I wear the weave of history like a second skin, I wake with runes of mystery of how we all begin, I walk the paths of pioneers who watched the circus start, The past now beats within me like a second heart.
Paul Hemphill. E Lucivan Le Stelle
Whilst its scope is eclectic and wide ranging in content In That Howling Infinite is especially a history blog. It’s subject matter is diverse. Politics, literature, music, and memoir are featured – but it is at its most original and informative, a miscellany of matters historical, gathered in Foggy Ruins of Time – from history’s back pages– yes, an appropriation of lyrics from two Bob Dylan Songs.
In compiling the annual retrospective for 2022, I decided I would put together a list of my favourite posts in each of the categories described above, beginning with the history ones. My primary criteria were not so much the subject matter, which is diverse, as can be seen from the ten choices (shown here in alphabetical order) but firstly, what I most enjoyed writing and secondly, those I considered the most original insofar as I referenced and republished few other voices, other than direct quotations from the sources I was consulting and books I was reviewing.
Outlaw songs and outlaw gothic are as much apart if the mythic Wild West as cowboys and gunslingers. A nostalgic canter through some of my personal favourites on records and in movies.
Androids Dolores and Teddy enjoy the Westworld view
Western folk, long on romanticism and short on historical knowledge, associate crusades and crusaders with medieval knights, red crosses emblazoned on white surcoats and shields and wielding broadswords battling it out with swarthy scimitar-swinging, be-turbaned Saracens. Here, we widen that orientalist perspective.
“… one thing is for certain: we all love a good story. As they say, in Arabic, as indeed in all tongues, times and places, “ka-n ya ma ka-n bil ‘adim izzama-n wa sa-lifi al aSri wa la-wa-n”‘ or, “once upon an time”. An original, idiosyncratic and not strictly accurate journey through those foggy ruins of time.
We know how the story of Thomas Cromwell ends. It’s how Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel gets us there that matters. Our questions here are whether Thomas could sense where it was all headed, and whether he could have quit while he was ahead.
“A wide-ranging rural road trip through England’s green and pleasant land takes the traveller by antique and desolated abbeys and monasteries, their ageing walls crumbling and lichen covered, their vaulted pediments open to the English elements. The celebrated poets of the romantic era immortalized these relics in poetry, and even today, when one stands in grassy naves, gazing skywards through skeletal pillars, one can almost feel an ode coming on”. A brief dissertation on Thomas Cromwell’s English revolution.
It is late summer in 1806, in the colony of New South Wales. After he loses everything he owns in a disastrous flood, former convict, failed farmer, and all-round no-hoper and ne’er-do-well Martin Sparrow heads into the wilderness that is now the Wollemi National Park in the unlikely company of an outlaw gypsy girl and a young wolfhound. Historian Peter Cochrane’s tale of adventure and more often than not, misadventure, set on the middle reaches of the Hawkesbury River at time when two culturally and spiritually disparate peoples collided.
In the First century, the Roman Empire was a far-ranging and cosmopolitan polity extending from the shores of the Atlantic to the borders of Persia. As far as we can ascertain from the historical record, Meniscus Diabetes was born in Rome in 25 CE. His father was a Greek slave in the Imperial Household of Tiberius Caesar, Emperor of Rome. These were turbulent times for Rome and Romans, but our hero managed to navigate through them.
The Sport of Kings’ is not a history book – nor is it an historical novel. But it is most certainly about history. And about identity. As Morgan puts it: “You would never escape the category of your birth”. It is also about memory and myth: “Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact”. It is both a meditation on race, on slavery – America’s “original sin” – and a bitter inversion of the American dream.
An illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride andrevelation, and a reminiscence of my short-lived ‘cowboy’ days. The horse” has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances, and yet, over the span of a few decades, a relationship that endured for six millennia went “to the dogs” – excuse my awful pet-food pun. And it happened almost unremarked, unnoticed, and unsung.
Our forest neighbour, recently deceased and internationally acclaimed English photojournalist Tim Page ran away from boring ‘sixties Britain to the exotic East at the age of seventeen, taking the ‘overland’ route that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’. He washed up in the great war of our generation, and left it critically injured and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper. This is the story of a war, and a young man who wandered into that war.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom Maya Angelou
زن زندگی آزادی Zan zandaky āzādy Women freedom life
In our relatively comfortable, free and still democratic countries, it is difficult to put ourselves in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consequences of potentially heroic failure. We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Maya Angelous’s poem The caged bird sings of freedom (above) and Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:
Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.
The courage of the of the Iranian protesters, and particularly the woman and girls who have been the vanguard of this unprecedented intifada cannot be exaggerated. For brave they are indeed. Having endured long years of a brutal and vengeful, corrupt and misogynistic theocratic regime and its security and paramilitary enforcers, they are fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
Several weeks, the nationwide protests that followed the murder in custody of a young woman arrested by the morality police after wearing her hijab inappropriately, and other young women and also, now, young men, who, officially, have died at their own hand or of pre-existing causes, have mobilized Iranians of all ethnicities, classes, ages and genders. And the security state us reacted predictably, red in tooth and claw. There is torture and death actual and awaiting on the streets of villages, towns and cities throughout the country, and the public trials with their black-garbed and turbaned hanging judges are in place and ready to protect the nation and the revolution in the name of Allah and the legacy of the canonised grey and dour uber-mullah Ayatollah Khomeini.
The perseverance and nihilistic exuberance of the Iranian street has reminded me of an exhilarating song and video created by a young Egyptian and his friends celebrating the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that precipitated the fall of practically Egyptian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak thirteen years ago last February. Sawt Al Huriya (The Voice of Freedom), went viral on YouTube after its release on 11 February 2011, the day before Mubarak’s departure?
Fast forward to the present, and we examine why the Islamic Republic’s sclerotic theocratic regime is so afraid of another song of revolution, the crowd sourced protest anthem, Baraya, which has become a thorn in the side of the government in Tehran.
Baraye, translated as “because of …” or “for …”,the anthem of Iran’s Woman, Life, Liberty protest movement grew organically from a Twitter hashtag trend in which Iranians expressed their uncountable discontents and their commitment to the protests. It continues to unite Iranians in their opposition to the rules, restriction nd repression of Islamic Republic weeks after it wasfirst releasedonline on an international and social media that the authorities have tried and failed to silence. To paraphrase Canadian songwriter and activist for injustice and the environment in his song Santiago Dawn (see below) to keep millions down “takes more than a strong arm up your sleeve”.
Bareya’s lyrics were created by the Iranians themselves and gathered and set to music , recorded, sung and shared by a young Iranian singer, Shervin Hajipour. Crazy brave, perhaps for predictably, he was detained by security operatives soon after he posted it on his Instagram page and forced to remove it from his feed. But it had already attracted millions of views worldwide and continued to be shared and shared and shared, and it has now been played and performed the world over as people across the glob empathize, identify with, and add to the images verbalised and the emotions these engender. We all have stories to relate of oppression and exclusion, of the abuse of power and privilege and the pervasiveness of prejudice and discrimination. To quote Bruce Cockburn once more about an earlier resistance, “see them matching home, see them rising like grass through cement in the Santiago dawn”.
Baraja gives voice to the voiceless – as Bob Dylan sang in another century, in comparatively straightened times:
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The Recording Academy, which hosts the annual Grammy Awards, announcedthat in its new merit category for best song for social change, more than 80% of nominations were for Baraye. Below is a video of the world-famous band Cold Play singing the song in Buenos Aires with Iranian actor Goldshifte Farahani.
The genesis of Baraya mirrors the organizational structure of the protests themselves insofar as like these, it is networked and leaderless, Ironically, however, David Patrikarakos editor of thee-zine Unherd wrote recently, this lack of leadership portends the protests’ doom:
“No leader has yet emerged. Instead, the protests are organised by different people or groups in different cities and towns on an almost ad hoc basis.The truth is that if the mullahs were to collapse tomorrow, there are no signs that a democratic movement would sweep to power …It is far more likely that the security state — led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps — would step into the void and make apparent what is already largely a fact: that Iran is no longer a clerical state but is now ruled by a Praetorian Guard …
… In 1979, Iranians held up images of Khomeini. In 2022, they tear them down. They know they want the regime gone but they have no one to hold up in its place. For a revolution to succeed, it’s not enough to be against someone; you have to be for someone else. It’s not enough that Khamenei loses. Someone else must win. Until that time, the mullahs will continue to cling on as murderously and barbarously as they always have, and Iranians will continue to die. For years Palestinians would say they needed a Saladin. They were wrong. What they need is a Ben Gurion. What the Iranian revolutionaries need now more than anything else is a Khomeini. Until that happens, this will only ever be half a revolution”.
At this moment in time, the outcome of that revolution hangs in the balance. The passion of the people for a better world is once again going up against the iron fist of the security state. Sadly, history past and present, in Iran and elsewhere, has shown us that when an irresistible force comes up against an immovable object, no matter how popular, righteous and justified that force may be, the immovable object invariably wins.
Meanwhile, hope springs eternal …
Our weapon was our dreams.
And we could see tomorrow clearly.
We have been waiting for so long.
Searching, and never finding our place.
In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.
Sawt al Huriya
Baraya … Because of
Because of dancing in the street
Because of fear while kissing
Because of my sister, your sister, our sister
Because of changing rotten minds
Because of shame for moneyless
Because of yearning for an ordinary life
Because of the scavenger kid and his dreams
Because of a command economy
Because of air pollution
Because of ‘Vali Asr’ Avenue, and its dying trees
Because of a cheetah (Pirouz) that may go extinct
Because of innocent, outlawed dogs
Because of the incessant crying
For the image to repeat this moment
Because of the smiling face
For students, for the future
Because of students, for the future
Because of this forced paradise
Because of the imprisoned elites
Because of Afghan kids
Because of all (Because of…) non-repetitive
Because of all these empty slogans
Because of the rubble of fake houses
Because of the feeling of peace
Because of the sun after a long night
Because of the nerve pills and insomnia
Because of man, country, rebuilding
Because of a girl who wished she was a boy
Because of woman, life, freedom
Nahid Shamdouz, assistant professor of Middle East and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin,Foreign Policy, 26th October 2022
Demonstrators sing “Baraye” while holding their phone lights high during a march in support of protests in Iran. Allison Bailey, Reuters. 26th October 2021
“Baraye,” the anthem of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Liberty” protest movement—a song woven together entirely from a Twitter hashtag trend in which Iranians express their investment in the current protests—continues to unite Iranians in their opposition to the Islamic Republic several weeks after it was first releasedonline.
For Iranians in Iran but also for the millions in the diaspora, this is the song of a generation, perfectly expressing this political moment and all that is at stake.
For dancing in the alleyways Because of the fear you feel when kissing For my sister, your sister, our sisters To change the minds that have rotted away Because of shame, because of being broke Because of yearning for an ordinary life
What makes this moment different from previous periods of protest is that the wall of acquiescence and pretense that maintained the state’s authority in the public realm has been torn down on a scale not seen since the 1979 revolution. In its recounting of all the painful grievances, “Baraye,” which translates in English to “for” or “because of,” signals the end of patience with the status quo and opens vistas onto a new future with a vocal crescendo that culminates in the word “freedom.”
The song reveals the simple, ordinary nature of the things that Iranians are aching for, asking for, and even dying for. It is radical in revealing on a national level the cruelty of a system that denies such basic demands—exposing the devastating conditions Iranians face under the current regime.
“Baraye” creates national intimacy by citing very specific events that all Iranians have suffered through together, in a palimpsest of collective traumas.
If “Baraye” reflects a different, perhaps unprecedented mood on a national level, it also mirrors the organizational structure of this recent protest movement. If it is networked and leaderless, so is the song. The lyrics were written by Iranians at large and merely set to music and vocalized by the young up-and-coming singer Shervin Hajipour. This explains why security forces detained Hajipour a couple of days after he posted it on his Instagram page, where it had already accrued millions of views. The regime has tried for years to push the apparent and already real aspects of people’s lives out of the public sphere.
On social media, Iranians have created a life that more closely mirrors their inner selves—replete with harsh criticism of leading clerics including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; female solo vocalists who are otherwise banned singing at the top of their lungs; and the exhibition of private lives that are anything but a reflection of the state’s projected pious paradise. Still, the state has sought to maintain a semblance of its ideology and control in actual public spaces and its media.
