Mubarak Quotes

When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don't have clean water, when you don't have a sewer system, when you don't have electricity, and on top of that you live under one of the most repressive regimes right now... Well, put all that together, and it's a ticking bomb. It's not of a question of threat; it is question of looking around at the present environment and making a rational prognosis.

If you desire the path of sincerity, develop a love for obscurity. Flee from the clatter and clinks of fame. Be like the roots of a tree; it keeps the tree upright and gives it life, but it itself is hidden underneath the earth and eyes cannot see it.

Let our religions unite us for human kindness rather than dividing us on what we believe. Eid Mubarak

Mubarak was so paranoid that anyone he perceived as competent became a threat to him.

Ek aur Eent gir gai deewar e Hayaat se naadaan keh rahe hain Naya Saal Mubarak"...!

The greatest iftar is to break the fast of apathy, with the feast of affection.

GOD MADE YOU AS A HUMAN BECAUSE HE WANTS TO SEE YOU IN THE HEAVEN, PROVE YOU WORTH IT, RAMADAN MUBARAK

إن الوطن باق والأشخاص زائلون.. ومصر العريقة هي الخالدة أبداً.. تنتقل رايتها وأمانتها بين سواعد أبنائها.. وعلينا أن نضمن تحقيق ذلك بعزة ورفعة وكرامة.. جيلاً بعد جيل.. ~ من خطاب الرئيس السابق محمد حسني مبارك يوم الثلاثاء 1 فبراير 2011.

The regime's policies, whether intentionally or unintentionally, had engendered a sharp divide between Muslims and Christians, in spite of the fact that generations of Muslims and Coptic Christians had lived together peacefully in the past. The regime was good at utilizing this divide to create a perception that without Mubarak in power, Egyptians would break out into sectarian warfare. As a result, Mubarak managed to market his police state successfully to the international community as the lesser of two evils.

Nations have faced autocracy before and recovered. It is not easy, but it is possible: witness the peaceful revolutions that preceded the collapse of the USSR, the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa, and the fall of tyrants throughout history, from Hitler to Milosevic to Mubarak.

The army could not have been happier. The result of the referendum was a repeated slap to the faces of those liberal powers who thought they could change the country. The army never wanted change, not with so many interests, businesses, and powerful people involved. It was a system sixty years in the making. Removing Mubarak didn’t even touch the deep state that he was a disposable face of. The Muslim Brotherhood were never serious about the revolution either. They used it simply to come into power. They had no problem with the old regime as long as they were on top of it. One

So maybe Third World discontent is fomented not merely by poverty, disease, corruption and political oppression but also by mere exposure to First World standards. The average Egyptian was far less likely to die from starvation, plague or violence under Hosni Mubarak than under Ramses II or Cleopatra. Never had the material condition of most Egyptians been so good. You’d think they would have been dancing in the streets in 2011, thanking Allah for their good fortune. Instead they rose up furiously to overthrow Mubarak. They weren’t comparing themselves to their ancestors under the pharaohs, but rather to their contemporaries in the affluent West.

They did not overthrow the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran; support the genocide of eight hundred thousand leftists in Indonesia; intervene on behalf of the fascist Phalange against the Palestinians in Lebanon; fight a dirty war against Dhofarian insurgents; underwrite absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, the shah of Iran, Morocco, and the Gulf Emirates; build with billions of U.S. tax dollars the golden throne upon which Mubarak sits like a modern-day pharaoh; arm Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and turn a blind eye to his genocide against the communists and Kurds; then kill seventeen thousand Iraqi civilians in bombing raids during the Gulf War, including more than four hundred women and children incinerated in the Amariyah bomb shelter. Nor did they stir the Shias of southern Iraq into revolt, then abandon them to Saddam Hussein’s executioners because George Bush senior calculated that the total destruction of the regime would create an impermissible power vacuum that Iran might rush to fill.

The only chance of a rupture is if Mubarak decides to push Gamal toward the presidency despite objections put forward by the military. The reason the military may object is that Gamal, unlike Nasser, Al-Sadat, and Mubarak himself, is not from within their own military ranks. Some point to the possibility of a military coup in such circumstances.

George Bush was right, however, when he said that “Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.” He made it so. He turned it from a nation that was not threatening us into a breeding ground for anti-American hatred. For a generation or more, we will be the victims of Iraqi revenge. And the Iraqis are not alone. The scenes of the U.S. occupation have inflamed Islamic opinion from Morocco and Western Europe, through the Middle East and South Asia, to Thailand and Indonesia. Radical Islamicists will not easily or soon be dissuaded of their hatred of America. Egypt’s President had said, “Before you invade Iraq there is one Usama bin Laden, after you invade there will be hundreds.” Hosni Mubarak was right. I

Ramadan isn't fulfilled by feasting on some tasty beef, the greatest of feast is haram if others go hungry.

The Islamic world can be viewed as an onion-layered multiple dictatorship: the dictatorship of political dynasties like the Mubarak, Gaddafi, Hussein, Ben Ali, and Assad families forms its first layer; the dictatorship of the military, the next; after that, that the dictatorship of religion, which determines how children are raised and educated; and finally, the dictatorship of society, which impacts life within families through archaic gender roles.

