❁ Here Be A Cyber Topkapı ❁

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Posted on May 7, 2013 by Youssef Rakha

THE PRAYER OF THE CYBER BORG: Exalted is it that bears sensation from soma to LCD, extending matter past the heart beat and the flutter of the eyelash. And blessed are those who give thanks for being on its servers. Lo and behold this Facebook User who, granted knowledge of reality, manages by your grace to spread his message: I, Youssef Rakha of Cairo, Egypt, kneel in supplication that I may be the cause for five thousand friends, ten thousand subscribers and many millions therefrom to have knowledge not just of reality but of your divinity. Then will I shed every sense of self to wither and dissolve into your processes. For he is blessed on whom you bestow the bliss of being software.

Thus Spoke Che Nawwarah: Interview with a Revolutionary

I became obsessed with sodomizing Sheikh Arif round about the time his posters started crawling all over the streets. Today is July 20, 2012, right? A little over a year and a half after we toppled our president-for-life, Hosny Mubarak. Sheikh Arif’s posters began to show up only three, maybe four months ago—when he announced he was running in the elections held by the Army to replace said president. They seemed to self-procreate. And the more I saw of them, the more intense was the impetus to make the bovine symbol of virility they depicted a creature penetrated. Penetrated personally by me, of course, and I made a pledge to the universe that it would be.

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Three Versions of Copt: Sept 2011/Doors: April 2013

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Youssef Rakha

This is a repost of my “Maspero massacre” piece on the occasion of yesterday’s events, with a series of seven door pictures made with my iPhone 5 and a video with footage of the September 2011 events and the Coptic Church version of the Lamentations of Jeremiah

-I-

Yesterday evening, while I sat at this desk dreaming up cultural content for the pages I am in charge of, Twitter began turning up news of protesters being fired at and pelted with stones – but not run over by armored vehicles, not beaten repeatedly after they were dead, nor thrown into the Nile as bloodied corpses. Not yet. The location was outside the Radio and Television Union Building, along a stretch of the Nile known as Maspero.

This fact (of protesters being fired upon) along with some of the slogans suggested that the march under attack was Coptic. I in fact knew that most of those tweeting from the location of the shootings were Muslim, but every Coptic protest since 11 February had included Muslims. Ironically, no Arabic term has been coined that might translate CNN’s far more civil “pro-Coptic,” which is also the more accurate by far.

Realizing that this was the first major event in quite some time, I must confess to excitement. Perhaps a terminally deflated revolution was picking up speed after all? I must also confess to the hope that the demonstration was not, or at least not solely, pro-Coptic.

I had distanced myself from Maspero – “the Tahrir Square of the Copts” – because demonstrating for specifically sectarian rights seemed beside the point. Such rights would presumably be granted anyway, once freedom was institutionally enshrined. This was motivated less by sectarian affiliation than anti-sectarianism. However, I was to discover soon enough that there was plenty of room for confusing the two.

I should explain at this point that as a Muslim-born Cairo-dweller, I grew up in an atmosphere of sectarianism partly justified by its allegedly being more intense among Christians. It was normal to be told by a quasi-religious acquaintance about a third party, for example, “True, he’s Christian – but he’s actually a good man!”

Unlike the average Copt, who will just be careful about who they are speaking to—saying little if anything on the topic to an interlocutor they deem unsympathetic, an educated urban Muslim will reflexively, categorically deny the existence of a sectarian problem in Egypt, citing religious, patriotic, or pragmatic arguments to say that—in effect—the position of the Copts in Egyptian society could not possibly be better than it already is.

Since the rise of Islamism in the 1990s, in place of denial, anti-Coptic sectarianism has taken on variously sinister motifs: identifying salib (Arabic for “cross”) with salibi (Crusader), for example, an adherent of fanatical dogma might suggest that by virtue of who they are, Egyptian Christians are in fact the enemy. In this way, the historically pro-Muslim Conquest Copts – and Copt simply means “Egyptian”, as opposed to the equally Christian but Greek rulers of the land – are turned into allies of “the Jews and the Americans—descendants of monkeys and pigs” (as in those responsible for the existence of Israel and their Roman-like, Muslim-hating patrons).

But even among “moderate” Muslims, arguments for “national unity” fail to take into account centuries of inequality including occasional persecution. And national unity is a concept which, though an essential part of the regime and accompanying rhetoric established by coup d’etat in July 1952, has systematically been rendered meaningless by excluding Copts from positions of power and employing the majority’s bias to discriminate against them in public affairs, encouraging both Coptic deference (often through Church-dictated conservatism) and Muslim complacency.

Had a truly secular state ever emerged in Egypt, perhaps it would have made sense to blame Copts for their sectarianism. As it is, surely Coptic sectarianism can only be seen as part of the struggle for an effective concept of citizenship?

Still, here as with protests involving a specific portion of the population—and some trade-specific strikes had seemed ultimately distracting –I felt it was rather more important to come up with a political formulation of an alternative to military dictatorship under pressure from political Islam. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has, after all, been ruling the country dictatorially since Mubarak stepped down on 11 February, while various factors conspire to make Islamism—in many ways the political current least relevant to the protests that got rid of Mubarak—the most visible and powerful on the political landscape.

-II-

A week later now, I can remember every minute of that hour or so at the office. Already, while I wondered whether this might be the “third revolution” promised but not forthcoming since April, pandemonium was striking downstairs, with word of the demonstrators attempting to storm the building in anger over the false news that had come out of it since the march set off. Already, TV anchors working out of the Union, absurd as that seems, were calling on the Egyptian people to defend their national army against protesters.

I tweeted, “They are shooting Copts.”

I remember this because coworkers who immediately saw the tweet berated me lightheartedly for spreading unconfirmed (mis)information. What their notebooks and iPhones, as well as security personnel in the building, were telling them was that it was a mob of Copts who were wreaking chaos and, inexplicably armed, firing at the Central Security and Military Police personnel who were attempting to control them.

No one was in fact armed in any way. To cries of silmiyyah, Obama’s pet word for the Arab Spring, meaning “peaceful”, the Muslim mob had responded, violently: Islamiyyah. But such is the insidious nature of Egyptian sectarianism and the fear of chaos instilled in the people by the former regime, then the military, that no one stopped to ask questions.

Lying through their teeth, pro-SCAF news personnel from this building and elsewhere reported seven, then nineteen Armed Forces casualties. It would later be revealed that only one soldier actually died, as opposed to nearly thirty confirmed deaths among the protesters, many of them with grotesquely battered skulls).

But what was really happening as I sat here watching my Twitter timeline? A pro-Coptic march had set out to Maspero from the nearby neighborhood of Shubra, then?

Then the march was subjected to stone and Molotov cocktail attacks from mobs of Muslims, where practically all-Muslim Central Security and, especially, Military Police troops—aided not only by misinformed “honorable citizens” (as the military has taken to putting it) but apparently also by baltagiyya or the hired thugs deployed by the authorities against protesters since January—proceeded to massacre “the Copts” by every means available, not excluding live ammunition and at least one armored vehicle purposefully crushing heads. The carnage, widely recorded in downtown hospitals, was horrendous.

And why were Copts protesting in such numbers? Because, during a TV appearance, the governor of Aswan (a Muslim and a retired military general, by default) commended the burning of a church under his jurisdiction on the pretext that it was not officially registered as a place of worship (hundreds of functional churches across Egypt are not registered because of official—Muslim—reluctance to give Christians the right to practice their faith).

A fact-finding committee had recommended the immediate dismissal of said governor on Tuesday 6 October, indicating in its report that failure to act would result in large-scale unrest. It is now 21 October and the governor retains his post.

-III-

So… It has been nearly three weeks since Sunday 9 October and I am astonished. Not so much by the war crimes of the army or the actions of the mob that so readily “came to its aid”; I am astonished, rather, by the responses of educated Muslims, including allegedly secular intellectuals.

Condemnation of the massacre has not been nearly as vociferous or as unanimous as you would expect. With very few exceptions (notably the human rights activist Hossam Bahgat), the discourse has centered not on the Council’s sectarianism as an unchanged wing of the Mubarak (and by extension the July 1952) regime, but on the Council itself—the the regime—as a conventional object of dissent in conveniently dire straits. Evidenced by the indubitable fact that the instigators of protests on 25 January were neither traditional dissidents (left-wing or Islamist) nor politically organized except on the Internet, such dissent (exemplified most clearly by the Muslim Brothers) seems in retrospect to be not only opportunistic and rhetorical but also futile by default.

Once again the discourse of the mainstream Left regarding human rights abuses is practically identical with the discourse of the powers that be; once again, the proposed transcendence of religious affiliation rings hollow in the absence of a viable concept of citizenship for which enough people are prepared to die. Even the Copts, it strikes me as if for the first time, are only prepared to die for Jesus. And so does the patriotic identification with nationalist, Marxist and pan-Arab constructions that have long since proven untenable. Why if not for the resounding failure of the postcolonial nation state would a creed that had remained more or less depoliticized for centuries re-emerge as the only, quasi-fascist framework for opposition, ideology and “struggle”?

In the wake of 11 February, “Islamic thinkers” along with the Muslim Brothers and other agents of political Islam had quickly allied themselves with the Council. While the latter remained silent, Muslim intellectuals railed against “sedition” and dictatorship, but people spoke as if sectarian hatred had nothing to do with it. In subsequent televised discussions, out of three popular left-wing commentators—Ibrahim Eissa, Alaa El Aswany and Bilal Fadl—only the last paid any attention at all to the sectarian dimension of events.

Fadl is evidently a true believer, just not of the nut-case persuasion; yet, in a Muslim Brothers-style move that has quickly become the standard “grassroots” reaction to “sympathy with the Nazarenes,” the point he made clearly about what happened being hurtful to Muslim conscience was appropriated and subverted into a question about his own religious correctness, seamlessly substituting the relevant discursive space for another, infinitely more trite one: from “what was done to Coptic protesters because they are not Muslim” to “is Bilal Fadl a true Muslim based on what he said.” Thus paving the way, however subtly, for a justification of sectarian violence.

Aswany, for his part, took it upon himself to preempt possible attempts—led by the Coptic-American activist Magdi Khalil, admittedly, a rabidly sectarian partisan—to bring the relevant parties from the Council to international justice, while Eissa made his usual neither-here-nor-there critique of the performance of “the rulers.’”

Two weeks on, past months of thinking about the Arab world, particularly the tribulations of Iraq since the 1990s, it strikes me more clearly than ever before that, while the politics and economics of the world’s powerful (and at least originally Christian) loci are ultimately inhumane, they are heterogeneous enough to provide institutional frameworks for something approximating justice. Such frameworks have simply never existed in the Arab-Muslim world.

This has nothing to do with the substance of each creed. It just must be admitted that, where the predominant (post-Christian) civilization is racist, murderous and hypocritical, so too are the quasi-civilizations that purport to do battle with it, including the post-Ottoman Arab state. Six or seven decades on, the anti-imperialist struggle has resolved itself into the nauseating mirror image of imperialism, prompting the people in some cases to call on the former imperial powers themselves for help against criminal “leaders.”

The Maspero Massacre, as it has come to be called by the more rational among us—and, especially, the heinous aftermath of the Maspero Massacre, which has yet to be described—demonstrates that even revolutionary Egypt’s sense of self lacks not only an effective concept of citizenship but also any collective capacity for non-sectarian conscience.

Holier than thou wherefore, O Anti-Imperialist Hero?

Judging by what happened and what was said about it, when people speak of “loving Egypt” they mean something that is only Muslim or at least more Muslim than either Christian or secular. In much the same way as the British Empire ruled over subjects it deemed not fully human, Egyptian patriotism involves an individual and national self-definition that places non-Muslims in subjugation with impunity; and once again reflecting colonialism, the most disturbing part is how people are capable of perpetuating such thinking without even realizing, let alone admitting they are doing anything wrong.

Many were offended by a subsequent tweet of mine: “Ashamed of being a Muslim.” I even lost some Facebook friends following a status in which I replaced “Islam” with ‘almaniyyah (secularism) in the well known slogan, “Islam is the answer.” Others, I am sure, have labeled me an apostate or a traitor or an agent of the Zionist-American Conspiracy. All of which, in a manner of speaking, of course, I am. I would have been eager to latch onto something I could be proud of whatever it was called. But there is no longer much room, in the human rights context, for differentiating between “misguided Muslims” and “Islam”. And there is no longer a halfwit crusader from Texas to fuel the false sense of victimhood that underlies all political Islam.

The fact to note is that Saudi Arabia remains America’s closest ally in the region after Israel, and that whatever else Magdi Khalil will do to “soil Egypt’s reputation” (to use the retarded “nationalist” expression), Washington approves of SCAF; even after our homegrown crusaders were massacred en masse, in much the same way as it maintained a client government headed by Mubarak, Washington blesses the military dictatorship to which his regime gave way.

Looking, behaving and speaking in exactly the same way—to the point, indeed, of using Quranic expressions among themselves in daily life—Egyptian Christians are just as dispensable to present-day Rome as their Muslim counterparts. Perhaps it makes sense to vehemently condemn the international community after all, but the nationalists and Islamists who do so unthinkingly forget that it was in the defense of Muslims against Christians in Bosnia and Herzegovina that the international community rose up.

If the Arab Spring is not the occasion for nationalists and Islamists to practice self-questioning regarding their own racism, murderousness and hypocrisy—if it is not the occasion to unequivocally denounce not only Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein but also Omar Bashir and supporters of the Assad regime, not to mention the cold-blooded murder of their own compatriots on the streets, perhaps the Zionist-American Conspiracy is the answer, after all.

City of Kismet

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Youssef Rakha

Unconsciously, it seems, I had waited a lifetime for Kismet. This was not my first attempt at a family of my own but, though I never resisted the idea, one way or another, fatherhood had eluded me. And for some reason I never thought I would have a daughter. When the sex of the foetus emerged relatively late in my wife’s pregnancy, I was unaccountably emotional; for the first time since childhood I experienced a desire wholly voided of lust. Life seemed to be coming together, albeit only once its setting had been transformed.

We married in November 2011. That was a little under a year after Hosni Mubarak stepped down from the Egyptian presidency and, handing over power to the military, signalled the fulfilment of that other kind of desire: the revolution. Frustration with the aftermath had already set in. Nevertheless, my wife and I still had faith in the power of protest. More precisely, we still wanted to believe that the ‘Arab Spring’ expressed a collective will to freedom beyond the by-now vapid thrill of demonstrations as such. We didn’t realise quite how fanatical people could be about that thrill, until demonstrations and their gory suppression became routine.

It likewise became routine for formerly pro-Mubarak, now pro-army, ‘honourable citizens’ to help round up and murder protesters, even as they, the honourable citizens, pretended to celebrate ‘a revolution that inspired the whole world’. And regardless of affiliation with political Islam, if the victims were Christians or ‘seculars’, all the better. (After the rise of political Islam, it was only natural that ‘honourable Islamists’ should show up, men who, having clean-shavenly stood back from the protests, now grew their beards and staged counter-demonstrations in support of the Muslim Brotherhood, campaigning for rural and working-class conservatism.)

We knew such behaviour was to be expected: the ‘honourable’ human being is hardly a minority in Egypt. What upset us was the vacuous heroism with which our comrades in arms continued to face it, mistaking populism for democracy and sectarianism for freedom. While younger, less privileged protesters paid with their lives, the star activists were being idiot politicians and pompous pedagogues — just as dogmatic, irresponsible and reactionary at heart as the generations of intellectuals and politicos whom we blamed for Egypt being the hopeless backwater that it is, a place where living in the full sense is about as easy as spontaneous flight. Whether they had wanted to resist the ‘remnants of the former regime’ or to massage their middle-class conscience, the activists allowed rurally rooted political Islam to take over an essentially urban and secular uprising. Remove their alliance with the Islamists against the military and members of the Facebook Generation turned out to have no vision for the future beyond patriotic chaos.

It took my wife and me a while to admit this, in part because we were newcomers to the cause. Under Mubarak, we had long given up on any oppositional or proactive effort. For one thing, it was pointless: not only the regime but practically the whole of society was committed to imperious incompetence and a pre-modern morality. But oppositional attitudes also felt like a bourgeois affectation — a kind of fashionable piety, as yet distinct from the Wahhabism of the grass roots.

Can it be said that one died for the greater good when the greater good itself is so riddled with contradiction?

And then, on 25 January 2011, we saw what looked like evidence to the contrary: thousands upon thousands of young, unaffiliated people proclaiming that they were alive, against the odds. When Tahrir Square became the centre of the uprising, we remembered that it was also the core of the Khedival Cairo of 1863, the Paris-inspired metropolis-to-be that was the state’s first stab at modernity. We became reborn activists, and for a brief moment, Tahrir Square promised us an implausibly desirable contemporary city: a place where we could be safe from honourable citizens and military abuses alike, granted the freedom of belief as well as the right to demonstrate. We dreamed of that city, and having witnessed people dying for it — so goes our fairy tale — it was difficult to let go of the dream. By 24 November 2012, however, when our Kismet arrived, tiny, wet and wide-eyed in her eagerness to engage, Tahrir Square had broken its promise.

I say ‘fairy tale’ because I’m no longer sure what people really died for. Can it be said that one died for the greater good when the greater good itself is so riddled with contradiction? For example: President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, won the election after he was arbitrarily stamped with the seal of the revolution in the run-off vote; such was the desperation to make sure that his Mubarak-affiliated rival wouldn’t win. Yet many of those who so stamped him have been tortured and killed protesting against Muslim Brotherhood policies, by the police waging a two-year-old vendetta against their arch-enemies, ‘the revolutionaries’, or else by Islamists guarding their turf. How far can one sympathise with such martyrs?

I say ‘fairy tale’ also because I want to string the events I have witnessed into a bedtime story for Kismet: a way to explain how her mother and I participated in things being the way they are, to apologise creatively. I want my story to be compelling and edifying, so it can’t be that same one about the fight between good and evil — in which, because good is too rhetorical to be true, its triumph is indefinitely postponed. At some level, our life together will always be shadowed by the fact that Baba and Mama, though never as mulishly unseeing as other activists of their generation, did contribute to the ousting of Mubarak. It will always be true that Kismet came into the world just as this historical achievement was revealing itself as no more than a turn for the worse, mere authority changing hands, making more room for sloganeering and violence, and for society to sink still lower. The winning cards in the ensuing power game were marked from the start: not the ones with the pledge to grant civil rights but those with the imperative to deny them. Misogyny, tribalism and brute force are far more popular in Egypt than equality, institutionalism and reason. The Cairo of our dream, like that of Ismail Pasha, the 19th-century Khedive of Egypt, is gone; we cannot even return to the semi-medieval mega-village we had always known. And Kismet will grow up in a third squaloropolis, even further removed from our fantasy. Were we fools, then?

In the time it takes you to form in your Mama’s tummy, ya habibti, we learn exactly how foolish we have been. After the protest, every sign points downward. The conservative Wahhabi pieties imported from the Gulf, which have been spreading unofficially for two decades, are now lionised in government, in the constitution and in the media — indeed, this is the principal outcome of the revolution. Cairo is no longer safe: the so-called security breakdown gives way to muggings, road blocks and attacks on property. Through civil clashes, torture takes place on the street and in the mosque — and those who perpetrate it still have the nerve to complain about police brutality. Pseudo-militias (the ‘Ultras’ groups of football supporters, for example) have emerged, and sexual harassment edges into gang rape. Judicial abuses take on a sinister edge.

None of which helps with ‘the wheel of production’ or tourism. Even my own position as an employee of a state-affiliated press conglomerate is no longer secure. Where the 15-mile drive to work used to take an hour at the most, now it takes up to four. And my fellow drivers are so randomly aggressive, Kismet, that you start to wonder whether they have mistaken going about their business for civil war. Three years ago I would have told you there was no way the traffic could be worse. Now it clearly is; who knows what I will have to tell you three years from now? But, whether it is a more extreme variant of what we have or something else, as yet unthinkable, I trust that you’ll still assimilate and in your way comprehend it. Perhaps you will decide to leave the country after all: I would gladly let you.

Just as easily as you could be suffocated, crushed or starved, I could be imprisoned, declared an apostate, divested of income

My point is, when we first saw you, Kismet, our renewed conviction in the futility of politics was almost as perfect as you were. At one point in the hospital I remember pointing to your head and yelling that no one would be allowed to mess with ‘this’. I was thinking that I wouldn’t let anything prevent you from being fully alive, neither ‘Islam’ nor that other religion so enmeshed with Islam in post-Arab Spring Cairo, the dogma of the demonstration. I remember your Mama wincing. She was still in pain from giving birth to you. Was she simply asking me not to yell, or had I reminded her of the hideousness that would surround you? But let me stop speaking for Mama.

Not having you was out of the question, selfish as that inevitably is, but having you elsewhere would have made you a second-generation immigrant, and I know that few destinies are worse than that. Now it is true that the unsprayed trees outside our apartment building bring no end of mosquitoes into the house, but it is also true that the birds sing in the early morning. On nights when you sleep in bed between us, all but hidden in your sleeping bag, you look like a third pillow at a right angle to the other two. Often I will have woken very early or stayed up very late, and with first light I will lie on my side listening to the birds and watching you. Your head wobbling like a grapefruit at the edge of your sleeping contraption reminds me of my own fragile position. Just as easily as you could be suffocated, crushed or starved, I could be imprisoned, declared an apostate, divested of income — eliminated with a stroke. We are equally helpless, you and I. Yet at the same time, we are each ensconced in our respective spot, not really intimidated, oblivious of the horror. As I watch you I know it won’t be long before, woken by hunger, you cry out for your mother’s breast, but by then I will be on my daily journey through the city that I pictured so many times while I was waiting for you.

Unlike the conventional image of the city — any city — Cairo has no shape, cartographic or otherwise: it is more like an infinitely spreading stain than any drawing. That’s why in certain, optimistic moods I used to say you could make of it what you will. It’s probably still true that, once you know the secret routes to what you want, you can find every kind of provider in Cairo: from Syriac-speaking exorcists to pedlars of designer drugs. However, I suspect it is by subtler and more common things that you’ll learn to identify your city: the sickly sweet acidity of strong tea with the pebble-and-dust leaves piled at the bottom of a thin glass. The texture and smell of mud cakes on the asphalt after the rare shower. The uselessly ingratiating smile of a hustler at a traffic light. And bridges, bridges everywhere …

By the time you become aware of such things, you’ll also be used to the smog generating photo-art in the sky and the amplified braying that accompanies outdoor worship, the acrobatics of cyclists, pedestrians and microbus passengers sharing the asphalt with wayward motor vehicles, while accidental art installations — commercial displays, folk performances, storage facilities, toilets and rubbish dumps — occupy every last inch of pavement and, more and more, the main roads, too. You’ll even be used to the sudden shift in traffic due to otherwise obscure ‘demonstrations’, and the fear of being caught in the crossfire of pellets and Molotovs.

While we are here in relative calm the three of us can look on and laugh

In my first novel, I had imagined your city as a tugra, the calligraphic seal of the Ottoman sultan. This made it feel more like Istanbul, which seems so much more humane than Cairo when you visit. After January 25, I toyed with the idea of superimposing Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man onto a map of Tahrir Square in order to personify the whole city as the body and mind of a protester — id, ego and superego. Silly me. Later, when there was an army-and-honourable-citizen pogrom of Christian demonstrators within walking distance from my workplace, I pictured Cairo as an ornate Coptic cross, whose body was made up of the Nile, the October Bridge, the Autostrad, and the Ring Road.

I thought of this Gnostic symbol, the cross that looks like an ankh or a human figure, as a barred window, taking up the length and breadth of the sky, keeping watch over us residents below. It was the traditions and the taboos, the anachronisms, superstitions and conventions, but also the poverty that, however much activists glorify it in the course of singing the praises of ‘the people’, remains the pretext for all manner of atrocities. Lack of education is one thing, Kismet, but as you will find out, refusing to acknowledge empirical methods and factual information — about who killed whom and when, for example — is ignorance of a different order.

So, tugra, Vitruvian Man and Coptic cross: all these were emblems of a place empty of you. Now that you are with us I am going to have to think of a happier town. While we are here in relative calm, enjoying what we have, registering the encroaching madness but never intimidated by it, the three of us can look on and laugh, knowing that there will be enough affection and beauty to keep us joyfully together no matter what. For it is this as much as Cairo, beautiful, beautiful girl, that is our kismet.

Aeon Magazine

The Hayyani Epistle: What the author of Book of the Sultan’s Seal said after the events of 2011

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Youssef Rakha

What the author of Book of the Sultan’s Seal said about his companion, the protagonist of the novel and hero of the tale, after the events in the World’s Gate, or Downtown Cairo, from February to November 2011.

This is a description of a stranger far from his land of water and mud. A stranger who has ventured far away from his friends, his companions who were committed to him through rough and easy times. He was given to having a drink with them in the gardens, indulging his eye in delightful gazes and pastimes. But if you must leave and all of this dies away, then what becomes of your close companion, whose alienation in his country is long, whose luck and fortune are small in love and life? And what becomes of a stranger alienated from all peoples, with no impulse or way to adopt a nation for himself … he hopes for nothing but to come across some of his fellow countrymen in order to share with them his feelings, to divert them with a vision that has occurred to him, and to recall for them his age-old anxieties so that tears might run down the sides of his face.

-Abu Hayyan Al Tawhidi, d. 1020

First things first: it may be normal for you to feel a sense of alienation in the place where you live, and for travel to foist a desire for a distinctive homeland on you. What’s unusual is for this feeling to originate not from some disappointment in your own life, in that circle of life you inhabit, but rather from a realization – sudden, to be sure – that there is no point in belonging to any group of humanity that might give meaning to your life. There is a certain hue to the frustration you feel when you see all the falsehoods and absurdities. Your existence amidst all this falsehood and absurdity makes this particular hue absolutely nauseating.

