Delusional nature of Haikal’s writings

I write about Haikal, storyteller and a political thinker, who contributed to the failure of the Nasserist national project more than the foreign enemies did.
He is just a storyteller who grew up in the era of oratory and rhetoric and absorbed the culture of the colonizers and still living with that culture even after their departure. Haikal considers those coming from the West as colonizers. But, he is the advocate of the new expansionist designs led by Iran in the region.
His malicious statements against Saudi Arabia are not new. It began with the birth of his political imagination, which is not based on reality. He created heroes in his writings as he did in his book on the Gulf War. He distorted the history of modern Egypt.
Haikal’s opinion concerning the Gulf region did not start with the Yemen war, which seems to have prompted his recent remarks. He has very scant knowledge about the Gulf and his book on the Gulf War is full of errors, fabrications and funny reports that include his alleged meeting with King Faisal in Alexandria in 1971 that lasted for more than two hours.
This alleged meeting gives an insight into his mindset and a way to understand his designs. He may have succeeded as a storyteller but has failed in this era when the flow of information can expose anyone trying to dupe others.
In most of his books, Haikal paints a picture of himself as a confidante and close companion of Arab leaders who include an array of figures, from Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to Sadat to King Hussein of Jordan to King Hassan II of Morocco, only to name a few. The only thing in common between those leaders is that they all have passed away and therefore there is no way one can verify Haikal’s claims.
Even if we ignore Haikal’s fabricated stories, we can find contradictions in his other activities.
After a hiatus, he decided to take to TV channels where politics is mixed with half-baked stories. He first selected Al Jazeera TV channel of Qatar, which he had earlier accused of having ties with Israel.
Following his visit to the United Arab Emirates, he expressed his admiration for the UAE’s rapid development but later came out with a funny story claiming that Iran has a right to the three Emirati islands it now occupies.
According to Haikal, Tehran bought the islands from the Arabs under a deal aimed at bolstering the Arab identity of Bahrain. Haikal’s claims are offensive not only to the Bahraini people and the government but to the Shiite sect who rejects the questioning of its Arab identity.
Haikal’s discourse is embarrassing even to the remaining Nasserists. Iran’s occupation of the three Emirati islands is an Arab issue before it is an Emirati one. Haikal’s claim of Iran’s entitlement to the three islands, which Iran only occupied after oil was discovered and British withdrawal, does not deny UAE’s sovereign right to retake them.
Abdallah Laroui, a prominent Arab thinker, once described Haikal as “the custodian of the false Arab consciousness.” I fully share Laroui’s view. In fact, I have always thought of Haikal’s oeuvre as akin to science fiction and his writings mainly aim to pander to the emotions of readers.
The problem with Haikal is that his ideas have done more harm to Egypt than to other countries. It is the Egyptian intellectuals’ responsibility to rid their country’s history of Haikal’s delusions. Haikal’s false ideas have contributed to the distortion of the history of Egypt more than any other country. In his Autumn of Fury, Haikal claims that Sadat slipped poison into Nasser’s coffee in the presence of Yasser Arafat.
Outside the Arab world, Haikal’s analyses and predictions are viewed as mere jokes. They include his claim that an extremist nationalist Serbian group is behind the 9/11 attacks; that the US provided Israel with reconnaissance aircrafts in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. This confirms that his recent anti-Saudi Arabia remarks are a continuation of the inflated ego of someone who is no longer capable of weaving more illusions at this critical moment in the history of the region.
Haikal reminds me of the character of the mother in Goodbye Lenin! The German film tells the story of a young man who seeks in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall to keep his fragile mother from learning that her beloved nation of East Germany as she knew it has disappeared. It is high time to say: Goodbye Haikal!