Part III
Although Albert Hourani gave brief consideration to the fact “that the extension of the area of political consciousness and activity, the coming of ‘mass politics’, would bring into the political process men and women” who had hitherto been obscured or smothered under the authority of religious elites in the Arab Middle East, he remained more or less unapologetic about his textualist methodological approach and his focus on elite liberal figures, be they “secular” or “religious.”1 Into this breach strides Joel Beinin, whose chapter provides a sweeping account of the blind spots of Egyptian liberalism over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From the “golden age” of Egypt’s liberal experiment (1922–36) through the mid-twentieth-century enthusiasm animating authoritarian modernist state building and developmentalism under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, Beinin demonstrates that urban workers were one social class that found itself consistently marginalized and trampled underfoot by the platitudes and promises of liberal government and ideology. Here is a critical perspective on the vexed relationship between the individual intellectual lionized by liberal principles, and the broader sectors of society – including urban workers and other subaltern groups – that such figures (may) seek to represent. Indeed, the open secret of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 is that it turned upon the radical upsurge in labor struggles throughout the country in the preceding decade or so, part of a much longer history of working class formation and activism.2 Beinin’s essay shines a light on the “dark side” of Egyptian liberalism during the so-called Liberal Age and shows how indeterminate and shifting the meanings and consequences of liberalism remain in the post-Liberal age.
Another aspect of liberal political ideology in the modern Middle East that spans both sides of this divide concerns the so-called “woman question,” which most memorably first emerged as a public matter in the Arabic-speaking world around the turn-of-the-twentieth-century lightning rod figure of Egyptian Qasim Amin (d. 1908). In his two foundational treatises, The Liberation of Woman (1899) and The New Woman (1900), Amin broke new ground in the frank and open discussion of such hot-button issues as veiling, polygamy, and child marriage. Ellen McLarney draws attention to a fascinating moment of the Islamic revival (al-sahwa al-islamiyya) in Egypt from the mid-1970s onward, one in which the afterlives of Qasim Amin were refashioned to suit contemporary Islamist tastes. Her chapter sheds light on the mutually constitutive powers of secular and religious discourses concerning the matter of women’s emancipation towards the close of the twentieth century in Egypt. Moreover, in tandem with Natalya Vance’s chapter in the preceding section, it bears emphasizing that an adequate understanding of the modern intellectual history of the Arab world requires attention to the life as well as the legacies of such individuals, books, and ideological trends over time.
During the late twentieth century, questions of identity and authenticity surged to the forefront of contemporary Arab intellectual inquiry. Yasmeen Daifallah provides a close reading of the political philosophy of one pre-eminent Egyptian intellectual who has been concerned with such matters, Hasan Hanafi, explicating how his work offers a fresh conceptualization of the political subject in troubled times. In a microcosmic case study of the Islamist intellectual culture analyzed more broadly by McLarney with respect to questions of gender, Daifallah zeroes in on how Hanafi and other Islamist intellectuals critically engage with the problematic of turath (Islamic heritage) in the context of authoritarian and post-authoritarian Egypt. Daifallah places Islamic discourses of modernity at the center of Arab thought, highlighting the ways in which Islam may be mobilized to link intellectual concerns to the struggle of the masses. To the extent that he is convinced key aspects of Arab and Islamic intellectual development may yet be salvaged, Hanafi need not be reduced to an avatar of what Leonard Binder termed “Islamic Liberalism,” in which political liberalism is a universal concept and category that may be adapted to cultural variations perceived to be fundamental to local sensibilities. By contrast, Hanafi emerges from Daifallah’s incisive analysis as an intellectual figure committed to Islamic learning, religious practice, and a specific notion of cultural “tradition” even as he confronts intemperate interpretations of Islam as well as what might be called the secularist fundamentalism of some Arab liberals, in order to promote a particular form of consciousness-raising. Rather than returning to stale attempts to reconcile free-floating entities called “Islam” and “modernity” – the hallmarks of Islamic modernism dating back to intellectual and religious figures such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ʿAbduh – Daifallah reveals an underappreciated aspect of Hanafi’s project for Islamic renewal, namely, its particular relationship to time. In this conception, the imagined subject is enjoined to cultivate a particular disposition towards past (Islamic tradition) and future (innovation) while situated squarely in the ever-vanishing present conjuncture.
Syrian political culture and intellectual life during the late twentieth century is much richer and more complex than conventional accounts of life under Baʿthist rule tend to allow. Syrian intellectuals living in the shadow of authoritarian dictatorship carved out new spaces for intellectual inquiry and deliberation. Suzanne Kassab considers the content and the form of one of those spaces, the short-lived yet influential Damascus journal Qadaya wa-shahadat (Problems and Testimonies) (1990–93). Among the many and multiple afterlives of the Nahda across the Arab world, Qadaya wa-shahadat represents a small yet determined cluster of Syrian, Egyptian, and Lebanese intellectuals who sought to reclaim and rejuvenate the spirit of reformism and independent inquiry that were hallmarks of the nineteenth-century Arab renaissance. In the smoldering ashes of the Lebanese Civil War and the Cold War, Qadaya wa-shahadat can be understood as part of a broader intellectual rediscovery of the “spirit of the Nahda,” in general, and the figure of Taha Husayn (previously discussed in Di-Capua’s chapter), in particular. Indeed, it was precisely this conjuncture that generated the sort of position of critique from the standpoint of the heirs of the Nahda exemplified in the 2002 essay by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury that appears in English-language translation for the first time as an epilogue. As Kassab points out, the aims of the editorial board sought not only to honor and revive the liberal agenda of pluralism and tolerance but also to directly address the searing legacies of Arab defeat in 1967 and the ensuing political repression and cultural malaise that is often said to characterize the post-1967 period. Intellectual and literary figures such as Adonis, ʿAbd al-Rahman Munif, Saadallah Wannous, and Jurj Tarabishi as well as critics such as Gaber ʿAsfur and Faisal Darraj contributed to this exciting collective effort. Indeed, the relationship between the intellectual and political developments in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa will continue to be discussed and debated by historians, political scientists, and cultural commentators alike.3
The re-assessment of postwar Arab intellectual history throughout this volume is addressed to fundamental questions of periodization, temporality, and space as well as the imagination itself. Art critic and historian Negar Azimi considers the vexed relationship between art and revolution in the Middle East, Egypt in particular, bringing insight to bear on the interplay between political and cultural expression in this contemporary moment of possibility and danger. Azimi’s chapter considers formal and ideological aspects of this diverse and rapidly evolving cultural landscape, suggesting new ways for understanding the relationship between art and politics in the Arab world more broadly. While revolutionary art may burst forth in times of social upheaval, our attention should also be drawn to the coercive forces that may co-opt or de-fang such cultural innovations. Whether due to global constraints on the Middle East art market or ideological restrictions keeping Arab artists penned into a particular aesthetic framework, there is no guarantee that cultural production ramifies in ways that transparently reflect political realities. Reality and representation continue to challenge and contest one another, even in and through their mutual constitution. The fate of artistic production, the art market itself, and the relationship between artists and the state all remain central to the transformation of Arab intellectual life in the present.
