BY SHADI HAMID
In the latest round
of Egypt's current crisis -- once again pitting Islamists against non-Islamists
-- demonstrators gathered at
the presidential palace in Cairo to protest President Mohamed Morsi's stunning
decision to claim authoritarian, albeit temporary powers and his subsequent
moves to rush through a controversial constitution. In a grim reminder of the
country's precarious state, police clashed with protesters and fired tear gas.
But this isn't really about Morsi and his surprise decree -- though to
be sure, parts of the decree employ language straight out of Orwell and seem
almost designed to provoke and polarize. However, neither the decree nor the
draft constitution are quite as bad as Morsi's opponents insisted. The
opposition's sometimes bizarre comparisons to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini,
the 1933 Enabling Act, and the French Revolution suggest a legitimate fury (and
an intriguing fascination with fascism), but make little sense as historic
analogies.
Morsi could have read his Friday shopping list on national television,
and it might have made little difference. The decree, after all, was only the
latest in what Morsi's opponents see as a long list of abuses. Egypt's
"original" revolutionaries are one such group that blast the
Brotherhood's compromises small and large with the old state bureaucracy,
lamenting how their revolution was sacrificed on the altar of expediency and
gradualism. And it is true that the Brotherhood-appointed leaders of the
Ministry of the Interior, the military, and the intelligence apparatus include
men who were complicit in some of the worst human rights abuses of the Hosni
Mubarak era -- and have gone unpunished to this day.
But these mostly younger revolutionaries, whose critiques have been
admirably consistent, are a small minority. The rest of the opposition is an
odd assortment of liberals, socialists, old regime nostalgists, and ordinary,
angry Egyptians, each whom have their own disparate grievances and objectives.
The liberals and leftists in the equation, led by figures such as Mohamed
ElBaradei, Hamdeen Sabbahi, and Amr Moussa, have little in common with each
other -- besides a fear that their country is being taken over, and taken away,
by Islamists. While they may be "liberal," in the sense of opposing
state interference in private morality, their attachment to democracy is
mercurial at best. Many of them welcomed the dissolution of Egypt's first
democratically elected parliament, called on the military to intervene and
"safeguard" the civil state, and even cast their presidential ballot
for Ahmed Shafiq, Morsi's opponent and Mubarak's last prime minister.
Liberals' problem with Morsi's decree is not so much its authoritarian
overtones, but that its authoritarianism is (or could be) in the service of an
ideology -- Islamism -- that they view as an existential threat to Egypt. While
Morsi has been extremely polarizing in power, the Muslim Brotherhood insists,
so far correctly, that it has not actually overseen the imposition of any
"Islamic" laws on the population.
But the Brotherhood too is missing the point here. Liberals, and so many
others, fear Morsi and the Brotherhood not for what it has done, but for what
it might do. Such fears, based on worst-case projections well into the future,
are difficult to engage and impossible to disprove. To assuage them, trust is
required -- and the heart of the problem is that there is little to go around
Egypt these days.
Islamist distrust of the other side, justified or not, is what led Morsi
to issue his Nov. 22 decree, people close to him insist. The Brotherhood saw an
existential threat on the horizon: Looming in the near future were court
rulings that would dissolve both the Constituent Assembly and the upper house
of parliament. Brotherhood and FJP officials told me that they knew from
sympathetic judges that rulings revoking Morsi's Aug. 12 decree, which
established civilian control of the military, and even possibly annulling the
presidential election law, were in the cards. Another prominent Brotherhood
member, who has privately been critical of Morsi's presidency, went so far as
to suggest to me that, if the president didn't act preemptively now, the
closing of Brotherhood offices could be next in a new campaign of repression,
followed by the dissolution of the group itself.
At the same time, the Brotherhood was well aware just how bad Morsi's
decree looked. As one senior FJP official admitted: "Yes, the decree isn't
democratic and it's not what you would expect after a revolution," but he
claimed there was simply no other choice. The message was clear: The
Brotherhood is in an existential fight and, as a result, the normal rules of
politics would be suspended. One Brotherhood member I spoke to likened it to
"shock therapy that runs the risk of leaving the patient dead."
In short, the Brotherhood sees its opponents -- whether liberals, the
judiciary, elements of the military and state bureaucracy -- as fundamentally
anti-democratic. Among other things, it points to the failure of someone as
prominent as Mohamed ElBaradei -- a "liberal dictator" in the words
of one Brotherhood official -- to stand up against the judiciary's dissolution
of parliament, and blasts his recent warnings that
the military may need to intervene "to restore law and order."
