I’m trying to detect another reason for the collapse of our
Egyptian immune system in facing cancer of extremism and religion-proclaimed
terrorism. I have already written about the precancerous condition’s spreading
and taking command of our society. I also wrote about what I think was the
first injury inflicted with our Egyptian immune system; that is duplicity of
education system; Azhari[1]
and modern, where the latter was established by Muhammed Ali Pasha[2], then ruler of Egypt,
after his failure to fulfill Sheikh Hassan Al-attar[3]’s reform vision, that
great man who called for developing and reforming education in the old mosque; al-Azhar.
Such duplicity in education has led to another parallel duplicity in culture
and conscience as I have detailed in last week’s article.
Today,
I will write about what I think was the second injury that wreaked our Egyptian
national immune system; that is the constant state of change inflicted with
Egypt, as a society, in the time period extending from the collapse of Muhammed
Ali Pasha’s attempt to modernize Egypt in the 19th century until now,
that change that hasn’t resulted in stability or completion of any other
attempt to modernize our country. Thereby, it’s more accurate to be described
as a state of discontinuity between each attempt and its normal development,
and between attempts one another.
In depicting the
movement of our history in a graphical form, we would find ourselves standing
before non-continuous adjacent dwarfed lines representing the political,
economic, and sociological aspects of our society, while it’s supposed to be a continuous
line, with ups and downs, apexes and bottoms, albeit continuous. Without
digging deep in our history, it’s ok to mention that the deterioration that wreaked
Egypt prior to the Greek invasion had different interpretations. Away from
causes lying behind it, we can detect a clear rift between pre-Greek-invasion
Egypt and post-Greek-invasion Egypt, followed by the roman, and then by the
Islamic Arabic one. Jumping forward to the modern era, we will discover that Muhammed Ali’s attempt to modernize Egypt has come to an end and even collapsed as
per the consequences of the Convention
of London on
1840, atop of those consequences
was scaling down the Egyptian army. Afterwards came Isma’il
Pasha[4]’s attempt that too came to a failure due to severe foreign debts and interference that paved
the way for the
British occupation to take place and make a clear disruption between Muhammed Ali
descendants’ ruling eras until this dynasty was ousted of power by
the revolution of the 23rd July, 1952, which in turn failed to achieve its targets after it was hit by the 1967 defeat. Thereby, laying
down foundations of liberalism and free market economy in society prior to 1952
was not complete and so was the attempt to adopt socialism in the hope of
building a multi-party social democracy that came to an end after 1967.
After 1967 came Sadat, and later followed by his hand-picked
successor Mubarak – they adopted the same policies in my opinion – where there
was an attempt to go back to political liberalism and free economy. However, it
was a botched one as despotism was mingled with corruption making it impossible
to go any further, and then the revolution of the 25th of January,
2011 erupted putting an end to that past era. And here we are still trying to move
again from despotism and corruption, followed by a sectarian muslim brotherhood
fascism, in the hope of finding our way to fascism-free political liberalism
and national capitalism void of despotism and corruption.
That disruption in Egypt political and economic history
had direct impact on its social structure as a clear class structure was not given
due time to form in order to allow class conflict among society’s three classes;
low, medium, and high, to take place on clear basis with each aware of its
interests. What is more dangerous is that such political and economic
deformations have resulted in an ugly sociological distortion represented in a
new class that took benefit of despotism and corruption. That class had put
everything at stake and traded in everything flouting all constitutional,
legal, and ethical constraints that control the society’s social balance. This distortion
has transferred as well to state institutions and could be noticed in the deeply-rooted
rife corruption we witnessed and suffered, starting from the presidential
palace to the least-ranked employee in a cooperative or a retail complex!
The right question to ask here is has this disruption hit
all aspects in the Egyptian life? The immediate answer is “no”, because
resistance pockets have been vigilant at the cultural level, in the broad sense
of the word culture, especially that this disruption was due to foreign
interference or presence, and therefore the national cause was always present
and raging against occupying our land or breaking our will. That was when
resistance movement had started since the Greek invasion and a new phenomenon
of migration and finding refuge in the desert to form resistance teams was
witnessed. Monasticism movement was more or less a continuation of this
phenomenon. Resistance diversified between acting positive and another negative
one by turning the back to all the ruler’s desires or actions. Connected chains
representing the Egyptian resistance movement could be detected throughout ages
until the disaster took place when the religion-proclaimed cancer took command
of the cultural infrastructure of our country and came to power to declare they
were going to stay for at least five coming centuries.
Such disruption in the
political-economic sides along with its devastating effect on the social side –
especially with the absence or delay in forming a clear class structure – was
most notably and negatively demonstrated in hitting or dismantling the Egyptian
middle-class, considered as the “dynamo” of the historical movement in view of
many interested in social history. Some were of the view that a project seeking
structure of the middle-class took place in the sixties. However, such project
has suffered a severe blow by the unbridled economic Infitah[5]era that followed. That era
was associated as well with migration of millions of Egyptians to oil-rich Arab
counties. That was when the most devastating damage inflicted with the
Egyptians’ culture occurred, but this matter deserves to be discussed in
details in the coming article.
Translated into English by: Dalia Elnaggar
Translated into English by: Dalia Elnaggar
This article was published in Al Ahram on February 2nd,
2016.
To see the original Arabic version, go to:
#alahram#ahmed_elgammal#our_immune_system#Egypt#1952#1967#infitah#egyptian_middle_class#60s
[2] Muhammad Ali Pasha: (Arabic: محمد علي باشا) (4
March 1769 – 2 August 1849) was an Ottoman Albanian commander in the Ottoman army, who rose to the rank of Pasha, and became Wali, and self-declared Khedive of Egypt and Sudan with the Ottomans' temporary approval. Though not a modern nationalist,
he is regarded as the founder of modern Egypt because of the dramatic reforms
in the military, economic and cultural spheres that he instituted. He also
ruled Levantine territories outside Egypt. The dynasty that
he established would rule Egypt and Sudan until the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 led by Muhammad
Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser.
(Source: Wikipedia)
[3] Hassan
al-Attar: (Arabic: حسن العطار) an
ex-chief of al-Azhar (1830-1835) who excelled in literature and modern sciences
– which was rare among Azhar clerics at that time – and the first voice calling
for reforming al-Azhar and education nationwide. He contributed to establishing
high-tech educational institutions in Egypt like the schools of Alsun
(languages), medicine, engineering, and others. One of his famous sayings was
“we need to change our country and renew its knowledge”. Due to his good
relationship with then-ruler of Egypt – Muhammed Ali Pasha– he urged him to
dispatch students in scholarships to Europe in order to acquire knowledge.
[4] Isma'il Pasha: (Arabic: إسماعيل باشا), known as Ismail
the Magnificent (31 December 1830 – 2 March 1895), was the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan from 1863 to
1879, when he was removed at the behest of the United
Kingdom. Sharing the ambitious outlook of his grandfather, Muhammad Ali Pasha, he greatly modernized
Egypt and Sudan during his reign, investing heavily in industrial and economic
development, urbanisation, and the expansion of the country's boundaries in Africa.
His philosophy can be glimpsed at in a statement that he made in 1879: "My
country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore
natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to
our social conditions". (Source: Wikipedia)
[5] Infitah: (Arabic: إنفتاح) the Arabic
word for the open door policy adopted by President Sadat in the years following
1973 October war. (Source: Wikipedia)
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