Essay on Imperialism in Egypt

Introduction

The practices of the ruling Arab elites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized and romanticized 'Arab Culture' created by French, British, and, later, American Orientalists; which conflates their people into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land.

- Said, Edward (1978)

As a citizen of a former colony and a globally perceived “third world nation”, it is safe to say that my perception of the Middle East stems from that of yet another orient looking at these countries with an empathetic yet investigative gaze. The Middle East as Edward Said rightly put it, has over the years internalized the ‘exoticism’ of their lands as their only legacy which then analyzes visual texts from countries of Egypt and Iran more fascinating.

The British colonized the Egyptians from 1882 till 1956 and the “land of the pharaohs” then was reduced to a military colony for the crown, Iran on the other hand was never directly colonized by the Europeans and yet saw one of the biggest cultural shifts in the Middle East due to the ‘spheres of influence’ set up over the years.

For the study we will be comparing and contrasting the post-colonial/imperial condition of the said countries by looking at the two visual texts; Egypt: Yacoubian building- (Marwan Hamed) and Iran: The lizard- (Kamal Tabrizi).

Yacoubian Building- (Marwan Hamed) 2006: The film is a derisive portrayal of modern Egyptian society since the coup d'état of 1952.

Iran: The Lizard- (Kamal Tabrizi) 2004: The film satirizes the clergy, religion, Iranian society, and life of people living in Tehran through the perspective of a petty thief.

Analysis

For a textual comparative study, we will be looking at three major markers for the analysis of both films; setting, representation, and identity.

Setting:

• Approaches towards colonialism/imperialism
• Definitions of what is post-colonial/imperial

The yacoubian building is set in the Gulf War period in Cairo specifically in the building that architecturally was considered a marvel for the aristocrats of European descent to live in but with the advent of the war, each floor is occupied by people who weren’t necessarily well-groomed, gone are the crème de la crème of Egyptian society that lived they're during the forties, in their stead, a loathsome breed of dejected people has taken over.

In the movie, there is a line that a politician says (originally in Arabic) which roughly translates to ‘Dumb on the roof, deformed in the basement’, which to me is a remarkably accurate metaphor for the colonial discourse of civilized/savage and Nobel savage. Egyptians were always looked at by the British as ‘things of exotic value’, that could be exploited and ones that needed to be brought to Europe as dancers and sex workers for pleasure and as a mark of bringing them to the civilized side of the world.

Similar to that of other British colonies, Egypt, post-colonisation seemingly accepted such colonial leftovers for their country’s identity. The British might have left the Egyptians but their remains were strongly found in the political sphere, they controlled the Wafd Party, which was seen as corrupt and solely a platform for the wealthy. Thus, the stage was set for a military coup that would overthrow both the British and the Wafd.

Opposing visions for the Egyptian state among the revolutionaries laid the groundwork for the ideological split between nationalism and Islamic reformism which rapidly manifested in violence between Arab socialist authoritarian regimes and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, thus reducing the Egyptians to nothing but a state now filled with violence and close to economic bankruptcy. It was as if the Egyptians had internalised the concept of being exploited, in the movie as well the prominent character of a big shot lawyer Kalam el Fouli, and his cohort Hagg Azzam rig the assembly votes and justify it by saying that they are implementing gods will as “our lord created the Egyptians to accept a higher authority”.

Juxtaposing this thought with that of the “white man’s burden” the only difference is that the ‘elite white man’ is now replaced with a supernatural being to do essentially the same, justify exploitation which then is a heartbreaking example of how the Egyptians have carried forward their colonial legacy instead of reclaiming their past.

