Home

Follow Countercurrents on Twitter 

Why Subscribe ?

Popularise CC

Join News Letter

Editor's Picks

Press Releases

Action Alert

Feed Burner

Read CC In Your
Own Language

Bradley Manning

India Burning

Mumbai Terror

Financial Crisis

Iraq

AfPak War

Peak Oil

Globalisation

Localism

Alternative Energy

Climate Change

US Imperialism

US Elections

Palestine

Latin America

Communalism

Gender/Feminism

Dalit

Humanrights

Economy

India-pakistan

Kashmir

Environment

Book Review

Gujarat Pogrom

Kandhamal Violence

WSF

Arts/Culture

India Elections

Archives

Links

Submission Policy

About CC

Disclaimer

Fair Use Notice

Contact Us

Search Our Archive

Subscribe To Our
News Letter



Our Site

Web

Name: E-mail:

 

Printer Friendly Version

Egypt’s Silenced Subaltern

By Dr Ipshita Basu

13 February, 2011
Countercurrents.org

As the march of millions swept through the streets of Tahrir Square in Cairo, in a strange, uncanny way it alluded to the story of Moses who had unleashed a swarm of locusts to persuade the Pharaoh Ramses to allow the Israelites to leave Egypt for the Promised Land. Moses could resort to the staff of God to induce plague after plague to win the freedom of Israelite slaves. In our times, the people of Egypt have no such divine providence and instead have to form a swarm of their own to force an unrelenting leader to abdicate and allow democracy to prevail.

Just over a month ago I had taken a cruise across the Nile, and lived for 7 days in the Egypt of 3100 B.C. Statues of Ramses the magnanimous, powerful, ever youthful Pharaoh stood tall in Luxor and Abu Simbel and just outside almost rivalling in size and scale were posters of Hosni Mubarak, the modern day, every youthful, ruler of Egypt. Back then I wondered whether the statues of Ramses were an exact replica, and the Egyptologist tour guide explained, that they were exalted versions made to instil awe, fear and even suggest immortality. And the tour guide was sharp enough to add that this was not unlike their current octogenarian leader, whose pictures were always cosmetically enhanced so that he didn’t show any sign of aging. Like Ramses the celebrity king of ancient Egypt, posters of Hosni Mubarak seemed to suggest that he was the perfect man, the permanent, all powerful leader of modern Egypt.

What struck me even more, as I travelled through Egypt was the way in which ancient relics and modern poverty interlocked with each other, with aged men digging through dust and heat desperately looking for something worthwhile from the ancient world to eek out a living in present times. Alongside this I saw the modern and the ancient collide with each other, as young children from the villages ran towards the rich travellers that these ancient sites drew to their country, but then angrily chided at them when they refused to give them a few pennies or sometimes even a pen for their school. The inequality between the rich traveller and the poor local was stark, deep and rigidly delineated by the travel company I was with.

As the events in Cairo unfold, my friends often ask me if I got an inkling of the unrest when I was in Egypt. And strangely I have nothing to say. I wondered how I could let this go past me, when as a discerning political sociologist I always pay attention to the underbelly of frustration and political unrest. And then it occurred that it had a lot do with way I had journeyed through the Nile.

It was the first time my husband and I had opted for a packaged group tour, on the advice of our friends who had warned us that travelling alone through Egypt was dangerous and unadvisable. With mixed measures of anticipation and excitement we joined a motley group of European, American and Australian tourists to cruise across the Nile, stopping at historic sites and villages along the way. Some of the tourists were history enthusiasts while others simply wanted to escape the harsh European winter. My husband and I were among the few Indians on the boat, and often invited curiosity and confusion from the Egyptian locals to whom we looked like one of them but seemed almost like misfits in a predominantly white European group. As the tour progressed, its orientalist undertones became more and more apparent.

