Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (21 page)

Then the army went in and cleared out the rest. The soldiers tore down the tents and stepped aside as thugs from the Baltageya beat the shit out of people while nearby shop owners cheered and applauded.

The liberals, the leftists, the Islamists and even the army were unified, sort of, when Mubarak was everyone’s hated target, but the interim phase pitted them against one another. Competing revolutions and competing demonstrations wracked Cairo as citizens egged on a popular government crackdown.

The real battle for the heart and soul of Egypt was on. The victor would determine the Arab world’s direction for a long time.

*  *  *

Tarek Heggy made himself slightly famous through books, newspaper articles and television appearances in Egypt and abroad. He stood out not only for lacking any feelings of hostility toward Israel but also for advocating rapprochement. In 2008, along with Professor Naim Mahlab, he established the Tarek Heggy scholarship at the University of Toronto for postgraduate studies in comparative Jewish/Muslim relations.

I met him in a hotel lobby outside the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, where he and his wife were escaping the heat, smog, noise and congestion of Cairo.

“I personally think there is nothing worse than Mubarak’s era,” he said as we sipped from tall glasses of Egyptian-brewed beer. “All the problems we have now come from Mubarak’s era. Even if we end up in the hands of the Muslim Brothers, it is because of Mubarak. He didn’t handle them properly.”

“How would you have dealt with the Muslim Brotherhood?” I said.

“He handled them only with a stick,” he said, “and you can’t handle Islamism with only a stick in your hand. I would have exposed them to open debate. I would have let all Egyptians know that their ultimate objective is power, the caliph system and the implementation of Islamic law. I would have made sure that more women, more liberals and more Christians knew exactly what would happen to them under the Muslim Brotherhood. I would have used the media appropriately. I would have shown people what happened in Iran.”

He meant the 1979 revolution, of course, when Islamists seized power in the wake of the Shah’s downfall and built a regime even more oppressive than the previous one.

“Mubarak’s Egypt was a very strong police state,” he said. “It shouldn’t have fallen easily, but it did, partly because of the popular movement but also because of the army. You can’t look at one and exclude the other. There was a coup d’état. That’s why less than a thousand people were killed.”

Heggy knew a bit more about what happened behind the scenes and off-camera than most journalists and foreign observers, partly because he knew some of the actors personally. Former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, for instance, was his neighbor. Sometimes they talked.

“Here’s the dramatic story,” he said. “On the 10th of February, Mubarak signed a decree sacking [Defense Minister Mohamad Hussein] Tantawi and appointing the head of the republican guard. The decree was sent to TV stations to be read on the air. The head of the TV station took it in his hand and went to Tantawi. So Tantawi was warned 24 hours before Mubarak stepped down. A half-hour later, the first announcement was made, and it was vague: the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces will continue meeting until the problem is sorted out, and the army will always side with the people. That was the first announcement, which, for somebody like me, was a sign of the coup d’état.

“The following day,” he continued, “Omar Suleiman was asked to read a statement that Mubarak was supposed to have written, but instead he read something crafted by the army. Mubarak heard it for the first time on TV just like the rest of us, and he was removed to [the resort city of] Sharm el-Sheikh. The head of the republican guard has been in jail since that minute. The main function of the republican guard is to prevent a coup d’état.”

“That’s what it’s for,” I said.

“It’s not for anything else,” he said. “It’s there to protect the president from his own army.”

Yet Mubarak’s republican guard failed to protect him. That’s how transitions of power often take place in the Middle East and North Africa. Mubarak was an army man, as were Nasser and Sadat, but his son Gamal, whom he had groomed to succeed him, was not. Maybe that’s why the army removed him and maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does. All that matters is that the army did remove him and has the power to remove anyone else it doesn’t like, for whatever reason, in the future.

“Egyptian-Israeli relations will be decided by the army,” Heggy said, “and the army is totally against confrontation with Israel. In the streets people say they want to renegotiate the Camp David agreement, but the army will never go for anything like this.”

