Blowing in the wind

It was once the epitome of success -- today it can mean struggling for a living. Fatemah Farag looks at what it means to be a lawyer in Egypt today
It was on 30 September 1912 that Law No. 26 -- the law which gave lawyers working in Egyptian civil courts (established in 1883) the right to a syndicate -- was passed. Lawyers working for the mixed courts were given this right as far back as 1876, but the rights conferred by Law No. 26 were an uphill battle for lawyers.
Law No. 26 was the fruit of efforts which began as early as February of 1886, when a civil courts "interest group" was formed and included the would-be nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul. In December of 1897, and in the office of Morqos Fahmi Effendi, lawyers met to establish a "bureau of lawyers" and in subsequent meetings, by-laws were discussed and a draft law prepared -- the same draft that was to pass on 30 September some 15 years later.
It was a date to remember, and for the first time in its history, the Egyptian Bar Association took time to celebrate "Lawyers Day" this week. As I walked onto the premises of the Bar Association on Ramses Street, I was overwhelmed by the banners draped over the building's walls. "The Legal Profession: the art of defending the victims of injustice and the oppressed," one banner read. "We are the closest people to right and justice," read another. "Lawyers: the hope of the nation in justice and freedom," read yet another.
Milling beneath the signs were dozens of young men and women strutting about in their black lawyers robes with the limp fur trim, full of energy and pride: they had just been sworn into the Bar and become full-fledged lawyers. But did they know what awaited them? Did they believe they had entered a profession that stood for ideals professed on the banners outside? Ideals aside, would they even be able to make a living?
I remember an early morning many years ago when I accompanied my friend Amal to the Bar Association. She was very excited. A recent graduate of the Faculty of Law, she was on her way to getting sworn into the Bar -- a process that happens automatically after graduation and allows graduates to begin work. I waited in the well-worn garden as she was given a black robe with its faux fur trim and not long after she joined me. We drank tea out of glasses placed on the inevitably mismatched saucer -- the surroundings made brighter by the fresh enthusiasm that beamed from her face. For a few months after, I would see her holding a couple of legal files from the office at which she was "training" -- i.e., doing the grunt work of more senior lawyers and not really being paid to do it. The last I heard, she now works in translation.
As I surveyed the young men and women at the Bar Association this week, I could not help but think of Amal and then of another friend of mine, who travelled to the United States to study law. From the start, she was prepared for some gruelling work, but she persevered in the knowledge that it would be worth it. Each time she returned to Egypt to visit, she seemed slicker, more sophisticated -- the product of a system that promised a high paying, prestigious career for hard work. Last I heard she was a successful lawyer in New York.
The contrast is not meant to imply Egypt's "backwardness." On the contrary, the legal profession in Egypt has a long, illustrious history and the ranks of lawyers have included some of the nation's most honoured political and intellectual figures. The dirty wooden floor now tread by lawyers asking about pension funds and health schemes, was once the place where political forces were born and broken -- and a good part of the nation's history was made.
On 11 March 1919, the Bar Association's leadership, headed at the time by historically renowned reformer Ahmed Lutfi El-Sayed and including among its membership prominent politicians such as Sheikh Ali Naser and Mohamed Hafez, decided to protest a decision not to allow Egyptians to travel to Paris to defend the demand for Egypt's independence at the Versailles Conference. The story is recounted in The Civil War at the Bar Association, by lawyer Mustafa Ewies, who notes that all lawyers who wished to take part in the protest were allowed to move their names from the lists of working lawyers to those of non-working lawyers. Lawyers went on strike and the association supported them, announcing that "the refusal to work will continue until the council sees it necessary for the benefit of the nation and the benefit of lawyers to return to work."
In response to British inquiry, the Bar Association replied: "It is the duty of every lawyer to defend personal freedom in every circumstance, and to respond to every violation of the law." It was a position to be consolidated in April of 1921, when the general assembly of the Bar Association announced that it would not be distanced from the affairs of the country and that it would be at the helm of the nationalist movement.
These were stances that reflected the role played by the Bar Association as an incubator of the country's political elite. It is no coincidence that among the ranks of lawyers were the likes of Mohamed Farid, Saad Zaghlul, Lutfi El-Sayed, Makram Ebeid, Abdel-Aziz Fahmi and Murqus Hanna (the only Bar chairman to be sentenced to death for his participation in the nationalist movement against British occupation in 1922, a sentence that was eventually reduced to a prison term).
The Bar's illustrious standing did not last, however. It would eventually come into direct confrontation with the Free Officers Movement, which in July 1952 overthrew the monarchy, and be greatly affected by the subsequent change in the national power structure.
Overt political animosity between the Bar Association and the Free Officers -- with Gamal Abdel-Nasser, in particular -- came during the 1954 March Crisis. The General Assembly met on 26 March and decided on the following demands: the release of all political prisoners, the immediate end to emergency law, the return of political parties, the end of the role of the Revolutionary Command Council. It also issued a call for a one day strike at the courts. (Justice, issue no. 21) It was a position that the assembly would pay for. On 22 December 1954, Law No. 709 was issued, disbanding the association's leadership and giving the minister of justice the mandate to appoint a new leadership in its stead.
A lot has changed since then, but one thing remains: the legal profession would never regain its original status as a hatching house for the political elite. Commenting on elite recruitment since the July 1952 Revolution, prominent columnist Fahmi Howeidy recalls the words of late historian Gamal Hamdan, who described the Nasserist regime's "Alliance of Popular Forces" as being, in fact, "an alliance of army officers and university professors." Until today, government portfolios are almost invariably filled by persons recruited from academia.
