A MODEST CONSTITUTIONAL PROPOSAL BY THE MILITARY

After months of stormy public debate, punctuated by occasional bursts of violence, about how Egypt’s new constitution is to be written, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces released a proposed set of supra-constitutional principles to be embodied in the new document and a set of standards for selecting the constitutive assembly that will write it.  With the first round of elections for the lower house of parliament set for the end of this month, almost all the parties planning to participate have soundly rejected it.  As Egypt moves closer to the moment when the institutional and ideological shape of the post-Mubarak landscape is determined, the conflict over this document reveals how Egypt has changed in the past nine months.

            The document evokes a profoundly corporatist vision of Egypt and places its democratic future to a remarkable degree in such a framework.  In at least two cases—the military and the judiciary—SCAF proposes to allow the affected branch determine the content of legislation affecting it.  In addition whether by the backdoor or by simple oversight the military has introduced a new penalty—stripping Egyptians of their citizenship—that no previous Egyptian constitution has allowed and that several appear to have prohibited.

            A popular slogan in the days after Husni Mubarak stepped down as president promoted the idea of the unity of the people and the army—like the fingers in a fist, they were a single hand.  In response to those who voiced misgivings about the army’s seizure of power, it was widely asserted that Egypt would become a democracy albeit with exceptions.  The most widely proposed exception was that some political or constitutional mechanism would have to be found that recognized the prominent interests of the armed forces in the country’s economic and political life.  Whatever else people say about the twenty-four members of SCAF, they can at least respond that this proposal is consistent with those earlier defenses of their role.

           

            In March, SCAF promoted a set of amendments to the 1971 constitution drafted on behalf of the late president Anwar Sadat and amended several times by Mubarak.  Although SCAF later abolished the 1971 constitution by fiat and replaced it with their own constitutional declaration, they retained the amendments that had received 77% of the vote in a referendum.   It was widely understood that these amendments committed SCAF to allow a freely elected parliament complete liberty to choose a constituent assembly of 100 members that would then write a new constitution.  

            As it became clear over the spring and summer that such a parliament would probably have a majority of members from the Muslim Brother’s political wing—the Justice and Freedom party—and more radically Islamist Salafi parties liberal and leftists began to urge the adoption of a set of supra-constitutional principles.  Their idea was that this would provide a common commitment to democratic values that presumably all political activists could agree on:  freedom of speech, association, and electoral mechanisms.  The Justice and Freedom party as well as the various Salafi parties objected that any such agreement pre-empted the sovereign powers of an elected parliament which they increasingly realized they were likely to dominate.  The force of argument between the two sides may have been equal but it is increasingly clear that the practical wisdom of not reaching an agreement on political principles was not identical.

            One common set of anxieties among foreign observers has been especially evident in the months since March:  the fear that Egypt would disintegrate into anarchy and that only the Muslim Brothers and the Army, presumably acting as one hand, could stem the tide.  That the Muslim Brothers and the Armed Forces have engaged in tactical cooperation from time to time since March, both in the referendum on the constitutional amendments and at several crucial turning points since, is evident.  This cooperation has, however, masked some very important differences that have now become apparent.  Much as outsiders hope that the Muslim Brothers are really, as the name of their newly-formed political wing suggests, similar to Turkey’s Justice and Development party the Armed Forces are unlikely to be their allies.  Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has fought a lengthy and largely successful battle to trim his army’s power; the Egyptian army is unlikely to wish to see a local Islamist party follow the same path.

            It is thus not surprising that the Muslim Brothers and other political forces have strongly objected to articles 9 and 10 of the army’s proposal.  Article 9 would give the SCAF an institutional presence in the new government with the sole right to determine the military budget and any other legislation that affects the Armed Forces.  In addition, although the president of the republic would be the “supreme commander” of the armed forces, the minister of defense would be the “general leader.”  One possible, although not necessary, implication of this formula is that the Minister of Defense would be a general chosen by SCAF itself.  In addition a declaration of war would require the agreement of SCAF as well as parliament.   Article 10 would create a National Defense Council headed by the president of the republic which would concern itself with broadly defined “issues relating to assuring the safety and security of the country.”  This is a much more specific renewal of a similar council called for by the 1971 constitution.  That article fell into desuetude but there is clearly some concern that this time around the Armed Forces might be more eager to put it into practice.

            These proposals for institutionalizing the power of SCAF in a new constitutional order are clearly not what the initial idea for agreement on supra-constitutional principles meant.  They do, however, speak to the Armed Forces concept of what a democratic order in the Egypt will mean and what limits will be placed on its power of decision.  It is also quite clearly a proposal designed to win a positive response from those, foreign and domestic, whose anxieties about a democratic order view it as equivalent to the unrestricted power of the Muslim Brothers, or mob rule, or a decision to initiate war with Israel. 

            The SCAF document also proposes a set of rules for the selection of a constitutional convention.  It takes authority largely away from the parliament that is about to be elected and replaces it with a vision of corporatist decision-making.  Parliament will choose 20 members of the constituent assembly from the various currents represented inside its walls.  The other 80 members will chosen from various occupational associations—already largely controlled by the government and thus indirectly influenced by SCAF—through their own internal processes.  The new assembly is to be heavily weighted to the middle classes and specifically the legal profession. The judicial branch of government (courts and prosecutors) will choose 15 members; the universities will also choose 15 members of whom 5 must be constitutional law professors; and a further 15 will be chosen by the professional associations (lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, engineers and so on).  The trade union federation and peasants union will also choose 5 members each.  The “Egyptian church”—presumably the Orthodox Coptic church—and the Azhar will choose one representative each as will the sports federation, the armed forces, the police, and the Federation of Industry.  The text helpfully provides that in many cases these representatives will be chosen by the appropriate legal mechanism of the relevant institution. 

            This understanding of the constitutional convention as a corporate rather than an elected representative body is reminiscent of the political climate in the Nasserist Egypt in which most of the members of SCAF presumably spent their adolescence and early adulthood.  This may be the golden age of order and progress to which the military leadership, and perhaps many other Egyptians, wish to return.  It is difficult to read the proposed principles without being reminded of Nasser’s Philosophy of the Revolution.  As in Nasser’s vision but now to be enshrined in the constitution is Egypt’s commitment not only to Arab unity but to the country’s Islamic and African vocations. 

            If SCAF will oversee legislation regarding the military and security, the judiciary will also oversee legislation that affects itself.  Article 5 proposes that to guarantee the independence of the judiciary the plenary associations of the judiciary will be given the freedom and responsibility to determine what legislation will affect their role.

            Overlooked, at any rate outside Egypt, in much of the discussion about this proposal are some ways in which it takes account of recent changes in the domestic and international political environments and especially the degree to which it creates new constitutional imperatives that may have significant long-term effects on the country.   Older constitutional guarantees are either implicitly or explicitly overturned while new governments may find themselves constitutionally barred from pursuing desirable policies.

            It comes as no surprise that the document reiterates that Islamic sharia is the source of law in Egypt.  New (article 2) is the proposal that it should now be a principle that the personal status of non-Muslims would be governed by their relevant religious law (that is, the non-Islamic sharia of their religious community).  This accords with contemporary Egyptian legislative practice but raises it to the level of constitutional principle.  For those who hope to create a unified civil law of marriage, divorce, and inheritance it will post a nearly insuperable constitutional barrier as well as those of ordinary law and custom.  Of course religious officials of the Christian and Muslim communities may find it welcome.

