Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (15 page)

“Without freedom of speech, you have only a culture of rumor,” Ashmawy liked to say.
³⁷
The ban was eventually lifted.
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I telephoned Ashmawy, now retired, to ask if he remembered the old case of the leftists.

“Of course. It was very famous,” said the chatty judge. “The government had no evidence of anything—not of trying to overthrow the government or ties to Libya. The government thought the court should be convinced just because it was saying so, but it didn’t offer any evidence.

“The first defendant gave a full confession, but I was sure he was tortured. Later he denied his confession, and I realized that all of them had been tortured.”

During the case, the government pressured Ashmawy behind the scenes. “The general prosecutor visited my office at the court,” the judge told me. “He didn’t ask for anything
specifically,
but it was quite clear that he came to say that this case was important to him and to the government.”

Despite the confessions, Ashmawy found all sixteen innocent.

The verdict was a turning point in the law student’s life, Amin explained to me.

“The student realized what would have happened if the judge had not been independent—if the judge had instead accepted the government’s case and done what it wanted him to do,” he continued. “All of them could have been executed or spent the rest of their lives in prison.

“The student,” Amin added, “concluded that the government could do whatever it wanted—oppress, detain, torture, whatever—but if the judiciary was independent, then freedom had a chance in Egypt. Without these independent judges, there was no hope of protecting human rights.”

After the center was opened, one of the judges it honored was Ashmawy.

I asked Amin what had happened to the law student.

“Well,” Amin replied, “he decided from that point on, whatever remained of his life, he was going to spend working on the independence of the judiciary and human rights.”

Amin finished the story and smiled, with that little twinkle in his eyes. Then I realized something.

“You were that student, weren’t you?” I said

“Yes,” he replied.

The Players

I
n the early decades of the twenty-first century, the political forces in the Middle East can be divided into three broad categories. The brave Egyptian activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim—an academic who was among the first to study the jihadists in the 1980s and then went on to found a democracy center, for which he was imprisoned three times, ironically sometimes with the jihadists—calls them the three “crats”: theocrats, democrats, and autocrats. I went to see representatives of all three in Egypt to discuss their visions of the future and how they planned to achieve them.

I started with the Muslim Brotherhood, because the theocrats are the most energetic political force in Egypt.

The Brotherhood’s neatly efficient headquarters is in a residential apartment that overlooks a row of leafy palm trees along the banks of the Nile. The movement was outlawed in 1954. It was still illegal more than a half century later, so the only signpost was a small white board with blue letters that had been attached to the frame of the door. Even it, I was told, was a fairly recent addition.

Visitors are asked to take off their shoes at the door. “We pray on this rug,” explained a greeter, politely. He was wearing natty suspenders but no tie. Like almost everyone in the bustling office, he had a bruiselike mark on his forehead, the sign of a devout Muslim who prays several times a day by getting down on his knees, bending over, and pressing his head against the floor in a sign of submission. Islam, literally, means submission, as in to God.

The headquarters is one of the few smoke-free environments in Cairo, a city where people still puff away in elevators, public transportation, shops, movie houses, and government offices. Members of the Brotherhood do not smoke or drink alcohol because they harm the body—“God’s gift,” the greeter explained.

The apartment-office is a deceptively modest facility for the most organized political movement in the Middle East and, almost certainly, in the wider Islamic world.
¹
It was founded in 1928 by Hassan al Banna, a disillusioned twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher, whose first followers were six disgruntled workers in the Suez Canal Company. Eight decades later, the Brotherhood had spawned eighty-six branches and affiliates in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Most Islamic political groups are a by-product, directly or indirectly, of Banna’s unlikely little band.

Hamas originally emerged in 1987 as the militant Palestinian wing of the Brotherhood, whose branch in Syria had become so strong by 1982 that former President Hafez al Assad launched a military crackdown against its stronghold in Hama, killing tens of thousands of people and leveling whole sectors of the city.

Given the Brotherhood’s controversial history, some affiliates have taken different names. The Islamic Action Front became Jordan’s largest opposition group during the kingdom’s first elections for parliament, after a twenty-two year hiatus, in 1989. The Iraqi Islamic Party was the most significant Sunni political group to run in Iraq’s 2005 elections.