On our induction meeting we were warned of the Egyptian other. We were asked to avoid the brown, deceitful local tradesmen, who would pursue and cheat the white, innocent and rich Europeans if they were given the slightest opportunity. And almost with a kind of military discipline most tourists followed the advice. We would step out of our air-conditioned tour bus, get into rank and file and march swiftly across the hawkers and street vendors, who in contrast were disorderly and loud. As the only dark-skinned members of this file, often inquisitive locals approached us and we eagerly took this as a chance to trespass from our line and talk to the ‘dangerous’ vendors. Our experience of similar Indian street hawkers added to our confidence, and we gladly chatted and haggled with them. We were pleasantly reassured that they were nice, friendly people just trying to make a living and perhaps a bit of profit if you weren’t cautious enough. We invited a few nasty stares from some of the other tourists who didn’t quite take to breaking the human boundaries that they were advised to set. Others, however, made jealous sideward glances as they saw human to human friendships take shape so instantly.

While this was the ‘dangerous’ other that most avoided to even make eye contact with, there was another kind of other we were shown from the tinted glass of our tour bus. This included the veiled woman who walked along the streets, the galabia-wearing farmer who was sowing his fields with his primitive hull and the stone masons and glass blowers who still practised their traditional crafts. From a distance and behind the safety of the tinted windows and the camera lens they were the romantic ‘other’ - stuck in time, belonging to another world, far away from here and now. This is how we missed a whole array of real, lived experiences. While the tour company had made an artificial boundary between us and the locals, so that we could gaze at them from a safe distance and imagine them in a way that suited western stereotypes, there were real issues and experiences in the lives of Egyptians that were numbed into stillness and silence.

The orientalist palate also painted Egypt in very contrasting tones of old and young. Inside the tombs the sarcophagus that encapsulated bodies from millions of years ago, the genius of the stone masons who carved hieroglyphs with mathematical precision and showed immense scientific imagination and the papyrus factories all evoked a civilization that was far more mature, wise and experienced than modern technology. But that ancient wisdom was credited to the Egypt of the bygone era. The Egypt of today was in contrast young, infantile and desperately poor. We came across it through young school children who gleefully approached tourists to shake hands or as groups of village boys who ran behind our bus. More dangerously, young boys would swim fiercely close to the rudder of our boat, throw a packet of crisps or a cigarette and demand a few pennies in return. They chased the boat, crossing gingerly over narrow locks in the canal, until they got a little money. That was the Egypt of here and now- young, reckless and desperate.

Finally, there was the exotic Egypt. While most tourists avoided the locals, inside the boat they eagerly dressed up in the local attire for the galabia night. Swaying to the tunes of Arabia, drunk on spirits and wine and enticed by a voluptuous belly dancer, Egypt was experienced as the sensuous, the decadent and as letting loose those desires that are forbidden by Victorian morals.

For the first time in my life I experienced how a colonial traveller would have journeyed through the east. That I could relive this experience in times when the West claims moral authority over defining the norms of liberal democracy and universal rights was worrying enough. But what worried me even more is the way in which the developed world continues to perceive poverty and inequality. From the safe distance of Western stereotypes of the developing ‘other’, the subaltern is still silenced from revealing their own experience.

Since the protests in Egypt began, foreign policy analysts and political journalists have written voraciously to recommend how the West should involve itself in the new Egypt that deviates so much from their assumptions on Middle Eastern politics. And I write Middle Eastern here with a word of caution, as many Egyptians would prefer to be recognised as part of the North African region, both historically and politically than with the Middle East. From the editorials in Western newspapers, I can see very vividly how the orientalist imagination that I experienced on my recent journey continues into Western foreign policy in the East.

Most editorials in reputed European newspapers express a sense of disappointment over the failure of Western diplomats and foreign policy experts to predict the Egyptian people’s revolution. In a sense it seems as if the West has to come to terms with its own self identity, as the Eastern other against whom they differentiated and elevated themselves, did not turn out to be conservative, despotic and other worldly. The youth protest movements that began through a Facebook group called Khaled Saeed and the People’s Parliaments, which is a conglomeration of opposition parties and independents have stood firmly on the side of secular democracy and have shown this admirable ability to not just withstand coercive forces but to embrace soldiers and police officers in a wide scale campaign for change.
Western leaders and their advisers who over the years have become more and more adept at dealing with the Saddam Hussein’s and Osama Bin Laden’s of the East find themselves quite taken aback by this unexpected breed of young, secular and liberal minded protestors. Alistair Burt, the Middle East minister in London quite humbly admitted that leaders in London were in no position to predict where this heaving tide for political change would go. Still, political experts who have been filling editorial columns over the last few days, have been trying to trace some sort of pattern to these events. These predictions are based first and foremost on their perception of the Egyptian protestors. Most often the people who have united, taking great risks to their lives and their future security, are described as ‘fickle mobs’ who have no clear political alternative to the despot they want to overthrow and are vulnerable to being hijacked by religious fanatics.

