The Egyptian student movement of the 1970s emerged on a large scale in response to Egypt’s defeat by Israel in the Six Day War. Initially led by young leftist activists, the movement also was influenced by the unchallenged outlook and theoretical understanding held by older generations of communists who were active in the 1950s and 1960s. Liberation of the Sinai and Palestine, along with democratic reforms, were at the forefront of the movement’s demands. And although so much has been said about reasons for the collapse of the Left in Egypt, often attributed to the “failure” of the communists and the leftists of the 1970s, Arwa Salih (1951–97), one of the main student leaders and a prominent member of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party (ECWP), offered a different perspective on the matter, problematizing the position of the private sphere among the Egyptian Left.
Salih never called herself a feminist, but that does not mean she did not provide a feminist analysis of the ideological shortcomings and internal power relations shaping the Egyptian Left. In exploring the suppressed world of Arwa Salih, joining other scholarship that began to address her story less than a decade ago, I will first present Salih’s perspectives on the oppressive contradictions between fighting for social justice and practicing sexism against female fellow militants, drawing on her memoir The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt (trans. Samah Selim, 2018; al-Mubtasirun: Dafatir Wahida min Jil al-Haraka al-Tullabiyya , 1996).Footnote 1 This inequality shaped attitudes to intimate relationships (love, marriage, sex) that tended to victimize women. The Stillborn combines Salih’s personal account of her experience of the movement along with a political analysis of the collapse of the 1970s Egyptian Left.
As Salih presents a broad political critique of the Egyptian Left, she also highlights how the revolutionary Left never really broke away from gendered social norms and traditions. Next, with the aim of filling serious historiographical gaps, I discuss the role of oral history and how the testimonies I gathered were shaped by a tendency to self-censor as well as ethical challenges. In some cases, the process of collecting narratives about Salih and underground political work revealed more than the actual content of the interviews. Third, using both Salih’s memoir and these oral histories, I outline a few historical factors that contributed to the marginalization of the private sphere from the overall discourse of revolutionary change pushed forward by Egyptian leftists. This process led them to overlook and sometimes even inflict gender injustices within their political organizations.Footnote 2
Why She Must Not Be Named
No one offered a more ruthless critique of the Egyptian leftist movement than their own one-time prodigal child, Arwa Salih. Most of Salih’s writings were political, and were mainly circulated within the confines of underground political work. In addition to her one officially published book al-Mubtasirun (The Stillborn), Salih also produced a translation of Tony Cliff’s Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation in Arabic. Shortly after her death in 1997, some of her friends, in tribute to her memory, edited and published limited copies of a collection of some of Salih’s unpublished texts, titled Saratan al-Ruh (Cancer of the Soul).Footnote 3 The publication included some poems by Salih and her literary analysis of novelist SunʿAllah Ibrahim’s fiction.
Arwa Salih calls her generation al-mubtasirun , which literally means “the premature.” Salih wanted to convey that the leftist student movement was defeated before its revolutionary aspirations could come to fruition. Nevertheless, the translator of the English version, Samah Selim, chose “stillborn” for the title. Selim decided to “use the Arabic title’s connotative meaning for the translation. A stillborn birth can also be a premature birth, after all.”Footnote 4 Selim’s choice reflects the overall impression of the reader who has finished reading the book. Salih was deeply disappointed and bitterly disillusioned by the movement. A premature birth may convey a possibility for the recovery of the newborn, whereas a stillborn can not be salvaged, which is closer to how Salih described her experience.
The deliberate silence of Salih’s comrades about her criticism of the movement is primarily linked to her revelations about the intimate history of their clandestine movement. Salih criticizes the compartmentalization of the struggle for social justice—treating economic justice and collective liberation as public concerns, while relegating matters of sex, love, and the family unit to the private sphere, in which political ideals were no longer applied. Salih explicitly refers to the sexual exploitation of female comrades without naming names, highlighting shortcomings of both the ideological understanding and the praxis of Marxist principles among her comrades.Footnote 5 In that sense, Salih’s experience of victimization in her political party is both the event observed (the object of analysis) and the method through which gender dynamics can be understood in the Egyptian Left of the 1970s.
Four of the eight interviews I have conducted form the main body of oral history in this article: interviews with Arwa Salih’s ex-husband and communist militant, Khalid Juwayli; her former close friend and comrade, Rahma Rifʿat; and two of Salih’s friends in the later part of her life, novelist and former militant (in another communist group) Fathi, and screenwriter Wissam Sulayman, who was her close friend during the last four years of her life. The other four interviews corroborated their stories and provided comparative accounts. However, these interviews were with former militants from inside and outside the Marxist-Leninist ECWP who refused to go on the record. Due to the fragmented nature of the guarded testimonies of the four interviewees quoted here, some gaps in Salih’s intimate history remain, as the narrators often left even larger gaps in their accounts of her life and political work. In off-record discussions, some of these gaps started to make sense, as interviewees were freer to name names. The names were mostly those of charismatic, widely respectable leaders who were likely able to charm younger, less experienced female comrades. From both the on-record and off-record interviews, it became clear that Arwa Salih was not the only woman who experienced abuse in the labyrinthine underground political work of the Egyptian Left. However, her story is the most well-known, as Salih spoke about it repeatedly with friends and former comrades.
