Free Officers’ revolution. Nasser’s regime was claimed to enter an unwritten contract with the population to offer public services in return for abandoning civil rights (Soliman 2011: 27). Nasser’s regime aimed to weaken the old landed aristocracy by issuing the 1952 land reform, limiting ownership to 300 acres per family. This reform was followed by a nationalisation policy of foreign interests including banks, the Suez Canal and insurance companies, which resulted in the emigration of thousands of foreigners. Nasser’s regime also expanded the public services by employing university graduates, which was accompanied by a vast expansion of university and secondary school education; for instance, the number of university students in 1953 was 54,000, spread across the four existing universities; by 1981, this figure reached 595,000 and the number of universities kept increasing to meet the growing demand (Abaido 1986: 17). Leading sectors of the economy were still dominated by imperialist interests such as banks and insurance companies until 1956 (El Messiri 1980: 88); between 1956 and 1960, the new government gained control of large parts of the private sector and laid out a plan to establish new industries, such as the flourishing textile industry in the city of Al-Mahalla, which was modernised following the World War II textile boom. The textile factories of al-Mahalla were nationalised in 1963, during Nasser’s regime, depending on kinship ties to recruit new labour, such as families specialised in certain production lines that could train and pass on their craft to their children and other relations. Nasser also increased the salaries of the workers ‘so as to attempt to separate them from the poor and unemployed’ (Johnson 1972: 11); in return, Egyptian workers and the peasantry admired Nasser as a national leader ‘who look[ed] after the poor’ (Washington Post 2012). The political and ideological changes not only had an impact on Egyptian society, but the whole labour movement, more so than the 1952 coup, which did not necessarily affect the masses of industrial labourers who ‘cared not whether they lived

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  45 under a socialist or capitalist regime provided that regime resulted in material improvements in their lives’ (El Messiri 1980: 337). The changes initiated by Nasser’s socialist government, however, motivated the industrial labourers, for instance in the Al-Mahalla textile sector, to support the ideology that kick-started this change (p. 340). Nasser’s stress on the role of education in modernising Egypt actually made mobility possible for many workers, who were able to send their children to school and later to university (El Messiri 1980: 339). These workers hoped that their children would achieve social mobility and become effendi or part of the administrative bureaucracy, rather than the traditional process of following them in their factory jobs; they wanted their children to gain an education and work in an office, and also to be rid of factory jobs, in order to accumulate enough capital to start their own independent businesses (p. 339). There was no housing problem prior to 1952, and the State promised to set up 1,200 units for the workers in Helwan and Imbaba. Following the 1952 coup and the subsequent nationalisation of factories, the State aimed to provide accommodation for the workers and the poor. Not only did Nasser’s regime promise them housing, but it also instigated a Social Security Scheme in 1950, providing pensions and financial assistance for families, especially widows with children, orphans, disabled persons and those over sixty-five years of age (Rizk 1955: 214). The government’s costly social welfare programmes, coupled with over-staffed public offices, demanded a batch of austerity measures in order to address state budget deficits; however, ‘there was no call to sacrifice for future generations, no austerity measures other than those dictated by military defeat – Egyptians were promised the fruits of the revolution (makasib al-thawra) in their time’ (Waterbury 1983: 69). Nasser’s social contract with Egyptians provided state services and goods in return for docility. The state housing laws in the 1960s resulted in reducing houses available for letting; for example, Law 168 of 1961 ordered the reduction of letting by 20 per cent, and Law 46 of 1962 defined a ceiling for house letting not to exceed 5 per cent of the value of the land or 8 per cent of the buildings. During Sadat’s regime and his Open Door policy, the private sector was invited to build housing units for the middle classes, which led to the increase in new buildings and the rise of land prices by 200 per cent and 300 per cent from 1974 to 1980 (Marafi 2011).

46  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m Military spending in the 1960s and 1970s escalated in preparation for the war with Israel in 1967 (and later in 1973) and exhausted public funding for state services. Building expansion plans in Cairo were shelved, even though the number of inhabitants continued to rise, as did the migration from the rural areas, putting more pressure on state housing services; this pushed the new city-dwellers to resort to informal housing; by 1981, 80 per cent of Cairo’s accommodation was unofficial, marking a record high of ashwayyat or slums (Al-Tayeb 2007: 5–6). The 1970s saw the working classes lose all hope that state reforms would improve their situation. The riots during that decade were blamed on communist agitators who opposed Sadat’s development plans and state capitalism (Lachine 1977: 5), rather than the miserable economic conditions suffered by many of the lower middle class and the increasing number of slum-dwellers, the majority of whom lived below the poverty line. The fact that jobs were concentrated in big cities, particularly the capital, triggered a new wave of emigration from the rural areas to Cairo, for example, which was referred to as ‘hadar’ or ‘civilisation’, indicating that the city was the emblem of progress and culture. People who emigrated from the rural areas to the large cities tended to be seen as a marginalised segment of the population, sometimes referred to as barbarians, ‘the mob’ or harafesh, described as such in Naguib Mahfouz’s novels (Marei 2011). With the increasing emigration from the countryside to urban areas, demand exceeded supply, which, in turn, promoted new state projects; building new metropolises such as 10 Ramadan City and setting up co-operatives to provide new housing units was an attempt to solve the housing problem (Marei 2011). However, the new cities, numbering fifteen by the end of the twentieth century, were exploited by private corporations that sold new luxury housing units for the well-off segments of the population, similar to how the Europeans living in Cairo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used to construct neighbourhoods for themselves in Cairo, well apart from the native Egyptians (European Cairo versus Egyptian Cairo); the rising upper-middle classes used these new cities to segregate themselves in their own gated communities, thus reflecting two faces of Cairo (Abaza 2006: 39) and widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  47 From the Slums to Civility and Back Again Nasser’s project to form a massive middle class of professionals did not work, as one Egyptian engineer summed it up: ‘Nasser always said, “I brought people up from the slums.” But he didn’t finish the job. He created a huge workforce that could have become the middle-class, but it never happened. This is one reason the Islamists have become powerful’ (cited in Abdo 2000: 82). Slums (ashwayyat) continued to develop throughout the 1970s and into the 1990s, in order to absorb at least 80 per cent of Cairo’s growth. Recommendations were made to the State to re-house ashwayyat dwellers in new desert sites, on the outskirts of the capital: the State offered these sites to modern luxurious gated communities instead, which shows how the State ‘constrain[ed] the provision of alternative shelter and hence the displacement of informal communities’ (Dorman 2009: 434). The Egyptian State had long ignored the problem of inadequate housing and the ashwayaat built on the outskirts of the capital were deprived of essential services such as sanitation and electricity; it was only the clash with the Islamists during the 1990s that gave rise to public discourse regarding these areas, considered to be a threat to national security and ‘havens for criminals and terrorists’ (Dorman 2009: 421). The government’s crackdown came after the militants declared to a Reuter’s correspondent in 1992 that they had managed to establish their own territory named ‘The Islamic Republic of Imbaba’ (Dorman 2009: 426). Ashwayyat refer to any housing projects built by individuals on their own initiative, not part of formal state planning (Marei 2011) and not connected to any amenities such as sewage disposal or clean water. The 1992 earthquake that caused the evacuation of dozens of families alerted the State to the acute ashwayyat problem, which could be ‘inundated by sewage and garbage, and [lacked] basic sanitary conditions’ (Abaza 2001: 108). It was estimated that the number of slums in Egypt was around 1,221, with 76 of them in Cairo alone, and the total number of slum-dwellers was between 14 and 15 million (Ibrahim 2012). Slums were seen not only as fertile grounds for social ills and moral decay and a black stain on the face of Egypt, particularly regarding the tourist trade, but also the incubators of militant Islam and crime (Ismail 2006). The ashwayyat are formally defined as unofficial sectors, as they do not

48  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m contribute to state revenue; moreover, employees living in such areas are not officially part of the state labour force (Marei 2011). The arbitrary division between the slums and luxury housing neighbourhoods adds to the dissatisfaction and injustice felt by the poor. Saft Al-Laban, a poor neighbourhood in Giza, suffered acute water shortages, whereas the neighbouring satellite city, 6 October, only a few kilometres away, had abundant water supplies, thus prompting Saft el-Laban residents to protest against ‘the injustice in water distribution’ (Ibrahim 2012). The lack of public services forced slum residents to adopt unorthodox measures to address some of their problems, for instance, by running pipes supplying water alongside those built by the local municipality. Residents of informal housing communities and slums constitute ‘the expanded popular classes . . . developed with the growth of commercial and service sectors of the economy under the policies of infitah’ (Ismail 2000: 375). Residents there involve themselves with the government or disregard it, according to their needs, so they can ‘organise and engage in collective action to pressure the government to provide services’ or they can also choose to provide this service ‘through private means, by collectively investing in the provision of services: purchasing cables and transformers for the connection of water and electricity, paying for sewage tanks and the removal of solid waste’ (ibid. p. 375). Zahran (2007: 15–16) defines the so-called marginalised and deprived class as unskilled and semi-skilled workers, domestic workers and street vendors who might be ashwayyat dwellers and who are usually underprivileged and often illiterate. They are used as ‘strike hostages’ by capitalist business owners during labour strikes in their factories and as ‘thugs’ during demonstrations. Street children have also become a ‘ticking bomb’ in urban centres such as Cairo – born in abusive or poor families they frequently end up on the streets or in corrective institutions. This term not only represents homeless children who live on the streets, surviving by begging or theft, but also refers to a much larger group of children who live with their families but work on the streets . . . engaged in occupations such as vending or petty services and many also attend school on a shift basis . . . the term may also be used to include the children of single or very poor parents whose children

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  49 are the only sources of income for the family . . . by begging or even picking pockets on the streets. (Bibars 1998: 202–3)

The number of street vendors on Cairo streets increased in the wake of the January 2011 uprisings, which prompted the city council to regard them as ‘street children’ and an uncivil image which needed to be corrected.1 The rapid increase of street children and slum-dwellers meant that they constituted a power source that could be mobilised, even for ‘fascist’ causes (Zahran 2007: 18) including thuggery. The word ‘thug’ (futuwwa) was historically used during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the alleys were ruled by futuwwa gangs who ‘played an important role in mobilising the population of the quarters . . . the threat to unleash gangs to loot and plunder forced rulers to retract from imposing higher taxes and raising prices’ (Ismail 2000: 370). During the 1980s, the term baltaga (thuggery) was used by the Mubarak regime to delegitimise Islamist militant activities (Ismail 2006) referring particularly to the young, unemployed poor and illiterate men living in slums, probably engaged in miscellaneous work in the middle- and upper-class districts (Ismail 2006: 143); the baltagi were defined by their facial scars and unkempt hair. Thugs, riffraff, rabble and gangs committed several crimes during Mubarak’s rule, ranging from gate crashing demonstrations to harassing the protestors, and were paid by the Mubarak authorities. They were also encouraged to burn churches, attack Christians and sexually harass women in the streets (Eissa 2008: 505). This faction of Egyptian society was (and is) considered to be an ‘uncontrollable, irrational, unconscious group who broil or cool as a result of a fatwa, their anger resides in their faith, their hunger and deprivation . . . they suffer from hallucinations of oppression, injustice, fantasies and vengeance’ (ibid. p.  506). The corrupt, argues Eissa (p. 507), need the rabble, riffraff, and so on, for their own survival. This group of ‘misfits’ was created, asserts Eissa (p. 508), from two conditions: lack of education, hence widespread illiteracy, and poverty; their deprived status, coupled with their ignorance of politics, made them docile servants of corrupt masters, enduring all forms of injustice and exploitation.

50  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m Thugs Since January 2011, Egyptians have seen an upsurge in the use of the word baltagi (thugs). Their aim is primarily to disrupt social life; being generally uneducated, they have no allegiance to any particular political ideology. During the rule of Mubarak, and particularly during the time of his Minister of Interior, Habib el-Adly, Egyptian protestors were accustomed to being intimidated and harassed by hired thugs; for example, the police used some of them, including females, to harass female journalists in a demonstration in 2005 against the results of the referendum on clause 76 of the constitution, in front of the journalists’ syndicate. One of these journalists, Shaymaa Abul Kheir, of the independent newspaper Al-Dustour, was beaten and groped by female government supporters in an attempt to force her to drop her complaint. Another instance of using hired thugs was during the ‘Battle of the Camels’ on 2 February 2011, when hundreds of thugs on camels and horses stormed Tahrir Square in order to unsuccessfully intimidate the young protestors: the latter group outnumbered them and were able to defeat them. Following the uprisings, hundreds of thugs were arrested, such as the notorious Sabri Nakhnoukh, who claimed that his arrest (August 2012) was an attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood (during Morsi’s brief term in office) to settle old scores, referring to his role in organising thugs to intimidate voters into electing Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP). He claimed that by deploying thugs during previous elections he was being patriotic: Because of my connections and because all my men love me, El-Adly [former Minister of Interior] would ask me to block polling stations. As a favour to the country I was doing it for free – out of love . . . It was all done based on instructions and directives, in order for the country to remain on the right track. I’m no thug . . . I was helping maintaining the stability of the country. (quoted in Tarek 2012)

It is noted that during the first three days of the 2011 revolution, several police stations and the governing party’s headquarters were set on fire, which resulted in a desperate blackout on all communication systems, including the Internet; however, it only lasted a couple of days before Mubarak’s regime restored them. The police stations were usually vandalised at the

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  51 hands of ­victims’ families and even detainees. Al-Mountazah police station in Alexandria, for instance, was set on fire in May 2011 by sixty-seven detainees in the station, twenty-eight of whom managed to escape (Al-Youm Sabei 2011), and in June 2011, police fired tear gas at protesters who had surrounded the Ezbekiya station in central Cairo. The protestors threw stones at the officers and set one vehicle on fire, after a bus driver was beaten and subsequently died of his injuries during a row with a policeman. This drove his family to gather protestors to attack the police station. In August 2011, a number of Egyptian citizens attacked a police station in Cairo’s Malek El-Saleh area and several cars were vandalised by the angry rioters after a person was killed by the police. The word ‘thug’, however, was also used in an attempt to discredit large sections of the revolutionary groups, and therefore the word lost part of its pejorative meaning as many revolutionaries called themselves ‘thugs’. The 6 April movement, for example, used to issue an online magazine called Baltagiya (Thugs) with a dedicated column ‘From one thug to another’, addressing its members and other like-minded youth, using the word sarcastically to refer to any protest groups such as students calling for change in their schools, workers calling for pay rises or humble citizens calling for better state services. One of the famous ‘revolutionary thugs’ was ‘Sambo’ (Mohammed Gad Al-Rab), also known as ‘the nationalist thug’. Sambo, a young ceiling carpenter from the humble neighbourhood of Sharabiya in Cairo, did not really participate in the eighteen-day uprising or the subsequent events; however, when violence erupted between the young revolutionaries and the police in June 2011, he became involved, particularly when he saw the security forces beating the families of the martyrs (the dead) on television. He attended the site where the fighting was taking place and threw stones at the police, even managing to wrestle a shotgun from a policeman. He was arrested and sent to prison, but was released in August 2012, when some civilians were given presidential amnesty during military trials. Living on Alms Post-independence Egyptian regimes strove to modernise the country by emulating the European concepts of progress, even though ‘modern progress must be understood as a movement towards increasing inequality’ (Mitchell

52  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m 1991: 125). This inequality then overlooks the Nasserite dream of social justice, but arguably can be justified in Islamic thought. The Islamist thinker Wagih Mahmoud (1998: 6) recognises the difference between social classes as embedded in the holy scriptures, and refers to the duty of the rich to give to the poor, according to the Qur’an, ‘who give a due share of their wealth to beggars and the deprived’ (Al Ma’arij, The Ways of Ascent, 70: 24–5).2 This giving should cleanse the rich from greed and enslavement to money while ‘purifying the poor of envy and resentment’ (Mahmoud 1998: 6). The poor can also give alms, similar to the rich, but in deeds rather than money: ‘A kind word and forgiveness is better than a charitable deed followed by hurtful [words]’ (Al-Baqara, The Cow, 2: 2633 (ibid. p. 6). The poor who endure a life of deprivation will receive recompense for this fortitude in heaven: ‘Say, [God says]. Believing servants, be mindful of your Lord! Those who do good in this world will have a good reward – God’s earth is wider – and those who persevere patiently will be given a full and unstinting reward’ (Al-Zumar, The Throngs, 39: 10)4 (ibid. p. 6). The leading Muslim Brotherhood figure Sayyed Qotb (Qotb 1993: 32–62) details the principles underpinning social justice in Islam as based on the principle of intellectual liberation; while other systems such as Marxism, promote the idea that economic liberation alone can be a means to free consciousness, economic pressure is a way to false consciousness. Free consciousness is embedded in the Islamic faith, as Muslims free themselves from idolising other gods. What is important as well is not to succumb to idolising money or rank, as this will fetter the individuals’ freedom, nor fall under the power of instincts and pleasures, as this may impact on true justice. Another principle is social support: Islam advocates support among family members, which also purifies the soul. Support entails obedience to one’s parents, doing good deeds, taking guidance from the Prophet’s saying, ‘When one sees evil deeds committed, one should actively stop the cause of the evil; if shall such be not possible, then one must speak-out against such a deed. If one can neither prevent the evil deed by action nor voice, then do so by admitting it is evil in the heart and turn away from it’ (Qotb 1993: 62). The way to enforce and spread these principles is to offer Zakat (donations) and alms to the poor (p. 65). According to Mahmoud (1998: 11), the poor are defined in Islamist thought as those who are unable to fulfil their needs and require aid in pro-

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  53 viding food, clothing and housing for themselves and their families. Poverty is a means of testing the Muslim faithful, argues Mahmoud; it can lead the poor either to a better understanding of their faith and becoming closer to God, or it could be a way towards sin. There are five spiritual stages through which the poor can strengthen their faith, as defined by Al-Ghazali (quoted in Mahmoud 1998: 12); these are: asceticism, contentment, conviction, diligence and infliction. Adding to these stages are several characteristics which could ensure happiness and satisfaction for the poor: piety, generosity, abstinence, honesty, patience and contentment. The poor’s piety gives them the conviction that poverty is a temporary destiny which may conceal later rewards, as indicated in this Qura’nic verse: ‘It may be that you dislike a thing, and God brings about through it a great deal of good’ (Al Nisa’, Women, 4: 19)5, (Mahmoud 1998: 14). Thus, the poor are encouraged to endure their ordeal with great patience waiting for God’s grace at a later stage; they should feel content and bear no resentment towards the rich (ibid. p. 16). They should also strive to conceal their poverty with modesty, ‘The ignorant man thinks, because of their modesty, that they are free from want’ (Al-Baqara, The Cow, 2: 273).6 Islam does not necessarily regard wealth in the sense of economic capital, such as in the following verse: ‘And there are those who amass gold and silver and spend it not in the way of Allah: announce unto them a most grievous penalty – The day when it will be heated in the fire of hell, and their foreheads and their sides and their backs will be branded with them; Here is what you hoarded for yourselves; so now taste the joy of your hoarding’ (Al-Tawba, Repentance, 9: 34–5),7 and it does acknowledge social divisions among different groups as inevitable: ‘And Allah has preferred some of you above others in wealth. Then, those who are preferred will by no means hand over their wealth and properties to those whom their right hands possess, so that they may be equal with them in respect thereof. Do they then deny the Favour of Allah?’ (Al-Nahl, The Bee, 16: 71).8 Mohamed I’mara (1988: 76) argues that the word ‘wealth’ does not mean money and property but rather, basic needs such as food, shelter, and so on. The act of almsgiving is described as a trade with God, by the words of the veiled actress, Hanan Turk, during her campaign to abolish slums. She referred to the following verse:

54  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m Those who rehearse the Book of God, establish regular Prayer, and spend (in Charity) out of what We have provided for them, secretly and openly, hope for a Commerce that will never fail. For He will pay them their need, nay, He will give them (even) more out of His Bounty: For He is oft-­forgiving, most ready to appreciate (service). (Al-Fatir, The Creator, 35: 29–30)

Her statement came as part of a campaign launched in 2011, led by her, the Islamic tele-evangelist Amr Khaled, the actor Mohamed Sobhi, and the TV presenter Amr Al-Leithy – all joined forces to collect donations with the aim of eradicating the slums. One of their TV appearances attempting to persuade viewers to contribute to the campaign showed the campaigners providing some reasons why it was acutely needed; one of which, according to Hanan Turk, was that it was rather embarrassing for foreign tourists to see slums in Cairo.9 The actor Mohamed Sobhi called the slums wasma (a stain) on the forehead of Egypt and all Egyptians. He appealed to slum-dwellers ‘not to let this initiative down’. The initiative entailed building new housing units to replace those slums, but on the condition that no unit should be later sold, exchanged or rented out. The household could pass the unit to their children but they had no property rights to sell it, thus, slum-dwellers were not regarded as being responsible for handling the donations or the constructions, or even the units, after they had been completed. Hanan Turk added: ‘We need to solve this problem so that we can proudly invite tourists to visit Egypt, what are we showing them now?10 This embarrassment is echoed in the comments of leading actress Ghada Abdel Razek, regarding the lavish lifestyle presented in one of her 2012 TV series, Maa Sabq el-Israr or Premeditation.11 Abdel Razek, who previously starred in successful documentaries regarding slums, stressed that she had no intention of showing any more of them in her forthcoming projects: We are not going to appear again in an uncivilised manner, whether in our fashion or home décor. Egypt is not what they show us [in slums]. We have to abide by good taste in our appearance. Any female professional [such as the protagonist in the series] should dress elegantly, so that everyone who sees her in the street will see an example of an elegant Egyptian woman. I did not want to show Egypt in an uncivilised image, because this is not true. Egypt is not only slums, and we need to reflect our true reality.

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  55 Slum-dwellers do not have separate private space, as illustrated in the words of the tele-evangelist Amr Khaled, ‘we know sins [adultery, thuggery or drug-dealing] are being committed in slums’;12 thus, eradicating slums from the public space will not only relieve the viewers’ conscience but also help slum-dwellers to end their sins. The latter group are not treated here as full citizens, on an equal footing with their donors; instead, they are depicted as less free to act, as their actions are directly visible to the rest of society. If other citizens wander freely between public and private realms, slum-dwellers enjoy no privacy as they are confined to one public space. On another episode on 19 June 2011,13 Amr Khaled showed what he termed a ‘positive example from the slums’, featuring a group of handicraftsmen in the pottery industry. The group was meant to refute the stereotype of slum-dwellers as unemployed and unwilling to work. Khaled said that God would hold ‘us’ – the people – responsible on the Day of Judgement because of ‘our’ responsibility towards those slums. Another example of the misrepresentation of the true Egyptians, according to the educated and well-off groups, is someone like Wiza, a humble woman with limited education who struggled to raise three children after her husband left her, and who featured in a BBC documentary called Marriage, Egyptian Style. The Egyptian anthropologist who helped the BBC crew in their production, Reem Saad (1997: 404), recalled how Egyptian commentators, appalled by Wiza’s vulgar language, accused Wiza of being ‘brought up on the pavement’ with no parents to teach her right from wrong. Saad (1997: 406) described this narrow expression of patriotic feelings as an attempt by the urban middle class to undermine ‘subordinate social groups’, arguing that the problem with Egypt’s image abroad ‘is simultaneously linked to an ambivalent attitude towards the West and to an ambivalent attitude towards peasants and the urban poor’. The shame caused by the presence of people like Wiza is due to the visibility of these slums as a public notice to the outside world, and the State does not ‘know how to prevent adverse publicity or deal well with it once such public notice is present’ (Spelman 1997: 105). Such a phenomenon ‘focuses not on changing the institution’ such as the state distribution policies, but on the middle class’s willingness to help disadvantaged groups. This is illustrated in one episode of Ala Al-Maqha (In the Café), broadcast on Al-Jazeera’s Mubasher Misr, in which a group of street

56  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m youth participated in a discussion about poverty and one of them challenged the presenter to find a problem with their poor conditions, but the presenter replied that the programme’s responsibility was only to show the situation and wait for the well-off people to react.14 The weekly Rouza-Al-Yousef magazine dedicated a long feature to what it coined ‘the anger of the slums’ (Mansour 2012) in which a sample of slumdwellers was quoted, expressing their views about the 2011 revolution – they expected it to be the ‘revolution for bread’ but it turned into a protest orchestrated by middle-class youth. One slum-dweller, Hosnia Al-Sayed, whose daily income was LE 10 (less than USD 1), had four daughters. She said that she expected the revolution to relieve her of her daily work as a bread vendor in the street and to be able to receive a state pension. It did not matter for those dwellers whether the president was from the Muslim Brotherhood, liberal parties or even Mubarak’s supporters; all they wanted was a genuine transformation and enhancement of their daily lives. The Al-Hurra channel15 also sees the slums as spreading like cancer and a bomb ready to explode. Al-Hurra hosted an interview with Al-Sayed and Manal Al-Tibi, the Director of the Egyptian Centre for Housing Rights. Al-Tibi disagreed with the use of the term, which she said reflected the way the regime had looked at the slums since the 1980s; at that time, they were regarded as a security problem, not a social problem. She said that the issue was not only to find alternative housing units, but to consider the fact that slum-dwellers needed to stay close to their working areas. When Amr Khaled or Amr Al-Leithy visited the slums and the audience followed their journey there, they somehow relieved their upper-middle-class audiences in particular, of any moral guilt for not knowing about these areas; however, this did not answer the question as to what had made this situation possible, what the State could do about it, nor did it give the slumdwellers the chance to say anything but to be merely thankful because they did not ‘dare to criticize the helper’ (Spelman 1997: 74). The discourses used by the upper-middle class and assumptions made about the composition of Egyptian society impacted on how they saw and interpreted the society to whom they listened, and the type of solutions they proposed to resolve these social problems. The result is a socially fragmented society with absolutist paradigms, not only in politics but in everyday life (Sharabi 1988). There is

ibn al-balad : the true son of e gy p t   |  57 this struggle for power, not only between the ruler and the ruled, but also amongst the ruled themselves, particularly those who own higher cultural and social capital and those who do not. Conclusion Disadvantaged groups, especially peasants and workers, were seen as the relics of a pure Egyptian past, but this past was too crude to be accepted without a fair amount of guidance. Although the Egyptian workers were claimed to have sparked both the 25 January Revolution in 2011, and the 17–18 January landslide protests in 1977, they are usually the last group to reap the benefits of revolutions. They are, nonetheless, the first group to be accused of halting the production cycle by involving themselves in strikes instead of working: hundreds of strikes took place during February 2011 with the participation of more than 150,000 workers requesting the right to form independent unions and the right to strike (Beinin 2012: 8). The recent discussions on the constitutional referendum by the supreme electoral committee included a heated debate about the definition of the category of ‘workers and peasants’ mandated to occupy half of the parliament seats. Workers claimed that they had never been adequately represented in the Egyptian Parliament although they paid circa 8 billion Egyptian pounds in taxes every year, compared to 2–3 billion collected from businessmen; on the other hand, some commentators asked to delete the item concerning the election of 50 per cent of MPs from workers and peasants, referring to Law 38 of 1972 which defines ‘worker’ as any employee who receives a salary from his or her manual or intellectual work, a category which also includes middle–class professionals such as doctors and engineers (Gomhouria Online 2012). The following chapter focuses on the middle classes, in an attempt to define this vast group and shed light on how it emerged in the 1950s, how it declined during the 1970s onwards, and how it once served as the true representation of the Egyptian character. Notes   1. See for instance Al-maqha, episode about street vendors, 23 August 2012, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQz6YW3MWz8.

58  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m   2. Quoted in The Qur’an, English translation by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (2010), Oxford University Press.  3. Ibid.  4. Ibid.   5. See also Abdel Haleem’s translation.  6. Ibid.  7. Ibid.  8. Ibid.  9. Source: http://forum.amrkhaled.net/showthread.php?410534-%​C7%​E1%​CD %​E1%​DE%​C9-%​C7%​E1%​CA%​C7%​D3%​DA%​C9..%​C7%​E1%​DA%​D4 %​ E 6%​ C 7% ​ C 6% ​ E D% ​ C 7% ​ C A-% ​ C A% ​ C D% ​ C A% ​ C 7% ​ C C-% ​ 2 6% ​ 2 36 5271%​3B%​DD%​DF%​C7%​D1%​DF%​E3-%​ED%​C7-%​D4%​C8%​C7%​C8. 10. Ibid. 11. Ahla Nogoum, 3 or 4 November 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?​v=​uBm​ 6uWLvFaE. 12. Source: http://forum.amrkhaled.net/showthread.php?410534-%​C7%​E1%​CD​ %​E1%​DE%​C9-%​C7%​E1%​CA%​C7%​D3%​DA%​C9..%​C7%​E1%​DA%​D4 %​ E 6%​ C 7% ​ C 6% ​ E D% ​ C 7% ​ C A-% ​ C A% ​ C D% ​ C A% ​ C 7% ​ C C-% ​ 2 6% ​ 2 36 5271%​3B%​DD%​DF%​C7%​D1%​DF%​E3-%​ED%​C7-%​D4%​C8%​C7%​C8. 13. Amr Khaled, Boukra Ahla, episode 9, 10 June 2011, about the slums, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=rstc5uBmblk&feature=related. 14. Al Maqha, episode broadcast on 26 September 2012, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pLJErQ3DbK0. 15. Al Hurra, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNkYjbm2D1c&feature=related.

