MJT: I’m not saying you are al-Qaeda.
Essam el-Erian: You know, but he is a decisionmaker. He says the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda are the same.
MJT: If you were al-Qaeda, I wouldn’t be sitting in your office.
Essam el-Erian: Look, sir. If you don’t dare to learn the truth about 9/11, we will. We were victims of this dirty and bloody crime.
MJT: You think you’re victims because Egypt was blamed?
Essam el-Erian: All the nation. The whole Arab and Muslim nation was called terrorists. And you put these nations under dictatorship to face this ghost.
MJT: We didn’t put Egypt under dictatorship.
Essam el-Erian: Your administration did.
MJT: Mubarak was already in power.
Essam el-Erian: And you put Hamas in the same cage as al-Qaeda. They are fighting for their liberty, but you describe them as terrorists.
MJT: What do you think of Hamas’ martyrdom operations [suicide bombings]?
Essam el-Erian: Hamas was elected in a democratic process that your former President Jimmy Carter witnessed, but you neglect everything and call them terrorists.
MJT: So you think they aren’t terrorists.
Essam el-Erian: Of course. They are fighters for liberty. Their land is occupied by the real terrorists. Real terrorists who kill innocent farmers in Qana and children in Egypt. They killed children in school here in 1968. They are the real terrorists.
MJT: Hamas kills children in schools.
Essam el-Erian: Why do you describe one as terrorist but not the other? Say both are terrorists. If you make an excuse for someone, you must have this excuse for others.
MJT: Not all violence is terrorism.
Essam el-Erian: Israelis kill children. They killed 300 children in Gaza. Those 300 children were fighters?
MJT: Children get killed in every war, but that doesn’t mean everyone who fights in a war is a terrorist. Egypt sent troops to Yemen to fight there and help the revolutionaries. Is Egypt a terrorist state? Do you seriously believe that no Egyptian soldier ever killed a child in Yemen?
Essam el-Erian: Look, sir.
MJT: I asked you a serious question.
Essam el-Erian: For three centuries your grandfathers killed the Indians.
MJT: We can do this all day.
Essam el-Erian: If you want to go to history, we can walk through history together. But we are speaking about the present. [Bangs table.] In the present, you are biased.
MJT: Of course we’re biased. So are you.
Essam el-Erian: Your media and administration are biased.
MJT: Everyone is biased.
Essam el-Erian: The politicians are no longer making the rules here. The people are. And the people are very intelligent in Egypt, even farmers in Upper Egypt. They know who is our enemy. Don’t link yourself and your nation to the enemy of the Egyptian people.
MJT: Who is the enemy of the Egyptians?
Essam el-Erian: Israelis.
MJT: You guys have a peace treaty with Israel.
Essam el-Erian: If they respect it, the Egyptian people will respect it, but the Israelis do not respect it.
MJT: Israel is not attacking Egypt.
Essam el-Erian: Israel attacks everybody.
MJT: Israel is not attacking Egypt.
Essam el-Erian: Why are you neglecting the attack on Gaza?
MJT: Gaza is not Egypt.
Essam el-Erian: Bombs came over our borders. Why do you neglect the treaty? We have no comprehensive peace and no Palestinian state.
The whole world is changing. This is a time to revise the whole world order, as George Bush the father said. We need a new world order. Human beings should have equal lives and equal opportunities with the West. We must share in this new order and not be neglected all the time.
Armin Rosen: There are a lot of people in the U.S. who think the Muslim Brotherhood wants a moderate Islamist state supported by the military like they have in Sudan.
Essam el-Erian: Sudan is not an Islamist state. [Laughs.]
Armin Rosen: It’s a constitutionally Islamist state backed by the military.
Essam el-Erian: All the Arab states are constitutionally described as Islamic states. All of them.
Armin Rosen: Well, what sort of ideal state structure do you want?
Essam el-Erian: An Egyptian state.
Armin Rosen: What does that mean?
Essam el-Erian: All of your colleagues ask me that question. The British made a democracy, and the French made another one, and the Americans made a third one, and the Germans made a sixth one. All are democratic. We have diversity and different interpretations, so we can have different models of democracy.
