Category: Political Thought

This post has been republished in Open Democracy, Sydney Democracy Network,  Al-Araby, and Agente Provocador (Spanish).

If there was one legacy, among many, of president Gamal Abdel Nasser that Egypt could have done without – it is the peculiar suspicion of foreigners, to the point of embarrassment, that rode the region’s pan-Arab nationalism wave in the 1950s and 1960s. A problem that still, in various manifestations, continues up until today through institutions, mass media and the public discourse.

Behind the iconic image of legendary jazz musician Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet at the Pyramids – stood an artist that, you would think, had no relation to Egypt’s politics and the Middle East conflict, and infact once stated “I don’t know nothin’ about politics”, was dragged into a mind-boggling controversy.

On his visit to Egypt in 1961, Armstrong was standing in a Cairo hotel lobby packed with over 20 news reporters who asked him if he supported Zionism. It must have been like asking Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez visiting Russia as to what he thought of the imperialist forces in the emerging Vietnamese conflict.

An incredulous Armstrong replied “What is that Daddy?” The reporters were surprised that an artist, immersed in his own world, was ignorant of their regional issues, the reporters said: “You helped the Jews a lot.” Armstrong, replied “Yeah, I help them. I help anybody. I help you. You need help? I help anybody’. He continued “I’m going to tell you this. I got a trumpet, and I got a young wife, and I ain’t got time to fool with none of the stuff you guys talking about”

Armstrong just walked off and left them all in the lobby.

It was, however, the incessant suspicions of Armstrong in the lead-up to his visit that raised his ire. In 1959, Egyptian newspapers were circulating rumours that Armstrong was the leader of an Israeli spy network. Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper went as far as to report that Lebanese security authorities uncovered a spy ring that was reportedly working undercover with various artistic troupes. The report stated “Among the leading members of the gang was the famous American Nergro musician Louis Armstrong, who had recently visited Beirut.”

When this was brought to Armstrong’s attention, he responded “I’ve been called many things in my life but this is the first time I’ve ever been called a spy.” When asked to sum up his feelings about the report, he replied “bunk.”

For a while, Armstrong ignored the rumours, but he drew the line when Nasser himself added his weight to the senseless reports. In 1960, the Egyptian president went further and believed that one of Armstrong’s “Scat singing” record was used by the artist to pass secrets during his first 1959 tour of the Middle East. An outraged Armstrong, in Boston at the time, mailed Nasser a copy of the suspect record, with a note rebutting the accusations:

“It’s all Greek to me. They claimed all that junk because I played in Israel. I don’t have to be a spy to earn a living. I have enough money blowing the horn and I have a very happy life doing it. Why don’t you tell these people who are spreading all this stuff to come around. I’ll tell them a few good traveling salesman jokes.”

It is not known how Nasser reacted. However, he did not stop the musician’s visit to Egypt the following year.

The achievement of Arab unity was so close, until the below Skat song and its encrypted subversive message destroyed it all.

The 1959 Middle East tour, that Nasser referred to, saw a prophetic Armstrong when, in Beirut, sitting around with colleagues and reporters, all smoking hashish, was asked “Say, how come you going playing for them damn Jews down in Israel?” Armstrong replied “Let me tell you something. When I go down there, the first thing they going to tell me, how come you play for them damn Arabs over there? Let me tell you something, man. That horn”, pointing to his prized instrument, “you see that horn? That horn ain’t prejudiced. A note’s a note in any language.”

True enough, when Armstrong landed in Israel, the first question he was asked as to why he plays in Arab countries, a furious Armstrong responded “I told them that you guys were going to say the same damn thing. So ain’t none of you no better than the other side. You’s as bad as they are, man”

Poor Armstrong, no wonder why he suffered a heart attack that same year in which his health would only deteriorate from this point onwards.

Of course, this is not to overlook the fact the US State Department sent artists like Armstrong on public and cultural diplomacy initiatives around the world to counter the influence of the Soviet Union in the developing world. Yet this is not the same deal as a “leader of an Israeli spy network.” It was atrocious enough that he suffered from the scourge of racism back home, even at the height of his fame, that he stated to an American reporter in 1957: “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country.” He also told Ebony magazine in a 1964 interview: “I don’t socialize with the top dogs of society after a dance or concert. These same society people may go around the corner and lynch a Negro.”

Yet, he was not even spared, at least ideologically, on the international platform.

