Cities are very articulate. They talk, smile, frown, wail and jubilate,
but their language can be only heard by those who care to listen. A city's
architecture and art, planning and design, streets and traffic, houses and
shacks, signs and billboards, advertisements and banners, all speak volumes
about its identity, and its relationship with people and authority. A glimpse
of a city's center is perhaps the quickest way to come face to face with this. The
center of the city - nearly any city - is akin to the liver in the human body:
it is a reflection of its overall health - or lack thereof.
Whereas Old Cairo became Egypt's capital city in the 10th century,
the current Downtown area of Cairo is relatively new. It was built by the overambitious
Khedive Ismail in the 19th century to become the 'Paris on the
Nile', an embodiment and symbol of his grand plan to align Egypt with Europe
and Western civilization. But waves of demographic and socioeconomic changes
over the past 150 years or so turned the 1,000-year-old city instead into the 'Bombay
on the Nile,' a metropolis weighed down by a large population, limited space, crumbling
services and a great deal of unease and frustration.
Chaotic, overcrowded and frenzied, Downtown Cairo's effervescence verges
on insanity. As if this was not enough, it has been compartmentalized in the
past few years by various concrete, bereft-of-beauty security walls intended to
keep protestors away from vital government buildings. The first of these walls
was erected during the deadly 'Mohamed Mahmoud Street' clashes between
protestors and security forces in November 2011. Some of them were later torn
down; others remain intact, or have been replaced with metal gates that can be
closed whenever social turmoil is anticipated. Ironically, the walls that were
built under the rule of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces as a temporary
measure have mostly remained in place through the leadership of the Islamist
president Mohamed Morsi, the technocratic, military-backed administration that
toppled him last summer and the current regime headed by President Abdel-Fattah
El-Sisi. This owes to the fact that, beneath the veneer of the army cap, the
Islamic beard and the Western hat, all these seemingly diverse regimes have a
lot in common: scarcity of legitimacy, political fragility and the exclusive
reliance on security approaches to solve their political problems.
Sheep Raids Speak to Revolution
In its pure, physical sense, a wall is nothing more than an orderly
amassment of bricks and concrete, designed and measured by the rules of physics
and engineering. It is soulless, a dull construction with a specific function -
that and nothing more. Yet, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, "small
facts speak to larger issues" - winks speak to epistemology, sheep raids
to revolution. Indeed, walls have massive psychological implications. We know
with confidence that human beings, by instinct, desire liberty and eschew
blockades and enclosures. Our eyes long for wide horizons, panoramic views and
open skies, and become strained in their absence. Walls, fences and all sorts
of barriers highlight differences, deepen divisions, impose an aura of
segregation and instill a sense of suffocation. The need for open space and
unrestrained movement cannot be more felt than in an overpopulated,
tightly-packed and anarchic place like Cairo. The downtown security walls have turned
streets into cul-de-sacs, making traffic congestion even worse and inhibiting
commute by foot. Moreover, the compartmentalization of life in Cairo reflects
the prevalence of political tension and conveys a sense of rigidness. "Even
paradise," an author convincingly argued, "could become a prison if
one had enough time to take notice of the walls."
Historical precedents of walls intended and built for the purpose of
security are replete with doomed fates and looked back upon with negative
connotations. Lofty, fortified walls are reminiscent of barbarous, mediaeval
wars, waged before the advent of civilization. In modern times, the Berlin Wall
and Israel's Separation Wall symbolized misguided policies. Their fates attest
to the fallacy of the logic from which they were born. The former failed to
preclude the flow of ideas into the walled-in communities in Eastern Europe, or
the eventual downfall of communist regimes; the latter does not protect the
Jewish state from terrorist attacks. Likewise, the Bantustans in South Africa, enclosed
areas designated for the indigenous population, collapsed with the end of
apartheid in the 1990s. These examples reveal an interesting conclusion: walls
erected to perpetuate notorious policies only exacerbate the problem they were initially
intended to fix. In a sense, the building of walls mirrors the shortsighted inclination
of regimes to procure vast amounts of weapons that are unlikely to be used.
Both acts tend to create a sense of security rather than achieve security per
se.
