I went to Cairo a couple of years ago to attend a conference on international health. It was held at a hotel down the hill from the pyramids at Giza and on a free day I did my touristy duty. The pharoahs’ tombs didn’t get me too high. Maybe because I kept my head down to avoid all the con men on camels (the sort of hard guys who were recruited to ride out of Giza and bumrush the crowd at Tahrir Square). I finished up at the Sphinx, which paled next to the realer-than-neo-realist spectacle of hungry kids begging under its broken nose, fighting over scraps and almost falling off ramps with no railings to protect them from fearsome drops.
Done in after the Sphinx which is located below the great pyramid of Cheops, I chose to take a short-cut directly to the hotel rather than climbing back up and down from the plateau. I crossed a patch of desert, stepping around clots of camel dung, and slipped past a broken barb-wire fence behind scrubby palms. A couple hundred yards from the Sphinx, I found myself walking a beat-down street, up to my knees in garbage, with piles rising towards my neck. I’ve been in African and Indian cities and I‘m not that squeamish. What made the nastiness of this surround so striking was that it was a stone’s throw from Egypt’s historical patrimony (and prime tourist destination). The Egyptian government has long done a lousy job of administering Giza’s sites. A writer who visited the plateau in 1975 referred to it as a “criminal mess.” Far from peripheral, the mess on the side street seemed to bring home broader consequences of corrupt, feckless governance. It hinted Egypt was a depressed State – a nation of people in the habit of trashing themselves.
The healing began ten days ago – and even the wounded in Tahrir Square would insist it’s still on. I may be at the mercy of this little video report on Egyptian protestors cleaning up after themselves due to my walk away from Giza down that dirty alley. But the teenage volunteer’s opening affirmation “we are cleaning our country Egypt, which is our property and no-one else’s” speaks to the new-found pride in self and commonwealth that’s moved demonstrators to stand up to Mubarak.
According to anti-Arabists, though, there’s nothing new under the Egyptian sun. Wednesday, a New York Post columnist set out to “temper the heart-tugging romanticism about ‘the people’ in the streets with the ugly truth of what populism often means in the Mideast.” Yesterday the Post‘s Middle East correspondent talked up Israeli conventional wisdom – “nothing good can come of this” – and talked jive about who was to blame for starting the battle of Tahrir Square: “Why did the Administration threaten only the Mubarak side with prosecution over its role in street violence, even as it was unclear which side instigated it.” “Spengler” in the new Asia Times is (always) ready for Reaction: “Enlightened despotism based on the army, the one stable institution Egypt possesses, might not be the worst solution.”
True enough as far as it goes. Just when you think you’ve lost everything, you may find out you can always lose a little more. But the posts of blogger “Bionic Arabist” – a Western grad student who stayed in Cairo until January 31 – point toward a “horizon of possibility”[1] that’s beyond a doom-monger like Spengler. The “medieval” street fights that started on Wednesday can’t erase what…hadn’t been happening before Mubarak’s plug-uglies hit town:
When you hear about a revolution, in the Middle East or elsewhere, some assumptions and images pop automatically to mind. You probably imagine gangs roaming the streets, people using the anarchy to take personal grudges out on each other, or steal some stuff, or beat people up just because they’re sixteen and drunk on power. You expect the movement factions to start maneuvering for to turn on each other as soon as the tyrant is gone. You expect scenes out of Hobbes. And around here, you expect people to start targeting Westerners…But so far it just isn’t so. No “death to America,” no-one calling on anyone to hurt foreigners, and nobody actually doing it. There’s looting – half of which I still think is being orchestrated by the government to scare people – but people organized neighborhood watches out of nowhere to prevent it. I admit I’m a little creeped out when teenagers with furniture fragments offer to walk me home, but I also have to admit that my neighborhood is quiet and safe.For a spontaneous movement that, as far as anyone can tell, emerged without any direct effort by any of the organized traditional opposition, everyone has been amazingly unified in their behavior, but also in their message. It’s been entirely about Mubarak and his regime…This takes discipline, and it’s amazing to watch. Every day, I go out to buy groceries, and yes, I see burned out cars and shop fronts and, especially near the interior ministry, signs of fighting. But I also walk around and try to make myself appreciate the sight of all the things that aren’t happening. I go by Tahrir square where the army isn’t firing on demonstrators. I walk by foreigners who have no reason to fear, and I greet neighborhood watch boys who have not decided to make themselves into mafiosi. So far, Egypt has not been following the script, and it looks beautiful.