The impoverished thinking that unfairly and irresponsibly attacked Armstrong – raised a generation that rules Egypt today, if not the Arab world, and sets the tone for a destructive conspiratorial language that tarnishes, if not sentences, the innocent, disembowels the political public sphere and foments political and social tensions. Armstrong visited an Israel that has since become an increasingly racist, brutal and a militarised state that would make Apartheid South Africa look like a lightweight. Not helped by the same government that sponsored Armstrong’s visit.

Armstrong’s encounter with the Middle East was a microcosmic reflection of the wider cancerous socio-political tumour of denial and scapegoating in the region that just keeps on festering with time. More so, the “What is that Daddy?” responses of Armstrong were refreshingly simple, altruistic and empathetic, in a complex, murky and relentless region where the indiscriminate use of words and charges are prone to lose all meaning.

So a posthumous note to Armstrong, nothing has changed since you left the Middle East, just more of the same, and worse. Someday, the meaning of ‘What a wonderful world’ will be understood and sung. Someday.

References:

Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (New York City: Pantheon, 2011) pp.180-181.

“Egyptians call Satcmo Armstrong Israeli Spy,” Jet Magazine (26 Nov 1959) p. 60.

“Satch Mails Egypt’s Nasser ‘Spy’ Platter,” Jet Magazine (14 April 1960) p. 61.

Ben Schwartz, “What Louis Armstrong really thinks” The New Yorker (25 February 2014).

Originally published in the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy

“Inevitably, our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.” – Public intellectual Walter Lippman, 1922.

With emotions running high on the eve of the 1952 coup, one of Nasser’s colleagues panicked and was close to tears. Nasser said firmly: “Tonight there is no room for sentiment. We must be ready for the unexpected.” The colleague soon regained his composure and asked Nasser, “Why did you address me in English?” Nasser laughed and replied, “Because Arabic is hardly a suitable language in which to express the need for calm.”

Whether or not this is truly the case—and I am not convinced that it is—the Arabic language today is certainly living up to Nasser’s perceptions, as it is being used to intentionally bring about anything but calm. A schizophrenia increasingly pervades Egyptian colloquial speech, empowering people to express wildly irresponsible and impulsive views and actions and yet expect positive outcomes—sadly, one frequently encounters such behavior these days.

It is easy to see the extent to which media discourse has affected public conversation, even to the level of hearing a news anchor’s sentence be unconsciously mimicked word-for-word the next day by members of the public, such as, “Egypt is not ready for democracy and needs a strongman from the military to rule it” and “Why does Sisi even need a policy platform?” That is not to mention the media-inspired accusations and conspiracies that infiltrate next-day conversations. This might not be unusual in many parts of the world, but in Egypt, it can have severe or even fatal consequences—opinions are shaped and inflamed here by an inexhaustible imagination that can leap from suspecting every tourist of being a spy to nodding at (if not cheering for) a mass death sentence.

The road to the presidential election is now paved with fear and suspicion, harming society’s mental and economic well-being. The result is a climate that renders the vision for the country described in Sisi’s interviews, despite their melancholy and opaqueness, to appear as all that Egypt can hope for. The inevitable problem herein is that if it takes hysteria to bring a man to the presidency, it will take hysteria to continue to legitimize his presidency. A “platform” of security and stability cannot be maintained without consistently invoking the scarecrow of chaos.

This is an Egypt where an old lady feeds some birds, asks about my well-being, and in the same breath, tells me the massacre of over 600 people at Raba’a was necessary; an Egypt where a medical professional, trained to save lives, tells me that a death sentence for 683 people should be carried out, though he will feebly concede that it may be a “bit harsh.” My usual response to people with such opinions is for them to go personally tell the parents of the 683 (or other victims) why their children need to be executed. This usually causes something of a short-circuit in their imagination, but few actually change their minds on the matter.

At the core of such interactions lies an overlooked, foundational problem that can shed light on the nature of the public’s irrational and uncompromising stance towards anything that falls outside the state line. This problem involves the accumulation of individual anxieties stemming from experiences that are reported and imagined, rather than directly felt and observed. As a result, an uncontrollable, collective national resentment has evolved that extends, disturbingly, to the point of turning a blind eye towards, or actively whitewashing, unjustified deaths. This darkness spreads although—or perhaps because—few are actually encountering real life threats on any appreciable scale.

