The Guns of the Egyptian Army Remain Silent

News from the Egyptian Street and Media Translated Without Comment from Arabic into English As a Public Service
***************************************

In the Egyptian Revolution of January 25, 2011, the guns of the Egyptian army were not turned on the demonstrators.  And Mubarak, a dictator for 32 years, fell from power.  Why were the guns of the largest Arab army did not mow down the Tahrir Square revolutionaries?  After all, Mubarak, like his predecessors, Nasser and Sadat, were members of that nearly one million man strong army establishment.

When we pose the question of why did Egypt's armed forces, by its silence on January 25 and beyond, did not turn on that historic rebellion?  The answer lies in the history, background, and make-up of those armed forces sitting on their tanks by the banks of the Nile.

The Egyptian army is a nationalist army.  In 1805, an Albanian tobacconist, by the name of Muhammad Aly, became the Ottoman Sultan's Viceroy in Egypt.  The Ottoman Empire was in decline.  Rebellions against it raged from the Balkans to the north, to the Sudan to the south, to Arabia to the East.  Fires fires everywhere against the far-flung Empire, the locus of the then-Caliphate, with no effective fire brigades.  Muhammad Aly, once Napoleon had withdrawn in 1803 his troops from Egypt, an important province of the Ottomans, saw his chance to pry Egypt loose from the dying Empire.  His tool was the establishment of the mightiest army in the Empire.  Two-hundred thousand man strong, with a navy whose ships were built from the famous cedars of Lebanon.  His trainers were French.  His recruits were Egyptian peasants.

Those peasant soldiers of the great Muhammad Aly, who also industrialized Egypt (and whose sons built later the first girls school in the Muslim world in the 1860's), knew no geographical or sectarian affiliation.  They only knew that they were Egyptians.  Cohesiveness came not from the province or the faith in which they were born.  It came from the flag and the national territory over which it was raised.  Thus, as one, they fought first for the Sultan in the Sudan, in Arabia and in the Balkans, then, for Egypt, against the Sultan, and helped make Egypt a hereditary monarchy, with autonomy, then independence from the Ottomans.

That army, born in Egyptian nationalism, then fought the British occupation which began in 1882 and ended in 1954.  Its sense of onness with the people was first manifested in those late 1880s in the rebellion led by Ahmed Orabi, a native of my village in the Province of Sharkia (the Oriental).  Orabi was exiled to the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, but the spirit of nationalism in that army never waned.  It, together with the police engaged the British forces in the Suez Canal in the early 1950s in non-conventional warfare.  Later came several wars with Israel over the question of Palestine, which ended with the Egyptian army crossing into Sinai in October 1973.  That October/Ramadan/or Yom Kippur War during the Sadat presidency led to two results, a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, and a huge boost to the reputation of the Egyptian army in the eyes of the Egyptian public.

So when the January 25 Revolution for freedom from dictatorship erupted, the Egyptian army whose conscripts could see their brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts in Tahrir Square, sat smiling on top of their tanks over which children played.

No wonder that the revolutionaries of Tahrir Square, finding that the vacuum left by the collapse of the Mubarak regime was leading to chaos, had no problem calling in their national army to govern in an interim capacity. Simultaneously a civilian government was set up under Dr. Essam Sharaf, as Prime Minister until Egypt could pull itself together through both parliamentary and presidential elections in late 2011.
Now, with Mubarak and his sons being tried before a civilian criminal court in Cairo, the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Field Marshal Muhammad Tantawi is expected to testify, together with his Deputy General Sami Anan, before that court which will determine Mubarak's guilt or innocence.

So when the question is asked, "Who owns the Egyptian Revolution?", the response from Tahrir is: the people of Egypt, from whom that proud army sprang.