Adrift on the Nile
The Limits of the Opposition in Egypt
Article Summary
Bruce Rutherford’s Egypt After Mubarak is an ambitious effort to explain how the Muslim Brotherhood, the judiciary, and the business sector can work in parallel, if not exactly together, to influence Egypt’s political future.
STEVEN A. COOK is Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Egypt After Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World
Princeton University Press
2008
292 pp.
$35.00
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For Rutherford, the Muslim Brothers' evolution into liberal reformers is demonstrable, with the notable exception of their position on women's rights. Putting his Arabic to good use, Rutherford examines firsthand the statements of leading Muslim Brothers to present a thorough account of the organization's record over the past 30 years. Rutherford's narrative is compelling because, unlike many Western analyses of the movement, which tend to portray the Brotherhood as static, it conveys a sophisticated understanding of the Brotherhood's development. Rutherford demonstrates not only that the organization has not engaged in violence during this time but also that it has managed to participate in highly circumscribed elections despite being outlawed by making alliances with parties of various ideological inclinations and proffering electoral platforms that have been in many ways unmistakably liberal.
Still, if Rutherford shows that the Muslim Brothers have earned reformist credentials, he fails to explain why they have so transformed themselves. At first glance, he seems to be making a case comparable to that of the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas, who argued in The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe that the religious parties of nineteenth-century Europe eventually became the largely secular Christian Democrats of today for reasons that had very little to do with an ideological commitment to democratic principles. Rather, a combination of self-interest and political constraints confronting both party and church leaders unintentionally spawned the contemporary parties. Rutherford's account suggests that various political pressures and incentives have forced the leaders of Egypt's Islamist movement to pursue the path of moderation. This is an interesting insight, as it implies that the Brotherhood, like Europe's religious parties over a century ago (or, more recently, Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party), could evolve into a political group only notionally tied to religion.
Unfortunately, Rutherford does not fully explore these potentially rich historical comparisons. Instead, he extensively examines four Islamist intellectuals -- Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Tariq al-Bishri, Ahmed Kamal Abu al-Magd, and Muhammad Salim al-Awwa -- who he claims have influenced the Brotherhood's thinking. Although this discussion will be extraordinarily valuable for non-Arabic speakers, who would not otherwise have access to these thinkers' work, Rutherford overstates their impact. Of this group, Westerners are most familiar with Qaradawi, the host of an extremely popular al Jazeera program called Sharia and Life. Qaradawi advocates treating all Israelis as legitimate targets of suicide bombers (since they all serve in the Israel Defense Forces) but holds progressive positions on family law, the status of women, and political reform (he recently told Egyptian government employees to pray less so as to improve their productivity). Central to the thinking of all four theorists, according to Rutherford, is a particularly flexible interpretation of sharia. Unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, Rutherford claims, the Muslim Brotherhood is interested in establishing a state based not on a strict reading of Islamic law but on principles inspired by it that are inclusive and compatible with modernity.
Rutherford is so confident in this interpretation that he overlooks an obvious red flag. The flexible understanding of sharia favored by Qaradawi and others is indeed alluring, especially to Western audiences, but this elasticity is inherently risky. It certainly makes good politics to paint contentious issues or concepts in broad strokes; doing so guarantees mass appeal and leaves room for political maneuvering. Rutherford seems blithely unaware that these theorists' protean notions can just as easily serve authoritarian policies as liberal ones. The leaders of the Egyptian regime, for example, speak openly about reform and democratization, but they do so with enough ambiguity to nonetheless pursue an inherently antidemocratic agenda. Perhaps the Brotherhood's embrace of liberal principles is more authentic than that of Mubarak and his associates; certainly, its delegates in the People's Assembly have distinguished themselves as serious legislators by holding the government's feet to the fire on a range of domestic and foreign policy issues. But whether the Muslim Brothers genuinely are liberals is an empirical question analysts will not be able to answer until they actually govern. In recent years, arguments such as Rutherford's have been used to make the case that the United States should engage the Brotherhood as a progressive force for modernization and political change. Yet so far, the Islamists' ostensible commitment to liberalism remains more assertion than fact.
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