How is it possible that a
revolution made by young revolutionaries can end up marginalizing them, while
the political candidate of a group that played almost no role in the revolution
becomes president, being only narrowly followed by the former prime minister of
the very regime that was overthrown?
Are we to believe people like
Hamid Dabashi, who crudely invokes an Orientalist logic to compare the Egyptian
revolution to the 1979 Iranian revolution, defining the former in opposition to
the latter as “calm, composed,
gentle, civil, human, hopeful, and principled”?[1] To
better understand his approach, we should note that Dabashi relies on a dichotomous formula to
polarise the comparison, and to 'other' the Iranian revolution. Edward Said's
criticism of Orientalism was that it constructed people from 'the West' as
being 'rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values,
without natural suspicion', and those from 'the East' as 'none of these'. In
Professor Dabashi's article, Egypt (once 'the Orient') takes the place of 'the
West', and Iran, 'the East'. This is done through the most extreme of
simplifications and misrepresentation of facts, in which anything and
everything related to the Iranian revolution becomes evil, while the opposite
is true for the Egyptian.
I do not have
space here to discuss the complexities of the Iranian revolution, which are
still playing themselves out and dice still rolling. My focus is on Egypt today, and on
asking whether people like Dabashi are right to argue that what is happening in
Egypt is nothing but a: “sublime democracy,
with minimum bloodshed, with people, the Egyptians themselves, at the driving
seat”. The military had dissolved the
parliament and assigned itself unprecedented power. There is now a president with
no democratic credentials, who belongs to a party that has broken all its
promises. There is neither a constitution nor a parliament, and the ultimate
law-maker is the Supreme Military Council (which has, in effect, become the Vali
Faqih of Egypt). All of this is happening while the structure of a state
that was built to support dictatorial rule remains intact.
Contrary to Dabashi’s
argument, there is nothing “sublime” about what is happening in Egypt. It is
not a “step in the only
direction possible: forward”, but a
systematic move by the dictatorial power structure of the state to mend the
damages which were sustained after Mubarak’s overthrow, and even to consolidate
its power further. The question which
should be asked, therefore, is what went wrong, and what mistakes might have led
to the current situation? Without answering these questions, it is possible
that the Egyptians will end up with only the facade of democracy, one aligned with
American foreign policy, without little substance. For instance, even one
engineered bloody protest could enable the Supreme Military to argue that in
extreme circumstances, extreme measures have to be taken, so as to re-introduce
martial law and later make it permanent.
Lack of alternatives: the Achilles heel of
the revolution
The greatest
mistake in Egypt was the revolutionaries’ failure to develop a democratic
alternative that could oversee a transfer of power from Mubarak’s regime to the
people. In fact, what we saw was only
the demand for Mubarak to go (erhal).
But as there was no further planning or production of a viable alternative, the
fall of Mubarak created a vacuum which was filled by those with different forms
of power at their disposal: the Egyptian Military, the Muslim Brotherhood and
the Salafis.
Other mistakes
include embracing the Egyptian army after removing Mubarak, not realising that
(as in Iran) it is simply a military-financial mafia and has an enormous
interest to preserve the status quo. Whether they did so out of a belief in the
army’s loyalty to the people or out of political expediency is irrelevant here.
As a result, the revolutionaries have now trapped themselves between a rock and
hard place.
Furthermore, using
the number of participants in Cairo as a model, we can see that the
demonstrations never mustered more than a million people in a city of 20
million. This means that in Cairo, around 5% of the population participated,
and we can safely assume that outside Cairo the level of participation would have
been even lower. If we compare this with
the 1979 Iranian revolution, where 4–5 million people participated in major
demonstrations in a city (Tehran) of around 6 million, this means that, excluding
the elderly, the sick and the children, over 90% of the population
participated.
How do we explain such a major difference?
Explaining this
difference brings us back to the absence of a viable democratic alternative
that could be communicated widely with people. On the contrary, during the Iranian
revolution, Khomeini outlined an
alternative of Islam as a discourse of liberty in 124 interviews, through which
the Iranian public could see the shape of a future regime in which human rights
would be central, and hence in which the freedom and equality of all Iranians,
irrespective of class, ethnicity, gender and belief would be secured; in which
a woman could become president; in which he himself would withdraw from frontline
politics, and in which the clergy would not interfere in the affairs of the
state.
These points were
communicated successfully with people widely across the country, and as a
result people could imagine a better future after the overthrow of the Shah’s
regime. This is why the Iranian revolution was rare in that it cut cross class,
ethnicity, gender and belief, and united the entire nation against a
dictatorial monarchy.
In the Egyptian
case, the very fact of Mohamed Morsi’s election as president and the defeat of
the revolutionaries in both the parliamentary and presidential elections tell
us that they failed both to produce a democratic alternative and to communicate
it with the Egyptian people. As a result,
we can see that the majority of Christians are voting for Shafiq out of fear,
and many others voted for Morsi because they could not see a better
alternative.
What should be done?
It seems that the
most important task for the Egyptian revolutionaries who are struggling for
democracy in an independent Egypt, whether they are Muslims, nationalists or
leftists, is to counter the rise of the power-oriented
and opportunist Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-democratic Salafis. In order to
do this, nothing could be more effective than introducing alternative
interpretations of Islam as a discourse of liberty and freedom, so that Muslims
do not feel that they have to choose between Islam and democracy. This wheel does not need to be re-invented,
and I suggest that, next to the work of Arab thinkers like Rashid Qanoushi, they
undertake the task of translating the massive literature being produced by
Iranian Muslim intellectuals such as Shabestari, Soroush and above all Banisadr’s
work (The Koran: A Book on the Discourse
of Freedom; Human Rights in the
Koran; or Free Intellect, Social
Justice and Totalitarianism). One of
the major factors which makes Banisadr’s work unique is his constant encounter
with the concepts of power and freedom. As he uses the Koran as his only point
of reference, the usual divisions between Shiism and Sunnism become irrelevant
as the Koran is the common denominator of both faiths. Given that Islam is a deeply embedded belief
among the majority of Egyptians, even if democracy is established in Egypt, it
will be a very fragile system unless there is other work done to revolutionise living
Islam, turning its various languages of power into a discourse of liberty.
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