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On the other hand when we look at the Iranian film “The Lizard” we get a somewhat different perspective on the Middle East as a whole. In the process of the struggle for political and economic liberation, the modern history of a ‘third world country’ such as Iran appears to be shaped by a dynamic interaction between the imperialist (Anglo-Russian and American imperialism) contention for achieving hegemony and the inevitable national movement it witnessed. The movie is set primarily in Tehran and specifically in jails where the petty thief Reza Mesghaly, known as Reza the Lizard for his ability to bare-headedly climb all walls is arrested and charged with armed robbery, a crime that as revealed near the end of the film, he did not commit, he is sentenced to life in prison, and is met at the jail by a strict warden, who says that he intends to 'make a person out of prisoners'; thus they will be led into heaven; ‘by force,’ if necessary. This particular notion in the film stems from the Iranian revolution that was led by Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini, (also known as Ayatollah Khomeini,) as a response to the imperialistic ways of the Shah of Iran. The concept of bringing the poor or those who commit sins to heaven is similar to that of bringing the savage to the civilized and the idea of center/margin with the primary difference being the fact that once again the white elite is substituted by the supernatural. Iran after the revolution was strictly an Islamic state and this approach to imperialism wasn’t completely unheard of.

Like many nations who were once imperialised the major problems that Iran faced was with their approach to post-imperialistic thought, they envisioned their state as one of Shiite Muslim majority imposing laws that then were misinterpretations of the Koran and hence creating a cultural shift in the Middle East. In the film there is a scene where Reza in jail tries to commit suicide by overdosing on medicines and to me this is a strikingly accurate representation of post-imperialist Iran where the people who were close to seeing the modernity of what their nation could be were pulled down by the wave of independence to then put them way back in time with their political and cultural practices.

Representation

• Impact of colonialism/imperialism on the nations
• Images from the text corresponding to cultural imperialism

To understand the impact of colonial rule on the people of Egypt we can look at how the floors of the Yacoubian building, portray the people of Cairo. The film plays directly on the imagery of the building with the first floor where politicians meet with the clergy on the pure basis of bribery for the assembly, a concept that was directly the colonial product of the Egyptian political world (as mentioned earlier a way of implementing god’s will). The second floor is where we can see two married men engaging in homosexuality and adultery; Though Abduh, an illiterate family man, appears to have consensually entered into a relationship with Hatim, editor of a newspaper, it is never clear whether he is in it for pleasure or by obligation as Hatim not only arranges work and accommodation for his lover but also promises to pay for anything Abduh's wife or son might need, the colonial rule considered the ‘homosexuals’ to be deformed humans and illegalized sodomy in most of their colonies, looking at the film portray such a relationship between two married men is a statement to how the country after nearly forty years was open to the idea of mainstream lgbtq representation in their literature and films. The third floor is where we see prostitution and the roof is the place of sexual harassment of female employees. Busayna accepts her employer's groping in the backroom because she has a family to support and Souad pretends to enjoy sex with her elderly husband because he can provide for her son from another marriage. These situations show how normalized sexual harassment, pedophilia, and prostitution for men and women were in post-colonial Egypt.

Interestingly enough when two elite Europeans walk up to the first-floor lift they see a boy cleaning the stairs and ask him if he has finished his schooling in his response the boy says that with his grades he could go to any college he likes but that isn’t possible, this seems to be hilarious and the lady walks away laughing. This reeks of colonial hegemony where a poor servant boy cannot attend college for he doesn’t have convent schooling and the fact that the lady laughs at this is yet again an example of the distorted power relations the British left in Egypt. The Arabic language is hardly spoken for it was deemed to be of lower value and English-speaking Egyptians were ironically the most valued in society even though they were merely puppets of the European elites. Colonialism in Egypt put their extremely rich culture to a mere standstill, traditionally Egyptian society had always been ethnically pluralist with significant Christian and Jewish communities living alongside the majority Muslim population, but with the British colonizing Egypt they benefited from the Capitulations and under the British, pluralism became increasingly identified with colonial rule, an association reinforced by the British government’s arrogation to itself of the “role of protector of foreign interests” in the country, favoring the Christians then became a primary cause in the development of the religious tensions between Muslims and Copts that surfaced during the first decade of the twentieth century and reappeared at various times thereafter, this left Egypt with strong communal tensions, something which was seen as a colonial by-product in nations like Israel, India, and sub-Saharan nations.

