Nehad Selaiha watches political assassination freshly debated in Mahmoud El-Lozy's revival of Alfred Farag's Sulayman El-Halabi at the AUC In the afternoon of Saturday, 14 June 1800, during the French campaign on Egypt, 24-year old-Sulayman El-Halabi, a Syrian from Aleppo studying at Al- Azhar, was arrested in the garden of Al- Azbakiyya palace, the site of the old Shepherd's hotel, close to where Cinema Diana stands now in Al-Alfi street. An hour earlier, in the same spot, the body of General Kleber, who had succeeded Napoleon as commander-in-chief of the French Orient Legion, had been found with multiple stabs in the chest and abdomen. Questioned in the presence of the new army commander, General Meno, Sulayman said he had spent three years at Al- Azhar before going back to Aleppo for a while when his father fell sick. He had arrived back in Cairo only a month ago, on 18 May, had called on Kleber's palace in Giza that morning (14 June) to seek employment as a clerk and had followed the general from Giza to Al-Rhoda, to the Armenian Barracks, down to Al-Azbakiyya palace simply because he wanted to see him face to face. He denied meeting the Ottoman Grand Vizier in Syria before coming back to Cairo, taking any orders from him, or discussing the assassination with any of his colleagues or teachers at Al-Azhar. Under torture, he confessed that he had confided his intention to four intimate friends, assuring his investigators that they had done their best to dissuade him. This cut no ice with the French and three of those friends were promptly captured and summarily hanged. Sulayman himself was accused of being a foreign agent, hired by the Ottomans to do the murder for 40 piastres, and was condemned to death by impalement. It was a clever political sentence intended at once to discredit Sulayman in the eyes of Egyptians before he could acquire the status of a hero in the popular mind, deter prospective imitators by the sheer brutality of the mode of death, and, by shifting the blame on the Turks, foster the illusion of a thoroughly subjugated and, therefore, peaceful and docile colony. History is recorded by the victors, they say, and in the Musée de la Criminologie in Paris, the shrivelled, embalmed head of Sulayman, labelled "Head of a Murderer", stares at you from inside a glass cabinet. This, and a vivid description of the actual assassination by the 19th-century historian Abdel-Rahman El-Gabarti, a few scattered lines in history books and the French proces-verbal of the investigation is all that remains of Sulayman. If only his head could speak the truth, tell us what he did during that fateful last visit to Cairo and what thoughts passed through his head! It is tempting to think that it was the sight of this pathetic, speechless head which prompted Alfred Farag, in 1964, to start another investigation of the incident and try to imaginatively delve into the mind of El- Halabi to discover his motives -- and this may well have been his original plan. Reading the play, however, one senses a divided interest, a conflict of directions, and nowhere is this more clearly discernible than in the structure. Designed on the model of Brecht's epic theatre (popular in the 1960s), the play has no traditional plot and consists of short, loosely connected scenes, spanning four acts and less than two months, and carefully edited to project events in different locations taking place simultaneously. It also features a chorus of narrators/commentators who alternately stand outside the events as detached observers or step inside Sulayman El-Halabi's mind or that of Kleber to engage them in an internal dialogue which questions their actions and motives. The result is a vast panoramic view of a country under a particularly savage form of foreign military occupation with occasional insights into the power relations of oppressor and oppressed and the underlying beliefs which inform them. In the middle of this epic construction, however, Farag plants an intellectual hero of potential tragic proportions and with distinct Hamletian echoes. The tension between the epic and tragic modes dilutes both to a certain extent, resulting in many unnecessary, rambling scenes and blurring the dramatic/ideological focus of the work. From the very beginning of the play, even before he sets foot in Cairo, El- Halabi seems firmly and irrevocably set on his course. While still in Aleppo, he is haunted by dreams of sitting in judgement on Kleber and punishing him for the many war crimes he committed against the Egyptian people. Why Kleber in particular is never explained, unless you regard Sulayman as a homicidal megalomaniac who wants to achieve fame by killing the most famous person within reach -- as, indeed, one of his friends in the play angrily describes him. Throughout the play, except for a long monologue near the very end, he does not show any signs of wavering in his conviction or doubting the absolute justice of his cause. This precludes internal conflict of any kind or the possibility of character development. Indeed, all Farag's efforts