Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Egypt Now

It has been thirteen years since the 2011 Revolution in Egypt toppled Hosni Mubarak. He had been at that point the president of Egypt for thirty years. A recent article, that in part recounted the revolution, spurred me to write what follows, which is in part a critique of the accounts of events in Egypt propagated in US media at that time, but also an account of my experiences in Cairo during and after those events.

Mubarak became president of Egypt when his predecessor Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981. Sadat became something of a hero in the US and Europe after he signed the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978.  He won the Nobel Peace Prize—along with his fellow anti-war activist Menachem Begun. Hollywood even made a laudatory movie about Sadat.

So when Sadat was assassinated it was difficult for American journalists to understand the reaction of Egyptians to his death—which was something less than an outpouring of grief. The perplexity of the journalists was due to the fact that the very thing they celebrated Sadat for was the same thing that Egyptians resented him for: the Camp David Accords. For Egyptians there was also another issue they held against Sadat. He had dismantled much of the socialist features of the economy that Nasr had put in place after the revolution of 1952. These changes caused hardship to all but the wealthiest class of Egyptians—an old story by now. To put it more bluntly as Egyptians saw it, first Sadat sold off the Egyptian economy to international finance capital, then he sold out the Palestinians to Israel and the US.[i]

By coincidence I left the States three days after Sadat’s assassination to go to work on a project in Libya. Though I didn’t know it at the time, that project began my engagement with the Arab World, with Arabic and Arabic literature—and much else.

Before Mubarak was toppled, my entire involvement with the Middle East and my academic career as a professor of Arabic had coincided exactly with his presidency. During those thirty years I had begun to study Arabic and spent time in Cairo studying it. I had gotten an MA in it and gotten married to a woman who taught Arabic at the American University in Cairo. Then I went to Princeton to pursue a PhD. While studying at Princeton I spent a year in Cairo on a Fulbright. When I finished my PhD, I landed a position at the University of Rochester teaching Arabic language and literature. During my time at Rochester, I served as the director of a summer Arabic language in Cairo in 2006 and 2007. And through all of those years one thing never changed. Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. In our time only the Rolling Stones have lasted longer.

What follows here was prompted by the August 16 article in CounterPunch, “Was Egypt’s Al-Sisi Serving as a Cut-Out for Israel to Bribe Trump?” Andie Stewart, the author of that article brings to light a number of things. Namely that al-Sisi may have been basically a bagman for Likud to help Trump weather a shortfall of cash during his 2016 presidential campaign.[ii]

To understand why the military, then led by al-Sisi, overthrew Morsi and then thwarted the revolution in Egypt, these events need to be placed in the context of the region. And that requires us to go all the way back to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

That invasion upset the rickety political structure of the region and eventually led to the so-called Arab Spring. Egypt was one of a string of Arab countries—Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen—that were thrown into turmoil and revolution. However, the role of the military in the Egyptian revolution was unlike that of the military in the other revolts in Arab states. In the other Arab countries the military stood by the government. Not so in Egypt. There it simply stood by and watched as events unfolded. The reasons for that lie in the history of the Egyptian military.

The modern Egyptian military was created by the nominal Ottoman governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, in the early 19th century. Its strength as an institution is seen in its endurance through all of Egypt’s wars—even its wars with Israel. Whether it won or lost, the Egyptian military has never shown any threat of disintegrating as some Arab armies have. There is another factor that is also significant. Since its founding the Egyptian military has been more than simply an army. It has played a central role in the modernization of Egyptian society. The military on account of these things has for a longtime been generally respected by Egyptians as a for progress and the least corrupt institution in the country. These things explain how the military reacted to the revolution in 2011.

When mass demonstrations began in Egypt in January of 2010, the military was not among the security forces Mubarak deployed to put down the uprising. The military presence in the streets of Cairo increased, but the military never moved against the predominately liberal and leftists who set things in motion. This would be decisive. Mubarak depended on the police and security forces. In addition to the regular police, there were other types of police forces in Egypt. There is of course the Mukhabarat or secret police. Then there are two quasi-military forces, which are popularly known as ‘the white ants’ and ‘the black ants’ on account of their uniforms. These police deal with medium sized tasks, guarding embassies, riot control and so on. There are even tourist police who guard antiquities and accompany any large groups of tourists—when I was last there ‘large’ in the case of Americans meant more than four people. But when the revolution began all of these security forces were held in check to some extent by the military’s initial neutrality.

