Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt
Today
by Talal Asad
I
I have used the term “tradition” in my writings in two ways:
first, as a theoretical location for raising questions about authority, time,
language use, and embodiment; and second, as an empirical arrangement in which
discursivity and materiality are connected through the minutiae of everyday
living.[1] The
discursive aspect of tradition is primarily a matter of linguistic acts passed
down the generations as part of a form of life, a process in which one
learns/relearns “how to do things with words,” sometimes reflectively and
sometimes unthinkingly, and learns/relearns how to comport one’s body and how
to feel in particular contexts. Embodied practices help in the acquisition of
aptitudes, sensibilities, and propensities through repetition until such time
as the language guiding practice becomes redundant. Through such practices one
can change oneself—one’s physical being, one’s emotions, one’s language, one’s
predispositions, as well as one’s environment. Tradition stands opposed both to
empiricist theories of knowledge and relativist theories of justice. By this I
mean first and foremost that tradition stressesembodied, critical learning rather
than abstract theorization. Empiricist theories of knowledge assert
the centrality of sensory experience and evidence, but in doing so they ignore
the prior conceptualization carried by tradition. My sensory
experience is incommensurable with yours. It is only through language (integral
to a shared form of life), and the conceptualization that language makes
possible, that we can develop argument and knowledge as collective processes.
Critique is central to a living tradition; it is essential to how its followers
assess the relevance of the past for the present, and the present for the
future. It is also essential for understanding the nature of circumstance, and
therefore the possibility of changing elements of circumstances that are changeable.
Relativist theories of justice assert that "justice" is simply the
name for the norms that actually guide and regulate a people's form of life.
And yet what other people consider to be justice is part of the circumstance
that confront the followers of every living tradition. As such it constitutes a
challenge to every critical tradition, an invitation to change contingent
aspects of one's tradition, or of the circumstances in which it is embedded, or
both. This is not a challenge of abstract theories but of embodied (and yet
criticizable) ways of life.
Discursive and embodied tradition do not refer to two
separate types of tradition, two mutually exclusive principles of social
organization (like Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, say).
In general I use the concept of tradition to address now the use of inherited
language and now the acquisition of embodied abilities by repetition. One might
suggest that having a tradition is an expression of a desire for the completion
of a present that is simply unfinished time. Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote:
“Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he picks up when he
feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone
lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in
love.”[2] For
Wittgenstein, in other words, tradition represents for someone who doesn’t have
it the object of an unattainable longing: the condition of belonging to
another, being accepted as such by him or her, and of hoping to learn (and
construct) through friendship who one is. Of course the language and practice
of tradition can and must be learnt (people do enter traditions they have not
inherited) but Wittgenstein’s emphasis is on the fact that what is learnt is
not a doctrine (rules) but a mode of being, not a thread one can pick up or
drop whenever one feels like it but a capacity for
experiencing another in a way that can’t be renounced.
I use the concept of embodiment to address questions of
beginning, growth, and completion, of finitude, of hope and of failure; I use
the idea of discourse in the same context to explore how citizens talk about
and engage with power and authority in shifting moments of time.[3] I
understand tradition to be given not invented.
Even when reform is proposed there is an assumption, explicit or implicit, that
“the tradition’s essence”—what is perceived as essential to it—is not to be
changed but defended through purification, the process of separating what is
contingent from what is essential. Thus contrary to those who see an
irreconcilable opposition between tradition and genealogy, I suggest that the
very act of “purifying tradition” draws on genealogical arguments. Genealogical
critique is not (as Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, has insisted) a rejection
of all grounding; its ground is “today,” the place from which
one thinks on the difference between time present and time past, and aspires to
future time. The purification of tradition uses violence (or the threat of
violence) to restore an obscured origin that can then accommodate itself more
smoothly to the real, progressive world. This process of critical purification
(modernization) is a process of what must be transgressed if tradition is to
become civilized. As a consequence, actual traditions, descriptively so
identified, can disintegrate or implode.[4]
Discourses and acts that found a tradition are not
exhaustive because subsequent events become part of those foundations, by
virtue of interpreting or developing them. In any living tradition there are
arguments about whether exegetical texts, or texts belonging to other
traditions, have any value for one’s own tradition, and if so why.
Disagreements therefore arise not only about the substance of interpretation
but also over where exactly the limits of a tradition lie. These arguments and
exchanges suggest that founding narratives are moments in ongoing
conversations: so in principle tradition can accommodate rupture, recuperation,
reorientation, and splitting—as well as continuity. Tradition is singular as
well as plural. For subjects there are not only continuities but also exits and
entries. Tradition accommodates mistakes as well as betrayal; it is not by
accident that “tradition” and “treason” have a common etymology.
So in what follows I want to think about politics in Egypt
today, especially by attending to ideas about Islamic tradition that have been
explicit or implicit in much of the discourse of participants and commentators
of the events since January 2011. In particular, I want to ask what a liberal
state, which is said to be a precondition of individual freedom (including
religious freedom), makes difficult or even impossible. I note that of course
not all liberal states are identical, but they do share something that enables
them to be identified as “liberal.” I begin, however, by asking what it is
about “tradition” that secularists find antipathetic, and then discuss how a
learned follower of Islamic tradition interpreted aspects of it to me. I then
argue that modern sovereignty (of subject and state) makes it difficult for
certain kinds of embodiment, certain kinds of ethics, to flourish in our
globalized, speeded-up world. I explore in what follows some openings and
closures brought about by modern concepts of ethical and political practice in
post-2011 Egypt.
II
Over the last several decades, before the coup in July 2013,
whenever I visited Egypt I often heard the so-called Islamic Awakening (as-sahwa
islāmiyya) censured. The critics regarded themselves as “modern,” and so
signs of what they identified as religion in public offended them. What they
found offensive wasn’t always political. Their anxiety was focused on two
aspects of what they saw as dangerous: on the one hand, the fastidious emphasis
on ritual as evidence of blind obedience to authority, and therefore
threatening to the autonomous modern self; on the other hand, the insistence on
the priority of the shari‘a in the constitution of the state—a
form of “religious” law that is politically divisive and archaic in its
assumptions of personal relations. The radical secularist position (not the
most vocal in Egypt) is that religion belongs to the past, as do all illusions
from which one has emancipated oneself; the more common view among secularists
is that “religion” is essentially a private matter of personal ethics and that
while it may perhaps be expressed in public ceremonies it must under no
circumstances enter the same space as politics. Many modernizers view the
present “crisis” of Arab society as being rooted in an unquestioning attachment
to “religious tradition.” The famous poet Adonis, for example, has written at
length on the need to break decisively with tradition (salafiyya). As an
advocate of revolutionary change in Arab society he urges “the necessity of
freeing the Arab from all dependence on tradition, the necessity of eliminating
the past’s sacredness and of considering it part of an experience or knowledge
toward which one has no obligation whatever (ghayr mulzima itlāqan).”[5] This
modern idea of choice stands defiantly against the idea of a past to which one
is bound by language, capability, and affection.
The censure my secular friends made of what they considered
Islamic tradition echoes a historical debate about “religion” since the early
Enlightenment that is partly based on a new psychology that emerged in Europe
in early modernity, a psychology focusing on such interior states as sincerity,
authenticity, and the will—and claiming a clear-cut antithesis between freedom
and authority.[6] Since the
seventeenth century, ritual has been spoken of very much as tradition has: it
looks to the past as continuous and unchanging, it consists of formal and
inauthentic action, it is based on non-rational thought, it submits one’s own
will to that of another, it prioritizes social convention over personal
sincerity and freedom of action. This view was epitomized in the Protestant
rejection of Catholic ritualism,[7] eventually
to become part of modern common sense.[8]
The old assumption that tradition is “antimodern” has been
countered in several ways. Thus Adam Seligman and his colleagues have recently
argued that the formal character of ritual has the function of smoothing social
life where a rigid adherence to one’s actual feelings (“being sincere”) would
seriously disturb it. The theoretical object of submission to ritual is
therefore not the suppression of authentic feeling but its management by the
use of conventional formalities so that social life becomes possible.[9] Again:
The principle of precedent in tradition is also known to be crucial to modern
law. In both common law and the principle of stare decisis, the
reasoning in prior judicial decisions is followed unless there are strong legal
reasons to do otherwise.[10] And
in liberal democratic countries the constitution is the foundation to which
future politics is expected to be bound and which citizens must venerate.
Finally, respectful attention to the objects, texts, buildings and landscapes
that have survived from the past become valuable evidence in the present for
reconstructing that past, and a critical assessment of such evidence is
essential to the making of veridical historical narratives. Discursive fidelity
to the past, and attention to the way in which language has constructed its
categories (used by people who lived in the past as well as those used by
scholars who have studied them) is central to the modern discipline of history.[11]
And yet one may object: None of this, surely, proves that religion should
have a place in modern politics. Some continuity with the past may be necessary
because it facilitates social intercourse, or because it provides a measure of
predictability to the law (and therefore to the state), but religious tradition
bases itself on unquestionable authority whereas democratic politics requires
public debate capable of being brought to a rational conclusion.[12] I’ll
return to this and other liberal claims about politics later but first I want
to talk a little about the Islamic concept of tradition so that it might help
us think about the times and authorities of politics in Egypt.
In 2009 I was in Cairo for several months and had weekly
conversations with Shaykh Usama Sayyid al-Azhari, occasional khatīb of
Sultan Hassan mosque, and also a protégé of Shaykh Ali Gum‘a, one-time Grand
Mufti of Egypt. I was initially concerned with hearing about his views on human
rights in Islam, but as he spoke I became more interested in what he had to say
about the formation of personal virtue within Islamic tradition. Thus at one
point Shaykh Usama commented “We say al-a‘māl bi-nniyyāt (deeds
are to be judged by intentions) but where do intentions come from?” And then
went on to say that the process by which human beings were formed (takwīn
al-insān) was what formed intentions, and therefore the possibility of a
just social life: The constitution of intentions by behavioral and verbal
action takes place in various contexts of social life. He went on to talk about
the education of good character (tahdhīb al-akhlāq) through the
practices of devotion and discipline, but insisted that the ethical formation
of the individual was not a matter for the individual alone, that it took place
through interactions among people and things in several social locations:
“household, school, mosque, the media, and the street.” In each location there
were proper and improper ways of behaving and interacting with others, behavior
that had to be learnt and being enacted was part of the process of learning. It
was not simply that practicemattered; it was that learning to
practice aptly what was learnt that was critical. That was
why, said Shaykh Usama, when ibn Taymiyya spoke of faith (imān) as
something expressed primarily in and through actions (a‘māl), he cited a
well-known hadith about the foundational status of devotional practices (‘ibādāt)
in Islam: “Islam is built on five [pillars]” (mabniya al-islām ‘ala khams).
The rituals cited are: a public articulation of faith (shahāda), the
formal worship of God five times a day (salāt), fasting in the month of
Ramadan (sawm), and giving charity (zakāt).[13] The
required declaration of intention (niyya) preceding every act of
devotion was part of the devotion and the verbal articulation was supposed to
sink into the act: it was therefore different from the formation and
implementation of intention in acts that belong to matters in commerce and
politics that might or might not be realized.[14] For
ibn Taymiyya, as for Ghazali, so Shaykh Usama reminded me, the unthinking
religiosity of ordinary people was more important for the tradition than the
formal reasoning of philosophers and theologians precisely because it was
embodied in everyday life.
What was crucial in traditional devotion was both its
initial guidance by an authoritative teacher, whether parent, friend, or
shaykh, and its perfectibility. It was in this exercise of the
soul, as Ghazali put it, that spiritual orientations and sensibilities could be
learnt and confirmed.[15] Thus
repetition of thesame creates (paradoxically) something different,
so that vice turns into virtue and inability into ability. The conception of
time here stands in clear contrast to the linear time of historical progress.
In the former, time can be completed, the past bound to present and future; in
the latter there is no completion, only continuous improvement into an
indefinite future, and an indefinitely accumulating past that must be left
behind.
It is easy to confuse what Shaykh Usama was saying with what
is called self-fashioning, a process well known in the ancient
world and revived in the European Renaissance. Christian thought and practice
had rejected self-making and developed an alternative in the monastic
discipline that taughtwilling submission to tradition. Augustine
expressed this rejection in a memorable warning: “Hands off yourself. Try to
build up yourself, and you build a ruin.”[16] The
individual, in other words, should not assume that he or she
was sovereign. The subject did not have the authority to make him/herself; that
authority resided in the practice of submitting oneself to the discipline of
tradition. “Submission” is here conceived of not as a passive or coerced state
but as an act of connecting to the authority of a tradition. Submission was
therefore not unqualified, because opposition to false claims to authority was
itself an essential form of obedience. Islam (“submission”)
shares this orientation, and the ethical language that goes with it, with
premodern Christianity, and has developed it even more vigorously in thesharī‘a tradition,
of which the practice of amr bi-l-ma‘rūf is a part. This
should not be surprising, incidentally, because Islam developed in late Antiquity
in a world where Byzantine and Sassanian empires ruled and Christian, Judaic,
and Mazdaean traditions flourished, and so, as Muslims interacted with
non-Muslims, they inherited institutions and ideas from that complex history,
and went on to develop them in diverse but distinctive ways.
With the growth of commercial society, however, the
possibilities of self-invention have opened up for much of the
population and have been justified as the right of the sovereign self. Many
critics have pointed out that that form of embodiment is based
on the illusion of sovereignty because and to the extent that the individual’s
behavior is a response to the market. According to this critical view the
market that organizes modern commercial society, like all transcendent force,
requires consumers and investors to fall into line. However, this view is not
persuasive to most people who feel that they are making free choices in the
market, that the market offers them a means of fulfilling their own desires,
but this assumption rests on the belief that coercion is always and only
external, always what is apparent to consciousness. It ignores the old problem
of internal coercion and therefore the possibility that one cannot be free
until the inner compulsion that clouds one’s judgment and distorts one’s
conscious action is dissolved. As philosophers of antiquity and the Renaissance
put it, one’s emotions (passions) imprison one, and it is only the
intentional use (action) of reason that can liberate one from this
prison. So there is a crucial difference between self-care that is entirely
subject to the individual’s choice and responsibility (self-invention),
and the discipline of the self whose experience and authority lie in tradition.
