10
But those who believe and do deeds of righteousness,
We shall soon admit them to gardens,
With rivers flowing beneath, to dwell therein forever.
QUR’AN 4:122
A RIVER WENDS its way through this book. The river is Islam, the “River of Life.”1 Its waters bring extraordinary generative powers. Midstream Islamic intellectuals report on the progress of the river, as it cuts innumerous channels through Islamic lands and to territories beyond. These openings enable al Tagdid al Islami (the Islamic Renewal) to work its worldly effects on a global scale. The great nineteenth-century Islamic reformer Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) first formulated this compelling representation of Islam. Today, the metaphor for Islam’s spiritual and temporal power has even greater resonance than when Abduh first offered it. In our time, the lifegiving force of Islam is apparent around the world. Twenty-first-century Muslims have established flourishing communities of believers on all continents. Al Nas (the common people) come to the “River of Life” from a myriad of ethnicities and cultures, bringing with them astonishing diversity. They come in ever-increasing numbers. People of all ages, including the Arab youth who played so large a role in the revolutionary upheavals of the spring of 2011, all act within a cultural context shaped by Islam. Islam is in the air in all those places al Nas gather.
The triumph of Islam of al Nas offers a compelling narrative. Islam has a serious claim as the world’s fastest-growing religion.2 More impressive than this surge in numbers has been the success of Islamic communities around the world in creating loyalties that commend to their members sacrifice of their most precious possessions to protect the ummah (community of Muslims). The human warmth of Islamic communities is especially attractive in a global age dominated by a Western, neoliberal order, which is experienced as cold and unfeeling. The market obsession of Western societies has taken a toll on all values, other than the competitive individualism and possessive consumerism it fosters. In such a barren global climate, Islamic ideas and values exert great appeal, creating what Rashid al Ghannouchi has called “the largest religious base in the world.”3
All of that, and more, could be read from my long-term vantage point in Cairo. Quite by chance, Tunisia, then as now, framed my experience of Egypt. It was in Tunis, rather than Cairo, where I first stayed put long enough in those early years of travels to actually experience Islam as a lived social presence. Even in the heyday of President Habib Bourguiba’s secularization drive, when I first visited in the mid-1960s, the deep roots of Islam in Tunisia preserved the country’s Islamic character. Elaine, my partner, loved the sea. I loved the villages. In August 1968 we married in Tunis. French bureaucrats foiled our original plan of a Paris elopement before proceeding to Tunis to study Arabic. Once we were in Tunisia, the old city in Tunis captured our imaginations. We had our small wedding party there. The City of Lights was eclipsed. We honeymooned in Sidi Bou Said, a village on the sea north of Tunis that is far too beautiful to be real.
The experience of Tunisia played the role of prelude to a lifetime love affair with Egypt. Still, some part of my heart has always belonged to Tunisia. I find myself frequently looking over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of what is going on there. However, for over forty years, it has been Cairo that has afforded me the most privileged vantage point and base for witnessing the unfolding of the Islamic Renewal. As it flows through Egypt, the waters of the “River of Life” have mingled from the first with Christianity, already firmly established along the Nile. Those confluent waters have flooded the land. The people have all drunk deeply from them. Inescapably, the river passed through Tahrir Square in January 2011, nurturing the souls who gathered there. It made its impact felt on all that happened in the square.
Worldly Miracles
I am often asked now why I continue to return to live in Egypt when the country is in such turmoil. Given the world-shattering events in Tahrir Square and across Egypt, the question always seems odd to me. How often in our lives do we have the chance to see a worldly miracle up close?
The Earth moved in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011.4 Only al Nas and the spiritual power of Egypt’s people, both Muslims and Christians, brought with them to the square could accomplish that. As the masses moved toward Tahrir, the “River of Life” moved with them. Subsequent events and the reversals they have brought do not change that reality, any more than the Great Terror erased the historic importance to the entire world of the battles for “liberty, equality, fraternity” that defined the French in 1789. The whole world watched mesmerized in 2011 as the ordinary people of Egypt made spiritual power a force in Egypt’s public squares. It was that power, drawn from both Islam and Christianity, that made possible their extraordinary revolutionary moment when they demanded “bread, freedom, and social justice.” No planning, no calculus of politics or economics, no abstract speculations of “tipping points” that tally accumulating causes or “swans” of any color telling us to expect the unexpected can diminish the wonder of so momentous an event. It is not surprising that at the time Egypt’s revolutionary upheaval confounded the policy pundits and academic experts, the Mossad and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives who swarm all over Cairo, and even the countless brave souls who themselves acted as the carriers of the revolutionary spirit. With spies and the best intelligence agents in the world everywhere, no one expected a revolutionary upheaval.
Those averse to metaphysical explanations have no hope of understanding what actually transpired. A genuine revolutionary upheaval in Egypt was impossible. The greatest power on the planet had spared no expense to keep America’s man in Cairo in power. The United States stood by the dictator until his very last days, clinging to power and to the extraordinary wealth and privilege it had made possible for him and his family. Mubarak’s Egypt boasted a gulag of prisons and concentration camps with torture machines second to none. Cairo was for years a destination of choice for the notorious American renditions program that sent prisoners to be tortured. The useful dictator and his cronies were protected by a military of half a million and an even larger force of a million and a quarter security police. The hated central security police swarmed all over the land, dressed in their black uniforms and with shields and truncheons in hand. They had as their sole responsibility the elimination of “enemies”—that is, the brutal repression of any who might be tempted to act on the mildest criticism of the regime. In Cairo and the major cities, the security forces were always just around the corner, packed into transport trucks in side alleys or left standing to bake in the sun for hours on end. They were poor, undernourished, and abused young men from the villages and slums, tormented themselves by a regime that trained them as torturers of their own brothers and sisters.
Like all miracles framed culturally by Islam, this momentous event was spiritual in its wondrous improbability. Yet it was practical in its causes and effects. Islam’s miracles, like the faith itself, are worldly. The Qur’an tells humanity less about seas parting and bushes burning and more about the wonders of the human mind and heart. At the core of the Qur’anic Message is the call to all human beings to live decent lives and build good societies. Ordinary men and women, and not just their shaikhs, imams, and religious scholars, are called to use their reason to guide efforts to establish just communities. Islam, no less than the other great monotheisms, belongs to no one group. The Islam that fed the revolutionary spirit that took hold of Egypt’s people was too beautifully spontaneous to be owned. It was the Islam of al Nas, the Islam that flows directly from the Qur’an and Sunnah. It is the “River of Life.” Justice is the word the Qur’an gives to freedom. It evokes economic and social fairness, political freedom, dignity, and divinely sanctioned rights for all of humanity. In this sense, the call to justice in Islam is a demanding one. Worldly miracles are expected of those whose lives are framed by Islam. Repression, foreign interference, poverty, and sheer exhaustion from the struggles of everyday life delayed their arrival. But on January 25, 2011, the miracle-makers did find their way to Tahrir. There were, as Žižek observed, “sublime moments” when the spiritual was right before our eyes. Christian Egyptians on Fridays surrounded their Muslim brothers and sisters as they bowed to pray and made themselves vulnerable to the security forces. Muslims returned the protective gesture on Sundays as the demonstrations continued.5 Even those Egyptians who rarely if ever pray joined in the massive collective prayers in the square. When I asked my friend Moustafa why, he replied simply that he was overwhelmed by the feeling of Islam’s presence in Tahrir. Prayer was the only possible response.
Facing revolution in Islamic lands, only the philosophers have dared to call things by their right name. In Western societies that we pretend are secular, we are not comfortable acknowledging that other people’s faith can play so large and positive a role in their affairs. When the philosophers have spoken this simple truth, they have paid a price. At no point in his career was the French thinker Michel Foucault more ridiculed and scorned than when he allowed himself to see the “the political spirituality” afoot in the land, when Iranians rose to overthrow the shah in their great mass revolution of 1979.6 Surveying the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek pronounced them a “miracle.”7 Both philosophers got it right, but both paid the price for being wrong by conventional lights. When the spiritual touches ground, as it always does in Islam, acknowledging its presence causes discomfort. Foucault stopped writing of Iran and all he learned there. Žižek began to back away from his description almost immediately.
It seemed clear to everyone that Egypt’s revolutionary moment could not be sustained. That message was on everyone’s lips. Everyone, that is, except for the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who showed a skeptical world that the revolutionary flame could be kept burning. The military, with the blessings of the Americans, put a despised figure of the old regime forward as the strongman to end the chaos. Then, in response to a call for yet another march of a million, the authors of the impossible returned to Tahrir Square. The images from the square of the second revolutionary wave were terrible: the body of a youth dumped onto a pile of garbage, a young woman pulled across the ground by her hair, soldiers firing on unarmed demonstrators, armored trucks driving into peaceful demonstrators. The call went out that all was at risk. Incredibly, the people did respond. Unbowed and in massive numbers, the people came again to the square to rescue not just the demonstrators but the revolution itself. Al Nas with their voices and their bodies, not laptops or cellphones, made themselves the primary movers in Tahrir.