This discussion leads back to the fundamental questions raised in the introduction of this volume, namely how Arab intellectuals confront and respond to the challenges of the age. In order to demonstrate the vitality of contemporary Arab intellectual culture, the concluding section of the book is comprised of three short essays, written originally in Arabic, previously unavailable in English. Chapter 15 is our original translation of a 2002 essay by the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury (b. 1948), one of the foremost intellectuals and writers in the contemporary Arab world. Given the provenance of this book, and its connection to a companion collection on the Nahda, the so-called Arabic liberal age, it is fitting that this collective inquiry should conclude with Khoury’s call for a “third Nahda.” Written in the shadow of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Khoury invokes a “Third Nahda,” which would amount to “a return to modern Arab history … to search for the truth that might help us escape from the frightful decline into which the Arabs have slid at the turn of the twenty-first century.” For Khoury, this third Nahda is contingent upon the reinvigoration of principles of liberal democracy, in light of the challenges of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Western imperialism, and Arab disunity. Even if there are limitations to the perspective Khoury sets forward – in particular his willingness to concede such analytical framing devices as “decline” and “stagnation” to explaining the Arab world – his contributions to literary, intellectual, and political life in the Arab Middle East is unmistakable. And although Khoury is by no means the first or the only Arab intellectual to call for such a revitalization of the Nahda project, given that so little of Khoury’s nonfiction writings have been translated into English, we hope this piece will refract the themes of this volume through a different lens as well as signal the continuing importance for Middle East scholars to engage with a broader range of modern and contemporary Arab intellectual discourse.
The political and humanitarian crises that have followed the Arab uprisings of 2010 to the present have also occasioned new directions in the fields of intellectual life and cultural production, broadly conceived.4 Building upon our engagement with the theory of generations, it is appropriate that this volume should conclude with a couple of short think pieces by highly influential figures from two generations of Syrian intellectual activists. The first, by novelist and activist Rosa Yassin Hassan, is a short statement of what is at stake for the younger generation of intellectuals vis-à-vis the cause of the Syrian revolution, on the one hand, and the entrenched authority (and even authoritarianism) of certain cadres of established Syrian intellectuals. In her piece, “Where Are the Intellectuals in the Syrian Revolution?” Hassan draws attention to the challenges that Syrian intellectuals confronted in trying to navigate the seduction of regime patronage while also maintain their own credibility in the eyes of their peers. In her words, Syrian intellectuals now found themselves at a conjuncture in which “the very existence of the intellectual was now merely dependent upon his or her own creativity and cultural knowledge.”
Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a veteran Marxist activist and scholar who is well acquainted with the existential challenges presented by acting as a public intellectual in Baʿthist Syria. After having languished in jail for sixteen long years, upon his release he was able to contribute to the flourishing of Syrian civil society and public discourse in the 2000s only to then watch his wife and friends disappear and his country burn. This makes al-Haj Saleh a tragic bookend to this volume, which seeks to recognize the important intellectual contribution made by critics, writers, and scholar-activists in the postwar Arab world even as we recognize that the life and work of these figures – as individuals and as part of larger class formations – are contingent upon much larger processes of struggle and transformation currently playing out across the length and breadth of the Arab world. Well aware of the dangers of arbitrary social divisions, al-Haj Saleh looks cautiously and optimistically towards the future of Syria, towards the future of the Arab world, undaunted by military and political repression, convinced that “it would be incorrect to describe a sharp dividing line between these two generations of intellectuals.” One hopes that in the coming years there will be more bridges built across social classes and national boundaries than divisions erected along class, national, sectarian, or religious lines.
1Hourani (1983: ix).
2Beinin (2012).
3Kassab (2014).
4The role of the intellectual amidst the bloodiest and most destructive situation in the contemporary Middle East – Syria – is an ongoing site of inquiry. See, for example, Yazbek (2012); Haugbolle (2015).
10
Joel Beinin*
Stanford University
One of the defining problematics in the intellectual history of the modern Middle East is whether new ideas and related institutions come from the West or whether they were indigenously produced.1 But this is a false binary. The Middle East has always already been engaged with Europe through webs of commerce, culture, religion, and empire. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this entailed specific forms of colonial cosmopolitan culture and capitalism that make it very difficult, if not impossible, to separate the indigenous from the foreign. The entire Middle East was integrated into the global market, but through a form of subordinate colonial capitalism that preserved elements of indigenous cultural, economic, and social relations. This historically formed matrix informed the fate of Egypt, and as Sherene Seikaly suggests in her contribution to a companion to this volume, Palestine, and also every other Middle Eastern country.2
Even the strongest proponents of secular Western modernism wrote in Arabic, a language that inevitably conveys rich layers of meaning resonating with the Islamic cultural heritage. Hasan al-Banna founded an organization, the Society of Muslim Brothers, whose members and target audience were the effendiyya (those educated in an Egyptianized western style), not graduates of al-Azhar. Furthermore, a disproportionate focus on liberalism in modern Arab intellectual history means that scholars have not fully considered the impact of the European left beyond notable figures such as Shibli Shumayyil, Salama Musa, and the attitudes towards socialism of a few other figures. However, ideas about equality, and the rights of le tiers-état, les sans culottes, and le menu peuple that emerged from both the utopian socialist experiments inspired by Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, and the radical wing of the French revolution represented by the Abbé Sieyès, Jean-Paul Marat, and François-Noël Babeuf are, as much as liberalism, the heirs of the rationalist, secularizing, Enlightenment tradition.
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi demonstrates in her refreshingly original The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 that radical ideas, culture, and institutions were a significant component of the Arabic cultural revival (the nahda) in this period and reached elements of emergent Levantine working classes.3 Khuri-Makdisi’s findings and other recent work on culture and society in the Arab provinces in the late Ottoman period by Michelle Campos, Lital Levy, and Salim Tamari expand our understanding of the Nahda beyond the traditional conception of a bourgeois-liberal, purely Arabist, cultural movement.4 Beyond the period treated by Khuri-Makdisi, Marxism became a substantial factor in Iraq and Sudan, and to a lesser degree in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria-Lebanon from the mid-1930s through the 1960s, on the cusp of the liberal age but also beyond it. Those radical trajectories into and beyond Marxism are represented in this book by Orit Bashkin’s reconstruction of the role of the Palestinian/Israeli communist Emile Habibi in forming “a joint Palestinian-Arab-Jewish front against the liberal Israeli state,” Fadi Bardawil’s discussion of the new left politics and post-Marxist sociology of Waddah Charara and Elias Khoury’s concluding essay calling for a radical “third nahda” based on democracy, pluralism, acknowledgment of defeat, and “the fall of the militarocracy.” Khoury’s prescriptions are all the more relevant in the uncertain aftermath of the Arab popular uprisings of 2011.
Liberal narratives of modern Arab intellectual history have traced a progressive and relatively unproblematic diffusion of European liberal ideas. By reexamining two moments within the temporal range of the book and one beyond its range and focusing on the confluence of liberal political forces and the Egyptian labor movement, I argue that from the point of view of workers (and even more so, peasants, who are not treated here), this history is much more fraught. More often than not, those claiming to be liberals marginalized, co-opted, and repressed workers and their rights in the name of what they imagined to be the interests of the nation.
The first moment during the liberal era is the wave of globalization and struggle against the British Empire from the 1880s to the consolidation of limited Egyptian independence marked by the victory of the popular nationalist Wafd (Delegation) Party in the January 1924 elections (a variant of Khuri-Makdisi’s periodization). From the beginnings of the Egyptian labor movement at the turn of the twentieth century, trans-Mediterranean migrant workers and radical political activists who were perceived by Egyptians as “foreign” or “European,” even if they held Ottoman or Egyptian citizenship, became leaders of strikes, trade unions, and leftist political parties. The second is the moment of Egypt’s Liberal Experiment, as Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot formulated it.5 The Wafd’s objective of an independent, bourgeois-liberal Egypt and the attempts of the Palace and the British occupiers to constrain that project resulted in largely successful campaigns to crush the left and independent trade unionism, contain the labor movement under the tutelage of the contending political forces, and disregard the interests of urban workers (and peasants) during the monarchy.
