Twelve years later: A change of hearts

The difference between the reaction of normal Egyptians to 9/11 and their reaction to the Boston bombings is palpable. There is a definite change of hearts here, but it is not due to a shift in moral principles (which have always been dubiously detached from reality in Egypt), but due to self-serving interests. And perhaps this is a blessing because in Egypt, as anywhere else, it is interests that stick rather than ethics and values. For this we have the very unlikely personage of George W. Bush to thank, not for his horribly botched wars, but for some of the more subtle and unintentional fallout of 9/11.

When 9/11 happened, the majority of Egyptians were gleeful. A lot of Americanized Egyptians will bitterly contest this in English, but in Arabic they know it's a solid fact. But the way Fox News portrayed the glee was not true either. There were no parades in the streets, people did not scream "death to Americans" as they quoted verses from the Quran that dictated they had to "kill the infidels". In fact, the glee was mostly non-religious, and mostly confined to an ethics-free sense of synthetic pan-Arabism and perhaps pan-Islamism in an ethnic sense. As far as I can recall, very few outlying opinions tried to justify 9/11 based on religious grounds, but these were marginal, almost akin to the Westboro church in the US. The majority opinion maintained that killing civilians was wrong. And in typical Egyptian fashion, the majority opinion then marched on to completely ignore this moral principle and try to justify 9/11 based on America's deeds in the region. People thought of unconditional US support for Israel in its indiscriminate killings, and also of first hand low grade but indiscriminate US bombing campaigns in the Sudan and Afghanistan. The major sentiment of the day was "At least now Americans would understand the way we feel".

This logic is essentially broken. Comparison of targeting civilians to collateral damage is faulty. Both are horrific, but there is a fine moral distinction there. But above all, one wrong should never justify another horrible wrong. Ironically, it is in some of the more religious communities in Egypt that this moral principle was tightly observed and in which 9/11 was condemned unconditionally. But for the majority of Egyptians (and perhaps Arabs) values are theoretical constructs, to be admired and cherished from afar, but to be hermetically isolated from daily life.

When the Boston bombings happened, the reaction in Egypt was unanimous: "Please don't let it be a Muslim!" Perhaps the proper first reaction should have been concern for the victims, and encouragingly, there was a lot of that. But the bulk of the reaction was concern over the identity of the bomber. And I don't see much wrong with that. In fact, I think any other group of people in the same situation would've reacted the same way. And that's good news, because finally, at least in a small way Egyptians are becoming conscious of their image and interests and are starting to deal with the them in a "normal" way.

The reason for this shift in reaction from 9/11 to the Boston bombings is not the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact both wars (but Iraq a lot more so) validated some of the broken logic of the glee on 9/11. The main cause for the shift is more subtle yet more far-reaching. It is in the impossibly elongated US visa application process that the average citizen was touched. It is in being singled out in airports that most people felt their collective responsibility for 9/11. It is in the technology bans and business restrictions that professionals felt values and morals coalescing into something tangible. Accountability is not something Egyptians are used to, living in a decrepit nanny state, and it is in accountability for 9/11 that they had to own up for something for the first time.

Perhaps if all these restrictions had been imposed only by the US, the collective Arab mentality would have filed it under conspiracy theory. But as the official measures, and the distrustful looks of ordinary citizens spread all over the globe, the reality became undeniable. With the London and Madrid bombings, most Egyptians became aware (even if they would never state it openly) that our region is the main producer and exporter of terrorism in the world, and that we all have to pay for it in moral as well as in physical form. This then flowed into a real and heart-felt concern by a lot of Muslims for what some from their midst had done to the reputation of their religion.

So when it turned out that it was a Chechen 

Egypt's low budget Kristallnachts

Two Muslim children in a large village/small town in lower Egypt draw swastikas on a Muslim seminary school. Roughly a week later, the Orthodox cathedral in Abassiya is being attacked by Islamists, local thugs, and the Ministry of Interior. In any sane universe the two events should not be related. But in Egypt there is a direct causal relation between the two. For some reason, local Muslims were eager to consider the swastikas crosses. Naturally, they proceeded to burn down the local church. When local Christians tried to defend themselves, naturally local Muslims killed five of them, burned all Christian shops, and forced all other Christian families to move out of town. When the cathedral in Cairo tried to hold a funeral for those who were killed, local Muslims in Cairo were naturally offended that Christians held crosses in a funeral and proceeded to try to burn down the cathedral. The police, naturally, fired repeated volleys of bird shot and teargas into the cathedral.

