Not yet
Taking the minibus is one of the
best ways to know the general mood in Egypt. Soon after my return to
Egypt two weeks ago to continue my research on literary and creative
trajectories, I was on the countryside on the way to visit friends,
and the passengers of the minibus wanted to know what I think about
president Morsy. “I haven't seen enough from him to make up my
mind,” I answered in an evasive manner. “You won't see anything
from him anyway”, one of the passengers replied, and the driver –
for some reason he insisted on taking me for an Egyptian – asked:
“Come on, don't be afraid to say your opinion. Whom did you vote?”
On this minibus, the opinion prevailed that Morsy is a
good-for-nothing, but on other rides one encounters people who think
that he is doing a good job, that the streets are already safer, but
that he needs more time. Two days ago in Alexandria, a passenger
wearing a short, well-fashioned beard of the style common to Muslim
Brothers, involved me in a discussion about the European perception
of Islam, and then went on to argue in support of Islamic economics
and the prohibition of interest in banking. I said that I'm quite
sceptical of Islamic economics when Egypt's new Islamic government
borrows money from the IMF against interest, and sells state bonds
with a lucrative interest rate. He
replied: “That is just because we do not have an Islamic government
yet, it is not yet fully in control. But it will be soon.”
“Not
yet” is the mood of these days – a hopeful “not yet”, a
fearful “not yet”, an impatient “not yet.” The
government of the Muslim Brotherhood is working hard on turning
expectations into facts, however. They are struggling to gain control
over the state, its institutions, the streets, the squares, the
culture. In circles critical of the Brotherhood, the neologism
akhwana “Brotherhoodisation”
has become the keyword of the Ikhwan's attempt to establish dominance
over all institutions of the state. But they have not been successful
yet, and for the time being both those in support of Morsy and his
government and those sceptical of or opposed to it have as the main
evidence for their point of view that not much has happened yet.
The
urgent problem, however, is that Morsy had promised that a lot would
happen. The deadline was last week. Upon entering office, Morsy
declared an ambitious yet very simple and uncontested One Hundred
Days programme to improve the economy, to restore security, to
improve traffic, to clean up the streets, to guarantee distribution
of subsidised goods, etc. It was a programme tailored at gaining wide
popular support, bare of any of the key ideological aims of the
Brotherhood and focussed on problems that are generally recognised as
urgent and important. On 6 October, on the occasion of the
celebrations for the anniversary of the 1973 October war, a huge
celebration was organised on Cairo Stadium, attended by honorary
guests (importantly not including the leading figures of the military
rule, Field Marshal Tantalize and General Annan whom Morsy in late
August promoted out of office by making them presidential advisers,
and more controversially including the Zumur brothers who had been
involved in the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat and spent the entire
Mubarak era in prison), a large crowd mainly made up of supporters of
the Muslim Brotherhood, and the rest of the ranks filled by soldiers
and policemen to fill up the stadium. His two-hour speech, broadcast
live on state television, was only secondarily about the October War.
First and foremost, it was political rally to mobilise support for
the president and to convince the nation that his 100-days programme
has been “successful up to 70 per cent.”
The
reality looks less like the image Morsy depicted in his speech. There
is a general sense that the security situation has improved (but a
friend of mine got robbed in plain sight on a main street recently,
and it is difficult to tell whether there really is less crime, or
whether people are simply less anxious), and that the economy has
slightly improved (but so far the improvement of the economy appears
to be mainly because the presence of a president and a regular
government gives people the confidence to invest again). Beyond that,
the urgent affairs of Egypt are very much like they were a hundred
days earlier, and some things are worse: Since August, the government
is fighting a de-facto war against Jihadist insurgents in the Sinai.
Also in the Sinai, Christian families in the border town of Rafah
were threatened by Jihadists and told to leave the town. They stayed,
but their situation remains precarious. Last Ramadan witnessed a
disastrous electricity crisis with repeated long power cutouts in
large cities.
