Learning on my feet

Hoping to lay the groundwork for an academic career, Blake Hounshell travelled to Cairo to learn Arabic - and found himself an unlikely activist.

Like so many young Americans of my generation, it wasn't until after those two Boeing 767s slammed into New York's World Trade Center that I developed even a passing interest in the Middle East - a dusty, mysterious place where the people always seemed angry. At the time, I was still in college. Having taken a few Japanese courses, I thought I might follow graduation with a year or two in Tokyo. But I never figured out how to make that adventure happen, so I went home to Pittsburgh in May and took a job at an environmental NGO instead.

It wasn't for me. When I should have been busy arranging outreach meetings with local stakeholders, I found myself spending long hours reading up on Arab history and politics. I wanted to understand what went wrong on September 11, so I read Bernard Lewis. I wanted to find out where Bernard Lewis might have gone wrong, so I read Edward Said. I read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence; I read The Arabists by Robert Kaplan. I fell asleep many nights to the audio edition of Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples. I even skimmed through The Arab Mind, just to see what all the controversy was about.

The war in Iraq - and the furious online debates that accompanied it - helped to shape my somewhat incoherent, often contradictory syllabus into a plan of action: I would learn Arabic and see for myself what I couldn't garner from books. So, I packed my bags for the American University in Cairo, hoping to see the Arab world at close range, dabble in a little journalism, and lay the groundwork for an academic career.

I never expected to get involved in Egypt's fledgling democracy movement. Yet one afternoon in the late summer of 2005, Saad Eddin Ibrahim roped me into it. I knew a little bit about the scholar and democracy activist from my voracious readings on Arab politics, so when my Iraqi-American friend Omar invited me to meet him, I jumped at the chance. The two of us shared a rickety Cairo taxi up a winding road to the Moqqatam hills overlooking the city, where we struggled mightily to explain in our broken Arabic exactly where to find the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, Ibrahim's NGO. Eventually, we decided that a shaded, somewhat bedraggled villa behind a high iron fence was the right spot, so after haggling with our by-now-exasperated driver, we got out, signed in with the guard - whom I later knew as a cheerful fellow named Khalid - and went upstairs to meet the man.

We found Ibrahim in his spacious office, sitting behind a large desk and consulting earnestly with a woman who looked to be nursing a broken nose. The woman, he explained in his elegant Egyptian accent, was an activist who had been beaten by riot police and sexually harassed only a few days before. As I saw on many subsequent occasions, Ibrahim assumed the role of a local potentate in such situations, leaning far back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head or stroking his goatee pensively, asking probing questions, listening to grievances, proposing courses of action, and promising support.

After sending her off with a few words of encouragement, he proceeded to give Omar and me a forceful, 30-minute disquisition on Egyptian politics, authoritarianism, terrorism, Islam, and the urgent need for democracy. It wasn't long before I was mingling my Arabic studies with arcane scribblings on the Muslim Brotherhood and the compatibility between sharia law and the separation of powers doctrine: I signed up to help the centre with its English-language-publications in my spare time.

My sojourn in Egypt was short - just under a year and a half - but I crammed it with knowledge. While many of my fellow students at AUC were partying it up at the Nile Hilton's Club Latex, I was consumed with questions about Egyptian politics and history. How did Anwar Sadat conceive of the party system? Why did liberalisation go off the rails in the late 1980s? Are the syndicates seething hotbeds of radicalism or bastions of reform? Would the Muslim Brotherhood merely replace one form of despotism with another?

Through it all, Ibrahim - or Dr Saad as we all called him - was my guide and mentor. As I grew more involved with the centre's work - generating election reports, conducting polls, documenting human-rights abuses, and writing op-eds - he shared his time with me and other staff members, freely offering advice and telling tales of his wild younger days or his relationships with various Egyptian and international players. His chief partner among the centre's dozen or so employees was Moheb Zaki, a cantankerous (but secretly kind-hearted) retired engineer who supervised the centre's publications and many of its programs and grants. Moheb liked to joke that Dr. Saad called him the centre's "resident fascist" for his sceptical take on Islamic fundamentalists.

Dr Saad had much to teach. Long before the word neoconservative became a household pejorative, he had been calling for political reform in the Arab world. An accomplished sociologist, he was among the first to link repression with terrorism. (One of his students at AUC, ironically, was Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the current president.) Years before the assassination of Anwar Sadat, Ibrahim was interviewing dozens of Islamic militants in Egyptian prisons. His findings on their social roots, ideology, and recruitment methods have been cited widely (although his pleas for a nuanced understanding of Islamic movements too often went unheeded). One such militant, Kamal al Said Habib, even asked Dr. Saad for a job when he was released, and worked for him for about two years.

For his troubles, Dr Saad has been imprisoned and vilified in the state-owned media as an Israeli-American stooge. He spent a total of about ten months in jail following a conviction in 2001 for "tarnishing Egypt's reputation" and other charges. While in prison, Dr Saad spent hours in discussion with his fellow political prisoners, many of the same sort that he used to interview as a sociologist. A secularist, he would often talk about the solidarity he felt with his Islamist prison-mates, many of whom became his unlikely political allies afterward.

His centre, meanwhile, was smashed and looted, its 27 employees arrested or intimidated into finding work elsewhere. It took an international campaign to free him in 2003, but meanwhile his health was deteriorating. Today, he walks slowly and with a limp, looking older than his 69 years. Despite his physical frailty, his speeches remain forceful, even spellbinding. The centre, though, has yet to fully recover. When I left Egypt in the fall of 2006, Ibn Khaldun was under increasing pressure from the regime: the "Arab spring" had become a bitter winter. I was lucky that, as an American, I could leave when hopes faded. It was a real challenge for the centre to find Egyptians willing to work under constant threat of arrest.

I wasn't surprised when, earlier this month, an Egyptian court convicted Dr Saad once again of "tarnishing Egypt's reputation". The charges are just as dubious as before, and they will probably be reversed on appeal. This time, Dr Saad was safely abroad when the conviction came. Still, I worry about him and his cause. He's been shuttling between Istanbul, Qatar, and the United States for about a year, unable to return home to Egypt for fear of being arrested. As he told me in a recent e-mail, "[The regime's] game plan is to keep me hounded and on the run. Also to drain my limited resources, as I am now without a job or regular income."

In all of our time together, I never once saw Dr Saad allow himself to be hobbled by despair, even as the odds seemed increasingly stacked against the democracy movement and the personal smears against him mounted. I feel guilty sometimes that I didn't make much of an Egyptian democracy activist, but I am honoured to have learnt from a great one.
Blake Hounshell is web editor of Foreign Policy and a former assistant to Saad Eddin Ibrahim.