What the Hounding of Emad Shahin Says About Egypt
January 23, 2014 § 1 Comment
A couple of weeks ago, Egyptian political scientist Emad Shahin was charged by the Egyptian government with espionage, forcing him to flee Egypt before he could be arrested. Professor Shahin, who was teaching at the American University of Cairo, is someone I know fairly well, as he was my professor while in grad school for a seminar on comparative politics of the Middle East and a course on political Islam, and supervised my masters thesis on Islamist parties that supported an opening to the West (although we haven’t been in touch in some years). The notion that he is a spy trying to undermine Egypt is, to put it bluntly, quite insane. I echo Nathan Brown’s comment that it is more likely that Joe Biden is a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army than that the charges against Professor Shahin are accurate. The charges in the indictment include espionage, leading an illegal organisation, providing a banned organisation with information and financial support, calling for the suspension of the constitution, preventing state institutions and authorities from performing their functions, harming national unity and social harmony, and causing to change the government by force. This last one is particularly laughable coming from a government that sits where it does because it carried out a military coup.
In all the time I spent with Professor Shahin, I found him to be fair, open-minded, intellectually honest, accepting of criticism, and above all imbued with a deep love and concern for his country. He was someone who recognized very early on that governments in the region would have to engage with political Islam and he tried to suggest ways in which this could happen, but he was not in any way a water carrier for or even supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an advocate of violence, or tolerant of authoritarianism in any guise. My masters thesis back in 2007 argued that Islamist parties were the ones most likely to be successful in Muslim-majority states and that the U.S. should identify ways of supporting Islamist parties amenable to coexisting with the West, with a focus on the ideological evolution of Ennahda in Tunisia and the AKP in Turkey. The Muslim Brotherhood was not one of the parties I identified as being sympathetic to the West, and Professor Shahin never suggested in any way that it was or argued that it was a moderate body worthy of Western support. Professor Shahin was also modest, reserved, soft spoken, and respectful to everyone with whom I ever saw him interact. In short, it boggles the mind that anyone would possibly think he is a covert Muslim Brotherhood leader seeking to overthrow the current Egyptian government in favor of an Islamist regime.
More broadly though, the nonsensical charges against Professor Shahin point to something I argued months ago, namely that crackdowns by an authoritarian government on one group always lead to the spread of a much wider net designed to ensnare all opposition of any stripe. Professor Shahin has been consistently critical of authoritarianism in Egypt, from the Mubarak regime to the Muslim Brotherhood government under Mohamed Morsi to the current military government. It is no surprise that the government is now trying to portray him as a Muslim Brotherhood stooge, as it has based its legitimacy on eliminating what it has deemed a terrorist threat and so the strategy is to lump anyone it can under that umbrella. But charging Professor Shahin with espionage and charging Amr Hamzawy with insulting the judiciary, both of whom are part of what might be deemed the liberal opposition, is a harbinger of what is to come, which will be a crackdown on non-Islamist critics of the government. When I wrote in Foreign Affairs in August that the Islamists were the first target but wouldn’t be the last and compared the situation in Egypt to that in Tunisia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali quickly moved against his secular and liberal opponents after he had dispatched Ennahda, some veteran Egypt experts argued that I was wrong and that the response to the Brotherhood was “special” so that liberals would be discredited but not put down. I take no pleasure in the fact that the Shahin affair appears to be vindicating my position, and I’d add that this is unlikely to be an isolated incident. Each situation is unique, but there is a reason that political scientists like to compare things, and if Tunisia continues to serve as a reliable guide – and I think that it will – the critical non-Islamist press, politicians, academics, and intellectuals are going to start finding themselves on the wrong end of these types of bogus charges with an unsettling frequency.
I hope that enough pressure is put on the Egyptian government, both internally and externally, to have the charges against Professor Shahin dropped so that he can return to his country if he so chooses. If he is forced to spend the rest of his time in the U.S., however, it will be American academia’s gain and another unnecessary loss for Egypt.