The former rests on the assumption that the self is self-contained (“buffered”
in the word of one modern philosopher) and the latter on the recognition that
it overlaps with, and contains, other selves.[17]
A modern secular version of self-care is institutionalized
in Freudianism, but with the interesting twist that the unconscious past is
made the source of psychic blockages whose removal can be secured through a
talking cure. But to regard the authority of the past as only the source of
blind obedience is to ignore the possibility that the past may be reached in
the present not only through the discovery of unconscious desires and fears
formed in the past that act as coercive forces in the present but also in an
opposite direction, through conscious repetition that aims at making one’s
self-conscious actions unself-conscious in the future. When one acts
unself-consciously one is not suppressing desires—and therefore coercive
forces—into one’s unconscious. One is educating one’s desires so that one does
not encounter them as obstacles to living. The disciplined body is not a
coerced body but a “docile” body, in the older sense of a body that is
“teachable.” To be teachable is not only to be able to listen to another person
(one’s teacher) but also and especially to be able to listen to oneself; that
is a skill to be acquired and perfected through tradition. Of course one may be
taught to do wicked things but that is a general problem about persuasion and
learning, not one special to living through tradition.
What Shaykh Usama was trying to describe was thus more
interesting than the disapproval of my friends in Cairo. What he sought to
convey was the idea of intention itself being constituted in the repeated acts
of body-and-mind within a social context. In fact, like the mastery of all
grammar, the ability to perform devotions well (to devote oneself) required not
only repetition but also flexibility in different circumstances. It was not
simply a matter of acting as in the past but of acquiring a capability for
which the past was a beginning and by which the need to submit consciously to a
rule would eventually disappear. When one mastered the capability, its exercise
did not require a continuous monitoring of oneself (“Am I following the rule
correctly?”).
According to Shaykh Usama there was always a social
dimension to the disciplines of devotion, as in the traditional duty of every
Muslim “to urge what is good and oppose what is reprehensible” (amr
bi-l-ma‘rūf wa nahy ‘an al-munkar),[18] including
advice (nasīha) and warning (tahdhīr). What I found intriguing
about his discourse was the attempt to tie amr bi-l-ma‘rūf to
the virtue of “friendship” (suhba, ikhwa), to present it as
a matter of responsibility and concern for a friend rather than simply of
policing.[19] The
language and attitude in which one carried out that duty was integral to what amr
bi-l-ma‘rūf was, because, “Every Muslim is a brother to every other
Muslim.” What is known historically in Christian history as “pastoral care” is
here diffused among all Muslims in relation to one another.
Michael Cook has pointed out in his valuable historical
survey of amr bi-l-ma‘rūf that the duty to “forbid wrong”
finds expression in a rich vocabulary: “A wide variety of locutions are used
for this besides ‘command’ (amara) and ‘forbid’ (naha). A man may
speak to (qāla li-) the offender, exhort him (wa‘aza), counsel
him (nasaha), censure him (wabbakha), shout at him (sāha),
and so forth. … [O]ther things being equal, one should perform the duty in a
civil fashion. … But although in general one should speak politely, there are
times when rudeness is in place.”[20] Clearly
the performance of that duty is in crucial measure dependent on the vocabulary
used, and the differences in language cannot be reduced simply to two
imperatives—obligatory and forbidden actions—that are central to what we would
today call law. They articulate a range of interactions belonging to tradition.
And yet despite his reference to the rich vocabulary employed in it, Cook
reduces this tradition to the imperative of “forbidding wrong,” a move that,
among other things, distracts attention from the complex process of
“encouraging right.” Of course, the former logically presupposes a conception
of what is right, butcultivating right behavior is not exhausted by
prohibitions as Shaykh Usama clearly recognized—it is usually a longer and more
complicated process of learning, in which the substantive language and the
repeated practice of the tradition, as well as the contingent circumstances in
which they occur, are interlaced. It requires speaking to those whose behavior
one wants to change in the way one would speak to a friend.
According to Shaykh Usama, a just society was possible only
if its individual members learnt the virtues through tradition, and were helped
to do so by relatives, teachers, and friends. He insisted that even if you meet
a stranger you should behave towards him as though he were a friend unless you
have good reason not to do so. One could reprove a person kindly but if urging
him to reform failed to produce a positive result, one should boycott him until
he changed, because countering the misguided behavior of a friend was a duty of
friendship.[21] One
implication here—although Shaykh Usama did not articulate it—is that speaking
harshly (as Cook notes in his review of the historical vocabulary) may
sometimes be necessary to make even a friend change his or her behavior.[22] Pointing
out explicitly that something is unconditionally forbidden is of course part of
that tradition—but only part of it. In a modern context this would include
political boycott, mass protest and civil disobedience, all responding to a
particular or cumulative injustice of state authority.[23]
In his analysis of the Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd case, Hussein
Agrama contrastshisba as a form of care of the self and also as a
legal device: “While hisba, in its classical Shari‘a elaborations,
was part of a form of reasoning and practice connected to the cultivation of
selves, in the courts it became focused on the maintenance and defense of
interests aimed at protecting the public order.”[24] His
account demonstrates that when the shari‘a tradition of amr
bi-l-ma‘rūf is incorporated into the judicial system of the state, it
becomes part of the state’s coercive power and legalized suspicion in the
interest of public order, and this makes friendship not merely impossible but
also a distortion of the modern (impersonal) concept of justice. Agrama argues
that the premodern shari‘a as practiced in the Fatwa Council
is not law but a tradition that seeks to resolve the moral blockages
encountered in everyday life by subjects who recognize themselves as Muslims.
With the development of the modern state, however, another part of the shari‘a has
been transformed into and treated in the Personal Status Courts as “law.” His
insightful account of the work of the Fatwa Council brings it close to the
tradition of amr bi-l-ma‘rūfas a form of care of the self—with the
difference that amr bi-l-ma‘rūf is initiated by someone
concerned about another’s behavior, whereas the Fatwa Council responds to
requests for advice and help from someone perplexed or worried about the
rightness of their own behavior as a Muslim. It is for this reason that Agrama
traces the authority of the fatwa not to doctrine (the normative rule) but to
the work done together by the shaykh and the individuals who
come to him seeking the right way to go on as Muslims. The authority of this
care of the self is rooted not in the sovereign subject but in the sovereign shari‘a that
preceded him/her and yet remains always co-present.[25]
Agrama draws on the argument of a famous article by Wael
Hallaq that presents the shari‘a not as a timeless structure
but as a complex temporality best grasped in terms of evolving tradition.[26] Agrama
is also aware that the premodern, prestate shari‘a is not
“law” in the modern understanding of that concept, not a system of legal
doctrines backed by sovereign state power, but a tradition consisting of
normative practice and commentary that includes (but is not exhausted by)
justiciable cases. In part the shari‘a is applied to matters
that are justiciable, and in part (through such traditions as amr
bi-l-ma‘rūf) to individual or collective pressure at a political level, as
well as to attempts at blaming, warning, advising, urging, etc., to encourage
friends, kin, and colleagues to act in a praiseworthy way. Which is why, as
Agrama shows, although the work of the Fatwa Council is fully informed by theshari‘a,
it does not deal with “law”[27] but
with a nonmodern conception of ethics.
Five years after I met Shaykh Usama, Abdul Mun‘im
Abu-l-Futuh, (a Presidential candidate in 2012) invoked the tradition of amr
bi-l-ma‘rūf in answer to questions about the uprising and the coup,
and the role of Egyptian religiosity in those events. “This religiosity (tadayyun)
is a definite fact,” he replied.
The Egyptian personality includes deep faith and devotion to
the sacred, and [a sense of] considerable interpenetration between everyday
life and the sacred. But this religiosity is not always accompanied by a
social, political, and legal consciousness, and sometimes it is [merely] formal
or superficial or ritual. The importance of religiosity in the January 2011
revolution was that it formed the moral background to the conscience of the
revolution even if its discourse didn’t display that clearly. As for the events
of 3 July 2013 and later, the powerful propaganda that preceded 3 July joined
in distorting and treating with contempt the Islamists in preparation for the
events of 3 July and after. And the matter reached the point of doubting even
what is sacred. . . . This was what weakened the values and meanings of
fundamental religiosity that forbids the shedding of blood and commands what is
right and forbids what is wrong and tyrannical (al-qiyam wa ma‘āni
at-tadiyyun al-asāsiyya allatī tahrum safk ad-dimā wa ta’mur bi-l-ma‘rūf wa
tanhi ‘an al-munkar wa-z-zulm) and so millions of people confirmed and
excused and supported ugly behavior that was without historical precedent. So
here was where superficial religiosity failed because of its separation from
values and norms.
Abu-l-Futuh’s observation on the massacres[28] of
pro-Mursi protesters by the military regime extends amr bi-l-ma‘rūf into
an explicitly political context. He invokes amr bi-l-ma‘rūf as
a religious tradition that authorizes the cultivation of politically relevant
virtues. What he sees that tradition as offering is not a rule about
right and wrong (as in a court of law) but the ability to recognize a
particular injustice and to react to it by demanding “a return” to
justice—without having to calibrate the matter by reference to generalizable
moral principles. Even if that ability is not always acquired perfectly, it is
what that tradition, as embodied practice, seeks to build. And where the
building is successful, it enables daily life to be lived without having to
find justifications for moral—or political—obligation.[29]
III
So I turn to the January 2011 uprising and what followed the
ouster of President Mubarak, and ask how religion, authority, and tradition are
linked together in that story. One cannot seriously maintain that “religious
tradition” was a significant inspiration to that overthrow of authority,[30] but
there can be no question that since the fall of Mubarak religion has been
involved in a complicated way in what followed that remarkable event. In a
well-known essay Hannah Arendt has traced a very specific concept of tradition
that was central to European history, in which it was bound closely to both
authority and religion, such that undermining of the one inevitably led to the
undermining of the other two.[31] This
historical sketch of tradition is relevant to the Middle East because it begins
with the Greco-Roman experience that is part of the classical heritage of both the
northern and the southern lands of the Mediterranean,[32] and
it ends with post-Enlightenment European political thought and practice that
have had a profound impact on Muslim societies ever since the beginning of the
nineteenth century.
Arendt argues that with the rise of modern science the
authority of “religion” was irretrievably lost, and so tradition as idea and
practice was also undermined—or, at any rate, radically transformed. The idea
and practice of tradition that post-Revolutionary Europe identified and
critiqued emerged, says Arendt, not with the Greeks but with the Romans, and
crucial to that conception were two things: The notion of foundation (the
sacred foundation of Rome, the state that Roman politics sought to preserve and
extend) and a religion of the ancestors essential to Roman political identity.
Arendt notes that the Latin for “authority” (auctoritas) derives from
the verb “to augment” (augere), and that what those in authority sought
to augment was the foundation. Although authority was rooted in the past, this
past was present in the actual life of the city especially in the domestic
rituals of the Romans. Authority, tasked with augmenting the foundation, was
vested in the Senate and distinguished from power (potestas)—or the
capacity to use force—that the people possessed. In the early centuries of the
Christian era, says Arendt, the Church took over Rome’s political constitution,
the most significant aspect of which was its adoption of the distinction
between authority and power, conceding political force to the secular arm (the
princes) and reserving for itself the authority of the keeper of the Christian
tradition. There was, nevertheless, a link between the two—as there was in
medieval Muslim governance between the collective authority of the ulama and
the individual amir’s power, where the latter was expected to adjust his civil
actions to the normative demands of the shari‘a as articulated
and maintained by the former.[33] The
important difference, of course, is that the ulama did not have a monopoly on
pastoral care as the Church did. With the modern attempts at building the
sovereign nation-state, religious authority was detached from political
tradition and political authority was thereby secularized—which is not to say
that “religion” was henceforth never used by the state to legitimate its
actions but that “politics” has come to be very differently articulated from
the configurations of power and authority that had previously prevailed.[34]
One of Arendt’s points is that although the bond between
authority and religion has dissolved in Europe, the Roman experience of
foundation has survived—and therefore, too, a crucial sense of tradition. In
fact since a foundation is itself a rupture from the past and an opening to the
future, this very ambiguity lends itself to the concept of revolution. But when
the Roman conception of founding a political tradition becomes sharply
separated from religious authority in thinkers such as Robespierre, the authority
of a popular revolution becomes merged with the necessity of violence. The
violent founding of a nation-state becomes a kind of tradition for as long as
the state’s foundation is invoked and explicitly augmented. Arendt tells us
that since the American and French Revolutions a fused form of authority-power
becomes instrumental. In the concept and practice of revolution it was not the
use of violence that was new but its role in constituting a new legitimate
order for the good of the People’s future. What she doesn’t note,
however, is that coup d’ètat belongs to the same family of political violence
as revolution but differs from the latter in being a challenge from within the
governing elite, one that aims to change only the rulers of the state not the
system itself, but that legitimates itself in terms of necessity (saving the
nation and ensuring its progress).
So not only is the dominant tradition of political authority
in Europe today not “religious” in either the Roman or the Christian sense,
that authority makes “the people”—“the nation”—sacred as an eternal subject,
and it claims that national memory (“recovering the past”) and the People’s
will (“making the future”) are functions of one and the same national subject.[35] Of
course, Arendt is not the first to maintain that modern society (or capitalism)
has destroyed tradition.[36] However,
she does point out that the demand to create new concepts with which to think
and act in a broken time reflects the human ability to make new beginnings. But
she does not attend to the resulting paradox: to the extent that what is new
actually marks a beginning it also initiates a tradition. It could be said,
therefore, that the repetition of beginnings in modernity represents an
enduring aspiration for continuity that is continually betrayed—an unhappy
yearning for tradition that eludes one.
The 25 January 2011 uprising in Egypt expressed an
aspiration that was neither “religious” nor “secular”: to overthrow the old
system and make a new beginning, to initiate a “democratic tradition” that
would flow from that beginning, a desire that the People’s political obligation
be founded on loyalty to the nation and not on fear of the state’s violence:
from now on no more political cruelty and deception; justice and progress will
follow naturally if government is truthful and visible. (Yet it should not be
overlooked that the security police too believed in visibility, as when they
exposed tortured victims for people to see and become afraid, or when the
judiciary stages show trials for the same reason in order to defeat the
nation’s enemies.)
