Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  At the same time, Morsi also claimed the powers of the dissolved parliament for himself. The president wanted to reassert civilian primacy, and, again, his interests on this front converged with those of the military, which wanted to take a step back from day-to-day politics. In another country, it might have been hard to imagine that any single person could temporarily hold the authority of the entire legislative branch. Under a less arbitrary system, new elections would have immediately followed the dissolution of parliament. But Egypt’s rulers liked to improvise. Faceless judges had dissolved the parliament, the SCAF had claimed authority, and two months later, this awkward Brother-turned-president had reached out and taken the power of law from the SCAF. It didn’t look anything like a democratic transition, but at the moment it did look like an improvement; better that unfettered, unregulated power rest with an elected civilian than with a secretive clan of violent, intolerant generals.

  From that first shift in August, however, some liberals and secularists warned that Morsi was amassing his own dictatorial powers. It was already considered a poor omen that he hadn’t tried to form a national unity government or a cabinet of neutral technocrats, instead preferring an ideological alliance with the Salafis to the Brotherhood’s right. The new president had not yet done anything that could be construed as authoritarian, but his detractors predicted it was only a question of time. Here was one man, an alumnus of an underground authoritarian religious order, who now possessed the entire power of the executive and legislative branches of government, along with total control over the body that would write Egypt’s next constitution. It was bound to go wrong, the liberals believed. Basem’s colleagues in the Social Democratic Party opposed military rule, but many of them, from the moment of Mubarak’s fall, had seen the SCAF as the only force that could check the Islamists. If the military retired from politics and returned to the barracks, the Social Democrats said, the Muslim Brotherhood would control everything.

  In short order, their fears proved justified. Morsi began packing the government with sycophantic cronies. A trusted hack was put in charge of state television and newspapers. During the campaign, the Muslim Brotherhood had promised to avoid “culture wars” and focus on rescuing Egypt’s broken economy. However, now that they were in power and goaded by their extremist Salafi allies, the Brothers proposed banning alcohol, censoring internet pornography, and closing down the all-night cafés that had been a mainstay of Egyptian social life for centuries. The Brotherhood abandoned one of the most pressing issues of its campaign, reforming the police and Interior Ministry, for a bigger priority: using the tools of the old regime for its own ends. The Brotherhood didn’t care if the police abused citizens, so long as it could insert its own loyalists into police ranks. As new cases of police brutality and torture piled up, the Brotherhood remained silent. The presidential advisers who really mattered were all Brotherhood loyalists: the prime minister, the justice minister, and the informal kitchen cabinet that helped Morsi set foreign policy. The Brotherhood’s influence was so widespread that its supreme guide felt obliged to hold a press conference denying that he controlled President Morsi, only intensifying the belief that he did.

  These were broken promises that very quickly merged into far greater breaches of trust. The Brotherhood wrote a parliamentary election law that gave it unfair advantage. The Supreme Court, which had final authority over election laws, requested changes. The Brotherhood made the revisions, but then refused to send them back to the court for a final review. Even more alarming to the liberals and the secularists was Morsi’s stewardship of the Constituent Assembly: the hundred Egyptians tasked with writing a new charter for the country. The assembly had been formed by the now-disbanded parliament, which had been controlled by a veto-proof supermajority of Brothers and Salafis. Most of the reputable non-Islamists had already quit the Constituent Assembly in protest before Morsi was elected, including Basem’s Social Democratic Party and the liberal groups that identified as revolutionary. By October, almost all the remaining non-Islamists resigned in protest from the Constituent Assembly, including conservatives representing the Coptic Church and the Mubarak-era political class. Now Morsi was acting unimpeded, in concert with the fundamentalists in the assembly.

  Liberals believed the situation had become irreversibly grave. After all the struggles of the previous two years, a single, relatively extremist faction controlled the presidency, the government’s legislative powers, and the Constituent Assembly. Carried away with their power, the Brotherhood and its allies had discarded their conciliatory rhetoric about the Islamic requirement for shura, or consultation, and the need to pave a durable way forward by including all Egyptians in the constitution. Instead, they were now forcing their way through with a winner-takes-all swagger. Morsi and his Islamist allies began to justify all their actions with a perverse misreading of democracy. The Brotherhood had won fair elections, they said, and now could write whatever laws it pleased, minorities be damned. They claimed the Brotherhood had the blessing of a democratic majority to do anything it wished, whether in government or in the drafting of Egypt’s permanent constitution. It had no need to consult or include anyone else; the Brotherhood state had the blessing of both God and the ballot box.

