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Seeds of wrath
Oh, Egypt! What’s to become of you? Your people are proud but their country has achieved little. Your people like to be governed but only until hunger, dissatisfaction and frustration with the future drive them out onto the streets again. And meantime the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. One thing’s indisputable. There’s more than one time-bomb’s ticking away along the Nile. Weapons are cocked. Have been for years. Deaths are totted up here like profits anywhere else. Anyone whose faith is different is hunted down. Anyone whose thinking is different is an enemy of the state. Society is deeply divided and reconciliation is not on the radar.
It’s true the fight with the demons has gone a bit quiet. But the conflict remains unresolved. Something else is indisputable: another storm will break. Because sooner or later, however patient and self-assured Egyptians are, however resilient their homeland – its ruler and his elite are again on course to test to breaking point that typically Egyptian desire for hope. Then it fizzes over again, that typically Egyptian boundless energy which will lead straight to the next outburst of fury. But hang on. Let’s look at this in the right order.
First up, the people do have other characteristics which are both important and positive. There’s a primeval quality that ought to make us feel they really can do peace and justice.
The fact that they can’t is for different reasons. The vast majority of Egyptians really are exceptionally peace-loving modern people. Yes, really. In many places they are by nature so friendly that you’ll struggle shamefully with their openness. They’ll often demonstrate an admirable, spontaneous readiness to help, especially towards foreigners. Their equanimity, their Mediterranean charm and their hospitality could really teach Europeans, especially we rule-loving Germans, more than just a thing or two about more life-enhancing qualities than the usual mental and spiritual toil of western culture. OK. Not always. But mostly. And that’s the same everywhere.
Most Egyptians have the usual human shortcomings, just like everyone else on the planet. Eliminating these is as demanding as it is challenging and so the problem isn’t addressed. They, too, strive to satisfy the basic human needs of security, safety and prosperity like people do in every corner of this crazy world. You could say they take a quantitative approach, so with a huge scale retreat into their own private lives. And, amazingly, they also take a qualitative approach, in the knowledge that it’s better to live with disappointments than with shattered illusions. Millions of Egyptians, male and female, oldsters or children, persist in the assurance, perhaps closely associated with their faith, that everything comes to he who waits. Sooner or later. Millions of people just want a quiet life.
But despite everything that goes on, life here could be good, especially for foreigners with no money worries, were it not for one particular national characteristic kept hidden in everyday encounters. Warm and open-hearted as they are wherever they meet you, they do also have in essence a particular state of mind found in many parts of the land. It’s often concealed, kept in check. Woe betide you if you trigger it. Their wrath. Once stirred, never mind who or what by, this trait will make its presence felt with a speed the average European can’t handle. Anger usually comes first, annoyance, indignation or an insult. That’s when the soul starts to seethe and the veins pulse. One wrong word can suffice for an outburst of emotion in which all sense of balance is lost. And if an Egyptian’s sense of honour is constantly disregarded and, with it, his sense of justice, then any perspective he ever had on personal fulfilment is lost; the wrath of one individual morphs into the uncontrolled energy of the masses, once so feared by every pharaoh.
Those ‘Days of Wrath’ have had a long-lasting impact on Egypt. The people had put up with it for long enough. They’d lived under the regime of President Hosni Mubarak for thirty years before they streamed onto the streets in January and February 2011, inspired by the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. They stayed out on the streets and squares for well over two weeks, protesting about Mubarak’s authoritarian rule with its characteristic security machine, about not having any say, about the refusal to reform, abuse of office and corruption in the state, the economy and the civil service.
Today, a few years on from the national unrest and the rebellion (nothing more than this) , still pitifully referred to by many Egyptians as the ‘Revolution’, there is another autocrat ruling the land, as much of a dictator and despot as ex-president Mubarak and his government were. The first free elections in the country after his removal were won by the Muslim Brotherhood. They were the only viable opposition party who could organise themselves fast enough. Their victory, and what they actually wanted and how they went about it, brought the Egyptians a further variation of that embittered rage which typifies the country to this very day.
First of all they were upset with the covert rulers, more than anything the military, a force in society without whose goodwill and agreement nobody in the Nile can expect to govern. Indignation came next, worry about the threat of a distinctly conservative Islamisation, anger about questionable political decisions, outrage at the lamentable level of competence. The Muslim Brotherhood had never been liked. Now they were leading Egypt straight to disaster. Insolvency and economic collapse threatened. Every month the sense of wrath increased, so much so that a military coup put an end to the spectre of the Muslim Brotherhood. General Sisi removed Morsi.
Since then Muslim Brothers have been, and still are, severely under attack, forced underground again, declared a terrorist organisation, their leaders and followers alike mercilessly hunted down, arrested or killed. The consequences are all too clear. Wrath has again been stirred; this time amongst the suppressed and to such an extent that its response to the violence wrought against it cannot be more aggressive and brutal. They bomb and kill in fury. Their wrath has turned to loathing. Hardly a week passes without reports of deadly soldiers, police or members of government murdered in response to the murder and terror directed at the Muslim Brothers. Sow the seeds of wrath and wrath is what you’ll get. Suppression triggers brutality. And although all involved claim to be various shades of practising Muslim, the lives of others cease to be sacred because retaliation defines all behaviours.
On top of that, as if this merciless domestic hostility between the powerful and the powerless is not already burden enough, there are quite a few others knocking about the place – the sympathisers and the cosmopolitan – who are also defined by violence and cannot tolerate those around them. Islamists, Salafists, Jihadists, Extremists, Terrorists, and Fundamentalists – if representatives of these groups were to confront one another out in the country’s deserts, they themselves wouldn’t know who, or what, the others were.
There is one particularly difficult struggle going on. In the north of the Sinai Peninsula the Egyptian army is fighting bravely and unsuccessfully against an offshoot of the so-called ‘Islamic State’. Egypt is part of the Arab front opposing the slaughter and barbaric deeds of this self-styled theocracy. The bestial acts of terror in Paris in November 2015 were condemned in the strongest possible terms by president Sisi. And in doing so, he also asked for better help in his fight, and more than anything more respect for it, against the people who were threatening his country, his people and every single stabilising achievement, however small, in the process of rebuilding.
Something often gets forgotten. Without ever wanting to, Egypt has become part of that gateway to hell created some years ago by the irresponsible and desperate foreign policy of the west in the Near and Middle East.
Sisi and the army are fighting a tough, relentless battle on several fronts against the murdering lunacy of so-called ‘Islamic State’, against the terrorist threats coming from Libya and against the radical Muslim Brothers. No voices are raised against this stance, nobody is there who remembers that this level of