Egypt’s
recent past is indeed provocative. Mohamed Ali, the Ottoman adventurer
who took control in 1805 after France’s withdrawal, began to modernize
Egypt by introducing effective administration, industrialization,
exposure to Europe, and a standing army. The Mohamed Ali dynasty’s first
six decades in power created an Egyptian empire that stretched from the
sources of the Nile in east Africa to the eastern parts of Turkey,
including the entire eastern Mediterranean and two-thirds of what is
today Saudi Arabia. But the empire fell when the dreams of the Pasha’s
descendants exceeded their state’s resources and capacities.
The
early-twentieth-century liberal experiment, when Egypt adopted the Arab
world’s first comprehensive constitution (in 1923), took the state away
from Ali’s family and (at least in theory) gave it to the people. Egypt
enjoyed the beginnings of democracy, true representation,
constitutionalism, and, crucially, the notion – central to modern
citizenship – of equal rights and obligations.
But
the experiment failed when Egypt’s leaders detached themselves from the
realities of their constituency – poverty, illiteracy, and widespread
anger at yawning inequality and top-down westernization. The illusion of
“Paris on the Nile” crumbled.
Gamal
Abdel Nasser, the first native-born Egyptian to rule Egypt since
Alexander the Great invaded the country in 332 BC, built a project “by,
for, and of the people,” the first truly Egyptian developmental
enterprise since the fall of the pharaonic state. But, by centering his
efforts on his own “heroic role,” Nasser failed his people. Lacking an
institutional base of support, and corrupted by a descent into
authoritarianism and utter disregard for Egyptians’ freedoms, the
project disintegrated when the hero died.
In
the 30 years of former President Hosni Mubarak’s reign, the regime
tried to transform the country by embracing a distorted form of liberal
capitalism and a relentlessly realist foreign policy that positioned
Egypt as a sidekick to the region’s petro-dollar heavyweights. The
former blew up from the internal pressures of poverty, inequity, and
anger, and the latter was swept away in an avalanche of rejection and
resentment, the tail end of which Egypt is still experiencing.
Egyptians
who lived through the past six decades and now see the country’s
political structure unraveling – with all the social convictions, power
nexuses, and top-down narratives that had been integral to it – feel
disoriented. Many feel that their lives have been wasted. Successive
failures have led to endemic anxiety and rage – and, in turn, to a
society-wide quest for redemption.
This
is especially true of the younger generations. Discussions with the
country’s activist groups reveal their rejection of this legacy of
failure – an inhibiting, heavy present that they inherited but to which
they did not contribute.
Given
the current fluidity of Egyptian politics, different groups,
representing opposing ideologies, deflect blame and responsibility for
the various failures and assign guilt to others. The result has been not
just a lack of a social narrative that a majority of Egyptians can
embrace, but also an exacting obsession with the past. This is a key
reason why political differences quickly turn into clashes of views on
the country’s identity – religious versus secular, Islam versus
Egyptianness, and military rule versus its emerging successor.
The
question now is whether these clashes will necessarily usher in
widespread violence. Three factors suggest that they may not.
First,
the unrivaled dominance of Egypt’s military, and the unlikelihood of a
split in its leadership, makes any extensive violence untenable,
especially given that the Egyptian state’s fight against terrorism in
the 1980’s and 1990’s significantly weakened jihadist groups’
operational assets in the country.
Second,
the powerful forces of political Islam may now be carried away by
passions, wrath, and a sense of victimization; but they will inevitably
opt to participate in domestic politics through organized structures and
processes. In a country with more than 45 million people under 35 years
old, no political player with any strategic insight can afford a
prolonged impasse.
Finally,
despite the significant demographic and economic changes in Egypt
during the last four decades, Egyptian society still retains its
agrarian character, which favors conciliation and compromise.
But,
even in an inclusive political transition, whether in the short or
medium term, Egyptians will have to answer the vexing question that they
have failed for six decades to confront: What is Egypt? One must hope
that the experience of recent decades – including the tension of the
last two and a half years – will induce a broad range of Egyptians to
seek an answer based on respect for plurality of ideas, frames of
reference, and traditions.
In her novel The Cairo House,
Samia Serageldin remarks that, “for those whose past and present belong
to different worlds, there are times that mark their passage from one
to the other, a transitional limbo.” Egypt today is in such a
transitional limbo. May its future be a different world from its recent
past.
Tarek Osman is the author of Egypt on the Brink.