Tunisia was the site where the spark was first struck. Events in Tunisia consistently over the years have spoken to my life in Cairo. The narrative that would move the world started with the police harassment of a Tunisian son of al Nas. Muhammad Bouazizi, a street vendor from a poor village in central Tunisia, suffered the seizure of his unlicensed vegetable cart. Muhammad appealed to the municipal authorities—“How will I earn a living?”—but to no avail. He simply could not bear this final indignity. In protest, he set on fire his one possession of value, his own body. It was an act that spoke to the humiliation and frustrations of a generation of young people across the Arab world, not least in Egypt. It was their response that gave Muhammad’s desperate and tragic act historic importance.
Not long after, from the Egyptian city of Alexandria came the unbearable image of Khaled Said, a very ordinary middle-class young man, beaten to death by the security forces who pulled him from an Internet café. Khaled, like so many of his generation, had become ensnared in recreational drugs and impossible dreams of immigrating to America. To be a martyr, one need not be a political or religious activist. Nor does it really matter why the police dragged him from the café and beat him to death. It was Khaled’s face after the beating that mattered. Khaled’s brother rescued him from oblivion as just another anonymous victim of Mubarak’s tyranny. He took the terrible picture of what the police had done to his brother and projected it to the world.
Just barely recognizable, Khaled’s broken face was intended as a lesson to Egypt’s rebellious youth. It was—but not the one imagined. The Arab youth of Egypt and beyond refused to look away from the inhuman brutality inscribed on Khaled Said’s face. Instead, the image was posted on Facebook and it immediately went viral: “We are all Khaled Said.” With that embrace, Egypt’s young people in massive numbers restored Khaled’s human dignity. They made him a symbol of their own. The youth said quite simply that they were ready to die for their freedom. Khaled Said passed into history alongside Muhammad Bouazizi. It is hard to imagine that the youth, so empowered by their self-generated revolutionary roles, will ever return quietly into the night of tyranny. Large numbers of young Tunisians and Egyptians lost their fear of ruling power, whether bearded or dressed in khaki. The understanding that change is possible registered.
In January 2011 Egypt’s youthful rebels issued the call to revolution. They presented themselves to the world as the Facebook Generation, young, educated, principled, tech-savvy, and fearless. They adhered to no one party. They announced no religious program other than unity and tolerance, with both cross and the crescent in hand. Theirs was neither a narrow political nor a religious revolution, with party bosses or clerics in the lead. Instead, they created a mass revolutionary moment for the social justice, human dignity, and freedom that Muhammad Bouazizi and Khaled Said had come to symbolize. Acts of desperation and unspeakable cruelty had all happened before. Over the years Egyptians and Tunisians had displayed similar flashes of the will to resist, but always the tyrants remained in place. This time was different, although no rational calculus can tell us why. The youth movement, holding the hands of the martyrs Muhammad and Khaled, had somehow sent a message to the people that broke through the wall of fear that had kept odious dictators in power for decades. Ordinary Tunisians and Egyptians by the millions took to the streets in a numberless stream. Al Nas ended the terrible dictatorships, to the astonishment of the world.
Entranced by the fearless, young, and educated revolutionary youth in Tunisia and Egypt, it has been all too easy to forget the other faces of the revolutions. From the outset, it was the common people of Tunisia and Egypt who were far more important in grounding the revolutions and enhancing their prospects for success. The cellphones, laptops, and satellite channels did matter, but their importance should not be overstated. Fahmi Huwaidi got it exactly right when he wrote that “yes, Facebook played a role but not the essential one. The entire people moved. The Tunisian example stirred the people of Egypt—it was the beginning of real movement.”8
My apartment is a few minutes’ walk from Tahrir Square, and over the next several years, I experienced those tumultuous events most directly in Cairo, going frequently to the square. I did so with reflexive side glances to Tunisia. For me, Cairo was the big screen, while Tunis was the smaller, yet at times more intense, embedded screen. More than once, critical events would first crystallize on the small screen and then project onto the large one. Tunisians were in no sense secondary players. Tunisia launched the first uprising. Tunisians held the first democratic elections, with an astonishingly high 90 percent turnout of the country’s four million-plus voters. In January 2014, Tunisia crowned these achievements by crafting an exemplary constitution with provisions both for democratic elections and protections for public freedoms, notably for women and minorities. The landmark Tunisian charter may well be the most liberal and democratic ever produced in the Islamic world. Civil liberties are protected. Legislative, executive, and judicial powers are separated. There are unprecedented guarantees for the parity of women in political bodies. The constitution recognizes Islam as Tunisia’s official religion but also provides explicit guarantees of religious freedom. These Tunisian achievements and their impact in Egypt and across the Arab world should be kept in mind, although the primary focus in this account will be on Egypt.
Revolutionary Uprisings
Western analysts, enamored with social media and susceptible to trendy talk of “millennials,” have led Western audiences to understand these massive events in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond as merely derivative reflections of their own experiences. The uprisings are all about the technology and social media and “youth bulge” that came with it; human agency and the Islamic cultural context disappear in these renditions. The human meaning of the historic events of 2011 is then further vitiated by labels like the “Arab Spring,” that originate with Western commentators and are then picked up in the echo chamber of regional media. The French and the Americans have revolutions; the Arabs have seasonal changes.
No, these were revolutionary uprisings in the Arab heartland by purposeful human actors with large dreams of freedom, equality, and justice. No single trend dominated events. However, in all cases Islamic intellectuals and activists played an important role, ensuring that these universal values were pronounced with Islamic shadings. It is generally recognized that the Kefaya movement that took shape in 2004 was the most important precursor to the groups such as the April 6 movement that issued the call to action in 2011. Less frequently noted is the critical role played by centrist Islamists, greatly influenced by the guidance of the New Islamic trend, in bringing together the multiple political forces that formed Kefaya. Key activists and intellectuals of the centrist Islamic Wassat Party, notably Abul Ela Mady and Essam Sultan, hosted an iftar gathering to break the Ramadan fast. The diverse intellectuals and activists who attended coalesced to form the core of the new movement. The highly respected jurist Tareq al Bishri, one of the most important of the New Islamic scholars, wrote the first manifesto of Kefaya in October 2004. Bishri forthrightly called Egyptians to “withdraw their long-abused consent to be governed.”9 Kefaya’s embrace of democracy and reform and this explicit call for civil disobedience hung in the air until 2011.
The Tunisian people took to the streets first in December 2010 and drove Ben Ali, their ruler for some twenty-three years, into exile in just twenty-eight days. Egyptians responded and within eighteen days accomplished the upending of Hosni Mubarak and his dreary and corrupt dictatorship of almost thirty years. These momentous events rippled through Arab lands with reverberations in street protests by hundreds of thousands in nearby Libya and Morocco, but reaching to Jordan and as far as Yemen and Bahrain. These massive uprisings all articulated values and aspirations that drew on a shared Islamic cultural context. Everywhere, the cries of the people invoked Islam for inspiration.
It was the faces of ordinary Egyptians in revolution that I saw close up. They bore the traces of accumulated anguish and humiliation. Egypt’s people were the victims of the cruel neoliberal economic order, imposed by the West and enforced by Mubarak. “Structural adjustment” programs made Egypt the darling of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for its impressive rise in gross domestic product, while the conditions of ordinary Egyptians deteriorated. Regime cronies amassed fortunes in the billions of pounds. Income inequalities reached staggering proportions. Meanwhile, common people were routinely brutalized by the police and security forces. In such a context, the preeminent Islamic value of social justice has revolutionary potential. Ordinary Egyptians were forced to work themselves to an early death, literally, in order to survive day to day and feed their families.
It was not always so for Egypt’s people. The poor and the working class have memories of other times, shared with them by their parents. They have not forgotten that their families were once treated as human beings by their government. The invitation to revolution was indeed issued by the liberal middle-class youth. We should not forget, however, that workers in Mahalla, an industrial center known for its activist labor base, and labor elsewhere had already undertaken a series of brave strikes. Egypt has a proud history of independent initiatives by informally organized workers that is routinely overlooked. Women often played a prominent role among the striking workers. It was the workers’ strikes that first inspired the youth, not the other way around. Simple people, including those from the villages around Cairo, had also committed spontaneous acts of resistance, blocking highways to signal their local hardships. Periodically, anomic and seemingly chaotic disturbances erupted in the poorest neighborhoods of Cairo, Alexandria, and other large cities. Political oppression, economic grievances, and the endless humiliations of daily life of the mass of Egyptians drew them to the squares and to the improbable sense of hope the young people had stimulated. Hope became a historic force when al Nas embraced it. Suddenly, people believed that it just might be possible to end the tyranny. Those public squares, above all Tahrir Square, became sacred ground.
Egypt’s revolution in January 2011 was not an Islamic revolution in the Iranian sense, nor did politicized Islam in Egypt play the role it did in Lebanon or Palestine. The religious establishment in Egypt provided neither the leadership nor cadres to make the revolution happen. The Muslim Brothers came late to the square. They clearly did not speak for Islam in Tahrir Square. Nor did the Brothers hijack the Egyptian revolution. Egypt’s revolutionary moment was the work of al Nas, and the people spoke for Islam. It was that simple fact that bleached out the influence of Western political ideologies and strengthened its Islamic character.
