“Dear Brother: I write these few lines to let you know we’re doing well, on the whole, though it varies from day to day: sometimes the wind changes, it rains lead, life bleeds from every pore,” the celebrated Algerian writer Boualem Sansal wrote in an open letter to the Tunisian vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who had set himself ablaze and launched this time of Arab tumult and promise. Sansal wrote this in June of 2011, six months after Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Sansal is a man unillusioned. He had lived through, and chronicled, the Algerian bloodletting of the 1990s. He had summoned the memory of Bouazizi with both hope and dread. “But let’s take the long view for a moment. Does he who does not know where to go find the way? Is driving the dictator out the end? From where you are, Mohamed, next to God, you can tell that not all roads lead to Rome; ousting a tyrant does not lead to freedom. Prisoners like trading one prison for another, for a change of scenery and the chance to get a little something along the way.”
This essay originally appeared in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 2, March/April 2012, with the title “The Arab Spring at One: A Year of Living Dangerously”; it is republished here in slightly different form with the cooperation and consent of the original publisher.
A rhythmic chant echoed through Arab lands throughout 2011: “The people want to topple the regime.” It skipped Arab borders with ease, carried by print and Twitter and Facebook, on the airwaves of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. It had the gift of economy. The regime could be Tunisian or Yemeni, Egyptian or Libyan; the popular wrath knew no boundaries. Arab nationalism had been written off—I own up to being one of the writers of its obituary—but there, in full bloom, was what most certainly looked like a pan-Arab awakening. There were aged rulers—the Syrian despot the exception—and young people in search of political freedom and economic opportunity, made weary of waking up to the same tedium day after day. The rulers had closed up the political world; they had become country owners in all but name. There settled upon the Arabs the sense that they were cursed and alone among the nations, doomed to despotism, the tyranny in their DNA. Waves of democracy washed upon the shores of other nations—Latin America shook off the caudillo tradition; East Asia, whose Confucianism was once seen as a barrier to democratic capitalism, was transformed. Now and then, where they could sustain it and when they could keep the tribalism and the anarchy at bay, Africans flirted with democracy. The solitude of the Arabs in the contemporary order of nations, their exceptionalism if you will, had become a huge moral embarrassment to the Arabs themselves. It was as though they had left history and had become spectators to their own destiny. It was a bleak landscape: terrible rulers, sullen populations, and a terrorist fringe that hurled itself in frustration at an order bereft of any legitimacy. This was the despots’ dreamland, it seemed. The postcolonial state among the Arabs had hatched a monstrous world. Kleptocracies had taken hold, and the rulers and their families “devoured the green and the dry.” It was estimated that “The Family,” as the clan of the former Tunisian ruler and his wife was known, controlled a third of the national economy. The heirs of Hafez al-Assad—his children, his nephews—had come to great wealth and monopolized key sectors of the economy. Muammar Qaddafi may have ranted about socialism, but he and his family knew no line between what was theirs and what was public treasure.
Powers beyond had winked at this reality. This was the best the Arabs could do, it was thought. In a sudden burst of Wilsonianism, in the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq, American power had given the support of liberty a try. The “diplomacy of freedom,” a child of the Iraq war, shook up the dominant Arab order. Saddam Hussein was flushed out of a spider hole, the Syrian brigades of terror and extortion were pushed out of Lebanon, and the despotism of Hosni Mubarak, long a pillar of the Pax Americana, appeared to lose its mastery. Dissidents stepped forth to challenge Pharaoh and, for a fleeting moment, Washington signaled its unease with the Egyptian ruler. Iraq held out mixed messages to Arabs beyond its borders: there was blood in the streets and sectarianism, but there were the chaotic ways of a new democracy, the surprising attachment Iraqis displayed to their experiment with democratic practice. The autocracies hunkered down and did their best to thwart this new Iraqi project. They fed the flames of Iraq, and their jihadists and slick media alike were pressed into this big fight. Iraq was set ablaze, and the Arab autocrats could point to it as a cautionary tale of the folly of unseating even the worst of despots. That fight issued in a standoff: the Arabs could not snuff out this Iraqi project, but the Iraqi example did not turn out to be the subversive democratic message that its proponents held it out to be.
Iraq carried a double burden: the bearer of liberty that had upended the Baghdad tyranny was the United States, and the war had empowered the Shia stepchildren of the Arab world. A traumatic change had taken place. Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid empire, had fallen to the Shia; the American war propelled a hitherto frightened Shia community to power. The last time the Shia had ruled Baghdad was—literally—a millennium ago. And that primacy did not last long, as Sunni internationalism reclaimed it. Now power had come to the Shia courtesy of an American invasion. Baghdad could not carry the torch of Arab freedom. The sectarianism of the Arab world—the dread and contempt for the Shia—blunted the force of this new challenge. In 2003–2005, when this history was unfolding, it was said by Arabs themselves that George W. Bush had unleashed a tsunami on the region. True, but the Arabs were good at waiting out storms, and before long the Americans themselves would lose heart and abandon the quest. An election in 2006 in the Palestinian territories went the way of Hamas, and a new disillusionment with democracy’s verdict overtook the Bush administration.
