Tag Archives: Mubarak

Anticipating 8 July

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And its discontents
Anticipating 8 July, Youssef Rakha discusses revolution
Tomorrow is “the second revolution”. I am no longer enthusiastic about the term. Not that I have the least ambivalence towards what is happening, what has and has not yet happened: if meaningful change is to occur, if justice is to be done, there is no escaping more and more sustained protest; I shudder to think there is no escaping more violence too, though in the light of Central Security (the Egyptian riot police) striking back, violence seems inevitable. An effective as opposed to puppet interim government and an end to both police and military abuses are the very least starting point for the promised new Egypt; naturally, as it now seems, neither has been forthcoming. Despite the appearance of relative stability, sooner or later something must explode; I say this analytically, not emotionally: whatever the powers that be are thinking, however much the quasi-official media continue to churn out misinformation, the current situation is not tenable. As far as we support the 25 Jan-11 Feb protests, perhaps we should be grateful that stability remains a brittle veneer. In some ways, of course – for 30 years prior to 2011 – stability was a veneer anyway. Yet protests have been repeatedly decried as a threat to stability and as such identified with disturbance of the peace (in much the same way as protesters have been identified with baltagiyya or thugs and subjected to military trials). There is a sense in which the discourse of revolution has been co-opted by some and marginalised by others, in which the uprooting of corrupt dictatorship has reduced to hollow patriotism, “bringing down the regime” to “loving Egypt”. In just over four months, dependency on the army has facilitated both a rise in reactionary (as in positively counterrevolutionary) Islamism and (coupled by a string of minimal, essentially cosmetic interventions) business as usual for all the elements constituting the former social-political order, media, security and Muslim Brothers not excluded. My gripe with “revolution” is that, all things considered, it seems to have struck an unprogressive chord with the silent majority; and the Historic Achievement of the Egyptian People – so far little more than a symbolic gesture – has reduced to a term. Even in daily discourse, the events of those 18 days have become synonymous with a period of time, the martyrs to a social group: people say “at the revolution” as if they are saying “last Ramadan” or “during the holiday”; and references to “the families of the martyrs”, stripped of any ethical prerogative, are juxtaposed with references to other social strata with a direct interest in the political future.
Tomorrow is “the second revolution”. One assumes the majority of the intellectual community will, at some point in the day, make their way to Tahrir Square and, with characteristic timidity, join in the chanting of slogans probably created by the “ultras”, as the organised, often uniformed football supporters-cum-male cheer leaders who have made up the bulk of Tahrir Square protesters in the last two months are now called. They will dissolve in the multitude, if multitude there is. They will be theorising about developments as developments occur. A very potent question is whether they will be there as protesters or in the presupposed capacity of “the conscience of the nation”. In just over four months, it has been fascinating to watch the intellectuals take part and, especially, comment on events while at the same time seeing how they might pragmatically benefit from the incumbent developments – assuming positions in the ministry of culture, for example, or allying themselves with people who have. It is not so much that they are on the wrong side of the moral divide. The important thing is to realise how, in much the same way as the ideological grand narratives, hero worship and tutelage that characterised the emergence of postcolonial national states in the Arab world have come to an impasse, so too have the discourses of an intellectual “margin” which, positing itself as the enlightened, progressive and selfless counterweight to an ineffectual, vacuous and often criminal mainstream, when the time came for it to make sacrifices, to turn itself into a self-respecting page, ended up producing little more than bystanders’ remarks. Should revolution pick up where it left off, now, what would be the intellectuals’ role in it? And other than prematurely exaggerating the significance of what happened through rhetoric and/or making sagely, often idiotic or patently counterrevolutionary statements about where to go from here, what was the intellectuals’ contribution to “the first” revolution? If enough people show up tomorrow, if the situation sufficiently escalates, one assumes there will be, around intellectuals and ultras alike, huge numbers of Central Security armed with freshly imported tear gas and a vengefulness for protesters, plainclothes operatives directing anti-riot operations as well as baltagiyya to aid and justify them, perhaps also snipers stationed on rooftops or elsewhere, perhaps arrests. A small core of committed activists – peaceful to the last – will be calling for an indefinite sit-in and, if the situation develops, eventually sealing off the square. If all this happens, if there are enough people to make it happen, “the revolution” will have happened again; in rhetorical tones, the intellectuals will express joy and concern, they will espouse ideological grand narratives and tutelage, but it is clear by now that they will not have answers to the only relevant, nearly intractable question of how to actually implement the demands of the revolution.
