On the State of Egypt (15 page)

Then I came back to Egypt and worked as a dentist in several places, including Torah Cement Company, where I discovered by chance that the company’s cement laboratory played an important part in the history of Egypt. During preparations for the 1973 war, the company’s chemists—Fakhry al-Daly, Nabil Gabriel, and others—worked to develop a special kind of cement in cooperation with the Egyptian Army Corps of Engineers. After arduous research they managed to produce a new, extra-strong cement with exceptional resistance to high temperatures, and Egyptian frogmen used this cement during the crossing of the Suez Canal to block napalm tubes in the Bar Lev line. When the Israelis opened the tubes to fire napalm, which would normally have turned the waters of the canal into a living hell, they were surprised by the improved Egyptian cement’s ability to stop the burning napalm, even under heavy pressure. After that I read another story: The Bar Lev line was one of the most formidable military defenses in history and it was thought that only a nuclear bomb could demolish it, but an ingenious Egyptian engineer by the name of Major-General Baqy Zaky from the Army Corps of Engineers did a careful study of the line’s composition, concluded that it was made of soil, and came up with an excellent, if simple, idea. He invented a water cannon that could increase water pressure until it had an extraordinary penetration capacity. During the crossing of the canal, Egyptian soldiers used the water cannon Baqy Zaky had invented on the Bar Lev line until it collapsed like a piece of cheese.

There is much to say about the ingenuity of Egyptians. Do you know the extent of Egyptian brain drain to Europe, America, and Australia? Some 824,000 Egyptians with advanced qualifications have gone abroad, a number equal to the population of some Arab countries, including three thousand scientists in important fields, such as nuclear engineering, genetics, and artificial intelligence. All of them would welcome the opportunity to serve their country. In the Gulf states the ingenuity of the Egyptians is most evident. These states, which acquire millions of dollars a day from oil, have built affluent new cities and set up giant companies. Egypt has succeeded in producing Ahmed Zewail, Magdi Yacoub, Naguib Mahfouz, Abdel Wahab, Umm Kulthum, and thousands of creative Egyptians, because the creativity of a people has nothing to do with wealth but rather with cultural experience accumulated over many generations. This cultural accretion exists in Egypt more than in any other Arab country, and in fact the Arab oil-producing countries are indebted to Egyptians in everything they have achieved. It was Egyptians who taught them at school and at university, who planned and supervised the construction of their cities, who set up radio and television stations, and who drafted their constitutions and their laws. You will find that even the national anthems of these countries were written and set to music by Egyptians.

Egyptian creativity is a fact that cannot be denied, so the question springs to mind: If Egypt has all this human creativity, why has it fallen to the back among the countries of the world, and why do most Egyptians live in misery? The reason can be summed up in one word: despotism. Egypt’s talents will continue to be squandered and its potential will go to waste as long as the political system is despotic and oppressive. Public offices in Egypt always go to followers of the regime regardless of their competence or education. Office holders in Egypt are not interested in performance as much as in their image in the eyes of the ruler, because he is the only person who can dismiss them. Because most of them have no talent, they are hostile to those who are competent, whom they see as a threat to themselves and to their positions. The machinery of the Egyptian regime routinely excludes competent and talented people and opens the door to sycophants and cheerleaders. We may be the only country in the world where a minister who has failed in the field of housing takes responsibility for the oil sector, about which he knows nothing, simply because President Mubarak likes him, and the only country where someone is appointed prime minister when he has never attended a political meeting in his life.

The Egyptian people have never been tested, or only on a very few occasions, such as the War of Attrition, the October War, and the building of the High Dam. Every time they have been tested, Egyptians have passed the test with distinction, but afterward they go back to the substitutes’ bench. We Egyptians are like a group of soccer players who are talented but whom the coach does not like, does not respect, and does not want to give a chance. Instead he uses a team of losers and degenerates who always bring the team to defeat. According to the rules of soccer a player who spends the whole season on the substitutes’ bench has the right to revoke his contract. All of Egypt has been sitting on the substitutes’ bench for thirty years, watching defeats and disasters and unable to intervene. Doesn’t Egypt have the right, in fact the duty, to revoke its contract?