The third moment addressed by this essay is what may come to be known as the neoliberal era: a period of finance-driven, corporate globalization entailing the outsourcing of industrial jobs from developed capitalist economies to the global South and the roll back of social welfare programs established by the New Deal, European social democracy, and Arab Socialism. This was justified by the free market fundamentalism propounded by Milton Friedman as a response to the protracted economic crisis (stagflation) of the 1970s. It was first imposed on Chile by the “Chicago boys” following the 1973 CIA-sponsored coup. Presidents Anwar al-Sadat (1970–81) and Husni Mubarak (1981–2011) nominally, though in very limited ways and with considerable hypocrisy, embraced political and economic liberalism. But as during the previous two moments examined here, the interests of working people were marginalized in favor of the interests of crony capitalism and preserving authoritarian rule.
Workers, Radicalism, and Late-Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century Globalization
Khuri-Makdisi demonstrates that as a consequence of the accelerated circulation of people, capital, and cultures across the Mediterranean in the period between the Egyptian cotton boom and World War I, the Nahda had a global aspect and that radical culture and politics circulated through the Levant, connecting it with Europe and the Americas. She argues that in addition to revising the range of European ideas influencing the Nahda, the geographical ambit of “Europe” should be expanded. Rather than being centered on France and Britain, it should prominently include Greece and Italy. Trans-Mediterranean labor migration installed large working class communities of Italians, Greeks, and Levantines in Alexandria and Cairo. Indigenous urban wage laborers, craftspeople, and small merchants and their organic intellectuals came to embrace ideas, institutions, and practices such as strikes, trade unions, labor federations, labor parties, working class solidarity, and class struggle. There was a gradual adoption and adaptation of European ideas. Egyptians had little choice about the overall context of European political domination and colonial capitalism. But the emergent Egyptian labor movement also relied on local traditions of solidarity such as guilds, Sufi orders, and the like.
Strikes were among the first signs of the emergence of an Egyptian working class. In 1882 the coal heavers of Port Said conducted the first recorded strike in modern Egypt. It does not seem to have been in any way influenced by European workers or ideas, except insofar as it occurred in a global city, the northern terminus of the Suez Canal.6 Until the late 1930s, Egyptian elites and the effendiyya (the urban intelligentsia educated in a modernist, western style) generally regarded strikes as a deleterious European phenomenon. In 1894, the future nationalist leader Muhammad Farid wrote, “This European disease has spread to Egypt.”7 The word disease (daʾ) indicates a strongly negative view of strikes, reflecting the general disinterest and even antagonism to the struggles of the emergent Egyptian working class (and also the plight of the peasantry).
This created a social space in which Greek cigarette rollers; Italian construction workers; Greek, Armenian, and other Levantine tailors; radical political refugees; and leftist political entrepreneurs established contacts with Egyptian workers and intellectuals and joined with them in strikes, trade unions, political parties, and other institutions of the labor movement and the left. At the turn of the twentieth century, the cigarette industry had the largest number of commodity-producing industrial workers – Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, and Egyptians. They were particularly militant because hand-rolled cigarettes requiring skilled labor were being supplanted by mechanization. The jobs and livelihoods of cigarette rollers were at risk. In 1896 they formed the first modern labor association in Egypt, the Eastern Economic Association for Cigarette Rollers in Egypt (al-Jamʿiyya al-Iqtisadiyya al-Sharqiyya li-ʿUmmal al-Lafaʾif bi-Misr), consisting of Syrians and Egyptians.8 They also carried out the first large coordinated strike. From December 1899 to February 21, 1900, some 900 workers led by Greek cigarette rollers in several Cairo factories went out on strike for higher wages. The strikers won a wage increase and formed a short-lived union led by a Greek physician, Dr. Kyriazi.9
Relations between Egyptian and trans-Mediterranean migrant workers were not always friendly and supportive, especially as Egyptians were typically relegated to the lowest paying jobs and some of the mobilizations of foreign workers involved struggles to maintain their privileged status. A strike by Egyptian workers at the Alexandria Tramway Company in 1900 was prompted by the demand to open better-paid job classifications to Egyptians.10 But the November 1901 Cairo tailors’ strike was characterized by broad multi-ethnic solidarity. A mass meeting in the Alf Layla wa-Layla café drew 1,500 tailors led by Dr. Pastis (a Greek), Nicola Diano (an Italian), and Ahmad Effendi ʿAli (most likely an Egyptian). Their demands were recited in Italian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and “Austrian” (perhaps a reference to Yiddish).11
Trans-Mediterranean migrant workers often brought with them some form of working class political consciousness and experience in the value of international working class solidarity. In the first years of the twentieth century an Italian anarchist network was active in Alexandria. It played a central role in establishing the Université Populaire Libre in 1901, an important institution contributing to the “reservoir” of “radical ideas, propaganda, information, and practices in pre-World War I Egypt.”12 In 1905 the Ligue des Employés du Caire, claiming 500 members, wrote to the headquarters of the Socialist International in Brussels asking for their advice and requesting that socialists take an interest in the League.13
Zachary Lockman has demonstrated that the summary trial and harsh sentences imposed on the peasants of Dinshawai in 1906 prompted the Egyptian effendiyya to reimagine workers and peasants – formerly a despised underclass, as Muhammad Farid’s view of strikes in 1894 suggests – as “the salt of the earth.”14 The leaders of the Nationalist Party (al-Hizb al-Watani) began to view workers and peasants as the core of the Egyptian “people” (al-shaʿb). By 1911, their newspaper, al-Liwaʾ (The Standard), as well as other publications increasingly used the terms “workers” and “working class” (al-ʿummal, al-tabaqa al-ʿamila) with a positive connotation.
Muhammad Farid assumed the leadership of the Nationalist Party after the death of its founder, Mustafa Kamil, in 1908. Under Farid’s direction it became the first Egyptian nationalist organization to seek to educate and organize urban working people. The party established a network of People’s Schools (madaris al-shaʿb) where student party sympathizers instructed urban craftspeople and wageworkers in literacy, arithmetic, hygiene, history, geography, religion, ethics, and by extension, modern, national identity. At the four night schools established in Cairo, “the carpenter, the shoemaker, the stonecutter, were shoulder-by-shoulder with the cook, all seeking education.” Commingling members of different guilds in the schools encouraged them to develop a new understanding of themselves as working people and as citizens of the nation possessing inalienable rights. Farid urged delegates to the 1910 annual party congress to contribute their time, money, and effort “to spread the principles of education among this wretched class,” to support trade unions, and to give lectures at these schools “so that the poor worker would learn that he has a right to a [human] life, not like that of animals.”15
Keir Hardie, the leader of the British Independent Labor Party, attended the Egyptian Youth Congress in Geneva in 1910 along with several of his comrades. Hardie met Muhammad Farid and made a strong positive impression on him. Following this encounter, Farid told Egyptians on several occasions that they should emulate the European labor movement.16 The following year the Nationalist Party and al-Liwaʾ strongly supported the strike of the Cairo tramway workers against the Belgian-owned concessionary company, a complete reversal of Farid’s negative view of strikes in the 1890s.
The Liberal Experiment Confronts Workers and the Left
The Wafd exemplified the forces ascendant in what is still referred to as the liberal age in the Middle East. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski elaborate in detail that the Wafd and the other central currents of Egyptian politics embraced democratic values throughout the interwar period.17 But this rarely extended to promoting the rights of workers and peasants. Moreover, the Wafd’s claim to be the sole authentic representative of the entire Egyptian nation during the campaign for “full independence” entailed undemocratic efforts to delegitimize forces that sought to retain their autonomy, including trade unions and the left.
