Do Muslims not Understand Free Speech? The Hate Film Furor

There are some events so shocking that you cannot process them coherently in words, even a week later. The horrific news of the killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other diplomats in Libya on September 11 is one of them. This article is not about that. As it turns out, the armed attack on the American consulate in Benghazi may have been unrelated to the Islam-reviling video clip that launched coincidental protests first in Cairo and then across the Muslim world.

But the question remains, about the crowds of hundreds or in some cases thousands who mobbed American embassies from Tunisia to Indonesia with protest signs against the so-called ‘Innocence of Muslims’ trailer, do Muslims not understand free speech? Why the violent reaction to such a laughable, beyond-amateurish attempt to insult their Prophet? Why not simply shrug it off as the piece of insignificant Muslim-baiting it is? Are Muslims too unsophisticated to understand the concept of free speech?

It’s not that simple. Muslim societies are sophisticated enough to be aware that the concept of free speech is not an absolute, even in the West. They are aware that in France or Germany, anyone who questions the number of victims of the Holocaust, let alone denies it, is jailed. They are aware that in France, Muslim girls are not allowed to wear a headscarf, a symbol of their faith, to public school.  They may or may not be aware that in the United State, the most recent attempt to adopt an amendment to criminalize flag desecration- which would include use as clothing or napkins- was defeated in the Senate by a single vote in June 2006.

In Egypt, people remember that United States administrations intervened regularly to condemn and ask for suppression of films, songs, or books critical of Israel. As the Mubarak regime complained at the time to the Bush administration, the U.S. criticized the Egyptian regime for cracking down on free speech and then asked it to do just that when it disapproved of the form that speech took.

Free speech is not an absolute value, anywhere in the world. Every society draws its red lines in a different place. In the United States, the First Amendment does not protect you if you cry fire in a crowded room. Hate speech is not protected if it is an incitement to violence.

So it may be simplistic to assume that Muslims just ‘don’t understand’ free speech. Even if it were an absolute value in the West, which it demonstrably is not, that does not mean that the rest of the world accepts that value as absolute. Indeed, as Stanley Fish pointed out in the New York Times today, the majority of the populations of the world, not only Muslims, place respect of religion above respect of free speech.

This California-produced ‘film’ was made, distributed and exploited with the transparent purpose of inciting furor, against Muslims and by them. Still, the question goes begging: why do Muslims rise so easily to the bait, time after time? Why does the blowback spread so predictably across the world? Why do they not respond in more measured, effective ways, or better still, ignore the derisory provocation for what it is?

The answer lies in the context on the ground: a world in which two Muslim countries are invaded and occupied by the West; a third nation currently threatened with pre-emptive bombing; a fourth subjected to drone strikes and their ‘collateral damage;’ and so on. The powerlessness to resist these concrete forms of subjugation and humiliation, and the perception that the gratuitous insults to the Islamic religion are part and parcel of the same supposed ‘war against Islam’, make the region a tinderbox that explodes at the striking of the flimsiest match.   

And once again the tragic dynamics play out. The perpetrators of the provocation claim their right to impunity, and the images of rioting Muslims confirm the opinion of those in the West who see them, at best, as political primitives who do not understand ‘free speech’, or, at worst, as violent followers of a violence- prone religion. 

What Is Hilary Thinking? Egypt's Islamists and U.S. Foreign Policy

Since his recent election, Egypt’s Islamist president is executing a series of breath-taking power grabs that confirm the worst fears of his detractors and confound the expectations of observers who expected the obscure, uncharismatic Morsi to be a toothless, figurehead president. But, as I wrote at the time of his election, Egypt has a history of obscure, uncharismatic ‘second men’ occupying the office of the presidency by default and then entrenching themselves in power. Sadat was generally underestimated as Nasser’s yes-man vice-president until he succeeded him after Nasser’s death, upon which he immediately engaged in an existential struggle against the competing ‘centers of power’ that sought to overturn him. Emerging victorious, Sadat then turned the entire ship of state around, notably in foreign policy and the peace treaty with Israel. When Sadat was assassinated by Islamists in 1980 and his vice-president succeeded him, expectations of the unimaginative Mubarak were low; but he managed to consolidate his power and maintain it for thirty years.