This exercise in nonsense is unusually dramatic in its culmination at the traditionally state-protected cathedral, but in other respects it is not uncommon for Egypt. In fact, it has never been uncommon in Egypt through its history. Sectarian tension and stratification have been essential components of Egyptian society since the Arab conquest. The only exception to this is the Nasserite era, where honest to goodness secularism removed sectarian boundaries and suppressed extremism among both Muslims and Christians. To fight leftists, Sadat empowered political Islamists, leading to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the formation of groups on its right wing.

During the Mubarak era, the state essentially tried to keep sectarianism under wraps. There was a generally colorless nature to this effort as with everything in the Mubarak era. Security forces protected churches, even if half-heartedly. if sectarian clashes erupted, authorities tried to contain them, even if they exerted pressure on the victims (almost always Christian) to let go of their rights. High ranking appointments of Christians were often made, even if they had a token nature, and even if sectarianism ran amok at other levels of the bureaucracy. 

But during the Mubarak era, sectarianism or lack thereof completely left the realm of the regime. Large numbers of people working in and coming back to Egypt from Saudi Arabia reshaped the country in the nineties. Bringing back different levels of religious fundamentalism ranging from outright Saudi Wahabism to some sort of synthetic Egyptian televangelism (a la Amr Khaled), this returning diaspora reshaped the country. The veil spread, prayers became more a matter of social pressure than personal spirituality, personal freedoms were restricted by society through society, and a general wave of superficial religiosity washed over the Muslims of Egypt.

In parallel, Christians developed their reaction to this sweeping wave of Islamization. The end result by the early twenty first century is that a people who are essentially the same in ethnic and linguistic terms became two people. Look at a family, if the woman is not veiled and they don't look rich, they are Christian. If they look rich, look at the guy's wedding band, if it's Gold they are Christian. Suddenly, everyone on both sides of the fence needed to find out the religion of everyone around them.

The January 25th revolution was a complex issue for Christians. The former pope of the Coptic church was vocal in not supporting the revolution, and a lot of Muslims and Christians probably agree with him now in hindsight. But at the time, most Christians were also furious with the Mubarak regime for various (mostly unrealistic) reasons. So contrary to Islamist propaganda, most Christians supported the revolution. But the revolution brought about an Islamist regime. And to everyone's surprise the Islamist regime brought about the most obvious result for Christians: Violence, persecution, neglect, and injustice.

Many may claim that neglect and persecution were also there under Mubarak. The main difference is that with the MB it is institutional and official. Whereas under Mubarak progroms did happen once every few years, sometimes perpetrators were caught, and sometimes they were punished. Under the MB progroms happen almost every month and they are fanned and directed by local FJP and Salafist leadership publicly and in official media. Using Egypt's Christians as scapegoats for instability in the streets and blaming them for all the anti-Morsi rallies is a dangerous and well documented game among the MB's top leadership. And unlike the Mubarak era (or Sadata or Nasser or even the Alawy dynasty) the main Cathedral in Cairo is attacked, the attackers are videoed, and the police aids them, and nobody is held accountable for it. What the MB regime is saying is that they essentially don't care about Christians. They are not particularly going to directly target them. But if the MB needs a scapegoat, it will use the church. And if local salafists decide they want to burn down a church, the MB is not going to make a super effort to stop it.

Morsi-Man & the Masters of the Universe

Why did Morsi try to drag Bassem Youssef, Egypt's low rent version of John Stewart, to Jail?

That was the question of the day all week last week. Conspiracy theories abounded about the reason. At face value the move seems to be without merit. I mean if there is something we know Morsi cares about, it is how the West views him. And the West responded decisively and rapidly to news of Bassem's arrest, so quickly in fact, that their response to the sectarian mini civil war seems muted in comparison. Moreover, the move gained Bassem significant solidarity in the upper middle class, a social segment Morsi needs to work hard to win over. Those who'd never heard of Bassem, and those who'd always thought he wasn't funny were all of a sudden looking for his videos on Youtube.

