JUNE 06 Newsletter

[back to the Table of Contents]

Can The Yacoubian Building lead to ademocratic awakening?
Blake Hounshell

The highest-budget Egyptian film in history, based upon the world’s best selling novel in the Arabic language for the past four years, opened June 21 to packed theaters in upscale areas of Cairo and has remained a major attraction since. It has already won acclaim at a number of foreign film festivals. Through the cast of characters that live and work in the Yacoubian Building, a real structure built by a wealthy Armenian immigrant in 1934 (though not the ornate edifice used for the film), a painfully realistic portrait of 1990s Egypt emerges.

Book author Alaa al-Aswani—who runs his own dental practice when he’s not writing—says that the strory sprang from his “nostalgia for Egypt’s bygone liberal era.” Between 1923, when the Constitution declaring Egypt’s official independence went

into effect, and 1952, when the Free Officers and Gamel Abdel Nasser took power, a kind of constitutional monarchy flourished under King Faruq and the nationalist Wafd Party, despite the ongoing de facto British occupation. The grand but decaying colonial-style edifices that still pepper downtown Cairo, where al-Aswani grew up, and neighboring Garden City, where he now lives, are silent reminders of the time before, as the opening monologue mournfully intones, “everything changed.”

Bathed in warm, wistful shades of light, downtown Cairo has probably not looked so beautiful since the “revolution.” Although we meet several of the poor families who live in shacks on the roof, the film mostly takes place in a few prominent vestigial enclaves of cosmopolitan Egypt—the Greek Club, Groppi’s, the Diplomatic Club, and the Louis XIV-style interiors of the Yacoubian building itself. Viewers don’t see the teeming, hastily-erected brick and reinforced concrete apartment blocks in which the vast bulk of Cairenes live.

Yet The Yacoubian Building is not a mere paean to colonial-era architecture, but rather a damning indictment of contemporary Egyptian society, and especially of its government and elites. As the book’s publisher Hagg Mohamed Madbouli, himself a legendary downtown figure, said, the story is so compelling because “it criticizes everybody.” But the thread that ties all of the building’s inhabitants together—from the doorman’s son Taha, who becomes an Islamist extremist after being rejected by the police academy, to Hagg Azzam, the outwardly pious businessman who sells hashish and bribes his way to a parliament seat, to Busayna, the poor, fatherless girl who lives on the roof of the building and tolerates sexual advances from her boss in exchange for pennies—are the humiliating moral compromises that they, like so many Egyptians, must make in order just to get by in today’s Egypt. No character emerges from the film without being degraded in some way.

The womanizing Zaki Bey, the building’s oldest and longest-standing tenant (played by the redoubtable mega-star Adel Imam, best known for slapstick comedies) functions as the institutional memory of Cairo’s fading pasha class. His father, long deceased, was a prime minister for the Wafd Party and a wealthy landowner, but the son failed at architecture and uses his office in the building as a place to satisfy his insatiable lust. In his drunken reminiscences of the time of La Vie en Rose, when downtown was “more beautiful than Paris”—a cosmopolitan oasis filled with foreigners, their parties, and their liberal ideas—he blames Gamel Abdel Nasser and a lack of democracy for the present state of the country, as do many in the Egyptian elite.

The film would be touching and entertaining, but not politically significant were it not for several scenes that raise such previously taboo topics as police brutality, government corruption, and homosexuality (which is illegal in Egypt).

Taha, who after his rejection by the police academy gets involved in Islamic politics, becomes the leader of a demonstration at Cairo University against the government and in favor of an Islamic state. He throws himself into the line of black-clad, baton-wielding riot-police, who beat and kick him until he is able to get up and run away through a nearby park. But he is chased down by a beefy plain-clothes policeman, thrown forcibly into a van, and taken to a dark, filthy hole of an interrogation room somewhere in Cairo. There he is hung on a meat hook by his wrists, beaten severely, and questioned about his links to Islamist organizations. When he finally refuses to give up his comrades, is sexually violated upon the command of the investigator and tossed in solitary confinement.

Dr. Ragia of the El Nadim Center for the Psychological Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, an Egyptian NGO that provides services to victims of state violence, said that although she had not seen the film, “much worse things go on in Egyptian prisons and police stations” than what takes place in the book.

A fixation upon vengeance leads a shattered Taha to tell his mentor, upon his release that he wants to “martyr” himself and kill the man who interrogated him. The mentor, the hardline Sheikh Shakir, takes him to a secret militant training camp out in the desert, where he is indoctrinated and trained in weapons. In Taha’s violent final scene, he and two other members of his radical Islamist organization stake out the investigator’s office. After the volley of shots that follows, both Taha and the investigator lie dead, their blood running together on the pavement in a stark depiction of how the government and the jihadists have become mirror images of one another.