The squat, sixty-year-old unknown, Mohamed Morsi, became the Muslim Brotherhood’s last-minute, default presidential candidate when the party boss, Khairat Shater, was disqualified. Since his election, Morsi has flexed the muscles of the Executive office- unchecked by the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Legislative- and pushed back against the secular, hostile Judiciary. Faced with what amounted to a coup by legislative decree that arrogated all powers to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), Morsi bided his time and exploited a terrorist attack in the Sinai to counter by a stunning coup of his own, firing the top military generals of all branches of the Armed Services as well as the powerful Intelligence agency.  The latest, most troubling move on Morsi’s part was to crack down on criticism in the media. It is hard to not to see an out-and out autocracy in the making.

And where is U.S. foreign policy in all of this? Many Egyptians watch, bemused, as events unfold with what can be interpreted as tacit consent by the U.S. Some speculate on an understanding between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Foreign Office; an understanding that is vociferously resented by Egypt’s Coptic Christians, some of whom protested Secretary Clinton’s meeting with Morsi when she visited Cairo this summer and expressed their anger by pelting her with rotten tomatoes.  But the fact is that it is good policy for the U.S. to avoid at all costs the appearance of siding against a democratically-elected president and parliament, Islamist though they might be. It may also be the case that the U.S. Foreign Office and the Pentagon have at least as comfortable an understanding with the younger generation of military generals Morsi appointed to replace the geriatric Marshall Tantawi and his cohorts.  Like the U.S.-educated Morsi himself and his Prime Minister Qandil, many of this younger generation of Egyptian military received training in the U.S. rather than in the Soviet Union, as was the norm in the Nasser years.  The non-alarmist reaction by Israel seems to confirm the understanding over the peace treaty.

But Secretary Clinton may be making a serious mistake. She may be discounting the history of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a history that has proved, over and over again, that they are not to be trusted. Since the inception of the organization, one Egyptian ruler after another has tried co-opting the popular support for the religious appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood, only to have them turn against him. King Farouk tried to present himself as the Caliph of his day, and lost his throne; Nasser sought Brotherhood support for his revolution, until they attempted to assassinate him; Sadat, in his later years, tried to re-invent himself as a devout Muslim, and was assassinated by a Brotherhood officer; Mubarak alternately mollified and cracked down on the Brotherhood, and watched them reap the benefits of the revolution that overturned him.

Secretary Clinton may be counting on a policy of giving Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood administration enough rope to hang itself. Nowhere in the Arab world has an Islamist government been tested by actually coming to power: in office, the slogans of the Muslim Brotherhood will come up short against the pragmatic realities of Egypt’s monumental economic problems, and their failure will be their undoing. But anyone who thinks they can dance with this particular devil should take another look at Egypt’s contemporary history.

  

Muslim Olympians Invisible in the Spotlight

No, not the Egyptian silver medalist fencer Alaa AbdelKassem; not the Saudi runner in a headscarf, Sarah Attar. Not the members of the Olympics teams from the Middle Eastern Muslim majority countries, who are the subjects of articles about the conundrum of competing while observing the Ramadan fast. The invisible Muslim Olympians are the ones the media focuses the limelight on every day without once mentioning that they are clearly of Muslim heritage. A case in point is top Russian gymnast Aliya Mustafina, whose father Farhat was also a gymnast. 

Is it ever appropriate for the media to mention the ethnic or religious background of athletes? Perhaps the exception should be for athletes of a minority background who are rare role models, particularly Muslims, given that the media focuses first and foremost on the religious affiliation of a criminal or terrorist disproportionately if he or she happens to be of Muslim background. Is there any doubt that, if James Holmes had been called, say, Hussein Mustafa, that fact would have trumped all else in the coverage of the Colorado massacre?

