Whatever Happened to the Egyptian Revolution?

Introduction

It has been two years since the outbreak of the revolution of January 25, 2011, which within less than a month brought to an end one of the worst eras in Egyptian history, the era of Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for close to thirty years and presided over declines in the Egyptian economy, social conditions, and Egypt’s status in the Arab world and internationally.

Egyptians were overjoyed that the revolution had succeeded in getting rid of the head of the regime and putting an end to the idea of dynastic succession by Mubarak’s son, and hopes rose that in the wake of Mubarak’s downfall the whole regime would be uprooted and Egypt would embark on a renaissance and a new era of progress. But the revolution soon ran into many obstacles, creating anxiety and fear that the high hopes might not be fulfilled.

This book includes chapters dealing, first, with many of the symptoms of corruption and decline that led to the January 25 revolution. It then explains the reasons why the revolution created such optimism for a bright future and lays out the causes for concern that have arisen now that the outlook is gloomier. The book also contains chapters on what could constitute components of a renaissance in Egypt, democratically, economically, in social justice, and through shaking off dependency, if we succeed in dispersing those clouds of gloom.

The story told in this book ends with the elections that brought in Dr. Muhammad Morsi as the new president. The conclusion describes the growing anxiety felt by many Egyptians, even after the fairly free elections of both parliament and president. It also tries to explain how a very promising revolution may very well have turned out to be abortive.

Part 1

Causes of the Revolution

1 Worse than Unemployment

1

Whenever I returned to Egypt after an absence of any length, as soon as I set foot in the airport, I would be struck by some manifestation of a class-based society: junior staff waiting for senior staff, someone carrying passports for an important group of people and completing the passport formalities on their behalf so that they could get out of the airport before anyone else, or the staff of tour companies, mostly university graduates, who could not find better employment than holding up a sign with their company’s name for passengers to see, and so on.

As soon as I started putting my bags on the bus that takes you from the airport to the parking lot, two young men would appear from nowhere, then three of them and then four, all competing to help me and my wife carry our bags. Then, as soon as the bus stopped and I started taking the bags off, another four young men would appear from nowhere, competing to perform the same task.

I noticed that those competing to do this job didn’t look the way porters used to look in Egypt. They were better dressed and younger, but the look of degradation on their faces was more distressing than the facial expressions of the old-time porters.

In such situations I would usually feel guilty in a way I had not felt all the time I was abroad, because travelers in Europe, the United States, or even in other Arab countries never come across such situations. Yes, of course, there are rich and poor, but not in this way. Yes, society there can be divided into classes, but they do not have the same privileges for the upper classes that you see in Egypt from the first moment you arrive, or the same servility among those beneath.

Social stratification is a very old phenomenon, of course, whether in Egypt or the rest of the world, but it has not always created this feeling of guilt on one side or bitterness on the other, because until recently the upper classes believed sincerely that they deserved their lives of luxury, as they were of a different breed because they were from distinguished families or simply because they owned vast tracts of farmland. In most cases they considered their wealth and their distinguished status to be a sign of God’s favor, and until recently the lower classes took this explanation for granted. Yes, we are of inferior stock, born to lowly families without status or land, which shows that we are out of favor with God for some reason or other, they would tell themselves.

Over the past hundred years things have happened to undermine these ideas or greatly weaken them on both sides of the divide. Race, color, pedigree, history, and religion cannot justify these class distinctions. It’s all a matter of outright injustice, and what makes matters worse is that everything is now obvious: the poor all know exactly how the rich live, if not from the luxury cars they see in the street, then from television, and they know that the upper classes can obtain all this opulence only by cheating.

The sense of bitterness on one side and the sense of guilt on the other were bound to grow, even if everyone pretended otherwise.

I know full well how you obtained your money or your job. That’s what those stuck at the bottom of the ladder tell themselves, while the others, even if they never say so in public, know that they are basically impostors who got where they are by force or by fraud.

In such a climate it’s hardly surprising that we find plenty of things to complain about loudly: new and unfamiliar types of crime, sexual harassment, bigotry, religious fanaticism, and so on.

