❁ 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.

The Heavenly Jeep

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Youssef Rakha

Some think of them as nightmares. Of course even “nightmare” originally referred to a wicked mare rearing over the sleeper in the night, waking them in a panic by making it hard to breathe. Like every word ever invented it is at bottom an image, an incident, a scene that speaks of something both bigger and smaller, less abstract than itself. There are many such creatures whose beauty, as Rilke famously said, is nothing but the beginning of terror: nightmares giving life something that comes close to but never quite becomes meaning. Unlike other strings of sounds that give meaning in more straightforward or practical ways, they are truer than reality.

Others consider them little mechanical constructions. Like buildings, they are essentially functional schemes. They contain spaces and have plans. You can walk through them, sit or lie down; sometimes, once inside, you can dance. They are made up of bricks and blocks; the difference is that they themselves can walk and talk. They take on shapes and colours, even sizes. They are designed according to futuristic schemes that make them at once solid and mobile. You may sleep in one of them only to wake up in another. They transmigrate through space; time is their mortar. They are the planets and stars of miniature solar systems of minds sensitive and diseased.

Others still conceive of them as incantations: spells, hexes, blessings. Unlike other little texts they have the ability to harness energy and reuse it. They work like magic, which is defined as “an intervention that alters reality”. That intervention does not have to be physical or perceptible; it does not have to be world-bound as such: the point of the hunter’s chant, the healer’s prayer, is that it is not mundane. You write them, you read them or you recite them; and like words dictated to prophets by archangels, they change the world. What it is important to remember is that they change your private, inner world. They are not revolutions.

Yet in as far as anything at all is important, they are even more important than revolutions; in the long run, at least, if they have not been abused, if they have not calcified into codes that stifle and kill, they give the world a slightly more meaningful look and feel. Which is why, in case you have not guessed by now, I am thinking of poems, not Poetry.

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.

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

Electoral Publicity: Video Art and Other Things Besides

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Youssef Rakha

So like a bit of stone I lie/Under a broken tree./I could recover if I shrieked/My heart’s agony/To passing bird, but I am dumb/From human dignity.

THREE REASONS I WILL NOT VOTE, December 2, 2011

1-The Martyrs. It seems utterly insensible to start holding this “national wedding” – as Egypt’s first “free” parliamentary elections have been called – within hours of the death of over 40 demonstrators at the hands of both police and military, the latter also being the overseers (with unequivocal American cover) of a democratic process neither compatible with nor possible without such crimes against humanity (crimes now divested, even, of the excuse of terrorism). I am no longer very sympathetic with the younger activist movers and the shakers of the revolution, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of the dead and the injured since January are unaffiliated with either parties or ideologies makes the posturing of even well meaning candidates a betrayal not only of revolution but of the most basic patriotic and human fellow feeling.

2-SCAF. It has been over 59 years since a military coup, on the pretext of expelling the British and adopting progressive ideologies, not only put an end to what vestiges of democratic process and civil rights were there under the monarchy but also (and always on grandiose pretexts) negatively impacted actual and potential urban planning, education, agriculture, industry and social-cultural development. The People of Egypt are as responsible for this as the in-power-until-dead-presidential Regime, but it is precisely out of complacency about illegitimate military power that, over six decades, things had got as bad as they were when people took to the streets on 25 January. Until the incompetent generals hand over power to competent civilians, whatever the means to making them do so and whatever Washington’s position, no elections can be effective.

3-The Candidates. The irony of the so called revolution, its greatest triumph and its worst tragedy, is that it has no political direction. Obstructed by SCAF as much as the Islamists – the very religion-mongers and reluctant (if not counter) revolutionaries whose oppositional relation to the regime and insatiable appetite for power has placed them in the best possible position for winning the elections today, Egypt’s hitherto more or less apolitical revolutionaries – my only possible representatives – have not had the time or wherewithal to set up parties, let alone form support bases among politically retarded constituencies who had been more or less against the revolution anyway. I will not be party to the very process whereby people died for freedom – only to pave the road for agents of unfreedom to be in positions of power.

Nukhba? Who the fuck is Nukhba? – Egyptian intellectuals and the revolution

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

Eat your words

Youssef Rakha discusses the culture of revolution

Egypt has had Islamists and “revolutionaries”. So who are the nukhba or elite routinely denigrated as a “minority” that “looks down on the People”? Educated individuals, non-Islamist political leaders, the catalysts of the revolution itself… But, in the political context, this group is to all intents synonymous with the cultural community. As per the tradition, which long predates the Arab Spring, writers, artists, scholars and critics often double as political activists/analysts and vice versa; and in this sense much of “the civil current” (anything from far-right conservative to radical anarchist) is made up of “the elite”—of intellectuals.

Construed as a political player, the cultural community in Egypt has been the principal challenge to the Islamists since January-February 2011, when the revolution took place—an understandably weak rival among the uneducated, materialistic and sectarian masses. Yet how has the cultural community dealt with the revolution regardless of this fact, assuming that what took place really was a revolution?

Considering that the speaker belongs in that community, however reluctantly, the answer will be a kind of testimony. It is up to the disentangled listener to make up their mind about imagination, politics, identity and the Role of the Intellectual: an unduly popular theme since long before the revolution. In the last two years, the meaning of each has changed repeatedly; and, as guardians of such values, intellectuals were forced to reinvent themselves in new, unstable contexts—something that has tested their creativity, integrity, sense of belonging and worth.

It would be easy to regurgitate platitudes to the effect that, as Conscious Agents, “we” were defeated yet again in the fight to spread enlightenment—which is good, and eliminate backwardness—which is bad, aiming towards Social Consciousness in the underdeveloped society-cum-postcolonial state in which we live. As activists, theorists, historians and politicians, however, how can we be sure that our enlightenment isn’t a symptom of the very backwardness we think we’re fighting? Since the dawn of modern Egypt under Muhammad Ali Pasha, after all, the very existence of a cultural community has been subsidised/tolerated, and the range of its action delimited, by the (military, anyway non-intellectual) powers that be.

What took place in January-February 2011 was a revolution insofar as it achieved regime change, however unlike its champions are the beneficiaries. In practise, of course, the nukhba—where it did not actively seek alliances with political Islam or otherwise condone its undemocratic practises—failed to show enough belief in the possibility of a viable alternative distinct from “the first republic”. This is not to say that, as the “ruler” at the helm of “the second republic”, the MB is not in most ways an extension of the Mubarak regime. But, unlike the nukhba, political Islam had established itself as the well-meaning underdog—a ploy even the nukhba itself seemed to fall for.