            Egypt will, in the coming years, need to re-negotiate the treaties governing the division of Nile water.  The existing treaties, initiated by the British during the imperial era and renewed during the Nasser period, strongly favor Egypt at the expense of the African countries of the upper Nile Basin.  These states have sought to renegotiate or unilaterally terminate the unequal treaties but agreed to forego such action at the time of the revolution.  The new principles would make the maintenance of Egypt’s historic rights to Nile water a constitutional issue rather than one of government policy presumably open to renegotiation.

            SCAF has also created some crucial tripwires.  The document sets several deadlines for the constitutional convention to complete its work.  In the event the convention writes a document SCAF considers unacceptable the Supreme Constitutional Court will become the final arbiter.  Whether the justices of that court will wish to, or would be well advised to, step into a conflict between SCAF, the constitutional convention, and the legislature is a question nobody has yet asked them. In the event that the convention as chosen cannot complete its work in the period assigned, it can be dissolved by SCAF which will then choose a new convention. 

            Nearly unnoticed in the discussion but possibly the most problematic of all is article 13.  Citizenship has become a significant issue in recent years especially as it concerns the children of Egyptian mothers and foreign fathers.   What has not been at issue, however, is the citizenship of other Egyptians.  The 1971 constitution explicitly provided that the regulation of citizenship was a matter of law but also provided that Egyptians retained the right both to leave and return to the national territory.  The fear of political persecution or judicial prosecution has certainly induced Egyptians to leave over the past 60 years (and more) but they did not thereby forfeit their citizenship.  It is therefore surprising that paragraph 13 of the proposals reads that although citizenship is a basic right of Egyptians and citizenship may be lost and citizens exiled or forbidden to re-enter the country as long as this is pursuant to a valid court decision.  In other words, exile is now a possible penalty that the state, through the judicial process, may impose on Egyptian citizens.  This has not been a possibility before in Egyptian law or life. Important as the courts may be in determining the rights of citizens, until now the constitution itself guaranteed these rights to Egyptians.  Now, as a matter of principle, it is proposed that that will no longer be the case.

            The attempt by SCAF to preserve its place in the institutional structure of the state may or may not succeed.   That it was an idea that many observers might have considered plausible nine months ago but no longer has much resonance with the political forces in contention reveals how much the country has changed.  It may no longer be possible to deny Egyptians the right to vote freely and fairly.  What remains is the kind of option that governments such as that of Kaiser Wilhelm in pre-war Germany:  to allow free elections and to remove as much as possible from the purview of the legislatures they empower.

Ultra-revolutionaries?

            Chou En-lai famously told Henry Kissinger in 1973 that it was still too early to be certain of the outcome of the French revolution.  Although the jibe is widely employed, no one takes it very seriously.  On the contrary, we now live in a world in which the longue durée is at most months and where the ideal model of political conflict is a sports match in all its details:  two sides playing by the rules on the field while their partisans sit politely in the stands and then return home after the game ends.  This certainly isn’t a very good description of politics and it may not even be a good description of sports where passions run high, grudges are taken home, and (from boxing to chess) opponents often engage in harassment off the field as well as on.

            In our world today sports have become ubiquitous.  Pundits and commentators employ sports metaphors with abandon.  Sports are big business and in some places sports celebrities leave the playing fields (or rooms) to enter the worlds of commerce or politics.  After the September 9 takeover of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, soccer fans—known as Ultras—have themselves at least briefly dominated the political news.  This has occasioned so much nearly hysterical coverage outside of Egypt that it seems worthwhile thinking about how it fits into the past couple of years and what it means for how we think about revolution, democracy, and political change.

            Just so there is no mistake, let me state briefly here I think of embassies the way I think of municipal water supply.  I do not support crowds taking them over.  Nor do I think it’s an essentially harmless enterprise.  Just as they need clean water, the powerfully centralized bureaucracies we call states also need to have some way to negotiate with each other over a variety of issues.  That they do so with little or no transparency protected by ruthless security even in the face of popular hostility is unremarkable.  There is, however, no reason to insist that this practical necessity of ensuring the daily (if not necessarily very smooth or very just) running of the world we live in requires any claims about higher values, morality, or the adherence to sacred duties.   What it does require is that the state valuing the embassy of another state, even one that it considers hostile or a strategic threat, safeguards the embassy.  And if the host state can’t or won’t then it’s important to think about why.  But if the state whose embassy was invaded doesn’t break relations, or formally withdraw its representation (which is different from physically removing the staff), or demand an apology then that’s also something worth thinking about.

            Judging from the comments that have appeared globally, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was such a rare or even unique event that it stands out as a testament to the complete lapse of public order, the norms of decent behavior in Egypt or anywhere else, and poses a crucial threat to the neat progress of Egypt toward democratic elections and beyond to what the French communist leader Gabriel Peri who was killed by the Nazis in 1941 called “singing tomorrows.”  I’m not sure which of these analytic moves is most misleading.

            Almost everyone who writes about Egypt, especially from outside, seems to have a particular story line that can be fitted into any particular occurrence.  Thus we keep hearing the same, more or less apologetic, story about the Mubarak regime which goes something like this:  yes, he was an autocrat, but at least when he was in power even if the trains sometimes ran off the track rather than on time, the police kept order, embassies were respected, and the xenophobia of ordinary Egyptians was kept in bounds both when it came to Israelis and other foreigners.   Ordinary Egyptians, according to this particular script, neither understand nor can be trusted with the niceties of law, order, or the safety of foreign ambassadors especially if they are either Jewish or Israeli. 

A second narrative has recently emerged that recognizes the authoritarian character of the Mubarak (and the Sadat and even possibly the Nasser) regime and accepts that mass demonstrations played a crucial role in bringing it down.  However, partisans of this narrative assert that mass demonstrations were the work of a Cairene (or at least urban) westernized middle-class and that Egypt must now do the real work of democracy.  The middle-class left, according to this view, is too enamored of street demonstrations and needs to buckle down to the hard work of party-building.  Otherwise the middle-class left threatens the transition to democracy.   Autocracy will return despite the desire of the overwhelming majority of Egyptians for democracy. 

            The first narrative blames the emotions of the mass of Egyptians for the failure of democracy; the second blames the emotions of a small slice of the population but it has the added cachet of embodying a paradox.  It turns out that it’s the very people who initially pushed hardest for democracy who are now its primary enemies.  What links both of these narratives is that the army and state bureaucracy bear no real political responsibility.  They only assume power to prevent the breakdown of public order. Purveyors of the first narrative think that’s a good thing and purveyors of the second think it’s bad.

While I’m quite aware that public safety is a real issue in Egypt, I don’t think I’m the only person who remembers that in November 2009 violence by soccer fans during World Cup preliminary matches provoked a crisis between Egypt and Algeria in which dozens of people were injured, the Algerian Embassy in Cairo was besieged, and assets of an Egyptian-owned telecom company in Algiers were torched.  This might be put down to the exuberance of the Egyptian fans except that I also happen to remember that it was Egyptian government television personalities and officials (including the son of the former president) who played a role in roiling public emotions.   It is easy to imagine a stinging critique of soccer fans as a mob whose violence deflected popular attention away from the deeper issues of politics being written about the events of 2009.  In fact, it’s not even necessary to imagine it; Joseph Mayton, founder of the English-language resource Bikya Misr in Cairo, pretty much wrote this critique for the British paper, The Guardian. 

Obviously there is much wider and deeper popular anger in Egypt about Israel.  Also the Algerian embassy, despite being in a much better known location, was not breached although it did sustain damage.  One crucial difference in the two situations was that in 2009 a phalanx of riot police, despite being pelted with bottles, torches and Molotov cocktails, prevented a smaller crowd from getting access to the embassy grounds although in the process they left a remarkably high wall of detritus on Hasan Sabri street. 