3 Misri Effendi – The Squeezed Middle Class

[The bourgeoisie] has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals . . . the bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilizations. (Marx, The Communist Manifesto)

Introduction El Misri, or the Egyptian, was a label that was used during the national struggle against the British occupation, and a name applied to the national leader, Ahmed Urabi, who called for reforms to hold the khedive (viceroy under Turkish rule) and his government accountable (Maghraoui 2006: 51). Misri Effendi (or Mr Egyptian) became a cartoon character during the 1920s, invented as a symbol of the average or ordinary Egyptian. The character, developed to refer mainly to petty bureaucrats, was later replaced by ibn al-balad, or the true son of Egypt (El Messiri 1978: 48). Misri Effendi remained a symbol of the emerging middle class during the first few decades of the twentieth century. This representation was seen in a film entitled Misri Effendi (directed by Hussein Sedki, 1949) featuring the story of Mr Egyptian (El-Misri), a middle-class salaried employee. He is not content with his life and wants to be wealthy in order to be able to afford luxury items for his 59

60  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m children. He joins forces with his friend, Ismail, in order to establish a housing company to fulfil his dreams – a reflection on the class of new, salaried employees that rose in considerable numbers during the 1950s and 1960s (Halpren 1963: 50). This chapter provides a discussion regarding the rise of the Egyptian middle class, drawing on a range of studies by Egyptian sociologists who define this class and the problems it has faced since Nasser’s era. Before doing so, a note is due about the definition of the Egyptian middle class vis-à-vis the classic Marxist characterisation. Waquant (1991) argues that Marxism failed to realise the continued increase of a middle-class sector between the capitalists on the one hand and workers on the other; instead, Marx subsumed all the groups below capitalists and landowners under the word ‘proletariat’: the lower strata of the middle class – the small trades-people, shopkeepers, and rentiers, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalist, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. (Marx 1974, quoted in Waquant 1991: 40)

The middle class is not necessarily in the same position as those exploited by the capitalist owners, for the middle class still possesses credentials and skills which help it to gain benefits in terms of its organisational authority, such as being part of the bureaucratic elite (Waquant 1991: 45). Waquant warns, ‘the middle-class is necessarily an ill-defined entity’ and the complexity of its situation and the task is not necessarily to draw ‘better theoretical maps’ but to ‘engage in historical and comparative investigations of how agents situated at various points of the middle zones of social space can or cannot be assembled’ (pp. 57–8). The Economist defined the middle class as those people earning above the poverty line of $2 and up to $13 per day, at 2005 wages. This definition captures a large growing population in the world, which has doubled from 1.4 billion to 2.6 between 1990 and 2005; in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, this population grew from 170 million to 240 million people between 1990 and 2005 (The Economist 2009: 2). These

misri effendi – the squeezed mi d d l e cl a s s   |  61 groups show an interest in politics, for example, the middle class in India in the wake of the Mumbai attacks in 2008, when thousands of young Englishspeaking professionals demanded a ban on criminality and engaged in social networking sites to express their opinions (ibid.). The middle-class population represented circa 50 per cent of the world population in 2006, compared to only 1 per cent in 1820 (at the time of the French Revolution). Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute in Washington defines the middle-class sector as leading a life ‘built on abstract relations based on shared values . . . we are used to dealing with people we don’t know in order to get something done and do it by abstracting away from the particular details of our background or personality’ (quoted in The Economist 2009: 5). The middle class supports social mobility more than the elite has done and it might be less inclined to fight political corruption: it might even give up on fighting for better public education, as an increasing number of members tend to send their children to private schools. There are two types of middle class: one formed by the State (white collar employees), who might be less inclined to fight the government, and entrepreneurs such as shop-owners (The Economist 2009: 5). The Egyptian Middle Class The middle class in Egypt can be defined as a sector of the population that enjoys greater social mobility compared to the lower class, due to its larger cultural repertoire; the middle class is also more likely to demand more liberty, such as freedom of speech, independence of the judiciary system and freedom of the press. This sector values education and can spend large parts of its budget on education in its aspirations for more esteem. Booz & Co (2012) surveyed 1,450 middle-class people in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. The results showed that those people were anxious about their living standards and job security and were unhappy with the level of public services such as education and health-care. It defined the middle-class population as the one whose income adjusted to purchasing power parity; in Egypt, this class formed around 44 per cent of the population. Booz & Co (2012) asked people to define what they perceived as the main attributes of the middle class; in Egypt, the majority (76 per cent) saw it confined to the materialistic (financial) definition, or that it is the class that is able to fulfil its material needs, receive a reasonable salary and have an average standard of living.

62  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m Members of this sector do not necessarily have to own their houses, as only 1 per cent saw house ownership as a main attribute (ibid. p. 6). More than 80 per cent of those people defined as middle class claimed to save money for their children’s education, up to 10 per cent of their monthly income (p. 17), and in Egypt, this class usually expressed less trust in media content and in governmental services (p. 26). The report concluded that this class ‘is unable to act as a stabilizing factor against external economic shocks’ (p. 11). The Egyptian middle class was formed in the nineteenth century, when landowners dramatically increased. Perlmutter (1967: 48–9) argues that at the time, the Egyptian middle class was not overly interested in entrepreneurship because this function was not only taken up by foreigners, but native Egyptians lacked the experience to compete. Also, Egyptians eager to climb up the social ladder, tended to favour administrative positions rather than commercial activities, as industrial and entrepreneurial activities were backed by the State at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and not by the market itself. Abdel Aziz Ezzelarab (1990: 132) analysed the reasons behind the failure of establishing an Egyptian bourgeoisie to fill the political gap during the late nineteenth century. He argued that the ruling elites controlled the production through their bureaucratic machinery and coercive military and police power, which left little material incentive for a new bourgeois class to emerge. The new class of civil servants and small merchants had to affiliate with the people in power in order to maintain their status. Egypt lacked a real entrepreneurial class that could take the initiative in developing civil associations, independent from the ruling elites. The unions were attributed to foreign ideas such as the socialist movement in Egypt, which was ascribed to a Russian Jew, Joseph Rosenthal, who organised strikes by the employees of tailors and barbers and formed the Communist Club in 1920; a year later, he launched the Egyptian Socialist Party (Barakat 1993: 173). During the first few decades of the twentieth century, Egypt had two clear middle-class strata: a national bourgeoisie of rural intellectuals and merchants associated with the Wafd party, and an upper bourgeoisie of industrialists. The 1952 coup replaced the latter with a class of bureaucratic and managerial elites: the same class that benefited from Sadat’s Open Door policy and the Privatisation policy of Mubarak (Barakat 1993: 88). The

misri effendi – the squeezed mi d d l e cl a s s   |  63 middle class can be further divided into old and new bourgeoisie (Al-Yamani 2005: 53): the first includes intellectuals, judges, teachers and army officers, while the latter consists of university graduates, private or public professionals and small entrepreneurs. The latter group has been strengthened in many Arab states following military and other coups during the second half of the twentieth century, thereby competing with the old bourgeoisie. Saad Eddine Ibrahim (1985) defines the Egyptian middle class as this social segment that has gained secular education and occupies influential positions in the public and military services. Egyptian society consists of three classes, according to Hegazy (2004): upper class, middle class, lower class. The first is the smallest of them and includes scientists, professors, managers, lawyers, judges, artists, army officers and IT specialists; most of them are highly remunerated, own shares and real estate and enjoy a luxurious lifestyle. The middle class includes salaried state employees, predominantly university graduates. The lower class includes small bureaucrats in state services, and their education level is usually vocational. The middle class across the three strata is a heterogeneous group and therefore its members reflect a diverse range of ideologies; the upper stratum usually follows the values of the upper class, while the lower stratum that of the lower class (Al-Yamani 2005: 62). The Egyptian economist, Galal Amin (1991) estimated that the Egyptian middle class constituted approximately 19 per cent of the population in 1952, compared to 80 per cent for the lower class and only 1 per cent for the upper class. Forty years later, the middle class had increased to around 45 per cent, while the lower classes constituted 50 per cent and the rest (5 per cent) belonged to the upper class. The main reason for the expansion of the middle class was the mobility of the lower class coupled with the fall of a number of those from the upper class (Al-Yamani 2005: 56). Al-Yamani argues that the Egyptian middle class, unlike its European counterpart, has grown out of its relationship with the State and not production capital: it is therefore located in between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (2005: 44). This class had grown in number since the 1960s and, by the mid-1980s, it reached 75 million people across the region (p. 50). Al-Yamani (p. 51) defines the middle class as the stratum that does not own

64  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m the ­production capital, but does possess instead a large proportion of social capital. The Egyptian proletariat and working class may enjoy a relatively higher living standard compared to the middle class, but it may lack social capital (in terms of education and networking). The labour migration to the neighbouring oil-rich countries provided avenues to absorb the growing Egyptian labour force (skilled and semi-skilled) while increasing remittances at a remarkable rate: from USD 2 billion in 1980 to approximately USD 9 billion in 2011. The new bourgeoisie embraces diverse ideologies, as mentioned before, and its rise has brought to the fore these conflicting ideologies of secularism, Islamism, socialism and authoritarianism. Al-Yamani (2005: 80–1) argues that the middle class has been divided between Marxist, liberal and Islamist discourses during Egypt’s recent history. Nasser adopted Marxist values during his rule, Sadat’s Open Door policies were liberal, and Islamist discourses flourished under Mubarak’s regime. The expansion of the European bourgeoisie was largely due to changes in the right to hold land; during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Egyptian middle class lived according to the feudal system, which kept land ownership in the hands of a few members of the nobility, while giving the right to cultivate the land to individuals who then hired peasants to work the land. This system meant that land ownership, as the main catalyst for class tension, was absent in Egypt during that epoch, therefore delaying the formation of a real middle class (Al-Yamani 2005: 66); as such, the main difference between the European and Egyptian middle class is that the former was created by market forces while the latter was by the State. The European bourgeoisie accumulated money from commercial and entrepreneurial activities which they re-invested in the market, while the Egyptian bourgeoisie did not reach its status via commercial activities but through education as a ticket to attractive administrative positions. The 1952 coup further strengthened this middle class of public servants, while the Open Door policy during Sadat’s rule witnessed a strengthening of the upper class (Al-Yamani 2005: 76). Social Mobility Abdelnabi (2000) argues that the police and military services are the most important institutions responsible for social mobility, particularly

misri effendi – the squeezed mi d d l e cl a s s   |  65 in ­developing countries such as Egypt. People employed in these services tend to receive above-average salaries in addition to various benefits. Other institutions which also contribute are the trade unions and political parties, according to Abdelnabi, as both institutions provide numerous advancement opportunities for individuals of all social strata; in the case of Egypt, migration to the oil-rich Gulf States improved the livelihood of millions of skilled and semi-skilled workers. He also regards inter-class marriage as a means of social mobility as well as the globalisation of media. Even revolutions and coups, in his opinion, usually witness the rise of new social strata; for instance, following the 1950 military coup, many individuals who joined the socialist movement received various benefits – not to mention political and social recognition – which helped improve their living standards. The new political elites of the 1950s came predominantly from the military section: armed technocrats strongly believed in the army’s role in building the nation and as a symbol of the country’s national identity (Faksh 1976: 144). The expansion of the army during the period mid-1930s to mid-1940s meant that the army was now open not only to the upper class but also to the middle and working classes; in fact, the main figures of the Free Officers movement ‘belonged to the first batch of middle-class youth that joined the Military Academy in the late 1930s . . . and naturally resented the privileges of the landed elite’ (Kandil 2012a: 9). The position of army officers was historically reserved for the Turco-Circassian elite during the reign of Mohammad Ali, while the majority of soldiers were peasants. The second army, established by the British in the early twentieth century, relaxed the rules of admission in 1936, allowing members of the middle class to enter, given that they had wasta, or influential figures, endorsing their applications. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s application to enter the Military Academy in 1937 was rejected because it was not supported by wasta (Aburish 2004: 15–16). Following the Free Officers’ coup in 1952, the Egyptian army grew exponentially as it was able to draw from a much wider section of the social strata (Abaido 1986: 12). Salaries paid by the army, police and diplomatic services were considered to be high relative to the rest of the remuneration system and were therefore very desirable (Abaido 1986: 24). To illustrate this change in the social background of military officers between the period 1950–84, Abaido (1986: 13) states that the percentage of upper-class recruits in 1950

66  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m was nearly 65 per cent, while in 1984 this figure shrank to only 4 per cent; on the other hand, the percentage of lower-middle class jumped from 0 per cent in 1950 to 11 per cent in 1984; the percentage of middle class also increased notably from 23.5 per cent in 1950 to nearly 90 per cent in 1984 (ibid. p. 13). Thus, the new bourgeoisie of army officers, professionals and functionaries replaced the traditional bourgeoisie of rural and urban capitalists that had been in power until the mid-1950s. This bourgeois class spearheaded the new agrarian reforms and nationalisation programme as part of its development plans, by introducing an economic system, referred to as ‘state capitalism’ – land ownership was transferred to the State while the production of crops remained within the capitalist system (Lachine 1977: 5). During Sadat’s reign (1970–81), the army was given a prestigious place in society but was discouraged from participating in politics; however, under his rule, the military had faced the problem of attracting middle- and upperclass recruits; although that was temporarily solved during the preparation for the 1973 war, Sadat demobilised the war-seasoned conscripts, freeing them to work in the emerging private sector (Kandil 2012a: 191). By depleting the army of well-educated and practical soldiers, it struggled to ‘absorb the advanced technology and training provided by the United States’ (p. 191). The army maintained its prestige in society with military power, even in the wake of the 1967 defeat and disillusionment, as not a single competent civilian faction emerged to lead the country: the new state apparatus still included mainly officers and technocrats, headed by the president and the military. Nasser’s nationalisation projects in 1957 and 1961 provided a model of state capitalism in which the State controlled the economy through fortyeight public organisations, after imprisoning several prominent investors (Kandil 2012b: 205). Reid (1974: 24) argues that Egypt witnessed the rise of professional syndicates composed mainly of lawyers, doctors, teachers and engineers, similar to their Western counterparts, by the beginning of the twentieth century. This rise of professionals was also due to the significant increase in the number of graduates from law, medicine, teacher training and engineering schools. There were approximately 32 graduates from the law school between 1887 and 1913, but this number rose to 216 during the period 1926–40 (Reid 1974: 36). Engineering graduates increased from

misri effendi – the squeezed mi d d l e cl a s s   |  67 8 to 109 during the same period, and teachers from 9 to 158. The period ­following World War II witnessed further expansion of higher education in Egypt; for example, law graduates reached more than 1,600 in 1965 (p. 37). The rise of professional syndicates meant a gradual immersion into political life through the election of officers from these groups. This led Nasser to curb the election of syndicate members in the mid-1950s by introducing the 1958 law which restricted syndicate members to belonging to his National Union (p. 55). It is noteworthy here, to point out that the first unions in Egypt were formed in 1899, but by 1920 there were 44 unions and this figure reached 491 in 1950 (Barakat 1993: 173). Bill (1972: 428) provided a table of the Egyptian classes in which the top place is occupied by the ruling political and economic elites, the lowest class by peasants, and the middle class by professionals as well as clerics. The latter is a non-bourgeois middle-class, many of whose members relate themselves to others through performance and service rather than through material wealth or personal connections: ‘the members of this class are engaged in professional, technical, cultural, intellectual and administrative occupations’ (Bill 1972: 433). The elites are defined as a select group who play ‘an influential role in social, political, economic or military affairs’ according to Abaido (1986: 1); consequently, the 1952 coup resulted in massive social changes, such as the disappearance of the old elites that came mainly from the middle and upper classes of bankers, landowners and senior officers (p. 7). Nasser leaned on the support of workers and trade unions for his Socialist Union Party as the only legitimate political forum in Egypt; however, his successor, Sadat, leaned on the support of the middle-class and private-sector elites, due to his liberal policies in order to please his new ally, the USA. It was possible to identify three main political trends in Egypt by the early 1970s: Marxist, Nasserite and the religious right factions (Lachine 1977: 6–7). Mubarak resumed this policy, and even expanded on it, although he avoided the sudden removal of state subsidies. The business elites, however, had gained considerably more powers since the rise of Mubarak’s son, Gamal, and the plan to groom him for the presidential post marginalised the middle class even more.

68  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m The Rise of the Conglomerates The rising pressures on the state budget following the 1967 war were perhaps the main reason behind Sadat’s decision to launch his Open Door policy or infitah in 1974, opening Egypt to foreign investment and trade. The policy, however, resulted in a rise in inflation and imports and a fall in wages. Sadat was then forced to seek aid from the International Monetary Fund to remove the state subsidy on basic foodstuff in 1977; in his speech to the Arab Socialist Union’s (ASU) Central committee on 27 March 1976, the former President Anwar Sadat said: The matter is that we depend on the government for everything. That is why there are shortcomings. We want the government to bring us our eggs, chicken and everything while the popular effort remains negative. This is a result of the system applied in the past stage. We should be quite frank and honest . . . the basis of the open-door policy is that the people should not stand by and watch the government working. I want them to work in the same way as the German people did [after World War II]. That is: both the government and the people, each working in its own field in order to set up the structure required.

When the State announced the decision, massive street protests erupted, forcing the State to reverse its decision (Posusney 1993: 96). Skilled and semiskilled Egyptian labourers emigrated to the oil-rich neighbouring countries in the 1970s as a temporary solution to the depressed economic situation, and invested in real-estate projects upon their return to Egypt. Their remittances also constituted an important source of revenue for Egypt, and were generally invested in Cairo’s urban, informal areas, thus creating a boom for informal housing during the period from 1967 to 1973 when formal development was put on hold during the military conflict with Israel. The rentier state began in Nasser’s era, when land became state-owned by decree, and limited acreages were sold to small farmers, the rest being owned and controlled by the government. Other sectors of the economy were nationalised, along with the Suez Canal from which remittances increased from USD 189 million in 1974 to USD 2,750 million in 1980 (Johnson 1972: 4–5). This form of state, argues Aulas (1982: 8), was intensified during

misri effendi – the squeezed mi d d l e cl a s s   |  69 Sadat’s era with the escalation of ‘various forms of unproductive income or “rent”. The main sources of this income were remittances from emigrant workers, oil exports, tolls from the re-opened Suez Canal and tourism.’ The Open Door policy also paved the way to a new class of capitalists and business owners from all social classes. One startling example was Rashad Osman who, it was claimed, had started life as an illiterate employee working around the docks of Alexandria, until 1975, when he smuggled a large quantity of hashish into Egypt and began an import-export company, accumulating millions of Egyptian pounds in a matter of a few years (Aulas 1982: 14). The Open Door policy also affected other sectors such as doctors and teachers, as well as other small independent operators such as taxi drivers and hairdressers, who raised their fees at the expense of salaried employees who felt the pressure of increasing prices and either emigrated to other countries or engaged in similar activities in order to accumulate their own wealth (ibid. p. 14). During Sadat’s rule, foreign trade increased rapidly from 35 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1974 to 97 per cent in 1979, and export of food declined from 38 per cent in 1974 to 14 per cent in 1981 (Kandil 2012a: 202). Sadat was also claimed to have moved Egypt from a planned economy to a ‘supermarket economy’ with an emerging bourgeois class whose only thought was to reap quick profits (p. 164). The top high-earners during this period increased their income from 5 to 22 per cent between 1970 and 1980 (p. 164). The 1970s Open Door policy and immigration to Arab countries resulted in a new wealthy middle class that was not necessarily well-educated. Class tensions also surfaced when 5 per cent of the population controlled 22 per cent of the national income, while the poorest 20 per cent controlled only 5 per cent (p. 204). The upper section of the middle class and higher strata of the population constituted only 15 per cent and 0.6 per cent respectively, in 1979 (Abaido 1986: 20). Small, middle-class entrepreneurs with limited education, as well as salaried professionals such as teachers, doctors and lawyers, were affected in different ways by the Open Door policy in the 1970s. Some of them managed to secure new, well-paid jobs in the private sector and increase their living standards, while others accepted lower paid jobs in either the public or private sectors; thus the middle class ‘moved towards heterogeneity, with the fortunes of some groups rising and others falling’ (Soliman 2011: 155).

70  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m Sadat’s policy created a new class of middlemen and agents for foreign companies, not to mention a group of over 17,000 millionaires who amassed their wealth during his ten-year rule (Kandil 2012b: 205). The division of the Egyptian middle class into various strata cannot be analysed through the Marxist tradition that divides the middle class into an exploitative and petite bourgeoisie (Kandil 2012a: 199). Historically endowed with adequate cultural and social capital in terms of education and positions in state bureaucracy, the Egyptian middle class found itself caught between its aspirations for prosperity and the diminishing income that ­shattered these aspirations. The Fall of Misri Effendi Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, who ruled from 1981 until his toppling in 2011, led the privatisation policy which, in turn, led to the explosion of a new wealthy class and the expansion of private education, including private universities in the wake of the declining role of state education. This became the catalyst for social mobility; by the 1980s, Egyptian society yielded to the idea of class hierarchy rather than question or fight it. Attributes such as nasab, the social status each person has due to belonging to a prominent family (Barakat 1993: 85), was replaced by the individual’s ability to forge new, powerful and profitable connections within the political and business spheres; thus ‘power . . . led to wealth far more often than wealth led to power’ (Bill 1972: 424). Mubarak’s regime opened wide the doors for business tycoons, particularly in the sectors of tourism, telecommunication, transportation and construction, to dominate the country’s economy, which, by the end of the 1990s, was owned by two dozen families (Kandil 2012a: 207–8). This growing class of super-rich sought not only to amass wealth but also to share political power; consequently, in 2004, Egypt had the first cabinet of businessmen, a process facilitated by Gamal Mubarak’s alliance with this growing, very wealthy upper class (ibid. pp. 207–8). Ignored here were the struggling lower-middle class, the unemployed, peasants and workers who had to tolerate shabby public services while they witnessed the super-rich group occupy the newly-developed satellite cities, send their children to international schools and receive health care in expensive private hospitals (Kandil 2012b: 210–11). The State exerted a certain degree of control over the new

misri effendi – the squeezed mi d d l e cl a s s   |  71 class of business magnates: public banks could offer major loans – generally sanctioned, regardless of loan approval procedures – to people who enjoyed close connections with the government and, therefore, had access to government-controlled major business groups such as the Federation of Chambers of Commerce (Soliman 2011: 150–1). New business elites were the reason behind the state deregulation of its economy by reducing taxes on the wealthy while limiting subsidies for the poor. The spread of corruption created a super-rich league of politicians and business aides: the Auditing Authority estimated that corruption had cost the country $100 billion between 1999 and 2004 (Kandil 2012a: 213). New satellite cities were built to cater for the needs of these affluent groups, and massive shopping malls proliferated in Cairo and in Nasr City, which had more than five malls in ‘a district dominated by the emerging middle-class [which had] accumulated wealth through migrant work in the oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia over the past 30 years’ (Abaza 2001: 100). Several of Cairo’s shopping malls were built in the 1990s and 2000s and are much larger than the few built during the early twentieth century by Jewish migrants. The increasing tide of economic liberalisation saw the emergence of a new devout bourgeoisie that managed to isolate its Islamic practices from other bourgeois ones, such as mall-shopping or living in gated communities; for instance, veiling, once a symbol of modesty, became a trend and a sign of status. A new class of Islamic preachers surfaced, such as the tele-evangelist, Amr Khaled. He appealed mainly to the middle and upper classes as he saw no contradiction in seeking both economic capital and religious piety (Bayat 2007: 153). This devout bourgeoisie depended on the State to preserve its affluence rather than confront it, as it would be too costly and financially risky, thus forcing them to ally with the regime, liberal opposition or journalists. The Muslim Brotherhood, as part of this devout bourgeoisie, remained a movement that appealed mainly to the educated lower-middle class and professionals that had missed out on the economic liberalisation programmes which had favoured the wealthiest groups and businessmen. The withdrawal of state services allowed groups such as the Brotherhood to provide their own welfare programmes, such as clinics, day-care centres, and so on, to the lowermiddle class and disadvantaged groups (Gumuscu 2010: 852–6). Another reason for the success of such Islamist movements, ­according to Abdo, was

72  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m the growing religiosity among salaried professionals who had worked for several years in the conservative Gulf States, where they had been exposed to stricter Islamic practices (2000: 81). The past decade had also seen numerous incidents of strikes among typical, middle-class professional groups such as lawyers, journalists, teachers, doctors and pharmacists; in 2009, for instance, lawyers arranged a protest across Egypt against the rise in legal fees. Other independent entrepreneurs, such as owners of diving clubs in Sharm-al-Shaykh, garage-owners and bakery-owners, also took part in strikes in 2009 and traditional, middleclass senior administrators expressed their anger: for example, a manager at the National Audit Office staged a sit-in in January 2009 because of his bitter resentment that land owned by him had been taken over by an influential group, ‘thugs’ according to him, and the police had done nothing to drive them off his land. He even threatened to immolate himself in front of the General Attorney’s office (Al Mirghani et al. 2009: 31). Pharmacists arranged a strike and total closure of thousands of pharmacies across the country in 2009, in protest against the Minister of Finance’s decision to raise taxes on pharmaceutical products, backdated to 2005. Doctors were also dissatisfied and arranged several demonstrations: one was in front of Al-Galaa Court against a series of verbal insults by a police officer to a doctor in Said Galal Hospital; another occurred in April of the same year, when doctors arranged a national strike which closed down more than 65,000 private clinics in protest against the low wages of doctors and the deteriorating conditions in public hospitals. Finally, employees of state TV arranged a sit-in, in front of the TV building, objecting to the huge rift in salaries between the so-called ‘external experts’ and local employees (Al Mirghani et al. 2009). Public services, such as transportation, education, health and housing, were deteriorating, not only for the middle class but for all Egyptians, to the extent that the word ‘public’ had become ‘synonymous with mediocrity’ (Soliman 2011: xiv). The middle class began to question the justification for paying taxes to a government that spent lavishly on the president’s palaces and on ministers’ benefits, while holding civil servants accountable for any failures in providing basic facilities for the population (Al-Aswani 2011: 25). People first wanted guarantees that their taxes would be spent on general

misri effendi – the squeezed mi d d l e cl a s s   |  73 improvements that would benefit everyone, and not wasted on palaces and in benefits for a small group of ministers. Professionals such as pharmacists and doctors went on strike against appalling conditions and the raising of their taxes. Doctors across Egypt protested over the deteriorating health services and demanded a minimum wage of 3,000 Egyptian pounds (USD 393) per month (Alexander 2012). The middle class also suffered as a result of the large gaps in salaries between high-ranking officials and low-ranking civil servants. The editor-in-chief of a newspaper or TV channel could claim hundreds of thousands of Egyptian pounds as a monthly salary, while a newly-hired reporter received only 500 Egyptian pounds (USD 65) a month (Soliman 2011: 73). A new layer of highly-skilled civil servants – graduates from foreign universities such as the American University in Cairo – provided professional services to ministers and other government agencies. The salaries of these professionals were often ten times those of ordinary employees in the same agency, creating a high degree of resentment (Soliman 2011: 73). Ministers were not necessarily concerned with the Egyptian public: their loyalties only lay with the president, who had the power to sack them at any time (Al-Aswani 2011: 26). Injustice and inequality was evident across all layers of society. The president abused his power by making his ministers only answerable to him; the ministers and high-ranking officials abused their power and positions in order to accumulate wealth by selling their inside knowledge of state plans for the building of new satellite cities to construction moguls; business tycoons abused their power when they directed their workers to vote for them or refused to pay overtime. This vicious circle, warned Alaa Al-Aswani (2011: 146), which starts with despotism and leads to negligence and corruption, recurs every day in Egypt and ends in the deaths of more poor people . . . it is saddening that the number of people who have died from corruption and negligence in Egypt is greater than the number who have died in all its wars. In other words, the Egyptian regime has killed more Egyptians than Israel [ever did].

