‘Welcome to the land of peace’ reads the banner flown by Egyptian warplanes. The camera pans to an almost tearful Abdel Fattah El-Sisi seated with his wife, Entissar, wearing a long black gown embroidered with golden hieroglyphs. This was the scene at the opening ceremony of the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum last November. Costing $1.2 billion, mostly funded through two Japanese loans totalling $750 million, the GEM is the largest museum in the region, covering approximately 500,000 square metres – roughly 70 football pitches. Located on the Giza Plateau, where it is flanked by the Great Pyramids, its angular structure features a translucent triangular façade echoing the nearby pyramids, which you can view from inside the museum through strategically placed windows, and a grand staircase lined with statues. The GEM boasts tens of thousands of ancient Egyptian objects and artefacts. The primary attraction is Tutankhamun’s tomb, displayed in its entirety – across two halls – for the first time since it was ‘discovered’ by British Egyptologist Howard Carter. Other items include an 83-tonne statue of Ramses II and the 4,500-year-old solar funerary boat of Khufu.
‘Egypt’s gift to the world’, according to its website, the GEM is, among other things, an attempt to position Egypt as a beacon of peace and civilization in a volatile region. At the opening festivities, a promotional film titled ‘Journey of Peace in the Land of Peace’ presented a glossy survey of Egyptian architecture, from the construction of the Pyramid of Djoser in the 27th century BC, to the 10th-century Church of St George and Saladin’s 13th-century citadel, to the Dubai-esque Iconic Tower of Egypt’s fortress of The New Capital, the cornerstone of Sisi’s New Republic, a heavily securitized new capital housing the presidential palace, ministries and government embassies approximately 50 kilometres east of Cairo. The film’s inclusion of Coptic churches, a Sufi sheikh and a Nubian singer projected an image of a unified, non-sectarian nation – reassurance in a region of confessional fracture. The ceremony concluded with a choreographed light-and-laser projection across the Giza skyline.
Twenty years in the making, the GEM could hardly have opened at a better time for El-Sisi. The narrative of Pax Aegyptiaca, seven millennia of civilization culminating with his ‘New Republic’, is part of the country’s attempts to assert influence in the region, as it casts itself as a key political mediator and peacemaker. Briefly usurped by Qatar, Egypt’s diplomatic centrality was reaffirmed by Israel’s strike on the Hamas leadership in Doha last September. The ‘land of peace’ slogan was first unveiled at the so-called Gaza Peace Summit held the following month in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh, adorning the hall where Trump, Erdoğan, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and El-Sisi gathered in another extravagant display. The ‘peace’ deal having been agreed, the state-owned press heralded Egypt as having ended the war on Gaza – and in October, no less, which is a month of victory in Egypt’s national calendar, marking the anniversary of Egyptian forces breached the Bar-Lev Line, crossed the Suez Canal and punctured the myth of Israeli military invincibility. October 1973,
El-Sisi’s government has, superficially at least, managed to navigate the internal threat posed by the war to its east. The mass emigration of Palestinian refugees did not materialize, and bar a few isolated casualties – one (according to official sources in Egypt) or two (according to other unverified accounts) Egyptian soldiers killed by ‘misfire’, the murder of an Israeli businessman and two tourists – violence between Egypt and Israel was avoided. The Egyptian security forces effectively suppressed mass demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza. Public anger at the regime’s refusal to open the Rafah crossing and its gas deal with Israel appears to have dissipated following the ceasefire negotiations. The opposition’s criticism of El-Sisi’s kow-towing to Israel and the Gulf can now be countered by Egypt’s rise in the comprador-state league table. At Davos last week, El-Sisi – in his first appearance at the World Economic Forum in over a decade – touted Egypt’s ‘stabilization’ agenda, presenting it as the bearer of both political and economic stability in the region. Indeed, Egypt got thanked for its contributions during the Board of Peace launch, and El-Sisi warmly accepted Trump’s initiation to join the board.
So self-assured is the regime that the guest list for the GEM opening included Mubarak-era businessmen who had been arrested in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings, or who withdraw from public life. Centre stage – like rediscovered mummies – were figures such as Ahmed Ezz, who once held a monopoly over Egypt’s steel industry and had been sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for money laundering, and Hisham Talaat Moustafa, the property magnate convicted in 2009 of commissioning the murder of the Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim, sentenced to death, later pardoned in 2017, and restored as chief executive of the Talaat Moustafa Group. Known to act as an intermediary between the Egyptian state and the UAE in major real-estate deals, his company is also a partner of the GEM. The businessmen even held a press conference before the Ramses II statue where they outlined their plans for the museum, unashamedly signalling to the Egyptian public that the grandees of pre-2011 Egypt are welcome in El-Sisi’s New Republic. Their presence, coupled with the ceremony’s inaccessibility – streets cleared of cars, passers-by and residents for miles around the museum – sent a clear message. It was a symbol of El-Sisi’s ambition since taking power in 2013 for a post-masses era, cleansed of the memory of 2011.
Appeals to the Pharaonic past to promote Egyptian nationalism are nothing new. From Sadat onward, the turn to antiquity has tracked Egypt’s strategic retreat from pan-Arab commitments, above all on Palestine. To legitimate the peace with Israel, formalized in 1978–79 – a decisive break with the post-1948 Arab consensus – the authors of Egypt’s alignment with Washington promoted a distinctly Egyptian history as evidence of civilizational destiny anterior to, and independent of, Arab solidarity. This was entrenched under Mubarak: Egypt upheld the treaty, deepened security cooperation and assumed the role of mediator, whose task was to manage and contain Palestinian claims. Cultural diplomacy followed suit, with investment in tourism and heritage that celebrated antiquity while excluding Palestine from the national story.
Pharaonism is also useful as a mode of rule, legitimating the authority of a narrow caste. In lieu of a credible, future-oriented political project, past glories can be invoked to present the ‘New’ society as perfectly continuous with the old. An Antiquities Ministry official boasted that the GEM could attract 50 million tourists per year, noting that this ‘means jobs, it means money, it means stability, it means a better life for every Egyptian’. Yet if the GEM is a fulfilment of a promise to ordinary Egyptians, it is a far more limited one – not an improvement in livelihoods, but symbolizing the assurance that Egypt will not become another Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria. Unprecedented impoverishment, packed prisons, migrants drowning at sea, neglected cities and deepening dependency are prices worth paying for the birth of the New Republic: a secure haven for the regime, its patrons and those who can afford it.
Opposition figures have been hesitant to criticize the GEM, and the museum has also drawn praise from Arab commentators otherwise critical of the Egyptian regime. With Syria’s collapse, the weakening of resistance in Lebanon and renewed talk of regional disarmament, many appear to be placing their hopes in a strong Egyptian state, capable at least notionally of acting as a balance against Israel. A genuinely sovereign Egypt would indeed be a gain for the region. For now, however, the wager rests on spectacle: Old Kingdom chintz reflecting the distance between advertised claims to autonomy and realities of subordination it cannot conceal.
Read on: Hazem Kandil, ‘Sisi’s Egypt’, NLR 102.