The last few days have marked the
first anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. Even to speak of the events in Egypt over the past year as a
revolution is to make a somewhat controversial statement. Was it, many scholars, commentators,
and activists have asked, a real
revolution? Already whole
conferences have been held in which experts in many fields, and occasionally
even on Egypt, have discussed whether Egypt is a case of revolution, transition
(possibly democratic, possibly stalled, possibly incomplete), or simply an
illusion. Egypt is disquieting
intellectually in a way neither Tunis, nor Libya, nor Yemen nor Syria seem to
be. The mass demonstrations in the
streets, the departure of an autocrat, the immense political agitation
self-consciously spoken not only in Arabic but in the languages and symbols of
historic Europe seem warmly familiar.
The outcome, however, disconcerts many observers. No palaces were seized, the peasants
have not stormed the manors, which in any case no longer exist in the countryside;
many personnel of the old regime—from its generals to its former prime
ministers—either never left or have returned after years in the political
wilderness. The
elections have brought to power a troubling cast of characters: bearded victors
who are modern professionals but speak the language of religion rather than
science. In the American, Israeli
and European press it has become common to wonder if religious obscurantism is
a rising enemy in the Arab world that has been helped to power by the
fecklessness of naïve academics who apologize for its violent excesses.
Part
of the problem is that in Egypt, and events elsewhere in the Arab world, differ
markedly from our canonical examples of revolution and democratic
transition. Social scientists have
learned about revolutions from Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol and Jack
Goldstone. We have also learned
about contentious citizens and social movements from Chuck Tilly, Sid Tarrow,
and Neil Smelser. And of course we
have an entire repertoire of concepts to understand transitions thanks to Juan
Linz, Alfred Stepan and Barbara Geddes.
Over the past year all of these have been deployed in a variety of
arguments across the entire spectrum of political and analytical possibilities
especially in regard to Egypt.
Words
like revolution or democratic transition are conceptual categories. Used with
precision, we are sure they are tools for comprehension. Used incorrectly they mislead. It matters, therefore, whether Egypt
fits into the category of revolution, or democratic transition, or
authoritarian stability. Perhaps Egypt is an example of a stalled partial
democratic transition or perhaps as a certain portmanteau word had it, it is a
“refolution” combining aspects of reform and revolution. And yet Egyptian experience continues
to escape from all of these categories and so the problem must lie in the
Egyptians not in the categories.
Egypt
obviously does not fit into any concept of revolution derived from or connected
to the work of Theda Skocpol:
Social revolutions
in France, Russia, and China were launched, it has been argued here, by crises
centered in the structures and situations of the states of the Old Regimes.
Still, the actual occurrence of social revolutions in these three countries depended
not only upon the emergence of revolutionary political crises, but also upon
the conduciveness of the agrarian sociopolitical structures of the Old Regimes
to peasant revolts.
Nor does
it fit into what Alfred Stepan suggests is the received wisdom about democratic
transition:
After the non-democratic regime
experienced a combination of internal divisions and growing opposition,
softliners from the non-democratic regime held important informal discussions
with the moderate democratic opposition. Over time, a ‘game’ emerged in which
the regime moderates and the opposition moderates both ‘used’ (and attempted to
‘constrain’) their own hardliners.
Unless,
of course, one believes that Field Marshal Tantawi and the generals are the
softliners of the Mubarak regime; the Muslim Brothers are the moderate
democrats; and that the events of the last year represent the outcome of
discussions between these two sides in the small hours of January 27 2011. This is a possible picture but nobody,
not even Stepan as far as I can tell, seems to think it’s an accurate portrayal
of the events of the last year.
Given the violence that has left dozens of people dead and hundreds more
wounded (from Christians who were run over by military vehicles in October to
the shootings around Midan al-Tahrir in November and December) this looks to be
a pretty rough “game.”
In
the past year it has also been suggested that the weakness of the
revolutionaries is that they have had neither ideological unity nor a coherent
organizational presence in Egyptian politics. This is, and will long prove to be, a difficult question to
address. The canonical
cases—whether of revolution or democratization—lead us to expect a path that
moves rapidly toward a more secular state, property rights that ensure economic
development, and a more active and hierarchical state. We expect the revolutionary
leadership to be self-consciously progressive by the tenets of the age: Jacobins who have read Rousseau or Communists
who have read Marx and Lenin.
