Two years ago, Nabila Makram, Egyptian Minister of State for Emigration and Egyptian Expatriates’ Affairs, attended a gala dinner in honor of Egyptian expatriates in Canada. In that dinner she declared, “any Egyptian who says anything against their country will be cut to pieces,” and she gestured with her hand towards her neck indicating slaughter.
Last week, the same minister declared that “Egyptians aboard are the most dangerous segment as they are subjected to wrongful information propagated by enemies of the state.”
As if taking their cue from her, on Saturday 10 July authorities in Cairo Airport detained Dr. Alia Mossallam, an Egyptian scholar who currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin, Germany. She was returning home with her husband and their three children to spend the upcoming Eid vacation with friends and family. But in Cairo Airport the whole family was detained, Alia was separated from her husband and children, and 17 hours later, she called them to say that she had been subjected to interrogation by State Security Prosecution in the Fifth District Neighborhood of Cairo. She is still held in custody.
Dr. Mossallam is a renown historian of modern Egypt with an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE). Prior to her current fellowship at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Dr. Mossallam taught at the American University in Cairo, the Free Universität in Berlin and the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences. Her studies are all ground-breaking, original and important, asking us to revise our understanding of some pivotal moments in modern Middle Eastern history. Her specialty is cultural history, and more specifically, the songs that tell stories that invite us to rethink the history of popular struggles in our part of the world.
Of particular note is her study on the songs sung by the 1.5 million Egyptian workers recruited into the Egyptian Labor Corps during the First World War. In her PhD (from LSE) she researched a popular history of Nasserist Egypt through the stories and experiences of the popular resistance in Port Said (1956) and Suez (1967-1974) and the construction of the Aswan High Dam through the experiences of its builders and the Nubian communities displaced by it. One of her current projects is a study of audio recordings done with Tunisian and Algerian soldiers fighting on the Western Front during WWI.
Relying on these songs and personal stories Dr. Mossallam very often comes across accounts that are at variance with the official nationalist narrative. The way Sawaysa (i.e. denizens of Suez) remember their heroic efforts and their sacrifices during the 1973 Egyptian-Israeli War, for example, does not coincide easily with the official account of that war. Nor does her story of the Egyptian peasants who were recruited into the Labour Corps during WWI sit comfortably with Egyptian popular or official understanding of the Great War or the subsequent national revolution of 1919.
But her original, critical history on songs and popular memory does not justify in any way her detention and being interrogated by State Security Prosecution, which is part of the Egyptian Ministry of Interior that deals with terrorism, among other grave crimes.
What makes Dr. Mossallam’s detention a very serious matter is that it is indicative, as Minister Makram clearly said, of an official suspicion of Egyptian expatriates, given their exposure to “wrongful information propagated by enemies of the state.”
Worse, it points to an unmistakable trend by the Egyptian state that equates academic research with unpatriotic behavior, at best, or espionage, at worse. The record says it all. In December 2015, Egyptian authorities arrested Ismail Iskandarani, an independent researcher and journalist who was conducting research on the Egyptian military in Sinai. Three years later, he was given a ten-year prison sentence by a military court. In February 2020, Egyptian authorities arrested Patrick Zaki, an Egyptian student pursing an MA at the University of Bologna on gender and human rights. He is still in detention with no signs of an imminent release. In January 2021, Egyptian authorities arrested Ahmed Samir Santawi who is an MA student in the Central European University, Vienna. He is an anthropologist working on women’s sexual rights in Egypt. Two weeks ago, he was given a four-year prison sentence. All three scholars were arrested at the airport upon entering the country to visit their respective families. And of course, in January 2016, Giulio Regeni, an Italian PhD student at the University of Cambridge working on the Egyptian labor movement, was abducted, tortured and killed while conducting his academic research in Egypt. After five years of investigation, the Egyptian authorities closed the case claiming they could not find Regeni’s killers.
The unmistakable message that the Egyptian authorities are sending is that academic research, no matter how innocuous, is not tolerated. Not only is research on the army, labor or sexuality deemed subversive; songs, jokes and personal stories are also deemed dangerous.
This ferocious attack on academic freedom should not be allowed to pass. Academic freedom, like free speech and a free press, is not only a cardinal principle of democratic society; it is also a central pillar of stability. A society that is not allowed to think critically about its past, or to question seriously its present is a society that is standing on shaky grounds.
Those in the West who lend their support to the current Egyptian regime, signing one protocol of educational and cultural cooperation after another, should stop to think not only about the gross human rights violations this regime is committing, but, more seriously, about the reckless policies it is pursuing. These policies are undermining the stability of the largest country in the Middle East.