Tomorrow is “the second revolution”. The demands of the first revolution, which were more or less willingly left for the army to respond to and have therefore not been met, will be made more forcefully, once again. It is as if the revolutionaries are suddenly discovering that the army had been part of the regime all along, and shared more or less the same interests. The stepping down of Mubarak is, as if for the first time since 11 Feb , seen for what it actually was: a significant enough concession to the social-political transformation posited by some eight million taking to the streets to remonstrate with the political status quo, more than 800 of whom were killed and nearly 2,700 seriously injured, but one that could not in itself lead to democracy. In the absence of guiding principles, planning or leadership, there remains one very significant question about an essentially liberal and middle-class revolution that started out as a protest against police abuses and ended up bringing down the president: for what, precisely, would such a revolution have an army that was technically under the authority of said president try him and the pillars of his regime? Crimes that would seem to be side-effects rather than substantial ailments of Mubarak’s dictatorship – financial corruption, lack of respect for the right to live, let alone the right to true and free political representation – continue to conceal the much greater crime of a once purposefully ideological political order rooted in the coup d’etat of July 1952 but now with absolutely no moral substance to it. I am not arguing with the culpability of Mubarak and his many cronies, a number of whom, including the former minister of information Anas El-Fiqi, were acquitted of some charges on Tuesday, generating greater outrage in the buildup to 8 July. I am personally against capital punishment, but I am not arguing with the right of the martyrs’ families to see the killers of their loved ones from Mubarak down receiving the harshest possible punishment. What I am arguing against is the idea that the extent and/or nature of the crimes committed by the Mubarak regime could be legally demarcated at all. Too many people were (are?) directly or indirectly involved with the former order, too much legal evidence has been destroyed since Feb, too many private interests would be done too many disservices should justice truly prevail. If 25 Jan is to remain both a white and a decentralised, non-ideological revolution, how can we expect adequate retribution? Perhaps the only true slogan of the revolution is Down with July, but neither intellectuals nor ultras nor even allegedly politicised Islamists have had the vision or the courage to chant it. Down with July, anyway.
Tomorrow is “the second revolution”: another step on the way to “the second independence”, which it has been persuasively argued is what the Arab Spring – an anti-police state, anti-theocratic and by extension anti-military dictatorship movement, if nothing else – is truly all about. But independence implies economic and military self-dependence, which thanks to the trajectory of July is far more than Egypt can say for itself. To have a revolution in any meaningful sense is to admit that this is where six decades of military dictatorship has brought us, all things considered: mobs burning up police stations while the government or agents of the government briskly go about the business of killing the people, and notwithstanding more or less retarded versions of Islamic theocracy, not the faintest horizon of an alternative way forward. To have a revolution is to say that, rather than a Zionist conspiracy or an extension of imperialism per se, what we have had for six decades is shades of rhetoric, and that insofar as we survive at all, we survive thanks to a global order that subsidises our existence in return for some human, mostly natural resources including our geographic location. Without aid, without tourism, indeed without peace with Israel – considering our standards of education and our performance in fields like agriculture, technology or trade – were on earth would we be now? It is not clear to what extent the first revolution has been successful in revealing just what a horrendous mess the military-led nationalist state founded by Nasser has ended up becoming. Perhaps the second revolution will bring home the even more significant and naturally more devastating fact that it was not Mubarak’s policy of conciliation with an unjust unipolar global order that was wrong with Mubarak, it was not Mubarak’s failure to “support the cause”, whatever that might me, that brought Mubarak down. It was Mubarak’s incompetence. And there is absolutely no hope in any revolution contributing to any better future until we are prepared to admit exactly how much we share that.