Als Präsident Obama den Aufstand als legitime Meinungsäußerung begrüßte, die von der Regierung anerkannt werden müsse, war die Verwirrung komplett. Die Massen in Kairo und Alexandria wollten keine Anerkennung ihrer Forderungen durch die Regierung, deren Rechtmäßigkeit sie rundweg ablehnten. Sie wünschten sich das Mubarak-Regime nicht als Gesprächspartner, sie wollten, dass Mubarak verschwand. Ihr Ziel war nicht nur eine neue Regierung, die ihre Meinung anhören würde, sondern eine Umgestaltung des gesamten Staates. Sie hatten keine »Meinungen «; sie waren die Wahrheit der Situation in Ägypten. (S. 55)

Once or twice a day, we had Gates, Mullen, Panetta, Brennan, and others quietly reach out to high-ranking officers in the Egyptian military and intelligence services, making clear that a military-sanctioned crackdown on the protesters would have severe consequences on any future U.S.-Egyptian relationship. The implication of this military-to-military outreach was plain: U.S.-Egyptian cooperation, and the aid that came with it, wasn’t dependent on Mubarak’s staying in power, so Egypt’s generals and intelligence chiefs might want to carefully consider which actions best preserved their institutional interests.

After simmering years of censorship and repression, the masses finally throng the streets. The chants echoing off the walls to build to a roar from all directions, stoking the courage of the crowds as they march on the center of the capital. Activists inside each column maintain contact with each other via text messages; communications centers receive reports and broadcast them around the city; affinity groups plot the movements of the police via digital mapping. A rebel army of bloggers uploads video footage for all the world to see as the two hosts close for battle. Suddenly, at the moment of truth, the lines go dead. The insurgents look up from the blank screens of their cell phones to see the sun reflecting off the shields of the advancing riot police, who are still guided by close circuits of fully networked technology. The rebels will have to navigate by dead reckoning against a hyper-informed adversary. All this already happened, years ago, when President Mubarak shut down the communications grid during the Egyptian uprising of 2011. A generation hence, when the same scene recurs, we can imagine the middle-class protesters - the cybourgeoisie - will simply slump forward, blind and deaf and wracked by seizures as the microchips in their cerebra run haywire, and it will be up to the homeless and destitute to guide them to safety.

President Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would pose a “red line” that would trigger an American military response. In August 2013, word filtered out that Assad’s forces had used poison gas against a rebel suburb of Damascus, killing as many as fourteen hundred people. This was a key moment. The United States was just a few hours away from launching airstrikes. “Our finger was on the trigger,” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later said.13 Obama decided otherwise. He concluded that airpower would be insufficient and ineffective, and he wanted congressional authorization but could not get it. He had come into office to end America’s two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—and he was loath to slip into a third, with no clear path to success. Air power in Libya had helped remove Gadhafi, but it had left chaos behind. Obama was also demonstrating that, as he later said, he had broken with the military response “playbook” of the “foreign policy establishment.” Moreover, he feared that an air strike would not eliminate all the chemical weapons, and Assad could then claim that “he had successfully defied the United States.”14 Still, an American president had said using chemical weapons was a red line, but had not acted on that. Coming on top of Mubarak, it made leaders in other countries question the credibility of the United States and its reliability as an ally.

Si la felicidad viene determinada por las expectativas, entonces dos pilares de nuestra sociedad (los medios de comunicación y la industria publicitaria) pueden estar vaciando, sin saberlo, los depósitos de satisfacción del planeta. Si el lector fuera un joven de dieciocho años en una pequeña aldea de hace 5.000 años, probablemente pensaría que era bien parecido porque solo había otros 50 hombres en su aldea y la mayoría de ellos eran ancianos, o tenían cicatrices o arrugas, o todavía eran niños pequeños. Pero si el lector es un adolescente en la actualidad, tiene muchas más probabilidades de sentirse incómodo. Incluso si los demás chicos de la escuela son feos, el adolescente no se compara con ellos, sino con las estrellas de cine, atletas y supermodelos que vemos continuamente en la televisión, en Facebook y en las carteleras gigantes. ¿Podría ser, pues, que el descontento del Tercer Mundo no estuviera fomentado únicamente por la pobreza, la enfermedad, la corrupción y la opresión política, sino también por la simple exposición a los estándares del Primer Mundo? El ciudadano egipcio promedio tenía muchas menos probabilidades de morir de hambre, de la peste o de violencia bajo el gobierno de Hosni Mubarak que bajo Ramsés II o Cleopatra. Las condiciones materiales de la mayoría de los egipcios nunca habían sido tan buenas. Uno pensaría que en 2011 estarían cantando por las calles y dando gracias a Alá por su buena fortuna. En cambio, se levantaron furiosamente para derrocar a Mubarak. No se comparaban con sus antepasados bajo los faraones, sino con sus contemporáneos en los Estados Unidos de América de Obama. Si

The one thing that seemed to be on our side, however, was the reality on the streets of Egypt. Day after day, the protests spread and Mubarak’s regime seemed to crumble around him. On February 11, I woke to the news that Mubarak had fled to the resort town of Sharm el Sheikh and resigned. It was, it seemed, a happy ending. Jubilant crowds celebrated in the streets of Cairo. I drafted a statement for Obama that drew comparisons between what had just taken place and some of the iconic movements of the past several decades—Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesians upending a dictatorship, Indians marching nonviolently for independence. I went up to the Oval Office that morning to review the statement with Obama. “You should feel good about this,” he said. “I do,” I replied. “Though I’m not sure all of the principals do.” “You know,” he said, “one of the things that made it easier for me is that I didn’t really know Mubarak.” He mentioned that George H. W. Bush had called Mubarak at the height of the protests to express his support. “But it’s not just Bush. The Clintons, Gates, Biden—they’ve known Mubarak[…] “for decades.” I thought of Biden’s perennial line: All foreign policy is an “extension of personal relationships. “If it had been King Abdullah,” Obama said, referring to the young Jordanian monarch with whom he’d struck up a friendship, “I don’t know if I could have done the same thing.” As Obama delivered a statement to a smattering of press, it seemed that history might at last be breaking in a positive direction in the Middle East. His tribute to the protests was unabashed. Yet our own government was still wired to defer to the Egyptian military, and ill equipped to support a transition to democracy once the president had spoken.

