Exciting beginnings: How I became a journalist – #25YearsAJournalist
In the second part of the #25YearsAJournalist series, Khaled Diab reflects on his eventful early years as a journalist in Egypt.
How did you become a journalist? What advice have you got for someone who wants to get into journalism?
These are the type of questions I periodically get from people wishing to break into the profession or those curious to learn how I made it at a time when there were few Arab voices in the English-language media and without having a degree in journalism.
I don’t have a glib answer or a flippant six-step programme for becoming a journalist. I don’t possess a secret recipe and the only ingredients I can detect have been a passion for storytelling, a compulsion to write, and what others perceive as a talent with words, combined with truckloads of patience, perseverance, tenacity and looking for alternative paths around road blocks.
As I described in the first part of this series, the path to the start of my career was long and meandering, not mention frustrating. My break came as people were excitedly or apprehensively preparing for the transition to a new century and millennium, a moment in history which held mystical significance for both religious and scientific prophecy, I finally managed to fulfil my dream of becoming a published writer.
In 1999, the year we tried to party like Prince said we should, I took my first exciting steps into the world of journalism and writing. Although I was still an English teacher at the British Council in Cairo, I also became a freelance journalist and writer. During this first phase of my career, I would not only write articles but would also experiment with and dabble in playwrighting, short fiction and humour.
Unfortunately, my first published article marked a beginning that was less auspicious and more disappointing than I had hoped. It was for Alive, a magazine which, ironically, faded pretty fast. Initially, I was excited by Alive‘s promise to breathe new life into Cairo’s English-language media by being edgy and going where other publications rarely if ever ventured.
However, Alive‘s founder and editors were trying too hard and self-consciously to be leftfield and creative. The magazine would prove to be more gimmicky than cutting edge – the print equivalent of click bait. Whereas the initial ideas I pitched were hard-hitting social, cultural and political, their preference was more lifestyle.
Of all the ideas I suggested, they locked on to the one I was least keen on writing: a feature on feng shui from my perspective as a sceptic. I had come to learn about this traditional Chinese art of channelling cosmic energy, or chi, as applied to interior design and furniture placement through an ex-girlfriend who had, in turn, tuned into this fad through her best friend, who was something of an amateur expert.
I did my homework and produced what I thought was an engaging, readable and sympathetic though sceptical exploration of this fad. But this was apparently not gimmicky enough for the editors. Upon publication, I was shocked to discover that the magazine had ditched, without consulting me, the entire feature and published a stand-alone interview with my ex’s friend, who had not wanted to be the central focus of the article, alongside a full-page photo of her, despite my having conveyed her express wish not to be featured in this way. Although the interview, I find upon rereading it all these years later, was quite personal and insightful, the fact that it lacked any other context or material meant that it placed a magnifying glass on the woman’s vulnerabilities.
I was furious and she was upset, though she did not blame me when I apologised. I had it out with the editor in chief and withdrew the rest of the ideas I was working on for them. I never wrote for the magazine again. With hindsight, my first publishing experience taught me the importance of standing my ground and defending my integrity and professionalism, as well as the importance of agreeing clear terms in advance.
Despite its amateurishness and gimmicky nature, Alive did occasionally publish some interesting content, such as a feature in which they followed around a ten pound note on its journey as it moved from hand to hand across Cairo. Another interesting feature, in which the magazine joined poor roof surfers on an Egyptian train was, shockingly, to prove, if I recall correctly, deadly for one of their reporters.
While writing this piece, I wanted to refresh my memory of Alive and see how what I recalled matched with the archives. However, fairly extensive online searching, including via the Wayback Machine, turned up nothing, not even articles about the magazine in other publications. I also doubt there is a physical archive anywhere of the magazine, seeing as it was a flash in the pan publication and Egypt is generally not renowned for the preservation of its print heritage. This poor track record was thrown into sharp relief once when I visited an Arabic media archive at Tel Aviv university which claimed to be the largest in the Middle East.
