The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (7 page)

A friend claimed the apartment he rented used to be Mourad’s, a luxury penthouse with panoramic views of Cairo all the way to the Citadel of Saladin and the Muhammad Ali Mosque. Downstairs was a brothel where the women shuffled in and out of the lobby in black robes and veils to deflect suspicion. Whores in burqas was certainly not the future that mid-century Egyptian cinema imagined. And yet there is no mystery as to what happened to that Egypt, or why a nation seemingly on the verge of modernity turned the clock backward on itself. Egypt has been a Muslim country for thirteen hundred years, and the half century or so nostalgically regarded as Egyptian modernity is most accurately regarded as a historical anomaly—albeit one that Egyptian cinema managed to capture in all its wit and glamour.

“Those films are not like American movies,” Mustafa said. “It’s small. But it’s ours. The language, the music, the manners—it touches every Egyptian’s heart. You Americans make movies that
everyone across the world loves.” Everyone except for his former employer.

“When Nasser was mad at the U.S.,” Mustafa explained, “he wanted us to let in fewer American movies.” As censor, Mustafa was responsible for vetting both Egyptian-made material and cultural imports. “My greatest achievement,” he explained, “was getting
Blow-Up
shown in Egypt.”

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 masterpiece includes a notorious scene with a photographer and two models rolling around on the floor. The camera cuts away before the orgy begins in earnest, but it was hard to imagine how Mustafa had managed to screen it in a Muslim country.

“There was silence in the theater,” he said, his small body shaking with the laughter of a silent-movie villain who has just tied a maiden to the railroad tracks. “It was very uncomfortable.”

It wasn’t the movie’s explicit sexuality that got him fired. “I wrote an introduction that appeared on the screen before the movie,” he said. “I explained that this film is a comment on our own contemporary events.” The movie was shown in the immediate aftermath of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. “I said the film is about things that aren’t what they seem to be.” In the movie’s final scene two mimes are pretending to play tennis, and as the photographer walks away, he hears a tennis ball batted back and forth. “The analogy was obvious,” Mustafa said. “During the war, we kept hearing that Egypt was destroying the enemy. Nasser told us that we were winning.”

Israel had effectively taken Egypt out of the war on its first day by crippling its air force, the signature of Arab military modernity. Yet for several days Voice of the Arabs, Nasser’s official radio station, continued to broadcast that the Arab armies were in the process of driving the Zionist entity into the sea once and for all. Nasser was well served by Cairo’s advanced media technology, for long before satellite broadcasting made Dubai and Qatar Arab-world media centers, radio was the mass medium of choice, and its two biggest stars
were Umm Kulthum and the Egyptian president. “After the war,” Mustafa said, “anyone who wanted to know the truth listened to the BBC.”

Maybe some did, but facts didn’t seem to matter much to the Egyptian or Arab masses who begged Nasser to rescind the resignation he offered after the war’s failure. They insisted that he not abandon them to their fate. It would be interesting to know exactly what ominous future the thronging crowds feared without Nasser to guide them. He had already steered them toward apocalypse; how could it get worse?

Historians of the period, Western and Arab, typically describe the 1967 war as the nail in the coffin of Arab nationalism, a catastrophe of such historic proportions that it compelled Arab elites, opinion makers, and intellectuals to reorient their ideological bearings from secular Arab nationalism to Islamism. And yet while the proportions of the two basic ingredients, Arabism and Islam, may have changed some in the wake of the 1967 war, the essential ideological recipe stayed the same—resistance against the West. The Arab nationalism that the twentieth-century ideologues advocated was an ideology built on both political and cultural pillars, and while the 1967 defeat shook the first, it did not bring down the edifice.

In part, that’s because the allure of Arab nationalism seems to make its adherents impervious to the facts. The implausibility of an actual political union between Arab states had been proven before the 1967 war when the United Arab Republic, which joined Nasser’s Egypt and Baathist Syria, lasted just three years (1958–1961), and it would be demonstrated yet again after a U.S.-led coalition kept Saddam Hussein from annexing Kuwait in 1991. Nonetheless, today, long after June 1967, Arabism and the hope of Arab unity continue to be a resilient cultural force that Arab leaders use to manage their domestic affairs, legitimize their regional ambitions, and create consensus out of dissonance and catastrophe. In doing so, all of these leaders—from Saddam to bin Laden to Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah—have
sought to emulate one man: Nasser. Mustafa’s boss remains the Arab nationalist leader par excellence, upon whom all others model themselves.