But an aspiration is not a realization. Some years later,
well after the July 3rdmilitary coup, looking back at the January
uprising, it becomes apparent that there never was a “revolution” because there
was no new foundation. There was a moment of enthusiasm in the uprising, as in
all major protests and rebellions, but the solidarity it generated was
evanescent. A hopeful attempt at beginning a tradition never guarantees the hoped
for future: clear aims, good judgment, patience, and willingness to learn a new
language and how to inhabit a new body, are required to respond to the various
dangers and opportunities that emerge from attempts to found a new political
order. Paradoxically, the first attack on the promise of a new political
tradition in the January uprising was the removal of Mubarak—by the military.
Most activists were delighted at what they saw as the solidarity of the army
with the People:īd wāhid! (“one hand!”) was the slogan that met the
soldiers as they entered Tahrir Square, but the army generals saw Mubarak’s
resignation more clearly as a first step toward an orderly restoration of state
power. They understood that it was not the uprising that undermined state authority
but the erosion of state authority—of its credibility—that had allowed the
popular uprising to explode and the military to move in. The state was no
longer the one Sadat inherited from Nasir: the army,[37] big
capital, and the Interior Ministry had by this stage fragmented the state’s
singular purpose and authority into a number of reconcilable interests among
the major leftovers from the Mubarak regime. It was the rebels’ failure to
recognize that fact that gave them an exaggerated sense of their own power.[38] When
people talked about “a transitional” period, there was, therefore, some
confusion of the time required for institutionalizing “the People’s will” (irādat
ash-sha‘b) with the time for restoring the sovereign state’s authority and
majesty (haybat ad-dawla), because both times sought the legitimacy of
political rule.[39]
Arguments about political legitimacy raged in Egypt after
the July 2013 coup d’état, although it was not always clear how those who made
the claims and counter-claims saw the relationship of legitimacy to legality.
Max Weber’s classification of political authority (legitimate domination) into
three ideal types is perhaps the most famous in the social sciences, but it
gives only one of them a basis in legality: rational-legal authority.
The other two, “tradition” and “charisma,” are unconnected to law. Carl Schmitt,
by contrast, saw legitimate rule in terms not of consent to authority but of
the right (the power) to resist, arguing that the loyalty of citizens to the
state was in effect another name for the fact that that right was not being
exercised. His assumption was that the nation-state must be homogeneous,
sharing a single normative order for political and legal
reasons: The right/power to break the claim to legitimate domination is not, in
other words, derived from positive law but from the normative order of society
that exists prior to the constitution of the state and its law, an order that
provides the constitution with its foundation.[40] It
is the Schmittian conception of legitimacy, incidentally, that makes it
possible for mass street protests against an established political authority to
claim that they are exercising the People’s will. Politics that derives from the
sovereignty of a modern liberal state is always open to a continuous fear—the
fear that the state’s authority may be violently undermined by the secret work
of internal enemies.
“Terrorists” in authoritarian Egypt, as in liberal
democratic America, are such a threat, and therefore also a spur to reinforcing
the devices aimed at meeting it. In theory the liberal state may concede the
legitimacy of political dissent, but when popular protest threatens to become
politically effective, when it seeks to change the fundamental way the state is
run, then concern for the state’s authority opens up different forms of action.
“Traitors” are close to “terrorists” but more dangerous to the state’s
legitimacy because while feigning to be ordinary citizens they abandon their
traditional obligation to the state and convey their loyalty to its enemies. It
is therefore rational for the state to extend its security systems (all the
while arguing for their necessity and legality) through technologies of
surveillance (directly, or indirectly with the help of private sector
enterprises), a strengthened police force, and open repression.
One approach to understanding attitudes to state violence in
Egypt is through a consideration of some remarks by a well-known journalist,
Hilmi Namnam, speaking at a meeting shortly after the coup d’ètat in which he
refers in positive terms (as many did) to the necessity of violence against
pro-Mursi protesters by the security forces: “No democracy or society,” Namnam
insists, “has ever advanced without the shedding of blood.”[41] Namnam’s
concern is not simply to assert that the necessary price of progress is the physical
elimination of its enemies but also to suggest that progress is not a matter of
completing a particular project but of an indefinite advance subject to
transcendent principles and it is this that constitutes
secularity, the real nature of society. “We must get rid of the lie that Egypt
is by natural disposition (bi-l-fitra) a religious state,” Namnam goes
on, “because Egypt is secular by nature.” The deliberate violence of the
progressive Egyptian movement is secular because it wants to make an increasingly
better future inthis world; the coercive activity of Islamists, by
contrast, seeks conformity with a divine plan. It is motive not effect that
distinguishes the two kinds of violence. Thus when Islamists appeal to
“religious authority,” instead of “the People’s authority,” they obscure
Egypt’s real nature. In making this claim Namnam draws on a revolutionary
tradition that affirms the necessity of political violence in this world as a
means of making historical progress. The necessity of this secular violence is
called for by an unseen future, a force in which all rational individuals
should have faith.
Hannah Arendt had this to say about the origins of this
tradition:
Necessity and violence, violence justified and glorified
because it acts in the cause of necessity, necessity no longer either rebelled
against in a supreme effort of liberation or accepted in pious resignation,
but, on the contrary, faithfully worshipped as the great all-coercing force
which surely, in the words of Rousseau, will ‘force men to be free’ – we know
how these two and the interplay between them have become the hallmark of
successful revolutions in the twentieth century, and this to such an extent
that, for the learned and the unlearned alike, they are now outstanding characteristics
of all revolutionary events.[42]
According to Arendt, therefore, all projects in which the
use of violence and the creation of terror among those subjected to it are
regarded as essential to the creation of free human beings, must be
distinguished from the active rejection of oppression presenting itself as
necessary or from its passive acceptance as inevitable. “Necessity,” she
suggests, has changed from being an excuse for particular cruelties to being
the truth of a sacred cause.[43]
Reflecting on the left-wing romance with revolution, Michel
Foucault once described the devious path of revolutionary “necessity” as
follows: Marxist and Marxisant movements that aimed to capture the state
apparatus because it was a historical necessity encountered a typical dilemma.
Not only was it deemed necessary for the revolutionary party to model itself on
the power structure of the reactionary state in order to fight it effectively,
it also found it necessary not to destroy state apparatuses entirely when it
took over the bourgeois state. It was necessary for state apparatuses to be
retained in order to fight the class enemy. Furthermore, in order to run the
appropriated state apparatuses, revolutionaries had to turn to
technicians and specialists from the old regime who had the necessary
experience—that is to say, who were members of the old class and who therefore
brought with them the continuity of old time.[44] This
fatal dilemma about clashing necessities—central to Egypt’s brief experience of
“liberal democracy”—was intimately connected to the aspiration of
“revolutionaries” to control the sovereign state. I will return to this point
below when I discuss the encouragement by the military government of a growing
body of patriotic citizens who voluntarily denounce their fellows to state
authorities.
The question of how political intentions are formed and then
expressed in action within a fluid, evolving situation—or even to what extent
intentions matter for understanding what happens in the political world—is more
complicated than accounts such as Namnam’s would have one believe.[45]The
eminent jurist Tariq al-Bishri makes a more interesting observation: The hatred
of secularists toward the Muslim Brothers, he argues, has been politically far
less significant than the enmity of the state apparatuses toward them because
self-styled secularists had neither mass organizations nor direct access to the
repressive instruments of the state.[46] As
a relatively small cultured elite from the middle and upper classes,
secularists were well represented in and by the media. However, whereas their
hostility toward “political Islam” was ideological, notes Bishri, the regime in
control of the state apparatuses was concerned not with “Islam” but with the
threat to their power and privilege issuing from the only major movement for
genuine systemic change in the character of the state. The state therefore saw
the Brotherhood as a serious political challenge: on the one hand as
represented by the professional unions of doctors, lawyers, teachers,
engineers, etc., that were dominated by the Brotherhood; and on the other hand,
by the Brotherhood’s nationwide organization with its considerable popular
following. Bishri says that after the uprising of January 2011 he had hoped the
deep state, the secularists and the Brotherhood would all come together
peacefully to establish and consolidate “democracy” in Egypt because the
alternative would spell disaster. The fact that that comprehensive alliance
didn’t take place was, in his opinion, the fault of all three.[47] However,
what actually took place, I would suggest, was not a collective moral failure,
a fault, but a particular political success in recapturing the sovereign state
in which the winners were propelled by powerful emotions and used state
violence (which their supporters endorsed) in order to save political time—by
cutting short the elected President’s period of legitimate rule. It is often
suggested by liberals and secularist militants that the Freedom and Justice
Party government should have reached out to them as potential allies against the
deep state, but supporters of the Brotherhood point to the longstanding
hostility of these elements towards them (which no doubt was reciprocated) and
ask rhetorically what value there would have been in reaching out to a small,
unfriendly, yet politically powerless current. This is the kind of mutual
distrust, based on a long history of contradictory political experience, that
renders new foundations virtually impossible.
Many critics have talked about “popular anger at Mursi’s
arrogance and incompetence,”[48] and
about the fear that he was “Brotherhoodizing” the state and “Islamizing”
Egyptian society. But Dina Khawaga, Professor of Political Science in Cairo
University, has made several perceptive observations about the anti-Mursi
protests in 2013: thus while she recognizes the tensions and criticisms within
the so-called “Islamic Awakening,” she explains the hostility to Mursi’s
presidency by reference to the idea of “moral panic” (al-hala‘ al-akhlāqi),
the sense that what was sacred to the nation (muqaddisāt wataniyya) was
being undermined by what was sacred to religion (muqaddisāt dīniyya).[49] Of
course, this is not the only time that someone has used that expression in the
context of general public tensions (it was first used in English at the
beginning of the nineteenth century) but Khawaga’s characterization of the
general atmosphere of anxiety, hostility, and volatility in the period leading
up to the coup does raise a question that neither secularists nor Islamists in
Egypt have debated publicly: In what sense can it be said that there were
different notions of “the sacred” in this political contest? And how did one
notion threaten the other?
Some left critics have insisted that to focus on the Sisi
coup (as the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters do) obscures the fact that
Mursi’s government was itself a part of the “counterrevolution,” because it
continued to rely on the repressive apparatuses of the interior ministry and
the military.[50] But
that doesn’t, I think, quite explain the ferocity of the winners against the
Brotherhood that never had control of those apparatuses, lacked a paramilitary
force, and was prepared (so its enemies say) to make an alliance with more
powerful elements of the “counterrevolution” such as the army: the sweeping
arrests of its leaders, the death sentences on its alleged supporters in mass
trials, and the savage repression of public protesters. I was struck, as many
other observers were, by the passionate expressions of hatred against the
Muslim Brothers coming from liberal and left members of the middle and upper
classes. “You don’t understand,” I was assured over the phone by Western-educated
friends in Cairo shortly after the coup, “the Muslim Brotherhood is a
reactionary, terrorist organization.” And when the security forces massacred
hundreds of peaceful Brotherhood supporters some left activists insisted: “That
tragedy was also the fault of the Brotherhood.” This enthusiasm for the
successful exercise of political violence is striking, and clearly very
different from the sentiment of inclusive solidarity that challenged state
repression in the January 2011 uprising. The emotional undertone of political
alignments and responses tends to be ignored or underestimated in many accounts
that attribute rationalistic motives to the struggling forces.
The motives of people who called or were encouraged to call
for Mursi’s removal were no doubt complex. They included traditional
lower-class deference toward the elite that took the initiative, as well as a
desire on the part of middle-class militants to revolutionize the nation-state,
and a fear on the part of those who owed their privileged position to the
Mubarak regime that their lifestyle was threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Motives are often colored by the concealed desires and misguided views that
people have of themselves. Once one insists on putting everything into boxes labeled
“revolution” or “counterrevolution” according to attributed motives one has
already appropriated the right to describe every political event in terms of
his/her attitude toward “freedom” (for or against) and thus foreclosed more
complicated accounts attending to shifts in perspective, fluid motivations,
revised judgments of persons and events, and accidental happenings—and thus the
collapse of attempts to build a new tradition.
Sometimes the attempt to explain political protest takes a
more sophisticated form. Thus a day after the coup the sociologist Hazem Kandil
wrote reassuringly: “Those who grieve over this affront to ballot box democracy
forget that Egypt, like any new democracy, has every right to seek popular
consensus on the basic tenets of its future political system. Revolutionary
France went through five republics before settling into the present order, and
America needed a civil war to adjust its democratic path. It is not uncommon in
the history of revolutions for coups to pave the way or seal the fate of
popular uprisings. Those who see nothing beyond a military coup are simply
blind.”[51]
Kandil sees the June protests and the July coup as the work
of a single subject (“Egypt, a new democracy”) following a clear cut road (“the
democratic path”). But invocations of “democracy” are part of a discourse that
all conflicting sides share, and it is not always clear what they mean by it
other than something self-evidently “good.” Those who carried out and supported
the military coup were defending “democracy.” Those dismayed by the forcible
removal of a legitimately elected (albeit widely criticized) President feared that
this act would damage the prospect of establishing “democracy.” For some,
installing “democracy” meant following a model supposedly embodied in Western
states—different from country to country, of course, but sharing a political
tradition of ideas and practices. For others “democracy” meant an end to the
pervasive corruption and cruelty of Mubarak’s regime, for yet others a just
distribution of wealth in Egyptian society. Kandil’s casual reference to
France’s history of failed republics (entangled as it was with colonial empire
and its aftermath) and to America’s bitter civil war to construct a strong
centralized state (that now extends militarily across the globe in
collaboration with international corporations) is not relevant to the anxieties
generated by Sisi’s coup today. What constitutes Sisi’s
authority—the necessity of his intervention to save democracy, or the People’s
acclamation? Of course, holding a national election is no guarantee of having
entered a “democratic path,” whatever that might be, but surely dismissing
electoral procedures isn’t “democracy” in any sense. Kandil
may be justified in saying that “Egypt has every right to seek popular
consensus on the basic tenets of its future political system,” but the
unanswered question remains: How, other than by the ballot box, can one
determine that that right is indeed being exercised?[52]
Echoing Kandil, the noted historian Khalid Fahmi wrote two
weeks after the coup, “We were taught in schools that we were a patient and
passive people, and for generations we accepted facile sayings about the genius
of Egypt, its tranquil landscape, its gentle river and undemanding people. And
yet here we are, proving to ourselves that we write our own history and that we
can depose our rulers if they do not succumb to our will.”[53] Fahmi
tells his readers that this traditional representation of popular submission is
no longer credible because the coup has proved that “we” (all the classes, rich
and poor, men and women, Muslims and Copts?) have the ability to “depose our
rulers.” This claim attributes to the Egyptian People a transcendent power—the
power to make happen what is true (to unseat disobedient rulers), and to say
what is true (to write a triumphant history), a power no longer constrained by
religious authority. Yet the considerable numbers of Muslim Brotherhood
supporters in Egypt’s cities and villages discovered that they could not retain
their “legitimate rulers.” It appears that the People’s power exhibits itself only
in deposing but not in installing or reinstalling its rulers.[54] Because
the nation includes those who are persecuted as well as their persecutors,
those who want stability at any price and those who want justice at any price,
the permanent victory of either side is never guaranteed. A paradox of the
modern nation-state, including Egypt, is that on the one hand it minimizes the
existence of significant internal differences in order to assert national
homogeneity, and on the other hand it emphasizes difference as significant in
order to exercise the violence that is “necessary” to its sovereignty.