But the underdog ploy could not in itself explain why, when we had the opportunity to help establish a functional democratic state in place of the dysfunctional quasi-military dictatorship we’ve had since the early 1950s, what we did, consciously or unconsciously, was to help establish the even more dysfunctional quasi-theocratic dictatorship now emerging. In the same way as political Islam has continued to play the role of Opposition even after it came to power, intellectuals seem to thrive on the absence of the Social Consciousness they purport to work for. It’s this absence that makes them look useful, after all, saving them the trouble of asking how, without either killing themselves/emigrating or openly giving up all pretensions of a Role/all socially “committed” activity, they might remain relevant to society.

The failure of the cultural community to make use of young people’s sacrifices—to take social-political initiative, adopt a clear moral stance or seriously revise half a century’s worth of historical “givens”—should illustrate how. In the course of regime change, “enlightenment” has cast the intellectual in one or more of their accepted roles: as Conscience of the Nation, as Voice of the People or as Prophet of Better Times. In each case the intellectual not only failed at their role but also actively compromised it, partly because the rhetoric attached to the process of engagement, which the intellectual as a rule will prioritise over the process itself, tends to be irrational, self-contradictory or absurd.

Too often that rhetoric is at once progressive and conservative, idealistic and pragmatic, moral and insincere—”poetic” in the worst (Arab) sense. What is presented as a cause—Palestine, for example—is in fact a festering status quo. Commitment to the Palestinian question was for decades on end a pretext for the worst forms of repression in much of the Arab world; and how exactly has that benefited Palestinians?

As in all discourses that apologise for totalitarian measures or tendencies, euphemism abounds. Social unity through wasati or moderate as opposed to ussouli or fundamentalist Islam, for example, has helped shift the emphasis away from universal rights and freedoms to a normative, sect-based (and, as it turns out, completely fantastical) status quo. As the catchword of that faction of formerly/nominally left-wing intellectuals who have supported the ex-Muslim Brotherhood leader, presidential candidate Abdelmoneim Abulfetouh and/or his subsequently established Strong Egypt Party, wasati has in effect extended the space in which fundamentalist dictatorship is to be taken for granted.

Likewise, instead of appeasing the Salafis—its avowed reason—the decision to replace ‘almani or “secular” with madani or “civil” in early campaigns helped to confirm the idea that the former word is in fact a synonym for “atheist” or, as a Salafi would put it, “apostate”, ceding the Salafis even more ground without granting “us” any more popularity or credibility among the Islamist-sympathetic grass roots.

For its part the discourse of “social justice” championed by (among others) the Nasserist presidential candidate Hamdin Sabahi, while reflecting an age-old obsession with class, fails to improve on Nasser’s more or less catastrophic legacy of state control; it does not address the issue of where wealth will come from, let alone the effectual means to its redistribution…

As Conscience of the Nation, the nukhba betrayed its role early on. Starting with the referendum on constitutional amendments that practically gave the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces absolute power in March 2011—and whose “yes” result Islamist forces were instrumental in obtaining—the cultural community condoned, participated in and often promoted the kind of “democratic” process undertaken with totalitarian intent. As a result, both the parliamentary and presidential elections were held in the absence of a constitution, and the vote-based process whereby political Islam aims to eliminate democracy is already underway.

Serving SCAF and MB interests and alliances, these “democratic weddings” took place under bloody circumstances, if not actually (as in the case of the parliamentary elections) directly at the expense of young protesters’ blood. Considering the MB’s underdog appeal and its tribal (increasingly ruling party-style) hold on much of the countryside, not to mention the Gulf’s Wahhabi influence on the culture, with vast numbers of susceptible Egyptians importing backward practices from their place of work on the Arabian peninsula—the pro-Islamist results of ballot-only democracy are a forgone conclusion. (I believe this holds for the constitutional referendum, whose results are to be announced.)

Instead of exposing such travesties of democratic process for what they are—by, at least, refusing to be part of them—each time the cultural community, including not only politically aware “revolutionaries” but, most recently, the openly anti-MB National Rescue Front—reverted to proactive and community-aware attitudes which, dictating a game whose rules “we” already knew to be unfair, was bound to serve Islamist interests. In so doing the nukhba also gave credence to the increasingly untenable assumption that what has been happening is political participation. Had the protesters of 25 January-11 February played by the rules set by the Mubarak regime and SCAF—as their “oppositional” predecessors had been doing for decades—no revolution would have occurred at all.

Undertaken on the scale of “the revolution”, a rigorous boycott of all such events—which would be the correct stance from the moral and “revolutionary” standpoint while not necessarily undermining the social status quo or being any less pragmatic as a course of action—might have stopped the forward march of the Dark Ages in its tracks, or at least presented it with a significant obstacle. If nothing else, it would have given meaning to a string of million-man demonstrations whose demands, while sometimes just as bloody and authoritarian in their way as the policies of the powers that be, were always muddled and unclear. If it isn’t the job of the Conscience of the Nation embodied in the icons of the revolution to give the lie to the ballot box as a means to dictatorship, I don’t know what is.

Yet, having agreed to enter the presidential race in the absence of a constitution determining their powers—and this is but one example of the nukhba failing to be consistent enough to act as its own conscience, let alone that of any nation—both Aboulfetouh and Sabahi were happy to lead a million-man demonstration protesting the results of the first round, which narrowed down the choice to the representative of the former regime, Ahmed Shafik, and the MB’s second choice, Mohamed Morsi. Neither Aboulfetouh nor Sabahi showed the least respect for the democratic process of which they had agreed to be part, nor the least concern about the rise to power of the MB through Morsi; apart from bolstering up the chances of the latter and helping identify the anti-nukhba MB with a revolution instigated by the nukhba, that million-man demonstration served no purpose whatsoever.

Now that the MB has virtually declared civil war on its opponents, who might be the People in whose name the nukhba prophesied better times after SCAF? Surely they are the ones who, while protesting Morsi’s singularly autocratic, blast-the-judiciary constitutional declaration of 22 November 2012 (a typically MB maneuvre to speed up the completion of and pass the Islamist-dominated draft constitution), were attacked/murdered, arrested and tortured by MB members and Salafis in no way officially affiliated with government institutions—and if not for the courage of individual prosecutors would have been framed for thuggery as well. Guided if not by their nukhba then by “revolutionary” ideas in which the nukhba had trafficked, many of these protesters had actually voted for Morsi.

When the People were able to force Hosny Mubarak to step down after 30 years in power, the People were a unified entity, unequivocally synonymous not only with “the revolutionaries” in Tahrir Square but also, very significantly, with the nukhba that had blessed their being there, the cultural community. Since that moment we have come a long way, especially in the light of the by now absurd statement that (as the slogan has it) “the revolution continues”: athawra musstamirra.

