Profile of Galal Amin

Galal Amin
The bestselling author of Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? reaches Zen-like state when talking about why he chose to be so brutally honest in his just-released autobiography

By Manal el-Jesri
(Ran in the October 2007 issue of Egypt Today magazine)



In the introduction to Madha Allamatni al Hayat (What Has Life Taught Me), economics professor and bestselling author Galal Amin quotes his favorite writer, George Orwell, who once said that an “autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” Orwell’s wisdom became a mantra as Amin set out to write the story, or stories, of his life, and he candidly writes about himself, his parents, his family members and the scores of public figures he has had the (mis-)fortune of meeting.




He was so candid, in fact, that a reader, writing to columnist Soliman Gouda in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, registered her scandalized shock that Amin dared to reveal his mother’s secret — that despite her long marriage to his father, the great intellectual Ahmed Amin, she had been in love with her cousin all along.

Sitting in Amin’s well-lived-in living room in Maadi, and trying carefully not to step on the puzzle the professor’s granddaughter had left on the floor, I soon feel comfortable enough to ask the question that kept coming up in my mind as I read Amin’s engrossing autobiography: How many people did you upset?

“[The autobiography] did upset some people, from the family especially. One of my nieces was upset about what I said about her mother. I tried to defend myself, but I could not. Some other members of the family were upset as well. There are other people whom I have not heard from, some public figures to whom I have not been kind. But if only you knew how much I deleted in order not to upset too many people. In the end I found that I do not regret either — what I deleted or what I published. Maybe in the next edition I will write a more favorable sentence or two about a certain person just to calm him down a bit. It will be true, of course,” says the writer of the witty and hugely successful Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? and its sequel, Whatever Else Happened to the Egyptians?

But what makes this autobiography so refreshingly different from most such works is how candid the author was about himself.

“I find it terribly silly. A writer should be brighter than that. Nobody likes to read about someone boasting about themselves, however good this writer may actually be. I am not ashamed of my flaws, because I believe that everybody I know has tremendous faults. I know some people who have much more serious faults. I have nothing to fear, especially when one writes when he reaches my age. I have less to fear than I used to when I was 30 or 40,” he says.



Amin draws on personal experience, history and literature in his autobiography.

A true liberal, Amin has followed political doctrines only when he truly believed in them. He was a Baathist for a very short while and a Nasserist rather briefly. He believed in logical positivism for some time, only to acknowledge the importance of the metaphysical aspect of life later on. Like most intellectuals, Amin was, and is, a skeptic who constantly asks questions, then reaches for his own answers.

Perhaps that’s why he has nothing to fear, because he is different from those who stick to one doctrine or direction and twist truths to fit everything to their beliefs? “It is true that I have passed through different political [schools], but this has nothing to do with it. I am talking about not being afraid of talking about my faults, but of course I am hiding some things. Nobody, nobody can tell the truth 100 percent,” he explains.

Amin has dodged labels almost as nimbly as he has told the truth in his latest work. “I explained in the book my changing attitude to Nasserism. This is why the two Nasserist newspapers, Al-Karama and Al-Araby, did not write about my book. It was all a bit too much for them. They love Nasser so much and they get so upset. The period I became closest to Nasser was when I saw what Sadat was doing. This is when I really liked him and did not want to say anything bad about him anymore, until years passed and Sadat died and Mubarak came. In 2002, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, I was invited to speak. I had to take the whole period in consideration. Some young Nasserists, who I like very much and greatly respect, were quite shocked.”

Commenting on this incident in Madha Allamatni Al-Hayat, Amin wonders whether it is impossible to learn from the experiences of others. The young Nasserists he talks about were children when the Revolution took place. Amin himself was a young man at the time, and he lived the era with all its ups and downs. “I think it is a general trait of human nature. On the other hand, if you don’t learn from your own mistakes you probably cannot learn — ever.”

Nasser, according to Amin, introduced a number of reforms, especially on the social level. “The 1967 defeat was a cruel blow. His economic policy had failed, so had his foreign policy, and his Arab policy vis-à-vis Israel. Much of what followed was a result of the ‘67 defeat. Camp David was the result, too. I do not want to exonerate Sadat from responsibility, but he could have resisted. The big powers, or the US, brought Sadat because they knew his character was such that he could sign an agreement like Camp David,” he says.


Omar Mohsen
Galal Amin, professor and best-selling author, encourages his students to read between the lines when studying economics.

Americana

In the autobiography, Amin talks about the past 50 years of our history, labeling them the “American era.”

“This has been true of the past 50 or 55 years. Yet I agree with Noam Chomsky that the American empire is now on its way to disintegration. I have seen signs that the empire is reaching its end. But this will take a bit of time, about 20 years or so. I believe the big mistakes America is now committing in the Middle East are due to the feeling that they are on the decline,” Amin says.

