US President Joe Biden’s Achilles’ heel has been his “” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis and launched a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza. He did this in the wake of the horrific October 7 Hamas terrorist attack Israel suffered in 2023.

Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel’s statehood. In return, Israel granted them investment and trade opportunities, as well as access to American weaponry and a US security umbrella.

Washington, however, failed to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework. It has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place, given the region’s increasing anger and revulsion over the ongoing civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.

Breathtaking hypocrisy

Washington’s efforts in the Middle East have been profoundly undermined by its breathtaking hypocrisy. After all, the Biden team has gone blue in the face decrying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine and its violations of international humanitarian law in killing so many innocent civilians there. In contrast, the administration let Netanyahu’s government completely disregard international law when it comes to its treatment of the Palestinians.

This summer, the International Court of Justice that the entire Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal in international law. In response, the US and Israel both thumbed their noses at the finding. In part as a response to Washington’s Israeli policy, no country in the Middle East and very few nations in the global South have joined its attempt to ostracize President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Worse yet for the Biden administration, the most significant divide in the Arab world between secular nationalist governments and those that favor political Islam has begun to heal in the face of the perceived Israeli threat. Turkey and Egypt have long had their daggers over their differing views of the , the fundamentalist movement that briefly came to power in Cairo in 2012–2013. Now they have begun repairing their relationship, specifically citing the menace posed by Israeli expansionism.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been persistently pressing Saudi Arabia, a key US security partner, to recognize Israel’s statehood at a moment when the Arab public is boiling over what they see as a genocide campaign in Gaza. This is the closest thing since the Trump administration to pure idiocracy. Washington’s pressure on Riyadh elicited the pitiful plea from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman that he fears being were he to normalize relations with Tel Aviv now. And consider that ironic given his own past role in the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In short, the ongoing inside-the-Beltway ambition to secure further Arab recognition of Israel amid the annihilation of Gaza has the US’s security partners wondering if Washington is trying to get them killed. This is anything but a promising basis for a long-term alliance.

Global delegitimization

The science-fiction-style nature of US policy in the Middle East is starkly revealed when you consider the position of Jordan, which has a peace treaty with Israel. In early September, its foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, issued a warning: Any attempt by the Israeli military or its squatter-settlers to expel indigenous West Bank Palestinians to Jordan would be an “act of war.” Such anxieties might once have seemed overblown, but the recent stunning (and stunningly destructive) Israeli military campaign on the Palestinian West Bank, bombings of populated areas by fighter jets, has tactically begun to resemble the campaign in Gaza. And keep in mind that, as August ended, Foreign Minister Israel Katz even the Israeli army to compel Palestinians to engage in a “voluntary evacuation” of the northern West Bank.

Not only is the expulsion of Palestinians now the stated policy of cabinet members like Jewish Power extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir; it’s the of 65% of Israelis polled. When Israel and Jordan begin talking about war, you know something serious is going on — the last time those two countries actively fought was in the 1973 October War, during the administration of US President Richard Nixon.

In short, Netanyahu and his extremist companions are in the process of undoing all the diplomatic progress their country achieved in the past half-century. Ronen Bar, head of Israel’s domestic Shin Bet intelligence agency, in August that the brutal policies the extremists in the government were pursuing are “a stain on Judaism” and will lead to “global delegitimization, even among our greatest allies.”

Turkey, a NATO ally with which the US has mutual defense obligations, has become vociferous in its discontent with Biden’s Middle Eastern policy. Although Turkey recognized Israel in 1949, under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the pro-Islam Justice and Development Party, interactions had grown rocky even before the Gaza nightmare. Until then, their trade and military ties had survived occasional shouting matches between their politicians. The Gaza genocide, however, has changed all that. Erdogan even Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler and then went further still, that, in the Rafah offensive in southern Gaza in May, “Netanyahu has reached a level with his genocidal methods that would make Hitler jealous.”

Worse yet, the Turkish president, referred to by friend and foe as the “” because of his vast power, has now gone beyond angry words. Since last October, he’s used Turkey’s position in NATO to that organization from cooperating in any way with Israel. This is on the grounds that it’s violating the NATO principle that harm to civilians in war must be carefully minimized. The Justice and Development Party leader also imposed an economic on Israel. It has interrupted bilateral trade that previously reached $7 billion a year and sent the price of produce in Israel soaring, while leading to a shortage of automobiles on the Israeli market.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party represents the country’s small towns, rural areas, Muslim businesses and entrepreneurs, constituencies that care deeply about the fate of Muslim Palestinians in Gaza. And while Erdogan’s high dudgeon has undoubtedly been sincere, he’s also pleasing his party’s stalwarts in the face of an increasing domestic challenge from the secular Republican People’s Party. Additionally, he’s long played to a larger Arab public, which is apoplectic over the unending carnage in Gaza.

The alliance of Muslim countries

Although it was undoubtedly mere bluster, Erdogan even threatened a direct on behalf of the beleaguered Palestinians. In early August, he said, “Just as we intervened in Karabakh [disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia], just as we intervened in Libya, we will do the same to them.” In early September, the Turkish president for an Islamic alliance in the region to counter what he characterized as Israeli expansionism:

“Yesterday, one of our own children, [Turkish-American human rights ] Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, was vilely slaughtered [on the West Bank]. Israel will not stop in Gaza. After occupying Ramallah [the de facto capital of that territory], they will look around elsewhere. They’ll fix their eyes on our homeland. They openly proclaim it with a map. We say Hamas is resisting for the Muslims. Standing against Israel’s state terror is an issue of importance to the nation and the country. Islamic countries must wake up as soon as possible and increase their cooperation. The only step that can be taken against Israel’s genocide is the alliance of Muslim countries.”

In fact, the present nightmare in Gaza and the West Bank may indeed be changing political relationships in the region. After all, the Turkish president pointed to his rapprochement with Egypt as a building block in a new security edifice he envisions. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi made his first to Ankara on September 4, following an Erdogan trip to Cairo in February. And those visits represented the end of a more than decade-long cold war in the Sunni Muslim world over al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against elected Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, whom Erdogan had backed.

Despite its apparent embrace of democratic norms in 2012–2013, some Middle Eastern rulers charged the Brotherhood with having covert autocratic ambitions throughout the region and sought to crush it. For the moment, the Muslim Brotherhood and other forms of Sunni political Islam have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and the Persian Gulf region. Erdogan, a pragmatist despite his support for the Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas, had been in the process of getting his country the best possible deal, given such a regional defeat, even before the Israelis struck Gaza.

Netanyahu’s forever war in Gaza

For his part, Egypt’s al-Sisi is eager for greater leverage against Netanyahu’s apparent plan for a forever war in Gaza. The Gaza campaign has already inflicted substantial on Egypt’s economy, since Yemen’s Houthis have supported the Gazans with on container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea. In turn, that has diverted traffic away from it and from the Suez Canal, whose tolls normally earn significant foreign exchange for Egypt. In the first half of 2024, however, it took in only half the canal receipts of the previous year. Although tourism has held up reasonably well, any widening of the war could devastate that industry, too.

Egyptians are also reportedly over Netanyahu’s occupation of the south of the city of Rafah in Gaza. They also despise his blithe disregard of Cairo’s prerogatives to patrol that corridor, granted under the Camp David agreement. The al-Sisi government, along with Qatar’s rulers and the Biden administration, has been heavily involved in hosting (so far fruitless) peace negotiations between Hamas and Israel. The Egyptian government seems to be at the end of its tether, increasingly angered at the way the Israeli prime minister has constantly new conditions onto any agreements being discussed, which have caused the talks to fail.

For months, Cairo has also been seething over Netanyahu’s charge that Egypt allowed tunnels to be built under that corridor to supply Hamas with weaponry. Cairo that the Egyptian army had diligently destroyed 1,500 such tunnels over the past decade. Egypt’s position was recently supported by Nadav Argaman, a former head of the Israeli Shin Bet intelligence agency, who , “There is no connection between the weaponry found in Gaza and the Philadelphi Corridor.” Of Netanyahu, he added, “He knows very well that no smuggling takes place over the Philadelphi Corridor. So, we are now relegated to living with this imaginary figment.”

In the Turkish capital of Ankara, al-Sisi that he wanted to work with Erdogan to address “the humanitarian tragedy that our Palestinian brothers in Gaza are facing in an unprecedented disaster that has been going on for nearly a year.” He underscored that there was no daylight between Egypt and Turkey “regarding the demand for an immediate ceasefire, the rejection of the current Israeli escalation in the West Bank, and the call to start down a path that achieves the aspirations of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state on the borders of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” He also pointed out that such positions are in accord with United Nations Security Council resolutions. Al-Sisi pledged to work with Turkey to ensure that humanitarian aid was delivered to Gaza despite “the ongoing obstacles imposed by Israel.”

To sum up, the ligaments of US influence in the Middle East are now dissolving before our very eyes. Washington’s closest allies, like the Jordanian and Saudi royal families, are terrified that Biden’s bear hug of Netanyahu’s war crimes, coupled with the fury of their own people, could destabilize their rule. Countries that not so long ago had correct, if not warm, relations with Israel like Egypt and Turkey are increasingly denouncing that country and its policies.

The alliance of US partners in the region with Israel against Iran that Washington has long worked for seems to be coming apart at the seams. Countries like Egypt and Turkey are instead exploring the possibility of forming a regional Sunni Muslim alliance against Netanyahu’s geopolitics of Jewish power that might, in the end, actually reduce tensions with Tehran.

That things have come to such a pass in the Middle East is distinctly the fault of the Biden administration and its position — or lack thereof — on Israel’s nightmare in Gaza (and now the West Bank). Today, sadly, that administration is wearing the same kind of blinkers regarding the war in Gaza that US President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top officials once sported when it came to the Vietnam War.

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Concerned that the war could mobilize segments of civil society, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where any form of public protest is banned, have cracked down on expressions of solidarity with Gaza, including the sporting of the keffiyeh, a checkered scarf that symbolizes Palestinian nationalism.

In December, pro-Palestinian activists at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai unprecedented restrictions, including prohibitions on flags and explicitly naming a country in news conferences, and scrutiny of their slogans. In January, the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, the biggest film event in the Middle East and North Africa, welcomed Palestinian cinema but the donning of keffiyehs by attendees.

Egypt is feeling the economic pinch

Like in the second half of the 20th century, protests in the Middle East beyond the Gulf in support of Palestinians and against Israel’s assault on Gaza are as much about anger at governments’ faltering economic performance as they are about the war itself.

Nowhere is the anger more acute than in Egypt, where the country’s currency slipped this week sharply against the US dollar after the central bank raised its main interest rate by 600 basis points to 27.75% and said it would allow the currency’s exchange rate to be set by market forces. It was the Egyptian pound’s fifth devaluation in two years. Hard hit by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the government the measures to stymie Egypt’s 31% inflation rate, attract desperately needed foreign investment, and tackle its staggering shortage of foreign currency.

Egypt has suffered from a loss of tourism, significantly reduced Suez Canal shipping revenues because of Yemeni Houthi attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, rising wheat prices in the wake of the Ukraine war and economic mismanagement, including investment in megaprojects such as a $58 billion new desert capital, as well as granting military-owned enterprises preferential treatment and an oversized stake in the economy.

The floating of the Egyptian pound an expansion from $3 billion to $8 billion of Egypt’s International Monetary Fund bailout loan, making the North African country one of the IMF’s highest borrowers.

The IMF agreement cemented a recent deal with the United Arab Emirates to develop a prime stretch of Egypt’s Mediterranean coast with a investment over the next two months. Egypt will retain a 35% stake in the development with the Talaat Moustafa Group, a construction conglomerate involved in building the new capital as one of the beneficiaries. While not officially announced, well-placed sources said It was understood that the deal was contingent on Egypt reaching an agreement with the IMF.

Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have in recent years backed away from pumping funds into black holes. Instead, they increasingly investments in countries like Egypt and Pakistan to economic reforms and prospects for a return on investment.

The UAE pioneered the approach when it based a government minister in Cairo immediately after general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s 2013 UAE-backed coup that toppled Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president. The UAE official attempted to nudge Al-Sisi towards economic reform.

In a similar vein, Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan an investment conference last year, “We work with the International Monetary Fund and according to its rules. The days of unconditional assistance are over.”

Egypt walks a political tightrope

Last week, 45-year-old policeman Abdel-Gawad Muhammad al-Sahlamy was alone when he a one-man protest waving a Palestinian flag atop an advertisement billboard in the port city of Alexandria, but many Egyptians were likely to have been with him in spirit. Many are angry that Egypt’s Refah border crossing into Gaza remains closed despite the images of thousands of Gazans dying and imminent famine.

In October, the government sought to pre-empt potential protests by pro-Palestinian demonstrations of its own.

Al-Sisi believes that pro-Palestinian activists who were allowed to stage protests under former president Hosni Mubarak shifted their focus in 2011 to his regime and ultimately toppled him during the popular Arab uprisings. The revolts also led to the demise of autocratic rulers in Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and sparked mass anti-government demonstrations elsewhere in the Middle East.

To be sure, Egypt is worried that Israel’s destruction of Gaza is an effort to rid the Strip of its population by inducing Gazans to flee to Egypt. Officials in Cairo also fear that Hamas operatives could infiltrate the Sinai Peninsula where the military has been countering a low-level insurgency. Al-Sisi’s government is wary of Hamas because of its links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Even so, many Egyptians resent the government’s close security ties with Israel and its support for a 17-year-long Israeli blockade of Gaza that has been tightened since the war. Egyptian resentment is compounded by that corrupt Egyptian government officials linked to the country’s intelligence service and a well-connected businessman who hails from the Sinai charge up to per person for travel permits from Gaza to Egypt.

Al-Sahlamy shouted “God is Great” and denounced Al-Sisi as a “traitor and an agent” before being arrested by security forces. The Egyptian Network for Human Rights (ENHR) Al-Sahlamy has not been heard from since.

The network quoted a friend of Al-Sahlamy as saying he was “breaking down” because of the war, which he described as “injustice.” Al-Sahlamy demanded that “the [Egyptian] borders [with Gaza] should be opened” to allow Gazans to escape the carnage, ENHR quoted the policeman’s friend as saying.

The IMF’s austerity program could push struggling Egyptians to a level of destitution not seen since the bread riots of 1977, despite the government’s insistence that it will put in place social protection measures to shield the most vulnerable.

The rising cost of basic goods has deepened the hardships faced by lower-class Egyptians. They have suffered from price hikes since the government embarked on an ambitious reform program in 2016 to overhaul the battered economy. Nearly of Egyptians live in poverty, according to official figures.

For now, Egyptians, like others elsewhere in the Arab world, fear that uprisings would only enhance the chaos already gripping their part of the world. In Egypt’s case, “the question of Sisi’s future will arise when Egyptian citizens decide that they have nothing more to lose,” Israeli journalist and Middle East analyst Zvi Bar’el. The same is true for much of the Middle East beyond the Gulf, with widespread public frustration at Arab states’ inability or unwillingness to alleviate Palestinian suffering as the joker in the pack.

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In response, Arab autocrats are scrambling to squash what they fear could evolve into a third wave of protests in little more than a decade. The autocrats have deployed tools ranging from cracking down on street protests to increased repression to engaging in perfunctory dialogue. They’ve made concessions and economic aid to defuse exploding and potential future powder kegs.

The third wave of protests since the Arab Spring

The latest protests erupted after street agitation across the Middle East bookended the last decade.

In the early 2010s, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Egypt relied on security force violence, military interventions and support for conservatives and rebel militias to roll back the achievements of the 2011 popular revolts that toppled the long-standing autocratic leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

Uprisings erupted again in 2019 and 2020 in Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan. A combination of autocratic political maneuvering and the Covid pandemic defanged them, often with devastating consequences.

Analysts, journalists and academics argued that counterrevolutionary measures had replaced the 2011 Arab Spring with a prolonged Arab Winter. The latest protests, however, suggest the winter’s snow may be melting.

This month, Iran braces for the September 16 first anniversary of Masha Amini’s death. Amini died under suspicious circumstances in the custody of Iran’s religious police, who detained her for allegedly wearing her headscarf loosely. Amini’s death sparked months of street protests in which killed 530 people and arrested more than 22,000. Since then, popular defiance has turned , cultural , courthouses and into protest and civil disobedience venues. “Wrong decisions may have painful consequences for the establishment. People cannot take more pressure. If it continues, we will witness street protests again,” a former government official .

Syria has seen almost two weeks of sustained mass anti-government protests in the Druze-populated southwest province of Suwayda, long a pro-government stronghold. The demands for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad are resonating in the neighboring Sunni region of Daraa and even Assad’s Alawite stronghold of Latakia. “Initially, Assad probably thought, ‘I have won and we can let this happen; we can let the Druze let off some steam.’ It turned out to be a mistake from the Assad point of view, and Assad’s military will have to keep him in power,” Syria expert Joshua Landis.

Authorities in Bahrain have so far failed to end a widening, more than three-week-long by 800 prisoners, or at least 20% of the Gulf state’s prison population, by acceding to some demands for improved incarceration conditions.

Libyan security forces were this week on the streets of the capital, Tripoli, to prevent renewed protests against a meeting between since dismissed Foreign Minister Najla al-Mangoush and her Israeli counterpart, Eli Cohen. The protests heaped pressure on Libya’s internationally recognized interim national unity government to step down and make way for a new administration.

Similarly to Iran, has been rocked by nine months of protests — even if Israeli pro-democracy demonstrations have focused on opposition to Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, with no reference to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

In Iraq, Arab and Turkmen protesters opposed to a Kurdish political presence in the disputed multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk clashed with Kurds this weekend, suggesting could rejoin the list of Middle Eastern countries experiencing social unrest. Authorities initially imposed a curfew in Kirkuk after four people were killed in the protests.

Could Egypt be next?

Supporters of President Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, including the UAE, worry Egypt could be the next to witness a renewed wave of protests.

“There’s a feeling people aren’t comfortable with anything right now. There’s a debt crisis, prices of everything and inflation have gone up dramatically. People’s lives and situations go from bad to worse. Their willingness to stay quiet has disappeared. You’re more likely to hear about the discontent openly in the streets,” Egyptian-Canadian journalist Karim Zidan said to me days after he arrived in Cairo for a visit last month.

In an entitled “Egypt’s Sisi Rules by Fear—and Is Ruled by It,” Egypt expert Steven A. Cook added, “There is a large, growing, and noticeable divergence between what the government promises Egyptians and how they experience everyday life.”

Fear of renewed protests in Egypt, set to become the world’s largest importer of wheat for the fiscal year 2023–2024, was likely one reason why the Abu Dhabi Export Office and UAE-based agribusiness Al Dahra last month to provide Egypt for the next five years with $100 million a year worth of imported milled wheat “at competitive prices.”