Western scholars and pundits write all too often of Egypt’s revolution as though they believe that the West has a patent on core revolutionary values. If you call for bread (i.e., social justice), then you must be a socialist. If you call for dignity (i.e., the right to your own identity), then you are clearly a nationalist. If you call for freedom (i.e., liberation from a foreign-backed tyrant), then obviously you are a liberal. Therefore, the ideologies afoot in Tahrir were Western; they had nothing to do with Islam. Such absurdities pass without comment, even though a moment’s reflection by anyone with the slightest familiarity with Islam would make it clear that the Qur’an speaks clearly to humanity of social justice, human dignity, and freedom. These values are universal human values, and they have for 1,400 years been expressed in an Islamic idiom. No modern civilization, not even the powerful West, holds their patent. Al Nas quite clearly brought the spiritual into Tahrir Square from their own rich Islamic heritage. Islam was pervasive in the square, although, given these ideological blinders, not everyone could see it. Al Nas did not have to see it. They felt it. They experienced it directly.
With their gaze fixed on movements or mosques, observers have missed the real spirit of Islam that was pervasive in the square. Some have seen Islam only in the fiery Friday sermons in mosques that undoubtedly did galvanize some of the demonstrators who poured into the streets when the prayers ended. Others felt Islam’s presence only when the bearded Brothers raised their chants and veiled women called out the greatness of God. It is not that such perspectives are wrong, but rather that they understate and diminish the spiritual character of the uprising. In the end, Islam required neither the government-controlled mosques nor politicized movements. Its capacities exceeded both. Islam came to the squares with al Nas in the millions. They brought it with them as naturally as their prayers. It came as Islam itself. It came as Islam of the Qur’an and Sunnah that eclipses both mosques and movements.10
Few could see beyond the pain and suffering of the mass of Egyptians to their incredible reserves of resilience and undiminished capacity for hope, both nourished by their deep religious faith. For the largest numbers of Egyptians that meant Islam; for others it meant Christianity. The deep reserves of inner strength of Egyptians find reflection in their legendary sense of humor and the warmth of their family and personal relationships. Very few observers thought a revolutionary upheaval was possible in Egypt, precisely because they had little understanding of these reserves of strength. The Egyptian writer Belal Fadl, known as the author of “the have-nots,” was one figure with such awareness. For years, he has been telling the stories of the long-suffering but always resilient Egyptian people with insightful humor, compassion, and a balanced sense of the role of religion in their lives. His extraordinary work, although unknown in the West, reveals the hidden sources of impressive strength of Egypt’s common people. Fadl celebrated the centrist Islam of figures like the late Muhammad al Ghazzali, who comforted and inspired ordinary Egyptians.11 Readers of Fadl and others like him were prepared to see the spirits of ordinary Egyptians soar in those historic days in January 2011. No plausible explanation for the success of the January 25 revolution can sideline the role of the religious faith of Egyptians and the spirituality it made manifest in Tahrir Square. Al Nas in that sacred square reminded the world that the voice of God can still be heard in the cries of common people for justice.
Tunisia’s Rashid al Ghannouchi has spoken of Islam’s “overall upward curve” to characterize the trajectory of the Islamic Renewal.12 This global narrative of Islam’s rise provides the backdrop against which all developments across Islamic societies in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century must be assessed. To be sure, not all developments mirror the ascending arc. Great spiritual moments do not last forever. The pressing concerns of everyday life and more mundane politics, including the politics of Islamic movements, always reassert themselves. In recent years, important political movements that raise an Islamic banner have suffered serious blows. They include the Muslim Brothers in Egypt but also Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon. The terrible assault on the Egyptian Brotherhood has attracted the greatest attention. It has also occasioned the most serious misreadings of Islam’s future.
The Muslim Brothers in Power
In the wake of their revolution, Egyptians directly experienced democracy. A presidential election was held in two rounds in May and June 2012, and Muhammad Mursi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected by a slender majority. Among international monitors, the most prominent was the Carter Center, whose delegation was headed by the former president himself. Carter later reported in a press release that the center “confirms the integrity of Egypt’s latest parliamentary elections and its compliance with international standards of fairness.”13 A year later, on July 3, 2013, President Mursi was ousted by the military.
The record of governance by Egypt’s fifth president, and the first elected democratically, was decidedly mixed. Despite the weak record when once in power, it remains true that the Muslim Brothers had performed remarkably well in the electoral space the Egyptian revolution opened up. In the two years immediately following Mubarak’s ouster, Egyptians voted for the Islamic political alternative in reasonably free elections and monitored referenda at least six times. Not once did the secular and liberal parties mount a serious challenge to the Islamic parties. In March 2011 there was a referendum on the political path to be followed. There were votes in November 2011 and January 2012 for the two chambers of parliament. Finally, in May and June 2012, presidential elections were held in two rounds. In December 2012 there was a referendum to ratify the new constitution. The parties of politicized Islam triumphed in all these contests.
The electoral successes of the Brothers and the lightening of repression during the year when Egypt had a Muslim Brother president make the story of the military action and the subsequent all-out violent assault on the Brothers all the more disturbing. With the active support of the secular trends, a military junta seized power on July 3, 2013, and removed the elected Brotherhood president. The new regime then launched a massive and brutal repression of Brotherhood members, their supporters, and all others who challenged their dictatorship.
Islam One Thing, Islamic Movements Another
The devastating losses suffered by the Brothers and their supporters have led to the misleading judgment that Islam itself is somehow losing strength. That line of reasoning is not surprising: Western analysts routinely mistake Islamic political and social movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood for Islam itself. Loose talk of the “end of Islamism” has resurfaced with a vengeance. In the international corporate media especially, stock obituaries for Islam by Western experts have reappeared.14 We are alerted with playful but pointed irony to the possibility of “a world without Islam.”15 Portentous talk of “post-Islamism,” whatever the odd expression may mean, has become pervasive.16 This standard Western rhetoric has little to do with realities on the ground. The simple truth is that no attractive alternative has arisen to replace the inspiring promise of al Tagdid al Islami to bring justice to al Nas. A military dictatorship can crush a movement and destroy the individual lives of its members, but in the long run, it cannot easily eradicate a vision and a movement with deep historical roots and an impressive mass following, no matter how much power and American weaponry are at its command.
Safely ensconced in the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims, the “River of Life” continues to flow through landscapes where movements that claim the Islamic banner have suffered reversals. Midstream Islam does not recognize divisions such as those that pit the Muslims who support the Brothers against those who do not, secular Muslims against Islamic activists, Sunnis against Shi’a, and Arabs against Iranians. The misguided and often manipulated struggles of these factions, sects, and nationalities do not alter the fact that they are all Muslims, no matter how they may be labeled and mistreated on political grounds. The “River of Life” passes through them all, nurturing improbable Islamic communities on both sides of these artificial divides.
It is impossible to know whether the Brothers will rise again, although their history suggests such a long-term outcome is likely. It is more difficult to hope for the repair of Egypt’s secular trends. The painful reality is that although liberal youth were in the forefront of those who launched the January 25 revolution, the secular camp has from the first been far weaker than both the Brothers and the military and far less connected to ordinary people. In five free elections in the wake of Mubarak’s deposition, the liberals consistently polled miserably among the mass of poor Egyptians, whether those in crowded neighborhoods on the margins of the big cities or in rural areas. Unable to defeat the Brothers by democratic means, the secular opposition embraced the military junta. Their actions tell a calamitous story of a signal betrayal of human rights and democratic commitments by Egypt’s secular political class. Leading advocates of human rights and democracy threw themselves into the arms of the generals. Their sole objective became elimination of the Muslim Brothers. They showed themselves willing to sacrifice all values and commitments on that altar. Their betrayals have clearly dimmed Egypt’s prospects. Khalil al Anani, an independent Egyptian analyst, notes that they did not “read the history of similar experiences, where the military reached power and the price was decades of authoritarianism, corruption and tyranny.”17
Removing the Muslim Brotherhood President
The removal from power of President Mursi was not a simple military action: It had substantial mass support. Tamarod (Revolt), a movement of young activists that only appeared to be spontaneous, had organized a signature campaign for early elections to remove Mursi and reinvigorate the democratic spirit of January 25. Any account that leaves out the events of June 30, 2013, is seriously misleading. On that day hundreds of thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets, totaling in the millions in Cairo alone. Those who marched believed themselves to number ten, twenty, or even thirty million. They judged that they achieved the largest mass demonstration in Egyptian history. Standard objective measures of crowd assessment suggest far lower numbers, although definitive results have not been possible.
Whatever their exact numbers, it is clear that a rainbow of social forces, missing only the Islamic groups, had lost confidence in the president. Revolutionary youth groups had a strong presence, expressing their resentment at being marginalized, with their demands unmet. The voices of ordinary citizens expressed deep disappointment that so little had been done to meet their pressing needs. Secularists, having failed to defeat Islamic candidates in elections, seized on the demonstrations as a way to remove the discredited and hated Muslim Brothers. The majority of Christians echoed these sentiments and expressed even greater fears about what continued Muslim Brother rule would mean for their communities.
