This article is a preview from the Winter 2013 issue of New Humanist magazine. You can subscribe here.
If you want a snapshot of the clashing social forces in the Arab world, look to the images of the Harlem Shake, Middle East style. What began at the start of the year as a global online video craze – an eye-rolling song-and-dance meme, with myriad variations posted on YouTube – took on a different meaning in Tunisia and Egypt. Two years after the popular uprisings that had unseated widely loathed dictators in both countries, Egyptian protesters took their dance spoof to the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo, while in Tunisia’s capital, officials from the Islamist-dominated coalition government tried and failed to stop a local twist on the Shake.
On their own, these small dance protests seemed little more than youthful mockery of political Islam and its adherents’ apparent disdain for frivolity. But both were symptomatic of a far greater malaise. For beyond the nose-thumbing rebukes was a deeper, more disruptive dispute with Islamist governments in both countries – democratically elected, but a crashing disappointment, even to many who had voted for them. Those governments, led by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and by its sister movement in Tunisia, Ennahda, were running into constant clashes with populations that had paid such a high price to end dictatorships and had high expectations of what should follow.
That was in February 2013, when the signs of discontent with Islamist governments were already visible. By July, that discontent had erupted onto the streets in Egypt, as mass protests paved the way for the army’s removal of the Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, who had been elected barely a year earlier. More than a thousand of its supporters were killed by security forces in a singleweek during the clashes that followed, and its leaders were arrested. In Tunisia, the Ennahda-led coalition government faced soaring hostility and protests, too. It was accused of misrule, of trying to silence dissidents and of tolerating a hardline, violent Islamism that had created the conditions in which two vocal political opponents were gunned down in the street in the space of four months.
With a careful eye on what happened in Egypt, Ennahda saved itself and Tunisia by responding to protesters: in August it dissolved the coalition government in favour of a technical, transitional body that would draft the country’s constitution. But though its own crisis was milder, it was evidence of the same thing: of political Islam failing in power – and failing, not least, in the eyes of the people who had voted these movements into government. By the autumn, the Brotherhood, which had spent nearly a century organising, often clandestinely, to win power, would find itself driven back underground, while Ennahda would be offering to give up power.
Why did it all go wrong, and in such a short space of time? The post-revolutionary turmoil and both countries’ shredded economies would have made governing a challenge for any movement. But the speed and manner in which populations became disillusioned – willing, in Egypt’s case, to support a coup that restored something akin to the police state that existed before 2011 – suggest there’s a deeper question about political Islam. Can it ever properly manage democracy? In these countries, does it even have a future?
In July 2011, in a Cairo district that hugs the bulging river Nile, men and women were making their way to mosques as the evening call to prayer mingled with patriotic pop songs blasting out of corner kiosks. Along a strip of shops, I stopped at a shiny sign bearing the logo of the Freedom and Justice party, the newly created political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Inside this former rented flat, in a room with pink paint and bunny rabbit wallpaper, sat a group of women in tight hijabs framing wide smiles.
“Under the old regime, we would have been arrested for having this meeting,” one of the women, Enas Mostafa, told me. “It was against the law to work on political issues freely, or to have this centre,” she added. Abdel Moaty Zaki, a prominent organisation member who was sitting in on the meeting, chimed in, repeating the point: “Against the law,” he said. And they all laughed. Freely.
Among Brotherhood members in Egypt, prior to the 2011 elections, this state of disbelief was common – organising in the open, contesting real, democratic elections, it all just seemed too good to be true.
Founded by the schoolteacher and imam Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood now has franchises across the Middle East. A religious, social and political movement, it aims to rule by Islamic law, although lately the definitions of that “law” have differed greatly. But despite that vagueness over its ultimate aims (what does it mean by “implementing Sharia law”, for instance?) it became a powerful, enduring movement through two strategies: grassroots organising – it has an extensive social and charitable network that it uses to build trust and as a recruitment base – and social welfare, notably provision of health and education.
In Egypt, the group has survived decades of alternately being barely tolerated or fiercely repressed, its operations semi-open or completely clandestine, its members free to stand in elections or imprisoned, tortured and exiled. As a result, the group is secretive and rigidly hierarchical: such were the necessary conditions for survival.
