“Where were you before the revolution?” This, Sheikh Darwish said, was the question the other parties now asked of the Salafis.
“Unfortunately, this question comes to mind through the media, the media that hears with only one ear and sees with only one eye, only the eye and ear of the liberal secular current. . . . The elite find it unbelievable and impossible for us to represent our children, our brothers, and our neighbors. These politicians think that it is them, and only them, who represent and speak for us. But, brothers, they did not come to our streets. They did not live in our villages. They did not walk in our hamlets. They did not wear our clothes. They did not eat our bread. They did not drink our polluted water. They did not live in the sewage we live in, and they did not experience the life of misery and the hardship of the people. They never experienced a gas crisis or a bread crisis and they never stood in a line to buy subsidized goods. It is enough for them to look fresh in the media. . . .
“Aren’t people equal like the teeth of a comb?” he asked. “Is the vote of a person with a PhD greater than the vote of a high school diploma? . . . You, Egyptian people, do you accept that? Do any of you accept this insult?”
I felt for a moment that I was listening to a sermon in a megachurch in suburban San Diego. If the West had stolen constitutionalism from Islam, then the Egyptian Salafis had borrowed back the religious populism of Jerry Falwell and William Jennings Bryan.
“Brothers, we, the Salafis, the founders of Al Nour Party, were part of the silent majority,” he said. “Those people do not live with us, they do not feel our pain or our hopes.” These elites will try to “clone” the Mubarak regime, he warned, and re-create “the same ‘democracy’ with its errors, the same capitalism with its errors, the same liberalism with its errors, but after the revolution, we accept nothing but real change.”
It was hard to quantify the popular support for the Salafi views on social issues, or to isolate that support from more general populist resentment. But taking a quarter of the votes in Egypt’s first free national election gave them a mandate. Salafi leaders used it to vex everything they touched in post-Mubarak politics. Borhami, the sheikh with the giant prayer bruise, made the most trouble of all.
9
Parliament Grows a Beard
January 23, 2012–May 23, 2012
The People’s Assembly sits behind tall iron gates a short and shady walk south of Tahrir Square, east of the British and American embassies and near the fortified headquarters of the Interior Ministry, which is as imposing as the Parliament. The white-domed assembly building, with neoclassical columns and papyrus-flower capitals, was built in 1923 by King Fuad as a monument to Egypt’s nominal independence. But he remained a British puppet. The Parliament never held real power. And the pell-mell urbanization during the Abdel Nasser era all but buried the edifice in tenements, storefronts, gas stations, and carts of fuul (the slow-cooked beans beloved by Egyptians). In my first year of running around Cairo, I had never noticed the building.
The newly elected lawmakers convened nearly a year after the uprising, on January 23, 2012. If the Salafis’ claim to a quarter of the seats in Parliament was the surprise of the election, the Brotherhood was the undisputed winner. Its candidates captured nearly half the chamber. Between the Salafis and Brothers, Islamists of one stripe or another accounted for three quarters of the votes. The liberals, leftists, social democrats, the Tahrir Square activists, and ruling-party incumbents each took a small share of the remaining quarter; they had all washed out at the polls.
The founder of the Brotherhood, Hassan el-Banna, had set his sights on a seat in the Parliament within a decade of starting his movement, in 1928. Now, after eighty years of struggle in the shadows, his heirs were poised at last to lead the assembly. I arrived by 8:00 A.M., and hundreds of Muslim Brothers were already there.
For a supposedly secret society, they were easy to spot. Where Salafis favored the unruly beards of storybook wizards, the Muslim Brothers kept their whiskers fastidiously trim. The archetypical Muslim Brother was middle-aged and middle class, perhaps with the slight potbelly that comes with age and kushari—but never with the kind of protruding abdomen that might suggest gluttony or indolence. He wore chinos and a button-down shirt with a button-down collar, never the traditional galabiya of a sheikh or a peasant. A pen or a mechanical pencil might protrude from a pocket. The Brothers—the Ikhwan—were upright, confident, sometimes arrogant, perhaps patronizing. They were professionals, small-business owners, or senior vice presidents of sprawling multinationals. Physicians and engineers filled the leadership; medical school and the hard sciences offered the surest paths to prestige for the strivers of the Egyptian middle class. Mohamed Badie, the general guide, was a veterinarian.
The image varied somewhat in rural villages, of course, and there were also university students and recent graduates—drawn by faith, fellowship, or the vision of a better, alternative Egypt. But even among younger Brothers, the outline of the older archetype was discernible: pleated pants, wire-rimmed glasses, argyle sweaters, and thinner, collegiate beards. Ikhwany, Egyptians sometimes called the look—Brotherhoodish.
Outside the assembly, Muslim Brothers and Sisters held hands and danced in the street. They sang religious and patriotic songs from the forties and fifties. I watched middle-aged men lift onto their shoulders portly lawmakers in suits and neckties, like a high school football squad hoisting a winning quarterback. Grown men cried tears of joy. “This is the most important day in our lives,” said Abdel Moneim el-Tantawy, a sixty-seven-year-old mechanical engineer.