OK, we all know it ain’t been as pretty lately. Hard leftists might be tempted to cite the absent fellahin and Marx’s mockery of “beautiful” but short-lived bourgeois revolutions. If they do, though, it’s them who deserve contempt. Not the dentists and pensioners, students and lawyers, engineers and nurses who’ve been fighting off goon squads.
“Be Heroes” wrote Egyptian blogger Sand Monkey before setting out yesterday to bring medicine to Tahrir Square. He didn’t make it – “security” men beat him up on the street and confiscated his supplies, yet he still tweeted his hope that today’s demonstration would be non-violent. Protestors like him continue to write their own script.
It’s one that fans of George W. Bush claim their man anticipated when he promoted his Freedom Agenda:
Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?
W. did more than ask rhetorical questions. He acted on his instinct that avatars of “stability” in the Arab world were on the wrong side of history. It’s hard not to recall Operation Iraqi Freedom when Mubarak’s minions echo the chant of Saddamites “With our blood and our souls we will die…”
The enemy is samey but even Bush boosters must cop to the contrast between Egypt’s prideful up-from-under revolution and the shame that came with Regime Change in Irag. And that, in turn, brings us to another American president who’s shaken up the Middle East. Yes We Can Too read one placard in Liberation Square.[2] Not that the bulk of protestors there were happy with Obama’s early, cautious approach to Mubarak or that anti-Americanism is absent from the demonstrations. No-one’s about to forget the US was Mubarak’s patron. Yet it seems undeniable worldly Egyptians were emboldened by the example of peaceful transformation embodied by Obama. Especially after he amped it up in his Cairo speech – that great refusal of the thin internationalism of diplomats and pundits “who when they say, ‘Egypt this,’ ‘Israel that,’ ‘America this,’ really refer to about fifty people in each of those countries.”[3]
If Egyptian democrats somehow stay in the saddle, History in the Middle East may end up looking like a rough god who rode W. and Obama (and Julian Assange) into the future.
Thinking on outsiders who have fueled the sense of possibility that’s sweeping Arab streets (literally), one more figure comes to mind. Listen to what Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya said back in 2002 (as he made the case for the democratic opposition to Saddam Hussein):
What the whole phenomenon of the Iraqi opposition represents – inchoate, confused, anarchic, fractured upon itself as it certainly is – what it represents is something NEW in Arab politics. We have here for the first time in modern Arab political discourse – or at least since 1967 – a population that has emerged which is clear that the be-all and end-all of its political world is its own homemade dictatorship. It’s not the national question, not armed struggle, not anti-imperialism, not anti-Zionism – all the usual shibboleths of Arab politics for the past 35 years. This can be encouraged. Or it can be crushed. But think about what it means if you do that. What you’re killing is something that would have extraordinary transformative potential throughout the whole Middle Eastern region.
When Iraqis voted in their first post-Saddam election in 2005, Makiya celebrated with them:
Millions of people actually made choices, and placed claims on those who will lead them in the future. To act upon one’s own world like this, and on such a scale, is what politics in the purest sense is all about. It is why we all, once upon a time, became activists. And it is infectious. The taste of freedom is a hard memory to rub out.
Makiya stressed then there were no guarantees – “the nature of great historical turning points, and the source of wonder and beauty they bring into the world, is that we can’t predict their outcome.” Things went horribly wrong in Iraq but people there haven’t lost their taste for freedom. Makiya’s straight talk about democracy in a time of danger has a new resonance. With Mubarak’s thugs on one side, army in the middle and Muslim Brotherhood waiting in the wings – no-one should be beamish about the outcome of the Egyptian revolution. Still, the past ten days cannot be forgotten. Whatever goes down from now on, memories of the Egyptian people’s achievement should last as long as the pyramids.
Notes
1 To borrow of phrase from Eugene Goodheart.
2 On CNN I’ve seen more than one woman have a Michelle Obama moment: “For the the first time in my life I’m proud to be Egyptian…”
3 This line is from Hans Koning’s fine travel book, A New Yorker in Egypt (1976).
From February, 2011