Which is the Lesser of Two Evils?

Egyptians today know they are voting for the lesser of two evils, but have a hard time determining which is the lesser. This is how part of my family in Egypt voted today in the presidential election run off : one couple went together to the polls together to cancel out each other’s vote. He suggested to his wife that they should spare themselves the hassle in the heat and just stay home, but she was determined to go to the polls, so he reluctantly had to go himself just to counter her vote. Although she had been a staunch supporter of the anti-Mubarak revolution, the wife voted for Shafiq, because she loathed the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Morsi and all he represented even more. Although he equally opposes an Islamist takeover, the husband voted for Morsi, on the basis that the people could always oust the Brotherhood, but could never oust the military, who wield the ultimate power and can only be minimally counterbalanced, at best. The critical factor in the husband’s reasoning is that the powers of the president have not yet been defined, and it is clear that the military is waiting for the outcome of the election: if Shafiq prevails, the military will define the powers of the president as virtually limitless, in other words Mubarak’s dictatorship on steroids; on the other hand, if the Islamist wins, the role of the president will be defined in the most limited terms possible. That rationale is not without merit.

Either way, many, even most, Egyptians are voting for the lesser of two evils, however they define the outcome. There is blame to be assigned on every side: the Muslim Brotherhood, unarguably, overreached in trying to control both the legislative and the executive, and in so doing spooked a sizeable proportion of the population. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is making an even more naked grab for complete power, and is prepared to nullify elections results and squash dissent unmercifully: not a single officer, high or low, has been held accountable for the brutality exercised against demonstrators and the deaths that resulted from it.

Then there are those who are opting out altogether, and heeding the appeal by famous writer Alaa Aswany who makes the analogy that, when a team realizes that the game is rigged, the only option is to stop playing, rather than legitimize the fraudulent victory of the opponent. Vote, opt out, cancel each other’s votes: no good options, no good outcome for Egypt today. So there are those post all over their Face Book pages: Pray for Egypt!

Egypt's Mitary Coup: Back to the Future

It’s not that a military power grab was not a scenario foretold: back in January 2011, with the revolution ongoing in Tahrir and Mubarak still in power, the warnings were many: Be careful what you wish for! You may get a historical first: an authentic people’s revolution that turns into a coup d’etat, sixty years after a coup d’etat in 1952, by Colonel Nasser et al, that turned into a socialist ‘revolution.’

Today, the worst case scenario has come to pass: ahead of this weekend’s presidential election, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces- Field Marshall Tantawi and company- mounted a ‘soft’ coup, in one swift blow re-instating martial law, dissolving Parliament, ruling for the eligibility of their own candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, and announcing the formation of a constituent assembly of their choice to set a new constitution, new parliamentary eligibility rules, and the powers of a new president.

The military’s candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, is a former Air Force Commander, just like his role model Hosni Mubarak; just like Mubarak, he is a strongman whose mantra is ‘I or the Islamists’.  In today’s Egypt, this slogan resonates with a wide swath of disillusioned, exhausted and intimidated citizenry, fearful of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover; they breathe a sigh of relief at the prospect of ‘back to the future’, carried along in a miasma of willful, collective amnesia about the corruption of the Mubarak elite and the brutality of his security forces, police and military alike. All over Face Book, they are giving thanks for sparing Egypt ‘the Iran scenario,’ even if it ends in a Turkey-style military takeover; over Iran, they will take Turkey any day. So would I.

But what if the alternative scenario is not Turkey, but Algeria? What if, by nullifying a parliamentary election in which Islamists won at the ballot box, the military will be risking a massive wave of protests and resistance that could lead to the kind of bloodbath Algeria experienced for a decade? Egyptians are not Algerians, the reassuring counter argument goes, with nothing like Algeria’s violence and tribalism. But then again, the conventional wisdom before January 2011, was that Egyptians did not revolt.

This weekend Egyptians may or may not go to the polls to elect a President whose powers are yet undetermined, in a country with no constitution, no Parliament, and under the heel of a Draconian martial law. A year and a half after a revolution that inspired the world, this is a bitter day for Egypt: the ideals of a revolution betrayed, the blood of the best and the brightest of its youth spilled in vain. 

