When I first saw Tahrir, seventeen years ago, the smiling face of Anwar Sadat, who had recently triumphed in the October War, beamed down on the streaming traffic from a huge painted panel. His popularity eventually faded, and in 1981 he was gunned down by Islamic terrorists. But he is not entirely absent from these precincts: the Tahrir station of Cairo’s new subway bears his name. Hosni Mubarak, who succeeded him as President of the Egyptian Republic, lacks the flamboyance of Sadat—or, for that matter, of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sadat’s predecessor. Mubarak is said to be more like the protagonist of a Mahfouz novel—banal, bumbling, a bit smaller than life. But then the Egypt over which he presides is a bit Mahfouzian, too: its achievements fewer than its hopes, its nervous energy reined in, and its taste for glory subsumed in a search for equanimity. Crossing Tahrir Square, though, is no less harrowing than it used to be.
On leaving my hotel, I would run a gantlet of hucksters of Pharaonic-style papyruses, exotic native perfumes, and guided tours of the pyramids, and then make my way through an open-air bus terminal, where hordes of dark-eyed men from the countryside, clad in galabias, debouched from battered buses to begin their morning’s work at various menial jobs. All around me were the pleasant odors of roasted lamb and rice, newly baked bread, and grayish-looking hot cereals offered for sale by elderly women, some of them tattooed, who were seated cross-legged on the pavement. Finally, I would reach the busy boulevards ringing Tahrir, over which a Y-shaped iron footbridge, never painted and rarely swept, once crossed; no doubt it was removed in order to encourage pedestrians to use the network of underground passages in the subway. Though these passages are safe, and surprisingly clean, the effort has been only partly successful. Cairenes clearly enjoy the game of defying oncoming traffic, some of it horse- or donkey-drawn but most of it moving at remarkably high speed. Under the indifferent gaze of shabbily uniformed policemen, pedestrians even leap the picket fences designed to keep them on the sidewalk. The first few mornings, I took the underground route, but I found it boring, and soon joined the crowds dashing mindlessly across the street.
As I approached the Ali Baba Café, I would see Mahfouz sitting at a table next to the upstairs window. On my arrival in Cairo, I had turned to intermediaries to introduce me, and the word came back that this would not be easy, because the huge numbers of journalists who descended on him after he was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature had exhausted him. I decided to approach him directly, having learned that each Thursday evening he meets with young writers at the Kasr el-Nil, a fashionable café on the upper-income island of Zamalek which overlooks the Nile. I found him there, surrounded by disciples, who looked at me with some suspicion while I engaged the Master in talk. After hearing me out, Mahfouz invited me to join him at the Ali Baba, where he was accustomed to take his morning coffee. He had written a few short stories recently, he told me, but the only regular writing he did now was a weekly column, usually on politics, for Al-Ahram, Egypt’s principal daily newspaper. “The prize disturbed my life,” he said. He expressed some regret over the curtailment of the rigorous schedule of writing which had dominated his life for so many decades. But when I knew him better I could see that this warm and sociable man, so long unknown outside the Arabic-speaking world, enjoyed the international attention he was getting and was not particularly eager—perhaps even reluctant—to return to the lonely discipline of composing novels.
The Ali Baba, in contrast with the glittering Kasr el-Nil, is a dimly lit recess flanked by cheap shops facing the square. It is one of a handful of cafés in Cairo where writers gather. Though Mahfouz had forgotten, I met him in 1982 at just such a literary café, shortly after an Egyptian friend acquainted me with his work. I had wanted to talk to Tawfiq al-Hakim, who was then Egypt’s first man of letters, about the popular response to Sadat’s death. My friend told me I would find Hakim at a café in the Champs-Elysées, a seaside hotel in Alexandria. With some difficulty, I located the hotel, a small, weathered structure on the boulevard that ran along the sea. Across from it was the beach, crowded with vacationing Egyptians, the suntanned men strutting about in their bikinis, the women seated fully dressed beneath umbrellas. The café, furnished with worn wooden tables and chairs, was the haunt in the summer season of a group of writers known for their democratic and secularist views. Hakim was their leader. An urbane, blue-eyed octogenarian with a white walrus mustache, he spoke elegant French, and habitually wore a beret, an emblem of the years he spent as a student at the Sorbonne. That morning, he graciously orchestrated an exchange between me and the half-dozen men sitting around him. As the hour for the midday meal approached, most of them drifted off, and I struck up a conversation with a man in dark glasses who had not said a word during the entire meeting. This was Naguib Mahfouz; he introduced himself and offered me his phone number in Cairo. I still have the slip of paper on which it was written. Later, when I reminded him of the encounter and asked why he had been silent, he replied that he had always found it difficult to express himself around Hakim, who was his professor and his literary idol.
The deference Mahfouz showed to Hakim says something about his perception of himself. Unlike his mentor, Mahfouz was not educated abroad. He was born in 1911, the last of seven children, in a run-down quarter called Gamaliya, in the old part of Cairo, behind the bustling souk known as the Khan el-Khalili. He attended Islamic elementary schools, a secular high school, and, finally, Cairo University (then called King Fuad I University), where in 1934 he earned a degree in philosophy. He then entered the civil service, where he remained until 1971, when he retired and became a full-time writer. Like most men of his generation, he lived with his parents until his marriage, which he undertook at the unusually late age of forty-three. He has been abroad only twice—on three-day government-sponsored trips to Yugoslavia and to Yemen. He has never seen Upper Egypt, the site of the great Pharaonic monuments, though the Pharaohs were ostensibly the subject of his early novels. (The real subject, veiled in symbolism, was Egypt’s struggle against colonialism.) “I didn’t travel, because I was poor,” he said to me in one of our talks. “If I had travelled, like Hemingway, I’m sure that my work would have been different. My work was shaped by my being so Egyptian.” Since the nineteen-thirties, Mahfouz has written almost exclusively about life in Cairo, with occasional scenes set in Alexandria. As opposed to the Europeanized Hakim, he is considered a pure Egyptian and a quintessential Cairene.
Scholars of Middle East literature say that as a stylist Mahfouz writes with remarkable precision (Arabic, an imprecise language, requires most writers to choose between poetry and clarity), and that this makes his prose easy to translate. He is also a tireless experimenter with fresh literary forms. Though he is sympathetic toward his characters, most of whom are everyday Egyptians, he is unrelenting in dissecting their flaws; he has frequently been called Egypt’s conscience. It is characteristic of Mahfouz to say of himself that on the international scale he is third-rate; still, the consensus is that even if he is not the peer of Dickens or Balzac, to whom he has been compared, he has earned the prize because of the unremitting honesty in his work—an honesty that sets a standard for writers throughout the Third World. I have never succeeded in persuading my friends at home to love Mahfouz’s novels as I do, but that disappointment has not dispelled my gratitude to him for revealing to me an Egypt that I could never have hoped to find on my own. His books have offered me a clear look at the dynamics of the social and personal relations of his countrymen—an area that in any country is often impenetrable to foreign observers.
Mahfouz declined to go to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize. His friends told me that he could not deal with the prospect of travelling so far, or of putting on white tie and tails to be received by the Swedish king. “I’m very introverted,” he told me. “I don’t enjoy leaving my milieu.” His refusal created consternation in Egypt’s literary establishment until he gave in to his wife’s urging and agreed to send his two daughters—Um Kalthum, then thirty, and Fatma, twenty-seven—to represent him. To chaperon them and to deliver his Nobel lecture, he chose the playwright Muhammad Salmawy, one of his acolytes. In the lecture Mahfouz expressed pride at being the first to address the Nobel assembly in the Arabic language, which he called “the real winner of the prize.”
Extremely jealous of his privacy, Mahfouz reveals little of his personal life even to longtime friends, and he resisted all my efforts to visit him in his home or to meet his family. He would wave when he saw me outside the Ali Baba, and emit a smile that was generally still on his face when I reached him. Then he would rise in courtly fashion, extending a hand in greeting. He seemed fragile to me; he is slim, and his thinning hair is brushed straight back from a high forehead. His face is remarkably narrow, and he wears tinted glasses so thick as to appear opaque. On most days, he would be dressed in a wool suit cut in the leisure style, and a turtleneck shirt. An untouched cup of coffee would be sitting on the table, and next to it would be several newspapers, of which, he said, he reads only the headlines, because his eyesight is failing. He would order a coffee for me and light a cigarette, and we would exchange a few words, but his English is halting and his hearing poor, so our conversations had to await the arrival of Samira Amar, a translator provided by the American University in Cairo Press, which has been Mahfouz’s English-language publisher for many years. She is a handsome and intelligent woman in her early forties, and Mahfouz was always delighted to see her. In his youth he was known as a ladies’ man, and his fires have obviously not been damped. Talking with her, he would relax visibly, sometimes making jokes—many of them mocking his private life, which was his way of avoiding the subject—at which the two laughed together. He seemed to enjoy having her lean into his hearing aid to make herself understood. I often thought that his patience in submitting to our lengthy talks had more to do with the presence of Samira Amar than it did with me.
Mahfouz walks to the Ali Baba each morning from his apartment in the middle-class quarter called Agouza, about two miles away, on the west bank of the Nile. This is an experience offering hazards that go well beyond the cars racing around Tahrir Square. For most of his life, one of his joys has been to roam Cairo’s streets on foot. The habit has made him a familiar figure to many Cairenes, who would otherwise know him only from his books—or (more likely) the movies that have been made from them. It is also a habit that made him vulnerable when the terrorist wing of Egypt’s Islamic fundamentalist movement—the same people who assassinated Sadat—responded to his winning the Nobel Prize by threatening to kill him.
