Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism

Illiberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy

Dalia F. Fahmy, Daanish Faruqi, Dalia Fahmy, Daanish Faruqi

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781780748832
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The liberatory sentiment that stoked the Arab Spring and saw the ousting of long-time Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak seems a distant memory. Democratically elected president Mohammad Morsi lasted only a year before he was forced from power to be replaced by precisely the kind of authoritarianism protestors had been railing against in January 2011. Paradoxically, this turn of events was encouraged by the same liberal activists and intelligentsia who'd pushed for progressive reform under Mubarak.This volume analyses how such a key contingent of Egyptian liberals came to develop outright illiberal tendencies. Interdisciplinary in scope, it brings together experts in Middle East studies, political science, philosophy, Islamic studies and law to address the failure of Egyptian liberalism in a holistic manner – from liberalism's relationship with the state, to its role in cultivating civil society, to the role of Islam and secularism in the cultivation of liberalism. A work of impeccable scholarly rigour, Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism reveals the contemporary ramifications of the state of liberalism in Egypt.

1

Egyptian liberals, from revolution to counterrevolution

DAANISH FARUQI AND DALIA F. FAHMY

INTRODUCTION

Now six years since the popular uprising that ended the regime of longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, many have argued that the liberatory sentiment that stoked the Tahrir Revolution in the first place is barely recognizable. Following a year of the admittedly incompetent rule of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated President Mohammad Morsi, the second uprising in July 2013 that brought down his rule ultimately gave rise to precisely the kind of authoritarianism Egyptian revolutionaries had been railing against in January 2011. Encapsulated most vividly by the Egyptian security forces’ calculated slaughter of protesters on August 14, 2013 in Cairo’s Rabaa Square,1 the Egyptian police state has returned with a vengeance. Under the stewardship of (now) President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, state repression has been escalated to levels hitherto unimaginable even during the Mubarak years, with not only suspected members of the Brotherhood, but Egyptian civil society more broadly, now subject to sweeping crackdowns.

As a preface, we cannot sufficiently emphasize that the ouster of Morsi was decidedly a popular coup. Even if the Tamarod (Rebel) movement that initially spearheaded the insurrection against Morsi in June 2013 ultimately exaggerated its claims to have collected twenty-two million signatures in opposition to Morsi’s presidency, anti-Morsi sentiment in the months leading up to the June 30, 2013 uprising was deeply palpable. A sizeable constituency of the Egyptian public had indeed grown increasingly disillusioned with Morsi as their first elected leader, and feared his stewardship of the country now stood to violate the ideals of the uprising they had valiantly spearheaded in January 2011. Even the very revolutionary forces that were so instrumental in the fall of Mubarak concurred: major players in Egyptian civil society, including groups like Kifaya and the April 6th Youth Movement that played such a dominant role in the January 2011 uprising, had initially lent their support to the Tamarod campaign and its demand for early presidential elections.2 In the face of such deep-seated anti-Morsi and anti-Brotherhood sentiment having permeated large contingents of Egyptian society, it is not altogether surprising that masses would enthusiastically cheer on the forcible removal of Morsi by the Egyptian military on July 3, 2013, or even then General Sisi’s call later that month for a full “mandate” from the Egyptian people to combat terrorism – and thus embark on a systematic crackdown against Islamists tout court.3

Nonetheless, even if popular dissatisfaction with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood can conceivably excuse a critical mass of the Egyptian public for having lent its support to the early termination of the democratic experiment in Egypt, it does not sufficiently explain why a key contingent of Egypt’s liberals succumbed to the same fate. Which is to say, an influential coterie of Egyptian liberal activists and intellectuals, who had earned their reputations as scions of protest and champions of democracy, civil society, and human rights during the Mubarak years, ultimately reneged on those commitments in the aftermath of the events of June 2013 and onward. Departing from their previous personas, these heretofore liberal figures instead lent support – in many cases enthusiastic support – to the new authoritarian order under President Sisi. All hail from different and varying perspectives, but are united by having been self-identified as liberal, secular democrats, and rather iconic figures of the idea of secular liberalism in Egypt more broadly. Yet paradoxically, these same figures came to enthusiastically support the coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president, and to continue that wave of support well into the point at which the new order under Sisi’s rampant illiberal repression – against Muslim Brotherhood supporters and beyond – was made readily apparent.

Briefly, before fully proceeding, we should clarify what we mean here by ‘liberal.’ Here we rely primarily on the benchmark of self-identification, but even then, what is the ‘liberalism’ to which Egyptian figures under consideration subscribe? Broadly speaking, these figures employ the term to refer to a political philosophy more immediately rooted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Incubated in the context of feudalism and the arbitrary abuse of power by clerical authorities, liberalism as articulated by its most luminary figures such as John Locke, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others, articulated a worldview in which individual freedom became sacrosanct:

[They] envisioned a new world in which the arbitrary authority of the church and an arrogant aristocracy would cease to exist; a world in which reason and democracy would temper provincial ethnic and religious hatreds between states and races; a world of unfettered freedom, without radical differences in the distribution of wealth, in which an individual might better his lot through hard work and without fear of obstruction by the state.4

The individual thus became central to the liberal worldview, as a subject endowed with inviolable rights, and whose freedoms were to be protected at all costs, be it against the fetters of religious dogmatism or the invasive proclivities of the state apparatus. We will speak more about the history of liberalism as a philosophy in a subsequent section, but for now it should suffice to highlight its most salient attributes, in order to understand how the project reconstituted itself in Egypt, outside the immediately European cultural context in which it was originally conceived.

