Egypt: I Ask Myself Why (Muslim Brotherhood) - Why Egypt 2011 Is Not Iran 1979
07 February 2011By Juan Cole
I ask myself why.
Why would authorities in a European county like
Switzerland entertain the idea of trying George W.
Bush for torture if he came to give a talk in that
country;
But, European countries are supporting Omar Suleiman
for interim president of Egypt, even though he was the
one who undertook the torture for Bush? Suleiman
tossed some 30,000 suspected Muslim fundamentalists in
prison, and accepted from the US CIA kidnapped
suspected militants, whom he had tortured. Some were
innocent. One, Sheikh Libi, was tortured into falsely
confessing that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda
operatives, an allegation that straight into Colin
Powell's speech to the UN justifying the Iraq War.
I ask myself why.
If Frank Wisner, President Obama's informal envoy to
Egypt, is a paid lobbyist for Egypt and says things
like that Mubarak must stay, which Obama then has to
deny …
Why didn't Obama send an envoy from Human Rights Watch
instead?
I ask myself why
If Bush and the Neocons installed a pathbreaking
democracy in iraq . . .
– Why does its prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, have
to pledge not to run for office again (taking a leaf
from the books of the rulers of Yemen and Egypt? Why
does al-Maliki have secret prisons where people appear
to have been tortured? Why is he taking over
independent commissions such as the electoral
commission?
I ask myself why.
If President Hosni Mubarak, his generals, and the
ruling National Democratic Party have engaged in voter
fraud and corruption during each of the elections for
the past few decades;
… Would would make them honest brokers in moving the
county to presidential elections in September?
I ask myself why.
If the Mubarak regime has had a change of heart and
will now move toward democracy;
why is its secret police snooping through Facebook
accounts with an eye to making arrests? And, where is
Wael Ghonim?, the Google exec who began the Facebook
page for the Jan. 25 demonstrations?
I ask myself why.
If the resignations of high Egyptian officials, and
reputedly even Mubarak himself, from the National
Democratic Party are sincere;
Then why not just resign from the presidency, since
the point of being in the ruling party was to attempt
to use it to come to power?
I ask myself why.
If the Muslim Brotherhood is supposed to be such a
radical party
Then why is it a) the first major opposition party to
begin negotiations with the government; and b) why is
the MB rebuking Iran's ruling ayatollah Ali Khamenei
for saying the street revolution is Islamic, insisting
instead that it is national?
Why
Egypt 2011 Is Not Iran 1979
Alarms have been raised by those observing the
popular uprising in Egypt that, while it is not itself
a Muslim fundamentalist movement, the Muslim
fundamentalists could take it over as it unfolds. The
best-positioned group to do so is the Muslim
Brotherhood. Some are even conflating the peaceful
Brotherhood with radical groups such as al-Qaeda. I
showed in my recent book, Engaging the Muslim World,
that the Muslim Brotherhood has since the 1970s
opposed the radical movements. In any case, the
analogy many of these alarmists are making, explicitly
or implicitly, is to Iran in 1978-79, which saw
similar scenes of massive crowds in the street,
demanding the departure of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi,
their king.
Misagh Parsa argued that the revolution of 1978-79 was
made by several different social groups, each for its
own reasons. The revolution was fought against the
monarchy, which presided over an oil-exporting economy
that had gone into overdrive because of the big
fourfold run-up of prices in the 1970s. Many felt that
they were not sharing in that prosperity, or were
inconvenienced by the Shah's authoritarian government.
1. THE BAZAAR: The bazaar
is a way of referring to the old business and artisan
classes who congregated in covered bazaars and around
mosques and courts in the older part of Iranian
cities. Everyone from tinsmiths, to moneylenders, to
carpet import-export merchants is encompassed by the
phrase. The bazaar came to be in significant
competition with the new business classes (importers
of tin pans were putting the tinsmiths out of
business, and modern banking was making inroads
against the moneylenders). The bazaar had many links
with the ayatollahs in mosques and seminaries,
including via intermarriage. The Shah despised the
bazaar as a bastion of feudal backwardness, and
imposed onerous taxes and fines on it, in addition to
casually destroying entire bazaars, as at Mashhad. THE
BAZAAR FAVORED THE CLERGY AND BANKROLLED THE
REVOLUTION.
2. WHITE AND BLUE COLLAR WORKERS:
Industrial and oil workers struck over
their wages and labor conditions. School teachers and
white collar professionals (nurses, physicians, etc.)
protested the lack of democracy.
3. SECULAR PARTIES: The
old National Front of the early 1950s movement for oil
nationalization was weak and aging but still
significant. The Communist Party was much less
important than in the 1950s but still had some
organizational ability. Left-leaning youth radicals,
such as the Fedayan-i Khalq (which leaned mildly
Maoist) had begun guerrilla actions against the
regime. There were also secular intellectuals in what
was called the Writer's Movement.