This got me thinking about a variation of the famous thought experiment about the tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear it: given our heavy reliance on the internet, if a historical text or an event does not make it online, do its ripples through time cease to exist?
This underscores a fundamental difference between the digital age and the tail end of the print era during which I started writing. Back when newspapers and magazines were produced on paper and when the vast majority of publications were print only, what was published became rapidly shrouded in oblivion – today’s news wrap was tomorrow’s newspaper wrapping for fish and chips or falafel. Nowadays, what a journalist produces remains accessible, as long as it has been published online and the website continues to exist. And, if not, chances are it can still be accessed via the Wayback Machine.
Back then, the transition from analogue to digital was in full throttle, but the world, particularly in Egypt, was still pretty analogue. Today, even though the digital landscape appears to be constantly changing and future-oriented, it is also a powerful tool for preserving the past and enabling us to navigate it. There is even a false sense of depth to the virtual past, what with all the newspaper archives and old books that have been digitised and placed online – which has been a boon to anyone undertaking research, especially to those of us who do not live near one of the world’s great libraries. In fact, I sometimes wonder how different my career as a journalist would have been and how poorer the perspectives, knowledge and depth of my writing would have been without this powerful research tool.
Given the rapidity with which print media used to vanish, I got into the habit common at the time of keeping an archive of my own writing. Flicking through the portfolio of my early work, I’m struck by the variety of topics I wrote about so early on in my career. It is also interesting to pick out the early threads of recurring themes that I would explore from various angles and depths at different points in my career. During this first phase of my career, I endeavoured, as I would throughout, not to be typecast in a certain type of journalism or writing. I wrote about a plethora of cultural, social, economic and political issues, including the theatre and the arts, literature, music, the environment, gender issues, the media, travel, and even restaurant reviews with an edge. I also took my first baby steps in opinion and column writing.
For some reason, Ramadan was to become one of those recurring themes I would return to repeatedly over the years. An introduction to the holy month was the subject of the first article I had published in a magazine to which I would become a regular contributor, Insights, a glossy monthly targeted at Anglophone Egyptians and foreigners based in Egypt. In later pieces over the years, I would explore the belt-tightening during the holy month for many in Egypt due to economic hardship, how Ramadan was celebrated in Europe, what Ramadan meant to a Muslim who had completely lost his religion, the significance of Ramadan for non-Muslims, bigotry during Ramadan, the physical consequences of fasting, not to mention the special kind of thirst drinkers suffer during the fasting month.
Insight was established and run by an Egyptian woman called Nahed, who was, at one level, a pretty savvy entrepreneur but, at another level, she also cared about elevating the magazine’s glossy lifestyle content, which attracted advertisers, with meatier subject matter. She was supported by a small core team of editors and in-house journalists, including one who also worked as a belly dancer and another who was building a career as a singer, as well as freelance contributors like myself.
Setting the stage
Not long after my first forays into journalism, I got the opportunity to write and stage a short play, titled The dead don’t protest, as part of the American University in Cairo’s Famous for 15 minutes festival. Although the director and the actors were all young amateurs, the experience was, nonetheless, a thrilling one. Seeing the story, characters and scenes I had first conjured up in my head come to semi-life in rehearsals and to full life on performance night was invigorating – a kind of sorcery. Of course, the final shape of the piece was quite different from the very first working draft. To express this notion, the curator of the festival and coach was fond of repeating the famous theatre adage: a play is not written, it’s rewritten.
Although it wasn’t quite a fulfilment of my teenage dream of becoming a fiction writer, I had fun writing satirical and humorous (semi-)fiction which also became an early staple. For example, I wrote a piece which mixed fiction with fact exploring the urban legend of the kelabgi, an unscrupulous and non-existent variety of kebabgi (kebab restaurateur) who made kebabs out of dogs (kelab) meat.
Satire also provided me with the opportunity to write pure fiction. This came mainly in the shape of a satirical character I created called Haflatoun, a name which combined the Arabic for Plato (Aflatoun) with haflata, which means drivel. This drivelling Plato, who fancies himself a streetwise urban philosopher and genius but is actually rather dim and naïve, embarks, like some accidental anti-hero, on a series of accidental adventures and profound drainstorming reflections on the toilet bowl.