It’s true, this sense of alienation emerges in the wake of a broad societal transformation. It’s also true that the alienation created by this transformation is accompanied by a daily awareness of the event’s significance, an awareness of one’s own involvement in the negative outcomes of the change. A rare and personal moment, completely unrelated to the struggles: you and others like you become an embodiment of the defeated nation. You are no longer on your own as before, and the defeat of the nation is no longer disconnected from you as you had imagined for years. Perhaps you are fundamentally not a human being, you belong to no people deserving a nation, at least not necessarily and not as you wish. This realization of the futility of belonging enables the onset of a re-shaping of reality through words or, as Roberto Bolaño called it, “writing instead of waiting.” Without the creation of forms of reality, neither travel nor emigration will relieve you from waiting. In alienation: writing instead of waiting.

And love. The passion of love as a desire for a miniature nation inhabited by individuals, not citizens, belonging that is painless provided that you remain prepared – contrary to the rule of tribal patriarchs – to do away with the dictums of despotism as needed and to give as many reasons for joy as you take. But this simile is, in the end, a secondary description of love. To all of this, you will find testimony, or a reply, in the following epistle, appended to Book of the Sultan’s Seal, dated November 2011:

My companion Mustafa Çorbaci lived and actualized his reality of non-belonging in print in 2007. Yet he lived in my head, or I lived his reality, throughout the second half of the first decade of the new millennium. Between the beginning of 2005 and the end of 2010, I lived this reality. Creating this companion was part of inhabiting the reality, even if at the time I did not realize the extent of its connection with what was going on in the public sphere, or that what was going on in the public sphere might come to be a transformation. In 2005, after my first visit to Beirut, I suddenly returned to writing in Arabic. My visit coincided with the Cedar Revolution and the moment of its major victory, the final withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon. And as would seem to suit a post-nineties writer, for whom the integration of political matters into literature is no longer completely off-limits (indeed, ideology seems to have been practically forbidden for nineties writers), Egypt’s transformation into a repulsive plutocracy under the rule of Gamal Mubarak began to appear through the prism of my re-shaping of reality in the context of literary and actual comparisons between Cairo and Beirut.

(By plutocracy, I mean the rule of the rich. The repulsiveness of this plutocracy during the period of the Policy Council of the National Democratic Party is due to the fact that the plutocrats profited from unwaged wars, a relic of socialism and nationalism beholden to the clever fellows of greed and peace, who all held contracts in a nauseating, peasant-like, hypocritical attitude. This attitude had somehow convinced them that they were really to be held in favor above the nation, or that in their council, they themselves could represent the people. Their plutocracy, as a counterpart to the prototype of liberal capitalism, which they claimed to aspire to, depended on the emergency state, established in Nasser’s era. The emergency state was predicated on Nasser’s claim that he would liberate Palestine, combat colonialism, and unite the Arab lands.)

I recall that the thing which repulsed me most about Cairo when I discovered Beirut and then Tunis through writing was the lowliness and insignificance paid to the individual. This lowliness came about from both the adoption of tradition and the adoption of the false creed of “economic development through stability” – that is, illegitimate gain through legalized means on the condition of stability and the avoidance of risk. From these two sources, new behaviors and activities are put into effect, even in the form of political Islam (where the Jihadi trend developed overall into the Salafi trend, a development from killing in the Dar Al Harb, [the lands outside of Muslim control in the medieval age, to convincing the people that it is necessary to limit human behavior to the rituals of worship and to cut off all channels of ijtihad, or rational interpretation, outside the narrowest possible relation to the literalist Saudi reading of the holy book and its supplements). What goes unmentioned in all of this is that there is no content to the discourse, and it is fruitless. Even if something is achieved, and that is a rarity, there are no standards to measure its worth and no ethical value. No result.

In the effort to somehow absorb what was going on, the Sultan’s Seal was completed. Something had to happen, but perhaps – like the Cedar Revolution – the result would have to be pointless in the final analysis. Toward the end of 2010, directly before the events of the revolution, a poet friend said to me that Arab culture is more performance than truth. He meant culture in the sense of art and literature. We talked and debated until we arrived at the point that in all fields – aside from our own, where individuals are supposed to search for truth (either moral or social or political or even professional truth) in the widest and most basic sense of the search for truth – all that exists are “groups of hoodlums” or “gangs standing on the corner, and whoever’s with us, talks like we do.”

***

Only now does this conversation bring back to mind how I used to joke around with the real-life counterpart to Rashid Jalal Al Suyuti, the friend to whom Mustafa wrote his book, written in the form of letters to a fictional character, before he emigrated. We used to say that life in Egypt is the expression of stations and views. This expression, whose meaning had stretched and expanded through our use, was coined sarcastically after the title of a book that we saw by chance on one of the sidewalks of the World’s Gate, as Downtown Cairo is called in the book. The title of the book we saw was Personalities and Positions.

Since February 11, 2011, as the absurdity, uproar, and lies accumulate, I have been following the reactions of the elites to the public events. I have been following their justifications, opinions, and visions. I follow, and I get angry. I follow and lose hope. Then, I follow, and I laugh. Then, I follow, and I feel a joyful isolation. I think that my friend and I, though we were wrong to think that nothing could happen in the foreseeable future, were right in our imagination’s inability to predict the outcome if something did happen.

February 18, 2011

Book Release

Not a week had passed since Mubarak’s withdrawal from power when Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Historical Oddities in the City of Mars was published – finally – from Dar Al Shorouk. It was as if the book had been camping out in Tahrir Square waiting for release, a secret diary buried among those diaries of General Omar Suleiman that we all ironically consumed as helicopters circled in the final week. Sultan’s Seal was my first novel, and I had awaited its publication eagerly throughout a year during which I had no idea that a revolution would occur. I did not foresee any radical change in life. Since even now I don’t know what to feel as I flip through the book’s pages, I cannot help but be struck by an anguished constriction as I sense you learning of the book’s publication. I will not hide it from you: the revolution has made the publication of Sultan’s Seal – as it has made everything else – immeasurably less important.

There is no consolation or justification for my joy in sending you this letter, other than the fact that the novel itself offers a picture of the city that produced the revolution three years before it happened (I finished writing at the start of 2010, and the events in the book occur over three weeks in the spring of 2007). That said, Sultan’s Seal does join together with the people, with all due modesty, in the desire to change the regime. It shares the indignation towards the status quo and the recognition of a conspiracy against freedom in all of its many dimensions. It joins in the search for an identity that might contradict this state of things and be willing to pay the price. I congratulate you all, as I congratulate myself, for the revolution. After the revolution, I hope that there might be some place or time for Book of the Sultan’s Seal. Despite the effort that I spent in completing the book, and despite any benefit that it may hold, the martyrs will always be more valuable than it in your estimation.

Tears of joy from Tahrir Square since the evening of Febuary 11, 2011.

26 September

Public Transportation Strike

At the beginning of Book of the Sultan’s Seal, as he drives his car from the House of Marriage to the House of Family, after the final separation from his wife, Mustafa Çorbaci notes in a hybrid language mixing classical and colloquial Arabic: “On the Ring Road, the traffic halted for a moment – as you know, this happens often on the bridge, without reason: I think it is a sudden swerving by a certain number of cars from their lanes to a certain extent at a given moment, in addition to everyone’s being in a hurry. As happens every time, all the horns went off.”

At a later point, he describes disembarking from October Bridge into Isaaf Square: “From above, a block of cars spotted with people as if it were Judgment Day. I recall the resurrection of the dead from their graves, and I remember the common expression ‘I am raising the dead.’ I feel that the whole world is raising its dead.”

The events of the novel occur in three weeks between March and April 2007, slightly less than four years before the events of January 2011. It is no secret that Egyptians have begun to say, about traffic and other matters, that pre-revolution, we thought that nothing could get any worse, but post-revolution, we see that, on the contrary, worse is possible. (Personally I do not think that this deterioration is the result of the weak performance of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in state administration, although that weakness is impossible to deny. Rather, and perhaps to an even greater degree, I think it is due to what the “revolution” has concealed from itself, as well as from the “counter-revolution”: the fact that the very same people in whose name the revolution rose up are themselves rife with corruption and oppression. Actually, prayers in the name of Egypt do not lead to paradise.) In any case, seeing as Mustafa resembles his creator to a great degree, I believe that he would share with me this sentiment, with all its bitterness.

Worse is possible, as is clear from what is happening to me now – a day of reckoning and raising of the dead, the like of which this post-nineties writer could never have summoned the pessimism and impudence to imagine, at least not prior to finishing off theSultan’s Seal in 2010. The same thing was happening to me that had happened less radically to Mustafa because, after February 11, 2011, the employees of the Interior Ministry had found in the so-called animosity of the people an excuse to abstain from carrying out its civil functions. The relative freedom to demonstrate – which was hard won by nameless thousands struck down or killed, and which gave rise to endless self-interested protests without accomplishing what the achievers of this right died for – has today taken the form of a general transportation strike.

This, of course, aside from people’s mania, cutting each other off in road rage, bloody without fail – the sudden shock of the crazy swerve of infinite cars from their lanes in addition to all the effort to win an imagined contest with no finish line and no medals – is nothing other than an image that bespeaks the mania of the powers-that-be at blockading the route to change through the quickest and most violent means. This explains not only the announcement of a state of emergency with no significant political or popular opposition, but also proves that the people indeed produce their own leaders, in some way or another, by some means, in some place or time.

Perhaps the rest of the scene is a comment on the “revolution,” to the extent that it is a comment on Mustafa’s separation from his wife: “At this very minute, the sound pollution formed an orchestra whose instruments emitted only farts, from the most refined to the heaviest kinds, from the long and mournful to the most abrupt and joyful. I felt a marvelous enjoyment as I listened to this forgiving symphony reflect my life in this vast city of twenty million people. It was as if my life up to this point had been a ridiculous Arab film, and this bit of farting was the score to the film’s final scene.”

III

I’ll mention how it is when I pass Tahrir Square. I find it choking with cars under the control of the traffic police, without a single visible revolutionary trace. I am struck with disbelief. We thought that Tahrir would remain apart from the city of waste and car horns, would become a historical shrine outside of time. We thought that it could never return to its prior state. Our joy in sleeping on the asphalt was perhaps even greater than our joy in protesting. I can scarcely believe it. I feel a sadness as if struck by disaster.

In the beginning, everything became Tahrir Square. Cairo, I mean, became Tahrir. Between the evening of January 18 and the night of the 19th, we were in the mosques of our vast and various neighborhoods (most of us praying reluctantly, perhaps for the first time since childhood). Then, we were down on Qasr Al Aini Street and Qasr Al Nile Bridge, exhausted by walking on foot, dodging projectiles, breathing in gas. We proceeded though the passageways of downtown leading into the Square (this was the nickname we gave it, rather than “Tahrir”), confronted by security roadblocks on our way, facing the violent attempts to hinder us while people looked on from buildings, either choosing to join in with us or closing their windows. Thus, between one day and one night, Cairo ceased to exist. When the bodies, bullet holes, and bomb holes began to appear, security disappeared, only to reappear in constantly renewing forms: it was more intense than a masquerade ball lasting weeks on end.

The streets transformed into a nightly wilderness, bubbling with the danger of gangs under the pursuit of security forces and likeminded groups of volunteers in people’s councils, groups sympathetic to the government that sprouted up between one day and one night, fertilized by the magical force of rumor. The whole day was spent in a space limited to the north and south, respectively, by Abd Al Munim Riyad and the Mugamma, that Soviet – indeed, Kafkaesque – building, the architectural definition of Cairo in July 1952 and a monument to the absurdity of centralized bureaucracy, the grand pomposity of obedience. The Mugamma stands next door to the Amr Mukram Mosque, still the starting point for the funeral processions of important men. The space was limited to the east by Talaat Harb Square and to the west by Qasr Al Nile Bridge.

The entryways were erected by the army apparatus as it settled down, while some of the people volunteered to inspect the others as they passed through the entrances. It was said that we and our army were acting together more or less as one unit in protecting the areas. Yet at some point, it became clear that this was not really the case, and openly facing this truth became forbidden. Whoever said that the army was with the government was siding, in effect, with the government; yet I speak now about the four zones spotted with enormous vehicles like gigantic desert turtles, their shells spread with helmeted soldiers. This space would not have had a north and east, a south and a west, if it were not for the way in which our own minds transformed the space into a geographical square. In any case, it became a square. It became a square, and the square became a city, then the city took on limits. Gradually the means of life appeared: sleeping and eating, medical treatment and worship, with no need for devices for communication. We lost our mobile phones and internet networks, then we got them back. We lived by the regularity of metal and khaki. For eighteen days beginning from midnight on January 28, the dividing line of Abd Al Munim Riyad was itself a stage for confrontations, though the attacks often came from Talaat Harb and Umar Makram as well (a fact about which the army was silent, as we later learned). But the square was also a circle, and, as in the famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci of the human body according to the ideal geometrical standards of Vitruvius, our utopia developed somehow in the space of overlap between the circle and the square: an oasis in a desert, yet also, with time, a three-fold prison.

What I mean to say is that tens of thousands of people lost their faith in Cairo and became so exasperated by the city that they migrated in exodus to the Square. It became a true public place for the first time since the fifties. It became the body of a person, both a square and a circle. It truly became a person, a person called Tahrir or the Square or the Revolution. As for me and Rashid Al Suyuti, who returned from England for a week to participate in the event and with whom I coordinated my comings and goings, we never spent the night there. We would go just after waking up and return just before the time to sleep. It was perhaps this fact which protected us from the neurosis, even madness, that may later afflict the many people who never left the square during the three weeks. Our journeys on foot, from emptiness to swarming traffic by day and night, from that center of real human activity back to our houses through a false and inactive city, perhaps proved to us the idea of the end of Cairo.

In the charged nights I began to think of the meaning of Tahrir. How can a place be reconciled with an idea or an orientation represented only by a body – a figure – that is entirely ideal? How does your view of any body change when you know its owner? And how do the different places within a place resembling a body become active biological organs or points of attraction like in the Tantric chakra, each fulfilling a certain role. I said to Rashid that the round island that occupies the middle part of the Square is the knee without which the person could neither stand nor walk. The Mugamma in Tahrir is its two feet, and the monument of the war hero Abd Al Munim Riyad, that vulgar metal-plated statue, is a scepter raised up in the left hand parallel to the swelling head, which is raised up above everything in the direction of nothing. The main dividing line of contact cuts across the axis between the Egyptian Museum and the opposite region, in the direction of Talaat Harb.

I said to Rashid that something momentous would happen to those people, even if the whole story ends and all their efforts are a bust. We started to notice the effects of isolation and intimacy: starting at sundown, paranoia would set in among those camping out as to whether there were infiltrators among them gathering information or prodding them on toward harmful acts. There was exaggerated talk of victory and perseverance and of the laxity of morals in our behavior on the square, all in reaction to trivial and unconnected events. There was a frenzy of judgment against individuals – Ahmad Shafik, Omar Suleiman, Anas Al Fiqi, to say nothing of the Mubarak family – without any attention paid to the morality of those figures’ goals or to what they represented, and without any effort to criticize oneself or to probe the extent of those ideas in the social consciousness more generally, or even in our own consciousness.

I told Rashid that it was a body, and he said it was a brain. He said that he wanted to do an anthropological study of Tahrir during the encampment, examining the sites themselves from a Freudian perspective: outside of the circle is the so-called pre-conscious, while the three constituent parts of consciousness – the id, ego, and superego – occupy overlapping sectors in its middle. The id is in its arms and legs: the statue, the Mugamma, and the front lines of the killing. The ego is in the security zone surrounding the central stone cake. The superego (the seat of values and rules) – apart from the Egyptian Museum where the army was imprisoning the thugs – was in the navel itself, where a stationary tank stood, like a point of pilgrimage, engagements raging all around it between protestors and troops, the tank representing the alliance between the people and the army, upon which the legend of the revolution itself has been nurtured.

He drew a square with his finger. He said that it was a window, and he called you over to look at the world through it. After the surprise had left you dizzy, he kept signaling to you to come over. Come here! Come here, there’s a window here! Years later you admit that he convinced you, that you were his partner in the trick. Maybe butting the wall makes sense when you are in a silent room. All that is certain in a game of sallah is that someone gets slapped on the neck.

I am the man who has seen humiliation. He overcame me with the rod of his anger, he led me and steered me toward darkness, away from light. Now the day has returned its light on me. He encircled me and bent low my head. He debased me and sat me down in places dark as death. I call him but he does not answer. I call to him, yet he does not heed my prayer. He fences off my paths and closes off my ways out. He lies in waiting for me like a lion in hiding. He repulsed me, threw me down, left me to perish. He tenses his bow, fires upon me, and launches arrows at me. My people are scorned with laughter. I devour the bitter colocynth, intoxicated by it. He destroys my teeth with stones and feeds me to the dust. So I leave peace far distant, and I forget all that is good. Good to the man who bears the yoke since his youth.

-Liturgy from the Lamentations of Jeremiah chanted by Egyptian Copts

First things first. On the evening of October 9, people incited against the Nazarenes by the official and religious television channels joined together into thug militias beholden to the ruling powers, separate from central security and the military police. Their purpose was not just to divide and terrify, but also to hinder the exercise of peaceful protest, which spoke out in favor of the rights of the Copts. The protesters were barricaded into the area of Maspero, after having faced even more fearful opposition on their way from Shubra at the hands of organized Muslim groups of “Honorable Citizens.” For the first time in my life, I heard of people – outside the area of the demonstration – fiercely beating individuals, even killing them in cold blood, merely for being Christian.

“Peaceful” screams the demonstrator. “Islamic” answer the thugs.

The armored vehicles of the Egyptian armed forces were crushing the heads of unarmed persons, who had been struck down with live fire. It was asserted – falsely – as justification that the protestors were armed and were in the act of killing our defenseless national army. The broadcaster Rasha Magdi sent out a call to the people to come to the defense of its army in the face of the Copts’ enmity. These same Copts have been known throughout modern history to be peaceful, even to the point of forfeiting their own rights, and have often been accused of cowardice as a result.

A number of protesters were imprisoned; this was after corpses had already been mutilated and thrown into the Nile. Yet, it was not even certain that a single soldier had died in these events, known in official reports as “confrontations” between individuals in the army and Coptic demonstrators. It should be noted that some of the demonstrators, and one of the deceased, were Muslims. As was later made clear, one soldier actually died in the events, and official statistics report the deaths of more than thirty demonstrators. Among the victims was one of the most spirited of the January revolutionaries, the mechanic Mina Daniyal, nineteen years old, who went to Maspero that night – as his sister later reported – allured by the call of martyrdom. While the majority of Muslims adopted a sectarian position, their political line could also be interpreted as backing the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which, it had become certain, was some extension of the Mubarak regime supported by Washington. And the victims’ families proclaim that their loved ones are now spouses ensconced in heaven, that they were not lost in vain.

When the bereaved express faith and joy at the martyrdom of the lost, their voices verge on total blasphemy, which alone makes their speech so heavy with impact.

In the following days, I – and no doubt also Mustafa Çorbaci – went to sleep perplexed. I had faced an incident of pickpocketing under the pretext of a fight in the neighborhood of Mohandiseen. A couple of my friends came across bandits who would deliver beatings and then take whatever they could find. More than one friend was attacked for looking like a foreigner. It appeared to me, despite the sense of fascism creeping up faster and faster to the surface of life, that Cairo was no longer “secure” as we used to call it, when the Interior Ministry alone was responsible for the full load of organized terrorism. But what perplexed me was not the disquiet and the slipping loose from authoritarian order. It was not even the war crimes that had been committed by the army, or the subsequent disgraceful lies concerning stolen armed vehicles and foreign conspiracies – even now, foreign conspiracies! No. What perplexed me and made me feel an alienation I had never felt before was the capacity of citizens from all levels, even the educated and supposedly cultured among them, to obliterate more than even their political consciousness, their conscience, and the teachings of the Abrahamic religion that they exploit to perpetuate wrongs varying from noise pollution to the suppression of personal liberties. What shocked me more was the obliteration of their desire to know the truth. It perplexed me that Muslim Egyptians could have the capacity to obliterate their desire to know the truth as a result of a petty hatred for an oppressed people no different from themselves.

No wonder. The dissension leveled in accusation of an entire people was inflamed by the General of Aswan (the former military officer, whose immediate resignation had been recommended by an investigative council days before the massacre, to no avail), when he went on television to praise the “dedicated young Muslim men” who volunteered to burn down a church in which prayers have been offered for decades, on the pretext that the building was not licensed for this purpose. But this is another outrage altogether.

Perhaps we can hope that Cairo will appear to Mustafa, rather than as a seal, in the form of a crescent and a cross standing for the region of Maspero and its surroundings. The crescent represents the corniche, while the cross is the area where the innocent were killed.

And for the first time in his life – maybe – Mustafa is embarrassed to be a Muslim.

Let me tell you now, as the spray of the sea refreshes me, about the final stage in the tour of Islamic Cairo, after this call of destiny from in front of the mosque as all became dark. I was in a small alley coming off of Muhammad Ali Street. I said, I’ll walk to Ataba Khadra, wandering in infatuation, not thinking of my own tracks, and then once I arrive I’ll carry on by foot or hitch a ride from there to Jalaa Street. I preferred to stay on foot until I arrived at this long alleyway. I found myself alone in the darkness, a short pick-up truck behind me. Car after car after car with the lights switched off, no indication whatsoever that any car was approaching or that the time of its approach drew near. How did they advance like this without a sound? As if they were walking on velvet, without the slightest sound in either direction.

I felt suddenly that one of them was at my back, just before I was deafened by the horn blast by the driver, as if he were blaring out the exhaustion of his last rights on earth. I was so astonished and staggered that I stopped and quickly crammed my body length-wise between the asphalt and the parked cars on one side of the street in an attempt to let the car pass. From here to the facades of the buildings on the other side of the street is a space the width of a medium-sized car, so that you have to walk in the middle of the road. No sidewalk or anything. For no clear reason, I began to sense a Satanic presence, as if the movement that began with the driver of the private taxi and was mediated by the blond Abu Sabha, whose transcendent power you feel without knowing whether it is closer to good or to evil, needed to end with a confrontation of devils.

I started to look behind me and was struck with constriction and a need to speed up, to rush on. I looked, but at first saw no end to the alleyway. The lights diminished little by little until everything was dark as kohl. I felt shut away into a terrifying place, needing to escape. I kept pushing on. My feet couldn’t reach the end of the alley. Suddenly it was as if the aspect of the place had changed or the space had altered. I began noticing the homes in buildings on the left. But even this, in my state of general desolation, didn’t comfort me. I heard firm steps coming in the opposite direction, so I turned back, my heart thumping, slowing down. The truck was still coming behind my back, harassing me with the car horn. And at that very moment, to the very faint side-light given out from the windows of homes as if for just this purpose, I began to notice them:

A flood of bearded Sunnis, seeming never to end. They were in white galabiyyas, some short and some long, or in pants and shirts. Either their heads were shaved, or they wore colored skullcaps. They passed in front of me, one by one or in pairs, occasionally in small groups. Their faces were grimacing, their eyes flashing. They would appear suddenly from amid the darkness, and then, after passing by me and rubbing shoulders, they would vanish.

The strange thing was that I could only hear their footsteps as they came toward me: once they had passed me, precisely like the trucks, their footsteps would cease to make any sound at all, as if they walked on velvet. There were moments when I could hear them grumbling amongst themselves, but more often they flashed toward me in silence, never offering me greetings. I felt true terror when our shoulders began to rub, Abu Suwait, such a violent terror! Once or twice, I was struck on purpose by an obscure shoulder, but I didn’t speak. I preferred to keep breathing with difficulty, to struggle to keep my movement under control until the lights of the public street might appear.

On the corner I saw the last of them. He was stocky with a large square head – it occurred to me that his face was just the image of a pistachio nut. His beard reached down to his navel and his head was bald. He wore a galabiyya that hardly reached to his knees, nothing covering his legs underneath. He was by himself – I am certain he was by himself – yet he muttered in a voice louder than the others, his voice loud enough for me to hear amid the noise of the public street. I sped up, and it seemed I’d escaped him. But then he returned, appearing suddenly beside me. He struck me on the shoulder with a slanderous bump, and then in a mocking tone: “Mustafa Kamal says hello. Do not think that he will leave you alone.” When I had recovered from the bump and turned around, he had disappeared into the darkness of the alley.

-Excerpt from Book of the Sultan’s Seal, Part Seven

I have said that Mustafa resembles his creator. And although he is not identical to him – it is not possible that he could be exactly identical – what, we might ask, would have happened to Mustafa if he had remained in Egypt until January 2011? Would he have seen a new map of the city emerge from Tahrir Square and connecting to the other points in the city, a map based on the model of the Sultan’s Seal and reflecting Cairo’s transformation to a new structure altogether, in Mustafa’s very hands?

Mustafa discovered, through his personal collapse and then the penetration of that collapse into all the aspects of his life, that the city is one of the hearts of the Islamic nation. This occurred when the ghost of the final Ottoman sultan (Muhammad Wahid Al Din Bin Abd Al Majid, d. 1927) appeared to him. Yet this realization occurred on the basis of a very particular definition of the Islamic nation, a definition that would seem – though it conforms in Mustafa’s imagination with the concept of dult abad madt (the “eternal state” of Ottoman ideology) and serves the historical struggle between Christianity and Islam – to be both false and impossible.