Mafouz’s falling-out with orthodox Islam goes back to 1959, when he published the novel called, in English, “The Children of Gebelawi”—Gebelawi being a symbolic representation of a rather unpleasant God. The novel is a departure from his normal preoccupations, which are worldly; it is a metaphysical allegory dealing with the social codes practiced in the name of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and finding all of them profoundly wanting. That he was evenhanded in examining the three faiths brought him no indulgence in the Islamic community. The novel, serialized in Al-Ahram prior to publication, scandalized devout Muslims, and before it appeared in book form it was banned by the authorities of the Al-Azhar Mosque, which is the official seat of Islam in Egypt. A Beirut publisher soon began smuggling in a bootleg version, slightly expurgated, which is available in a plain brown wrapper at a few downtown bookshops. I obtained a copy after spending an hour persuading a shop owner—who pretended at first never to have heard of such a thing—that I needed it for my research. Most Cairo intellectuals got their copies in the same way. When the Nobel award was announced, the fundamentalists feared that “Gebelawi” would be removed from the proscribed list, but their concern was not limited to keeping the novel off the market. They have still not forgiven Mahfouz for writing it, and they decried his selection by the Nobel committee as evidence of a Western plot to discredit Islam.
The controversy took on more serious dimensions a few months later, when Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie for the sacrilegious content of his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Mahfouz acted promptly to defend Rushdie’s right of expression, calling Khomeini a terrorist; predictably, his position further inflamed the fundamentalists. Denunciations circumspect enough to stay within the law but fiery enough to permit the faithful to reach their own conclusions became standard fare in the Friday sermons delivered in the nation’s mosques. The Islamic press gave out ominous warnings—though it, too, took care not to step over the line. Death threats raced through the Cairo grapevine, and a writer for a Muslim newspaper published in London declared, “If only we had behaved in the proper Islamic manner with Naguib Mahfouz, we would not have been assailed by the appearance of Salman Rushdie. Had we killed Naguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie would not have appeared.” A high-ranking Egyptian cleric linked to Muslim terrorists told a Kuwaiti paper that according to Islamic law Mahfouz should have been done in when “Gebelawi” appeared, on the ground that he had abandoned his religion—though by the time these words were reported in the Cairo papers they had been softened with a proviso that execution could be waived if Mahfouz was willing to repent.
In fact, Mahfouz was willing to repent—or, at least, to distance himself from Rushdie in the interests of prudence. In a press conference at the Kasr el-Nil a few weeks after Khomeini’s pronouncement, he rejected any comparison between “The Satanic Verses” and “The Children of Gebelawi,” which he called “my illegitimate son” and the product of a phase in his life which had ended thirty years before. His defense of Rushdie, he said, had been quoted out of context, and, furthermore, had been made before he read Rushdie’s book, which, he said, as a Muslim he found disgusting. He subsequently gave an interview to a magazine in Cairo in which he declared that while he might defend an author’s right to misinterpret Islam he could not tolerate Rushdie’s “insults and calumny against Islam and the Prophet.”
In the course of our talks at the Ali Baba, I asked Mahfouz if he considered himself a good Muslim, and he said that he did. But when I asked whether he prayed he declined to reply. He acknowledged shifting, after the threats on his life, to what has become the standard position of Muslim “liberals” on the Rushdie case. It holds that Islam has no special immunity from criticism, and that Khomeini certainly had no power to impose a death sentence, but it concedes that Rushdie might quite appropriately be tried in a court of law for slandering Islam or the Prophet, much as any citizen would be tried for slandering a fellow-Egyptian.
“I had to take the threats on my life very seriously,” Mahfouz told me. “These people killed the President of the Republic, and they have tried to kill others. They could kill me.” Though the Egyptian government took no official position on Khomeini’s pronouncement against Rushdie, the Mufti of the Republic—the state religious official who is responsible for interpreting Islamic law—declared that any Muslim who sought to assassinate Mahfouz was insane. On a more practical level, the government offered bodyguards to Mahfouz and asked him to refrain from his long walks alone through the city. A guard was stationed outside his apartment. “I could not change my routine,” Mahfouz said. “I just try not to think about the danger.” At that very moment, he said, there might be a guard outside the Ali Baba, although from the window we never saw anyone who met the description.
I asked Mahfouz if he was disappointed that, after he had been recognized worldwide for his literary achievement, the Al-Azhar Mosque refused to lift its ban on “The Children of Gebelawi.” He simply shrugged. I knew that some of his friends had hoped that Egypt’s politico-religious establishment would be loath to appear medieval and, in response to the Nobel Prize, would restore Mahfouz’s Islamic credentials. The Rushdie fuss, however, has apparently made it impossible for either the government or Al-Azhar to risk such an action.
Like all Egyptians, Mahfouz often talks of being shaped by a history that goes back seven thousand years. (A less inflated assessment is five thousand, since historians know little about what was happening along the Nile before the establishment of the first Pharaonic dynasty, around 3100 B.C.) In his Nobel address he cited the importance to contemporary Egyptian culture of Pharaonic civilization—its art, its literature, its architectural miracles. His novels, too, make clear his belief that today’s Egyptians are the same people who inhabited the Nile Valley in the time of the Pharaohs—that their nature was not transformed by the Muslim conquest. In his talks with me, he noted with obvious delight that the Islam practiced by Egyptians contains Pharaonic elements—for instance, elaborate burials and the veneration of saints—which offend such Islamic purists as the Saudis. He also pointed out that, more important, Egypt had inherited from the ancients a sense of nationhood unknown to other Arab peoples. Isolated by desert from neighbors to the east and west, endowed with the Nile as a source of agricultural wealth and a channel of communication, Egypt became a cohesive society, with one religion, one artistic style, and one government. Egyptians note with a mixture of conceit and bemusement that their bureaucracy is the oldest in the world, having begun to spin red tape three or four thousand years before the Arabs arrived in the seventh century with the sword and the Koran.
The Arab conquest made the Egyptians Muslim, but did it make them Arabs? The early Arab dynasties succeeded in imposing their language in place of the old Pharaonic tongue and the widely spoken Greek; however, after three hundred years of Arab rule, Egypt fell to the Fatimids (who founded Cairo and Al-Azhar), then to the Ayyubids, the Mamluks, and the Ottomans—all of them Islamic but none of them Arab. Today, Egypt is indisputably a part of the Arab world, but its culture is not strictly Arabic. The spoken language, for example, is a dialect notably different from the colloquial speech of other Arabs. (In his work, Mahfouz, like most Egyptian writers, avoids the dialect in favor of classical Arabic.) Physically, most Egyptians look more like the figures on the walls of their ancient temples than like the descendants of the Semites who came out of the desert. And though, under Nasser, they were swept into the campaign for Arab unity, their enthusiasm seemed to come not from the heart but from a calculation that begs to be called imperial. It is interesting that Anwar Sadat entitled his autobiography “In Search of Identity.” As Mahfouz’s words to the Nobel assembly suggest, Egypt’s thousands of years of civilization imbue it with a feeling if not of superiority then of uniqueness in the Arab world. Other Arabs resent this attitude but know that they must live with it.
Given the Egyptians’ deep-seated sense of nationhood, it is hard to explain why they tolerated foreign domination for so many centuries. From the advent of Alexander the Great, in 332 B.C., to the abdication of King Farouk, in 1952, the country was ruled without interruption by non-Egyptians. Most historians hold that the Muslim identity the Egyptians adopted suppressed the yearnings associated in modern times with nationalism. But Egyptians have been docile even by Islamic standards. The gentle, bounteous Nile may well have bred rebelliousness out of them; one expert suggests that there was no indulging a taste for insurrection in the flat, narrow Nile Valley, which was easy to police, or in the merciless desert immediately beyond, where no sanctuary was to be found. This political passivity is a factor that Egypt’s rulers take for granted. Its other face is that Egyptians, having been alienated for so long from their rulers, do not have very high expectations of their government.
Western values began merging with the Pharaonic-Muslim mixture in 1798, when Napoleon landed at Alexandria and easily defeated the Mamluks, a fraternity of emancipated slaves who were ruling Egypt then in the name of the Ottoman sultans. The French, in their three years of occupation, introduced Egypt to new concepts in law, administration, technology, and public health, and left a strong hunger for Western knowledge behind them, particularly in urban circles. In the vacuum created by their departure, an Albanian freebooter named Muhammad Ali, who had been dispatched to Egypt at the head of an Ottoman force to fight the French, maneuvered his way into power after brutally exterminating his Mamluk rivals. He ruled for four decades, founding a dynasty that, though nominally Ottoman, was free of Ottoman control and lasted a hundred and fifty years. Muhammad Ali resolved to bring Egypt into the modern world. Relying on French advisers, he nationalized agriculture and established state industrial enterprises, applying European technology to both. He broke the Islamic monopoly on education by instituting a system of state schools, and he sent students to Europe, and particularly to France, to bring back a modern curriculum. His policies produced a Westernized intellectual élite, from which there emerged, in time, the likes of Naguib Mahfouz and the restless society he chronicles.
Under Ismail, Muhammad Ali’s French-educated grandson, Egypt made a huge leap toward the status of a first-class state. On acceding to power, in 1863, Ismail declared, “My country is no longer in Africa, it is in Europe,” and embarked on a grandiose program designed not only to Europeanize Egypt but to make Cairo the rival of Paris. Most celebrated for presiding over the construction of the Suez Canal, Ismail also dug irrigation networks, brought clean water to the cities, built bridges across the Nile, and laid out a telegraph and postal network. He encouraged the founding of newspapers, introduced theatre to Cairo, and built an elegant opera house. To aid him in these enterprises, hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians took up residence, and in Cairo and Alexandria new, European-style quarters were constructed. Throughout the eighteen-sixties, the high prices paid for Egypt’s cotton in international markets—a consequence of shortages produced by the American Civil War—fuelled Ismail’s ambitions. But when the war ended the market collapsed, and by the mid-eighteen-seventies Egypt was bankrupt. This being the heyday of colonialism, the European powers, which once vied to finance Ismail, now used his indebtedness as a lever for domination. In 1879, they forced Ismail to abandon his throne and seek refuge abroad. Three years later, British troops took possession of the Suez Canal, seized Cairo, and confirmed the accession of Ismail’s son, Tawfiq, the first of a line of weak khedives who identified with the occupiers rather than with the rising tide of Egyptian nationalism. Yet Britain never formally asserted sovereignty in Egypt; it authorized the establishment of a parliament without substantive powers, and consistently promised Egyptians independence. But decade after decade passed, and Britain’s army—and its corps of civil servants—stayed on. The British deferred to the fiction of Ottoman rule until the First World War, when they declared Egypt a protectorate.