Mainstream margin

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Last week Youssef Rakha lamented the sameness of the cultural press in the wake of revolution; this week he unpacks the role of that press as the morally superior Margin to an alleged establishment Text
It has been less than four months since the interim government of Essam Sharaf took charge and, true to form, intellectuals representing the supposed margin (of dissidence, of freedom, of whatever happens to be unlike or alternative to centres of money and power) are already assessing the performance of Emad Abu-Ghazi’s Ministry of Culture, questioning the presence in its ranks of former members of the NDP or its attempts to accommodate Salafi pressures through censorship, forgetting that the NDP and fundamentalist Islam are far more representative of the society in which they live than they could ever hope to be, and still possessing not a clue on how to achieve what they have always taken to be their raison d’être – transforming that society.
Intellectuals are doing so, for example, in the dedicated publication Akhbar Al-Adab, which, following a drawn-out, post-revolution strike against a corrupt editor more like a pro-government journalist (for which read civil servant) than an intellectual, is now edited by Abla El-Reweini: a triumph for all concerned but a development, ironically, that maintained the pre-revolution status quo of a small-circulation, progressive weekly subsidised by a gargantuan, more or less reactionary establishment (Akhbar Al-Yom). After some 50 years of ineffectuality, abolishing the ministry of culture altogether seemed not only the wiser but also the more revolutionary decision.
Yet the proposition found little support among the universally pro-revolution intellectuals themselves – and cultural circles by extension. It seems the intellectuals, like their counterparts in almost every field of endeavour, were eager to resume their usual role: that of disgruntled observer of official culture, which presupposes the existence of the latter. It seems they too could not wait for life to go “back to normal”. What is strange about this is not their impatience with the prospect of chaos, with temporary or partial unemployment and logistical, financial uncertainty. It is their failure to see the revolution as an opportunity for revising their perspective on culture itself: what it means to be an intellectual, what counts in a political position, what is the point of having or being part of a government-controlled institution…
For a decade following the “first independence” of 1956, big ideas about national consciousness and a state for the people did support cultural practises as part of a totalitarian system whose credibility came into question with the 1967 defeat. However, with the onset of anti-nationalist nationalism and mafia-style capitalism under Sadat, Egyptian culture – for a brief spell, an effective arm of the state – very quickly devolved into sporadic literary and audio-visual phenomena that have existed outside or in spite of corrupt and by now wholly superfluous institutions.
(Superfluous to the point of no longer even serving the regime that squandered public funds on them: from within another small-circulation, relatively progressive weekly subsidised by an even more gargantuan and reactionary institution, the revolution has made it possible to ask whether the decision by the former editor in chief of the daily Al-Ahram Ossama Saraya, a few months before the revolution, to Photoshop the figure of Mubarak from the back to the front of a small group of heads of state in a universally available wire picture before publishing it – the notorious “expressive intervention” scandal – actually served Mubarak’s interests.)