            The Mubarak government had cancelled matches in mid-January and they did not resume until mid-April when the clubs, many of which are owned by the police or the army, complained that if play didn’t resume they would go bankrupt.  The plight of the soccer clubs never figured in the national debate about the economy (the so-called “wheels of production”) that was then underway, but the government did allow play to resume.  And in a game between Zamalek and Tunisia’s Club Africain the police disappeared from the stadium, violence broke out when Egyptian fans attacked Tunisian players and an international incident between revolutionary Tunisia and revolutionary Egypt was only narrowly averted.  

There are differences of course: the Egyptian government rapidly made amends; very few Egyptians have any deep feelings about Tunisia (which at any rate does not pose a strategic threat); and no one attacked the Tunisian embassy (which is not further away from Midan al-Tahrir than the Israeli embassy). 

How is the post-January period different? The Ultras were said to have been especially angered by a battle with police during a match on September 7.  Let’s accept that they were more than ready to fight the police and that many people were angry at the deaths of five Egyptian border guards in a fire fight with Israelis pursuing the men who attacked two buses in Israel earlier in the week. 

            Perhaps the army and the police were taken unawares by an unexpected demonstration from Tahrir Square where at least tens of thousands (and possibly 100,000 by some estimates) had gathered for a “Friday of Correcting the Course” (of the revolution).  A sudden lapse of attention by the army may be a little hard to believe.  The army, which has asserted its control over Tahrir and eliminated ongoing occupations of the traffic roundabout by force, had withdrawn from the area for the period of the demonstration.  Given that almost every Friday demonstration since May has seen thousands of demonstrators split off and walk the distance of about a mile to the area near Cairo University where the Israeli Embassy is housed in a high-rise building and given that thousands had demonstrated in front of the building the week before it is hard to understand why, after building a concrete wall in front of the building, the area was only lightly guarded.

            And yet perhaps it is not so strange.  It has been suggested that the army deliberately encouraged or at least connived at the embassy take-over either to prepare the way for the renewal of an authoritarian dictatorship or to shore up its legitimacy with a population that is viscerally pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli (if not in fact viciously anti-Semitic—it all depends on who is telling this particular story).   Surprisingly no one (as far as I know) has proposed that the army was willing to have the embassy sacked as a message to the Israeli government.  This tale would at least have the advantage of explaining why the Israeli Prime Minister couldn’t reach Field Marshal Tantawi by telephone.

These particular stories, no matter what the particular spin, seem remarkably implausible to me.   It sounds like we’ve all been watching too much television or seen too many action/horror movies.  The kind where the villain performs the equivalent of flapping hummingbird’s wings (or perhaps commits a heinous murder) and months later, through the action of a Rube Goldberg apparatus, the hurricane bursts when hero breaks through a locked door and is promptly handcuffed by the villain and readied for execution. 

Rather it seems to me that a military whose legitimacy is based on the claim that it did not fire on the demonstrators in January and which, with the collapse of the police lacks the kind of force necessary to control demonstrators preemptively, has decided that withdrawal is sometimes the better part of valor.  Thus, just as the police withdrew from the Zamalek-Tunis match and the army withdrew from Midan al-Tahrir on September 9, there is no reason to believe that the army was prepared for a more serious assault on the Israeli embassy than had occurred the previous week when the so-called “Flagman” had scaled the building to tear down the flag.  Nor does it seem to have been ready to fire on demonstrators on the evening news.  The presence of a small fortress of a building that houses a police force for the Giza governorate more or less across the street may have given them false confidence.   That it too would have come under siege was probably not something they considered.  And if, as unconfirmed and possibly unreliable stories in the press indicate, Egyptian Prime Minister Esam Sharaf was trying to resign while all this was going on it would also explain why reaching Tantawi was so difficult. 

One important result is that the events of recent weeks have clearly attracted the attention of Prime Minister Netanyahu.  If, whatever the causal chain behind the events, Egyptians really wanted to convey the message that things are not as they were under Mubarak that message has certainly gotten across.  And the Israeli government seems to have been uncharacteristically quiet in its official responses even if private citizens and commentators have not.

            Focusing on the foreign punditry on the attack on the embassy, however, two important things to think about become salient.  The first has to do with demonstrations and elections.  My sense is that there is, at least among American observers, a tendency to focus on elections as both the goal and medium of democratic revolution.  Like embassies and clean water, elections can be very useful practices.  As the Egyptian political scientist Rabab al-Mahdi pointed out in a recent article for the daily Al-Shorouk, “correcting the course” means thinking seriously about what you think the course ought to be.  And the goal of the revolution was to allow Egyptians to have greater control over their own destiny.  Electoral democracy in contemporary capitalist societies (a category which includes Egypt) is a notoriously imperfect instrument for affecting the lives of most citizens.

To paraphrase the century-old work of Robert Michels, political parties can become like professional sports teams, owned by their administrative staff and other investors.  They engage in biannual or quadrennial playoffs around which their partisans are mobilized while most of the fans are largely demobilized awaiting the outcome.  Politics, in short, becomes a game to be watched rather than an activity in which citizens engage.   When American foreign policy experts (in government and academia) talk about democracy, I always suspect that this is what they’re thinking of.

            The increased number and intensity of demonstrations, by teachers, industrial workers, students, and government employees, are testimony to the ways in which Egyptians have continued to participate in politics.  Without minimizing what the impact of the Israeli embassy take-over could have been, it is clearly not like the occupation of the American embassy in Iran in 1979. That take-over was the extension of an internal conflict between components of the revolutionary coalition seeking dominance over each other.  Egypt is awash in demonstrations and strikes, but demonstrations, strikes, protests, and public debate are also part of democratic governance. And, as far as external observers can tell, most of them are local and immediate in the nature of the demands and leadership.

            A good example is precisely the protest about “correcting the course” which addressed, at least in passing, the problem of the election laws. These have received remarkably little discussion outside Egypt.   The decision of the Military Council days ago that the upcoming elections will be wholly based on proportional representation (rather than a mix of proportional-list and individual candidacies) appears to be the outcome of the persistent mass demonstrations, not very transparent discussions, and some emerging tension between the army and the Muslim Brothers.  While foreigners will not be able to contribute to election campaigns, it’s less clear what kinds of rules will govern how Egyptian businessmen and wealthy individuals are involved.  There are, technically, strict limits on how much campaigns can spend.  It remains to be seen how those rules will be extended, massaged, or enforced. 

            The second issue about protests and Cairo is to note how little attention external observers seem to have paid to the importance of mass demonstrations in the capital.  Much has been written about why the Egyptian (and Tunisian) military reacted differently than armies elsewhere especially Syria and Libya.  Much has also been written about the economic motives of mass discontent and the importance of demonstrations (sometimes with significant violence) in provincial cities.  These are undoubtedly all part of the story.  Less attention has been paid, as far as I can tell, to what difference it made that mass demonstrations occurred in capital cities (Tunis and Cairo) where government was paralyzed and the sheer size of demonstrations in a primate (that is, the largest) city overwhelmed the repressive forces of order.   Twenty percent of the population of Egypt and Tunisia live in the greater metropolitan area of the capital.  The inability of the revolutionary movement to enter Damascus and its repression in Tripoli seem to have played a role in the political process in Syria and Libya. 

             Attempting to downplay the importance of Cairo in the Egyptian revolutionary process or the role of demonstrations as forms of participation (and not only contestation) is as misleading as expecting that the Egyptian revolution will be over in a month or a year.  Chou would have known better.