Now
that the hundred days are over, the way the new government tries to
solve the nation's urgent problems begins to look increasingly
haphazard. Most recently, the minister of local development has
passed a regulation to limit the opening hours of shops (excluding
pharmacies) to 10 pm., and of cafés and restaurants to 12 pm. In
Egypt, a country that has a very night-oriented way of life, where
people often work at very late hours, and where especially in poorer
areas many cafés and shops are open day and night, this regulation
appears strange to say the least. The official reason given for the
regulation was saving electricity – but it does not seem very
convincing, given that the demand for electricity is at its highest
before 10 pm., not after. Prime minister Qandil defended the
regulation, claiming that there is no other country in the world that
does not regulate the opening hours of shops and cafés. Aside of the
prime minister, I have so far not managed to hear anybody else
speaking in support of the regulation. Everybody I meet finds the
regulation ill-informed, disastrous for Egyptian lifestyle, bad for
security (open shops and lots of people are the best way to make
streets safe at night), and impossible to implement. Aside of being
haphazard and ill-planned, this regulation also reveals a lot about
the underlying idea of good urbanity among Egypt's new rulers. It is
a vision oriented on Europe, America, and the Gulf States, informed
by the lifestyle of the economical elites in well-secured, calm and
motorised suburbs – the social class from which the leadership of
the Muslim Brotherhood and the ministers of the government with few
exceptions hail. In this regard, the policies of the Morsy era do not
seem so far from those of the Mubarak era, dominated as they are by
the life experience and horizon of economical elites who often
experience the lively street culture of the less fortunate classes as
disturbing chaos and dysfunctional informality, consequently seeing
it as an obstacle to overcome instead of recognising it as a
functioning social order.
The
hundred days' programme addressed issues that are consensual. At a
number of other points, the Ikhwan are beginning to show their true
colour. Some cases – like the closing hours for shops – tells how
close their understanding of policing public order is to that of the
Mubarak system. Others – like the removal of sexual education and
reproductive health curricula from schoolbooks, and the increasing
number of lawsuits on the ground of “denigration of religions” –
fit perfectly within the framework Islamist ideology and, disastrous
though they are, are in no way surprising. Other issues, again,
reveal a sharpening sense of confrontation between different
political forces as the Ikhwan are trying to establish control, but
are not yet successful. In this last regard, the last days have
brought some surprises, and more can be expected.
“The Battle of Sheep”
For last Friday, demonstrations
were announced by liberal and leftist revolutionary groups against
Morsy and his government. Then, two days before that date, all
accused in the Camel Battle (on 2/2/2011 when supporters of Mubarak
tried to storm Tahrir Square) court case were declared innocent for
lack of evidence. Predictably, this raised quite some sentiments, but
it also offered the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis the occasion
to declare their participation in what they deemed a demonstration
for the sake of purifying the judiciary. Thursday evening, the news
broke that Morsy has transferred the public prosecutor – who was
widely deemed responsible for the failure of almost all court cases
about the killing of protesters during the revolution - to the post
of the Egyptian ambassador to Vatican. For the moment, it seemed that
Morsy had gained another victory in establishing control over the
state, and now the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi participation in the
demonstration was to be in support and celebration of Morsy.
Then things went badly out of
hand. Already the previous night there were verbal exchanges and
minor fights between supporters and opponents of Morsy on Tahrir
Square, and the next morning witnessed a veritable battle of
stone-throwing between the competing fractions. I was not there, but
D., a long-standing revolutionary from the village in the Nile Delta
who moved to Cairo last spring, was. This is his account:
D. went to Tahrir early in the
morning, and by that time the revolutionaries were few in numbers,
and became quickly outnumbered after significantly larger (but not
huge – 500 according to one estimate) numbers of Muslim Brotherhood
supporters entered the square. The revolutionaries chanted against
Morsy and the Brotherhood with chants like “Down with the rule of
the Supreme Guide” and “Sell the revolution, Badie” (referring
to the Muslim Brotherhood's Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie, the real
strong man behind Morsy), and the Brotherhood supporters reacted by
demolishing the stage set up by the Popular Current of former
presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi (in front of running
television cameras) , and Brotherhood supporters forced the
revolutionaries out of the square to Muhammad Mahmoud St., where D.
and his comrades faced a rain of rocks thrown at them from the square
and were forced to hold out there. By this time he had to go to work,
and as he returned from work a couple of hours later, he encountered
a group of protesters on al-Qasr al-Ayini street who had tried to
enter the square but were forced back and did not want to get
involved in fighting. He managed to convince them that it was
necessary to reestablish the revolutionary presence in the square,
and they managed to enter the the square without a fight. For a while
the square was split into two parts, the Brotherhood supporters on
the central circle, and the revolutionaries on the pavement on the
side of Downtown. Both groups were chanting their slogans but no
fighting was taking place, until more marches of the revolutionary
fraction started to arrive and tried to enter the square from Talaat
Harb Street and Abdelmoneim Riad Square. Rocks being thrown both
ways, the revolutionaries who were already on the square tried to go
between but without success, and a street battle endured between for
an hour and a half, with neither side being able to make advances,
until at six in the afternoon when the Brotherhood supporters at once
all withdrew (upon order by their leadership, it later turned out),
and headed to hold a protest in front of the high court against the
public prosecutor. The revolutionaries took over the square, and two
of the minibuses that had transported brotherhood supporters were set
on fire.