Haflatoun also had an idiosyncratic and eccentric supporting cast. This included the formidable Kahka (whose name means cookie in Arabic but also alludes to Kafka), the local existential baker who had undergone her own bizarre metamorphosis and ran a deconstructionist bakery, and Luna, his missing love interest, Otter, his blind Siamese cat, and Double-Click, the cat’s guide mouse. Other members of this motley crew included the historian and biographer Herriditoz, the ex-rocker Drop Dead Ted, the men from PAPA (Puritans and Anti-Progressives Army) who run the sinister DAD (Department for the Advancement of Decency), not to mention the ecowarriors of CLEAN (the Co-operative Lobby for Environmental Anti-Negligence).
I was also interested in writing fiction in book form but did not have any possibility of finding a publisher, nor the abundance of time needed to research and write a book, given that I needed paid work to survive. One way to move a step closer to that goal, I figured, was to start off with translating Arabic fiction. This would give me some insight into and experience with the book-writing process and, if I hitched my wagon to that of a well-known Egyptian writer, it would provide me with an entry point into the publishing world and the writer a bridge to an international audience.
Another challenge was that the Arabic literary translation field was relatively small and crowded, dominated by a few big name Arab authors and a few, mainly western, translators. Given that most translated books were serious works, I decided to focus on satire to make myself stand out more against the crowd. I settled on Ahmed Ragab, the famed Egyptian satirist who passed away in 2014. An editor at the American University in Cairo Press, the leading publisher of translated literature in Egypt, found the idea novel and appealing but, like had occurred with my youth supplement idea, he needed to see a draft and discuss it with his superiors before they could commit. Their normal mode of practice was to identify candidate works to translate themselves.
A little weary after my previous experience of ultimate rejection but unperturbed, I decided to undertake the venture, figuring that even if they don’t take it, someone else would at some point in the future (spoiler alert: this proved optimistic). After considerable toing and froing with Ragab’s secretary, I managed to land an appointment with the famous writer at his office at Al Akhbar newspaper, where he had been writing short satire and captioning Mustafa Hussein’s caricatures and cartoons for decades. Although Ragab was intrigued by my proposal, the publisher ultimately balked, fearing that there would not be a market for translated Egyptian satire.
Newsworthy developments
In addition to Insight, I freelanced with other English-language publications in Egypt. One of these was the groundbreaking Cairo Times, which attempted to push the envelope out and test the limits of media freedom in Mubarak’s apparently liberalising Egypt, with its split personality towards the population’s freedom of expression and the regime’s freedom of repression. The weekly regularly had articles removed by the censor, was withdrawn from newsstands and had several issues which were outright banned, which proved catastrophic for the publication’s finances. This caused its founder, the trailblazing Hisham Kassem, no end of headaches and stress, though he would often joke this off.
However, this did little to temper or dissuade Hisham and his team from pursuing stories with gusto. Being a glutton for punishment, Hisham went on, many years later, to cofound the then independent Arabic-language newspaper al-Masry al-Youm and, during the revolution, tried to get another newspaper off the ground that sought to tap into the short-lived sense of freedom in the heady early days of the revolution. Last year, Hisham fell foul of the Sisi regime and received a six-month prison sentence for his outspoken criticism. He, like many other political prisoners, was represented by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which was founded by Hossam Bahgat, who started his career as a young reporter with the Cairo Times. Since then, he’s become a courageous rights defender who even turned up to COP28 in Sharm el-Sheikh to highlight the dire human rights situation in Egypt, much to the regime’s chagrin and embarrassment.
As I was holding down a teaching job at the British Council at the time with fixed class hours, my ability to write for Cairo Times was limited due to the fact that my schedule was not flexible enough to allow me to easily cover newsy stories.