Given Nasser’s stature, it seems peculiar that the Egyptians had a very minor part in early efforts to promote Arab nationalism. Intellectual figures like Sati‘ al-Husri had hoped that Cairo would come to play the leading role that its size, history, and cultural influence all warranted, but through the opening years of the twentieth century, as the Ottoman Empire was on its last legs, the energies of Egyptian thinkers were consumed by other intellectual and cultural currents, like pan-Islamism and Arab liberalism. It wasn’t until the Arabs’ 1948 war with Israel that the Egyptians entered the Arab nationalist arena when the country’s decrepit monarchy went to war against the nascent Jewish state as a way to assert its Arab bona fides alongside Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan.

The Egyptians were especially wary of the Hashemites and calculated that they could not risk letting King Abdullah walk away with too large a share of the spoils should his well-trained, British-led Arab Legion actually defeat the Jews. There were domestic issues as well, and Egypt’s King Farouk needed to shore up his legitimacy against local rivals, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, which had agitated on behalf of the Palestinians as a pan-Islamist cause for two decades. In declaring war against the Zionists, Egypt was also battling its Arab rivals (and putative allies) in order to check their regional ambitions.
¹

Nasser, a veteran of the 1948 war, came to power on a wave of popular resentment against not only Israel and the established Arab order that had lost the war but also the Western powers that underwrote both. His radio station tarred Jordan and Saudi Arabia as American stooges, even though the Egyptian president cultivated warm relations with the CIA throughout the 1950s.
²
President Eisenhower wondered why the Arabs loathed America when, after forcing France and England to stand down during the 1956 Suez crisis, it had
handed Nasser his one success in a career of adventurist disasters.
³
But the reason is simple: with the eventual departure of America’s two Western rivals from the region, only the United States was left for Nasser to use as a fulcrum to enhance his prestige by leveraging popular opinion against his regional rivals Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the so-called conservative—that is, pro-American—regimes. And even in the 1950s, it was clear that one way to unite the Arab masses was to attack the West. One of the ways Arab nationalism became a powerful and popular ideology, in other words, was by becoming fused with another powerful current of feeling: anti-Americanism.

 I
t may seem surprising that there was a deep wellspring of anti-Americanism in the region five decades ago, since it’s sometimes been made to seem as if Arab anger at the United States started with the Bush administration. The truth, of course, is that Arabs’ anger at America long predated the invasion of Iraq. This was obvious immediately after 9/11, for despite the general goodwill that the United States was supposed to have enjoyed in the region following the attacks, in reality the most vocal Arab spokesmen celebrated or justified 9/11, while others charged that Washington itself had engineered the attacks in order to hurt the image of the Arabs and destroy Islam. The U.S. ambassador to Egypt at the time, David Welch, wrote an editorial in one of the Egyptian papers politely asking the press to stop accusing the American government of slaughtering its own citizens, a request that didn’t go over too well with the Egyptian media, outraged that this self-styled proconsul had the nerve to try to dictate terms to them, a free press.
⁴

As for the ostensibly sympathetic Arab opinion makers, they disguised their anti-Americanism by claiming that they felt bad for America until Bush’s post-9/11 wars made Arabs despise America, which, while self-serving, was not entirely false. Just about the only thing that could really make America hatred noticeably worse is if
Washington decided to confront the anti-American ideological and political agenda that leads to attacks on U.S. citizens, allies, and interests—which is exactly what the Bush administration did, through diplomatic, political, and military means. It was only natural that America’s image started to trend even farther down in the Arab world once all the post-9/11 crocodile tears had dried: fighting back never earned anyone the love of those who wish them harm.

Nonetheless, an entire social science rose from the ashes of 9/11, a growth industry with public opinion polls and surveys, along with man-on-the-street interviews and consultations with Arab officials and intelligentsia, churning out data to explain why Arabs were angry with the United States—or, to be more precise, why Arabs hated U.S. policy since it was clear that they had a high regard for America itself and its people. Alas, it never dawned on those American researchers and journalists who reported back to the home front with their dire findings that separating a people from its leaders is one of political warfare’s oldest stratagems:
We have no quarrel with your great nation, only your bad government and its vile policies, so stand aside and let us finish our work, after which there will be a time of great understanding and comity.

