A Timbuktu Madrassa

Timbuktu, a town whose name elicits visions of an exotic African paradise, is a decidedly boring town. Although it is only a few miles from the Niger River, the lifeblood of northern Mali, the sands of the Sahara have overrun every inch of the town. Dust devils spring up at random intervals on city streets, mixing trash and sand into a fetid cone, and you cannot walk for more than a few minutes without pausing to empty a pile of sand from your shoes. Given this disconnect between imagination and reality, it is no wonder that Rene Caillie, the first European to reach Timbuktu and return to tell the tale, found himself the object of intense ire in Europe from Europeans who could not fathom that Timbuktu was anything but a heavenly city.

Despite its downtrodden appearance, however, Timbuktu still has a few gems that revealed themselves as I explored the town. The town was a center of trade and Islamic learning in the middle of the last millennium, and a few beautiful mosques and libraries of old manuscripts remain to tickle any traveler’s imagination. Trudging through the sand berms that passed for streets, I stumbled upon the Sankore mosque, a an mud-brick mosque with a pyramid-shaped minaret that dates back to the 14^th century and used to house Timbuktu’s biggest madrassa (Islamic school).

The Sankore Mosque, Timbuktu

Unfortunately most mosques in Mali have signs posted outside their gates that specify that entry for non-Muslims is interdite (forbidden), and Sankore was no exception. Rumor has it that foreigners used to have free access to mosques until Vanity Fair used the Great Mosque of Djenne as the scene for a risqué photo shoot that did not go over so well with Malians. While the profit motive ultimately triumphed over religious concerns in Djenne (my guide there informed me that I could have a look inside the mosque if I forked over $10 to a man sitting in a ambiguously official manner beside the mosque’s rear door), Timbuktu still seemed to be holding out. Sankore was closed and the prominently posted sign next to the front door discouraged me from knocking.

After I had circumambulated the mosque, I came upon a small group of low-slung mud buildings where, lo and behold, I heard a language that sounded a lot like Arabic. As I moved closer to investigate, I found myself peering into a classroom filled with students listening intently to a teacher lecturing them in Arabic as he gestured at pictures on a chalkboard. I paused for a few seconds outside the window to listen, but in that short period of time the attention of the entire class had shifted from the teacher to me (the large white man at the window). Not wanting to distract them, I decided to keep walking. After I had taken a few tentative steps, however, I stopped and thought to myself, “this is an opportunity that you should not pass up.”

“Salaamu aleikum,” I said to the teacher as I appeared at the door to the classroom, “can I sit for a few minutes in your class?”

“Please, here you go,” He responded with a mixture of surprise and bemusement as he pointed me to an empty desk in the front row, but he was able to pick up his train of thought immediately after I sat down.

The lesson of the day was about reptiles. The teacher had written out all of the material on the chalkboard, and he led the class through it in a sing-song voice.

“What types of reptiles are there?” he asked rhetorically in flowing, formal Arabic. “Some have legs, like the turtle and the lizard, and others, like snakes, just slither.”

To emphasize key points, he would take a statement that he had just made and turn it instantly into a question, expecting that the students would answer in unison.

Teacher: “Most lizards live in dry, desert-like climates. Where do they live?”

Students (in unison): “In dry, desert-like climates.”

Before attending this class, I had not realized that some Malian madrassas taught more than just how to read the Quran. In Djenne, for example, madrassa students begin their lessons at the crack of down and finish a few hours later so that they can head off to their conventional schools. They study Arabic primarily through the Quran, and as a result most students can read and understand Quranic Arabic but have no practical mastery of the language. This school in Timbuktu, however, was clearly different. As I learned from the teacher after the lesson ended, these seventh graders had been learning in Arabic since kindergarten, and they were expected to speak it in class as well.

Mali, like almost every other country in sub-Saharan Africa, must navigate some rocky terrain when it comes to language and education. The affairs of state are conducted in the colonial language, French, but two Malians speaking to each other on the street are much more likely to use a local language – “mother tongue.” Bambara, the most prominent of the mother tongues, is widely spoken in the southern part of the country, but it becomes less common as you head north. In Timbuktu, for example, you are just as likely to hear Tamashek (the language of the Tuareg nomads) or Songhai (the descendants of the great Songhai Empire that ruled Mali in the 15th and 16th centuries). This mixture of languages poses a serious pedagogical dilemma: should students learn in their mother tongue, the language that they speak with their family and on the street, or should teachers throughout the country use French as a unifying language? In fact, the Malian educational system seeks to find a middle ground: in government schools, students learn in the dominant mother tongue of their particular region for their first three years, after which all lessons are taught in French.

