Looking for a revolution

Maybe it's a rule of politics. The more rabid and wild-eyed the editorial line, the gentler and calmer the person behind it. Samir Ragab, for example, chief of Al Gomhoriya newspaper, and whose vitriolic columns are by now legendary, could well turn out to be a really nice guy. Maybe that's stretching it, but for sure the theory seems to hold with Magdy Hussein. He's a picture of serenity, extremely polite and gracious. One of the major publicity problems the government has had with Islamists in recent years is that so many of them are just so damn amiable, at least when they deal with the media. 
We meet him on press day at Al Shaab, and he's maintaining composure in the face of a million requests and demands from staff hovering all around him. "Hmm, hmm," he says approving the latest page layout stuffed into his hand. "The woman's got something wrong with her," he repeats cryptically to journalist Salah Bedeiwi. "Great," he says mechanically to a not very impressive attempt by cartoonist Essam Al Sharqawi to scribble an insulting portrait of interior minister Hassan Al Alfi. 
Like Hussein, Bedeiwi, Sharqawi and three other writers on the paper are facing legal action by Alfi for slander -- the upshot of the two-month long campaign to topple the minister, which Al Shaab began in August. Hussein could face four years in prison if he loses. Whether he does is hard to predict: for all the independence of the judiciary, the fact is that -- as in the trial of Israeli spies -- this is a political issue. Hussein says the court might choose to drag it out over a year -- though that would mean hearing all of Al Shaab's witnesses, something observers doubt the judge will do -- or they may just fine him. 
Nevertheless, the possibility of a sticky end remains real. "The minister could just do like other people who take care of their enemies without coming to court," bragged Alfi's chief lawyer to journalists at the first session, and one hates to think what would happen if the minister finally just loses his patience. The first court session a few weeks ago witnessed an extraordinary security presence. A squadron of 190 security officers and soldiers -- including five at the level of generals -- accompanied by a batch of riot police and 20 cars and vans that blocked the streets around the courthouse. The only person not there was the minister himself. 
And yet the atmosphere in the Shaab office is blase, almost carnival-like. Somehow it's reminiscent of Palestinian teenagers scurrying away in laughter from Israeli tanks that have just fired tear gas at them. There's something liberating, it seems, about having the courage to say "get lost" to imposing authority. 
Hussein says his witnesses are also being threatened, though often the ministry -- and this is no surprise -- gets it wrong. Following the latest claim in Al Shaab that Alfi has appropriated 350 feddans at Salhiya Al Gadida in Sharqiya, governorate police detained for four hours a number of workers of the local agriculture ministry thinking they had been the moles. 
For Hussein and his followers, that they are in the right is almost an article of faith. Some leftists-even though they think Alfi's no angel-have dismissed Al Shaab's campaign as the revenge of political Islam on the minister who broke terrorism's back. "For sure the minister has the documents to disprove the allegations," wrote Rose Al Yousef's Wahid Hamed, the man who penned most of Adel Imam's anti-Islamist films of recent years. But the major criticism against Hussein has been that he has used unnecessarily abusive language against the minister. "The way [their writers] attack makes it easy to exploit them. They confuse laying the charge with specifying the punishment, carrying out the investigation and establishing guilt -- so now they have become the accused, rather than Alfi," says political commentator Wahid Abdel Magid. (Though the police do exactly the same when they beat people up and force them to sign confessions.) 
Yet Hussein seems genuinely shocked at the suggestion that the paper shot itself in the foot by insulting Alfi as a "thug" -- he says he's just telling the truth. "He took money from someone being investigated and whom he had prevented from traveling abroad," he says, referring to Abdel Wahhab Habbak, a businessman jailed for corruption earlier this year. "If that isn't thuggery, what is? It's worse and it happens at the hands of the interior ministry in a country in a state of emergency with some half a million officers under the minister's command." He goes on, "the prosecutors are biased towards officials whether we use sharp language or not." And in any case, he adds, "the language we use is common in political life." 
