I.
The sky is a dark bowl, the stars die and fall.
The celestial bows quiver,
the bones of the earthgods shake and planets come to a halt
when they sight the king in all his power,
the god who feeds on his father and eats his mother.
—“The Cannibal Hymn,” anonymous Old Kingdom lyric, c. 2180 B.C.
“Hieroglyph” means “sacred writing” (from the Greek hieros sacred + gluphe carving). Its emergence around 3000 B.C. in the Nile Valley marks as well as anything else the beginning of human civilization. More elaborate and abstract than the cuneiform script developing at the time in the Fertile Crescent, hieroglyphs glorified the political acts and religious beliefs of the pharaoh. By the middle of the third millennium B.C., though, writing in Egypt became capable of what we might call “literary” expression. The tradition of lyric poetry—including elegies, odes, hymns, love-songs, and epitaphs—begins in Egypt around this time. The Egyptian literary tradition is among the oldest and richest in the world: the history of the book begins in Egypt; Origen of Alexandria is the father of Christian theology; Christian monasticism, with its traditions of learning and scholarship, begins with the desert monasteries of the early Coptic Church in the third century; imaginative literature thrived after the seventh-century Muslim invasion of Egypt, including the pioneering work of philosophical and science-fiction novelist Ibn al-Nafis in the thirteenth century; modern Egypt has seen its own extraordinary literary achievements, in the work of Taha Hussein, Yousef Idris, Tawfiq Al-Hakeem, and, most famously, Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz.
While there have been some artistic glimmers in Egypt’s more recent past, for instance in the fiction of Sonalla Ibrahim and Alaa Al Aswany, the decades since the 1970s have been on the whole a low point for Egyptian culture. There are many reasons for this, including political repression under the recently overthrown Mubarak regime, the influence of conservative Saudi Wahhabism in the country’s religious and social attitudes, and the deterioration of the country’s educational system. We may add to the list, as Tarek Osman argues in his timely Egypt on The Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak (2011), the failure of a leader to articulate a national project around which the country could coalesce. It is worth noting, though, that these developments occurred contemporaneously with the economic liberalization begun under Sadat’s al-infitah (Arabic, “opening up”) and continued under Mubarak in modified form. In fact, they corresponded with a simultaneously counter-revolutionary spirit in the West, which we may date from Margaret Thatcher’s ascension to Prime Minister in England in 1979 and Ronald Regan’s ascension to the presidency of the United States in 1981. The past three decades have been reactionary ones, both in the West and in Egypt. This is no coincidence.
What follows is not a commentary on the state of Egyptian literature or culture. It is an analysis of the Obama administration’s political rhetoric in response to Egypt, some aspects of the U.S.-Mubarak alliance, and the roots of resistance in Egypt. I return periodically to how words have developed and how they are used because I believe with George Orwell that there is a special connection between political and linguistic debasement: as he puts it in “Politics and the English Language,” if one gets rid of certain bad habits in writing and speech, “one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.”
I also assume that the state of a society’s culture, especially its literature, is an important indicator of its health. In this, I am in perfect accord with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote in his Defence of Poetry (1821) that “the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence.” Shelley refers to drama in particular because he thought drama was the form under which the greatest number of poetic modes may be subsumed, so that the “connection of poetry to social good” is more observable there than anywhere else. The drama of ancient Greece thus “coexisted with the moral and intellectual greatness of the age.” In contrast, the intensely melodious poetry of the writers “who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt”—Shelley alludes to Theocritus, Callimachus, and Bion, poets living in Alexandria under the Ptolemy kings or at Syracuse in Sicily—“overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness.”
I begin with Shelley because we owe to him and his Romantic contemporaries the language we use to talk about revolutions. “Revolution” itself only came into its etymological own in the late eighteenth century, when the great revolutions of that century (American, French, and Haitian) decisively shifted its meaning from the cyclical restoration of lawful authority to the linear, teleological establishment of a new order bound to human progress. The vocabulary we use to talk about revolutions—including “reform,” “innovation,” the “rights of man,” and the “spirit of liberty”—is Romanticism’s mixed legacy to us: it mediates enlightened ideals of freedom and justice to us and, through that mediation, sullies their imagined universal purity.
The recent events in Egypt—so far the model and paradigm of what is perhaps the most remarkable regional uprising of our time—are calling the sufficiency of that vocabulary into question. It is essentially the language of bourgeois liberalism, a flexible discourse that for two centuries has served the interests of revolution and imperialism in practically equal measure. What we are seeing in Egypt is not necessarily a “bourgeois” revolution, as some Marxist historians understand the French Revolution of 1789. The protest in Egypt gained momentum only after it was given support by the “April 6th movement,” a group of young, educated Egyptians formed in the spring of 2008 to support the strikes of textile workers in Al-Mahla Al-Kobra. The young Egyptians who stand at the vanguard of the movement—and the industrial laborers who have been organizing for over a decade—are skeptical of the liberal capitalism that linked the Mubarak regime, specifically the elite circle around Gamal Mubarak, with Western interests. What we are seeing in Egypt is not a bourgeois revolution, nor is it, one may argue, a “revolution” at all, despite the use of the term in the media and indeed throughout this essay: the military that has essentially been in control of the country since 1952 remains in power, and there have not yet been significant socio-economic changes, as the continued protests in Tahrir Square demonstrate. Though this may change. The Egyptian “revolution” and its effects may be changing, in fact, the way we think about modern democratic movements—or, what amounts to the same thing, the language we use to describe them.
II. Words and the Sides of History
I am the son of Coptic emigrants from Egypt. The Coptic Orthodox Church, among the oldest in the world, was founded in Egypt by the apostle Mark around 42 A.D. Christianity quickly became the country’s main religion and remained so up to four centuries after the Muslim conquest in 640 A.D. The Copts receded into the social background during Ottoman rule but assumed a leading role in the political, economic, and artistic life of Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Relations between Muslims and Christians became increasingly strained in the second half of the twentieth century, as a wave of fundamentalist Islam transformed the society, often violently. My parents left the country near the beginning of this wave in the early 1970s, after my mother had been denied a postgraduate fellowship on what appeared to be religious grounds. They were part of a larger emigration of educated Copts from Egypt around this time, depriving the country of a historically productive social group, a move mirrored internally by the conspicuous withdrawal of Egyptian Christians from the country’s social life.
