In his 93 years, some 70+ of them as a journalist and pundit, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal went through several incarnations, made powerful friends (Nasser), powerful enemies (Sadat), and outlived them all. And then played a major role in recording the history of his times. He was often as controversial as he was prolific. But he remained to the end a major voice in Egypt and the Arab World as a whole as a journalist and author, and in the past decade in a lecture series for Al-Jazeera.
I've known enough of the players in those years to know that many of them felt Heikal's books distorted facts and claimed greater knowledge than he possessed, and they may be right, but he wrote so many books that he may well control the narrative. Most people write only one memoir (Sadat is an exception), but Heikal wrote many. Al-Ahram, which he long edited, remembers him here.
He cut his journalistic teeth covering the Battle of Al-Alamein in 1942; he started out with the English-language Egyptian Gazette. He later moved to the weekly Akher Saa and then to Akhbar al-Yom. He first met Gamal Abdel Nasser during the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, and was with the Free Officers on the night of the 1952 coup.
With Nasser at Al-Ahram
His golden age was the Nasser era. His 17 years as Editor of Al-Ahram (1957-1974), and his reported role as a ghostwriter for Nasser's Philosophy of the Revolution cemented his role as the public interpreter of Nasserism. To some, he was an apologist, though he liked to portray himself as a trusted adviser. He straddled the line between journalism and government.
After Nasser died, Heikal never enjoyed as close a relationship with Sadat. He remained at the helm of Al-Ahram through the 1973 war, but in 1974 Sadat replaced him as Editor. He fell out further over the peace with Israel, and in 1981 Sadat jailed him in a widespread crackdown on his critics. After Sadat's assassination and Heikal's release, he wrote a book, Autumn of Fury (Kharif al-Ghadab), ostensibly about the Sadat assassination but really a scathing treatment of Sadat's whole career, retailing every scurrilous rumor, with or without evidence. Though the book was banned in Egypt for years, the jailed journalist had his revenge.
Heikal was a frequent critic of Mubarak. He never took a full-time newspaper post again but wrote columns and articles for a variety of papers and magazines across the Arab world. In 2003, at age 80, he announced he was stopping writing. But he continued his commentaries in interviews, two "lecture series" on Al-Jazeera, and after Al-Jazeera became anathema in Egypt, with the Egyptian satellite channel CBC.
Whatever else one may think of Heikal as a reporter, analyst, and commentator, no other Arab journalist enjoyed so long and prominent a career.
As many of you will be aware, tomorrow, July 23, will mark 63 years since the Naguib/Nasser coup against King Farouq in Egypt. It will be the seventh July 23 since I began this blog in 2009, and even a historian of Egypt starts to run out of ideas without repeating himself. I've read most though probably not all of the Free Officers' memoirs, but there are still some lingering mysteries. One involves the evening of July 22, the night before the coup, so I'll post it today rather than tomorrow.
Anwar Sadat's memoirs (or at least some of them; he retold his life several times), those of his wife Jehan, and most other standard accounts of the coup agree on one thing: Anwar Sadat, later Egypt's third President, nearly missed the coup because he was at the movies when his co-conspirators were trying to locate him. I am not the first person to wonder: what movie or movies were they watching, and at what theater? (Let me warn you now: at the end of this post, neither one of us will know the answer for certain.)
I can't answer the question, because Sadat, the old revolutionary and underground conspirator, never told us more than he wanted us to know, and he often told different stories, In the summer of 1981 on his last visit to Washington before his assassination, US media reported (I don't have the citation at hand but remember the event) that Sadat reportedly told President Ronald Reagan that he'd been attending one of Reagan's movies. I thought then and think now that Sadat, who had been lionized in the US media for the peace with Israel and was probably more popular in Washington than Cairo, was flattering Reagan and again rewriting his autobiography, though I suppose I could be wrong. Anyone with access to Egyptian newspaper files from 1952 who can check the cinema listings for July 22 might be able to confirm if any Reagan movies were playing that night.
The Sadat Autobiography Problem
I've never bothered because Sadat retold his life several times and each time told it a bit differently. I have sometimes wondered if by that summer of 1981, when he was lionized in America but jailing former allies in Egypt, if he was even certain of the truth of what happened in 1952: it's well known (ask NBC's Brian Williams) that if you keep telling the same story often enough you will believe it yourself.
In the 1950s when Sadat was editor of the popular revolutionary paper al-Goumhuriyya, he wrote his first round of memoirs: Al-Qissa al-Kamila min al-Thawra (The Complete Story of the Revolution, 1954), which must not really have been complete since in 1955 he wrote Safahat Majhula (Unknown Pages [of the Revolution]); and in 1957 the English-language account Revolt on the Nile, which is not in fact a translation of either of the Arabic works but does not contradict them. Then in 1958 came YaWaladi Hadha ‘Ammak Gamal: Mudhakirat Anwar al-Sadat (My Son: This is Your Uncle Gamal: The Memoirs of Anwar al-Sadat).
That amounts to four memoirs of himself or the revolution in the Nasser era: the mere title of the last (the one I've never seen) indicating Sadat, as Editor of al-Goumhuriyya, was doing his job as a sycophantic propagandist for Nasser. Then. in 1978 after his trip to Jerusalem, came his official autobiography, called in Arabic Al-Bahth ‘an al-Dhat and in English, where it was a bestseller, In Search of Identity.
That's still not all. Sadat often retold stories of his life in speeches and, before his death in 1981 was retelling his life in a weekly feature in his National Democratic Party's weekly magazine Oktober. I have some of these in a file but not all, and have no idea if they were ever compiled.
