“Is that because the army knows it lost the 1973 war even though the government pretends Egypt won?” I said.
“I like the way you phrased that,” Heggy said. “Everyone here thinks we won in 1973 and only lost in 1967. We did very well during the first week in 1973, but wars are judged by how they end, not how they begin. Sadat didn’t want to fight in 1973 to win. He wanted to fight for some pride when he sat at the negotiating table. That’s what his wife, who is a very good friend of mine, said to me at her house in Maryland. Sadat told her many times that the best he could do in a war against Israel is put in a good performance at the beginning. The Israelis have a better army, better training, and they have America behind them. He said he needed to be able to sit down and talk to Israelis with his head held high, and he could only do this by first giving them a good punch. They will give him two good punches, but at least he will have given them one.”
Sadat didn’t only need to “punch” Israel so he could hold his head high. The entire country felt, and still feels, humiliated by its repeated losses to Israel. It isn’t easy for even a military dictator to keep his finger off the trigger when a whole country is crying for war.
Egypt’s army was certainly more rational in its behavior toward Israel than it would be if it heeded public opinion, but the army was partly responsible for shaping public opinion. The brass hardly liked Israel or the United States any more than the Muslim Brotherhood did.
Few Egyptians I spoke to other than Heggy seem to have paid even the slightest attention to what happened in Iran after the 1979 revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamists took over. There are at least two excellent reasons for that. First, Egypt’s Free Officers regime, unlike the Shah’s, didn’t go down with Mubarak. And second, the Muslim Brotherhood stood virtually no chance of creating its own army inside the country as Khomeini had done when he built the Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. There’s only room for one army in Egypt. An attempt to create a second would be suicidal.
So Egypt’s revolution was very different indeed from Iran’s, but history doesn’t need to start repeating exactly before its lessons ought to be heeded.
“Do people here take Iran seriously?” I said.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s not on the screen.”
“Why?” I said.
“It’s far away,” he said. “Egyptians are among the most localized people in the world. They look inward and greatly exaggerate their value in the world. I’m sure you must know that.”
I did know that. I saw it in Egypt’s military museum at the Citadel on a hill overlooking Old Cairo. Everyone who set foot inside learned how the Egyptian army—and therefore the government—saw itself.
The Citadel’s museum was the kind of place a superpower would build. Architecturally it looked like it was built by Victorian-era imperialists from Great Britain but with a bombastic Russian, even Soviet, style. Not even in an alternate dimension would such a grandiose place be built by the bumbling Iraqi or Lebanese armies. I couldn’t imagine anything like it being built by any Arab army other than Egypt’s, with the possible exception, I suppose, of Algeria’s.
The Citadel is a medieval fortification overlooking Old Cairo and was built in the 12th century by Salahaddin (a.k.a. Saladin), the Kurdish warrior who reconquered Jerusalem from the Crusaders and made himself sultan of Egypt and Syria. It’s fitting that the Egyptian army built its museum there. Its officers saw themselves as modern-day descendants of Egypt’s ancient and medieval warriors.
Egypt’s military adventures abroad against Israel, Yemen and Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the first Persian Gulf War were celebrated. North Korea’s government donated the services of one of its painters to illustrate an Egyptian-Israeli air war over the Sinai in 1973. The painting was commissioned during Mubarak’s tenure in 1993, many years after Sadat signed the peace treaty with Israel.
Egypt’s geopolitical clout fell after it signed that treaty. It no longer resembled a mini regional superpower. The elite in the armed forces, however, yearned to see Egypt rise again if it could unshackle itself from American requests that it be a status quo power for regional peace and stability. They saw themselves as bigger and more important. Serious moves in that direction would play very well indeed on the street.
* * *
Hala Mustafa was distraught. She was one of Egypt’s most prominent liberal intellectuals and the founder and editor-in-chief of Democracy magazine. The authorities had been hounding her for years by smearing her name in the press, wiretapping her phones and sending anonymous death threats. Her name appeared in newspapers all over the world when the government launched an official investigation into her private life after she met the Israeli ambassador in her office at the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
My colleague Armin Rosen and I met with her in that same office.
“I hope this doesn’t come across as a paranoid question,” Armin said, “but do you think your office is bugged?”
“Of course!” she said. “Yes. It’s very bugged.”
“So I guess if I have a message for Egyptian intelligence,” I said and chuckled, “this would be the time to deliver it.”
Perhaps I should have been alarmed at the possibility that the Mukhabarat might be spying on me as well as on her, but the news wasn’t as disturbing as it would have been if I were interviewing dissident intellectuals in a place like North Korea or Syria. Cairo’s regime was an Arab Nationalist military dictatorship, but it was built on the standard-issue authoritarian model rather than a totalitarian one. The odds that anyone in her office would be arrested were small, and the odds that any of us would be kidnapped or assassinated by the state were infinitesimal. Even so, Egypt was not the free country some mistook it for at the time.