Egypt’s Tunisian Future
August 28, 2013 § 3 Comments
Watching what is taking place in Egypt as the military goes after the Muslim Brotherhood, I can’t help but note the parallels to Tunisia under Ben Ali’s first few years in power (which, not coincidentally, is one of the case studies in my dissertation). There too, the regime mounted a campaign against Islamists in the name of national security and anti-terrorism following Islamist electoral success, while the secular Tunisian opposition parties supported the government’s efforts on the theory that the regime would eliminate an ideologically threatening political foe and that they would benefit in the end. What happened instead is that once authoritarian methods were deployed against the Islamists, the state quickly decided that it wanted to repress any and all political opposition, no matter the ideological bent, and so the campaign that had initially only targeted Ennahda quickly morphed into a wider effort. I use this episode to argue in Foreign Affairs today that Egyptian secularists and liberals are being myopic in their cheering on the army’s fight against the Brotherhood, since that fight will quickly boomerang back in their own direction. Here is a snippet:
An Islamist political party does well at the polls, and an authoritarian regime goes after it with a vengeance, killing its activists and arresting its leaders. The party is driven underground while secularists and other political groups applaud the government’s harsh measures, all taken in the name of eliminating a terrorist threat. Meanwhile, the regime and the non-Islamist parties assure the world that once the Islamists have been dealt with, the regular political process will resume again.
So it has happened in Egypt, but it is also the story of Tunisia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when hopes for a democratic transition were smashed after a campaign of repression that first targeted Islamists but eventually grew into a much wider effort to eliminate all political opposition. Tunisia’s experience offers a glimpse of what may be yet to come in Egypt — and suggests that Egyptian secularists should think twice before supporting the army’s efforts to eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood.
After replacing President Habib Bourguiba in a bloodless coup in November 1987, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, a military officer, embarked on a program of liberalization and democratization that was at that point unprecedented in the region. His government released all political prisoners and gave them amnesty, revised the laws governing the press and political parties, and got every political bloc — including the Islamist Ennahda Party — to sign a national pact guaranteeing civil liberties and free elections.
Those elections were held on April 2, 1989, and were at the time the most competitive in the country’s history, if not in the entire Arab world. Although the winner-take-all system guaranteed that Ben Ali’s party would carry the day, given its organizational advantages developed over decades of unopposed rule, the president and most observers assumed that the secular opposition parties would emerge as the dominant opposition. Instead, the Islamists received the highest share of the opposition vote, 14.5 percent, a figure that was likely deflated due to fraud.
Just after the election, The New York Times declared [3], “Tunisia is undergoing a transition from a one-man dictatorship to a much more open society with a sleight of hand that could furnish lessons for Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader.” The article went on to quote the head of the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights saying, “I am absolutely certain of Ben Ali’s good will.”
As it turned out, though, the prospect of a strong Islamist opposition, and especially of an Islamist government at some point down the road, was too much for Ben Ali and the Tunisian state to bear. The government launched a brutal crackdown, killing 1,000 Islamists, jailing another 30,000, and forcing into exile the leader of Ennahda, Rachid al-Ghannouchi. The regime justified its actions by claiming that the Islamists were terrorists out to sow discord and tear Tunisia apart. Only because of the national security threat that they presented, Ben Ali argued, were the Islamists being targeted.
To read about how the Tunisia story played out, and the specific lessons for Egypt, please head over to Foreign Affairs for the rest.
Predicting the Outcome of the Arab Spring
March 30, 2012 § 3 Comments
I am once again going to step away from Israel and Turkey because I cannot let Walter Laqueur’s piece in World Affairs on misplaced optimism about the Arab Spring go uncommented upon. Laqueur’s argument is that most observers assumed that democracy was going to sweep the Middle East, which is now apparently not going to happen, and so we must ask why the chances against that happening were ignored. He cites the writing of Roger Cohen and Nick Kristof as leading the optimistic charge, and says that Westerners mistook Arab dissatisfaction with the status quo as a desire for democracy and universal human rights, and that “it should have been clear that the odds against the emergence of a democratic order in the foreseeable future in the Arab world were impossibly heavy.”
Agreed, I am 100% on board with this last observation. The problem is, by focusing on the reporting of a couple of New York Times columnists, Laqueur makes the same mistake that they committed in that he misses the big picture, which is that plenty of people made it very clear that the odds of democracy emerging were depressingly slim. Just because high profile journalists ignored the vast array of expert opinion that was out there at the time does not mean that we can somehow alter reality and act as if Kristof and Cohen represent the consensus opinion of the world. If you are looking for contemporary warnings from the leading ranks of Middle East analysts that democracy in Egypt was not imminent, you can try this or this or this. Just because Kristof and Cohen chose to ignore the vast weight of history and the crushing burden of institutional legacies in favor of the heady optimism of Tahrir Square protestors does not mean that there needs to be soul searching on the part of anyone save columnists who parachute into the midst of a revolution and deign to explain what is going on to the world without taking a step back to consider the various structural constraints that are constantly shaping the political sphere. Democracy does not happen overnight; it emerges following a long and difficult path in which literally thousands of little things have to go right, and even then it is a long shot unless the underlying conditions for democracy to flourish are present. I do not mean to take anything away from the thousands of Egyptians who demonstrated in Tahrir and elsewhere, standing up to Mubarak’s goons and then to the army in order to nurture a dream of a better political and social order. Their presence was and is remarkable, but it is not enough to make democracy appear out of thin air, not when there are so many countervailing forces pushing back.