On January 29, 2011, the military was reportedly ordered to fire live ammunition on the demonstrators in Tahrir but refused to so do.  Two days later the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, SCAF, issued a statement saying the military recognized “the legitimacy of the people’s demands.” Furthermore SCAF said that the military “will not resort to the use of force against this great people.”

The security forces made one last desperate attempt to quell the revolt. On February 2, 2011. they attacked the demonstrators in the central square of Cairo, Midan Tahrir—which means Liberation Square. Some of the secret police thugs—or baltagis—rode camels into the crowd of demonstrators trying to break up their demonstration and break their will. This would become known as the Battle of the Camel. This was an allusion to one of the most famous events in Islamic history a battle between Ali the fourth caliph and the son-in-law of Muhammad and Muhammad’s widow Aisha. During the battle Aisha sat on a camel in a palanquin watching the battle all around her as her army clashed with Ali’s army.

On February 11, Mubarak resigned and taken into custody by the military. An interim government under the supervision of SCAF was formed until a new constitution could be created and new elections be held.

By this time, however, a third party had entered the picture, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, was initially uncertain as to what position to take about the uprising against Mubarak by mostly secular leftists. It took a month or two before the Ikhwan regrouped and saw an opportunity to realize what had been their goal ever since their founding in 1928, an Islamic Egypt. But to bring this about the Ikhwan faced a formidable obstacle. The Egyptian military.

The miliary did not regard the Brotherhood as part of the “great people.” Since the founding of the Brotherhood in 1928 the Egyptian military had seen it as their mortal foe. Nevertheless members of the Brotherhood soon joined the demonstrations—under the watchful eyes of the military to be sure.

The day Mubarak was toppled,  tanks rolled into Tahrir Square and jubilant demonstrators climbed atop them and gave the soldiers flowers. They chanted the slogan, “The Army and the People are one.” It was a heady but also violent time in Egypt. Things that had once seemed impossible now seemed possible. There was greater freedom of expression and public debate about what sort of government would deal with poverty and unemployment and corruption and other assorted social ills. More skeptical minds on the Egyptian left knew the hardest part was still to come.

Very soon however a new conflict emerged between the Muslim Brotherhood and the secularist liberal and leftist forces. There were counterdemonstrations by the two sides and often these turned into violent clashes. The military, now running the country, no longer stood by. They intervened, and with their implacable hostility towards the Ikhwan, not as a neutral referee separating the two sides. The terms of the struggle shifted. From a conflict between an autocracy and a liberal democracy, it became conflict between a religious state and a secular state.

During this same period the military was also trying to bring about a transition, channeling the chaos of revolution into a peaceful process of drafting a new constitution that would provide an electoral process.

After the fall of Mubarak the military government announced there would be new parliamentary elections at the end of the year 2011 with a presidential election to follow in the spring of 2012. The military had in this period wide public support. A poll in October of 2011 showed 92% of Egyptians thought the military would provide free and fair elections. That poll may have overstated the popular support for the military but certainly it was substantial.

When the parliamentary elections were held in the spring of 2012 the results were not promising for the goal of restoring peace in Egypt. The Brotherhood’s party won 44% of the seats. A Salafi party took 25% of the seats—salafis are even more a case of arrested development than the Ikhwans, since they seek to impose what they take to be the 7^thcentury version of Islam.  Be that as it may, Islamists now held 69% of the seats in the new parliament. People of Islamist politics do not make up anywhere near 70% of the Egyptian people. Egypt has a large and sophisticated intellectual class who lean left. Coptic Christians make up 10% of the population. And then the was rest of Egypt. Peasants trying to scrape out a living in the countryside with little time for political activity and a large middle class of secular and westernized people. So what happened? How did the rest of the Egyptian people end up with the Islamists holding 69% of the seats in the new parliament?

The short answer is that the Islamists consisting of the Ikhwan and the salafis more or less set aside their political and theological differences, while the secular liberal and leftist forces remained splintered. It must also be that there remained a significant number of supporters for ‘Mubarakism’ without Mubarak. No one can govern a country as large as Egypt without a significant number of supporters.

