Harsh as the government of Abdel
Fattah Sisi continues to be it has suffered some significant setbacks at the
hands of the judiciary, the religious establishment and the parliament. This is so despite its tens of thousands of
political prisoners and severe repression of civil society associations
committed to defend free expression and the rule of law as well as its more
obvious political opponents. Each individual defeat can be explained as the
result of a combination of idiosyncratic factors, but the growing list suggests
reconsideration of our understanding of the regime as simply an authoritarian
state.
These conflicts are worth attention
because these institutions have been so closely identified with the creation of
the current regime. Many trial judges enthusiastically
supported the new regime and issued guilty verdicts against a wide swath of
opponents of the coup who were frequently labeled terrorists. In hundreds of cases defendants were
sentenced to death and in thousands of others they were given long prison terms. The chief justice of the Supreme
Constitutional Court served as interim president. Leading religious figures, including the head
of the Azhar, associated themselves with the ouster of former president
Muhammad Morsi and with Sisi himself.
The parliament, elected in 2016 under the constitution that replaced the
one written during the Morsi era, is widely viewed as a docile, rubber
stamp. It affirmed most of the decrees
Sisi issued during the year and a half in which Egypt had no legislative body
whatsoever. Parliament was to some
degree the creature of the intelligence agencies which influenced the election
process. To the extent that it represents anyone at all, it represents the
interests of powerful local elites who were threatened by the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Morsi presidency. The
religious establishment, notably the head of the Azhar but including past and
present officials, opposed the Morsi government and publically provided support
to the coup in the days leading up to it and in the formation of the government
afterwards.
There is a widespread presumption
that each of these institutions is subservient to and directly controlled by
the president. This may not be the
case. It may, in fact, be the case the
Sisi presides over an elite coalition whose internal disputes and conflicts
make its members difficult, if subordinate, partners in the current
regime. It is convenient to think of
each of these institutions as completely under the control of the armed forces,
President Sisi, and the security forces.
They are certainly not independent or unaffected by the army, the
president, or the intelligence agencies, but they also have independent reasons
to support the current regime and on occasion to dissent from its
policies. Examining those moments of
dissent is revealing of the contours of the Egyptian state and politics today.
Contemporary political science has
a dichotomous understanding of political regimes: democratic or authoritarian. Although
there are various “flavors” of each type, when political scientists speak of
the types of governments there are they invariably are interested in how
political officials are chosen. Speaking
of democracy it is common to point out that more than free elections are
required and to propose a list of individual freedoms that democracies must
protect if they are to be considered real.
Political science describes dictatorships in a variety of flavors which
themselves are largely devised to explain how public officials are chosen or
choose themselves.
Interesting as this is and useful
as it may be for American policy makers and pundits, it is different and
possibly far less sophisticated than the political analysis of political
regimes that dominated much European political thinking for hundreds of years
when there were no democracies and most executives were ruling monarchs. During the centuries in which early modern
Europe was made, almost no states were (in our contemporary sense) democratic
nor was democracy generally conceived as either a viable or a valuable form of
political organization. Until very
recent times, when critics of autocratic rule thought about how socially
prominent, politically powerful, and wealthy groups could temper the power of
centralizing rulers they rarely mentioned democracy and they paid little if any
attention to the rights of the lower classes, women, or religious
minorities. They thought in terms of
aristocracies, oligarchies, or mixed governments in which elites shared power.
Egypt is by no means a democracy
and the government does not shrink from savage violence. We can understand it better if we think of it
as an oligarchy composed of a coalition of interests and institutions. We can ask ourselves when their interests (both
material and institutional) are aligned or at cross-purposes. Doing so casts light on contemporary Egyptian
politics and it also casts light on why Egypt, in the wake of the Arab Spring,
has turned out to be a very different place than Tunisia, Yemen, Syria or
Libya. This is not to say that Egypt
today is in a better place than its neighbors or even a particularly good place,
only that it is worth trying to understand how it is different.