“Baraye” has broken that violently imposed wall between the state’s enforced reality and people’s real lives. It forced into the open, in the face of authority, all that people have known for long but were not supposed to express openly on such a national dimension.
For the sake of a laughing face For schoolkids, for the future Because of this mandatory paradise For imprisoned intellectuals
Since its release, the song has become the single most covered protest song in Iran’s history. Within a few short weeks after Hajipour composed the music for it, musicians across Iran and beyond its borders have sung it verbatim in their own voices, translated it, and sung it in other languages—and even universalized the lyrics for a more global audience.
There have now been many interpretive dance performances to it all over the world, and it is regularly blared from cars and balconies and open windows across Iranian cities and towns. Malala Yousafzai, the girls’ education activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, recently sent a video message of solidarity to Iranian women, with the track playing in the background.
Last week, the Iranian rapper Hichkas released a militant hip-hop trackreferencing “Baraye” through the more casual rap lingo “vase,” enumerating his reasons, starting with “vase Mahsa” (for Mahsa Jina Amini, whose death at the hands of Iran’s morality police sparked the protests) and ending with “for a good day,” in a nod to his own 2009 Green Movement protest song.
Mahsa Amini Protest in Iran
Protesters gather in London on Oct. 1 in solidarity with people protesting across Iran.
Indeed, the expressed concerns wrapped up in the short tweets shown in Hajipour’s video, and in the #Mahsa_Amini hashtag itself, are quite universal—the precarious condition of the planet, drastic inequalities, the desire for a peaceful life—which is why the song has become resonant with so many people around the world as well.
For the garbage-picking kid and her dreams Because of this command economy Because of this polluted air … For a feeling of peace For the sun after long nights
At the same time, “Baraye” creates national intimacy by citing very specific events that all Iranians have suffered through together, in a palimpsest of collective traumas. Hajipour sings “For the image of this moment repeating again,” drawn from a tweet with a photo of Hamed Esmaeilion and his young daughter relaxing together on a couch reading newspapers. (His wife and 9-year-old daughter were killed when Iran’s Revolutionary Guards mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner leaving Tehran in January 2020, and Esmaeilion has become the face of the grief affecting all those who lost loved ones in the crash.)
This line resonates with Iranians because so many families have been torn apart by the country’s massive brain drain, caused by a closed and corrupt economy that offers few opportunities.
In other lines, Hajipour sings sarcastically “Because of this mandatory paradise,” referring to the theocratic state’s imposed restrictions, justified in the name of achieving an Islamic utopia.
In yet another, he sings of “houses in rubble,” pointing to collapsing buildings caused by the rampant nepotism and corruption that shield state-connected builders from transparency on safety measures. In another, he sings of the “imprisoned intellectuals,” in a nod not just to the hundreds of journalists, human rights lawyers, and filmmakers but even award-winning university students who have been locked up.
The chorus arising from hundreds of tweets is clear: This is a regime that seems to be against life itself, punishing dancing, kissing, and smiling faces.
The song’s singular overnight success is not a small achievement given the long, rich history of protest songs in Iran. Already at the time of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution in 1906, poets created songs about the spilled blood of the youth who agitated for representative government and, not long after, about the Morning Bird breaking the cage of oppression, which many decades later became one of the most intoned protest songs in post-revolutionary Iran.
The trajectory of Iran’s musical history clearly exhibited a century-long struggle for freedom and justice, not yet realized.
Although “Baraye” and other songs of the current protest movement continue this strong tradition, they break with the post-revolutionary legacy on one key point: They no longer call for reforms.
At the time of the last major convulsions in 2009, many activists and musicians of the Green Movement called forth songs from the 1979 revolution to stake a claim to the revolution’s original yet unattained promises. People wore headscarves and wristbands in the green of Imam Hussain and went to their rooftops to shout “Allahu akbar” to invoke God’s help against a corrupt, earthly power.
But this time around, there are no religious signifiers or any demands for reforms. If classical songs are performed, they are not the icon Mohammad Reza Shajarian’s conciliatory song Language of Fire in 2009, when Iranians were still agitating for reforms from within, but his militant 1979 song Night Traveler, (also known as “Give Me My Gun”) in which he calls “sitting in silence” a sin and asks for his gun so he can join the struggle. One of Shajarian’s masterful female protégés posted the song with the hashtag #Mahsa_Aminiand swapped “the brother” out of the verses to sing “The sister is an adolescent, the sister is drowning in blood,” in recognition of the teenage girls who have given their lives in the protests.
The state security system instantly understood the significance of “Baraye” as a protest song. Hajipour was forced to take it off his Instagram account; however, not only has his song already been shared widely by other accounts and on other platforms, but the sentiments behind the lyrics are within the millions of people who wrote them.
The chants of “Death to the Dictator” have reverberated from the streets to the universities, from oil refineries to urban rooftops, and from bazaars to school courtyards. And so have the haunting calls for freedom repeatedly intoned at the end of “Baraye,” pouring forth from every corner of the actual and virtual Iranian public sphere.
That song’s reality can no longer be repressed and hidden by force.
Song lyrics in this article are based in part on Zuzanna Olszewska’s translations.
Nahid Siamdoust is an assistant professor of Middle East and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran.
The best thing one can say about 2021 is that it is not 2020. i guess we’ll all be glad when twenty one is done.
There were no bushfires to entertain us like last year, but the pandemic hung like a dark cloud over our everyday lives. In this, the second year of the pandemic, economies continue to struggle, livelihoods continue threatened or destroyed, many borders remain closed, and cities, towns and homes continue to be locked-down and isolated, and restrictions and precautions are ever-present.
There’s a sense that time has stood still, as if nothing much has really happened since the pandemic struck and that we’ve been treading water, awaiting wake if not rescue, them at least, release.
Things have changed, of course. The affairs of gods and men carry on above it all. But in our personal lives, there have been changes too – our behaviour and the nature of our interactions with others and the outside world, have indeed changed utterly. And our outlook on life, the universe and everything has changed too.
Most of all, we’re all feeling tired. Burnt out. Disengaged. Cynical.
I noticed it during the recent local government election when otherwise astute and active folk could not summon up the energy and interest to involve themselves with the issues at stake. The elections had been cancelled twice due to COVID19, and many had just lost interest. “When is the election again?” they’d ask apathetically.
A year ago almost to the day, we wrote in our our review of 2020, A year of living dangerously: “Time during 2020 has been elastic and confused. On 21st December, The Guardian asked readers to sum up how they felt about 2020 in one word – and likewise their feelings for 2021. As of Xmas Eve, the standout words were respectively (a) shit, fucked and challenging and (b) hopeful and better. My poll responses were “fascinating” and “unpredictable”.
And a year hence, I would give much the same response. Compared to other folk here in Australia and overseas, we’ve had a “good” Covid – if that indeed is the most appropriate descriptor. We don’t have to earn a living and we live on a beautiful rural acreage that is totally stand-alone and off-grid – there couldn’t be a more congenial spot to self-isolate. But we’d love to be able to escape the padded cell – to exit the Australian bubble for a while, to visit friends and relatives in England and to reconnect with the history and geography that we love in the world outside. Perhaps in 2022, we’ll have that opportunity.
The title of this review is borrowed from the famous American baseball coach Yogi Berra. As we leave 2021, here’s another:
“Predictions are always very hard, especially when they’re about the future”
She’s a Rainbow
Paradise Park Fernmount
The World in review
It was for us personally the saddest of years. Our close friend, neighbour and forest warrior, Annette, departed our planet mid-year after what seemed like short, aggressive illness – although in retrospect, we know that it was a slow train coming for a long while. I wrote Farewell to a Tarkeeth Tigerin tribute to her. And in September, our beautiful, talented, wise friend and soul sister Krishna Sundari.
As for the world at large, COVID19 continues to dominate the news, with more contagious variants popping up all over the place lake a game of “whack a mole”. As does the ongoing struggle to reach global consensus on the need to confront climate change. Tackling both looks a little like the story of Sisyphus, the Greek King of old who was condemned by Zeus to spend eternity rolling a huge boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down as soon as he reached the top.
The year kicked off to a fine start with the January 6th Insurrection in Washington DC as Donald Trump endeavoured to cling on to office by inciting his supporters and sundry militias to storm the Capitol to stop the count of electoral votes that would cede the presidency to Joe Biden. Though he failed, and was impeached
for a second time, and the Biden administration sought to calm America’s troubled waters, the Orange One haunts The US’ fractious and paralyzed politics and the prospect of a second Trump term is not beyond imagination.
Trump’s bestie, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving Prime’s minister, also got the push in the wake of the third election in just over a year. The unique coalition that emerged from torturous negotiations spanned the political, social and religious spectrum – left and right, secular and orthodox, Arab and Jew, and promised little more than maintaining the unsatisfactory status quo, that pertaining to the occupation and the settlements, illegal migrants, and the disproportionate influence the Haredim, none of which are morally, politically, socially or economically sustainable.
China under would-be emperor Xi Jinping continues to aggressively build its military and economic power, determined to take its rightful and long overdue place at the top of the geopolitical ladder, causing consternation among its neighbours and also other powers and fears of war in our time. With Xinjiang’s Uighurs and Hong Kong firmly under its autocratic boot, it continues to expand its nautical footprint in the South China Sea and signals loudly that Taiwan’s days as a liberal democracy are numbered. Its belligerency is increasingly meeting blow-back as other nations react in various ways to what they perceive as clear and present danger. What happens next is anybody’s guess.
Russia under would-be czar Vladimir Putin continues to aggressively rebuild its military power and influence, determined to revive the glory days of the defunct Soviet Union, whist channeling memories of its former imperial glory. Whilst in no way as powerful as China, it is taking advantage of the the world’s preoccupation with the ascendancy of the Celestial Kingdom Redux to reassert its influence in its own backyard – including the veiled threat to reconquer Ukraine – and also in the world, particularly in Syria and through the use of shadowy proxies and mercenaries, in Africa. What happens next is anybody’s guess.
Turkey under would-be Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to aggressively pull its self away from the west and towards some concept of a leadership role in the Muslim world.Its economy, meanwhile, is in free-fall, with unemployment and food prices rising and the lira tanking. At the heart of the problem is Erdogan’s attempt to take a sophisticated globalized economy and run it as an emirate does, replacing state institutions with personalized rule.You cannot run a sophisticated, modern economy on conspiracy theories and doctrines from the 7th century.But President Erdogan, having rigged the electoral system and cornered the religious and nationalist vote, and with no rivals in sight, isn’t gong anywhere soon.
America finally ended its “endless war” in Afghanistan, in a chaotic, deadly scramble that left that country’s forever unfortunate people in the hands of a resurgent and apparently unreformed and unrepentant Taliban. It’s over a 100 days since the last evacuation plane took off in scenes of chaos and misery, leaving behind thousands of employees and others at risk of retribution, and the new regime has yet to establish a working government. Meanwhile professionals, human rights workers, officials of the former regime, members if the old government’s security forces, and especially women and girls wait, many in hiding, for the worst. Meanwhile, winter is coming and the country is broke and on the brink of of starvation. A major humanitarian crisis is imminent. What happens next, everybody does indeed know. As St. Leonard said, “We have seen the future and it’s murder!”
Whilst the war in Afghanistan ended, there are still plenty to go around for the weapons manufacturers and arms dealers, the mercenaries and the proxies. The year began well for Azerbaijan when it emerged victorious from a vicious 44 day drone and missile war against Armenia for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave that saw Turkish and Syrian proxies engaged each side of the conflict. An old War was rekindled in Ethiopia as a Nobel Peace Prize winner sent his troops to rake pillage and conquer a fractious province which turned the tables and is now poses to seize his capital. Hubris extremis? Meanwhile, war went on in the usual places – Syria, Libya, Yemen, Mali, the Central African Republic, and places too obscure to mention.
Meanwhile, back home DownUnder, the story that dominated political news – apart from COVID19 and the shmozzle of the vaccine roll-out, was the delinquent behaviour of politicians and their staffers in Parliament House – commentators have likened the goings-on in there to a school yard or frat house, and more bluntly, to a Roman orgy, with tales of bullying and sexual harassment, drunken parties, mutual masturbation sessions, and even rape. The prime minister huffed and puffed and asked his wife how he should deal with the situation; commissions of inquiries were set up; and reports handed down. The motto is “we must do better – and we shall!” But as with most things these days, nobody believes what politicians say anymore.