Another English-language publication which I liked reading, especially for the regular column by the late Edward Said, was Ahram Weekly, However, I did not get around to writing for it until years later, after I’d left Egypt, even though I had visited their premises and met the late Hani Shukrallah when he was managing editor and before he became editor-in-chief. Part of the reason, if I recall correctly, was because Ahram Weekly didn’t tend to use freelancers at the time, except for prominent writers based abroad, and, as was the case with FM radio, I wasn’t willing to apply or work for a state-owned newspaper.
Although I reported on the occasional news story during my time freelancing, I was only able to dedicate myself properly to news journalism after I successfully applied for Reuters in 2000, which felt like a long shot at the time. But it appears that my written assignment and interview impressed the reserved and measured bureau chief Alistair Lyon, who acted as emotional in the office as a classic Reuters news article. Despite his standoffishness, I did learn a lot from Alistair and the others in the bureau about the importance of striving for journalistic neutrality and balance. With time, I discovered that it is impossible to be fully objective, despite the best efforts of the well intentioned, and the best you can achieve is fairness. Worse still, that it is possible to hide your partiality behind impartial-sounding language and the skilful use and abuse of facts.
Reuters Cairo bureau was located at the top of a downtown highrise owned by Misr Bank which had an incredible panoramic view of the city. When the smog and suspended dust allowed, even the pyramids were visible in the distance.
At the time I joined the bureau, Reuters in Egypt had been looking to expand its journalistic pool to include local talent. Prior to that, although some Arabs had worked for the agency as reporters and correspondents, Egyptians had largely been confined to stringer roles, photography and filming, not to mention translation for the Arabic service. One journalist on the Arabic desk also occasionally wrote articles in English and he did so, amazingly, without being able to speak the language.
The difficulty of finding people who could both write faultless English and had journalistic talent was one of the reasons why there were no Egyptians on the English desk. Another reason was the legacy nature of English-language journalism, the classic idea that a foreign correspondent ultimately had to be foreign to the context they were reporting on, i.e. white or at the very least western.
Two other Egyptians joined the bureau at the same time as me: Heba Kandil and Abdallah Hassan, both of whom spoke perfect English. Heba pursued an English-language education in Egypt, while Abdallah barely spoke Arabic, having grown up in New York. The remainder of the reporters on the English desk were British and American, including Andrew Hammond, who was married to an Egyptian-Palestinian and spoke native-level Arabic, and Rachel Noman, who was married to an Egyptian.
Although we newcomers were treated as equals and with respect, we were not paid equally to our western colleagues. This was because Reuters utilised a dual employment system similar to the one I had experienced at the British Council and used by many multinational companies and NGOs: well-paid international contracts and lower-paid local contracts. Although this did not discriminate against our ethnicity in principle, as locally hired foreigners could also receive local contracts and we, Egyptians, could also get international contracts if we were to successfully apply to a bureau outside our home country, it was somewhat discriminatory in practice because this kind of transfer was, at the time, still pretty uncommon. At a certain level, it was fair because it compensated journalists who moved country. At another level, it was unfair because it penalised locals with profound knowledge and familiarity with the society they were reporting on.
Joining the news agency as a group made our integration and the steep learning curve involved less daunting. We were able to lean on and learn from each other, as well as offer each other moral support. We also received an on-the-job training programme and plenty of assistance from our more experienced colleagues. I had a particularly good dynamic with Andrew and we collaborated closely.
Each of the newcomers had their own challenges. Mine was my natural wordiness, passion for word play and love of colourful language. I recall how frustrating I initially found the editing process, in which the colour was drained from my prose and almost every last adjective was excised like a rotting tooth. Even more colourful synonyms for “said” were frowned upon because using them involved a value judgement.
Reuters was also my first real introduction to the single-sentence paragraph.
And journalism led me to rethink and abandon, uncomfortable as it made me feel at first, the schooltime prohibition I’d had drilled into me that you never start a sentence with a conjunction.