Sadat may have come to believe his own retellings, or they could have been true and those written in the Nasser era mere sycophantic propaganda. Or, as I suspect is true of many political memoirs, they could be a melange of truth, self-justification, recycled and improved memories, inventions, and just plain bullshit. I'm guessing the Reagan tale falls in that last category, but may be wrong.
But to Return to July 22 . . .
Most biographical and autobiographical accounts agree that Sadat returned from deployment in Sinai, taking the train to Cairo because he had learned the coup was imminent. As no one from the Free Officers met him, he resolved to go with the family to the cinema. There is some confusion about who was along. Earlier accounts said his wife and children; In Search of Identity said his wife; Jehan Sadat's autobiography says her parents were invited and implies they attended. Sadat was late returning home, various accounts putting it at 11 or 12 pm.
Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, whose Autumn of Fury appeared after Sadat's assassination and repeats every scurrilous rumor he could find about the man who imprisoned him, alludes to an alleged tale that Sadat got into a public argument at the cinema, implying he was creating a public alibi if the coup failed, though even Heikal doesn't go so far as to insist the tale is true. There is no question that Sadat did join the plotters later that night, and broadcast the first announcement on he radio the next morning.
Many accounts suggest that the cinema in question was one of the outdoor "summer cinemas" common in Cairo in the days before widespread air conditioning. These open-air theaters (like American drive-ins but with folding chairs instead of car parking) were summer-only, opened at sundown, and ran two or three features, usually not first-run films. There were once dozens around Cairo. (A 2006 Egypt Today article by film director Mohamed Khan remembered these as well as the indoor downtown cinemas of the classic era; that site is no longer online, but you can find the text through the Wayback Machine, here.)
A few years ago a mailing list of old Cairo hands to which I belong was waxing nostalgic about these outdoor cinemas when an Egyptian contributor expressed the opinion that Sadat had attended either the old Cinema Rio in the Bab al-Luq/Midan Falaki neighborhood, or one of two open-air theaters on Manyal Roda, the names of which I don't recall, and I can't now find the post. (Anyone knowing please chime in in the comments.) I have no idea if that has any basis in fact, but I do remember the Cinema Rio, which was still in business in the 1970s. Back in 2011 CairObserverposted photos of the ruined hulk of the Rio today, for those who remember its glory days.
Does it matter which theater Sadat attended, or what film(s) he saw? Perhaps not in the greater scheme of things, but given the fact that Sadat nearly missing the revolution is a key bit of mythology about the 1952 coup, the inconsistencies in the accounts (and the story he told Reagan), it's an interesting little historical question. Anyone with answers, please comment below.
For Egyptians, the 6th of October is Egyptian Military Day, marking the initially successful assault across the Suez Canal, still celebrated as a victory despite the far from conclusive outcome of the war. The "crossing," (al-‘ubur), as it came to be called, was seen as redemption for the disastrous defeat of 1967 and opened the door to negotiations, the reopening of the Canal, and eventually the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
It is still a holiday in Egypt, celebrated with parades and military fly-bys. But the date is also the anniversary of another October 6, eight years later in 1981, when President Anwar Sadat was assassinated while reviewing the Military Day parade. Subsequent years' celebration of Military Day rarely allude to the double nature of the anniversary
The photo above shows a rare appearance of then-Field Marshal Sisi in public with his wife, Intissar Amer. It dispelled rumors that she wears he full veil, but indications so far re that she will keep a low public profile when she becomes Egypt's First Lady. During the Presidencies of Anwar Sadat and Husni Mubarak, when the title "First Lady" was applied as a semi-official title and the incumbents had a highly-visible public profile. made the President's wife a public figure on he world stage, but not all of Egypt's first ladies have been as high-profile as Jehan Sadat and Suzanne Mubarak.
Under the monarchy, of course, the queens had a high public profile. Fuad I's Queen, Nazli, and Farouq's Queens, Farida and, after their divorce, Nariman, were given the public roles due to royalty on the European model. Of Middle Eastern monarchies, Egypt and Jordan gave their queens high levels of publicity and public role, unlike Morocco or the Arab Gulf monarchies. But there has been considerable variation since the fall of the monarchy. Omitting transitional and interim figures:
Muhammad Naguib's wife, ‘A'isha Muhammad Labib, who was at least his second wife, played no real public role and remains little known. Some references even give her the first name ‘Aziza.
Nasser and Tahia's Wedding
Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser's wife had a more public role, though not nearly as visible as her two successors. Tahia Kazem, also called Tahia ‘Abdel Nasser,was the daughter of an Iranian father and Egyptian-Iranian mother. She was frequently photographed with her husband and children but did not have the high profile public role of her two successors.
During Nasser's Presidency
Tahia, who died in 1990, wrote a memoir of her life with Nasser which was not intended for publication. It was finally published in 2011 in Arabic, and last year in English. She thus joined, belatedly, Jehan Sadat in publishing her memoirs.
Jehan Sadat
Anwar Sadat's wife, Jehan, became the first Egyptian First Lady to play a major role in public, and to achieve international fame.in her own right. Jehan Safwat Ra'ouf, better known as Jehan El Sadat, married Sadat in 1949, shortly after his divorce from his first wife, Iqbal Mahdi, by whom he had three daughters. Jehan was the teenaged daughter of an Egyptian doctor and his British wife. (Many Egyptians believe that her mother was actually Maltese, but public documents show her mother was from Sheffield, as she asserts in her memoir. Some suggest the Maltese rumor may have originated when the Free Officers did not want to seem linked to the British occupation.) During the Sadat years the term First Lady (al-Sayyida al-Ula) began to be regularly, if unofficially, used. After Sadat's assassination, Jehan worked to keep his legacy alive, in part through the Anwar Sadat Chair at the University of Maryland. where she is a senior fellow.
