Just World News with Helena Cobban

Dr. Abdel Monem Abul-Futouh is a genial, energetic man who looks
to be about 60 years old.  The thick, dish-like lenses of his
eye-glasses magnify his eyes and give him a vulnerable, owlish
look.  To
see him at his office in the gracious old building that houses both
the Egyptian Medical Society and the Arab Medical Union, you have to
make the appointment well in advance.  When you arrive a tall,
well-organized young man who glides around the building with a bundle
of files in his hand takes you to Dr. Abul-Futouh’s office. We greet
each other, and the doctor immediately lays out the terms of engagement
for the interview.  “Ask anything!  How long do you
need?  Is thirty minutes enough?”  I ask for forty, and am
granted them.

Did I mention that, in addition to being the General Secretary of the
Arab Medical Union, Dr. Abul-Futouh is also a member of the Guidance
Council
of the Muslim Brotherhood?

The most interesting part of the interview came when I pressed him to
explain his view on Israel.

“We as the Muslim Brotherhood know that the Jews in Israel are human
beings,” he said,

He sought to illustrate his argument about why the Jewish people
of Israel should not be killed by describing an Arab custom whereby a
person who is born as a result of a rape should not face any punishment
or stigma on account of that fact.  “That person’s existence may
be the result of a fault, but the fault was not his,” he said. 
“What fault has he committed?”

He continued,

I asked him, did he really say a “secular, democratic
state”?  This seemed ground-breaking given the MB’s traditional
opposition to the idea of secular rule, and I wanted to confirm that he
really intended to say it that way– in Arabic, “dawla dimuqratiyya ‘ulmaniyya“. 
He confirmed that he did mean that.

I had started the interview by asking how he saw the situation in
Egypt, whre the MB has been the subject of a governmental crackdown
that has grown increasingly harsh over the past year.

He said,

Continue reading “Interview with Dr. Abdel Monem Abul-Futouh”

The trial of Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer, who is on trial for his writings criticizing Egypt’s al-Azhar religious authorities, Islam and President Husni Mubarak, resumes in his home town of Alexandria today. Fellow blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy writes:

From the way the trial has been going, and Kareem’s family’s recent media stunt, unfortunately I’m expecting a harsh verdict. I hope I’m proven wrong…

Kareem is a student at Al Azhar University, where he enrolled with, I presume, the strong support of his very religiously observant family. He broke with their religious values/practices– and now as I understand it his dad has publicly excoriated him. It must be very painful for all members of the family.
Kareem’s supporters have been running a support blog called Free Kareem, which distributes news of the various public actions being held in his support in various places around the world. I see that sadly none are listed for Egypt. The only Middle Eastern country in which activities are posted is Bahrain. The photos indicate that many of these actions are very sparsely attended. Having taken part in any number of sparsely attended public actions of my own I understand that doing that– especially in a place where such public actions are not very common– takes a certain amount of courage.
The way I see it, this trial is about Kareem Amer– but it is also about the fate of blogging and the freedom of expression in general, in Egypt. In the past few years all of the public media here has become markedly more open and more ready to publish views highly critical of the regime. This applies to the print media as well as the blogosphere and other portions of the internet.
Here, by the way, is a very interesting article on the whole subject that was posted recently on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website. It surveys the whole scene of the Egyptian blogosphere– secular and pro-MB– and has material from an interview conducted with Hamalawy:

Hossam el-Hamalawy, one of the most famous Egyptian bloggers, whos is publishing http://arabist.net/arabawy/, says that the Muslim Brotherhood experience with the Internet started early, seeing the Islamic group as among first political powers to use the Internet and Email groups from an early time.
El-Hamalawy suggested that he was receiving many Emails and statements from Muslim Brotherhood Email Groups as early as 2002.
El-Hamalawy added that the weblogs have been introduced to Egypt by the secularists, specially Leftists whether the mainstream Left ( those affiliated to a leftist party or group ) or leftist individuals; but the actual revolution of weblogs in Egypt was during 2005 referendum, after which bloggers managed to make weblogs a credited source of news.
El-Hamalawy pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood’s young members’ use of the weblogs took place later on may be because the weblogs are considered personal diaries in which personal feelings are expressed while the Muslim Brotherhood discourse avoids such methods, specially under the tense relation with the regime and security.
El Hamalawi added that the most important Muslim Brotherhood weblog that has been recently browsing is: http://ana-ikhwan.blogspot.com/ because it follows up the news of detentions among the Muslim Brotherhood group.