The Muslim Brotherhood's version
was of course different. In different statements the previous
evening, members of their leadership declared that the Brotherhood
had not been present at the square in the first place, and that they
had withdrawn in order to calm down the situation. The next day, the
brotherhood's press organ al-Hurriya wa al-'Adala came up with
an official version of their account, according to which it was the
Ikhwan who had been attacked by an unspecified party, and that there
was an unprecedented media campaign going on to defame the Islamists.
The critics of the Brotherhood
were outraged. This was not the first time that Brotherhood
supporters had either compelled their opponents to leave the square,
or tried to make their slogans unheard by the sheer power of superior
sound systems. But it was the first time that Brotherhood supporters
had entered such a direct confrontation with their opponents. The
arrogance with which they demolished the Popular Current's stage and
tried to prevent their opponents from entering the square was only
topped by the lies of their leadership, first denying involvement and
then putting blame on an unknown party – echoing the “third
party” theory so routinely used by the military rulers in 2011 and
2012. The Brotherhood certainly showed itself a worthy successor of
Mubarak's National Democratic Party
This is not to deny that quite a
few revolutionaries were rather happy to enter a fight with the
Ikhwan, too. But from all witness accounts and reports I have read,
it appears that Brotherhood supporters and Salafis were the initial
attacking party – and the Ikhwan leadership's refusal to say by
whom they were attacked and their vague references to an unknown
party only further supports the revolutionaries' version of the
events.
The
revolutionaries quickly started calling the incident “the Battle of
Sheep” in an ironical reference to the “Camel Battle” - a name
that for draws a direct comparison between the Brotherhood
and the NDP, and furthermore claims that the supporters of the
Brotherhood (who arrived on Tahrir with minibuses provided by the
Freedom and Justice Party, and left the square at once when their
leadership called them back) are sheep-like creatures that follow the
whistle of the shepherd and lack a will of their own.
The Ikhwan are doing their best
to depict themselves as victims, and they may yet take the events as
a pretext to silence opposition towards them on other occasions. But
for the moment, many revolutionaries experience the battle as a
victory. They had been pushed out of the square a few times by the
Islamists, and this was the first time they ended up dominating the
square by the end of the day. And although the Ikhwan are really good
at explaining things their way, the incident certainly are a serious
media setback for them – the more so since it was accompanied by a
another setback.
While fighting endured on Tahrir
Square, the judiciary had taken a united and firm stance against the
dismissal of the public prosecutor. It also turned out that legally
the president was only allowed to replace the prosecutor in agreement
with the judiciary. By this time, Brotherhood supporters were
commanded from Tahrir Square to demonstrate in front of the High
Court. Heated rounds of negotiated evolved, and on Saturday noon,
Morsy had to admit his defeat and the public prosecutor could stay in
the office. The official version was that the president had given his
consent to a petition by the Supreme Judicial Council, but the
Council declared that they had not sent any such petition.
While the “Battle of Sheep”
was a struggle about the power to speak in the name of Tahrir Square,
the struggle between the president and the prosecutor was one between
the Ikhwan trying to establish control over the state, and an
institution of the old system successfully defending its power.
Unlike in the transitional period when the Muslim Brothers could play
a tactical game of changing alliances with the revolutionaries and
the military rulers, they now face opposition on two fronts. They
still have some of their revolutionary credibility, and they are
very, very good at mobilising shows of mass support (of the kind they
did on 6 October). But as they become the ruling party, it gets
increasingly difficult to exploit that credibility. At the same time,
they are officially in charge of the state, but in practice many
institutions of the state remain hostile to them. Today on the train
to Cairo, I happened to sit together with three police officers, two
of them in civil. Noticing that I was reading the Brotherhood's organ
Al-Hurriya wa al-'Adala, they expressed their clear dislike of
the Brotherhood, were very
happy about the success of the public prosecutor in holding his
position, and argued that the Camel Battle court case was all based
on rumours anyway, and that it was a spontaneous action of the
tourism entrepreneurs of Nazlat al-Samman. They didn't look like they
would be a very willing executive of Morsy's government.