Unfortunately, this language dilemma has no perfect solution. The problem with the current arrangement is that children whose parents do not speak French find it very hard to connect what they learn in school with what they do at home. Ideally, a positive learning environment at home can reinforce the knowledge that a child picks up at school, but in rural Mali (and to a lesser extent in the cities), school and home are two different worlds.

The students at the Sankore madrassa also learned French, further strengthening their status as true polyglots. Their French skills enable them to navigate the world of Mali’s capital Bamako, and their Arabic enables them to communicate with their neighbors to the north (although they have to cross the desert in order to do so). But as residents of Timbuktu, their education still sells them short: if the leaders of tomorrow still conduct official business in Arabic or French, what hope is there for the vast number of people who will never make it past primary school? As long as this language dilemma persists, the prospects for comprehensive economic and social development remains slim.

Two More Muslim Countries, Two More Perspectives on Islam, Politics, and Society

Continuing my winter break sojourn, I left Israel just before Christmas and I’ve spent the past 2+ weeks in Tunisia and Mali. I am currently in Mopti, a transit hub on Mali's Niger River. Blocks of salt from Timbuktu, cargo pinasses (dugout canoes with outboard motors) loaded to the brim with food staples and other goods headed up the river, passenger buses headed to Bamako that are relics from a bygone era of transportation – it’s all here! Tomorrow morning, I am going to board a private pinasse and begin a leisurely three day journey up the river to Timbuktu. That world famous town is home to the Festival au Desert, a three day desert music spectacular that features both Malian and international artists. While the phrase “once-in-a-lifetime experience” has turned into something of a cliché, I think that it actually might apply in this instance.

The festival will be the culmination of my winter break travels, but I have also picked up a wealth of other experiences along the way. In particular, I have been fascinated by the different faces of Islam that I have seen in Tunisia and Mali. My reference point for Islam is, of course, Egypt. Thus, whenever I travel to another Muslim country, I find myself comparing it to the land of the pharaohs.

The Tunisian take on Islam is, from what I could tell, fairly similar to Egypt. Both countries are now about to usher in a new era of Islamist government, people who I interacted with asked me similar questions about my religious background and used similar arguments to try to convert me to Islam (they were just as ineffective in Tunisia as they have been in Egypt), and Tunisian Arabic, like Egyptian, is peppered with religious phrases. One major difference, however, is that the Salafi (hardline Islamist) movement that has taken Egypt by storm over the past decade has yet to manifest itself in Tunisia. I saw a few Tunisian men sporting the long beard that has become a Salafi trademark, but the phenomenon was nowhere near as widespread as it is in Egypt. Al-Nahda, the formerly banned Islamist movement that won a majority in the recent parliamentary elections, seems to be decidedly centrist, and people were quite happy about the appointment of a well-known secular politician as the country’s president (the prime minister is an Islamist). Just as many people who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt told me that they did so primarily because they respected the brothers and wanted to see how they would handle being in power (and not out of a fierce devotion to the party or a desire to see Egypt go the way of Iran), a number of Tunisians told me that they had voted for Al-Nahda for the same reasons. “Give them a chance,” one taxi driver told me, “and if we don’t like them we’ll find someone new next time around.”

Mali, on the other hand, is a world away from Egypt. The most notable difference is linguistic. The country is 90% Muslim and mosques abound, but the vast majority of Malians only know a few token Arabic religious phrases (perhaps a close analogy is that of American Jews who pray in Hebrew but have no practical understanding of the language). I enjoy using those phrases (Peace be upon you, God willing, praise God, etc.) when I speak with Malians, but the only full conversation in Arabic that I’ve had here was with the imam of the Great Mosque of Djenne (pictured below).