For Egypt these were years of deepening resentment of foreigners—not just those who governed but the privileged European communities, largely exempt from local law, that were changing the face of Cairo and Alexandria. Yet hand in hand with this resentment went a growing attraction to such Western concepts as elected government, free expression, political parties, and popular suffrage. Egyptian intellectuals were comfortable substituting secularist European ideals for the political teachings of Islam. They continued to cultivate Ismail’s dream of creating a first-class state, convinced that democracy would somehow emancipate them from colonial oppression. This was Egypt’s Liberal Age, and its high point was the so-called Revolution of 1919, a short-lived series of anti-British demonstrations touched off by Britain’s adamant refusal, even after the war was won, to negotiate Egypt’s independence.
Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy,” generally considered his masterwork, chronicles the latter part of the Liberal Age, through the experiences of the Jawad family, who live in one of the alleys of Gamaliya, where Mahfouz was born. The “Trilogy” is probably the most autobiographical of his works, and Mahfouz has acknowledged that he modelled the family’s youngest son, whose growing up is threaded through the twelve-hundred-page text, on himself. The Jawad family is traditional in structure, middle-class in income, and jealous of its status in the community. The father, the tyrannical Al-Sayyid Ahmad, and Amina, his submissive wife, try valiantly to keep the old lines of authority intact, but the family is increasingly riven by currents of modern thinking, and the parents inevitably fail. The “Trilogy” went virtually unnoticed in the West until Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize; Doubleday later acquired the American rights, and the first volume, “Palace Walk” (the Arabic title means “Between the Two Palaces” and refers to what was once ceremonial ground linking mansions of the Fatimid caliphs; it is now a thoroughfare in Gamaliya), was published in February. It is vintage Mahfouz, in that he describes the Revolution of 1919 without a trace of romanticism, reminding us that it was ambivalent in conception and irresolute in execution. Fahmy, the oldest son and the only Jawad to join in the protests, dies at the end, not in an act of heroism, but “by mistake”: he is shot during a student demonstration held to celebrate what Egypt took to be a victory. Mahfouz writes movingly of Fahmy’s futile efforts to persuade his parents to sanction his involvement in the nationalist movement. “How can you expose yourself to danger when you’re such an intelligent person?” Fahmy’s mother asks. Fahmy has no answer.
The other members of the family are scarcely more patriotic, and, unfortunately for Egypt, their pragmatism was vindicated. After the uprising, the Wafd Party, which had directed it, could not reach agreement with the British on a formula that satisfied British security concerns, so Britain ended by issuing a unilateral declaration acknowledging the principle of Egyptian sovereignty while reserving to itself the ultimate power over foreign and military policy, and much of domestic security as well. Ahmad Fuad, the great-grandson of Muhammad Ali, endorsed the British terms and in 1922 named himself King Fuad I, proclaiming a new constitution that established a parliamentary system tilted heavily in favor of the monarchy. In the years that followed—a time of worldwide economic depression—the struggle between the monarchy and the nationalists dominated Egyptian politics, with corruption and violence becoming increasingly common on both sides. In 1936, Fuad I was succeeded by his son Farouk, whose ideas were no more democratic than his father’s, and whose habits were even more dissolute than those of the members of the parliament.
“Maybe my generation of intellectuals was the last one that really believed in democracy,” Mahfouz said in one of our morning talks. “I was proud of our 1919 revolution and proud to be Wafdist. But the top priority of the revolution was not democracy; it was to get rid of foreign rule. Egypt was the first country in our century to rise up against European occupation. The people, led by the Wafd, ended the protectorate but failed to gain real independence, and, in any case, the Wafd did not know how to govern in a democracy. Democracy is not deeply rooted in our culture. Egyptians would make sacrifices for independence, but they did not value democracy, and so, step by step, our system fell apart. The generation that came after mine blamed democracy for the corruption of the monarchy and the privileges of the rich. I believe that the blame really belongs to Britain’s colonialism and Egypt’s kings. But, whoever was responsible, most Egyptians had concluded by the start of the Second World War that democracy offered nothing—not social justice, not freedom, not even full independence. They laughed at democracy.”
While the Liberal Age wound down to an ignominious end, life in Cairo’s alleys, resistant to the advances of modern times, became both more difficult and less rewarding. Few Westerners have ever seen much charm in the alleys. An English traveller in the eighteen-twenties, when Cairo was nothing but alleys, noted, “In a city containing three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, there is not one tolerable street. Splendid mosques, some of which surpass, in my estimation, those of Constantinople, are built in . . . filthy lanes; the public thoroughfares are hardly twelve feet wide, darkened by mats to impede the rays of the sun, and choked with putrid vegetables and reeking offals, from the various stalls which line the streets. The first thing that astonishes a stranger in Cairo is the squalid wretchedness.” Yet, eternal as they seemed, the alleys could not hold off change forever. The modernization of Cairo, which began with Khedive Ismail, brought electricity, sewers, running water, and, most notably, schools; but it also brought inflated social expectations, which became the raw material for Mahfouz’s novels. Today’s alley-dwellers, particularly the young, almost invariably end up disappointed, victims of Egypt’s perpetually stagnant economy. A few, with talent and ambition, may break free of the trap. Many go into the state bureaucracy, where they can at least count on a regular income, a little power, a retirement pension, and (important in a status-conscious society) a measure of prestige commensurate with their educational attainment. But the rest, unless they turn to crime, find only subsistence work, and spend their lives at the economic and social margins.
In an earlier era, the alleys were socially integrated: the rich had bigger, nicer homes, but they lived next door to the poor. The Europeans, in establishing new quarters near the Nile, introduced the notion of good and bad neighborhoods to the Egyptians. Well-to-do families, like the Jawads, began moving away from the alleys, leaving behind a culture increasingly defined by poverty. During the Second World War, peasants from the countryside, responding to a demand for labor, began to occupy the space that the rich had vacated. When no more of it remained, they subdivided, built additions on roofs, doubled up in tiny rooms, and then doubled up again. Even the gracious courtyards of traditional houses were colonized, giving to the narrow streets the recreational and social role the courtyard had played. Privacy, cherished in a community that hides its women, steadily diminished, and women became an accepted part of the street scene. The personal interdependence that had historically softened physical hardship gave way to more distant relationships. Meanwhile, rent freezes discouraged building maintenance; roofs were left to leak, and trash went uncollected.
Clearly, population growth and displacement—Cairo’s population has risen from two million to fourteen million in the postwar years—severely strained the social controls that came with knowing everyone in the neighborhood; what is astonishing, from the Western perspective, is that the bonds did not break. It helped that old and new residents shared the values and traditions of Islam. The structure of the extended family generally remained strong. The shopkeepers of the alleys maintained tight surveillance over suspicious strangers. Mahfouz makes clear in his work that alcohol was always present in the alleys—notwithstanding Islamic strictures—and so were prostitution and drugs; nor were the alleys ever free of violent crime. But, somehow, the vices were not allowed to devour the society, and daily life, in the streets no less than in the homes, did not come to be pervaded by physical fear. If, externally, the alleys came to resemble Western slums, their inhabitants seem not to have acquired the self-destructive slum mentality that Americans associate with their own worst urban neighborhoods.
For me Mahfouz’s Gamaliya was a fascinating place to visit, chiefly because of its gorgeous old mosques and madrasahs. Some of them date back to the Mamluks of the thirteenth century, some to the Fatimids a century earlier, but almost all are in serious disrepair. A few wear the sagging scaffolding of decades-old restoration work, performed lackadaisically by Egyptians and financed, as likely as not, by a Western foundation. In the courtyards of the mosques, old men in rags lie on the pavement, taking the afternoon sun; in the madrasahs, students cluster around their imam, absorbing the Koran. The government has restored several handsome houses, built by long-departed merchants. Their lush gardens are blooming, and their upper windows are covered with latticed mashribiyas—the shutters through which sequestered women once looked out upon the street. But the reminders of vanished riches cannot veil the evidence of poverty. You walk in Gamaliya along crowded streets with beguiling names—Street of the Judge’s House, Sugar Bowl Street (the title of the final volume of the “Trilogy”), Street of the Tobacco Merchants—and you do not feel threatened. But the pavement is muddied with water running from unrepaired sewers, and trash heaps require frequent detours. A building whose ground floor is graced by pointed arches rises three or four stories in unsightly concrete blocks. A man stops to wash at an Ottoman-era sabil, a public fountain decorated in richly colored marble; behind him stands a heavy middle-aged woman waiting her turn to fill a pitcher for the evening’s cooking. A dark-eyed mother shrouded in a black abaya sits on a doorstep feeding bits of bread to her unwashed babies. Persistent young boys hustle souvenirs or postcards in accomplished English. One small shop offers coal for sale by the chunk, weighed on a primitive scale, while in another a tailor presses pants with an iron he heats in an open fire.
“There are moments in a man’s life when he feels a certain spiritual dryness,” Mahfouz told me. “When I go to Gamaliya, all sorts of images rush to my mind, and I feel full again. A man must have some place to hold on to, something that can move him emotionally.” Indeed, it is said that every Cairene, wherever in the city he has been reared, has—for better or worse—something of the alley within him.