The celebrations followed weeks of deadly, on-again, off-again clashes in the streets abutting the People’s Assembly. But as in most such protests over the previous year, the Islamists had stayed out of them. The battles had pitted riot police against liberal or left-leaning protesters demanding civilian rule. (There were three camps now: the security forces, the Islamists, and those self-described “revolutionary” activists.) The street cops were still missing in action. And the riot police did more to provoke than to disperse. Their signature tactic was picking up rocks and throwing them back at the civilian protesters. Just a month before, a makeshift missile a policeman had thrown from the top of the cabinet building had hit my left boot, sending me limping off to look for a helmet. Having successfully ended the weeklong melee before Thanksgiving by building a wall across Mohamed Mahmoud Street, the army had erected no fewer than five more cement barricades across streets around the neighborhood to stop other brawls between the riot police and protesters. Three more went up in February. The stately neighborhood of Garden City was becoming a labyrinth of walls. On one, graffiti artists had painted a trompe l’oeil image of the streetscape behind it.
It seemed clear enough to me that the generals were loath to cede power to an Islamist-led Parliament. To address that question, a barrel-chested general with a white crew cut had summoned me and eight other journalists from Western news organizations for a special briefing before the swearing in, on December 7, 2011. Egyptian news outlets were excluded.
Do not worry about the Islamist electoral victories, the general, Assistant Minister of Defense Mokhtar el-Mulla, told us. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces would still name the prime minister. The army would still control the government. In fact, the generals had decided to oversee the writing of a new constitution—a job that all the candidates for Parliament had campaigned on as the chamber’s main responsibility.
“In such unstable conditions, the Parliament is not representing all the Egyptians,” Mulla explained. “So whatever the majority in the People’s Assembly, they are very welcome, because they will not have the ability to impose anything.”
Islamists, he insisted, could never represent the true Egypt. “Do you think that the Egyptians elected someone to threaten their interest and economy and security and relations with the international community? Of course not!”
Besi
des, he said, the Mubarak constitution was mostly just fine. “A lot of legislators are saying that we have a very good constitution, and a very unique one, except for only Chapter Five, about the presidential elections, so we will only amend this chapter.” He promised that under the military’s supervision, a committee of jurists could do the job in less than a month. Just three weeks had passed since the generals had dropped their overt plan to preserve their power by dictating constitutional principles; now they were trying a more subtle approach.
I was incensed that Egyptian journalists had been left out of the briefing. So I arranged for the New York Times website to post my audio recording. The reaction to Mulla’s comments was swift. Liberals and Islamists again accused the generals of attempting a coup. The Brotherhood pulled out of a civilian “advisory council” the generals had set up. Within days, the military had retreated back to letting the Parliament oversee the writing of the charter.
But as obvious as the mutual suspicions between the soldiers and the Islamists seemed to me, many non-Islamist politicians and activists saw a conspiracy. They were convinced that the Muslim Brothers were secretly cutting a deal with the generals. The Brothers had accepted the military’s continued control of the government, the theory went. In exchange, the generals had scheduled elections on a quick timetable that enabled the Brothers’ well-prepared organization to lock up a plurality of the Parliament.
Now, in the midst of the Brothers’ celebrations outside the assembly, protesters arrived denouncing the supposed Islamist sellout and demanding that the Brothers in Parliament push harder to take power from the generals. “No to the military, no to the Brothers, the revolution is still in the square!” hundreds of demonstrators chanted. Some seized on a phonetic similarity between the Arabic word for “sell” and the family name of the Brotherhood’s general guide, Badie. “Sell, sell, sell the revolution, oh, Badie.” It was funny in Arabic.
The Brothers, though, were well coached that morning. Scores linked arms. A long chain held back the protesters. A few threw empty plastic water bottles at the Islamists, but the Brothers more or less held their ground, and, for the day, kept the peace. How long would that restraint last?
* * *
• • •
Every conversation about the Arab revolts eventually became a debate about the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamists inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brothers constituted the main opposition to every Arab autocracy. The Cairo headquarters had no control over the many loosely aligned affiliates around the world, but every Arab autocrat sold himself to the West as a bulwark against the dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam. Would participation in pluralistic politics now domesticate the Brotherhood? Or was the Brotherhood’s promise of an “Islamic democracy” a Trojan horse packed with jihadis? Were we watching a triumph of liberal democracy, or a clash of civilizations?
The U.S. government had been trying to understand the group for nearly six decades. Eisenhower had invited a senior Brotherhood leader into the Oval Office: Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of the Brotherhood’s founder. He had come to the United States in 1953 to attend a conference at Princeton, and a cable from the U.S. embassy in Cairo had warned against “offending this important body.” Eisenhower hoped to court the Brotherhood as an ally against communism. But when the Cold War ended, there was less to discuss. Mubarak learned in the early 1990s that American diplomats in Cairo had talked with the Muslim Brothers, and he exploded in rage.
“Your government is in contact with these terrorists from the Muslim Brotherhood,” he fumed to the journalist Mary Anne Weaver—tarring the Brothers with an accusation that had dogged them for decades without substantiation.