Fear of unrest drives harsh repression

The fear of protests, even in countries like Saudi Arabia with a low risk of discontent spilling into the streets, may also explain out-of-proportion repressive measures like the kingdom’s recent of Muhammad al-Ghamdi, a 54-year-old teacher and brother of a dissident Islamist scholar, for his activity on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Human Rights Watch said the two X accounts associated with al-Ghamdi and cited in court documents had only ten followers between them. Al-Ghamdi generally retweeted tweets by known critics of the Saudi government.

In a just-published , author Robert D. Kaplan noted that Vladimir Lenin, a founder of the Soviet Union, understood “that it was necessary to murder and incarcerate the innocent. For how else could a dictator inculcate total fear in the population? To punish only the guilty would provide the innocent, who constitute most of the population, with peace of mind. And that, of course, would undermine the sort of control that Lenin believed was necessary.“

Kaplan’s analysis bears out in Iran’s response to protests and Israel’s West Bank and Gaza-related policies. Moreover, it doesn’t bode well for Syrian protesters. Even so, the analysis provides an explanation for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s unnecessarily harsh repression of any sign of dissent.

However, what protests in countries like Iran and Syria and powder kegs such as Egypt suggest, as did the 1989 anti-government demonstrations that sparked the demise of the Leninist empire, is that repression at best buys autocrats and authoritarians time. In the end, it doesn’t remove the risk of mounting discontent with social and economic policies spilling onto the streets.

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Russia’s strategy in the Middle East is infinitely more perceptive and successful than the incoherent American effort. President ��is a good example of the expanding influence of Russia in the region. Egyptian and Russian ministers signed a $21-billion deal to finance and build . Putin and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi also agreed to work toward rebuilding economic and military relations to the way they were in Soviet times. President Sisi sees the durability of the US alliance as unreliable.

In Syria, Russian support was crucial in the and other jihadi rebels and has cemented its influence there for a future generation. Russian/Iranian relations are again blooming in trade, energy and military cooperation. Even in the Sunni Arab oil producing countries of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, Russia’s spreading influence has been helped by the alignment of interests in curtailing oil supply and maintaining high energy prices.

Contrast this to American policy, which has been compete in the energy markets to depress prices and to remove America as a market for Middle Eastern oil. Moreover, President Donald Trump has gone out of his way to offend Muslim sensibilities throughout the region both by his clumsy travel ban, racially charged rhetoric and the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. The only other initiatives Trump has come up with are to encourage Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman to ally Saudi Arabia with Israel against Iran, fight a proxy war in Yemen and to ditch all economic and political support for the Palestinians.

The one positive achievement from Trump’s inaugural foreign visit was the much touted $100 billion worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Like most of what Trump says and does there is so much less to this than the claim. There is no $100-billion deal. There are letters of interest or intent, but no contracts. In fact, not one single new arms contract has been signed. The US Senate has neither reviewed nor given approval for any new strategic arms contracts with Saudi Arabia and, of course, there is considerable doubt about whether Saudi Arabia could even afford to spend such amounts of money. President Putin has carefully sidestepped the folly of this sort of thinking: He has concentrated on making friends and influencing people, signing real deals and positioning Russia as a dependable partner with no ideological bias.

All this muddled US policy traces back to Trump’s naive mantra of “America First.” In reality this is no more than pandering the prejudices of his base — the white working class — but at the same time pushing through policies to please his wealthy donors. Trump may not know it, but US foreign policy has always been America first. The whole purpose of American projection of its power — military, economic, cultural and diplomatic — has been to shape the world environment to American interests. This never needed to be stated, and American success in doing this is obvious to all.

But the Trump version of “America First,” and how he translated this into Middle Eastern policy, has reversed the process. Trump has allied himself to Sunni governments that are undemocratic and deeply unpopular with their own people, carelessly insulted Arabs and Muslims and stirred up a new confrontation with Iran. He has also thrown his weight behind a right-wing Israeli government that is poised to annex the majority of the West Bank and force the Palestinians to live in a collection of self-governing unconnected “reservations.”

None of this is of any benefit to the US. In fact, it is the reverse and with long lasting negative implications. The State Department and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s contribution to Middle Eastern strategy has been almost totally absent or ignored. President Trump has appointed only one ambassador in the whole region — to Israel — which highlights his priorities. This is disrespectful at the very least to the regimes he is trying to be friends with. In short, the whole effort to project American interests in the Middle East has been a disaster, and one Russia has benefited from and will continue to exploit for the reminder of Trump’s presidency.

Putin is delighted: Russian relationships will endure long after the regimes that love Trump so much have disappeared.

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Faced with a drop in popularity, intermittent protests against rising prices and calls for a mass anti-government demonstration, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is seeking to appease the country’s youth, soccer fans and activists with promises of change.

Sisi’s efforts have included a one-time lifting of a ban on spectators attending soccer matches; promises to revise Egypt’s draconic anti-protest law; reviewing cases of youth detained without trial; and holding monthly meetings with young people to follow up on resolutions of a national youth conference held in early October. However, these moves provoked sharp criticism before they even got off the ground.

An that Sisi’s popularity has dropped 14%. Writing in��, journalist Omar Hadi rejected Sisi’s addressing of youth as his sons and daughters, insisting that Egypt’s youth were citizens with duties and rights. As the government-organized conference opened, Twitter lit up with youth organizing their own virtual gathering.

Hadi’s rejection and the “counter-conference” constituted far more than a rejection of Sisi’s brutal repression of dissent and widespread disillusion with the president’s promise of a bright future of social and economic opportunity.

Father of the Egyptian Nation

Against the backdrop of severe economic deterioration since Sisi came to power in a military coup in 2013, and the prospect of severe austerity as part of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout program, Hadi and the counter-conference’s rejection of being sons and daughters amounted to a rejection of neopatriarchy, the fundament of Arab autocratic rule.

A phrase coined by American-Palestinian scholar Hisham Sharabi, neopatriarchy ��involves the projection of the autocratic leader as a father figure. Autocracy in Arab society, according to Sharabi, was built on the dominance of the father, a patriarch around which the nation and nuclear family were organized. Vertical relations between ruler and ruled, as between father and child, are maintained. In both settings, the paternal will is absolute and mediated in society, as well as in the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion. At the top of the pyramid resides the country’s leader as the father of all fathers.

The virtual conference raised the very issues the official conference sought to control, such as “the relationship between public freedom and political engagement of youth” and “causes of violence in football stadiums and the methods of retaining spectators.” Under the hashtag��, it focused on the detention of tens of thousands of political prisoners, the disappearance of scores of others, lack of basic freedoms, and the continued closure of stadiums to a soccer-crazy public. A later hashtag, “,” leapfrogged to the number one trend on Egyptian social media.

“If Sisi held the #National_Youth_Conference in Prison, there would have been a larger attendance than Sharm El-Sheikh,” the resort town in the Sinai, quipped tweeter��.

“Where else are they going to be? They are either going to be buried in the ground, or imprisoned above ground or thrown off the grounds completely,” added��.

Sisi told the official conference that “the government, in coordination with the relevant state parties, will study the suggestions and proposals to amend the protest law … and include them in the set of proposed legislation to be presented to parliament during the current session.”

Setbacks for Sisi

It was not only youth that President Sisi appeared to having difficulty convincing. Egyptian businessmen warned that raids on sugar factories, and traders accused of hoarding the commodity amid a severe shortage, would undermine confidence of foreign investors at a time when they are crucial in helping Egypt dig itself out of an economic hole. With the Egyptian armed forces opening outlets, and military trucks roaming the country selling cheap groceries to compensate for shortages and rising prices, Sisi has promised to reduce the enormous stake of the army in the economy over the next three years.

Sisi suffered a further setback when Saudi Arabia announced it was stopping oil shipments to Egypt. The president has irritated the kingdom by refusing, despite massive Saudi financial support, to back Riyadh’s policy toward Iran, Syria and Yemen.

As part of Sisi’s fledgling efforts that also include various failed attempts in the past to either repress or coopt soccer fans, the government has announced that 75,000 spectators would be allowed to attend a 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifier on��November 13��in Alexandria’s Borg el-Arab Stadium. The announcement followed the admission of 70,000 people to a match between storied Cairo club Al Zamalek SC, whose militant Ultras White Knights (UWK) fans have a long history of anti-government protest, and South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns FC.

While far smaller numbers have, until now, been granted entry to stadiums where international matches were being played, pitches have been closed to the public for much of the past five years for all domestic premier league games. The closure was designed to prevent stadiums from again emerging as platforms for the venting of pent-up anger and frustration.

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That anger and frustration has been boiling to the surface in recent weeks with a new group, the Ghalaba Movement or Movement of the Marginalized, calling for mass protests on��November 11��against subsidy cuts, rising prices and increasing shortages of basic goods.

Meanwhile, Interior Minister Magdy Abdel Ghaffar has warned that Egypt’s widely despised security forces would not permit “a repeat of previous attempts at sabotage and social unrest in Egypt.” In a statement on Facebook, Abdel Ghaffar said that security measures were being tightened to “protect citizens and establishments.”

Growing Discontent in Egypt

Nevertheless, reports in Egypt’s tightly controlled media of several incidents of individual protest have prompted speculation that some within the military are sending Sisi a message—that he needs to get a grip on discontent that could spiral out of hand. The incidents include a taxi driver who, in an act like the one that sparked the , set himself alight earlier this month to protest rising prices and deteriorating living conditions. An Egyptian television station also broadcast an outburst by a tuk tuk driver who vented his fury at Egypt’s economic plight. The video clip garnered some 10 million hits on the television station’s website before it was taken down.

Large numbers of people in Port Said, where the worst politically-loaded incident in Egyptian sporting history occurred in 2012, took to the streets earlier this month to protest the rising cost of housing.

It remains an open question of whether mushrooming discontent amounts to the makings of renewed mass protests in Egypt. Many Egyptians look at the horrendous state of post-Arab Spring countries wracked by war and violence and do not want to see their country travel that same road.

Nonetheless, economic hardship and repression appear to be reaching a point at which an increasing number of Egyptians are no longer willing to remain silent.

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Earlier this month, the Egyptian state����of both individuals and organizations engaged in human rights advocacy, including the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, the Egyptian Center for the Right to Education, and their organizational leaders. This is merely the latest episode of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s suppression of dissent within the largest Arab country. The government has cracked down on the��,����and other activist groups, journalists,��, and nearly any organization accused of criticizing the president or the state.

Since 2014 al-Sisi and his allies have enacted problematic legislation on��,����and��,��. With the help of a��, these laws have created a largely rubber stamp parliament and have resulted in an estimated����in Egypt. In 2016 alone,����have stood trial.

Mixed Response

The US response to these developments in Egypt has been mixed, at best. Following the ouster of the democratically elected, though��, Mohamed Morsi, the Obama administration suspended Washington’s����of over $1.5 billion to Egypt in October 2013. To regain the financial and military aid, Egypt had to follow a “roadmap” to democracy. Less than 18 months later, the US restored the aid despite no real steps toward democratic governance or widened civic participation in Cairo. Washington remains����how the aid has been spent.

Moreover, during those 18 months, ��to substitute more aid to cover��, amounting to $4 billion. Beyond some strongly worded statements and diplomatic finger wagging, al-Sisi’s government has faced no concrete pushback from major allies for orchestrating the overthrow of a democratic government and establishing a regime intolerant of dissent and abusive of human rights.

As the Obama administration approaches its last winter, the future of US-Egypt relations inevitably hinges on the disposition of the next commander-in-chief. Against the advice of the DC think-tank community, both major party candidates����this week during the UN General Assembly session in New York. Notably, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s post-meeting release emphasized maintaining����with Cairo but made no mention of human right or democracy.

Mitigating Authoritarianism��

In contrast, Democratic candidate��Hillary Clinton raised concerns about����in Egypt, mirroring statements����by Secretary of State John Kerry. But Clinton prefers working within the status quo of Egypt. During the Arab Spring protests, she����not to support the ouster of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. A Clinton White House is unlikely to depart greatly from the Obama White House Egypt policy.

In general, human rights and good governance in Egypt take a back seat in Washington to counterterrorism, safe passage through the Suez Canal and peace with Israel. The most that can be hoped for in the next administration is the mitigation of the continuing oppressive authoritarianism of President al-Sisi, which will, if unabated, lead to increased violence and religious terrorism in the country and potentially beyond.

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Indeed, research has shown that the quashing of religious liberty tends to breed��, and legal and societal marginalization����populations toward violence as a means to achieving their political goals. By banning and victimizing the Muslim Brotherhood, attempting to����and marginalizing all political dissent within the country, al-Sisi risks turning Egypt into a breeding ground for terrorism and political violence.

This reality will create headaches for countries throughout the Middle East, as well as subsequent US presidents. Ironically, Washington’s endless pursuit of stability at the expense of human rights will likely result in an Egypt with neither stability nor human rights.

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An Egyptian businessman with close ties to Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the general-turned-president, has submitted a bid for the broadcasting rights of the Confederation of African Football (CAF). The move is widely seen as an effort to polish the image of Egypt, which has been tarnished by the mass abuse of human rights, failing economic policies and a military coup in 2013 that put an end to the country’s first democratic experiment.

The ��also challenges the predominance among Arab satellite broadcasters such as beIN, the Qatar-owned sports network that is part of Al Jazeera and has bought broadcasting rights across the globe.

If successful, the bid could help improve Sisi’s domestic standing at a time when the president is struggling economically and being propped up by funding from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Many Egyptians cannot afford beIN’s subscription rates that range from $7.50 to $54 a month.

Relations between Qatar, a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Egypt have been strained ever since Sisi toppled Mohammed Morsi, a Brotherhood member and Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president.

In June, Morsi was sentenced to 25 years in prison for passing state secrets to Qatar, in a case in which several Al Jazeera journalists were convicted in absentia to either death of long prison terms. Al Jazeera was taken off the air in Egypt within hours of the 2013 coup, and three of its journalists were held in prison and sentenced to years in jail before ultimately being released.

Ahmed Abou Hashima

The businessman, Ahmed Abou Hashima, a steel and media magnate with close ties to President Sisi, has��the close to the Egyptian leader��despite�� that the Muslim Brotherhood supported him in 2012��when Morsi was in office. Abou Hashima sought help at the time in his high-profile divorce—reportedly involving a $30 million settlement—from Haifa Wehbe, one of the Arab world’s most prominent singers and actresses.

Abou Hashima’s effort to improve Egypt’s international image by buying African broadcasting rights builds on Egypt’s past African soccer glory. Egypt’s national team is the African Cup of Nation’s most crowned squad, winning the title in the three consecutive tournaments that preceded the 2011 popular revolt which overthrew President Hosni Mubarak.

“We do our best to project Egypt’s name in all sectors in Africa, especially sport,” Abou Hashima said in a����on August 30.

Pro-Sisi deputies have linked Abou Hashima’s bid more directly to the mass anti-Morsi protests in summer 2013 that were supported by the military and security forces and paved the way for Sisi’s takeover.

“The proposal the Egyptian company presented to buy the broadcasting rights of African football honors the Egyptian people after the��30 June��glorious revolution,” Hamdy al-Sisi, a namesake of the president, lawmaker and member of the lower house’s Youth and Sports Committee, told��.

“Egypt is the main key driver of the Middle East and it remains the pulse of the Arab world. The fact that an Egyptian company obtains the broadcasting rights of matches indicates a lot, including Egypt’s recovery from its crisis as it has come back to the African arena,”����Mahmoud al-Sayyed, another lawmaker and committee member.

Proper marketing of the broadcasting rights would project Egypt—despite a violent insurgency in the Sinai—as stable, demonstrate public support for Sisi and boost tourism, according to Sayyed.

Abou Hashima’s bid appears also to be part of broader government strategy to harness soccer in its effort to garner domestic popularity. The bid was announced days after����in the Suez Canal city of Port Said, one of Egypt’s least populated and most neglected governorates.

Egyptian Ultras

Seventy two members of Ultras Ahlawy—a militant soccer support group that played a key role in the overthrow of Mubarak and subsequent resistance to military rule—died in Port Said’s existing stadium in 2012 in a controversial and politically loaded brawl. It was Egypt’s worst ever sporting incident. Port Said did not figure in the government’s investment plan that was presented in 2015 to an economic development conference.

Many in Port Said resent the fact that court proceedings have laid blame for the incident with militant supporters of Al Masri SC, some of whom have been sentenced to death, and two security officials in the city. Seven other security officers were acquitted. The defendants have appealed the verdicts.

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Sisi sought to co-opt Ultras Ahlawy earlier this year on the fourth anniversary of the tragedy by offering group the chance to independently investigate what happened. Ultras Ahlawy turned the offer down, arguing that it could not simultaneously act as accuser and judge.

The Egyptian president made his offer as militant soccer fans formed the backbone of anti-government student protests that were brutally squashed. The protests were not only against the harsh repression of the Sisi regime, but also against its economic and social policies that have failed to create public sector jobs for graduates and more places for students at universities.

Sisi’s effort to use sports to his advantage sought to exploit the fact that physical exercise, including jogging and cycling, enjoys unprecedented popularity among Egyptian youth. In one event, the president led military academy cadets in 2014 on a well-publicized bicycle ride around Cairo, the Egyptian capital.

“The young people can’t go out demonstrating, but they can go out to run,” sports coach Ramy A. Saleh told��.��“It’s connected with the withdrawal from public life by young people,”��added��political scientist Ezzedine C. Fishere.

“Everyone who had participated in 2011 [in the popular revolt] started to move to the private sphere, some took refuge in depression, some in nihilistic activities and many in fitness — not just fitness, but taking care of oneself,” Fishere said.

Sports may, for now, prove to be a way for President Sisi to engage with youth who, in the absence of post-2011 politics, find expression in physical activity. If history is any guide, however, sports could also turn on him as was evident with soccer fans being the foremost group to physically resist the Mubarak regime in the years before the former president’s downfall.

Sisi appears to recognize this with Egyptian stadiums remaining largely closed to the public since 2011. But that didn’t stop Ultras Ahlawy from rioting in July during a match against a Moroccan team.

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Since the 1952 coup d’état by the Free Officers Movement, Egypt has had six presidents. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the incumbent president, is in the same league with at least two seminal names in modern Egyptian and Arab history: Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat.

Although Sisi is still in their shadow, it may not be for too long. The quiet general is fast becoming an important political figure. The Egyptian leader is still not a revolutionary, but he is certainly a man of original approaches to the challenges around him—a reformer in the making.

If he becomes a fully-fledged reformer, he may well be the modern-day version of Muhammad Ali Pasha, the man who led reforms in Egypt throughout the early 19^th century.

Most Important Arab Nation

Egypt is not just an Arab and Middle Eastern country. Rather, it is Egypt that is the most important Arab state in the region. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not the rich Saudi Arabia that is entitled to be defined as the most important Arab nation.

