Contrary to popular belief, Mark Twain never said that
“denial ain’t just a river in Egypt”, but the phrase touches on a truth. Denial
is not universally scarce, but in Egypt it is both a river and a way of life.
This is quite understandable. To cope with tough times, Egyptians have resorted
to a plethora of remedies and antidotes, including denial, amnesia and an
enormously creative sense of humor. Egypt’s Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz,
describing the psyche of the nation that clings to the present, hopes for the
future and overlooks the past, summed it up well in his masterpiece Children
of our Alley: “The lesion of our alley is oblivion.” The nation with the
oldest history, ironically, has the shortest memory span.
But if ordinary Egyptians
resorted to these psychological defense mechanisms as a means of survival,
their rulers did so out of greed. Generalizations are slippery, but they are
not always entirely futile. Based on the historical record, it is no
exaggeration to argue that, once in power, the minds of modern Egyptian
policymakers are afflicted with a lethal combination of denial, amnesia,
shortsightedness, ignorance of history, suicidal indulgence in wishful thinking
and surrender to the illusions of power — in short, subordination of logic to
self-delusion.
Political leaders are, by
definition, supposed to learn from the past and plan for the future, but the
wisdom of hindsight and the art of foresight have mostly eluded Egyptian
politicians. Obviously, if they assume that the past is meaningless and the
future is guaranteed, then in the inner sanctum of power they are only left
with the indulgences of the present, authority and affluence. Therein lies
their present strength, and also their future vulnerability. Two examples from
Egypt’s contemporary history tell the melodramatic tale of its rulers —
jubilation, amnesia and eventual downfall.
The forgetful clique
Egypt’s ousted president
Mohamed Morsi’s moment of glory was delivering a speech in Cairo’s iconic
Tahrir Square on June 29, 2012. Morsi celebrated his election victory that day
with his zealous followers, sipping the ecstasy of victory and relishing the
long-delayed compensation and vindication for the arduous decades he had spent
opposing authority among an outlawed, repressed group, the Muslim Brotherhood
(MB). Amidst the intense euphoria, little did he or his cohorts expect that the
celebration of the nascent freedom would soon be followed by a return to
captivity and anguish, or that he himself would precipitate this fate.
In his impassioned speech,
Morsi touched on the struggle of past generations that finally came to fruition
with the election of Egypt’s first civilian president after decades of
dictatorship and plunder. He rambled on about the “tree of freedom” that had
been planted by the generations of the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s —
but he paused when he mentioned the 1960s, and his tongue slipped. “The 1960s,
you do not want to know about the 1960s,” he said.
Morsi’s allusion to the
1960s was easy to understand. The MB had experienced its worst ordeal in the
prisons of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser (ruled 1954-1970).
The memoirs and testimonies of the Muslim Brothers who were incarcerated at the
time are replete with horrific prison tales: torture of Muslims by fellow
Muslims, echoing screams from dark cells and guards whose absence of mercy knew
no limits. It was in these wretched prisons that Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the
Islamist theorist and MB leader, was imprisoned and hanged. These distressing
stories reverberated through, were engraved on, the Brothers’ psyche, one
generation after another.
Morsi took the helm. But it
is one thing to seize power, and another to sustain it. His year in power
commenced with great expectations. It ended in a fiasco of his own making.
Morsi’s faults as president included power grabs that perpetuated
authoritarianism; the pursuit of divisive policies that undermined national
unity and stability; the deployment of an extremely poor and unpersuasive
political discourse; catastrophic administrative inefficiency; and a lame
foreign policy. At the psychological level, Morsi and the clique of senior MB
leaders failed to bond with the people they strove to rule. They lacked
charisma and charm, experimented with governance like toddlers do with toys,
and committed blunders day and night. To add insult to injury, the MB seemed to
put the interests of the group above the interests of the nation, giving the
impression they were a group in itself and a group for itself.
Morsi seemed unaware of the
fact that his popularity had dwindled to a dangerous point by the first months
of 2013 — or else he didn’t care. He could have defused public anger in many
different ways but he opted for inaction, which in times of crisis is
tantamount to suicide. Widespread popular indignation culminated in the June 30
mass protests which paved the way for Morsi’s dramatic ouster by the military
on July 3. But the state apparatus did not limit itself to conducting early
presidential elections as the anti-Morsi protestors demanded. Instead, it
embarked on a more comprehensive change that was premised on crushing the MB,
tarnishing the 2011 revolution and restoring the clout of the security
apparatus— a swift return to the habits of the authoritarian state.
So, in a tragic irony,
Morsi, who had recalled the 1960s on his first day in office, confidently
pledging that decade’s notorious ways would never re-occur, became the pretext
for the return of its ethos to Egyptian politics. The 1960s’ republic of fear
has returned, this time more forceful and more ghastly. Since Morsi’s removal
there has been an unprecedented use of (excessive) force against protestors,
crackdown on dissenters and stifling of freedom of expression. According to
Wiki Thawra, an initiative established by the Egyptian Center for Social and
Economic Rights to document the victims of Egypt’s political violence, over
21,317 people were detained between June 30 and December 31, including more
than 330 minors (1). Worse, 1,400 people have been killed (mostly by the
security forces) since July 3 (2).
