Egypt Archives - Page 2 of 2

Arab Autumn: Egypt Now

by Yoav di-Capua

Almost eight months to the day after the ouster of President Mubarak on February 11th another dramatic set of events set Cairo ablaze. This time, it was not the “people” who were pushing against a corrupt regime but unidentified forces that pushed the army, the riot police, the plainclothes police and some of the 165,000 gangsters who were previously employed by Mubarak (and apparently were still on someone’s payroll), to violently attack a peaceful Coptic Christian demonstration. By the end of a long day, 25 Christian protestors were confirmed dead and dozens were wounded. Three soldiers found their deaths as well though their names and pictures were never released. Sunday, October 9th became Egypt’s “Bloody Sunday.” “What exactly happened,” writes journalist and blogger Yasmine El Rashidi, in a moving post, “when, amid a great deal of confusion, a peaceful protest turned into something of a massacre, has become a question of enormous implications” for Egypt’s transition towards civic democratic life.

Indeed, this transition, or what some already skeptically call the mirage of transition, has increasingly become the object of severe doubt. And much of this doubt is directed toward Egypt’s de facto ruling authority; the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Though a civic interim government is charged with the everyday business of Egyptian life, all major decisions, as well as the general political tone of the state, is determined by hitherto anonymous military officers. As such, they are almost solely responsible for the nature, direction and overall success of the transition. This is hardly an easy task, as the very meaning of transition is still shrouded in mystery and raises far more questions than it answers. “The revolutionaries are traitors, The revolutionaries are traitors.” This cartoon shows Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein (Tantawi), head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, using state media in order to incite against the revolutionary forces.

Here is a partial list of what is publicly at stake since the fall of the previous regime. First, Egyptians are struggling with the traditional, or chronic, issue of social justice. This question has been the subject of politics for much of the previous century and it is still unresolved as levels of poverty and social inequality continue to rise and expand. The quest for better wealth distribution, social equality, opportunity, and mobility opened the nature of the post-revolutionary economic system for debate. In the last half century, Egypt has already experimented with radical socialism and deep neo-liberalism, both of which failed miserably. Which ideas should inform the next economic agenda? Should the reliance on elite capitalism and its global partners should be swapped for a different order, and if so which one? Most problematically, how precisely to accomplish an orderly economic transition when the military industrial complex is the largest economic sector and the chief benefactor of decades of a neo-liberal orientation?

A second concern is how to institute human dignity and the various democratic freedoms that guarantee it, such as freedom of expression and political association, the right to a just trial, transparency and accountability in public affairs, and the end of police brutality and abuse. In theory, there is a sweeping consensus in support of these rights and safeguards. In practice, beyond laws, the entire political and bureaucratic culture of the state would need to be transformed. As Egyptians have discovered since February 11th this is challenge as enormous as it is elusive.

Third, and most sensitive, is the relationship between church and state, or, put differently, the cultural orientation of Egypt. Should Egypt become an Islamic state, a Western-oriented liberal democracy or some combination of the two? And related to this, should the Islamic legal code, or Sharia, dominate legislature or should it be a flexible, man-made civic legal code? Likely, as most commentators predict, the choice is not between two polar opposites but rather something resembling a healthy and constructive dialectic between the two. But how exactly should this dialectic occur? No one knows. The current process of transition stipulated that following a lengthy process of national elections (which would stretch from November 2011 to March 2012) a new Parliament will draft a new constitution which, in turn, will bring these concerns toward successful resolution. But, rather than reducing the level of anxiety, the lengthy constitutional process ahead only raises it. Especially concerned are the roughly nine million Coptic Christians (about 10% of the Egypt’s population) and the liberal forces that started the revolution in the first place. They have their reasons.