Like so many others before it, the current Egyptian regime has failed to
realize these subtle truths. Indeed, if contrasted with the walls of Berlin and
the West Bank, the connotation of building walls in Downtown Cairo would be extremely
embarrassing for the regime. The walls built by East Germany and Israel were erected
in the heat of a conflict, in order to thwart these two country's arch enemies.
In contrast, the Egyptian regime has built walls and established buffer zones
in the heart of its capital city, in order to deter or obstruct its own people,
causing economic harm and undermining Cairo's quality of life. The forced separation
between people and vital state institutions (the Cabinet, the People's
Assembly, the Ministry of Interior) is, on the symbolical level, epitomic of the
wide chasm between the ruler and the ruled, and indicative that people's tense relationship
with power has undergone little change since the 2011 uprising against then
President Hosni Mubarak.
Since states are usually more powerful in the center than in the
far-flung territories, indications of fear in the center can be seen as an
official admission of weakness and vulnerability. During the time of Mubarak, there
were no walls in Downtown Cairo. Fear among the people reigned for decades,
thanks to the brutality of Mubarak's gigantic security machine, and there were
only a few, small-scale and intermittent demonstrations. The 2011 revolution
tore down the barriers of fear, unleashing a popular movement unseen in
decades. With the people protesting and the government taking one defensive
measure after another, one is tempted to ask: Who is now more afraid? The
guards, or those at whom the guards point their weapons?
Tahrir Square, the hub of Egypt's revolution, has been closed to anti-regime
protestors since Morsi's ouster in 2013. That the area surrounding it is now zoned
with barricades, roadblocks and barbed wire on days when protests are
anticipated reveals what little remains of the hopes unleashed the day Mubarak
was overthrown in February 2011. To be sure, any official talk about
"democracy," "legitimacy" and the "will of
people" becomes void when a military zone is created in Cairo's iconic
'square of liberation.' When thousands of protestors poured into Tahrir Square
on January 25, 2011, after they had managed to break through the multiple security
cordons imposed by the riot police, they considered setting their foot on the
square an opening—the inauguration of a new era, the restoration of a right
long subjugated by the state. They hugged each other in ecstasy and settled
down, establishing over the 18-day revolution what was dubbed the 'Republic of
Tahrir.' This has been reversed since last summer: Tahrir is closed, protests
are outlawed and security fences consolidated.
To add insult to injury, last February the authorities painted the gate
of Qasr al-Aini Street - a major thoroughfare leading to Tahrir Square - in the
colors of the Egyptian flag. We are faced here with a tragic irony, serving as
a reminder that shameful deeds are often wrapped in the clothes of patriotism
and nationalism. Without a doubt, renaming a thing does not alter its nature; a
vulture remains a vulture even if it swears time and again that it is a
peaceful dove. The truth is: nations accommodate, embrace and mend fences;
dictatorships divide to rule, building barriers and then disguising them with a
national flag and declarations of good intent.
This situation - barring demonstrators from the square of demonstrations
- gives birth to a major paradox: if the policies of the current regime are
supported by the majority of Egyptians, and if this majority perceives its rising
leader (the military's strong man, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi) as "the savior of
the nation," then why does the regime feel so insecure? Why is it so
obsessed with closing the square and applying the strictest of security
measures? The answer is simple: majority is different from unanimity. What the post-Morsi
regime is apparently pursuing is the elimination of dissent, sowing the idea
that there is only one voice; there is no opposition, no diversity. This is reminiscent
of another country with many walls and no windows: North Korea.
Repression and Defiance
Cairo's walls are walls of mistrust and wariness. They reflect the
absence of political consensus, and the failure of Egypt's transition to
democracy. There are no divisive walls in inclusive systems. Security measures
around the White House or London's Downing Street are perhaps less strict than
those enforced around any local police station in Cairo. Legitimacy itself is
surely the best wall of defense. Instead of building walls that will eventually
be torn down, the focus of Egyptian policymakers should be on how to legitimize
the regime, its institutions and the political process it espouses. In order to
do that, the establishment of a true democratic system and the reform of decaying
state institutions, particularly the security apparatus, are imperative steps.