Yet American policies toward the Middle East have been consistent throughout modern history. The need, or struggle for hegemony is nothing new, I interpose.

“But don’t you see that they are more strikingly violent? It is partly because of their fear, they want to achieve quickly before it is too late,” he says. “They remind me a bit of [Anthony] Eden in 1956. He felt that if he allowed the nationalization of the Suez Canal, it would be the end of Britain. And it was the end.”

When Amin took up a visiting professorship at UCLA back in the 1970s, he was stunned to find the US so very different from what he had in mind. “I found the Americans very unindividualistic, with a sheep mentality. It was a surprise. It was the opposite of everything people say. A lot of our intellectuals glorify the American democracy. It reminds me of Chomsky’s article, “The Bounds of Thinkable Thought.” There are boundaries to what you are allowed to think. People pounce on you and despise you if you think outside these boundaries. I had just read Orwell’s 1984, and I found it really strange that he had never visited America. He would have been surprised if he had,” he says.

But there is a difference, Amin is quick to point out, between the disintegration of the American empire and the disintegration of the American and Western civilization. Surely one has to follow the other, I quiz. And when it does, what will happen to all the young people who are being schooled in international institutions, which are churning out dozens of youth aspiring to American ideals?

“It is the beginning of a road that is terrible,” he says. “You are aware that the Arabic language is terribly humiliated, and it continues to be so at the hands of foreign languages and the encroachment of the colloquial. It is a double humiliation. But you cannot blame the young people. They are under the influence of the same pressures that the American people are suffering from. The media’s influence upon youth is terrible. There is also the loss of confidence in your ability to change big things. People just focus on themselves, and concentrate on their individual projects. This has become a global phenomenon. It is all because of the 1984 mentality. People are convinced there are some unseen powers that move things, and no matter what you do you can change nothing. Survival dictates that you do what you can, which is enough to save yourself and your immediate family. As a result, feelings of national pride will become weak, and language is a part of this. Our love for the Arabic language was a part of our love of the nation.

“Even the Chinese, who are one of the reasons the American empire is becoming weaker, are adopting the trappings of the Western civilization. I do not want to say that they are adopting it completely, but they are adopting it in a very big way. So are many parts of Asia and India. But at the same time, a Japanese lecturer who came to the AUC some time ago told me that Japanese youth are choosing to learn Chinese as their second foreign language after English. Asia is on its way up, but it is a very slow process. Either way, the danger to our own culture is great,” Amin warns.

Arab Pride

And where does our own culture stand today? Unfortunately, according to Amin the true intellectual is a very rare breed.

“Intellectuality is a very rare attribute everywhere. There are educated people, there are writers, but an intellectual is someone like Orwell, Aldous Huxley, or Chomsky. Someone once said of Orwell that if he takes out his napkin to blow his nose, he starts thinking about the moral aspects of the handkerchief industry. An intellectual is someone who sees an incident within the framework of the big picture. The world, culture and the consumerist society are making them even rarer. They are less numerous than we think, in comparison to the people who are described as ‘the great thinker’ who think about nothing but money,” Amin explains.

The son of prominent writer and Islamic historian Ahmed Amin, Amin witnessed some of richest years of Egyptian cultural life. He believes that each of these eras had its own traits and characteristics.

“The time before the revolution was very different from the 1950s to 1965. After ‘65 was a different era. I feel nostalgic for the cultural movement leading up to the mid-1960s, when the decline started. The 10 years before the defeat of ‘67 were the richest. The most important poetry, films, art and press were produced during that period. The era preceding the revolution was rich as well, but in a different way. The leaders of the cultural movement were elites like Abbass El-Aqqad, Tawfiq El-Hakim, Taha Hussein and Ahmed Amin. They were different from the people who came later. They represented a very well-respected ideal,” he says

Amin himself is a role model for his students at the American University in Cairo, where he has taught economics regularly since 1979.

“I love teaching. I thank God that I do the thing I like. I write about this in the book. Teaching gives you fantastic independence. In our culture, there are still traces of the old saying, ‘I become a slave to the one who teaches me a letter.’ Of course students no longer respect teachers like they used to. But teaching remains a lovely job. It allows you to think. Preparing a lecture is really a process of thinking. You think of what you will say and what you will not say, and of how to make the idea clearer.

“Although some teachers tell you students only want grades, I believe good students are always there. These are the ones who make you enjoy walking into a classroom. These four or five students in a class of 30 give you the incentive to improve and to do well. They encourage you to think harder, which is all you need.”