           

Memories of 1977 in Cairo

            On a hot summer’s day in 1977 I walked from downtown Cairo out along the road parallel to the Nile, the Corniche, past Bulaq and over the bridge to Zamalek.   Egypt, under President Anwar Sadat, had made a few gestures in the direction of openness but in fact the country was still in the grip of a one-party state. There was, in those days, no elevated highway over 26^th of July Street nor did the May 15 bridge exist.  Crossing the Nile meant using the now-dismantled Abu al-Eila bridge, an old-fashioned filigree of a bridge erected, I believe, by a French company specializing in cast iron structures at the beginning of the 20^th century.  Further downstream you could see, as you still can today, the railway bridge that crosses from Shubra to Imbaba for the train traffic heading south to Asyut, Luxor and Aswan.  It was a perfect place to take a picture of the Nile.  So I did.  In fact, I took several and hoped that the heat would not affect the Kodachrome in my single-lens reflex camera before I returned to the United States in several months.

 No Pictures  Allowed in 1977

            I needn’t have bothered.  My reverie was broken when a man, probably in his 50s, tapped me on the shoulder.  My Arabic was not very good nor was his English but what he was able to make what he wanted perfectly clear.  It was illegal to take pictures of bridges or from bridges.  I had broken the law and I had two choices.  One, I could remove the film from my camera, expose it on the spot, and destroy not only the pictures I had just taken but all the rest as well.  Two, I could accompany him to a police station.   I was a foreigner with a very very limited command of Arabic; obviously I was on the verge of being accused of being a spy; I had plans to see a friend who was waiting his apartment.  The photos I had just taken had been completely touristic and had absolutely no value to me.  The choice was pretty clear and soon a ribbon of exposed film was curled up in the hands of a self-satisfied and self-righteous Egyptian citizen.  Memory can always play us false, but I seem to remember it gained a slightly pinkish tone as it overexposed in the hot sun.  Somewhat shaken I trudged across the rest of the bridge, stopping only for a juice at a small store that, forty years later, is still there with the same somewhat shopworn pictures of the Virgin Mary on the back wall.

            During that same summer of 1977 Shaykh Mahmud al-Dhahabi, the former minister of religious endowments, was kidnapped by an Islamist group.  The government press turned its attention briefly from the election of Menahem Begin, routinely described as a fascist and war-monger under whose governance Israel would move even further from peace, to the traumatic murder of a former high government official.  The state-controlled media was nearly useless for rendering a decent description of these kinds of events, let alone any understanding of why they occurred or what their implications might be.  Occasionally by comparing the nearly identical stories in the leading newspapers astute readers could glean additional bits of information.  It was therefore common, among those who could afford it to use a short-wave radio to listen either to the BBC Arabic Service or to Radio Monte Carlo.

            As a consequence when I arrived at my destination, still shaken, I was invited to listen to the news.  Listening to foreign radio broadcasts was not something lightly done.  I believe it was still illegal in those days (as was travelling off the main roads in the Delta for foreigners or taking pictures of bridges) to listen, but at any rate my host took appropriate precautions.  We retired to the kitchen, a room which shared no walls with neighboring apartments.  The short-wave radio was turned to the lowest possible volume compatible with audibility.  Even if it was legal, there was always the risk that the neighbors might inform the police or employers of activity which was certainly frowned upon. 

            It was, I believe, the following year that Gad al-Haqq Ali Gad al-Haqq became the Mufti of the Egyptian Republic, a post which he shortly relinquished to become the most prominent religious figure in Egypt, the Shaykh of the Azhar.  The Azhar was founded more than a 1000 years ago when Cairo as a city was first constructed to be the capital of a Shi’i empire whose roots lay in western North Africa.  Gad al-Haqq, during his career, issued a great many legal opinions or fatwas.  One, for which he is still known, dates from around this period and proposes that the common Egyptian practice of excising part or all of the clitoris is something good Muslims should do.  He did not say Islamic law required Muslims to do but he did argue that it was preferable that they do and that it was sanctioned by past practice and argument.

            The Egypt of the 2011 revolution is in many ways a very different place.  The focus on mobile phones, Twitter and Facebook as communications devices overlooks many dimensions of their use.  Because photography has long been so popular in Europe and the US both as an art and as a popular practice, it is easy to overlook the use of mobile phones as cameras even though since 2003 globally more cameras have been sold bundled into phones than as stand-alone devices. Relatively few Egyptians have dedicated cameras.  Mobile phones had already been widely used to record both video and still images, but they were nearly ubiquitous even in the early days of the revolution. 

 The troops came out and so did the cameraphones

            Since Foucault academics have come to think of photography as a form of surveillance and as a “gaze” of power.  This was not how I experienced photography during the demonstrations I was in. It was not uncommon on January 28 to watch Egyptians surrounding tanks in downtown Cairo, arms extended and holding mobile phones aloft to photograph soldiers and tanks.   This cascade of photography continued and I frequently saw parents photographing their smiling children standing on tanks next to soldiers in the days after Mubarak left Cairo.  Once, late in the spring walking back home over the span that replaces the old Abu Eila Bridge I even noticed a small bus pull over to the northern sidewalk.  A handful of weary, bearded protesters clambered out while their veiled wives remained seated.  They were heading for the circumferential highway after what must have been an organized trip to from either a suburban neighborhood or rural town for a bit of sightseeing and political activism.  They took pictures of each other to commemorate their day, got back into the bus and drove off into the sunset.

On several occasions people asked to be included in photographs with me and on many others smilingly asked with some insistence that I take their photographs.  None of these people expected to receive copies of the photographs. Rather I think people wanted a record of their participation.  The desired record, however, was at once public in the sense that it was freely and openly done and private in the sense that another person rather than an agency of the state possessed it.   In some cases people, especially those carrying home-made signs advocating highly idiosyncratic demands, would move so that I could photograph them more easily.  That, in immense demonstrations where concerns such as the fate of a single person who disappeared in police custody before the revolution, makes sense.   But people also asked me, even when my camera was simply hanging around my neck, to take their pictures.  Thus I have a lovely photo of two smiling men, one without a front tooth and wearing a baseball cap next to a friend, a burly man with a large beard that in Egypt is easily associated with Salafis and in the US with working-class conservatism.   On another occasion, a man who looked to be in his 70s, asked me to take a picture of him holding a picture of a demonstration from 50 years ago.  As he was explaining to me the significance of the photo he suddenly realized that I was not Egyptian and said with some surprise and to general laughter, “You’re a foreigner”. 

 Recollections of Earlier Demonstrations

Only twice did I run into problems taking photographs.  In late May during a Friday demonstration a very young man asked me take his picture.  He may have been in his very early twenties and he had very long, flowing hair.  For a second, indeed, I thought he might be a young woman.  I was leaving Midan al-Tahrir to meet a friend for lunch but since I expected it to take only a minute I agreed.  He smiled sweetly and I took his picture.  Suddenly a voice from ten yards away broke out.  It was a young woman, dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt.  She was exactly the kind of middle-class Westernized woman that Americans routinely expect to be champions of liberal ideas, free expression, and unrestricted personal freedom.  She objected to my taking his picture.  I asked what reason she had to intervene and as the conversation meandered around it became clear, without any explicit statement from her, that she was afraid an effeminate young man would become the face of the Egyptian revolution.   More people gathered around and someone asked me what I planned to do with the picture.  It was just a picture I had been asked to take and we all agreed it wasn’t really an issue.   