“The moment of liberal change hasn’t come yet,” she said. “The regime today is the same one that was founded in 1952. This is still the Nasserist regime. I was hoping this revolution would bring something different, that we could return to the liberal tradition that existed before Nasser destroyed it. Egypt had a historic opportunity to revive its liberal past, but the moment has passed. The military didn’t encourage that path, the Muslim Brotherhood jumped over everybody to manipulate the process, and the liberal secular forces retreated.”
Egypt did go through a relatively liberal period before the Free Officers launched their coup against King Farouk in 1952. Egypt was hardly a democracy at the time, but it was much more open, tolerant and Western-oriented. Nasser changed everything when he imposed socialism (in the Russian rather than Scandinavian style), pan-Arab nationalism and a virulent strain of violent anti-Zionism. Yet with Soviet backing he transformed Egypt into something that looked like a regional superpower.
Many Sunni Arabs throughout the region swooned to his pan-Arabism and wished to be annexed by Cairo. Syria actually did get annexed to Egypt for a couple of years when the two merged into the doomed United Arab Republic. Nasser even started military adventures abroad when he sent soldiers to Yemen and sparked the Six-Day War against Israel. Both conflicts led to disaster, especially when the 1967 war ended with the Israeli occupation of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
The regime was a secular Arab-nationalist one, but radical Islam gained strength with Nasser’s squelching of Egyptian liberalism. The overwhelming majority of women throughout the country wore headscarves during and after the Mubarak era, whereas few did in the first half of the 20th century. A startlingly large number of men sported bruises on their foreheads—acquired by hitting their heads on the floor during prayer—to show off their piety. I saw more men with bruised foreheads in a single day in Cairo than in all other Muslim-majority countries I’ve visited, combined, in more than a decade.
The revolution, coup d’état or whatever we ought to call it did not return Egypt to 1951, the year before Nasser. History has no rewind button. Egypt couldn’t regain what it lost when King Farouk was overthrown any more than the U
nited States could suddenly return to the Truman era.
“All we can do,” Mustafa said, “is preserve the minimal amount of our liberal tradition that still remains. But the military rule and the growing Islamization of the society make it very difficult. The conservative forces are trying to prevent any sort of progress in the country. The military rulers are different from the Muslim Brotherhood, but they don’t contradict each other.”
Most Western analysts described Mubarak’s government as an American ally that was at least moderately cooperative with Israel, which was accurate to an extent, but his state-controlled media cranked out vicious anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda every day for three decades. No one should have expected liberalism (and I’m using that word in its general sense, not in the parochial American sense) to emerge anytime soon after all that.
“I’ve read many American analyses of the Arab Spring,” she said, “but most neglect the presence of the regime. Americans seem to think the regime went down with the dictator, but it’s not true. So they’re basing their analysis on what the people in the street do and say, but they don’t realize the regime is directing the process. The Salafists right now are completely controlled by the state security apparatus, and so they’ve suddenly become a major power. They weren’t in the past.”
“What does all this mean for the United States?” I said.
“That the moment of change hasn’t come yet,” she said. “It was a premature revolution. Mubarak’s regime wasn’t Mubarak’s. It was the regime that was founded in 1952, and it’s still here. The regime’s attitude against Israel is the same. Americans thought Mubarak was with Israel, but it’s not true. Mubarak did nothing to change the propaganda or advance peace. You have to rethink what was happening.”
I saw for myself what kind of message the military regime put out when I visited the October War Panorama commemorating Egypt’s supposed victory against Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973—a war Egypt actually lost.
The North Koreans built that museum, the largest and most outrageous of its kind that I have ever seen. Unlike the Citadel, this place was a cartoon.
Outside, across the street from a Soviet-style apartment complex, fighter jets, missiles and tanks were on display for everybody to gawk at. You could easily see them from the sidewalk without paying admission. You couldn’t even miss them while driving past in a car. That’s how I first found out that the panorama existed. My taxi driver took me past the gate on my way to the airport in 2005.
“What’s that?” I said as I gestured toward old air-force jets propped up on stands and pointing to the skies.
“It’s a museum celebrating our victory against Israel in 1973,” he said as if he actually believed Egypt won. Hezbollah’s empty boast of a “divine victory” at the end of the disastrous 2006 war was part of a preposterous tradition that goes back a long time.
Inside the main entrance I saw a series of murals in the ancient style that showed Semitic slaves captured and tormented by the Pharaonic regime alongside modern Israeli soldiers trampled on and humiliated by 20th century Egyptians.
The set piece, and the museum’s namesake, was an enormous panoramic painting depicting the Yom Kippur War, when Egypt mounted its temporarily successful surprise attack against the Israeli forces in the Sinai before Israel counterattacked and finished the war on its terms.
Visitors sat in theater-style chairs on a raised platform that slowly spun around so they could leisurely take it in.
Bogus history punctuated with bombastic martial music and cries of “Allahu akbar” (God is great) played over a single-channel audio track. All the women in the audience wore headscarves, and everyone in the audience, men and women alike, stared at me as though I had purple paint on my face. They must have wondered what on earth I was doing there and what I thought of it all.
