Preliminary Notes: This essay is based on notes from a talk already given, so I am not expecting it to be fully consistent since it was intended as a brief (spoken) introduction, and still doesn't read like an essay. In the coming months I plan to expand the essay into a book chapter adding more footnotes and references on particular authors such as Thoreau, Marx, Hegel, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, etc. The translations of Maikel Nabil's fragments were substantially altered to be readable to native English speakers; any mistakes in them, are entirely my responsibility.
Maikel Nabil and Peaceful Resistance[1]
Freedom
occupied no place in the world of Greek philosophy where political freedoms
were taken for the granted, and only began to concern philosophy at a time when
Greek civilization – together with its celebrated political freedom – was on
the verge of decline[2]. Inner
freedom or what the Christian tradition calls free will, was unknown to the
Greeks and it is safe to assume that it had no political relevance, since one
of the basic conditions of being a free man was being free with others in the
public space so that politics and the world could happen and arise in between
men and from them[3].
Modern
notions of sovereignty are derived from this confusion: When free will –
impotent as it is to generate power or human relationships – is made tantamount
to political freedom – liberty, that is – the will of the lone individual is
placed atop the free association between a plurality of men and ideas, the
immediate form that power and action takes, is one of non-spontaneity in which
dominance and oppression is the natural consequence[4].
Therefore violence is understood as a political means par excellence to achieve
political ends.
But
violence by its very nature lacks the spontaneity and plurality inherent in
human action. Political power grows in between men whereas violence is
possessed by one man alone, and once power is seized by violent means, politics
and political power is destroyed and only violence is left. Violence is
measurable and calculable while power is imponderable and incalculable.
Violence is objective and identical with the means it utilizes, but power comes
to life only momentarily and through pure unmediated action[5]. It
could be said that in a way violence is the antithesis of politics.
Surprisingly,
it was in the turbulence of the violent 20th century the time in
which an unprecedented social and political response arose to tackle this
difficulty, in the form of organized nonviolent resistance. What this social
invention proposed was not an impotence of the Christian kind – like that
impotence inherent in the realization of the free will as freedom that nearly
all political philosophy adopted – but the use of mass power to destroy
violence as exemplified by Ghandi: He thought that the power of the masses was
the only thing that could bring violence to an end[6].
The role of
violence in politics could be said to be an extraordinary situation under
conditions of stability, but it is imminently present during revolutions and
shifts in power balance that might have revolutionary momenta but not
necessarily translate into a revolution. While it has been demonstrated that
short-term violence might have a positive long-term effect, it is unlikely that
a form of power so critically embodied in specific groups and persons and
without the openness necessary for a plurality of men to appear in public,
might sustain the conditions necessary for the kind of political freedom that
enables full political participation to all men without depriving them of their
essential differences, and thus, turning them superfluous.
The course
that the Egyptian revolution took was one of deep ambivalence between the
monism of unity – unmistakably associated with the impotent will – and the
human condition of plurality, expressed in tolerance: “Maybe there are many who
don’t know the simple distinction between seeking unity and seeking tolerance,
but we saw the core difference between the two things and how unity leads to
failure while tolerance earns you strength and pushes you to succeed.[7]”
The right
of free association exercised by the revolutionary momentum translated into a
moment of isonomy out of which no freedom could be produced, except under
conditions of peaceful resistance out of which power would arise naturally as
the consequence of men and women appearing for the first time in the public
sphere, as their own objective personalities.
In a world
of pluralities, unity is not possible except at the expense of being seduced by
nostalgia or by the restoration of an ancient past in lieu of a promise of the
future in which unity is destroyed by the mere fact of essential differences
that have to be negotiated through plurality again.
From all
the actors involved in the revolution, very few exemplified the necessity of
politics through difference rather than through sovereignty as did the
political prisoner Maikel Nabil, who spent ten months in jail on charges of
insulting the military institution and who was turned by the military
institution – a powerhouse of nostalgia and reactionary sentiments in every
country of the world – into an example of how a revolutionary momentum can be
syncopated into reactionary nostalgia by pinpointing a common enemy to
highlight the unity of the past instead of fostering the plurality and
tolerance implied in the promise of the future made by the revolutionary
momentum itself.
Singled out
for his pacifist views that included the call for a friendly relation with the
neighboring State of Israel and an anti-militarist stance going as far as to
actively promote the idea of making military service non-compulsory and atheism.
While there was nothing necessarily extraordinary in his views, the practical
application in the realm of politics dealt a deadly blow to a comatose
authority. The case of Nabil not only exploited reactionary sentiments among
the public but also exposed the background against which the notion of unity
was fostered: Anti-Semitism, militarism, Islamism and the cult of the
authoritarian personality, all of which apparently had been debunked by the emergence
of the revolution itself and that ultimately became the stumbling block of the
process itself.