I was able to gain some insight into Islam’s place in Malian society when I ate dinner with a volunteer from the Peace Corps who is living and working in southern part of the country. The mosque in her village, she said, is largely the domain of the old men who study and pray there. The youth, she observed, tend to be fairly uninterested in religion. Nevertheless, the whole village does observe Ramadan (even the Christians join the prayers during Eid Al-Fitr at the end of the holy month) and Eid Al-Adha (the day of sacrifice), engaging in practices like fasting and slaughtering a goat that would be instantly recognizable to Muslims around the world.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention some of the beautiful Islamic architecture that I have seen in both Tunisia and Mali. I have included some pictures of the exquisite doors on houses in the city of Kairouan in Tunisia and a white mosque wedged onto a hill in a Berber village in southern part of the country. Mali, on the other hand, is all about mud. The Great Mosque of Djenne surpassed my sky-high expectations that I held coming into this trip – it is, simply put, a stunning building.

A Kairouan door

A hilltop mosque in Berber country

The Great Mosque of Djenne

The Qalandia Checkpoint

First, some context: it’s been nearly a month since I’ve last posted, during which time much has happened in Egypt (elections, street violence, etc.) that I will try to write about in due time. For this post, however, I am skipping all of that in order to chronicle an experience I had last week as I was traveling in Israel and the West Bank with my friend Trevor. To all readers of the blog, Merry Christmas (belated), Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year (in advance).

The ride from Jerusalem to Ramallah is short. In less than hour, after zipping through the Qalandia checkpoint that separates Israel from the West Bank, Trevor and I found ourselves in the heart of Palestine. After spending two and a half days in Nablus and Ramallah (with quick trips to Bethlehem and Taybeh, a small village southeast of Ramallah that is home to the Arab world’s only microbrewery), we decided it was time to go back to Israel.

The ride from Ramallah to Jerusalem is long. After about 25 minutes, we arrived once again at Qalandia, where everyone on the bus jumped from their seats and clamored to get off as fast as possible as if their lives depended on it. Bemused, Trevor and I took our time exiting and had to retrieve our bags from underneath the bus. We had heard about the difficulties that Palestines faced in trying to pass through Qalandia, but we assumed that there would be some other way for foreigners like us to bypass that messy process and waltz back into Israel. There was not.

We assumed our place in line behind the rest of our bus in a space that can only be described as an animal pen built for humans. Metal bars on both sides of the corridor hemmed us in, and a revolving metal door at the end regulated the flow of traffic into the security area. No official was in sight, nor were there any guardrails that might have enabled us to line up in an orderly fashion. In the absence of supervision, jostling and pushing soon resulted in the formation of a giant blob of humanity pressed up against the walls and the gate.

The Qallandia Checkpoint (photo: www.holylanddispatches.blogspot.com)

Five people were allowed into the security area at a time. When they passed through, a buzzer above the gate emitted a prison-esque beep and the red light turned green. The revolving doors unlocked abruptly, and the blob pushed forward in an effort to squeeze through. This cattle carousel came to an abrupt end after five more people made it through, and there was often one unlucky person who found himself literally stuck in between the revolving metal doors and the bars on either side. Each prisoner stood with a forlorn, distant look in his face for a few minutes until the buzzer sounded again to let five more through.

We inched forward ever so slowly, and the congestion worsened significantly as we approached the gate. An older woman behind me clucked disapprovingly to her companion: “mithla hayawanat ihna!” (It's like we're animals!). In front, I watched through the bars as an old man was refused entry because his papers were not in order. He gestured angrily at the border guards (who were invisible from our vantage point), but finally threw up his hands in resignation and began to look for a way to return to the Palestinian side. There was no side door. Everyone waiting in and next to the metal gate had to move back to let him pass back the way he came, head down and cursing to himself.

After some time – I don’t remember how long exactly – we finally made it through the gate. As we were walking the several feet from the gate to the x-ray machine, an old woman walking between us didn’t see a piece of concrete sticking up on the ground, tripped over it, and fell onto her knees. The contents of her bag spilled onto the ground, and she looked up at me with a desperate, exhausted look that I will not soon forget. She picked herself up – no time to nurse your wounds in the no man’s land between the gate and security area – and shuffled forward.

We put our bags through an x-ray machine, walked through an unmonitored metal detector, and handed our passports to two Israeli soldiers sitting behind soundproof glass. I handed them my passport with stone-faced stare, mirroring the one I was receiving from the soldier. After flipping through it with a few cursory glances, he handed it back and waved me away dismissively. As I walked toward the bus that would take us from the checkpoint to Jerusalem, I was serenaded with one last buzzer sound and creak of the metal gate as five more humans – mithla hayawanat – pressed through.