One morning, I asked Mahfouz why, given his deep attachment to the alleys, he portrays its male inhabitants so negatively. The women of his novels are generally not only dutiful but strong, whereas the men are almost invariably self-centered, exploitative, weak, ready to abandon substance for appearance. Few of them are even likable. Mahfouz’s best-known male is probably Al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Jawad, who has become an archetype—as Hamlet or Scrooge, say, has in our own culture. He is the paterfamilias who is hail-fellow-well-met among his friends and a tyrant and hypocrite at home. Mahfouz’s other male characters are no more engaging. In the novel “Respected Sir,” Othman Bayyumi, a lifelong functionary (some say that here Mahfouz was satirizing his own career as a civil servant), focusses his attention on promotions, sacrificing love and his own integrity to position and recognizing only on the eve of his death that all has been a waste. In “Autumn Quail,” two promising young government officials, paralyzed by a shift in political winds, are destroyed, one for lack of adaptability, the other for lack of honesty. Perhaps Mahfouz’s most contemptible character is Hassanein Kamel Ali, the impoverished protagonist of “The Beginning and the End,” whose hunger for respectability strips him of qualms about abusing anyone, even his own family. When his black-sheep brother, whose crimes financed Hassanein’s education, is brought home wounded after a gang battle, Hassanein muses, “I’m the one who’s really injured. . . . As for him, he’s sound asleep in a happy state of unconsciousness. . . . Recovery would be more serious than death. If his condition becomes worse, the police will be informed. And if it improves, his existence will continue to weigh heavily upon me until his enemies inform the police. So scandal is inevitable. Is there no escape? I loathe this wounded man, I loathe myself and even life itself.” The book ends with Hassanein forcing his sister, who has become a prostitute, to commit suicide, after which, in a fit of hopelessness, he kills himself.
The anxiety of Egyptian men about appearances was exemplified for me in a talk I had with a prominent Western-trained Egyptian intellectual, who complained that he was about to go deep into debt to buy an apartment for his newlywed daughter, although her husband was a professional with a lucrative position. When I asked why he was doing this, he explained that it was his traditional responsibility as a father. Not only his children but his relatives and his friends expected it of him, he said, and, as an Egyptian, he would be forever shamed if he failed to carry out his paternal duty.
The system of values that produces such attitudes was explained to me by Dr. Nawal el-Messiri Nadim, an Egyptian anthropologist who wrote a dissertation for Indiana University based on two years of living among the people of Sugar Bowl Street. In the culture of the alleys, she said, what others think of you is more important than any individual achievement, since an alley-dweller is not just a person but part of a social network. Mahfouz’s Hassanein knew that if his brother was exposed as a criminal or his sister was known as a prostitute it made no difference what he did himself: his career would be ruined, and he would have no prospect of marrying into a good family. “This is real,” Dr. Nadim said. “This is not imagined. Mahfouz’s characters are very true to life. The quality of the furniture that your friend buys for his daughter’s apartment is considered the community’s business. Relatives and friends come to visit, and they check up on the fabric. Everybody knows. Your friend’s accomplishment in life is measured by how well he meets the obligation.” Though it began in the alleys, Dr. Nadim said, the value system that determines this conduct is recognized by all Cairenes. In spite of the huge demographic transformation, the system has neither changed nor softened, she said, and shores up the social structure of the city.
When I pressed Mahfouz on the deficiencies of his male characters, he smiled enigmatically and was slow to respond. He insisted that the traits he sketched would not neutralize Egypt’s efforts to become a first-class country. “I guess I did much of my writing during an era when Egypt felt defeated,” he said. “That has been the case through most of my life. Ours has not been an era of heroism. My characters were poor. The economic system did not give them much hope. I have no doubt that Hassanein would have been a better man under better conditions. Yet it is true that I admire Egyptian women more. Jawad’s wife, Amina, may have been mousy. She was kept by her husband in a permanent state of terror, but it was because of her that in crisis the family stayed together. It may be the women who save Egypt.”
Readers of “Palace Walk” will remember the yearning of Amina, who was sequestered in the house, to visit the famous Al-Hussein Mosque, the minarets of which she could see from her window. The mosque, at the edge of the labyrinthine Khan el-Khalili bazaar, is dedicated to Al-Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was killed at the Battle of Karbala, in Iraq, in 680. Five hundred years after the battle, a head said to be his was brought to Cairo and placed in a shrine where the mosque stands now. One of Cairo’s largest mosques, it was built during Ismail’s reign. Every year, hundreds of thousands of fellahin flock to Cairo to spend a few days at a moulid, or religious street festival, held to celebrate the anniversary of the head’s arrival. The moulid is a favorite gathering for brotherhoods of Sufis, Muslims whose worship consists of inducing in themselves a mystical trance. Few sophisticated Cairenes will go anywhere near the Al-Hussein Mosque at moulid time.
I arranged to attend the moulid with my friend Ali Darwish, a poet, who admitted to being something of a Sufi himself. We arrived at the square in front of the mosque in the early evening, before the festivities were under way, and Ali suggested that we pass some time at Fishawi, a celebrated café in the Khan el-Khalili. Fishawi is a fixture in Mahfouz’s stories; in his younger days, he told me, he often went there to smoke a narghile and ruminate on his life and work. Ali and I sat at a long outdoor table, in an alley brightly lit by strings of colored bulbs that hung overhead, and drank tiny glasses of sugary mint tea. The foot traffic through the alley was heavy; diversity of dress announced the presence of Egyptians of every station, the men in turbans, scarves, skullcaps, and woollen hats, and the women ranging from citified teen-agers in bluejeans to veiled grandmothers. Near us at the table, her legs tucked under her on the bench, was a copiously tattooed and made-up woman of eighty or so chain-smoking cigarettes. Ali said she was one of the characters of the quarter and was known as the Queen of Sufi. A man in a galabia walked by leading a cow; young boys, presumably en route to nearby restaurants, hurried past with great wooden trays of steaming bread on their heads; a little girl approached the table, swinging an incense pot, to ask for coins; a handsome woman wearing a man’s tattered jacket over a flowered dress stopped to serenade us in a monotone with songs in praise of Al-Hussein, and a man playing a trombone accompanied her. Mixing with the smoke of the narghiles (for which a waiter every few minutes brought hot coals and fresh tobacco) was the pervasive odor of unwashed bodies and cooked garlic.
After an hour or two, Ali announced that it was time for the moulid, and we left Fishawi. By then, the square in front of the mosque was overrun—mostly by bearded men wearing galabias of rough peasant fabric. A few had women with them; some carried children on their shoulders. Decorated stands at the edges of the square sold souvenirs, candy, cheap jewelry, photographs of Egyptian movie stars, and little cone-shaped party hats. Ali and I circled the exterior of the mosque, two of whose sides were partitioned by giant draperies into compartments ten or twelve feet wide. Each of these, Ali told me, was the meeting place of a different tariqa, or Sufi lay order. In some of them, men were playing an instrument that sounded like a bagpipe while other men danced slowly to the music. Later that night, all the space around the mosque would be alive with Sufi ceremonies, Ali said, but now the compartments seemed to be there chiefly to provide bed and board to the visiting families.
The huge interior of the mosque was stuffy, noisy, disorderly, and dazzlingly lit. Various sheikhs were conducting separate services for audiences seated on the stone floor before them. Here and there, an armed soldier stood silently, presumably to enforce order, though no one in the sweaty, pushing throng seemed at all quarrelsome. With some difficulty, Ali and I made our way into the shrine of Al-Hussein’s head, a narrow side room that had at its center a large glass sarcophagus decorated in hammered silver. Moving with the crowd, and occasionally stumbling over the feet of worshippers seated against the walls, we shuffled around this structure, and then Ali led me down a long corridor, past dingy rooms where men sat on their haunches eating, to a small, smoke-filled chamber that looked like a storeroom for documents. There a dozen men—neighborhood dignitaries, it turned out—were seated around a table finishing off plates of rice and meat. Ali greeted them warmly, and told me that as part of the tradition of the moulid the mosque officials offer food to all travellers. I was welcome to partake, Ali said, and a bearded man in a white turban confirmed the invitation with a gracious wave of his hand toward the table. But the heat, the smoke, and the smells of the evening had taken their toll of my appetite, and I declined as politely as I could. As soon as it seemed decent to do so, I nodded to the company and headed for the fresh air. When I last saw him, Ali was deep in conversation, waiting for the next sitting of dinner.
In a report on the moulid the following morning the Egyptian Gazette, the local English-language newspaper, estimated the crowd at the mosque at a million believers. At the Ali Baba, I told Mahfouz about my experiences, which led us back to an earlier discussion about whether this profoundly Islamic people was ready for secular democracy. Mahfouz made the argument, which I have also heard from other Muslims, that democracy is embedded in Islamic doctrine. The early successors of the Prophet Muhammad, he said, were chosen by a consultative body called the shura—a kind of proto-parliamentary assembly. It was, in fact, over the selection process that the great schism in Islam, between Shiites (the word means “partisans” and refers to the supporters of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law) and the Sunni majority, occurred. The Shiites, contending that the succession should remain in the immediate family, held that the shura was too political for a religious community. Though Islam does not recognize the distinction between Caesar’s realm and God’s, Mahfouz said, only the Shiites are interested in a theocratic state; Sunni states have always had secular governments. Islam contains no concept that, like Europe’s “divine right,” might be used to sanctify hereditary despotism. “The autocrats who have ruled the Arabs over the centuries have not drawn from our Islamic heritage,” he said, adding that though democracy had become an idea associated with the West, it might have been identified with Islam but for the cruel tricks of history.
Egypt came out of the Second World War with both the monarchy and the nationalist movement discredited. Britain, while in retreat elsewhere in its empire, insisted on staying in Egypt, if only to keep watch over the Suez Canal, and this encouraged the rise of anti-democratic groups on both the left and the right—Communists, the fascistic Young Egypt, and, most notably, the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, all of which exhibited far more energy than the Wafd. The Brotherhood used terror to undermine the political system and, more than any other group, fanned the fervor that brought the decision in 1948 to go to war against Israel. Egypt’s subsequent defeat exposed the government’s incompetence, irresolution, and corruption, weakening its ability to maintain order. By the early nineteen-fifties, industrial strikes, political assassinations, and student demonstrations followed on one another, with violence increasingly directed against the British forces. On January 25, 1952, British soldiers at the canal bombarded an administrative compound of the local police, killing fifty Egyptians. The next day, mobs set fire to Cairo.
