With luck, Egypt will soon be free. Empowered by a wave of young Egyptians who make up almost 70 percent of the country's population, the stifling statism that has, for the last 60 years, restricted their freedom and ripped away their opportunities for economic success may soon be drowned, replaced by an open democracy capable of building on its energetic and hungry youth to create a modern nation. But while we can remember the crowds that bravely filled Tahrir Square in the spring of 2011 and hail them as courageous revolutionaries who overthrew a crumbling dictatorship, there is only one way to have even a remote idea of what will replace Hosni Mubarak's security state. We must journey into the past and examine Egypt in the 20th century: its people, its governments, and the ideas that impelled both their successes and their failures. This Egypt On The Brink achieves with clarity and grace.
Published a year prior to the 2011 Arab Spring, this treatise from Mr. Osman, on 20th century Egypt, its politics, its economics and its religion, makes the Tahrir uprising seem like an inevitable outcome of 60 years of political corruption and societal decay. Who is responsible for this desolation? The three men who have hovered over Egyptian life since independence in the 1950s.
Gamal Abdel Nasser rose out of the fog of obscurity to guide his country away from British colonialism and into an ideological marriage with the USSR. Under Nasser, Egypt became a command economy that saw millions of impoverished Egyptians educated and welcomed into a new middleclass, dominated by the public sector. But when, in 1967, his plans to unite the Arab world under a single, pan-Arabic banner were crushed by Israel's shocking victory over the combined might of Egypt and its Arabic allies in the Six Day War, Nasser's reforms lost legitimacy, a reality which only hastened their decline into the bureaucratic stagnancy typical of Soviet-style economies.
Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser by being the least offensive of the available options, not only abandoned the Nasser plan, he ran in the opposite direction. Politically and economically, Sadat embraced the West, implementing Al Infitah, a program of privatization which both enriched and ingratiated him to Egypt's elite. However, when Sadat's reforms only succeeded in cementing an Egyptian oligarchy, the millions of Egyptians who were elevated to the middleclass under Nasser were mercilessly dropped back down into poverty, creating widespread discontent. This discord crescendoed with Sadat's assassination in 1981.
Which brings us to Hosni Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship. Forever marked by the terror of being at Sadat's side when the president was killed during a military parade in Cairo, Mubarak left behind Nasser's socialism and Sadat's capitalism to carve out his own identity, the leader of a security state. He consolidated Sadat's oligarchy and kept faith with Israel and the United States while, at home, he cracked down hard on dissent, imprisoning his enemies and dissolving any forms of organized opposition to his authority. Unfortunately for the Egyptian people, Mr. Mubarak did not learn one of the major rules of human nature, that denying someone a thing, no matter its form, only makes him want it more. After a series of assassination attempts, Mubarak was overthrown in 2011 by the Tahrir revolt.
Egypt On The Brink is a marvelous and concise breakdown of the difficulties the Egyptian people have faced over the last seven decades in which they have been bounced from colonialism, to socialism, to capitalism, to the militarism. They have been the victims of a cruel game of political experimentation driven by the desire of three powerful men -- Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak -- to seize power and impose their ideologies upon their people. And so, while Mr. Osman has done a wonderful job elucidating the tragic march of Egyptian history, his greatest achievement here is to present to his readers a potent, systematic indictment of not only authoritarianism, but that form of political paternalism that infuses ambitious men with the misguided belief that they know best. We only needs look to Egypt to grasp the full cost of such folly.
This is riveting work, only marginally dated by the revolution that so quickly followed it. (4/5 Stars)
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