In somewhat complicated elections that took place between November 2011 and February 2012, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party won nearly half the seats in the lower house while Islamists (including the Salafi al-Nour party) took 84 per cent of the upper house, the Shura Council. That same year in May, Mohamed Morsi won the presidential elections in a run-off, with 51 per cent, but then a month later, the supreme court dissolved the lower house, saying it was invalidated because party candidates had run for seats supposed to only be contested by individuals. All this meant that Islamist groups were in control of all the operational bits of government. But almost immediately the problems began to mount.
The party’s problems can be filed into three distinct categories. First, the Brotherhood was politically inept or naïve: the movement made avoidable, damaging mistakes. Second, they are insular ideologues – a trait that is not exclusive to religious parties: Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, for example, displays a very similar kind of uncompromising, uncooperative and stunting fundamentalism. Third, the Brotherhood failed because of forces beyond its control – and in part beyond its borders. Egyptians are sometimes comically taken with outlandish conspiracy theories (Mossad-trained sharks; spyware-fitted birds; a Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cell lodged in the White House). But it is not paranoid to suggest that, because of its geo-political significance as the largest Arab nation, a US ally with control over a vital trade and military route, and a regionally affecting 30-year-old peace treaty with Israel, Egypt attracts many outside meddlers. By contrast, in Tunisia, chaos was partly averted because Ennahda does not suffer the first and third of these problems. Such disorder as did arrive post-revolution is, arguably, down to the party and hardline Islamists beyond it trying to impose their fundamentalism on people who don’t want it.
What’s more, the Brotherhood’s support in Egypt was not as sturdy as the vast numbers who voted for them might suggest. Many non-Islamist voters gave them the benefit of the doubt – because they were far better organised than the other parties, and because the other remaining candidate in the presidential election was a Mubarak-era official.
Egypt’s revolution was neither launched nor won by Islamists, and in such circumstances the party was bound to be scrutinised closely by the public. For much of the president’s rule, there ran a popular online “Morsi Meter” tracking the leader’s list of broken promises. One crucial promise was broken before he even got to power: to win over Egyptians who suspected the Brotherhood of being more interested in seizing control than helping the country build a free and democratic society, the movement had pledged not to contest all parliamentary seats, or to put up a candidate for the presidency; it then did both.
Then came the u-turns and the intolerance. Having – after much prevarication – sided with the revolutionaries on the streets, in government the Brotherhood started to abandon the very things those revolutionaries were fighting for, captured by the enduring slogan: “Bread! Freedom! Justice!” The party rushed through an unpopular constitution curtailing women’s rights, religious freedom and freedom of expression, which was then approved by a pathetically low-turnout referendum. When demonstrations against that took to the streets nationwide, protesters were met with brutal violence. As for the “justice” bit, the Brotherhood put the armed forces responsible for killing protesters in the 2011 revolution beyond the law. And freedom? Not so much. According to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, police detentions, torture and violence continued under Morsi as they had under his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.
In November 2012 Morsi made a shocking power grab, when he professed a need to “safeguard the revolution” and issued a decree that stated that himself, the Shura Council and the constitutional assembly were all immune from judicial review. This drew accusations that Morsi was a “new Pharaoh” (an insult that had been thrown at Mubarak in his day) and provoked another round of devastating, divisive protests. It was one of a second category of errors – those caused by the Brotherhood’s inward-looking fundamentalism. Perhaps the movement’s leaders were incapable, after so many years of suppression, of trusting any other group enough to co-operate with them. Another, less sympathetic reading would suggest that they just didn’t want to. And this is the bit that scares people – the worry that Islamists, once in power, just use it to stage a take over and do away with the democratic process that got them there in the first place. This fear, along with the economic mess, the spiralling food and fuel costs, the unemployment, the lack of security, is what propelled so many Egyptians back onto the streets in June, demanding that the president step down.
