On the State of Egypt (7 page)

I thought about this while following what was happening in Egypt when President Mubarak went to have surgery in Germany. Of course I wish everyone who is sick a speedy recovery but I do not think that the president’s illness is particularly special. Everyone falls ill and the president’s advanced age is bound to bring some health problems from time to time. But the regime’s scribes treated the president’s illness as though it were the end of the world and some of them even wrote that the country itself had fallen ill with the same disease, as if President Mubarak was the incarnation and embodiment of all Egypt. This cheap and disgraceful sycophancy continued throughout the time he was under treatment, and when the surgery was successful and President Mubarak came back to Egypt, the sycophants let loose with their chorus of pipes and drums. Some singers received orders to compose songs specifically to celebrate the president’s auspicious return. I don’t know how any real artist could allow himself to sing eulogies for a fee, like those beggars who go around the annual festivals of popular holy men. Have these sycophants thought what they will do when the president goes to Germany again for further treatment? Will they compose new songs for when he returns? Does President Mubarak believe this flattery? Does it ever occur to him, even for a moment, that these pipers and drummers don’t like him, but are merely defending the privileges they have acquired under his rule? Doesn’t President Mubarak realize that these sycophants have always clung to those in power and have shaped their own ideas and opinions to be in tune with the ruler? They were loyal socialists in the time of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, but when the wind changed and the state turned to the market economy they become some of the prime advocates of privatization and the free market.

What conception of what is happening in Egypt does President Mubarak have? Does he know that more than half of all Egyptians live below the poverty line? Does it bother the president that millions of Egyptians live in shantytowns without water, electricity, or a sewage system? Is he upset at the prevalence of unemployment, poverty, disease, and frustration? Does President Mubarak know that Egypt has hit rock bottom in many fields? Has he heard about the poor people who die standing in line to obtain bread or cooking gas? Has he heard of the death boats on which thousands of young Egyptians embark to escape misery, only to drown on the high seas? Has anyone told the president that for months thousands of civil servants and their children have been lying on the pavement in front of parliament because their lives are no longer tolerable? Has President Mubarak thought about civil servants who support a whole family on a salary of 100 Egyptian pounds ($18) a month when the price of meat has risen to 70 pounds a kilo? Of course I don’t know how President Mubarak thinks, though I imagine, based on the theory of ‘dictator’s solitude,’ that his conceptions are completely detached from the reality of what is happening in Egypt. The reality is liable to produce an explosion at any moment, and if that explosion takes place, God forbid, we will all pay a heavy price. I hope President Mubarak ends his many years in office by carrying out real democratic reform, amending the constitution to allow for honest competition between candidates and for free and fair elections so that Egyptians can choose new faces—people who are respected and willing to take responsibility for ending the ordeal Egypt has been through and to begin a new future. When will President Mubarak grasp this truth?

Democracy is the solution.

April 6, 2010

Does Rigging Elections Count as a Major Sin?

O
ver the coming eighteen months or so Egypt will have parliamentary and then presidential elections. In the past the Egyptian regime has tried to use judges to conceal election rigging, but upright judges refused to betray their principles and their message was clear: “Either we supervise the elections seriously and scrupulously, or we’ll withdraw and let the regime alone take responsibility for the fraud.” This time the regime has decided from the start to abolish judicial supervision and has announced that it will not allow any international monitoring of the voting. All this confirms that the next elections will be rigged. Even now Egyptians are well aware that members of the ruling party will win the majority of seats in parliament and that the presidential elections next year will be a farce through which President Mubarak will either hang on to power or bequeath it to his son, Gamal.

The question here is: Who is responsible for rigging elections? The Ministry of Interior is the authority that supervises the conduct of elections and so is responsible for rigging them, but in fact the interior minister is no more than carrying out orders. The person who takes the decision to rig elections is the president himself, and so the decision to rig is conveyed from the president to the interior minister and is then implemented by thousands of police officers and civil servants across the country. These are the people who prevent people from voting, call in thugs to beat up voters who don’t belong to the ruling party, fill in unused ballot papers, close the ballot boxes, and then announce fabricated election results. These fraudsters, like most Egyptians these days, are conscientious about performing their prayers, fasting in Ramadan, giving alms, and going on pilgrimage, and they ask their wives and daughters to wear the
hijab
. Although they are meticulous about these religious obligations, they take part in election rigging and do not in the least feel they are committing a religious sin. They are not kept awake at night by any feelings of guilt. Generally they consider themselves merely to be carrying out the orders of their bosses, as though they see the whole question of elections as unconnected with religion.

Let’s imagine, for example, that the president, instead of giving orders to rig elections, gave the police and civil servants orders to drink alcohol or not to fast in Ramadan. They would definitely rise up against him and refuse to carry out his orders, on the grounds that one must not obey a human being if it means disobeying God. Why do these civil servants see rigging elections as just carrying out orders when they see drinking alcohol and failing to fast in Ramadan as serious sins? The answer will lead us to comprehend the vast gap between the reality of Islam and the way we understand it. Pick any book you like on Islamic law and you will not find in it a single word on rigging elections, because they are all old books written in ages when elections were unknown. The gate of
ijtihad
, or individual judgment in matters of Islamic law, was closed centuries ago, and most experts in Islamic law now do no more than recapitulate legal opinions pronounced a thousand years ago. Besides, many jurists in Islamic history allied themselves with despotic rulers, and while they did explain the Islamic precepts on many aspects of life, they deliberately ignored the political rights of Muslims. In fact some of them distorted the truth and interpreted religion in a way designed to prop up the despot and exempt him from any oversight.