Ah, my dear friend Hassim, seems our paths cross once again, how fortunate for this humble Sheik.” As Abdullah spoke in his usual self deprecating manner I realized that a favor was on the tip of his tongue and that I was about to be offered a quid-pro-quo. We were sitting crossed legged on large fat pillows with gold fringe. The tent was large with partitions dividing living, sleeping and cooking space. It was made from heavy cotton canvas erected on thick poles in the center giving the structure a peaked circus tent appearance. The women serving us were young, wearing harem pants low on their hips with cropped gauze tops made from sheer silk. Their exposed midriffs were flat and toned, their belly buttons were decorated in precious stones that glittered in the torch light as they moved. They were bare footed with stacks of gold ankle bracelets making the only sound we heard as they kept our glasses filled with fresh sweet tea and our communal serving trays piled high with dates and sugar incrusted sweets of undetermined origin. Abdullah took no notice of these women, his nonchalance intrigued me as I was obviously having trouble keeping my mind focused on the discussion at hand, this was all part of the Arab way, when it came to negotiation they had no peers. “So my dear friend, tell me, the region is on fire is there a solution?” I spoke in a deliberate and flat tone, little emotion just concern, one friend to another. “We were shocked by the American response in Egypt and Libya, never had we seen them move so fast with such efficiency. The fall of Gadaffi was unexpected and Mubarak’s fate stunned us; he had been a staunch supporter of the US in this region we fully expected the Obama administration to prop him up one more time, as they had done so many times in the past.” I looked carefully at Abdullah,

I saw Clinton again during the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan in Israel’s Arava Valley in 1995. That year, I also sent him my third book on terrorism, Fighting Terrorism, and he sent me back a cordial letter. Notwithstanding his civility, I knew his administration would do anything to defeat me. In fact they did. Totally committed to the idea of a fully independent Palestine, they were not aware that Rabin himself had been opposed to such a state. Clinton sent his number one campaign strategist, James Carville, his pollster Stan Greenberg and his top team of experts to Israel to help tip the scales in Peres’s favor. Special envoy Dennis Ross would later say, “We did everything we could to help Peres,” and Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, would also later admit, “If there was ever a time that we tried to influence an Israeli election, it was Peres vs. Netanyahu.”23 Normally such an outrageous and systemic interference in another democracy’s elections would elicit outcries of protest from the press in America and Israel alike. No such protests were heard. Totally supportive of Peres, the press in both Israel and the United States was silent. Though the odds were stacked against us, we weren’t fazed. “About Carville,” Arthur said, “we can beat him.” Clinton and Peres organized an international peace conference in Sharm el-Sheikh a few weeks before the elections. Peres, Clinton, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, and Arafat all showed up and danced the dance. Yet a few months earlier, soon after Peres was installed without an election as replacement prime minister following Rabin’s assassination, King Hussein had sent me a message through his brother Crown Prince Hassan, asking: Would I meet Hassan secretly in London? In a London flat the crown prince and I hit it off immediately. I liked Hassan. Straightforward, with a humorous streak, he didn’t even attempt to hide his concern about a Peres victory. Though they wouldn’t admit it publicly, he and many Jordanian officials I met over the years were concerned that an armed Palestinian state could destroy the Hashemite regime and take over Jordan.

Al-Zawahiri, the son of an upper middle-class family who had grown up in Al-Maadi, an affluent Cairene suburb, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of fifteen right after the 1967 defeat. He quickly moved from the Brotherhood's ordinary ranks to join (and create) independent, highly radicalized cells. Though he had no links to the murder of Sadat, he was imprisoned in the major incarceration waves that followed the crime, and was sentenced to three years. Having served his prison sentence, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia, then soon afterwards to Afghanistan to join in the fight against the Soviets. It was during that time that he met Dr Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian godfather of many militant Islamic groups and the founder of the Jihad Service Bureau, the vehicle that helped recruit thousands of Arabs to the Afghanistan War. Al-Zawahiri became a close friend and confidant of Azzam. After the Soviets' withdrawal from Afghanistan, he returned to Egypt where he became the effective leader of the Al-Jihad group. In 1992, Dr Al-Zawahiri joined his old Arab Afghan colleague, the Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden, in Sudan, and from there he continued to lead Al-Jihad, until its merger with Al-Qaeda in 1998. Dr Al-Zawahiri presented his thinking and rationale for ‘jihad by all means’ in his book Knights under the Prophet's Banner.38

In the 1890s, Kuwait offered a dramatically more cosmopolitan and commercially vibrant environment than Riyadh. As a result, by his middle teens the future King of Saudi Arabia had acquired firsthand experience of dynastic politics, humiliating exile, and desert warfare. He spoke some English and had watched Sheikh Mubarak conduct commercial and diplomatic relations with Europeans. He was a very unusual young man for his time and place, and he stood six foot, four.

