THE ISLAMIST SPRING: WHAT MUBARAK GOT RIGHT, WHAT OBAMA GOT WRONG

From FPRI:

THE ISLAMIST SPRING:


WHAT MUBARAK GOT RIGHT, WHAT OBAMA GOT WRONG

by Raymond Stock



December 9, 2011



Raymond Stock, former assistant professor of Arabic and

Middle East Studies at Drew University, lived in Cairo for

20 years before being deported by the regime of Hosni

Mubarak in December 2010, apparently due to his 2009 article

criticizing then-Culture minister Farouk Hosni's bid to head

UNESCO in Foreign Policy Magazine. He has published widely

on the Middle East and translated stories by many Arab

writers, including seven books by Naguib Mahfouz, whose

biography he is writing for Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New

York.



Available on the web and in pdf format at:

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/2011/201112.stock.egypt.html



WHAT MUBARAK GOT RIGHT, WHAT OBAMA GOT WRONG



by Raymond Stock



As Egyptians overwhelmingly chose Islamist candidates last

week in the first parliamentary ballot since the fall of

President Hosni Mubarak-after nine months of disorder and

mayhem-a popular caricature published at the opening of his

trial last August came to mind. Displaying a particularly

Egyptian brand of gallows humor, it showed Mubarak with a

noose around his neck and an ironic look on his face: "I

understood you," he says.



This was a wry allusion to a statement made by Mubarak

during the protests that led to his ouster by Egypt's

military on February 11, to President Barack Obama, as told

to ABC's Christiane Amanpour on February 3. Amanpour said

that Mubarak informed her that he had warned Obama that "he

doesn't understand the Egyptian culture and what would

happen if I step down now."



Mubarak wasn't predicting that he would be hanged if he left

office in those circumstances, though that still might

happen. Rather, he cautioned that if he gave up the

presidency at that time, chaos would follow, and the feared

Muslim Brotherhood rise to power. Overwhelmingly, the media

and regional experts dismissed his claims as the fear-

mongering of a dictator desperately clinging to his job. But

since then, events seem to have proved him right and those

who mocked him wrong. That may be shocking to some-and

hardly amounts to an excuse for many aspects of his rule.

Yet it does reveal the actual complexity of what had seemed

a simple case of the people bringing down a tyrant. Instead,

the demonstrators gave the military a pretext to remove a

flawed leader about to install his son, Gamal (who was not

one of their own) to succeed him, replacing him with

something worse, with even worse likely to come.



For a while, Mubarak tried to hold on by saying that neither

he nor his son would stand in the presidential elections

then set for September, even offering to transfer some

powers to his newly-minted vice president, the head of

military intelligence, Omar Suleiman. Though contradictory

statements issued from Obama's administration for the next

week, by February 10, when Mubarak's own cabinet began to

make ambiguous noises about his going, our president was

impatient. "Too many Egyptians," he said in a written

statement that night, "remain unconvinced that the

government is serious about a genuine transition to

democracy." By the next evening, Mubarak was gone.



G. B. Shaw advised, "There are two tragedies in life. One is

to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it." In

this case, Obama (and the protesters) gained it-and the

result is what Mubarak admonished would follow. Soon, the

Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the group that

kicked out Mubarak, invited Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the

spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), to return

from his forty-year exile in Qatar to address the great

victory celebration at Tahrir on February 18. Al-Qaradawi,

who has praised Hitler and begged God to let the Jews' next

Holocaust be at the hands of the Muslims, is the most

popular preacher in the Islamic world, one whom the

mainstream media often tout as a moderate-like the

organization he inspires. Demanding war against Israel

(which the revolution was not supposed to be about), he

completely filled Tahrir in a way that dwarfed the previous

demonstrations. Meanwhile, Wael Ghonim, the Google executive

who became the best-known of the Facebook youth that

launched the uprising in January, was turned away when he

too tried to address the crowd. The real leaders of the

revolution announced themselves that day-but most of the

world ignored it.



Late last month the MB and the SCAF, which has run the

country since Mubarak's departure, made a deal on the

timetable for a turnover to civilian rule, thus confirming

the long-obvious fact that they are in close alliance. The

SCAF itself, like most of the officer corps, seems to be

made up mainly of MB sympathizers. Now that the MB has taken

up to thirty-seven percent of the first of three rounds of

voting (rotating around the country), and the even-more

blatantly hard-line (Salafi) al-Nour party has gained

twenty-five percent as well-far better than projected-Egypt

is likely soon to be an Islamist state. The more secular

liberal revolution envisioned by at least some of the

Facebook youth (many of whom were also Islamists) will be a

memory.



The newly-empowered MB has never been the moderate force

seen by so many people who should know better. Rather, since

1928 it has quietly worked for rule by strict shari`a law,

was funded and armed by the Nazis in World War II, and

aggressively has spread chapters all over the Arab world. In

October 2010, the MB's current Supreme Guide, Mohamed Badie,

a veterinarian, openly called (in Arabic) for global jihad

against the United States and Israel. (Only one writer in

English-Tel Aviv-based Barry Rubin-even noticed.) And many

Salafis openly call for the removal of all Egypt's Coptic

community-the descendants of the ancient Egyptians, who make

up between the ten-to-twenty percent of the total

population-by any means necessary.



