I stopped updating this blog in June 2013. But I am publishing this long essay that was written during spring 2014 here on this blog until it gets published elsewhere.
There will be blood
Expecting violence in Egypt, 2011-2013
Caricature (c) by JF Andeel, July 2013. Courtesy of the artist
From
January 2011 until early June 2013 I was occasionally writing a blog
about everyday life and politics in Egypt in the time of a
revolution. The final blog entry, written in the beginning of June,
told about the growing opposition against Morsy and the Muslim
Brotherhood, the Tamarrud campaign, and the expectation expressed by
many people I spoke with who were certain that “there will be
blood” (hayibqa fi dam) or even that “there's got to be
blood” (lazim yibqa fi dam). This notion was so present that
I at first thought about using it as title of the blog entry. But
optimistic as I was about the capacity of the Tamarrud campaign to
provide a peaceful, civil alternative, I hesitated, and instead
titled the text “Seize the day”.
Some
weeks later, the day was seized, and there was blood.
An
extreme escalation of anger, mutual accusations and provocations was
unleashed, fuelled by a media campaign (the
mass media were brought under nearly total government control
immediately after 3 July) that made no distinctions between
truth and lies, only between friend and foe. A
large number of Egyptians (there are no reliable polls to tell how
large) came to agree that defeating and
killing the Muslim Brothers was necessary,
right, and good. Throughout July, a series of
violent clashes and massacres evolved. Most of the people killed were
supporters of the deposed president, and the most common cause of
death was sniper fire. The escalation reached its peak on 14
August, 2013, in the storming of the Rabea El-Adawiya and El-Nahda
Square sit-ins in Cairo, which were followed by clashes and attacks
on police stations and Christian properties in several cities. Ever
since, violence has continued, with people getting killed in
demonstrations, tortured and disappearing in prisons, Jihadist
bombings aiming police and military targets, and ordinary citizens
getting into fights with each others.
All
sides accused the others of being guilty of violence, and legitimised
their struggle by the violence exerted by the other side. However,
there was a great asymmetry of killing. Those supporting the storming
of the Rabea El-Adawiya sit-in have regularly cited the fact that
also policemen and conscripts were killed and that some of the
protesters were armed. According to the Ministry of Health, the
nationwide death toll on 14 August 2013 was 638, including 43
conscripts and policemen. According to the documentation of
WikiThawra (WikiThawra
2013),
in contrast, the nationwide death toll on 14 August was 1385 (among
them 52 conscripts and policemen) and 399 more (including 48
policemen and conscripts) were killed during the following five days.
According to the same source, the storming of the Rabea el-Adawiya
sit-in alone cost 904 lives, among them 7 policemen and conscripts
(See Human Rights Watch 2013). Whatever the exact figures may
be, the asymmetry is evident. What happened was not a battle but a
massacre.
One
year later, the new regime lead by El-Sisi has
established its firm grip on power, but a lower level of
confrontation continues, and so does
the asymmetry of killing. Many voices
continue to call for the merciless suppression and killing of Muslim
Brothers and their allies because “this is the only way to deal
with these people” (el-nas di mayinfa‘sh ma‘ahum gheir
keda). One of the most absurd consequences of this call for
killing in order to stop violence were the death sentences that
a judge passed in two processes in March and April 2014 on
1212 persons in for the murder of
three policemen in al-Minya. (In
April and June, the same judge confirmed 220 of these sentences, but
they will still be appealed, and it is unclear at the time of writing
this whether the Egyptian judiciary is committed to killing the
sentenced men. See Human Rights Watch
2014.) Many did not find the sentences absurd, but instead
argued that the sentenced were terrorists
who had attacked the police and innocent people. From their point of
view, Egypt was facing an attack of violent and evil people, and the
only way to deal with such people was to either imprison or kill
them.
I
do not intend to say that this is a mood shared by all or most
Egyptians – perhaps not even the majority among them. Many others
were sceptical of the polarisation to start with, or have grown
sceptical of it, and a large part of the population remains
sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood's cause. Most Egyptians
continue to live in peace with each others despite irreconcilable
political differences. But it is the mood that helped
the current regime to seize power,
and that resulted in a wave of killing that will haunt Egypt for a
very long time.
The
escalation in summer 2013 came unexpected to many of those who had
come to appreciate and admire Egypt's “peaceful revolution” and
the flourishing social and cultural activity that the 25 January
Revolution had unleashed. It was a common expectation that the Muslim
Brotherhood or some of their allies might opt for violent struggle if
Morsy were toppled. Such violence of the defeated was expected, and
some of it has taken place. But the violence of the victorious –
which by the nature of the asymmetrical relationship of victory is
bound to be more brutal and devastating – has been much more
extreme, and more shocking. The most shocking part of it was not its
extent, but the enthusiasm with which it was promoted by so many who
just months earlier had expressed quite different stances.
And
yet this turn was in reality neither sudden nor surprising. Many
Egyptians had been preparing themselves for extreme bloodshed since
the beginning of the revolution, and if many Egyptian and foreign
commentators failed to notice it, it was not because it wasn't there,
but because we didn't quite want to see it. It didn't fit well into
the beautiful picture of revolutionary resistance.
But
we cannot separate beautiful resistance from terrible bloodshed, just
as we cannot isolate the flourishing of cultural life from the spread
of violent street crime in and after 2011. They belong to one and the
same process.
What this essay is about
I
have been on and off in Egypt before and during the revolution, and I
have accompanied some circles of friends who describe themselves as
“revolutionaries” (a position that from 2011 to 2013 was marked
by a double rejection of the old regime establishment and the Muslim
Brotherhood) in Alexandria and a village in the Nile Delta, and I
have tried to understand the often troubling and contradictory nature
of the revolutionary experience in ordinary life. I was not in Egypt
in the summer 2013 and did not witness the polarisation and
escalation that happened July and August. But I did see it growing in
the months and years before. This is the background from which I ask
two key questions: How did bloodshed emerge as a promising solution
to the tensions and troubles of the revolutionary period? And how did
different people who were on one particular side of the events from
2011 to 2013, react to the bewildering moment of violence of victory
in summer and autumn 2013?
With
these questions, I try to contribute to a conversation opened by
engaged academics writing about Egypt (e.g. LeVine 2014; Ali 2014),
trying to understand the wide-scale support
for killing that emerged in Egypt in summer 2013. My key argument is
that the violence unleashed after 30 June, 2013, was thoroughly moral
in character, a consequence of an intensifying process of
polarisation where the need to defend right against wrong was caught
up in an ongoing sense of tension, confusion, anxiety and
emboldenment. (There is no doubt that leading
politicians and officiers manipulated the media and moral anger in a
cynical and calculating fashion to promote their struggle for power.
But on the level of general opinion among Egyptians, the moral
quality of the polarisation was real and powerful. And one should
take seriously that politicians often enough actually believe in some
of their own lies.) In this mood of “broken fear” (which
is not the same thing as the overcoming of fear), the expectation
that “there will be blood” was a promise of reaching clarity,
purity and truth through a decisive battle. Tragically enough, it
works. The incitement to bloodshed and the spiral of violence can be
described as form of ethical cultivation where a sense of purity is
established through dramatic and radical confrontation.
Paradoxically, during the the bloody summer of 2013, moments of
irbak, that is, confusion, bewilderment, loss of solid ground,
were sometimes more likely to open up ways out of the circle of
hatred and confrontation than firm and clear principles.
Bewilderment
and confusion was the mood in summer and autumn 2013 among some
(probably a minority) of the leftist revolutionaries whom I know.
