Egypt in the Era of Hosni Mubarak 1981-2011 (2011) by Galal Amin. The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, New York Professor Galal Amin makes a poignant case for the re- examination of the three decades Egypt was ruled by ex- president Hosni Mubarak. The story is one of gradual disillusionment. "Egyptians," the author makes clear at the outset, "had a very short honeymoon with Mubarak." The scandal sheets came right after Mubarak's finest hour. Amin's is tremendous read but demands a strong stomach for those who love Egypt and contemplate the best for this country. Amin deciphers the "Soft State", and disentangles the "Economy" and "Corruption". The first half culminates in oppression and outbursts of the "Poor" and ends with the exasperation of the "Pashas". Meanwhile, Mubarak metamorphoses into the Mad Hatter himself. Mubarak and his menials demonstrated how an intense love for the presidency and power were destined to tip over into a dangerous obsession. And we in Egypt and the Arab world cheer them on. And, their paymasters in the West egg them on. Mubarak and his retinue of hangers-on mimic and compete with Dostoevsky's The Demons. Amin's work is written with an attractive mix of academic and populist style. The second part of Amin's book details the disappointments of the intellectuals, the raging religious discourse, the alienation of the youth and just about everyone else. Amin again introduces a curious crowd of characters and concepts. They flit through the pages of Amin's engrossing work. A prolific professor of economics at the American University in Cairo, Amin is internationally acclaimed for his bestsellers Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? (AUC Press, 2000) and Whatever Else Happened to the Egyptians ? (AUC Press, 2004), and The Illusion of Progress in the Arab World (AUC Press, 2006). In Egypt in the Era of Hosni Mubara k, Amin paints yet another touching portrait of his beloved homeland. Hallucinations of Hosni Mubarak were firmly rooted in the ex-president's misconception that militant Islamists might easily sweep through Egypt with his political demise. On the eve of his renunciation of power he told the nation so. Amin inoculates how it is always a mistake to underestimate the resilience of Egyptians. Egypt survived the assassination of Anwar El-Sadat by the militant Islamists, Amin contends. He explains in a nutshell what the Mubarak years were about -- a question he's better equipped to answer than perhaps anyone else. Amin speaks as an academician, a social scientist and economist, and as a gifted writer. Ask him a question and he without fail pauses a beat. He often smiles before answering in complete sentences in his precise, professorial tone. "I maintain that the important change that came over the nature of religious discourse during the last three decades of the 20th century permitted a climate conducive to the increase in corruption rather than closing the door on it," Amin says. A serious drawback, though, is that Amin's Egypt in the Era of Hosni Mubarak contains neither a bibliography nor an index. One of the most damaging aspects of the Mubarak regime to my mind was that it permitted a young and talented man like Khaled Said to be brutally murdered in cold blood in police custody. His killers assumed that they could get away with murder, and they nearly did. This incident of a middle class youth tortured until death by the police was the trigger that sparked the revolution on 25 January, Police Day, as if the people of Egypt wanted to defy the police on the very day marking the celebration of policemen. I very much wished to understand Amin's perspective on the violations of human rights and civil liberties under the Mubarak regime. I was obliged to ask him in person. He pointed out that the Western standard and values directly influence human rights in Egypt and the Arab world. "Some people tend to confine human rights abuses to the realm of torture and suppression of political rights and freedom of expression and association. Actually, the systematic deprivation of economic and social rights are just as humiliating and lethal," Professor Amin extrapolates. The right to have a dignified life was the one right that was most vehemently suppressed under Mubarak. The State Security apparatus flagrantly flaunted its power to humiliate Egyptian citizens and rob them of their dignity. They were cowed into submission and yet encouraged to keep hoping for a more decent standard of living if they compromised their ideals and endorsed corruption. Mammon and God co-existed in an uneasy manner, and yet they did so for the sake of sheer survival. There was a dangerous disengagement there that did present formidable challenges. A failure of good sense and judgement and the dynamics of corruption and nepotism clutched the country with their tentacles. "All opposition newspapers had been closed at the time of Sadat's assassination, but he left behind a well-organised Islamic movement; so well-organised in fact that its partisans were able to kill the president while he was standing amid his army," Amin muses. This paradigm shift was to have disastrous consequences in the last two decades of Mubarak's iron-fisted rule. Egypt in the Era of Hosni Mubarak is a seeming mash-up of his predecessors' dreams and reveries. Mental images enmeshed in Mubarak's narrow-minded phantasm of his Egypt contradicted the realities on the ground. Like Nero's Rome, Cairo was set ablaze and the cumulative result was the 25 January Revolution. Here again Amin hits the nail on the head. "In a climate of such deep despair, more of these opportunist intellectuals came to prominence. They were, indeed, as despairing as anyone else about the political and economic future of Egypt, but they were far from being, despairing when it came to the realisation of their own personal ambition." The sad truth was that the intelligentsia turned into collaborators. And so did the religious gurus. "It is a very easy thing to reconcile the practice of corruption with the pretence of religiosity; it is also very easy for people to accept bribes or engage in cheating while mouthing religious expressions," the author extrapolates. Amin's