BY DOTUN AKINTOYE<\/p>\n
With any revolution comes reaction, or to be more precise, the language of reaction. The counterrevolution in Egypt is couched in words like stability.<\/em> A word which, if there remains any meaning in it, can only mean the maintenance of the status quo.\u00a0 But the debate surrounding the departure of Hosni Mubarak requires a grasp of that status quo; how it was sustained and at what cost.\u00a0 In other words, what it meant to live in his Egypt.<\/p>\n You might call Egypt an ownership society.\u00a0 Former President Mubarak owned everything and everyone.\u00a0 I spoke to two young Egyptian men, both in their middle twenties, about what growing up in Egypt was like.\u00a0 There is something incredibly buoyant yet guarded about intelligent young men who grow up in such a society. They wouldn\u2019t even let me use their names. One granted me permission to use his first, Mohammed, because it\u2019s common enough. The other insisted on remaining anonymous so as to not endanger his family in Egypt (I\u2019ll call him Hassan).\u00a0 Even with Mubarak in flight they don\u2019t feel safe.\u00a0 Exhilarated but not secure.<\/p>\n Hassan described Egypt as a paternal society, a sort of \u201cFamily Corporation.\u201d \u00a0When Hassan was a school boy, the image and voice of Mubarak were everywhere; as was the mythologizing of his efforts in the 1973 war against Israel.\u00a0 \u201cWe watched him on TV and heard him on the radio. We called his wife Mama Suzanne. They wanted us to feel loyalty towards Mubarak\u2019s family the same way we would feel loyalty to our own.\u201d\u00a0 In a country whose median age is 24, Mubarak has been President as long as most Egyptians have been alive. \u201cThat\u2019s why he talks to us as if we are children. Retarded children.\u201d<\/p>\n Not just minds, but bodies too.\u00a0 \u00a0The pictures of Khaled Said\u2019s shattered skull and face are available all over the internet.\u00a0 \u201cThere are a million Khaled Saids\u201d says Mohammed. Said was beaten to death in public by two policemen in June last year, an act of state violence so pornographic that it helped to galvanize the revolution.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore 2005, if you wore a beard, you were arrested,\u201d Hassan tells me, reflexively stroking his own. It sounds ridiculous and so I laugh out loud.\u00a0 \u201cNo. I\u2019m serious,\u201d he insists. \u201cThe police thought that it meant you were religious, or at least took your religion seriously. Many people refused to attend early morning prayers because that is when most people disappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n Outsiders talk about corruption in Egypt, but they\u2019re only referring to the petty bribes that keep the state running. When Egyptians talk about corruption they mean that every interaction in one\u2019s daily life is a form of perjury. Hassan relates the story of a man who was arrested and tortured until he agreed to inform on the members of his mosque every week to the police. \u201cThey told him that if he didn\u2019t come back to them, they would find him and do it again.\u00a0 We joke in Egypt that one in every three people you meet is an informant.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo you lie to everyone and everyone lies to you?\u201d I ask.\u00a0 Hassan smiles faintly, the way you do when someone has just grasped what you mean in the most superficial way. \u201cYeah, but somehow it\u2019s even worse than that\u201d he answers. \u201cYou have to bribe your kid\u2019s teacher just to get to the next grade. They call it private lessons<\/em>. If you don\u2019t pay for them, you can\u2019t pass the exam. And who can blame the teacher? \u00a0He makes almost no money and he has to bribe his own children\u2019s teachers.\u201d<\/p>\n My conversations with both young men wander to the people they seem to feel the most sorry for, their parents.\u00a0 Hassan tells of the small sacrifices of conscience required daily of his own father. \u201cHe is just a businessman. He\u2019s not religious or involved in politics. But he has to involve himself in petty bribes every day just to run his business.\u201d<\/p>\n Mohammed\u2019s parents, both doctors, have spent much of the last 20 years trying to put the bodies of young men like their son back together after encounters with the police, or ministering to the destitute and invisible.\u00a0 But Mohammed doesn\u2019t describe them as great humanitarians. For his parents, to practice the rituals of life and death in Cairo is to learn to weep for the victims while you smile at their executioner.<\/p>\n Mohammed himself readily concedes Mubarak\u2019s claim to stability.<\/em> \u201cLook,\u201d he says. \u201cWe used to be proud to have a man like him. But it just got too bad, the police, the poverty.\u00a0 My grandfather was a member of the NDP (the ruling party) and watched the last election rigged against him, right in front of him at the polling booth.\u00a0 He had been a public servant for thirty years and no one said anything. \u00a0The last ten years have taught Egyptians of all classes that no one is safe.\u201d<\/p>\n Tourists don\u2019t go to the shantytowns near Cairo, to the neighborhoods with streets too narrow for cars and wooden boxes too narrow for bodies and noses too accustomed to open sewage to even smell the shit anymore. But Hassan was a social worker for three years after college and witnessed these medieval ghettos that Mubarak created by physically driving the poor out of the city to preserve the fa\u00e7ade of stability<\/em>.\u00a0 Those shantytowns are Mubarak\u2019s Egypt too.\u00a0 They\u2019ve been there for years. Stable.<\/em><\/p>\n