Egypt: On Why Only an Inclusive Transition Is the Only Solution to Civil Strife and Regional Instability

MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA, 22 Jul 2013

Alemayehu Fentaw Weldemariam – TRANSCEND Media Service

It now seems that the first popular uprising associated with the now famous names of Tahrir square and the Arab Spring had little more than symbolic significance to the Egyptian populace. Not because it didn’t result in the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, the country’s long-reigning dictator, but because it led to the hijacking of the revolution by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The ascendance to power of Mohamed Morsi backed by the Muslim Brotherhood yielded nothing, but an emergent theocratic state by subverting the legitimate ends of the popular uprising and setting Egyptians’ democratic aspirations aside. Needless to say, it is unproductive to enter into a debate about whether secularism is a defining feature of democracy. For one thing, it’s because scholars like Alfred Stepan has already shown decisively that a state can be religious, but still democratic and even, if you like, that the original intention of secularism in the US Constitution was just a prohibition against the federal government from establishing an official religion, and not against the states. Mona Eltahawy, the eminent Egyptian-American journalist, recently tweeted that “Egypt is making western leaders and scholars redefine what ‘democracy’ and ‘coup d’etat are.”  I replied to her tweet saying, “maybe that’s because they were trying to understand regime changes according to pol sci textbook definitions.”  Regime changes rarely unfold according to textbook definitions of “democracy,” “coup,” or “revolution.”  However, what makes coups and revolutions similar, if not identical, at the most general level is that both are unconstitutional means of changing ruling regimes, and, as such, it’s hard to make an ordinal ranking between them.  If the distinction is not that helpful, and perhaps inconsequential, then I wish to call particular attention to John Locke’s idea of a right to rebellion as an important element of western conceptions of liberal democracy.  Even if you adamantly adhere to these conceptual distinctions, it’s hard to dismiss the fact that the Morsi regime was removed through a mix of military coup d’etat following popular mass participation in the streets.  What then?

As you might recall, when Vice President Omar Suleiman announced on February 11, 2011, that Mubarak would be stepping down as president and handing power over to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, almost every analyst worth his salt never dared to call it a military coup d’etat. Soon after the June 24 announcement of the presidential election victory of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood declared the Shura council and constituent assembly unconstitutional, decreed presidential decisions beyond the reach of judicial review, and passed a draconian civil society law.  In view of this, and the damning statement of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights regarding the state of democracy, freedom, and justice in Egypt, it is crystal-clear that the so-called revolution that toppled Mubarak and ushered in Egypt’s first free and fair elections, was rendered meaningless.  Of course, Egypt was obviously in need of a new constitutional dispensation, but Morsi and the Brotherhood had hijacked the process and limited broad participation for all sectors of Egyptian political and civil society.   Many Egyptians considered this state-of-affairs a major step backwards and popular dissent mobilized on the streets.

In my opinion, it is too silly to ask whether it’s a coup d’etat or a revolution.  The more serious question that should be asked is, “are the Egyptian people securing the change they intended to bring about”?   Eltahawy agrees with an “Indeed.”   But I think it is too early to answer this question.  However, let me share with you why I think Mohamed El Baradei is the right choice for leadership.  El Baradei is a smart pick as he is a secularist, democrat, veteran technocrat, and has a full grasp of international relations.  He also has sensible ideas on how to share Nile water resources with other riparian nations based on equity and fairness, rather than to engage in sabre rattling.  In this connection, nothing testifies to his credentials for pacifism more than his persistent advocacy for a policy of multi-lateral diplomacy instead of war during the debates about nuclear weapons control in Iraq.

As Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has aptly observed in a recent Financial Times piece, “[s]o the military acted. Some will term what it did as a coup d’etat.  But this would be inaccurate. This political intervention came in response to a crisis; it was not its cause. Just as important, the events of recent days were not a power grab by Egypt’s military. The country’s soldiers wisely show little appetite for rule. They [are] entrusting temporary power with judicial authorities and setting up a timetable for political transition. This is as it should and must be.”

