The New Middle East (20 page)

The challenges facing the new Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Egypt were huge. Most of the big ones – unemployment, corruption, bad infrastructure, poor education – they inherited from the old regime. Three-quarters of Egyptians under thirty years old are jobless and increasingly frustrated with the lack of change in their lives after the revolution.
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The regular violent protests have damaged its crucial tourism industry, leaving Egypt in 2013 at the bottom of the rankings for safe and secure places to go on holiday, below even Pakistan.
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The new government shied away from making politically painful economic reforms in an election year. Instead, by the spring of that year, public sector salaries had gone up 80 per cent since the revolution.
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That all led to protracted discussions with the IMF over the conditions for a US$4.4 billion loan, when what was needed was immediate action. Until Egypt could show it was sorting out its finances investors withheld their cash. Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat, and so as the currency slid, finances became even tighter. The country had to keep going cap in hand to more Arab states for more loans. So while they inherited a mess, the new government made matters worse. Egypt tottered on the verge of bankruptcy.

The economist Ahmed el-Sayed el-Naggar warned that Morsi was making getting agreement on reforms harder because he had already made some of the same mistakes as the old regime:

Morsi has surrounded himself with the same business entourage as Mubarak had, and they all have the same ideas, the same interests, and they are stopping him from reforming the economy because it is not in their direct interests. So the environment and the people that surround the Presidency haven’t changed. All that’s different is that in the middle of this is Morsi, not Mubarak.

These challenges would be a tall order for even the most adored of revolutionary parties or leaders. The Muslim Brotherhood is not adored by most of the Egyptian people. It is not even liked by very many of them, because it is barely trusted. The rushing through of the foundation of the new Egypt, its constitution, only made that worse. It set up a struggle over the role of women in society, which has begun in all the new democracies that have seen Islamists come to power. Now that women have a real vote they will help decide the fate of the new Islamist governments.

I asked Egypt’s leading women’s rights campaigner, Nehad Abul  Komsan, if the new constitution there was good or bad for women.

It is a disaster. ‘Bad’ is a very nice word. It’s a disaster for women and human rights in general. It is very vague and open to interpretation. We could end up with women leaving their homes only twice. Once to move from their father’s house to their new husband’s house, and once to be carried to their graves. There is no guarantee that there will be a liberal interpretation of the constitution. There are no guarantees the situation for women won’t be worse than Saudi Arabia.

Was she more worried by the Salafists or the Brotherhood?

Both, but sometimes we think the Salafists are much better than the Muslim Brotherhood. Both of them believe in the same thing but the difference is the Salafists are very honest about how they see the role of women. That means you can have a proper discussion with them and sometimes you can change their views. If you don’t, then they will say honestly: ‘We are not convinced.’ The Muslim Brotherhood is completely different. They have the same beliefs, they have very conservative views, but they talk nicely about how they believe in women’s rights. But their double, or triple, standards mean you cannot trust them. The last two years have shown they lie about everything. They just want to build a new dictatorship around religion.

Nehad was speaking as a woman who also took her faith seriously. When we met she was wearing a headscarf that entirely covered her hair. But her identity as a Muslim did not make her any less feisty about her rights as a woman in an Islamic society.

The Brotherhood entered the third year of the post-revolution era with not many friends at home and even fewer abroad. It struggled to find answers to Egypt’s many problems simply because there are so many. For now the more elections it fights the more it is likely to lose support from the wider population. The sympathy it once had is long gone. The clean image it was so proud of has been sullied by the dirty business of politics. In power the Brotherhood was accused of using the same instruments of state security that oppressed its membership for so long to now try to silence its detractors. Its instincts were to try to impose obedience, but it failed. The people of Egypt had found their voice.

The Ikhwan had a mandate, but not an overwhelming one. They were reminded of that reality every time their own authoritarian streak got the better of them in the period that followed. ‘The Muslim Brotherhood has not done very well because it is not a party of power, so now that they are in power they are a bit lost and they have been quite clumsy on many issues,’ observed Professor Roy in the spring of 2013. ‘They don’t have a proper programme, so they have fallen back on the traditional tools of power: trying to control the press, trying to control the religious sphere and working with the security forces. But I think this is more about being a bit lost than having a hidden agenda.’

‘Egypt is a place that needs the rest of the world,’ one of Israel’s senior military strategists warned me in April 2013, correctly predicting the coming chaos:

It’s got ninety million people and huge problems with water, food and the economy. I believe that more than likely Morsi, eventually, will fail, but not because Morsi will fail but because anyone would fail. Whoever comes first it is almost impossible to succeed there. I look at Egypt both as a potential threat but also as an opportunity. If there is an engagement between political Islam and the region and the rest of the world which works, well then the opportunities will grow. If not it will turn to radicalism.

A failure of the Muslim Brotherhood does not mean a failure of political Islam. It is perhaps the only thing the senior echelons of the Israeli military and one of the Brotherhood’s most important figures of the last forty years, Abdul-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, can agree on: ‘I believe that Islam as a culture and its principles must be respected because whoever wants to represent the people of this region must understand that he can’t rule without respecting the foundations of Islam’s beliefs and principles.’