One view of Hussein says that this is exactly the kind of irresponsible attitude that proves the wisdom of the government's determination to keep Islamists out of the political process for the time being. The political history of Egypt in the last decade has been the story of the eradication of political Islam. They had 20 percent of the seats in the 1987 parliament. Now new jails are bulging with detainees -- members of extremist groups, Muslim Brothers and those just caught up in the fray -- and parliament is devoid of all but one Islamist. See, I told you we didn't have an Islamist problem, one can imagine the political leadership saying. Aside from the issue of who started it -- the alternative theory is that former interior minister Zaki Badr deliberately precipitated the violence with the assassination of Gamaa Islamiya spokesman Ala Mohieddin in 1990 -- Hussein sees Al Shaab's role as to constantly remind the government that, unfortunately, they are in fact still there. 
"There's no doubt that when the Islamist groups resorted to violence they made a historical mistake. Even those who didn't agree or take part in the violence became implicated," says Hussein. "It led to human rights abuses, an eradicationalist approach, and refusing even the moderate Islamist trend any role in political life. Now they've evicted us from parliament by force, by rigging, so that we have only one representative there." 
"What's happened is like ethnic cleansing, rooting the opposition out from the syndicates, parliament, local assemblies, village umdas, and universities. We understand that Third World goverments think they can stay there forever but the intelligent governments leave space," he says. The allegation that Islamists want power all for themselves he says is not true. It's not us or them, an either/or issue. It's participation, he says -- what the Islamic equivalent of democracy, Shura, is all about. "Maybe they can stay in government, but not deny the other [opinion] entirely. It's a narrow vision to want to have no opposition," he says. 
But what price is there for the government to pay? Even intellectuals like Mohammed Sid Ahmed admit the communist movement came out of prison in the '60s cowed by the experience, and convinced Nasser had it right and they had it wrong. Couldn't the same happen to the thousands in Egypt's jails today, despite, by all accounts, horrible treatment? Yes, says Hussein, but only if there is a change in foreign policy towards more independence. He's well aware that it's not fear of an Islamic state that stops the state democratizing, it's the shift in the tenor of foreign policy that it would lead to, and the resulting threat to Western support for the regime. 
In fact, another major criticism of the Husseins is that they stake their faith in Islamic politics only in as far as it will free the Arab nation from subjugation to foreign powers. The major preoccupation of his uncle Adel Hussein -- former editor of Al Shaab and general-secretary of the Labor party -- has always been empowering the Arab world, fighting American influence, challenging Zionism. During the first part of his career, the battle was waged under a Marxist banner, since the mid-80s it's been as an Islamist. He and his uncle have always argued their politics -- whether Marxist or Islamist -- are an extension of those of Ahmed Hussein, Magdy's father and Adel's half brother. He was the founder of the Young Egypt party of the 30s, a revolutionary movement that admired the mobilizing power of the fledgling fascist paramilitaries of Europe at the time. Magdy Hussein has been schooled in this essentially Third World liberationist environment (though associates say memory of his late father borders on idol worship). 
Which is why they find the policies of the interior ministry so repugnant. The war on the intellectuals, and the rank and file of a movement that represents a significant stratum of the nation can only be counter-productive, Magdy Hussein argues. Mid-October Al Shaab began cataloguing and republishing over entire pages the acts of brutality against civilians reported in the local press (19 were counted in September alone) and well as the monthly death toll of militant violence. It's only right that the Hussein's should restore the balance, he implies. 
Via the IMF-backed program of economic reforms, the state has neatly bypassed the political parties almost entirely -- it's answer to the country's political crisis. The lobby groups given a hearing in Egypt in the late 90s are the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, the President's Council, the Rotary Club. Even Al Ahly football club has more influence than political groups today. When the club recently threatened to withdraw from the football league, cabinet officials rushed in to avoid a national catastrophe. 
Columnist Fahmy Howeidy once said the extremist groups never would have been so extreme had they been legalized. Similarly, a newspaper wouldn't dedicate itself to destroying a minister like Alfi if there were any hope that charges laid in a sober manner could influence the governance of the country. Neither would Al Shaab have to scream and shout if the political current they front received a smidgeon of recognition.