The failure of the Sadat regime to live up to the promise of freedom and its wholesale adoption of the Cold War strategy of endorsing political Islam to fend off the communist threat – just as idiotic, in the end, as Nasser’s non-alignment or pro-Soviet strategies of pan-Arab nationalism – resulted in the phenomenon of the “marginal” intellectual (i.e., the intellectual who did not openly pander to a regime she knew to have no legitimacy) as “the conscience of the nation”.
In the light of the isolation of both culture and power from an ever more underdeveloped society and so in the absence of the nation itself, the conscience of the nation is an interesting concept. The conscience of the nation critiques a construct, and in so doing it enters into a power game with fake representatives of (Arab, or Muslim) identity. Culture turns into an airtight system of shifting alliances and ongoing conflicts, personally driven and materialistically substantiated. The cultural margin becomes a steganographic part of the text of the regime not half as different from the society it rules as Akhbar Al-Adab would have us believe, a text – or a muddle of pious bureaucracy and incompetent profiteering – no longer really being written.
The marginal intellectual’s role before as after the revolution is to cling onto the moral high ground, critiquing the failure of said regime to undertake its national responsibility to a sublime thing called culture. But there can be no moral high ground in the absence of morality, nor does true culture – whether state-supported or spontaneous – emerge in isolation from the flesh-and-blood, dust-and-exhaust fume reality of which it is part. Neither nation nor culture can ever be very clearly defined in a police (or military) state where ideologies and counter ideologies, whether nationalist or Islamist, have eventually revealed themselves to be mere sloganeering.
Under Mubarak, Islamists (Salafis) were systematically unleashed on society in return for staying out of politics. The Ministry, headed for over 25 years by the former intelligence agent and abstract expressionist painter Farouk Hosni, turned culture into mega-project business closely associated with tourism and archaeology, by turns outraging and making outrageous concessions to Salafism.
Under Hosni the ministry totally emasculated an intellect like Gaber Asfour and totally abandoned one like the late Nasr Abu-Zeid, a potential and an actual victim of the “Islamic threat”, respectively. It siphoned money out of the country, like every other stolid ministry under Mubarak. In the systematic attacks on its abuses by the founding editor of Akhbar Al-Adab, the novelist Gamal El-Ghitani (who has called on Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, Mubarak’s long-standing defence minister and the head of the Higher Military Council, to assume the role of absolute ruler for a period of three years following the revolution), it found a shadow ministry with sufficient cover to make intellectuals feel they were active agents of a living culture, up against something they should be up against, owners of the moral high ground.
Yet now as before it is as if what must by definition be creative and organically rooted practise can be judged on the same terms as health care, for example. Now as before even intellectuals who recognise the bankruptcy of slogan-driven and populist consciousness are unable to let go of their role as the mirror image of a monster that does not really exist, or one that exists only insofar as they themselves allow it to.
The socio-cultural critic, which is the closest thing to what the Akhbar Al-Adab intellectual is or should be, is still at the receiving end of an intention emanating from an establishment that has proven, again and definitively, both culturally and morally hollow, paper thin, a vomit bag of un-things. Not only does this arrangement undermine the rebellious individual, it also turns the margin into a cog in the machinery of the very text it sets out to oppose – in the present case, and despite all the noise on both sides of the unreal divide: silence.

