by Lin Noueihed
Such ambiguity on the details was partly a matter of political expedience, allowing the Muslim Brotherhood the flexibility to hone its policy depending on the situation. It also helped it to carry all of its members. Like any large organization, the Muslim Brotherhood embodies a spectrum of opinion, and while it has famously emphasized discipline in its ranks, long-standing internal divisions burst into the open after the fall of Mubarak. The group shed supporters from its left and right fringes, partly because it banned its members from joining any political party other than the FJP, and partly because it contains various generations that sit uneasily together and often vie for influence. The FJP's leaders include some senior reformists such as Essam al-Erian, but they were chosen without consultation by the Muslim Brotherhood's leadership, drawing criticism from younger members who had hoped that the party would be more independent.
At the top level, the Muslim Brotherhood is led by a General Guide who, until 2010, was appointed for life. 77 Below the conservative leadership, uneasy about the ideological compromises that political life might bring, float two younger generations, those in their 50s and 60s, and those in their 30s and 40s, who are more dynamic and open-minded. It was these reformers who played a central role in coaxing the leadership to embrace principles such as citizenship, which not so long ago were rejected as a Western import. As far back as 1996, some split off to form the more moderate Al Wasat, or Centre, Party, which competed independently in the 2011 elections.
The younger generation, those in their twenties and thirties, were divided into two broad factions. One was the progressive youth who took part in the demonstrations from day one. They blog and are keen to engage with different aspects of civil society, but many have become increasingly frustrated and begun to drift away from the Muslim Brotherhood proper. The Egyptian Current, for instance, was co-founded in 2011 by Islam Lotfy, who was involved in the uprising and ran in the elections as part of a coalition of revolutionary youth and socialist activists, shunning the two Islamist-led coalitions.78
At the other end of the spectrum, Salafist ideas have spread rapidly in Egypt in recent decades, particularly among young men looking for meaning and dignity in lives otherwise subsumed by the struggle to make ends meet. Their opponents accuse the Salafists, whose men sport beards and whose women wear the niqab or face veil, of rigid thinking and of seeking to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages. Yet the Salafists’ influence has increased greatly in rural areas, including the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt, where some zealots have clashed with the southern region's sizeable Coptic community.
The Salafists contested the elections as part of a separate coalition, the Islamist Alliance, that went head-to-head with the Muslim Brotherhood-led Democratic Alliance and won more than a quarter of seats at the elections, a performance that startled many. While they are splintered into different groups and lack the political experience and organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists’ rise puts the Brotherhood in a tricky position. With their simple demand for an Islamic state, the Salafists could present themselves as standing for the ‘real’ Islam and appeal to illiterate and poor rural voters who have less in common with the Muslim Brotherhood, historically dominated by urban middle-class professionals and espousing a more reformist and nuanced vision. In parliament, the Muslim Brotherhood will have to strike a fine balance between showing its moderate face to non-religious parties and to the West, and maintaining its appeal to the religious right represented by the Salafists.
On the Losing Team?
It began, by the accounts of the protesters themselves, as a peaceful gathering outside Cairo's Maspero building to demand justice over a church attack in the southern province of Aswan. By midnight on 9 October, at least twenty-five people were dead and more than two hundred wounded.79
Protesters who were running back and forth from Maspero armed with small rocks, exhausted, sweating, eyes red from tear gas, said the violence started when a demonstration coming from the Shubra area of northern Cairo, where many Christians live, was attacked first by thugs, then by the army, sparking pitched street battles. Gunshots rang out in downtown Cairo, tyres and vehicles were set on fire, shops were closed. ‘I came in the big protest from Shubra this evening and we were attacked three times on the way,’ said Andrew Sarwa, a young protester who was holding on to an icon. ‘Then, outside Maspero, they drove tanks over people and crushed them and shot at people with live bullets. The protest from Shubra had Muslims and Christians in it but they first attacked it in Shubra, before we got here. We wanted justice over the church that was burned. We want the people behind it brought to justice, that is all.‘80
Another man came forward to explain that it was not just about the church in Marinab, 700 kilometres to the south. It was about discrimination against the country's Coptic Christians. It was about the licencing process that hampered church-building, forcing Copts to break the law while mosques sprang up on every corner. It was about puritanical Salafists who attacked not just Christian churches but Muslim shrines they considered idolatrous, and about the government's reluctance to stand up to them. It was about pushing Copts out of the country which they had inhabited before the seventh-century arrival of Islam. Why else had violence erupted at a church in Ain Shams in May 2011, when local Salafists had tried to prevent the building, which had been closed by the army after a bout of violence three years earlier, from reopening? The church, a court later found, was illegally converted from a garment factory.81
But for all the Muslims, many of them secular youth activists, who came out to support the Coptic protesters on 9 October, there were others who came out to attack them. A group of bearded men came out shouting ‘Islamic, Islamic’. Suspicions abounded. One young protester with a bleeding leg limped to a hospital for help but was brusquely told by the staff standing outside that this was a private hospital. No one would help him. In a nearby street, a man complained to his friend that Copts had held the protest because they were religious extremists.82
One man, who described himself as a journalist, expressed the sort of opinion that the SCAF may well have been hoping to inflame. ‘I want a military ruler and we should have no elections until the country calms down … The Copts fired on the army,’ he said, though it was clear the protesters were armed with nothing more than sticks and stones. ‘No one burnt their church. It is a lie. These Copts want their own state. They want to divide Egypt and have their own state in the south.’ When the Muslim Brotherhood finally made a statement, it blamed the violence on regime remnants, sidestepping the question of why soldiers, in that case, had not protected protesters.83
What came to be known by activists as the ‘Maspero massacre’ highlighted not only the dangerous nature of the standoff between the military and the youth activists, but the deteriorating state of communal relations in Egypt, where religion is at the heart of the struggle for the future of the country. Coptic Christians make up at least 10 per cent of Egypt's 80 million-strong population, and are spread across the country. Though they comprise a larger proportion of the population in Upper Egypt, their relatively small overall numbers and lack of political clout mean Muslim fears over church-building or secessionism are largely unfounded.