The Copts, along with other historically underrepresented groups in Egypt, are closer than they have been for decades to being reintegrated into the country’s political system. The revolution begun in January is not yet completed; its completion depends, as it always has, on continued popular struggle. Recent events should be a mere prelude to more comprehensive democratic reforms, at least if we wish to mean anything at all when use the word “democracy.” And what we mean by that term is a discussion that has once again spilled over from policy institutes and political theory seminar rooms onto the pages of mainstream newspapers. Scott Shane of the New York Times thus situated the developments in Egypt in their obvious context, America’s long and consequential history of propping up brutal dictators in the service of its own interests: Batista of Cuba, Pahlavi of Iran, Marcos of the Philippines. The embarrassing list goes on, of course (Suharto of Indonesia, Duvalier of Haiti, Pinochet of Chile, and, less directly, Ceausescu of Romania). The pattern confirms the basic attitude of U.S. “democracy promotion”: democracy is fine so long as it does not interfere with American economic and strategic interests. This is not a leftist position; it is the conclusion reached by the prominent conservative scholar, Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (2004). “Every country has both values and interests,” Shane writes in “America’s Journeys with Strongmen.” “Sometimes they coincide—for example, promoting human rights can help combat terrorism—and sometimes they conflict. What makes the United States stand out, perhaps, is how frequently American officials proclaim their values to the world, setting themselves up for charges of hypocrisy when a policy is expedient rather than idealistic.” Calling out hypocrisy, it should be added, is not an end unto itself. It is only worth doing if there are changes that may result from it.
It is worth considering, then, what we mean by national “values” and “interests,” two of the most invoked and least defined terms of our political discourse. It is clear how individuals have values and interests; less clear how nations or states, strictly speaking, may have values or interests. For most of its history, “value” denoted a more or less quantifiable estimation of worth (“On Condition he paid a certain number of Cows, or the Value,” etc.). “Value” begins to take on a qualitative, quasi-moral sense of principles that a society may share only in the twentieth century (“American” values, “family” values, etc.). Even if one were to recognize that nations—people with a common ethnicity, language, and/or religion—may have values in common, it should be noted that there are and have been very few nation-states in this sense. Most states are multinational, i.e. constituted by different peoples with divergent values and interests. Politicians may be fond of talking about “American” values, but it is hard to understand what they mean aside from basic moral principles held by people from many different nations (freedom, justice, security, etc.), a fact recognized even by George W. Bush in his recent memoir.
Similarly, when U.S. or national “interests” are invoked, it is rarely the interests of the nation or people itself that is referred to (which studies indicate include adequate health care, functioning schools, a fair justice system, etc.). It almost always denotes the interests of what are already the most powerful sectors of society, the corporations which have only increased their control of the political system since the January 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision. American “interests” in the Middle East, which are rarely specified but which the public is expected to support unconditionally, thus refers to open access to markets and resources, i.e. potential profits. To this we may add “strategic” interests, partnerships that allow the U.S. military to prevent or counteract any interferences with American access to markets and resources.
That the state should work to advance corporate interests should not come as a surprise. It was evident to the father of classical economics, Adam Smith, who wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776) of the excessive political power enjoyed by those with large amounts of capital:
It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interests have been entirely neglected; but the producers whose interests has been so carefully attended to; and among this latter class our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principal architects. In the mercantile regulations…the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to; and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed.
Throughout The Wealth of Nations, Smith emphasizes how the state, whose policy is determined by the interests of its most rapacious elements, interferes with the free operation of the market. With the substitution of “corporations and lobbies” for Smith’s “merchants and manufacturers,” this is a more scathing indictment of state-capitalism than you are likely to find in liberal commentary today. It is also, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an issue that needs to be addressed if we wish to understand U.S. interests in the Middle East and, by extension, the role those interests have played in what we are seeing in Egypt and throughout the region.
Foremost among our values and interests, we are told, is “stability,” a seemingly unobjectionable end in its own right, opposed only by anarchists and the “sowers of discord” inhabiting the lowest circles of Dante’s hell. “Stability,” though, does not refer to peace. It refers to market stability and to enough political stability to allow for the unimpeded flow of capital, the necessary conditions of neoliberal economics. Far from denoting peace, “stability” is sought often through violence and force, as it has been in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is only once we disassociate “stability” from things like peace, freedom, and justice that we can make sense of Obama’s response to a question about Mubarak’s atrocious human rights record prior to his trip to Saudi Arabia and Egypt in the summer of 2009: as the New York Times reported at the time, “Mr. Obama signaled that while he would mention American concerns about human rights in Egypt, he would not challenge Mr. Mubarak too sharply, because he is a ‘force for stability and good’ in the Middle East.” We must adopt curious definitions of “stability” and “good” indeed if we are to understand them as characteristics of the Mubarak regime. Of course the regime had an element of stability: it was among the most brutally repressive in the world. In an interview shortly after the revolution in Egypt, Noam Chomsky remarks:
You have to remember that stability is a Cold War code word. “Stability” doesn't mean stability; it means obedience to U.S. domination. So let's go back to [Kissinger]. He was the primary agent in, among other things, undermining the democratic regime in Chile. He later commented that “The U.S. had to destabilize Chile in order to establish stability.” If you understand the terminology, that is not a contradiction. It means the U.S. had to undermine, through Kissinger’s initiative, the parliamentary government in order to institute an obedient dictatorship, and that is what he means by “stability.” He doesn't mean that things are calm and straightforward; he means they are under control.
“Stability” is what classical rhetoricians would have called a euphemismus, a substitution or circumlocution intended to palliate something unpleasant; Orwell would have called it newspeak. U.S. “values,” if it means anything at all, thus refers to nothing in excess of basic human values; U.S. “interests” refers to the economic and strategic interests of the most powerful sectors of society, who determine the policy of the state at the expense of the interests of the nation; “stability” is achieved through violence. “The purpose of Newspeak,” Orwell writes, “was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”
No wonder, then, that the Obama administration, which has not changed the essentials of the diplomatic approach of previous administrations, found itself having to defend certain paradoxes of U.S. foreign policy. It promotes U.S. values like freedom and justice at the same time that it pursues U.S. interests like market stability. When they contradict, our values, which we proclaim so loudly and so often, are subordinated to our interests, which are discussed in only the most general terms because they are not public interests at all, but elite interests. That these interests are not aligned necessitates a steady stream of propaganda declaring that what is good for American corporations and the military is good for America. The false “values-interests” dichotomy—every nation has values and interests; sometimes they coincide; sometimes they conflict—is usually taken as a matter of inevitable fact. It is a false dichotomy because it fails to ask why values and interests conflict—they “conflict” because they are the values and interests of distinct social groups, falsely subsumed under a national heading—and because it fails to imagine how a society might seek to realign the values and interests of the people who constitute it.
