flag does not predominate: instead people arrive with homemade banners, always with middle-aged men in the lead, chanting and singing. One banner says: ‘Fight for social justice, not your own demands’. At the edge of the square, the top-selling items on the souvenir stands are A4 posters showing Mubarak and all his ministers in orange jumpsuits, with nooses around their necks.
A loud delegation from the Masry Shebin El-Kom textile factory surrounds me. Mahmoud el-Shaar, who’s led a thirty-five-day occupation at the plant, says:
We’re striking to remove the imperialist presence of foreign elements. Mubarak privatized the company to Indonesian owners and they’ve shut four out of seven units. We want the prosecution of the corrupt officials who ran the cotton industry, and we want to terminate the contract with the Indonesians because it’s destroying our lives. Our average wage is between LE360 and LE700 a month.
The company was the target of a classic Mubarak-era deal: the Indorama group paid LE174 million for 70 per cent of the assets, the state kept 18 per cent and the NDP-run trade union would own 12 per cent. ‘The old, Mubarak union did nothing but corrupt the situation: we’re finished with them,’ el-Shaar says.7 Rifat Abdul, in the t-shirt of the public transport union, grabs my arm. His banner demands a minimum wage of LE1200. What’s changed?
I feel free. We all feel we can say what we think without getting detained for it. At work, though, nothing has changed: wages, conditions, work hours, nothing. But there is a spirit of optimism between all workers, in every sector. During the revolution, we were here from day one. But now it’s reached the point where we look around and we recognize these other delegations from the days in Tahrir Square, people from totally different sectors: we know each other’s faces, we shake each other’s hands, we slap each other on the back.
His mate, Wasim, rips the baseball cap off his bald head. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘We’re not going anywhere. I’m 100 per cent sure the whole world is behind us. We’ll stay here in the sun and heat until it’s done.’ But it’s not done yet.
The question for Musa Zekry
Back in the Moqattam slum, Musa Zekry’s future revolves around a single type of shampoo, brand name Pert. To prevent counterfeits, Procter & Gamble pay the zabbaleen to shred every Pert bottle they collect, in return for cash. With the cash—supplemented by money from Bill Gates—they run a school. At the school the kids learn Arabic, English, computing and how to shred the Pert bottles. Zekry learned English at this school and now mentors the kids.
They are bright-eyed and cheerful, but decide to sing me a doleful Coptic song whose refrain asserts the inevitability of being poor and the certainty of salvation. One kid, aged thirteen, explains his daily routine: ‘I go rubbish collecting from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m., and at 8 a.m. I go to school.’ With free English lessons he’s one of the lucky few, so what are his ambitions? ‘To collect so much rubbish we can pay for another school.’
Will he leave the slum? He shakes his head. The combined efforts of Bill Gates, Procter & Gamble and thirty years of Mubarak’s rule never managed to raise the aspirations of the Cairo poor beyond a better kind of poverty. By contrast, twenty-one days of revolution have brought freedom.
And freedom poses questions philanthropy does not bother with. Will Musa Zekry get healthcare, a living wage, free education for his kids as of right, instead of through charity? Will the ‘Mubaraks-in-every-enterprise’ be toppled? Will Egyptian society be scarred by rampant corruption and inequality forever? Or will they get something better?
These are questions which, for twenty years, the policy elite believed were closed. The great surge of freedom that carried Musa Zekry into Tahrir Square has reopened them.
But I’m rushing ahead. We need to backtrack, to the old world, where everything was stable and imagination was dead …
Nobody Saw It Coming: How the World’s Collective Imagination Failed
President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia on 14 January 2011. By 11 February, Hosni Mubarak was gone, and protests were spreading across the region: to Yemen, where the first ‘day of rage’ took place on 27 January; to Bahrain, where protesters occupied the Pearl Roundabout on 14 February. Then, on 17 February, security forces started shooting marchers in Bahrain and the Libyan people rose up against Gaddafi. On 25 March the long, tortured battle for freedom in Syria began.
Nobody had seen this coming. Nobody with any influence, anyway. The stock image of Arabs in the Western media was of a passive but violent race, often filed under the categories of ‘terrorism’ and ‘insoluble problems’. The Middle East specialists in the diplomatic and intelligence communities worked with a scarcely more sophisticated version of the same view. The Economist magazine’s celebrated yearbook, published in December 2010, contained just four predictions for North Africa and the Middle East: Sudan would split; Iran’s economy would suffer; Iraq would continue to be a headache; and there would be new peace talks over Palestine.1 Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Saleh and Assad were deemed to be of no interest.
Even after the fall of Ben Ali, they failed to see it coming. In an article titled ‘Why the Tunisian revolution won’t spread’, Stephen M. Walt, Harvard professor of international relations, opined that: ‘The history of world revolution suggests that this sort of revolutionary cascade is quite rare, and even when some sort of revolutionary contagion does take place, it happens pretty slowly and is often accompanied by overt foreign invasion.’2
Even when Tahrir Square was occupied, they could not see it coming. On the night of 25 January, Hillary Clinton told reporters: ‘Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable.’3 On the same day, Israel’s military intelligence chief told the Knesset much the same thing. He predicted that Mubarak would ‘be able to keep the demonstrations in check’, and echoed Clinton’s words: the regime was ‘stable’.4
And even when the revolution was all but over, some could still not see it. Peter Mandelson, the former Labour minister, made an extraordinary plea to the global elite to save the Egyptian dauphin, Gamal Mubarak:
Gamal Mubarak … has been the leading voice in favour of change within the government and the ruling party. Of course, it is easy to cast him as the putative beneficiary of a nepotistic transfer of family power, the continuation of ‘tyranny’ with a change of face at the top. This analysis, in my view, is too simplistic.
For a good six months, then, the Western political elite, media, academia and intelligence services were effectively driving with a shattered windscreen. But why?
The specific myopia over the Arab states is not hard to explain. Decades ago, Edward Said tried to warn the West about the self-deluding nature of its narrative on the Middle East:
Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.5
Said’s words were written in 1980: long before 9/11, before two invasions of Iraq had laid the basis for sectarian civil war there, and before the West began to conflate the narrative of Islam with al-Qaeda’s narrative of ruthless, nihilistic terror. For Carnegie scholar Tarek Masoud, the misapprehension goes deeper than the problem of cultural stereotypes:
Those of us who study the region not only failed to predict the [Mubarak] regime’s collapse, we actually saw it as an exemplar of something we called ‘durable authoritarianism’—a new breed of modern dictatorship that had figured out how to tame the political, economic, and social forces that routinely did in autocracy’s lesser variants.6
This gets closer to the root cause of disorientation, and holds lessons valid beyond the Middle East. A flaw in the West’s political