Has the Islamist Winter Killed the Arab Spring?

F. Mohamed: The Islamist Winter?

We have learned to be skeptical of sweeping ideological revolutions, but “non-ideological” democratic revolutions come with a paradox: as soon as the polls open, the vanguard that has fought and sacrificed to earn the ballot is unceremoniously swept into the political margins. Results from the first round of parliamentary elections in Egypt have been trickling in, starting with a reported turnout of 52 percent (a higher number was previously reported and corrected on December 5). Of the 498 seats in the lower house, 168 are up for grabs in this first round; 112 of the seats will be drawn from party lists, with the remainder filled by those running as “independents,” who are not necessarily without party affiliation. Four independents did not require a run-off to earn a majority vote: Mustafa Bakry (a carry-over from the previous parliament), Ramadan Omar and Akram al’Shaer (both of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party), and Amr Hamzawy (a public intellectual and human rights advocate). No woman or Copt has won a seat or made it to a run-off round, though some may yet enter parliament on a party ticket.

In a country where little proceeds like clockwork, and where for decades parliamentary elections have been little more than a bully’s prank, 52 percent voter turnout is a remarkable success in and of itself and suggests a promising level of civic engagement. Observers from the Carter Center reported a lack of organization at several polling stations, but were largely positive about the electorate’s participation and the peaceable atmosphere at the polls. Ninety ballot boxes in the Al-Sahel district of Cairo were either tampered with or went missing, but the Supreme Administrative Court has already declared results in the district invalid and a new vote is being arranged. Run-off races on December 5 and 6 have seen lower turnout. They have also seen the re-appearance of Mubarak-era thugs, who reportedly smashed the car windows of one election official, but hardly as part of the widespread intimidation campaign seen during pre-revolutionary elections.

Firsthand accounts with the Twitter hashtag #egyelections suggested that many people found Cairo traffic to be a larger obstacle to voting than delays at the polls themselves. Those firsthand accounts confirm other trends. A large portion of the Twitter demographic is sympathetic to, if not directly involved in, the protests in Tahrir Square and Alexandria calling for the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to cede power. The SCAF has lost the revolutionaries’ trust through a series of outrages, from the military trial of over 12,000 civilians; to forced “virginity tests” that amount to sexual assault on women demonstrating in Tahrir; to the jailing of prominent dissidents like blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah; to the drafting of “supra-constitutional principles” that would permanently place the military, and military funding, beyond the reach of civilian authority (we might look to Pakistan to see how well a parliamentary system functions when the military is a state within the state). Though these activists were reluctant to give the SCAF the patina of legitimacy that a large election turnout would offer, many seemed to overcome their hesitancy and head for the ballot box, that modern depository of vain hope.

The other significant trend was the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood. With impressive if self-interested efficiency, Brotherhood members made themselves prominent on the streets and directed voters to the nearest polling stations, as well as assisting the elderly in polling station lineups. A coalition of Egyptian election monitoring organizations described them as “nearly a partner in running the electoral process in some stations.” No other party had anything resembling its organization. Some of this flouted electoral guidelines, though there seemed to be little effort from election officials to stop it.

Given such involvement, given their long history of running charity schools and hospitals, given that they are a known quantity among dozens of parties less than six months old, and given that they speak in the religious idiom of the majority, it is no wonder that the Brotherhood seems to many Egyptians to be the most ready alternative to lingering apparatchiks from the Mubarak regime—who have done gratifyingly poorly in this round of the election—and revolutionaries perceived to be too disruptive to bring stability to a nation reeling from the after-effects of Mubarak’s overthrow. The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) has won 40 percent of the party-list seats in this round, or forty-four out of 112 spots, and has forty-five candidates headed for run-offs.

That result is not as dispiriting as we might think. The FJP are not likely to be the sort of Islamists to deny full citizenship to women and Copts, and they have tried already to assure the world of their commitment to human rights. What’s more, they are likely to enact more socially progressive measures than would a parliament filled with former NDP members and their friends in big business.

Much more surprising, and more worrying, is the reported 25 percent of the vote going to the Salafist Al-Nour Party, which picked up twenty-eight of 112 party-list seats and is still competing in twenty-seven run-off races. These are the sort of Islamists who pride themselves on their aspiration to deny full citizenship to women and Copts. These fundamentalist wing-nuts, as Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations has shown, can have only a poisonous influence. Though participating in the electoral process, one of their most prominent members, Alexandrian parliamentary candidate Abdel-Moneim Al-Shahat, has declared democracy to be ungodly (and has denounced the novels of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz as promoting prostitution and drug use).

Salafis are the kind of Muslims whose enthusiastic worship has led them to pound their heads into the ground so often as to develop that thickening of the skull deemed in the Persian Gulf to be the acme of human evolution. Al-Nour has partnered with offshoots of the Brotherhood who never denounced violent jihad, such as the Gama’a al-Islamiya and its Building and Development Party. It is especially obscene that Alexandria has become their stronghold, given that city’s history as one of the world’s great centers of cosmopolitan learning. Adding to this sad poignancy is the fact that their electoral successes arrived in the same week as the major archeological discovery of a fourth-century Coptic city. It is a timely reminder that Christianity has roots in Egypt reaching past the birth of Mohammed, one fact of life in the Dark Ages that Salafis choose to forget.

The alliance of liberal and leftist parties sympathetic to the revolution’s principles, the Egyptian Bloc, has come in third in the party race thus far with roughly 13 percent of the vote, bruised by inexperience, lack of organization, and Salafist accusations of a Coptic agenda. They will be in the new parliament, if only in the wings of a largely Islamist show. Only time will tell just what sort of policy the FJP will implement, but it has already refused a political alliance with Salafis and may yet prove to be the best defense against extreme expressions of political Islam. The FJP’s success in this election will come directly at the Salafis’ expense—and vice versa, of course. The former are likely to implement at least some of the revolution’s democratic principles. But what exactly will the FJP’s “Islamic reference” be? Will it look to Al-Azhar University or to Riyadh? Will political pressure from the Salafis push them to more extreme religious views? Or will we see the new parliaments of Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt craft a moderate and modern Islamism committed to human rights and social justice? How will Islamist victories affect the drafting of new constitutions in these countries?

The FJP has the public’s trust, for now. It is one thing to sustain a reputation for courageous and principled resistance to a corrupt regime; it is quite another to sustain a reputation for sound government. The Muslim Brotherhood might be on its way to a Pyrrhic victory, stepping into an exceedingly challenging term of office with complete inexperience. If governing parties, religious and secular, do one thing reliably well in democracies, it is disappointing the expectations of the electorate. The FJP’s inevitable missteps in the new parliament might make Egyptians look elsewhere in the future. One can only hope that they will look left rather than right, and that organized and competent parties will be waiting there to greet them.

Click here to read an update following the run-off elections.

Feisal G. Mohamed is an associate professor in the English department and in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois. His most recent book is Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism.

Photo by Mosa’ab Elshamy, via Flickr creative commons