The American war in Iraq had to be rescued, and the “surge” came in the nick of time to turn that war around. The more ambitious vision of “reforming” the Arab world was given up. America could not want freedom for the Arabs more than they wanted it themselves, and the autocracies had survived a brief moment of American assertiveness. A new standard-bearer of American power, Barack Obama, delivered the autocracies a reassuring message. America was done with the diplomacy of change; it would make its peace with the status quo. There were these two rogue regimes, in Damascus and Tehran: the custodians of American power would set out to “engage” them. Iraq had become a big American disappointment. The patina of cosmopolitanism attached to President Obama concealed the unease with the foreign world at the core of his worldview. He was not exactly a declinist, but he had risen to power at a time of American fatigue and economic retrenchment. This was not a man to tilt at windmills in Araby. He would make a stand in Afghanistan—the good war of necessity that he embraced as a rebuke to the war in Iraq—with no illusions about that country. America was to remain on the Kabul hook, even as the president believed that Afghanistan was a hopeless undertaking. The greater Middle East would be left to its furies.
It did not take long for the embattled liberals in the Arab-Islamic world to catch on: when a revolt erupted in Iran against the theocrats in the first summer of his presidency, Obama was caught flat-footed by the turmoil. He was out to conciliate the rulers, and he couldn’t even find the language to speak to Iran’s rebellion. Meanwhile, the Syrians were in the midst of seller’s remorse: they had given up their dominion in Lebanon under duress and were now keen to retrieve it. A stealth campaign of terror and assassinations, the power of Hezbollah on the ground, and the subsidies of Iran all but snuffed out the exquisitely choreographed Cedar Revolution, which had been the pride of the Bush diplomacy.
Realists who assessed the (apparent) balance of forces in this region would have been right to concede the autocrats an eternal dominion. They would have prophesied for the repressive national security states the dynastic succession that had all but transformed the republics of the Arab world into hereditary monarchies. Beholding Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, they would have been forgiven the conclusion that a similar fate awaited Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, and the large Egyptian state that had been the trendsetter in Arab political and cultural life. Beneath this surface stability there was the political misery and sterility of the Arab world. No Arabs with a scant awareness of the world needed “human development reports” to remind them of the desolation of their politics. Consent had drained out of public life, and the glue between ruler and ruled was the pervasive fear and suspicion that poisoned the political realm. The drumbeats of anti-Americanism were steady—this was the release a pent-up population was permitted by its rulers. Modernity, the lodestar of earlier generations of Arabs, had gone into eclipse.
There was no public project to bequeath a generation coming into its own—and this was the youngest population in the world, the “youth bulge” about to sweep away the stagnant order. Bouazizi had taken one way out, and millions of unnamed Bouazizis would take to the streets. The despots, secure in their dominion, deities in all but name, were now on the run. For its part, the United States scurried to catch up with the upheaval. “In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed in mid-January 2011 in Qatar, as the storm had broken out. The Arab landscape lent her remarks ample confirmation; what she omitted was that American diplomacy, too, would be buried in this avalanche.
This was, through and through, an Arab revolt, a settlement of the account between the powers that be and populations determined to be done with the despots. These may have been akin to prison revolts; the protesters had not been given skills at governance, but Arabs were done with quiescence. In the manner of big upheavals, this rebellion that broke out in Tunisia had a scent for the geography of things. It had erupted in a small country on the margins of the Arab political experience—more educated and prosperous than the norm in lands to its east, with a sustained traffic with Europe across the Mediterranean. As the rebellion made its way eastward, it skipped Libya and arrived in Cairo, or Umm al-Dunya (the mother of the world), which Egyptians and other Arabs call this great metropolis. In Cairo, this awakening found a stage worthy of its ambitions. This most enigmatic of lands has always played tricks on those who would pronounce on its temperament. This “hydraulic society” often written off as the quintessential land of political submission, on the banks of an orderly and well-mannered river, has known ferocious rebellions. A classic account of this country is found in The Nile in Egypt (1937), by Emil Ludwig: “Once the fellahin (the peasants) and the workers of Egypt revolted against their masters; once their resentment burst out, a revolution dispossessed the rich men and the priests of Egypt of their power.” One such revolution at the end of the Old Kingdom raged intermittently for two centuries (2350 BC–2150 BC). It had been Mubarak’s good fortune that the land tolerated him for three decades and that he had been the designated successor of Anwar el-Sadat. His reign had become the third longest since Ramses II. He had been a cautious man, but his reign now sprouted dynastic ambitions. For 18 magical days in Tahrir Square, Egyptians of all walks of life came together to be rid of him. He had come out of the officer corps, and now the senior commanders of the armed forces cast him aside. He joined his fellow despot, the Tunisian Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had made a run for it a month earlier.