Iran however had a completely different impact of imperialism in their nation, to understand this we can look at the portrayal of certain characters from the film and their direct metaphorical representation of a post-revolution Iran. When we look at the character of Reza we see that after leaving the prison he steals a clergy mans robes and starts impersonating him, for one who is an atheist Reza then tries to hide his deceit and starts giving sermons to the people while still trying to get his fake passport and escape from Tehran, this can be associated with the post-colonial discourse of mimicry; predominantly the idea of mimicry has been associated with colonizer-colonized but I would like to apply this here and see how Reza becomes the extended metaphor for the Iranian people and the mullah( head clergyman) then becomes an extension of the post-imperial power (which is now the dominant power) and thus Reza’s attempts of impersonating the clergyman is a form of mimicry which then tells us how even though the country wasn’t colonized its Islamic rule is in a way a dominant discourse that stems directly from the post imperialist condition.

When Iran was under imperialism, the Shah of Iran wanted to heavily westernize the country, following the 1973 oil crisis, he found himself in possession of colossal wealth and used it to buy the latest American weapons in pursuit of his imperial ambitions to dominate the Middle East, he ended up destroying the Iranian middle class to a point where the factories were shut down, this affected the education system in Iran as well, as the imperial powers of America made schooling “all American” in the words truest sense, this highly impacted the cultural side with Iran on the brink of losing the Persian culture altogether. Once the Iranian revolution began to overthrow the Shah, staunch Islamic ideas were brought back changing the education system completely with the establishment of a Shiite Muslim nation.

Identity

• Instances from the text that spoke about the post-colonial/imperial identity

The concept of identity in post-colonial Egypt was directly taken up from where the British left it, the people were torn down to such bits that their cultural identity of being Arab or Egyptian was predominantly from the external locus of the west, the civil culture of Cairo, as shown in the movie, was anything but “normal”. As we look at the film, it unfolds layers of the social strata with each floor reducing the men and women to mere attributes. Women were constantly engaging in seductive methods to please foreign nationals to essentially rob them while men engaged in prostitution and sex work, pedophilia was normalized to a point where fifteen-year-old girls were sleeping with forty-year-old men to conceive children and rear them and men raping boys were justified as they technically couldn’t be pregnant. This gruesome portrayal of Egypt wasn’t done to stereotype the Arab world but was done to show how a country with an extremely rich culture was torn down for profit by the colonizers leaving them with a loss of cultural identity and with evils of the world-making way into mainstream “normal” culture.

Iranian identity however never depended on the imperialists, as a nation they knew their roots but let America and Russia sway their ways a little, it was after the revolution that the Iranians reclaimed their past from the imperialists and formed a homogenous cultural identity, as the film ended we could see how Reza despite being exploited by an authoritarian ruler ended up doing good for the people and when it came to him being arrested he accepted that without hesitation, this being a direct reference to how the Iranians were reduced to thievery when the Shah ruled with imperial powers but then when the clergy took over, the community united and accepted a common cultural identity that highlighted their Persian past as primary and the imperial legacy as secondary.

Conclusion

The Middle East has more to offer than what we see in the romanticized pop culture references of Hollywood, the countries of Egypt and Iran have both been under either colonial or imperial rule yet their approaches to the same have been very different, the cultural domination of the colonial/imperial legacy in the two nations is again on two extremes with Iran completely taking control of the narrative a reclaiming the past while Egypt moving the colonial legacy forward. The locus of identity that both Egypt and Iran have is external and mostly Western but the major difference is that Egyptians post-colonization look at themselves via the eroticism glasses as they identify as the romanticized eastern land whereas the Iranians take the more magisterial approach and turn the glasses inwards to look at themselves as more than imperial products.

Both films have been remarked as cultural viewpoints for the Middle Eastern nations for their extensive coverage of socio-political issues in the nations through satire and comedy, in turn giving us means to somewhat decipher the post-colonial condition of the Middle East while adding to the world view on The Arab imagination.

References

1. Benab, Younes (2019) - The origin and development of imperialist contention in Iran; 1884-1921 A case study in under development and dependency
2. Tabziri, Kamal ( 2004) – Marmoulak
3. Aswany, A. (2006)- The Yacoubian building
4. Cole, Juan (1992)- Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East
5. Powell, Eve (2003)- A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan