8 - 14 March 2001
Issue No.524
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 March 2001 Issue No.524 |
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Egypt's onward journey
Rihlat Umr: Tharawat Misr Bayn Abdel-Nasser wal-Sadat, (The Journey of a Lifetime: Egypt's Wealth under Abdel-Nasser and Sadat), Rushdi Said, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, 2000. pp214
The journey that Dr Rushdi Said, a prominent political and scientific figure, recounts in his autobiographical reflections published as The Journey of a Lifetime: Egypt's Wealth under Abdel-Nasser and Sadat, is the journey of his generation. Said is the product of Egypt's "liberal era," a period which stretched from the early to middle decades of the last century and which was dealt a terrible blow in the defeat Nasser's nationalist regime suffered at the hands of Israel in the 1967 War. His generation believed in an Egypt remade by individual initiative and by technological development; when this belief was tested as a result of the 1967 events, Said, like many others, withdrew to an extent from public life, retaining public office under President Sadat, notably as head of Egypt's Mining Organisation and as a minister in the government, but being detached from any specific political ideology and being sustained chiefly by his scientific work. His autobiography, he writes, is about a "search for roots," and it contains fascinating reflections on the role of Egypt's Copts in the national community, the role of industry and of science in Egypt's development under first Nasser and then Sadat, and the sometimes grisly world of politics under their successive regimes.
Said begins his autobiography by describing the liberal atmosphere that reigned in his family circle when he was growing up before the 1952 Revolution. It is for this reason that he gives comparatively little space to what one might expect to find in a more conventionally written autobiography -- namely, to the description of his family members, to his lineage, and so on. Though he says that he is not uninterested in questions of genealogy, even visiting his family hometown of Al-Sakarna near Deir Al-Mehraq on several occasions in search of his family's past, he gave up such visits when he discovered little to interest him and turned instead to the history of Al-Sakarna itself and to a description of the mental worldview of those members of his immediate family that most influenced him. These included an elder sister, Wedad, on whom Said seems to have modelled himself, his mother, who was a highly educated woman, especially for the time, graduating from an American school when most of her classmates would have been non-Egyptians or boys, and his father, who of the three seems to have left the deepest mark on him. Said is a firm believer in the virtues of secular liberalism, and he says of his father that though he held all religions in deep respect, he himself led a "purely secular life," having no particular attachment to the Church. Such an upbringing explains why Said finds the rise of the conservative, religious trend in Egyptian society from the 1970s on to be beyond his comprehension, in his autobiography several times criticising the way in which religion has invaded politics over the past three decades or so.
As well as describing the family milieu that shaped his mature attitudes in some detail, however, Said also gives considerable space in his narrative to an analysis of particular historical events that have determined his views. Three events in particular were especially important, the first being the 1919 Revolution against British colonial domination of the country, the second being the Second World War and the years leading up to the 1952 Revolution and the third being the rise of the religious trend in Egyptian life over the past few decades. Of the 1919 Revolution, Said says that it was a formative event, since it restored to Egyptians "their self-confidence and their love for the nation," laying the foundations for future political development and for the 1923 Constitution. It was during the war years, and during, in particular, the years preceding 1952, that the modern shape of Egyptian society came into being, he says. Of the rise in religious influence in contemporary Egypt, Said comments that understanding this is crucial since it is only in this way that one can understand the contemporary direction of Egypt. He attributes the rise of the Islamist current in Egyptian life to important contemporary social factors, the most important of which is the state of frustration that came over society following the 1967 defeat. Nasser's failure to halt Israeli expansionism meant that people began to look for an alternative to the nationalist discourse they thought had failed them, "and they could not find anything better than the religious tide to stand against the nascent Jewish state in Palestine," Said explains.
Said's identity as a member of Egypt's Coptic minority population dominates many parts of the narrative, and Said has many interesting things to say about how he sees successive governments as having dealt with the Coptic issue. Of the 1952 Revolution and the Free Officers that led it, for example, Said comments that, for him, "the Free Officers had little knowledge of the Copts," basing his view on the fact that they would have had little direct contact with Copts and little indirect knowledge of them. Nevertheless, Said says, the Officers recognised the qualifications of educated Copts as being essential for efficient public administration, assigning important state positions to them as a result. Sometimes, the Free Officers also acted in order to ensure at least some Coptic representation at the highest levels of government. Noticing that the new government created in 1952 to replace Ali Maher's cabinet contained not a single Copt, for instance, Said writes that Fathi Radwan nominated his friend Farid Antoun to be minister of food to make up for a perceived Coptic deficit.
The Coptic issue also enters into Chapters Four and Five of Said's text, which are given over to a discussion of the author's career in politics and public life first under Nasser and then later under Sadat. His political career Said describes as being a rather unexpected one, it having been launched by his appointment to a committee charged with selecting candidates for forthcoming parliamentary elections in the 1960s. In the changed atmosphere of today's politics Said is able to speak freely of the abuses of this time, commenting that "I don't know who nominated me to this committee, but I firmly believe that my appointment was not done through the security apparatus. Probably, it had most to do with the campaign then being mounted by Mohamed Hassanein Heikal of Al-Ahram to build bridges between the government and the intellectuals." Nevertheless, he says that the subsequent election revealed starkly how few Copts then played a part in the country's political life, since only one Coptic candidate was elected. It was as a result of such results that a law was passed allowing the president to appoint 10 MPs, half of whom were usually Copts, in the interests of ensuring minority representation.
