What
triggers the research for this volume is how Egypt's liberals could firmly
stand behind the military coup of July 3, 2013, and further justify the bloodshed
of hundreds in Rabaa and El-Nahda squares that followed a few
weeks afterwards. For the editors and the contributors alike, the support and
the justification are mind-boggling. Regardless of excuses, the book finds that
in throwing all their weight and legacy behind the military establishment,
Egypt's liberals become themselves victims. How so? Given their biases against
the Islamists, figures like Mohamed El Baradei, Alaa Al-Aswany, Ibrahim Eissa,
Dr Saad Eddin Ibrahim, and Mohammed Abol Ghar, among others, grossly
exaggerated the Islamists' threat, mistook their target, and misread the
motives behind calls to unseat President Mohamed Morsi. At heart, the military
dictatorship was never against the Brotherhood or the Islamists as such, that
is, for ideological reasons. General Sisi and members of the deep state were
against the democratic experiment itself. The military establishment could
neither fathom nor pardon whoever took part in the revolution of January 25,
2011, forcing President Mubarek, another deeply-entrenched military, to
abdicate. As soon as General Sisi was done with the persecution of Islamists,
he immediately turned his fury against the liberals, some of whom contributed
to this volume. Even when all contributions in the book do not explicitly
highlight the benefits of the liberal predicament in the country, the evidence
each contribution brings specifies that anyone who dared to actively imagine a
future for Egypt outside the immanent framework in favour of the military has
been targeted. Given their predicament, the liberals have never ceased on this
basic reality. That explains why liberals of Egypt keep crying over spilt milk.
For it is precisely they who are completely passed over by the new order they helped
to bring and sell as a national necessity for Egyptians.
The
book contains four sections, counting exactly twelve chapters (the introduction
included) and a conclusion. Like with all edited volumes, not all contributions
merit the same attention, particularly when attending to the predicament of
liberalism in Egypt. That explains why I am examining only those critical
contributions that engage with that predicament.
Daanish
Faruqi and Dalia F. Fahmy's introductory chapter leads readers that the
insurrection against President Morsi was a popular demand from the outset.
Still, they think that liberals should have practised restraint and not fall in
for supporting the counterrevolution, military or otherwise. By liberals, the
editors trust in self-identification. Still, the book ensures that the liberals
it refers to are not armchair intellectuals or fair-weather political activists
(p. 4). Rather, most derided liberals have been outspoken individuals for
democracy and the rule of law. Some suffered under the pre-2011 ruling
establishment by languishing in prisons or being forced to exile. In order to
make a case for the problematics of the book, the chapter contrasts such
self-proclaimed liberals' and democrats' statements before and during the
revolution against other statements and positions taken after the rise of the
Brotherhood's candidate to power in June 2012. Indeed, the chapter finds that
the liberals' substitution from initial commitments for civil society, freedom,
and democracy has "emboldened the nation's recidivism into authoritarian
rule" (p. 10) despite a long legacy that calls for democratic order,
freedom and the rule of law.
Chapter
Two: Dalia Fahmy studies the structural illiberalism of Egyptian party
politics. For the 2013 coup is now read as an instantiation of "an
illiberal political order, enshrined and perpetuated at a systemic level."
(p. 31) As parliament under President Sisi becomes a rubber stamp for formalising
the illiberal will of the executive, Fahmy is understandably enraged. That rage
translates into the evaporation of decades-long liberal activism. She
encourages readers to register the extent of civic and democratic regression.
Indeed, the coup of July 2013 has turned "a healthy system of party
politics not only absent but has been rendered constitutionally impossible."
(p. 53)
Following
the structural approach that Fahmy starts, Hesham Sallam,
in Chapter Three, examines how the illiberal practices during Nasser and
Sadat's rule, mostly characterised by pitting Islamists against liberals, have
impacted contemporary liberals distrust of Islamists. A healthy polity can be
founded—the chapter claims—by uniting the activism of both liberals and Islamists,
and this can only be achieved by bypassing the preexisting and decades-long
divide. Considering the period from the 1952 coup to 2011, Sallam finds that "the
organisational asymmetries" (p. 83) between, on the one hand, the
Islamists who clandestinely built their networks given their illegal status and
the liberals, on the other, the state granted official status but
simultaneously stifled their every move spelt in the long run that the Muslim
Brotherhood stands in 2011 at an unparalleled advantage overall political
actors including the military. Undoing an unhealthy and deeply polarising
political arena can set the state for both Islamists and liberals to stop being
pawns for the military, each time played against one another by giving the
illusion at one point that it pampers the Islamists (between 2011 and early
2012) at another, the liberals (between late 2012 to 2013 and afterwards) while
in fact, it approbates none but the eternalisation of its order.