It is precisely the charge of hypocrisy and, as it has been termed inside and outside the White House, standing “on the wrong side of history” that has led the Obama administration to fear the resentment of newly empowered people in Egypt who it had assumed would remain powerless for the foreseeable future. Obama thus commissioned an internal White House study after the protests in Egypt began, focusing on revolutions against U.S.-backed dictators, including “the 1986 popular revolt against Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the Chilean transition from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to democracy in 1990, and the 1998 uprising in Indonesia that drove out President Suharto,” as Scott Wilson of the Washington Post reports. The specious values-interests conflict became increasingly apparent in the public conflict between the White House and the State Department on how to respond to the events in Egypt. Obama, surrounded by a younger generation of “idealistic” aides who warned him of creating lasting bitterness in the region if he were to stand “on the wrong side of history,” was inclined, it seems, to give greater public support to the protesters by taking a hard line with Mubarak. Obama’s envoy to the region, Frank Wisner, was at the same time telling a conference in Munich that Mubarak was an indispensible part of Egypt’s transition to democracy (Wisner was subsequently recalled following revelations that his law firm had financial ties to the Mubarak regime). Wisner’s comments were reinforced by statements from the State Department, declaring that any credible transition in Egypt would “take time.”
Such statements, taken literally, are meaningless: change, by definition, “takes time.” Taken as diplomatic code (“the U.S. does not support immediate democratic change in Egypt”), the statements are dangerous and, as Obama suspected, deeply offensive to people who do not believe that they should have to wait to stop being detained without trial or tortured. Obama was reportedly angry at the mixed signals the administration was sending, assigning John Kerry the task of clarifying the administration’s message on the Sunday morning talk shows.
Analysis of the administration’s handling of the crisis tended to view it along philosophical lines. In the analysis of the Times (“In U.S. Signals to Egypt, Obama Straddled a Rift”):
The trouble in sending a clear message was another example of how divided Mr. Obama’s foreign policy team remains. A president who himself is often torn between idealism and pragmatism was navigating the counsel of a traditional foreign policy establishment led by Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Biden and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, against that of a next-generation White House staff who worried that the American preoccupation with stability could put a historic president on the wrong side of history.
The false “values/interests” opposition is reiterated as a false “idealism/pragmatism” opposition. Just as the supposed values/interests conflict erroneously implies an inherent contradiction between the two terms (the real contradiction, again, is between basic moral principles and corporate or geostrategic interests), the idealism/pragmatism opposition erroneously implies a necessary contradiction between what should be done and what can be done. The “ideal” course of action is represented as necessarily out of reach. Once an unattainable state of ideal perfection is abandoned, the more “pragmatic” approach may be embraced without moral scruple. There is, of course, no real contradiction here. “Idealism” and “pragmatism,” as two schools in the history of philosophy, do not propose contradictory doctrines: idealism is a claim about the nature or structure of reality; pragmatism a claim about how to go about solving philosophical problems. But the always even-handed Obama is not weighing the merits of Hegel and Dewey here. He is navigating between fundamentally democratic and undemocratic approaches to foreign policy. To construe it as a difference between “idealism” and “pragmatism” is to imply that this is a genuinely philosophical problem, endlessly debatable and best confined to graduate seminar rooms and think-tanks.
There has been no shortage of accounts of how Egypt arrived at its revolutionary moment, many of which say little about the Mubarak regime’s relationship with the United States and Israel. There is, as always, the narrative presented by the media. According to that account, the causes of what happened in Egypt may be traced to what happened in Tunisia—but typically not much further—where demonstrations over unemployment, rising food prices, and government corruption forced out President Ben Ali on January 14, 2011. Activists in Egypt—inspired by the success of the Tunisians, prompted by similar grievances, and empowered by new social media—launched their own protests, taking to the streets of downtown Cairo and other cities on January 25th, the “Day of Rage,” with what quickly became a core set of demands: that Mubarak step down, that the emergency law in effect since 1981 be lifted, and that the constitution be reformed or redrafted. The contours of the drama that unfolded over the next eighteen days are now familiar to us: the government’s unprecedented shutdown of the Internet, its use of sycophants and mercenaries to provoke violence in the crowds, the nonviolent resistance of the vast majority of protesters, the cosmetic changes repeatedly offered by the regime and rejected by the people, the alternate reality portrayed on state television, the threats and paranoid rhetoric of the newly appointed vice-president Omar Suleiman, and, finally, the resignation of Hosni Mubarak and the ebullient celebrations of February 11th.
Alongside this standard account, we may trace the response of the Obama administration and the State Department. On January 25th, Hillary Clinton declared “the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people," a falsehood to even the most casual observer. On January 26th, Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesperson, asserted that “Egypt is a strong ally” when asked whether the U.S. still supported Mubarak. On January 27th, as police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse peaceful protests declared illegal under Egypt’s permanent state of emergency rule, vice-president Joe Biden said that he would not refer to Mubarak as a “dictator” (a comment that must have come as a surprise to the Egyptians in Tahrir Square and that sources say he quickly regretted). On January 27th, Obama remarked that “reform”—a term that since Burke has been opposed to “innovation” or radical change—is “absolutely critical to the long-term well-being of Egypt,” a statement, offensive to only the staunchest reactionaries, that says almost nothing at all.
The rhetoric of “reform” gave way in early February to the language of “orderly transition,” used by U.S. envoy Wisner in his personal communication with Mubarak and by Clinton on American television. "We want to see an orderly transition so that no one fills a void, that there not be a void, that there be a well thought out plan that will bring about a democratic participatory government," Clinton told Fox News. The remark is telling. It expresses not a hope for democracy in Egypt, but a fear that, without careful American and ideally international handling, democracy in Egypt might yield unpalatable results, as it did in Palestine in 2006 when the people voted for Hamas (and for which they were immediately punished by Israel’s U.S.-backed siege of Gaza in 2006, producing what four prominent human rights organizations deemed a humanitarian crisis). A “void,” we should note, is precisely what genuinely democratic, participatory processes are intended to fill. Without a period of “momentary openness,” Slavoj Zizek observed in The Guardian, there can be no true democracy.