Egypt's Long, Hot Summer

Egypt’s liberal progressives are going about stunned today. They shake their heads in despair: Has is come to this? A choice between equal evils for President: either Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood or Mubarak Redux personified in Ahmed Shafiq, the Mubarak-era Prime Minister who presided over the infamous ‘Battle of the Camel’ in Tahrir Square when peaceful young protestors were set upon by Mubarak thugs. Shafiq represents back to the future in every sense: for one thing, he is a military man like every president of Egypt to date: Naguib, Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak.  He is also an unreformed counter-revolutionary hardliner who in a recent public speech affirmed his admiration for Mubarak and promised, if elected, to ban demonstrations by cutting off electricity to ‘shut down Cairo in ten minutes.’

It is a dismaying sign of how far the perception of the security situation has deteriorated in Egypt over the past year that there are many ordinary citizens, who once supported the revolution, but would vote tomorrow for the ‘law and order’ candidate, as Shafiq presents himself. But that rationale overlooks a fatal flaw: the record of the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) in ensuring security in the eighteen months since the revolution has been abysmal, as has its record in policing its own forces in their dealings with civilians.

To ‘law-and-order’ voters, the mantra of ‘anybody but the Muslim Brotherhood’ is paramount, and for good reason. The shocking domination of the MB Party in the parliamentary elections has panicked secular-thinking Egyptians before the prospect of a complete takeover of power by the Islamist movement. The obscure and uncharismatic Morsi is a pinch-hitter for the Muslim Brotherhood boss, Khairat El-Shater, himself disqualified on account of his imprisonment under Mubarak. Alarmists warn that, if elected, Morsi will take his orders from El-Shater, just as Putin’s protégé place-holder president took his orders from Putin; they warn that Morsi will be unduly influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood ‘guide’, or spiritual leader, just as John Kennedy was suspected, as the first Catholic candidate, of taking his guidance from the Vatican.

The Coptic community has the most reason to be alarmed by the prospect of a Muslim Brotherhood domination of both the legislative and the executive branches. It has taken its guidance directly from the Patriarch’s office and thrown its entire weight behind Ahmed Shafiq.

Secular-minded women, as well, are alarmed at the specter of an Islamist victory resulting not only in a more restrictive social climate but to the actual revocation of certain gains for women’s rights in Muslim family law; these legal rights were acquired, or rather imposed by presidential decree, under Sadat and Mubarak, but remain controversial with a large sector of public opinion and are unlikely to withstand an open vote in Parliament.

But women, unlike Copts, do not vote as a block, and the Muslim Brotherhood counts among its activists many outspoken, committed women who support their cause wholeheartedly. Further complicating the picture for liberal Egyptian women voters is the brutality of the military in its crackdowns on women demonstrators: seared in their minds is the shocking image of the ‘blue-bra girl’, stripped, beaten, stomped on and dragged by the hair at the hands of a military riot squad. 

No wonder, then, that the young idealists who marched and died in the Revolution of January 25^th feel doubly betrayed; they are left out of the political power game and cannot endorse either the Mubarak era hardliner who represents the counter-revolution or the Islamist opportunist who represents a religious absolutism that is anathema to the ideals of the revolution.

Curiously, Mubarak’s trial, which had receded behind closed doors, out of sight and out of the public mind, over the past couple of months, suddenly surged to the foreground and came to a rapid conclusion. Whose interests did this sudden closure serve? Many presume that the SCAF might have calculated that the political football of Mubarak’s trial was best taken out of the game before it could land at the feet of their candidate, Ahmed Shafiq. If so, the calculation backfired, as the sentence seems to have enraged rather than appeased a large segment of public opinion across the board. Mubarak was not held responsible for the killing of demonstrators at the hands of his security police; he was convicted only of failing to prevent the killing. The conviction has no basis in Egyptian law and is expected to be overturned on appeal; even if no appeal was granted, few expect to see Mubarak serve his life sentence in prison. Further adding to the grievance of the families of the victims and their supporters was the relative unaccountability also accorded to Mubarak’s reviled Minister of the Interior, to whom the police reported directly.  Mubarak’s two sons, widely suspected of wielding the power behind the scenes in the final days of the deposed dictator’s regime, were acquitted of all charges.

Since the sentence was proclaimed, hundreds of thousands of protesters have demonstrated in Tahrir and in city centers across Egypt. The second round of the presidential elections is scheduled for mid-June. If the MB candidate Morsi wins and the Islamists seriously engage in power struggles with the military, the SCAF might mount a coup. If Ahmed Shafiq wins, widespread unrest cannot be ruled out. Either way, it may be a long, hot summer for Egypt.