All the better that Aliya Mustafina, like millions of women of Muslim heritage, wears no headscarf and never mentions her religion. The Olympics are about many things, and one of them is shattering stereotypes as well as records.

 

Caliphs and 'City' Girls: Split-Personality Muslim Television

Ramadan is the Islamic holy month of fasting and prayer, but it is also the Muslim world's television drama addiction month. At the end of a day’s deprivation, millions of Muslims from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf gather in front of their television sets to follow daily episodes of month-long miniseries especially created for the Ramadan sweeps month. Every year, one or two of the multiple offerings becomes the breakout success, and the year’s forerunners invariably reflect the zeitgeist of the Islamic world.

This year, the two stand-outs are a mind-boggling contrast: on the one hand, a scholarly, pious docudrama of the life of Omar, a Disciple of the Prophet and second Caliph; and on the other, a wild Egyptian version of Sex and the City. It is disconcerting enough that ‘The Girls’, as the latter is called, is allowed to air in newly Islamist-governed Egypt and conservative Gulf Emirates- more about that later- but even more controversial is the life story of the Caliph Omar. That strikes at the heart of a particular Sunni-Shiite split in Islamic doctrine.

In the eponymous docudrama, actors play the Caliph Omar and other close disciples of the Prophet, as well as members of his family, breaking a long-standing taboo in the film industry of the Muslim world. So far, Arabic screens have been spared Cecile B. De Mille style religious epics with Victor Mature and Charleston Heston in biblical garb. 

But the interdiction on portraying Muhammad and his disciples is a Sunni tradition, never observed in Shia Islam. In Iran, black-browed, black-bearded, turbaned depictions of Muhammad, the Caliph Ali and his martyred son Hussein, are ubiquitous. On the other hand, in strict Sunni Saudi Arabia, the prohibition against idol-worship is so sweeping that the very shrines and tombs of the Prophet’s family were destroyed by Wahabi zealots in the eighteenth century.

Even in moderately Sunni Egypt, imams of the Azhar University have been ambivalent about the Ramadan docudrama ‘Omar,’ although the tone of the Emirates-based MBC production is irreproachably respectful, and the lead role is played by a sympathetic, brawny, charismatic young actor. The Prophet Muhammad is never shown or heard directly, although his off-screen presence is intimated in many scenes. The dialogue is enlivened by a few wrestling scenes and a love story featuring a Spartacus-like Ethiopian slave.

On the other hand, the four girls of ‘Girls’ Stories’ are blatant mimics, if not parodies, of the Sex and the City Quartet, down to the Carrie character’s habit of concluding each episode by recording her thought of the day on her laptop. They live in an unrecognizable, aseptic Egypt of gated communities and traffic-less roads, and pepper their vocabulary with five Americanisms per sentence. Camellia, the crudest and wildest, is the ‘Samantha’ character, but all four of the ‘girls’ vamp around in six-inch heels, skintight spandex, décolletage and nip-tuck faces. They chase elusive boyfriends and equally elusive jobs with the talentless single-mindedness of rhinos. They abuse any male at hand, including lackluster suitors and doting daddies- not Sugar Daddies, but their actual progenitors; for these Egyptian ‘girls’ are spoilt brats who still live under the roof of improbably indulgent fathers whom they treat with such contempt that one boyfriend actually objects. The girls are so unsympathetically drawn that it is a mystery which demographic these charmless protagonists are intended to attract.  

Unless, of course, wittingly or unwittingly by their creators, they represent a cautionary tale, girls gone wild, ‘secular’ values taken to a cartoonish extreme. In that case, it is no wonder that Egypt’s newly-elected Islamist government turns a blind eye to their onscreen shenanigans during the holy month of Ramadan.

Suleiman: The Spymaster Who Came in from the Cold?

