The GOP Brotherhood of Egypt

Demonized in the U.S. as radical terrorists, Egypt's Islamists are actually led by free-market businessmen

By Avi Asher-Schapiro

Khairat Al-Shater, Muslim Brother and free marketeer (Credit: AP/Amr Nabil)

Topics:Egypt

While Western alarmists often depict Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as a shadowy organization with terrorist ties, the Brotherhood’s ideology actually has more in common with America’s Republican Party than with al-Qaida. Few Americans know it but the Brotherhood is a free-market party led by wealthy businessmen whose economic agenda embraces privatization and foreign investment while spurning labor unions and the redistribution of wealth. Like the Republicans in the U.S., the financial interests of the party’s leadership of businessmen and professionals diverge sharply from those of its poor, socially conservative followers.

The Brotherhood, which did not initially support the revolution that began a year ago, reaped its benefits, capturing nearly half the seats in the new parliament, which was seated this week, and vaulting its top leaders into positions of power.

Arguably the most powerful man in the Muslim Brotherhood is Khairat Al-Shater, a multimillionaire tycoon whose financial interests extend into electronics, manufacturing and retail. A strong advocate of privatization, Al-Shater is one of a cadre of Muslim Brotherhood businessmen who helped finance the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party’s impressive electoral victory this winter and is now crafting the FJP’s economic agenda.

At Al-Shater’s luxury furniture outlet Istakbal, a new couch costs about 6,000 Egyptian pounds, about $1,000 in U.S. currency. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, Istakbal’s clientele is largely limited to Egypt’s upper classes.

Although the Brothers do draw significant support from Egypt’s poor and working class, “the Brotherhood is a firmly upper-middle-class organization in its leadership,” says Shadi Hamid, a leading Muslim Brotherhood expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Not surprisingly, these well-to-do Egyptians are eager to safeguard their economic position in the post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite rising economic inequality and poverty, the Brotherhood does not back radical changes in Egypt’s economy.

The FJP’s economic platform is a tame document, rife with promises to root out corruption and tweak Egypt’s tax and subsidies systems, with occasional allusions to an unspecific commitment to “social justice.” The platform praises the mechanisms of the free market and promises that the party will work for “balanced, sustainable and comprehensive economic development.” It is a program that any European conservative party could get behind.

Over the last few months the Brothers have been publicizing their economic conservatism to international investors and financial institutions.

“The Brothers see this as a major source of its appeal among Western audiences,” Hamid explains. “Most people think the Brothers would be aligned with a leftist interventionist approach to the economy. But after taking a second look, most investors find themselves pleasantly surprised when they find out otherwise.”

Speaking to Reuters in November, Hassan Malek, a textile mogul and Brotherhood financier, emphasized that the Brothers “want to attract as much foreign investment as possible … and this needs a big role for the private sector.” Just last week, Malek was tapped by the Brotherhood to head up the newly formed “Egyptian Business and Investment Association,” a coalition of leading Brotherhood businessmen working to promote private investment.

For his part, Al-Shater has been personally courting select investors and reassuring them in private that the Brothers have no radical plans for the economy.

Over the last few months the Egyptian investment bank EFG-Hermes organized sit-downs between Al-Shater and 14 major investment managers from Europe, the United States and Africa. Al-Shater used the opportunity to reassure investors that the new government shares their goals.

“I believe the meeting dismissed some investors’ concerns about an extreme economic policy,” said Wael Ziada, an official with EFG.

The Brotherhood wants continuity. Al-Shater’s relationship with EFG-Hermes has raised some eyebrows, since the investment bank was partially owned by deposed President Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal. But the businessmen in the Brotherhood do not seem concerned by this connection, and they are not at all hasty to jettison the Mubaraks’ economic legacy.

Malek has even gone so far as to praise the economic policies of the Mubarak regime. “We can benefit from previous economic decisions. There have been correct ones in the past … Rachid Mohamed Rachid [Mubarak’s minister of trade] understood very well how to attract foreign investment.”

What Malek failed to mention is that Rachid fled to Dubai after the ouster of Mubarak and has since been convicted in absentia of squandering public funds and embezzlement.

Rachid worked to privatize Egyptian industries, reduce taxes and subsidies, and defang unions. This economic model, adopted at the urging of the IMF and international financial institutions, delivered strong economic growth — nearly 6 percent a year from 2004 to 2009 — but also generated inequality. The gains were concentrated in the hands of Egypt’s economic elite, while millions of working-class Egyptians saw their wages stagnate, as rising food prices pushed many to the brink.

This pressure inaugurated a wave of strikes, which were a key component in the uprising that toppled the Mubarak regime last spring. Since Mubarak’s ouster, however, the Brotherhood has taken a hostile line against trade unions. When a wave of strikes rocked Egypt last September, the Brothers sided with business interests and the ruling military junta against the unions.

“The Brothers have been against wildcat strikes and all significant labor actions,” says Zeinab Abdul-Magd, an Egyptian academic and leftists activist. “The Brothers just don’t relate to workers.”

The Brothers do run a number of impressive charity organizations for Egypt’s poor, and during holidays the Brotherhood offers subsidized meat to the poor. The Brotherhood’s candidates won big in last month’s parliamentary elections preaching social justice and promising relief to Egypt’s increasingly impoverished population.