Calls for unity during the spring demonstrations. The posters read: “No to sectarian war” and “Egypt: A United People”

Seven months ago, in order to legalize the actions of the interim government and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Egyptians participated in a national referendum to amend the previous constitution. The Copts and the liberals demanded the wholesale discarding of the old constitution, wishing to declare it null and void. It is a constitution that viewed the Sharia as a major source of legislation and which was, historically, instrumental in turning the Copts into second-class citizens. Yet, following the recommendation of a specially nominated constitutional committee headed by a neo-Islamist judge, the old constitution prevailed, a few obviously undemocratic articles were tossed away and the Copts and liberals lost the referendum by a landslide. Backed by the army, reformist Islamists, as well as conservative Islamists, radical Salafis (fundamentalists) and other ordinary Muslim citizens, triumphed. To one degree or another, the next constitution will most likely be Islamically-oriented.

Though this fact, in and of itself, is not necessarily a cause for concern, especially when the transition in Tunisia seems to point towards a moderate and democratic Islamic option, Coptic suspicion nonetheless runs high since the lost referendum. Indeed, the marginalized status of the Coptic community serves as a constant reminder that the Muslim-Christian unity which made this revolution happen is fragile and that national unity is at stake. The smoke of several churches burned since the revolution is still in the air. On September 30th, another Coptic church, this time in the southern city of Aswan, was set on fire. The unfortunate events of “Bloody Sunday” were meant to be a collective and peaceful expression of Coptic anxiety and a plea for government and army action against Islamic fundamentalists. Yet, instead of assuring the Copts and their liberal allies that the transitional process would conclude to their relative satisfaction, the army made things considerably worse. This dent in the transitional process brings many to conclude that the forces of counterrevolution are in full swing and that, eight months after Mubarak’s fall, hardly any major institution of the previous regime has been meaningfully challenged. Instead, one can identify more structural, if not personal, continuity than change. The revolutionaries are surely tired, but it looks like their real work has not even begun yet. The first round of parliamentary elections, scheduled for late November, will take place amidst this atmosphere of suspicion, fatigue and a prevailing sense of the army’s betrayal.

Photo Credits:

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff, July 23, 2011, TwitPic via Wikimedia Commons

Photo by Gigi Ibrahim via Wikimedia Commons

Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn by Asef Bayat (2007)

by Lior Sternfeld

In the wake of the recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East, many try to predict whether Islam can exist together harmoniously with democracy. In this book, Bayat successfully dismantles the presumptions that constitute this discourse, by stating in the beginning that “the question is not whether Islam is or is not compatible with democracy, or by extension, modernity, but rather under what conditions Muslims can make them compatible.” In order to answer this question Making Islam Democratic closely examines the different trajectories of two countries with similar socio-religious backgrounds: Iran and Egypt. Specifically Bayat asks why Iran produced an Islamic revolution, while Egypt developed only an Islamic Movement.

Bayat first analyzes Iran as a “revolution without movement,” arguing that as a result of years of a repressive political system the clergy failed to build social infrastructures and thought that the way to gain political influence would be to “recruit” the intellectual elites to their side. While they were successful in creating national-religious discourse among the intellectual elites, they “lost” the masses to other ideologies, such as Socialism, Marxism, and Secularism. The public heavily consumed western cultural products, magazines, movies, and books. During the revolution in 1979, the different sectors “were pushed into the arms of Shi’a clergy” to lead the revolution, but sectarianism remained present and vital.In Egypt, on the other hand, the Islamic parties could not participate in the political game, but succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the population by establishing a wide system of education, healthcare, banking and social welfare that benefitted the poor and traditional population of Egypt. The decision of the Egyptian ‘ulema (Muslim jurists) not to attempt to take over the government but rather to win the population allowed them work and prosper with government consent, and was therefore able to influence and Islamize society, which became significant later (as recently seen). This model can be useful to some extent in looking at other instances such as Turkey and Jordan.

Bayat has succeeded in writing a clear and jargon-free book. He supports his argument on profound research in these two telling case studies. This book eloquently refutes many common beliefs and anxieties about Islam and democracy.