idiosyncratic work is also a curious one. He is hopeful the country will pick itself up in the years to come. The book describes Mubarak's increasing infatuation with power. With a playful eye for human foibles, Amin demonstrates what a demented lot those possessed with power can be. Mubarak was power hungry. Yet, politics was not even his real vocation. Still, he had a profound impact on the economy and culture of this country. Under his presidency, Egyptians became ever more reliant on capital. Class consciousness and a deep concern about income inequalities surfaced. "The middle class today is a defeated and humiliated class," Amin emphasises. "At the time of the July 1952 Revolution, the Egyptian middle class was indeed quite small in size, but it was quite distinct, patriotic, and highly influential." Not under Mubarak. In the Nasser years, benign dictatorship curtailed corruption. However, as Amin points out, there are various versions of corruption not readily perceived by the public. "The constant presence of authority was, indeed, an effective measure limiting the extent of corruption in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s, but one must acknowledge that there are several types of corruption, and that the desire for illegal income and wealth is only one of them," he notes. He gives much space to the good socialists. But Amin acknowledges that their influence waned with the entrenchment of Mubarak and his hangers-on. "Gamal Abdel-Nasser extended an important service to the Egyptian middle class by contributing to its vigorous growth through two channels: on the one hand he made it possible for large numbers from the lower class to enter the middle class by way of education, vocational training, or through acquiring government or public sector jobs, and through the impact of agricultural reform on small landholders and tenant farmers," Amin observes. "On the other hand, Nasser expelled numbers of the upper class from their comfortable positions, obliging them to join the ranks of the middle class." Socially, too, Mubarak undid whatever good Nasser sowed. There was a big fuss about Sadat launching the so- called "Open Door" policy, but it was Mubarak who actually executed and perfected the trick of the trade. Overnight non-entities metamorphosed into pashas, except that they did not quite have the panache and aplomb of the real pashas of yesteryear. Nasser's revolution abolished titles and the sobriquets pasha, bey and effendi. Popular perceptions of life under Mubarak re-instated the pashas. Nasser was president of a powerful state. So, was Mubarak heading a weak or a strong state? Nasser resigned and was re-instated by popular demand. Mubarak was forced to step down. "Such complete subjugation to the state was really what aroused feelings of resentment against the revolution from some prominent intellectuals such as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq El-Hakim, even if they could not express it openly. It also aroused resentment from some prominent Egyptian economists, who withdrew from public life, some of them emigrating abroad for many years," Amin notes of the Nasser years. But while the intelligentsia were disgruntled under Nasser, they dared not openly oppose the middle classes that lent the Nasserist state legitimacy. In sharp contrast, matters deteriorated sharply for the middle classes under Mubarak. Instead of living off the state, the middle classes were left to fend on their own. Leeching spread like wildfire. "During the following three decades (1980-2010), the Egyptian middle class suffered a series of blows that slowed its growth rate sharply, lowered its standard of living, and made it even less indistinguishable from the lower class." And, sure enough, the strong sense of patriotism that characterised the Nasser years soon subsided. "It was inevitable that this would be reflected in a further weakening of its patriotic sentiment as well as in a lower ability to participate in political, economic, and cultural life." The sheer embuggerance of it all created a new breed of Egyptian, greedy and self-loathing. "During the past 20 years a number of powerful elements have thus gathered together to produce a degree of corruption among various sections of Egyptian society the like of which had not been seen in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s, nor even in pre- revolutionary Egypt," Amin stresses. "There was now a weak state that lost both the power and the will to punish those transgressing the law, with no commitment to a national project which could unite the people, but which attached the greatest importance to currying favour with a certain foreign power that protects it and grants it aid." What is more, the author acknowledges that respect for learning and academic credentials declined, and the prestige of being a minister in the cabinet was eroded to the extent that few cared to recall a minister's name. The exception to that rule was when the minister in question was embroiled in some corruption scandal or another -- an act that ironically enhanced his personal prestige. Under Mubarak, the possession of certain prestigious goods and the accumulation of wealth were considered the only measure of success. "No wonder the title 'pasha' is today more associated with a feeling of humiliation and self- debasement than ever before." Hope springs, for instance, from the comeuppance that befalls the bad capitalists of the soft state. "Egyptians had a very short honeymoon with Mubarak, which was perhaps the result of advice given to him to calm things down after Sadat's assassination by trying to placate the various opposition groups." "But let us begin with the honeymoon. A few weeks after the assassination of Sadat, the president took the very promising step of releasing all prominent political prisoners and receiving them in honour at one of his presidential palaces, as if he were apologising for the uncivilised behaviour of his predecessor." "In February 1982, another felicitous step was taken that inspired hope in the hearts of Egyptian economists that genuine economic reform was about to begin. This was when Mubarak invited some of the most prominent of Egyptian economists, of