Issandr El Amrani's Blog, page 24

Changes coming to this site

When I created this blog 10 years ago, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, I had no idea it would become so well-trafficked or that it would last so long. It was an experiment, one that had its up and downs, a range of contributors, the occasional hiatus and periods of prolific production. It has never been a major (or frankly even minor) source of income for me, but having been self-employed for most of that decade, I had complete freedom to put as little or as much work into the blog as I wanted.

For me, the current version of The Arabist is 4.0 — it is a mature product, with many idiosyncrasies built up over time and a personality its readers have come to expect. Some of that is going to change in the year ahead as we move towards a 5.0 iteration of the website. Some recent changes were behind the scene, in terms of the engine that drives the site and making it more mobile-accessible. The coming changes will be more editorial.

First of all, my own role in the blog will be reduced for a while at least. The editor role is passing on to Ursula Lindsey, and she is likely to become the most frequent poster. I will post occasionally but, at least initially, much less frequently.

The main reason is that I am starting a new job as the North Africa Project Director at International Crisis Group, the conflict prevention organization. My new job requires me to publicly represent them, and I want to avoid confusion with the range of views and contributors on this site. For this reason the Twitter handle I have been using, @arabist, will now mostly be used to publicize site content and links. I will be moving to @boumilo – please follow!

The Egyptian crisis, Libya's increasing chaos, and the transition in Tunisia are going to be my main focus for the next few months. This will all require a lot of my attention, and I want to dedicate myself entirely to this task, which will mean a hiatus in blogging. I'm sure that Ursula, Steve Negus, Nour Youssef, Paul Mutter and other regular contributors to the site will do a great job. Things readers have indicated they like, such as links lists, will remain – although we want to find a better way to present them and attract your attention to great articles about the Middle East, which is one of this site's main missions. And we want to act some more static content alongside the blog. So stay tuned and thanks for reading.

Et Tu Sonallah?

On the New Yorker's blog, Robyn Creswell lauds Sonallah Ibrahim (whose first novel That Smell he recently translated, to glowing reviews) as Egypt's "oracular novelist," arguing that his skepticism over the January 25 revolution's impact (he has preferred to call it an intifada, an uprising, rather than a thawra, a revolution) marks him as a "soothsayer." Creswell argues that Ibrahim's doubts echo his early skepticism of the Nasser regime, which "was seen as a harbinger of its collapse."

I am a great admirer of Ibrahim's sharp, troubling, original work -- and I was charmed by the man himself. But I think the argument above is more pertinent to his straight-forward opposition to the Sadat and the Mubarak regimes, whose shortcomings he satirized in his tour-de-force novel Zaat  and denounced publicly. Ibrahim has had a much more complicated and contradictory relationship to Nasser, like many Egyptian Communists (who voluntarily dissolved themselves in the 1960s to support the national cause) -- one in which anti-imperialism trumps anti-authorianism, and ideology overrides self-interest and otherwise excellent analytical powers. 

I say this in light of a recent interview in which Ibrahim, commenting on the current situation, says that "the military power is working on behalf of the people," and describes Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi as "a gain for political life in Egypt," a "patriotic personality" and someone who "for the first time since Gamal Abdel Nasser challenged America and the West." 

 (He also argues that "In the first place we have to understand that there is a plan, developed in research centers in Germany and the US after studying our political and social situation, to maintain their control over us. And this plan is executed by spreading a number of public figures among us to work in its interest, and one of these figures in Mohamed ElBaradei.")

I don't know when this interview was done and I don't know how reliable it is (El Youm El Sabaa isn't always a pinnacle of professionalism). Ibrahim is hardly alone among Egyptian  writers to be celebrating and defending the army after Morsi's ouster. 

But it suggests much less comforting thoughts, not about a lifetime of skepticism and prescience, but about the recurrence of a certain gullibility or delusion. 

In That Smell Ibrahim portrays a country that has turned into a prison, a place where people can't connect or tell the truth. Yet in the interview he describes Nasser as a "great leader." As Creswell himself notes in his introduction to That Smell, when Ibrahim and other Communists were jailed by Nasser in 1959, "The consistent support his faction had given Nasser ended up counting for nothing."  

