Where the Nile Flows Into the Rubicon

 

Never in recent history have officials, commentators and even political activists spent so much time parsing the meaning of a handful of words, notably “coup”, “revolution”, and “democratic legitimacy.”  The quality of magical thinking inherent in much of the discussion is striking but nowhere more so than when Western commentators whose clear and long-standing disdain and derision for the now-deposed regime of Muhammad Morsi and Muslim Brothers was abruptly transformed into equally dismissive assertions that unless an elected leadership could remain in office until the end of its term in office Egyptians had once again proved their lack of both ability and desire for democracy.

Millions of people in the streets demanding the Morsi resign was assimilated by many to mob rule and it was not uncommon to hear that if equally large numbers later came out against his successor then an unfortunate precedent was set in which the Armed Forces could again act.  Better, therefore, to wait.  In the world of thought experiments performed by political philosophers it is completely correct.  It was equally true proposed as a counter-argument when Zakariya Abdel Aziz, former head of the Judges’ Club, declared in late January 2011 that the masses of people in the street had effectively abrogated the constitution.   The idea, however, that millions of people are easily roused to demonstrations and that, once so roused, they should be ignored seems incompatible with the notion of democracy.  The question then is not so much should the Armed Forces have intervened but how should President Morsi have responded?

            Much recent foreign commentary presumes that, sufficiently chastised by the commentator, the Egyptian people will come to their senses and pursue policies that ensure the ultimate success of stable democratic development.   This approach has not worked well in the People’s Republics of Berkeley or Cambridge nor in the Duchy of the Beltway; it is unlikely, with one exception, to have the least impact on Egypt.  The one exception, of course, is if the outrage moves from the pages of the daily press to whatever documents President Obama signs to name the recent events in Egypt a coup and thereby deny military aid to the Egyptian Armed Forces and perhaps to delay or deny its request for economic aid from the International Monetary Fund.  This is unlikely because Obama possesses a sharp sense of realism and rapidly scales back his policies to meet an opposition well beyond the half-way point.

            Having moved for a second time to overthrow a head of state whose legitimacy was unquestioned internationally while domestically challenged the Egyptian army and General Sissi have taken a step from which there is no turning back.  Whatever else happened when the 2012 constitution was put into place, it established in theory that President Morsi was not only the head of state but also the supreme commander of the armed forces.  The constitution tactfully avoided discussing who was in charge should the Supreme Commander (the president of the republic) and the Commander in Chief (the Defense Minister and a general) disagree.  No longer.  When Julius Caesar led the Thirteenth Legion across the Rubicon he had committed a capital offence, as did the soldiers who obeyed him.  In Republican Rome only elected officials could command armies on Italian soil; thereafter only success mattered for there would be no other accounting.  Whether General Sissi’s agreement with President Morsi last fall was a tactical retreat or a real truce can, along with the discussions of coups and legitimacy, be left to future historians.  Neither of Egypt’s two living and deposed presidents can be allowed to return to power if those who pulled them down have any hopes for their own futures.

            The army coup that forced former President Mubarak out of office had widespread support and any who opposed it, the feloul (remnants of the old regime), were too disorganized and politically weakened to return to power and exact retribution from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.  The coup that has forced President Morsi out of office may have the support of a significant portion and perhaps even a majority of the Egyptian population, but it has occurred in a very different political environment.  Opponents, centered around the Muslim Brotherhood, however, are far from disorganized even if they are momentarily bereft of much of their top leadership.  President Morsi’s supporters believe they were stripped of legitimate authority and have every right to regain it.  The Muslim Brotherhood would be ill-advised to trust the Armed Forces in their present composition again with either their president or their political order and those feelings of distrust have presumably been strengthened by the shooting deaths of more than 50 people in front of the Rabi’a al-Adawiyah mosque.  The precise sequence of events on the morning of July 8 may elude us.  They are certainly relevant should anyone bring criminal charges and they will also be relevant more generally for human rights advocates who will correctly place responsibility on the government for its handling of demonstrations.  But such precision will not be important as the competing narratives of the Egyptian revolution that belong to different political camps continue to develop.  There are, in these developing narratives, no accidents and no bad decisions; there are only actors whose actions reflect their inner moral motivations.  I am not asking that we spare a tear for the Armed Forces but only recognize what the generals themselves must recognize:  there is no way back, no way to compromise with ex-president Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.  Certain dates mark irrevocable turning points:  February 25, 1954 when Nasser ousted Naguib from the Revolutionary Command Council was one, February 11, 2011 was another and July 8, 2013 marks still another.  The Armed Forces are a powerful institutional presence in Egypt as are the courts, and the Muslim Brothers. 

Even if most Egyptians have never studied political science, they do understand that their choices are already limited by the available institutional options as well as by agendas set by politically powerful, and frequently intransigent, actors. 

            Both of Egypt’s two recent ex-presidents, faced with massive opposition in the streets, seem to have taken pride that they could be described as stubborn; neither seems to have thought, until the generals were at the door to usher them out, that the time to craft a new way to govern had come and gone.  And the partisans of both continue to believe that although their preferred president had indeed made mistakes, he did not deserve to be driven from office.  He had, after all, performed adequately and students who do passable work do not deserve, at the end of the day, to be failed.  Parenthetically I note that we hear similar complaints from the Obama administration and its friends:  American policy and US Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson have made mistakes but it is not really their fault that the policy has proven to be both unworkable and so profoundly misunderstood by Egyptians as to have provoked their hostility. 

            It is an open question whether it is possible, in the current circumstances, for anyone to think clearly about Egyptian politics as anything other than a morality play in which people are ultimately rewarded or punished for their intentions and their actions by God, the dialectic of history, or the principle of karma.  There is also some question about whether Western scholars whose reputations were centered on claims about the essential political values of the objects of their research can now look clearly at events that have (at best) cast profound doubt on their conclusions.   Just as an earlier generation of American academics, in particular, were convinced that the Armed Forces in Egypt were the agents of unfolding modernization so too have their recent successors been certain that the Muslim Brothers, in a variety of national guises, would be the agents of democracy and the destroyers of authoritarianism.             

            There is no particular reason for now to believe that the Egyptian Armed Forces are the modernizers envisaged by American academics in the 1960s.  Nor is there reason to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood is the carrier of democratization through an Islamic state as envisaged in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Of course the governments after 1952, invariably led by Army officers, pursued industrialization policies for strategic reasons.  So, too, the Muslim Brotherhood leadership pursued open elections for their own strategic reasons.  Neither the Army nor the MB are or were particularly committed to the wider principles that academics like to read into these policy choices. 

              While it may be that Husni Mubarak and Muhammad Morsi shared some psychological features, it is equally likely that the structure of contemporary Egyptian politics makes it easy for office holders to indulge their refusal, if not to cooperate, at least to recognize the legitimacy as well as efficacy of their political constraints.  Both men, faced with widespread and intense opposition, chose to resist rather than to respond.   Military hierarchy shaped Mubarak, the last of three military officers to preside over republican Egypt.  Over decades, his political base narrowed and became increasingly fragile.  The civilian hierarchy of the Muslim Brotherhood shaped Morsi’s adult political education and it took only months for his political base to narrow and for wider and wider opposition to shatter it.   In each case the armed forces stepped in forestalling the failure of the state in the face of mass mobilization.

