WATANI International
10 October 2010
Amin al-Mahdy is a writer and intellectual famous for his sharp, uncompromising views. He has been frequently harassed and sidelined because of his bold writings. He holds an unconventional opinion of the Arabs and their relationship to Egypt, and believes that the solution for the Middle-East’s problems is in peace and democracy. Amin al-Mahdy’s intellect and wit have carried him to limitless horizons. Watani talked to Mr Mahdy
Your writings have always been controversial …Why haven’t we read anything by you recently?
For me, writing is not a mere mechanical process, it is an unbound responsibility. But I have, for the moment, discontinued writing any studies or articles in order to devote my time to my two-volume book The Arabs Against the World. The Arab’s Predicament with History is the title of the first volume which is a social, historical analysis that aims at answering the question of why contemporary terrorism is being linked to the history of Muslims. The second volume is The Arab’s Predicament with the Era and applies the same analyses to the cultural, social and political components of the Arab community. All this prompted the confrontation between the Arabs and the world.
What do you think of Egypt’s role in the region, especially regarding the peace process?
Egypt’s late president Anwar al-Sadat made a major contribution to Egypt: peace. President Sadat was a tyrant and dictator; but he had a major cause, that of advancing Egypt, and getting closer to the West. He knew that Middle East peace was a precondition for advancement. With this in mind, the October 1973 War against Israel was but a crucial, necessary step on the road to peace. Then came Sadat’s visit to Tel Aviv and his speech in the Knesset. The move was unprecedented for any Arab leader; it was the work of a visionary. Israel realised that it was important to reach peace with that man, and it did.
All Sadat’s political struggle and achievements appear to have been forgotten or overlooked once he died. The concept of winning the October War was endowed with undue significance and was overly applauded, thereby overshadowing the peace achieved as an aftermath of the war. The war, which was a mere tactical move towards the broader process of peace, gained oversize proportions.
Today the Egyptian public resents the normalisation of relations with Israel, and the region has gone back to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Egypt lost its credit of peace with Israel as well as its leading role in the region; its role has become limited to that of mediator between Hamas and Israel or to pacification agreements.
Does this mean that the peace process has become irrelevant?
There is no intention for peace either on the part of Israel or on the part of the Arab regimes. With the freedom of expression which came with the rule of Mubarak, Islamist calls for war against Israel took off, as well as the promotion of sub-state organisations such as Hizbullah, Hamas, and the terrorists in Iraq, under the motto “the return of Egypt to the Arab fold”. Is Egypt thus honouring the peace agreement of which it is signatory? Of course not. The media is propagating a culture of enmity against Israel, even though official military and security relations with Israel are as good as ever. Egyptians are thus deprived of the fruit of the peace agreement. But I still believe that, in general, the worst peace is better than the best war.
How do you see Egypt today?
Since the 1952 Revolution, all the resources of Egypt have been in the hands of the State; oil, the Suez Canal, financial resources, everything. Activities such as building or restoring churches are controlled by the security apparatus—you know that building or restoring a church requires a security permit. Given that the second article of the Constitution stipulates that Islam is the State religion and that Islamic sharia is the main source of legislation, the entire community is confined within the centralised frame of a military State with a religious address. There is no place in Egypt for liberals or religious minorities, or even for independent scientific research. It is no surprise then that we are living through a crisis.
Do you believe that issuing a unified law for places of worship will solve some of the problems?
Issued or not, the mere fact that it is being discussed proves that there is a crisis. You would be surprised to find out that before the Revolution there were only 10 Islamic schools and higher institutes all over Egypt, while nowadays there are some 13,000 Islamic schools and 440 Islamic higher institutes. A full fledged State Islamic university, al-Azhar, which I personally tag as ‘sectarian’, also has branches in various Egyptian governorates. So you see where the real crisis lies? I believe that to demand a unified law for places of worship is to handle the problem superficially. The crisis engulfs Egypt in its entirety—the dignity, freedom and rights of Egyptians, and their contribution as a human group to the entire human race.
Don’t you think the Copts in Egypt have problems?
There are problems with Nubians, Baha’is, Shiites, Sinai Bedouins, scientific research centres and freedom of expression. How can you disregard all that and only focus on Copts? Coptic leaders harm their cause when they limit it to the sectarian perspective, thus dealing with it on the same grounds on which their opponents are dealing. The Coptic cause should be dealt with by calling for civic and democratic rights, and should be raised to the level of international legitimacy and human rights.
International law says crimes of persecution can never be dropped no matter how much time elapses, and that the persecuted has the right to resist even if through civil disobedience. We can see that international laws, international legitimacy and civil laws support the Copts’ cause, so confining it within the frame of sectarian demands weakens the case and does not help put an end to the attacks against Copts.