Rows over places of worship have long been central to Coptic complaints in Egypt, but a spike in attacks since the uprising that overthrew Mubarak raised sectarian tensions to new levels and heightened Christian fears that a more Islamic Egypt which would be less tolerant of religious differences was emerging from the turmoil. Only three weeks before the uprising, on New Year's Eve, a suicide bomber had attacked a church in Alexandria, killing twenty-three people and igniting sectarian riots.84 In March 2011, a romance between a Christian man and a Muslim woman prompted an attack on a church in Helwan and subsequent clashes that killed 13 people and wounded 140.85 In May, several people were killed when sectarian riots broke out in the working-class Cairo neighbourhood of Imbaba, after Muslims attacked a church because of a rumour that a convert to I
slam was being held against her will.86 Rumours seem often to be at the centre of sectarian clashes, with Christians quick to believe churches have been attacked and Muslims reacting to whispers about women converting or eloping. As with any mob, it is always difficult to discern who is inciting the violence; attackers appeared to include hired thugs as well as Salafists, raising fears that the former regime was inflaming sectarian tensions to undermine the push for democracy.
Whatever the case, the fall of Mubarak had emboldened the myriad Islamist groups in Egypt, a more overtly conservative place today than it was half a century ago. The veil, which was not so common among the middle classes up to the 1960s, was so pervasive by 2011 that an uneveiled woman in form-fitting or flesh-revealing clothing could expect to be harassed in the street. A large number of Egyptian men proudly sport the zbiba, or raisin, a dark callous that forms on the forehead of fervent worshippers. Outward markers of religion have also created a more visible distinction between Muslims and Christians. So many Muslim women wear the hijab, or head covering, that Christian women stand out in a crowd more than they once did.
More generally, the national identity had been transformed over the past century from an Egyptian identity under the monarchy, to a broader Arab one under Nasser, to an increasingly Islamic one by the early 2000s. The Egyptian and Arab identities were religiously inclusive, emphasizing national and socio-linguistic loyalties over religious belief. There was no contradiction between being a pious Copt and an ardent Egyptian nationalist. Nasser's socialist policies had an adverse affect on Egypt's wealthy Christian families, but he also repressed the Muslim Brotherhood and his rhetoric was nationalistic rather than religious in tenor and content. The Islamic identity began to gain ground under Sadat and was in the ascendant by 2011.
The divisions are clearer in classrooms, playgrounds and offices, and Christians increasingly view themselves as a victimized minority.87 Like other Middle Eastern Christians, many increasingly feel they no longer have a place in Egypt, while Coptic NGOs suggest that emigration, which began in the 1950s, has increased since the uprising. It is an assertion supported by anecdotal evidence, but accurate figures are hard to come by and there are major discrepancies between different sources.
The Copts are so outnumbered in Egypt that there can be no sectarian civil war of the sort that plagued Lebanon or Iraq, both strategically located mosaics of overlapping religious and ethnic identities. But the upheaval in 2011 has left the Coptic church in an uncomfortable position that has threatened its leadership. While many young Copts felt the revolution was the perfect time to push for equal rights under a civil state, and held successive protests at Maspero, the church must walk a fine line between defending the flock and antagonizing the military junta or provoking an Islamist backlash. Like many Middle Eastern minorities, the Copts had tended to offer political acquiescence in return for protection from Mubarak's nominally secular regime. With that equation now changed, Copts have been outspoken in their demands for equality and some now speak of a new politicization and growing activism in the Christian community.
