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 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.

The invasion of Iraq turned the region into a cauldron. And when the new American president decided the time had come to withdraw, the cauldron boiled over. And then there was this folly we called the Arab Spring. Mubarak must go! Gaddafi must go! Assad must go!” He shook his head slowly. “It was madness, absolute madness. And now we are left with this. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of the United Kingdom, right on the doorstep of Europe. Even Bin Laden would have never dared to dream of such a thing. And what does the American president tell us? ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS is the jayvee team.

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.

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.

Love, eternal, peace, and uncountable blessings on Eid Ul Adha, Eid Mubarak, from my depth of heart.

Tiger Woods earns the golden medal of Freedom.

Eid Ul Adha is not only about sacrificing an animal before sacrificing the animal, we have to put a knife on your pride, your selfishness, and your ego as well, and slater the animals living inside our heart,our brain, our thoughts and personality, so we can achieve the real meaning of Eid Ul Adha, may Allah accept all our good deeds and sacrifice. Happy Eid

Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, who watched a live television broadcast of an official ceremony in Egypt, saw President Hosni Mubarak warmly shaking the hand of Marwan, who accompanied him in laying a wreath on Nasser’s tomb. After

consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far.

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Nope. This one is especially delusional. Let's first assume, for the sake of argument, that Israel is a "democracy." If she were, would she be the "only" one? "Only" is defined as "being teh single one," or "single in distinction." Of course, we now have democracies in Iraq, Tunisia, and Egypt. Egyptians are so democratic that they demonstrated against Mubarak, and then ousted Mubarak, and then elected Morsi, and then demonstrated against Morsi, and then ousted Morsi. That is democracy in full force.

revolution that overthrew Mubarak will lead to a new set of institutions capable of bringing prosperity

Change in leadership brands must be influenced and proactively effected at a personal level, it can never be forced from outside with sustainable effectiveness. Saddam Hussein, Muammar al Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak are all political trophies, yet the effects of the military or “civil” initiatives that toppled them, are nothing to be proud of considering what continues to happen in countries like Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria, after the use of force to bring political change.

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!

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.

In Washington, for example.” Rousseau set off along the embankment. “The invasion of Iraq turned the region into a cauldron. And when the new American president decided the time had come to withdraw, the cauldron boiled over. And then there was this folly we called the Arab Spring. Mubarak must go! Gaddafi must go! Assad must go!” He shook his head slowly. “It was madness, absolute madness. And now we are left with this. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of the United Kingdom, right on the doorstep of Europe. Even Bin Laden would have never dared to dream of such a thing. And what does the American president tell us? ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS is the jayvee team.” He frowned. “What does this mean? Jayvee?” “I think it has something to do with basketball.” “And what does basketball have to do with a subject as serious as the rise of the caliphate?” Gabriel only smiled. “Does he truly believe this drivel, or is it an ignorantia affectata?” “A willful ignorance?” “Yes.

THE STORY OF LIFE IS THAT OF SOUND AND FURY

YOUR FACE IS THE LOVELIEST SIGHT I EVER BEHELD , AND YOUR VOICE IS THE SWEETEST VIBRATIONS I EVER HEARD

GIFTS ARE THE LONG LASTING REMINDERS OF SWEET MEMORIES

YOUR FACE IS THE LOVELIEST SIGHT I EVER BEHELD , AND YOUR VOICE IS THE LOVELIEST VIBRATIONS I EVER HEARD

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.

So no one in the CIA could imagine Mubarak ever being out of power, right? You know, complex, adaptive systems go through state changes, and they do it in very complex and unpredictable ways where one day they’re one way and the next day there’s been a dramatic shift. And, you know, the way that you undermine a complex, adaptive system is you begin to undermine the inputs that sustain it. So the inputs that sustain complex adaptive systems are energy, money, goodwill, and you know, I think the health care system is doing a very good job of eroding all of those things.

contrast to Nasser, who interacted with his people as a missionary figure charting a path to national glory and redemption, Sadat was the village chief (oumda): a traditionally dressed, honoured, pious and modest guest at weddings, funerals and regional celebrations, ready to engage in discussions on matters of day-to-day concern.

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.

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

In Al-Karnak, an Egyptian film produced in the mid-1970s, the leading Egyptian actress Souad Hosni brilliantly exposed what a broken soul would look like, after her character – an aspiring postgraduate student – was humiliated, tortured and raped in ‘Nasser's prisons’.

