Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  The mediocrity of Egyptian education was reflected by Cairo University, the official added. The once-noted university had dropped to twenty-eighth place in Africa, the continent with the world’s worst education system. The Cairo campus was also no longer among the top 500 universities in the world.38

  Egypt’s troubled economy also had to accommodate at least 800,000 new young job seekers every year—complicated by the regime’s pledge that all college graduates could get a government job. As a result, the government spent most of its revenues on security, a bloated bureaucracy to keep people employed, and subsidies for gasoline, wheat, and sugar—leaving little to invest in infrastructure, much less Egypt’s future.

  Baz described Mubarak as a practical person in responding to these challenges. “He has never been a government employee; he’s not an ideologue. He doesn’t like bureaucratic formulas and ideas,” the presidential adviser explained. “He thinks bureaucrats are limited by nature, because they want to protect themselves.”

  Ironically, bureaucrats were also big obstacles to Gamal Mubarak’s future. The old guard grumbled about the young Mubarak, several analysts told me, because they believed it was their turn next at the top. Key military officials felt the president should emerge from within their tradition.

  Baz insisted that Gamal Mubarak was not running for the presidency, although he did leave the door quite noticeably ajar. The caveat became a common refrain in comments from other Egyptian officials, too.

  “Gamal Mubarak wants only the rights of any Egyptian,” Baz said,

  “and that includes the right to run for parliament, or office, or to be active within the National Democratic Party.” As if Gamal Mubarak were just any Egyptian.

  As I waited to hear about the Mubarak interview, the Foreign Ministry urged me to talk to Mohammed Kamal, a young political scientist on Mubarak’s new policy committee. Kamal’s office is in a new building at Cairo University constructed out of the side of an old one. It was an Alice-in-Wonderland experience finding it. I walked down the hall of the old building, opening one classroom door after another, until I found one that instead opened up into a hallway with a whole new set of classroom doors. Then I had to find Kamal’s door. Finding my way out was just as tricky. Every door looked the same.

  Kamal did his graduate work at Johns Hopkins University; his dissertation was on the role of the United States Congress in crafting foreign policy. He had a simultaneous fellowship on Capitol Hill, where he said he did work for the House International Relations Committee and Democratic congressmen Tom Sawyer of Ohio and Sam Gejdenson of Connecticut.

  “I liked the Democrats,” he told me, sitting behind his desk in a white, freshly painted office. “The experience taught me a lot and helped me fine-tune my dissertation.”

  Kamal, who looks a bit like the younger Mubarak but with rounder cheeks, joined the ruling party in high school. When it won only thirty-eight percent of the seats in parliament in 2000, he was one of nine young Egyptians summoned to form Gamal Mubarak’s new policy committee.

  “That election was a real wake-up call,” he explained. The little group, made up of young experts who had all been educated or lived in the West, drafted a new platform for the National Democratic Party.

  “The old platform places the party in the socialist camp. It contained elements of a one-party state. It identified the party as a big tent—for all ideological orientations and for all classes, rich, poor, and middle class,” Kamal explained. The revised platform redefined it as center-left and largely of the middle class.

  “We’re talking free enterprise but also government that has a social responsibility towards the people, like the thinking of Bill Clinton or Tony Blair,” Kamal said.

  During the process of defining a new direction for the leadership, he added, the younger Mubarak had created political space and helped to empower his generation.

  “Before, the process of legislation had been dominated by old-fashioned legal scholars who lost touch with the modern world a long time ago,” Kamal explained. “Today, if you look at different departments in government, you will see people in their late thirties and early forties who are involved in key executive committees. And the influence of this group is expanding. I’m now responsible for educating members of the party politically. I am forty. I credit Gamal with doing that.”

  Kamal had also been appointed to Egypt’s Shura, which translates as “consultative council”; it is the upper house of parliament. He was its youngest member.

  Looking ahead, Kamal explained, Mubarak’s advisory group was working on a new antiterrorist act to replace emergency law. It was also crafting reforms to foster a multiparty system and empowerment of women. He specifically cited talk about a quota for women in parliament, a practice adopted in Iraq and the Palestinian territories and increasingly popular in dozens of developing countries.

  When I asked him what kind of numbers, he suggested thirty or forty seats—or less than two percent. It was a telling sign of how little the autocrats want to change.

  To get a sense of how open the ruling party would be with its rivals, I asked Kamal about the Muslim Brotherhood.

  “We don’t consider the Ikhwan a terrorist organization,” he said, even though the group was outlawed. “There is a big debate about this issue, not just in Egypt, but all over the Arab and Muslim worlds. Everywhere they are moving forward and, as a political scientist, I feel it is the key to democracy development. The question is how to regulate the relationship between Islam and politics, and this debate is healthy.”

  The ruling party was divided into three schools, Kamal explained. One argued that all religious parties should be banned, on grounds that they ultimately will not share power. “It’s Iran all over again. It’s one man, one vote, one time,” he said.