The article also contains a whole blogroll of blogs maintained by “MB Youth”. They start off there with some female-authored blogs… Haven’t had a chance yet to check many of them out.
And here is a post from yesterday on the MB website, under the title Blogs against military rulers, which summarizes some recent blog postings on the continuing campaign of detention and economic expropriation that the Egyptian authorities have been maintaining against the MB.
I just note, finally, that if Kareem Amer is sentenced to a jail term it is possible he could be subjected to some bad harrassment in jail– from guards or fellow prisoners who object to the criticisms he has voiced of the role of Muslim religious authorities and/or are influenced by the government’s accusations that that makes him un-Islamic and a threat to national security. I think it would be excellent if an influential organization like the MB could declare publicly that it stands against any mistreatment of Kareem Amer or any individual on the basis only of views that he or she has expressed and of government accusations against him…

I have been incredibly busy, “uploading” information and impressions from here in Egypt into my brain, renewing old acquaintances here, making new ones, rushing around in general. My daughter– and one-time research assistant– Leila is here for the week, too, taking her one-week midwinter break from teaching first grade in snowbound Brooklyn with us here, which has been a LOT of fun. So yes, on Sunday I did spend a day doing out with her to see some pyramids…
It was good to re-connect with 5,000-plus years of this ancient civilization, with its underpinnings of an incredibly stable state/bureaucratuic structure. Also really interesting to drive through the peri-urban areas– to see the extent to which the hyper-fertile green fields are being eaten up by “informal housing”– that is, dense clumps of four- and five-story concrete and brick buildings that have metastasized out from the older city in many, many directions.
We had a brief discussion along the way about the effects of the Aswan High Dam, built in the 1960s to regulate what used to be the very frequent (and actually, soil-enriching) inundations of the Nile down here at the apex of the agriculturally fabulous Delta. The person who was with us said that since the dam was built, the absence of flooding means the farmers downstream can now get five crops per two-year cycle, where previously it was only one crop per year. But they need a lot of ferilizer to keep the soil productive on such a punishing schedule… Anyway, all the irrigated land we saw as we dove around– to Memphis, to Saqqara, to Giza– was intensely cultivated and very green, and the villages that remained unengulfed by the city’s growth looked bustling and productive.
Monday, Bill and I drove out for lunch with Mohamed Hassanein Heikal and his wife Hedayat at their farm west of town. Getting out of Cairo took– as always– a long time, and then we sped through some agricultural land and some near-desert. When we were about 50 minutes out from the city center– well into a partly agricultural, partly desert-side zone– we passed a massive conglomeration of fantastically futuristic buildings, all of them constructed from acres of sheeny blue glass supported by whitewashed concrete. The effect was somewhere between “Mediterranean Arabic” as in Tunisia’s cute seaside villages, Windows’ “blue screen of death”, and just plain tacky… This was the “Smart Village”, a huge zone of office structures and labs for participants in the country’s booming IT sector. (With reportedly big investment from Bill Gates, hence perhaps the “blue screen of death” effect?)
We sped on… Barely five minutes later as we drove along a broad tree-lined road Bill nudged me: “Look!” Ahead of us was a herd of camels being herded along the other side of the road to, presumably, some camel market nearby. There were about thirty of them, all trotting/galloping fast fast along the road, all keeping to their own side of it, and being herded by (as far as I could see) a single herder mounted on his own camel who brought up the rear and controlled them by, I suppose voice commands. It was a great sight– one I have never seen before. The camels had paint-writing on their flanks and their full, plumped-out humps; it looked like the names of their owners or perhaps the names of butchers who had bought this meat on a futures market.
As we continued driving, we passed a couple of smaller herds, and I saw one large pickup truck with a couple of very recalcitrant-looking camels tied down in the back. Must have been market day somewhere close?
Heikal, for those who don’t know much Egypt, was a key eminence grise of the Nasser regime who often acted as an intermediary between Nasser and western powers in times when Nasser was intent on trying to hew to a neutral position in the Cold War. He became Nasser’s Minister of Information, and kept that job under Sadat after Nasser died of a heart attack in fall 1970. After Sadat undertook his peace diplomacy with Israel Heikal became a vocal critic of that… And then, when Sadat went into his last fatal spiral of paranoia in fall 1981 and started locking up everyone whom he suspected of harboring any independent thoughts at all, Heikal was one of those imprisoned.
(I was working in London at the time– including, doing a little research on Heikal’s behalf in the Public Records Office in Kew into some aspects of Britain’s policy in Egypt in the late 1940s. But as the Egyptian crisis deepened I went to Cairo to do some reporting, and I was able to go visit Hedayet and get some news back to their friends in London about what was going on… I think I have only seen her once since then; so it was good to reconnect with them both this week… )
