Sex, lies and censorship

Pascale Ghazaleh wonders why, in 2001, politics was found guilty of indecent exposure
This was a year of war: war in Palestine, war in Afghanistan, war on terrorism, war on dissent. It was a year of profound economic crisis, a year when fear and anger seemed to simmer beneath the surface, in Egypt as elsewhere. Yet the expected expressions of rage and humiliation -- street demonstrations, lively parliament debate, increased efforts on the part of representatives to expand their constituencies and carve out a greater slice of political space -- have been strangely absent.
Domestically, Egypt witnessed several noteworthy incidents in 2001, involving individuals who could just as well have served as symbols: Saadeddin Ibrahim. Nawal El Saadawi. The Cairo 52. The editors of Al-Nabaa and Al-Muwagaha. Shohdy Naguib. Or, in other terms: human rights. Women's rights. Sexual freedom. Freedom of the press. The Internet. Or, in other terms: treason. Blasphemy. Perversion. Slander. The dissemination of information harmful to Egypt's reputation.
We may call them by different names, but these cases have all revolved around one common theme: morality and, more specifically, the nature of legitimate sexuality and religiosity. The controversies in question could have been eminently political for, on one level, they are about political issues: publication guidelines, the place of religion in public life, the state's right to interfere in private life, the independence and accountability of civil society. On another level, however, they can be transferred into a realm liberal thinkers would consider consummately private: that of personal ethics. Again and again, the point has been driven home: Egypt is a conservative society. Efforts to modernise it, if judged incompatible with a certain interpretation of the Shari'a, will be defeated -- not on the grounds they seek to promote, but on entirely different terrain: in terms not of freedoms but of conformity to "social norms."
Parties and parliament may be moribund, but morality is on fire -- the politics of morality, rather than the morality of politics, is the order of the day. Instead of discussing platforms and policies, the main political debates of the past year -- political in the sense that they have polarised opinion, aroused heated debate, and been placed firmly in the public sphere for examination -- have focused on questions that seem almost mediaeval (were mediaeval debates not so much freer: could the Mu'tazilites, today, argue about whether the Qur'an is created or eternal?). Instead of engaging in open debate over where the limits of press freedom should lie, for instance, newspapers have chosen to insinuate that monks are not as chaste as their vows imply, and published photos alleging to prove the accusation. Then the government has closed down the papers in question, justifying its decision on the grounds that the editors were "inciting sectarian strife."
Is this year's great morality debate a sign that society is becoming increasingly intolerant, the state more intrusive than ever before? Or is it simply a continuation of politics by other means?
In Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, 1998), David Campbell argues: "Ironically... the inability of the state project of [ensuring] security to succeed is the guarantor of the state's continued success as a compelling identity. The constant articulation of danger through foreign policy is thus not a threat to the state's identity or existence; it is its condition of possibility."
Campbell may be speaking specifically of foreign policy, but, as Benedict Anderson has shown, all nations are "imagined communities," not natural beings; and borders can be drawn to encompass and exclude any number of individuals, both between and within geo-political entities.
This year, then, we witnessed the creation of some new boundaries, in sometimes surprising domains.
Saadeddin Ibrahim, the director of the Ibn Khaldun research centre, was sentenced on 21 May to seven years in jail (his appeal, scheduled for 19 December, has been postponed to 16 January). The charges against him included accepting foreign funds without government approval (from the European Union, which funded efforts to promote political awareness and participation in Egypt's general elections); compiling false reports about the status of Copts in Egypt; attempting to embezzle money; and making plans to bribe radio and television officials to broadcast programmes about the Ibn Khaldun Centre. Ibrahim's trial, however, was about much more than academic freedom: among civil society activists in Egypt, it reopened a debate some had considered closed, about the morality of accepting funding from donors that could seek to dictate an organisation's agenda. Much as they may have disagreed on that particular point, no one failed to get the message Ibrahim's sentence was meant to convey: the very survival of civil society would remain subject to government approval. "It was a very successful security blow," notes Hisham Kassem, president of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights. "Everyone who had been active in the civil liberties movement chickened out. It was accompanied by an unprecedented smear campaign, and the state used Ibrahim's American nationality to exploit animosity toward Americans. He should have been more careful in choosing an attorney, too: he went to Farid El-Dib [popularly referred to as the 'spy lawyer,' having represented Azzam Azzam, accused of espionage for Israel], and that finished him off" -- for the Arab-Israeli conflict, too, is framed in moral terms.