Egypt is a country of so many “firsts” in the modern history of the Middle East: the first to be occupied by a European power; the first to introduce Western-style reforms; the first to be connected to world commerce through the Suez Canal; the first to experience a popular revolutionary reaction to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood; the first to turn to the Soviet bloc with Nasser at the helm; and the first to make peace with Israel, which completely changed the strategic landscape of the�� Arab-Israeli conflict, rendering any Arab military option against Israel virtually impossible and irrelevant.

It is in this context that we must examine what has already been achieved by President Sisi.

He had to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood in power after democratic elections, including a year of internal turmoil characterized by a concerted effort by the Brotherhood��to turn Egypt into a theocratic dictatorship. In one year, Egypt sunk so fast toward the abyss with Syrian- and Iraqi-style chaos behind the door.

Yes, democracy is about elections, but not only that. It is also about the rule of law, respect for minorities and political dialogue rather than coercion from above. The murdered , the burnt churches and even a killing campaign against the dramatic evidence of the so-called Islamic democracy of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sisi saved Egypt from the inevitable anarchy that was awaiting the country with daily atrocities by the Brotherhood. This was a great contribution not only to Egypt, but to the entire Middle East. Can we even imagine the course of events in the region if the Muslim Brotherhood were allowed to stay in power? An Egypt ruled by the movement could have been the catalyst for a regional Islamic revolution—much like how Nasser was behind a regional eruption of Pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 60s that threatened to turn the entire Middle East upside down.

This is the point where some readers may raise their eyebrows in astonishment with the question: “And what is it now if not an Islamic volcanic eruption”?

Arab Spring

The surprising answer is no, it is��not. Libya, Iraq and Syria have been going through turmoil for years, even prior to 2011. The conflicts in these countries cannot be considered anymore as a manifestation of popular Sunni movements, as the 2011 uprisings were replaced and taken over by a terrorist movement known as the Islamic State, or ISIS, which may have some support but not enough. In Syria and Iraq, we have a local sectarian struggle being dominated by a regional power struggle.

The popular wave of an Islamic revolution was checked and stopped in Egypt due to the decisive actions of Sisi—surely one of his greatest achievements to date, if not the greatest.

President Sisi did not stop there. As a real reformer, he had this to : “Does this mean that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants … Impossible!” Brave and unprecedented words from a devoted Muslim leader to the men of religious rulings at the highest institution of the Muslim world.

The Egyptian president has said a lot more about other contentious issues. He ordered the , conducting a sustained and successful campaign against the group’s terror tunnels in the Gaza Strip. During the Israeli-Hamas confrontation of 2014, Egypt all but supported Israel, denouncing Hamas in the harshest possible terms.

This is not a whimsical policy of revenge against Hamas for its participation in the Muslim Brotherhood’s actions in Egypt. It is part of a careful strategy to give useful and meaningful substance��to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

In the midst of a terror campaign against Israel, known as the so-called “Knives Intifada,” Egypt restored its full diplomatic relations with Israel. Sisi even went as far as considering the possibility of giving a portion of the Egyptian-controlled Sinai to the Palestinians as a solution to the harsh living conditions in Gaza—clearly a .

More Stable Middle East

Simply put,��we have a leader who wants to solve problems rather than create and exacerbate them; a leader��who deals with sacred cows; a leader who puts aside demagogy and incitement in favor of rational��political discourse.
The Egyptian president is not shying away from the chronic economic problems of his country. He knows that the legacy left behind by years of stagnation under former President Hosni Mubarak, a year of destruction under the Muslim Brotherhood, and the continued anti-tourist campaign of terror are his litmus test. Bread and butter to the masses will determine it all in Egypt.

This is where the Saudis and other Arab Gulf states come into the picture. And this is where the United States, the European Union and Israel should also play a role.

Support for the Sisi government should become a project of highest priority to those who want to see a more stable Middle East. We cannot lose time over that. A brave, potentially great leader and 90 million people are waiting to see what will be done.

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In summer 2013, activists, with megaphones on street corners and in metro stations, collected signatures en masse calling for an end to the presidency of and sparked one of the largest public in Egyptian history. After Morsi’s ouster, the state Egypt’s revolution. Egypt’s democracy movement spirals downward, back to where it came from: authoritarianism. Once a promising sign of the potency of Egyptian grassroots mobilization to hold authority accountable, more than one year after its foundation it is clear that Tamarod ended up dividing society, catalyzing bloodshed, chaos, and a power grab by the state establishment.

Today’s Egypt bears deep scars of division, and following months of civil unrest and one of the bloodiest political in recent history — the clearing of Rabaa El Adaweiya Square in August 2013 — a political calm is held uneasily in place. First with emergency rule, curfews, and tanks, now Egypt’s security apparatus is revived and emboldened, complete with a small army of open-topped, machine-gun manned police jeeps. Thousands of and secular activists alike are locked up behind prison bars, and is off limits to protesters following the declaration of a law banning . , , , human rights , and have been victims of state aggression and intimidation.

The shoddy monument erected in the revolution’s epicenter celebrates the victory of the state-affiliated construction companies contracted to build it; the one in Rabaa Square honoring “police martyrs” stands in unabashed dishonor to those dead citizens who died at the hands of the security apparatus. The bullet casings that littered Cairo sidewalks have been swept up and melted down alongside thousands of American-made teargas . The chanting has died down amidst fear of arrest, torture and murder by the state.

Even those who seek to channel dissent through legitimate and constructive channels — youth, civic, and nongovernmental organizations — face intrusive and obstructive under Egypt’s draconian civil associations law. Meanwhile, a notoriously slow judiciary proves to be exceptionally quick and merciless when it comes to locking away of the revolution or Islamists to death en masse.

Culture of Fear

Now, Egyptians salute current president and former general and military spy chief . Hailed as the hero of the “second revolution,” many believe his government can address all of Egypt’s problems so long as the “terrorists” are dealt with by any means necessary.

But for revolutionary hopefuls, the current sense of calm in Cairo, however, wreaks of fear, apathy, and defeat of the populist cause.��Egypt’s counter-revolution — the current wave of repressive tactics and consolidation of the state’s institutional and corporate interests — is blowback from a once promising Tamarod rebellion against former President Morsi.

For liberals and academic observers, Morsi succumbed to the authoritarian tendencies of his predecessors and failed to press a populist agenda, favoring a neoliberal one that benefited the elite financiers of the Muslim Brotherhood. The perception that he focused on party power consolidation over national interests turned him into fresh bait swallowed whole by the state establishment as soon as they sensed his weakness: dwindling popular support in the face of a volatile, yet divided, political opposition.

The trend so far: massive mob impeaches president, massive mob approves war against fellow citizens, angry mobs clash violently in the streets, massive mob massacred, mob cheers on bloodshed, massive arrests, mass death sentencing, and so on.

Those ensnared by the incessant propaganda against the Muslim Brotherhood, were convinced to doubt the group’s loyalty to Egyptian national interests amidst a culture of and economic uncertainty.

Tamarod’s petition campaign calling for the ouster of Mohammad Morsi set in motion a series of chaotic events, eventually leading to nation-wide polarization, an explosion of senseless violence and subsequent repression under the guise of restoring security, led by now-President Sisi. The signs of a healthy democracy — targeted civil society campaigns, competition between parliamentary coalitions, court battles, and engaged efforts to spark constructive public debates — were forsaken. Instead, Tamarod took Egypt’s political conflicts to the street where a series of massive brawls and armed scuffles ensued and the body count began.

It is understandable how most normal Egyptians, trying to make it in a suffering economy after months of daily protests, shootings, and church attacks wanted stability. Sisi’s promise of stability was accompanied by a continuous barrage of propaganda alleging that the political group ruling Egypt for the past year was secretly a terrorist organization, collaborating with foreign powers to destabilize the country and jeopardize national interests. This aimed to terrify the public to give up the essential freedoms it made strides in gaining in 2012. The narrative, peddled by mass media, made fear — not rule of law — the stabilizing force.

Sisi capitalized on that fear, if he did not help orchestrate it. Allied with former supporters of the regime and big business-affiliated media, he officiated a narrative wherein Egypt faced existential security threats from Muslim Brotherhood “terrorists” in a hyper-nationalistic political climate reminiscent of 1930s European or post- United States.

State propaganda accompanied military intelligence’s offer of extensive support to help Tamarod orchestrate the June 30, 2013, protests, according to Newsweek Mike Giglio.

Trial By Mob

General Sisi used the revolution’s very own weapon — mass public mobilization — against it. In an address to the nation on July 24, 2013, he upon Egyptians to take to the streets as a public mandate to “fight terrorism.” What ended up being the final mass demonstration in Tahrir Square since (apart from a government-sponsored October 6 show of loyalty to the revived military order, the same day state security around 53 anti-state protesters marching toward Tahrir) tens of thousands of Egyptians gave Sisi the green light.

After an extensive year-long study of evidence and firsthand testimony, Human Rights Watch (HRW) “premeditated,” “widespread and systematic” use of lethal force by Egyptian police and military forces against thousands of protestors at Rabaa el-Adaweya and al-Nahda squares and other public marches following the ousting of Morsi in July 2013. The organization concluded that the massacres “constituted serious violations of international human rights law, but likely amounted to crimes against humanity.”

Violent armed , mass , , and repressive laws soon followed, often to the sound of applause by military loyalists and media pundits. Not a single police or army single officer has been held , nor has any actionable internal inquiry been launched.

Rabaa Immortal

“Rabaa”, now the immortalized “four-finger” symbol of protest martyrdom amidst a series of state killings marks the apex of a dark chapter for post-revolution Egypt, wherein mob whims, fear and brute force won out over law, skilled organizing, and fair political competition.

The tragedy at Rabaa el-Adaweya Square represents the culmination of strategic blunders on behalf of Egypt’s opposition forces alongside an irresponsible rebellious attitude by pro-military, pro-January 25, and pro-Morsi forces alike. It was a preventable event caused partially by the desperation of Egypt’s failed non-Islamist political , which joined forces with the military because they could not compete against the Muslim Brotherhood in an open political arena. Myopic grassroots leadership sparked unrest that allowed a revolutionary movement to be coopted by a fear-high state apparatus.

In demanding the ouster of the first democratically elected president in Egyptian history, Tamarod tore to shreds the legitimate foundation for rule of law and long-term stability — the 2012 . Despite certain flaws, a majority of Egyptians, spurred on in part by the Brotherhood’s effective political machine, approved it in Egypt’s first fair election. In return, the post-coup constitutional vote, secured with corporate-funded and marred by the and arrest of those campaigning against it, marks a return to Mubarak-era thug politics. The tainted constitutional referendum effectively robs the nation of legal legitimacy from the outset, not to mention the document’s legal around the military, police and judiciary. “Rabaa” epitomizes a security apparatus immune to accountability, a bleak reality now enshrined in the nation’s highest set of laws.

Still, since its passage, the state has regularly violated the very constitution it propagated, abusing rights of press , , and due . Without constitutional legitimacy, the justice system’s by the state is evident with each announcement of a mass sentencing against the state establishment’s political enemies. It is not legal accountability, but fear and repression — the root causes of tragedies like “Rabaa” — which governs the “order” of the day.

Rather than a fair, clear-headed, individualized justice process, Egypt succumbed to the whims of a fearful, angry citizenry and became victim to the poisons of mob rule. The trend so far: massive mob impeaches president, massive mob approves war against fellow citizens, angry mobs clash violently in the streets, massive mob massacred, mob cheers on bloodshed, massive arrests, mass death sentencing, and so on. It is as if individual guilt, distributed among so many, fades away amidst a sea of injustice.

The Lost Way, Bloodstained Conscience

There was another to preempt massacre and repression. When the public was galvanized against Morsi, the opposition could have guided grassroots momentum to press the government for reasonable demands alongside independently achievable public initiatives. Demands for a cleaner environment, better education, and a healthier life would have significantly improved the conditions and psyche of the people whether or not the government was controlled by the Muslim Brothers. Most importantly, the key actors in such demands would have been the people — not the military — who had an opportunity to embody change and band together across political divides in order to attain such aims.

The failure of revolutionary forces in Egypt to foresee the extensive political and social maturity necessary for meaningful, societally beneficial civic engagement and democracy proved crippling for the movement.

The compromise between the Muslim Brotherhood and the opposition could have been keeping Morsi as president alongside constitutional provisions regulating executive authority, and immediate parliamentary elections. The millions who showed their support for the Tamarod petition could have been mobilized to vote for a united alternative to the military and Islamic currents that aimed to advance the populist or revolutionary goals, and hold Morsi’s Islamist agenda in check.

Civil society and opposition to Islamist forces could have coalesced into a platform to hold the government accountable with constructive criticism, while guiding the youth masses and pressuring the government to assist in efforts of social welfare — not through handouts but comprehensive development and mass scale volunteerism. This may have proven to be what Egypt would have needed to foster the evolution of the rebel mindset into a truly revolutionary one, wherein individual and societal goals are united.

Such feat could have been achieved had cool persistence quelled Egypt’s fiery impatience and fear of the Brotherhood. Come election time, such force of progressive populists, with the grassroots girth of the Tamarod movement, could have handily competed with the Brotherhood machine on a fair political playing field. Ultimately, it was time for the progressive, non-denominational alternative to step up and compete. At the end of Morsi’s term, whichever force more effectively addressed the plight of the Egyptian people would have gained electoral sway.

Instead, myopic notions of a “quick fix” prevailed, wherein a list of demands was somehow thought achievable by toppling of the government figurehead. It was relatively easy to mobilize people to chant and demand a better economy. But it is that much harder — and this may be the key to a successful revolution — to keep people fed, peaceful, content, organized and engaged in the effort to make their communities a better place to live in the long term. This is the difference between the negative energy of a movement like Tamarod, which sparked chaos, regression, and “Rabaa,” versus the positive force for social activism and genuine revolution that it could have been (and still could be).

Civil disobedience is a vital tool for any citizenry willing to confront forces of oppression. But the failure of revolutionary forces in Egypt to foresee the extensive political and social maturity necessary for meaningful, societally beneficial civic engagement and democracy proved crippling for the movement. A Pandora’s box — a power vacuum now filled by the immovable military-state establishment — has shattered the essential notions of accountability and constitutional legitimacy bringing the revolution back to square one. Except now, the blood of thousands stains our collective conscience.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.
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Between May 26-28, Egyptians voted for a new president as yet another election was held. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi won with more than 90% of votes against his only opponent, the left-wing populist Hamdeen Sabahi. Sisi was widely-expected to win as the former army chief was supported by the state apparatus and large parts of the Egyptian elite. What surprised many, however, was the low voter turnout, which prompted the election commission to extend the voting process from two to three days.

Several nongovernmental organizations, the African Union, the Arab League and the European Union (EU) observed the presidential election. The EU mission encountered obstacles from the outset and was almost canceled. In the end, it could only be implemented in a reduced manner. As a result, EU representatives could not get a comprehensive picture of the situation in Egypt.

Therefore, the positive tone of the EU mission’s first statement after the vote came as a surprise. It essentially confirmed that the Egyptian authorities administered the election “in line with the law.” Despite describing the election’s political context as repressive, EU representatives highlighted that there was “broad support” from the Egyptian population who were in favor of the transitional government’s roadmap. However, no evidence was delivered for this. The decision to extend the election by one day was seen as in accordance with the law, despite being controversially discussed among Egyptian jurists.

Even more problematic was the lack of assessment over voter turnout. Instead, EU observers cited the 47.3% given by the Egyptian election commission. Given that many polling stations remained virtually empty, this number should have been addressed as highly suspicious. Moreover, the statement did not mention that the population was ordered to vote under the threat of punishment. Egyptian law entails an obligation to vote; however, this has never been enforced. Threatening enforcement of this law emphasized the desperate efforts by Egyptian authorities to achieve a high voter turnout in order to equip the new president with as much legitimacy as possible. Accordingly, this move should have been addressed by the EU.

Legitimizing the Political Process in Egypt

The real problem with the EU observer mission is not its questionable assessment. Rather the EU, through its political decision to conduct an observer mission, has lent a considerable amount of external legitimacy to the election process, which was not free and fair. The invitation by Egyptian authorities to the EU may have been motivated by fears of a low voter turnout that would have indicated a lack of support for Sisi. This made any act of external legitimization by the EU even more crucial for the Egyptian regime, due to the lack of internal support.

Apparently, the EU is more concerned with short-term stabilization in Egypt rather than long-term stability. It does not seem to believe in a successful democratic transformation of the country.

The legitimacy boost for the regime was even bigger as the mission had an explicit political element. Not only were election specialists part of the mission, but so too was a delegation of European Parliament representatives. Thus, it is not surprising that Egyptian state media interpreted the EU mission as a sign of support for the political process.

Apparently, the EU is more concerned with short-term stabilization in Egypt rather than long-term stability. It does not seem to believe in a successful democratic transformation of the country. Instead, the EU has sent a signal to the ruling Egyptian elites that the political process steered by them has been accepted.

However, in doing so, the EU not only alienates opponents of the regime such as activists that brought down Hosni Mubarak in 2011 — the same activists who were celebrated as protagonists of civil society demands for self-determination. Rather, the EU has also damaged its long-term opportunities to influence the situation.

If it becomes clear that Sisi cannot rule successfully due to a lack of societal support, one of two scenarios will emerge. First, state repression will intensify, something the EU will not be able to ignore in the long-run. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have already spoken out against unacceptable conditions, diminishing press freedom and excessive police brutality, including killings and mass incarcerations that go unpunished. The second situation could see a spread of discontent among the Egyptian population, leading to mass protests once again. If another leader is overthrown, the EU will face considerable difficulties in justifying its support for the current political process.

The concluding statement by a member of the EU mission, mentioning that the election was “democratic, peaceful and free … but not necessarily always fair,” is a mockery considering the current political climate in Egypt. In the eyes of its Egyptian critics, the mission completely discredited itself. Even if the final report, which is set to be released in a few weeks, details the election’s shortcomings, the first impression will stick: the EU has sided with repression in Egypt. Having failed to boycott the quintessentially undemocratic process in Egypt, the EU has virtually supported it.

*[This article was originally published by����and was translated from German to English by .]

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Two sayings often come to my mind when I think about the Egyptian revolution these days. The first is attributed to Prophet Mohammed:��“khayr al-amur al-wasat” (the best path is the middle one). The second is attributed to James Baldwin, replacing “love” with “revolution” (although I think there are many similarities):��“Love does not begin and end the way we think it does.��Love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up.”