The Egyptian Feminist's Dilemma: Mona Eltahawy

‘Why Do They Hate Us?” Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy laments on the cover page of Foreign Policy, in an article illustrated by provocative photos of a naked woman painted to look as if she were wearing niqab. Who are the ‘They’ and who are the ‘Us’ referred to in the title of Eltahawy’s piece? She claims, in her many television interviews since the publication of the piece, that her intention was to turn the 9/11 mantra ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ on its head. But in fact, she subscribes to it. The ‘Us’ she claims to speak for are Arab/Muslim women, but the ‘They’ accused of hatred are the same: Arab/Muslim men. In subscribing to that sweeping generalization, Eltahawy created a media controversy in the States but forfeited the support of a considerable segment of the women she purports to champion.

It is easy to understand and sympathize with Eltahawy’s bitterness and disillusionment: a vocal supporter of the January 25^th Revolution in Egypt, she was assaulted sexually and had both her arms broken by riot police during a demonstration in Cairo. But Eltahawy’s article is a blanket condemnation, not only of the tactics of the riot police under Mubarak and his loyalists; not of a misogynist interpretation of Islam pushed by an extremist sect called Salafis; not even of regressive attitudes toward women arguably prevalent, especially among the less educated, in the Middle East.

Eltahawy’s generalization tars all men in the Muslim/Arab world with the same harsh brush, as if the riot policeman stripping a female protester were indistinguishable from the young man trying to protect her. She ignores the experience of thousands of Egyptian women who camped side by side with men in Tahrir Square day and night during the heyday of the revolution, without being subjected to harassment or intimidation.

With similar lack of distinction, she makes sweeping generalizations about all Arab countries, as if Saudi Arabia, the only country where women are not allowed to drive and are forced to wear a niqab, were indistinguishable from Tunisia, where policewomen direct traffic.

Eltahawy selects the worst instances of abusive laws or practices from each country and throws them indiscriminately into her quiver of accusations: for instance, the abhorrent practice of female circumcision is still common in parts of Egypt, but it is a Nilotic practice, not an Islamic one, and is unknown in the Muslim country most repressive against women: Saudi Arabia. On the other hand Egypt and most Arab countries enforce a minimum age of sixteen for marriage for girls, whereas Saudi Arabia does not.

By wielding her weapon so bluntly and indiscriminately, by making the same mistake Western feminists have historically made in trying to disassociate the ‘Oriental’ woman from her context, Eltahawy risks alienating the support of the women she may sincerely be trying to champion. A woman does not exist in a vacuum; she is a mother, daughter, wife, sister; she is a Muslim or an Arab. There are claims to her loyalty other than gender.  At a time in history when her sons or brothers are indiscriminately branded as potential terrorists for being Arab or Muslim, she will shrink from comforting those dangerous stereotypes by subscribing to an equally reductionist diatribe against them as misogynists; at a time when wars are being waged, or threatened, against Arab and Muslim-majority countries partly with the justification of ‘saving women’, these same women fear the consequences of such reasoning.  

But perhaps the most misguided aspect of Eltahawy’s indiscriminate attack in ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ is that it leaves the women’s rights movement in these countries with nowhere to go. If feminists in Arab and Muslim-majority countries are to gain the full measure of rights and liberties for women, they will need to enlist the support of a sizeable segment of the male population, not antagonize it wholesale. Women’s rights cannot be imposed from outside, by marshalling public opinion in the West. Eltahawy’s courage and sincerity must be tested by the same measure as any feminist facing the same dilemma: by her efforts to change facts on the ground in Egypt, not by success in creating a media uproar in America.

Egypt's Presidential Primaries: Everything at Stake

This spring seems to be the season of hotly contested presidential primaries around the world. Now that the Republican primaries in the U.S. have been decided in favor of Mitt Romney, and Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande are facing off in France, perhaps the most critical presidential ‘primaries’ of all are being fought out in Egypt. Everything is at stake here, arguably not just for Egypt, but for the region and the world.

The future of the Arab Spring hangs in the balance, with three possible scenarios: Egypt’s elections return a hardliner Islamist for president, setting it on the path of Ayatollah Iran, confirming the worst fears of the West; or the military re-asserts its role in the power balance, along the lines of traditional Turkish politics; or, in a case of Mubarak redux, an old regime loyalist is brought in to protect the interests of the beleagured business elite.