Kareem Fahim writes, in the New York Times, that “Not one of the 34 cabinet members belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, the 80-year-old Islamist movement that propelled Mr. Morsi to the presidency a year ago, or to any other Islamist party. The cabinet does include three women and three Coptic Christians, making it slightly more diverse, in some respects, than Mr. Morsi’s cabinet.”

Nevertheless, the major reason why Muslim Brotherhood has to be accommodated in the course of the transition is not least because it won the elections last year, but also because it suffered a long history of persecution. This points to a cardinal principle on the basis of which the ongoing transition has to be completed, namely tolerance. But that’s not without a proviso. That proviso can’t be expressed any better than by Leo Strauss: can tolerance remain tolerant when confronted with unqualified intolerance?

Equally importantly, what’s more particularly worrisome about the upheavals in Egypt today is the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is grounded in the teachings of Sayyid Qutb, none the less.  What pervades the writings of this Islamist ideologue is not only the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser, but also his idea that Muslim society in the Arab world and beyond had ceased to be Islamic, having relapsed to the condition of jahiliyya, the paganism of the period of ignorance that preceded the revelation of Islam. And so Qutb, the most influential of modern Sunni theorists in the Arab world, redefined the concept of jahiliyya, the age of ignorance before the coming of Islam, in terms of the modern state, thereby de-legitimizing it. Executed for his participation in an alleged plot to overthrow President Gamal Abdul Nasser in 1966, Qutb achieved a kind of posthumous revenge on the infidel government which martyred him: his resurrection of the writings of the 13th-century Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya contributed indirectly to the murder of President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Even if I would not say, following David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, that every election in which Islamists declared victory should not be taken seriously for lack of democratic legitimacy, I do contend that Islamic parties should be given political space as long as they play by the rules and do not attempt to subvert the rules of the game once in power.  Therefore, the transition can only ill-afford not to include the Muslim Brotherhood as long as it does not turn to violence and focuses on governance that respects the basic human rights of all Egyptian citizens and conducts its foreign affairs in the spirit of good neighborliness.

Although it goes without saying that liberals are more accommodative of diversity, but it is not without limits. If liberals are to be supported, it is not for the mere reason that they are secular, but for the reason that they are accommodative and hence democratic. But if the Islamists, which might sound  an oxymoron, promise, if not prove, that they’ll be accommodative of whatever diversity there is in Egypt’s public life, they shouldn’t be denied of a chance to run the state apparatus. That explains part of the reason why I initially supported the liberals. The other part has to do with the liberals’ commitment to regional peace. Given that the Nile plays a significant role in the hydropolitics of North East Africa, the successor has to be as accommodative and as responsible to the interests of riparian countries’ interests in the river.  Besides, the issue of peace in the Middle East in general, and that of Israel and Palestine in particular, has to be factored in the succession plan. In view of the fact that Egypt will be impacting on the regional stability of the Middle East and North East Africa because of its geopolitics as well as the whole planet as a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism, it’s imperative that not only the Egyptian populace, but also the international community has to see to it that there should be a regime that places a premium on domestic peace and regional stability in Egypt.

Thus, the enormous challenge facing the incoming Egyptian leadership is sheparding forward a democratic transition, turning around an economy in free fall, curtailing the illegitimate use of violence, including rape and the ongoing backlash against Copts, promoting religious toleration, and reaching a win-win solution with Ethiopia on the Nile.  Egypt’s future leadership, whoever that may be, should not be deterred by the enormity of the challenges.  Egypt needs reasonable, problem-solving politicians and liberal visionaries such as El Baradei.  Last, but not least, the transition leadership should commission an independent investigation into allegations of arbitrary killings committed in the course of the upheavals.

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Alemayehu Fentaw Weldemariam is an Ethiopian-born Horn of Africa analyst based in the US. He holds a joint appointment at University of Texas’s LBJ School of Public Affairs and Austin Community College. Most recently, he’s been appointed as Visiting Professor of Government at Suffolk University in Boston.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 22 Jul 2013.

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