MJT: Lebanon has its own model of democracy, and Iraq has a slightly different one. What would Egypt’s look like structurally?
Essam el-Erian: Lebanon is a special circumstance.
[His cell phone rings. He has been ignoring most incoming calls, but he has to take this one, and he talks for 10 minutes in Arabic. He eventually hangs up and switches back to English.]
Thank you, sirs. It was a nice hot meeting. [Laughs.]
MJT: Before we go, can I at least ask why you aren’t down in Tahrir Square with everyone else? Every party in the country is demonstrating against the regime except the Muslim Brotherhood.
Essam el-Erian: We were in Tahrir Square.
MJT: But you aren’t there now.
Essam el-Erian: Because now is very confusing. I went down there yesterday. I looked at the faces of the people, and they are not the people I know.
MJT: The people down there are liberals and socialists.
Essam el-Erian: It’s chaos.
Armin Rosen: We’ve talked to a lot of activists there, and almost all of them say the Muslim Brotherhood is not on their side, that you’re opportunists.
Essam el-Erian: We were there on Friday, but we are not backing the sit-in.
Armin Rosen: I mean in general. They don’t feel like you’re on their side.
Essam el-Erian: Look, sir. When the history of this revolution is written, everything will be clear. We are not going to say anything about our role in the revolution. Let the others say what they want.
Chapter Ten
The Children of Hannibal
Tunisia, 2012
The Arab Spring didn’t go well. Egypt managed to rid itself of Hosni Mubarak, only to foolishly elect the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammad Morsi to replace him as its new pharaoh. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi then removed Morsi in a popularly-backed military coup, but imposed a military regime far more vicious and cruel than Mubarak’s.
Libya degenerated into a failed militia state. Earlier it suffered from far too much government—Qaddafi’s system was thoroughly totalitarian and modeled on Nicolae Ceausescu’s in Romania—but the new state was so weak it hardly existed.
Civil war erupted in Syria, one in which the revolt against the tyrannical house of Assad was just the opening chapter. The fighting eventually blew across the borders into Lebanon and Iraq. The Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, an outfit so extreme that even Al Qaeda disowned it, finally committed one atrocity too many and brought down the wrath of a US-backed military coalition.
But things look different in Tunisia. The Islamist party Ennahda won more votes in the first election than any other, but it still won less than half and was forced into a coalition government with secular liberal parties. The Islamists outright lost the second election to the aggressively secular party Nidaa Tounes--or Call of Tunisia in English. No one person or party could get its mitts on all the levers of power, and in early 2014 Tunisia adopted the most liberal constitution in the entire Arab world.
Why did the Arab Spring turn out so much better in the country in which it began? The answer lies back in time more than 3,000 years.
* * *
The northernmost point on the African continent is just outside the Tunisian city of Bizerte at the tip of Ras Angela cape. Here is where t
he Mediterranean bottlenecks. The Italian island of Sardinia is barely 100 miles away. Sicily is but 100 miles across the water from Tunis in another direction. The Italian town of Pantelleria, on the island of the same name, is only 37 miles off the east coast. Palermo, Sicily’s largest city, is closer to Tunis than it is to Rome.
It should come as no surprise, then, that this area became the overseas core of the Roman Empire.
What is now the greater Tunis urban area, though, was an advanced civilization even before Rome was founded. Roughly 900 years before Christ, Elissa (whose Greek name, Dido, was immortalized by the Roman poet Virgil in his epic The Aeneid) was exiled from the Phoenician city of Tyre in southern Lebanon. She founded a new city on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and became its first queen.
That city, which at its height became known as the “shining city,” was Carthage.
It grew into an innovative and technologically advanced, cosmopolitan sea-based power with one of the most formidable navies in the ancient world. At its peak it controlled most of the southern Mediterranean, from Morocco to Libya.
Three hundred thousand people lived in the capital alone, making it a megacity by antiquity’s standards. The city was so dense that the Carthaginians had to build six-story apartment buildings in order to house everyone, something never before accomplished anywhere in the world. The apartments even had indoor plumbing.