A Picture That Wasn't Quite Forbidden

The people who refused to let me take their pictures were children.  Not children at demonstrations who were often as eager to be photographed as adults but the children on the streets of Cairo who sell matches, flowers, and Kleenex. 

If attitudes toward photography have changed at least in step with if not necessarily because of the wider availability of cameras, the availability of information has also increased.  It has become a cliché to think of information and the Arab revolts as connected at the hip to Twitter, Facebook and Al-Jazeera but these are, I think, far from the whole story.  In the 1970s the government-owned press consisting of Al-Ahram, Al-Gumhouria, and Al-Akhbar provided most of the news Egyptians consumed (as well as wrapping most of the bean and falafel sandwiches they consumed).  Nearly identical in coverage and adulation of the nation’s political leaders and their policies, these papers provided Egyptians with relatively little news of their own country or any other.  In the wake of President Anwar Sadat’s political liberalization a few new papers were given permits to publish and access to newsprint through the state import monopoly. The government thereby retained the right to manufacture occasional shortages of shipping space and Finnish log production which translated into silencing the critical and tiny newspapers of the left (Al-Ahali) and the Right.  The only other critical publications allowed were non-periodical, occasional, publications which required no license but which could, by the nature of the law permitting them to appear, only be published once.

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed an overlooked print media explosion in Egypt.  The 2004 appearance of Al-Masry al-Yawm as the first commercial daily in Egypt since before 1952 was one crucial event.  The newspaper proclaimed itself devoted to factual coverage verging on exposes just as the ideal of newspapers as objective reporters was under assault in Europe and the United States.  It was soon joined by an array of other newspapers of a variety of political viewpoints none of which were easily categorized by party as had been true of the media until that point:  Al-Dustour, Al-Karama, and Al-Shorouq which seems to have been born as a venerable newspaper of opinion.  These newspapers continued to push boundaries and create tempests, not all of which were contained in teapots.  Al-Dustour made a point of directly criticizing Hosny Mubarak and his family while Al-Masry al-Yawm was filled with accounts of government shortcomings in the provision of clean water, sewage facilities, and education to Egyptians in the capital and the provinces.  Al-Masry also provoked one of the major political crises of the Mubarak government when one of its reporters, herself wearing a headscarf, was berated by the former Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosny, for belonging to a generation of women less liberated than, as he put it, “our mothers and grandmothers.”  For a month the Egyptian parliament was consumed in a debate about the veils, headscarfs, and whether Egyptian women were more liberated or less than previous generations.  Not since the 1940s when Al-Ahram was a privately owned newspaper to which outstanding liberal intellectuals such as Taha Hussein had contributed had Egypt’s press been so lively.  Those were also the days when Egyptians could choose between Al-Ahram, Al-Balagh, and Al-Wafd al-Misri among others. 

Because the circulation of Al-Masry al-Yawm is about 200,000 (Al-Ahram is still believed to have a circulation of 300,000 and may in fact draw a larger audience since it became more independent in the wake of the revolution), it is plausible to argue that Al-Jazeera, Facebook and Twitter are more important sources of news, especially in a country where there is still widespread illiteracy.  What I find more important, however, is that (parallel to the point I made about photography) Egyptians can in large numbers openly access news from abroad (BBC Arabic is also available on-line and through satellite and no longer requires a short-wave in the kitchen) as well as receiving a broad range of critical views and information from at-home. 

Shaykh Gad al-Haqq might be pleased that more women are wearing headscarves than in his day, but he might be less pleased at changes within the institution he once headed.   In 2007 the Azhar Council on Islamic Research issued a statement that female genital mutilation is neither required nor desirable from the point of view of Islamic law.  The death of 12-year old Badour Shakour that June as a result of such an operation shocked much of the country’s conscience although it is also estimated that between 70 and 90 percent of Egyptian women in the 15-49 year old age range have been subjected to one or another variation of it.  The procedure was medicalized in the 1990s and only physicians could legally perform it until it was completely criminalized in 2008.  If the Azhar and the present Mufti of the Republic, Ali Gomaa, are on board, the parliamentary delegation of the Muslim Brothers was not.  They opposed the 2008 legislation on the grounds that it was yet another measure imposed on an unwilling society by an authoritarian state and that the procedure was not, in fact, in opposition to classical Islamic law.  One of the deeper ironies of their stance was that it not only contradicted the Azhar but was in opposition to the expressed opinion of Gamal al-Banna, the now elderly younger brother of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brothers.  Gamal al-Banna was considered a stalking horse for the Islamist movement in the 1940s when, as a trade union official, he regularly had run-ins with the left and he spent much of the Nasser and Sadat eras in a kind of splendid isolation writing books on Islamic labor law, the increasingly violent Islamist movements that murdered Shaykh Dhahabi, and the failure of the Weimar Republic.  Western commentators tie themselves in knots trying to discover whether his grand-nephew, the Francophone scholar Tariq Ramadan is truly liberal, truly open, and an important spokesman for Islamic movements.  Al-Banna meanwhile has emerged as a strikingly open defender of Islamic liberalism who work is exclusively published in Arabic for Arabic-speaking audiences.  Many of those engaged in violent Islamist movements of the kind that first emerged into public view in 1977 are now seriously considering engaging in electoral politics.  Nowhere is this more striking than in the transformation of two cousins convicted of participating in the assassination of Anwar Al-Sadat, Tariq and Abboud Zumr.  They were released from prison after the revolution not because the new regime was particularly well-disposed to them but because they had served their prison terms and were being held without any legal justification whatsoever.  Unlike many Egyptians they claim to have found the late Mubarak era less problematic for Egyptian hopes of democracy than the period when Anwar Sadat was president.  At all events, they now expect, if not themselves to run, at least to be members of an Islamist party (not the Muslim Brothers) in politics.

There is a peculiar debate about democracy waged in the American and European press these days and much of it centers on whether Egyptian society is conducive to democracy.  This debate remains curiously frozen in opposing and highly ideological camps to my mind.  Where some observers see very little change in an Islamic social ethos that drove protests for justice in medieval Cairo and during Napoleon’s invasion similar to those of the past century, others see a vibrant democracy now encompassing almost all the organized political forces in the country including the Muslim Brothers and the so-called Salafis.   On that summer day in 1977 when I destroyed some innocuous film, Egypt still echoed with the slogan “No voice higher than the voice of the revolution” which had been used to choke off debate and discussion.  Egypt is, in many ways a different place than it was then and Egyptians are, in equally many ways, trying to make it more different still.  This revolution, unlike what occurred in 1952, has allowed a plurality of voices to be heard.  That’s a very important and wonderful thing to my mind but by the very nature of plurality they’re not all singing the same song. 

A Few Thoughts on the Muslim Brothers

                   

           

            The Muslim Brothers have been getting remarkably good press in the United States.  This is understandable in one way but it is also peculiar in another.  It is understandable because most people who study and write about the Middle East today don’t want to be (or even to seem to be) prejudiced against Muslims or Islam.  Equally, nothing is more desirable in academic discourse than showing that something is not what it has seemed to be in the mainstream media. It is also understandable because the Muslim Brothers have dramatically changed much of their rhetoric over the past decade and because they have made determined efforts to cultivate support in American academia and the press.  And, lastly, Americans of all persuasions share a naively touching belief that only good people accomplish good things.  So if Egyptian democracy, for example, requires that the Brothers participate then they must be democrats.

