Pity Egypt, It Has No Liberals
By SAMUEL TADROS
What happened to Egypt’s liberals? Jackson
Diehl’s question in the Washington Post is not a new one. In the aftermath of
the Egyptian revolution and as Islamists swept every electoral competition, the
question was being sincerely posed. Where have all those young champions of
freedom that filled Tahrir square and captivated the world disappeared? Today a
deep sense of disappointment accompanies the question. The commitment to
principles by those once hailed as the founding fathers and mothers of Arab
democracy evaporated at the first real test.
Mohamed
Morsi’s election was not Egypt’s first experiment with democracy. In the
aftermath of the 1919 revolution and after a stormy constitutional process,
Egypt’s first democratic parliamentary elections were held in 1924. The
elections pitted Egypt’s greatest liberal thinkers and its political elite
gathered in the Liberal Constitutionalist Party against a man that five years
earlier had been one of their own; Saad Zaghloul and his Wafd Party. The masses
chanted “if Saad nominated a stone we would elect it” and they gave the Wafd 90
percent of the seats leaving the liberals to lick their wounds and draw lessons
from their humiliating defeat.
It did
not take long for the former champions of democracy to argue that Egyptians were
not ready for it. How else could they explain how Wafdist candidates from
undistinguished backgrounds could defeat the great landlords and thinkers of
the land? With no potential for winning a free election on their own, they
abandoned their slogans and tied their fortune to that of more powerful
players; the King and the British. They committed every sin in their pursuit of
destroying the Wafd. They plotted against it when it was in power and
suppressed it when it was in opposition.
Not
that the Wafd was a model of democratic behavior. Zaghloul’s first government
maintained a restrictive press and associations law that it had condemned while
in opposition, dismissed many civil servants replacing them with Wafd
loyalists, failed to deal with Egypt’s greatest crisis; the British occupation,
and when opposition newspapers criticized its actions, their headquarters were
mysteriously attacked by the mob. All in all, Zaghloul’s government lasted for
nine months before being forced to resign by a military ultimatum, from the
British military. Egypt’s imagined Liberal Age (1923-1952) would see this
episode repeated time and time again, until the whole system crumbled under the
roll of the tanks led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and his fellow conspirators.
Egyptian
liberalism was flawed from the start. Egyptian liberals were born, not from an
independent bourgeoisie, and from the tension of the individual and the state,
but from the very bosom of that state and its bureaucracy. Obsessed with
modernization, they always allied themselves with the ruler, hoping that he
would turn out to be an autocratic modernizer. Viewing Islam as an obstacle to
modernization and drinking from the fountain of French secularism, they aimed
to banish it from the public sphere and in the process grew antagonistic to
Copts. Their liberalism was inherently illiberal, and what remained of it, was
soon swept away as the disillusionment with liberal democracy coincided with
the fascist temptation haunting Europe.
A great
deal has changed in ninety years. The three military generals that ruled have
taken the country left and right and finally settled down on an unexciting
middle route, and Egyptian liberalism’s lot has certainly deteriorated from a
flawed intellectual like Ahmed Lutfi El Sayed who for all his vices, translated
Aristotle into Arabic, to a second rate international bureaucrat like Mohamed
El Baradei, but the decline in the country’s fortune is a reflection of its
endemic predicament. The liberals of old completely failed to build any ideological
or political foundation for their ideas, and over time, those ideas became part
of an amorphous amalgam of Nasserism, Socialism and nationalism. Today it is
impossible to find any serious discourse in Arabic that stands on anything
resembling a moral platform. That ground has been left for Islamism to occupy.
Egypt
is caught between democrats who are not liberals (Muslim Brotherhood) and
liberals who are not democrats, goes the popular saying. The first half is
problematic. The Brotherhood’s understanding of democracy is flawed and had no
room not only for minority rights, and press freedom, but to such basic
concepts such as separation of powers and the rule of law. But the second half
is false. Those supporting a military coup who rejoice at the repression of
their political opponents and engage in the worst display of ultra nationalist
discourse against the U.S. are hardly liberals. Egypt’s liberals are not flawed
democrats. They are illiberal to begin with.
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