These days, Heikal, who is 84, is doing a weekly half-hour program on Al-Jazeera in which he is narrating his research and analysis of, I believe, events during his entire time close to power. He has been doing it for about three years now and has reached 1955. It’s an interesting format: he sits behind a desk looking very scholarly, and brings out documents– both the original diplomatic records (maybe some that I had gotten for him from the PRO back in 1981?)– and their Arab translations, and discusses both the documents and the other events around them…
Anyway, we had a good lunch conversation there with the Heikals and their other guests. Heikal said, “Ask me anything!” and I did. One of the things I asked him about was the succession issue here in Egypt. He was adamant that Gamal Mubarak would not be the next president: “Everyone hates him!” he exclaimed at one point. He also talked at length about the extent to which President Mubarak has insulated and isolated himself from ordinary Egyptians and has built an impermeable bubble of courtiers and yes-men around himself.
One of the other lunch guests remarked on the fact that that morning, Mubarak had presented the Egyptian “Order of Merit”, one of the country’s highest honors, on the outgoing head of US Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid. “Outrageous! That just proves how isolated Mubarak has become!” was Heikal’s reaction. (I haven’t seen this significant award mentioned anywhere else. Has anyone else seen any reports of it? Maybe the news of it was fairly tightly held by the Mubarak courtiers so as not to embarrass the ageing Pharaoh?)
More later on the content of those conversations… That evening we were once again generously hosted, this time by Ali Dessouki and his wife Eglal. Ali is a recent Minister for Youth and Sports. He and another of the dinner guests, Muhammad Kamel, are both on the NDP committee that’s working on political reform. We had a very lovely dinner in an incredibly posh new sporting- and social club out to the southeast of the city, and a conversation that was often very lively. Ali grew very impassioned as he explained to me how the regime felt it really had to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood these days, with an argument along the lines of “We gave them an inch [of liberalization] and they tried to take a mile, so we really had no alternative but to push back against them very hard.” On that basis he was adamant about justifying, for example, the recent re-arrest of some dozens of MB activists immediately after they had just been freed on the orders of a judge…
Yesterday morning I went to the generally pro-establishment Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, where the Director, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly had thoughtfully set up a small round-table discussion for me on current strategic developments in the region, with three of his senior colleagues there at the center. The discussion continued for two hours– mainly in Arabic (which I had to record, since I absolutely cannot conduct a conversation in Arabic while taking notes on it at the same time.) Again, more later on that… The main thing that came out of the discussion there was the intense preoccupation that these people all had with the current rise of Iran in the region. Indeed, it was hard to get them to talk about anything else!
Abdel Monem noted that there are a variety of views among Egyptians towards Iran and its nuclear program, with some seeing it as something of a threat, some seeing it as a potentially useful bargaining chip to try to win an agreement on making the whole Middle East into a region free of nuclear weapons, and some seeing it as an actual strategic asset for Egyptians.
And then, on to my afternoon appointment, which was with Dr. Abdel Monem Abul-Futouh, who is both the secretary-general of the Cairo-based Arab Medical Union and a member of the Guidance Council of the MB. Once again, as when I interviewed Dr. el-Arian last week, this meeting was in the downtown headquarters of the Egyptian Medical Society. One of the most notable things he said was to express support for the idea of a secular democratic state in Palestine! (That was, of course, the old proposal of Fateh and the PLO, back in the late 1960s, before they became converted to the idea of a two-state solution.) Dr. Abul-Futouh said something like, “We could see there being either a one-state solution or a two-state solution in Palestine. But I think if there’s a two-state solution they would still be fighting, so from that point of view one state– a secular democratic state– would be better.”
I double-checked with him that he meant to say a secular democratic state, and he said he did. I also probed a little the degree to which he would see the Jewish (Israeli) citizens of present-day Israel being included in this political project, and he said they should be. “Like the South African solution,” he confirmed. He also quoted a saying about the need to give decent treatment to a child born as the result of a rape. “The child should not be punished,” he said. The clear implication was that, though he saw Zionism as a political crime, as he said, the people who had come into being as Israeli citizens as a result of it should not be punished. Or anyway, not all of them. I did not get to complete clarity with him whether only the Jewish Israelis born in Israel or all those currently in Israel should be allowed to stay; though he did say clearly that there should be an end to discriminatory forms of (Jews-only) immigration into the country.
He repeated his and the MB’s respect for Judaism as a religion.
Anyway, more of that later, too.
Later yesterday, a quick meeting with former close presidential confidante Osama al-Baz…
As you can see, I’m having some extremely interesting discussions and experiences here Now, I gotta run and have some more.