They had participated in the 30 June movement, but expressed a sense
of shock, confusion, and frustration about what resulted from the
popular coalition in which they had participated. It is a sentiment
that I share with them. As an academic committed to support the
revolutionary process in Egypt, I also supported the uprising against
Morsy in summer 2013. The realisation of having participated,
if only by the very weak means of academic essays, in a
counter-revolution that has restored the Mubarak regime with some
reforms and adjustments, and at an enormous cost of lives, causes
moral trouble. It puts question marks on one's role as an academic
whose job is to be critical and to ask difficult questions. What
happened cannot be undone. But we can try to understand how it could
happen.
The
story I tell is a highly partial one. I do not make any claims to
speak about Egypt or Egyptians in general. It is the story of people
who consider themselves as “revolutionaries” through a double
opposition towards the Mubarak regime on the one hand, and Islamist
groups, on the other. A different story could be told if we looked at
Muslim Brotherhood supporters, or at sympathisers
of other Islamic movements, or at old regime loyalists, or
at the many people who did not take such firm stances. But the
people who are the framework of my analysis describe
themselves as left wing revolutionaries. This is their vision
of the events, and my vision of the stances they took.
One
of the events of the revolution
Much
critical energy has been spent on asking whether what happened after
30 June 2013 was a coup or a revolution.
This is a misleading question.
There
are two standard answers to that question. One is that it was a coup
because Morsy was the legitimate president and he was overthrown by
an alliance from within the acting government and institutions of the
state – most importantly the Ministries of Defence and Interior –
and eventually the minister of defence who directed the operation
became the new president. The other is that it was a revolution
because it was based on a genuine mass movement of a great variety of
Egyptians who overthrew a failing president who refused to listen to
the will of the people. It is true that the
president was removed from office by the minister of defence, which is a textbook case of a coup
d'etat. It is also true that this was supported by very large mass
demonstrations which had a revolution as their explicit aim. But in
reality either claim is not an analytical but a moral
statement. Coup is bad, revolution is good. Saying that what happened
was a coup is saying that what happened was bad and wrong. Saying
that what happened was a revolution is saying that it was good and
right, or at least it was good and right in the beginning. But this
is a misleading choice. First, it relies on an unquestioned narrative
of popular legitimacy, be it by elections or demonstrations: If “the
people” can be shown to support it, it is good. But beloved
dictators are far more terrible than hated ones because they can get
away with much worse crimes. Second and most importantly, the
“revolution or coup?” choice is misleading because it is based
on the assumption that revolution is good. But why should we assume
that a revolution is a good thing? Revolutions are processes in which
people get killed, things get broken, and in the end the most
powerful and ruthless parties gain power. In 1951, Albert Camus
looked back at the great revolutionary transformations in Europe and
noted:
“All
modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the
State. 1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the
Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic,
Hitler. These revolutions, particularly after the First World War had
liquidated the vestiges of divine right, still proposed, with
increasing audacity, to build the city of humanity and of authentic
freedom.” (Camus 1991)
Instead
of the coup-revolution choice, I propose something more unpleasant.
The polarisation and violence that followed 30 June, 2013, has
damaged Egypt and Egyptians in a deep and long-lasting way. It has
not only resulted in the killing of several thousands of people, it
has also fractured and split the society in a way that will take
generations to repair (and there may be much more bloodshed and
damage ahead before the work of repair can even begin). It has helped
in the establishment of a populist dictatorial regime that will rule
Egypt with an iron hand for many years to come (although I need to
add that many consider that an accomplishment and not a damage). Last
but not least, it has largely destroyed the revolutionary movement
which either allowed itself to be co-opted by the counter-revolution,
or was marginalised by the military vs. Muslim Brotherhood
confrontation, or was suppressed and imprisoned. However, this was
not some sort of tragic derailment from the right track of
revolution. Instead, we need to understand the 30 June
counter-revolution as a consequence of the revolution, “one of the
events of the revolution” as one of the village revolutionaries
called it. It is a continuation of the revolutionary process, a
process of increasingly nervous tension and polarisation and of the
use of symbolic politics of confrontation where martyrdom and
violence play a crucial part.
Believing
in the glorious nation
By
spring and summer 2013, the leftist revolutionaries from the village
had come to consider the Muslim Brotherhood a greater enemy than the
old regime. For them, it was a matter of civil or secular versus
religious politics – among other reasons. But the conflict line
that divided Islamists from supporters of a civil and/or secular
state would never have been sufficient to create the 30 June
coalition. Also the dramatic infrastructural problems (fuel shortage,
electricity cuts) that became rampant during Morsy's rule would not
have been sufficient to create such a coalition. The most powerful
and successful accusation against Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood
was not that they were fundamentalists, but that they were traitors
to the nation. The opposition towards Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 was
successful because it was primarily articulated in nationalist terms.
The reality of Egypt after 30 June 2013 took a lot of Western academics and others by surprise because they did not quite anticipate the power of nationalism. In a time when the study of globalisation and transnational movements is in fashion, nationalism has not been a sexy research topic. In recent anthropology of the Middle East and Islam in particular, the nation has been most likely to appear in the framework of a critical study of the “secular nation-state,” implying an opposition of religion and secularity where the nation state is the side of liberal, secular framework of power, and thus distinct from, even opposed to, society. The idea that the state is an external upside of power that is opposed to, even adversary, to society and its moral and ethical values, is a very liberal and very American idea. But people in the Middle East often have a much more ambiguous relationship with the state. They are oppressed by and at odds with some institutions of the state such as bureaucratic institutions, the police, and so on. But at the same time they often express a very firm love towards the nation, towards the army, towards military struggle for national liberation. And through a highly expansive public service, a very large numbers of Egyptians are also government functionaries in one way or another, so that the image of an invisible and invincible “deep state” needs to be complemented by the vision of a less mystical but very substantial “wide state” (Brown 2013).
Egypt
is a God-fearing country where fearing and trusting God is a key part
of people's moral and spiritual worlds. But it is also a militantly
nationalist post-colonial country with a firmly rooted tradition of a
national struggle where people believe in the Nation, the Army, and
the Glorious October War. Patriotic values were enormously
strengthened and magnified in the revolutionary uprisings across the
Arab world in 2011. The national flag was
always a central and highly ambiguous symbol that could be used to
claim patriotic unity for the sake of quite opposed aims and ideals
(Winegar 2014). Before 2011, there was a widespread sense of
frustration that was sometimes expressed in anti-patriotic terms.
Such kind of anti-patriotic frustration largely disappeared in 2011,
and instead, enormous emotions were located in the body of the nation
and “the people”. The revolution was very much a process of
learning to love the nation that until then had showed little love to
her sons and daughters. In 2011, that
emotion was still directed at an abstract body of the nation and “the
people” in the remarkable absence of a revolutionary leader. In
summer 2013, love for the nation became heavily personalised in the
figure of a venerated leader: Abdelfattah El-Sisi, glorified as
the saviour of the nation in songs and posters that have
covered homes, public spaces and businesses across the country.
Supporters of Morsy have tried to depict him in similarly heroic
terms, which was not easy because he was notoriously uncharismatic
when in office. Paradoxically, he has meanwhile proven himself to be
a much more inspired and charismatic political prisoner.
Image circulated in social networks and as a printed poster,
depicting El-Sisi as „Lion Heart”
The
anthropologist Saba Mahmood has argued in regard to the Danish
caricature crisis of 2006 that Western publics failed to understand
the “labour of love” invested in the person of the Prophet
Muhammad which made symbolic attacks against his person a matter of
grave moral injury and anger (Mahmood 2009). Looking at the highly
sensitive manner in which many Egyptians have reacted to any kind of
critique of the Egyptian Army and Nation (be it by foreigners or by
Egyptian critics of the military leadership)
in 2013, it seems that also military struggles like the October War,
the army, and the unity of nation have a similar kind of labour of
love invested in them – a labour of loving something that is often
not easy to love. In a similar manner, there is also an ongoing
cultivation of a strong sense of moral anger at those who act or
speak in a disrespectful manner about the things into which people
invest so much love. Love is not just a sweet and kind thing. It is
also the ground of cultivating a sense of being very easily offended
- and an urgent need to retaliate.