The regime is not unstable and the
president will usually get his way, but occasionally some actors manage to
outmaneuver the president. They do so at least partly to keep their own
institutional power intact as well as for more direct reasons of interest. The Egyptian parliament, the Azhar and the
judiciary are closely aligned with the presidency but they also have
significantly more autonomy than at any time in the last 60 years with the
obvious exception of the brief period between January 2011 and July 2013 when
one repressive regime ended and another began.
Among the most recent and perhaps important
defeats of the president came with an attempt to cede arguably Egyptian
territory to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the attempted passage of a law regulating
the civil service, and most recently with the attempt to eliminate men’s right
to divorce their wives verbally. In each
case the government’s position has faced some significant popular opposition
but also ultimately was rejected by the judiciary, the legislature, and the
religious establishment respectively.
Each of these challenges to presidential authority occurred openly. The fate of the islands and divorce remain
open but the government made at least some concessions on the civil service
law.
Defense of
the nation’s borders is a constitutive element of modern nationalism. National sovereignty over national territory
has mobilized Egyptians for more than a hundred years. British troops did not completely leave the
country until 1954 and Israeli troops occupied the Sinai Peninsula in 1956 and
again between 1967 and 1982. Between
2011 and 2013 there were rumors that President Morsi planned to give Sinai to
the Palestinians so that they could withdraw from Gaza and create a state. During those same years Egyptian army
officers also frequently warned of plans to divide the country into separate
statelets. Unfounded and ridiculous as these rumors were, they served
to intensify a sense of existential threat and the fragility of national sovereignty.
The failure of the armed forces to
prevent the creation of a sovereign Israel in Palestine in 1948 was a proximate
reason for the military seizure of power in 1952. The army’s defeat in 1967 was a deeply-felt
national catastrophe weakening the Nasser regime. President Sadat carefully
nurtured the image of the 1973 war as a military victory to enhance his
legitimacy as did President Mubarak after Sadat’s assassination. Even intellectuals highly critical of the
Nasserist regime and its repression have expressed fears that integration into
the global economy could threaten national sovereignty.
Egyptian writers have, on occasion,
expressed popular fears about tyranny, corruption, and existential threats to
the nation. Sometimes these expressions
have been humorous and sometimes nightmarish.
Gamal Al-Ghitani is known in the US and Europe, to the extent that he is
known at all, as the author of the short novel Zayni Barakat. It first appeared in Arabic as a magazine
serial in 1971 and in 1974 as a single volume.
Its English translation, introduced with a foreword by Edward Said,
provided a much wider audience with access to a story of how a police state
works. El-Ghitani set his account of
authoritarian excess in early 16th century Mamluk Egypt. Other accounts of the Nasserist state by
authors like Naguib Mahfouz such as Karnak Café were set in the historical
present. While they detailed the ethical
and physical destruction such government produced they did not portend the
collapse of the state. By setting his
novel just as the Ottoman conquest of Egypt occurred, El-Ghitani seemed to
suggest that authoritarianism had deep historical roots as a strategy for
governance but that it also created a government that could be fatally
unresponsive to external challenge.
By the
time of his death in 2015 El-Ghitani had long ceased to be an insurgent figure
in Arabic literature or the Egyptian literary establishment, but his early work
remains a useful touchstone. The recent decision by the Egyptian Supreme
Administrative Court voiding a treaty that would have ceded two islands in the
Red Sea to Saudi Arabia makes it worth revisiting his 1978 story, “What
Happened to the Land of the Valley” written when Israeli troops occupied the
Sinai Peninsula and Israeli settlers built towns along the northeast coast.
“No one
knew when it began,” Ghitani opens his story, but voices were raised against
allowing foreigners to own land even then.
Elements of irony abound when we learn that initial purchases include
not only apartments and small stores but even pavement. A dystopian global market drives foreigners
who can no longer afford housing in London, Paris, and Sidney to buy more and
more property in Cairo and its environs.