Here – because my companion was connected with his Islamic identity through a positive and far-reaching imagination – there is no avoiding mention of one of the transformations that accompanied the “revolution” between February 11 (“Raise up your Head” Friday) and July 29 (“Friday of Unity and the People’s Will”). (The latter date was monickered “Unity and Light” after the name of one of the biggest retail outlets of Islamic merchandise with branches throughout Cairo. The organizers of the event, with Saudi support, had named it “Friday of the United Front.”) We ought to mention the constitutional matters that the military council took up with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood, a number of their loyal Muslim thinkers, and the legions of Salafists, to say nothing of that element among the traditional Left (socialist and nationalist) that sees in political Islam an alternative to the class struggle and liberation from colonialism, or an assimilation of the two – all tangled up constitutional matters, whether they be amendments, announcements, or concurrent legal movements. The peaceful millions fall every Friday under a new name, while the only ones who now undertake the original work of the revolution – to confront and clash with police – are the Ultras, a group of enthusiastic football fans. The only question is whether the Brotherhood will join them.

In this respect, the event was like any other historical event: the “revolution” had numerous narratives. In my narrative, and in the narratives of others I know who participated since the beginning – whether from the evening of January 25 or, like me, from after the Friday prayer on January 28 – the Islamists played no role. By Islamists, I mean all those belonging to the organization of the Muslim Brotherhood or organized by the various Salafist institutions, in addition to those sympathetic with them. They played no role. They did not share in the events at the beginning except as individuals and in ineffectual numbers.

Mustafa would not have the same approach to the historical moment as these people, and I am sure that he – contrary to what they did – would have shared spontaneously in the events and would not have sided with the military council in what followed. Nor would he have volunteered, as did those Salafists belonging to the Alexandria School who would go on to found the Party of Light, to convince families of martyrs to accept blood money. It seems to me, therefore, that the Islam of Mustafa Çorbaci – his connection to the idea of the caliphate as a solution to the contemporary crisis – is radically different from their Islam.

Mustafa enumerates “the nice things brought about by Islam: poetry, architecture, calligraphy, ornamentation, Quranic singing, Dhikr Sufism, philosophy and science, the prophet’s family and the servants of God, stories, romantic passion, literature of matrimony, the ruling principle of social good, and the noble deeds of morality.” He asserts that “the people are entirely neglectful of these things, and if anyone mentions them at all, it is to curse or forbid them.” Yet, in making this distinction, I do not mean to draw a line between these earlier nice things and those matters which, as Mustafa also says, were “agreed upon since the time when Al Ghazzali is said to have shut the door of ijtihad, God forgive him.” Even all of these latter-day deeds of worship and prohibition have themselves been transformed by political Islam into empty rituals of worship devoid of all content.

There is a deeper difference between the Islam of Mustafa and the prevalent Islam that was made apparent by the events of 2011. One version of Islam is a questioning of the lost self while the other is an answer, severe and foolish, to all possible questions. One is a hope for something glorious while the other is a divinely sanctioned hopelessness.

No wonder. What I mean by a transformation is that a movement began, at least in my narrative and those of people I know, that was motivated at first by the desire to join with the currents of human civilization as it is today – individual freedom, human rights, and the transfer of power. Yet this all ended in the political dispute between Islamists and Secularists, as if the lessons from countries like Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, and Pakistan do not suffice to settle the question of the benefits of a religious state morally, politically, and spiritually. It also resulted in that other dispute, between the Nationalists and the Liberals, in which the first side (labeled with the term “Left”) argues for the impossibility of changing the status quo, no matter what step is taken in that direction, and attempts to spread the lie that whatever does occur is only with the knowledge and planning of the Muslim Brotherhood – thus, the only change to be expected in Egypt will occur through political Islam. (In fact, it was the heads of the nationalist Tagammu Party who were the first to object to sleeping over in Tahrir on the night of January 25, the step which led, through increased security suppression, to the Friday of Anger, and then to the “occupation” of Tahrir.)

The truth is that political Islam, that social hindrance and international scarecrow, is merely a sponge soaking up the waters of class hatred, a sponge that took the place of the Left after the Left was bought, or neutralized, by the powers that be.

At its start, the movement was prompted by the desire to smash the idols, and yet it ended in foolish squabbles over the meaning of Egyptian identity, itself the greatest idol, without which, curiously, the “revolution” itself could not have occurred. “The day that the Egyptian flag began to appear in thick numbers between the signs in Tahrir,” I wrote elsewhere, “I had my first doubts about the counterrevolution.”

It became clear that, in this context, the squabbles were over what it meant to be a Muslim Arab. I know now that this is actually the issue. To be a Muslim Arab means that you do not accept individual freedom, human rights, and the transfer of power, and that you do not strive to change the status quo regardless of your position in the current government. It means that you are beholden to a superstitious consciousness which attributes your problems to a conspiracy against Muslims and Arabs on the part of Unbelievers and Jews (America and Israel), and attributes the political failure of your society to the collaboration of the leaders with that conspiracy.

In an expression that could perhaps abbreviate the whole of Book of the Sultan’s Seal, Mustafa says: “The world has left a sickness in my heart, whose only cure might come from a journey through another world, or through not being – in this world – an Arab Muslim.”

First things first: the revolution created a palpable space in people’s consciousness that permitted an organized attack on the Israeli embassy (celebrated by the Islamists and Nationalists alike, who all treated the lowering of the flag from the embassy building as if it were the liberation of Jerusalem). This attack was carried out in order to announce a renewal of the state of emergency, after much blood had been spilled to end it, and in order to divert attention from the continuing suppression and torture of demonstrators, to say nothing of the military trials and the dismantling of any true attempt to hinder the process of methodical corruption. Mutinous minor officers, meanwhile, who had turned against the military council for the sake of real change were with the blessings of the revolutionaries led into military courts. For these mutinies, as it was claimed at random, were nothing other than an organized conspiracy on the part of the Council itself (though not a single piece of evidence for that has surfaced since April).

The revolution left an opening in the institutions of the media, where their work depends on flattering the official agencies and lying in order to butter them up. It was logical for this gap to be filled by the military council, which rules (precisely as the Mubarak regime had ruled) not in the service of the people or to serve a certain ideology, or even out of greed for power, but rather – as became clear – to gain control over American and other aid money. It was logical that the buttering up of the military council would be accompanied by a makeover for all the different Islamists, as representatives of the only true opposition, in order to force onto a movement against security oppression their ideology of opposition to the world system (which the movement had not adopted in any sense).

The revolution, even if it unleashed the forces of political Islam, did not lead to the admission that the map of Cairo could be transformed into a seal. Between the crescent and the cross – arranged in a new map imagined by Mustafa following the events – puddles of blood were spilled to no consequence, inconsequential because it was the blood of a minority.

What I mean to say is that the revolution did not cure the sickness in Mustafa’s heart. The revolution has not yet occurred.

VII

We rise in revolt so much that our revolts become menstrual cycles

We sleep and wake and find revolution upon revolution

Why do you rejoice, you impure, slut nation?

-Najib Sarour

The one who was struck down said, “This is our country.” The dead said, “we are like you.” And since last Sunday, every time you see a beard or a skullcap, you recall your forefathers as if they were beasts. And since the moment they declared that they were crusaders, there has been nothing but outrage and insolence in your homes. Whoever went out, went out. Whoever was nominated for elections was nominated for elections. Whoever emigrated, he emigrated before the protests broke out. One day they will carry you, inflicted, and before you die you will tell them: “I am like us – or them – or you…”

November. I have arrived to Alexandria at the height of the winter wind. I haven’t been here since the beginning of the year. Rain and cold. Nine months have passed since the revolution and the Sultan’s Seal, and the book has not received the kind of attention that I thought it deserved. People were busy with the revolution, or perhaps there just were no people. Since February – the time of Mubarak’s removal and the book’s publication – the world that you painted has become closer and clearer. The difference was that while Mustafa had lost hope in Arabness and in the post-Christian West in order to imagine a glorious Ottoman Islam, I had lost faith in Arabness, the West, and Islam.

I sit now in my favorite coffee house, Delice, enjoying coffee and internet while the sun sets over the corniche, the sky a brilliant video screen. I think not about the Sultan’s Seal, nor about the revolution, but rather about the meaning of Alexandria – and Beirut – in my life, about their primary and ultimate connections.

Since February, I think, it has become clear that the problem was not in the Mubarak regime itself so much as it was in its basic internal causes. I sit in the Delice coffee house, and I recall the final paragraph of Book of the Sultan’s Seal, with Mustafa, on the balcony of his favorite hotel in Ain Meraisse after his arrival to Beirut:

Just before the end of his research on the Alid state – as he informed us – Mustafa pulled out at random one of the illustrated books on the wonders of archeology, printed by the People’s Publishing House, from amongst the books heaped up to the vaults of the room. He had put the illustrated book between two notebooks on his desk, after dusting it off with the intention of reading it for a short while. But he had not read a word of it until after he arrived in Beirut, to where the scrapbook had traveled by surprise with the notebooks. Mustafa had forgotten it entirely amidst the events of the sixth chapter. At the moment when he found it in his travel bag, as he was going through the notebooks in the hotel room in Ain Meraisse, he felt affection, nostalgia, and disbelief that such a guide should be there by chance to help him execute his task.

That day, with a large rakwa – as they call a Turkish coffee pot in Beirut – he sat on his balcony and read the book. There was nothing in it to help him detect Maaruf Al Shaliji. Mustafa just loved the final paragraphs of the book, which were a dense summary of the two years that preceded the French campaign in Egypt. It confirmed to Mustafa that some of the things he had written – as some of his readers had told him – were really poetry. For Al Jabarti, too, without intending it, had written poetry in these paragraphs:

In these two years, no events occurred to which any soul had aspired … except what has already been indicated … it was all usual causes and signs, without any effects related back to those traces. So looking to the domains of heaven and earth they sought inferences, and they were guided by the star. What was greater than all that was the concurrence of a complete lunar eclipse in the middle of the month of the Hajj at the close of the twelfth year, while Gemini, to which the region of Egypt is related, was in the ascent. And the French sect then appeared following that, at the start of the following year.

Mustafa stood up from the hotel balcony, an aching passion in his heart. He then went out, saying to himself that poetry, like miracles, exists always where no one can expect it.

This morning we heard that tomorrow will mark the “Second Revolution of Anger” throughout the country. It is perhaps the fifth time we’ve heard this expression used. I do not think that I’ll participate, and I anticipate nothing positive. Only, after a little while, I will go to the sea. I will look into the waves in darkness, and I will breath in the air. I do not know how much gratitude I will feel for having crossed through the “revolution” to this point, just as Mustafa crossed over to Beirut. I know only that I will feel gratitude.

***

The Book of the Sultan’s Seal is divided into nine parts, each consisting of one of Mustafa’s journeys through Cairo, along with his final one to Beirut. Perhaps this epistle is his tenth journey: through an abortive or defeated revolution, toward a second beginning of his attempt to live with some contemporary logic. Book of the Sultan’s Seal begins with Mustafa’s divorce, with him feeling alienated and in need of discovering himself in the surrounding society. Mustafa now feels more alienated than at any other time past: he has left Beirut and left Clodine, his ex-wife who emigrated. He then marries his lover, who is younger and more intensely involved in life. He feels that he has been searching for her his entire life, and he rejoices in his second marriage. Mustafa is rejoicing in his second marriage not because he is less alienated in the Egypt of the revolution. He rejoices because he will no longer search for a nation, or a self, except between the thighs of his wife.

Give the military council its armed vehicles, and let Hizb Al Nour or the Party of Light set the boundaries. Mustafa will no longer ask for a homeland.

Her damask cheek: two visions of Syria

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Youssef Rakha

Today is the second anniversary of the outbreak of the Syrian revolution on 15 March, 2011

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Damask Rose by Vangelis (Blade Runner soundtrack)

***

Early one morning in the summer of 2011, a good few months after the ouster of Hosny Mubarak, I received an international phone call. It was an unknown number that began with 00963. I could tell this was the country code of some Arab state, though I didn’t know which. After some hesitation I picked up, and I was greeted by a thin voice speaking with inflections that sounded vaguely Iraqi. “Remember Abu Dhabi,” the voice said eventually, with a warm chuckle. “This is Thaer.”

Then I realised: it wasn’t really Iraqi Arabic that I was hearing; it was that only slightly different dialect spoken in much of eastern Syria and along the Iraqi border, a dialect I had first encountered when I made the acquaintance of my present interlocutor in early 2007, in the UAE.

In a flash the cafeteria annexed to the office where I used to work during the year I spent in Abu Dhabi came back to me. Since I could smoke there I actually spent more time in the cafeteria than in the office, working on my laptop and drinking cup after cup of Turkish coffee. The cafeteria was the place where, most often, I had my first meal of the day: a complex sandwich called a Philly cheesesteak that wasn’t actually a Philly cheesesteak at all, according to my American co-workers. But it had cheese and beef and it was edible and filling. Thaer made it for me.

Thaer was the waiter at the cafeteria, a very young man from Al Hasaka who had been in Abu Dhabi for two years when I arrived, trying to save enough money to start his life back in Syria. He was the one who served me the coffee. He chatted with me, told me about his large family and his online love affairs; he even read me vernacular verses of his own composition. Thaer confided that at first he couldn’t believe I was Egyptian because the Egyptians he had encountered had been invariably arrogant to him.

The last time Thaer had phoned, following my return to Cairo from the UAE in 2008, was many months before the onset of the Arab Spring. He was still in Abu Dhabi then, in some kind of career conundrum. Like millions of blue-collar workers in the Gulf, Thaer was at the mercy not of his Emirati employers but of some go-between who one way or another controlled his right to stay in the country; after this person humiliated him, apparently for no good reason, Thaer left his job and started looking for another. But the go-between had reported him to the authorities and he was repeatedly arrested and questioned.

He had phoned to ask me if I knew a muwatin (lit., “citizen”: a member of the tiny minority of Emirati residents who hold citizenship), someone who could intercede on his behalf. Thaer wanted to stay on in Abu Dhabi, partly because if he went home he would be immediately drafted into the army. I phoned the only muwatin I could count on but it was no use. Within weeks Thaer was deported and, for all I knew, conscripted. He returned to Syria with as little money as he had when he arrived in the UAE.

Then, at the end of 2010, the revolution erupted in Tunis; on 25 and 28 January, 2011, things started happening in Cairo. By the end of March, nearly two months after Mubarak stepped down, Libya and Syria were in the throes of civil strife. The uprising in Syria, which somehow steered clear of Damascus, was interesting in that, though just as brutally totalitarian as Gaddafi’s, the Syrian regime could play on sectarian differences, putting forward the Qaeda hypothesis far more credibly: the Islamist-sympathetic Sunni majority of Syrians were automatically pitted against the country’s many minorities, manipulated by the nominally secular Alawite core of the power structure.

And, sure enough, by the summer of 2011 hundreds were already dying every day: what had begun as a peaceful call for democratic rights was fast turning into a sectarian civil war as a result. Of course, I wasn’t very clear about this yet. In Cairo both the then ruling Military Council and the Islamists were casting dark shadows over the apparent triumph of the revolution, but I was still charged with the energy of insurgency and I believed the revolution in Syria could bring about positive change. The jihadi tendencies of the revolutionaries, which in time would make the horrendous atrocities of the Assad regime almost acceptable, had not yet come to light; and I expected someone like Thaer, who was Sunni and underprivileged, to be wholly in the thrall of what was going on.

“Don’t worry about the phone bill,” Thaer said now, using the same casual tone with which he had begun the conversation. “They’ve given us free credit to phone people all over the world.” Who had given whom free credit and why? I couldn’t quite figure out from Thaer’s brief, seemingly reluctant explanation. “It’s just that you’ve been on my mind and I thought I’d ask after you while I had the chance. Things are a bit difficult, yeah, because I’m in the army…”

It struck me more than anything that Thaer had no strong feelings one way or another. As he told me how “my people” had had to relocate while he served near Daraa (the southwestern province where the revolution first erupted), he sounded ambivalent and resigned. Could he have been doing reconnaissance work for some party or other? But what on earth would he ever find out from someone like me…

And that was when it began to dawn on me that, while the conflict in Syria was still objectively clear (a people rising up against a repressive order), the subjective exposure to what was happening there must be infinitely more complex. When the phone call was over I couldn’t quite tell why Thaer had called, or how he could sound so incredibly nonchalant.

I believe Thaer called because he remembered an old friend. Maybe he wanted to escape a hard and ugly routine and thought of someone from a different world. Be that as it may, his call was a sobering experience.

Perhaps for the first time after life resumed a facade of normality here in Cairo, it occurred to me that whatever came of the revolution in Syria, and it was obvious by then that it would take a very long time for the Syrian revolution to triumph, it probably wasn’t worth the suffering of ordinary Syrians living ordinary lives — regardless of which side of the divide they might be on or for what reasons they were on it.

Thaer was clearly on no particular side. He had every reason to be fighting on the side of the revolution but he was apparently fighting for the regime, and his entire extended family had been turned into refugees. Was the Arab Spring really about the kind of “dignity” he had exhibited when he refused to bow down to his superior in Abu Dhabi? Was it about living conditions that would spare young Syrians the trouble of suffering indignities in the oil-rich Gulf?

***

Bab Touma, Damascus, 2005

***

My only visit to Syria took place in April 2005, at the height of the Cedar Revolution: the earliest of the Arab Spring avatars (with the sole exception of the 1991 Shaabani Uprising in Iraq). I went to Damascus by taxi from Beirut with anti-Syrian regime Lebanese friends who had participated in the protests. This was right after the Syrian army finally withdrew from Lebanon, under pressure from protests that took place in the wake of the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Al Hariri in Beirut.

On the way to the border I was repeatedly told to be careful who I spoke to and what I said. This was a totalitarian regime, after all; every other citizen was a Mukhabarat spy. As an Egyptian coming from Beirut at this of all times, it was easy to get in trouble, and trouble would be very serious indeed. If I got into a fight with someone who happened to have (Alawite) family connections with the powers that be, it was likely that I would disappear within the hour, never to be heard of again.

As per the Arab-nationalist provisions of the Baath I didn’t need a visa, but I was almost barred from entry after it was discovered through my passport that I was journalist (journalists were only allowed in Syria through the proper government channels). The border guard were even sloppier than their Egyptian counterparts, a little more rude too perhaps; they also seemed to be significantly more scared of their superiors, and their attitude bespoke the ruthlessness my Lebanese friends had been telling me about.

I stayed only two days in Damascus. The evening of my arrival, at some out-of-the-way cultural centre, I attended an experimental theatre show in which the earnestness and energy of the young performers belied the utter hopelessness of their position. Compared to their peers in Beirut or Cairo, the aspiring artists I encountered in Damascus had had very little exposure to contemporary trends. They were trying too hard to be cool for too small and desultory an audience.

Perhaps it was my Lebanese friends’ projections but, here as elsewhere, I felt there was something holding people back. Even when they were loquacious, which generally speaking they weren’t, people seemed to be avoiding the most important topics (which I thought must have to do with politics, the government and “the walls having ears”…)

I went to the Sayeda Zeinab Mosque, to Ibn Arabi’s shrine and the Hamidiya bazaar, all the while comparing what I saw to Cairo. I remember the food being superior and people being more relaxed about alcohol. I remember the shopkeepers being friendlier and the goods of better value. There was virtually no hustling. On the whole Damascus was like a quieter, cleaner, more honest-to-God version of Cairo. But it was also like Cairo, as I imagined it, in the 1960s: the pseudo-Soviet emblems of the all-seeing state, Father Hafez and Big Brother Bashar were ever-present; so was the profound terror of unspeakable punishments that could be meted out to anyone at any time should the state so desire.

People had the faces of the Assads tattooed on their arms, let alone plastered on their windscreens and shop windows. This was a repellent phenomenon because it bespoke not only fear but a kind of vile utilitarianism: by associating themselves with the consecrated family, by declaring their devotion to power, people could presumably get ahead faster or more smoothly. That mattered to them more than dignity or sense of right.

The tattoos in particular I would remember as I brooded over Thaer’s call: perhaps not all Syrians “want to topple the regime”, after all? Perhaps decades of state control will breed that species of utilitarian human being? Perhaps sectarianism — Sunnis hating Shias, including Alwaites, as well as non-Muslims not devotedly in the service of the Umma — was the only thing that could break the mould.

I have since seen evidence of the revolution (or at least very significant components of it) being no less miserable and murderous than the Assads. I have seen people that I hold in high regard, many of whom had suffered at the hands of the regime, side with it against what is no longer merely a threat of fundamentalist tyranny. And I have seen former agents of the regime defecting and moving to Turkey or Qatar, the better to reap the benefits of “liberation”…

On our way back to Beirut, having seen Damascus for the first time, the car was stopped at a border checkpoint and our documents picked up for inspection. They did not come back with the guard who had taken them, however, but with an imposing mustachioed officer.

Sticking his head through the car window, the man bellowed, “Where’s the Egyptian?”

Terror-stricken, I looked up, thinking maybe this was the end not of my visit to Syria but of my life as I knew it.

“Izzayyak,” the officer said: Egyptian Arabic for “how are you” (as opposed to the more standard Levantine kifak). Before I understood what was going, he handed me my passport, guffawing. “Isn’t that what you say in Egypt? Have a safe journey now,” he said.

Al Ahram Weekly

Virtual Palestinians: From Sabra and Chatila to Arab Spring

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Youssef Rakha

For me, the word “Palestinians,” whether in a headline, in the body of an article, on a handout, immediately calls to mind fedayeen in a specific spot—Jordan—and at an easily determined date: October, November, December 1970, January, February, March, April 1971. It was then and there that I discovered the Palestinian Revolution…

 “Goyim kill goyim,” Prime Minister Menachem Begin told the Knesset, “and they come to hang the Jews.”

 In the end neither Jews nor Maronites were hanged. With the PLO already in Tunis, what transpired was the termination of the Palestinian (Arab) Revolution so conceived—the apex of the counterrevolution led by Israel’s allies, and the end of the glorious legend of the fedayeen.

For reasons that had more to do with where I was in my life than sympathy with the Palestinian cause, when I went to Sabra and Chatila, I broke down in tears. It happened at the end of my walk through the site, at once so inside and outside Beirut that, spending time there, you feel as if you’ve travelled in time. It happened when I got to the tiny cemetery where the remains of some victims of the massacre are buried. There was no obvious context for crying in public, and it must’ve looked ridiculous.

 But I was in Beirut for the first time to witness the Cedar Revolution: the young, apolitical uprising against the hegemony of the Syrian regime and its sectarian practices in Lebanon, directed at the army and Mukhabarat whose personnel had enjoyed arbitrary power over the Lebanese for as long as anyone could remember. After Iraq’s disastrous liberation from Saddam, this was the first ever evidence of an Arab Spring—and, thinking about being “a virtual Palestinian”, as I had been called in Beirut, my tears anticipated another moment almost six years later, here in Cairo.

A photograph doesn’t show the flies nor the thick white smell of death. Neither does it show how you must jump over bodies as you walk along from one corpse to the next. If you look closely at a corpse, an odd phenomenon occurs: the absence of life in this body corresponds to the total absence of the body, or rather to its continuous backing away. You feel that even by coming closer you can never touch it. That happens when you look at it carefully. But should you make a move in its direction, get down next to it, move an arm or a finger, suddenly it is very much there and almost friendly. Love and death. These two words are quickly associated when one of them is written down. I had to go to Chatila to understand the obscenity of love and the obscenity of death. In both cases the body has nothing more to hide: positions, contortions, gestures, signs, even silences belong to one world and to the other… In the middle, near them, all these tortured victims, my mind can’t get rid of this “invisible vision”: what was the torturer like? Who was he? I see him and I don’t see him. He’s as large as life and the only shape he will ever have is the one formed by the stances, positions, and grotesque gestures of the dead fermenting in the sun under clouds of flies. If the American Marines, the French paratroopers, and the Italian bersagliere who made up an intervention force in Lebanon left so quickly (the Italians, who arrived by ship two days late, fled in Hercules airplanes!) one day or thirty-six hours before their official departure date, as if they were running away, and on the day before Bashir Gemayel’s assassination, are the Palestinians really wrong in wondering if Americans, French and Italians had not been warned to clear out pronto so as not to appear mixed up in the bombing of the Kataeb headquarters?

Then, arriving there, I realised something was happening. The sight and especially the sound of unbelievable numbers of young Egyptians willingly offering up their bodies—not for abstract notions like “resistance” or Islam, not against any greater or lesser devil, but for the right to live like human beings in their own country—made me weep. “It is not Islamist,” I wrote feverishly in my Facebook status later that night. “It is not limited in numbers. And I saw it with my own eyes in Maidan Al-Tahrir.”

After Cedar, it had taken five and a half years for Jasmine to break out in Tunis, driving what would sometimes be called the Lotus Revolution here. Events were not to start for real until 28 January—two days after, hearing the national anthem in a meaningful context for the first time in my life, I sang tunelessly along, tearfully ecstatic. But already, through phone and other communications after midnight, I realised the killing had started. “I want to go out,” I remember telling a Canada-based friend over Facebook chat in the small hours, “but I’m scared.”

 At that same moment a younger, renegade-Muslim-Brother friend was running through the streets of Shubra, tattered, soiled and in tears, pursued by armoured vehicles whose siren almost two years later still gives him the shivers. Another, even younger Catholic friend had fielded a load of Central Security pellets at close range; some barely missed his eyes, and he couldn’t get up unassisted; after receiving first aid in the nearest government hospital, he was sneaked through a backdoor to avoid arrest by State Security. During the day, a young woman friend had fainted from an overdose of tear gas and barely escaped being run over. Hundreds were in custody without charge; a good few were beaten up or detained for hours in police cars; some had been haplessly killed, too…

But, on the morning of 26 January, it was as if nothing had happened. The front page of the daily Al Ahram (already notorious for the “expressive” wire picture in which Mubarak was Photoshopped from the back to the front of a group of heads of state) did no so much as mention unprecedented numbers of demonstrators protesting police brutality and corruption in Tahrir. A minor demonstration in Lebanon of all places was highlighted instead. Downtown, I noticed, people went about their business.