Mubarak of Kuwait sheltered the Al Saud because, like them, he had no time for the Al Rasheed of Ha’il,

Maybe nothing would come of my Cairo speech. Maybe the dysfunction of the Middle East would play itself out regardless of what I did. Maybe the best we could hope for was to placate men like Mubarak and kill those who would try to kill us. Maybe, as the Pyramids had whispered, none of it mattered in the long run. But on the only scale that any of us can truly comprehend, the span of centuries, the actions of an American president sixty-five years earlier had set the world on a better course.

May all our prayers be answered by Allah and so embrace with divine blessings, Eid al-Adha Mubarak.

Let us be grateful to Allah for all the love, happiness, compassion and peace we receive throughout these challenging times. Eid Mubarak!

Being 'YOU' is an absolute power that only you possess. Have faith in yourself and give your best shot to life everyday.

I still have a photograph of the five of us looking at President Mubarak’s watch to check that the sun had officially set, since it was the Muslim month of Ramadan, and we had to confirm that the religiously prescribed fast had been lifted before seating everyone for dinner.

the months to come, I’d think back often to my dinner with Abbas and Netanyahu, Mubarak and King Abdullah, the pantomime of it, their lack of resolve. To insist that the old order in the Middle East would indefinitely hold, to believe that the children of despair wouldn’t revolt, at some point, against those who maintained it—that, it turned out, was the greatest illusion of all. —

The group was divided, almost entirely along generational lines. The older and more senior members of my team—Joe, Hillary, Gates, and Panetta—counseled caution, all of them having known and worked with Mubarak for years. They emphasized the role his government had long played in keeping peace with Israel, fighting terrorism, and partnering with the United States on a host of other regional issues. While they acknowledged the need to press the Egyptian leader on reform, they warned that there was no way of knowing who or what might replace him.

hung up the phone. For a moment, the room was silent, everyone’s eyes glued on me. I had given Mubarak my best advice. I had offered him a plan for a graceful exit. Any leader who replaced him, I knew, might end up being a worse partner for the United States—and potentially worse for the Egyptian people. And the truth was, I could have lived with any genuine transition plan he might have presented, even if it left much of the regime’s existing network intact. I was enough of a realist to assume that had it not been for the stubborn persistence of those young people in Tahrir Square, I’d have worked with Mubarak for the rest of my presidency, despite what he stood for—just as I would continue to work with the rest of the “corrupt, rotting authoritarian order,” as Ben liked to call it, that controlled life in the Middle East and North Africa.

CONTRARY TO THE BELIEFS of many in the Arab world (and more than a few American reporters), the United States is not a grand puppet master whimsically pulling the strings of the countries with which it does business. Even governments that rely on our military and economic assistance think first and foremost of their own survival, and the Mubarak regime was no exception. After

Still, it wasn’t until February 10, 2011, the day before Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt, that this absurd theory really got traction. During a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Trump hinted that he might run for president, asserting that “our current president came out of nowhere….The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” At first, I paid no attention. My biography had been exhaustively documented. My birth certificate was on file in Hawaii, and we’d posted it on my website back in 2008 to deal with the first wave of what came to be called “birtherism.” My grandparents had saved a clipping from the August 13, 1961, edition of the Honolulu Advertiser that announced my birth. As a kid, I’d walked past Kapi‘olani Medical Center, where my mother had delivered me, on my way to school every day.

For one who lives with kindness, every day is Ramadan.

For one who lives with kindness, everyday is Ramadan.

Mubarak said: I talk to you during critical times that are testing Egypt and its people which could sweep them into the unknown … Those protests were transformed from a noble and civilized phenomenon of practicing freedom of expression to unfortunate clashes, mobilized and controlled by political forces that wanted to escalate and worsen the situation. Leaders of government or corporate leaders finding themselves in such crisis typically employ tactics as they seek to, “distance themselves from their illegitimate behaviours and then create identifications with the public values they are reputed to have violated

only Mubarak could stand for presidential election on a yes or no vote. Elections were more of a selection process since most of them were rigged and falsified. Mubarak claimed to have won five consecutive presidential elections with a questionable sweeping majority in all of them.

President Mubarak had overspent his goodwill and reputational equity that he may have had when he assumed leadership in Egypt 30 years ago. His harsh policies and unresponsive attitude to the needs of the people quickly eroded any likelihood for him to salvage his presidency following the breakout of these rashes of protests.

اے ہوا تو ہی اسے عید مبارک کہیو اور کہیو کہ کوئی یاد کیا کرتا ہے

Ae hawa tu hi use eid mubarak kahiyo, aur kahiyo ki koi yaad kiya karta hai.

A second important difference between the international environment that shaped Western states and the one that is now shaping post-colonial Middle Eastern states is that many in the latter category can trade petrodollars (or strategic rents) for Western arms, which artificially increases the ability of the rulers to coerce the ruled.[8] At the turn of the century, the Middle East already spent more of its GDP per capita on defence than any other region. Between 1999 and 2008, that spending increased by another 34%.[9] With this difference in mind, it is unrealistic to insist, as Western diplomats and leaders have done following the removal of Mubarak, that transitions from dictatorships to fledgling democracies must be orderly. This is particularly unrealistic given that the international weapons trade, the international reliance on oil and the Western tendency to view the region through a lens of counter-terrorism objectives have all helped to sustain these regimes, but cannot realistically be altered by those who take to the street in protest.