            What is peculiar, though, is how infrequently American academics and reporters pay any attention to the complaints and criticisms of people who have known (or been members of) the Muslim Brothers for years, worked alongside them, or simply interacted with them in the same communities.   The most vocal of these critics are Egyptian Christians, liberal Muslims, and the small group of Egyptian leftists, but there are also deeply religious (and even devout) Muslims who mistrust and dislike the Muslim Brothers as a political tendency and as an organization. 

            On February 13, 2011 the New York Times magazine published an article by Nicholas Kulish describing an interview he had with the noted constitutional attorney, former parliamentarian, and Muslim Brothers leader Subhi Saleh.   Kulish, who speaks German and was once head of the Times’s Berlin bureau, must have been thrown for a loop by Saleh who he wonderingly describes as being clean-shaven, wearing an orange sweater and black flip-flops, and keeping his Kleenex in a leopard-shape stuffed animal toy.  Kulish, it appears, has had relatively little experience interacting with Egyptian professionals.  He knew Saleh’s apartment wouldn’t be “Bin Laden’s cave” but for some reason he doesn’t seem to have expected a person who argues before the country’s highest court to live in a “tasteful apartment with landscape paintings and three chandeliers….”

            Having established that Saleh’s decorating preferences accord well with those of readers on the Upper East Side and Georgetown (although I do wonder if Saleh favors Empire style furniture with heavy gilt or something a bit more contemporary), Kulish proceeds to the substance of his article.  He informs us that “the Muslim Brotherhood sounds like a fictional name a scriptwriter would give to a terrorist group.  Its actual members don’t really fit that cartoonish characterization.  They come across as civic-minded people of faith.  There is none of the proselytizing or the menacing tones of hard-core Salafists—the Al Qaeda types.”

            I have to admit to being a little stunned by this comment which is the core of the article.  Perhaps Kulish is conflating stereotypes of the Aryan Brotherhood, a criminal organization based in American prisons, with a religious association.  But if you translated “Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimoon” as the “Fraternity of Muslims” would an innocent reporter imagine them to be refugees from a John Belushi movie?  Of course members of the Brotherhood don’t fit that cartoonish characterization either.

            Let’s accept that the people Kulish met were indeed civic-minded and that leaders such as Saleh certainly did not address a reporter for the New York Times with menacing tones.   Let’s assume, for the moment at any rate, that Sobhi Saleh (advocate before the Supreme Constitutional Court and former parliamentarian) is at least as smart as Nicholas Kulish and in fact knows much more about Kulish’s view of the world than Kulish knows about the Muslim Brothers.

            Suggesting that Saleh knows more about Kulish than the reverse, by the way, does not imply that Saleh is a cartoonish terrorist.  It just means that Kulish was out of his depth in dealing with a political leader sufficiently astute and intelligent to manipulate him.   This doesn’t require Saleh to be any more sinister than most American politicians, businessmen, or university presidents.  They all appear to engage in regular interviews with reporters while doing a variety of things (from embezzlement to infidelity) that they want to keep hidden.   

            In the months since that interview Saleh has emerged as a much more voluble spokesman of the Muslim Brothers in the Egyptian press.  Two of Saleh’s recent statements are of interest.  In regard to the imposition of the so-called hudud penalties, Saleh has said that it is the desire of the Muslim Brothers to introduce them into Egyptian legislation.   These are the criminal penalties, such as amputation for theft, whipping for drunkenness or crucifixion for highway robbery, that evoke such alarm in the United States and Europe.  As Saleh knows, of course, these penalties have rarely been employed in Islamic history and attempts to introduce them in contemporary societies from Pakistan to Sudan have met with unmitigated failure.   Relatively few Egyptians are likely to be worried that theirs will shortly become a society of one-armed former bandits.  What they may see as more menacing is his claim that all real Muslims want to introduce these penalties and that anyone who refuses to introduce them is not really a Muslim at all.  What Saleh is setting up is the argument that Muslims (of whom there are many) who resolutely don’t want these penalties introduced despite their canonical status are not really Muslims at all.  A thoughtful scriptwriter here might ponder a scenario in which civic-minded people in Columbus, Ohio favor the death penalty partly because of its Scriptural provenance but equally because they will accuse abolitionists of being un-American. 

            If Saleh became an object of conflict for this statement he an object of ridicule and outrage among liberals and not a few devout Muslims for his later assertion that men in the Muslim Brothers should only marry female members.  Even seemingly devout and demure veiled women who were not in the organization, he said, were really unsuitable for creating proper Muslim families he said.   No one, I think, objects if members of the Muslim Brothers turn to each other for love, affection and as partners in family formation.  The serious problems that are raised, of course, are that Saleh’s assertion indicates that he seems to think that only members of his organization are really good Muslims and, moreover, that the Muslim Brotherhood is something of an alternate and closed society.   There is no reason that the Brotherhood cannot have such a vocation but it is easier to understand the unease with which many Egyptians—Muslim and Christian—might view it if that is indeed what it wants to be.

Although Kulish could not have known in February 2011 what Saleh would say several months later, Saleh’s general attitudes have undergone no significant change.  Saleh didn’t volunteer these ideas then but neither did Kulish make any attempt to elicit Saleh’s thinking.   

It could be said that Saleh was simply speaking for himself.   The Muslim Brothers and their supporters often make exactly that case.  Off-message statements by leaders of the Muslim Brothers are often said not to reflect the official position of the organization. So, too, the Brotherhood frequently disavows the actions of members when they attract negative attention.   These disavowals are the cause of some popular distrust of the Brothers as an organization.  On the one hand they have a well-deserved and well-burnished reputation for the discipline and commitment of their members.  On the other, the leadership immediately invokes the claim that they lack control over members when the words or deeds of members provoke unwanted attention.  The earliest, and still cited, examples are the instances in which members of the organization assassinated Judge Ahmed Khazindar and Prime Minister Mahmoud al-Nuqrashi in the 1940s.  The Brothers have denounced such violence and members have not engaged in it in decades.  What remains a problem, however, is that the Brothers continue to trumpet their discipline except when it becomes uncomfortable to do so.  What people legitimately wonder about is whether the Brotherhood is playing a double game.  When members of the Muslim Brothers took part in demonstrations cutting the main north-south transport arteries in the southern province of Qena in April 2011, the leadership denounced their efforts after a couple of weeks as it became clear the Supreme Military Council and the government were weary of the ongoing dispute.

The issue of member discipline matters a great deal because it goes to the heart of what kind of an organization the Muslim Brotherhood is in a political environment in which no Egyptians think of it as a “cartoonish” terrorist organization (leaving aside the issue of whether Al-Qaeda is another such).   In April 2011, the Muslim Brothers created the Justice and Freedom party to participate in parliamentary elections.  This party, they claimed, will be completely independent of the Brotherhood although it will take positions generally consonant with its politics and those of Islamism more generally.  Unlike the MB itself this party accepts Christians as members and one of the vice presidents is a Coptic intellectual, Rafiq Habib.   Habib has served as an advisor to leaders of the MB and he was also an officer in the Wasat party, itself a splinter from the MB.  Sometimes derided as a “professional Christian” he has shown, in interviews, a fairly clear political line which is quite similar to the one Al-Bishri has urged on the Brothers.  Habib has said he has no desire to see Egyptian Christians lose their own cultural heritage and civilization and enter into the kind of secularist compromise that characterizes European Christianity.  For him, it seems, the best guarantee of the stability and security of the Copts as a community is the implementation of the Brotherhood’s vision of an Islamic Egypt: where people’s primary loyalty is to their community.  Thus he sees the Justice and Freedom party as the guarantor not only of Muslim society but of his own best hopes for an admittedly subordinate but nevertheless intact Christian society.