Al-Ahram Weekly

Starting up

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In the cultural if not the mainstream press, revolution might have prompted installing a new OS altogether, writes Youssef Rakha ; it has barely suggested a restart

Once again I am perusing the cultural press and once again I am distressed. It is partly the same old disappointment in frivolous topics being overblown and muthaqqaf (or intellectual) responses to ideas and events being, as if by definition, politicised. It is partly the persisent perception of “the intellectuals” — for which read, very simply, agents of cultural activity of any kind — as something over and above what they do or more often fail to do adequately: the madness of presupposing that, irrespective of the nature or extent of their work, intellectuals are not only producers of discourse but also, and perpetually, agents of transformation, “the role of the muthaqqaf ” — and the Poet in particular — standing in for that of the Sage or the Superman, if not the Ruler then the Prophet. But current distress resulting from perusal of the cultural press is mainly a matter of a revolution having taken place: a predetermined idea, in my own mind, about the positive effects of the events of 25 Jan-11 Feb on “intellectual” consciousness — no such luck!

Whoever came up with the idea that poetry can change the world, I don’t know (God forgive Jean-Paul Sartre for his theory of engagement, though I doubt it has much to do with this in context), but three months on, “revolution” is an occasion to rethink not only the haloed topic of “the relationship of the intellectual to authority” but also modern Arab-Muslim history as a whole: the actual role of the intellectual in its unfolding. In 18 days, no more than one tenth of the population managed to dislogdge an abominable, prehistoric president. Of those, less than a tenth handed over power to the army, admittedly without much resistance from anyone. But it is the remaining nine tenths (who had nothing, factually, to do with either the protests or the intellectual force behind them) who have been crying Revolution ever since.

Counterrevolutionary discourse to the effect that the events were a foreign conspiracy, however absurd, is gaining ground; but it is cooption and subversion that remain the principal lie. People cry Revolution even despite there being no tangible change in the way the country operates or the vision of the powers in charge of it — themselves an extension, however distorted, of a half century-old “nationalist” project which, existing nominally for the People, has tended consistently to sacrifice people to a more or less abstract (if not wholly phony) greater cause. Consciously or not — all things considered, it hardly matters — intellectuals have abetted this process. The real-life narrative of the “indpendent” Arab state has in fact involved fewer intellectuals than figures of authority or picaroons, not to mention preachers; and many intellectuals, whether or not they preached ideologies while they did so, doubled as picaroons or figures of authority.

Now that I have witnessed the cold-blooded murder, with public funds, of a sizable portion of the very People in whose name Arabs and Muslims had endured so much immoral autocracy and mind control, unnecessary backwardness and underdevelopment, indignity and — increasingly — mafia-style corruption, it is easy to see why even with the best intentions, generations of patriotic and “nationalist” intellectuals contributed to perpetuating vicious circles of political untruth: glory and unity meaning defeat in the time of Nasser, victory meaning Cold War-style Islamism and unchecked capitalism in the time of Sadat, development meaning phenomenal nepotism and the systematic syphoning of money out of the country in the time of Mubarak.

Considering that for the longest time patriotism and nationalism have been preconditions of intellectual legitimacy — even well-meaning supporters of peace with Israel were methodically and effortlessly cast out of the intellectual community — it is easy to see how limited the role of the intellectual had to be: an intellectual could only oppose practises, not ideas; she could only criticise actions, not values; however oppositional she sought to be, however many years she spent in prison, an intellectual could only ever exist as part of an overriding national project whose attendant discourse, thanks in part to that intellectual herself, was increasingly, irrevocably divorced from reality.

The issue has less to do with helping Palestinians, for example, than it does with liberating Jerusalem — a task whose failure is as yet a forgone conclusion. It has less to do with improving living standards than replacing a non-alignment strain of nationalism with a socialist or communist one. It has less to do with endorsing freedom of worship than implementing a totalitarian vision of “the Islamic state” (whatever that means, and however much pandering to liberal democracy it requires). By the same token, culture has less to do with engaging the people than speaking in their name, contributing to an ever more discourse-bound narrative of hopes, intentions and abstractions. It has less to do with creativity and the intellect than blocking out and maintaining a meaninglessly politicised group of people — popularly known as “the communists” — who are neither trusted nor popular, and whose work seldom makes it past the block they occupy.

Now that I have witnessed cold-blooded murder on the streets, it is easy to see how maintaining the kind of discourse with which the intellectuals have been identified or allowing it to maintain itself — how speaking, again, of the role of the intellectual, of enlightenment and moderation as opposed to secularism, for example — is an integral part of the problem. And it is distressing to see that, notwithstanding all that happened on the streets of Cairo, notwithstanding all that became clear as a result of it, the discourse of the cultural press has not changed in the slightest.

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The counter paradise

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… and from the factories go the heavenly proletarians

awkwardly under their arms they carry their wings like violins

Zbigniew Herbert, “Report from Paradise”

It took blood for paradise to happen. It happened very fitfully and incompletely, paradise. It lasted no longer than three weeks within a cordoned off area around the busiest traffic circle in all of Cairo, including the circle itself. It happened sponateously and uncertainly, like a dream or a transparent sheet of glass. It was very brittle, I mean. But it happened. By the end of 28 January, while millions of people were recovering from tear gas, I was convinced that God had appeared in Cairo. He was to leave again within the space of a month.

