Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  We were walking through the center of the city at night, the streets empty, craning to admire the marble colonial facades that had survived the fires of the late colonial era and the poverty of Mubarak’s. The Egyptian activist had been in jail before for criticizing the regime. The Turks didn’t have foreigners build their Metro for them, he said. I was not sure that was true, but I got the point; Turkey was seen as a more independent country, a country that built itself. Yet, at the time, I didn’t know what this statement meant in the Egyptian context, or what it meant more broadly. My understanding of global economic systems was still so limited that instead I was surprised the Egyptians did not build their Metro themselves—who else would have done it? (The French, and others.) We Westerners talked of Istanbul’s sea views. Egyptians spoke of its metros.

  Turkey was in fact building more metros, more bridges, more airports, more office parks. By the time of the Egyptian revolution in 2011, Istanbul’s city limits were exploding with development, office towers shooting up as if in some real-time video sequence. Turkish friends saw the European side of Istanbul from a boat on the Bosphorus and noted how striking this new stock-market-graph skyline was, how there used to be hills carpeted green here and poofs of trees there. Everywhere there was the knocking of hammers and hum-screeching of saws; festivals and biennials; decrepit buildings sandblasted into hotels overnight. Western cities, cowering shamefully from the financial crisis, suddenly, according to countless travel articles, seemed places of the past—the new world was east.

  That time in Turkey was exuberant, people and places came alive as if they had been mummified in the amber of Kemalism and now were free again. The old Ottoman bank building in my former neighborhood, the bank receipts and handwritten notes of Armenians and Greeks collecting dust in its basement, was turned into a multimillion-dollar art space called Salt, where Arabic script had been carved into the marble: “He who earns money is God’s beloved servant.” Its founder, Vasıf Kortun, told me the Turks didn’t know their own history, and now they had the means and freedom to discover it; Kortun put on exhibits about Armenian photographers, the 1980 military coup, defunct leftist literary magazines. “In New York it feels like the best years are behind us,” a woman from New York said. “In Istanbul it feels like the best years are yet to come.” Turkish friends counseled caution. “Many of the reasons the West thinks a place like Istanbul is optimistic is linked to the idea of private money achieving things,” one artist told me. “Yes, private money is doing things right now, but it’s too early to know whether it will benefit artists. It hasn’t been tested. If Western history is a guide, it will find that in capitalist societies, consumer culture is not a way to find new ways of living. For this Istanbul could be interesting. We’re a very young country. And when you’re young you tend to believe in ideals.”

  There was a disconcerting paradox at the heart of Turkey’s prosperity, which was achieved to a large degree because the government was selling off all the country’s public works companies. In the shadows, in vastly complicated and inscrutable judicial maneuverings and police actions, the optimism of democratic beginnings was being steadily undermined by a leader both insecure and arrogant. The Gülenist allies of the government that had come to dominate the judiciary had been mounting aggressive cases against secularists, and countless journalists and military officers once associated with the old secularist regime languished in jail. The Gülen movement had seeped into the police force and intelligence departments and was wiretapping everyone’s phones. The AK Party seemed to be taking control of every institution in the country, just as Rana had warned.

  Yet to the outside world, Erdoğan equaled stability. Turkey looked good. In fact, in the eyes of policy makers and journalists, Erdoğan’s Turkey had gone from being the secular model for Iraq before the invasion to an Islamic-democratic model for the entire Arab world: some religion, some democracy, some investment-fueled economic growth. Pundits called it the Turkish model, an example of an Islamic country that managed to become democratic. But the analysis hinged on multiple false assumptions. Turkey had always been, and still was, an authoritarian country with democratic electoral processes. Unlike the Arab world, Turkey was never colonized by foreign powers, or humiliated by Israel, and it rarely appeared to be overly subservient to the United States. It always maintained an illusion and a narrow reality of democratic and economic participation. Even with four military coups and decades of violence, a certain confidence and pride in Turkishness prevailed. Turks had not suffered in the way the Arabs had, and it did not have the same grievances.