A Hopeless Science

In the autobiography, Amin explains his disillusionment with economics as a science. “I was talking to my students about this yesterday. It was the first class of the new semester. I told them I am sorry this course would be very critical of economics. One of my students, who is about to graduate, felt very sad, and wondered whether she had wasted all those years studying a hopeless science. I explained that things are not that simple. When I lost faith in economics — or, to put it better, I realized the weakness of economics — I started to combine it with other sciences. It is a very important part of knowledge to know the economic situation, but to restrict yourself to it and try to understand society only by economic principles alone is not right. Whatever Happened to the Egyptians is not an economics or sociology or politics book. It is a mixture of all.”

To illustrate the point, Amin recalls how as a visiting professor in Los Angeles, he was asked to participate in research on rich and poor countries in the Middle East. “I wrote about Egypt, and I started reading about the economic, political and social development, and wrote not knowing which branch my writing belonged to. I had questions in my mind and I was looking for their answers. Economics on its own is not enough.”

It’s a point Amin analyzes in his latest effort, the soon-to-be published Philosophy of Economics. “Its subtitle is ‘The unscientific foundations of economic science’,” notes Amin who clarifies that, “Economics was born at a time when the natural and physical sciences were producing great success. It was the time of Newton and of great discoveries in chemistry, mechanics and mathematics, leading up to Adam Smith. Some people wanted to do the same in economic sciences, making them as precise as Newton’s laws. The man I write about in the book, whose secretary switched the numbers on a chart, yet he was still able to explain them according to the same theory, is a great example.

“Economic theory is so general that it can explain anything. It tells you nothing. If price increases, demand will decrease. Yes, well of course. They once asked Einstein why he chose physics as his field. He said, ‘I tried philosophy and found it too difficult, and I tried economics and found it too obvious.’ This is exactly it. It is really too obvious. Students, who are engrossed in studying it too closely, lose themselves in theories and expressions that sound grand,” Amin explains.

A New Level

The professor’s disillusionment with his own science is only one of the changes Amin has gone through during his rich life. Another has to do with his belief in the metaphysical.

“My understanding of the metaphysical is different. There is more to metaphysics than religion. Life [abounds] with the metaphysical. Through my observations and readings I reached the conclusion that life is not livable if you question everything. You have to take some things for granted.”

Looking back, Amin explains that it was his enchantment with the utilitarian ideology that eventually led him to metaphysics. “The utilitarian school of thought, which was born at the same time as the economic sciences, succeeded so quickly because it struck a blow against the metaphysical. It judges everything according to benefits. It is the same doctrine that led to the term ‘business is business.’ When people heard this towards the end of the eighteenth century, they were still religious, so they were very shocked. On the other hand, people who had already begun to harbor such ideas were very happy.

“These ideas developed with the development of modern civilization. Logical positivism is the extension of this, and it impressed me in the beginning, but then I do not know what made me realize that it is bad. It is good in some things, like in accuracy of expression. Many of our intellectual mistakes are the result of the inaccuracy of language. But their stance towards metaphysics was very tough.”

Today, Amin is convinced we cannot live without the metaphysical.

“When they asked Michele Aflaq [the founder of the Baath party] what is the meaning of nationalism, he said nationalism is love. Marxists made fun of him at the time. We were young and we were Baathists and we felt embarrassed by this. But later on, I found it an apt description. What is nationalism other than the reciprocal love for a group of people? I believe the weakest facet of the Western civilization is the marketing which encourages people to calculate everything,” he says.

At 72, Amin has reached an even more empowering understanding of life. “What is the explanation of the satisfaction I now feel regarding my life? I welcome each day with a degree of optimism that I rarely felt in the past. The explanation is that while I lost the raging feelings of joy, I have also lost the burning feelings of sorrow. I have recognized my faults and accepted them, and I no longer torture myself with the wish to be someone else or to have what I know is impossible to attain.

“I am now ready to accept that there is someone who is better than me in this thing or that, and I am satisfied that I have enough and more of this or that. But I also find that my fear of the future, that fear of death, is also much less than it used to be.”

It’s an almost Zen attitude to live by, and I ask whether we will all reach the same level of understanding one day.

“It is one of the aspects of becoming old. You lose interest and you realize that it is all the same. It is wisdom, maybe. Or it is an aspect of wisdom, because really, it is all the same in the end.

“I once asked an old relative which of two very attractive job offers I should take. He said it does not matter, because in the end it will not matter. It is true. What defines results is not which offers you take, it is you. What you make of this offer. As long as I am constant, whether the result will be good or bad depends on me. Good things in life are much easier to attain than you think. They are much more handy and accessible. You can get a lot of pleasure from very small things. I am not less happy than I was, but I am less excited. I am less excitable, which is not bad.”