And not just here in Australia, but all over the world. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads like … well, a coronavirus. The US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states. In the bizarro conspiracy universe, American right-wing commentators and rabble-rousers are urging their freedom-loving myrmidons to rescue Australia from totalitarianism. Apparently we have established covid concentration camps and are forcible vaccinating indigenous people.
In early December, US President Joe Biden held a summit for democracy, and yet his administration are still determined to bring Julian Assange to trial, a case that, if it succeeds, will limit freedom of speech. The conduct of the trial also poses a threat to the US’s reputation because it could refocus attention on the ugly incidents during the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were exposed by WikiLeaks. There is a strong humanitarian and pragmatic case to look for a way out of Assange’s Kafkaesque nightmare, but the bastions of freedom, America, Britain and Australia show no interest in doing so notwithstanding the harm it does to their democratic credentials.
I chose these invigorating times to stand as a Labor candidate for Bellingen Shire Council in those elections I referred to at the beginning of this review. What we thought would be a short, sharp two month campaign extended to an exhausting five month slog as the Delta variant necessitated delaying the elections for a second time.
Few in the Shire can remember the last time Labor candidate stood for council, so we began with a very low public recognition, but we ran a good, honest campaign and raised our profile.
But alas, we were outgunned, outspent and outnumbered by the well-funded, professionally organised chamber of commerce independents coordinated, advised and directed by the National Party, who played to a disengaged and cynical electorate by gas-lighting us with the claim that we were “infiltrators” from mainstream political parties, bankrolled by big party money, and dictated to by Macquarie Street (the NSW Parliament), and thence, with no entitlement to represent the Shire – even though we were long-standing residents well-known in the community. Progressives on council are now but two against five, and the Nationals have reclaimed the Shire for business, development and traditional values. Back to the future. There will be buyer’s remorse for many ho voted for them without checking their credentials. And meanwhile, I’m quite happy not to have to sit in the council chamber with a bunch of neo-Thatcherites.
And finally, on a bright note, in the arts world, there was Taylor Swift. Fresh from her Grammy award for the sublime Folklore, she released her re-recorded version of her copyright-purloined album Red. How can anyone improve on the fabulous original? Swift does! It’s brighter, shinier, sharper, bigger, beatier and bouncier (I stole the last alliterations from the Who album of yonks ago), and her mature voice is a pleasure. Released just over nine years ago, when she was 22, it feels as fresh today, and for all the gossip and innuendo that surrounded its conception and reception and endure to this day, even in the hallowed habitats of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone (the Economist hasn’t weighed in yet), I find it refreshing and encouraging to listen to an artist so articulate and audacious, precocious and prodigious for one so young. Tay Tay also delivered one of the pop culture moments of the year, beguiling us all with the adventures of her old scarf. It out that not only did actor Jake Gyllenhall take her innocence, but he nicked her scarf too, and for one weekend in November all the internet cared about was its whereabouts. Safe to say it was a bad 48 hours to be Gyllenhaal.
Our year in review …
True to its mission statement, In That Howling Infinite reflected the events of the year with an eclectic collection. But, curiously, deliberately or by mere circumstance, we published nothing about the plague that had dominated our lives.
In a year when the treatment of women dominated the Australian news, and Grace Tame and Brittany Hughes became household names, we look at the status of women and girls in less fortunate parts of the world. Facing the Music – no dance parties in Palestine tells the story of a young Palestinian DJ and her confrontation with social conservatism and religious orthodoxy. In Educate a girl and you educate a community – exclude her and you impoverish it, we discus how countries who exclude women from political, social and economic life are the worse for it.
As always, this blog has a strong history focus. I spent a lot of time conversing with our friend and forest neighbours, acclaimed photographer Tim Page about his adventures in Indochina during the Vietnam War. I’d edited his unpublished autobiography, and written a forward to open it. It ended up in Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey. This was accompanied by a story told by Ken Burns in his excellent documentary The Vietnam War about a young man who went to war and did not return: The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy. Part memoir, part memory lane, i recall the story of my own youthful travels in Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days
A Celtic heartbeat inspired Over the Sea to Skye, the story of the famous folk song and of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald, whilst a continuing interest in The Middle East saw the completion of a log-standing piece, a contemplation on the Crusade: Al Tarikh al Salabin – the Crusader’s Trail. Our Israeli friend and guide Shmuel Browns explored the Anzac Trail in the Negev Desert and discovered a forgotten battle that had a direct connection to our own neighbourhood and the ever-evolving story of Chris Fell of Twin Pines: Tel al Sabi’ – Tarkeeth’s Anzac Story.
The Crusades
Our own Kalang River was the subject of the latest in the Small Stories series, Crossing the South Arm– how that wide river was first spanned back in the day. On Christmas Eve last year, a koala took up residence on our property and stayed for several weeks – the only koala we have actually seen in forty years (we do hear them often). This led to a historical and contemporary commentary on the parlous predicament of our much-loved marsupial: The Agony and Extinction of Blinky Bill. Last year, we exposed the alarming reality that Tarkeeth Forest wood was being chipped and used to generate electricity. Our earlier The Bonfire of the Insanities- the Biomass Greenwash was followed by The Bonfire of the Insanities 2 – the EU’s Biomass Dilemma.
And finally to poetry and song. In Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet’s memorial to a forgotten crime, we looked at “the great Australian silence – what historian Henry Reynolds called “this whispering in the bottom of our hearts” in the context of a famous poem by Judith Wright and the almost forgotten secrets of our own hinterland here on the “holiday coast”. On a brighter note, we revisit the history and legacy of Banjo Paterson’s iconic poem Waltzing Matilda with Banjo’s not to jolly swagman – Australia’s could’ve been anthem.
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i don’t know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here
Somali poet Warsan Shire, Home
Outside my regular, earthy existence here on our acreage in the midst an Australian forest, where our days are largely dictated by the weather and the changes of the seasons, I have two extracurricular preoccupations. These are a lifelong passion for the Middle East – its history, it’s politics, its many faiths and cultures, and its people, supplemented and complemented by travel to those lands that are still safe and accessible for travellers; and working as a volunteer helping people who have come to our country town as refugees from war – and, increasingly of late, the displaced and damaged Yazidi Kurds from benighted Syria and Iraq. I’ve previously been written about this work in In That Howling Infinite: No Going Home – the refugee’s journey (1) and Hejira – the refugee’s journey (2).
And along comes a beautifully written story that speaks elegantly, poignantly, and yet, viscerally to the refugee experience. Mohsin Hamid writes: “… everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time”. Many of us are indeed temporal migrants, crossing the world to establish new lives far from home and “the fields that we know”, as Gandalf the Grey put it a long time ago in a land far, far away. And when we migrate, we leave former lives and loves behind. When Nadia promises her lover’s father that she will look after his only son, ”by making the promise he demanded she make, she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our loves those we leave behind”.
Like Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel of 1953, Mohsin Hamid’s novella Exit West is a fable and also, a parable. A tale of alternative futures that says much about ourselves, and sounds a warning about where we are headed. But unlike Bradbury’s incendiary scenarios, it also signposts paths that may lead to what may in dire circumstances be interpreted as happy endings.
Hamid also echoes the fantastical fancy of a “Time And Relative Dimension In Space” (yes, The Tardis!) storyline that once propelled Alice through the looking glass glass and the Pevensie children through their wardrobe, and the magical realism of our own times. It is a portal fantasy, straight out of speculative fiction and children’s literature, but the world on the far side is darker and more dangerous than either Wonderland or Narnia.
Like Bradbury’s, this is a book for the times. Then, it was the blinkered and poisonous groupthink that ensnared American politics, society and culture during the years of the McCarthy witch hunts (and indeed, anywhere past and present where straighteners endeavour to chain their compatriots with their own world view). Now, it is the unravelling of societies riven by politics, religion and war, a world in which millions of souls are cast adrift on the highways and the high seas.
Exit West begins, ironically for myself as an Australian and until quite recently a longtime resident of inner-city Newtown, in a terrace house in the neighbouring suburb of Surry Hills. An unidentified women is sleeping. A dark, disheveled stranger struggles out of the darkness of her closet door, crosses the bedroom and slips out of the window into the warm Sydney night.
Time and space shift – as they do over the next two hundred or so pages – and unexpected, strange, wonderful, frightening, dangerous things happen.
Arabian nights
Imagine a modern, cosmopolitan city in the Middle East, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, heterogenous, and relatively tolerant. People and their various communities get along with each other despite, in spite of, even, their differences. Secular and religious, rich and poor coexist in relative harmony. Alongside mosques and madrassas, there are cafes and coffee shops, colleges and campuses, banks and ATMs. There is the glitzy uptown with wide streets, hotels and department stores, and a picturesque and historic old town, the timeless jungle of suqs and alleyways, ancient mosques and churches, Ottoman and colonial-era mansions with their hidden courtyards now converted into boutique hotels, and the all-hours hustle and bustle, street sounds and smells. And beyond, the boulevards with their post-colonial apartment blocks, and outlying, sprawling slums and shanty towns that attract the dispossessed and destitute from the countryside, and the refugee camps that over time have become suburbs housing refugees from drought and financial misfortune and from wars past and present. It could be Damascus or Aleppo before the war, Baghdad or Mosul, Beirut or Istanbul.
There are the rich folks and there the poor folks, and in between, the relatively comfortable middle classes cleaving to their religious and political affiliations, and yet, getting along with each other, and striving to be part of the globalized world. Many are educated, some are affluent, multitudes struggle. But there is power and water, and in our wired age, good mobile and internet service and social media. People are able to communicate and connect with each other and with the wider world.
It is a time of turmoil and social and political unrest and the city is swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war. A young man meets a young woman in a classroom, but doesn’t speak to her.
“It might seem odd” writes Hadid, “that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class … but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about on errands and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending dies not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it dies”.
Nadia and Saeed have met in an evening class “on corporate identity and product branding”. She wears a long black robe, he, a fashionable stubble rather than the required beard. When he follows he downstairs to ask her out, he is surprised to see her pick up a black motorcycle helmet. She rides around their city on a scruffy trail bike. Saeed is the only and late-life child of two educated parents whom he loves and respects. He lives with them in their flat in a once elegant part of the city. Nadia has broken with her religious, well-meaning family and lives alone in a rickety flat at the top of a house. Her dress, Saeed learns, is to protect her from men. They meet in coffee shops and a Chinese restaurant, and eventually, in Nadia’s tiny apartment. They play music on an old record player, smoke dope, eat magic mushrooms which Nadia has bought online, and fall in love.
In this urban landscape set in what could be the very recent past, the still unfolding present, or an impeding and dystopian future, things are falling apart and the centre is not holding. The distant drumbeats of civil strife get louder and closer. For all their weaponry and electronic sophistication, under the drone-crossed sky and in the invisible network of surveillance that radiated out from their phones, recording and capturing and logging everything…18, the forces of law and order are struggling to hold back the falling dark.
First there are “just some shootings and the occasional car bombing”. Then there are checkpoints, and soon the sky is full of helicopters as the army strikes at militants infiltrating the suburbs and attacking strategic locations. Law and order crumbles; there are power and internet outages; and a rush on food stores and banks. Battles rage. Buildings are bombed and shelled, and innocents are killed in the crossfire. The militants advance and inevitably, conquer, targeting those of other faiths and affiliations, and imposing their coded of conduct and costume.
In the pages that follow, ordinary chores and ordinary preoccupations of thoughts, feelings, emotions, fears and fantasies play out in uncertain, extraordinary and often magical circumstances.
As people adjust to the new reality of homelessness and danger, a new normalcy is created: “Refugees had occupied many of the open places in the city … some seemed to be trying to recreate the rhythms of a normal life, as though it was completely natural to be residing, a family of four under a sheet of plastic propped up by branches and a few chipped blocks. Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy”.
As the violence worsens, and lives are shattered, escape feels ever more urgent. War erodes the façade of Saeed’s building “as though it had accelerated time itself, a day’s toll outpacing that of a decade”. Nadia tapes up her windows against shattering glass. They hear of mysterious black doors appearing all over the city, all over the world. To walk through these doors is to escape into another part of the world and into a new life.
Led by a shadowy agent to a shattered dentist’s office and shown a door that once led to a supply cupboard, Saeed and Nadia go through the door, experience a passage of extreme stress and darkness “both like dying and like being born”, and miraculously arrive, exhausted, in a toilet block next to a beach club on Mykonos, Greece.