Another liberal worry is that there is no organized political power to take over if Mubarak goes. Of course there is not; Mubarak took care of that by reducing all opposition to marginal ornaments, so that the result is like the title of the famous Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None. The argument for Mubarak—it's either him or chaos—is an argument against him.
“Void,” though, in the language of the State Department and Fox News is not “momentary openness,” but code for the possibility of a radical Muslim take-over of government, the omnipresent bogey-man that has been used to justify the suppression of democracy throughout the region. Far from paving the way to a “democratic, participatory government,” an “orderly transition” of power, in which as many pieces of the old regime as possible stay in power, was intended to prevent any democratic, participatory engagement that would run counter to U.S. interests.
The real fear within the State Department is not of a democratically elected theocracy, which they know is not likely to happen in Egypt, but of a democratically elected government that is not as inclined as the Mubarak regime to accommodate American interests, including cooperation with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, intelligence gathering, and privileged access to the region’s markets and resources. These issues, though, do not sell well to the majority of Americans, who have other, more immediate concerns. The elite fear of regional instability, then, has to be repackaged as a popular fear: a void that might be filled by people who want above all else to destroy America. Nature, the source of value for Romantics like Shelley, and the State Department abhor vacuums for very different reasons.
The other, quite noticeable, fear of the Obama administration has been embarrassment. As media attention turned to how surprised it seemed to be by developments in Egypt, calling into question the intelligence of the CIA and the State Department, Hillary Clinton responded within a day in the language of elementary sociology: “The region is being battered by a perfect storm of powerful trends,” including lack of political reform, a growing youth population, and new web-based technologies. The administration, so often prone to speak of the “aspirations” of people everywhere and “winning the future” here at home, has suddenly become historical materialists: this was bound to happen. In a sense, they are right. There is, though, something unsettling in the difference between the active, empowering language of “winning the future” and “being the change you want to see” used to rally the liberal base at home and the deterministic language of “perfect storms” used to describe revolutionary movements abroad. Part of this, no doubt, is a commendable desire to appear politically aloof from the situation—thus the common non-interventionist refrain “What happens now is up to the Egyptian people.” The more troubling aspects of Clinton’s remarks are implied: popular democratic movements in the Middle East may be explained on statistical models that track inevitable trends not economic or political structures the U.S. has been instrumental in engineering; if one can predict these popular uprisings one could theoretically prevent them, ideally with just enough political reform to leave the basic structures in place; and, finally, democratic movements in the Middle East are something to be feared, the result of a storm—“perfect” in one sense, ominous in another—“battering” the region.
The narrative presented in the media, when not obsessing over the role of Facebook and Twitter, is not entirely off base. In its more substantive moments, it relates crucial facts: 40 per cent of Egyptians live below the international poverty line (with per capita GDP at $6,000); three-quarters of the population are under the age of 35 (a third is under the age of 14); unemployment is at 10 per cent (double for those under 30); overall literacy is at 71 per cent (59 per cent for women). These are important facts that help to explain the current situation. But they do not tell us much about the roots of the surge in democratic sentiment in Egypt. Those roots are, on one hand, uniquely Egyptian, embedded in the country’s lengthy history of foreign rule and then counter-productive national regimes; on the other hand, they are part of global economic and political trends in which we are all implicated.
III. “Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art”:
The U.S.-Mubarak Alliance and the Roots of Resistance
The object of frustration on the “Day of Rage,” January 25th 2011, was clear: the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak came into office in 1981, following the assassination of Anwar Sadat, with the promise of restoring tranquility to a country that had known mostly upheaval, poverty, and war. The means of restoring calm and prosperity, Mubarak wagered, was to extend and modify al-infitah, the liberalization of the economy begun under Sadat, but to abandon the ambitious political and religious goals of the past (Nasserite Arab nationalism and Islamism). Mubarak essentially subordinated every other social or political issue to the development of the Egyptian economy—a policy that, to the extent that it benefitted anyone at all, benefitted Mubarak, his family, high-ranking members of the military establishment, and a select group of connected businessmen.
The alliance between political power and capital—and the startling inequality such an alliance tends to produce—began with Sadat’s inauguration of al-infitah in 1974 and then was a defining feature of the Mubarak regime. Prior to Mubarak’s fall, the richest 5 per cent of the country’s population controlled 40 per cent of the country’s wealth. The 2004 “reform” government consisted largely of Egypt’s wealthiest and most powerful businessmen. The trade minister was a major shareholder of one of Egypt’s largest consumer-goods empires, the health minister was the country’s most successful healthcare entrepreneur, and the agriculture minister was the country’s most prominent wheat trader (these are the sorts of interests that presumably worked with other elements in the NDP to organize the confrontational “pro-Mubarak” stooges during February’s protests). The result of these conflicts of interest in Egypt was, as one would expect, widespread corruption, with the lives of the connected elite becoming farther removed from the harsh realities of millions in Cairo’s poorest neighborhoods. The socio-economic disparity became even more evident in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Such a dangerous alliance of wealth and power, and the inequality it produces, is now a depressingly familiar part of the American political and economic landscape. The recent financial crisis, which revealed on a broad scale how intimate regulatory agencies were with the industries they were intended to regulate, has only exacerbated a thirty-year trend of growing inequality. The richest 10 per cent now control two-thirds of Americans’ net worth, with the top 1 per cent controlling over a third of it. Average household income has nearly quadrupled for the richest 1 per cent over the past thirty years; it has stagnated for the bottom 80 per cent. The richest 1 per cent pays less in taxes now than at any time since 1945. Among the eight most developed countries, the United States is now the most unequal and the least socially mobile.
I juxtapose these sobering statistics from Egypt and the U.S. to illustrate a structural symmetry in their fusions of wealth and power and in their thirty-year tends of increasing economic inequality—an economic symmetry that coincided with an exceptionally close political alliance. “Coincided,” of course, is too neutral a word. The U.S.-Egyptian partnership has served particular interests well.