Now the most we can do, whether as revolutionaries or intellectuals, is to vote no in the referendum on a constitution that compromises some of the most basic rights and promises to turn Egypt into both a worse presidential dictatorship than it was under Mubarak and a Sunni-style “Islamic republic”—its drafting, thanks in part to our failure to boycott parliamentary elections, having been monopolised by Islamists—a referendum whose ultimate result, due as much to our dithering and lack of imagination as to Islamist power, influence and politicking, will almost certainly be a “yes” vote.

Being the champions who have not managed to become beneficiaries even in the most noble sense, indeed in some cases being the very (presumably involuntary) instruments of political Islam, how are we to see ourselves two years after the fact? Not in the kind of light that obscures the possibility that the pose we adopt, our Role, might be simply that: an affectation that helps us with upward mobility and individual self-esteem, but whose social-cultural function—like political Islam, identity-driven, with a chip on its shoulder vis-a-vis the former coloniser—is ultimately to legitimise systematic incompetence, economic dependence and sectarian tribalism.

Video, pictures and words

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

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.

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
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***

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

Lost in affirmation: artists, Islamists and politicians

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

Against “the threat of Islamisation”, culture is said to be Egypt’s last line of defence. But what on earth do we mean when we talk about Egyptian culture?
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The night before the ridiculously so called 24 August revolution—the first, abortive attempt to “overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood”—Intellectuals gathered in Talaat Harb Square to express discontent with the new political status quo. Much of what they had to say centred on the draft constitution making no provisions for freedom of expression, but the resulting discourse was, as ever, an amorphous combo of statements: “We cannot stand idly by while our national symbols of thought and creativity are subject to attack,” for example. Here as elsewhere in the so called civil sphere, resistance to political Islam has readily reduced to generalised statements of individual positions rallying to the abstract title of Intellectual, which in Arabic is more literally translated as “cultured person”. Cultured people—actors, for example, are eager to protect culture—the films and television serials in which they appear; and in so being they have the support of artists, writers, “minorities” and “thinkers”.
Never mind the fact that most Egyptian actors have never read a book in their lives, whether or not they admit to such “lack of culture”; it is their social standing as visible producers of something falling under that name that places them in a position to defend an equally, historically compromised value system: enlightenment, secularism, citizenship; imagination, inventiveness, choice…
To a pro-Islamist majority of the constituency—and it is irrelevant whether or to what extent that majority confuses political Islam with the Rightful Creed—the Talaat Harb rally would have been anathema. Comparatively tiny in numbers though they remain, Intellectuals promote practices and ideas that Islam in its present-day formulations will tend to reject. So, for example, where an actress who already subscribes to the pre-Islamist censorial strictures of a seemingly forever “conservative society” may talk about a slightly skimpy outfit being necessary for the role, the post-Islamist TV viewer vindicated by the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Ikhwan—so much so that, clean-shaven all through the almost two year long transitional period and before, he now has the moustache-less beard prescribed by stricter schools of orthodoxy—will talk about nudity, depravity, iniquity and hellfire.
And it was exactly such discourse, taken to insolent extremes, that prompted a series of more specifically “artistic sphere” (as in actors’ and singers’) protests in the last few weeks. On a programme he presents, a supposedly respectable Salafi “Islamic scholar” named Abdalla Badr attacked the film star Ilham Shahine for her stand against the rise of political Islam on the religious satellite channel Al-Hafidh, on 20 August. He went so far as to say, addressing the actress, “How many men have mounted you?” prompting outrage in many (including Al-Azhar) circles. Events have centred variously on Shahine being subjected to such audiovisual libel (she has since taken Badr to court), on similar incidents with actresses Nabila Ebeid and Hala Fakhir, and on the legal battle being waged on comedy superstar Adel Imam for several months now. The last seminar, in solidarity with Shahine, took place at the Actors’ Syndicate on 4 September.
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So far, so clear: civil society and its Intellectual vanguard, however conservative or uncultured in their own right—however ineffectively, too, all things considered—are facing up to “the Islamist threat”. The civil-Islamist (or, less euphemistically, the secular-Islamist) fight is no longer avoidable; and its media facet remains important even though it plays out more effectively in the long run in academic and literary circles. (Remember such incidents as the court case that forced the late scholar Nasr Hamid Abu-Zeid to leave the country, the attack on Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s life, and the several legal “crises” over Ministry of Culture publications, all of which were eventually taken out of circulation. Remember that such incidents—together with the unprecedented spread of hijab and other overtly sectarian phenomena—all happened under Mubarak, at a time when Islamists were not only not in power but also subject to persecution.) Now that the political underdog of yesteryear has far more leverage to attack this year’s underdog-in-the-making, the battle lines would seem to be clearly marked; someone like Shahine looks like a victim of misguided religious extremism.
Yet to a wider pro-25 January (2011) majority—one that definitely includes some of those protesting against “the Ikhwanisation of the state” on the evening of 23 August—by now much “civil” politicising is, rightly or wrongly but perhaps more rightly than wrongly, identified with the pre-25 January political status quo. Whether because liberal and leftist forces are incompetent or because the religiosity of the constituency prevents them from building support bases, as was so painfully evident on 24 August, the only political players willing to oppose political Islam are those “remnants of the fallen regime” who had directly or indirectly benefited from the Mubarak system. (That Islamists too are “remnants”, perhaps the worst kind, is not a widely accepted idea however true.)
With a few notable exceptions, the “artistic sphere” in particular was largely against the revolution whose “legitimacy” the Ikhwan have practically inherited, aided by those “revolutionary” forces who had no support among “the people”. Adel Imam was seen insulting the Tahrir protesters on TV before Mubarak stepped down. Ilham Shahine repeatedly called for the brutal suppression of protests even as protesters were being murdered under SCAF; she openly lamented the age of freedom that the revolution put an end to. But more generally, the Intellectual fails to see the connection between the religiosity and conservatism of society at large and political Islam’s hold on that society. Such deference to the sect embraces not only the Intellectual vanguard (the phenomenon of the female film star who retires after taking hijab, or the Nasserist activist who supports “the resistance”) but also the revolution itself.
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It is this issue—the Intellectual failing to represent a society susceptible to “extremism” and consequently being implicated with corrupt and autocratic (but, until Mursi was elected president, still nominally “civil”) power—that summarises the conundrum of the role of culture in Egypt. The futility of culture as a line of defence against anything at all was further illustrated on 6 August, when “a delegation” of mainstream arts figures including Imam met with Mursi at the presidential palace to discuss recent tensions with Islamists. Typically of any Egyptian official before or after the revolution, Mursi provided the requisite “reassurances”, speaking against the “satellite sheikhs” who insult artists and affirming the role of culture in “the civilisation of nations”. There is no reason on earth to believe that a president whose rise to power has entirely depended on Islamists will actually do anything to support “art” against “extremism”; and it is easy to conclude that what the delegation was doing was to actually offer a pledge of allegiance to the new powers, the better to be under their protection in the same way “artists” were under Mubarak’s.
What the delegation said to Mursi, even as it included complaints about the attacks to which female actresses in particular have been subject, would seem to support this thesis. Imam, for example, pointed up the role of “art” in dealing with “social issues”, not only denying past statements of his own but also no doubt alluding to the totally meaningless dose of moralistic preaching often included in otherwise profoundly immoral mainstream films, plays and TV serials. The actor best known for presenting the most searing attacks on Islamists under Mubarak thus implicitly offers to use what popularity he has left to polish the image of Egypt’s Islamist rulers. So much for the Intellectual…
Culture that negotiates a marginal space with power—like culture that speaks for “the people” as an undifferentiated mass, without genuine representative authority—will not promote enlightenment or choice. It will promote an increasingly repressive status quo. Defending so called freedom of creativity, for example, makes little sense in the acknowledged absence of freedom of belief. The kind of art that builds civilisation, whose audience is admittedly very small in Egypt, requires not a presidential decree but a vision of reality where slogans like “Islam is the answer” can only take up the peripheral role they deserve. But perhaps culture is less about commercial films and patriotism—less about experimental theatre, prose poetry and contemporary art—than about a perspective on reality that gradually, slowly and (in the Egyptian context) inevitably through non-official channels, reaches enough private lives to shape the public.
Perhaps the mistake we make about culture is ignoring its original meaning of a way of life and a system of values, values that—all things considered, at this historical juncture—political Islam must be seen to undermine.