You cannot take God out of the politics of the Middle East any more than you can take God out of the politics of middle America. Both groups care deeply about their religion. Egyptians will happily sit around for hours, even with foreigners present, and savagely deconstruct the failings of their society. But even the educated Westernised elite, post-9/11, feel protective towards their faith. Many of these people took part in the uprisings and are still trying to work out what they want from the brave new world they helped create. Many will lean towards a moderate Sharia model for social issues in the public space but a secular model to guide their personal freedoms.

Islam is a religion that has a lot to say about politics. It offers guidance not only about individual morality but about wider society and governance. The more vocal minority of the urban elite might disagree, but the vast majority of Egyptian Muslims are quite comfortable about having aspects of Islamic law and tradition as a cornerstone of their new society. Political Islam is a reality that America and the wider West need to build into the foundations of their new foreign policies for the region. It is not going to wane in influence, even if, eventually, the Brotherhood does.

Egypt failed its first democratic test. Morsi’s leadership was incompetent, divisive and hugely unpopular but he was fairly elected. A way should have been found to vote him out. It was the People who demanded his removal but by approving the short cut of a military intervention they may have damaged Egypt in the long run. Many Egyptians think toppling Morsi and having new elections gave them a clean slate. In fact it has permanently stained their democratic enterprise. The People may have now taken on and won their battles against both the army and the Ikhwan but they’ve also set a dangerous precedent. And they did it without building a viable political alternative. The Brotherhood may be down but they are not out.

After years of fighting, the Muslim Brotherhood and the army briefly realised they have more in common with each other than they do with the people who launched the revolution. These two organisations have grown old together. They began as a totally mismatched couple whose union was forged in the passion of Egypt’s first revolution in 1952. They fought with, cheated on and betrayed one another. But through that process the institutions, if not always the individuals inside them, learned about, understood, and in their old age began to accept if not entirely trust each other. This was the realisation they reached soon after the 2011 revolution. But the popular coup in 2013 may get up a new generational struggle.

They both took a beating, quite literally, when they tried to shove the newly emboldened Egyptian people around during the periods when the generals and then the Ikhwan each got their chance to run the country. But the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood was in power at all in Egypt is as revolutionary an outcome for the region as the uprisings themselves. And when it comes to its role in the New Middle East, the Brotherhood has much more right to say it represents democratic values than many of the other regional Arab players. The Muslim Brotherhood has much less money, but it does have much more credibility, because it was democratically elected, however grudgingly and briefly. That is something the Gulf rulers cannot claim. The struggle will continue between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudis, as they compete for influence within Sunni societies. It is likely to be an important one, which is why the Gulf states were the first to congratulate the Egyptians on their 2013 popular coup.

If at home there is much that divides the three new forces in Egypt – the people, the Brotherhood and the army – abroad there is one issue that unites them. The cause of Palestine was the first thing that brought them together, and they all still think about it the same way. The ascension to power of the Islamists in the region has already begun to change the struggle for the creation of a Palestinian state. The new power wielded by Islamist parties has strengthened the Islamist movements in the Palestinian conflict too, at the expense of the more secular ones that have their roots in Nasser’s socialist Arab nationalism.

The Brotherhood, in power, held off pushing hard on the Palestinian cause because it hoped for successful first term in the Presidential Palace. The Ikhwan did not have a free hand in regional affairs because it needed Western help to sort out the economy. Domestic policy and the state of the economy will still, for now, consume the Brotherhood in whatever political role it plays in Egypt. But it will return to the issues it cares deeply about, and it cares deeply about the Palestinian issue. If there is one lesson to be learned from the Brotherhood’s fight with the army, it is that this is an organisation with incredible patience. It will wait for its moment because it believes that, God willing, its moment will come.

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The Problem

Sana Kadir was scurrying around her home in the Gaza Strip collecting her daughter’s dolls, dusting them off and placing them in a small pile. Her husband and the neighbours were busy loading their possessions onto the back of a flatbed truck. The Kadir family was moving house. That had not been their intention the night before, but now they had a large hole in their living-room wall from which they could see the pancaked remains of the house of the man who had lived next door. His name was Ibrahim Saleh, and he was a senior member of Hamas’s internal security forces. Mr Saleh still held his job that chilly winter morning because the Israeli airstrike had missed him. He wasn’t at home. The same could not be said of his relatives, over a dozen of whom were now in hospital, having been dug out of the rubble.

The Salehs’ house, in the Jabalia Palestinian refugee camp, had probably been hit by one of the Israeli drones that were still whirring above me. They drifted lazily across a brilliant blue sky that was etched with the swirling jet streams of outgoing Hamas rockets. Thumps and drones were the accompanying sound to the eight-day war fought between Israel and Hamas in November 2012. The Gazans called the drones the ‘Zenana’ because of the noise their engines make. Zenana is Arabic for ‘whining child’.

When Sana had tidied up she was going to see her five children – three girls and two boys – who were in Gaza’s Shifa hospital. ‘I’ve become a refugee again,’ she said as we stood in the wreckage of her home. ‘I don’t know where to go, perhaps to my father’s house. We want to find a safe location, but only God knows where is safe or not. Perhaps nowhere is safe.’ Gaza is just forty kilometres long, between six and twelve kilometres wide, and is home to more than 1.5 million people. With so many civilians in such a small space it is not the best place to have a war. For now though Sana’s children were safe. They were not badly injured and they would soon be back with their parents once they’d been patched up. Omar Misharawi would not.