I am one of those who think the situation in Egypt is the result of a constellation of complex factors that simply cannot be reduced to a “coup” or a popular revolt.��What occurred was a popular revolt that led to a coup, which was implicitly called for by much of the Egyptian population.��

As such, I find myself repulsed by extreme interpretations of the situation in Egypt in either direction. It is certainly true that Egypt today bears all of the signs of a brutal counterrevolution: journalists have been jailed (although 60 political prisoners have recently been released); dissent is silenced, sometimes brutally; and a climate of xenophobia fills the airwaves.��

Many have been rounded up and jailed on suspicion of being a member of the now outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Many who supported the demonstrations of June 30 do not wish to affiliate themselves with the events that have transpired after July 3.��

Others feel pain over these events, but are in a state of confusion about what the alternative would have been. Still, others believe it is more or less justified.

Relatedly, protests in many of Egypt’s universities by Muslim Brotherhood supporters have crossed the line into brutality, including����of damaging property, burning buildings, ripping the clothing off of a female professor, and assaulting elderly male ones.

There are frequent terrorist attacks across Egypt that often target security installations, such as during the December 24 attack in����and��.

Even though responsibility for these attacks was claimed by a group called Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, it is difficult to believe the Muslim Brotherhood had no involvement. After all, the attacks were stepped up following Mohammed Morsi’s ouster and these Islamist groups are ideologically aligned — even if loosely.

The Brotherhood’s allies have taken their fight off Egypt’s shores by launching an international campaign against the Egyptian government in American and European universities and airwaves, many of which shockingly parrot Muslim Brotherhood talking points without offering a counterview in a nation that strongly supports the military intervention against Morsi.��

“Brotherhoodization”

Another fact, which is difficult for Western observers to grasp but is not at all difficult for many Egyptians to intuitively understand, is the following: Egyptians currently have terrible options and so they support what they consider to be the lesser of two bad options.��

Many, including , have written extensively about why so many Egyptians found the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power so intolerable that they didn’t want them to finish their term.

In brief, Egyptians felt that under the fig leaf of a democratic election, the Muslim Brotherhood took gross advantage of its slim mandate in a revolutionary context to put forward policies that had the potential to seriously damage Egypt.�� ����

In other words, under the cover of a “revolution” and “democracy” — a democracy in which the Muslim Brotherhood eked out a win by 1.3% of the vote against a contender from the old regime that had just been thrown out in a revolution one year prior — the Egyptian population was being slowly subjected to what they call��takhwiin, or the “Brotherhoodization” of the state.��

With this Brotherhoodization came a number of appointments to sensitive, high-skilled positions based on loyalty over merit, and a theocratic agenda of some kind that was uncomfortably unclear to many.

Most seriously was the perception of shifting Egyptian alliances toward extra-judicial jihadist groups and their shared pan-Islamist agenda.��

The idea is that Egypt is much too big, both population wise and in the imagination of the region and the world, to have been hijacked in this manner. This is why – and perhaps this clears up at least some confusion – many Egyptians chose and continue to support the army and Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who they view as having saved the country from disaster.

The Media and the Impact of Syria

The media in Egypt is clearly aiding this support for Sisi, which often turns to hysteria and dangerous xenophobia against Islamists and even revolutionaries — or anyone who departs from the military’s authoritarian line.��

The media is feeding on fears of Egypt being on the brink, having come close to collapsing into a different understanding of a regional order that favors the pan-Islamist over the nationalist. For many Egyptians, this idea is anathema.��

In addition, one can look at deeply troubled nearby Syria to see what happens when the state collapses and the army suffers major defections —��a vacuum created where��,��bearing ideologies and agendas that have little to do with the desires of the native population, flood in to destroy the country by imposing their rule, based on a radical interpretation of Islam.��

Is it any wonder that Egyptians went into near cardiac arrest after Morsi’s “rally for Syria,” in which he all but called for Egyptians to travel over the borders and wage jihad? Or standing at a state function with clerics who openly engaged in��taqfir��(declaring a Muslim a kafir, unbeliever) against Shi’as and propagated distrust against Christians?

No one, especially considering Mubarak’s presidency, could have imagined such sentiments coming from the president of Egypt. A dangerous line had been crossed.

The military transition certainly has left its own trail of blood. This includes the massacres at Rab’a al-Adawiyya, where Morsi supporters were cleared from their sit-ins after 47 days in one of the bloodiest moments in Egypt’s recent history.

Seeing the Facts as They are Embedded on the Ground

Three years on, I have learned that I no longer believe in critique for the sake of critique. This is an admittedly unusual statement for an academic to make. However, I am convinced that critique and mere opinion offering — without a serious consideration of facts as they are embedded on the ground in the specific country and not strictly based on high theory, including democratic theory — is the easiest form of intellectual labor there is.��

Unfortunately, it is woefully insufficient. In an era of revolutionary change in Egypt whose course no one predicted, there is no reason to assume that comparing a reading of events in the county — often from afar — to democratic theory, produced in the West for another context entirely in previous centuries, would provide the best insight.��

Egyptian affairs must be understood in the context of Egyptian particularities, which include an ethnographic study of its peoples’ attitudes and then having the humility to take those attitudes seriously.

Some have made critique for the sake of critique into a career. In the West, we have reams of analysis on Egypt that refer to Egyptian culture and sentiment only in the vaguest terms, choosing only to concentrate on an analysis of state institutions from a Western perspective, both practical and theoretical.��

A final reason one might sour on critique for the sake of critique is empirical. Many of the very same people who shouted “irhal, irhal” (step down) to Morsi from his first day in office, seemed to run quickly to the sidelines after June 30 and July 3 were said and done, as if they had nothing to do with any of it.��

“But we never wanted the army,” they say. In political terms, this is a meaningless statement, as it is a basic fact that the army brokers political transitions in Egypt. It is little wonder that Egyptians who want to live a normal life no longer have a lot of regard for professional revolutionaries, who will not accept the consequences of their actions. ��

Not Just a Coup

Rather than reading events in Egypt as a simple coup, we should begin to grasp the much deeper and wider implications of what occurred.��

The most important point is that political Islam has been dealt a major blow in Egypt; after all, what happens in Egypt reverberates across the Arab world. The effects of this blow are only beginning to show and, if leveraged correctly, can amount to a major milestone in the crucial cultural aspect of the revolution that started in 2011.��

The second point is that the people largely chose a military coup and will now have to live with the consequences of an iron fist rather than an indiscernible theocratic one. This is an ongoing revolution and, we, like the French, have time.��

The most important orders of business are freeing political prisoners and jailed journalists, and overhauling the Egyptian economy. I would venture to say that most Egyptians find this much more important than a “democratic transition” — which they have recently tried and found unsatisfying, to say the least.��

It is also very important, though much more difficult, to figure out how to broker some kind of political deal with the Islamists. However, at present, this is impossible with their frequent terror attacks and the military regime’s incessant propaganda and dragnet arrests.

The army will overplay its hand. This is inevitable, as a military regime does not have the required skills to truly bring Egypt the reforms it needs. ��

It would be wise of Field Marshal Sisi to conclude that, for this reason, it would be best for him and Egypt if he did not run for president. Having said that, there is, however, a serious question of who would be the best person to run Egypt instead.

It is near impossible to predict what will happen. But having a strong national institution in charge of the country — even if this power is a mirage — is what (most) Egyptians need psychologically to reassure them that their country will not collapse into the chaos that citizens see all around them.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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With the world watching, Egypt’s long-time intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, announced the departure of Hosni Mubarak from his presidential throne on February 11, 2011. The epic eruption of cheers, tears, song and dance that ensued in nearly every street in Egypt reverberated across the globe. Its boom sent chills of awe and waves of hope to pro-democracy advocates and observers alike.

Three years ago, on January 25, 2011, tens of thousands of brave men and women banded together in Tahrir Square to embark on a national journey to assert their rights. Egyptians rejected despotism, failed governance, corruption, economic exploitation and police abuse, demonstrating what can be achieved when people unite to march towards a single goal with selfless, wholehearted dedication.

The revolution marked a new chapter in Egyptian history as the people collectively called out the state’s failures, embraced their rights, and took collective action to change their country. Once united, the Egyptian people held high hopes for a seamless democratic transition and a significant government reform.

After the February 11 announcement, power was transferred from Mubarak to the nation’s top military cadre, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), who were supposed to merely oversee a peaceful transition period to civilian democracy where Egyptians would work together to draft and approve a constitution, elect a parliament, and vote for a president.

Back to Square One

But three years later, Egypt is back to square one, having scrapped its first trio of elected institutions (constitution, parliament and presidency) while the military maintains a firm hold on power.

Revolutionary mandates for the broad government reform and redefinition of civil-state relationships, which are necessary for Egypt to realize democracy and tackle society’s challenges, have not taken hold.

Instead, two subsequent waves of regression — first by the Muslim Brotherhood, and now by the old state led by the military — have derailed the revolution’s trek forward.

The old state establishment that held power for generations — the military institution, former members of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP), bureaucratic stalwarts, and the corporate elite that for years collaborated with such power holders — seeks to preserve its unchecked economic privilege and institutional power in the face of the revolution’s mandate for broad change and government accountability.

Its actions, especially following the June 30 popular uprising and subsequent military coup against former President Mohammed Morsi, have solidified such entities’ hold onto power.

Egyptian society is still gripped by a toxic environment, economic turmoil, educational crisis, political stagnation, and infrastructural deterioration. The governing institutions that have failed year after year to address such problems show no signs of improvement under the military-backed government.

To throw salt on sore wounds, a nation which rejected authoritarianism en masse is getting ready to elect a general from the antechambers of the elite military-intelligence establishment that capitalized on authoritarian rule for the entirety of Egypt's existence as a modern state.

Revolution Hijacked… Twice

Those most poised to seek power after the start of the revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood — whose  economic policies favored its wealthy top ranks, among whom are several prominent millionaire  — sought to gain the economic privilege of their Mubarak-era predecessors and monopolize political power.

The group’s brazen Islamist platform, designed to attract both conservative and poorer segments of society, swept up huge numbers into its . The Muslim Brotherhood provided the financial backing for long-standing Islamic charities that established key services and social safety nets for poorer segments of Egyptian society.

They also funded an electoral mobilization strategy in 2012 strongly encouraged by food staple .

The Brothers’ mantra of an "Islamic state" alongside irresponsible, inflammatory  by top Brotherhood officials at massive rallies across the country scared much of Egypt’s moderate middle-class and secular-leaning aristocrats.

The allure of Egypt’s Islamist tide emboldened retrograde Islamist factions like Salafists and jihadists, creating the perception of a hyper "Islamic" climate. While such attacks were likely not coordinated by the Muslim Brotherhood, multiple instances of such factions resorting to violence against Coptic Christians and the Shi'ite Muslim minority groups further polarized Egyptian society and increased anti-Brotherhood dissent.

Despite the strength of their political movement, the Muslim Brotherhood failed to promote the core Islamic values of justice, knowledge, hard work, and love that Egypt desperately needs. Instead, the "religious" climate, and the vast divisions it sewed into Egyptian society, pushed many moderate Muslims further away from core religious creed.

Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood cast grassroots revolutionaries, liberals, and union workers aside and hijacked the revolution that they started. The Brothers utilized their political machine to defeat the liberal revolutionary current, still in its organizational infancy, in the first election rounds of the post-Mubarak era.

The Brotherhood proceeded to lay the foundations of a post-revolutionary Egypt without the original revolutionaries, while they alienated liberals from the 2012 constitution-drafting process.

Morsi’s year as president was marked by the undemocratic mode of governance of its authoritarian predecessors. First, his government  with the old state establishment to solidify their mutual power hold, offering them broad concessions in the first constitutional drafting process that retained their power and privilege.

Then the Brothers began ,  and  its members, and . They  the revolutionary fronts that could have worked with them to address Egypt’s social needs, and  from a policy development dialogue.

Such exclusionary policies and lack of progressive or reformist initiatives lost them public support early on in Morsi’s administration. This culminated in the Brotherhood’s demonization by local media and wide-rejection by the masses after the revolution’s second uprising, organized by the grassroots Tamarrod campaign which called for Morsi’s ouster and early elections on June 30, 2013.

With the old state’s most formidable and well-organized political opponents cast away, the road was paved for it to fully reclaim its power and groom Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the "hero" of the July 3 military coup that officially ousted Morsi, for president.

"The Empire Strikes Back"

Now, the military-backed establishment (which, once Sisi is elected, will merely replace a uniform with a suit) continues to suppress the essential  and  that martyrs of the revolution died for.

Revolutionary street art and slogans have been washed out of public spaces in favor of giant posters of Sisi. The police unabashedly abused campaign freedoms in the first round of elections following the June 30 uprising,  against the establishment-backed constitution.

Meanwhile, a massive state-advocated and   to win the support of an exhausted and vastly undereducated mass public takes hold of the Egyptian mind, with disconcerting success.

Aside from banning the Muslim Brotherhood as a "terrorist organization" and  or  of its members, the military-backed government’s  include the , , , , and .

Old state proponents in the media  the youth movements and activists at the core of the January 25 Revolution. They stir elaborate  to distract the people from Egypt’s real enemy, the  by the long-standing establishment and its inability to address the needs of the Egyptian people.

Such suppression of dissent is a waste of government resources and energy when so many of the country’s central challenges remain unaddressed.

With "security and stability" — a Mubarak-era mantra — as justification, pre-revolutionary authoritarian habits continue with a reinvigorated fervor. Clearly, Egypt is undergoing a  led by those institutions and factions who had the most to lose from the broad government reform, transparency, and accountability called for by the uprising in 2011.

While the mass media and wider public is preoccupied with an alleged "war against terrorism" — used by the government to justify the crackdown — government entities profit from billions of dollars of Gulf aid money spent on , which are contracted out to companies  by military and Mubarakite economic elites (the same ones the people rose up against in the first uprising).

Egypt also faces the threat of an insurgency, especially in the Sinai, as the military’s crackdown against Islamists has seemingly strengthened the resolve of insurgents.

Its closure of tunnels to the Gaza Strip has cut a vital economic lifeline for both Palestinians and Sinai Bedouin communities. This increases discontent with the military government that has long oppressed and neglected communities in the Sinai.

The military fights fire with fire, instead of addressing the structural roots of discontent — lack of infrastructural development and economic opportunity in the Sinai that edge many residents to turn to smuggling in the first place.

Thus, while millions are spent repaving already drivable roads and repainting sidewalks and as billions are used to  from Russia, slums, villages and schools are seemingly forgotten. The popular plight of the people remains unaddressed.

Instead, the establishment’s  agenda seeks to perpetuate an economic status quo that sustains the wealth and prestige of the nation’s top cadre.

Constitution of the Old Guard

Egypt’s institutions of power are further emboldened by the new constitution, which was overwhelmingly approved by the masses. Many voted under the pretext that a vote for the constitution was a vote for Egypt, Sisi and stability, whereas a vote against it favored the "terrorists."

The constitution passed following a massive  "Yes" campaign spearheaded by Tarek Nouri, the head of Mubarak’s last presidential run. Those who campaigned against the constitution were rounded up and .

The failed system that sparked the revolution lives on, embedded in a constitution that perpetuates the economic interests of those in government without provisions to keep them accountable to the Egyptian people.

The passing of the constitution means the military’s autonomy is further enshrined, while maintaining broad jurisdiction to try civilians in military courts. As the law stands, the military is  laws or any electable mechanism of check or balance. Its economic empire lacks any semblance of oversight.

Constitutional provisions strengthen the police and intelligence services that, for years, have done the establishment’s dirty work and sustained the corrupt status quo.

The constitution’s maintenance of autonomy for the state’s numerous fiefdoms, or , dims the prospects of good governance.

These fiefdoms "[establish] their own economic interests… in partnership with private sector actors. They will fight to preserve and possibly expand these interests. As a result, all possible checks on the taifas state, including free media, the transparent flow of information, independent auditing, assertive labor unions, strikes, and demonstrations, will be restricted,” according to , a resident scholar for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Such a system, an echo of Egypt’s past, increases the likelihood for institutional infighting and competition rather than coordinated progressive action.

As Nathan Brown, a resident fellow and Egypt law expert, recently : "Egypt has replaced a single dictator with a slew of dictatorial institutions." These institutions lack the key mechanisms of civilian oversight — a staple of democracy that prevents corruption while ensuring that popular will is adhered to.

Hope Never Dies

Little indicates that the military’s shepherding of the current "democracy" will bring about change for the better. They will continue to govern to favor those who have been at society’s helm for generations. Deep state corporate interests make it unlikely for Field Marshall Sisi to adopt a Nasser-esque populist or socialist agenda for the nation.

Egypt’s main hindrance is its lack of a strong, organized, and progressive alternative to the military. The revolution itself lacks a shepherding ideology or solid vision that channels efforts of progress-minded Egyptians with concrete, achievable aims.

Civil society groups have yet to coalesce into an effective network for popular advocacy and coordinated mass action. Luckily, the only way from here is up.

Sisi’s likely presidency — with the same institutional flaws that have failed the country year after year — is already set up to fail. This means revolutionaries, progressives, democracy advocates, and youth movements have another shot at planning a vision for Egypt’s future and organizing a grassroots base that can win both the confidence and votes of the people come the next election cycle.

Plans to rekindle the participatory spirit of January 25 and channel its momentum to massive volunteer efforts that make impacts on the lives of struggling Egyptians could be a start.

If one thing is for sure, so long as Egypt’s young generation has not lost hope, prospects to revive the revolution and achieve its aims will remain.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Over one year ago, Casper Wuite and I became published authors when our book, , was released. An incredible feat for the two of us aside, the revolts that swept the Middle East and North Africa from December 17, 2010, have certainly been the most seismic event of the 21st century so far. Indeed, as we mentioned in the book, the impact of the revolts will continue to be felt for decades.

A Primer

Looking at the uprisings from the other side of the tunnel as 2014 is in full swing, one can see results that have failed to meet the initial optimism that activists and analysts both rightfully envisioned.

Tunisia continues to see political uncertainty with  set to become the new caretaker prime minister. His task will be to form an interim government that will satisfy all parties — a formidable challenge for a country that not too long ago was dubbed the model for Arab nations coming off a political transition.

The National Constituent Assembly in Tunisia has struggled to agree upon a comprehensive draft constitution that is accepted by all actors, while terrorist attacks — once unthinkable in the tiny Maghreb nation — and  have been a reoccurring nightmare. Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Uprisings, is in a state of flux. Beyond civil unrest in  in December 2013, lawmakers have  as the assembly struggles to agree upon a constitution that is deemed satisfactory by Islamist and secular parties.   

In Egypt, the so-called "deep state" has made a comeback as the military is back on the scene after a coup d'état against an Islamist president who forcefully imposed his — and his party's — controversial and authoritarian policies upon resilient Egyptians. Egypt's military rulers, under the face of interim President Adly Mansour, have brought back much-hated and oppressive laws, including a controversial curbing of protests as well as a recent state of emergency. Aside from the mass arrests of Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters that have been criticized by , youth activists of the 2011 uprising were recently handed  — the imprisoned blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah was one of them.

