In A Time Of Monsters

Travels Through a Middle East in Revolt

Emma Sky

• Editore: Atlantic Books
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786495617
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Social Science Biographies

Returning to the UK in September 2010 after serving in Iraq as the political adviser to the top American general, Emma Sky felt no sense of homecoming. She soon found herself back in the Middle East travelling through a region in revolt. In A Time of Monsters bears witness to the demands of young people for dignity and justice during the Arab Spring; the inability of sclerotic regimes to reform; the descent of Syria into civil war; the rise of the Islamic State; and the flight of refugees to Europe. With deep empathy for its people and an extensive understanding of the Middle East, Sky makes a complex region more comprehensible. A great storyteller and observational writer, Sky also reveals the ties that bind the Middle East to the West and how blowback from our interventions in the region contributed to the British vote to leave the European Union and to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.

CHAPTER 1

Hold your head up, you’re an Egyptian!

Egypt

May 2011

‘Ash-sha’b yurid isqat an-nizam!’ the Egyptians chanted over and over again.

I joined in with them, cautiously at first and then more enthusiastically. ‘Ash-sha’b yurid isqat an-nizam! [The people want the fall of the regime!]’ There was something so rebellious, so enrapturing, so empowering in those words. It was intoxicating.

It was May 2011, and although President Mubarak had been removed three months previously, Friday demonstrations had turned into a weekly ritual. Egyptians waved flags, their hands and faces painted in its colours of red, white and black. I read the slogans on the banners: ‘Bread, freedom and social justice’, ‘Muslims and Christians – we are all Egyptians’, ‘The army and the people are one hand’.

In the circle in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that day, protesters were angered by rumours that Mubarak was being offered amnesty on the condition that he returned the money he had taken and also apologized to the Egyptian people. They scoffed that his wife, Suzanne Mubarak, had only admitted to assets worth $4 million, and they demanded she be jailed. There were posters depicting Mubarak trying to run off with the wealth of the Egyptian people; on another, Zakaria Azmi, his chief of staff, was portrayed as a tortoise and accused of ‘Corruption, blood and slow governance’; yet more showed the entire Cabinet with vampire teeth.

Further details of the dishonesty of the old regime were coming to light. The former tourism and housing ministers were both in jail awaiting trial, accused of selling off plots of prime real estate for virtually nothing to their cronies, who then made millions. Businessmen close to the regime had received government contracts and loans, while most Egyptians had few economic opportunities.

A man, who I presumed from his beard was one of the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, led the crowd in chants. Everyone joined in. Then it was the turn of a young cleanshaven man, who chanted the revolutionary slogan ‘Hold your head up, you’re an Egyptian’.

I moved towards another area. A young woman, wearing a baseball cap and a black-and-white chequered keffiyeh scarf around her neck, stood on a platform singing before a group of female activists. There had been reports of horrible sexual assaults in Tahrir Square, but this woman stood boldly in front of the crowd. She shrieked the lyrics, inviting her audience to shout back. Her confidence was extraordinary. What she lacked in musical talent, she made up for in enthusiasm.

I looked around me. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party building had been gutted by fire. Guards now appeared to be protecting the red neoclassical Egyptian Museum, repository of some of the finest ancient treasures in the world. It had been broken into on 28 January 2011 – the ‘Day of Rage’ – with some of the displays damaged and artefacts looted. The fourteen-storey Mogamma building, which housed myriad government agencies, had been left untouched. I hated that place. As a student, I had once queued there for hours and hours, waiting for a permit to visit the Western Desert oases. A 1992 Egyptian movie Al-irhab wal kabab (The Thief and the Kebab) tells the story of a man who takes people in the Mogamma building hostage after trying unsuccessfully for weeks to complete paperwork. Everyone wants to know about the big political statement he’s making, but there is none. He was simply hungry and wanted a kebab - and justice. I found it odd that this building had been spared. Perhaps it was because so many Egyptians were on the public-sector payroll.

I struck up conversation with the man standing next to me. ‘The situation is much better since the revolution,’ he told me. ‘There is more freedom. No police knocking on doors in the night and taking people away.’

After years of passive compliance, the Egyptian people were no longer accepting their lot in life. It was they – not Western intervention – who had removed an autocratic regime. The power of the people.

Egypt, Umm al-Dunya (Mother of the World), was once more leading the region. New identities were being created. New friendships were being formed. In Tahrir Square, people helped each other: they collected the trash, they provided drinks, they administered first aid. I had never witnessed such a spirit in all the years that I had been visiting Egypt. They were fearless in their demands for dignity. And my heart was with them.