Moral decay is also looked upon as a decline in values and ethics, as the latter are detached variables from the social and political context; thus,

74  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m accusing Egyptians of being lazy and unproductive ‘ignores the fact that productivity in any country requires a good education, equal job opportunities, and salaries that allow a decent standard of living’ (Al-Aswani 2011: 183). The rise of complaints was seen as one reason behind the Egyptians’ inability to cope with capitalist policies, which the 2011 revolution could not satisfactorily address: the newspaper, Al-Masri-a-Youm warned that the number of patients with mental health issues had actually doubled since the 2011 revolution (Al-Tayyeb 2012). Nasser’s middle class thrived from the 1950s to the early 1970s by keeping fanaticism and corruption at bay, but left the middle class deprived of its democratic rights; therefore, it was unable to defend the socialist system when Nasser was gone. Corruption took root following the Open Door and privatisation policies, and society became polarised between the very poor and the very rich, squeezing the middle class even more. It was therefore no wonder that the struggling middle class rose up in revolt against Mubarak’s corrupt regime and his small circle of business tycoons, calling for better state services in education, jobs, welfare services and health care. These classes will continue to form the greatest challenge to any Egyptian government, whether from the Islamist or the liberal blocs, which will have to rethink economic remedies in the short term, without losing sight of long-term strategies, in order to secure the alliance of this section of the population and without the use of coercive force. For ordinary Egyptians, the struggle will remain regarding which group (and class) best represents the nation. Conclusion Hannah Arendt (1965) argues that the French Revolution failed in fulfilling its goals, while the American Revolution succeeded, because the former was preoccupied with the social question and the poor. This preoccupation, she claims, distorted the political realm directing attention away from the battle for the political virtue of freedom: ‘freedom had to be surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself . . . the revolution had changed its direction, it aimed no longer at freedom, the goal of the revolution had become the happiness of the people’ (p. 55). The American Revolution, on the other hand, did not prioritise the social question but concerned itself with political rights: ‘what were absent from the American scene were misery and

misri effendi – the squeezed mi d d l e cl a s s   |  75 want rather than poverty . . . since the laborious in America were poor but not miserable the problem that they posed was not social but political . . . [and] concerned the form of government’ (p. 63). In the same vein, the Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Eissa, editor-in-chief of the Tahrir newspaper set up in the wake of the 2011 revolution, argued that ‘freedom is more important than the poor’, and that ‘the revolution was ignited to seek freedom, and freedom comes before bread and before life itself’. He claimed that ‘the people revolted for their pride and integrity, not necessarily for their bread’ (Eissa 2011). His article was in reply to a post by the Egyptian blogger, Ahmed Abul Gheit, who sparked the debate with his well-known blog, which attracted thousands of likes on Facebook, and in which he asked, ‘Why don’t we see those [poor] people’s photos? Is it because they are poor and vulgar? Because their clothes are cheap? Why are the only popular photos of martyrs from middle- and upper-middle classes?’ (quoted in El-Wardani 2011). The ideal demonstrator for some middle-class protestors was someone with adequate political knowledge and an ability to articulate the protestors’ demands, or in the words of one of those protestors, ‘someone that is dressed nicely and goes on the street to chant without the usage of swear words while focusing on his freedom . . . Someone who is exposed and somehow educated. Someone who saw people abroad and understands things. Someone who understands basic human rights’ (quoted in El-Sharnouby 2012: 42). One young middle-class demonstrator protested by saying, ‘They looked as if they just came out of prison. They are not looking like demonstrators or people who love their country. I got the feeling they are youth who went out to steal and then died’, when the media published photographs of some martyrs from the deprived lower class (El-Sharnouby 2012: 41). The debate reflects the dividing opinions as to what constitutes social justice, especially recently, with the rising popularity of Army Marshal al-Sisi, who was claimed to be the 2013 version of Nasser by endorsing his sense of social justice and patriotism.

4 The ‘As if’ State

Introduction Egypt ranked thirty-first in the global Failed States Index of 2012, climbing fourteen places compared to the previous year, which prompted journalists and commentators to question the legitimacy of the State (Howeidy 2013). A failed state, in political terms, is characterised by endogenous problems as well as the collapse of its legal and political systems, the structure that guarantees a certain degree of order; externally, a failed state will have no single body representing it at international level (Bush 2004), and sociologically, its core government will have collapsed. The government referred to here is one that monopolises power, thus, the police service as well as the judiciary would be incapable of maintaining law and order, and hence allow violence to prevail. Such a state is ineffective in that it fails to fulfil its function of government and, practically, it becomes an illegitimate state. A legitimate government, in contrast, is one which is accountable to its citizens and successfully ensures citizens’ compliance without having to resort to violence; if state strength is measured by the ability of a state to propose and implement major societal changes then Egypt cannot be classified as a strong state. Although it has a united presence at international level, Egypt’s considerable internal problems jeopardise its functionality as well as its legitimacy. It is important, therefore, to revisit the political scene before and after 76

the ‘a s i f ’ state | 77 2011, in order to understand the weaknesses of the Egyptian State in view of the recent uprisings. The political opposition was largely disorganised during Mubarak’s era, thanks to the dominance of the wealthy elites and their complex control of the domestic scene. One of the most striking facts about Egypt was the huge gap between the elites and the rest of the population; while a tiny fraction of the population lived in guarded communities with luxurious amenities such as swimming pools, sports courts, private schools and private green spaces, half of the population was deprived of basic state services and survived on less than USD 2 a day. Added to this were the regime’s fraudulent national election in 2010 and the numerous acts of police violence against lower- and middle-class youth. This chapter discusses the presence, or rather absence, of the role of the Egyptian State and its transition into a weak state – or ‘as if’ state, as one commentator named it. The scarcity of state services is best illustrated in the ubiquity of slums, which gave rise to a large charitable civil society, mainly led by the Islamic movements, which filled in for state administration in these populous areas. The weakness of the state is further illustrated in its inability to implement its laws and regulations, leading to a general state of apathy among Egyptians. The centralised state had a massive 8 million people on its payroll; this formed most of the so-called ‘deep state’ or the privileged institutions of the army, intelligence services, security and judiciary. The Muslim Brotherhood failed to conquer this deep state, unable to win the support of the army, security services or the state-run media. Morsi did not aim to win allies from amongst civil society actors, preferring instead to appeal to the Islamist base (The Economist 2013). The military controlled a great share of the economy and it had been vigilant in concealing the exact figures of its interests, although it was estimated to have been between 25 and 40 per cent (Abd Rabou 2014). This lucrative interest may have pushed the military to resist the handover of power to civilian control in an attempt to defend its economic position (ibid.). The Pressure on Families There is no doubt that the impressive economic growth during the last decade of Mubarak’s rule (reaching up to 7 per cent in 2008) was not due to it being pro-poor or pro-children. The number of children in poverty increased in

78  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m 2009 to match the highest level recorded in 1996, although that rate fell during the period 1996 to 2000. It was estimated that around 23 per cent of children under the age of fifteen lived in poverty (or under USD 2 per day). The problem was compounded by the fact that social aid programmes did not have full national coverage and the state budget allocated to child welfare was practically non-existent. There were more than 7 million children, or one in four, who lived below the breadline, of which around 5 million were deprived of appropriate housing conditions. What statistics also showed was that poverty was regional, particularly child poverty in the rural areas of Upper and Lower Egypt, compared to households in urban areas (UNICEF 2010). It was estimated that there were around 2 million street children in Egypt, and one study, conducted in 2011 by the National Center for Social and Criminological Research (NSCR) in Egypt, showed that around 20 per cent of these children were in fact victims of human trafficking for sexual exploitation or forced to beg and steal (International Organization for Migration 2011). The youth did not fare much better: the percentage of fifteen-yearolds and above who used illegal drugs had increased to 30 per cent, with added reports that children as young as ten consumed various forms of drugs. The phenomenon was attributed to unemployment, lower levels of education and family breakdown. Egyptians spent around 30 billion Egyptian pounds (or nearly USD 4 billion) on illicit drugs according to a UN report, and there were 7 million drug-users (Hassan 2013). It was these conditions that prompted a large group of youth from many political ideologies to demand the ousting of Mubarak and his regime in 2011. The Egyptian State was alerted to the danger of the young population, defined as those between fifteen and thirty-five years of age who were still completing their education, had recently started their careers or were still seeking jobs (Abdelnabi 2000). The government set up the Ministry of Youth in 1999 in order to control youth centres and to harness the youths’ energy through information communication technology (ICT) training. This training included technical education for the youth to encourage advancement in their work and guidance in ‘religious piety in order to withstand both foreign cultural influence and home-grown political Islam’ (Bayat 2010: 131). Foreign influence was also blamed for the spread of Satanism among a group of youth in 1997, which led to moral panic in the country and speculation

the ‘a s i f ’ state | 79 on the impact of imported ‘heavy metal music’ on well-off youth members, accused of practising satanic rituals as part of their dance gatherings (ibid. p. 132). Islamist groups who used to dominate Egyptian universities, banned performing arts, music concerts and even films. They justified their attacks on mass entertainment as a need to re-establish self-control and rationality, and eliminate the people’s distraction from practising their faith (Bayat 2010: 151). This introduced a new genre of clean entertainment developed through new, private outlets such as Shabab TV, which broadcast Islamic talk shows, innocuous TV programmes and religious songs such as those by Yousef Islam, particularly produced and distributed during the month of Ramadan. It was now the case that the majority of households wrestled with the threat of unemployment, which constituted another major challenge not only to Egyptian families but also to the State. The rate of unemployment skyrocketed to nearly 12 per cent in 2011, from around 8.7 per cent in 2009, forcing higher labour migration, particularly to the Gulf States. Semi-skilled labourers headed to the Gulf sub-region, while highly-skilled migrants, including doctors and engineers, headed to North America and Europe (around 11 per cent of Egyptian migrants, according to the International Organization for Migration – IOM). The IOM estimates of the number of Egyptian migrants abroad was approximately 2.7 million, of which about 70 per cent resided in Arab countries and the remainder in Europe and North America. The youth dreamed of a life in Europe where there were supposedly job opportunities, a decent income and more freedom. Anecdotes among ordinary citizens who had family members abroad discouraged these aspirations: What is widely circulated that these immigrants [in Europe] saved much money in Europe or lived better lives is rubbish, and if they say that [they lived a better life], they are liars. Honestly, they live in nasty lodgings, worse than [those] in Egypt. As for work, it is pretty hard. You have to accept poor-paying jobs in housekeeping or restaurants, jobs you would never accept in Egypt,

said Mohamed Safwat, a sixty-year-old Egyptian businessman who migrated to Germany in 1960 (quoted in Mansour 2013). Most families in Egypt had to struggle with the growing problem of sexual harassment which was (and still is) estimated to affect more than 99

80  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m per cent of women in the country. There was an appearance of unity between men and women, Islamists and liberals alike, in Tahrir Square in 2011, and a temporary absence of sexual harassment during the first few months of the 2011 revolution, but the problem resumed later that year and reached an epidemic level. One of the most recent striking examples of sexual harassment – that turned into a violent mob-style attack – was recorded on video during the inaugural celebrations of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in June 2014. The video showed a mass sexual assault on a nearly-naked woman and a police officer struggling to extricate the victim. Activists blamed the State for not training police officers to combat such crimes, and the Nazra Feminist Studies Centre documented more than 250 cases of mass sexual assault during 2012 to 2014 (Kirkpatrick and El-Sheikh 2014). Girls and young women in rural areas also faced the problem of minority marriages: it was not unusual to find child-wives as young as fourteen going to court to obtain a divorce from their husbands. Two men were recently accused of child abuse after the Egyptian father agreed to marry off his ten-year-old daughter to an Arab national in return for LE 14,000 (USD 1,900). Child marriages had become widespread in governorates like Giza, Fayoum and Kafr-el-Sheikh, despite the law prohibiting any marriages under eighteen (Salem 2013). The consensus between commentators, sociologists, politicians and the media as to the cause of many of these social ills, including the rise of Islamic militancy, is the rise of ashwayyat or slums (Bayat 2010: 178), which have mushroomed in recent decades thanks to increased urbanisation. The population explosion escalated from 2.5 million to 11 million between the 1950s and the 1990s in Cairo alone (Dorman 2009: 422). Poverty here was seen as the result of the absence of well-paid jobs, inadequate infrastructure, low education levels and a lack of social welfare services (UNICEF 2011). Following the 2011 revolution, the majority of Egyptian families felt even more pressurised by the deterioration of security coupled with declining income. A survey by the Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC) in 2012, showed that 57.5 per cent of families said that their income was not sufficient compared to 45 per cent in 2012, and nearly 90 per cent felt that the crime rate had increased; in fact, it had soared in recent years (and has tripled since the 2011 revolution), attributed to the demoralised police

the ‘a s i f ’ state | 81 force (Daragahi 2013). Recorded incidents of homicides tripled from 774 to 2,144 from 2010 to 2013, and ransom kidnappings rose from 107 to 412 during the same period. Car thefts became widespread, jumping from nearly 5,000 in 2010 to well over 21,000 in 2012. It was not unusual for the thieves to demand a ransom before returning the car to its owner. Recorded armed ­robberies also soared from 233 in 2010 to 2,807 in 2012 (ibid.). Promises of improvements by governments, before and after 2011, were not fulfilled and major interventions were conducted by civil society organisations in the slums. One slum, Ramlat Boulaq, is an example of the irrecoverable gap between the rich and the poor. The area was historically occupied by migrants who moved from southern Egypt in the early twentieth century seeking jobs in Cairo. It continued to expand in order to accommodate many poor families who could not afford the skyrocketing house prices in other parts of the capital. Frequent clashes broke out between Ramlat Boulaq residents and the guards of the luxurious Nile City Towers, such as the one in August 2012, which lasted several days. The Towers’ guards refused to provide the residents with water hoses to put out a fire that left a five-yearold child dead and destroyed the dwellings of fifteen families. One Ramlat Boulaq resident was killed, later accused by the guards of being a ‘thug’. It was also claimed that many residents had moved out after being offered between USD 500 to 1,000 for each square metre of their land, although it was worth much more (El-Shamy 2012). State threats to remove parts of the slums did not materialise as many dwellers managed to escape the law. It was not unusual for a citizen who had received a court order to leave his or her illegally constructed annex, to appeal to the judge to maintain the status quo: ‘when one goes to see the judge, it is important to cry in front of him and to explain that the additions are necessary for the survival of the family’ (quoted in Ghannam 2003: 175). Slum-dwellers did not see any prospects of changing their lives. A twenty-seven-year-old driver whose average monthly income was USD 150, and who shared an eight-room, mud-brick home with his mother and three siblings, together with seven other families, commented: ‘You may call this a house, but you can’t possibly say that we’re living . . . in Egypt, even dreams are expensive’ (El-Tablawy 2011). Luxurious new cities built on the outskirts of the capital saw a boom in the so-called gated residential communities. These communities are

82  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m c­ haracterised by high-level security systems at the gates that monitor activities within the communities and entry by outsiders. Many residents install iron bars across their windows as additional security measures against burglaries. Such communities have created urban segregation in the capital city, or what the Egyptian sociologist Mona Abaza (2006) coined, ‘the neo-liberal dream of segregation’. The status of the Egyptian elites and the facilities they enjoy are jealously guarded. One resident from a gated community in Al-Rehab city who spotted her former maid in one of the shopping malls in Al-Rehab commented: I was really annoyed because we pay a huge amount of money to maintain our quality of life . . . and then you find, unexpectedly, your former maid strolling in the mall . . . we left them [other districts in Cairo], why are they following us? . . . we do not pay maintenance fees to the management company to let outsiders benefit from the same advantages we enjoy. (quoted in Marafi 2011: 48)

The same resident showed concern regarding the servants and maids and the risks of being robbed by them: [servants] are eager to know even more details about us. For instance, the servant . . . asked me once if I knew of a nearby currency exchange office . . . the truth of the matter was that she did not want to exchange dollars, but wanted to know whether or not I had US dollars or any other foreign currency . . . I have become an expert in interpreting servants’ questions’. (quoted in Marafi 2011: 61)

These fears of rebellious poor people were fed by mainstream media accounts of burglaries targeting these wealthy gated communities. Thieves soon learnt how to penetrate them; for instance, in 2009, a man known as ‘the thief’ of the new city of Al-Rehab, specialised in stealing from there. He confessed that he only stole from the rich (not the poor) and used cunning tactics to enter Al-Rehab without arousing the security guards’ suspicion, by dressing in smart suits and driving modern cars (Marafi 2011: 79). The lack of sympathy between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ was further illustrated in the account by a twenty-five-year-old plumber, who was called to fix some leaking pipes in a villa in one of the gated compounds. The shower alone cost more than

the ‘a s i f ’ state | 83 he could possibly earn in six months, yet, after fixing it, the owners quibbled over the USD 20 he charged (El-Tablawy 2011). Some of those belonging to the deprived classes, who were made visible in the 2011 revolution, were depicted as exceptional, such as Mina Danial, who was described as ‘special . . . unique, charismatic and impossible to hate. He was a cheerful young man, who was always smiling and had the uncanny ability to win people over’ (Fathi 2012). Danial died at the age of nineteen, during the Maspero demonstrations staged in October 2011 by a group of Copts, after the demolition of one of their churches in Upper Egypt. The protestors who approached the Maspero television building were attacked by security forces and the army, killing twenty-eight, including Mina Danial. He came from a poor Christian family residing in the suburb of Ezzbet Al-Nakhl, one of the most poverty-stricken districts in Greater Cairo. Danial became an emblem of the revolution and particularly the Maspero demonstrations, and his image was even used during the first presidential elections after the revolution. Several newspapers and TV programmes talked about his bravery, and his eldest sister, Mary, admitted to having received 5,000 Facebook friend requests and 1,000 pending requests from people who recognised her as Danial’s sister. One of his friends described Danial as ‘a martyr of the poor. It was the plight of the impoverished that concerned him the most’ (Fathi 2012). Danial sought a solution to end poverty in Egypt, a solution made by the poor for the poor; he wanted the poor to unite ‘and help each other and to fight for their rights’ (Fathi 2012). The prisons were no exception: prisoners were divided into elite and non-elite; master and servant. A young man named Islam Abdalla, thirty-one years old, was imprisoned for neglecting his military service; during his time in the same Tora prison where Mubarak’s sons and the symbols of the old regime served their sentences, he noticed the hierarchy inside the prison, where the former political and business elites would hire a ‘servant’ to follow them all day and carry their messages to the prison administrators (Abdel Razek 2012). Each of these ‘masters’ paid a monthly wage to their servants, usually ranging from LE 900 to 1,200 (USD 118 to 157), depending on their generosity. Abdalla, once he had completed his sentence, said in an interview to an Egyptian newspaper that he had learned many lessons in prison, chief among them was that the inevitable hierarchy existed, and that the wealthy

84  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m would always receive respect while the poor would continue to be deprived and humiliated, especially if they were unable to comprehend the inevitability of class distinction in a place where punishment was supposed to be equal, for both the poor and the rich (Abdel Razek 2012). Substituting for the State – Charitable Civil Society Nasser’s era can be remembered for one thing: its social contract promising to improve the conditions of the poor; on the other hand, Nasser’s State deprived the masses of their right to political participation by suppressing the opposition and coercing the working classes to accept the status quo. Sadat’s State worked hard to abolish everything for which Nasser had stood, beginning with opening the country to a market economy while limiting political participation. When Mubarak took over power in 1981, he became active in sustaining his political status by avoiding radical reforms or changes; however, the State had not been able to generate economic growth other than in rentier sectors such as the Suez Canal, remittances from Egyptians abroad and oil revenues, rather than a more sustainable growth depending on agriculture and manufacturing. The result was dwindling state services such as health, education and housing, and the rise of a very rich minority. Soliman (2011: 21) defines the rentier state as ‘a state whose revenue derives predominantly from oil or other foreign sources [such as aid or workers’ remittances] and whose expenditure is a substantial share of GDP’. The Egyptian government was also the main employer; state finances were on the verge of collapse in the early 1990s when a miracle happened and foreign resources poured into Egypt, following Egypt’s participation in the second Gulf War to free Kuwait from Saddam’s army (Soliman 2011: 2). Inequality of financial support distribution within the ministries had a negative impact on the economy. The Ministry of Interior for instance, had been used to having budgets of nearly 9 billion Egyptian pounds a year (USD 1 billion), or twice the budget of the  Ministry of Health (Al-Aswani 2011: 24). The army under Mubarak’s rule on the other hand, felt side-lined from the political scene, deprived of the necessary funds and training to attract middle-class recruits (Kandil 2012a: 192). The police force reached more than a million officers – in order that the Ministry of Interior could provide protection and control for the regime, the army had a force of around 460,000 conscripts (p. 194). The Ministry

the ‘a s i f ’ state | 85 of Interior expenditures constituted about 6 per cent of the GDP, spent not only in salaries for their own recruits but also on hiring ‘street thugs’ and, at times, police officers themselves behaved as thugs (pp. 195–6). Mubarak’s policy eventually backfired and led to the abrupt end of his regime and the failure of his plan to pass the power onto his son, Gamal (Kandil 2012a: 5). Widespread bribery, state negligence to provide basic services and the double standards in implementing laws and regulations across all social classes demoralised a large segment of the citizens, who saw in voluntary organisations, particularly the religious ones, a symbol of justice and solidarity and the ethics lacking in state services, which were geared to help only a minority of Egyptians. The deteriorating economic and social conditions in Egypt instigated the rise of civil society associations whose number soared to more than 30,000 by 2008. Only around 138 of these were human rights associations, while the majority were welfare and religious organisations such as the Islamic association, Al-Resala (Hassan 2011). Egyptian civil societies, unlike Western NGOs, developed within the socio-religious context instead of providing new alternatives. Religious, particularly Islamic, associations for instance, constituted the largest proportion of civil society groups in Egypt and they played a pivotal role during social and economic crises, such as helping to provide shelter, following the 1992 earthquake. Their aid, however, usually aimed at providing short-term assistance rather than long-term solutions, such as offering cash assistance to widows, or out-of-school tutorials rather than calling for a new education policy (Abdel Hamid 2009: 101). Islamic associations tended to stress their selfless mission of helping the community for the sake of Allah, which appealed to the majority of Egyptians. Islamist movements such as Ansar al-Muhammadiyya Association provided alternative services to state and private sectors, such as building mosques and schools and providing medical treatment in deprived areas (Bayat 2010: 80); in addition, poor neighbourhoods often had clinics and schools set up by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), offering social services that rivalled those offered by the State. During Mubarak’s rule, the MB managed to win the majority of seats in many professional syndicates such as the Doctors’ Syndicate and the Engineers’ Syndicate and won the support of a vast majority of the lower classes, thanks to the Brotherhood’s tangible charitable work across Egypt (Fahmy 1998: 552). The MB began as a charitable

86  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m society in 1928, helping to build schools and shelter for the homeless; by the mid-1990s, the number of Islamic civil associations constituted around 35 per cent of all NGOs in Egypt (Shehata et al. 2012). The number of mosques and religious media soared, winning more support, especially from the lower classes served by the Islamic NGOs (ibid.). Alerted to the rise of such associations, the State applied strict rules to scrutinise and even dissolve some of these associations, such as the Al-Gamiyya al-Shariyya in 1990, due to its alleged ties with the MB (Shehata et al. 2012: 73). These associations, however, hardly mobilised the lower classes to demand social justice or even to question the socio-economic hierarchy, which was more or less accepted as the status quo. What these societies run by the middle class cared about was reflecting an image of charitable Islamised society against the image of an apathetic and corrupt state (Harmsen 2008). Egyptians presiding over civil society associations usually possessed a large social capital in terms of education and social status. A recent study of sixty NGOs in Cairo and a few provinces showed that board members usually belonged to the middle class, and those based in rural areas would usually include relatives of the villages’ Omda (reeve or village president) (Abdel Hamid 2009: 141). Employees in these NGOs, when asked about the reasons behind this recruitment strategy, saw it as adequate for the purposes of their associations, in which middle-class professionals were more capable of expressing the interests of their associations and reaching out to decisionmakers within their vast social networks (ibid. p. 141). Civil society associations, however, usually lacked volunteers due to the absence of the volunteering culture in Egypt, not to mention the dire economic situation for millions of households, which made them more concerned about providing for their daily needs than joining NGOs – a luxury task confined to the upper-middle class (Abdel Hamid 2009: 143). Although more than 62 per cent of Egyptians offered donations to the charity sector, only 14 per cent offered their time for volunteering in civil society associations, which motivated many NGOs to offer payment to their volunteers (Abdel Hamid 2009: 143–4). Egyptians are usually reluctant to engage in civic action, as revealed in the World Values Survey 2002 in which approximately 82 per cent and 97 per cent of sampled Egyptians declared that they would never participate in a demonstration or a strike, respectively. The period from 2004

the ‘a s i f ’ state | 87 to 2009 witnessed the attitude towards civic actions change, with more and more Egyptians joining sit-ins, strikes and peaceful demonstrations (Abdel Hamid 2009: 108). A poll by the Al Ahram newspaper revealed the low rate of civil engagement among Egyptian voters, in which only 8 per cent declared membership of one political party and 6 per cent membership of a civil society association; the percentage was lower in cities such as Cairo than in rural areas. People in the rural areas usually joined civil and political associations to support their kith and kin (Abdel Hamid 2009: 97–8). Wael Ghonim set up his association ‘Poor First’ in 2011 to alleviate the living conditions in the slums by focusing on one slum at a time, with dependence on donations from Egyptians abroad. The initiative was critiqued by some commentators, such as Amr Ezzat, who saw the title of the association as a means through which the select groups could rid themselves of their guilt by embracing the poor masses. Ezzat (2011) insisted that the socalled ‘poor’ was a broad label, given primarily to workers and peasants who only seek their rights and not donations or alms. The idea that cash transfers, whether from the well-off inside Egypt or remittances from elsewhere, might replace public services was indeed an illusion (Sen and Dreze 2012). Charity NGOs, which generally make up for the failing state services, are prevalent not only in Egypt but in the whole region, for example, in the Palestinian territories where NGOs accounted for 60 per cent of health care services (Bayat 2010: 86). The abundance of civil society organisations is not in itself an indicator of increasing reforms. Carothers (2000: 21) rightly argues ‘a strong civil society can actually reflect dangerous political weakness’ in his reference to Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and its flourishing civil society culture, which led weak political institutions to ‘shift their allegiance to nationalist, populist groups and eventually to the Nazi Party’. There is no guarantee either that a stable democracy should embrace a vibrant civil society, as France and Japan illustrate with their civil state powers and relatively weak civil society (Carothers 2000: 23). The majority of civil society associations in Egypt are charity organisations, with only a few dedicated to political reforms and human rights, such as the famous Kefayya (Enough) movement, founded in September 2004 in the wake of the USA announcement of the Greater Middle East plan (Zahran 2007: 33–45). A few NGOs were concerned with

88  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m socio-economic reforms, such as the National Committee to Defend National Insurance, founded in 2004 after announcements that state debts to the Insurance Agency amounted to 179 billion Egyptian pounds (USD 23 billion). The following government reshuffle witnessed the then Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif abolishing the Ministry of Social Affairs which controlled the Insurance Agency, and affiliating it to the Ministry of Finance – the debtor and creditor therefore became a single legal entity (Zahran 2007: 61). Mubarak’s new class of politicised businessmen, who joined the People’s Assembly (parliament) in 2010, owed their success to their workers who constituted a major voting bloc. The turn-out in elections was historically much higher from new industrial cities such as 10 Ramadan City, than the turnout of workers from traditional workers’ districts such as Helwan or Shoubra (Soliman 2011: 159). Workers were easily able to mobilise, as workmates frequent the same cafes and markets. Their children go to the same schools and commonly marry each other. These networks of social relations, in which the family is the central unit, sustain the workers’ movement and make it difficult for the government to extinguish it without using massive force. (Beinin 2011: 183)

Following the end of Mubarak’s rule, the number of labour strikes simply soared, especially the so-called fe’awi protests, or those by small groups who shared common interests such as doctors, engineers or workers from a certain factory. Numerous strikes were staged by members of these working classes, for instance, more than thirty drivers of Toc-Tocs1 arranged a strike in 2009 against police mistreatment of them and the inability to complain to police officers (Al-Mirghani et al. 2009: 38). This strike inconvenienced may residents living in narrow streets where normal taxis could not go, and those unable to afford normal taxi fares. The number of strikes and labour demonstrations exceeded 3,000 during the period between 1998 and 2009 (Beinin 2011: 181). Vast protests were also launched against injustice, whether at the hands of the police or other state bodies; for instance, Bedouins from a remote village mosque attacked the police station in Al-Gafafa in Sinai in 2010, after an officer tried to stop one of their elders from delivering a sermon at Friday prayers. They fired rubber bullets, burnt tyres and set one car on fire

the ‘a s i f ’ state | 89 in protest. The Bedouins often complained of government neglect and police harassment, blaming the authorities for excluding them from the thriving tourist industry in Sinai. Following a series of bombings at tourist sites in South Sinai between 2004 and 2006, the Egyptian police detained thousands of Bedouins, resulting in strained relations between them and the security forces – Bedouins were prevented from any form of collective gathering, including Friday prayers. It was claimed that thirty torture cases in police stations were recorded during the first 100 days of Morsi’s rule, as well as eleven cases of death following torture in police stations (Nagui 2012). Assaults on public hospitals had become a common theme following the 2011 revolution. Two families were engaged in a fight outside the Shubra Public Hospital in September 2012, leading to the injury of one person who required hospital treatment. The rival family later attacked the hospital, firing guns inside and leaving many citizens disheartened by the absence of police in this case. The same year witnessed several similar incidents, such as the one in Mahalla hospital where members of two families were admitted, but one of the families stormed the hospital later and killed the patient of the rival family (Morsi 2012). Citizens had also become dismayed with the lack of adequate state medical services: being a patient in a public hospital had become a stressful and often deadly affair; many hospitals lacked nurses, the wards were filthy and medical facilities were inadequate. The upper class, including the political elites, would not have experienced this problem as they would either have used private hospitals or received treatment abroad (Browne 2011: 105). More than 500 military personnel and police troops died and their cars burnt, with the overthrow of Morsi’s rule. Many commentators and academics re-elevated the role of the media as inevitable in order to regain State dignity or heiba. Media scholar Farouk Abu Zeid said that the media play an important role in communicating the State’s vision and decisions to the people and in rebuilding values. Dr Emad Gaad also saw the media playing a pivotal role in regaining this lost heiba, by refraining from challenging state institutions or criticising the judiciary on national television (cited in Shaarawi and Hussein 2014). Many policemen claimed that they had to conceal their professional identity markers in order to avoid violent clashes with members of the public. One colonel said that his family lived in fear of