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

Something wrong with the wires

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

Youssef Rakha considers revolution and Ramadan
Revolution gives way to security breakdown. The people vote for the Sheikh. The Israeli Embassy is ringed with protesters, but so—eventually—is its Saudi counterpart. False prophets take over Tahrir Square. Thousands die; millions grow beards. Previously unseen gods of the sect bless the public sphere with fatal ministrations. The traffic is worse and worse. Petrol shortages give way to mortal combat, but not before a president is elected do arbitrary power cuts set in, apparently for the good of Islam. It turns out the General has been in league with the Brother all along. The Dissident preaches self-hatred. Then, electricity allowing, the people gather before the television to see how 18 months of turmoil may have affected the content and style of the sine qua non of their yearly month of devotion: the serial drama. Somehow, in spite of the economic slump, social uncertainty and political depravity, the makers of programmes have been busier than ever. “Revolutionaries” are still in jail, incarcerated murderers of the “Islamic” stripe are being set free by presidential decree—but it is all about thugs and Israel.
Nor does it have anything to do with the Arab Spring as such. One thing on which Islamists and seculars may agree is that Egypt’s yearly festival of gluttony and comatose staring at screens would arguably look more like the holy month it was intended to be were it not for that unholiest of square monsters: the surface on which the ghosts of a given society tell that society what it is about. But it is interesting to observe how so called drama has developed in the wake of so called democracy. There is more swearing, more acknowledgement of unsavoury phenomena—the drug taking, the bribe receiving, the ballot rigging, the torture using—but none of these things is sufficiently thought through to feel remotely real. Shanty town thugs come across as downtown intellectuals, high-profile female lawyers as expensive prostitutes, activists as actors playing unemployed young men who are themselves playing at being activists. Upper Egyptians have still not mastered their own dialect; and, contrary to any evidence, sectarian tensions are still the rare exception to the rule of “national unity” between Muslims and Christians. Remarking on his failure to extract a confession using electricity, one State Security officer who looks and sounds like an employee of the Ministry of Endowments says, “I thought there might be something wrong with the wires.”
In one of at least two big-budget productions on the ever present fascination with “the Zionist entity”—the copy of a copy of a copy of something that may once have been entertaining or funny— comedy superstar Adel Imam transports the concept of Ocean’s Eleven into the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict (“our brothers in Gaza” notwithstanding): he is an Egyptian diplomat who gathers and commands a band of high-wire artists in various disciplines to rob a bank in Israel. Forget plausibility and deeper implications (how on earth would such a feat benefit the Palestinian cause, for Nasser’s sake?): the stink raised among “the Enemy” by Imam’s absolute ignorance of Israeli society and the callousness with which he is treating Judaism is threatening to develop into a diplomatic crisis in its own right. So, having been mistaken for a hero of secularism earlier in the year, while the president denies writing to Peres and Peres shows the world the president’s letter to him, counterrevolutionary Imam may yet be mistaken for a hero of nationalism.

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.

Open Letter to Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

Mohamed ElBaradei at the World Economic Forum in Davis, Switzerland on 25 January 2007. Image from Wikipedia.

June 2012; Cairo

***

Dear Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei:

Happy 70th and thank you! Truly, thank you: for refusing to be part of this travesty of presidential elections, for rejecting any form of putsch or “revolutionary justice”, for insisting on a sound constitution and political pluralism, for understanding democracy at a time when those fighting military dictatorship have completely missed the point. I’m sure you feel sufficiently vindicated and at peace to enjoy your birthday; and you must realize by now how many Egyptians respect you…

Dr. ElBaradei,—It’s been nearly 20 months since I saw you, surrounded by familiar, famous faces, striding into Tahrir Square. You are tall. I could just make out your face a head above the rest from where I stood, and I didn’t have very strong feelings about it. All through the 18-day sit-in, personages like you would arrive, preceded by the requisite hubbub, always surrounded by faces. You would be mobbed by admirers or the curious (only members of Mubarak’s party and his police force were unwelcome, then); and before I knew it, you would be gone.

From that evening I recall a squat fortyish protester in a grimy galabeya sashaying in the direction of a crowd that was excited about greeting you. I recall the garment billowing; it was winter, remember? There must’ve been a strong breeze. I also recall the stubble on the man’s face as he started wagging his index finger high above his head in an emphatic nay-saying gesture, shouting as he did so. To him you were an emissary of a devil called America and, in that knowing and peremptory way so inherent to Egyptians that it crosses otherwise inviolable class boundaries, he was urging the crowd not to let you sully the sanctity of his patriotic Revolution.