On November 25, the Ikhwan (as the MB are known in Arabic)

held a rally in Cairo, with crowds chanting, "One day we

shall kill all the Jews," and calling for jihad to conquer

Jerusalem. They were addressed by none other than Shaykh

Ahmed el-Tayib, the head of al-Azhar and the highest

clerical figure in Sunni Islam. El-Tayib, well-regarded in

the West, denounced attempts to "Judaize" Jerusalem and

(falsely) claimed that the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple

Mount was currently "under an offensive by the Jews." (And

on the previous Friday, when the MB and the Salafis together

brought up to one hundred thousand people to Tahrir, a

Salafi preacher eulogized Osama bin Laden as a martyr during

yet another call for jihad.) Meanwhile, Israel is preparing

for a time when it will no longer have relations with Egypt.



This is where we are now, but what were the choices back in

February? Though aging, corrupt, and increasingly out of

touch, Mubarak had defeated the Islamist uprising of the

1990s, had kept the unpopular peace with Israel (however

coldly) for thirty years, and had launched economic reforms

which made the economy grow at six percent the year before

he lost power. Following the natural euphoria then, there

has been surging crime, endless strikes and demonstrations,

vastly increased attacks on Christians, the sacking of the

Israeli embassy in September, devastated tourism (down

forty-two percent last quarter from the same time in 2010),

and a rapidly sinking economy.



Many have blamed Mubarak for crushing any secular

alternative to the religious militants. But in fact, after

Sadat let them out of prison to combat his leftist opponents

in the 1970s, there has never been a genuine rival to the

Islamists, whose message has far more resonance in a society

that has been profoundly religious since before the First

Dynasty (2950 BC). If Mubarak had left the liberals alone,

they would have remained voices in the wilderness, most of

them crying out for dead-end leftist economic solutions and

foreign policies identical to the M.B.'s. That the largest

group of liberal parties, al-Kutla al-Misriya (The Egyptian

Bloc), garnered only fourteen percent of the vote in this

round, which was held in the two cities-Cairo and

Alexandria-where most of their supporters are found, should

have come as no surprise. The liberals are now so desperate

that one of the leading bloggers, called The Big Pharaoh,

recently declared that they will secede to form their own

republic in the (tellingly upscale) Cairo suburb of

Heliopolis. Though he was joking, the reality is that he and

those like him will have no space of their own in the

entirely different new Egypt from the one of which they

boasted in February.



Though it might not have been easy to get the Tahrirists to

accept the idea, it clearly would have been wiser to have

let Mubarak have his more orderly transition to the next

presidential election, perhaps with new parliamentary polls

early next year. This would have allowed everyone a chance

to organize for them properly (and not just the already-

prepared MB). It also would have avoided the naked military

dictatorship that ensued, run by Islamist-leaning officers

(as is obvious in many of their actions), and the ordeal

that all Egyptians have since endured. And it just might

have prevented the tragedy of the Islamist victory.



Unfortunately, as only a few far-sighted commentators said

at the time, Mubarak's abrupt departure, hastened by his

trusted "friend" and ally, President Obama, virtually

guaranteed the present unpleasantness. Moreover, a smoother

interim would have led to a more democratic future as well

as a stronger economy, the ostensible reason for the January

25th Revolution.



Elsewhere, Islamists have won the recent elections in both

Tunisia and Morocco. In Libya, the Transitional National

Council, whose forces defeated and lynched Mu`ammar al-

Qaddafi last month, already has declared the country a

shari'a law state, while the head of their largest

contingent of fighters, Abdel-Hakim Belhadj, is a well-known

commander from al-Qa'ida, whose flag has now flown over the

heart of Benghazi. In Yemen, the m‚lange of opposition

forces also includes al-Qa'ida and Shi'ite militants backed

by Iran, as well as the MB. In Syria-like Tunisia under the

ancien regime, a nominally secular state-the MB and other

Islamists form the majority of the leadership put together

under neighboring (also Islamist) Turkey's guidance.

(Meanwhile, the Assad government's patron, Iran, via its

proxy, Hizbollah, now rules formerly friendly Lebanon, while

America takes no meaningful action to stop Tehran's headlong

progress to acquire nuclear arms.)



On the whole, American policy applauds these evident

expressions of the popular will, dismissing the radicals'

role (and even their very ideology) as harmless or even

beneficial. Obama's favorite foreign leader is said to be

Receb Tayyib Erdogan, Turkey's Islamist prime minister,

whose chief foreign cause is the defense of Hamas. Yet once

Islamists gain power, even by democratic means, they are

unlikely to relinquish it willingly in future, as we have

seen in Gaza, Afghanistan and Iran, while no nation in the

world has more incarcerated journalists than Turkey. After

all, they really believe that their legitimacy comes not

from the people, but from God.



Now the Islamists have won the biggest prize of all: Egypt,

the largest and most important Arab country and one of the

most influential in Africa as well as the Islamic world. As

Hosni Mubarak-a leader to whom America long looked for

insight into Middle East affairs-might put it, "Welcome to

the Islamist Spring!" He would be entitled to add, "I told

you so," as well. With his deadliest enemies about to

become the new masters of Egypt, that caricature of

Mubarak's head in the noose may cease to be just a joke. And

thanks to our annual two-billion-dollars-plus in aid, we

even might be supplying the rope from which our long-time

friend could swing.



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