New Look, Same Blog

As regular visitors to this blog will realize, I have decided to give it a new look. I started this blog a few years ago as part of an assignment in Arabic class (hence the creative name "mkarabic.blogspot.com"), but it has since become a place to muse about Egyptian politics and society based upon my daily experiences here in the land of the pharaohs.

The new name is a nod to the uniquely Egyptian word "fahlawa." While it defies a precise translation into English, fahlawa is basically a way to describe how the majority of Egyptians survive on a day-to-day basis. With high rates of unemployment and a lack of social stability, most Egyptians earn their daily bread in the informal sector. A person who embodies the idea of fahlawa is one who can swiftly assess any new situation that he finds himself in and figure out if there is a way to profit from it. As a foreigner in Egypt, I have "fahlawa experiences" on regular basis, and they tend to be alternatively hilarious, frustrating, and enlightening. For a good example of fahlawa, check out this post that I wrote during my semester abroad in Alexandria in 2010. Finally, for a full, eloquent definition of the word, I strongly encourage everyone to visit the "al-Bostoni" blog - he hits the nail right on the head.

So, without further ado, I invite you to join me at www.fahlawamusings.com!

An Analysis of Last Week's Events in Tahrir Square

Egyptians returned to Tahrir Square en masse last week in what many dubbed the “second revolution”. What began as a largely Islamist protest on November 18 against the attempts of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to insulate itself from civilian oversight and play an active role in politics turned into an extended sit-in as thousands of protesters, with the support of all of Egypt’s liberal parties, clashed with central security forces and sought to bring down the SCAF. The Muslim Brotherhood, however, which had a heavy presence in the square on November 18, was noticeably absent from the subsequent protests.

The dynamics of the most recent Tahrir Square protests shed further light on the distinct strategies that Egypt’s liberal and Islamist groups employ to achieve similar goals. Both groups descended upon Tahrir Square to voice their opposition to the SCAF’s ongoing rule. The Islamists, however, made it clear that they view the ballot box as the most effective means to combat the SCAF. After their brief stint in the square, they refused to officially support the ongoing protests and strenuously resisted calls to delay this week’s parliamentary elections (which, by most accounts, they are poised to dominate). Liberals, on the other hand, demonstrated once again that the square is their preferred forum to express discontent and try to effect change. Although elections were less than a week away, nearly every liberal party turned its attention away from their campaigns and supported efforts to topple the SCAF. While both sides are participating in the elections, the liberals have had little success in expanding their base of supporters and thus have little to lose by continuing to protest. The Islamists, on the other hand, seem ready to take aim at the SCAF through the institutions of state – namely the Parliament. The diverging tactics employed by both sides reveal fundamental differences in the groups’ faith in the democratic system as a framework within which to achieve their goals.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, Egypt’s two most prominent Islamist groups, began the Tahrir saga on November 18 with a major protest against a SCAF’s proposed supra-constitutional principles. The most contentious aspects of the document included a stipulation that the military budget would not be subject to civilian oversight and an effort to ensure an active role for the military in the constitutional process. Both Islamists and liberals opposed these principles on the grounds that they would enable the military to remain outside the control of any civilian government. The Islamists were particularly vehement in their opposition, however, because they feared that the principles would also empower the military to intervene in politics – a direct threat to the Islamists’ strategy of gaining control of political institutions and working through them to oppose the military. The Islamists crowded the square with thousands of supporters and spent the day inveighing specifically against the supra-constitutional principles.

While the Islamist supporters left the square, a few family members of those killed and injured during the January revolution who had spent the day in Tahrir decided to remain. On Saturday, a group of central security police officers violently flushed them out. As news spread of the officers’ use of excessive force, thousands of Egyptians came down to the square to support the protesters. By the end of the night, protesters had retaken the square and running battles with the police continued on the outskirts of Tahrir. Compelled by the spread of videos showing the police treating the dead with utter disrespect, the crowd in Tahrir continued to grow. By Sunday night, one of the streets leading to the square turned into a de facto war zone between riot police and protesters.