The demonstrators were divided between advocates of two very different pathways to ending the Mursi presidency. Many, most likely the majority, demanded Mursi’s resignation and early elections. They saw their movement as congruent with the democratic aspirations of the January 2011 revolutionary uprising. Others called on the military to remove the president, and thereby embraced a return to military rule.
Within three days of the onset of the mass demonstrations, the democratic experience had been terminated. Behind the screen of a hand-picked civil government, Egypt was once again ruled directly by a military strongman. Such a move could not have been made without an American nod. Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security advisor, was out front in subverting Egypt’s democracy. Rice called the generals just before July 3 to assure them that there would be no consequences to removing Mursi. Rice then called Mursi’s advisers to tell them bluntly, “You’re over. The generals are coming.” No great efforts were made to conceal U.S. complicity. The Israelis, for their part, had reportedly made Mursi’s removal a condition for their resumption of the sham talks with Palestinians to keep the smoke of a “peace process” coming. Within days, the meaningless negotiations did in fact resume. Inane talk from Washington of a “democratic transition” in Egypt once again clogged the airwaves of the corporate media.18
The spectacle of huge crowds imploring generals to depose democratically elected leaders has been repeated frequently in places like Buenos Aires and Bangkok, among others. Nowhere have they set the stage for a democratic transition. Those familiar with the history of the last half-century cannot be blamed for cautioning that the results of military take-overs and manipulated mass demonstrations have uniformly entailed violence, repression, and human rights violations. There was no real reason to think that things would be different in Egypt. What happened in Egypt in the wake of Mursi’s removal from power and arrest has little to tell us about Islam. That story must be told in a strictly political register.
The Political Narrative
Egypt’s current regime has been quite clear that the development of the country will take generations, not years. Meanwhile, to justify its authoritarianism the regime has been eager to wrap itself in a Nasserist mantle. The aura of a faux Nasserism that surrounds the new military dictator will be the most difficult to sustain. Tunisia’s Rashid al Ghannouchi incisively explained why. No admirer of Nasserism, Ghannouchi nevertheless recognized that, in addition to Nasser’s record of suppression of the Brothers and stifling of political freedoms more generally, his regime successfully advanced a bold and progressive agenda for Egypt. Ghannouchi comments that “the security and political oppression was obscured by a vast number of promising and very attractive cultural and political projects, such as land reform, the spread of education, the expansion of al Azhar, the liberation of Palestine, the unification of the Arab nation, anti-imperialism, and leadership in the non-allied movement.” In contrast, Ghannouchi asks, what project does the new ruler “carry for his people and nation, other than a pseudo-intellectual cover for brutal repression that has reached such low levels as to accuse the legitimate president of the ‘crime’ of collaborating with Hamas”?19 For all of these reasons, the new ruler’s improbable and poorly conceived recent attempts to drape his regime in an Islamic mantle have even less chance of success.
The presidential elections of May 2013 suggested that Ghannouchi’s assessment resonated in Egypt. The general had called for a massive turnout of some forty million or an ambitious 80 percent of the electorate. He didn’t get it. Made desperate by the shockingly low turnout on the first day of voting, the interim government extended the voting period by a full vacation day and threatened to fine nonvoters. The Muslim Brothers were not alone in boycotting the elections; the April 6 youth movement, their staunch opponent, echoed that call. In the end, outside observers estimate that the general won support from approximately 25 percent of the electorate. Even the official figure of 46 percent, challenged as inflated from all quarters, was a galling six points less than the 52 percent turnout that Mursi had received.
Assessing the Brotherhood’s Record
Clear-eyed and fair assessments of Muslim Brotherhood governance are now becoming possible. They include incisive critiques by prominent Islamic intellectuals.20 The Brothers did narrowly win an internationally monitored election for the Egyptian presidency. They did not win the right to speak in Islam’s name, but the Brothers in power acted as though they did. It also appears certain that some in the Brotherhood leadership came to see their movement as the driving and defining force behind the success of the 2011 revolutionary uprising. These patently false claims may well explain the arrogance that ultimately contributed to their downfall. The Brothers in the presidential palace made too little progress in restoring security, giving substance to their calls for social justice, and sharing power in meaningful ways with other political trends. They knew how to run mosques, social service projects, and entrepreneurial business enterprises, but administering state structures and engaging in the political give-and-take that governance requires was another matter. No transition from a thirty-year dictatorship to a democratic political system could realistically be dominated by one trend. No constitution written without the effective participation of a representative range of the nation’s political forces could hope to command legitimacy across the political spectrum. No majority party could display insensitivity to the legitimate concerns of women and Egyptian Christians and still claim to speak for the nation. The Brothers committed all these sins. They were self-inflicted, costly, and unnecessary. To be sure, Muhammad Mursi was only given a year. Moreover, there were important development projects in the works. They ranged from an ambitious development project for the Suez Canal Zone to enhancements of the food subsidies program. Unfortunately, time ran out. Miscalculations and plots overwhelmed the presidency.
President Mursi made his most egregious political miscalculation when in November 2012 he issued a constitutional decree that placed his presidential power above that of all other government branches, most notably the judiciary. From a presidential perspective, there was good cause for the decree that set off a firestorm of protest. The judiciary in place from the Mubarak era had set about systematically undercutting the president’s ability to govern. Nevertheless, his action looked very much like a power grab that would have placed the president above the law. The outcry was deafening: It included critical assessments by prominent New Islamic intellectuals, including Tareq al Bishri.21 The president reversed the order under intense pressure, but it was too late: Mursi had handed his political enemies the smoking gun. The dam broke. In the eyes of too many Egyptians, the president had completely lost the legitimacy his electoral victory had conferred. A wise and experienced political leader would have recognized that political reality, resigned, and established procedures for early elections. Egyptians in more than sufficient numbers had given Mursi a ringing vote of no confidence. For the sake of Egypt and for the sake of democracy, Mursi should have accepted that decision.
These were all political miscalculations that have nothing at all to do with Islam. There was nothing inevitable about the course of action Mursi actually took in the face of the massive demonstrations of June 30. The Muslim Brotherhood was never a monolithic bloc with a fixed authoritarian and theocratic trajectory dictated by its Islamic roots. Decisions emerged in the context of power struggles at the highest leadership levels that reflected competing policy orientations within the Brotherhood. Different factions had quite distinctive policy preferences. Outcomes were in no way predetermined.
The Islamic background of the movement did not preclude a more flexible and accommodating politics. Islamic critics of Mursi’s decisions make this case by contrasting the rigidity of the Brothers in Egypt with the flexibility of the Islamic Ennahda party in Tunisia. Egypt’s Muslim Brothers must be one of the most studied movements on the planet. At the highest organizational levels of the Brotherhood two factions were locked in a dispute over grand strategy for the society. A useful simplification would identify one group as reformers. They sought a less rigidly hierarchical organization, more inclusive of younger Brothers, and more open to contemporary influences of a globalized world. At the same time, they claimed continuity with that aspect of al Banna’s legacy that emphasized the proselytizing “call” rather than politics. Their goal was to work at the societal level to strengthen Islamic values and create effective Islamic social institutions. This faction was represented by some of the more sophisticated thinkers in the Brothers who also had closer relationships with the younger generation of Brothers. A second, conservative faction embraced these proselytizing goals but subordinated them to a drive for political power. The conservatives are sometimes referred to as Qutbists, although the label is misleading. This group did accept the political thrust of Sayyid Qutb’s later work. They did tend to have elitist attitudes. However, the conservatives, like the reformers, accepted peaceful, democratic change. They sought to come to power through the ballot box. The conservatives triumphed. They succeeded in driving deeper thinkers and politically more savvy and progressive figures like Abdel Moneim Abul Futuh out of the society.
Muhammad Mursi represented the second tier of the conservative wing. Nevertheless, during his year in office he did not make assertive efforts to use the presidency to Islamize Egyptian society. There was no concerted drive for the implementation of Shari’ah, although the issue did come up in discussions on the new constitution. There were numerous Brotherhood appointments to important governmental posts. Yet such a practice is standard everywhere when a new administration assumes power, although a government with only a very slim mandate should have exercised more restraint. Despite reasonable concerns about the placement of Brotherhood figures in key media and educational organizations, the national press and higher education under the Brothers were freer than under Mubarak, and infinitely more so than what the return of military rule would bring.
From the outset, Mursi worked within very strict constraints. The president was locked into both Camp David and the neoliberal economic order underwritten by the United States. American dominance of the Middle East region ensured that these economic and political frameworks would remain in place no matter who occupied the Egyptian presidency. The Brothers immediately signaled their compliance on both scores. Change that would benefit the mass of Egyptians would be difficult. In lieu of an alternative economic vision, the Mursi government concentrated, although without success, on finalizing an IMF loan as a passport for additional loans for investment and to plug the budget gap. The mass of Egyptians would have found their suffering increased even farther under such a solution, as Mursi realized. He therefore prolonged the negotiations by refusing to make concessions to the IMF that would have severely damaged the subsidy programs.
