al-Zahf al-muqaddas (The Holy March), Sherif Younis, Cairo: Dar Merit, 2005. pp208 There exists, in contemporary Egyptian letters, a tradition of polemic many readers will readily and rightly dismiss as unworthy of time or attention. Whether this tradition has the capacity to evolve into something more convincing, at the level of intellectual import or that of surface enjoyment, is a question for the future. But the present book, perhaps an untypical variation on the polemical theme, certainly suggests that it does. It is an engaging, fresh read that proves intellectually stimulating, virtues that tend to be absent from the work of the vast majority of present-day polemicists. Often produced within the framework of one left-wing ideology or another, contemporary Egyptian polemic employs both historical fact and philosophical argument to service a preset political agenda. It tends to forgo fair-mindedness in favour of a shallow objectivity, logical as opposed to empirical. And its purpose will more often than not be cyclically to reiterate, over and over again, an ultimately simple statement about a rival or reviled political figure, epoch or group, in this case the Nasser regime. Judging by tone and content alike, this book takes its cue from the Generation of the Seventies political tract, a very particular, if largely short-lived, instance of the polemical tradition. This is an often pompous, largely adolescent literary form that benefits as much from situationist politics, post- Freudian psychology and existentialist literature as from its more serious precedents, namely texts written by more mature Marxist activists working and writing in the fifties and sixties. Even as it transcends polemical conventions, the book progresses through a set of dynamics similar to those of the aforementioned tract. It combines political analysis with literary skill to produce an ultimately damning statement about a specific historical subject: that the 1952 Free Officers' coup (also known as the July Revolution) gave way to an essentially totalitarian order that erased all vestiges of plurality. According to the author, and this is the crux of his argument, the Revolution offered the patriarchal, almost divine figure of Gamal Abdel-Nasser as an object of both identification and adoration. In less equivocal terms, it replaced political life with a Big Brother. Younis demonstrates this by documenting, with seeming objectivity, two moments in the history of the Revolution. The first, March 1954, is when Nasser, the then prime minister, exiled fellow RCC member Khaled Mohyieddin and placed General Mohamed Naguib, the then president, under house arrest. 1954 marked the beginning not only of unadulterated military rule, but also of state control of political activity, intellectual life and the press. Fast forward to the protests, on 9-10 June 1967, against the by now ubiquitously powerful president's decision to undertake an act of tanahhi (abdication, or the renunciation of power, in response to the shocking defeat of 5 June), and you end up with a different situation altogether. The country has just undergone "its greatest defeat since the battle of Al-Tal Al-Kabir of 1882". But the effects of military rule have been such that there is no alternative to the ruling regime, and the easiest way for that regime to survive is for Nasser, responsible as he remains for the defeat, to remain in power. The author stops at the fact that, unlike the March 1954 demonstrations, the 9-10 June protests could not have been wholly staged. They reflect the will of the people just as much as that of the political order, and as such, according to this author, point to the extent to which Nasser had managed to co-opt and subordinate political consciousness, not only in Egypt but also throughout the Arab world. It should not go unnoticed that the cover of the book shows a Sphinx bearing a strong facial resemblance to the leader. The notion of Nasser as Big Brother, whether a rightful or illegitimate one, is interesting in itself. And the book points to the possibility of pursuing a less politicized understanding of the place Nasser, the first fully Egyptian ruler of Egypt since ancient times, came to occupy in the collective popular imagination. Seen in the context of Ancient Egyptian myth, the psychological paradigms of which persist to this day, that place would seem to be equivalent to that of the falcon-headed god Horus in the collective unconscious, to borrow a Jungian term. It is interesting to note that the Revolution changed the emblem of the Egyptian flag from a crescent to a bird of prey closely related to a falcon, the eagle. Horus, who would in later ages be replaced by Christ and by many a Muslim saint, was the warrior conceived from the dismembered body of the patriarch Osiris by the divine mother. He was the legitimate heir responsible for avenging his father by fighting evil and thus taking over the throne, all attributes that apply to Nasser. Be that as it may, what the author of this book fails to take into account is that, however ultimately off-putting Nasser's strategies may have been, they answered not only to a genuine collective need for the figure of a leader but also to a growing and vastly commendable regional drive for Arab unity. The irony is that, however much the reader might agree with the message being conveyed, in the end the formal limitations of polemic will always take away from the force of the argument underlying any one text or series of texts. These limitations do so by, among other means, separating a particular proposition from the wider dialogue of which it would otherwise be a part. So here, for example, the author fails to say that the Nasser regime was typical of postcolonial rule throughout the Third World. The fact that it adopted a repressive mode of governance and a populist discourse to ensure the longevity of the national order it sought to establish in the wake of imperial domination is, rather, emphasised in isolation. The author considers specific ways in which that regime was repressive, delineating not only practices testifying to such an orientation but also the conceptual and verbal language that informed them. He goes on to list dire short- and long-term consequences without allowing for the benefit of hindsight. And in common with the vast majority of Egyptian polemicists, he may well appear to be doing so only to make the point that this was, after all, a repressive regime, over and over again. He certainly seems to be saying that the Nasserist ideology, whether intentionally or not, led to the immediate handover of all individual or communal sovereignty to a handful of army officers among whom a hierarchical order placed Nasser on top. And while undoubtedly true at some level, these claims are seldom set against a corrective discourse, or a different viewpoint. Rather than drawing on, or in some way accounting for, the narrative of so-called Nasserists of later periods, for example, the author relies wholly on the discourse of the Revolution itself, concentrating on Nasser's speeches and the journalistic work of Mohamed Hassanein Heikal. Moving from one topic to the next, he does little to shed contextual light on the discourse in question, by, for example, detailing the historical circumstances in which it emerged from a broader historical perspective, whether regional or global. Indeed, his insistence on putting forward a whole, seemingly objective picture not only of life under Nasser but of official intervention in the living of it overshadows a rare, indeed almost Wittgensteinian, clarity of vision. Such clarity reaches beyond the simple fight-picking of seventies polemicists to a far more stimulating process of questioning: how Nasser came to occupy the place he did, for example, but, more importantly, how that place came to be available in the first place and what the cost incurred on social-cultural existence might be of giving in to military rule, however well-intentioned or timely. Here is a polemical tract, then. But here, equally, is a meticulous reading of Nasser's populist discourse, and a retrospective, hence detached, comment on one of the most intriguing events in recent Middle East history, namely the tanahhi protests. By proposing an almost semiotic approach to the official narrative of the Revolution as it unfolded, the author manages to build on a seemingly abortive tradition to generate a powerful propelling mechanism for asking intimately relevant questions, not only of politics but also of social and cultural identity and of the very collective psyche that espouses them. In addition, through a quasi-structuralist analysis, he produces a kind of lexicon of Arab despotism in the postcolonial context, with specific words accumulating associative momentum as they are revealed, debated and further probed in a variety of interconnected situations. In the end, however, it is precision and insight into the dynamics of language that save the day, by lending credibility to an endeavour that might have been dismissed as pointless. Nasser's speeches, for example, are quoted as they were uttered, with all the vernacular terms kept intact, and not in the Standard Arabic in which they were subsequently recorded. And the author spends pages and pages on a single term, such as "the people", tracing its origins in "revolutionary" discourse through its emergence and re-emergence on various historical occasions, to bring out its significance. In so doing, he contrasts what it is supposed to mean with what it refers to in practice, or the political function it actually performs. And the resulting process amounts to rather more than a cyclically reiterated statement of the fact that the Nasser regime was bad, or disastrous, or badly and disastrously repressive. By Youssef Rakha