90  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m sudden and unjustified attacks: ‘we live in anxiety. Everyday a colleague dies as a martyr. We fight an unknown enemy’ (quoted in Al-Hayat al-Jadida 2014). Challenging State Authority The State enacted new laws, but it failed to implement them. A 2001 law requiring Egyptians to wear seatbelts while driving or riding in a car resulted in thousands of fines on the first day of implementation, after which, many Egyptians found ways to outsmart the police by installing fake seat belts for the benefit of the police. It was not long before the law was disregarded by the police, leaving Egypt among the most dangerous countries in which to drive. According to the World Health Organisation, Egypt loses around 12,000 lives every year due to traffic crashes, and the majority killed are passengers. Egyptians disregard the existing speed laws and the wearing of crash helmets and seat belts on poorly maintained roads; although the State attempted to re-enforce the wearing of seat belts by introducing new laws in 2008, Egyptians continued to disregard them in a display of disrespect for authority and rebellion against widespread bribery (Browne 2011: 108–9). Neglect of the State to collect waste also caused citizens to demonstrate their apathy by littering everywhere. Hassan (2011: 3) argues that Egypt is ‘a soft state’ in which laws are not adequately enforced or do not always apply to the rich people who can avoid fines by bribing small functionaries. One example was the 1992 earthquake, which exposed the severe housing problems that had existed prior to the disaster. This afforded the opportunity to the Muslim Brotherhood to intervene and provide shelter and medical aid for the earthquake victims (ibid.). Street vendors also constituted an example of defying the State. They did not request permission to display their goods in the streets in any part of the downtown areas, thus contravening local regulations, including traffic laws. The 2011 revolution did not end this issue; in fact, it was intensified by many vendors publicly defying the laws of a state that seemed to be in chaos (Al-Ghazaly-Harb 2013). Another problem was sexual harassment, which had plagued Egyptian society in spite of existing penal laws, with statistics confirming that around 80 per cent of all Egyptian women had experienced sexual harassment (BBC

the ‘a s i f ’ state | 91 2012). The issue, described as epidemic, could turn into violent attacks at any time. Those women who dressed conservatively were still targeted by sexual harassers according to the campaign Egypt’s Girls are a Red Line; in fact, according to their statistics, ‘most of the women or girls who have been sexually harassed have been veiled or completely covered up with the niqab’ (BBC 2012). According to one Egyptian sociologist, the problem was a mixture of rising Islamic conservatism and patriarchal attitudes. The State had failed to enforce adequate laws to control the spread of this phenomenon, and the police did not do enough to protect women in the streets; even the short-lived Morsi government did not regard this problem as a priority. It was claimed that sexual harassment would not happen inside gated communities such as Al-Rehab; one resident there said: ‘it is almost impossible to think that a person from these strata [upper–middle class] would exhibit such offensive behaviour’ (quoted in Marafi 2011: 66). State officials, however, have often complained that Egyptians had no sense of belonging to the city, which justified their careless attitude towards maintaining public spaces. Cairenes, for instance, were seen as a mass that did not necessarily feel a sense of belonging to the city and this was claimed to be evident in their lack of maintaining public spaces or caring about beautifying Cairo. They were also suspicious of the government and its domestic policies, as vividly expressed by one of the former Cairo governors, Abdel Rahim Shehata: The behaviour of the public does nothing to encourage our efforts . . . The public, however, does not try to preserve what we have made available. You will find that the sidewalks are broken and pulled up. We install garbage cans, yet people still throw garbage on the ground. People must make it their concern to take care of public property . . . The problem is that many of Cairo’s inhabitants lack a feeling of belonging. Many do not come originally from the city; they are either recently arrived migrants or in transit. This is a big issue. You have to try and develop people’s feeling of belonging . . . People do not like to listen to the government . . . I don’t know why. Old habits, I guess. They seem to doubt that the government is here to serve their needs. (quoted in Farag 1999)

The eighteen-day uprisings reflected a unified image of the same mass, who took to the streets to express their will to guard public spaces; this view

92  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m soon faded away, however. On 12 February 2011, a day after Mubarak’s resignation, many of the middle-class youth went to the Tahrir Square and surrounding areas to sweep the streets and remove the bricks used for self-defence during the protest. They took part in what they coined ‘Tahrir Beautification Day’ by reclaiming their public space while wearing signs on their backs saying, ‘Sorry for disturbance. We build Egypt’ (Winegar 2011: 35); however, this enthusiasm quickly waned and the streets became once more littered with garbage. The former Minister of State for Antiquities, Ahmed Eissa, warned in 2013 that some of the important tourist sites in Egypt may have to be placed off-limits. He issued a targeted warning to the residents of the village of Nazlet Al-Samman, near the Giza Plateau, many of whom worked in the tourist industry, following the rise of complaints about the aggressive behaviour of some of the street vendors and parking attendants. The minister said that tourists were harassed and asked to pay large sums of money for souvenirs and camel rides or to park their cars, and that the US embassy in Cairo had already warned its citizens to stop visiting the Giza Plateau. The minister cautioned that if the harassment continued, ‘This would mean that the site would be deserted and closed to all intents and purposes, even if it was still officially open to the public’ (El-Aref 2013). Informal employment opportunities were believed to constitute 60 per cent of the total workforce in the private sector (Samy Abo Shady 2014). The main challenge for this informal economy was the lack of engagement of its workers in a society in which they were not officially recognised and therefore faced considerable financial instability compared to civil servants; there was an upsurge of street vendors, for example, following the revolution in 2011. The Egyptian State had failed to meet the citizens’ basic needs or to enforce existing policies and laws. While the charity sector has taken over a large part of the state’s work, by giving donations, building substitute housing units for those living in the slums, and providing in-kind aid, it may end up contributing to isolating the social question (justice) and have a negative impact on the economy (tourism) or on the political scene (policies to combat the increasing crime rate).

the ‘a s i f ’ state | 93 Conclusion The Egyptian State in which Egyptians had lived during the past two decades was an illusion, claimed Moustafa Hegazy, the founder of a strategic centre and later political advisor to the former interim president, Adly Mansour. Hegazy called the Egyptian State the ‘as if state’ meaning that Egyptians had been living in a country which they thought would provide education, health care and political institutions. The truth is, he argued, that Egyptians had been hostage to the social evils of poverty, illiteracy and a malady of pretence: the pretence of having a functioning state (El-Sawy 2011). He also thinks this ‘as if’ status had blinded the revolutionary youth, who became involved in finding new tools for political reforms instead of setting clear objectives and achievable standards by which to measure such reforms. The ‘as if’ state is illustrated in the education sector in which state schools were incapable of providing adequate free education for school children; instead of calling for school reforms, civil society associations embarked on building small centres providing private tuition for state school pupils. This was not the solution, argues Hegazy, who also warned that the problem arose when people who were traditionally divided by social class, professional categories or even religious identities gathered together in the mosques, churches, businesses or even luxury cities. All these groups momentarily assembled in Tahrir around a single gaol to oust Mubarak, but once it had ended, they went back to their separate safe havens (El-Sawy 2011). The 2011 revolution was said to be led by the ‘people’, but the concept of ‘people’ can have different interpretations (Mellor 2014). The stereotypical figure in Egyptian mainstream as well as American and European media of a well-educated, middle-class rebel was perhaps more appropriate, because he (or she) was wealthy and had much to lose if the regime changed. Wael Ghonim was hailed by the American media as the ‘voice of the revolution’, especially after he declared his willingness to sacrifice his job in Dubai, his affluent life and even his family for his ‘Egyptian dream’ (Watson 2011). He was also accused of being a ‘traitor’ by a former security official and a witness in Mubarak’s trial (Al-Mogez 2014). Ghonim was accused of sympathising with the Brotherhood and of meeting with a CIA agent (ibid.). However, if the slum dwellers had led the revolution, they would have been accused of

94  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m being hired to do so (by the Islamists or foreign forces) or they would have been accused of attacking the rich out of envy (not out feelings of injustice). A middle-class rebel said that the 2011 uprising was a good opportunity for the poor to stand on an equal footing with the middle class, and for the first time in their lives they could rub shoulders with the foreign university graduates. Another middle-class rebel claimed that Mubarak’s regime deliberately flooded the mainstream media with pictures of the middle class to polarise revolutionaries. A collective action ultimately requires a collective identification, including social and cultural values, but the State only helped expand social fissure instead of defining and engraining such values. Note 1. Three-wheeled motor bike used as a taxi.

5 Tools of Mass Persuasion

One of my concerns is that we are creating subcultures within the Arab culture. In private schools, which are now becoming a major force in Arab education, the language used and culture practiced are often those of other nations. Of course it is proper to teach foreign languages, yet without proper education in the Arabic language and traditions, the country risks class/language fragmentation in society. I also see blind imitation as another threat to the culture of the Arab world. If MTV in America (which incidentally does not reflect the rich American culture) airs certain programming, it does not mean that Arab society is not modern unless its channels offer the same thing. (Ahmed Zewail 2011: 41)

Introduction This chapter focuses on one of the significant tools in shaping national identity as well as public opinion in Egypt, namely education; other significant tools include the media and language. The education system is crucial in enforcing certain identities, whether pan-Arabism or cosmopolitan, which is marked linguistically through the use of grammar and discourses, prevalent in interpersonal communication. These markers include participants’ roles, positions and relationships (Ochs 1993: 424). Language, moreover, warrants attention as an object of study and a tool by which human memory is 95

96  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m c­ onstituted, victims are identified, perpetrators are named, and group identity is formed. It is through language that we express feelings of solidarity with other groups, or alienation from the same groups. It is also through language that we define the boundaries of each group vis-à-vis other groups, not to mention that ‘knowing how to use language well and knowing when to intervene in language are two essential features of intellectual action’ (Said 1994: 20). The role of language will be discussed in the next chapter. This chapter argues that education systems in Egypt have contributed to consolidating a two-tier society, intentionally or unintentionally, in as much as they are directly involved in stratifying citizens, not necessarily according to their intellectual abilities, but according to their socio-economic status. Education can also be channelled to serve a certain ideology such as Islamism, as illustrated in the Muslim Brotherhood’s (MB) enthusiasm to pursue Islamic education in Egypt as part of their nahda project; through education, young generations of Egyptians are directed towards specific professions in the labour market; for instance, in Egypt, graduates of state schools and state universities do not necessarily obtain the same opportunities in the labour market as those holding degrees and certificates from foreign universities. This process contributes to segmenting the labour market and even career paths for these generations. It is also through education that the State enforces and consolidates its vision for nurturing citizenship and national identity. The first part of this chapter begins with a discussion on the role of education which, since the late nineteenth century, has been the bedrock for development discourse. A brief discussion on the role of Islamic education follows, with particular reference to MB practices. Chapter 6 focuses on the role of language in articulating a national and regional identity, and examines the ongoing debate among Egyptian scholars on the function of language (whether written Arabic or vernacular) in defining an Egyptian identity. The position of media and culture as a political battleground shall be discussed in Chapter 7. Education as the Bedrock of Development Encounters with European scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a model for Arab and Egyptian scholars to emulate (Sharabi 1965: 472). That era saw the rise of new secular elites and informed

tools of ma ss persuasi o n  | 97 ulama who wanted to gain or reclaim knowledge from Europe, which they thought had been borrowed and adapted from Arab civilisations. The advance of science and political life in Europe were regarded as the foundation of European progress, and education was the key to unlock a vast new potential for these new Arab elites (Sharabi 1965: 474); thus, the attitude towards Europe was one of ‘ambivalence which at one and the same time coveted and detested Europe, respected and despised it, wanted and rejected it, imitated and spurned it (Sharabi 1965: 471–2). The British occupation of Egypt (1882–1922) in the late nineteenth century, under the leadership of Lord Cromer, introduced a two-tier education policy by raising the school fees in order to limit access to schools, while basic literacy lessons would be offered to the masses in informal institutions such as Kuttab in the villages (Russell 2001: 51). The British occupation curbed the free access to public schools and imposed fees on educational institutions, perhaps to avoid the surfacing of new, disruptive educated leaders from the working classes (Loveluck 2012: 4); since then, nationalist leaders called for free education for all, and Nasser not only provided this, but he also guaranteed employment to all university graduates in the public sector (ibid.). Cairo University was established in 1908, thanks to the efforts of campaigning and fund-raising by nationalists such as Mostafa Kamel. The government decided to amalgamate existing private and state universities in 1925 and previously named University of King Fouad I became Cairo University in 1940. School curricula were revised following the 1952 coup, in order to propagate socialist democratic values, glorifying the achievement of the Free Officers’ revolution. These changes in curricula were claimed to be an attempt at indoctrination which concealed opposition viewpoints in order to promote the new regime’s values (Baraka 2008: 6). The main concern with Nasser’s promise of free schooling was to open schools and classrooms for more students rather than improve the quality of education. The expansion in the education sector continued during subsequent regimes, while funds and resources did not keep up with the increasing number of students. The result is that state education was deprioritised (Baraka 2008: 7). The social and political fragmentation in the 1950s was reflected in state education as well, in which there were significant divisions between graduates of religious and secular schools. The expansion in higher education created a new cadre

98  |  the eg ypti an d r e a m of disillusioned intellectuals whose professional aspirations were not matched by adequate numbers of job opportunities in the public sector (Szyliowicz 1969: 159). Educational institutions served the pan-Arabism ideology propagated during Nasser’s era by sending a large number of Egyptian educated professionals, such as doctors, engineers and teachers, to other Arab countries while receiving thousands of Arab students to study in Egypt. The number of Egyptian teachers, for instance, leaving Egypt to work in other Arab countries rose from 690 in 1952 to 1,676 in 1956, while the number of Arab students studying in Egypt in 1956 reached 8,584 (Harby and Affifi 1958: 437). Schools and universities revised their curricula during Sadat’s rule in order to reflect the leading role envisioned for Egypt by him, following the 1973 war against Israel. Sadat’s Open Door policy affected the education sector in that the parallel private education sector, catering for the middle class, had flourished since the 1970s, while state education had to struggle with poor facilities, low teachers’ wages and ailing infrastructure. The poor quality of state education also gave rise to the phenomenon of private tutoring, or the informal educational sector, in which state teachers provided hours of private tuition in order to increase their earnings. Recent statistics show that 60 per cent of investment in education was spent on private tutoring (Loveluck 2012: 6–7). Students who could not afford private tutoring were usually disadvantaged and lagged behind in their academic achievements, as teachers provided only basic teaching in the classrooms in order to encourage students to sign up for private tutoring. The middle and upper classes on the other hand, usually sent their children to private schools, and later to private universities. The result was the creation of a two-tier system of education and a vicious circle for those unable to afford private schooling that usually ended up in low-quality technical and vocational education. The education system was centralised, with the Ministry of Education responsible for regulating schools rules and setting the curricula for the schools, including private ones. All schools were also under the direct supervision of the ministry, whose inspectors paid regular visits to the schools in their local districts to ensure that they abided by ministry regulations. There were more than 18 million students in Egyptian schools – excepting Azhar schools – in 2012–13, and 1.4 million teachers in these institutions. Azhar

tools of ma ss persuasi o n  | 99 schools had 2.1 million students, of which 56 per cent were male (2011/12). The Supreme Council of Universities was set up after 1952 to handle the education policy and many new universities were built. Law 101 of 1992 allowed private universities and, in 1996, four such universities were launched. The Ministry of Higher Education was the highest authority for all universities other than Al-Azhar and the American University in Cairo; the latter had enjoyed a unique legal status since its establishment in 1919 (OECD 2010: 96). Universities had 2.1 million students in 2011/12, of which 51 per cent were in state universities. Spending on education was 54 billion Egyptian pounds (USD 7 billion) in that period. The main challenges were expensive educational fees, students’ absence or lack of motivation, failures and outdated curricula, not to mention that there were 10,000 areas without schools, mostly in the villages (IDSC 2013: 8). It was estimated that the demand for higher education would increase in the following years – from 27 per cent in 2007 to 35 per cent by 2021/22. This equates to more than one million places being required in Egyptian universities (state or private) by 2021 (OECD 2010: 76). The result was that the country was hit by the so-called ‘Diploma Disease’ or the exaggerated demand for university credentials, which inflated the value of higher education, particularly in state institutions, producing hundreds of thousands of graduates on an annual basis without ensuring the quality of their training and basic skills such as critical thinking and problemsolving (Browne 2011: 17). This lack of necessary skills and training only exacerbated the problem of youth unemployment (Browne 2011: 18). One key challenge, therefore, was the mismatch between graduates’ skills and the job market requirements. The high level of youth unemployment was officially estimated at 12 per cent. Egypt had nearly 15 million students in pre-college education and 2.2 million in colleges, but employers often complained about the lack of knowledge and adequate work ethics amongst new entrants to the labour market, and experts blamed it on the under-funded educational system (Hussein 2014). Between 2013 and 2014, Egypt ranked 111th out of 122 countries in terms of education, according to the Global Competitiveness Report (ibid.). Technical education, in the meantime, did not receive the necessary attention it required to adequately prepare students for the job market (ibid.). The lack of investment in schools not only led

100  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m to overcrowding in the classrooms and students’ absence, but the teaching profession was also considered to be a low status job enforced by the meagre salaries (approximately USD 280 a month) (Loveluck 2012: 3–6). Teachers in public schools more than triple their monthly salaries by supplementing their regular jobs with private tutoring; poor salaries and falling standards in state schools encouraged the growth of this lucrative field of education, which has grown phenomenally during the past few decades (Douban 2006). One primary teacher at a public school in Cairo explained: My salary is 470 EGP [USD 61]; how am I supposed to live when my rent is 600 EGP [USD 78]? How is a teacher supposed to live and work normally when he has to count how much money he is spending on breakfast? Most of the money allocated to education is spent on government officials’ wages and high earners, whose salaries can be up to 40,000 EGP [USD 5,240] a month, while teachers’ pay remains extremely low, even though we are essential to education. (cited in El-Sheekh and Tarek 2013)

Since 2011, teachers have taken to the streets, demanding higher salaries. It is noted that 83 per cent of the education budget in the year 2013–14, about 67.5 billion Egyptian Pounds (USD 8.84 billion), was allocated to salaries and wages but there exists a huge gap between the salaries of senior ­management versus those of low-ranking employees (ibid). The state education system, once founded on the principle of converting cultural capital (education) into economic capital (labour market), failed to deliver key skills with the increasing pressure from student numbers and lack of adequate facilities. Consequently, families realised that they needed more economic capital for investment in private education in order that their children would acquire the necessary cultural capital. This cyclical process has continued until the present, thus deepening the social division within society. The bifurcation and the division between private and state education pushed the Egyptians themselves to continue investing in an unequal education system that stratified its users according to their socio-economic status. The segregation between the privileged and disadvantaged groups widened with each group controlling its own social space, including housing, schooling and even jobs. Work opportunities in lucrative international companies were monopolised by graduates of private and foreign universities, making such

tools of ma ss persuasi o n | 101 institutions the ticket to prestige and affluence. Demand on private education significantly increased while admittance to such institutions became ever harder due to filtering prospective users according to their socio-economic capital: instead of reducing poverty and inequality, education contributed to reinforcing these societal ills. The system as a whole served as a powerful tool of socialisation and social production, and it reflected the social hierarchy and distribution of power within Egyptian society, with the social space of private education made exclusive for the upper-middle class and the state education system for the lower classes (Herrera and Torres 2006). Rizkallah (2014) sums up the challenges in the Egyptian educational system by two points: firstly, education needs to offer people the tools and resources to develop their lives and encourage learning, and secondly, education should be aligned with the country’s needs. Education has also been a battleground for ideological dominance, and the control of religious knowledge, in particular, has turned into a power struggle between the State on the one hand, and Islamist groups on the other. Islamic Education Western colonisation during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century marked a binary division between secular and religious education, and state schools were forced to accept secular educational models as part of their developmental plans. This is why education has been a battleground for Islamist thinkers such as Mohamed Abdu, who pushed for a new model combining Western-inspired knowledge with Islamic teaching (Al-Azemi 2002: 35). Hassan al-Banna, founder of the MB, also realised the significant role of education in combating anti-colonial discourse; in 1935, al-Banna put together a list of proposals to the Minister of Education aiming to give equal weighting to Islamic and secular subjects in the curricula. He also asked the minister to consider teaching foreign languages at secondary schools and not at primary level, where the focus should be on the Arabic language. He also called to make it mandatory for non-Muslim students to attend religious teachings relevant to their own religions during school time (Al-Azemi 2002: 126). Al-Banna also stressed the importance of education to the Brotherhood, as shown in his editorials in Ikhwan magazine, such as the one published in 1949:

102  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m The Muslim Brothers see that the issue of education in Egypt is in need of an audacious step and a revolutionary policy that treats all kinds of questions and problems related to education and that gives education an Islamic aspect which brings together the cultures and eliminates discrimination in education. Also, it is necessary that subjects of Arabic, Islamic history, national education and sciences be encouraged. (quoted in Al-Azemi 2002: 116)

Religious education was dominated by Al-Azhar, with a network of schools and educational institutions of more than 1 million students, in addition to private Islamic schools, which had emerged over the past few decades. The tide of Islamisation over recent years saw even secular state schools being Islamised, with more and more female students from primary schools upwards wearing the veil as part of their school uniform (Shehata et al. 2012: 8). With the revival of Islamism as a reaction against state authority and the hegemony of Western cultural practices, religious education institutions gained more power in disseminating and defending Islamic discourses against state policies, whether at schools or universities. Examples abound: for instance, during the 1990s the Minister of Education introduced a range of measures in an attempt to curtail the power of Islamist movements within state schools. Such measures included the banning of the niqab, reducing the hours dedicated to religion classes, and excluding teachers known for their support for, or affiliation with, the Muslim Brotherhood (Herrera 2000). The measures sparked an angry reaction by Islamist groups who continued providing private Islamic schooling as an alternative to state education, thereby challenging the State’s moral authority of disseminating Islamic culture (Starrett 1998: 5). The media criticised the government’s decision, seen as disrespect for Islamic law, and several students sued the Ministry for violating their personal rights (Browne 2011: 152–3). The Ministry of Education then introduced a new course about ethics into the school curriculum, which the media represented as an essential component of American interests in order to undermine religious education in the public system (Browne 2011: 152). The Ministry and some of its supporters justified the new course by the need to build tolerance within social and religious groups, but they were depicted

tools of ma ss persuasi o n | 103 in the media as co-conspirators in depriving Egypt of its Islamic identity, and subjecting Egypt to a new form of cultural imperialism. Thus, while the former Mubarak’s regime attempted to win the support of Islamists and appease their demands by controlling religious discourses at school, the latter groups resisted these attempts by providing an alternative dialogue, including a school system, while infiltrating state institutions such as Al-Azhar on the grounds that the society suffered religious ignorance, moral decadence and the loss of its Islamic identity at the hands of despotic regimes (Gumuscu 2010). This explains the upsurge in the number of those applying for a discipline related to Islamic studies during the period 1995 to 2006: the number of students enrolled to study Qur’anic and Islamic studies constituted round about 20 per cent of the total number of students enrolled in Humanities and Social Sciences in 2005–6, or about 164,292 students (OECD 2010: 190). Many Egyptian professors, who had returned from the Gulf States after several years and after being exposed to a strict form of Islam, wanted to make Egyptian universities more Islamic, which prompted Mubarak’s regime to impose a new law in 1994, handing over the power to select faculty deans, previously chosen by a committee of professors, and university chancellors, who were handpicked by the president (Abdo 2000: 136). A few recent studies (see Elsayyad and Hanafy: 2012) argue that there exists a correlation between the level of voters’ education and their preference for either Islamic or secular parties, with a tendency for university graduates to sympathise with a greater share of secular voting, while a high illiteracy rate in a constituency correlates with a high share of voting for Islamist parties. Not only have Egyptian universities such as Cairo University witnessed student protests since the 2011 revolution, Al-Azhar University also staged several protests both during the MB’s regime and after it was toppled. Protests broke out at the university in April 2013, following the food-poisoning of around 500 students at the campus dormitories. Youth movements then accused the MB of plotting the poisoning in order to discredit the Al-Azhar grand sheikh and force him to resign, after he refused to accept the MB’s draft law of Islamic bonds (sukuk). The university’s main campus is located at Nasr City in Cairo, the same city which hosted the sit-in of MB supporters from July to August 2013; following the toppling of the MB regime, student protests at Al-Azhar broke out in support of the deposed President Morsi,

104  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m and they attempted to enforce a boycott of examinations, resulting in several clashes with the police. The campus, with its 120,000 students from twenty different faculties, witnessed confrontations with police forces for the first time in October 2013, when the police entered at the request of the university head to control the violent student riots. It is noted that police forces or the Ministry of the Interior guards had been banned from operating inside universities since a historic court ruling in 2010. It was alleged that there was a large number of Muslim Brotherhood schools set up, without first obtaining the necessary licence from the Ministry of Education. It was also claimed that such schools violated the official curricular requirements by teaching extra subjects without seeking the Ministry’s approval, and replaced the country’s national anthem with one called ‘Jihadi, Jihadi’ (Leila 2013). One of the extra subjects was called ‘Ethics’ and another called ‘Human Rights in Islam’ in which the teachings drew on books by Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Sayed Qutb. The Ministry of Education vowed to inspect these schools and to remove the teaching material of those extra subjects. The number of such schools was estimated to be 147, of which 85 had multiple owners and many were not Brotherhood members. The Ministry of Education announced its intention to restructure the schools’ boards of directors in December 2013, following the court order banning all institutions belonging to the Brotherhood, related to or being funded by it (Ahram Online 2013). Following the toppling of Morsi by the army in July 2013, school students were prohibited from discussing political or religious issues, whether amongst themselves or with teachers, as per a decree from the Ministry of Education issued in September of that year (Abdel-Baky 2013). Teachers were warned by the Ministry, if they violated the decree they could face suspension: ‘the decree is to help create a peaceful environment in which young people can be separated from the state of political polarisation which divides Egyptian society’, said the then Education Minister, Mahmoud Abul-Nasr (cited in Abdel-Baky 2013). Conclusion Post-independence Egypt had declared education as the main bedrock for development and distribution of knowledge. Nasser celebrated the availability of education and hence knowledge to all social classes, while ­maintaining

tools of ma ss persuasi o n | 105 the choice of private and foreign schools, which had expanded at an unprecedented level since the 1970s thanks to Sadat’s Open Door policy and Mubarak’s privatisation. People strove to place their children in private, English-language schools in Egypt, which obliged state schools to experiment with curricula in English in primary classes. The increased enrolment in private schools had two aims: to acquire a proficient level in the English language and at the same time to escape the ‘boring’ curricula of state schools. Hussein and Zughoul (1993: 240) note that it is paradoxical that, since the independence of Arab countries from colonialism, English has acquired a more important role in the region’s modernisation. The growing number of foreign-language schools in Egypt has meant that more and more young people are drawn away from the written variety of Arabic, whose rigid rules do not appeal to the young generation. The rise of foreign languages, particularly English, seems to be inevitable in the new economic situation in the Arab region in which the regimes work hard to attract foreign capital, and the new job openings demand proficiency in English as a global language. In state schools, on the other hand, families resort to private tutoring in an attempt to support their children’s progress and it is estimated that Egyptians spend nearly 15 billion Egyptian pounds (nearly USD 2 billion) annually on private tutoring, to compensate for the deteriorating education levels in state schools (Sallam 2012). There follows a discussion on the role spoken language plays in enforcing a sense of distinct Egyptian identity and the competition it faces with the written variety (Modern Standard Arabic – MSA), which in turn is an emblem of pan-Arab identity.