From Cairo, this awakening now had the chance to be a pan-Arab affair. It caught fire eastward in Yemen and Bahrain—the latter being the exception, a monarchy in a season where the republics of strongmen were the ones seized with unrest. The monarchies were whole, they had a fit between ruler and ruled; Bahrain stood apart, riven by a fault line between its Sunni rulers and Shia majority. It was in the nature of things that an eruption in Bahrain would turn into a sectarian feud. Yemen was the poorest of the Arab states, secessionist movements raged in its north and south, and its strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was a polarizing figure who had no other skill save the art of political survival. The feuds of Yemen were obscure; they were quarrels of tribes and warlords. The wider Arab tumult had given Yemenis eager to be rid of this ruler the heart to persist in their challenge to him.
Then the revolt doubled back westward to Libya, flanked as that country was by Tunisia and Egypt. This was the kingdom of silence, the realm of the deranged “dean of Arab rulers,” Muammar Qaddafi. For four tormenting decades, the Libyans were at the mercy of this warden of a big prison who was part tyrant, part buffoon. Qaddafi had eviscerated his society, the richest country in Africa with an abysmally impoverished population. This brutalized country had been ill-served by history. In the interwar years it had known savage colonial rule under the Italians. It had had a brief respite under an ascetic ruler, King Idris. But a revolutionary fever gripped it in the late 1960s. Iblis wa la Idris, “Better the devil than Idris,” went the maxim of the time. And this country got what it wanted. Oil sustained the madness, European leaders and American intellectuals alike came courting, the ruler had wealth to dispense and bedouin kitsch. Qaddafi, a barely literate child of desert adversity, had his animal instinct: the ferocity with which he defended the regimes of Mubarak and Ben Ali gave away his panic. He and his entitled children must have prepared for a reckoning of this kind: the underground tunnels were the works of a man who, on some level, intuited his own end. Benghazi, at some remove from his capital, rose against him; history now gave the Libyans a chance.
Qaddafi had erred. When Benghazi defied him, he had warned that his armor was on the way, that he would crush this rebellion house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, alleyway by alleyway. The League of Arab States, which had never stood up to a tyrant, gave a warrant for a Western intervention against him; he had offended and belittled his fellow rulers, turned his back on the Arab world, and dubbed himself “king of the kings of Africa.” He was a man alone when Britain and France took the lead against him, and a reluctant American president, “leading from behind,” launched a military intervention that decapitated this tyrannical regime. Barack Obama wanted no shades of Rwanda on his conscience, no mass slaughter in Benghazi staining his record. The Libyans had been lucky. Barack Obama himself would say that the intervention was a close-run affair, a 51–49 proposition, he would tell an interviewer for Vanity Fair. NATO functioned as the air force of this rebellion, and without foreign support it is certain that the despot and his mercenaries and his money would have crushed the rebellion.
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The Egyptian rulers had said that their country was not Tunisia; Qaddafi had asserted that his republic differed from that of the Tunisians and the Egyptians. In the same vein, the ruler in Damascus said that his country differed from Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. He was young whereas the rulers in those lands had been old men, and there was the myth of being a “confrontation state” against Israel to see his regime through. He spoke too soon: in mid-March, it was Syria’s turn. The rebellion had not erupted in Aleppo or Damascus, nor had it flared up in Hama, the city in the central plains whose name evokes the terror of the war between Hafez al-Assad and the Muslim Brotherhood, which ended in terrible slaughter in February of 1982. This rebellion broke out in Deraa, a remote provincial town in the south by the border with Jordan, the kind of place out of which the Baath Party had risen in the early 1960s and had outgrown as it fell for the charms and ease of Damascus. Despotism and sectarianism—the rule of the Alawi minority that dominated the security forces and the army—begot the most fearsome state in the Arab east. This had been the handiwork of Hafez al-Assad, a man of supreme cunning and political skill.
Syria, Damascus in particular, occupied a special place in the memory and reverence of orthodox, mainstream Islam. This had been the province where Islam made its first home, when it outgrew the Arabian Peninsula; this was the original home of the Arab kingdom in the middle years of the seventh century, before Islam slipped out of the hands of the Arabs and came under the control of the Persians and the Turkish soldiers. Yet here was Damascus, under a community of schismatics who had ridden the military and the Baath Party to absolute power. This revolt had a distinct geography, as Fabrice Balanche, a French political geographer who has done extensive field research in Syria, has documented. The rebellion has been based in the territories—and the urban quarters—of the Sunni Arabs. There was Deraa, of course, where it all began, and then it spread to Hama, Homs, Jisr al-Shughour, Rastan, Idlib, Deir al-Zour, etc. The revolt did not take in the Kurdish territories, or in Jebel Druze, or, of course, in the mountain villages and the coastal towns that make up the Alawi strongholds.