Suzanne Mubarak
Husni Mubarak's wife. Suzanne Thabet, officially known as Suzanne Mubarak, is, like her predecessor, the daughter of an Egyptian doctor and a British mother, in her case a Welsh nurse. Like her predecessor she had a high profile, founded or was patron of schools and charities, and is believed to have been a strong supporter that her younger son Gamal should succeed his father. She was reported to be writing her memoirs before the Revolution broke out, and after the revolution Rose al-Youssef published what it claimed were excerpts, but many believe these, such as other leaks purporting to be her husbands memoirs, are a hoax.The source is highly dubious, to be generous.
Muhammad Morsi's wife, Nagla' ‘Ali Mahmoud, was a striking departure from her two fashionable predecessors. She wore the hijab, flatly refused to be called First Lady (saying she preferred "Umm Ahmad"), but she did give occasional interviews and discuss her role.
Which brings us to Madame Sisi, Intissar Amer. Sisi has said that they met in secondary school and he married her on graduation from the Military Academy in 1977. She is said to dislike public appearances and has not pursued a career, preferring to raise her family. She does not dress as conservatively as rumors speculated, but modestly, at least based on that one photo, but from what is known of her she is likelier to follow the Tahia Nasser model than the Jehan Sadat or Suzanne Mubarak one.
April 25 is not just Anzac Day; in Egypt it is also Sinai Liberation Day, the date in 1982 when Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai (except for Taba, which went to arbitration).
Israel occupied all of Sinai in 1967; after the 1973 war and the Kissinger shuttles it withdrew from the zone along the Suez Canal.
Only in the 1979 peace treaty did Israel agree to withdraw completely by 1982.
The Egyptian patriotic video below touches most of the key points: the crossing of the Canal in the 1973 war; Sadat in wartime command; Sadat at he Knesset in 1977; Sadat, Carter, and Begin signing either the Camp David Accords or the peace treaty; lowering the Israeli flag and raising the Egyptian one.
In an online, social-media poll for Time's Person of the Year (which is NOT the way the winner is chosen: the Editors will do that), Egypt's General Sisi ran first, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan second. and Miley Cyrus placed third. Are you surprised so many people outside their home countries even know who Sisi and Erdoğan even are, when neither man is known to have made any naked music videos with a sledgehammer? (Though that's a thought.) Best guess: they don't. This sounds like national campaigns to promote the local hero through padding the online vote. (Pope Francis ran behind, but he wasn't urging his followers to tweet their votes for him.)
1977: Not General Sisi
Remember, this was a Twitter-driven poll, not Time's actual choice. Anwar Sadat did win the honor in 1977 after his trip to Jerusalem.
A hat tip to Ursula Lindsey at The Arabistfor my belated discovery of this gem from Nael Shama at Le Monde Dipomatique in English: "Understanding Cairo." Egypt's Presidents (with one exception) are assessed as not understanding the capital. Read it all, but it offers such a refreshing insight and a new spin on recent events that I think it deserves rather extensive excerpts:
Modern Egyptian rulers failed to unravel the secrets of the city,
abandoning it at times, unleashing their wrath against it at other times
— always failing to understand it. They mistook Cairo’s patience for
apathy, overlooking the fact that, like all old cities, it is both wise
and resilient. It smiles in the face of hardships, bears the ebbs of
time with a strong heart, but in response to tyrants, it doesn’t murmur:
it shouts.
President Anwar Sadat sought solace in his village house in Mit Abu
El-Kom, in Menoufia Governorate, away from Cairo’s political traffic
jams. Sadat was not returning to his roots in a quest to consolidate
family ties or evoke sweet childhood memories. Sadat hated Cairo and its
unruly people . . .
Likewise, from the late 1990s until 2011, President Hosni Mubarak — and
his “royal” entourage — spent long periods of time in the resort town of
Sharm al-Sheikh, far away from Cairo’s oven-like heat and suffocating
air pollution . . .
. . . In the tranquility of his comfortable exile, Mubarak could block out what
had become of Egypt during his three-decade rule: a despairing nation, a
corrupt and dysfunctional state, a failing economy addicted to foreign
largesse, crumbling services, an ailing infrastructure, a population
boom (more than a million new souls every year), a fading grandeur
replaced by a pitiable image in the region and beyond. Yet Mubarak’s
flight to the periphery did not bring the core to rest: Cairo bent under
Mubarak, but it did not break. Eventually, Cairenes flocked to Tahrir
Square, Cairo’s (and Egypt’s) center, to seal Mubarak’s fate.
. . . Morsi’s downfall was also partly because he didn’t understand Cairo.
Despite the MB’s successive ballot box victories in post-Mubarak Egypt,
it was Cairo that slowed down the group’s foray into the territory
abandoned by Mubarak and his defeated, dissolved party. In Cairo, Morsi
lost both rounds of the presidential elections (May-June 2012) as well
as the referendum on the constitution (December 2012).
Morsi visited Tahrir Square only once after his election victory.
This visit came on his first day as president, in order to celebrate his
victory among his supporters and, in hindsight, to pay farewell to the
central square of a city he so quickly and foolishly lost. Morsi
remained oblivious to the threat posed by Cairo’s recalcitrance until
the very end.