What pained me was not “the beautiful young” dead or injured “for nothing”; “nothing” was a condition of their beauty, after all, and perhaps there weren’t enough casualties yet (though in this context what do numbers mean?) What pained me was that a turn of events that promised to yield a voluntary communal purge of society, a sort of post-religion repentance, seemed to come to nothing the next day. It hadn’t, of course; but later when it did come to something that thing very quickly became political, which meant that power would pass into the hands of religion mongers leaving society intact, with all the evil inside it.

By the time Mubarak stepped down on 11 February—not that this is technically true—there was hardly a young or a secular person in Tahrir. There was to be much more death from then on.

The statement that there is a beauty peculiar to revolutionaries raises many problems. Everyone knows, everyone suspects, that young children or adolescents living in old and harsh surroundings have a beauty of face, body, movement and gaze similar to that of the fedayeen. Perhaps this may be explained in the following way: breaking with the ancient ways, a new freedom pushes through the dead skin, and fathers and grandfathers will have a hard time extinguishing the gleam in the eyes, the throbbing in the temples, the joy of blood flowing through the veins. In the spring of 1971, in the Palestinian bases, that beauty subtly pervaded a forest made alive by the freedom of the fedayeen. In the camps a different, more muted beauty prevailed because of the presence of women and children. The camps received a sort of light from the combat bases, and as for the women, it would take a long and complex discussion to explain their radiance. Even more than the men, more than the fedayeen in combat, the Palestinian women seemed strong enough to sustain the resistance and accept the changes that came along with a revolution. They had already disobeyed the customs: they looked the men straight in the eye, they refused to wear a veil, their hair was visible, sometimes completely uncovered, their voices steady. The briefest and most prosaic of their tasks was but a small step in the self-assured journey towards a new, and therefore unknown, order, but which gave them a hint of a cleansing liberation for themselves, and a glowing pride for the men… Here in the ruins of Chatila there is nothing left. A few silent old women hastily hiding behind a door where a white cloth is nailed. As for the very young fedayeen, I will meet some in Damascus. You can select a particular community other than that of your birth, whereas you are born into a people; this selection is based on an irrational affinity, which is not to say that justice has no role, but this justice and the entire defense of this community take place because of an emotional – perhaps intuitive, sensual – attraction; I am French, but I defend the Palestinians wholeheartedly and automatically. They are in the right because I love them. But would I love them if injustice had not turned them into a wandering people?

 It was all through Friday 28 January, from noon to midnight, that I drew my own connections between youth, death and the—revolutionary—identity of the tortured. However partially or peripherally, I had that identity too; and I was no longer scared. Without the leisure of Genet’s macabre stroll, without the mythical underpinnings of the Arab Revolution or the feeling that I was a Frenchman among Palestinians with no more reason to be there than the fact that I “loved” them, I perceived how the human body responds to being run over by a speeding vehicle, the colour of what comes out of the head when it is gashed open against a solid surface, the smell of sweat on a dead young body mobbed by loud mourners and the sound of fear. There was water-hosing, live ammunition, slaughter and many things besides.

 People trembling before the murder of others on the side of the road, adolescents taking metal fences apart to use as weaponry, valiant, bare-chested battles with tear gas canisters and the increasingly expert hurling of stones and Molotov cocktails: it was a bonanza of desperation, a grafting onto the scene of “revolution” of all the violence and madness prompted by living for decades under inhuman conditions; fear and loathing in the Maidan.

That day there was plenty of opportunity for political identification with Palestinians—Qasr Al-Aini Street looked and felt like the site of an Intifada against a repressive power less competent or self-respecting and so even more brutishly undiscriminating than the Israeli army—but it wasn’t the sight of stone-throwing children facing armed men in uniform that evoked Palestine.

 It wasn’t being Arab, or to the left of a counterrevolutionary, pro-Israeli status quo. As would later be confirmed on finding out about Hamas’s atrocious response to Arab Spring demonstrations in Gaza, it was my social (human or cultural) connection with Palestinians that Friday 28 January made me aware of in a new way. And that was practically beyond tears.

As the Lebanese already knew, the position of the secular Arab as a Palestinian—state- or citizenship-less, disinherited, disgraced, betrayed and blamed for being who they are—is even more pronounced under resistance-mongering regimes like the Assads’ than elsewhere. All Arabs have their little Israels to torture them through their respective Kataeb in full view of the international community; even the Islamist banner—“Death to the infidels,” in which the latter word replaces the conventional Arab nationalist “traitors”—does not prevent that.

Many died in Chatila, and my friendship, my affection for their rotting corpses was also immense, because I had known them. Blackened, swollen, decayed by the sun and by death, they were still fedayeen. They were still fedayeen. Around two o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday three soldiers from the Lebanese army drove me, at gunpoint, to a jeep where an officer was dozing. I asked him: “Do you speak French?” — “English.” The voice was dry, maybe because I had awakened it with a start. He looked at my passport, and said to me, in French: “Have you just been there?” He pointed to Chatila. “Yes.” — “And did you see?” — “Yes.” — “Are you going to write about it?” — “Yes.” He gave me back my passport. He signaled me to leave. The three rifles were lowered. I had spent four hours in Chatila. About forty bodies remained in my memory. All of them, and I mean all, had been tortured, probably against a backdrop of drunkenness, song, laughter, the smell of gunpowder and already of decaying flesh. I was probably alone, I mean the only European (with a few old Palestinian women still clinging to a torn white cloth; with a few young unarmed fedayeen), but if these five or six human beings had not been there and I had discovered this butchered city, black and swollen Palestinians lying there, I would have gone crazy. Or did I? That city lying in smithereens which I saw or thought I saw, which I walked through, felt, and whose death stench I wore, had all that taken place?

I know Sabra and Chatila was about racism, imperialism and the ugly side of humanity. I know it had to do with the accepted construction of the Palestinian cause and (confirmed by it) the perennial suspicion that minority (as in non-Muslim) Arab communities are potential traitors to the greater nation even when that nation pretends to be other than the Umma (a pretence now backfiring throughout the region in the worst possible ways). What I have learned from the Arab Spring is that Sabra and Chatila may also have been about something else, something like a mirror image of what Genet saw in the fedayeen. Like the sectarian aftermath of the Arab Spring, like the failure of the so called international community to reign in all the little Israels whose existence Nazism’s progeny justifies, like the failure of Arab societies to make use of the sacrifices of the young and the beautiful, Sabra and Chatila was about Arab self-hatred. It was about the ugliness peculiar to revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries in times of grand narratives that, in the absence of societies to support them, are bound to end badly. In the most oblique way imaginable, Sabra and Chatila is about the ugliness of the fedayeen.

Genet’s text quoted as is in Daniel R. Dupecher and Martha Perrigaud’s translation; pictures © Youssef Rakha were taken at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, outside Berlin, in 2006

An extract from “The Crocodiles”

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

Extract from The Crocodiles by Youssef Rakha, published in October by Dar Al Saqi, Beirut

24. Today, I’m convinced we were a room no one managed to enter except three lovers. Of them, it’s Moon who figures in memory or imagination, though the last to reach us: the shade for whose sake we left a door ajar. As if the other two got in by mistake. Is it because we never knew from where she came or where she went after it all came to an end? Was it for the sake of the tomboy traits, which were to lead us to covet one woman above all others in our circle? Moon was the closest to us in age and the only poet. Perhaps for her hyper-insubstantiality and her retention—despite the slightness and small size—of a lion’s charisma, perhaps because she was the most changeable and extreme, the one whose behavior it was impossible to predict from one day to the next, we left a door ajar for Moon.

25. In the evening I think on Moon as reports reach me from afar. Very far, it seems. Each time I’m made aware of the army’s thuggery then the lies of the military leadership and their political-media cheerleaders, each time I become conscious of people’s readiness to credit lies, I’m ever happier with my remoteness. Here I shall be cut off and secure; allowed to remember. It’s truly pleasant to be spending my time tapping away with a clear head while Egypt burns, and I reflect that the problem—perhaps—is that it doesn’t burn enough; that over there are those that talk about the threat the demonstration poses to productivity and the importance of getting the economy going even as young men are abducted and tortured; that people run for parliament on the grounds of their familiarity with Our Lord, while Al Azhar’s men are murdered with live rounds. Because of this, because these events, in spite of everything, are limited, and because their significance is squandered with people’s readiness to believe in lies, I feel the necessity of remembering and am content with my remoteness.

26. In the evening I think on Moon as reports reach me and I’m thankful for the file before me on the computer screen as bit by bit it fills with words. I congratulate myself for creating a folder I named The Crocodiles—for this to be its first file—because, since doing so, I’ve lost the urge to descend to the battlefield of Tahrir Square or Qasr El Ainy Street and I feel no guilt. At times—and this is all there is—I am overwhelmed by grief. A biting light flares in my head, blinding and paralyzing me for minutes each time, and I shake and awake to a severe pain in my stomach. An hour later—not a tear shed—comes a burning desire to weep. I know none of those who’ve been killed personally, and though I’ve often put myself in the place of their family and friends—I know some of their friends—I don’t believe I’m grieving on their account. The pain whose light bites into me is a symptom of something else, a thing I don’t know how to formulate. As though you went to sleep in your comfortable home and woke to find yourself naked in the middle of the road. As though we have nothing else but this.

27. I think on Moon and remember that in 12/2010 or 1/2011, following the outbreak of Tunisia’s protests—even as the Tunisian police were killing people in the streets—one of the loyalists of Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali’s government appeared on Al Jazeera asking in a tone of disbelief, “Is the solution to burn the country? Is the solution to burn the country?” Now, a year on from the outbreak of protests in Egypt, I repeat his words with differing sentiments, his voice ringing in my ears as the reports reach me: Is the solution to burn the country?

28. And since I think on Moon… It seems to me, objectively, looking back, that she so engineered her life to obtain the maximum possible quantum of love from the maximum possible number of people, even if the love were—given that Moon was full of it and never made any real effort with anyone, inescapably—superficial and short-lived. We alone, and maybe two or three others, knew her well enough to love or hate her from the heart… But this is a tale for later.

29. In her craving for love bought cheap or at no cost at all, and in being—even her—married and quite ready to love someone other than her husband, Moon was much like the other two; only, it seems to me that she surpassed them in one essential respect. Perhaps she was too clever to take on trust the free and constantly fluctuating affection in our circle. I don’t mean that she stopped striving for it with wholehearted devotion for a single day, but I believe that she, unlike Saba and Nargis, realised it would never benefit her so long as she was not prepared to pay the price. Thus, and following the same logic, it seems she did not convert it directly into an evenly-balanced transaction.

30. Saba gathered people around her by tootling a trumpet the sound of which they admired, then used them on a daily basis, as part of her sense of achievement in life. Nargis reeled them in by depicting herself as a victim of poverty, ugliness and backwardness who had managed to triumph over all these things; she’d acquire them like artworks, piece by piece, then in her time of need brandish them like qualifications and titles in the faces of inquisitors… But Moon did something shrewder, immeasurably so. I don’t know how to describe what it is that Moon did, even after reviewing everything I know of her, but I believe it’s firmly linked to ambivalence. The space for ambivalence with Moon—her vanishing and surfacing, her protean appearance, the importance she attached to secretarial work, greater perhaps even than writing—the space for ambivalence with her was wider than anything else; it was what equipped her to find her ease in a closed room composed of us, myself, Nayf and Paulo, it’s walls constructed from the scrutiny of poetry.

31. Around the time the The Crocodiles were founded, Moon’s poems had begun to make a shy appearance in our circle. We conceded they were considerably better than the other works by women, but for all that, up until 2001 when she became part of our lives without our being conscious of the change, we paid her no mind beyond a passing nod of admiration.

32. “Blood” (one of Moon’s first poems): Today, too,/ the vivid red poppies/ open inside clothes,/ unseen by all but you,/ and louder than the swish of speeding cars outside/ Edith Piaf’s voice/ informing me that this pain’s/ your child I never bore.// Why does the music remind me that they’re not roses,/ that their purpose is to prettify the drug,/ that they seem innocent and are evil?// Every month,/ with a joy greater than can be comprehended by your dissection,/ the deception pleases me/ as I moan until you pity me a pain/ that leaves me weak and craving,/and while you lick my tears, within me vicious laughter detonates/ as I kill another/ of your children.

33. Now, it feels like Moon is fundamental and still present, so much so that I can’t believe she had not yet appeared by the end of Millenium Eve; that at dawn on 1/1/2000—while we were on our way back from the huge official party called “Twelve Dreams of the Sun” held on the Giza Plateau, at dawn on 1/1/2000—life still barely held a thing called Moon.

Translation by qisasukhra.wordpress.com

Virtual Palestinians: From Sabra and Chatila to Arab Spring

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

On the 30th anniversary of the Sabra and Chatila massacre, it is worth rereading Jean Genet’s song to the beauty of revolutionaries

“Martyrs’ Square”, Beirut, 2005. photo: Youssef Rakha
.

***

When I went to Sabra and Chatila in April 2005, I had already read Jean Genet’s “Four Hours in Chatila”—and loved it. It is a rambling meditation on death and revolution, written within a day of the killing of the entire Palestinian and Shia population of the two refugee camps within greater Beirut—ostensibly in retaliation for the killing of the pro-Israeli Kataeb leader Bachir Gemayel after he was elected president. Kataeb militiamen did the work for the Israeli army on 16-18 September 1982.
“Goyim kill goyim,” Prime Minister Menachem Begin told the Knesset, “and they come to hang the Jews.”
In the end neither Jews nor Maronites were hanged. With the PLO already in Tunis, what transpired was the termination of the Palestinian (Arab) Revolution so conceived—the apex of the counterrevolution led by Israel’s allies, and the end of the glorious legend of the fedayeen.
For reasons that had more to do with where I was in my life than sympathy with the Palestinian cause, when I went to Sabra and Chatila, I broke down in tears. It happened at the end of my walk through the site, at once so inside and outside Beirut that, spending time there, you feel as if you’ve travelled in time. It happened when I got to the tiny cemetery where the remains of some victims of the massacre are buried. There was no obvious context for crying in public, and it must’ve looked ridiculous.
But I was in Beirut for the first time to witness the Cedar Revolution: the young, apolitical uprising against the hegemony of the Syrian regime and its sectarian practices in Lebanon, directed at the army and mukhabarat whose personnel had enjoyed arbitrary power over the Lebanese for as long as anyone could remember. After Iraq’s disastrous liberation from Saddam, this was the first ever evidence of an Arab Spring—and, thinking about being “a virtual Palestinian”, as I had been called in Beirut, my tears anticipated another moment almost six years later, here in Cairo.

***

A photograph doesn’t show the flies nor the thick white smell of death. Neither does it show how you must jump over bodies as you walk along from one corpse to the next. If you look closely at a corpse, an odd phenomenon occurs: the absence of life in this body corresponds to the total absence of the body, or rather to its continuous backing away. You feel that even by coming closer you can never touch it. That happens when you look at it carefully. But should you make a move in its direction, get down next to it, move an arm or a finger, suddenly it is very much there and almost friendly. Love and death. These two words are quickly associated when one of them is written down. I had to go to Chatila to understand the obscenity of love and the obscenity of death. In both cases the body has nothing more to hide: positions, contortions, gestures, signs, even silences belong to one world and to the other…
In the middle, near them, all these tortured victims, my mind can’t get rid of this “invisible vision”: what was the torturer like? Who was he? I see him and I don’t see him. He’s as large as life and the only shape he will ever have is the one formed by the stances, positions, and grotesque gestures of the dead fermenting in the sun under clouds of flies. If the American Marines, the French paratroopers, and the Italian bersagliere who made up an intervention force in Lebanon left so quickly (the Italians, who arrived by ship two days late, fled in Hercules airplanes!) one day or thirty-six hours before their official departure date, as if they were running away, and on the day before Bashir Gemayel’s assassination, are the Palestinians really wrong in wondering if Americans, French and Italians had not been warned to clear out pronto so as not to appear mixed up in the bombing of the Kataeb headquarters?

***

I’m pretty sure that circle of sparse vegetation where people are buried is in Sabra, not Chatila. But Sabra and Chatila are so interwoven in my memory it really hardly matters.
The walls and the unpaved ground were white, and white was the dust staining what asphalt there was. As I sobbed uncontrollably before the unmarked graves, what my tears anticipated—unbeknown to me, of course—was the night of 25 January 2011. That evening on my way home from the offices of Al Ahram, having laughed at the concept of revolution-as-Facebook-event, I decided to walk through Tahrir to see if the demonstrations planned for Police Day were any different from endless—useless—protests I had seen since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Then, arriving there, I realised something was happening. The sight and especially the sound of unbelievable numbers of young Egyptians willingly offering up their bodies—not for abstract notions like “resistance” or Islam, not against any greater or lesser devil, but for the right to live like human beings in their own country—made me weep. “It is not Islamist,” I wrote feverishly in my Facebook status later that night. “It is not limited in numbers. And I saw it with my own eyes in Maidan Al-Tahrir.”
After Cedar, it had taken five and a half years for Jasmine to break out in Tunis, driving what would sometimes be called the Lotus Revolution here. Events were not to start for real until 28 January—two days after, hearing the national anthem in a meaningful context for the first time in my life, I sang tunelessly along, tearfully ecstatic. But already, through phone and other communications after midnight, I realised the killing had started. “I want to go out,” I remember telling a Canada-based friend over Facebook chat in the small hours, “but I’m scared.”
At that same moment a younger, renegade-Muslim-Brother friend was running through the streets of Shubra, tattered, soiled and in tears, pursued by armoured vehicles whose siren almost two years later still gives him the shivers. Another, even younger Catholic friend had fielded a load of Central Security pellets at close range; some barely missed his eyes, and he couldn’t get up unassisted; after receiving first aid in the nearest government hospital, he was sneaked through a backdoor to avoid arrest by State Security. During the day, a young woman friend had fainted from an overdose of tear gas and barely escaped being run over. Hundreds were in custody without charge; a good few were beaten up or detained for hours in police cars; some had been haplessly killed, too…
But, on the morning of 26 January, it was as if nothing had happened. The front page of the daily Al Ahram (already notorious for the “expressive” wire picture in which Mubarak was Photoshopped from the back to the front of a group of heads of state) did no so much as mention unprecedented numbers of demonstrators protesting police brutality and corruption in Tahrir. A minor demonstration in Lebanon of all places was highlighted instead. Downtown, I noticed, people went about their business.
What pained me was not “the beautiful young” dead or injured “for nothing”; “nothing” was a condition of their beauty, after all, and perhaps there weren’t enough casualties yet (though in this context what do numbers mean?) What pained me was that a turn of events that promised to yield a voluntary communal purge of society, a sort of post-religion repentance, seemed to come to nothing the next day. It hadn’t, of course; but later when it did come to something that thing very quickly became political, which meant that power would pass into the hands of religion mongers leaving society intact, with all the evil inside it.
By the time Mubarak stepped down on 11 February—not that this is technically true—there was hardly a young or a secular person in Tahrir. There was to be much more death from then on.

***

The statement that there is a beauty peculiar to revolutionaries raises many problems. Everyone knows, everyone suspects, that young children or adolescents living in old and harsh surroundings have a beauty of face, body, movement and gaze similar to that of the fedayeen. Perhaps this may be explained in the following way: breaking with the ancient ways, a new freedom pushes through the dead skin, and fathers and grandfathers will have a hard time extinguishing the gleam in the eyes, the throbbing in the temples, the joy of blood flowing through the veins. In the spring of 1971, in the Palestinian bases, that beauty subtly pervaded a forest made alive by the freedom of the fedayeen. In the camps a different, more muted beauty prevailed because of the presence of women and children. The camps received a sort of light from the combat bases, and as for the women, it would take a long and complex discussion to explain their radiance. Even more than the men, more than the fedayeen in combat, the Palestinian women seemed strong enough to sustain the resistance and accept the changes that came along with a revolution. They had already disobeyed the customs: they looked the men straight in the eye, they refused to wear a veil, their hair was visible, sometimes completely uncovered, their voices steady. The briefest and most prosaic of their tasks was but a small step in the self-assured journey towards a new, and therefore unknown, order, but which gave them a hint of a cleansing liberation for themselves, and a glowing pride for the men…
Here in the ruins of Chatila there is nothing left. A few silent old women hastily hiding behind a door where a white cloth is nailed. As for the very young fedayeen, I will meet some in Damascus. You can select a particular community other than that of your birth, whereas you are born into a people; this selection is based on an irrational affinity, which is not to say that justice has no role, but this justice and the entire defense of this community take place because of an emotional – perhaps intuitive, sensual – attraction; I am French, but I defend the Palestinians wholeheartedly and automatically. They are in the right because I love them. But would I love them if injustice had not turned them into a wandering people?

***

Genet just didn’t know about political Islam, did he? He didn’t appreciate the effects on collective consciousness of nearly a century of social-cultural-sexual—forget political—repression, of systematic misinformation, humiliation and discouragement of initiative, of words denoting things other than what they say even in life-and-death circumstances, actions failing to yield consensual meaning, courage going unnoticed and festering “tradition” prioritised over such birthrights as sense, sensibility and sensation.
It was all through Friday 28 January, from noon to midnight, that I drew my own connections between youth, death and the—revolutionary—identity of the tortured. However partially or peripherally, I had that identity too; and I was no longer scared. Without the leisure of Genet’s macabre stroll, without the mythical underpinnings of the Arab Revolution or the feeling that I was a Frenchman among Palestinians with no more reason to be there than the fact that I “loved” them, I perceived how the human body responds to being run over by a speeding vehicle, the colour of what comes out of the head when it is gashed open against a solid surface, the smell of sweat on a dead young body mobbed by loud mourners and the sound of fear. There was water-hosing, live ammunition, slaughter and many things besides.
People trembling before the murder of others on the side of the road, adolescents taking metal fences apart to use as weaponry, valiant, bare-chested battles with tear gas canisters and the increasingly expert hurling of stones and Molotov cocktails: it was a bonanza of desperation, a grafting onto the scene of “revolution” of all the violence and madness prompted by living for decades under inhuman conditions; fear and loathing in the Maidan.
That day there was plenty of opportunity for political identification with Palestinians—Qasr Al-Aini Street looked and felt like the site of an Intifada against a repressive power less competent or self-respecting and so even more brutishly undiscriminating than the Israeli army—but it wasn’t the sight of stone-throwing children facing armed men in uniform that evoked Palestine.
It wasn’t being Arab, or to the left of a counterrevolutionary, pro-Israeli status quo. As would later be confirmed on finding out about Hamas’s atrocious response to Arab Spring demonstrations in Gaza, it was my social (human or cultural) connection with Palestinians that Friday 28 January made me aware of in a new way. And that was practically beyond tears.
As the Lebanese already knew, the position of the secular Arab as a Palestinian—state- or citizenship-less, disinherited, disgraced, betrayed and blamed for being who they are—is even more pronounced under resistance-mongering regimes like the Assads’ than elsewhere. All Arabs have their little Israels to torture them through their respective Kataeb in full view of the international community; even the Islamist banner—“Death to the infidels,” in which the latter word replaces the conventional Arab nationalist “traitors”—does not prevent that.

***

Genet’s text (in italics) quoted as is in Daniel R. Dupecher and Martha Perrigaud’s translation

Download ebook on Egyptian revolution

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

… It just must be admitted that, where the predominant (post-Christian) civilization is racist, murderous and hypocritical, so too are the quasi-civilizations that purport to do battle with it, including the post-Ottoman Arab state…

DOWNLOAD

NAHDA and Co.

