Since the dawn of history, humanity has known two ways of dealing with those who came before us in power: either to build upon what they built, or to erase their traces and make history begin with ourselves.<\/p>\n
The second approach is not new. It is as old as civilization itself.<\/p>\n
The ancient Egyptians knew this practice\u2014though they had no single name for it\u2014and they practiced it with remarkable skill. They erased the cartouches of previous pharaohs from temple walls, defaced their faces on statues, and carved one name over another.<\/p>\n
Tutankhamun himself did not escape this fate at the beginning of his reign, when he sought to erase the legacy of Akhenaten. Queen Hatshepsut’s monuments and inscriptions were also erased after her death by those who came after her.<\/p>\n
The issue was not really about history. It was about something deeper:<\/p>\n
Who has the right to exist in memory?<\/strong><\/p>\n This is the question that deserves philosophical and ethical reflection.<\/p>\n Every generation has the right\u2014indeed, the duty\u2014to reexamine those who came before it.<\/p>\n To criticize their policies.<\/p>\n To expose their mistakes.<\/p>\n To evaluate their achievements according to the standards of reason rather than loyalty.<\/p>\n This is the essence of all human progress. Any nation that fears reexamining its history is condemned to repeat it.<\/p>\n But there is a fundamental difference between criticism<\/strong> and erasure<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Criticism presupposes the existence of what is being criticized. It sees it, engages with it, refutes it, or preserves it.<\/p>\n Erasure, however, is an entirely different act by nature.<\/p>\n It does not say:<\/p>\n \u201cYou were wrong.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n It says:<\/p>\n \u201cYou never existed in the first place.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n This is not a superficial distinction. It is the difference between someone who trusts truth to confront falsehood and someone who fears that truth may remain as a witness and expose them.<\/p>\n When someone’s name is removed from a metro station, taken down from a public square, or their memory is suppressed until years have passed since their disappearance, the implicit message is not:<\/p>\n \u201cThis person made mistakes.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n It is:<\/p>\n \u201cNo one should remember him.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n And this message does not concern the past alone. It also carries a warning directed at the present:<\/p>\n Whoever rules today may be erased tomorrow, unless his successor possesses enough \u201clegitimacy\u201d to survive without resorting to erasure.<\/strong><\/p>\n This is not merely a theoretical phenomenon. It is a pattern that repeatedly unfolds before our eyes whenever power changes through rupture rather than continuity.<\/p>\n Mohamed Naguib, the first president of republican Egypt and one of the leaders of the July Revolution, disappeared from public life for many years after his removal in 1954. His name and image vanished from the public scene, as though the revolution he helped lead had never known him.<\/p>\n Saad Zaghloul and Mostafa El-Nahhas, the symbols of the 1919 Revolution and leaders of the Wafd Party, which represented popular will for decades, also receded noticeably from public memory after July 1952, despite having led the first truly popular revolution in modern Egypt against colonial occupation.<\/p>\n In a more recent era, Hosni Mubarak, following his resignation after the January Revolution, saw his photographs removed and the memory of his achievements erased from public life with striking intensity.<\/p>\n Yet the person who assumed power immediately after his resignation was not a symbol or leader of the revolution, but Field Marshal Tantawi\u2014his companion and minister of defense for two decades.<\/p>\n The paradox here is that erasure was not always carried out by a \u201cnew victor\u201d<\/strong> in the revolutionary sense. Sometimes it came from within the very same system, as though disowning the name was easier than disowning the legacy.<\/p>\n Then came Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose presence was likewise erased from the public scene after June 30, with much the same intensity that had been directed at those before them.<\/p>\n The pattern is not uniquely Egyptian.<\/p>\n In Yugoslavia, following the departure of Tito, who had held the country together for decades, suppressed national identities began to reassert themselves and rewrite their own histories, gradually dismantling what he had built until the state itself ultimately disintegrated with him.<\/p>\n But there are opposing examples that demonstrate that erasure is not an inevitable fate. It is a choice.<\/p>\n Charles de Gaulle in France, despite his sudden resignation in 1969 after losing a referendum, and despite his sharp conflicts with political opponents, was not erased.