to invest his hero with Hamletian features -- a meditative cast of mind, a rich imagination and a predilection for clowning in moments of crisis -- and to develop his obsession with justice into a moral dilemma remain purely verbal, superficial and come to naught. Set against harrowing reports of terrible oppression, mass devastation, of looting, burning, killing and ruthless extortion, El-Halabi's decision seems perfectly natural and morally justified. The objections of his colleagues are not moral but rather strategic. They need more time to bury their victims, catch their breath and rally their forces before launching another attack against the French. Meanwhile, they will try to undermine the morale of the invading army by circulating leaflets telling the soldiers that while they die the wealth of Egypt is smuggled to Paris to fill the coffers of their leaders. The wisdom of this policy is borne out by the rage of Kleber on discovering these leaflets. Despite his friends' warnings that his action, while achieving very little in the long run, would bring down the French on Al-Azhar, the cradle of the resistance, and result in collective punishment and indiscriminate mass hangings, El-Halabi refuses to listen and, except for a fleeting moment of hesitation near the end, relentlessly embarks on his plan like a mad fanatic with a self-appointed holy mission. Asked by the chorus in a final confrontation why he chose to kill Kleber rather than any of the Turkish rulers in his country who terrorise his own people, he tells them that he could only kill "rationally", for a just cause, but never out of personal vengeance. Doesn't this turn him as a self-professed judge into a cold-blooded murderer? they ask. "Yes," he answers; "life itself is one such paradox: the judge wears the garb of the murderer and the murderer that of the judge and together they make up Sulayman El-Halabi." Such casuistry could hardly pass for a tragic moral dilemma and in the subsequent dialogue El-Halabi is openly compared, both by the chorus and himself, to a holy man executing the will of God -- a man who has "purified" himself of all earthly failings and human feelings, whose heart can no longer feel pain or misery, fear, weakness, or even joy. Of such stuff fanatics are made, not tragic heroes and El-Halabi's total self-absorption, overweening pride, self-righteousness and feeling of moral superiority defeat All Farag's attempts to enlist our sympathies in his favour. To explain the play's muddled sympathies and confusing structure one should, perhaps, look beyond it to the time it was written. It is possible that, like many of his contemporaries, Farag, once he got to work on his material, could not resist, consciously or otherwise, using history as a mask through which to comment on the present. In the 1960s, memories of the British occupation of Egypt were still fresh in the minds of Farag's generation and in his preface to the play he pointedly compares the assassination of Kleber in 1800 to that of the general commander of the British forces in Egypt, Sir Lee Stack, in 1924. But it is not to the British occupation that the play seems to point. The 1952 coup d'état managed to get rid of the British but not of military rule. Nasser's military dictatorship, masquerading as the rule of the people, was even harsher and more pernicious and hatched at least one known attempt on his life in Alexandria in 1954 (the year that marks his emergence as dictator). Farag had personally experienced the rigours of the new regime, spending a term in prison, as did most intellectuals at the time, and eventually forced into self-exile. At certain points in the play, the historical mask thins out to a dangerous point as Farag's anger seems to get the better of his craftsmanship and he vents his rage through his characters. Listen to this: "You call this a life... that people live nowadays? No, death is infinitely better than such a life... Look at us... We are dressed in shame, made to feed on remorse and dangerous ideas constantly peck at our minds. Evil eyes follow our every movement, like serpents loosed by vicious wizards; they sneak behind us to the table to put us off our food, to work to distract us from it, to bed to plant thorns there. They have opened the gates of hell, made it the rule of life and it throbs and burns through our veins. Kneel and submit... Surrender your manhood to humiliation, your children to the fangs of hunger and your neighbour's neck to the hangman's noose. Come on, come on, kneel, submit and live... live to fill your eyes with dust and stuff your mouth with rubble... Live to be metamorphosed by the black magician from a man to a dog." One wonders who is speaking here: Sulayman or Farag? The metamorphoses of humans into dogs under military rule, as a recent PhD thesis, The Worldview in the Theatre of the 1960s by Hamdi Abdel-Aziz, has established, was a recurrent motif in all the plays of the period. What the above passage describes is life in a modern police state (not under foreign occupation) -- an experience