“Sorry,” I said. “That’s just how it looks.”
He buried his head in his arms.
“Take Iranians,” I said. “They used to think Islamism was a fantastic idea. Now they hate it. Same goes in Afghanistan. Algerians don’t think too much of Islamism either after 150,000 people were killed in the civil war. I hate to say this, but it looks like Egypt might have to learn this the hard way.”
“You are right,” he said. “You are right. I went to an Egyptian chat room on the Internet and asked 15 people if they fasted during Ramadan. All of them said they fasted during at least most of it. I went to an Iranian chat room and asked the same question. Fourteen out of 15 said they did not fast for even one single day.”
“Egypt didn’t used to be like this,” I said.
“Nasser’s biggest crime was not establishing democracy when he took over,” he said. “Back then, Egyptian people were liberal. It would have worked then. But not now.”
Progress is a funny thing. Westerners like to think it moves in a straight line. In America that’s pretty much how it is. No serious person would argue that American culture was more liberal and tolerant in the 1950s than it is now or that it was more liberal and tolerant in the 19th century than it was in the 1950s. But Egypt moved in the other direction. Why?
“When Nasser took over,” he said, “people were angry at Britain and Israel. He nationalized all the industry. He banned political parties. He stifled everything. Banned the Muslim Brotherhood. Banned the Communists. Banned all. When Sadat took over in 1970, he had two enemies: the communists and the Nasser remnants. So to counter these threats, he did what the United States did in Afghanistan during the Cold War: he made an alliance with the Islamists. He brought back the Muslim Brotherhood, which had fled to Saudi Arabia when Nasser was around. He used them to destroy the left.
“That was part of it,” he continued. “During the oil boom of 1973, a lot of Egyptians went to Saudi Arabia to work. Then in the 1990s, two important things happened. After the first Gulf War, Saudi Arabia began to Saudi-ize its economy and said they no longer needed Egyptian workers. Egyptians came home contaminated with Wahhabism. Egypt’s economy kept getting worse. Unemployed members of the middle class either sat around and smoked or got more religious. That was when Islamism moved from the lower class to the middle class. Now it is moving even to the upper class.”
“Egypt will get over it after a while,” I said, “just like Iran is getting over it now.”
“That will take 25 years! I don’t have 25 years!”
The Iranian ayatollahs had so far been in power for 26 years.
I felt bad for Big Pharaoh. Even the Egyptian capital, despite its immensity, hardly had a place for a person like him.
The bartender came around and gave everyone a glass with a green liquid in it. Hey, I thought. Free drinks. Apparently beer wasn’t the only thing they had in the bar after all.
“What is this?” I said.
“It’s the water the beans were cooked in.”
I stared at him.
“This is bean juice? Are you serious?”
“Yes,” he said. “You will love it.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
“There is a first time for everything,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Here goes.”
I took a small sip.
It was horrendous.
“No,” I said.
I wanted a glass of red wine. And I wanted some women around. Hanging out at a wiener roast is no fun. It reminded me of something Carsten Niebuhr wrote in 1774: “Young men who like their comforts, and a dainty table, or who wish to pass their time pleasantly in the company of women must not go to Arabia.”
“A friend of mine recently went to Algeria,” Big Pharaoh said. “When he came back he told me that there are far fewer veiled women there than there are here. It is much more liberal in Algeria because there they have tasted Islamism. Egypt does need to experience what happened in Iran and Algeria … as long as I am in the U.S. or Canada when it happens.”
Even though he would rather live in the United States, he was seriously looking into immigrating to Canada. It might be easier for him to qualify for an immigrant visa. “If I live in Canada, I will be in the apartment above the party.”
“The apartment above the party?” I said.
“America is the party,” he said. “And I will be living right above it. So I’ll be in the apartment above the party. And I’ll go downstairs a lot.”
“I sincerely hope you can make it out of here,” I said, although I partly felt bad because his leaving would only contribute to Egypt’s brain drain.
“Mubarak is a horrible, horrible man,” he said. “He is the reason we are in this thing. He has oppressed all the liberals.”
Optimism came naturally to me at the time. Beirut, where I lived, was looking up. The Lebanese had cast off Syrian occupation without firing a shot. The city felt like I imagined Berlin did shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hezbollah had not yet ignited the war with Israel in 2006. That would happen seven months after I left Cairo. Nor had Hezbollah invaded Beirut. That wouldn’t happen for another two years. Nor had the Syrian civil war erupted, which would—rather predictably—spill into Lebanon.
Beirut seemed to have a bright future ahead of it. I was wrong about that, but Cairo’s bleak future was obvious.
“You want to feel good?” he said. “You want to be optimistic? Go back to Beirut.”
* * *
I had to check myself. Perhaps I was wrong about the Muslim Brotherhood. Maybe they really were moderates, and Big Pharaoh, as one of the few Egyptian liberals, was being paranoid and excessively partisan. It happens.