But he failed to use that mandate to transform his (and his people's) dreams into lasting institutions; he failed to convert his revolution into a state.

The speed of these social changes outpaced the development of Egyptian society and the people. Land reform and asset nationalization resulted in a far more equitable land and asset distribution across the economy, but the new owners and managers were hardly on a par with the grand objectives of the developmental endeavour they were leading;

The Islamic movement in Egypt, from the late 1970s, managed to occupy the political space in the country that had been the domain of Nasserite Arab nationalism, and to monopolize the representation of the country's middle class.

Arab revolts

civic, secular, nationalist frame of reference (devoid of any religious underpinnings) would face immense challenges in today's highly religious Egyptian society.

At that time, a grand Arabic project emanating from Cairo had credibility. That is not true today. The relative standing of Egyptians (the country, the people and the culture) in the Arabic milieu has significantly declined. The major socio-economic challenges that ordinary Egyptians have struggled with for thirty-five years have exacted their price on the country's living standards, income levels, educational quality, as well as on the people's skills, aptitudes, behaviours and attitudes. Such deterioration was taking place while many Arab countries, especially in the Gulf (but also in the Levant), were improving their indices in all these areas.

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, thousands of Egyptians were forced conscripts and paid fighters constituting the bulk of Iraq's 200,000 reservoir in its war with Iran. The ‘Egyptian fighter’ was also absent from the Arabs' most important struggle against Israel in the last thirty years: the Israeli–Hezbollah wars in southern Lebanon. Also, today, an Arab nationalist identity based on the old premise of an Egyptian leadership does not match the reality of the developmental state of Egyptian society relative to its supposed constituency (the Arab world).

Unlike political Islamism, Arab nationalism has no major following on the Egyptian streets. Unlike liberal capitalism, it lacks the resources and the might of the country's ultra-rich to impose itself on society. Nasserite Arab nationalism, failing to reinvent itself, could well become irrelevant as a result of the impending fight between political Islamism and liberal cap italism over the hearts and minds of young Egyptians.

Al-Sharaawi's fatwa that ‘humans do not own their bodies’ – and hence his prohibition of organ-transplant operations – was a key factor behind the Egyptian parliament's repeated blocking of legislation on the issue. His influence extended even to Egyptian cinema; he was one of the architects of the ‘religious wave’ among actresses in the 1990s who chose to shun the art, dropping out of the film business and ‘reverting to God’ as born-again Muslims.

Cairo itself was founded under their rule in 969, as was Al-Azhar (whose name is derived from that of Al-Zahraa). The dynasty also inaugurated a large number of religious and social festivals, the most notable of which venerate Ahl Al-Bayt (Prophet Mohamed's descendants) and commemorate Al-Mwaled

unique mix of Sunni theology and Shi'ite social traditions.

But the society became characterized by a unique mix of Sunni theology and Shi'ite social traditions. Al-Azhar evolved and consolidated its unique status; and the people continued to honour the Prophet Mohamed's descendants (in many cases ascribing to them powers of divine and spiritual intercession), to celebrate Al-Mwaled and to embrace various Shi'ite traditions; even today, the country's social calendar is dominated by festivals and observances of clear Shi'ite origin.3 This Sunni–Shi'ite mix made Egypt both hostile ground and a natural target for Wahhabism.

the expansionist Wahhabi project found fertile ground in Egypt. Three indigenous factors contributed to its favourable reception. First, between 1974 and 1985, more than 3 million Egyptians migrated to the Gulf, with the majority settling in Saudi Arabia. Most of them hailed from Egypt's lower (and lower middle) classes, and had had limited exposure to Egypt's old glamour. In part as a result, they quickly absorbed the cultures of their new home; and more slowly, the dominant social and cultural milieu of the Gulf's most austere centre found its way to Egypt's Delta and Saeedi villages, and later to the heart of Cairo and Alexandria.

The change can be measured in the increase in the proportion of women in Egypt wearing the veil, from less than 30 per cent to more than 65 per cent in two decades; by the early 1990s, the veil was established as the dress code on the Egyptian street rather than as an occasional choice. In the less-privileged villages of the Nile Delta, as well as in Cairo's and Alexandria's poorest neighbourhoods, the veil became the natural step for girls as young as twelve.5 There was also a general shift in the socially preferred pattern of gender roles, with the return to an emphasis on men's public role and women's domesticity.6

Thousands of prayer rooms (Zawyas) were established in garages and ground-floors in rich and poor neighbourhoods alike. In the mid-1980s there was a mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians, by the mid-2000s, there was a mosque for every 745 persons.

