"Tahrir Square was not the Revolution," a young Egyptian woman told me in Cairo last week. "The real Revolution," she said, "has yet to come." Considering that over 300 protestors died in the Square two and a quarter years ago, this is chilling news.
A former US Foreign Service
Officer, I just spent ten days in Egypt listening to Egyptians from every
quarter, including getting caught in the middle of a demonstration in Tahrir
Square. These conversations, and what I saw myself, convinced me that what this
woman said is true. The 2011 Egyptian Revolution--bringing so much hope to so
many--only succeeded in doing away with the Mubarak regime, entrenched for over
30 years. It did not fundamentally change a culture shaped by a history of
top-down rule going back to the Pharaohs.
What the 2011 Revolution did
do was open a Pandora's box, freeing forces and players who, blinded by the
light and unaccustomed and incompetent to deal with the new freedoms, have
mostly turned inward, consumed with self preservation and turf wars. What's
missing in Egypt today is any powerful vision of Egypt as a national
enterprise, with citizens coming together across party and religious lines.
What's missing is any selfless civic effort to create and support the
stability, justice and prosperity that the country so desperately wants and
needs. In the cities, you can't miss the sheer number of smart, capable and
well-educated Egyptians, men and women. Egypt clearly has the human resources
to attain its goals, but reaching them demands a leadership that has not yet
appeared.
Many of the brave young people
who toppled Mubarak thought that they had created the space in which a whole
new society would inevitably grow. Now they understand those hopes were naà ¯ve,
and their disappointment, frustration and anger builds by the week. With all
respect to the young martyrs of Tahrir Square, creating the "new Egypt" will
take far more work, patience, and commitment than six weeks of shouting and
blood.
One of the issues holding back
progress is an entrenched, foot-dragging bureaucracy, where Mubarak holdovers
still wield important power, especially in the military and police. And at
lower levels, getting rid of the rampant corruption of the Mubarak regime has
forced bureaucrats and cops to live on meager salaries; many simply don't show
up for work or do poorly when they do. Crime in the streets has skyrocketed, as
have the prices of food and gas, and traffic control is almost nonexistent,
adding to complaints of citizens who, after more than two years of waiting, had
expected something better.
But the thorniest issue blocking
progress is the inability of Egyptians to agree on the basic relationship of
church and state. After a brief period of Army rule, new elections brought to
power a government with both its legislative and executive branches controlled
by the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful, secretive Islamist movement whose
leaders had been repeatedly jailed by Mubarak and his predecessors. But in
exile, the Brotherhood had had plenty of time to organize, and when relatively
free elections were held in 2012, it easily trounced a disorganized collection
of new secular and liberal parties that had sprung up in the wake of the
Revolution.
Religion in Egypt is a tricky
business. I was struck, in Cairo, a cosmopolitan city, by how overtly religious
Egyptians are. Three quarters of the women in Cairo wear the hijab, the Muslim
hair-covering scarf. And perhaps another 5% cover all but the eyes. Many
restaurants and offices have prayer rugs in the corner and, at the proper times
of day, some people will break off conversations to prostrate themselves in
prayer. You can buy an alcoholic drink at the top tourist hotels, but almost
nowhere else.
But these are moderate
expressions of Islam, acceptable and non-threatening to the great bulk of
Egyptians. What's worries many, however, is the thought that the Muslim
Brotherhood, pushed to the right by more extreme Islamists, called Salafists,
is only waiting until it consolidates enough power to turn Egypt into a
theocracy, or at least into a neo-theocracy like Saudi Arabia. Rural areas of
the country are already more conservative.
I don't think this extreme will
happen. For one thing, the Brotherhood is led, not by mullahs in black robes
but by savvy, western-oriented business-types who have no wish to scare off
foreign investment and tourism by coming across as Taliban. In addition, at
least urban Egypt has been a relatively westernized and cosmopolitan society
for so long that it seems impossible that Egyptians--especially the many smart,
well-educated Egyptian women in positions of real responsibility--would ever
stand for an imposition of harsh religious restrictions on daily life.
Still, there is real nervousness
among many secular and liberal Egyptians as to the Brotherhood's real
intentions, made worse by the Brotherhood's long history as a semi-secret
society, and by the bold cleverness of the Salafists, whose influence has, in
the minds of many, already risen to alarming levels.
Suspicion and mistrust,
primarily over the religious issue, now dominate the political landscape,
leading to gridlock There can be no real easing of it until a stable balance is
struck between church and state that satisfies enough people so that a
government can start to tackle the huge challenges the country faces,
especially the failing economy. Foreign investment will stay away, as will the
tourists, until Egypt demonstrates that it is on a steady, peaceful course.
There is plenty of blame to
share for the current mess. The Muslim Brotherhood government, under President
Mohamed Morsi , has missed many opportunities to reach out to its secular
opponents for the good of the country. It has resolutely refused to try to
create a multiparty, multi-religious government focused on solving the
country's problems. Instead, perhaps influenced by its decades as a pariah, it
seems consumed by an existential fight for survival, fending off challenges
from the secularists on the left, the Salafists on right and a semi-independent
court system somewhere in the middle. Now poorly led and managed, bereft of any
unifying vision, Egypt and its economy spiral downward.
The Brotherhood's secular
opponents seem scarcely better. They've squandered the momentum of their
magnificent Revolution by fighting with each other. Dozens of secular/liberal
parties have sprung up over the last two years, each seemingly incapable of the
kind of compromises needed to forge a unified front that could be a competent
electoral challenge to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The country is on an edge. Still, there
are solid grounds for hope. There are simply too many bright, creative,
courageous patriots in Egypt to allow the country to implode, or to slide back
into feudal Islam. But the fire under the pot is again building. June 30 will
be the first anniversary of the Morsi government and many say the violence
could renew then. There will indeed be another revolution in Egypt. Whether or
not it is violent remains to be seen.
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