Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  We are sick of aid conditional on turning a blind eye to Israel.

  They give us money and tell us what to do.

  The Sinai is underdeveloped because the Camp David agreement says we can’t populate it or develop it, because that makes Israel feel safer.

  The “international economic network” that forced structural reforms caused the disaster that resulted in the revolution.

  Part of the revolution was because of corruption but also because of poverty.

  Before structural reforms, we had a productive economy.

  Foreigners are working in Egypt and sending their money abroad; we have a skilled population and nowhere to work.

  We want a relationship based on fairness with Israel.

  They’re taking 25 to 40 percent of our oil reserves in exchange for developing them. We don’t do it ourselves.

  The Americans knew if they could sideline a country with the history and power of Egypt, that would take care of much of the Arab world.

  Central Cairo, the neighborhoods surrounding Tahrir Square, had wide boulevards and stunning architecture, the atmospheric cosmopolitanism of the Mediterranean. Even with the grime and smog and trash—and even without the minorities that contributed to such cosmopolitanism—you could feel the pulse of a divine city. And yet something had happened to Cairo, the worst kind of neglect and contempt for its people—an entire country of promise left to decay. Forty percent of the population lived on two dollars a day; fifteen million lived in shantytowns, many of which had no water or electricity. In the last twenty years, manufacturing has eroded, the economy has become service-oriented and stratified, and unemployment has risen among the middle class. Much of Egypt’s exports were energy products that did very little for job growth at home. And this was the country that received more American aid than any other country besides Israel.

  How could this couple, the Mubaraks, any couple, any leader, have allowed their country to suffer this way? How had they stayed in power? The Mubaraks had not been clever people. “The truth is, they were just mediocre,” one Egyptian man said to me. They could not have stayed in power for thirty years unless they had been held there by an outside force. The evening that I saw Nawal El Saadawi, only six months after the revolution, she was already warning of the future that was to come, and said to the room of young activists: “We are facing a very dangerous counterrevolution. Who is the counterrevolution and who is against women? It is the United States of America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Mubarak regime, and some of the military class inside the country. All these powers internal and external are working to abort the revolution.”

  There was a long history to explain why the United States ended up in such terrible company. The Mubaraks had been our people, I thought. I believe that this was the first time, standing on the other side of a revolution that had inspired such transcendent hope for the future, that I felt wholeheartedly that America was me, and I was it. This recognition did not feel like a form of guilt at all, something that can be indulged, regretted, and forgotten. It felt like learning, say, that I had a whole second brood of relatives whom I never knew about, and that to some degree my denial of their existence had allowed for the prosperity and happiness of my own.

  Nawal El Saadawi once wrote that she was often invited to conferences in the United States and asked to talk about her Egyptian identity. “It makes me turn your question round and round,” she said. “Why does no one ask you, what is your ‘identity’? Is it that American ‘identity,’ American culture, does not require any questioning, does not need to be examined, or studied or discussed in conferences like this?”

  * * *

  THE AMERICANS MAY not have had a European-style colonial past, but they did arrive in the Arab world at the beginning of the nineteenth century, long before Charles Crane’s expedition. The first missionaries, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, left Boston in 1819 for the Ottoman Empire, or Palestine, “to attempt to evangelize the lands of the Bible” and reclaim them from “a withering infidel grasp,” writes the historian Ussama Makdisi (who is himself a descendant of Arab Protestants). But the Americans would not have an easy time converting the infidels of Palestine. They had a faulty belief that the entire religion of Islam would soon collapse. Other successful military conquests in the East—the British conquest of India, for example—had convinced them that Christians could convert the entire world.

  At that time, the Ottomans sometimes called the Americans “aliens,” or müsteminler, and some Arabs referred to Americans as “the English.” That they were American meant very little; no one knew anything about the United States. The Americans didn’t know anything about the Ottoman Empire either. The missionaries’ first five years at Mount Lebanon passed without a single Arab Christian convert. They had not realized that the Ottoman Empire was multireligious, where coexistence was possible because Ottomans tried not to “openly blaspheme or insult other people’s religions,” as Makdisi writes. The Maronites, Muslims, Jews, Druze, and Armenians shared a way of life. The Ottoman authorities viewed the American intruders as a “threat to diversity.” Protestantism was unquestionably alien.

  The American missionaries did not believe they needed to understand a culture before attempting to wrest someone from it. The imperial nature of American Christianity and the Christian nature of American imperialism had become entwined during the wars against Native Americans, and now this particular fanaticism had come to Palestine. The missionaries sent long, tortured letters home about the supremacy of their own Promised Land. “I cannot tell you how much like a paradise America appears, as I view it from this land of darkness,” said one missionary, referring to the city of Beirut. They saw all non-Westerners, all people of the East, as backward and savage.

  Recognizing that their efforts to convert Arabs to Christianity were failing, the Protestants instead began to sell them on the idea of America. The Protestants’ schools did not require conversion to Christianity, and offered Arabs a kind of scientific education common in the West. In turn, many Arabs did come to believe in America as a symbol of modernity. After graduating from the Syrian Protestant College, two Christian Arabs named Faris Nimr and Yaqub Sarruf started a journal called al-Muqtataf, which was meant to provide Arabs with the knowledge to become a “literate, scientific, and secular modern citizen.”

