Egypt showed the basic flaw of the Western appeasement policy toward Islamists. To label the Muslim Brotherhood in the so-called Arab Spring as moderate Islamists was the usual euphemism. Morsi’s defeat may represent a defeat for the decades long pro-Islamist policy of most of the Western policy establishment. More generally, this defeat in Egypt may represent a turning point for the Muslim Brotherhood –not only in Egypt– the start of a slide downhill, starting slowly at first, maybe gaining momentum further down to swing back to – granted semi-democratic – secular and efficient Atatürk models. Specifically the Syrian conflict has morphed into a multiplayer geopolitical chess game. With Iran fearing the loss of a key ally, Turkey aspiring to dominate a post-Arab Spring Middle East, the Saudi-Qatari axis spending billions to unseat Iran as a key strategic player, and the US and Russia fighting over a remaining spheres of post-Soviet influence, the Syrian conflict still awaits a meaningful outcome saving the lives of the secular elite and religious minorities.
The Muslim Brotherhood has a long history.After the military coup of July 1952 in Egypt there was a power struggle in Egypt. Gamal Abdel-Nasser wanted to introduce socialism, the Muslim Brotherhood theocracy. All Islamist terrorist movements accrue from them, not only in Egypt, but all over the world. The President Sadat destroyed them, but later, the terrorist group Al-Dschamaa al-Islamiyya, killed him because he has closed a peace treaty with Israel. This in turn led the successor Hosni Mubarak, who expanded the police state.Some of the Islamist fighters had to flee from Egypt and, in Afghanistan, with Saudi money and American weapons fought against the Soviets. The al-Qaeda terrorist network as founded. The political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood remained active in Egypt and built a glorious international conquest represented in over 70 countries and lobby for their cause. The aim of the association was like creation in the 1920’s, the Islamization of Arab States, then to conquer the world.
After the Arab revolutions two and a half years ago, they saw the goal near. Through democratic elections they succeeded in the conquest of Egypt and Tunisia. The West has not understood in Egypt as in Syria and Istanbul, that there is now third force in the eternal battle of military interference against militant theocracy – the highly politicised (and often secular) society. President Mursi, shut down democracy and adopted decrees, which guaranteed him absolute power. The opposition was excluded, the state intuitions were being undermined, critical media legally prosecuted. After only one year term of office, the disappointed million were back to the road. The deposing of Mursi an the Muslim brotherhood was a necessity. Because the Egyptian Parliament has already been dissolved, there was no other option, except to initiate a vote of no confidence against an president turned dictator than mass protests.
The army also had its problems with Morsi and his entourage. The Muslim Brotherhood called for Jihad in Syria on the Egyptians, what displeasure within the army. In addition, there is the Morsis amateurish economic policy, the country to ruin. The Muslim Brotherhood suffer from their poor understanding of democracy. They think democracy is the right of the majority, to do everything and allow what it wants, without having to be held accountable to. One of the terms that they used in the elections: your victory over the forces of liberalism you designated as “gazwat-al-sanadiq” (battle of the ballot boxes).
The word gazwa (robbing campaigns) refers to Prophet Mohammed who led Islam against the Unbelievers in 7. Century. Just did the Islamists with their political opponents. They immediately referred to them as “unbelievers” and they excluded them of negotiations on the new Constitution. Now Anti-Mursi-demonstrators and the Allied army could mobilise masses while the brothers were no more able to. That is why Muslim Brotherhood relies on violence.
The future of Egypt is uncertain. One option is the Algerian scenario. When the Algerian Islamists at the beginning of the 90s lost power, they covered their countries with terror and violence. To be reminded, the USA favored the Islamist takeover after Algerian Islamists won the elections in 1991. The ruling faction there, originally called by the grandiose name, National Liberation Front [FLN] –as if they were liberators– did not let the Islamists enjoy their electoral victory. This set off a civil war in which the Islamic Salvation Front [Front Islamique de Salut — FIS] proved their salvation credentials much as the FLN proved its liberation credentials. The Islamists especially slaughtered, killing many tens of thousands indiscriminately.
A better mode would be the Mustafa Kemal Atatürk model: the army retains the same privileges, is obliged to go with the democratic process and to act as a guardian of the constitution. In a fragile democracy, this has been always the best possible solution.The reforms undertaken by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk after the creation of the Turkish Republic put Turkey ahead of other regional countries and made it a model today for Arab nations grappling with unrest. The same holds true in the Occupy Gezi protest. Though there were signs of a similar highly politicised society presence in Taksim and Gezi, the army has chosen to watch from the sidelines. However, as the Gezi movement has moved forward it has begun to make some historic inroad, even as the Islamist Turkish government will retreat. 1924 was when the last caliph — Islam’s supreme religious and political leader, the Prophet Mohammed’s heir — was deposed, thus abolishing the 1,400-year-old institution of the caliphate, and sending all members of the Ottoman dynasty into exile.