2

There were two young men standing at the movie theater entrance, neither of them more than thirty years old, and their only job was to check tickets. One of them might escort you into the theater to show you your seat. There’s nothing strange about that, but the surprise was the way they treated us, my wife and me, as soon as I gave them the tickets. I’ve come across such situations before, but every time the shock makes it seem like the first. From the first word they uttered it was clear they were thinking only of their tip. We had arrived half an hour before the film started, so they suggested we sit in the movie theater’s snack bar and promised they would come and tell us as soon as it was time to go in. I disliked the degrading way they were speaking and I found the situation most unpleasant: two good-looking young men wearing smart suits (no doubt the management required it) yet prepared to beg for tips in this manner.

I took another two steps and another young man of similar appearance came up to me, with a young woman in hijab next to him, helping him with his work. What kind of work was it? He was inviting me to take part in a competition, the gist of which I did not quite understand, but I gathered from what he said that if I won I would get a prize.

After recovering my composure I went back to one of the men who had met us when we came in and asked him a few questions:

What’s he after, that man who offered me a prize?

He’s the agent for a travel company that’s trying to promote its business, and the competition and the prize are part of the promotion.

What did you study at university? I asked him (I was almost certain he had a university degree).

He said he had a degree in computer science.

And your colleague?

He studied commerce, in English, he said.

Are you married?

Yes, and I have two kids: a boy, two years old, and a girl of six months.

Do you live with your family or your wife’s family? I asked.

No, we live in a rented apartment.

How much is the rent?

Four hundred and fifty pounds a month, he said.

Don’t get upset if I ask how much you earn.

Two hundred pounds.

Does your wife work?

How could she work when we have two kids that age? And suppose my wife did go out to work, when would we be together, when I work from four in the afternoon until midnight?

Do you have another job in the morning?

No, because they sometimes ask me to work in the morning instead of the evening.

Then I realized how important the tips were; not just important but a matter of life and death. Was it surprising then that this young man and his colleague should treat me in such a degrading manner? I left him and went to the restroom. I saw another man standing at the door waiting for me. This man differed from the others in age but not in the impression of degradation he conveyed. He was older and thinner and his face suggested he was malnourished. It was a familiar sight that nonetheless gave me an agonizing feeling with a touch of anger every time I saw it. Not anger with the man, but with what drove him to behave in this way.

The poor man didn’t know what he could do or what service he could offer me in order to get a reward. But he knew how important it was to get the reward, which he had done nothing to deserve. Was that precisely what caused the feeling of humiliation so evident on his face? I guessed that this man did not receive any wage whatsoever. If the movie theater owner was only paying the young ticket taker two hundred pounds a month, he had probably offered this man a choice between a job without a salary or no job at all, and the man had taken the job in the hope that customers would take pity on him.

This phenomenon is much more widespread in Egypt than we imagine: jobs that must number in the millions in what is called the service sector. Someone selling goods or a service knows that the buyer expects him to provide some small additional service, like the car owner at the gas station who expects someone to fill his tank instead of doing it himself, or the customer at the supermarket who expects someone to help him bag his groceries or carry them to his car, or the hotel guest who expects someone to come and carry his bags, or the passenger getting on a train who wants someone to show him to his seat, and so on.

But employers don’t want to cover the cost of providing these small services. Since they know that Egypt has millions of unemployed people looking for any work, they exploit their weakness by giving them a choice between remaining unemployed or doing these jobs for no pay (or for insignificant payment) and relying on their ingenuity in dealing with customers.

This phenomenon, which is now widespread in Egypt, is not an old one. It did not exist to any noticeable extent in the time of the monarchy, under President Gamal Abd al-Nasser, or under President Anwar al-Sadat. The phenomenon prevalent when Egypt was a monarchy was what economists call disguised unemployment. Men would work at way below their full capacity, but not in this peculiar position of intermediary between customers and employers. That was the case with the surplus labor in the countryside, and with peddlers and shoe shiners in the cities.

