The
name Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim does not, for most people, evoke any particular
memories. It would hardly surprise
me if a few friends thought I had meant to type Ahmad Lutfi Al-Sayyid, the
renowned and sometimes reviled leader of the Egyptian Constitutional party of
nearly eighty years ago. And yet
there he was, Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim, on January 25, 2011 staring somberly out
from the front page of the daily Al-Misry al-Yawm. He was, the paper reported, accused of being the leader of a
group of about 20 members of the Palestinian based Islamic Army who had set
off a bomb that took the lives of 24 people at the Qiddisayn (or Two Saints) Church
in Alexandria on January 1, 2011.
He was famous for an instant and the story of his fame and subsequent
complete disappearance tells us something important and unexpected about the
extraordinary events of the Egyptian revolution. And it provides a way to understand the wave of commentary
that has already begun about what has changed and what has not after two years
of revolution as well as to indicate how difficult are the problems Egyptians
face as they seek to create new governing institutions.
On
January 24 the two main privately owned liberal newspapers, Al-Shorouq and
Al-Masry al-Yawm, ran front-page stories detailing government reports that it
had solved the case of the explosion.
Habib al-Adly, Al-Masry al-Yawm, then Minister of the Interior, had
revealed that decisive evidence proved the IA was behind the explosion. It is hard to judge the Adly’s
statement because neither the decisive nature of the evidence was revealed nor
was Ibrahim himself brought forward.
As of January 24, the press reports make it seem as if the literature
graduate from Alexandria was in custody and confessing the details of the crime
The next day the revolution began
and the stories about the bombing of the church and those who might have been
responsible end. While the
revolution was certainly bigger news, its occurrence was not the only reason
the press ceased its coverage.
Rather the then public prosecutor, Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud, prohibited
publication of details of the ongoing investigation of the crime. This, Mahmoud explained in a statement,
was necessary because the law obliged criminal inquiries remain secret so as
not to impede any ongoing investigation.
The statement itself had been communicated to Anas Fiqqi who was then
the Minister of Information so that he could prevent further reports from appearing
in the “visual or spoken media as well as in the national press, the partisan
(daily and weekly) press, whether local or foreign as well as any other
publications.” In other words
there was to be no further discussion anywhere of any aspect of the
investigation.
And
indeed there has not been any further discussion about the Two Saints Church,
Ahmad Lutif Ibrahim, or Sayyid Bilal, a young Alexandrian Salafi who was taken
into custody on January 5 and whose body, with marks of torture, was returned to
his family for burial on January 6, 2011.
Although some (primarily left-wing) activists consider Bilal a martyr of
the revolution, and although four police officers were convicted of his murder
in absentia, he too has largely vanished from public view. Not even the Salafi
currents recognize his existence or memorialize his death.
Consequently more than two years
later, we know nothing about who was responsible for the criminal act of
January 1. Today Habib al-Adly is in
jail and Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud has been dismissed as public prosecutor; the entire
political order for which they both labored no longer exists. Muhammad Morsy, a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, rather than Husny Mubarak, is president; Egypt has a new
constitution; elections for a new parliament are in limbo but there is no possibility
that the former National Democratic party will dominate it. Hundreds of people were killed by the
police during the popular uprising that overthrew Mubarak and hundreds more
have been killed in the months since he left office by the police and the Armed
Forces. And there have been violent
confrontations between Muslims and Copts at several churches as well as in
villages around the country.
There are other disastrous
continuities as well: train crashes, police brutality, and widespread poverty. The
revolution’s defenders and critics frequently invoke the continuity of 30 years
(or sometimes 60) to explain or explain away contemporary disasters such as train
wrecks that take dozens of lives or unfathomable political or legal defeats
such as courts that do not convict the guilty merely because of an absence of
evidence. Strange it is that in
all of these instances the distant past remains obstinately part and parcel of
the present. But an event that
occurred less than three weeks before the revolution exists now in an alternate
temporal universe for which neither the revolution nor the current government
nor the institutions of the state have any responsibility.
