Morbid Symptoms

Relapse in the Arab Uprising

Gilbert Achcar

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780863561832
• eBook ISBN: 9780863561788
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Since the first wave of uprisings in 2011, the euphoria of the "Arab Spring" has given way to the gloom of backlash and a descent into mayhem and war. The revolution has been overwhelmed by clashes between rival counter-revolutionary forces: resilient old regimes on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalist contenders on the other.In this eagerly awaited book, foremost Middle East and international affairs specialist Gilbert Achcar analyzes the factors of the regional relapse. Focusing on Syria and Egypt, Achcar assesses the present stage of the uprising and the main obstacles, both regional and international, that prevent any resolution. In Syria, the regime's brutality has fostered the rise of jihadist forces, among which the so-called Islamic State emerged as the most ruthless and powerful. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood's year in power was ultimately terminated by the contradictory conjunction of a second revolutionary wave and a bloody reactionary coup. Events in Syria and Egypt offer salient examples of a pattern of events happening across the Middle East.Morbid Symptoms offers a timely analysis of the ongoing Arab uprising that will engage experts and general readers alike.Drawing on a unique combination of scholarly and political knowledge of the Arab region, Achcar argues that, short of radical social change, the region will not reach stability any time soon.

TWO

Egypt: The “23 July” of Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852–1869)

The above epigraph is one of the best-known and most often repeated and mimicked quotations from Karl Marx.¹ Commenting on the coup d’état that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III) led on 2 December 1851, thus ending the short-lived French Second Republic (1848–51), Marx was comparing it with the coup led by Louis-Napoléon’s uncle, the famous Napoléon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon I) on 9 November 1799 – 18 Brumaire Year VIII of the French revolutionary calendar.² What Marx’s ironic comment overlooked, however, is that the “farce” itself can be quite tragic – what the French call farce tragique. Alfred Jarry’s play King Ubu (Ubu Roi in the original – a partial parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth) is regarded as this genre’s founding text.³ From it, the French derived the adjective ubuesque, which refers to grotesquely cruel despotism.

Of course, 23 July is the date of the coup that Egypt’s Free Officers, led by Gamal Abdel-Nasser, executed in 1952, overthrowing the Egyptian monarchy. On 3 July 2013, Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi led a coup toppling Mohamed Morsi, and ending the short-lived Egyptian Second Republic (2011–13). Without any fear of ridicule, Sisi’s coup was travestied ad nauseam by its enthusiasts as a second iteration of what, in Egypt, is referred to as the “23 July Revolution”. The truth, however, is that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup had much more in common with his uncle’s – they were both essentially reformist coups, ending a phase of revolutionary turmoil in order to carry through a major stage of France’s bourgeois transformation – than Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi’s coup has with the one led by Nasser. The latter was a textbook case of a revolutionary coup d’état, whereas the coup executed on 3 July 2013 was definitely a reactionary one that restored Egypt’s old regime – indeed, with a vengeance.⁴

When I finished writing The People Want, at the end of October 2012, the chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, Mohamed Morsi, had been president of Egypt for only four months. His co-thinkers were celebrating his success in imposing civilian control over the military – as demonstrated in their eyes by Morsi’s sending into retirement of the two most senior members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), on 12 August 2012 – and the global media overwhelmingly shared their assessment. Against this widespread view, I emphasised that “the army’s power and privileges have by no means diminished under Morsi in comparison with what they were under Mubarak. Egypt has seen nothing even remotely resembling the events in Turkey … that put a real end to the military’s tutelage over the Turkish political authorities.”⁵

With regard to the economic and social perspectives, I asserted that, by following the neoliberal prescriptions, “Morsi, his government and, behind them, the Muslim Brothers are leading Egypt down the road to economic and social catastrophe.” The political and social instability engendered by the uprising made the prospect of growth led by private investment in conformity with the neoliberal credo still more improbable, “and one has to have a strong dose of faith to believe that Qatar will make up for the penury of public investment in Egypt … ”⁶ As a result of this failed economic policy continued by Morsi, social turmoil was on the rise: I quoted data showing that the number of social protests and strikes had increased in Egypt during the first one hundred days of Morsi’s presidency. “Managerial and state authorities reacted to this resurgence of struggles with repressive measures, including a sizeable number of individual and collective dismissals. But none of this has been or will be any use … ”⁷

Indeed, both crucial problems crippling Morsi’s tenure – the army’s tutelage, albeit initially muted in the aftermath of Morsi’s election, and the social turmoil – continued to worsen week after week.