Martyrdom and killing
Although
the 25 January uprising was initially celebrated as a non-violent,
peaceful revolution, more than one thousand people were killed in
political violence during the first 18 days that resulted in the fall
of president Hosni Mubarak. The vast majority were protesters killed
by the security forces. The events gave raise to a veritable cult of
the martyrs of the Revolution.
Martyrdom
in fact preceded the uprising. A key turning point was the murder of
Khaled Said by police officers in Alexandria in summer 2010 that
resulted in a first wave of protests, and turned Khaled's portrait
into one of the most iconic images of the revolutionary period. The
founding martyr of the revolution, Khaled Said has since been
followed by thousands of others, although only a handful have made it
into the prominent gallery of the revolution's martyrs. As violent
events followed one another, new martyrs emerged, each of them
associated with specific struggles, claims and calls for bringing
justice. Often, the blood of the martyrs itself became the key ground
of mobilisation: more important than any political aims was to “bring
justice for them or die like them” (ya ngib haqquhum ya nmut
zayyuhum).
The
link of martyrdom and non-violence is paradoxical. The Egyptian
revolution was framed as non-violent although lots of people got
killed, and the killing continued and continues. Until today,
movements calling for protests make a point of claiming that they are
non-violent – and their opponents work hard to deny that claim.
Faisal
Devji has pointed out that Gandhi, although known for his powerful
use of non-violent tactics, was not in principle opposed to the
possibility of violence and war. According to Devji, Gandhi actually
supported the idea of war as a purifying moment in certain situations
(Devji 2012). Non-violence is not about nobody getting hurt. Instead,
non-violence is about occupying a moral high ground through an
asymmetry of violence. The central moral principle of non-violence is
that the other side does the killing. And this is where martyrdom
becomes such a powerful weapon. The most tragic events have often
been the most successful events of the revolutionary movements
because they have made people angry, because they have provided
grounds of rightful anger. As the confrontation continues, killing,
martyrdom, and a righteous anger against the perpetrators become a
central ground for the continuation of the struggle.
Polarisation
The
revolution began in a polarised situation where opponents of the
Mubarak regime were pitted against the regime and its supporters in
an antagonistic manner. However, when the military deposed Hosni
Mubarak on February 11, 2011, there suddenly emerged a sense of
national unity, accompanied by mediated narratives of Egyptians being
united in victory, which they of course were not, because there were
winners and losers. Antagonism was briefly buried under a vision of
unity – a vision that quickly became a rather counter-revolutionary
one, propagating a quick return to normality for the sake of a new,
happy Egypt (Winegar 2011). Actually there never was unity, not even
among the Tahrir protesters. Unity was claimed by silencing certain
key differences. During the first sit-in in Tahrir Square, for
example, nationalists and secular movements could coexist with the
Islamist movements because there was a clear agreement about not
making certain claims or not carrying certain symbols.
After
February 11, the revolutionary coalition soon broke up as some groups
were more successful than others in wrestling for a share of power,
while others were to weak to do that and instead opted for principal
resistance. Starting from early March 2011, a split emerged between
the major Islamist movements that were well organized and initially
very successful in the struggle for power on the one hand, and
various mainly leftist, liberal and also some Islamist groups, on the
other. The latter were too weak and disorganised to seize power but
strong enough to spearhead a series of new protests and crises. In
the course of 2011 they came to be called the revolutionaries. In the
following two years, this split – which partly
corresponded with a long-existing
split between Islamist and other political groups that had
been frequently and successfully exploited by the Sadat and Mubarak
regimes in favour of one or the other side depending on circumstances
– developed into an antagonism between “the revolutionaries”
and the Muslim Brotherhood, the first increasingly viewing the latter
as traitors to the cause, and the latter trying to either co-opt or
to marginalise the first. This picture is
complicated, however, by Islamist groups such as Hazemoon,
the followers of Hazem Abu Ismail who participated in protests
against the military rule in 2011 and 2012 and only joined forces
with the Muslim Brotherhood in summer 2012.
A
turning point in this polarisation was the rise in power of the
Muslim Brotherhood through the presidential elections in 2012 and
their attempt to rule Egypt by themselves without sharing power with
their former revolutionary allies (and their former allies were not
being cooperative either). This resulted in old regime loyalists as
well as leftist and liberal revolutionaries finding themselves on the
same side in a new set-up of government and opposition, while
revolutionary Islamist groups like the Hazemoon turned into allies of
the new Brotherhood-lead government.1
The rhetoric of the Mubarak and Nasser regimes against the Muslim
Brotherhood was appropriated by supporters of the revolutionary
current, while people who until then had held very little of
revolution and protests, appropriated revolutionary slogans and
tactics. The anger of those who saw their privileges threatened by
the emerging rule of the Muslim Brotherhood came together with the
anger of those who saw the revolution stolen and betrayed by the
Muslim Brotherhood. It was at this point that a narrative of the
Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign, treacherous, sectarian movement that
did not – could not – represent the Egyptian people emerged. A
shared oppositional narrative was established where the Muslim
Brothers appeared as fundamentalist fascists and enemies of the
nation who needed to be stopped before they take over the entire
country. This narrative made it possible to channel oppositional
anger (that until then was channelled against “the system”)
against one specific group in the political scene. On the other side
of the conflict line, a different narrative of polarisation was
produced by supporters and allies of the Brotherhood, claiming that
those who opposed Morsy were either Christians, godless liberals, or
corrupt old regime elites – thus, once again, not the true Muslim
Egyptian people.
During
the years of the revolutionary stormy season, the landscape of
political struggle was mapped by insults and stereotypes more than by
positive identifications. In spring 2011, there were agendat
- “people with (foreign or particular) agendas”; baltagiya
– “thugs”, which originally means gangsters on the payroll of
the police and the government, but was used to indicate civilians
fighting on the opposing side in a street battle, whichever that side
may be; and after the fall of Mubarak, there were filul
- “remnants” of the old regime. When the logic of political
polarisation shifted, so did the insults. In autumn 2012, khirfan
- “sheep” became the standard insult against Muslim Brothers,
implying that they were sheepishly taking orders rather than acting
of their own accord. On their side, Islamists had turned the
originally positive identifications ‘almani
- “secularist” and laybirali
- “liberal” into accusations insinuating that liberals,
secularists, and socialists were in fact kuffar
- “infidels”, an accusation that was avoided in public discourse
but more often made in the informal circles of local politics. In
Summer 2013, the new situation was once again accompanied by new
insults: irhabiyin -
“terrorists”; and ‘abid el-biyada
- “slaves of the military boot”. (Andeel 2014) These and other
insults not only structured the political field; they also denied
those at whom they were addressed the capacity of being a persons
with reasonable choices of his or her own accord. Instead, they
depicted supporters of
the other side
as delusional, stupid, and wicked. Whatever they would say could be
safely assumed to be a lie.2
This
escalation of mutual distrust was accompanied by a series of violent
events where supporters of different sides regularly accused the
other side of bloodshed. It is almost impossible to get reliable and
independent information about what exactly happened in deadly events
like the Ittihadiya Palace on 5 and 6 December 2012, where both
opponents as well as supporters of Morsy got killed in unclear
circumstances after supporters of Morsy stormed an anti-Morsy protest
camp, the Port Said Prison on 26 January 2013 where tens were killed
by bullets of the police following an attempt by protesters to storm
the prison, or Sidi Gaber in Alexandria in late June and early July
2013 where opponents and supporters of Morsy clashed over several
days. A spiral of mutual accusations emerged where an exchange of
opinions beyond angry shouting became almost impossible, and where
each side saw the other as violent.