So why did Morsi do it? Was it because Bassem is in fact an MB agent hell bent on keeping secular political forces glued to TV's on strategic Fridays? This conspiracy theory is strangely enough, very popular. A lot of people suspect Bassem of being an undercover MB and the whole drama as an attempt to prop his credibility. Or is it an honest to God attempt at silencing the media, some good old fascism for a change?

I think the reason is much simpler, and scarier.

This is why Morsi tried to jail Bassem!

Yes, it's as simple as the "president" being insulted by a spoof of him in his ridiculous Pakistani honorary Ph.D. hat. People resist the idea that it could be that simple because it is frightening to imagine that we are being ruled by people whose main driving force is so superficial. But what most people miss is the mentality that drives a typical MB'er.

One of the most important teachings of the Muslims Brotherhood is that they are the cream of the cream of Egyptian, Arab, and Muslim society. As a result of being the cream of Muslims, they therefore believe themselves destined for mastery of the world, or what is called ostazeyat al3aalam. The manual of operations of the Muslims Brotherhood revolves around achieving this ultimate goal. There are very specific goals and standards when it comes to Muslim societies. Upper echelons are infiltrated at all levels and high calibers are enlisted (one cannot join the MB, one must be asked to join it). Slowly but surely, it is believed, the Muslim Brotherhood will come to rule such societies, and it will come to rule them with the best that such societies have ever produced.

What comes next is Messianic, vague, and esoteric. Somehow, these Muslim societies are then expected to have an orgasmic explosion of renascence in all fields as the best in these societies is allowed to flourish under the benevolent rule of its master class: The handpicked brotherhood. The non-Muslim world is also expected to somehow fall under brotherhood rule. It is not clear how this should come to be and brotherhood literature is mixed here. On the one hand, the West is supposed to stare in awe as they see the miracle in the East, and they are supposed to voluntarily want to be ruled by the master race. On the other hand there's always talk about force and power and how the brotherhood will get what the brotherhood deserves no matter what the imperialist forces do.

Compare this insanely delusional sense of superiority with the horrific facts that MB rule made the MB face. The MB had assumed (however difficult it is to believe that they are so simple) that Egypt is a resource rich country and Mubarak was personally stealing all the money. When faced with the reality of Egypt being a poor noncompetitive, and now unstable country the MB simply froze. When they woke up it was too late and too embarrassing to face people with the reality. Plan B was begging for money. The US kneeling in front of the MB would have to wait for now. Now the MB have to be "coy" and "cunning" and kneel down before the US, and Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, every Western European country, and China.

Definitely not what the MB was bargaining for.

So when an opportunity comes up for Morsi to show off it had to be caught. The Pakistan moment was critical. After being denied the Washington invite he so badly coveted, Morsi had to do with a bunch of third world visits (on which he also had to beg uselessly for money). Now, here was a foreign country giving him an honorary degree and showing genuine happiness and pride in hosting him. This was not only a moment in which the MB superiority would finally show, it is a moment where international recognition materialized.

And then Morsi appeared on TV. Everyone in Egypt (but the MB) laughed. Nobody could specifically point out why they were laughing, but the way he looked was genuinely funny.

And then Bassem did his simple entrance. In a few seconds of over the top caricature he focused everything that was wrong about Morsi. The man from the Eastern Delta who spent years studying in the US, but whose English is much worse than a freshmen at the AUC. The president who wears coats two sizes too big. The guy who rearranges his genitals in front of the international press. The dude whose tolerance, exposure, and diversity training is so extensive that he said his girl doesn't wear jeans because she is not a slut. This was Morsi, and this was by extension the MB. A bunch of technically savvy, but culturally challenged and provincial people with industrial strength superiority complex.

This is it, Bassem's prosecution was not planned, it was just one more bout of impotent rage by a president as shocked by his own incompetence as the rest of the world.

Dawn of conscience: Holy Drawings

"It is a rotten civilization." That's how a prominent, and rather off putting Salafist described ancient Egyptian civilization. This was actually one of the more balanced and sane attitudes among Islamists towards the original culture of the land they now live on. Positions ranging from destruction of all ancient sites, to their drowsing in molten wax to "stem idolatry" color the uniformly insane spectrum of Islamist views on the ancient Egyptians.