That was the only time I saw you, in February 2011; and I have nothing to say about the occasion or the all-Egyptian faux-urgency of the man’s behavior. I’m sure you’ve seen it many times; I’m sure you forgive the man his ignorance, too. I thought highly of you then, but even I didn’t know enough about you to appreciate just how instrumental you had been to him being there at that moment.

Now it is clear to many besides me that, whatever else may be said about it, you’re the true godfather of our Revolution.

So I am writing to ask you why it has failed so miserably, and what it would mean for it to succeed—whether you really think the aims about which you give interviews will ever be achieved: the bread, the freedom, and the social justice for which the people wanted to topple the regime. I am writing to ask you how it is that such a large group of people end up collectively choosing to screw themselves over.

You’re the right person to address not just because you’re the closest thing in real life to that mythical Leader whose absence everyone has been lamenting. I choose you and not God, for example, because I agree with your views. I think any Egyptian with any sense of responsibility will understand why you haven’t been as proactive or incendiary as other pro-Revolution “presidential hopefuls” under the circumstances. I think most Egyptians with a little information and sense will agree with your views, provided they can make that tiny leap—so much easier for the rationally-minded and the English-speaking—from imagining a better or a more meaningful life to actually believing it’s possible. Maybe it is really to mourn the wrenching loss I’ve felt since the time I saw you that I’m writing. My stated reason is to ask you why Egyptians cannot make that leap.

Dr. ElBaradei,—For several days now I’ve been watching you speak on YouTube, admiring your moral and rational consistency: interview after long interview at various points in the endless downward slope that started just as soon as the Revolution seemed to triumph. I’ve heard you adjust to events by modifying what you had to say about the Muslim Brotherhood (your former allies as opposition under Mubarak) and SCAF, always careful to be fair and civil without shying away from directing blame, never forgetting the general principles on which a given judgement is based. Just now I read your recent statements to The Guardian and I was pleased with your “withering assessment” of the Brotherhood, even more so with you acknowledging the failure of young protesters to embrace leadership or direction.

What I still have trouble believing is that it took you that long to realize the Brotherhood was simply the other side of the same originally populist coin, and that the young protesters could be neither superheroes nor seasoned statesmen—just well brought up rioters.

What would it have taken for you to embody the necessary guiding principle, taking the concomitant risks as you did so, making Egypt your state whatever the cost?

Don’t misunderstand me—I don’t blame you at all. In fact the reason I ask is that I feel the answer to the question is precisely what it would have taken me, an apolitical individualist, to stay politically active after Mubarak stepped down. And my point is that it has nothing to do with your (my) intentions or abilities. To convince enough Egyptians not to screw themselves over without confronting them with all that is wrong with their lives is an all but impossible objective. Not that I have any sympathy with Mubarak, but I hope you will agree that Mubarak, in this sense, is one of history’s most fascinating scapegoats: every Egyptian was responsible for the state of things; and for the state of things to improve, every Egyptian would’ve had to take responsibility.

To make people work in their own interest, it seems, would have taken not only a narrow enough worldview to overlap with all those illiberal feelings that eventually dominated Tahrir—just like that of the “well-meaning” among our presidential candidates. It would have taken reducing the leap from imagination to belief to a slogan or a dogma. It would’ve taken, in other words, some kind of reversal of the original aims of freedom, pluralism, and equality.

Because they confirmed yet again that you could never be the kind of lying bastard who would use the sacrifices of protesters and the discourse of revolution to champion such a reversal, your statements reassured me about what I have to say to you. I don’t know if I could be counted among “the young” whose horn you are so fond of blowing, at 36. But I am going ahead with saying it anyway: What on earth did you think you were doing when you dreamed of a better life for Egyptians?

Not being a dedicated activist or ever particularly keen on protests—not someone who will be persuaded that, unless it articulates something definite and of truly public concern, standing on a street corner holding a sign and chanting slogans is any less ridiculous than it is—I am not a person you are likely to have heard of. But, sharing your sense of responsibility for human life on earth, for Egypt, I hope you will see something in what I have to say nonetheless: not a way out of the nightmare—never that—but a meaning or an insight into what you stand for, which I know now is exactly what I too stand for (however irrelevant I am by comparison). In your person I’m addressing my own painfully aborted Revolution.

Dear Dr. ElBaradei,—It took you 18 months and I don’t know how many stays back in Vienna, decisions, retractions, announcements and counter-announcements, to begin to admit that things are worse after the Revolution than they were under Mubarak. I trust you knew all along that the “transition to democracy” would take at least that long even with the cooperation of SCAF and the Brotherhood, which (as I expected, and you say you didn’t) turned out to be absolutely not forthcoming.

I trust you’ve understood Change, since you first called for it in 2009, as a matter of competence and conscience—democratic enough to include very arguably sectarian and anti-national bodies like the Muslim Brotherhood et al, in the context of liberal nation building, which you spent your life finding out how people do—but still (in terms of motivation and intent) essentially from the top down.

I would never blame you for transparent good intentions. But perhaps because I’m not as well-meaning as you, perhaps because I’ve seen more of Egyptian society since the Nineties, and perhaps because I am more prone to boredom than Sisyphean determination, I want to take issue with your motivation. Surely it is on people without access to Twitter and Facebook that Change will ultimately depend—on their capacity to want rights and freedoms, whether they understand them or not.

I think you were wrong to go along with the tendency of Islamists to use the trappings of liberalism including the voting part of democracy to totalitarian ends. I think you were wrong to expect Salafis to sit down with seculars and women without hijab to draft a constitution safeguarding rights and freedoms. I think you were wrong to insist on the myth of peaceful regime change through a SCAF-dominated transition knowing that world powers like Washington are prepared to endorse the worst forms of repression in the name of democracy.

I also think you were wrong to not speak out more forcefully and more often against the proactive and community-aware attitudes that have made boycotting the political process impossible, against the corrupting force of “traditional” and provincial values like religion, extended (patriarchal) family, and (xenophobic) patriotism. But I really don’t know what difference avoiding any of these mistakes would have made.

In retrospect the route you took seems to be exactly as noble as was required for it to lead to this: the vote between Mubarak’s last prime minister and the Brotherhood’s second choice for president, under conditions which Amnesty International call “the legal sanctioning of abuse” and no end of judiciary, political, and security misconduct (now with a constitutional declaration that divests the president of any power, too, and perhaps yet another secret alliance between Islamists and the military—in case the Brotherhood’s candidate wins). But it is not so much the route that I want to question as the reason you felt it was worth taking.