When they have purchased the entire country the new owners attempt to
evict the inhabitants. The eviction is
thwarted by the discovery of an acre in Upper Egypt which remains out of their
possession. In a dramatic but uncertain
conclusion thousands of Egyptian men, women, and children link arms to protect
the acre from being flooded as the alien purchases open dams and dikes to flood
the single crucial acre of sovereignty that remains.
When it was
announced in early 2016 that the Egyptian government planned to cede control
over Tiran and Sanafir, two islands between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas to
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egyptians were stunned. The Saudi government claimed that Egypt had
occupied the islands in the mid-20th century at its request to protect
them from Israel. Egypt was not ceding
territory; it was simply returning islands mid-way between the Saudi and
Egyptian mainlands to their original sovereign.
The
government never gave a clear reason for the transfer and popular and elite
suspicions blossomed that the regime was exchanging the national territory for
billions of dollars of aid it had already received from the Saudis. These concerns are not new. The billionaire Saudi investor and prince
Walid Bin Talal was forced to relinquish an agricultural project in Upper Egypt
in the early months of the 2011 uprising due to widespread concerns about
corruption and undue influence over the Mubarak government.
It is not
surprising that intellectuals, activists, and ordinary citizens quickly moved
to stop the transfer. Public
demonstrations occurred despite a ban that has frequently been enforced with
murderous violence. Khalid Ali, an
attorney and leftist opposition candidate for president in 2012, initiated
legal action. Within weeks historians, legal scholars, and
others identified decrees, maps, and legislation showing that that the islands
were subject to Egyptian control in the late 19th century. If so the islands would have been Egyptian
well before the Saudi state came into existence. This
matters because the government cannot, under the existing constitution,
alienate Egyptian territory. The
government’s initial explanation of the transfer of the islands was that it
resulted from delineating the Egyptian-Saudi maritime boundary. The argument for border delineation made the
transfer an administrative decision rather than a legislative act. Just for this reason the ultimate arbiter of
the legality of the transfer was the High Administrative Court rather than the
Supreme Constitutional Court. The court
determined that the evidence put the transfer outside the administrative power
of the executive authority. It could
only be accomplished by a legislative act regarding the sovereignty of the
state.
The generally
compliant legislature has not voted either to transfer the islands or to grant
the president the right to do so. This
is not the first time the legislature has been recalcitrant to government
initiatives. In January 2016 the
legislature, reviewing laws promulgated before it was seated, rejected
President Sisi’s civil service law by a vote of 336 to 150. The law, a revision of the pre-existing law
on the civil service, aimed to make it easier to discipline workers and to fire
them as well as to cut the growth of wages paid them. It was unpopular with civil service employees
and their unions and led to public protests that, although illegal, were not dispersed
with the kind violence deployed against political protests.
A revised
civil service law was enacted at the end of 2016. The new law provided greater financial
incentives to government employees than the original proposal and was clearly a
defeat for Sisi. Egyptian analysts
differ over why the legislature opposed Sisi on this issue. Some have argued that the police played a
significant role in electing the current parliament and that the conflict over
the civil service law reflects a continuing conflict between the police
establishment and the military. Another
possibility is that Sisi’s decree in July 2015 that the 75% of the seats in the
parliament would be individual candidacies and only 20% party lists has had
unforeseen consequences. Individual
seats strengthen the candidacies of wealthy businessmen and influential
families whose interests are not wholly dependent on the regime. Consequently the creation of the majority
“For the Love of Egypt” list by the late military intelligence officer, Sameh
Seif El-Yazal, did not or could not re-create the kind of pliant partisan
apparatus that former president Mubarak had with the National Democratic
party. Weakening the legislature may, in
fact, have weakened executive control over the legislators. Lastly, the choice of the issue over which
the legislature confronted the executive is meaningful. Over the last 20 years employment in
state-owned industry has markedly declined as privatization and market-oriented
policies have dramatically decreased the size of state-owned industry. Civil service employment has decreased but
remains large. As an example of what
this means, in 2010, government statistics indicated that just over 12% of
Egyptians were employed in manufacturing which is increasingly in private
ownership and almost 9% were employed in education which remains largely a
public function and almost another 8% were employed in either the civil or
defense administrations.