In the first and second rounds of elections the leftist liberal forces fielded too many candidates in a situation that called for a ‘Popular Front.’ Morsi and the salafi candidate won 42% of the vote, with Morsi getting 25% and the salafi candidate getting 17%. While the three secularist candidates won 56%—the remaining candidates can be ignored. Again the lack of a popular front showed. The largest part of the secularist votes 24% went to Ahmed Shafik, a retired Air Force officer who had been Minister of Civil Aviation under Mubarak. The result was that the two candidates for the final round were the Brotherhood’s man Mohamed Morsi and the Mubarak hold-over Ahmed Shafik, who it should be said was widely regarded as one of the most corrupt members of the government in the Mubarak era.

I arrived in Cairo a few days before that final round of voting was to take place. This was not by design. I had been planning to go to Cairo for some time but my plan had been delayed by personal matters.  Over the course of the next week in my conversations with acquaintances and friends, nearly all expressed great disappointment with how the process of the elections had played out. Few of them intended to vote. Not voting was their way of contesting the validity of the election.

On Friday evening, two days before the results of the election would be announced, I was in my room at the President Hotel watching the demonstration in Tahrir on TV. The President Hotel which is a twenty-five-minute walk from Tahrir. There were at least 300,000 people in Tahrir. I’ve read Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Adorno et al and I thought this is a real revolution. I should see this with my own eyes..

I walked to the Qasr al-Nil bridge into Midan Tahrir—I didn’t look for a cab because the driver would think I was crazy to want to plunge into that chaos. The traffic lanes of the bridge were crowded with people coming and going. But the sidewalks of the bridge were lined with people doing what people would do on any Friday evening in the summer. People were leaning on railings, catching the breeze off the river, fishing, watching the little boats tricked out with neon cruising up and down the river, full of people drinking and listening to musicians.

When I reached the midan there was no security. A few civic-minded types tried to direct the pedestrian traffic so a motorbike or, if needed, an ambulance could get through. There were parade barriers manned by people whose authority wasn’t clear. One man was checking the ID of two men who by their looks and dress were certainly Egyptians. I asked a young man if I could go in. He said sure. I walked right past the two men who had been stopped.

The first thing I saw on was a big pavilion set up by the Ikhwan with member at tables handing out pamphlets and talking with visitors. On the wall next to their pavilion was graffiti that read, “Al-Ikhwan Kadhibeen.” The Ikhwan are liars.

I stopped well short of what looked like a mosh pit in front of a stage where there were speakers speaking in vain because no one could make out what they were saying for the racket all around them. There were street musicians entertaining small audiences while groups of twenty, thirty people snaked past them, chanting slogans. On the fringes of the crowd there were people who had brought folding chairs and snacks who were watching it all as they might a soccer game.

After a few minutes one of three women who were veiled head to toe spotted me. That was something you never saw in Cairo when I first went there. The woman pointed me out to the young man with them. For first time in thirty some years in Egypt I met some hostility from someone other than a cabbie.

The young man, visibly angry walked up to me and said, “Why you here?” I I took a moment to answer. I said —like it was obvious—, “I want to see this.” He scowled at me but he didn’t know what to say and rejoined the women who glanced over at me before they all moved on.

When I left it was easy to flag a cab. The driver was in his late forties. He greeted me in Arabic and I replied in Arabic. Then he pulled up his shirt sleeve to reveal a small cross tattooed on his arm so I would know he was a Copt. It was about a ten-minute drive to the hotel and we were great friends immediately as these things go. He told me his name was Albert which he pronounced the French way—the Copts favor French names—and I told him my name. I told him I was an American and had been in Cairo many times before. I told him I had Coptic friends and that the Copts were wonderful people and so on.

When he pulled up near the hotel I got out, fished a few bills out of my jeans and I leaned in to pay him. Then he said in English, “You are beautiful. What is your number? Which in the midst of the revolution caught me somewhat by surprise. I laughed and said, “Bon Soir, Albert!”

What was missing in the television coverage focused only on Tahrir was carnivalesque air on the in the city surrounding it, the people in folding chairs watching the spectacle, the boats with their neon décor and music coming from them—a carnival-like air perfectly summed up in the attempt of the taxi driver Albert to pick me up in another sense.

Two days later on Sunday, June 24, it was announced that Morsi had won the election by 51% of the vote to Shafik’s 48%. That day Wael Ghonim, one of the leading leftist activists, told Christiane Amanpour on CNN that the election was not legitimate. He emphasized that half of the Egyptian people didn’t vote as a protest against the legitimacy of the election. Amanpour perched in CNN booth above Tahrir was mystified and CNN cut short the interview with Ghonim. CNN already had its story: Morsi was the first “democratically elected” president of Egypt. But the fact was Morsi only had the support of a quarter of the Egyptian people. For Ghonim and those who like him had started the revolution Morsi was not ‘democratically elected.’