            There is no reason to believe that the underlying concerns and motivations of various institutions and their leaderships have changed in the past few years but they may, as have many Egyptians, learned that the politics of revolutionary upheaval is an unforgiving environment.  I have never believed that the army generals particularly want to rule Egypt on their own; what they do want is a political cohort that can provide stability and sufficient economic growth to allow the maintenance of stability.  This the Muslim Brothers proved to be incapable of providing.  Whether this was due to their incompetence or to powerful opposition was less relevant to the army than the simple fact of their failure and the unexpectedly massive opposition.   Had the petition campaign demanding Morsi’s resignation indeed been as inconsequential as it appeared to the leaders of the MB (and most observers) when it began, there is no particular reason to believe the Armed Forces would have moved.

            Egyptian society is increasingly polarized.  Egyptians tell very different stories about the revolution until this point and they see the events of the last week in completely different ways.  Such disagreements about the moral narrative of change are characteristic of revolution and they persist for generations.  In this sense Egypt as well as its army has crossed the Rubicon:  it will be a very long time before the Egyptian revolution is an object of academic study rather than a source of emotionally resonant political allegiance.  Much as I appreciate the call for dialogue between the competing camps, it will be a while before their discussions are anything other than the trading of irreconcilable and irascible monologues. Even today there is no rue Robespierre in Paris and no Kerensky Street in Moscow. 

Whether the two camps are equally large is less important now than that they can no longer agree on a common political project or political policies.  The two camps are not secular and religious nor are they political Islam and moderates.  They might, more charitably, be called adherents of majoritarian revolution and revolutionary pluralism.  The MB is now a cadre party dedicated to the conquest of power and the transformation of society in accord with their vision.  Because similarly organized parties elsewhere and at other times were dedicated to socialist utopias it is easy to dismiss the MB’s rhetoric of revolution as pretension or smokescreen.  But the current leaders have their own vision of a just society as well as of the mainsprings of political action; their understanding of politics has allowed them to persevere and also, at moments, crucially to misunderstand what was happening around them.   Their opponents, not united by much other than a distaste for the MB and (an important point) a desire to create political structures in which non-majoritarian parties can thrive, would prefer a plural political order.  They have been, at least in the past few months, more realistically attuned to what is happening around them.  Thus, both the Salafi Nour party and the Social Democratic party realistically understood how unpopular Morsi had become and that the Armed Forces were no longer willing to wait.  They agree about very little (if anything) substantively but they have both been willing to participate in a coalition to re-constitute a government and perhaps re-found the state. 

At this point in Egypt’s political and constitutional history it may be that stubbornness is not an admirable quality in a president.  This has less to do with the personal characteristics of those who offer themselves up for the office and more with the structures of power.  Perhaps Egypt needs a president who is in reality (and not merely formally) independent of the ruling party.  Only such a president can change the prime minister or call for new elections when millions of people take to the streets to protest its policies. Egypt clearly needs some mechanism to recognize protests of such magnitude and respond to them short of creating widespread social violence and a constitutional crisis.  The 2012 constitution was written to resolve the problems of the Mubarak regime in which presidents could too easily dissolve parliament and subject governing parties to their will.  The MB was determined to write a constitution in which a strong party could dominate both the presidency and the legislature.  Unfortunately it seems to have magnified the problems of the new order.  And much of the confusion of outside commentators has come from their inability to see the difference.

The Political Consequences of Mr. Morsi

            The week before demonstrations planned for June 30 demanding that Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi step down and new elections be held has been one of unsettling violence and an increasing sense of foreboding that the political situation is spinning out of control.  It is clearer to many what Egypt is not (Turkey, Brazil, Tunisia, Eastern Europe) than what it is. With millions of Egyptians taking to the streets on June 30, 2013 to demand the Morsi step down Egypt has entered into a new period of revolutionary upheaval.

            The events of the last two weeks have, moreover, provided some answers to some long-standing questions of the past two years.  The protests that ousted former President Mubarak were not solely (or even primarily) the work of Islamists hiding under a thin veneer of westernized secular youth; the Muslim Brothers, despite a wide membership and impressive internal capacity for mobilization far from the uncontested representative of a heterogeneous but predominantly Muslim society; fractured and occasionally clueless as the opposition may be, millions of Egyptians, in the large cities and provincial towns, will nevertheless mobilize in the streets along with it.  Oh, and, it still makes sense to call events in Egypt a revolution even if they diverge significantly from the canonical (and largely academic) definitions.  Lightly amended for our modern taste, Lenin writing in 1913 declared that a revolutionary crisis occurred when the elite could no longer rule in the old way and the masses no longer desired to live in the old way.

Unfortunately a two and a half hour speech by the president on June 26 outlining his analysis of the situation and the accomplishments of his first year in office only worsened the polarization.  Morsi criticized publishers, political figures and at least one judge by name as well as asserting that the opposition was, in some measure, treasonous.  Despite a claim that “the media” broadcast rumors, adversity and hate speech, he was not, he said, “accusing everyone in the media.”  Many Egyptians may, however, have heard a soft echo of the old repressive Nasserist slogan: no voice higher than the voice of the revolution.  Morsi indulged in other populist rhetoric, claiming (for example) that lines and shortages at gas stations were due to petty corruption.  As with any good elected politician he also blamed most problems on the old regime while occasionally taking credit for its successes, notably the imposition of a minimum wage of 600 Egyptian pounds which has been in effect since January 2012 (six months before his election).   Some parts, such as the idea that 32 families control the Egyptian economy, seem to have no particular relationship to reality.  At least one other part was plaintively all too correct: Morsi was right to voice his distress at the “icy relations” between the people and the government but his analysis that it was all due to the fear of the Islamic boogieman must have sounded hollow to large numbers of people who consider themselves Muslims and whose educations owe nothing to the boogieman of Orientalism.

The speech itself may have only deepened an already existing credibility gap between the government and the bulk of the population.  Several times in the last weeks, for example, ministers claimed that there was no shortage of gasoline; or that diesel (called “solar” in Egypt) was available; and that electricity outages would soon cease.  Such routine assurances flew in the face of the daily experience of millions of people.  The MB has frequently betrayed its promises to its political allies and rivals, but these are not really the stuff of mass protest.  The ten million people who returned 235 members of the MB in the 2011 parliamentary elections were not disturbed that it had earlier promised to contest fewer seats.  It was clear by the time of the presidential run-off a year ago that the country was deeply divided but there is no reason to believe the vote for former General and Prime Minister Ahmad Shafiq was driven by concern that the MB had promised months earlier not to field a candidate for president.  These are legitimate concerns for activists but they have not brought millions of people out into the streets.