The wrath of the state
reached its zenith on August 14, 2013 with the bloody dispersal of the
encampments of Morsi’s supporters in Cairo that left hundreds dead and
thousands injured, representing one of the worst days of violence in Egypt’s
modern history. By the evening of that day, the camp of Rabaa in east Cairo
(which protestors had transformed into an Indian shantytown) had been reduced
to what resembled a battlefield in Syria’s bloody civil war. When the clouds of
tear gas dissipated, the magnitude of the tragedy appeared. Images captured
rows of corpses wrapped in bloodstained white sheets, wrecked and burned cars,
and debris eerily scattered all over. For a moment, it seemed as though a scent
of death was floating in the air or that crows were flying amidst the black
clouds, croaking the story of Egypt’s failed democracy and ending the power
dreams of the MB.
Indeed, in a sense, June 29,
2012 and August 14, 2013 in turn represented the climax and anticlimax of the
MB’s brief post-revolution power venture. This fate could have been avoided if
only Morsi and his aides had realized that history can repeat itself. It
takes no political literacy to know that we are what we remember and that we
are condemned to repeat what we forget.
The blind state
The modern state in Egypt,
established following the 1952 Free Officers coup, was not only ubiquitous,
stretching its presence in all directions and domains, it also bestowed on
itself an aura of metaphysical prowess. It thought it was invincible, and it
wanted others to think the same way. Because prestige reinforces survival, the
state, and its squad of representatives, allies, clients and puppets, strove
for decades to make Egyptians believe not only that the system was
unbreachable, but also that their own wellbeing was conditioned on the survival
of the system.
Then came the events of
January 28, 2011, shattering this psychological edifice, perhaps for good. The
revolution began on January 25, but its most dramatic and decisive day was
January 28 — “Friday of Anger”. Following the Friday prayers, peaceful
demonstrators marched to Tahrir Square in the millions, while smaller
provincial demonstrations targeted local police stations in Cairo and other
cities with shouting, rocks and Molotov cocktails. Around 100 police stations were
burned or damaged in the span of a few hours. The scenes were surreal, hitherto
unthinkable. Egyptians held their breath as they saw police stations—places
they had avoided in the past for fear of mistreatment—consumed by fountains of
flame and turned into black facades, atop heaps of rubble and overlooking
ruined police trucks.
By the evening, there were
no police officers on the streets of Cairo, not even traffic officers. It
looked as though they had vanished into thin air, or as if they had been swallowed
by a black hole. The army and popular committees filled the security vacuum in
the neighborhoods. But the Mubarak regime had breathed its last with the
collapse of the police, although its official death was only announced through
Mubarak’s resignation two weeks later. Mubarak had finally lost his stick, and
no carrots could convince protestors to leave Tahrir, the hub of the
revolution, and go home.
But forgetfulness, we must
not forget, is the plague of our alley, and it is endemic in the state’s upper
echelons. Following the downfall of the MB, the police state again used brute
force to quell dissent and restore order — the same misguided methods that had
led to the eruption of the revolution in 2011. Old habits die hard, foolish
habits die harder. The police apparatus quickly forgot that the activists who
called for a day of demonstrations against Mubarak in 2011 had deliberately
picked January 25 — Police Day in Egypt. Mubarak’s regime deserved to go for
many reasons, but a single cause of people’s indignation was the culture of
humiliation sponsored by his interior ministry.
It is easier to forget the
past than reflect upon it. It is not astonishing that those who are long on
muscles but short on brains are so unaware of the lessons of history. After
all, Egyptian police officers seem to be more interested in dominating the
country than understanding it. But the velocity with which memories of near
history are erased — including scenes witnessed with one’s own eyes — is
unfathomable. Thomas Jefferson once said “power is not alluring to pure minds.”
Otherwise it can become recklessly blind and deaf, forgetting that plummeting
from the summits of political might can happen in the blink of an eye.
The wide-scale repression
has already backfired; it is terrorism’s most effective catalyst and raison
d’être. The Rabaa massacre and the state repression that preceded and followed
it played into the hands of jihadist fighters, who are waging an insurgency in
Sinai and slowly creeping into Cairo and the Delta region. It has also
alienated the revolutionary youth, who feel that their revolution has been
stolen, that their struggle has gone in vain. Let there be no doubt, they will
soon rebel again. And although another January 28 is not imminent, it is
inevitable if the state continues to act in a way that is out of touch with
history and out of touch with morality.
Egypt’s lamentable modern
history has followed a circular rather than linear pattern. A single step
forward was followed by ten steps back and countless massive defeats were
punctuated by meager gains. But the future will come one day. In preparation
for it, Egyptians must not forget the lessons and must not forgive the sinners.
Nael M. Shama
(1) Sarah Carr and Leyla
Doss, “Too Many to Count,” Mada Masr, 31 January
2014.
(2) Amnesty International, “Egypt Three Years on, Wide-Scale Repression Continues
Unabated,” 23 January 2014.
*
This article appeared first on the website of Le Monde Diplomatique (English)
on February 20, 2014.