  The second school argued that the Brotherhood was a reality and had to be recognized. “This school argues: If it walks and talks like a party, it’s a party,” Kamal explained.

  “I’m somewhere in the middle, in the third camp,” he said. “Society is not ripe for creation of a party because Egypt is a conservative society—and because more people are becoming religious every day. If you allow the Islamists to establish a political party, they will undermine the development of democracy because they will dominate the discourse with their religious ideas.

  “You cannot compete with the words of God or the sayings of the Prophet,” he continued. “The Islamists will try to present you as against God—and this resonates very well with people.”

  Kamal then told me the story of the blue cheese. He had recently been to his local grocer in an upscale neighborhood to buy Danish blue cheese, but the grocer told him he no longer carried it. As it happened, the refrigerator door was open behind the grocer and Kamal clearly saw the cheese on a shelf. The grocer then confessed that he still had some but quickly added, in front of other shoppers, that he was preparing to return it.

  The grocery encounter happened shortly after a Danish newspaper published caricatures of the prophet Mohammad that triggered riots in dozens of countries on three continents. More than 100 people had died and more than 800 had been injured in protests. The Muslim grocer could not afford to be carrying anything Danish.

  “This is the danger I’m talking about,” Kamal said.

  “So, you can’t exclude the Islamists from the political process. The fact is, they’re there already. They need to be part of this formula but to evolve as the political system evolves—into a conservative party that believes in family values and prayers and references to religion, like the Republicans in the United States,” he said. “But the way they are today, they want a state based on religion.”

  Kamal is on the most liberal fringe of the National Democratic Party and, he conceded, the younger generation faced uphill battles of its own. “Our influence is exaggerated because we are working with the president’s son. Change is not easy. There are many others in both the party and the government who have vested inter
ests in the status quo. For them, it’s not a battle for reform, but a turf war.”

  Before I left, Kamal promised that he, too, would put in an urgent call to help me get in to see Mubarak.

  As I continued to wait, I went around to talk to Hala Mustafa, the glamorous editor of Democracy Review, a journal published by the government’s leading think tank. She had also been recruited to assist the new Policy Secretariat, although at the second of three levels. The inner circle had only nine members. The second had some 130 prominent younger Egyptians. And the third had around 400 people to advise Gamal Mubarak.

  Mustafa is an intense woman who speaks quickly and does several things at once. She was wearing a smart gray suit with a designer scarf in bright red, yellow, and green. Her jewelry included a heart-shaped pendant and earrings, both encrusted with diamonds. She had manicured French nails, and her two-toned hair was softy coifed. She is in her midforties but looks a decade younger. On her desk was a large photograph of an attractive young woman who I initially took to be her daughter; there were six other pictures of the same person in various sizes and poses arrayed on bookshelves behind her desk. Looking closer, I realized they were all of Mustafa.

  Mustafa, who did her graduate degree on Islamist movements, considers herself to be a secular, open-minded liberal. Democracy Review gives voice to a range of ideas—in Arabic and English—on the steps to democracy, press freedoms, women’s rights, grassroots movements, the role of opposition parties, and both Christian and Muslim cultures. She was never a member of the ruling party, although she received a government paycheck. And she was initially enthusiastic about Gamal Mubarak’s reform initiative.

  “I eagerly embraced this whole idea of liberalizing the regime or the party from within,” she told me.

  But like others I talked to, she soon became frustrated. “The first year, there was real discussion. I felt there was new space to express my pro-reform ideas. But then things began to change,” she said. Economic reform got priority, while political change was put on hold. Gradually, the most outspoken reformers were marginalized or excluded.

  “The government, instead of going forward, took a step back to defend itself,” she said. “When the moment came to make a choice, the panic began.

  “Then,” she added, “It became worthless to participate. It became clear that this process was only a vehicle for Gamal Mubarak’s succession.”

  As she began to criticize Mubarak’s reform efforts in public and in the domestic and foreign press, Mustafa also began to receive threats. One was made in a face-to-face meeting with a representative of Egypt’s State Security. “They told me that what I was saying endangered the regime and the policy-planning project,” she recounted.

  The harassment made her reluctant to openly quit Gamal Mubarak’s policy group for fear of the consequences.

  “I was really worried for a period of time in 2005 about both my job security and my physical safety. Frankly, I felt hopeless,” she said.

  “Now, things are a bit better. But I’ll tell you this: If they try to ride the same old political horse, they won’t get anyplace.

  “That old horse,” she said, “is finished.”

  The autocrats’ attempts at something new increasingly appeared to be just more of the old, as notable figures began to turn on the younger Mubarak and the reform bodies that he had launched.

  The National Council for Human Rights was one offshoot of the new policy committee. It was established in 2004. It was supposed to show that the government was working harder to improve human rights.