*

It has been six weeks since I returned from France. By coincidence, my month-long stay there was to start after the “end” of the Egyptian revolution on 11 February. I left on 8 March, still charged. I returned on 9 April to a Cairo just as complacent as the Cairo I had known before the revolution “started” on 25 January. I still believe very strongly in what happened during those three weeks (25 Jan-11 Feb); I would have liked it to keep happening or happen to the end. Now that it is over, my intellect tells me it is wrong to think of something so clearly bracketed in time and so limited in social impact as a revolution. That is why “start” and “end” are placed in quotation marks. Something has to be.

One question that had dogged me since 2005 at least, notwithstanding what nominally democratic practises were being introduced under pressure from the West, was how far the corruption and incompetence of the regime had permeated society.

This spring I ended up missing what many take to be the defining moment in the aftermath of the revolution (and I to be its defeat): the referendum on constitutional amendments proposed by the Higher Military Council, in charge since Mubarak stepped down, and supported by the forces of political Islam as well as conservatives everywhere. Those who had participated in the revolution and those who saw it as a chance for true change were against the constitutional amendments. By speeding up parliamentary elections and still granting the president too much power, the amended constitution would work towards maintaining the duoploy on politicts of non-ideological, business-crazed dictatorship on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalism on the other; hence the ironic alliance between Islamists, National Democratic Party (NDP) politicans and a Council at best eager to eliminate uncertainty, at worst working systematically to re-establish the political status quo as fast as possible – a Council whose role as a surrogate for the regime many refused to see.

The referendum was held on 19 March; I remember weeping quietly in my room overlooking the Chateau de la Napoule on the Azure Coast after finding out that the overwhelming majority had voted yes.

*

In the period after Mubarak stepped down (11 Feb-19 Mar), there was much talk of the counterrevolution. That discourse is less pervasive now, but for a while it defined the way the revolution saw itself and its hard-won triumph (over 800 dead and nearly 6,500 injured,): the long-term fight against clandestine efforts to undermine the achievements of the protesters or reverse the results of the protests.

No doubt this had been going on since the outbreak of the revolution; no doubt it had instantly identifiable agents in the security apparatus, the upper echelons of the business sector, the government and the NDP. The army, led by the Council and (until he handed over authority to it) the President of the Republic, was said to stand apart: a dispassionate observer and keeper of the peace, and eventually also, with a little self-delusion on the part of the protesters, a wielder of power on behalf of the revolution.

However, while counterrevolution as described did happen, there was a different, far deeper and more widespread reactionary current underway – part of which, mad as this sounds, emanated from within the revolution itself: Islamist and (to a lesser extent) socialist-nationalist-Nasserist ideological strains, while automatically pandering to the status quo of which they had been a repressed or a marginal part, upheld exactly the totalitarian, sectarian and patriarchal values that the protests, instigated by young liberals keen on human rights and democratic process, seemed to be rising up agaist in the first place.

After the disappearance of the police on 28 January, when the protesters took over Tahrir Square, apart from the bumbling brutality of an ancient, decadent and phenomanlly smug regime taken by surprise, little could unify the revolution beyond the common objective that the president should step down – something that was further complicated by the absence of   leadership – and once the president did step down, handing over his powers to the army, the vast majority of the protesters were willing to let the army take charge. What more or less cosmetic change happened after 11 February, happened through the Council responding to daytime Friday demonstrations that have never since turned into a round-the-clock strike like the one constituting “the revolution”.

*

For the longest time I had not even asked myself what it was that the revolution wanted: bringing down the regime, as in the main slogan, seemed self-explanatory; and I wilfully forgot much of what I had thought (and written) prior to 25 January: that the regime’s most horrendous crime was the way it had managed to graft itself onto society, turn society not only into its arena but, more disastrously, its mirror image, with all the patriarchally rooted structures of nepotism, greed, ignorance, identity bias, policing, disorganisation and impunity replicated again and again from the top down.