And thus, the narrative transforms into an antique story of lovers fleeing their homeland. From Mykonos the couple travel on several times, including through a startling vision of London in the near future …”The following evening helicopters filled the sky like birds startled by gunshot, or the blow of an axe at the base of their tree.”
Illustration, Jun Cen, The New Yorker
Slipping Away
But it is not just the abandoned and forsaked of Nadia and Saeed’s once cosmopolitan city that are falling apart.
“Rumours had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country … Most people thought these rumours to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-minded. But most people began to gaze at their own doors a little differently nonetheless”.
“The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders, nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. Many were arguing that smaller units made sense but others argued that smaller units could not defend themselves”.
Imagine then a world where the affluent, peaceful, economically and technologically advanced countries of Europe and North America, the so-called “north”, become a magnet to people who yearn to escape the poverty and violence, drought and famine, oppression and dispossession of the overpopulated “South”. Millions are on the move by land and by sea, and from the Rio Grand and the Sonora Desert to the Sahel and the Sinai, to the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, they are spilling over the borders, staggering across deserts, and washing up on the shores of the lands of milk and honey.
As Nadia and Saeed stagger into the Mykonos sunlight, elsewhere people are emerging in the same dazed way from garden sheds and bedroom closets all over the world. And the couple’s journey is punctuated with disconnected moments happening elsewhere on earth. “All over the world people were slipping away from where they had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields,
But those who are slipping away are not trekking across deserts or taking perilous journeys on a lethally overcrowded dinghies across the Mediterranean or Walking the dusty, thirsty highways of the Balkans. They just step through a door. For those who are slipping away, there are no life-or-death journeys in the backs of lorries, trecks across rivers and desert, or perilous crossings on flimsy, overcrowded dinghies; No harrowing middle passages – just a swift, jarring stepping through a dark doorway, and the cognitive shock of having been freshly transplanted to tough new terrains.
Whilst the story highlights the triggers that impel or more often compel people to flee their homelands, it focuses more on the psychological consequences of dislocation – and then in a superficial romantic fashion – boy meets girl, boys runs away with girl, boy loses girl. It neglects the reality of the trials and vicissitudes of dislocation. As described in No Going Home:
What if you had to leave behind everything that you hold dear. Your identity, culture, language, faith. You job, your school. Your loved ones, your friends, and your play-mates. What if you have to sleep with your shoes on so you are ready to run if your enemies are approaching your village? And then you have to flee your home and climb the mountain to escape, helping your youngsters and old folk up the rocky slopes in the summer heat, and there is nothing to eat or drink, and nothing you can do except wait for capture or rescue. What would YOU do if you had but a short while to gather a few things together and run, leaving your whole life behind? What would you try and take with you? Then you wash up, literally and figuratively, on foreign shores – in border refugee camps, dusty border towns or urban slums. And there you stay, with other tens, hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands in like dire straits.
Hejiras of Hope
For all the confusion, dislocation, disappointment, there is hopefulness. In one of the parallel but alternative universes a suicidal man chooses life. In another, two old men – one Dutch, one Brazilian – exchange a kiss. Most of all there is prayer – prayer for the loss that “unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry”. Being human is the solitary commonality.
But as with most things in life, there is a reckoning. If you escape from your homeland with your romantic partner, through a door or otherwise, things get pretty intense pretty fast, and amidst countervailing currents and crosswinds, relationships slowly, sadly, and realistically unravel. Not only do emigres and refugees slip away form their former lives, they slip away from other people, people they had in some cases loved – “as Nadia was slipping away from Saeed, and Saeed from Nadia”.
For in this life and in the next, there are promise made and promises broken. Bonds forged and then loosened and broken – “eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime”.
“She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not. But then around he she saw all these people of all these different colours in all their different attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed, and a new time was here …”
And in a world that is constantly changing, revolving evolving, sometimes it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
The following is a survey of the statistics of the world refugee crisis, published in In That Howling Infinite in June 2019 as an epilogue to No Going Home, and after that are tow reviews of Exit West
The Melancholy Mathematics of the World Refugee Crisis
Like death and taxes, the poor and racism, refugees have always been with us. But never in modern times – since the Second World War – have they been so many!
There are over sixty nine million people around the world on the move today – that have been forcibly displaced from their homes – fleeing from persecution or conflict.
This doesn’t count economic migrants who have hit the roads of sub Saharan Africa and Central America fleeing drought and crop failure, economic recession and unemployment, poverty, gangs and cartels, seeking a better life for themselves and the families in Europe or the USA.
Three quarters of a million ‘economic migrants’ are on the move in Central America, whilst the UN estimates that at least four million people have left Venezuela because of its political and economic crisis in what has been described as the biggest refuge crisis ever seen in the Americas. There are refugee camps on the Colombian border. Most are in Columbia but others have entered Brazil and Peru. But these are not by legal definition refugees – see below, The Refugees’ Journey .
Of those sixty nine million people over 11 million or 16% are Syrians. The numbers keep growing Thirty one people at being displaced every minute of the day. In 2018 alone, 16.2 million people were newly displaced.
Forty million people have been internally displaced within their own countries – this includes six million Syrians and off our radars, some two million souls who once lived in the contested regions of eastern Ukraine.
Over 25 million are refugees in neighbouring countries and further afield. 25% of them are in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and Uganda. Some 57% of them come from three countries: Syria, 6.3 million, Afghanistan 2.6 million and South Sudan 2.4 million. The top hosting counties are Turkey 3.5 million, Lebanon, 1 million, Pakistan 1.4 million, Uganda 1.4 million and Iran 1 million.
Jordan shelters over three quarters of a million Syrians; during the Iraq wars, this relatively poor country sheltered a similar number of Iraqis, and still hosts tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians who’ve fled persecution at home.
These figures are of those registered by the UNHCR. The real numbers are much higher. The Lebanese government estimates that there are more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees in the country.
Much of the focus these days is on the Middle East – Syria and its neighbours, on Libya and the frail boats crossing the Mediterranean, on the war in Yemen which has killed over thirteen thousand and displaced over two million.
But situation in Africa is as dire.
More than 2 million Somalis are currently displaced by a conflict that has lasted over two decades. An estimated 1.5 million people are internally displaced in Somalia and nearly 900,000 are refugees in the near region, including some 308,700 in Kenya, 255,600 in Yemen and 246,700 in Ethiopia.
By August 2018, the Democratic Republic of the Congo hosted more than 536,000 refugees from Burundi, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. And yet, there are over 4.5 million Congolese people displaced inside their own country and over 826,000 in neighbouring countries, including Namibia, Angola and Kenya.
Should the present situation in Sudan deteriorate into civil war, another tide of humanity will hit the road.
And closer to home, there are millions of refugees in Asia.
As of March 2019, there are over 100, 000 refugees in 9 refugee camps in Thailand (as of March 2019), mainly ethnic Karen and Shan. Refugees in Thailand have been fleeing ethnic conflict and crossing Myanmar’s eastern border jungles for the safety of Thailand for nearly 30 years.
There were an estimated 1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar before the 2016–17 crisis, and since August 2017, an estimated 625,000 refugees from Rakhine, had crossed the border into Bangladesh.
The top-level numbers are stupendous. The detail is scary.
Some 52% of the world’s refugees and displaced are children. And many are unaccompanied. Every hour, around 20 children run for their lives without their parents to protect them.
Children are the most vulnerable to disease and malnutrition and also to exploitation and lose years of schooling. Millions are elderly and are also face health problems.
And the problems facing young people and adults are all enormous. International aid is limited and host countries often unsympathetic. Work opportunities are few, some countries even forbidding refugees to take work, whilst unscrupulous employers exploit the desperate. Migrants are often encouraged, sometimes forcibly, to return to their countries of origin regardless of whether or not it is safe for them to return. There are reports that many have returned to Syria into the unwelcoming hands of the security services.
Refugees have lived in camps and towns in Pakistan and Thailand, Namibia and Kenyan for decades. Most refugee children were not born in their parents’ homelands.
And the camps are by no means safe havens. There may be no shelter or only basic shelter in tents; no privacy; a lack of clean water; meagre food; limited medical care; and the threat of injury, disease and epidemics. They may be poor physical security and armed attacks, and abuse by the authorities and officials. There may be organized crime, shakedowns and extortion, corruption and bribery.
Families may have become separated, exposing women and children without the protection of male family members to more fear and violence. Women are subsequently vulnerable to harsh conditions, including potential sexual and physical and abuse, poor healthcare, and unequal access to food and water. They may be coping with the loss of the head of the family and with the changing roles and responsibilities that come from being the sole parent. They may not know if their male family members will return to them safely and they must deal with the stress and anxiety, the grief and loss arising from their recent experiences. They might be fearful of the future, which in a camp is unknown and unpredictable.
This Syrian mother and her child were rescued by the Greek Coast Guard.
Exit West, a novel about migration and mutation, full of wormholes and rips in reality, begins as it mostly doesn’t go on. A man and a woman meet at an evening class on corporate identity and product branding. Saeed is down-to-earth, the son of a university professor, and works at an ad agency. Nadia, who wears a full black robe and is employed by an insurance company, lives alone, rides a motorbike, enjoys vinyl and psychedelic mushrooms. She doesn’t pray. We think we know what will happen next: a boy-girl love story, opposites attracting, secular individuals struggling with the shackles of a theological state.
Now, though, this unnamed city is filling with refugees. Militants are creating unrest. The old world was neither paradise nor hell – one of its parks tolerates “early morning junkies and gay lovers who had departed their houses with more time than they needed for the errands they had said they were heading out to accomplish” – but its terrors are driving out those with ambition and connections. Saeed and Nadia embark on a journey that, like the dream logic of a medieval odyssey, takes them to Mykonos, London, San Francisco.
Hamid, intentionally for the most part, doesn’t exert as tight a narrative grip as he did in previous novels such as The Reluctant Fundamentalistand How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.Exit West shifts between forms, wriggles free of the straitjackets of social realism and eyewitness reportage, and evokes contemporary refugeedom as a narrative hybrid: at once a fable about deterritorialisation, a newsreel about civil society that echoes two films – Kevin Brownlow’sIt Happened Here and Peter Watkins’s The War Game – and a speculative fiction that fashions new maps of hell.
All the same, the novel is often strongest in its documentation of life during wartime, as Hamid catalogues the casual devastation of a truck bomb, the sexual molestation that takes place as hundreds of city dwellers throng to take their life savings from a bank, and the supernatural elation of taking a warm shower after weeks on the road. This is annexed to elements of magical realism and even The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe-style children’s storytelling. A normal door, Saeed and Nadia’s colleagues start to discuss, “could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all”.
Characters move through time and space like abrupt jump-cuts or skipping compact discs. There are no descriptions of life-or-death journeys in the backs of lorries or on flimsy dinghies. No middle passages. Just the cognitive shock of having been freshly transplanted to tough new terrains. Hamid is deft at evoking the almost contradictory nature of Nadia and Saeed’s digital life (their phones are “antennas that sniffed out an invisible world” and transported them “to places distant and near”), whose broadband freedoms contrast with the roadblocks, barbed wire and camps they face in what passes for reality.
Exit West is animated – confused, some may think – by this constant motion between genre, between psychological and political space, and between a recent past, an intensified present and a near future. It’s a motion that mirrors that of a planet where millions are trying to slip away “from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields”.
The skies in Hamid’s novel are as likely to be populated by helicopters, drones and bombs as they are by dreams and twinkling stars. Yet his vision is ultimately more hopeful than not. In one of the book’s parallel but alternative universes a suicidal man chooses life. In another, two old men – one Dutch, one Brazilian – exchange a kiss. Most of all there is prayer – prayer for the loss that “unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry”.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is published by Hamish Hamilton (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.comor call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
American writer Richard Hoffman, judging the web ‘zine The Morning News’ Tournament of Books 2018, declared: “… Exit West is a full-fledged masterpiece; it’s necessary, timely, wise, and beautiful”.
Saeed and Nadia meet in a business class and begin dating just as war starts encroaching on their city:
“The following evening helicopters filled the sky like birds startled by a gunshot, or by the blow of an axe at the base of their tree. They rose, singly and in pairs, and fanned out above the city in the reddening dusk, as the sun slipped below the horizon, and the whir of their rotors echoed through windows and down alleys, seemingly compressing the air beneath them, as though each were mounted atop an invisible column, an invisible breathable cylinder, these odd, hawkish, mobile sculptures, some thin, with tandem canopies, pilot and gunner at different heights, and some fat, full of personnel, chopping, chopping through the heavens’.