4. RELIGIOUS FORCES: The
religious forces included not only the clergy and
mosque networks of dissidents such as Grand Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini (in exile in Najaf, Iraq and then
Paris), but also religious party-militias such as the
Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK: Fighters for the People). In
Shiite Islam, a doctrine had grown up that laypersons
owe implicit obedience to the clergy when the latter
rule on the practice of religious law. Ayatollahs have
a place of honor not common for Sunni clergy.
Parsa argues, I think correctly, that the religious
forces were initially only one of the important social
groups that made the revolution, but of course they
ultimately hijacked it and repressed the other three.
Note that although the rural population was the
majority in Iran at that time, it was little involved
in the revolution, though it was very well represented
in the subsequent revolutionary parliament and so
benefited from new rounds of road, school and other
building in the 1980 and 1990s.
Egypt is, unlike Iran, not primarily an oil state. Its
sources of revenue are tourism, Suez Canal tolls,
manufactured and agricultural exports, and strategic
rent (the $1.5 bn. or so in aid from the US comes
under this heading). Egypt depends on the rest of the
world for grain imports. Were it to adopt a radical
and defiant ideology like that of Iran, all its major
sources of income would suddenly evaporate, and it
might have trouble even just getting enough imported
food. Moreover, the social forces making the
revolution in Egypt have a significantly different
profile and different dynamics than in Iran. Let us
just go through the same list.
1. THE BAZAAR: To the
extent that there is a bazaar (the Arabic would be suq)
in Egypt, it is by now very heavily dependent on the
tourist trade. Coptic Christians are well represented
in it. The suq therefore tends to oppose social
policies that would scare away Western tourists. The
suq will do very badly this year because of the
turmoil. One merchant in Khan al-Khalili once told me
that the bad years for his business had been 1952,
1956, 1967, 1973– the years of the revolution and then
the Arab-Israeli wars that would have been celebrated
by nationalists but which he regretted.. Because few
tourists came those years. That the Egyptian Market
would bankroll Egyptian fundamentalists to establish
an oppressive theocracy that would permanently scare
away German holiday-makers is highly unlikely.
Khan al-Khalili
2. WHITE AND BLUE COLLAR WORKERS: These groups are
among the primary instigators of the Egyptian
uprising. The April 6 group of young labor activists
first came to prominence when they supported strikes
by textile factory workers in Mahalla al-Kubra and
elsewhere for improved wages and work conditions.
There have been more than 3,000 labor actions by
Egyptian workers since 2004. The pro-labor youth
activists have been among the major leaders of the
uprising in the past week, and had pioneered the use
of Facebook and Twitter for such purposes.
Egyptian Factory Workers
3. SECULAR FORCES. When I say ‘secular' with regard to
Egypt, I do not mean that these groups are made up of
atheists and agnostics. Their members may go to mosque
and pray and be personally pious. But such people can
nevertheless vote for parties that are not primarily
organized around religion. These include the New Wafd
Party, a revival of the old liberal party that
dominated Egypt 1922-1952 during its "liberal" period
of parliamentary elections and prime ministers. The
Wafd had originally represented the interests of great
landlords and budding bankers and industrialists,
though its original role in fighting for independence
from Britain also gave it popular support. It
reemerged when Egypt began turning away from Gamal
Abdel Nasser's socialism and it again championed
private property rights. It attracted the allegiance
of many Copts, as well as middle class Muslims.
Although it has suffered divisions and declining
popularity in recent elections, in a situation of free
and fair elections it could regain some popularity.
Then there is the Tomorrow (al-Ghad) party of Ayman
Nur, who won 8% of the vote in the 2005 presidential
election. And there is the Kefaya! (Enough!) movement.
All three favor human rights and parliamentary
democracy. There are also many secular figures in the
literary establishment and in the film world (such as
comic Adil Imam). And, of course, there is the ruling
National Democratic Party, which has a generally
secular bias and dislikes Muslim fundamentalism.
Whether it can overcome its association with Hosni
Mubarak and continue to contest elections credibly
remains to be seen. It is now by far the dominant
party in parliament, though nobody thinks the
elections were free and fair.
Ayman Nur
4. THE RELIGIOUS FORCES: Unlike in Iran, there are
relatively few prominent dissident clergy.