            If it was not clear enough from the presidential run-off that the country has profoundly divided, it has been far more so since last November when President Morsi issued a constitutional declaration that sought to shield his administration from challenge in the courts.  That was when the first massive demonstrations against Morsi and the earliest slogans calling for an end to what was labeled as the “government of the Guide” (referring to the role of the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Badi’) circulated.    Since then Morsi himself has increasingly become the target of the opposition. Gone are the jokes about Morsi as the spare tire.

            Morsi’s major accomplishments, being the first elected civilian president of Egypt and the man who could claim to have gotten the Armed Forces out of political life, have not been followed up with equally rapid changes in the economic or political environment.  To the contrary, for those with an interest (either intellectual or practical) in politics the last six months have been less than inspiring.  Morsi’s government, led by Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, was barely able to pass legislation enabling Islamic bonds (sukuk) due to the opposition of the Azhar whose enhanced role the MB had written into the new constitution.   The Azhar and other, Islamist, opponents claimed the legislation would allow strategic national assets to become the private property of foreigners.

The government has also been sharply attacked by a variety of figures for its recent decision to create a special investment area in the Canal Zone which, it was alleged, would dilute sovereignty for the benefit of foreign investors. This may have seemed an implausible concern.  This is an especially important issue in the Canal Zone cities (Suez, Ismailiya, Port Said) that have been centers of revolt since January 2011. It  also evokes powerful fears in a country one of whose major assets, the Suez Canal, was owned by foreigners (among which the British government) until 1956.  Educated Egyptians of Morsi’s generation are likely to recall the novelist Gamal al-Ghitani’s 1970s fantasy , “Recollection of What Happened in Egypt”,  in which foreigners threaten to buy up all of Egypt and evict the Egyptians as a cautionary tale if not a likely probability.

That the MB had trouble passing legislation is surprising because it only needed a majority in the rump Shoura Council (Upper House) where it holds nearly 45% of the seats in its own name.  There is, for now, no lower house because it was dissolved by the Supreme Constitutional Court last year; the new constitution specifically grandfathered the Shoura Council as the country’s legislature until new elections are held. 

More immediate domestic problems however are rising unemployment, shortages of gasoline and diesel, electricity outages, and continuing problems with the function of the country’s infrastructure, including public transit and the national rail network.   To some degree these are legacies of decades of misdirected investment; to some degree they have been exacerbated by the revolution itself; and to some degree they have been worsened by decisions (or more frequently the absence of decisions) by the present government.   Morsi’s speech at once recognized and tried to deflect a widespread sense of the government’s incapacity.   These, however, that affect all Egyptians every day directly and indirectly.  What the government recognizes as a problem with “traffic” translates into increased commute times that affect not only upper-middle class people who drive their own cars but working class women forced out of paid employment because commuting time makes it impossible to hold paid employment and attend to family expectations.

There might be more widespread willingness to give the government more space if it had not opened up a yawning credibility gap.  Along with the obvious shortages of good and services, the government has produced more than its quota of excuses and denials.  Ministers have proclaimed the electricity problem solved and an end to outages that then become more extensive although they never seem to occur in the neighborhoods where the ministers themselves live. The government claims there are ample supplies of gasoline, butane and diesel despite long lines and rising prices on the black market.  These were the problems President Morsi, perhaps unwisely, promised to address if not to solve within the first hundred days of his administration.

The inability of the government to restore public safety and the perception of rising levels of violence has also tended to undermine the government’s credibility.  There is a widespread belief that muggings, robberies, and armed assaults are more frequent than in the past.  There have been something like a dozen authenticated lynchings over the last two years and in several instances the bodies of supposed criminals who were beaten to death were exposed to public view on the ground or hung from utility poles.  

For the last several years as well religious violence appears to have increased with several attacks on churches and street battles between Christians and Muslims.  Last week religious violence moved in a new direction when a mob estimated at more than a thousand attacked a Shi’i sheikh, Hassan Shehata, in a Cairene suburb and beat him to death along with three of his followers.  Shehata, originally an Azhari-trained Egyptian Sunni, had worked in the neighborhood decades earlier before his conversion and he may have had enemies as well as friends and supporters.  He evidently fell victim to a heightened antagonism to Shi’i Islam increasingly evident in some Salafi circles (including some members of the MB) over the decade which was itself heightened by a specific campaign led against him over the past few weeks.  Those who led the attack evidently spread rumors that their Shi’i fellow-citizens were engaged in wife-swapping and ritually cursing several of the earliest followers of the prophet Muhammad.  Investigations afterward have shown that the police were at the very least criminally negligent as they were evidently stationed less than a hundred meters from the site where the crowd gathered to beat the men and firebomb the house they were in. 

As has been true elsewhere over the last several years the response of Egyptians to this terrible act of violence was far from what the perpetrators may have expected.  While there were some attempts to explain it away or defend it there were widespread condemnations of the killings, including one from the Azhar which has itself been engaged in opposing what it alleges is the danger of Shi’i infiltration into Egypt.  Shehata’s murder was a singular event but its roots lie in the increased demonization of Shi’i thought and practice that lie largely within the Salafi movement and which have, over the past several years, engaged in attacks on Sufi shrines as well. 

The police may well have been afraid to intervene once the crowd had gathered but their absence contributes to a sense that Morsi (who issued a condemnation of the murders 24 hours after they occurred) says one thing while his supporters act in a very different way.  If the MB once had a credibility gap with the outside world for saying one thing in Arabic and another in English it now has a sharper credibility gap with sections of the Egyptian people to whom its leaders seem to say one thing on the stage and whose followers may practice entirely differently with a completely different rhetoric in the streets.

Morsi has not been much more successful in international affairs than domestically.  The most dramatic and most recent problem was the decision by the Ethiopian government to build a dam on the Blue Nile, one of the major tributaries of Egypt’s own Nile.  Just as the Mubarak government was taken by surprise when the governments of the Upper Nile basin decided to abrogate the treaty governing present favorable division of the Nile waters (a legacy of British rule) the Morsi government professed surprise at the decision to build a dam.  It has long been clear that the countries of central Africa would at some point need access to Nile water but successive Egyptian governments have ignored the problem.  Faced with a public relations crisis (since the dam itself will not be filled for year it is not an immediately pressing issue in terms of actual water), the government allowed a public discussion in which the ideas of invading Ethiopia, creating chaos, and other unrealistic possibilities were floated.  If members of the opposition who participated in proposing some such proposals were embarrassed the entire affair left another sense that the government itself is insufficiently concerned with acting on the country’s vital interests before rather than after they have been critically affected.

            After the adoption of the new constitution in December 2012, the MB was on the brink of consolidating its new order.  The older and frankly ineffectual politicians of the opposition were in disarray.  The emergence of the Tamarrod (revolt) petition campaign at first was a completely marginal enterprise, its leaders not only young and unknown but largely different from those young activists who were associated with the 2011 demonstrations. 

