This post was written by Hatchet reporter Josh Griffith.
Egyptian author and journalist Ashraf Khalil recounted last year’s 18-day “siege” of Tahrir Square and pushed for a strict anti-corruption campaign in the Arab Spring’s aftermath Friday night at the Elliott School of International Affairs.
Khalil spent nearly 15 years in the Middle East as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy magazine and The Times of London. He said he watched tension build until Egypt’s unrest became a full-fledged revolution that left the nation fragile and still shrouded in corruption.
“There is a distinct air of pessimism inside and outside Egypt,” he said at the event hosted by the Project on Middle East Political Science.
Ashraf Khalil discussed his new book, "Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation," Friday night in an event sponsored by the Project on Middle East Political Science. Zach Krahmer | Hatchet Photographer
His book, called “Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation” and published Jan. 3, offers a first-hand perspective on the uprising that he said has yet to stabilize the country.
Though the activist movement may have succeeded in removing former president Hosni Mubarak from power exactly one year ago, remnants of his regime persist in institutions like the Ministry of Interior, Khalil said.
He argued that public distrust in these institutions has been a roadblock to change. For example, he said, a riot that killed about 70 people during a soccer match 10 days ago demonstrates the lack of a legitimate security force.
There’s an economic downside to the destabilized country too, Kahlil added, saying that riots and protests deter tourism that brings in revenue necessary for the country’s growth.
Kahlil proposed a long-term “reprogramming” of the country in which trained civilians replace the corrupt officials who have climbed to power. An anti-corruption campaign that forces those politicians from office needs to take shape, he said, where “heads must roll on a massive scale.”
If progress stalls, protesters will have to return to Tahrir, he said.
I appreciate this man’s attempts to find a way that Islam can come into the modern world but I think all such attempts will fail. Islam, unlike any other major faith is, as Bertrand Russell observed almost a century ago, the only religion which is totalitarian in structure and ideology. And there’s no reforming a totalitarian ideology.
You can’t have a kinder, nicer Nazism or a reformed Marxism. Totalitarian ideologies must be discarded. They can never be squared with such things as liberty, true democracy and equality under the law. I don’t doubt that many Muslims now and in the future will be pretty much passive about all the pathological instructions that their religion demands of them, but that is not germane. The religion itself, in all its totalitarian make-up, will remain and, guaranteed here, will always function as a death cult for at least a certain percentage of Muslims when they don’t get their way. Ultimately, it’s the relgion itself which is rotten and, though personally not religious, I don’t see rottenness in any other major faith. The Islamic theological blueprint is flawed to its very core. No other religion’s theological blueprint is. This is the essence of the problem.