So I called senior Muslim Brotherhood leader Essam el-Erian and asked for an interview. He was the Brotherhood’s smooth media man, the go-to guy journalists liked to talk to when they need a fresh quote or wanted to know what the Brotherhood stood for and thought. He spent time in Egypt’s dungeons, not because he was a terrorist (he wasn’t) but because, like Egypt’s liberals, he was an enemy of Hosni Mubarak.
I felt some sympathy for him even though his politics were radically different from mine. Though I couldn’t say I wanted to see him in power, that didn’t mean I wanted to see him repressed or in prison.
“Your campaign slogan says Islam is the solution,” I said. “If Islam is the solution, why did millions of Iranians move to the United States after the 1979 revolution? Why do so many people in Afghanistan hate the Taliban?”
He laughed. Not a belly laugh, but a knowing laugh, as though he fielded a version of that question every day.
“Listen, Mr. Michael,” he said. “Iran is not Egypt. Egypt is not Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not Sudan. Sudan is not Algeria. There are different models of Islamic life. We have a very long civilization here. It is ancient. We have common values here between Muslims and Christians and even Jews.”
I liked his answer but could not take his word for it. I needed specifics. It’s not enough to say that Egypt isn’t Afghanistan. That was obvious anyway. How was his ideology different from that of the Taliban?
“Okay,” I said. “What kind of model for Islamic life does the Muslim Brotherhood have in mind for Egypt?”
“I cannot answer specifically now,” Erian said. “We are not in power. We are struggling for democracy. All people must be respected in a democratic system. It is very important to be tolerant.”
Nice-sounding boilerplate, but it was a dodge. I decided to get back to this later rather than beat him over the head right at the start.
“If the Muslim Brotherhood were in power in Egypt,” I said, “would you cooperate with the West against al-Qaeda?”
“From the first moment we are against al-Qaeda,” he said. “We condemn all violent activities. We condemned it then. But we have doubts about the way the West fights terrorism. This way of fighting is the wrong way. We need a concrete definition of terrorism before we ca
n cooperate.”
“What’s your definition of terrorism?” I said.
“We need an international meeting and conference to decide on a definition.”
“Good idea,” I said. “So if you attended an international conference, what definition of terrorism would you suggest?”
“I am not going to give you a definition,” he said. “We need dialogue and consensus. It is not only for the Muslim Brotherhood to decide.”
“But what would you say to Western governments if they agreed to a dialogue with you? What is your definition of terrorism? Never mind what anyone else thinks.”
“I cannot give you an answer now,” he said.
This guy was more useless than government ministers I’ve interviewed. But I had to give him credit. He was extremely well practiced in the art of saying nothing.
I decided to try another angle on the first question he’d dodged.
“Would the Muslim Brotherhood ban alcohol in Egypt?” I said. “Would you ban books?”
“We are not going to do anything without discussion. We are not in power.”
“Should women be forced to wear a veil or a hijab?” I said.
“You must understand,” he said. “We are outlawed. We can clarify these points after we are free.”
“Why don’t you clarify now?” I said.
“We need fresh air,” he said. “We need fresh air before we can clarify this.”
“People want to know what you stand for,” I said. “My job is to help you explain yourselves to them.”
“The government likes to confuse people about what we really believe,” he said.
“Tell you what,” I said. “You clarify your vision of an Egyptian Islamic state now and I promise to get the word out.”
“We need fresh air before we can clarify anything,” he said.
He went round and round like this, refusing to even hint at what their Islamist program might look like. It seemed plain enough to me that his deliberate obfuscation was a ploy to feign moderation and conceal a hidden extremism.
“Mr. Michael,” he said. “It is late and I am tired. Just two more questions please.”
We had only been talking for a few minutes. And he hadn’t yet answered even one question.
“Okay,” I said. I had plenty more questions I wanted to ask, but if I was only allowed two, I needed to ask something he couldn’t dodge quite as easily. “If you could change three things about American foreign policy, what would they be?”
“Respect human rights and international law,” he said.
We could have dug into that one for hours, except of course he wouldn’t let me. Instead of dwelling on it, I moved straight to the last question, one that tends to be a lightning rod for Islamists.
“What do you think about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie?” I said. Since he wouldn’t answer my question about whether or not he wanted to ban books in Egypt, perhaps he would give it away when discussing the world-famous “blasphemer” whom Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced to death for his novel The Satanic Verses.
“It was the wrong way to treat,” he said. “Ignoring would have been better.”
What could I say? It was a good answer, the best answer there is. He did know how to put on a moderate face when he wasn’t blatantly dodging my questions.
I can only assume he had a definition of terrorism that Westerners would think is extreme. Otherwise he would have told me what it was.
I can also only assume he would like to ban booze and veil women. Otherwise he would have said that he didn’t.
If I was wrong about the Brotherhood—and if Big Pharaoh was wrong—it was the Brotherhood’s fault for dissembling.
* * *
I couldn’t go to Egypt without seeing the pyramids, especially since they’re less than an hour from the center of Cairo. So I hired a grizzled 60-year-old driver named Nabil to pick me up at my hotel in the late morning.