With thousands of protesters in the square, the array of Egyptian political parties faced a choice: support the protesters and demand the resignation of the SCAF or call for calm and a truce to end the fighting. The response from the liberal side was overwhelming: activists who had played a major role in the January revolution set up camp in the square, twitter buzzed with activity, and the chants calling for the SCAF to step down grew louder by the minute. Furthermore, liberal parties released official statements of support for the “million-man protest” on Tuesday, November 22. The Free Egyptians Party, one of the most prominent liberal parties, distributed a list of seven demands that included the widely-echoed call for the formation of a “National Salvation Government” to take control of the country. Such a government, which protest leaders had proposed would include a representative distribution of Egypt’s political interests led by the respected presidential candidates Mohamed al-Baradei (a liberal) and Abu Monem Abul-Fatooh (a former Muslim Brotherhood member), represented the ideal solution for Egypt’s liberals: the end of SCAF rule and a transfer of power to a government headed by a trusted liberal leader with popular support.

As the violence continued and the ministers of the sitting government submitted their resignations in protests, the SCAF’s hold on power seemed to weaken. The Muslim Brotherhood, however, remained on the sidelines. The group equivocated, stating that it would not officially participate in the protests but supported the right to peaceful protests and sit-ins. When some of the group’s younger members joined the protests in defiance of orders from their superiors, the brotherhood released a statement on its website reaffirming its original decision not to participate.

For their part, the liberal parties were not prepared to match some of the most extreme demands of the activists in Tahrir. As pressure from many activists for a delay or boycott of the elections grew in light of the violence, most liberal parties did not officially support such calls. Indeed, the speed with which those in the square forsook the elections in favor of concentrated opposition to the SCAF indicates the particularly low value that many hardcore revolutionaries place in the electoral process as a means to achieve their goals. Nevertheless, the liberal parties stood in solidarity with the protesters against the SCAF throughout the week.

For the time being, the SCAF has regained its hold on power. After soldiers stepped in to end violence, the protesters found themselves unable to maintain the support that they had received out of sympathy for those who had died or been injured while fighting the police. Now, as the liberals’ immediate and direct challenge to the SCAF’s rule seems to have temporarily softened, the advent of parliamentary elections means that the Islamists’ real efforts are just beginning. In the end, however, both sides will likely realize that they are most likely to achieve their common goal of knocking the SCAF out of power through coordination and cooperation. A combination of intense protests and parliamentary pressure – drawing on the resources of both the liberals and Islamists – may well be the straw that breaks the SCAF’s back.

Why?

Fighting rages on tonight in Tahrir Square. Tear gas, birdshot, live ammunition. Protesters have hurled a steady stream of stones and molotov cocktails at lines of police officers for almost four days in a row. Protests and skirmishes between police and protesters have erupted in Alexandria and other cities and towns throughout the country. Field Marshal Tantawi, leader of the ruling military council, went on television tonight and delivered a Mubarak-esque speech expressing sympathy for the martyrs' families while at the same time calling for protesters to end the violence immediately. He also accepted the resignation of the current transitional government (almost every Egyptian I've talked has no trust in the government, so the resignation is essentially a moot point).

Protesters want the military council out; that much is clear. The post-revolution elation and optimism about the military's potential to responsibly guide the country through the current transitional period is gone. It gradually dissipated throughout a spring, summer, and fall that saw a flurry of military trials for civilians, a ratcheting up of media censorship, and generally incompetent leadership on all fronts.

What is still unclear, however, is why the protesters and police continue to fight. The fighting has been concentrated for several days now on Mostafa Mahmoud Street - one of the streets that leads to Tahrir Square - and the battle lines have scarcely moved.

One possibility is that the protesters are trying to break through the police barricades and reach the Ministry of the Interior (MoI). The MoI was and still is one of the hated state institutions, and one of the central demands of the January revolution was that it be completely reformed. That reform hasn't yet happened. But do the protesters really think that they can break through a police line, huge barbed-wire fences, and then several more phalanxes of police and soldiers protecting the building? Even if protesters were able to break through, the death toll would be horrific, and they would be no closer to actually achieving their goal of reforming the ministry.

Another possibility is that the police are trying to fight through the line of protesters in an effort to reach Tahrir Square and drive out its occupants. But why would the police concentrate all of their resources on just one street? Clearly, if they wanted to remove protesters from the square by force they would launch a multi-pronged assault (that happened on Saturday, by the way, but the police then withdrew from the square and protesters reoccupied it).

Despite the absolute lack of logic, the fight continues. Ambulances make runs to and from the front lines, field hospitals in the square are jammed with people suffering from head wounds and excessive tear gas inhalation. Everyone screams slogans against the military council and the police, but no one stops to think about whether thousands of Egyptians continuing to throw rocks at hundreds of police officers is actually achieving anything.