The religious revival, coupled with the conservative outlook of the ruling military council, has also presented a challenge for women's rights in Egypt. Women played an equal role in the protests but have had their representation rolled back since. There are no women in the Egyptian army and therefore no women on the ruling military council. There were no women on the committee appointed by the military junta to redraft the interim constitution. The new electoral rules passed by the SCAF, again with little consultation, removed a quota of sixty-four parliamentary seats for women introduced in 2010. No other system was devised to ensure that women were well represented, as the results sadly show. No more than ten women, including two appointed by the military council, were expected to secure seats in a 508-seat lower house dominated by Islamists, some of whom oppose women's role in politics.88
Parties running in the elections were forced to include only one woman on each list but these were closed lists, which meant that those at the top were more likely to win seats, and they were mostly men. The decision to force the parties to run even one woman faced opposition from the Salafist Noor Party, which declared that any nation ruled by women would fail. During the election campaign, the Noor Party prompted online controversy by replacing the photo of its female candidate with a flower on campaign posters, and then with a picture of her husband, so that voters were asked to cast their ballot for the wife of so-and-so, raising questions about how full a role she would be able to play in a parliament dominated by men. In the lead-up to elections, Salafists also prompted ridicule online when they veiled a public fountain in Alexandria, offended by the bare-breasted mermaids that adorned it.89
Salafists have been unequivocal in their view that a woman or a Christian cannot hold the position of president. With women under-represented in parliament and with the assembly dominated by religious conservatives, women's voices are likely to be muted as delegates hammer out the constitution and the finer legal points of female rights in divorce, marriage and child custody.
Bouthaina Kamel, a television newsreader and veteran activist, announced after the uprising that she would run for president, making her the first woman candidate for Egypt's top job. She was not hopeful of winning but was determined to break a taboo, declaring:
Women are marginalized so when a woman reaches the level of running for president it is a message to all marginalized sectors of society, from Copts to Bedouins to Nubians to the disabled. The right to run is the same as the right to vote. This is a message to all Egyptians, that you do have a chance in this nation, you have an opportunity in your revolution. I am fearful for Egypt, not fearful, but concerned because, to be honest, I will fight for democracy my whole life, for a democratic, free, modern and civil state in which all citizens are respected equally by the constitution. Citizenship is what decides rights and responsibilities and it makes us all equal, minorities, majorities. We are citizens and not subjects.90
Egyptian feminist, author and opposition activist Nawal Saadawi has received death threats from Islamists over the years for her outspoken campaign for women's rights. Chairing a meeting of the Egyptian Women's Union, an organization that was closed down under Mubarak and that she has tried to revive since the uprising, she spoke of her fears that Egypt's constitution and laws might be Islamized to the detriment of women. ‘We need a new civil constitution that gives equal rights to men and to women, to Muslims and to Christians and legitimate and illegitimate children … We need a new social contract,’ she said. ‘After each revolution, a new social and economic and political contract is made. We have not done this … We need the world to stand with men and women who are calling for civil law in Egypt and against this conspiracy.‘91
Now in her eighties, Saadawi herself has come a long way from her own childhood as the eldest of nine children in rural Egypt, proving that women can change their lives. Yet with 42 per cent of Egyptian women unable to read or write so many decades on, Saadawi's ideas still seem a world away from the precarious position of women living in a patriarchal society where gender bias is widespread, particularly in rural areas.92 Raising awareness among women themselves is a long-term project in a society where huge emphasis is placed on women's traditional role as wives and mothers, and on the importance of preserving women's honour.
When women's rights activists held a protest in downtown Cairo in March 2011 to mark International Women's Day, they were attacked by thugs who sexually harassed, molested and hit them.93 When the military arrested protesters in Tahrir Square, they took away seven unmarried women who were later subjected to virginity tests in a country where any doubt over a woman's chastity will blight her reputation and marriage prospects. So traumatic was the experience that only one woman, Samira Ibrahim, an unmarried virgin, was suing the military over the virginity tests by the end of 2011, describing the crude examination, which was carried out by a man in full view of other soldiers, as sexual assa
ult. Many women were now too scared to protest, which women's rights activists say was the ultimate goal of using shame and sexual violence as a deterrent to political action.94
Unfortunately for the women, the Christians, the moderate Muslims and the secular Egyptians who protested side by side in Tahrir Square, even if the Egypt that emerges is more democratic, it is unlikely to be more liberal. It is instead likely to be a more religious, more conservative place where Christians feel excluded from an increasingly Islamic national narrative and identity. The position of women in the new Egypt could become more precarious, at least in the short term, as their rights come under assault from conservative religious groups with a new-found voice in law-making.
Yet many activists say that despite the difficulties they have faced in the first year since the uprising, the changes have opened up new spaces for discussion and action in the public sphere and have encouraged grass-roots movements, as opposed, for instance, to the ostensibly pro-women laws that were passed under Mubarak while independent women's groups were sidelined. ‘It was not possible in 2010 to talk about establishing a movement for women's issues, not laws, a movement, but this idea is open now. In 2010, it was not even possible to talk about setting up a political party. Whether you like what has happened or not, there has been an experience with political parties now,’ said Mozn Hassan, director of feminist studies group Nazra. ‘It could fail, it could be stolen but there are spaces and there are subjects that are open now that you could not discuss in 2010.‘95