Evidently, Salih was aware of the discomfort caused by her book during the last few months of her life, which were also the first few months following its release. Some of the interviewees have referred to how disappointed Salih was about the response al-Mubtasirun received. Wissam Sulayman was in her early twenties when she met Salih. In her testimony, Sulayman described how reactions to the book from comrades, writers, and intellectuals affected Salih:
There was more of a neglect, meaning that she would send out copies of the book, and those who gave feedback would only mention the letters. They would say “I liked the letters,” they didn’t engage with the content at all or with the other important chapters of the book… . The rest of people’s reactions accused the book of self-flagellation—that the book involved self-flagellation. Maybe that’s what she found painful the most. Overall, it was either “the book is self-flagellating,” or “I really liked the letters,” or just general disregard for the book.Footnote 6
Two letters at the end of the book include personal introspection. In the letters, Salih spoke of her struggle to write and why she became a communist. She addressed them to friends she does not name. In off-record interviews, these friends were named. Almost everyone knew who they were, but no one wanted to refer to their names on record. The first letter was written in Cairo in 1988 and the second in Spain (where Salih was in self-imposed exile) in 1985. The addressee of one of the letters refused to talk with me about the matter, even though the letter had been made public by the book.
The Making of Arwa Salih
The historical climate could not have been more apt for Salih to emerge as a revolutionary leader of the 1970s generation, a generation associated with immense revolutionary aspirations and equally intense defeats. Naturally, they inherited the heavy burden of state persecution of communists of the generations that preceded them. The bloodless overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 by al-Dubbat al-Ahrar (the Free Officers), a largely middle-class group of military officers, was explicitly against the communists. The Free Officers promoted Arab nationalism and believed in centralized state-led reforms, not in class struggle. An independent working class movement would threaten their aspirations for power. The story of Mustafa Khamis and Muhammad Hasan al-Baqari reveals that, although the revolutionaries did not need to shed the blood of the ailing monarchy to prevail in the 23 July 1952 revolution, the same leaders resorted to brutality against whoever threatened their authority. As early as two weeks into the emergence of the new ruling class of military officers, Khamis and al-Baqari, two workers who led a strike at textile factories in the northern city of Kafr-aldawar, were arrested and accused of being “communists.” Both workers were hanged in September 1952, two months into the Free Officers’ rule, setting the tone for how the new regime would deal with the labor movement. In 1954 and 1955, further trials were “set up” to sentence leading communist members to prison. Another wave of this witch hunt took place in 1959, when the regime imprisoned approximately seven hundred communists. Between 1959 and 1960, at least nine communists died in prison as a consequence of extreme torture.Footnote 7 In 1964, all communist prisoners were released before Khrushchev’s visit to Egypt.
The official end of the generation of Marxists of the 1950s and 1960s was marked by the dissolution of their political parties in 1965 and their absorption into Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union (ASU). Historian Gennaro Gervasio refers to the leftists who dissolved their communist organizations and assimilated themselves into the Nasserite project, prioritizing the national, anti-imperialist struggle, as the “Official Left” or the “Old Left.”Footnote 8 Prioritizing the nationalist struggle is arguably the feature that most connects all generations of Egyptian communists, as will be discussed. In the late 1960s, atomized Marxist study groups began to form. These would later serve as a nucleus for the emergence of al-Tanzim al-Shuyuʿi al-Misri (the Egyptian Communist Organization) in 1969. However, these study circles were not substantial political organizations, given the state persecution of political activity.Footnote 9 Leftist groups that emerged from the student movement of the 1970s arrived at a time when party structures and organized platforms had already been liquidated.
The defeat of the Six Day War in 1967 was the catalyst for the resurgence of a new generation of communists. Gervasio refers to them as the “New Left,” as they were critical of the Old Left for their absorption into the Nasserite state apparatus and sought to break away from the political tradition of their predecessors.Footnote 10 The Six Day War, known as al-Naksa (the setback), led to Israel’s annexation of the Sinai, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, and to the student intifada (uprising) in February 1968, which was joined by strikes and protests in other sectors.Footnote 11 Students demanded the release of their arrested colleagues, freedom of speech, and further accountability of the military leaders responsible for the 1967 defeat.Footnote 12 The protestors’ foremost issue was the Israeli occupation of Egyptian and Palestinian lands.Footnote 13 But soon this intifada was suppressed by Nasser’s regime. When president Anwar al-Sadat assumed power in 1970, another student uprising broke out in December 1972 and January 1973. Students occupied Tahrir Square in the heart of Cairo, leading to several arrests of both male and female students.
Some of the student leaders belonged to the Egyptian Communist Organization, which had a significant presence at universities and among intellectuals, known for its unapologetic criticism of Nasserism, which set it apart from and against generations of older Marxist tradition. The Egyptian Communist Organization later became the Egyptian Communist Workers Party (ECWP) in 1975. The ECWP was active from the mid-1970s to the decade’s end, along with other communist parties and groups such as the 8th of January Communist Party and the Marxist League. The ECWP was led by older communist activists from the 1960s generation, Khalil Kalfat and Ibrahim Fathi, and its importance was that, despite this leadership, it could “legitimately be considered part of the new Arab Left due to significant elements of rupture with the previous communist waves.”Footnote 14
The ECWP represented a New Left disillusioned with the values and promises of the 1952 revolution. However, this New Left also maintained some continuities with the Old Left, namely, “its unbalanced attention to national and regional issues to the detriment of both internal social issues and its relationship with the Egyptian working class.”Footnote 15 Arwa Salih writes of this imbalance in her memoir. She was on the central committee of the ECWP, which operated mainly underground due to 1953 laws that banned the formation of political parties.Footnote 16 Salih admits in several parts of The Stillborn that she herself did not see these continuities that her generation maintained with the previous one.