Pyschosocial questions about Egyptians as “a people making history” in opposition to their own illiberal and identity hangups seem somewhat more fundamental than institutional questions about unchecked power and ruinous corruption—against fascism; and that’s what I have in mind when I ask what you were thinking. I defer to your knowledge, of course, but I invite you to consider my existence.

What is the point of “breaking”—your word—and rebuilding the security apparatus if it is on the basis of arbitrary power and systematic humiliation (a process in which the victim is as implicated as the culprit most of the time) that any authority is respected? What is the point of avoiding rigging where votes can be bought? What is the point, even, of demonstrations when the demonstrators cannot agree on a demand and where—without a a more or less neutral army—just as many baltagiyya or thugs can be instantaneously deployed to turn the protest into a massacre? What is the point, indeed, if people are going to mistake what could have been an effective reform movement for a futile attempt at an old guard-style “revolution”? What on earth is the point, Dr. ElBaradei…

What did we think we were doing—I ask you, at the eleventh hour—by seeing the Brotherhood as a legitimate “national faction” with rights when all that could mean was turning a freedoms-oriented Revolution into an excuse for sectarian totalitarianism and providing all manner of Islamist extremists with political cover? That squat fortyish man whose interests you had at heart when I saw you in Tahrir, and who nonetheless wagged his finger in protest of you being there—I ask you—was he really staging a revolution? Was the revolution he was staging our Revolution? What is the nature of the collective will he was expressing? Is it any less totalitarian than the will of the sixty-year-old “nationalist” police state or the proposed quasi-theocratic “renaissance”?

I was exactly as fed up with the Mubarak regime as you were: in my having to get an education outside the country for a university degree—a requirement for what few citizen’s rights can be had—to be any use; in the incompetence that surrounds my work at a state-run newspaper; in my encounters with the Interior Ministry; in my observation of the economic and educational state of society; in the general sense of indignity I felt as an Arab, as a Muslim, and as an Egyptian; and in the “ideological” limitations of the vast majority of even potential “revolutionaries” who failed to see Mubarak as an extension of the military takeover of power of July 1952.

I was perhaps even readier than you to make personal sacrifices to topple that regime. And, from the evening of January 25 until the result of the March 19 referendum on constitutional amendments, in 2011, I believed we really were toppling it. I realized we could never peacefully explode the criminal military core of the Egyptian state, but I thought we were on the right path to contending with it as a civil nation, becoming part of contemporary history. After the referendum I realized we had failed, but I thought we could still uncover that core and expose the Brotherhood for the power-hungry, retrogressive force that it is. Then there were parliamentary elections while young men were being killed, and the Brotherhood-dominated parliament proved even worse than I might have expected. And then no one but you refused to participate in yet another travesty of democratic process. At some point I realized that we had missed our chance, maybe: probably after one of the massacres in late 2011. Protests that had given us power to depose the president were so overused and emptied of content they were not only politically ineffective; they drove the neighbors in Abbassiya to actively attack protesters.

By that point I had already stopped going to protests. I’d stopped feeling that protesters, whose sacrifices were turning into a cheap political card in the hands of Islamists and whose leaders—the star activists—felt no responsibility for the loss of life, were expressing anything like my Revolution. I began to feel there was no point targeting the political process until Change happened from the bottom up; and it was then that I thought of you, while you were in Vienna…

I thought of you, of Egyptian culture, and of the madness of endorsing Islamism as the only possible alternative to nationalism however politically suppressed Islamists had been: What did you think you were doing when you called for Change from the top down? Why did we call our protests a revolution? Was there an alternative to either?

Dr. ElBaradei,—Since January 2011 I have wept three times only: once, after coming home the morning of January 29, from the sheer horror and beauty of our battle against Mubarak’s security, which we had unequivocally won; another time, when I realized the Islamists had managed to obtain a yes vote for the benefit of SCAF in the referendum on constitutional amendments—I was in France then, on a writer’s residency in the Riviera, and I remember retiring early to my room in the beautiful villa where I was staying and thinking there was not much left to fight for.

The third time I wept, Dr. ElBaradei, was on the announcement of the results of the first round of presidential elections, even though the results were precisely what I had expected, when it was demonstrated to me with unprecedented clarity that fascism and the herd mentality were still far stronger than the civil nation that I aspire to being part of.

I am not weeping now, but I ask you—apart from silence and the slow apolitical work we were all already doing under Mubarak, when apolitical work was both more effective and easier to do—where do we go from here? Now that our sacrifices and aspirations have been turned into a struggle between two kinds of fascism whose sudden alliance may render us nonexistent, is there really anywhere we can go, Dr. ElBaradaei?

Truly yours,

Youssef Rakha

Dumb from human dignity

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

***
So like a bit of stone I lie Under a broken tree. I could recover if I shrieked My heart’s agony To passing bird, but I am dumb From human dignity. – William Butler Yeats

Dumb from human dignity
Youssef Rakha refuses to assess the cultural life to be expected