Fifty years ago the laws governing
civil servants affected only a small, relatively secure portion of the workforce. As the work of Egypt’s Nobel prize winning
novelist Naguib Mahfouz recounts, these employees may have been subject to
chicanery and mis-treatment by their superiors but their positions were
nevertheless largely understood as desirable.
The Egyptian public service has grown larger and wages, especially at
the lower levels, have become increasingly hard to live on while service
rendered the public has become increasingly poor in quality. Less secure tenure not only eliminates one of
the important perquisites of the positions but is widely understood to make
employees even more subject to the whims of supervisors.
That parliament defended its own
constituency is by no means an indication of its support for freedom of
expression, liberalism, or support for any greater principle of good governance
or democracy. Parliament has stripped
two members of their seats in the last year.
The first, Tawfiq Okasha, was ousted by a majority for having had
contacts with the Israeli embassy without first gaining parliamentary
approval. The second, Mohammad Anwar Esmat al-Sadat,
nephew of the late President Anwar el-Sadat, was ousted recently for his
attempt to prevent passage of extremely restrictive legislation governing the
work of non-governmental organizations and his disclosure of wasteful spending
on parliament itself.
Last, the regime has felt
disaffection from the religious establishment including the public expression
of discontent by Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmed al-Tayyeb. The Azhar is often described as a
thousand-year old university and the most respected global institution of Sunni
Islam. The Azhar does comprise an old
and significant set of institutions for religious instruction where many of the
officials who oversee Egypt’s mosques are trained. It also provides formal and informal opinions
(fatwas) for government and private individuals about the religious character
of their actions. Speaking of the Azhar
can also refer to the modern university with faculties of medicine, politics
and literature or the primary-secondary school system with more than a million
students. The “Azhar” comprises a broad
array of educational and religious institutions. Like the government educational bureaucracy
and the court system, reaches deeply into Egyptian society. Like the army and the bureaucracy the Azhar
has not been well or deeply studied, not least because it does not welcome
external scrutiny. A poignant account of
the life of a fictional Azhari graduate is to be found in Abderrahman
Sharqawi’s 1952 novel “Al-Ard” (This Egyptian Earth): a graduate finds himself morally at odds with
a government official who steals land from peasants but also finds himself
trapped by his own economic insecurity in acquiescing in the theft.
In 2016 the government proposed a
change in the law governing divorce in ways consistent with what many analysts
have referred to as “state feminism”. Over
the last 60 years Egyptian governments have occasionally attempted to use the
law to shift the balance of social power toward women. These have generally enhanced the bargaining
power of women in family law but without empowering independent civil
associations of women. In Egypt Muslim
men can divorce their wives at will.
Divorce for men is what scholars call performative because saying the
words “I divorce you” three times ends a marriage. The act of speaking the words constitutes the
divorce which need not be communicated to the wife or registered with the
state. Women can initiate proceedings to
obtain a divorce but, unlike men, they cannot unilaterally end a marriage. Sissi proposed that verbal divorce be
annulled to be replaced by a formal meeting with a religious official. His
stated concern is both that there are too many divorces and divorce is
increasingly common. Forcing the process into an administrative
process might diminish their number if only insofar as it becomes more
expensive, more cumbersome, and more public.
Tayyeb publicly opposed this
measure which was unpopular with many of the Azhari ulama and especially the
governing council. The proposed change
may very well disadvantage men to some degree and it is at odds with received
practice and understanding of family law as subordinate to Islamic norms. Because the constitution mandates that
Islamic legal principles provide the basis of Egyptian legislation there is
tension between institutions that claim authority to interpret what constitutes
Islamic law or legal principles. These
debates have become more acute as two constitutions were written, ratified and
approved in referenda in the past four years.