And in the Egyptian context, it is important to first preface that the liberals who form the basis of this study were not mere armchair intellectuals or fair-weather political activists. Figures of the persuasion we consider here had legitimately paid their dues in the pre-revolutionary context, many having faced serious persecution under Mubarak for their efforts at promoting democracy and the liberal rule of law. The prominent Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Eissa is a case in point: long a thorn in the side of the Mubarak regime, as editor of the opposition newspaper al-Dustour, Eissa was regularly harassed by the Egyptian courts for publishing allegedly subversive commentary – perhaps most famously in 2007, in which his article questioning then president Mubarak’s failing health earned him a year-long prison sentence. Insinuating that the Egyptian president had health problems, the charges against him stipulated, was tantamount to harming national security.5 Similarly, democracy and civil society activist Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been no stranger to the travesty of Egyptian justice, having spent several years languishing in Mubarak’s prisons on the dubious charge of defaming Egypt through his advocacy work at the Cairo-based democracy think tank he had founded, the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.6 The famed Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany and founder of the March 9th Movement for University Independence Dr. Mohammad Abol Ghar also fall into this cadre of liberal reformers: Aswany was a founding member of the Kifaya, Egyptian Movement for Change, protest movement, while Abol Ghar served as a spokesman for the National Association for Change led by Mohamed El Baradei, and following the 2011 revolution co-founded the Social Democratic Party, “what many viewed as the most substantial political party for liberals.”7

During their pre-revolutionary political careers, moreover, these liberal figures were quite nuanced in how they handled their associations with the Muslim Brotherhood. As avowedly secular figures, none was remotely sympathetic to Islamism as a political platform, but their opposition to the discourse of Islamism did not preclude them from accepting the Brotherhood as a reality in Egyptian political life. Ibrahim Eissa is perhaps more contentious than most liberals in this respect, having had a palpably antagonistic relationship with the role of religion in society even in his earlier career. As early as the nineties, Eissa published critiques of religious discourse, both in his expository writing in columns and books, as well as in a series of novels. But even then, as editor of al-Dustour, he allowed Muslim Brotherhood figures the opportunity to publish in his pages, and defended the group against state suppression. Arguing that the Brotherhood was “representative of Egypt’s class and cultural map,” in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 uprising, Eissa celebrated their electoral wins, declaring as recently as October 2011 that “[i]f millions of Egyptian voters were to give the Muslim Brotherhood the majority in the elections...this would be majorly and abundantly beneficial.”8 Thus, as much opprobrium as Eissa may have heaped on Islamism as an ideological discourse, he nonetheless respected the Brotherhood’s role in Egyptian civil society.

Other liberals were even more forthcoming in their defense of the Brotherhood as a legitimate political force. Alaa al-Aswany in his pre-revolutionary writings stressed national unity despite ideological differences with the Brotherhood, reiterating in a column dated August 9, 2009, that it was the Mubarak regime that “has deliberately exaggerated the role and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood for use as a bogeyman against anyone who calls for democracy.”9 Even if the Brotherhood were to win fair elections, he maintained in a November 8, 2009 column, “wouldn’t that be the free choice of Egyptians, which we should respect if we are true democrats?”10 As for Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, perhaps the defining aspect of his career both as a sociologist and as a democracy activist has been his long-standing commitment to the domestication of the Brotherhood. The quintessential Arab democrat, having refined his ideas on Islamist domestication through time spent with Brotherhood figures while in prison, Ibrahim has consistently maintained that allowing Islamists entry into the democratic process would liberalize their movement in the long term. Shortly after the 2011 revolution, Ibrahim analogized the Brotherhood to the Christian Democrats of Western Europe, arguing that “[t]hey started with more Christianity than democracy 100 years ago. Now they are more democracy than Christianity.”11

Yet once the Muslim Brotherhood successfully entered the political arena, culminating in the election of Mohammad Morsi in June of 2012, these same figures radically shifted gears in their hitherto firm commitment to democratic reform. For all his bravado about considering a Brotherhood win in a fair election “majorly and abundantly beneficial,” Ibrahim Eissa ultimately proved unwilling to abide by his own dictum. His journalistic work now degenerated from cutting-edge dissident commentary to sycophantic pro-military propaganda, Eissa firmly backed the overthrow of Morsi on the paranoid premise that, as he lamented in a conversation with Negar Azimi of the New Yorker, “[w]e don’t want to turn into Iran.”12 Elsewhere, in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Egyptian liberals, from revolution to counterrevolution
• Section I: Liberalism and The Egyptian State
• Section II: Liberalism and Egyptian Civil Society
• Section III: Islam, Secularism, and the State
• Section IV: Egyptian Liberals in Comparative Perspective Post-2013
• Conclusion: Does liberalism have a future in Egypt?
• About the contributors
• Copyright