A Time to Kill: Egypt's Tragic Ramadan

Rarely has Ramadan come at a more tragic time for Egyptians, or for that matter for Syrians. The spirit of the season is intended to be a holy month of peace and worship; of turning away from the material world and tuning in to the spiritual; of seeking forgiveness and redemption through fasting and self-abnegation. And yet the new moon that announces the advent of this year’s Ramadan shines a grim light on Egyptians killing Egyptians in the streets.

The elation was short-lived for the millions who marched to oust Morsi and his catastrophic administration on June 30^th. First there was the backlash from the Muslim Brotherhood, echoed by a chorus in the international media accusing 'a coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president.' The fact is that the Islamists, notably the Brotherhood and the Salafis, cannot lay claim to the Revolution of January 25^th , a revolution they initially boycotted, and whose ideals they neither subscribed to nor sacrificed for. If anyone stole the revolution, they did. Similarly Morsi supporters’ mantra of ‘legitimacy’ rings hollow: he acted illegitimately in office from the day he was elected, grabbing power, riding roughshod over the institutions of government, putting himself above the law, and stuffing his administration with incompetent cronies.    

On the other hand, the liberal/secular camp- for want of a better catch-all designation for the diverse factions forming the opposition to the Islamist parties- the liberal camp exaggerates the role U.S. foreign policy played, or could have played, or should have played, during the past year and in the days leading to the June 30^th uprising. Had American policy openly supported an uprising backed by a military coup against Egypt’s first democratically-elected, Islamist president, how would that American support have played domestically in Egypt and in the Arab/Muslim world? It is hard to imagine that the Muslim Brotherhood camp would have failed to make propaganda of the fact that the Egyptian military is the United States closest interlocutor, and that the ousting of an Islamist regime in Egypt is welcome news in Israel.

There has been much criticism of how the aftermath of the ‘coup’ was handled, with house arrest of leading Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and taking Islamist television channels off the air. But these media were being used to enrage and incite the mass of Morsi supporters, who shouted into the cameras blood-curdling threats of revenge and killing, particularly against the Christian minority. By any measure, in any country, these threats constitute hate speech and incitement to violence, and would have been taken off the air.

Nevertheless, the deaths of fifty-plus Morsi supporters demonstrating before a mosque at dawn on Monday is a sickening and tragic development. It should never have happened. Even if there had been provocation on the part of the Brotherhood supporters, the military should have been ready to control and contain a confrontation, not overreach with lethal force. The same use of deadly military force against protesters resulted in the deaths of more than 25 protesters, mostly Coptic Christians, during the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces' eighteen-month rule in the transition from Mubarak to Morsi. It was such incidents that turned public opinion against the military and brought thousands into the streets chanting ‘Down, down with Military Rule’. How could that lesson have gone to waste?

The path to a positive future for Egypt is anything but straightforward. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties cannot and should not be excluded again from political life, but it is not at all clear that their participation, now or in the near future, can take a constructive turn. Egypt’s Islamist parties have shown that they do not subscribe to the spirit of democracy, as opposed to the ballot box. In fact they do not even claim to subscribe to it. For them, the separation of politics from religion is illegitimate, and a plurality of opinion is heresy. For them, the ballot box is only a means to an end, and once that end is achieved, the box is to be discarded once and for all.

The Flying Head of the Wolf: the Military and the Islamists

Two seemingly unrelated developments in the Middle East, one in Egypt and one in Turkey, represent a radical departure from the 20^th century history of the region.

On Friday, after a decade-long trial, Turkey sentenced 322 military officers to long sentences for the failed ‘Sledgehammer’ plot to topple the Islamist Erdogan government in 2003. After decades of dominance over the politics of the country, and repeated coups against civilian governments that dared to contest their power, Turkey’s generals had finally met their match in the Islamic AK party of Tayyip Erdogan.

On August 13, President Morsi of Egypt forced the resignation of Field Marshall Tantawi and his top generals, the de facto rulers of Egypt since the fall of Mubarak. After 60 years of regimes headed by military men, from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak, the generals had thought to continue to rule behind the throne, and accordingly staged what amounted to a coup to strip the presidency of its powers when it became clear that the Islamist Morsi had been elected president in June. In August, Morsi made his highly risky move to reassert the powers of the civilian executive, and prevailed: Tantawi and the other top brass obeyed orders to resign.

As President Morsi boasted in an interview in the New York Times today: “The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the commander of the armed forces, full stop. Egypt now is a real civil state. It is not theocratic, it is not military. It is democratic, free, constitutional, lawful and modern.”

The last statement remains to be validated, but there is no denying the quantum shift in the power politics of the state of Egypt. To many, the acquiescence of the generals to Morsi’s demand for their resignation came as a surprise. But it is possible that the example of the once all-powerful generals in Turkey, on trial for their lives, served as a caution for Egypt’s generals. As they say in the Middle East, it was the lesson of the flying head of the wolf.

In the Middle Eastern fables of Kalila and Domna, from which La Fontaine derived many of his fables, the lion, who is King, is displeased with an answer the wolf gives him, and swats his head off with a blow of his paw. When it is the fox’s turn to answer the same question, the fox gives the right answer, and the Lion King asks him: “Who taught you that?” To which the fox replies: “The flying head of the wolf.”

It is also no coincidence that the civilian governments that managed to challenge the might of the military in both Turkey and Egypt are headed by avowed Islamic parties, the moderate AK in Turkey and the newly-elected Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Respected as the military traditionally is in Middle Eastern societies, the Islamists can draw on an even stronger counter claim to legitimacy with the people. Erdogan’s AK has turned out to be generally moderate and modernizing; Egypt’s Morsi and his Brethren have yet to be tested in office, in spite of the reassuring line he is espousing on his first visit, as head of state, to Washington.