6 Language of Division or Unity?

Arabic began to appear in official documents from the eighth century and it soon became an official language along with Coptic and Greek, although the number of Arabs was small compared to the number of Copts: 80,000 to 8 million, respectively. Egypt was a polyglot country, with a diverse population made up of rural peasantry, city-dwellers who lived on the fringes of the arable land around the Delta and in the deserts. The Nile Valley and Delta areas were densely populated with a Coptic-speaking population, and the cities were inhabited by Greek merchants and urban Copts. Coptic was the spoken language of the majority for a long time after the Islamic conquest in AD 639–42 (Holes 1995: 18). The spread of immigration into Egypt from Arabia, and the conversion to Islam of several Copts in order to escape the poll tax, favoured the spread of the Arabic language as part of the overall process of Arabisation and Islamisation (Holes 1995: 24–5). The modernisation process in nineteenth-century Egypt, led by the Turkish ruler Mohammed Ali, called for further up-grading of the language; in his efforts to improve military education, Mohammed Ali ordered the translation of teaching materials into Arabic, including foreign-language books which could be used for educating his soldiers (Haeri 1997: 801). This process continued and included a closer look at the spoken vernacular; although it marked the beginning of improved education possibilities for the masses (ibid. p. 801), it simultaneously caused a decline in the role of 106

l ang uag e of di vi si on or un ity ?  | 107 religious schools, based upon teaching the Qur’an in classical Arabic. Arabic was declared the sole official language in Egypt in 1863, thereby eroding the status of the Turkish language. Other languages, however, such as English, Greek and French, were still used in all professions and with the British conquest in 1882, Arabic ‘suffered another reverse, when English was declared the sole official language in 1898’ (Holes 1995: 36). Classical Arabic was considered ‘the linguistic jewel in the Islamic cultural patrimony. It is regarded as the inimitable apogee of perfection, unsurpassable in beauty, an ethereal ideal of eloquence, perfect symmetry and succinctness – however imperfectly, in practice, many Arabs understand it’ (Holes 1995: 4). The written language developed into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) which is the evolving variety of classical Arabic, modified and simplified for daily use in formal institutions including education, public offices and the media. Arab academicians sought to protect the language from dialectical influence in order to maintain its purity, thereby undermining the evolution of MSA (Holes 1995: 252); however, urban, and particularly Cairene Arabic, has been the standard variant (Haeri 1996: 170), and spoken Arabic or dialects are thus ‘the varieties of the language which all native speakers learn as their mother tongue before they begin formal education . . . the greater the distance [geographically] between any two points of comparison, the greater will be the differences between the ordinary vernaculars spoken in them’ (Holes 1995: 3). This chapter discusses the role of language which, it is argued, was not the chief tool in creating imagined communities in Egypt – unlike the situation in Europe where the vernaculars replaced Latin, thereby contributing to the rise of territorial nationalism and print capitalism (Fahmy 2007). It is worth noting that Egyptian Arabic covers local dialects spoken across Egypt, of which Cairene Arabic is the most dominant (Versteegh 2001), used in daily conversations, films and entertainment as well as some literary works; due to the popularity of Egyptian films and TV series, the Egyptian dialect is widely understood across the Arab region (Mejdell 2006). Egyptian Vernacular as the Mother Tongue The written variety of Arabic, although not used for daily communication, remained an official language, thanks to three institutions: religion, education and the media (Haeri 2003); nonetheless, the vernacular played a role in

108  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m promoting Egyptian nationalism during the early twentieth century through songs, films and plays as well as zajal or colloquial Arabic poetry written in the vernacular (Fahmy 2007: 38). These popular media therefore ‘facilitated a sense of collective camaraderie, which was an instrumental component in the development of a national imagined community’ (ibid. p. 44). Beinin (1994: 193) showed that zajal contributed to the Egyptian nationalist discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, projecting a ‘unified image of the popular strata of the nation’, including workers, poets and audiences. By the 1940s, however, the left intelligentsia, including the Poet Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, resorted to classical conventions such as fusHa (MSA) rather than using the Egyptian vernacular in their writings (p. 207). This period, in fact, witnessed the prevalence of the Egyptian colloquial language as a vehicle of mass culture and as a theoretical means of resistance against colonial and elite authority (Fahmy 2007: 18). It was popular genres such as songs and films as well as radio programmes in the vernacular that facilitated public debates, and many of these genres dealt with the concerns of ordinary Egyptians, such as the lack of economic opportunities (ibid. pp. 300–2). The Egyptian vernacular then appeared regularly in newspapers and literary forms such as plays, elevating it into a national language, coinciding with the emergence of nationalist discourse during that time. The use of the vernacular could have been a rhetorical tool used by the intellectuals to mobilise public support and ‘invite the masses into history; and the invitation card had to be written in a language they understood’ (Tom Nairn 1977, cited in Beinin 1994: 192). Several periodicals were produced at that time, moreover, featuring cartoons representing an urban ibn al-balad, and from 1880 to 1909, the number of available colloquial periodicals jumped from 12 per cent of all periodicals to 22 per cent (Fahmy 2007: 30). Intellectuals, such as Abudalla Nadim (1843–96), saw in the vernacular a vehicle to teach an audience of which the majority was illiterate; nonetheless, when former colonial powers such as Britain and France encouraged the promotion of dialect studies and its use in publications and literature, their efforts were opposed by a number of scholars who saw in these attempts a means to weaken pan-Islamic movements (Mejdell 2006). Egyptian nationalists, such as Tawfiq Awwan, wrote about Egypt’s distinct identity in 1929, which was also reflected in the Egyptian language.

l ang uag e of di vi si on or un ity ?  | 109 Others, like Salama Musa (d. 1958), agreed on a distinct Egyptian national character derived from its Pharaonic heritage. Musa dismissed attempts to relate the Egyptian national identity to religion and propagated a secular outlook (Suleiman 2003: 181); he also saw standard Arabic as a dead language ‘which [could not] compete with the colloquial as the true mother tongue of the Egyptians’ (p. 182). Hussein argued that linking Arabic to Islam ‘obscures the fact that many nations operate with a linguistic duality in which the language of faith is different from the language of everyday life and culture’ (p. 195). The use of the colloquial began to decrease sharply during and after World War II, following criticism by another cohort of religious clergy and intellectuals who feared that the vernacular might erode classical Arabic; consequently, the number of colloquial periodicals decreased to under 2 per cent by the early 1940s (Fahmy 2007: 149). The rise of pan-Arabist ideology under Nasser in particular, witnessed MSA regain its status as a symbol of ‘power and control, as opposed to the language of intimacy and domesticity (the vernacular)’ (Holes 1995: 5). The country exalted the written variety of Arabic as the code of pan-Arabism and Egyptian nationalism. However, this changed during Sadat’s time (1970–81): English was favoured in educational institutions and the country turned towards the USA for assistance in its internal development projects (Schaub 2000: 228). The rise of postindependence nationalist movements helped enforce the status of MSA as the official pan-Arab language – stated in Egypt’s constitutions, including the most recent one of 2013. Vernacular Arabic is the daily communication tool for all Arabs, although the written variety has survived due to its presence in three spheres: religion, media and bureaucracy, of which the first plays the greatest role (Haeri 2003: 31). MSA has been preserved in daily prayers, for instance, whether individually at home or in the mosques, while all other daily communication is made in the vernacular. Even among Christian Arabs, the Bible and church services are in classical Arabic; however, Muslims have always considered classical Arabic to be the language of the Word of God, therefore, they do not expect non-Muslims to master this language (ibid. p. 49). Journalists tend to convert vernacular statements into MSA, depending on the place of interlocutors on the social ladder, such as the president or a celebrity. Ordinary people are,

110  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m on the other hand, given less importance; this is confirmed, for example, in the analysis of reported speech. Haeri (2003: 104) shows that interviews with the President of Egypt were reported in MSA, while the speeches of other public figures were reported in a combination of Egyptian dialect and MSA, mainly in order for their messages to be better understood. A comedian or a dancer, however, would be represented in Egyptian dialect – the sophisticated code of MSA would seem inappropriate and probably less effective (ibid.). Schulthies (2014) argues that pan-Arab satellite entertainment media have helped favour spoken Mashreqi, or Egyptian and Levant dialects, while the Maghrebi vernaculars (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) were regarded as less understandable. The media corporations have recently recognised the market impact of widening this intelligibility to include the Maghreb as well as Khaliji (Gulf) vernaculars. Examining pan-Arab talent programmes which bring together panellists, contestants and producers, Schulthies (2014) argues that media outlets have felt the need to market their products across the region but still favour Mashreqi dialects, seldom using MSA in their programmes, which illustrates the contested pan-Arab interaction. News media outlets, in contrast, such as Al-Jazeera (Arabic) typically use only MSA for their talk show and bulletin outputs. This does not mean that ordinary Egyptians embraced MSA in their daily practice; in fact, there is evidence that MSA is still difficult to master for millions of Egyptians. O’Shea (1949: 318) postulates that among the 18 million Egyptians (in 1949), 15 million of them were illiterate, speaking ‘a debased form of Arabic, a “kitchen Arabic”, with a small vocabulary, a simplified grammar, and a large number of words which have no similarity with the words of literary or classical Arabic’. He also argues that the Qur’an, which is the source of classical written Arabic, includes inaccuracies, although ‘pious Moslems refuse to admit any errors, even grammatical ones . . . they blindly declare that the “apparent error” is really the rule and that all words that differ from the “rule” are “exceptions” to be learnt by heart’ (ibid. p. 318). The Egyptian novelist, Yousef Idris, drives home this point in his story al Naas (The People), written in 1957, in which a group of university students sough to fight peasants’ superstitions by preaching in eloquent MSA in villages and mosques; while the villagers listened attentively out of courtesy, they did not understand what was being said (Holes 1995: 306). During the 1940s, and in order to bridge the gap

l ang uag e of di vi si on or un ity ?  | 111 between literary Arabic and the vernacular, factories used to appoint teachers to give MSA lessons during the lunch hour (O’Shea 1949: 319). Egypt, at that time, particularly big cities such as Cairo and Alexandria, embraced a large number of polyglots coming from Italy, Greece, France, Britain, Russia, Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia. Bars and coffee shops were usually owned by the Greeks, while the Jews profiled themselves in white-collar professions such as doctors, lawyers and engineers. There were also multilingual schools serving these diverse communities, especially in Cairo; by the mid-1940s, however, the government surrendered to nationalist youth who wanted to exalt the Arabic language as the official state language, and passed a decree that all Egyptian firms must keep their accounts in Arabic, although foreign companies were allowed to have a second set of accounts in other languages (O’Shea 1949: 322). Middle- and upper-class Egyptians may have exalted the role of MSA in forging the pan-Arab national identity and resisting colonial influences, but they would not apply this in practice when they chose their children’s schooling, for instance. One upper-class Egyptian father expressed his discontent when he remembered how he was not allowed to converse in Arabic in his school, even during recess, because teachers wanted the children to practice English at all times. The same Egyptian, however, continued to send his children to that school on the grounds that English ‘is the language of all the beautiful things which they [people] see. And they want their children to learn this language which may give them that level of life’ (quoted in Haeri 1996: 186). The result was the emergence of several levels of MSA usage. Badawi (1973) distinguished between five language strata in Egypt, ranging from the classical Arabic of the Qur’an and Hadith, to the educated vernacular of the intellectuals: a mixture of vernacular, MSA and spoken dialect of the illiterate. He also maintained that the majority of speakers (except the illiterate who would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to express themselves) could move from one level to another, for example, L1 (classical Arabic) would be confined to recitation of the Qur’an and Hadith; L2 (MSA) for political speeches; L3 (MSA and some vernacular) for the news; L4 the language of the ordinary middle class (some MSA but prevalently dialect); and finally, the language of unskilled and illiterate craftsmen (vernacular).

112  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m Other scholars believe that the diglossic nature of Arabic may hinder children’s learning of Arabic at school and discourage parents from helping their children in their writing tasks (Abdul-Aziz 1986; Al-Rabaa 1986). The presence of a diglossic language policy, in which MSA is practised in state institutions and the vernacular in every day dealings, may have exacerbated the illiteracy problem, or, as Maamouri (1998: 5) sums it up: There is a growing awareness among some Arab education specialists that the low levels of educational achievement and low literacy rates in most Arab countries are directly related to the complexities of the standard Arabic language used in formal schooling and in non-formal education. These complexities mostly relate to the diglossic situation of the Arabic language and make reading in Arabic an overly arduous process,

thus, the gap between the colloquial forms, which are the true mother tongues of the speakers, and MSA causes many problems to educationalists and writers. Although it is assumed that in the education system only the standard form would be used, the fact is that it is used only for writing. The language of instruction in schools or university lectures is the colloquial in its various forms. Students are therefore faced with the problems of receiving their instruction in one form, and reading and writing in the other. (Abdul-Aziz 1986: 21)

Pupils tend to use the vernacular to answer the teachers’ questions at school, particularly state schools, where classical Arabic should be practiced daily (Haeri 2003: 41); in fact, people can no longer see the point of learning the complex grammatical rules of a language whose value lies in its connotation as the language of the Holy Book and consequently, as the symbol of Muslim identity across nations. People strive to place their children in private, English-language schools in Egypt, which pressurises public schools to experiment with English curricula early on in primary classes. The increasing enrolment in such private schools has two aims: to acquire a proficient level in the English language and, at the same time, to escape the tedious curricula of public schools (Howeidy 1999). Hussein and Zughoul (1993: 240) note that it is rather paradoxical that, since independence of the Arab countries

l ang uag e of di vi si on or un ity ?  | 113 from colonialism, English has acquired a rather more important role in the region’s modernisation; furthermore, several university disciplines are taught in foreign languages, particularly English, despite calls for Arabisation of the curricula. The lack of coordination among Arab academies, however, is one of the obstacles towards Arabisation. The academics’ underestimation of MSA as a teaching language, and their declining research on Arabisation have contributed to the isolation of MSA from Arab universities. The dominance of English, not only as the language of business but also the language of information technology (the Internet and so on), has had an impact on the online language used by young Arabs. One study on the use of Arabic and English online by professional Egyptians, although derived from a small sample, points at a new trend among young Internet users in the Arab region: the use of a Romanised version of the vernacular to chat online (Warschauer et al. 2002). The same situation occurs in other Arab states, such as the Emirates, where parents requested that their children should be spared from Arabic lessons in private schools, because it is redundant, given the future prospect of their children joining an English-language university once they have completed their secondary education. Head-teachers have warned that English has not only become the language of instruction at universities, but it is also being used for off-campus communication between students (Arabic News Digest 2013). Claims have been made that students prefer to use English with its association with the languages of science and computers, and regard Arabic as an inferior language in this respect. It is also worth mentioning that MSA is no longer in demand as an important qualification, particularly when more and more foreign corporations establish their presence in several Arab countries, imposing English as their lingua franca. The unfortunate combination of an increasing number of young people and the rising unemployment rate, has made Arab families feel the need to send their children to English-language schools (if they can afford them) at the expense of MSA proficiency (Haeri 1997; Howeidy 1999). One outcome is that larger segments of the population can follow English news media with little difficulty, and in doing so, they become familiar not only with the news genres, but also the debating traditions of foreign media. The last few decades, however, have seen a call for the revival of MSA by several intellectuals who regard the vernacular as one of many social ills; for

114  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m instance, the Egyptian Nobel prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz asserted that: ‘the colloquial is one of the diseases from which the people are suffering, and of which they are bound to rid themselves as they progress. I consider the colloquial [language] one of the failings of our society, exactly like ignorance, poverty and disease’ (cited in Cachia 1967: 20). Taha Hussein, the doyen of Arabic literature, also shared the view that the vernacular is ‘corrupt in some respects, unworthy of being called a language and unfit to fulfil the aims of intellectual life’, while the vernacular is denied the chance to develop as a literary language (ibid. p. 21). ‘It remains difficult in the Arab world to arouse interest in the dialects as a serious object of study. Many speakers of Arabic still feel that the dialect is a variety of a language without a grammar, a variety used by children and women, and even in universities there is a certain reluctance to accept dialect studies as a dissertation subject’ (Versteegh 2001: 132). The Egyptian poet, Farouk Shousha (2003), former SecretaryGeneral of the Arabic Language Academy in Egypt, lamented in a lecture to the Arabic Language Academy in Jordan about the deteriorating standards of MSA in the media, particularly in TV and radio, relating it to the overall falling standards of teaching the Arabic language in schools and universities. He even provided a long list of common syntactic and lexical mistakes in the news, made either by the presenters or the correspondents. This enthusiasm was echoed in other Arab states in which the vernacular had been regarded as a threat to pan-Arab identity and even a reason for Arab defeatism. The Saudi newspaper Al Riyadh (Al-Nimr 2009), for instance, commented on the spread of the vernacular as a written medium, justifying this with the increased use of blogs among the youth, while a letter to the editor in the Libyan newspaper Libya Today (Libya al-Youm) listed the reasons for the infiltration of vernaculars into the media as illiteracy, Arabs’ sense of defeatism, the openness to other cultures, cultural imperialism and the lack of sound teaching strategies of written Arabic in Arab schools and universities (Irqiq 2010). Islamic preachers and clergy are usually the main opponents of using the vernacular as a written medium, and as the Kuwaiti intellectual, Khalil Ali Haider (2010) argues, this is because the Qur’an and Hadith are written in classical Arabic; therefore there is a need to encourage the teaching and mastery of that form of Arabic instead of encouraging the use of the vernacular. He even cites the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna,

l ang uag e of di vi si on or un ity ?  | 115 who was said to have invited members of the Brotherhood to learn to speak in fusHa (classical Arabic). Several commentators, as well as a segment of the educated elites, tend to favour MSA and have issued warnings against abandoning it, which would be equal to abandoning one’s roots, or even one’s mother: ‘because of her ragged clothes’ (Suleiman 2004: 43). Some favour the intervention of the authorities in protecting MSA, because for them living without MSA is like living ‘without a father or an authority to protect it or claim the responsibility for its future’ (El-Khoury 2005: 306). The fact remains, however, that MSA has not been mastered by a large segment of the population: not only the illiterate but also the educated middle class. Soliman Yousef Asou (2012: 24) argues that in addition to the traditional illiteracy (referring to the portion of the population that cannot read or write), there is now a new group of educated illiterates, such as university students and professors, who are incapable of writing or conversing in MSA. He refers particularly to the tendency among some university professors to use either English or the vernacular as linguistic media (or French in some Maghreb countries), and even in scientific conferences and symposia. He called for the need of ‘linguistic security’ in order to defend the use of MSA in universities and by students. A few preachers, such as the late Mutwalli Al-Shaarawy, used the vernacular in their sermons (Haider 2010) and Al-Shaarawy, in particular, was one of the most popular preachers in Egypt; he used a mixture of the vernacular and gestures in his preaching (although he had mastered classical Arabic), which increased his popularity among a wider audience. He was also admired by Egypt’s actors and actresses, and given credit for encouraging several Egyptian actresses and female singers to retire from their artistic careers during the 1980s and 1990s on the grounds that acting was haram, forbidden or proscribed by Islamic law. The Vernacular: Proof of Non-Arab Roots? There exists another group of intellectuals who favour parting company with MSA, on the grounds that it ‘represses’ the mother tongue, namely, the vernacular, or as the Palestinian writer Fawaz Turki says: I grew up in a society that in fact conditions the individual to fear any form of originality. We are conditioned to look upon the authority figure

116  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m as someone to fear. This notion of conditioning is reflected in the way we speak our language. Arabic is a language that it not suitable for logical thinking. Arabic is probably the most degraded and dehumanized language in the entire world. It blocks us from being part of the global dialogue of culture. Why is that? Because language is culture. We come from a culture that is repressive; the language we speak is equally repressive. So, we have a problem on two levels: the problem is to liberate ourselves from occupation and on the other level to liberate ourselves, to have an Intifada, directed against our home. (cited in Suleiman 2004: 4, 16)

Others, such as Salameh (2011: 50), challenge any claims that Arabic is the first language in the region, relying on the arguments of leading Arab thinkers such as Taha Hussein, who have shown that the Middle East’s demotic languages are not Arabic at all, and consequently, that one can hardly speak of 280 million native Arabophones – or even of a paltry one million such Arabic speakers – ­without oversimplifying and perverting an infinitely complex linguistic situation. The languages or dialects often perfunctorily labelled Arabic might indeed not be Arabic at all.

Safouan (2007: 93) goes as far as suggesting that the systematic degradation of the vernacular is a deliberate policy of the despotic Arab rulers to prevent the transformation of [their] authority from being an object of faith to being an object of thought . . . No Middle Eastern ruler will ever accept the teaching of vernacular Arabic in school as a language just as ‘grammatical’ as classical Arabic. Children with literary talents end up constituting a class whose members are linked together by a linguistic narcissism, as were the scribes. They don’t think the language they write as sacred – but they do think it superior.

Qandil (1999) dedicates a whole book to his argument that the Egyptian identity and language is markedly distinct and cannot therefore be subsumed under the all-encompassing label ‘Arab’, which, according to him, refers to the identity imposed by former colonial powers with no historical or cultural validity. Qandil (1999: 105) suggests that Egypt’s language has gone through five stages of development:

l ang uag e of di vi si on or un ity ?  | 117 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Ancient Egyptian language (between 3000 and 2200 BC) Middle Egyptian language (2200 to 1600 BC) Late Egyptian language (1550 to 700 BC) Demotic language (700 BC to AD 400) Coptic language (second century to seventeenth century).

This development is sidestepped by Arab and Egyptian linguists who still link the Egyptian vernacular to classical Arabic, claiming that the Egyptian dialect is a Semitic language, thereby denying the cultural heritage of Egypt prior to the Islamic invasion and the prevailing language at that time. Qandil’s monograph is a meticulous effort to prove, through numerous examples of the daily usage of Egyptian dialect, that the spoken Egyptian language has been developed from the Ancient Egyptian languages of hieroglyphics, Demotic and Coptic. This is shown in several linguistic features such as verb inflection and negation, which differ from all other Arabic dialects. Although the Egyptian dialect may lexically borrow from other Arabic dialects, or indeed from classical Arabic itself, it is still not, as Qandil claims, a Semitic language, but belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family known as Hamito-Semitic. The Egyptian commentator Sherif Shubashy published another greatly controversial treatise entitled Down with Sibaway if Arabic is to Live on (2004), which linked the Arabs’ failure to modernise with their inability to use their mother tongues (vernaculars) for the purposes of innovation. Instead, there was still a persistent call to use an archaic language (fusHa or MSA), which Shubashy compared to ambling cameleers from the past, unable to compete with high-speed vehicles on the highway; the title of the book refers to the eighth century grammarian, Sibaway, who is considered to be the father of Arabic philology. Shubashy began his book with an anecdote expressing his surprise that the encyclopaedic Almanac did not include (written) Arabic as a world language, because it is not used as a spoken language or a mother tongue. He then called for abandoning what he described as hypocritical calls to keep teaching the written variety of Arabic (fusHa) when students hated learning it and well-educated Arabs hardly used it without making numerous mistakes (p. 14). He even called for a linguistic intifada (‘shaking off’) to modernise written Arabic, arguing that those who seek to mummify classical Arabic should remember that mummifying is only for the dead, while those

118  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m who refuse to modernise it should remember that language is dynamic and thus subject to change (p. 80). He also cited the thinker Salama Musa, who once described classical Arabic as archaic: ‘we inherited it from pre-Islamic Bedouins and we are asked to use it in the age of planes’ (p. 167). Written Arabic is also in constant competition with foreign languages in language schools, particularly English and French, which are very popular with middle-class parents who want their children to master at least one foreign language as the ticket to a decent job. Some Islamic preachers favour Arabic language teaching in schools rather than foreign languages, and Shubashy (2004: 154) reminds them of what the Egyptian intellectual Mohamed Abdu once said about his learning French: no one can claim to be educated and capable of serving his country and its interests unless they learn one European language. Why not? Muslims’ interests are now intertwined with the Europeans’ and how can those who do not know European languages benefit from the Europeans or even avoid tension with them?

Shubashy’s book caused so much controversy that he was called for crossexamination in the Egyptian Parliament, after opponents of the book denounced it as an attack on the Qur’an and Islam and against pan-Arab unity. The ousted president Hosni Mubarak even warned against such calls as Shubashy’s to abandon written Arabic in his speech on 9 November 2004: I must caution the Islamic religious scholars against the calls that some are sounding for the modernization of the Islamic religion, so as to ostensibly make it evolve, under the pretext of attuning it to the dominant world order of ‘modernization’ and ‘reform’. This trend has led recently to certain initiatives calling for the modification of the Arabic vocabulary and grammar; the modification of God’s chosen language no less; the holy language in which he revealed his message to the Prophet. (quoted in Salameh 2011: 57)

Safouan (2007: 9) argues that, since the Ancient Egyptians’ era, Egypt has been used to having a separation between the language used in administration and that used in everyday life and in the streets. The state language, or the written variety, during the Ancient Egyptians’ time was exalted as sacred and divine, while the vernacular or mother tongue was scorned and,

l ang uag e of di vi si on or un ity ?  | 119 as such, Ancient Egyptian kings behaved like contemporary colonial powers who despised the language of the natives ‘so that the natives may despise themselves and refrain from thinking about a freedom that they don’t deserve and that doesn’t suit them’. Safouan (pp. 48–9) opted to translate Othello into the vernacular in order ‘to enable ordinary people to read great writers in the language they learn at the breast and in which they spend their life from birth to death’. He explained that he ‘chose Shakespeare because his greatness is indisputable. If it is possible to translate him into our mother tongue, disdainfully disparaged as “vulgar”, then the proof is given that our mother tongue too can attain the sublime’ (p. 52). Conclusion The Egyptian education system is characterised by its bifurcation, but this is also mirrored in the state of the language as the tool to articulate national identity and the main instrument for social interaction between educators and students. The written variety of Arabic serves as the cornerstone of the state educational system, versus foreign languages, particularly English, which have held the monopoly due to the ever-increasing number of private schools. The Egyptian vernacular, on the other hand, has been exalted as vivid proof of the uniqueness of the Egyptian identity while questioning the ‘Arab-ness’ of Egypt. The link suggested by Bourdieu (1986) that should exist between the upper class and the official language does not seem to hold in the Arabicspeaking Middle East. The upper class often adopts foreign languages, while proficiency in MSA is not seen as a sign of high social status; consequently, there are two educational systems: a private one in which MSA’s role is under-estimated, and a public one in which MSA is an integral part. The labour market further accentuates the gap between the vernacular and MSA: graduates of Al-Azhar, the Islamic university, can hardly compete with those who graduate from foreign universities in the same fields. Most of the highlyrespected jobs do not necessarily demand perfect command of MSA, while low-paid jobs in the public sector necessitate some knowledge of it (Haeri 1997: 804). The Jordanian linguist Mohammad Ibrahim said: ‘there is an important difference between standard Arabic . . . and standard English. It is possible for an individual to acquire standard English simply by belonging to

120  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m a particular socio-economic class . . . Social status and mobility in any Arab society, however, are insufficient for the acquisition of the High language [classical Arabic]’ (cited in Haeri 1996: 166). The 2011 revolution is an example of the success of privately-educated people with a host of skills, including English language and rhetorical and media skills, who attracted a great deal of attention from both regional and Western media, perhaps because they reflected the image of non-violent liberal demonstrators conveniently labelled ‘the Facebook generation’, youth who adopted secular values and drew on modern communication tools such as social media to mobilise mass demonstrations. European and American media such as the BBC and CNN focused on the non-violence and social media features of the revolution, almost as a reversal of the terrorist stereotype, although there were acts of violence such as the burning down of the National Democratic Party’s headquarters and a number of police stations (El Mahdi 2011).

7 The Intellectuals’ Identity Crisis

The French Revolution also gave rise to a new figure of professional revolutionist, who spent his life not in revolutionary agitation, for which there existed but few opportunities, but in study and thought, in theory and debate. (Hanna Arendt 1965: 262)

Introduction The intellectual, argues Edward Said (1994: 11), has a public role to play as ‘an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public.’ This act of representation and articulation of a message is based on personal reflection; consequently, Said does not distinguish between private and public realms for the intellectuals’ role: there is therefore this quite complicated mix between the private and the public worlds, my own history, values, writings and positions as they derive from my experiences, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice. There is no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world. (Said 1994: 12)

121

122  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m Intellectuals are the ironists, according to Rorty (1989), or those who are selfcreating, seeking autonomy from previous pasts and theories and who have ‘played all the authority figures . . . against each other’ (p. 137). Brinton ([1938] 1965: 40) states, in his classical work about revolutions, that intellectuals in societies that had witnessed revolutions transferred their allegiance from the government, calling for radical reforms. Intellectuals ­provide ideas which beget debates which in turn beget reforms: We find that ideas are always a part of the pre-revolutionary situation . . . No ideas, no revolution. This does not mean that ideas cause revolutions, or that the best way to prevent revolutions is to censor ideas. It merely means that ideas form part of the mutually dependent variables we are studying. (ibid. p. 49)

As Said (1994: 28) states, ‘there has been no major revolution in modern history without intellectuals; conversely there has been no major counterrevolutionary movement without intellectuals.’ The intellectual therefore, is ‘someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations’, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: ‘that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behaviour concerning freedom and justice’ (Said 1994: 11). Intellectuals are also expected to belong to the same side as the weak or to serve as a modern ‘Robin Hood, some are likely to say’ (p. 22). It is also part of the intellectuals’ task to help their community have a sense of common identity, and particularly in dark times ‘an intellectual is very often looked to by members of his or her nationality to represent, speak out for, and testify to the sufferings of that nationality’ (p. 43). The Moroccan thinker, Abed Al-Jabri, describes the intellectual as ‘a social critic, the person who is occupied with defining, analysing and working . . . the conscience of society’ (cited in Jasem Mohamed 2013: 34). Egyptian and Arab intellectuals have been occupied with two questions since the 1967 war: why have Arabs and Muslims been falling behind other nations, and why did the Arab nahda (renaissance) not materialise? One easy answer was to blame the colonial powers for the failure, and later, to blame American cultural imperialism for weakening the Arab sense of identity

t h e intellectua ls’ i denti ty cr is is  | 123 and heritage. This is termed the ‘conspiracy theory’, very popular with both the Arab masses and intellectuals, particularly in times of crisis. Intellectual debates were roughly divided into three trends: those who rejected Western culture altogether because it did not, in their view, reconcile with Islam (the Salafist trend); those who wanted to integrate Islamic values with European ones (the moderate or Wasat); and those who were infatuated with Western culture, especially radical socialist ideologies, as a replacement for Islamic heritage (Hegazy 1985: 58). In the same vein, the Egyptian scholar Atef Ahmed Fouad divides Arab intellectuals into four categories: those who are subordinate to authority; those who rebel against it; those who withdraw within themselves; and those who are hesitant to take any action (cited in Jasem Mohamed 2013: 35). This chapter provides some explanations proposed by selected intellectuals regarding the reasons for the lagging behind of Arab and Egyptian culture in modern times, and whether it was because of the lack of military prowess, culminating in the 1967 defeat, or the rise of consumption and the market economy. The debate surrounding Egyptian identity grew more intense during the 1990s, and there were calls to protect that identity from the negative influences of Western cultural values, which were not considered to add any real substance to Egyptian identity. Such views regarded the West as a dangerous cultural threat to Egyptian identity, and a great deal of scepticism existed surrounding any reform ideas suggested by a Western country. Navigating Between East and West Arab intellectuals were disillusioned about their heritage according to Al-Jabri (2011), who saw it as far removed from contemporary challenges – contemporaneity and heritage were divided. For him, the European cultural model had been imposed on Arabs since the nineteenth century, due to European colonial expansion and post-independence, in the name of a global civilisational model: free economy, state apparatus, the role of science and industrialisation. The new model, he claimed, resulted in inequality and division in terms of imbalanced trade and political intervention in the name of protecting minorities. The result was that people lived in two spheres: one emulating Western ideas and another backward-looking towards tradition and cultural heritage. This duality is the core of the cultural problems in

124  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m Egypt today, as people are not in a position to reconcile the two models or choose one of them; consequently, contemporary sectors are nurtured in the name of development and modernisation, and Egyptians strive to revive their heritage in the name of authenticity. The epoch of Gˇāhiliyyah (or pre-Islam) denoted chaos and ignorance; however, this view detaches Arab culture from its rich origins embodied in the Ancient Egyptian, Phoenician and Assyrian civilisations. Arab cultural history is arguably based on isolated parts and epochs, and is even tied to certain cities such as Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Basra, rather than to time. Moreover, the West has meant two things for the Arab consciousness: colonial aggression and dominance, and modernity and progress. Al-Jabri does not question the impact of colonialism on Arab societies and cultures, however, but he confines his analysis to the ninth century, which witnessed the early development of Arab cultural heritage (or tadween, the age of recording). His aim is to reconstruct this heritage in order to proceed to the present. He calls for an inclusive culture that embraces the ethnic and linguistic diversities in the region on the one hand, but insists on preserving written Arabic as the unifying linguistic code on the other (Kassab 2010: 159). His analysis abounds with generalisations on the Arab, Greek and Western minds (Kassab 2010: 161). Al-Jabri’s theories were attacked by other scholars; prominent among them was the Syrian Gorges Tarabichi who accused al-Jabri of partial use of historical sources and epistemological bias, not to mention sectarian prejudice, favouring Sunni historians over Shi’ites (Kassab 2010: 162). This divide amongst Muslims, argues Heikal (1982: 77), can be traced back to the death of Othman Ibn Affan in ad 656. Ibn Affan helped himself to public money stored in the treasury, which not only triggered opposition and dissatisfaction, but exposed the prevalence of corruption. The opposition and rebellions culminated in the killing of Ibn Affan in Medina, while appointing ’Ali, the Prophet’s nephew, as the next caliph, who was assassinated in ad 661. Ibn Affan, similar to many contemporary Arab leaders, treated the public treasury as their private property, and appointments to important posts were (and have often been) confined to close friends and family. The result was that many Arab populations were disenchanted with the state of their countries and the advancement of Western hegemony. They felt the reason for their dissatisfaction was the corruption

t h e intellectua ls’ i denti ty cr is is  | 125 their rulers’ practiced and the abandonment of Islamic teachings, hence the call to ‘return to the true spirit of Islam’ (Heikal 1982: 27). The Egyptian Islamic scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid argues that religion (Islam) was used opportunistically for propagating certain political ideologies. Islam was adopted in the 1960s to support socialist ideologies for instance, then in the 1970s it was used to advocate liberalism, and in the 1980s it was used by Islamist militant groups to combat liberalism (Abu Zeid 1994). The rule by religion can be totalitarian, argues Abu Zeid, as it invests the power to interpret and understand God’s wisdom in a certain group of people who rule over the rest of the nation in the name of God (Abu Zeid 1994). The past decades have witnessed an ideological tension among religious scholars, intellectuals and liberal activists, culminating in the 2011 revolution, which prompted the Egyptian jurist Tareq Al-Bishri, appointed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in 2011 in order to propose constitutional changes, to label this tension an ‘ideological civil war’ (quoted in Abdel Fattah 2005: 3). The Egyptian scholar Moataz Abdel Fattah (2005) argues that there exist four types of ideological trends in Egypt: traditionalists, modernists, secularists and statists. Traditionalists seek to resort to Islamic teachings, even if seemingly contradicting modern democracy, while modernists search for a compromise that balances European democracy with Islam, arguing that the State in contemporary times is very different from that of the Prophet. Secularists, however, seek a clear separation between religion and State, while statists argue that Egypt is stricken with high rates of illiteracy and emotionalism which makes it difficult to enforce democracy, hence, the State is justified in imposing limits on the freedom of individuals. Conversely, for the Egyptian philosopher Fouad Zakariyya (2010: 28) it is impossible for any group to hold on to a certain epoch, however glorious, while denying what preceded and succeeded that era, assuming that the past would preserve itself against the currents of the present changes. Fighting the so-called cultural imperialism and rejecting any imported ideas, argues Zakariyya (2010: 88), is a denial of one’s past, because the Arab culture itself is the sum of the amalgamation of several civilisations, as illustrated in the Egyptian scholars’ translation of European books and the borrowing of European concepts during the nahda (renaissance) period in the late ­nineteenth century.