“To some extent you could compare it to Manhattan,” Stefan G. Chrissanthos, the author of Warfare in the Ancient World, told the History Channel. “It was a huge population living in a relatively small area. This was an important commercial and cultural hub not only for North Africa but for the entire western Mediterranean world.”
They built baths, a complex sewer system and enormous cisterns that you can still see today. Some of the more backward and impoverished parts of the Arab world still don’t have all the things the Carthaginians had, but the city now known as Tunis had them even before ancient Rome did.
Carthage was truly a superpower. For hundreds of years it rivaled Rome in prestige, strength and wealth. No other nation at the time could challenge and threaten Rome as it did. When the two finally clashed, Carthage produced one of the greatest military generals in history—Hannibal—who fought a hard and bloody 15-year campaign against his chief rival. His army swung through Spain and Gaul and invaded Italy from the north on the backs of elephants. Europe was very nearly conquered from Africa. And while Hannibal failed, he put cold fear into the hearts and minds of Rome’s citizens.
The Roman statesman Cato the Elder was later reported to have uttered the words “Carthago delenda est”—Carthage must be destroyed—after every single one of his speeches.
At the end of the Third Punic War (Punic is the Latin word for Phoenician), Rome did destroy Carthage, and it did so utterly. Barely a stone remained on top of another. The conquerors killed or enslaved all the inhabitants. Julius Caesar rebuilt the city in the Roman style, settled it with Roman citizens and made the new Carthage the principal European city in Africa.
Three wars with Carthage—two of them existential—convinced the Romans that they needed a serious empire lest they be conquered by somebody else. “It was in Tunisia,” Robert D. Kaplan writes in his book Mediterranean Winter, “where Rome began to build its empire in earnest … Tunisia became to Rome what India would be to Great Britain, its ‘jewel in the imperial crown.’”
The Romans first annexed it and then renamed it Africa. Tunisia is hardly a typical country in Africa—it is at least messily democratic, and 60 percent of its citizens are middle class—but the entire rest of the continent was later named what Rome used to call it. The Romans eventually conquered the whole of North Africa, but they developed none of it as much as the area that now surrounds Tunis.
You can see that even today if you visit. Roman ruins are scattered all over the place and can be found as far south as the sand seas of the Sahara. The largest coliseum outside Rome was built just a few hours’ drive south of Tunis in a place called el-Djem.
“The closer to Carthage,” Kaplan writes, “the greater the development.” Of course that development wasn’t started by Rome. Rather, it was continued and accelerated by Rome.
Little remains of Hannibal’s Carthage. The archeological site just to the north of downtown Tunis is mostly Roman, though there is a Phoenician portion just outside the museum. Ahmed Medien, a local journalist I toured the area with, didn’t think of the ruins there as something left behind by somebody else, the way many Americans might view Native American sites in Arizona and Colorado. He saw a straight historical line between himself and ancient Carthage and described the Roman and Phoenician ruins as parts of his own cultural heritage.
Modern-day Tunisians admire and identify with Hannibal. There’s even a statue of him with two elephants all the way down in Tozeur at the edge of the Sahara. Stores and hotels are named after him. The last light-rail stop before the lovely seaside suburb of Sidi Bou Said is called Carthage-Hannibal. The international airport is named Tunis-Carthage. Tunisians love the idea of ancient Carthage as a sophisticated, prosperous, cosmopolitan, sea-based superpower. Today’s Tunis-Carthage is in some ways just like the old Carthage, although—unlike Egypt—it has been blessedly shorn of its militarism.
Fragments of Phoenician culture persist in small ways, as well. During the spring and summer, for instance, Tunisian men walking the streets will place jasmine flowers behind their ears, a fashion that was popular even in Hannibal’s time.
The Roman Empire, however, left an even more lasting imprint, one that goes well beyond names and flowers and statues of ancient war heroes. Its legacy is one of urbanism and legitimate government, two things that are still extremely weak—at times dangerously so—in some Arab countries, even in ones like Jordan, which are relatively trouble-free.