Egypt’s monarchic-parliamentary regime was overthrown a few months later—not by any of the known extremist groups but by the Free Officers, a secret association of young Army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Anwar Sadat, who at various times had flirted with the Brotherhood, Young Egypt, and even the Marxists, had been a key organizer of the group, but he gave up its leadership when the British imprisoned him in 1942 for making contact with German intelligence. Nasser succeeded him. Both men were of lower-middle-class origin, and both had turned eighteen in 1936, the year that the British, mindful of the approaching war, authorized the expansion of the Egyptian Army. The Royal Military Academy offered Sadat and Nasser a career never before available to young men of their class. But at the academy they became avid nationalists, who certainly did not see the Army as a way to serve Britain or King Farouk; for them it was an instrument of political and social revolution. Nasser, who had seen combat in 1948 against Israel (Sadat was once more in prison), bore personal witness to the depravity of the regime. Neither he nor his co-conspirators, however, had crafted a political philosophy that went beyond a desire to expel Britain and overthrow the monarchy. Few Egyptians had regarded the Army as a candidate for power. Egypt’s thinking had been shaped by a century of parliamentarism; if there was an alternative, it appeared to come from traditional Islam. The country had not had a military regime since the Mamluks. Yet the Free Officers took over without firing a shot.
“For years, we asked ourselves what the way was out of the monarchy and the corruption of the regime,” Mahfouz said to me. “We asked, ‘When will the people revolt?’ Then one morning we woke up and our entire past was gone.”
At the time, no one knew much about Nasser. In the first days after the coup, both the old-style politicians and the Muslim Brothers talked about using the Free Officers—whose ruling organ was called the Revolutionary Command Council—to serve their own political ends. Their illusions vanished with the onset of authoritarianism. In its first three weeks, the R.C.C. executed the leaders of a strike. Then it purged the officers’ corps and the higher ranks of the civil service. After briefly jailing the old political leaders, it barred them from office, and it cracked down on municipal councils, the bar association, and the press. It organized a huge security apparatus and dissolved the Muslim Brotherhood, its principal enemy, whose leadership went underground. Following an attempt on Nasser’s life in 1954, the R.C.C. tried more than a thousand people for high treason, targeting Communists as well as Muslim Brothers and routinely torturing prisoners. In 1955, the regime executed six Muslim Brothers; by then, it held more than three thousand political prisoners. Meanwhile, the collective responsibility of the R.C.C. had given way to the dictatorship of the charismatic Nasser, who ruled through the pervasive Arab Socialist Union, a party modelled on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. To their astonishment, and with mixed feelings, Egyptians found that their revolution had produced despotism.
While their liberty was slipping away, however, Egyptians also found grounds for applauding the regime. On the domestic side, it decreed a major land reform, which dramatically improved the conditions of life for most of the peasantry. It nationalized almost the entire economy (a policy that ultimately proved disastrous), and it established a structure of state enterprises whose aim—at least partly successful—was to transform Egypt into an industrial society. It also heavily taxed the rich. In foreign affairs, the regime reached an agreement that removed Britain’s troops from Egyptian territory. (Eighty thousand British soldiers had been at the canal in 1952.) In 1955, Egypt became a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, then signed an arms-purchase agreement with the Soviet Union, which ended its dependency on the Western powers. In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and, after President Eisenhower reversed the results of the Israeli-British-French victory in the brief Suez War, he claimed a victory over imperialism, vowed a rematch with Israel, and launched a campaign to assert his leadership of the Arab world. Nasser’s overreaching was paving the way for what were to be devastating military defeats—one in Yemen, the other in the Sinai—in the nineteen-sixties, but the vision of national glory, so long denied to Egyptians, was like dust in their eyes.
“The generation of intellectuals that came after me was thrilled by Nasser,” Mahfouz told me. “They didn’t like the dictatorship, but they were excited by his heroism in the fight against imperialism and by the social justice that the revolution had brought. I had a serious break with my mentor, Hakim, over the revolution. Having long before lost his patience with Egyptian democracy, he was lenient toward Nasser. Frankly, I was surprised at how easily Egyptians accepted the dictatorship. But Nasser gave them what they wanted—free education, land, jobs—and dictatorship was a price they willingly paid. The people who gained from the revolution quickly forgot everything else. I, too, was impressed by the achievements of the revolution, but, unlike Hakim, I was frightened of the dictatorship from the very first day. My friends and I would meet in the Café Riche. We were angry, yet we were very careful in our conversations. We knew that the walls had ears, that spies were listening to us. What we saw all around us persuaded us to keep our opinions to ourselves. We kept democracy in our hearts, but we didn’t even dream of opposing the regime.”
Not until Nasser was safely buried did Tawfiq al-Hakim make a public confession. “Where were the thinkers in this country?” he wrote. “And where was I who loved freedom of thought? The fact is that we . . . felt no constraint. On the contrary, I was happy with the coming of these young men and dazzled by what they had undertaken in throwing out the king. . . . I welcomed this revolution and did not grieve for the loss of the constitution. This, then, is my responsibility.” Hakim’s confession—the English translation is entitled “The Return of Consciousness”—was not received with much sympathy, his critics noting how little courage it took to attack Nasser after he was dead, but Mahfouz, in our talks, made no claims about his own courage during the era. He wrote the final draft of the “Trilogy” in 1952, the year of the coup, and did not produce another novel until “The Children of Gebelawi,” in 1959. An Israeli specialist (the top experts on Mahfouz, interestingly, are Israelis) has cited passages that he says show Mahfouz to have regularly used allegory during the Nasser years to condemn the regime. Were the Nasserites fooled? Unlike many of his fellow-writers, Mahfouz never went to jail. He was in trouble with the police once, he said, for a 1966 novel (not yet translated into English) called “Chitchat on the Nile,” in which there are critical allusions to the political system, but he paid no penalty. As a novel, “Gebelawi” is itself a strong statement against authority, but with that exception Mahfouz’s work during the period consisted, as it always had, of stories of everyday life, and if they contain allegorical references these are not particularly apparent.
“It is true that when I attacked the dictatorship I was symbolic,” he told me. “What saved me, I suppose, was that I had no impact on the masses. Since I belonged to no party and had no connection with any foreign embassy, I was not a threat to Nasser. Still, I never felt secure during the Nasser era. My wife used to say that when she went out shopping she was sure that someone was watching her. I always worried that one night someone would come knocking at the door. I was lucky.”
The Nasser era ended in a few bloody days in 1967, when Israel decimated the Egyptian Army and positioned units at the Suez Canal, some sixty miles from Cairo. Mahfouz, like nearly all Egyptians, still displays humiliation and anger when he talks about the Six-Day War. It demonstrated, he said, that Nasser’s regime was scarcely less corrupt than the monarchy had been. The Army was under the command of incompetent men, favorites of Nasser; the troops themselves were poorly motivated and lacked discipline. No one fought, he said; everybody ran. The war was over so fast that those of his friends at the Café Riche who were in the reserves did not even get a chance to put on their uniforms. The defeat took the wind out of the regime and the will out of its leader. Nevertheless, when Nasser died, three years later, Egyptians recalled the grandeur, forgave the blunders, and cried over his bier.
Anwar Sadat dramatically reversed Nasser’s course, moving away from the Soviet Union and the Arab world and closer to the West. In 1972, he expelled the fifteen-thousand-man Soviet military contingent that Nasser had invited to Egypt. In 1973, he won Egypt’s heart by successfully sending its Army across the Suez to recapture a segment of the Sinai which Nasser had lost. Building on Egypt’s recovered self-esteem, he then initiated the process of peacemaking with Israel, which culminated in his trip to Jerusalem, in 1977, and the Camp David agreement, a year later. Meanwhile, he undertook a process of liberalization, which he hoped would revive the economy. Though he did not substantially depart from Nasser’s practice of one-man rule, he restored many of the attributes of a free society, authorizing electoral challenges to the ruling party, lifting censorship, renewing the integrity of the courts, and diminishing the presence of the secret police in Egyptian daily life.
“Sadat moved us back toward democracy, though I don’t know whether he believed in it or not,” Mahfouz told me. “What he gave us, however, was far from real democracy—it contained many traces of authoritarianism. But it was a change of direction which, with some setbacks, has continued. And for a while we felt relieved. Sadat’s great contribution was to turn the country to constructive goals and values. The most important was to bring Egypt peace.”
Mahfouz told me that he began thinking of peace with Israel after the defeat of 1967, while Nasser was still in office. Peacemaking was not a course that he could explore openly, though he talked about it with Hakim, and the two agreed that it was senseless for Egypt to remain indefinitely in the posture adopted by Nasser—of no war, no peace. “I witnessed five wars in my generation,” Mahfouz said. “After every one, we had to start over from scratch to build our country. That’s why I was against war. Sadat knew we could not wage another war, and so did Nasser. So why not peace? To my way of thinking, the pride of the Arabs would not be destroyed by peace.”
Discussions about peace intensified in the cafés after Nasser died. In the Ministry of Culture, where Mahfouz worked, quasi-official meetings among the senior civil servants were occasionally held to explore political alternatives. Mahfouz was even bold enough to convey his thinking privately to Sadat, who answered with public mockery: “Mahfouz and Hakim want me to negotiate peace. God forbid!” But in 1973, after the canal crossing, Sadat himself took the initiative in peacemaking, and began looking for allies among Egypt’s intellectuals. A month after the ceasefire, Mahfouz, in his column in Al-Ahram, called on Arabs everywhere to concentrate on developing their countries instead of waging war. “The Arab East has to be transformed into a land of civilization before its natural resources are depleted,” he wrote. “Otherwise it will wake up . . . to find itself back in the stage of hunters and herders.” Not long afterward, he gave an interview to a Kuwaiti paper in which he scandalized the Arab world by advocating peace with Israel. “The Arabs didn’t like it when I told them to spend their money on culture rather than on arms,” he told me. When Sadat made his journey to Jerusalem, the Arab world severed relations with Egypt, and Mahfouz’s works were blacklisted in many Arab countries as a result of his outspokenness. He was also personally ostracized by Cairo’s left-wing and Nasserite intelligentsia, still largely beholden to Moscow, who saw peace as equivalent to a rapprochement with the Western powers.