The
killing of protesters in January and February 2011 still caused a
sense of shock and anger that was big enough to bring Mubarak to fall
even if it wasn't enough to actually topple the regime. Since then,
many Egyptians had increasingly learned to cope with violent events
and developed legitimatory narratives and tropes such as “Why were
they there anyway?”, “They must have done something bad”, “They
must have attacked first”, that were repeatedly cited to legitimise
police brutality against protesters since autumn 2011. Although it
was unlikely that one would accidentally find oneself in the middle
of street clashes – they were highly localised, and life continued
as usual only few blocks away – political violence became normal.
At
the same time, supporters of the revolutionary current were becoming
increasingly disillusioned about peaceful action. Their repeated
failure to make a difference by means of elections, and their
relative success in stirring up the situation through street action
at some occasions, compelled more and more of the people I know to
argue in winter and spring 2013 that elections and peaceful means
were inadequate to remove the Muslim Brotherhood from power and to
establish what they hoped to be a truly revolutionary government.
One
paradoxical component of this vision was the trope of “Muslim
Brotherhood militias” that was regularly cited between 2012 and
2013 by opponents of the Brotherhood who claimed that the
organisation was training paramilitary troops that were stepping in
place of the security apparatus. The Muslim Brotherhood is a very
well organized group indeed. On some occasions they in fact were
acting as an informal police force against their opponents (most
prominently during the Ittihadiya clashes in November 2012 – with
all the brutality that goes along with police work in Egypt, see
Human Rights Watch 2012). But the vision of the “Muslim
Brotherhood militias” proved out to be an exaggeration simply
because in street battles that evolved in 2012 and 2013, the
Brotherhood's supporters and their allies usually were at the losing
end. This created a paradoxical mixture of fear and opportunity: the
perceived need for firm defence against “militias” was combined
with the practical realisation that the Muslim Brotherhood was
actually quite weak and could be defeated in a street battle (Salem
2013).
This
paradox was further amplified with the rise of the Tamarrud Campaign
that began to collect signatures for a popular impeachment of Morsy
in spring 2013, with significant success. The Tamarrud movement
represented itself as a legal and non-violent movement to make the
people's voice heard. But when I was in Egypt in May and June 2013, I
constantly heard people speaking about the upcoming bloodshed they
expected. The expectation was that the Brotherhood would not go
voluntarily. They would fight back fiercely. They would need to be
forced.
Broken Fear
The
expectation that the others would fight fiercely was grounded, in
part, in one's own readiness to fight. So ideological polarisation is
not the whole story. More was needed to make bloodshed seem a
reasonable, even desirable path of resolution.
The
now proverbial “breaking of fear“ has been frequently mentioned
as one the few true of accomplishments of the uprisings of 2011 in
the Arab world. Authoritarian regimes like those of Mubarak, Ben Ali,
and Asad relied strongly on fear as the driving force that compelled
citizens to avoid head-on confrontation and to be complicit with the
system even if they hated it. This sentiment is well caught in the
idiomatic expression yimshi
ganb el-hita
- “to walk by the side of the wall”, that is, to mind one's own
business and to avoid the confrontation and exposure that would
result from pushing one's way in the middle of the street.
The
revolutionary uprising marked a moment when a lot of people stopped
walking by the side of the wall and instead boldly asserted their
will, point of view, and way of doing things. There was a shake-up of
all kinds of social taboos and inhibitions. Opinions that had been
kept secret were openly expressed. Conflicts that had been suppressed
were openly carried out. After the subdued mood of the Mubarak era,
the mood of life became more radical and outspoken, and full of
nervous tension. The examples commonly cited sound rather
sympathetic: a flourishing artistic and cultural life, couples more
likely to show their affection publicly, a great plurality of
different visions of life and points of view, and an ongoing series
of protests and strikes aiming to right wrongs instead of enduring
them. But the same sense of emboldenment has also meant an increase
in street crime, sexual harassment taking more
violent forms, people settling their private conflicts with
guns in the streets, an aggressive and impolite tone of interaction,
and the idea that the best way to deal with one's political opponents
is to eradicate them from the face of earth.
The
Novelist Mukhtar Shehata with whom I work on a research project about
writers literary lives in Alexandria, argues that the breaking of
fear has been mistaken for a disappearance of fear. Instead, he says
in an essay written in spring 2013 that we need to ask what has come
in place of the fear that marked the Mubarak era:
“The
truth is that neither has fear been broken, nor have any other
emotions been removed. Rather, these are new emotions born out of the
preceding chaos of emotions. ... Thus the emotion of natural,
immediate fear is replaced by an entirely new emotion which we do not
know but we call it ‘the broken fear’.” (Shehata 2013)
In
other words, broken fear is a positively existing sentiment: it is
fear, but it is broken, reconfigured in a seemingly chaotic way. It
can be described as an affective complex in its own right that
involves anxiety, excitement, terror, courage, unrest, hope, and an
attitude of assertively standing to one's own point of view. Broken
fear as the emotional tone of the revolutionary stormy season does
not allow us to neatly distinguish between positive and negative
effects of the revolution. They belong to the same process, the same
sentiment.
As
time passed, the destructive side of that process became more and
more evident in the shape of nervous tension, aggression, confusion,
and anxiety. In the traumatising “chaos of emotions” the path of
assertive, aggressive action appeared as a way out.
In
winter 2012/13, a friend of mine argued that the only way out of the
current deadlock was to go from house to house and to kill all the
Muslim Brothers. Powerful and destructive as such “fighting words”
(Bangstad 2011) can be, they are not yet the same as fighting. This
mentioned friend is known as a man whose words are bigger than his
deeds. Nobody expected him to follow his own advise. Eventually, when
the killing actually
began
(although it happened on squares and not in houses), he was
against it.
Such fantasies of violence are part of the process towards actual
bloodshed, and yet they might have meant little if it weren't for the
possibility to turn them into a reality. Broken fear was the
condition of that possibility. For it also affected many taboos and
inhibitions that were about maintaining social peace.
Peace
is not obvious. It needs to be maintained. Often it is maintained at
quite some cost. Especially in situations where people live in close
proximity and mutual dependency while they may deeply dislike each
others, peace can be much more important than justice. Rural
customary law (‘urf)
councils, for example, are often primarily aimed at reaching a
compromise and restoring peace rather than establishing truth or
delivering justice. But in the mood of assertive, anxious
emboldenment, the mechanisms of keeping peace became increasingly
hard to uphold, and a terrible, decisive battle became an
increasingly attractive and likely option.
Decisive battle
The famous 18 days of January and February 2011 did feel like a decisive battle. But soon it became clear that the struggle had only begun and that little had been decided. In early autumn 2011, in a time when the still great expectations of radical change faced the resilience of the old system that continued to rule Egypt in the shape of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, I for the first time heard people talking about a decisive, bloody battle as a solution.
Today,
opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood refer to Youtube videos where
Brotherhood leaders argue that the death of some is acceptable to
reach the good of all, in order to prove that the Brotherhood always
was up to violence as a path to power. But the Brotherhood leaders
were just saying what a lot of other people were saying, too. In
October 2011, for example, one of the revolutionary leftists from the
village argued to me that the peaceful revolution had come to a dead
end, and that the only way to truly overcome the Mubarak regime and
to make a fresh start would be a Libyan-style armed revolution – in
other words, a civil war. If it would cost
the lives of 10% of Egyptians, it would still be a small price for a
better future for the country, he said.