For better or for worse, Salih’s political life began in this historical context, surrounded by older, more experienced communist militants and prominent intellectual figures. Her ex-husband and former party comrade Khalid Juwayli describes the highly intellectual scene that shaped Salih, at as young as thirteen years old:
ʿAbd al-Hamid Yunus was the one who founded folklore studies. He was blind, but he was also a professor and head of the Faculty of Arts, and a very prominent sociologist, especially in the context of Egypt’s sociological history. God willing, he had a son—whether he’s still alive or not, God knows—who, at a certain age, also became blind. That was before he earned a PhD in aesthetics from Spain. This son was well-connected with all the intellectuals, songwriters, and musicians in Egypt. His house was like a constant intellectual workshop or, you could say, a daily salon. He was an eloquent speaker, deeply cultured, and well-acquainted with figures like ʿAbd al-Rahman al-ʾAbnudi, Sayyid Hijab, Najib Shihab al-Din, al-Shariʿi, the musician. He had a circle of intellectuals around him. Hamdy, Arwa’s older brother—Arwa was about twelve or thirteen at the time—used to love bringing her along into that environment. All of this was extremely mentally stimulating. When a child is exposed to such towering figures, and when the entire surrounding atmosphere is like that, it really provokes the mind and emotions—from a very young age. It means you’re constantly surrounded by stimuli that raise questions: What’s a cause? What is a result? What is a novel? What is a poem? All of this stimulated her brain greatly.Footnote 17
Every testimony about Salih mentioned her exceptionally sharp mind. Juwayli sets a scene reminiscent of 1920s Paris, except that Cairo was shaped by Egypt at the peak of Nasser’s project of nation-building and anticolonial resistance. The atmosphere Juwayli described explains how Salih became an exceptional intellectual leader of the student movement.
However, exceptional intellect was not commonly associated with women in revolutionary political activism, especially in the 1970s. Salih broke through this gendered bias. Her intellect attracted many icons of the Left to her. Her older comrades put her on the central committee of the party at a young age, before she had the chance to develop direct, everyday life experience to complement her theoretical acumen. And although this may be perceived as the party reinforcing gender equality, what truly matters is how women were treated overall in the organization, not just whether they were represented in the leadership. At the ECWP, as well as other communist groups of the time, women carried out risky and leading roles. However, their victimization in the “private sphere,” that is, when it came to love and sex, revealed that leadership roles were a restricted form of gender equality. Salih suffered from exploitation when she was put on a pedestal at an early stage of her life. It is easy to see how the iconization of a teenage girl facilitated further manipulation and coercion by older, more experienced male comrades. Coercion, alongside the pretext of resisting social norms, also may lead a young woman to “idealize” her comrades. This toxic exploitation permeated the clandestine political work.
Salih quit the party in 1981, and the party dissolved in the following years.Footnote 18 While working in the cinema industry, moving to Spain for a brief period, and working as a translator for the economic magazine al-ʿAlam al-Yawm (The World Today), Salih suffered from chronic psychological illness. Her multiple failed suicide attempts included an incident in 1985 when she jumped off a bridge into the Nile, but was saved by a young soldier who swam to her rescue and pulled her out of the water.Footnote 19
Reading the Intimate History of the Movement Through and With Salih
The Stillborn: A Critique of the Depoliticized Private Sphere
Hanan Hammad points to the absence of primary resources about the Egyptian Left from the later 20th century. Unless the researcher is a former party member, access to resources is impossible. “The communist movement’s documents and literature remain confined in the custody of the police and the state security department, or ʾAmn al-Dawla .”Footnote 20 Unsurprisingly, there is also a scarcity of material documenting the role of women in different leftist groups throughout Egypt’s history.Footnote 21 Although many women were tasked with carrying out quite risky roles of underground activism (Siham Sabri and Arwa Salih are the most well-known in the leadership of the 1970s), the history of the Egyptian Left continued to center on male comrades.Footnote 22
As pointed out by Samah Selim, The Stillborn is arguably hard to classify by form or genre.Footnote 23 This shows in its fragmented, sometimes incomplete, sentences and ideas. The included letters suggest that Salih’s mental health particularly worsened whenever she had to write about her political experience. For example, in one letter she describes a severe depressive episode caused by writing during her time in Spain. I suggest that The Stillborn is a social and political critique of the rise and fall of the 1970s Left because Salih’s political analysis integrates the private and intimate in the process of forming a comprehensive understanding of the public and collective. The private sphere, and its conventional association with women, forms an intrinsic part of her political analysis of the era.
