TELL OLD PHARAOH:

The Sorrows of Egypt: A Tale of Two Men (Fouad Ajami, September/October 1995, Foreign Affairs)

At the heart of Egyptian life there lies a terrible sense of disappointment. The pride of modern Egypt has been far greater than its accomplishments. The dismal results are all around: the poverty of the underclass, the bleak political landscape that allows an ordinary officer to monopolize political power and diminish all would-be rivals in civil society, the sinking of the country into sectarian strife between Muslim and Copt, the dreary state of its cultural and educational life.

A country of 60 million people, the weekly magazine al-Mussawar recently revealed, now produces a mere 375 books a year. Contrast this with Israel's 4,000 titles, as the magazine did, and it is easy to understand the laments heard all around. Al-Ahram, the country's leading daily -- launched in 1876 and possessed of a distinguished history -- is unreadable. There is no trace of investigative journalism or thoughtful analysis on its pages, only the banal utterances of political power. No less a figure than the great novelist Naguib Mahfouz, a product of the ancien régime (he was born in 1911), has spoken with sorrow and resignation about this state of affairs. "Egypt's culture is declining fast," he wrote. "The state of education in our country is in crisis. Classrooms are more like warehouses to cram children in for a few hours than places of education. The arts and literature are barely taught in these institutions, which are run more like army barracks than places where cultural awareness and appreciation can be nurtured." In more apocalyptic terms, the commentator Karim Alrawi warned that the modernizing imperative that has dominated and driven Egypt since the early 1800s after its encounter with Europe is being reversed.

It is out of this disappointment that a powerful wave of nostalgia has emerged for the liberal interlude in Egyptian politics (the 1920s through the revolution of 1952), for its vibrant political life, for the lively press of the time, for the elite culture with its literati and artists, for its outspoken, emancipated women who had carved a place for themselves in the country's politics, culture, and journalism. Some of this is the standard nostalgia of a crowded, burdened society for a time of lost innocence and splendor; some, though, is the legitimate expression of discontent over the mediocrity of public life. Egypt produced better, freer cinema in the 1930s than it does today. Its leading intellectual figures were giants who slugged out the great issues of the day and gave Egyptian and Arabic letters a moment of undisputed brilliance. When the critic and writer Louis Awad, a Copt, a prolific and independent man of letters born in 1915, died in 1990, an age seemed to come to a close. The Egypt of the military has produced no peers for Awad and Mahfouz and their likes.

Curiosity about this bourgeois past and about its contemporary relevance led me to the home of Fuad Pasha Serageddin, a nearly legendary figure of that era, born in 1908, a man of the ancien régime, who was the boy wonder of his time, rising to become a minister at age 32. On the eve of the Free Officer revolt, he was the ancien régime's largest landholder: he was secretary-general of the Wafd Party, the repository of bourgeois Egyptian nationalism from 1919 until the military revolt of 1952. The Free Officer regime had imprisoned and then exiled him; he had returned in the 1970s when Sadat opened up the life of the country; in no time his political party, under its revered old name, the Wafd, became a force to reckon with. It was in many ways a natural home for the professionals and the Copts and the men and women of private industry and commerce. Sadat had derided the Pasha, had called him Louis XVI, but the figure from the prerevolutionary past made a place for himself in the new political order.

The Pasha -- the country knows him by no other name -- lives in a palace in Garden City, one of Cairo's neighborhoods that still has patches of what the city was in more quaint and less crowded times a half-century ago: villas once grand but now shabby and covered with dust, homes with gardens where the great bourgeois families once lived secure in their sense of place and order. The Pasha's palace, built by his father in 1929, speaks of bygone splendor. Dark and decaying inside, with the threadbare furniture of the era, it has the grand entrance and the marble columns of its time. The staff and servants, too, old and bent by the years, must have been with the Pasha's household since better times.

A scent of old Egypt, the Egypt of the grand tour, the country celebrated by Lawrence Durrell in his Alexandria Quartet, blows in with the Pasha when he enters the reception room. He has spanned decades and worlds of Egypt's contemporary history. Nostalgia and a scathing judgment of the military regime drive the Pasha's vision. He ridicules the government-controlled press; he now reads al-Ahram, he says, for the obituaries of his old friends; there is nothing else to read in the subservient press. He has a jaundiced view of the American role in Egypt. The Americans, he believes, feel quite comfortable with authoritarianism. The American fear of a fundamentalist takeover, he observes, plays into the hands of Mubarak's regime.

The Pasha's world, the world of his Wafd Party, has deep roots in this conservative land. But after a moment of genuine enthusiasm, the Wafd lost much of its lure. A bargain it made to contest the parliamentary elections back in 1984 in alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood seemed like a betrayal of the party's secular heritage. The Pasha's age was another handicap. The memories his presence evoked were increasingly his alone. He reintroduced into the political world a measure of courage in the face of the state and launched a daily paper infinitely better than the official organs of the regime, but Egypt's troubles seemed beyond his scope. Sixteen million people have been added to the population since Mubarak came to power in 1981. This increase alone is more than the combined total populations of Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. The facts of Egypt's poverty and need are so well known that one hardly need state them. One set of figures reveals the trouble: 400,000 people enter the job market every year; 75 percent of the new entrants are unemployed; 90 percent of these people have intermediate or higher education diplomas. That is why some of Mubarak's critics concede the burden the regime has to carry. The task of keeping the place afloat and intact is like plowing the sea. This crowded land has gone beyond that pleasant bourgeois age and its houses with gardens. [...]

Chroniclers of the Mubarak regime may look back at his rule as ten good years followed by lean years of trouble and drift. By his own early accounts and self-portrayal an ordinary man with no claims to greatness, Mubarak appeared to heed the fate of his predecessor. A cautious man, he drew back from the precipice, stitching back together as best he knew how the fault line between the state and the mainstream opposition. He rebuilt bridges to the Arab world burned by Sadat; he gave every indication that the fling with America and the West that had carried Sadat away would be reined in, that a sense of proportion and restraint would be restored to Egyptian politics. He presented himself as a man with clean hands who would put an end to the crony capitalism and economic pillage of the Sadat era.

But Mubarak was no great reformer bent on remaking the political landscape. To begin with, he labored against the background of an adverse set of changes in the economic domain. The 1980s proved to be a difficult decade for Egypt's economy. The rate of annual growth plummeted; in 1989-90 the economy grew a mere two percent, less than the growth in the population. Egypt dropped from the World Bank's group of lower-middle-income countries to its lower-income category; inflation rose and the real income of industrial workers eroded. A regime unable to reverse this decline fell back on its powers of coercion when the Gamaat took on the state.

In retrospect, the choice that mattered was made by Mubarak with his coronation for a third term in 1993. A modest man (a civil servant with the rank of president, a retired army general of Mubarak's generation described him to me) had become president for life. Mubarak had broken a pledge that he would limit himself to two terms in office. Though outsiders may have a romantic view of Egyptians as patient fellaheen tilling the soil under an eternal sky, in veritable awe of their rulers, in fact a strong sense of skepticism and a keen eye for the foibles of rulers pervade Egyptian political culture. No one had the means to contest Mubarak's verdict; a brave soul or two quibbled about the decision. An open letter was sent to Mubarak by Basheer, one of the country's most thoughtful and temperate public figures, questioning the wisdom of the decision. Autocracy prevailed, but a healthy measure of the regime's legitimacy seemed to vanish overnight.

There's only one source of legitimacy for a regime in the 21st Century: consent of the people in one form or another.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2005 7:48 AM