What can one dare to hope now?
That
said, it seems unlikely that the Brotherhood would be out of power
any time soon – and in fact, it is not even desirable. The
question, instead, is to what extent they will be successful in
establishing control, and what other dynamics will be taking place in
Egyptian society. I try to explain what I mean with the help of four
recent conversations.
First,
there is the pessimistic view. It was expressed by M.,
my journalist friend in Cairo. He expects that the Ikhwan will be
able to push through a constitution of their liking – and some
revolutionaries and liberals will boycott the constitutional assembly
in order to deny its legitimacy, but it won't make a difference
because it will be in force anyway, and laws will be passed and the
state run according to it. Sooner and later there will be
parliamentary elections and the Ikhwan are an election machine able
to mobilise a lot of voters under any conditions, and they will not
shy away from using all means necessary to secure a parliamentary
majority. Once firmly in power, they will never give it up
voluntarily again. Furthermore, the opportunists who are always on
the side of power are already busy siding with the Brotherhood. And,
M. adds, the people are tired, the prices are rising and although the
economy is recovering a little they are too busy with existential
things. There will be no revolution against the Ikhwan like there was
against Mubarak, at least not any time soon: “It looks like they
are going to stay with us for a long while.”
But
one of the twists of the Brotherhood era is that the lines of
political opposition are being redrawn. I know some people who had little interest in politics even during the revolution, but who have
developed a much more sharply oppositional attitude since Morsy's
election. F.,
owner of a café in a small town, thinks that there may soon be a new
uprising against the Ikhwan very well – and he in fact hopes it –
because they have so disastrously failed to run the affairs of the
country. His business suffered severely from the wave of electricity
cuts throughout Ramadan, and the government's plan to limit the
opening hours, if implemented, will be equally disastrous. He says:
Yes, the people want to be left in peace and get back to work and
business, but the government is failing precisely in that point, and
people are getting angry again.
The
question, however, is what would follow from a new uprising or from a fall of Morsy. D., on his turn, does not expect the Brotherhood to leave
power any time soon – in fact he hopes them to stay for at least
four years, and as far as he is concerned, they should go through
with the Brotherhoodisation of the state, because only that way they
can lose their aura as a victimised oppositional movement, and
Egyptian people can have enough time to understand how far removed
from Islam Islamist politics really are. Furthermore, he adds, if the
Ikhwan would lose power now, it would most likely be in favour of the
supporters of the old system who have been able to organise their
ranks again after their temporary disarray in 2011, and who still
command considerable power over many parts of the state. The
revolutionaries are currently neither able nor competent to seize
power. While expecting the Ikhwan to stay in power, D. is hopeful for
different reasons. He perceives a significant change in political
consciousness of ordinary people in a way that, he argues, is bound
to put Egypt to a better path. But it will not happen now, and we may
not be the ones who profit from it, he says. He points out that this
does not only involve the revolutionaries who have been able to
transform themselves through the experience of uprising. It is a
change that even involves those who once lacked an oppositional
consciousness, or even were close to the system. The judges'
successful power struggle with Morsy is not only about guarding the
old system, he says: It is also about the judiciary developing a
different self-understanding as an institution of the state under
changing governments and presidents. And he says that in many daily
encounters, walking the popular districts of the city, and in is
work, he finds people critical, and aware of what politics means in a
way that was still lacking during the revolution. Importantly, he
himself has the feeling that he can do something, in his work, in his
studies, in the many political debates he develops with people on a
daily base.
In
2011, D. was one of the first people I know who reached the
frustrated conclusion that the revolution had failed. A year later,
when most young revolutionaries now also think that the revolution
failed, D's new-found optimism is striking. It is an optimism,
however, that depends on the continuity of a relatively free and
pluralistic political space. A return of heavy-handed repression and
fear can still falsify it. The Ikhwan are the power to reckon with
for the years to come, but the decisive question is how much power
they will have, and what shape that power will take.