If ever a man knew too much, it was Omar Suleiman. The most powerful spymaster in the Middle East, Mubarak’s black box, the C.I.A.’s rendition agent in Egypt, Israel’s intermediary. The head of Egypt’s dread Mukhabarat, a spy chief so powerful that his very identity was unknown to the average Egyptian until he chose to go public a few years ago. The Intelligence Chief who, when asked by the C.I.A. to provide a DNA sample from the brother of Ayman Zawahiri, the Al Qaeda leader, offered instead to send them the man’s entire arm.

No wonder that the out-of-the-blue announcement of Suleiman’s sudden death, purportedly at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio when he was supposed to be in the Emirates, unleashed a flood of conspiracy theories worthy of a John Le Carré novel.

I sat a table away from Omar Suleiman at a wedding in February, by sheer chance. This was a year after Mubarak’s downfall, and a couple of months before Suleiman briefly and unsuccessfully ran for president of Egypt. It struck me then what a physically small man he was, in person, but how he commanded deference from his entourage. It was testament enough to his power that, in the year that elapsed since the January Revolution, in spite of Suleiman’s sulfurous reputation, in spite of his closeness to Mubarak, he was never at risk of being tried, let alone jailed, as so many ministers and other powerful regime figures were. The inescapable conclusion was that Suleiman knew so much about enough people to be untouchable. Even the news media seemed too cowed to touch him.

At the wedding we both attended, at tables nearby, there were a few sotto voce jokes about: “Where is the man behind Omar Suleiman?” A reference to the indelible, notorious television image of his pale and haunted face announcing Mubarak’s resignation on February 11^th 20111, while behind his chair a stone-faced, burly man in glasses stood guard. Some, at the time, wondered if Suleiman were being coerced into reading the resignation announcement, but if ever a man had a face designed by nature to deliver mournful news or be painted by El Greco, it was Omar Suleiman.

Pity he wasn’t available to announce his own demise. Although there are plenty of conspiracy theories to suggest that he may well have been. After all, the circumstances are ripe for intrigue. First Suleiman’s two daughters precede him out of Egypt, then he himself is reported to have left for the Emirates; then it is suddenly announced that he had been at the Cleveland Clinic all along and that, although he was well when he checked in, he died during treatment. That doesn’t say much for the Cleveland Clinic. On the other hand, if Suleiman, like his former boss Mubarak, was trying to stage a temporary death- who can forget Mubarak’s miraculous resurrection in June, when he rapidly progressed backward from ‘clinically dead’ to ‘comatose’ to ‘stable’ to ‘commenting on the elections’ in three short days?

If Suleiman were trying to engineer a convenient disappearance beyond the reach of Egypt’s current Islamist-led government that might conceivably hold him accountable for ordering the torture of extradited Islamist suspects on behalf of the C.I.A., he could well have orchestrated his own ‘death’, with the connivance of his friends in the U.S. intelligence community, witness-protection style. Or there is a more sinister scenario possible:  the man who knew too much may finally have known too much for his own good. Only John Le Carré could have dreamed this stuff up, but then truth can be stranger than fiction. 

When Did Egypt's Revolution Get Downgraded to a Revolt?

 On February 3^rd, 2011, the day after Mubarak ‘loyalist’ thugs rode into Tahrir Square on horses and camels and started bludgeoning the peaceful protesters camping there, I wrote:  ‘If (Mubarak) stays, the events of the past ten days will be referred to as "the uprising of January 2011"; if he goes, we will talk of a revolution. We owe it to these brave young protesters to make it the latter.’

Today, ominously, there are more and more references to Egypt’s ‘revolt’ in the media; just this morning, the New York Times referred to ‘Egypt’s postrevolt politics.’ Ironically, the context was an article about the reconvening of the first democratically-elected Egyptian parliament, after sixty years of what effectively amounted to one-party rule; at the behest of the first democratically-elected president in the first contested presidential election, after sixty years of yes/no referendums on the incumbent that invariably returned the sitting president with an incredible 90% plus approval.