*

The British ambassador, Dominic Asquith, had kindly offered to host me during my stay in Cairo, after I emailed him asking if he might have time to meet. It was his last month in Egypt, and he was packing up.

I had first got to know Dominic in Baghdad in 2004, when we both lived in ‘Ocean Cliffs’, the name ironically bestowed on the trailer accommodation in an underground car park that protected us from incoming rockets. The great-grandson of British prime minister H.H. Asquith, Dominic certainly looked more at home in the substantial stone building in Cairo than a containerized housing unit in Baghdad.

Built in 1894, the ambassador’s residence served as a reminder of Britain’s former prestige and power. It was here that General Kitchener planned the expedition to the Sudan to avenge General Gordon’s death. In fact, Dominic’s desk was the very one he used. The bedroom assigned to me was where Churchill used to stay during his visits. It was larger than my whole house in London. And when I opened the shutters, I looked out upon the Nile.

Over dinner and wine, Dominic explained the events that had led to the revolution. Khaled Said, a young middle-class man with an interest in computing, had been arrested in a cybercafé in Alexandria by two detectives on 6 June 2010. They smashed his head against a door, beat him to death and stuffed drugs down his throat. Photos of the battered body went viral. Dominic said that Egyptians had been furious that the police would no doubt escape with impunity. He pointed out that if such an end could come to an innocent-looking kid from Alexandria, then no Egyptian felt safe.

Shortly after the killing, Wael Ghonim, a Google marketing executive, set up a Facebook group called ‘We are all Khaled Said’. Wael’s postings, in colloquial Egyptian dialect, initially complained of police brutality. However, influenced by events in Tunisia, his postings started to call for action to bring about change in Egypt, urging people to gather in Tahrir Square on 25 January – National Police Day – to protest the police state. (National Police Day commemorates the attack on Ismailia police station by British forces on 25 January 1952, in which fifty policemen were killed. Six months later, on 23 July, the Free Officers Movement led by Mohamad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser staged a coup that marked the Egyptian revolution. King Farouk was exiled, Egypt was declared a republic and the Brits were driven out.)

The British residence was located in the Garden City neighbourhood of Cairo, close to Tahrir Square. On 25 January, Dominic had watched thousands of Egyptians congregating. There were calls for the Minister of Interior to step down, complaints about the secret police making arrests, and demands for a higher minimum wage. Dominic had wandered into the square and spoken with some of the protestors. They had chanted the same slogans as the people in Tunisia, calling for the fall of the regime and for Mubarak to get on a plane like the Tunisian president Ben Ali. But they had not really expected to start a revolution, Dominic stressed.

However, when some demonstrators were killed in Suez, those in Cairo took the decision to continue going to Tahrir Square in order to honour their memory. Family members urged them to remain home and stay out of trouble, assuring them that their voices had been heard. But Mubarak responded by dispatching baltagiyya (thugs) – some of whom were on camels – to attack the protesters. His speeches to the nation came too late and were tone-deaf, showing how completely out of touch he was with public sentiment.

Anger increased and more people came to the square. From 2 February onwards, the protesters began in earnest to demand that Mubarak should go. The Muslim Brotherhood, who had not participated in the demonstrations at the start, turned out to man the barricades, pushing back the police, protecting the protestors and providing basic services. And thus the relationship between the Ikhwan and the secularists developed through a common cause in the square.

*

I really did not know what to make of what I was seeing in Egypt. I’d had a conflicted relationship with the country since my first visit – a year spent at the University of Alexandria studying Arabic as part of my Oxford degree. I had wonderful memories of visiting Siwa and oases in the Western Desert, of floating on a felucca down the Nile, of riding on horseback through palm groves to the pyramids, and of hanging out in the hippy resort of Dahab on the Sinai Peninsula.

However, by the end of that year I had concluded that our cultures were very different, and that when brought into contact they frequently clashed. There were, for example, the awful attitudes towards women. Over 90 per cent of women had been subjected to female genital mutilation – a practice that was supposed to discourage them from adultery. Total contempt was shown to me, and I was frequently humiliated. I had men rub up against me on buses, and hands thrust between my legs as I walked down the street.

Egyptians also asked me endless questions about the British author Salman Rushdie. At that time the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwa calling for him to be killed for blasphemy for his novel The Satanic Verses. I responded that I respected Rushdie’s right to express his views, even if I disagreed with them. Countless Egyptians argued back that no one had the ‘right’ to insult the prophet – and Rushdie should be punished by death.