The spirit of Tahrir Square, which donned the colors of the Egyptian flag and brought down a long-standing military dictator in Hosni Mubarak, has indeed faded into the abyss. Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were certainly not the right leaders for Egypt as they upheld their own dictatorial and inexperienced policies at the expense of everyday Egyptians.

However, neither is the repressive military under General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi — the same military that countless Egyptians stood against on many occasions one year prior. If Tunisia is in a state of flux, Egypt's so-called "revolution" has taken more than two steps back. Should Sisi run for office — as  — all eyes would turn towards revolutionary groups to see if they would accept such an outcome, even if it comes via the ballot box.  

Meanwhile, Libya's government has failed to enforce a solid security strategy, while arms trade and proliferation are a significant concern for Mediterranean countries and sub-Saharan Africa. The vast majority of militias that were involved in the civil war did not disarm and have since sought to challenge the state's security forces. Weapons from Libya have even made their way to West Africa and the Levant. In fact, these same militias managed to destabilize neighboring Mali and drag the country down into its own conflict. Alarmingly, Tripoli's inadequate security policy meant that the country's prime minister, Ali Zeidan, was recently  by extremists.

Tribal militias had even managed to block 80% of Libya's oil exports for months on end, while the country's daily output plummeted severely throughout 2013.

The demise of Libya's security situation has a number of implications not only for the wider region, but also for everyday Libyans as threats of a second civil war are not farfetched.

If the Libyan government fails to curb armed militias — of nearly a few thousand — and secure the abundance of weapons throughout the country, Libya will not progress economically. Libya is in dire need of investment and infrastructure as the country needs to be rebuilt. It is quite clear that foreign companies will think twice about investing in a nation that is severely unstable. The outcome will be a likely increase in unemployment and, as a result, the Libyan people will grow more and more restive. For southern Europe, this will mean an increase in migrants sailing across the Mediterranean.   

Yemen's transition in a post-Saleh era is still marred by corruption, violence and drones. President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi — who was elected in a farcical one-horse race in February 2012 after a GCC-led transition agreement that forced Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down — is overt regarding US drone strikes in Yemen. In fact, when visiting Washington, D.C. in September 2012, Hadi praised and all but welcomed the attacks by stating: "."

Aside from the moral implications of US drone warfare, Yemen's security situation is clearly of core concern to regional states as well as the international community. Any rise in terrorism-related activity in Yemen has the potential to impact upon Western interests in the Gulf but also abroad, as  in 2009 showed. However, a "zero margin of error" is definitely a false assertion by President Hadi when a  can be mistakenly hit by a drone strike. Hadi is simply a new face for an old, corrupted regime.

Bahrain's al-Khalifa family continues to rule with its oppressive hand. The Gulf kingdom's Shi'a majority has a right to stand up against the state when it fails to cater for all its citizens. Indeed, Manama's human rights record is nothing short of atrocious.

With arbitrary arrest and military-style trials of civilians, Bahrain has managed to present its political unrest as a sectarian issue with Iran at the forefront. While Iran does hold its own agenda over the nation's unrest, a sectarian-led explanation for Bahrain's uprising is far from the truth.

The majority Shi'a population are wrongfully discriminated against and treated as third-class citizens. With all moral issues of human rights abuse aside, Bahrain should empower its Shi'a populace to reduce the much-warranted grievances against the Khalifa family. A united population is imperative for economic growth and social cohesion.  

As civil war in the Levant approaches its third anniversary, it is Syria which is perhaps the most heartbreaking story of what Marc Lynch had dubbed the "" — a term which he himself admitted was not an accurate assessment of the region's uprisings. As battles rage on between forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and armed opposition fighters — consisting of Syrians and non-Syrians, including Islamists, Salafists and the drowned-out voices of secularists — it is the innocent bystanders of the war who have to bear the brunt of both sides' brutality, unending violence, and unyielding stance.

While NATO hit the trigger alarmingly fast in Libya without giving diplomacy a thorough try, the international community has failed to diplomatically bring about peace in Syria. As hopes of a ceasefire in the upcoming Geneva conference fade, the civil war sees no end in sight as innocent men, women and children watch their lives being torn apart on a daily basis.

The Fruits of the "Spring"

Indeed, Syria is the tragedy story of the so-called "Arab Spring," with  having been killed by Assad loyalists and armed opposition fighters. However, while the third anniversary of Mohammed Bouazizi's self-immolation has passed, it is worthwhile to assess the Arab Uprisings in a "then" and "now" fashion.

As each nation's uprising or political unrest differed in terms of its specific causes and outcomes, it is imperative to look upon the countries on an individual basis and evaluate how they have progressed from 2010/11 until now, while also providing suggestions for each nation on a social, political and economic basis.

What will follow as 2014 surges forward is a series of articles which tackle exactly that — on Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, as well as Morocco, Algeria and Jordan. Such a comprehensive analysis of these nations is necessary as the fruits of the "Spring" have not been met — at least not yet.     

*[This article was produced in partnership with the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In January, al-Nour Party elected a new head, Younis Makhyoun. Tensions between al-Nour and the Brotherhood broke to the surface when Khaled Alam Eddin, a senior al-Nour member who had been chosen by Mohammed Morsi as an advisor,����and making consensus-based governance impossible.

He also admitted meeting with the recently formed National Salvation Front (NSF), an alliance of mostly secular, anti-Morsi parties. On January 30, al-Nour and the NSF����for moving forward to extricate Egypt from the political impasse that had formed between Morsi and his opponents. From that point on, al-Nour openly refused to participate in protests organized by Islamists to show public support for Morsi. In mid-February, President Morsi dismissed Alam Eddin with accusations of improper conduct.

In the media frenzy that followed, the al-Nour Party and the Muslim Brotherhood traded barbs that culminated����that he would soon publish a report documenting the Brotherhood’s plans to “Ikhwanize” the state. The al-Nour Party joined the chorus of opposition accusing Morsi of incompetence, being deaf to the people’s concerns and attempting to force the Brotherhood into all levels of government.

As the situation approached its finale, on June 9, Nader Bakkar announced that al-Nour would not participate in pro-Morsi rallies on June 30. (But to be fair, the maverick Salafi, Hazem Abu Ismail, a popular supporter of Morsi, also refused to participate. Both he and al-Nour cited the danger in two big bodies of supporters meeting in the streets.)

Supporting the Coup

But al-Nour ended up doing much more that merely refusing to stand with the Brotherhood. When Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took to the air to announce the military’s overthrow of President Morsi, al-Nour’s leader, Younis Makhyoun, was seated prominently next to him along with other coup supporters. While Abdel Ghaffour and other many other ��(not associated with the Salafi Call) frequented the rostrum at the Raba’a sit-in, the al-Nour leadership����any of its rank and file members who participated.

, Makhyoun and Bakkar continued to lambaste the Brotherhood for its failings. Bakkar even����as the al-Nour Party’s spokesman after he – counter to his party’s line – praised the peaceful nature of the sit-ins. When the military assaulted protesters to break up the sit-ins, the line between the Salafi Call/al-Nour and the rest of Egypt’s Salafis (and Islamists more broadly) became clear.

Some independent Salafi preachers like Mohammad Abd al-Maqsud took to the internet and launched ��for shedding civilian blood. Others chose to go silent in the face of the intense violence. These included the famous Salafi preacher Muhammad Hassan from the Ansar al-Sunna organization, who had earlier��.

The al-Nour Party, however, reaffirmed its support of Sisi and the army. Bakkar has continued����and has stated several times that al-Nour has��. On August 16, as the worst of the crackdown was playing out, al-Nour and the Salafi Call issued a joint declaration��. The party has expressed only the����for the killing of civilians.

How was it that the al-Nour Party, so long a specter of some conservative Islamist take over, has actively supporting the Sisi regime despite its slaughter of fellow pious Muslims? This cannot be explained merely by pointing to al-Nour’s troubled relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The army’s massacre of civilians has earned broad condemnation from across the political spectrum, including from Brotherhood opponents. Wouldn’t a party of pious Muslims, faced with the killing of unarmed Muslim men and veiled Muslim women, abandon the Sisi government faster than, say, Mohammad el-Baradei or other disenchanted liberals?

Saudi Influence or Securing Limited Objectives?

There are two theories to explain this. For the conspiracy minded, there is the theory that the al-Nour Party was conceived, funded and directed by Saudi intelligence services. The deal: the military cum ancien regime would run the country, the Salafis would run the mosques, preaching an apolitical, Saudi-friendly message.

Hence, al-Nour’s ungainly leap on the anti-Brotherhood bandwagon in early 2013, its embrace of the NSF, and its wholehearted support of the Sisi government. Hence, its bizarre obsession with anti-Shiite vitriol that exceeded mere theological polemics (standard for Salafis) and flooded madly into the political realm.

In April, after Egypt and Iran agreed on an innocuous tourism exchange, a small delegation came from Tehran. Al-Nour reacted as if Shiite legions were breaching the Suez Canal.����in Cairo and, on May 13,��al-Nour MPs in the toothless Majlis al-Shura declared that Iranian tourism was����– all in a country with an insignificant Shiite population. Hence, the party’s loyal embrace of the Sisi regime despite its jailing of thousands of Muslims, closure of Salafi satellite channels and, most glaringly, the secularization of the constitution.

The most plausible element of this theory is that al-Nour/Salafi Call has so steadfastly supported the Sisi regime in the hopes of increasing its share on Egypt’s mosque and Islamic educational scene. But this is unconvincing both in theory and in fact.

First, other Salafi organizations, including the Ansar al-Sunna and influential Salafi preachers like Muhammad Hassan and Abu Ishaq al-Huwayni, have avoided the regime’s wrath by eschewing politics. They seem more likely to attract Salafi followers than a party/religious organization that has actively supported a regime which has gunned down and imprisoned so many like-minded Muslims.

Second, under the Sisi regime, the Egyptian government has stepped up its efforts to centralize mosque preaching and Friday prayer sermons under the leadership of the pro-Sisi, vehemently anti-Salafi Shaykh of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayyeb. The “,” being instituted by this initiative, is far from welcoming to the Salafi brand.

The second theory is the al-Nour Party leadership believed that by supporting the coup, it could secure the relatively limited objectives it had been founded to pursue: protect Salafis from police brutality and lock Egypt’s legal regime into a shari’a framework.

Unlike many Muslim Brothers, Salafis never bought into democracy as an ideal. At worst, it was prohibited by Islam (haram); at best, it was a useful procedure. Rooted deeply in the political quietism of the classical Sunni Islam of the medieval period, Salafism is much closer to the state-obsequious institution of al-Azhar than to the Western political engagement of the Brotherhood. As one 14th century scholar wrote: “We are with whomever wins.”

This theory would explain why, throughout its months of anti-Brotherhood cheerleading and cooperation with the NSF, al-Nour leaders were nonetheless hounding the then- and current-interior minister, Muhammad Ibrahim,����of detained Salafis as well as liberal protesters. Even on May 11, the����after he refused to let newly bearded policemen return to work.

This would explain why, just a day before Article 219 was dropped from the constitution, Bakkar announced that,��, he was very concerned over the overwhelmingly secular make-up of the drafting committee and of the impending ban on religious parties.

A Naïve Decision

If this is why the al-Nour Party supported Morsi’s deposal, then the party’s decision was catastrophically naïve. This failing probably supports the theory more than it undermines it, since naiveté regarding the nature of military coups has been the order of the day across Egypt’s political spectrum. Al-Nour Party officials, who might bemoan their support for Sisi, can find solace in the company of liberals like el-Baradei.

That the al-Nour Party was providing an Islamist fig leaf for an adulatory, ultra-nationalist and oppressive military regime may have been obvious to Borhami, Makhyoun and others. That Morsi supporters, many of them pious, bearded and veiled, would be crushed beneath its boot may also have been clear. This is what happens, a good Salafi might note, when one chants the very Western slogan of democratic legitimacy (���󲹰�‘i��ⲹ) instead of following the classical shari’a duty of obedience to the ruler.

But the al-Nour leadership should have known that their precious amendments to Egypt’s legal identity, those few words that could make it a legitimate Islamic state in their eyes, were doomed the moment the army warned it might intervene. Even the first representative that al-Nour managed to wedge into the drafting committee, Bassem al-Zarka,����just a few days after the committee began its work – for “health reasons,” insisted Makhyoun.

Perhaps the al-Nour leadership knew they were being used in a process that would very quickly lead to the party’s own dissolution. This might not be too high a cost in the estimation of Borhami, Bakkar and their comrades. The party and the foray into politics had always been an experiment, dispensable and detachable from the Salafi Call’s real mission.

The question is, having supported a government that has left thousands of bearded men and veiled women, young and old, dead, disappeared and detained, and with all the emotionally maimed families they leave behind, how many Muslims in Egypt will now consider heeding the Salafi Call?

*[This article was originally published by .]

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When Mohamed Salmawi, the spokesman for the committee appointed to draft Egypt’s post-coup constitution, appeared before the press on October 29, the��. There would be no place for Article 219 in the new constitution, and there would be no further discussion.

The announcement followed two months of anxious efforts by the Salafi al-Nour Party to secure the Islamic language introduced in the now-voided 2012 constitution. This has been quite the battle given their single-member representation of the tiny two-person Islamist contingent on the 50-person committee.

In late August, the al-Nour Party’s head, Younis Makhyoun, had proposed the party’s vision for Egypt’s road forward: an end to the violence and instability in the streets, and an inclusive political process led by the military and guided in religious matters by al-Azhar. His worries: a return to the police state of Hosni Mubarak and the removal of Islamic elements approved in the 2012 constitution.

Shari’a and the Egyptian Constitution

As it became clear to al-Nour in mid-October that the drafting committee, which interim President Adly Mansour appointed, was writing a new document nearly free of Islamic references, the party��. Article 219 could be excised, provided that the word “principles” was removed from the less controversial Article 2, which seemed to have survived and states that the “principles of the Islamic shari’a are the chief source of legislation” in Egypt. But their efforts were to no avail.

Article 219 had been the al-Nour Party’s great prize. For them, it added substance and heft to what they considered the flaccid phrasing of Article 2. The “principles of the shari’a” could be as bland and non-committal as “justice” and “the protection of life, dignity and property.” It was not specific enough to ensure Egypt’s commitment to Islam and the shari’a.

Shaykh Yasir Borhami, the chief ideologue behind the al-Nour Party, had penned lengthy diatribes against the liberal and permissive manner in which Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court had interpreted Article 2. It understood the article as prohibiting any new laws that contradicted “the principles of the shari’a,” which the court understood as the minimal, core rulings of Islamic law.

To the horror of conservative Muslim scholars like Borhami, this had allowed the court��, since wearing it was not actually a requirement across the Sunni schools of law. In the opinion of al-Nour Party, Article 219 rectified this problem. It specified that the principles of the shari’a consisted of “its main categories of evidence, jurisprudential and substantive law principles, and its recognized sources according to Sunni Islam.”

Among Salafis, Article 219 became the rallying point for a post-Mubarak affirmation of Egypt’s Islamic identity. Perhaps as a reaction to this celebration, it also became the bête noire of the Salafis’ secular and ancien regime foes, who viewed it as a harbinger of an impending descent into Islamism.

Loading 219 with such significance is ironic, since the article’s wording is as malleable in Arabic as it is in English, and it adds little of substance to Article 2. I have never heard a passable explanation for how Article 219 would have reined in a liberal interpretation of Article 2. Rulings like the constitutional court’s approval of the face veil ban would be just as possible with 219’s verbose posturing as it had been without it. In one sense, however, Article 219 was of particular significance to Salafis. They����the fact that it specified, for the first time, that the understanding of the shari’a in Egypt would be a Sunni one. This was no more than a symbolic affirmation, however, since Shi’i law has played a marginal role in legislation in Egypt, and the country has a miniscule Shi’i population.

Salafi Call and the al-Nour Party in the Post-Mubarak Era

It has been a short and predictable trip for the al-Nour Party. Founded in the immediate wake of Mubarak’s fall in February 2011 by leading members of the Salafi Call (al-Da‘wa al-Salafiyya), the Alexandria-based Salafi organization, the party had three main aims: to ensure that post-Mubarak Egypt would not be a place where bearded men are arrested and tortured; improve the county’s deplorable standard of living; and make the Egyptian government Islamically legitimate. This last objective was particularly important. Well before the 2011 revolution, Shaykh Borhami, the Salafi Call’s most charismatic scholar, had written that Egypt’s government was not “Islamically legitimate.”

On this point the Salafi Call differed with most of the other Salafi organizations in Egypt. Although they all forbade any rebellion against a Muslim ruler, the Salafi Call stood out in that it��.��Salafi Call leaders cited the well-known shari’a law principle that a ruler who fails to establish shari’a law is not Muslim. As such, his rule is illegitimate for his Muslim subjects. Article 2, which had been introduced by late President Anwar al-Sadat in the hopes of shoring up his Islamic legitimacy, offered a ray of hope, but it applied only to new laws.

If rebellion against Mubarak’s government had been Islamically permissible according to the Salafi Call, the organization never considered it a good idea.��Calculating no chance of success in a confrontation with the state, the Salafi Call laid low and focused on teaching its followers. With Mubarak’s fall, however, the political square had been opened, and the Salafi Call leaders saw an opportunity to achieve real change.

The al-Nour Party was consciously designed by its main architect within the Salafi Call, Emad Abdel Ghaffour, to be administratively separate from the Call’s religious organization, which was to continue its religious activities apart from politics under the guidance of Borhami and other senior clerics. If the revolution went south or politics proved too polluting, the al-Nour Party could fold, and the Salafi Call could continue on as a religious organization with little impact. Alas, reality proved different.

Al-Nour’s early days were halcyon. In the country’s first free parliamentary elections in decades, al-Nour won 21% of the seats in the lower house and proved even more successful in the upper house elections. On the basis of impressions gleaned from Egyptians who voted for al-Nour, the party’s support came from its Salafi constituency and more conservative Muslim voters who saw the party as a fresh alternative to the checkered Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Nour suddenly seemed to be the new kingmaker in Egyptian politics.

Matters deteriorated, however. In September 2012, disputes between Abdel Ghaffour, the party’s chairman, and members of its leadership committee��. Nader Bakkar, the party’ spokesman and one of its more telegenic personalities, explained that, since Abdel Ghaffour had been appointed as a close advisor to President Mohammed Morsi, he could no longer serve as al-Nour’s head as well. Behind the scenes, the real rub was the personality clash between Abdel Ghaffour and Borhami.

Shaykh Borhami had evidently not observed the division of labor between politics and religion, providing political direction to Bakkar and others.��To make matters worse, Abdel Ghaffour’s approach to politics differed from that of Borhami and company. The shaykh was cautious and did not want al-Nour to commit itself too much to the initiatives of the Morsi government. Abdel Ghaffour believed this was the time for Islamists to leap fully into the political arena.