But when it comes to specific policy proposals that could help Egypt’s millions of families who struggle to afford food, the Brothers employ what Shadi Hamid at Brookings calls “strategic ambiguity.”

“Their approach is to be everything to everyone all at once,” but in reality, Hamid says the leaders of the Brotherhood are “not in touch with the shockingly high levels of poverty on the grass-roots level.”

With Egypt facing a looming financial crisis — with rising unemployment and diminishing currency reserves — the real priorities of the Brotherhood will be tested. Despite Islam’s prohibition on interest, the leaders of the FJP have already met with representatives of the IMF who are offering over $3 billion in loans to ease Egypt’s financial burden.

It will be weeks before the new parliament takes any concrete steps to reform Egypt’s economy. But George Ishak, the co-founder of the Free Egyptian Party, a moderate liberal party that only managed to win one seat in the parliament, expressed skepticism that the Muslim Brotherhood would break with the past. “There’s a danger they will continue with the Mubarak policies.”

When asked what he would do differently Ishak responded, “I think we need to focus not just on growth, but instead think about the quality of growth … we need to think about redistribution.”

But that’s not what the Muslim Brotherhood is thinking about.

: Avi Asher-Schapiro is a writer living in Cairo. More Avi Asher-Schapiro

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Can Egypt reignite the Arab Spring?

Huge protests marked the revolution's anniversary as many dissidents hope to spark an uprising against the army

By Erin Cunningham, GlobalPost

(Credit: AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)

Topics:GlobalPost, Egypt, Egyptian Protests

This originally appeared on GlobalPost.

CAIRO, Egypt — It may have been the largest demonstration Egypt’s ever seen.

Hundreds of thousands — some boasted a million — descended on Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square Wednesday to mark the first anniversary of the uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak and to call for an end to military rule.

The square was so packed that the crowds spilled onto the bridges and streets that fan out from the plaza and into Cairo’s downtown streets, with chants for freedom thundering against the area’s crumbling, colonial-era buildings.

The sheer number of demonstrators — as well as their insistence that celebrations of the so-called revolution be rejected — seemed to suggest Egypt’s young firebrand dissidents have a groundswell of support in their bid to fell the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), a coterie of unelected generals that seized power after Mubarak’s resignation.

But how well the revolutionaries can galvanize the thousands that turned out for the anniversary, which is a national public holiday and now wrought with symbolism, to help forge a sustained resistance to an increasingly repressive SCAF, is still unclear.

On Thursday morning, several thousand, some camped-out in tents, remained in Tahrir. A handful of leftist groups, including April 6, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition and the Kefaya (Enough) movement, declared an opened-ended Tahrir sit-in until the army cedes control.

The army-led democratic transition has so far been plagued by military trials of civilians, severe crackdowns on protesters and an uptick in sectarian violence — a more volatile version of Mubarak rule.

“The army repressed us and provoked us to demand our rights,” Joanna said.“We want a guarantee they will transfer power to civilians.”

The number of people, however, has dwindled to just a fraction of Wednesday’s demonstration, and traffic moved freely through the square.

Activists were calling for another mass demonstration after Friday prayers, a traditional day of protest that organizers hope will help maintain the anti-government momentum.

“I was never interested in politics. But when I saw the military attacking the woman in the blue bra, I realized we are living under tyranny,” said 25-year-old Amra Ahmed, an IT specialist marching from the impoverished Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood to Tahrir Square. “And this isn’t acceptable. This has to end.”

But support for prolonged protests has declined in many quarters as the Egyptian economy stagnates and the instability pushes millions even closer to the poverty line.

While the activists see their demonstrations as a noble effort to extract concessions from an oppressive regime, they also run the risk of alienating fellow Egyptians.

“The revolutionaries have not gotten beyond the stage of protests in the squares,” said Joshua Stacher, professor of Egyptian and Middle East politics at Ohio State University.

For many who want to see an end to SCAF rule but also to the unrest, the alternative lies with the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement’s Freedom and Justice Party, which now holds a majority in the newly-elected parliament, says civil legislation is the best way to usher the generals from power.

“I’m afraid for the country, it’s not going in the right direction,” said Hoda, an elderly woman also from Sayeda Zeinab. She did not want to give her last name.“I just want the parliament to do its job, and for a good president to take over and fix all of this.”

Despite the general harmony of Tahrir on Wednesday, the deep political divisions were not far from the surface.

As the sun set over the square, groups of young boys broke away from the crowds and began smashing rocks as they taunted police in riot gear defending the ministry of interior nearby.

There were no reports of violence between protesters and security forces overnight, but local shopkeepers were weary and unimpressed.

“These boys, they are the sons of dogs,” said one store owner.

: More Erin Cunningham

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Growing pains for Egypt’s youthful revolution

One year after Tahrir Square, young people find new thinking, some freedom, and less money

By Ben Gittleson

A youthful revolution (Credit: Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh)

Topics:Tahrir Square, Egypt

CAIRO – When massive crowds filled Egypt’s Tahrir Square one year ago chanting for the downfall of former President Hosni Mubarak, observers immediately tagged the movement “the revolution of the youth.” Organizers in their 20s and 30s had encouraged their compatriots to take to the streets and stand up for “bread, freedom, and social justice,” and they played a central role in leading the demonstrations up until the dictator’s demise.

