Notes from Cairo, #2

I have gathered such a lot of great material from my time here in Egypt so far that it has been a challenge for me to figure out how to write it. One of the most interesting things has been the interview I did with Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson Dr. Issam al-Arian last Sunday (February 11). But even just to write that has been a challenge for me, as I felt the need to put in a lot of background and it was getting fairly unwieldy.

Plus, I was still running around doing a bunch of other things, as well.

So I finally decided to write the background material separately, and to upload it here. Expect the interview itself within the next few hours.

But right now, I probably need to go out for a long walk and clear my head. Often, when you’re crossing a major street like Qasr al-Aini Street or the Nile-side corniche, this involves playing the terrifying game of Extreme Human Frogger. Cairo is about the most pedestrian-unfriendly city I have ever been in. I haven’t seen a single posted vehicular speed limit within the whole city. Don’t the people here realize that allowing public space to be so hostile, or even potentially lethal, for pedestrians means that a whole chunk of members of society– the disabled, the elderly, mothers with young children– become effectively prevented from real social inclusion?

To say nothing of the damaging effects of the pollution…

But enough whining… I have actually been having a really great time here… And truly, this time as always I really do love Egypt!

1. Entering the twilight of the Mubarak era

Medical science is a powerful tool that has done much to increase
human wellbing and lengthen the productive and hapy lives of miliions
of people. However, no-one has yet found a way to prolong human life
indefinitely.  (Even the kings of Saudi Arabia, who have
unconstrained access to all the most expensive forms of medical
treatment, have had to learn this.)  Egypt’s President, Hosni
Mubarak, is 78 years old.  And though he’s remarkably, as they
say, “well preserved” for his age, still the fact remains that in Egypt
today there’s an almost palpable sense that his powers are
waning.  Everywhere there is talk of the succession– and this,
though he has another four and a half years to serve on his current
six-year term in office.  But already, there are many rumors of
who might be in line for the succession, and how various sectors of
power might be circling around and lining up to position themselves for
the moment when either there’s the next scheduled election (September
2011), or, even before that, his powers might fail to the point that
some other form of succession becomes necessary.

Mubarak has notably never named
a Vice-President, a step that could have muted or even eliminated all
this uncertainty around the succession.  He himself became
President after his predecessor, Anwar as-Sadat, was assassinated in
1981– by virtue of the fact that he had at the time been Sadat’s VP…
and prior to that, Sadat became President in 1970 by virtue of the fact
that he had been the VP of his predecessor, Gamal Abdel-Nasser. 
So having a designated VP did on both those earlier occasions ensure a
nearly trouble-free succession.

So why has Mubarak never named one?  What he says  to people
bold enough to ask is that he considers it undemocratic for a president
to name the person who thereby becomes almost certain to be his
successor.  But other possible explanations have certainly also
been mentioned here, including that he does not have enough trust in
anyone to name him as VP (with an undertone that that VP, if
underhanded enough, might actually undertake some action to speed up
the succession…  ), and that he has been waiting and/or hoping
for his son Gamal Mubarak (named after you-know-who) to have enough
experience of national governance to be able to fit “naturally” into
the successor’s shoes…

This latter prospect would be a kind of a replay of what happened in
Syria– another avowed “republic”– where Bashar al-Asad became the
successor to his father, the late President Hafez al-Asad, on his death
in 2000.  (In the United States, yet another avowed republic, we
have also seen the re-emergence of a tiny trend of family
succession…  Is this a worldwide phenomenon, I wonder?)

So there is much speculation about who the main contenders for the
succession might be.  Egypt is currently a complex form of a
(mainly) one-party state, with the party in question being the National
Democratic Party, which was established by President Sadat in 1978,
mainly as a first attempt to constrain the influence of the military,
which has played the key power-broker role inside Egypt ever since it
was the group of the “Free Officers” that overthrew the
British-supported monarchy here in 1952.  The military still, by
all accounts, seeks to play that role, though several well-clued
Egyptian analysts say the domestic-focused “State Security” apparatus
plays a much greater role than it used to.  Bottom line: a lot,
though not all, of what goes on in the NDP is a little bit of a facade.

Another thing worth bearing in mind: the NDP has never had any
existence separate from the ruling power or the state.  Iin the
past there were frequently many jokes made at its expense– that it had
no real principles, was just a patronage machine, had no  real
raison d’etre, etc…  But in the past few years it seems to have
been trying to come to grips with the task of defining itself and its
role more precisely.  This in reaction to a number of things
including: changing influences in an Egyptian society that has now
moved quite a distance away from the old Nasserist notions of social
equality and a large state role in the economy; the challenge of trying
to define itself in reaction to the threat from rising sociopolitical
forces in Egypt, with at their head the extremely strong Muslim
Brotherhood; and finally– probably the smallest role motivating these
political changes has been earlier, nannying urgings of Condoleezza
Rice and her boss that Egypt (which is of course a significant US aid
recipient) should take significant steps towards democratization.

