Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2014 00:11:01 +0200
“Mursi was a Muslim Brotherhood enforcer”: Brookings Analyst
Asharq Al-Awsat talks to author of Temptations of Power: Islamists and
Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East about Mursi, Muslim Brotherhood and
political Islam
Written by : <http://www.aawsat.net/author/mohamed-ali-saleh> Mohammad Ali
Salih
on : Friday, 4 Jul, 2014
Washington, Asharq Al-Awsat—On the anniversary of the ouster of Islamist
President Mohamed Mursi, Asharq Al-Awsat speaks to Brookings Fellow Dr.
Shadi Hamid, an analyst and author who specializes in political Islam and
the Arab Spring.
Hamid gives his view on the ouster of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed
Mursi—Egyptian interim president Adly Mansour was sworn in as his
replacement one year ago today. Hamid talks about Mursi’s one year in
office, the differences between the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist
organizations’ in the Middle East and what’s next for the now outlawed
group.
Shadi Hamid is a fellow with the Project on US Relations with the Islamic
World in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He served as director of
research at the Brookings Doha Center until January 2014. Prior to joining
Brookings, Hamid was director of research at the Project on Middle East
Democracy (POMED) and a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on
Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Hamid is currently vice-chair
of POMED, a member of the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Advisory
Panel and a correspondent for The Atlantic.
Asharq Al-Awsat: Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in
a New Middle East deals with the new wave of political Islam in the Middle
East and the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Why did you choose
to focus on this topic?
Shadi Hamid: I wrote Temptations of Power because I wanted to take a step
back from day-to-day controversies and the headlines, the tweets and the
Facebook comments, and try to understand how and why mainstream Islamist
groups evolve over time, identifying a set of causal mechanisms.
I also wanted to take their ideas and ideology seriously, as something
“honestly felt,” instead of seeing them as the modern-day equivalent of
Christian Democrats, moving along some predetermined linear trajectory
toward liberalism or whatever end goal we would like them to end up at.
Islamists are Islamists for a reason—because they believe in something
distinctive.
That distinctive something is, by definition, at least somewhat illiberal,
and herein lies the tension between liberalism and democracy, something
which I discuss at considerable length in the book. But I do believe
Islamists have the “right” to be illiberal if that is, in fact, who they are
and what they believe. We don’t have to like it but we do have to understand
it.
Q: Tell us a little about your personal knowledge of some of the Islamist
leaders? How do you judge some of those you met such as former Egyptian
President Mohamed Mursi?
This book was really 10 years in the making. I began researching Islamist
movements when I was living in Amman [in Jordan] in 2004-5. Since then, I’ve
tried to track the shifts in Islamist behavior during what turned out to be
a very tumultuous period. I take seriously the notion that to truly
understand Islamist movements you have to do something very simple: talk to
them, get to know them and try, in the process, to understand their fears
and aspirations.
I got to spend some time with Mohamed Mursi before he became a president. I,
and probably he, would have never dreamed then that this man would become
not only Egypt’s first democratically elected president, but also one of the
most polarizing figures in the country’s history.
Mursi was a Brotherhood loyalist, an enforcer. He was not a visionary or a
strategic thinker, by any means. He also tended to be dismissive of the
liberal opposition, who he saw as fundamentally detached from the Egyptian
public mood. This could have been tolerable in a head of a political
party—knot a head of state.
Q: What are the main differences between the Islamists in Egypt and those in
Tunisia?
What Tunisia has that others in the region do not, are strong,
vibrant&8212;and unabashedly secular—civil society organizations, media
outlets and opposition parties. Even the most mild, symbolic sort of
“Islamization” will face considerable resistance at every turn.
The country’s “founding father” Habib Bourguiba was not only an autocrat,
but an autocrat strongly influenced by the French tradition of Laïcité, the
notion that religion should be entirely separate from politics. In contrast
to the Anglo-Saxon model, which allows ample space for expression of
religion as long as the separation of church and state is respected.
This cultural re-rendering of Tunisian society, taking place over decades,
cannot be ignored or reversed, as many in Ennahda seem to recognize. For
example, Tunisia’s Code of Personal Status is one of the most progressive in
the region and enjoys broad public support. Ennahda members eventually made
their peace with the personal status code, not because they wanted to
necessarily, but because they had to.
In short, while Tunisia’s Ennahda Party and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
are from the same school of thought, they have evolved quite differently due
to the particularities of their local context. Another difference worth
mentioning here is the role of Ennahda’s historic leader and founder Rachid
Ghannouchi in forging Ennahda’s identity and keeping the sometimes disparate
parts of the organization together under the same umbrella.
The Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan Al-Banna being the exception, has lacked
charismatic leaders and intellectuals. In Egypt, the institutionalized and
even in a sense overwhelming nature of the organization, or tanzim, very
much supersedes individual personalities, making them less relevant in the
evolution of the group over time.
Q: Why did Islamic rule fail in Egypt?
First of all, I don’t think we can really say that there was “Islamic rule”
in Egypt. There was very little in the way of actual government-directed
Islamization during Mursi’s one year in power. The Brotherhood remained the
calculating gradualists that they had always been—they just happened to make
the wrong calculations. Despite considerable legislative and executive
powers, Mursi and the Brotherhood passed almost no “Islamic” legislation,
with the exception of a law on sukuk, or Islamic bonds.
I think it’s important not to conflate the growing opposition to the
Brotherhood with opposition to “Islamism” as such. If one looks at the
Tamarod (Rebellion) movement’s justifications for seeking Mursi’s overthrow,
for example, none of them had to do with the group’s religious conservatism.
