Lessons for the Left from Egypt’s Right
Lessons for the Left from Egypt’s Right
Bilal Ahmed: Lessons for the Left from Egypt’s Right
Last month, Cairo’s Tahrir Square was host to a significant number of people concerned about Islamist domination, rampant misogyny, and the continued irrelevance of leftist and secular forces in the fragile civilian government. Given the increasingly reactionary moves by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and continued Islamist victories in the country’s elections, Egypt’s progressive forces must confront hard realities about the current political situation. From these confrontations will emerge strategic thinking regarding the path forward.
The first step is to analyze the factors behind Islamist victories in recent Egyptian elections. Although the intervening hands of electoral fraud and Gulf petrodollars are certainly present, they have been somewhat overstated. The Muslim Brotherhood has been able to mobilize voters through nearly a century of smart organizing.
It has commanded loyalty through its proven ability to speak to core grievances in Egyptian life, and through a charity wing with a long history of humanitarian projects that filled the gaps between the military state and those at the lowest levels of society. The Brotherhood has provided food, clean water, and other necessities to many Egyptians. It should surprise no one that many voters concluded that an organization that has long provided them with material assistance could adequately represent those needs in parliament.
It need not take a century for liberals and leftists in Egypt to convince voters that they can better represent their material needs. The newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Freedom and Justice Party (the political wing of the Brotherhood), intends on maintaining the neoliberal economic policies of the Anwar al-Sadat era Intifah, which opened up the country to U.S. investment while privatizing much of the public sector, and contributed to massive poverty and inequality. The fact that the Brotherhood is maintaining these neoliberal policies, and the ways these policies will affect daily life, must be communicated to Egyptians in a clear and convincing way–through strategies such as publicizing personal anecdotes and appealing to the images of inequality directly seen within Egyptian communities. Because of tensions in the Muslim Brotherhood between its senior leadership and lower-ranking members regarding precisely these policies, neoliberalism will continue to be a major topic in the country’s political discourse.
However, Islamist successes in Egypt are not solely due to their proven ability to meet material needs in many communities. Islamism has historically made strides in Egypt due to its ability to fill an ideological vacuum and stay on message. This is compounded by the fact that Arab secularism is associated with autocratic rule?by the military in Egypt, and by the Ba’ath Party of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq?and national humiliation. After Gamal Abdul Nasser’s spectacular defeat by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War, Islamist factions made a compelling case that their religious interpretations offered the best path toward national strength. Even (and perhaps especially) among more left-wing Islamic factions, such as the recently formed Wafd Party, the association between secularism on the one hand and autocracy and weakness on the other must be confronted.
This will require a broader conversation about secularism and autocracy in the Arab world, and about the failures of Nasserism. The Arab Spring has made this possible, but now progressive groups must begin advancing their own narratives. They might note that the Arab Middle East has never truly had an entirely secular government. For instance, many autocratic rulers attempted to fuse themselves with Islamist thought while simultaneously combating it. Saddam Hussein, in the later years of his rule, commissioned an entire Qu’ran to be written in his blood. His objective was to establish a religious cult of personality–a kind of politics that socialists and secularists must openly identify as “red fascist” and counterrevolutionary.
Most important, however, progressive and revolutionary groups in Egypt must stay focused, on message, and as unified as possible. Conservatives tend not to splinter nearly as often as liberals and leftists. The ideological schism in the Muslim Brotherhood related to neoliberalism and its senior leadership’s overtures to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has not affected Islamists as a voting or revolutionary bloc. They have been able to focus their energies into the more pressing concerns of carrying out a successful government transition. Egypt’s Left must similarly coalesce into a more unified yet ecumenical entity. As many commentators have noted, the potential election of Ahmed Shafiq?Mubarak’s last prime minister who, despite a ban on campaigns by top officials in Mubarak’s government over the last decade, was allowed run for office?could have been avoided if Nasserist candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi had merged his campaign with that of moderate Islamist Abdel Fotouh. Without the numerous “anyone-but-Shafiq” votes cast in the runoff between him and Morsi, the winner of a Sabahi-Fotouh and Morsi contest would have had greater legitimacy.
Morsi’s election last month makes him the first Islamist head of state in the entire Arab region. Now, it is time for secularists to shed their associations with the autocratic past and take some lessons from the effective organizing and savvy politics of their Islamist opponents.