It might be objected that these
concepts, derived the study of other places and times, are not very applicable
to Egyptian experience. Bernard
Lewis (the emeritus Princeton professor doted on by the right and despised by
the left in academia today) has suggested that it is not very useful to apply
the categories of European experience to an Islamic society. Lewis argues that in the Muslim world popular
social upheavals demand justice not freedom. Thus the canonical cases do not
apply. In one way Lewis is quite
correct. Justice was an important
demand of the demonstrators a year ago.
But it was only one of three primary demands expressed in the slogan:
“bread, freedom and social justice.” This is remarkably similar to the well-known slogan of the
French revolution (“freedom, equality, brotherhood”) although it replaces the
demand for male solidarity with a demand for human well-being . Lewis is, on this reading,
unsurprisingly unmasked yet again as an Orientalist but the demonstration
strikes me as futile if we use it to score verbal points rather than to
understand the world around us. We
can leave aside the contrast between justice and freedom that Edward Said might
have thought invidious to wonder about justice. Perhaps we would learn more if we explored what Egyptians
argue about when they discuss justice. It is, after all, a concept widely discussed in American
political philosophy since John Rawls resurrected it a generation ago in an
influential study of the importance of fairness in organizing society.
American social science has been
fairly consistent in asserting that neither the experience of revolution (its
phenomenology) nor the relatively short period in which a transfer of power
occurs is worth much study. While
there are significant differences between the concepts of revolution and
transition, they do share one similarity in contemporary American social
scientific thinking. For both
Skocpol and Stepan the role of massive public protest plays a rather small role
in a process that (as Skocpol asserts) relatively rapidly transforms social and political structures and
institution. They appear to be primarily
epiphenomenal to deeper structural causes whether class, institutional or as
part of a bargaining game.
Necessarily
for the structural arguments (even of significantly different kinds) to work,
the process of change cannot be an open-ended process. It must define a clear
break and it should have a definitive moment at which the process begins and at
which it ends. It should also leave
no particular mark on those who experience it, not even their rates of
discounting the future which are set outside the game itself. I have no particular problem with this
as an analytic stance as long as we recall that it necessarily constructs the
materials into a plausible case as it goes along. It is not what philosophers would call a “natural
kind.” And in point of fact
historians argue at length these days in their studies of revolution (as they
no doubt will about democratic transitions) about what constitute the points of
departure and termination as well as degrees of continuity and rupture between
those points. Skocpol, it is true,
recognizes a kind of continuity of institutional administration and even of
many aspects of economic and social life but she never pays much attention to
how quickly or how incompletely the French revolution changed France.
The
past quarter of a century studies of the French revolution have suggested that
it did not mark quite the kind of demarcation point in French society, economy,
or governance between the world before and after 1789 that we often imagine. The clearest demarcation, as the work
of Francois Furet indicates, may be between those to whom it marked such a
demarcation and those for whom it did not. The old regime collapsed, and new political institutions and
laws were created. It is certainly not possible to say that politically the
revolution rapidly created stable new structures of governance or grievance let
alone of property rights in the countryside. The decisive political conquest of a republic by the French
did not occur until 1870 with the creation of the Third Republic (which itself
has been succeeded by two more). As Eugen Weber points out (admittedly with a
significant dissent from Tilly) France itself did not begin to supersede its
regions until well after the Third Republic was in place. Patterns of
landownership and industry retained significant continuities from the early 18th
century until well into the 19th. Yet the experience and discourse of the Revolution had a
decisive impact on French political thought that, as Furet also points out,
lasted until well after the Second World War. Attitudes toward the revolution remained a crucial dividing
point for the politics of France until the last third of the 20th
century. Americans will recognize
something similar about the civil war.
It marked a significant break in American history in some ways and yet
it would be plausible to argue that between 1890 and 1940 power and social
practice retained very large elements of continuity with earlier experience in
the American South.
