Raymond Stock
Raymond Stock, former Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic and Middle East Studies at Drew University (2010-11), and Guggenheim Fellow (2007), lived in Cairo for 20 years (1990-2010). He was denied entry and deported by the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak on a return visit in December 2010, apparently due to his 2009 article criticizing then-Culture Minister Farouk Hosni’s bid to head UNESCO in Foreign Policy Magazine. With a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania (2008), he has published widely on the Middle East in such periodicals as The Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and the Middle East Quarterly. His translations from Arabic fiction have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, London Magazine, and other venues. He has further translated seven books by Egyptian
Nobel laureate in literature Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), whose biography he is writing for Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New York. His translation of Mahfouz’s novel Before the Throne appeared through Anchor Books (Random House) in paperback in July 2012.
Closing a celebration on June 30, 2012 for his swearing-in as what the world hailed as Egypt’s first civilian, freely elected president, Mohammed Mursi declared, “We will not look back, nor will we look beneath our feet, but we will look forward always.” In that simple, seemingly pedestrian statement he summed up the strategy that has brought the Society of the Muslim Brothers from humble but ambitious beginnings in Ismailiya in 1928 to political (if not yet physical) dominance in the largest Arab nation, and most other parts of the region, today.
Mursi’s unexceptional imprecation at Cairo University not “to look beneath our feet” has ages of folk wisdom embedded within it. When Egyptians want to say that a leader is foolish or uncertain of where he is headed, they compare him to a donkey—a stubborn but timorous beast that hesitates and looks down at its feet as it walks. When a leader is wise and farsighted, they liken him to a camel—a smart, confident creature that gazes steadily at the horizon as it moves imperturbably toward its goal.
For this reason, President Hosni Mubarak—whose nearly thirty years of rule were marked in many ways (though not in all ways) by caution mixed with obstinance and a fear of rapid action in any direction--was ridiculed on the street with countless jokes like the following:
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, President (Hafez) al-Assad of Syria, and President Mubarak die and are called to meet their Maker. Our Lord is angry and tells them, “Look, I didn’t like the way you three behaved down there before, so I’m sending you back to Earth in the shape of animals.”
As the three dead despots gape at each other in dread, God continues, “You, Fahd, because your name means “cheetah,” I’m sending you as a cheetah. And you, Assad, because your name means “lion,” you’re going as a lion.” Then He pauses. “But you, Mubarak—you’re a donkey!”
Raymond Stock, former Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic and Middle East Studies at Drew University (2010-11), and Guggenheim Fellow (2007), lived in Cairo for 20 years (1990-2010). He was denied entry and deported by the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak on a return visit in December 2010, apparently due to his 2009 article criticizing then-Culture Minister Farouk Hosni’s bid to head UNESCO in Foreign Policy Magazine. With a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania (2008), he has published widely on the Middle East in such periodicals as The Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and the Middle East Quarterly. His translations from Arabic fiction have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, London Magazine, and other venues. He has further translated seven books by Egyptian
Nobel laureate in literature Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), whose biography he is writing for Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New York. His translation of Mahfouz’s novel Before the Throne appeared through Anchor Books (Random House) in paperback in July 2012.
Closing a celebration on June 30, 2012 for his swearing-in as what the world hailed as Egypt’s first civilian, freely elected president, Mohammed Mursi declared, “We will not look back, nor will we look beneath our feet, but we will look forward always.” In that simple, seemingly pedestrian statement he summed up the strategy that has brought the Society of the Muslim Brothers from humble but ambitious beginnings in Ismailiya in 1928 to political (if not yet physical) dominance in the largest Arab nation, and most other parts of the region, today.
Mursi’s unexceptional imprecation at Cairo University not “to look beneath our feet” has ages of folk wisdom embedded within it. When Egyptians want to say that a leader is foolish or uncertain of where he is headed, they compare him to a donkey—a stubborn but timorous beast that hesitates and looks down at its feet as it walks. When a leader is wise and farsighted, they liken him to a camel—a smart, confident creature that gazes steadily at the horizon as it moves imperturbably toward its goal.
For this reason, President Hosni Mubarak—whose nearly thirty years of rule were marked in many ways (though not in all ways) by caution mixed with obstinance and a fear of rapid action in any direction--was ridiculed on the street with countless jokes like the following:
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, President (Hafez) al-Assad of Syria, and President Mubarak die and are called to meet their Maker. Our Lord is angry and tells them, “Look, I didn’t like the way you three behaved down there before, so I’m sending you back to Earth in the shape of animals.”