Now, of course, the Bushites have moved significantly away from their
earlier campaign for “democratization” in the Middle East.  But it
seems to me significant that the NDP people are nonetheless continuing
their push to try to (re-)define themselves, their party, and the
political system over which they rule.  Well, they’re doing so in
their own particular, very top-down kind of way, of course.  But
still, something (however small) is happening.

The Carnegie Endowment’s Michele Dunne has a fairly thorough January
2007 paper here
(PDF) on the political reforms currently being considered by the
NDP.  She sees the main goal of the reforms as being to position
Gamal Mubarak optimally for the succession.  More to the point, it
positions the NDP optimally for any future rounds of slightly more
multi-party elections, regardless of who the NDP’s candidate for the
presidency might be.  It’s true, the party apparatus has taken
some steps recently that seem to boost Gamal’s image and nationwide
popularity; but there reportedly remains some non-trivial resistance to
the idea of a Gamal succession within the party’s ranks.  (And
reportedly, even more resistance to him from within the security organs
whose role, in the end, will probably still be decisive.)

Dunne makes quite clear, meanwhile, the extent to which the proposed
“reforms” are intended to provide some show of democratization while
continuing to circumscribe the political power of the Muslim
Brotherhood.

You can also find some excellent commentary on the NDP’s current
“reform” proposals from Egyptian female blogger Baheyya… including in
this January
8 post in which she writes:

One
of the many political
absurdities left behind by Mr Anwar Sadat is something called “The
Political Party Affairs Committee.” This thing, composed exclusively of
NDP members, gets to cherry
pick the regime’s opposition (see Law
40/1977). This means that we have opposition parties headed by the
likes of Shaykh Ahmad al-Sabahy, president of al-Umma Party…
Shaykh al-Sabahy includes among his many preoccupations the mandatory
return of the fez, the intricacies of dream interpretation, and the
mysteries of astrology, all veritable burning issues in Egyptian
politics. During the presidential elections campaign of 2005 in which
he served as one of the principal contestants, al-Sabahy simply could
not contain his admiration and support for President Mubarak, and vowed
to vote for him on election day. Yes. Shaykh Ahmad al-Sabahy presides
over a legal opposition party in Egypt, but Islamist Abul Ela Mady and
Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahy (no relation to Shaykh Ahmad) are repeatedly
and unequivocally turned down when they avail themselves of established
channels for forming legal opposition parties. What’s wrong with this
picture?

What’s wrong indeed!

Anyway, going back to Michele Dunne’s paper, she wrote that back during
the heady heyday of the Bushists’ “democratization” push in the Middle
East, 2004-2005, they increased US government funding for
“democracy-building assistance” projects in Egypt from $5 million to
$50 million annually.  She noted,

What she completely fails
to note there, of course, is the signal event that happened in
late January 2006 regarding democratization in the Middle East: namely
the victory won by Hamas in
the parliamentary elections held in Palestine.  It was that
development more than any other which was surely responsible for the
Bushists’ decision to jettison their democratization agenda.

Still, the election-monitoring training given to thousands of Egyptians
in 2005 may well prove to have left a legacy of skills that can prove
helpful in future elections, too.

2. The Muslim Brotherhood

This is a huge country whose politics certainly affects
the balance within the whole region.  Back in Nasser’s day, Egypt
exercized a palpable degree of leadership over much of the Arab world–
and Nasser’s charisma was felt much further afield, too.  The
other day I was in the luxurious new headquarters of the Egyptian
Journalists’ Union, and there in a fourth-floor hallway was a small
exhibition of black-and-white photos from the past 55 years of the
country’s history, including Nasser playing his role of a leading light
at the 1955 Bandung
Conference, which was a precursor of the Non-Aligned Movement,
Nasser with various other world leaders, etc…

Egypt isn’t nearly as weighty as that in world affairs any more. 
It even got upstaged by the Saudis during the diplomacy to conclude the
recent Fateh-Hamas agreement– something which was noted by many of the
Egyptians I’ve been talking to.  (One noted that the only reason
the Saudis could do it was because nailing down the agreement involved
going considerably outside of what was permissible to the
Americans.  “And the Saudis could do that where the Egyptians
couldn’t, because the Egyptians get money from the American pocket but
the Americans get money from the Saudi pocket.”)

But even though it doesn’t have the strong leadership role that it once
had, Egypt does still remain a remains a big player in Arab politics;
and within Egyptian politics without a doubt the most significant
non-governmental player is now (as frequently throughout the past), the
Muslim Brotherhood.

The MB’s weight in society certainly seems to have increased
significantly since the days, back in the late 1970s and through late
1981, when I used to come here quite often from my home-base in Lebanon
to cover some fast-breaking political developments in Egypt… Back
then– the twilight years, as it turned out, of former Pres. Anwar
as-Sadat– the MB were considered to be a large but still definitely
“behind-the-scenes” player in Egyptian social life.  Among the
foreign journos in Cairo, this or that individual was rumored to “be
connected” in some way or another to the Brotherhood.  But I don’t
recall that they had much of a recognizable public profile or public
presence.  There were also– then as now– various very small and
very violent Islamist movements, such as the group that apparently
organized Sadat’s assassination in October 1981.  But Nasser and
Sadat had both repeatedly taken strong actions againstall the country’s
Islamists, including the MB; and its influence seemed to have thereby
been largely “contained.”