The situation defies logic, but that might be the point. We may have arrived at the point where Egyptians are fighting just for the sake of fighting. To the protesters on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, the police are the representatives of a dictatorial system that still hasn't died. They are expressing their frustration and anger with every rock that they throw. That may be why.

But what does the future hold for this country? No one knows.

The Need for Police Reform in Egypt

I just published my new piece on Fikra Forum today focused on the importance of reforming Egypt's police force (read it here). With so much attention being devoted to Egypt's upcoming parliamentary elections (the first since Mubarak's fall in February) it is easy to overlook the underlying problems that plague the country's security services. As I argue in my piece, however, political and economic development cannot occur in the absence of fundamental changes in the relationship between the police and Egypt's citizens. My other two published articles on Fikra Forum can be found here and here.

Election Season Begins in Egypt

Mohamed, my friend and ex-Muslim Brotherhood member, left Cairo two weeks ago for his hometown Damietta. He is going to be there for a month and a half, and he hopes to come back to Cairo in the beginning of November as a newly-elected member of the Egyptian Parliament. If his party, the “Egyptian Movement” (it makes sense in Arabic), wins 60% of the votes in his electoral district, Mohamed will win a spot in the first Egyptian Parliament in the post-Mubarak era.

Before he left, I had a chance to sit down with Mohamed for an extended chat about his political ambitions and platform at one of Cairo’s many cafes nestled in a downtown alley. Before discussing his election campaign, Mohamed first laid out the basics of the electoral system in Damietta. As he described it, his party is competing primarily with a party composed of former Mubarak supporters (known in Arabic “falul” – the remnants). The residents of Damietta will be voting on two separate ballots: one is a party-list system, in which voters vote for a specific party which is then allocated a number of seats in Parliament proportional to the percentage of votes it receives. The other is for independent candidates, running without a party affiliation, whom the voters choose based on their individual merits. Mohamed is running on a party-list, and he is ranked fifth out of eight candidates on the Egyptian Movement’s party list (Damietta will have eight party-list seats, so if a party won 50% of the votes, for example, its top four candidates would earn seats in Parliament). If you find this system unnecessarily confusing, you are not alone – there has been a lot of griping over the past few months about the complexity of the electoral system and its vulnerability to fraud.

Mohamed began describing his platform with a simple statement: “I am running in order represent the interests of Damietta’s youth.” Before diving into his views on specific political or economic issues, Mohamed detailed his plan to revamp Damietta’s educational system, which he considers one of his core issues. Arising from the belief that the education system fundamentally sells Egypt’s youth short and inculcates them with useless information through its emphasis on rote memorization, Mohamed wants Damietta’s youth to take matters into their own hands. He plans to identify 300 of the brightest students in the area (“for their critical thinking skills, not their ability to score well on Egypt’s secondary school exit exam”) and provide them with six month scholarships to study education in Brazil or Malaysia. After learning about those countries’ educational systems, they would then return to Damietta and begin working in local schools as teaching assistants and administration advisers in an attempt to change the curriculum to better serve the students’ needs. At the same time, Mohamed wants to open a new high school for exceptionally smart students (50 per year) that would be modeled after the American educational system (read: critical thinking skills, hands-on learning, liberal-arts style breadth and depth).

In addition to his proposal for education reform, Mohamed also has a distinct economic philosophy that he describes as “socialist and centered around the needs of the poor.” Damietta is a large manufacturing center, and Mohamed commented that the many factory workers are all inclined to vote for candidates with socialist economic policies. He is calling for the Egyptian government to play a significant role in supporting certain industries with tax breaks and investment subsidies, while identifying others that it deems less essential and will thus tax stiffly. “How can Egypt export grain,” Mohamed queried, “when we have to import other food from abroad in order to feed our own people?”

On top of emphasizing domestic production and imposing stiffer government oversight on Egypt’s exports and imports, Mohamed plans to focus on ensuring that all of Egypt’s workers have a minimum wage of 50,000 Egyptian pounds (approximately $8,500) per year. Given that Egypt’s current GDP per capita is just under $3,000, that goal seems nearly impossible to reach in the near future. Suffice it to say that Mohamed’s economic plan, were it actually implemented, would represent a major shift away from the Mubarak regime’s efforts to promote liberal economic reform.