In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. Political power has been narrowly concentrated, and has been used to create great wealth for those who possess it, such as the $ 70 billion fortune apparently accumulated by ex-president Mubarak. The losers have been the Egyptian people, as they only too well understand.

He rewarded Andy and me handsomely for mentoring his favorite grandson. Our Eid Mubarak greeting card read: “Please accept this gift and a week's vacation to anywhere you’d like as a token of my appreciation for the friendship and guidance you so kindly provided to my grandson. The Simorgh and the Kahyy'am are at your disposal. (Signed) Hadrah Hakim.” Enclosed were two cheques for $3,000 each.

Good Evening and Eid Mubarak, Sir. The vehicle which has caught your eye is a rare 1938 Sport Cabriolet." An elegantly dressed gentleman walked over, and chimed in. "Yes! Isn't it stunning? I don't think they make these anymore. It's a Horch Erdmann and Ross," he said.

I remembered the card from the harem ladies which I had left on my writing desk. When I opened it, a cheque for $16,000 was sandwiched between an Eid Mubarak card and a beautifully scripted message by Nasreen, on behalf of the harem women. It read: “Young, Thank you for your contribution to our make-overs. Please accept our humble gift.” All of the women had signed it. I was touched by this lovely gesture of gratitude and I promised myself then and there that I would make fashion my career. I would help women show their shiny beautiful selves to the world in shiny and beautiful couture!

Tuy nhiên, nếu nhìn kỹ vào vấn đề, hiếm có nhà lãnh đạo nào chỉ có cho mà không nhận, huống chi đây lại là độc tài, toàn quyền sinh sát. Những Saddam, Mubarak hay Assad chỉ đơn giản là áp dụng kế sách truyền thống “chia để trị”. Một mặt họ bảo vệ những sắc dân thiểu số, mặt khác họ lợi dụng chính sự yếu thế này để đổi lấy lòng trung thành. Dưới cái cánh gà mái che chở là lời răn đanh thép: “Các người làm quái gì có sự lựa chọn nào khác? Không trung thành với ta thì chỉ có chết!” Thỉnh thoảng, khi mấy chục phần trăm đám dân thiểu số ấy có vẻ hơi hạnh phúc quá đà thì nhà độc tài của chúng ta lại tạo cớ gây sự một tí, để cho tổn thương đau đớn một tí là ngay lập tức đám dân đen này hồi phục trí nhớ. Cái hố ngăn cách và sự thù hằn giữa các cộng đồng phải được giữ ở thế chỉ sôi lăn tăn, chứ ấm áp dễ chịu quá hay nóng bỏng cả tay thì hỏng bét. Một xã hội bị chia rẽ, bị phân hóa, chỉ có nghi ngờ nhau, hằn thù nhau nhưng chưa đến mức xông vào giết nhau là một xã hội dễ cai trị nhất.

But if Nasser's gift to the Egyptians was their sense of pride, Mubarak's curse is to have created a cultural climate where the only rewarded character traits are shameless opportunism and lack of dignity.

every fork in the road Nasser went left, Al-Sadat went right, and Mubarak says, "Don't move.

I had known Mubarak and his wife, Suzanne, for nearly twenty years. He was a career Air Force officer who had risen through the ranks to become Vice President under Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian ruler who fought the Yom Kippur War with Israel in 1973 and later signed the Camp David Accords. Mubarak was injured in the extremist attack that assassinated Sadat in 1981, but he survived, became President, and cracked down hard on Islamists and other dissidents. He ruled Egypt like a pharaoh with nearly absolute power for the next three decades.

Government neglect and endemic poverty means that, aside from the constant hassle tourists must suffer from the legion of touts, many of the city’s young men become prostitutes as the only hope of earning a living. In the 1990s, Luxor became the center of male prostitution in the Middle East. The studs sold themselves to older foreigners (the john’s gender made no difference), who arrived throughout the year for unabashed, but for the most part locally denied, sex tourism.1 Luxor’s mayor, Samir Farag, was arrested after Mubarak’s ouster on charges of rampant corruption, as were many other mayors up and down the country; but a few years earlier he had told an Arabic-language newspaper that as many as 30 percent of Luxor’s young men had married an older foreign woman, and in most cases this was covert prostitution2—the latter being both illegal and shameful for the conservative locals to openly acknowledge. I was loath to return to Luxor because even if as a single Westerner you are not on the lookout for street meat, you are still solicited by the city’s rent boys and pestered for cash by the tourist hustlers. Not, of course, that the two groups are mutually exclusive.

Luxor attack in 1997 in which Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya killed fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians outside a pharaonic temple. In the same year, an ambush near the Egyptian museum in downtown Cairo by the group took the lives of nine tourists. In 1995, eighteen Greek tourists had been killed close to the Pyramids. But the violence was not only directed at the ‘infidel Westerners’ (though they, and the tourism industry, were especially prized victims). Egyptians also suffered: between 1982 and 2000, more than 2,000 Egyptians died in terror attacks – from the speaker of parliament to a number of secular writers and commentators (for example, Farag Foda, a prominent and controversial writer, was assassinated in 1992, and in 1994 an assassination attempt was made against Egypt's Nobel Literature Laureate Naguib Mahfouz), to a series of senior police officers,39 and children caught up in the blasts.

Khaled Yousef's Hina Maysara a voyeuristic, smash-hit film, produced in 2007, recounts of the story of Cairene slums – such as Imbaba – in which religious extremism blurred with aggression, drug use, child labour and abuse, the grey economy and prostitution.

