There's a reason Egyptians keep taking to
the streets: The Muslim Brotherhood has proved to be little more than the old
Mubarak clique with beards.
BY HANI SHUKRALLAH |FEBRUARY 8, 2013
CAIRO —
There is no denying that Egypt's revolution has turned more violent and grimmer
since its ecstatic early days. For all its nobility of purpose, it has proved
unequal to the enormous tasks history had placed on its shoulders. It was
stalled and hijacked -- first by the military in uneasy collaboration with the
Muslim Brotherhood, and then by the Brotherhood in uneasy collaboration with
the military.
What
can look like mere chaos is actually the natural product of a revolution whose
signature demands remain unfulfilled. And there's no wishing it away anymore:
Hosni Mubarak's regime is alive and well, in all but name. The only difference
is that its representatives sport the trim beard preferred by Brotherhood
leaders, if not the grizzly, flowing beards of their Salafi allies.
Yet
again, a single political party seeks to exercise uncontested hegemony over
Egypt's state and society. Not only has it kept in place a legal code laden
with repressive legislation, but it has maintained the structures of
authoritarian rule erected by its predecessors.
Two
years after the revolution against Mubarak's police state, not a single step
has been taken to reform Egypt's hated police force, which ran riot during 30
years of uninterrupted state of emergency. Today, it continues to function as a
lawless militia feeding on torture, murder, fabrication, and detentions without
trial.
Egyptians
received another reminder of this fact last Friday, Feb. 1, when a citizen
captured on video a horrific scene of roughly a dozen police officers --
dressed in full anti-riot gear -- beating and stripping naked a middle-aged
protester, Hamada Saber. Possibly more disturbing was the televised
"confession" Saber was later made to give, in which the battered,
clearly terrified man claimed that he'd been stripped and beaten by the
protesters and that the police were actually helping him. Saber later reversed
his initial account, admitting that
the police were to blame and that his confession was coerced.
The
"confession" was even more revealing than the incident itself: Two
years after the revolution, Mubarak's police remain as willing to use threats
and torture to fabricate evidence and extract the most ludicrous of testimonies
-- and the Muslim Brotherhood remains unwilling to demand change.
The
abuses of Egypt's police under President Mohamed Morsy's administration are
increasingly attracting international attention. In the course of a single week
of protests marking the second anniversary of the revolution, some 50 people
were killed and hundreds more injured in street battles between the police and
Egyptian citizens. In a statement on the violence, Amnesty
International noted that eyewitness accounts "point to the unnecessary use
of lethal force by security forces during a weekend of clashes with
demonstrators."
And as
for the new constitution drawn up exclusively by the Muslim Brotherhood and its
Salafi-jihadi allies, it has proved to be potentially even more authoritarian
than the 1971 constitution under which Mubarak consolidated his rule.
Maintaining the previous constitution's bizarre penchant for rendering basic
rights and civil liberties subject to the stipulations of a profoundly
anti-democratic legal code, the new constitution subjects them as well to the
unstated "principles of Islamic law," as elaborated by the
collectivity of acknowledged Sunni jurists -- most of whom lived and delivered
their rulings during the Middle Ages.
Two
additional twists to the new, "democratic" constitution potentially establish an
Iran-style, if Sunni, theocracy. Prominent Salafi leaders have interpreted the
constitution as allowing judges to refer directly to Islamic law in passing
sentences -- cutting the hands of thieves, stoning adulterers, and the like --
without having recourse to specific penalties stipulated by the legal code.
The
Muslim Brotherhood's use of torture and street thugs is also hauntingly
evocative of standard Mubarak regime practice. Following the Dec. 5
attack on protesters demonstrating before the presidential palace -- employing
guns, knives, swords, and tear gas -- Morsy delivered a televised national
address in which he claimed he had solid evidence, including confessions, that
some 80 detained protesters were paid agents of Mubarak regime
"remnants."
In
fact, the detainees, who had been captured and tortured by Brotherhood thugs,
were all cleared and released the next day by the district prosecutor. At that
point, the Morsy-appointed prosecutor general punished the prosecutor by transferring him to a
remote province -- triggering open rebellion in the prosecution service and
forcing the prosecutor general to retract his decision.