There can be no denying the sectarian dimension of this fight: Homs, the third largest city in Syria, bears this out. The violence was most pronounced in Homs because the demography was explosive: Homs is two-thirds Sunni, one-fourth Alawi, one-fifth Christian. The Alawis were newcomers to the city, they had ridden the coattails of the state and the army, and they huddled among their own in their own neighborhoods. If Homs came to conjure up the memory of Sarajevo—the snipers, the warring neighborhoods—the demography goes a long way toward explaining the violence. Sectarianism was not all, of course. Syria has had one of the highest birthrates in the region—when this ruling cabal came to power in 1970, Syria had a rural population of six million; now it is home to twenty-three million people. A young population had known no other rule than that of the Assads; the arteries of the regime had hardened. A military-merchant complex had formed at the apex of political and economic life. There wasn’t much patronage left for the state to dispose of; under the banner of privatization, the state had pulled off a disappearing act. The neglected provinces and towns conquered their fear, shook off the memory of the bloodletting of the 1970s and early 1980s, and made a run at the regime. Their revolt fused a sense of economic disinheritance, and the wrath of a Sunni majority determined to rid itself of the rule of a godless lot.
If the Sunni Arabs had lost Baghdad to the Shia, there was suddenly within grasp the prospect of restoring Damascus to its “proper” place, breaking its alliance with the Persian state and Hezbollah, and seeing it once again under the rule of Sunni Islam. There was no mystery in the exit that Hamas made out of Damascus in December of 2011. That Palestinian movement which had made a home of sorts in Damascus could not risk being left out of the mounting Arab consensus against the Syrian regime. “No Iran, no Hezbollah, we want rulers who fear Allah” was one of the more meaningful chants of the protesters. Alawi rule was an anomaly, and this brutal regime, with its security forces desecrating mosques, firing at worshippers, and ordering hapless captives to proclaim that there is no God but Bashar, had written its own banishment. The Arab sense of outrage was genuine. There was Sunni solidarity at work; but, in all fairness, there was anger at the brutality that the iPhones and the YouTube postings and the television channels transmitted to all corners of the Arab world. Old Man Assad had committed cruelties of his own, but always remained within the fold of the Arab consensus. Bashar was a different creature—he left no room for ambiguity or compromise. It was this recklessness and the steady display of official cruelty that had prompted the Arab world’s most influential ruler, the Saudi monarch, to condemn the “killing machine” of the Damascus cabal. And, three months later, the Arab League surprised the Syrians by suspending Damascus’s membership in that organization.
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Syria put on cruel display the deformities of the Arab state—state power as ghanima (war booty), the isolation of the rulers, the nexus between state power and economic plunder, and the narrow sectarian or clan base of the ruling cabals. The Syrian people no doubt knew they were in for a long fight. In a refugee camp on the outskirts of Antakya, a young lawyer from Jisr al-Shughour told me that he fled his town in the summer months but brought his winter clothing with him. He knew that the entrenched dictatorship would fight for the dominion it had conquered and grown addicted to. The embattled ruler appeared convinced that he can resist the very laws of gravity. There had been substantial defections from the army, but the instruments of repression remained more or less intact. A “Libya envy” came to grip the Syrian protesters, but no foreign rescue mission was on the horizon. Turkey and the Arab states were invested in this bloody fight for the country. With all the uncertainties, this much can be said: the fearsome security state that Hafez al-Assad and the Baath Party and the Alawi soldiers and intelligence barons had built was gone for good. When consent and popular enthusiasm fell away, the state rested on fear, and fear was defeated. The bonds between the holders of power and the population have been broken.
There was, of course, no uniform script for the Arab regimes in play. Tunisia, home of the Jasmine Revolution, in an old state with a defined national identity, settled its affairs with relative ease. It elected a constituent assembly, and Ennahda, an Islamist party, secured the largest number of seats—89 out of 217. There were votes across the entire spectrum—even the Communists secured three seats of their own. The leader of Ennahda, Rachid Ghannouchi, was a shrewd man: years in exile had taught him caution. His party would form a coalition government with two secular parties. In Libya, Qaddafi was pulled out of a drainage pipe, beaten, and murdered—and so was one of his sons. Another son, Khamis, with a brigade named after him, would be killed in October 2012, a year to the day after his father’s gruesome end. Men are not angels. These were the hatreds and the wrath that the ruler himself had sown; he had reaped what he had planted.
In Bahrain there hovered over that archipelago kingdom the shadows of Iran and Saudi Arabia, but there is a Bahraini malady, and an international commission of inquiry authorized by the ruler himself gave Bahrain a searching assessment. There is no Syrian-scale terror here, but the political order is not pretty. There is sectarian discrimination and the oddness of a ruling dynasty, the House of Khalifa, which had conquered this place in the late years of the eighteenth century but still retained the mindset of a ruling caste that had not made its peace with the population. Outsiders—from Jordan and Pakistan among others—man the security forces, and the peace between the Shia majority and the regime seems a long way off. As for Yemen, this is the quintessential failed state. For both better and worse, the footprint of the state is light here and the rulers offer no redemption, but there is no draconian terror. The country is running out of water, and jihadists on the run from the Hindu Kush have found a home in Yemen, Afghanistan with a coastline. The men and women who went out into the streets of Sanaa sought the rehabilitation of their country. They wanted for it a politics more dignified than the cynical acrobat at the helm for more than three decades aiding and abetting the forces of terror and backwardness, as he offers his services to outsiders with deep pockets keen to keep the pathologies of Yemen in check. (Yemen is the birthplace of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman, a mother, an activist, and, at 32 years of age, the youngest peace prize recipient.)