As the three dead despots gape at each other in dread, God continues, “You, Fahd, because your name means “cheetah,” I’m sending you as a cheetah. And you, Assad, because your name means “lion,” you’re going as a lion.” Then He pauses. “But you, Mubarak—you’re a donkey!”
Stunned, Mubarak looks up at the Almighty and whines, “Again?”
All the more ironic, then, that in the case of Mubarak’s abrupt fall from power, he arguably was not the real donkey of the story. The then eighty-two year old Mubarak, in fact, though ill and out-of-touch with most daily affairs, accurately foresaw that the moment he left office—especially without arrangements to assure a smooth and stable transition that would increase the chances of preserving a more secular system—his regime would be followed by his (and our) own worst enemies: the Islamists.
Rather than a doddering tyrant stubbornly clinging to power, as so many have portrayed him, Mubarak, with all his grievous faults, and though it came too late to save him, at that moment was really like the camel, seeing clearly what lay ahead of him and his troubled country. If he hesitated, it was not from stupidity, but because he plainly perceived the abyss before him. Clearly he was not afraid for himself and his family, for he, his wife and sons trustingly remained in Egypt after President Obama made it clear to the generals on the evening of February 10, 2011 that he wanted a speedier move to a new regime, and Mubarak thus stepped down the next evening. Meanwhile, the so-called Facebook revolutionaries (whose leaders, we will soon see, were apparently not quite what most people thought they were), Western media and governments—all played a counterintuitive role. Indeed, all of these widely hailed forces of goodness and reason became the convenient vehicle on which Mohammed Mursi, the MB, and their more openly militant allies, the Salafis, have now ridden to power.
How the Muslim Brotherhood, by keeping its eyes fixed on the distant prize of state power for more than eighty years, fooled almost everyone into seeing this situation in the obverse of the truth is the real story of the “January 25th Revolution.” It is also the real joke here—probably the best ever composed in the five thousand year history of a country justly famed for its biting—if often bittersweet—political humor. And maybe even in the history of revolutions, too.
THE FACEBOOK SCAM
From the beginning of what came to be known as the January 25th Revolution, we’ve all heard that it was launched not by Islamists like the MB, but by a group of liberal social media-savvy activists, mainly of university age. For them, the immediate catalyst was allegedly the beating death of a young dissident named Khaled Said by police in an Alexandria internet café in 2010. This led to a protest movement, ostensibly to oppose police brutality, which was used to set a date to start demonstrations whose object was to bring down the Mubarak regime, on National Police Day—Tuesday, January 25, 2011. The organizers were drawn from a national anti-Mubarak coalition that had grown out of a strike of textile workers in the Delta town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra, which led to a massively suppressed (and failed) attempt at a national general strike on April 6, 2009.
The leaders and passionate members of that group, dubbed the April 6 Movement, were themselves largely drawn from an array of anti-Mubarak and anti-Israeli forces (in Egyptian politics, they are one and the same) galvanized by the bloody start of the Second Palestinian Intifada in the fall of 2000. April 6 was also in a tacit alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, partially outlawed under Mubarak, hundreds of whose members languished in prison. April 6 strove to free the MB detainees, while pushing for a goal on which the two groups were formally agreed: cancellation of the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty signed by President Anwar al-Sadat in 1979 with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, under the auspices of U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Even more than police brutality and the arbitrary arrests and torture inflicted on dissidents through the hated Emergency Law (first imposed by Gamal Abdel-Nasser, then prolonged and expanded by both Sadat and Mubarak), no other issue so united the Islamists and the generally secular Egyptian Left than their mutual virulent rejection of peace with—and the existence of--the Jewish State.
Ironically, as part of its efforts to appease its domestic critics—and because the cultural elite had grown up with hatred of Israel (and, increasingly, hatred and fear of Jews) since the days of Nasser—the Mubarak-controlled media as well as the opposition deliberately incited an air of hysteria against what it called the mass murder of children by the malevolent Zionists in the Intifada. (This peaked, of course, during the global uproar over the Muhammad al-Durra affair early in the Palestinian uprising, which in February 2012 the French Supreme Court in effect ruled a hoax meant to frame Israel for the boy’s death.) Supposed experts on Judaism delivered anti-Semitic rants on television, newspapers published letters by readers calling for the completion of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, and a general portrayal of Israel and the Jews as the epitome of evil helped found and motivate the very
All the more ironic, then, that in the case of Mubarak’s abrupt fall from power, he arguably was not the real donkey of the story. The then eighty-two year old Mubarak, in fact, though ill and out-of-touch with most daily affairs, accurately foresaw that the moment he left office—especially without arrangements to assure a smooth and stable transition that would increase the chances of preserving a more secular system—his regime would be followed by his (and our) own worst enemies: the Islamists.
