The festive protests that broke out on Jan. 25 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square have become a window into what Egypt might look and sound like without the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Tahrir’s troubadour collective has specialized in the invention of slogans that are witty, abusive and aimed directly at the president, e.g., “Mubarak, you rhinoceros (kharteet), / get out, get out, you pest (ghateet).” Sometimes, perhaps to signal a certain gravitas, they dispense with rhyme and say it straight: “The people want the fall of the regime.” Along with the chanting, there has been much baladi music — a catchy, popular style, heavy on hooks and reverb — as well as poetry recitations and effigy hanging. This is Egypt’s folk culture: profane, bawdy, politically sophisticated. It stands as a direct challenge to the version of culture propagated by the Mubarak regime and its predecessors.
That version is one in which the state hands culture down to the people via its more or less underpaid intermediaries — the Egyptian artists and intellectuals who can hardly hope to make a living otherwise. Even the country’s greatest novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, spent the better part of four decades as a midlevel government clerk, though he was eventually appointed a consultant to the minister of culture (the widespread notion that Mahfouz was a genial storyteller from the souk is too simple: he knew the corridors of power as intimately as the alleyways of the old city). In his 1975 novel “Respected Sir,” Mahfouz tells the story of Othman Bayyumi, an ambitious state employee who offers his life to “the sacred fires” of public service. At one point Bayyumi reflects: “The ideal citizen of other nations might be a warrior, a politician, a merchant, a craftsman or a sailor, but in Egypt it was the government official. . . . Even the pharaohs themselves, he thought, were but officials appointed by the gods.”
This is hyperbole, but only just. Among Arab states, Egypt was the first to make a concerted effort to co-opt its intellectual class, and it has set the standard ever since. Muhammad Ali, who ruled during the first half of the 19th century, conscripted several generations of scholars to import scientific and military knowledge from Europe. These new experts also staffed government schools and edited official newspapers. A state-centered approach to culture persisted through the early part of last century and reached its apogee under the rule of Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Following the Free Officers’ Revolt of 1952, Nasser’s regime nationalized the press, the cinema and most publishing houses, establishing what one historian has termed “a virtual state monopoly on culture.”
Mubarak exploited this monopoly for his own needs. During the 1990s, as Egyptian security forces fought a low-level war against Islamist groups in Upper Egypt, the regime did its best to recruit intellectuals to its side. It provided lavish support for the Supreme Council for Culture, book festivals, educational publishing ventures, and the iconic new library in Alexandria. The Supreme Council of Antiquities, run by the outspoken archaeologist Zahi Hawass, was especially favored. The ideology pushed by this ensemble of institutions was straightforward. It affirmed the regime’s role as a bulwark of modernity, democratic reform and social order, while it painted Islamists in the opposing colors: antimodern, antidemocratic and essentially terroristic (and they didn’t care about King Tut). Few Egyptians took this argument seriously, but it found a more receptive audience abroad.
This ideological program and the role it allots to Egyptian intellectuals is hardly exhausted. On Jan. 31, six days after the protests began, Mubarak announced a new cabinet, naming Gaber Asfour as minister of culture. In the ’70s and ’80s, Asfour had been a respected critic. He was editor in chief of Fusul, an important journal that introduced French literary theory into Egypt. In 1991, Asfour became general secretary of the Supreme Council of Culture — a sort of think tank for state culture — and began to write books that hewed closely to the regime’s version of the war for hearts and minds: “Defending Enlightenment,” “Against Fanaticism,” “Opposing Terrorism.” So when Asfour was named minister of culture it was no great surprise, yet fellow intellectuals, in Egypt and abroad, were quick to express their dismay. Over the weekend before his appointment, Al Jazeera reported that more than a hundred protestors were killed during street fights provoked by pro-government thugs. The Palestinian poet and memoirist Mourid Barghouti posted to Twitter, “The blood of the martyrs is on your hands, Minister.”
The problem with the regime’s slogans is that for too many Egyptians “modernization” means endless traffic jams and gated suburbs; “democratic reform” means bribery and fraudulent elections; and “social order” means the policeman’s club, or the interrogator’s electric prod. Not coincidently, these everyday realities are the subject matter of Egypt’s opposition artists, who have joined the carnival in Tahrir or served as its tutelary spirits.
The novelist Alaa Al Aswany has been an especially enthusiastic participant, delivering speeches to the crowds and posting regular updates on his blog. Al Aswany’s best-known work, “The Yacoubian Building,” was an international best seller and allowed him to make his living as a writer (he is also a dentist). At least some of the novel’s success was due to its explicit portrayal of political corruption and police torture. Al Aswany’s latest novel, “Chicago,” includes a cameo by the president, who is unnamed but said to dye his hair — a common claim about Mubarak — and to display a “cheerless smile that, a quarter-century earlier, he had deemed photogenic and so never changed it.” Al Aswany has for many years hosted a regular salon, a kind of ongoing teach-in for young Egyptian activists. Since the protests started, he has also hosted foreign journalists at his clinic. Asked there if he’d like to become minister of culture, he reportedly demurred.
But for the crowds in Tahrir, now is above all a time for poetry, and the muse of the moment may be Ahmed Fouad Negm. Born in 1929, Negm was a railway worker, postman and political prisoner before he became a hero of the counterculture in the 1970s. During that decade, he paired up with the oud player Sheikh Imam and recorded dozens of amusingly anti-authoritarian songs — including a famous lampoon of Richard Nixon and an equally famous elegy for Che Guevara — that circulated in cassette form among university students. Since the early days of the demonstrations, these songs and poems have resurfaced in the square. Interviewed on Al Jazeera shortly after the protests began, Negm was burbling with excitement. He immediately launched into his poem “Good Morning,” which was composed for high school students during a series of demonstrations in 1972 and borrows its theme from folk songs that celebrate a newborn’s first week of life. Asked if he had been to Tahrir, Negm said he hadn’t, explaining that he was “an old man.” In fact, he is one year younger than Hosni Mubarak, but maybe he just meant that he knew when to get off the stage.
Against the regime’s version of top-down culture, the protesters have created a defiantly popular egalitarian and confrontational culture of their own. While Egypt’s intellectual class may be internally divided, the people in the square have, for now, drawn very clear lines in the sand. In the words of Negm, often chanted in Tahrir: “Who are they, and who are we? / They are the authority, the sultans. / They are the rich, and the government is on their side. / We are the poor, the governed. / Think about it, use your head. / See which one of us rules the other.”