For his
part, Morsy has yet to offer an apology or explanation for his wild
accusations, which under the Egyptian legal code renders him liable for
prosecution and a prison term for slander.
Freedom
of expression and freedom to peacefully protest have also been under concerted
attack by the new regime. The Brotherhood, rather than acting to guarantee the
independence of the state-owned media, has sought to bring these outlets under
its sway -- maintaining and even increasing their obsequiousness to the ruler
of the moment and their nearly unmitigated lack of professionalism. The
Brotherhood did so even as it acted to intimidate and strangle privately owned
media: Its Salafi allies laid siege to Greater Cairo's Media City, home to most
private TV stations, and called for the "purging" of the media,
while the government launched a record number of cases against the
president's critics in the media, most prominently liberal satirist Bassem Youssef -- Egypt's Jon Stewart.
Even
the Brotherhood's single claim to democratic governance -- allowing free
elections --is now being subjected to increasing challenge. The constitutional
referendum, the single poll held under Brotherhood rule, was tarnished by various recorded incidents of electoral
rigging, including the barring of potential "no" voters from gaining
access to polling stations.
The new
parliamentary electoral law has also been tailored to perpetuate the Islamists'
dominance of the legislative branch. The Brotherhood has gerrymandered Egypt's
electoral system so that it is very far from one man, one vote: Under the new
law, Qalyubia governorate, effectively a working-class suburb of Greater Cairo,
has been allocated 18 parliamentary seats, while the Brotherhood-dominated
Upper Egypt governorate of Sohag is allocated 30. The number of voters in
Qalyubia exceeds the number in Sohag by 300,000.
There
is no little irony in the fact that the only relatively free polls Egypt has
known in decades might prove to have been those held under military rule.
And two
years after a revolution whose equivalent of the French Revolution's liberté,
égalité, fraternité was "bread, freedom, social justice,"
Egyptians find themselves governed by a regime deeply rooted in class privilege
and pursuing the very same social and economic policies that favor the rich at
the expense of the poor. Muslim Brotherhood leaders, not least the
president, have continued to ignore demands for progressive taxation, a fair
minimum wage, and the need for sweeping reform of the bloated, inefficient, and
corruption-ridden bureaucracy.
The
new-old regime's social intentions were made even starker by the one
significant piece of economic legislation put forth by Morsy: An increase of
the sales tax, which would have hit the poor and middle class the hardest, was
stealthily passed in December and then announced a week later at 9 p.m. --
practically on the eve of the second round of voting on the constitutional referendum.
It was then comically retracted a few hours later,
around 2 a.m., after Morsy said he had "felt the pulse" of the
masses, most of whose members were presumably asleep.
Meanwhile,
basic public services are in a state of general collapse. The most recent
evidence of this is the recurring railway disasters, which in the course of
Morsy's presidency have claimed the lives of nearly 80 people, including more
than 50 children, and caused the injury of hundreds. Public hospitals are
nearly everywhere bare of the most basic medicines and equipment, including
beds -- critical patients are made to lie on dirty, littered floors. Public
education, ostensibly free, has in fact become almost prohibitively expensive
for most Egyptian families, even as standards have hit rock bottom.
The
revolution continues, but…
For all
these reasons, "normalcy" has not returned to Egypt. Protesters will
continue to take to the streets en masse until the demands of the revolution
are met.
The
second anniversary of the revolution provided yet another illustration of this
fact. Egypt once again witnessed demonstrations in Cairo's iconic Tahrir Square
and all major Egyptian cities, a state of emergency in the three Suez Canal
cities, lethal police violence and attacks by unidentified armed thugs, and the
icing on the cake -- a late-night presidential statement issuing threats while
calling for dialogue. It was like déjà vu all over again.
Yet
this is not a mere replay. It is difficult to imagine this uprising ejecting
Morsy from the presidency in the same way Mubarak was ousted from power two
years ago. The major difference, of course, is electoral legitimacy. It can't
be denied that the Muslim Brotherhood and its hard-line allies do continue to
enjoy a popular base and are in possession of a huge party apparatus with tens
of thousands of indoctrinated, committed cadres.