First, on the mass level, there was a basic frustration with the Mursi
government’s failure to address the country’s economic woes and ensure
stability. Second, for the country’s liberal elites, however, it went well
beyond this, and this is where recognizing the fundamental ideological
divides at the heart of Arab politics becomes critical. They feared the
Brotherhood not only for what it had done, but for what it might do in the
future.
And this is why the Brotherhood or even milder Islamists like Ennahda will
always arouse fevered opposition, regardless of what they actually say or
do. The fears might be speculative—and this itself is problematic—but they
are also grounded in a reality of ideological difference.
Islamists and non-Islamists do, in fact, have different visions for their
societies, and that includes foundational—almost metaphysical—issues about
the meaning, nature and purpose of the nation-state. And then there are the
more obvious reasons.
Any democratically elected president, Islamist or otherwise, was going to
have to a deal with an almost impossibly complex array of problems, which
had been building up, really, over decades. This is, in part, why
revolutions are inherently destabilizing; they unleash popular
expectations—expectations that, in the real world of politics, simply
weren’t going to be met. This was why many warned the Brotherhood against
running a presidential candidate—one of the group’s original sins—but for a
number of reasons they were pushed in that direction.
Q: Why didn’t the same thing happen to Tunisia’s Islamists?
Ennahda leaders had a number of things going for them: first, they didn’t
have strong Salafist parties aggressively injecting religion into every
political debate and dragging them further to the right.
Second, the second largest party, after the first elections, was a secular
party, the Congress for the Republic (CPR).
Third, Tunisia also, importantly, lacks a history of military intervention
in politics. [Former President Zine El-Abidine] Ben Ali saw the army as
potential competition and kept it at a distance. Tunisia’s transition period
was fundamentally different—the old regime was less front and center, and
Tunisians could start anew to a greater degree than in Egypt, designing new
transitional institutions that enjoyed broad legitimacy across ideological
lines.
Lastly, Tunisia’s Islamists had the benefit of hindsight. They saw what had
happened in Egypt in July 2013. They were afraid and paranoid, but instead
of lashing out and trying to monopolize power (which would have almost
certainly failed) they erred on the side of caution and restraint. They
wanted to live to fight another day. So, they backed down during the
confrontation with the secular opposition over the summer.
Q: Do you agree with the notion that Islamists, generally speaking, don’t
believe in democracy? And that once they reach power through democratic
means they will seek to dismantle it?
I understand where this fear comes from, but it’s a fear that’s purely
speculative in nature. There is no recorded instance in history of
“one-person, one-vote, one-time”—of Islamists coming to power through
democratic elections only to abrogate the democratic process. Most Islamist
movements in the Arab world, as well as South and Southeast Asia, have
participated in and respected the democratic process.
As I discuss in the book, some of the most internally democratic
organizations in the Middle East are Islamist parties, Jordan’s Islamic
Action Front (IAF) being a notable example. Now, one might say that a
scenario of “one-vote, one-time” might happen in the future. As an analyst,
I can’t disprove something that has not actually happened yet. What I would
say is that we have to be careful not to make definitive statements about
the character of a rather diverse movement based on something that may or
may not happen in the future. If anything, looking at the historical record,
Islamists have a better record of respecting the democratic process than
secularists or liberals do, so it seems odd that we would focus so much on
the democratic commitments of one but not the other.
That said, we have to make a distinction between “liberal democracy” and
“democracy.”
Mainstream Islamist groups like Ennahda or the Brotherhood may be committed
to the democratic process, but that does not mean they’re liberals or are
going to become liberals anytime soon. Islamists are Islamists for a reason,
after all. So it’s fair to say that many Islamists would like to use the
democratic process for illiberal ends, but that’s not the same thing as
saying they don’t believe in democracy.
Q: You wrote that Islamists are convinced “that the US and other Western
powers simply would not allow them to win.” Is that true?
It’s true that Islamists have generally believed that and held on to it as
an article of faith. This draws, first and foremost, from the Algerian
experience, where democratically elected Islamists were on the verge of
coming to power, only to see various Western powers either tacitly or
directly supporting the military coup. I think there was an opportunity with
the Arab Spring to move beyond that and, to its credit, the administration
of US President Barack Obama was willing to accept democratic outcomes in
Egypt, even if they had concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood.
Q: What about the Islamist governments of Sudan and Iran? How are they
different from the experiences of Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia?
When the Brotherhood in Egypt came to power, a lot of people raised the
specter of Iranian-style theocracy. The comparisons with Iran, Sudan or
Afghanistan, though, are a bit misleading. Iran’s Islamists came to power
through revolution, not democratic elections. The path of reaching power is
a key determinant of Islamist behavior once in power. Revolutions, by their
very nature, are supposed to be radical and radicalizing, and that helps to
explain the uncompromising nature of Iran’s Islamists, at least in the early
years of post-revolutionary Iran.
But this is also why the Brotherhood and Ennahda had so few “models” upon
which to draw. The examples of Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan weren’t quite
applicable to their own experience. This also helps explain why Islamists
after the Arab Spring were less prepared than they perhaps should have been.
A lot of this was new terrain and, to a large extent, Islamists were
learning on the fly, without a clear vision of what they actually wanted and
what they hoped to accomplish in both the short and medium term.
File photo of Brookings Fellow Dr. Shadi Hamid.
File photo of Brookings Fellow Dr. Shadi Hamid.
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