Sadat’s belief that Egyptian leftists were the chief obstacle to his peace initiative led him to his biggest blunder. He had long had a quiet admiration for the austerity and dedication of the Muslim Brothers, and, believing that he could exploit their zealotry, he tacitly lifted the ban on political activity which Nasser had imposed on them. Though he did not underestimate their fanaticism or their seditious appeal to Egyptian soldiers, a large majority of whom were practicing Muslims from the countryside, he thought he knew how to keep them focussed on religion rather than politics—a belief that events proved grievously wrong. Confident of government endorsement, gangs of Muslim Brothers did indeed begin terrorizing Marxists on campuses and in union halls, but they also broke up dances and rock concerts, and nearly provoked a sectarian civil war by putting the torch to Christian churches. Their publications angrily denounced Sadat’s policy of economic liberalization, Westernization, and peace with Israel. By 1980, the Brotherhood was out of control, and in September of 1981 Sadat cracked down in a manner that would have put Nasser to shame, arresting sixteen hundred dissidents in a single night. Most of them were Muslim fanatics, but the roundup also included politicians, professors, and journalists of all political hues—every real or illusory foe he could find. Egyptians wondered whether their President had lost his senses. On October 6th, military members of an extremist Muslim group called Jihad shot and killed Sadat while he was watching a parade commemorating the eighth anniversary of the canal crossing.
“Unfortunately for Sadat,” Mahfouz said, “the last deeds he performed are the ones for which he is remembered.” In contrast with the grieving for Nasser, almost no Egyptians shed tears for the slain Sadat. It was to examine why he was unmourned that I made my journey to see Hakim and his friends in Alexandria nearly a decade ago. The Egyptians I spoke with then were themselves puzzled, but they put forward a number of speculations. Sadat, they said, made much of his humble, peasant origins while wearing ostentatious uniforms and living in unconcealed luxury. He extolled liberty but brutally suppressed dissent. Nasser was direct; Sadat was deceitful and hypocritical. Nasser abolished entrenched privilege; Sadat’s policy of liberalization granted special favors to the rich, encouraged high living, and tolerated corruption, from which members of his family benefitted. He professed a deep dedication to Islam but radiated a non-Islamic worldliness. He allowed his wife to conduct herself arrogantly, even immodestly, in the manner of Western women. Why, they said, she even kissed Jimmy Carter on the cheek at the Cairo airport, on television!
“What I utterly reject,” Mahfouz said, “is the notion that the assassination was a popular repudiation of Sadat’s policy of peace. I was there the day Sadat returned from Jerusalem, in 1977. Five million people poured into the streets to greet him, and their enthusiasm was genuine. There was no doubt that they were ready for peace. Egyptians are deeply disappointed that what the peace promised it failed to deliver—a settlement for the Palestinians and prosperity at home. But I know of no one who regrets that we are at peace. Sadat’s killers were the exception. They were unquestionably opposed to peace, and they knew that his popularity had collapsed. They killed him thinking that it was Islam’s chance to seize power.”
The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood was a reaction to the Liberal Age. The Muslim thinkers of that era had distanced themselves from Islamic traditions and practices, and the distance increased with the victory of the Western democracies over the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. With Egyptian society unmoored, the Muslim Brotherhood became, according to one historian, “the first mass-supported and organized, essentially urban-oriented effort to cope with the plight of Islam in the modern world.” The movement’s founder was Hassan al-Banna, who was born in the Nile Delta in 1906 and raised in a religious family. While still a young man, he went to Cairo to pursue his studies, became a Sufi, and acquired a teaching post in Ismailia, the capital of the British-occupied Suez Canal region. He began proselytizing among the workers there in the late nineteen-twenties, and within a decade the Brotherhood had five hundred branches. By 1949, it had two thousand, with adherents estimated at half a million. It also spread throughout the Arab world, supporting Muslim groups dedicated to the overthrow of secular regimes.
Having begun by focussing on moral and social issues, the Brotherhood became increasingly political, but in Egypt it was more a mass movement organized around a charismatic leader than it was a political party. In fact, the Brotherhood opposed political parties (along with democracy itself), on the ground that they would divide the Islamic community. Though the bulk of its membership came from the urban working class, it also attracted a large number of Western-educated professionals. It denounced foreign control of the economy, and it took the lead in agitating against the British occupation and in favor of the Arabs in Palestine. In 1948, Farouk’s government dissolved the Brotherhood for the first time. Three weeks later, a Muslim Brother assassinated Egypt’s Prime Minister. Shortly after that, Banna was himself murdered, presumably by the Egyptian secret police.
Nasser, a practicing Muslim, actually enlisted the Brotherhood’s help in his coup of 1952, but in the end he did not need it, so he had no debts to repay. The regime’s motto was “Religion Is for God, and the Nation Is for All,” a clear expression of church-state separation that traditionalists considered heresy. Nasser proceeded to suppress the Brotherhood, and he relied on the submissive clergy of the Al-Azhar Mosque to place Islam at the service of the state.
But Nasser’s secular policies disintegrated along with his Army in the Six-Day War, and suddenly Islam was again a dynamic force in Egypt. The Brotherhood proclaimed that the defeat was God’s will, and demanded a national religious resurgence. (In Israel, Orthodox rabbis said the same thing about the victory.) On the campuses, young women put on the abaya and head scarf as a sign of their rediscovered faith, and young men adopted neatly clipped, Islamic-style beards. What Sadat failed to appreciate in turning the Brotherhood loose against his leftist foes was how aggressive it had become. Within the movement was a body—probably a majority—that was not violent, but there were also fanatics who rejected all restraint. In 1974 and again in 1977, the government faced fundamentalist insurrections serious enough to require the use of force; these were followed by mass arrests and a number of executions. It was the movement’s fanatics—drawing courage from Khomeini’s victory in Iran, in 1979—who killed Sadat and threatened the life of Naguib Mahfouz after he won the Nobel Prize.
“This is part of a general revulsion against Westernization—a movement in the last few years throughout the Arab world to go back to the Sharia, the Islamic law,” Mahfouz said. “It is particularly strong among young people. They feel that the system has failed them. Democracy failed them, Nasser failed them, Sadat failed them, and the Brotherhood has come along to give them another way, which is to go back to their ancestors. The Sharia is just a symbol of what the Brotherhood wants, however. The Sharia can be applied by secular governments, and it has been, throughout history. In fact, ninety per cent of the laws we live under in Egypt overlap the Sharia, and if the remaining ten per cent were added the country would not be ruined. The true battle is over power. When the Brothers say ‘Islam is the solution’ or ‘Apply Sharia,’ what they really mean is ‘We want to make the rules.’ They want the power to take us backward. If we had a Berlin Wall across our minds, I think most Egyptians would be tearing it down; the Brotherhood would be building it back up. They’re getting stronger every day.”
One evening, I went to discuss the Brotherhood with Ahmad Baha al-Din, a well-known secular columnist for Al-Ahram. Baha al-Din lives in a high-rent quarter called Dokki, just west of the Nile, near the new opera house that the Japanese built. (The Japanese have been generous to Egypt when it comes to paying for highly visible, splashy projects; American aid buys sewers, agricultural and medical research, and village schools.) Many diplomats and business executives live nearby. So does Jihan Sadat, the unpopular widow of the late President. The high rents notwithstanding, I found the streets muddy and covered with rubble; the halls of Baha al-Din’s apartment building were unlit and difficult to negotiate. The Egyptians—and Arabs generally—are very bad about public space; no one takes care of what is everyone’s responsibility. I am often astonished, when my host opens the door in the dingy hallway of some seedy-looking building, at the beauty of the apartment I see inside.
Baha al-Din, a stooped man in a stylish blue blazer and heavy spectacles, showed me into a huge, brightly lit living room with polished wood floors, modern paintings, and many linear feet of books. “The fundamentalists are furious with me,” he said. “I fight the battle every day, arguing that the Koran is liberal, that Islamic values are consistent with modern life. But even if the Koran gives women full rights, what of it? Our societies have never permitted them to enjoy those rights. The Koran talks of democratic rule, which was applied in the first two or three decades after the Prophet but hasn’t been in the thirteen centuries since. We all recognize that Islam requires respect for human rights, but no Arab regime cares about them. The Prophet commanded his followers to make this a better world. The fundamentalists have distorted the meaning to justify taking the law into their own hands, attacking Christian churches and coed parties at the university, threatening the life of Mahfouz.
“But I think it is important to make a distinction within the Islamic community. The Brotherhood itself has come a long way since Banna’s time. It has accepted and is willing to work through the political system. It is now more than a half century old, and it has mellowed. It is no longer secret. Its writers make their arguments in the press. It is deeply involved in parliamentary politics. It has become respectable. But the extremists, generally grouped under the name Jihad, are disciples of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim absolutist who was arrested and executed in connection with a plot to kill Nasser in 1965. His writing did for contemporary Islam what Vladimir Jabotinsky’s did for Zionism—that is, he made it much more militant, intolerant, and bloody. Sadat’s indulgence of the Brotherhood in the nineteen-seventies encouraged the fanatics. He did not perceive their rise, and, unfortunately, neither did the rest of us. It’s not clear now what the relationship is between the two branches. Jihad sneers at the Brotherhood for being collaborationist, and the Brotherhood is angry at having to pay for Jihad’s extremism. Ostensibly, they hate each other. But some say that the Brotherhood is the civilian branch and Jihad the military branch of the same organization. Clearly, Jihad’s recruiting is made a lot easier by the grassroots organizing of the Brotherhood.