How the Muslim Brotherhood’s Bid for Power Unfolded

Through the emirate of Qatar’s mediation, Washington had bet on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and at the regional level as a way to co-opt the 2011 revolutionary shockwave and steer it towards results compatible with US interests.⁸ As emphasised in the introduction above, this led to a triangular contest between one revolutionary pole and two rival counter-revolutionary camps, both equally antithetical to the emancipatory aspirations of the “Arab Spring”. The weakness and/or inaptitude of the revolutionary pole allowed the confrontation between the two other rival camps to predominate, and after a while become the primary concern of each of them. Egypt provides a very clear illustration of this unfortunate development.

As it officially joined the mass mobilisation in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 28 January 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood offered its counter-revolutionary services to the Egyptian army, the backbone of the post-Nasserist mutant regime, which was deployed in the capital in the evening of that same day. From that moment until the Muslim Brothers’ betrayal of their pledge not to seek control of parliament by limiting the number of their candidates to the elections, they worked hand-in-glove with the military. In an unholy alliance with the fulul (the old regime’s “debris” or remnants) and the Salafists, they campaigned for the Yes vote in the SCAF-sponsored constitutional referendum of 19 March 2011.

This was in tune with the tradition established since Sadat’s release of the Muslim Brothers from Egyptian jails in the 1970s: their strategy had been consistently predicated upon collaboration with the regime in a bid to exert their moral–cultural influence on the society and polity until such time as they were in a position to accede to political power – a typical strategy of “war of position” preparing the ground for a “war of manoeuvre” in due time. These military concepts are known to have been borrowed by Antonio Gramsci in his discussion of hegemony and counter-hegemony. What is original in the Muslim Brotherhood’s case, however, is the fact that the reactionary ideology it propagated could actually be regarded by the regime as serving its own hegemony to a large extent. Both Sadat and Mubarak were happy to let the Brotherhood play an ideological role in the face of the left and liberal oppositions, provided it did not overstep its role by trying to interfere with political power. Both presidents repressed the Brotherhood every time they felt it had crossed the line.

But the Muslim Brotherhood’s rapid expansion under the new conditions created by the 2011 uprising – its ability to act freely and take advantage of Qatar’s financial support and television promotion (through Al Jazeera) and its attraction of a vast proportion of the middle classes seeking an alternative enforcer of law and order after the apparent demise of the old regime – led it to become increasingly assertive and ambitious. The Muslim Brothers’ collaboration with the SCAF started seriously unravelling when the parliamentary election held between late November 2011 and early January 2012 gave them a large plurality of seats in the People’s Assembly. They demanded the dismissal of the SCAF-appointed Kamal al-Ganzouri’s cabinet, and asserted their right to form a new one. They thereby put themselves on a collision course with the military.

There was no way that the Egyptian military would allow the Brotherhood to hold both legislative and executive power, thus challenging their own control of the state. The Muslim Brothers’ constant reference to AKP-run Turkey as a model was not made to appease the SCAF’S worries, either. The dismantling of the Turkish army’s tutelage over the state and the humiliating purge and imprisonment of its top brass by an AKP government availing itself of the parliamentary majority were for the Egyptian military a nightmarish scenario that it was not going to allow at home. This required thwarting the Brotherhood’s plan to design a Turkish-like parliamentary system for Egypt and secure its domination over it by way of its powerful electoral machine. Accordingly, the Egyptian judiciary – another unscathed institution of the old regime, complicit with the military – challenged the new parliament’s constitutional prerogative, and put the very existence of the People’s Assembly in doubt by questioning its constitutionality in February 2012 (due to a defect in the electoral law that had been promulgated by the SCAF itself). In April, the judiciary imposed a thorough modification of the composition of the Constituent Assembly that the parliament had elected.