The irony of non-Islamists' antipathy toward the Muslim Brotherhood is
that the current version of the organization happens to be the moderate,
reconstructed version. For all its considerable faults, the Brotherhood of
today is not the Brotherhood of the early 1980s, when calls for tatbiq al-sharia ("application of
Islamic law") were its core demand. This was not just rhetorical: As the
Islamic revival intensified, the formal effort to synchronize Egyptian law with
sharia won the support of Egypt's most powerful men, such as Sufi Abu Talib,
the speaker of parliament and a close associate of President Anwar Sadat. By
1982, Abu Talib's committees had painstakingly produced hundreds of pages of
draft legislation (which were for the most part never implemented), including
513 articles on tort reform, 443 on the maritime code, and 635 articles on
criminal punishments.
Back then, the Muslim Brotherhood was more a sharia lobby than a
political party, with a seemingly obsessive focus on Islamic law. The 1987
electoral program of the "Islamic alliance" -- a coalition of the
Brotherhood and two smaller parties -- allowed little room for dissent on such
a fundamental matter: "Implementation of sharia is a religious obligation
and a necessity for the nation. This is not something that is up for
discussion; it is incumbent upon every Muslim to fulfill God's commandments by
governing by his law." The push for sharia would be, the program says,
"a massive national undertaking that will require experts to devise how to
apply Islamic law in a variety of realms."
The Brotherhood took steps to smooth over the hard edges of its
political program during the next two decades, culminating in its 2005
electoral platform -- the centerpiece of the group's effort to rebrand itself
and offer a vision for political and institutional reform. Democracy, rather
than sharia, was the new call-to-arms. Much of the program focused on how to
establish a workable system of check and balances and ensure the independence
of local government from the central executive. Interestingly,
one of the program's longest sections is on "financial and administrative
decentralization," where the Brotherhood calls for "transferring
powers and the authorities of the ministries to the governorates,"
including the ability to impose and collect taxes. Indeed, if there is a
dominant theme that runs throughout the 2005 platform, it is the notion that
the executive branch has too much power, which it abuses at will. (It makes for
dispiriting reading in light of today's top-heavy constitution, which enshrines
a too powerful presidency.)
After the revolution, the Brotherhood and its political wing, the
Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), made a major flip-flop -- they are now
apparently believers in a strong president, at the expense of parliament and
local government. But they still seem to genuinely think that they are
democrats, and their rhetoric, perhaps today more than ever, is replete with
references to electoral legitimacy and the will of popular majorities. As for
the constitution, they insist it is a moderate, consensus-driven document. From
the Brotherhood's perspective, the constitution's Islamic content is minimal:
In a stark contrast to the 1980s, the Brotherhood actually pushed back against
Salafi demands that the "rulings" rather than the
"principles" of Islamic law be the primary source of legislation.
Liberals would tell an almost completely different story, and their
disagreements are based on process as much as substance. Recently, at the
Brookings Doha Center, we held our third "Transitions Dialogue," where we brought together Islamists and liberal representatives
along with U.S. officials to seek out areas of consensus. Depending how you
looked at it, the participants were either very far apart or surprisingly close
together. It was hard to tell, since they seemed to have different
interpretations of reality and often couldn't even agree on what they disagreed
on. Some of the differences were on procedure -- including the decision to
appoint 50 Islamists and 50 non-Islamists to the Constituent Assembly, which
one human rights activist called the "birth defect" of the process.
From the very beginning, liberals have complained of an assembly
"dominated" by Islamists, where each camp became entrenched in its
position and voted as a bloc. And they were right: Islamists set the assembly's
agenda and led and oversaw the constitution-drafting process. Brotherhood and
Salafi representatives, however, felt that the 50/50 agreement was, in fact, a
major concession on their part. If the assembly was elected, rather than
appointed, Islamists pointed out that they would likely have taken at least 70
percent of the seats. As for content, they were only calling for the
"principles" of sharia, rather than its "rulings," as the
Salafis had wanted, to be the main source of legislation. The constitution has
a few Islamically flavored articles, but for the most part it is a mediocre --
and somewhat boring -- document, based as it was on the similarly mediocre 1971
constitution. This, too, Islamists treat as a concession to their opponents,
arguing they could have had stronger Islamic clauses but instead compromised
with liberals -- angering many Salafis in the process.