There had been cooperation between the U.S. and Egypt before Sadat: between 1954 and 1966 the U.S. contributed $643 million of wheat shipments to strengthen the internal stability of Nasser’s nationalist regime, support that was interrupted by the U.S. in 1964 in retaliation for Egypt’s intervention in the Yemeni war, aggravating what was already a financial crisis in Egypt. The modern U.S.-Egypt alliance, though, begins with Sadat’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel. The humiliating defeat of the 1967 war with Israel, which many Egyptians blamed on the inferiority of Egypt’s Soviet weaponry to Israel’s American weaponry, made it clear that U.S. support was a strategic necessity for Egypt. Sadat concluded that making peace with Israel, a move resulting in Egypt’s expulsion from all Arab organizations, and opening up the economy along capitalist lines were crucial in getting U.S. support. And in this prediction he was right. Since 1979, Egypt has received between $1 billion and $1.5 billion annually in U.S. aid (second only to Israel), with the corruption of the Sadat and then Mubarak regimes ensuring that little of that aid found its way to the people. This is in addition to the significant amount of military aid Egypt received from the United States, much of that, again, going to the military-based regimes. Mubarak, taking office after Sadat’s assassination by Muslim fundamentalists in 1981, modified the U.S.-Egypt alliance envisioned by Sadat: he transformed Sadat’s vision of a U.S. “Marshall Plan” in Egypt into a vision of Egypt as the leading figure in a regional Pax Americana.
From the American perspective, all this was fair compensation for Egypt’s “neutralization” of Arab-Israeli tensions and for acting as a Cold War partner. The U.S. military, in addition, gained privileged access to the Suez Canal, the most important strategic asset in the Middle East. The joint Egyptian-U.S. military exercises, dubbed “Bright Star,” became among the most significant military operations in the Middle East. The U.S. military received support from Egyptian security agencies in its effort to set up permanent security forces in Iraq. The CIA gained valuable intelligence from Egypt related to radical Islamist groups, the threat of which the Mubarak regime was happy to exaggerate to Washington and to the Egyptian people (suggesting to both it was the only thing standing between them and terror). The CIA also found a cooperative point man for its rendition, or torture, program in Omar Suleiman (who the U.S. backed in his brief stint as Vice-President in the final days of the Mubarak regime). Economically, the United States, along with China and Russia, has been a key beneficiary of Egypt’s economic liberalization.
The majority of the Egyptian and American people, who are joined by the fact that their relative economic standing has deteriorated over the past thirty years, have seen little benefit from this partnership. The alliance primarily served elite interests, while everyone else endured economic stagnation and weakened social safety nets. The result in both countries, predictably, has been anger. In the U.S., one can see it on the right in the Tea Party, who rightly feel like they have been left behind economically—if for the wrong reasons—and on the left in the wave of union demonstrations in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the Midwest earlier this year, merely the latest expressions of economic frustration that has been building for decades.
The anger expressed in Egypt’s national “Day of Rage,” an appellation since borrowed by other uprisings in the region, has likewise been building for years, as Alain Roussillon details in his excellent survey of modern Egypt, “Republican Egypt Interpreted: Revolution and Beyond,” in the Cambridge History of Egypt, Vol II (1998). Much of the frustration since the beginning of al-infitah has been economic. Nasser’s nationalist revolution—a combination of land reform and the creation of a public sector—transferred around 75 per cent of Egypt’s GDP from the country’s rich to small landowners and, more to the point, to the state. Sadat’s infitah, a reaction to Nasserite nationalism, abandoned the socialist aims of the past, with wealth moving back to the top of the society—an increasingly indistinguishable mesh of “public,” “private,” and military interests—through state intervention. Again, much like in the United States, the illusion of a free market belied the state’s active redistribution of wealth upwards (as Smith had discerned was happening in England in his own time). An immediate result of al-infitah was inflation, prompting Egypt to work with the IMF to gain sorely needed funds. To appease the demands of the IMF, authorities announced in 1977 the removal of subsidies from a number of basic commodities: rice, flour, sugar, oil, butane, etc. One of the “perverse effects” of the subsidy system was the overnight increase in the prices of the affected goods, increases ranging from 15 to 45 per cent. Millions of people took to the streets; the state’s repressive forces took action, leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded.
The January 1977 uprising marked a new era in the history of Egyptian demonstrations of popular anger. As unemployment and inflation continued to rise (the cost of living for an average Egyptian household rose by more than 75 per cent from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s), social suffering intensified. 2003-05 witnessed a surge of popular expressions of frustration: the civil society Kefaya (“Enough”) movement, the Judges Club, various student unions, the feminist group Shayfenkom (“We Are Watching You”), and Nasserite loyalists all became increasingly vocal in their opposition. Similarly, in 2007-08 there were more than 150 demonstrations and strikes, most famously the riots that erupted at a state-owned weaving factor in Al-Mahla Al-Kobra, again ending violently. Many of those who participated in demonstrations during the Mubarak era, and even those who did not such as bloggers, ended up in jail, in accord with the emergency law in place since 1981 that sets strict limits on free speech and the people’s right to assemble. Prior to the fall of Mubarak, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights estimated that as many as 18,000 people remained in detention without charge or trial, often in horrific conditions and subject to torture.
If student groups, professional syndicates, and civil-society groups seemed to be the only active voices of opposition in Egypt’s recent history, that is because the state, from Nasser to Mubarak, has typically been more concerned with controlling the two groups it felt posed a real threat: the Marxist left and the Islamists. The modern Egyptian state’s struggle with the Marxist left goes back to the Nasser military regime’s sporadic repression from 1952 to 1958 of the Egyptian communists, who had broken with the Free Officers’ movement after the leaders of a major strike were hanged. Nasser’s socialist regime struck at trade unions, teachers, and militant peasants who threatened to destabilize the nascent regime’s hold on power. Repression intensified immediately following Nasser’s 1958 visit to Moscow, resulting in the “great trial” of Egyptian communists. A few years later, the National Action Charter of 1962 (al-Mithaq) promulgated a non-exploitative “Arab socialism” defined in opposition to imported forms of communism or Marxism. The regime concluded a formal alliance with the Marxists in 1965, though none were represented in the Higher Council for the Liquidation of Feudalism, created by Nasser in 1966 to oversee land redistribution and agrarian reform laws. Marxists played a paradoxical role throughout Nasser’s socialist project, directly providing it with the intellectual framework it needed at the same time that Nasser pursued an “anti-communist” agenda to consolidate his own revolutionary gains.