The reason I forgot to ask myself what the revolution was about, and the reason it seemed like paradise, was the fact that these structures ceased to function. They were in suspension, and the greater cause made it seem as if they (like the president, like his deputy, like the new prime minister he appointed) could really disappear overnight.

On my return from France the most painful disillusionment had to do with this fact: what the regime stood for, what the revolution was against – notwithstanding either the increasingly imaginary counterrevolution of revolutionary discourse or the increasingly in-your-face counterrevolution of the Higher Military Council, the Islamists (who had played an indispensable role in the revolution itself), and the many and various patriarchally inclined quarters of the Egyptian constituency as a whole – it was all still there, on the streets and at work, in government offices, in the way people drove, in what people said about what was going on. Bribery, stupidity, conspiracy theory were as active as they had ever been – and with sectarian clashes at the time of writing, it is not clear that they are going anywhere. Paradise had broken – glass everywhere!

*

In a strange sort of way, the counterrevolution now seems to me to have been contained in the revolution itself. The more I think about this the more mind-boggling it gets, but maybe what it means is simply that, rather than an outside force toppling the regime and all that it stood for, what actually happened was an implosion within that regime, a necessary climax of dysfunction allowing society to adjust – or readjust. There will be time for that. I am not optimistic. I am simply grateful that I lived to see paradise.

Babelmed

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Malta’s premiere poetess supports the Revolution

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LISTENING                5.02.1011

 

by Maria Grech Ganado

 

Can you hear it swelling

throughout the Arab world –

this wailing claim

for consciousness at last

of all its pain?

 

I am so sick of names,

call it Democracy, Dictatorship, Islam,

Chaos, Violence, Revolt –

inimical to the West or holding hands,

the despots must be told their time has come

to go – I fear for innocence trammelled

by politics or power, ill-fortune, ignorance, rout –

 

but this cry is for us to listen to

it’s humanity crying out.

 

mgg

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In memory: Baghdad Falls, 2003

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Saddam Hussein detained several Westerners, wi...
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A view from nowhere

Youssef Rakha recalls a country he has never seen

The writer of this piece was barely 16 when the first Gulf War broke out. One (televised) image that lives on in memory is that of Mrs Thatcher, a late-in-the-day political analyst, commending President Mubarak’s stance. Some of the raw resentment brought on by the notion of Egyptians fighting Iraqis is summoned up, too. Up until then Iraq had existed only in situ, as it were. Suddenly, and for what sounded like the wrong reasons, it was all over the place. From then on what one recognised as the centre of the Abbasid dynasty, the Mashriq’s most notable patrons of the arts, became synonymous alternately with sanctions and Saddam. Already in 1991 one realised Iraq was a police state; at millennium’s end it became, in addition, a rogue state. American Middle East policy was infuriating and Iraq was a case in point. The saddest part was that this diverted attention even further away from its role in Arab culture, in the glories and triumphs of an imagined identity.

Arabs of my generation have seldom had occasion to visit Arab countries, a paradox that reflects exactly how imagined that identity is. Of Baghdad, as much as of Damascus or Sanaa, what one likes and relates to has little to do with present-day reality. Such, at least, is the assumption: associations of political corruption, arbitrary justice and economic disinheritance are paramount; history and culture figure less prominently. Or else they figure, in a variety of contexts, at an abstract level. Prior to the start of the war, the terra incognita of contemporary Iraq consisted largely of the reports of Egyptian acquaintances who had sought employment in an oil-rich Gulf country, impressions of Iraqi literati and academics one had met and the contents of books of history and literature. Connections between the latter, prior or unreal knowledge, and information gleaned from the media or through hearsay were few and far between; to register fully or evolve into a holistic picture of the country, they required some degree of creative intervention.