The train to Cairo

On trips to Cairo, I have come to find that interactions with the passengers I encounter on the Alexandria to Cairo train set the tone of my trip to the capital. Beside me most recently was an armed forces cadet and an Interior Ministry junior officer. As all the seats had already been sold, the three of us (and a few others) were forced to stand for the two-and-a-half hour trip.

The cadet abused his position to probe into my life, starting with the xenophobia-inspired question “Are you Syrian?” (I’m often mistaken for a Levantine because of my light complexion and altered Egyptian dialect from having lived abroad). He asked me why I was heading to Cairo, to which I replied that I was attending a funeral. He asked where in Cairo, and I replied Mohandessin. No answer could satisfy him. In fact, the stern way he first stated his occupation—“Armed Forces”—was a futile attempt to knock me off balance.

The Interior Ministry officer steered the conversation away from my destination, and we began talking about Australia. I was struck by the way that he casually spoke in a way that perfectly echoed statements mouthed off by state media. He asked me about my Ph.D. research and how Australia was different from Egypt. Then, he asked the predictable question: “What do they think of us?” I replied that they probably are not happy with Egypt at the moment, given that one of their citizens (journalist Peter Greste) is languishing in jail. I then turned the conversation to the use of torture by the Ministry. He tried to explain that torture was limited to specific cases, that it does not strike him as morally wrong, that it is not as a widespread as popularly thought, and that the global media exaggerates it—“We treat Brotherhood detainees with utmost respect.” On asking my religion (this questioning is second nature to Egypt), I was able to satisfy him that I am indeed a Muslim. Despite all the above, he then went onto explain how religion is not being applied correctly in the country.

Despite both of us being around the same age and engaging each other politely, the implicit feeling was that there was an invisible wall between us—a wall that was put there by historical and exclusionary hegemonic forces. In the end, we could only agree that Egypt is going through a generational struggle and that the young are disadvantaged throughout the county—I left with a feeling that I will cross paths with him again someday.

1984 in Tahrir Square

Standing outside the Hardees in Tahrir Square while waiting for a friend, I decided to take a number of photos to kill time. At a news stand, I saw George Orwell’s 1984 and snapped a photo of it, tweeting the words “a very timely piece of work.” In an ironic moment soon after, the police came by and, as a crowd of eight of them gathered, they pulled me in to their nearby, makeshift security office. They searched through the last photos on my phone and asked me countless questions. I explained the reasons behind each photo—that is a book cover I took an interest in; that was a road accident; that is graffiti; that is a panoramic shot of Tahrir. They grew alarmed at one photo of Muhammad Mahmoud Street where I had snapped a “creative” night shot through barbed wire. I somehow managed to reassure them that was just a harmless attempt at artistry.

Ultimately, the decision to let me go was not based on my words alone. After showing my Egyptian ID card and my University of Sydney card, the senior officer smiled and decided to let me go. The officer who pulled me, though, chose to take one last shot: “Are both of your parents Egyptian?” I answered: “Yes, my mother and father, may he rest in peace, are both Egyptian.” He looked at me sternly, handed back my cards, and responded, “May he rest in peace.” What most frightened me in this case was that somehow my heritage presumed my innocence, and doing a doctorate reassured them that I was “respectable.” What about others who are detained and who do not fit into this culture- and class-based security framework? The language of darkness has its subtexts.

The funeral of Bassem Sabry

The funeral I was attending in Mohandessin was that of Bassem Sabry. Having communicated with Bassem online but never having been able to meet him only further fuelled my anguish. The feeling was not unlike what I feel when thinking of the goals of the revolution that were always talked about and yet have remained elusive.

Beyond serving to mark the tragedy of losing a great human being, Bassem Sabry’s funeral was a surreal showcase of myriad key players involved in the darkness enveloping Egyptian politics now, fighting either for or against it or simply riding its wave—weary human rights workers, life-endangered journalists, veteran activists, opportunistic political figures, brown-nosing media personalities, despondent intellectuals. People who would normally be at each others’ throats were calmly gathered, though avoiding eye contact. It was like Sabry’s funeral invoked an uneasy truce for that one night as the Quranic recitations played on. At one stage, while seated next to TV comedian Bassem Youssef (who spoke in an ominous tone), I told him that he had little to worry about, as his fame gave him some sort of immunity. He replied: “You think two million Twitter followers can save me against a regime? A regime that arises to defend special interests will be more deadly than one that defends political interests.” He should know—he has been pushed onto the front lines against the insanity that has gripped the nation.