Mohamed
Elmasry, in Chapter Six, addresses the fortunes of
civil society through the media. In particular, the chapter traces the
illiberal turn of celebrity journalist and novelist Ibrahim Eissa who
systematically demonises the Brotherhood through his live shows. Eissa's
example underlines how pretending liberals sold ordinary Egyptians the
reductive image that President Morsi and the Brotherhood from which the latter
emerged as incompetent and an existential threat to Egyptians: "outright
treasonous to Egyptian state and society" (p. 176). Hysterical portrayals,
entrenched in myths than in anything else and of the sort propagated by Eissa,
led Egyptians to uncritically embrace those hegemonic narratives which paved
the way for entrusting the military: finding no qualms with coup nor the massacres
and other human rights abuses that followed.
In
Chapter Nine, Ahmed Abdel Meguid and Daanish Faruqi find that both liberals and
Islamists are more complicit in the climate of mutual distrust than what each
is willing to admit. Worse, they both trusted uncritically in statism, the
logic which finds only state a means of carrying out the presumed needful work
of social engineering. Theoretically clouded, they both sought "a
Hobbesian conception of the nature and role of the state as the sole and ultimate
interpreter and implementer of the Egyptian social contract" (p. 254). This
chapter finds the logic of statism that explains frenzied and depleted mindsets
between 'frenemies' that naively handed the keys to the military-led counterrevolution.
Elevating the state to the point of invisibility at the expense of the
individual's liberty results in illiberalism, pure and simple. And here comes
the liberals' historical alliance with elitist postures as they classically
distrusted the populace, viewing common men as little more than mouths to feed
and flesh to cloth. The two contributors find that well before Nasser's coup of
1952, "liberal figures increasingly welcomed the idea of a left-wing
reformist dictatorship, or a "just tyrant" (al-musta'bid al-‘adil)
to emerge and create the conditions for a liberal civil society, purge
the existing political order of its corruption and patronage networks,
and then to forcibly inaugurate the modernist reforms they sought"
(p. 263) Therefore, liberals' reaction to Sisi's coup of 2013 did not
constitute a rupture, but rather a continuum, even a historical totality with
earlier liberals' firm and biased approach against ordinary Egyptians. Hence
the chapter calls for an invigorating brand of liberal politics that goes
beyond the constraints of state and statism because that logic can ruin the
chances for a positive change, ushering in an era of post-statism.
Chapters
Ten and Eleven can be read together as Emran El-Badawi and Joel Gordon contrast
the careers of eminent liberal activists. El-Badawi compares the Egyptian Gaber
Asfour and the Syrian Buran Ghalioun. This study finds that liberal activists'
public engagement remains opposed to their theoretical excitations regarding freedom
and civil liberties. The contrast evinces severe limitations. How so? Liberal
activists remain staunchly statist and vehemently against political Islam. This
explains why they could not mobilise the masses (p. 297). For her part, Gordon
juxtaposes Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany with the satirist Bassem Youssef. Gordon
finds, never falter from a long string of liberal luminaries in contemporary
Egyptian history, such as Taha Hussayn and Muhammad Husayn Haykal, as they
internalise secular versus religious binary division. Nowhere this internalisation
manifests more than in how the counterrevolution of July 2013 capitalised on
the presumed threats such as the "Brotherhoodization" of the state.
Liberals' flirtations with fascism during the 1930s (p. 318) come as a solid
reminder that liberalism has not evolved much after all. When Bassem says in
his final TV show: Egyptians, I apologise for misunderstanding you; you did not
need a revolution, did not understand it, and did not deserve it. I will leave
you this stagnant water that we tried to clear for your sake… (p. 333). In
deriding his audience and people and with such bestiality, Bassem makes the book's
rationale and its zooming on the crisis of liberalism ever more pressing.
The
editors deem Amr Hamzawy and Hossam Bahgat, among others, true Egyptian
liberals as they vehemently condemned the ousting of the democratically elected
President Morsi aside from their consistent opposition to his policies. With this
background in mind, we read Hamzawy in Chapter Twelve, who counts five
anti-democratic deceptions that the liberals fell into: "…contribut[ing]
to the militarisation of Egyptians' collective imagination, which began with
the people's search for a 'military saviour'" (p. 338). These 'liberal-made
grand deceptions' range from sequential (the entrenched belief that transition
to democracy must be tenable only when poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment
become past) to incremental prerequisites for the success of democracy (traced
in slogans such as nothing is more important than…), national necessity,
religion station of politics and politicisation of religion, state above all
else. The deceptions do not stop as deceptions but degenerate toward
emboldening the military to mount its coup, aborting the brief democratic
experiment in the country and initiating "a break from history and human
values." (p. 339)
Emad
El-Din Shahin brings the volume to its conclusion by recalling robust and
renewed faith in liberalism. Towards this end, he reminds readers of the
bleakest day for liberals where El Baradei stood with Sisi in the coup
announcement on July 3, 2013. Shahin calls for a new brand of liberalism, "grounded
in the nuances of particularities of Egyptian society, and construct an indigenous
liberal model with its creative frame of reference" (p. 362). He
recommends that in order for true liberals to reconstitute their project, they
will have first to disavow neoliberal forces from their midst. At a second
level, they will have to undo the religious-secular divide. Other than being
misleading, the divide gives regressive forces leverage to exploit the dynamic
forces of society, liberals, and Islamists.