In a region that has consistently demonstrated the validity of the mantra ‘as Egypt goes, so goes the Arab world’, the United States has vital interests, from Iraq to Israel; the run-up to the June-slated presidential elections is closely watched from Washington to Moscow. So it is intriguing that the process of elimination of candidates is taking place in the courts rather than at the polls.

The explanation for the critical role of the courts lies in a constitution riddled with Mubarak-era amendments jerry-rigged to ensure, in effect, that no one but the former president, or his offspring, stood a real chance of running for president of Egypt. One such rule, excluding anyone convicted of any misdemeanor, even on blatantly political, trumped-up charges, was intended to disqualify Ayman Nour, who had dared to run against Mubarak. After the revolution, the same rule was applied to disqualify Muslim Brotherhood candidate Khairat Shater, jailed under Mubarak for his Islamist activities.

Moreover, after the revolution, the Islamic-dominated new parliament voted into law new hurdles for presidential candidates, designed to exclude certain figures from the old regime or certain candidates it deemed too secular. On the one hand, Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak-era prime minister and the current military rulers’ candidate-of-choice, was recently disqualified according to the new rule against any ancien regime top ministers running for president. On the other hand, it was with considerable schadenfreude that many saw the most radical hardliner among the Islamist candidates, Abu Ismail, a vociferous reviler of the Unites States, disqualified by the courts on a technicality: although born of Egyptian parents on both sides, his mother had become a naturalized American citizen at some later date. 

But in this game of arbitrary court-decreed elimination, the ‘Mubarak redux’ lobby was dealt a blow of its own, when the courts disqualified Omar Soliman, Mubarak’s long-time spy chief, top liaison official with Israel, and eleventh-hour vice-president in the final days before Mubarak’s resignation. Soliman was excluded from running for the presidency on a technicality involving a mere 31 votes, a blow to the military rulers of the country, who considered Soliman, himself a military man, one of them: he was never caught in the wide-ranging net of prosecution that swept up the major cabinet and business elite figures associated with Gamal Mubarak, and is widely believed to have retained much of his behind the scenes power.

As have many of the old establishment, even those currently behind bars. Western observers who follow the trials of Mubarak, his sons and his loyalists focus on the ‘humiliation’ of ‘the cage’, as they call the traditional dock with bars, ubiquitous in Egypt and in some European countries. What Egyptians are more likely to note are the obsequious salutes with which these Mubarak politicians are greeted by the policemen assigned to guard them as they enter the courthouse, a clear sign that these men in white prison garb still wield power to be reckoned with, even behind bars, and that they have the tacit protection of the military rulers of the country.

So in the run-up to the June election, as one candidate after another is knocked down by the courts on a technicality, schadenfreude is short-lived, and new candidates pop up in their place: the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood and the fundamentalist Salafis are already fielding new candidates in place of their first choices, whereas the ‘secular-liberal’ movement is left with nothing but compromise options.

The first choice of the young revolutionaries and most liberals would have been Nobel Prize winner Dr. Baradei, but he has refused to throw his hat in the ring, opting instead for the rather Utopian goal of building a new, progressive party that would be ready to contest free, fair elections next time around. That decision may partly have been dictated by his lack of popular appeal among a certain sector of the masses which suspects Baradei of American bias, ironically, given that he was anathema to the Bush administration for his obstructionist role as head of the U.N. Atomic Energy Agency in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War.

The compromise candidates before the secular liberals at the moment are narrowed down to two: Amr Moussa, former head of the Arab League and former Foreign Minister under Mubarak, but less tainted than he might be by this association on account of his reputation as an independent, nationalistic politician; and Abou El-Fotouh, a moderate former Muslim Brotherhood member who resigned from the party over his differences with them.

But there is still over a month to go till the June elections, and typically skeptical Egyptians predict that the military rulers of the country will step in and pre-empt them. Recent demonstrations against just such a scenario have united a broad spectrum of the population, Islamist and secular, but there is yet another contingent of the electorate that would welcome a military take-over in the name of ‘a return to security and economic stability.’ Meanwhile, the courts play an unpredictable game, disqualifying one candidate after another, and issuing equally arbitrary rulings in other cases: one of Egypt’s most popular comic actors was convicted on a charge of ‘insulting Islam’ in his films, only to be exonerated of the self-same charge in an identical case. The power struggle between the different political currents in the country is playing itself out in the courts, and if that is any indication, this will be a hot election season in Egypt.