Another challenging dimension of writing agency copy was the time constraint. Previously, though I had to deal with deadlines, I was writing for weeklies and monthlies, which meant I had plenty of time to research and work on an article. At Reuters, we were working constantly against the clock. We needed to get stories out fast partly because we were like wholesale suppliers of news and newspapers and other outlets relied on us for much of their coverage. Another reason was inter-agency competition. But we also needed to be extremely accurate for reasons of journalistic integrity and to protect our reputation. This was also to avoid having to issue a correction, which was seen as shameful but could also confuse matters because a newspaper somewhere may have published the incorrect information in the meantime.
The need for speed and accuracy, the heavy workload, combined with the fact that I was still temporarily teaching part time so as not to leave my students in the lurch, made my first weeks at Reuters among the most stressful in my career, and some of the memories a blur of activity.
Breaking news
At Reuters, I also got my first experience at covering breaking news/developing stories. The first big one I covered related to the kidnapping of German tourists in Luxor. With the memory of the bloody terrorist attack that killed dozens of foreign tourists at the Hatshepsut temple still fresh in people’s mind, the initial suspicion or fear was that terrorists were likely behind this kidnapping.
After writing a short item outlining the few facts we knew, I dashed home to pack a small bag and then rushed to the airport to fly down to Luxor. Once there, we spent the next three days or so, during which I only got a few short hours of sleep, chasing the story. We staked out government and police offices, pestered officials, managed to get the number of the kidnapper and interviewed on the phone. But, above all, we spent endless boring, frustrating hours in the hotel lobby, waiting for the next development, exhausted but too wound up and anxious to be caught napping if something were to happen.
The story that emerged was not off Islamist terrorists but of a desperate father. A tour guide whose German wife had taken their children to Germany without his consent and whom he was unable to visit had decided to take matters into his own hands by kidnapping a group of German tourists. At one point, he even claimed that the tourists he was holding hostage were there voluntarily and had agreed to play along with his action because they were sympathetic to his plight, though one of the hostages had a different take on the matter.
The exhausted, sleepless kidnapper eventually surrendered. Shortly before that, he told me that he had spoken with his wife who promised she would bring the children to Egypt. I don’t know if this persuaded him to end the drama. However, we feared that this was far from the end, and would be just the beginning for the hapless tour guide. The Mubarak regime did not like to be embarrassed internationally and certainly did not like anything interfering with the inflow of tourism dollars, so it was highly unlikely, we suspected, that this kidnapper would get off lightly. He was sentenced to 15 years with hard labour that same summer.
At Reuters, I also got my first experience of that hazard of the job: unwittingly sparking unintended controversy. Sting was due to play a concert at the pyramids, which seemed like it would make good material for a light music/culture piece. I got the assignment and I looked forward to the novel experience of seeing, with my girlfriend, rock music against the rock-solid backdrop of these timeless monuments.
The concert was delayed massively because Sting’s warm-up act, local shaabi pop star Hakim, appears was exceedingly late. After 90 minutes, while the organisers were introducing Sting, Hakim burst on to the stage complaining that he was not being allowed to sing. “Whoever is willing to accept the insult of an Egyptian in Egypt can stay. Goodbye,” he snapped as he stormed off.
The crowd initially expressed sympathy with Hakim until the organisers explained that the Egyptian singer had missed his allotted slot by a long shot, which caused the audience to conclude that it was Hakim’s own fault.
Due to the nature of the beast of wire journalism, I jotted down some initial thoughts during the concert and dashed to the office late at night to draft my article and submit it to the desk editor in London, as my colleagues in Cairo were all off duty.
Although I had not led with the Hakim incident and reported on it in neutral terms, the night editor in London moved it up and described the crowd’s reaction as a “burst of anti-Western fervour”. Under normal circumstances, I would have got a readback, spotted this and requested its removal. But because the hour was late, the editors in London, unfamiliar with the Egyptian context, ran with it and ran the story.
The next morning, I received angry messages and reactions, including from people who had been at the concert. “How could you write such a thing?” one asked. I hadn’t, I explained.
Writing economy and business news was the part of the job that I least enjoyed. The one advantage was that my university education didn’t go entirely to waste: the economics and business I had studied there enabled me to understand these types of stories more easily than some of my colleagues and find an interesting angle to cover them.