            How independent is the electoral party from the parent organization and, equally pertinently, what kind of organization is the parent?  Hassan al-Banna founded the MB to serve various functions.  It was to be, depending on social circumstance and the needs of members, a mystical Sufi order, a political party, an instrument for social reform, and an Islamic confraternity.  In the last decade the MB has claimed to be a primarily a social movement and in the last few months it has explored the possibility of registering with the Ministry of Social Affairs as a non-governmental organization.  Under existing law this would allow the Ministry to dissolve the organization if it were deemed to exercise political functions.  The MB leadership would, of course, claim that the Freedom and Justice party is a political organization but since the Brotherhood has provided most of the members of the new party, chosen its top leadership (almost entirely from within its leadership), and provides the guidelines for its activity this will be a difficult argument to get most Egyptians to accept.  Many are quite skeptical.

            Some top members and a few of the youth have left the MB.  They frequently pay their respects to the organization in which they spent a more or less lengthy period of their life but generally have indicated that to remain in the MB is to forego further personal growth.  The numbers are small but they do suggest a disturbing trend in which many of those who seem to form bridges between the Brotherhood and other sectors of society (including relatively conservative but non-Salafi religious sectors) leave.   They also suggest the strong possibility that within a couple of years the Brotherhood might have some real competition—not from the liberal or secular forces—from other centrist or conservative parties such as the Justice party in which Mustafa al-Naggar plays a leading role or the Rennaissance party founded by Ibrahim Zaafarani, a doctor and former leader of the Brothers in Alexandria, the city Subhi Saleh also calls home. 

            As the MB has expanded the number of seats it plans to contest in a parliamentary election, it has also said it will not run a candidate for president.  In part this move is designed to reassure the Egyptian public that they do not hope to gain control over both the legislative and the executive branches.  In part, however, it may reflect the Brotherhood’s hope and preference for a president under a still-to-be-written constitution who will have very limited powers.  The Brothers may fully understand that they are not likely to win a presidential race but that they can realistically hope to be a powerful party in a powerful parliament. 

            When one of the top leaders of the Brotherhood, Abd al-Munim Abu Al-Futuh decided to run for president as an independent he was warned not to and then expelled.  It has been widely argued that the Brotherhood leadership worried that if Abu al-Futuh ran he would be seen as the stalking horse of the organization.  They may also have worried about the fate of their organization if they cannot get their members to abide by its decisions.  In other words, Abu al-Futuh presented a profound challenge.  Having expelled him, however, a different dynamic begins to appear.  For if the Brotherhood are indeed an organization in civil society like other non-governmental organizations then why exactly is it expelling members for their choices about political participation?  The Brothers and their friends and supporters would no doubt say this shows that they can never win, especially with skeptics like me:  if they allowed Abu al-Futuh to run they aree seen as sneakily trying to control both branches; if they expel him for running anyway they are still seen negatively.

            The problem for the Brotherhood is that outside its own ranks and those who are already its friends and supporters it garners quite a bit of distrust.  This is obviously not because it espouses Islam.  It is because of the lack of transparency in the organization itself, its high level of control over the political and social lives of its members, and its assertion that the Brotherhood leadership itself knows better than anyone else in Egypt what Islamic principles might mean in the present.  Its on-again off-again relationship with the youth movement in Midan al-Tahrir and what many see as an increasingly close relationship with the Military Council has confirmed many in their antagonism to it.

            Nevertheless it can probably safely be said that almost all Egyptians believe that the Brotherhood represents a very large slice of the Egyptian public and that no real democracy is possible without it.  What is apparent is that, in opposition, the Brothers clearly prefer parliamentary democracy to autocracy in hands other than their own.   There is, however, one possible way out of the impasse they find themselves in:  agreeing to a constitutional document or at least something like Muhammad al-Baradei’s constitutional principles before the next election rather than waiting for elected parliamentarians to choose a constituent assembly.  What remains to be seen, however, as the demonstrations in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt once again pick up force is whether the parliamentary elections still scheduled for September and the constitution are really the primary topics on the agenda.  Even as the international media has turned its attention away from Egypt, it looks as if what Lenin once called “dual power” is re-emerging: the masses in the streets and the still powerful remnants of the old institutional order gear up for yet another confrontation.  In this situation there is every reason for US officials to talk to the Brothers but there is equally no reason to be naïve about them.  And lastly there is no reason whatsoever to believe that, in a very fluid situation, they will continue to represent the center of conservative Islamic politics in Egypt today.

           

Homely Thoughts on the Egyptian Economy : I

 

            While teaching at the American University in Cairo, three mornings a week I took a bus from Zamalek, an island in the middle of the Nile, to the campus in the desert far on the eastern edge of the urban area.  The newly-built or expanded freeways and roads are crowded with cars and private buses.  I had time to reflect on some of the problems of the Egyptian economy of which this is the initial installment. 

The first time I lived in Cairo for an extensive period of time was 1980.  Then foreigners were often surprised by how crowded the public transport system, almost exclusively made up of buses, was.  Buses were more than full.  Passengers felt packed in and would sometimes have to hang to each other on the steps at the doors.  Entry and exit sometimes resembled an athletic competition as the driver slowed but did not stop to allow people to jump off and on. 

            The Mubarak government solved the problem of an overcrowded public transit system: it largely dismantled it.  The two lines of the subway system that run north and south are cheap, efficient and well-run but they don’t get most Cairenes where they need to go.  And therein hangs a tale not only of urban inconvenience but also of a transit system which is, in one way that economists think about these things, highly efficient.  Unfortunately it is therefore a system that imposes profound costs on both the public and the private sectors and makes firms within them less and less profitable over time.

            Much has been written about Cairo traffic:  how much time it can take to travel even short distances, how much pollution it produces, how annoying it is.  These accounts tell us quite a bit about how traffic affects the consumer (or user, if you prefer).  People waste quite a bit of time; poor health whether due to the prompt effects of pollution or high blood pressure extract resources from society.    

            Looking at transportation, especially public transit, this way isn’t obviously wrong.  It accords with a prominent critique of economics (usually phrased as a criticism of “neoliberalism” or “globalization”) that is very popular in area studies generally and Middle East studies in particular.  Public policy, it seems, is privileging firms by making ordinary people bear the costs of transportation in private.  This looks very similar to the kinds of policies that have also led, in Egypt, to investments that have created gated communities (Dream Land) or upper class suburban environments (Qatamiyyah or Sixth of October City). 

            The provision of transportation by firms or agencies for their workers seems like a plausible work-around.  And, in a sense it is.  It’s one of those conveniences that seem to increase the income of workers.  So, too, the provision of housing or medical care, or any of the other non-cash sources of income that firms and public agencies often provide their workers.  And taking them away would clearly decrease income available for other purposes.

            But in fact the provision of transportation (or housing or any other good) isn’t best thought of as an increase in income to workers.  Historically the provision of in-kind income has served two purposes.  One is to overcome the weakness in existing markets for particular goods.  The other purpose is to tie workers to the workplace.  The second goal is usually predicated on existing imperfections or shortcomings in labor markets or product markets.  In 19^th century England and early 20^th century Egypt, it was common for factory owners to provide housing, groceries and other goods directly to workers.  This was frequently necessary because the available stock of housing, other commodities or services was initially so small as either to be physically unavailable or available only at exorbitant market prices.  Thus the provision of goods and services in-kind substituted for the inability of prevailing money wages to command what workers needed to live.  In such conditions, however, owners rapidly found (if they did not already know it) that the provision of such in-kind income made workers dependent on the owners and far more amenable to factory discipline.  To lose one’s job was immediately to lose one’s home or access to a store.