The exception? Who's left?:
Only Nasser — who clipped the wings of the aristocracy and uplifted
the poor, creating a viable middle class — bonded with Cairo. The
expansion in education and health services and the establishment of an
industry-oriented public sector gave rise to, and consolidated, Egypt’s
middle class in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956, he vowed steadfastness
against the tripartite aggression (Suez) from the rostrum of the widely
revered Al-Azhar mosque, in the heart of Cairo’s old Islamic city. “I am
here in Cairo with you and my children are also here in Cairo. I did
not send them away [for protection from air raids],” he said, to affirm
his loyalty to the city.
Nasser did not travel much during his reign. He was not a big fan of
the tourist retreats of Egypt’s pre-revolution aristocracy. He stayed in
Cairo, and there he died. In the autumn of 1970, Nasser resided for a
few days in Cairo’s posh Nile Hilton during the emergency Arab summit
convened to put an end to the bloody Palestinian-Jordanian conflict —
Black September. On the night of September 27th, on the balcony of his
hotel room that overlooked River Nile, Kasr El-Nil Bridge and the lights
of the city that never sleeps, he told his friend Mohamed Heikal: “This
is the best view in the world.” On the following day, he died.
There's a genuine truth in this piece, and one that goes far to explain the deep differences among Egyptians today. Read the whole thing, though. At least twice.
I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've
prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural
interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There
will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on
current developments as required.
"The Army Carries Out a Peaceful Military Movement."
"Dismissal of a Number of Senior Officers and Protection if Public Faciilities."
In the ensuing 70 years the Army was rarely directly involved in politics, given the presence of British troops in Egypt as a counterbalance. There were some military plots during the Second World War, and military dissatisfaction with King Farouq began to build after the defeat in the 1948 First Palestine War/Israeli War of Independence.
Sixty-one years ago today, all that changed. A group of dissatisfied officers, mostly colonels and lower but including General Muhammad Naguib, seized power, deposed the King, and the following year declared a republic.
The Free Officers (1st row: Nasser, Naguib, Abdel Hakim Amer, Sadat)
In many ways all of Egyptian history since July 23, 1952 (labeled a "Revolution" after the fact) grew from the events of that day. With the exception of the one year from last July to this one, the Army has directly or indirectly been the primary source of legitimacy in Egypt ever since. With the Army now back in power it will be interesting to see how July 23, still Egypt's national day, is officially marked.
I have posted so often about 1952 that there is little new to add. You can read my posts from July of 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, as well as all my posts tagged Naguib, Nasser, or Sadat, since all three of Republican Egypt's first three Presidents were senior figures in the original Free Officers.
The coup itself was a classic one and became a model for the Arab military regimes of the 1950s and 1960s, with other countries' officers even adopting the name Free Officers and/or calling their junta a Revolutionary Command Council. After the Army's not-a-coup-really on July 3, the Denver Post posted a collection of photos of the preludes to the coup (including Black Saturday) and the coup itself, including some of the same photos I posted last Friday.
Naguib and Nasser
Although Muhammad Naguib was the ostensible leader of the coup and became first Prime Minister and then, after the proclamation of the republic, Egypt's first President, he was soon eclipsed by his Prime Minister, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and finally deposed by him; Naguib remained a nonperson until the Sadat years, but has been somewhat rehabilitated since.
Nasser became a symbol for the Arab world, first as the man who ended the British role in Egypt and then, in 1956, resisted the triple invasion of the British and French colonial powers plus Israel. Until his image received a setback in 1967 Nasser was enormously popular.
Naguib Outflanked
Nasser's socialist reforms were less successful and his introduction of a national security state that became the model of the mukhabarat republics that dominated the Arab world for years casts a shadow on his memory, but he still as many admirers.
The third President from the Free Officers, Anwar Sadat, has also had a mixed legacy. Having lived in Egypt for two of the eleven years of his Presidency, I can attest to the shifts in his image through the years. At first seen as very much in Nasser's shadow, the 1973 war made him a hero. His 1977 trip to Israel and subsequent peace treaty was much less popular, and led to Egypt's ostracism from the Arab world. By 1981 he had become increasingly repressive, and his funeral after his assassination that year was attended mainly by foreign dignitaries with most Egyptians excluded, a sharp contrast to the millions who turned out for Nasser's. Yet now, more than 30 years later, Sadat is increasingly popular in retrospect and often referred to as a martyred President.
Egypt's fourth President, Husni Mubarak, was too junior to have been in the Free Officers (he graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1950), but he was very much a product of its legacy. Of Egypt's leaders since 1952, only Muhammad Morsi had no links to it. The Free Officers were forged in the 1948 war with Israel and led Egypt during the 1956, 1967, War of Attrition and 1973 wars. (By contrast, the current military chief, Gen. Sisi, is the first modern Egyptian military chief with no combat experience, being commissioned in 1977.)
So 1952, whether seen as a coup or a revolution, has dominated Egypt ever since.
Two videos, both in Arabic (though the first is probably self-explanatory, showing scenes of the coup; the second is Naguib addressing the country after the coup:
That's all I know. Don't know where; don't know when. Certainly don't know why. It looks like during his Presidency, which was long after she played Cleopatra.
Beginning spontaneously when the government lifted subsidies on flour and other necessities, they spread throughout the country until put down by the military. They were an early echo of the dissidence that would eventually bring down Mubarak (who was then Vice President under Anwar Sadat). I wasn't in Egypt during the bread riots, but arrived for a year's stay a few months later, and heard stories of how intense they had been; there were apparently moments when Anwar Sadat contemplated leaving the country.
You wouldn't know that from this 1977 CBS 60 Minutes report in which Sadat seems confident of his own popularity. (Egyptian Presidents in denial is not a new thing.) Sorry, but you have to watch an ad before the clip.
