Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (24 page)

Essam el-Erian:
I was surprised when a congressman visited me last week and said it is well known in America that the Muslim Brotherhood is linked to al-Qaeda.

MJT:
I’m not saying you are al-Qaeda.

Essam el-Erian:
You know, but he is a decisionmaker. He says the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda are the same.

MJT:
If you were al-Qaeda, I wouldn’t be sitting in your office.

Essam el-Erian:
Look, sir. If you don’t dare to learn the truth about 9/11, we will. We were victims of this dirty and bloody crime.

MJT:
You think you’re victims because Egypt was blamed?

Essam el-Erian:
All the nation. The whole Arab and Muslim nation was called terrorists. And you put these nations under dictatorship to face this ghost.

MJT:
We didn’t put Egypt under dictatorship.

Essam el-Erian:
Your administration did.

MJT:
Mubarak was already in power.

Essam el-Erian:
And you put Hamas in the same cage as al-Qaeda. They are fighting for their liberty, but you describe them as terrorists.

MJT:
What do you think of Hamas’ martyrdom operations [suicide bombings]?

Essam el-Erian:
Hamas was elected in a democratic process that your former President Jimmy Carter witnessed, but you neglect everything and call them terrorists.

MJT:
So you think they aren’t terrorists.

Essam el-Erian:
Of course. They are fighters for liberty. Their land is occupied by the real terrorists. Real terrorists who kill innocent farmers in Qana and children in Egypt. They killed children in school here in 1968. They are the real terrorists.

MJT:
Hamas kills children in schools.

Essam el-Erian:
Why do you describe one as terrorist but not the other? Say both are terrorists. If you make an excuse for someone, you must have this excuse for others.

MJT:
Not all violence is terrorism.

Essam el-Erian:
Israelis kill children. They killed 300 children in Gaza. Those 300 children were fighters?

MJT:
Children get killed in every war, but that doesn’t mean everyone who fights in a war is a terrorist. Egypt sent troops to Yemen to fight there and help the revolutionaries. Is Egypt a terrorist state? Do you seriously believe that no Egyptian soldier ever killed a child in Yemen?

Essam el-Erian:
Look, sir.

MJT:
I asked you a serious question.

Essam el-Erian:
For three centuries your grandfathers killed the Indians.

MJT:
We can do this all day.

Essam el-Erian:
If you want to go to history, we can walk through history together. But we are speaking about the present. [
Bangs table.
] In the present, you are biased.

MJT:
Of course we’re biased. So are you.

Essam el-Erian:
Your media and administration are biased.

MJT:
Everyone is biased.

Essam el-Erian:
The politicians are no longer making the rules here. The people are. And the people are very intelligent in Egypt, even farmers in Upper Egypt. They know who is our enemy. Don’t link yourself and your nation to the enemy of the Egyptian people.

MJT:
Who is the enemy of the Egyptians?

Essam el-Erian:
Israelis.

MJT:
You guys have a peace treaty with Israel.

Essam el-Erian:
If they respect it, the Egyptian people will respect it, but the Israelis do not respect it.

MJT:
Israel is not attacking Egypt.

Essam el-Erian:
Israel attacks everybody.

MJT:
Israel is not attacking Egypt.

Essam el-Erian:
Why are you neglecting the attack on Gaza?

MJT:
Gaza is not Egypt.

Essam el-Erian:
Bombs came over our borders. Why do you neglect the treaty? We have no comprehensive peace and no Palestinian state.

The whole world is changing. This is a time to revise the whole world order, as George Bush the father said. We need a new world order. Human beings should have equal lives and equal opportunities with the West. We must share in this new order and not be neglected all the time.

Armin Rosen:
There are a lot of people in the U.S. who think the Muslim Brotherhood wants a moderate Islamist state supported by the military like they have in Sudan.

Essam el-Erian:
Sudan is not an Islamist state. [
Laughs.
]

Armin Rosen:
It’s a constitutionally Islamist state backed by the military.

Essam el-Erian:
All the Arab states are constitutionally described as Islamic states. All of them.