The story is told in a lofty, mythical, religious tone. Sentences spool out like scripture. For the most part, I found this style beautiful. Occasionally, it would become too much, and I wished the story was more simply told. But that would only happen rarely, and the beautiful far outweighed the florid.
As things worsen in their city, the couple starts hearing rumors about the existence of doors that will magically lead them to a different place. I’d heard about this element of Exit West, and as that part of the story drew closer I found myself resisting the idea. I don’t know why that was. (Magical realism prudishness?) Whatever the case, I was dragging my feet. When it did finally occur, when they found a door, my stomach knotted up the way it does when your therapist or partner points out a flaw in your character. That knotted-up feeling was short-lived. The doors are a beautiful device. They make the reader feel—more clearly than straight realism ever could—precisely what refugees want. They want a door to take them from whatever frightening place they’re in, to a place that is safe. By skipping the realism we see it for what it is. The trick is high art.
There is a blurb on the back of the book that calls it “extraordinarily clever.” That is a gross understatement. Better than clever, the book is wise. Not only does it track Nadia and Saeed as they move through these doors, traveling first to a small island in Greece, then to London, then to Marin County, but it also tracks their relationship as it slowly, sadly, and realistically begins to unravel. There is no melodrama in this part of the story. When the two lovers lie in bed without touching, it feels as if they are true flesh-and-blood characters.
In the end, Exit West did that thing that only great literature can do: It made me feel more fully for humans writ large.
Ten years ago, people across the Middle East and North Africa rose up in protest against their corrupt, autocratic and repressive rulers, demanding freedom and democracy. Tyrants were toppled or feared that power was being torn from their grasp as millions of demonstrators surged through the streets, chanting that “the people demand the fall of the regime”.
Myth and memory often embellish the stories and the glories of oppressed people rising up against the power, but when we recall these oft-times forlorn hopes, from Spartacus to the Arab Spring, it is difficult to imagine ourselves, in our relatively comfortable, free and democratic countries, in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consequences of heroic failure.We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:
Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.
“There was nothing phoney about this mass yearning for liberty and social justice. Vast numbers of disenfranchised people briefly believed that they could overthrow dictatorships, both republican and monarchical. But …the dream of a better tomorrow expressed by herself and millions during the Arab Spring in 2011 was to be brutally dispelled as the old regimes counter-attacked. Crueler and more repressive than ever, they reasserted themselves, or where they had fallen, they were replaced by chaotic violence and foreign military intervention.
… none of the kleptocratic powers-that-be intended to give up without a fight. They soon recovered their nerve and struck back with unrestrained violence. … across the Middle East and North Africa, rulers used mass imprisonment, routine torture and summary executions to crush dissent. Repression not only affected places where the Arab Spring had been at its peak, but spread throughout the region, which is home to 600 million people, as frightened rulers sought to stamp out the slightest hint of dissent in case it could become a threat to their regimes …
… Could could the Arab Spring have ever succeeded against such odds? The question is highly relevant today because oppression by regimes, aptly described as “looting machines” on behalf of a tiny elite, is no less than it was in 2011. Even more people now live crammed into houses with raw sewage running down the middle of the street outside while their rulers loll on yachts anchored offshore.”
We published the following piece just over a year ago. Little has changed since them – if anything, with the world distracted by the pandemic and the US and its allies – and alsoadversaries, indifferent if not complicit, the situation has gotten much worse.
In Egypt, the grip of Egyptian strongman Abd al Fattah al Sisi has tightened. Civil wars rage still in Yemen and Libya exacerbated by outside interference (see Tangled – a cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East). Syria’s misery continues with the regime almost but not quite on the verge of victory, and the Kurds betrayed by the Trump administration and defeated by Turkish forces and their Syrian mercenaries. Lebanon, which avoided the fate of other Arab countries a decade ago, although enduring the influx of millions of Syrian refugees, in the wake of a winter of protests, economic meltdown and political paralysis, and the explosive destruction of Beirut’s port and environs, is on the edge of an abyss (see our Lebanon’s WhatsApp Intifada).
All is, as Kent lamented in King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly”.
Last month saw the death in exile of former Tunisian strongman, dictator and kleptocrat Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and the resurgence on 20th September of Friday street protests in Cairo and smaller Egyptian towns – and around the world – against the corruption and oppression of Egyptian strongman Abd al Fattah al Sisi and his military cronies. Predictably, some three thousand people have been arrested – protesters, prominent activists, journalists, lawyers and politicians, including Islamist and leftists alike and dissenters in general. These have now been added to the tens of thousands that have already been incarcerated on conspiracy and terrorism charges, largely without trial.
it appears to be an indiscriminate backlash,The Independent’s Bel True writes: “… according to rights groups and people I’ve interviewed, among those haphazardly rounded up are children who were out buying school uniform, tourists holidaying in Cairo, human rights lawyers going to court to represent clients, confused bystanders, young men popping out for evening strolls, visiting foreign students and street vendors. All are now swallowed up in Egypt’s notoriously opaque justice system”.
The protests have for the moment been contained, but with a third of Egypt’s population below the poverty line (and that’s a government figure – it’s very likely much higher), about one-third of the total under age 14 and sixty percent under 30, one can’t help feeling a hint of déjà vu. It is hard to keep one hundred million people down with just a strong arm up your sleeve.
Meeting with al Sisi in New York, US President Donald Trump praised him for restoring order to Egypt. At this year’s G7 summit in Biarritz, Trump had referred to the Egyptian president as his “favourite dictator”, a comment that was met with stunned silence from American and Egyptian officials. Boris Johnson has likewise found a friend in Al Sisi. Tru quotes a British-Egyptian filmmaker: “There is a misconception that Sisi is a partner in stability which allows governments, particularly in Europe, to turn a blind eye to his behaviour: as long he keeps buying weapons and submarines and power stations”.
The Voice of Freedom
In our relatively comfortable, free and democratic countries, it is difficult to put ourselves in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consequences of potentially heroic failure. We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:
Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.
The courage of the of the Egyptian protesters – for brave they are indeed For having experienced six years of brutal and vengeful military regime, they are fully aware of the consequences of their actions – reminded me of an exhilarating song and video created by a young Egyptian and his friends, celebrating the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that precipitated the fall of practically president-for-life Hosni Mubarak eight years ago last February. Sawt Al Huriya (The Voice of Freedom)), went viral on YouTube after its release on 11 February 2011, the day before Mubarak’s departure.
Bur first, let us revisit those heady days and the doleful years that followed.
Remembering Tahrir Square
The self-immolation in December 20111 of young Tunisian Muhammed Bouazizi was the catalyst for the pent-up popular outrage that led to the heady days of January and February 2011, with the green of the Arab Spring fresh sprung from the soil of the economic and political bankruptcy of the Arab Middle East.
The fall of longtime dictators Zine el Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, was precipitated by the yearning of their oppressed and impoverished people, and particularly the young, for freedom, justice, dignity and employment, and an end to endemic corruption, nepotism and brutality; for a society in which there were jobs and a decent living, where you could save up enough money to get married, where you didn’t have to bribe corrupt officials for everything from traffic fines to court decisions to business permits to jobs, where you could be arbitrarily arrested and/or beaten up or worse for speaking out against the government, the system, or just…speaking out.
Egypt had only known a handful of military rulers until Mubarak was ousted in February 2011, following weeks of protests centred around Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
When elections were held a year later, Mohammed Morsi, standing for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, emerged as president. After decades of repression of the Muslim Brotherhood under Egypt’s military rulers, Morsi promised a moderate agenda that would deliver an “Egyptian renaissance with an Islamic foundation”.
A year later, he was gone, replaced by Abd al Fatah al Sisi, his own defense minister, who threw him in jail and cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, putting hundreds of its members in front of courts that sentenced them to death in mass trials.
His year in office was turbulent, however, as Egypt’s competing forces struggled over the direction the country should go in. Opponents had accused him of trying to impose an Islamist agenda on the country and mass protests began on the anniversary of his election. After more than a week of spreading protests and violence and talks with Sisi in which Morsi reportedly was prepared to make concessions to the opposition, the army announced it had removed Morsi and taken control on 3rd July 2013.
Morsi’s supporters had gathered in Cairo’s Rabaa Square before he was toppled, and there they remained, demanding he be reinstated. On 13th August, the army moved in, clearing the square by force. More than a thousand people are believed to have been killed in the worst massacre of peaceful demonstrators since China’s Tienanmen Square in 1999.
Whereas Hosni Mubarak died in pampered confinement, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president, was held in solitary confinement for six years, and died in June 2019 after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power. See: Nowhere Man – the lonesome death of Mohamed Morsi
Morsi’s fall led to a military regime more brutal and corrupt than any that preceded it, and with full support from the US and it’s European allies, and of the Egyptian elites, has consolidated the rise and rise of the new pharoah. Al Sisi and other US supporterd and armed Arab autocrats have transformed an already volatile Middle East into a powder keg.
Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president died in June 2019 after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power in 2013
The Arab Spring failed because its youthful vanguard were not prepared for the next stage. In reality, it only occurred in Tunisia and in Egypt. Like the Occupy movement in the west, it lacked coherent leadership and purpose, and in the end, unity against the forces of the establishment that were mobilized against them. But the young, inexperienced idealists were no match for the experienced activists of the Muslim brotherhood, the apparatchiks of the established political parties, and the cadres of the mukhabarat, the military, and the “deep state” that were able to hijack and subvert the revolution.
The Arab Spring was effectively over once the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators had departed and the counterrevolution had already begun – in Egypt particularly with the electoral success and later putsch of the Ikhwan, and finally the “tamarrud” or “rising” of the fearful and conservative middle classes that ushered in military rule.
The great unravelling
The Tunisian and Egyptian risings were followed rapidly by the outbreak of insurrections in Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. These were more sectarian and tribal based, with less reliance on social media, and while media chose to consider them as part of the Arab Spring, in reality, they were not.
This was transformed into a long, hard and bloody winter., and eight years on, the wars of the Arab Dissolution have dragged the world into its vortex. Great Power politics and proxy wars are taxing intellectual and actual imaginations.
And they led to the virtual destruction and disintegration of these countries, the ongoing dismantling of Iraq, and an expanding arc of violence, bloodshed and repression from Morocco to Pakistan, extending southwards across Africa into Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and the Sudans, and their unfortunate neighbours.
Tunisia alone has held on to some of the gains of its “Spring”, but there it is often a case of two steps forward one step back. Nevertheless, the country is holding ostensibly free and fair elections as I write. Elsewhere, the misnamed Arab Spring entered into a cycle of protest and repression little different from earlier unrest, and also, as in the past, foreign intervention. And the story has still a long way to run…
Civil war and economic desperation propelled millions of refugees across the Mediterranean and the Aegean into Europe, threatening the unity and stability of the European Union. Islamic fundamentalism filled the vacuum created by crumbling dictatorships and vanishing borders, unleashing atavistic, uncompromising and vicious Jihadis against their own people and coreligionists, and onto the streets of cities as far apart as Paris, Istanbul, Beirut, Djakarta, and Mogadishu. In Syria particularly, but also in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, outsiders intervened to further complicate the chaos, rendering an early end to these wars a forlorn hope.
All is, as Kent lamented in King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly”.
Against this a back-drop of the revolution despoiled, hijacked, and betrayed, I share the song created by Seed Mostafa Fahmy and his friends and the video they shot in Tahrir Square during the demonstrations. “In every street in my country, the voice of Freedom is calling!”
Sawt al Hurriya
I went (to go protest), vowing not to turn back.
I wrote, in my blood, on every street.
We raised our voices, until those who had not heard us could.
We broke down all barriers.
Our weapon was our dreams.
And we could see tomorrow clearly.
We have been waiting for so long.
Searching, and never finding our place.
In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.
We raised our heads high into the sky.
And hunger no longer mattered to us.
Most important are our rights,
And that with our blood we write our history.
If you are one of us,
Stop your chattering,
Stop telling us to leave and abandon our dream.
Stop saying the word, “I”.
In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.
Brown Egyptian hands
Are outstretched amidst the roars (of the crowd)
Breaking barriers.