So like a bit of stone I lie/Under a broken tree./I could recover if I shrieked/My heart’s agony/To passing bird, but I am dumb/From human dignity. – William Butler Yeats
After the first round of presidential elections, the bleak prospects facing Egyptian society since the revolution have become apparent – with the incumbent, largely fake polarisation between the former NDP and the Islamic-style NDP (aka, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party) consuming far more energy than it is really worth, all things considered. This is due, as much as anything, to the failure of “the civil forces” representing “the revolutionaries” to coalesce into an effective political front – if not to compete with the two blocs, one of which, that supporting the SCAF-cum-former regime candidate Ahmad Shafik, is detracted far more consistently than the other: the Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi – then to provide the revolution with adequate representation in society at large. Aside from the fact that culture has been relegated to a secondary and less visible part of the stage, it is hard to see how or why the cultural and social renaissance promised by 25 January might happen in the foreseeable future. Yet the vapid polarisation has transferred itself into cultural circles too, and much intense argument has taken place therein.
Feeling that Mursi (being, if only temporarily, against SCAF) is the candidate who must be closer to the revolution or the one, at least, who does not represent a mere extension of the Mubarak regime, many have felt morally obliged to vote for the Brotherhood. From the viewpoint of culture this would seem to be the easier standpoint to discredit. Art, literature and the lifestyles associated with them have been the most frequent targets for Islamist attack; and, though it may be argued that the Brotherhood – conservative as it remains – may generally be more or less sensible, it is also clear (from the experience of Tunisia, if nothing else) that a Brotherhood monopoly on power would provide adequate cover for all manner of less civilised and less enlightened practitioners of political Islam to attack and, with various degrees of social and security support, eventually abolish contemporary cultural practises. Most writers, artists and performers would be subject to charges of offending public morality if not contempt of religion or even apostasy. Most would have to work outside official and mainstream spheres. Judging by Brotherhood attitudes, performance in parliament, and Freedom and Justice-controlled media, what is more, the Mursi choice poses serious issues for freedom not only of creativity but also of expression: women, journalists and other gauges of a functional public sphere will be at best marginsalised, at worst criminally persecuted.
Following this line of thought, equally many intellectuals – those not too wrapped up in blind loyalty to an increasingly irrelevant “revolutionary moment” – have opted for the opposite choice, seeing Shafik – the military man with a propensity for Bushisms and Bush-like (more or less fascist) statements – as the only possible safeguard to “civil society”. Notwithstanding the stark irony of military dictatorship once again posited as the answer to a quasi-theocratic threat, such writers and artists purposefully forget that it was under Mubarak, his predecessors and, especially, technocratic aides to him like Shafik – and partly as a result of intellectuals allying themselves with a repressive, short-sighted and incompetent regime out of concern about the spread of political Islam in a society given to repression, prurience, piety and double standards – that Brotherhood lies about the greater good took root, identifying (otherwise rightful) dissidence with social Islamisation and enabling Islamists to instantly occupy the “democratic” space generated by the revolution. That is not even to begin to explain how the regime is economically, politically and (to some extent) socially responsible for the power (and, especially, the victim’s power) of Islamists among the grass roots.
As culture minister for life under Mubarak, even a reportedly gay expressionist painter like Farouk Hosni occasionally agreed to ban books published by the ministry in response to legal cases filed by then banned Brotherhood MPs. What liberal margin existed under Mubarak eventually resulted in the revolution, but it had not been wide enough to nurture viable alternatives to the military-religious pincers holding political life in place. Hosni is but one example of how the regime, while presenting a liberal façade to the world at large, was actually just as traditional – repressive, prurient, pious and immoral – as the Islmists. As a writer I am deeply concerned about the kinds of censorship and aggression that may develop under the Brotherhood, but I would be engaging in self-delusion if I was to believe or claim that Shafik in power will protect me against such censorship or against any other form of suppression. What is missing from Egypt is a vision for life, including culture. And wherever it comes from, that vision will never come from either arms- or religion-based, ultimately corrupt identity-based power. It will come from a presumably ever widening margin not of protests as such but of social liberalism, whatever form it takes and whoever it happens to be under.
The question remains of what is to be done about the elections. Proactive and community-aware attitudes have resulted in boycotts and strikes being totally ineffective all through the last year and a half. Yet as far as culture goes, at least, the only humane position to take remains refusing to participate in the travesty of democratic transition to which the revolution has been reduced by political power.

Megawra talk: Cairo as a lone individual: the geography of self-exploration

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

Man as map

I will start by thanking those who brought me here. It was Mai Ibrashi, I believe, who first paid attention to the geographic aspect of my first novel, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal—in many ways also my first full-length book—which, though it was completed in two spurts over a three-year span, gathered together a lifetime’s efforts and experiments in writing, in playing with different registers of Arabic, and in looking at the world—or Cairo.
In it the hero, Mustafa, who will soon start having historical visitations, notably from the last Ottoman sultan, is propelled into rediscovering those parts of the city in which his life comes to have meaning, by drawing the routes he takes as he actually experiences them, with his eyes closed. The shapes that he ends up with later combine to produce a tugra or sultan’s seal—which comes to be the symbol of the city as one person’s madness, the city as Mustafa: a calligraphic emblem with many non-empirical references to reality. A sort of psychological form of map-making thus became at the centre of the creative process.

I was not as aware when I wrote the novel as I am now that what I had Mustafa do was one form of what might be termed literary cartography. That is: the appropriation of space through an internalization of its subjective and human (as opposed to objective or “scientific”) experience with the purpose of integrating the result into a print context—in this case, by turning it into calligraphy. In my new novel project, I am using the Phoenician letter Waw to a similar end—it is similar to the Latin Y but not the same—comparing it with the shape of the Nile valley in Egypt among other cartographic representations of topics being dealt with, all reached through the very personal experience of the characters.

I will not get into the details of how this works in each book. All I want to say is that literary cartography—so understood—is an interesting mode of engagement that has rarely been explored or practiced in context. Some conceptual artists have no doubt employed cartography in their work in a similar way, perhaps architects and designers and theorists too, which goes to show that maps make up an essentially multidisciplinary approach to the real. But in terms of literature, though the inclusion of cartography forges instant and fascinating connections with illuminated manuscripts and many echelons of the Arabic canon, it remains more or less unknown. So all I will do tonight is talk a little about literary cartography.
I am not much of an artist, but I’ve found photo-based representation—first through the dark room, then digitally—to be invaluable in the process of complementing print with imagery to which a relatively complex idea might be uniquely anchored: post-millennial Cairo as an Ottoman seal, for example, or the Nile valley as a sacred letter. I’ve also always been fascinated by maps as an alternative mode of recording reality in print, and writing places—of which I’ve done more than any other kind—is a less precise but more inclusive form of map-making.
Literary cartography has to do with two quite separate things, I believe: two ideas, two motives, two different activities of the novelist as witness and, principally, as a writer of extended letters to unknown recipients but also as someone who crystallizes human experience into signs (whether letters or drawings) laid out on paper.