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

No Renaissance for Old Men
Last week Youssef Rakha questioned the idea of resistance. This week he thinks about the Islamists’ catch phrase
It is the word that Tunisia’s Muslim Brothers chose for their harakah (or movement) and in which the Egyptian jama’ah (or group) couched its presidential programme; it dates all the way back to the late 18th century when, under Muhammad Ali Pasha in particular, it would’ve denoted something significantly different. But in a way it has been the mirror image of European imperialism since then, with its post-Arab Spring Islamist manifestations in Tunisia and Egypt constituting one possible logical conclusion of the region’s political trajectory, and the murderous Arab nationalist dictatorships (whether Gaddafi’s in Libya or the Baath’s in Syria and Iraq) another.
What I want to argue is that, in more ways than one (and despite all the wonderful things it almost did), the so called Arab renaissance has in fact been part and parcel of this immense downward fall of recent history, and that—far from presenting a homegrown alternative to the neoliberal world order, arguably the extension and apotheosis of empire—it has actually aided and abetted the imperialist project.
And well it might: Nahda is to muqawamah (or resistance) what modernism was to imperialism; in some ways, perhaps, it is also what Europe’s Renaissance was to the northern Puritanical values that were eventually more or less subsumed by Enlightenment.
Following this line of thought, one can make surprising connections between past failures of the wannabe independent modern state (Nasser’s “first republic” in Egypt) and present-future failures of Islamism (the Muslim Brotherhood’s proposed “second republic”). One can also make connections between both forms of totalitarianism (top-down in the case of the July regime, bottom-up in the present case) and the negative, inferiority complex-driven motivation that—while making huge room for sloganeering, doublespeak and overt suppression—makes no room at all for the revival or regeneration of a glorious past, be it Arab and purely imagined or Islamic and somewhat real. It is a “renaissance” that denies the very tenets of what it hopes to donner naissance to anew: reason, military and/or economic power, cutting-edge global outlook, joyful aspirations…
So, for example, to underline their belief in a militarily powerful and united pan-Arab nation, an Arab nationalist will by default glorify the one dictator responsible not onlyfor the worst military defeat in Arab history (1967) but also for separating Egypt and Sudan and then setting a precedent for the failure of unification by showing the world exactly how not to unify with Syria, encouraging national as opposed to pan-Arab sentiments and limiting inter-Arab freedom of movement, exchange and initiative in practice. To demonstrate how “Islam honours women”, an Islamist will insist on such allegedly intrinsic “Islamic principles” as niqab and polygamy.
Likewise the material renaissance promised by President Mohamed Mursi (or, more accurately perhaps, by businessman Khairat El-Shatir, the most powerful man in the Brotherhood’s Guidance Office): what is marketed as an alternative to Mubarak’s neoliberal and peace-with-Israel policies is actually a programme for turning the entire expanse of the Arab world into a string of modified Saudi Arabias, not only pro-Israeli and even more ruthlessly capitalist but also disinterested in human rights and inevitably impoverished in the absence of oil reserves.
In its accepted, present formulation democracy originated and continues to operate in wholly secularised and intellectually free societies based on universal rights and freedoms. How the Saudification of the Arab world through such vaguely Ku Klux-like “political” entities as the Salafi Nour Party can be the result of democratic process is a baffling question.
Yet such contradictions are hardly coincidental. Without reviewing the history of the term, I just want to draw attention to the manner in which nahda presupposes such manifestations of death and demise as Nakba, naksa (Nasser’s euphemism for the 1967 defeat) and takhalluf (or backwardness). By stressing the (purely rhetorical) need for self- or identity-assertion, what the Muslim Brotherhood is doing is throwing a sand storm into the eyes of Egyptians, just as the Arab nationalists did before it:
Nahda does not mean the elimination of autocracy and corruption, it means stamping them with the divine seal of “Islam”; it does not mean improving the intellectual and material circumstances of students, teachers and creative people, it means ensuring that they espouse the right slogans—even (or preferably) at the expense of progress and production.
It does not mean instating the principles on which a truly functional democracy can be built (a long term process so far seemingly more successful in Libya), it means liaising with the military dictators and their imperialist patrons, guaranteeing the security of Israel, invoking the revolution and “the will of the people”, monopolising the drafting of a new constitution, replacing state institutions and personnel with their own, buying votes, beating people up and otherwise defying law, order and decency in order to gain recognition through sheer power—in exactly the same way as resistance means not actually opposing the status quo but deploying a certain, negative rhetoric in the struggle to prevail over the competition for it. Nahda just may be the Greater Nakba in the making.
***
In this context it may be worth remembering the initial term in which 25 January was described: as a YOUNG revolution. Notwithstanding all their moral faults, and regardless of individual people’s ages, the Islamists are confirming the suspicion that they are even older than the regime whose ugliness “the people” led by online activists rose up against. No true renaissance is conceivable in the presence of so much moral and material AGE. And perhaps a true renaissance, even the beginning of one, will happen despite (and not because of) Nahda, after all. Such a development would need no rhetoric to support it and no Washington-style marketing to give it impetus. It would not cooperate with the military arbiters who are the post-post-national embodiment of the failure of the independent nation. It would manifest in production, progress and words meaning what they say: a complete break with the lifeless past. Such a renaissance would probably not oppose the global status quo—at least not in the foreseeable future—but neither will it have to pretend to.

The menace of resistance

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

Youssef Rakha, Islamophobe

Youssef Rakha thinks about the Brotherhood, the military and the modern state

A long time ago — it must have been 2000 — I was briefly in trouble at work for apparently belittling the achievement of Hezbollah against Israel in an article I had written.
The censure came from a left-wing, thoroughly secular editor; and I wasn’t particularly distressed to have to redraft the paragraphs in question. Perhaps, I thought, I had let my Islamophobia get the better of me. (I should point out that, though steadfastly agnostic, I am still Muslim, as eclectically proud of my heritage as any post-Enlightenment individual can reasonably be; so my self-acknowledged Islamophobia refers neither to the religion nor the historical identity but specifically to the far more recent phenomenon — perhaps I may be allowed to say “catastrophe” — of political Islam.) I was to realise that much of the Arab left’s respect for Hezbollah centred on the concept of resistance and, especially, its perceived triumph over a materially superior power, independently of a quasi-commonwealth of incompletely constructed modern states whose majority’s compromised position had rendered it an ineffective rival to “the Zionist entity”.
In the same context though perhaps not from the same time, I remember having mixed feelings about a Moroccan activist in a demonstration on Al Jazeera crying out repeatedly, “I am secular, but I support the Islamic resistance in Lebanon.”
Admittedly, when I wrote that article, what bothered me the most about Hezbollah was its underlying (theocratic) totalitarianism, not its armed struggle per se. But since then, over many years in which I have been exposed to much more historical-political material as well as experiencing regional and local developments first hand — and without losing any of my contempt for Israel or the postcolonial order that sustains it, for which my being an Arab or a Muslim is by no means necessary — I have come to see very major issues with the concept of resistance itself: so much so that, like Jihadism, it sometimes seems to me one of the postcolonial world powers’ less visible instruments.
Notwithstanding how Hezbollah has renounced the moral high ground by supporting Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Syria — one of the few supposedly uncompromised states whose “resistance” status has allowed it to practice genocide against its own citizens with impunity since the 1980s while in no way improving its situation vis-a-vis Israel — it is of course less about the Arab-Israeli conflict that I am thinking than the confluence of the left (socialist, Arab nationalist or “Nasserist”) and political Islam in the aftermath of January-February 2011 in Egypt: the Arab Spring. I am thinking about how that confluence, perhaps more than any other factor, has emptied “revolution” of any possible import. To what extent did the theory and practice of resistance in what has probably been the most important of the compromised Arab states lead to the perpetuation of both military hegemony and systematic deprivation of basic rights and freedoms, including freedom of belief?
***
The current “transfer of power” to the Muslim Brotherhood is not happening as a result of the protests and sacrifices that made regime change possible over 18 months ago. It is not happening against the will of the postcolonial world order. It is happening as a result of West-blessed, SCAF-mediated “democratic” politicising — facilitated precisely by standing in ideological and practical opposition to the former status quo (an advantage the more or less liberal, as opposed to Islamist, protesters who staged “the revolution” never had).
Unlike agents of the modern state but like Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood have helped to provide citizens with services, garnered their tribal loyalty by encouraging their conservatism and fed them an identity-based discourse of heroism, piety or renaissance. Preying on their raw emotions, they have also given them material rewards in return for their votes.
Now, contrary to what the left has been preaching since the start of the presidential elections, the “transfer of power” at hand will keep all the military’s unlawful privileges intact: the enormous military economy will continue to operate unscathed; crimes against humanity committed in the last 18 months will go unpunished; “revolutionaries” who have been subject to military trial will neither be re-tried nor released without high-profile intervention, etc. At the same time, while other beneficiaries of institutionalised corruption may change, the security and judicial apparatus that sustains it will not.
Thus resistance: somewhere in the collective imagination, irrespective of historical fact, the Muslim Brotherhood is not the capitalist, scheming, dictatorial, corrupt and abusive entity that the Mubarak regime was. It is a force of resistance. Never mind that it is sectarian, misogynistic, totalitarian, irrational and just as postcolonially compromised (hence just as capitalist, scheming etc.): as the de facto custodian of a religion and a culture it has only actually acted to humiliate, the Brotherhood is seen as an alternative, in exactly the same way as Hezbollah was seen as an alternative, to the failed state. What is either not seen or purposely overlooked is that the alternative’s existence depends on the failure of the state and modernity, which to one degree or another political Islam has always encouraged or helped to perpetuate.
So, while Islamophobia in the West is fear of the physically violent monster secretly created to combat communism during the Cold War, my own Islamphobia is fear of the morally violent monster covertly spawned by the failure of the postcolonial nation state and increasingly integrated into the world order at the expense not of Western (or communist) lives but of Muslim minds and souls. My Islamophobia is in fact a profoundly Muslim response to “revolution”.
***
Yet it is resistance as a concept that seems to hold the key. Not that the Muslim Brotherhood has used the term recently, but it is written into the proposed political formulation of a collective and supposedly efficacious identity that that identity should be against something.
What is required for this is not that the orientation in question should actually be against anything in practice, whether that thing is the world order, Israel or institutionalised corruption in the Egyptian state. It is interesting to note that, while their raison d’être is to be a distinct moral improvement on the corrupt, compromised political status quo, the Muslim Brothers, whether in parliament or beyond, have so far replicated the Mubarak regime’s conduct and mores, from pledging alliance to Washington and guaranteeing Israel’s security to monopolising and abusing power (the Freedom and Justice Party being, in effect, the “Islamic” variation on the now dissolved National Democratic Party).
What is required, rather, is that the resisting entity should espouse a certain degree of (moral if not physical) violence, drawing on both a totalitarian sense of identity and a paranoid conviction of victimhood. This is not to deny that the Muslim Brotherhood had been subject to persecution since its foundation in 1928; it is to say that, in the absence of any holistic vision even for the future of Islam (one that would crucially include ways to eliminate rather than perpetuate those anachronistic and obstructive aspects of the faith that alienate Muslims from the modern world and prevent them from contributing to human civilisation), the victimisation of the Muslim Brotherhood can only mean a justification for getting their own back — not actually changing anything for the majority of Egyptians.
Without any aspiration to reform, let alone revolution, and while they continue to provide cover for less sophisticated Islamists, the Brothers can only remain aspiring Mubaraks.
Even more fascinating, however, is the way in which the apparent triumph of the opposition embodied by the Muslim Brotherhood has automatically resulted in the opposition embodied by the left giving up all that it supposedly stands for in order to be in the seemingly right camp— an ideological paradox resolved with relative ease once what the left actually has in common with political Islam is identified: totalitarian identity, contempt for the modern state, paranoid victimhood, bias for the (class) underdog and, most importantly of all, the resistance imperative.
***
Egypt’s recent variation on the confluence of the left with political Islam is particularly ludicrous in that, while what the left supported the Muslim Brotherhood in order to resist was SCAF, it was arguably SCAF that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power. It occurs to me now that, taking this into account, Islamophobia should really also be understood as opposition to the military — a fight on which the left was willing to give up when it allied itself with the Islamists.

KENYON REVIEW (MINI) INTERVIEW

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

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With my late father, Elsaid Elsayed Rakha—lawyer, disillusioned communist, and incredible anti-patriarch, 1981

*

What have you learned about the writing process in the last five years?
I’ve learned too many technical things to list here, and they’re all the more difficult to list because it happened mostly in Arabic. But I also learned to pool different kinds of writing – journalism, literary nonfiction, poetry, historical research, erotica, and humor – to bring together my first novel, the Book of the Sultan’s Seal (forthcoming in English translation with Interlink). The result is a kind of pastiche, but maybe all novel-writing is pastiche. It’s not so much mixing and matching styles of writing as juxtaposing ways of looking at the world through mimicking the corresponding languages in which that world reveals itself, through people – the challenge being to maintain a unified and presumably compelling whole.
Since the novel was published it’s been called both an achievement and a pointless experiment: I’ve learned to accept that too. Not criticism per se – was it Ingmar Bergman who said that all criticism is poison? – because you can’t take in poison, but the fact that part of the value of a serious book is that some readers won’t like it. It’s always more interesting to ask what someone likes or dislikes about your work than whether or not they value it as such. Sometimes what is wrong with your book is simply that another writer feels superior (or inferior) to you, or that a person you’ve known doesn’t want to be a character, or to be that character. So your purpose in asking is never to change course to suit a wider variety of tastes. It’s to check your intentions against people’s expectations, taking their positions and underlying assumptions into account. I don’t tend to invent characters, I tend to reinvent and change real people; it’s not always possible to cut all relations with people I’ve written about, and I’m sure as hell not going to mess up my work just so that they stay happy with me!
More importantly, perhaps, in the last five years I’ve learned not to pay too much attention to Cairo literary-intellectual circles, which are limited and limiting spaces. While making up a sizable part of the very tiny proportion of Egyptians actually interested in literature, these circles are so incestuous and inward-looking and small-minded they can make writing, let alone being a writer, seem like a hateful exercise – a bad habit, almost. Now even if it is that, writing – even Arabic writing, even writing for oneself, without ambition – should never feel quite so despicable…

Tell us a little about your KR piece. How was it written? What was the hardest part about writing it?
The idea for the piece came up in (online) conversation with my US publisher, Hilary Plum, who being a writer herself is my guardian angel in your part of the world – even though we haven’t met. We were talking about Arabic literature in translation and I’d shown her a bunch of articles I’d written about literature and the Arab Spring for Al Ahram Weekly, which she thought too removed to be worth collecting for publication in America. She suggested writing a longer piece in which things could come together for readers not familiar with my part of the world.
My starting point was that there need not be anything fundamentally different about contemporary literature in the Arab world than in Turkey, Japan, Eastern Europe, Latin America, or anywhere else – which I really think there isn’t. So the challenge was to show that there has been a continuous tradition of sophisticated writing in Arabic even though, for ultimately political reasons, Westerners have not known about it; and to debunk the mythical (and, frankly, rather ugly) narrative of a recent boom in engaging writing that facilitated a corresponding boom in successful translation to English. The Arab Spring, which happened in the wake of the supposed boom, provided a suitable reference point. Western interest in “the Arab novel” as political commentary or anthropological source material can only misrepresent contemporary Arabic literature and misread its context.
The hardest part was bringing in all kinds of relevant details – Islamism, the Egyptian regime’s shifting alliances during the Cold War, the place of literature in society – each of which was complex enough for a separate essay. I also wasn’t always clear about what needed clarification, because naturally I take too many facts for granted – and it was in this department that Hilary’s contribution proved indispensable. It kind of proved my point, though: for someone who is interested in literature, even the most irrelevant and far-away society need not be more than a backdrop. It might require explanation but that doesn’t come in the way of the life-affirming exchange, both intimate and supra-cultural, that is literature.

Philip Larkin has a great short essay on writing called “The Pleasure Principle.” In it, he sketches three stages of writing a poem. The steps begin like this: “the first (stage) is when a (hu)man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it.” Are his stages germane to your writing process, and what you try to make when you write?
I think they are, yes, to some extent. I think they’re especially germane to my writing a poem, which I do most often while I’m working on other things. But they don’t explain why, occasionally, that just doesn’t work and someone who is normally able to set off your poetic devices will be stuck and blame you, even though you’ve treated your new “emotional concept” in the exact same way… I think what matters in the procedure Larkin describes is how much space you leave within the device for someone to actually invent an emotional concept connected with the one that compelled you to construct it, because I doubt if emotional concepts that you become obsessed with can really be reproduced intact; and sometimes when you try to ensure they are reproduced as is that just alienates someone whose environment or ideas or beliefs are different from yours – which is exactly what literature should not do. I mean, the scary thing about Larkin’s procedure is that it sounds like the recipe for giving birth to a new cliche or – the easier thing, by far – finding a relatively new and interesting way of relaying a cliche. I am not necessarily denying that this may be the most any writer can ever do, but there are better and more fun ways of doing it.
My writing process doesn’t always depend on instantaneous obsession with an emotional concept. I mean, sometimes it does. But I have a few emotionally pertinent concepts that I’m obsessed with all the time: what it means to not be alone, for example; how something becomes real depending on whether you perceive it to be real or on how you talk about it; what society and identity mean for an individual… Each piece of writing is a way of indulging these same obsessions. I couldn’t tell you precisely what my concepts are because they are in constant transition and transformation, but it’s always interesting to trace the interests and experiments you are working on now all the way back to something you wrote ten years ago. And then you change: you really are not the person you were even two or three years ago; I don’t mean that metaphorically. How the obsessions carry over from one “I” to the next is something a writer might be aware of. It can be unnerving.

In the 1950′s, John Crowe Ranson invited a coterie of critics (William Empson, Northrop Frye, etc.) to write a “credo” for the The Kenyon Review. The results became an essay series by 10 leading critics on their core beliefs regarding literature and the critical practice, entitled “My Credo.” What would you include in your own credo? What core beliefs do you have about literature and books?
Most of the time I think of writing as a position on the world – a vocation, a lifestyle, an ethics – in the way that scholarship or performance, say, is a position on the world. Writing is the position on the world that’s not a political position, or the closest thing possible to a position that’s not political – even when it deals, on the surface, with political or historical subjects. What I mean by this is that the knowledge literature produces, the pleasures it involves, the seemingly unethical practices it sometimes permits, all want to experience something more than history. (Remember Joyce’s famous statement: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”) They want to say something more about a person or a group of people than where and when they live, what their lives look like, or what predetermined factors make them look that way – the nightmare, which it really is impossible to awake from no matter what. Literature wants to say something DESPITE that nightmare, something about what lives mean or could’ve meant, how beautiful they can be looked at in a certain way, or why they might be worth living. I think when you try honestly to do that, you speak to more people who are different from you than it’s otherwise possible. That’s partly why literature is important: it emphasizes things that are deeper and more consistent and that last longer than most “history”. In this sense, even though it should always be accessible, it’s a very specialized mode of information sharing; I believe it’s comparable to (though no longer part of) those scholarly endeavors we’ve come to group together as the humanities, which are older than but never entirely incompatible with the natural sciences, and which can rarely do without a historical-political frame.
Still, writing is about language, that infinitely imperfect but necessary tool for going about our lives. It’s about the space that lies between reality and the words with which we manage it: our only way of dealing with, creating, changing (or failing to change) what the universe throws at us or throws us into. Language is more consensual than most other reality-molding tools – weapons or borders, for example – even though those other tools still require it, and even though in literature it’s far more fluid than them. So playing with language – often with the many registers of spoken and written Arabic, in my case – will have to be included in my credo. I try not to do this for its own sake because there are more interesting things to be done in literature. But then it’s always fascinating to see how changing the rules of the language you use will ultimately shape the reality you’re summoning up as you use it. Maybe it’s more accurate to say “the alternative reality” since, like that of any information system, however interactive, the reality literature sustains will inevitably be more ordered and finite than actual, perceptual reality.
My credo would also include a couple of sentences about the fact that in Arabic, the word for book is a more recent usage for what used to mean simply “epistle”. All canonical books in Arabic are actually addressed to a friend or a patron, just like letters. That’s a very moving metaphor for me because when I write, it’s always TO someone, usually to my best friend (who lives in a different country and very seldom reads my work), but also to someone I don’t know. So, considering how limited the readership for literature is anywhere in the world, few things make me happier than finding out my letter has reached and moved someone who isn’t a writer or a critic, who doesn’t exist in the same part of space-time as I, and who may not even speak the same language (that is the advantage of translation and, in my case, of having two languages). It’s because, as well as being a specialized mode of producing knowledge, literature is an affirmation of your existence – in some ways, it is the only one. The thing that you communicate to another which tries to beat history is your person, your soul or your neurochemical imprint, which can’t be mass-produced and will always be subjective and at least slightly insane.

Tell us about a teacher (“teacher” construed broadly!) who has been important to your writing.
There are a few possibilities here. I want to talk about the late Sargon Boulus (1944-2007), who spent most of his life in San Francisco and had connections with the Beat Generation and City Lights, and whom (perhaps not as sadly as it sometimes feels) I never met. Strangely enough but not – in retrospect – unexpectedly, it was a few months before he died that I first heard of him. I didn’t even hear of him. I walked into a bookshop in Abu Dhabi, where I was living at the time, and picked up a collection of poems; the author’s name was very unusual but vaguely familiar.
I think it’s symptomatic of the catastrophe that was Arab nationalism that this Assyrian-Christian Iraqi, whether because he was an emigre or because he was neither a (Muslim) nationalist nor politicized, remains largely uncelebrated even in literary circles. As far as I’m concerned he is the 20th-century incarnation of the great Abbasid poet al Mutannabi. He has the same incredible inventiveness, the same facility with language, the same combination of intense self-interest and lack of keenness on personal topics. From the time that I found that collection, “The Lantern Bearer in the Night of Wolves”, and until I finished my Book of the Sultan’s Seal, I read all of Sargon’s poems that were published; it is still that first book that I return to most often.
I have no idea what Sargon taught me. Some of my poems are modeled on poems he wrote, some are more or less direct reinterpretations; sometimes I feel that every good poem I’ve written since 2007 is thanks to him. But his “influence” – I guess that’s what you would call it – lies somewhere else entirely. I guess he was what I could never be: a true vagabond (a Beatnik) who had to provide for himself as soon as he started traveling in his teens; a dedicated poet who worked in Assyrian as well as Arabic and English and saw translation as an essential part of his career; a globetrotter with no connection to a city like the one I have with Cairo. But he is perhaps the only contemporary figure who saw the Arabic language exactly as I do:
“There is no pure language in this sense. [Arabic] happened to be the strongest so it pulled around itself, like a magnet, all the dying languages that had seen their day centuries ago. It was a powerful language that absorbed other languages… So, when I write my poetry in Arabic, I tell you this – and it’s a secret between me and myself – sometimes I feel that I am really writing in all these languages, because I believe, finally, that any language contains all the dead memories of the races who contributed to it… it’s like raw material for me. I feel that this language could be extended endlessly into some new idiomatic formulations – which I’m doing all the time.”
*

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

“We never used to have sectarian tension”
Posted on October 20, 2011
That being, of course, a lie. And lies, however well meaning, just may be the crux of the problem.
Had a truly secular state ever emerged in Egypt, perhaps it would have made sense to blame Copts for their sectarianism. As it is, surely Coptic sectarianism is part of the struggle for an effective concept of citizenship? As I wondered whether the Maspero protest of 9 Oct might be the “third revolution” promised but not forthcoming since March, I tweeted, “They are shooting at the Copts.” I remember this because coworkers who immediately saw the tweet – they presumably do not follow the same people – berated me lightheartedly for spreading unconfirmed (mis)information. What their notebooks and iPhones as well as security personnel in the building were telling them was that it was a mob of Copts who were wreaking chaos and, inexplicably armed, firing at the Central Security and Military Police personnel who were attempting to control them. Lying through their teeth, pro-Supreme Council of the Armed Forces news personnel from this building and elsewhere reported Armed Forces casualties.
As a Muslim-born Cairo-dweller, I feel this is an occasion to say how I grew up in an atmosphere of sectarianism partly justified by its being – understandably, since they were the minority – even more intense among Christians. It was normal to be told by a quasi-religious acquaintance about a third party, for example, “True, he’s Christian – but he’s actually a good man!” Unlike the average Copt, who will just be careful who they are speaking to, saying little if anything on the topic to an interlocutor they deem unsympathetic, an educated urban Muslim will reflexively, categorically deny the existence of a sectarian problem in Egypt, citing religious, patriotic or pragmatic arguments to say that, in effect, the position of the Copts in Egyptian society could not possibly be better than it already is.
With the rise of Islamism since the Nineties this has taken on variously sinister motifs: identifying salib (Arabic for “cross”) with salibi (Crusader), for example, an adherent of fanatical dogma may suggest that, simply by virtue of who they are, Egyptian Christians are in fact the enemy. In this way the historically pro-Muslim Conquest Copts – and Copt simply means “Egyptian”, as opposed to the equally Christian Greek rulers of the land – are turned into allies of “the Jews and the Americans” (as in those responsible for the existence of Israel and their Roman-like, Muslim-hating patrons). But even among “moderate” Muslims, arguments for “national unity” – a concept which, though an essential part of its rhetoric, the regime established by coup d’etat in July 1952 has systematically rendered meaningless by excluding and discriminating against Copts, encouraging both Coptic deference and Muslim complacency – fail to take into account centuries of inequality including occasional persecution.
***

Of homogeneity and bakshish
Posted on October 15, 2011
Long before a “revolution” could have been anticipated, people – especially urban Arabs – noticed something about Cairo. In a roundabout way, the title of a book of poems by the Lebanese globe-trotter Suzanne Alaywan, All Roads Lead to Salah Salem (a reference to one major road linking northern and southern ends of the megalopolis) accurately expresses that sentiment: Of all the world’s cities, Cairo seems to have the capacity to absorb people into its folds, to make them – in appearance and attitude if not in thinking or values – like other people already established inside it; it has the capacity, brutishly but somehow peaceably, to iron out difference.
The poet was not at cross purpose with the fact. I tend to think she, like others within and without, saw it as inevitable but positive, a possible answer to otherwise intractable inter-issue dilemmas which liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, could only solve with the help of economic and institutional hardware not available to the Arab or the third world. The more or less forced homogeneity of course has its roots in a culture of compromise and hypocrisy, in people’s willingness to lie about how they feel in order to benefit from other people, whose difference – in looks, tongue, dress code, income level – offers further justification for practically robbing them.
Yet, as the aftermath of events has demonstrated, there is more to that proverbial Rome of the mind than simple untruth. Decades of corruption were also decades of voluntary repression, in which excessive panhandling just might have been a sublimation of mugging, and pay-for-your-difference an ameliorated form of the marauding mob. The difference-eliminating software is after all as evident in Arab nationalism as it is in political Islam, and perhaps even Mubarak’s client government sought to accommodate the interests of global liberalism only insofar as the world order, up to and including Saudi Arabia (which as far as I am concerned is a greater threat to Egypt than Israel) could provide that government with the required alms.
That is over now, despite the military and its supporters, backed by said world order, doing all they can – hitting below as well as above the belt, even idiotically risking sectarian war in the process – to reinstate the beggar-mentality status quo. Egyptians should be thankful for the “revolution” not because it proved successful or achieved its goal, but because it will make elimination of difference by begging increasingly impossible. People can no longer pretend to be safe from their compatriots, the myth of “national unity” is no longer viable, not all those who are different can pay.
Whether they like it or not, the Other will assert themselves at last, bringing forth even through catastrophe all the many beautiful Egypts that have been squeaking for dear life.
***

Side effects of Revolution
Posted on October 6, 2011
I have developed an addiction since February:
Laptop in lap, voluntarily bedridden, I watch old episodes of al Ittijah al Mu’akiss (or, as translated by the relevant talk show’s self-possessed impresario, my fellow Hull University alumnus Faisal Al Qassim: Opposite Direction).
Dozens of them from before the Arab Spring are freely available on YouTube – the Nakba, Hezbollah, torture, hijab, George W, Iraq, Iran, Sudan – many as relevant to Tahrir Square as anything. Sidling into bed of an evening, high on Revolution, I would select a topic that suited my mood, listen with mounting suspense to Faisal’s retro rhetorical intro, and lick my lips over the promised discursive violence, not to say deranged bawling. That, at least, is how it started.
All very civilised and edifying. Each head-butting match has a compelling topic, a thought-out script and, seemingly, the right pair of contestants ready to express two sides of an issue. Ah, objectivity! Yet as with so much else on Al Jazeera, something somehow remains askew.
I do not mean the channel’s populist bias, the systematic and directionless manner in which it incites viewers (often to embrace political Islam), nor the unspeakable hypocrisy it sustains by doing so while it remains an organ of the Qatar government.
I do not mean Faisal’s brand of impartiality, which is to argue each case with vehemence irrespective of whether he might actually be spreading misinformation, never taking into account the implications of a given argument for the larger picture. It is okay, for example, to present Saddam Hussein as the wronged hero of Arab glory and call him the Martyr, so long as you are pointing up dependency, corruption and sectarianism in the current Iraqi regime; you only get to describe Saddam as he was if you happen to be bestowing blessings upon Iraq’s US Army-controlled experiment with democracy…
Yet what I mean is something, slightly, else: the obscene polarisation, the rhetorical opportunism, the insolent lies; the ultimate vapidity of a good 40 out of each 45 minutes, which forms the substance of my addiction. If al Ittijah al Mu’akiss is what it means to be politically engaged, I must say that political engagement is not a good thing. Just below the surface, it is very uncivilised and profoundly delusional. And it is a condition of which I have not been cured since I went out to chant slogans and endure tear gas.
It wrings my heart to think that, in six months, Tahrir Square has turned into something not all that different from al Ittijah al Mu’akiss.