So why bring up this particular bit
of history that has now become ancient even if it is entirely recent? The
victims of the Alexandria bombing were not political activists; they were
celebrating Christmas in a church; had they simply returned safely home after
that Mass perhaps they would have joined the revolution three weeks later. Perhaps not. Unlike the dozens of
people, many of whom were Christian, who were crushed to death by military
vehicles in front of the television broadcasting headquarters those who died in
the church are not, by anyone’s account, martyrs of the revolution. They are simply the victims of criminal
violence and criminal conspiracy but, given a widespread belief that violence
is worse in both quantity and quality now than under Mubarak perhaps it is
best, as the Egyptian expression goes, to allow what is past to expire.
And
yet, what happened that night in Alexandria casts vivid illumination on some
aspects of the revolution’s first two years.
When President Morsy determined to
oust Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud from his post last fall, his stated reason was that Mahmoud
had failed to achieve successful prosecutions of either the police officials
implicated killing revolutionary martyrs or against alleged corruption in the
old regime. Morsy and his party
have, in other words, no problem pursuing prosecutions of their political enemies,
but they seem decidedly less interested in righting other wrongs of the old
regime.
In late March 2013, the Cairo
Appeals Court ruled that Morsy had unconstitutionally and wrongly dismissed
Mahmoud and ordered his re-instatement.
This ruling will now be taken to the Court of Cassation. There are obviously plausible legal
arguments, but many Egyptians will perceive this as part of an ongoing conflict
between the executive and judicial branches of government. The court has not so far released the
text of its reasoning but it appears to have been based in part on the question
of whether the president can nominate a public prosecutor without the
participation of the judiciary.
Mahmoud was certainly a creature of
the old regime. So too is the
entire judiciary and prosecutorial staff which was angered by Morsy’s decision
to resort to a constitutional declaration in order to remove him. President Morsy and the Muslim
Brotherhood would claim that Mahmoud was unwilling to prosecute his associates
in the old order. Their opponents
argue Mahmoud’s failures were necessarily the result of the maintenance of the
rule of law in Egypt in place of the installation of a politically motivated
form of revolutionary justice. For
many reasons—some good and some bad—there was simply not enough evidence for
convictions under existing Egyptian law.
One way to judge between these competing narratives then is that Morsy
sacked Abdel-Meguid for his failure to achieve a result not available under
Egyptian law rather than for his failure to prosecute or even fully investigate
a shocking act of criminal violence that had occurred earlier in his tenure.
Neither
Mahmoud nor his replacement, Talaat Ibrahim, who was ostensibly appointed to
bring a more concerted pursuit of justice to the office, re-opened the case of
the Two Saints Church. Yet recall
for a moment the atmosphere of the time: the shock, dismay, and outrage at a
criminal act of sectarian murder.
That there would continue to be attacks, sometimes murderously violent,
on Christians was widely believed.
About a year earlier, after all, there had been a drive-by shooting at a
Christmas mass in Nag’ Hammadi. The
Azhar Ulama Front, now occasionally described as a conservative organization of
religious scholars, had issued a call for a boycott of Christian businesses and
prominent figures, such as the attorney and 2012 presidential candidate, Salim
al-Awa, had claimed that Christians were stockpiling weapons in church
basements.
Religious violence therefore seemed
as plausible as a future encompassing revolution on the Tunisian model. Bombing
a church had ratcheted up the violence and the inevitable rumors swirled: it was Islamist extremists, it was one
branch or another of the state secret services, it was Christians
themselves. The story that Habib
Al-Adly told was designed, like most stories the government had told for
decades, to pacify the public and assure everyone that Egyptians were not to
blame. Only
foreigners—Palestinians, Israelis, or the agents of other powers—were capable
of such acts. Egyptians, as
government after government has hastened to reassure them, are not responsible
for any of the bad things that happen in the country.
One
cannot even speculate; one can only wonder what we would learn if the existing
files were opened. The least
likely outcomes are that Israelis or Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim and his Palestinian
associates were the criminals.
Perhaps we would learn that the evidence pointed in the direction of
Salafi groups, including those whose members have been elected to
parliament. Or perhaps the
security forces were involved, whether as active agents or passive
facilitators. Perhaps the government knew who had committed the crime but
lacked evidence or worried that the truth was politically too inconvenient. Perhaps
we would simply learn that the files, such as they are, are largely empty and that
the government had no clues and no intention of discovering who committed the
crime.. This last possibility seems most likely of all when we recall that it
was the very day of the announcement that the revolutionary tide began to scour
the country.