            No doubt there will be many more descriptions and analyses of the Tamarrod campaign but I want to focus on two aspects that I think deserve attention.  The first is that the campaign itself emerged in the context of statements from members of the MB and their associated Freedom and Justice party taunting the opposition for its inability to organize.  They were not alone in this as a significant number of foreign commentators picked up the same theme.  The idea of a petition campaign demanding that Morsi step down and early presidential elections be held appeared at first as simply another sign of the inability of the opposition to the MB to organize and of their equally great inability to accept the verdict of a democratic vote that had made him president.

            There are, it seems to me, two important but distinct ways that over the last century Egyptians have organized what analysts (especially American analysts who have been somewhat obsessive about this) call social movements.  One is an exchange model in which political entrepreneurs provide welfare goods and receive political support in return.  This has been a staple for how the MB and many of its daughter organizations have been built.   It was also a model deployed, with less success, by Egyptian communists in the 1940s.  The other model I can only think of as a civic mobilization model and its greatest success in Egypt was the 1918 “tawkilat” campaign of the Wafd in which hundreds thousands of Egyptians (among whom the illiterate) signed or sealed petitions giving the Wafd their power of attorney to negotiate with the British.  These are not peculiar to Egypt and in the US we are familiar with the exchange model through the history of the integration (especially) of immigrant populations into politics through the agency of political machines and also with the mobilization model through the civil rights movements in which millions of disenfranchised African American won the vote in the South. 

            The petition campaign turned out to be a popular way for people to express opposition to the Morsi government and as such it served its purpose as an organizing tool.  It has provided millions of people with the possibility of peacefully demanding an end to the current situation both through the provision of signatures and through what has become certainly the largest and widest set of demonstrations in absolute terms in Egyptian history. 

            There is considerable discussion among foreign commentators and Egyptians about the responsibility that now devolves on the opposition and much less on the responsibility that devolves on the ruling party.  I want to emphasize the role of the ruling party rather than Morsi because the mechanism that most critics of the opposition (for example Walter Meade writing on his website and Leslie Chang writing in The New Yorker) is that parliamentary elections now and presidential elections in three years are the democratic solution.  Thinking back over the past four decades of the history of the western democracies suggests that leaders are not so infrequently forced out of office by demonstrations albeit not directly.  The catalyst is usually that the demonstrations foretell a loss at an upcoming election that the leader or his (or her) party find unacceptable.  This was certainly the case with Margaret Thatcher whose policies, after a decade in power, had become not only increasingly unpopular but electorally dangerous.

            Clearly just as President Morsi has proven to be unwilling to separate himself from the MB leadership, the legislative delegation of the MB/FJP in either house has so far proven unwilling to separate itself either from him or the organization’s leadership.  They have all shown a remarkable party discipline more similar to that of the Communists of the 20^th century than to its Social Democrats.   In one sense this is a remarkable achievement but it invariably carries the cost of electoral and political rigidity and ultimately failure. 

            Yet the question remains exactly why, if the opposition is so weak and divided and if the MB/FJP are so committed to democracy they don’t themselves call for new elections.  Snap parliamentary elections would have been one way to settle the dispute before now.  They would have placed the opposition (and Tamarrod) in an uncomfortable position of either accepting elections they might lose or refusing to participate in the democratic process.  And indeed until recently the MB as well as the White House and many American commentators have argued in just such a vein. Parliamentary elections should have been held several months ago according to the timetable established in the new constitution but they have not.

            Of course fear of losing elections is a very good reason to postpone them.  How is it possible for the MB to postpone the elections while at the same time casting the blame on the opposition? The opposition, after all, has effectively no legislative power because the MB-dominated legislature that writes the necessary laws for implementing elections.  The now somewhat tired and almost forgotten story is that the new constitution gave the Supreme Constitutional Court the task of prior review of the election laws and in the process denied them subsequent review.  This was to prevent the court from dissolving parliaments as it had done both under Mubarak and in the post-revolutionary period. 

            The Shoura council passed an election law which it sent to the SCC which it deemed unconstitutional for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with electoral procedures.  The Shoura council lightly amended the law and then the SCC took the occasion to claim that it could engage in continuing prior review.  It then rejected the new law and the Shoura council has not since attempted another try.  A party eager for elections and relatively certain of its chances could have easily complied with the SCC requirements (this is not the place to go into the specifics of electoral mechanics).  By not writing such a law the MB can take advantage of a different section of the new constitution: the one that mandates that the present Shoura council is the legislature until whenever new elections are held.  For now, the MB can argue that it would like to hold elections but the opposition is threatening to boycott and besides is using its power, in the SCC, to block the necessary legislation.  It has neatly deflected the issue away from itself.  As a consequence President Morsi and a rump parliament can rule for some indefinite period of time and cloak themselves in the legitimacy of electoral victory that seems so important to the Obama administration and its advisers.

            There remains another problem with the new constitution which I will touch on only briefly in conclusion.  It is not clear that a solution to the current political crisis in the streets can be found that will not provoke an equally profound constitutional crisis as long as Morsi remains president.  The new constitution was written with several unspoken assumptions that I will also not address at the moment.  Under the new constitution, however, if the president and the Lower House represent very different political programs living together will be very difficult.  Partly this is because the president and the prime minister have distinct but interlocking responsibilities; partly this is because it is more difficult to name a new prime minister in the absence of a clear parliamentary majority but it is also extremely dangerous for the president to dissolve a deadlocked parliament.  Whether the current situation will lead to such a conflict is unclear but those who think that there is an easy answer to the political difficulties Egypt faces without Morsi’s resignation are fooling themselves. 

           

Two Saints and a Sinner

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            The name Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim does not, for most people, evoke any particular memories.  It would hardly surprise me if a few friends thought I had meant to type Ahmad Lutfi Al-Sayyid, the renowned and sometimes reviled leader of the Egyptian Constitutional party of nearly eighty years ago.  And yet there he was, Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim, on January 25, 2011 staring somberly out from the front page of the daily Al-Misry al-Yawm.  He was, the paper reported, accused of being the leader of a group of about 20 members of the Palestinian based Islamic Army who had set off a bomb that took the lives of 24 people at the Qiddisayn (or Two Saints) Church in Alexandria on January 1, 2011.  He was famous for an instant and the story of his fame and subsequent complete disappearance tells us something important and unexpected about the extraordinary events of the Egyptian revolution.  And it provides a way to understand the wave of commentary that has already begun about what has changed and what has not after two years of revolution as well as to indicate how difficult are the problems Egyptians face as they seek to create new governing institutions. 

            On January 24 the two main privately owned liberal newspapers, Al-Shorouq and Al-Masry al-Yawm, ran front-page stories detailing government reports that it had solved the case of the explosion.  Habib al-Adly, Al-Masry al-Yawm, then Minister of the Interior, had revealed that decisive evidence proved the IA was behind the explosion.  It is hard to judge the Adly’s statement because neither the decisive nature of the evidence was revealed nor was Ibrahim himself brought forward.  As of January 24, the press reports make it seem as if the literature graduate from Alexandria was in custody and confessing the details of the crime

The next day the revolution began and the stories about the bombing of the church and those who might have been responsible end.  While the revolution was certainly bigger news, its occurrence was not the only reason the press ceased its coverage.  Rather the then public prosecutor, Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud, prohibited publication of details of the ongoing investigation of the crime.  This, Mahmoud explained in a statement, was necessary because the law obliged criminal inquiries remain secret so as not to impede any ongoing investigation.  The statement itself had been communicated to Anas Fiqqi who was then the Minister of Information so that he could prevent further reports from appearing in the “visual or spoken media as well as in the national press, the partisan (daily and weekly) press, whether local or foreign as well as any other publications.”  In other words there was to be no further discussion anywhere of any aspect of the investigation.