“The US administration has worked out a package deal with our
government,” key Muslim Brotherhood (MB) spokesperson Dr. Issam
el-Arian told me recently.  “The regime works for US
interests in the region, and the
US remains silent on its abuses.  That deal  worked for many
years.  But it
can’t work now in an era of transparency.”

I met Dr. Arian in his office in the gracious– and
bustling– 1930s villa in downtown Cairo that is the headquarters of
the Egyptian Medical Society.  Arian is the organization’s
treasurer, having been released just this past fall at the end of a
five-year stint in jail.  (He had earlier served two shorter prison terms.) I asked him about the kind of
treatment he had received in jail this time round.  “It was more
terrible under President Nasser,” he said.  But he said that
regime agents had been following him throughout the preceding week, and
there was a risk he might be re-arrested.  “And they’ve prevented
me from traveling,” he said.

We talked February 11.  Four days later, the Egyptian police
arrested an additional 73 MB members, including some individuals who
had run as candidates in the parliamentary elections held in November
2005.  But not Arian. This brought to around 300 the total number
of imprisoned MB members, with the majority of them having been
arrested within the past 12 months.  (Human Rights Watch has a list of
the 226 MB members detained as of February 13, 2007.)

Arian is a friendly, well organized man in his early fifties, with a
slightly receding hairline and the same kind of neatly trimmed beard
that the Hamas people wear. “I feel we are in a border stage between
two eras,” he told
me.  “Our president is 79 and ill.  There are many rumors
about the possible succession of his son, Gamal.  This is a big
problem in Egypt because the army has always been the main power
here.  It still is, though now the “State Security” is much
stronger than it was.  Still, the army has taken to the streets
twice here, in 1977 and 1986.  And that has to be a big concern.”

He said that in his view, the constitutional changes now being
discussed in Egypt “are aimed at preventing the ermergence of all
indpendent political parties, not just the Brotherhood.”  He
explained that though there are some 23 or 24 “official” opposition
parties in the country, “they only have seven or eight seats between
all of them.”  (The parliament contains 444 elected seats– and
ten seats allocated by the President.)  Some of the changes
currently being discussed for the country’s Constitution concern
Articles 76 and 77, which define strict conditions for which
parties  should be allowed to field candidates in the presidential
election.  Though Article 76 stipulates that the president should
be elected in a multi-party election it is in fact true that, under the
current rules and most currently presented changes to them, none of the
“official” opposition parties would qualify!

For its part, the MB now has 88 members of parliament who are loyal to
it, though they ran as independents in the November 2005
election.  In addition, Arian said that six of the country’s
two-member constituencies still have not had their election results
certified.  “And they would give us probably another seven
members.”

Despite the fact he felt he was being closely watched and followed,
Arian seemed relaxed, and he even projected a
certain amount of confidence.  One of the topics I was eager to
discuss with him was the complex relationship between Egypt and
Palestine– and between the MB and the organization that had grown out
of the MB’s Palestinian affiliate, Hamas.

“The main obstacle to the development of strong relations between Gaza
and Egypt comes from Egypt,” he said.  “And the main reason for
that obstacle is the government’s fear of the relationship between the
Brotherhood and Hamas.”  He recalled a news account of the degree
to which Hamas’s victory had distrubed the Egyptian government.

“The fact that Fateh and Hamas reached their recent agreement in Mecca,
not here, was significant, because the negotiations were actually going
well here in Egypt until the Americans intervened,” he said.  “The
Egyptians have no room to navigate with the Americans.  Saudi
Arabia has more…  As for Hamas, it continues to work with the
regime here regardless of what the regime does to the
Brotherhood.”  He indicated that he understood why Hamas made that
choice, and he could live with it.