If Nasser’s regime had a paradoxical relationship to the Marxist left, Sadat’s regime had an unambiguously counter-revolutionary approach to it. Sadat’s “corrective revolution” (thawat al-tashih) reversed the founding principles of Nasser’s socialist project, opening Egypt up to foreign capital and investments. His creation of the National Democratic Party in 1978 marked the beginning of “democratic socialism” in Egypt, a platform resembling of course neither democracy nor socialism, but the liberal capitalism of the West. The creation of the Socialist Labor party in 1978 was the idea of Sadat himself, who sought to create an “opposition wing” of his own NDP in order to marginalize the Marxist left even further. Mubarak employed similarly divisive strategies to control the left, legalizing in 1990-1 the existence of visible, “clientist” opposition parties intended to atomize and de-politicize the population. Forceful repression of workers’ strikes, such as the 1987 railway workers’ strike, continued under the emergency law. On the whole, Mubarak’s regime—economically driven in its later years by the Western-oriented, liberal capitalist circle around his son, Gamal Mubarak—aggressively confronted any leftist oppositional forces it could not contain under the façade of political pluralism.
The other major threat to regime stability in Egypt, as previously mentioned, has been Islamism. As with the Marxist left, the Islamic threat goes back to the origins of the modern Egyptian state under Nasser. The Muslim Brotherhood—founded in 1928 by the Hassan Al-Banna (assassinated by the Egyptian police in 1949) to represent a call to religion (al-dawaa) in modern Egyptian society—was an immediate enemy of the regime. It had supported Nasser’s opponent, General Naguib, in his struggle for the presidency, and the assassination attempt on Nasser by a Brother in 1954 led to a violent crackdown on the organization, resulting in its temporary dissolution. Less than a decade later, Al-Azhar University—founded in 970 A.D. and the world’s seat of Sunni learning—condemned the “secular” nature of the 1962 charter, demanding that Islam be recognized as the official religion of the State, objecting to the charter’s language regarding the equality of men and women, and challenging the charter’s stipulation that half the seats in all elections represent “workers” and “peasants” (fellahin). A second wave of regime repression against the Brotherhood commenced in 1965, with arbitrary detention and execution continuing into the 1970s.
The Islamist movement regained some of its footing under Sadat, who abandoned Nasser’s heavy-handed methods in favor of a more nuanced approach, a “calculated risk” intended to extinguish the remnants of the Nasserite and Marxist left. It had some success in that regard, though at a potentially destabilizing cost. The increased freedoms accorded to the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s coincided with the beginning of a religiously conservative turn in Egyptian culture, an Islamization that dramatically altered the society over the next thirty years. The state worked with its new Islamist allies to introduce the “law of apostasy” in 1977, stipulating that renouncing Islam is punishable by death; initiatives were taken to Islamize legislation; religious programming on television increased and “illicit” scenes were censored; Islamic dress and appearance, including veils for women and long beards for men, became prevalent. This brief period of cooperation between the regime and the religious right, beginning a process of cultural transformation that would last for decades, came to an end with the unpopular 1979 peace treaty with Israel. At this point, though, the Islamists had already mobilized themselves politically and further established their role as a provider of social services for millions of poor Egyptians, including highly organized health, education, and finance services (“Islamic savings societies” had a profound effect on the Egyptian economy throughout the 1980s and 90s).
If Sadat sought to appease the Islamists in order to destroy whatever remained of the Nasserite or Marxist left, Mubarak sought to incorporate moderate Islam into the political fold as a way of countering the most prominent threat to the stability of his regime: radical Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to exert pressure from within the political system, though still banned as an official political party because such a move would have justified the creation of a Coptic political party. The Copts, in fact, suffered collaterally as a result of the conflict between the state and Islamic radicals, with religious violence increasing throughout the 1980s and 90s. Unable to attack the regime itself, militant Islam launched vicious attacks on Christian communities as a way to metaphorically attack the non-Islamic tendencies of the state and to destabilize the regime’s control of the country. This prompted more severe crackdowns on Islamic extremism by the state, including a major offensive in 1992, that in turn radicalized the Islamic movement as a whole. As described above, this process corresponded to an overall Islamization of Egyptian culture, a religiously conservative turn inspired by Saudi Wahhabism evident in all aspects of the society. We may note, in passing, that this is another structural symmetry in the counter-revolutionary decades of both the U.S. and Egypt: the same thirty years that witnessed a dramatic increase in economic inequality witnessed a reawakening of religious fundamentalism the state needed to accommodate in order to maintain the existing distribution of wealth and power. There are of, course, important differences—the level of violence and repression foremost among them—but the pattern reveals the depth of the alliance between the U.S. and the Mubarak regime and the social consequences of that alliance.
IV. The “Liberal Experiment” Then and the Egyptian Left Now
This schematic rehearsal of some trends in Egypt’s recent history should suggest some of the formidable challenges the revolutionary movement must now face. There are serious problems in Egyptian society: crushing poverty for millions of people, the violent religious persecution of the Coptic minority, sexism on the street and the relative absence of women in civil society and government, widespread anti-Semitism, an inadequate public education system, a corrupt and incompetent political culture, the dominance of the military since 1952 in the affairs of the state, militant Islamism and terror, etc. These are real problems, none of which constitute an “essential” part of Egyptian culture. They are the products of Egypt’s long historical drama, particularly its modern history of colonial rule and then increasingly tyrannical regimes. The core of the revolutionary movement—the youth at the vanguard and the industrial base that has been organizing in spite of repression for over a decade—has a historic opportunity to address these problems democratically.
The fear of democracy in Egypt in the West is premised on a false essentialism, a fiction that is promoted by reactionary elements in the Middle East as well: an attribution of “essential” characteristics to a nation and a denial of its historical contingency. It would be instructive in this respect to look again, critically, to the “liberal experiment” in Egypt from 1919 to 1945. The 1919 revolution against British rule, resulting in formal recognition of Egyptian independence in 1922, gave birth to the first civic constitution in the Middle East. The 1923 constitution enshrined parliamentary representation, separation of powers, universal suffrage, and the respect for civil rights. An optimistic “Egyptianism” surged, in which national identity was defined not through religion but through citizenship and an inclusive, secular civil society. In religion, influential leaders within Islam, such as Al-Tahtawi, Mohamed Abdou, and Abbas Mahmoud Al-Akkad, had since the nineteenth century argued for the compatibility of Islam and liberal democracy, stressing the “adaptive genius of Islam and Koranic philosophy.” Economically, the liberal experiment incorporated capitalist elements, turning Egypt into a cosmopolitan commercial center with significant Greek, Jewish, and Armenian immigrant populations.
