While Americans are an easy mark for those peddling dreams of personal progress, Egyptians typically fall for those promising national glory. The dirty little secret of Egypt is that individual self-worth is often tied closely to how the world perceives the country. As a result, the country has fallen victim to an increasingly more brazen set of false prophets. The refusal to allow scrutiny into the “cure” should make us suspicious of it. When it fails, there will be a rush to find the perfidious foreign powers behind the derailing of the Egyptian dream. It has been thus and will always be so, until the habit is broken. The white-hot Egyptian hyper-nationalism needs a dousing of cold water, not so much to cool it, but to shatter its illusions.
Egypt did not lack for people ready with a bucket of cold water. But the last century has seen a marginalization of such voices. In 1921 a misguided collection of prominent thinkers established the “Eastern League”. They included Rashid Reda, an early peddler of political Islamism and role model for Hassan Al Banna, and Al Ahmadi Al Zawahiri, whose grandson would take anti-Western anger to lethal heights. The elixir in their bottle was a belief that rejection of “Western values” would bring glory back to Eastern nations. Salama Moussa would spend the entire decade of the 1920s debunking such thinking with brazen assertions, both correct and provocative. His famous statement “ana kafir bil sharaq wa mu’men bil gharb ” (“I am a disbeliever in the East and a believer in the West”) was a typically over-stated appeal for universality as cure for backwardness. Taha Hussein, a more measured man and a more elegant thinker, also made the case for the universality of civilization. Ahmed Zaki Abu-Shady established the “Apollo Group” to disseminate a literary version of unapologetic modernity. In a twist of fate the group included Sayyd Qutb, whose later apostasy from universalism would make him a major bottler and distributor of the most noxious of false hopes.
It is the tragedy of Egypt that the snake oil salesmen often proved themselves the more able promoters. Sensible voices were silenced or marginalized. Salama Moussa would spend the last two decades of his life in fruitless pursuits and score-settling. Taha Hussein was relieved of his command of Egyptian education by Nasser in 1954, and spent the next two decades little affecting national life while receiving plenty of honors. Abu Shady took the easy route out in 1947 and immigrated to America. He never came back. In the meantime, men such as Qutb and Ahmad Hussein, leader of the Egyptian fascists, would visit the West and come back with fantastical tales of its decadence and immorality, and advocate authentic cures for Egyptian ills. That the patient got progressively sicker was no reflection on those cures, but on the perfidious West which conspired ceaselessly against the country.
A story is told, reliably but with no proof, that shortly before Taha Hussein’s death he was visited by a group of his old friends. There was a mention of Abu Shady in connection with an attempt to house his collected papers in an American university. The ancient men began to weep. One suspects it was as much for the country that left them as it was for the departed friend who left it.
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