True,
winning an election is not all it's made out to be. I would hazard that, had
Mubarak been willing to run in a free and fair presidential ballot, he would
still have won -- simply on the strength of state patronage. An unrigged
election is not the same as a free and fair election, which assumes a fairly
even playing field. And there is also no denying the Brotherhood's swift loss
of popularity once it achieved power, which has been a sight to behold.
But
still, this is not the extreme isolation of an ossified and decaying clique,
like the last years of Mubarak's rule. Nor can the Brotherhood and its Salafi
friends be compared to the bloated, dilapidated network of state patronage that
was Mubarak's ruling party, nor even to what Mubarak loyalists liked to call
the "Ahmed Ezz militia" -- a reference to the mostly yuppie men and
women assembled by the infamous steel magnate to rig elections and whip the
tattered party apparatus into shape.
Meanwhile,
the profound cleavage at the heart of the revolution remains in place. Egypt
experienced an almost strictly urban revolution, with the countryside -- which
accounts for a little over 40 percent of the population -- largely standing
aside. This urban-rural divide is playing out again in Egypt's current political
struggle as the Brotherhood loses support in the country's major cities. In the
first round of the presidential election, the cities overwhelmingly voted for
non-Islamist candidates, and in the constitutional referendum the cities also
slipped away. This dynamic is further substantiated by the hundreds of
thousands of protesters who have won nearly uncontested preeminence on the
streets of major cities throughout the country.
But the
Brotherhood and its allies' support in rural and semirural Egypt remains
strong. This support allows them to fall back on claims of "electoral
legitimacy" through mobilizing their supporters in the countryside,
especially in Upper Egypt. They are also further bolstered by the traditionally
higher voter turnout in rural Egypt compared with urban voter turnout.
Whether
the Brotherhood can maintain its electoral advantage, however, depends on the
vision of its political leadership. Its odds aren't good: The Islamist
movement came to power in Egypt after having disposed of its most intelligent
and politically sophisticated leaders. By 2008, such notable figures as former
Deputy Supreme Guide Mohamed Habib and former Guidance Bureau member Abdel
Moneim Aboul Fotouh had been divested of any real influence within the group.
The
leadership has subsequently fallen fully in the hands of what the group's
reformist members describe as "the organizational wing," which
controls recruitment, indoctrination, and the internal hierarchy, as distinct
from "the political wing," which was involved in day-to-day political
activism, including collaboration with other non-Islamist political forces.
This organizational wing is made up of Salafists and hard-line followers of
Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb, and it is the movement's most regressive,
doctrinaire, and least politically savvy force.
Following
the revolution, the reformist trend found itself outside the Brotherhood
altogether. In fact, all the Brotherhood representatives in the Coalition of
the Youth of the Revolution -- which provided field leadership in the 18-day
uprising that toppled Mubarak -- are now outside the group, divided among the
ranks of Aboul Fotouh's Strong Egypt party and the Egyptian Current. These
figures are now moving even further away from the Brotherhood, toward a new and
democratic Islamism -- a potentially historic development for Egypt and the
entire Muslim world.
In a
Facebook posting a few months ago, I joked that of all world revolutions,
Egyptians seem to have picked the French Revolution to emulate -- that is, a
struggle that raged, in various shapes and forms, for nearly a century.
Hopefully, we're not in for another 100 years of this tumult, but the path
toward the realization of the revolution's great aims remains long and
tortuous.
Egypt's
polarized political and social forces continue to be too evenly matched, and
the schism between the protagonists too deep, for any viable resolution in the
short term. The Muslim Brotherhood may have won -- for the moment -- the
reluctant backing of the military and the police, but they're by no means its
creatures. The country's security services have minds and imperatives of their
own that are by no means identical to, or even commensurate with, those of the
Brotherhood leadership. The judiciary also continues to jealously defend its
independence from repeated Brotherhood attacks.
And
most important of all: The revolution continues.
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