Letter from Cairo: March of the Saladins

Before the January 25 Revolution, you would only see Egyptian flags on top of a few government buildings, not exactly fluttering, but rather flaccidly hanging there coated with layers of dust that betrayed decades of neglect for their value and that of the country they stood for. Torn at the sides and with the red, white, and black fading into one single pale shade that looked like something between the grey of a thousand-year-old mummy and the yellow of lifeless autumn leaves.

There is no need to mention what this extreme lack of care for the flag signified for a people who might have reached the point of preferring to sing the Barbadian anthem and pledge allegiance to the Sultan of Brunei. There is also no need to point out the reasons behind the stellar change that took place not when Egypt was rid of the despotic regime that rendered everything national bland and colorless as many would like to think, but the moment Egyptians realized that they belong to a country that is worth fighting for and it was time they stop pretending to salute a worn-out rag.

Now, however, you can hardly spot a house or pass by a car or come across a store or eat at a restaurant that does not carry one size or another of the Egyptian flag and display some form or another of finally reconnecting to the long-neglected motherland.

For days and months the fluttering of Egyptian flags, all new and bright and throbbing with color, has become part and parcel of the country’s landscape, but this nationalistic fervor started taking a different shape as the flag of the country that made one of history’s most memorable revolutions made way for another one that so much yearns for the moment it merges with the usurped sky of which it has been deprived for the past 60 plus years. After seemingly sinking into oblivion together with the cause it stands for, the Palestinian flag made a glorious comeback to remind Arabs and the whole world not only that the struggle for freedom knows no limits, but also that gone are the times when the Palestinian cause had no longer become a priority for Egypt and come the times when revolutions prove they can break separation walls, pull down checkpoints, and bid farewell to refugee camps.

After living with the shame of being part of a regime that gave precedence to Israeli interests and deepened the rift between the Palestinian people, Egyptians were once again allowed the chance to bring back to life the Arab dream that they considered clinically dead since the signing of the Camp David treaty, viewed by nationalists as the official abandonment of Palestine that sealed the end to a collective Arab unity against a Zionist enemy.

With the removal of a president labeled as “Israel’s man,” Egyptians were finally able to exercise their right and duty as Arabs to defend their next of kin who are suffering from a kind of oppression—rather a form of genocide—that might not be similar to the one they suffered before the revolution yet can still be eliminated by the same means. Seeing the revolution gaining momentum in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, not wanting to waste more time on slogans and long-term plans, and deciding that tearful commemoration of the Nakba only rubs salt into the all-time sore wound, they made up their minds to take the first step—quite a lot of steps in fact—and march to the land on the day its people were rendered land-less.

Attempting to recapture that moment of Arab nationalism that most of the youths who planned the march had not witnessed but only dreamt of, constituted a reenactment of past glories that are not called so because they brought about any triumph—they were in fact all moments of bitter defeat—but owing to the long-gone values they stood for—a unified cause fought for against all odds. The 1948 War, in which Arabs hurried to the rescue of Palestine, immediately came to mind as the prospect of a similar communal action—a different kind of resistance though—started reemerging as part of the Egyptian psyche.

Stories from the days of Nasser, as controversial as he was and still is, are now being retold to younger generations and the spirit for which he stood are becoming an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Egyptians nostalgic for the long-lost Arab dignity. He might have been a dictator—indeed he was—and he might have dragged the country to the most horrendous defeat by flexing his muscles in the 1967 War—indeed he did—but, they argue, he loved this country at least. Nasser, who was the only Arab leader to have an ideology named after him, inspired nations across the world, not because he was an ideal ruler, but because he came at a time when countries struggled to assert their independence and fought to regain their nationalist pride, and he relentlessly and unflinchingly supported that cause with all his might.

It is this cause that made so many world leaders label themselves “Nasserites” till the present moment.

For me, it is neither the memory of 1948 War nor the spirit of Nasser that are summoned up with the calls for the march towards the “promised land.” My mind has made a longer journey back in time as the image of Saladin—interestingly not an Arab—presented itself to me, and suddenly I envisioned the Kurdish warrior mobilizing his troops to liberate Jerusalem.

The May 15, 2011 march was called by its organizers as the day of “zahf,” an Arabic word that literally means “creeping” or “crawling” but that is usually used to denote the slow, yet determined, movement in the direction of a much-coveted place, in many cases a holy land unjustly usurped by powers seen as formidable or invincible. Saladin had done what Nasser failed at despite the centuries that set them apart: he combined the soldier with the sage and never allowed ardent faith in the cause to miscalculate his careful moves towards an all-sweeping triumph. He knew what he wanted, but also knew when he could get it… he was a man of war and an epitome of peace… he was what Egyptian perpetrators of the revolution and the initiators of the march aspire to be as they set out to prove that history can, in fact, repeat itself.

The analogy between the Egyptians’ march to Gaza and Saladin’s liberation of Jerusalem might not have escaped the Israelis who have been attacking the strip and obstructing humanitarian aid heading its way since they got wind of the approaching earth-shaking treads of a once crippled opponent. The threat they perceive in a group of peaceful activists embarking on a symbolic act of conquering—they were not planning to besiege Israel with catapults nor expel its “crusader” inhabitants after all, were they?—is quite indicative of the power inherent in the Palestinian cause and the victory it can accomplish once Arabs are no longer drained by fighting tyranny at home.

To those, both average citizens and state officials, who had objected to the march on the grounds that more pressing issues are more worthy of the energy and effort of Egyptians and under the pretext that the country is going through a critical phase in which any distraction, no matter how minor, is not welcome, I say one thing. Those Egyptians who managed to uproot a regime as deeply entrenched in its soil as its most ancient obelisks and who did so without shedding one drop of blood are capable of all sorts of things.

This might sound pretty naïve and a little bit dreamy slash idealistic slash romantic, but it is equally true slash possible slash bound to happen: those very same Egyptians are capable of reconstructing the country they have just liberated while not allowing themselves to indulge in border-confined dreams that exclude those whose destiny has always been intertwined with theirs or to fall into the same moral abyss in which their previous despots felt so much at home.

Forgot to tell you that the word “zahf” also implies movement toward different directions and penetration of several fronts. Who on earth charted one single, straight-line path toward freedom? What course would history have taken had Saladin not braved the hazardous terrain from Tikrit to the Levant? What could have happened had Che Guevara remained a medical student in Argentina?