Overcome 9/11 through 2/11
The road to reconciliation
leads not through Baghdad or Kabul but through Tahrir
BY ROGER COHEN
Perhaps the most effective antidote to 9/11 will prove to be
2/11, the day Hosni Mubarak conceded the game was up with his
30-year-old dictatorship and left town under military escort for the
beach.
We’ve tried invasions of Muslim lands. We’ve tried
imposing new systems of government on them. We’ve tried wars on
terror. We’ve tried spending billions of dollars. What we haven’t
tried is tackling what’s been rotten in the Arab world by helping a
home-grown, bottom-up movement for change turn a US-backed police
state into a stable democracy.
This is the critical opportunity
Egypt now presents. Islamist radicalism has thrived on the American
double standards evident in strong support for the likes of Mubarak’s
regime. It has prospered from the very brutal repression that was
supposedly essential to stop the jihadists. And it has benefited from
the reduction of tens of millions of Arab citizens to mere objects,
shorn of dignity, and so more inclined to seek meaning in absolutist
movements of violence.
If westernised Egyptians and the Muslim
Brotherhood can coexist in Egypt’s nascent Second Republic, and if a
long subjugated Arab people can show that it is an actor of history
rather than its impotent pawn, the likelihood of another Mohamed Atta
walking the streets of Cairo will recede.
In 18 riveting days
Egypt has become a key to the unresolved 9/11 conundrum, the one
President Obama promised to tackle by building bridges to the Muslim
world, before Afghanistan diverted him.
“If we get Egypt
right, it could be the best medicine to get rid of radicalism,”
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning opposition figure, told me.
In the Middle East, you expect the worst. But having watched
Egypt’s extraordinary civic achievement in building the coalition that
ousted Mubarak, having watched Tahrir Square become cooperation
central and having watched the professionalism of the Egyptian army,
I’m convinced the country has what it takes to build a decent,
representative society – one that gives the lie to all the stereotypes
associated with that dismissive shorthand “The Arab Street”.
In fact, post-Tahrir, let’s retire that phrase. Speaking of
streets, I watched them get cleaned the morning after the revolution.
All the sweeping, dusting and scrubbing tempted me to suggest that
there was no need to get carried away and try to turn the glorious
metropolis of dust, Cairo, into Zurich. But Marwa Kamal put me right.
Kamal, 26, looked proud in her purple hijab. She was next to a
sign saying, ‘Sorry for disturbance, we build Egypt’. I asked why she
swept. “All the dirt’s in the past,” she said. “We want to clear out
the old and start clean.”
A retired chemist, Mahmoud Abdullah,
stepped in: “This is a very precious generation,” he told me, pointing
at her. “They did what we failed to do.”
Right now Egypt has
no president, no vice-president, no Constitution, no Parliament and no
significant police presence on the streets. But it has the meeting of
generations between these two Egyptians; and it has a new sense of
nationhood forged through countless other barrier-breaking discoveries
of 18 shared revolutionary days.
Perhaps it was a good thing
that, cocooned with his yes-men, Mubarak proved so stubborn, locked in
the prison of his formal Arabic and his hubris while language and
nation unloosed themselves. I think it was over once the army declined
to shoot. But by lingering Mubarak gave Egyptians time to get to know
each other.
Revolutions, like wars, have their interludes of
boredom. They were filled with chat. And what did Egyptians find?
Here’s one scene: Marwa Kassem, 33, westernised, living in Geneva,
talking to bearded Magdy Ashour of Muslim Brotherhood sympathies.
She’d rushed to Cairo after the uprising began. He’d joined the
protests after a friend was killed. If they’d passed each other in the
street a month ago, each would have pulled back from the other,
divided by fear.
He tells her he was arrested at regular
intervals. How often? Sometimes twice a month. And? Ashour’s
14-year-old son is watching. He asks him to leave, saying, “I want to
show him freedom, not my cowardice.”
A frisson of tension
stirs. Ashour stands up. They stripped me naked, he says, blindfolded
me. He links his hands behind his back: this is how Mubarak’s security
goons shackled him. They hung me from a hook on the wall, he says.
Then came the electric shocks: to his toes, nipples, genitals.
There are tears in his eyes now. There are tears in Kassem’s, too.
He pulls up his pants to his knee, revealing a terrible black scar on
his calf. She cannot look. Why this treatment? “They wanted to know if
I knew Osama bin Laden.”
What they both want now, this secular
woman and this religious man, these two Egyptians, is a state of laws
and rights. Overcome 9/11 through 2/11: the road to reconciliation
leads not through Baghdad or Kabul but through Tahrir. n
(Roger Cohen is a columnist for The New York Times. This article was
published in The New York Times on February 13, 2011.)
Courtesy: The New York Times; www.nytimes.com
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