What
are the implications of this kind of argument for today’s Egypt?
As
we look at the events in Egypt over the last year what we must wonder is what
would happen if we reversed our usual focus. What would happen if, instead of beginning with the
canonical understandings and cases, we began with events themselves? What if, instead of focusing on the
known outcomes over a very short period of time and then working back to
“explain” them we began with what is more true of revolutionary uprisings:
their emotional background and whatever sustains massive protest. We could begin with a very simple
question. One very good
explanation of the uprising in Cairo is based on the assertion of continuities
between rising numbers of contentious protests before January 2011 and the
demonstrations that drove Mubarak from office. But what if this explanation hides as much as it reveals? What if the events of January 25-28 mark
a discontinuity with earlier protest instead? What if what happened over that weekend was a break in
recent Egyptian history?
And what if, on the other side, we
assumed that the continuities that are apparent even as the mass protests
subside are a normal part of revolutionary process rather than a hijacking? What if we wondered less about the
institutional destination to which the revolution is supposed to travel and more about the contestation between the
travelers to appropriate the revolutionary narrative as it moves forward? What if we assumed, for example, that
Egypt will still have a powerfully bureaucratic state and a powerful president
in five years but that Egyptians will also, for the first time, be publicly divided
about the role of the army in their history? If the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis have their way the
most prominent religious figure in Egypt, the Shaykh of the Azhar, will be
elected rather than chosen by the president of the republic. What will happen to the prestige of the
institution when it becomes a more obvious focus for open political conflict
even if only within the confines of the institution itself? Criticisms of the Azhar today that it
bends to the demands of government may be replaced by criticisms that it bends
to every passing breeze or to none at all. Debates about religion and politics are likely to continue.
Debates will also sharpen about whether 1919, 1952 or 2011 represent what the
Egyptian revolutionary experience is “really” about. What if Egyptian electoral politics become, for the first
time in 60 years, a focus of practical political effort even if the Ministry of
Interior remains a crucial mechanism for determining local spending
patterns? What would happen
if, instead of trying to explain what caused something that we define as a
single well-defined event—the revolution—we tried to fit it instead into a
longer pattern of changing Egyptian intellectual, institutional and even
economic patterns? Would these be
useful things to think about?
Would they help us to understand events as they unfold?
We
might notice a few other things worth thinking about over the longue durée. We would notice, for example, that nearly a century after
Shaykh Ali Abd al-Raziq was expelled from the Azhar for writing Islam and the Basis of Governance most
Egyptian Muslims accept the idea that parliamentary democracy is the best way
to organize the Egyptian state rather than an autocratic system. What remains unresolved, and what Raziq
himself did not address, is what role they assign to Christians in their
democratic polity. One especially
burning question is whether they will seek to make Christians equal citizens
through their membership in a religious community or as individuals of a
liberal republic. Most likely what
happens will turn out to be best described by what is now the watchword or
shibboleth of social scientific thinking: it will be termed a hybrid.
The Azhar that expelled Abd
al-Raziq was not, however, a particularly unified body nor did it wholly fail
to understand that changes were coming for it confided to another shaykh, Abd
al-Wahhab Khallaf the task of studying some of the outlines of a new state even
as it was condemning Abd al-Raziq.
Many of Khallaf’s proposals are now staples of the politics of both the
Brotherhood and much of the Azhari elite.
Indeed by an irony of fate it might be said that the two most prominent
representatives of official Islam, the Ahmad Tayyib, shaykh al-Azhar, and Ali
Gomaa, the mufti of the Republic, are today significantly more liberal than
most of the parliamentarians elected under the banners of political Islam.
Reading the electoral program of
the Muslim Brothers is, at least occasionally, an exercise in nostalgia. They
propose not only that Egypt pursue self-sufficiency in wheat (which it
routinely no longer had before World War I) but that it become self-sufficient
in cotton as the basis for a textile industry. The latter demand mirrors proposals of the 1916 committee
for industrialization of Egypt under the stewardship of Ismail Sidqi. He was, I believe, the only prime
minister in the world during the 20th century to have dramatically
reduced democratic participation when he stripped Egyptian illiterates of their
votes. It is sometimes said that
the Muslim Brothers favor free market policies like those of Hosni Mubarak and
the International Monetary Fund.