During the nationalist uprising of 1919–1922 that followed the arrest and deportation of Saʿd Zaghlul and his colleagues, the Wafd adopted the fusion of a nascent working class and national identity earlier promoted by the Nationalist Party. Wafdist lawyers installed themselves as counselors to trade unions, many of them newly formed during the popular upsurge, and encouraged workers to take militant collective actions against foreign employers and British colonial power. Wafd-affiliated unions became an important component of the party’s urban social base. But it sought sole patronage of the labor movement.
Muhammad Kamil Husayn, a lawyer and supporter of the Nationalist Party, which criticized the Wafd as too willing to compromise on the demand for full independence, had been involved with workers for several years before the uprising. In mid-1919 he became president of the Cairo Tramway Workers Union, perhaps the strongest in Egypt at that time. At the head of a strike committee comprised of a majority of Muslim Egyptians, a Jew, an Italian, a Syrian Christian, and other foreigners, he led the tramway men on an eight-week strike in August–October 1919.18 This sparked a wave of strikes and union organization that combined economic and nationalist political issues. The tramway men won their economic demands. But their gains were soon rolled back. Husayn led efforts to restore them in 1920–1921. Their failure, partly attributable to weakened solidarity of indigenous Egyptian and immigrant workers, undermined his popularity among the tramway workers. A second strike in April–May 1921 failed. This provided an opportunity for Wafdist lawyers to try to oust Husayn from the union leadership. By late 1921, the combination of British repression and Wafdist antagonism drove Husayn underground. When he reemerged in 1923, most of the Cairo tramway men had become Wafd supporters. Husayn’s appeal was further diminished by his endorsement of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party in the January 1924 elections, when the popularity of Zaghlul and the Wafd was at its peak.
In February, only weeks after the installation of the Wafd government, Husayn’s supporters began agitating for a new strike. They were told that Zaghlul wanted no disruptions of public order so that the Wafd could press for Egypt’s full independence. Several of Husayn’s supporters in Giza who did strike and march into Cairo were arrested. Husayn was also arrested and charged with insulting the prime minister. By the second half of 1924, a Wafdist advisory council was in control of the Cairo Tramway Workers Union.
Joseph Rosenthal exemplifies the combination of trans-Mediterranean migration and the circulation of radical ideas.19 He was born in Safad, Palestine in 1872 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Ukraine around 1854. When he was fourteen, he clashed with his traditionalist Jewish schoolteachers over the radical ideas he had recently discovered were embraced by his late father. Consequently, his mother sent him to live with his older married sister in Beirut. There he learned the craft of watchmaking and deepened his knowledge of Marxism and socialism while turning his shop into a center of radical political debate. Warned of the displeasure of the Ottoman authorities, in 1897 Rosenthal emigrated to Alexandria. He worked there as a watchmaker and jeweler for the rest of his life, except for 1899–1900, when he moved to Cairo to make contact with the future Nationalist Party leader, Mustafa Kamil, hoping he would embrace social as well as national liberation.
Rosenthal was actively engaged in the emergent trade union movement in Cairo and in Alexandria among both trans-Mediterranean emigrant workers and indigenous Egyptians. The upsurge of strikes and union organization accompanying the 1919 nationalist uprising provided the momentum for establishing a trade union federation under Rosenthal’s leadership. The Alexandria Confédération Générale du Travail was inaugurated in February 1921, with twenty-one affiliated unions and 3,000 members. Its French name indicates the large number of migrant worker members. Several Alexandria unions comprised primarily of indigenous Egyptians did not join the CGT because their leaders were committed to the nationalist political agenda.
Rosenthal was also prominent in two revolutionary and worker-oriented study circles established in Alexandria in 1920–1921, comprised mostly of migrants, especially Greeks, and some indigenous Egyptians. The Alexandrian circles and similar one in Cairo joined with a group of reformist intellectuals, whose most prominent member was Salama Musa, to form the Egyptian Socialist Party in August 1921. The ESP suffered rancorous splits involving considerable hostility between Rosenthal and Musa and then Rosenthal and an Egyptian lawyer, Mahmud Husni al-ʿUrabi. In late 1922 al-ʿUrabi engineered Rosenthal’s expulsion from the party, claiming the Comintern demanded this as a condition of the ESP’s affiliation. It was more likely due to personal rivalry. In January 1923 al-ʿUrabi became Secretary General of the Communist Party of Egypt, which was formed after the reformist members of the ESP departed and the radicals accepted the Comintern’s famous “twenty-one conditions” for membership. Despite his expulsion from the CPE, Rosenthal remained active in the CGT. By early 1924 the federation had 15–20,000 members and was the foremost force in the Alexandria labor movement.
In response to continuing contentious action by workers, by late 1923 the quasi-independent Egyptian government enacted several repressive laws. Public meetings were regulated; anti-government speech was criminalized; “vagrants” (i.e., the unemployed) were made subject to expulsion from cities; and strikes by workers in public transport or utilities were prohibited without fifteen days prior notice. In February 1924 a new wave of strikes began, sparked by a sit-in strike of the workers at La Filature Nationale, Egypt’s only mechanized textile mill. Strikes and factory occupations spread to the Egolin, Kafar al-Zayyat, and Abu Shanab cotton oil factories, the Salt and Soda Company, and Vacuum Oil. The Filature Nationale union was affiliated with the Nationalist Party, while the unions at Egolin, Kafar al-Zayyat, and Abu Shanab were represented by Antun Marun, a leader of the CPE; many workers at those firms were party members. The Wafd viewed the sit-ins as a disturbance of public order that violated private property rights as well as a political challenge by the Nationalist Party and the communists.
Nonetheless, the strikes were initially settled peacefully by negotiations among Marun, the CGT, and representatives of the ministry of interior. The sit-ins resumed in March because of lack of progress in resolving the workers’ grievances. The government responded by arresting the leadership of the CPE and the CGT, and sealing the CPE offices. The communists were deported or sentenced to jail. By the end of the year the CGT had vanished and the CPE was paralyzed and ineffective. Pro-Wafd union leaders endorsed the actions of the “people’s government.”
The Wafd’s allegation that its rivals instigated the sit-ins purely for political gain was probably false and was likely a pretext to destroy working class-based, multi-ethnic, radical politics, which posed an alternative to its monist nationalism. The deputy minister of interior who visited Alexandria to resolve the first wave of strikes asked several workers how they had learned of the sit-in tactic. “We have only repeated what the workers of Milan and other cities did before Mussolini came to power,” they replied.20 Egyptians living in a city with many Italian residents would certainly have heard or read of factory occupations involving some 600,000 workers in Milan and half a dozen other Italian cities in the course of Italy’s abortive 1920 revolution.
The first sit-in strike about which much is known was at the General Electric Works in Schenectady, New York, in 1906. Its principle leader was James Connolly – an Irishman born in Edinburgh and an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. The GE workers apparently deserve credit for this “tactical innovation.”21 The IWW enthusiastically embraced immigrant workers when unions like the American Federation of Labor (which did not support the GE strike, much like the Wafd-affiliated unions in Alexandria) would not. Therefore, we might consider this an international working class tactic from its inception. Egyptian workers did not need to be incited by “foreign agitators” to occupy their factories any more than autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, in 1936–1937.