126  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m A turning point in the Arabs’ soul-searching was the 1967 defeat – a wake-up call to scrutinise the gains and losses following their political independence. This defeat disillusioned Arab populations and the ideas of Arab unity, and national liberation movements lost their currency (Heikal 1982: 125); consequently, ‘for many, the only answer was religion’ (p. 127). People found solace in religion and in stories of the Revelation, such as the one distributed by the Egyptian army during the 1973 war with Israel, assuring soldiers that one of the good men saw the Prophet in a dream pointing to Sinai, or the Copts’ report of seeing the Virgin Mary appearing in a church in Cairo (Heikal 1982: 127). The sale of religious books soared and fascination intensified with classical scholars such as Taha Hussein and Abbas Al Akkad, who wrote about the early history of Islam (Heikal 1982: 129). From Defeat to Cultural Populism In his book entitled Arab Intellectuals and Israel, Amin (1998) argues that intellectuals’ frustration with the 1967 defeat (naksa) was indescribable; in less than a week, he argues, Sinai in Egypt was captured, the West Bank was occupied, the Golan Heights in Syria were seized, and the Israeli army reached the banks of the Suez Canal. There was wide disbelief that the defeat had occurred, which concluded years of Egyptian over-confidence and high expectations following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and challenging the tripartite attack in 1956 (ibid. p. 13); even the victory recorded in the 1973 war was rather short-lived, with the army already talking about a peace treaty a few days after crossing the Bar-Lev line (p. 14). Intellectuals contributed to the feeling of humiliation and frustration by writing about the social ills, thereby adding to the prevalent mood of shame and self-hatred (Amin 1998: 23). Galal Amin (2003: 165) recalled the incident of the circus lion named Sultan, which attacked its trainer Mohamed Al-Helw on 12 October 1972, as a parody of the fear and chaos that had hit Egypt after the 1967 defeat; in addition, the novelist Yousef Idris released his volume of short stories, I am Sultan, inspired by the same circus accident. The hero of the first short story, I am Sultan, is the circus lion that serves as a symbol of all Egyptians surrendering to the strange forces that rule the world. Sultan feels the fear of his trainer, the same way Egyptians felt after the 1967 defeat, losing confidence in their leadership and doubting their courage and direction.

t h e intellectua ls’ i denti ty cr is is  | 127 Some Arab intellectuals relate the 1967 defeat to the Arabs’ lack of modern warfare technology, which, in their opinion, needed more attention than chanting about socialist revolutions (Kassab 2010: 79). The Syrian Georges Tarabichi regards the defeat as more than just a military one; rather, it marked the loss of self-esteem in the Arab consciousness and the loss of confidence in the father of pan-Arabism, Gamal Abdel Nasser (Kassab 2010: 167). Others cite the reason behind Arab failings as being the lack of freedom. The Syrian literary critic Adonis commented on the decades following independence as follows: The space of freedom has shrunk, and the repression has increased. Our chances for building a democracy and a civil society, for making room for pluralism and diversity, have decreased, and the foundations for violence and oppression have grown stronger. And we have today less religiosity and less tolerance and more confessionalism and more fanaticism. We are less united and more fragmented. We are less open, accept less the different Other, and are more closed and enwrapped in darkness. So we are today poorer and weaker. And what we call homeland is becoming a military barrack, a confessional hamlet, a tribal camp (quoted in Kassab 2010: 129–30).

Samah Edrees (1992: 31–5) examines the relationship between intellectuals and the ruling power, particularly during Nasser’s era, and concludes that the intellectuals at that time wanted the army to return to their barracks and leave the governance to a civilian authority; they also objected to Nasser’s failure to provide a pluralist multi-party system, and his replacement of technocrats with his military peers in high-profile, government posts and state administration. The defeat of 1967 deepened the intellectuals’ doubts about the aims of the 1952 coup and about the whole Nasserite system. The novelist and commentator Tawifk al-Hakeem (d. 1987) considered the defeat as a personal humiliation and a warning to investigate the coup’s failings (Edrees 1992: 47). The Islamists, on the other hand, justified the defeat by Nasser’s adoption of Western and imported concepts such as socialism or nationalism, thereby ignoring Egypt’s Islamic and Arabic roots (ibid. p. 48). It was indeed argued that the defeat gave rise to the establishment of several Islamist movements, which saw in the defeat an opportunity to accuse the secular modernisation project of failure, and called for resorting to

128  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m the indigenous heritage. Suddenly, the pan-Islamist identity had precedence over pan-­Arabist identity and ‘religious identity replaced national identity’ – ‘what binds me with Muslim Chinese, Afghan, Indian or Nigerians [is] stronger than the bond connecting me with fellow non-Muslim Egyptians’ (Hegazy 2002: 112). Some commentators also cast doubt on the viability of pan-Arabist identity; for instance, Ahmed Abdel Mo’ti Hegazy (2002: 125) wondered if Arabs were truly one nation: so why could they not build this new state? And why have they not formed an economic unity, and how can they explain the diverse cultural differences amongst them? There is no common Arab market for books, education, film or a joint Arabization project. The only hope of forming this unity is for Arabs to first acknowledge that they have not yet built this unity and then start working on building this nation.

The problem with Egyptian culture, argues the Egyptian philosopher Fouad Zakariyya (2010: 78), is the belief in obedience as a virtue, and it runs across all state institutions, including the education system. Tarek Heggy, the Egyptian political thinker and international petroleum strategist, pondered on the reasons behind Egypt’s regression compared to other progressive nations in his book, Critique of the Arab Mind (1999). He listed several negative qualities which, in his view, hinder Egyptians from keeping pace with Western development. Chief among these is the tendency of Egyptians to over-rate their capabilities, a phenomenon which only pervaded the last decade of the twentieth century (Heggy 1999: 30). Reading through the headlines of Egyptian newspapers, argues Heggy, it is easy to see numerous examples of this excessive over-rating of the role of Egyptians, such as claiming that the Egyptian economy would never collapse, that the Egyptian experience – in any field – could benefit other nations, or that leading international powers like the USA should not ignore the status of Egypt in the region, and so on. The remedy, argues Heggy, is to acknowledge reality as it is and to accept all the inflicted wounds. These characteristics, according to Heggy, are very much the psychological costs of the 1967 defeat, when Egyptians felt the huge gulf between words and deeds, or between rhetorical reality and practical actuality; hence their tendency to fall into the binary of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ in their dealings with other nations or the binary between

t h e intellectua ls’ i denti ty cr is is  | 129 futile subjectivity and sober objectivity (Heggy 1999: 34–5). Egyptians used to refer to Israel not as a strong state but as ‘Jewish gangs’ before the defeat, only to wake up on 5 June 1967 to the facts and to realise that the enemy was not made up of ‘gangs’ (p. 39). The elites’ commentators and scholars formed a group of Egyptian nationalists who critiqued any misrepresentation of Egypt’s image abroad, resorting to takhwin (charging with betrayal) which had become the twin of (the Islamists’) takfir (or charging someone with apostasy) in the discourse of purported freedom of expression (Saad 1997: 402–3); when history was discussed, it was not dealt with objectively but rhetorically (Heggy 1999: 40–1). Arabs have become less tolerant of constructive criticism, so if anyone proposes a dialogue with the historical enemy (Israel) as the only solution, argues Heggy, they would be harshly critiqued and even accused of being less patriotic to Mother Egypt (pp. 86–7). The belief in the conspiracy theory bestows a rather mythical feature on those schemers, while the self-image tends to be negative and defeatist (pp. 109–10). Osama alRashidi (2014) published a recent report of what he calls ‘manufacturing of illusion’, referring to how Egyptian mainstream media, including some of the private outlets, have resorted to exaggerating tales of glory and pride about Egyptian achievements that simply do not exist. Examples include news clips from the archives about Egyptian manufacturing of rockets and space-ships during the 1960s, which never materialised. Most recent examples include a device that an Egyptian army general was claimed to have developed, with the aim of detecting within seconds the presence of liver disease in patients sitting metres away. The invention, announced in 2013, caused much controversy amongst Egyptians, especially after most of the media had endorsed the invention as a breakthrough in the history of medicine, even though it had no scientific basis (Kingsley 2013). Another challenge, according to many Egyptian intellectuals such as Galal Amin (2003), is cultural populism, triggered not only by the open market policy endorsed since the 1970s, but also by the influence of American mass culture. In a book entitled The Era of the Masses, Amin (2003) argues that Egyptian society before the 1952 coup was divided into three segments: upper, middle class and poor, with the last category embracing a large portion of the population. Following the coup, a considerable part of the masses moved from the third category to the second one, demanding

130  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m more mass-produced items such as additional television output, magazines, tabloids, charter flights and mass entertainment. Literary magazines, which used to sell only 2,000 copies before World War II, were shut down and replaced by lower quality, popular magazines which thrived on sensationalism and gossip. Telephones turned from a useful tool into an entertainment gadget, used only to waste time and to brag about in front of friends. What happened was a cultural transformation made possible by two factors: (1) technological progress which included improved communication and transportation, and (2) Americanisation of culture, which hailed the ordinary man as the centre of the capitalist system. Small production turned into mass production, tailoring to the desires of the common man, who wanted hardwearing jeans, cheap travel, quick travel guides, fast food, films with simple plots, and sensational news. Serious television programming then moved to a midnight time slot, leaving prime time for talk shows aimed at the general public; in a few decades, the USA had gained much more power than colonial Europe ever had over centuries, simply by addressing the ordinary man and satisfying his demands (Amin 2003: 15–17). The 1940s witnessed rich people being discerned by their fashionable clothes: men wore expensive suits and women competed by wearing bare-shoulder dresses; at present, both the ordinary man and millionaires wear blue jeans and their wives generally wear a veil (p. 87). Religion fared no differently: Islamists, such as Sayed Qutb, who used to write for the intellectuals and well-educated audiences, were replaced by preachers such as Shaarawi, who used simple Egyptian vernacular in his televised preaching programmes to reach out to millions of followers (p. 30). Audiences who favoured lowbrow and ‘vulgar’ literature about Jinn, superstitions or sex, were several times greater than those who preferred highbrow arts such as opera or ballet. This is one consequence of continued state censorship on culture which started in the 1950s, coupled with the devastating effects of the 1967 defeat, when not only intellectuals but the rest of Egyptians felt the shock of the unexpected military humiliation. This made intellectuals lose track of their mission in society and the nationalist aspiration turned into a ‘no project phase’, followed by the State’s total control of all artistic productions, and its short-sighted policy which favoured quantity over quality (Hegazy 2002: 40–1). Abou Heif (2006) argues that Arab intellectuals have been forced to

t h e intellectua ls’ i denti ty cr is is  | 131 engage in the media machine at the expense of culture, which impels them to tailor their creativity to the needs of the media, and hence to market supply and demand. Theatre, films and songs were produced to appeal to consumers more than to citizens, and vernacular poets and popular television series’ writers became more famous than the distinguished Naguib Mahfouz. The learned public preferred television and cinematic adaptation of novels to reading the original scripts, and even intellectuals contented themselves with watching adapted literary works at the expense of reading. Arab intellectuals have suffered from impermeable fear, insecurity and power-phobia due to the powerful elites hardly recognising their value. To become a ‘public intellectual’, argues Abaza (2010: 37), one needs to enhance one’s status as a commentator who contributes to the pan-Arab press and appears as a regular guest on talk shows. The mass appeal of intellectuals is therefore dictated by the market, which creates ‘its own rules on culture and discourse’ (ibid. p. 37). Intellectuals are consequently defined as those who write commercially successful songs, TV series and movies, and the name of a TV series writer, such as Osama Anwar Okasha, has become more familiar than previously well-known novelists, proving that Egyptians, including the intellectuals, prefer to watch televised fiction rather than read a novel (Abou Heif 2006: 102). Media and Culture as a Battlefield Egyptian intellectuals used to believe in a distinctive Egyptian personality, in what was known in the early decades of the twentieth century as the Pharaonic movement, especially with the European discoveries of the monuments of Pharaohs in Egypt and the establishment of Egyptology as a modern discipline, which made Egyptians proud of their unique heritage (Chejne 1957: 254). Egypt led the Arab world culturally during the early decades of the twentieth century, with its revived printing presses, education, radio and cinema (Chejne 1957: 256). There was some Egyptian interest in Arab unity during the 1930s, although a few intellectuals, such as Taha Hussain, were not keen on total unity but only on unifying education, the military and economic co-operation. Hussain believed in Egypt’s unique personality being preserved by all means (Chejne 1957: 257–8); however, by the 1940s, more Egyptian intellectuals

132  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m began to subscribe to the pan-Arabism concept, especially with Egypt’s role in setting up the Arab League in 1945 (p. 259). The sentiments for Arab unity subsequently faced several challenges, such as the competition between Cairo and Baghdad for the leadership of the League, as well as the defeat of the Arab forces in the 1948 Palestinian war by the Israelis. This was met with pressure from many Egyptian intellectuals who had originally opposed Arab unity, to use the defeat as an opportunity to demand that Egypt should abandon this unity project (p. 260). Pan-Arabism was re-kindled in Egypt following the military coup of 1952 by the Free Officers, including Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser’s success in settling the Suez Canal dispute, his support for other Arab countries seeking independence, such as Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, and his nationalisation projects conformed to the desire of many Arabs for a unity plan. Egypt claimed a leading role in the region, with its educated cadres of professionals such as teachers, engineers and religious scholars who served in different Arab countries. Egyptian schools and universities were also open to other Arab nationals (Chejne 1957: 265). Nasser’s regime used culture as a propaganda tool for disseminating and consolidating the values of the 1952 coup. Newspapers were nationalised and editors-in-chief were appointed from military circles. The Ministry of Culture and National Guidance was set up to ensure equitable distribution of cultural production, and to promote creative work that praised the coup and its aims; indeed, the slogan used during the 1950s was ‘Raise your head, my brother, the age of slavery and imperialism has passed’ (Wahba 1972: 10). Following the 1952 coup, the patronage of the arts, according to Wahba, was established on a more rational basis. A heightened national pride and the sense of efficiency of the government stimulated State aid with a view to bringing about a cultural renaissance, at a time when universal education seemed to some to have watered down the cultural content because of the widespread demand for it. For the first time in Egypt’s history, the State became truly aware of the tremendous fascination which culture could exercise on the nation’s imagination, and for the first time, the organization of cultural promotion was such that it was aimed at associating the vast majority of the people, and not simply at showing the outside world how clever and ‘Westernized’ Egyptians could be if they so wished. (Wahba 1972: 76)

t h e intellectua ls’ i denti ty cr is is  | 133 Mass media were regarded as instrumental tools in the modernisation process, and the government’s concern since then has been to control media messages, seeing the press and media as a threat for the mobilisation of public opinion against the regime. As a consequence, the press turned into a mere mouth-piece for national governments and the mass media were regarded as instruments in the hands of statesmen disseminating the rulers’ missives, while appraising the country’s development plans (Mellor 2005). It was not expected that these media should take on the role of watchdog, as any criticism of development plans would be regarded as a criticism of the whole nation (Abdel Rahman 1985: 24). The nationalist project introduced by Nasser in the late 1950s was that of an industrialised Egypt, capable of building cars, appliances and even space rockets. The reality though, was different, as illustrated by Rami Jabbar’s documentary Ramses the Car – ‘Ramses Egyptian car’ used to be the source of nationalist pride during the early 1960s. The car was marketed as a car for all Arabs, manufactured by Egyptian hands, in spite of many parts being manufactured in Europe. Commenting on the birth and death of the car ‘Ramses’, as part of Egypt’s nationalistic propaganda, the Egyptian artist Salah Enany said, if we look at Egypt’s history over thousands of years, it was never a real country until it had a national project, and everyone had to believe in the project and be involved in it . . . we don’t have a project to unite us. So people start working on their own [individual] project. What can they do other than turn to [the] heavens?1

Sadat’s regime, on the other hand, was characterised by two moves: the Open Door policy and promoting the radical Islamist movements in order to combat Nasser’s socialism. As a consequence, Clause 2 was added to the 1971 constitution, confirming the role of Islam as the religion of Egypt, Arabic as its main language and Shari’a principles as the source of legislation. It could be argued that, as a direct result of these changes, the Jihadist groups emerged, and sectarian clashes between fanatics and Copts broke out. As for Mubarak’s rule, it can be summed up in two words: neo-liberalism and privatisation. Culture and education were reduced to commodities, while radical Islamism continued to grow, targeting authors and intellectuals and curtailing ­freedom

134  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m of expression. Examples include the attacks on Naguib Mahfouz, Farag Fouda and Nasser Hamed Abu Zeid (’Ali et al. 2010: 289–91). Egyptian theatre, television production and publishing houses tailored for wealthy Gulf tourists proliferated during Mubarak’s rule, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, in order to satisfy the taste of the so-called ‘Petro-Dollar’ (Amin 1998: 49). From the 1990s, and as a consequence of the Open Door and privatisation policies, however, independent cultural groups were founded, particularly in the capital and big cities, but they faced a number of challenges, such as censorship and a shortage of adequate funding; the Ministry of Culture had the lowest budget of all ministries, and the lion’s share of its budget was allocated to the salaries and wages of civil servants. Spending on cultural centres in the rural areas therefore stagnated at approximately 13 per cent, although the rural areas had 56 per cent of the total population in Egypt. The result was also a decrease in the number of cultural centres, from 527 in 1995 to 428 in 2008 (’Ali et al. 2010: 300–12). Politicians, media commentators and scholars have become increasingly concerned with measuring the impact of cultural hegemony on Arab and Egyptian youth since the 1990s. This economic development, coupled with technological advances and the spread of new media by means of the Internet, have prompted scholars to warn against the lack of a distinct Arab identity and the hegemony of Anglo-American values (Abdel Rahman 2002). The new pan-Arab satellite channels, for instance, have been accused of depending on imported programmes and copying existing American ones, rather than producing distinctly Arab content. Cultural imperialism has thus been at the centre of several Arab publications and the main focus of debate among Arab scholars, several of whom see in globalisation a celebration of capitalistic values and a threat to native cultural identity. To back this argument, these scholars have pointed to the increased consumption of Western goods and the imitation of Western lifestyles by Arab youth, thereby focusing on the cultural exchange of the globalisation process rather than the economic or political exchange. These scholars therefore equate globalisation (at least at the cultural level) with dependency on the West and hegemony of the latter in setting up new values and norms. Such views usually refer to the global statistics on cultural flow, showing, for instance, how Egypt’s imports of cultural products (from the

t h e intellectua ls’ i denti ty cr is is  | 135 USA and UK in particular) exceed its exports: Egypt’s cultural exports were reduced by one-third from 1994 to 2002, with the rest of the Arab countries as the major importers of Egyptian cultural exports such as books, newspapers, ­periodicals, printed matter, recorded media, visual arts and audio-visual media. Globalisation is consequently seen as both a celebration of capitalistic values and a chaotic phenomenon, which has no historical roots in any cultural identity and cannot even offer individuals a new sense of identity (Abdel Rahman 2002: 8–10). One of the reasons claimed to lie behind the fear of the effects of globalisation on local culture is the spread of consumerism and similar lifestyles sponsored by multi-national corporations. The Egyptian media scholar Awatef Abdel Rahman (2002) considers the consequences of globalisation will rather be the accentuation of the gap between the North (developed world) and the South (developing world), and hence, the dependence of the latter on the former. The cultural products of the developed world (particularly the USA) may be used by the people of developing countries as a means of escapism rather than a means of encouragement to participate in public debates. Furthermore, Abdel Rahman (2002) defines one disadvantage of globalisation and the emergence of trans-national outlets as particularly having an effect on the printed press, which is expected to lose a larger proportion of its advertising revenue to the newly emerged pan-Arab satellite channels. The problem with globalisation, according to Kumaraswamy (2006), is the lack of a well-defined national and pan-Arab identity, which is both inclusive and representative of ethnic and religious diversity, not only within the region, but in each Arab state. The main reason behind the prevailing social ills of unemployment, sexual harassment, sectarianism, street children and poverty, according to many Egyptian commentators, is the excessive openness to non-Arab cultures and the spread of the Internet, cell phones and satellite television as the new tools for cultural imperialism. After being regarded as a keystone in the post-independence government’s development plan, the media are now regarded as one source of social ills which needs constant monitoring. The State uses the media to stir public opinion, setting up the Ministry of Information in 1952 as the Ministry of National Guidance, to include what was later known as the Ministry of Information and Culture. It became the

136  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m Ministry of Information in 1982, while the Ministry of Culture became a separate entity. Egyptian regimes have excelled in constructing an alternative reality to circulate their own narratives about the nation, such as the one about the 1973 war against Israel: instead of foregrounding heroic stories of Egyptians’ crossing the Suez Canal, Sadat and Mubarak’s regimes depicted the war as a sweeping victory for the Egyptian army, although Egypt gained little from this confrontation. Sadat made himself the hero of that war and the ‘Leader of War and Peace’, as he liked to be called during his rule, while Mubarak made himself the initiator of the first air strike against Israel, which miraculously led to Egypt’s victory. The state narrative is memorialised in the Military Museum with large sculptures and photographs, such as a ‘doctored’ photograph depicting Mubarak and Sadat standing over a table along with other generals, although the original photograph of these generals does not include Mubarak (Elshahed 2012). The Ministry of Culture was unable to monopolise public cultural performances after the 2011 revolution, with independent artists taking the initiative to present their performances in public and sometimes inside Tahrir Square (von Maltzahn 2014). Revolutionary art such as graffiti was celebrated as a tool for social critique and a new forum called El-Fan Midan (Art Square) as a street festival was partially subsidised by the Minister of Culture Imad Abu Ghazi in 2011, but his successors did not show equal support. The National Collation for Media Freedom objected to the hiring of a new information minister on 10 July 2011, the first one to be appointed after the 2011 revolution, arguing that such a ministry is only found in dictator states; the coalition requested the ministry to be dissolved. More than one hundred participants from the cultural sectors and artists, as well as journalists and intellectuals, participated in a conference entitled ‘Independent culture for democracy’ between 15 and 17 December 2012. The conference aimed to assess the meaning of independence in light of the State’s policies regarding the cultural sector. The participants agreed on the need to re-examine Arab cultural policies in the wake of the Arab Spring in order to develop these policies, instead of continuing the old regimes’ monopoly of production and distribution of cultural output. They also called for the equitable distribution of cultural services and for supporting the freedom of creativity and cultural diversity. Funding was also a major challenge in the cultural sector,

t h e intellectua ls’ i denti ty cr is is  | 137 and the suggestion here was to dedicate at least 1 per cent of GDP to it, supporting independent cultural work and creating local funds to provide for self-­governing initiatives and individuals, as well as exploring new funding avenues from tax revenues. Finally, participants also suggested new mechanisms to fight repression and censorship in the cultural field, advocating the right of artists and creators to freely express their views in their cultural work. Another challenge in the cultural sector has been the role of religion and how much Islamist actors can contribute to the country’s cultural scene; during Mubarak’s rule, for instance, the Islamists in Parliament raised several complaints against works of art – literary or fine art – on the grounds that these works violated Islamic ethics. One example was the naked portrait of Adam and Eve by the Austrian Gustav Klimt, which was published in an Egyptian magazine in 1994. The then culture minister Farouk Hosny insisted that the portrait was not offensive, explaining that art should be interpreted in its totality (Hegazy 2002: 91). The (same) minister’s position had dramatically shifted by 2001 when a Muslim Brotherhood MP submitted an inquiry to the minister concerning three novels which, in the MP’s view, included indecent material amounting to pornography. The minister’s inquiry resulted in the withdrawal of the novels from circulation, and the minister simply defended his position as the guardian of social morality. The episode, argues Mehrez (2001: 10), was an example of the culture war between the Egyptian State and Islamists, in which power, and not free expression, was the final goal. The few years since the 2011 revolution have clearly illustrated how the media can be used by both the Islamists and their opposition in a war over the direction of public opinion, seeing television in particular as the core educational and cultural tool available for the poor (Abu Yousef 2006: 231). However, according to Abu Yousef (2006: 233), the problem is that Egyptian media have no clear identity. Popular culture presented on television is hardly underpinned by a unique set of values and it does not necessarily depict good images of Egyptians; the typical images foregrounded in television entertainment, besides celebrities, are wealthy businessmen, thereby encouraging Egyptians to accumulate material wealth by any means and at any cost (ibid. p. 233), while the concept of common interest or the debate about much needed political and cultural reforms is relegated to the background.