Gen. Shazly fourth from left, next to Sadat during October 1973 War
Though Muhammad Morsi was not, as the ludicrous ad in my previous post implied, the "Comander of the Great October Victory" in 1973, Egypt's first civilian President will preside over tomorrow's celebration of Egyptian Military Day, on the 39th anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal on October 6, 1973. In advance of that, he earlier this week made an intriguing if somewhat contradictory gesture, by posthumously awarding the Order of the Nile to two key figures of that crossing, former President Anwar Sadat and General Saad El Shazly, Chief of Staff at the time, fired in the midst of the war, and later an outspoken foe of Sadat's from exile. Shazly is widely considered the architect of the successful crossing of the Canal and taking of the Israeli Bar-Lev line of defenses.
The Order of the Nile
Shazly, who died at age 88 on February 10, 2011 (the day before Husni Mubarak resigned), was previously discussed here. Morsi presented the medals to the Shazly family and to Gamal al-Sadat, the President's son, a few days ago. As Zeinobia notes, there may have been some awkwardness in presenting the two awards on the same day, given the later enmity between Sadat and Shazly, but whatever their later history, both men were responsible for the successful military operation, hence the award of Egypt's highest honor. The fact that the awards were made by Egypt's first civilian President and a longtime Muslim Brotherhood member at that, seems to be part of Morsi's effort to reassure the Egyptian establishment.
The photo below is of Gamal al-Sadat receiving his father's award from Morsi.
I'm two days late with this, but July 18 marked the 40th anniversary of Anwar Sadat's expulsion of Soviet advisers from Egypt in July of 1972. In my musings last month on my own 40th anniversary of arriving in the Middle East for the first time, I noted that Soviet and East Bloc advisers were still very much on evidence when I got there. They remained so up to the 1973 war, but the expulsion of the military "advisers" (many of were actually flying aircraft, manning SAM sites, etc., though that was not acknowledged) in the summer of 1972, was memorable, however. I was living in an apartment along the Nile, and as we looked out from our balcony one day after we'd been there a month or so, we watched waves of big Antonov transports flying eastward over the city. In retrospect they were probably flying our of Cairo West and other bases to the west of the city, heading back to the USSR. At the time we feared it was a major buildup moving troops to the Suez Canal. Either later that day or the next day, all was explained when it was announced that the Soviet advisers (some 20,000 of them) had been kicked out.
In this chaotic year for Egypt, another politician with a legacy name has passed away, only weeks agter Khalid Abdel Nasser died. Talaat al-Sadat, nephew of President Anwar Sadat, has died of a heart attack at age 64. A maverick politician who opposed Husni Mubarak and was once prosecuted and jailed for suggesting the Army was behind the Sadat assassination, he somewhat inexplicably became the last head of Mubarak's National Democratic Party after Mubarak's departure and before the party's dissolution. More on him here and here, and Zeinobia's assessment here.
As I already noted earlier today, October 6 is not only Egyptian Military Day, it is also the day on which Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981: 30 years ago today. I already reflected on Sadat's mixed legacies at home and abroad on last October 6, .but this excerpt from an unfinished novel by Maria Golia, consisting of memories of that day.is posted at The Arabist today, and it reminded me of another such reminiscence,by an old colleague now in Burundi who blogs as Diana Buja, who was working on a project in Upper Egypt at the time, where the security jitters were particularly intense. During the Revolution in February, she posted her memories,appropriate enough since that moment in 1981 also marked the beginning of the almost (but not quite!) endless Mubarak era. [Belated correction: correct link is now here. It didn't previously work.]
One needs to remember, too, that this was before the wave of poltiicial assassinations by Islamist militants in the early 1990s. Despite occasional failed attempts in the Nasser and Sadat eras, in 1981 no senior official had been killed in a political assassinstion since the days of the monarchy. Egyptians and foreigners living there were equally shocked.
Do read both of these accounts. I might as well tell my own. I was then in Washington, but preparing to go to Cairo for a military equipment exhibition scheduled for a couple of weeks later. The publications group I then worked for was a co-sponsor of some sort, and we had even prepared a bilingual program with me and some Arabic translator colleagues having to learn military equipment vocabulary in order to edit it. An old friend and fellow Cairo hand woke me with a phone call to tell me about the first confused reports coming in. In those pre-all-news-channel days we were dependent on television networks, and information coming out of Cairo was scarce.An old Egyptian journalist friend, Muhammad Hakki, had just become Sadat's spokesman a short time before and I saw him several times on television; then he disappeared. I later learned that though he was new in the job, Mubarak wanted his own man in and sacked him.
My own memories are more relevant if I move on to the stay in Cairo (about a week I think), which would have been around the third week in October, with the assassination still fresh. Field Marshal Abu Ghazala, the patron of the military exhibition and the Defense Minister, had been standing next to Sadat on one side (with Mubarak on the other), but was determined that the show must go on. However, since it was well within the 40-day period of mourning, the parties and receptions that defense firms usually stage for such shows were canceled or toned down. (Everything was taking place on an Air Base, so of course security was high.)
I remember seeing armored vehicles in Tahrir Square, which had for the moment been renamed Midan Anwar al-Sadat. Thankfully, that did not last (though the subway station s still Sadat Station). "Sadat Square" just would ot have worked as a rallying symbol.
A funny story made the rounds at the time and was pretty universally believed to be true among the attendees at the defense exhibition, though as usual in these cases there was no public record. In the confusion of the assassination's aftermath (or perhaps just because of an Egyptian bureaucratic turf war), the Gumruk, the customs authority, was holding up all the military equipment at the airport claiming the Defense Ministry hadn't cleared the paperwork. All the big defense firms were desperately greasing palms to get the equipment in the country.