Even within these constraints, Mursi did find some room for maneuver. He was able to signal that a new orientation might just be possible. His earliest initiatives suggested that he might try to bring Egypt closer to the Islamic world. The president’s first trip abroad took him to China, and not to the West, and he made a point to visit Teheran early in his presidency. Mursi actively courted the best possible relations with Turkey. He relaxed to the maximum degree the border pressures on the Palestinians. None of these gestures represented a substantial reorientation of Egyptian foreign policy, but they did signal that a change might well be possible over the longer term.
Domestically, Mursi never effectively controlled the army, the police, or the security apparatus. As with the Americans and Israelis in the foreign policy arena, he had little choice but to bow to superior power. The president signaled that the privileges of all of Egypt’s military and security institutions would remain intact. Abuses of power by all three had long been an established part of Egyptian life. The abuses continued under Mursi, although at a lower level of intensity. Most egregious was the violence in Port Said during three days of protests that left forty-five dead, due to the disproportionate lethal force used by security forces.22 Overall, the government hand, especially on freedom of expression, was somewhat lighter during that one year of Brotherhood governance than in the thirty years before.
Opportunities were missed. The president could have exposed the mystifying nonsense of an Egyptian “deep state.” Deconstruct the concept of the deep state and you have a predatory and corrupt military, with massive and secret economic holdings, and a brutal police and security apparatus, supported by a bloated bureaucracy. An authoritarian ideology that the Egyptian people must be ruled by the rod justified this debilitating complex of structures. Mursi could have appealed directly to the people and explained honestly and openly just how retrograde these structures had become. At a minimum, he could have made clear in frank language just how little room for new initiatives he had. Many of his early supporters wondered what had become of the Mursi who, in a dramatic moment at the time of his inauguration celebration in Tahrir Square, had defied the assassins and opened his jacket to give his enemies a better target.23 What happened to that creative spirit of defiance that knew instinctively how to express itself in a way the people could understand? What had become of the bold leader who, in one dramatic swoop, replaced the Mubarak-era generals with a new cohort? Mursi could have acted to do something, anything for the mass of poor Egyptians so that they could see signs that the president stood with them. There were some gestures to the lower middle class, notably some salary and minimum wage increases. There were also efforts to protect and even enhance the subsidies for bread, critical to the masses on the edge. They were simply not enough. Moreover, on the macro level, the economy suffered. Foreign currency reserves dropped precipitously and the government was unable to defend the Egyptian pound. It steadily lost value. Since Egypt now depends on imported food, including the wheat staple for bread, the poor suffered disproportionately as the prices of imports rose. So, too, did public sector companies and the workers they employed.
The president’s hold on the people was slipping. Mursi was told all of these things by the wider array of Islamic and nationalist figures around him who were more in touch with society than his narrow inner circle of top Brotherhood figures. Mursi always listened politely, but he never acted. Even as his power slipped away, the president showed a complete lack of realism about just how tenuous his grip on the presidency really was. Instead of facing this reality and reaching out, he seemed to address himself more and more to the Brotherhood and less and less to al Nas.
All of these mistakes and missed opportunities took their toll. Any fair accounting of the Brotherhood experience must also acknowledge the dark forces of counter-revolution and reaction arrayed against Egypt’s first democratically elected president. The army, the police, and the security structures actively conspired against the president. The business elite that had thrived under Mubarak and had gravitated to his son Gamal joined their efforts. Elements of the old statist regime welcomed any and all opportunities to obstruct the president. The oligarchs who financed the destabilization campaigns and supported the efforts of the mobilized young people of Tamarod have been only too glad to tell the world of their hand in deposing the Brotherhood president.24
Throughout Mursi’s rule, the attacks by the opposition media on the Muslim Brothers were unrelenting, lacking in minimal journalistic standards and remarkably innocent of any factual basis. Mursi confronted a truly astounding range of conspirators, eager to bring him and the Brotherhood down. There was more. The judiciary, led by the Mubarak-era Supreme Constitutional Court, systematically reversed and undermined all attempts to build democratic institutions to fill the void created by the dark years of Mubarak’s dictatorship. Finally, the very fact that Mursi came to power via the ballot box alarmed regional states, notably including the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. They all feared a democratic contagion, although they masked that fear of democracy with useful but unfounded talk of the Brothers as terrorists.
From my Cairo apartment just outside of Tahrir Square, I got a look at garden-variety conspiracies close at hand. Years ago, I learned that the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz walked each morning very early through the streets of the city while most Egyptians slept. I have followed suit, convinced that the morning walk stimulated Mahfouz’s enormous talent. I concluded that a brisk morning walk held great hope for the improvement of my own writing; the logic seemed airtight. By the time I realized that it wasn’t, and that no noticeable improvement in my writing had occurred, it was too late: I was hooked on very early morning meanderings through the streets of central Cairo. Through all the tumultuous events of the last several years, I have walked just about every morning when in Egypt. In the months before Mursi’s ouster, the lines at gas stations seemed to start earlier each day and grow longer and longer by the time I doubled back to my apartment near the square. Then something wondrous happened for those beleaguered drivers: Within just a few days of Mursi’s removal, gasoline deliveries resumed and gas returned to the stations in Cairo. The lines disappeared. In parallel fashion, my investment in a huge electrical surge protector for my apartment was rendered unnecessary, thanks again to unknown forces. The electricity that had shut down periodically and fluctuated dangerously during Mursi’s year in power suddenly stabilized at a time when the military regime was cultivating popular support. Egypt’s new military rulers brought with them the blessings of gasoline and electricity—although I have noticed that the lines started forming again in the early summer of 2014 and cuts in electricity have become more frequent as well.
Dark Days of August 2013
In the wake of the military action against the elected president on July 3, 2013, the Muslim Brothers and their supporters turned their demonstrations in public squares into occupations. They created Islamic communities of nonviolent resistance of men, women, and children, displaying generosity and compassionate care for each other. These were assemblies of ordinary Muslims. Food was prepared for hundreds, a respectful security system was created, crude sanitation facilities were set up, and makeshift medical clinics were established. The occupation continued for some fifty-five days, extending through Ramadan with communal iftars, prayers, and various celebratory programs, highlighting the talents of children.
The military responded on August 14, 2013 with utter brutality, slaughtering approximately nine hundred in Rabaa al Adawiyya and another eighty-seven in al Nahda squares. Whatever the final count of men, women, and children killed and maimed, the massacre is quite clearly, as Human Rights Watch proclaimed, the worst mass killing in Egypt’s modern history. The regime had quite clearly committed a crime against humanity.25 In their investigations, Human Rights Watch found less than twenty weapons among the some thirty thousand demonstrators. When the merciless onslaught came, the demonstrators were unable to defend themselves. Their defenselessness gives the lie to the stories of armed terrorists threatening the public order. Not surprisingly, official Egyptian and Arab human rights organizations in the wake of Mursi’s deposing have lined up with the regime estimates of far fewer deaths and charges of crimes by the Brothers. They also put emphasis on the human rights violations that had occurred during Mursi’s year in power. However, subsequent charges against the Brothers and the trials of members have been flagrantly evidence-free and scandalously unmindful of the most fundamental legal procedures. In the face of the vicious repression, the Brotherhood and a growing number of diverse supporters, on democracy and legitimacy grounds, continued to demonstrate across Cairo and around the country in the aftermath of the slaughter, demanding the end of military rule and the restoration of the legitimately elected president.
At the heart of all these events stands the battered, deeply flawed, yet resilient and nonviolent Muslim Brothers. All agree that the Brothers displayed a damaging unwillingness to work constructively with other trends. There is not, however, the slightest justification in the best academic studies for the persecution of the Brothers as terrorists.26 Muhammad Mursi’s presidency lasted only one year, undermined by mass dissatisfactions, serious mistakes by the inexperienced president, quite real plots, and the shallow commitment to democracy of secular elites. However, without the help of an arrogant and close-minded Brotherhood leadership and an inexperienced and poorly supported president, it is hard to believe that Egypt’s democratic experiment could have been ended so easily. The Tunisian experience suggests as much and more.
Obstructions in Egypt, Openings in Tunisia
Outcomes in Tunisia are awkward for those who seek to read the end of politicized Islam into the disasters that have engulfed Egypt’s Muslim Brothers. The overall upward ascent of the Islamic wave has created impressive alternative reserves. In its fourteen-century history, Islam has consistently displayed the capacity to respond to a setback in one context by creative initiatives in another, more favorable to those who raise the Islamic banner.
This broad pattern can be seen most recently in the context of the historic fourth surge of Islamic Renewal that began in the 1970s and continues to this day. Comparisons between the experiences of Tunisia and Egypt are illustrative. Constructive developments in Tunisia respond to the serious setbacks in Egypt. This complementarity should occasion no surprise. The connections between the two peoples and the two Islamic movements are multiple and longstanding. From the outset, experiences have been shared as well as awareness of the dangers confronting political parties with Islamic roots from powerful secular forces.27 In October 2011, following the Tahrir revolution, a workshop was held in Istanbul for revolutionary activists, including representation from the Egyptian Muslim Brothers and the Tunisian Ennahda party. Discussing prospects for the transition to democracy, the participants identified two worrisome obstacles. They feared that remnants of the old regimes in both countries that remained entrenched in the military, police, judiciary, and bureaucracy would work to block revolutionary advances and undermine the democratically elected government. They also expressed apprehension that despite democratic rhetoric, the Obama administration and the EU would place their longstanding ties with authoritarian elites above the interests of the advocates for democracy. The military action against Mursi with American complicity and European vacillation confirmed the worst of these common fears.