We return to Umm al-Dunya, Cairo, and the fate of Egypt. The country may have lost the luster of old, and Arabs may no longer be fixated on that city as they had once been, but this Arab time shall be judged by what comes to pass in Egypt. In the scenarios of catastrophe, this revolution would spawn an Islamic republic: the Coptic minority would take to the road; tourism, a historic source of livelihood, would be lost for good; and Egyptians would yearn for the iron grip of a pharaoh. The results of the parliamentary elections—the strong performance of the Muslim Brotherhood, the surprise of a Salafi party coming in second after the Brotherhood, the disarray and splitting of the vote among the secular liberal parties—seemed to justify the worries about the country’s direction.
Memories of a period of a proud liberal history, the interwar years of the past century, play upon Egyptians. Six decades of uninterrupted military rule had robbed them of the very experience of open politics. Egyptians were now without a pharaoh. Say what you will about these elections, they were generally transparent—and clarifying. The broad secular-liberal forces were not ready for the contest. The Brotherhood, with eight decades of political life behind it, had been waiting for this historic moment, and it had made its good fortune. The Salafis had come out of the catacombs, but no sooner had they made their appearance they began to unnerve the population and to pull back from fire-and-brimstone positions on tourism, on women, on the place of the Copts in public life, and on the space for individual liberty.
Tahrir Square had transfixed us all, but as the immensely talented young Egyptian intellectual Samuel Tadros puts it, Tahrir Square was not Cairo and Cairo was not Egypt. By the time the dust settled, three forces were contesting the Egyptian future—the army, the Brotherhood, and a broad liberal and secular coalition of those who want a civil polity, the separation of religion and politics, and the saving graces of a “normal” political life. For the Brotherhood, this is the fulfillment of a dream—and then some, for there is ample evidence that the Brotherhood went beyond the electoral gains it had wanted for itself. There had been a special time in the history of the Brotherhood, a very brief moment in the aftermath of the Free Officers coup d’état in 1952. The Brotherhood had described the coup as a blessed movement. The Brotherhood struck an alliance with the junta, or so it thought. Gamal Abdel Nasser sought political monopoly, and an assassination attempt on him by the Brotherhood in 1954 sealed the group’s fate. The would-be assassins were sent to the gallows and thousands were dispatched to prison—the Brotherhood was never the same again.
To this current struggle to reshape Egypt, the Brotherhood brought its time-honored mix of political cunning and its essential commitment to its mission—the imposition of a political order shaped in its image. This was the tradition bequeathed the Brotherhood by its founder, Hassan al-Banna, who was struck down by an assassin in 1949 but still stalks the politics of the Islamic world, from Morocco to Indonesia. Banna, a ceaseless plotter, was the quintessential chameleon, a man possessed. A village boy, he mastered the politics of Cairo. In the unsettled world of Egypt of his time—the Great Depression, the bottomless anger of a country that wanted the British out but could not expel them, the distant thunder of Fascist and collectivist movements, the growing pauperization of the urban middle class—Banna was in his element. He knew worldly politics. He talked of God and His rule, but in the shadows he struck deals with the palace against the dominant political party of his time—the Wafd. He played the political game as he put together a formidable paramilitary force. He sought to penetrate the officer corps, and his inheritors have pined for this coalition ever since. Doubtless, he would look with admiration on the tactical skills of his inheritors, maneuvering between the liberals and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, partaking of the tumult of Tahrir Square, but stepping back from the exuberance to underline their commitment to sobriety and public order.
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Tahrir Square gave rise to a second republic, but the square would not dominate this new order. The final round of the presidential election, held a little more than a year after the abdication of Mubarak, pitted a figure of the feloul (the remnants of the old regime), a retired military officer, against a functionary of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was a close contest: the candidate of the Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi, emerged with a slim edge (51.7 percent to 48.3 percent) over Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak crony.
There was nothing flamboyant or special about Morsi. He was the ultimate organization man. The Brotherhood had thrust him forward when a more powerful figure within its ranks had been banned from contesting the election on technical grounds. A village boy from the impoverished Delta, born in 1951, he was to go to university, the prestigious college of engineering, courtesy of the populism of the Nasser regime. A government scholarship took him to the University of Southern California, where he obtained a doctorate in 1982. In hindsight, he would claim that he was shaped by America only “scientifically.” But he hadn’t been eager to leave the United States after completing his degree. He stayed on for three years as a faculty member at California State University at Northridge. Two sons of his were born in the United States and were said to hold American citizenship, and it was in Los Angeles that his very traditional and pious wife was pulled into the orbit of the Muslim Brotherhood. The group may have railed against America and the shadow it cast over Egypt, but leading technocrats from the Brotherhood, Morsi among them, rose to professional success and prominence through American degrees, and their years in America took them beyond the cloistered world from which they hailed.