  In the Constituent Assembly, the Brotherhood and the even more extreme Salafis appeared completely indifferent to the rights and privileges of others: women, Christians, secular Muslims, liberals. Instead, they were moving forward with a document that would preserve centralized misrule (but now in the service of the Brotherhood), while advancing a particularly fundamentalist brand of Islam. In practice, no one was interested in negotiating the compromises necessary for a legitimate constitution. The liberals had aspired to write a document that would simply ignore the aims of Egypt’s conservative, Islamic citizens, who probably made up the single largest bloc of the population. Now the Islamists held the levers, and they were going to write the constitution their way. This wasn’t Philadelphia in 1787; this was the Wild West. There were manifold areas of contention, but three threatened to overwhelm the entire constitution.

  First was the process itself. This constitution was supposed to be the product of negotiation among all Egypt’s factions, a departure from the norm of dictatorial rule. Instead, it was being written in secret by one group alone. For many, the lack of inclusivity and transparency was as big a problem as the Brotherhood’s actual policies.

  The second was the military’s special privileges. For decades already, its budget had been secret, and it operated without de facto civilian oversight. In exchange for allowing civilian politics to proceed, the military wanted these protections enshrined officially and permanently in the constitution. The military would get to select its own chief and its own defense minister, who would dictate national security policy independently of the elected president. Almost everyone except the fringe revolutionaries was willing to accept this toxic demand as a necessary evil, but the liberals and the Islamists each had very different ideas about what kind of deal they wanted to make with the military in exchange for its immunity and autonomy.

  This disagreement pointed to the third and final point of contention: religion. Secularists had tried once already in 2011 to circumvent the democratic process by negotiating a bill of rights in a secret deal with the military. Known as the Selmi document, this bill would have guaranteed a secular state (along with the military’s special status), but the Islamists rightfully shot it down because of the unacceptable backroom manner in which it was conceived: liberal goals by illiberal means. Once they were in charge, however, the Islamists were just as undemocratic and self-serving. They ignored the few token secularists, liberals, Christians, and women in the Constituent Assembly. The Islamists made their own backroom deal with the military: the same special privileges the SCAF was always pursuing, in exchange for a new provision to define Egypt as an Islamic state that gave clerics the power to review laws, and that left little to no room for religious minorities, secular Muslims
, and laws based on universal rights rather than the Koran. The reflex of both the secularists and the Islamists, when in power, was to dictate to the other side rather than negotiate. Even on so fundamental a question as the constitution and the source of all laws, the Islamists and their secular counterparts behaved like little dictators, pursuing a winner-takes-all strategy, Egypt be damned.

  The crisis came to a head at the end of November. Another war had flared up in Gaza. In the past, Egypt had acted as a willing enforcer for Israel and the United States. Mubarak, Israel, and America shared a common distaste for Islamists. The Brotherhood, however, stood firmly on the other side of the conflict. The Islamist militant faction Hamas, after all, had begun in the 1980s as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. There was a rare moment of geopolitical suspense. Would President Morsi break with the Egyptian military on a key matter of national security policy and side with Hamas, spreading the instability from the Gaza war into Egypt? To the surprise and pleasure of the Egyptian military, the Israeli government, and the White House, Morsi took a pragmatic tack. He used his leverage over Hamas to broker a cease-fire, acting less interested in the Hamas cause than in preserving Egypt’s longtime role as the regional leader and neutralizing any outside distractions to his domestic rule. President Obama rewarded Morsi with a long, friendly phone call and copious positive press. A few months earlier, Obama had snubbed Morsi’s efforts to visit the White House; now he was praising Morsi as a statesman.

  On November 22, basking in the glow of tacit approval from an American government that suddenly realized how much it needed him, Morsi went further than anyone had imagined he would. He issued a decree that gave him unlimited dictatorial powers, just two days after the Gaza cease-fire and just one day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Cairo. Egyptians were stunned, but the US government barely uttered an objection. To all appearances, the United States had given Morsi its blessing. The president’s decree concentrated all the nation’s power in his hands. It took away the judiciary’s power to dissolve the Constituent Assembly or the Shoura Council, the relatively impotent upper house of the legislature, which remained in place. Judicial review was gone. Morsi had assumed legislative authority already, and now he took the authority of the judiciary as well. This was more formal power than any of Egypt’s dictators had ever held.

  The fallout was immediate. Everyone except the Muslim Brotherhood and its Salafi allies viewed Morsi’s new powers as a coup against the state. His moderate advisers resigned in protest. Secularists, liberals, and nationalists who had been bickering among themselves now found common ground in opposing Morsi’s new tyranny. Morsi tried to rally support. “The felool, remnants of the old regime, are hiding under the cover of the judiciary!” he shouted in a raspy speech. “I will uncover them!” Tragically for the prospects of consensus and democracy, he was right in his diagnosis if not in his cure. The judiciary was acting unconscionably as the long arm of the deposed regime, overturning elected institutions capriciously and thwarting reform and transition. Unfortunately, the only solution that Morsi and the Brotherhood could concoct was to banish the entire opposition and erect their own dictatorship.