True, there is controversy over the eligibility, under Mubarak-era rules, of Muslim Brotherhood candidates to run for one third of the seats they won. But even an observer like myself, dismayed by the sweep of the legislative and executive by Islamist candidates, must admit that vox populi had spoken.

True also that the election of the president turned out to be not the end but the beginning of an intensification of the tug of war between the civilian president and the military establishment. Those who object to the Constitutional Court ruling that invalidated one third of the seats point out that the Generals made a power grab by dissolving Parliament under the cover of a ruling by the Mubarak-appointee court. Others, like Mubarak-opposition leader Mohamed Baradei, uphold the authority of the Court on the principle of ‘a government of laws, not of men.’ This brings to my mind the parallel with the Bush/Gore impasse of 2008, when Vice President Gore bowed to the higher authority of the courts, regardless of the widespread criticism of their role at the time.

So democracy is messy, even in the country that prides itself on being the city on the hill. Democracy, as we understand the concept today, evolved over centuries in specific contexts that, until recently even in the West, did not include women, colored persons or the uneducated. In a country with Egypt’s rate of illiteracy, where a vast swath of the disaffected, disenfranchised masses turned to religion as ‘the solution’, is it any surprise that the outcome of the first free elections disappointed the ideals of the secular-minded young liberals who originally launched the January 25^th revolution?

But that does not negate the fact that it was a revolution, not a mere revolt. To suggest otherwise is to insult the memory of the young idealists who suffered, sacrificed, and died by the thousand to break the cycle of fear and autocracy, once and for all.

Islamist First Family in Egypt: Style or Substance?

A parallel universe. There really is no other way to put it. More than anything today, Egyptians of all political stripes, whether devastated or delighted, are experiencing the surrealist sense of a parallel universe. In that universe, the all-powerful and ineluctable Pharaoh of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, is a prisoner in a hospital somewhere, and a bearded, shabby, obscure Islamist called Mohamed Morsi, a veteran of Mubarak’s prisons, is shown around the presidential palace by the same presidential guard that would never have allowed him within a mile of Mubarak’s person. Less than eighteen months ago, such a scenario would have been too far-fetched even for a movie spoof.

When Mubarak, his wife or his son made a public appearance, it was the culmination of careful coordination and preparation intended as much to preserve the aura of grandeur of the First Family as to shield its members from friction with the public. Especially when you are preparing for the succession to your son, you cultivate the unapproachable mystique of royalty.

By contrast, today in his first public appearance in Tahrir as President-elect, Morsi concluded a passionate, theatrical speech by flinging off his jacket, waving aside his guards, and wading into the crowd of thousands, making a show of relishing his ‘bain de foule’, or bathing in the crowd, as the French say.

Suzanne Mubarak, and Jihan Sadat before her, fully embraced the publicity and power of her role as ‘First Lady.’ In the eyes of the world, where rumors of their greed and ambition rarely penetrated, the two attractive women were reassuringly Westernized; their elegance and polish did credit to Egypt in state visits and international women’s conferences. They shared much: both were half-British, on the distaff side; both married young, to officers of more modest backgrounds; both continued their education later in life and earned advanced degrees while their husbands were in power. Both espoused the typical causes of child welfare, education, and in Suzanne Mubarak’s case, the arts.

Mohamed Morsi’s wife Naglaa Mahmoud comes from a different world. She is not an Egyptian Everywoman, as the New York Times wrote recently; she is an Islamist Everywoman, and many Egyptian women would deny that she represents them. She is not just ‘veiled’, as so many Egyptian women are, with a headscarf; she wears a ‘tarha’ or prayer veil, that sweeps down to her knees. Unlike Turkish President Gul’s wife, who makes every attempt to look attractive and stylish in spite of her headscarf, wearing six-inch ankle boots to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace, Morsi’s wife, by contrast, seems to make every effort to look as severe and dowdy as possible.