“I don’t think that we consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy,” Obama said on September 12 of the tangled relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo. “They’re a new government that is trying to find its way, and there would be some rocky times ahead.” The day before, crowds had scaled the wall of the American Embassy in Cairo, burning the Stars and Stripes in protest against a video, “The Innocence of Muslims,” which had triggered protests in twenty Muslim nations. No diplomats were killed in Egypt, as they were next door in Benghazi, but an American president then obsessed with his own election was reminded of the difficulties sure to make themselves felt in the relationship between the American patrons and the new order in Cairo.
“That depends on your definition of ally,” Morsi told The New York Times days later, on the eve of a visit to the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting. Morsi had been passionate in his condemnation of that vulgar video—ironically, the work of an Egyptian Copt, a fraudster who made his home in California—but had been slow to condemn the protests. “We took our time,” he said, “but in the end acted decisively.” He did not step back: “Successive administrations,” he added, “essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region.” Mubarak was at times a prickly ally in his own way, but this first civilian ruler of Egypt since 1952 had served notice that it would not be easy dealing with this new breed of Islamists.
Still, Morsi and the collective leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood were under no illusions about the terms of Egypt’s relationship with the United States. They were in need of American patronage—theirs is a country that is the world’s top importer of wheat, a burdened economy running a budget deficit of 11 percent of GDP. Governance in Egypt has been tethered to feeding and subsidizing a huge and rebellious population. Rulers have had leeway in that crowded country, but food riots have been the rulers’ nightmare. American help was vital, and the Brotherhood knew when purity had to yield to necessity. In the immediate aftermath of Mubarak’s demise, the Brotherhood had proudly asserted that it would not turn to the International Monetary Fund for assistance: populism was the rage. The Brotherhood talked of raising a $3.2 billion loan on the domestic market. But this populism was pushed aside, the loan rose to $4.8 billion, and the technocrats of the Brotherhood, negotiating with the IMF, were full of sweet reason.
The Brotherhood had not reinvented this weary land. Egyptian governments had long perfected the art of playing cat and mouse with the IMF and with foreign donors, mixing dependence and defiance, at once needy but proud and brittle. Like riverboat gamblers, Egypt’s rulers seem to relish the game, secure in the knowledge that a country of 80 million people at the crossroads of so vital a region, so near to the oil fields of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, a Sunni balance to Iran, will always be bailed out, that it is too big to fail.
The plain truth of it is that Egypt lacks the economic means with which an Islamic order—whatever that means—can be erected. The rule of the jurist in Iran rests on oil, and even the much milder ascendency of Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his party, issues from a prosperity secured by the “devout bourgeoisie” in the Anatolian hill towns. Egypt lies at the crossroads of the world; it lives off tourism, the Suez Canal, infusions of foreign aid by nations invested in its security, and remittances from Egyptians abroad. Virtue has to bow to necessity: the country’s foreign reserves have dwindled from $36 billion when the political troubles began to $20 billion a year later. Inflation hammered at the door. Four finance ministers came and went in the course of a single year. A desire for stability had begun to check the heady satisfaction that a despot had been brought down.
The Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood had in mind was anathema to the free spirits in the land. It is perhaps a fragile hope, but this has always been a country of coffeehouses and storytellers, a people given to humor and forgiving of the follies of others. This is not stern Arabia, but a land with a vibrant street and night life, banter between the sexes, an earthiness that looks with suspicion on zealots and the “virtue” they claim to uphold. In a moment of national turmoil, when the Brotherhood-led regime was battling the forces arrayed against it, Morsi in late January 2013 declared a curfew and a state of emergency in the cities of Suez, Port Said, and Ismailia. The inhabitants of these cities defied him, and untold thousands took to the streets at night and sang and danced and played soccer. They were determined to hold onto the world they knew. They needed no instruction in religious devotion. They trusted themselves with their own faith; the enforcers of the Brotherhood could not intimidate them or write them out of their own tradition.
It fell to the country’s leading playwright and satirist, Ali Salem, so thoroughly a man of his land and an irreverent free spirit, to offer a biting commentary on the aridity of the Brother-hood’s utopia. (Salem, born in 1936, had been doing this for decades. In the mid-1990s he had journeyed to Israel, wrote a book about it, and ignored the taboos of the writers guild.) In a short satire, Salem turns up at the counter of the national carrier, Egypt Air, and asks for an economy booking to Egypt at anytime that is available. Those around him waiting to conduct their own business look at him with wonder, as does the agent at the counter. “What’s so strange about my request, what’s so odd about a man who loves his country and yearns to return to it?” Salem asks. “But you are in Egypt already, having coffee in Cairo’s Talaat Harb Square, in the offices of Egypt Air. Which Egypt do you want to travel to?” the agent inquires. “Misr, Egypt, is my home, I did not say I wanted to go to Egypt, I said I want to return to Egypt,” he insists. The agent is not amused, she is ready to help him book passage to any capital in the world. But she can’t countenance his stubbornness and frivolity; she knew of him. His reputation had spread around the airline offices and the travel agencies. “You folks are now not only preventing Egyptians from returning to Egypt but also preventing Egypt returning to Egyptians,” he says.