During my last visit to New York, I saw, as usual, many Egyptian university graduates working as restaurant waiters and as gas station attendants. One night I was walking down 42nd Street and I came across someone standing at a cart selling hot dogs. He looked Egyptian and I went up to him and spoke to him. I was surprised to find that he was a graduate of the Ain Shams medical faculty. He offered me mint tea and I sat in the street next to him. A customer came along and he got up to make him some hot dogs, and I thought I was seeing a living example of what the Egyptian regime is doing to Egyptians. This young man had worked hard and honorably to qualify for medical college, graduated as a doctor, and now he is making hot dogs for passersby. As though he were aware of my thoughts, he sat next to me, lit a cigarette, and said, “You know, sometimes I feel that my life’s gone to waste. I’m afraid I’ll spend my whole life making hot dogs in the street. But then I tell myself that here I’m a hot dog seller and a respected citizen, whereas in Egypt I might be a doctor but I would have no rights and get no respect.” He told me how his father, a civil servant in the Ministry of Religious Endowments, had struggled to educate him and his sister; how after he graduated he discovered what he called the “three no’s” theory—no job, no marriage, no future; and how he discovered that working in the Gulf was humiliating and uncertain, and that signing up for higher studies was beyond his means. He told me how he had asked the only girl he ever loved to forget him because he could not marry her or have her wait for him.

He paused a while and then, trying to be cheerful, he said, “Would you like to hear Mohamed Munir? I have all his tapes.” He took a cassette player from his cart and added Munir’s voice as background to the sad scene. It was bitterly cold and the heater next to the cart was inadequate. We pulled our coats tight around us and blew on our hands to little effect. The customers were gone and the street was almost empty but he would have to stay until morning, as the cart owner required. I stayed a long while with him, talking and laughing. Then I took my leave and he embraced me firmly. He did not speak. We didn’t need to talk. I felt for him completely. I took a few steps away toward the square and did not look back, but he called after me in a loud voice. “Listen,” he said. I turned around and found him smiling at me and saying, “Remember me to Egypt. I miss it very much.”

Democracy is the solution.

August 25, 2009

Are Egyptians Really Religious?

F
or years I worked as a dentist in a large government establishment with thousands of workers. On the first day, while I was treating a patient, the clinic door opened and someone appeared. He introduced himself as Dr. Mahmoud, the pharmacist, and invited me to come and perform the noon prayer as part of a group. I declined, saying I would finish my work and then pray. We got into a discussion that almost became an argument because he insisted I abandon the patient and join the prayers, while I insisted on continuing to work. After that I discovered that Dr. Mahmoud’s ideas were widespread among the people working in the establishment. They were as devout as can be. The women all covered their hair, and at least half an hour before the noon prayer everyone stopped work completely and set about performing ablutions and spreading mats in the corridors in preparation for communal prayers. Of course they would also take part in the
hajj
and
umra
trips the establishment organized every year. I had no objection to all that because it’s a wonderful thing to be devout, but I quickly discovered that many of the people working there, although rigorous about performing their ritual obligations, were committing many serious offenses, ranging from mistreating people, lying, and hypocrisy to abusing subordinates and even taking bribes and embezzling public funds. In fact the Dr. Mahmoud who insisted on inviting me to prayers turned out later to have been tweaking the accounts and selling medicine on the side.

What happened in that establishment happens throughout Egypt: manifestations of piety are so widespread that a recent Gallup survey found that Egyptians are the most devout people on the face of the Earth. Yet at the same time Egypt leads the way in corruption, bribery, sexual harassment, fraud, and forgery. One has to wonder how we could be the most pious and the most delinquent at the same time. In 1664 the great French dramatist Molière wrote his play
Tartuffe
, about a corrupt man called Tartuffe who seeks to satisfy his basest desires while making a show of piety. At the time the Catholic Church raised a storm against Molière and prevented any performance of the play for a full five years. In spite of the ban
Tartuffe
become such a theatrical classic that the word Tartuffe is used in French and in English to refer to a hypocritical man of piety.