The Stillborn shows a glimpse of the depoliticized private sphere behind the scenes of underground activism. Initially, the future looked brighter for Salih’s generation, as they were the first generation of militants to break away from the conservative gender relations upheld by the leftists of the 1960s.Footnote 24 She points out that the political movement of the 1970s drew more women to it than any previous leftist generation. According to Salih, the 1960s Marxists had the same views as Nasser’s regime when it came to women’s liberation. Under Nasser’s regime, women were encouraged to enter the job market and were granted the right to vote within the overall framework of a model family unit in which the husband and children have a better chance at climbing the social ladder.Footnote 25 Salih argues that the Marxists of the 1970s initially attempted to engage in relationships free from social norms, bourgeois family values, and the calculations of everyday life. Political and personal transgression were intertwined by seeking to emancipate the self from the family’s authority and traditions associated with romantic relationships.Footnote 26 One of the reasons Salih gives for the setback of the movement is the liberalization of the Egyptian economy during Sadat’s era. Liberalization led to the further impoverishment of some layers of society, and therefore an increasing economic and social dependence on the family for survival. Salih notes that regressing to dependence on the family as a social institution reinforced bourgeois values, such as an emphasis on the wealth of a prospective husband or wife, elevation of family solidarity over romantic love, and abandonment of ideological principles to provide familial stability and social distinction.Footnote 27
Salih gives another reason for the contradiction between her male comrades’ attitudes to social justice and their exploitative attitudes toward female comrades:
The important point here is that these leftists processed their experiences with women not through their “principles” but through the psychology of the conservative milieu that shaped them. Their experience of love and sex was just a form of frivolous rebellion against entrenched social taboos rather than the much more difficult working-out of a set of new and freely chosen values. And so their experience—separate from and complicated by their principles—ended either in conventional marriage or in absurdly twisted and morally corrupt forms of sexual dissolution, or both simultaneously.Footnote 28
A form of moral corruption resulted from comrades upholding traditional, sexist beliefs while being promiscuous in their own marriages or relationships. Whereas marriage was an institution for which male comrades would choose a “respectable” wife, the other side of that choice was the absence of moral codes or values in relations with female comrades, under the guise of freedom or sexual indulgence that stemmed from a fascination with social taboos. It also did not help that the Marxist political groups of the time never really were invested in feminist questions, nor did they circulate any literature addressing gender and sexuality.Footnote 29
The “Telling” of Arwa Salih
As disclosed to all interviewees, the main aim of the oral history interviews was to talk about Arwa Salih. My questions sought to find out more about Salih’s political journey, how it began and why it ended up being so painful for her. Interviewees also expressed their opinions of Salih’s theoretical and political perspectives on the rise and collapse of the movement. I also asked questions about their own experience in underground activism, the role of women in the organizations in which they participated, and whether oppressive power dynamics were ever discussed during their underground activism.
Analyzing these oral history interviews required attending to how the act of telling took place. By orality, I mean two things: first, the temporal aspects of the act of narration itself, such as the duration and pace of the conversation, and, second, the nonverbal expressions that occurred during, before, or after the narration. In relation to the first, all the interviews went over two or even three hours, without much being said during that period of time, either because the interviewee was trying to choose their words very carefully, with many pauses and unfinished sentences, or because Salih only occupied a small fraction of the interview and the speaker spent time discussing other subjects and topics unrelated to the questions I asked. The most challenging interview was the one I conducted with Salih’s ex-husband, Khalid Juwayli. Over three hours he talked about everything from photography to Palestine; from the collapse of the Egyptian cinema industry to how much my city, Alexandria, has changed. He brought up each of these topics in response to a question about Arwa Salih. It is possible that the protagonists of this history, including Juwayli, feel ownership over it, and fear losing that ownership by sharing the history with anyone else. This sense of ownership of history is likely to have emerged under the unusual, unsettling nature of underground political work.
With regard to the second aspect of narration, the nonverbal expressions occurring before or during the interview, multiple interviewees kept eyeing my recorder nervously. Their tone became more relaxed when the recorder was switched off, at which point they began reacting less suspiciously to my facial expressions. Their nervous demeanor was most likely linked to residual effects of clandestine political work, and how safe they felt opening up to a stranger on the record.
Historian Alessandro Portelli draws attention to the act of “telling,” and not only the “tale” in oral history narratives. Portelli argues, “We can think of oral sources as something happening in the present, rather than just as a testimony of the past.”Footnote 30 And in the case of oral histories about Arwa Salih, the process of telling was in itself informative of broader contexts. In all my interviews, most of what I was told about Salih was off-record. After all, these were former militants under a dictatorship, giving testimonies under another dictatorship to someone they had never met before. The need to remain cautious and the tendency to mistrust others had had no reason to subside anytime between their twenties and their seventies.
However, the long duration of the interviews allowed them to speak more about their own militant experiences. When I was sometimes asked very detailed questions about my research, and my motives for writing about Salih, I understood that their real concern was protecting the history they possess from potential distortion. However, once it became clear to them that my aim was not distortion, they seemed to feel a degree of satisfaction in telling someone from a younger generation about the history that person had not experienced. Here, what was historically relevant was not always what they said about Salih, but their desire to share a bit of themselves with me: their political opinions and past heroisms. It was a desire to remain relevant, and to remember out loud, as they narrated to me, times of resistance, fighting back, and sacrificing.
The ethical issues raised from these encounters were twofold: first, what to do about all the off-record material; and second, how to research relations in the private sphere without breaching the privacy of both the living and the deceased. The answer to the first question was relatively straightforward. I have not drawn on any off-record conversations about Arwa Salih in presenting my research. However, those testimonies helped me fact-check some information and form an overall idea about what went wrong for women in the movement. For example, it was unclear to me how strong-willed women militants could be sexually coerced. As one testimony will show, sometimes a charismatic male leader coerced the female partner of a much younger, less experienced male comrade into having a relationship with him. That was not the whole story, however. Some off-record details revealed to me how underground work can create a particularly vulnerable situation for a woman, in which she is not protected from coercion. This helped me to understand the on-record testimony of older leaders about breaking up the relationships of younger comrades.
The second ethical challenge was exploring the intertwining of private and public worlds without turning research results into a gossip column. Privacy had to be respected, especially when some information was irrelevant to the scope of the research and would not advance a better understanding of women within Egyptian Marxist activism. For example, the details shared, at some points, about Salih’s second marriage in the 1990s to a younger man who was never politically active had little to do with her critique of the 1970s political movement. These parts were left out.
The 1970s Marxists and Gender: What Went Wrong?
