The Muslim Brotherhood stayed out of it. The leaders saw a trap. The presence of Muslim Brothers could provide a pretext for a crackdown or a cancellation of parliamentary elections, now scheduled to begin on November 28. Other protesters said that the Brothers had sold out for a chance to win power. When a dissenting Brotherhood leader showed up to apologize, a mob hounded him out. Convinced that the Brothers’ accommodation amounted to collusion, the liberals and leftists never forgave the Islamists.
The military council had begun backing down almost as soon as the fighting began, the day after the all-Islamist protest. First the generals downgraded their binding principles to mere suggestions. Then they dropped the suggestion that they hold on to their power. They replaced their prime minister. They set a date for presidential elections, to begin in May 2012. They pledged that they would exit civilian government fully when the new president took office.
Finally, on the night of Thursday, November 24—Thanksgiving in America—the generals called a halt. An army crane stacked cubes of concrete to form a ten-foot wall across Mohamed Mahmoud Street. A row of soldiers stood impassively on top of it. The generals had turned off the violence, as if they could have done so any time they had chosen. “Our hearts bled for what happened,” they wrote on the Facebook page of the military council.
National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and other stability-minded senior staff had gone home for Thanksgiving dinner. The younger cohort left in charge, including Rhodes and Denis McDonough, a deputy national security adviser, were more eager for change in Egypt. At 3:03 A.M. Friday morning in Washington—10:03 A.M. in Cairo—the White House issued its first statement explicitly urging the generals to let go of power: “The new Egyptian government must be empowered with real authority immediately” for “the full transfer of power to a civilian government” to take place “as soon as possible.”
The generals’ inability to manage the transition “was becoming an embarrassment,” one senior diplomat later told me.
When he woke up to the statement, Donilon was furious. “How could you let this happen?” he complained to Steven Simon, who oversaw Egypt on the staff of the National Security Council.
But Simon, too, had taken a rare night off for Thanksgiving. Talk to McDonough and Rhodes, Simon snapped back. He was fed up with the White House’s tugs-of-war over Egypt.
8
Forefathers
November 26, 2011–January 22, 2012
Could a Muslim man marry a Jew or a Christian?
A tall and heavy-set sheikh was fielding questions from admirers in an Alexandria mosque. His name was Yasser el-Borhami. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a beard so long and unruly that it seemed to form a tripod. One tuft grew from his chin and two more from each of his cheeks. The prayer bruise on his forehead was as big as a doughnut.
Yes, Borhami answered, but the Muslim husband must show his wife only “contempt” until she converted.
Contempt in marriage?
“Must every man love the woman he rapes?” Borhami replied.
Borhami’s advice, recorded in an online video posted in the years before the uprising, took on new salience during the election that fall of a post-Mubarak Parliament. The voting began on November 28, just days after the wall across Mohamed Mahmoud Street went up that Thanksgiving night, and continued in stages through January 11, 2012. By early December, it was already clear that Sheikh Borhami and the movement he founded, the Salafi Call, were among the big winners. Virtually everyone expected that the Muslim Brothers would take the most votes. The surprise was the Salafis like Borhami, whose conservative, literal-minded, and chauvinistic understanding of Islam made the Brothers look like milquetoasts.
Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the clerics of Saudi Arabia—they were all strains of the same Salafi movement. All, like the Egyptian Salafis, shunned electoral politics. It was a source of strife among the faithful, and a foolish attempt to put man-made law above divine revelation. But now the Egyptian Salafis had somehow sprinted ahead of leftists, liberals, and nationalists who had been at politics for decades. Salafi parties had won a quarter of the vote. They were second only to the Muslim Brothers in political clout. No one—not the Brothers, not the American embassy, and certainly not me—had seen it coming. Had we all so badly misunderstood where “the revolution” was headed?