The recent rise in terrorist attacks being carried out in Egypt does not
validate the blind substitution of comprehensive political blueprints with marginal
security plans. On the contrary, terrorist bombs are tantamount to alarm bells,
raised to remind policymakers of just how much the old problems have been exacerbated,
and old solutions have failed. Men do not go on killing sprees out of lust or
boredom, but out of anger and frustration. But self-delusion can be comforting,
especially for a regime searching for pretexts. It is tempting to divorce
terrorism from its causes, to think that some people are innately evil. It is a
convenient way to close any discussion about cause and responsibility. As Terry
Eagleton explains, "we have thrown out a determinism of environment only
to replace it with one of character. It is now your character, not your social
conditions, which drives you to unspeakable deeds." Clearly, thinking it
is faced with evil and psychopathic terrorists, the Egyptian regime has
resorted to an all-out, life-or-death war with its nemeses.
This is a flawed logic. Men with arms might be defeated with arms, but if
the underlying reasons that impelled them to use deadly violence against the
state are not addressed, then more men will be prompted to take up arms, escalating
the conflict and undermining efforts to contain it. The new generations of
terrorists will, moreover, be fueled by an insatiable urge for vengeance and
destruction. Seasons of migration to the battlefield will continue unabated, and
the normalization of war will ensue. The ways of Egyptian politics,
which dominated - and impaired - the country for decades, and which habitually looks
at complex political problems through a narrow security prism, must therefore finally
change.
Alas, autocrats think in terms of
control and coercion, not partnership and engagement. They build more walls
than bridges. They constantly ask themselves one question: why should I bother
with the constraints of democracy when I can impose my will and get away with
it? Although they are far from being perceptive, they can infer how little
legitimacy they have, how much contempt they attract, and, accordingly, how
mush force they need to use to stay the course. Living in a world of threats,
real and perceived, the dynamics of panic guide their behavior. Their physical energy
is consumed by defensive acts: erecting high walls, buying new weapons, hiring more
guards, fastening extra chains, and building more prisons; their mental energy
is mesmerized by the delusion that these measures would secure them. History tells
us that those who rely on the stick for survival never know when to stop, never
get out of their cocoons. Psychologists have a name for this mindset: "the
fortress mentality," prisons of one's own making.
There are, nevertheless, two shining facts about the story of
repression. The first is that repression begets resistance; in fact, an extra
dose of it usually invites extra spurts of defiance. The second is that the
oppressed almost always outwit and outmaneuver their oppressors. It seems as though
dictatorship is destined to marry stupidity, and then fall at its altar. In the
Egyptian context, the undignified endings of Mubarak's and Morsi's journeys of
power provide two vivid cases in point. Egyptians' response to the notorious
walls came in the form of graffiti - marvelous, creative wall paintings that
merge art and skill with intelligence and humor. The colorful murals expose the
tyrants, commemorate the martyrs, and vow continued persistence. "The
walls are the publishers of the poor," said the Uruguayan writer Eduardo
Galeano. The street of Mohamed Mahmoud turned during and after the 2011 monumental
clashes into an open-air art gallery. The sense of contrast could not be more
intense; the faces of oppression and recalcitrance, coercion and artistry, hideousness
and beauty, juxtaposed in one spot, along the shores of one battle. It looked as
if the brave protestors were shouting at their hunters: you shoot, we draw; you
put to death, we bring to life.
Social Fragmentation
If Cairo has not changed much on the political level since the early
1950s, its urban landscape has changed on a massive scale since then. Cairo used
to attract immigrants from other Egyptian regions for many decades, but in
recent times it has seen its own people (those with the financial means, of
course) retreat from the city, escaping to its outskirts and the new urban communities
that mushroomed around its borders. While the trend was partly driven by the
desire to remain within the metropolis but break away from its plagues - the pollution,
congestion and crowdedness - it was also triggered by multiple social values,
such as the pursuit of isolation, yearning for distinction and suspicion of the
social 'other.'
Unlike
the neighborhoods of old Cairo which in earlier centuries accommodated, in
harmony and peace, the castles of Pashas, the houses of middle class merchants
and state clerks and the ‘Takaya’ (hospices) of Sufi orders, the new
Cairo imposes segregation, limited interaction and shallow mutual knowledge.