Whatever coherent sense the idea of “sustained unity” has,
it comes not from common sentiment but from the shared life of a tradition—and
even that does not preclude bitter disagreement among those who follow the same
tradition, and mutual accusations of taking what is contingent for what is
essential and worth defending to the last. The disputes themselves make for a
kind of unity. The modern sovereign territorial state, by contrast, doesn’t
have such a unity because the lives of people within it are too disparate in
the things they value, in the pasts to which they attach themselves, in their
sense of what group they belong to, in the bodies they inhabit, and in the
authorities they invoke. It is precisely because of this diversity that
democracy (for all its obscurities and ambiguities) has emerged as an
assemblage of political and legal devices—including elections—for addressing
the ineradicable presence of difference, disagreement, and mutual hostility
within the modern state with minimum damage, and why the skills and sensibilities
required to engage effectively in democratic politics is acquired by
experience, sustained by goodwill and blessed by good luck, and why the ballot
box is an indispensible part of “democracy” whatever else “democracy” might be.
As hostility to the Mursi government mounted, the secular
activists joined the state apparatuses and their business allies (who had been
working to unseat Mursi from at least November 2012) allowing the army to enter
the political arena publicly yet again.[55] Certainly
Mursi’s incompetence was linked to his exaggerated sense of presidential power
and immunity and to his underestimation of the resources and tactical skills of
his enemies. The June 2013 popular movement that drew on a variety of
complaints and fears (some genuine, some grossly inflated by the pro-Mubarak
media) was ostensibly aimed at “the restoration of the January 25th revolution,”
but what it did was to facilitate the coup.[56] In
the 2014 military-backed constitution, references to the 25th January
uprising present in the previous constitution were removed—and hardly anyone
noticed. In general, 25th January has been erased or vilified
by the state media[57] and
military violence has openly claimed authority by invoking its own version of
“revolutionary tradition.” The possibility of democratic time has collapsed,
and it will not—at least for an indefinite period—be retrievable.[58]
The military coup consisted not merely in the removal and
imprisonment of the President and the violent suppression of opponents to the
new/old order, but in getting various social actors to accept Sisi’s claim to
be exercisingtemporary authority over “the [contending] sides” (al-atrāf)—the
nationally elected President on the one side and the opposition on the other—in
his giving the street protests military protection, and in requiring “the two
sides” to resolve their disagreement within a short, specified period of time.
In thus positioning himself (and the military) above “a crisis of the state”
Sisi was enabled by the emotional rhetoric of popular sovereignty to present
his unilateral resolution of that crisis (for which Mursi’s obduracy was said
by opponents to be entirely responsible) as an affirmation of the People’s
will.[59]
In his book published shortly after the January 25th uprising
the poet Yasir Anwar recounts incidents that exemplify secular feelings of
unease and repugnance for the vocabulary of Islamic tradition, including such
banal phrases as inshā’allah.[60] But
the main interest of that book lies in its desire to transcend the political
categories used by Marxists, liberals, and Islamists in their polemics:
We have escaped from a prison of politics to a prison of old
books. No one sees this world with his own eyes, only with the eyes of others:
this one is a Marxist, that one a Wahhabi, and a third a Sufi. We are all in
need of a translator because we don’t share a common language (lughatnā
laysa wāhida). How can Ibn Taymiyya debate with Marx? How can Hegel
converse with Ibn Arabi? If disagreement is considered a source of culture and
a sign of its fertility and vitality, cultural despotism and polarized thinking
reign supreme over the present scene. Faced by the dominance of [social]
fragmentation and splintering, the idea of eliminating the other has taken the
place of accepting the other, of the relationship of neighborliness, of the
interweaving [of different ideas] – all this has disappeared.[61]
Anwar’s complaint that “no one sees this world with his own
eyes” is problematic, of course, because no one can do without authoritative
knowledge accumulated from the past; in that sense our own eyes are also the
eyes of others who have preceded us. But he is right to draw attention to the
significance of friendship and antipathy in exchanges between people who do not
always recognize the disparity of times to which the people they draw on or
dismiss belong. Heated debates across radically different traditions, he says,
seem endless and fruitless because appropriate sensibilities and the exercise
of imagination are both lacking. Certainly mutual distrust and hostility have
been major features of political life in Egypt ever since January 2011.
Especially in times of political upheaval, fear, suspicion, and misattributions
of intention render trust—and therefore friendship—extremely fragile.
But first: why is rational debate of primary importance to democracy? One
answer is that it has a decisive outcome and is therefore the best way, in
politics as in law and natural science, of determining the truth. Liberals
typically represent “religion” as appeals to divine authority, and that is why
(liberals believe) debates about “religious belief”—or debates generated by
it—are passionate, inconclusive, and prone to violence.[62] Less
well known is the liberal state’s dependence on early modern arguments for
capitalism,[63]in
which the idea of “interest” increasingly displaced the idea of “passion” as
the principal mode of politics. The good that is calculable (“economic
value”) was considered superior in politics to the good that isn’t (“religious
value”) because only the former could be conclusively assessed. This discursive
move gave the market its ideological claim to being a neutral mediator for
resolving conflicts over value, a claim that has since become central to the
secular tradition of the modern liberal state. The electoral process itself has
adapted itself in several ways (resource investment, targeting swing voters,
gaining and losing seats) to the idea and practice of the market. The market has
become part of liberal commonsense and liberal governance: no pursuit of
sectional “interests” within the sovereign state, no politics; no free
commerce, no paradigm of political liberty. It’s this formula that underlies
the emergence of the modern state according to which politics now comes to be
the interest in gaining access to the total system of social control embodied
in the sovereign state for the realization of calculable goods. Although the
inconclusiveness of debate about “religious belief” was originally a reason for
proposing that appeals to transcendence be excluded from the domain of politics
and confined to the private sphere, today inconclusiveness is
no longer grounds for excluding debate from politics. Indeed the
inconclusiveness of argument (such as over the manner and degree of state
intervention in the economy or in religion), the turnaround of party
government, is part of that inconclusiveness that is now regarded as a
political virtue, a sign that “liberal democracy” is at work.
To understand how the “democratic promise” of the past
appears in the present, how the authority of the 2011 uprising was aborted and
replaced by another, one needs to attend not only to connections between the
power of the state and popular resistance to it, but also to the constitution
of subjects who adjust fully to modern sovereignty—as well as of those whose
conditions of existence are incompatible with it. The subject is not only, of
course, what he owns and thinks but also how he/she has learnt to move and sit
and speak and feel in different situations—and what he or she wears and eats.
So my final comment on Anwar’s complaint is this: It is not simply that public
views are now mutually unintelligible (which they are), or that debate is
interminable (which it is). It is that, like the destructive shifts following
capitalist crises, the fractious time of petty dispute and distrust overwhelms
the temporality of learning discursive traditions, on recognizing how dependent
one is on others, and living accordingly.[64] The
power of the modern sovereign state resides not only in what it promotes but
also—and especially—in what it disables when it joins with a particular economy
(capitalism) and a particular metaphysic (nationalism).
IV
There are several excellent studies of Egypt’s acquisition
of liberalism—including a vocabulary of “freedom,” “equality,” “progress,” “the
moral sovereignty of the individual,” and so forth—since the latter part of the
nineteenth century, interrupted only partly by its socialist phase under Nasir,
and then resumed in the liberal policies of Sadat.[65] These
are, however, not simply moments in Egypt’s past; they are integral to a
contradictory present in which people invoke aspects of the country’s political
traditions: The beginning of state welfare, state funded education, and
secularization—as well as the growth of the secret police and the military.[66] Nasir’s
state reforms of Egyptian society and economy are usually set in opposition to
the “liberal” periods that preceded and succeeded his rule. Thus much Egyptian
political history since the defeat of 1967, and especially after the death of
Nasir in 1970, is seen by the left as the unraveling of the state structure
even though the military and security apparatuses retained and even enlarged
their presence in it: various state functions and projects were privatized, and
the so-called Islamic Current in urban society emerged as the most important
organized opposition to the secularizing state.[67] There
are certainly different ways of marking out political times in Egypt but
underlying all of them since the late nineteenth century is the aspiration of
its ruling classes to “catch up with” modern time, whether in a “liberal” or a
“socialist” Egypt.
It is not always remembered that Nasir’s land reforms
benefitted farmers who were considered to be “efficient” and “productive,” as
against the very large population of poor peasants,[68] that
after Nasir’s death the long-standing project of increasing efficiency and
productivity helped to promote arguments for free enterprise rather than state
ownership as the engine of growth and the precondition for national welfare.
Whether the state is or is not despotic, “efficient growth” is its primary
function together with maintaining its continuity and strength, and rulers have
thus become receptive to arguments for privatization and marketization. And it
is the continuous dislocation effected by the logic of the market that renders
tradition increasingly precarious. The unities enabled by market-promoted
lifestyles—fashions in clothes, foods, corporal appearance—are not to be
confused with the embodied disciplines of tradition that Shaykh Usama talked
about because fashion is ephemeral. One can take up fashion or
abandon it whenever one feels like it.
As in other parts of the globe, the idea of freedom of the
individual in modern Egypt has merged with the idea of the free market,
expressed in part in the Supreme Constitutional Court’s reforms of the
bureaucratic laws that were seen to be holding back private enterprise.[69] In
the period of economic and political liberalization a plethora of NGOs has
created an expanding space of “civil society”: middle-class activists, with
institutional funding from Euro-America and entry to Western networks, telling
their fellow-citizens to claim their rights as free persons from their state
and to produce more efficiently in a free economy.[70] One
result has been that this “civil society” has become further alienated from the
predicament of the urban and rural poor.[71] Market
time with its emphasis on the sovereign consumer not only undermines much of
the continuity of everyday life but also disrupts the time necessary for
cultivating trust that goes beyond the interests of the individual.
Over the last few decades the increasing circulation of
money from rentier income has contributed to rapid social mobility that has
helped undermine past solidarities and commitments, and created personal
aspirations together with resentment at the failure to realize those
aspirations.[72] Several
years ago, the prominent Egyptian social critic and political economist Galal
Amin bewailed what he saw as a change in people’s behavior: Promise keeping,
pride in one’s work, and loyalty to old relationships, are, he wrote, now
rarely valued.[73] Hisham
al-Hamamy, advisor to Abdul Mun‘im Abu-l-Futuh, cites an expression to describe
what he sees as the growth of self-interest in Egyptian society: gildi
wa gaybi, literally, “my skin and my pocket,” that is, “all that matters is
what affects my body and my money.”[74] From
a relativistic perspective (according to which the successful individual
is the sole judge of what is ethical behavior and the successful nation
is the sole criterion of what is justice) the principle of gildi wa
gaybi cannot be faulted.
With the increasing complexity of social-economic life,
relationships have a tendency to become oversimplified and crude. The space of
genuine friendship, critics say, is disappearing. With the growth of
consumerism deepening differences among life chances grow too;[75] continuity
with the past, essential to friendship, is devalued.[76] When
some people speak of growing corruption (fasād) in Egyptian society it
is the autonomous self they claim to see emerging everywhere. To what extent
these reactions reflect a sense of anxiety on the part of the older middle
classes about rapid social mobility that sometimes seems to threaten them is
difficult to say. If looked at carefully, of course the matter is complicated:
People still belong to families and associations, and they claim they have
friends. Nevertheless, commitment to others—and trust in them—is in
considerable tension with the liberal incitement to individual autonomy. It
would be interesting, in this regard, to trace the changing discourse of ethics
as it reflects the increasing subjectivisation of morality—that is to say, the
increasing shift of moral authority to the “conscience” of the autonomous
individual. Thus today, in Egypt as elsewhere, secular moderns—especially those
belonging to the middle class—define ethical behavior by appeal to conscience,
or by reference to good/bad consequences. This subjectivization of morality (so
different from shari‘a traditions like amr bi-l-ma‘rūf)
makes it much more difficult to develop a coherent moral language with which
citizens can collectively criticize state policies.
When the middle classes welcome the modernization of
Egyptian society, they point to individual autonomy as the basis of economic
enterprise and efficiency and to its rejection of religious group identity in
politics. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century restructuring of Egyptian
society and polity towards what was conceived of as modernity encouraged a new
form of governmentality: subjective self-fashioning (based on freedom from
external constraint) that has increasingly eroded the conditions for tradition
in embodiment. But it is not quite correct to say that the pervasive corruption
of Egyptian society that accelerated with marketization has removed any space
for ethics. What one sees, I suggest, is a new form of ethics that is gradually
overtaking the old: a morality modeled on the law in which the individual
legislating his or her transcendental principles for him/herself stands in
tension with the legislation of the sovereign state.
Hostility to the presence of “religion” in the public sphere
is part of being modern. It is a reflection of the fact that the concept and
practice of “religion”—as well as of “politics” and “ethics”—are in process of
being formed or radically reformed in modern liberal society. Thus one might
point out that “religion” has not been excluded from the state: Azhar has
acquired an increasingly public role in the post-coup era. Working in close
collaboration with the Ministry of Religious Endowments, the present Grand
Shaykh of al-Azhar, Ahmad at-Tayyib (who supported the military coup), aspires
not only to greater prominence in the public domain but also to greater
collaboration with the state in the extended regulation of mosques, preachers,
Islamic research centers, some university faculties, etc., and seeks to project
an Islam “appropriate to the twenty-first century,” as he has put it. But two
points need to be noted about that Islam. First, “true Islam” is the product of
a calibration; it excludes “extremism,” that is to say, Islam that uses
“illegitimate” violence; hence it is more often referred to as “moderate” or
“liberal” Islam that assigns the use of violence to the state. Second, its
attachment to the state is a form of “administration,” not “politics.” Although
politics takes place within the framework of the modern state its typical form
is the political party by which it competes for power with other parties. In
that sense “moderate Islam” is not political. It is a force in the service of
state authority, an instrument of modern sovereignty for the protection of
modern sovereignty—an aim to which the Muslim Brotherhood has also been
committed.