<\/p>\n His name and legacy remained, and his presence in France’s collective memory grew even stronger after his death, until his name came to grace one of the country’s largest airports as well as its public squares.<\/p>\n The difference here is fundamental.<\/p>\n France experienced transfers of power through well-established constitutional mechanisms that did not require legitimacy to be built upon denying the person who came before.<\/p>\n It was therefore able to preserve de Gaulle in its memory as both a hero and a controversial political figure\u2014criticizing him without erasing him.<\/p>\n This confirms the point made earlier:<\/p>\n Erasure is not a judgment on the value of a person or the scale of his achievements. It is a mirror reflecting the nature of the transition itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n Where legitimacy is continuous, there is no need for erasure.<\/p>\n Where legitimacy is built upon rupture, erasure becomes an indispensable instrument.<\/p>\n There is another phenomenon worth contemplating:<\/p>\n Why are the positive aspects of a ruler recognized only a generation or two after his departure, rather than immediately?<\/p>\n It is as though truth itself requires a period of distance from those who have a direct interest in distorting or exaggerating it.<\/p>\n The generation that lived through the struggle for power carries its hostilities and loyalties with it and often cannot see the scene except through those lenses.<\/p>\n But the generation that comes later, separated by sufficient distance, is less bound to those battles and begins to look at both achievement and failure with a calmer eye.<\/p>\n This reveals a profound moral flaw in our relationship with power:<\/p>\n We do not dare to be fair until sufficient distance separates us from the moment of conflict.<\/p>\n This is more a form of inherited collective cowardice than wisdom, because genuine fairness is fairness expressed while the person and his legacy are still close enough to be judged honestly\u2014not decades later, after he has become a page in a book read only by researchers.<\/p>\n Here, this issue connects with something I reflected upon in another article about the difference between the nation<\/strong> and the state<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Erasing names from public squares and stations is, at its core, a confusion between the two.<\/p>\n Every ruler governs the state for a period of time, but no ruler owns the right to rewrite the nation in his image alone.<\/p>\n A square that bears a name, or a station that preserves a memory, does not belong to whoever happens to govern today.<\/p>\n It belongs to the collective memory accumulated across generations.<\/p>\n That memory has the right to be reviewed, reconsidered, and debated\u2014but no one has the right to confiscate it.<\/p>\n When one ruler does to his predecessor what the pharaohs did to those who came before them, he is not truly defeating his absent rival.<\/p>\n He is admitting that he has not yet succeeded in creating a legitimacy independent of denying someone else.<\/p>\n And here lies the deeper paradox:<\/p>\n The act of erasure, intended to demonstrate strength, is in its essence an admission of weakness.<\/strong><\/p>\n It is often said that history is written by the victors.<\/p>\n But perhaps it would be more accurate to say:<\/p>\n History is written by those who fear that they have not won decisively enough, and who therefore attempt to guarantee their victory by erasing everyone who might remind people that other possibilities once existed.<\/strong><\/p>\n Truly great nations, as France’s experience with de Gaulle demonstrates, are not those that erase their history every time their rulers change.<\/p>\n They are those capable of preserving all their successive faces upon their walls, with their virtues and their flaws alike.<\/p>\n For history is not the private property of anyone.<\/p>\n It is the memory through which we know who we are.<\/p>\n Without it, we become a nation without a face\u2014starting over every time, and never truly arriving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since the dawn of history, humanity has known two ways of dealing with those who came before us in power: either to build upon what they built, or to erase their traces and make history begin with ourselves. The second approach is not new. It is as old as civilization itself. The ancient Egyptians knew …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14100,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[280,103,272,16,197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-collective-activities-articles","category-all-articles","category-almasry-alyoum","category-articles-by-dr-badrawi","category-translated-articles"],"yoast_head":"\nBetween Criticism and Erasure: A Fundamental Moral Difference<\/h2>\n
Living Examples Across a Century of Egyptian History<\/h2>\n
The Exception That Illuminates the Rule: De Gaulle<\/h2>\n
The Delayed Truth<\/h2>\n
The Nation Does Not Belong to a Passing Ruler<\/h2>\n
Conclusion: Who Writes History?<\/h2>\n