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 Yorker’s 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.
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:
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