 

Back to Basics

Our latest translation courtesy of the team at Industry Arabic is a column from former National Salvation Front spokesman Khaled Dawoud (he quit over his inability to continue dismissing the Rabaa massacre), which originally appeared here. 

Back to Basics

When
the Tamarrod movement launched in early May and quickly moved to unseat
President Mohamed Morsi, the goal was clear and simple: to call for early
presidential elections -- once the man that many described as the Muslim
Brotherhood Guidance Bureau's representative in the Presidential Palace had
proved a failure at managing the country's affairs, with a similar incompetence
shown by the rest of his organization as well. This constituted a threat to the
future of Egypt itself and the cohesion of Egyptian society, and even brought
us to the brink of civil war. Furthermore, those in the movement really did
believe the Road Map, the whole July 3 production, and the pledge to swiftly
return to the polls for free and fair elections that would grant popular
legitimacy to the new regime.

Despite
their belief that the Muslim Brotherhood had completely deviated from the
revolution's goals, the stated aim of the parties and movements that rose up to
defend the goals of the January 25 Revolution was never to crush the Muslim
Brotherhood, imprison its entire leadership and ban them from political
activity – and of course not to kill them and mow them down in the hundreds.
The actors who are now moving in this direction belonged to a different current
that is completely unrelated to the January 25 Revolution; they are the ones
who have considered the revolution from the start to be a conspiracy to put an
end to their power, influence and corruption, a conspiracy launched by the
Muslim Brotherhood with support from Hamas, Iran, America and the whole
familiar list. The current trend toward exclusion is backed by those who belong
to intellectual currents that have always considered the Brotherhood's ideology
to be an obscurantist project at odds with the principles of the Nahda and
Egypt's progress toward joining the ranks of the European democracies. In my
view, these people do not represent the majority in Egypt's secular parties of
any orientation, whether liberal, leftist or nationalist, since to put it
simply, Egypt isn't France.

The
truth remains that the supporters of these two currents – the old state that
has been in place since 1952 with its entire apparatus of repression, murder
and a duplicitous, state-controlled media along with those in certain
intellectual circles who can be labeled as "exclusionists," have
utterly failed to achieve the goal of crushing and excluding the Muslim
Brotherhood over the past 80 years since the Brotherhood was founded. Even with
all its brutality, Mubarak's police state failed to inflict a crushing defeat
on the al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya that was at the forefront of the terrorist attacks
in the 1990's, even though their organizational strength and popular base can
hardly be compared to that of the wealthy Muslim Brotherhood, which possesses an
international organization spread across more than 80 countries. The former
Interior Minister Habib al-Adly, who is now cooped up in a prison cell, was
forced to make concessions to pave the way for a partial restoration of
security and to put an end to the daily acts of violence committed by al-Gamaa
al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad.

Certainly,
the Muslim Brotherhood was stubborn, smug and arrogant up to the last moment.
They tried to hold a monopoly on speaking in God's name and in the name of
Islam and totally refused to recognize that there was broad opposition to their
policies. They succeeded at alienating a broad spectrum of society and state
institutions, which made it impossible for them to continue managing the country's
affairs, even if Morsi did win in fair elections. Morsi lost his ability to
govern, not just his legitimacy. Added to that, there was the whole spectacle
of the sit-ins at Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda Square, which dragged on for 47
days, turning the lives of Cairo residents into a living hell with their
occupation of the city's main arteries and their violent – not peaceful --
protests.

Furthermore,
their media discourse was directed primarily toward the West in bid to win its
support. This was due to their firm conviction that Western and American
support is the only way for them to possibly return to power – although this is
in fact impossible. In pursuit of this goal, Egyptian mothers did not hesitate
to abandon the least drop of motherhood and parade their infant children before
the cameras as they breathe in tear gas. These women insisted on staying just
to shoot such a scene, or force their children in Rabaa al-Adawiya or al-Khamsa
to wear burial shrouds and say they are "martyrdom projects" while
"Morsi is my president, al-Sisi is a killer."