            In the absence of effective markets, workers accepted the provision of in-kind income but resented it.  They especially resented the control over their lives it provided owners but they were aware that they were also being provided with inferior goods at monopoly prices.  Generally trade unions attempted to end the provision of in-kind wages and substitute higher (and presumably more nearly adequate) money wages.

            Owners were also frequently more than willing to move away from the provision of in-kind income.  What owners realized was that what looked like income to workers frequently involved capital investments that were less profitable than their core business.  What looked like in-kind income to workers was often, it turned out, an unprofitable charge on capital.  Mill owners discovered they were participants in a very illiquid housing market with sunk and essentially irrecoverable capital charges.  Or they were in the grocery business with perishable goods and a workforce they found difficult to monitor. 

            Or, in the case of many industrial firms and government agencies in Egypt today, they find they are in the transportation business.  They must buy and maintain vehicles, employ drivers, insure them, and monitor them to ensure that only people who are employed are using them.  If they don't do it themselves they have to rent all these services from companies that specialize in them. Thinking of this as a charge on the firm’s capital indicates the problem:  it makes the firm less profitable by directly reducing the return on equity.  Providing transportation is a cost of doing business as much as the shipping of raw materials in or finished products out.

            In exchange for higher taxes, firms could get out of the business of running their own transportation systems.  They would leave that, generally unprofitable, business to the state.  Americans should, by the way, pay attention to this because without significant investments in public transit and rising gasoline prices it is easy to imagine that firms here will find themselves in the transportation business in the future.

            In the 1990s Egyptian policy makers made a decision to rely on private cars (including a vastly expanded taxi fleet), mini-buses and micro-buses many of which were privately owned, and a light-rail system that linked previously existing northern and southern routes.  The explosive growth of these forms of transportation has occurred thanks to subsidized prices for gasoline and diesel that are only small fractions of world price as well as the constant construction of new highways in ever more vain attempts to ease congestion.  

            Relying on privately owned small vehicles is “efficient” as economists sometimes use the term.  You can get anywhere you want to go and you can get there as comfortably as you desire.  As long as you pay the price.  Indeed you can even choose between a white cab with a meter or a black cab in which you and the driver bargain over the fare before you depart.  Efficient as the system is individually it has enormous costs socially, not the least of which is that during rush hour average speeds can drop to five kilometers an hour.  The conundrum, as in many parts of the world, is that despite the vast technical advances of the past century you must frequently travel at less than the speed a donkey or a horse would have taken you a century ago.

            There are other ways to organize transportation and many other “Third World” countries have employed them as Egypt could have.  The differences may appear to be purely technical or based on engineering, but in fact they represent very different ways of thinking about the relationship of public goods, economic development, and society.  Brazil, for example, uses dedicated bus lanes to mimic, at significantly lower cost, the rapidity and ease of light rail.  Egypt, which once had its own bus manufacturing capacity, could have done something similar.  The use of cars and privately owned buses has been a boon to cab drivers, auto importers, and investors in mini-buses.  To more than 85 million other Egyptians, not so much.

           

You Say You Want A Comparative Revolution?

            I spent a couple of days at a conference which dealt, at least in part, with the Egyptian revolution in comparative perspective.  One thing that I’ve noticed is how little interest there is in comparing 2011 to other episodes of Egyptian history in the past hundred years.  There are clearly some important differences.  The most obvious one is the role that British military and administrative power played until 1954.  Nevertheless some of the similarities and differences are instructive.  I will deal very briefly with one:  the 1919 revolution.

            The history of the 1919 revolution and the incompletely liberal parliamentary regime that was created in its wake seems largely lost to contemporary Egyptians and non-Egyptians alike.  Partly this is because the military regime that decisively came to power in 1954 made a point of tarnishing and diminishing that history.  Partly because the post-revolutionary regime was incompletely liberal and historians and social scientists have dealt with its failures harshly and rarely considered its successes.   This is unfortunate because it provides at least one plausible framework from which to view the failures of the regime that has just suffered such a major defeat.

            I draw some very brief parallels based on fairly widespread agreement among those who have studied these events and asking a bit of indulgence from some of my very expert readers.  The 1919 revolution also had roots in mass revulsion against the mis-use of legal power by a regime that was both distant from popular concerns and intent on maintaining control of the unruly population by any means.  In 1906 in the wake of an altercation, several peasants were executed by the Egyptian government for attacking British soldiers who were essentially trespassing on private land.  This became the first media cause in 20^th century Egypt as a wave of pamphlets, speeches, songs, and other popular forms of communication were deployed to transform some quite ordinary peasants into symbols of government misrule.  It was, I suggest, the equivalent of the wave of revulsion against the brutal beating of Khalid Said.

            The campaign around Dinshaway was carried forward by what were then relatively new media:  the newspapers, printed pamphlets, and plays as well as songs.  This media campaign did not cause the revolution but it certainly helped to spread a sense of revulsion and politically conscious antagonism to the state.  In addition other new media were just being deployed such as the telephone and telegraph which, for the first time, made it possible to communicate from Alexandria in the north to Aswan in the south instantaneously.  This was itself a part of what was an earlier wave of globalization which, for example, also connected Egypt to cotton markets in Liverpool, Manchester and New Orleans by the same means and made international prices local prices more or less literally overnight.

            Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians had earlier signed petitions making Saad Zaghlul and his Wafd party their agent to negotiate independence with the British.  Unlike the button clicking that brought hundreds of thousands of Egyptians in 2010 to sign up electronically for the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page, in 1918 people literally signed a power of attorney.  Those who couldn’t read or write (and may therefore have missed the Facebook page) used their seals to stamp their acceptance.

            The colonial regime was in the process of consolidating its control over the country.  In international law, Egypt was an occupied country when World War I broke out.  Although subject to British control it was understood to have the capacity for independence.  In 1918 the British announced plans to transform the country into an imperial dependency and to create a legislative body to enhance their control over the country.  This was, in some ways, even more threatening to Egyptian self-governance than Husni Mubarak’s plans to pass presidential power to his son.

            The revolution that began in March when Zaghlul was exiled from Egypt as he was about to set sail with a delegation for the Versailles conference (whence the name of his party—the “Wafd” or delegation) was spontaneous, spreading from north to south within a day or two.  The economy came to a halt and the state effectively ceased to function.  Despite the absence of any coercive power on the part of the state there appears to have been relatively little violence against either British soldiers or officials or foreigners more generally. 

            Two main differences are apparent.  The British deployed massive armed force to put down the revolt.  Although the revolt itself appeared to be spontaneous and massive, there was an existing political leadership drawn from a political elite that had both a political program (“complete independence”) and relatively high degree of unity across regional and religious differences.  Although the revolt itself was suppressed by the end of April 1919, by 1923 the British had recognized the independence of Egypt.   The 1923 constitution created a bicameral legislature.  Unfortunately, it allowed the monarch to rule with only slight hindrance by a majority party.  Something of a mixed bag.  More exciting but less glamorous than the 2007 television serial, King Farouk which is, I’m afraid, all that most people today know about the period.

            One important difference worth considering is that in 1919, unlike 2011, there was a unified civilian (and non-religious) political leadership consisting of members of the political and economic elite (former government ministers, land owners, businessmen).  Their demands were expressed in fairly pithy terms (complete independence; the country belongs to the people, religion belongs to God).  Whether any of them were truly charismatic is open to question but they certainly inspired significant confidence as manifested both in the signature campaign I described and in the degree of widespread support for their role as interlocutors with the British.