During his
imprisonment Nabil writes: “I’ve always believed that I was a writer and my
role is to present the analysis for my readers and now after my imprisonment I
became unable to participate in any other role (in spite of the high price tag
I am paying because of that role). Now I don’t have anything but to advise the
revolutionaries to know exactly who wants the counter-revolution? Who mobilizes
it? Also, to realize that the revolution wasn’t completed yet and it is
inadequate for us to be divided on ourselves while we are still in the middle
of the battle…
It’s a call
for tolerance, for accepting difference, overcoming the differences and the
collective work under the banner of the homeland until we reach the civilian
democratic state which martyrs died and victims were injured for, the missing
people that disappeared and the revolutionaries that went to prisons. Our
strength is our cohesion, our tolerance and our collective work. The future
will decide, are we going to win or lose in completing our revolution?[8]”
In the
aftermath of the revolution, Nabil was vocal in criticizing the newly
self-appointed military rule that had committed extensive human rights
violations during and the after the revolutionary momentum. In spite of the
fact that his analyses had been proven right time and again, the prejudice
exercised by the counter-revolutionary mood that included not only the old
authorities but also many of the new revolutionaries; the focus was solely on
his views on religion and the State of Israel that while defied older notions
of sovereignty, little had to do with the process of the revolution itself.
Even after
egregious incidents such as virginity tests performed by military personnel on
women and the Maspero massacre in which several Copts were murdered at the hand
of the military authorities, little changed in the perception about Nabil even
though he had issued the warning months in advance, prior to his arrest, before
anyone else had and while it was a matter of pride that the leadership of the
revolution had been handed out to the military institution, even though it had
been proven time and again that we were dealing with a corrupt and criminal
institution.
The
peaceful struggle of Nabil to bring to an end his detention led him to enter an
extended hunger strike that put his life at risk countless times and that
lasted over one hundred days, in one of the most extreme forms of political
resistance we have witnessed in the contemporary scenario.
In his own
words: “The idea of the strike in general is objecting and resisting injustice,
it is one of the means of non-violence struggle… Instead of resisting injustice
with violence, resisting by peaceful means, one of which is the hunger
strike. The strike’s significance is
that the person is ready to die but he won’t continue living under injustice…
Of course,
the implicit message is that if the person on a strike does he didn’t commit
suicide, but was killed, because the person on a hunger strike would have
stopped had he been released from injustice, but the unjust continued injustice,
the result of which is death by hunger strike; therefore the one who is
considered responsible for the injustice is the killer of the person on hunger
strike.[9]”
The
continued strike did not succeed for a long time in raising alarm calls in the
international community or among the Egyptian public itself, and even though
minority voices were loud in campaigning for his release, that had seemed to be
not enough to put an end to the suffering he himself described: “My suffering:
I can’t describe my suffering in prison… Imagine someone made a surgery without
anesthesia, no matter how much he described his suffering, no one will
understand his pains… I’m also like that, no matter how much I described, no
one will feel how much I suffer here![10]”
However,
his suffering – indescribable as it might have been – never took on the pathos
of a tragedy and he expressed himself with certain cheerfulness: “Until now, I
didn’t eat or taste any food for 28 days. From my point of view, this is not a
heroic act, but it’s the only thing I can do from my confinement to resist
military rule[11]”.
In the
essay where he articulates his defense of hunger strike as means of peaceful
resistance he makes a case for criticizing religious authority in general when
religious authorities might have condemned his means of resistance as suicide,
in which he invoked the sacrifices of Christian saints, Muslim prophets and
secular heroes and concludes by saying: “Unfortunately, this kind of religious
thought produced a jurisprudence which grew in a climate of political tyranny,
by clerics by who interpret religion for the liking of unjust authoritarianism,
so they made religion a means for oppressing the people[12]”.
The same
thinking strains are detected in a sharp criticism of how the means-ends relations
promoted by the teleological nature of monotheistic theology in the expectation
of rewards, cuts across the specter of Egyptian society:
“The
ethical problem in Egypt is because the people have become used to go good in
order to receive good in return. The reason for this is the philosophy of
reward and punishment that exists in religions, so that people have grown used
to do good only in order to receive a reward and an acquittal in the afterlife.
I personally do good because it’s good and I do the righteous because it’s
right, I’m not waiting for any return on anything good I do. I discover that
when someone thanks me for something I did, I don’t deserve it because I wasn’t
even able to do wrong. If people would become used to right because it’s right,
we would get rid of the state of ethical decline existing in Egypt.