As Egyptians plan to rally and march Wednesday to mark the one-year anniversary of the start of their revolution, nearly a dozen youths from across the political and socioeconomic spectrum told me Egypt had fundamentally changed, although not all agreed that transformation had been for the better. From increased political freedoms to fewer economic opportunities, the uprising has led to both expected and unexpected consequences for Egypt’s youth, who make up 25 percent of the country’s population.

Most young people I spoke with said the revolution has generally been positive for them, but all agreed that improvements have been slow to occur, from stalled police reform to the military’s continued grip on power. But nearly all also agreed that it had altered the way Egyptians think. Young people here no longer see themselves as pawns of the system. They feel connected to the future of their country, even as they disagree significantly on where Egypt is today and where it should go.

A political awakening

Millions of Egyptians young and old cast ballots in parliamentary elections spanning the last couple of months, and observers praised the relatively free and fair vote. It was the first time many youths had directly participated in the political process, having grown up with rigged elections under Mubarak.

“I voted for a sheikh,” said Baha Saama, 21, a salesman at a souvenir shop who voted for the first time. “It was a beautiful thing.”

Many have not just voted but have become politically active over the past year.

Saleh Fekry, 25, has watched his life transform in a matter of months. Fekry had for years been politically apathetic, but the revolution whet his appetite for activism. He attended demonstrations, joined Twitter and started to frequent socialist and liberal circles. In November, police beat and briefly detained him during clashes with protesters.

“I was almost dead before the revolution,” said Fekry, who studied to become a chemical engineer but who now works as a safety officer at a German oil and gas company. “It’s like opening a door and light comes through.”

Muhammad Elgeba, 27, took his political engagement a bit further, running for parliament in his native Damietta, in the Nile Delta region. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood for 12 years, Elgeba broke with the Brotherhood in May feeling that youth reformists did not have a strong enough voice in the organization.

After helping form a new political party, the Egyptian Current, Elgeba decided to run for parliament on the list of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party; while he did not become a part of the Brotherhood again, he says he still agrees with the movement’s ideology. But 10 days before the elections in November, he pulled out because of the new bloodshed he witnessed in Tahrir Square. If he had stayed in the race, he most likely would have become a member of parliament.

He remains happier than ever, though. He’s currently trying to form a youth movement that harnesses the strategy and way of thinking he witnessed during his days in Tahrir last year. He hopes the army relinquishes power soon, but he says his movement remains open to those with demands across the political spectrum.

“The youth, they are the factor that will help achieve this,” he said.

Demands unfulfilled

Many told me they were largely disappointed with the pace of progress. Thousands of civilians languish in military prisons, substantive police reform has yet to materialize, and the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has repeatedly extended its rule despite promises to step down.

“I thought that the revolution would take care of all these things,” Fekry said. “I was very, very naive.”

Ramy Saad, a 28-year-old who sells Egyptian products online, said that when the Mubarak regime was still in power a plainclothes policeman once stopped him as he walked home from work near Cairo’s famed Khan al-Khalili market. The policeman led him to the local precinct and kept him there for two hours as he checked his identification card for seemingly no reason. Such intimidation occurred at random under Mubarak, when police and army officers ruled the streets, Saad said.

Now, the harassment is less, “but I’m worried because it’s the same people,” he said. Still, Saad believes the revolution was “definitely” positive for Egypt. He happily participated in parliamentary elections — he voted for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party — but has become disenchanted by political bickering.

In the months since the initial uprising last January and February, young liberals have become increasingly exasperated with and surprised at their dwindling support among the general population. Islamists won more than two-thirds of seats in the parliamentary elections, and the military has increasingly portrayed the protesters in a negative light.

The ruling military council has continued many of the practices of the old regime, earning the ire of many young people.

“We had confidence in the military council,” said Akram Samy, 23, a diplomatic reporter for the independent newspaper Youm7. He said that while the SCAF has moved forward with two main demands of the protesters — holding elections and putting Mubarak on trial — Egyptians have yet to achieve the dignity and justice they long for. Young Egyptians sometimes compare their country to Tunisia, where post-revolutionary change has moved much more rapidly.

Meanwhile, the press in Egypt has not become any freer, Samy said. While new media outlets have proliferated, the same red lines still exist, albeit slightly shifted: Instead of limits on directly criticizing Mubarak, journalists now largely stop short of directly attacking the military council.

In the end, Samy is glad the revolution took place. “I think Egypt has improved and is better,” he said.

Economic woes

Many young Egyptians say they did not expect the political instability in their country to cause Egypt’s economy to crash, with foreign investment and tourism drying up, wages dropping and unemployment on the rise.

That’s particularly true for young people working at the famous Khan el-Khalili market, hawking everything from silver and gold to plastic pyramids and papyrus.

Saama, the souvenir salesman who voted for the first time, stood in his shop on Monday watching one or two tourists trickle by every couple of minutes. Before the revolution, he sold upward of $35 of products a day. Now, he’s lucky if one or two people spend a few dollars at his stall, a tough reality for the 21-year-old from the working-class neighborhood of Gamalia.

Large hookah pipes and colorful trinkets adorned Ahmed Adel’s shop just up the street. Adel, 32, went to nursing school but became a full-time souvenir salesman before the revolution to support his young children. Now, fewer foreign visitors have led him to work as a nurse on the side to make ends meet.

