The Americans knew if they could sideline a country with the history and power of Egypt, that would take care of much of the Arab world.
Central Cairo, the neighborhoods surrounding Tahrir Square, had wide boulevards and stunning architecture, the atmospheric cosmopolitanism of the Mediterranean. Even with the grime and smog and trash—and even without the minorities that contributed to such cosmopolitanism—you could feel the pulse of a divine city. And yet something had happened to Cairo, the worst kind of neglect and contempt for its people—an entire country of promise left to decay. Forty percent of the population lived on two dollars a day; fifteen million lived in shantytowns, many of which had no water or electricity. In the last twenty years, manufacturing has eroded, the economy has become service-oriented and stratified, and unemployment has risen among the middle class. Much of Egypt’s exports were energy products that did very little for job growth at home. And this was the country that received more American aid than any other country besides Israel.
How could this couple, the Mubaraks, any couple, any leader, have allowed their country to suffer this way? How had they stayed in power? The Mubaraks had not been clever people. “The truth is, they were just mediocre,” one Egyptian man said to me. They could not have stayed in power for thirty years unless they had been held there by an outside force. The evening that I saw Nawal El Saadawi, only six months after the revolution, she was already warning of the future that was to come, and said to the room of young activists: “We are facing a very dangerous counterrevolution. Who is the counterrevolution and who is against women? It is the United States of America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Mubarak regime, and some of the military class inside the country. All these powers internal and external are working to abort the revolution.”
There was a long history to explain why the United States ended up in such terrible company. The Mubaraks had been our people, I thought. I believe that this was the first time, standing on the other side of a revolution that had inspired such transcendent hope for the future, that I felt wholeheartedly that America was me, and I was it. This recognition did not feel like a form of guilt at all, something that can be indulged, regretted, and forgotten. It felt like learning, say, that I had a whole second brood of relatives whom I never knew about, and that to some degree my denial of their existence had allowed for the prosperity and happiness of my own.
Nawal El Saadawi once wrote that she was often invited to conferences in the United States and asked to talk about her Egyptian identity. “It makes me turn your question round and round,” she said. “Why does no one ask you, what is your ‘identity’? Is it that American ‘identity,’ American culture, does not require any questioning, does not need to be examined, or studied or discussed in conferences like this?”
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THE AMERICANS MAY not have had a European-style colonial past, but they did arrive in the Arab world at the beginning of the nineteenth century, long before Charles Crane’s expedition. The first missionaries, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, left Boston in 1819 for the Ottoman Empire, or Palestine, “to attempt to evangelize the lands of the Bible” and reclaim them from “a withering infidel grasp,” writes the historian Ussama Makdisi (who is himself a descendant of Arab Protestants). But the Americans would not have an easy time converting the infidels of Palestine. They had a faulty belief that the entire religion of Islam would soon collapse. Other successful military conquests in the East—the British conquest of India, for example—had convinced them that Christians could convert the entire world.
At that time, the Ottomans sometimes called the Americans “aliens,” or müsteminler, and some Arabs referred to Americans as “the English.” That they were American meant very little; no one knew anything about the United States. The Americans didn’t know anything about the Ottoman Empire either. The missionaries’ first five years at Mount Lebanon passed without a single Arab Christian convert. They had not realized that the Ottoman Empire was multireligious, where coexistence was possible because Ottomans tried not to “openly blaspheme or insult other people’s religions,” as Makdisi writes. The Maronites, Muslims, Jews, Druze, and Armenians shared a way of life. The Ottoman authorities viewed the American intruders as a “threat to diversity.” Protestantism was unquestionably alien.
The American missionaries did not believe they needed to understand a culture before attempting to wrest someone from it. The imperial nature of American Christianity and the Christian nature of American imperialism had become entwined during the wars against Native Americans, and now this particular fanaticism had come to Palestine. The missionaries sent long, tortured letters home about the supremacy of their own Promised Land. “I cannot tell you how much like a paradise America appears, as I view it from this land of darkness,” said one missionary, referring to the city of Beirut. They saw all non-Westerners, all people of the East, as backward and savage.
Recognizing that their efforts to convert Arabs to Christianity were failing, the Protestants instead began to sell them on the idea of America. The Protestants’ schools did not require conversion to Christianity, and offered Arabs a kind of scientific education common in the West. In turn, many Arabs did come to believe in America as a symbol of modernity. After graduating from the Syrian Protestant College, two Christian Arabs named Faris Nimr and Yaqub Sarruf started a journal called al-Muqtataf, which was meant to provide Arabs with the knowledge to become a “literate, scientific, and secular modern citizen.”