He and I cruised from the city center to the outskirts through miles of shabby apartment towers. I saw precious little economic activity—unsurprising since half the country earned less than $2 a day—and couldn’t escape the sense that most of Cairo, despite being the Arab world’s cultural capital, was actually a cultural void packed with people who spent nearly all their energy struggling just to get by. The culture produced by Egypt and consumed by the rest of the region was created by a minuscule minority.
The quality of the apartment towers was inversely proportional to their distance from downtown. The farther Nabil drove from the center, the worse everything looked. Soon the tenements were nothing more than red brick warehouses for humans, many of them without windows and no doubt without air-conditioning.
Nothing was worse than the slums on the outskirts. Streets weren’t paved. Each neighborhood had its own garbage dump where children played barefoot. Lush agricultural land—tended by farmers with oxen and adorned with what presumably were date palms—was checkerboarded throughout the slum blocks. The housing was horrid, but the landscape was verdant and subtropical, and it helped take the edge off the ugliness.
I wanted to raise my camera to the window and take pictures, but I was worried it would embarrass Nabil. I imagined he wished every tourist who came through Egypt did not have to see what I was seeing. So I pretended I didn’t.
“So, Nabil,” I said. “What do you think of Hosni Mubarak?”
“He does many good things for people outside of Egypt,” he said. “For Americans, Europeans and Israelis, he is a man of peace. I like that. But he does nothing for us. Look at these poor people.”
At least Mubarak didn’t plaster his picture up everywhere like Qaddafi did, at least not in Cairo. Unlike Nasser, he didn’t even attempt to gin up a cult of personality. He was not a mass murderer like Saddam Hussein, not a totalitarian like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. He was just a standard-issue strongman who’d leave you alone if you stayed out of his way, though he ran Egypt like it was his private plantation.
One Egyptian, however, told me that outside Cairo, Mubarak’s portraits were more common and sinister. He looked like everyone’s dad in the pictures I saw. In Upper (southern) Egypt—the stronghold of the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood—he was supposedly decked out in sunglasses and an officer’s uniform.
“Do you have any children?” Nabil said.
“No,” I said. “I’m married, but I don’t have any children.”
“Good,” he said.
Good? Middle Easterners tended to be slightly horrified and confused by Westerners who don’t have children.
“Why is it good?” I said.
“Raising children is a huge responsibility,” he said. “I have three, and it is so hard. I have an electrician’s degree, but the government doesn’t pay enough money for us to live on.” Apparently, finding electrician’s work in the private sector isn’t much of an option. “So I drive car,” he said.
I had agreed to pay him $12—his asking price—to drive me out to Giza and wait for me for two hours while I looked at the pyramids and the Sphinx. Twelve dollars for a half-day’s work may be a lot in Egypt (I don’t know), but it seemed like nothing to me. So I quietly decided I would pay him $20 instead if he didn’t try to extract any more from me.
“What do you do for a living?” he said.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Oh!” he said, delighted. “What do you write about Egypt? You write about pyramids?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m also interested in politics. Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood.”
He twisted up his face.
“I not like them,” he said. “I like women. And I like beer.”
“Beer and women are good,” I said. He grinned and gave me a high-five.
We pulled off the freeway and turned onto a dirt road between the tenements. A cart drawn by a donkey got in our way. Nabil sighed. “Cairo traffic,” he said.
He stopped the car at the edge of the city of Giza. The silhouette of a pyrami
d towered above us in the haze, easily as high as a skyscraper but much wider and more imposing. Two horses were tied to a post on the sidewalk next to us.
“Do you want to ride camel or horse?” he said.
Actually, I wanted to walk. I especially didn’t feel like being a dorky tourist riding a camel. I’d ridden an ass-busting camel once already, in Tunisia, and that was enough.
“A horse,” I said, not wanting to be a pain by insisting on walking.
Horses are more trustworthy. Camels have been known to chase down their owners (while bellowing like Chewbacca) when they get disgruntled and are finished taking orders. I admire that about them, but I didn’t need any drama from an animal that weighed hundreds of pounds more than me.
Nabil summoned a horse man who introduced himself to me as Mohammad.
Mohammad offered to help me mount the horse, but I didn’t need it. He mounted his own and we set out into the street alongside automobile traffic.
This was a stupid way to travel in Cairo.
“Watch your legs!” he shouted as a filthy bus roared past.
A driver rounded a corner too quickly and clipped my foot with his mirror.
“Watch your legs!” Mohammad said again.
After riding a few blocks, we reached the gateway to the pyramids. I saw then why we needed horses. The area around the pyramids was huge, much larger than I had expected. And it was all sand. There was no road to drive on. It would not have been possible to walk around and see everything in under four hours, let alone two.
I paid my admission, and as we passed the gate, a policeman carrying a horse whip and a gun walked up to us.
The officer screamed something at Mohammad in Arabic. Mohammad screamed something back at him. The policeman then cracked his horse whip on the sand and narrowed his eyes at us.
Having no idea what the problem was, I pretended to be a perfectly happy and oblivious idiot, hoping it might tone down the temperature by a degree or so.
Mohammad said something nasty to the policeman in Arabic and then led our horses away as the officer’s face flushed with hatred and rage.
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 4