Egypt's collision course with history

This is not the first time the Egyptian people have balked against an administration’s brutality. Observers are comparing the incident to the Denshawai Affair of 1906, when, on a hot June afternoon, five British officers entered the Egyptian village of Denshawai to go pigeon shooting. The angry villagers protested the shooting of their domesticated livelihood. One of the officers, in a Cheney-style moment, accidentally shot a female villager and set fire to their grain. The angry villagers retaliated and the British officers wounded five villagers - the exchange resulted in casualties on both sides. When the British authorities intervened, they had the choice between serving out justice or order. They purely chose the latter: 52 villagers were put on trial for premeditated murder, 32 were found guilty with four hanged, and the rest were flogged. The Egyptian public was up in flames. The event would mark a dramatic turning point in the British occupation of Egypt and see the Empire’s sun set over the Nile.

Thus, Saeed’s tragedy is Egypt’s tragedy. A young man, neither a political activist nor religious radical, but an ordinary Egyptian whose accused actions could not in any way warrant his lynching. Saeed was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s friend, someone’s neighbour, someone’s customer, and if not for what had happened, someone’s future. Saeed was, in the local vernacular, a son of Cleopatra. Yet the system that was supposed to protect him and give him his rights, took away those rights by taking away his life. Moreover, the fact that his corpse needed to be exhumed (some accounts say twice!) is revelatory of further decay in a system that should have addressed the cause of death before laying Saeed to rest in peace.

While it will continue to be debated if the recent tragedy turns out to be a 21st century Denshawai moment for Egypt, nonetheless, like Iran’s Neda Agha-Soltan, Saeed’s battered face has become a powerful symbol and rallying point for those who are craving reform in Mubarak’s Egypt. If anything, it is one extra nail in the coffin of the ever-widening gulf between the ruler and ruled. While the moderation of the Egyptian people have often saved the country from the worst excesses (unlike Iraq or Iran), yet one only hopes that the constant calls for liberalisation and human rights improvements are heeded, for without it, one needs to pray that the next Cleopatra’s Baths episode does not turn into a Cleopatra’s bloodbath.

Fifty years after the Denshawai incident, following the 1956 Suez War and the humiliating political defeat for the UK and France, Egyptian journalist Muhammed Hassanein Heikal would describe it as the “pigeons of Denshawai have come home to roost”. Yet what the Egyptian establishment maybe forgetting - and the descendants of the Denshawai village can tell you today - is that pigeons come home to roost more than once.