  Before the invasion of Iraq, protests had erupted around the Arab world. The journalist Anthony Shadid said that in conversation with Arabs at that time, he rarely heard the word “freedom”; instead, Arabs talked about “justice.” I don’t think that by 2011, when Egyptians filled Tahrir Square, the Americans cheering them on knew the difference between those two words. By the time Mubarak resigned, many Americans watching from afar believed this to be a righteous conclusion to a thrilling revolution. They thought themselves the kind of people who supported democratic protest, and as I watched the Egyptians dancing in the streets I did not feel the shame I had when I saw bare, fleshy American legs outside a mosque, or that I felt while flooding my neighbor’s apartment with dirty pipe water, because in the case of the Egyptians I had not at all been conscious of the history that we shared.

  * * *

  IN THE FALL OF 2011, six months after the revolution, I went to Egypt to write about the legacy of Suzanne Mubarak, Hosni’s wife and fellow dictator of thirty years. I was consumed with the narrow details of the story: Did she oppose his policies, was she an advocate for women’s rights, where was she now? I saw her as an evil woman, an easy villain. Suzanne, sequestered somewhere with Hosni and her sons, wouldn’t give me an interview, so I spent my days among her associates and antagonists. One of them I visited on a sun-dappled street in the upscale neighborhood of Mohandeseen, its weeping willow trees with limbs like ballet dancer arms sweeping the streets.

  Suzanne’s right-hand woman, Farkhonda Hassan, was sitting inside the new office of the National Council for Women, which had been Suzanne’s most important initiative; the old offices on the Nile had been set on fire during the protests. Hassan was bemoaning the new space, as if a revolution hadn’t just happened.

  “You should have seen our old building!” she cried. “We had three floors! They were so beautiful. And everyone had their own office.”

  “Was Suzanne surprised by the revolution?” I asked.

  “She didn’t realize how bad things were,” Hassan said in a plaintive voice. She spoke about the revolution and its effects on her as if she were part of a company that had been downsized.

  “They loved her!” she said. “Why people turn so quickly from support to extreme criticism overnight is very strange.”

  The West had also celebrated Suzanne from afar. As the Mubaraks often justified their thirty years of rule by invoking the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, Suzanne presented herself as a secular-minded woman who protected women’s rights, and would counter the pernicious effects of Islamic fundamentalism. “Egyptian at Center on Rights of Women,” went one New York Times headline in 2000. But feminists I sat with in Cairo said that Suzanne had not been a champion of women. In a country where women lacked basic rights, Suzanne always stuck to a conservative platform of “family values.” (The phrase was championed by Erdoğan as well, though a Turkish feminist once told me he swiped the language from the playbook of the Republican Party of the United States.) One evening in Cairo, Nawal El Saadawi, one of Egypt’s foremost feminist activists, sat with her long, white braid in the middle of a modest apartment, surrounded by fellow activists, and told me that the Mubarak regime in fact sidelined, banned, and harassed feminist NGOs. “They really fragmented the feminist movement,” she said. The mandate of the National Council for Women—Suzanne’s organization—was to be the only representative of Egyptian women
.

  Dr. Amal Abdel Hadi from the New Woman Foundation spoke of Suzanne in the same way. “All the very vibrant movements were crushed, very harshly,” she said. A pattern of co-optation was established. “We worked hard on establishing the woman’s right to pass the Egyptian nationality onto their children even if their husband is not Egyptian. From the Mubaraks, there was a strong resistance. Suzanne claimed that the President said it was a national security issue, and we’ll never do that. Until the last moment they were against it.

  “And then suddenly they were for it! So the law was changed. It became their victory—all the women’s organizations worked for years to bring something she had opposed, and then they took it over! If you were calling for a radical change, they opposed you. If you were going to succeed, then they appropriated it.”