While some economy stories were interesting to work on, especially those with a social dimension, producing the morning stock market report, which we each took turns to do based on a rota, was wat I dreaded the most. It gave taking stock of a situation a whole other meaning. Talking to brokers about their expectations for the day’s trading and their near-term forecasts was as dull and uninteresting as it sounds, at least for someone who had studied economics out of a misguided sense of pragmatism but had avoided following the path of my fellow students into banking, finance or accounting.
I soon discovered that the only thing duller than working in finance was writing about it. However, reporting on political, social and cultural issues more than made up for the nuisance of occasionally manning the business desk. However, given that everything I covered needed to be news, I sometimes had to be creative in finding a news hook that would allow me to cover issues closer to my heart.
Out of Egypt
Although Katleen and I had moved in together and she was also settling into a job she enjoyed, though less so than I enjoyed mine, there came a moment when we started discussing whether it was time to leave Egypt.
And the trigger?
The army.
I had already had several deferments of my military service due to the fact that my parents were divorced and I was the eldest son. However, as my brother, Amr, who was the second oldest, was on the verge of graduating, this meant that I would have to re-submit myself to the draft authority and they would decide whether to exempt me permanently or conscript me.
The general consensus was that the army was drowning in conscripts and would most likely grant me an exemption when the time came. But… A good Egyptian friend who was in a relationship with an Italian friend was also widely expected to be turned away from the army but was conscripted, which left his partner at a loose end for an entire year. Another friend who was expected, at worst, to get one year was landed with three years because he was an engineer and the army needed engineers. There was a chance that the army might decide it needed my foreign language or writing skills. Or, if someone in power was keeping an eye on me, they may decide to subtly punish my disobedient journalism with a stint of obedience in the military. The machinations of authority in Egypt move in such mysterious ways that you can never be sure.
After much long deliberation and after witnessing the difficulties the Egyptian-Italian couple experienced, we ultimately resolved that, even if the risk was minimal, it was wisest not to take it, even if it meant abandoning jobs we enjoyed. Our plan was to leave Egypt for Belgium, at least initially, a few months before my deferment expired, to avoid suspicion that I was fleeing army service. We also decided to ship our belongings so that we could travel light and look like we were only going on holiday.
There was disappointment at work when I broke the news that I would be resigning and leaving in summer, cutting my career at Reuters short after less than a year there. I was also unsure about the momentous decision I was taking that would likely have long-term consequences on my career. I hoped that I would be able to find something equally good in Europe but could not be certain. What was certain is that I was giving up a job that many would give an arm and a leg for, and the chance to advance and possibly travel the world with one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious news organisations. How different a trajectory would my career have taken had I stayed on?
But I – anti-establishment, rebellious and pacifistic – did not want to risk becoming a soldier and Katleen did not want to risk having to be forcibly parted while I was in khaki. So we chose our personal wellbeing over building a career.
Freedom of repression
My last couple of months at Reuters, in 2001, were eventful and also troubling. A crackdown that had begun the year before was intensifying. Apparently spooked by how Egyptians were becoming more vocal and restive, the Mubarak regime was pulling out all the stops to intimidate, silence and even appease. It had arrested numerous activists and critics. One of the most prominent of these was academic, democracy advocate and human rights campaigner Saadeddine Ibrahim, who was arrested in 2000 and was awaiting trial at the time.
The government was simultaneously cracking down on and appeasing the Islamist opposition, simultaneously pretending to be the best foil against their theocratic authoritarianism while attempting to appear holier than the pope – or, better said, holier than the emirs of the Islamist groups. Beyond arrests and efforts to exclude Muslim Brotherhood members from the 2000 parliamentary elections, where many ran as independents and became the strongest opposition force, the government discriminated brazenly against religious minorities, especially Copts and Bah’ais.
Another group which the regime centred in its crosshairs was the country’s discreet but increasingly visible gay community. This was spectacularly and troublingly demonstrated one night in May 2001, when the police raided the popular floating nightclub known as the Queen Boat, which drew a mixed clientele, including from Cairo’s vibrant gay community.
