Robert Solé Has Written a Book about the Tahrir Square Revolution and Mubarak

As I was driving back home from the hospital, where my husband has been for more than two weeks now after suffering a very serious heart fibrillation (he’s coming along and may be able to come home in a few days), I was listening to the Swiss French language radio station. The guest was Robert Solé, a journalist and writer who discussed two of his recent books.

Solé is Egyptian but moved with his parents to Paris in 1973 when he was still a child. His professional interest has always been Egypt and one of his books is about Ramses II, put into the modern context after the discovery of his mummy. The other book is about the January Tahrir Square revolution that brought down the Mubarak regime. The book, Le Pharaon renversé, 18 jours qui ont changé l’Egypte (Editions Les Arènes) is in French, but it will surely soon be translated.

He was clearly immersed in his subject and made interesting ties between the original Pharaoh, Ramses II, and Mubarak, in a sense the last pharaoh. One of his thoughts was that Mubarak had every reason to know that the revolution was coming but, because of his position as a quasi-pharaoh, he ignored the evidence. He also noted that Mubarak paid, in some sense, for the constitution created by Anwar Sadat, who made Charia law the basis of Egyptian law, thus allowing Muslim fundamentalists to direct some Egyptians toward the Islamist world view and creating great divisions in the country.  His comment was that the past two decades have seen the re-veiling of Egypt.

He also sees the Sadat constitution as the reason for recent religious persecution against the Copts, the most ancient of Christian sects still in existence, who were, after all, in Egypt more than 500 years before the Muslim religion arrived.

He told several Egyptian jokes, including one that is circulating in Cairo now.

“Mubarak was close to death and his doctor visited him and said, ‘Hosni, you really should say good-bye to the Egyptians.’ Mubarak looked up and said, ‘Why? Are they all going someplace?’ ”

Robert Solé is an interesting person and his books should provide many insights into what is happening in Egypt and all over the world of the Arab Spring.