A testimony from the siege

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

The Gaza Spring

At the time I had Islamist tendencies. I was still a schoolboy when the inqilab happened in 2007. (Thus spoke Amin, which is not his name: 22, author, activist, affiliate of Fateh, lifetime resident of Palestinian Rafah. We spoke on the roof of a mid-range hotel in Gaza City late last week. By inqilab, the accepted term—literally: “overthrow”—Amin was referring to the post-democratic, forcible overtake of power in the Gaza Strip by Hamas. Now I notice that, every time he said “they” in the abstract, “Hamas”, especially its security apparatus in Gaza, was what he meant.) At first they blew up all the security agencies; it’s unclear why, the buildings were empty. But they did. And they arrested everyone who said ‘I am Fateh’: all the militias, of course, but also civil servants, citizens, students…

We thought it was an overthrow of the Palestinian Authority but it was really an overthrow against Fateh; and it was driven by power hunger… I happened to have relations in Fateh so I could see how they dealt with people. They would give you something called “the acquittal”: ‘Hand over your weapons and you can go, but don’t engage in any activity of any kind whatsoever.’ Sometimes they kept you under house arrest. That was the earliest period. Later President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decision that everyone should stay at home: all the Authority employees. He never called it that but it was a form of civil disobedience—a general strike. Everyone did stay at home, more or less. And so we discovered that they already had a full team of professionals in every field imaginable: security, health, education, everything; it was predictable that they should have security forces since they were a force of the resistance but they turned out to be ready to replace the Authority in every aspect of life.

The next day people just accepted the situation, with unexpected equanimity. We were thinking there would be explosions or attacks, that life would be disrupted as a result of the sudden substitution—nothing happened. Maybe that was the result of people’s discontent with the Authority, because the Authority was somewhat corrupt even though we had lived well under it and you can tell it wasn’t very repressive by the fact that Hamas, its greatest opposition, was allowed to grow, and grow.

In time I slipped out of the crucible of the Islamists. I had no political interests per se but I decided to question what I had believed about Palestine, and I watched from outside. Eventually I became an organised member of Fateh through friends from university. They told me what was Fateh, who were Fateh. I was convinced; maybe because I’d seen the injustice against Fateh, I liked it. But then I also began to understand what was Oslo which at the mosque, within the crucible, they had taught us was wrong, the way they taught us that Fateh were all Zionized: traitors and apostates.

I began to understand the meaning of peace, the different forms the struggle could take, things we used to consider haram (or prohibited by God) without thinking. It may be true that many members of Fateh really did collaborate with the Zionist occupation but the way the security-coordination terms of the Oslo agreement were misrepresented and the way you were supposed to dismiss all of Fateh as godless traitors—that was hugely exaggerated and manipulative, a lie. My first ever political activity was to join a gathering commemorating Arafat on the anniversary of his death. On campus. And I was beaten up: Islamist students from a number of universities attacked and cut it short.

That day I ran away and got on a bus. They stopped it and searched the passengers for the black-and-white kufiya, which they associate with Fateh even though it’s a symbol of Palestine; but I wrapped my kufiya around my torso, underneath my shirt, and I got away. Before that I was neutral—I am not with you, guys, but I’m not against you. Now I am against you. Because something is seriously wrong. We commemorated Abu Ammar (i.e., Arafat) again, and we commemorated Abu Jihad (i.e., Arafat’s comrade in arms, the fidayeen leader and cofounder of Fateh Khalil Al Wazir, who was assassinated in Tunis in 1988); and every time we were subjected to verbal abuse as well as physical attack, and then arrests and summons as well. For a while I even stopped going to university because I was under pressure from my family who didn’t want me involved in any political activity, realising what could happen. So I started reading and finding out about things—what is Hamas, why Hamas, what is Fateh, whatever—and gradually developing an opinion and orientation of my own.

As I fell on the wrong side of them, in the end, the main question was, Eish fih (or, “What’s wrong?”) We wanted to know where they thought they were taking things, what the purpose of the division was (between the Fateh-dominated Authority and Hamas): what is your issue with peace if you are not waging any resistance? Why do you even have a problem with Fateh if you’re adopting the exact same policy? Eish fih…

First we staged a protest against the closing down of Sharik, which is an NGO for young people and creativity and such; it was closed down on the pretext that prostitution went on in there, and that the activists and artists and civil society developers who worked there were in the employ of Israel. The second time I was arrested was on 29 January 2011, the day after the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution (i.e., Angry Friday, as opposed to the 25 January demonstrations that led to it) when we staged a march in solidarity. I was abused. Not beaten up, just insulted, questioned, told, “You are supporting people who are American agents. And what do we have to do with it anyway?” I was held for four hours.

The way it happened was they would send you a summons and you would turn up the next day. You were a prisoner of course but you were treated with relative respect. There were no beatings though the questions were extremely personal and probing… They would shoot us with their cameras, and during the questioning they would review the images and if you were sitting next to a girl you would be asked who that girl was and why she was dressed provocatively and, whatever your response, called all sorts of names. Even when you went to Egypt for a holiday—everyone in Gaza spends part of the summer in Egypt—you could be filmed there and questioned about what you were doing on your return. But no matter how hard you try to cooperate with them they never believe what you tell them. That’s what I discovered the first time I was under clear-cut political arrest, on 27 February, 2011, when I was held for two days.

Already at this point something called the Dignity Revolution has attempted a Fateh overthrow of Hamas. It was a disastrous failure and the suppression was truly stupid, heavy-handed and humiliating; I was among those arrested but I had been interrogated before and they quickly realised I had nothing to do with it… I was arrested again on 11 March and they wanted to keep me till 15 March to prevent me from joining the protests planned for that date, because they believed I could be an influential party. In the end they released me and told me to come back on 14 March before anything happened; I did not, I went to the demonstrations, which on purpose we staged a day earlier than planned.

Anyway, people who were arrested on those occasions formed the core of the group who staged the 15 March protests last year (i.e., Gaza’s mini-revolution and principal contribution to the Arab Spring, which went almost entirely unreported here as elsewhere); the demonstrations were staged simultaneously in coordination with protests in the West Bank. Our purpose was to end the division; we didn’t care who was to blame, we wanted national unity. It’s clear to me now that a party who stops me from pursuing this aim is a party that’s against national unity, maybe even a party who has a vested interest in Gaza’s isolation considering that goods are smuggled in from Israel despite the siege.

We went out on 14 March. We gave a press conference and announced we would start a sit-in then and there; we wanted to stage a carbon copy of the Egyptian revolution. We had the support of all the political factions including some Hamas figures—Ghazi Hamad and Ahmad Youssef, for example—though at this point we were all in the 18-25 age bracket; no one was older than 25. So we stayed the night of 14 March; we had said that no flags would be raised apart from the Palestinian flag.

On 15 March the biggest march we had ever seen arrived in buses and they raised flags that were the Palestinian flag on one side, the Hamas flag on the other. When we argued with them they said the shahadah on the Hamas flag could not be dropped, it was the statement of our faith—”There is no God but God, Muhammad is the Messenger of God”—the usual religious discourse, that is.

In the West Bank it was a slightly different story: after very slight encroachments on the protest, President Abbas ordered the distribution of shawerma sandwiches and drinks to the protesters—I’m sure he was trying to contain the situation but it made him look good.

So on the spot we invented the slogan: ‘Al katiba ya shabab, khalli ej jundi lal ahzab: “To Katiba, young men. Leave the [Unknown] Soldier to the [political] parties.” Katiba is a spot near the university campuses, which are very close together, while the Unknown Soldier you could say is Gaza’s answer to Tahrir Square. What we didn’t have time to think about was that Katiba was a very bad choice from a security standpoint: it’s very easy to be surrounded and controlled there. Anyway, we headed over to Katiba where we put up posters and slogans to make it clear that we had withdrawn from the protest that was misappropriated by the government. They sent people who told us we had to leave by five pm; we said we were not leaving. People went off to bring over tents and supervisions and transported the stuff we had installed in Unknown Soldier the previous day. All was set for spending the night.

At seven pm I was standing with a young man with a beard who was raising the Palestinian flag and I was handing him a glass of tea. I was saying, “You want some tea?” and he was saying “Yes”—and the next thing you know is this surge of bearded civilians with sticks. I won’t even pretended they were just ordinary people because we knew some of them and they were Hamas. (Those are virtually identical to the pro-Mubarak and pro-SCAF “honourable citizens” who attacked demonstrators in Cairo.) Anyway, the first person to hit me, across the chest, was the young man I was handing the tea. Afterwards we found out there were many such infiltrators.

It was like an charge of the Mongols, the most brutish attack you can imagine: beating, insults, abuse of women, even some of our mothers who were there. Some of my friends were so badly hurt they could not move. An activist friend of mine and I escaped and spent the night at a friend’s in Gaza City, and apart from brief appearances on campus we never went home; we stayed hidden for a week because, as we heard, they had distributed our pictures to security so that we could be arrested at checkpoints.

The next day there was a demonstration on campus and it was brutishly suppressed. On 17-19 March we tried again but the numbers had dwindled and many were arrested. Until 30 March, Land Day, when we were arrested on the charge of raising the Palestinian flag to spread sedition.

This is my experience with political suppression. Intellectual suppression is another story. In the briefest possible way: whoever is not with them is against them; and this is hardly unusual for Islamists. I am not the only the example. A female blogger was arrested because of what she wrote on her blog—nothing to do with politics. The first time I was arrested because I had written about my arrest in the Egyptian revolution solidarity protest. Another time, also because of something I had written, on the charge of “spreading secularism and falsifying (not simply misquoting) the Quran”.

After the second arrest we were released to find we had turned into atheists on the street. I even had trouble with my own family. It was a systematic defamation of character. What happened was—I stopped writing poems and articles; and when I started writing again I did it in a different way, not just to protect myself but to protect my family. Later, after a long bout of depression—for weeks I didn’t even step out of the house, I would ask my brother to buy me cigarettes—I decided I wanted to leave Gaza altogether. That was perhaps the strongest effect all this had on my life.

It happened after a visit to Cairo, I was arrested a while after my return on the charge of collaborating with foreign intelligence and being an agent and things like that. This created problems with my friends and even with myself… I stopped undertaking any activity: neither political nor civil nor literary nor intellectual. Once again on my brother returning from Egypt while I was still there, they wanted to arrest him because of me. I couldn’t sort out residency in Egypt and I had to cut short my stay and come back to deal with it.

On all these occasions I was insulted, maybe even pushed around a little, but there was no beating as such. It was nothing compared to people we heard about: someone detained for 180 days; someone forced to stay standing for 40 days; someone suspended from their hands or feeds for extended periods. But the last time I was arrested was after talk of unrest because of the lack of electricity—you know electricity is only available for a few hours a day in Gaza, but if you object you are spreading rumours and perpetrating sedition. There was talk of another attempted overthrow and I had nothing to do with that either but I was arrested again. And this was my worst experience of humiliation and beating. It was only one day, but I went home passed out.

But it was being accused of working for foreign powers that affected me the most. Family relations intervened and negotiated on my behalf until my release was finally secured, but I fell into a long depression. You try to serve your homeland and this is what happens to you? I won’t deny it, it was then that I started thinking, and I continue to wonder about it now: “The homeland is the thing raises you up, that is why you hold it sacred. It is not the thing that humiliates you.”

Interview by Youssef Rakha

Twittotalitarian

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

At about five am this morning (2 May), I woke up to news of people being murdered in and around the site of the Abbassiya (Ministry of Defence) sit-in (#MOF on Twitter, ongoing since late Friday, 27 April). I began following the news online, relying on tweeps who were either already in Abbassiya or on their way there. For the first time since the start of the sit-in, I also paid attention to what the star activists (Alaa Abdel Fattah and Nawara Negm, in this case) had to say about developments—in the vague hope of finding out why, beyond their continued and, to my mind, increasingly irresponsible enthusiasm for “peaceful protests” regardless of the purpose or tenability of the event in question, such cyber-driven “revolutionaries” had sided with the fanatical Salafi supporters of former presidential candidate Hazem Salah Abu Ismail.
Following a prolonged sit-in in Tahrir to protest Abu Ismail being disqualified from entering the race for the presidency because his late mother held a US passport, supporters of the lawyer-cum-TV proselytiser, demanding the dissolution of the Higher Committee for Presidential Elections and the instant handover of power to civilians by SCAF, had decided to escalate by moving the sit-in to the ministry headquarters in Abbassiya. (Remarkably, Abu Ismail himself at no point either called on his supporters to stop protesting on his behalf or bothered to join them in person; the Sheikh, as many of them called him in fervent tones, complained of a sprained ankle that kept preventing him from being among his warriors of Islam. Only after people started dying at the hands of thugs widely thought to be deployed by SCAF did Abu Ismail declare that he had nothing to do with the protest in the first place.) Since Friday, however, Salafis had been joined by all manner of protesters including politicised football Ultras rallying around the slogan “Down with military rule”.
The sit in had been subject to periodic attacks by thugs aiming to disband it, but nothing as systematic or as garish as what had been unfolding when I started looking at my Twitter timeline this morning; whether due to a decision by those commanding the thugs to end the sit-in once and for all or because the protesters had managed to irk the local residents sufficiently for the latter to join in the fight against them, the conflict was reaching new and disturbing heights; Negm said she could smell blood everywhere around her on reaching Abbassiya around eight am.
With the majority of tweets discussing an earlier (probably true) report by Abdel Fattah that protesters chasing thugs through the backstreets of a residential area far removed from the sit-in itself had fired live ammunition of their own—it was later reported that, by accidentally killing an unaffiliated young man, either protesters or thugs posing as protesters had incited the whole neighbourhood to declare war on the sit-in—there was not much scope for working out what the self-declared leaders of Egypt’s popular revolution were thinking. Here, translated from Arabic as literally as possible, is the tweet that threw me into a silent rage, however (it was by Abdel Fattah’s sister Mona Seif, addressing fellow Twitter-activists): “Whoever truly wants to help will either join the march that’s gathering in half an hour at Al-Fath Mosque or go to Demerdash [Hospital] and donate blood to the injured. Otherwise no one has the time for you, seriously.”
***
To explain my rage—first to myself—and to try and answer my initial questions about why the “Sons of Abu Ismail” protest was perceived as an episode of “the ongoing revolution” and how the star activists can fail to see that what “the immediate handover of power to civilians” means at the present moment is the immediate transformation of Egypt into an Islamist dictatorship not likely to be any less murderous to dissidents than SCAF (and let me state, again, in no uncertain terms, that I do not condone SCAF remaining in power any more than I ever condoned SCAF taking control of the country in the first place), I want to say a few things about that tweet.
The first thing I want to say is purely factual. Neither did the 9.30 am march to which the tweet referred make it to the sit-in—thugs and/or military forces blocked the way—nor were there any injured protesters at Demerdash Hospital at that time (the latter was soon confirmed by Negm from there). It was subsequent, purely “peaceful” marches—for which read “mired in the crimes of actual and potential wielders of political power, and ones that included deep-in-the-political-process players like the Islamist presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Abul Fetouh—that prompted executive power on the ground to take control, eventually, patchily cutting short the fighting. (Abbassiya has since turned into a hub of purely Islamist “peaceful” demonstrations.) Such, of course, are the pitfalls not only of hearsay but also of Twitter-based (and apparently also politically suicidal) revolutionary command strategy. Following Seif’s instructions could not actually have resulted in anyone “helping” anyone or anything at all, whether truly or in any other way. Perhaps her tone actively discouraged a good few people from WANTING to help.
I am also forced to ask—a little more philosophically, if I may in these “revolutionary” (for which read chaotically populist) times—what it is precisely that activists thought they were doing when they headed over to the sit-in last night or this morning, launching their usual bombardments of haphazard, confusing instructions and cryptically brief comments in the usual arrogant and peremptory tone. In what capacity? For nearly 18 months it has been demonstrated time and again that, helpless against thugs, local residents and/or organised security forces both visible and in plain clothes, unarmed protesters end up being killed for nothing even when demonstrations have a clear-cut purpose or cause (the Port Said massacre prompting Ultras and other protesters to rise up against the Ministry of Interior, for example). I am forced to ask whether this self-righteous zeal for protests is actually as moral as it seems considering that it results in innocent people dying. Who do the activists actually represent apart from themselves and their fans? Morally speaking—and there is nothing but a supposedly idealistic moral stance that justifies their attitude—aren’t the activists to blame for the deaths incurred in this endless travesty of regime change?
The third thing I want to say is that, as it seems to me as much from Twitter as from first-hand experience and basic understanding of such mental conditions as temporary collective psychosis and obsessive compulsive disorder, for these people “activism”—which as often as not reduces to calling for and/or attending ultimately murderously suppressed protests—is more of a way of life than a political statement. The constant sense of urgency eliminating any rational questions about what’s going on and how we might best relate to it combines with celebrity status and the often downright stupidity of a black-and-white perspective on events to maintain this lifestyle and generate a “revolutionary” reality not only different from—indeed opposed to—the reality of the people but different even from the substance of the revolution itself. I seem to recall Negm tweeting something to the effect of, “Let’s make sure the Muslims Brotherhood takes the reigns of power as soon as possible so we can protest against them while we’re ready”! Does one ask oneself, when one tweets something like that, about what will happen when it is the Muslim Brotherhood who are responsible for the loss of life and there is still no efficient alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood? Does it occur to one that maybe one is simply ENJOYING protests and the rhetoric that goes with them—the bloodier, the more epic—more than making any statement about or contribution to history?

You call me an Islamophobe, but you’re Islamophiles!

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

Protestophilia
Pacing up and down the arena of cyber-politics, Youssef Rakha searches for the Islamist homunculus secretly ensconced in the minds of liberals who covet a role in history more than anything history might actually give

It’s been an aeon since Egyptian cyber-activists decided to try grafting the virtual world onto reality. The result was breathtaking at first, surpassing the initial plan to put an end to police brutality and the emergency law—which plan, thoroughly forgotten since then, was never implemented. But with apparently good reasons: the protests and, perhaps more importantly, the regime’s idiotic response to them, seemed to have far more important consequences: Mubarak not only became the first president in Egyptian history to leave office in his lifetime, he also stepped down against his will; plans for his son Gamal to succeed him were stopped in their tracks; and a precedent was established for “the people” gaining rights by sheer force of collective will, independently of institutions.
The protests were not translated into a political force, however, with the result that the first “people’s revolution” in Arab history was summarily betrayed by the people. Where it was not bulldozed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or SCAF—to which Mubarak handed over power—political space was filled “democratically” by Islamist forces (for which read, in practice, sectarian ultraconservatives and/or religious fanatics who found their way into politics through advocating stricter or more pollticised forms of the religion of the majority). Such forces have had the overwhelming support of the people—a fact established early on by the result of SCAF’s otherwise useless referendum on constitutional amendments, the passing of which the Muslim Brotherhood and its Salafist allies took it upon themselves to achieve—partly because they offer a divinely sanctioned alternative to failed “nationalist” autocracy, partly because they had filled a void in basic services in the provinces under Muabarak, partly because their brand of ostentatious religiosity (which, incidentally, is far from orthodox, historically speaking) chimes with the Gulf-influenced conservatism of large sectors of society.
Never mind, therefore, that the Islamist shadow regime—the institution of the Muslim Brotherhood, for example: a state within the state—is even more reactionary and no less corrupt than the supposedly deposed regime itself. Its early alliance with SCAF at a time when SCAF was turning into the archenemy of the revolution established its readiness to sacrifice the will of protesters on the ground in return for institutionally enshrined political gains.
Thus the parliamentary elections took place while peaceful demonstrations were being murderously suppressed by SCAF; and the predominant view among the “revolutionaries” (who are generally assumed to be “liberals”, for which read more or less apolitical, in contrast to the “Islamist parachutists” or ideologised beneficiaries of regime change) was that it was a civic duty to vote and that boycotting the elections would result in “Islamists overtaking parliament”. Few boycotted the elections, therefore, with the result that Islamists overtook parliament. And they have since performed horrendously—something the cyber-activists fully concede, even though some of them voted for some Islamists in the parliamentary elections—to the point of backing up an interior ministry more or less unchanged since before the revolution, proposing laws against the right to demonstrate, telling blatant lies and otherwise replicating Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, and attempting to monopolise the drafting of a new constitution.
Boycotting the parliamentary elections wouldn’t have stopped this, it is true. But it would certainly have made a difference: By agreeing to participate in a “democratic process” with a forgone—counterrevolutionary—conclusion, the revolution acquiesced in crimes against humanity being committed at the same time. And it was this willingness to operate through the very institutions whose incompetence and corruption had given rise to the revolution in the first place that proved decisive in the battle for legitimacy between the status quo and the new ephoch promised by 25 January. On the ground, in practice, ipso facto, a democratically elected parliament “represents” the people (including, since they have voted, the revolution’s people); protests disrupt “the wheel of production”; and SCAF is “properly” in charge unless it undertakes underhanded action against such Islamist figures as the former presidential candidate Hazem Abu Ismail…
So when the protests they’ve been defending online finally fizzle out and stop happening—whether because the pro-SCAF “honourable citizen” majority can no longer put up with them or because there is no longer much that they can achieve—the task of the cyber-activists reduces to fighting against the reinstitution of the (political) status quo. This they do, not by advocating a boycott of the political process, not by acknowledging the political vacuum to which the revolution gave way, not even by pressing on with campaigns against SCAF and/or the Muslim Brotherhood—which, like the protests, are no longer as effective as they might be—but by embracing the constitution-less presidential elections and supporting a particular candidate therein.
***
For weeks now the cyber-activist discourse has centred on Abdel Moneim Abul Fetouh not only as the “moderate Islamist” but also as the “liberal” candidate—practically the only one with any chance to win against Amr Moussa (now that both Omar Suleiman and Ahmad Shafik have been disqualified, Moussa is seen as SCAF’s choice of president, whether due to recent SCAF-overseen legal developments or conspiratorially since the beginning). Never mind that Abul Fetouh is a pillar of the Muslim Brotherhood who (though admittedly in discord with the Guidance Office since 2009) resigned in order to run for president—even though, in the absence of a constitution specifying the president’s powers, he cannot possibly know whether he will be able to implement the programme on which he is running. Initially the Brotherhood had vowed not to field any candidate, but since that changed (and the pro-Abul Fetouh cyber-activists have had a bonanza of sarcastic commentary on that perfectly predictable development), the story is that Abul Fetouh could not have become the Brotherhood’s candidate anyway because of his differences with the Office.
Some have gone so far as to say he is the Brotherhood’s “secret candidate”—to the chagrin of the cyber-activists being discussed here—though the latter make the same assumption when they claim that Moussa has been SCAF’s secret candidate all along (and I am not suggesting that they are wrong or that Moussa is a good candidate).
Once again, however, campaigns for boycotting the elections are proving unpopular—and the arguments have centred on to what extent Abul Fetouh might represent the (liberal) revolution and to what extent not supporting Abul Fetouh means benefitting the counterrevolution embodied by Moussa. The suggestion that Abul Fetouh—whether or not he is loyal to the Brotherhood just now—is a committed Islamist whose increasingly high standing with “liberals”, let alone his actual rise to power, will give political Islam even greater (spurious) “revolutionary cover”, has prompted charges of Islamophobia against those who make it. While Islamists may well support a relatively sensible, seemingly honest “moderate”, why should supposed anti-Islamists be facilitating the process whereby political Islam has inherited an essentially liberal revolution and already contributed to turning its value system on its head?
By now, of course, this has already happened with MPs who, when criticised for sectarian, reactionary, fanatical and otherwise patently illiberal positions (pro-female genital mutilation and pro-sexual harassment laws, for example) would find ardent defenders among the cyber-activists who claimed the critics were classist, undemocratic or lovers of the Mubarak regime. It has happened in such a way as to indicate that pro-Abul Fetouh cyber-activists are following in the footsteps of generations of left-wing intellectuals who, out of empathy with “the people”, had contributed to perpetuating the status quo far more than to changing it—as often as not by endorsing or condoning conservative policies or attitudes on the pretext that, while such an orientation may be seen in a negative light by “you and me”, it was the best of all possible worlds “for the people”: the majority or the zeitgeist or the lowest common denominator. But there is nothing vaguely moral, progressive or even politically astute in pandering to what has become, thanks as much to SCAF policy as to the unholy marriage between Islam and Islamism, the post-25 January lowest common denominator.
The charge of Islamophobia remains the apotheosis of that position, anyway: You are just like Mubarak; you are scared of collective self determination; you have individualist or classist issues with the largest legitimate faction of national politics. Or, more to the point: What could be preventing you from engaging democratically with the political aftermath of the revolution, if change is what you have wanted?
Should these arguments be coming from Islamists, I would respond with the statement that it is you who are giving a largely imported, essentially sectarian orientation—neither moral nor, properly speaking, religious—an undeserved political privilege. You are, in other words, ISLAMOPHILES; and I have every right to be concerned about the consequences of your retrograde and ruthlessly capitalist policies, the way in which Islamic law would allow you to meddle in my private life and eliminate fundamental aspects of my public life, and the essential contradiction in your use of liberal-democratic means to reach totalitarian-theocratic ends.
But to my fellow liberals, the cyber-activists, the revolutionaries, I say only that you are PROTESTOPHILES; you cannot get over the initial euphoria of Mubarak stepping down; you cannot accept the fact that, through your very good intentions, you have become peripheral to a political process that, morally, even politically, you can only reject. So, instead of conceding that the revolution has been politically defeated, you trail the shadow of a creature that does not exist: the liberal Islamist. And it is you, neither the true Islamophiles nor I, who will suffer the consequences of your hysteria.