In the face of these adversities, the Tunisian revolutionaries have quite remarkably managed to keep alive the promise of a democratic revolution and transition with a major role for the Islamic trend. Once again, diminutive Tunisia, with some ten million inhabitants and a mere 64,000 square miles, has made itself the source of outsized inspiration for all of Dar al Islam. Comparisons between Tunisia and Egypt are most often cast as the contrast between the Egyptian failure and the Tunisian success, but that framing distorts both experiences.
The January revolution in Egypt has historic importance worldwide. The Iranians produced the first mass revolution in the modern era that was not based on Western ideologies. Their achievement bore a distinctive Islamic stamp. It had its greatest impact in the Islamic world. Egyptians also drew in profound ways on their religious traditions, both Islamic and Christian, to give their January 25 revolutionary uprising spiritual depth. That meaning expressed itself in ways that transcended civilizational definitions. A revolution for “bread, freedom, and justice” could draw deeply on Islamic sources, but it could also speak for unbounded human aspirations. The Iranians in the end moved Muslims. The Egyptians, with their Tahrir Square revolutionary uprising, were widely seen to speak for human aspirations. Despite all the blood and pain of subsequent developments, Egyptians succeeded in making Tahrir Square in the heart of their beloved Cairo a symbol of an enlarged horizon of freedom for people everywhere. Only a short-sighted view would label such an experience a failure.
The paired notion of a Tunisian “success” also has problems. Unintentionally, it understates the difficulties of the struggles of the Tunisians. In Tunisia, there was no easy walk to freedom. There was nothing facile about the Tunisian story of a self-immolation that moved a small nation to seize its freedom from a corrupt tyrant. Daunting parallels, rather than simplified contrasts, should dominate comparative reflection on the revolutionary experiences of Egypt and Tunisia. For decades both countries were ruled by dictators who amassed overwhelming powers. Those repressive rulers enjoyed the unfailing support of major Western powers. Both created oppressive police states. Both the Egyptian and Tunisian public suffered from the effects of the neoliberal economic order the dictators enforced. The economic suffering of ordinary Tunisians bears comparison to that of the Egyptians. The Tunisians experienced as well political betrayals as opposition forces failed to coalesce and engaged in destructive infighting. Tunisians suffered the murders of key national political figures. In short, Tunisians, like Egyptians, faced barriers that should have been impassable.
At the same time, there were certain key differences. They went beyond Tunisia’s small size and homogeneous population and proved decisive in shaping the very distinctive outcomes of these parallel freedom struggles. Most important was the political legacy of the strongman rulers and the character of the contending Islamic and secular successor trends. While both Mubarak and Ben Ali ruled dictatorially, their political legacies differ markedly. Mubarak presided over the systematic deconstruction of the Egyptian state and the purposeful elimination of any independent political life. By the end of his tenure, the progressive achievements of the Nasser era had been totally vitiated. The feeble openings to a more democratic order under Sadat were summarily ended as well. During the Mubarak era, national political structures like the parliament were systematically hollowed out. Elections were voided of any meaning. The press was corrupted and manipulated. The independent judiciary was brought to heel by the appointment of subservient judges. Tamed opposition political parties, with their aging and discredited leaderships, all but disappeared in the shadow of the ruling party. Two classes of oligarchs ruled the country. First were the top-ranked military and security officers, with their monopoly of force and huge stake in the economy. Second in line stood the extraordinarily wealthy and flagrantly corrupt businessmen who flourished under the American and IMF neoliberal economic regime that Mubarak enforced.
The Tunisian political inheritance was much richer. It owed a great deal to Habib Bourguiba. Although a dictator, Bourguiba combined authoritarian rule with genuinely progressive developments. Studying in Bourguiba’s Tunisia in the 1960s, my wife and I were very aware of the pervasive presence of secret police and informers who numbered in the tens of thousands. They cast an unmistakable pall over public life. Political speech of even the mildest kind was criminalized. Yet we were also aware that authoritarianism did not tell the complete Bourguiba story. Under Bourguiba, Tunisia retained its Islamic character and Tunisians tenaciously preserved their Islamic identity. However, the government was insistently secular. The military was kept relatively small and placed firmly under civilian control. Tunisian secularists were unburdened by the cult of the “deep state” that cast a debilitating shadow over Egyptian political life. The Bourguiba regime accommodated a strong and independent labor movement with an organizational independence denied its Egyptian counterpart. It survived through the Ben Ali years. On the critical social fronts of women’s rights, education, and health, Bourguiba built the foundations for a substantial middle class and resilient political institutions. Particularly noteworthy is the 1956 Charter of Personal Status. This remarkable document enhanced women’s personal rights by abolishing polygamy, establishing a minimum age for marriage, and enabling women to initiate divorce proceedings. Beyond these matters of family law, the charter advanced women’s legal equality with men and explicitly ensured their right to education. These achievements survived the efforts of Bourguiba’s successor, Ben Ali, to dismantle them. Tunisians were able to mount their 2011 revolution on more solid social and political ground.
Revolutionary politics in both Egypt and Tunisia was dominated by a core clash of Islamic and secular trends. Yet again important differences marked the two experiences. There were important contrasts in both the context for action and the character of the respective political actors. Egypt is a major country that borders Israel. The West, particularly the United States, has consistently blocked or undermined its development and regional power aspirations. The aim, as with Iraq and Iran, is to keep such potentially influential states as weak and divided as possible. Tunisia, in contrast, is small, with far less impact on and importance to regional power politics, so it can safely be left alone to develop an independent political model, with no perceived risks for the United States or Israel.
In Tunisia, the actors on both sides of the Islamic–secular confrontation were also in some ways more experienced and sophisticated as political players. Tunisia’s Islamic trend was dominated by the Ennahda party and its impressive leader, Rashid al Ghannouchi, rightly regarded as a herald of the Islamic Renewal. Ghannouchi’s party was originally inspired by the Muslim Brothers, and Ghannouchi has consistently recognized the major historical contributions of the Brotherhood. However, Ghannouchi’s understanding of Islam has evolved in ways more progressive than the Brothers and closer to the thinking of Egypt’s New Islamic trend. Ghannouchi has maintained multiple ties with New Islamic thinkers, notably including Yusuf al Qaradawi and Salim al Awa. Although Ghannouchi is not an Islamic scholar by training, he is a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars headed by Qaradawi. In more recent years, Ghannouchi has been impressed as well by the advances in democratic practice and economic development by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, although his enthusiasm has cooled with the signs of authoritarianism in Turkey. Ennahda has displayed an impressive capacity to act effectively on the ground. The party has also demonstrated the wisdom not to push that advantage to humiliate and alarm other political forces.
Under Ghannouchi’s leadership the party has demonstrated an understanding of democracy that entails more than the elemental principles of majority rule and transfer of power through the ballot box. To win broad support, a democratic order also has to guarantee fundamental freedoms that make the political rights and political participation meaningful. Most importantly, democrats must find ways to respond creatively to the historic strength of the civilian secular trend in Tunisia. Tunisian secularists had confidence in their weight and popular support, sufficient to deal with the Islamic movement, even in the face of the substantial electoral strength the movement immediately showed. In this regard, the contrast with the Egyptian secularists is striking. Despite the long years of persecution and the exile of its leading figures, Ennahda had rebuilt its ground organization in the wake of Ben Ali’s overthrow. Almost immediately, Ennahda demonstrated great strength in electoral contests at all levels. Tunisia’s secularists monitored every move of the Islamists that might infringe on the character of Tunisian society. They responded quickly and forcefully when the Islamists raised the slogan of the implementation of Shari’ah or questioned the advances that women had made. Secular forces retained confidence that they could respond effectively to any excesses of the Islamic party and act to correct their infringements on the delicate balance between Islamic and secular influences that Tunisia had achieved.
When the Islamic movement came to power in Tunisia, there were miscalculations. The party did not take adequate steps to signal that power would be shared. Ennahda, as governing party, should have included more leftists in its first cabinet to reflect leftist strength in parliament. The party also failed to take adequate steps to rein in the Salafis and extremist militias at the neighborhood level who were prone to violence. At times, Ennahda politicians themselves indulged in rhetorical excesses against secularist political actors. Meanwhile, economic conditions deteriorated with Ennahda in power, and the party leadership showed no great skill in managing the economy. Most devastating for the stability of the country was the assassination of two popular secular political figures by extremists. Secularists responded with anger and determination not to tolerate such violence. There were large demonstrations and clashes in the streets. Tunisia appeared to be moving in the dismal direction that had almost destroyed neighboring Algeria in the long years of its bloody civil war between 1991 and 2000.
