If nothing else, the recent turbulence in Egypt leading to the ouster of the elected President Mohamed Morsi should negate the facile view that all Muslims are temperamentally inclined towards radical Islamist solutions.
The sheer scale of the mass protests that finally propelled the military takeover on Wednesday demonstrates that the normal choppiness associated with emerging democracies — and our neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh have had their fair share, as have Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines — hasn’t left Egypt insulated.
How could itIJ What was significant about the Tahrir Square demonstrations that led to the ouster of the well-entrenched former President Hosni Mubarak was its reliance on mass mobilisation. Recall that it was precisely such a mass upsurge that led to the dethronement of the Shah of Iran in 1979-80. By contrast, regime changes in places such as libya — and the ongoing conflict in Syria — were accompanied by a vicious civil war which creates its own complications. I am, of course, not including Afghanistan and Iraq where regime changes arose from foreign military interventions.
Yet, while it is parallel to detect parallels with the Iranian revolution that established a quasi-repressive, theocratic regime, would it be right to welcome the ouster of President Morsi and the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood as a pre-emptive strike to prevent Egypt going the Iran way. It is precisely such a logic that has prompted many western liberals to welcome the mass protests against the creeping Islamisation of society and politics in Turkey.
No doubt President Morsi, who was elected in a free and fair election a year ago, had a strong commitment to the creation of an Islamic society. He complemented this radical impulse with an inept management of the economy and outright cronyism that saw many disreputable Islamists being appointed to important posts. But incompetence and democracy often go hand in hand, as many Indians will readily admit. If economic bungling and cronyism are such unforgivable sins, it is scarcely possible that any elected regime will ever enjoy any measure of stability. Certainly, the quantum of mass protests against the elected governments in France, Greece and Brazil should make these countries candidates for change at gun point.
In Egypt it was an alliance of starry-eyed liberals, Nasserite socialists, remnants of the Mubarak elite and hard-up urbanites who came together to demand the ouster of the Morsi regime. Of course they shared a common distaste for an intrusive Islamisation process which, in any case, was bad for tourism. Yet, this experience was not uncommon. In the early-1970s, it was a similar experience of competitive crowd power that created the conditions for the military coup which ousted the neo-Marxist Salvador Allende from power in Chile. People with longer memories will also recall the street protests that led to the ouster of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. The archives now tell us that the coup in Chile was meticulously planned by the CIA in cooperation with US corporations. It is also known that British Intelligence played a major role in the removal of Mosaddegh (after he nationalised the oil wells) and the restoration of the Shah.
As yet, there is nothing to suggest that there was a ‘foreign hand’ in the removal of Morsi. True, approximately $1.35 of the $1.55 billion US aid that goes to Egypt is expended by the military — a possible price for maintaining the peace with Israel — but, as is evident from the reactions of the Obama Administration — Washington is trying to balance between its distaste of incipient Islamism and its enthusiasm for democracy.
This is a genuine dilemma that faces most people who have no love for the Muslim Brotherhood but are uncomfortable about the peremptory military intervention in Egypt. The awkwardness is compounded by the fact that Morsi has been arrested and may be put on trial on the ridiculous charge of “insulting the Presidency.” Moreover, the arrest of Mohammed Badie, the supreme leader of the Brotherhood, and the warrants for the arrest of 300 of its leading activists prompts the fear that the emerging democracy in Egypt could well be the flip side of the Islamic democracy that prevails in Iran. In Iran, for example, all the candidates for the post of President have to be vetted by a council of theologians; in Egypt’s emerging politics, the principle of “anyone but the Muslim Brotherhood” could end up prevailing.
Such norms go against all democratic principles. Morsi may have been thoroughly incompetent and his Government was constantly at loggerheads with the judiciary. But political misjudgements cannot be equated with criminality and unconstitutional conduct. By forcing the Muslim Brotherhood into a corner and unleashing repression against it, the do-gooders have, in effect, confirmed the radical fear that democracy and Islam are totally incompatible.
It is possible, especially if the Brotherhood can also demonstrate its skills in mass mobilisation, that some patchwork compromise may be worked out that prevents Muslim nationalists in Egypt going the way of the anti-Assad opposition in Syria. For the moment, however, those who disavow religious extremism must see the events in Egypt as a monumental secularist self-goal.
From Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak to General Fatah al-Sisi, coup politics inevitably carries the seeds of its own destruction. Egypt hasn’t been saved from a surreptitious Islamist revolution; it has been brought closer to endemic instability. Politics, it would seem, is too serious a business to be left to the emotional preferences of Americanised liberals who can be so easily manipulated by the men in uniform in the name of modernity.