This had inspired the late Egyptian vernacular poet Ahmed Fouad Negm (1929-2013)
to write: “long live my countrymen; there is no acquaintance amongst them that
makes the alliance lives on.” Ironically, while the walls and gates of the
old Cairo (built by the Fatimid and Ayyubid dynasties from the 10th
to the 12th century) were there to protect the whole city from
outside aggressors, today's walls protect the elites from other social classes,
the 'other' Egyptians.
The new compounds and semi-resort housing projects that popped up around
Cairo, in the suburbs of New Cairo and the 6th of October City and
along the Cairo-Alexandria and Cairo-Suez roads, are mostly gated and
heavily-protected, looking from afar like formidable strongholds scanning for
intruders. These gated communities reinforce the boundaries between social
classes in a highly unequal society that already suffers from a huge (and
expanding) gap between the haves and the have-nots. A recent government report
stated that poverty in Egypt has increased over the past few years: 26.3
percent for the year 2012/13 compared with 25.2 percent in 2010/11 and 21.6
percent in 2008/9. Meanwhile, five businessmen from two families dominated the 2014
Forbes list of Egypt's wealthiest people, with a combined total wealth of $17
billion (around 4.2 percent of Egypt's total wealth). In other words, Egypt's wealth
is concentrated in a small social segment, and this segment's wealth is in turn
concentrated in the pockets of a few individuals.
Inadequacy is a powerful motivator. The mere sight of the walls and
guards of Cairo's desert colonies could instill outsiders with a burning
desire. As the old Arabic idiom goes, "what is forbidden is desired most."
Walls by definition indicate that there is something precious beyond them that
needs protection. There is a general feeling in Egypt that if an "uprising
of the hungry" ever erupts in Cairo, then its first targets would be the
living compounds of the rich. Indeed, various 5-star hotels and nightclubs were
ransacked and set ablaze during the riots of the Central Security forces'
conscripts in 1986. These were then the outlets and getaways of the rich; there
were no social enclaves in the Cairo of the 1970s and 1980s.
Gated communities are one of the many manifestations of neoliberalism,
whose whirlwinds have in recent times swept across Egypt's middle and lower
classes. Egypt's political and economic power is quickly moving to the suburbs
of Cairo, putting down the roots of a new center and leaving behind the wounded
and lost city. Scores of politicians live in the suburb of New Cairo, including
former President Mohamed Morsi and Ahmed Shafiq, the runner-up in the 2012
presidential election. The headquarters of the presidential campaign of Field
Marshall Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi was also located there. It's interesting to note
that a newly-opened commercial and corporate center in New Cairo carries the
title "Downtown." The meanings conveyed by the names are clear: a
"new" Cairo has emerged with a "downtown" of its own. Indeed,
in the making are two Cairos, divided across social and financial frontiers;
one is inhabited by the exuberant few who indulge in a joie de vivre attitude,
the other by sullen crowds struggling to make ends meet. This is a reflection
of social fragmentation, not urban development. The impoverished Egyptians are living
on the margins of this new city - in the deprived belts of misery that surfaced
since the 1970s - just as they have always been living on the margins of the
country's non-egalitarian economy.
Egypt's political walls will come down, stone by stone, when a new dawn
breaks over Egypt and a new political order is born. But the problem with social
walls is that they are more entrenched. The Germans use the expression Mauer
im Kopf (the wall in the head) to indicate that the psychological divide between
East and West Berlin is still alive despite the reunification of Germany in
1990. There's something similar to that in Egypt: overwhelming feelings of division,
segregation, rupture and distrust - the set of poisonous ingredients that make
nations falter.
Undoubtedly, a city without political walls is more confident in itself,
and a city without social walls is more at peace with itself. Cairo - the city 'victorious'
in Arabic - is a weary city, fraught with tension, weighed down by the number
of its inhabitants, suffering from decades of negligence and torn by social
tension. Cairo is today more defeated than victorious, more fragmented than
united and more exasperated than content. Its walls epitomize the massive political
and social tensions that engulf Egypt as a whole. If only the walls could talk.
Nael M. Shama
* A
shorter version of this essay appeared first in the September 2014 issue of Le
Monde Diplomatique (English).
