Cities are not merely population centers, or dots scattered on a
lifeless map or names listed in the directory of an atlas. Cities are
expressions of cultural identity, symbols of historical processes, hubs of
social development, media for transmitting ideas and radiating knowledge, focal
points of interaction with the outside world, factories of modern man's anxieties
and ambitions, and arenas of war and revolution. Cities are the locus of human
activity.
In Egypt, it is Cairo—or, in Arabic, Al-Qahera (the city
victorious)—that reflects all these sociological and psychohistorical processes.
The 1,000-year-old city has an abundance of complex meanings and sharp contradictions,
both visible and hidden, enriched by a long history of fluctuations—magnificent
rises and steep declines, glorious triumphs and disastrous setbacks, bursts of enthusiasm
and tears of grief. Cairo is a wild yet charming city. Its liveliness is
stupendous; its flavor is a blend of Africa, Asia and Europe; its pulse is
frenzied but musical; its chaos borders on madness; and, most importantly, its
people retain their distinctive wit however great the difficulties.
Modern Egyptian rulers, however, failed to unravel the secrets of the
city, abandoning it at times, unleashing their wrath against it at other times—always
failing to understand it. They mistook Cairo's patience for apathy, overlooking
the fact that, like all old cities, it is both wise and resilient. It smiles in
the face of hardships, bears the ebbs of time with a strong heart, but in
response to tyrants, it doesn’t murmur; it shouts.
President Anwar Sadat, for instance, sought solace in his village house
in Mit Abu El-Kom, in Menoufia Governorate, away from Cairo's political traffic
jams. Sadat was not returning to his roots in a quest to consolidate family
ties or evoke sweet childhood memories. Sadat hated Cairo and its unruly people.
The 1970s in Egypt were a decade of vibrancy and volatility. Sadat's shattering
of Nasser's policies provoked leftists and Nasserites against him. Cairo's universities
and intellectuals' cafes bustled with anti-regime political activities and
debates. The 1977 food riots in particular drew Sadat closer to the village and
away from the city.
Likewise, from the late 1990s until 2011, President Hosni Mubarak—and
his 'royal' entourage—spent long periods of time in the resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh,
far away from Cairo's oven-like heat and suffocating air pollution. His
extended stays there prompted his critics to describe the small town as "the
president's capital." The time Mubarak spent in Sharm al-Sheikh, in a posh
villa overlooking a picturesque sea and mountain view, was perhaps his only way
to think of himself as an achiever, a leader whose services to his country did
not go in vain. Tourism flourished under Mubarak, with resorts like Sharm al-Sheikh
and Hurghada turning into international tourist destinations.
In the tranquility of his comfortable exile, Mubarak could block out what
had become of Egypt in his three-decade rule: a despairing nation; a corrupt and
dysfunctional state; a failing economy addicted to foreign largesse, crumbling
services, an ailing infrastructure, a population boom (more than a million new
souls every year), and a fading grandeur replaced by a pitiable image in the
region and beyond. Nevertheless, Mubarak's flight to the periphery did not
bring the core to rest. Cairo bent under Mubarak, but it did not break. Eventually,
Cairenes flocked to Tahrir Square, Cairo's (and Egypt's) center, to seal
Mubarak's fate.
Goethe said that to rule is easy, to govern difficult. Sadat and Mubarak
exemplified the saying—the former assassinated (on October 6, 1981, in a
military parade commemorating his "day of glory"), the latter deposed
by a massive popular revolution. The fate of both men was determined by Egypt's
middle class, the crucial yet ever-neglected force in Egyptian politics.
The weight of this critical mass—comprised of the urban, educated and
vocal social segments—in Egyptian politics is disproportionate to its size.
Since the reign of Mohamed Ali (1805-1848), it was this class that introduced
new ideas to Egyptian society, flirted with Western ideologies, championed the cause
of independence from foreign occupation, embodied and propagated Egypt's 'soft
power' in the Arab world, and thought about national issues and aspirations. Cairo
has been the incubator of all these energetic processes. In contrast, the lower
class has been pushed to the margins of public movement and debate. Unsurprisingly,
when Tahrir Square was fanning the flames of revolution against Mubarak in 2011,
remote rural areas, particularly in the largely impoverished and underdeveloped
Upper Egypt region, remained detached and noiseless.
If history repeats itself, first as tragedy, next as farce (as Marx said),
then Morsi's short-lived rule denotes the latter. While Mubarak was hated by
the majority of his people, Morsi seemed to be leader by accident, underdog
rather than tyrant, a helpless stooge of the aging and conspiratorial Muslim Brotherhood
leaders, a target of mockery rather than an object of criticism, and a victim
of his own banality and blindness to Egypt's realities. Nobody took his threats
seriously, and after a few months in power, almost everybody sensed that he
would not survive for too long. When Morsi was ousted, most people felt no urge
to retaliate, only a sigh of relief.
Morsi's downfall was also partly because he did not understand Cairo. Despite
the MB's successive ballot box victories in post-Mubarak Egypt, it was Cairo
that slowed down the group's foray into the territory abandoned by Mubarak and
his defeated, dissolved party. In Cairo, Morsi lost both rounds of the presidential
elections (May-June 2012) as well as the referendum on the constitution
(December 2012).
Morsi visited Tahrir Square only once after his election victory. This
visit came on his first day as president, in order to celebrate his victory
among his supporters and, in hindsight, to pay farewell to the central square
of a city he so quickly and foolishly lost. Morsi remained oblivious to the
threat posed by Cairo's recalcitrance until the very end. During his last
crisis in power, he reportedly told US President Barack Obama that those who
demonstrated against him constituted a minority (only 160,000 people, he
claimed), when aerial images taken by military helicopters captured millions
packing the streets and squares of Cairo and other cities to demand his expulsion.
Only Nasser—who clipped the wings of the aristocracy and uplifted the
poor, creating a viable middle class—bonded with Cairo. The expansion in
education and health services and the establishment of an industry-oriented
public sector gave rise to, and consolidated, Egypt's middle class in the 1950s
and 1960s. In 1956, he vowed steadfastness against the tripartite aggression from
the rostrum of the widely revered Al-Azhar mosque, in the heart of Cairo's old
Islamic city. "I am here in Cairo with you and my children are also here
in Cairo. I did not send them away [for protection from air raids]," he
said, to affirm his loyalty to the city.
A river of people gathered in Tahrir and surrounding areas to attend
Nasser's epic funeral—the same unprecedented numbers who assembled in the same
square decades later to send first Mubarak then Morsi a clear message: you
terribly misunderstood us and you have to go.
Cities should be defined by demography, not geography. In his tragic
play Coriolanus, Shakespeare wondered: what is the city but the people? Had
Sadat, Mubarak and Morsi shared Shakespeare's wonder, their fates could have
been different. But in the end, the historical pattern repeated itself. The
city retained the validity of its name, victorious; and its thoughtless despots
continued to be defeated, ostracized and deleted from collective memory.
Nael M. Shama
*
This article appeared first on the website of Le Monde Diplomatique (English)
on August 15, 2013.