Said by Bahgory; right, the Abu Tartour phosphate project over which Said disagreed with late President Sadat
In general, Said is unhappy with Coptic participation in public life, criticising the "apathy" in the community that has meant that Copts, in his view, have been instrumental in "forcing themselves out of political life and public service, and thus revealing the schism in society that it had been hoped that the appointment of Copts to parliament would heal." It was hoped at the time that the direct appointment of members of the country's Coptic minority to parliament would be "a temporary measure, until the Copts' own faith in politics had been restored, and they would have become fully engaged in politics. Alas, however, this was not the case, and the presence of Copts in parliament became too much the prerogative of the ruler and not of the electorate," Said writes. Of his own presence in the 1964 parliament, he therefore explains that he felt uncomfortable with the perceived tokenism that his position might have been felt to betray, realising that by accepting "such an appointment, I had become the 'Other' in my own country." There is much in the book on the relationship between the state and the religious authorities, and Said confesses that sometimes he finds this relationship to be a perplexing one. Sometimes the state will co-opt religion for its purposes, he comments; sometimes it will "insist that religion and politics remain separate and ban the formation of political parties with religious platforms," he says. In general, Said is for the nurturing of a stronger civil society in Egypt, and of greater organisational pluralism.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book, however, is that in which Said talks in detail about his own experience in the state bureaucracy as head of the country's Mining Organisation in the later 1960s. Co-opted to head the organisation from his post as a university professor, Said offers a fascinating account of the intricacies and complicated web of relationships that ran through this official body whose job it was to search for mineral resources in Egypt's deserts. Said explains how he had to manage with limited resources, how he felt he was beset by numerous conspiracies against him, and how he believes the security apparatus was then used to co-opt some people and to condemn others. What comes through most clearly from Said's account of the trials and tribulations of these years, however, is his own clear sense of the mission of this organisation and the vital role it had to play in the country's economic development. Despite the problems he had to face -- the Soviet experts seconded to the organisation he says were of little use since they lacked the necessary knowledge of Egypt's terrain -- Said shows how he managed to lead the organisation to some real achievements in these difficult years, managing also to use Egyptian expertise where possible and to train Egyptian human resources. The subsequent success of the Geological Survey Authority, the successor organisation, owes a lot to Said's leadership and vision, it having been developed under his chairmanship.
However, despite the considerable interest of this material, the most sensational aspect of Said's memoirs, and the reason that they have been widely noticed in the press, is the author's discussion of what he calls "the untalked-about issues in Egyptian politics" of the time. These silences, which Said has made it his aim to address, had to do with the then "ruling system" in Egypt. "There was a persistent lack of transparency and a consistent blocking of the flow of information," Said charges. "Too often state officials were not accountable, and citizens remained unengaged in civil-society organisations." Though he was himself a part of this "system," being a member of three successive parliaments between 1964 and 1971, he does not believe that the system, or its legislative arm in parliament, had credibility. He criticises, in particular, the parliament's supine stance before the nomination of MPs by the security apparatus, its failure to scrutinise legislation, and its willingness to refer everything to the executive without debate.
Said offers a similarly bold assessment of the Sadat years that followed. Though he had few ideological affiliations aside from an ingrained belief in liberalism, and thus did not particularly mourn the demise of the Nasserist system, he strongly criticises Sadat's policies on managerial and technical grounds for what he believes was their role in marginalising the role of industry in the Egyptian economy. "This marginalisation was part of a larger scheme to prepare Egypt to accommodate a new Middle Eastern order in which Israel would have a secure place," he writes, arguing that Sadat's policies meant the end of the attempts at unification, or of enhanced co-operation, among Arab states, which had so marked the previous decades, with the result that the Arab countries became isolated in the face of Israeli expansionism. Such policies also marked the end, however, of the kind of independent economic development that had officially marked out Nasserism, Said argues, since an industrially strong Egypt would have posed a threat to Israeli hegemony.
This abdication before Israel "explains the fact that none of the Arab countries managed to build an industrial base apart from Egypt and Iraq. But thanks to the Gulf War, Iraq has now lost its industrial base, and in Egypt the ruling elite opted to move away from the field of production to the field of services, thereby dismantling the country's industrial base." It was when he saw this happening that Said decided to quit politics, submitting his resignation as minister of industry in 1977, and putting an end to his years of public service. He then spent many years on private projects, often living outside the country for long spells. He was in the United States in 1981 when he learnt that his name was on the list of those to be arrested in a government crackdown on dissent.
Said's book reveals many of the author's personal qualities, and it explains, through the journey of one who was a part of it, a generation's faith and hopes for Egypt. Many of these hopes, however, have been disappointed, Said admitting defeat particularly in his generation's failure "to build a university that could compete with the prestigious universities worldwide," and thus contribute to the country's development. Despite such self-criticism, however, Said remains hopeful that the problems that Egypt is now facing can be solved. "The Egyptian people are capable of solving them," he remarks, "could they just find the right leadership and set themselves the right targets. This has been the lesson of my own experience, as it has been that of Egypt throughout her history."
Reviewed by Omayma Abdel-Latif
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