Several weeks ago, I spoke to an Egyptian secularist woman who suggested to me that the halfway optimistic scenario for her country would be “the Turkish model.” What she meant by this was the advent of a parliamentary democracy in which the military still acted as safeguard on secularism and a counterbalance against the likely Islamist victory at the polls. In Turkey, at least up until recently, the Kemalist military ran its own policy, forced the separation of mosque and state, and even invalidated several governments result it didn’t like, thereby operating a “deep state” beneath the superficial one of a functioning, transparent democracy.
The irony here was twofold. First, my secularist friend has got the most in common with Western democratic values and yet she was plainly relying on the least democratic means of guaranteeing her safety, a kind of junta-in-reserve to be wheeled out as needed against an over-mighty Muslim Brotherhood. Second, the prospects of a deep state for Egypt have now been categorically rejected by the main beneficiaries of one — Egyptian secularists — leading to the unintended consequence of cementing an alliance between the military and the Islamists. How this happened is worth some explication if only to show how much the budding democrats of the Arab Spring have yet to learn about national politics.
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the junta that has ruled Egypt for the past eight months, has run a disastrous transitional government, overextending itself on every occasion, moving from a source of national pride — the army that refused to fire on unarmed protestors, then sided with them — into a decrepit encore of Mubarakism. Human rights abuses were rampant. Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi’s regime has tried as many as ten thousand Egyptians by military tribunal (some for “crimes” of expression such as daubing cartoons derisive of the army), subjected women to “virginity tests” to verify their allegations of rape (as if only virgins can be raped), and used whips and electric batons on the very protestors whom soldiers once shielded from police blows. As for protecting Egypt’s secularism, consider that SCAF has quietly looked the other way as Coptic churches have been burnt to the ground by Salafists; it’s also incited its own sectarian violence by using state-controlled media to blame some demos on “Christian mobs” and, according to many activists who reject the findings of a national enquiry, played a trigger-happy role in the Maspero massacre in October.
Moreover, SCAF had set a deadline of April 2013 for both a new Egyptian constitution to be written and for free presidential elections to be held. In other words, this week’s election is only for a provisional “people’s assembly” that will determine the warp and woof of Egypt’s future political system. But then Tantawi got greedy. He called for “supra-constitutional principles” for running his deep state, including autonomy on deciding the military’s annual budget. There’d also be a “national defence council” beholden to no parliamentary or executive oversight to decide matters of national security. In other words, the army wouldn’t need a presidential by-your-leave to roll into the Sinai.
In Western democracies, and even in Middle Eastern pseudo-democracies, people protest after election results come in that they dislike or believe to be fraudulent. (Think of Iran’s Green Revolution.) In Egypt, however, the centrists retook Tahrir Square on November 18, two weeks before the polls opened, in reaction to SCAF’s continued mismanagement and its announced “principles.” Many of these protestors claimed to want both an immediate end to military rule and the postponement of national elections, two irreconcilable demands. Dozens were subsequently killed in a brutal state crackdown. Four days later, Tantawi gave a terrible speech, sacked his interim cabinet, appointed an aged relic of the ancien regime as acting prime minister, and decided to at least offer the people what they wanted. Now, he said, presidential elections will be held in March or April 2012; as for the military’s role, its budget will simply be designated as having a “special status,” and the national defense council will, in fact, be headed by the president. The deep state had been deep-sixed.
But who benefited from this month’s chaos and Tantawi’s reluctant climb-down? The Muslim Brotherhood, by far the most sophisticated and organised political movement in the country. According to Marc Ginsburg, the former US ambassador to Morocco, SCAF had already been funneling cash to Islamist political organisations, including the Brotherhood and its allied Salafist parties, which in turn disbursed “walking around” money, food and clothes to the neediest Egyptians. Perhaps for this reason, the Brotherhood stayed well clear of the Tahrir tumult, focussing instead on the serious business of electioneering for their new Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). As the New York Times reports, “Teams of young members [of FJP] sat with laptop computers at strategic points, such as outside mosques, around Cairo to help voters locate their polling places, helping anyone but providing the information on slips of paper advertising their candidates.” Meanwhile, the liberals and secularists set up tents and have given angry quotes to newspapers, echoing Occupy Wall Street activists who, like a bad Escher painting, had once claimed to be echoing the original Tahrir protestors.
The result of this recent turn of events is clear. The Islamists’ all-but-certain electoral triumph will be seen to have national legitimacy, making the latest rallies seem petulant and premature. But that triumph will also certify the marriage of convenience between Egypt’s religious fundamentalists and her armed forces.