  But Nimr and Sarruf quickly realized that the Americans were not entirely open to every aspect of the Arabs’ modernization. The missionaries excluded Arabs from professorships and high positions. “Sarruf and Nimr extolled scientific modernity as a vehicle for Arab emancipation,” Makdisi writes, “without realizing that it was the same historic force that had given rise to powerful Western, including American, ideas about the fundamental superiority of the white Anglo-Saxons over all other races.” Some years later, in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt visited a restive Cairo to tell the Egyptians to abandon their fight for independence from the British. The Arab intellectuals of the time were outraged that the American president would betray his own American ideals. They felt “Roosevelt should act as an American, not as an imperialist European.”

  The Arabs, however, still had faith in the American missionaries. It was one of these imperialist missionaries with good intentions, Howard Bliss, who stood before the world leaders in Paris after World War I and proposed that a commission be sent to Syria and Lebanon to ask the Arab people whether or not they wanted to be ruled by a foreign power. President Woodrow Wilson agreed. A Western leader had decided to listen to the natives. Thus began the journey of Charles Crane and Henry King.

  If the Sykes-Picot Agreement was an act of imperialism, Makdisi writes, the Arab writer George Antonius saw the King-Crane Commission as the manifestation of American goodness. Crane wrote home that “even the Bedouin of the desert knew and appreciated what America had done for Cuba and the Philippines,” and that Arabs said that should they not be granted independence, they would accept the guardianship of the United States. “They declared that their ch
oice was due to knowledge of America’s record,” King and Crane wrote, “their belief that America had no territorial or colonial ambitions, and would willingly withdraw when the Syrian state was well established as her treatment both of Cuba and the Philippines seemed to them to illustrate … From the point of view of the desires of the ‘people concerned,’ the Mandate should clearly go to America.”

  The Arabs were misinformed about Cuba and the Philippines, and Crane and King were clearly biased, but in any case, the remarkable contents of the King-Crane Commission were cast aside for European ambitions. Syria and Iraq were handed over to the French and British, mainly for their oil fields, and Western-backed rulers installed in their capitals, as well as in Cairo, where independence riots were repressed. Writing decades after the event, the journalist Muhammad Haykal recalled that the decision fell on the Egyptians “like a bolt of lightning,” especially because of the betrayal by Woodrow Wilson. “Here was the man of the Fourteen Points, among them the right to self-determination, denying the Egyptian people its right to self-determination,” Haykal writes. “Is this not the ugliest of treacheries?!”

  Despite King and Crane’s grave warnings against it, the Americans would also support the establishment of a Jewish state. It was to be the first in a series of turning points over Israel. The Arabs who admired America so much saw American support for the Jews as “bigotry.” Antonius had believed that the American missionaries had been crucial to the Arab national movement. He had even dedicated his book to Charles Crane. But the ultimate test of the Western-Arab relationship was whether the West would force Palestinians from their land so that the Jewish people who suffered during the Holocaust might have a refuge: “To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilized world,” Antonius said. “It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another.”

  The Arabs who found their lands once again conquered were vulnerable and helpless. They had no modern armies, few sympathetic representatives abroad. Arab intellectuals debated the correct response to such a catastrophic betrayal: nationalism or Islamism, democracy or authoritarianism, pro-Western or anti. The Arab thinker from this general era that Americans may know today is, again, Sayyid Qutb; after September 11, his texts were pored over to understand Muslim fundamentalism, the hidden strain of Arab life that explained everything. But Arab intellectuals were grappling with the crisis of Israel and the Arab world with varying analyses and prescriptions that didn’t involve an Islamic revival. Many, such as the intellectual Constantine Zurayk, who used the term nakba to describe how the establishment of Israel wounded Arab souls, continued to embrace Western progress as a guide for the “wholesale revolution” within Arab society.

  On the question of Israel in Palestine, however, there was no debate. The pro-American Arabs of this era, those who had been raised in American schools and who had thrilled to American ideas, would become heartbroken and disillusioned. The Americans, who had by then embraced the spirit of their missionary forebears, found themselves the patriarchs of a region, one of uncommon riches and uncommon despair.

  After the missionaries came the oil speculators. Abdelrahman Munif’s novel Cities of Salt, about the arrival of the first American oil explorers in the 1930s in the eastern Saudi province near Dhahran, is one of the few Arab testimonies translated into English about the United States as an explicitly colonizing force. To see “the American” portrayed this way is contradictory to our sense of ourselves as liberators rather than colonialists, especially because we also rarely see American characters portrayed as mysterious and menacing foreigners, the way Arabs and Asians are so often depicted in our own newspapers, films, and books. “The Americans were something completely new and strange,” Munif writes, “in their actions, their manners and the kind of questions they asked, not to mention their generosity, which surpassed that of all previous visitors.” Like Malaparte, Munif writes of this new people’s immature qualities, “who looked and behaved like small children, showed endless, unimaginable surprise and admiration.” The Arabs sent to work on American oil fields watch their huge American ships arrive, gape as the bare-armed women disembark, laughing, and despair as the foreigners waste water carelessly. “Why did they have to live like this, while the Americans lived so differently?” Munif writes of the Arabs’ wonder. “Why were they barred from going near an American house, even from looking at the swimming pool or standing for a moment in the shade of one of their trees? Why did the Americans shout at them, telling them to move, to leave the place immediately, expelling them like dogs?”