However, the Salafists are not unique in the Middle East and the Western world in their hate towards the ancient Egyptians. In fact, this ancient civilization presents a perplexing model that does not fit with the patriarchal, white, Abrahamic view of how man became human. But the reality is that The lower Nile is where humanity became itself. Attempts at demonizing the ancient civilization, shifting the credit to Mesopotamia, or simply ignoring the entire antiquity of humanity have consistently failed to stem the genuine interest of millions of young children in the ancient Pharaohs of Egypt. In two blog posts I will discuss just two aspects of how ancient Egypt represents a repository of human conscience. And in doing so I am ascribing zero credit to modern Egyptians regardless of their religions, for they have little in common with their ancestors.

One particularly nasty misconception about ancient Egypt is that its writing system, the Hieroglyphic writing, was intentionally complex. This is part of the great web of untruth weaved about the priesthood of Amun: That they kept writing intentionally unreachable that commoners could never use it. Regardless of the fact that in its late period Hieroglyphs developed into Demotic, literally the commoner writing, even the original Hieroglyphs themselves were astonishingly easy to read.

Perhaps the reason that many people find Hieroglyphs intimidating is that they try to measure them against modern writing systems. Egyptian writing was multi-layered, its main concern was clarity and unambiguity. A word was written, but multiple symbols were added just to make sure the reader would be able to sound it out correctly, and understand its meaning without confusion.

A very small group of Egyptian glyphs are "ideograms" or symbols that represent a whole word. For example a glyph of a mouth with a dash underneath represents a mouth or (ir) in ancient Egyptian. A glyph of an enclosure with a dash under it is a house or (per) in ancient Egyptian.

Although ideograms are few and far between they represent an idea of how the writing system came to be. At once Hieroglyphs are derived from mundane everyday symbols, and at the same time they represent a stroke of genius in how they are employed to form bigger words. But what's eerie is that the writing system seems to pop out in a more or less complete form. The date where it first pops out keeps being pushed back by new discoveries. It's already been pushed back enough to deny the desperate attempt to describe Egyptian as a derivative of Sumerian.

The majority of Egyptian words are written by using the similarity of the sounds of certain words to form larger words. A common example that James Allen used to illustrate is using the glyphs for eye, bee, and leaf in English to describe the phrase "I believe" through similarity of sound. To sound out the words, Egyptians used glyphs that had three letters, two letters, and one letter. The glyphs containing one letter were added redundantly to make reading the two and three letter glyphs easier and definitive. In doing so, the scribe wanted to help readers, rather than hinder them. For example the word ANKHU (the living) is written using the famous glyph for ANKH (actually means sandal, but sounds like ANKH for life). It is followed by the single letter glyphs for N and KH. The W in the end (the chick) is the male plural marker.

But even with redundant two-layered phonetic writing, the ancient scribe was obsessed about clarity of meaning. So the majority of words ended up in a glyph that was not pronounced called the "identifier." The only job of the identifier is to classify the word and allow it to be easily identified. So for example ANKHU is not only spelled out phonetically at two levels at once, it also has an identifier glyph added to the end. The identifier is two people, indicating we are talking about a property of people. Three dashes indicates this is a plural.

In short, the writing system included elements of Syllabries, Alphabets, pure and impure Abjads, logographic writing systems, and ideogramatic signs all wrapped up in one. Hieroglyphs were a repository of human writing, foreshadowing every kind of writing system that would later spring up due to its obsessive and redundant nature. As Greek letters started to be used to write Coptic, Ptolemaics gave special mystical meanings to the use of certain glyphs to write certain words. This was never the intention of the ancient scribes who just used the glyphs because they sounded like the words they wanted to write. This Greek mysticism is the origin of the myth about the complexity of Egyptian writing.

However, it is worth noting that the Greek alphabet is itself a very intelligent daughter of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Between the Middle and New Kingdoms, Egypt was embroiled in a long and bitter series of civil wars, and large parts of the North was occupied by invaders from the Levant. In the civil war, all sides used Semitic mercenaries in their armies. To allow these mercenaries to communicate, Egyptians taught them a simplified version of Hieroglyphs using only single sound glyphs. This was the alphabet used to write Semitic graffiti in Wadi-El Hol. As Egypt began to be liberated from the Hyksos, most of the mercenaries had to leave back to the Levant. We can find traces of Wadi El-Hol in Serabit el Khadim in Sinai. Later that became proto-Canaanite and then Phoenician, the so called first alphabet, but in fact the first abjad.

