The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (19 page)

“The main issue facing the Arabs,” Saghieh continued, “is not about democracy, but much more basic and primitive. The idea was that the only problem is at the political level, and the solution is to reward Arab society by giving it democracy, and that democracy can let it reveal its energies. The problem with democracy is not that there’s not enough supply, but not enough demand for it. The problem is at a cultural level.”

Democracy is not an application, but the manifestation of a worldview that holds certain values dear, values that, since they were fought and sacrificed for, cannot be easily transferred from one culture to another.

“Globalization put the Arabs face-to-face with their contribution to modernity,” says Saghieh. “The Arabs did not contribute to its
production, but only consumed it. So we got the technical side of it, meaning we only got it in negative ways. We have the Internet and globalization without a cultural revolution, or what has to happen prior to globalization and the Internet.”

The energies that might have led to such a revolution were dammed up long ago. The nineteenth-century Muslim reformers inoculated their audiences against the set of ideas that gave birth to the technological innovations of Western modernity, as well as its forms of political organization, like liberal democracy. Muhammad Ali Pasha sent the Arabs westward to learn what the Europeans were making, and the Salafis, led by Afghani and ‘Abduh, encouraged Muslims to accept those scientific advances to improve their lives and strengthen the
umma.
Throughout the course of the twentieth century, the Arabs availed themselves of goods, from consumer electronics to military hardware, while disdaining, as the Salafis had also counseled, the values that accompanied these products, values they associated with the West.

The battle lines in the Middle East’s war of ideas are drawn over this simple question: Should the Arabs reject or accept the values that are the building blocks of political and technological modernity? In effect, the Americans had taken the wrong side in the debate in failing to see that the manifestations of a free society, including democracy, are its flower and not its roots. Liberalism and liberal reform are the work not of technology but of real human beings, men and women with a stake in their own societies, like the Arab liberals, inheritors of a tradition that had begun more than a century ago, back in Cairo.

  I
f the Americans were looking to transform the region, it would come not through technology or elections but by aligning themselves with the men and women who had identified the problems of the Arabic-speaking Middle East long before Washington even understood there was a battle of ideas. I’m not talking about so-called Arab moderates, or the men like Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas whose temperament and personal culture differ from, say, the leaders of Hamas in degree rather than kind. I mean Arab liberals, whose intellectual tradition, like Salafism, had its origins in the first modern meeting between the lands of Islam and the West. But unlike Salafism, Arab liberals saw no fundamental conflict between themselves and Europe, and indeed welcomed the encounter.

 T
he Shepheard Hotel was burned down in the anti-British riots in the winter of 1952, half a year before Nasser’s coup, and the reconstruction, far from the original site, seemed to concentrate most of that once-famous spot’s Anglo-imperial charm into a
dark, wood-paneled tavern now filled mostly with paunchy Egyptian businessmen seated at the bar rail. In the orange glow of the dark room in back, Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab ever awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, pressed his eyelids together like a cat dozing in the sun.

It was one of the regular meetings of the Mahfouz circle, a weekly gathering of his friends and hangers-on—all of them from the secular intelligentsia’s younger set, or at least younger than Mahfouz, since the writer had survived his peers by decades. Yet this younger generation—journalists, professors, novelists, and professionals—was old enough to have taken sides in the Cold War, and these men, and one woman, of the left were not exactly the liberal, free-market thinkers that the White House’s freedom agenda for the Middle East had hoped to galvanize. The Mahfouz circle laid into the Americans, questioning the sincerity of their intentions, until the old man told them to wise up. “It’s not a problem if the Americans want us to have democracy,” Mahfouz said. “Sometimes our interests and theirs coincide.”

The circle’s one American regular was Raymond Stock, the novelist’s biographer and translator. Stock had lived in Egypt for a dozen years and was as close to Mahfouz as anyone else in the country. It was he who had invited me, and I asked along Raouf, for whom Mahfouz was as much a part of his inheritance as the Pyramids, and this living monument was showing wear. The novelist had fallen earlier in the day, a Band-Aid was hanging from his large, bony eyebrow, and he looked fragile, like a stack of china tottering in the middle of Cairo traffic.