In his oration before an audience of senior military and
police officers celebrating the “October 6 victory” in the 1973 war against Israel,
Shaykh Ali Gum‘a, previous Grand Mufti of Egypt, denounces the Muslim
Brotherhood as a sectarian minority, as “heretics and traitors” (khawārij),
as “dogs of hellfire” (kilābu-n-nār), and therefore as deserving of
slaughter by the military protectors of the nation. In the video of this event
the military authorities are visibly satisfied with this theological
denunciation, one that conforms to the government’s branding of the Muslim
Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.[77] Shaykh
Ali Gum‘a’s posture is neither surprising nor new because as a Sufi adept he is
known to have close religious connections with many members of the security
police (and, so it is said, of Sisi himself) who therefore come to him for
spiritual advice.
There is “true religion” and “false religion” for everyone
(including the state) to whom “religious tradition” matters. Making this
distinction is part of what conflicting claims to orthodoxy within tradition
do, as articulated by Shaykh Ali Gum‘a. But the construct of religion itself
allows outsiders to attribute beliefs, practices, and attitudes to other traditions
(“yes, that is their religion, and that is why all its
believers are our enemies”). In the Schmittian politics thus generated, friends
are essentially those who share one’s enmity towards defined others. The aim of
this politics is to defeat the enemy and eliminate or convert him to “real”
orthodoxy and orthopraxy—whether inspired by divinity or by humanity.
V
A question I have tried to address in this essay is why
liberals and the left in Egypt sought to exclude “religion” from political
space. The short, familiar answer is: they tend to see the future as the
continuous progress of mankind led by secular states, and therefore tradition
(especially “religious” tradition) as divisive and a source of political
discord. The result is not only a distrust of religion’s attempt to enter
politics (the space that seeks to control society as a whole) but a visceral
hostility towards “religion” as the political enemy rather
than the military or multinational coporations.
I have already argued against the claim that religious
disagreements are typically inconclusive and therefore should be excluded from
the rational debate that democracy requires. I might add that theological
disagreementsare themselves resolved—which is one way that
religious traditions evolve. It is true that such resolutions presuppose
certain assumptions that others may not share, but that is a problem common to
all situations where opponents are unable to reconcile their fundamental
values. This impasse doesn’t in itself inevitably lead to violence, and not all
eruptions of violence draw on “religious” values. However, my aim in this essay
is not to “defend religion”; it is to explore a problem that remains generally
obscured in the secular hostility to what is assumed to be “religion.” I argue
that the problem with “political religion” is not religion but the politics
that derives from the sovereign state.
Many Egyptians have an understandable concern at the
attempts to impose an Islamic personality on a country
containing diverse traditions and identities.[78] But
the crucial question is not why should an Islamic identity not
be imposed on Egypt. It is: What is there about the modern state that requires
a homogeneous political identity? The modern state seeks a singular personality
for itself in the exercise of sovereignty, and claims that this is necessary
for the progress and modernization of its subjects. The desire to assert and
preserve the unity of the People rests on a political metaphysic that is shared
by liberals and Islamists alike, a metaphysic that underpins the modern concept
of sovereignty: The belief that there is such a thing as a homogeneous nation,
that a homogeneous nation has the right to absolute independence represented by
a state, and that the state must reflect the nation’s singular personality.
Thus a common complaint against Mursi was that he was not acting as the leader
of all Egyptians. This was never problematized publicly by questioning in what
sense a President elected by a majority of citizens in a heterogeneous state
can be “the leader of all Egyptians” as opposed to being the legitimate head of
state and defender of its constitutional personality (made more difficult by
the repeated rewriting of the constitution). Like all heads of liberal
democracies, he responds to the conflicting interests of fellow citizens by
yielding to those who exert effective pressure on his government, whether
through elections or financial pressures or personal allegiances. Even the
Supreme Constitutional Court is not the ultimate guardian of a unified people
in Egypt.
One may recall here a remark Michel Foucault once made in
relation to the Iranian revolution: “Concerning the expression ‘Islamic
government,’ why cast immediate suspicion on the adjective ‘Islamic’? The word
‘government’ suffices, in itself, to awaken vigilance.”[79] Naive
critics of Foucault have taken his interest in the Islamic Republic of Iran as
evidence of his “romance with political Islam” (in response perhaps to his
early criticism of the left-wing romance with “revolution”). But they are
mistaken: Foucault’s reaction to the Iranian revolution is his concern (as so
often in his writings) to think beyond clichés, and in particular to formulate
questions about how truth is manifested in connection with the exercise of self
on self, “the relation between the truth and what we call spirituality”—a topic
that preoccupied him in his last years.[80] In
the comment I quote he is posing a question about the modern state’s practice
of sovereignty and the sovereign subject in that state. For the modern state
(including varieties of the liberal state) is held together not by moral ideals
and social contracts but by technologies of power, by instrumental
knowledge—and also, importantly, by the way it requires dependence on and
demonstration of truth: traitors are those who conceal the truth.
The genealogy of the modern state is to be found primarily
not in legal, constitutional histories but in the evolution of the concept and
practice of “politics” conceived of as the autonomous apparatus of control by
the state—and by those who have access to the state through political
parties—over the life of an entire society. This evolution emerged in and
helped define modern Europe, later to be adopted, adapted, and imposed in the
Middle East (and elsewhere). Medieval European legal theories of status
regni tended to have a personal view of power according to which the ruler
possesses or even embodies the institutions of government, although the modern
state’s genealogy, as Quentin Skinner has pointed out, lies in advice-books for
magistrates and in the mirror-for-princes literature that emerged from them,
especially in Renaissance Italy. In that retrospectively traced tradition it
was argued that the most important requirement for the prince to maintain his
state as a prince was to keep control of the power structure
within one’sregnum or civitas. This vindicated the idea
that there is an autonomous “civil” or “political” authority whose purpose is
to regulate the public affairs of an independent community, and to reject
interference by any outside power in its own civitas or respublica.[81] Thus
according to Hobbes, sovereign power is alienated to and vested in “an
artificial man” who is neither the ruler nor the ruled but the apparatus of government
that it is the duty of rulers and ruled to maintain. The concept and practice
of the state’s monopoly of legitimate power, as well as of its external and
internal sovereignty, together belong to this discursive tradition. Liberal
celebrations of the modern state do not recall that its emergence involved the
crushing of city freedoms by rising territorial princedoms based on modernized
military force and centralized social discipline.[82]
Crucial to political sovereignty today is the founding
distinction between “citizen” and “alien.” But in premodern times the
distinction between someone born and bred in a particular place and another who
has come from elsewhere to settle in that place was socially recognized but
that fact defined no legal privileges and disabilities. The distinction that
mattered in premodern law (and is not recognized today) was between “free” and “slave.”
The distinction between “alien” and “citizen” is not only massively evident in
the modern state but has been a crucial step in its formation.[83] Since
the paramount aim and duty of the modern state is the maintenance of its
sovereignty, it assumes the authority to expel or intern aliens where their
presence constitutes a “threat to security.” Under circumstances it perceives
as critical, the state may even deprive citizens of their civil rights,
defining them by emergency laws as actual or potential “enemies of the
state”—as in the case of members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who find
themselves (like Palestinian and Syrian refugees) in the modern category of
“aliens.”
There is a tendency nowadays to identify the modern state
with “liberal democracy,” a political arrangement to which, minimally, the rule
of law, the separation of powers, the election of parliamentary
representatives, and the right to public dissent are said to be central. But
“modernity” is usually used to mark historical time, and also to refer to an
assemblage of values, institutions, and projects that are not entirely
coherent—two senses that are often assumed to overlap. This identification
seems to me problematic, however, for at least two reasons. First: There are
states—authoritarian and/or religious—that have an arguable claim to being
considered “modern.” How would one characterize the Islamic Republic of Iran?
As not modern but still Islamic? As not really Islamic but modern? As neither
modern nor Islamic? These questions are relevant to any serious assessment of
Mursi’s alleged attempt to “Islamize” the state in Egypt: Was he trying to turn
the state back to a premodern—because “religious”—time or was he simply moving
forward on the modern principle of state sovereignty as the representative of a
predominantly Muslim society?
The second reason why the identification of the modern state
as a “liberal democracy” is not satisfactory can be put this way: The liberal
democratic state can transform itself into forms that are neither “liberal” nor
“democratic.” Thus there are clear indications in the secular United States
that civil rights—the freedoms that a liberal state is constitutionally
required to articulate and defend—are being openly eroded. This is not due to
accident, or to some eternal human vice. Many of the reasons for such
transformation are intrinsic to its liberal character—most importantly, its
commitment to securing the life and property of its citizens, to making them
fully safe. Popular struggle to oppose that erosion is extremely difficult
because it is not simply a matter of the restoration of rights but of
confronting an elaborate structure of state protection, control and secrecy
that is almost impossible to dislodge.[84] Hence
the typical liberal problem of “how difficult the trade-off between liberty and
security can be in a democratic society”[85] that
is confronted in Egypt (as elsewhere in the “war against terror”) today. This
gives cause for worry about liberty to some citizens while offering to others
an opportunity for extending state security and state power—for the sake of
property if not always of life.
The crucial point about the modern nation-state is precisely
its mobile and contradictory character: on the one hand its commitment to
defending the citizen and securing general welfare and progress, on the other
hand to defending the state so that it can fulfill this commitment. Because the
latter task takes priority over the former, it calls for the accumulation of
secret information about the entire subject population in order to preempt any
possibility of subversion by a minority within it. In societies heavily
dependent on information technology (like the US) this can be done by
sophisticated techniques such as the National Security Agency uses. But in all
revolutionary societies this has been done by recruiting as many of the
ordinary population as possible into becoming secret informers on neighbors,
colleagues, friends, and relatives. What is at stake, after all, is the
patriotic citizen’s duty to defend his/her nation-state, and the latter’s task
of defending and transforming society in a progressive direction.[86] The
incidental result of this mode of defense, ironically, is a general increase in
fear and anxiety, and thus a greater desire for social tranquility. A recent
documented study by Husni Hammada[87] has
shown how Gamal Abdul Nasir, committed as he was to creating modern Egyptian
subjects,[88] sought
to build a comprehensive network of informers in “revolutionary Egypt” to make
sure that people were speaking and thinking in the right way. Writing about the
increase of denouncers in the urban flow of ordinary life in Cairo, the
journalist Belal Fadl speculates as to whether Sisi will be able to realize
Nasir’s dream of a nation in which everyone is a potential denouncer of his or
her fellows.[89] The
denouncer-patriot is essential to the national project of transforming
Egyptians into a secular democratic people. This kind of system is made less
important by the new information technologies for collecting “private” data
that liberal democratic governments in the West now use.
The Anglican philosopher Stephen Clark has argued that
looked at critically, liberal arguments for political obligation within the
modern state have no force, and that consequently the only alternatives are
between anarcho-capitalism and a theocratic state, and it is the latter he
endorses: “Either the state can have no authority beyond that of a simple
police force (if it has that much), or else it must be supposed to embody a
sacred, moral purpose that constrains or contains all lesser purposes within
society.”[90] The
questionable assumption here, shared by those who urge the sacralization of the
state and those who don’t, is that in the absence of political sovereignty
nothing but social chaos and ruthless individualism can obtain.
Instead of answering the question “A secular or a religious
state?” one might try to imagine what politics not focused on
the sovereign territorial state might look like. In order to do so one would
need to draw on older ideas that have been pushed out by the narrative of
secular progress since premodern times, such as the absence of rigid
territorial boundaries and the presence of overlapping authorities. One can
belong to “a People” without thinking that it must therefore complete itself by
governing its own territorial state.[91] It
is only with the arrival of the modern concept of sovereignty that jurisdiction
and territoriality have come to be defined in terms of each other, although
some ambiguity remains on this point in international law, most acutely as it
relates to the new humanitarian norm of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P).
The primary question is how far rights and duties attaching
to civil status can be negotiated (just as they now are in international law)
without an overarching authority. But whereas the latter regulates relations
among sovereign states one might think of a plurality of groupings, each with
its institutional order and purpose, but overlapping in membership and/or
territory and each capable of being continually readjusted through negotiation.
In the absence of sovereignty there would be no distinction between
international and domestic law. The negotiation between relatively equal
parties would build mutually recognized custom (“urf”) through
precedent, difference that can be recognized and negotiated as
difference—difference in time as well as in purpose. Some parties would be
subsidiary to others for narrowly defined purposes and times but none would
have the comprehensiveness, the final authority, and unchanging continuity
claimed by the sovereign territorial state. The customs could develop into
traditions not defined by bounded territory or exclusive membership but
embedded in networks of commercial and intellectual relations and political and
spiritual movements extending unevenly and intermittently, beyond various
existing borders—a state of affairs that Garth Fowden in his book on the world
of late antiquity has called a “commonwealth.”[92] The
experience of having to live together, the learnt ability to negotiate
practical problems by reference to techniques and knowledge acquired from the
past (or from a very different region) is the open-ended, cooperative way of a
commonwealth.
I stress that my concern is not with democratic relations
between international units,[93] still
less with a decentralized utopia in which all power is held locally. Autonomous
local groups can be almost as cruel as the state, but my point is that one
might try to think of ways in which no sovereign center of power, whatever its
scale, can actually exist. That the individual can recognize—and act on the
recognition—that he/she is partly reflected in other selves, just as his/her
group is partly reflected in other groups.
The idea of numerous nonhierarchical domains of normativity
opens up the possibility of a very different kind of politics—and policies—that
would always have to address numerous overlapping bodies and territories.