Our innovative youth
Have turned autumn into spring.
They have achieved the miraculous.
They have resurrected the dead,
Saying: “Kill me,
But my death will not resurrect YOUR country.
I am writing, with my blood,
A new life for my nation.
Is this my blood, or is it spring?
In color, they are both green.”
I do not know whether I smile from happiness,
Or from my sadnesses.
In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.
(Translated by Egyptian Seed Mariam Bazeed.)
Sout al-Hurriya صوت الحرية
Nezelt We qolt ana mesh rage3
نزلت وقلت انا مش راجع
I went out and said I would not return
we katabt bedamy fe kol share3
وكتبت بدمي في كل شارع
And I wrote on each street with my blood
Sama3na elli makansh same3
سمعنا اللي ما كمش سامع
We heard what was not heard
we etkasaret kol el mawane3
واتكسرت كل الموانع
And all the barriers were broken
sela7na kan a7lamna
سلحنا كان احلامنا
Our weapon was our dreams
we bokra wade7 odamna
وبكره واضح قدمنا
And tomorrow was clear ahead of us
men zaman benestana
من زمان بنستني
We’ve been waiting a long time
bendawar mesh la2een makkanna
بندور مش لاقيين مكانا
Seeking but not finding our place
fe kol share3 fe beladi
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
sout el houriya beynadi
صوت الحريه بينادي
the voice of freedom is calling
……………….
rafa3na rasna fe elsama
رفعنا رسنا في السما
We lifted our heads high (in the sky)
we elgo3 maba2ash beyhemna
والجوع مبقاش بيهمنا
And hunger no longer bothered us
aham 7aga 7a2ena
اهم حاجه حقنا
What’s most important are our rights
wenekteb tarekhna be damena
ونكتب تاريخنا بدمنا
And to write our history with our blood
law kont wa7ed mnena
لو كنت واحد مننا
If you were really one of us
balash terghi we t2ol lena
بلاش ترغي وتقولنا
don’t blather and telling us
nemshy we neseeb &elmna
نمشي ونسيب حلمنا
To leave and abandon our dream
we batal te2ol kelmt ana
وبطل تقول كلمه انا
And stop saying the word “I”
fe kol share3 fe beladi
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
Sout El-7ouria beynadi
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
……………..
spoken poetry at 2:14:
ايادي مصريه سمره
Dark Egyptian arms
ليها في التمييز
knows how to characterize (against discrimination)
ممدوده وسط الذئير
reached out through the roar
بتكسر البراويز
breaking the frams
طلع الشباب البديع
the creative youth came out
قلبوا خريفها ربيع
turned it’s fall into spring
وحققوا المعجزه
and achieved the miracle
صحوا القتيل من القتل
awakinging the murdered from death
اقتلني , اقتلني
kill me , kill me
قتلي ما هايقيم دولتك تاني
killing me is not going to build up you regime again
بكتب بدمي حياه تانيه لوطاني
I am writing with my blood another life for my country
دمي ده ولا الربيع
is this my blood or the spring
اللي اتنين بلون اخضر
both seem green
وببتسم من سعادتي ولا أحزاني
am i smiling from my happiness or my sadness
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
UN-sponsored talks have produced a new interim government for Libya aimed at resolving a decade of chaos, division and violence by holding national elections later this year. But with myriad factions loathe to surrender influence they already hold, and with foreign powers invested in local allies, the new government may rapidly come under pressure. The appointment of a new government may also do little to change the balance of military power on the ground, where armed groups rule the streets and factions remain split between east and west along a fortified front-line.
Some Libyans have been critical of a process which they view as being managed from abroad and which they fear will allow existing power-brokers to cling to their influence. “It’s just a painkiller to portray Libya as stable for a while. But war and tension will certainly come back sooner or later so long as militias have power,” said Abdulatif al-Zorgani,a 45-year-old state employee in Tripoli.
“Déjà vu all over again”
A year ago, In That Howling Infinite published Tangled – a cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East Back then, Libya held poll position for its multitude of active players and, to use that Shakespearean script note, “voices off”. A year on, borrowing again from the Bard, there are continuing “alarums and excursions”.
Libya has long been a jigsaw puzzle of competing interests –tribal versus urban, Islamist versus secularist, revolutionary versus old-regime, localist and regional players, Middle Eastern and European – all prepared to tear the country apart for in pursuit of their own political and economic interests – which include, as is often the case, oil and gas. Their contortions get more and more torturous.
It was reported year last year that that more than 1400 Russian mercenaries had been were deployed in 2019 by the Wagner company, a Russian military outfit headed by a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had deployed in Libya to assist warlord Khalifa Haftar’s self-styled Libyan National Army in its push against Libya ostensibly internationally recognized government. It was joining troops hired by Haftar’s backers, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and included mercenaries from Sudan’s brutal Jamjaweed militia – aided and abetted by several EU members and French, Italian and sundry other arms suppliers.
Wagner’s sell-swords included a good number of Syrians – sundry rebels and jihadis left high, dry and unemployed by the Syrian regime’s ongoing ‘reconquista’ – which is, as we know, bolstered by the Russian military – including Wagner’s fighting men, who include in their number many Muslim Chechens from Russia’s subservient neighbour.
When Haftar’s offensive stalled outside Tripoli, Libya’s capitol, last June, it was reported that more than a thousand of the Russian and Syrian mercenaries had beenpulled back from the front lines and taken planes to who knows where. This “retreat” was precipitated by a Turkish military intervention that has helped block an assault on the capital.
The Turkish contingent is comprised of numerous specialists and advisers, artillery and aircraft, and a contingent of, surprise surprise, hirelings drawn from the same battered battlefields of northern Syria. Those same jihadis and rebels in Wagner’s pay.
Many Syrians sell their services because it is the only way they can feed their families in the war-battered economy of the regime’s Syria, and the besieged enclaves of the disparate rebel forces. It reported that these mercenaries, zealous and reluctant alike, have also been deployed in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh during the recent brief but bloody war between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-supported Azerbaijan. Recruits on both sides in both conflicts are reportedly complaining that they are not being paid what they were promised nor on time.
Haftar spend time late last year in Egypt conferring with his patron and mentor, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, over possible next moves. There is speculation now that whilst Haftar’s backers are becoming increasingly disillusioned with his martial abilities, they are reluctant to relinquish their influence in this politically and economically strategically area leaving the field to an ambitious Erdogan. They may, indeed, be surreptitiously looking around for a new dance-partner.
As COVID-19 infections continued to rise, and as Turkey and Russia vied for influence in this strategically important corner of the Mediterranean, there wereincoherent mumblings that the that the USA might be about to throw its MAGA cap into the crowded ring, This did not however eventuate, and there are indications that the new administration may be reluctant to involve itself in torturous proxy wars involving disreputable Arab and other despots.
Nevertheless, Libya’s nightmare continues. As American baseball wizz Yogi Berra once said, “It feels like déjà vu all over again”.
Last month saw the death in exile of former Tunisian strongman, dictator and kleptocrat Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and the resurgence on 20th September of Friday street protests in Cairo and smaller Egyptian towns – and around the world – against the corruption and oppression of Egyptian strongman Abd al Fattah al Sisi and his military cronies. Predictably, some three thousand people have been arrested – protesters, prominent activists, journalists, lawyers and politicians, including Islamist and leftists alike and dissenters in general. These have now been added to the tens of thousands that have already been incarcerated on conspiracy and terrorism charges, largely without trial.
it appears to be an indiscriminate backlash, The Independent’s Bel True writes: “… according to rights groups and people I’ve interviewed, among those haphazardly rounded up are children who were out buying school uniform, tourists holidaying in Cairo, human rights lawyers going to court to represent clients, confused bystanders, young men popping out for evening strolls, visiting foreign students and street vendors. All are now swallowed up in Egypt’s notoriously opaque justice system”.
The protests have for the moment been contained, but with a third of Egypt’s population below the poverty line (and that’s a government figure – it’s very likely much higher), about one-third of the total under age 14 and sixty percent under 30, one can’t help feeling a hint of déjà vu. It is hard to keep one hundred million people down with just a strong arm up your sleeve.
Meeting with al Sisi in New York, US President Donald Trump praised him for restoring order to Egypt. At this year’s G7 summit in Biarritz, Trump had referred to the Egyptian president as his “favourite dictator”, a comment that was met with stunned silence from American and Egyptian officials. Boris Johnson has likewise found a friend in Al Sisi. Tru quotes a British-Egyptian filmmaker: “There is a misconception that Sisi is a partner in stability which allows governments, particularly in Europe, to turn a blind eye to his behaviour: as long he keeps buying weapons and submarines and power stations”.
The Voice of Freedom
In our relatively comfortable, free and democratic countries, it is difficult to put ourselves in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consequences of potentially heroic failure. We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:
Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.
The courage of the of the Egyptian protesters – for brave they are indeed For having experienced six years of brutal and vengeful military regime, they are fully aware of the consequences of their actions – reminded me of an exhilarating song and video created by a young Egyptian and his friends, celebrating the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that precipitated the fall of practically president-for-life Hosni Mubarak eight years ago last February. Sawt Al Huriya (The Voice of Freedom)), went viral on YouTube after its release on 11 February 2011, the day before Mubarak’s departure.
Bur first, let us revisit those heady days and the doleful years that followed.
Remembering Tahrir Square
The self-immolation in December 20111 of young Tunisian Muhammed Bouazizi was the catalyst for the pent-up popular outrage that led to the heady days of January and February 2011, with the green of the Arab Spring fresh sprung from the soil of the economic and political bankruptcy of the Arab Middle East.
The fall of longtime dictators Zine el Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, was precipitated by the yearning of their oppressed and impoverished people, and particularly the young, for freedom, justice, dignity and employment, and an end to endemic corruption, nepotism and brutality; for a society in which there were jobs and a decent living, where you could save up enough money to get married, where you didn’t have to bribe corrupt officials for everything from traffic fines to court decisions to business permits to jobs, where you could be arbitrarily arrested and/or beaten up or worse for speaking out against the government, the system, or just…speaking out.
Egypt had only known a handful of military rulers until Mubarak was ousted in February 2011, following weeks of protests centred around Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
When elections were held a year later, Mohammed Morsi, standing for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, emerged as president. After decades of repression of the Muslim Brotherhood under Egypt’s military rulers, Morsi promised a moderate agenda that would deliver an “Egyptian renaissance with an Islamic foundation”.
A year later, he was gone, replaced by Abd al Fatah al Sisi, his own defense minister, who threw him in jail and cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, putting hundreds of its members in front of courts that sentenced them to death in mass trials.
His year in office was turbulent, however, as Egypt’s competing forces struggled over the direction the country should go in. Opponents had accused him of trying to impose an Islamist agenda on the country and mass protests began on the anniversary of his election. After more than a week of spreading protests and violence and talks with Sisi in which Morsi reportedly was prepared to make concessions to the opposition, the army announced it had removed Morsi and taken control on 3rd July 2013.
Morsi’s supporters had gathered in Cairo’s Rabaa Square before he was toppled, and there they remained, demanding he be reinstated. On 13th August, the army moved in, clearing the square by force. More than a thousand people are believed to have been killed in the worst massacre of peaceful demonstrators since China’s Tienanmen Square in 1999.
Whereas Hosni Mubarak died in pampered confinement, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president, was held in solitary confinement for six years, and died in June 2019 after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power. See: Nowhere Man – the lonesome death of Mohamed Morsi
Morsi’s fall led to a military regime more brutal and corrupt than any that preceded it, and with full support from the US and it’s European allies, and of the Egyptian elites, has consolidated the rise and rise of the new pharoah. Al Sisi and other US supporterd and armed Arab autocrats have transformed an already volatile Middle East into a powder keg.
Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president died in June 2019 after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power in 2013
The Arab Spring failed because its youthful vanguard were not prepared for the next stage. In reality, it only occurred in Tunisia and in Egypt. Like the Occupy movement in the west, it lacked coherent leadership and purpose, and in the end, unity against the forces of the establishment that were mobilized against them. But the young, inexperienced idealists were no match for the experienced activists of the Muslim brotherhood, the apparatchiks of the established political parties, and the cadres of the mukhabarat, the military, and the “deep state” that were able to hijack and subvert the revolution.
The Arab Spring was effectively over once the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators had departed and the counterrevolution had already begun – in Egypt particularly with the electoral success and later putsch of the Ikhwan, and finally the “tamarrud” or “rising” of the fearful and conservative middle classes that ushered in military rule.