“Is that because the army knows it lost the 1973 war even though the government pretends Egypt won?” I said.

“I like the way you phrased that,” Heggy said. “Everyone here thinks we won in 1973 and only lost in 1967. We did very well during the first week in 1973, but wars are judged by how they end, not how they begin. Sadat didn’t want to fight in 1973 to win. He wanted to fight for some pride when he sat at the negotiating table. That’s what his wife, who is a very good friend of mine, said to me at her house in Maryland. Sadat told her many times that the best he could do in a war against Israel is put in a good performance at the beginning. The Israelis have a better army, better training, and they have America behind them. He said he needed to be able to sit down and talk to Israelis with his head held high, and he could only do this by first giving them a good punch. They will give him two good punches, but at least he will have given them one.”

Sadat didn’t only need to “punch” Israel so he could hold his head high. The entire country felt, and still feels, humiliated by its repeated losses to Israel. It isn’t easy for even a military dictator to keep his finger off the trigger when a whole country is crying for war.

Egypt’s army was certainly more rational in its behavior toward Israel than it would be if it heeded public opinion, but the army was partly responsible for shaping public opinion. The brass hardly liked Israel or the United States any more than the Muslim Brotherhood did.

Few Egyptians I spoke to other than Heggy seem to have paid even the slightest attention to what happened in Iran after the 1979 revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamists took over. There are at least two excellent reasons for that. First, Egypt’s Free Officers regime, unlike the Shah’s, didn’t go down with Mubarak. And second, the Muslim Brotherhood stood virtually no chance of creating its own army inside the country as Khomeini had done when he built the Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. There’s only room for one army in Egypt. An attempt to create a second would be suicidal.

So Egypt’s revolution was very different indeed from Iran’s, but history doesn’t need to start repeating exactly before its lessons ought to be heeded.

“Do people here take Iran seriously?” I said.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s not on the screen.”

“Why?” I said.

“It’s far away,” he said. “Egyptians are among the most localized people in the world. They look inward and greatly exaggerate their value in the world. I’m sure you must know that.”

I did know that. I saw it in Egypt’s military museum at the Citadel on a hill overlooking Old Cairo. Everyone who set foot inside learned how the Egyptian army—and therefore the government—saw itself.

The Citadel’s museum was the kind of place a superpower would build. Architecturally it looked like it was built by Victorian-era imperialists from Great Britain but with a bombastic Russian, even Soviet, style. Not even in an alternate dimension would such a grandiose place be built by the bumbling Iraqi or Lebanese armies. I couldn’t imagine anything like it being built by any Arab army other than Egypt’s, with the possible exception, I suppose, of Algeria’s.

The Citadel is a medieval fortification overlooking Old Cairo and was built in the 12th century by Salahaddin (a.k.a. Saladin), the Kurdish warrior who reconquered Jerusalem from the Crusaders and made himself sultan of Egypt and Syria. It’s fitting that the Egyptian army built its museum there. Its officers saw themselves as modern-day descendants of Egypt’s ancient and medieval warriors.

Egypt’s military adventures abroad against Israel, Yemen and Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the first Persian Gulf War were celebrated. North Korea’s government donated the services of one of its painters to illustrate an Egyptian-Israeli air war over the Sinai in 1973. The painting was commissioned during Mubarak’s tenure in 1993, many years after Sadat signed the peace treaty with Israel.

Egypt’s geopolitical clout fell after it signed that treaty. It no longer resembled a mini regional superpower. The elite in the armed forces, however, yearned to see Egypt rise again if it could unshackle itself from American requests that it be a status quo power for regional peace and stability. They saw themselves as bigger and more important. Serious moves in that direction would play very well indeed on the street.

*  *  *

Hala Mustafa was distraught. She was one of Egypt’s most prominent liberal intellectuals and the founder and editor-in-chief of
Democracy
magazine. The authorities had been hounding her for years by smearing her name in the press, wiretapping her phones and sending anonymous death threats. Her name appeared in newspapers all over the world when the government launched an official investigation into her private life after she met the Israeli ambassador in her office at the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

My colleague Armin Rosen and I met with her in that same office.