Then, the completely unexpected happened: Political leaders on both sides compromised. Most dramatic was a series of unprecedented concessions by the Islamic movement under Ghannouchi’s leadership. Early efforts to change the language of “equality” of men and women to “complementarity” were abandoned. During the discussions to draft the constitution, Ennahda dropped the drive for the inclusion of references to Shari’ah as the source for Tunisian law. In the new constitution, Tunisia was described as a free state, with Arabic its language and Islam its religion. There was to be no mention of Shari’ah. The Ennahda leadership accepted this formulation, despite the opposition of much of its base.
In the wake of the widespread disturbances caused by a second political assassination, Ghannouchi went still further. He did the unthinkable: Ennahda turned over power peacefully to a technocratic government and returned to the status of the loyal Islamic opposition. Clearly, the movement leadership had placed the well-being of Tunisia above that of the Islamic movement. While Mursi had seemed to turn from the Egyptian people to the Brotherhood in the face of such controversies, Ghannouchi moved in exactly the opposite direction with a stunning show of pragmatic wisdom. Militants in the Tunisian Islamic movement mounted their most serious assault on Ghannouchi for these compromises, accusing him of “trading in religion” to retain a leadership role in the power game. In the end, Ghannouchi’s long years of persecution and decades of exile under Ben Ali gave him the stature to withstand the attacks. He carried the party with him.
The spirit of the grand compromise enabled the constitutional process to go forward. Debates were tumultuous, and memories of political violence that took the lives of two secular leaders were fresh. The possibility that the entire constitutional project would collapse remained very real—but it did not. Ghannouchi was crystal clear in his analysis of what had, in the end, been accomplished and how. “Tunisians,” he explained, “have committed to the establishment of a pioneering model of political partnership between moderate secularists and moderate Islamists.” He identified the key to the success, noting that “bringing together the center in this way helped us adopt a constitution in January [2014] with the backing of an astounding 94% of the national assembly.” Ghannouchi, rightly, described the constitution as “among the most progressive in the Arab world.”
In Egypt, these same issues of the role of Shari’ah, the rights of women, and the character of state and society had driven a fateful wedge between the Brothers and Salafis, on the one hand, and their secular opponents on the other. The Egyptian Islamic journalist Fahmi Huwaidi bluntly pronounced that Ennahda was paying attention to the unity of the nation, whereas in Egypt the Islamic movement gave priority to the gains of the Brotherhood. Forthrightly, Huwaidi pronounced that the Muslim Brothers “should have been smart enough” to see the danger to the nation, admit their mistake, and treat other trends in a more inclusive and less divisive way.28 Concessions should have been made, Huwaidi argued. Instead, the Brotherhood leadership focused on clinging to power gains at the expense of the unity of the nation. In his reflection on the astuteness of Ghannouchi’s unprecedented compromise, Huwaidi invoked Qur’anic values. Contrasting developments in Tunisia and Egypt, he told his readers, reminded him of the Qur’anic story of Moses and the Golden Calf, recounted in surah Ta Ha. This surah raises the difficult issues of compromise and priorities. Islam’s worldly character, in the view of New Islamist thinkers like Huwaidi, means unavoidable confrontation of the dilemma faced when values are in conflict yet decisions must be made. As human beings go about the business of “building the world,” the issues they confront are not all about the clear conflict between good and evil; at times, choices must be made between two goods or between lesser evils. Yusuf al Qaradawi, whom Huwaidi cites, has written extensively of such value conflicts and the pragmatic, situational wisdom they demand. Muslims, Qaradawi insists, need a fiqh of priorities to help them navigate such dilemmas.
Huwaidi retells the relevant Qur’anic story in some detail. Moses was called by God to leave his people, the Israelites, in the care of his brother, Harun, to receive guidance from God. He was ordered by God to fast for thirty days. He advised his people accordingly. At the end of the thirty days, Moses broke his fast by eating the leaves of a plant to sweeten his breath. God then ordered him to fast for an additional ten days. When he returned to his people, Moses found that the Israelites had lost patience due to his delayed return to them. They had turned away from worshipping God and began worshipping the Golden Calf.
A deeply angered Moses chastised Harun for breaking his trust and failing to safeguard his word to God. Harun responded that he tried to persuade the people to desist but could persuade only a small number. Although he was aware of the seriousness of their transgression, Harun feared that if he pushed the matter and caused a split among the people, he would be subject to the reproach of his brother for dividing the Israelites. Harun had given priority to the unity of the Israelites. Huwaidi judged that in his “deeds of righteousness” that avoided civil war in Tunisia and preserved the unity of the Tunisians, Ghannouchi too had understood the pragmatic importance of the fiqh of priorities.29 He put the unity of Tunisia first.
Tunisia’s secularists managed to reach agreement on the basis of Ghannouchi’s compromise. They cooperated with the Islamic trend in producing a model constitution, thus laying the groundwork for a successful political transition to a democratic Tunisia. The secularists demonstrated their own political maturity by accepting activists of the Islamic movement as legitimate political actors. They did not press for a ban on their political participation, or worse, as happened in Egypt with such disastrous results. Ghannouchi could find in Islam the basis for principled compromise. The Tunisian secularists, for their part, reaffirmed a strong commitment to democratic principles that they extended to the Islamic movement. In a major address to the United Nations General Assembly in the fall of 2014 on terrorism and the means to counter it effectively, the American president singled out this historic success of Tunisians. Obama stated clearly and simply that Tunisia had given the world an example of the kind of positive change “where secular and Islamist parties worked together through a political process to produce a new constitution.”30
As remarkable as this constitutional achievement was, it did not mark the end of Tunisia’s historic achievements. In October 2014, with a democratic constitution in place, Tunisians held their second free and fair elections. For the first time, an Arab Muslim people had executed a successful democratic transition. Tunisians registered a political triumph that should be considered the single most important political event in the Arab Islamic world in the modern era. In Tunisia, in the context of intense citizen involvement, al Nas and a political leadership formed by both Islamic and secular trends achieved a successful democratic transition. The promise of freedom of the Arab uprising was not illusory after all.
The contrast with Egypt could not have been more painful. The Ennahda compromise had spared Tunisians the hysteria and despair that had gripped Egyptians who, in large numbers, had turned to the military to remove their democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president and install yet another Arab military dictatorship. The Tunisian triumph did not, of course, belong to the Islamic trend alone: The disparate secular forces in Tunisia, including leftist nationalists, progressives of various stripes, and former officials, had coalesced for the elections to form the successful Nidaa Tounes party. Ennahda assumed the role of democratic opposition and normalized the democratic transition. Ghannouchi drew the obvious and most important lesson from the Tunisian experience: “Despite what some believe, there is no ‘Arab exception’ to democracy, nor is there any inherent contradiction between democracy and Islam.” To be sure, Tunisia’s young democracy still faced daunting challenges, not least those of a failing economy and massive unemployment among the young. Both the Islamic and secular trends recognized these daunting challenges and the need for support to meet them. Ghannouchi, for his part, expressed appreciation for “President Obama’s positive citation of Tunisia in his speech before the United Nations in September.” However, with the American role in Egypt clearly in mind, Ghannouchi added pointedly that “support for our democracy must come both in words and action. The West cannot return,” he added for emphasis, “to the era when it perceived an illusory trade-off between stability and democracy.” The leader of the loyal democratic opposition in Tunisia concluded “that long-term stability cannot exist if our people are disenfranchised, our institutions monopolized and our youth disempowered. The choice between stability and democracy is false.”31
Islam, the “River of Life,” had found its way to both countries in turmoil. Islam had made itself a presence in both Egypt and Tunisia. Still, it was up to the “the builders of the world” to make the most of the opportunities Islam created. Neither success nor failure was preordained. We know little about how this “River of Life” works its effect. The only thing we do know with some certainty is that the “River of Life” is not running dry. Clearly, any effort to gauge its effects must do so with a broad lens. Perhaps the greatest mistake of observers is to narrow the focus for the sake of detailed studies. However, the interconnections that give Dar al Islam coherence may mean that the real drivers or inspiration of events in one site may well originate in some more distant part of Dar al Islam. No one incarnation can encompass the “River of Life.” Multiple incarnations coexist, and they may be complementary or contradictory. Islamic civilization, Muhammad al Ghazzali pronounced, invented pluralism and has thrived because of it. This multiplicity of expressions, all recognized as authentic, provides the resources for Islam’s extraordinary powers of absorption and adaptation.32 It exercises those powers while remaining everywhere and always Islam. Such was the lesson of the contrasting outcomes of Islamic parties in power in Egypt and Tunisia.
Humility in Knowledge of Islam
We should avoid making easy generalizations about the fate of politicized Islam and about the character of Islam itself. Clearly, we should write and speak of Islam with humility. Goethe, that Western sage and mystic, may have overstated the case when he pronounced that “a man doesn’t learn to understand anything unless he loves it.”33 There is something to the notion: Without at least empathy, understanding others different from ourselves will remain out of reach. To the degree that Goethe is right, the quest for understanding of Islam should pass through those who have come to love Islam and have made it a presence in their lives. Only in this way can we hope to catch a glimpse of what the faith means to those believers who act for Islam. It is only Muslims and others who love Islam who can feel what the “River of Life” means for any age. There is no pathway around believing Muslims or behind their backs to direct knowledge of Islam. Their experiences, their observations, and their representations of the faith cannot be ignored in any serious attempt to understand Islam in God’s world.