Relations with the Muslim Brotherhood

There was still more rancor. The leadership of the Salafi Call and the senior leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood had come out of the same Islamic student activist groups of 1970s. They knew each other well but had taken divergent paths, with Borhami and others choosing the path of Salafi religious scholarship and the political orbit of Saudi Arabia over Muslim Brotherhood activism in Egypt. There was no love lost between the groups now. Soon Abdel Ghaffour was ousted from al-Nour Party, and along with a hundred defectors from Nour, he went on to form the����in December 2012.

Despite their prickly relations, the al-Nour Party and the Brotherhood could work together on common causes. Al-Nour and popular Salafi Call preachers campaigned vigorously for Morsi in the run-off with the ancien regime stalwart Ahmad Shafiq. The two groups also worked together to draft the 2012 constitution and mobilize voters for its ratification by popular referendum, though the Salafis had irked the mainstream core of the Brotherhood with its insistence on Article 219 and its (failed) efforts to change “principles of the shari’a” to “the rulings of the shari’a” in Article 2.

In November and December 2012, however, relations worsened. Morsi’s constitutional decree, declaring himself immune from Egypt’s Mubarak-era judiciary, provided the president’s diverse but broad opposition with a golden opportunity. He was acting like the power-hungry Islamist they had always feared, and now even the most flagrant Mubarak-era folks could don the mantle of the revolution by calling for his departure.

*[Click to read the final part. This article was originally published by .]

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On October 6, Egypt  the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War with Israel — known to Egyptians as the October War — with an unprecedented level of popular emotional engagement and important political statements. The historical event became a vehicle for reflections upon the current conflicts in the Egyptian street and the ruthless reshaping process of the first post-Arab Spring country.

During Hosni Mubarak's rule, people used to watch the anniversary performances on TV with live broadcast from the Nasr City conference center. This time, it was instead held in one of the largest open-air stadiums in Cairo, with a painstakingly choreographed show delivering domestic and international messages which deserve a closer look.

The on-stage hosts were a Coptic and a Muslim actor, narrating the scene of the meeting between military officials shortly before October 6, 1973, the date seen as the start of the war. They clearly emphasized the Christian name of General Baki Zaki Youssef, who came up with the idea to destroy the Israeli Bar Lev Line defenses. 

A few minutes later, the whole pyramid background of the stage reflected an icon of Mary and baby Jesus, while a chorus chanting "Kyrie eleison" was followed by a supplication made up of the Lord's Prayer and some Muslim words. On the other side, a camera was fixed on General Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi who was surrounded by the son of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the wife of Anwar al-Sadat and several Arab leaders. Finally, top Egyptian and Arabian Gulf singers performed with allusions and gestures exhorting el-Sisi to "accomplish the journey" he began.

El-Sisi: Egypt’s Savior?

This scene focused on el-Sisi being portrayed as Egypt's savior. The legacy of the October War, which restored the dignity and reputation of Egypt's armed forces, was employed to support el-Sisi by knitting a narrative of Egyptian military history into the show. The theme was Egypt being unified against "evil intruders" throughout history, starting from the Hyksos (circa 1800 BC) to the Tatars, Israel (1967-73), and finally "the bats of darkness" – an allusion to Islamists – with the image of el-Sisi appearing on the massive pyramid in the background of the stage.

Surrounded by the heirs of Nasser and Sadat, in his , General el-Sisi recapitulated every icon of historical leaders idolized by Egyptians. Signaling his victory over the Islamists, el-Sisi addressed Egyptians with tender language, borrowing the calm style of Nasser and the powerful implicit, yet very recognizable, gestures of Sadat.

His message to the international community was that "the Armed Forces of Egypt are unbreakable just like the pyramids." Addressing Arab countries, he said: "The Egyptian army is the army of the Arab world… Egypt does not forget her sister countries which stood with us, as well as the countries that stood against us" — in a clear message to Qatar, which was and remains a strong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The symbolism in this euphoric scene is unmistakable. First, the whole scene delivered a message that Egypt is not only unified, but specifically unified around its armed forces. Second, Copts — who largely suffered at the hands of Islamists, who destroyed nearly  and properties as well as  a number of Christians — will no longer be marginalized, as the issue of sectarianism is at the heart of the government's priorities. Third, and most importantly, a new status quo has been set up in Egypt.

This status quo represents an unprecedented level of reconciliation between Egyptians and their government. Whereas some observers characterize Egypt as highly polarized at the moment, polarization presumes there are two strong counterparts (Army and Islamists). This was the situation before Mohammed Morsi's presidency. In the current situation, however, the street is almost in a state of consensus over the figure of el-Sisi and hatred towards the Muslim Brotherhood — namely after Morsi’s failure and the terrorist attacks that followed his ouster.

The seal of this unity is not a satisfaction based on a good governmental performance, but rather a stronger one; a nationalistic cult consumed in, and guaranteed by, the figure of el-Sisi whose image can be found in almost every street in Egypt.

The recapitulation of Egyptian history by el-Sisi was aimed at accommodating to a nostalgic feeling spread amongst the frustrated public, who no longer believes in the Arab Spring which brought the Muslim Brotherhood into power. The restoration of Egypt’s post-1952 legacy of Egyptian nationalism was a reversal process subverting "the bats of darkness," over whom el-Sisi enjoyed a victory on June 30 — the start of mass protests against Morsi.

The main agenda of Morsi's government and the different political factions involved in the political scene was to build "the second republic" which was prepared for since January 25, 2011, and launched amid Morsi's persistent criticism of all Egyptian presidents since the "first republic (1952-2011). In the  of the October War, Morsi gave a different presentation in which he excluded Sadat's wife and instead seated , who was involved in the plot of Sadat's assassination, beside him.

Morsi's final speech explained how he inherited a suffering country from the first republic, one in which Nasser turned the state’s welfare into debt and how since then crises accumulated. Supported by the existence of an ideological gap in the post-January 25 era left by leftists and Islamists who both endeavored to deconstruct the legacy of the first republic, Morsi seized the opportunity and paved the way for a new set of religious principles coined by constitutional articles. An example of this was the inclusion of Article 219 that defined "the principles of Islamic Shari'a" of the second article – which determined Islam as the religion of the state – according to the Salafist view of legislation.

This came amid the endless speeches by the  about restoring the dream of the Caliphate, which was ended by the 1952 Revolution when King Farouk — who had plans to revive the Caliphate — was forced to abdicate by the Free Officers Movement. Leftists, including the novelist Alaa al-Aswani, the famous satirist Bassem Youssef and January 25 youth figures, did not call for the ouster of Morsi but were in favor of him to continue his four-year term, despite their criticism of his administrative failure.

The so-called "silent majority," which showed its powerful momentum in reaching nearly 50 percent of votes for the ex-army figure Ahmed Shafiq in the 2012 presidential election, realized the new character of the growing second republic with its increasingly Islamist outlook — one that stood in stark contrast to Egypt's post-1952 ideological and religious legacy.

The need for the restoration of what was seen by many as the country’s genuine identity, boosted by the unpleasant harvest of the Arab Spring, became the main power behind the largest demonstrations in the history of Egypt. These events marked the end of the second republic at the hands of el-Sisi; a man whose shoulders bear the legacy of the first republic, with its greatest achievements such as October War and its most bitter lessons.

The Borderline Between the Two Republics

This year’s celebrations of the October War implied an ideological borderline dividing the second and first republics. Whereas the second republic did not only consist of Islamists but also those who were not necessarily against a religiously oriented system of government and thus tolerated this strong Islamist presence, the first republic formed the bedrock of identity for generations of Egyptians.

Despite the fact that Mohammed el-Baradei and others appealed to the armed forces to oust Morsi eventually, they remained within the borders of the second republic of January 25 — a key reason of why they are publicly rejected today.

 and  differing opinions could be seen in their interviews given to the Washington Post at the same time.

El-Baradei explained the problem of Morsi's regime in terms of administrative failure that dragged Egypt to a dreadful economic situation. At the same time, el-Sisi, who wrote an essay arguing against fundamentalist ideologies during his studies in the US, explained that the basis of his decisions was ideological. According to him, the Muslim Brotherhood's ultimate affiliation is to a Caliphate, with Egypt as a nation state being less of a priority — something which is unacceptable to el-Sisi.

This simply explains how the new status quo in Egypt is not entirely new but is ultimately different in its core, as it is not a reaction to failed governance but instead to the very principles of the January 25 uprisings, which welcomed the Muslim Brotherhood and entrusted them with the construction of the second republic. This is precisely what lies behind the symbolism of the October War celebrations.

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An Egyptian delegation heading to Moscow just after the United States cut $300 million out of its aid package to Cairo to punish the July 3 military coup,  for a new superpower patron.

In the 1960s at the height of the Cold War, the old Soviet Union had a favored position in the Arab world. The Arab nationalist Egypt of Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser tilted heavily toward Moscow after 1956, and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev made a regal state visit to Cairo in 1964. Algeria and Syria tilted to the Soviet Union, and in 1967 South Yemen became the region’s only Communist state. Iraq gradually also came to tilt toward Moscow at times.

US strategic analysts were deeply worried about the whole region becoming a Communist stronghold and a Russian sphere of influence. The Suez Canal and the region’s gas and oil were seen as key global assets. The US coordinated with Saudi Arabia and other conservative Muslim and/or monarchical forces to push the region to the Right, in which it ultimately succeeded. The high point of that effort was the joint Reagan-Saudi jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan of the 1980s, which produced al-Qaeda as blowback.

In the 1970s, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat abandoned the Soviets in favor of the US, a major coup for Washington policy, resulting in massive US aid for Egypt since 1979, in part to nail down the resulting peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

Russia is no longer a progressive force, and if anything, now resembles some Middle Eastern regimes. Its economy is dependent on gas and oil, and it has a semi-authoritarian government backed by billionaire oligarchs, in which the religious irredentism of the Eastern Orthodox Church is invoked for the purposes of a wounded nationalism. At the same time, religious extremism and separatism, as with the movements in Chechnya and Daghestan, were brutally crushed.

Thus, if Gen. al-Sisi saw Vladimir Putin as a kindred soul, it would come as no surprise.

Egypt just collected $4 billion each from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates for crushing the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Gulf monarchies see as a revolutionary and republican force rather than as a conservative one loyal to the royal status quo.

But as patrons, the Gulf monarchies are distinctly unsatisfactory, and indeed, they are seeking an Egyptian security umbrella against the Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic of Iran, both viewed as anti-monarchical and populist.

A Real Pivot Towards Russia?

The Egyptian feint toward Moscow, however, is probably a form of flirting, aimed at making Washington jealous rather than a serious reorientation.

The USG Open Source Center translated canny remarks of Russian journalist Mariya Yefimova on the issue at Kommersant: “Egypt Looks for US Aid in Russia. Playing on Russian Federation-US Contradictions” for October 24.

She notes the Egyptian aim of “raising bilateral relations to a new level.” She adds: “And in mid-November, according to Kommersant’s information, a meeting of the heads of the two countries’ foreign and defense ministries in the '2+2' format is due to be held in Egypt for the first time.”

She observes that the US aid freeze, coming from a criticism of the summer overthrow of a democratically elected but authoritarian president, deprived Egypt of ten Apache helicopters, four F-16 fighter jets, as well as anti-ship missiles and spare parts for tanks, along with a loss of $250 million in cash assistance.

So the Egyptian military may be looking around for more reliable weapons’ suppliers, she says.

Her Russian sources, however, think that Egypt is mainly trying to arouse Washington’s jealousy. She writes:

"'The Egyptians are hoping that US Congressmen will begin at least to needle Obama for the fact that he is handing the strategically-important Egypt over to Russia,' Yevgeniy Satanovskiy, president of the Middle East Institute, explained to Kommersant. At the same time, in his words, the Egyptians understand perfectly that 'Russia does not have enough money to maintain their country.'"

Satanovskiy also told her: "Moscow has received a chance to use the situation tactically. 'Some arms contracts may be concluded. Moscow can ask for a base in Alexandria in place of the military facility at Tartus in Syria… but it is hardly a question of the establishment of real strategic relations.'"

I would just point out that weapons systems are systems, and you cannot necessarily get Russian jets to talk to American tanks easily, nor can Russia provide Egypt with spare parts for Cairo’s massive arsenal of US military equipment.

As I noted a couple of days ago, Saudi Arabia itself, a firm US client virtually since the 1930s, 

The authoritarian backlash in the Middle East against the political opening and instability produced by the 2011 youth revolutions, appears to have given Putin an opening to reassert Russian influence in the Arab world. Russia and the Ba’ath government of Syria are extremely close. Russia is also friendly to Iran and hence, Iraq.

Egypt’s flirtation with Moscow may just be pique, but it could also signal the glimmers of a more multilateral Middle East, in which Bush-era hopes for complete American dominance are fading fast.

*[This article was originally published by Juan Cole’s .]

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If Egyptians were to believe the current local media mantra, the country should currently be basking in a state of revolutionary afterglow since emerging victoriously from our second uprising in nearly as many years to slay the draconian Muslim Brotherhood (read: Islamo-fascist terrorists). The people’s Egyptian Armed Forces saved the nation from a group that shackled Egypt in its quest to achieve democracy and hijacked the revolution to actuate a plan to restore the Islamic Caliphate.

To undo the damage that Islamists brought upon Egypt, the current transitional government of technocrats is working hand-in-hand with the military to swiftly address the country’s economic woes, revive tourism, and eliminate the security threat posed by terrorists.

But Egypt’s reality today does not shine as bright as the Egyptian-flag-donned “news report” backdrops make it seem. Indeed, the country remains ripe with political and social strife, as governmental reform and genuine social progress take a backseat to nationwide military deployment and emergency law. The emphasis on economic and security policies of the past cloud Egypt’s vision for a better tomorrow.

If the revolution is to live on, Egyptians must continue to question the state’s official narrative and the path it charts for our nation’s future. Pressure for institutional reform has never been more important than at this current juncture; each individual must strive to blaze a trail to social progress at individual and community levels.

Authoritarian Habits Die Hard

Unfortunately, a string of recent government decisions that , , , ,  and , prove that old authoritarian habits die hard with a member of the military cadre at the helm of the country’s decision-making process. The economy remains stagnant as , , and reports of newly-opened factories or farms are rare. Frequent clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and their opponents demonstrate the country’s ongoing volatility.

While the government launched a few initiatives aimed at reviving the economy and restoring security, any sturdy look at these government policies shows that they are merely prima facie measures aimed at appeasing the masses to save face in the short-term, without addressing Egypt’s deeply-rooted structural ills.

The labor force remains highly unskilled and inefficient (146^th globally, according to the recent World Economic Forum’s ), education dwindles near a , pollution is at an all-time high, infrastructure fails to keep up with an ever-growing population, and state bureaucracy remains as inefficient and disorderly as ever.

Unable to redress their grievances productively, much of the population feels undignified and hopeless amidst mounting economic pressure and a lack of future outlook. As the government plays a game of charades with societal progress, economic development, and true reform, real progress towards “bread, freedom, and social justice” remains elusive.

Today’s Government: Charade of Progressivism

If the governments of the past two years were merely a façade of democracy, then the government of today represents a mere charade of progressivism, unless it works to sow the seeds of reform into the state, economy, and public mentality. The government still proves highly exclusionary and favors a particular cadre of elite, corporate, and institutional interests. Its policies to-date have yet to prove effective.

At best, the revolution sought by hundreds of thousands of protesters who rejected an authoritarian status quo in 2011 is back to where it was after Hosni Mubarak’s downfall, when the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) assumed the reigns of power, and still awaits a cultural and intellectual renaissance. Rather than genuine progressivism, Egypt’s anything-goes still prevails in Egyptian culture, and applies to the government and people alike.

The revolution has yet to inspire enough people to alter attitudes on an individual level to serve their families, communities, and economies better. Although political space has opened up compared to the Mubarak years, the nation still lacks a solid vision for reform.

Egyptian optimists say their people and government are learning by experience and that the current administration still has not had enough time to deliver, but if we follow the current transitional roadmap, the fruits of change will ripen soon enough. And if this government does not meet expectations, the next one, which will be democratically elected without any interference from Islamists, will open the door to civic contribution and surely deliver. A revolution steered off course by Islamists is now being corrected. Let us hope this is the case.

To the skeptic and pessimist, however, what Egypt witnessed over the past few months was a full-fledged counter-revolution stirred by deep-state entities — intelligence, military, police, and corporate powers — with strong ties to Mubarak’s old guard. These structures capitalized on Morsi’s failed executive policies and the state of national economic hardship to encourage dissent by the Egyptian populace against the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood’s attempt to monopolize governmental power alongside a self-serving neo-liberal economic agenda threatened the corporate interests embedded in the country since Mubarak’s reign.

The Return of the Old Guard?

Egypt’s military, , owns shares in numerous domestic and international companies operating locally. Thus, its actions in July 2013 align with the interests of a business elite with whom it has had a long and prosperous relationship, as well as with the interests of its post-Morsi Arab sponsors in the Gulf.

Given the announcement of Prime Minister Hazem Beblawi — the neo-liberal stalwart — of a multibillion dollar private-public partnership plan for Egypt’s economy, the billions of dollars offered by Gulf kingdoms are indirect investments into companies that the kingdoms themselves partly-own, alongside the military and affluent, corporate-minded Egyptian elites. At the same time, businessmen and old regime figures such as Ahmad Ezz walk free, and  has been upgraded from a jail cell to a fully decked-out luxury hospital suite.

In either case, General Sisi and the transitional government have their work carved out for them. Departure from old trends, given either narrative, remains unlikely as long as government bureaucracies remain unreformed, civic groups remain uninfluential, and the Egyptian self remains un-empowered.

In the wake of the popular uprising-turned-coup, the current government’s top priority has been . It seeks to address this by implementing a long-resented emergency law, launching a massive domestic “war on terror” that targets the Brotherhood, drafting up a law that requires Interior Ministry approval before protests, and by shutting down roads and public squares whenever they fear imminent demonstrations.

This makes it clear that the current government has no intention of reconciling with Islamists in the near future and chimes in an uncomfortable new era of societal division.

Instead, the government is following in the footsteps of its military-hailing predecessors and is moving toward sustained political suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a general restraint of political space. It indulges in a  against mostly peaceful protesters, reminiscent of the Mubarak-era. This risks radicalizing the fringes and increasing the resolve of militant-breed groups launching anti-government operations, which have already  in the Sinai Peninsula.

Alongside the scores killed in the clearing of the Rabaa and Nahda sit-ins, each military operation against such groups and each death increases the number of “martyrs,” amplifying the Islamist rallying cry against the state. Even if some of these protesters were armed, as the military alleges, the thousands of deaths since the July 3 overthrow demonstrate the state’s willingness to engage in collective punishment rather than holding itself to the standards of due process.