Salih’s critique does not address the endless discussion about how feminism and Marxism can be intertwined, or the juxtaposition of capitalist economic production and social reproduction, or whether the public and private spheres should be dichotomized. What she criticizes is the absence of the private sphere altogether from the realm of resistance. There was no friction between Marxist and feminist perspectives because feminist issues were not being discussed in the Egyptian Left to begin with. Salih herself does not use the terms “private” and “public” in referring to the contradictory values held by male comrades (class equality vs. subscribing to bourgeois family values). Instead, she speaks of the triumph of the conservative milieu over ideological principles, especially when it comes to women’s oppression.Footnote 31
Nevertheless, the depoliticization of the private sphere is the crux of Salih’s criticism of her fellow comrades. That is to say, she rails against the perpetuation of systemic oppression by those publicly committed to fighting it who justified this contradiction with what social theorist Nancy Fraser calls “the rhetoric of domestic privacy.”Footnote 32 The real question here: How could a group of people sacrifice so much collectively and individually for the far-reaching causes of national liberation and social justice, and also enact or tolerate systematic abuses of power? The fact that the private sphere was overlooked amid the predominant anti-imperialist, anticapitalist struggle of the progressive 1970s leftists did not facilitate critical self-reflections about gender power dynamics, whether in society or inside activist circles. However, as gender theorist Judith Butler argues, the public and the private merge in the act of protest as private pain becomes a shared public demand.Footnote 33 So, what about the interplay between the two in underground political work when the militants’ private lives were entirely erased, with new false identities and relations created to carry out collective political resistance? Why was the private sphere absent from the agenda of leftist activism when it was one of the main forms of sustaining the clandestine nature of their resistance?
The Primacy of the National Struggle
The recurring motif in all forms of political movements in Egypt’s modern history is struggles deferred. For example, the feminist movement that peaked in Egypt in the 1940s had to significantly shrink from the 1950s onward because of British and French imperial interests, particularly in the Suez Canal, and because of the Arab–Israeli wars. It got to the point that some Egyptian feminists, such as Inji Aflatun, denounced Durriyya Shafiq’s hunger strike against Gamal Abdel Nasser at the Indian embassy in Cairo, claiming that it was not the right moment to antagonize the president over feminist issues when the nation was deep in national struggle.Footnote 34 Aflatun, a feminist and a communist activist from the 1940s until her arrest by Nasser’s regime in 1959, reveals in her dismissal of Shafiq’s activism how nationalist struggle superseded everything else in the agenda of the Old Left, including gender struggle. Shafiq was criticized, by Aflatun and many others, for continuing to fight for feminist issues even when that meant confrontations with Nasser. Despite the imprisonment and torture Nasser’s regime inflicted on the Old Left, going against him meant compromising on the nationalist struggle.
This sole focus on fighting imperialism continued in the New Left. Arwa Salih explains,
In spite of all our Marxist nattering then, the language through which we chose to read our world (or which history chose for us) was nationalist, as was our historical consciousness. There is nothing to be ashamed of here. Rather, it was entirely logical. But the illusion of “Marxist overcoming” in which we dealt (in our capacity as living specimens of the future planted in an ephemeral present) gave us an equivocal consciousness that led us into extremely complicated positions on both the intellectual and personal levels.Footnote 35
The biggest struggle of Marxists of the 1970s was resisting Israeli expansion in the region, backed by the US imperialist agenda. Salih’s criticism, which is often overlooked, touches upon a core issue: that political movements in colonized and semicolonized nations primarily ended up conceding to the existing regime, rather than challenging it, as the regime had to be saved from the claws of colonialism.
Rahma Rifʿat was Salih’s close friend and comrade from the ECWP. Her testimony shows how female militants dealt with women’s liberation:
At the time, women’s issues didn’t carry much weight, because within the party we were deeply committed to certain ideologies. We genuinely believed in equality, in struggling side by side, in the idea of freedom—that people should be free to live their lives the way they choose. That’s why, during the early phase of the students movement, and probably up until the 1980s, we didn’t feel there was a need for a separate feminist struggle. It just didn’t feel like a part of our lives. But over time, through lived experience, that started to change. You begin to realize that even within your own party, you have to fight hard just to prove yourself among your comrades. You start noticing that, in practice, things aren’t as fair or progressive as they seem. That was something that really affected Arwa, for example. She was shocked to discover that a fellow comrade—someone who, in theory, spoke about equality and women’s rights—wasn’t at all committed to those ideals in practice.Footnote 36
Rifʿat was not the only militant who mentioned the ideologically contrary relationship between the oppression of women and male comrades in the organization. It was a recurring idea in other interviews as well. Even though the gulf between Egyptian men and women with regard to rights and equality, whether in the 1970s or now, is significant, circles of leftist militants assumed that they had overcome these injustices and that these distinctions would in no way exist among Marxists. One of the main factors that reinforced the “weightlessness” of feminist concerns and “struggling side by side” was the primacy of national liberation.