The Brotherhood’s countermove consisted in betraying yet another of its initial pledges: it decided to aim at the top executive position, and field a candidate to the presidential election in the person of its key leading member, Khairat al-Shatir, a wealthy businessman known to play as important a role in the organisation, if not more, as that of the General Guide, Mohammed Badie, himself. This bold decision, taken at the end of March 2012, sharply contrasted with decades of circumspection on the part of the Brotherhood. It was far from unanimous within the movement’s 108-member Consultative Council (Majlis al-Shura), which split in half over the issue, those in favour outnumbering those opposed by only four. The Brotherhood’s youth activists, in alliance with the hardliners led by Shatir, had managed to tip the balance.⁹ The critics warned of the dire consequences likely to result from a head-on clash with the army.¹⁰

This move accelerated the chess game between the SCAF and the Brotherhood, with each side manoeuvring to prevent the other’s best candidate from running. The electoral commission disallowed Shatir’s candidacy, along with that of the ultra-populist Salafist Hazim Abu Isma‘il. In order to give this double elimination a semblance of fairness, Omar Suleiman’s improbable candidacy was likewise rejected. Mohamed Morsi – the Brotherhood’s “spare wheel”, as he was nicknamed by Egyptian public opinion – replaced Al-Shatir, while the Brotherhood’s attempt to block through parliament the candidacy of former commander-in-chief of the Air Force and last Mubarak-designated prime minister Ahmed Shafiq was dismissed.

When it became clear, after the first round of the presidential election on 23–24 May 2012, that the Brothers’ candidate stood a good chance of winning the second round despite everything, the intensity of the tug-of-war between them and the military increased dramatically. At the very end of the second round, held on 16–17 June, the SCAF seized upon the ruling by the Constitutional Court that the parliamentary election completed in January had been unconstitutional, in order to formally dissolve the law-making lower house of parliament, the People’s Assembly, and issue a “complementary constitutional declaration” on 17 June. By virtue of this decree, it took legislative power back into its own hands, granted itself the power to form a new constituent assembly if the existing one proved unable to achieve its mission and curtailed the constitutional prerogatives of the soon-to-be-elected president.

The Brothers feared that the state apparatuses were going to rig the presidential election. They made sure to enlist Washington’s blessing of their presidential bid and its firm opposition to fixing the election’s results. On 22 June, the Wall Street Journal published a long interview by a member of its editorial board with Khairat al-Shatir, “the millionaire businessman” whom the article accurately described as the head of “the dominant conservative wing of the Brotherhood – also known as the ‘Persian Gulf ’ crowd” and “the boss, in a Chicago machine sort of way, of the Muslim Brotherhood” – a man who “if the Brotherhood came to power … would be in charge”.¹¹ Shatir told the journal’s editor most bluntly that “the priority [for the Brotherhood] is a close ‘strategic partnership’ with the US, which the group expects to help it unlock credit markets and gain international legitimacy”.¹²

Eventually, having granted themselves “legal” means to block the new president’s action if necessary, the military let the electoral commission release the election results and proclaim Morsi’s victory. Indeed, this was the smartest thing for them to do. They had lost a lot of credit running the country by default since February 2011, and were not in a position to risk a major clash with a still popular Muslim Brotherhood – whose candidate has been anointed by Washington, to boot. It was much wiser to let the Brothers burn their fingers in turn by handing them the very hot potato of governing a country in revolutionary turmoil. Morsi was therefore confirmed as president of Egypt. The Brotherhood were in charge of the civilian government thereafter, but without holding real power. The latter, in Egypt more th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Of Revolutionary Cycles and Seasons
• Syria: The Clash of Barbarisms 15
• Egypt: The “23 July” of Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi
• Conclusion: “Arab Winter” And Hope
• Notes
• References and Sources
• Index