Procedures to deal with differences and disagreements would include civil
pressure directed against authorities, such as civil disobedience, to make
office holders accountable. But the differences would not take the form of a
legal distinction between “citizen” and “alien,” or between Muslim and
non-Muslim. The tradition of amr bi-l-ma‘rūf could form an
orientation of mutual care of the self, based on the principle of friendship
(and therefore of responsibility to and between friends) not on the legal
principle of citizenship. This sharing would be the outcome of continuous work between
friends or lovers, not an expression of accomplished cultural fact. The same
tradition might find its way to collective acts of protest against excessive power
(and so there have to be notions of power’s temporalities and bounds). There
would be neither the power nor the technical ability of “state apparatuses” to
impose a single legal authority, or to deploy an institutionalized force. The
risk of a military force being formed to create an exclusive territorial body
would have to be met not merely by constitutional barriers but also by the work
of tradition in the formation, maintenance, and repair of selves who are bonded
to one another. The longing for tradition by someone who doesn’t have one that
Wittgenstein spoke of is not a frightened wish for the comfort that comes from
submission to authority; it is a desire for being transformed through
friendship, through belonging to others who belong to you, as they themselves
are also changed by that mutuality.
The late Neil MacCormick, legal philosopher and a Scottish
member of the European Parliament, has published an interesting exploration of
how aspects of such an arrangement might be made to work in the context of the
European Union,[94] although
the European Union remains a bounded territorial unit containing states and
their subdivisions, overridden by a power center consisting primarily of the
European Central Bank and the Brussels bureaucracy. In a stateless order it
would be impossible to aim at capturing state power or to impose a single
identity and a single destiny. In sum, only if sovereignty were to be replaced
by more complex forms of authority, time, and belonging, would both
“secularism” and “political Islam” have no raison d’être.
Of course, even in a world where political sovereignty no
longer exists, the past would continue to be necessary to a coherent form of
life, or to a life aspiring to coherence. The familiar claim that “tradition is
a model of the past...in the present” tends not
only to separate the past unthinkingly from the present; it also renders
tradition as a representation of time sited in a circumscribed
reality (“the present”). However, whenever people quarrel about whether or not
they can continue to live essentially as they do now because the world is (or
is no longer) the way it is claimed to be, we have a more complicated
relationship between tradition, time, and place. Tradition may turn out to be
not so much a model of the past that is inseparable from its interpretation in
the present, as a set of practices that presuppose “today” as a part of
unfinished time. Whether the present in Egypt is still in some significant
sense part of the time of January 2011 (when an attempt was made to establish a
new political tradition) or that time now belongs to an irretrievable past is
perhaps too early to say. But certainly the project of doing away with
sovereignty (of state and subject) is part of unfinished
time—although to identify time as unfinished is not to say that there is still
time enough.
Finally: One may gesture at what one thinks of as a possible
solution to the intolerable cruelties and injustices of the sovereign state but
applying that solution successfully is quite another matter. The interests of
governing elites as well as of the classes that benefit from the opportunities
provided by Egypt’s sovereign state have to be reckoned with. The sentiment of
national loyalty and pride may be fluid, unevenly distributed, and
indeterminate but it is still powerful. In Egypt the considerable numbers of
voluntary police denouncers guarding against “traitors, spies, and terrorists”
is one symptom of that sentiment of patriotism—although Egypt is by no means
exceptional in this regard. Given the world we live in, the mere suggestion
that sovereignty be dismantled therefore borders on fantasy. Today no state
accepts the violation of its sovereign right—although that is precisely what
happens to weak states that are unable to do much about it. For in practice
there are rights overriding the principle of sovereignty that powerful
sovereign states can exercise.[95] Thus
the US—and Israel—insist on their right to use preemptive violence against
another state, or against a foreign population, on grounds of self-defense, as
well as of the duty to intervene by force in another state in order to protect
a population against imminent massacre by its own rulers or by sectarian
elements whom the state is unwilling or unable to restrain.
All modern sovereign states, including Egypt, are invested
in the continuous search for global markets and investment capital, as well as
dependence on military security and access to the most sophisticated weaponry.
They are driven by an ever-present desire for increasing profit, consumption,
and power, all under the auspices of financial and industrial corporations. The
results, with which virtually everyone is familiar, include accelerating
climate change, systematic environmental degradation, impending nuclear
disasters and financial collapse, developments that cannot, so it seems, be
stopped. It is this excess, expressed by continuous desire and willfulness,
that traditional forms of life have sought to control—even if often they have
failed to do so. But in our world the (morally) sovereign individual and the
(politically) sovereign state, each reflecting the other, neither able to
change this world for the better, are both trapped,
gridlocked. That is the tragedy not merely of Egypt but of our time.
[1] I am grateful
to the following friends for critical comments on early versions of this essay:
Hussein Agrama, Gil Anidjar, Ayça Çubukçu, David Scott, Alexis Wick, and Gary
Wilder. During the months of March, April, and May 2014, while I was teaching
in New York, Mohammed Tabishat carried out interviews for me in Cairo with a
number of Egyptians, only some of whom I know personally; I thank him for this
work.
[3] For a
remarkable exploration of temporality in relation to politics—with special
reference to the failed Grenada revolution—see David Scott, Omens of
Adversity; Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice, Duke University Press, 2014.
[4] I draw here, of
course, on Michel Foucault, who opposed genealogy to transcendental critique.
In endorsing the former, he observes that “this critique will be genealogical
in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is
impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the
contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being,
doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make
possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give
new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.”
Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère
Lotringer, Semiotext(E), p. 114.
[6] See, for
example, Susan James, Passion and Action, Oxford: 1997; Antony Flew
and Godfrey Vesey, Agency and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987;
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, Princeton,
1977; Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard
University Press, 1971.
[7] Historians of
ideas trace the beginnings of the modern critique of tradition to the so-called
“Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” in the second half of the seventeenth
and the first half of the eighteenth century, when religious and political
apologetics confronted each other (See Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the
European Mind, 1680-1750, New York: NYRB, 2013 [1961]). The Ancients were
not totally rejected by Moderns but re-situated: they were criticized,
historicized, and used for new purposes.
[8] The prominent
British anthropologist Maurice Bloch elaborated the concept of traditional
authority by arguing that the very “formality” of oratory (as in the formality
of manners) was a means of social control and political domination because it
rested on the repetition of a priori forms as opposed to authentic expression.
Formal speech and behavior—whether in religious ritual or in political
oratory—should be seen for what it really was: the denial of choice and
therefore blind submission to authority. (See his “Introduction” toPolitical
Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, ed. by Maurice Bloch, London:
Academic Press, 1975) This approach to ritual therefore reinforced the idea
that to think and speak autonomously and rationally the subject needed to break
from tradition and claim the legitimacy of her own beliefs. The book that has
had the greatest impact on anthropological thinking on tradition is The
Invention of Tradition edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger,
Cambridge University Press, 1983. My approach to tradition is quite different,
and draws on the work of MacIntyre.
[9] Adam Seligman
et al., Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of
Sincerity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
[10] See David
Lieberman, “Law/Custom/Tradition: Perspectives from the Common Law,” Questions
of Tradition, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
[11] Walter
Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (in Illuminations,
ed. by Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1969 [Original German in 1955])
has become especially attractive to critics of the concepts of authenticity and
tradition. But contrary to the simple way this famous essay has usually been
read, we should note that it actually articulates a problem that was quite
apparent to its author. Here is the problem: Since the Benjaminian notion of
aura spells uniqueness and authenticity, the destruction of aura undermines
tradition. The difficulty with this is that tradition not only guards the
uniqueness of authentic things, it also conveys historical knowledge of them.
“The authenticity of a thing,” writes Benjamin, “is the essence of all that is
transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its material duration to its
testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical
testimony rests on [its] authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by
reproduction when material duration ceases to matter. And what is really
jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the
object.” (p. 221) So Benjamin explicitly recognized that “tradition” was the
process by which something authentic was preserved and passed on down the
generations. A humanly-made object—say an old dagger—has aura by virtue of the
fact that it displays its uniqueness in its shape and materials, as well as in
its scratches and discolorations, all signs of its ancient history. An old
document that embodies specific traces of the past, similarly has an aura.
Memory is central to the way the past is conveyed and re-presented, a point
Benjamin makes more elaborately in “The Storyteller,” where he also emphasizes
what we now know about Homeric poetry— namely, that the memory embodied in the
epic, and also the recall required for its performance, both depend on a
process of iteration, on the same being repeated with perhaps
occasional slight modifications. The time employed in the work of tradition is
not simply the homogeneous time of modern progressive history. It is the
complex time of everyday experience, remembrance, and practice. Thus memory,
too, may be authentic or inauthentic, just like any physical object. The
distinctive question for Benjamin is whether it inhabits more than one time.
[12] Can there be
a rational basis for choosing between contending traditions? MacIntyre, who has
done most to rehabilitate the idea of tradition in Anglophone philosophy,
proposes how such a rational choice can be made. Citing Aquinas’s debate with
the followers of the Muslim Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rushd, MacIntyre
argues that Thomist Aristotelianism provides “a standpoint which suffers from
less incoherence, is more comprehensive and more resourceful in one particular
way. For among those resources. . . is an ability not only to identify
limitations, defects and errors in the light of the standards of the opposing
view itself, but also to explain in precise and detailed terms what it is about
the opposing view which engenders just these particular limitations, defects
and errors and also what it is about the view which must deprive it of the
resources required for understanding, overcoming, and correcting them”
(MacIntyre, Three Modes of Moral Inquiry, p.146). This is an
attractive argument, but can’t one reasonably claim that in time it
may be possible to overcome apparent incoherence by a proper resort to the
resources of one’s own tradition? In other words, while MacIntyre points to
criteria for judging the rational vulnerability of particular traditional
beliefs in transcendental form, he doesn’t say when arguments
based on those criteria become decisive, and why time is crucial to
persuasiveness. Being able to grasp the force of a criticism leveled at one’s
tradition from outside it, of being persuadable, one has to be a
person living a particular form of life who is yet prepared to change his/her
opinion entirely at a particular point in time. If that move occurs it may be
closer to a conversion than to a deductive conclusion, because the truthfulness
of a tradition is essentially a matter not of propositions but of a form of
obligation carried out over time, achieved not by theoretical proof but by
persuasion through conversation and demonstration in and appeal to the
solidities of everyday life. Persuadability is the measure of a subject’s
capacity to be persuaded—and therefore also the precondition of a successful
process of persuasion. There is, of course, no special virtue in persuasion:
one can be persuaded to commit serious intellectual mistakes and crimes.
[13] And a fifth
of the spoils of war (khums) that, according to Sunnis, lapsed after the
Prophet’s death. See Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyya, Al-Imān, Beirut:
al-Maktab al-Islami, 1996, p. 12.
[14] Wael Hallaq
has an excellent analysis of this aspect of the shari‘a in The
Impossible State, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
[15] In Ghazali’s
words, by “exercising the soul” (riyādat an-nafs) one can develop a
virtuous constitution—by learning orientations of faith and exigencies of a
lived form of life in which destructive desires are gradually restrained. See Ihyā’ ‘Ulūm
ad-Dīn, Cairo: Dar Ihya’ al-Kutub al-‘arabiyya, vol. 3, p. 47 ff. (kitāb
riyādat an-nafs). Shaykh Usama often cited Ghazali, and used the latter’s
psychological vocabulary.
[16] Peter Brown, Religion
and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, London: Faber and Faber, 1972,
p. 30.
[17] “The buffered
self” is a term used by Charles Taylor to distinguish moderns from “the porous
self” of premoderns: “Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and
world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are ‘in the mind.’ They
cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm.” But the question
that Freud has helped us to ask is whether being buffered is in fact how
moderns live, or simply what theyconsciously assume must be how
they ought to live. One can accept that there are significant differences
between moderns and premoderns, but does the simple binary of “buffered” and
“porous” catch that difference adequately? Believing that the self is buffered
(when it isn’t) has a repressive function, so that what conflicts with that
belief is pushed into the unconscious, ready to resurface in irrational ways.
(Augustine: “Try to build up yourself, and you build a ruin.”) I have discussed
the buffered self briefly in “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics”
(Robert Orsi, ed., Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies,
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
[19] In one of our
discussions Shaykh Usama cited the famous hadith from Muslim: man ra’a
minkum munkaran falyughayyaruh biyadih, fa in lam yastati‘ fabilisānih, fa in
lam yastati‘ fabiqalbih fa dhālik ad‘afu-l-‘imān (“Any one from among
you who sees an evil doer, let him change him by action, and if he cannot do
that, then by speaking out, and if he cannot do that then silently in his [own]
heart – and that is the weakest form of faith”).
[20] Michael Cook, Commanding
Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, Cambridge University Press,
2000, p. 96.
[21] Ghazali, whom
Shaykh Usama often quoted, has written at length about the duties of
friendship. See Adāb us-suhba wa-l-mu‘āshara, Beirut: Dar al-Kutub
al-‘Ilmiyya, 2007. On the duties and correct ways of advising and instructing
friends, see especially pp. 66-9.
[22] See Chapter
1: “The Legalization of Hisba in the Case of Nasr Abu Zayd” of
Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism; Islam, Sovereignty, and the
Rule of Law in Modern Egypt, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
[23] I have
discussed nasīha in the context of state policy in Saudi
Arabia in Chapter 6 of Genealogies of Religion, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993.
[25] Understanding
the shari‘a as “tradition” as opposed to a fixed structure
(even as the context for understanding it as a normative ideal in relationship
to the time of “real history”) seems to me essential. Thus although the well
known account of the shari‘a’s primary sources include the Qur’an,
Hadith, as well as reasoning by analogy, the authority of doctrinal consensus,
and independent reasoning, “custom” (‘urf) is also incorporated into the shari‘a by
devices such as “necessity” (darūra), so long as it doesn’t contravene
the primary sources.‘Urf is that which is ma‘rūf (good
custom, fitting practice, decent behavior) as in amr bi-l-ma‘rūf.
“Good custom” was not recognized at first as an independent source of law even
though it was continually integrated into the shari‘a, however
since the sixteenth century ‘urf has been formally recognized
as a legal category. The changing character of allowable practice is therefore
also part of that tradition so long as the changes don’t affect what is
allowable. So one might suggest that (allowable) habitual practice isn’t merely
a possible source for the shari‘a, it is in a deep sense what the shari‘a is
– by which I mean that the authority of the shari‘a resides
not in (written) rules and commands but in embodied practices (including “sound
interpretation put into practice” of what the sources say) in accordance with
living tradition. The changing character of custom in different historical
circumstances inevitably affects the way in which Qur’anic and prophetic authority
is interpreted and argued over in the shari‘a tradition. Hence
the tradition of amr bi-l-ma‘rūf can be seen not only as
coming within the purview of the shari‘a but also as an
expression of the everyday concern of friends and kin for the welfare of one
another’s souls, as well as an expression of the occasional need for addressing
the holders of power.