Writing was independently discovered in antiquity in only four locations: China, Central America, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Central American (Mayan) and Mesopotamian (cuneiform) writing died out. Chinese lived and flourished and inspired Japanese and Korean. But every other writing system everywhere is descended from the holy drawings of the ancient Egyptians. Some writing systems picked only single letter symbols, and became alphabets, whereas others used multi-sound symbols and became syllabries, but they all share a single ancestor.

However much the Salafists might hate it, the fact is everything from Arabic and Indian scripts to Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are due to a civil war in the countryside of Asyut. And however much a lot of people would rather owe their writing system to the mysterious Sumerians; the fact is, it was in the Nile Valley that a bunch of people of maddeningly indeterminate race said: World, meet writing!

False similies

The Muslim Brotherhood has faced a major problem since the revolution. On the one hand their filling the sudden vacuum of power suddenly and stupidly created by the revolution of the secular upper middle class was inevitable. On the other hand they needed some sort of model to wave in front of their people, the Egyptian people at large, and the world as a whole. Islamists constantly insist that the utter failures and despicable atrocities of Islamist experiments in Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Northern Mali are all just errors in execution. A "true Islamic country" on the other hand would be heaven on Earth.

So what would that look like?

What the MB presented as examples of successful "Islamic democracies" have consistently been Malaysia and Turkey. In both countries the MB has found the right balance of economic success, local stability and control, and international recognition that the secretive sinister organization so strongly desires. But any examination of either country with any depth reveals that they don't only contradict what the MB has been and intends to do with Egypt, but also contradict what the MB says about them.

In Malaysia we are supposed to see a stable Islamic democratic society with an Islamic constitution and a miraculous economy built entirely on the religious zeal and hard work inspired by Mahathir Mohamad. In reality Malaysia is absolutely none of these things. Malaysia is not a democracy by any definition. There is little or no political freedom in the country, and freedom of expression is only allowed within preset limits. Malaysia is also not an Islamic country, and its constitution, read beyond the preambles is not nearly as theocratic as Egypt's.

In fact Malaysia's current stability is a result of a short lived civil war between the Malay's and the Chinese of the country. The status quo in the country is a balance of affirmative action, large scale religious and cultural freedoms, and prescribed sectarian power sharing. What the MB and Salafists claim to be Malaysia's application of Islamic law or Shariia is simply the application of Islamic personal laws to Muslims and only Muslims. This is identical to the situation under Mubarak. Attempts at applying Islamic penal law, or huddud, have consistently been struck down by the Malaysian supreme court based on its "Islamic constitution."

This is all well and good, but to claim that Malaysians' standard of living, admittedly exceeding many western countries, is due to the application of Shariia is so disingenuous it's evil. Malaysia is a country of 20 million people, practically drowning in oil, water resources, equatorial rain forests, rubber plantations, palm oil, and Tin. How that can be compared to an overpopulated desert country with dwindling resources in ... everything is beyond me. But the more shocking part of the story is that the Chinese Malaysians (40% of the population) are beyond most of the country's entrepreneurship and growth. Perhaps it is uncool to admit that the Pagan Buddhists are the reason that the Muslim Malays are living so well, but this is pretty much what Mahathir Mohamad said at the end of his term as he lamented the failure of Malays to utilize affirmative action acts he initiated.

Turkey is an even more shocking example to use. It's so absurd and irrelevant that I don't even know where to begin. Turkey is a solidly secular society. All sectors of Turkish society, and all factions of Turkish politics believe, almost religiously (even if it is an oxymoron) that secularism is a necessity. Turks also pride themselves in a unique national identity, almost to the extent of supremacism. All Turks also pride themselves in being a bridge between Europe and Asia, and in equal amounts. So when Erdogan (the avatar that the MB so often conjured in their descriptions of a utopia to come) visited Egypt, he plainly said that Egypt must adopt a secular constitution. That was pretty much the end of the MB fascination with him as a figure, but their fascination with the industrial and practical success of Turkish Islamic parties has continued.

It is infuriating seeing Egyptian Islamists scam the Egyptian people about models they don't intend to imitate  But it is almost sad seeing a lot of people believe them as they watch just one more episode of an atrociously acted Turkish soap opera and day-dream about a society with which they have nothing in common. 

For a better view of the future, Egyptian should look at the last country the MB ruled with a pseudo-theocratic constitution: The Sudan.