The Crazy Woman is Back: Egypt's Social Rift

The crazy woman is back. You hear her shouting on the street in front of the building, early in the morning and at sunset, ranting yells as indecipherable as an infant’s existential angst. I never see her, only hear her; I don’t know how she survives. For several months there was no shouting, she was off the street; I only realized it when she came back, the way you only realize your tooth had stopped aching when it starts acting up again. I wonder where she had gone to, why she was back.

The street is in an upscale neighborhood of Cairo, but in Cairo proper, even in the best neighborhoods, the comfortable are not insulated from the poor; it has always been that way. In this city, the poor and the affluent cross each other a hundred times a day with easy mutual acceptance and civility. Residents of this neighborhood of embassies and banks share the sidewalks with doorkeepers, servants, delivery boys, shopkeepers, unofficial parking attendants, street vendors; high and low exchange a second-nature calibration of greeting according to status.

So, when the revolution broke out, there was some relief that it had not morphed into what is called here ‘a revolution of the hungry’, in which mobs stormed the villas and high-rises. Only in the new suburbs of October 6^th and Qattameya were the gated communities obliged to hire armed guards to protect the villa dwellers from intruders. In Cairo proper, it was felt, that was not necessary.

But lately there has been an alarming up-tick in ‘drive-by’ purse-snatching, even in the most privileged neighborhoods. This scenario is typical: the robber sweeps by on a motorcycle with missing license plates, targets an elderly woman, swoops down on her, snatches her handbag, spilling her onto the sidewalk in the process, and speeds off. The modus operandi is ingeniously adapted to a congested traffic pattern where cars have zero maneuverability in narrow streets but motorcycles or bicycles can thread their way between the cars and zigzag in and out. The typically elderly victims of these drive-by raids often sustain broken bones as well as the theft of their purses.

Almost everyone, by now, personally knows of someone who has been the victim of a purse-snatching or a car-jacking. People avoid traveling at night now; they are more suspicious of strangers. It’s not that there are more thieves or kidnappers, some people sigh, only that before they were afraid of the long arm of the police state. On the contrary, diehard supporters of the revolution counter, the breakdown in order is a plot by the disaffected security forces to create a rising sense of panic that will strengthen the ‘law and order’ –read military- lobby at the polls in the upcoming presidential elections. Both viewpoints are correct, at least partly.

The presidential election in June looms as an uneasy deadline; some frustrated liberals are threatening to boycott the ballot boxes, rather than be faced with a non-choice between various shades of Muslim Brotherhood candidates. The MB wants a president ‘with them but not of them’ went the mantra, until they started to speak of fielding their own candidate. And in any case, bewildered citizens object, on what basis can you elect a president, when the constitution that will define his powers, retroactively, has not yet been written?

Meantime, the strategy of the ruling council seems to be to keep the citizenry off balance with rumors and counter-rumors, periodic shortfalls of gas, and setting Egyptians against each other over soccer matches. The Islamist-dominated Parliament, rather than focus on alleviating the crisis in unemployment and the economy, is playing diversionary politics by threatening to ‘clean up’ satellite television stations.

But there are many in the business community who, although wary of the Muslim Brotherhood, find reassurance in the fact that leading members of the Brotherhood themselves are known for being some of the most successful business men in the country. The most optimistic of these observers count on the military to guarantee security and the Brotherhood to foster business; ‘in five years, in ten years, we’ll be Turkey,’ one highly successful businessman assured me.

He could be whistling in the wind. More serious than the ‘lapses in security’ are the signs of an ugly rift tearing apart the social fabric just where it should be strongest: philanthropy. Philanthropists who had devoted a good part of their lives to charitable organizations are finding themselves under attack by the very people they had served. In one case, a group of women, both Coptic Christian and Muslim, who had successfully and tirelessly worked for years to bring electricity, water, and schools to a dirt-poor Coptic-Muslim village, find themselves resented and unwelcome by the very community that had benefited so tangibly from their efforts.

In another instance, a woman in her seventies who had devoted her entire life to running an orphanage that had been the 100-year-old legacy of her grandmother, and who had taken abandoned baby girls off the streets- raised them, found them employment, gave them a home till they married, and helped them set up house when they did- this elderly lady now finds herself accused in court of abusing the girls and turning them out into the street to become prostitutes. Her shock and disillusionment is so great the philanthropist now goes about like a bewildered shadow of her former self.