Although she accompanied her husband to the United States, where he studied engineering while she gave birth to two of their sons, she herself holds no college degree. Naglaa Mahmoud keeps her maiden name, not as a sign of independence from her husband, but rather in adherence to the convention of Muslim societies, where a woman never takes her husband’s name. In fact, ‘Suzanne Mubarak’ and ‘Jihan Sadat’ never existed outside of media parlance; legally, they kept their maiden names, as evidenced by the court charges, after the revolution, against ‘Suzanne Sabet’, the maiden name of Mrs. Mubarak.

As nervous observers in Egypt today try to decode style for substance, President-Elect Morsi and his wife will come under the closest scrutiny. How will Morsi, a virtually unknown back-up candidate brought in at the last minute by the Muslim Brotherhood to contest the presidential elections, deal with the pressures of office? But Egypt has a history of dark horses, once dismissed as lightweights- Sadat was derided as Nasser’s yes-man and Mubarak as an accidental president- who, finding themselves elevated to the position of president, prove to have the tenacity and cunning to not only hang on to power but to sustain their rule for decades. Morsi might prove to be just such an accidental president, confounding expectations. Whether that is a prospect to be dreaded or welcomed depends on where you stand in a divided Egypt today.

Islamist President in Egypt: The Devil You Don't

Celebrating Morsi win in Tahrir photo by M. Serageldin

Egypt today was a country divided, nearly as neatly down the middle as the votes- 51% versus 49%- that elected Islamist Morsi over his rival for the presidency, the military-backed Shafiq. On the one hand, in Egypt today, there was celebration, horns tooting, flags flying; on the other hand there were tears, lamentation, fear of what the future might bring. Cairo alone was an ominous demonstration of national divisiveness: Tahrir Square was dedicated to the supporters of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, while Nasr City was the gathering ground for the supporters of the former general and Mubarak loyalist Shafiq.

It was the culmination of an escalation of events that began with the coup d’etat, by legislative decree, staged by the Generals on Thursday. For a few surreal days, Egyptians were in limbo: supporters of Morsi were happy their candidate won, but then so were supporters of Shafiq, who also declared he had won; those who wanted Mubarak dead were told he was clinically dead, and those who wanted him alive were reassured he was merely in a coma.

Now the suspense is over. On Sunday afternoon the head of the Egyptian Election Committee appeared on television, carried live by half the television stations around the world, and- as if determined to stretch his fifteen minutes of fame into fifty- launched into an agonizingly detailed accounting of the results of each precinct; at the end of which he finally pronounced the verdict the world was waiting to hear: Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, carried the day.

Tahrir erupted in cheers. It was not only Muslim Brotherhood supporters camped out in the square; there were secular liberals, as well, who were standing up for the sanctity of free and fair democratic elections and refused to see the revolution annulled and the clock turned back to Mubarak-era military rule. For those liberals, including Wael Ghonim of Face Book fame, the principle of democracy trumped ideological differences, however bitter the pill was to swallow.

But for many others in Egypt, it felt like the end of the world. For many of my friends who are distrustful of the military but outright terrified by the Muslim Brotherhood, the devil they know would have been better than the devil they don’t. One woman I know was choked up with tears, speaking on the phone from Egypt. Yet I remember a conversation with her, a year or so before the revolution, in which she’d dismissed my misgivings about the outcome of a hypothetical Brotherhood accession to power. “So what? They’ll make us wear a headscarf for a couple of years, that’s all, and then they’ll forget about it,” she shrugged at the time. Today she is in tears.

But this being Egypt, the air is thick with conspiracy theories. Morsi and the Generals must have reached an agreement, it is believed, hence the delay in announcing the results. The election of Morsi would avert the threat of massive unrest on the part of his cheated supporters; but with all powers concentrated in the hands of the military, he would be a toothless president reduced to a ceremonial role. Moreover, another, counter-intuitive conspiracy theory maintains, the election of an Islamist would further the secret plan of the United States to see Egypt broken up into two states, like the Sudan, Iraq and potentially Libya. 