In Syria, the West and Turkey have been promoted the rise to power of Muslim Brotherhood governments in Sunni Arab countries. Syria was once dominated by Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shiism, considered heretics by Sunnis (but as Muslims by Shiites, at least as long as convenient). Obama’s first trip abroad after taking office as president was to Ankara, where Erdogan –a veteran Islamist– had successfully subdued his possible political opposition in the army and the judiciary, installing his own men, and had adopted an aggressive pro-Islamist foreign policy with overtones of nostalgia for the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Obama’s second trip abroad, in June 2009, was to Egypt where he was going to make the Arab and Muslim worlds love America, while he forged an alliance of sorts with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Obama brought the Muslim Brotherhood out of official political ostracism in Mubarak’s Egypt. Promoting political Islam has been the real foundation of Obama’s Middle East policy, which Putin thinks it is insane. Yet this pro-Muslim brotherhood policy had to be further revised after the Arab Spring. To be sure, when crowds in Tahrir Square in Cairo –January-February 2011— called on Mubarak to leave, Obama echoed those calls and also stated that an Muslim Brotherhood govt in Egypt would be acceptable to the United States. To be sure, the real US foreign policy as shaped by the State Department, CIA and other agencies, was never smart. But it never has been so blatant as it is now under Obama.
Now the West and its media is feeling sorrowful over the overthrow of the Muslim brotherhood president of Egypt, Muhammad Morsi, as an anti-democratic act although the overthrow is supported by tens of millions of Egyptians. It is often claimed in American and British media that Morsi was elected in free and fair elections. What they conveniently forget is that Morsi as a stalwart Muslim Brother despised democracy and human rights, just using the lofty slogans of democracy and human rights when it is advantageous for them to do so. Amr Hamzawy, a liberal member of the dissolved Parliament and prominent political scientist, wrote in an NYT online commentary. “Egypt is facing a horrifying coup against legitimacy and the rule of law and a complete assassination of the democratic transition.” The recent popular outrage against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, culminating in their overthrow, is a good thing. It puts the West in a quandary. What to do now, now that a political instrument cultivated and favored for years, has been rejected by the masses in the most populous Arab country? Are the million of Egypt’s now activists like the rebels labeled “activists” in Syria?
Excerpt : Don’t view Egypt’s coup with a Western lens
A chorus of liberal US foreign policy voices admitted red- faced the ouster of Egypt’s incomptent president, Mohamed Morsi. This was a “good military coup” that American liberals should support, they complied to common sense, because it was done in the name of the people, it advances progressive values, and most importantly, it removes political Islamists from power and opens the door for Egyptian secularists.
This coup marks a colossal setback for the prospects for a democratic Egypt. An intractable and unaccountable military has returned to the center of politics, a fact that makes the US Democrats voices cheering Morsi’s ouster all the more astounding. Such approbation, however, reflects a deeper Western philosophical problem: namely, how to think about the development of democracy in Muslim societies.
This philosophical problem is both historical and cultural, and it has contaminated intellectual debate in the West on Muslim societies for centuries. It is fundamentally a problem of enduring Euro-centrism; a reluctance to understand the Islamic world through the prism of its own historical experience instead of the Western one. The essential questions are: Can we think differently about the relationship between religion and political development? Are there alternative paths to modernity whereby Islamist groups can effectively contribute to democratization?
The modernization experience of the Arab-Islamic world has been qualitatively different from the Western one. For complex reasons rooted in the failures of the post-colonial state, modernization has produced strong religious-based opposition movements and weak secular groups in deeply polarized societies.
As many had predicted, the Brotherhood’s first attempt at exercising power highlighted its incompetence. Morsi made one bad decision after another and his party’s popularity plummeted. The Brotherhood was headed for certain defeat in the coming parliamentary elections.
All of this suggests a need for rethinking the Western approach and assumptions about the struggle for democracy in the Arab-Islamic World. The standard formulas and paradigms, drawn from Western history, as to which political constituencies are better agents of democratization, break down upon examination. This also applies to political struggles in “established” Muslim democracies such as Turkey and Indonesia, as well as in “developing” democracies such as Tunisia and Morocco.
For those who seek a genuine understanding of challenges facing democracy in the Middle East, what is required at this moment is a degree of humility and reflection about a coup that topples a islamist government, regardless of how undemocratic that may be.