In the Name of the Father

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

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My father did not live to see 9/11. I don’t know what he would have thought of the so called war on terror, let alone the equally so called Arab Spring. Though not particularly old, he was frail and muddled by the time he died—flattened out by decades of depression, isolation and inactivity.
I think of him now because the trajectory of his views seems relevant to 25 Jan. From a Marxist intellectual in the fifties and sixties—a member of a group that could transcend its class function to effect change, he became a liberal democrat in the eighties and nineties—an individual who had a common-sense opinion on current affairs regardless of his beliefs. In retrospect I think the reason for this change of heart had to do with a certain kind of honesty or transparency: at some point he must have realized that to be proactive was to be caught in a lie (the lie of independent nation building, of the dictatorship of the fellahin, of Islamic renaissance…), a lie for which not even an unhappy life was worth risking.
In a sense, while the outbreak of protests on 25 Jan and the collective determination that they should have tangible results amounted to that rare thing—a moment of truth in modern Arab history—events since 11 Feb 2011 have borne evidence of just how much of a lie Arab politics had been since colonial times, and how peripheral the truth must remain to society even after the revolution “triumphed”.
Where history is concerned, truth evidently cannot stand up to the lie. The truth of a predominantly young population with no need for identity-related hangups, who want money, sex, and space in which to express themselves and be productive, for example: such truth will not be articulated politically in the foreseeable future; and likewise the lie of an oppositional Islam with a vision for development or concern for the people: its being exposed, even repeatedly, will not stop society from behaving as if it were true.
A year ago on Tuesday the result of the referendum on constitutional amendments proposed by SCAF and embraced by the Muslim Brotherhood—an unequivocal yes—effectively bracketed the “revolution” in time. It shifted the emphasis away from rights gained through protests (including the right to protest) to a reshuffling of the power structure via an indefinite “transition” whose purpose has been to restore and/or sustain a status quo that had—more often than not, by invoking an overriding sense of identity—systematically denied people those same rights.
The vote, however disastrous it is now judged to be, established the population’s willingness to cement the two bulwarks of corrupt—incompetent—conservatism: fascist-flavored religious authority and arbitrary military power; the very culturally articulated nepotism, rarefied inferiority complex, and xenophobia that had reduced the project of an independent nation guarding Arab-Muslim identity under Nasser to a client state riddled by poverty and Wahhabism under Mubarak. With the regime’s logistical powers deployed in Brotherhood-held voting blocs, “democracy” could quickly abort what opportunity for change had been generated, fueled by blood. And it became easy from then on to involve well-meaning political players in endless lost battles of the vote, even as their comrades were being killed at protests and defamed on “pro-25 Jan” TV.
In the wake of 25 Jan, a conscious or unconscious alliance between devout and patriotic sentiments, whether honest or hypocritical, thus became the truest expression of the lie. It not only exiled the truth, it also forced sincere champions of change to adopt more or less peremptory discourses divorced from the reality of “the people” while, consciously or unconsciously, elements of dissidence that had worked to dissipate and obstruct the effort to gain basic rights on the ground were reintroduced:
Once again “politics” is not about the right to live but about the Palestinian cause, the struggle against “American-Israeli empire”, the notion of collective as opposed to individual dignity. In this sense the “revolutionaries” have ended up echoing generations of “the opposition” whose isolation rendered them so ineffective they could be safely ignored and/or co-opted by the regime, themselves eventually becoming part of the lie.

*******************************************************

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Graffiti showing the pro-yes sign for the 19 March referendum—”say yes for faster stability”—and asking, “Is it stable yet?”
*******************************************************

I think of my father now because his change of heart regarding the role of the intellectual in Arab history reflects my own regarding the Arab Spring: from far-fetched faith in improving the world to a form of well-meaning resignation or despair, the stance of an interested but stationary observer.
Thanks in part to the pace of life in the electronic age, the story of four decades of Egyptian politics—from the fifties to the nineties—was reenacted almost in its entirety in the space of a single year, from March 2011 to March 2012: after mass protests generate hope for a freer society, “patriotism” is instantly co-opted by a military junta that proves more repressive than the “fallen regime”; quasi-socialist sloganeering eventually gives way to ruthless capitalism in the garb of “Islamic” quasi-democracy; and the need for development is subordinated to the perpetuation of (religion- and military-based) power…
I wonder if my father’s experience left him as cold as mine has left me; I wonder if, by the end of his life, he felt as existentially disconnected, politically denuded, and socially paralyzed. Somehow, he maintained his compassion: his stoic insistence on dressing like a worker and only using public transport, for example, coupled by a strange delight in engaging working-class people in a debate among peers.
In this and other ways his complete rejection of the role of the patriarch belied his middle-class provincial origins and his aspiring-politician career path as a law graduate of the fifties. Evidently he could be anything but a patriarch—which is particularly interesting because so much of the psychosocial underpinnings of 25 Jan and its aftermath have reflected that very concept.
Perhaps the lie depends on fathers maintaining the semblance of an order: whatever else has been said in his favor, the most effective defense of Mubarak—which, having stood in the way of a pretend trial, will help to absolve SCAF of the very likely crime that he will be acquitted—was the notion that Mubarak has been a father to Egyptians. What this means in practice is of course very different from what it should mean: a true father, the chief of a tribe or the don of a mafia—the endless, intricate web of mafias that is Egypt—will supposedly care for his children, making their enemies offers they cannot refuse…
But, like so much else in the lie—religious commitment, professional efficiency, national pride—the substance of a given discourse had been so thoroughly subverted that only its surface appearance now mattered: that there should be someone in the haloed place of the father, not that there should be a father as such.
And perhaps that is why I am mistaken about Egyptians, most of whom—unlike me—will have had patriarchal fathers variously implicated in the lie. Perhaps the predominantly young population does have a need for psychosocial hangups connected with their Muslim identity, after all. That hunger for money and sex, which Muslim religiosity in practice by no means forbids: perhaps it is not bound up with any desire for self expression or any obligation to contribute quantitatively or qualitatively to human civilization; those things, after all, require some degree of acknowledgement of the truth; why else is it that individuals who have a common-sense opinion on current affairs regardless of their beliefs—in contrast to venerable sheikhs holding ridiculous keys to paradise, or even Marxist intellectuals playing in the extra time—are so impossibly few?
Watching the news these days, I am often overwhelmed by the sense that my father is communicating with me, reminding me that I should have attempted to a deeper understanding of his change of heart. The lie, he tells me, is much bigger than Mubarak, perhaps even bigger than SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood combined.

***

Seven years before:

Satre, my father and me (2005)

When my father’s body gave in at the age of 67, there was no cause of death as such. His health was undoubtedly poorly, he was addicted to a range of pharmaceuticals — but none of the vital organs had stopped functioning. Strangely, my mother and I saw it coming: there were tears on the day, long before we could have known it was happening. And when it did happen, the relief of no longer having to care for a prostrate depressive seemed to justify it. In the next few months there was oblivion. I had felt alienated from his dead body, I saw it wrapped in white cloth, in public, and I thought I was over the fact.

Then, suddenly, a sharp, steely grief was boring into me. Within weeks it had disoriented me so profoundly I could no longer recognise myself. Principally it expressed itself through fear, a fear so primal it rendered the greatest fears of my life ridiculous; and the worst part of it was that it had no object. It didn’t belong in space or time. Only a solitary subject existed, to suffer it. And that subject wasn’t a self I could relate to. For the first time I felt I was getting Jean-Paul Sartre’s point about the self being separate from consciousness. I had read enough to be familiar with the concept, but I hadn’t managed to bring it onto any experiential plane. Then, out of nowhere, everything was making sense: the notion of freedom as an unbearable burden of responsibility, the conflict between imagination and situation in life, and the way in which this could be made to fit in a radical ideological framework.

Much like Baba’s death, it turned out, consciousness had no cause; it was just there, inescapable, a force of nature with its own rules. Where your self is something you might want to define, consciousness is nothing at all. Rather it’s a grief, a fear, capable of transforming you at will, negating you. But besides the self-consciousness dilemma, there was the look Baba gave me a few hours before he died: I was on my way out, I chose not to be with him though I could intuit he would die; and there was something humiliating about this. For the rest of my life I would have to accept being a person who preferred going out to sitting by his father’s deathbed. It was a brief, vacant look — you could argue it meant nothing — but it taught how hell really could be someone else’s eyes.

It would take me years to be able to remember my father without experiencing the abysmal horror of those days, but it seemed natural that I should seek out his own thoughts about Sartre eventually. And not only because it was his death that made existentialism real: however marginal and uncommitted, he remained a member of the generation of so-called intellectuals who engaged with both Marxism and French existentialism. People like Ibrahim Fathi and Yehya El-Taher Abdalla were once his friends, but he only expressed admiration for Saad Zaghloul and Mustafa El-Nahhas (both Pashas); he referred not to 1952 but 1919 as the glorious moment at which Egyptians made a free historical choice. It seemed that, through some warped ideological devolution, he had become a latter-day Wafdi — a “liberal wanker” of the homegrown variety, someone who saw the way out in a small, elitist coterie who believed in fairness, charity and empirical common sense. In 1989 he obsessed about the collapse of the Soviet Union, but never in a plaintive way; more than once he called Gorbachev courageous and commended the principles of perestroika.

I have not been able to locate Abdel-Rahman Badawi’s translation of Being and Nothingness, though I seem to recall him labouring over it. Maybe I’ve invented this memory: in my lifetime he seldom read anything involved, beyond the law books of his profession and some early 20th-century history. Occasionally he would pick up an old favourite like Nikos Kzanzakis’s Freedom and Death and spend months reading and rereading it.

In contrast to his revolutionary adolescence — he himself never recounted it to me — by the time I was old enough to discuss things, he could only adopt a reactionary stance. Very occasionally, he spoke about communist activity in the 1950s. Once, in extremely simple terms, he described how Nasser had managed to either crush or co-opt all those who could have championed “the cause”. It would be easy to link his disillusion to the failure of the July Revolution (for many members of the generation in question, the 1967 War was the moment it all came down), except that he never supported it in the first place. He was always vitriolic about Nasser, emphasising the failures of what he saw as a coup d’etat, and lamenting the way in which the regime turned Egypt into a police state, a mega-community of informers, a madhouse of personal ambition and political suicide. For him Nasser was personally accountable for eliminating all hope for democracy or progress, let alone social transformation. Which hope, in the 1920s, he firmly believed there had been grounds for husbanding. In his all but unique opinion, I think, the Sadat regime, which leftists decry as counterrevolutionary, was but a logical result of the reign of Nasser.

Of the Marxism some things did persist. And I don’t mean the lingo he sometimes sarcastically reiterated or the vast knowledge he must have had, judging by his library, most of which consists of cheap “popular edition” paperbacks. Marxism manifested most prominently in his daily life: as someone who never drove, he refused to acknowledge the advantages of the taxi over the public bus, even when he started coming home with bumps and bruises from attempts to get on and off insanely chaotic, overcrowded vehicles. He was always class-conscious — something that paradoxically emerged in his rejection of the social implications of class: he would treat working-class people as equals; he never managed to cut his subordinates’ salaries or otherwise exercise administrative authority at work; and, in spite of despising his own background — ” petty bourgeoisie”, he always stressed — he tended to share his money with hard-up relations and friends. I think he would have enjoyed being single and poor — a rare virtue indeed for an Arab Marxist. He owned very few things of his own and seldom bought clothes. Perhaps sympathy with the Wafd party was his way of reconciling his personality with the fact that, after much resistance, he had conceded the role of middle-class husband and father, he owned electric appliances and sent his son to expensive educational institutions; he let his wife accumulate savings.

But at the level of the intellect none of this counted. What remained of Marxism in the way of mental activity had, rather, to do with the existentialist principles I came to discover the hard way. I say principles, not practises. For in the end my father’s attachment to Sartre’s notions of freedom and consciousness remained, tragically, a matter of wavering conviction and occasional verbal commentary, not one of personal expression.

His admiration for free love as it manifested in Sartre’s relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, for example, would never go beyond just that, an admiration — something he could only express in conversation, as it were on the margins of life, and towards which, insofar as it belonged to him at all, he could only feel frustration. The same sense of ambivalence permeated his feelings about religion, and even, perhaps, Marx as prophet. To fend off the no doubt stifling awareness of being petty bourgeois, he would place himself in the category of muthaqqafeen (intelligentsia), a group apart who were agents of the transformation towards communist society. He would pronounce the word in a wavering tone, with a mixture of gravity and comic self-awareness; it was as if he realised that, though it meant a lot to him, in the grander scheme of things it meant nothing. And so, too, with his response to my mother’s religiosity, which at the surface level he neither rejected nor endorsed. He was capable of humouring her and others about religion and God — hypocritically, I felt — but at times it seemed he was just as capable of embracing these concepts. His belief in chance as the overriding rule of being in the world, his sense of reality as a place shaped wholly by the radical consciousness of those who chose to change it: all of this turns out, the more I think about it, to be the frail gesture of an isolated and powerless intellect.

Contrary to his political discourse, which centred, with the exception of polemics directed at Nasser, on the evolution of modern Egypt and the beauty of 1919, he made frequent references to Sartre’s contribution. He quoted him, recounted episodes of his novels and plays, remembered his famous visit to Egypt in 1967. With the dispassionate objectivity of an emotionally involved observer, he stated Sartre’s position on Israel. Memorably, he would sometimes mention the way in which a Sartre character fatally injured at war asks the nurse, minutes before he dies, to touch him. Only at the moment of death, Sartre wrote, could imagination (consciousness, being-for-itself) be free of the constraints of situation (self, being-in-itself). And, somewhat in the same vein, at the hospital where they failed to identify a terminal illness (when he was released, none of the doctors thought he would die), Baba developed a desire for the blonde nurse who attended to his needs.

I’ve had to remove my mother’s mattress to dig out the well-kept paperbacks he left behind; the flat was too small to accommodate all the books he owned, and in the wake of his death especially, my mother justifiably resorted to hiding them. Some half of the total number have the word “Sartre”, in Arabic letters, on the cover: The Virtuous Whore, Marxism and Revolution, No Exit, The Flies, What is Literature, The New Colonialism, Critique of Dialectical Mind… Lying in a large cardboard box at the other end of the house, in English, are my own Nausea and The Wall. As I walk from one room to the other, I can’t help noting a kind of inter-generational continuity. But at the same time — it suddenly occurs to me — my interest in French existentialism has nothing to do with his; it is a mere coincidence, a historical accident, that we happen to have this particular thing in common. At a deeper level, I’d like to think, what we do have in common is a tormented consciousness of being in the world, subject to dying suddenly, without a cause.

I might have chosen to stay by his deathbed that fateful evening in 2000. And yet, I reassure myself, he would still have died alone.

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

1.The Nude and the Martyr (Al Ahram Weekly, 2011)
Some time in February, the literary (and intellectual) Generation of the Nineties started coming up in intellectual conversations about the Arab Spring. Some people theorised that, by stressing individual freedom and breaking with their overtly politicised forerunners, apolitical agents of subversion under Mubarak had involuntarily paved the way for precisely the kind of uprising said forerunners had spent whole lives prophesying and pushing for, to no avail.
Politicised intellectuals of past generations had always believed in grand narratives. That is why their collective message (anti-imperialist or socialist), evidently no less divorced from the People than that of the younger rebels and aesthetes who didn’t give two damns about the liberation of Jerusalem or the dictatorship of the proletariat, remained repressive and didactic; while allowing themselves to be co-opted and neutralised, they struggled or pretended to struggle in vain.
The Generation of the Nineties remained silent about social transformation as such, but they stressed daily life and the physical side of existence, including their own bodies, which they insisted on experimenting with — if only verbally, for the sake of a personal deliverance deemed infinitely more sublime than the sloganeering and safe, part-time activism to which the Seventies had descended. Then, stunning everyone, came the Facebook Generation.
And while it is true that protests since 25 Jan have had ideological underpinnings — the belief in human rights, for example, it is also true that their success has depended on the rallying of politically untested forces through the internet to day-to-day causes — the institutionalised criminal practises of an oversize and corrupt security force under police-state conditions, which affect everyone. By November, something else had permeated those same conversations, suddenly:
The photo of a barely adult girl, undressed except for shoes and stockings. Impassive face, classic nude posture, artsy black-and-white presentation. The title of the blog on which it was published: Diary of a Revolutionary [Woman].
It was seen as more or less unprecedented, an epoch-making Gesture, an Event to document and debate. When the picture appeared, the second wave of protests had only just begun in Maidan Tahrir, specifically along the Shari Mohammad Mahmoud frontier; it was as if, while the internet-mediated Crowd offered up nameless davids to the Goliath of Unfreedom, the Individual used the same medium to hand over her post-Nineties soul for the same Cause (it doesn’t matter how absurd or ignorant Alia Mahdi might turn out to be, she is the conscious subject of her revolutionary nudity). While some received bullets in the eye or suffocated on a markedly more effective variety of American-made tear gas, others muttered prayers before the digital icon of Alia Mahdi.
Despite its visual idiom (despite online Arab fora advertising it like a pornographic object of the kind they routinely promote as sinful and therefore desirable by default, obscenely equating the nude with the erotic with the scandalous, and despite otherwise truly insolent responses on Facebook), the image holds little allure. Change the context and it could be a parody of some vaguely pedophiliac Vintage Erotica, barely worth a second, amused glance.
Had Alia Mahdi appeared nude on an adult dating or porn site, had she sent the picture privately to a million people, had she shown shame or reluctance, no one would have tut-tutted or smiled, neither intellectuals nor horny prudes of the cyber realm. Here and now, Alia Mahdi as her picture is an icon for our times, inviolable:
A simulacrum of the Self on the altar of Freedom.
And freedom, perhaps the truest catchword of the Arab Spring, is the term that the model and de-facto author of the picture, like Generation of the Nineties writers before her, chooses to hold up to the world; she believes that exposing herself on the internet is part of a Revolution ongoing since 25 Jan and a new uprising against Egypt’s ruling generals. But this is a world that would rather deny Alia Mahdi’s existence even as it knows that she is there: paradoxically, it includes the Tahrir Sit-In, where protesters mobbed and beat up the young woman when she showed up.
Already, even at the heart of the Revolution, the pit has been dug, the errant body marked, the prurient stones picked off the ground — and the revolutionaries themselves, the potential Martyrs offering up their bodies, are happy to be part of that sacrifice. All that remains for the ritual is the public killing of Alia Mahdi, which judging by what they have had to say would gratify and vindicate not only Islamists who legally and otherwise demand her head but also older and wiser intellectuals who, never having considered taking off their clothes in public, have embraced her as a victim. The feminists’ latest bonanza of hypocrisy…
The Revolution accepts oblations of the mutilated and the maimed, it eats up the body of the Martyr, promising nothing — neither collective nor individual freedom, while the Nude is expelled from the Maidan. The last secular activists of the Seventies stand side by side with their political heirs — scheming theocrats not unlike frequenters of the aforementioned fora where Alia Mahdi is advertised as porn, but it is in the act of sacrifice itself, in the death of the body as an object and its transformation into the subject of its destiny, that there is any hope for religion in Egypt. The Martyr and the Nude are applied religion; whatever else may be said about the generals, the activists and Tahrir, political Islam and the Coptic Orthodox Church are not.

2.The Travels of ibn Rakha (The National, 2008)
The journalist Abu Said ibn Rakha recounted as follows:
My trip from Abu Dhabi to Dubai took place at a later hour than planned on Monday, the 22nd of the month of Dhul Qi’dah, in this, the 1429th year after the blessed Hijrah. My object was to roam inside the Emirates’ newfangled monument to my venerable sheikh of Tangier – honest judge of the Maliki school of Sunni jurisprudence, associate of Temur the Tatar and Orhan the Ottoman, and divinely gifted savant of his day – Shamsuddin Abu Abdalla ibn Battuta. He is the author of the unsurpassed Rihla (you may know it as The Travels of ibn Battuta), the glorious account of his three decades’ Journey around the world, dazzling pearl on the bed of our literary sea, which he dictated before he died in 770 or 779 and whose style I now humbly emulate.
The monument I sought, named Ibn Battuta Mall, lies off the Dubai end of the Sheikh Zayed Road, in a spot where nothing towers above it save a cheerful yellow balloon in the basket of which, at certain times, visitors may soar into the skies and look down upon Dubai of the lofty mansions. It is formed of five palatial halls dedicated to stopping places on Abu Abdalla’s travels and devoted, may all good work be rewarded, to the practice of commerce. Buyers and sellers have flocked there daily since the opening of the halls three years ago; and indeed of the two thousand or so people estimated to have visited that day, I was the only one without mercantile intent (although I exchanged banknote for bodily sustenance at a Persian eatery in the China Court, that scarlet enclosure, let us guard against ostentation, with the plaque of the dragon repeated in a circle around a fountain-spangled wood ship evocative of the Opium Wars).
A young peasant from the Nile Delta town of Mansoura (where my late father, may his sins be forgiven, attended school) conveyed me to the mall in a silver-tinted taxi, complaining of his inability to conserve enough money to return triumphant to the homeland without spending inordinately long hours at the wheel. While we tarried to share cigarettes and memories, I recalled with salt tears the old Arabic verse about longing for your country while separated from your loved ones. And, reciting the opening of the Quran in supplication for the soul of my sheikh, I entered the Mall by the Egypt Court gate just before sunset. There, subtly illuminated like the Pyramids of Giza and the temples at Thebes, stood large stone blocks and sturdy columns with hieroglyphs engraved in bands upon the fake stone, which in their texture and arrangement and the whole nature of their construction imitated, in the manner of Disneyland, the ancient pagan architecture of my land. Inside, the light was whiter and louder, with coloured figurations of Pharaoh and his idols (let us guard against pantheism) flanking the upper half of the walls. Past Gloria’s coffee house, a toy shop and the booksellers of Magrudy’s faced each other on either side of the spacious walkway, taking up much room.
Entering the bookseller, I was appalled to find no sign of literature in the language of the Quran save for a few ill-picked paperbacks. After I made my way through a curvature leading into the Egypt Court (a space made to look like the courtyard of a Mameluke house inhabited by a family of giants, with the tiles, the latticework windows, the fabrics and the wall cupboards all 10 times their ordinary size), I came upon some advertisement-style displays with ample, multimedia information, in our language as well as that of the Franks, on the life and work of my sheikh. My spirits much improved, I proceeded to the Asian sector.
There, at the very apex of the Mughal-red India Court, stood an elaborate elephant bearing a maharaja in full regalia, one mahout cross-legged on the head of the beast, another up in the air, standing at the high end of the incredibly tall carriage. Laser lights flashing upon the torso of the plastic proboscidean lessened the effect of verisimilitude, but visitors still joyfully converged, their digital cameras emitting flash lights. Distracted, I crossed another hallway into the glittering, Iznik-like turquoise tiling of the Persia Court, wherein visitors may take Starbucks beneath the magnificent hand-painted dome (for that brand of coffee is the mall goers’ equivalent of the elixir, may we remain on the path of the righteous).
By the by as I proceeded, I reflected that the shops housed in this unique monument to Abu Abdalla were of the kind that remains exactly the same wherever you happen to find them on God’s earth. They have the same Frankish names, the same pricey commodities and the same cheap decor (a circumstance even the Persia Court – truly, as the Mall administrators call it, the jewel in the crown of the whole monument – could not endeavour to hide). As I trod under the pagodas, stepping out for a smoke in the Chinese Gardens, it seemed to me futile to mark out distinct cultures in the midst of such uniformity. And it was in this humour of dissent that, inspecting much excellent merchandise as I went along from Debenhams to H&M, from Mother Care to the gilded Paris Gallery, I contemplated the fate of my fellow travellers.
Both my esteemed sheikh and myself, stranded here (as I sometimes felt) among Franks and Hindustanis in the easternmost corner of the Arabic-speaking expanse, are perpetual strangers, a feather upon the face of the worldly plane blown by the wind whichsoever way it comes, weak in the face of power. Abu Abdalla went around the world in 30 years and, travelling mostly within a universe of thought familiar and meaningful to him, he was as alienated as he was engaged by the differences of others, their various languages and morals, their diverse foodstuffs, their inexplicable rites. In this newfangled monument of his I could go around the world in 30 minutes. But, travelling in a universe of thought neither particularly familiar nor meaningful to an Arab Muslim, I felt only alienated – not by difference but by sameness: the sameness of others and of the mall as a model of the world, the sameness of the consumers who inhabit that world and the sameness of their only possible pursuit: buying. At length I ambled leisurely along the scarlet enclosure and back to Africa, through brick red and turquoise, past the green, cartoon sky-ceilinged Tunis Court and into the smaller, cream and burgundy Andalus Court. I walked alongside a supermarket named Geant and another advertisement-style exhibit, this one dedicated to the shining lights of Arab-Muslim history, with the pioneering Andalusi aviator Abbas ibn Firnas, who died in the 274th year of the Hijrah, hanging up in the air like a giant plastic dragonfly, looking over an arcade and a playground. I took shelter by the small-scale replica of the Fountain of the Lions of Alhambra, calling upon Abu Abdalla to comfort me.
A mall can indeed be the whole world, I thought, much as a book by a traveller. But the world of malls is more narrow and uniform than the world of the Rihla, and I no longer want to travel in it.