In Egypt there are dozens of famous sheikhs attached to various religious schools, from the sheikhs at al-Azhar, to the Salafi sheikhs, to new preachers, and every day they preach to Egyptians in thousands of mosques and on dozens of satellite channels, dealing with everything in the life of a Muslim—marriage and divorce, whether to wear gold or silk, even how to perform the ritual ablution to remove a serious impurity—but none of them ever says a single word about rigging elections. A few months ago I met a famous new preacher and found him to be a cultured young man. He asked to attend the weekly salon I organize and I welcomed him. When he came he found the audience talking about democracy and the emergency law and asserting that Egyptians have the right to choose their rulers. He did not contribute a single word to the discussion but sat in silence and then left. He did not come back and I never saw him again. In the opinion of this preacher, religion has nothing at all to do with public affairs. For him, religion begins and ends with modesty for women, moral virtues, and performing religious obligations, so he has no enthusiasm for discussing political rights and public freedoms. He also knows that discussing these subjects in Egypt carries a heavy price and he does not want to pay it.

I referred to religious books to understand Islam’s verdict on election rigging and I found that sins are divided into major sins and minor sins. Major sins are those that deserve punishment by God in this life and in the afterlife, and although jurists disagree on details they all agree that bearing false witness is one of the gravest of the major sins. The Qur’an itself strongly advises against bearing false witness in more than one verse; for example,
and those who bear not false witness
(25:72) and
eschew the speaking of falsehood
(22:30). Bearing false witness is lying deliberately in order to undermine justice. When someone stands in front of a judge and testifies falsely, he commits a grave sin because through his false testimony he deprives people of their due and confers it wrongly on those who do not deserve it. In their condemnation of false testimony some jurists go so far as to couple it with idolatry and even say that it cannot be absolved by repentance or by performing the pilgrimage until the offender has made amends to those who lost their rights, or until he at least confesses to them his crime and asks their forgiveness.

Bearing false witness, which Islam considers to be one of the gravest of faults and one of the most horrendous crimes, is the equivalent in contemporary life to rigging elections, no more and no less, because the civil servant who takes part in rigging elections bears false witness to fake results and prevents the winning candidate from obtaining the position that is his or her due while giving the position to someone who does not deserve it. In fact, in my opinion, rigging elections is much worse than bearing false witness, because bearing false witness deprives an individual or a family of their due whereas rigging elections deprives the whole nation of its due. If the fraudsters in the Ministry of Interior realized that from the religious point of view they are bearing false witness they would refuse to take part in the rigging process, but like many Egyptians they consider elections, democracy, and the rotation of power to be secondary matters that have nothing to do with religion. This limited understanding of religion makes us susceptible to despotism and more submissive in the face of injustice, and it explains why despotism is more widespread in Islamic countries than elsewhere.

People progress only in two cases: either when they understand religion properly as primarily the defense of human values—truth, justice, and freedom—or when they start with an ethical concept that makes the human conscience the arbiter that sets the criteria for virtue and honesty. But in countries where religion is understood as detached from human values, talents and resources will go to waste and the people are bound to fall behind in the march of civilization. Limited understanding that ignores the spirit of religion and turns religion into a set of procedures leads mankind to false formal piety and undermines the natural sense of conscience. It may even drive a man to behave appallingly while confident of his own piety, which he thinks is limited to performing religious obligations. The state of affairs in Egypt has sunk to rock bottom, and it is no longer possible to stay silent. Millions of Egyptians live in inhumane conditions, amid poverty, unemployment, disease, repression, and unprecedented corruption. These people have a right to a dignified and humane life. The change we demand will come from the top of the political pyramid and equally from the base. It is our duty to put pressure on the regime until it allows proper elections, but at the same time we have to explain to people that those who take part in rigging elections are committing a grave sin and a despicable crime against their country. When the president gives his orders to rig elections and finds that no police officer or civil servant in the Interior Ministry will agree to soil his honor and his religion by taking part in the rigging, only then will the future begin in Egypt.

Democracy is the solution.

April 19, 2010

Do We Need a Benevolent Dictator?

L
ast Wednesday was a bad day for Gordon Brown, the British prime minister and leader of the Labour Party. He was making an electoral tour in the northwestern town of Rochdale and while he was talking to people in the street a woman named Gillian Duffy appeared, a retired civil servant sixty-six years old. Ms. Duffy had a heated discussion with Brown in front of the television cameras and she complained about immigrants from Eastern Europe, saying they have taken jobs from British people. The prime minister tried to persuade her that his government’s policy on immigration is right, but Duffy stuck to her position. All Brown could do was end the debate gracefully and ask her about her children and grandchildren. He then shook her hand politely and hurried back to his car to catch his next appointment. But unfortunately for Brown he forgot to turn off the small microphone attached to his lapel, and so the microphone continued to broadcast to the television networks what Brown was telling his aides in the car. Brown was angry about his encounter with Duffy and said, “That was a disaster. They should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? … She was just a bigoted woman.” All the media carried Brown’s words and within an hour the gaffe was the talk of Britain. The prime minister had insulted a British citizen, accusing her of bigotry simply because she disagreed with him. When Duffy heard through the media what Brown thought of her, she was most upset, so just a few days before the general elections in Britain on May 6, Brown was in a difficult position. He called Duffy on the phone to apologize but that was not enough. Brown later appeared on British television and the presenter was tough. He played Brown a recording of what he had said about the woman and asked the prime minister if he blamed himself for what happened. Brown said he did blame himself and would never do the same again, and he then made an apology to Duffy in front of the whole country. But even that was not enough to enable the prime minister to put his heinous act behind him. He had to go back to Rochdale and visit Duffy at home, where he spent forty minutes and repeated his apology. Finally Duffy accepted the prime minister’s apology but she refused to come outside with him to announce in front of the media that she had forgiven him. So Brown went out alone and announced once again that he had made a mistake and regretted it but now he was relieved that Duffy had graciously accepted his apology.