“I wish it had never happened,” he said of the revolution.

Hostel owner Dina Abouelsoud, 36, disagreed. Normally, she’s overbooked this time of year; now, her hostel is at 10 or 20 percent capacity. But Dina is happy the revolution occurred. Like others, the upheaval lifted her from political apathy and thrust her to the forefront of political organizing; she focuses on making sure young women are represented in the liberal activists’ decision-making process.

“The main thing is just to empower women’s political life and life” in general, she said. She abhors recent political developments and believes the Egyptian people have been tricked into supporting an illegitimate parliament, which held its first session on Monday.

The Christian factor

Coptic Christians are perhaps one of the most visible constituencies who have suffered after Mubarak’s downfall. While many were glad to see Mubarak go, some young Christians have become disenchanted by prominent incidents of sectarian strife and the Islamists’ overwhelming electoral victory.

“I’m not a political person,” said Rasha Fayez, a 25-year-old Coptic Christian from the working-class neighborhood of Shubra. But she wishes Mubarak was still in power. “He was Muslim, but he was a political man” who maintained strong foreign policy and kept Egypt peaceful domestically.

Now, Fayez worries that an Islamist will become president and force Islamic law on all Egyptians, maybe even making all women cover their hair with a headscarf.

George Kalliny, a 23-year-old Coptic Christian, thinks most Christians agree with Fayez, although he believes that over time governing the country will force the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultraconservative Salafists to moderate their views. In the end, he said, liberals like himself will gain more power.

The revolution continues

“Until we find a generation that is not scared to fight for their rights,” the revolution will not realize its goals, said Shayma Kamel, 31, an artist. Sitting among her mixed-media collages at Cairo’s Mashrabia Gallery only minutes from Tahrir Square, Kamel said she was glad the revolution occurred but insisted the fight against corruption and oppression still had decades to go. Before the revolution, Kamel’s art dealt primarily with women’s issues, but her current exhibition derides the relationships politicians have with their people.

“We should keep pushing,” she said.

Saad, the online merchant, said, “Right now, the revolution is not complete. We’re only at 10 percent … or maybe less.”

Fekry, the liberal activist, said he has learned from months of political back-and-forth that revolutions take time. “You always have to take a step back to jump ahead.”

: Ben Gittleson is a writer living in Cairo. Follow him on Twitter @bgittleson. More Ben Gittleson

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Egypt’s sexual counterrevolution

As society democratizes, social conservatives seek to reassert control over women

By Khaled Diab

Egyptian women face a counterrevolution (Credit: AP/Hossam Ali)

Topics:Egypt, Feminism

Half a world away from the Republican presidential primaries where candidates vie to outlaw birth control and promote abstinence, ban pornography and condemn the “sin” of homosexuality, Egypt’s first post-revolution parliamentary election was, thanks to the Islamists, dominated by similar issues.

As the first anniversary of the revolution approaches this week, Egypt is facing a spate of urgent political, social and economic issues, such as mass youth unemployment, a tanking economy and a cabal of die-hard generals who just refuse to call it quits. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the discourse of Islamists, particularly the hard-line Salafist Nour party, which has focused attention on issues of “morality,” including talk of banning booze, prohibiting or restricting bikinis and censoring “sex scenes” in Egypt’s vibrant film industry.

Although women from all walks of life have been at the forefront of the popular uprising and are treated as relative equals by the revolutionary youth movement that has orchestrated the revolution, the burden of this moralizing, as is often the case, has fallen on the shoulders of women. This has led Egypt’s secular, liberal women and feminists to look to the immediate future with a mixture of apprehension and worry.

“When Egyptian media spends hours and hours discussing bikinis and alcohol with presidential candidates, it tells you where women are going,” says Marwa Rakha, an Egyptian writer, broadcaster and blogger. “After the revolution, we saw women exposed to humiliating virginity tests, fired at, beaten up, arrested, molested and stripped naked by army officers. Why would I be optimistic?”

But why is Egypt’s Islamic right so obsessed with sex and women, and seems to view both as the root of all evil?

Rakha sees a cynical populist ploy. “They want attention, lights and media presence. How else will they get there unless they talk about women and their evil bodies?” she said.

“These are issues that people can relate to on a personal level,” explains Karima Abedeen, a secular British-Egyptian living in Cairo. “They are also vague and not quantifiable and most of the people who use these issues as their platform haven’t a clue about how to solve any of the other, more urgent social and political issues.”

On a more ideological plane, Muslim conservatives have successfully painted sexual liberty and gender equality as a Western import designed to weaken Egypt’s Islamic identity and corrupt Egyptians. The argument is that only by embracing Islamic traditions and morals wholeheartedly can Egyptians resist Western hegemony and recaputure their past glory.

“Focusing on issues of morality sends a message to the community that parties like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis will protect our Islamic identity against the Western identity, which liberals try to promote,” observes Gihan Abou Zeid, an Egyptian activist and feminist who is working on a book about the women who took part in the revolution. “Many Egyptians believe that following Islamic orders would fix many of the current challenges that Egypt is facing.”

In this, Islamists and their supporters are confusing the symptoms with the disease. The reason Egyptian society is failing its people is not because it has veered too far from tradition, but because it has not embraced secular modernity enough, resulting in the relative marginalization not only of women but of young people too.