ʿAbd al-Rahman Fahmi, one of Zaghlul’s lieutenants, who organized a General Federation of Labor Unions in the Nile Valley under Wafd patronage in March–April 1924 after the Wafd had suppressed its rivals in the labor movement articulated the Wafd’s preferred relationship to urban workers. He envisioned disciplined workers serving the nation in the framework of an orderly, bourgeois, modernity.
We want the worker in his factory to be like a soldier on the field of battle. There is a time for work and a time for leisure. At work there should be devotion, diligence and sacrifice, at leisure freedom and renewal. We want him properly behaved, moderate in his habits, sincere in his desires and relationships, pious in all situations, pure and clean in his actions. He should respect law and order and preserve peace and public security, meritorious in the eyes of men and rewarded by God.22
The Wafd and its rivals shared a conception of trade unions as an adjunct of the nationalist movement under their tutelage and sought to restrain expressions of class struggle.23 From 1930 to the middle of World War II, the most prominent alternative to Wafd leadership in the trade union movement was Prince ʿAbbas Halim, a cousin of King Fuʾad (r. 1917–36). The prince began his checkered career as a labor leader by collaborating with the Wafd to revive trade unions weakened during Isma‘il Sidqi’s authoritarian regime (1930–33) – which could optimistically be regarded as an anomaly of the liberal era or, pessimistically, as an expression of its inherent limitations. The Wafd’s attempt to assert control over the union federation headed by ʿAbbas Halim provoked a split in 1935 that debilitated the labor movement.
Egyptian elites beyond the Wafd and ʿAbbas Halim had an even more negative and paternalistic view of workers, exemplified by the judge who convicted workers at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla al-Kubra after they struck on July 18, 1938, demanding a higher piece rate and an eight-hour day in place of the twelve-hour shifts they had been working.24 As the first Egyptian-owned mechanized textile factory in Egypt, established by the hero of economic nationalism, Talʿat Harb, in 1927, Misr Spinning and Weaving Company (now popularly known as Ghazl al-Mahalla) occupies a central place in the nationalist imaginary. About a hundred workers were arrested for their role in the strike and paraded through town as an example; fifty-five were convicted for participating in the strike. The presiding judge expressed the court’s
strong regret and astonishment at this foolish action on the part of the weaving workers of the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company at Mahalla … they have departed from fulfilling their duty toward a company which helped them, supported them, and opened a door for them which they might enter while they were still ignorant … The workers must … cooperate with the company for production and sacrifice every personal interest in order to serve the fatherland, develop its commerce, and not lose the fruits of that gigantic effort because of the influence of dangerous opinions which we do not like to see among the workers, whatever the reason … strikes and destruction have nothing to do with Egyptians. These acts are completely repulsive to them by virtue of their education, their circumstances, and their religion, which is based on forgiveness, cooperation, and nobility of character. This young company, one of the pillars of our current renaissance, did not overwork the workers and did not ask more than their capacity, wages being determined in accordance with output.25
According to the court and those who shared its outlook, ignorant peasants should be grateful for the opportunity to become industrial wage workers and to participate, perhaps unwittingly, in the project of national economic construction, which required them diligently and obediently to sacrifice their personal interests for the good of the nation.
Only minimal labor legislation was enacted during the constitutional monarchy. In response to the visit of a mission by the International Labor Office (ILO) the previous year, two laws regulating the employment of women and children were passed in 1933. The mission’s chief of party had been selected by the Sidqi government, and its recommendations reflected the government’s very limited view of the appropriate legislation. When the Wafd returned to power in 1936, it reneged on its campaign promise to pass a law recognizing trade unions. It achieved only two minor labor policy reforms before being dismissed in December 1937. Egypt joined the ILO in June 1936, and later that year a weak employee accident compensation law was enacted.
The Wafd returned to power in February 1942, considerably weakened by its installation in government under the muzzles of British guns surrounding the royal palace. In an effort to restore its popular support, it enacted Law 85 of 1942 legalizing trade unions. However, the same legislation gave the Ministry of Social Affairs extensive powers to regulate unions (the Ministry of Manpower and Migration exercises this function today) and banned union federations and the unionization of government employees. As before, the Wafd attempted to dominate both previously existing and newly formed unions.
Workers and the End of the Liberal Era
The global crisis of liberalism during the 1930s and 1940s, the persistence of colonial rule in the Arab world, and the advance of Zionist colonization of Palestine were accompanied by the rise of the quasi-fascist Young Egypt and the renewal of the communist movement, which remained nonetheless fatally divided. Many trade unionists and leftists regard the period of the decline of the monarchy and the discrediting of laissez-faire liberalism, from 1939 to 1952, as a “golden age” during which a politically independent and militant labor movement emerged with a considerable communist presence, not unlike the U.S. labor movement of the same period. Successive governments attempted to repress the labor movement and blocked several efforts to establish a national trade union federation. Many labor activists, especially communists, were jailed. The Palace and its political allies and the Free Officers who replaced them sought to delegitimize Marxism by branding it as “foreign” and “Jewish” – an ultimately successful effort to close the cosmopolitan socio-political space created in the years between the opening of the Suez Canal and World War I.
After suppressing independent trade unionism, the regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser reluctantly established the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) in 1957. The regime simultaneously extended many benefits to the urban working classes and the peasantry. But the paternalist/corporatist pattern of trade union organization established by the Wafd was maintained. As Nasser reportedly said, “The workers don’t demand. We give.”26 The Nasserist economic strategy of pursuing import-substitution-industrialization and increasing consumption simultaneously was mismanaged and could not be sustained. Consequently, in 1966, Egypt turned to the International Monetary Fund for assistance. Nasser ultimately rejected its “background stabilization program.” He deemed the IMF’s proposed cuts in subsidies for basic commodities, which had been in place since World War II, politically destabilizing. Nasser’s successors were more willing to accept the IMF’s notorious conditionality.
The Neoliberal Era
Presidents al-Sadat (1970–81) and Mubarak (1981–2011) gradually undid the Nasserist “authoritarian bargain” – expanded social services and a higher standard of living, but no democratic participation. They claimed to be introducing more liberal and political and economic institutions, and there was some truth to this. There was greater freedom of expression and association, less intrusion of state security forces into the lives of citizens, more room for private entrepreneurship, and, under al-Sadat, but not Mubarak, no state torture of political opponents. But ultimately, Nasserist authoritarian-populism was replaced by a softer form of authoritarianism, crony capitalism, a declining standard of living for the majority of the population, and a tightly managed multi-party system with a façade of electoral competition.
Nasser’s regime had begun to move away from Arab Socialism in 1968.27 But Anwar al-Sadat’s 1974 “October Working Paper” proclaiming an “open door” economic policy (al-infitah al-iqtisadi) officially heralded the new era. The new economic policy aimed to reorient the economy away from state-led development and an alliance with the Soviet bloc towards private investment, especially from oil-rich Arab states, and eventually political realignment with Saudi Arabia and the U.S. bloc. However, because of both popular resistance and the entrenched institutional interests of ETUF, this took two decades to implement.
A period of declining real wages in 1971–1972 impelled the most significant workers’ collective actions since Nasser’s consolidation of power 1954, in both public and private sector enterprises in Helwan (iron and steel workers) and Shubra al-Khayma (textile workers), expressing grievances accumulated during the Nasser era.28 Workers’ protests subsided during the next two years because of rising wages and the 1973 war. Wages declined again from 1974 to 1976, accompanied by a sharp increase in strikes and other contentious actions.29 One of the most important occurred at Ghazl al-Mahalla. For three days in March 1975 workers occupied the factory while maintaining production to demonstrate their commitment to rebuilding the national economy. They won a wage increase from EGP9 to EGP15 a day for all public-sector production workers.