As the story goes, due to the customs hangup, the French armored vehicle firm Panhard did not get one of their armored fighting vehicles cleared until sometime well after midnight. Though a wheeled vehicle, the Panhard had a turret with a gun and thus, while not a tank (it didn't have treads) most people would call it a tank. It was on a flatbed truck, or so the story went, and the drivers started into town from the airport looking for the military base where the show sas being held. They didn't know the way and everything was closed. Finally they saw a big building with lots of lights on in the wee small hours and decided to pull up to it and ask directions. So they pull up to the lighted compound with their armored fighting vehicle, complete with cannon, in plain view . . .
It was ‘Uruba Palace, where Mubarak was staying.
According to the various versions I heard, Egyptian security hit all their panic buttons and the French found their truck a subject of considerable excitement. Eventually, it sank in that it wasn't a coup attempt but some lost French.
Now, I wasn't there. I'm sure officially it never happened, and I didn't see it (though I had the vehicle in question pointed out to me several times). But that's my anecdote about the jitters the assassination provoked, even if his happened two weeks or so later.
The Middle East is somewhat notorious for its fondness for conspiracy theories (the "Byzantine" part of "Byzantine plot," of course, is from the region). Perhaps it was inevitable that, nearly 30 years after the event, the Anwar Sadat assassination that made Husni Mubarak President would be a subject of debate after Mubarak's fall. Zeinobia rounds up some of the recent claims and allegations (her post is in English but many of her embedded TV clips are in Arabic). Lately various members of the Sadat family have been reviving old rumors, and the release of long-imprisoned conspirator ‘Abboud al-Zumur, who has hinted at conspiracies beyond those arrested, has sparked new speculation suggesting Mubarak somehow was involved, or was at least aware of the plot.
Personally, I'll take a lot more convincing. Most versions of some sort of top level plot involve both Mubarak (who despite being next to Sadat got a minor finger wound) and then-Defense Minister Field Marshal Abu Ghazala (who had a bullet through his uniform hat but wasn't even grazed). Mubarak, after years of depending on him, fired Abu Ghazala in 1989 and he was later disgraced in a sex scandal his friends thought was trumped up by State Security; he died a couple of years ago or so. I think if he had knowledge of a plot involving Mubarak and himself he'd have taken more people down with him. The old cui bono or "who benefits?" suspicion has led to theories that Andrew Johnson was involved in Lincoln's assassination or Lyndon Johnson in JFK's, and absent any actual evidence I think the rumors about Mubarak are just paranoid speculation. But read Zeinobia's piece anyway, especially if you can watch the videos in Arabic.
Personal note for full disclosure: I was in Cairo just a couple of weeks after the assassination and interviewed Abu Ghazala on that visit and on other occasions, so I may have some biases.
At a moment of supreme crisis in Egypt, it has ironically lost a war hero and military commander who also became a prominent dissident and spent years in exile. General Saad al-Shazly, (also see this link), Chief of Staff during the 1973 war and architect of "the crossing" — Operation Badr to cross the Suez Canal and breach the Bar-Lev line — but who was removed by Anwar Sadat and named as Ambassador to London, has died, on February 9 in Egypt, at age 88. In the picture above left, he is to the left of Sadat (Sadat's own right) during the war. Later (after Shazly became a dissident) Sadat claimed he was fired for wanting to withdraw troops and that he had had a breakdown. Shazly denied those claims, which were not made at the time, but years later.
Shazly was named Ambassador to London and later, Portugal. (The photo at right is from his diplomatic days.) After the Camp David Accords, Shazly broke with Sadat. He was dismissed and went into exile. His 1980 book The Crossing of the Suez told his side of the story, but led to charges of writing a book without permission (which he didn't deny) and revealing military secrets (which he denied)., and conviction in absentia.
After years in exile, he returned to Egypt in 1992 and served half of his three-year sentence.
Shazly had apparently been seriously ill for some time. If Egypt were not preoccupied by other events, it would be interesting to see how he was remembered. At least, Al-Ahram noted his passing. Though it fudges the exile (saying only that he left Egypt in 1978 and returned in 1992) and fails to mention the jail time, at least it was noted.
I've posted about Anwar Sadat several times, most recently and fully on October 6, the anniversary of his launching of the 1973 war and, eight years later to the day, of his assassination. Today for my Weekend Historical Videos, I've again raided YouTube for some weekend clips for you. The first three clips show the trip to Jerusalem through the Camp David accords; the last two are of the Sadat assassination. Unfortunately I couldn't find a good (free) clip in English, for the Jerusalem trip. There are some English segments where Sadat and Begin are speaking in English, but the narrative is in Hebrew (and my Hebrew is rudimentary at best, which is a gross exaggeration even then), while Sadat of course is speaking Arabic. But even so, I think you'll get a lot of the gist.
Whereas Nasser died before I ever visited the Middle East, I lived in Egypt for two of Sadat's 11 years as President, watched the parade when he returned from the Knesset, and was in Cairo again only a couple of weeks after the assassination. If you had asked me when I first lived in Egypt in 1972 if we would ever see the picture that appears above right, I'd have said not in my lifetime. Yet it happened seven years later. (Sadat, Jimmy Carter, and Menahem Begin, for those of you who weren't born yet.)
October 6 is, as I noted last year, a curious double anniversary in Egypt: Sadat's greatest pride was the crossing of the Suez Canal on October 6, 1973, restoring the honor of Egyptian arms after the debacle of 1967; even if the 1973 war had its reverses as well. October 6 became Egyptian Military Day (it still is), and it was at a Military Day Parade in 1981 that Sadat was assassinated. (Two years later, at an Egyptian Military Day reception at Fort Myer, I met the lady who would become my wife, but that's another story, and off-topic.)
