The obvious conclusion from Egypt is that political Islam’s ‘concordat’ with democracy has proved a failed experiment. The few willing to undertake a deeper and more insightful analysis of the dynamics of political Islam as unfolded in Egypt are led to conclude that the problem is not democracy but the lack thereof. The right lesson to learn is that the still embryonic democratic culture in the Middle East is to be defended against the illiberal, valueless secular elites and powerful civil-military bureaucracies that pay lip service to democracy while vying for the maintenance of their own power and influence with blessings of their foreign mentors. That is why the coup in Egypt is to be rejected and opposed.
The heart of the matter and the bitterest lesson is what Patrick Galey has said in “The Day the Revolution Died”, “I’ve learned a basic and terrifying truth today: that many would rather see a military junta rule with impunity and autocracy than see a democratic administration govern with fecklessness and error. That many people who call themselves revolutionaries and advocates of democracy simply hate Islamism more than they love freedom.”
The right lesson for societies in transition is to create infrastructure salubrious for democratic values and practices to take root. Democratic institutions need to tame down and cut to size emboldened militaries with a history of political intervention. Mohamed Morsi’s greatest failure was in not being able to create constitutional checks and balances against the unwarranted interference of Egypt’s powerful military, and in his ineffective dealing with a variegated and vociferous opposition. Without such measures to let democracy take root, it will remain on life support with the ever present threat of the military boot stomping the life out of it. The right lesson is not less but more democratisation from the grassroots — social, economic and political — so that the balloting exercise has more meaning and the legitimacy of the results it yields commands respect.
The consequences for political Islam have been graver still. The Egyptian experiment is a significant let-down for the moderate voice that had reconciled Islam with democratic practice. Through its double standards and complicity with the brutal military that ousted Egypt’s democratic government, the west has ignored this far-reaching consequence to its own peril.
We cannot bury our head in the sand when it comes to Morsi’s fatal mistakes that showed a lack of understanding of complex issues. Given the fact that the Brotherhood is the most well organised Islamic political group with decades of struggle behind it raises an important concern about the development of leadership in the Muslim world. The vital need is to develop a comprehensive strategy to chisel visionary and pragmatic leadership that possesses fidelity to the faith and yet is conversant with modernity and is poised for mediating between the polarised extremes in Muslim societies.
Events in Egypt also expose the juvenile euphoria over the Arab Spring and the ‘revolution’ in Egypt. Students of history are aware that revolutions are bloodstained and often in vain, seldom yielding enduring change. Lasting change follows a bottom-up trend, rising from the grassroots. It is engendered through a gradual and consistent evolutionary process. Gradualism is an important insight employed by the Quranic method of social reform. Groups calling for revolutionary change to install Islamist regimes are terribly misguided. Such a revolutionary change will rest upon feet of clay.
The polarisation of Muslim societies into the religious and the secular is likely to create wide and irreparable rifts that will threaten social stability and solidarity and flare up in times of crisis. Few in the Muslim world have deciphered this writing on the wall. Egypt’s political showdown stems from its deeper ideological crisis gnawing into the roots of its body politic. Conflicting aspirations of the secular and the religious made the country virtually ungovernable. This ideological rift running like a tectonic fault line through society made the achievement of a consensus over just about everything impossible to reach.
In a desperate, sincere, but ill-advised attempt to ‘defend’ Islam from the assault of the powerful secular-liberal lobby, Islamists become more insular and exclusivist. It results in two embattled ideologically opposed camps with strong in-group solidarity and out-group hostility. Islamists must realise that given the resourcefulness of their opposition and the backing and support from powerful western allies, such a clash will be hard, long-drawn and ugly. They must learn that by being on the defensive and ghettoising, they bring the clash closer and lend strength to the polarisation.
The right lesson for Islamic leaders is to actively work to prevent such an eventuality through education and dissemination of ideas that do not deepen the rifts but reach out by speaking in a universal, inclusivist voice. They must be ready to take up the grand project for social reform by infiltrating into the rank and file of a stratified, broken society and not under narrow parochial labels and confining banners of ‘Islamic’ or otherwise.
Organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood would be well advised to hold off the political struggle and prioritise the bigger social project that is less exclusivist and less essentialist. This will help create leadership for the wider community, the academia, the media, courts of law and the civil-military bureaucracy. The political struggle not needing to be called by a label can then be erected on surer footing grounded in an ideological framework that is inclusive and all-embracing, visionary and pragmatic, faithful to its religio-cultural roots and yet confidently forward-looking and willing to engage.
And at the end of the day it all boils down to what lessons we choose to learn from Egypt.
The writer is a social worker, teacher and columnist and can be reached at [email protected]