Similar to America’s Christian fundamentalists, Egypt’s Islamists and other social conservatives are alarmed by the corrosion of the traditional patriarchal order caused by the increasing emancipation of women. The loss of centuries of male privilege, especially in the public sphere, that this entails fuels the panicky public obsession with what should be private issues, such as virginity and promiscuity. In this worldview, strong, independent women are regarded with suspicion, as if they are carrying a volatile sex bomb that will explode upon contact with freedom and shred the fabric of society in its wake.

But despite the clear similarities between social conservatives in Egypt and America, the social context in which they operate is quite different. Egyptians on the whole may not necessarily be more religious than Americans, who seem far less inclined to abandon their faith than Europeans, but Egyptians interpret their faith far more traditionally.

Secularization has progressed much further in America than in Egypt, where it has been partially discredited through its association both with Western neo-imperialism and the corruption and failure of Egypt’s secular dictatorships. American Christian fundamentalism is a movement founded on freedom and imperial swagger, whereas Egyptian Islamism is a reaction to weakness and decline. The people who have been stripped of power in society for decades are focusing on those few areas on which they have been able to exercise control, i.e., “morality.”

Whereas religion is a fairly flexible and personal affair in America, in Egypt, religion, or tradition, is more often than not about conformity. And those who challenge this hegemonic view often suffer for their “indiscretion,” as witnessed by the massive overreaction by Egyptian society pretty much in its entirety to the decision by a bold art student, Aliaa Elmahdy, to post naked images of herself on her blog to protest the growing Islamization of society and to demand freedom of expression.

This traditionalist mind-set also partly explains the paradox that, although millions of Egyptian women have entered academia and the workforce, often outdoing and outperforming men, they have not become sexually freer but have had to compromise by stressing their “virtue” through adoption of the hijab. As men lose control of women in the public sphere, they try harder to control them in the family, suggests Abou Zeid.

Even Egypt’s secularists, although they view women more as their equals, share the Islamists’ objectification of the female form. “The secularists and the conservatives are two faces of the same coin when it comes to women,” concludes Rakha. “Most of the politicians in both currents objectify women; one side wants to cover us and lock us up, while the other wants to strip us naked and show us off.”

That said, there are significant differences between the right-of-center and heterogeneous Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the Salafis. For example, Abou Zeid points to the fact that the Brotherhood is not against women working, albeit within limits, but the Salafis want them to “return” to the home.

The Salafis, she also adds, want to force women to cover their faces, as demonstrated by their vigilante “morality police,” who have been roaming rural areas of Egypt, though, fortunately, Egyptian women have been fighting back.

“The Salafis are mad. They represent the very, very dark ages. The Muslim Brotherhood are not all bad,” says Abedeen. “I think the fact that the Salafis exist should push the Muslim Brotherhood toward a less conservative approach.”

In addition to the likelihood that the FJP will align itself to liberal, albeit economically conservative parties, the wind is not yet out of the sails of the secular revolutionaries who have so far spearheaded change in Egypt, as illustrated by the defiant “Revolution Continues” movement.

One consequence of the revolution is that it has empowered the previously marginalized, namely the young and women, and made them believe that they can be agents of their own destiny. “Attitudes toward women are better among the young generation, particularly the middle class, to which most of the politically active women belong,” notes Abou Zeid.

This is bound to widen the gap between the young generation and secularists, on the one hand, and older generations and traditionalists, on the other, leading to a more polarized social landscape. “I think that women’s attitudes toward themselves have changed,” observes Abedeen. “The new generation of women is much stronger than older generations and is much less willing to compromise.”

Abedeen also believes that once Egyptians see what the Islamists are like in power, they will soon fall out of love with them.

“I am trying to stay positive and tell myself that it is natural that people should gravitate toward a more conservative option, hoping that these people will not be corrupt,” she says. “I am hoping, down the road, that people will realize that is not the way forward for Egypt.”

It will be largely up to Egyptian women to carve out their rightful place in society.

“Looking at Egypt now, I see a lot of courageous defiant women, but I also see millions who realize how oppressed they are, yet do nothing about it,” says Rakha. “It is up to each woman on her own, in her house, at her desk, in her car, on her way to and from places. This is an individual fight whose collective gains and losses will reflect on the status of Egyptian women.”

: Khaled Diab is an Egyptian journalist based in Jerusalem. His website is Chronikler. More Khaled Diab

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The devastating crackdown on Egypt’s revolution

Since Mubarak was deposed, over 12,000 civilians have been tried by shadowy military tribunals

By GlobalPost

Om Ahmed demonstrates for the release of her son and his friend on July 1, 2011. Both were sentenced to five years in prison in a military trial for breaking curfew. (Credit: Mona Seif/Courtesy)

Topics:GlobalPost, Egypt, Egyptian Protests, Arab Spring

This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

CAIRO — Before the pro-democracy movement’s demonstrations swelled the streets of this city and ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Amr El-Beheiry was a 32-year-old factory worker who hailed from Nile Delta and was proud of his large and very close family.

El-Beheiry struggled like most Egyptians, but his family says he kept a simple dream of being able to afford an apartment and to save enough to finance a modest wedding. He minded his own business.