And there are yet others in Egypt who will go to bed tonight weary of conspiracy theory, suffering from revolutionary fatigue, longing for a return to ‘normal’- with only the vaguest of notions of what normal might look like today. 

Mubarak: Rumors of My Death are Exaggerated

‘Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated,’ Mark Twain said, and of no one is that more true than of Hosni Mubarak. From a ‘clinically dead’ diagnosis on Tuesday, he seems to have made a miraculous recovery in the Maadi military hospital.

Ironically, it was the looming prospect of his death that provided the underlying catalyst of the Revolution of January 25^th, and the reason it initially succeeded. Egyptians were, by and large, prepared to wait for the perennially imminent eventuality of Mubarak’s death of natural causes; it was the prospect of inheriting his son Gamal as his successor, and a perpetuation of Mubarak rule for another thirty years, that finally proved intolerable to the people of Egypt.

Most crucially, it proved inacceptable to the Generals. Gamal Mubarak and his elite coterie of civilian businessmen threatened the deeply entrenched powers, privileges, and economic interests of the Armed Forces, which controlled some forty percent of the economy of the country. Initially, when the revolution erupted, the military stood on the side lines, but in the end the Generals confronted Mubarak with an ultimatum: leave or be deposed. Had the military chosen to intervene against the demonstrators, the course of the revolution would have been very different.

The passing away of Hosni Mubarak just after the Generals staged a bloodless coup d’état would have been a curiously tactful bit of timing on his part, taking the potentially explosive issue of his controversial sentence off the table. Before the revolution, the hoariest joke about Mubarak went this way: Mubarak is on his death bed, and the people come to pay their last respects. His Generals come to him and say: “Mr. President, the people have come to say goodbye.” Mubarak replies: “Why, where are the people going?”

Apparently, it is not yet time for Mubarak to go. Except, perhaps, abroad for ‘treatment’ somewhere where he can live out his life in luxurious exile; this is the cynical rumor that is currently circulating in Egypt. For most of the eighteen days of the Egyptian revolution of January 2011, all the people in Tahrir asked of the Mubaraks was for them to go. “Leave, leave,” they chanted. The Mubaraks chose to stay, perhaps believing in a come-back. Today, given the mood of the country, after disillusionment and counter-revolution, violence and contested elections, exile may be more than Mubarak can hope to be granted.

Egypt: Equilibrium of Evils

It could not have been more blatant or more predictable: late Sunday evening, as the polls closed and the presidential run off elections projected a win for the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Morsi, the military rulers of Egypt declared a new interim constitution that severely restricted the powers of the president : he would be reduced to greeting heads of state at airports, as one friend put it, along the model of the Indian or Israeli presidents. Thus the ruling generals consolidated the coup d’état they staged on Thursday night- under the thin veneer of ‘court rulings’- that dissolved the Brotherhood-dominated parliament and arrogated to the generals all law-making powers, as well as control over the national budget; power to declare war; the naming of a constitution-drafting assembly; and complete freedom from civilian oversight. Moreover, the simultaneous re-assertion of draconian martial law effectively signaled that dissent would no longer be tolerated.

And so, at the moment when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had promised to hand over power to civilian authorities, they re-instated a military dictatorship: Mubarak on steroids. Regardless of the two-hour news conference the generals gave today, attempting to soften their message, there is no getting around that stark reality: this is what the revolution has wrought.

The power struggle is not over. No one is satisfied in Egypt today, but many look at the situation as an equilibrium of evils: neither a Muslim Brotherhood sweep of the executive and the legislative, which would have opened the door to an over-reaching Islamist government; or the election of the military-backed Mubarak throw-back, Ahmed Shafiq, which would have legitimized the ruling generals coup d’état. For some, including liberals who disagree on all points with the Brotherhood but cannot stomach rule by military junta, it might even look like a glass half-full. Half-full of a bitter drought, nonetheless.