In 1983, the great writer of Cairo, Naguib Mahfouz, published “Before the Throne,” a novella in which Egyptian rulers over five millennia, from King Menes to Anwar Sadat, stand before the Court of Osiris, and answer for their deeds. The divinities Osiris, Isis, and Horus assess the record of triumph and brutality and determine who is worthy of immortality. Mahfouz failed to include the last of the pharaohs: Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak.
Last week, it was not the gods but the people of Egypt who stood in judgment of Mubarak, and, from Suez to Islamiya, their verdict was deafening. “Irhal! Irhal!” the crowds on Cairo’s Tahrir Square chanted: “Leave! Leave!” Decades of bottled-up resentment came unstoppered. Egyptians, secular and religious, poor and middle-class, flowed into the public square to express their outrage after years of voiceless suffering; they protested injustice, the endlessly documented incidents of torture and corruption, the general stagnation and disappointment of their lives.
Mubarak had hoped to achieve immortality by installing his son Gamal on the throne, but now such schemes were impossible, and the old man, his chest sunken, his hair dyed an inky black, stayed in the palace and watched, on television, his effigy dangling from a traffic light. Osiris, Isis, and Horus were silent, but the Egyptian masses had spoken.
Read the rest: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/02/14/110214taco_talk_remnick
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