There are two predictions for the future of Egypt. One version continues with oriental stereotypes of the Eastern other and predicts with scepticism that political upheaval in the Middle East can dangerously lead to election of despotic and fundamentalist leaders. Citing the Iranian Revolution of 1979 they warn that chaos in Egypt can only lead to further threats to the West. So, the advice is to hold on to the predictable, the devil you know, those who are the strategic partners of the west, Mr Mubarak in this case, than allow unpredictable political change to take place. In short, if elections were to take place the Egyptian people cannot be trusted to support a stable and liberal political regime. Western strategic interests in the Middle East are best served as long as the political structure is predictable and controlled rather than one that is open to public choice and decision-making- the stuff that democracy should be about. Of course, an important fact that these accounts omit is that the political regimes that they are basing their warnings against, the likes of Khomeini’s, Saddam’s or Osama Bin Laden’s, could not have taken shape without the active support of Western leaders.. The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, benefited largely from Western aid and was used to subvert the socialist non-aligned politics of the Abdel Nasser era.

The second version sees the protests in Egypt’s as some sort of a seismic wave that started in Tunisia and spread to Cairo and could potentially take over the region. While the popular struggle for democracy is applauded in this version, it also carries subtle orientalist perceptions. The Egyptian revolution is likened to the revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989. Pro-democracy writers and activists take this as an opportunity to cheer and support Egyptians for standing up for all that liberal democracies stand for. The Orientalist lens is apparent, in that Egyptians are believed to be somehow imitating the West, as desiring to reach the moral high ground that Western liberal democracies have become the representatives of. As if the Egyptian protestors are somehow revising their core values by borrowing from the West- rule of law, enforceable human rights, independent courts, free and fair elections and so on. Even this version is not without its intention of furthering Western dominance and control by installing the predictable - the political model which they are most familiar and at ease with. After all, the message this version implicitly relays is that the West has somehow perfected the ideal typical model of liberal democracy and that Egyptians can benefit by imitating this model. Again, what this accounts leaves out is the version of democracy the Egyptians themselves want. The slogan of the protestors very aptly includes “bread, freedom and human dignity” as for many Egyptians democracy is not just about a stable state or fair elections but about the provision of fundamental rights for freedom from fear and persecution, for food and above all justice.

Going back to Moses and his somewhat coercive approach to persuading Ramses, aside from the religious overtones of his story, it is an account of a leader and his oppressed people who were fundamentally asking for the same freedoms, that the Egyptians are struggling for today. One may go as far as saying that not very unlike those times the Red Sea has been a crucial rite of passage for spreading the message of freedom. What this means of course is that democracy and all the values it stands for is not an ultimate end in itself but much rather a continuing process of change.

Free and fair elections in Egypt and whatever outcome it may bring forth will be one step in a much longer learning process for the Egyptians. Neither did Western states arrive at democratic foundations without their share of conflict and violence nor have they arrived at a final perfect state. The Egyptians too should be allowed to define their own path for democracy, and even if they stumble along the way, it is their right to decide how they want to shape their political institutions and hold them accountable. The revolution in Egypt is not another opportunity for the West to further its strategic interests in the Middle East. It is the struggle of the Egyptians who have taken high costs to their lives and security for freedom and justice.

Dr Ipshita Basu is the Head of Research at the Institute of Governance Studies, BRAC University. [email protected]

 


 




 


Comments are not moderated. Please be responsible and civil in your postings and stay within the topic discussed in the article too. If you find inappropriate comments, just Flag (Report) them and they will move into moderation que.