In the time of Abd al-Nasser disguised unemployment sharply declined as a result of agricultural reform and industrialization, though it gradually reappeared in the civil service and the public sector when the drive for industrialization lost momentum after the 1967 war with Israel. But in the time of Abd al-Nasser we did not see the pernicious phenomenon I’m talking about. Nor did we see it to any noticeable extent under President Sadat because of the job opportunities available through migration to oil-producing countries.

All these outlets have been firmly shut for the past quarter-century. The number of jobs in agriculture and industry is growing too slowly, the emigration rate has fallen sharply because of the fall in demand for Egyptian workers in oil-producing states, and the Egyptian government has withdrawn from the business of giving jobs to all graduates and is cutting expenditures in the hope that the private sector will do what the government used to do. But the private sector is in the state I explained above: its motto is supply and demand, whether of commodities or labor. If someone is ready to work for no wage, why pay them a wage?

Whenever I open the window at home in the morning I see a young man of about twenty-five from Upper Egypt. I know his life history well because I have met him so often in my street. I know that his father did the impossible to make sure he completed his secondary education and then to get him into university to obtain a degree in business. Now, after he and his father did everything possible to get him a job that matches his qualifications, he has ended up with the job of wiping dust off the fancy cars parked in front of the building opposite mine. His hopes, just like the hopes of the men I have already described, depend on the generosity of the car owners, but this generosity is not assured and cannot be calculated precisely so he cannot rely on it when deciding whether or not to get married, for example. There are other needs that are more important and more pressing, including sending some of what he earns to his mother, who has stayed in Upper Egypt.

After seeing the ‘workers’ at the movie theater, I recalled some statistics presented by a prominent economist, a specialist in employment and unemployment, as evidence that the employment situation in Egypt has improved. The economist stated proudly that the unemployment rate in Egypt fell from 11.7 percent in 1998 to 8.3 percent in 2006. I said to myself, There’s something very strange about this, because the unemployed don’t keep waiting for jobs until they die of hunger. They have to find jobs of some kind to feed themselves and their families. After getting computer science diplomas or degrees in business studies and then completely despairing of life, they must have agreed to take on the jobs I have described, and so the eminent economist can then deduct them from the rolls of the unemployed, and the ministers of investment and economic development can mention them in their statistics as evidence of achievements in reducing unemployment. But how should one really describe the work they are doing?

3

There is a new way to die, known to Egyptians only for the last twenty years or so. What you do is pay several thousand pounds to someone whose specialty is smuggling people to Italy or Greece, then you get into a vehicle along with a group of other desperate people, cross the border into Libya, and get on a rubber boat with about fourteen other people. The boat takes you to somewhere off the coast of Italy or Greece, then you leave the boat and rely on yourself in swimming to shore, in a place where you hope the coastguards will be few. You slip past the guards and find yourself in a country where one can work illegally, unlike in Egypt, where there are no jobs, legal or illegal.

The problem is that the rubber boat is vulnerable to the rough seas of the Mediterranean and the traffickers usually overload it with people, so there is a serious risk of drowning before you reach the coast of Italy or Greece. Many such boats have sunk in the last few years. One of the most recent drowning incidents involved seven young men from the villages of Zanqar and Nousa in Daqahliya Province who were trying to slip into Greece. One of the survivors said that the boat capsized only thirty yards off the Greek coast.

I say this is a new way for Egyptians to die, and of course I mean poor Egyptians because rich and middle-class Egyptians do not die this way. If they want to go to Italy or Greece, they get on a plane or a ship. It’s a new way for poor Egyptians to die because they used to die at home of hunger or of grief, or on the roads in bus accidents because the brakes were worn or the driver was exhausted from long hours at the wheel or from the stress of driving on Egyptian roads. When poor Egyptians did die of drowning, it would be on a ferry that was badly maintained or not seaworthy in the first place. For poor Egyptians to drown from a rubber boat that isn’t designed to cross the Mediterranean is what’s new, but it’s not the only new aspect of this way of dying.