By targeting Ibrahim, who holds dual US-Egyptian citizenship, for punishment, furthermore, the state opened the door to a discussion revolving around questions of allegiance and treason -- a discussion that dovetailed conveniently with the ongoing legislative dispute over granting citizenship to children of an Egyptian mother and non- Egyptian father (see "A matter of survival," Al-Ahram Weekly, 3-9 May). The objection to reforming the law that denies these children (many of them from families whose principal breadwinners, Palestinian, Libyan or Sudanese, for instance, often work at low- paying jobs) the benefits of state sponsorship (subsidised education and health care) was that their loyalty to their mother's country was in question. Government officials have repeatedly warned that national security is at stake, as children with foreign fathers may serve in the Egyptian army -- the implication being that they will be tempted to betray their mother's country for their father's. This strikingly patriarchal logic -- implying that nationalist sentiments, like legitimacy, are passed exclusively through the male bloodline -- has barely been questioned, though its biological bases are less than rock-solid. The reason seems clear enough: what is at stake, rather than national security, is women's sexuality or, in another formulation, reproductive freedom.
And it is the question of freedoms, according to Magdi Mehanna, associate editor-in-chief of Al-Wafd, which is pivotal to understanding how it is possible for the state to intervene in the moral affairs of its citizens. "An Eastern society, an Arab society," he remarks, "frames issues that others would see as a matter of freedoms in terms of morality." Commenting on the outcome of the Queen Boat trial, in which 52 young men were accused of "habitual debauchery" (see for example Al-Ahram Weekly, 22-28 November), Mehanna noted: "Our society has always made morality subject to legal and political debate. This was not a question of freedoms but of public morals."
That trial, indeed, seemed to lay bare a profound disparity: while human rights groups such as Amnesty International condemned Egypt for persecuting individuals "because of what they are," the public prosecutor vowed he would not countenance the "attack on Egyptian manhood" that homosexual practices constituted.
Who decides, then, what constitutes public morals? As Salah Eissa, editor-in-chief of Al-Qahira, remarks: "Immoral people use morality for immoral ends." Perhaps, though, the matter is more complex than that: where is the limit of state intervention, and where does private life begin? Perhaps the ongoing controversies are one way of working out this debate through various indirect pathways. One argument is that morality has always been subject to the state's intervention: the muhtasib, or market inspector, until the end of the 18th century was responsible for public morality among other things; his tasks included ensuring that vendors did not defraud customers by overcharging or selling adulterated goods; but the injunction to "command good and prohibit evil," which his office was designed to embody, also included preventing lewd behaviour -- for instance, tracking down and chastising an unmarried couple in a secluded spot, or punishing public inebriation. Then again, a muhtasib's manual dating from the late 13th/early 14th century, by one Ibn Al-Ukhuwwa, recounts a cautionary tale intended to set out the limits of intervention. The Caliph Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, according to this tale, came across merrymakers drinking wine in a vintner's booth. When he reprimanded them, they accused him of spying on them unlawfully; conceding "tit for tat," he went on his way.
Private space is carefully delineated, at least as far as jurisprudence is concerned. What happens, though, when that private space is brought into the public domain in ways the Rightly- Guided Caliphs could never have envisaged? In the case of Al- Nabaa, the newspaper that caused outrage by publishing photos of a defrocked monk in compromising positions with various partners, "press ethics" became a byword for the question of whether or not to use "sex, religion and crime to boost publication figures." The issue of what a newspaper was allowed to publish was passed over in favour of what "Egyptian society" could tolerate -- what "deviations" could be exposed without causing clashes between Copts and Muslims. In other words, the debate over press freedoms was evacuated, in favour of one over obscenity and, in the background, sectarian strife. In contrast, Eissa remarks, the US uproar over President Clinton's tryst with Monica Lewinsky focused on the legal point of perjury; the sexual scandal, while a subject of popular fascination, could not be used against him in court.