Between 1991 and 1993, the militants had virtually taken complete control of Imbaba, replacing the government as the social arbiter. The situation reached a climax in 1992 when the security forces decided to intervene. More than 12,000 troops in more than 100 armed cars descended on the neighbourhood (home to more than a million Cairenes) and sealed it off; by the end of a bloody, tense day,

the Luxor attack (the latter widely reported in the West as a serious indication of a regime unable to assert its control over the country and contain the threat), the Egyptian security forces launched a comprehensive campaign against the key militant groups in (and outside) the country: infiltrating the most important, targeting their key leaders, taking control of thousands of mosques, squeezing their financial sources, draining the weapons sources (especially in Al-Saeed) and stepping up the internal pressure with a series of arrests. In a very intelligent move, the government diverted the payment of Islamic alms (zakat) from the local committees and charities that traditionally had allocated it to government-controlled banks, depleting one of their key sources of internal funding.

regime had handled the military threat successfully.41 But the rise of Islamism as a social force was a different story.

Brotherhood extended its social reach and infrastructure into a much more developed political platform. In the late 1990s, the traditionally vague Muslim Brotherhood proposed a draft political manifesto, seen by many observers as the skeleton of an alternative constitution. It championed political reform, increased freedom and fair elections, all in the language of Egyptian political activism. The Brotherhood, for the first time since its rehabilitation in Egyptian politics, was positioning itself as a direct political competitor to the regime that had ruled Egypt since 1952. This became abundantly clear in the

The charm offensive was complemented by the work of a number of Islamic intellectuals with strong links to the Egyptian Islamic movement in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Tariq Ramadan was the most famous of these. The grandson of Hassan Al-Banna and a scholar at Oxford University, he argued for a heterogeneous Islam that combined the religion's traditions with new aspects rooted in the experiences of Muslims living in the West.

regime also imposed a further restriction on religious parties (and independent parliamentary candidates), namely an amendment of Articles 1 and 2 of the constitution to define Egypt as ‘a state of citizenship’ and remove the reference to Islam as ‘the religion of the state’. The change in theory would have the effect of allowing women, and Christians, to run for any position, including the presidency.

1923 constitution. The committee, which comprised five Christians, one Jew and six Muslims, instituted Article 1 (that Islam is the religion of the state) unanimously. And interestingly the five Christian committee members were the ones who rejected a clause, suggested by a Muslim, to have a minimum number of parliamentary seats and ministerial posts reserved for Christians. ‘It would be a shame for Egyptian Christians to be appointed, not elected,’ commented one of the Christian committee members. That was the era when a Christian politician such as Makram Ebeid Pasha, the legendary general secretary of Al-Wafd, was elected for six consecutive terms to the parliament in a constituency with virtually no Christians. Sadly, those were different times.46 In another incident following its 2005 electoral success,

Al-Azhar had over several decades lost part of its authoritative intellectual firepower. Several notable theologians emerged in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Sunni world) who had been trained by Al-Azhar yet later broke away from the institution's structure and became independent. Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi is the most prominent of these.

Amr Khaled, the most successful of those young sheikhs,

Islam became the uncontested ‘last resort’. The fall of loyalties and ideologies, the lack of national projects and the sense of humiliation as a result of successive decades of drift and what seemed to many as a series of historical defeats47 left the society clinging to religion as its innermost identity, its only remaining shield and consolation.

There was a major demographic boom in Egypt from the 1980s, in which the population almost doubled from around 45 million to 80 million, but there was also a notable increase in literacy and urbanization. The literacy rate in Egypt increased from around 45 per cent in the early 1970s to 65 per cent in the early 2000s,

hiwala's expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, when hundreds of offices were set up across Egypt, was exponential. In a few years, the halal hiwala became the main (sometimes the only) interface through which hundreds of thousands of families were receiving their livelihood from absent fathers and brothers.

the mid-2000s, Islamic banks operating in Egypt controlled around 10 per cent of the commercial deposits in the country's banking system; and a number of the world's leading banks (from Citigroup to HSBC) were heavily promoting their ‘Islamic arms’.

economic aspect of Islamism penetrated a number of the economy's industrial and service sectors. For example, eight of the twenty richest families in Egypt throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with vast and interconnected equity stakes across the country's private sector, had direct links to either the Muslim Brotherhood or other Salafist groups.52

the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, political Islam in general, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particu lar, believed that Egypt's future was theirs.

Their chance came with the 2011 revolution. The group's leaders calculated that the end of Mubarak's reign would create a political void, and hoped that the Brotherhood, with their unmatched organizational skills, deep roots in Egyptian society, command over the religious vernacular, and the aura earned by so many decades of persecution and resilience, would gain a decisive advance. And so they lent their support to the uprising and played a leading role in its success.

In the end, the majority of Egyptians overwhelmingly approved the proposed constitutional amendments. Of the more than 18 million Egyptians who voted on the 19 March 2011 referendum, more than 77 per cent voted in favour of the amendments, paving the way for the parliamentary elections. It was a major success for political Islam in general, and the Brotherhood in specific.

since ancient times, the people of Egypt have been expert in deceit and treachery’, he said, before recommending a ruthless campaign in the country.

(Ibrahim Pasha captured and flattened the Saudis' capital of Diraiyah – now a suburb of Riyadh, arrested the Saudi emir Abdullah Ibn Saud and sent him to Istanbul, where he was beheaded).