Although less influential than the Muslim Brothers in the events that followed, the Salafis turned out to be a good place to begin an education in political Islam. They were what most Westerners I knew pictured when they imagined an Islamist: bearded, puritanical, antimodern. Before I moved to Egypt, I had supposed that differences among Islamists were a matter of degree, from moderate to extreme. Liberal or secular-minded Egyptians in Cairo often insisted that the difference was only in degree of candor: Salafis were simply honest about what all Islamists secretly wanted. But more than anything, the Salafis demonstrated that the term “Islamist” can have many contradictory meanings. People who say they seek Islamic governance disagree profoundly, even bitterly, about what that should look like—the way that Protestants and Catholics split over theology, or socialists and communists clash about politics. Compared with the Muslim Brothers, Salafis were in many ways more rigid and doctrainaire (like communists), but at the same time less uniform in their teachings (like Protestants). Let me explain.
Salafiyya refers to the pious forefathers, the original Muslims who were companions of the Prophet Mohamed. But there is some irony in the use of the term. It was first popularized in the late nineteenth century by Sheikh Muhammad Abduh, who was arguably the progenitor of all modern Islamist movements, including the Brotherhood. Abduh used Salafiyya to mean almost exactly the opposite of what it means today.
Born around 1850 to a prosperous family in the Nile Delta, Abduh studied at Al Azhar—the centuries-old Cairo mosque and institute that remained the premier center for the study of Sunni Islam when I lived in Egypt. But after Al Azhar, Abduh also visited the great universities of Europe, including Oxford and Cambridge. He drank in the Enlightenment rationalism that he found there, and returned to Egypt convinced that Islam had once embodied all the same virtues—before Europe did, while Christendom was still in its Dark Ages. Europe leaped ahead in science and philosophy because centuries of despotism across the Muslim world had buried Islam’s original rationalism under rigid intolerance and rote learning.
Abduh self-consciously modeled himself on the Protestant reformers of Europe. He taught that a return to the ways of the Salafiyya meant restoring the rationalism and openness of the early Muslims. Only by reviving that spirit, he argued, could the Muslim world shake off colonialism and catch up to the West.
Visiting Europe, he wrote near the end of the nineteenth century, always renewed his hope “of changing the conditions of the Muslims for the better by reforming the religion that they have corrupted.” Or, more aphoristically: “I went to the West and saw Islam but no Muslims; I returned to the East and saw Muslims but no Islam.”
Abduh became an influential enough agitator for Egyptian independence that in 1882 the khedive (the hereditary ruler of Egypt who was by then a British puppet) forced him into exile, in Damascus, Beirut, and Paris. But Egypt’s British overseers appreciated Abduh’s admiration for their culture. They especially valued his emphasis, as he mellowed, on putting pedagogical reform ahead of political change. (In 1884, sympathetic Brits outfitted Abduh in a bright blue gown and white turban for a visit to Parliament, to make him look more satisfyingly exotic.) With the blessing of the British consul general, Abduh ascended to become the grand mufti of Egypt—its highest Islamic authority—and he spread interpretations of Islam that still sounded liberal in 2011. He taught that Islam required limited and representative governments, that citizens should determine their own laws, that polygamy was neither required nor tenable under Islam, and that only God could know which sects were closer to His vision (so Sunni and Shia should stop fightin
g about it). Abduh defended Charles Darwin decades before the Scopes trial of 1925.
I have often heard Westerners talk about the need for a Muslim Martin Luther. I realized in Egypt that it is far too late for that: Abduh came and went a century ago. But Abduh’s ideas never went far. Abdel Nasser nationalized Al Azhar in the middle of the last century, and the institution became more hidebound and authoritarian than ever. Without freedom of speech and assembly, there was little hope for religious freedom either.
Contemporary Salafis say that they, too, emulate the early Muslim companions of the Prophet Mohamed. Like Abduh, they are willing to set aside centuries of intervening tradition to get back to those roots. But instead of returning to a golden era of reason and debate as Abduh proposed, these Salafis seek the most literal possible meaning of the text of the Quran or the sayings of the Prophet. Salafis like Borhami say they want the seventh-century applications of the original texts. Abduh was a modernizer; these Salafis reject modernity. They despise Abduh as a Westernized stooge.