“I have no doubt that the moderates of the Brotherhood are afraid they will be swept away by the extremists. The problem is that even the moderates will not call for what I believe is necessary—a basic overhaul of Islam. Islamic thinkers even in the Liberal Age were, at best, tinkerers. If Islam is to go anywhere, it must take a revisionist view of its history and its roots. Muslim writers today express a diversity of views, but none are discussing the need for reform courageously. When I write a column critical of Islam, the sheikhs in Al-Azhar call me to say that they are with me, though they won’t say so publicly. They consider it too dangerous. What happened to Islam’s freedom of speech? My reading of history is that Christianity did not come out of the Dark Ages until it undertook a full reëxamination of its own thought. That’s what the Renaissance was all about. Khomeini was a Savonarola, when what we need is a Jan Hus, or a Luther. We need a Reformation if Islam is to lead the Muslim peoples into the modern world.”
Baha al-Din’s words inspired me to pay a visit to the Mufti of the Republic, whose name is Muhammad Tantawi. He was born in 1928 in a village in Upper Egypt and is said to have memorized the Koran by the age of twelve. The Mufti’s official duty is to provide interpretations of Islamic law. He was a dean and professor of religion at Al-Azhar before President Mubarak appointed him to his present post, in 1986. He and the principal sheikh of Al-Azhar, who is more conservative, are the pillars of Egypt’s religious establishment, but they differ openly on such questions as Islam’s attitude toward family planning and the issuing of government bonds. (Islam forbids the payment of interest on loans.) The Mufti, being the more liberal, is more popular with the government. He tours the country for Mubarak denouncing Jihad, of which he is a bitter foe. I found him—surprisingly—in a shabby tenth-floor office in a run-down section of Cairo near the railroad station. He had sleepy eyes and Arafat-style unshaven cheeks, and on his head he wore a white turban with a red crown. He had a servant bring tea, and he stirred a teaspoon of sugar into my glass before handing it to me.
“The politician and the religious man have different responsibilities toward the state,” the Mufti said, after delivering the obligatory condemnation of Jihad and sectarian violence. “That is not the same as the separation of the state and religion. We believe they are one. But the politician specializes in politics, the religious man in religion. If either transgresses, it leads to mistakes. We have a difference on this with the Shiites, who see no problem in the clergy’s being involved in politics. We Sunnis believe that religious men should not be ignorant of the world but neither should they try to run it. I haven’t studied politics, so how can I practice the art of government?”
I asked the Mufti what limits he placed on examining the precepts of Islam. Was he willing to go back to the Koranic roots of the faith? Was Al-Azhar?
“Religion comes from Heaven like rain,” he answered, illustrating this figure of speech by lowering his hand from eye level to his desk. “What comes down is clear and pure, but when it hits the earth it becomes mixed with dirt and refuse. So people all over the world—Muslims or Christians or whatever—need to take it while it is still in its pristine state. Unfortunately, many people do not. They use religion to advance themselves, but they, not religion, are to blame. Religion is innocent. That is why we must go back to the original texts, to relearn the tenets that exalt the best qualities of mankind.”
When I asked why Salman Rushdie had been condemned for examining the roots of religion, the Mufti answered, without any sign of distress, “It is not right to slander God and the Prophet. I myself am against spilling any blood, but I think Rushdie should be brought before a neutral panel, and if it is decided that he should be killed the judgment should be made scientifically."
Did he support Al-Azhar’s banning of Mahfouz’s “The Children of Gebelawi,” which also explored the roots of religion?
“Though only God knows for certain what is inside a man, I consider Naguib Mahfouz a good Muslim,” he replied. “But as a human being he can make errors. Mahfouz said that he did not mean to slander the Prophet in this book, but many people nonetheless feel that he did precisely that. His other books have posed no problem. I hope Mahfouz will rewrite ‘Gebelawi’ and make the necessary changes. Then perhaps he and Al-Azhar will be able to negotiate a reversal of the ban.”
Two weeks after my conversation with the Mufti, the Cairo newspapers reported a possible attack—the facts were not quite clear—on the life of Zaki Badr, the Minister of the Interior and head of the national police. Badr was known throughout Egypt as the scourge of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the papers were filled with dutiful statements from prominent Egyptians associated with the Islamic movement, who wanted to distance themselves from the alleged attack. Muhammad Abdel-Kuddous, with whom I happened to have an appointment a day or two after the incident, had been one of Badr’s principal targets. He is a lawyer and a writer for Liwaa al-Islam (“Flag of Islam”), a fundamentalist magazine. His father, Ihsan Abdel-Kuddous, and his paternal grandmother, Rose el-Youssef, were both well-known literary figures of a secular bent; we met in his father’s apartment, on the island of Zamalek. Abdel-Kuddous is in his early forties, and wears a neatly shaped beard that signals his allegiance. He had been a Muslim Brother for fifteen years, he told me, and had twice been jailed for his beliefs. With some disdain, he said that the Badr incident was faked—that no attack had ever taken place.
“The Brotherhood is still not legal, though we are tolerated,” he said. “This is common in Egypt—that a practice is not legal but nonetheless goes on openly. As everyone knows, we have several dozen members in the parliament—elected on the ticket of another party. But Badr kept us under surveillance all the time. Under emergency laws that have been in force since Sadat was killed, he regularly arrested and tortured our people. Our magazine is often confiscated. There are secret police standing outside on the sidewalk who watched you come into this building. I can be taken in any time. The government knows that it can’t crush us—that any serious attempt to do so would backfire. But it is afraid of an Islamic revolution, which could erupt at any moment, because of worsening economic conditions. The government thinks that it needs absolute power to live. Things have been that way since the Pharaohs.”
Abdel-Kuddous insisted that most Egyptians shared his deep Islamic faith, though they were not as willing as he was to put themselves on the line for it, and that they would vote for the Brotherhood in any election that was not, as he put it, “rigged” in favor of the government party. Such an election, he said, would give the Brotherhood enough votes either to form a Cabinet or to become a major opposition force in the parliament, and that was what he was working for. In addition to writing for Liwaa al-Islam, Abdel-Kuddous said, he was “a soldier for Islam” during most of his waking hours, preaching in various mosques on Fridays and working with students, professional organizations, and union members.
“Tactically, we disagree with Jihad, which wants violent revolution,” he said. “Islam has never been spread by the sword. Our goal is to change Egypt by political means. We do not agree with the government that Islam should stay out of politics. It’s too bad that Al-Azhar is just another bureaucracy, and has no credibility among the people. If it had been doing its job, Hassan al-Banna would not have seen a need for an Islamic movement. Al-Azhar does nothing to fight the Western idea that religion is a private matter between man and God. We think that all of day-to-day life is attached to religion. Work becomes a form of worship. We recognize that injustice may exist in husband-wife relations, but we believe that this is because most men do not pray as they should. If a man is a true Muslim, he respects his wife. I devote myself every day to trying to help people understand that religion is not a series of half-hour prayers. The separation of religion from politics and life may work in the West. It does not work in the Islamic countries.”
The government never verified the attempt on Zaki Badr’s life, and as time passed more and more people had their doubts. In January, after I had returned from Egypt, Mubarak dismissed Badr and replaced him with a professional policeman who had urged dialogue with Islamic groups. The same day, the Egyptian Organization for Human Right—expanding on earlier charges by Amnesty International—released a detailed report criticizing the widespread use of torture under Badr, most of it against Islamic activists. Badr’s dismissal, which the Brotherhood greeted as a victory, was also received favorably by Western governments and human-rights organizations. For some fundamentalists, however, it was not enough. In the heavily Islamic city of Asyut, which has long been the scene of anti-government protests, an unruly crowd demanded that Badr be put on trial. In suppressing the demonstration, the police arrested twelve people, and at least one protester was killed by gunfire. Later in the spring, there were firefights between Islamic extremists and security forces, both at Asyut and in the oasis of Fayoum. According to press reports of these incidents, seven policemen and at least twenty-one of the militants were killed.
Hosni Mubarak has tried conscientiously—but with mixed results—to bring calm to the country since taking over as President, in 1981. Mubarak, a former military pilot and Air Force commander, had been Sadat’s Vice-President; he was on the reviewing stand, near Sadat, when the shots rang out and the President was killed. Upon assuming his new office, Mubarak immediately reaffirmed Egypt’s commitment to the peace treaty with Israel. He initiated the release of the political prisoners whom Sadat had arrested a month before, and he made friendly overtures to the Arab states that had been embittered by Sadat’s petulance. He also made it clear that he would curb the Islamic militants and enforce public order; as Vice-President, he had opposed the freedom to make trouble which the fanatics had won from Sadat. After the assassination, he had several hundred of them arrested, and he dismissed more than a hundred others from the armed forces. A month after the killing, the government put two dozen conspirators on trial for Sadat’s murder, all of them Muslim extremists, and five were executed.
Egyptians took quickly to Mubarak, Mahfouz told me. “Nasser thought of himself as a god, and Sadat thought of himself as a Pharaoh,” he said. “No one could ever touch either one of them. No one could put an arm around the shoulder of either one without feeling that his hand would be cut off. Such personal distance is not our way.” Egyptians also liked Suzanne Mubarak, the President’s half-English wife, Mahfouz said, and saw it as a credit to her husband that she is modest in her public behavior. In what was perhaps Mahfouz’s highest compliment, he said that he would feel comfortable sitting in a café drinking coffee with Mubarak.
Mahfouz’s remarks took me back to a meeting I had had with Mubarak a few years earlier. He was still living in the unpretentious villa that he had occupied as Vice-President, but he had set up an office in the Kubba Palace, in Heliopolis, some ten miles northeast of downtown Cairo, and he invited me to interview him there. The Kubba Palace was built by King Fuad, and its formal, white-and-gold interior evokes visions of Europe’s vanished monarchies, but Mubarak volunteered with a laugh that it had been poorly maintained and was likely to collapse at any moment. We met without interpreters, in a small library filled with French antiques. Mubarak seated himself in an elegant armchair directly in front of me, and he frequently reached out as we talked to grab my shoulder for emphasis. Both his manner and his words confirmed Mahfouz’s description of his simplicity; it was clear, too, that he cultivated the contrast between himself and his two predecessors and delighted in his popular image as an earthy man, an everyday Egyptian.
