History, which Indians know is both burden and blessing, recently came to Tahrir Square. The revolution in Egypt has riveted the world. Mubarak is gone but a struggle over multiple pasts, not unlike in India and many other societies around the world, continues. Which past to remember and how to remember it? To make a modern nation, it would seem, it is necessary to come to a proper reckoning with the past. Tahrir Square is a skirmish in an Egyptian war of memory.
Walk the streets of Cairo, as I did during a visit a few years ago, and you will encounter men with marks on their foreheads, sometimes large and black and vivid. These are bruises caused by the repeated rubbing of the forehead on the ground during the daily prayers every devout Muslim is to perform. Egyptians call this wound of piety a zabiba, a raisin. Just as the white sacred ash marks devout Hindus in India, so too these bruises mark devout Muslims in Egypt. Not so long ago, Egyptians will tell you, this dried fruit of fervor was not quite so common. The number of men who sport this fruit of faith on their foreheads — women seem not to in quite the same way — has risen in recent decades.
Some Egyptians dismiss the zabiba, call it a cosmetic flaunting of devotion rather than true piety. Egypt, they will point out, is not just the zabiba. They will direct you to Gezira, where you can visit the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art full of irreverent works, including one by A Mostafa depicting a Muslim cleric in a wheelchair whose beard as well as background is made up of veiled women’s heads. Or else to little drinking holes of downtown Cairo, not far from Tahrir Square, where late one evening, in the company of a trade unionist lawyer, the beer flows freely despite the apparent injunction against liquor in Islam.
Like India, Egypt is an ancient land of contradictions. Like Delhi, Cairo is built around the stupendous monuments of successive phases of history — the massive Pyramids of Giza, the intricately wrought Coptic Christian Churches of Old Cairo, the elegantly proportioned mosques and madrasas around Al-Azhar (arguably the oldest university in the world). In Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, you will find monumental signs of other phases of Egyptian history — Greco-Roman ruins and catacombs and the magnificent new library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, built recently in memory of that other ancient and famous library of Alexandria reputedly destroyed about two thousand years ago. To these Pharaonic, Roman, Greek, Christian, Arab Muslim and Turkish phases of Egyptian history, add colonial French and British influence starting from about two hundred years ago.
So many pasts, mingling over so many millennia in a narrow if long strip of land along the river Nile. Haunted like India by many pasts, Egypt struggles to become an exemplary modern Arab nation. In the shadow of the ancient pyramids in the desert, it strives to be a model to other Arab nations. Before and since Gamal Abdel Nasser and his fellow military officers overthrew the monarchy in 1952 and progressively removed surviving British colonial influence over their country, it has been in the process of crafting itself as a modern Arab society.
For better and for worse, Nasser espoused a pan-Arabism — a vision of a united political and economic future for Arabs — that proved influential for many years. He drew Egypt closer to the Soviet Union and imagined an industrial and modern future for Egypt. Remnants of this Nasserist philosophy are still to be found in Egypt. All nations remember, but every nation remembers in its own way. In Egypt’s struggle of memories, only the kleptocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak, supported by the Americans and intent only on clinging to power, seems to have had no meaningful and powerful notion of the past to offer.
S Shankar is Professor, Department of English University of Hawaii at Manoa.