The struggle for power between the military and Morsi escalated immediately. Morsi called for a ‘new’ constitution with Islamic law as its basis Any intrusion of religion into the governance of Egypt was intolerable for the military. Soon there were clashes between Ikhwan protestors and soldiers over that constitution, and also between leftists over the now dominant role of SCAF in all facets of politics and the government. At the same time Ikhwan protestors also battled with the secularist protestors. By fall of 2012 a three-cornered struggle between SCAF, Morsi and his Islamist backers, and the secular left was taking place in the streets, in the Assembly and behind the scenes. All the time the Egyptian economy was worsening since tourism the mainstay of the economy, which had been suffering since January of 2011, was now non-existent.

The fall of 2012 I was asked to give a talk on campus about my summer trip to Egypt. I said the elections in Egypt had decided nothing. Half the people did not regard the elections as legitimate. The Egyptian military would never let the Brotherhood take over Egypt. The revolution was not over.

In January al-Sisi, now the head of SCAF, reportedly met with Morsi and told him he had six months to turn the situation in Egypt around. Meaning to ditch the members of the Ikhwan in his government. As though he didn’t have enough problems in Egypt, Morsi flailed around antagonizing other Arab countries with his contradictory statements on the various conflicts and long-term disputes in the region trying to appease both his followers and the US and the Arab World—an impossible task. In sum Morsi’s presidency was in shambles with massive demonstrations all across Egypt now calling for his resignation. The only support he had was from the Brotherhood. The showdown between the Brotherhood and the military was now on track. Even as the Brotherhood had seen the revolution as their chance to take power, the military saw it as its chance to settle its scores with the Brotherhood once and for all.

In July—more or less on schedule—SCAF gave Morsi 48 hours to meet the demands of the Egyptian people. All the non-Brotherhood members of his government resigned.

On July 3 al-Sisi announced that Morsi was no longer the president of Egypt. On television behind him were the leader of Tamarod and the leaders of the other youth groups that had started the revolution. Also among those standing behind al-Sisi were members of the journalists’ syndicate, the highest Muslim cleric in Egypt, the Shiekh al-Azhar and the Coptic pope. After Al-Sisi spoke, the others spoke and endorsed what the military had done. The military had wagered that the majority of Egyptians wanted a secular state and won. In view of that support, the coup of July 3 can be seen as form of democracy. Democracy by other means.

But the doubts of Egyptian leftists proved to be warranted. Al-Sisi’s government began cracking down on the activists who had started the whole ball rolling. That crackdown continues today.

Egyptian students I know say the repression is worse than it was under Mubarak. Al-Sisi has betrayed Egyptians as Sadat did. This includes his stance toward the Israel war on Gaza—and much else in the region. But now—as in 1978—the lamentable situation of Egypt can’t be blamed simply on al-Sisi. Egypt is a poor country. It is dependent on the US and reactionary states like Saudi Arabia and its Gulfi friends. That dependency restricts Egypt’s power and influence on every level and dictates its stances on the war in Gaza and much else.

The economy is in even worse condition. The only thing putting the brakes on another uprising is the knowledge of Egyptian that the next one would almost certainly be the bloodiest ever.

When I went back in 2016 I asked the cab driver who picked me up at the airport about the situation now. He said roughly it was so-so. But he emphasized he was a still a man of the Revolution. He asked if I supported it. Yes, I said. I wanted the best for my Egyptian friends.

Now more than a decade after the revolution, a number of articles have appeared and analyzed the revolution as a failure. There is more discontent than ever. An Egyptian student told me this spring that Egypt seemed to be approaching the boiling point again. Inflation is wild and for middle class families even buying a chicken is now beyond their means. Now the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and the West Bank has also added to the anger of Egyptians. Should the wider regional war that Netanyahu is trying to provoke erupt, the consequences for al-Sisi and his government would be dire.

Notes.

[i] A description of the reactions of Egyptians to the Sadat era and the Camp David Accords can be found in the novel The Day the Leader Diedby the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz. It is set in the days immediately preceding Sadat’s assassination. Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988.

[ii] “Was Egypt’s Al-Sisi Serving as a Cut-Out for Israel to Bribe Trump?”  Andie Stewart CounterPunch, August 16, 2024.

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