By Mohamed Salmawy Naguib Mahfouz was a great believer in democracy. Since he launched his career with a series of novels on ancient Egypt and right through his last work, Dreams, you can detect a constant plea for freedom in his writings. For Mahfouz, democracy was more than an ideal. Our nation is ready for democracy, he insisted. Mahfouz often reminded his foreign visitors that Egypt had a democratic past rivalling any other modern state. We had our first parliament in 1866, much earlier than other countries. "Some think that our first parliament, launched about a century and a half ago, was too primitive to be taken seriously. This is not true. This parliament was born strong, for the country was politically mature and had a long-standing cultural tradition. The first parliament, which was created under Khedive Ismail, was powerful enough to depose Ismail himself a few years later. And that's the same parliament that stood by Ahmed Orabi against the government. There is no denying that Egyptian democratic legacy is alive and well," Mahfouz once told me. "Why, then, are we having so much trouble catching up with something that seems so out of reach? Why have we lagged so far behind other democratic nations?" I asked. "We're no strangers to democracy. It is part and parcel of our political past. Our first parliamentary attempt may have disintegrated because of the British occupation, but we didn't give up. We went for democracy once again in 1924, for this is what we wanted. And everything went like clockwork. When I was a child, elections were fiercely contested. In our constituency in Abbasiya, a Muslim candidate once challenged a Copt who happened to be the candidate of the Wafd Party. The voters were mostly Muslims. But they took sides with the Copt and the Muslim lost. He took such a low percentage of the vote that he was not eligible for a refund of the financial deposit he paid to enter the race. Those who restrict democratic life in this country claim that our people are too immature to take control of their future. Those people are either ignorant or downright malicious," Mahfouz said.
