When Israel Talks, Cairo Listens

By Andrew Hammond

It took Israeli criticism of the guilty verdict and seven-year jail sentence to coax Egypt out of its silence over the shocking judgment against Egyptian-American sociology professor Saadeddin Ibrahim. Within days of the May 21 verdict, the Washington Times called the ruling “an insult from Cairo.” “The violation of the basic rights of a U.S. citizen,” the paper editorialized, “was carried out by a country which has grown accustomed to receiving some $2 billion in U.S. military and economic aid every year.”

The U.S. State Department said it was “deeply troubled” at the verdict, and the European Commission said it was “deeply disturbed.” And well the European Union might be. The 62-year-old civil rights activist was found guilty of illegally receiving European Commission funds to monitor parliamentary elections, misusing the money to offer bribes to forge official documents, and penning rights reports on strained relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt which “defamed” the country’s reputation abroad. A spokesman said the EU was “very worried to see an Egyptian court finding that EU financial support to promote democracy and human rights constitutes a criminal offence.”

In a joint statement, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch described the charges as “politically motivated.” Nor does there seem to be even a pretence that this was not the case. The judges at a high state security court pronounced the guilty verdict only 90 minutes after Ibrahim’s defense had completed its summing up. Also convicted were 20 employees of Ibrahim’s Ibn Khaldoun Center for Social Development Studies—one of Egypt’s oldest and most prominent civil rights groups.

Throughout this barrage of international criticism Egypt maintained a studied silence—until Israeli comments, in the press and from the government spokesman, filtered through. Cairo is concerned by Israeli efforts to utilize the Ibrahim verdict in its propaganda war against Egypt, the main defender in Western diplomatic circles of the Palestinians in their nine-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Egypt fears the influence on the Bush administration of the pro-Israel mainstream media in the U.S.

Samir Ragab, editor-in-chief of the state-owned Al Gomhouriya, opened the subject of the verdict in response to an article in the Jerusalem Post which said the trial lessened the chances of Egypt transforming into an open society. “How can Israel be concerned about Egyptian society when its attempts to undermine the interests, the stability and the welfare of the Egyptian people have never ended?” Ragab wrote. “Also, where has [the Jerusalem Post] come by the information that the charge for which Ibrahim has been sentenced was only that of receiving EU funds? His crime was far worse. Suffice to say that he forged election voting papers which were found in his home and his ultimate goal was to set himself up as a state within a state. What Ibrahim attempted was not social research, but an act of treason and a threat to stability.”

Similar comments followed from other government-owned organs.

Analysts have been wracking their brains to figure out what possibly could have prompted Egypt’s leadership to push ahead with this trial, which is turning out to be the major public relations disaster that Western diplomats privately tried to warn President Hosni Mubarak it would be. When Ibrahim himself heard the verdict, standing in a court cage, he muttered repeatedly, “unbelievable,” then reportedly spewed forth a flood of insults against Mubarak.

And it’s here, perhaps—in the personal relationship between Ibrahim and Mubarak—that the key to the conundrum of why Egypt bothered may be found. Ibrahim, as he told the court himself, was once the darling of the state in its fight against Islamic fundamentalism. He was given a television program from 1992 to 1995, aimed at promoting moderation in politics and religion, and even wrote speeches for Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne.

Never popular with Egypt’s many-headed security apparatus, Ibrahim was detained for over a month last summer, in what was then the latest in a series of moves made against local rights activists. He was released, and that seemed to be that. After his rel’ase, however, Ibrahim spoke out strongly against the state of democracy in Egypt, and in one interview questioned whether Egypt would go the way of other Arab republics where power passes to the son of the president, coining the phrase “jumlakiyya,” or “republicarchy,” combining the words for republic and monarchy.

There has been much speculation that Mubarak’s banker son, Gamal, is being groomed for the top job, although Mubarak poured cold water on that suggestion in a Newsweek interview in March. Ibrahim was the commentator for the Arabic satellite channel Orbit during last year’s funeral for Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad, during which he made numerous comments about the phenomenon of the son taking over from the father in Arab republics. In recent private sittings with Mubarak and other intellectual figures Ibrahim said it was time to have real elections and real democracy in Egypt.