Later, he said, “If you consider what Hamas was able to do– to survive
for a whole year under those terrible siege conditions– it was really
remarkable.”  He also said that the Egyptian Medical Society had
been making aid shipments to the Palestinians for the past 20 years,
and that the society and the Arab Medical Union with which it is
affiliated now have plans to raise $1 billion of aid to send to
Palestine.

He noted, regarding the demonstrations that had taken place the
previous Friday to protest Israel’s launching of some excavation work
in occupied East Jerusalem, at an entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque, that

I was also interested to ask this spokesperson for a large Sunni Muslim
organization for his views on the possibility fo a serious split
developing within the Middle East along primarily sectarian,
Sunni-Shiite lines.  “Recently, our Murshed (Supreme Guide) made an
address about this issue, warning about the risk of breakdown between
the Sunnis and the Shiites.  The MB has worked on this since
1940… But why are we seeing this issue re-emerging now?  Because
of the rise of Islamic trends, from Morocco to Indonesia. So the
Americans have been planning how to try to stop this.”

He said he thought the issue was most problematic for Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, and the Gulf states.  “In Iraq, many Sunnis and Shiites
had intermarried.  They were all oppressed under Saddam
Hussein.  He was not a Sunni
ruler, but a dictator.”

I asked what he thought the reaction of Egyptians would be to any
prospective US military attack on Iran.  “At the official level,
the government will probably be quietly supportive,” he said. 

He also noted the apparent disregard of  US officials to the
troubling rights situation in Egypt.
 

There is a lot more that can be said, certainly, about the political
prospects in its birth-country of this veteran organization, which was
founded in Egypt in 1928 and now has affiliates in many other parts of
the Arab and Muslim worlds.  Egypt is now– as I noted here—
entering a decidedly fin de
régime period, in which great uncertainties abound. 
It is doing so, moreover, at a time when the region of which it is a
part is in huge turmoil, the future course of which is hard to predict.

The regime that is approaching its fin—
at at the very least, approaching a crucial turning point as the powers
of the president continue to decline– is one in which there are many
different trends and currents, including the representatives of the
different security forces, the power of NDP officials and
bureaucracies, the eroded power of officials in the public sector, and
the “lobby” of the big  business interests that have emerged under
the past three decades of economic infitah
(opening) of what was previously a tightly state-controlled
economy.  And yes, there are some really huge business interests
in Egypt today.  Some of those trends push towards liberalism and
open-ness; others are much more conservative. 

And the Brotherhood itself is, by all accounts, not monolithic. 
Indeed, one look at the relative radicalism of its rhetoric and the
conservatism of its actual political practice will quickly indicate
that there must be many younger members or supporters of the
organization who, fired up by its rhetoric, may not yet have fully
understood the nuances or practices of its political
conservatism.  And the Brotherhood, too, has some big business
interests behind it…  There are, indeed, many ways in which it
might seem to line up naturally with portions of the conservative trend
that is under the regime’s umbrella, and others in which it benefits
from the (relative) political open-ness that is encouraged by the
liberalizing trend within the regime.

One thing seems certain, though.  That is that the opening of the
Egyptian public space– principally, its media– that has occurred over
the past decade will prove almost impossible to roll back.  And in
this new atmosphere of the proliferation of media sources and the
general democratization of the information order both locally here in
Egypt, and internationally, it will be impossible for the regime to
keep all its opponents bottled up and excluded from political power for
very much longer.  The broad crackdowns– against the MB, and all
other opponents, real and perceived– that were possible in the Nasser
era can never be repeated.  Even when Sadat attempted to repeat
those tactics in 1981 it proved extremely counter-productive for
him.  Now, no ruler who is even half-way sane would do to attempt
to repeat such actions.

It strikes me, therefore, that since the MB has proven its staying
power and its adaptability to the changing decades, it is very likely
that within the next few years the regime is going to have to do some
kind of a political deal with it, to ensure the stability of the
country.

For my part, yes, I do have concerns about several parts of the
organization’s agenda.  I wish that, like Hamas, they had done
more to foster the real inclusion of women into their public political
life.  I wish they would do a lot more to start thinking about a
future for the region that would seek to include the Israeli people and
their reasonable political aspirations, on an egalitarian basis. 
I hope that, benefitting as they now do from the agendas of many
human-rights organizations, they will continue to keep the human-rights
agenda very much in mind if and when they move closer to exercising
real political power.

Anyway, I learned a lot from my conversation with Dr. Arian.  I
hope I can explore some of these issues a lot further with him in the
future.

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…

Continue reading “Notes from Cairo, #2”