Arab Spring and »Islam«

A conference at Indiana University in Bloomington in March 2013 gave me my first chance to head a discussion on an issue that had long given me pause for thought. One participant presented a theory about governmentality and the structure of Islamophobia in Turkey. Strange? Or not really? Engaging with the phenomenon of hostility to Islam in the western hemisphere, as I have been doing for more than half a decade, is a complicated affair. The West has its Muslim minorities, and their minority position mostly brings with it a socio-economical and political marginalisation. But is it possible to speak of Islamophobia in a Muslim-majority country as well? In countries where the talk in the West is rather of the »persecution of Christians«? If so, then should this perhaps be done only with reservations? Or at least in a different way than when talking about Europe? It emerged that the Arab Spring, and in particular the counter-revolution, above all in Egypt, provided and still provide an example of the way Western Islamophobic manners of expression have been adopted.
Let us stick with Turkey for a bit. It was the spring of 2012 when several staff members from the University College of Teacher Education Vienna/Krems (KPH) came back from a trip there undertaken together with their Muslim colleagues from the Islamic Pedagogical University (IRPA) in Vienna. Overwhelmed by the hospitality, architecture and good food, they recounted an episode that seemed to throw light on the question posed above. During a guided tour around a private Christian elite school in Istanbul, a person residing there spoke of the Turkish pupils having »a hate of Islam drilled into them.« The teachers were aghast at this claim, especially as it was made about a country that until 1453 was the seat of Orthodox Christianity and in which the »oppression of Christians« tended to be the main focus of reporting by the church. The above-mentioned lecture at the Indiana University took a similar tack. It presented Atatürk and his single party as a political power that, inspired by its love of secular France, elevated a deep aversion to Islam into a political agenda and at first tried to wipe out religion, before later incorporating it into the state, albeit in a weakened form. The Turkish experience is certainly an authentic one, something which has to do not least with the fact that the country was never occupied as a colony – a completely different state of affairs to that in most Arab countries.
No Arab leader in the post-colonial phase of striving for independence – with the exception of in Tunisia – would ever have managed without a trace of Islamic religiosity in his rhetorical repertoire, whether Gamal Abdel Nasser with his socialist and pan-Arabian orientation or the pan-Africa-minded Muammar al-Gaddafi with his »Green Book«. Appealing to »Islam« was part of the system of reference in the revolutionary phase against the colonial powers. At the same time, many of the new rulers came into conflict with their Islamic (or Islamist) opposition forces, who, far more than they themselves, advocated »Islam« as a holistic system for living, mostly as a third power alongside communism and capitalism. Citing the Israeli historian Emmanuel Sivan, we can speak here more of a »clash within Islam« than of a »clash of civilisations«. After all, it was a matter of establishing who in the Arab world could represent »Islam« more authentically. For example, in the new Egyptian constitution, the 50 authors hand-picked by the military leadership have retained Islam as the official religion and sharia as the primary basis for constitutional law, what ever that may mean in practice.
At any rate, it is precisely this power of »Islam« to mobilise that creates a source of the conflicts that could be observed on all sides in the Arab Spring. At the same time, these processes cast light on the selective reception of the spectre of Islamist terrorism in Western reporting depending on geopolitical interests. For, even though the Arab Spring was not an Islamic Spring, the reference to Islamic religiosity was an element of the revolution from the outset, whether in the Friday prayer session for which millions of people gathered in Tahrir Square or in the recurrent »fatawa« (plural of »fatwa«, an Islamic legal opinion) that, for example, disqualified demonstrations against the ruling family in Saudi Arabia as illegitimate in Islam. On the other hand, Islamic movements (during the first revolution they were characterised as moderate Islamic or Islamist movements) tended to use an apparently »secular vocabulary«. It was indeed secular to the extent that explicit references to Islam were seldom ever in the foreground. But the fact that the justice demanded by the revolution was also of central importance in Islamic political thought caused certain »translation errors« in the West. For the most part, these kinds of interpretations reflect Western socialisation and patterns of thought, and cover up the fact that secular grammar – following Talal Asad's anthropology of secularism – also entails a type of cognitive exclusion that makes it hard to recognise what seems meaningful to people from other regions and cultures.
After the sham democracies in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia were swept away by desperate, angry and courageous people – mostly led by well-educated youth – Western media pretended to be surprised that it was, in the main, Islamic parties who dominated in subsequent elections. After all, these were the first really free elections, and a new democratic era seemed to be dawning. But how was one to treat the newly founded Islamic parties?
The counter-revolution in Egypt that began in 2013 already marked the end of the short period of rejoicing, of the democratic breeze of freedom that gave the people hope that they would be able to determine their own future. Even if, in Tunisia, a pragmatic form of politics prevailed, and the Islamic party, as the most powerful force, steered a joint course with the other parties hammered out amid many political compromises, the situation in Egypt, geopolitically the most significant country in the region, with 80 million inhabitants, is completely different. Precisely in Egypt, a deep split opened up, not between the Islamists and the rest, but between the Muslim Brotherhood and the rest (the Salafist Al Nour Party supported the military coup). While the Muslim Brotherhood succeeded in winning both the parliamentary elections and the presidential elections in the country of its founding – the latter only just – its solo political effort, along with a deep ideological division, was to sound in the counter-revolution. The rest is history. The first Egyptian president ever to be elected in free democratic polls was ousted by the military, which styled itself as the representative of the people. His party, which was elected democratically by a majority, was classified as a terrorist organisation. A huge number of protesters was shot in the course of counter-protests. At least 16,000 people were arrested. And 529 were condemned to death. It is of only secondary significance whether Mohammed Morsi's policies were indicative of capability or a lack of it, or whether they bore liberal or illiberal traits. The fact that the first supreme head of state to be freely elected in the history of Egypt since the country attained independence in 1952 was immediately toppled by the army seems to give carte blanche to the established powers, i.e. the military, which had been the buttress of the dictatorship since 1952, to mow down the democratic will of the people any time that this does not fit in with their ideas. It also means, however, that a revolution can only be a revolution if the military is disempowered. Seen in retrospect, Morsi's pragmatic inclusion of the military was the first step to suicide. It can be read as a paradoxical sign that, of all things, the television show of the comedian Bassem Youssef, an incisive critic of Morsi, was de facto terminated under the military rule of el-Sisi; the military regime has little patience with any criticism of the political establishment.
But let us get back to the real issue here: the role of Islamic religiosity in the discursive strategies of the counter-revolutionary military. For decades, in his international political dealings, Mubarak painted a dire picture of the Egyptian ayatollah. If the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, he argued, the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord and democracy in general would be done for. Once the Brotherhood was in power, it would never relinquish it again and would set up a dark system of oppression and religious fundamentalism, he asserted. But it is precisely this same scenario that has become reality under the regime of el-Sisi.
While many fundamentalists of enlightenment, such as Hamed Abdel-Samad, interpreted the military coup in Egypt as a defence of liberal society, many commentators studiously overlooked the politicisation of religion that was undertaken to legitimate the use of military force. This already started with the coup against the first freely elected president, which was broadcast live on television. It unfolded against a background that was decorated among other things by Coptic and Muslim dignitaries. Subsequently, a number of prominent personalities in the religious establishment were sent out into public view by the Egyptian military to give a religious legitimation to the bloody actions of the security apparatus against their religious opponents. The constitutional amendment of 2014 was backed by the historically oldest Islamic university in the world, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, and by the Coptic Church, whose representatives even delivered eulogies about el-Sisi. One of the university's teachers went so far as to say that el-Sisi had been sent by God to save the Egyptian people from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Shortly after the military coup, Ali Gomaa, the former Grand Mufti of Egypt, gave a 30-minute address to soldiers in which he tried to justify the killing of demonstrators: “When somebody comes who tries to divide you, then kill them, whoever they are.” He meant the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were branded as “terrorists” both on state television and by state-friendly TV broadcasters.
The sermon by the former »pop Islamist« Amr Khaled, who had lived in Great Britain and was known in the West as an advocate of inter-religious dialogue, also received special attention. For Khaled, the soldiers were not serving the commander, but God himself, he said in his talk. It was a divine duty to obey the military superiors, he said. Admittedly there were online discussions about the context in which the video recordings were made, but not about the way they were used.
What was much more important for the political process in Egypt was the fact that the military employed personalities from the religious establishment to justify the killing of demonstrators. Many observers saw this manoeuvre as indicative of a crisis atmosphere within the military at the troop level. They claimed that the military leadership was afraid of disloyalty in its own ranks. In other words, in Egypt, which is known for the widespread religious faith of its people, secular and political, ideological terms seemed also unable to legitimate the actions of the military. A radicalisation of the religious discourse to justify the crackdown on the opposition followed. The Muslim Brotherhood members were the »khawarij« of our times, according to many clerics at the state-run Islamic university Al-Azhar and Ali Gomaa. In using this term, the el-Sisi regime was referring to early Islamic history, during which – to put it very briefly – a horde of puritanical zealots spread violence and destruction in the Muslim community. This topos is an extremely old one that was invoked against the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood as far back as the 1950s. Paradoxically, it was the Muslim Brotherhood that was employed in jails by the Mubarak regime in the 1990s to convert terrorist groups such the Jihad Group to non-violent Islam. Back then, the Mubarak regime was still firmly in power and was able to keep the Muslim Brotherhood in check. The fact that, under the Morsi government, one of the leaders of a former militant group was appointed governor of Luxor led to an outcry. From a historical perspective, this could also have been cited as a proof that formerly violent segments of Egyptian society had been successfully integrated into the system. This would have to a certain extent continued on from the Mubarak era. But at this point in time, the tables had already turned in the public domain. The era of the democratically elected »moderate Islamists« had come to an end.
The thing that was particularly striking in this phase was the barely existent reaction of Western media and the silence of Western politicians. Imagine if a woman had been stoned to death during Morsi's time in office. Or if the Muslim Brotherhood had murdered people during the demonstrations against Morsi. What an outcry there would have been – and rightly so – in the western hemisphere! The police operation against the Taksim activists was already enough in itself to make Erdogan a »bad guy«. In the present case, however, hundreds of peaceful demonstrators were murdered on the streets and altogether more than 1,000 people condemned to death in the court of first instance. The military tried to justify this with, among other things, a radical Islamist discourse, saying it wanted to stop the feared Muslim Brotherhood from turning Egypt into an Iran 2.0, as was its alleged intention according to the current regime. The fact that the young leaders of the revolution, the April 6 Movement, which had formed against Mubarak, Morsi and then el-Sisi, are also in prison today seems to vanish in a sea of meaninglessness. Both the United States and the EU at first reacted hesitantly. However, after the el-Sisi regime consolidated its power, they gave it their support – extremely cautiously on the diplomatic front, but massively in real political terms. Since then, US financial military aid, which was briefly halted, has partly been resumed. John Kerry had anyway clearly described the road map for restoring normality in July 2013 as »the right path« for the Egyptians. The return to free elections after the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood ultimately meant going back to electing the marionettes of the military. El-Sisi made this very evident by running as a candidate in the presidential elections. Nothing seemed impossible any more in a political culture that had taken on such grotesque dimensions.
In the process, the el-Sisi regime – the military, as well as state-run and the most influential private television stations – invoked conspiracy theories that portrayed the Muslim Brotherhood as collaborating with the USA, Zionism, Israel and the rest of the world. The military accordingly pretended that it had to take action against the »Islamisation« of the Brotherhood. Terms taken from the Islamophobic repertoire of the West, such as »Islamofascism« (according to the US columnist and author Norman Podhoretz), were used to underscore this alleged nightmare. But what the world was really experiencing was an »Islamisation« and »fascism« in a different guise. This seems to be of little concern to Western leaders. At any rate, the USA's credo of decades, »stability over democracy«, seems to be still the order of the day.
It will probably be only a question of time before the millions of people who are without work and food rediscover their lost fear, expose the abuse of religion, mount the barricades to remove the next unjust regime and thus, as one could say following Frantz Fanon, regain their humanity.