[26] Wael Hallaq,
“Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” International Journal of Middle East
Studies, vol. 16, 1984.
[27] See Chapter 7
of my Formations of the Secular, Stanford University Press, 2003
(entitled “Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt”) in which I
tried to argue that in its premodern form the shari‘a is not a
primitive confusion of “morality” and “law” but something quite different from
both as they are understood in modern society.
[28] See Human
Rights Watch report, All According to Plan: The Rab‘a Massacre and
Mass Killings of Protestors in Egypt, 14 August 2014,http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/egypt0814_ForUpload_0_0.pdf
[29] What both
Shaykh Usama had to say, as well as Abdul Mun‘im Abu-l-Futuh, is consistent in
some respects with what has been written by several Western critics who take a
long historical view of Western liberal culture, although their sources of
inspiration are different. For example, in a well-known essay Elizabeth
Anscombe describes the emergence of a modern concept of ethics in which the
Aristotelian concept of virtue ethics has been historically abandoned and yet a
quasi-legal notion of obligation has been retained in secularized fashion
(“Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 124, 1958).
She thinks that philosophers since Hume are correct in asserting that there is
an unbridgeable gap between what is the case and what ought morally to be the
case—but that is only because in the absence of a divine commandment “morally
ought” has no content. Her criticism is that the modern concept of “moral
obligation” tends to rely on notions of “conscience,” or of “self-legislation,”
or of “consequentialism,” all of which are either meaningless (their usage
allows for any or no content) or are confused about what comes under the notion
of “practice” and “intention.” Thus “conscience” as the founding criterion of
“moral obligation” is absurd because one’s conscience may dictate
anything—including unjust behavior—and “legislating” for oneself is meaningless
because of the metaphor used. Anscombe thinks that it would be better, in
modern philosophy and common discourse, to abandon the modern liberal notion of
“moral obligation” altogether (rooted as it is in the idea of the
self-contained—“buffered”—self. Her philosophical argument is consistent with
an understanding of the shari‘a(especially of amr
bi-l-ma‘rūf) that I encountered at length in Shaykh Usama’s words, and more
briefly in Abu-l-Futuh’s statement.
[30] And yet
“religion” was not absent from the uprising—see my article, “Fear and the
Ruptured State: Reflections on Egypt After Mubarak” Social Research,
vol. 79, no. 2, 2012.
[32] Garth Fowden
has argued recently for an extension of the temporal and spatial limits of
antiquity as traditionally defined—from the sixth century (“the rise of Islam
marks the end of antiquity as well as the split between the Northern and
Southern Mediterranean lands”) right up to the end of the millennium (Islamic
lands and the Northern Mediterranean belong to a single complex history with
traditions shared as well as diversely developed). His book, Before and
After Muhammad: The First Millenium Refocused(Princeton, 2014), is
primarily an intellectual history, but it constitutes an important new
challenge to the writing of quite separate histories of what is now called
Europe and the Middle East.
[33] Wael Hallaq,
has an impressive analysis of the political context in which premodern sharī‘a rule
operated, including this separation between power and authority in The
Impossible State, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
[34] In A
History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Ira
Lapidus has traced this separation to the Mihna (the so-called
inquisition) in ninth-century Baghdad through which the defiant ulama emerged
triumphant in their challenge to the Caliphate’s pretension to theological
authority. However, Lapidus’s claim that this represents “secularization” is
quite mistaken.
[35] In On
Revolution, where Arendt claims that there was only one successful
foundation that was relatively nonviolent: the American Revolution based on the
pre-existing power of self-governing colonies. In making this claim, however,
she ignores the constitution of the United States as an expanding political
power based on violence—expanding geographically and socially—from the very
beginning: Indian massacres and forced removals, slavery, the civil war,
institutionalized racism, the US-Mexican war, and the extension of Federal
state power and authority, all of which have helped to constitute the United
States. It is only in retrospect, and when this revolutionary history is set
aside, that the writing and formal adoption of the constitution in 1787 on the
basis of pre-Revolutionary power of the colonies can be regarded as the
“founding” of the American republic. In other words, apart from the many verbal
emendations that were made to the text of the constitution, the republic was
constituted—often very violently—both before and after 1787. InThe Two Faces
of American Freedom Aziz Rana convincingly shows how the contemporary
US drive for global hegemony is part of its complex political tradition in
which the continuous continental expansion, the transformation of an agrarian
into an industrial economy, and the waves of always useful but not always
welcome immigration, were reflected in the often violent reconstitution of
state authority and power.
[36] Arguing, as
Walter Benjamin did in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
that if techniques of reproduction are continuously revolutionized tradition as
continuity ceases to exist. But Benjamin had a more conflicted view of
tradition as something at once inconsistent with and yet essential to
modernity. See note 11 above.
[37] See Yazid
Sayigh, “Above the State; The Officer’s Republic in Egypt,” The
Carnegie Papers, August, 2012.
[38] The Muslim
Brotherhood suffered from the opposite fault. Its hesitation in joining the
2011 uprising (for which they were repeatedly criticized by secular liberals
and leftists) may partly be explained by a fear of repression. Thus when Kifaya organized
a public protest against Mubarak’s rule in 2005 the Muslim Brotherhood
immediately called for their members in large numbers to join it. They also
mobilized their own protests demanding political reform. These protests
collapsed without any positive results, and were followed by further severe
penalization of the organization. See Bruce Rutherford, Egypt After Mubarak:
Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008, p. 14.
[39] See, for
example, the very interesting account of developments from the revolt of
January 2011 to the coup and its aftermath in July 2013 by Ibrahim al-Hudaiby,
“Hukm al-qitā‘ayn al-amny wa-l-‘askary fi misr: tahālufāt mutaghayyira wa
qam‘ mustamirra” Mubādirat al-islāh al-‘araby, April 2014, p.22. In
spite of the many valid criticisms that can be made of the Muslim Brotherhood
(and Hudaiby makes many of them) his representation of the Muslim Brothers as
essentially part of the “counterrevolution” seems to me unconvincing. The
evolving situation was too fluid, confused, and emotionally charged for the
categories of “revolution” and “counterrevolution” to be useful in describing
what happened.
<http://www.arab-reform.net/ar/%D8%AD%D9%83%D9%85-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%B9%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%85%D9%86%D9%8A-%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%8A-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D9%85%D8%B5%D8%B1-%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%85%D8%AA%D8%BA%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D9%88%D9%82%D9%85%D8%B9-%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%B1>
[41] Mafīsh
dimūqrātiya wa mafīsh mugtama‘ intaqal ila-l-amām bidūn damm. See the video
of the workshop organized by the journalist Hilmi Namnam discussing the making
of the new constitution by the military-appointed committee (halaqa
niqāshiya lil-hay’at al-injīlīyya hawl dastūr misr ba‘d 30 yūnyū). Many
middle-class workshops, Muslim and Christian, have been held on this topic,
especially in Cairo. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__rdetkbS_s>
[43] Before
Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty had analyzed revolutionary violence in Humanism
and Terror, New York: Beacon Press, 1969 [original French, 1947].
[45] One might ask
why so many ordinary Egyptians come to hold a mistaken view of their country’s
identity, seeing it as “religious” when it is not. One answer often given by
liberals is that the masses are ignorant and the Islamists provide a
reactionary leadership that renders violence against them necessary in the
cause of progress. This is not an explanation, of course, but a claim. In a
sophisticated study, Carrie Wickham has recently provided an account of the
ruralization of the Muslim Brotherhood and its influence on its leadership, as
well as the consequent greater emphasis on ritual among ordinary members,
trends that she connects to the group’s increasing conservatism and quietism in
relation to what she calls the “predatory Mubarak state.” But here and
elsewhere in her study Wickham’s approach makes explicit something Namnam
misses: that it is the interaction of different generations of the
Brotherhood’s leaders with individuals from different classes, and with
authoritarian state institutions, that helps explain their political
sensibilities and predispositions. Carrie Wickham, The Muslim
Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement, Princeton University Press,
2013.
[46] The
mobilization of large numbers of lower middle-class Egyptians for “restoring
the revolution” was largely the achievement of those who worked through the big
business community, the ministry of the interior, and the media, warning the
populace that instability would lead to a decline in incomes, that government
mismanagement had led to crucial shortages, etc. Some of the activists
eventually turned against the army whom they had initially welcomed, but by
then it was “too late” (seehttp://www.alquds.co.uk/?p=136030).
[48] “By
intimating that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood had, in some way, hijacked
Egypt’s political process, the United States, in the crucial weeks after the
July coup, effectively legitimated the logic that the coup was necessary in
order to salvage Egyptian democracy. As we have shown, Morsi’s year in office
was more democratic than his critics allege, and the military-backed government
that seized power in the coup is significantlymore autocratic than
Morsi ever was.” Shadi Hamid and Meredith Wheeler, “Was Mohammed Morsi Really
an Autocrat?” in The Atlantic, March 31, 2014. <http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/was-mohammed-morsi-really-an-autocrat/359797/.
The other familiar complaint against Mursi was that he simply played along with
“counterrevolutionary forces.” And yet compared to the old constitution, the
one drafted under the Muslim Brotherhood government was more concerned to
define and restrict the powers of the President. For example, Article 73 of the
1971 constitution gave the President extraordinary powers to fight any “danger
to the safety of the nation”; Article 136 allowed him to dissolve parliament
“whenever necessary.” Such articles were removed in the new constitution.
[50] In a recent
interview with the London based daily Al-quds al-‘arabi, the
spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, Ibrahim Munir, claimed that had
the Brotherhood kept quiet about the massive corruption of the Egyptian
military Mursi would have remained President. Apart from reference to the
enormous properties owned by the generals (it is estimated that the army
controls about 40% of the Egyptian economy, but its budget is not open to
government inspection), Munir claimed that the military had authorized the
redrawing of Egypt’s maritime boundaries and ceded thereby considerable areas
containing vast underwater gas resources to “other states,” all in exchange for
personal bribes. See Ibrahim munīr li-“al-quds al-‘arabī”: law sakat
al-ikhwān ‘ala-l-fasād fi misr lazalla mursi ra’isan, November 22, 2014,http://alquds.co.uk/?p=254556
[52] In a second
piece, published eight months after the coup, Kandil writes: “There is no
getting around it. What Egypt has become three years after its once inspiring
revolt is a police state more vigorous than anything we have seen since Nasser.
As in the dark years of the 1960s, the enemy is everywhere, and any effort to
expose and eradicate him is given popular assent.” Hazem Kandil, “Sisi’s Turn,” London
Review of Books, Vol. 36, No. 4, 20 February 2014. The main theme of
Kandil’s story is “religious fascism.” By its dishonesty, incompetence, and
hunger for power, says Kandil, the Muslim Brotherhood facilitated the emergence
of a police state for which they are therefore responsible:
From the Brotherhood’s scheming there emerged the military government’s
repression. But “religious fascism” is merely a term of abuse echoing
Christopher Hitchens’s coinage “Islamo-fascism.” Kandil undertakes no
reassessment of the reasons for his earlier optimistic judgment about the coup,
nor why it is right to attribute political disaster only to the Muslim
Brotherhood and not also to the “revolutionaries.” His account rests on claims
and allegations drawn uncritically from the Brotherhood’s fiercest enemies on
the right and on the left. Kandil’s message, like that of the military
government and its supporters, is that there are enemies of
the state (“enemies of society”), and that the state has the authority—the
duty—to identify and deal firmly with them. He seems to be perturbed only by
the fact that the state’s suppression of “enemies” has now also begun to affect
left and liberal members of the middle classes. Unfortunately he doesn’t
address the familiar claim that it is the state’s rhetoric of national
security, its identification of “potential enemies” within the nation, its
appeal to nationalist sentiment, and its celebration of a military officer as
the savior of the nation, that constitutes the logic of fascism and not the
inflated political aspirations of the leadership of a movement that lacked a
paramilitary wing and that, as a government, was imprisoned within a hostile
political environment, faced by intractable economic problems, and that
displayed a profound lack of political judgment. Whether the entire leadership
of the Muslim Brotherhood was utterly devious or merely obtuse is a minor
question: it was certainly a fatal mistake for it to make a bid for the
presidency—despite earlier assurances that they would not do so. But the idea,
held by many critics of Mursi, that his government naturally chose
to work with rather than attempt a major reform of the security establishment
fails to address the problem of the Interior Ministry’s entrenched power that
included the support of the army generals and intelligence officials so long as their autonomous
power and privilege remained unaffected—not to mention a hostile higher
judiciary and media. Kandil does not consider whether the orchestrated movement
of protest at the end of June that eventuated in and supported the military
coup compromised the attempts, however limited, to build a democratic
tradition. (Incidentally, the term “religious fascism” is now commonly and
uncritically used in the authorized press to describe the military suppression
of the Muslim Brotherhood. See, for example, Mahmoud al-‘Alayly, “Min
ath-thawra ila ad-dawla,” al-Shurūq daily, Sunday, 16
November, 2014.http://www.shorouknews.com/columns/view.aspx?cdate=16112014&id=1446390b-cae9-4837-97f1-106cdc3a7e11.)
[54] There is some
dispute about the actual numbers of anti-Mursi protesters, given the interest
of the latter in exaggerating the numbers and of their opponents in minimizing
them. (See “Exactly How Many Millions Were We, My General?” International
Boulevard, 17 July 2013,http://www.internationalboulevard.com/exactly-how-many-millions-were-we-my-general/).
It will take some time to make reasonable assessments of how many and who were
involved. Several observers have noted that Mursi’s supporters were largely
poor. The British journalist Robert Fisk visited Egypt before as well as after
the coup, and reported on massacres and popular demonstrations with
considerable perspicacity. In an article published three weeks after Mursi’s
ouster by the military Fisk described two protests in very different parts of
Cairo: “One point that stood out – and it may be unfashionable to say so – is
that the Brotherhood supporters were generally poor and looked poor in their
grubby abayas and plastic sandals. Some of the Tahrir demonstrators, who were
truly revolutionaries against Mubarak in 2011, trooped over the Nile bridges
waving posters of General al-Sisi. And one has to say, painful as it is
to do so, that the sight of well-heeled people holding aloft the photograph of
a general in sunglasses – albeit a wonderful and very democratic general – was
profoundly depressing. What really happened to the 25 January 2011 revolution?”
see Robert Fisk, “As Impoverished Crowds Gather In Support Of Mohamed Morsi,
The Well-Heeled March Behind Their Images Of The General,” The
Independent, July 27, 2013.