The police turn up, because the agent had used the time to tip them off about this quarrelsome man. He is hauled off to the police station, and the commissioner on the scene, on the verge of retirement, is keen to finesse the matter. He could, he tells the nettlesome man, commit him to a mental asylum. But he will write in the official report that the man had been misunderstood, that he had asked for a booking to London and the agent had mistaken his request. He gives in grudgingly, takes his leave, and resists the impulse to go to other airline counters. “I must confess that the Egypt I know no longer exists, that it is impossible to travel there. I must reconcile myself to the Egypt all around me, to the Nile as it is, to these ugly tents [on Tahrir Square]. I must not get angry when I hear that some people now lay siege to the courts and the judges and burn their legal files. I must accept and live with a sorrow so immense that no newspaper anywhere in the world could accommodate.”
Salem is heir to a distinguished tradition in Egyptian letters. There is a special roster, a pantheon of luminaries that any country in the world would be proud to claim as its own—the playwright Tawfik al-Hakim, Taha Hussein, the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, Louis Awad, Yusuf Idris, etc. All have passed away, and Salem is the link to them. He carries their torch. Egyptian modernism may be fragile, and the voters in the countryside may have given the edge to a repressive constitution. Given a choice between a man of the feloul (the remnants of the old regime) and a functionary of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian liberalism had proved timid and inadequate, and its leaders quarreled among themselves. But the saving grace of an “Egyptianness” that is merciful and tempered, shaped by two centuries of striving for things and ways modern, was not resigned to going gently into the night.
For two centuries now Egypt has led a Sisyphean struggle for modernity, for a place among the nations worthy of its ambitions. It has not fared well, and the lamentations all around bespeak of a disappointment with the dismal economic and cultural results. Yet another false detour can only compound the grief of Egypt. On August 3, 2011, there happened a scene that could give Egyptians a measure of solace. The country’s last pharaoh—may it be so—came to court on a gurney: “Sir, I am present,” the former ruler said to the presiding judge. Mubarak was not pulled out of a drainage pipe, as was Qaddafi. And unlike Bashar al-Assad, he had not hunkered down with his sect and his family murdering his people at will. Outsiders who have savored and thought they have known this land have always fallen back on the ability of this country—the words are those of E. M. Forster—to harmonize contending assertions. If this attribute quits Egypt, there shall be endless suffering for a country that has known more than its share of heartbreak.
* * *
Egypt’s journey out of the dictatorial past was to put on display the difficulty of surmounting tyrannical legacies. In the space of some thirty months the country was to know the excitement and complications of a new season of liberty, a brief ascendency by the Muslim Brotherhood, and then an odd mix of a popular insurrection and a military seizure of power that upended the rule of the Brotherhood. The “democratic” experiment that had issued in the presidency of Mohamed Morsi turned out to be a brief interregnum. The ballot had not resolved the contradictions of a deeply divided society. Egypt had become ungovernable, and a military coup d’état on July 3, 2013, offered a way out of the great impasse between the Brotherhood and a broad secular coalition. Dictatorship rests on a measure of consent: an ordinary man obliges, and the crowd projects onto him its need for a redeemer. There was nothing unusual about General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He had been a man of military intelligence, the product of a vast officer corps. Yet the crowd—the secularist crowd—anointed him as a savior. In truth, there had been no urgencies to the sacking of Morsi. All the levers of power were beyond his writ. The army was a force all its own, the judiciary was a truculent establishment by Mubarak holdouts, and the police was a rogue force that Morsi had tried to conciliate with very little success. A strong case could have been made for letting the Morsi presidency play out, but the young who had tasted power in Tahrir Square and the officer corps had come together to bring the interlude of the Brotherhood to an end.
Vengeance stalked the land. An irreverent young physician and satirist, Bassam Youssef (he has been repeatedly dubbed the Jon Stewart of his country), in an essay on July 16, gave Egyptians an honest rendition of their crisis. Youssef mocked the secularists’ dream of a “normal country” of “good-looking people” without veils or beards. The liberals of Egypt, he said, were on a “victory high,” their media outlets “full of discrimination and inciting rhetoric.” The satirist cut to the heart of things: the liberal secularists averting their gaze from the transgressions of the army and the police were no different from the “Islamists who think that their enemies’ disappearance off this planet would be a victory for the rule of God.” The army had broken the stalemate between the secularists and the Brotherhood, but the rancor of politics had not ended. “We have replaced the enemies of Islam with the enemies of the state,” Youssef said. The army and the police can rout the Brotherhood and overturn the verdict of the ballot, but there can be no total victory over the Brotherhood. “These people are never going to disappear. . . . They will return to their homes full of hatred, frustration and disappointment,” Youssef said. They will pay back the rulers with “more violence and determination.”
The secularists who were willing to cast their loyalty aside in order to be rid of the Brotherhood insisted that it hadn’t been a military coup that had overthrown Morsi. These erstwhile liberals were strident: Morsi had been brought down by “popular impeachment,” they said. People who had loathed the police were now singing their praise.