But the greatest vitriol, I discovered, was directed at Jews and the ‘Zionist entity’ (as Israel was habitually referred to), despite the formal peace treaty Egypt had signed with its neighbour following the Camp David Accords of 1978. At bookstores, I saw covers with caricatures of Jews and swastikas, and copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery about a Jewish plan to dominate the world.

Towards the end of my course in Alexandria, the most bizarre incident took place. Hans, a fellow student, and I had decided to drop in for a drink at the Radio Bar. Small and dingy, with smelly toilets, it was our regular haunt as it was downtown and served alcohol – a rarity in this highly conservative city. Sometimes we would sit in the corner wearing monster masks, looking like aliens from another planet – which was exactly how we felt. But more often than not we would drink away our time discussing the crazy experiences of the day. On this particular afternoon, the bar was empty except for an overweight, middle-aged Egyptian sat in the corner on his own drinking beer.

‘Hello, welcome,’ he called out loudly to us in English when we entered. ‘Where are you from?’

‘England,’ I responded.

‘Germany,’ Hans replied.

The Egyptian jumped to his feet, giving Hans a Nazi salute. ‘Heil Hitler!’ he blasted out excitedly. ‘Hitler was a good man. He killed six million of them!’ Hans had frequently received this sort of response in Egypt whenever he mentioned his nationality, but he still found it mortifying. A number of my Jewish relatives had died in the Holocaust. Before coming to Egypt, I had never heard anyone praise Hitler.

Hans and I tried to ignore him as we sat down at a table, ordered drinks and got stuck into our own conversation. But the Egyptian man had started to cough. And the coughing turned to choking. He collapsed, red in the face and gasping for breath. The barman rushed over to help. I suggested we lay him on the ground on his side in the recovery position.

‘No! An Egyptian man does not lie on the ground!’ the barman shouted at me animatedly. He and his assistant instead put a couple of chairs next to each other and laid the man on his back on top of them. Then the barman proceeded to thump him on his chest, yelling repeatedly ‘Wahad Allah!’ One God. He pulled the man’s ears hard.

By this stage, the man had gone strangely silent. I took his pulse, checked his eyes and held a mirror to his mouth. I then pronounced him dead.

‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un [We are all from Allah and to him we return],’ the barman declared. He and his assistant debated what to do next, saying that they could not admit the man had died in the bar.

Hans and I told them we would go to the nearby hospital to notify medical staff so they could come and take the body away. Hans turned the sign on the door to ‘Closed’ as we walked off in shock. We returned about forty minutes later with a doctor to find the sign on the door had been turned to ‘Open’. We went in. The place was full of customers.

Hans called the barman over and asked, ‘Where’s the body?’

‘What body?’ the barman responded, straight-faced. He then went on to explain to the doctor that there had been a man who had fainted but he had recovered and gone home. Hans and I looked at each other, astounded. There was only one exit from the bar – out the front of the building. They could not have put the body in the toilets, because people were constantly going in and out. So they must have put him in the kitchen, we reasoned. While the barman and doctor talked, I walked to the back and peered through the crack in the kitchen door. I could see the body propped up against the fridge.

The doctor believed the barman and left. Hans and I headed out to the waterfront. It was now dark. We stood in silence, looking out at the sea.

And then we began to talk it through. An Egyptian man had died due to an unintended consequence of his interaction with us. If we had not gone to the bar that afternoon, then the Egyptian most likely would have finished his beer and gone home.

We guessed that, later that night, after everyone left, the barman and his assistant would take the corpse and dump it in the sea. The body would later wash up on the shore and his family would never know the circumstances of his death.

‘Perhaps it was divine intervention?’ Hans contemplated.

*

It was over twenty years since my student days in Egypt. Could the country really have changed so much, I wondered. Had globalization Americanized Egyptians? The young Egyptians in the square seemed so like the young Americans who had mobilized to elect Obama. Were they representative of the country as it was now, or was I only encountering educated elites? I needed to explore beyond Tahrir Sq...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Map
• Prologue: What had it all been for?
• 1 Hold your head up, you’re an Egyptian!
• 2 Dégage!
• 3 ‘Assad – or we burn the country’
• 4 They are all thieves
• 5 Zero neighbours without problems
• 6 Better sixty years of tyranny than one night of anarchy
• 7 … to the hill of frankincense
• 8 We have no friends but the mountains
• 9 ... but surely we are brave, who take the Golden Road to Samarkand
• 10 The Islamic State: A caliphate in accordance with the prophetic method
• 11 What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East
• 12 And even though it all went wrong
• Epilogue: The sun also rises
• Acknowledgements
• Index