all different political orientations, to a conference to discuss the deteriorating condition of the Egyptian economy and to suggest ways of getting out of it. All of them were able to express their minds in a manner unknown in the previous 20 years, and which we have not seen since." The author is enamoured with the "penetrating insights" of the Swedish economist and sociologist Karl Gunnar Myrdal "who could combine a knowledge of economics with politics and sociology, and who refused to reduce economics to a branch of applied mathematics." Moreover, poor logistics presented a problem for a proper partnership of businessmen and politicians. "A soft state is a state that passes laws but does not enforce them. The elite can afford to ignore the law because their power protects them from it, while others pay bribes to work round it. Everything is up for sale, be it building permits for illegal construction, licences to import illicit goods or underhand tax rebates and deferrals. The rules are made to be broken and to enrich those who break them, and taxes are often evaded. People clamour for positions of influence so that they may turn them to personal gain. Favours are sold or dispensed with to protégés, relatives and sycophants." Amin espouses the hypothesis of his mentor Myrdal. Mubarak's Egypt as a "soft state" had to steer a difficult course. "Myrdal provides a pure class-based interpretation of the soft state: the power that the upper class enjoys enables it to enforce its will upon all other segments of society... Myrdal also points out that there appears to be tacit agreement among writers on development issues to keep quiet about the phenomenon of the soft state." In short, Egypt under Mubarak was the proverbial "soft state". The author quotes journalist Ahmed Bahaaeddin's depiction of Egypt's liberalisation policies implemented "helter-skelter" without regulation or legal underpinning. According to Amin it was Mubarak's "soft state" and not Sadat's infitah, or Open Door liberal economic policies, that led to the ruin of Egypt. "Egyptians have always been better off under a strong state," the author asserts. This phenomenon may be the result of the country's utter reliance on the Nile for survival. "It is interesting to note that Napoleon, in exile in Saint Helena, writes in his memoirs that he knows of no other country in the world in need of a strong central government to the degree that Egypt does," Amin muses. "When the Egyptian state is strong, the economy flourishes, taxes are collected, and the state launches development projects and provides public services, creates jobs and furnishes the poor with a safety net. When the state is weak, taxes are not collected, people are left to break the law, they lose respect for the police, traffic laws are flouted, and security is lax." Drawn into an ever closer embrace, businessmen and politicians formed a formidable alliance under Mubarak. The irony is that Mubarak's soft state was authoritarian and brutally repressive of dissent. The crux of the matter was that neither business community nor the soft state could enhance the people's living standards and welfare. "This may be true of many other countries as well, but not all. For example, in Lebanon, the economy seems to flourish more under a weak state," Amin avers. The author is exceedingly good at explaining the mechanics of Mubarak's iron-fisted rule. Gamal Abdel-Nasser had broken a previously impenetrable political glass ceiling for Egyptians of the lower social strata. "Nasser was certainly a dictator, but he was not corrupt. He lived and died in the same house he had resided in before the revolution." In that respect, Nasser differed radically from Mubarak. But it took three decades for the Egyptian people to press the panic button on their relationship with their rulers. "The few attempts made after Nasser's death to establish that he had left an account in a foreign bank met with abject failure." Moreover, the people surrounding him, his closest political associates were obliged to follow suit. "The fear of their president was enough to curb their selfish ambitions... A surprisingly austere life prevailed among the middle class in Egypt in the days of Nasser that someone who did not live through them would find difficult to credit." Amin devotes the entirety of Chapter Nine to the vexed question of Religious Discourse, which he fathoms degenerated into farce. Matters came to a head in May 2006 when two weird fatwas, or religious edicts, were issued by two of the highest-ranking sheikhs in Egypt. "The issue that the head of the hadith department was speaking in was, if you can believe it, the breast-feeding of adults, not a baby. As an example of this, he postulated a woman nursing her colleague at work behind closed doors." For his part, the grand mufti of Egypt at the time, when asked about the permissibility of seeking blessing by touching the tomb of a righteous man such as the Prophet's grandson Hussein bin Ali, answered that it was permissible. And, "citing as an example the companions of the Prophet drinking his urine for the blessing in it." That was religious freedom of expression gone berserk. Under Mubarak, religious discourse, if one could call it that, had degenerated into a farcical soap opera designed for the mass consumption of the frustrated people of Egypt. Religion, to use Marx's words, metamorphosed the opium of the masses. And there are those, Amin included, who suspect that the authorities of the ousted regime deliberately encouraged the curious chemical-like dependency of the Egyptian population to religious discourse. "A large segment of Egyptian intellectuals, too, resent this new type of fanatical discourse in which they see a glaring departure from the more tolerant interpretation of religion that prevailed in previous decades, and to which they had been accustomed." If Nasser was an intentional maker of modern Egypt, Mubarak was an unwitting maker of the contemporary country, too. Most of all Amin sees hope in that eternal reservoir of resilience characteristic of Egyptians. The people of Egypt no longer succumb in silence to the anguish of self-alienation. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
