... And why Egyptians shouldn't

By Lee Smith, Globe Staff, 2/16/2003

AIRO, Egypt -- As the Cairo Book Fair wound down in early February, my friend Muhammad, a 23-year-old philosophy student, walked me past several stalls containing what he calls "the forbidden books." Here were the works of Sudanese Marxists, Iraqi socialists, and Syrian positivists-titles that are almost impossible to get in Egypt.

All of these books are to some extent critical of Islam, and therefore the government has banned them to appease Egypt's religious authorities. Many of these volumes are published by Lebanese concerns, some by an Arab-language publisher based in Germany. But they are all printed in extremely small print runs, which is not too surprising as they are read only by initiates like my friend, and are closely monitored by Islam's official caretakers.

There is little room for open criticism or reflection in the Arab world right now. Qatar's hard-charging Al Jazeera spares its host government careful scrutiny. Even the Lebanese media, historically considered the freest in the Arab world, avoids offending Syria, which has occupied Lebanon since 1989. Egypt, an American ally that receives around $2 billion a year in US aid, is no exception-as the Egyptian-American sociologist and human-rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim knows all too well.

In December Ibrahim was released from prison, pending a retrial, after serving two years of a seven-year term. He is currently being tried once again on the same charges: receiving foreign funds for use at the Ibn Khaldun research center that he founded at the American University in Cairo; embezzling those funds; and tarnishing the image of Egypt abroad by writing about rigged elections and discrimination against Egypt's Coptic Christian minority.

In private, many Cairo intellectuals mock the charges and echo Ibrahim's own criticisms of the government. But they've rarely spoken out publicly in his defense. Still, Ibrahim himself has not stopped speaking out. And against all odds, his efforts may be changing his society for the better.

At a dinner in Cairo recently, Ibrahim spoke almost cheerfully about breaking his ankle while attempting to jog on the prison grounds. "The good part," he says, "is that everyone wanted to push my wheelchair around so I got to hear great stories." Those stories are likely to be included in Ibrahim's prison diaries, one of several works in progress. In Ibrahim's view, prison-with its petty corruption and strict security services-provides an apt metaphor for Egyptian society as a whole.

The 64-year-old Ibrahim established his academic reputation with his work on Egypt's burgeoning and increasingly violent Islamist movement. In the course of his research, Ibrahim became close to the militants, although their views are antithetical to his own brand of liberal pluralism. Some of them became his cellmates in prison, and the tales they told him illuminate much of the absurdity of contemporary Egyptian life.

"There's one guy who's become an entrepreneur in prison," Ibrahim says. "His family brings fish from Alexandria, which he prepares and sells to us: gourmet food at deluxe hotel prices. His mother tells me her son wants a lawyer to get him released. She says, `But we're poor and he's making good money in jail and we have no other means of support.' I tell her, `He's enterprising, he'll do fine outside.' She explains that to rent a storefront would cost more than he could put up, and worse, the authorities would never give him a license. Of course it breaks her heart as a mother, to want her son to stay in jail-but what can they do?"

Ibrahim is also working on a study of the Arab world's failure to construct a culture of self-criticism. "September 11 brought it to a head," he told me. "Arabs said, `Arabs didn't do it, Muslims didn't do it.' Arabs are in denial because they have built a false bridge to this idea of their great past. OK, it was great-but not perfect. Three of the four righteously guided caliphs after Muhammad died of non-natural causes, so it wasn't a perfect society, right?"

It is widely believed that Ibrahim was really arrested because he did the one thing that the government never allows: He criticized President Hosni Mubarak by name. Ibrahim wondered in a published article if the president was grooming one of his sons to succeed him.

When the government came for him, few took his side. Echoing a popular argument, a former graduate student at the American University tells me that Ibrahim "was close to the regime," and therefore had it coming. It's true that Ibrahim had hoped to push the government toward reform; he even wrote speeches for both the president and his wife. But modern Arab intellectuals have long played a significant role in Arab politics, for good and ill. Why would Ibrahim's peers question his desire to influence the Mubarak government?

Certainly, American support for Ibrahim raised the suspicions of many Egyptians. "The Americans are right to support him," my friend Muhammad says. "But for the sake of diplomacy, they should realize that Arabs don't like to be told what to do." And yet the Arab world's Muslims aren't entirely clear about what they want the US to do. The US should get Israel out of Gaza and the West Bank, but not interfere with Syria's occupation of Lebanon. The US should sponsor democratic growth in the region, but not tell a sovereign state, even if it's a police state, to release a democratic activist like Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

"I saw myself as fighting for the cause of Egypt and the Arab world," says Ibrahim. "I did not ask the US government for anything. But I appreciated every bit of support I received. Remember, it was two-and-a-half years after the ordeal started that the US kicked in, and this mostly was in response to pressure from US journalists."

Ibrahim's supporters hope US pressure doesn't backfire now. With a war in Iraq imminent and the economy more unstable than ever after a recent currency devaluation, the Egyptian government may be more concerned about manipulating the domestic situation than soothing the Bush administration. And yet there is some evidence that, contrary to Arab public opinion, the United States has pursued more than its own self-interest in the region.

"Since September 11, the US has taken a hard line with the regime," says one academic researcher who knows the inside workings of the Egyptian government. "It demanded reform and there's been some. We have a female judge in Egypt for the first time because the US kept pushing. Before then the regime kept saying, `We can't appoint a woman, the fundamentalists will take to the streets.' But nothing bad has happened."

A few months ago, the Egyptian government took another small, though symbolically significant, step. Jan. 7, the day Coptic Christians celebrate Christmas, was declared a national holiday. Though the Copts make up roughly 10 percent of Egypt's population, official acknowledgment of their place in Egyptian society is rare. Ibrahim himself had written often about the plight of the Copts. Indeed, the government originally scheduled the re-trial to start on the day of Coptic Christmas-a cynical reference that was lost on no one.

Jan. 7 may come to mark a date that resonates with hope for Muslim and Christian Egyptians alike, and indeed throughout the Arab world. Saad Eddin Ibrahim spoke his mind, paid a high price for it, and things changed.

Lee Smith, who currently lives in Cairo, is working on a book on Arab culture for Scribner.

This story ran in the Boston Globe on 2/16/2003.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.