I, thus, accuse all Coptic leaders of selfishness, because they do not call for the freedom of all Egyptians, especially that I believe that the Copts’ social, financial and historical size is beyond being just a sect, cult or religion. What I am saying is supported by facts: 70 per cent of Copts live in cities, while only 30 per cent live in villages. This means that Copts are a main, vital component within the Egyptian middle class, and this reflects their social and political responsibility in saving Egypt from tyranny and discrimination.
But Copts are attacked on grounds that they are apostates. What dangerous impact can this have on Egypt?
There are penalising laws in Egypt for ‘offending the President’, ‘offending the Armed Forces’, or ‘disdaining religions’, in this case the Islamic Sunni religion. But there is no single law penalising anyone who allows incites hatred against non-Muslims or their killing on grounds of their being apostates. There is also no law that prevents an allegedly civil court from ruling that a scholar of the stature of Nasr Hamed Abu-Zeid is an apostate, to the point of ruling that he must be separated from his Muslim wife. All this involves all Egyptians who fight for a civil State.
The Coptic file in its entirety is in the hands of the security apparatus and has never been handled politically or according to the civil law. Even when sectarian incidents involved outright crimes against Coptic lives and property, they were not handled according to the law but according to the so-called traditional reconciliation sessions [where the victims or survivors are forced to sit with the offenders or criminals to ‘reconcile’, thereby relinquishing all their legal rights]. The same old problems will go on, and the Coptic file will remain in the hands of security apparatus, as long as we are not a civil, democratic, free State.
Stories about Christian underage women who convert to Islam under shadowy circumstances or who elope with Muslim men and never re-appear are becoming common. How do you assess this trend?
What do you expect of a community that is degenerating into an ultra-religious-oriented, security-governed one? It is normal that young women growing up under such climate lose all social skills and become commodities in a market in which Islamists see the conversion of non-Muslims as a ticket to eternal paradise. You must know that the Islamic World Union in Saudi Arabia has a yearly budget of some USD4.5 billion. Its main activity lies in promoting extremist thought in Egypt and Pakistan through building mosques and prayer corners, and producing tapes, CDs and books. Add to this that one third of public education in Egypt has become Islamic. According to an international study, among 92 radical armed Islamist organisations around the world, 34 have come out of Egypt. In the light of the prevalence of the religious address over education, politics and public culture, how can you expect any social skills to develop? And even if they do develop, what is the value of such skills amidst the religious activities which appear to move everything in our community. Winning over a Christian woman to Islam may be seen as a wonderful Islamic victory.
Given this climate, how do you see the role of intellectuals?
The establishment of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) offered an unprecedented chance to open a window to knowledge and the respect of the human mind. But the State’s dull culture and its security apparatuses prevailed over the BA administration. The conferences of the so called ‘change and reform’, of which the only outcome was a waste of the mind and violation of the culture of freedom, were also governed by the regime. Books written by liberal Egyptian thinkers, such as Khalil Abdel-Kerim and Abkar al-Thakaf, are absent from the BA bookshelves.
More than 90 per cent of Egyptian intellectuals have become State employees and the remaining 10 per cent are either too old or marginalised and are engaged in defending themselves against accusations of apostasy. Conditions for free culture, based upon critical thinking and scientific knowledge, have been utterly lost.
Do you think that Egyptians have changed?
What has happened in Egypt throughout the last decades has wiped out the traditional Egyptian community formats on the social, cultural, and political levels. During the first half of the 20th century, some three million non-Egyptians came to Egypt from the Levant, Morocco, Greece, Italy, and many other places and settled down there. They became integrated and thoroughly Egyptianised; they set up thriving businesses, and endowed Egypt with a plurality it easily took to. But, after the 1952 Revolution, the majority of them who were forced to leave Egypt, taking with them the plurality which easily linked Egypt to the outside world. Cosmopolitan Egypt was lost; Arab Islamic Egypt took over.
What we see in Egypt today is the result of a general social weakness and an absence of the values which produce social, scientific and artistic skills. There is a general tendency towards consumerism and against such typically Egyptian values as professional conscience and the value of work, the value of knowledge and the value of art. Egypt has become passive before the culture and power of its oil-rich regional neighbours.
What do you expect for Egypt in the upcoming period?
The only hope lies in complete change and the rehabilitation of the State and the community. All the political, economic and cultural resources need to go back to the public. We need a democratic regime, and a civil State that does not function within a religious frame. As for now, I can only see a pitiful situation that keeps on getting worse.