            And indeed there has not been any further discussion about the Two Saints Church, Ahmad Lutif Ibrahim, or Sayyid Bilal, a young Alexandrian Salafi who was taken into custody on January 5 and whose body, with marks of torture, was returned to his family for burial on January 6, 2011.  Although some (primarily left-wing) activists consider Bilal a martyr of the revolution, and although four police officers were convicted of his murder in absentia, he too has largely vanished from public view. Not even the Salafi currents recognize his existence or memorialize his death. 

Consequently more than two years later, we know nothing about who was responsible for the criminal act of January 1.  Today Habib al-Adly is in jail and Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud has been dismissed as public prosecutor; the entire political order for which they both labored no longer exists.  Muhammad Morsy, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than Husny Mubarak, is president; Egypt has a new constitution; elections for a new parliament are in limbo but there is no possibility that the former National Democratic party will dominate it.  Hundreds of people were killed by the police during the popular uprising that overthrew Mubarak and hundreds more have been killed in the months since he left office by the police and the Armed Forces.  And there have been violent confrontations between Muslims and Copts at several churches as well as in villages around the country. 

There are other disastrous continuities as well: train crashes, police brutality, and widespread poverty. The revolution’s defenders and critics frequently invoke the continuity of 30 years (or sometimes 60) to explain or explain away contemporary disasters such as train wrecks that take dozens of lives or unfathomable political or legal defeats such as courts that do not convict the guilty merely because of an absence of evidence.  Strange it is that in all of these instances the distant past remains obstinately part and parcel of the present.  But an event that occurred less than three weeks before the revolution exists now in an alternate temporal universe for which neither the revolution nor the current government nor the institutions of the state have any responsibility. 

So why bring up this particular bit of history that has now become ancient even if it is entirely recent? The victims of the Alexandria bombing were not political activists; they were celebrating Christmas in a church; had they simply returned safely home after that Mass perhaps they would have joined the revolution three weeks later.  Perhaps not. Unlike the dozens of people, many of whom were Christian, who were crushed to death by military vehicles in front of the television broadcasting headquarters those who died in the church are not, by anyone’s account, martyrs of the revolution.  They are simply the victims of criminal violence and criminal conspiracy but, given a widespread belief that violence is worse in both quantity and quality now than under Mubarak perhaps it is best, as the Egyptian expression goes, to allow what is past to expire.

            And yet, what happened that night in Alexandria casts vivid illumination on some aspects of the revolution’s first two years. 

When President Morsy determined to oust Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud from his post last fall, his stated reason was that Mahmoud had failed to achieve successful prosecutions of either the police officials implicated killing revolutionary martyrs or against alleged corruption in the old regime.  Morsy and his party have, in other words, no problem pursuing prosecutions of their political enemies, but they seem decidedly less interested in righting other wrongs of the old regime. 

In late March 2013, the Cairo Appeals Court ruled that Morsy had unconstitutionally and wrongly dismissed Mahmoud and ordered his re-instatement.  This ruling will now be taken to the Court of Cassation.  There are obviously plausible legal arguments, but many Egyptians will perceive this as part of an ongoing conflict between the executive and judicial branches of government.  The court has not so far released the text of its reasoning but it appears to have been based in part on the question of whether the president can nominate a public prosecutor without the participation of the judiciary.

Mahmoud was certainly a creature of the old regime.  So too is the entire judiciary and prosecutorial staff which was angered by Morsy’s decision to resort to a constitutional declaration in order to remove him.  President Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood would claim that Mahmoud was unwilling to prosecute his associates in the old order.  Their opponents argue Mahmoud’s failures were necessarily the result of the maintenance of the rule of law in Egypt in place of the installation of a politically motivated form of revolutionary justice.  For many reasons—some good and some bad—there was simply not enough evidence for convictions under existing Egyptian law.  One way to judge between these competing narratives then is that Morsy sacked Abdel-Meguid for his failure to achieve a result not available under Egyptian law rather than for his failure to prosecute or even fully investigate a shocking act of criminal violence that had occurred earlier in his tenure.

            Neither Mahmoud nor his replacement, Talaat Ibrahim, who was ostensibly appointed to bring a more concerted pursuit of justice to the office, re-opened the case of the Two Saints Church.  Yet recall for a moment the atmosphere of the time: the shock, dismay, and outrage at a criminal act of sectarian murder.  That there would continue to be attacks, sometimes murderously violent, on Christians was widely believed.  About a year earlier, after all, there had been a drive-by shooting at a Christmas mass in Nag’ Hammadi.  The Azhar Ulama Front, now occasionally described as a conservative organization of religious scholars, had issued a call for a boycott of Christian businesses and prominent figures, such as the attorney and 2012 presidential candidate, Salim al-Awa, had claimed that Christians were stockpiling weapons in church basements.

Religious violence therefore seemed as plausible as a future encompassing revolution on the Tunisian model. Bombing a church had ratcheted up the violence and the inevitable rumors swirled:  it was Islamist extremists, it was one branch or another of the state secret services, it was Christians themselves.  The story that Habib Al-Adly told was designed, like most stories the government had told for decades, to pacify the public and assure everyone that Egyptians were not to blame.  Only foreigners—Palestinians, Israelis, or the agents of other powers—were capable of such acts.  Egyptians, as government after government has hastened to reassure them, are not responsible for any of the bad things that happen in the country. 

            One cannot even speculate; one can only wonder what we would learn if the existing files were opened.  The least likely outcomes are that Israelis or Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim and his Palestinian associates were the criminals.  Perhaps we would learn that the evidence pointed in the direction of Salafi groups, including those whose members have been elected to parliament.  Or perhaps the security forces were involved, whether as active agents or passive facilitators. Perhaps the government knew who had committed the crime but lacked evidence or worried that the truth was politically too inconvenient. Perhaps we would simply learn that the files, such as they are, are largely empty and that the government had no clues and no intention of discovering who committed the crime.. This last possibility seems most likely of all when we recall that it was the very day of the announcement that the revolutionary tide began to scour the country.

            Had Charles Dickens chosen to write about Cairo rather than Paris his words would ring equally true:  it has been the best of times and the worst of times. The past years have seen dramatic mobilizations by unlikely and frequently powerless groups.  Through the spring of 2011 Copts demonstrated not simply for their rights but for the right for a more public presence in the neighborhood known as Maspero..  In October 2011 members of the Egyptian armed forces attacked Coptic demonstrators in front of the Maspero television station by driving armored personnel carriers into their midst.  An ugly scene was made worse when news announcers urged honorable citizens to descend into the streets and engage in vigilante justice against thugs who had killed and wounded members of the armed forces.  But there were no thugs and no soldiers had died.  Instead, a group of soldiers had gone on a killing spree in which several dozen Christian demonstrators were crushed to death.  