Roman Carthage was an extremely important city in early Christianity. The biblical canon was confirmed there. Early Christian theologians Tertullian and Cyprian hailed from the area. The famed Christian philosopher and writer Saint Augustine, a Berber, was also from this part of Roman Africa. His hometown of Hippo is now called Annaba and lies on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast, but it’s barely inside Algeria just on the other side of the Tunisian border. That border is a modern invention. During Rome’s time, Hippo was very much a part of greater Carthage.
Rome’s culture and political system were firmly implanted not only into the cities and soil but also into the cultural DNA of the people who lived there. Tunisia belonged to Western civilization for nearly 1,000 years, more than four times longer than the United States has so far existed. Rome eventually fell, of course, but Tunisia remained part of the West for several more centuries.
In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 3, Edward Gibbon describes Tunisia as seen by the conquering Vandals from Germany: “The long and narrow tract of the African coast was filled with frequent monuments of Roman art and magnificence.” Of the Vandal King Genseric he writes, “[he] acquired a rich and fertile territory which stretched along the coast … from Tangier to Tripoli … He cast his eyes toward the sea; he resolved to create a naval power, and his bold enterprise was executed with steady and active perseverance. The woods of Mount Atlas afforded an inexhaustible nursery of timber; his new subjects were skilled in the art of navigation and ship-building.”
So the Vandals ruled Tunisia for a while but lost it again to the Eastern Roman Empire, which had become the Byzantine Empire, in 534 A.D. Not until the 7th century A.D. did Arab armies finally take it for themselves.
The newcomers didn’t impose the culture of the Arabian Peninsula wholesale on the inhabitants. They couldn’t. The people of Carthage were too strong for that. The newcomers met them halfway and adjusted themselves to the advanced civilization that was already there. Conquering Arabs did this everywhere to an extent, as have imperialist peoples everywhere. The same happened when ancient Mongolia conquered China: the Mongols became Chinese. In few place
s, though, was the indigenous culture as resilient as it was in Tunisia. In few places—the most notable exception being Andalusia in Spain—was the pre-existing culture part of the West.
The Hafsid dynasty ruled from Tunis from the 13th century to the 15th and, at their peak, controlled the parts of Libya and Algeria that even today orient themselves somewhat toward Tunis-Carthage. The Hafsids ramped up trade with Europe dramatically during the time of their rule. Tunis was a culturally and artistically advanced place during this time and produced one of the Arab world’s greatest historians, Ibn Khaldun, whose masterwork, the Muqaddimah, is still read today by Western students of the region. One of his arguments in the book is that desert nomads must be brought under the control of an urbanized state to prevent anarchy from overwhelming the realm. Roman statesmen learned this lesson the hard way. At the time of this writing, the Arab governments of Libya and Yemen still haven’t figured out how to do it.
Later, and far more recently, the French ruled Tunisia. They took it from the Turkish Ottomans in 1881 and didn’t entirely leave until 1963, seven years after the country achieved independence.
After all that history, Tunisia has emerged as unique. It doesn’t have tribes as do most Arab countries. Its citizens make up an entirely modern and coherent nation-state. Its culture is cosmopolitan and tolerant, its enthusiasm for religion relatively mild. The whole population even beyond the urban core—including those who live deep in the southern desert—is both fluent and educated in the language of Paris.
It is at an angle to the rest of the Arab world. A serious angle.
“Our future,” said Tunisian diplomat Ahmed Ounaies, who was briefly the foreign minister after Ben Ali was overthrown, “is with Europe.”
* * *
The coastal region of Northern Tunisia—directly across and just a short hop from Italy—is where most people live. The middle is sparsely populated, and the south is Saharan and empty. Whole swaths of the urban architecture are strictly Western—French—and nearly all the ruins are Roman. The Frenchification of the greater Tunis area is startling when seen for the first time. It is much more extensive than in Beirut. Parts of the country almost look and feel as though they’re in Europe.
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 19