Prominent Arab politicians as well as notorious extremists got their feet wet politically in Egypt’s Brotherhood before moving on to lead their own groups. Yasser Arafat joined when he was an engineering student at Cairo University in the 1950s, before he founded Fatah and took over the Palestine Liberation Organization. Al Qaeda’s chief ideologue, Ayman al Zawahiri, was a teenager when he signed up, but he left in the late 1970s to join the more militant Islamic Jihad and then, in the 1990s, to merge forces with Osama bin Laden. Fathi Shikaki joined during his years as a medical student in Egypt in the 1970s, but reportedly left out of frustration at its limited action agenda and founded the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the 1980s.

The Muslim Brotherhood—or
Ikhwan,
as it is known in Arabic—is still strongest, however, in Egypt, its birthplace.

In Cairo, appointments often happen on Middle East time, meaning late, but I was ushered into the office of Mohammed Habib precisely at the appointed hour.

Habib is the second in command to the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide. His life is a microcosm of the recent Brotherhood experience. He served in parliament; he also served three stints in prison.

A tall man, Habib was wearing a blue and white pinstripe shirt and had a short, well-groomed beard. His glasses had rims at the top but not along the bottom. Habib started out as a geology professor who specialized in detecting geological data from satellite images. He still occasionally lectures.

“No, no, I’m not a cleric,” he said, laughing. “Most of us here now are professionals—doctors or engineers or professors.” He volunteered that he had done geological research at the University of Missouri at Rolla in the late 1970s.

Although his hair is white and thinning at the top, Habib represents the young guard or more moderate wing of the religious movement. He is middle-class, educated, courteous, articulate, and passionately devout while also experienced with the outside world.

The Brotherhood first moved into mainstream politics through men like Habib. In the early 1980s, Brothers who were doctors, lawyers, journalists, engineers, and other white-collar professionals started winning elections to lead Egypt’s unions. Unions are called syndicates in Egypt; they had traditionally been dominated by secular leftist, nationalist, or liberal activists. The movement made the formal leap in 1984. Under cover of a legal centrist party, the Brotherhood ran its first candidates for parliament and won a token presence of eight seats. It ran again, in an alliance with liberal and labor parties, in 1987 and won thirty-six seats. Habib was one of the big winners.

The Brotherhood’s presence in mainstream politics has been growing ever since, in fits and starts.

In 2005, although still illegal, the Brotherhood ran again. This time, it exceeded all projections. Eighty-eight of its candidates, running as independents, won twenty percent of the seats in the People’s Assembly. It was the largest victory by any group against the ruling party since Egypt became a republic in 1952. The Ikhwan had redefined Egypt’s political spectrum.

The Muslim Brotherhood was suddenly the main duly elected opposition party.

And the numbers were misleading: The Brotherhood actually won more than one half of the seats it contested. It put up only 161 candidates for the 444-seat assembly, and it stayed away from many races with high-profile politicians from the ruling National Democratic Party.

The Ikhwan’s real strength is one of the most debated topics in Egypt.

The Brotherhood clearly has a critical advantage over all other opposition parties. “President Mubarak has closed down so much that there are only two platforms left for political activism—his National Democratic Party and the mosque,” said Hisham Kassem, the editor of Egypt’s first independent daily newspaper, who lost as a secular candidate for parliament in 2000. “And he can’t close the mosques, so the Muslim Brotherhood effectively has thousands of general assemblies once a week.”

Egyptians are a deeply religious people, both Muslims and Coptic Christians. Faith provides a sense of reason and a comfortable rhythm in difficult Egyptian life.

It is visible in Cairo taxis, in the miniature shrines built on the dashboards, or the “I rely on God” bumper stickers, or the lists of “The Ninety-nine Names of God” dangling from the rearview mirrors. It is audible in the lilting Muslim call to prayer chanted from thousands of mosque muezzins or interrupting programs on state-controlled television five times a day. It is evident in the standard response to statements on virtually anything from the weather and marriage prospects to politics—inshallah, or “God willing.”

For almost 1,000 years, Cairo has been the world’s largest Muslim city and its most important center of Islamic learning at Al Azhar, the oldest university in the Islamic world. Egypt has also produced the two most famous (and rival) new Muslim televangelists—the charismatic young modernist Amr Khaled on Iqra satellite television and the older and fierier Sheikh Mohammed al Qaradawi on al Jazeera.

