“All the chants that used to be used to insult Mubarak [are] now being substituted with Zahi Hawass, beautiful.” – Egyptian archeologist Nora Shalaby on Twitter, Feb. 16.
Until Hosni Mubarak suddenly became a television staple a few weeks ago, Zahi Hawass was probably the best-known Egyptian outside that country’s borders.
As vice-minister of culture and, since 2002, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), he’s been the country’s most prominent ambassador to the West and the East, donning his now famous Stetson for appearances in umpteen TV documentaries and penning shelves of books with titles such as Secrets from the Sand and Curse of the Pharaohs. When Barack Obama visited the pyramids and the Sphinx near Cairo in June, 2009, it was Hawass who gave the U.S. President the personal tour. When Hawass visited the Tutankhamun exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario last March, his lecture in Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto drew turn-away crowds.
Now is he about to be turned away himself? Until recently, Hawass seemed unassailable, much like Mubarak. “Everybody loves a star and Hawass in a way is a reality-TV star,” one observer says. Certainly at 63 he’s had his critics, who’ve labelled him, variously, a corrupt blowhard, petulant control freak, publicity hound, promoter of dubious scholarship and whimsical decision-maker. But the criticism, much of it made on condition of anonymity, never seemed to coalesce into anything substantial, not least because Hawass’s power flowed directly from Mubarak; the former president’s wife, Suzanne, was one of his best friends. If you were an archeologist who wanted to dig in, say, the Valley of the Kings, Hawass controlled all access. “You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. You don’t want to ruin the diplomatic relationships that have been set up,” is how one archeologist put it to me.
But less than three weeks after Hawass made the perhaps fateful decision to formally enter the Mubarak government by accepting an invitation to become minister of antiquities (a new post), Hawass’s power and influence are being strenuously tested. On at least two occasions last week SCA headquarters in Cairo has been besieged by demonstrators calling for Hawass’s ouster. Some of the protesters have been SCA employees, irked by poor wages and lack of advancement, others unemployed or underemployed archeology graduates and impoverished tour guides. As one Egyptologist told me, “a living wage is hard to come by … in Egypt,” where the average annual income is between $1,500 (U.S.) and $2,000, and most of the 3.4 million people who “depend on tourism for their income live on tips.”
“If Hawass can hold on, it’ll be by convincing the military first of all and whatever new emerging power structure there is in Egypt that he is indispensable,” says Alex Joffe, a U.S. archeologist who writes on Middle East affairs for The Wall Street Journal and the Middle East Quarterly. But “everybody who had a position in and around the old power structure is in a much more precarious position.… Nobody’s indispensable anywhere.” (Indeed, the country’s former interior minister was arrested last Thursday on corruption charges; the former tourism minister was arrested late last week.) Adds Joffe: “I’m not going to lay odds. But at the same time there’s a lot of people suddenly talking about how unhappy they are with him, which has never happened before.”
Hawass has been taking his lumps internationally, too – and not just for giving the okay to pricey touring shows such as Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt, which began its international run last week in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since the uprising, he’s issued a series of confusing statements as to just how secure various excavations and historic sites are, including the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square. One day his “heart is breaking and [his] blood is boiling” over reports of break-ins, vandalism and looting, the next he’s the picture of calm, a soothing sayer, the next he says 17 artifacts – make that 18, or maybe eight? – have been stolen from the museum but three (or is it two?) have been returned. (This past Thursday, it was reported that a limestone statue of the father of King Tutankhamun, stolen in late January, was found beside a trash can in Cairo and returned.)