More callous observers assign this ‘biting the hand that feeds’ to unsuspected reserves of class resentment or to the effect on easily manipulated minds of a daily barrage of corruption exposés in the media. Whatever the case, it is a sign that the time-honored understanding that lubricated social interchange in the country, and provided for the needs of the least privileged, is breaking down. Take the case of the crazy woman who shouts in the street early in the morning and at sunset.   

Apparently she had worked for a resident of the building once, and when that lady died, the woman could not be rehired because of her mental instability. At some point she had been sent to an asylum, but was so ill-treated there she found her way back on the street, and from then on relied on the kindness of strangers. I have never seen her, but someone who knows her tells me she survives on ample handouts of food by the denizens of the neighborhood basements and garages: doorkeepers, chauffeurs, servants of the villas and high-rises, restaurant waiters. Periodically, some kind soul in one of the apartment buildings reels her in for a bath and a fresh set of clothes, and releases her back on the street.  

Why she disappeared for several months is a mystery that, like much in Egypt, is dismissed with a shrug if you ask the question. Perhaps someone took her in for a while; or perhaps someone got fed up with her mindless ranting and sent her away to an asylum again. Either way, the crazy woman is back on the street, yelling her existential angst to pained if tolerant ears. That is Egypt.

The Dead Pope Rises: Coptic Conundrum in Egypt

The Dead Pope Rises : Coptic Conundrum in Egypt

The death of Pope Shenouda, spiritual head of Egypt’s Coptic Church for four decades, threw millions of Copts into mourning, and was marked by the Egyptian government as a state funeral, attended by top political authorities and the Muslim religious establishment, as well as foreign dignitaries. Copts were given an official three day holiday in which to mourn, and thousands took the opportunity to besiege the cathedral where Pope Shenouda’s body was displayed in state, first lying in a coffin, and then, as if risen, propped up on a throne, in his most magnificent robes and miter, looking peaceful, if ashen and close-eyed. Such was the crush to catch a last glimpse of their ninety-year-old spiritual leader that two elderly Copts suffocated to death in the crowd.

While the heads of the Azhar, Islam’s oldest university and religious authority, paid their respects, and many Muslims called their Coptic friends to offer condolences, Egypt’s Sunni Muslim majority followed the proceedings with awe and curiosity. There is no equivalent figure to the pope as spiritual leader in Sunni Islam, which, in this respect, is more akin to Protestantism. The head of the Azhar University, the highest religious authority in the land, commands considerable but by no means universal influence, and is regarded by many as a political appointee, with supporters and detractors. Nor is he seen as representing his Muslim countrymen, whereas the Coptic Pope has come to represent his coreligionists. His funeral would be a simple affair not much different than that of any other Muslim: the body washed and wrapped in white cloth and buried as rapidly as possible, on the same day or the next. The burial would be followed, within a day or two, by visits of condolences held in one of the major mosques of the city, at which one and all would be free to stop by and present their respects to family and close friends. Typically, men would receive in one part of the mosque and women in another.

If the spectacle of the deceased pope risen and sitting up in a bishop’s chair riveted Egyptians to their screens, the election of a new pope is similarly shrouded in exotic ritual. The council of bishops casts votes amongst themselves, and the names of the three top-polling candidates are placed in a box, from which a child draws one name, presumably under divine guidance; the bearer of that name becomes the new pope. The late Pope Shenouda the third was himself the second-ranked candidate in his election.

During his forty-year reign, Shenouda expanded the political power of his office to become a national figure, claiming to represent the Coptic community vis-à-vis both the Egyptian regime and foreign governments, while tolerating little in-house dissent among Copts. He oversaw the exponential growth of the Coptic Orthodox church in America, and in general reached out ecumenically to other churches as well as to the Islamic establishment. Popular in Egypt among many Muslims as well as Copts for certain patriotic stances, he fell afoul of Sadat and was exiled for four years in the Natron Valley Monastery in Egypt’s Western desert, where he was buried today. On the other hand, he consolidated his relationship with Sadat’s successor so that, at the time of the revolution, his diehard pro-Mubarak stand put him at odds with the younger generation of his base, who saw the deposed regime as complicit in the sectarian conflict it exploited to justify its draconian police state.

