Short Posts Archives - Page 2 of 2

Mubarak Died Long Ago

Many are disappointed in seeing Mubarak walk free,
but perhaps we can look at it from another perspective – Mubarak’s perspective?

Since 11 February 2011, Mubarak has had to live with the fact that he has been condemned by history, being toppled in such a humiliating way and vomited out by the body politic. The court decision is not his redemption and never will be unless he is reinstated as president.

In June 1974, White House reporter Lawrence M. O’Rourke speculated that US president Nixon would have wished to be assassinated on his state visit to Egypt’s Alexandria rather than go through the inevitable and ignoble resignation as a result of Watergate. Nixon did not want that moment of shame and degradation to come. Martyrdom suddenly looked more appealing (it worked well for Kennedy). But that moment did come. And Nixon died a painful metaphorical death that he never recovered from until his actual death 20 years later.

Whether in a democracy or dictatorship, the forced surrender of power is an excruciating pain that a leader can be put through – more than facing prison time or even the death penalty. For every one of them is obsessed with the historical legacy they will leave. A perceived noble legacy cannot happen if they feel they have been short-circuited by a different form of power arrangements. When the facade came crashing down bringing the leader down in the process. The point is the leader lived to see, and bludgeoned by, a politically quintessential and unerasable humiliation.

The days between the moment they are forced to step down and the moment they breathe their last – are the most harrowing days they will live through, as every single day they will murmur and mumble at how they have been wronged. Their toppling from power should never have happened – they are haunted by it in their living days, tormented by it in their sleep.

It does not take much imagination to realize that Mubarak, being the narcissistic monster he is, hates his political successors more than he hates the revolutionaries who overthrew him. Because the (faceless to him) revolutionaries have receded into the background, while al-Sisi and the military generals have come into the limelight – the very limelight that was exclusively reserved for Mubarak. Every newspaper’s front page and news broadcast will agonizingly remind Mubarak of his stupidity and utter failure to hold onto the power he loved most.

His current existence is his ultimate prison, if not death, sentence.

And yet, irrespective of Mubarak’s status or pain, our work that began in 2011 still continues. Often limping with much difficulty in these repressive times, but it continues.

Why terrorism will always feel worse today than in previous decades

This will not be of much consolation to the people and victims in Brussels, but it’s important to put the timeline of terrorism in Western Europe in perspective. As the chart by Satista shows, this, by far, is not the worst decade of terrorism in Western Europe. The 1970s and 1980s saw, primarily but not limited to, terrorist groups like ETA, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), West German Red Army Faction (RAF), the Italian Red Brigades, the French Action Directe (AD), and the Belgian Communist Combatant Cells, cause high amounts of deaths and carnage in European cities. Yet Europe managed to successfully subdue them to a great degree. There is no reason it will not succeed in overcoming the Islamist terrorist scourge.

The illustration should serve as a reminder that terrorism committed by citizens against fellow citizens is not something novel to European history. Also, the difference between today and past decades of one’s exposure to reports of terrorism is that social media makes us live vicariously through the violence unleashed and tears shed due to round-the-clock reporting, Facebook posts and tweets. Consequently, feeding into an exacerbation of our fears and stretching our human attentive capacity to its extreme limits. This is an astronomical leap from the old days of watching the six o’clock news to see a five-minute report and reading an article in the following day’s newspaper.

To emphasise, the diagram should not make one relax or underestimate the gravity of today’s terrorist acts – a grave threat that needs to be dealt with in all seriousness. Yet there is no reason not to take a leaf from history to inspire hope that at the end of it all, with concerted political will and collective human efforts, ISIS and its mutations will wither away and become another failed experiment. History is not on their side.

The Hidden Triumph of the Egyptian Revolution

Republished in openDemocracy

To those who cast doubt on the success of the Egyptian revolution. Step back, look around you, and reflect for a moment.

[From Alexandria’s Stanley neighborhood: “The People,” the eternal cry of the revolutionary voice that would follow it up with “Demand the fall of [insert your current oppressor here].” — [From Alexandria’s Stanley neighborhood: “The People,” the eternal cry of the revolutionary
voice that would follow it up with “Demand the fall of [insert your current oppressor here].”

As a result of the revolution, your social relations have been dramatically reconfigured. You have made new friends of strangers. You speak a new political language never known before. Your relationship to the state and public has been redefined. You have been involved in an unprecedented archival culture that narrates everything that has been happening. For every document, photograph and video will aid the next generation in resuming where you have finished off. For you cannot move forward without defining your relationship to the past.

Your understanding of history has been permanently altered. The 2011 revolution ruptured the political and social timeline giving you a new source of historical legitimacy. It gave you a critical juncture that emits a wave of vivid memories of sacrifices, victories, and betrayals of your hopes.

The 2011 revolution gave you a new validity to hold onto, and to rival any previous validity. No longer do you live in vain waiting for a future democratic “paradise”, you now realise that such a paradise needs to be shifted from the future to the present, from a goal to a process, to be instigated in small doses to the best of your human capacity.

The revolution in effect destroyed the previous dominant situation and cannot consolidate the new dominant situation, which can easily be clouded by the smokescreen of arrests and crackdowns.

That is what the revolution achieved. It did not arrive to give you a choice of regimes. It arrived to initiate a new beginning, one that is already on its course. You, among many, have been given a shared fundamental worldview that you unconsciously implement every day, and will determine the course of events in the present and, more theatrically, when the climate is ripe in your favour.

In a marvellous transformation, you can no longer recognise your pre-2011 self.

Was all of this worth it, Assad?

Imagine, when Bashar al-Assad and his regime was
confronted with an uprising in early 2011, he could have
wisely stepped down, initiated a democratic redBAA transition or negotiated a power-sharing agreement. He instead declared war on his own people, caused one of the largest refugee exodus in modern history, laid the foundation for radicalisation, indirectly gave birth to ISIS, lost half his territory to ISIS, killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, lost the heritage of centuries, lost international legitimacy, opened up his government to interference from Russia and Iran (and the Gulf monarchies who exploited and supported his opponents).

Not to mention the latest terror attacks, nothing certainly original, but the blood splattered in Ankara, Sinai, Beirut and Paris has a trail that, in part, goes back to the chaos in Syria.

It could have all been so different, and all this heartache and agony for what? Because Assad could not bring himself to, at the very least, sit at the same table with protest leaders and citizens during the honeymoon days of the Arab uprisings. No, he just could not do it. It was beneath him. Alas, power and privilege is so intoxicating that it makes you believe the price of civilisational collapse is worth it.

Alexandria’s walls can still speak: Shaimaa el-Sabbagh in street art

The late poet, writer and activist Shaimaa el-Sabbagh who was killed by security forces on 24 January 2015, as she was walking to lay flowers for those who have fallen in Tahrir, has, this month, been painted on the walls of her home and the surrounding vicinity in Moharem Bey, Alexandria. The moving words that accompany the images says it all:

“The one who fears the sun will have to imprison the day.”

“is there anyone guaranteed to walk in safety or not in safety – where can they walk?”
– Sheikh Imam

(This is a follow-up to my previous post on the drawings of Shaimaa)

In taking her life away, they inadvertently made her into a powerful living symbol. Rest in peace.