Still, Mahfouz enjoyed these nights out, to smoke, talk, and mostly, at his age, listen, though he was so hard of hearing that his interlocutors took turns sitting next to him to shout directly in his ear in order to be heard.
“Naguib Bey,”
they hollered.
“Naguib Bey.”

That night, the Mahfouz circle was discussing
Children of the Alley.
An Egyptian weekly newspaper had just excerpted sections of the novel without the consent of Mahfouz or his publisher, and the
writer was angry. The last thing Mahfouz needed was trouble from the Islamists again, and he had promised the sheikhs at Al-Azhar that the book would not be published in Egypt without their permission.

“It is obvious why the men of religion don’t like the book,” Raouf leaned over to tell me. “The characters’ names refer to specific prophets, and the last prophet is named after science. This is very controversial since Muhammad is supposed to be the last prophet.” When one of Mahfouz’s friends put a cigarette in the old man’s mouth and lit it for him, Raouf reached for his pack. He pulled a cigarette out for himself and then handed another to me and lit them hurriedly. Now we were smoking with Naguib Bey.

Raouf thought that
Children of the Alley
was Mahfouz’s best book. “Better than the Bible and the Quran,” he whispered. I told him he should let Naguib Bey know that. “I’ll have to shout it out loud,” he said. “And everyone will look at me.”

Raouf was an extremist of self-effacement. He burned everything he wrote, all his stories and articles, and later relished telling me about the Western and Arab sources he had drawn on, the historical analogies and careful arguments he used to make his case-before he set a match to it. When I asked him why he kept destroying his work, he shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Who am I writing for except myself anyway?” he said morbidly. “What’s worse, if no one understands what I’m saying or if they do understand it?”

The history of Arab liberalism gave Raouf plenty of reason to regard his hero Mahfouz with mixed emotions, like awe, admiration, pity, and a horror of someday winding up in the same place. Alienation and dangerous notoriety have been the fate of all independent Arab voices, dating back to Abu al-‘Ala al-Ma‘arri, an eleventh-century poet-philosopher regarded as Islam’s first Voltaire. “He was not optimistic about human nature,” Raouf says. “I have a lot of sympathy for that position.” Abu al-‘Ala was also a “freethinker,” a coded word for atheist or heretic, whose dislike of Islam, and all religion,
has made him a touchstone of Arab dissent for close to a millennium:

Like Abu al-‘Ala and all the freethinkers, skeptics, infidels, and liberals, Mahfouz had paid for his outspokenness of many years. “He looks sad,” Raouf said. “He’s had a hard life.” He’s also a man in his nineties, I said. He’s just old. “That, too,” Raouf conceded halfheartedly. Why pursue that sort of life if in spite of the popular acclaim the result is distance from those closest to you? In the end it was safer to destroy your work lest it be the cause of your destruction.

Mahfouz was born in 1911 and raised in a working-class Cairo district among the monuments of the ancient city’s Fatimid period, where he first learned to listen to the generations of Egypt, and heard their warnings, dreams, and petitions of the past and their echoes in the present. He graduated from Cairo University in 1934, a time of social ferment and hope steered by the country’s liberal intellectuals, writers whose work he had immersed himself in since adolescence. They derived their ideas from classical liberal principles, the work of French and English political philosophers, and thus could hardly see themselves as anti-Western. Rather, they struggled with the challenge of the West, a generation that, among its many other cultural achievements, made the novel into an Arab art form. Mahfouz and the Arab novel are almost exact contemporaries; the first modern Egyptian novel,
Zeinab
, was published three years after Mahfouz was born. His first novel was published in 1939, and he went on to write forty novels and short-story collections, dozens of screenplays, and literary criticism. And Mahfouz was not merely the scribe of modern Egyptian history, for he also participated in it, albeit unwillingly, when the Islamists came for him.