In
spring and early summer 2013, a terrible decisive battle was expected
and desired – not only by the opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood
but also many of its supporters and allies who at that moment still
believed that the army was on their side. There was an escalation of
more or less open mutual threats which, in turn, could be utilised
for mutual accusations for promoting violence.
Caricature published on an Islamist satirical Facebook site.
Text on the hand reads: “[electoral] legitimacy is the red line”.
Text on the face that gets beaten up reads: “liberalism;
secularism; communism; socialism”. Images and
social media posts like this often were copied into anti-Brotherhood
media that used them as a proof of the inherently violent nature of
their opponents.
The
idea of a decisive battle is based on the promise that it will
establish how things are, show who is the boss, and replace anxiety
and ambivalence by certainty and clarity. It is very attractive
because for a part of it, it is true. Struggle can establish clarity.
M.,
a university graduate in his early twenties, belongs to the circle of
leftists from the village. He lives in Alexandria, considers himself
a socialist, and is firmly opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood and
other Islamist movements. On 28 June, 2013, he participated in one of
the street battles in Sidi Gaber in Alexandria that evolved both
before and after 30 June. Sidi Gaber is one of the key sites for
demonstrations in Alexandria, and in this period it was claimed by
the two mutually hostile currents, which resulted in repeated
clashes. (Ali 2013) These clashes took place largely in the absence
of the police, and a small number of firearms were used (and as
usual, both sides claimed that the other side was responsible for the
violence and using firearms). This is how M. experienced the clashes
on 28 June:
“When
the thugs of the Brotherhood attacked us on the 28th
when we went to protest in Sidi Gaber. That brought one to the point
that you have to... You reached a level where you frightened them,
and they
are now coming to terrorise you, or to shake you up a bit. And the
people who were hit in front of our eyes... Maybe... There was an old
man inside the Sidi Gaber tunnel, I took him out of there, he had
been hit by a bullet in his shoulder. In his arm, the bone... it
wasn't clear, but there seemed to be no bone left, his arm was
smashed. We brought him to the field hospital. There the doctor said:
That's a dumdum bullet. That's the same kind of bullet that killed
the martyr Al-Husseini
Abu Deif .3
It made you feel... You reached a point where, if you had had any
doubt previously... if you had had any hope that those people [i.e.
the Muslim Brothers] might have done so to defend a cause, now they
were defending the position of power they had. They would repeat what
they did before, they wouldn't be afraid at all to repeat it with you
or others. […] After that, you continue [i.e. join the 30 June
demonstrations], while at the same time you object to there being
people in the demonstration with you who chant ‘Join us El-Sisi!’
(inzil ya Sisi),
But there are also people with you in Sidi Gaber, not at the Northern
Military Headquarters,4
people who love to chant for the martyrs and who hold their pictures,
who are not in the demonstration to support a certain person.”
M.
tells us (in an interview recorded in mid-October 2013) how the
experience of violence came together with a political history of
struggle and created a moment of truth and decision in spite of the
doubts he continued to have. This is one of the most attractive and
terrifying aspects of engaging in a violent confrontation.
The
anthropologist Oskar Verkaaik, writing about ethnic violence in the
city of Hyderabad in the province of Sindh in Pakistan, argues that
daily life and also low-level conflicts are characterised by
ambiguity and negotiability where there is space for playfulness and
where radical ideas don't need to result in radical acts. But when
the people involved sense that there is an urgent existential threat
for collective survival, and when people are getting killed, there
emerges a “condensation
of negotiable beliefs into a single existential truth, a conviction
that leaves no room for other memories or beliefs.” (Verkaaik 2004:
140) Verkaaik argues that notions of ethnic purity alone do not lead
to violence. Most of the time, people with mutually antagonistic
visions of purity live in peace. But when violent confrontation
occurs, then such notions get connected with deeds, and people
involved sense that truth is revealed, that things are clear and
certain. Following Verkaaik's argument, I suggest that the
ideological polarisation and power struggle of different movements
and institutions did not as such result in the escalation of violence
that was unleashed in summer 2013. The expectation of bloodshed grew
and gained concrete shape because it was accompanied by an assertive
mood of broken fear and by repeated events of bloodshed that provided
more and more certainty and clarity about the upcoming decisive
battle.
Escalation
Then
came 30 June, 2013. Supported by massive demonstrations, the army
deposed Morsy on 3 July and instated a nominally civilian government.
Morsy and the Brotherhood leadership went to prison, his supporters
took to the streets, and the dynamic of polarisation and violence
took a different turn.
The
expectation among many in the 30 June movement had been that the
Muslim Brotherhood would attack the protesters, which would have
provided a final delegitimisation of their rule. However, the killing
that did happen on 30/6 was almost exclusively related to the
storming and defence of the Muslim Brotherhood's headquarters and
offices. Perhaps the Brotherhood leaders would have wanted to use
force against the protests on the streets but no longer had the
military and police under their control. Perhaps they did not want to
do it anyway because they knew that it would have de-legitimised them
even more. Whatever the case, with the police and army changing
sides, the balance and asymmetry of lethal force had already shifted.
After
3 July, the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies followed a strategy of
mass protests and martyrdom, at times intentionally provoking the
military, and turning every massacre against protesters – and there
were many massacres
– into a moral claim for righteousness of their cause of
“legitimacy”.5
The new, de facto military government and the 30 June alliance, on
their side, declared that they were “fighting terrorism” –
already before terrorist attacks began. “Fighting terrorism”
means declaring your enemy to be outside the realms of law,
negotiation, and fair treatment. A “terrorist”, regardless of
whether he or she actually commits any acts of terrorism, is by
definition a person can and must be caught or killed before
he or she can act.
Martyrdom
for legitimacy versus war against terrorism was the recipe for an
irreconcilable stand-off that made escalation very easy and retreat
very difficult. According to Verkaaik, the confrontation in Hyderabad
in 1990 reached a point of no return partly through the use of
powerful symbolic politics that made it impossible for the other side
to retreat without losing face, which resulted in a situation where
police officers facing a women's march had no way out and freaked
out, with deadly consequences. In a similar manner, the different
sides of the confrontation in Egypt staged a series of powerful
symbolic actions in June and July 2013 that left the other party with
a choice between humiliating capitulation and an escalation of the
confrontation. The Rabea el-Adawiya Sit-in was the most tragic of
these confrontations. The supporters of Morsy, who had declared to be
steadfast for their cause until martyrdom, could not retreat. The
military and its allies, having declared their enemies for terrorists
who must be
destroyed so that the
nation can live, could not let them be. Long before the massacre,
everybody knew that the stand-off was going result in a massacre.
Every symbolic gesture in the name of the nation, religion, the
people, revolution, or the martyrs made it more difficult to retreat.
This
logic was not new – it had its beginning already in spring 2011
when protesters would react to refusal by the government to accept
their demands by raising their demands. And it had always
successfully prevented compromises and constructive solutions.