Mubarak stressed that he had had to start over in remaking Egypt. Nasser and Sadat, he said, had focussed on foreign affairs, while inside Egypt the population was growing at an alarming rate and the economy was disintegrating. Now, he said, Egyptians wanted not glory but housing, enough to eat, and a modern, working infrastructure—demands not easy to meet, given the years of neglect. He maintained that although the social order was fragile, and vulnerable to extremist demagogy, democracy was the only system under which a country as diverse as Egypt could be governed. “I welcome debate between Muslim fundamentalists and the Al-Azhar people—the scientists of Islam—on the proper course for our country,” he said. When I asked him about his own religious beliefs, he replied, “Sometimes I go to the mosque, but usually I pray in my house. I’m a very modern man—I’m not so strict about the rules.” While asserting that Egypt would not adopt the Sharia, or ban interest on loans, or proscribe alcohol (“That is between you and your God”), he said that he would lower the voice of the Presidency on religious matters, in the hope of moving religious disputes to the periphery of the country’s political discourse. He favored democratic freedoms even for dissenters, he said, but he expected dissenters to keep their activities within the political structure and to abstain from violence.
I asked Mubarak why he did not share the suspicion of democracy that had characterized Nasser and Sadat.
“I was used to meeting all people in the Air Force and listening to them tell me what’s right and what’s wrong,” he replied. “Sadat did not do that. And I’ll tell you what else Sadat did not do. I lived all my life on an airbase, though I had a house in Cairo. I passed most of my life among the working people of the Air Force—not just the officers but the sergeants, corporals, soldiers. When I was commander of a base, I used to get up at five or six o’clock and make a tour, to see that the sentries were eating well, to see that the people guarding the important posts understood their responsibilities. I liked to speak with them. What’s your mission? Are you eating your food? I asked them about personal things. Are you married, how many children do you have, did you receive your new shoes, how is your family, do you have sons, are you tired, do you have a problem with the job? I looked out for the lower ranks more than the higher. It’s the same way with me now. I’m not sitting in an office. I’m always meeting with people—lots of telephone calls from all over the country—until at the end of the day my head gets like this.” He separated the palms of his hands to about the length of a watermelon. “The Nasser and Sadat governments suited the needs of the time. Now it is another era, and I must deal with the country in a very different way. Nasser and Sadat did not accept freedom and democracy. I do.”
Yet, ironically, Mubarak’s greatest triumphs have been in foreign, not internal, affairs. He has kept his treaty obligations to the Israelis while—to signal his objections to Israeli action in Lebanon and the occupied territories—maintaining a dignified distance from them. At the same time, he has nursed the peace process along in his attempts to serve as a bridge between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Not the least of his objectives was to regain the preëminence among Arab states which Sadat lost after Camp David, and which most Egyptians have sorely missed, but he has not wavered in his refusal to repudiate Egyptian-Israeli peace as the price of Egypt’s return to the Arab fold. His strategy has been to cultivate Arab leaders personally, and to be staunch in his defense of the Palestinian cause. One by one, the Arab states have restored diplomatic relations, the latest being Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, the hardest of Sadat’s hard-line foes, in January.
For Mubarak, even a ceremony in which he presented the Order of the Nile to Naguib Mahfouz, in recognition of his Nobel Prize, was an exercise in Arab politics. In his presentation Mubarak repeatedly referred to Mahfouz as “our Egyptian-Arab writer.” One morning, I asked Mahfouz what Mubarak meant by that curious expression, and he shrugged. The answer, I finally decided, was that Mubarak saw the term as a step in Egypt’s tortuous journey to self-discovery. In the Liberal Age, Egypt entertained the notion that it was a European power. Then Nasser proclaimed it an integral part of the Arab nation. After Egypt was expelled from the Arab community, Sadat testily declared that it was a Pharaonic state, unique in the nature of its grandeur. Mubarak is bringing Egypt back to its Arab roots—though surely not to lead the Arabs in a quest for lost glory, as Nasser intended. In his tribute to Mahfouz, Mubarak called Egypt “a part of the Arab nation,” and said that “everything Egypt contributed was presented to the larger family of that Arab nation.” Whatever those syrupy words mean, the Arab unity that Mubarak contemplates is not one that subsumes Egypt’s peculiar character; rather, it is an amalgam of states linked by natural cultural and economic bonds. Unlike the “Arab nation” that Nasser believed it was Egypt’s destiny to lead, Mubarak’s unity is one in which Egypt would be the first among equals.
In the field of democratization, Mubarak has done more than most Egyptians thought he would. He inherited the powerful party that Nasser created and Sadat renovated—it is now called the National Democratic Party—and he is likely to stay in office as long as he retains control of its machinery; but he has relaxed the election laws to permit greater multiparty competition, and representatives of opposition parties now hold about a quarter of the seats in parliament. The Communists and the Muslim Brotherhood, though officially proscribed, have been allowed to run under different names, but neither presents a real challenge: the Communists, their ranks depleted by decades of oppression, are an anachronism to most voters, and the Brotherhood, whatever its claims of popularity, drew only eleven per cent of the vote in the 1987 election, the latest to be held. In that election, Mubarak enjoyed major advantages in funds, organization, patronage, and access to television; still, the election was probably more honest than any ever before conducted in Egypt. The results indicated that the voters, after three decades of high-voltage leaders, appreciated Mubarak’s low-key direction, his refusal to intrude into their lives, and the predictability that he restored to their daily existence.
Mubarak has been a disappointment only in the economic field, which he had promised to make his top priority. Egypt’s population, which was twenty-two million at the time of the 1952 revolution, currently exceeds fifty-four million and is growing by more than a million a year. With arable land fixed by the borders of the Nile Valley, and a marketing policy (common to the Third World) of shortchanging farmers in order to deflate food prices for the benefit of the urban masses, Egypt has a food deficit that increases each year. On the industrial side, the state remains saddled with hundreds of inefficient factories—relics of Nasser’s socialism—which it does not want to sell or close for fear of exacerbating unemployment, already in the twenty-percent range. Only by spending huge sums for subsidies can the government keep prices fairly stable. The result of all this is spiralling foreign debt, heavy inflation, inadequate investment, retarded job growth, declining productivity, and not enough money for vital services like education. Though Egypt builds three schools a day (American aid pays for one of them) to serve its rising population, it needs five. Literacy is less than fifty per cent and is dropping. So is the quality of university education, which was once the country’s pride.
The problem is not that Mubarak has done nothing about reform. It is, rather, that he has been doing too little to keep pace with a seriously deteriorating situation. He has honored Nasser’s commitment to provide employment to every college graduate, for example, while extending the waiting list to five years—which means that the state bureaucracy, already hopelessly bloated, is increasingly staffed by those unqualified for other work. Specialists from the World Bank complain that Mubarak, having acquired a cushion for painful economic initiatives by his foreign-policy triumphs, refuses to use it. Unable to ignore the international bankers, Mubarak keeps them at bay with palliatives and promises. He regularly makes speeches indicating that he understands that measures must be taken—and occasionally announces this or that modest reform—but he appears convinced that as a practical matter his unwillingness to make large-scale changes is justified.
“The correct solution is not tough measures, because if you take very tough measures the country may reach a collapse,” he told me that day in the Kubba Palace. “I have no intention of bringing the country to collapse. I will take the necessary steps at the suitable time. I could make big headlines by removing the subsidies on bread, and”—he clapped his hands sharply—“a loaf of bread would double in price. You know what would happen? It would make hell in the country. This is the nature of Egypt.” Mubarak clearly had in mind Sadat’s experience in 1977, when, to please the international lending agencies, he raised the price of bread, and woke up the next day to nationwide riots that placed the regime in jeopardy. In 1986, Mubarak had to suppress a police riot that began with a protest over salaries that were falling steadily behind inflation; last year, he had to deal with major strikes by railroad workers and steelworkers. Mubarak knows he has enemies—most notably the Brotherhood—who are good at provoking these disturbances and profiting from them, and he has no intention of providing them with grievances. But the consequence of his caution is a widespread perception—probably correct—that Egypt is adrift.
Naguib Mahfouz, on the day he received the Order of the Nile from the President of the Republic, paid Mubarak a mixed compliment. He thanked him for the honor and commended him for promoting Egyptian culture. Then he said he hoped that he would one day be able to reciprocate by congratulating Mubarak on a victory over the challenges that face Egypt. It was a subtle slight, meant to suggest that Mahfouz would not surrender his integrity just because he had a medal hanging around his neck. The incident created a minor scandal in Egypt.
“Mubarak is sincere and honest,” Mahfouz said to me at the Ali Baba Café. “He has made a genuine effort to correct Egypt’s past errors as a democracy. He has given journalists and artists full freedom of speech. He is a protector of free thought against the assaults of the religious extremists. But, unfortunately, the only people who believe in him are those who need him. Egyptians have no emotional attachment to him. Mubarak’s aim is to open no new fronts in Egypt’s war against backwardness. That’s not enough, and I’m afraid it is the thinking of a man with a passive character.
“But, ironically, his very passivity gives Egyptian democracy room to assert itself. We are fortunate in that what we need at this moment in our history is not so much charismatic leadership as popular involvement. I wish, though, that the people were as zealous about straightening out our government as they are about soccer. They want democracy, but at the same time they are afraid of it. We may still be a hundred years away from being able to cope with real democracy. A great deal of damage has been done to our national spirit by our history of oppression, and the recent decades of independence have not been especially kind, either. I am confident that we have the potential to become a first-class country, but I’m afraid it will take many more generations to overcome our handicaps.” ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment