Earlier this year the Egyptian
people rose at last to claim their freedoms. After thirty years of rigged
elections, rampant corruption, arbitrary arrests and more recently, food riots
and labour unrest hundreds of thousands of protestors flocked daily to Tahrir
Square in Cairo to demand of their government only one thing, that President
Mubarak should "Go". At a sermon on the so-called "Day of Departure", the imam
enjoined the crowd and the world's gathering press that this was not a religious
or ideological revolution but simply a call for regime change. The response from
Washington has been one of shock, Mubarak had been a close regional ally and a
heavy recipient of US foreign aid but such had been the clamour for change even
the White House wasforced into a volte face, echoing calls by EU leaders
that an orderly transition towards a new democratically elected government must
begin 'as soon as possible'.
The world's media have been generally sympathetic towards the demands of the Egyptian people but a significant proportion of commentators have instead taken the opportunity to point to the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and see not a burgeoning democracy but the makings of a Sunni religious state. This, however, is both absurd scaremongering and cynical stage management; while mischaracterising the nature of religious belief within Egypt it also drained international support from the revolution. This type of misrepresentation is in fact also the counter-revolutionary gambit of an increasingly desperate regime who for the first time on state television in late January, after six days of protests shown worldwide, acknowledged that there were even demonstrations in the country and it did so by blaming the unrest on the Muslim Brotherhood.
But I think we have to distinguish here between the several gradations of 'being Islamic' in Egypt. If we can point to an imaginary spectrum whose bottom end is; "adhering to all the principles of the Koran as evinced by those of the Wahhabi faith" (commonly regarded as the most fundamentalist version of Islam) and move our way through the intermediary stages whose top end is unadulterated secularism, that is to say a political position which is in no way, shape or form influenced by any religious tenets, then we will find an agreeable middle bulge of the populace who retain a faith, practise it daily like all Muslims, yet are sufficiently temperate in their outlook to adjust themselves to a fledgling democracy which is not intent on morphing into a theocratic state. That is the situation, it appears, in Egypt at present.
Few, if any, of the protestors were calling for a reprisal of an Iranian style theocracy; what they desired most of all was to be rid of Mubarak and secondarily the ability to elect, in free and fair elections, a representative government that will endeavour to work for their own interests.
No power on earth could have put a stop to that process. After Mubarak himself, the army chain of command represented the last barrier between the Egyptian people and their long denied right for legitimate self-determination. We saw the will of the middle ranking officers dissolve amidst their own feelings of solidarity for the demonstrators. They told the crowd they shared their anger, that they were gathered only to dissuade looters, and some of them had even helped the people daub their own tanks with anti-Mubarak slogans.
The world's media have been generally sympathetic towards the demands of the Egyptian people but a significant proportion of commentators have instead taken the opportunity to point to the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and see not a burgeoning democracy but the makings of a Sunni religious state. This, however, is both absurd scaremongering and cynical stage management; while mischaracterising the nature of religious belief within Egypt it also drained international support from the revolution. This type of misrepresentation is in fact also the counter-revolutionary gambit of an increasingly desperate regime who for the first time on state television in late January, after six days of protests shown worldwide, acknowledged that there were even demonstrations in the country and it did so by blaming the unrest on the Muslim Brotherhood.
But I think we have to distinguish here between the several gradations of 'being Islamic' in Egypt. If we can point to an imaginary spectrum whose bottom end is; "adhering to all the principles of the Koran as evinced by those of the Wahhabi faith" (commonly regarded as the most fundamentalist version of Islam) and move our way through the intermediary stages whose top end is unadulterated secularism, that is to say a political position which is in no way, shape or form influenced by any religious tenets, then we will find an agreeable middle bulge of the populace who retain a faith, practise it daily like all Muslims, yet are sufficiently temperate in their outlook to adjust themselves to a fledgling democracy which is not intent on morphing into a theocratic state. That is the situation, it appears, in Egypt at present.
Few, if any, of the protestors were calling for a reprisal of an Iranian style theocracy; what they desired most of all was to be rid of Mubarak and secondarily the ability to elect, in free and fair elections, a representative government that will endeavour to work for their own interests.
No power on earth could have put a stop to that process. After Mubarak himself, the army chain of command represented the last barrier between the Egyptian people and their long denied right for legitimate self-determination. We saw the will of the middle ranking officers dissolve amidst their own feelings of solidarity for the demonstrators. They told the crowd they shared their anger, that they were gathered only to dissuade looters, and some of them had even helped the people daub their own tanks with anti-Mubarak slogans.
Scenes like those were the true catalyst for a genuine revolutionary moment; the lapse in army discipline and the transference of its loyalities signalled a crucial lack of resolve amongst the higher army command. It didn't take long for this acid of public outrage to corrode Mubarak's scaffold of state; how many wise heads within the army were now ready to place themselves at the people's disposal? All was practically lost for the regime at this point; and the longer the stand-off went on without an unconditional abnegation of power by Mubarak the more many deduced his hands were soaked in blood.
Of all those who stuck closest to him, amid the central cabal, it was the army generals who faced the most excruciating dilemna. Each of them had it in their power to either pre-empt an unthinkable bloodbath or become the fateful apostle of the hour and command their troops to down weapons. It should'nt have to come to this impasse and Mubarak had the wherewithal to cater for his ultimate departure; negotiations were ongoing between the "people's emissaries" and unofficial channels of the government - bartering away his walking papers and ensuring his wealth either left the country or was at least secured ($45 billion according to the Guardian Middle East expert) - all the final moments of horse-trading legalese, the last will and testament of a failed experiment in despotism.
Here lay a sponsored military state like Tunisia, Yemen and Saudi Arabia (favoured redoubt of all Middle East tyrants) whose internationally attested "aid budget" was nine tenths repression and one tenth succour; a staggering haul of cash, annually secured, to combat a half concocted war on terror. The more concocted it became, the more cash they generated, largely through China, and by way of the US national debt. How many victims will now emerge? How many have been real "terrorists" and how many the fabrications of a self-fulfilling institutional paranoia?
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