From Sadat to Mubarak

Now that President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down and Egypt is preparing itself for a new leader, it seems a propitious moment to look back at The New Yorkers coverage of the early years of Mubarak’s three decades in power. In 1984, John Newhouse, then our diplomatic correspondent, wrote a Letter from Egypt in which he profiled the new president, who came into office after Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. The article, which gives a detailed account of Mubarak’s rise from Air Force chief to vice-president to president, shows just how much has changed during his tenure in power.

Newhouse opens his article by interviewing Ali Dessouki, a political scientist at Cairo University, who says that Egyptians prefer joking to protesting.

Curiously, there are no jokes—not yet, anyway—about Hosni Mubarak, who became President in October of 1981… Dessouki says, “The reason is that Mubarak projects himself as a very normal Egyptian, a man of the people, who tolerates most things. There isn’t much to joke about.”…

As Vice-President, [Mubarak] was the figure of fun he hasn’t been since succeeding Sadat as Egypt’s ruler. Cairenes called him “la vache qui rit”—“the laughing cow”—after a popular French cheese, because he was often photographed in situations in which he seemed to have nothing to do but smile.

But as Mubarak’s rule stretched on, the jokes caught up with him, many of them catalogued in the current Foreign Policy. (“Azrael, the archangel of death, comes down to Mubarak and tells him he must say goodbye to the Egyptian people. ‘Why, where are they going?’ he asks.”)

Newhouse’s piece also offers some compelling parallels between the latter years of Sadat’s reign and those of Mubarak’s:

Relief is the main reaction to Mubarak that one senses in most Egyptians, of whatever political bias. Sadat had stretched their tolerances too far. In the later years of his rule, he seems not just to have been out of touch with popular sentiment but to have completely misread it. _The entire article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.

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