Their
discourse toward us, the Egyptians, on the platform in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square
was all menace and threats and plunging into the fires of hell, sectarian
appeals explicitly threatening to set Upper Egypt and its churches and
Christians on fire if the sit-ins were broken up, and crossing red lines in a
way we have never seen before in our political existence. This was along with
direct appeals to open up fractures in the army and without any scruple to
avoid a repeat of the Syrian scenario in Egypt with all its brutality. For a
large swathe of Egyptians, these behaviors confirmed that the Brotherhood places
the interests of their organization and clan first – ahead of Egypt – and they
thereby lost a great bit of the sympathy that had enjoyed among average
Egyptians, who love their army – even if only by dint of the mobilization and
media discourse they have been subject to over the past six decades since the
army-led 1952 Revolution.

Then to
make matters worse, they went and tarred everyone with the same brush, thinking
that their enemies are all Mubarak supporters and "feloul," refusing
to believe that comrades from the January 2011 Revolution were a pillar of the
movement that ended up deposing Morsi only one year after he attained office –
a historical development that not even the most optimistic Brotherhood leader
would have dreamed of two and a half years ago. However, they squandered this
opportunity through stupidity and arrogance, along with the belief that they
possess the absolute truth, forgetting that they lack the expertise and skills
to run the country. As a result, the basic rules of logic and necessity
demanded that they work on building alliances and abiding by the promises that
Morsi personally made in the famous Fairmont agreement with prominent national
figures days before it was announced that he had won the presidency.

However,
all this does not mean tolerating or shrugging off the killing of Egyptians by
unaccountable security forces. This is not the state that millions of Egyptians
launched a revolution in order to build in January 2011. The basic assumption
that the Muslim Brotherhood has turned into a terrorist organization that will
be eliminated and silenced just through violence is completely wrongheaded. It
will cause a further deterioration in the situation and will give the
Brotherhood's leadership exactly what it wants.

Everyone
knows that the Brotherhood leadership longs for the security forces to commit
murder and bloodshed as part of a clear strategy based on the idea that this is
what will push the UN Security Council to convene and possibly issue an
official statement with the magic words calling for the Egyptian government to
"respect legitimacy," i.e. to restore Morsi to power. If the killing
mounts, we will soon hear the Muslim Brotherhood leadership calling for the
international community to intervene directly in Egypt under Chapter VII of the
UN Charter. We cannot allow ourselves to go down that slippery slope.

What we
need now is to get back to basics. Putting a stop to the bloodshed is the
number one priority, since the nation and its future are at stake. These basics
are the reasons the people rose up in the January 25 Revolution, and what the
supporters of the old police state are clearly trying to root out: bread,
freedom, social justice and human dignity.

 

We have always been at war with Eastasia, Egypt version

From Bradley Hope's account of the increasingly widespread belief that Morsi and friends were broken out of prison by Hamas and Hizbullah, and other re-writings of the 2011 uprising: 

This view is now being taken further by some Egyptians as they seek to explain their country's zigzag course back to a state of emergency, one of the most reviled pillars of Mubarak's rule. The role of foreign influences, including United States funding for civil society groups in Egypt, looms ever larger in their attempts to explain and justify it.

To many former members of Mubarak's National Democratic Party such as Ali El Dean Hilal Dessouki, it seems increasingly plausible to suggest that foreign Islamists, with the aid of the Brotherhood, infiltrated the protests and hijacked the revolution, setting Egypt on a path that culminated with the military's intervention on July 3.

This "second revolution", as the coup against Mr Morsi is sometimes referred to, is more meaningful and legitimate than the first, he said.

It is, Mr Dessouki said, the first "exclusively internal Egyptian uprising."

Asked why the Mubarak regime collapsed so quickly, he said it was too soon to know for certain. But he pointed to many signs of foreign intervention, including the prison break and foreign funding of non-government organisations.