George W. Bush raised a fuss when Egypt jailed non-Islamists, but he did as Mubarak asked when it came to the Muslim Brothers. “We have not engaged with the Muslim Brotherhood. And we won’t,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during a visit to the American University in Cairo in 2005, after Mubarak had moved to thwart the early Islamist victories in the parliamentary voting. Egypt “has its rule of law, and I’ll respect that.”
The philosopher Tariq Ramadan—son of the Muslim Brother who met Eisenhower and a grandson of the movement’s founder—was hired as a professor at Notre Dame in 2004. The Bush administration denied him a visa. Ramadan was forced to teach at Oxford.
Seven years later, in 2011, some in the Pentagon and the Obama White House still viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as a close cousin to Al Qaeda.
“They are all swimming in the same sea,” General James Mattis of Central Command later said in a speech looking back on the period. He meant not only the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda but also the Shiite theocracy in Iran. National Security Council staff presented Mattis with intelligence reports delineating the deep differences and even animosities among those three rival strains of political Islam. But Mattis stubbornly persisted in lumping them together.
“Is political Islam in the best interest of the United States?” Mattis asked in the same speech, at the Heritage Foundation. That was the “fundamental question,” he said. “If we won’t even ask the question, how do we get to the point of recognizing which is our side in the fight?”
He saw the fight against political Islam—in all its forms—as the central dynamic of the Middle East, and plenty of others agreed with him in Washington, including at the Pentagon, in the White House, and in Congress. “Islamists are not our friends,” Dennis Ross, the president’s adviser, later wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times, making the same case. “Their creed is not compatible with pluralism or democracy.”
John Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and future secretary of state, was an inveterate foe of the Brotherhood. In a 2008 confirmation hearing to send an ambassador, Margaret Scobey, to Egypt, Kerry asked only about “the current state of threat” posed by the Brothers.
“I’ve heard this from President Mubarak,” Kerry said, describing the theory that democratic elections in Egypt would precipitate a Brotherhood takeover on the hard-line model of Hamas in Gaza. “If you sort of open it up and the Muslim Brotherhood were legitimate, that you would in fact have a more radical outcome and greater instability in Egypt.”
Then there was the question of public opinion. Even those in the administration who understood the difference between the Brotherhood and Al Qaeda knew that distinction eluded most lawmakers and voters. No American politician wanted to publicly support the Brotherhood. An Egyptian lawmaker from the Muslim Brotherhood had turned up at a reception at the Cairo home of the American ambassador in 2007, and it became a Washington scandal. During the eighteen-day uprising against Mubarak, Hillary Clinton and White House officials avoided any mention of either “Islamist” or “Muslim Brotherhood” when they met with think-tank experts. The White House stuck to the euphemism “nonsecular actors.” Later that spring, Obama personally struck the words “Muslim Brotherhood” from a draft of a speech about the uprising.
When European diplomats invited their American counterparts to meet with Arab Islamists, Steven Simon of the National Security Council staff imagined the headline: UNITED STATES JOINS EUROFAGS TO MEET WITH TERRORISTS. The Americans skipped it.
Now Egypt (and Tunisia) could provide the real-world answers to decades of hypotheticals about what might happen if Brotherhood-style Islamists won free elections. They were poised to wield power, and some in the administration realized that apprehension had kept Washington from acquiring firsthand information about the Muslim Brothers or their internal dynamics.
The American embassy in Cairo, heeding the six-year-old promise from Rice, had eschewed all contact except rare meetings with lawmakers who happened to be Muslim Brothers. In the spring of 2011, the State Department knew no one in what was about to become Egypt’s most influential political bloc. “Why were we not talking to these people?” one member of the White House national security staff later told me, recalling the
exasperation. “We didn’t know anything!”
Advisers to Clinton at the State Department and staff on the Egypt desk at the National Security Council drafted a cable formally instructing the embassy in Cairo to reach out to the Muslim Brothers. But Donilon was still nervous. He sat on it for more than a month.
Finally a Clinton adviser got his hands on a faxed copy of a cable with the same instructions from Prime Minister David Cameron to the British embassy in Cairo. Now Washington was falling behind London. Donilon immediately approved the American cable.
Then the embassy resisted. Its diplomats were too anxious about being seen with the Brothers, and too unsure of which ones to call. By the summer, Clinton’s chief policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, decided to send the State Department’s expert on political Islam, Peter Mandaville, to make contact. But the outgoing American ambassador, Margaret Scobey, exercised a seldom-used prerogative to block the visit. She acceded only after top State Department officials assured her that Mandaville would bring along an embassy diplomat to the meeting.
Finally, in July 2011, Mandaville and the embassy diplomat met for coffee at the InterContinental Semiramis hotel in Cairo with Mohamed el-Shahawy, a forty-year-old Muslim Brother who worked as a regional executive for 3M, the American multinational. Western diplomats, journalists, and academics were swarming over Cairo asking about the Muslim Brothers by then. That coffee was just another meeting for Shahawy. As it happened he was on his way out of the movement. He resigned soon after as part of a mass defection of moderates.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 14