The New Middle East (18 page)

The Brotherhood claims that the FJP is independent from the Ikhwan. But when Muhammad al-Qassas and other members of the Brotherhood youth wing created a party to unite all young activists, they were immediately thrown out of the movement. ‘The problem with the group that leads the Muslim Brotherhood is that it does not trust the people or the other political forces, they only ever trust their own organisation,’ Muhammad al-Qassas told me in early 2013 as the country descended into legal wrangles over the timing of the second post-Mubarak parliamentary elections due later that year.

This mentality and spirit is making them always in a hurry to win something and then pause to look around. We had several meetings and dialogues with Morsi [in 2011] and our hope was that he would expand the circle around him to include other political forces. But Morsi, because of the way the Muslim Brotherhood thinks, trusted no one but the small group he had around him. Even now it’s the Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau that really calls the shots.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s first foray into governance was a disaster. After years of suffering at the hands of the regime it attracted a huge sympathy vote, even from those not naturally inclined to support it. That though was soon squandered. The 2012 parliament was televised, allowing the middle classes to watch their new democracy in action. It started going wrong from day one, when many of the new MPs dismissed the sanctity of the oath of office and decided instead to add their own caveats about what they were or were not willing to uphold. That produced a long row between the MPs over whether or not it was illegal to tamper with the oath, and things went generally downhill from there. Any goodwill the electorate might have been ready to show the fledgling institution evaporated almost overnight. The intellectual elite who should have been defending democracy went on a verbal rampage, telling diplomats, journalists and anyone else who would listen that it was a joke.

Things did not go any better in the first parliament for the Salafists either. They were a loose collection of grass-roots puritanical Sunni Muslims whose priority was a greater role for Sharia law in society. In Egypt they are a more conservative version of the Muslim Brotherhood. ‘They are a bit like the Tea Party was in the United States in regard to the Republicans,’ says Princeton’s Professor Haykel. ‘They are the ones who will ideologically pull the Muslim Brotherhood to the right.’

Before the revolution the Salafists had always rejected politics as un-Islamic, so they were not expected to figure at all in the political make-up of the new Egypt. Then at the last minute they flip-flopped and stood in the polls as the Al-Nour Party, the ‘Party of The Light’, and won 25 per cent of the seats in the parliament compared with the Brotherhood’s 47 per cent. They had never figured prominently in mainstream society before, so the Salafists were a fascination for urban Egyptians when they started turning up on their TV screens. The Salafists quickly proved themselves susceptible to the narcissism of public life. One of their supposedly pious MPs had to resign for making up a story about a carjacking to hide the fact he’d just had a nose job, something strictly forbidden by the movement.
³⁰
Another was caught having sex with a veiled teenager in a car park. The MP said it was all a big misunderstanding and that the young woman was just feeling a little sick, so he had been helping her wash her face.
³¹
Egyptians began mocking them as the Al-Nose Party.

The Brotherhood though had to take them very seriously, because they were eating into their power base. ‘I was surprised, although the explanation was right there in front of me. I don’t know why I did not see it happening,’ said the Brotherhood’s Mahmoud Ghozlan.

For thirty years the Ikhwan faced a hostile state which hunted, persecuted and tried to isolate the Brotherhood from society. At the same time, the Salafists were allowed to work in mosques, and because they were not involved in politics, they were not harmed in any way. Therefore they were able to grow in popularity, and when the election happened it was normal that the poor people, who used to listen to the Salafists in mosques, supported them.

‘Our ideas are the same as the Brotherhood, we both want an Islamic society which is pure without any additions, myths and innovations. It’s the practical implementation on the ground where the differences appear,’ Mohamed Nour of the Al-Watan Salafist party told me. ‘The difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and us is that they want to change things from the top down. The Salafist school of thought is to start at the bottom and work up.’ That wasn’t the biggest difference. Salafism is a principle, not a disciplined unit like the Brotherhood. Mohamed Nour’s party was a breakaway group from the Al-Nour party. The Salafists had barely cut their teeth in politics and they had already begun to split.

The Egyptian People’s Assembly is the lower house of parliament, and as in the UK it is the most powerful chamber. The upper house is called the Shura Council, and like the UK’s House of Lords, its powers are limited. After the elections members of the Muslim Brotherhood dominated both. The main function of the first parliament was to pick a 100-member Constituent Assembly made up of two halves: MPs and individuals from outside the chamber. Together they would draw up a new constitution to define the balance of power between the parliament and president, the role of Sharia law in society and the role of the army. The Brotherhood packed it with Islamists. In response, the handful of liberals, Christians and women’s rights supporters walked out, allowing the SCAF to rightly claim that it wasn’t representative of the nation.

The Brotherhood’s complete mismanagement of the process of drawing up this new constitution would dog it through the 2012 presidential campaign, into the Presidential Palace and beyond. It would give the army the chance to try to reassert its authority and usurp the democratic process.

In April 2012 the courts disbanded the first version of the Constituent Assembly. MPs then elected a second Constituent Assembly, which was also dominated by Islamists, in June 2012. A few days later the Supreme Court dissolved the People’s Assembly, ruling that some of its members had been improperly elected. The Supreme Court then pondered dissolving the second version of the Constituent Assembly because it was elected by a body the court had just ruled was unconstitutional. If all that seems confusing that is because it was. For months on end everyone in Egypt was confused too. Each party blamed every other, and no one knew what was going on or how the impasse would end. The SCAF were accused of running the courts behind the scenes, the judges of being Mubarak-era stooges, the Islamists of trying to stamp their interpretation of Sharia all over the country’s institutions and laws. The people wondered what was happening to their revolution.

