Issue No. 596
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25 - 31 July 2002 Issue No. 596 Home news |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Recapturing the revolution
Celebrations of the golden jubilee of the July Revolution were the cultural event of the week. Amina Elbendary reports
Black and white photographs of the Free Officers, but predominantly of Gamal Abdel- Nasser, have overtaken the visual sphere -- they are simply everywhere, on every page you turn and every satellite or terrestrial channel you surf. And while at some level this would seem inevitable -- of course, the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution had to be marked -- it need not be taken for granted. One has only to look back to the 30th anniversary of Nasser's death (in 2000) -- which uncharacteristically passed without much fanfare -- to realise that these celebrations in and of themselves mean something.
On the official level, there was approval, encouragement and sponsorship. The bulk of the country's publications (this newspaper included), national or private, published special editions or supplements commemorating the event. State television channels devoted their political talk shows to the revolution, classical revolution films were rerun on TV.
Civil society has also been active in celebration. On Tuesday and Wednesday the Journalists' Union hosted the seminar "Half a Century after the July Revolution -- A Look Ahead". It included an open political conference to which were invited such political figures as former Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella. Other Arab dignitaries included Al-Faqih Al-Basri from Morocco, Nagah Wakim and Osma Saad from Lebanon, Azmi Bishara from Palestine, Hassan Abdel-Azim from Syria and Abdel-Rahman El- Na'imi from Bahrain. Revolution Command Council member and former Vice-President Hussein El-Shafei was also in attendance.
At the leftist Tagammu Party, a whole of week of seminars was organised to mark occasion. On Tuesday night, the party held a special celebration at its headquarters in which its leader Khaled Mohieddine, himself a Free Officer and a former Revolution Command Council member, recounted his memories of the revolution. The Tagammu, formed in 1977, is based on an alliance between Nasserists, communists and other Leftists who derive their main principles from the 1952 revolution.
That the intellectual and political climate of Egypt in July 2002 is ready and willing to invest so much time and emotion on the events of 50 summers ago is worth noticing. For in the midst of Arab confusion and a Middle East that is about to undergo its most thorough remapping since World War II (and, indeed, since the events of the 1950s and 1960s which make up the history of the Revolution), the July Revolution brings back memories of Arab unity, hope and national pride. While the Egyptian economy suffers a crisis, the Revolution brings back memories of grand national projects (think High Dam). While the New World Order is one totally dominated by one superpower, the Revolution brings back memories of a Non-Aligned Movement and a third way.
The crowning celebration par excellence --from the intellectual point of view, at least -- was the three-day conference held under the auspices of Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni and organised by Dar Al-Kutub wa Al-Watha'iq Al- Qawmiyya, Egypt's National Library and Archives.
The nostalgia at the heart of the celebrations was quite in evidence at the opening ceremony at the Cairo Opera House Small Hall on Saturday. In his speech on behalf of Egyptian historians to the opening ceremony Yunan Labib Rizk divided Egypt's post-52 history into three stages. To talk about "50 years of revolution" can never be accurate, he argued, about any given revolution. Rather, we can speak of a "revolutionary period" from 1952-1961 which is the period that witnessed deep political, social and economic changes. The second period, which coincided in part with the first and lasted from 1952-1967, was one in which the revolution tried to export itself until that process was cut short by its enemies. The third stage is that of the state that rose from the revolution -- a stage that arguably survives till today.
A decidedly sympathetic attitude taken towards Nasser and the revolution characterised the conference. Though, as Rizk had stressed, the event was not meant to defend either but rather to put forth questions and problematics.
The conference tackled different themes related to the revolution, from the history of Egypt in the 1940s, to the early hours of the army's movement and the Free Officers' relations with other political forces. Yet, a lot of emphasis was placed on the revolution's policies and achievements, perhaps at the expense of thoughtful discussion of its more controversial aspects. Thus too little discussion was devoted to the strangling of individual freedoms under the revolutionary regime, for example.
Of particular interest was Ahmed Zakariya El- Shalq's paper which gave the controversial background which led to the attempt by a member of the Brotherhood to assassinate Nasser in October 1954. El-Shalq analysed the attempts of the regime and the Brotherhood each to contain the other, outlining the Brothers' reactions to such policies as agrarian reform, dissolving political parties and the British evacuation treaty.
In recognition of the importance of pan- Arabism in revolutionary politics, the conference invited participants from Palestine, Morocco, Algeria and Sudan. Unfortunately the third world angle and African relations received less attention, perhaps indicating a disinterest on the part of Egyptian historians to study those angles of foreign relations.
Egypt's support for liberation movements was dealt with in Abdel-Hamid Shalabi's presentation on the revolution's support of the imamate in Oman, for example. On the Arab front Ahmed Abdel-Karim discussed Egyptian-Syrian relations in the 1950s which led to the formation of the United Arab Republic in 1958. Nasser's polices regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict were, naturally, the subject of several presentations and discussions. In his presentation Abdel-Ghaffar Shukr argued that Nasser's vision towards the Arab- Israeli conflict proved right after all. Nasser viewed the conflict as a struggle for national liberation and one that directly affected Egyptian national security, he added. Palestinian Abdallah Hourani went so far as to argue that it was the Palestinian cause that triggered the July Revolution.
The panel on the historiography of the revolution was one of the more invigorating events of the conference. Historian Raouf Abbas, professor emeritus of modern history at Cairo University and president of the Egyptian Historical Society, discussed the image of Nasser in the works of eight foreign writers. While the sheer number of foreign studies on Nasser is in itself remarkable, what is equally remarkable is the conclusion Abbas reached from studying those eight samples; that they were mostly closer to being objective. These works included both the positive and negative aspects of Nasser's rule despite their biases and despite, he argued, the lack of primary sources. And it is this latter point, which Abbas mentioned seemingly in passing in his conclusion, which was the underlining focus of his presentation. For, unfortunately, a historian cannot embark on a similar study of Arab works on Nasser. Nasser's Arabic biography has not been written yet.
Indeed, Egyptian and Arab historians have yet to write the history of the revolution. Even a standard orthodox account of the July 1952 Revolution is missing from Arab bookshelves, the only exception being Ahmed Hamroush's attempt to document the main events of army's take over of power, mainly through interviews with surviving participants.
Needless to say, perhaps, a revisionist account of those events does not seem in the offing. The absence of official documents makes any such project futile. For as Mohamed Saber Arab, director of the National Archives, pointed out, the Archives do not have any documents related to the revolution. What is potentially worse is that no one, no institution -- public or private -- has a register of what "Revolution documents" there are, or where they are. This leaves ample room for loss and destruction of archives.
Some may never be recovered. The type of documents that historians are interested in is quite varied and wide. They are interested in speeches and decrees and plans of the eve of the revolution, yes, but they are also interested in letters, minutes of closed sessions and meetings, drafts of proposals, indeed drafts of anything!
Arab gave the example of High Dam documents, which the National Archives attempted to acquire from the ministries of Agriculture, Irrigation, Electricity as well as the High Dam Authority, but to no avail. The net result is that a social historian cannot dream to write a history of such a grand national project as the High Dam. Not yet. Perhaps, never.
The July Revolution: 50 Years conference could mark a serious new phase in the historiography of the revolution. Previous official attempts to write that history had particular political motives behind them, whether praising or damning the revolution.
Fifty years after the fact, the cultural and political arenas should, perhaps, have matured enough to allow for a more sober appraisal of those epochal events of Egyptian history. The intellectual framework is there, new generations of historians have been trained and are ready for the work. The meat, though, is still missing.
Will documents related to the revolutionary regime be declassified, and when?
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