  The power grab climaxed on December 1. President Morsi announced that the hallowed constitution, which was supposed to be the studied product of deliberation and consensus, would be completed that very night. Incredibly, it would be put to referendum just two weeks later. The Constituent Assembly, with only its Islamist members present, rushed through in a single all-night session more than two hundred articles meant to govern every aspect of life in Egypt. Clerics and jurists shouted down one another, inserted sloppy last-minute language, and fell asleep in an appalling spectacle that was broadcast on live television. In the past, the Islamists had argued plausibly that regardless of their faults, they were smart, competent, and had an overarching vision. This constitutional fiasco proved otherwise. The hastily drafted legal language was sloppy and prone to multiple interpretations. Clerics got their authority over lawmaking. The military got its total immunity and independence. Countless other provisions weakened the civil state. This was anything but a revolutionary constitution.

  This contest for Egypt’s future deranged all sides. Morsi gave screaming speeches about his legitimacy and the conspiracies of the felool. The secular forces, frightened into cooperating, couldn’t decide whether to campaign against the constitution, seek Morsi’s impeachment, or boycott all politics. Most of the anti-Morsi secular political groups united under a new banner, the National Salvation Front, but it was as illiberal as the Muslim Brotherhood. The Salvation Front rambled endlessly about the evils of Islamism, but its leaders never discussed liberties, individual rights, due process, or the primacy of elected civilians over the military. They talked only about how the Islamists were the new dictators and had to be turned back.

  A week after Morsi’s decree, protesters surrounded the Ittihadiya Presidential Palace. They called Morsi a new pharaoh and demanded his immediate resignation. They called his followers sheep, khirfan, which in Arabic rhymes with Ikhwan, Brothers. They were filled with righteous indignation and hunger for vengeance. Some tried to drive a bulldozer toward the palace. Others attacked and killed Muslim Brothers who were counterprotesting in support of the president. Police stood by and let the two sides fight it out.

  Morsi could have responded to the protesters’ demands by reconvening the Constituent Assembly, or he could have ignored the demonstrations outside his palace. Instead, he called on the Brotherhood’s supporters to gather at the palace and defend his legitimacy. It was a recipe for war. Thousands of partisans swarmed Ittihadiya. Muslim Brothers detained and beat people they suspected of felool or revolutionary sympathies. In tents outside the palace, Brothers tortured and interrogated activists in sessions that were videotaped and leaked. Brotherhood lawyers and presidential advisers then cleared some detainees for release; others they transferred to the police for detention. Egyptians were already veterans of all the depredations of a police state. Now they were experiencing a new abuse: makeshift torture chambers on the grounds of the president’s house, staffed by members of the president’s religious organization.

  Moaz and Basem had both joined the first protest at Ittihadiya. Once the Brotherhood called out its thugs, Moaz left. As more and more of his friends were captured and beaten, Moaz worked the phones. He called his old contacts in the Brotherhood hierarchy, pleading for them to release the activists they had tortured. He helped secure the release of Ola Shabha, an eloquent young leftist, who appeared on television that week with her face bruised and swollen and a black eye, a living testament to the thuggishness of Morsi’s presidency. “It was a big mistake,” Moaz said of the Ittihadiya clashes. “There were mistakes on both sides.” In the final count, more than ten people were killed and thousands injured.

  Confident he would win the constitutional referendum, Morsi rescinded elements of his presidential decree and restored some powers to the courts. But the palace fight galvanized the secular opposition. The secular National Salvation Front briefly stopped its dithering. Mohamed ElBaradei joined forces with former presidential candidates Amr Mousa and Hamdeen Sabbahi. Most of the secular, nationalist, and liberal political parties were aboard too. Three days before the nationwide referendum on Morsi’s constitution, the Salvation Front initiated a “no” campaign. It was too late and outmatched but still managed to convince one-third of the voters to oppose the constitution. Crucially, the “no” vote won in Cairo, signaling that the Muslim Brotherhood had lost the capital.

  The National Salvation Front offered a final chance for liberal redemption. Over the previous year, secular groups had failed to unify in a single coalition for the parliamentary elections, and then even more spectacularly had lost a chance to win the presidency by squabbling among themselves and splitting the secular vote. Morsi’s missteps opened an opportunity. The Muslim Brotherhood had exposed itself as power hungry and eager to use violent tools of repression
to silence opponents. It was mismanaging the economy, and had restored neither dignity nor law and order. The anti-Morsi forces could now unite, if they chose, and advance a positive agenda that appealed to Egypt’s moderate center. There was a vast pool of citizens who identified as Islamic supporters of a secular state and had voted in the presidential race for the mild ex-Brother Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh. There were avowed secularists who ran the gamut, from outright liberals and progressives such as Basem and his friends, to right-wing authoritarians who hated Islamists but hardly qualified as democratic. Pumped with anger at Morsi’s behavior, the electorate was ripe for a message of civil rights, reconciliation, and competent governance.