In December, the Deputy Guide of the MB and the man in whose stead Morsy ran for President, Khairat Shater announced that his organization and a group of Salafi societies had come to an important agreement and issued a joint statement. The joint statement issued at a nationally-televised press conference asserted that Muslims should not wish their Christian neighbors Merry Christmas. There is no comparison between the refusal to return a greeting and criminal homicide nor did the agreement become the official policy of the state.  It was, however, the first time in modern Egyptian history that politicians associated with a governing majority have publicly associated themselves with such a policy.  And one had to wonder why a prominent political figure who might have been president (and might still be prime minister) should have found this a crucial task to undertake while the country was enduring spasms of violence and a decaying economy.  There is an enduring and disquieting uncertainty about a political party that recognizes the constitutional possibility that a Christian could be president of Egypt while openly and steadfastly asserting that its members would never vote for one.  

            Most stories of the revolution’s prehistory begin with trade union unrest in the Delta in the first decade of the 20^th century, the protests against the Israeli invasion of Gaza, or with the demonstration effect of events in Tunis in December 2010.  Important those instances of mass mobilization were but the atmosphere of the weeks before January 25 was filled with shadows.  The focus on the industrial cities often includes an implicit claim that class unity trumps religious division, but the history of the 20^th century is not very reassuring on that count.  The revulsion that many Egyptians felt about the bombing of the Two Saints before January 28, 2011 should not be discounted as a contributory factor to the widely discussed and frequently praised accounts of Muslim-Christian solidarity during the celebrated 18 days.   

            Recalling the bombing of the Two Saints church as the prelude to January 25 is thus necessarily an exercise in outlining the limits not only of the Egyptian uprising so far but also the limits of the parties that have emerged as the dominant political forces in its wake. 

            Religious community and prejudice point us in one important direction but also tend to obscure other, equally important and even connected, aspects of what has changed over the past two years.  Perhaps Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim was the person behind the bombing, although it seems unlikely.  More plausible is that, as had become in common in the political life of Egypt over the past 60 years, the government chose to blame criminal behavior on someone, perhaps even a fictitious someone, who was not an Egyptian.  Egyptians, Egyptian governments have argued for a very long time, are not responsible for criminal acts of prejudice, for terrorism, or for politically motivated wrong-doing that damage national unity.  Those actions are, the public has been told time and again, the work of foreign hands, outside agents, or third parties.  Real Egyptians have no interest in breaking the unity of the nation and consequently they cannot the agents of such activity.

            Recently Ttere has been a marked decline in attempts by either the government or private persons to claim that their opponents are foreign agents or elements acting in their interest.  This is not because political discourse has become kinder and gentler.  It has become notably more intense and it is certainly not limited to debates about policy differences.  Striking, however, is how infrequently anyone levies the once-common charge that opponents are not Egyptian.  Thus when the television satirist Bassem Youssef was called in for questioning on March 30, 2013 he was accused of maligning President Morsi.  Anyone watching his show (which includes several leaders of the Salafi trend) realizes how rooted in domestic perceptions of political idiocy it is.  Political opponents now may be characterized as venal, stupid, immoral or even criminal but they are ineluctably Egyptian.  It is too early to say if this is a station on the way to a discourse that is both more civil and more probing or simply to distinct communities that refuse to listen to each other.  But it is a significant change.

            The explosion in front of the Two Saints was a purely criminal act.  For Americans it inevitably recalls the 1963 bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  Like that crime, it was not an isolated event; it had a context.  It occurred, as I briefly alluded above, in a stream of assaults on Christians and their institutions over a longer time and a wider space.  Frequently these assaults involved sections of a local Muslim majority pressing demands or expressing fears against Christians:  claims that Christians were illegally building churches or imprisoning converts to Islam.  In other words, they invoked a claim that a minority was itself engaged in possibly criminal behavior that local government was either unwilling or unable to prevent.  Some, like the well-known judge Tariq al-Bishri, limited themselves to that point.  Others took the argument a step further to insist on the necessity of self-help in the absence of government action.

            The resort to self-help is always seductive and dangerous.  Seductive because it appears to be a community empowering itself against those who despoil it; dangerous precisely because, despite the language of revolutionary or religious justice with which it is sometimes imbued, it is so frequently and easily directed against the marginal, the powerless, and the impoverished.  Frequently first employed against an identifiable and less powerful minority, such violence can be and is deployed against others.  These forms of violence are, of course, illegal but governments, in some instances, have high degrees of toleration for them and Egypt is no exception on both counts.

            Successive Egyptian governments, perhaps especially in the wake of 2011, have been unwilling to react strongly against such incidents.  Not infrequently, as in an incident when a Christian man’s ear was cut off or when a church was burned down or a community driven by force from their homes and shops, the government has intervened at best in a tardy fashion and never with criminal sanctions.  It has preferred reconciliation committees in which the weaker party generally foregoes significant compensation and agrees not to participate in criminal prosecution. 

            There have been lynchings recently in which members of local communities killed alleged criminals.  The ostensible reasons range from the murder of a young child to attempted theft of a tok-tok (motorcycle-rickshaw).   Those who were lynched were tortured to death:  they were kicked, hit, knifed and ultimately literally hung from lamp-posts (in at least one case upside-down).   I am ignorant of whether this violates specific provisions of Egyptian penal law, but it certainly violates the rights of citizens enunciated articles 35, 36 and 77 of the recently adopted constitution. 

The news accounts are sketchy and occasionally suggest participants may have thought they were acting under cover of enacting a Quranic punishment against socially destructive criminal behavior.   The free use by some Islamist activists over the past year of the language of the Quranic penalties against highway robbery (the so-called hadd al-hirabah) may have had some influence, but much more important is the likely conviction in communities that without a functioning police force overwhelming chaos and criminality threaten.

Was their choice of who to find guilty any better than Habib al-Adly’s on January 24?  In the absence of mechanisms deploying either the forensic capacities of the regular police or the even more stringent evidentiary requirements of the Qur’an or classical Islamic jurisprudence we are not in a position now or even to know.   When even the Minister of Justice, Ahmad Makki, referred to the lynchings as signaling the death of the state he was repeating a profound fear of many Egyptians today.  Given the profound economic problems and the continuing violence confronting the government and the Egyptian people, finding the guilty parties behind the bombing of the Two Saints church is not now high on anyone’s agenda.    The bombing also raises too many questions about the fissures of religion, politics, and government authority to be anywhere except in the temporal limbo I described earlier for the time being.  But, depending on how these questions are resolved, there may come a time when a government decides once again to examine what happened in Alexandria and to throw some additional light on the events of the past several years. 