Sadat's legacy is somewhat curious. In life, he had more admirers toward the end in the US than at home. In death, he remains controversial: one's opinion of his opening to peace with Israel is part of it, but his drastic crackdowns on many elements of Egyptian society in his last months have soiled his reputation at home. He was a better diplomat and strategist, perhaps, than executive of Egypt with its many problems and challenges.
One thing for certain: Sadat was interesting in ways that Husni Mubarak is not. He loved the dramatic reversal: purging the Nasserists of the ‘Ali Sabri group (his "Corrective Revolution" of 1971, though some saw it as a counterrevolution), throwing Russian advisors out of Egypt in 1972, launching an attack across the Suez Canal in 1973, shifting to a US alliance in 1974-75 and, of course, offering to go to the Knesset — and then actually going — in 1977, and Camp David in 1979. The assassination of Sadat also marks 29 years of Husni Mubarak's rule, and one has to say that, whatever else, any given year of Sadat held more surprises than all 29 of Mubarak's put together. Of course, that's the stability Mubarak's supporters see as his legacy.
Sadat's success on the international stage may have served as the nemesis that undermined his leadership at home. As Time's Man of the Year, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a regular on the American TV networks, Sadat was on a global stage, and like many world leaders, seemed to believe his own publicity. But not all was well. Earlier in 1977 (the year of the trip to the Knesset), major bread riots broke out in Egypt, leading to use of the Army to calm things down, a rare use of the military as opposed to the security services. The first stirrings of radical Islamist violence were being felt. Sadat's infitah or "opening" economically opened up the economy a bit but also encouraged corruption. Domestically, he did not enjoy the success he relished on the international stage.
And the man's style was very different from Nasser's. Nasser always sought to be the man of the people; Sadat preferred some combination of paternalistic village elder (when he went to his home village of Mit Abu'l-Qom, he'd pose in galabiyya, smoking a pipe) and hints of pharaonic splendor.
Sadat redesigned the dress uniform of senior officers (actually, I think he had Pierre Cardin or someone similar design it) as shown at left. It had some faintly Pharaonic touches, but he also posed with a field marshal's baton with the lotus and papyrus emblems of Upper and Lower Egypt, a distinctly Pharaonic touch. I couldn't find a photo online, however.
When his assassins were on trial, his primary assassin publicly boasted "I killed Pharaoh." This was not just a reference to Pharaoh as a monarch: in the Qur'an, Fir‘awn, Pharaoh, symbolizes worldly power and corrupt tyranny, so it has an Islamic as well as an Egyptian reference.
His ego grew with the Nobel Prize and international fame: his autobiography In Search of Identity rewrote the earlier versions of the Free Officers he'd published in the fifties under Nasser, and took more credit for himself. He kept rewriting his own autobiography until I'm not sure he knew the truth himself.
While many Arabs (and Egyptians) still disagree with his opening to Israel, that is not, contrary to the usual assumption in the West, what led to his death (though it was surely part of the mix). In the summer and fall of 1981 he cracked down on all his enemies at once: he jailed the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood and also exiled the Coptic Pope to a desert monastery; he jailed Mohammed Hassanein Heikal (who after his death wrote a take-no-prisoners deconstruction of Sadat called Autumn of Fury; it remains the most savage interpretation of the man I know of, and a lesson in why you shouldn't jail journalists). And he was rounding up opposition party heads (even the ancient Fuad Serageddin, King Farouq's last Interior Minister and head of the Wafd Party) and jailing them as well. More and more, he appeared in military uniform; in Nasser's later years, he rarely did so.
In the end, in this period of high tension and repression, Sadat was gunned down on the eighth anniversary of his proudest triumph. (Two innocent bystanders were collateral damage: the Omani Ambassador and Coptic Bishop Samweel, head of the interim bishops' council Sadat named to replace the exiled Pope; both were behind him on the reviewing stand and died in the crossfire.)
I noted last week the contrasts between the funerals of Nasser and Sadat. To be fair to the latter, since he died by assassination, the security establishment he had retained from Nasser's day was naturally paranoid (as security establishments tend to be) and did not trust the populace to attend. Two or three weeks later, when I was in Cairo, armored vehicles were still parked around Tahrir Square.
Sadat's historic accomplishments need no apologies: the Canal crossing, the strategic shift to the West, the peace with Israel.
In his own country, his memory is more ambiguous than in the West, but he still has many admirers. And of course, the ending, while memorable, was violent, and one of the more violent early manifestations of Islamist fury.
Does anyone immediately recognize (if you haven't read the title) the elderly gentleman at the right, photographed in his last year of life, aged 83? (Scanned from the memoir published in the year he died; hence the page crease.) The year was 1984, and aspects of his life were indeed Orwellian: for decades he was an "unperson."
Today is July 23, the anniversary of Egypt's 1952 Revolution, and Egypt's National Day. One of the difficulties with being in my second year of blogging is that when a major date comes along like today, I have to think of something different from what I did last year, when I reflected on the 1952 Revolution, since all I have to do is hot link to that for you to reread my thoughts, and have just done so. So for this year's July 23 post, let's remember the Revolution's nearly forgotten man, Egypt's first President.
Line 1 of the Cairo Metro, the first one to open, has stations named Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. It wasn't until Line 2 came along that Egypt's first President, Muhammad Naguib, got his station, shown at left. Naguib tends to be the forgotten President, in part at least because he endured that Orwellian "unperson" status for most of the 1950s and 1960s, and really only re-emerged in public awareness in the last years of his life, between Sadat's death in 1981 and Naguib's own in 1984.