The elite in the government and the army knew they lost the war in 1973. How could they not? They lied to puff themselves up. And they never stopped broadcasting the message that Israel and the United States were their enemies even as Israel and the United States described them as friendly moderates. The army blamed all Egypt’s problems during the post-Mubarak chaos on foreign (i.e., Israeli and American) saboteurs and subversives and tightened entry requirements on Western visitors, even tourists. This is not the way a peaceable ally behaves, but aside from the new visa requirements, it was nothing new, really. Mubarak’s government did the same thing.
It was next to impossible to get an interview with anyone in the junta. I was laughed at when I tried. “They won’t give interviews to the Egyptian media, let alone the American media,” my Egyptian colleague Yasmin said.
No one from the army gave speeches. No one from the army went on television to talk about what it was doing or what it wanted. SCAF had little contact with the society it ruled. Its soldiers were not ubiquitous on the streets like those of so many Arab armies. Once in a while the junta sent out a press release, and it did so at least once via Facebook, but the officers were so distant and removed from their subjects, they may as well have been holed up in a bunker in the sky over the horizon.
I asked Hala Mustafa what she thought about the game Mubarak played with the United States, how he claimed the Muslim Brotherhood would only get stronger if he opened up Egypt’s political system as Washington asked.
“The army is trying to prove he was right,” she said and laughed. “His men, his establishment want to prove he was right. He’s gone, but they are still here, and that’s why they’re co-opting the Muslim Brotherhood.”
She insisted the regime had been far more consistently anti-liberal than anti-Islamist. “The army recently released Anwar Sadat’s assassin,” she added. “It’s bullshit.”
The street activists I met were optimistic, but Mustafa was not. “The regime and the Islamists hate liberalism and Westernization,” she said. “This has been the problem since King Farouk was toppled by the Nasserists. Egypt’s liberal bourgeoisie and the liberal thinkers are associated with the imperial power of the moment, so they are rejected. Leftists and Marxists, however, overlap ideologically with the regime because they are anti-liberal and anti-American.” This was also, in her view, part of the reason Israel had to be demonized: “not because it’s Jewish but because it’s Western and liberal.”
That right there is why I couldn’t shake my feeling that no matter what happened, no matter who might win Egypt’s upcoming election, the country’s near- and medium-term future would be grim. Aside from the fractious activists in the square, Egypt was for all intents and purposes a two-party state pitting the army and its supporters against the Islamists. Political liberalism can’t grow in a place where the two main factions are both anti-liberal.
That was the problem from which most others sprang. Egypt need not copy the West down to the last detail in order to flourish, but there’s no getting around the fact that people who reject everything the West stands for are guaranteed to live in poverty with boots on their necks. The only question is which brand of boot.
Chapter Nine
Hanging With the Muslim Brotherhood
Cairo, 2011
My second interview with Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Essam el-Erian in Cairo is one of the strangest of my career. I’m reproducing it here in its entirety so you can experience the Brotherhood raw and unplugged.
First, some context. This interview took place after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and before the election of the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi to the presidency. Morsi was later overthrown in a military coup by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and Erian was arrested along with the rest of the Brotherhood’s leadership.
In early 2014, more than 600 Brotherhood members, presumably Erian among them, were sentenced to death at the end of a single show trial, making General Sisi Egypt’s most vicious ruler in decades.
My friend, colleague and traveling companion Armin Rosen joined me in Erian’s office.
Armin Rosen: Can you tell us about the Muslim
Brotherhood’s vision for Egypt at this point?
Essam el-Erian: Egypt has changed, and change is ongoing. It has been changing not only in the last 10 years but for 100 years. We have been struggling for freedom and independence for a long time, ever since we were occupied by the British in 1882. During this period we had two big attempts to build a democratic state. Both failed. One was a good attempt after the big revolution in 1919. We had a liberal life, a parliament and a constitution, but the monarchy stopped everything. Then we had a military coup in 1952. We hoped to have a good democratic system, but when the military rules, you can forget about having a democracy.
This is our third attempt, and it’s different this time because the people themselves went to the streets to revolt. No one dares to say he’s a leader of the revolution or behind the revolution. The people are making this happen through their own efforts. We Muslim Brothers were among the people because we represent a sector of the population, but we’d never dare to say this revolution is an Islamic revolution. It’s a national revolution.
MJT: You guys were completely taken by surprise by this, weren’t you?
Essam el-Erian: We all need a free and independent democratic state. We have struggled for a strong and independent Egypt not only for 100 years but for 200 years, since Muhammad Ali. He was also supported by foreigners. There was no USA at that time, but the French, British and Germans put him under siege, and this was an insult to Egyptians. We were under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, and we respected Muhammad Ali and the Ottoman authorities, but he wanted reform within the empire and to have a good modern country as a symbol. He never achieved this. In 30 years, he was broken. And ever since we’ve wanted an independent and strong modern state.
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 17