familiar to Farag but alien to his hero and the historical context of the play. In a sense, one could regard the play as a kind of cathartic exercise intended to relieve its author's frustration and purge him from a destructive passion through the figurative killing of Nasser disguised as Kleber. Using a condensed version of the play, Mahmoud El-Lozy's current production at Falaki centre goes to great lengths to emphasise its link with the present. Modern dress is consistently used for all, including the Azharite students and their leader, Sheikh El-Sadat, who is arrested in a shirt and trousers, and the set (by Stancil Campbell) is historically neutral. On one side of the avant-scene, a stone prison cell (which could belong to any age or country, depending on what you put in it) harbours the chorus/singers (Ahmed Bahgat, Ahmed El- Tonsi and Yusra El-Lozy) who, apart from saying their lines, punctuate the scenes with a significant selection of satirical songs from the Ahmed Fouad Negm/El-Sheikh Imam politically hot repertoire, popular among Egyptian university students in the 1970s, which defines their time as Sadat's era. Having identified the reign of Sadat, through the cell and songs, as an extension, albeit in a different guise, of Nasser's military dictatorship which the text targets, El-Lozy goes a step further to argue that though Nasser and Sadat are dead nothing has changed. With the help of Campbell (as lighting designer) he managed to visually transform the whole auditorium into an extension of the chorus's cell by projecting over it a lighting pattern of crisscross bars whenever the lights came up on the cell. But while the cell and chorus were visually and aurally firmly planted placewise in Egypt, the rest of the stage, together with the central and side aisles of the auditorium had a triple geographical identity. In the original play, part of the set represented a spot in Aleppo and the rest, several places in Cairo. In the current production, the set -- a single structure consisting of a one-storey building, with two windows and a large front door, flanked on both sides by wide stairs leading to a flat area on top, with the silhouette of a chain of hills at the rear -- still indicated Aleppo and several places in Cairo; on these, however, it superimposed a new location: Baghdad. To achieve this, El-Lozy adds an opening scene (vividly reminiscent of the opening scene in Khaled El-Sawi's recent hit, Messing with the Mind ). In it, a group of soldiers rampage through the auditorium, waving guns and screaming orders and insults at us in a distinctly American accent, while blinding spotlights glare at us from the stage and a famous American song (which I am told was made after 11 September) plays at a deafening volume, blaring to the world something to the effect that "We" (Americans) have the right to "bring" (forcibly impose?) freedom to the world. And as if this was not enough to drive the point home, we were treated after the interval to a travesty of an American talk show in which a silly bimbo of a star is interviewed amidst rounds of applause about her recent trip to Egypt (not Baghdad) and asked how the natives felt about "our fine boys who are doing a great job there". A while later, El-Lozy sneaks in another scene of a brawl between American soldiers which ends with one shooting himself -- a pointed allusion to the stories of American soldiers committing suicide in Iraq. Indeed, from the very first scene, the identification of the old French campaign on Egypt with the recent American invasion of Iraq is clearly established in the staging, and the subsequent identification of Egypt (past and present) with Iraq follows as a kind of warning to all Arab countries. What happened to Egypt two centuries ago is happening now in Baghdad and could happen tomorrow to Syrian and other Arab countries, seems to be one message. Another strives to establish a causal link between the nature of the ruling regimes in Arab countries and the threat of foreign invasion, thus preserving Alfred Farag's original identification of internal with external military oppression, and goes a step further to hint at a kind of collusion between them. One is clearly reminded here how once upon a time Saddam was the darling boy of the American administration. With all these double visions and superimpositions you cannot expect the eponymous hero to emerge unscathed. Angry and in modern dress, he looks like any young Palestinian or Iraqi civilian you see on television and his grim determination to exterminate Kleber, knowing full well that the attempt means his certain death and brutal, retaliatory collective punishment for his people, transforms him at the end, as he delivers his last monologue, alone, in a spotlight, on the dark, empty stage, while Ravel's Bolero plays softly at the back, into the nearest thing to an Iraqi or Palestinian suicide bomber -- redefined as a freedom fighter, not a terrorist. By the end of the production you realise that here, it is the vanquished, not the victors, who are made to write history.