Liberal democracies should be immune to this kind of propaganda, but it never occurred even to those the White House tasked with public diplomacy and “re-branding” America to explain to the Arabs, and some Americans, that the essential feature of our republic, what distinguishes our form of governance from theirs, is that we
choose
our policy makers. The Arab conceit that there is some wide gap between Americans and the leaders they elect became even more ludicrous after the American people showed exactly how far they were from the policies of the U.S. government by electing George W. Bush to a second term in 2004.

Still, it’s not hard to see why tracking surges in anti-Americanism with hard numbers, even if they didn’t mean anything, became attractive to those who wanted to illustrate that the best way to keep Arab youth from killing Americans was to change American policies
in the Middle East. If it was only a matter of tweaking a few policies, then 9/11 could be written off as a misunderstanding of sorts, and there was no real conflict between Americans and Arabs. The problem, however, is that there is no real correlation between most U.S. policies and Arab anti-Americanism. Consider the two policies for which America is most famously hated throughout the region, and for which it was attacked by Nasser more than a half century ago—its support of Israel, and its backing of “corrupt” Arab regimes.

While it’s true that Washington immediately recognized the Jewish state at its inception in May 1948, it was only after Israel’s victory in the 1967 war that the two nations consolidated an alliance when Washington came to see Israel as a potent counterforce to Soviet influence in the Middle East. Until 1967 it was France that supplied Israel with most of its weaponry, including Mirage fighter jets, a detail that did not stop Nasser from broadcasting the lie that American pilots had flown missions against Arab targets in the 1967 war. The Egyptian president could count on the outraged Arab response because he as much as anyone had seen to it that the United States was despised by the Arab masses.

As for the second complaint, U.S. support of despotic Arab rulers, the premise is that Washington’s backing is the only thing that allows these regimes to stay in power, a notion so prevalent that it became a cornerstone of Al Qaeda strategy. It’s true of course that Egypt receives some two billion dollars in U.S. aid annually, but regime maintenance is a relatively inexpensive affair, where some of the most lavish expenditures are devoted to feathering the retirement nests of high-level military and security officers. And what it costs an Arab regime to defeat an Islamist insurgency—torture, murder, assassination, collective punishment—hardly requires the beneficence of the U.S. taxpayer. Two of the most repressive regimes in the region, Iran and Syria, terrorize their own populations quite competently without any American support at all, as did Saddam for the last two decades of his career. The “U.S. support for despots makes the Arabs
angry” is a red herring: after 9/11, the Bush administration apologized for supporting Arab despots, and then it went out and deposed one, but all that happened was that Sunni Arabs across the region became outraged that the United States had taken down an Arab champion like Saddam.

Regardless of what the United States does, or how Washington changes its policies, whether it targets Arab despots or supports them, anti-Americanism is an Arab constant. It’s so ubiquitous, in fact, that you can find it even at places like the American University in Cairo, one of the manifest strongholds of U.S. “soft” power in the Middle East.

Opened by American Episcopal missionaries in 1919, the AUC intended to provide the Egyptian ruling classes with the intellectual foundations of democratic governance. Today, the school is a regime citadel, the alma mater of Egypt’s First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak, and her two sons, Alaa and Gamal, where the ruling classes pay close to ten times the average Egyptian’s annual salary to get their children an American-style education and imprimatur. Nonetheless, one warm winter afternoon I saw dozens of students demonstrating in the courtyard, heavily muscled boys in brand-new black T-shirts bearing the legend, in English, “Jihad Is the Only Language They’ll Understand.” This was more than a year before the invasion of Iraq, and American military force was limited to Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s Arab guests were plotting against U.S. citizens, interests, and allies, including Hosni Mubarak and his Egypt. How had the boys and girls destined to inherit the regime taken up the slogans of the regime’s chief rivals? Because anti-Americanism is the region’s lingua franca, and from Nasser to Nasrallah it has not changed in over fifty years.