People have
been used to the idea that anyone expressing an opinion must have a personal
benefit in expressing that opinion, so they imagine that anyone defending Bahai
rights, he is doing it because he’s Bahai, that anyone defending Christian
rights, he is doing it because he’s secretly Christened, that anyone defending
homosexual rights is homosexual himself but afraid to say so, that anyone
defending peace receives a profit from Israel… Hey you! It’s not because you
are an opportunities and wouldn’t do anything except if you levy a payment and
benefit everyone who is like yourself. There are many people who have
principles defending certain rights for no reward and sacrifice their lives and
happiness for those rights.[13]”
Hereby Maikel Nabil is – perhaps unknowingly – picking
up a thread of thought that is older than the Western tradition of political
thought and that goes back to Socrates himself: When Socrates said “it is
better to suffer wrong than to do wrong” he inaugurated what we understand
today as moral philosophy, however, unlike the entire Western tradition – and the
failure of moral philosophy – he didn’t try to go on and prove this rationally
or subscribe it to a confession of faith, that many philosophers – even secular
– have professed through the ages.
The Socratic opinion was based on the assumption that
if I do wrong, I still have to live with myself, and I wouldn’t like to have to
live with a murderer or a slanderer, because I shouldn’t allow to contradict
myself since I would no longer coincide in my appearance in the world with my
inner being and therefore would be unable to live with myself. According to
Socrates, whoever is not able to live with himself, cannot either live with or
among others. This simple principle is the foundation of all secular worldviews
and is not indebted to the Enlightenment and rationalist principles but rather
precedes them all by over two thousand years.
It was but the trial of Socrates, the event that
divorced political common sense from philosophical curiosity, what led Plato to
turn inwards, condemn the political realm and seek avidly to escape the realm
of human affairs into absolute truths, so vastly distant from the plurality of
opinions and truths that were promoted by Socrates himself. This anti-political
bias can be detected in the entire Western tradition of political thought, and
the instrumentality with which morality and ethics are performed today, attest
to the fact that this bias is more alive today than ever. What Maikel Nabil is
offering in these fragments written during his time in prison is not only
autonomy and freedom of the personal kind, but also an augmented sense of
decency which is necessary to partake in the public realm.
It is only necessary to look carefully into his
writings – simple as they might be – to make up one’s mind about the nature of
his ideas and the peaceful nature of the worldview that he is advocating
without naïveté or romanticism. The struggle of Maikel Nabil can be summed up
with an Austrian adage popularized by Hannah Arendt: “There’s no discussion as
heated as that on a book that no one has read”, which he articulates in another
fragment:
“I feel it’s strange that people defend me without
having read my articles. How come you defend someone without knowing what did
he say? I also feel it’s strange that people attack me and curse me without
having read anything I wrote. How come you attack me and criticize me without
knowing what did I say? Isn’t it possible that when you read me you might be
persuaded by what I say…? A nation that doesn’t read is a disgusting nation.[14]”
The peaceful resistance of Nabil and his staunch
criticism of militarism together with his humanist worldview – in the tradition
of an old Socrates, forgotten today to the analytical impetus of public
administration and policy passed as politics – gives us a stern warning about the
side-effects of violence in a revolution: The centralist implication of
militarism and the bureaucratic economy that supports this system, as well as
hatred and intolerance, sexism, the undermining of a peaceful and democratic
society. Any practice of violence, is likely to change the world, but not under
the aegis of a revolutionary vision; it is only likely to change it into an
even more violent world[15].
[1] This essay is dedicated to my
friend E., for his love of both freedom and the life of the mind.
[2] Hannah Arendt, “The Promise
of Politics”, Shocken, 2005, pp. 5
[3] Hannah Arendt, “What is
Freedom?”, in “The Portable Hannah Arendt”, Penguin, 2000, pp. 438-461
[4]
Ibid
[5] Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch,
Vol. 1, 1950-1973, Piper, 2002. Notebook 12, §5, November 1952 (translation is
mine)
[6]
Ibid
[7] Maikel Nabil, Between Unity
and Tolerance – A Plan to Fragment the Egyptian Revolution, 2011/06/08
[8]
Ibid
[9] Maikel Nabil, Hunger Strike
isn’t Suicide, October 2011
[10] Maikel Nabil, Fragments, I’m
Going Crazy in El Marg Prison – 2012/01/22
[11] Maikel Nabil, Message from
Maikel Nabil, El Marg Prison, September 19 2011
[12] Maikel Nabil, Hunger Strike
isn’t Suicide, October 2011
[13] Maikel Nabil, Fragments, I’m
Going Crazy in El Marg Prison – 9, 2011/9/28
[14] Maikel Nabil, Fragments, I am
Going Crazy in El Marg Prison – 26,
2011/12/23
[15] Hannah Arendt, “On Violence”,
pp. 80
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