January 8, 2014
Why Egypt’s Liberal Intellectuals Still Support the Army
Posted by Negar Azimi
When the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany took the stage in October at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to promote the French translation of his latest novel, he was presumably not expecting to be heckled and chased from the venue by a crowd of his own countrymen. But minutes into his talk, the author’s voice was drowned out by the shouts of Egyptian emigrés who had come out for the chance to tear him to bits.
One of the Arab world’s most popular novelists, Aswany was a prominent supporter of the demonstrations that climaxed with the dramatic fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. (Wendell Steavenson wrote a Profile of Aswany for the magazine in early 2012.) More recently, in his columns for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm (and, since October, for the International New York Times), Aswany has been a relentless critic of Mohamed Morsi and his followers in the Muslim Brotherhood—and a passionate defender of the man who deposed him, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whom Aswany has called “a national hero.”
In clips of the Paris gathering posted on YouTube, one can see the room erupt into chaos resembling a food fight. The event’s host, the translator and former ambassador Gilles Gauthier, helplessly pleads, “This event is about literature!” while Morsi supporters in the audience stand up to chant “Down with military rule!” and “Traitor!” in Arabic. A sea of hands shoots up in the crowd, waving the four-fingers gesture that has come to be an emblem for the mass killing of Muslim Brotherhood protestors at Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiyah mosque in August. (“Rabaa” means “fourth” in Arabic.)
Before long, Aswany, a practicing dentist with the girth of a night-club bouncer, is standing up, jabbing his finger and shouting, “Down with the dogs of the Morshid … You are traitors … You have betrayed the revolution!” As if that were not enough, members of the crowd advance on the stage, pushing a security guard back, onto the table at which Aswany and Gauthier are sitting, splitting it in two. As unidentified objects begin to fly at the author’s head, the two men slip through a glass door at the back of the stage and escape down a trap door in the floor. It is an unlikely, if not inelegant, exit.
The scene is painful to watch, and yet not entirely surprising. Two thousand miles from Cairo, it serves as a window onto the vast polarization of the Egyptian political sphere over the past twelve months, which culminated two weeks ago with the military-backed government’s designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as an illegal “terrorist organization.” The new designation set off an even more aggressive crackdown on the group, most of whose leaders have been jailed. Protests in several Egyptian cities have escalated into violent confrontations between Brotherhood supporters and police; on Friday, thirteen people were killed, and almost fifty wounded, in clashes across the country.
* * *
Ardent supporters of the Brotherhood have been pitted against partisans of the current military government since the events of this summer, when protestors filled streets and squares across Egypt to demand that the country’s first freely elected President step down. (Estimates of their number range from 476,000 to the oft-cited but highly implausible thirty-four million.) Morsi, predictably, refused to budge, and was kidnapped by the Army, a move his supporters protested with prolonged sit-ins—until these were broken up with considerable violence in August, killing somewhere between six hundred and two thousand six hundred people. (The numbers game in Egypt is an impenetrable thicket.) The victors cast their triumph as a revolution—merely the next phase in the photogenic uprising that began with Mubarak’s removal; the vanquished called it a military coup, topped off by the bloodiest massacre in modern Egyptian history.
The fact that no independent investigation has been conducted into the deaths of Brotherhood supporters does not bode well for those embracing the photogenic version of events. Nor, for that matter, does the passage, in November, of an anti-protest law that makes it virtually impossible to gather ten or more people in one place without a special permit. Dozens of activists have already been jailed for violating it; they were joined in prison, at the end of December, by three Al Jazeera journalists, who were essentially arrested on charges of sympathy for the banned Brotherhood.
The elaborate semantic disputes over the facts of Egypt’s recent history can be dizzying. To use the word “coup” in describing the events of this summer will invite, in some circles, the suggestion that the Brotherhood’s ascendance was the work of a Western conspiracy involving an odd troika: two-faced local human-rights groups, flush with foreign money; biased anti-military and pro-Morsi journalists with the Times and other U.S. outlets; and, of course, the secret leadership of Barack Hussein Obama.
Referring to the July events as a “revolution,” on the other hand, will lead the opposing camp, consisting of Morsi supporters and critics of the military (who are, increasingly, an unpopular minority), to point out that there may have been more legitimate means of expressing disapproval of Morsi—through, say, civil disobedience or a public campaign for early elections.
Many of those who believe it was a “coup” would add that there is evidence that the security forces, Army, and even remnants of the Mubarak regime helped orchestrate the protests against Morsi. In this view, the twists and turns of the past three years were nothing but theatrical diversions in an elaborate farce choreographed by the military and the old regime: first, let the octogenarian dictator fall; appear enlightened by allowing an underdog Islamist candidate to win the election; let the country descend into chaos—so the Army can once again come to the rescue, welcomed with open arms by the grateful populace.