At the same time, a new education policy meant that a tremendous number of law faculty graduates were hitting the market. And while many large law firms shut down as a result of nationalisaton policies, it remained that to "make it" in the profession, one had to have access to some capital. The requirements of a successful lawyer included having a good office, preferably downtown, or in some other affluent neighbourhood, and the proper connections. These were qualifications that the thousands of new graduates who began to enter the job market, particularly since the '70s, did not have, and their options became either to join the office of a "big" lawyer and make a pittance for years, or to join the legal department at a public sector institution or government ministry, or scavenging the courts for easy prey and modest cases.
The effects of this state of affairs on the standards of the profession have been profound. According to Abbas Haggar, a lawyer who joined the Bar in 1977 and has been active in the association, "The level of professional activity is at its lowest and things are really in a state of collapse. Go to a court house and sit in on some of the sessions and you will find that the language used by young lawyers is very poor, and that professional skills have been badly hurt."
"This is because there has been the total absence of the role of the Bar in protecting and upgrading the profession," complained Haggar. "At the same time, the number of lawyers graduating and entering the job market are increasing at incredible rates. All of this is compounded by the fact that these are difficult times economically."
We were sitting at the law office of a friend and Haggar became too agitated at this point to remain seated. As other lawyers around the room shook their heads in agreement, a tense Haggar added that "People complain that lawyers have turned into real- estate agents or middle men. But that is not the problem. The problem is that the level of professional ability is at a record low. Many lawyers are shutting down their offices and most young lawyers are resigned to working as clerks, photocopying papers and running around doing the drudge work. They have no one to teach them and they are not being trained."
And what of the Bar Association when all of this decline in the profession was taking place? Well if it wasn't one thing it was another. There was the rift with Abdel-Nasser, which was eventually placated and in a historic move, Abdel-Nasser walked into the Bar Association dressed in lawyers robes and signed the visitors book the one-liner: "I wish from God success for all."
Looking back on the political heritage of the Bar Association and under the late President Anwar El-Sadat, the Committee for the Defence of Liberties became very active, the '70s being a time when the Bar Association became a forum for all those fighting the battle for democracy. It was a role only reinforced with Camp David and much energy went into anti-normalisation activities -- until the 1981 wave of arrests launched by Sadat against over 1000 of his political opponents from across the political spectrum in the country.
On the heals of the arrests, the government once again struck at the Bar Association, and the elected council was removed and an appointed council brought in. In 1983, an elected council was let back in and until 1985 the Bar was controlled by "political associations" -- fronts for the various political forces vying for control. And while the Bar continued to retain a strong presence as a defender of democracy, its role as a syndicate for lawyers and the need to address the professional problems faced by so many lawyers were for the most part ignored. Hence, it was in 1985 that the Islamist movement first surfaced. During the 1985 elections, Mukhtar Nouh became the first Islamist member of the association's governing council, recounts Haggar. "He came from a society called the Islamic Shari'a, which had in fact been set up by the government to counter the Liberties Committee, a then leftist outpost."
With the 1985 elections, the council and leadership started to fight over seats. "This was the beginning of the end, because the fight that ensued totally destroyed political societies within the syndicate," lawyer and author Mustafa Ewies told Al-Ahram Weekly. "People were making decisions solely on the basis of self-interest, and at the time, Nouh was just sitting and watching instead of participating in the deadly fray."
By then, most lawyers were young graduates dispossessed of the means to make a success of their careers. They become the "proletariat" of the Bar Association. In come the Islamists represented by Nouh, who took the position of head of the Bar Association's registration office.
Haggar explains the significance of that position as follows: "The people at the registration office are very important -- they are people a new lawyer meets at his admission to the Bar, people you will probably always remember." For the Islamist movement, this strategy put them in a position where they could ingratiate themselves with new initiates by helping them complete their paper work and explaining procedures. So while the disputes between everyone else had reached the level of fist blows and, on occasion, bullets fired in the air, the Islamist movement was working slowly and diligently under everyone's noses -- feeding people rice pudding and reading the Qur'an. "They would send people on errands, like photocopying case files and pay them well -- all a kind of bribe, but young lawyers are desperate."
And despite the fact that it had been coming for some time, when the Bar Association eventually did fall into the hands of the Islamists in 1989, the reaction was one of disbelief and shock. In the words of one activist, "To see that bastion of democratic struggle in the '70s go down was so shocking that we felt it must have been an indication that the Islamist movement was in fact in the position of taking over much more."
Of course, even though the Islamists had based their movement on the "proletarian" lawyer, not much changed in their lives. Eventually, the government sequestered the Bar Association and the battle for self-government began again. Finally, elections were allowed last year and the ball is once again rolling -- or is it? "There have been at least 15 years of destruction and at least another 15 more years are needed to transcend their devastating effects," grumbles Haggar.
He may be a pessimist, but Amir Salem, a lawyer and one-time Bar Association activist, points out that "There are hints of change that will wreak havoc on the current structure of the legal profession and the middle class in general -- namely, the major challenges that are beginning to be forced upon us with globalisation and the full implementation of the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]. What this means for the professional class is that individuals are going to be up against huge conglomerates. In the case of lawyers, big legal firms will eventually enter the market and wipe out the individual Egyptian lawyer and his private law office. Instead of offices, we are talking about whole buildings; instead of a few lawyers we are talking about a couple of hundred employees. We are also talking about a skills market that is way beyond the reach of most Egyptian lawyers: multi-language abilities, international law specialists and technological skills that most Egyptian lawyers simply do not have."
The banners overhanging the Bar Association's down-town headquarters continue to flutter in the wind, but the question hangs: what does the future hold for the tens of thousands of lawyers who deem themselves "the hope of the nation in justice and freedom."
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