But like hundreds of thousands of Egyptians El-Beheiry found himself swept up in the momentum of history and he took to the streets to join the protests that began January 25, 2011 and 18 days later resulted in the downfall of Mubarak. El-Beheiry continued to challenge authority — newly empowered, his family says, by the idea of a better future. On Feb. 25, he was arrested along with dozens of other protesters in front of the building where Egyptian cabinet meets.

El-Beheiry has the unfortunate distinction of being among the very first civilians arrested under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the governing body made up of generals that was given executive authority in Egypt during the transition to a newly elected government.

As a result, he was among the first of some 12,000 civilians to be brought before a military tribunal under the country’s so-called “Emergency Laws.” This process routinely suspends a civilian’s right to a fair trial and human rights activists fear it is an old ploy of the Mubarak regime which is once again being used to crush dissent.   El-Beheiry has been badly beaten in prison, held incommunicado and sentenced to five years on what his family and lawyers say are trumped-up charges of breaking curfew and assaulting a soldier.

He was sentenced at a court hearing that was never announced to the family and which not even his lawyers were permitted to attend.

Mubarak used the “Emergency Laws” for decades to circumvent the civilian justice system and was criticized by international human rights groups for years for doing so. But in three decades of Mubarak’s autocratic rule, there were only 2,000 cases of civilians being tried by military courts. In just ten months of SCAF taking control of the country, there have been six times that many.

Human Rights Watch released a report this week to mark the anniversary of the “January 25 Revolution” in Egypt that highlighted SCAF’s use of these “Emergency Laws” and to call for the newly elected parliament to make it a legislative priority do away with this web of laws that curb free expression, limit the right to assembly and restrict just about any form of opposition to the ruling government. Egypt’s newly elected lower house of parliament, known as the People’s Assembly, will sit for the first time Monday.

In the 46-page report titled “The Road Ahead: A Human Rights Agenda for Egypt’s New Parliament,” Human Rights Watch sets out nine areas of Egyptian law that most need reform if the law is “to become an instrument that protects Egyptians’ rights rather than represses them.”

Amid the call for a change in Egypt’s laws to end the practice of military trials, El Beheiry’s case has become a cause célèbre, launching a popular, national movement known as “No Military Trials.” Bumper stickers and street graffiti supporting the movement can be seen everywhere.

The movement has begun to affect change: three days before the first anniversary of the revolution, and with rising fears of anti-military protests across the country, SCAF announced that Marshall Mohamed Hussien Tantawi signed a pardon decree for 1959 prisoners who have been sentenced by military tribunals. El-Beheiry is not among them.

The news comes less than two weeks after Marshall Tantawi denied the use of military trials in a meeting with former US president Jimmy Carter, who held extended meetings with top Egyptian officials, heads of political parties and NGOs after the Carter Center participated in what they described as “witnessing the Egyptian parliamentary elections.”

The sudden change in the military’s stance did not surprise the activist community nor did it slow their preparations for wide-scale protests.

*****

This is how El-Beheiry’s ordeal began.

As the soldiers moved in to arrest him, he was severely beaten. Leila Soueif, one of Egypt’s prominent human rights activists, saw this unfold and intervened. She had never met El-Beheiry but Soueif is the grandmother and matriarch of a family with a long history of opposition to the Mubarak regime. She insisted that she would not leave the scene of the protest without this young man whom she saw unfairly arrested and savagely beaten with her own eyes.

He was temporarily released, only to be apprehended again and then taken into a netherworld of military prisons and a military court system which human rights activists here say is systematically denying civilians their basic right to a fair trial.

Soon after his arrest, the movement “No Military Trials” was started by the daughter of the long-time human rights activist who first tried to help El-Beheiry in Tahrir Square when he was originally detained. Mona Seif said that her mother’s actions on behalf of El-Beheiry and the quick succession of others cases like it forced her to realize that “the detention of protesters by military personnel was systematically happening in the back stage of the revolution.”

Seif is a 25-year-old researcher at a breast cancer research center run by Cairo University. Just like El-Beheiry, the January 25 uprising turned her into a hard core female activist who refused to surrender her cause despite security intimidation, detention, brutality and the risk of losing her job.

The Egyptian military, which was originally celebrated as heroic defenders of the revolution, has shown very different colors in recent months, according to Seif and growing chorus of criticism across Egyptian society.

“They (the military) pretended to defend the revolution, and they continued with the same suppressive practices we revolted against,” says Mona Seif.

Amr El-Beheiry’s family also stepped up to highlight his case. They filed around 300 complaints and requests for a retrial over the past year. And then his family was told that he would finally be permitted to stand retrial. But they say they were never told of the trial date. To date, El-Beheiry remains in El-Wadi El-Gedid prison compound, a maximum security facility located in Egypt’s western desert, around 500 kilometers from the capital Cairo.

El-Beheiry’s brother, Mohammed, told GlobalPost that the family is kept completely in the dark as to any of his legal proceedings. He said they are worried about Amr’s well-being after getting a glimpse at what his brother suffered in military detention.

“When I first visited him he was injured and left untreated, his head injury was infected because of the lack of medical attention in jail,” said Mohammed.

But this was not the only case of brutality at the hands of the military. Hundreds of other physical abuse cases were documented over 11 months of military rule, human rights activists say.

The case of El-Beheiry and around 9000 others since February 2011 has brought the ruling generals of Egypt under fiery criticism and raised questions about their intentions toward the ongoing revolution.

