Introduction

Towards the end of the 1970s, as the opening up (infitah) toward the west and the liberalization of the economy were sharply criticized as “betrayal” of the 1952 revolution’s goals, as return of the exploitative bourgeoisie, and as abandonment of the Palestinian cause, certain observers, Egyptian and foreign, began to lay out a new “model” for the reading of contemporary Egyptian history. This model attempted to view Egypt’s various “experiments,” before and after the revolution, from a common perspective; it also made it possible to explain the “cycles” through which Egypt has ultimately failed to “modernize” and regain the place among nations that its millenia of history allows it to demand. Muhammad ‘Ali and Nasir, breaking with a past of national humiliation, both incarnated Egypt’s “will to power” by basing restoration of its regional and international role on a state economy heavily reliant on industry and the construction of a national armed force: the failure of both projects was brought about by conjunction of the “perverse” consequences of their own options and methods, and by the hostility from coalitions of external interests, alarmed by the regional role to which Egypt aspired. The successors of Muhammad ‘Ali and Nasir, Isma’il and Sadat, both betrayed or distorted their predecessors’ “developmentalist” aims and sacrificed the public good and Egypt’s independence to the mercantile interests of a class of speculators and unscrupulous businessmen that served as a wedge for foreign penetration. The crucial point here is the repetition itself and the way these successive “cycles” may be articulated: Nasir “repeats” Muhammad ‘Ali, precisely because, under Isma’il, the work of his grandfather had been swayed from its objectives; in the same way, if Sadat “repeats” Isma’il, it is because the conditions that had led to Muhammad ‘Ali’s failure were still in force, producing the same effects, and enabling the articulation of something that may appear as a “law” pertaining to the specific history of Egypt.