More important to the shift in Egypt’s political winds was the economic crisis of the 1990s, which produced what Egyptians dubbed their “Gulf-ization” period. Between 1989 and 1996, up to seven million Egyptians were driven to find work in conservative Persian Gulf countries. Egyptian officials told me they realized what was going on when the government could not keep teachers; some three million left Egypt.
²
Most Egyptians eventually came back, with new money but also often with conservative Gulf ways that were best reflected at home by the Muslim Brotherhood. The experience left a particularly deep impact on Egypt’s middle class, the cornerstone of any society’s political system.

The tide had turned so much that Habib predicted his movement could win sixty percent of the seats in a free election—if the Muslim Brotherhood could fairly compete for every seat.

Several Egyptian analysts disagreed. They countered that the highly organized Brotherhood mobilized all the votes it could get in the 2005 election and still did not attract the silent majority—more than seventy-five percent of Egyptian voters—who were not motivated enough to go to the polls to cast ballots for anyone.

Some cynics also argued that the movement put up only 161 candidates for the 2005 election because it had no other viable nominees.

The election proved the movement’s weakness rather than its strength, Kassem, the editor of
The Egyptian Today,
told me. “Look, in 2005, it had been trying to get to power for almost eighty years,” he said. “I would have trouble hiring someone who took that long to make an impact.”

But Habib claimed that the number of candidates was a calculated decision. The Brotherhood’s go-slow strategy, he said, sought to produce gradual change rather than radical upheaval.

“Our approach, our plan, our vision has adopted the slogan: participation, not overpowering,” Habib explained, sitting at a desk covered with neat stacks of books and papers. “We know the Egyptian regime does not want us, and they are holding on tight to their seats of power. No one wants to provoke or confront the regime on that point.”

In the early twenty-first century, the Brotherhood has evolved in its discourse and strategy, if not its goals. The Ikhwan’s original creed projected radical transformation. “God is our purpose, the Prophet our leader, the Koran our constitution, jihad our way, and dying for God’s cause our supreme objective.”
³

The motto is still in its official literature. But a simplified and vaguer version—“Islam is the solution”—has been used for public consumption in recent years. The movement talks less about jihad and theocratic rule, too.

Indeed, when the new class of Brotherhood members showed up for parliament in 2006, its early focus was not on stereotypical issues associated with Islamic rule, such as banning alcohol or imposing Islamic dress on women. They instead went after a government decision to let a retired French aircraft carrier loaded with tons of asbestos sail through the Suez Canal en route to India, where it was to be disassembled for scrap metal. A Brotherhood politician angrily warned of the environmental hazards to Egypt.
⁴

To call for a chance to speak in the People’s Assembly, legislators have to wave a copy of Egypt’s constitution at the parliamentary speaker. With eighty-eight members, the Brotherhood delegation literally began a wave of challenges about reform issues that secular parties had been unable or unwilling to tackle. Persistently and sometimes noisily, they demanded answers on the use of torture. They called for a status report on more than 15,000 political prisoners. They pressed for an end to emergency law. They urged judicial independence and freedom of speech for journalists reporting on government corruption. They called for term limits on the presidency. They appealed for the rights to assemble and associate.
⁵

In one session, Brotherhood parliamentarian Hussein Ibrahim scolded the regime for its human-rights record, noting “horror stories about torture in police stations, cases in which prisoners have disappeared from jails, and innocent citizens have been forced to admit to crimes they didn’t commit.”
⁶

The disciplined movement also prodded parliament’s work ethic, notably its high absenteeism. All eighty-eight Brotherhood members attended all sessions, all the time, Egyptian analysts told me. Votes can be called at any time, without a quorum, so ruling-party legislators were suddenly forced to attend more often for fear of what laws might get passed without them.

During my visit to Brotherhood headquarters, Habib insisted that the Brotherhood understood the pragmatic realities of twenty-first-century politics. The Ikhwan had made a full commitment to work within the system, he said.

“We can now say that for decades we have accepted democracy,” he told me. “We approve multiple parties on the political arena, and this reflects a change or an evolution in our way of thinking about political life.

“We approve the peaceful transfer of power. And we declare as well that the people are the source of authority, that people have the right to choose their leader, and that people are the ones to choose their candidates. The people are the ones who have the right to choose the program that they see fit for them, politically, economically, and socially.”

The source of authority is a central issue as Middle East societies begin the process of change, particularly as Islamist groups reconfigure the political spectrum. Is it God? Or is it the people? The answer will define the next stage of political development.