Sabry’s funeral was the funeral of part of the inheritance of the January 25 revolution as well—the language of hope. That night, the Cairo air was filled with the vibes of December 2010, yet unlike then, the political language of darkness has exposed a serious absence of empathy and forgiveness in the public discourse that endangers any aspirate for a positive outcome. It was as if empathy and forgiveness, Sabry’s defining characteristics, were two inheritances that had been lost.

Followers of the hyper-nationalist trend are just like those advancing religious fundamentalism, minus the beard. Both are showing themselves to be destructively intolerant—the former more so these days—and incapable of accommodating the rich and diverse tapestry of Egypt.

But is all hope lost?

As I came back to Alexandria, I decided to take a boat ride in the Mediterranean with friends to get away from all the madness—no Sisi posters out there on the water, thankfully—and to reflect on the past few weeks. The sailors who I encountered had this remarkable demeanor that made them seem detached from the political upheavals, and a glow of hope radiated from their faces. The simplicity and fortitude of the sailors made a mark on me. An explanation was soon coming.

I came back home to a friend who had shared a story of a distressed man who, in 1973, had sent a letter to author E.B. White saying that he had lost faith in humanity. The man received this response:

“As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock as a contribution to order and steadfastness. Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But, as a people, we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time, waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.”

I can think of many remarkable human beings who fight tirelessly for social justice, some of whom I met for the first time at the funeral. They, like many others, are battling to establish the right conditions to affect, positively, the volatility of human nature. It is not that Arabic is hardly a suitable language in which to express the need for calm. It is that the true definitions of freedom, social justice, and democracy have yet to triumph over the state’s definitions of these terms. This state of affairs, however, cannot endure for long.

Published in the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy 

“Would you allow your unmarried daughters to live alone in their own apartments in Cairo?” This was the question asked by American journalist Milton Viorst to the late Naguib Mahfouz in the 1990s. The legendary Arab novelist replied that such a circumstance would not be acceptable, as it simply would not look right.

Mahfouz did not invoke a financial, safety, or even religious motive to underpin his reasoning—in effect, he made the “what would people say?” argument, which permeates  Egyptian society and holds hostage any and all statements and actions to the court of public opinion, consequently warping people’s reasoning.

In light of the increasing harassment of bearded men in Egypt, I called a relative of mine out of concern for his safety. His first response to my inquiries was, “Can you imagine what the Americans and British are saying about us now?” He found this conjecture to be a more pressing issue than his personal safety and the safety of others. Indeed, every relative with whom I speak cannot help but ask, “What is the West saying about us? Make sure you tell them the truth!”—as if I had a monopoly on the information coming out of Egypt (and the rest of the world had no access to the Internet).

A sort of obsessive-compulsive public-image disorder is sufficiently widespread that it crosses social and class lines in Egypt. At the heart of everyday decision making lies the anxiety of what society may think rather than any consideration of the merits involved. This hyper-sensitivity to public opinion is present on multiple levels, ranging from how society will judge the individual to how the international community will judge Egypt. For the latter, this sensitivity is in no way a constructive one that encourages appropriate responses, such as tackling sexual harassment and human rights abuses. Instead, it combines with an entrenched political and social schizophrenia, leading to a pattern of denials, conspiracy accusations, and selective historical reminders whenever sensitive topics are discussed –“Did you not know that Egypt loaned money to Great Britain during World War Two? Or that Egypt used to provide the Kiswah (covering cloth) for the Kaaba in Mecca?” There is an accordingly disoriented sense of priorities for the state and individual.

You would think that the deaths of protestors would lead to the prosecution, if not at least the resignation, of the responsible public officials. To the regime, however, such deaths are not as serious asDecember’s banner fiasco, which marred the promotion of Egypt’s new constitution by featuring foreign, stock-image faces and an Arabic spelling mistake. This public relations embarrassment before the world saw State Information Service head Amgad Abdel-Ghaffar resigning and the designer of the banner being “penalized.” Yet, the Interior Minister is still in his position. Banners, clearly, make Egypt look bad—arrests and killings do not.

Such a climate transforms Egypt’s political sphere into a theatre of the absurd, enabling the recent, extraordinary scandal of the military “invention” that allegedly cures Hepatitis C and AIDS. This worrying development is a reflection of the authorities shifting into desperation mode, trying to improve their image by demonstrating any sort of unprovable achievement. This is so even though it comes at the expense of damaging the reputation of Egyptian doctors and scientists and, worst of all, giving false hope to millions of impoverished patients across the country who are unlikely to see through the political smokescreen.