Those who thought reform of Egypt’s justice system on January 2, 2011 was crucial have been proven right.  It needs some new people at the top as well as a sense of commitment to making Egyptians safe from criminal violence regardless of their political or religious beliefs.   Reflecting on the Alexandria bombing in the light of recent events one thing that seems clear is that while one aspect of the present conflict centers on whether Talaat Ibrahim or Abdel Meguid Mahmoud ought to be confirmed as public prosecutor neither avenue represents a step out of the impasse.  What is needed is a different public prosecutor with a different sense of mission—perhaps even to recognize, probe and bind up the wounds of the past rather than to ignore them. 

           

           

           

           

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Democratic Transition

        

        

         There is a paradigm nobody talks about much any more in regard to Egypt: the democratic transition.  The problem with the idea of democratic transition, dearly beloved by both the Obama Administration, most of my colleagues in political science, and the Muslim Brotherhood was that it presumed the institutions of the state would be passed, intact, from the old regime to the new.  Through elections, constitutions, and the circulation of new elites popular sovereignty and democratic practice would re-invigorate the barren institutions of the old order.  Where necessary, new ones would be created.

         What, we are impelled to ask, went wrong in Egypt?  What made it, one analyst is reported to have said, the stupidest transition ever or the revolution that never was?  Or did the fault lie not in our Egypt but our selves?  Not least in our inability to recognize that the complicated and confusing period, lasting a decade or more, between the first observation of revolutionary upheaval and its conclusion, is both more important and more uncertain than we feel comfortable with.

         I want to begin at the point where theories of failed revolution and failed democratic transition diverge:  the institutions of the old order.  Theorists of failed revolution tell us that too many Egypt’s old institutions and old elites survived the 2011 upheaval:  the Armed Forces, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and the old elites.  Theorists of failed transition might seem to believe that not enough of the old institutions survived but on closer inspection they have a different concern:  given free elections and the doctrine of popular sovereignty not enough Egyptians seem to have taken the outcome of elections with sufficient seriousness.  Specifically the winners of the parliamentary and presidential elections, the Muslim Brothers, have not been accorded the legitimacy of a freely and popularly elected government.

         This is puzzling.  Free and fair elections are the tonic of transition.   All theorists of transition recognize that free elections are not “enough” as they put it to ensure democracy but free elections, by definition, they are the way in which the people express their will.  Once elections have been held it is up to the new government to do its work and for the people to wait a decent interval before judging its performance at the ballot box rather than through ongoing and defiant street demonstrations and conflict.  This is even more puzzling because it is a little difficult to argue that this has something to do with Islam since the Islamist parties won and they have no problem with asserting the doctrines of popular sovereignty and electoral legitimacy.

         The dominant concern in Egypt today is the high, and increasing, level of polarization.  It seems to be common in the US and Europe to describe this a conflict between the country’s minority urban secular middle-class and its religious (Islamic) majority.  That Egypt has become increasingly polarized is apparent but it is doubtful that the polarization that paralyzes the country is between the secular middle-class and the rest of Egypt.   Much of the violence in the streets today is occurring outside of Cairo in the Canal Zone and the provincial cities of the Delta, places not known for their large, secular middle-classes.   The violence is often specifically between the Muslim Brotherhood, its direct supporters and its occasional allies on specific issues, and the restive lower middle and working classes in these cities.  Socially we can speak of polarization on many dimensions.  There is a marked rural/urban dimension to what we see; there is also a clear aspect of educational attainment; in terms of religion there is also an obvious Christian/Muslim dimension, but within the Muslim community there may also be an antagonism based on how the Brotherhood understands Islam in the modern world (of which more below).    Lastly there is a rather widespread dissatisfaction with what many Egyptians perceive as the Brotherhood’s own internal lack of transparency and democracy and aggrandizing organizational ambitions.  These, in turn, provide both local and national elites with the basis through which they have opposed the Brotherhood but over which they have very little direct influence.

         It is possible to use electoral maps to see a geographic dimension to this increased polarization. Egypt has had two constitutional referenda, parliamentary elections (and run-offs) for two chambers, as well as a presidential election and runoff.  The elections are not strictly speaking comparable but what we see is a decline over time in turnout, relative support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and an increasing polarization centered on the Delta.  Specifically three quite different provinces—Gharbiyya, Cairo, and Minoufia—have emerged as localized centers of opposition to the Brotherhood.  All three of these provinces, which voted no in the December 2012 constitutional referendum had voted yes in the March 2011 referendum.  They also voted against Morsi in both the initial and runoff stages of the presidential election.  Gharbiyya is the province in which the textile center of Mahallah is located whose 2006 strikes are often referred to as the origin of the collapse of the Mubarak regime.  Tanta, however, also a textile center is even more strongly opposed to the MB; what may differentiate the two is the presence of the headquarters of an important Sufi order, the Badawiyya, which is located there and to which there is an annual pilgrimage.  Cairo is the most urban of the governorates and, of course, has the largest concentration of the socalled secular middle class.  Minufia is quite unlike both Cairo and Gharbiyya and the best anyone can come up with to explain its behavior is that it was the home of both Sadat and Mubarak, but this seems like weak tea.

         Given recent events it might now be possible to add the Canal cities of Suez, Pt. Said, and Ismailiya to the list of anti-MB strongholds.  There are some specific grievances in each of these three cities of which the most well-known stems from the deaths of 79 people at the Port Said soccer stadium on February 1, 2012 during a match between the local team, Al-Masri, and the Cairene Ahli team.  The death sentences handed down to 21 defendants in Port Said on January 26, 2013 led to demonstrations and riots in Port Said and demonstrations in support of the verdicts in Cairo.  The next day, itself the anniversary of the uprising that toppled Mubarak, massive riots broke out in Pt. Said and the other Canal cities as well as Alexandria.  In response President Morsi declared a state of emergency and curfew which the demonstrators promptly and publicly broke by announcing street demonstrations to begin at the same hour as the curfew.  The army refused to enforce the curfew with force and Morsi was left to slowly withdraw it and then allow it fade away.

         One of the peculiarities then of the last two years is that the authority of the executive and the legislative branches of government  have, for the time being, diminished while the authority of judicial branch and the Armed Forces (especially in the months since it relinquished power to President Morsi in August 2012) has increased.  The Armed Forces have become more independent, constitutionally and even practically, from the executive branch than at any other time in recent history and the judiciary has intervened in politics with remarkable independence over the past two years.  Sometimes, as when they dissolved Mubarak’s National Democratic party, the courts gained universal praise.  At other times, as when the Supreme Constitutional Court proclaimed the first post-Mubarak parliament elected in violation of the constitution, less so.   The courts in Egypt, as elsewhere, are a counter-majoritarian institution; their role may seem to be hard to explain in the context of the Arab world generally where such an independent court system that asserts such broad powers of review is anomalous.  It is, in fact, anomalous within the context of the French jurisprudential system from which Egypt’s judicial system springs.  Briefly what we are seeing is the result of two trends.  One is the culmination of at least a hundred years of judicial culture in Egypt based on asserting the necessity of the rule of law as a way for the ordinary courts to control the executive and asserting claims of constitutional interpretive power.  The other is the reality that, of the three branches of government, the courts have been the one to which ordinary Egyptians have resorted most frequently and with most success over the past 100 years.  The courts can be arbitrary, corrupt, and unresponsive but they have proven to be more useful than the other branches.