Salafis I knew in Egypt praised the Prophet’s medieval penal code. They condemned the salutation “Merry Christmas” as sinful heresy. They taught that women were designed to stay in the home, not a workplace, and they forbade any mixing of the sexes outside an immediate family. If forced to talk to an unveiled woman, Salafi men stared at the ground and refused to shake hands. Salafi women did the same if they had to meet me. Some sheikhs urged women to shun Facebook: a male face on a screen was too intimate. In a gesture toward the inclusion of women in the new Parliament, the military council had required political parties to include at least one woman in each candidate list. The Salafis put up billboards blocking out the veiled faces of their token females: two rows of beards, with a flower in the corner.
I heard music everywhere in the cities of Egypt. Om Kalthoum, a mid-twentieth-century Egyptian diva who is the Edith Piaf of the Arab world, crooned from the stereo of every taxi. Profane homemade rap music stored on USB drives thumped from the tuk-tuk taxis. Outdoor wedding parties took over whole blocks and rocked until dawn. But many Salafis forbade all music, even at weddings. Salafis allowed only the singsong a cappella recitation of Islamic poems or Quranic verses. On the eve of the November parliamentary vote, a Salafi sheikh named Hazem Shoman crashed the stage of a rock concert in the city of Mansoura. He grabbed the microphone and implored the audience to repent, until he himself was yanked from the stage. How could a quarter of Egyptian voters cast ballots for such austerity?
I went to meet Sheikh Borhami, at home in Alexandria, in a building with a small sign reading BORHAMI MEDICAL CLINICS. A vegetable peddler outside called up, and Borhami leaned out his window to throw down a key.
He made his living as a pediatrician, practicing in the same building where his father once had, and also in a government health clinic around the corner. His sister was also a doctor and she practiced in the same building, he told me proudly—Salafi ideas about gender notwithstanding.
His father and an uncle had both been imprisoned for their Islamist politics, which were the kind that had threatened Nasser and Sadat. Borhami found their imprisonment “terrifying,” he told me. He discovered a safer form of political Islam on a visit in 1979 to Saudi Arabia, in its austere, authoritarian formulation of Salafism. Saudi sheikhs taught that strict obedience to an earthly ruler (even Sadat or Mubarak) was a religious duty. Any dissent meant fitna—strife or unrest among believers.
Borhami volunteered to me that his greatest influence was Sheikh Abdel Aziz Ibn Baz, a blind scholar who had been Saudi Salafism’s leading evangelist. He may be best remembered for insisting into the final decades of the twentieth century that the sun circled the Earth, a position he recanted only in 1985 after Saudi prince Sultan bin Salman returned from a week aboard the space shuttle Discovery. The word of a royal was enough for the sheikh.
Petrodollar Islam, some scholars called the Salafism of Saudi Arabia. Arabs from Egypt and other poor countries traveled to Saudi Arabia to work in the oil boom and brought back Salafi ideas. And the newly rich Saudi donors used their bank accounts to finance Salafi missions and mosques around the region. Borhami was an apostle of Saudi-style Salafism, and he acknowledged to me the helpfulness of Saudi Arabian money.
“Of course people in Saudi Arabia like to build mosques here in Egypt. It is much cheaper!” he said, grinning.
Borhami and other Salafi leaders would somehow always end up on the Saudi side of politics in post-Mubarak Egypt, with fateful consequences. But that would come later.
While Borhami was spreading Salafism in Alexandria, other Egyptians—especially in the rural south—were following a similar literalist Salafi methodology to an opposite conclusion. These Salafis seized on the Prophet Mohamed’s exhortations to battle against the rivals of the early Muslims. They deemed the Mubarak government apostate and fought a bloody insurgency against it. One of these Salafi jihadis, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a physician who grew up in my neighborhood of Cairo, went on to shape and lead Al Qaeda.
Borhami and the Alexandria-based Salafis wanted no part in any of that, and their deference to authority naturally met only encouragement from Mubarak’s mukhabarat. The police occasionally detained Alexandria Salafis briefly in Islamist roundups but not as often or for as long as they arrested Muslim Brothers, and the mukhabarat developed a working relationship with the Salafi sheikhs. “The intelligence service is everything you need in Egypt,” Bassem el-Zarqa, a Salafi leader who lives a few blocks from Borhami, told me defensively. “Do you mean that we are active agents of the intelligence, or just under surveillance like everyone else? If you really live in Egypt, then you don’t have to ask this question.”