"The situation was much more complicated then," he said.

The headline does not do the story justice; read it as a documentation of how the idea that Morsi – in late January a freshly arrested political prisoner – has been recast as the center of international jailbreak conspiracy. This is just one of the mind-f**ks that the battle to define what reality is in Egypt has created. He who controls the past...

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Back to Cairo

The man across the aisle was reading an article headlined: “No Turning Back and No Surrender Before the Forces of Darkness.” As our plane descended over night-time Cairo, the streets were blurry in the weak city lights, and eerily empty because of a military curfew.

The Arabist household just returned, with some trepidation, to Cairo. Here is something I wrote about my own feelings on re-enty for the NYT Latitudes blog. 

 

Mrs. Lincoln’s Egyptian Constitution

Nathan Brown, in FP, asks: 

Can a constitution written in 2012 largely by people now decried as terrorists really be amended to serve Egypt in 2013? Isn't the new regime's "road map" to restore constitutional rule and elections superseded by recent events? 

No it is not. The process is likely to continue and the political logic behind the road map remains quite robust. The reason is that it offers a way to concretize and institutionalize the current political arrangements. Worrisome as they might be, those arrangements remain ones that the dominant military, security, and civilian actors have every interest in entrenching. Egypt will have a constitution again, to be sure -- but it is one that will be a codification of the will of the current regime, like all of Egypt's past constitutions. And Egypt's international partners are therefore likely to be confronted soon with a regime that looks very much like the present one but can present a formal democratic face.

We translated some of the measures proposed for the new constitution recently, here and here. Some of what has been announced largely reverses Islamist provisions in the 2012 constitution, but some surprising elements have also been introduced, such as a return to the Mubarak-era individual seat electoral system.

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Meanwhile in Tunisia

Allegations of a deal between the country's two top political leaders: 

Not much reliable information about the meeting in Paris between former Tunisian Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi and Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi has been leaked. However, it is known that the two have reached an agreement in principle, which foreign partners — namely the Europeans, the Americans and the Germans — have imposed. The two enemy brothers need to agree in order to achieve a democratic transition in Tunisia and to avoid an Egyptian-style bloody scenario, even if that would anger the popular bases of the two camps.

The deal includes keeping Ali Laarayedh at the head of the government and Mustapha Ben Jaafar at the head of the National Constituent Assembly (ANC), while replacing Moncef Marzouki with Essebsi as president of the republic. As for the government, it will consist of technocrats and politicians with the addition of two new posts of deputy prime minister; one for security affairs and the other for economic affairs. These two posts will be “offered” to the democratic opposition.

If true, it's exactly the kind of elite back-room dealing that appears to be the key to fragile political transitions. 

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The Way Out

I prefer to see what happened as a great fire, which many shared in starting, some out of negligence and stupidity, some out of revenge, some of out greed and some out of inattention. Everyone thought his own actions explained the fire’s outbreak, but the truth, God knows, is they all joined in starting it… And what matters is that they started it, and the army came to power claiming to put it out.

This is a passage from Ezzedine Choukri Fischere's Bab El Khoroug ("The Way Out") which I took with me this summer while traveling outside Egypt. I just wrote about in for the LRB blog.   

 

The tale of Kerdasa's police chief

 Thugs are thugs. They attack because they can. It makes little difference whether they are from the MB or not. Those were Kerdasa's police chief Mohamed Gabr's thoughts on his unfriendly neighborhood thugs, according to his relative Mohamed Khalil, which he conveyed a month before his brutal murder became a default example of the violence carried out by some Islamists.

Khalil and his friend Amr (an acquaintance) met chief Gabr the night they got into car accident and were taken to the Kerdasa police station for driving without a license on the Mehwar. The man offered the tea and coffee while they waited for the unlawful released the car without due process. Mostly done as a favor for his relative, partly because parts of the vehicle were going to “get misplaced” in police custody anyway. 

There Khalil and Amr encountered two signs of police weakness. The first came as a suggestion by chief Gabr himself to pay a neighborhood thug some money to let their car be and the second stood as a reminder outside the station. 