A more concerted drive to restructure the Egyptian economy began with the visit of an IMF delegation in the fall of 1976, which recommended, as a similar delegation did a decade earlier, dramatic cuts in subsidies on basic consumer commodities.30 Unlike Nasser, al-Sadat’s government accepted the recommendation. Its announcement prompted the widespread “bread riots” of January 18–19, 1977, an intifada similar to the subsequent “IMF riots” against neo-liberal policies in Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, Algeria, and Jordan.31 Industrial workers initiated and played a major role in the uprising, which according to some accounts came close to toppling the regime.
The consumer subsidies were restored, but gradually reduced over the next three decades. Popular anger over the gradual rollback of Nasserism was partly assuaged during the “seven fat years” when the economy was buoyed by the rising global price of petroleum. Mass migration of workers to the Gulf and Libya reduced unemployment and provided a flow of remittances in hard currency that funded a wave of consumerism extending into working class neighborhoods and rural villages. The reopening of the Suez Canal in 1975, tolls paid by the oil tankers sailing through it, and increased income from Egypt’s own modest oil exports provided additional state revenues. Generous U.S. aid following the signing of the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty comprised a new source of strategic rent for Egypt during the oil boom and beyond.
At the same time, the left – both the legal National Progressive Union Party (al-Tagammuʿ), one of the three parties legalized when al-Sadat introduced a highly controlled multi-party system in 1976, and the illegal communist parties – were subjected to several waves of repression.32 Many leftists were arrested after the 1977 bread riots, and a series of trials in 1980 and 1981 virtually destroyed the underground new left that had emerged during the student movements of 1968 and 1972–1973.33 The pro-Soviet Communist Party, reestablished in 1975 after a hiatus of ten years, continued to function and played a role during the upsurge of workers collective action in the 1980s. But it was gravely weakened by the demise of the Soviet Union and the decision of its leadership to support the Mubarak regime against the Islamist insurgency of the late 1980s and 1990s.
The collapse of the oil boom in 1985–1986 and continuing pressure from international financial institutions to transition more aggressively to the neoliberal order resulted in price rises and falling real wages. In response there was an upsurge in workers’ collective actions involving perhaps as many as fifty actions a year (but an average closer to thirty) from 1986 to 1993.34 These were largely defensive actions by public sector workers seeking to defend the economic benefits and social status they acquired under Arab Socialism.
Resistance to the new policies began as a response to the 1984 legislation doubling workers’ contributions to health and pension plans. Workers at the Nasr Automotive Company and the Alexandria Transport Authority refused to accept their pay checks, forcing the government to withdraw the law and reissue it a few months later with a staggered implementation plan – the same strategy followed when the cuts in consumer subsidies were restored after the 1977 bread riots. When the new rules were applied they prompted a three-day-long urban insurrection in the textile town of Kafr al-Dawwar during which workers and urban crowds cut telephone lines, set fires, blocked transportation, and destroyed train cars before a massive crack-down by security forces restored order. In September 1988, the termination of annual grants to public sector workers to purchase clothing and supplies for children at the start of each school year resulted in a strike initiated by women workers at Ghazl al-Mahalla that closed the factory for three days.
By the mid-1980s tax incentives granted to new private sector firms established under the open door policy began to expire. Several began to lay off workers, reduce wages, or shut down entirely, provoking the occupations of several factories and the Cairo ETUF offices. Private sector firms ignored with impunity the decisions of the parliamentary committee tasked with approving factory closures when it declined to rule in their favor or court rulings that workers were due back pay. The state prosecuted train drivers of the Egyptian State Railways who went on strike on July 7–8, 1986. They appealed and ultimately were acquitted by the Supreme Constitutional Court, which ruled that Article 8(d) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which protects the right to strike and which Egypt ratified in 1981, constitutes an international treaty obligation superseding Article 124 of the Egyptian penal code, which bans strikes. The court directed that the penal code should be amended. But the Mubarak regime ignored this ruling, as it commonly did with court decisions it found inconvenient.35
The violent climax of this cycle of contention between labor and the state was the two-month sit-in strike at the Iron and Steel Company in Helwan in July and August 1989.36 Riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas assaulted striking workers seeking a wage increase and a meal during their workday. The security forces invaded the mill, killed one worker, injured about one hundred, and arrested hundreds more. Kamal ʿAbbas, a prominent strike leader who was inspired by the example of Solidarity in Poland, was arrested several times, tortured, and eventually fired for participating in an “illegal” strike (despite the Supreme Constitutional Court ruling that the law was invalid). In 1990 he became the founding general coordinator of the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS), the most important NGO dealing with labor affairs for the next twenty years. Like other advocacy NGOs established in Egypt from the mid-1980s on, the CTUWS was subjected to harassment and repression and denied official recognition; it was closed for a year in 2007–2008.
After a decade and a half of equivocating measures towards liberalizing the economy, by the early 1990s real wages in manufacturing in Egypt (as well as Algeria, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia, where similar IMF inspired programs were instituted) were at or below their 1970 level.37 In 2006 Egyptian real wages were lower than in 1988.38 Egypt, like Morocco and Tunisia, eventually developed a successful textile-exporting sector based on subcontracting for major North American and European brands. But the number of new private sector jobs created was roughly equal to the number of public sector jobs eliminated. The private sector did not provide adequate employment for youth seeking work for the first time. The official rate of unemployment in the early 1990s was over 11 percent and only briefly dipped below 8 percent for the rest of Mubarak’s tenure in office. Many observers believe the actual unemployment rate was as high as double the official rate.
The Intensification of Neoliberalism and the Decline of Democracy
In June 1991 the Mubarak government signed Economic Restructuring and Structural Adjustment Program (ERSAP) agreements with the IMF and the World Bank. These agreements signified the intention to accelerate the restructuring of the economy. Law 203 of 1991 established the framework for privatizing over 300 public enterprises. The ETUF leadership accepted the ERSAP and Law 203 of 1991.39 After a decade of resistance ETUF also ultimately acquiesced to the enactment of the Unified Labor Law of 2003. A significant provision of that legislation radically altered the prevailing practice of tenured employment after a trial period by allowing employers to engage workers indefinitely on “temporary” fixed-term contracts and dismiss them at the termination of those contracts at their sole discretion.
This “flexibility” in the labor market was considered necessary to attract foreign investment. As it eliminated the job security workers had come to expect, this became an issue of frequent and sometimes bitter contention. The ETUF leadership succeeded in inserting clauses into the new legislation prohibiting mass firings after privatization of a public sector firm and providing compensation to workers harmed by privatization. But these aspects of the laws were poorly enforced.40 A program encouraging early retirements in public sector enterprises established in 1994 ameliorated some of the potential conflict over loss of public sector jobs and benefits, layoffs either before or after privatization of firms, and the refusal of owners of newly privatized enterprises to pay the wages and benefits previously enjoyed by workers. By the end of the decade, however, the early retirement program ended, and there was a new upsurge in workers’ collective action.
The defeat of the Arab new left and the Islamic revival of the 1970s led to the retreat of a good part of the Egyptian urban intelligentsia from secular party politics. From the mid-1980s on, leftists and liberals who sought to continue political activity founded and joined NGOs promoting human rights, prisoners’ rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and workers’ rights. Such NGOs were tightly supervised and regulated by the state, hence not really “nongovernmental.” Those judged to be dangerously oppositional were denied legal recognition. By 2011, Egypt had about perhaps 30,000 registered and government-regulated NGOS. Most of them engaged in charitable and development work, several dozen in various forms of advocacy.