For some Egyptians, the years between 1919 and 1952 were a “golden age” in the country’s history. Egyptian society was, or at least seemed to be, cosmopolitan, tolerant, and glamorous, with a prosperous economy and a thriving cultural scene. Alexandria was a beautiful and diverse Mediterranean city, bearing hardly any resemblance to the overcrowded and dilapidated city today. The arts experienced a rebirth in this period: the Egyptian novel came into maturity, in the historical novels of Hadid, the French-inspired realism of Tawfiq al-Hakim, and the stunning achievement of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (published in 1956-57, but written prior to the 1952 revolution); Taha Husayn’s Fi al’shi’r al-jahili (1926) inaugurated the tradition of modern Egyptian literary criticism, drawing condemnation from the Islamic establishment in the process; theatre thrived in the drama of Roushdie, al-Rihani, and al-Hakim; in poetry, the Diwan Group, inspired by English lyric poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, brought French neoclassicism in Egypt to an end, and the Apollo Society, founded in 1932, became the center of the country’s Romantic movement in poetry. Outside of literature, the vibrancy of Egyptian culture in the period is evident in the painting of Mahmoud Saeed and Muhammed Naji, the sculpture of Mahmoud Mukhtar, the music of Mohamed Abdel Wahab and Umm Kulthoum, and the burgeoning film industry of the 1930s and 40s.
This is not to say that the decades from the 1919 revolution to the Free Officers’ coup in 1952 were without problems or that the nation was unified in embracing these changes, as some of the recent nostalgia for the liberal period might suggest. Egypt did not yet have sovereignty: the “kingdom of Egypt” during these years was still very much a puppet of Britain. The Salafist movement represented a conservative counter-current to the reformist, liberal trends within Islam. In opposition to the Europe-oriented Wafd party, the “Easternists” sought to position Egypt as the political and cultural leader of the Near and Middle East. In the arts, the development of Egyptian culture described above was largely Eurocentric, with many of its intellectual and artistic leaders returning to Egypt after being educated at the Sorbonne or in England. Most importantly, the “liberal experiment” was largely a phenomenon confined to the country’s small urban elite, doing little for the poor who continued to constitute more than 80 per cent of the country’s population. The failure of the “liberal experiment” to improve the lives of the majority of Egyptians was an important cause of the 1952 coup that abolished monarchism and established republicanism under Nasser.
The example of the liberal experiment should, however, dispel the notion that the Egypt with which the West is presently familiar is how Egypt has always been or how it always must be. Attention to the liberal experiment reveals that the face of Egypt typically depicted in the Western media—indistinguishable masses of poor, angry, dust-covered, militantly religious men—is the consequence of a particular phase in the long history of the Egyptian people (as discussed above, one beginning roughly in the mid 1970s).
There is of course no single face of the Egypt that is emerging. It is imperative to remember as things progress the diversity of the revolutionary movement. The youth at its forefront, including the April 6th movement, appear to be sophisticated and organized, self-acknowledged students of civil disobedience. They head a group of perhaps 1 million young people, though they were capable of mobilizing as many as 15 million when they called for people to take to the streets during the peak of the demonstrations. According to the Egyptian political economist Samir Amin, they are democratic, opposed to U.S. hegemony in the region, opposed to Egypt’s cooperation with Israel in the violent siege of Gaza, and, while concerned primarily with social injustice and inequality, typically not inclined to identify themselves as part of theoretical frameworks such as socialism.
The youth movement, as previously noted, is building upon years of worker organization, including a wave of strikes three years ago that were the strongest the African continent had seen in fifty years. These were popularly organized strikes; the official trade unions had been controlled by the regime. What remains of the radical left has been incorporated into the fold, and evidence suggests that they are forming a productive relationship with the youth movement. There are what Amin calls “middle class democrats,” such as El Baredei, who accept the free market, America, and Israel as necessary parts of Egyptian economic and political life.
There is also the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that Amin calls “ultra reactionary,” open opponents of the workers’ strikes, proponents of the idea that the market is sacrosanct in the Koran, complicit with the crimes of the former regime, etc. It is nonetheless worth noting, again, that it is not an organization committed to radical or militant Islam; nor is it even the most influential Islamic force in Egyptian society, a distinction that belongs to the resurgence of Salafist movements advocating a return to an earlier, more pious form of Islam. In the more recent chapters in its long history, the Muslim Brotherhood has been an ally of the regime in opposing Islamic extremism that threatened to destabilize the economy and the state.
While groups such as the youth movement and the Muslim Brotherhood have dominated the media’s attention, it is essential that democracy in Egypt include, at the level of the state and in its civic institutions, substantial representation of other interests and social groups, including women, labor, the Copts, the poor, the Nubians, and the Sinai Bedouins.
V. The Language of Revolution
As some of these groups gathered in Tahrir Square, they articulated a popular language of resistance not seen on the streets of Egypt in decades. The use of poetry, tech lingo, foreign languages, and even hieroglyphics was noticeable throughout the demonstrations. As Ben Zimmer of the New York Times reported in “How the War of Words Was Won in Cairo,” “On their own protest signs, Egyptian wordsmiths transliterated irhal, the standard Arabic imperative for ‘depart,’ into Egyptian hieroglyphics so that ‘the pharaoh’ would understand.” Tech-savvy youth had signs reading “Mubarak Fail.” “But for the crowds in Tahrir,” Robyn Creswell of the Times reported, “now is above all a time for poetry.” Noha Radwan, professor of Arabic literature at UC Davis, recorded the popular poetry of the protests, which she says began as chanted, rhyming couplets and expanded into improvised, colloquial verse.