Great Books on Egypt in the Modern World

by Yoav di-Capua

Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (2007)
Not only was modern history writing new to the Egyptian life of the mind, but also new were anthropology, sociology, demography and a host of other disciplines in the social sciences. In this book, intellectual historian Omnia EL Shakry offers an institutional and cultural history of the Egyptian social sciences. By examining a wide array of historical and ethnographic material, this book illustrates the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in their specific Egyptian colonial context. In doing so, it uncovers how the social sciences influenced local modes of governance, expertise, social knowledge and a racist imagination that shaped Egyptian national identity in the first half of the twentieth century.

Hanan Kholoussy, For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt (2010)
In this original and concise contribution, social historian Hanan Kholoussy takes a close look at the institution of marriage in early twentieth-century Egypt, a time when a new, modern middle class emerged, the extended family declined, and the nation as a whole was striving to free itself from British rule. Situated in the intersection of various political, economic and social forces, marriage became both a metaphor and a battle ground for what young educated Egyptians hoped to achieve. By looking at the historical origins of the ongoing crisis of Egyptian marriage crisis, this book offers critical background for the understanding of contemporary Egyptian youth.

Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s (2009)

Since 9/11 public figures in the US and in some European states have debated the existence of an intellectual tradition called Islamo-Fascism. Serious scholars joined the fray arguing that in and around the Second World War Arab thought absorbed the basic tenants of Fascist, mainly Nazi thought to degree that a fusion of sorts between Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism took place. In this remarkable and meticulously researched book, the authors joined hands to offer the most comprehensive analysis of Arab cultural relationship with Fascism and Nazism. Their argument convincingly shows how the Arab intellectual elite repeatedly and successfully resisted Fascism, insisting instead on the durability and benefits of democratic culture.

Jörn Rüsen (ed.) Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate (2002)
In this unique collection, historians of history writing and philosophers of history question the universality of the Western historical method. Contributors from Europe, Asia and the Middle East reflect on the philosophical foundations of Islamic and Chinese historical tradition and of the causes and dynamics that brought about their demise.

Yoav di-Capua on Egyptians Writing History

“History,” at least as Egyptians read, write, think, and know it today, is actually of surprisingly recent origins. As both an idea and a method, it was put to work only at the very end of the nineteenth century, and in a few short decades, it had managed to completely replace a rich and venerable nine hundred year-old scholarly tradition of Islamic historiography. The shift was extremely rapid, almost automatic – and as such, it raised a few interesting questions: could non-Western countries like Indonesia, Kenya, Peru, China, or, in this case, Egypt, import the European historiographical model in a fashion that would satisfy their cultural and political needs, or is history-writing culturally bound? If the European model is adopted, what should these societies do, and what have they done so far, with their centuries-old historiographical traditions? More specifically, which dynamics have characterized the career of modern historiography in Egypt during the past century and what can we learn from them? Below are a few reflections that may bring us a step closer to understanding how some societies outside the European tradition “think with history.” Most importantly, they challenge us to ask to what degree we can say the modern mode of history writing is universal.

In Egypt, until the mid-nineteenth century, Islamic historiography accounted for all things past through an extraordinarily diverse range of written and oral forms. These genres are unique to the degree that in some cases, we do not have proper equivalences for them in English: khitat (geographical and ethnographic surveys), tarajim and tabaqat (biographical dictionaries), rihla (travel literature), in addition to chronicles, diaries and world histories. By approaching the past through multiple written genres Islamic historiography created a mélange of mythical, literary, poetic and ontological writing that allowed readers to re-experience the past as intimately as possible. Indeed, experiencing the past, that is, invoking the lost aesthetic sense of past times, was an important historiographical ideal.