Rather than a doddering tyrant stubbornly clinging to power, as so many have portrayed him, Mubarak, with all his grievous faults, and though it came too late to save him, at that moment was really like the camel, seeing clearly what lay ahead of him and his troubled country. If he hesitated, it was not from stupidity, but because he plainly perceived the abyss before him. Clearly he was not afraid for himself and his family, for he, his wife and sons trustingly remained in Egypt after President Obama made it clear to the generals on the evening of February 10, 2011 that he wanted a speedier move to a new regime, and Mubarak thus stepped down the next evening. Meanwhile, the so-called Facebook revolutionaries (whose leaders, we will soon see, were apparently not quite what most people thought they were), Western media and governments—all played a counterintuitive role. Indeed, all of these widely hailed forces of goodness and reason became the convenient vehicle on which Mohammed Mursi, the MB, and their more openly militant allies, the Salafis, have now ridden to power.
How the Muslim Brotherhood, by keeping its eyes fixed on the distant prize of state power for more than eighty years, fooled almost everyone into seeing this situation in the obverse of the truth is the real story of the “January 25th Revolution.” It is also the real joke here—probably the best ever composed in the five thousand year history of a country justly famed for its biting—if often bittersweet—political humor. And maybe even in the history of revolutions, too.
THE FACEBOOK SCAM
From the beginning of what came to be known as the January 25th Revolution, we’ve all heard that it was launched not by Islamists like the MB, but by a group of liberal social media-savvy activists, mainly of university age. For them, the immediate catalyst was allegedly the beating death of a young dissident named Khaled Said by police in an Alexandria internet café in 2010. This led to a protest movement, ostensibly to oppose police brutality, which was used to set a date to start demonstrations whose object was to bring down the Mubarak regime, on National Police Day—Tuesday, January 25, 2011. The organizers were drawn from a national anti-Mubarak coalition that had grown out of a strike of textile workers in the Delta town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra, which led to a massively suppressed (and failed) attempt at a national general strike on April 6, 2009.
The leaders and passionate members of that group, dubbed the April 6 Movement, were themselves largely drawn from an array of anti-Mubarak and anti-Israeli forces (in Egyptian politics, they are one and the same) galvanized by the bloody start of the Second Palestinian Intifada in the fall of 2000. April 6 was also in a tacit alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, partially outlawed under Mubarak, hundreds of whose members languished in prison. April 6 strove to free the MB detainees, while pushing for a goal on which the two groups were formally agreed: cancellation of the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty signed by President Anwar al-Sadat in 1979 with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, under the auspices of U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Even more than police brutality and the arbitrary arrests and torture inflicted on dissidents through the hated Emergency Law (first imposed by Gamal Abdel-Nasser, then prolonged and expanded by both Sadat and Mubarak), no other issue so united the Islamists and the generally secular Egyptian Left than their mutual virulent rejection of peace with—and the existence of--the Jewish State.
Ironically, as part of its efforts to appease its domestic critics—and because the cultural elite had grown up with hatred of Israel (and, increasingly, hatred and fear of Jews) since the days of Nasser—the Mubarak-controlled media as well as the opposition deliberately incited an air of hysteria against what it called the mass murder of children by the malevolent Zionists in the Intifada. (This peaked, of course, during the global uproar over the Muhammad al-Durra affair early in the Palestinian uprising, which in February 2012 the French Supreme Court in effect ruled a hoax meant to frame Israel for the boy’s death.) Supposed experts on Judaism delivered anti-Semitic rants on television, newspapers published letters by readers calling for the completion of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, and a general portrayal of Israel and the Jews as the epitome of evil helped found and motivate the very
movement that would eventually bring Mubarak down, more than a decade later. Despite his close security
cooperation with Israel—particularly against Hamas and Iranian infiltration of Gaza and the Sinai—(which he
downplayed), and his sometimes helpful role in the ever-troubled peace process (of which he boasted), to divert
attention at home he used Israel as a scapegoat. Hence he didn’t mind when his wife’s reputed fashion consultant,
an abstract painter whom he’d made Culture Minister named Farouk Hosni, forbade Egyptian artists and
intellectuals to have any contact with any Israelis (including peace activists), a practice mirrored in the professional
syndicates and on university campuses around the country, including even the faculty senate of the American
University in Cairo.
