Book review: A non-feminist view of the last 10 years of Mubarak's rule in Egypt

Lebanese researcher Dalal Al-Berzy tells her own experience of living in Egypt for 10 years, comparing internalised images of Cairo with its modern reality

Misr Allaty Fi Khatery (Egypt in My Mind) by Dalal Al-Bezry, Beirut: Dar Al-Saki, 2011. pp.191
The Lebanese researcher and writer Dala Al-Bezry lived in Egypt from 1999 to 2009, witnessing early indications of the Egyptian revolution to come and the birth of opposition movements out of the heart of oppression.
Rather than focusing on theory or historical record, Al-Bezry presents the reader insights from the lives of Egyptians at the end of Mubarak's rule. As indicated in the publisher's note, the stories in this book were "lived as accomplice to them: from the veil to the niqab…to the relationship between men and women, the movement of women's bodies and what those movements reveal, to the state of religiousness…to the intellectuals and their role in bearing social responsibility."
Al-Berzy indicates that, together with her two previous books, Politics more Powerful than Modernism and Egypt vs. Egypt, her work is the result of ten years spent in Egypt and the fruit of the daily encounters and monitoring changes that led in the end to the decline of cultural authenticity replaced with cheapened imitations.
The seven studies included in the book are not restricted to an academic frame, but as expressed in her introduction, "As a sociologist, the closing of the society didn't excite me. I had to use anthropology and semiotics as well. But I used each of the sciences as the reality was being revealed and as I experienced it and interacted with it: through noting, observing, living and participating; through people's stories about themselves and their own lives; through walking in the street, using the metro and being present in any place where people gather." According to Al-Bezry, it's a book that attempts to understand the strangest faces and absurd scenes Egypt presents.
Part of her mental image of the country stems from the Egypt of the 1960s: Abdel-Nasser, Om Kolthum, Abdel-Halim Fafez and the songs of the revolution. Despite being a Francophone, it's not unusual then, that she'd learned to understand the speeches of the eloquent Nasser. Al-Bezry received her Ph.D. for her research on the Muslim Brotherhood. She'd read everything to do with the movement in Egypt, linking both her studies and daily existence to an important actor in the Egyptian scene. This, for Al-Bezry, was combined with her knowledge of the history of the Egyptian stance vis-à-vis Israel, the U.S. position on that relationship and a support for national liberation movements around the world.
The author's life in Cairo was a reverse cultural shock, as Egypt throughout those ten years had been moving backwards, "rejecting all its inhabitants: women, rich, poor, from different religions, foreigners… I was a stranger in Egypt. An estrangement I'd never expected or read about. An estrangement that seemed to be the end of all estrangements, as if the boundaries of the universe had expanded without an end and without healing."
The seven studies included in the book are new approaches to familiar topics, opened up by the author with unusual boldness: Egypt of the Photos, Niqab and Immunity, The Veil and the Temptation of Covering, Men and Women: Harassment not Love, My Body Their Body, Religion: Doctrine of Rituals, and finally, The Intellectual: Bohemian Notables.
In one example from Niqab and Immunity, Al-Bezry details the experience of joining a large demonstration, which began at Al-Azhar Mosque, against the Gaza siege. The world changed for her as she realized that whoever joined a demonstration was subject to oppression and physical abuse, including the veiled and those wearing Niqab.
While herself wearing the Niqab to join the demonstration, Al-Bezry reflected on the possibility of Niqab becoming enforced by law. "Maybe because the Niqab gives me a chance to mock the law of the state after so long of being fed up of its laws that filled the society with chaos and retardation. It allows me the relaxation and prestige, playfulness and seduction with guaranteed results."
The author not only wore the niqab and veils for a time, but also mingled with Cairo's intellectual society and elites, as well as every now and then visiting its slums.
Her experiences led to more questions than answers, for she had no prior knowledge, but continues gathering information from her own living experience, for Egypt – the only mental image she had before she visited – is another Egypt in reality, and she had to give it up for it's nearly all gone. The reality was shocking and it led her to try to understand what really happened and to end up with the questions.
Al-Bezry's weakness may be that she focuses only on Cairene society, leaving out the nuances of the Egyptian Delta and Upper Egypt. She has defended the omission by saying that she did not restrict herself to an academic approach, which would have included samples from communities across Egypt. Her approach was a kind of casual, living study, collecting observations as both a sociologist and a resident, joining in events and listening to the stories told around her.
In the book, dedicated to the martyrs of the January 25 Revolution, Al-Bezry points out that Egyptians before the revolution were weaker than the regime. They had born poverty and corruption together with lack of freedoms, but were now finally able to overcome this fear by forging a freedom of their own.