Morsi

We all know this firsthand: Sometimes revolutions happen — and then lose their constituencies along the way.

The same exact thing happened in Egypt this year. The frontliners in the revolution that forced Hosni Mubarak from power last year discovered this year they could not win elections. They ended up on the sidelines, pathetically calling for a boycott of the presidential runoff vote.

The runoff elections featured the two leading candidates from the multi-candidate field that contested the first round. Neither of the two candidates embodied the cosmopolitan, urban and youthful partisans who first occupied Tahrir Square: Mubarak’s last prime minister and the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The partisans of the Arab Spring were obviously disappointed. The final contest reflected the decades-old confrontation between the secularist state and the Islamic militants. It did not articulate, the partisans said, the forward-looking ideas of those who actually waged the revolution.

Most of the actual revolutionaries called on voters to desist from participation in the elections either by abstaining or by demonstrating their disgust by spoiling their ballots. A large number probably heeded their call: only half of the voters cast a ballot to choose between the two finalists.

Electoral boycotts, we know from our experience in the events leading up to the Edsa Revolution, do not shape electoral outcomes. Such campaigns merely exclude the campaigners from the mainstream of political engagement.

The brilliant voices that shaped the most glorious moment of the Arab Spring were lost in the vagaries of electoral politics. Some of them, in the last hours, decided to support one of the candidates figuring in the runoff. But they were too few and too late to matter.

The actual contest was a blast from the past. For decades, the military elite that ruled Egypt since it regained independence was effectively challenged only by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood had radical fringes, one of which was implicated in the assassination of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat. Many members of this movement ended up in jail. Some of its members ended up in more radical, more internationalist terrorist movements such as the Al Qaeda.

True, the Brotherhood, in the main, is now a more moderate movement and is expected to become even more so as it actually wields power. The secular urban youth, the religious minorities such the Coptic Christians and the more westernized middle classes distrust the Brotherhood wielding power, fearing this movement will try to impose an Islamic state and drag this most sophisticated society back to the middle ages.

The relationship of antagonism between the Brotherhood and the military-led regime will have to be understood, as well, in the light of the ideological disposition of that regime. Military rule in Egypt shares the same historical progeny as the Baathist rulers of Syria under Assad and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. These were regimes that inspired the secular and modernist intellectual trend most dramatically espoused by the Turkish military after the end of the Ottoman Empire.

In Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Egypt, the military stepped in after the collapse of the old feudal order to build a modern state. That modern state shunned Islam as state ideology and strove to build a secular apparatus of rule. Understandably, that inclination ran against the disposition of fundamentalist Islamic movements.

In Turkey, after many years of military dictatorship, the country moved towards democratization in the European mold. In the last elections, however, the Islamist party won. Against the misgivings of the military elite that saw itself guardian of the modern state, Turkey’s current president has resisted efforts from the radical wings of his party and kept within a secular and moderate political path.

The best scenario is the same sort of moderate Islamic rule might happen in Egypt as well. In the same way that soldiers sometimes prove to be the best arbiters of democratization, the rule of a moderate Islamist in Turkey demonstrates that Islamic movements can also broker social modernization.

At any rate, as we know, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood won narrowly against Mubarak’s last prime minister. This was an electoral contest shaped by the mass of rural, religious and poor Egyptians more than the demographically inferior middle classes responsible for the Tahrir Square uprising.

Mohamed Morsi, sworn into office a few days ago, carries a heavy burden. In the 7,000 years of Egyptian civilization, he is the first leader of that country installed by democratic vote. For seven millennia, pharaohs or their modern incarnations ruled this country.

Just by winning the elections, a possibly violent confrontation between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the Muslim Brotherhood was averted. The SCAF constituted the interim government since Mubarak’s fall. On the eve of the runoff poll, the SCAF reduced the powers of the presidency, obviously as a precaution against Islamist control.

The Electoral Tribunal, after much delay, proclaimed Morsi the winner by a narrow margin. The partisans of the Brotherhood, fearing the elections might be stolen from them, celebrated in the streets.

For his part, Morsi did everything to calm fears and unite the nation. All his policy statements intended to calm whatever fears there might be to install an Islamic state. He assured the minorities and even suggests having deputies representing the Coptic Christians and women. He pledged to abide by Egypt’s treaties and hewed closely to the main points of the country’s standing foreign policy. He likewise resigned from the Brotherhood.

Morsi, more than anyone else, understands the viability of his democratic presidency will be a matter to be negotiated with the military, the historical guardians of Egyptian nationhood.