If so, then they are indeed a group engaged in a trip “back to the
future” but their future lies not in 8th century Arabia but in the
semi-liberal free market rent-seeking economy of the 1930s. It is unlikely that they will be more successful in capturing
a significant share of the global textile industry from China than Egyptian
governments of the 1930s were from the Japanese. And it is unlikely as well that they can solve the problem
of globalization by creating a closed Egyptian market.
We
might also notice some important discontinuities. A return to plebiscitary presidential elections or
completely falsified parliamentary contests seems unlikely. Politically
contested parliamentary elections will likely continue even if (or perhaps
especially if) the legislature has no more power than the French Assembly for
the first three quarters of the 19th century or the German Reichstag
under Kaiser Wilhelm. It will be difficult to pigeon-hole such a government,
but how much will it be worth to determine what is the appropriate “regime
type” to assign to either the old situation (semi-plural authoritarianism?) or
the new (plural semi-authoritarianism)?
A
more important discontinuity is what appears to be, even in the worst case, a
dramatic change in the structure of Egyptian politics. It is common to view Egyptian politics
between 1923 and 1952 as a three-cornered game between the Throne, the British,
and the Parliament (dominated by the Wafd party). Between the 1952 coup and 1954 two of the players vanished
and the Throne was replaced by the Free Officers and then Gamal Abdel
Nasser. From 1954 until 2012 Egypt
remained a one-cornered game. For now, and perhaps for quite a while, Egyptian
politics will be a two-sided game in which the parliament (now dominated by the
Muslim Brothers) and the presidency (now in the hands of SCAF and likely to
remain under their watchful eye) contest.
Egypt in 2012 may not turn into another liberal experiment (even if the Muslim
Brothers pursue some of the economic policies of early 20th century
nationalists), but it may yet give ordinary Egyptians more access to government
institutions than they have had in 60 years.
Egyptians
are also beginning to agree to disagree.
Not always happily and not yet completely, but even in the calls for
unity and single-handedness at least one well-worn slogan of the last 60 years
has vanished with the demonstrations of the past year: “no voice higher than the voice of the
revolution.” The use of
extra-legal force (whether in the forms of private thuggery or casual
repression by the military and police authorities) is worrisome and clearly
aims to prevent some voices from being heard that cannot be silenced by appeals
to law. This can be seen in the
uneven response to the “Liars” or “Kazibun” campaign in which young activists
show videos in public spaces to convince Egyptians that the military
authorities are neither truthful nor trustworthy. I attended one in late December which was displaced
by force by angry and nearly violent counter-demonstrators; others have
evidently occurred without significant incident.
For
the Muslim Brothers and perhaps for many who voted for them the events of the
last year are miraculous. For them
the revolution has not been hijacked but has slowly moved into a channel as
inevitable as any story we can tell about France or Russia. The military council, on the other
hand, as I hope to discuss in another blog may have a very different
understanding of the past year as a bullet it barely dodged. And, lastly, there are other political
forces whose dreams were of a different order entirely and who are profoundly
disappointed at an emerging understanding between the Brothers and the army
leadership. It would not be
difficult to imagine the kind of violence I witnessed in December or that
Egyptians have experienced in the past year with attacks on churches,
demonstrators, or even in one case an Azhari shaykh.
What
may matter most is that Egyptians are about to embark on a long political
conflict about the nature of revolution with profound implications for the
country’s future. The debate about
whether 1952 was a revolution or a coup is not really about semantics (like the
regime type debate) but about the nature of mass participation in Egyptian
politics. The victors of 1952
attempted to diminish if not erase 1919 from the national consciousness. Some of the slogans of 1919 have,
directly or indirectly, returned to popular consciousness such as “Religion
belongs to God but the nation belongs to all” (al-din l-illah wa’l watan l’il-gamic ) . Others have been created to contrast
with them such as “civil state with an Islamic reference (dawlah madaniyah bi margaciyah diniyah). These will be
more than academic debates; they will be visceral.