The great unravelling
The Tunisian and Egyptian risings were followed rapidly by the outbreak of insurrections in Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. These were more sectarian and tribal based, with less reliance on social media, and while media chose to consider them as part of the Arab Spring, in reality, they were not.
This was transformed into a long, hard and bloody winter., and eight years on, the wars of the Arab Dissolution have dragged the world into its vortex. Great Power politics and proxy wars are taxing intellectual and actual imaginations.
And they led to the virtual destruction and disintegration of these countries, the ongoing dismantling of Iraq, and an expanding arc of violence, bloodshed and repression from Morocco to Pakistan, extending southwards across Africa into Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and the Sudans, and their unfortunate neighbours.
Tunisia alone has held on to some of the gains of its “Spring”, but there it is often a case of two steps forward one step back. Nevertheless, the country is holding ostensibly free and fair elections as I write. Elsewhere, the misnamed Arab Spring entered into a cycle of protest and repression little different from earlier unrest, and also, as in the past, foreign intervention. And the story has still a long way to run…
Civil war and economic desperation propelled millions of refugees across the Mediterranean and the Aegean into Europe, threatening the unity and stability of the European Union. Islamic fundamentalism filled the vacuum created by crumbling dictatorships and vanishing borders, unleashing atavistic, uncompromising and vicious Jihadis against their own people and coreligionists, and onto the streets of cities as far apart as Paris, Istanbul, Beirut, Djakarta, and Mogadishu. In Syria particularly, but also in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, outsiders intervened to further complicate the chaos, rendering an early end to these wars a forlorn hope.
All is, as Kent lamented in King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly”.
Against this a back-drop of the revolution despoiled, hijacked, and betrayed, I share the song created by Seed Mostafa Fahmy and his friends and the video they shot in Tahrir Square during the demonstrations. “In every street in my country, the voice of Freedom is calling!”
Sawt al Hurriya
I went (to go protest), vowing not to turn back.
I wrote, in my blood, on every street.
We raised our voices, until those who had not heard us could.
We broke down all barriers.
Our weapon was our dreams.
And we could see tomorrow clearly.
We have been waiting for so long.
Searching, and never finding our place.
In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.
We raised our heads high into the sky.
And hunger no longer mattered to us.
Most important are our rights,
And that with our blood we write our history.
If you are one of us,
Stop your chattering,
Stop telling us to leave and abandon our dream.
Stop saying the word, “I”.
In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.
Brown Egyptian hands
Are outstretched amidst the roars (of the crowd)
Breaking barriers.
Our innovative youth
Have turned autumn into spring.
They have achieved the miraculous.
They have resurrected the dead,
Saying: “Kill me,
But my death will not resurrect YOUR country.
I am writing, with my blood,
A new life for my nation.
Is this my blood, or is it spring?
In color, they are both green.”
I do not know whether I smile from happiness,
Or from my sadnesses.
In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.
(Translated by Egyptian Seed Mariam Bazeed.)
Sout al-Hurriya صوت الحرية
Nezelt We qolt ana mesh rage3
نزلت وقلت انا مش راجع
I went out and said I would not return
we katabt bedamy fe kol share3
وكتبت بدمي في كل شارع
And I wrote on each street with my blood
Sama3na elli makansh same3
سمعنا اللي ما كمش سامع
We heard what was not heard
we etkasaret kol el mawane3
واتكسرت كل الموانع
And all the barriers were broken
sela7na kan a7lamna
سلحنا كان احلامنا
Our weapon was our dreams
we bokra wade7 odamna
وبكره واضح قدمنا
And tomorrow was clear ahead of us
men zaman benestana
من زمان بنستني
We’ve been waiting a long time
bendawar mesh la2een makkanna
بندور مش لاقيين مكانا
Seeking but not finding our place
fe kol share3 fe beladi
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
sout el houriya beynadi
صوت الحريه بينادي
the voice of freedom is calling
……………….
rafa3na rasna fe elsama
رفعنا رسنا في السما
We lifted our heads high (in the sky)
we elgo3 maba2ash beyhemna
والجوع مبقاش بيهمنا
And hunger no longer bothered us
aham 7aga 7a2ena
اهم حاجه حقنا
What’s most important are our rights
wenekteb tarekhna be damena
ونكتب تاريخنا بدمنا
And to write our history with our blood
law kont wa7ed mnena
لو كنت واحد مننا
If you were really one of us
balash terghi we t2ol lena
بلاش ترغي وتقولنا
don’t blather and telling us
nemshy we neseeb &elmna
نمشي ونسيب حلمنا
To leave and abandon our dream
we batal te2ol kelmt ana
وبطل تقول كلمه انا
And stop saying the word “I”
fe kol share3 fe beladi
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
Sout El-7ouria beynadi
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
……………..
spoken poetry at 2:14:
ايادي مصريه سمره
Dark Egyptian arms
ليها في التمييز
knows how to characterize (against discrimination)
ممدوده وسط الذئير
reached out through the roar
بتكسر البراويز
breaking the frams
طلع الشباب البديع
the creative youth came out
قلبوا خريفها ربيع
turned it’s fall into spring
وحققوا المعجزه
and achieved the miracle
صحوا القتيل من القتل
awakinging the murdered from death
اقتلني , اقتلني
kill me , kill me
قتلي ما هايقيم دولتك تاني
killing me is not going to build up you regime again
بكتب بدمي حياه تانيه لوطاني
I am writing with my blood another life for my country
دمي ده ولا الربيع
is this my blood or the spring
اللي اتنين بلون اخضر
both seem green
وببتسم من سعادتي ولا أحزاني
am i smiling from my happiness or my sadness
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Maya Angelou
Death in slow-mo
Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president died last week after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power in 2013.
The old tyrant Hosni Mubarak whom Morsi had replaced in 2011 in the wake of the Tahrir Square protests, died in pampered confinement. Not so his successor, held in solitary confinement for six years – thanks to the hard hearted Pharaoh who followed him.
Morsi’s fall led to a military regime more brutal and corrupt than any that preceded it, and with full support from the US and it’s European allies, and of the Egyptian elites, has consolidated the rise and rise of Egypt’s new rais and of the Arab autocrats who have transformed an already volatile Middle East into a powder keg.
Veteran journalists Robert Fisk and David Hearst are among the few to have called out the deafening silence of the world when Morsi died in the dock (see their tributes below). It’s was like as if a tree falls in the forest – does anybody hear? Certainly not the pusillanimous, obsequious rulers of the so-called “free world”. “How useful it is”, Hearst wrote, “for Western leaders to shrug their shoulders and say, in true Orientalist fashion, that a regime such as Sisi’s is business as usual in a “rough neighbourhood”.”
It was if he had never lived. And death in the dock was perhaps the only way he could escape – he had in a fashion been rescued and gone home to his family and to those who had supported him through his long travail.
Sixty seven year old Morsi was imprisoned in 2013 after being toppled in a military coup by Egypt’s current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He was back in court facing a retrial on charges including espionage – part of a swag of cases that had initially seen him sentenced to death.
Egypt had only known a handful of military rulers until Mubarak was ousted in February 2011, following weeks of protests centred around Cairo’s Tahrir Square. These were the heady days of the brief “Arab Spring” and the fall of longtime dictators Zine el Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak. It was precipitated by the yearning of their oppressed and impoverished people, and particularly the young, for freedom, justice, dignity and employment, and an end to endemic corruption, nepotism and brutality.
When elections were held a year later, Morsi, standing for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, emerged as president. After decades of repression of the Muslim Brotherhood under Egypt’s military rulers, Morsi promised a moderate agenda that would deliver an “Egyptian renaissance with an Islamic foundation”.
A year later, he was gone, replaced by And al Fatah al Sisi, his own defense minister, who threw him in jail and cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, putting hundreds of its members in front of courts that sentenced them to death in mass trials.
His year in office was turbulent, however, as Egypt’s competing forces struggled over the direction the country should go in. Opponents had accused him of trying to impose an Islamist agenda on the country and mass protests began on the anniversary of his election. After more than a week of spreading protests and violence and talks with Sisi in which Morsi reportedly was prepared to make concessions to the opposition, the army announced it had removed Morsi and taken control on 3rd July 2013.
Morsi’s supporters had gathered in Cairo’s Rabaa Square before he was toppled, and there they remained, demanding he be reinstated. On 13th August, the army moved in, clearing the square by force. More than a thousand people are believed to have been killed in the worst massacre of peaceful demonstrators since China’s Tienanmen Square in 1999.
Morsi faced a number of trials, including on charges of spying for Qatar and of participating in prison breaks and violence against policemen during the 2011 uprising against Mubarak and was sentenced to death and multiple decades-long prison sentences. However, the death sentence and others were overturned by Egypt’s appeals court in 2015, prompting the retrial proceedings.
The conditions in which Morsi and tens of thousands of jailed dissidents were being held, as well as concerns raised by his family and supporters about his state of health, had long attracted the attention of activists and international human rights organisations. British MPs warned in March 2018 that Morsi was facing an “early death” because of the conditions he was being held in, which included 23 hours a day of solitary confinement, sleeping on a cement floor and being fed only canned food. He was reportedly suffering from diabetic comas and was losing his eyesight.
Morsi collapsed on Monday inside the infamous cages in which defendants are held in Egypt’s courts, and was pronounced dead soon after. Egypt’s public prosecutor declared that a medical report showed no signs of recent injury.
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded And that even the nobles get properly handled Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Morsi’s mixed legacy
Safeguard the revolution. Safeguard the revolution, which we have acquired with our sweat and with the blood of our martyrs, as well as with our two and a half year march. You should all safeguard it, whether you are supporters or opponents. Beware, lest the revolution is stolen from you. Mohamed Morsi’s last speech as president
David Hearst writes that for all his faults, Morsi was an honest man and a true democrat, but (that) for much of the year he was in power, he was not in control, caught up in a maelstrom that became too big for him.
Fisk adds: “ … it’s true that Morsi was a second-choice president – the man the Brotherhood originally chose was barred from standing on a technicality – and it’s correct to say that Morsi’s near-year in power was also second-rate, uninspiring, disappointing, occasionally violent and tinged by a little dictatorial ambition of his own … Trotting out of cabinet meetings to phone his chums in the Brotherhood for advice was not exactly running a government through primus inter pares. But he was not a bad man. He was not a terrorist and he did not lock up 60,000 political prisoners like his successor – who is, of course, regarded as “a great guy” by the other great guy in the White House”.
The world today appears to be the play-pen of the ‘big man’, and of it’s Arab equivalent, az-zaim, the boss: the autocrat with the big mouth and the large persona, with the power of patronage and the heft of the security services behind him – Tony Soprano bereft of all his redeeming features.
Morsi’s demise demonstrates to every ‘big man’ in the Middle East and beyond that their misdeeds will go unpunished and unthought of, that justice will remain unredeemed and history books unread. On the bleeding edges of the Middle East, the bin Salmans and Assads, the emirs of the Gulf, and the militias of Libya, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Sudan and Congo, will not be losing sleep. Nor, of course, will Abd al Fattah al Sisi.
Hearst writes: “The Egyptian president stands above the law – beyond elections and parliament, out of any legal reach, or indeed that of the constitution. All of these are his playthings; soft wax in his hands. He will rule for as long as he lives, as absolutely as anyone in Egypt or the Middle East. Asked if he backed the efforts to allow Sisi to stay in power for another 15 years, Trump said: “I think he’s doing a great job. I don’t know about the effort, I can just tell you he is doing a great job … great president.”
But whilst the caged Morsi died alone and unsung, he will be remembered.
He is mourned by many millions of Muslim Arabs the world over, a martyr for the faith and a symbol of what might have been. The grief is more a remembrance of what he stood for more and the brief flickering of happiness and hope that accompanied his ascension than for what he accomplished during his tenure. His presidency was brief and bewildered, caught between many rocks and hard places in th turbulent tides of the short-lived Aran Spring, between the seemingly irreconcilable demands of democracy and the deity, between what the Egyptian people wanted and needed, and between what his Ikhwan believed they needed, even if their conception of what was good for themselves and Allah was not what the youths of Tahrir Square, men and woman both, had fought and bled for.
Critics have argued that Morsi opened the door to the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood – and indeed, he appeared to dance to their tune – but it is his successor and el Sisi’s allies, financiers and armourers, west and east, who by their actions and indeed, inaction, who are stoking the fires of radical fundamentalism.