Methodologically
considered, the volume remains at its strongest when it sticks to its own
proclaimed long durée approach, tracing the governing dynamic that
dictated the work of the long liberal history in Egypt. To embrace this
approach, none but Hesham Sallam underscores its utility: "Simply put,
history did not begin on January 25, 2011" (p. 63). The statement is
almost Hegelian in perspective; it brings that significant evidence has been
amassed, and any approach worthy of its own has to interrogate that experience
critically. The method serves students of social movements lest crude
opportunism and a predisposition for clientelism become explanatory principles.
In
Chapter Six, Mohamad ElMasry's stipulations vis-à-vis the Egyptian press can be
confusing for readers. One wonders if it is indeed the lack of professionalism
on the part of the Egyptian news outlet that led to the sinister portrayals of
the Brotherhood. How does this explanation corroborate/sit with the method of
the long durée? The author keeps referring to technicalities such as the
Egyptian press system, which stays receptive to this anti-Brotherhood discourse
as if such a system or any other has an autonomous existence of its own.
Arguments such as lack of sound journalistic training and journalists without
journalism degrees translating "a completely servile media apparatus"
(p. 179) do not explain how liberals went into bed with the military. The same
applies to arguments that chase Morsi's slips of the tongue or his alleged
Brotherhoodization of the country. Elmasry does not broach upon the role of
foreign influence and Gulf Sheikhdoms' mortal fear of the success of the
democratic experiment in Egypt. Indeed, the Sheikhdoms pumped their
petrodollars behind the restoration of the L'ancien régime.
More
troublesome, though and given his Islamist biases, Khaled Abou El Fadl, in
Chapter Eight, remains fixated with what he calls the "secularly minded
and secularised intelligentsia whose thinking on democracy and
constitutionalism is hopelessly opportunistic and muddled." (pp. 235-6) He
does not say how much opportunistic and how much muddled because other
contributors find more muddled thinking than pure grab or opportunism. With
opportunism, one will be zooming on another category of the Egyptian elite, les
arrivistes, but these are neither liberals nor truly influential. The
military establishment knows that this category has no symbolic capital.
Meanwhile, true liberals like El-Baradei or Aswany, referred to by name in the
volume, cannot be dubbed as carpetbaggers or bootlickers. To keep counting them
so is a methodological genocide. A purely legalistic approach, concerned solely
with legitimacy and social contract as methodological armaments, happens to be
the counter-revolutionists' approach. Despite what looks like an incendiary
critique of liberals in Egypt and the depleted human existence in the abstract,
Abou El Fadl maintains that the elites are endowed with the power to generate
ideas, not that material reality generates ideas and determines their
circulation. But he is right to note, though, that "the actual coup was a
mere formality" (p. 250) since what he calls the 'secularised
intelligentsia' already had had power firmly in its hand, and the Brotherhood
accepted to engage in a game lost well in advance. Precision is key. The
secularised intelligentsia had nothing to do with the coup; it was the military
with the global capitalists behind them that planned and carried out the
restoration.
In
his contribution, Hamzawy rushes to conclude that initially, Egyptians "wanted
a true liberal order" (p. 340), and it was the military establishment that
thwarted that popular demand. Nothing can be further from the truth since
Egyptians massively voted for the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012.
Still, Hamzaway does not reject developmentalism as he criticises the liberals'
trust in linear approaches to modernity and their defence for an authoritarian
order under the guise of waiting until the time Egypt scores a level of
development conducive to democracy. This future is constantly postponed (p.
341). In outlining the final deception, Hamzawy overlooks how the state with
classical national borders is no longer a viable player under the neoliberal
global order. Specifically, it is precisely that powerful state that has to be
liquidated for commodities to circulate and for capital to keep extracting
value.
Emad
El-Din Shahin, a professor at the American University of Cairo, was sentenced
to death in 2015 on the alleged charges of destabilising the country, refusing
domestication and elitism. Despite his credentials as a true liberal, and like
other contributors, Shahin keeps fixated on the palliative. When some
medicament is not working, the sensible policy is to seek a second opinion and
try a new medicine. Perhaps worse than these confusions, the editors and
contributors alike still believe in the existence of what is an extinct class,
the Egyptian bourgeoisie (p. 365), a class which, after WWI, had universally
gone extinct. In recommending disengagement from the authoritarian state,
readers are left wondering why future liberals of Egypt would behave any
differently? That explains how Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism
cannot be a critical reconsideration or revision, as the editors want us to
understand, but a re-legitimisation. Instead of a project for the future that
Egyptians should axiomatically adopt, anyone reading the recommendation, in
conclusion, cannot overlook an onerous retrenchment project of liberal
democracy. The amount of indisputably historical evidence this volume brings
amounts to how that conventional wisdom of a renewed faith in the liberal
project has exhausted its utility.
Université d’Adrar
(Algeria)