  But in the spring of 2006, the council issued a report charging that the number of detainees held without trial was instead growing—and that they were being held for longer periods of time. The regime, it added, was blatantly ignoring court orders to set many of them free. Besides the thousands in more recent detention, at least a dozen people had been held without being formally charged or tried for twelve years—since 1994. The council called the trends dangerous for the political health of the nation.39

  The same month, a prominent Egyptian writer did finally dare to quit Gamal Mubarak’s reform committee. Osama Harb, editor of the moderate foreign-policy journal International Politics, publicly blasted Egypt’s reform efforts as “a sham.”40

  “I fear for the future of this country,” Harb declared, “And many others share this fear.”41

  Like Mustafa, Harb came under a sudden deluge of criticism in the state-controlled press. Officials suggested that he was disgruntled only because his personal political ambitions had gone unfulfilled.

  Harb countered that his journal could publish criticism of governments throughout the Middle East—but not about Egypt. He could speak critically of President George W. Bush or Russian President Vladimir Putin—but not Gamal Mubarak. He could not even extricate himself from the inner circle without risk.

  “It should be easy to resign, to say no,” he said. “But not here. This is Egypt.”42

  Over the next eighteen months, the Mubarak regime steadily tightened its squeeze against the disparate array of groups that had spawned, haphazardly, the Arab world’s most ambitious democracy movement. It also ran another round of tainted elections. Thousands were harassed or detained in the run-up to a poll for Egypt’s upper house of parliament, the Shoura Council. More than seven hundred Muslim Brotherhood members were among the many activists and dissidents locked up. Charges of using religious slogans—a new offense—were filed against seventeen of the nineteen candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood. Judges were kept away from monitoring the election.

  Ghada Shahbender of “We’re Watching You” again dispatched volunteers to monitor the election. Afterward, she reported widespread ballot stuffing and bribery—even attempts to bribe her monitors. Many voters had been turned away, she reported.

  “The government has reestablished the fact that elections are fraudulent,” she told reporters. “Our monitors were offered money…to go in and vote,” she said. “Outside Cairo, we had reports of very, very low participation but then full ballot boxes.” The government claimed more than 30 percent of eligible voters turned out. “We’re Watching You” estimated the turnout at only three percent.43

  Not surprising, President Mubarak’s ruling party won—overwhelmingly.

  But a total monopoly of government apparently was not enough. In August 2007, Saad Eddin Ibrahim—the aged and ailing democratic activist who was the first to publicly criticize the meteoric rise of Gamal Mubarak—was warned not to return to Egypt for fear of once again going to jail. “Or worse,” he wrote.

  In a clever legal scheme, the regime’s supporters filed more than a half dozen civil lawsuits and criminal complaints, accusing Ibrahim of everything from treason to undermining Egypt’s economic interests. One dared to charge him with harming national interests by persuading the U.S. Congress to cut back on aid to Egypt.44

  “My real crime is speaking out in defense of the democratic governance Egyptians deserve,” he wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post. “Sadly, this regime has strayed so far from the rule of law that, for my own safety, I have been warned not to return to Egypt. My family is worried, knowing that Egypt’s jails contain some 80,000 political prisoners and that disappearances are routinely ignored or chalked up to accidents. My fear is that these abuses will spread if Egypt’s allies and friends continue to stand by silently while this regime suppresses the country’s democratic reformers.”45

  The silence was indeed deafening. And the way was increasingly clear for the Mubarak dynasty.

  FOUR

  LEBANON

  The Dreamers

  Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

  —FRENCH-ROMANIAN PLAYWRIGHT EUGENE IONESCO

  They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

  —AMERICAN ARTIST ANDY WARHOL

  Two dynamics will define political change in the Middle East for years to come. The first is the oldest for
ce in politics—identity, the accumulative package of family, faith, race, traditions, and ties to a specific piece of land. Few regions have a more complex or competing set of identities, long before factoring in Israel. The clash of cultures begins within the Middle East.

  The second dynamic is the newest force in the Middle East—youth and an emerging generation of younger leaders. The young have never been so important: More than seventy percent of the people living in the region stretching from Tehran to Rabat are under thirty years old. The young will have more influence than any previous generation because, for the first time, the majority of them are literate. They are also connected enough to the outside world to be deeply dissatisfied with the status quo at home. They are the dreamers.

  Both dynamics play out in Lebanon with spectacular passion.

  No country in the Middle East has more legally recognized identities than Lebanon—seventeen, to be precise. All are religious. The range is vast and unusual. Lebanon is home to the Maronites, an eastern wing of the Catholic Church that emerged around a Christian hermit named St. Maron in the fifth century. Their priests are allowed to marry. Lebanon also has the largest concentration of the secretive Druze, an eleventh-century offshoot of Shiite Islam with tenets influenced by Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, and Christianity—and known fully, after “initiation,” only to its elders. They believe in reincarnation, do not accept converts, and are not considered to be Muslim by other Muslims. Lebanon also has Orthodox, Alawites, Sunni, Chaldeans, Shiites, Protestants, Melkites, Copts, and two types of Armenian Christians, among many others. Each of Lebanon’s seventeen sects has an official role in government, claim to jobs, and a share of the military.

  All seventeen are also crammed into the Arab world’s second smallest country. Think twenty percent smaller than Connecticut.