Women’s interests have been ultimately tied to national liberation, not only in Egypt, but in many postcolonial Muslim-majority countries, as discussed by Leila Ahmed.Footnote 37 The roots of both Rifʿat’s account and Salih’s text about the subordination of class and feminist demands to the struggle for national liberation can be traced to the beginnings of the Egyptian feminist movement that was born out of and occurred in conjunction with the 1919 revolution against British occupation. Women took to the streets for the first time, participating in and sometimes even leading protests. When women were shot and killed in the protests and became martyrs of the revolution just like men, a women’s liberation movement was born.Footnote 38
At times, the national movement dictated the limits of feminist demands. Those limits were associated with colonial and imperialist discourses about the necessity of saving indigenous women or defending them from oppression. Leila Ahmed explains:
In the debate about women in the Islamic world, as in other parts of the non-Western world, those proposing an improvement in the status of women from early on couched their advocacy in terms of the need to abandon the (implicitly) “innately” and “irreparably” misogynist practices of the native culture in favor of the customs and beliefs of another culture—the European… . This rhetoric became insistent and pronounced with colonial domination, and it was in this context that the links between the issue of women and the issues of nationalism and culture were permanently forged.Footnote 39
That is how feminist demands emerged in many parts of the world in close relation to colonial discourse, which in reality had no interest in improving the lives of men or women. This is not to claim that feminist struggles were not fought as fiercely because colonialism used women’s rights as a straw man. However, the fact that feminist demands in postcolonial nations were born from the nationalist struggle on the one hand, and served as a useful tool for perpetuating colonial rule on the other, meant that Egyptian Marxists inherited a complex legacy of feminism, which was at once both secondary to national liberation and a weapon of Western imperialism.
Clandestinity Compromising Praxis
Leftist political activism has traditionally been clandestine in Egypt, because of persecution by the colonial authorities, the Egyptian regime, or both. The degree of clandestinity varied proportionally to state violence and its repression of opposing political groups. From 1975 onward the student movement had to go underground.Footnote 40 What this effectively entailed was dividing the organization into two groups: one that worked in public (not necessarily as a political organization, but for example as a theater group, a book club, etc.) and another that took on fake identities and designed fictitious scenarios which aimed to preserve the secrecy of the work. For example, militants had to cluster in small groups to create plausible family-like scenarios in different apartments. These apartments served to secure the clandestinity of the organization, but also provided a private space for meetings and organizing. Militants took on new names and led new lives to carry out these roles. The scenarios varied, but most relied on the presence of a married couple (not necessarily a couple in real life).
These small clusters of activism were breeding environments for spiraling into conceptual knowledge without much room for direct contact with broader society. In Marxism, theory and praxis are dialectically intertwined through the material conditions producing them, meaning that theory emerges from both the material status quo and the need to change it, and purposeful, transformative action is what organizes theory and makes conceptualizing change possible. This cycle is interrupted in the absence of an opportunity for transformative action stemming from real human activity within the exploited layers of society.
Salih refers to the disconnect between theory and praxis poetically in language perfectly suited to describing a revolutionary consciousness that is closer to a dream than to purposeful, transformative action:
You will not allow a word spoken against your piety; you refuse the human being as a world unto herself, alive with contradiction. People become objects to be carefully laid on Procrustes’ bed. You chop off this one’s head and stretch that one’s leg, to make him fit on the bed. You become heavier than the stone lid of a coffin carved of certitude.Footnote 41
This excerpt is from the preface of Salih’s The Stillborn, which she revised prior to the book’s publication several years after she wrote it. She mentions how her views had changed in some respects, and that even though she did not agree with everything in Stillborn at the time of its publication, she would not change a word in it, as it was true to her experience and the experience of her generation. The stretching and amputating of others quoted above refers to the supremacy of poorly conceptualized revolutionary politics over reality.
Political persecution led many militants to live dual lives, one in which revolutionary ideas and aspirations were discussed in small clusters, isolated from the masses and everyday life, and another in which they had different names and families, and fake private lives. For example, a woman would act as if she were married to a man to justify having guests frequent the apartment. The nature of this underground work dissolved the boundaries between the public and the private. Comrades had to live together under the same roof, claiming a false identity in public, and their private lives were shared with the collective and for the collective. Leading double lives for years contributed to exploitative and minimally regulated interpersonal relationships between male and female comrades, in which private matters of love and sex were rendered irrelevant and apolitical amid revolutionary activism.
The details and nuances of Salih’s experience were never shared with me on record. However, my interviews included a few accounts of how demoralized and alienated she felt at the end of her political journey. Fathi ʾImbabi, a novelist and former member of another communist group, described the state Salih was in after she left underground work.Footnote 42
She had been with someone back at her time of innocence [meaning time before going underground]. By the time Arwa left [underground work] and got out of that bad [exploitative] relationship [from her underground life], that person had been involved with another woman, he became tied to a whole family—a whole family that was very powerful. And maybe, maybe even everyone, everyone turned against her. She ended up completely alone, deeply alone—to the point of suicide. Arwa Salih tried to kill herself about seven times, and she failed. She went through seven, seven suicide attempts. At that point, suicide wasn’t about the defeat of thoughts anymore, nor ideology, or ideological dilemmas. We’re talking, for example, I mean let’s say—by the eighties—all the political organizations, I mean, they just weren’t there anymore, whether they had become very weak or dissolved themselves. We’re talking here about Arwa Salih’s social context in the eighties and nineties. What does that mean? In the middle, in the middle—in the middle of social relationships, for someone like her—someone, as you said, so remarkable in this way—I mean, I can’t say, for example, that her relationship with ideology remained the same. On the contrary, on the contrary—one of her colleagues, I mean—she had, by that time, reached a point where she was just trying to find a way to live. Just to live, I mean, to find how to survive… . This beautiful being. So beautiful. So smart. Extremely intelligent. Extremely intelligent. Someone who was supposed to—who was seen as—one of the leaders. One of the major leaders in the movement. The movement—I mean the leftist movement. I wouldn’t say the labor movement, because that didn’t really happen. All of that—you could call them, like… projects. Projects of underground movements.Footnote 43
In the nearly three hours of Fathi ʾImbabi’s testimony, he touched on a wide range of topics, and I often had to steer the conversation back to Salih in one way or another. ʾImbabi was not determined to say as little as possible about her. Rather, he appeared conflicted about how much to disclose. He seemed to be navigating between censoring his narrative and sharing more about Salih’s journey. At other points in the interview, he admitted to feeling guilty for not doing more to prevent her suicide. His fragmented sentences—which are difficult to follow in writing, but clearer with the affective cues of his spoken delivery—reflected the heavy burden carried by those who narrate Salih’s story. The fear of being accused of distorting the legacy of the 1970s movement, the risk of criticism from surviving comrades or the families of the deceased, and the impulse to protect Salih’s privacy all hovered over the flow of ʾImbabi’s account.