         It is I think for this reason that there has been, in the years since 2011, so little popular response to calls for the establishment of revolutionary tribunals.  Egyptian experience with exceptional tribunals, whether revolutionary or military, has not been positive.

         Looking forward then we can see two institutional forces with significant legitimacy: the Armed Forces and the courts.  And we can see two institutions, paradoxically based on liberal notions of legitimacy—an elected presidency and legislature—which are having the most trouble establishing broad acceptance.  One problem for the president is that he tries to wield the power of his office in ways consonant with a regime that is dead (the old republic) or with a regime that has not yet been born. 

Let us recall his attempts to deploy the power of the presidency in the interregnum between the old constitution and the new one.  SCAF had dissolved the lower house after the Supreme Court ruled it had been elected unconstitutionally.  On assuming the presidency Morsi tried to issue his own constitutional declaration ordering the lower house back into session.  The courts, the SCAF, and significant portion of public opinion rebuffed his attempt.   I have already noted that his recent attempt to create a state of emergency in the Canal provinces failed.  In November he issued a constitutional declaration that allowed him to replace the Public Prosecutor and also shielded the work of the committee writing the constitution from judicial oversight.  Massive demonstrations, including attacks on the Presidential palace, forced Morsi to rescind the declaration although not its effects and the committee wrapped up its work in record time so that a referendum could be held thereby putting the threat of judicial review behind it. 

         So, going forward politics in Egypt appears to be bounded by four forces:  the judiciary, the army, the elected legislature and presidency likely controlled by the MB, and the mass public protest.  Mass public protests, rare between 1952 and 2011, have often had the effect of forcing the executive to back down on policies and the last two years, in which they have become common, are no exception.  Unfortunately these protests have, over the past year, increasingly turned into street battles between the MB and their opponents, especially in the provincial towns.  Even casual viewers of Egyptian television recognize that the Canal cities and other towns of the interior are now the scenes of pitched battles in which people—clearly not the secular westernized intelligentsia—are determined to attack and destroy the MB’s local offices and headquarters.  The most obvious example occurred in early December 2012 when the national headquarters of the MB in Muqattam (Cairo) was torched.  Generally the police do nothing as they do nothing in most street fighting unless they themselves have been attacked.  But there are also indications in many provincial cities that MB militias and those based partly on soccer clubs now engage in routine street battles with each other.

         It may come as a surprise then to realize that the Morsi government has been able to carry out some of its responsibilities even if it has chosen to do so in ways that maximize the influence of MB’s political wing, the FJP, in politics.  The government has recently managed to pass a law allowing it to issue Islamic bonds over the opposition, not of the secular liberals who play almost no role in the Shura Council (the upper house) but over the opposition of the Azhar and the Salafi parties.  The government has been able to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund and the absence of an agreement has more to do with the IMF’s concern about Egypt’s unstable politics than with the incapacity of the government to reach an agreement with the international body.  The government does not, it is clear, have much control over the police but the opposition leadership does not have much control over the demonstrators.  If the opposition leadership often appears weak and divided it is equally clear that its base, especially in the industrial cities, is unwilling to tie its future to the National Salvation Front.  In other words, the broad outlines of power are far from settled in the country.

         New parliamentary elections will be held beginning in April.  The opposition has, for the moment, decided to boycott the elections.  Not to participate is to allow the MB and other Islamists to dominate the parliament completely which, given the new constitution, will allow them fairly wide power over society.  Whether that will come with the ability to solve the country’s pressing economic problems and increasing polarization is far from clear.  Obviously the MB hope to ride out the storm but if they do there is every reason to believe that their preference will be to impose.

         And indeed neither they nor any other government will have much time given the rapid decline of Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves, the evident lack of competitiveness in the export of manufacturing or agricultural products, and the country’s declining tourism (itself in part subject to competitive pressures since the primary tourist destination is the country’s beaches not its Pyramids). 

         Egypt is by no means a country engaged in a democratic transition.  It is a country in the midst of a revolution. For better or worse, however, unlike the classic revolutionary situations Egypt has a functioning and still respected court system (not true of France, Russia or China) and a functioning Armed Forces which will intervene to prevent the collapse of the state but not much more. 

Egypt is also a country whose urban population has been mobilized as never before and which has stayed ready to take to the streets long after most people had written that possibility off.  It is primarily the pressure of the streets that have pushed the political situation forward, but at some point the political leadership of the country must take up its real responsibility.   Egypt is now in a situation reminiscent of what, in 1975, Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki called the crisis of democracy.  What they meant was that the levels of mass mobilization had undermined traditional (that is, previously existing) relations of authority within the state, the religious institutions, and elsewhere.  The masses were too eager to participate and thus, through an excess of democratic aspirations and activity, threatened democracy itself at least as Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki (and the Trilateral Commission) understood it.   The decline of authority, or haibat al-dawlah as the Arabic equivalent employed in Egypt today has it, was a moral as well as a political crisis in the minds of these three distinguished conservative intellectuals.  They could hardly imagine how such a chaotic situation would end well.   The world of the advanced industrial societies differs today from the one that existed in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and probably also from the one that the authors of the report might have preferred.   The revolutionary democratic impulse that they feared was contained for many reasons, not least of which was the adjustment of institutions and elites to new ways of governing.   To paraphrase Lenin, revolutionary situations occur when elites can no longer govern in the old way and large numbers of people want to live in some as yet unspecified new way.  

What might this mean for Egypt?  For the MB this may mean that winning elections is no longer anywhere near sufficient as a goal.  To succeed they will need to find a different way of governing.  Today’s polarizing conflicts in Egypt are far from limited to differences between the MB and a secular, middle class (or Facebook) opposition.  It is possible that, for example, many of the young people who showed up to dance the “Harlem Shake” in front of the Muslim Brothers’ national headquarters were engaged in middle class mockery.  If that were the opposition with which the MB had to contend they would be in a very different situation than they find themselves.  The dock workers who have several times shut down the port at Ain Sokhna  (most recently in mid-February 2013) were interested neither in embarrassing the MB nor in line dancing.  Nor are industrialists like Magdi Tolba dancing for joy:  the weakened pound is causing nearly as many problems as it solves for textile exporters like him.

The National Salvation Front faces its own problems.  Frequently derided as feckless and irresponsible, they have the opposite problem of the MB: a political coalition that is sufficiently broad and whose institutional connection to its possible electoral base is sufficiently tenuous that they cannot find a way to compete coherently in the electoral process.     Whether the boycott strips the elections of legitimacy or locks the opposition into the political wilderness remains to be seen.

Even a large electoral majority in parliamentary elections may not, for the foreseeable future, translate into viable governance as popular demands continue to be expressed in ways that are both democratic and disruptive and as the political leadership of the country finds it difficult to agree on a common path forward.