As to foreign policy, Mohamed declared that Egypt should emulate the Turkish “zero problems with neighbors” model. In his own words, Mohamed emphasized his belief that “dignity” should be a core concept of Egypt’s foreign policy: “If other countries respect us, we will certainly respect them.” Beyond the rhetoric, however, he did not go into many specifics. When I asked him about his position on Egypt’s relationship with Israel, he replied that he did not inherently oppose the idea of Israel as a Jewish state nor was he opposed to the idea of Egypt and Israel continuing their economic and diplomatic relations. He did say, however, that “as long as Israel continues to kill our soldiers [on the Sinai border] and Palestinian children, we cannot accept it as a legitimate partner.”

Taken as a whole, what is there to make of Mohamed’s policy positions? In my opinion, his platform as a whole seems high on rhetoric and low on substance. He is enthusiastic and full of ideas, but none of them seem to be grounded in a sober analysis of the political and economic realities in Egypt. Can the Egyptian government actually pay for any of the social programs he proposes? Would it be able to carry out a major realignment of the tax system? Will the Parliament be able to wrest any control over the country’s foreign policy away from the military? Mohamed, like many other candidates for Parliament, does not have any political experience. While he and his fellow Egyptians are bursting with enthusiasm at the prospect of what they hope will be the country’s first set of transparent democratic elections, no one is quite sure how that enthusiasm will translate into the reality of writing, passing, and implementing legislation.

In addition to that uncertainty, the elephant in the political room is, of course, the military. It remains as powerful as ever, and, as of yet, has not laid out a firm timetable for completing the transfer of power to a civilian government. In the battle for power between a Parliament filled with green politicians and a military council composed of experienced soldiers who have access to extensive financial resources and support from the behemoth that is Egypt’s security apparatus, it is hard to imagine that Mohamed or any of his peers will have much success carrying out their plans without the military’s approval.

For now, however, Mohamed has the luxury of ignoring the rocky road ahead. He left his job as a sales representative at a medical services company to focus on his election campaign. From now until election time, he will be doing what politicians do when they campaign: attending public events, meeting with voters, spreading his message as widely as possible. After we had finished our last cups of tea, I wished him good luck: “rabina yuafuqk!” – May God grant you success.

Egypt's Treason Law: Using Mubarak-era Tactics to Keep Mubarak's Cronies Out

Earlier this summer, I wrote an article for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's "Fikra Forum" about the ongoing economic debate in Egypt. Today, I just published my second piece on the site. This article is about Egypt's newly-amended "Treason Law," which is aimed at keeping Hosni Mubarak's former cronies in the now-defunct National Democratic Party out of Egypt's future political scene. As you will see in my article, however, this law has the potential to backfire and open the door to a new era of dictatorship in Egypt. You can find it here on Fikra Forum.

A Firsthand Look at the Muslim Brotherhood

Since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has emerged as a legitimate political force that is sure to play a large role in shaping Egypt’s future. Both Egyptian and Western media organizations have devoted a large amount of focus to analyzing the MB’s political prospects, its power structure, and its position in Egyptian society. While most Egyptians have plenty of opportunities to form their own opinions about the MB from their own interactions with members and the Egyptian media’s coverage of the subject, the only exposure to the MB that many non-Egyptians have is through the Western media. Those articles and news reports have alternately described the MB as a widely popular, democratizing force, or terrorist sympathizers bent on war with Israel and ensuring that Egypt becomes another case of “one man, one vote, one time.”

While I do not consider myself an expert on the MB, I want to share with the readers of this blog some of my experiences with the Brotherhood throughout the past few months in Cairo. Before this year, I had not had the opportunity to meet any Brotherhood members. Open membership in the MB during the Mubarak era could easily lead to expulsion from college or the loss of a job. This year, however, everything has changed. Membership in the Brotherhood no longer puts one at risk of intimidation or state-sponsored violence. As a result, I have had the opportunity to meet and befriend an MB member, and I think that his story is quite instructive for anyone wanting to learn more about the role that the MB plays in Egyptian politics and society.

The story begins with a discussion group that I attend every Thursday afternoon at a Cairo think tank. A group of Egyptian political activists and interested citizens from all sides of the political spectrum come together to discuss a specific political issue with an expert in the field – past meetings have focused on the relationship between religion and the state, the continued sit-ins in Tahrir Square, and analyzing the recently released electoral laws. I generally do much more listening than talking at these meetings (I consider it an achievement that I am merely able to understand much of what is being discussed…), and I consider each meeting one of the highlights of my week.