“No Military Trials,” the initiative inspired by El-Beheiry’s detention, has organized dozens of protests against the ongoing violation of human and civil rights, but their efforts seem to have little influence on the policies of the SCAF’s ruling generals.

Ragia Omran, an Egyptian female activist and lawyer specializing in military trials of civilians said that torture has been “consistently used toward those detained by military police.” She says that physical abuse was documented in almost all protests and strikes dispersed by the military “on March 9, April 9, Israeli Embassy protests, May 15, June 28, September 9, the last week of November and mid-December when they dispersed the sit-in beside the cabinet building.”

Most of those detained by the military police were stripped of their legal rights and according to Omran, “The case is usually built on a reports filed by arresting officers, reports that normally don’t include any details or substantial evidence.”

The European Parliament issued a statement on November 17 after the detention of Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah.

“The European Parliament calls for the immediate release from prison of Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah and reiterates its call to stop prosecution of civilians by military courts in Egypt,” said the official statement.

The blogger who was detained on charges of stealing military weapons, attacking government facilities and killing a soldier decided not to answer to military prosecutors. His boycott continued for three consecutive questioning sessions before he reached an unprecedented success and was referred to a civilian criminal court along with over 60 other detainees.

There has been a significant decrease in use of military trials against civilians in recent months, but more than 9000 prisoners continue to serve time.

“Military trials of civilians have not stopped yet; however, there has been a significant decrease in the cases reviewed by the Military Prosecution since the events of Israeli Embassy on September 9,” said the lawyer and human rights activist Ragia Omran.

Omran thinks the decrease in military trials for civilians “was achieved by the combined efforts of local protesters, the media, and international organizations that harshly criticized the practice.”

While the cases are being highlighted, what actually goes on inside the prison walls is largely unknown.

But Abul Maati Ahmed provided a glimpse.

He is one of the few who recently stood retrial and were released, and he was interviewed by GlobalPost.

He was first detained on February 2, 2011 trying to bring food and supplies to a tent in Tahrir Square where his family was gathered in support of the protest movement. This was before the fall of Mubarak and 5 days after Egypt’s army took to the streets, for the first time in decades, to, as the generals put it, “defend the revolution.”

“I was deported to the Military Prison, I was tortured along with other detainees for four continuous days, we were offered no food during that time, some detainees collapsed and were carried away, I believe some of them died,” said Abul Maati.

Once again, Abul Maati confirmed how theatrical those trials were. “I saw a prosecutor for less than 15 minutes, he asked me a few questions after which I was dismissed,” he said.

The confused detainees who all experienced similar brief questioning sessions were deported once more to a different prison. “When we arrived in prison I asked what will happen next, a prison worker told me I was transferred to serve a five years jail term.”

Behind the maximum security walls of El-Wadi El-Gedid prison, Abul Maati and his fellow protesters turned inmates decided to go on hunger strike. On the tenth day they were informed by the prison administration that they were pardoned by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

“We broke the hunger strike and waited to hear the news of our release. We found out that they lied to us. They threatened us not to think of a hunger strike anymore, or else we will be tortured,” said Abul Maati.

Back in his hometown of Shalakan, a small agricultural town north of Cairo, Abul Maati’s father, Ahmed Abu Arab, started his hunger strike to protest the detention of his son, while the brother and other family members continued to file complaints and requests for a retrial. On the tenth day of his hunger strike, the unhealthy old man was rushed to hospital after he collapsed.

Abul Maati was finally granted a retrial in mid October. He stood a second military trial in November that sentenced him to six months in jail for breaking curfew. And he was released based on the nine months he had already served.

He emerged from the prison to find out that he had lost his job at the Egypt Gas Company. Requests to the company to allow him to retain his job were in vain.

The healthy athlete and martial arts champion came out of prison a heavy smoker; he vowed to return to Tahrir Square, where he was first detained.

“I will be protesting in Tahrir Square on the anniversary, prison will never make me surrender what I came out for last year,” said Abul Maati.

He described his experience behind bars as “the reality of the Egyptian military,” which pretended to defend the revolution but “targeted the youth who fueled it.”

“It is the biggest betrayal I have ever experienced.”

The heavy strain that the military imprisonment and tribunals caused Abul Maati and his family, particularly his father who fell ill, is a familiar story among the thousands of detainees still in prison.

*****

This stress has certainly taken a toll on Amr El-Beheiry’s father.

Abdalla El-Beheiry suffered a stroke, his family says, after hearing that his son, Amr, was permanently fired from his job while serving his sentence.

And while thousands of protesters demanded reform and chanted against the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the now bed-ridden father found himself begging officers at the Military Judiciary Department to pardon his jailed son or allow him to stand retrial.

On January 10, El-Beheiry’s appeal for a retrial was accepted. The old man still clings to a hope that his son might be released and return to his job. He waits to see if the retrial will really take place. But the father has been rendered mute by the effect of the stroke and is unable to say how he feels about the slight hope that his son may be released.

“My father just couldn’t tolerate the news,” said Amr’s brother, Mohamed.

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Talking to the Muslim Brotherhood (finally)

U.S. diplomats bow to reality and talk to Egypt's Islamic party

By Matt Duss

Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie speaks to the media after

Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood

Last week, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration had decided to significantly increase contacts with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, in the wake of the group’s significant showing in recent elections. According to the Times, the new contacts represented “a historic shift in a foreign policy held by successive American administrations that steadfastly supported the autocratic government of President Hosni Mubarak in part out of concern for the Brotherhood’s Islamist ideology and historic ties to militants.”