Paris on the Nile’ or the ‘finery of Cairo’, Al-Ismailiya – a district to which Ismael gave his name – comprised large, wide avenues, piazzas, belle époque buildings and urban public gardens.8 He brought steam shipping to the Nile, which revolutionized internal trading. He was a major patron of the arts and created the Cairo Opera House, another architectural jewel. He founded Dar-Al-Kuttub (the National Library), an ambitious project that started with more than 250,000 volumes, most of which were gathered from Egyptian, Levantine, Turkish and European collections, and which grew to become the region's largest library and one of the cultural treasures of the world.

Neither Mohamed Ali nor any of his descendants (up to King Fuad, who ascended to the throne in 1917) even spoke classical Arabic, let alone mastered the Egyptian variant (Turkish was the language of administration up to the second half of the nineteenth century, when a breed of Europe-educated Egyptian bureaucrats began to take leading roles in government agencies and ministries, and started to Arabize the the administrative system).

Whereas in 1800 at least 90 per cent of Egyptians were poor peasants, by 1900 more than 25 per cent of the population of 10 million lived in Cairo, Alexandria and the Delta's main cities, and could be counted as lower middle class or working class.11 The economy was by and large in the hands of the royal family, its Turkish-Albanian-European entourage and the thousands of foreigners who had settled in Egypt from the mid- and late-nineteenth century; yet Egyptians, and especially the increasingly influential landowners, were rapidly climbing the political and socio-economic ladder.

Believing that Egypt's future lay with the Levant, Iraq, Iran and the Arabian peninsula, the easternists sought to establish strong relationships with the rising Saudi family, accommodated the Hashemites (in Jordan and Iraq), established through marriage a political alliance with Iran,20 and sponsored attempts to formulate an Arabic political forum (which evolved, in 1945, into the League of Arab States).

The Alexandria Bourse (the fourth largest worldwide) and the Cairo stock exchange were sizable, international markets. In fact, the story of the Alexandria Bourse – or the Alexandria Futures Exchange – is an interesting representation of Egyptian society's capitalism – and cosmopolitanism – in the first half of the twentieth century; the Bourse's board of directors included Muslim, Christian and Jewish Egyptians in addition to Egyptianized foreigners who had settled in the country.

theatre, pioneering artists such as Fatima Rouschdie and Naguib Al-Rihani introduced popular comedies as well as melodramas (Al-Rihani 1889–1948, ‘the father of Egyptian comedy’, worked with his lifelong friend Badeih Khairy on Egyptianizing a number of French theatre hits and presenting them in Egyptian theatre, and later cinema). Egyptian cinema, introduced in the early 1920s by Italians and Armenians living in Egypt, was boosted by the creation of Studio Misr (under the patronage of Talaat Harb Pasha, the era's most prominent capitalist).

country's middle class was growing at a very slow pace. By the late 1940s, around 5 per cent of the population controlled more than 65 per cent of the country's asset base (private companies and traded stocks); more than 20 per cent of all Egyptian peasants were landless while around 3 per cent of the population held around 80 per cent of all cultivated land; and foreigners continued to exert dramatic influence on the economy.

In general, the liberal experiment seemed to have failed to put forward a development programme for the country's poor, who continued to constitute more than 80 per cent of the entire population.34

vital historical fact: that Gamal Abdel Nasser signifies the only truly Egyptian developmental project in the country's history since the fall of the pharaonic state. There had been other projects: a Greek one in Alexandria, an Arab–Islamic one under the Ummayads (the first dynasty to rule the Islamic world after the end of the era of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’), military–Islamic ones under Saladin and the grand Mamelukes, a French one under Napoleon's commanders and a dynastic (Ottoman-inspired) one under Mohamed Ali Pasha and Khedive Ismael. But this was different – in origin, meaning and impact. For Nasser was a man of the Egyptian soil who had overthrown the Middle East's most established and sophisticated monarchy in a swift and bloodless move – to the acclaim of the millions of poor, oppressed Egyptians – and ushered in a programme of ‘social justice’, ‘progress and development’ and ‘dignity’: a nation-centred developmental vision.

Tawfik Al-Hakeem, one of Egypt's most renowned twentieth-century writers, described Nasser as a ‘confused Sultan

Such criticism grew in the later 1970s, as the immediate post-Nasser years gave way to the period of economic opening up (al-infitah) under Anwar Sadat, and the entire Nasserite project was assailed as a failure rooted in a lack of dynamism. If anything the exact opposite was true. Nasser's development programme was frenetically action-oriented as well as rich in rhetoric. In the space of a few years following the July 1952 coup that abolished Egyptian monarchism, Nasser overhauled Egypt's entire political system; sidelined the political class that had ruled Egypt for half a century, replacing the Turco-dominated aristocracy with ordinary Egyptians, who at least in theory represented the will and aspirations of the masses; emasculated all political parties; tried (and in many cases imprisoned) most of the key politicians of the ‘bygone era’; created a new constitutional order; and established a new system based on an ultra-powerful presidency supported by an executive government, the legitimacy of which was derived from the consent (albeit without formal electoral channels) of the people.

Land reform was enacted through enforcing a 100-acre ceiling on the size of any single family's holding; ending absentee ownership; capping rent on leased lands; strengthening the legal rights of peasants (al-fellahin); and, crucially, confiscating hundreds of thousands of fertile acres from major landowners and distributing them to millions of landless peasants. Today, almost five decades later, the footage of Nasser distributing landownership titles to poor peasants in drab jalabeyas is still a powerful – and moving – symbol of the rise of the poor classes (Al-Tabaquat Al-Fakeera) and the transformation of a feudal system into one based on ‘equity and progress’.