Other Egyptian Islamists believed the answer was easy: the Alexandria-based Salafis were so accommodating to the authorities that they had effectively turned into active agents. As time went on, I understood their reputation.
The Salafis had always opposed protesting Mubarak. Borhami urged all Muslims to stay home on Police Day, to avoid fitna and bloodshed. But after Mubarak’s ouster, Borhami pushed his fellow Salafis to start their own political party, arguing that otherwise the Muslim Brotherhood might dominate elections and push them aside.
Who was buying what these guys were selling? After the Salafis’ surprise success in the first stage of the parliamentary voting, my colleague Mayy el-Sheikh and I set out in early December 2011 to see them on the stump, in the village of Shabramant, Giza.
We drove about an hour southwest through a patchwork of urban sprawl and sugar beet fields. Trash floated in irrigation ditches. Corroded diesel water pumps roared like eighteen-wheelers.
The dirt road narrowed. Cinder-block walls rose on either side of us, and when the space became too tight for our SUV, we knew we had arrived. The road smelled of fresh manure, and we continued on foot to an open plot in the center of the village. Donkeys harnessed to carts were grazing on straw in a makeshift parking lot. Beyond them were hundreds of folding chairs. Loudspeakers stood in the dirt at either side of an elevated platform, and floodlights had been rigged on the low building behind us. A gaggle of sheikhs was mounting the rostrum, and I noticed that Mayy was the only woman in the square. (She and I were also the only ones in pants; the men all wore galabiyas.) I glimpsed a niqab peeking out from a window in the brick walls around the square. Salafi views on gender, alcohol, and female modesty were only common sense in towns like Shabramant (and in much of rural Egypt).
The organizers unfolded two seats for us in the front row and pressed into our hands two cans of sugary Mirinda orange soda. Sheikh Shaaban Darwish, with a fluffy white beard and a sizable paunch below his galabiya, was seated at the center of the platform, and he spoke into a microphone on the table before him.
Constitutions, elections, freedom of conscience, and the rights of religious minorities—Sheikh Darwish claimed that all these ideas had originated with the Prophet Mohamed.
“The Prophet,
may peace be upon him, said, ‘elect twelve deputies from among you,’” he said. “‘Elect!’ See the word, ‘election,’ it is ours! ‘Elect twelve deputies from among you,’ meaning representatives. So the idea of representation is ours. It is not from Western culture, as they claim. The West took it from us. It is ours and now it has returned to us.”
The Prophet Mohamed “established the first written constitution in history,” Sheikh Darwish continued, alluding to a charter Mohamed had promulgated in the multifaith city of Medina. The people of Shabramant nodded. “Anyone who said that citizenship is an invention of the modern culture of liberalism lied. Citizenship is from Islam. The West took it from us! They wrapped it and canned it and reexported it to us!”
As literalists go, the Egyptian Salafis could be remarkably squishy. Did they earnestly envision an Egyptian government stoning adulterers and cutting off hands? Or would those medieval punishments apply only in some hazy end-times utopia, when poverty and ignorance had vanished from earth? Should the state require women to veil their hair and cover their bodies, or was that just a nice idea for sheikhs to encourage? And what did the sheikhs really think about Christians like me? Salafi sheikhs and candidates gave more liberal answers in more liberal precincts like Port Said but conservative answers in places like Shabramant.
There was no pope or general guide to set Salafist policy, which varied among allied movements in different Arab countries. Like Protestant fundamentalists, the Salafis cared about the individual reading the text for himself (or for herself, but mostly for himself).
But the Salafi roots ran thirty years deep. They had never been chased from mosques by the security services, smeared by regime propagandists, or sullied by electoral mudslinging. They were running charities, clinics, and schools. They had village street cred. The Muslim Brothers were doctors, lawyers, and engineers. They were professionals who preached and ministered to peasants. The Salafis were the peasants. They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking up resentfully at the Cairo elites—including, implicitly, the Brothers.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 13