In the early days of the Revolution, however, Naguib was the visible face, as seen by his appearance on the cover of Time — in that era, the sign that a foreign ruler had made it into the big leagues, like the cover of Rolling Stone would later be for musicians — for September 8, 1952 (below right). And the cover story, entitled "Egypt: A Good Man" showed that Time, at least, liked him far better than it would ever like Nasser:
Naguib is a "strong man"—but he neither looks nor acts the part. He lives in a modest suburban house with his wife and three young sons, earns $4,000 a year, smokes cheap Toscani tobacco and drives a tiny German Opel on which he still owes three or four payments. Quiet and self-effacing, a better listener than he is a talker, he exudes an old-fashioned courtesy that echoes the prose of the Koran. How did this mild-mannered man lead a revolution in a land where corruption, disease, glaring wealth and bitter poverty are as old and as familiar as the Pyramids?
"Old fashioned courtesy that echoes the prose of the Koran?" "As old and familiar as the Pyramids." Ah, Time in Henry Luce's day certainly had its recognizable style.
Gamal Abdel Nasser was in the wings all along, but Naguib certainly thought he was more than a figurehead in his years in power.
He had become something of a celebrity in Egypt during the Palestine War/War of Israeli Independence in 1948 when he (and his subordinate Gamal Abdel Nasser) were cut off by Israelis in the "Falluja Pocket" but avoided surrendering, the only slightly bright spot in an otherwise dismal performance by the Egyptian Army.
Since Naguib's fellow Free Officers ended up writing most of the history, he is usually portrayed as having been chosen as a figurehead, with Nasser holding the real reins of the Revolution from the beginning. But Nasser and the other Free Officers were young majors and colonels, and Naguib a well-known Major General and critic of the King's Men in the military. Naguib led the Free Officers to victory in elections to the Army Officers' Club in early 1952, provoking the King to cancel the results and the Free Officers to move up their coup, which they had planned for several years later.
So Naguib became the visible face of the Revolution. Here is his first broadcast (Arabic):
Naguib became the head of the new Revolution Command Council (RCC) but did not officially take a political office at first; former Prime Minister Ali Maher was named Prime Minister. The Free Officers became frustrated with Maher and in September Naguib made himself Prime Minister. (Egypt was still, as most people forget, a monarchy; Farouq had abdicated in favor of his son Ahmad Fuad II, an infant who was in exile but theoretically reigned through a regency council. Egypt's last King is still alive, as I noted last year complete with pictures.)
Naguib remained Prime Minister and then, on June 18, 1953, proclaimed Egypt a republic (with himself as President and Prime Minister and Nasser as Deputy Prime Minister); he remained the most visible figure. But increasingly, one notices Nasser in the photos (in the picture below right, Naguib talks to Nasser and Salah Salem). (Don't Nasser's eyes look dominating?) Still, in the surviving clips from the era, Naguib seems the mature, pipe-smoking, avuncular leader (left).
Increasingly, though, the ambitious Nasser, who had been the real creator of the Free Officers (except in some of Anwar Sadat's late rewritings of his memoirs, when he tried to take credit) began accumulating the real authority, in lieu of Naguib. Finally, in February 1954 the rivalry between Naguib and Nasser became open; the Free Officers sought to replace Naguib but he regained power, though Nasser was given the title of Prime Minister and increasingly made all the decisions. Naguib failed to regain real authority and finally in November 1954 he resigned the Presidency as well.
Nasser confined Naguib to a comfortable villa but under close house arrest; as the narratives of the Revolution emerged, he was portrayed more and more as a figurehead from the beginning, though it seems clear he did not understand things that way.
Muhammad Naguib began his decades of unperson-hood, sequestered in his villa. Anwar Sadat eased the house arrest but he remained out of public view. After Sadat's 1981 assassination, with most of the original Free Officers now out of government, Naguib was allowed to emerge from obscurity, give interviews, and write his memoirs. When he died in 1984 he was given a military funeral and Husni Mubarak attended. Such items as the naming of a Metro station for him (as an afterthought after Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak stations, however, and Sadat and Mubarak are major hubs while his is a local stop) indicate that nearly 60 years after that Time cover, Egypt has finally rehabilitated its first President, even if he is still largely forgotten in a country where much of the population has grown to adulthood under a single President, Husni Mubarak, who seems to be immortal. (The Presidencies of Naguib, Nasser, and Sadat combined, 1953-1981, total about one year less than Mubarak's rule — thus far.)
Finally, a tribute on YouTube to "The First President and the First Victim." The soundtrack is Arabic music but you don't need to understand Arabic as it's just a stream of still photos.
Today was the Martin Luther King holiday in the US and I've been busy with family things, but I thought I'd offer a few quick links you might wish to check out:
Amira al-Tahawy, one of the bloggers arrested in Nag Hammadi and held in Qena, managed to conceal her cellphone and get a few pictures from captivity: the blog's in Arabic but everybody can figure out the pictures.
Anwar Sadat's first wife, Iqbal, has died at age 93. She was the mother of his three eldest daughters, but he divorced her and married his second wife Jihan, who became familiar to the world as Egypt's outspoken First Lady and as Sadat's activist widow.
The disqualification of 500 Iraqi politicians for alleged ties with the Ba‘ath has further clouded the prospects for the upcoming elections. I'll post more eventually but in the meantime you can follow coverage of the issue by Norwegian blogger Reidar Vissar, who has published a detailed series of analyses; or see shorter posts such as those by Marc Lynch, and also Juan Cole.
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