Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (7 page)

I remembered Cairo’s subway, how the first car in the train was only for women.

“I’m having the time of my life, though,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll be in Spain. It will be fun to be a single woman in Spain.” She winked at me, gathered her things and got ready to leave. “Happy travels,” she said. And then she was gone.

*  *  *

I met Blake Hounshell in the lobby of the Hotel President in Zamalek. He was an American student studying Arabic at the American University of Cairo and the founder of the group blog
American Footprints
, formerly known as
Liberals Against Terrorism
. He would later become the editor of
Foreign Policy
magazine.

“Let’s go somewhere off Zamalek, shall we?” I said. “This city is huge and I need to see as much of it as I can.”

“What would you like to do? Have lunch? Coffee? Smoke
shisha
?” A
shisha,
or hookah, is an Arabic water pipe, like a bong for flavored tobacco.

“How about all of the above?” I said.

“I know just the place then,” he said, “in a cool neighborhood where lots of young people like to hang out.”

He hailed us a cab and we hopped in the back. I had no idea where we were going, but a cool neighborhood where lots of young people like to hang out sounded perfect.

But the neighborhood he took me to looked grim and depressing, much more so than Zamalek, and was not at all what I expected from a place hip young people had colonized. But I kept my gripes to myself.

“You have to revise your expectations downward in Cairo,” he said, as though he knew what I was thinking. “This probably looks Stalinist to you.”

“It isn’t
that
bad,” I said. But it was, actually, almost that bad. Much of Cairo looked Stalinist.

“No, it’s not pretty,” he said. “But you get used to it.”

He led me into what counts in Cairo as a nice restaurant. The floors were orange tile. The chairs were made of wicker. A mild feeling of gloom hung over the place like a cloudy day just before rain.

“Do you like living in Cairo?” I said as we sat down. A beaming waiter brought us two menus and bowed.

“Well, it’s a big sprawling mess,” he said. That was certainly true. “You either hate it or love it. I think I’m in the latter category. I was bored back home in the States, and I’m not bored here at all.”

He and I have different personalities. I worried that I’d be bored and alienated into depression if I lived in Cairo after I saw all the sights, though I loved living in Beirut, a vastly more sophisticated and prosperous city that was also thrilling and edgy. It’s impossible to be bored there for even five minutes. Going from Lebanon to Egypt was like descending into a poorly lit basement.

How far the mighty do fall. Fifty years earlier, Cairo was a relatively wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan jewel of North Africa and the Middle East. Nasser’s cultural and economic wrecking ball smashed the place as totally as the communist regimes he aligned himself with. Mubarak was no communist—that’s for damn sure—but he was spectacularly uninterested in cleaning up Nasser’s mess.
Wall Street Journal
reporter Stephen Glain once aptly described Egypt as a “towering dwarf.” I don’t think the description can be improved upon.

Hounshell and I ordered sandwiches, soft drinks and a
shisha
to share as we talked politics.

“There are 21 political parties,” he said. “But 16 don’t really exist. They are newspapers, not parties. Their reporters aren’t really reporters. They have no handle on policy or ideas whatsoever. Some of them even sell access. If someone wants to smear a businessman, for instance, space can be bought for that in their pages.”

The only real opposition to Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, had been active in Egypt for 77 years at that point and had painstakingly built a formidable political machine through the mosques even while banned.

The two main liberal opposition parties, al-Wafd and al-Ghad, were tiny, disorganized and woefully unprofessional. They were fringe parties, not broad-based popular movements. It’s not that the Muslim Brotherhood truly represented everyone else—they didn’t. But the liberal parties had not been around for as long and hadn’t been free to operate normally or build themselves up. Their ideas found little traction in Egypt anyway. The country was, for all intents and purposes, a two-party state, with Mubarak’s military regime on one side and the semiunderground Islamists on the other.

Hounshell and I passed the
shisha
pipe between us. The tobacco flavor was apple, widely considered the best.

