Before the Deluge Reflections on the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt

I was briefly a political prisoner of the regime of Tunisia’s now-deposed President Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali—which I hope will convince my readers that I’m not carrying water for him, or for his similarly deposed Egyptian fellow dictator, Hosni Mubarak, when I say that the nearly eight weeks I spent last summer in the North African ummah (Tunisia and Egypt, to be specific) filled me with the opposite of the euphoric optimism that now seems to be the hallmark of both liberal and conservative commentary on the “jasmine revolution” uprisings in both countries.

Granted, my “imprisonment” by Ben Ali heavies lasted only about five minutes, and it consisted of being frog-marched out of the immigration-control center at the Tunis-Carthage International Airport, where I had just arrived and then filled out a standard form, by two sleek-suited, shaven-headed undercover police officers who suddenly appeared out of nowhere to express disbelief that I was in the country legitimately.

In fact, my purpose in visiting Tunisia in late June could not have been more innocent. I had been chosen, finishing up a doctorate in medieval studies, to join 15 other lucky scholars in a five-and-a-half-week National Endowment for the Humanities-funded seminar in Tunis. We were to study and discuss the autobiographical writings of two Christian saints who had lived in the adjacent city of Carthage during the early first millennium when the area was a prosperous Roman province: Augustine, whose Confessions included a famously lust-plagued sojourn in the city during the late 4th century, and Perpetua, a young mother martyred along with her slave-companion Felicitas in the arena at Carthage in 203 a.d.

“I also wondered on my walks where all those emancipated women were that [former Tunisian leader Habib] Bourguiba’s modernization blitz had promised would materialize. After more than 50 years of official campaigning against the hijab if not forbidding it outright (Bourguiba called it an “odious rag”), at least half of Tunisian women were covering their hair. That was in downtown Tunis; in the countryside the percentage was close to 100, many of the women wrapped in a Berber veil that folded around the entire body. In Egypt, even in Cairo and Alexandria, almost the only local women who went veil-less on the streets were Coptic Christians. Many married Egyptian women went all the way and curtained themselves from head to toe in black, their shrouded faces an almost comical contrast to their Western-attired husbands and their small children in kidwear that could have been bought at an American shopping mall.

Those hijab-wearers weren’t grannies, but, rather, young and pretty girls, many of them university students, who had turned Islamic dress into something chic and figure-flattering: a long-sleeved, close-fitting, high-necked jersey topped by an overblouse or tunic and worn with skinny jeans or a long slim skirt. The hijabs themselves were Scheherazade headdresses: gossamer-light and ornamented with sequins, bling, and glittery little crowns. The hijab and its male equivalent, the lightly stubbled chin that satisfies Muhammad’s injunction in the Koran that good Muslim men wear beards, were ubiquitous among young people in both countries. In that self-presentation they were finding and expressing identity, distinguishing themselves from a West that they deemed decadent and unholy: the tourists in their shorts and miniskirts and tiny tops. They have resacralized an existence that they believe was forcibly taken away from them by their own Westernizing, secularizing dictators. I’m certain that in some elite and very wealthy sectors of North African society a different ethos prevails. I would occasionally catch a glimpse of this parallel Islamic universe that seemed to exist in exclusive suburbs far from city centers: dark-haired, bikini-clad girls on the upscale beach at Gammarth in Tunisia riding camels for hire and flirting with sheesha-smoking young men with plenty of leisure, a nail salon that I frequented whose bareheaded female customers wore elegant slacks and high heels, a billboard depicting a female newscaster who looked like a ringer for Katie Couric. But that was not the world in which the overwhelming majority of the people lived, even in the most sophisticated of their capital cities.

No one can predict what’s going to happen next in Tunisia, Egypt, or anywhere else in the Islamic world. The sudden reappearance of the Muslim Brotherhood on Egypt’s political scene is troubling, and one of the byproducts of an Islamic monoculture is persecution of Christians. Christianity may have been nearly eradicated in Tunisia, but Copts account for 10 percent of Egypt’s population. No one talks much about them right now, and the New Year’s Eve bombing that left 23 of them dead in an Alexandria church seems to have been already forgotten. It is not that many ordinary Muslims aren’t admirable, likable people making do and living sociably with very little. I enjoyed the small and courteous commercial encounters I had with Tunisians: adding dinars to my cell-phone card, for example, or visiting the bedraggled zoo animals at the Parc du Belvedere. During Ramadan in Egypt, every night was a festival of families picnicking outdoors with their children overjoyed at the gluttonous breaking of the fast. It was just that they were different from us. They were living in their own world, and it is a world that is not necessarily friendly to ours.”

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