Adrift on the Nile
The Limits of the Opposition in Egypt
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Egypt After Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World
Princeton University Press
2008
292 pp.
$35.00
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It is hard to believe today, but just four years ago, the Arab world seemed on the brink of dramatic change. During the so-called Arab Spring of early 2005, Iraqis went to the polls for the first time since the demise of Saddam Hussein, Syria withdrew from Lebanon after one million protesters descended on central Beirut, and Saudi Arabia staged municipal elections. In Cairo, activists from across the political spectrum, having grown more confident and savvy, forced the regime of President Hosni Mubarak to cast itself as reform-minded, which loosened the reins on the opposition. The editorial pages of Western newspapers were asking triumphantly if the Middle East had finally arrived at that mythic tipping point.
Within the Bush administration, however, there was detectable unease, particularly when it came to the developments in Egypt. U.S. officials were worrying about how to react, not because they questioned President George W. Bush's "forward strategy of freedom" but because political transformation in Egypt presented a policy puzzle with no simple solution. On the one hand, Mubarak and his associates were profoundly unpopular; on the other, the opposition was thin on democrats and liberals and heavy on leftists, Nasserists, and Islamists, all deeply opposed to the United States. More broadly, the opposition was divided along fault lines that had vexed Egyptian politics for six decades. It was difficult to believe that these groups, acting alone or in a coalition, could dislodge Mubarak.
Since the July 1952 coup in which Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers dislodged King Farouk I, the central question confronting Egyptians has been, what should the state's central ideology be? At first blush, the answer seems obvious. Soon after seizing power, the Free Officers abandoned their plans to reform Egypt's political system in favor of a new order based on nationalism and an ill-defined variant of socialism, and they quickly established unrivaled authority, which their descendants still exercise today. Yet contemporary Egyptian leaders have repeatedly had to fend off deeply attractive alternatives to the regime built by the Free Officers. With the Egyptians preparing for an inevitable transition -- this year, Mubarak will celebrate his 81st birthday and the 28th anniversary of his rule -- the competition is on the upsurge. The main contender, as ever, is the Islamist movement.
Although the stakes of a change in leadership in Cairo are considerably lower for U.S. policymakers and analysts than for the Egyptians, the prospect has sparked a lively debate in Washington. A recent addition to the conversation is Bruce Rutherford's Egypt After Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World. Readers looking for the inside story on who will succeed Mubarak will be disappointed; there is little gossip in these pages. (Speculation is that Mubarak's son Gamal is being groomed for the top job.) But they will nonetheless be rewarded by Rutherford's ambitious effort to explain how significant political actors, specifically, the Muslim Brotherhood, the judiciary, and the business sector, can work in parallel, if not exactly together, to influence the country's trajectory over time. This is a novel approach to analyzing Egyptian politics, the conventional view being that although Egypt's leaders confront myriad economic and political challenges, the state is rarely, if ever, constrained; it just has too much firepower at its disposal.
BROTHERS' KEEPER
A perennial target of this firepower, sometimes literally, has been the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928 to save Egyptian society from what he thought was the West's depraving influence. The Brotherhood's mission was to re-Islamize Egypt from below through preaching, education, good works, and even (between the 1940s and the 1960s) violence. It hoped to foster among the Egyptian masses so much demand for a system based on Islam that Egypt's leaders would have to either submit or be swept away. When the Free Officers Movement began to crystallize in the late 1940s, it found allies in the Brotherhood. Not all of the movement's members shared the Brotherhood's desire to build a society closely hewing to Islamic law, but they endorsed its abiding opposition to the West's colonial project in Egypt and the greater Middle East. The Free Officers and the Islamists embraced the same nationalist project.
In the almost 60 years since the Free Officers' coup, much has been written about the Brotherhood and its relationship to the Egyptian political system. Nowadays, Western observers tend to be split in their interpretation of the organization. At one end of the spectrum is The Wall Street Journal, which editorialized in the spring of 2005 that the Brotherhood represents a genuine political movement that Washington cannot ignore without undermining its case for promoting democracy in the Middle East. At the other end are the skeptics, who consider the Muslim Brothers to be extremists. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney summed up this sentiment during a Republican presidential primary debate in 2007 by jumbling together Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood into what he called "the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate." Between these two groups are scholars with a more nuanced view, who claim that the organization has evolved, with its younger leaders embracing accountability, transparency, tolerance, and the rule of law as part of their project for Egypt. Others, although also recognizing recent changes in the Brotherhood, are less sanguine about the group; after all, it has never repudiated its historic goal of establishing an Islamic state based on an inherently antidemocratic interpretation of sharia.
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