The
shift in the asymmetry of violence and the irreconcilable stand-off
were accompanied by macabre shifts in how people spoke about
martyrdom sometimes, and legitimate force at other times. Many people
who saw themselves as revolutionaries continued to celebrate the
memory of martyrs like Mina Danial (killed by the army on 9 October
2011), Sheikh Emad Ezzat (killed by the army on 16 December 2011) or
Jika (Gaber Salah, killed by the police in November 2012) while at
the same time supporting the army and the police in killing the
supporters of Morsy. Among the Brotherhood supporters, same people
who in January-February 2013 had legitimised and defended the killing
of protesters by the police in the Port Said prison Massacre, now
found themselves as the targets of new massacres executed by the same
police force. As the supporters of Morsy claimed those killed by the
police as martyrs, those opposed to them accused them of “trafficking
with blood”, that is, turning the deaths of their own into a
political asset. But the way the Brotherhood employed martyrdom as a
political asset was not so different from the way in which the
revolutionary current had repeatedly turned the deaths of their own
into powerful symbols of struggle, nor was it more strategical than
the way Egyptian media publicly remembered the deaths of Egyptian
soldiers and policemen killed in bomb attacks and the military
campaign in the Sinai.
A graffiti depicting Mina Danial and Sheikh Emad Ezzat,
Cairo, February 2013. Photo by Samuli Schielke
Portrait distributed on social networks depicting Hala Abu
Sha‘sha‘ who was killed in el-Mansoura
in July 2013 during her participation in a
pro-Morsy demonstration
TV footage from the military funeral of conscripts killed in
action in Rafah in the Sinai, distributed as a still image on social
networks in August 2013
Although
both sides continued to see the other side as the primary perpetrator
of violence, “the war against terrorism” brought a different
logic of violence: a violence of supremacy that no longer fitted into
the moral logic of defensive struggle and martyrdom. Such violence of
supremacy no longer abided by the logic of relative equity of
response. It required an inhuman, terrorist enemy to whom such
considerations of equity did not apply. Even in the absence of actual
violence, the mere fact that the other side would act in a
provocative manner became an existential threat that legitimised a
call to eradicate them. The more the pro-military party demonised its
enemies, the more demonic did it become.
M.
remembers the discussions of those days that increasingly circled
around the desire to put a clear end point to the confrontation
regardless of the cost, to live and let die:
“Then
it reached a point where every day you say that these farces and
theatres that were going on in the sit-ins of Rabea and el-Nahda, and
the massacres that happened with them in Isaaf Square or in Ramses,
or at the Presidential Guard... all the incidents that happened made
one say: This farce must have an end. But how to end it? People tell
you: ‘Just storm it, man! Finish it!’ The thing one most heard
was: ‘What's the problem if we finish them off?’ With the same
logic of Morsy: ‘So what if one dies so that the others can live?’
No! No matter how much the people wanted it to end, and you see that
those are your enemies and they don't deserve to live – It's not OK
that you get to the point of exterminating them so that you can get
rid of them altogether, or so that you can live and take their
place.”
But
as M.'s strong misgivings show, this was not a smooth process, and
not everybody bought into it. A.S., a man in his mid-twenties from a
bourgeois family in Alexandria, had participated in protests ever
since 25 January, 2011. He was on the streets in January and February
2011, during the Mohamed M. uprising in November and December 2011,
and on many other occasions. He was injured twice and experienced
some narrow escapes from death. Those were the most beautiful days of
his life. He also participated in the 30 June movement, and on 5 July
2013, he was among a large group of demonstrators facing a large
group of Morsy supporters in Sidi Gaber in Alexandria. The clashes
that evolved cost 12 lives. The night after the clashes, he wrote on
his Facebook page:
“What
happened today in Alexandria wasn't a victory for us because we
pushed the Muslim Brothers to the sea and caught and killed many of
them, and neither was it a victory for the Muslim Brothers because
they shot us with birdshot and killed many of us. What... what
happened today was a human tragedy. The people on both sides no
longer felt what they were doing. They just lost their humanity, and
were left with their wickedness and love for blood and burning and
killing, They began to enjoy when they killed more, and the boast
that they killed somebody with a knife in his head or burned his car.
That is, when the Muslim Brothers throw one down from the roof and
when he dies they shout ‘God is great,’ celebrating the blood...
And when the revolutionaries catch one of the Muslim Brothers, and he
tries to escape, and they gather around him, 100 of them, like hungry
animals who found a piece of meat and everybody wants a bit of it,
happy as hell that they killed him and finished off the agent and
traitor. What stopped me in the middle of all what happened, was when
I saw the Salafi man wounded in front of me, the blood flooding the
street, and his eyes frightened. At that moment, I imagined that my
brother who is a Salafi could be in the place of that man. At that
moment, I couldn't stay the master of my nerves, and I could no
longer understand anything any more. For me, this has nothing to do
with either religion, or revolution, or citizenship/patriotism
(muwatana).”
A.S.
was shocked and confused when the beauty of revolutionary street
action transformed into a bloodthirsty frenzy. For him, this
particular struggle – unlike all preceding ones – brought no
clarity but confusion, a shattering of the certainty he had had. And
yet it would not shatter his enmity towards the Muslim Brothers,
although it did alienate him from the short-lived alliance he and
others like him had made with military enthusiasts.
The
shock and confusion experienced by A.S. was born from witnessing the
ugly and wicked reality of decisive battles. But the vast majority of
Egyptians only experienced those events through the media – heavily
filtered at best, fabricated and twisted at most. For those following
the events on their television screens and on social media, neither
the frenzy and joy of killing nor the shattering and confusing
experience of being part of it, were part of their experience of the
escalation. Instead, they received a much more convenient vision
about right and wrong, a vision where their enemies were acting in
wicked bloodthirsty frenzy while their own side was taking measured,
necessary steps to defend the nation against existential threat. When
the fantasy of bloodshed became real, it needed to be heavily
filtered to make it feel necessary and appropriate, to prevent
moments of shock and confusion like the one A.S. experienced. The
illusion of acting in a necessary and limited fashion against
inhumanely wicked enemies helped people to oscillate between two
seemingly incompatible stances: A call to kill one's enemies, and the
insistence that it was one's enemies who were being violent. It is
one thing to call for a massacre, and another thing to admit having
participated in one. And it is much easier to lose one's
humanity in front of a television screen.
No
tears for Rabea
This
is the moment when what once had been the revolutionary current fell
apart. They did not fall apart about 30 June,6
nor did they disagree about their enmity towards the Muslim
Brotherhood. But they did split about violence and the role of the
military leadership. At least in the village in the Nile Delta, the
decisive event was El-Sisi's call to Egyptians to give him a popular
mandate (tafwid) to
fight terrorism. The popular mandate, which was followed a
massacre against Morsy's supporters already
the next morning,7
provided the key legitimation for the storming of Rabea and el-Nahda
less than three weeks later. Those who joined the large-scale
demonstrations of the popular mandate considered those who didn't as
cowards and traitors. Those did not join the popular mandate
(probably fewer in numbers), saw that those who did had sold out the
principles of the revolution.
Those
opposed to the popular mandate made recourse to a counter-discourse
against polarisation and killing that had already formed in June
2013, making use of the humanist notion of humanity/humaneness
(insaniya) and the
Islamic notion of sanctity of blood (hurmat al-dam),
the prohibition of shedding the blood of one's own. Among the village
leftists, this stance was made most explicit by a middle-aged
one-time member of the Communist Party who emphasised that his stance
was not a political but a moral one. “If we ask about those who got
killed in Rabea: ‘What were they doing there anyway?’ (eh
illi waddahum hinak?), then what
were those killed on 25 January doing there anyway, and what where
they those killed in Mohamed Mahmoud doing there anyway, and what
were they all doing there anyway?”
And
yet it would be mistaken to claim that those who refused the popular
mandate were acting in a moral way while those who joined it were
not. In a moment of immediate confrontation, the loss of moral
inhibitions and the outbreak of hysterical anger can be an
uncontrollable and explosive situation where people just freak out.