Similar to all other branches of Islamic knowledge, the procedures for making sense out of the past placed God’s hand, or will, at the center of the work. In that sense, as in many other medieval cultures including European Christianity, history had a strong philosophical bond with theology. With God situated at the center of history, the task that fell to Muslim historians was not so much to explain human actions as it was to exemplify known truths and turn them into moral models. This was another historiographical ideal.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, classic Islamic historiography was still functioning. It left us, for example, with a rich and beautifully written account of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. But just seven decades later, this tradition was dead. How did this happen? The answer is that it was replaced by “historicism,” –the basic modern European mindset which seeks to establish the causal and scientific origins of any given phenomenon. Although it is not well known, historicism was, in fact, Europe’s number one intellectual export to the colonial world. Coupled with Darwinism, it established a new cultural gold standard for thinking about how the past shapes the present. Given the fact that during this time Egypt was drawn closer and deeper into the global economic order, for instance by building the Suez Canal in 1869, historicism became an irresistible habit of mind.

Historicism differed markedly from the Islamic historical model. Islamic historiography recorded all meaningful events on a monthly or annual basis in a kind of immersive fashion, usually without an overarching narrative and without a consistent commitment to establish causal relationships between them or to aspire to find objective empirical truth in the past. But historicism advocated both causality and objectivity. By the 1880s, the modernized educated classes had embraced historicism and had begun to view Islamic historiography as a fictional account full of forgery, myth and childish miracles. Losing its cultural credibility and seeing its practitioners marginalized by new classes, the diverse tradition of Islamic historiography completely collapsed.

By the early 1900s it began to be widely recognized that because of its teleological and narrative properties, modern history writing could be used to legitimate and justify political action. As young nationalist politicians began composing their first books, the strong affiliation between history writing and popular nationalism became quite obvious. Increasingly, the subject-matter of history writing became the nation-state and the forces that created it, and, equally important, who should represent it. This new focus situated the historical method at the heart of a political struggle between fervent nationalist parties and a paternalistic monarchy. In 1920, faced with the possibility of losing the historical battle over the place of the monarchy in modern Egyptian history and hence, his very legitimacy to rule, King Fuad established Egypt’s first and only historical archive. The archive was housed in his downtown Cairo residence, the ‘Abdin palace, safely within his reach and just a few floors below his bedroom.

This was no ordinary archive but an all-inclusive, in-house operation that offered custom-tailored collection of documents, translation of source material, guidance on how to do archival work, free office space and paid residency, editing, publishing and international marketing. It thus provided an umbrella of services beginning with collecting source material and ending with the publication of close to eighty thick tomes on modern Egyptian history. All of these publications were written by paid European historians in French, Italian and English and were thus internationally visible.

In supporting this formulation, the ‘Abdin archive manipulated source material, introduced selective translations, and effectively created the myth that there are not now, nor were there ever, alternative sources for the study of Egyptian history. Because of the archive’s politicized and selective structure, all books researched there ended up showing how the monarchy had fathered modern Egypt. The roles of ordinary Egyptians such as peasants, women, and the poor were ignored. Such an undemocratic politics of knowledge instilled the sense that the past is dangerous and must be controlled.

Modern historiography requires institutions: universities, professional associations, conferences, seminars, fellowships and of course, libraries and archives. But it also requires a professional culture or an ethos. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the colonial world, the formation of such an ethos was a middle-class enterprise, which began in the late 1920s in close cooperation with the royal archive. Under the leadership of the Western-trained historian Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal, a close community of followers developed a professional creed that included four elements: a) the designation of a body of esoteric historical knowledge that practitioners were required to master, (b) professional autonomy in controlling the work and its practitioners, (c) a bid for monopoly of historical knowledge, and (d) the creation of an ideal of service which was both a commitment and an ethical imperative. Given the commanding presence of the royal ‘Abdin project, professionals believed that the methodological process of historical investigation was bound to yield objective scientific truth. This newly-constituted notion of professionalism served as an important identity codifier for these historians, and they used it, along with their ‘Abdin-based notion of scientific objectivity, to fend off competition from popular nationalist historians.