In the same way, coverage of the Queen Boat trial focused almost exclusively on the question of "deviance," taking for granted the validity of the allegations against the defendants, and sidestepping the question of whether or not the state has the right to pass judgement on an individual's sexual preferences in the first place. One defence lawyer, however, argued that the trial was the regime's way of alienating the public from the Internet -- prominence was given to gayegypt.com, the Web site through which security officers posing as homosexuals made dates with hapless men, arresting them when they showed up for the rendezvous. "This is one way of saying 'see what the Internet has brought us?'" agreed the EOHR's Kassem.
The Internet, of course, poses a problem since it offers so many alternatives to the hegemonic narrative provided by the most powerful and widest-reaching media in Egypt: television and radio, both of which are state monopolies. The Supreme Council for Culture is hardly equipped to deal with issues of intellectual property rights, having become little more than an instrument for the banning of "seditious" books like Haydar Haydar's A Banquet for Seaweed; while legislation stiffening penalties for publication offences has led to the imprisonment of several editors-in-chief, the freezing of publication and the closing down of political parties (as in the case of Al-Shaab and, more recently, Al-Qarar), it is always possible to discover and disseminate opinions on the Web -- which, furthermore, is the sole available forum for political discussion outside official channels. Yet that is not how the regime incites opposition to electronic communications; rather, it is by warning against the Internet's morally corrupting influence. "We can neither interact with the world nor shut it out," says Eissa, "so this dilemma is more visible here."
It could always be argued, however, that in transferring all debate to the register of morality, the government is only obeying the people's wishes, and therefore acting as a democratic and popularly elected regime. After all, as Kassem notes, "the Khul' law almost caused a revolution in one of the most quiescent parliaments ever. People don't think about the emergency laws; they don't mind the state of the health care system; but they cared about that. And if this is the existing popular sentiment, then the government will block modernity -- including denying increased participation and equal rights to half the population -- in order to satisfy it." Judging from widespread reactions to the television series A'ilat Al-Hajj Metwalli -- reactions overwhelmingly sympathetic to its devious, polygamous protagonist, and supportive of the model of submissive womanhood it promotes -- this seems an accurate call. How, though, to explain it? Eissa believes that "our social and moral development has not kept pace with our material means. This is the problem."
And if blocking modernity means reducing the parameters of discussion, it would seem that state and society are collaborating on that particular enterprise. Kassem and Eissa call it fascism. "Since 1952," Kassem states, "there have only been three acceptable political projects: Arab nationalism, political Islam and Stalinist socialism. All debate must be framed in terms of one of the three." Especially since the 1980s, when the results of the state-sponsored rise of political Islam became evident, the government has sought to promote itself as the guardian of true legitimacy, the correct alternative to excess Islamist zeal.
Today, however, at the very moment that Islamism as an explicitly political movement entailing a project of government is being defeated globally, it would seem that a new "Islamic morality" is gaining credence, even among former advocates of the two other modes Kassem mentions. In the opposition's corner, Nawal El Saadawi, accused of apostasy and taken to court to be divorced forcibly from her husband, protested that her upbringing was as religious as the next person's, and that her father, indeed, had been a Muslim mystic; but she did not claim her right, as a Muslim, to interpret sacred texts -- a right, ironically, that radical Islamist ideologue Sayed Qutb had demanded, doing away with the religious establishment's mediating role between the faithful and God. The "post-feminist" debate in the Arab world, too, has turned to Qur'anic exegesis in an effort to convey the importance of women's rights to a less than receptive audience, while orphanages and other charities cite prophetic hadith to encourage generosity in potential benefactors.
So is morality the new politics? And if so, is politics the new pornography? Since space for formal political representation and debate is shut down so firmly, morals -- and specifically, "legitimate" expressions of sexuality, national identity, religious belief and gender -- are gaining prominence as the space where politics has taken refuge. Of course, one could turn the question on its head and argue that in fact, discussions of the legitimacy of individual behaviour are ciphers for public debate -- the continuation, indeed, of politics by other means.
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