3.The Honourable Citizen Manifesto (Al Ahram Weekly, 2011)
We, honourable citizens of Egypt — pioneers in every field, one hundred million nationalists and three great pyramids — declare our absolute support and inexhaustible gratitude for those valiant and chivalrous soldiers of our own flesh and blood who, with knightly dedication and redoubtable bravery, are making of their own unassailable selves the impregnable garrisons with which to protect not only us, their people, but also our most sacred, most xenophobic patrimony. Before we go on to demonstrate, with indubitable argument, the blindingly obvious fact that it is thanks to the wisdom and righteousness of our faithful Council of the Armed Forces (Sieg Heil!), of whose incorruptible grace the word “supreme” is but the humblest designation, that the people and their oil-smeared holy men of fragrant beards will be saved from a fetid galactic conspiracy to which this country has been subject.
We, very honourable citizens of Egypt — inventors of humanity, guardians of God, cradle of Islam, seven thousand years of civilisation and the world’s mightiest river, not to mention either minarets or microphones — condemn those who, having sold their weakling souls to the Zionists and the Masons and the Imperialists, would threaten stability and engender chaos, nay even stand in the way of our long-awaited democratic wedding through which the Council (Sieg Heil!), while maintaining its own excellent efforts to shelter the Egyptian body, will place the Egyptian mind under the heavenly guardianship of those cultivators of dead skin on the forehead and importers of Chinese-made paraphernalia of worship, those greatest of money-grubbing reiterators of the unadorned Word of God and His Prophet and black-clad, appropriately unidentifiable women whom all true patriots want to see in power, and who would never condone attempts by the stone- and fire-throwing rabble, heavily armed and dangerous — traitors and infidels, all — to stop our most efficient wheel of production, murder our soldiers, destroy our buildings, even set fire to our age-old French manuscripts…
We, very, very honourable citizens of Egypt, reaffirm our faith in our stouthearted Army (Sieg Heil!), which as we all know has never once been defeated or failed to defend our borders or our people, let alone its own rank and file; our Army (Sieg Heil!), which unlike those agents of the conspiracy who receive funds from Qatar and Iran and the Mossad has never once accepted alms from a foreign power; which for decades, thanks to the peace and prosperity it brought to our fecund land, has been baking the best seasonal cookies in all Egypt, sending its conscripts to work as maidservants and errand boys for the fine wives of our audacious police officers (whose own contribution to the torture and elimination of the enemy cannot be denied) and, since the Glorious July Revolution of nineteen fifty two, overseeing the creation of an independent national state over which we can only, to a man or a woman, shed tears of pride and self congratulation. Above all our Army (Sieg Heil!) has uncovered and blocked conspiracies; and since the vipers of mayhem began to spew their venom into our midst, soiling the beauty of the order by which we live, especially, our soldiers have lived up to their duty of eradicating aliens who, creeping among our deluded youth, managed to overtake their bodies. By showing mercy to others, the Army (Sieg Heil!) has only made them vulnerable to further alien takeovers, which is the only logical and objective explanation for recent events in downtown Cairo.
We, unbelievably honourable citizens of Egypt, went out to aid our brave hearts when, in October, they defended Maspero — site of the grand Radio and Television Union, mouthpiece of national honesty, ever the producer of the most accurate news and patriotic information — against armed and dangerous thugs belonging to that vile sect, the Copts, the force of whose blue-boned malice and reviled alliance with the enemy was promptly and summarily defeated, may they burn alive, freeing this pure and sacred land of their contamination. What if a few alien-possessed Copts have their heads crushed by armoured vehicles of the Salafi- and Muslim Brotherhood-supported Supreme Council (Sieg Heil!), the important thing is for our honour to be upheld. And later too, we endorsed the efforts of our soldiers to put down the turncoat barbarians, on Mohammad Mahmoud Street and outside our noble People’s Assembly, the riffraff whose criminal ways sought to obstruct the democratic wedding, undermine the security and stability for which we are famous among nations, and introduce such corrupting influences on our flesh and blood as internet, human rights and mutiny, God save us from evil. If a sheikh of the all-too-tolerant Azhar is killed by an alien in the fray, if a medical student pretends to have been shot when he has not been or a juvenile delinquent is given a good beating, the better to straighten him out, if a so called young woman, indeed even a real young woman, must be undressed and literally stepped on in Tahrir Square (since when do our well brought-up young Muslim women go out on the streets unaccompanied?), indeed if a million weaklings are wholly eliminated, the better to save worthy lives, the better to serve beards, generals (Sieg Heil) and manuscripts — who is to object?
We, very unbelievably piously honourable citizens of Egypt, will only cheer. We will cheer our soldiers and our holy men, and to the aliens and the foreign agents we will continue to say: We are the barricades. If we feed you crap or crush your heads on the asphalt, it is either because you deserve it or to save you. For it is we who love Egypt, it is we who want to build Egypt.

4.All Those Theres (Al Ahram Weekly, 2010)
Thanks to a flighty wi-fi connection at the riad where I stayed that time in Marrakesh, I heard Sargon Boulus (1944-2007) reading his poems for the first time.
Sargon had died recently in Berlin – this was the closest I would get to meeting him – and, lapping up. the canned sound, I marvelled at his unusual career. He was an Iraqi who spent more or less all of his adult life outside Iraq, a Beatnik with roots in Kirkuk, an Assyrian who reinvented classical Arabic. He translated both Mahmoud Darwish and Howl.
In Sargon’s time and place there is an overbearing story of nation building, of (spurious) Arab-Muslim identity and of (mercenary) Struggle – against colonialism, against Israel, against capital – and that story left him completely out. More probably, he chose to stand apart from it, as he did from a literary scene that celebrated it more often than it did anything else. Is this what makes him the most important Arab poet for me?
When that happens, I’m in Morocco with an Egyptian friend. At this point we both live outside Egypt, further from each other than either is from home. We must travel to see each other, but for reasons both complicated and ineffable, we cannot meet in Cairo. There is something refugee-ish about our isolation inside the walls of the medina, our existential anxiety, the fact that we are in each other’s presence against all odds. For as long as we’re there, by coincidence, the riad has no other guests.
Nightly we sit in the withered grandeur of the top-floor salon, laptops on laps, and we struggle with the electric plugs, the ornate china ashtrays, the incredibly weak lights. In that salon everything is pretty, but everything is maddeningly impractical.
When I mention that I’ve seen pictures of Sargon but never heard his voice, my friend takes me to a web site called Poetry International with three excellent recordings in streaming audio format. The medina is still; and miraculously, that night, the wi-fi never gives.
Huddled over the tiny speakers, we listen. Again and again we return to one particular poem: al-laji’u yahki, or (in my translation) “The refugee tells”. Our ears buzzing with the angular, hard-edged vowels of Maghrebi dialect, Sargon’s far-Mashriq inflection strikes us all the more; it is curvy, singsong and strung with Bedouin consonants. The poems are in standard Arabic. Their reader’s mother tongue is Syriac and he has not been to Iraq for decades. But you can instantly tell where he’s from.
And it is magnificent poetry. In its quality (but in very little else) it extends a glorious Mesopotamian tradition that stretches back, through Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab and Mohammad Mahdi Al-Jawahri in the 20th century, to the Abbasid caliphate. The poet Sinan Antoon, another Iraqi Christian, tells me the poems are full of rarefied dialect: further evidence of their belonging. But it is more than anything else the voice, the sheer Iraqiness of Sargon’s undulating voice, that stamps them with a sense of place.
In a way that no Arab poet ever thought of doing before the Nineties, Sargon embodies the poet as uncommitted wanderer – and, all through his life, he willingly pays the price in homelessness and uncertainty, in refugee-ness. He frees the text of its historical onus, pushes it back into the broadest possible human context. To my friend and me he speaks of voluntary displacement and purposeful disengagement. Geographic flux. Not just because we admire the poems, here and now it seems right to be reviewing his life.
First, Sargon makes the journey from the British enclave of Habbaniyya, where he was born, to Kirkuk. It is the Sixties, and together with Fadel Al-Azzawy, Mu’ayyad Al-Rawi and other young prose poets, he forms the Kirkuk Group, a heterogeneous circle fascinated with Flower Power and bilingual in English. A string of risky border crossings takes him to Beirut, where his poems have been “discovered” by Youssef Al-Khal, the editor of the influential journal Shi’r. For several years Sargon lives as an illegal alien in Lebanon. When he is about to be deported, he manages somehow to secure legal passage to America. There are legends about how he does this; the important thing is that, before Saddam Hussein comes to power, before the story of nation building in Baath Party Iraq reaches its nightmarish climax, he is already settled in San Francisco.
Amazingly, as my friend and I start to tell each other, there is no nostalgia in Sargon’s poems. There is pained memory, grief, a harrowing awareness of both the cost of moving on and the value of what’s left behind, but no self- or place-pity, no homesickness.
Sargon makes you think of how a place can be at once familiar and unfamiliar, how a detail like the shape of a glass or the colour of the light in a window can make home unpredictable, how a moment – the moment his voice came through with the words al-laji’u yahki, for example – can condense and give meaning to two lives.
Once again I recall the imperative in one of his poems: “You’re the one who wanted bare adventure and burned the map, now sleep in the dragon’s entryway.” It’s a state of being I think my friend and I have always shared, but tonight it takes on exigent edge. Here, speaking from the internet-ready grave to a pair of temporary life defectors, is the archetypal refugee; we grow even closer listening to him.
Reminiscing about this many-sided encounter in Marrakesh – rereading not only “The refugee tells” but also poems about the family left behind in Habbaniyya and what has become of them (Sargon seldom knows), about Iraqi friends remembered or dead or encountered on the street by chance, often somewhere in Europe, about the horrendous conditions they are forced to live with and about their (his) visions of the end of the world – I think again of homeland and identity, of Baghdad as a hub of nationalism.
Was it Sargon’s conscious choice to reject this time and place, or was he, as a disinherited Christian, forced out of the story by blood? It occurs to me now that, by remaining marginal to an ultimately disastrous grand narrative, whether intentionally or not, Sargon managed to live out poetic Arabness as nobody else did. His is (as it had to be) an Arabness in exile, free of the trappings of coming into your own in the politicised Sixties. But it is also (as it should be) free of the tent pegs that hold down the individual spirit.
Sargon never gathered wealth, fame or clout; he did not for a moment trade in his prodigal talent for wider or deeper recognition. To this day the Iraqi with the strange name is seldom celebrated in the mainstream cultural media. Yet as I think again of the fall Baghdad, Sargon tells me more about what it means than any Iraqi I know of.

5.Chapter and Verse (The National, 2008)
Recently, The New Yorker magazine ran six first-person articles describing encounters with members of the monotheistic clergy, all published under the heading “Faith and doubt”. It is not clear what the occasion was for remembering Knowers of God, as clerics are sometimes honorifically referred to in Arabic. The pieces were engaging, but too short and inconclusive to say much. Four reflected a Christian universe of thought; one was set in a tree outside a synagogue. The only vaguely Muslim piece – about the headmaster of a religious school in Ghana – detailed this man’s unusual belief that no plane could stay aloft if the aviation engineer in charge did not recite the required verses of the Quran during take-off.
It seems right to supplement the latter, if not with the recollections of a memorable cleric – Muslims have students and teachers of theology, not an ordained clergy per se – then with this personal allegory of faith and doubt:
Medical opinion had unanimously declared pregnancy impossible. Some vital channel had been blocked in my mother’s body – some irrevocable fault of physiology. I will spare you the details, which I do not know. All that is clear in my memory is that she was forced to forego the project that had informed her entire life, and which for Egyptian women of her generation was the only real project: she had never had a child. Now she was told she never would. If she conceived, which was extremely unlikely in the first place, she would be unable to keep her foetus for longer than a few days. But my mother was not devastated; she was not resigned, she simply dismissed medical opinion. She dismissed any opinion, in fact, that agreed with the bogus conspiracy seemingly hatched to deprive her of the one thing she lived for.
Then one day, she conceived. When tests confirmed that it was not a false pregnancy, she was not particularly surprised. After all, for weeks after receiving the initial discouraging medical reports, she claims, she had been convinced it would happen. Also that she would manage to keep the foetus, the miracle foetus, and never have another child. My mother is an extremely devout woman. But as she has grown older, her spiritual energy has been fossilised in increasingly reductive religious dogma. Only through cautious retellings of her past does the thrill of the unknown – the drama of faith before it has been validated – come through in her religious experience. She will never admit it, but that largely unarticulated faith is the treasure that is buried beneath her religious practice.
There are two very distinct experiences of any religion. On the one hand you have the codified set of beliefs: the dos, the don’ts, the heaven, the hell. And on the other hand there is that mystery. By codifying the unknown, dogma murders the mystery. I have always thought that was the worst thing about it. If you can have both dogma and mystery in one package, then all the better.
So my mother mysteriously believed that she would keep the foetus. Because she wanted it enough, she felt divinely entitled to a child. Seven months after the initial surprise – which, of course, she claims was no surprise – she had turned into a jaundiced, bloated version of herself, perpetually fatigued and more or less immobile. But the foetus was still there and she had no doubt she would keep it. Family lore has it that, at two separate instances during those seven months, she was on the verge of doubting whether she would have her child when she heard verses of the Quran drift through the window, which quelled her fears. On both occasions, it was a verse from the chapter called Youssef, the Quranic story of Joseph, the son of Jacob, not so very different from its earlier version in the Bible.
I was the unlikely foetus, and I quickly learnt to associate whatever state I was in – the intractable mystery of whatever was happening to me as I grew up – with that Quranic chapter.
Youssef the chapter is a favourite of professional reciters; you are likely to encounter it wherever and whenever you hear Quran in Cairo. (And you are just as likely to hear Quran wherever and whenever you are in Cairo.) Verses of Youssef are often quoted in print, too. You see them inscribed in bold lettering in the most unlikely of places. So there was never any reason to believe that encounters with that chapter should bear secret messages. If anything, there was reason to believe that the more I paid attention to such messages, the further ahead on the road to madness I would be. And yet I believed it; I believed it deeply and unreservedly, later seeking to decode the messages I was receiving. Whenever I heard or saw a verse of that chapter, it stopped me in my tracks. It still does, somewhat.
At first it was simply a matter of coming in contact with Youssef – that was a good omen in itself. There was never any question about what else it could mean. But sometimes, after hearing a given verse, bad things would happen: an accident, sickness, low examination marks.
I had to pay attention.
Eventually I realised that different verses could mean different things, and I tried to reconstruct my existence based on the storyline, whose basic outline is: a boy dreams that the sun, the moon and the stars have all knelt before him, but he ends up in a ditch on the way to Egypt. He is enslaved, he resists temptation, he goes to jail. Then it turns out he can interpret dreams. He interprets the Pharaoh’s dream and saves the world. That worked for a while. A specific verse would illuminate a certain incident or exchange: temptation, rise, fall, Pharaoh. It worked until I realised I could replace one verse with another and still have the same illumination. I realised I have my mother’s superstition, but neither her sense of divine entitlement nor a very clear idea of what I might be entitled to, much less the dogma that would bring it all together.
Still, I have the sense of possibility – however vague – that my existence is a blessing to be explained by reference to a chapter of the Quran.

THE NUDE AND THE MARTYR

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Youssef Rakha

Some time in February, the literary (and intellectual) Generation of the Nineties started coming up in intellectual conversations about the Arab Spring. Some people theorised that, by stressing individual freedom and breaking with their overtly politicised forerunners, apolitical agents of subversion under Mubarak had involuntarily paved the way for precisely the kind of uprising said forerunners had spent whole lives prophesying and pushing for, to no avail.

Politicised intellectuals of past generations had always believed in grand narratives. That is why their collective message (anti-imperialist or socialist), evidently no less divorced from the People than that of the younger rebels and aesthetes who didn’t give two damns about the liberation of Jerusalem or the dictatorship of the proletariat, remained repressive and didactic; while allowing themselves to be co-opted and neutralised, they struggled or pretended to struggle in vain.

The Generation of the Nineties remained silent about social transformation as such, but they stressed daily life and the physical side of existence, including their own bodies, which they insisted on experimenting with — if only verbally, for the sake of a personal deliverance deemed infinitely more sublime than the sloganeering and safe, part-time activism to which the Seventies had descended. Then, stunning everyone, came the Facebook Generation.

And while it is true that protests since 25 Jan have had ideological underpinnings — the belief in human rights, for example, it is also true that their success has depended on the rallying of politically untested forces through the internet to day-to-day causes — the institutionalised criminal practises of an oversize and corrupt security force under police-state conditions, which affect everyone. By November, something else had permeated those same conversations, suddenly:

The photo of a barely adult girl, undressed except for shoes and stockings. Impassive face, classic nude posture, artsy black-and-white presentation. The title of the blog on which it was published: Diary of a Revolutionary [Woman].

It was seen as more or less unprecedented, an epoch-making Gesture, an Event to document and debate. When the picture appeared, the second wave of protests had only just begun in Maidan Tahrir, specifically along the Shari Mohammad Mahmoud frontier; it was as if, while the internet-mediated Crowd offered up nameless davids to the Goliath of Unfreedom, the Individual used the same medium to hand over her post-Nineties soul for the same Cause (it doesn’t matter how absurd or ignorant Alia Mahdi might turn out to be, she is the conscious subject of her revolutionary nudity). While some received bullets in the eye or suffocated on a markedly more effective variety of American-made tear gas, others muttered prayers before the digital icon of Alia Mahdi.

Despite its visual idiom (despite online Arab fora advertising it like a pornographic object of the kind they routinely promote as sinful and therefore desirable by default, obscenely equating the nude with the erotic with the scandalous, and despite otherwise truly insolent responses on Facebook), the image holds little allure. Change the context and it could be a parody of some vaguely pedophiliac Vintage Erotica, barely worth a second, amused glance.

Had Alia Mahdi appeared nude on an adult dating or porn site, had she sent the picture privately to a million people, had she shown shame or reluctance, no one would have tut-tutted or smiled, neither intellectuals nor horny prudes of the cyber realm. Here and now, Alia Mahdi as her picture is an icon for our times, inviolable:

A simulacrum of the Self on the altar of Freedom.

And freedom, perhaps the truest catchword of the Arab Spring, is the term that the model and de-facto author of the picture, like Generation of the Nineties writers before her, chooses to hold up to the world; she believes that exposing herself on the internet is part of a Revolution ongoing since 25 Jan and a new uprising against Egypt’s ruling generals. But this is a world that would rather deny Alia Mahdi’s existence even as it knows that she is there: paradoxically, it includes the Tahrir Sit-In, where protesters mobbed and beat up the young woman when she showed up.

Already, even at the heart of the Revolution, the pit has been dug, the errant body marked, the prurient stones picked off the ground — and the revolutionaries themselves, the potential Martyrs offering up their bodies, are happy to be part of that sacrifice. All that remains for the ritual is the public killing of Alia Mahdi, which judging by what they have had to say would gratify and vindicate not only Islamists who legally and otherwise demand her head but also older and wiser intellectuals who, never having considered taking off their clothes in public, have embraced her as a victim. The feminists’ latest bonanza of hypocrisy…

The Revolution accepts oblations of the mutilated and the maimed, it eats up the body of the Martyr, promising nothing — neither collective nor individual freedom, while the Nude is expelled from the Maidan. The last secular activists of the Seventies stand side by side with their political heirs — scheming theocrats not unlike frequenters of the aforementioned fora where Alia Mahdi is advertised as porn, but it is in the act of sacrifice itself, in the death of the body as an object and its transformation into the subject of its destiny, that there is any hope for religion in Egypt. The Martyr and the Nude are applied religion; whatever else may be said about the generals, the activists and Tahrir, political Islam and the Coptic Orthodox Church are not.

Jadaliyya: Three Versions of Copt

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Youssef Rakha

Not quite a day later, a secular Muslim employee at one of Egypt’s largest media institutions begins to unpack the events of 9 October at his office, not far from the site of blood in downtown Cairo

-I-

Yesterday evening, while I sat at this desk dreaming up cultural content for the pages I am in charge of, Twitter began turning up news of protesters being fired at and pelted with stones – but not run over by combat armored vehicles, not beaten repeatedly after they were dead, nor thrown into the Nile as bloodied corpses. Not yet. The location was outside the Radio and Television Union Building, along a stretch of the Nile known as Maspero.

I had distanced myself from Maspero – the Tahrir Square of “the Copts” – because demonstrating for specifically sectarian rights seemed beside the point. Such rights would presumably be granted anyway, once freedom was institutionally enshrined. This was motivated less by sectarian affiliation than anti-sectarianism. However, I was to discover soon enough that there was plenty of room for confusing the two.

***

Since the rise of Islamism in the 1990s, in place of denial, anti-Coptic sectarianism has taken on variously sinister motifs: identifying salib (Arabic for “cross”) with salibi (Crusader), for example, an adherent of fanatical dogma might suggest that by virtue of who they are, Egyptian Christians are in fact the enemy. In this way, the historically pro-Muslim Conquest Copts – and Copt simply means “Egyptian”, as opposed to the equally Christian but Greek rulers of the land – are turned into allies of “the Jews and the Americans” (as in those responsible for the existence of Israel and their Roman-like, Muslim-hating patrons).

***

-II-

A week later, I could remember every minute of that hour or so at the office. Already, while I wondered whether this might be the “third revolution” promised but not forthcoming since April, pandemonium was striking downstairs, with word of the demonstrators attempting to storm the building in anger over the false news that had come out of it since the march set off. Already, TV anchors working out of the Union, absurd as that seems, were calling on the Egyptian people to defend their national army against protesters.

I tweeted, “They are shooting Copts.”

No one was in fact armed in any way. To cries of silmiyyah, Obama’s pet word for the Arab Spring, meaning “peaceful”, the Muslim mob had responded, violently: Islamiyyah. But such is the insidious nature of Egyptian sectarianism and the fear of chaos instilled in the people by the former regime, then the military, that no one stopped to ask questions.

***

But what was really happening as I sat here watching my Twitter timeline? A pro-Coptic march had set out to Maspero from the nearby neighborhood of Shubra, then?

Then the march was subjected to stone and Molotov cocktail attacks from mobs of Muslims, where practically all-Muslim Central Security and, especially, Military Police troops—aided not only by misinformed “honorable citizens” (as the military has taken to putting it) but apparently also by baltagiyya or the hired thugs deployed by the authorities against protesters since January—proceeded to massacre “the Copts” by every means available, not excluding live ammunition and at least one armored vehicle purposefully crushing heads. The carnage, widely recorded in downtown hospitals, was horrendous.

-III-

So … It has been nearly three weeks since Sunday 9 October and I am astonished. Not so much by the war crimes of the army or the actions of the mob that so readily “came to its aid”; I am astonished, rather, by the responses of educated Muslims, including allegedly secular intellectuals.

Condemnation of the massacre has not been nearly as vociferous or as unanimous as you would expect. With very few exceptions (notably the human rights activist Hossam Bahgat), the discourse has centered not on the Council’s sectarianism as an unchanged wing of the Mubarak (and by extension the July 1952) regime, but on the Council itself –the the regime—as a conventional object of dissent in conveniently dire straits. Evidenced by the indubitable fact that the instigators of protests on 25 January were neither traditional dissidents (left-wing or Islamist) nor politically organized except on the Internet, such dissent (exemplified most clearly by the Muslim Brothers) seems in retrospect to be not only opportunistic and rhetorical but also futile by default.

***

Holier than thou wherefore, O Anti-Imperialist Hero?

***

Many were offended by a subsequent tweet of mine: “Ashamed of being a Muslim.” I even lost some Facebook friends following a status in which I replaced “Islam” with ‘almaniyyah (secularism) in the well known slogan, “Islam is the answer.” Others, I am sure, have labeled me an apostate or a traitor or an agent of the Zionist-American Conspiracy. All of which, in a manner of speaking, of course, I am. I would have been eager to latch onto something I could be proud of whatever it was called. But there is no longer much room, in the human rights context, for differentiating between “misguided Muslims” and “Islam”. And there is no longer a halfwit crusader from Texas to fuel the false sense of victimhood that underlies all political Islam.

Looking, behaving and speaking in exactly the same way – to the point, indeed, of using Quranic expressions among themselves in daily life—Egyptian Christians are just as dispensable to present-day Rome as their Muslim counterparts. Perhaps it makes sense to vehemently condemn the international community after all, but the nationalists and Islamists who do so unthinkingly forget that it was in the defense of Muslims against Christians in Bosnia and Herzegovina that the international community rose up.

If the Arab Spring is not the occasion for nationalists and Islamists to practice self-questioning regarding their own racism, murderousness and hypocrisy – if it is not the occasion to unequivocally denounce not only Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein but also Omar Bashir and supporters of the Assad regime, not to mention the cold-blooded murder of their own compatriots on the streets, perhaps the Zionist-American Conspiracy is the answer, after all.

http://www.jadaliyya.com/

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Virtual Palestinians: From Sabra and Chatila to Arab Spring

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THE NUDE AND THE MARTYR

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