One such excluded historian was ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi’i. Al-Rafi’i was by far the most prolific and popular chronicler of nationalist Egyptian politics and the author of a series of books that flew in the face of the monarchical party line, arguing that it was in fact the Egyptian people who had created modern Egypt. A political adversary of the King, he was banned from working in the archive and had to make do with journalistic accounts and interviews. In the eyes of the newly-emerging professional academics, his politics and his usage of journalistic sources branded him an unprofessional amateur. Though shunned by the Egyptian academy, his popularity soared among ordinary Egyptians. He became Egypt’s foremost nationalist historian. The legacy of this early experiment with professionalism was a debate that haunts Egyptian historians to this very day: who has the right to tell the history of Egypt? The absence of a politically neutral archive, providing documents for verifying competing historical arguments contributes to this state of affairs. Yet, the revolutionary events of the last few months are likely to radically change this dynamic.

Contemporary History as Taboo

Reacting to the use and abuse of history under the monarchy, the 1952 Revolution that overthrew the King eliminated the ‘Abdin project and much of the academy that had supported it. Under the guidance of the revolutionary state, a new attitude toward the past promoted celebratory accounts of the nation and its leader. This self-congratulatory historiographical logic prescribed the writing of patriotic accounts of liberation and struggle that were useful for the formation of collective national identity and group cohesion, but useless as public critique. Since the state and the nation were practically indistinguishable, critical historiography of the sort that questioned established political patterns, habits and trends was treated as unpatriotic, dangerous and, ultimately, illegitimate.

And so, beginning in the 1950s, the state refused to share its records with the citizens and systematically frustrated the possibility of using the past in order to establish a critical account of the nation’s affairs. In doing so, it established the notion that contemporary history writing was a taboo. Even after the surprising and crushing military defeat of 1967, civic forces were unable to examine historical documents to investigate the failure and understand its causes. Other major events in contemporary Egyptian history, such as the controversial 1979 Peace Treaty with Israel, also remain virtually unknown. Deprived of state records and with a predominant disdain for historiographical critique, the public-regime interaction lacks transparency and accountability. A few decades later, by the 1980s, a host of Egyptian historians, pundits, writers and novelists began talking about the death of the modern Egyptian historical consciousness. Though at the same time, historians who studied the politically irrelevant medieval past, faced little or no state opposition.

A Universal Practice?

Reflecting on a century of historical thought and writing, one can say that the endurance of the historiographical apparatus that arrived in Egypt a little more than a century ago was dependent on the thriving of a democratic and transparent political culture. The absence of such conditions, the manipulation of the archives by the state, along with the inherently alien philosophical origins of modern history writing, triggered a chronic questioning of the historicist values (objectivity, accuracy, accountability, transparency and truthfulness), historical concepts (change, reform, revolution and continuity), historical themes (the nation-state), and organizational forms (training and accessibility to historical records). Thus, more than questioning the past itself, it is the mode of its interpretation, which was constantly being questioned. Such evidence casts doubt on the alleged universal tradition of history writing. Standing on the doorstep of a new political cycle, one that promises to be more democratic and open, the method of Egyptian history is ready for a new re-configuration.

Yoav di Capua, Gate Keepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt

“Not Like Baghdad” – The Looting and Protection of Egypt’s Treasures

by Christopher Heaney

This weekend, as Cairo’s protestors struck their tents and tidied up Tahrir Square, a clean-up operation of another sort was underway nearby: in the Egyptian Museum, home to King Tutankhamen and countless other archaeological treasures.

The museum had haunted the protests since they began in late January. In the first few days of the unrest that toppled President Hosni Mubarak on Friday, newspapers were quick to note that a group of looters had broken through a skylight, apparently searching for gold. Although Tut’s famous mask was thankfully under lock-and-key, the intruders knocked over or damaged approximately 70 artifacts. In one of the many exciting turns of the last several weeks, however, Egyptian neighborhood patrols surrounded the museum and caught the would-be thieves.

“I’m standing here to defend and to protect our national treasure,” one man told the AP. “We are not like Baghdad!” shouted another. The looting of Iraq’s National Museum in 2003 was on every observer’s mind.