The
fourth conversation took place online between me an Iranian friend
who pointed out to me how much the development in Egypt reminds him
of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. It is not the same, he
says, but it has many similarities: The revolution in Iran was based
on a wider popular consensus from right to left. The Islamists
presented themselves consensus-oriented and pluralistic at first, but
upon seizing power started to systematically eliminate and
marginalise their opponents. This is an important point of
comparison, and it was certainly not taken seriously enough in spring
2011 by all those commentators who stated that Egypt will not be like
Iran, when instead it would have been necessary to ask what can be
done in order to prevent Egypt from going Iran's path. However, there
is an important difference, and a paradoxical one: I think that one
of the greatest failures of the Egyptian revolution may turn out to
be one its main assets in the future: the lack of revolutionary
justice. One of the key themes of mobilisation ever since the
revolution began has been that the leaders of the old system and the
perpetrators of crimes against protesters must be judged and
punished. Almost none of that has happened, and practically all who
were responsible for killing protesters in January 2011 have been
acquitted, except for the life sentence for Mubarak, which was
nevertheless a major disappointment for all those who wanted to see
him hanged. After the Mubarak verdict, many revolutionaries reached
the conclusion that Mubarak should have received the same treatment
as Gaddafi did, that true revolutionary justice can only take place
at the lampposts of Tahrir Square, and that the first step of the
revolution should have been a thorough purge of the state apparatus.
However, they may eventually consider themselves lucky for the
failure of revolutionary justice, because such justice is extremely
prone to turn against the revolutionaries themselves – and often
with even greater brutality – as soon as one of the revolutionary
parties has seized power. Already now, hundreds of protesters are
still held in prison (and it is unclear whether the president's
recent pardon on all revolution-related crimes will actually include
them), but so far the leading figures of the different fractions, be
it revolutionary, Islamist, or old system, have remained free and
largely unharmed. No matter how troubling the failure of justice
towards many of the most outrageously criminal figures of the Mubarak
era may be, it also sets a precedent that makes it more difficult to
make opposition leaders disappear in prison or get shot on open
street.
The
struggle over control continues, and while the Muslim Brotherhood definitely has
the upper hand, it is yet undecided, and in fact difficult to decide
because it is a struggle of three blocks – Islamist, old system, revolutionary (the latter being the weakest of the three) – and as soon as one block seizes power, it faces
the opposition of the two others, so that the struggle may continue
for a long while still. And increasing political confrontation
brought by the brutality of the Military Rule, the tactical manoeuvres
and determination to power of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the radicalisation of
the liberal/left revolutionary block has made it increasingly
difficult to find any sort of consensual base across these blocks.
However, while this is the situation of party politics and activist
circles, ordinary political life in Egypt is still not very firmly
entrenched along block lines, and people who are not committed
supporters of any given block, tend to have complex, multiple and
more open-ended visions and positions. I therefore conclude this
otherwise very inconclusive essay with one little item that displays
the complexity of everyday political allegiances.
While
the “Battle of Sheep” took place in Cairo, I was attending the
annual festival (mulid) of the great Muslim saint Ahmad al-Badawi in the city of Tanta.
Contrary to last year when the festival had suffered from the general sense of
anxiety and insecurity, it was quite successful this year (the Muslim
Brotherhood has been traditionally been sharply opposed to mulid
festivals, but so far Morsy's government has been rather busy with
other business). A new cheap sales hit made rounds at the mulid: Colour
posters with the portrait of Mubarak's predecessor Anwar al-Sadat in
military uniform. Displaying the portrait of Sadat in one's shop is a
fairly clear stance against the Ikhwan, and also a more ambiguous
show of allegiance with the state of the Free Officers – ambiguous
because for one part it is can be a way to show support to the old
system, while at the same time it is also a way to take distance from
Mubarak and his era. Sadat also enjoys some ambivalent sympathy in
the revolutionary circles: While he stands for the beginning of the
ruthless privatization policies, for the oppression of the left wing
in favour of the Islamists, and for the much hated Camp David peace
treaties, he is nevertheless also the hero of the October War of 1973
(although the revolutionary daily al-Tahrir
recently devoted whole two pages in their 6 October issue to
questioning this image, and claiming that the counter-attack across
the canal and the resulting intrusion of Israeli forces on the west
bank of the canal was made possible by tactical errors by Anwar
al-Sadat and the “totalitarian” structure of command that
compelled the military leadership to implement Sadat's plan against
their better knowledge), and a secular hero assassinated by Islamist
militants. My friends from the revolutionary leftist/liberal circles
in Alexandria found it outrageous that Morsy in his two hours long
speech on the occasion of 6 October failed to mention Anwar al-Sadat
with a single word. Displaying the portrait of Anwar al-Sadat does
therefore more than expressing explicit disagreement with Morsy and
implicit allegiance with the pre-revolutionary order. It is also
expressive of a search for something like a consensual base in a
moment where it is very difficult to find one.