Dying at the ripe age of nearly ninety, after a long reign that spanned Nasser to post-Mubarak, Shenouda III leaves the Coptic community to ponder the succession and the conundrum of his legacy: the expanded role of the Coptic pope. If he is not only the spiritual head of his community but also its ‘national’ representative, does this not marginalize the Coptic community? At a time of the rise of Islamist parties in the Egyptian parliament, does this not exacerbate the danger of a polarization of the two communities? And given the extent to which personality shapes politics, will Shenouda’s successor have the clout and charisma to negotiate Egypt’s treacherous political waters today?

Egyptian Women on International Women's Day: where from here?

Today is International Women’s Day, and women in Egypt are uneasy about where they will be same time next year. “Iran,” gloomily prognosticates a friend as she dithers between chocolate soufflé and Om Ali from the dessert buffet at lunch in a private home. “Next year we will be Iran.” Another woman nods. “We will be Saudi Arabia without the oil,” she predicts. “Next summer at the beach, will any of us dare walk around in a swimsuit?”

Several of the women present were preparing to march in today’s demonstration in Cairo, calling for a substantial representation of women on the constitutional council. Desperate measures are necessary after the near shut-out of women candidates from parliament following the recent elections. The women at the luncheon will shift from the worldly to the political as seamlessly as they slide directly from a visit of condolences to a baby shower: they dress in black and keep a bright jacket and colorful scarf in the car for a rapid change of look.

On the surface, life carries on as usual in Egypt, but look closer, and the strains show. Anywhere around Cairo, on any day of the week, an unpredictable demonstration is apt to disrupt life in the city: it could be disaffected students besieging the Ministry of Culture on the Nile in Zamalek, or disgruntled workers of a medical supplies company blocking traffic in front of the makeshift headquarters of the Council of Ministers in Heliopolis. Increasingly, the demands focus on issues of livelihood. The acute crisis in unemployment is manifest in the hordes of work-visa applicants who camp out in front of the Arab embassies in the leafy embassy neighborhood of Zamalek.

In the absence of police, the streets of many of the best neighborhoods in the city are turning into an unregulated parking lot, with cars double and triple parked on both sides of the street. On the highways and the October 6^th overpasses, traffic is essentially self-regulated, and it is a miracle that it moves at all.

People are noticeably short-tempered. To object to being cut off while driving on the highway; to criticize the performance of a waiter in a restaurant; to question the bill of a tradesperson, is to risk an unpleasant argument. The civility and camaraderie of the early days of Tahrir are a distant memory.

The atmosphere of insecurity is maintained by the reports of incidents of kidnapping or robbery, infrequent, but enough to unnerve the residents of a city that was a byword for safety. But it is the uncertainty about the future that weighs even more heavily in the air. No one knows what the presidential elections will bring next June. The mother of a bride who is celebrating a lavish wedding at the Four Seasons today justifies the over-the-top event this way: “It might be the last of the big celebrations- perhaps even the last of the weddings where men and women aren’t segregated- so we might as well make the most of it!” In other words, today, eat, drink and be merry; tomorrow, we might be Iran. But there is always someone to rebut: “Fashar!” An untranslatable Arabic expression meaning; “Never!”

Notes from a Fragmented Egypt: Bedouin to Bikinis

It is hard to paint a coherent picture of today’s Egypt from the inside; you experience daily life and news items as a fragmented reality. Things are not following apart, the center holds, but centrifugal forces pull at the periphery of this once highly centralized state. The ‘Arabs of the Sinai’- the Bedouin tribes- are on the warpath, their long-term vendetta with Mubarak’s police forces breaking out into open hostilities, effectively shutting off the Sinai to tourists and Egyptians alike. It sounds like an atavistic throwback to the era of the historian Jabarti, who wrote a chronicle of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1789: Jabarti describes the citizens of Cairo fleeing the city ahead of the French forces, only to be driven back by the menace of the Bedouin outside the city walls, waiting to plunder and attack them. So it is today in Cairo, once the safest city of its size anywhere; you will hear people say that central Cairo is safe, but the outlying areas are vulnerable to carjackers and highwaymen.

