Egypt, we now know, is a society with a split personality.
After the armed forces intervened last week to force out Muhamad Morsi, the nation’s first elected leader, protests have continued. This time around, it is the Muslim Brotherhood leading the demonstrations, demanding Morsi be restored to his post.
During one particularly bad skirmish between pro-Morsi demonstrators and the armed forces, soldiers opened fire at demonstrators and left over 50 people dead. The demonstration occurred close to where it is generally believed Morsi was detained.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a well-entrenched movement. Since it was founded about 80 years ago, the Brotherhood was banned several times as a political organization. Despite almost continuous persecution from modernizing regimes seeking a modern and secular state, the organization more than survived. It wove strong ties with the more traditional sections of Egyptian society.
During the massive demonstrations two years ago that led to the ouster of the Mubarak regime, the Brotherhood joined liberal forces in the streets. When elections were called, the fight for the presidency eventually narrowed to Morsi, candidate of the Brotherhood, and the candidate of the pro-Mubarak forces. The forces of liberal democracy proved unready for electoral contestation, being divided into so many factions. Morsi won that historic electoral contest in the runoff election.
Morsi, a reluctant leader from the start, proved to be an ineffective leader. Egypt’s economy continued to rot. Misery multiplied. The Brotherhood established an exclusivist government that was aloof to the voices of liberals that claimed their rightful place in the post-revolutionary arrangement.
On the first anniversary of his unlikely rise to power, Morsi himself was deposed by way of military intervention. Not all democrats across the world agreed with the intervention against an elected government. It signaled the re-entry of the army as the ultimate guarantor of the Egyptian state.
The army pledged not to directly rule and offered a timetable for new elections to properly install a government replacing Morsi’s. The chief justice was invited to exercise the powers of the presidency in the interim.
After over a week since the army intervened the newly installed leadership found it hard to form a Cabinet. The squabbling among the groups wanting to reinstitute a modern and secular regime was simply too intense.
Meanwhile, the military caretakers of one of the world’s oldest civilizations faced daily demonstrations from pro-Morsi supporters. The barricades shut down some of Cairo’s most important streets. Clashes happened almost daily until the onset of Ramadan.
The demonstrations are difficult to ignore. The Brotherhood demonstrated its capacity to bring hundreds of thousands of people to the streets. The two political poles of organized politics in Egyptian society — the Brotherhood and the army — appeared unwilling to give ground to the other.
The decades-old confrontation between pro-Islamic forces and the army as a modernizing institution continues. There is no indication when the confrontation will finally work itself out. The army’s intervention against the Morsi government merely aggravated the historical confrontation between modern Egypt and medieval Egypt.
The latest news coming out of Egypt suggests charges will be filed against Morsi as part of the effort to keep him detained and quash the pro-Islamic demonstrations. Arrest warrants were also issued against scores of Muslim Botherhood leaders, although only a few have actually been served.
The army, of course, cannot possibly detain the millions sympathetic to the Brotherhood --- and by extension to Morsi. The more they try to suppress the Brotherhood, the greater the reaction from the more conservative sections. The confrontation between the modernizing and the traditionalist constituencies promises to go on and on.
While that confrontation continues, there is no way Egypt can revive its tourism, a major leg on which the economy stands. Without resolving the confrontations now going on in the streets, There is no way the Egyptian economy can be revived to pre-revolution levels.
The more miserable Egyptians feel at this time, the more desperate any government established today becomes. A weak domestic economy that has lost its ability to raise foreign exchange by way of tourism immediately condemns every successor government to a Sisyphean task of trying to win legitimacy by way of sound economic performance.
It is unlikely the Egyptian economy will recover anytime soon. Everything has become too politicized. As public grievance mounts, any new government will face pressure from the streets.
It is much easier to throw out governments than to put together a fully functioning one.
The Brotherhood has deep roots in the poorer sections of Egyptian society. Economic failure will make the Brotherhood’s constituency a more vocal one. A new liberal government will not imply the economic crisis plaguing Egypt will end soon. The competing forces facing off in the streets in daily demonstrations make economic recovery a more distant achievement.
Poor Egypt. The country is doomed to economic weakness until its politics calm down. However, poverty has its way of making politics a tricky affair. The greater the signs of economic failure, the more volatile the nation’s politics tend to be.
There is an old Egypt and a new Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood has managed to install itself as the representative of the Old Egypt. The technocrats who are clawing for a share of power are too vulnerable to surges in the streets. The new Egypt might be an unsustainable one.
The political volatility in this ancient society pushes up the price of oil. That impact reflects in our own pump prices.
There is never an easy way to work out collaboration in quest of prosperity, not in a society split into two epochs, a nation encompassing two very different societies.