On the State of Egypt (26 page)

On that day God will ask him, “Why did you assault a poor Egyptian girl who could not defend herself? Why did you hit her, drag her along the ground, and abuse her in public? Would you like it if someone did that to your daughter?” What will the general say then? He cannot tell God he was carrying out orders. Orders will not absolve him or spare him God’s punishment for the crimes he has committed, despite the general’s authority and influence, despite the tens of thousands of riot police and thugs and police karate units that, like vicious trained dogs, await one signal from him before they beat and abuse innocent people. In spite of all this overwhelming power, the general felt deep inside as he assaulted the girl that he was weak and wretched and unable to control himself and that little by little he was being drawn into committing horrendous crimes in order to protect President Hosni Mubarak and his family.

The general felt that the girl he was beating was stronger than him because she was defending truth and justice, because she was innocent, noble, pure, and brave, and because she loved her country and would defend it with all her strength. As they dragged her along the ground, kicking her with their boots, she did not beg, or call for help, or appeal to the brutes. She was chanting: “Freedom, freedom, long live Egypt, long live Egypt.” And at that point the general had a strange feeling. He realized that he could kill this girl, tear her body apart if he wanted, but he could never defeat her, or humiliate her, or break her will. He felt that despite all his power he was defeated and that it was this poor abused and violated girl who would triumph. At that point all the general could do was scream.

Democracy is the solution.

April 12, 2010

Should We Start with Moral Reform or Reforming the System?

T
wo illustrative incidents from my student days come to mind in discussing professional standards, morality, and corruption. The first incident occurred when I was studying dentistry at Cairo University. At the end of the year we had to take theoretical and practical exams, followed by an oral examination that was the magical gateway to favoritism and the misuse of influence. I remember that a fellow student in my year, a woman by the name of Hala, had a father who was a professor of medicine at a provincial university and so was friends with most of the professors responsible for the exams. As luck would have it, I went to the oral examination on physiology together with Hala and another woman student. The professor asked me a barrage of difficult questions, which I managed to answer. He then grilled the other woman with abstruse questions, and she stumbled and could not answer. When it was Hala’s turn the professor looked at her, sitting next to me, and said sympathetically, “How are you, Hala? Send my regards to your father.” He then told her she could leave. I came out of the appointment feeling humiliated and wronged, because I had passed a difficult exam while the professor had not asked Hala any questions at all. When the results came out, Hala and I were graded ‘excellent’ in physiology; in my case because I gave good answers during the exam and in Hala’s case because she sent the professor’s regards to her father.

The other incident took place some years later at the University of Illinois while I was studying for a master’s degree. The statistics professor was a white racist woman who hated Arabs and Muslims, and although I completed the final exam with no mistakes I was surprised to find that she gave me a ‘very good’ grade, instead of the ‘excellent’ I deserved. I complained to one of my American colleagues and she advised me to read the university regulations and to make an appointment to see the professor. I read the regulations and discovered that students who felt unfairly treated in exams had the right to submit a complaint against the professor, in which case the university would appoint an external group of professors to review the exam paper. If the student’s complaint was unjustified the university would not take any measures against him (the aim of that provision was to make sure that students were not too intimidated to complain), and if the student’s complaint was justified the result would be changed at once and a formal warning would be sent to the professor responsible. If a professor received three such warnings, his or her contract would be automatically invalidated. I went to see the bigoted professor and after discussing it with her I was certain she had treated me unfairly. Calmly, I told her that in accordance with the university regulations I wanted to photocopy the answer paper because I was going to submit a complaint against her. This sentence had a magical effect: she paused for some moments and then said she needed to review the paper carefully. When I went back to her at the end of the day, as she had requested, the secretary told me she had adjusted my grade to ‘excellent.’

After that I thought long about the significance of these two incidents. The bigoted American professor was just as unfair as the Egyptian professor, but she failed to have her way because the regulations at the University of Illinois protect the rights of students and punish anyone who treats them unfairly, regardless of rank. The regulations at Cairo University, on the other hand, give professors full authority over students, so they can do what they like with impunity. The factor that brings about justice in any society is the application of the law against powerful people rather than against the small. What happened to me at Cairo University is what happens right across Egypt. Many people obtain things they do not deserve as a result of their personal connections or their ability to pay bribes, or because the security agencies or the ruling party have selected them. But most Egyptians live in inhumane conditions—poverty, disease, complete despair about the future—and the law in Egypt is usually applied only against the weak, who cannot escape it or obstruct it. The junior civil servant caught taking a few hundred Egyptian pounds in bribes is tried and thrown in jail, whereas nobody touches the senior civil servant who takes commissions worth millions. Given this widespread injustice, it is pointless to urge people to act ethically without changing the corrupt system that pushes them to be dishonest.

Some years ago a well-known television program on a government channel invited me to talk about the phenomenon of bribes in Egypt, and I was surprised when the presenter portrayed bribery as merely a moral failing caused only by a flawed conscience and weak faith. I told the presenter that what he said is true but that it is not enough to explain bribery, which cannot be studied without discussing the level of wages and prices. He strongly objected and ended the interview early. In fact what that presenter did is the same as what all government officials do: portray ethics as invariable, completely divorced from social and political circumstances. Generally they attribute Egypt’s current tribulations to the poor morals of Egyptians themselves. Perhaps we can now understand why President Mubarak is always accusing Egyptians of being lazy and unproductive. Such thinking ignores the fact that productivity in any country requires a good education, equal job opportunities, and salaries that allow a decent standard of living. All these tasks President Mubarak’s regime has completely failed to accomplish for Egyptians.