Although not as visually shocking, equally damning are scenes that show pervasive government corruption. Character Kamel El Fouli is a cocky party kingmaker who bears more than a passing resemblance to certain well-known Egyptian political figures. When Hagg Azzam tells El Fouli that he wants to become a “Patriotic Party” candidate for the hotly contested downtown district, the party boss draws a rabbit—slang for a million Egyptian pounds—on a piece of paper, narrows his eyes, and asks him, “so are you a rabbit … or a turkey?” They then shake hands while saying the opening verse of Qur’an, until El Fouli, who seems to be mumbling his way through the words that every Muslim is supposed to know, interrupts to tell him: “I want the money next Tuesday. In cash.”

The film’s release arrives, surprisingly, amidst a crackdown on dissent after what had been a promising year or so of political openness. Following the parliamentary voting, in which the officially banned but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood won 88 seats amid widespread fraud and violence on the party of the security forces and hired thugs, the government postponed the municipal elections for two years. A showdown between reformist judges and the government over a new judicial law has ended in defeat for those hoping for genuine independence from the executive branch. Two prominent judicial leaders, Hisham al-Bastawisy and Mahmoud Mekki, were eventually not convicted for the “crime” of accusing some of their fellow jurists of collaborating in falsifying the elections, but the message to others was clear. And on June 27, the popular fire-breathing editor of independent weekly al-Dustour, Ibrahim Eissa, was suddenly sentenced to a year in prison for “insulting” the President, along with one of his journalists.

State-owned newspapers have launched repeated attacks on leading democrats such as George Ishaq, the general coordinator of Kefaya, the leftist Egyptian Movement for Change, former Gamal Mubarak intimate Dr. Osama al-Ghazali Harb, who is launching a new liberal party called the Democratic Front, and the liberal dissident and scholar Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who has served time in prison for his criticism of the government. Dr. Ayman Nour, the outspoken opposition politician who ran against President Mubarak and garnered 7% of the vote, remains in prison for allegedly forging signatures for his party’s registration application.

And in an eerie parallel to the film, leftist youth activist Mohamad al-Sharqawi, a former associate of the recently deceased Ahmad Abdallah Rozza who also blogs at http://www.speaksfreely.net/ says he was abducted at a demonstration on May 25th, beaten and sodomized with a cardboard tube at the Qasr al-Nil police station near the Four Seasons in Garden City, and then denied medical treatment. The head of his defense team, Gamel Eid told US-based NGO Human Rights First that “I hadn’t seen anyone that badly tortured in 12 years.” Another one of his lawyers, Amir Salem, says that al-Sharqawi has been complaining of chest pain and may even have a broken rib, but as of June 29th has yet to be seen by a doctor in a violation of Egyptian law and international norms.

But al-Sharqawi has responded to his mistreatment differently than Taha, with activism rather than violence. Although other Kefaya and Youth for Change activists were released, he remains in prison. The authorities will not say why, according to Salem, who speculates that he is being held until he heals. Al-Sharqawy’s case has reached international human rights organizations, and Egyptian civil society has mobilized around him, but so far without results. Outside of a few hot-button issues like American foreign policy, Israel, and the price of bread, Egyptian politics is still largely a conversation among Cairo elites.

It remains to be seen whether The Yacoubian Building can raise awareness about democracy and human rights among a broader segment of society. Some Egyptians have even speculated that if the government allowed the film to proceed uncensored, it must be because its depiction of corruption and brutality is false. Ali Abou Shadi, the government official in charge of censoring films, told the Christian Science Monitor that the government has no problem with a film that is “critical of the government, extremism, homosexuality.” Moreover, as much as the film pushes boundaries, it does so more cautiously than the book itself.

Perhaps only a few thousand Egyptians have read the book in Arabic, while tens of thousands may eventually see the movie, and so most of those exposed to al-Aswani’s critique will get only the slightly sanitized version. Moreover, there are several competing theories purporting to explain Egypt’s decline. Many of the leading figures of the Kefaya movement are Nasserists who see no conflict between their idolization of the late dictator and their activism on behalf of democracy. As for the Islamists, the more radical types such as Taha and his friends argue that the abandonment of jihad as an implied sixth pillar of Islam has led to the current crisis. Both the Nasserists and Islamists are quick to blame Egypt’s problems on America, Israel, and the legacy of colonialism. Consequently, liberal intellectuals such as Alaa al-Aswani have a great deal of work more to do in order to convince Egyptians of their side of the story.

 blakehounshell@yahoo.com