The question here is: Have millions of Egyptians become copies of Tartuffe? I think that the problem in Egypt is deeper than that. Egyptians really are devout, with a faith that is sincere, but many of them behave immorally without any pangs of religious conscience. Of course one must not generalize because there are many devout people in Egypt who are guided by their conscience in everything they do. The great judges who have fought for the independence of the judiciary to defend the dignity and freedom of Egyptians, jurist Noha al-Zeini who exposed the government’s election rigging, Yahya Hussein who fought a fierce battle to protect public money in the Omar Effendi deal, and many others—all of these people are pious in the true sense. But on the other hand the young men who harassed women in the street on the morning of the Feast had fasted and prayed in Ramadan. The policemen who torture innocent people, the doctors and nurses who mistreat poor patients in public hospitals, the civil servants who rig the election results in the government’s favor, and the students who cheat en masse, most of them are devout and rigorous about performing their ritual obligations. Societies fall sick in the same way as people, and our society is now suffering from a disconnect between belief and conduct, a disconnect between piety and ethics.

This sickness has numerous causes: first, the despotic regime, which necessarily leads to the spread of cheating, lying, and hypocrisy, and, second, the fact that the understanding of religion that now prevails in Egypt is ritualistic rather than behavioral, in the sense that it does not present religion as synonymous with morality but sees it as confined to the performance of a set of procedures, the completion of which qualifies one as pious. Some people will say that the formalities of worship are aspects of religion as important as morality. The fact is that all religions came about to defend human values—truth, justice, and freedom—and everything else is less important. The sad thing is that the Islamic tradition is full of evidence that ethics are the most important element of religion, but we do not understand that and we do not want to understand it. There’s a well-known story about the time when the Prophet Muhammad met an ascetic who devoted himself to worship day and night, and the Prophet asked him, “Who provides for you?” The man answered, “My brother works and provides for me.” Then the Prophet said, “Your brother worships more than you do.” The meaning here is decisive and important: that someone who works and provides for his family is more virtuous in God’s eyes than the ascetic who spends all his time worshiping but does not work.

A limited understanding of religion is one of the main reasons for the decline of conditions in Egypt. For twenty years the streets and mosques of Egypt have been filled with millions of posters urging Muslim women to wear the
hijab
. Imagine if these posters had urged people, on top of wearing the
hijab
, to reject the injustices imposed on Egyptians by the ruler, to defend the rights of detainees, or to prevent election rigging. If that had happened, democracy would have been established in Egypt and Egyptians would have extracted their rights from the despotic system.

Virtue can come about in only two ways: by real piety, which is completely identical to morality, or by morality alone, even if it is not based in religion. Some years ago my late mother fell ill with cancer and we called in one of the best cancer doctors in the world to treat her, Dr. Garcia-Giralt of the Curie Institute in Paris. This great scientist came to Egypt several times to treat my mother and then firmly refused to take any payment. When she insisted, he said, “My professional conscience does not permit me to take any payment for treating the mother of a fellow doctor.” This man does not believe much in religion but his gracious and magnanimous behavior puts him at the highest level of real piety. I wonder how many of our great and devout doctors today would even think of refusing payment from a colleague.

Another example is an incident that took place in 2007. In order to improve the image of the Libyan regime around the world, an annual international literary prize was organized with a value of about $150,000 and with the name, Gaddafi International Prize for Literature. A committee of prominent Arab intellectuals was formed to choose a writer to receive the prize. That year the committee decided to award the prize to the great Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo, who was seventy-eight years old. The surprise was that Goytisolo wrote a letter to the committee members thanking them for choosing him but also saying that he could not accept a prize from the Gaddafi regime, which had seized power in a military coup and had abused, through detention and torture, thousands of its opponents. Goytisolo turned down a prize worth $150,000 because it was incompatible with his moral conscience.