  Amal Abdel Hadi was describing only one aspect of the Mubaraks’ relationship to civil society. From afar, outsiders heard about the violence, about imprisonments, repression, and torture in Egypt—all of which should have been a searing enough indictment of the U.S.-backed regime. But what Abdel Hadi was elucidating were the more subtle—and to foreigners almost invisible—ways in which a dictatorship worked. Once again, as in Turkey under the Kemalists, the illusion of Westernization that the Mubaraks projected for their American patrons was the opposite of liberation.

  “Suzanne wasn’t a feminist, that’s for sure,” Abdel Hadi said. “She was pro women’s rights, but she acted in a way that’s not really for women’s rights. If you dismantle the feminist movement, then women’s rights will not come to communities like ours. Feminism is not a popular issue. It needs a lot of work and it needs a real movement. She wasn’t an anti–women’s rights person. But she’s not a human rights defender. And she’s not a feminist. She was doing this as part of her personal glory.”

  * * *

  THE REVOLUTION TOOK the Mubaraks by surprise, people told me, because they saw Egypt through a gilded peephole. For them, cars were towed, walls scrubbed, flowers planted, grass grown, Egyptians bribed to smile. When Suzanne arrived at unfamiliar buildings for meetings, her staff replaced the soaps in the bathrooms. Roads in a city of clamorous traffic would be shut down for their convoys. Egyptians offered various explanations for the Mubarak psychosis—absolute power begets corruption, the oligarchs insisted they stay, the Mubaraks believed Egypt would crumble without them. On some basic level, however, all such ideas made sense and strained credulity at the same time: What kind of people, even out of self-preservation, wouldn’t notice how much they were despised?

  I went to meet one of Suzanne’s family friends at his office in Zamalek. It is an upscale neighborhood with an air of colonial romance, though outside the window traffic blared as if a fleet of garbage trucks dumped their wares all at once. The man’s elegant demeanor—he was handsome, and smoked as if the cigarette were but another of his elegant appendages—was accompanied by a steadily building sense of menace in his words. Since his family had been close to the Mubaraks, I had expected that he would defend them, but he, like many others, had lived a double life: the one in which you survived under a regime, and the one in which you despised it.

  “I want to emphasize that my opinion of her from what I know personally and from my dealings with her is completely different from my political opinion,” he said. “I knew her very well. She and my mother went to the same school, they remained very good friends all along. She was a very shrewd woman, serious, cultured and interested in culture, and somewhat charismatic.”

  “What was important to her?” I asked.

  “Housing for the poor, poverty alleviation, education for children, literacy,” he said. “I must tell you I genuinely believe she meant well, she wanted to have a better educational system and combat poverty, and she wanted to meet and talk to people, but the security measures were simply insane, which caused them to be isolated.”

  “People have said that they barely knew Egyptians.”

  “I must tell you, it is not the person as much as the institution,” he said. “I have seen the gradual change through the years—I have seen what they were and what they have become. It is not only them; it is this whole system that caters to godlike people—that caters to people who are worshipped.

  “There’s only so much you can do to resist that, and in thirty years you cannot, so you become so isolated, you become literally insane. Privilege comes with a wide range of people who feed it. I have never seen so much corruption and audacity, or such a widening of the gap between rich and poor, or such a horrific police state, one that only cares about the privileged, like I have seen during this regime. When was the last time they touched a car handle? When was the last time she actually saw money? Do they have a wallet? It is a life that is so corrupting. I am really blaming a culture and a system for putting unprepared people in such high positions. I don’t blame the people because they are very ordinary people.

  “But when you allow your close entourage to be what it was—villains—then that says something about you. We didn’t know the magnitude of the corruption. It is horrific. Egypt became like a little farm or something, it wasn’t a state anymore. Talk to me about gas, talk to me about all these state security companies, talk to me about wheat, about petroleum—this is where money is, this is where the corruption is.”