As I recall, I was on duty the night of the arrests and we got word during a work event. I gathered the initial patchy intel from our stringer and other sources but did not have a very clear picture of what had happened. A fuller picture emerged of the mass arrest when my colleague took over the story after I went off duty.
Of the 52 arrested and eventually tried, only 30 had actually been on the boat, while the rest had been rounded up earlier. Women (benefiting from the perceived non-existence of lesbianism) and foreigners (protected by their non-Egyptian passports) were not arrested. Caught up in the dragnet of gay men and some others the police had a dislike for, which extended far beyond the Queen Boat, was a friend and ex-colleague from my recently ended teaching days, I soon learnt from mutual friends. There followed a period of tormented concern, powerlessness and frustration.
I met regularly with friends of his to discuss ways we could help him and the other detained men. As information emerged of the mistreatment of the Queen Boat detainees, with rumours of verbal and physical abuse, our alarm only rose.
It also quickly became apparent that the authorities had no intention of releasing the men any time soon. And judging by the salacious fake news being spread in the pliant regime-aligned scandal sheets about the things that allegedly happened in the nightclub, the “deviant” cult it housed, the baseless rumours of a massive foreign conspiracy to “globalise perversion”, and the homophobic tone of the coverage. Meanwhile state security claimed it had found a pamphlet in the supposed ringleader’s home (who was arrested sometime before the Queen Boat raid), which allegedly outlined the imaginary cult’s purported creed, “Our religion is the religion of Lot’s people, our prophet and guide is Abu Nuwas.”
It appeared that the government had successfully turned public opinion against the men and temporarily distracted the public from the state’s many failings. Moreover, very few were raising their voices to defend these men’s fundamental rights, including, shamefully, some leading local human rights defenders. One of the few exceptions was Hossam Bahgat, who broke the silence and wrote robustly and critically about the affair. For his pains, he was dismissed from the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights, which prompted him to set up the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, as I mentioned earlier, which has not shied away from defending the rights of everyone, including the country’s embattled gay community.
Our friend’s horrendous experience demonstrated that you don’t have to be interested in politics for politics to take an interest in you. Though he had studiously steered clear of the political, the political decided to veer towards him and run him over in zealous pursuit of cynical self-interest. Like the other defendants, he was maltreated and exposed to humiliating medical examinations. The contrast between the terrified image of him trying to mask his face in the defendants’ cage and the last time I saw him on the beach in South Sinai, carefree and nursing his tan, was saddening.
Shocked by the injustice being meted out on these men and concerned for the wellbeing of my friend, I wanted to do something. But the paths open to me as a journalist were, at that moment, closed off. There was also the question of how to do it: would openly defending these men’s right to express their sexuality in the way they pleased likely to help or harm them?
When I suggested I work on a feature about the arrests and the precarious situation of the gay community, my bureau chief adopted a wait-and-see approach, arguing that until something concrete happened, and not just speculation and hearsay, there was no story – and by the time there was a story, I had already left the country. Subsequently, Reuters did cover the trial extensively.
Beyond the personal dimension of the case, the Queen Boat saga had a strong influence on my subsequent career, my perception of my role as a journalist and my awareness of the of the vulnerable status of the media.
Although fake news is often talked about as a new phenomenon and a side effect of the digital age, the false reports and rumours in the predominantly print media of Egypt at the time reveal that there is nothing new about it and that even without the speed and proliferation of social media and the internet, it could destroy lives. In fact, the volume of fabricated or half-true content in Egypt’s largely pliant media under its various dictators had led to the term “kalam garayed” (“newspaper speak”) becoming synonymous with fantasy or fiction in the popular vernacular. In reality, one advantage of the spread of, first, satellite TV and then the internet was that it broke the state’s near monopoly on the media, exposing people to multiple sources of information, which enabled those who were ready and able to fact check the (semi-)official sources and learn about things not reported by the mainstream media.