This may appear to be a rather
marginal issue on which to oppose Sissi and his government, but it indicates
some important disagreement between the Azhari elite and Sissi’s proclaimed
project of reforming Islam. There are
good reasons for insisting that verbal divorces be registered—not least
fairness to women who are divorced without knowing it. There are also reasons why members of the
Senior Scholars Council which, in the wake of the tumult of the last few years,
now wields significant authority again might reject such a proposal. Azhar has gained both autonomy and a secure
constitutional role in the wake of the uprising. Where the head of the Azhar (the shaykh) was
formerly chosen by the head of state, he is now chosen by the Senior Scholar’s
Council and the constitution guarantees that the institution will receive
government support. Azhar’s leaders
have every reason to protect it against any encroachment.
Overall, the bench, the officers’
corps, the legislature and the religious establishment supported the coup and
the creation of the current government. This is in contradistinction to the 1952
coup, frequently taken as the model and progenitor of Egypt’s current
constellation of institutions. In 1952
large sections of the religious establishment and the free professions (from
which the legislative elite was largely drawn) opposed the seizure of power by
army officers and the Free Officers spent years subordinating the civilian
elite to their control. Nasser spent
years in frequent, and frequently unsuccessful, attempts to create a single
ruling party. The ultimate success of
Hosny Mubarak in creating the National Democratic party provided him with a
means to transfer authority away from the army and, he seems to have hoped,
ultimately to his son. The decision not
to encourage a single majority party forecloses a possible repetition of that
move but may have strengthened the concern of legislators to retain some
independent influence over their electoral fate.
The civil administration has grown
larger and far more important in Egyptian political and economic life than it
was in 1952 even if it is arguably often over-staffed, less expert and
inefficient. As the Egyptian political
scientist Ashraf el-Sherif noted several years ago, many of the bureaucratic
institutions and ministries have become more autonomous since the
uprising. This may have begun during the
long stasis of the late Mubarak era but it progressed with some rapidity after
the uprising. Institutional autonomy is
reinforced by the increased personalization of positions including
inheritance. The children of officers
become officers; the children of judges become judges; the children of
legislators become legislators. The
mechanisms may be subtly different in each case but they also reinforce the
need and the ability to retain some institutional independence if only to
ensure that the children can inherit the positions and authority of the
fathers. In several well-publicized cases institutional
closure has gone even further so that branches of the judiciary have refused to
allow law school graduates deemed socially inferior to enter service.
Egypt is not a democracy nor is it
a liberal political order. It may,
however, be a mixed political system in which a powerful president is both
sustained by and sometimes opposed by other powerful institutions that seek to
retain as much autonomy as they can. The
set of political institutions that have emerged since the coup are more stable
than many people think and can probably survive a transition to a new political
leader. To forestall such a transition
Sisi will have to ensure the legislature and judiciary both agree to
constitutional amendments. But it will
take more than simply amending the clause limiting the president to two terms
in office. It will also require amending
the clause that forbids amending the limitation itself. If there is indeed any desire among
legislators and the judiciary to preserve their independence that latter clause
is one they will have to hold dear.
Jurists and legislators are now
faced with a new challenge: President Sisi’s decision to invoke a state of
emergency in the wake of the bombing of churches in Tanta and Alexandria. There is not much reason to think that the
legislature will refuse Sisi’s requests to extend the state of emergency. It will be easy as well for legislators of
limited horizons to cooperate against a judiciary that is widely perceived as
self-interested, illiberal, and cruel.
The decline of an oligarchy nourished in the long years of Hosni Mubarak
and that flowered in the wake of his collapse will not mean democracy. Could it, however, lead to something worse
than the present?