That was very much on my mind last week as, in a hurry to return to Cairo from the Mediterranean coast, we took the shortcut through the 200 kilometer Natron Valley, an unpopulated stretch of desert where you might not cross another vehicle for hours in the high season of mid-summer, let alone in the dead of winter after dark in these fearsome days of insecurity. Given the risk of carjacking or even a flat tire without a gas station or emergency vehicle in sight, we were luckier than I realized to make it through the Wadi Natron.

Once we rejoined the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road I breathed a sigh of relief, took my foot off the accelerator, and stopped at the nearest rest house, Omar’s Oasis, an old-fashioned restaurant whose main attraction are the fragrant loaves baked to order in a traditional Egyptian bread oven, in full view of the diners. As I walked into the restroom, the attendant handed me a few sheets of toilet paper, and smiled at me as she adjusted her headscarf: “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

It seemed so incongruous a greeting, from such a seemingly unsophisticated person, in such unpromising surroundings. But that’s Egypt today: a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces refuse to fit.

St Valentine’s is a recent importation in Egypt, where it is known as the Festival of Love, but the younger generation of urbanites has taken to it with gusto. Now there are gloomy predictions of: “This will be the last St Valentine’s to be celebrated in Egypt; once the Muslim Brotherhood take control, they will abolish all such Western ‘decadent’ festivities.” Whether or not this proves to be the case, it is shocking to compare the mores of Egypt in 1963 with those of 2012, half a century later. A 1963 newspaper advertisement for a new resort at Gamsa features two women in tiny bikinis; it is a measure of how far Egypt has regressed from modernity that today, such an ad would be unthinkable. Although women in bikinis do still stroll the beaches of most of the private resorts on the Mediterranean coast and all the tourist beaches of the Red Sea, it is becoming increasingly common to see women bathing in ‘Islamic’ dress.

The Muslim Brotherhood claim they will double tourism, without resorting to bikinis or alcohol, but this wishful thinking is met with skepticism and derision by their many critics.

And that is perhaps the most hopeful sign left in today’s Egypt: the critics of the Brotherhood and of the Military are many and fearless. The genie let out of the bottle on January 25^th refuses to be stuffed back into the black hole that was the police state.

Egypt's Soccer Ultras: Revolution Gone Wrong

As I look out of my balcony window in Cairo, I see competing demonstrations pass by on the riverbank, some in support of the Ahli Club, most in an appeal for national unity and healing. After yesterday's shocking soccer massacre, healing seems far away. Yet today, February 4th, is the anniversary of the so-called ‘Battle of the Camel’, the decisive turning point of the Revolution of January 25^th, when the peaceful democracy protesters in Tahrir were able to beat back a vicious onslaught by pro-Mubarak thugs who attacked them on horseback. A week later, Mubarak resigned. Part of the credit for the push-back against the Mubarak forces went to the ‘ultras’, as the most extreme soccer fanatics are called in Egypt, akin to England’s infamous ‘football hooligans.’

Today, a year later, the soccer ultras are being blamed for a massacre on a football field in the town of Port Said on the Suez Canal; but the real question is, who put them up to inciting a riot? And the even greater outrage now debated in the extraordinary session of Parliament and everywhere in Egypt is this: why did the security forces stand by while Egyptians killed Egyptians? Why the lapses in security from the beginning, not only in the case of this soccer match, but in several suspicious incidents over the past week, and indeed the past month?

In the minds of even the least conspiracy-minded of Egyptians, one answer is inevitable: at the very moment when there is the most pressure to abrogate the loathed ‘emergency laws’ under which Mubarak ruled for thirty years, and now the SCAF rules with complete unaccountability- at that very moment, the incidents of suspicious random violence are multiplying. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the climate is being created in which the SCAF can claim that the people are fed up with the insecurity in the country and are calling for a return to the heavy-handed tactics of the police and the military.

Writing about the Nasser era in my first novel a decade ago, I had said that in Egypt, soccer rivalries replaced party politics in a country with a monolithic single-party regime that prohibited any expression of political opinion. In today’s post-revolutionary Egypt, the airwaves buzz with political debate and party politics are hotly contested at the ballot box and in the media. But at what price freedom? How do you explain the spectacle of Egyptians killing each other on a soccer field for no apparent reason? One year from the day when outrage against the thuggish tactics of the Mubarak loyalists united Egyptians behind the protesters in Tahrir Square, united them young and old, Muslim and Copt, secular and religious, ultras and ulamas; one year from that hope-filled day, Egypt’s Revolution seems to have gone terribly wrong.