There is a broad consensus among “transitologists” who imagine that such NGOs and housebroken, officially sanctioned opposition parties can eventually bring about democracy through the gradual expansion of “civil society.” Expressing that consensus, Larry Diamond maintains that, “in a number of prominent cases, civil society has played a crucial role, if not the leading role, in producing a transition to democracy.”41 An opposing school of thought focused on what it regarded as the exceptional persistence of autocracy in the Arab world.42 But except for the relatively successful human rights NGOs in Morocco and Bahrain (before the post-2011 repression), legal opposition parties and “civil society organizations” – which were subjected to systematic supervision by security forces in all Arab countries – and remain so despite the events of 2011 – human rights NGOs did not become effective mobilizing structures.43 The proliferation of NGOs absorbing the energies of the oppositional intelligentsia and the creation of legal but closely supervised political parties may even have contributed to depoliticization.44
Those who built rights-oriented NGOs in response to the defeat of the Arab left were honorable and well-intentioned. They registered significant accomplishments while confronting heavy pressures and restrictions. But they did not and could not confront authoritarian regimes or mobilize others to do so. NGOs staffed by upper-middle class professionals and political parties that do not function outside the walls of their offices do not build democracy; democracy is an outcome of social struggles.
Intensified economic “liberalization,” as it is antiseptically termed by its proponents, was not accompanied by democratization. Egypt’s highly controlled electoral system from 1984 to 2011 allowed for no possibility of circulation of power. All elections were fixed to a greater or lesser extent. Twenty-four parties were legalized and supervised by the regime; several others operated with tolerated illegality. Eberhard Kienle argues that during the 1990s the state became more repressive. Economic “reform” did not open the economy to meaningful competition.45 This was partly a consequence of the expansion of the internal security apparatus in response to the Islamist insurgency concentrated in the urban peripheries and Upper Egypt. But Kienle argues that the “deliberalization of Egypt” was “more than a response to Islamism.”
The elections of 1987, 1990, and 1995 are widely considered less democratic than those of 1984. Three of the four opposition parties with any popular support boycotted the 1990 elections. Due to judicial supervision, which subsequently became de rigueur, the 2000 elections were cleaner than the exceptionally violent and fraudulent 1995 balloting. There was a secular decline in the total votes cast, the rate of participation of registered voters, and the number of voters as a percentage of those eligible to vote from 1987 to 2000 despite an upward tick in 1995, possibly due to ballot box stuffing.46
Eventually, the Supreme Constitutional Court ruled that the electoral procedures of 1987, 1990, and 2000 were illegal. The legal opposition parties, especially al-Tagammuʿ, which claimed to represent the interests of workers and peasants, were co-opted by the regime and ceased to offer meaningful opposition. In 1993, gains made by the Muslim Brothers in elections for professional associations were partially rolled back by more restrictive election regulations.47
The “Government of Businessmen”
In July 2004 “the government of businessmen,” as it was known, led by Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif, was installed. Nazif’s mandate was to fast-track the neoliberal transformation of the economy and the sell-off of the public sector. Assisted by western-educated PhDs and CEOs of large corporations who occupied the economic ministries in his cabinet, he was largely successful. The World Bank praised Egypt’s efforts and designated it one of the top ten “most improved reformers” for three years in a row.48
Workers’ responded to the Nazif government by immediately escalating the number of strikes and other collective actions, which had been trending upward since 1998. There were about thirty strikes and other contentious actions a year during the high point of the 1984–1994 cycle of contention between workers and the state. From 1998 to 2003 there were 710 strikes and collective actions, an average of 118 per year. In 2004 there were 265 collective actions – more than double the 1998–2003 average.49 Although centered in the textile industry, which had been targeted for privatization, by 2007 the movement encompassed virtually every industrial sector, public services, transport, civil servants, and professionals.
Not only did workers’ collective actions spike sharply in 2004, they assumed a more militant character than previous upsurges. There were more strikes, as opposed to factory occupations while continuing production, a tactic of the Nasser era, when halting production would have been widely condemned as undermining national economic development. Strikes also became longer, with several lasting for months.50 Collective actions from the 1970s through the 1990s were largely in public sector enterprises, where workers fought to preserve gains made during the era of Arab Socialism. After 2004 an increasing number of workers in the expanding private sector were engaged. In 2009, 37 percent of all collective actions were in the private sector; in 2010 the figure reached 46 percent.51 Women workers, who previously had participated in collective actions mainly in an auxiliary capacity, became increasingly assertive and in some cases became prominent activists and even spokespersons.52
The January 25 Uprising
Although youthful liberals have received most of the attention in the West, the wave of strikes, sit-ins, and collective contestations of Egyptian workers that began in 1998 contributed substantially to the diffusion of a culture of protest and the de-legitimization of the Mubarak regime. Khaled Khamissi, author of the bestselling novel Taxi, told a French journalist, “There is continuity between those strikes and the 2011 revolution.”53 Not only was there continuity, but the massive strikes of workers beginning on February 8, 2011, were an important element in the decision of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to push Mubarak aside three days later. Workers continued to mobilize and protest for the rest of the month at an unprecedented level – 489 strikes and collective actions during the month of February involving at least 150,000 workers.54 Contentious actions throughout 2011 and 2012 reached historic levels.
In the 2000s there were two largely parallel Egyptian social movements – one of workers and the other of oppositional urban middle-classes comprised of Nasserists, Marxists, liberals, and some, especially younger, Islamists who, even though they had opinions on economic issues, did not mobilize around them. Middle class activists established the Popular Committee to Support the Palestinian Intifada in 2000–2002, which staged the first tolerated street demonstrations not organized by the regime since 1952 and called for a boycott of Israeli goods. The same configuration of forces organized demonstrations against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March and April 2003 that were larger than any in the previous thirty years not organized by the state.
In the summer of 2004 three hundred intellectuals, including many who had participated in the campaigns in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada and against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, launched the Egyptian Movement for Change (popularly known as Kifaya or Enough). Its first public demonstration on December 10, 2004, called on Husni Mubarak not to run for a fifth presidential term in 2005 (he did), not to promote his son Gamal as his successor (he did), and for reduction in the powers of the executive branch (they were maintained).
The same configuration of forces mounted protests against the constitutional amendments Mubarak proposed to give the appearance that the 2005 presidential election, in which there was a nominal choice between the incumbent and opponents for the first time, would be free and fair. On May 25, 2005, the day of the referendum, Kifaya called for a demonstration in front of the headquarters of the Press Syndicate, which had become by convention over the preceding years a relatively safe “free speech zone.” The demonstrators correctly claimed that the amendments effectively guaranteed that Gamal Mubarak or someone like him would succeed his father as president. Plainclothes thugs of the regime viciously attacked the demonstrators. Women were particularly targeted for sexual molestation. This shocking innovation in repressive technique resulted in the day being called “Black Wednesday.” Sexual harassment subsequently became routine when the Mubarak regime confronted demonstrations it was unwilling to tolerate.