There’s another important aspect: that the poor Egyptians who die this way are not usually illiterate. In fact, many of them have university degrees, and despite these degrees (or maybe because of them) they have not been able to find suitable work at a reasonable salary. When illiterate Egyptians leave their villages and decide to emigrate, they rarely go anywhere other than the Gulf countries or Libya, so they are rarely exposed to the danger of drowning off the coast of some European country. This way of dying is closely linked to the phenomenon of growing unemployment among graduates over the past twenty years, because they are the ones who feel the painful gap between their aspirations, reinforced by the education they have received, and the wretched reality of their lives and their inability to meet their most basic demands: a reasonable job and a home that enables them to get married.

4

In an old film by the famous Italian director Vittorio De Sica, made about half a century ago, there’s a story that’s as funny as it is moving. It’s about the conditions that prevailed in some of the poorest regions of southern Italy, where unemployment was common and finding rewarding work was just about impossible, and so it was impossible to get suitable housing. In order to obtain somewhere to live, some of the poor young men would resort to the following ruse: they would find an empty piece of state-owned land, bring anything they could find that could be used as a substitute for bricks or stone, and build a small room under cover of darkness and as quickly as possible. By daybreak the building would be done and the police could not do anything against them because the law banned the demolition of any building with a roof, except through complicated judicial procedures that the police considered to be pointless. What mattered was that the building should have a roof. If the police happened to arrive before the roof was complete, it was all over; the building would be knocked down and all the efforts of the unemployed young men would go to waste.

The reader can imagine how a very amusing film could be made on this subject. The whole story becomes as funny as it is tragic, like a game of cat and mouse between the poor and the police over whether the poor will be able to put the roof on before the police arrive. During this tragic game the poor often found it useful to assign someone as lookout, to monitor the police from afar and warn the others if the police were coming, whereupon they would quickly do something to trick them, either by trying to divert them to somewhere else or by covering the missing part of the roof with anything, even with newspapers or old rags. The attitude of the police toward them varied according to the temperament or mood of the policeman. There was one hard-hearted policeman who would insist on arresting them and demolishing the room, and another decent one who voluntarily looked the other way while they finished building the roof or who pretended that the roof was real when it was not at all, and so on.

Something similar happens every day in Cairo and for similar reasons. As unemployment has increased in Egypt, the number of people seeking jobs of any kind to keep body and soul together for themselves and their children has grown year by year. I noticed that the number of people doing what economists call marginal work has increased rapidly in recent years: shoe shiners, peddlers, and street traders with minimal stock of cheap goods and a daily turnover of no more than five or ten pounds, whose profits might be no more than a third or half of that amount, selling meager quantities of limes or tomatoes, a few loaves of bread, or a few blocks of low-fat white cheese, and so on. The police constantly harass them on various pretexts: that they are blocking the streets and obstructing traffic, that they are getting in the way of pedestrians on the sidewalk, that they are giving foreign tourists a bad impression of Cairo, or that they are a security threat if a senior official is on his way to or from work, and so on. So the police confiscate their goods: they pick up their crates and baskets and throw them into police trucks, and the tomatoes or limes spill into the street as the traders scramble helplessly to pick them up. Then they run after the police vehicles, begging for mercy and shouting that the police have taken all their capital (which in fact amounts to just a crate or a basket), and the answer they hear is that if they want they can recover their goods from the police station after all the necessary procedures have been followed.

In these police vehicles I have seen many kinds of ‘capital’: baskets of pretzels, shoe shiners’ boxes, various cheap children’s toys mixed up with combs and plastic mirrors that the owners a few moments ago were offering for sale, shouting out, Anything for a pound. Sometimes you find that the traders themselves have got into the police vehicles with their goods and their crates, since they see no sense in watching their only source of livelihood disappear out of sight without going and trying to recover it, as if it were a pound of their own flesh that was being confiscated.

These people often assign one of their number to stand watch at the corner of the street down which the police might come, to monitor their movements and give the others an early warning as soon as he sees a policeman coming. When the warning comes, the others hurriedly gather up their goods and disappear in the blink of an eye, or hide their goods in a nearby place where they have an agreement with the owner and pretend that they are doing something else.

