From the time of Gamal Nasser’s seizure of power in 1956 to the mid-
After Sadat was assassinated by Islamic radicals in 1981, Egyptian relations with Israel deteriorated, but Egypt and Israel maintained their fragile peace as Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, took office. Mubarak was a consistent supporter of Israel and a mediator for peaceful relations between Israel and the Arab world. In return for helping to stabilize the region, the United States gave Egypt billions of dollars in development, humanitarian, and military aid. Domestically, this aid failed to yield economic development, and Mubarak ruled with an increasingly dictatorial hand. Many of the government’s critics charged that massive fraud and corruption funneled Egypt’s wealth to a privileged few. Over 40 percent of Egyptians lived in poverty.
Human rights under Mubarak’s thirty years in office were no better. Emergency law, in place since 1967, legalized censorship, suspended limited freedom of expression and assembly, allowed for the establishment of a special security court, and gave the government the right to arrest people without charge and detain prisoners indefinitely. Mubarak used the emergency law to create a wholly separate justice system in order to silence all opposition and punish, torture, and kill anyone perceived as a threat to his rule. Demonstrations, political organizations, and even financial donations that were not approved by the government were banned under the law. Thousands of people were arrested. In May 2010 the parliament approved the law’s extension for another two years.
In December 2010 demonstrations broke out in Tunisia against the twenty-
The “Arab Spring” uprisings that swept the Middle East shook a political order that had rested in the hands of the armed forces and pursued secular, nationalist objectives. The deposed leaders were the ideological descendants of Nasser, though their regimes had come to rely more on force than on modernizing social reform. The reaction against these regimes was often religious and culturally conservative. The political transitions resulting from this upheaval tended to pit secular and religious factions against each other amid debates over the nature of government and social change.