“The MB is going to win around 100 seats in parliament,” he said. (As it turned out, they won 88.) “That’s 100 out of 444 seats, plus another 10 appointed by Mubarak directly. That’s a lot of seats considering that they only ran 120 out of fear of being smacked down by the state if they posed too much of a threat.”

It
is
a big deal that the Muslim Brotherhood won more than half the seats they contested, especially since Mubarak’s NDP still cheated and even opened fire with live ammunition on voters.

“All the ministers are members of parliament,” he said. “So the minister of energy,” for example, “has to face an election. In all the races where these big guys are running, we are seeing vote rigging, vote buying, intimidation and cheating.”

During one of the early rounds of elections in Alexandria a street battle erupted between NDP guys wielding swords and Muslim Brotherhood members who came at them with chairs. The army fired tear gas at groups of voters in Brotherhood strongholds to keep them from reaching the polls.

How extreme was the Muslim Brotherhood, really? That’s the argument that never ended in Egypt, in large part because the Brotherhood refused to admit where it stood. People saw what they wanted to see. Anti-Islamists feared the worst while optimists hoped the Brotherhood’s self-identification as moderate was sincere.

Would they actually ban alcohol if they came to power? Who knew? They wouldn’t say. Would they force women, even foreign women and Christian Egyptians, to wear the veil? No one had any idea.

“Islam is the solution” was their rallying cry, but they said they wanted to build an Islamist state democratically.

They also claimed, at least sometimes, that they were not sectarian—a difficult thing to believe considering that they wanted an Islamist state. “I went to a Muslim Brotherhood rally,” Hounshell said. They chanted Muslims and Christians, we are all Egyptians.”

The problem for Egyptian Christians (who make up between 10 percent and 15 percent of the population) wasn’t that the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn’t recognize their right to live in Egypt and be Egyptians. The problem was that they stood a real chance of losing some of their already diminished rights and being forced to live by the code of another religion.

Mubarak’s regime was secular, yet even under
him,
Christians were blatantly discriminated against when it came to government jobs. In a country where huge swaths of the economy are controlled by the government, that’s a serious problem. They also had trouble building churches. Muslims could build mosques, no sweat, but Christians faced years of bureaucracy, and regime apparatchiks routinely said no. So Christians feared that if the Brotherhood ever ascended to power, the already existing discrimination from the secular state would only increase under an Islamist state. Why wouldn’t it?

“The Muslim Brotherhood is run mostly by old people,” Hounshell said. “The old guard is definitely less moderate and less democratic. But they are also more willing to make concessions to the regime. They really don’t believe in democracy. The younger members, though, are more democratic. At least they seem to be. They talk a good game, but the way this will all play out if they ever come into power ultimately is unknowable.”

*  *  *

To those who were easily and perhaps willingly fooled, Mubarak appeared to cry uncle after sustained U.S. pressure to open up his one-party state and hold real elections. But the reforms were a farce—and hailing his just-kidding charade as a sign of progress in the Middle East was naive and reckless.

Human-rights activists and independent politicians—most famously Saad Eddin Ibrahim and, more recently, Ayman Nour—continued to be harassed, arrested and booked on trumped-up charges. And since kicking around his opponents during “campaign season” wasn’t enough to guarantee victory, Mubarak worked over the voters as well.

In early 2005 he announced that he would allow candidates other than himself to run for president. Millions of Egyptians were ecstatic. Finally they would have an actual choice in an election—a first-time experience for everybody. Yet no one who wasn’t already registered to vote under the old system, in which Mubarak was the only candidate, would be allowed to vote in the supposedly real election at the end of the year.

The Egyptian government knew better than to imitate the Syrian and Iraqi Baath Parties by claiming to get 99 percent or even 100 percent of the vote. That didn’t mean Mubarak actually won a normal election. It only meant he was a tad less obvious about it.

He was still pretty obvious, though. The democratic opposition parties only won 3 percent of the seats. It all went according to government plan, then. Kicked-around parties like al-Wafd and al-Ghad had no better chance of beating Mubarak at his game than the Green Party had of winning the White House in the United States.