Now that they were fully immersed in the country’s politics the Brotherhood had to balance appealing to the moderate centre without alienating its religious base. It naively tried to do this by constantly selling two very different messages, one to its core supporters and another to the broader Egyptian public. Somehow it convinced itself that nobody would notice. It even tried that tactic when tackling issues relating to foreign policy. After violent demonstrations in Egypt over the deliberately insulting film
Innocence of Muslims
, made by a US-based film-maker, the Brotherhood tried to spin two different responses. One was moderate for external consumption, the other raged for internal consumption. That prompted the American embassy in Cairo, whose walls had been breached by protesters, to tweet back to the Brotherhood’s English Twitter feed: ‘.@ikhwanweb Thanks. By the way, have you checked out your own Arabic feeds? I hope you know we read those too.’

If foreign bureaucrats were cynical about the Brotherhood, that was doubly the case for many of the locals. Every time the Brotherhood did something that raised the suspicions of the general public in Egypt it pleaded for their trust. Yet little in their history or their actions after the revolt suggested that that trust was deserved.

By the time the country and the Brotherhood were preparing for the presidential elections in the summer of 2012 the country was awash with guns. Many had been ‘liberated’ from post-Gaddafi Libya and then driven across the border and sold on the Egyptian black market. Everyone, including my most mild-mannered friends, seemed to have bought a weapon and a huge steel front door. The sense of civic pride and unity created by the revolution was gone. People were fearful and scared. They were desperate for a restoration of law and order, though they still didn’t trust the police. Their withdrawal by the NDP backfired over the eighteen days of the uprising, but over eighteen months it worked out quite spectacularly for the army, because they were the only institution people trusted to provide security. Conspicuously little effort had been expended to rejuvenate the damaged institution that was the police force, despite, as one diplomat told me, many offers of help from Western governments. Perhaps it was not surprising that Ahmed Shafiq, a man from the past who campaigned on a ticket promising a return to order and stability, would turn out to be the most formidable challenge to the Brotherhood in the presidential polls.

The men and women formed different queues that circled in opposite directions around the Al-Bahiya Girls Middle School on Port Said Street in the Sayeda Zeinab district of Cairo. The city is notorious for its chaos and confusion, but on polling day there was order and calm despite the summer heat, which left people leaning into the walls to escape the burning sun. The men looked largely the same in loose shirts and wide trousers. It was on the women’s side that I could clearly see that all of Egypt’s various layers of society had turned out to do something unprecedented. The Egyptian nation was going to freely elect their leader. The women’s line was a rainbow of colour, punctuated with pockets of black. It was impossible not to be infected by the enthusiasm of the people waiting patiently to play their small part in history. Many had gone through this process before under Mubarak. What was different now was that as they stood in line to put their mark next to one of the twelve men seeking their vote, nobody knew who was going to win. The ballot boxes were all arriving empty. And for the first time anywhere in the Arab world the Muslim Brotherhood was openly contesting for the presidency and was seriously trying to win.

These were the first elections for a head of state after the Arab uprisings, and they were taking place in the most influential country. Egypt’s problems of poverty, sectarian tensions and poor infrastructure are much closer to those of the rest of the region than rich, well-educated, homogeneous Tunisia’s are. All these things made this event remarkable not just for Egypt but for the whole Middle East and North Africa region. Here was the proof that it could be done.

The choice people were making that day had already proved controversial because ten of the men the country thought they would probably have to choose between had already been disqualified from standing. Among those was the Muslim Brotherhood’s first choice for president, Khairat al-Shater. He was barred because of a rule stating that no one could run within six years of having been released from jail. Al-Shater had been jailed by the old regime in 2007 and was only released by the SCAF after Mubarak fell.

The Brotherhood announced in March 2012 that it was going back on its pledge not to field a presidential candidate so that it could oppose the candidacy of the man who had put Mr Shater in jail, Omar Suleiman. In the end Suleiman couldn’t run because the old spy’s new team of political agents couldn’t add up. His team failed to submit the 30,000 signatures required by law to contest the poll, so he was disqualified. He would die just months after the polling ended.

There were two more factors in the Brotherhood’s U-turn. They feared that if they did not try for the presidency and the parliament was undermined they would end up with nothing. Just as important was the risk of the presidency going to the former Brotherhood leader Abdul-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh. He had backed the uprising from the start, and went to Tahrir Square. He decided to seek the presidency at a time when the Ikhwan’s position was that it would not run a candidate in the poll. He was still very popular within the Brotherhood. In the President’s Palace he would be a serious threat to its unity.

I wandered along the queue on the first voting day with a female colleague who politely asked the women if they would be willing to talk to me as they waited for their turn to come. Not a single woman declined, though not all wanted to give their full names. The first we spoke to was wearing a niqab. The black cloth covered her entire body. All I could see was her eyes. I could tell she was old because the bags beneath them pressed gently down on the black veil that lay across the bridge of her nose. Her voice was a whisper that my translator struggled to hear against the noise of the bustling traffic. I asked how long she had been waiting to vote. ‘Today,’ she said in Arabic, ‘I have been waiting for one hour, but before I have been waiting my whole life.’

Standing a few places in front of her was Manal al-Subair. She was twenty-eight years old and wore a bright purple headscarf wrapped around her neck and tucked into a long black shalwar kameez embroidered with matching purple flowers. ‘Does the revolution end today?’ I asked. ‘Inshallah’ – ‘God willing’ – she replied. It did not.

The run-off vote was held on 16 and 17 June 2012. The two men left were the Brotherhood’s last-minute replacement for al-Shater, Mohamed Morsi, and Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, who was widely seen as the army’s man.