However dishonest, self-contradictory and ultimately self-defeating his public posture on the issue, Mubarak nonetheless bravely kept the peace with Israel for thirty years, breaking forever, it seemed, the endless ruinous cycle of repeated war and defeat. A key result was that in his final years—though there was little hope of keeping pace with Egypt’s booming population—the economy was growing at an impressive 5-6 percent per annum. But thanks to the arrogant ostentation of the nouveaux riches, the crass cronyism of Mubarak’s circle and the ignorance of the young about the lean years of war, few appeared impressed by this remarkable achievement. Hence the revolution was supposed to be about the economy, stupid. But journalists did not seem to notice that some of the signs in Tahrir depicted Mubarak with a Star of David on his forehead, or hear the rumors that he was a Zionist agent, about to flee to Israel. Thus, under the surface and in the back of many minds, the revolution was also about the Jews next door.
To this day in Egypt, Jews appear largely as malignant caricatures, in pictures and in words, in the press. Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose translation into Arabic were commissioned by the Mufti of Jerusalem, a Hitler protégé and close friend of Himmler and Eichmann based in Berlin during the war (from which he broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Muslim world) were—and still are—prominently displayed and much in demand in almost every bookstore and street kiosk in Cairo. Learned (and sometimes lurid)-looking tomes and “encyclopedias” of Judaism peddling half-baked and often offensive theories filled whole shelves in upscale bookshops. Like Mohammed Mursi, most people deny that Arabs were to blame for the 9/11 attacks (though many had cheered them on the day itself). They insist that it had it had to be an inside job, aided if not planned by Mossad. Then they will tell you, “But if America doesn’t watch out, we’ll do it again.” Dwelling in a sea of lies (much of the Egyptian press is what American supermarket tabloids would look like if directed by Joseph Goebbels and Ayman al-Zawahiri), with few trustworthy sources of information, coupled with growing access to the open data (and disinformation) highway of the Internet, the conspiracy theory reigns supreme. There is a virtually all- enveloping belief that Israel and America lurk behind every problem in Egypt and the Middle East. Yet the real tragedy is not that they believe in conspiracies, because some of those do exist. The trouble is that they—and the Western media, governments and academe—typically don’t believe in the real ones, especially those hatched by the Islamists to exploit this seething mass of ignorance and discontent. This is an art form the MB has mastered through many years of patient struggle and organization from the bottom up, going back most of a century.
Continue reading, click here
However dishonest, self-contradictory and ultimately self-defeating his public posture on the issue, Mubarak nonetheless bravely kept the peace with Israel for thirty years, breaking forever, it seemed, the endless ruinous cycle of repeated war and defeat. A key result was that in his final years—though there was little hope of keeping pace with Egypt’s booming population—the economy was growing at an impressive 5-6 percent per annum. But thanks to the arrogant ostentation of the nouveaux riches, the crass cronyism of Mubarak’s circle and the ignorance of the young about the lean years of war, few appeared impressed by this remarkable achievement. Hence the revolution was supposed to be about the economy, stupid. But journalists did not seem to notice that some of the signs in Tahrir depicted Mubarak with a Star of David on his forehead, or hear the rumors that he was a Zionist agent, about to flee to Israel. Thus, under the surface and in the back of many minds, the revolution was also about the Jews next door.
To this day in Egypt, Jews appear largely as malignant caricatures, in pictures and in words, in the press. Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose translation into Arabic were commissioned by the Mufti of Jerusalem, a Hitler protégé and close friend of Himmler and Eichmann based in Berlin during the war (from which he broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Muslim world) were—and still are—prominently displayed and much in demand in almost every bookstore and street kiosk in Cairo. Learned (and sometimes lurid)-looking tomes and “encyclopedias” of Judaism peddling half-baked and often offensive theories filled whole shelves in upscale bookshops. Like Mohammed Mursi, most people deny that Arabs were to blame for the 9/11 attacks (though many had cheered them on the day itself). They insist that it had it had to be an inside job, aided if not planned by Mossad. Then they will tell you, “But if America doesn’t watch out, we’ll do it again.” Dwelling in a sea of lies (much of the Egyptian press is what American supermarket tabloids would look like if directed by Joseph Goebbels and Ayman al-Zawahiri), with few trustworthy sources of information, coupled with growing access to the open data (and disinformation) highway of the Internet, the conspiracy theory reigns supreme. There is a virtually all- enveloping belief that Israel and America lurk behind every problem in Egypt and the Middle East. Yet the real tragedy is not that they believe in conspiracies, because some of those do exist. The trouble is that they—and the Western media, governments and academe—typically don’t believe in the real ones, especially those hatched by the Islamists to exploit this seething mass of ignorance and discontent. This is an art form the MB has mastered through many years of patient struggle and organization from the bottom up, going back most of a century.
Continue reading, click here
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