Had
Charles Dickens chosen to write about Cairo rather than Paris his words would
ring equally true: it has been the
best of times and the worst of times. The past years have seen dramatic
mobilizations by unlikely and frequently powerless groups. Through the spring of 2011 Copts
demonstrated not simply for their rights but for the right for a more public
presence in the neighborhood known as Maspero.. In October 2011 members of the Egyptian armed forces attacked
Coptic demonstrators in front of the Maspero television station by driving
armored personnel carriers into their midst. An ugly scene was made worse when news announcers urged
honorable citizens to descend into the streets and engage in vigilante justice
against thugs who had killed and wounded members of the armed forces. But there were no thugs and no soldiers
had died. Instead, a group of
soldiers had gone on a killing spree in which several dozen Christian
demonstrators were crushed to death.
In December, the Deputy Guide of
the MB and the man in whose stead Morsy ran for President, Khairat Shater
announced that his organization and a group of Salafi societies had come to an
important agreement and issued a joint statement. The joint statement issued at
a nationally-televised press conference asserted that Muslims should not wish
their Christian neighbors Merry Christmas. There is no comparison between the
refusal to return a greeting and criminal homicide nor did the agreement become
the official policy of the state.
It was, however, the first time in modern Egyptian history that
politicians associated with a governing majority have publicly associated
themselves with such a policy. And
one had to wonder why a prominent political figure who might have been
president (and might still be prime minister) should have found this a crucial
task to undertake while the country was enduring spasms of violence and a
decaying economy. There is an
enduring and disquieting uncertainty about a political party that recognizes
the constitutional possibility that a Christian could be president of Egypt
while openly and steadfastly asserting that its members would never vote for
one.
Most
stories of the revolution’s prehistory begin with trade union unrest in the
Delta in the first decade of the 20th century, the protests against
the Israeli invasion of Gaza, or with the demonstration effect of events in
Tunis in December 2010. Important
those instances of mass mobilization were but the atmosphere of the weeks
before January 25 was filled with shadows. The focus on the industrial cities often includes an
implicit claim that class unity trumps religious division, but the history of
the 20th century is not very reassuring on that count. The revulsion that many Egyptians felt about
the bombing of the Two Saints before January 28, 2011 should not be discounted
as a contributory factor to the widely discussed and frequently praised accounts
of Muslim-Christian solidarity during the celebrated 18 days.
Recalling
the bombing of the Two Saints church as the prelude to January 25 is thus
necessarily an exercise in outlining the limits not only of the Egyptian
uprising so far but also the limits of the parties that have emerged as the
dominant political forces in its wake.
Religious
community and prejudice point us in one important direction but also tend to
obscure other, equally important and even connected, aspects of what has changed
over the past two years. Perhaps
Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim was the person behind the bombing, although it seems
unlikely. More plausible is that,
as had become in common in the political life of Egypt over the past 60 years,
the government chose to blame criminal behavior on someone, perhaps even a
fictitious someone, who was not an Egyptian. Egyptians, Egyptian governments have argued for a very long
time, are not responsible for criminal acts of prejudice, for terrorism, or for
politically motivated wrong-doing that damage national unity. Those actions are, the public has been
told time and again, the work of foreign hands, outside agents, or third
parties. Real Egyptians have no
interest in breaking the unity of the nation and consequently they cannot the
agents of such activity.
Recently
Ttere has been a marked decline in attempts by either the government or private
persons to claim that their opponents are foreign agents or elements acting in
their interest. This is not
because political discourse has become kinder and gentler. It has become notably more intense and
it is certainly not limited to debates about policy differences. Striking, however, is how infrequently
anyone levies the once-common charge that opponents are not Egyptian. Thus when the television satirist
Bassem Youssef was called in for questioning on March 30, 2013 he was accused
of maligning President Morsi.
Anyone watching his show (which includes several leaders of the Salafi
trend) realizes how rooted in domestic perceptions of political idiocy it
is. Political opponents now may be
characterized as venal, stupid, immoral or even criminal but they are
ineluctably Egyptian. It is too
early to say if this is a station on the way to a discourse that is both more
civil and more probing or simply to distinct communities that refuse to listen
to each other. But it is a
significant change.