Even colloquial Egyptian changed: ‘Good morning’ (‘Naharak Saeed’) and ‘Good evening’ (‘masaa al-kheir’) were replaced by ‘peace be upon you’, Islam's greeting (‘al-salamu aleikom’).

The politics of the 1970s were the second factor in this social shift. In his efforts to confront the Nasserite and socialist forces in Egypt, President Anwar Sadat unleashed Egypt's Islamic forces. He released thousands of the Muslim Brotherhood's leaders and members from jail (after years of imprisonment and prosecution under Nasser), and allowed the Brotherhood's old newspaper the Call (Al-Dawaa) to be reissued. He tried to assume the mantle of Islam by calling himself ‘the guardian of the faith’; emphasized that his first name was ‘Mohamed’ not ‘Anwar’; promoted religious schools; authorized a major increase in the budget of Al-Azhar and an expansion of its parallel educational system; opened the door for leading religious scholars and commentators to dominate the state-controlled media; introduced apostasy laws in Egypt after years of a highly liberal intellectual atmosphere; declared sharia law (Islamic jurisprudence) as the principal source for the Egyptian constitution (after decades during which religion was generally marginal to legislation with the exception of personal status laws); and declared himself the leader of ‘an Islamic pious country’.

Shame Law’ which gave the state wide powers to prosecute anyone ‘who threatens the values of the society’; the values were defined as ‘the genuine traditions of the Egyptian family’. The law also prosecuted those ‘who propagate views that are not in step with divine religions’.

economic situation in the 1970s and 1980s also supported the rise of the religious movement. Open economic policies that Sadat introduced in the mid-1970s (al-infitah) put enormous pressures on Egypt's middle class, which witnessed a significant erosion in its purchasing power and its relative standing in society (especially with the rise of segments of the country's lower classes that had significantly benefited from the economic consequences of the migration to the Gulf); the result was a damaging reshuffling in its composition (discussed in Chapter 4). These pressures in turn provided an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to re-establish its presence in Egyptian society.

The group's growth was dramatic; in under fifteen years, the Brotherhood grew from a single room in Ismailiya to 3,000 branches across the whole of Egypt, and from a tiny cell round Sheikh Al-Banna to more than 450,000 active members.

Some (but not Nasser) actually ‘swore on the Koran and the sword’ (pleaded allegiance to the group). But neither the Brotherhood's political nor its military leadership had any command of the group of officers who led the coup in July 1952.

A number of the coup's leaders, including Nasser, had relationships with the Brotherhood. Some (but not Nasser) actually ‘swore on the Koran and the sword’ (pleaded allegiance to the group). But neither the Brotherhood's political nor its military leadership had any command of the group of officers who led the coup in July 1952.

The Brotherhood gambled on the ‘pious wings in the movement’ (the words of Hassan Al-Tuhami, one of the closest members of the coup's leadership to the Brotherhood), and in so doing, positioned itself as a strategic opponent of Nasser (who at the time – the second half of 1953 – was sidelining all the coup's leaders who were not personally loyal to him). The chain of events led to a bitter confrontation between Nasser and the Brotherhood. In 1954 Nasser accused the Brotherhood's ‘secret apparatus’ of perpetrating an attempt on his life that had just taken place in Alexandria. Soon after, the Brotherhood was officially abolished, scores of its members were imprisoned and thousands were compelled to leave Egypt.

to the, then, sympathetic Saudi Arabia, where many managed to build vast fortunes. Others settled in Europe, especially in Switzerland, where new branches of the Brotherhood were created and were able to operate freely.

the factor that really cemented the Brotherhood's social re-emergence, and founded the Islamic movement's social base, was its highly efficient services infrastructure.

Egyptian liberalism is typically presented as an odd combination of two arch enemies: monarchical (the liberal, Europe-oriented elite) and Nasserite (Arab nationalist, which despite an anti-Western political agenda is culturally drawn to London, Paris and New York).

Rather, the society was wide open to popular Western culture at the very time when it was being drawn towards conservatism and increased religiosity. The Cairene and Alexandrian middle-class family would watch the afternoon lesson of Sheikh Al-Sharaawi only to switch channels later to watch the evening episode of Dallas or Dynasty, and later Grey's Anatomy or Desperate Housewives. As large segments of society became participants in the new consumerist waves,13 they were also presented with archaic, debilitated views of ‘a return to Islam’.