The case provided me with an early lesson in both the power and powerlessness of the media. Previously, I had entertained some romantic dreams of using my pen to help change the world, but the sword was proving mightier than the word. Even though I was ready and willing, I could not find the space to publish on this pertinent issue, no publication I approached was willing to touch the topic at that moment in time. My failure increased my determination to use my skills and platform to challenge the powers that be, even if it proved to be futilely, whether that be the state or the “mob”, to stand up for the vulnerable, as much as I could, to be honest in everything I wrote and, above all, to be independent in my journalism.
But it also raised questions with which I would grapple in future. How do you carve out a space when the narrative and truth you wish to express run counter to those of the state, of vested interest groups, of social prejudice, or even of the media itself? What happens when you encounter a perfect storm in which the state, society and the media agree on something harmful or destructive? How do you raise your head above the parapet without causing additional damage or doing harm to yourself? How do you deal with your own apprehensions and fears?
And at that point, I was, at the very least, nervous and, at times, apprehensive and even afraid. Although working for an international news organisation afforded me a modicum of protection against the wrath of the authorities, the fact that I was an Egyptian meant that I did not possess the additional protection of a foreign passport that helped shield most of my fellow reporters. It also provided precious little protection against potential vigilantism from, say, religious conservatives. But my main apprehension, one shared by the vast majority of Egyptians, related to the government and its state security apparatus, especially at a time when I was planning to leave the country.
Horrible as the situation was in Egypt, I was regularly reminded that there were worse places in the world to be a journalist. One was neighbouring Sudan. Sounding almost like a an anachronistic artifice from colonial and monarchistic times, our bureau covered both Egypt and Sudan. This meant that I worked as both an Egypt and Sudan correspondent. But this wasn’t as exciting or adventurous as it sounds. What it boiled down to was writing copy at our office in Cairo based on information provided by our stringers in Sudan. One of them was a South Sudanese journalist based in Khartoum who had to tread very carefully, constantly fearing arrest or possibly worse, in Omar Bashir’s Sudan because of his Christian faith and the persecution and mass murder inflicted on the separatist south by the military-Islamist junta.
Another case, from the other end of the social spectrum, heightened my apprehension of falling in state security’s crosshairs. I attended and reported on a press conference held by released Islamists who alleged they had been mistreated and tortured while in detention. In the end, I didn’t receive a phone call or a knock on the door, but I did spend a while figuratively and furtively looking over my shoulder.
Then, an unexpected incident freaked me out somewhat. An Egyptian colleague at Reuters, out of the blue and uninvited, told me that military intelligence knew I was leaving Egypt and they were fine with my departure. Till this day, I have no clue whether this man was some kind of informant, or had sources he could tap, or whether this was some kind of elaborate practical joke – he was a bit of a comedian and enjoyed pulling people’s legs. However, I have no idea why he would joke about such a serious matter, especially as I had expressed no apprehensions to him, which makes me feel that he was not kidding.
After all, that a foreign news agency and those working for it would be under surveillance would not be surprising – the regime made sure to keep a close eye on the media. And what had happened on the Queen Boat, among other things, revealed how arbitrary the state felt entitled to be in the exercise of its powers of dissuasion – if even the apolitical could fall victim to its machinations, what could happen to those who exposed or criticised or annoyed the powers that be?
Eventually, the time came around for me to depart Egypt. Perhaps unconsciously drawing on suppressed childhood trauma of all the times we were stopped from leaving the country due to my parents’ political activities, the possibility that I was on a watchlist or the temporary nature of my military deferment, I wasn’t sure if I would be stopped or allowed to leave. As it transpired, Katleen and I managed to get out without any trouble. I was about to embark on the next chapter of my life and career. Although I had entertained the idea for some years of departing Egypt, a country that appeared to be well advanced on the road o dysfunction and creaking its way towards collapse, there remained so much that I still wanted and needed to do there. Regardless of whether this was the best time to leave or not, I was determined to make a go of becoming a journalist abroad. If I would succeed or not was an open question, especially at a time when there were so few Arab voices in the western media. But I was excited by the possibility and looked forward to the new challenge.