When you have a close look at the policeman who comes to enforce the law and confiscate their goods, you find that he’s no better off than they, for life has not been any kinder to him. The way he treats them, whether cruelly or with compassion, varies according to his temperament and his mood, or depending on whether his own superior treated him harshly or compassionately that morning. However the policeman or his superior behave, this game of hide and seek is bound to recur day after day in Cairo’s streets and public squares, as if it were part of the nature of things and the way of the world. People have to eat to live.

5

I can understand that someone might love a particular woman or a particular man, but that someone would love ‘humanity’ as a whole strikes me as a dubious proposition.

That’s because people, by nature I believe, find it easier to direct their emotions toward a particular person than toward abstractions such as all humanity, freedom for everyone, or women as a whole, and so on. If someone were to claim that they did not love anyone in particular but that they did love people as a whole, we would be right to doubt their sincerity until they produced some evidence.

In my own life I have known socialists and communists of this kind, people who talk a lot about how they hate the exploitation of man by his fellow man. But then I find they have been exploiting their wives or their friends in the most appalling fashion. Some of them also have not given back books they borrowed from me, despite firm promises that they would do so, because in their eyes I am an exploitative bourgeois unworthy of compassion while it is only the proletarians who deserve compassion, and not a particular proletarian but proletarians in general.

I remember reading an article in which the British philosopher Bertrand Russell described meeting the communist leader Vladimir Lenin after the revolution in Russia. Lenin was describing what the socialist revolution had done to the big landowners whose land the revolutionaries had confiscated. Russell said he was surprised and shocked to see on Lenin’s face, as he talked, signs of extreme cruelty that Russell could not reconcile with the empathy implicit in what Lenin said about impoverished peasants.

I remembered these incidents when I read reports in 2009 of how a group of women who worked in a youth center in Sixth of October City had been tormented. The head of the Ministry of Youth Affairs in Giza had issued a decree terminating their secondment to the center to punish them for failing to obey strict orders to turn up at the Cairo stadium on a certain day. The women had good excuses, which the official ignored. Nahid Abd al-Hakim, for example, did not carry out the order because she was pregnant. Nahid Abd al-Khalik was nursing her infant son, who is a polio victim. Iman Abdallah, Seham Sabri, Rabia Yassin, Dalia Abd al-Qader, Ahlam Mahmoud, Fatma Sayyid, and others had similar excuses.

The occasion that prompted the Ministry to issue the strict orders that this group of wretched women was compelled to disobey was a women’s marathon presided over by Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of President Hosni Mubarak. The government newspaper al-Ahram described the marathon as part of the objectives of Suzanne Mubarak’s Women’s International Peace Movement, which include supporting the participation of women in the process of peacemaking and providing safe communities for women and children.

6

On the first day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday in 2006, dozens (some say hundreds) of young men attacked a number of women in the center of Cairo within sight of other people, including policemen, and everyone felt that something new and serious was happening or that something serious had started to come to light when we had not thought that things had gone so far.

The basic conclusion that emerged from that incident, especially as it took place a few days after we discovered that in some cities and villages the drinking water had been contaminated with sewage water (dozens of people were taken to the hospital and some died), was that the Egyptian government, after thirty years of highly reckless and selfish policies, had reduced a considerable proportion of the Egyptian population to a standard of living not fit for human beings.

It did this by starving a large number of Egyptians, neglecting to educate them, and failing to provide them with rewarding jobs, to build houses that were fit for human habitation and that would enable them to marry and settle down, to provide public transport that they could use with dignity, and so on. These Egyptians, who might account for 40 percent of the total population, most of them young, turned into creatures that wandered the streets aimlessly and without hope, thinking only about the basics of life, such as providing food for themselves and their families, seeking sexual satisfaction by pressing themselves up against women on public transportation (and now in the street) or through common-law marriages that the couple knew had no legal value, committing murders to steal paltry amounts of money, or becoming addicted to cheap drugs that relieved them of the burden of thinking about the cruel reality around them and at the same time reduced the pangs of hunger. Some sought a way to escape the country in the hope of finding a livelihood abroad, such as by going to Saudi Arabia on the pretext of performing the minor pilgrimage and then slipping off into the desert when it was time to go back to Egypt (as a large proportion of Egyptian pilgrims have done recently), or accepting offers from human traffickers to take them across the Mediterranean to Italy, where they could swim ashore and slip into the country in the hope that the Italian police would not see them, and then look for work there, even if the engineers among them have to work as porters, the accountants as hotel staff, and the lawyers as newspaper vendors, assuming they manage to avoid death by drowning on the way.