In the same context we can now understand the recent behavior of Minister of Education Ahmed Zaki Badr, who is already infamous as the president of Ain Shams University who brought armed thugs to beat up students protesting on campus. Badr, accompanied by journalists and television cameras, has been making surprise visits to schools, where he abuses teachers who are absent or turn up late. He appears on camera lecturing teachers on the virtues of discipline, as if God created some good teachers who are disciplined and other teachers who are evil and lax by nature and who need to be severely punished until they learn to be disciplined. This perverse logic ignores the fact that government schools have no supplies, no equipment, and no laboratories, and the teachers receive such derisory salaries that they have to beg from those who pay them for private lessons or look for a second job so that they can provide for their own children. The minister does not want to see or hear all this because it would imply that he has a duty to carry out real reform, which he is unable to do. So he just lectures us on morals in isolation from any other considerations.

The same logic has been adopted by minister of Health Hatem al-Gabali, who is one of the giants of private sector investment in medicine in Egypt, as well as the man most responsible for public hospitals deteriorating to the point that instead of treating and caring for the poor their function is to finish them off and send them to the next world. Amid this decline, the minister, always accompanied by journalists and cameras, makes surprise visits to public hospitals and appears on the front pages of newspapers berating doctors who come in late and lecturing them on a doctor’s humanitarian vocation. Of course he overlooks the fact that under his fine supervision these hospitals lack the most basic medical facilities, that rats and various insects are making merry throughout them, and that these wretched doctors are not paid enough to provide for their children and have to work day and night in private clinics to earn in a full month what His Excellency the minister earns from his private hospitals in minutes.

Appealing for moral reform in isolation from political reform, besides being naïve and unproductive, prevents a clear understanding of the situation and distracts people from the real reasons for decline. We cannot ask people to do their duty when they do not enjoy the most basic rights. We cannot hold people accountable until we provide them with a minimum of justice. I am not trying to justify corruption and I know there is always a category of outstanding people who are immune to corruption, however bad things get. But the morality of most people is influenced by the system that governs them. When someone senses justice it brings out the best human traits in him, and by the same token if he feels wronged or desperate then he is liable to be immoral and aggressive toward others. However eloquent our sermons may be, we will not wipe out prostitution until we wipe out poverty and we will never get rid of bribery and corruption until we set up a fair system that gives everyone his due and punishes wrongdoers, however powerful and influential they may be. Political reform is the first step forward and everything else is a waste of time and effort.

Democracy is the solution.

April 26, 2010

Are Freedoms Inseparable?

T
his is an important issue. A group of lawyers in Egypt recently filed a lawsuit in favor of confiscating the book,
A Thousand and One Nights
, on the grounds that it contains obscenities. Obviously these lawyers have never read the classics, as most classical works contain graphic details of relations between men and women, including
Kitab al-aghani
(The Book of Songs) by Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani,
Kitab al-imta’ wa-l-mu’anasa
(The Book of Enjoyment and Conviviality) by Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, and others. Even al-Jahiz (781–869
CE
), the undisputed master of Arabic prose, wrote a famous epistle entitled “Mufakhara bayna ashab al-ghilman wa ashab al-jawari” (Debate between Owners of Concubines and Owners of Ephebes), in which a man who likes young boys has a discussion with a man who likes women. The work contains some obscenities but remains a beautiful and exquisite literary text. Censoring the great Arabic literary heritage opens the gates of hell to destroying and mutilating it. We must preserve our great heritage as it is. Even if we print expurgated texts that can be taught to adolescents and youngsters, the original texts must be maintained without any changes or deletions. That is my opinion and that is why I enthusiastically joined those defending freedom of literary expression against censorship and reactionary ideas.

But a difference of opinion did arise later, because in the middle of intellectuals’ battle to defend
A Thousand and One Nights
the Egyptian government announced that it was extending the emergency law, which means that the natural law that protects the freedom and dignity of Egyptians will be suspended. I expected the champions of freedom defending
A Thousand and One Nights
to go out of their way to defend freedom in general, but unfortunately this did not happen. Many of the intellectuals defending
A Thousand and One Nights
today never open their mouths in protest at rigged elections or detentions or torture, all of which are horrendous crimes perpetrated by the Mubarak regime against millions of Egyptians. So I find myself wondering: Are freedoms inseparable? Can one defend the freedom of creativity in isolation from general freedom? Can intellectuals limit their role to matters related to writing while saying nothing about the country and people in general?

It’s unfortunate that we even need to ask this question. In the world as a whole and in Egypt in the past, intellectuals always took a coherent position in overall defense of truth, justice, and freedom. The examples are countless: Abbas al-Akkad, Taha Hussein, Alfred Farag, and Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi among Arab writers, and in the West Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, Pablo Neruda, and many other great creative artists who stood firmly against injustice and despotism and often paid a heavy price for the positions they took. In fact the most important novelist in the history of literature, the great Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), took part in public life and joined a secret organization to end Tsarist rule in Russia, for which he was arrested and sentenced to death, though the sentence was commuted at the last moment to four years in prison in Siberia. The essence of literary creation is the defense of noble human values, so how can a writer defend freedom in his books and then stay silent about violations of freedom in his daily life? The intellectual must lose all credibility if he puts his talents at the service of tyrants and never objects to injustice, corruption, the theft of public funds, and the oppression of the innocent, but at the same time waxes indignant in defense of a poem that is banned or a book that is confiscated.