***

First, there is the fact that, for reasons of temperament and drive, writers tend to be self-obsessed no matter how much they endeavor to prove the opposite. This is aesthetically perhaps as it should be, in the sense that it is within a given creative intellect that this intellect is likely to find literary meaning or beauty. The beauty in literature seems to come less from the object being written about—confusingly, this is often referred to as the subject—than from the manner of its transformation into language: how a city like Cairo becomes a calligraphic symbol, to follow through the example. This process belongs with the writer, not the world. Reality is subordinated to a subjective standpoint that makes no attempt at eliminating bias.
I don’t actually necessarily believe that this all that happens, since the subject too—the writer—is part of a greater reality and presumably open to all sorts of currents: I could go on about the writer as convoy or medium, about things like objective coincidence and automatic writing. But still, subjectivity in this sense, however aesthetically perfect, raises moral questions. Nor is it simply that people get upset with you when you write honestly about them, for example. Unlike that of a map drawn to scale, your image of reality is going to be all but private, solipsistic even, the meaningless sounds made by a social outcast humming to himself in the dark.
When that picture is condensed into an objectively articulate image, something everyone can look at and appreciate at least as much as a map—even if it will never be nearly as useful—that sense of moral doubt is significantly reduced. It is almost as if, by constructing your statement logically and enunciating it clearly, you bring it into daylight. You do not turn the subject into an object the way empirical science does, but you produce a subjective object, an object that integrates bias as an essential part of its constitution, an object which—even though it remains an object—could never exist without the subject that brought it into reality: the signs, the letters, the language is utilized to a meaningful end.
Secondly, besides all else that he does, a writer is forced to make a choice between time and space, history and geography, narrative and description. I happen to believe that time or history is more violently peremptory and limiting. It is more prone to meaninglessness, to the exclusionary blindness and manipulative falsification of power (something that can be seen clearly in current, presidential-elections narratives of the revolution). That is partly because, compared to stories or human beings, it is much more difficult to judge places as such. Unless you include the narrative of what it depicts and how, looking at a map, it is impossible to say that its shape is immoral, for example, or that its stance is unfair.
Building on my first point—that a writer’s subject will inevitably be himself—I want to argue that conceiving of the self as inclusive, pluralistic space is far more rewarding and ultimately also more honest than presenting it as a narrative of the triumph of good over evil (or the defeat of good by evil), no matter what kind of good the subject stands for, or how complex, which is what literature is likely to reduce to once it surrenders itself wholly to the idiocies of history. The self as a geography of humanity that is trying, in a desperate but courageous bid, to transcend history: that seems far more meaningful than the self as a the convoy of an inevitably false and ultimately one-dimensional storyline.
However contrived in the context of a given novel, however subjective in fact, literary cartography, it seems to me, is the clearest embodiment of the self as space in language: the map that makes no reference to empirical reality is the salient image of literature as the epistemological exercise of making sense of the world through words or (as they are or should be) through signs inscribed on paper that, looked at, inspire faith in the meaning of life.

Talk at Megawara on Sunday, 27 May, 2012

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.

Watermelon republic

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

.
Watermelon republic
Ensconced online, Youssef Rakha plays sportscaster
In the last few weeks cyber politicising has of course centred on the presidential elections. Apart from a few smallish boycott campaigns on Facebook, few have discussed the significance of what—were it not for the Washington-blessed military-and-Islamist pincers holding political reality in place—would have been the most significant event in Egyptian history since 1953. No one has brought up such issues as the absurdity of running in the absence of a constitution (i.e., on a programme that may prove impracticable once the constitution is drafted), the fact that democratic process is untenable under the hegemony of a military junta, or the lack of any difference between rigging and obtaining votes by distributing sacs of rice or bottles of cooking oil or indeed gas cylinders a la Muslim Brotherhood campaign strategy. The politicising has centred, rather, on who to vote for—and activists as much as analysts, both professional and amateur, have displayed disturbing levels of hysteria in championing the cause of their candidate of choice, fuelled either by supposed loyalty to the revolution and its martyrs or by concern for the future of security and economic stability—with the result that the scene looks like a football match in which the players are substandard and the two teams on the field (the Islamists and the Fuloul or “Remnants of the Fallen Regime”) are vying for supporters of a third (the Revolutionaries) that has been disqualified from competing.
Of the 13 candidates, four (2, 3, 7 and 11) remain more or less completely unknown. Three (the Islamist intellectual Mohammed Selim El Awwa-8, the oppositional judge Hisham El Bastawisi-6 and the leftist MP Abul Ezz El Hariri-1) are generally believed to have little or no chance. And one would seem to be running more to demonstrate that he can than to actually win: the young lawyer and activist Khalid Ali (12), perceived by the writers-and-artists ghetto as the revolution’s candidate—”the romantic dreamers’ choice,” as it has been put—comes across as an unintelligent parody of the populist orator, barely adequate for the presidency of the Youth Centre at the working-class neighbourhood-cum-shanty town of Habbaneyya. Five candidates remain, only one of whom—the well-known Nasserist politician Hamdin Sabbahi (10)—remains outside the Islamist-Fuloul polarity. Despite Arab nationalist and centralist hangovers, reported affinities with Saddam and Gaddafi, and occasional statements in support of Al Qaeda, Sabbahi’s programme would seem to be the pragmatic-progressive path of least resistance under the circumstances; and those relatively sensible tweeps and Facebookers who are cured of spasticity have switched to his side. But it is regarding the four polar candidates that most of the cockfights have taken place: the conservative Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed (Spare Tyre) Morsi-13, who ran in place of Khairat El Shater when the latter was legally blocked from running; the reformist Muslim Brotherhood’s Abdel Moneim (Retired Terrorist) Abul Fetouh-5, who had to resign from the Muslim Brotherhood in order to run; the former air force commander, civil aviation minister and last prime minister under Mubarak Ahmad (George W.) Shafik-9; and the former foreign minister and Arab League secretary Amr (Cigar Bey) Moussa-4.
Not to suggest that they are any less likely to win than the other three, Spare Tyre and George W. have elicited more mockery than critique, as they are patently empty dummies of what they stand for: respectively, corrupt quasi-theocracy whose principal achievement thus far has been organising mass female-genital-mutilation bonanzas in the provinces, and the pre-25 Jan status quo. Apart from the latter’s often hilarious verbal blunders (“Unfortunately the revolution succeeded”, or “I fought for my country: I killed and I was killed”), they have done nothing to induce any strong feelings—or change anyone’s mind about anything. So it is to (especially liberal) supporters of Retired Terrorist and their cigar-lighting detractors that much of the frenzied pecking has fallen; who will draw blood first remains to be seen. As it has been repeatedly pointed out, however, the pro-revolution, conscientious and “enlightened” face of the Brotherhood is as fanatical as the best of them: suffice to say that, on air, he broke down in tears over his differences with his comrades in arms more often than over anything else; he expressed respect for the assassins of president Sadat, and never repented being a founding member of the Jamaa Islamiya (who are responsible for the bulk of tourist bombings and assassinations of secular figures during the 1990s), so even if he has renounced violence, Abul Fetouh’s loyalties are clear. Drinkers, unmarried couples, creative people and other believers in personal freedom can look forward to various forms of elimination or refugee status abroad. Amr Bey, on the other hand—though infinitely more sophisticated and articulate than Shafik—is a self-acknowledged pillar of the post-9/11 world order; he tries to curry favour by pretending to have championed the Palestinian cause when in fact he is among the architects of the defunct peace process; he is old and arrogant and unlikely to shy away from heavy-handed suppression of the opposition, probably by now more interested in his cigars and other pleasures than anything else indeed.
Still, when all is said and done, the action is only just beginning. Now that it is watermelon season, watching while we make obscene squishy noises and drip red liquid everywhere should be fun. Needless to say, this writer is boycotting the presidential elections.

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?

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