The disjointed nature of his reflections may also, at times, be attributed to the difficulty of recalling events from decades ago. Yet in some instances, the beginnings of a story would emerge only to quickly vanish. The excerpt above is an example of how the act of telling, as an action taking place in time, informs what is being told. For example, in his attempt to convey that Salih’s difficulties extended beyond political disillusionment and included material hardship, ʾImbabi remarked, “On the contrary, on the contrary—one of her colleagues, I mean—she had, by that time, reached a point where she was just trying to find a way to live. Just to live, I mean, to find how to survive." Too many stories are jammed into a few sentences, and too little is said in the time taken to tell it. That story about one of her colleagues remained incomplete. Although ʾImbabi did not reveal much about Salih’s clandestine life, his quiet tone and broken, hesitant speech conveyed more about the broader reluctance to reinsert Salih’s memory into the history of the Egyptian Left—because of what it came to symbolize—than it did about Salih herself.
The Moral Vacuum
Salih’s critique touches heavily on the question of morality, both the moral obligation to fight injustice and her disappointment in the contradiction between fighting injustice in the public sphere while maintaining it in the private one. By joining a revolutionary organization, women militants sought, on some level, personal emancipation from the injustice they experienced in their private lives.Footnote 44 However, it seems that morally questionable behavior was not taken seriously within political circles.Footnote 45 Salih argues that women, under the guise of personal freedom or liberation, are manipulated, then judged for their sexual behavior. She states,
The young woman who accepts a date with an intellectual doesn’t dare hope for a fancy outing, or even a not-so-fancy one. You’ll find her heading for a decrepit cafe where her young intellectual will buy her a glass of bitter boiled tea and sell her a bunch of “progressive” dreams that cost him nothing but a string of his cheapest merchandise: talk. Talk about “justice” that he himself is no longer quite sure he believes in; the kind of talk that a sheltered and oppressed petty bourgeois girl desperately longs to hear.Footnote 46
The scheming, predatory element is Salih’s biggest concern with the “intellectual” (a word used to refer to people of the Left, especially with the decline of their political role). Women assume, by getting romantically involved with a comrade, that they are revolting against unequal normative relationship dynamics. Salih accuses the intellectual of operating within a morality of petit bourgeois biases that only serve to reinforce more forms of injustice in society. Male comrades, who exercised sexual freedom, were exempt from any form of responsibility, whereas women were punished for the same action. “For the intellectual, a woman’s morals are synonymous with her sexual behavior.”Footnote 47 Salih locates this absence of morals in hypocritical double standards, in which freedom is defended while all forms of social responsibility are evaded, leaving women to deal with personal and social consequences. She writes,
And so our young man talks about justice, and the hypocrisy of social values, and a lot of other things besides. But the most important thing—the real purpose of it all—is the talk of “free love”—love liberated from money and responsibility of any sort, love raised on “personal responsibility” with no social consequences whatsoever.Footnote 48
The line between personal freedom and hurting or manipulating others is blurred. Society does hold women more responsible for their choices than men, but the fact that this is also symptomatic of a Marxist organization adds a layer of manipulation in the name of justice.
I sought a fuller picture of these dynamics in my interviews with Salih’s former comrades. When asking Fathi ʾImbabi, who did not disclose his organization’s name, about what Salih was referring to in her discussion of morality in political activism, he claimed not to know about Salih’s experience, but shared his own perspective on the matter based on his experience as a former militant.
We used to have three moral institutions: the bourgeois institution, the religious institution, and the rural institution—most of the boys who came from the countryside carried with them appreciation for ideas of friendship, brotherhood, and those kinds of values. All of these institutions collapsed—not because they fell apart on their own, but because someone decided to bring them down, and that happened from within the leftist institution itself. There was another vision—one based on freedom—and the concept of punishment ceased to exist: no divine punishment, no punishment in the hereafter. As a result, everyone started acting according to their own personal understanding. And that produced a structure that is completely hostile to any real notion of revolution. Because revolution, comrades, is when people join hands, don’t betray each other, don’t harm each other, and when their personal relationships don’t result in hurting others. If I were the head of the cell, and I knew that A was in love with B, and that A was arrested and put in prison, but the head of his cell decided he could start a relationship with the beautiful girl who was the comrade or lover of the guy in prison? Even though I can’t say how widespread it was or how big it got—because I don’t have any documentation—it was common.Footnote 49
Whether or not Fathi ʾImbabi was personally victimized by unequal gender dynamics remains unclear. This example sheds light on the nature of private lives inside the organization, which were not subject to disciplinary standards or political questioning—not even on the grounds of preserving the unity of the group.
ʾImbabi identifies the root cause of the moral vacuum. According to him, the three frameworks from which society derived its morals are questioned by Marxist thinking and by the overall momentum of revolutionary change. Challenging the existing religious and bourgeois systems also entails the collapse of the values they uphold. Challenging the conservatism of rural lives also means the subversion of traditional rural morality. This led, according to ʾImbabi, to a moral vacuum, especially for student militants who moved from the countryside to big universities in the city. The question of where Egyptians (or any people) derive their moral codes is complex. But at the core of ʾImbabi’s analysis is the encounter between political and personal liberation within a milieu that has been historically conditioned by conservatism, female oppression, and sexual repression. Freedom can be equated with immaturely breaking taboos and tossing away any value system altogether.