Egypt has always been a fairly strongly religion-observing
country.  At noon on Fridays, many of the side-streets and alleys
of the relatively modernized “city center” areas of Cairo fill up with
the worshipers who have overflowed from the nearby mosques: they lay
out their prayer mats in the street and go ahead, should-to-should, to
perform their prayer rituals there in the street.  Many men–
including Pres. Sadat– proudly sport on their forheads the smudge (or
three smudges) of bruising that result from frequently pressing the
forehead to the floor during prayers.  The appearance of those
forehead marks seems a lot more widespread now than it was in the
1970s… And so is the wearing of hijab headcoverings by Egyptian
women.  Actually, I’ve been coming to Egypt every couple of years
since 1981; and I would say that the biggest increase in hijab-wearing
rates happened back in the late 1980s.  In recent years, I reckon
the biggest increases in overt bodily signs of religious observance has
been in the forehead- marks of men– many, many men now have them– and
in the (re-)appearance in Cairo of women wearing face-veils (niqab.)  Sometimes these are
face-veils that hang under the eyes, and sometimes there is one hung
under the eyes and then a piece of more transluicent veiling that goes
over the eyes as well.  Women who wear the niqab always wear gloves in public,
as well.  (As I saw with Sister Maha of Hamas, when I was in Gaza
last March.)

The niqab isn’t nearly as
frequent as the hijab, but I honestly don’t recall seeing more than one
or two women wearing it when I was here in early 2004.  This year,
there are many more munaqqabat
(women wearing niqab.)

However, we shouldn’t draw a straight line between signs of religious
observance and affiliation with the MB.  My old friend Prof. Saad
Eddin Ibrahim– who was imprisoned along with a huge group from all
sectors of society, including Islamists, during Sadat’s crazed last
weeks in power in 1981, and has kept in touch with some of his Islamist
cellmates ever since– says that when he was called in to see the new
head of the much-feared State Security service not long ago, he was
interested to see that that man– who is the one who has been detaining
(and mistreating) hundreds of MB members in recent weeks– also has the
forehead marks…  And so too, as noted above,  did Sadat
himself.  Evidently, there are many people who are strongly
religiously observant within pro-regime circles, as well as in the MB.

Anyway, after Mubarak came to power as president in 1981, he started
slowly to allow the MB slightly more of a public role, though this was
still not a role as an open player within the country’s politics. 
In the 1980s– and with Mubarak’s indirect permission– the MB was able
to run a small number of candidates on the parliamentary list of the
historically liberal-nationalist “Wafd” Party, and later through a
similar deal with the Labour Party.  Thus, periodic crackdowns
against the MB still continued, but the MFB at least gained a
recognizable presence in national politics.

In the elections of 2005, the MB again participated, but under a
different arrangement. This time, its members ran as “independents”,
but they did so under the MB’s own main slogan of “Islam is the
solution”, so everybody knew who they were.  They won 88 of the
country’s 444 elected seats.  (There were numerous problems at the
polls. See e.g. the details in this
WaPo editorial on the matter. Many analysts have noted that the MB
would have done considerably better if the vote had been fully free and
fair.)

Having its members in parliament has notably not
provided the MB with any protection against the continuation of
arrests and other forms of opression.  Last December, these
campaigns took a new turn, after a notorious event at Al-Azhar
University.  I have heard many accounts of this event during my 16
days in Egypt so far.  The best sense I can make of the accounts
is roughly as follows….  The state authorities had first of all
tried to prevent the pro-MB students at AZU from participating in
elections for the university’s “official” student union.  Those
students then established their own, “free student union” in
response.  That riled the authorities, who then moved to
expel  those students from AZU’s student housing, and the students
then held a sit-in at the university.

In the course of the sit-in, some of these students then organized what
has been described to me as “a karate exhibition”, and they did so
while wearing black clothes, black face-masks, and bandanas with the
word “Samedoon” (steadfast) written on them, in conscious imitation of
the “look” of a Hamas rally.

That really got the authorities riled!  So then the police
intervened, and arrested
at least 140 students and 17 other senior
members of the MB, including Khairat
al-Shatir, who is the MB’s deputy
supreme guide and is described as having coordinated the many economic
ventures the MB has been running throughout the country. Human Rights
Watch noted that this was a continuation of an arrest campaign that had
netted “at least 1,000” alleged members of the MB since last March.

This week, HRW reported this:

It should probably be noted at this point that Mubarak can do this
because Egypt has been continuously under “Emergency Regulations” ever
since that last, crazed crackdown of Sadat’s in 1981.