Folks who study and write about the Middle East professionally are not surprised at what is taking place today. I am certainly no expert, just a small voice on the periphery, but even I saw what was coming. One of the main premises of my dissertation (which is merrily underway and nearing completion), which I came up with for the first time in the fall of 2007, is that Tunisia has long been the only Arab state in which conditions are favorable in almost every respect for democracy and that there is a particular ideological legacy that has been holding it back. On the day that Ben Ali fell, I argued in Foreign Policy that Tunisia is unique and that it was unlikely that any other Arab dictators would be joining Ben Ali soon. That prediction was obviously (and happily) wrong, but only because my language was far too imprecise. What I should have written, and what I have argued long and loudly ever since, is that other Arab regimes were unlikely to be replaced, and indeed anyone who has followed events in Egypt knows that Mubarak may be gone but the authoritarian regime has remained right where it always was. In February 2011, I wrote the following in a short essay that I could not convince anyone to publish: “In Egypt, the military’s interests are too bound up with those of the regime to let it be overtaken, and as seen by events in Tahrir Square, where the army allowed violence to flare up but has now acted to simply keep both sides apart, the army is neither on the side of the demonstrators nor a force for democracy. In Syria, civil society is far weaker than in Egypt, making mass demonstrations difficult to sustain, and the army has a history of firing on civilians, unlike the Egyptian military. In short, Arab regimes and militaries are remarkably resilient and protective of their interests, and the chances of an outbreak of successful revolutions or democratic transitions are slim at best.” In hindsight, some parts of this are more correct than others – demonstrations have been going on in Syria for over a year, and Egypt and Libya carried out revolutions with varying degrees of success – but underlying analysis was right on point, which was not to expect democracy outside of Tunisia any time soon. I am not reprinting my thoughts from the first months of 2011 to make myself seem particularly prescient, but to highlight the fact that anything but the most shallow analysis easily led to a more pessimistic conclusion than the optimism Laqueur describes as widespread. Laqueur wants observers to reassess how their wishful thinking impacts their analysis, but the truth is that it is not Middle East analysts who got history wrong, only the wishful thinkers who moonlight as analysts.
A Quick Diversion To Tunisia
March 26, 2012 § Leave a comment
Despite it not being Israel or Turkey, I write about Tunisia a lot as well, and there is some significant news today on that front. Contrary to some who insisted that the ruling Islamist Ennahda Party was no more moderate than any other Islamist party in the Arab world and that their proclamations regarding not making religious dictates compulsory was cover in order to win over Western audiences, Ennahda has announced that it will keep the language in the first clause of the existing Tunisian constitution in place. This may seem trivial, but it is significant because the Tunisian constitution makes no mention of sharia law, and Ennahda is not going to alter that despite its Islamist ideology. This is going to make it harder for them to defend their right flank and will likely prompt an outcry from Tunisian Salafists, who have been demanding sharia law and a rollback of the more liberal social legislation that has been a hallmark of Tunisia since the days of Habib Bourguiba. This is just the latest in a long list of reminders that not all Islamists – even Arab Islamists – are the same. Ennahda advocated for democracy and was receptive (and even positive) toward Western influences well before the Arab Spring, and it has consistently pledged to maintain Tunisia’s secular Personal Status Code. Furthermore, its founder Rachid Ghannouchi wrote decades ago that secularism with personal freedom is preferable to sharia with authoritarianism, so today’s announcement on the constitution should not surprise anyone. Some object to the description of Ennahda as moderate given Ghannouchi’s and others’ statements on the acceptable use of violence against Israel, but the harsh reality is that even Arab liberals espouse some odious positions on Israel and Jews, and moderation in Arab politics is a sliding scale. On every other issue, Ennahda is aptly described as moderate and does not appear to have a nefarious plan to institute creeping sharia through the back door. It instead presents a hopeful model for what an Islamist regime can look like when it is focused on policies that will improve democratic quality and social freedom in an effort to win votes past the initial election rather than on policies designed to create Islamic social homogeneity. It is important to object to Ennahda’s position on when it is ok to kill Israelis since Israeli life should be deemed just as valuable as any other, but that should not blind anyone to the fact that it is a completely different organization in both tenor and practice than the Muslim Brotherhood.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming…