The Egyptian military arrived soon after, took the looters into custody and made the museum a base of operations. Just outside, Tahrir Square became the protests’ center. It seemed to be a victory for Egypt’s people and its military.

“If Cairo museum and the pyramids are safe, Egypt will be safe,” said Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities, The National Geographic reported. “Inspectors, young archaeologists, and administrators, are calling me from sites and museums all over Egypt to tell me that they will give their life to protect our antiquities,” he further claimed. Countless political cartoonists, meanwhile, depicted a sphinx-like Mubarak losing his nose, or tumbling from the pyramids.

On Saturday, however, Hawass revealed that not all in the house of Tut was as well as he had claimed. Confirming what many Egyptologists suspected, Hawass reported that 18 objects have disappeared, including two gilded statues of the boy pharaoh, as well as an image of Nefertiti. A Twitter campaign is now calling for Hawass’s investigation, and a march for his resignation is apparently being planned for Wednesday.

Before commentators perpetuate the inevitable comparisons to the National Museum of Iraq, it is worth remembering the difference in scale – upwards of 15,000 artifacts lost in 2003. But, more importantly, Egypt has a long and complicated history of the protection of ruins and artifacts. In times of transition, that history is felt keenly. For millennia, new governments in Egypt – dynastic, foreign and national – have had to re-build the country’s monuments and mummies, often aware that the rest of the world was waiting to collect the pieces.

Of Strongmen and Mummy Powder

Egypt’s fear of such loss is as ancient as the pyramids. Egyptians of the Old Kingdom, the third millennium BCE, spent much effort protecting their monuments and tombs from the malice of future regimes. Pharaohs built “dummy chambers” to hide their mummies and nobles engraved their statues with bawdy warnings such as: “Whosoever should deface my statue and put his name on it … let Emil, the lord of this statue and Shamasg tear out his genitals and drain out his semen. Let them not give him any heir.”

Millennia later, Arab, Mamluk and Ottoman rule saw a healthy trade in books that claimed to reveal the treasures of forgotten tombs. Digging up mummies proved more profitable, however. To feed European hunger for “Oriental” secrets and medicine, traders shipped the ancient dead to Italy, where they were bought and sold as mumia – ground-up mummy — used as a medicine and sometimes as a color in painting. Antiquarianism during the Renaissance and Enlightenment again made Egypt an object of desire. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he brought along a bumptious team of French savants who sketched ruins and collected artifacts for the Louvre. France capitulated to England, however, and the British Museum got the vast majority of Napoleon’s spoils, including the famed Rosetta Stone. (The French savants, for their part, first threatened to throw it all in the sea, rather than turn the prize over to their enemies.)

In 1835, Egyptian authorities established the Antiquities Service of Egypt to staunch rampant looting by locals and Europeans like “The Great Belzoni,” a former circus strongman from Venice who hauled out busts and obelisks by the ton – a tale laid out in rollicking, lacerating form by archaeologist Brian Fagan in The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt. Under the system that developed, only scientific experts could excavate and half of the artifacts they found would stay in Egypt – a system called “partage.”

As in all archaeologically-rich regions, however, enforcement proved hard. Locals continued looting to supply growing tourist demand, British archaeologists saved key artifacts for their patrons, and French and Egyptian employees of the Antiquities Service sold pieces from the museum on weekends. Egyptian train conductors used mummies for fuel, Mark Twain claimed. Somewhat hypocritically, Europeans and Americans cast the dysfunction of Egypt’s antiquity system as a further rationale for England and France’s informal rule: if Egyptians couldn’t protect the treasures of their past, the logic went, they weren’t ready to govern themselves.