“Rigging elections is a sport here,” American political scientist and long-time Cairo resident Josh Stacher told me in his office. “There are 2,000 different ways to do it, and the methods vary by constituency and region. When all else fails, they just physically block people from voting.”

All else failed in the Nile Delta during the third round of elections, including the physical blocking. Military police fired not only rubber bullets but also live ammunition at voters, killing at least eight and wounding more than 100.

Mubarak’s regime didn’t fail merely in politics. It spectacularly failed in every way a state can possibly fail. The economy was moribund. The habitable regions of Egypt were so overpopulated that cemeteries and garbage dumps had been transformed into slums packed with millions of people. Barely half the population could read or write. The state was a mafia with an army; its grubby paws stifled and profited from practically everything. Just walking around, I felt hopeless depression and dread like a dead weight.

Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington both described Mubarak as a moderate and an ally. They gave him $2 billion a year. To a certain extent he was “our son of a bitch.” And that was precisely the problem.

Stacher explained how it looked to Egyptian eyes. “Mubarak’s NDP fires tear gas at people who line up to vote. ‘Made in the USA’ is stamped on those canisters. When this sort of thing happens, lots of people here compare themselves to Palestinians living under foreign occupation.”

The popular Egyptian notion that Mubarak was an American “puppet” is understandable to a point. The U.S. government was far too cozy with the man. At the same time, it was a bit of a stretch. His state-run media organs propagandized relentlessly and hysterically against the United States, arguably more so than any other newspapers and TV stations in the Middle East.

The U.S. was frequently compared to Nazi Germany. (At the same time, Egypt’s media wallowed in Holocaust denial.) Al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was described as an American agent. Colin Powell, according to government weekly
al-Ahram al-Arabi
, accused the Sudanese government of genocide in Darfur as part of an American plot to steal oil. Just a few months earlier al-Mihwar TV had the audacity to air an interview with an Egyptian general who claimed that Vice President Dick Cheney admitted that the September 11 attacks were hatched by rogue elements in the White House. These are mere samples of what Mubarak’s government-controlled media cranked out on a regular basis. No one who airs and publishes this kind of nonsense can honestly be counted as a friend or an ally, let alone a “puppet.”

The Bush administration, to its credit, pushed for democratic reforms in Egypt, but it wasn’t enough. Gently prodding a dictator who is otherwise treated politely and as a friend doesn’t work if he’s not a reformer. The Nasser-Sadat-Mubarak regime created Egypt’s 21st century problems in the first place, and Mubarak turned out to be a little like Assad in Damascus. He created problems only he could solve, and he refused to deliver.

The very idea of a good autocrat is for the most part an oxymoron, but they do pop up here and there. Robert D. Kaplan defined such a rare creature as “one who makes his own removal less fraught with risk by preparing his people for representative government.” Mubarak missed that mark by a couple of time zones.

Still, his government could only do so much damage to a thousand-year-old city like Cairo without physically tearing it down. I wanted to see the oldest parts of the city, places where dreary human-storage units didn’t make up the skyline. I also wanted to see the blogger Big Pharaoh again. I liked the guy, and his pessimistic view of the place more or less lined up with mine. So we met at my hotel and took the subway as near as we could to Khan el-Khalili, the ancient souk near the Fatimid walls of the old city.

We got off the subway a half-mile or so from our destination and walked through a concrete catastrophe of a neighborhood on the way. Most storefronts were either closed permanently or shut behind grimy metal gates that pulled down in front of the entrances like garage doors.

“Don’t eat anything from these guys,” Big Pharaoh said as he gestured to a man selling food that was spread out on a rickety outdoor table. “If you eat that, you’ll
die
.”

“I’ll
die
?” I said. “From what?”

“From a horrible disease.”

I’m sure he exaggerated, but I duly noted his warning.

“We’re coming up to the place where a bomb went off earlier this year,” he said. “Are you okay with that?”

“I live in Beirut,” I reminded him.