138  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m The Muslim Brotherhood established the Hawiyya (Identity) group under Morsi’s rule, comprising writers and academics who sought to enforce Islamic values in art and culture (von Maltzahn 2014). Artists, media professionals and a number of intellectuals took to the streets several times in order to assert their freedom of expression within the cultural sector, and to curb the penetration of the Brotherhood (ibid.). There remains a struggle between the secularist and Islamist ideologies over inclusion-exclusion in the intellectual field, with each camp seeing the other as intolerant (Abaza 2010). The preaching of tolerance, however, seems to exacerbate intolerance in the intellectual and social spheres. Secular intellectuals would rather tolerate a corrupt regime than live under theocratic forms of rule, making it possible for the regime of the former ruler Mubarak to mobilise intellectuals against the so-called war on terrorism (Abaza 2011). Another episode of this culture war occurred in May 2013, when the former President Morsi appointed Ala’a Abdel Aziz as Minister of Culture, steering a wave of protest within cultural circles. Abdel Aziz began his term of office with the termination of employment of a number of senior figures in his department, including the Head of the Egyptian Book Authority, Head of the Egyptian National Library and Archives, Head of the Cairo Opera House and Head of the Sector of Fine Arts, as well as four seniors at the Egyptian National Library and Heritage Library. The protesters then claimed that the minister’s move was part of the Brotherhood’s tactics to replace those senior figures with members and supporters of its own movement. Protests broke out against Abdel Aziz’s statements regarding the 25 January Revolution and his intention to embark on a cultural project to document the revolution, as he had held exclusive discussions with the Justice and Freedom Party by excluding liberal voices. Several sit-down strikes were arranged, including one at the Cairo Opera House, and even inside the Minister’s office; in addition, the Attorney-General received requests to prosecute several authors and artists on the grounds that they had disturbed public security. The Cairo Contemporary Dance Centre was also threatened with closure, following criticism by a group of Muslim Brotherhood supporters against ballet dancing and, in protest, members of the Opera House Ballet Company went to the streets to perform ‘Zorba the Greek’ near the Ministers’ office, collecting the signatures of several artists and activists to save the centre. Abdel Aziz

t h e intellectua ls’ i denti ty cr is is  | 139 resigned his post in the wake of the toppling of Morsi’s rule on 4 July 2013, and intellectuals called for the election of a new minister by the intellectuals themselves. Conclusion In a book entitled Culture is not Well, the Egyptian poet and journalist Ahmed Abdel Mou’tei Hegazy argues that Egyptian culture is ‘unwell’, and that there is often a disregard for the role of culture as a continuous process and an honest confrontation of reality. Culture is ‘sick’ because it has not developed and it has no goals and no critics (Hegazy 2002: 44–8). He argues that Egyptian cultural policy is a reflection of Egyptian national identity; therefore, if the cultural sphere is failing, there is a real risk that national identity will be unstable, which leaves room for fanatic religious movements to mushroom (ibid. p. 28). Egyptian intellectuals, moreover, feel that there exists a great sense of confusion and lack of direction in the field of the production of ideas and symbols; consequently, Arab intellectuals have begun to lose confidence in their philosophies and ideologies in a world dominated by mass media and mass ideas. Surrounded by the three critical factors of (1) losing the universities as incubators of new ideas, (2) dominance of mass media, and (3) monopoly of ideas by the ruling elites, intellectuals often prefer to either remain silent or to claim that new ideas are unproductive (Afayia 2013: 108). The relationship between intellectuals and the regime generally altered with the change in intellectuals’ attitudes towards the regime; if the government sensed the intellectuals’ support, it would allow more freedom, and vice versa (Amin 1998: 44). As for their influence in society, Arab intellectuals are often blamed for being cut off from the masses, thanks to government policies, whereas the masses cannot move without (intellectual) guidance (Hegazy 2002: 84). The veteran Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Eissa (2008: 99–100), however, blames the masses or the Egyptian people in general for being too lenient and lax towards the regime’s oppressive policies. For Eissa, the situation in Egypt is definitely the consequence of people’s passivity, which is also the result of corruption, not only of high-ranking officials, but a corruption that is rampant in the whole body of the nation, turning all people, regardless of their rank, into dishonest workers. The strategy of Mubarak’s

140  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m regime, therefore, was to silence the people by corrupting them; for instance, university professors would not be questioned when they passed on university posts to their sons and daughters, in order that no one would question Mubarak’s succession plan to groom his son, Gamal, for the presidential post. Low-level employees in public offices would receive bribes so that they would not dare to later question the higher-ranking officials about the bribes they had received of multi-millions of Egyptian pounds (Eissa 2008: 102). Eissa went so far as to compare the Egyptian majority to a pimp who could not complain that his own sister was a prostitute (p. 103), thereby blaming the Egyptians for being so inordinately passive that they had allowed the old regime to escape punishment for their crimes of oppression and corruption. The Egyptian workers, argued Eissa (p. 257), ‘used to be feared by rulers and state security apparatus used to respect their presence. But suddenly the workers have surrendered . . . so their factories and companies were divided and sold . . . with their silence, those workers are accomplices in the current political and economic corruption in Egypt’. Egyptian workers in particular, according to Eissa, did not participate in many protests against Mubarak, thereby abandoning their historical role as part of great national movements against occupation and colonial power (p. 258). Workers and other professionals, as mentioned above, did indeed stage several strikes before 2011, and these strikes have increased remarkably since then (see Beinin 2012; Al-Mirghani et al. 2009). Above all, the massive 2011 protests shocked intellectuals like Eissa, who never predicted a revolution on that scale. Note 1. Cited in Jabbar’s documentary, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6j​Wrao​ 1n9E.

8 When Egyptians Revolt

Among free men there is competition as to who will do most, each for the common good, each by himself, all expecting to share in the misfortunes of defeat, or in the benefits of victory; but an enslaved people loses in addition to this warlike courage, all signs of enthusiasm, for their hearts are degraded, submissive, and incapable of any great deed. Tyrants are well aware of this, and, in order to degrade their subjects further, encourage them to assume this attitude and make it instinctive. (La Boétie 2008: 62)

Introduction Protests broke out in Greece in December 2008 after a fifteen-year-old student was killed by two policemen, resulting in widespread riots in Greece and later, in solidarity demonstrations in several cities such as London and Paris. The Egyptian popular al-Youm al-Sabei newspaper carried out an investigation in the wake of this riot, wondering why Egyptians did not revolt against police abuse as they had done in Greece (Al-Said 2008). Asking several Egyptian citizens and a police general that question, the newspaper journalist expressed her surprise that those she interviewed did not show much interest in joining protests against the police, concluding that those street protesters seemed to be ‘so different from those leading strikes in front of professional syndicates, writing blogs or joining Facebook groups’. The 2011 revolution 141

142  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m had therefore come as a shocking and unexpected event. Everyone was left wondering about the conditions which could trigger Egyptians to revolt. This chapter examines these conditions, as defined by selected Egyptian intellectuals, including Islamists, and how the Egyptian uprisings between 1952 and 30 June 2013 have been viewed. The word ‘revolution’ stems from Latin and has the meaning of ‘change and turn’ (revolving). It perhaps first appeared in political discourse in seventeenth-century England in reference to the Declaration of Rights, which marked the triumph of parliamentarians in what was called the Glorious Revolution. History books also refer to both the American Revolution (1775–83) and the French Revolution (1787–99) as the greatest in modern Western history, in which the first sculpted the relationship between the new independent state and the people, while the latter marked the collapse of the French monarchy and the rise of French republicanism – Liberté, égalité, fraternité. The Egyptian philosopher and leading authority on modern Islam Hasan Hanafi (2012) argues that it is imperative to discuss Egyptian revolutions in light of their relationship with Islam; for Hanafi, Islam and revolution are two sides of the same coin and contemporary Egyptian politics illustrates this inseparable link, from the 1952 military coup and the 2011 revolution, or from the time when the military allied itself with the largest Islamic organisation in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, having previously isolated and oppressed it. It has now become more important than ever, stresses Hanafi, to analyse Islam and revolution as a new ideology of ‘revolutionary Islam’, after the Brotherhood won the majority of parliamentary seats and one of their leading figures was elected president in 2012. This chapter reviews some of the definitions of revolution, drawing on Western and Egyptian perspectives. The first section of the chapter focuses on selected Western definitions and characteristics of political and social revolutions, and the subsequent section will introduce the Islamic perspective from the writings of leading Islamist thinkers. The aim of this brief introduction is to illustrate the subtle ideological differences between Western and Islamic viewpoints: for instance, Western theories seem to regard revolutions as an ongoing process with the aim of transforming existing political structures as a by-product of fundamental changes in state security apparatus or foreign policy; on the other hand, Arab-Islamic theories place emphasis on

when eg ypti ans revolt  | 143 Muslims as individuals and their duty to fight corruption within the state and in accordance with God’s laws. This fight does not necessarily involve a lengthy procedure, as Muslims are expected to fight to achieve a specific goal, after which they are expected to retreat and follow their (new) leaders. This overview is by no means exhaustive, but it does provide a starting point for a debate in examining such ideological differences and the criteria that can justify a rebellion against a ruler, even if he (or she) belongs to a seemingly pious Islamic movement such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Revolution – a Western Perspective Crane Brinton ([1938] 1965) compares revolution to a rising fever which culminates in an uprising in The Anatomy of Revolution. There are, Brinton argues, symptoms accompanying this fever, such as an angry middle class when it feels threatened by what might be regarded as injustice towards its position in society, such as rising taxes. Revolution therefore is a ‘drastic, sudden substitution of one group in charge of the running of a territorial political entity by another’ (ibid. p. 4 ); however, just as the body reacts by seeking to restore itself after fever, so do societies seek to restore order in any social and political chaos resulting from a revolution. This may mean that revolutionaries do not always accomplish their goals: for example, the French witnessed an attempt in 1815 to restore the monarchy as a reaction to extremists coming to power following the revolution. Brinton’s model defines revolution as a process that may not necessarily end with drastic changes from the pre-revolution era. This model would obviously not apply to coups d’état, in which change occurs at the top of the social hierarchy, or to revolutions by the occupied against the occupier. Brinton’s model also applies to revolutions that happened prior to 1945, such as the French Revolution, which exhibited several of Brinton’s causal symptoms: discontented people (peasants were discontent because of their deprivation, while the nobility was discontent because it did not want to pay taxes), intellectuals felt despair about how society operated, and government was incapable of meeting society’s needs or correctly organising its finances. Brinton examined the English, French and Russian revolutions, arguing that they all followed a similar path: moderate revolutionaries igniting the revolution, followed by a period of terror, or what he called ‘Thermidorian reaction’,1 and ­convalescence when the body or

144  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m s­ ociety seeks to restore itself by returning to the old status quo: ‘societies which undergo the full cycle of revolution are perhaps in some respects stronger for it; but they by no means emerge entirely remade’ (Brinton [1938] 1965: 17). Revolution for many scholars implies the need for change. Marxists would see revolution as fulfilment of the people’s will and an inevitable byproduct of economic exploitation, arguing that revolutions may be categorised as bourgeois or proletarian. Skocpol (1979: 4) defines social revolutions as ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures . . . accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’. Arendt (1965: 34), on the other hand, sees revolutions as not necessarily a radical regime change but a restoration of political norms in order to re-establish the freedoms that were temporarily lost under a despotic regime. Huntington (1968: 266), moreover, defines revolutions as ‘the rapid and violent destruction of existing political institutions, the mobilization of new groups into politics, and the creation of new political institutions’. Jack Goldstone (2001: 142) considers revolutions as ‘an effort to transform the political institutions and the justifications for political authority in society, accompanied by formal or informal mass mobilization and non-institutionalized actions that undermine authorities’; according to this model, revolutions are inevitable if three conditions or symptoms prevail: a state in crisis, alienated elites and an ability to mobilise large parts of the population to rebel. For a revolution to occur, all factors must be strongly present, and thus it might be possible to predict a revolution, such as the Iranian Revolution, if attention is paid to the development of the conditions. It was previously claimed that revolutions could be caused by loss or the fear of losing economic privileges, such as the coup d’état in Egypt in 1952 which culminated in a period of protests by peasants and workers (Davies 1962). However, without the coalition of several social strata, the revolution would not succeed; as Goldstone (2011: 8) says: ‘history is replete with student movements, workers’ strikes, and peasant uprisings that were readily put down because they remained a revolt of one group, rather than of broad coalitions’. The aim of the Egyptian 25 January Revolution, according to Goldstone (2011), was to fight a sultanate dictatorship, composed of modern ‘sultans’ whose rule is based on no clear ideology, although they may keep some formal aspects of democracy such as elections or political parties. Modern sultans work on keeping their people

when eg ypti ans revolt  | 145 ­ epoliticised by controlling elections and political parties and paying off d their allies. He also provides a few indicators to detect the rise of revolutions, including unjust government, elites alienated from the state, mobilised sections of the population across ethnic, religious and socio-economic classes, and international powers’ reluctance to step in to defend that government. Scholarly debate has not only centred on defining revolutions, but also on categorising them. Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, classified them into political revolutions, sudden but violent, or slow revolutions, with complete transformation of an entire society; in the same vein, Samuel Huntington (1962: 23) classified revolutions into four types: internal wars (such as Algeria in 1962), revolutionary coups (such as Egypt in 1952), reform coups (such as Syria in 1956), and palace revolutions (Haiti, 1957). Brinton ([1938] 1965: 92–105) divides revolutionaries into moderates, usually from the middle –class and nobility, and extremists who dominate in the critical stage and the period of terror and chaos. The latter period signifies the struggle between the moderates and extremists ‘which begins almost as soon as the dramatic overthrow of the old regime is effected, [and] is marked by a series of exciting episodes: here street fighting, there a forced seizure of property, almost everywhere heated debates, attempted repressions, a steady stream of violent propaganda’ (p. 148). Revolution, as a phenomenon, exhibits discernible characteristics or symptoms, such as the mobilisation of large segments of the population due to their frustration with the status quo. The revolutionists then seek to cause disequilibrium in the state, and hence, a shift in power from the former regime (state) to other competing groups (elite, middle and lower classes) who might be reluctant to pay higher taxes or to surrender to repressive security forces. This power struggle leads to mobilisation of followers of each interest group, and here ideology and culture play a crucial role in securing successful recruitment. The deep causes of revolution are rooted in the structural decay of the existing regime and a strong desire to vest power in a new one. For revolutions to achieve their aims, they have to secure wide participation and the coalition of diverse social classes by providing a counter-ideology or different values. Revolutionary groups should therefore be able to construct an ideology that ‘will (a) inspire a broad range of followers resonating with existing cultural guideposts, (b) provide a sense of inevitability and destiny about

146  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m its followers’ success, and (c) persuade people that the existing authorities are unjust and weak’ (Goldstone 2001: 156). Revolution is, therefore, a long process whose aim is to re-distribute political power and material resources. Revolution – an Egyptian Perspective The word ‘revolution’ (Arabic: thawra), argues Ayalon (1987), acquired its positive meaning by the end of the nineteenth century; prior to that, the word fitna (rebellion) was used to refer to conflicts and insurrections. Ayalon consulted the Lebanese scholar Butrus Al-Bustani’s (d. 1883) definition in the Arab Encyclopedia: a thawra [revolution] in the jargon of politics is what the Arabs call fitna. It means a big change and serious unrest which would occur in a country for political reasons, when public order is upset or people’s views disagree . . . the result is conspiracy, then disturbances, finally fitna takes over. (quoted in Ayalon 1987: 162)

The word thawra gained more currency following World War II, with the increasing struggle for independence and solving domestic problems. The Egyptian Islamic thinker Mohamed I’mara (1988: 11) considers that the word thawra in Islam means ‘restlessness, coup, change, rise, expansion, and anger’. He agrees with Ayalon that the word thawra used to connote fitna, in that it implied khuruj or literally ‘deviating from a certain course’. Khuruj, therefore, was used to mean differences in ideologies and the struggle between different parties (I’mara 1988: 13). Drawing on Qur’anic verses, I’mara (p. 30) argues that ‘revolution’ appeared to be synonymous with the word ‘victory’, and thus implied not only a radical change but also the victory of the weak and oppressed. He argues that the numerous references to ‘revolution’ and ‘victory’ in the Qur’an mean that Muslims are endowed with this characteristic of fighting to end tyranny (p. 31). I’mara (p. 18) contends that Islam, as a religion, is in itself an embodiment of an ideological, social and political revolution in the history of mankind as it rebelled against many of the social customs and traditions at the time of its arrival. Revolutionary Islam, I’mara adds (p. 42), ended tribal authority and handed over freedom to individuals. An example of the revolution in Islam, I’mara continues (p. 178), is the fitna which marked the First Islamic Civil War

when eg ypti ans revolt  | 147 (ad 656–61). It was a rebellion against, and the killing of, Caliph Othman Ben Affan; ’Ali, the Prophet’s nephew, the revolutionaries’ choice of new caliph, then announced the reversal of Affan’s policies, such as handing over leading administrative posts to Affan’s family and friends, or dividing the land between the same group instead of regarding it as public property for all subjects. This is fulfilment of the Prophet’s saying (Hadith): ‘No obedience to a creature that disobeys the Creator’. The late Egyptian Islamic jurist Muhammad Metwally El-Shaarawy (d. 1998), whose popularity earned him the title of ‘the preacher of the century’, explained the meaning of revolution in Islam in one of his televised sermons; according to him, Islam marked a transformation of human history or what he called ‘the revolution of heaven against the doctrine of Earth.2 Thus, the Prophet came to end an epoch of corruption and injustice. Civilians can also revolt, argues El-Shaarawy, to end ‘what they think’ is corruption. Here El-Shaarawy distinguishes real revolutionaries from trouble-makers. The latter category includes those who rebel frequently and cause chaos in society, while the real revolutionaries only ‘revolt in order to end injustice and then retreat in order to build glories’. Gamal Abdel Nasser used to refer to this definition of revolution in his speeches in the early 1960s, in which he compared the 1952 coup to jihad, distinguishing between the lesser (a spiritual struggle within oneself against sin) and the greater (a struggle against non-believers), referring to the coup as the lesser jihad, resulting in a quick operation to end colonialism, while the latter referred to the lengthy process of rebuilding Egypt (Hanafi 1989: 55). Revolution, therefore, can be the expression of a strong faith, as Muslims are encouraged to amend the wrong with their own hands, according to the Hadith: ‘If one of you sees something wrong, let him change it with his hand; if he cannot, then with his tongue; if he cannot, then with his heart and this is the weakest faith.’ Abu Zeid (1994), however, argues that Islamists can resort to the weapon of expiation of the ruler over a long period of time, instead of acting immediately in order to cease his corruption. Islamists (whether moderate or extremist) can endorse revolutionary movements if they manage to reform the ruler. Expiation (takfir) may not automatically lead to revolution, which may take several years to simmer below the surface. The leading Islamic scholar Muhammad Ghazali (d. 1996), for instance, reminded the Egyptians

148  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m that the Prophet did not destroy a single statue of the old gods, until he was sixty-one years of age; instead, he verbally called for change to happen, and when the chance arose to open Mecca, statues were then destroyed (quoted in Abu Zeid 1994: 69). Takfir became a weapon in modern religious discourses, appearing and disappearing, according to the ebb and flow of the relationship between state and Muslim movements (Abu Zeid 1994: 71). Takfir, moreover, can be a weapon to use in order to alienate political opponents and even to agitate public opinion against foreign states (p. 72). Another example is Sayed Qutb, the former leading figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, who dedicated his book, Milestones, by denouncing the former President Gamal Abdel Nasser as an infidel, and his regime as the rule of ignorance (jahiliyya). Al-Odah (2012: 33) says that revolution usually aims at ‘rejuvenation and self-criticism moving the self to a better state’. It is different from a military coup in that the state could be hijacked by a small number of people who eventually take full control of everything. Revolution in essence is a manifestation of public anger, but it differs from other protests such as intifada (shaking off) in that the latter needs to develop into a genuine revolution by expanding its limited goals and presence (p. 35). Revolution is also a ‘leap and not a gradual movement . . . aiming at overcoming a past experience which did not contribute to the reform needed by the people . . . it is also an attempt to bridge the huge gap between the ruler and the ruled. It is a form of equality between the ruled and ruler through re-writing the social contract’ (p. 36). Revolution, then, carries the meaning of ‘deliverance from suffering and oppression’ (Walzer 1984: ix) and connotes a process of transformation of the political landscape, and accordingly, re-organisation of the social world. It is a story of different stages, including oppression, liberation, covenant and new society. Only in the sense of oppression, corruption and moral revulsion can revolution make sense as an inevitable transformation for the restoration of balance and justice and secure progress (Walzer 1984: 40). Progress in society may be based only on faith or on secular modernisation plans such as those adopted by Nasser’s regime. Both views share the belief in knowledge and education as remedies for the backwardness of the Arab-Islamic nation. Corrupt rulers would not therefore encourage education and dissemination of knowledge, lest the new, educated cadres threaten their authoritarian power: the end of such rulers would help strengthen the Arab

when eg ypti ans revolt  | 149 nation (umma). The 1940s, for instance, witnessed a call by many nationalist parties to provide free education to all citizens and revolutions were linked to the rise of an intellectual elite. Even with the end of authoritarian regimes, however, knowledge might not necessarily be attained by all social groups, for there are always some groups who are favoured by God with more knowledge and intellectual power: It is God who has given some of you more provisions than others. Those who have been given more are unwilling to pass their provision on to the slaves they possess so that they become their equals. How can they refuse to acknowledge God’s blessings? (Al-Nahl, The Bee, 16: 71)

I’mara (1988: 76) argues that ‘provisions’ (possessions) can refer to needs such as shelter or intellect; thus, those who lack intellectual wealth might be ill-prepared for democracy because they represent intolerant demagogues (Lipset 1960). Other Quranic verses emphasise this division by intellectual ability: You who believe, if you are told to make room for one another in your assemblies, then do so, and God will make room for you, and if you are told to rise up, do so: God will raise up, by many degrees, those of you who believe and who have been given knowledge: He is fully aware of what you do. (Al-Mujadala, The Dispute, 58: 11)

and Say, [God says], how can those who know be equal to those who do not know? Only those who have understanding will take heed. (Al-Zumar, The Throngs, 39: 9)

Revolutions however, are not always triggered by poverty or deprivation. Hafez (2003: xvi) argues that uprisings in the Muslim world are not primarily an aggressive response to economic deprivation or psychological alienation produced by severe impoverishment or failed modernization. Muslim rebellions generally speaking, are a defensive reaction to predatory state repression that threatens the organizational resources and lives of political Islamists.

150  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m He further shows that there is little correlation between economic deprivation and insurgency in five Arab Muslim countries, namely Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia (p. 10). Another example is Iran, prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, when the annual growth rate was high and unemployment was relatively low (p. 15). Kuran (1989) argues that major political revolutions are unanticipated, such as the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and that the reason for this is that people who rebel against their government are usually able to hide their desire for change until the opposition is stronger. The unpredictability comes from what Kuran calls ‘preference falsification’, or when individuals who, for any number of reasons, become increasingly sympathetic to the idea of change, do not necessarily take actions that betray their changing private preferences. If the government enjoys widespread support and, hence, is very powerful, such individuals find it prudent to remain outwardly loyal to the existing order. In the process, they keep the government, outside observers, opposition leaders, and even each other in the dark as to the regime’s vulnerability. Their silence makes society appear stable, even though it would find itself in the throes of revolution if there were even a slight surge in the size of the position. Sooner or later, a relatively minor event makes a few individuals reach their boiling point and take to the streets in protest. This kicks off the latent revolutionary bandwagon, and the opposition darts into power. The magnitude and speed of the revolutionary process come as an enormous surprise, precisely because the masses had been concealing their growing frustrations. (Kuran 1989: 60)

Ayatollah Khomeini spread the message that the Iranian soldiers’ sympathy lay with the people and not with the Shah, in order to mobilise his supporters and avoid a clash with the Shah’s army (Kuran 1989: 64). He was not even sure that the revolution would succeed and he could not predict its speed (ibid. p. 64). The Iranian Revolution united people from all walks of life to join in the uprising, including Westernised scholars, the Muslim clergy, nationalists and communists, workers and wealthy people, even those who might have benefited during the Shah’s rule. This unity, however, concealed the fact that it could trigger a counter-revolution after the

when eg ypti ans revolt  | 151 Shah’s ousting. The Islamic regime conducted massive campaigns of ‘repression and i­ndoctrination’ to suppress any anti-Islamic movement (Kuran 1989: 68). There were several attempts by Islamic movements to end authoritarian post-independence regimes during the twentieth century, but these were met with fierce state subjugation of Islamists, which, argues Hafez (2003), did not always result in the elimination of Islamist opposition. To illustrate this argument, Hafez (2003) drew on examples from Algeria, where repression intensified the Islamist uprising, and Egypt, where the mixed strategy of tolerance and oppression did not manage to keep insurgency at bay. Theories of revolution would either see the process of transformation as performed by a divine power, the vanguard, or by the oppressed themselves (Walzer 1984: 49). The underpinning issue is that people revolt in an attempt to reclaim their freedom, although they might eventually accept the authority of divine laws. There is, as Walzer (1984: 53) argues, ‘a kind of bondage in freedom: the bondage of law, obligation, and responsibility. True freedom . . . lies in servitude to God’. Claims have been made that Muslims have entered a new covenant, as Islam is said to have protected individual freedoms and reformed society by transforming the Peninsula society from a tribal one, preoccupied with wars and backwardness, to an empire (Barakat 1982: 52). The question of freedom occupied Arab thinkers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on freeing the Arab mind from European cultural and imperial powers. Ironically, Arab scholars, such as the Egyptian Al-Azhar scholar Rifaa Tahtawi, looked up to the West in their articulation of the question of freedom; following his sojourn in Paris between 1826 and 1831, Tahtawi (d. 1873) equated freedom with justice, in which freedom for the Parisian society was synonymous with what Egyptians would regard as fairness and justice. He praised the Parisians for guaranteeing individual freedom, based on the equal application of laws: ‘All residents in France, regardless of their status, have to obey the laws . . . this is the bedrock for justice and equality in treating the poor and the rich . . . this is one reason why they have progressed in human sciences’ (quoted in Barakat 1982: 289). Ahmed Lotfi Al- Sayyed (d. 1963), another Egyptian scholar, valued freedom, which for him was synonymous with life itself:

152  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m if we were to live by bread and water only, we would be happy, but our real food is of a higher degree and today it has become the most precious and expensive demand. It is to nurture our minds with nothing less than freedom. I wonder how some would think that life is one thing and freedom is another matter, and cannot see that freedom is life and no life without freedom. (quoted in Barakat 1982: 66)

Freedom is therefore an integral part of life and individuals, according to  Qasim Amin (quoted in I’mara 1976: 28), seek freedom as part of their  development and, although they are born free, they may face repression in various forms throughout their lives, until they reclaim their freedom. Revolution is consequently an event that aims to restore justice and freedom by ending corruption and inequity; thus, it is not necessarily an event that aims to (re-)instate Muslim ideologies, especially in states where the majority of the people are Muslims. This injustice must also affect a large segment of the population, including youth, who would then express their anger by revolting in order to end the state of unfairness. One such young influential figure was Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in 1928, who promoted the ethos of altruism and the struggle against British imperialism. Revolution against Infidelity The above discussion shows the reasons, such as corruption, that could trigger a revolution, but what if the ruler is part of a well-established Islamic movement such as the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)? Why would Egyptians rebel against him, if he seemingly abided by Islamic virtues? The answer is that such a ruler can still be accused of infidelity, not because he has breached Islamic rules but because of his disloyalty to Mother Egypt. An examination of the MB and how it ruled the country – albeit for only a year – after being oppressed for eighty years, is an example. The Muslim Brotherhood proved an important ally to the Free Officers in the coup d’état in 1952. Gamal Abdel Nasser met with the founder of the Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna, and shared his views on the future of Egypt. This was confirmed in the memoirs of Khaled Mohieldin, a key member

when eg ypti ans revolt  | 153 of the Revolution Command Council. Mohieldin recalled the words of Al-Banna in his welcome to Nasser: We, the Brotherhood, are like an immense hall that can be entered by any Muslim from any door to partake of whatever he wishes. Should he seek Sufism, he shall find us ready. Should he seek sports and scouting, it is there. Should he seek battle and armed struggle, he shall find us. You have come to us with the issue of the nation, so I welcome you. (Mohieldin 2012)

The Free Officers, however, refused to share political power with the Brotherhood, and rejected the call for an Islamic constitution. The tension between the regime and the Brotherhood had increased by 1954, when Egypt signed a treaty with Britain regarding the Suez Canal. The movement clashed with Nasser’s regime, which culminated in the Brotherhood’s failed attempt to assassinate him in 1954. This prompted Nasser to abolish the MB organisation and imprison and torture thousands of its members. Leading intellectuals such as Taha Hussein, Ali Amin, Kamel Al-Shennawi and Galal Al-Din Al-Hamamsi, criticised the assassination act as a call for violence and chaos (fitna). Taha Hussein (Hussein et al. 1955: 13) attacked what he saw as the Brotherhood’s hypocrisy in instigating killings of fellow Egyptians, contrary to the teachings of Islam; in his critique, he referred to the MB as the ‘gang’ who had already planned Nasser’s assassination long before he signed the new treaty with Britain in 1954 (p. 28). The Brotherhood were accused of alliance with communists, and even the Zionists, not only for personal gain, but for receiving large sums of money from the Free Officers in order to help fight the British presence in Suez (Hussein et al. 1955). Nasser issued Law No. 8 of 1958 which required that syndicate council candidates must be members of the ruling party, in an attempt to curb MB control of professional syndicates. Nasser also assumed the power to dissolve the syndicates, for example, the Lawyers’ and Journalists’ Syndicates in 1954, when they sided with his opponent Mohammed Naguib, who suggested that the army should quit the political scene and return to its barracks. It was still obligatory for candidates to obtain approval from the Attorney-General, even though Law No. 8 was later amended in 1977. Sadat continued Nasser’s harsh course of action, and dissolved all syndicates in 1971 in order to disempower the Arab Socialist