  “Do you think she approved of the violence against the protestors during the revolution?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought this kind of violence against protestors could be a solution for them to stay,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all. We know the Muslim Brotherhood was subjected to the most brutal torture. It was taken for granted that the Mubaraks would run Egypt forever. They thought they were the only people holding the country together, and if they left, the Muslim Brotherhood would take over. They actually believed that, one hundred percent. I think she was a woman of duty.”

  I wondered if before the revolution, he would have felt comfortable talking about them this way to a journalist.

  “No, I would not feel comfortable criticizing them to a journalist. When they were upset with you, it was their bodyguards who would take care of it. It’s not them, it’s the institution. They have very innovative ways of destroying people.”

  He kept saying that same thing: “It’s not them, it’s the institution.” The “institution” he conjured was one that had been built of forces enormous and historical, something beyond the Egyptian people’s control.

  * * *

  THE YEAR AFTER the regime fell in 2011, it appeared the Muslim Brotherhood was poised to take power after the country’s first democratic elections in decades, which filled many Egyptians with fear. Since its founding in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic network had functioned like a parallel society—richer members provided its poorer members with food, medicine, and clothing through annual financial donations, and millions of Egyptians sought refuge in the Brotherhood’s supportive social networks. The organization’s goal was to create, through proselytizing, a nation that fulfilled the dictates of God’s law.

  When Hassan al-Banna and later Sayyid Qutb led the Muslim Brotherhood in the early to midcentury, one of their primary motivations had been to resist Western imperialism, first British, then American. These men, like many of the peoples from the countries of the former Ottoman Empire, had been dismayed by the Americans’ betrayal of the Arabs after World War I. The texts Qutb wrote in jail were radical enough that they would eventually inspire al-Qaida. For thirty years, Hosni Mubarak was able to use the Brotherhood’s existence as justification for his undemocratic policies: it was either Mubarak, a corrupt dictator who tortures and loots but accepts America’s military aid, or the Brotherhood, religious fanatics who hate Israel.

  One evening, I visited one of the Brotherhood’s financiers, Hassan Malek, in Heliopolis, a neighborhood of high-end shopping malls and Italian restaurant chains, modern apartment buildings and ornate nineteenth-century villas. Under Mubarak, Malek had spent
four years in “prisons not fit for animals, let alone for humans.” Inside the Malek family’s apartment, a large, brown stretch of leather on the wall had been engraved with the ninety-nine names of Allah. Malek’s twenty-six-year-old son passed out chocolates and talked about how “everyone should help their country.” His sixteen-year-old daughter shyly displayed her artwork, a portrait of a woman with long hair. Another son played peekaboo with the toddler, who ran around screaming. The Maleks gave off an earnest “ask not what your country can do for you” vibe, as if dispatched to the twenty-first century from a less cynical era.

  That evening, Malek was concerned about the demands of the IMF to reform the economy, which for the Egyptians sounded in many ways like the West’s crippling economic demands in the past.

  “We don’t have a preconceived position against the IMF,” he said. “But they have to listen to us. They can’t impose on us conditions that are not good for Egypt. We will deal with the Egyptian society in a transparent way. Our society should become self-reliant from now on. I believe that the West and particularly the United States furthered the injustice that befell us because they supported the regime,” he said.

  “And even despite that, we are willing to turn the page completely, even with America, but under one condition: that they too change the way they deal with our country and our people.”

  Those weeks, I met more leftist dissidents and Muslim Brothers imprisoned by the Mubaraks, the heads of anti-poverty NGOs and feminist NGOs, the former dean of Al-Azhar, people suing Suzanne Mubarak for illegally purchasing villas, young activists who broke from the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafis who had lived in the United States, labor organizers who had been protesting long before the revolution, young women attacked in Tahrir Square. Corruption and torture and repression were common themes of our conversations, but even more prevalent were references to international economic policies. I began to know what people were about to say before they said it. Implicit in all of these statements was a recognition of American power.