What about the world?

One of the most common tactics to justify the public image disorder is to employ the logical fallacy of tu quoque, Latin for “you, too,” which has become increasingly rife in everyday language. Criticism, constructive or not, when levelled at Egyptian policies or social ills, is rejected solely on the basis of the critic’s perceived inconsistency, not the argument or position itself. While many critics of Egyptian matters may indeed be hypocritical and inconsistent, this form of ad hominem attack still does not invalidate their arguments.

Following the horrific 1997 Luxor massacre, which saw 62 people, primarily tourists, killed, an Egyptian official came out before the international press, grinding his teeth and insisting that this happens everywhere else in the world. Such is the function of the time-honored deflection of responsibility that we still hear daily—“It happens around the world, not just in Egypt!”

Sexual harassment rampant in Egypt? That is fine, it happens in India too. Buildings and bridges collapsing in Alexandria and Cairo? Not to worry, Bangladesh has it worse. Pollution choking Egypt’s capital? Have you even seen Beijing? Foreign journalists illegally incarcerated in Tora prison? What about Guantanamo? Was that a massacre of a couple of hundred demonstrators in Rabaa? Well, it’s our war on terrorism, just like yours.

Egypt might be burning, but the only response it seems to have is to deflect attention away from the flames. Tu quoque or not, it is clear by now that reason and logical arguments have been pushed to the margins of political discourse in an Egypt where a stork and muppet can be investigated for conspiracy, terrorism and espionage.

The politics of visual piety

The public image disorder can also be seen in the way that religion plays a powerful role in Egyptian society and the value attached to being seen to adhere to religious norms reflects the society’s abiding concern for what others may say.

Once, while attending the Friday sermon at a Cairo mosque, I heard the imam express disappointment that youth were not attending the fajr (dawn) prayer. After a number of conversations with the devout who were not in attendance, it did not take me long to figure out that, apart from the stay-up-and-sleep-in behavior common to the Egyptian lifestyle, the societal incentive to be seen attending the fajr prayer is significantly less than that which is attached to the weekly, congregational Friday prayer, an event that not even a bank robber would miss.

This is neither to dismiss genuine convictions nor to deny the fact that Friday prayers—in the congregational manner—are considered obligatory in Islam. Rather, it is to show that the social element attached to public displays of devotion is so overwhelming that it skews the degree of religiosity in Egypt, widening the gap between beliefs, statements, and actions.

The rule of former President Hosni Mubarak gutted the official political-administrative sphere, and the religious sphere grew in scale as a form of societal empowerment and opposition. Women increasingly donned the veil, the zabiba (a mark on a Muslim man’s forehead from frequent prostration) mysteriously proliferated, and the crucifix became more prominent on Copts. This phenomenon at least partly explains why the Muslim Brotherhood confused Islam with Islamism and believed that their form of identity politics could just be rammed through the public sphere without any semblance of negotiation

Women, religious or not, receive the harshest judgements regarding personal dress, whereabouts, and life decisions in general. Every deviation from the behavior associated with that of a mohtarama, or a “respectable woman,” is discouraged by families concerned by the social impact of what people may say about her.

Since the revolution, there has been a growing trend of Muslim women removing their veils. Those with whom I have spoken largely argue that they have neither become any less religious nor comprised their principles, and they stress the freedom element involved in the decision to wear the veil. Strangely enough, these women are not admonished with “God will disapprove” statements; they instead encounter responses focused on society. One young woman who had recently removed the veil remarked, “I lost so many friends who felt that I was letting them down, that I was no longer the person they thought I was. The public was unforgiving; they had certain expectations of me that were defeated.” Equally, it is not unusual for women who wear the veil to receive compliments and criticisms that revolve around fickle public opinion, not divine ordainments.

The state’s extreme makeover

However, there is a deeper and more sinister side to this disorder. Inevitably, as national image becomes conflated with national security, this disproportionate concern with perception over reality helps to pave the way for public policy to effortlessly make inroads into the private social sphere. Taking advantage of a public already well-practiced in focusing on social perceptions, the state sets the tone of this self-image affliction by accusing its “opponents” of nonsensical crimes such as “spreading false news,” “damaging Egypt’s image abroad,” “insulting the judiciary,” and “breaching national trust.” Looking at the names of these “crimes,” it is almost as if the Egyptian state has feelings that are easily hurt.