Indeed, it sometimes seems that Brotherhood and Salafi representatives
viewed the very presence of "liberals" on the assembly as a gesture
of goodwill and magnanimity. The Brotherhood's disdain for
liberals is nothing new and is, at least in part, a product of the Mubarak
years, when many liberals tolerated the Mubarak regime as the lesser of two
evils. But it runs deeper than that: Islamists generally don't see liberals as
having any natural constituency in Egypt. Moreover, they represent an ideology
that is foreign to Egypt and, worse, morally subversive. To the extent that
Egyptians ever support "liberals," it's only because they don't want
to vote for the Brotherhood, not because they're liberal or even know what
"liberalism" means. In my interviews with Brotherhood leaders both
before and after the revolution, I usually got the sense that, despite
occasionally trying, they simply couldn't bring themselves to take liberals
seriously. They were almost always more concerned about those on their right
flank, the Salafis.
Lack of respect aside, when you look at what each side says they
believe, there seems to be room for consensus. After all, the major liberal
parties say they support a role for sharia in public life (Egypt's most
"liberal" party has been known to campaign with banners saying "The
Quran is Our Constitution"), while the Muslim Brotherhood says all the
right things, calling for a "civil state." Even the Nour Party, the
political arm of the largest Salafi organization, says that
"the state should be far from the theocratic model."
But these groups are acting more moderate than they actually are.
Liberals are trying to be more responsive to the popular mood, which is both
conservative and religious. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood and Salafis are eager to
portray themselves as "responsible" actors, particularly in the eyes
of Western governments, whose support is necessary for Egypt's economic
recovery. But such ostensibly conciliatory gestures have also led each group to
believe that the others are acting insincerely. It is understandable that
liberals, being the weaker party, fear that the Brotherhood will use its
increasing powers to undermine and exclude them. But the Brotherhood, too,
fears its opponents are out to destroy it, using any tools at their disposal to
reverse the group's electoral victories.
As Brookings Institution scholar Khaled Elgindy astutely observed, "a persecution complex is the backbone of authoritarianism."
He may be right, but that doesn't make the Brotherhood's persecution complex
any less real. The memory of 1954 looms large, when President Gamal Abdel
Nasser banned the Brotherhood, rounded up its members en masse, and executed
many of its leaders. More recently, the Algerian tragedy of 1991 -- where the
staunchly secular military aborted an election Islamists were poised to win,
plunging the country into civil war -- remains a defining moment in the
Islamist narrative.
For the Muslim Brotherhood, another Algeria is always around the corner.
Winning one election after another is no guarantee of political survival, just
like it wasn't in 1991. For the Brotherhood, the dissolution of parliament last
June offered yet more evidence that the liberal opposition and international
community would not stand up for democracy when it was Islamists who suffered.
These betrayals -- and each side has their own long list -- are now
etched in memory, making reasoned dialogue a challenging task. To be sure, the
mistrust is amplified by a terribly mismanaged transition, but it also draws
from something real and deep, if often unstated. Behind all the accusations and
the seemingly minor procedural objections lies something more basic: Egyptians
simply may not agree on the fundamental attributes of the modern nation state.
Should the state be ideologically neutral, or should it be an enforcer of
morality, intent on creating virtuous families and virtuous individuals? Egyptians,
and most of the Arab world for that matter, haven't really had this
conversation until now.
In the short term, there can and will be at least some consensus. The
Brotherhood is constrained not only by an increasingly vocal opposition, but
also by external actors. The economy is teetering on the brink and
stabilization will only come through the economic support of the United States
and Europe. There is only so far Morsi and the Brotherhood can go -- for now.
Their focus is on stability, security, and the economy, not on applying Islamic
law or creating the mythical Islamic state.
That said, Islamists are Islamists for a reason. They have a distinct
ideological project, even if they themselves struggle to articulate what it
actually entails. The Brotherhood has already been developing something called
the "Nahda Project," a sort of dream for Islamist would-be
technocrats. While some of the project's ideas on institutional reform,
economic development, and urban renewal are impressive, they shouldn't be taken
as the end point of what Islamists are trying to do.
Islamists have a core constituency that, naturally, wants to see sharia
implemented. Democracy does not necessarily moderate such ambitions: According
to most polls, the Egyptian public wants to see more Islam and Islamic law in
their politics, not less. And then there are the Salafis, the second-largest
electoral bloc in the country, who are likely to do whatever they can to drag
the Brotherhood -- and everyone else, if possible -- further to the right.
A manufactured consensus may, in fact, be easier to forge now, in this
early stage of Egypt's democratic transition. "Islamists" and
"non-Islamists" may hate each other, but, on substance, the gap isn't
currently as large as it might be. In the longer run, however, the consensus
that so many seem to be searching and hoping for may not actually exist.
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