Islamic scholars know that God has spoken only once for Islam with the Word of the Holy Qur’an. Determination of the meaning of that Word for particular Muslims is always the demanding work of the human mind and the heart. As the Qur’an makes clear, such has always been God’s high expectation of humanity. Scholars also know that God sent the Prophet Muhammad as an exemplar of what it can mean to live the way that the “River of Life” makes possible. However, the Prophet’s struggles and resolutions of the challenges he faced cannot substitute for the strivings of other Muslims in other times and places to bring Islam into their lives and communities in ways suited to their own circumstances. The “River of Life” did not divulge the secrets of its life-giving, uplifting powers once and for all through the Prophet’s example. The Qur’an instructs that, by God’s design, there are no such secrets. The closest we can come are the diverse stories and distinctive reflections of those who have drunk deeply from the waters of the “River of Life” and learned to love the life its generative powers make possible.
Those who look to the river with the hubris to think they will learn its secrets risk falling into the trap of seeing only their own reflection on the surface of its waters. A great deal of what is taken to be knowledge of Islam in the West has this character of seductive self-reflection. Misplaced certainties about the nature of Islam more often than not represent little more than revelations of self. The Greek myth of Narcissus should be required reading for the army of Western commentators on Islam. Narcissus was a hunter of striking beauty, but his exorbitant pride in his appearance expressed itself in utter disdain for all those who loved him. He spurned the love of a gentle nymph who did not survive his insensitive rejection. As divine punishment, Narcissus was made to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool. He was so smitten by what he saw that he did not realize that he was merely looking at his own image. Unable either to consummate this love or to leave the perfection of his own image, Narcissus wasted away to death.34 The myth conveys a haunting warning against the perils of deadly self-absorption.
A seductive thread runs through a great deal of the Western work on Islam. It has little to do with commonalities and everything to do with scarcely concealed hostility. So much of the literature is simply an excuse for invidious comparison and mindless preening. The struggle to know more about Islam means abandoning the narcissistic pleasure of “mirror” literature that is really all about us. We pretend to be writing about Islam, but in reality we lovingly search out every flaw and every inequity in Dar al Islam and use it as a background to show up the absolute perfection of our own culture and historical trajectory, turning studies of Islam into the most flattering of mirrors.
To gain even a modicum of understanding of Islam and of the momentous events in Dar al Islam we need windows and doors, not beguiling mirrors. Astonishingly, the most important such windows and doors are willfully kept closed. Islam cannot give interviews or have conversations. Only Muslims can talk to us. Yet the assumption is pervasive that what Muslims say has little to do with what they mean and what they will do. There is no point in listening. Nor is reading what Islamic scholars write worth the effort. The educated Muslim classes know our most important thinkers. They read the books of our most distinguished intellectuals. Only rarely do even Western scholars who are specialized in the Middle East return the gesture of intellectual respect. The very notion is unthinkable to pundits and instant media experts. Of course, neither a single Muslim nor even a group of Muslims can speak for all of the world’s billion and a half Muslims. However, individual Muslims can tell us of their own direct experience of Islam. Experiences will vary widely. Some will have drunk deeply from the “River of Life” and Islam will have found its way to the very core of who they are. Others simply live on lands watered by the “River of Life.” For them Islam is simply one thread among the many that define their life patterns. Their story of Islam will be quite different, but it will be no less important for that.
To gain knowledge of Islam, we must interact with Muslims. Those who would know them need to come to such interactions with an open responsiveness and with a clear sense that brothers and sisters who have taken a different path are worthy of our respect and attention. Ibn Battuta, for all his personal indulgences and hyperbole, provides a far more instructive model than our own Christopher Columbus. Admittedly, exchanges in a spirit of open responsiveness to what others can teach us are difficult, especially for those who come from a country that considers itself “the indispensable nation.” It is hard to look beyond such a splendid self, but the myth of Narcissus warns of the dangers of losing the capacity to love others and learn from their experiences.
Yet perhaps Goethe demands too much. Love is not easy; it does not come by command, and the responsive openness to others that love requires proves especially difficult for the powerful. Michel Foucault has offered a useful minimalist strategy. It is more within reach but actually would accomplish a great deal. Foucault remarks that “the question of Islam as a political force is an essential question for our time and will be for many years to come.” With the utmost reasonableness, he then adds that “the first condition for treating it with a minimum of intelligence is that one not begin with hatred.”35
Today, the landscape in key parts of Dar al Islam is bleak, characterized by violence and ignorance. Circumstances are so dire that frequent speculation arises about Islam’s end. There are investigations of what would come after Islam, about what a world without Islam would look like. In such dark days, it might help to recall that those who give us authoritative characterizations of that landscape of despair and those who seek to monitor Islam’s fate in the world by the usual military, political, and economic measures have always missed the real sources of its strength. They have always gotten it wrong. Islam’s improbable and elusive power resides in the capacity to foster deep commitments from ordinary people. Those commitments are woven into the sense ordinary Muslims develop of who they are and what they can do.
These profound attachments of ordinary Muslims in the millions give Islam its startling capacity for reform and renewal, even in the face of devastating reversals. Ordinary Muslims rise from the ruins to make themselves the authors of extraordinary things. Islam itself demonstrates over and over its remarkable resilience.
The River Moves On
The narrative of Islam in God’s world opens in this book with the observation that in the modern era Muslim peoples have endured a period of relative weakness and decline by all the usual measures of power and prosperity. Yet Islam itself has gone from strength to strength. For decades this great contradiction has loomed with no resolution or even understanding of its import. The Islamic world did not experience the death of God. Islamic intellectuals did not share the pervasive sense in the West that the grand narratives of human history had come to an end. Quite the contrary, a fourth great surge of Islamic Renewal has been sweeping through Islamic lands since the 1970s, although the West has barely taken notice. In contrast, the response across Dar al Islam has been electrifying: Hundreds of millions are feeling anew the power of God’s Word and a heightened sense of connection to the ummah it had created.
Al Nas understands that Islam’s fate cannot be read from outcomes of the political history of Muslims, whether assembled in empires, states, or movements. The successes and failures of such groupings of Muslims tell precious little about the future of Islam itself. They are worldly chronicles whose denouements have most to do with leadership, strategic vision, and political capacities, as the recent experience of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt indicates. They are best understood in those circumscribed political and social terms.
Islam’s story unfolds in a very different register. It is always and everywhere the story of the values and higher purposes of the Qur’an. Jesus, the Savior of Christianity, returned to his Father in heaven. The Holy Qur’an, however, remained on Earth to provide guidance for humanity’s spiritual and worldly struggles. This difference is crucial for all that has come from the Message of Islam. Islam inspires humanity, articulates values and purposes, and sets limits. It is not implicated in outcomes. The story of Islam in the world has no predetermined ending. Islam carries no authoritarian or theocratic gene. The manner in which Islam itself manifests itself is always open-ended and pluralistic.
The Qur’an alone speaks in Islam’s name. Mosques and movements can contribute in extraordinary ways to the life of the ummah. They can also be captured and corrupted. The Message is secure only when safely ensconced in the hearts and minds of millions of ordinary Muslims. Addressed to al Nas, the Qur’an gives divine voice to values and higher purposes to guide an imperfect humanity. Islamic thought differs from philosophical thought in that its first premises originate from God rather than human reason or imagination. However, it is similar in that, like any system of thought, its elements are all related and developed from its first premises. Islam in God’s world is understood to come to humanity from the general to give meaning to the particular, from the absolute to guide the relative, from the fixed to govern the changeable, from the permanent to rule the temporary.36
Carried by the “River of Life,” the contemporary Islamic Renewal relies on the spiritual power of Islam itself to guide humanity in these ways. Islam made its first worldly appearance in a bleak landscape in seventh-century Arabia characterized by ignorance, violence, and war. The Message came from God. It addressed al Nas of Arabia and beyond. Through fourteen centuries a flawed humanity has responded. At best, there have been partial realizations of the Call to justice, equality, and freedom. There is always more work to be done, always yet another channel to widen, and always one more course to open. Today the obstacles to Islamic Renewal include daunting repression and destructive foreign interventions. The challenges include as well the terrible distortions by criminal extremist groups. The misdeeds of this minority are used to justify the campaigns of hatred and demonization that are regularly mounted against Islam itself.
Today the “River of Life” is making its way through a tumultuous landscape that is scarred yet again by ignorance, violence, and war. Yet not all the tumult generates despair. Against the odds, al Nas in Tunisia have bravely spoken and acted effectively for justice, equality, and freedom. Their success stands, however, against the powerful negative trends that dominate in Dar al Islam. Hope for the future resides in the knowledge that Islam made its first appearance in the world in just such difficult circumstances. The adversity of those initial circumstances paradoxically served to highlight Islam’s inherent strength and promise. Nascent Islam’s ability to rise above those circumstances and create an advanced and creative civilization continues today to inspire Muslims everywhere. As Muhammad Abduh explained: “How splendid is the wisdom of God in revealing the nature of Islam. Islam appeared as a River of Life, welling up in the barren desert of Arabia.”37