154  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m Union; a decade later, Sadat dissolved the Lawyers’ Syndicate and imprisoned its president, following criticism of his treaty with Israel (Fahmy 1998: 555). The period between the 1970s and the 1990s witnessed incidents of increased hostility between the Islamists and the leftist groups in Egypt (Abdelrahman 2009: 41). This coincided with the clash between state security and Islamist groups, culminating in the police siege of Imbaba district in Cairo in 1992, where Islamists and members of Gamaa Islamiyya were known to take refuge, and consequently resulted in their defeat (Dorman 2009: 419). This changed during the last decade, which saw a renewed alliance between the leftist and Islamist activists out of feelings that it would be more productive to collaborate rather than limit each group to like-minded people (Abdelrahman 2009: 45). The MB formed alliances with leftist and liberal parties during Mubarak’s rule, in an attempt to participate in the electoral process; for instance, in 1984, it joined forces with the liberal Wafd party and won fifty-eight seats. It took part in an opposition boycott of parliamentary balloting, calling for transparent elections and rigorous monitoring in 1990. It subsequently co-operated with the Socialist Labour Party and the Liberal Socialist Party to form the Labour Islamic Alliance, winning sixty seats, of which thirty-seven were held by the MB. The Brotherhood participated in the 2005 elections with 161 candidates, although they attempted to avoid direct confrontation with the government by keeping the number of candidates down so that in the event of them winning the elections, they would not have full control of parliament (Hamzawy and Brown 2010: 7). In addition, the Brotherhood joined forces with liberal movements such as Kefayya in major street protests in March 2006, following the arrest of two Egyptian judges who had denounced the 2005 election process (Vairel 2011: 39). The three decades under Mubarak’s rule were marked by increased levels of corruption, deterioration of the legal and political conditions, increased police brutality, acute breaches of human rights, lack of free elections and serious undermining of the freedom of speech. The 25 January Revolution began as a massive protest, supported by many political movements such as Youth for Justice and Freedom, Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution, the National Association for Change, as well as opposition political parties such as the Ghad Party (led by Ayman Nour), Karama, Wafd, Democratic Front and the MB.

when eg ypti ans revolt  | 155 Tensions between the Brotherhood and liberal forces escalated following the 2011 revolution, and the MB was accused of thuggery. The former presidential candidate and Head of the Socialist Popular Alliance party Abu el-Ezz el-Hariri, for instance, accused the Brotherhood of hiring thugs to assault him and his wife in Alexandria in November 2012. Another example of this tension was the so-called ‘Battle of the Camel’, a parody of the historical revolt of AD 655 which marked the first civil war in Islam. The modern battle, however, refers specifically to the notorious attack on protestors with horses and camels on 2 February 2011, which was said to be orchestrated by two former officials of Mubarak’s deposed National Democratic Party (NDP). The confrontation was significant because it triggered a series of angry protests following the court’s acquittal of all twenty-four defendants in October 2012. The Brotherhood were accused of striking a deal with the military in order to conceal the evidence for the case; moreover, the former presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq, one of the leading figures during Mubarak’s rule, accused the Brotherhood of plotting this attack by using hired thugs. A year of turmoil followed, in which the MB’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, led the country amidst a strong sense of polarisation, which still prevails. Morsi was overthrown and arrested, together with scores of other MB leading figures. The MB leaders, at the time of writing, were jailed, not only accused of high treason, but of conspiring with Hamas to enter Egyptian territories and free Egyptian prisoners. The Egyptian intelligence claimed to have intercepted calls between Hamas and the Brotherhood during the 25 January Revolution, requesting Hamas to infiltrate Egypt in order to support the Brotherhood from there. The former President Morsi was detained by the security forces on 27 January 2011 and moved to Wadi Al-Notroun prison; Hamas was claimed to have infiltrated the Sinai borders, stormed the prison and set Morsi and others free. Morsi spied for the US and Turkey, according to the broadcaster Abdel Rahim ’Ali, who sued Morsi for treason (Essam El-Din 2013). The Brotherhood were accused of reviving the Islamic Caliphate, preferring it rather than showing allegiance to their native Egypt. They were accused of planning to sell off the Suez Canal to Qatar, to hand over Sinai to Hamas as an alternative Palestinian homeland, and to allow Libya to take over Salloum, as part of Libya’s eastern borders. The then Defence Minister

156  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s decree to prohibit the sale of land in the Sinai to foreigners was welcomed as a patriotic act against the Brotherhood’s treason. There were also talks about the MB’s intention to hand the Halayeb triangle to Sudan, where the current regime had declared its moral allegiance to the MB in Egypt. This was after the former regime had rejected discussions with Sudan on the Halayeb issue and expelled all Sudanese police from the area, in the wake of the failed attempt to assassinate former President Mubarak in 1995 (Eleiba 2013). It was also claimed that the MB’s Freedom and Justice Party website featured a map showing Halayeb as part of Sudan and not Egypt (ibid.). Others alleged that the MB had long conspired against the Egyptian army, regarding it as an emblem of Egypt’s strength as a nation-state. General Sameh Seif Yazal, for instance, claimed that the MB had led a systematic campaign in international media to discredit the Egyptian army, in order to turn international public opinion against it. The treason, it was claimed, dated back to colonial times, when the MB conspired with European colonial powers against the Ottoman Empire. The MB also conspired with the USA and Israel, it was further claimed, to end Saddam’s rule in Iraq (Abu-el-Hasan 2013). The Brotherhood’s supporters who waved the black flag with the slogan: ‘no God but God’, led many commentators to claim that it was a sign of their treason and disloyalty to the Egyptian flag; when the Salafist preacher Ahmed Amer called for a new Egyptian flag, not only secularists but other Islamist scholars rejected the idea, stating that the flag was a symbol of Egyptian culture (Abdel-Baky 2012). The current flag, introduced in 1984, has three bands: red, white and black; the red band represents the 1952 coup, the white represents its peacefulness, and the black band is a symbol of the British and monarchical oppression before 1952. Superimposed in the centre of the flag is an eagle, referring to the Eagle of Saladin who led the Islamic forces during the Crusades in the twelfth century. The Egyptian flag has changed at least ten times over the last century: the most notable flags were the ones introduced in 1923, with a green and white crescent marking the conditional independence from Britain in 1922, and the flag introduced in 1958, marking the short-lived unity between Egypt and Syria (Abdel-Baky 2012). Flying the flag has become a symbol of one’s belonging to Egypt and a source

when eg ypti ans revolt  | 157 of pride, particularly after the 25 January Revolution. Ordinary Egyptians were claimed to have rejected the idea of changing the flag: for example, one shop owner saw the flag as a symbol of ‘the native land, the Egyptian soil, and the country’s principles’ (quoted in Samih 2013). One street vendor warned against replacing the flag because if it were changed ‘there [would be] a danger that the people [would] change too’ (quoted in Samih 2013). Ali Suleiman, the Egyptian psychiatrist, said: ‘the flag could function as a symbol of motherhood, a kind of safe haven and embodiment of the mother of all Egyptians’ and, like a son kissing the hand of his mother to express his gratitude to her, Egyptians respecting the flag would express similar feelings, and if some Islamists wanted to change this flag with the Al-Qaeda black flag, they would be promoting a symbol of ‘a stepmother’, demonstrating their alienation from Mother Egypt (Samih 2013). The MB, although appearing to be representative of pious and uncorrupted Muslims, were accused of being disloyal to the nation, thereby dishonouring Mother Egypt. It was claimed that the MB’s allegiance was not to the nation, but to an international network whose interests did not necessarily coincide with Egyptian ones. The corruption in which they were involved, it was further claimed, was not necessarily based on material greed, but on moral perversion, which turned the movement into the enemy from within, and hence justified rebellion against MB rule. Conclusion The selected Islamist thinkers briefly discussed in this chapter regard revolution as an expression of public anger against injustice and not necessarily as a lengthy and on-going process spanning more than one phase. Revolutionaries are regarded as faithful subjects with an adequate ethical disposition that enables them to discern wrong deeds and deviation from Islamic teachings, and to rebel against these wrongs. The ongoing turmoil in Egypt, on the other hand, illustrates that revolution is indeed a long process, and that the toppling of a corrupt regime is just the first step towards maintaining justice and order in society. This is reminiscent of the second phase predicted by the Egyptian commentator Muhammad Hassanien Heikal (1982: 4–5), who sees revolution as a multi-stage process in which the first phase is a euphoric realisation of suppressed dreams and, during that phase, ‘the revolution can

158  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m afford to be generous and can embrace many divergent opinions’. Subsequent stages, however, reveal that revolution clashes with reality and the awareness that dreams alone are not enough to change that reality. It is here that revolutionaries discover the difficulty in ‘reconciling state and revolution’. Revolution therefore, is an expression of the desire for change. Revolution in Islam is also a call to restore justice, to end corruption, and to return rights to those who lost them; however, when Islamists ruled Egypt, the meaning of revolution shifted to being centred on disloyalty to Egypt and lack of patriotism. In both cases, revolution does not necessarily aim at addressing the social issue of redistributing material resources in society for the benefit of the poor; rather, it is a fight against corruption (material or moral), while keeping intact the hierarchal societal system. Post-revolutionary Egypt, for instance, showed that middle-class revolutionaries were met with the murmurings of the lower classes who yearned for a more prosperous life but refused many of the new legislations, such as the laws regulating street vendors; when the lower classes joined the revolt during the decisive eighteen days in 2011, they did it to fulfil their humble dreams of not only a decent life, higher wages and better education opportunities for their children, but improved state services such as health care, sewage systems, cheaper electricity and gas. The ongoing protests in Egypt among social groups illustrates the difficulties in fulfilling the social justice dream without the united efforts of all social groups, in order to restructure and reform all state institutions. Notes 1. 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794, according to the French Revolutionary Calendar; available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermidorian_Reaction (accessed 3 March 2015). 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LPQxLhoLtk.

Conclusion

The massive Egyptian protests in Tahrir Square in 2011, argues Hamid Dabashi (2012: 12), marked the end of post-colonialism. In an interview with Al Jadaliyya (2012), Dabashi states his thesis as follows: the end of post-colonialism is a narrative marking of the commencement of this liberation geography, accentuated by an even playing field in which our people can define the terms of their own history, no longer in conversation with a dead interlocutor called ‘the West’.

The post-independence era was marked by a variety of ideologies, such as socialism, Islamism and nationalism; the post-revolution regimes cannot be identified with the same ideologies, thereby marking new regimes of knowledge where the previous binary of East and West have finally collapsed (Al-Jadaliyya 2012). The end of post-colonialism therefore means the death of the concept of the ‘West’ as a powerful construct and a dualistic opposition to the East; on the other hand, post-colonialism ‘stands for a transformational politics, for a politics dedicated to the removal of inequality’ (Young 2003: 114). It aims to bring to the fore the views of those outside the hegemonic power structure, whether this exclusion is caused by their economic deprivation, ethnicity or gender. Post-colonialism then is concerned with the issue of identity: of that of subaltern or marginalised vis-à-vis those in power. The question here is whether the ‘Egyptian Spring’ has empowered the subaltern, 159

160  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m freeing them from authoritarian regimes following years of colonial political order. One argument in this book is that Egyptians have not yet managed to free themselves from the shackles of hegemonic ideologies, and that since its political independence, the new ruling elites have sought to re-instate a similar political order, suppressing not only the political rights of citizens, but also any attempt to construct a true national identity or Egyptian-ness. It is true that the 25 January Revolution was depicted in Anglo-American media as an inevitable action against tyranny (similar to the French Revolution). Egyptians were depicted as enlightened people rising up to demand political freedom; however, regime change and genuine elections do not alone reflect the essence of true democracy, as is the case with Freedom House ranking, in which new Eastern European democracies may receive high scores for holding fair elections, but this ranking does not take account of the widespread corruption or restriction on freedom of expression (Welzel and Inglehart 2008: 128). The Egyptian Revolution was also depicted as a masterpiece of collective action and a multi-class movement in which Egyptians from all walks of life and across different social classes were united around one goal, which was to oust Mubarak and his regime. This collective action was expected to spur a profound transformation of the social system, particularly with the oft-chanted slogan of the Revolution: ‘Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice’. Instead, the issues of freedom and social justice remain unresolved, and the central question now seems to rest on sifting out the true Egyptian representatives from the ‘false Egyptians’ who show allegiance to external states or bodies and not to Mother Egypt, such as the Muslim Brotherhood leaders and supporters who were imprisoned, accused of high treason. Accusations have poured from all directions since 2011, targeting not only the Brotherhood supporters but also key activists who were once hailed for master-minding the 2011 revolution. The Egyptian journalist Abdel Rahim Ali, host of a controversial programme on Al-Qahera Wal Naas channel (The Black Box), for instance, released recordings of telephone conversations between prominent activists such as Mostafa al Naggar, Asmaa Mahfouz, Wael Ghonim and others, suggesting that they were complicit in a plot with foreign nations to bring down Mubarak’s regime. Mubarak himself

conclusi on | 161 was labelled an agent of the US, and myriad images available on the Internet showed anti-Mubarak graffiti sprayed on street walls and even on burnt-out trucks belonging to the security forces, accusing him of being a US puppet. A key figure, the Nobel Laureate Mohamed El-Baradei received his share of accusations. He was once depicted as the symbol of a new democratic era, uniting thousands of Egyptians from all walks of life to greet him at the airport upon this arrival in February 2010, a scene that made the well-known writer Ala’a Al-Aswani (2011: 136) declare that day as representing the end of submissiveness to injustice. The throngs of Egyptians who conquered their fears and gathered at the airport to welcome El-Baradei were not professional politicians, and most of them did not belong to any political parties. They were very ordinary Egyptians, like one’s neighbours or work colleagues, and they came from different provinces and different social classes. Some of them came in luxury cars and many came by public transport, including university professors, professionals, students, farmers, writers, artists, and housewives, Muslims and Copts, veiled and unveiled women, some wearing the niqab, others not. These Egyptians, different in every way, all agreed on change, on ­serious work to restore justice and freedom.

Fast-forward to 2013, and Mohamed El-Baradei became the subject of a court trial, after resigning his post as interim Vice-President for Foreign Affairs, on charges of breaching national trust, and many talk shows accused him of betraying Egypt. El-Baradei was also accused of being a foreign agent because he had lived and studied outside Egypt, the Nobel Prize he received merely his reward for sabotaging Egypt’s development (Youssef 2014). The same happened to activist Wael Ghoneim who held a respectable post in the American company Google, which made him ostensibly an agent and a traitor (ibid.). The satirist Bassem Youssef was also accused of being a traitor, a spy and a CIA agent. One newspaper editor once wondered how Youssef could possibly manage to obtain undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, a doctorate degree, as well as the British College of Surgeons’ fellowship, and a professional license from the United States, all in a matter of seven years; these achievements, suggested the journalist, could have been the rewards for being an agent (Youssef 2014).

162  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m Supporters of a civil state fired similar accusations during the Brotherhood’s rule; for example, an Islamic cleric who opposed the Muslim Brotherhood described the ousted President Mohammed Morsi as a Zionist who shared security interests with Israel. The cleric also criticised the former president of planning for auctioning the exploration of key historical sites and monuments to Qatar.1 An interim president, Adly Mansour, was appointed after Morsi was deposed, who became subject to rumours from Brotherhood supporters that he was also an agent. One example was Al-Jazeera (Arabic) presenter, Ahmed Mansour, who wrote on his social media sites that Adly Mansour was not a Muslim Egyptian, but had originated from a Jewish family, in order to cast doubt on Mansour’s loyalty to Mother Egypt. Egyptians even became suspicious of advertising, excessively decoding what they saw as secret messages amongst the Brotherhood supporters or their opposition; for instance, in January 2014, Vodafone Egypt issued a statement denying that a commercial which it had produced – featuring Muppet-like dolls – carried any form of subversive messages. The statement followed allegations aired on a television talk show that the commercial contained imagery and words suggesting a coded message, specifically addressed to Islamist terrorists: it showed a cactus with four branches, suspiciously similar to the four-fingered salute that became a symbol for Brotherhood supporters (The Economist 2014). The role of the military in toppling the Brotherhood, following the 30 June uprising, was glorified with songs created in support of the military and its then leader, Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, such as ‘May those hands be safe’ referring to the military officer as the hero who had sacrificed his life to protect his country and make Mother Egypt proud. Mainstream media – privately owned or state-owned – moreover, joined forces to disseminate the rhetoric of ‘the need for stability’, argues Hussein Abdel Ghani, an Egyptian journalist (2014: 133). The message was to divert attention away from the demands of the 2011 revolution and focus on the need to re-establish security and turn the wheel of production, as was often stated in televised talk shows and reported in newspaper columns. This rhetoric, argues Abdel Ghani, did not differ much from Mubarak’s, which embraced corruption and torture. The 30 June event was not only a civil-military alliance, but also a socio-­ political one, involving protestors who had never previously engaged in pro-

conclusi on | 163 tests. The military apparatus, argues Abdel Ghani, which was doomed to a marginalised role under Mubarak’s regime, found in the revolution an opportunity to return to the centre of the political scene. Thus the 30 June uprising produced the military-capitalistic alliance of the army and businessmen – of which many owned private media outlets – who then jointly launched several campaigns to scare voters away from choosing leaders from outside this military-capitalistic circle or their closest allies, and another to discredit many civil activists, leading citizens to accept that ‘for the interest of Egypt, the one who rules should preferably be a military figure’ (Abdel Ghani 2014: 141). There is indeed a remarkable resemblance in the above accusations, whether made by those who supported Mubarak, the military forces or the Brotherhood, in that each group accuses the others of being traitors to Mother Egypt. However, what is interesting is that none of these groups sought to define the unique Egyptian qualities which those traitors denounced, or the glue that binds all Egyptians but failed to bind those traitors within the national fabric. Here, understanding Egyptian national identity is pivotal in making sense of the recent uprisings in Egypt. National identity rests on social bonds and a great sense of community; but this community includes imaginary boundaries separating those who should be included and those who should be excluded, even within the same group of compatriots. Thus, there are those who fit into a certain prototype, but the problem in Egyptian society is that this prototype has been in flux: at times, it referred to the good-natured simple ibn al-balad, while at other times, it referred to the hard-working middle class; in recent times, it referred to successful businessmen with an international outlook and, following the uprisings, the prototype has been fragmented between different social and ideological groups, with each seeing themselves as the ideal representation of Egyptian-ness. The previous chapters have illustrated the disintegration of Egyptian society in terms of language, the roots of Egyptian identity, personality traits, education and the characteristics of the true representatives of the nation. The recent uprisings have revealed the deep-seated diversity within Egyptian society comprising different ethnic and religious communities. While past state leaders attempted to unify Egyptians around one ethnocultural identifier, making Cairo the prototype of such an identity, Egyptians

164  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m cannot really pride themselves in a set of values which they can ascribe to themselves á la the American creed or the American dream, whether in work ethics or democratic or constitutional values, which could incorporate diverse groups, including non-Egyptians, into the national Egyptian fabric. The only value since 2011 that has become strongly affiliated with Egyptian-ness is patriotism, as a manifestation of strong loyalty to the territory rather than to a set of norms, but this, as illustrated above, has been loosely defined, as it is becoming easy to discredit one’s opponents by casting doubt on their patriotism and loyalty to Mother Egypt. Diversity in ideologies and beliefs, paradoxically, has become a divisive force in Egypt, which has embraced a myriad of cultures during the early part of the twentieth century. Egyptians should realise that, contrary to the dominant state rhetoric, differences in views and beliefs do not necessarily degenerate into anarchy or antagonism, nor do they harm the ‘collective we’ feeling, but can actually strengthen the appreciation of a common Egyptian-ness. The question of identity will continue to occupy the Egyptians, and will continue to be used or abused by political players. Identity plays an important role in securing a state’s legitimacy: states where citizens share common ideas and a common sense of identity enjoy legitimacy and good governance, while states that lack a common identity will never progress. In the latter case, a state can risk collapsing in the face of unpredictable conditions, with ‘fluid, unstable environments encourag[ing] polities to split along the most profound cleavages: ethnicity, religion, tribe, clan and so forth’ (Kaplan 2009: 467); if it does not end in bloodshed, uncertainty can result in stalemate and the inability to promote development. Egyptians need to feel a sense of belonging, to feel that they have a stake in their society and that they can all work towards the same goal and face the same challenges. They need to share the Egyptian dream. Note 1. http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2013/03/01/269060.html.

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Index

1919 revolution, 3, 10, 25, 41, 99 1952 coup, 3, 11–12, 17–18, 24, 30, 32, 42–5, 62–7, 97–9, 127, 129, 132, 135, 142, 144, 145, 147, 152, 156 1967 defeat, 3, 22, 28, 30, 32, 46, 66, 68, 122–30 1992 earthquake, 31, 47, 85, 90 2011 revolution, 2–4, 13, 16, 20, 30–1, 34, 37, 49, 50, 56–7, 74–5, 77, 80, 83, 89–90, 92–4, 103, 120, 125, 136, 137, 141–2, 155, 159, 160, 162 25 January, 4, 16, 57, 138, 144, 154, 155, 157, 160 al-Azhar, 20, 23, 34, 98–9, 102–3, 119, 151 Al-Banna, Hassan, 101, 104, 114, 152, 153 Al-Mahalla, 44–5, 89 al-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 75, 80, 156, 162 Americanisation, 130 Arab Spring, 1, 11, 136 Arabic, 101–2, 105–33 Arabisation, 106, 113 Army, 2, 9, 22, 25, 63, 66, 75, 77, 83–4, 104, 126–7, 129, 136, 150, 153, 156, 163 ashwayyat, 46–8, 80. See also Slums authoritarian, 3, 8, 32, 64, 148–9, 151, 160 Ayalon, Ami, 146

Bassem Youssef, 161 Bedouins, 88–9, 118 bourgeoisie, 42, 59, 62–4, 66, 70–1 Christians, 21, 23, 27, 49 civil society, 4, 10, 12, 13, 33, 77, 81, 84–7, 93, 127 collective identity, 6–8, 29,30 colloquial language, 108–9, 112, 114 colonialism, 1, 7, 22, 41, 105, 113, 124, 147, 159 communities, 11, 30, 31, 46–8, 71, 81–2, 91, 107, 111, 163 constitution, 115, 20, 41, 50, 57, 109, 125, 133, 153, 164 Coptic, 6, 8, 16, 23, 25, 27, 106, 117 crowds, 38–9 culture, 3, 17, 24, 28, 33, 38, 42, 46, 86–7, 95–6, 102, 108–9, 114, 116, 123–5, 128–9, 130–9, 145, 156, 164 diversity, 127, 135–6, 163–4 education, 42–5, 49, 55, 61–4, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 78, 80, 84–6, 93, 95–9, 100–7, 109, 112,113, 119, 128, 131–3, 137, 148–9, 158, 163 Egyptian Parliament, 11, 57, 88, 118 Egyptian vernacular, 96, 106–19, 130, 131 Egyptian-ness, 3–9, 14, 17, 160, 163, 164

188

i ndex | 189 El-Baradei, Mohamed, 161 Europe, 25–6, 35, 79, 97, 107, 130, 133 fahlawi, 3, 13, 27, 30 family, 32, 44, 49, 51–2, 70, 78–9, 81, 83, 88, 89, 93, 117, 124, 147, 162 fitna, 146, 153 Free Officers, 22, 30, 32, 43–4, 65, 97, 132, 152–3 French Revolution, 24, 38, 61, 74, 121, 142–3, 160 Galal Amin, 63, 126, 129 globalisation, 36, 65, 134–5 Gulf States, 3, 29, 30, 65, 72, 79, 103 Hamdan, Gamal 28 hegemony, 18, 102, 124, 134 higher education, 2, 32, 67, 97, 99 housing, 29, 43, 45–8, 53–4, 56, 60, 63, 72, 78, 84, 90, 92, 100 ibn al-balad, 4, 37, 39, 42, 59, 108, 163 imperialism, 20, 27–9, 103, 114, 122, 125, 132, 134–5, 152 infitah, 68, 29, 48; see also Open Door policy intellectuals, 3, 4, 8, 10, 13, 17, 24, 26, 42, 62, 63, 89, 108–9, 111, 113, 115, 121–3, 135–7, 129, 130–3, 136, 138–40, 142 Islam, 7, 8, 20–5, 27, 52–3, 78, 79, 103–4, 109, 118, 123–6, 133, 142–3, 146–7, 151, 153, 155, 158 Islamic identity, 8, 17, 103 Israel, 3, 6, 10–11, 28–9, 46, 68, 73, 98, 126, 129, 136, 154, 156, 162 jihad, 22, 147 labour market, 9, 33, 96, 99, 100, 119 liberalism, 26, 40, 125, 133 masses, 3, 21, 37–9, 40, 42, 44, 84, 97, 106, 108, 123, 129, 139, 150 MB see Muslim Brotherhood media, 2, 3, 7, 11, 17, 19, 23, 31, 34, 37–9, 62, 65, 75, 77, 80, 82, 86, 89, 93–6, 102–3, 107–10, 113–15, 120, 129, 131, 133–9, 156, 160, 162–3 Mediterranean, 26–27

middle class, 3–4, 10, 12–13, 32, 41, 45–7, 55–9, 60–7, 69, 70–7, 84, 86, 91–4, 98, 101, 111, 115, 118, 129, 143, 158, 163 military, 4, 12, 30, 35, 41–2, 45–6, 51, 62–8, 77, 83, 89, 106, 123, 127, 130–2, 136, 142, 148, 155, 162–3 Misri, 4, 26, 59, 70 Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), 105, 107–15, 117, 119 modernisation, 20, 36, 105–6, 113, 124, 127, 132, 148 Mohamed Ali, 25, 26 morality, 20, 137 Morsi, Mohamed, 3, 11, 50, 77, 89, 91, 103–4, 138–9, 155, 162 mosques, 20, 23, 85–6, 93, 103, 110 Mother Egypt, 15, 32, 129, 152, 157, 160, 162–4 Mubarak, Hosni, 1–4, 13, 30–1, 36, 49, 50, 56, 62, 64, 67, 70, 74, 77–8, 83–5, 88, 92–4, 103, 105, 118, 133–4, 136–9, 140, 154–6, 160–3 Muslim Brotherhood, 1, 4, 15, 36, 40, 50, 52, 56, 71, 77, 85, 90, 96, 102, 104, 114, 137–8, 142–3, 148, 152, 160, 162 Naguib Mahfouz, 30, 46, 108, 114, 131, 134 Nahda, 7, 21, 96, 122, 125 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 3, 11, 13, 18, 22, 28, 42–5, 47, 60, 64–8, 74–5, 84, 97–8, 104, 109, 127, 132–4, 147, 152–3 National Democratic Party, 50, 120, 155 national identity, 2–9, 13–14, 16–20, 24–6, 28–9, 34, 39, 41, 65, 95–6, 109, 111, 119, 128, 139, 160, 163 nationalism, 3, 13, 18–19, 20, 25, 28, 32, 41, 107–9, 127, 139 neo-Pharaonicism, 26 NGOs, 35–6, 85–7 Open Door policy, 18, 23, 29, 30, 45, 62, 64, 68–9, 74, 98, 105, 133–4 Ottoman Empire, 17, 25, 156 Pan-Arabism, 18, 28, 95, 98, 109, 127, 132 peasantry, 40–2, 44, 106 Pharaonic, 8, 16–17, 25–8, 109, 131 police, 2, 9, 12, 30–1, 36, 39, 50–1, 62, 64–5, 72, 76–7, 80, 84–5, 88–9, 90–1, 104, 120, 141, 154, 156

190  |  the eg ypti a n d r e a m Port Said, 2 poverty, 27, 46, 49, 53, 56, 60, 75, 77–8, 80, 83, 93, 101, 114, 135, 149 private education, 70, 98, 100–1 private schools, 61, 77, 95, 98, 105, 112–13, 119 Qur’an, 21, 23–4, 52, 103, 107, 110–11, 114, 118, 146 Qutb, Sayyed 104, 130, 148 religion, 3, 6–9, 19–20, 22–3, 101–2, 107, 109, 118, 125–6, 130, 132, 137, 146, 164 religiosity, 21, 72, 127 remittances, 29, 64, 68–9, 84, 87 Saad Zaghloul, 3, 41 Sadat, Anwar, 3, 11, 23, 29, 45–6, 62, 64, 66–9, 70, 84, 98, 105, 109, 133, 136, 153–4 Salafist, 1, 123, 156 Saudi Arabia, 29, 61, 71 secularism, 20, 64 segregation, 82, 100 shaab, 42 Shaarawi, Sheikh 22, 89, 130 Sinai, 88, 89, 126, 155, 156 slums, 46–9, 53–6, 77, 80–1, 87, 92 social identity, 6

social mobility, 45, 61, 64–5, 70 socialism, 26, 28, 43, 64, 127, 133, 159 street children, 48–9, 78, 135 syndicates, 66, 67, 85, 141, 153 Taha Hussain, 131 Tahrir, 1–2, 31, 50, 75, 80, 92–3, 138 Tahtawi, Rifaa, 21, 25, 151 takfir,129, 147–8 teachers, 25, 63, 66–7, 69, 72, 98, 100–4, 111–13, 132 thugs, 48–9, 50–1, 72, 85, 155 unemployment, 33, 75, 78–9, 99, 113, 135, 150 unions, 22, 30, 33, 57, 62, 65, 67 upper class, 49, 63–5, 67, 70–1, 89, 98, 111, 119 Urabi, Ahmed, 26, 39 Wael Ghonim, 87, 93, 160 Wafd, 3, 41, 62, 154 workers, 3, 6, 10, 12, 29, 39, 40–5, 48, 51, 57, 60, 65, 67, 69, 70, 73, 84, 87–8, 92, 108, 139, 140, 144, 150 youth, 2, 23, 30–3, 35–7, 51, 56, 65, 75, 77–9, 92–3, 99, 103, 111, 114, 120, 134, 152, 154