Children of the Alley
first appeared in serial form in 1959. Its depiction
of God and the prophets so outraged the religious authorities that Mahfouz agreed not to have the book published in Egypt, though it has been in circulation elsewhere in the Arab world and in dozens of other languages ever since. A year after Mahfouz’s 1988 Nobel Prize, Omar Abdel Rahman, onetime spiritual adviser to al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, noted that had someone punished Mahfouz for his famous novel, Salman Rushdie would not have dared to publish
The Satanic Verses.
In 1994, one of Sheikh Omar’s acolytes acted on the hint and stabbed Mahfouz in the neck, nearly killing him. And thus caught between the state authorities on one side and the men of religion closing in on the other flank, Mahfouz joined a long line of Arab writers and intellectuals who had been persecuted for their work and their ideas. This line included the greatest figure in modern Arab literature, greater even than Naguib Bey.

 T
aha Hussein, born in 1889, the seventh child of a modest family in a village in Upper Egypt, was early recognized as a man of promise. When he was still in his teens, he began contributing to a leading Egyptian newspaper whose editor prophesied that the young polemicist would be “our Voltaire.” Over his long career, Hussein published novels, short stories, essays, translations, and a three-volume autobiography regarded as his masterpiece,
Al-Ayyam (The Days)
, one of the cornerstones of modern Arabic prose. As a public figure, he was frequently embroiled in controversy thanks to his passionate advocacy of what were often considered Western ideas of freedom. Critics like the Arab nationalist ideologue Sati‘ al-Husri saw Hussein as a dangerous turncoat who wanted the Arabs to forgo their Arabism in order to walk, as Hussein himself put it, “in the path of the Europeans so as to be their equals and partners.”

In Hussein’s view, contact with the West was altering Egypt’s moral and physical landscape for the better. As he records in his autobiography, ignorance and faith in folk remedies had cost the lives of his youngest sister and an older brother, so what was the
value of tradition if it forced Egypt to sacrifice its children on the altars of their fathers? “God has bestowed on us a boon to compensate for our misfortune and calamities,” he wrote. “The world has struggled for hundreds of years to attain the present stage of progress. It is within our power to reach it in a short time. Woe to us if we do not seize the opportunity!”
¹

Hussein’s career was a culmination of the brief liberal era’s reformist impulses, exemplary in its successes and even more so in its failures. He died in 1973 with his wife, Suzanne, a French Catholic, at his side—the “sweet voice,” he called her in his autobiography. They’d met some fifty years before when he was writing his dissertation on Ibn Khaldun at the Sorbonne (Émile Durkheim was his supervisor) and needed someone to read to him aloud. Hussein, often referred to as the dean of Arabic letters, had been blind since early childhood, and hence the other epithet accorded him, the Conqueror of Darkness.

Like many able blind boys in Egypt, Hussein was encouraged to pursue Quranic recitation as a career. Reciters didn’t have to read the book, just learn it by heart and then deliver passages at feasts and funerals. Hussein, who’d lost his sight at the age of three, learned the Quran in its entirety, forgot it, and memorized it again, thus earning the nine-year-old the title of “Sheikh.” In
The Days
, Hussein relates how his father sent him with an older brother to study at Al-Azhar. There the great Muhammad ‘Abduh, “the Imam,” as Hussein calls him, was revitalizing the curriculum with electives in “modern sciences,” like literature. “I know of nothing in the world,” Hussein writes, “which can exert so strong an influence for freedom, especially on the young, as literature.”
²

‘Abduh, as we’ve already seen, was a central figure in the Salafist movement, but his influence as a reformer was so wide that he also inspired a circle of liberal and mostly secular intellectuals, journalists, and activists, whom Hussein joined after cutting his ties at Al-Azhar. The liberal intellectuals’ main concerns were the treatment of women and minorities, the separation of religion and the state, and the right to freedom of expression, inquiry, and religion. They also
proposed a theory of liberal nationalism that, in contrast to Arab nationalism, was based on an Egyptian identity derived from the country’s long and ancient history and territorial integrity dating back to the pharaohs. Hence the liberal nationalists—Muslims as well as Christians and Jews and other ethnic groups that had been a part of the Egyptian mosaic for thousands of years—were also sometimes referred to as the Pharaonists.