Egyptian’s private spheres are continually violated rather than protected, particularly with regard to bodily integrity such as an individual’s safety, privacy, religious freedom, liberty, and protection from arbitrary arrest and detention. This is a key factor behind the establishment of Hossam Bahgat’s Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights,  human rights in Egypt have largely focused on the public sphere, not the personal sphere (and even in the former, they are struggling against a rising tide of state authority). The private sphere is where one experiences everything from silent violations, like one’s religion being placed on national ID cards, to the more menacing trend of neighbors ratting out neighbors to the authorities—your business is everyone’s business when your actions are seen to reflect on the state.

As with many problems, one may need return to childhood for an answer. Here, the 1971 collection “The Black Prince and other Egyptian Folk Tales,” by Ahmed and Zane Zagloul, may have the answer.

In one of the stories, a father decided to teach his son a valuable lesson due to the son’s frequent response of “what would people say?” in regards to his father’s disciplining him. The father mounted a donkey and told his son to follow along on foot in the market place. The crowds immediately responded: “Do you have a rock instead of a heart, you merciless man? How do you have the shamelessness to ride while that poor boy of yours runs along behind?”

So they switched places, with the father now following the boy and donkey on foot. An old man yelled out: “I do declare! If that ain’t the way to bring up an ingrate. Yes sir-ree, if you want no respect from your boy, that’s the way to get it…What are fathers made of these days, I’d like to know?” Finally, they both mount the donkey only to be jeered at by more onlookers who are never happy with whatever the father and son do. The ending sees two police officers taking the father and son first to the police station, then to the madhouse. “This, my son,” the father says, “is the result of troubling yourself over what other people would say.”

Egypt’s own written traditions scream against the excessive “what would people say?” syndrome, as it compromises one’s integrity and leads to actions that are not reflective of an individual’s true self. It shuts down debate, separates one from exposure to new ideas to improve the human condition, renders self-expression perilous, and makes hypocrisy and double-standards into accepted norms. The end result is a society that is living a lie as the world moves on, with or without Egypt.

Now vs. Then

Dr. Nawal el-Messeri Nadim did her dissertation on Mahfouz’s Sugar Street. She makes the case that, in Egypt’s culture of the alleys, what people think of you trumps your individual achievements. That is to say, an alley-dweller is not just a person; he or she is part of a social network that is final arbiter of his or her value.

Yet, one of the Egyptian revolution’s secondary goals has been to break this kind of social network, particularly its harmful elements. Despite the revolution’s apparent regression, it has had remarkable success in the cultural arena, which has witnessed a massive expansion in the space that is open for creativity, from new forms of street art to the wide popularity of satirist Bassem Youssef. Such openings reflect a force against which the state will have to reckon.

It will be some time before the public space renegotiates the question from “what would people say?” to “what would the future say?” Historians studying the current period in Egyptian history will undoubtedly find its events beyond description and understanding.

One only hopes that the obsessive-compulsive image disorder, along with the many other disorders that are a part of this increasingly fascist-leaning environment that is pushing people into the folktale’s madhouse, burns out before it burns the rest of the country with it.

Published in the Atlantic Council

By the time philosopher Hannah Arendt penned the words in her 1970 work On Violence: “The means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals,” a generation of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood transitioning into the Anwar Sadat era were reeling from the “means” of imprisonment and torture. For sixteen years, under the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the ideological foundations of radical Islamism were largely nurtured in Egypt’s prison system, and exported to the rest of the world. It became painfully clear with time, the Brotherhood and Islamists had to be co-opted into the political process, rather than rewind the clock back to 1954.

Over the past three months, security services have arrested key Brotherhood figures, in effect decapitating the organization’s first and second tier leadership, shutting down media outlets, seizing its assets, demonizing the group, arresting and killing countless supporters. Now the latest court ruling to ban the eighty-five year old organization is on the table. It is becoming obvious that Egypt’s political and security elites envision an Egyptian future in which the Brotherhood and its support networks are completely destroyed or incapacitated. Such a short-sighted move overlooks the group’s proven survival mechanisms.

In the tightly-controlled public sphere and information space of Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s, Brotherhood inmates, intentionally dispersed across the country’s prisons in order to cripple the apparatus, were largely survived by the (little-known) Muslim Sisterhood. The latter acted as an informal prison support network, carrying ideas and messages from prison to prison to sustain the Brotherhood, and were vital to their rebirth.