It was a lonely watchtower that fell outside of the station’s premises, inexplicably completely out of reach for the officers who were supposed to man it. The tower is the awkward result of a standoff between the police and thugs months ago that took place when the station was being restored after the 2011 nationwide attacks on the police. They had begun to build an enclosure wall around the then-new tower. However, their plan was frowned upon by a group of thugs, who had unilaterally decided that they owned the land outside the station and didn’t wish to see a wall built on it. The land, they decreed, was going to be used as a garage, where they could keep the new cars they found parked alone nearby. Outnumbered (and humiliated I might add), the police conceded to build the wall behind the tower, leaving it stranded in the new garage.

One of the few, if not the only, positive outcomes of Jan 25 that people cite is the breaking of the barrier of fear. People now are not afraid to speak their mind, protest, etc. But courage turned into impudence for some. Now people also feel safe criticizing the killing of hundreds mostly peaceful protesters, or retrieving a family member from a jail cell and shooting whoever doesn’t get out of their way fast enough.

That prompted chief Gabr to take a series of precautions to avoid the recurrent violence. First, he decided not to keep weapons in the stations anymore - nothing more than the handguns carried by each officer, that is - to dissuade nonpaying gun shoppers from visiting. And then he decided to play Hide and Seek (Elsewhere) with the families of all prisoners.

"If I arrest someone, I always make sure they get transferred to another prison so their families wouldn't know where he is," he had explained to Khalil in his office over tea. "If a prisoner spends the night here, his family will come in, take the keys, unlock the gate and take him out. If I so much as say a word; I would get shot." And he did, less than a week ago.

Only he wasn't just shot, they also reportedly slit his throat, stripped him down to his underwear, tied him to a car, next to his subordinates who suffered a similar fate, and dragged him around the station for a while before coming to rest in front of a brick wall (believed to be al-Sho'araa mosque, 300 hundred meters away from the station) where his body was dumped alongside others on the ground for people to gawk at.

There, the corpses were videotaped and asked why they brought that upon themselves. Their mothers were cursed and their red faces were covered with white sheets, only to be repeatedly uncovered by curious bystanders. (To sample the mindless violence, watch this video of one of the victims, seemingly alive, being asked to say the shahada, and when he failed to respond, a bystander furiously concluded that he was a Zionist).

Meanwhile, other bystanders cursed “the bearded sheikhs” that allegedly killed the policemen, only hours after the dispersal of the Raba'a sit-in begun, according to Mohamed Hossam, a local who watched the attack from his balcony with his neighbors.

“The neighbors were crying the whole time. My own father didn’t eat for the rest of the day,” he said, as if more perplexed by the emotional reaction to the vile public murder of almost a dozen people than by the murder itself.

“(Kerdasa’s islamists) lost people in Raba’a, so they wanted to make an example out of the police in Kerdasa,” he added dryly. “I wanted to do something, anything...but if the police can’t protect itself, then who will protect me?”

From Citizen To Problem: The New Coptic Tokenism

Paul Sedra, in Jadaliyya: 

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry released a statement this past Thursday that was entirely without precedent, and yet it received practically no media attention amidst the political turmoil the country is currently experiencing. According to the statement, “Beyond overlooking the violent and dangerous reality of the Rabea and Nahda sit-ins, a number of foreign governments and international media outlets have also chosen to overlook the recent increase in killings and attacks that are once again targeting Egypt’s Christian community.”

Observers of Egypt’s Coptic community could be forgiven for rubbing their eyes in disbelief upon reading this pronouncement by the Egyptian government. What is so remarkable and, indeed, bewildering about the statement, is that the Egyptian government has repeatedly and forcefully denied the existence of sectarianism on Egyptian soil for decades. For an arm of the government to reference Copts as a target of violence—much less reference the Copts as a distinct community at all—is a stark departure from a long-standing policy of refusing the acknowledgment of sectarian divisions within Egyptian society.

Worth reading.

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