My friend Mohamed, a 27 year-old man who works at a pharmaceutical company, is the leader and organizer of the group. Until this past March, Mohamed was a member of the MB, but he and several hundred other young members formally split from the Brotherhood a few months ago. Mohamed had been a part of the Brotherhood for 12 years. While we had discussed politics and international relations several times previously, I did not learn Mohamed’s personal story until my last week in Cairo this summer. After we finished our weekly meeting, he asked me if I would come with him to a local café and serve as a translator for an interview that a Czech researcher had scheduled with him. The interview lasted an hour and a half, and, in addition to learning firsthand how tough it is to serve as a translator, I was fascinated by Mohamed’s story.

Mohamed grew up in a town in the Nile Delta near the Mediterranean coast, the son of a politically indifferent mother and a socialist father. At age 15, he decided to join the Muslim Brotherhood. He respected the local Brotherhood members and believed that there was a natural synthesis between the Islamic principles that the Brotherhood espoused and the establishment of a just, transparent government in Egypt (i.e. the opposite of the Mubarak regime). While Mohamed’s father was initially opposed to his participation in the MB, Mohamed recalled that his father’s opposition softened over time as he saw that Mohamed’s participation in the MB seemed to make him a more focused student and well-rounded person.

Mohamed climbed the ranks of the Brotherhood, and he continued to play a role in it throughout college and after graduation. He eventually reached the fifth and highest level of Brotherhood membership (although if he had stayed on he would have had a ways to go before obtaining a provincial or national leadership position). He participated in the January revolution that toppled Mubarak, but in the wake of Mubarak’s resignation Mohamed found himself caught in the divide that has currently split the MB in two.

In a meeting on March 26 with several hundred members of the Brotherhood’s younger generation, Mohamed and his colleagues declared that they were officially cutting ties with the MB. As Mohamed was careful to point out, he did not split off from the MB because he disagreed with the group’s political or religious principles. Instead, he fundamentally disagreed with what he saw as the MB’s mixing of preaching and politics as it sought to garner political support leading up to the first elections in the post-Mubarak Egypt. While Mohamed himself had taken part in both fields (preaching and politics), he steadfastly maintained that two must remain separate. The MB devotes a great deal of effort to maintaining a presence at local mosques and spreading its version of Islamic values to the attendees therein. In Mohamed’s opinion, however, the MB’s preaching had begun to cross over into the political realm. As he explained to me in one of our earlier conversations, bringing politics into the mosque has the potential to sow division and detract from the Brotherhood’s political and religious goals. “Politics is a matter of choice,” he said, “you pick the person or the party that you think best represents you. Disagreement is normal. The problem with mixing preaching and politics is that if someone disagrees with your politics, that disagreement can carry over to religion, too. Our opponents will then seem to be arguing not only against our politics, but also against religion as a whole. If that happened, it would sully both our name and Islam as a whole.”

That was Mohamed’s official reason for leaving the Brotherhood, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity. At the same time, however, he and his fellow youth defectors did not disavow the Brotherhood’s ideology. He joined a new party called the “Renaissance Party,” which he described as embracing almost all of the Brotherhood’s values without mixing preaching and politics. He also supports former Brotherhood leader and current presidential candidate Abd-Munam Abu-al-Futuh (who was expelled from the Brotherhood upon declaring his intention to stand in the presidential elections – the MB is not fielding an official candidate for this year’s presidential elections). Mohamed’s continued adherence to Islamist political platforms suggests that there is another factor that contributed to his decision: the split between the older and younger generations of the MB.

While people often think of the Brotherhood as a monolithic institution devoid of any differentiating views on politics or religion, it has become quite clear since the January 25 revolution that the Brotherhood is actually quite diverse. The Brotherhood’s leadership is largely composed of the old guard members whose political views have been hardened by years of repression under the Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak regimes. The younger generation, however, has shown itself much more amenable to cooperation with non-Islamist groups. Furthermore, the younger generation has publicly chafed against the old guard’s hesitance to turn over leadership positions to them. This split in the Brotherhood continues to grow, and, with defections such as those of Mohamed and his colleagues and the rise of more hardline groups such as the Salafis, the MB no longer has a monopoly on Islamist politics in Egypt.