Armin Rosen:
Well, what sort of ideal state structure do you want?

Essam el-Erian:
An Egyptian state.

Armin Rosen:
What does that mean?

Essam el-Erian:
All of your colleagues ask me that question. The British made a democracy, and the French made another one, and the Americans made a third one, and the Germans made a sixth one. All are democratic. We have diversity and different interpretations, so we can have different models of democracy.

MJT:
Lebanon has its own model of democracy, and Iraq has a slightly different one. What would Egypt’s look like structurally?

Essam el-Erian:
Lebanon is a special circumstance.

[
His cell phone rings. He has been ignoring most incoming calls, but he has to take this one, and he talks for 10 minutes in Arabic. He eventually hangs up and switches back to English.
]

Thank you, sirs. It was a nice hot meeting. [
Laughs.
]

MJT:
Before we go, can I at least ask why you aren’t down in Tahrir Square with everyone else? Every party in the country is demonstrating against the regime except the Muslim Brotherhood.

Essam el-Erian:
We were in Tahrir Square.

MJT:
But you aren’t there now.

Essam el-Erian:
Because now is very confusing. I went down there yesterday. I looked at the faces of the people, and they are not the people I know.

MJT:
The people down there are liberals and socialists.

Essam el-Erian:
It’s chaos.

Armin Rosen:
We’ve talked to a lot of activists there, and almost all of them say the Muslim Brotherhood is not on their side, that you’re opportunists.

Essam el-Erian:
We were there on Friday, but we are not backing the sit-in.

Armin Rosen:
I mean in general. They don’t feel like you’re on their side.

Essam el-Erian:
Look, sir. When the history of this revolution is written, everything will be clear. We are not going to say anything about our role in the revolution. Let the others say what they want.

Chapter Ten

The Children of Hannibal

Tunisia, 2012

The Arab Spring didn’t go well. Egypt managed to rid itself of Hosni Mubarak, only to foolishly elect the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammad Morsi to replace him as its new pharaoh. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi then removed Morsi in a popularly-backed military coup, but imposed a military regime far more vicious and cruel than Mubarak’s. 

Libya degenerated into a failed militia state. Earlier it suffered from far too much government—Qaddafi’s system was thoroughly totalitarian and modeled on Nicolae Ceausescu’s in Romania—but the new state was so weak it hardly existed.

Civil war erupted in Syria, one in which the revolt against the tyrannical house of Assad was just the opening chapter. The fighting eventually blew across the borders into Lebanon and Iraq. The Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, an outfit so extreme that even Al Qaeda disowned it, finally committed one atrocity too many and brought down the wrath of a US-backed military coalition.

But things look different in Tunisia. The Islamist party Ennahda won more votes in the first election than any other, but it still won less than half and was forced into a coalition government with secular liberal parties. The Islamists outright lost the second election to the aggressively secular party Nidaa Tounes--or Call of Tunisia in English. No one person or party could get its mitts on all the levers of power, and in early 2014 Tunisia adopted the most liberal constitution in the entire Arab world.

Why did the Arab Spring turn out so much better in the country in which it began? The answer lies back in time more than 3,000 years.

*  *  *

The northernmost point on the African continent is just outside the Tunisian city of Bizerte at the tip of Ras Angela cape. Here is where the Mediterranean bottlenecks. The Italian island of Sardinia is barely 100 miles away. Sicily is but 100 miles across the water from Tunis in another direction. The Italian town of Pantelleria, on the island of the same name, is only 37 miles off the east coast. Palermo, Sicily’s largest city, is closer to Tunis than it is to Rome.

It should come as no surprise, then, that this area became the overseas core of the Roman Empire.

What is now the greater Tunis urban area, though, was an advanced civilization even before Rome was founded. Roughly 900 years before Christ, Elissa (whose Greek name, Dido, was immortalized by the Roman poet Virgil in his epic
The Aeneid
) was exiled from the Phoenician city of Tyre in southern Lebanon. She founded a new city on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and became its first queen.