  Cities of Salt is a novel few Americans read, and its initial reception in 1988 might have something to do with why. That year, John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that Munif was “insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel.” He called the writer “a campfire explainer”: “There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance.” This was an odd expectation of a novel about an event in which the collective experience is paramount, and in which the larger moral point is that there was nothing “equal” about the Americans and the Arabs. “Arabs are discomfited, distressed, and deranged by the presence of Americans in their midst,” a concept that, for Updike, “wears thin.” Munif’s novel was banned by the Saudi family beholden to American oil interests. In the United States, the country’s leading man of letters, John Updike, in its leading magazine, The New Yorker, concluded that “the thought of novels being banned in Saudi Arabia has a charming strangeness, like the thought of hookahs being banned in Minneapolis.”

  The great Arab novel, for an American critic, hadn’t been modern enough; for Updike, the experience of Americans in a foreign land simply wasn’t important to American ideas of literature, while for Munif, the discovery of oil and the American occupation of Arabia “was a breaking off, like death, that nothing and no one could ever heal.”

  * * *

  THE HISTORY OF the Arab world had so often been reduced in America to a battle over Islamic extremism, but rarely did Americans question from what Islamism had emerged—why it had become such a potent political force in the first place. In the postwar era, there had been other hopes for liberation in the region, especially in Egypt, with the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser. At the time, neither nascent Islamic fundamentalism nor Constantine Zurayk’s notions of Western progress had compared to the appeal of Nasser’s secular nationalism. The Americans even supported Nasser’s coup against the Egyptian monarchy and the British, because they wanted an Atatürk, someone “ruthless and efficient” to rule the country, as the academic Hazem Kandil writes. In the beginning of Egypt’s independence, the Americans preferred a strongman in power.

  Nasser, enjoying the adoration of the region, quickly proved himself an independent-minded pest. Though he welcomed American aid, he would not go as far as joining the anti-Communist Baghdad Pact, which brought together Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and, informally, the United States, against the Soviets. Nasser favored something called “positive neutrality” in the Cold War. This was the decade of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Bandung Conference, when leaders such as India’s Nehru and Indonesia’s Sukarno promoted the possibility of independence from both Cold War behemoths. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in the name of Egyptian sovereignty, President Eisenhower defended the Egyptians, hoping his support would eventually convince Nasser to become a bulwark against communism, rather than a full-blown nationalist. Time and again, the Americans saw nationalism as support for Moscow, not an assertion of independence.

  Eisenhower would eventually turn his back on Nasser, and Woodrow Wilson’s principles of self-determination, completely. By 1967, the Americans supported the war of Israel against the Arabs in hopes that it would bring about Nasser’
s downfall; Charles de Gaulle even called Israel’s war an American proxy war. Israel’s defeat of the Arabs was the beginning of several humiliations that would undo the promises of Arab nationalism. “Nasser may have fallen, and with him the dreams of a generation, but Pax Americana helped usher in an age of defiant religiosity, resistance, and cynicism,” Ussama Makdisi writes. When Nasser died, citizens around the world wept. The antagonism of Arab nationalism by the Americans helped to open a social vacuum for Islamism, and, in Egypt, for the Muslim Brotherhood.

  The total capitulation of the new Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, to the demands of the United States during a series of negotiations after the 1973 war with Israel sent Egypt hurtling down a path of subservience and economic devastation. Kissinger, amused by the Egyptians’ prostrations, encouraged Sadat to sell out his entire country; according to the agreement, the Suez Canal would never be closed to Israel, Egypt would supply Israel with energy products, President Nixon would be received in Cairo by cheering crowds. Even that wasn’t enough. During the Camp David Accords five years later, the Americans wanted the Egyptians to accept a degradation of their own military prowess in order to elevate Israel as the dominant force in the region. The foreign minister of Egypt said afterward: “I almost died of disgrace, disgust, and grief as I witnessed this tragedy unfold.”

  The American-Egyptian relationship soon approached a level of the grotesque. The United States paid for Sadat’s security detail and trained his guards, provided him with street cameras and electronic devices for spying on Cairo streets, and began loaning Egypt millions of dollars on the condition that they buy American weapons. Sadat opened Egypt up to American corporations. Al-Infitah, as this period was called, ushered in a different kind of desolation in Egypt, “a perpetually dependent market on foreign products.” In his novel The Committee, the Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim catalogued the parade of Western companies invading Egypt: “Phillips, Toshiba, Gillette, Michelin, Shell, Kodak, Westinghouse, Ford, Nestlé, Marlboro.” The era of the 1950s when Europeans and others embraced American goods slid into an era of unease about the new corporate imperial onslaught.