To borrow from Bruce Cockburn, keep millions of people down down takes more than a strong arm up your sleeve.
There will be a reckoning.
There will be hell to pay.
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up A thundercloud And they’re going to hear from me
The lack of comment from our heads of state is positive encouragement to every Middle Eastern leader who now knows their own misdeeds will go unpunished
Ye Gods, how brave was our response to the outrageous death-in-a-cage of Mohamed Morsi. It is perhaps a little tiresome to repeat all the words of regret and mourning, of revulsion and horror, of eardrum-busting condemnation pouring forth about the death of Egypt’s only elected president in his Cairo courtroom this week. From Downing Street and from the White House, from the German Chancellery to the Elysee – and let us not forget the Berlaymont – our statesmen and women did us proud. Wearying it would be indeed to dwell upon their remorse and protests at Morsi’s death.
For it was absolutely non-existent: zilch; silence; not a mutter; not a bird’s twitter – or a mad president’s Twitter, for that matter – or even the most casual, offhand word of regret. Those who claim to represent us were mute, speechless, as sound-proofed as Morsi was in his courtroom cage and as silent as he is now in his Cairo grave.
It was as if Morsi never lived, as if his few months in power never existed – which is pretty much what Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, his nemesis and ex-gaoler, wants the history books to say.
So three cheers again for our parliamentary democracies, which always speak with one voice about tyranny. Save for the old UN donkey and a few well-known bastions of freedom – Turkey, Malaysia, Qatar, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood-in-exile and all the usual suspects – Morsi’s memory and his final moments were as if they had never been. Crispin Blunt alone has tried to keep Britain’s conscience alive. So has brave little Tunisia. Much good will it do.
Yes, it’s true that Morsi was a second-choice president – the man the Brotherhood originally chose was barred from standing on a technicality – and it’s correct to say that Morsi’s near-year in power was also second-rate, uninspiring, disappointing, occasionally violent and tinged by a little dictatorial ambition of his own. Trotting out of cabinet meetings to phone his chums in the Brotherhood for advice was not exactly running a government through primus inter pares.
But he was not a bad man. He was not a terrorist and he did not lock up 60,000 political prisoners like his successor – who is, of course, regarded as “a great guy” by the other great guy in the White House.
It’s instructive to note how differently Morsi was treated after the coup d’etat that destroyed him. Banged up in solitary, unable to talk to his own family, deprived of medical help; just compare that to the comfort in which his predecessor Hosni Mubarak lived after his own dethronement – the constant hospital treatment, family visits, public expressions of sympathy and even a press interview. Morsi’s last words, defending his status as the still existing president of Egypt, were mechanically muffled by the sound-proof cage.
Our pusillanimous, disgraceful silence is not just proof of the pathetic nature of our public servants in the west. It is positive encouragement to every leader in the Middle East that their misdeeds will go unpunished, unthought of, that justice will remain unredeemed and history books unread. Our silence – let us be frank about it – is not going to have the Bin Salmans or Assads or the princes of the Gulf or the militias of Libya, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq shaking in their boots. Nor, of course, Sisi.
But yes, for many millions of Arab Muslims, Morsi was a martyr – if you imagine that martyrs have a cause. The trials and executions and mass imprisonments of the Brotherhood, “a terrorist organisation” in the eyes of Sisi (and almost in David Cameron’s until his security flunkeys told him it was a non-starter) will not destroy it. But are there any other Morsis around, willing to risk death in a prison cell as a price of their overthrow? Morsi himself told one of his senior advisers, Egyptian-Canadian physician and academic Wael Haddara, that if he could navigate Egypt towards democracy, he expected to be assassinated. Which, I suppose – given his ill treatment, isolation and unfair trials – was his ultimate fate.
The only western newspaper to give a friend of Morsi a chance to speak about him appears to be the Washington Post – all praise to it – which allowed Haddara the room to demand that Egypt must answer for the ex-president’s death. At a last meeting before he became president in June of 2012, Haddara asked Morsi to autograph an Egyptian flag.
And this is what Morsi wrote: “The Egypt that lives in my imagination: an Egypt of values and civilisation; an Egypt of growth and stability and love. And its flag, ever soaring above us.”
Would that a crackpot president or our own ignorant Tory masters were capable of such eloquence – or such honour.
People hold pictures of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi during a symbolic funeral ceremony on 18 June in Istanbul (AFP)
Egypt’s first democratically elected president met an end as dramatic as his one and only year in power. The man feted on social media as Egypt’s ‘martyr president’ will enjoy a status in death that he never achieved in life. The date alone on which it happened is significant. Mohamed Morsi died on 17 June, seven years to the day from the second round of his presidential election.
For all of his time in prison, Morsi was held in solitary confinement. He was allowed onlythree visitsfrom his family in nearly six years. The state had ample opportunity to kill off a diabetic who suffered from high blood pressure in private, but if they wanted to convince the Egyptian people that their former president was dead, the job would have to be done in public, which is what Monday’s events were all about.
The cruellest pharaoh
We will never know the truth. Morsi’s nemesis, the man he handpicked to lead the army and who went on to depose him, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, will never allow for an international investigation. Egypt is ruled by a pharaoh as absolute and cruel as any in its long history.
But even if Morsi died of natural causes, who are the people responsible before the court of history?
How easy and convenient it would be to place all the blame for Morsi’s death on Sisi himself. How useful it is for Western leaders to shrug their shoulders and say, in true Orientalist fashion, that a regime such as Sisi’s is business as usual in a “rough neighbourhood”.
Another variation on the same theme was former US President Barack Obama’s private reaction to the massacre at Rabaa Square in the weeks following the military coup. He reportedly told aides that the US could not help Egypt if Egyptians kill each other. That comment alone explains why the West is in decay: Obama’s reaction to the worst massacre since Tienanmen Square was to go back to his game of golf.
Morsi was held in solitary confinement for nearly six years. How many times in that period did Western leaders put pressure on Sisi to get access to him? None.
When State Department aides attempted to convince the former secretary of state, John Kerry, of the need to pressure Sisi to allow the Red Cross access to detainees in prison, Kerry rounded on him: “Give me a policy the Egyptians will not scream at me for,” a source with knowledge of the incident later told me.
Above the law
How many high-profile visits was Sisi allowed to make during the period of Morsi’s detention? He was feted on the international stage all over the world. France flogged him Mistral class warships. Germany flogged him submarines.
In Sharm el-Sheikh this year, Sisi was allowed to play host to world leaders from the EU and Arab League, purporting to uphold the world order. Far from taking lectures on human rights at the summit, Sisi gave them. Talking of the spike this year in executions, he told European leaders that executing detainees was part of “our humanity”, which is different from “your [European] humanity”.
“The global rules-based order is clearly under threat,” opined European Council President Donald Tusk. “We have agreed here in Sharm el-Sheikh that both sides will work together to defend it. Multilateral solutions remain the best way to address threats to international peace and security.”
What, Mr Tusk, has Sisi to do with the “rules-based” order? Who are you kidding?
The Egyptian president stands above the law – beyond elections and parliament, out of any legal reach, or indeed that of the constitution. All of these are his playthings; soft wax in his hands. He will rule for as long as he lives, as absolutely as anyone in Egypt or the Middle East.
Morsi rotted in jail, forgotten by all but a handful of human rights advocates, who found themselves screaming into an empty room. The world moved on and forgot all about the man to whom they had briefly flocked.
With the arrival of US President Donald Trump, Sisi’s suppression of his political opponents was not simply sidelined; it was lauded. Asked if he backed the efforts to allow Sisi to stay in power for another 15 years, Trump said: “I think he’s doing a great job. I don’t know about the effort, I can just tell you he is doing agreat job … great president.”
So who is responsible for Morsi’s death? Look around you. They call themselves the leaders of the free world.
Morsi’s legacy
Morsi did not die in vain, although it may seem like that today. I and my fellow journalist Patrick Kingsley were the last journalists to interview him, just a week before his ouster. Morsi struck me as a good man in the middle of events that were rapidly sliding out of his control. Even the palace in which we filmed him was not his main seat of power, from which he and his staff had been moved earlier. Power was slipping from his grasp, even as he proclaimed to me that he had absolute faith in the army.
He was better one-on-one than in public. He could communicate privately far better than he did publicly.
Morsi addresses Egyptians in Tahrir Square after his 2012 election (AFP)
His speeches often failed to be understood, but he made two important ones during his time as president. The first was the day he was sworn in as president. Morsi wanted to be sworn in, in Tahrir Square, in front of the revolution that had brought him to power. He was told that it had to be in front of the Constitutional Court, packed full of the deep state, with members who vowed by hook or by crook to oppose him.
In the end, in true Morsi fashion, he was sworn in twice – once before the court and the deep state, the other before the Egyptian people inTahrir Square.
What he said in Tahrir Square is worth repeating. “People of Egypt, you are the source of the authority. You give it to whoever you want and deny it from whoever you want,” Morsi said.
And he meant it. This is closely based on a verse in the Quran, which says that God gives glory to whomever he wants, and he takes it away from whomever he wants. But here was an Islamist telling the people that they were sovereign.
‘Safeguard the revolution’
His last speech as president bore an equally resonant democratic message. He addressed future generations.
“I want to safeguard the girls. They will be future mothers who will teach their children that their fathers and forefathers were truly men who do not succumb to injustice and who never go along with the opinions of the corrupt and who would never give up on their homeland or their legitimacy.
“Safeguard the revolution. Safeguard the revolution, which we have acquired with our sweat and with the blood of our martyrs, as well as with our 2.5-year march. You should all safeguard it, whether you are supporters or opponents. Beware, lest the revolution is stolen from you.”
Which is exactly what happened. The revolution was stolen by more than just the army, which was never going to allow a Muslim Brotherhood president to continue. It was stolen by Cairo’s elite class of liberals, who decried Morsi as an Islamist dictator. It was stolen by the politicians who lied that Morsi had seized all power for himself and was incapable of sharing it.
As we know now, both journalist Hamdeen Sabahi and politician Ayman Nour were offered high posts by Morsi. Nour was told to form his cabinet as he wanted. It’s ironic that Morsi told Nour he had to include one post – that of Sisi as minister of defense. They did not say it then. They admit it now.
We also know now, from the participants themselves, that Tamarod, the grassroots movement founded to register opposition to Morsi, was a creation of military intelligence.
This is not to absolve the Brotherhood of responsibility for what happened. A Muslim Brotherhood president was in all probability doomed from the start. There were many points in which the Brotherhood abandoned Tahrir Square for the warm, treacherous embrace of the army. They made huge misjudgments, but those misjudgments were not, in and of themselves, the cause of what was to follow.
A democratic hero
Morsi himself was an honest man and a true democrat. For much of the year he was in power, he was not in control, caught up in a maelstrom that became too big for him.
Mohamed Morsi, confined to a courtroom cage
Who is responsible for Morsi’s death? We all are. There will only be two forces that profit from his death: Sisi and the military regime around him, and the Islamic State (IS) group, which “wished him hell and the worst of states”.
Morsi devoted his life to a people who abandoned him. If Sayyid Qutb before him became a hero for Islamists, both the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, Morsi’s legacy will be a democratic one.
Morsi quoted a poem before his collapse :
“My country will still be dear to me no matter how much oppressed I’ve been treated, and my people will still be honourable in my eyes no matter how mean to me they have been.”
The man now feted on social media as the “martyr president” will enjoy a status in death that he never achieved in life. He vowed to his end never to recognise the military coup that overthrew him, and he stayed true to his word. That is Morsi’s legacy, and it is an important one.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
David Hearst is the editor in chief of Middle East Eye. He left The Guardian as its chief foreign leader writer. In a career spanning 29 years, he covered the Brighton bomb, the miner’s strike, the loyalist backlash in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Northern Ireland, the first conflicts in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in Slovenia and Croatia, the end of the Soviet Union, Chechnya, and the bushfire wars that accompanied it. He charted Boris Yeltsin’s moral and physical decline and the conditions which created the rise of Putin. After Ireland, he was appointed Europe correspondent for Guardian Europe, then joined the Moscow bureau in 1992, before becoming bureau chief in 1994. He left Russia in 1997 to join the foreign desk, became European editor and then associate foreign editor. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he worked as education correspondent.
In That Howling Infinite 