That city, which at its height became known as the “shining city,” was Carthage.

It grew into an innovative and technologically advanced, cosmopolitan sea-based power with one of the most formidable navies in the ancient world. At its peak it controlled most of the southern Mediterranean, from Morocco to Libya.

Three hundred thousand people lived in the capital alone, making it a megacity by antiquity’s standards. The city was so dense that the Carthaginians had to build six-story apartment buildings in order to house everyone, something never before accomplished anywhere in the world. The apartments even had indoor plumbing.

“To some extent you could compare it to Manhattan,” Stefan G. Chrissanthos, the author of
Warfare in the Ancient World,
told the History Channel. “It was a huge population living in a relatively small area. This was an important commercial and cultural hub not only for North Africa but for the entire western Mediterranean world.”

They built baths, a complex sewer system and enormous cisterns that you can still see today. Some of the more backward and impoverished parts of the Arab world still don’t have all the things the Carthaginians had, but the city now known as Tunis had them even before ancient Rome did.

Carthage was truly a superpower. For hundreds of years it rivaled Rome in prestige, strength and wealth. No other nation at the time could challenge and threaten Rome as it did. When the two finally clashed, Carthage produced one of the greatest military generals in history—Hannibal—who fought a hard and bloody 15-year campaign against his chief rival. His army swung through Spain and Gaul and invaded Italy from the north on the backs of elephants. Europe was very nearly conquered from Africa. And while Hannibal failed, he put cold fear into the hearts and minds of Rome’s citizens.

The Roman statesman Cato the Elder was later reported to have uttered the words “
Carthago delenda est”
—Carthage must be destroyed—after every single one of his speeches.

At the end of the Third Punic War (Punic is the Latin word for Phoenician), Rome did destroy Carthage, and it did so utterly. Barely a stone remained on top of another. The conquerors killed or enslaved all the inhabitants. Julius Caesar rebuilt the city in the Roman style, settled it with Roman citizens and made the new Carthage the principal European city in Africa.

Three wars with Carthage—two of them existential—convinced the Romans that they needed a serious empire lest they be conquered by somebody else. “It was in Tunisia,” Robert D. Kaplan writes in his book
Mediterranean Winter
, “where Rome began to build its empire in earnest … Tunisia became to Rome what India would be to Great Britain, its ‘jewel in the imperial crown.’”

The Romans first annexed it and then renamed it Africa. Tunisia is hardly a typical country in Africa—it is at least messily democratic, and 60 percent of its citizens are middle class—but the entire rest of the continent was later named what Rome used to call it. The Romans eventually conquered the whole of North Africa, but they developed none of it as much as the area that now surrounds Tunis.

You can see that even today if you visit. Roman ruins are scattered all over the place and can be found as far south as the sand seas of the Sahara. The largest coliseum outside Rome was built just a few hours’ drive south of Tunis in a place called el-Djem.

“The closer to Carthage,” Kaplan writes, “the greater the development.” Of course that development wasn’t started by Rome. Rather, it was continued and accelerated by Rome.

Little remains of Hannibal’s Carthage. The archeological site just to the north of downtown Tunis is mostly Roman, though there is a Phoenician portion just outside the museum. Ahmed Medien, a local journalist I toured the area with, didn’t think of the ruins there as something left behind by somebody else, the way many Americans might view Native American sites in Arizona and Colorado. He saw a straight historical line between himself and ancient Carthage and described the Roman and Phoenician ruins as parts of his own cultural heritage.

Modern-day Tunisians admire and identify with Hannibal. There’s even a statue of him with two elephants all the way down in Tozeur at the edge of the Sahara. Stores and hotels are named after him. The last light-rail stop before the lovely seaside suburb of Sidi Bou Said is called Carthage-Hannibal. The international airport is named Tunis-Carthage. Tunisians love the idea of ancient Carthage as a sophisticated, prosperous, cosmopolitan, sea-based superpower. Today’s Tunis-Carthage is in some ways just like the old Carthage, although—unlike Egypt—it has been blessedly shorn of its militarism.