But maintaining a mood of righteous anger
for weeks and months requires a more conscious work of incitement. It
also requires a mood of calm justification of necessity in face of
urgency.
Morality's
location is where spontaneous and cultivated emotions meet, and where
intuitive gut reactions and reflection come together. Compassion,
love, anger, fear, emboldenment, friendship and enmity can all be
spontaneous affects and moral principles at once, and they can be
extended or restricted to more or less people. Maintaining
uncompromising anger can be just as moral as insisting on the
sanctity of blood. In fact, those of the revolutionaries who in
summer 2013 stood on the side of uncompromising anger were very
affirmative that their stance was the morally righteous one.
M.S.
moved in the same circles of revolutionary leftists in the village.
He belonged to those who joined the popular mandate, and for several
months he was not on good talking terms with those who rejected it.
In July 2013, he wrote to me, very angry about what in my view was my
opposition to summary killings, but in his view was my support for
the fascist Muslim Brotherhood. In remarkably internationalist terms,
he criticised me for failing to support the anti-fascist struggle
that should be the shared cause of the left worldwide. When I finally
met him on my next visit in Egypt in October 2013, our tempers had
calmed enough that he could explain me his point of view.
Yes,
he had been calling “down with military rule” during the rule of
the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in 2011/12, but now the
situation was different, he told. As a leftist and secularist
activist and intellectual, he was facing a fundamentally violent
fascist movement, and that movement had to be defeated. As an
intellectual, he explained, he could not successfully fight them in
the streets. To do that, the muscle and the organisation of the army
was necessary. For M.S., this was not just a strategic choice. It was
a matter of principle. As a Nasserist and nationalist, he sees the
army and the nation as united – however, he sees the role of the
army as the protector, not as the leader of the nation. For M.S., who
is an active supporter of the Nasserist politician Hamdeen Sabbahi,
El-Sisi did the right thing in summer 2013, but he should not have
become president. Even
months later, when increasing scepticism spread in the former
revolutionary circles who found it hard to deny the reality of a
full-scale re-consolidation of the old regime, he made his stance
clear on his Facebook account: “So you may call me a mutabbalati
(“drummer“, propagandist for the regime) and old regime loyalist,
but still the Muslim Brothers are not Egyptians just like us, and not
all blood is haram.”
Support
for the violence of supremacy did not necessarily go hand in hand
with support or respect for the military's role. R., a woman from
Alexandria active in the revolutionary movement, invested no hope in
the military, but she would also shed no tears for those killed in
Rabea. When I met her in spring 2014 and we sorted out our different
points of view, she insisted that what was happening was “two armed
gangs finishing each other off.” The Rabea sit-in was armed, she
told me. There were only perpetrators, no victims. She and many
others put much effort in discursively establishing a symmetry of
violence that would allow one to claim the
position of a righteous outsider and not to ask
certain uncomfortable questions.
Be
it in the exposed militancy of M.S., or in the way R. took distance
from the events by placing equal blame on the parties involved, these
stances required reflection, consideration about right and wrong,
means and ends. They and others were involved in what contemporary
anthropology calls ethics (Laidlaw 2013; Lambek 2010; Mahmood 2009):
the reflection about the relationship of values and actions, and the
cultivation of those values as attitudes. They had strong opinions
about right and wrong, and they had thought about them well.
“Ethics”
sounds sympathetic because it is associated with being good,
consistent, responsible, and trying to do the right thing. But when
people argue that the good, right and responsible thing to do is to
kill their enemies, then ethics reveals a darker side of human
wickedness that needs to be taken seriously.
In
his book The Rebel
(Camus 1991) first published in 1951, Albert Camus addresses murder
as the key philosophical problem of the 20th
century – a philosophical problem in the very practical sense that
philosophy has provided justifications for the oppression and killing
of people for the sake of higher aims and ends. This problem quite
evidently remains relevant in the 21st
century, too. Low, criminal ends can seldom cause such havoc as high,
lofty ideals can.
This
is not to ignore that power struggles and the defence of vested
interests propelled much of the events in summer 2013, nor is it to
ignore that there were people in charge who cynically and cunningly
employed moral panic in order to consolidate their power. But power
and interests are not separate from moral concerns. To defend „our“
way of life is a matter of interests and values alike, it is about
what we value highly as the right and good, and it is about the
specific rights and the material goods that we enjoy and do not want
to give up. Truly cynical people are rare, and many mass murders have
been committed by people who were idealists on their own terms.
In
her reportage Eichmann in Jerusalem,
Hannah Arendt shows that the most terrifying part about Eichmann was
that he was not the
fanatical monster as which the prosecution tried to depict him.
Eichmann saw himself as a law-abiding citizen who had read Immanuel
Kant's Critique of Practical Reason
but later replaced the Kantian idea of abstract duty by the Nazi idea
of duty towards the Führer (Arendt 2006: 136-7). In the terms of
contemporary anthropology, Eichmann was engaged in a reflection about
the relation and form of acts and norms. If the engineer of one of
the world's greatest mass murders can be described as an ethical man,
then we need to rethink what we actually intend when we talk about
morality and ethics.
One
of the key tasks of anthropologists is to take seriously points of
view and visions of life they do not share, even if they strongly
disagree with them. Understanding rather than judging should be our
task. In the past couple of decades, Western anthropologists have
become reasonably good at recognising the ethics involved in Islamist
revivalist piety although its ends and aims can be radically at odds
with what most anthropologists themselves believe in. Anthropologist
have been less good, however, at giving the same benefit of doubt to
paranoid nationalism. One can speculate
about the reasons. My hunch is that this is because anthropologists
in their own societies are often politically and ideologically in
open conflict with supporters of populist and paranoid nationalism.
We can speak with more ease about people who are not out immediate
enemies. But this is not an excuse. If we can give extreme piety the
benefit of doubt about its ethical nature, then we must be able to
give the same benefit of doubt to extreme nationalism.
With
this, I do not mean to say that we should become relativists who
agree that whatever people claim to be right is right for them.
Morality is about living with others. It is about contact,
communication and conflict. There are no relativistic cultural
islands. M.S.'s recourse to the leftist internationalist discourse of
anti-fascism is a case in point. What I mean is that we must take
seriously the fact that human evil and wickedness are rooted in the
desire to defend the good. There is no safe realm of ultimate
goodness.
A plea for confusion and weakness
To
have a consistent moral stance, one needs to engage in reflection –
alone or, more typically, with others – about what is right, what
is important, and what is to be done. One needs to cultivate it in
acts and attitudes. But moral reflection also requires moral
oblivion. To have faith in something, one must be sceptical about
things that might trouble that faith. Even better, one should not
think about such things at all. One has to
develop sensibilities and attitudes that make one sarcastic,
condescending, or angry about acts and claims that could constitute a
competing sense of right and good. One has to use
double standards without noticing that one is doing so. In
short, one has to make oneself immune towards views and ways of
living that would trouble the sense of right and good which one has
worked hard to make one's own.
The
cultivation of moral injury, the way people develop a deep anger
about seeing, say, their national symbols or their venerated
religious figures challenged, is a good case of how moral oblivion
works. Another case is the kind of academic leftism that is very
strong among anthropologists in the West. Anthropologists can be
highly critical about global power inequalities while not paying much
attention towards the way in which their own careers are rooted in a
class society.
At
no other time is moral oblivion as crucial as in the time of a
righteous struggle. This, if any, is the moment of clear, firm
stances, a moment of action, a moment of purity. It is a moment when
it is necessary not to
see things from your enemy's point of view, and not
to question one's own position, but instead to go with the flow of
righteous anger. Remembering that the bearded man lying on the street
could be one's own brother would destabilise the consistency of the
struggle and contaminate its oblivious
purity. Purity is a
very dirty business.