These are young men who have nothing to lose—no wives, no children, no decent jobs, and no money. Their fathers and mothers, trying to survive, are too busy to care. They have no hope for the foreseeable future of having a family, a job, or any money. They don’t seem to worry about how the people around them see them or about the hatred and contempt that their deeds might provoke, because they are hated and despised in any case. There is nothing to distinguish them from the herds of thousands of young men lost in the streets and they have nothing to fear from the police because a high proportion of policemen are not much different from these lost young men. Just look at the wretched expression on the faces of the police, from complete despair, their bodies frail from starvation, their degradation, their inability to brush away a fly, let alone pursue young men trying to molest a woman in the street. Most policemen have the same problems of poverty, hunger, bad housing, and poor marriage prospects, besides the daily abuse they face from officers who have problems that may be somewhat different in quality but stem from the same source as the problems of the wretched policemen and the young unemployed—corruption and a state that is lax and negligent. What could possibly motivate a poor policeman or even a dynamic officer to protect a girl or a woman who is being harassed in the street in this pervasive climate of frustration?

A very small category of Egyptians does not feel this frustration: those for whom the streets are swept every morning, for whom the roads are closed for hours if the message comes that they want to go out driving, for whom luxury houses are built and luxury foodstuffs imported, who get engaged and married to young men and women of the same class that monopolizes the luxury food and drink and the beaches, and reserves for its children the jobs, the houses, and the fabulous weddings. This category of Egyptians has even monopolized the newspapers, for it is noticeable that the state-owned newspapers didn’t publish anything about what happened on the first day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday until it was the talk of the whole world and had been reported on foreign radio stations. The state-owned newspapers, after waiting a week without writing a word about it, began to look rather suspect and in the end had to say something. Yet, when you read the coverage of the subject in the government’s prime daily, it would have been better if they had not written anything at all. The coverage ranged from implicit defense of the young men, saying they went out to have a fun time on the occasion of the holiday, to criticism of the young women for going out when the streets were crowded, to denial that anything serious had happened at all and portrayals of the police as having done their duty in full.

Several weeks earlier we had been told that members of this lucky sector, which had ruled over the Egyptian people for ages, and their children, who intended to take their place as rulers, didn’t read what was written in the independent and opposition newspapers because they did not have time to listen to complaints. They had more important preoccupations, basically connected to preparing Egyptians to accept the news that the son was going to take his father’s place as ruler. In my opinion they were wasting their valuable time on something that was pointless, because amending Articles 76 and 77 of the constitution or re-amending them in order to enable the president’s son to succeed him was no longer of interest to the vast swath of Egyptians whose circumstances I have just described. Perhaps the objective in amending this or that article was to convince certain foreign governments and organizations that the son’s succession would take place democratically. But maybe these governments and organizations were also uninterested in whether this or that article was amended or preserved as it is because these governments and international organizations are in reality only interested in ensuring that this lucky group of Egyptians soon sells off this bank or that company to foreigners and that they do not say a single word in opposition to what this country or that organization is doing in Iraq, Lebanon, or any other country. So, in order to ensure that this bank or that company is sold and that this small and lucky group continue to monopolize the luxury food and drink, the housing, the beaches, and the fabulous weddings, it is fine to starve a high proportion of the Egyptian people and make them homeless in this manner, so much so that one can sometimes see policemen looking for scraps of food in garbage bins, and hundreds of young Egyptians, in order to resolve their psychological and sexual problems, resort to remorseless assaults on any woman they find in the street.

In the newspapers after that Eid al-Fitr I read that the police had received hundreds of reports of sexual harassment over the holiday. The number of instances that