National Foundations

Yet this wasn’t the entire story. Kept out of Egyptology by the British, Egypt’s Muslim intellectuals engaged in an Arab humanism ignored by history until only recently. They found work in the Cairo Museum – opened in 1902 – and led the study of Coptic and Islamic architecture and art. “It is not fitting for us to remain in ignorance of our country or neglect the monuments of our ancestors,” Egyptian scholar Alu Mubarak wrote in 1887, as quoted by Donald Malcolm Reid in Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. “For what our ancestors have left behind stirs in us the desire to follow in their footsteps, and to produce for our times what they produced for theirs; to strive to be useful even as they strove.”

When the country achieved independence in February 1922, nationalists used Cairo’s Museum and foreign archaeologists to debate continuing British influence. In November of that year, American Howard Carter, funded by England’s Lord Carnavon, made his famed discovery of King Tut’s tomb. In the media circus that followed, newly independent Egyptians protested that the English and American team was being too secretive and perhaps moving artifacts to England and New York. Egypt eliminated the “partage” system and claimed all excavated objects, to Carter’s lasting fury.

Foreigners still loomed large over the next half-century of research, but in the years after Hosni Mubarak took power in 1981, the Egyptian Museum and its flamboyant spokesman, Zahi Hawass, oversaw a period of national consolidation. Seen as a cultural hero by some and a one-man showboat by others, Hawass focused world attention on Egypt’s past with a series of blockbuster discoveries, profitable traveling exhibits, and noisy campaigns for the return of the country’s artifacts from American and European museums. In some cases, he was successful. In November 2010, the Metropolitan Museum agreed to return its share of treasures that Howard Carter had stolen from the young pharoah’s tomb (as former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving had claimed in his 1978 book, Tutankhamun: The Untold Story).

A New Start?

To use a metaphor as old as Tut, will Mubarak’s fall, and the museum’s loss of 18 objects, now shake Hawass’s own dynasty? As in past transitions, the politics of archaeology are running hot. Hawass has confirmed outside claims that looters broke into another deposit of artifacts in Egypt’s south; further losses are sure to emerge. Hawass’s affiliations with Mubarak may also cause him problems. While protestors assailed the administration in the streets, Mubarak promoted Hawass to his cabinet. Like their fellow Egyptians in Tahrir Square, the Cairo Museum’s employees are demanding higher wages and less corruption. Meanwhile, human rights advocates say that the army has detained and abused protestors either behind the museum or inside the museum itself.

Although an investigation of the Museum break-in should proceed, it is too soon to call for Hawass’s resignation. As Ian Parker of the New Yorker recently noted, Hawass is too central to Egypt’s antiquity system to lose during the transition. More importantly, it would be unfair to blame the losses on the protests themselves or to claim that Egypt’s museums have “failed.” It has been speculated that Mubarak’s secret police themselves – perhaps working with the museum’s guards – may have been behind the museum’s robbery. Hawass has vehemently denied the charge, but it provokes the question: no matter the identity of the looters, for whom were they collecting? The 18 stolen pieces were true treasures, suggesting, like the looting of Baghdad’s museum, that the job was done to fulfill the “wishlist” of a private collector, perhaps foreign.

The robbery of the Egyptian Museum and the loss of other objects from archaeological deposits around Egypt is a reminder of the shared responsibility of cultural patrimony. The protection of monuments and mummies like Egypt’s requires vigilance, not only from Egypt’s people but also from the international community whose collectors have made looting lucrative for centuries.

As the behavior of the heroic neighborhood patrols who detained the looters attests, Egypt seems to be holding up its side of the bargain. It’s a small comfort, but perhaps the theft of only 18 of the museum’s objects is a victory, given past losses. It’s time that the rest of us do the same, respecting just what Cairo’s museum and its history represent to the Egyptian people. A former Arab diplomat has characterized the last month as “Facebook meets the Egyptian Museum.” As we read newspapers online and scrutinize photos of celebrations in Tahrir Square, we should cheer the fact that Cairo’s museum, and the history it represents, is literally that victory’s background.

Sources: The pharaoh’s ancient curse is cited in Z. Bahrani, “Assault and Abduction: The Fate of the Royal Image in the Ancient Near East,” Art History 18 (1995).

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