Asked in the same Newsweek interview about Ibrahim’s trial, Mubarak replied nonchalantly, “Some say he’s a traitor.” But there are many reasons to doubt the genuineness of Mubarak’s disinterest. It seems Ibrahim and his Western-style outspokenness were too much for this most moderate of Middle East leaders.

An Unlikely Hero

A row in Egypt over who penned the anti-Israel lyric that made a superstar of a previously little-known working class singer has revealed the gaping hole between the country’s intellectual elite and the masses they seek to represent. Shaaban Abdel Rahim became the toast of the nation when his song “I hate Israel and I love Amr Moussa”—a reference to Egypt’s pro-Palestinian then-foreign minister—came out after the Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza erupted in September. It was even rumored in political circles that President Hosni Mubarak’s decision to move Moussa to head the soporific Arab League in May had something to do with the popularity which the song suggested Moussa had with the ordinary Egyptian on the street.

Now Awad Badawi—a poet who writes for major Arab stars like Warda—claims he came up with the hate lyric. Last October, he says, he was playing around with a phrase in colloquial Arabic that goes something like, “I hate Israel and I love Ezrael (Angel of ½eath), If he took the Jews he’d be a really cool guy.” That evening Abdel Rahim was present at a Cairo music soiree where the lyric was bandied around by Badawi’s composer friends. Next thing he knew his lyric had become something akin to the national anthem. “Abdel Rahim is a working-class, illiterate singer, so how could he sing about politics and Israel?” Badawi asked. “It was my idea, he would never have thought about a subject like that.”

Even the official arts censor, who has the power to censor lyrics deemed politically or religiously offensive and isn’t shy to use it, has joined the fray, claiming credit for the golden lyric. “Originally it was ‘I don’t like Israel,’ Madkour Thabet said, “but I made a recommendation that they choose another word equal to the state of people’s feelings [because of the intifada].”

But while Abdel Rahim hates Israel, that hasn’t endeared him to the country’s intellectual class. On the contrary, Abdel Rahim’s sudden stardom—achieved after 20 years of crooning in the slums—has rattled Egypt’s cultural elites, who look down on him. The literary weekly Akhbar Al Adab noted the strange reactions of some after it received howls of protest over its comparison of Abdel Rahim to Sheikh Imam, the blind singer whose subversive music of the 1970s gave sustenance to a whole generation of anti-government student activists. “There is another culture that we don’t know anything about,” the weekly recently said, “and that is the culture of the lower classes, which encompasses millions of Egyptians. It is a culture marginalized by resentment and arrogance from the cultural elite.”

For a while after the intifada broke out in September, it was easy to vent all the anger one harbored toward Israel but was afraid to express for fear of annoying the government, which has maintained peace with Israel since 1979 despite popular antipathy for the Jewish state. “Hate” for Israel came out of the closet, as students hit the streets. But it was an illiterate singer from a dirt-poor village on the edge of Cairo who first pushed the boundaries and made the most of the moment. For your dyed-in-the-wool pan-Arab anti-Israel intellectual, that can be a little hard to handle. Egypt’s intellectuals see themselves as guardians of Egypt’s virgin pure resolve not to normalize relations with Israel.

The unlikely hero, Abdel Rahim, also symbolizes everything the government and its massive state media do not want Egypt to be. In one television interview he said he made his shirts out of the same material covering the family sofa. Many Egyptians might do the same, but are expected to be ashamed to say so, not least if they take themselves seriously as a singer. That endears him to the masses—who first got his tapes through pirated copies in the sprawling poor districts—but not to the state. Television has not once played his Israel song.

There have been famous working-class singers before, but they at least paid lip service to the state and the intellectual elite’s official version of what high culture is. People such as Ahmed Adawiya in the 1970s and Hakim in the 1980s eventually found their way onto state television and openly aspired to emulate greats of the official canon like singer Abdel Halim Hafez, who died in 1977. “Abdel Rahim is illiterate and has no culture,” said one television presenter. “Why don’t people listen to Hany Shaaker?” he added, referring to a Hafez clone who is popular today.

Sometimes when Egypt looks at itself, it doesn’t like what it sees.

Andrew Hammond is a free-lance journalist based in Cairo.