Such destructiveness stands in contrast to the Tunisian experience: Ennahda said it wanted to power-share in the period preceding the country’s first democratic elections in October 2011. Then it did just that, in a three-way “troika” coalition with the secular Congress for the Republic and the social democrats, Ettakatol. It was turbulent, but it enabled a degree of progress and stability that Egypt could only dream of through the constant tussles, tear gassings and killings. In August this year, Ennahda bowed to popular pressure and dissolved this coalition in favour of a caretaker government. That was after two assassinations of anti-Islamist opposition figures had sparked months of unrest over the role of Islam in politics and the way in which Ennahda was dealing with deadly tensions on the streets. Ennahda must have had one eye on the chaos in Egypt last July, which sparked copy-cat protests in Tunisia calling for the party to resign. As Fatima Ayub, Middle East and North Africa fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, explained to me: “Ennahda long realised what the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t, which is that they don’t have a majoritarian mandate, that the context they’re working in is so volatile and it’s probably better to be a bit conciliatory and make sure there’s a survival space for the movement to operate within.”
Sometimes, though, that political acumen has seemed in short supply. Back in March, when Tunisia’s government tried to ban the Harlem Shake protesters, the dancers wondered why the government wasn’t similarly outraged by a much more dangerous kind of protest: rising cultural vigilantism from the country’s Salafis, with violent attacks on artists, intellectuals and politicians.
Salafis had been repressed in both countries before uprisings, but sprang up into the free public space created by those revolutions. A strict, conservative, ultra-religious movement, Salafis have emerged, to the surprise of many, as a force in post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia – claiming 27 per cent of the lower assembly seats in Egypt’s 2011 elections. The Tunisian Salafi party, Jabhat al-Islah (“the Reform Front”), only gained a license for the first time last year, which means it can now compete in forthcoming elections. Opponents in Tunisia say that Ennahda has pandered to the Salafis rather than confronting them head on, for fear that it would bleed support to the hardline Islamists.
But in Tunisia this approach sparked fury among a population that fears religiously motivated crackdowns. Tunisians have pushed back, often using the power of cultural creativity to do so. Such protests have included dancers and rappers trying to reclaim public space, as they did with the Harlem Shake; silent sit-down protests where the participants just read books; and even eL Seed, a “calligraffiti” artist who painted a verse from the Qur’an that tackles intolerance on the minaret of a mosque in his home town of Gabes, after Salafists disrupted an art fair in Tunis in June.
My own favourite was the “parsley protest” of February this year. When an independent TV station critical of Ennahda lost vital funding, it claimed this was down to Ennahda supporters warning off the station’s usual advertisers. The channel’s appeal for donations on Facebook was promptly disrupted by Ennahda supporters, who left comments saying the funding drive was as silly as trying to sell parsley on the streets. You can see where that went: the station raised £47,000 in parsley sales in one day, and created the satisfyingly absurd visual of Tunisians strolling the capital’s streets with forelocks of parsley looped over their ears.
At street level, this is so often what it has come down to: the attempted imposition of Islamic values on societies that aren’t going to put up with it. Of course, Tunisians and Egyptians face far bigger day-to-day hardships: the economic mess, the spiralling food and utility prices, the instability and lawlessness on the streets, the arrests, imprisonments and torture, the crippling lack of justice for perpetrators of violence against protesters. Each country has its own list of maladies, but there is an underlying link between the battles fought on the streets of both. It’s something that the Islamists have got wrong, this idea that you can make present-day post-revolutionary countries more pious, more conservative, more observant than they want to be. It doesn’t look as if this could take hold either in Egypt or – even less likely – in Tunisia. Identities don’t work like that, and people who have only just shaken off dictators will resist those others who try to force a new set of cultural norms on them.
I spoke to eL Seed, the minaret-painting artist, who told me his work was about bringing people together at a time when arguments over religions seemed to be tearing them apart. While Egyptians now watch as their deposed president is put on trial by the generals who removed him, in Tunisia the fragile democratic process is threatened by attempts from Islamist militants to derail it, as with the recent failed suicide bomb attack in Sousse in November. “We used to live all together,” eL Seed told me. “The problem after the revolution is how we can stick together.”