The escalation of the regime’s mode of repression may have been induced by an announcement by judges two weeks earlier of a threat to boycott their supervisory role in the 2005 presidential election because they were unsatisfied with the probity of the procedures. This would have rendered the election illegitimate regardless of the outcome of the May 2005 referendum. In the spring of 2006 the Ministry of Justice brought two of the respected judges who had suggested that there was substantial fraud in the 2005 presidential and parliamentary elections before a disciplinary hearing. Kifaya and the Muslim Brothers organized demonstrations to support them. For three weeks in April–May 2006 demonstrators battled the police throughout downtown Cairo. Over 300 demonstrators were arrested. Many were beaten and tortured. Security forces again sexually abused women. Journalists were beaten and forcibly prevented from covering the story.55
This was the high water mark of Kifaya and the liberal pro-democracy movement before January 25, 2011. The regime succeeded in making the cost of protracted opposition higher than what most activists could tolerate, and Kifaya could not broaden its social base beyond the educated urban middle classes. The Muslim Brothers had already experienced a wave of arrests since unexpectedly winning 20 percent of the seats in the December 2005 parliamentary election despite its irregularities. Ever the survivors, they backed down from an all-out clash with the regime to protect their organization and fight another day. The demonstrations protesting Israel’s assault on Lebanon in July 2006 were less combative on both sides.56
Young liberals from the same social background as Kifaya members and supporters, including many who had not previously participated in street demonstrations, mobilized to welcome Mohamed ElBaradei when he returned to Egypt in February 2010 after finishing his term as director general of the International Atomic Energy Association in late 2009. Many believed that ElBaradei was a viable candidate to challenge Husni or Gamal Mubarak in the presidential election scheduled for the fall of 2011. But neither ElBaradei nor the National Association for Change he formed were politically effective. ElBaradei was out of the country on January 25, 2011, the day the occupation of Tahrir Square that toppled Mubarak began, though he subsequently joined in.
Many of these middle class youth and their supporters in the West literally could not see the workers’ movement or its import. A month after Mubarak’s demise, Ahmad Mahir, one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, confidently asserted, “The workers did not play a role in the revolution. They were far removed from it.”57 Khalid ʿAli, a labor lawyer and director of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, gave a more careful and precise assessment: “The workers did not start the January 25 movement, because they have no organizing structure.” But, “one of the important steps of this revolution was taken when they began to protest, giving the revolution an economic and social slant besides the political demands.”58
The contrast between the “liberal” Ahmad Mahir on the one hand and Khaled Khamissi (who was born into a communist family) and Khalid ‘Ali (who subsequently joined the Socialist Popular Alliance Party) on the other hand expresses the continuing battle over the narrative and political import of all the Arab uprisings of 2011. Were they simply rebellions demanding human dignity and formal democracy – that is, limited by the horizons of liberalism? Or were they also movements for substantive democracy, or “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice,” as the chants in Tahrir Square put it? The military coup of July 3, 2013, and the installation of a praetorian autocracy even more repressive than the Mubarak regime has, hopefully only temporarily, suppressed the debate over the options of an electoral democracy that would maintain the exclusions of liberalism and a social democracy.
*This essay is dedicated to the memory of my friend, the late Samer Soliman.
1The two sides of this argument are exemplified, respectively, by Hourani (1983 [1962]), and Gran (1979).
2Seikaly (2016).
3Khuri-Makdisi (2010).
4Campos (2011); Levy (2007); Tamari (2000; 2004).
5Sayyid-Marsot (1977).
6Lockman (1994: 83–87) discusses alternative interpretations of this incident. See also Chalcraft (2001).
7Farid, Tarikh Misr min 1891, unpublished manuscript quoted in ʿAbbas (1967: 50).
8Khuri-Makdisi (2010: 155–56).
9ʿAbbas (1967: 50ff); Beinin and Lockman (1987: 50–51).
10Khuri-Makdisi (2010: 157).
11Al-Muqattam, November 5, 1901, quoted in ʿIzz al-Din (1967: 69–72.)
12Khuri-Makdisi (2010: 130).
13Ibid., 150.
14Lockman (1994).
15Al-Rafiʿi (1961: 151).
16Ibid., 134, 150.
17Gershoni and Jankowski (2010).
18This narrative is based on Beinin and Lockman (1987: 110, 113–15, 128–34).
19Information on Rosenthal is based on ibid., 137 ff., and Ginat (2011: 28ff).
20La Bourse Egyptienne, February 29, 1924.
21McAdam (1983).
22Quoted in Beinin and Lockman (1987: 161).
23In his introduction to Majallat Kulliyat al-Huquq, January 15, 1935, a special issue on labor legislation, the editor and Wafdist labor lawyer, Husni al-Shantanawi, quotes ʿAbbas Halim’s conviction that “our workers’ movement must remain purely Egyptian” and associates this with his own (and the Wafd’s) view that, “The workers’ movement in Egypt … is a national revival, like the other revivals whose spirit is prevailing in the country.” The split between the Prince and the Wafd did not alter the position of either of the parties on this issue, as confirmed by ʿAbbas Halim’s statement several years later in, “Hawla masʾalat al-tabaqat.” al-Ahram, June 16, 1939. See also similar statements about the nationalist character of the trade union movement by Husni al-Shantanawi, “Hal fi Misr mushkila li-l-ʿamal wa-l-ʿummal,” al-Ahram, June 26, 1934, and by Wafdist labor lawyer ʿAziz Mirham, “Tanzim shuʾun al-ʿummal,” a speech to the Wafdist National Congress reported in al-Ahram, January 10, 1935.
24Al-Khuli (1992: 165ff).
25Quoted in Eman (1943: 183–84).
26Quoted in Posusney (1997: 74).
27Cooper (1982).
28Beinin (1994: 251).
29Posusney (1997: 101, 132, 136–38, 142).
30Beinin (1994: 248).
31Beinin (2001: 165–66).
32For details, see the articles I wrote under various pseudonyms in the Guardian (New York): “Sadat Throttles His Critics as Economy Worsens,” October 29, 1980; “Sadat Consolidates Power,” May 28, 1980; “Internal Opposition Shakes Sadat’s Regime,” April 16, 1980.
33On the student movement see Abdallah (1985: 149–211).
34El Shafei (1995); Posusney (1997: 139, 143–47, 150–51); Pratt (1998).
35Case No. 4190, JY 1986/1987, al-Azbakiyya circuit, cited in El-Ghobashy (2008: 1608).
36El Shafei (1995: 22–35).
37World Bank (1995: 4).
38Said (2009: 54–55).
39Posusney (1997: 180–230).
40Ibid., 276–77.
41Diamond (1999: 235).
42For example, Schlumberger (2007).
43Stork (2011).
44Langohr (2004).
45Kienle (2001; 1998).
46Sulayman (2006: 27–30); Kienle (2001: 14, 51–64).
47Kienle (1998: 228).
48World Bank, Most Improved Business Reformers in D B 2008 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009); World Bank, Most Improved Business Reformers in D B 2009 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010); World Bank, Most Improved Business Reformers in D B 2010 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011).
49Beinin (2011: 188–90).
50Al-Basyuni and Saʿid (2007: 13, 15, 19).
51Beinin (2011: 188–90).
52Beinin (2010: 71–72); Ricciardone (2008).
53Raphaël Kempf, “Racines ouvrières du soulèvement égyptien,” Le monde diplomatique, March 2011.
54Muʾassasat Awlad al-Ard li-Huquq al-Insan, “186 iʿtisaman wa-77 idraban wa-151 tazahura wa-48 waqfa ihtijajiyya wa-27 tajamuran wa-fasl wa-tashrid 4205 ʿamilan hisad al-haraka al-ʿummaliyya fi shahr fibrayir,” www.e-socialists.net/node/6689.
55Human Rights Watch, Press Release: “Police assault demonstrators, journalists; hundreds arrested in Cairo crackdown,” May 13, 2006, www.ifex.org/egypt/2006/05/16/police_assault_demonstrators_journalists/.
56Vairel (2011: 40–41).
57Kempf, “Racines ouvrières du soulèvement égyptien.”
58Ibid.