Amid these rival claims, Aswany’s passionate defense of the military sits squarely in the mainstream of public opinion, and yet it has surprised and disappointed some of his admirers. After all, we expect our writers and intellectuals to be moral giants, holding up a mirror to the world’s inequities. In Egypt, this expectation has particular resonance, as several generations of politically committed writers—beginning with Naguib Mahfouz and continuing with Sonallah Ibrahim, Gamal Al-Ghitani, Ahdaf Soueif, and Hamdi Abou Golayyel—have made vivid the many grinding injustices of Egyptian life. Across the decades, one finds a familiar cast of literary types: the thuggish politicians who take your bribes, the drug dealers who ply you with cheap painkillers, the pimps who sell your sisters, the police who beat you to a pulp, the Islamists who censor your books and trash your cinema, and—of course—the unacknowledged, but omnipresent, Big Man.
Aswany’s 2002 novel, “The Yacoubian Building,” which had all the pyrotechnic melodrama of a soap opera, deftly showcased the social ills of Mubarak’s Egypt through the interwoven stories of the inhabitants of a once glamorous downtown-Cairo apartment building. One of his characters, a young man tortured and raped by the police, turns to radical Islam; Aswany uses his story to illustrate how the state’s abuses have bred terrorism. An ominous Mubarak-like figure, fearsome and never identified, lingers in the background throughout. A spectacular best-seller, the book was adapted into a big-budget film, and then a television series. Aswany’s new prominence did not diminish his criticism of the regime: he was one of the founders of Kifaya, a heroically rag-tag anti-Mubarak coalition composed of Nasserists, socialists, liberals, and assorted others who, in 2004, began to stage protests against the government—usually a hundred people at most, ringed by far larger crowds of state security police in riot gear. These gatherings, which for so long seemed futile, were in many ways among the seeds for the uprising that toppled Mubarak.
* * *
I met Aswany in Cairo last month at the Garden City Club, a members-only bar and restaurant on the roof of a faded but regal art-deco building. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the incident in Paris, which Aswany waved away with a mischievous laugh. (“It was very hot,” he recalled.) Turning back to the events of the summer, he was less mirthful. “Mr. Morsi cancelled the democratic system last November,” Aswany said, referring to the former President’s extra-constitutional decree granting him sweeping new powers untouched by legislative or judicial oversight. “He cancelled the law, the constitution, and put himself above all the courts. He acted like a Turkish sultan, you see?”
In Aswany’s view, the November, 2012, decree was only Morsi’s most dramatic failure: there were legions of others, from the minor (distractedly scratching his own crotch in front of the Australian Prime Minister) to the major (bungling the economy; appointing a member of the Islamist group Gama’a al-Islamiya, whose militants killed dozens of tourists in Luxor in 1997, to be the governor of Luxor province).
“You know, I gave him a chance,” Aswany said. “Many of us did.” But the writer’s distaste for the Muslim Brotherhood is deep-rooted, and long predates Morsi’s election. “They are terrorists,” he said. “We had the feeling we were in a room of gangsters. People woke up every morning asking, what did these people do overnight? Did they give up the Suez Canal? Did they make an under-the-table deal about Sinai? Did they ban ballet? They wanted to ban the ballet! Ballet is not erotic! At the same time, you have their people in the parliament trying to convince us that it is O.K. to marry a girl that is fourteen years old … this is a disease; it is pedophilia!”
He grew more animated. “They are like a bad version of Don Quixote because they live in history. They believe they were chosen by God to restore the glory of their religion. This type of fascism is very, very dangerous!”
I pressed him about the killing of Morsi supporters in August. “We don’t have the numbers yet.”
About the word “coup”:
“There was a warning, and Morsi refused to step down. The Army interfered to protect millions who were already in the street. This is not a coup d’état.”
About whether General Sisi, for whom there has been cultish enthusiasm in Egypt, should run for president:
“I cannot answer that question until we have a system of fair elections.” (This is not a likely development anytime soon.)
And, finally: What if Morsi had stayed?
“They would have controlled the whole country. There would be Brotherhood in the media, Brotherhood in the Ministry of Culture, Brotherhood everywhere!”
This, I felt, got to the heart of what many secular intellectuals fear most. I heard it over and over again this fall: given enough time, the Brotherhood would have spread its tentacles throughout the system, until it became the system. “We don’t want to turn into Iran,” the newspaper editor Ibrahim Eissa told me, explaining why he felt the ongoing crackdown on the Brotherhood was necessary. Eissa, a friend of Aswany and a prominent Egyptian liberal, faced multiple prison sentences for criticizing Mubarak in the aughts. These days, his weekly television talk show is a wince-worthy carnival of affection for the military. In a landscape in which good choices are few and far between, the Eissas of Egypt have attached themselves to what they may perceive as the lesser evil.