Baghdad was, for example, home to the Thousand and One Nights Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid, whose reputation for sensual excess was tentatively backed up by reports of a subdued but unequivocal focus on the simple pleasures of life. Hard as they worked — and, compared to Egyptians, it was said, they worked really hard — Iraqis had a tremendous capacity for fun; no feelings of guilt or obligation could hamper their enjoyment of what life had to offer. Others who had encountered trouble supplied similar, individual glosses on the general precepts of life under Saddam. Ex cathedra interference in the lives of ordinary residents was ruthless and demeaning; there existed, in many social arrangements, what amounted to a caste system in which those not affiliated with government bodies were repeatedly put in their place. The wielding of power was, in general, far more reckless and vainglorious than in Egypt. More reassuringly people also referred to a stricter moral code governing human interactions; a man’s word was honoured beyond all else; an Iraqi employer, so long as you did not betray or attempt to deceive him, was eminently reliable. Such, it would seem, was the Abbasid strain.

Encounters with Iraqis proved equally heterogenous. By the time they occurred, the sanctions had taken their toll on those of them who lived there. Others, like the great poet Abdel-Wahab Al-Bayati, were confident and irritable. The latter was an icon of the contemporary poetic movement — lyrical, romantic, thoroughly modern. As an aspiring author who knew many of his lines by heart, I had expected a soft-spoken, gentle old man. The person who met me, a few months before his death in Amman, seemed gruff and reluctant. His welcome was far from warm, but neither did he know me. I have retained, along with the disorientation induced by the perception of such a difference between the man and his work, only his inattentive gestures, his gutteral voice, the rare, sarcastic smile. Before Al-Bayati, I had discovered Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab; and after him, Saadi Youssef. The felicity, power and innovation of modern Iraqi poets convinced me that in spite of everything the Arabs’ literary heritage, the essence of which is poetry (some of the best remembered lines were produced during the reign of the aforementioned dynasty), was alive and well only in Baghdad — or among a Baghdadi diaspora scattered, sadly and perhaps irrevocably, across the whole world.

I also recalled, however, that during that era the vanity and sophistication of the literary capital could cast Al- Ma’arri — a relatively simple, blind Syrian even as he remains a formidable poet and thinker — out of it, keeping him in his small hometown of Ma’arra till the end of his life. Something of this duality appeared in all my dealings with Iraq. Hearty and intense, the Iraqis I met were nonetheless too proud to give up, even for a moment, that impenetrable veneer of confident civility. Their cinema, what little of it I saw, may have been slack and rudimentary, but their literature evidenced a corresponding combination of confessional fluidity and linguistic polish. The Baghdadi maqam, a distinct musical form which I discovered through the fortunate coincidence of being given a French-produced CD, was the closest I came to the sound of Abbasid music — an intuition that finds support in historical fact. Unlike anything I had heard, and full of the refinement of a culture at its height, it was a real awakening.

Walking across Tahrir Square the day after the arrival of the American and British forces in Iraq, I could think of nothing but the unmediated sense of identity so many Egyptians felt. Anti-American sentiment was inflated, but it was justified and real, far more real than resentment of the Saddam regime. No one cheered when the dictator’s statue toppled over; and subsequent images of looting and plunder could only inspire shame and a sense of having been betrayed. Everyone sympathised with Iraq, but what did Iraq mean to people? It was at this point that I thought of making a mental list of all those things Iraq, a country I had never seen, meant to me. I thought of a man who sold donner kebab near Hull University campus, an exile whose perpetual homesickness had metamorphosed into a painful quietude. The solitude, the desolation on his face drove me to inquire about his personal history, but he would have nothing to do with me. One night, following an intense evening at the Union Bar, I happened to drop the name of Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab. Slowly, pensively, in a voice more like its author’s, this little educated man recited Al-Sayyab’s most famous poem, Unshoudat Al-Mattar (Rainsong). By the end he was on the verge of tears; he never shed any.

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