Hemp to Egypt
From DESMOND STEWART
CA1110
Ttlose who have just stumbled from The Connection must be disabused: my title has "thing to do with the export of Indian hemp (or hashish) to the Nile Valley. The export to Which I refer is entirely prosaic and respectable, an English export, furthermore, which has been Unaffected by the Suez crisis: stout hempen ropes delivered to the Egyptian Government for the purposes of judicial hanging.
Three thousand people have been hanged in ...gYpt during the last seventy-five years, includ- ing, an Egyptian will hastily remind one, the benshawai victims of imperialism. This gives a Yearly average of forty. Each rope costs the gYPtian Government £30 and is used twice Only. An average of twenty ropes a year repre- sents a tidy sum of £600 per annum to some deserving factory in the United Kingdom. Of the 3,000 dispatched in what we may call the Wandsworth fashion,' only five have been Women; sex differentiation can bring benefits as well as setbacks to the stronger sex.
A recent case has aroused intense interest in Judicial hanging. There is no wave of abolitionist sentiment. To scrutinise capital punishment may he the first step to its condemnation; yet death IS as commonplace as life in this teeming coun- try. In the press there is a stark absence of senti- inent over the thirty-eight men already eking out their last days in the red cotton shirt, trousers and skullcap which are the uniform for those .11 whom sentence of death has been passed. c:gYpt is the land of the flashing cameraman. Just as in Canada the bridal pair are snapped at the altar rails, so in Egypt every moment from trial to execution is photographed. The EgYptians, innocent or guilty, love the camera. he youngest murderer, an eighteen-year-old lee-seller who killed an elderly Greek woman for !T money, is shown writing maxims about atience. round his cell door. A matricide poses !Ike a film star with a cigarette. The prison diet Is good: the condemned are expected to put on weight. They get three free cigarettes ('Hay- wood' brand) a day; if they have the money, they can buy sweets and cakes from the prison canteen.
Moslem opinion, in this being nearer to that of Catholic than Protestant Christianity, does not seem to suffer from scruples of conscience. The conscientious objector to military service is unknown, and I have met only one abolitionist, a law student. Yet despite the 'eye for an eye' maxim, Arab Moslems are rarely sadistic, nearly always soft-hearted. The Turkish method of executing former Cabinet Ministers got a very bad press in Cairo: which is the more remark- able when one remembers that the late Adnan Menderes, a pioneer of the Baghdad Pact, was almost as unpopular as Nun i as-Said. The hanged-bird spectacle of the revived-from- suicide Prime Minister, dangling, as he slowly strangled between the legs of a tripod, was widely published; it represented (irony apart) a worse fate than the measured drop, where the dislocated neckbones end feeling more quickly than they end the pulse.
The new interest in hanging to which I have referred has not been aroused by an error of justice of the kind annotated by Mr. Ludovic Kennedy. A moment of drama, rare anywhere, unique in Egypt, has been almost as talked about as the secession of Syria.
A month ago the execution was scheduled of two rogues, Ayoub Labeeb and Azouz who had murdered a retired general when he surprised them burgling his wardrobe. The morning of execution came. The black flag flew. The criminals were weighed; gratifyingly, they had put on weight. The photographers recorded the last walk, the last cigarette, the hand of a police captain half-restraining, half-consoling the first to die. The platform reached, Labeeb asked the hangman (whose fee is E5 a job) not to spring the trap till he had finished speaking. The rope round his neck, he then launched into an impassioned plea to the journalists to see that his children were cared for, to say nothing of his old mother. His last-minute eloquence was not in vain. For before he reached his perora- tion, a reprieve arrived and the photographers took a new picture: the astonished relief of a man who had been nearer than caressing dis- tance to death [he lawyer of the condemned men had worked in a tradition more Californian than Cairene. The stay of execution was not due to any sen- sational discovery of new evidence; for the first time a technicality had been invoked at the last moment. The judicial authorities have now de- cided that there is no cause to reverse the original sentence. As with Caryl Chessman, the drama must go on This coup de theatre has led to a debate: should the two murderers- be led to the scaffold a second time?
In al-M usawwar, the leading illustrated weekly, a number of leading writers and thinkers have given their opinion. Sheikh Ahmed Heneidy, speaking for religion, urges the execution of the divine law. God himself has revealed the lex talionis; the killer's life must be exchanged for that of the killed. (The Sheikh no more quotes the Prophet's saying, 'An eye for an eye is the law, but Mercy is better,' than Christian priests quote the Sermon on the Mount in war-time.) Al-Aqad, an elderly man of letters, invokes the protection of public order as a reason for carry- ing out the execution. Yusif Wahba, a heavy- weight actor in the Donald Wolfit league, sug- gests that as the two condemned men have experienced already the frightening part of their punishment, the execution should be carried out, but with the victims heavily drugged.
The most respected voice, however, has been for life. Taha Hussein is Egypt's most likely candidate for a first Nobel Prize. Educated in the Azharite disciplines, he also studied in France; he has contrived a rare synthesis be- tween the Islamic and the humanist traditions. He has written on Muhammad and has trans- lated (Edipus Rex into Arabic. His comment on the hanging controversy is emphatic. 'No man should be forced to confront death in this way twice.' He suggests that President Nasser should commute the sentences to life imprisonment.
Taha Hussein, like Milton and Abu'VAIII- or for that matter Justice—is blind.
'—So remember, boys—at tomorrow's big game 1 want you all to get out there and win for the.good old Academy!'
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