The surrender of the liberals, now gripped by a spirit of vengeance, was the shameful surprise of this moment of Egyptian history. “This is not us. It’s not Egypt at all. We are not happy with death and blood,” said Israa, an Egyptian woman who gave only her first name to a foreign reporter. Israa gave voice to a reflexive, unexamined pride—the good, peaceful land whose life has been regulated, since the dawn of history, by a steady, gentle river.
Now go tell that old, timeless idea of Egypt to Mohamed ElBaradei, the celebrated Egyptian liberal who, as the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had returned to his country crowned with a Nobel Peace Prize. He was glorified on the Egyptian street for having frustrated, as best he could, the George W. Bush administration’s resort to war in Iraq.
ElBaradei had given his blessing to the July 3 coup. He had given the interim regime a respectable façade when he accepted the vice presidency. He opposed the storming of the two encampments of the Brotherhood, which took place six weeks after the coup. The estimates as to the number killed ranged between 230 and 421. ElBaradei had foreseen the bloody outcome and sought to distance himself from it.
His resignation was the only honorable thing open to him. After that decision, his secular allies wanted him tried for treason: he was a Freemason, a tool of the Americans, an enemy of the valiant Egyptian army, a covert ally of the Muslim Brotherhood determined to use it for his own bid for power. ElBaradei has reportedly left Cairo for Vienna, his old domicile.
Egypt was done with patience and compromise. On November 4, some four months after his forced disappearance, Morsi turned up at court. He had refused to dress in prison clothing; he had declared himself Egypt’s lawful president and rejected the legitimacy of the trial. Whatever his faults, he had been duly elected. But now this didn’t matter. Egypt had given itself over to a military strongman.
* * *
In the scheme of modern Arab history, this tumult, this awakening, is the third of its kind to wash upon the Arabs. The first, a political-cultural renaissance born of a desire to join the modern world, came in the late 1800s. Scribes and reformers, lawyers, would-be parliamentarians, and Christian intellectuals in the lead sought to reform political life, separate religion from politics, emancipate women, walk away from the debris of the Ottoman centuries. Fittingly enough, that great movement, with Cairo and Beirut at the head of the pack, was chronicled by George Antonius, a Christian writer of Lebanese birth, Alexandria youth, Cambridge education, and service in the British administration in Palestine. His book The Arab Awakening, published in 1939, three years prior to his premature death, remains the principal manifesto of Arab nationalism and of the high hopes of those years.
The second awakening came in the mid-1950s and gathered force in the 1960s. This was the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, and the early leaders of the Baath Party. No democrats, the leaders of that time were intensely political men engaged in the great issues of the day. They were men of the broad middle class. They had dreams of power, of industrialization, of ridding their people of the sense of inferiority hammered into them by the Ottomans and then aggravated by colonial rule. In a reflection on his upbringing, Bourguiba (1903–2000) remembered his time at the lycée, his French instructor reading Racine and the students moved to tears by the reading. Say what you will about Bourguiba—he was vain and pompous—but he puts to shame the thieves and policemen who replaced him in 1987. No simple audit could do these men justice: they had monumental accomplishments, and then an explosive demography and their own authoritarian proclivities and shortcomings undid a good deal of their work. Political Islam and plain police rule came forth to fill the void when these leaders faltered.
This third awakening came in the nick of time. The Arab world had grown morose and menacing, and the people no longer claimed their own nation-states. The populations hated the rulers and wished them ill, loathed the foreign patrons and backers of these rulers, and bands of jihadists, forged in the cruel prisons of these dreadful regimes, scattered about everywhere looking to kill and be killed. A Tunisian vendor, in the most horrific of ways, summoned the Arabs, particularly the young among them, to a new history. In Tahrir Square, and in those places that wanted a Tahrir Square of their own, Arabs were now reclaiming their countries. “Realists” in distant lands, and skeptics among the Arabs made weary by the failures of the past, were prophesying disaster for this bold, new awakening. Luckily for the Arabs engaged in this tumult, they were paying no heed to the realists.
Translation of “A Mohammed Bouazizi” (An Open Letter to Mohamed Bouazizi), by Boualem Sansal was first published in Le Monde, June 15, 2011. An English translation can be found at www.wordswithoutborders.org.
For a classic account of Egypt, see Emil Ludwig’s The Nile in Egypt: The life-story of a river, first edition (Allen & Unwin, 1937).
For more detail about Syria, see French political geographer Fabrice Balanche’s La region alaouite et le pouvoir syrien (The Alawi Region and Power in Syria) (Karthala, 2006).
For a view of Egypt in the early twentieth century, see British novelist and humanist E. M. Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon (Hogarth Press, 1923).
The full-length op-ed by satirist and television host Bassam Youssef can be found in Al-Shorouk, an Egyptian newspaper, “Alas Nobody Lives There Anymore,” July 16, 2013. An English translation can be found at TahrirSquared.com (retrieved on July 17, 2013).
For further reading on the Arab condition, see George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (Simon Publications, 1939).