The
explosion in front of the Two Saints was a purely criminal act. For Americans it inevitably recalls the
1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Montgomery,
Alabama. Like that crime, it was
not an isolated event; it had a context.
It occurred, as I briefly alluded above, in a stream of assaults on
Christians and their institutions over a longer time and a wider space. Frequently these assaults involved sections
of a local Muslim majority pressing demands or expressing fears against
Christians: claims that Christians
were illegally building churches or imprisoning converts to Islam. In other words, they invoked a claim
that a minority was itself engaged in possibly criminal behavior that local
government was either unwilling or unable to prevent. Some, like the well-known judge Tariq
al-Bishri, limited themselves to that point. Others took the argument a step further to insist on the
necessity of self-help in the absence of government action.
The
resort to self-help is always seductive and dangerous. Seductive because it appears to be a
community empowering itself against those who despoil it; dangerous precisely
because, despite the language of revolutionary or religious justice with which
it is sometimes imbued, it is so frequently and easily directed against the
marginal, the powerless, and the impoverished. Frequently first employed against an identifiable and less
powerful minority, such violence can be and is deployed against others. These forms of violence are, of course,
illegal but governments, in some instances, have high degrees of toleration for
them and Egypt is no exception on both counts.
Successive
Egyptian governments, perhaps especially in the wake of 2011, have been
unwilling to react strongly against such incidents. Not infrequently, as in an incident when a Christian man’s
ear was cut off or when a church was burned down or a community driven by force
from their homes and shops, the government has intervened at best in a tardy
fashion and never with criminal sanctions. It has preferred reconciliation committees in which the
weaker party generally foregoes significant compensation and agrees not to
participate in criminal prosecution.
There
have been lynchings recently in which members of local communities killed
alleged criminals. The ostensible
reasons range from the murder of a young child to attempted theft of a tok-tok
(motorcycle-rickshaw). Those
who were lynched were tortured to death:
they were kicked, hit, knifed and ultimately literally hung from
lamp-posts (in at least one case upside-down). I am ignorant of whether this violates specific
provisions of Egyptian penal law, but it certainly violates the rights of
citizens enunciated articles 35, 36 and 77 of the recently adopted
constitution.
The news accounts are sketchy and
occasionally suggest participants may have thought they were acting under cover
of enacting a Quranic punishment against socially destructive criminal behavior. The free use by some Islamist
activists over the past year of the language of the Quranic penalties against
highway robbery (the so-called hadd
al-hirabah) may have had some influence, but much more important is the
likely conviction in communities that without a functioning police force overwhelming
chaos and criminality threaten.
Was their choice of who to find
guilty any better than Habib al-Adly’s on January 24? In the absence of mechanisms deploying
either the forensic capacities of the regular police or the even more stringent
evidentiary requirements of the Qur’an or classical Islamic jurisprudence we
are not in a position now or even to know. When even the
Minister of Justice, Ahmad Makki, referred to the lynchings as signaling the
death of the state he was repeating a profound fear of many Egyptians
today. Given the profound economic
problems and the continuing violence confronting the government and the
Egyptian people, finding the guilty parties behind the bombing of the Two
Saints church is not now high on anyone’s agenda. The bombing also raises too many questions about
the fissures of religion, politics, and government authority to be anywhere
except in the temporal limbo I described earlier for the time being. But, depending on how these questions
are resolved, there may come a time when a government decides once again to
examine what happened in Alexandria and to throw some additional light on the
events of the past several years.
Those who thought reform of Egypt’s
justice system on January 2, 2011 was crucial have been proven right. It needs some new people at the top as
well as a sense of commitment to making Egyptians safe from criminal violence
regardless of their political or religious beliefs. Reflecting on
the Alexandria bombing in the light of recent events one thing that seems clear
is that while one aspect of the present conflict centers on whether Talaat
Ibrahim or Abdel Meguid Mahmoud ought to be confirmed as public prosecutor
neither avenue represents a step out of the impasse. What is needed is a different public prosecutor with a
different sense of mission—perhaps even to recognize, probe and bind up the
wounds of the past rather than to ignore them.