The revitalization of popular poetry on the Egyptian street is a direct response to a long history of a state-centered approach to culture: Muhammed Ali’s importation of European culture in the early nineteenth century, Nasser’s nationalization of the press and the cinema in the middle of the twentieth, and Mubarak’s more recent manipulation of intellectuals within the Supreme Council for Culture and Supreme Council of Antiquities to affirm the ideology of the state. “The ideology pushed by this ensemble of institutions was straightforward,” says Creswell. “It affirmed the regime’s role as a bulwark of modernity, democratic reform and social order, while it painted Islamists in the opposing colors: antimodern, antidemocratic and essentially terroristic.” As Creswell notes, few Egyptians took these arguments seriously, even if some in the West did, because they understood that these terms have ceased to signify anything meaningful.
The problem with the regime’s slogans is that for too many Egyptians “modernization” means endless traffic jams and gated suburbs; “democratic reform” means bribery and fraudulent elections; and “social order” means the policeman’s club, or the interrogator’s electric prod. Not coincidently, these everyday realities are the subject matter of Egypt’s opposition artists, who have joined the carnival in Tahrir or served as its tutelary spirits.
The symmetry of the U.S. and Egypt is not merely socio-economic and political, as argued above; it is discursive. The corruption of political language in the United States noted previously has been paralleled in the corruption of political language in Egypt. It makes sense, then, that six days after the protests began, Mubarak installed Gaber Asfour as Minister of Culture, “only the latest, perhaps last, stage on his journey into the dark heart of the authoritarian state,” Elliot Calla wrote in Jadaliyya. Asfour, who introduced French literary theory to Egypt through his journal Fusur, wrote a number of books allying the regime with democratic principles, including Defending Enlightenment, Against Fanaticism, and Opposing Terrorism. The monotonous simplicity of the titles—subject-less present participles and prepositions introducing either an object of aversion or desire—indicates the tendency toward heavy-handed abstraction characteristic of propaganda. “The word ‘fascism,’” Orwell wrote in 1948, “has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” The debasement of political language is not a new phenomenon, nor is it confined to the United States and Egypt. It is an increasingly global phenomenon that has only worsened over the past three decades, corresponding, in the case of the United States, to a decreased emphasis on humanistic education and to the increased power of corporate media.
Alongside the recent resurgence of popular poetry on the Egyptian street is the language used by emerging leaders within the revolutionary movement, such as Mohamed El-Baradei. In an Op-Ed for the New York Times, El-Baradei reflected popular suspicion of the political discourse of recent decades, but he did not seek to do away with it altogether. As a moderate voice within the movement, El-Baredei seems to want to restore basic terms like “stability” to meanings that are at least internally coherent.
Under the three decades of Hosni Mubarak’s rule, Egyptian society has lived under a draconian “emergency law” that strips people of their most basic rights, including freedom of association and of assembly, and has imprisoned tens of thousands of political dissidents. While this Orwellian regime has been valued by some of Egypt’s Western allies as “stable,” providing, among other assets, a convenient location for rendition, it has been in reality a ticking bomb and a vehicle for radicalism.
The “stability” sought by the West is an illusion because it is premised on repressive regimes that predictably incite popular anger. This kind of “stability,” El-Baradei, suggests, is a fiction. The term, though, appears again toward the end of the piece. “We are at the dawn of a new Egypt. A free and democratic society, at peace with itself and with its neighbors, will be a bulwark of stability in the Middle East and a worthy partner in the international community.” The self-conscious repetition of the term signals its re-appropriation, its removal from the discourse of political cant and its definition as a recognizable element of social life. The moderate El-Baradei invokes in his column the abstract language of liberalism—freedom, democracy, social justice, opportunity, etc.—in order to reform it. It is perhaps the responsibility of the left, including workers and intellectuals alike, to introduce the more concrete language of labor, popular control of resources and assets, distribution of wealth and power, cooperation with the U.S. and Israel, etc., into the democratic process.
It is precisely because of these challenges that the prospect of a democratic Egypt is exciting. The recent activities of many young Egyptians, Osman argues, have been “truly independent from the liberal capitalists and the Islamists; they represented the need of millions of young Egyptians to rise above their unfortunate situation (including the struggle between the regime and the Islamic movement) and to cling to something they could be proud of, some frame of reference, a skeleton of an identity.” A new frame of reference may be emerging in Egypt, as the false choice between Western-style liberal capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism—a dichotomy some in the West have been eager to embrace—is being discarded in favor what has the potential to be a more leftist form of political participation. “If the true choice is between Muslim fundamentalist theocracy or Western liberalism, we are lost,” Zizek argued on Al-Jazeera in February. “It is crucial to have a strong left. Only this can save us, in Arab countries and in the West.”
The emphasis on the necessity of a strong left in Egypt and the West is apposite, though equally necessary is a reconsideration of the language we use to understand our values and interests. The “momentary openness” Zizek says is necessary for democracy is not merely political; it is, again, discursive. The fact has not been lost on the different groups now competing for power in Egypt, who are paying a great deal of attention to the names they attach to their emerging political parties. The youth coalition seems to have settled on the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, which won out over the Square. The Muslim Brotherhood has launched its Freedom and Justice Party, a name briefly entertained by the remnants of Mubarak’s NDP. Former members of the NDP are now said to be working with the words “youth” and “January 25th” for their new party names. Any party with the word “secular” in its name is not likely to do well, Neil MacFarquhar of the Times reports, as “jihadists have successfully distorted the word ilmani, a direct translation of ‘secular,’ into a synonym for kufr, or ‘infidel.’”
“Silly words and expressions have often disappeared,” Orwell writes, “not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority.” The conscious action of the revolutionary movement in Egypt has already begun to articulate a frame of reference that does not constitute itself along familiar ideological lines, whether liberal capitalism or fundamentalist theocracy. There is no escaping from history, but it is possible that the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and now elsewhere in the region are constructing a mode of discourse in which terms such as “revolution” and “reaction,” “values” and “interests,” “stability” and “void” begin to take on new meanings more closely related to the lives of real human beings. What is needed is a language that resists equally the cant of corporate interests and religious fundamentalism. It has traditionally been the privilege and distinction of poetry to articulate a new kind of language, as it was when the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley forged the language of revolution we use today. It is time, perhaps, for Egypt to give us a new poetry, and to restore herself to her rightful position as the “mother of the world.” It is time for Egyptians to reclaim what has been the prize of empire, what Herodotus called the “gift of the Nile.”