If a moral fissure is widened by repressive backgrounds and upbringings, then maybe the seemingly free pass to limitless freedom also was linked to the clandestinity of political work. Women are ultimately more vulnerable in this clandestine setting. With regard to the Egyptian family, clandestine women had to overcome multiple challenges, including significant worsening of relationships with their own families when they pursued underground activism. They were less likely to have a support system outside the bubble of the false lives they led. These ghettoized political clusters impacted mental health as well, suggesting that internal moral anomalies are not unimaginable. Exploitation of power and the vulnerability of others may occur. The absence of public visibility, transparency, and accountability leave room for immorality and gendered double standards to emerge.
Rahma Rifʿat preferred to speak of her own direct experience than describing Salih’s. Rifʿat, as mentioned earlier, was in the ECWP, and showed disappointment as she told this story.
I was in a position of responsibility [in the party], and there was a comrade who used to beat up his wife. I requested that we open an investigation. A higher-ranking comrade responded, “Why should we get involved in people’s private matters?” I said, fine—I’m going to freeze his membership, then. He was being considered for promotion to a higher level, and I made it clear that I wouldn’t approve of that. Because someone who is capable of harming his wife can’t be the same person who would fight to prevent harming others. That’s a veto. Everyone responded to me saying, “So now we’re going to assess people politically and in terms of their mass work based on your psychological analysis?” And I said, “Yes.” Because someone who isn’t psychologically sound can’t be a revolutionary, and shouldn’t have a role that’s meant to serve everyone. I’ll never forget that conversation. It’s a major issue—really, it is.Footnote 50
Rifʿat told me that she was alone in arguing in this situation, against a group of men who repeatedly accused her of mixing people’s private lives with their political performance. Evidently, the wife-beating comrade to whom she refers was quite exceptional in his work with the masses, and not helping him get promoted in the party was seen as a political loss more important than “private” matters.
This example gets to the heart of the fundamental issue of morality in the Egyptian Left of Arwa Salih’s time. Revolutionary ideas were never taken into the private sphere, that is, inherited religious and social codes were not upended by underground political work toward revolutionary change. Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm’s writings mention this as one of the reasons for the defeat of 1967 and the ideological failure of the Arab Left.Footnote 51 He argues that traditional patriarchal structures were not only an obstacle to gender equality, but also to real national liberation. The exclusion of private lives from revolutionary morality led to the entrenchment of traditional family ties and the debasement of personal morality to the level of self-serving indifference to broader communal or social values. The fact that ties to official political and social institutions began decaying in 1967 also contributed to the atomization of collective interests. Al-ʿAzm writes, “Due to the loss of social institutions, political organizations, and mass parties, the Arab citizen, in moments of imminent danger, becomes vulnerable to the spontaneous sway of tribal and clan loyalties.”Footnote 52 In his view, as long as the private sphere was seen as a distinct category to which revolutionary transformations did not apply, political movements would fail, and not only morally.
Conclusions, and To Be Concluded …
One would expect more engagement with the memoir of a compelling communist figure who authored the only gendered critique of the Left during one of Egypt’s most transformative moments at the time of its publication. However, the revolution of 25 January 2011 witnessed a revival of interest in Arwa Salih and her book. She came to symbolize revolutionary aspirations and disillusionment. It was as though Salih’s body, as it descended from the tenth-floor balcony, was pulled down by the weight of past defeated dreams as well as future disappointments the nation was yet to witness. The timelessness of Salih’s experience and critique, within an Egyptian political context and within the context of postcolonial nations stuck between nation-building and imperialism, motivated my interest as well.
Born out of the womb of the 1967 Naksa, Arwa Salih told the intimate history of the generation whose lot was to be first in line confronting this defeat. She offered insights a linear historiography of these times cannot, especially insight into the power dynamics shaping the movement’s gendered personal and familial relations. Love, sex, marriage, and the family unit became reflective of the crisis characterizing Marxists of the postcolonial world, encapsulated in their contradictory upholding of revolutionary ideas against imperialism and foreign exploitation while maintaining traditional, oppressive family values. Keeping the private sphere in private chains maintained its exclusion from overall political change and progress. The depoliticization of the private sphere came naturally to the leftist movement of the 1970s, whose experience has not been sufficiently assessed. We need more research that asks the difficult questions: What went wrong? And whose voices are we not hearing? There remain many gaps in our understanding of the place of gender in Egyptian as well as broader Arab leftist thought. We need to reveal, address, and reflect upon stories of gender injustice and the dismissed private sphere. Oral history is a key methodology for this work.
Despite Salih’s fragmented sentences, three themes were recurrent in her analysis of the defeat of the 1970s movement: the primacy of the national struggle, the clandestine nature of their activism, and a morality crisis. What these three have in common is that they maintained a depoliticized private sphere. Without revolting against deeply rooted family-based traditions and gender injustice in society, revolutions will be stillborn.
Few, if any, Egyptian women militants have become as iconic as Arwa Salih. Indeed, no other revolutionary figure so poignantly embodies both the beauty of the “collective dream of salvation” and the devastating burden of its loss.Footnote 53 What remains to be determined is whether the curse of deferred struggles will ever be lifted from authoritarian, postcolonial worlds, and whether the women of this world will find freedom behind closed doors, and not only seek it in the public squares of national resistance.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by ERC grant WO-NAM, project 101088489, funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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