“I hope this doesn’t come across as a paranoid question,” Armin said, “but do you think your office is bugged?”

“Of course!” she said. “Yes. It’s very bugged.”

“So I guess if I have a message for Egyptian intelligence,” I said and chuckled, “this would be the time to deliver it.”

Perhaps I should have been alarmed at the possibility that the Mukhabarat might be spying on me as well as on her, but the news wasn’t as disturbing as it would have been if I were interviewing dissident intellectuals in a place like North Korea or Syria. Cairo’s regime was an Arab Nationalist military dictatorship, but it was built on the standard-issue authoritarian model rather than a totalitarian one. The odds that anyone in her office would be arrested were small, and the odds that any of us would be kidnapped or assassinated by the state were infinitesimal. Even so, Egypt was not the free country some mistook it for at the time.

“The moment of liberal change hasn’t come yet,” she said. “The regime today is the same one that was founded in 1952. This is still the Nasserist regime. I was hoping this revolution would bring something different, that we could return to the liberal tradition that existed before Nasser destroyed it. Egypt had a historic opportunity to revive its liberal past, but the moment has passed. The military didn’t encourage that path, the Muslim Brotherhood jumped over everybody to manipulate the process, and the liberal secular forces retreated.”

Egypt did go through a relatively liberal period before the Free Officers launched their coup against King Farouk in 1952. Egypt was hardly a democracy at the time, but it was much more open, tolerant and Western-oriented. Nasser changed everything when he imposed socialism (in the Russian rather than Scandinavian style), pan-Arab nationalism and a virulent strain of violent anti-Zionism. Yet with Soviet backing he transformed Egypt into something that looked like a regional superpower.

Many Sunni Arabs throughout the region swooned to his pan-Arabism and wished to be annexed by Cairo. Syria actually did get annexed to Egypt for a couple of years when the two merged into the doomed United Arab Republic. Nasser even started military adventures abroad when he sent soldiers to Yemen and sparked the Six-Day War against Israel. Both conflicts led to disaster, especially when the 1967 war ended with the Israeli occupation of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

The regime was a secular Arab-nationalist one, but radical Islam gained strength with Nasser’s squelching of Egyptian liberalism. The overwhelming majority of women throughout the country wore headscarves during and after the Mubarak era, whereas few did in the first half of the 20th century. A startlingly large number of men sported bruises on their foreheads—acquired by hitting their heads on the floor during prayer—to show off their piety. I saw more men with bruised foreheads in a single day in Cairo than in all other Muslim-majority countries I’ve visited, combined, in more than a decade.

The revolution, coup d’état or whatever we ought to call it did not return Egypt to 1951, the year before Nasser. History has no rewind button. Egypt couldn’t regain what it lost when King Farouk was overthrown any more than the United States could suddenly return to the Truman era.

“All we can do,” Mustafa said, “is preserve the minimal amount of our liberal tradition that still remains. But the military rule and the growing Islamization of the society make it very difficult. The conservative forces are trying to prevent any sort of progress in the country. The military rulers are different from the Muslim Brotherhood, but they don’t contradict each other.”

Most Western analysts described Mubarak’s government as an American ally that was at least moderately cooperative with Israel, which was accurate to an extent, but his state-controlled media cranked out vicious anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda every day for three decades. No one should have expected liberalism (and I’m using that word in its general sense, not in the parochial American sense) to emerge anytime soon after all that.

“I’ve read many American analyses of the Arab Spring,” she said, “but most neglect the presence of the regime. Americans seem to think the regime went down with the dictator, but it’s not true. So they’re basing their analysis on what the people in the street do and say, but they don’t realize the regime is directing the process. The Salafists right now are completely controlled by the state security apparatus, and so they’ve suddenly become a major power. They weren’t in the past.”