"Televangelist" Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in exile in Qatar,
should be counted among them. The Egyptian state had
for the most part nationalized mosques and controlled
the clerical corps. Few Egyptian clergyman command the
respect or obedience of the laity to the extent that
Khomeini did in Iran. The major religious party is the
Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. Although it
developed a terrorist wing in the 1940s, it faced
severe crackdowns in the 1950s and 1960s, and lost
that capacity. Although the radical thinker Sayyid
Qutb came out of their movement, the MB leadership
disowned him in the late 1960s and even refuted his
radical doctrines (such as declaring other Muslims
with whom he disagreed to be ‘non-Muslims') as
"un-Sunni." By the 1970s the Brotherhood's leaders
were willing to make their peace with the government
of Anwar El Sadat. He let them operate if they agreed
not to resort to violence and not to try to overthrow
the government. In the 1990s, the Brotherhood came to
counter the radical movements, such as the Egyptian
Islamic Jihad, and so had a tacit partnership with the
state. Egypt does not allow parties to be organized on
the basis of religion, but even so Muslim Brother
candidates have done well in some parliamentary
elections (especially 2006), running under the rubric
of other parties.
So to recapitulate. The white collar and labor
activists are far more central to the organization of
the Egyptian protests than had been their counterparts
in the Iranian Revolution. The Egyptian "bazaar" is
much less tied to the Muslim clergy than was the case
in Iran, and far less likely to fund clerical
politicians. Whereas Iran's bazaar merchants often
suffered from Western competition, Egypt's bazaar
depends centrally on Western tourism. Secular parties,
if we count the NDP, have an organizational advantage
over the religious ones, since they have been freer to
meet and act under Mubarak. It is not clear that the
law banning religious parties will be changed, in
which case the Brotherhood would again be stuck with
running its candidates under other rubrics. And, Sunni
Muslims don't have a doctrine of owing implicit
obedience to their clergy, and the clergy are not as
important in Sunni religious life as the Shiite
Ayatollahs are in Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood, a
largely lay organization, has a lot of support, but it
is not clear that they could gain more than about a
third of seats even if they were able to run in free
elections.
One of the sources of the Muslim Brotherhood's
popularity was its opposition to Mubarak, and it may
actually lose followers without him around. Other
religious politicians and entrepreneurs may
proliferate, in a freer atmosphere, dividing the
religious section of the electorate. And, the
Brotherhood could well evolve to be more like Turkey's
Justice and Development [AK] Party than like its old,
sectarian, underground self. There is nothing in MB
ideology that forbids participation in parliamentary
democracy, even though it was not exactly a big theme
of its founder, Hasan al-Banna.
Some analysts read off support for the MB from
Egyptians' religiosity. Egyptians have been undergoing
a religious revival in the past couple of decades. You
have to think about them like southern evangelicals in
the US. When I am in Egypt it reminds me a lot of
South Carolina in that regard. But that people go to
mosque, or that their women wear headscarves, or that
they value religion, does not necessarily translate
into them voting for a sectarian and somewhat cliquish
group like the Muslim Brotherhood. Many pious Muslims
are factory workers and so closer to April 6 than to
the Brotherhood. Many women who wear headscarves do so
to legitimate their entry into the modern labor force
and appearance in the public sphere. National identity
co-exists with the religious. Egyptians are also great
nationalists, and many insist that the Egyptian nation
is a framework within which Christian Copts are
completely legitimate participants.
A recent Pew poll found that 59% of Egyptians favor
democracy in almost all situations. And fully 60
percent are very or somewhat worried about the specter
of religious extremism in their society. About 61% do
not even think there is a struggle between modernizers
and religion in Egypt.
Among the 31% who did see such a struggle, 59% favored
religious forces and 21% favored the modernizers.
Barry Rubin and Michael Totten misread this latter
statistic to be true of all Egyptians. They are wrong.
The statistic is not about Egyptians in general, but
about the third of them who see a conflict between
modernizers and religion. 59% of 31% is 18% of the
whole Egyptian population who favor fundamentalists
over modernizers. The rest either favor the
modernizers or think it is a phony conflict. Not
thinking that modernism and religiosity conflict is
generally a liberal point of view.
It cannot be assumed that the Muslim Brotherhood is
the future face of Egypt, and there is no reason to
think it has the popularity or levers of power that
would allow it to make a coup. The Brothers are more
likely to gain further influence (as they already have
since 2006) via parliamentary elections. I cannot, of
course, know whether there will be new parliamentary
elections in Egypt soon, whether the Muslim
Brotherhood will be allowed to run, or how well,
exactly, they will do. They would likely be far more
influential in a democratic Egypt than they have been
under Mubarak, but I cannot see what would make them
hegemonic. They would want liquor to be banned
throughout the country, e.g. which would be very bad
for tourism, and a lot of Egyptians depend on tourism.
Of course, social groups sometimes do go in directions
that irrationally harm their economic interests. But
the Cassandras have no proof that Egyptians will take
that path.
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