Aswany and Eissa are not lone wolves: if anything, they reflect the views not only of most Egyptians, but of their fellow liberal writers. In the past few months, Al-Ghitani and the feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi have gone on record defending the military’s role in the events of the summer, as has Ibrahim, probably Egypt’s most admired novelist, who was venerated for his principled and unyielding opposition to the Mubarak regime. Very few prominent writers—among them Soueif, who hails from a family of prominent human-rights advocates, and Belal Fadl—have rejected the binary choice between the military and the Brotherhood. In September, Soueif and others launched the Road of the Revolution Front, a group that aims to reject what it calls the fascism of both sides. And yet it remains small and, in many circles, unpopular.
* * *
A few nights after the Garden City Club encounter, I drove up to Moqattam, a desert suburb that hangs above the smoggy city, atop one of Cairo’s few plateaus. Aswany was holding his weekly literary salon—a tradition that goes back some fifteen years—in a cultural center called Shababeek. As I walked in, Aswany was squinting beneath an overly bright spotlight, giving an interview to a local television station. I heard him exclaim, “I was not afraid!” It took me a second to realize he was referring to the incident in Paris, faithfully fulfilling the role of a man who would never bend to humiliation.
Upstairs, where he would be talking, about eighty people—a respectable cross section of stooped and young, veiled and unveiled, men and women—patiently waited for their host, in a room whose walls were painted black, as if to communicate a “contemporary” atmosphere. (I imagined that many Arabic rap concerts and slam-poetry readings had been held there.) As Aswany walked in, he was besieged by well-wishers and worked the room like Frank Sinatra. He climbed onto the stage, and the room fell into a reverential hush.
The theme of that evening’s session was satire and its importance in democracy. Only a few days earlier, the popular satirical show hosted by Bassem Youssef—invariably described as “Egypt’s Jon Stewart”—had been cancelled, ostensibly because Youssef had gone one step too far in his jokes about the military. Aswany passionately defended Youssef, and then went on to present a short history of satire’s role in Egyptian political life. At one point, he had the room in stitches as he told joke after joke, including one of his favorites from 2011: “Someone tells Mubarak the people are saying goodbye—and Mubarak says, but where are they going?”
When it finally came time for questions, a young man in a hoodie got up and, with prepared notes in hand, made a series of statements about the crimes of the Army, ending with the massacre that took place in Rabaa al-Adawiyah. At one point, he said to Aswany, “Ask yourself, do they have the right to kill innocent protestors?”
Aswany—probably thinking, “This again?”—seemed taken aback. “I didn’t kill anyone,” he said, defensively, “but anyone who kills a member of the Army is a traitor … The Muslim Brotherhood has blood on its hands.” He reiterated a point he had made earlier in the evening: even though many of Egypt’s Communists had spent years in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s prisons in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, their party never turned to violence. “They didn’t touch a mosquito,” Aswany concluded. The Brotherhood, he seemed to suggest, had violence in its DNA.
At that point, a well-dressed woman, with elaborately pomaded hair and a tight-fitting top, turned to her friend and said, loudly, of the boy in the hoodie and his female friends, who were veiled: “They are with the Brotherhood!”
One of the veiled women took issue, and soon, everyone seemed to be standing, pointing, and shouting. I saw a few elderly people in the room slip out, probably anticipating a fistfight.
Things eventually calmed down, and a young veiled woman—from the same group of friends—posed another question. Aswany had said General Sisi’s duty was to protect the people, she began, but why were those who criticized him brought before military courts? Some of her own friends, she said, had been jailed for this reason.
Aswany, looking both impatient and dyspeptic, acknowledged that there would be no democracy without opposing opinions. Then his face brightened, as if pleased by an idea, and he said, happily, that she had the right to call what happened this summer a coup if she wanted.
I left soon after, mostly because the tensions in the room had grown to the size of a Goodyear blimp. As I walked out, the first thing I saw in front of me was an old Morsi poster, worn away by time and abuse, so that he no longer had a chin. On it, red spray paint advertised “Walid for Real Estate,” along with a cell-phone number that was missing two digits. I thought back to my conversation with Aswany a few nights earlier, when I had asked him whether he thought democracy was simply an electoral process, or if it represented a more diffuse set of values.
“Democracy is our homework,” he said. “If in one year we end up with military rule, we don’t blame the military. We can only blame ourselves.”
Photograph by Jerome Schlomoff.
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