Such
ethics of purity and struggle came to dominate the scene in Egypt in
summer 2013, preceded and made possible by two and half years of
polarisation and the mixture of aggressive emboldenment and anxious
uncertainty that, for the lack of a better word, was called “broken
fear”. Among those who sided with el-Sisi's “war on terrorism”,
a societal and medial excitement of extreme anger and disbelief
towards those who stood on the other side – liars, terrorists, not
Egyptians like all of us –, combined
with a convenient oblivion about the real shape and extent of the
killing and torture that was being committed by one's own side,
worked towards a sense of certainty that centred on the positive
value of the nation and a sense of urgency that centred on the threat
of terrorism. This made the bloodshed that followed not only
possible, but also justified, measured, and necessary from the point
of view of those who sided with the “war on terrorism”.
If
terrible crimes can be committed in the name of lofty values, if any
stance and any action
can be ethical with the help of some hard work of cultivation,
reflection and oblivion, if anger and fury are such a successful way
to prevent potential doubt – then what hope can there be? Can there
be a moral stance that may not, in the right circumstances, join the
campaign for the mass killing of those whose stance is wrong?
Consistency
and reflexivity do not provide a way out. A refusal of political
violence in the name of “humanity” and the “sanctity of blood”
can be as consistent and well-thought as the call for a relentless
“war against terror” for the sake of a strong nation, and the
same applies to the commitment to martyrdom and confrontation for the
sake of “Islamic Law and electoral legitimacy” (el-shari‘a
wa-l-shar‘iya), as it also
applies to a Jihadist bombing campaign of “martyrdom attacks”.
And each stance relies on some things taken for granted, some
questions not asked, some instinctive gut reactions escalated and
others suppressed.
But
of course, humans are seldom consistent. Consistency requires
struggle – both in the sense that one must sometimes struggle to
maintain an “illusion of consistency” (Ewing 1990), as well as in
the sense that meaningful struggle is the most powerful way to
maintain that illusion. Peace, in comparison, is a messy and
hypocritical affair of compromises, concessions, and questionable
deals.
And
yet
struggle creates not
only moments of clarity but also moments of confusion, moments
when the cultivation of certainty and oblivion fails.
One such moment was A.S.'s shock when the beauty of struggle
transformed into the joy of killing. Another such moment is described
by M. in the following. M. does not reject political violence in
principle, but soon after 30 June he became suspicious about the
military leadership's aims and shared in the discourses of humanity
and sanctity of blood. But in the middle of an unresolved stand-off
and a media out-roar of one alarming report following the other, he,
too, began to hope that the storming of the Rabea el-Adawiya sit-in
would put an end to the escalation, and at first he even bought into
the official narrative of “self-constraint” by the police:
“We
were happy when the storming of Rabea began. In the beginning, when
the storming began. We were sitting together and watching [on
television]. We thought: ‘Beautiful! They are evicting them without
hurting them. Just shooting some tear gas at them...’ And all the
stuff that was told on TV at first and all the images that were
broadcast on ONTV or the other channels that were covering it.8
[…] We were all... or never mind ‘we’, let me just speak for
myself. I was sitting and watching, and I was happy that it was over,
and that it was just tear gas without excessive violence, and I said:
‘Now you really are doing something. You are decreasing the tension
inside the people against the Muslim Brothers. You put an end to it,
and relieve people from the violence that was accumulating inside
those in the Rabea and el-Nahda sit-ins.’ And then, when the
numbers got known, and the aggression and violence that happened, and
the horrible way they dealt with the people inside the Rabea
sit-in... And graver than the numbers of people who got killed was
how the people who previously were angry about violent treatment
against anybody, now when the violence was against others and far
from them... It makes your realise that before, you weren't against
violence just because you are against violence. People were against
violence because it targeted them. When it turned away from them and
targeted those they hate, it became good. Now they want it, prefer
it, and they demand that it is used against those people, and they
tell you that that's the only way to deal with those people.”
M.'s
stance was not a consistent one – or, more precisely, he did not
try to depict his decisions and choices as consistent, because he
experienced a confusion that he could not, or would not, rationalise
and explain away. Unlike M.S. who was firm in his stance of a
righteous struggle by all means necessary, M. could not have joy
about seeing his enemy defeated when he realised what that meant in
practice. He could not resist the temptation to see his enemies as
fellow human beings.
It
can take a lot of strength and integrity not to follow the escalation
of polarisation and moral anger, “to maintain one's humanity” as
those who were against escalation and bloodshed in summer 2013 put it
(Youssef 2013). But in a time when so much emotional and ethical work
is invested in creating and maintaining enmity, also weakness can
become a virtue. Being a coward can rescue one from the destructive
stand-off of fearless confrontation (see Shehata 2013b). Temptation
can become the change of creating a crack in the carefully crafted
wall of an absolute good-evil binary. The sense of irbak –
bewilderment, confusion, and
loss of solid ground – can become an anti-thesis to fiercely
cultivated determination and oblivion. These sentiments came too late
to prevent the bloodshed. But maybe they can show a way out from the
deadlock of certainties.
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on lectures I gave at Stanford University in January 2014 and the University of Cambridge in May 2014. I am grateful for Aisha Shahid Ghani, Sharika Thiranagama, James Laidlaw, and Johannes Lenhard for offering me the occasions to discuss, develop, and write this essay.
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Footnotes
1The
picture got more complicated again in early 2013 when the Salafi
Nour Party, formerly the Muslim Brotherhood's most important ally,
changed sides and joined the opposition. In 2013 and 2014, the Nour
Party (which is dominated by clerics who have a remarkable history
of loyalism towards the Mubarak regime) has stood firmly on the
side of El-Sisi, which is a good reminder about the fact that the
conflict between religious and secular politics is just one of the
important conflict lines.
2
In Summer 2013, this logic of insults gained a new dimension in the
practice to ironically misspell words like “coup” or “human
rights” as if they were foreign loan words, insinuating that
concepts such as human rights were imported, empty words that had no
bearing for Egyptian reality and needed not to be taken seriously.
3Al-Husseini
Abu Deif was a photojournalist who who was killed in the clashes at
the Ittihadiya palacde in November 2012. His killers were never
identified, but in the anti-Morsy opposition it was considered
certain that they were from the Muslim Brotherhood.
4The
Northern Military Headquarters and Sidi Gaber Station are less than
one kilometre apart. The headquarters were a focal point of
anti-military protests in 2011 and 2012, and of pro-military
sentiment on 30 June 2013.
5“Legitimacy”
refers to the electoral mandate of Morsy's presidency. But in
Islamist discourse in 2013, it transformed into an increasingly
abstract and absolute category that referred not so much to the
numbers of votes in elections as it claimed the absolute legality
and legitimacy of the Brotherhood's claim for power and the
illegality and illegitimacy of competing claims. Because it is an
empty, legal category, it turned out to be a poor propagandistic
means to regain popular support in summer 2013. It has nevertheless
become deeply entrenched in the political language of the opponents
of the 30 June movement.
6There
were supporters of the revolutionary current who did not join the 30
June movement because they resented the prominent role played by
Mubarak loyalists in it, but in the village, the leftist
revolutionary social circles stood united in their support of 30
June.
7Protesters
from the Rabea sit-in tried to expand the area of the sit-in towards
the monument of the unknown soldier – an extremely symbolic
location for the Egyptian army – and nearly one hundred people
were killed when they were dispersed with live ammunition in the
early morning hours of 27 July 2013.
8M.
and his friends would not watch Al-Jazeera which they disliked and
distrusted because of its pro-Muslim Brotherhood bias.
