The New Middle East by Paul Danahar Read Free Book Online

you’ve got to be out knocking on doors.’ So we were reporting for six to eight months the stench of a society that had gone wrong. Shortly after we started that Sadat began his crackdown. It was an undifferentiated crackdown because he was arresting everybody, left, right, centre, it didn’t matter. So the actual assassination of course shocked everybody because you never expect it to happen, it’s the ‘black swan’, but you’re not surprised that that situation produced something dramatic.
For a week afterwards the only concern we had was that this was something larger than a one-off killing. Islamists were attacking police stations and so forth. When the government reasserted control in a sense everyone got comfortable again. We knew Mubarak, he’d been the vice-president for years. I don’t think anyone thought he would be a short-term leader, but nobody knew how long he would last. But the key in everybody’s mind was restoring stability, and once that happened the comfort groove just took over.
     
    The comfort groove stretched on for thirty years. The assassination of Anwar Sadat by an extremist Islamist group with links to the Brotherhood provided a good reason for a whole new generation of American foreign policy makers to fear them, so they began building their policy instead around Hosni Mubarak and what he represented, which was no big ideas and no big surprises. He remained true to form until the end. He was not a great man, he was not an inspiring man, and he did not achieve great things.
    During Mubarak’s rule the cycle of accommodation and confrontation between the army and the Brotherhood would go on. In that time the army’s position in Egyptian society sank further, as did the calibre of its leadership. Its dependence on American aid grew, and so it started to lose its capacity for independent thought. While the Ikhwan adjusted to the changing world, the last Egyptian dictator would spend his rule trying to hold together the system he inherited as it crumbled around him. And he would fail.
     
    II: Revolution
    ‘We are turning into Afghanistan,’ said Ahmed. ‘It’s an uncompleted revolution, and if you are asking me which direction we are going in, then honestly I don’t know.’ Ahmed ran a travel agency. It was an industry hammered by the violence and uncertainty of the first year after the revolution took place. I met him walking with his two teenage daughters in January 2012 a few blocks from the People’s Assembly building in Cairo just after it had started its first session of the post-Mubarak era.
    ‘Last January I was very proud, very proud, now I’m disappointed. Did you see the parliament, how they were looking? I mean, first time in my life to see in the Egyptian parliament, gallabiyas [traditional long Arab robes] with jackets over it!’
    The new parliamentarians, most of them Islamists, wore Western suit jackets over their traditional long shapeless robes. Not only did they not look like modern democrats, they did not act like them either.
    ‘For me parliament is a circus, it’s big beard versus small beard, who can be more right-wing than the other, who can be more obsessed with sex and moral values than the other, and who can waste all this time talking about Internet porn and not teaching English in school, whereas the majority of Egyptians’ concerns are unemployment, poverty and security on the streets,’ said the writer and activist Mona Eltahawy, who was still recovering from being attacked and sexually assaulted three months earlier in protests against the ruling SCAF. ‘The Muslim Brotherhood have been utterly ineffective in delivering any of that, so I think for the average Egyptian who thought: “OK, you know what, they seemed like good people, they helped me when the regime didn’t and they talk about God,” they look at them now and say: “They are crap at politics, they can go back to the mosque.” ’
    But they did not. This was not what the