The combination of the land-reform programme and the creation of the public sector resulted in around 75 per cent of Egypt's gross domestic product (GDP) being transferred from the hands of the country's rich either to the state or to millions of small owners. The closest parallel to such a large-scale social programme had been in the early days of Mohamed Ali Pasha's rule in the early nineteenth century.

seemed to be turning Egypt from a poor and lethargic economy into an exemplary developmental case study. The country's economy grew at an average rate of 9 per cent per annum for almost a decade. The extent of cultivated land increased by almost a third (an achievement that had eluded Egyptians for more than a millennium); the contribution of manufacturing to GDP rose from around 14 per cent in the late 1940s to 35 per cent by the early 1970s.

Nasser's ‘Arabism’ was thus almost unprecedented in Egypt's long history. Nasser did not even invent Arab nationalism as a political identity. The easternists led the way towards the ‘Arabic East’. Michel Afleq, the Sorbonne-educated Arab Christian political philosopher who founded the Al-Baath (Rebirth) party in 1941, pioneered the call for an Arab political front.

The liberal constitutional experiment that the Egyptian political scene had witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s remained the province of Cairo's and Alexandria's elite and upper middle class. The liberal cultural fashions of the same period were detached from the crushing living standards of the peasants in the Delta and Al-Saeed, as well as the poor in the country's urban areas. It was no surprise then that the vast majority of people on the Egyptian street cheered Nasser's repudiation of the ‘bygone era'(which conveniently lumped together the monarchy, the aristocrats, the landed gentry and the different political parties – from the liberal and secular to the conservative and religious). Nasser's political and socio-economic plans emerged as the country's sole and compelling project with a substantial, expansive mandate.

Voice of the Arabs (Sout Al-Arab), Nasser's far-reaching radio station, became a propagandist vehicle par excellence, conveying the leader's fiery speeches to the Arab world from ‘the Ocean to the Gulf’; even Egyptian cinema and music were mobil ized to market the notion of the ‘rising Arab nation’ led by its ‘historical leader’. A new adaptation of the Saladin story was made into a smash-hit film, in which the Kurdish leader who fought the Christian Crusaders in the name of Islam was transformed into ‘the servant and the leader of the Arabs fighting the invading Westerners’.

after challenging France by arming and bankrolling the Algerian revolutionaries, he had the courage to send thousands of his troops to Yemen, on the Saudi borders, to support the revolutionaries in their coup against the country's antiquated royal regime. Nasser's project appeared to be a true revolutionary avalanche. Syria begged to unite with Egypt under his leadership. The Syrian leadership accepted union terms with Egypt that in effect dissolved the Syrian state. Several Iraqi leaders invited him to Baghdad to announce Iraq's inclusion in the ‘United Arab Republic’. Lebanon's Muslims and Druze hailed him as their leader.

Nasserite project was increasingly becoming real; something akin to a ‘United Arab World’ could, at the time, be envisaged; it was impossible to dismiss or ignore his project.

With the sole exception of Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, every single invasion the country witnessed in its history had come from the East. Sinai, throughout thousands of years, has been the invaders' route into the country.

Sadat, years later, commented that Nasser did not die on 28 September 1970 but on 5 June 1967 (the day the war broke out).

The hero, the historical giant, the dream, was revealed to be a mere inept leader presiding over a failing system. He trusted military commanders who proved to be incompetent and hopeless (King Hussein of Jordan once described Marshal Amer, the general commander of the Egyptian army in 1967, as ‘retarded’); the great leader rushed into a battle only to be trounced in less than a week. The Arab nationalist project lost its momentum and its appeal. No longer were Nasser's actions ‘historic’, no longer was ‘the nation moving on a generational stride towards victory’. Nasser became mortal: merely the president of a poor, third-world country that had been humiliatingly defeated in a war. For the first time ever, Egyptians rioted against Nasser; in March 1968, thousands of university students took to the streets to condemn what they saw as lenient verdicts on the military leaders ‘responsible for the 1967 setback’, and later in the same year, workers in different factories held strikes against the regime.

Friends, the ancient word is dead; the ancient books are dead; our speech with holes like worn-out shoes is dead; our poems have gone sour; women's hair and nights have gone sour; my grieved nation, in a flash, you turned me from a poet writing for love and tenderness to a poet writing with a knife; our shouting is louder than our actions; our swords are taller than us; friends, smash the doors; wash your brains; grow words, pomegranates and grapes; sail to countries of fog and snow; nobody knows you exit in your caves; friends, we run wildly through streets; dragging people with ropes; smashing windows and locks; we praise like frogs; turn midgets into heroes; in mosques, we crouch idly; write poems and proverbs; and pray God for victory.

Some of the key pillars of Nasser's project proved greatly lacking. The public sector evolved into a Soviet-style system of sterile thinking, a deathbed for talent, a site of mediocre resource allocation, inefficiency, suffocating bureaucracy, waste and decrepit management; in no way could it support lasting economic development in the country. Many of Nasser's detractors argue that land reform precipitated a dramatic retreat of Egyptian agribusiness: that the replacement of sophisticated, well-capitalized large landowners by low-skilled and poor peasants resulted in lower quality products, no concern for the long-term subsistence of the land, poor marketing of strategic Egyptian crops such as cotton and a continued erosion of links to