Looking Ahead

The questions Egyptians must ask themselves are: How effective have these blanket security measures been? Do the expected gains outweigh the stripping of our political and civil rights? Does the current outlook reflect the “revolution” we supported when we took to the streets on June 30 to protest the failures of the Morsi administration?

It seems obvious to me that the security measures have thus far failed: just ask the family members of those killed in Sunday’s tragic  outside a church where the victims were celebrating a wedding.

Tanks in crowded city centers and a curfew do not help a society where faith in and respect for the law falters. Mass protests on the streets that we call a revolution do not mean anything if the people do not follow up with intensive and organized pressure on the government to reform and perform.

Egypt must look toward political inclusion and compromise to end its battle with angry “anti-coup” youths. Jailed Muslim Brotherhood leaders must be held accountable for crimes and tried as soon as possible if the state possesses convincing evidence; otherwise they must be released.

The inflamed political tensions that have engulfed the nation, especially after Morsi’s removal on June 30, will not die down until Egyptians across the political spectrum are assured that the government will only apply force legitimately to uphold the principles of justice, rather than to advance or suppress the political aims of any domestic force of interest.

The state must immediately address its justice system to sow the seeds for the respect of its legal institutions — dubbed rational-legal legitimacy by political scholars — in order to ensure that long-term rule of law is respected. State institutions must work to grow the legitimacy of its legal system — both with respect to the professionalism and effectiveness of its police force as well as the efficiency and impartiality of its over-burdened judiciary.

Meanwhile, the real focus for revolutionary youths and progress-minded Egyptians should be to empower themselves and the rest of society in a framework that serves as an outlet for accomplishing ends greater than chanting in the streets and throwing rocks. A democracy not only means that we select our leaders, but it means that onus is on the individual to guide the government and serve as a positive force for his or her community and nation.

Only then can the people truly correct the revolution’s path — when reform at an individual level sparks a high degree of societal organization that can actually shepherd the government with an eye toward a better tomorrow.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The brief history of the Muslim Brotherhood discussed in , gives us some context as we try to understand Egyptians’ feelings as they took to the streets on June 30.

I was in Egypt shortly after these events and went to the rallies that General Sisi called to gather a mandate to “deal with terrorism,” where I interviewed dozens of people over 12 hours.

There has been some dispute over the size of the crowds in support of the uprising against Morsi’s government. I dismiss most of this as unconvincing. This analysis is based on the assumption that Tahrir Square was only filled once, ignoring that people milled in and out throughout the day, and ignores other squares and neighborhoods as well as other parts of Egypt.

Remember, there was no major opposition to Morsi when he first took power in 2012; and the many who were not inclined to vote for the former president did so anyway, as his opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, was a member of the old regime. Despite the extraordinary weakness of Shafiq, Morsi only won by 1.3 percent of the vote.

Egyptians entrusted Morsi with the revolution and, one year later, they had deemed their trust soundly misplaced. Some cite the nefarious Egyptian media to explain this dramatic loss of public trust, but the fact of the matter is that the only difference in media before and after June 30, 2012, is that the Islamists now had their own channels.

This is not to say the Egyptian media is accurate or professional: it is very often neither. But to explain Egyptians’ deep distrust and discontent with the Muslim Brotherhood by claiming a mass media delusion while ignoring Egyptians’ lived history, is conspiratorial and inaccurate.

In retrospect, the Muslim Brotherhood should not have run a presidential candidate, as they originally promised. Morsi’s cabinet was full of Mubarak’s men – reflecting a clear strategy to share power with those already in power, including the military and members of the old regime.

Beyond the makeup of the cabinet, concerns that Morsi reported back to the unelected��murshid��(supreme leader) of the Brotherhood were valid; which meant his true inner-circle was made up of the tightly hierarchized Muslim Brotherhood leadership.

This kind of rule by an unaccountable oligarchy was certainly not what the revolution was about, nor was it about fomenting sectarianism, or handing the country over to a closed group with a non-transparent agenda.

But most egregiously, many Egyptians perceived the Morsi government to have lost its legitimacy after the November 2012 constitutional decrees, which placed Morsi above judicial review and was followed by a very rushed referendum for a deeply-flawed, Islamist-dominated constitution.

Those who attended the pro-Sisi rallies truly believed Egypt had been rescued from the brink of disaster.��I detected palpable relief, as if people were exhaling at long last. ”We stayed quiet,” they said, “until we could not take it anymore and were going to explode. We love our country!” As someone put it to me: “Imagine if you came to rule Egypt, but you only spoke English, and only spoke to your American friends. That is what Morsi did to Egyptians — he didn’t talk to us! He ignored us and talked only to his group.”

They would cringe, I was told, when Morsi addressed (his) audiences as, “Ahli wa Ashiiraati”��(my family and my tribe). This is an ancient address for tribe — the classical Arabic use is often in connection with Arabian tribes of the pre-Islamic/early Islamic period — when addressing people, as opposed to Nasser, who would say: “Aayuha al-ikhwaa il-muwaatinuun”��(oh my brothers and fellow citizens). In addition, Egyptians were insulted that their religiosity and Islamic theology and practice had been questioned by people who seem to think they are better Muslims, and thus better people than them.

Most importantly, the Muslim Brotherhood disrupted and disturbed what many people called “the Egyptian identity.”

”Our heritage, our gentleness, our openness, our tolerance,” I was told, “it’s like they do not like the Egyptian nature.” In a context where people are suffering economically, identity is the one thing you cannot touch. One person said to me, “it’s all we have.”

Erroneous Fixation with Elections

Official western discourse is fixated on elections — reading the events starting on June 30 as a major setback for democracy. Since this concern is not important to the majority of Egyptians at present, the larger question becomes: Do or should people, who are going through democratic transitions, bend to this model? Or should the aggregate model amend itself to reflect the complex Egyptian example?

The Egyptian military must be watched closely and checked on its many abuses. Keeping in mind that the same Egyptian population revolted against this very same military regime a mere two years ago, I think there is a strong chance significant popular checks will be back in place in the coming months.

Egyptians, who instinctually felt the revolution would not be respected and advanced under a Morsi regime, have spoken loudly and clearly. It is certainly possible to call this a form of democracy. But the larger point now is that most Egyptians do not care about the nomenclature, and consider this an irrelevant and even naive western-based discussion.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Enough time has passed since the June 30 revolution against Mohammed Morsi’s regime, which brought millions of Egyptians to the street to call for the removal of their first elected president. Many of these Egyptians demanded for the army — whom they had protested against a mere two years prior – to step in and broker a transition to another period of military rule. Since the military heeded the call, this portion of Egypt’s recent dramatic events can be called a military coup — but only this portion. Thus, the entire episode cannot simply be reduced to a “coup.” 

There is a strong chance that significant popular checks against military rule will be back in place in the coming months. For now, unfortunately, given the current worship of General Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and the army, this will happen only after abuses multiply and begin to feel more familiar to Egyptians who have only recently revolted against military rule. At present, palpable relief at the end of Muslim Brotherhood rule is so overarching that impunity of the military regime continues to worryingly grow. 

On the question of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the angles we can now explore with more analytic distance is the difficult to understand, yet essential historical dialectic between the Brotherhood’s theological grounding and the political realm in which they insistently operate.

A Historical Perspective: The Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna in the town of Ismailiyya. The movement held the ethos of “Islam is our Constitution,” and grew throughout Egypt’s monarchic period — a time where they exercized tremendous political power, often in league with the king himself. During the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1952-1970), the group began to clash seriously with Egyptian authorities, culminating with the death by a firing squad of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood ideologue and intellectual.

Anwar el-Sadat’s presidency (1970-1981) began with a famous reapproachment with the Islamists, who Nasser had jailed in very large numbers. Sadat released prisoners incarcerated during Nasser’s era to buttress Nasserists, communists and other leftists, who he feared would challenge him. This strategy ended ironically and tragically with Sadat's assassination at the hands of Gama’at Islamiyya militants — an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were radicalized once forced underground again after their opposition to the Camp David Accords — who conspired with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1981.

During Hosni Mubarak’s presidency (1981-2011), the Muslim Brotherhood functioned almost exclusively as a bogeyman that he could present both to a domestic and international audience; the policy was: “If not me, an authoritarian military dictator, then it's them — terrorists.” 

In 1948, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated an Egyptian prime minster, Mahmud Fahmi Nokrashi. The Brotherhood’s secret apparatus, a militant wing of the organization, was accused of an attempt on President Nasser’s life in 1954, driving them underground again.

The Muslim Brotherhood's long influence in universities — their major realm of operation since Sadat would not let them organize into a political party — contributed to the “Islamization” of student culture and activism, and has led to debates over literature and art, including several attempts at banning them, and debates over scientific innovation. More and more young women took the veil as a result of the Brotherhood's influence — Egyptians returning from work in the Gulf also had an impact upon the veil. 

Perhaps most importantly, the Brotherhood's exact stance on Islamic law and the state is uncomfortably unclear to Egyptians. It is likely that the group today keeps this stance strategically ambiguous, whereas imposition of shari'a was a very explicit goal of the organization until Mubarak’s era.

A case in point here was the Morsi regime’s absolute insistence on parliamentary elections — even after the November 2012 constitutional decrees. This was at a time when his government was in a deep crisis, and while many Egyptians thought it had lost basic democratic legitimacy.

The inevitable result of these parliamentary elections would have been a majority Islamist parliament to add to the executive — a fact the Muslim Brotherhood knew very well because of their far superior elections machinery, in comparison to any other organized political group in Egypt, with the exception of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP).  

But here is the key point: At the same time that the Muslim Brotherhood argued for the absolute necessity of immediate parliamentary elections, the temporary Shura council — composed of many Salafi allies who were likely to have been voted into an official parliament — were debating whether to lower the marriage age of young girls to nine-years-old. 

Typical of their strategy, the Muslim Brotherhood made no statements about this and other such controversial initiatives. Rather, the Brotherhood kept their talking points to a simple insistence on formal structure for their own sake — knowing full-well the unpopular practical results that were sure to follow.

Simply put, therefore, I believe, based on the Muslim Brotherhood’s intellectual and actual history, that they continue to nurse the vision of Islamizing the Egyptian state today, whether in the short- or long-term. 

Finally, in Muslim Brotherhood literature, one finds a marked de-emphasis on Egypt as a contiguous homeland for Egyptians with borders that have been more or less in place for 7,000 years. Instead, a pan-Islamic vision is favored that deemphasizes and even condemns these basic nationalist sentiments.         

*[Read the on October 10.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The  a distant offshoot in Palestinian Gaza of the Muslim Brotherhood, has seldom been on the sunny side of the street. But a combination of difficult political choices has left it more isolated and more broke than ever before in its history, as . Adding insult to injury, Hamas faces a Tamarrud (rebellion) youth movement of a strong secularist bent, that is vowing to do to it what Tamarrud in Egypt did to former President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Israel imposed a blockade on the entirety of Gaza in 2007, after its attempt to dislodge the party from power there failed. The blockade was damaging but imperfect, There were ways partially to circumvent it. Egypt winked at the construction of huge underground tunnels from Gaza to the Sinai desert, through which smugglers brought in millions of dollars worth of goods. Moreover, cash came in from Iran to reward Hamas (Sunni fundamentalists) for allying with secular Syria and the Shiite fundamentalist Hezbollah of south Lebanon.

These were not ideological allies but rather strange bedfellows, all of whom only had a fear of Israeli expansionism in common. The expansionism may have been driven by Israel’s own insecurity, but it was real. Israel occupied and tried to colonize Gaza from 1967 to 2005, occupied Syrian territory in Golan from 1967, and occupied a substantial swath of South Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. In fact, neither the people in Gaza nor the Shiites in South Lebanon had been particularly militant before the Israelis tried to batten onto them and oppress and exploit them.

Palestinians have been among the least fundamentalist populations in the Muslim world, and the hard line religious temptation is one that only a minority felt. Hamas did win the January 2006 elections for the Palestine legislature, but that was a fluke and said more about the corruption and unpopularity of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) rather than about desire for religious rule. In the aftermath, the Israelis and the Bush administration decided it had been an error to let Hamas run — in fact, Bush hadn’t expected them to win. They connived with the PLO (the leading party of which is Fatah) to make a coup against Hamas, which succeeded on the West Bank but failed in Gaza.

Hamas retained power in Gaza, but then faced the Israeli blockade, which aimed at punishing Palestinian civilians by keeping them just on the edge of hunger. Some 70 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are from families ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is now southern Israel in 1948, or in later wars such as 1967. Many of them could walk back home in an hour; and many of them still live in refugee camps, having never received compensation for the property that was stolen from them.

Dilemma: Hamas and the Syrian Civil War

Hamas was presented with a severe dilemma by the outbreak of the attempted popular revolution in Syria, and then the civil war. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood enthusiastically joined the opposition to the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad. The Brotherhood had opposed the socialist, secular policies of the Baath Party and its land reform and large public sector.

The Muslim Brotherhood represented urban shopkeepers and entrepreneurs, and ideologically is not so far from the evangelical wing of the US Republican Party. Moreover, the Baath came to be dominated by Alawite Shiites, whom Muslim Brothers do not consider Muslims. The Brotherhood staged a revolt in Hama in 1982, which al-Assad’s father brutally crushed, killing thousands.

Not only was Hamas’ alliance with al-Assad increasingly uncomfortable — what with the Syrian Muslim Brothers denouncing them as traitors — but then in June 2012, Mohammed Morsi of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood won the presidency. He opposed al-Assad and was a long-time warm supporter of Hamas.

So most of the Hamas leadership (not all) abandoned al-Assad and Damascus, seeking to replace his patronage and support with that of Morsi in Cairo. This move had the advantage of aligning Hamas with the other main regional branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Since Egypt is more influential with Israel than Iran, moreover, the alliance with Cairo also promised more likelihood of a successful truce with Israel. (In between bouts of militancy and violence, Hamas has often said it would accept a long-lived truce of up to a century, even though it rejects Israel in the long term.)

But the Hamas abandonment of Syria angered Iran, which allegedly cut Hamas off without a further dime. (The US has to stop charging Iran with being a supporter of "terrorism," if what it means is that it gives money to the government of Gaza.) That cut-off of Iranian support was all right with much of the Hamas leadership, however, as Morsi in Egypt was willing to become the movement’s patron instead.

Morsi’s Overthrow

Then on July 3 of this year, Morsi was overthrown by a combination of a popular revolution and a military coup. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was more or less declared a terrorist organization by the military, with 2,000 of its leaders arrested and its sit-ins broken up in a bloody crackdown, killing hundreds.

Not only is the officer corps apparently determined to criminalize the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, they charge the Brotherhood with links to Hamas as a way of tainting the MB with the terrorism label. The Muslim Brotherhood foreswore violence in the 1970s, but Morsi’s support for Hamas is being used to tar him with the brush of terror. Hamas has deployed violence, including against civilians, for its political purposes and it is wed to an extreme theocratic vision of an oppressive religious dictatorship.

The Egyptian military even alleges that Morsi gave Hamas sensitive information about the Egyptian prison, in which he was being held during the 2011 revolution against Hosni Mubarak, so that they could send guerrillas to spring him and his associates from their cells.

So the Egyptian military now has it in for Hamas, as well, which they suspect of having links to Egyptian militants and rebellious Bedouin in the Sinai Peninsula, where Egyptian troops have lost their lives fighting al-Qaeda affiliates. As a result, the officers have done what Mubarak never dared: They have definitively closed the tunnels. Apparently nothing is getting through. And they closed the Rafah crossing. The Palestinians in Gaza are complaining that Egypt’s General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has deeply harmed “tourism,” but surely that is a euphemism for smuggling.

Rebellion in Gaza

Just as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown in part by the militantly secularist Tamarrud or rebellion movement, so too have Palestinian youth in Gaza thrown up their own rebellion group. They feed stories to the Egyptian press, such as that  where they imprison their ideological (secular) enemie,s and where they practice the ugliest kinds of torture and interrogations. The Gaza movement  and to be considered a real threat by Hamas.

In fact, the Israelis are now being a little nicer to Gaza than the Egyptians, since they are sending in a few truck loads of building materials, on which they still have restrictions lest Hamas build military bunkers with the cement. The extent of Israeli generosity should not be exaggerated.

The USG Open Source Center translates this item for September 21:

“Palestinian Information Center in Arabic at 08:19 GMT on 21 September cites Deputy Jamal al-Khudari, chairman of the popular committee for confronting the siege, as saying that ‘losses incurred by the suspension of the projects of the private sector, the municipalities, and the various institutions in the Gaza Strip have reached $100 million as a result of the Zionist siege,’ adding that ‘Israel’s promises to allow entry of building material covers only 25 percent of these projects if Israel fulfills its promise, which means the continued disruption of many of these projects.’”

Some observers are speculating that the Egyptian army will intervene in Gaza to overthrow Hamas. Others think Hamas will be forced by its new financial woes to make up with the PLO, which runs the West Bank, and essentially put itself under President Mahmoud Abbas.

While it is true that guerrilla movements are difficult to simply starve out, Hamas does at the moment seem in real trouble. There have long been signs that Palestinian youth in Gaza are sick and tired of its extreme fundamentalism; so if change comes, it could have a local social base.

*[This article was originally published by Juan Cole’s .]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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As in El Salvador, Nicaragua, East Timor, Angola, Lebanon, and Gaza in previous years, the massive killing of civilians in Egypt is being done with US-provided weapons by a US-backed government. As a result, the Obama administration and Congress are morally culpable for the unfolding tragedy. While the  to suspend some military aid to Egypt is certainly welcome, the United States' role has, on balance, made matters worse.

As with many of these other cases, elements of the Egyptian opposition have contributed to the bloodshed and bear some responsibility. Some members of the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters have attacked government buildings, anti-Brotherhood protesters, libraries, museums, and churches, and many of them have been armed. This comes in the wake of the Brotherhood squandering its year in power by trying to shape the politics of the post-Mubarak era solely on its own terms, imposing unpopular social and economic policies, and ruling in a semi-autocratic manner.

Indeed, the Brotherhood isolated itself by refusing to do what the Tunisian Islamists did, which was to govern as part of a  of Islamists, progressives, and traditional oppositionists. In Egypt, the Islamists instead took advantage of their plurality of support to push through their agenda unilaterally — so alienating the majority of Egyptians that millions took to the streets in protest, prompting a coup that was initially quite popular. In the aftermath, rioting by many of the Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters, combined with their refusal to consider becoming part of a civilian coalition to govern alongside the military, alienated people still further.

Yet the fact remains that the vast majority of Egyptians killed since the coup have been unarmed protesters, who were struck down with American-made weapons by soldiers transported in American-made vehicles provided by the American taxpayer. Whatever one thinks of the Muslim Brotherhood’s politics or leadership style, nothing justifies the massacre of hundreds of peaceful protesters and bystanders.