“Now, the Americans come to meet us in person because they have estimated that we will be coming to power,” Mohamed Saad Katatny , the secretary-general of the Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, told the Washington Post, “and therefore they want to know us, but we have not discussed more than the general conditions and made introductions.”

On Wednesday Deputy Secretary of State William Burns met with the head of the Brotherhood’s political party, the highest-level contacts ever.

The Obama administration’s first tentative steps toward the Muslim Brotherhood go back to the president’s Cairo speech in June 2009, which was attended – at the administration’s request – by Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated activists. “America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them,” the president told those assembled at Cairo University. “And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments — provided they govern with respect for all their people.”

Laying down a condition for democratic participation, President Obama continued in Cairo, “government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party.”

The shift has been some time coming. For decades, U.S. policymakers struggled to develop a coherent approach to Islamic political parties in the Middle East, of which the Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest. Founded in 1928 by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna as a populist social movement aimed at returning Egyptian society to its Islamic roots, the group originally supported the Egyptian revolution of 1952, but soon fell out with the new government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. An attempt on Nasser’s life in 1954 led to the organization being outlawed and to a prolonged period of repression, some splinter factions turning to violence.

After Brotherhood-affiliated candidates won 88 seats in the national assembly in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary elections, the Bush administration began talking to them, but pulled back as Mubarak launched a renewed crackdown on democracy activists. Bush’s “freedom agenda” was buried under a wave of anti-American radicalism driven by the occupation of Iraq.

Obama’s election on a pledge to change direction and his Cairo speech put him in a decent position to side last year with the Tahrir Square protesters’ demand for political reform and the end of Mubarak’s regime, something for which Obama has continued to be criticized by Republicans who see little difference between the religiously oriented politics of the Brotherhood and the violent nihilism of al-Qaida. Faulting the administration for not supporting Mubarak, presidential candidate Rick Santorum called the Muslim Brotherhood “as dangerous to western civilization and the future of our country” as al-Qaida.

Back in July, as it became even clearer that Islamist parties were preparing to make significant gains in the coming elections, it was reported that the Obama administration was seeking “limited contacts” with Brotherhood activists. Conservatives once again criticized the shift, but it’s unclear what the other options are, aside from doubling down support for Egypt’s current interim government, headed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has become increasingly violent against protesters over the last months. (That is, repeat the same mistakes that we have made for decades in supporting oppressive authoritarian regimes against their own people for the sake of stability.)

“I think the [New York Times] story was a little overstated,” said Steven Cook, a Middle East Scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, whose book “The Struggle for Egypt” was published in September. “For years we’ve been having unofficial contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood. And pretty early on after Mubarak fell, the State Department indicated that there would be contacts.”

The bottom line, according to Cook, is that the Brotherhood is “an important part of the political landscape and choosing to wall ourselves off from them is unnecessarily handicapping ourselves. They haven’t engaged in any violence for the better part of five decades. So it’s reasonable to be talking to them. There doesn’t seem to be any downside, unless you buy into this idea that the Brotherhood is part of the effort to establish the global caliphate, which is not the case.”

Some analysts take a darker view. “It is tempting to believe that the FJP will moderate once in power,” writes Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but a number of factors make this highly unlikely, including the challenge to the Brotherhood’s right flank from more extreme Salafi parties. Trager also argues that Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel is in danger. “Although the party has said that it will honor Egypt’s international agreements,” Trager writes, “it has carved out an exception for the Camp David Accords, which it intends to put to a national referendum, thereby shielding itself from direct responsibility for the treaty’s demise.”

But Olivier Roy, a French scholar who has covered trends in political Islam for some time, asserts that the parties like the Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda, which won recent elections there, should be considered “post-Islamist.” While they continue to espouse many ideas at odds with modern liberalism (just as do some Western conservative religious political movements), in Roy’s analysis they have adopted in principle the necessity of working within a pluralistic political space.

“The paradox of Islamization is that it has largely depoliticized Islam,” Roy wrote. “Social and cultural re-Islamization – the wearing of the hijab and niqab, an increase in the number of mosques, the proliferation of preachers and Muslim television channels – has happened without the intervention of militant Islamists and has in fact opened up a ‘religious market’, over which no one enjoys a monopoly. In short, the Islamists have lost the stranglehold on religious expression in the public sphere that they enjoyed in the 1980s.”

By reaching out to parties and Islamic movements that have been vilified for the past decade, the Obama administration is taking a risk, especially in an election year. Brotherhood members continue to make contradictory statements in regard to their plans and goals for a new Egypt, and the group’s most prominent affiliated cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, regularly issues the grossest anti-American and anti-Semitic slanders on his Al Jazeera show. There is clearly reason for concern. But, if the U.S. is to be serious about democracy promotion, it is unclear what other options exist.

“We’re going to have to get used to the fact that there’s a strong Muslim Brotherhood presence in Egyptian politics,” Cook concludes. “It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t speak out then we disagree with their policies, but this is the reality. The question is: Do we adjust? Or do we forever fight against the political will of the people in the region?”

: Matt Duss, policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, is a regular contributor to Salon. Follow him @mattduss More Matt Duss