Today, there is no need for prison support networks when that network now has a stronger international reach. No longer limited to the Gulf and London, the Brotherhood is opening offices as far flung as Australia. These groups are geared towards revising the Brotherhood strategy and wait for another political opening in Egypt. They are also making efforts to disturb diplomatic relations, skewing the Muslim world view of Egypt, splintering an already splintered diaspora, and pushing a clear-cut anti-coup narrative as opposed to the pro-army’s ill-defined ‘war on terrorism’ battle cry that has come to encompass Sinai’s violent extremism and Pro-Brotherhood protestors throughout Egypt

Recent events have enabled the Brotherhood to take the high moral ground, when addressing both their domestic constituencies and foreign audiences, depicting an Egypt engaged in a secular or religious sacred drama, nicely divided into digestible binaries. To the West, the Brotherhood argues that they are the torchbearers of democracy that are fighting the return of an authoritarian state that overthrew Morsi. To the Muslim world, the Brotherhood has effectively portrayed itself as the defender of Islam, battling godless secularism in the heart of the Sunni intellectual nerve centre.

It does not seem to matter that Morsi and the Brotherhood took a destructive course while in power, that a majority of Egyptians, including Al-Azhar and religious Muslims, have a highly unfavourable view of the Brotherhood or that the organization’s polarizing discourse of incitement and victimhood provides the cover for the killing and destruction of property. A sophisticated and nuanced reading into why Morsi and the Brotherhood collapsed and are largely unpopular is lost in translation.

And why should it not be? The rise in strains of liberal tyranny to rival the strains in religious tyranny gutted the moral clout of anti-Brotherhood arguments, let alone the argument to shut them down. Egypt has been transformed into a bear pit that is locked in an existential battle for survival, with each side going as far as targeting the perceived allied minorities of the other camp: non-Islamists target Syrian and Palestinian refugees, and more violently, the Islamists target Christians and their churches.

Given that the power cards are heavily stacked in favor of the military and security forces, and by extension, the interim government; they need to seriously address the imagination crisis that deal with security issues. It should be noted, no matter how ‘well-intentioned,’ the sight of a military machine carrying out killings in Cairo’s squares for the benefit of ‘your side’ does not score points with the rest of the world. More so when state media is fanning the flames of xenophobia and the arrest of foreign nationals occur in a country in dire need of tourists.

Yet no questions are being asked, how the child who lost his pro-Brotherhood parents in the Raba’a massacre will grow up in a society that largely cheered on the violent dispersals. Or how Islamists will ever trust the democratic process when they are continually being marginalized. Or the Coptic child who lost a father because the security forces did not turn up – some would argue strategically delayed to tarnish the Brotherhood – to protect Christian communities and churches when the threat of an Islamist mob was imminent in the usual rural flashpoints. These are the seeds of bitterness that will matter more to the future Egypt than the current intended myopic goals.

There is little doubt that laws need to be passed to prevent the misuse of mosques for political campaigning and sectarian incitement. The Brotherhood needs to be legally obliged to become transparent with its activities, and importantly, pushed into a state of self-reflection. Banning the organization pushes its members further back into their traditional comfort zone in which they thrive – victimhood and opposition.

As highly problematic as the organization is, the Brotherhood is not the by-product of a foreign plot, rather it is a by-product of Egypt’s social forces and needs to be reintegrated into a system of transitional justice and national reconciliation. Targeting the Brotherhood’s social support networks – healthcare, education, and welfare services – will have a crippling effect on the rural poor. The state is too incompetent to fill the void. Former regime loyalists and revolutionary forces struggle to run an effective political campaign in these areas, let alone service their basic needs. 

The late poet Mahmoud Darwish sounded a warning: “Those who spend an era breastfeeding from the milk of cruel despotism can only perceive destruction and evil in freedom.” In this lays the grim inheritance bestowed upon Egypt following decades of authoritarian rule, the public not only perceives destruction and evil in its own freedom, but in the freedom of others and, consequently, any notion of political co-existence. A third route is needed to save it. Instead of crushing the Brotherhood, there needs to be a national inclusive dialogue on the role of religion and politics, a focus on strengthening institutional checks and balances, and the enforcement of rule of law to protect Egypt from political and security violations and excesses, whether by Islamists or otherwise.

Egypt deserves better.