Egyptian liberals were naive to trust the military. They were grateful that the military belatedly allied with them to push Mubarak aside and allied with them again to oust Morsi. However, many forgot that the military is more interested in maintaining ultimate control than democratizing society, even if it has to unleash unprecedented waves of terror on the streets of Egypt’s cities.

Just two weeks before the August 14 massacres, the US Senate, defeated by an , passed a resolution to enforce US law against providing military aid to regimes that seize power by military coups. The bill would have called for suspending arms transfers to Egypt and using the money for bridges and related infrastructure projects in the United States.

A Stacked Deck

The violent turn in Egypt is particularly tragic since the overthrow of the US-backed Mubarak dictatorship was largely nonviolent. In many ways, the 2011 revolution’s victory was a continuation of the global, nonviolent pro-democracy struggle that has brought down scores of dictatorships from the Philippines to Poland and from Chile to Serbia. Unfortunately, the Egyptian military — through the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which assumed control after a mass civil insurrection drove Mubarak from power — refused to hand power over to the liberal democrats who led the revolution, choosing instead to maintain their corrupt hold on key sectors of the economy and to suppress dissent. Washington rarely complained and continued to supply massive amounts of military aid as the repression continued.

When elections did finally come, liberals and progressives barely stood a chance.

Thanks to decades of repression by the notoriously brutal and corrupt US-backed Mubarak regime, Egyptian civil society — despite growing markedly over the past decade — was relatively weak and inexperienced. As the time for the country’s first free elections approached, the young idealistic activists who were so tactically brilliant in the 2011 revolution found that they had neither the organizational experience nor the financial resources of the seasoned leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been organizing — often clandestinely — for many decades. Nor did they have the anything approaching the resources of the military, which fielded a presidential candidate of its own in air force commander, and former Mubarak prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq .

Once the military allowed for elections, it was through a two-round electoral system where the top two vote-getters in the first round would face each other in a runoff. Despite the Brotherhood’s advantages in organizing and the military’s powerful institutional support for their candidate, the majority of first-round votes went to liberal, democratic, and secular candidates. Because liberal forces split their votes among several contenders, however, the second round came down to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi and the military’s Shafiq — the worst possible outcome for the pro-democracy forces that ousted Mubarak. Morsi narrowly won. As a result, though it eked out a slim majority of the vote in the runoff, the Muslim Brotherhood never had more than a plurality of support to begin with, and it lost much of that once Morsi came into office.

Still, the Brotherhood enjoys a sizeable following, albeit a minority. There are tens of millions of Egyptians who recognize that the Brotherhood won the freest election in Egyptian history and was forcibly removed from power. When Islamists have taken to the streets in protest — most, though not all, peacefully — they have been gunned down. Meanwhile, the United States refuses to even acknowledge there was a military coup and has continued to arm the thugs who are killing them. This is not likely to encourage moderation, compromise, or better relations with the West.

Under the Military’s Boot

The struggle in Egypt is not about religion. The vast majority of Morsi’s pro-democracy opponents, who  in largely nonviolent protests during the year the Muslim Brotherhood was in power, were observant Muslims. It’s always been about the Muslim Brotherhood’s conservative policies and autocratic tendencies. Furthermore, despite power struggles between Morsi and military leaders while he was in office, they were quite willing to cooperate in suppressing the Egyptian left.

In many respects, ever since Mubarak’s ouster, it has been a three-way struggle among liberal democratic forces, Islamists, and the military, with the military playing one side against the other. It’s important to remember that Mubarak himself was an Egyptian military general who headed the air force prior to Anwar el-Sadat, who named him as vice-president just before his assassination. Sadat also came from the military, as did his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser. In effect, the military has ruled Egypt for more than 60 years. It controls as much as one-third of the economy and has proven its willingness to do whatever it takes to stay in power, from switching sides in the Cold War to massacring its own people.

As a result, while the United States was clearly unhappy with Morsi’s victory in last year’s election, the sense was that the military had enough leverage to keep the Brotherhood from doing much to hurt US interests. In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood leadership, despite its extreme antipathy toward Israel, was pragmatic enough not to threaten the Jewish state, given its vast military superiority. And, as a movement dominated by wealthy businessmen, the Brotherhood was quite willing to cooperate with US economic interests and international financial institutions.

There is no evidence to suggest the United States was behind last month’s coup. It came as a result of the massive and largely nonviolent uprising in late June and early July demanding Morsi’s ouster. Unfortunately, as with the ouster of Mubarak two years earlier in a similar popular uprising, the military has hijacked the popular struggle.

In short, both the military and the Muslim Brotherhood are wrong. Neither is concerned about democracy and both are willing to use violence. The last thing the United States should be doing is continuing to pour arms into this tragic and chaotic situation and rationalize for brutal repression.

*[Note: This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy. 

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Many Egyptians and Western critics of the Muslim Brotherhood welcomed the military coup that recently toppled the country’s elected Brotherhood-led government, praising the military for safeguarding secularism and “democracy.” This betrays a gross misreading of the country’s history.

The Egyptian coup of 2013, after all, was by no means its first. Military dominance has been a fact of Egyptian political life since at least 1952, when Gamal Abdel Nasser led a coup against Egypt’s British-backed monarchy. In comparing these two instances, the number of similarities suggests that there is nothing inevitable about the military relinquishing its hold on the country.

During the early to mid 20^th��century, the monarch King Farouk was the formal ruler of Egypt. However, most Egyptians understood that Farouk was a puppet of the British, who held true control over the state and its government. British control of the military in particular did not sit well with many officers, nine of whom began to covertly recruit a broad array of officers sympathetic to their idea for a movement of “Free Officers.”

This foreign presence also led to protests spearheaded by the youth and the parliament’s largest opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing on these grievances and others, the Nasser-led Free Officer Movement was able to craft a unifying nationalist narrative. When the time was right, they struck, successfully overthrowing King Farouk in July 1952. Egyptians of all stripes gathered in the streets in celebration.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

A Familiar Script

This time around, it was President Mohammed Morsi’s attempts to consolidate power for the Muslim Brotherhood — and take it away from the military — that did not sit right. The widespread youth- and opposition-led anti-Morsi protests that gripped Egypt at the end of June provided the perfect opportunity for the military to step in and forcefully depose the nuisance leader. However, this time that leader was democratically elected, demonstrating the institution’s����when it does not operate in the military’s interests.

But that is not where the similarities end.

After the Free Officers’ 1952 coup, military officers dissolved parliament and the constitution, appointed an interim head of government, and instructed him to form a cabinet. The Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), mostly made up of the nine original Free Officers and under Nasser’s leadership, proceeded to dictate interim policy to the new civilian cabinet.

Following the formal Free-Officerization of Egypt’s new government, the RCC government launched a campaign to eliminate any threat to its power. This included an increase in the number of Free Officers appointed to ministerial positions, a ban on all political parties, a specific crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, and the trial, conviction, and disenfranchisement of many of the previous regime’s public servants on the allegation that they had “abused the public trust to their own advantage.” The junta encountered much popular resistance, but it was acquiring too much power for the opposition to stop it.

Today, something similar has taken place. After the military deposed Morsi, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) — reprising a role it played after the earlier ouster of Mubarak — suspended the constitution, disbanded parliament, appointed Mubarak-era jurist Adly Mansour as the interim head of government, and instructed him to put together his cabinet. Not only must these new leaders answer to SCAF, but coup leader General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi right off the bat secured a����in that cabinet as the first deputy prime minister and minister of defense, entrenching the military more deeply and formally in Egypt’s fluctuating political system.

A spokesperson for Sisi said: “Although the general was not��, there was nothing to prevent him from so doing if he retired from the military.” This information is alarming, although frankly Sisi has enough power already that he does not need to run for president. It is also worth noting that in his thesis, written in 2006 while studying at US Army War College in Pennsylvania, Sisi stated that establishing caliphate-style leadership “is widely recognized as the goal for any new form of government” in the Middle East — an insight, perhaps, into the general’s abiding distrust of democracy in the region.

While political parties have not been formally banned, the military is engaging in a brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood — those “abusers of the public trust” — by accusing members of inciting violence, excluding Islamists from the interim cabinet, and shutting down all anti-military, pro-Morsi, and Brotherhood-sympathetic TV channels. Add to this, of course, the horrendous massacres of pro-Morsi demonstrators in the streets.

A Missed Opportunity

If there was one force that stood a chance of reducing the military’s power after Egypt’s long years of authoritarian rule, it was the Brotherhood. Underground for decades, the Brotherhood had plenty of time to fume against the military and organize ways of pushing back against it, particularly in a democratic framework. But overtaken by political blunders of its own, it fell short. Though deeply divisive, the military’s actions have been met not with resistance but with overwhelming support from much of Egypt’s population.

But come the day when the military’s interests do not coincide with the people’s, Egyptians will regret that all that power was concentrated in one place. And that goes not only for political power, but also for economic power and military power.

All this is exacerbated by continued US aid to Egypt’s military — aid that it may use as it pleases, as it enjoys full autonomy from any form of oversight — and Washington’s failure to hold the military accountable for what it does with that money. One can only wonder if the civilian government might have fared better if Washington had����to deliver development assistance.

In light of the recent����— as well as the US prohibition against providing aid to coup governments, which the Obama administration has����— that aid should be suspended. The United States must not finance an increasingly brutal regime, a regime whose actions also create the added danger of possibly radicalizing moderate Islamists. The reinstitution of aid must be contingent on a peaceful transition to a civilian, democratic government; free, fair, inclusive elections; and respect for human rights. Even then, distribution of aid must be reevaluated: more for economic and political stability, and less for the military.

It is important that Egyptians — including members of the Muslim Brotherhood — take action now and during the redrafting of the constitution to check, reduce, and redistribute the military’s power. They must establish some form of civilian oversight over military activities, including its economic enterprises. Otherwise they will risk never achieving a legitimate democracy for the people and by the people, not the military.

[Note: This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Shortly before riding into the vice-presidency of Egypt on the back of military tanks, Mohammed El-Baradei told the��Foreign Policy (FP) magazine, “” in a criticism of the policies (or apparent lack thereof) of the previous Morsi presidency. The comment appears to have been throwaway humor intended to impress the FP’s readership that is, to put it mildly, inclined to view anything other than opening up foreign markets for “trade” (or exploitation) as unfeasible, impractical and dangerous, coupled with their traditional deeply held negative views of Islam — a disdain seemingly shared by El-Baradei and his liberal secular allies, who appear to have little more than faux concern over the continued massacres of anti-coup protestors by the military upon the orders of General Sisi and continue to label the masses of opposition against the coup as “terrorist” elements. The FP editorial team duly responded by using the line as the title for their .

For all the rhetoric, El-Baradei would be hard pressed to identify exactly what elements of Islamic law the Morsi government was actually given the opportunity to enact in a general sense, let alone in economic policy. In fact, most criticism of the Morsi government centered on the largely continued same failed polity of the previous Mubarak regime. This implicitly would include its neoliberal economic program that earned the praise of the IMF as recently as 2010 and the widening of the wealth disparity within the country, which was one of the factors that led to the revolt in 2011. El-Baradei alludes to this in his piece, stating that the Morsi administration relied on “the same worn-out ideas” simply carried by more religious figures in power.

Committed to the Failing Policies of the Past

One of the reasons that the Muslim Brotherhood-backed government was accepted, if not warmly welcomed, by western governments was because of its openly stated commitment to the��proclaimed “free market” left behind by Mubarak (along with their guarantee to maintain the strategically important Camp David agreements with Israel). As noted by , with Morsi as president, a few key Muslim Brotherhood members have espoused free markets, deregulation and attracting foreign direct investment, all of which make up the central rhetoric of neoliberal economics.

Highlighting the acceptance of several central Brotherhood figures to play within the existing neoliberal order rather than comprehensive adherence and application of Shari’a, the Morsi government pursued a loan from the IMF despite the Muslim Brotherhood’s previous condemnation of such loans due to them being interest-based. If there is a single, economically orientated Shari’a principle that is accepted and universally known, it is the general prohibition of interest. However, this position was altered by religious figures supporting the Morsi administration, who claimed that repayments were analogous to administration fees rather than interest.

One of the conditions for the loan was the imposition of a sales tax upon 25 goods, something Morsi announced and subsequently pedalled back on within 24 hours as a result of public outcry. Note, any expert of Shari’a economics will recognize the concept of a sales tax upon goods as another non-Shari’a compliant policy. Part of the campaign to oust Morsi focused upon the fact that he was pursuing such external loans that were deemed harmful to the general population, already barely surviving with below the poverty line and a further hovering just above it.

The��Tamarod��campaign, eventually fronted by El-Baradei and used to legitimize the military ouster of Morsi, gave new impetus to the revolutionary call for an end to the wealth inequality that was one of the hallmarks of the Mubarak-era and has not improved in the two years since his overthrow. It has since emerged that the campaign was also backed by major businessman Naguib Sawiris, the second richest Egyptian who reportedly has an estimated wealth of approximately $3 billion (eclipsed only by his father, Onsi Sawaris). The Sawiris family empire grew under the Mubarak regime, with Naguib reportedly being close to Mubarak’s son, Gamal, who further advanced a neoliberal economic agenda in the last decade prior to the uprisings in 2011. Mubarak himself was not averse to going to bat for the Sawaris business interests, for example, advocating on their behalf with the Syrian government in an attempt to resolve a dispute over an Egyptian-Syrian cell phone enterprise between Orascom Telecoms (run by Sawiris) and Syriatel.

Therefore, it is wholly unsurprising that Sawaris lamented Mubarak’s fall, stating that he was “,” believing he had “done a lot of good for the country.”

Egypt’s Elite-Controlled Economy

The Sawiris clan is a prime example of the massive wealth disparity in Egypt, as it represents the tiny neoliberal elite that controls about 25% of national income. One of the most visible problems with the Egyptian economy is the fact that an elite few control it. When elites control an economy, they use their power to create monopolies and block the entry of new people and firms, which is how Egypt worked for three decades under the Mubarak regime. The government and military own vast swaths of the economy which, by some estimates, is as much as 40%. Even when they did “liberalize,” they privatized large parts of the economy right into the hands of regime insiders and friends. Big businessmen close to the regime, such as Ahmed Ezz (iron and steel), the Sawiris family (multimedia, beverages, and telecommunications), and Mohamed Nosseir (beverages and telecommunications), received not only protection from the state, but also government contracts and large bank loans. Together, this elite put a stranglehold on the economy while creating astronomical profits for regime insiders, blocking opportunities for the vast mass of Egyptians to move out of poverty. Hence, the impressive IMF pleasing macro figures coupled with poverty and desolation at the ground level.

With such financial support for the campaign to oust Morsi, it is unlikely that the military- appointed government is going to change course from the same failed policies of the past, especially given the military’s vested interests. Having already been promised a government of “technocrats,” the code-word for ostensibly politically neutral experts (whose only allegiance is to the nebulus “markets”) who will enact measures to make Egypt more “attractive” for “international investment” and financial aid, the appointment of liberal economist Hazem El-Beblawi as interim prime minister certainly bodes well for those who would like to see a continuation of the neoliberal experiment in the post-Mubarak era.

In his last before agreeing to front the future technocratic government, Beblawi talked about how the Egyptian people needed to understand that the current level of subsidies in Egypt were unsustainable, taking up 25% of the budget, and that “the cancelling of subsidies requires sacrifices from the public, and therefore necessitates their acceptance.” He also praised some of the economic performance of the Mubarak-era, stating: “Right before the revolt, growth rate was 7% for 4 consecutive years, foreign investments were on the rise and investing in the stock market became more attractive.” He failed to note (in the same manner as the IMF) that these macro indicators mean absolutely nothing about the state of the economy as far as the average Egyptian living on the bread line is concerned.

Beblawi’s call for the Egyptian public to sacrifice, echoed the words of El-Baradei two months earlier, who talked about how austerity was the price that Egypt had to pay for the sake of assistance from the IMF, which would then encourage foreign private investment. Indeed,��if there is a universal constant in these times of “austerity” — it can be found in the ease with which the moneyed liberal elite inform everyone that the masses have to bear the brunt of suffering in the name of the greater good. As more time elapses after the global economic crash brought on by the financial sector,��the liberal elite only appear to have grown more assured as the blame for economic woes has been shifted from greed at the top to the supposed profligacy of those at the bottom. Ideological preferences aside, the state of the Egyptian poor provide ample empirical evidence that you can’t eat neoliberalism.

An Alternative Islamic Economic Policy

Rather than relying upon trying to implement a “cleaner” version of the tried, tested and failed policies of the past, Beblawi might actually do better to consider radical options provided by Shari’a economics.��Contrary to the pragmatism displayed by the ousted president, a real attempt to move to an Islamic economic system would entail a revolutionary shift and upheaval of the current economic paradigm. An economy based upon agriculture and heavy industry rather than tourism; wealth and land taxes rather than income and indirect taxation; direct rather than indirect redistributive policies; a currency backed by gold and silver rather than pegged to the dollar; no privatization of vital state resources; the abolition of the predatory stock markets; and, significantly, no interest-based loans or investments with risk-sharing enterprises in their stead.

Such a program would obviously conflict head-on with the vision of a neoliberal world economic order, in part because self-sufficiency means less debt and market opportunity to be exploited by international finance, meaning that it would take a brave person to follow them through. Whether that bravery would be shown to be born out of naivety or a visionary outlook is something that history will judge. But at the very least it is worth understanding that there are possible substantial answers to El-Baradei’s initial throwaway quip that could be explored, even if the Morsi presidency was unable to provide them.

Bravery aside, Beblawi has already proven to be a man of many contradictions. As pointed out by��Joshua Stacher, he coined the phrase “” to critically describe the manner in which the Gulf states purchase loyalty for their regimes by largesse rather than through good governance. Ironically, the interim prime minister now leads a government brought in via a coup and financially rewarded by such aforementioned Gulf states. He also resigned from his position in the SCAF administration in 2011 after the Maspero demonstrations which resulted in the deaths of 28 protestors, while he accepted to join the current SCAF-appointed government after the killing of more than 50 protestors at the Republican Guard palace. Beblawi has also continued in his role as prime minister despite the killing of approximately 100 anti-coup protestors on the fringes of the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in at dawn. However, expecting a liberal economist to adopt an economic policy derived from Islamic law is probably a contradiction too far.

This means that Beblawi and his technocratic colleagues will likely move down the line of conventional wisdom in times of “austerity,” acquiring more international debt in exchange for cutting state subsidies, adherence to IMF conditionality, the promotion of stock markets and a call for (more) public sacrifice. None of these ideas appear particularly original or are likely to satisfy an ever-more impoverished population still seeking its bread and social justice, which bear little relation to macro-economic indicators. With the price of basic foodstuffs increasing along the country’s continued dependency on others for their daily bread, the stage is set for future upheavals, irrespective of whether the current military-backed government successfully eliminates its opponents from the political scene.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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