Fayza Hassan reviews two recently published books on change in Egypt A case of hit and miss Inside Egypt: the Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of Revolution, John R Bradley, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. pp230 John Bradley's latest book Inside Egypt, was at the centre of controversy earlier this summer: the buzz had it that it was not a welcome addition to our political edification. This controversy is over now, as the book can be easily found in Cairo bookstores. Among the Egyptian small English-speaking minority, those who finally managed to find the book have dubbed Bradley, "John Bravery" because he did put in writing what they have been saying in restricted company about the disintegration of the country. Yet in his later years Naguib Mahfouz who had become disenchanted with the state of the country, already denounced the failures of contemporary Egypt. In one of his novels The Day the President Was Killed, his protagonist, Ilwan, sits in a coffee house (Maybe Bradley's El-Nadwa El Thaqafiya ?) on the day Anwar El Sadat was assassinated on 6 October 1981 and reflects that "[w]e are a people more acclimatized to defeat than to victory. It is just a mafia which controls us -- where are the good old days?... How many nations live here side by side in this one nation of ours? How many millionaires are there? Relatives and parasites? Smugglers and pimps? Shi'ites and Sunnis?... What do eggs cost today? This is my concern. Yet at the same time, singers and belly dancers in the nightclubs of Pyramid Road are showered with gratuities and banknotes. What did the imam of the mosque say within earshot of the soldiers of the Central Intelligence Force? There is not one public lavatory in this entire neighborhood...[Sadat] rented our entire country -- furnished -- to the United States." Clearly then, Bradley has not been revealing any well guarded secrets. As he himself points out, the famous Egyptian writer Alaa El-Aswani has gone a long way in describing once more the ills (old and new) of our present society in his immensely popular book and film The Yakoubian Building. Movies, TV serials and talk shows are doing the same every day. By now the most ignorant city dweller knows that something is terribly wrong in Egypt. Bradley cites Aswani in an interview he gave once to Egypt Today, the English-language magazine published in Cairo, after a leading UK provider of advice for foreign companies wanting to invest in Egypt and for those seeking travel insurance, gave the country's service and tourist sector a flat zero. Aswani agreed wholeheartedly with the result, adding that the whole Egyptian government should get a zero in all fields. He furthermore had much to say to Bradley about the failure of the 1952 Revolution and the shortcomings of those who engineered it. In his opinion they were the ones who started the country's rapid course towards the abyss. Obviously Bradley shares the same views and is careful to interview several well known like-minded historians, writers and politicians, as well as the odd taxi driver and the unemployed student who have a bone to grind with the system. He does travel to the provinces as he points out repeatedly and befriends people in the small cities often sharing their lives for a few days. Unfortunately, however, he does not seem to have had any significant contact with the fellahin who are the backbone of Egypt. And, as he writes about past revolutions he seems to forget that Saad Zaghlul and Ahmed Urabi proudly touted their peasant origins, while Gamal Abdel-Nasser's first concern to enforce his rule was the agrarian reform. Hassan El-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, himself was of peasant stock. It would have been a worthwhile effort on the part of the author to extend his investigation in this direction. Just as restrictive to the conclusion he is labouring to bring about is the fact that he discounts the role of the Egyptian woman in the political process, although especially in the countryside, wives often influences the political attitude of the family through their own tribal connections. Samir Raafat the author and lover of Cairo, [in its] glory years -- a book that bemoans the demise of the beautiful buildings erected during the reign of the Khedive Ismail and following Egyptian rulers, is eager to complain to Bradley: since 1952 the objects of his admiration, the villas, have been disappearing every day sold by the numerous impoverished heirs of their previous owners, to make room for ugly urban developments. This is the age of real-estate hungry speculators, not architecturally savvy rich proprietors. As well as the private beautiful villas and their lush gardens, Raafat mourns the passing of an era of gentility and culture, in which the Egyptian elite basked, undisturbed, for half a century. However, neither Aswani and Raafat, nor Dr Ahmed Okasha, (president of the Egyptian Psychiatric Association and director of World Health Organization's Center for Training and Research in Mental Health) -- Bradley's third interlocutor -- have an agenda to solve Egypt's present woes. They personally have no power to provoke change and can only react as indignant passive witnesses. Unlike the formers, Okasha is against looking towards the past for answers. He does not agree with Bradley's assertion that "Even considering the undoubted ill effects of direct or indirect colonial rule the current Egyptian regime fares badly in every respect when compared to the pre- Revolutionary monarchy that Napoleon Bonaparte short lived invasion of Egypt in 1798 inadvertently helped to create." Okasha thinks that yearning for the past is dangerous. The world has changed and what worked then cannot work today. He predicts a state of constructive chaos which will lead to a coup d'état or to a takeover by Muslim extremists. "Then again," he adds, there could be peaceful change brought about by political parties." He has faith in the ruling National Democratic Party "[b]ut they can't act." Having found no one to offer concrete actions to pull the country out of its misery, Bradley is content to examine all its problems and its very few saving graces. He deserves credit for not missing any sore point. Fluent in Arabic he has ready access to everything published in the Egyptian press. One of his longest chapters, on torture, is particularly well documented, while religious strife, the blatant theft of Egypt's antiquities which are flooding international specialized markets, the disastrous state of health and education, among other afflictions, are carefully exposed in all their sad reality. His take on Islam however represents the weakest part of his analysis as he completely fails to see the connection between Islamism and Sufism and the historical role the Egyptian fellah has always played in his powerful religious observances and practices. Bradley seems to believe that Islamism was imported to Egypt by workers coming back from the Gulf. However this influence concerns more the superficial aspects of Islam, such as veiling and beard growing. More to the point are the teachings and authority of the home grown Muslim Brothers whose power in the end can only come from the countryside with the support of the fellahin. Having perused the consequences of Egypt military regimes, Bradley's conclusions fail to show how and why Egypt would be on the brink of revolution more now than at any other time. Apparently, he believes that the Muslim Brotherhood will eventually pick up the pieces because they are "if only by default the strongest [organization]" to oppose the present regime and he rather lamely cites as proof the vague comments posted on the official Web page of the Brotherhood in reaction to a 2007 BBC article "that laid the conditions most likely to lead to popular unrest and overthrow of a government." Among the key factors identified in the piece which might lead to regime change are: "widespread public protest, bringing in many different social and economic groups; an opposition leadership with clear ideas around which people can rally; the ability to use the media to get a message across; a mechanism to undermine the existing regime whether by an internal coup in the case of a military junta, the emergence of reformers, or the simple exhaustion of an existing leading to its collapse." Bradley adds that "[t]he excited Muslim Brother activist who brought attention to the article asked his fellow Islamists on their Web site: "In Egypt, can it be implemented?" a question which surprisingly leads the prosecution (Bradley) to rest his case: "The question was posited, one got the impression, more than just rhetorically," he concludes hastily, oblivious to the fact that in the end he did not make a convincing case for impending revolution.