[55] Supported by
the United States. See Julian Pecquet, “Kerry says Muslim Brotherhood ‘stole’
Egypt’s revolution,” The Hill, November 20, 2013.
[56] See Sheera
Frenkel and Maged Aref, “How Egypt’s Rebel Movement Helped Pave the Way for a
Sisi Presidency,” BuzzFeed World, April 15, 2014.http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/how-egypts-rebel-movement-helped-pave-the-way-for-a-sisi-pre
[57] See “Sabāhi:
ad-dākhiliyya tafrut fī istikhdām al-quwwa…wa-l-i‘lām yaqūd hamlat isā’a did 25
yanāyir,” al-Shurūq daily, 11 January 2014.
[58] The sporadic
fighting by protesters against the coup (not necessarily members of the Muslim
Brotherhood, although they were usually described as “Mursi supporters” in the
Egyptian media), in the Sinai as elsewhere, provides the military with a modern
form of legitimacy: the violent suppression of “religious terrorists” who
threaten the safety and integrity of the People and its state. On the one hand,
the military arrests and massacres Islamists; on the other, churches are conspicuously
left unguarded to face vengeful Muslim Brotherhood supporters. (It should be
noted, however, that rights activists have raised serious questions about the
degree to which the ministry of the interior has been actively involved
in incidents aimed at increasing sectarian hostility and general alarm. See,
e.g., Fahmy Huwaidy’s column, in al- Shurūq daily, Tuesday 6
January, 2014.)
[59] State
sovereignty was restored even though prior agreement with Israel and financial
support from the Gulf countries were apparently necessary to ensure it. General
Sisi sought support from both Saudi Arabia and Israel shortly before the coup,
the former promising money and the latter military coordination against Hamas
in Gaza. On prior knowledge of the coup by Saudis see Esam Al-Amin, “The Grand
Scam: Spinning Egypt’s Military Coup,” CounterPunch, July 19-21,
2013; on Israel, see “Al-Sisi informed Israel of the coup three days prior,” MEMO: Middle
East Monitor, Tuesday, 16 July 2013. See also “A Grande Entente,” in Baheyya:
Egypt Analysis and Whimsey, Tuesday August 12 2014, http://baheyya.blogspot.com/?m=0 for
an excellent analysis of the overlaps between regional democratic struggles and
the struggle to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
[60] Anwar
recounts his exchange in a meeting at a cultural event with an aggressively
secular woman poet sitting beside him who belonged to the Egyptian communist
movement (“whose infidelity we had forgiven but who did not forgive us our
faith,” alladhīna sāmahnāhum ‘ala kufrihim wa lam yusāmihūna ‘ala
īmānina). “We began to talk,” he continues, “and when she asked me whether
I was going to recite a poem, I said to her: ‘inshāllah.’ And the doctor
of philosophy immediately responded: ‘How backward!’ I was astonished that the
expression inshāllah should have irritated her so. I smiled at
her outburst but that didn’t help in restraining her loquacity – and from her
elaborate interpretation of inshāllah and other common
expressions as the cause of this nation’s backwardness, and from her urging me
to be enlightened. So I said to her: ‘I am an Other. Do you not speak of
respect for the Other (ihtirām al-ākhir)? I am, dear lady, that Other.’
I realized at that moment that the nation’s crisis was hidden within its
cultural elites – to whom I hope I do not belong.” Yasir Anwar, Al-‘almāniyūn
wa-l-islāmiyūn; muhāwala li-fad al-ishtibāk, Cairo: Shams, 2011, p. 7.
[62] Passion, it
is still said, is a force that overcomes one as opposed to action that one
undertakes. It is common knowledge that this aspect of secularism emerged in
Europe out of the theological polemics and wars, thus helping to form the early
modern state that had to administer mutually hostile Christian churches. By
contrast, modern Middle Eastern states grew mostly out of the processes of
colonial deconstruction and anti-colonial attempts to constitute “a nation”
that therefore had the right to its own state. The ruptures in their respective
traditions were different but the concept of sovereignty as the organizing principle
of the modern state was shared.
[64] This was
already apparent to observers in the emerging culture of modernity in late
nineteenth-century Europe. Thus Paul Valéry: “Interruption, incoherence,
surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real
needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed. . . by anything but
sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. . . . We can no longer bear
anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit.” Quoted
in Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 2005, p. 1.
[65] For an
account of the critical period in Egypt’s political liberalism, see Afaf Lutfi
Al-Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment 1922-1936, Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977.
[66] For a
critical but not entirely unsympathetic account of Nasir’s revolutionary
project by a Marxist, see Anouar Abdel-Malek, Egypt: Military Society,
New York: Random House, 1968.
[68] The
expropriation of large landed property was essentially political, aimed at
undermining Egypt’s ruling elite. “While the direction of the redistribution of
agricultural income has in general been from richer to poorer groups,” wrote
Patrick O’Brien, “the reduction of rents, the elimination of middlemen, and the
abolition of interest charges by the Agricultural Bank affords greater benefits
to those who cultivate, borrow, and sell on a larger scale than to smaller and
less affluent farmers. Moreover the selection of owners for land redistributed
under the agrarian reforms did not favour the most impecunious families in the
countryside but was biased, on efficiency grounds, towards existing tenants or
those considered to be competent farmers.” The Revolution in Egypt’s
Economic System, Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 295. See also Eva
Garzouzi, Old Ills and New Remedies in Egypt, Cairo: Dar Al Maaref,
1958, pp. 100-103. For a later account of the way “development” has reinforced
inequality in rural Egypt, see the excellent article by Timothy Mitchell,
“America’s Egypt: Discourse of the Development Industry,” MERIP,
No. 169, March-April 1991.
[69] See Tamir
Moustafa, The Struggle for Constitutional Power; Law Politics and
Economic Development in Egypt, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
[70] NGOs often
aim to encourage economic development through entrepreneurship among craftsmen
and the poor whom they employ. See Julia Elyachar, Markets of
Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005, especially chapter 1, “The Power of Invisible
Hands.” But these NGOs rarely address the really poor. For an interesting
journalistic account of the predicament of the urban poor, the mutual
understanding between the police and businessmen, and the assistance that poor
squatters typically received from the Muslim Brothers, see Tom Dale and
Abdelkasim al-Jaberi, “Land rights, labor and violence in a Cairo slum,” Egypt
Independent, 15/07/12. The claim of critics that the Muslim Brothers were
in league with big business and the police is a generalization that requires
careful examination.
[71] The elitist
character of NGOs in Egypt, their inability or unwillingness to reach the mass
of ordinary citizens, is described in Mohamed Hussein El Naggar, “Human Rights
Organisations and the Egyptian Revolution.” IDS Bulletin, January
1, (43) 1, 2012.
[72] In Misr
bayn al-‘isyan wa-t-tafakkuk, (see note 38 above) Tariq al-Bishri
attributes the new corruption to the governing elite—but other commentators
regard it as far more widespread.
[73] “Patterns of
behavior that were highly regarded in a more stable society such as sticking to
one’s word or promise, pride and personal integrity, are now less prized. Such
values are less fit for a rapidly changing society where loyalty to old
relationships, be they friends, spouses, places or principles appears as
nothing more than an excessive sentimentality unbecoming in one who is on the
make.” Galal Amin, Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? Changes in
Egyptian Society from 1950 to the Present, Cairo: AUC Press, 2000, p. 24.
[75] In Misr
wa-l-misriyūn fi ‘ahd Mubārak, 1981-2008 (Cairo: Dar Mereet, 2009),
Galal Amin elaborates on the effect of the national and global economy on the
moral state of politics and society under Mubarak. A crucial part of his
account—see especially chaper 6—is concerned with the enormous expansion of the
middle class from Nasir’s “socialist” revolution onward, and its recruitment
into the expanding state bureaucracy that remains overblown. The “open-door”
economic policy, initiated by Sadat and continued under Mubarak, led to the
amalgam of a massive bureaucracy with a consumerist culture fuelled by the
infusion of “rent” income—from overseas remittances, expanded tourism, and the
Suez Canal. The creation of a consumerist culture requires not only the flow of
unproductive income but also the expectation of continuous economic growth and
the material aspirations of the middle and upper classes that go with it.
[76] Thomas
Hobbes, the great theorist of modern sovereignty, writes in a memorable passage
on its psychological preconditions: “By MANNERS, I mean. . . those qualities of
man-kind, that concern their living together in Peace, and Unity. To which end
we are to consider, that the Felicity of this life, consisteth not in the
repose of a man satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus,
(utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of
in the Books of the old Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose
Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imagination are at a stand.
Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another;
the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later. The cause
whereof is, That the object of man’s desire, is not to enjoy once onely, and for
one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desire.” Leviathan,
Chapter XI, 1651 (Everyman’s Library edition, Introduction by A.D.Lindsay,
1914, p.49). The process of ceaseless desire strikes at the root of the
discipline that is fostered by tradition, and already by the nineteenth century
this was becoming apparent to many observers (see note 51 above).
[78] Thus Tarek
Osman writes in criticism of the Muslim Brothers: “in Egypt, Islam—as a frame
of reference, an identity, and a major social component—has always (sic)
existed alongside Arabism, Mediterraneanism, Levantinism, Christianism, and
pharoahism” (Tarek Osman, “Egyptian Dreams,” The Cairo Review of Global
Affairs, May 14, 2014, italics added). But these are elements of a nationalist ideology,
not of an actual historical sense of belonging of various peoples in Egypt. It
is the function of statist ideology to suppress the untidy formation, diverse
experiences, and multiple attachments of people in historical societies.
[79] Michel
Foucault, “Open Letter to Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan,” in Afary and
Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 261. For an
excellent review of the Afary and Anderson book, see Jonathan Rée, “The Treason
of the Clerics,” The Nation, August 15, 2005.
[81] See Quentin
Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 volumes,
Cambridge University Press, 1978.
[82] See, for
example, Richard Mackenney, The City-State, 1500-1700: Republican
Liberty in an Age of Princely Power, London: MacMillan, 1989; Philip
Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise
of the State in Early Modern Europe, University of Chicago, 2003. Mackenney
sees the process as essentially secular, Gorski as religious, but both
recognize the centrality of power—repressive as well as productive—in the
formation of the modern state.
[83] See Keechang
Kim, Aliens in Medieval Law; The Origins of Modern Citizenship,
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
[84] For a
discussion of that institutional structure see the very interesting interview
with Glenn Greenwald on the significance of the congressional report on CIA
Torture.http://www.salon.com/2014/12/11/exclusive_corrupt_toxic_and_sociopathic_glenn_greenwald_unloads_on_torture_cia_and_washingtons_rotten_soul/
[86] Foucault,
incidentally, failed to mention this in his discussion of the paradoxes of
revolutionary “necessity” that I mentioned above: every citizen a denouncer.
[88] In his
opening speech to the first session of the National Assembly on 22 July 1957,
President Gamal Abdul Nasir proclaimed: “We must ever keep in mind that the
most important, the most difficult and the most crucial of our problems is to
rear in this part of the world a lively, vigilant and conscious nation and that
human beings are the raw material of which such a nation is made. The real
effort, therefore, in building the new Egypt lies in the adequate development
of the latent potentialities with which the Creator has endowed this raw
material.” Quoted in E. Garzouzi, Old Ills and New Remedies in Egypt,
Cairo, 1958, p.5.
[89] Belal Fadl, “Hal
yanjah as-sīsī fi tahqīq hilm ‘abdu-n-nasir bi an yasbah kul muwātin mukhbiran,” Mada
Masr, Sunday, 9 November 2014.
[90] Stephen R. L.
Clark, Civil Peace and Sacred Order, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989,
p. 82. Clark goes on to cite Simone Weil, but he doesn’t note that Weil wrote
this in a time of despair, when Nazi Germany was occupying France and the felt
need for rallying resistance against the occupier seemed critical, so I give a
much longer quotation from her book:
Since the people’s obedience towards the public authorities
is a necessity for the country, this obedience becomes a sacred obligation, and
one which confers on the public authorities themselves, seeing that they form
the object of it, the same sacred character. This doesn’t mean an idolizing of
the State in association with patriotism in the Roman style. It is the exact
opposite of this. The State is sacred, not in the way an idol is sacred, but in
the way common objects serving a religious purpose, like the altar, the
baptismal water or anything else of the kind, are sacred. Everybody knows they
are only material objects; but material objects which are regarded as sacred
because they serve a sacred purpose. That is the sort of majesty appropriate
for the State. If we are unable to inspire the people of France with a
conception of this nature, they will have only the choice between anarchy and
idolatry. Idolatry might take a communist form. That is probably what would
happen. It might also take a nationalist form, in which case it would
presumably have as its object the pair of idols so characteristic of our age,
composed of a man acclaimed as leader and at his side the iron-bound machine of
State. But we mustn’t forget that, first, publicity is able to manufacture
leaders, and secondly, if circumstances place a man of genuine ability in such
a situation, he rapidly becomes a prisoner of his rôle. In other words, in the
language of today, the absence of a pure source of inspiration would leave the
French people no other alternatives than anarchy, Communism or Fascism. [Simone
Weil, The Need for Roots, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, pp.
177-8.]
Sacralizing the state, whether as an idol or as common
objects serving a religious purpose, seems to me equally dangerous. Weil is of
course right to stress the need for roots as a condition for transcendent
commitments (the subtitle of her book is: “Prelude to a Declaration of Duties
towards Mankind”). But having roots doesn’t logically presuppose the
nation-state.
[91] Thus even the
word umma, usually taken nowadays to signify “a nation,” has a
Qur’anic sense of ethical formation and creatureliness detached from
territoriality. As used to signify a human grouping, umma has
evolved historically. Originally it carried no sense of exclusive descent or
territoriality. The word occurs several times in the Qur’an, generally in the
sense of the followers of a prophet or the beliefs and practices that
distinguish them from others—and so of the moral space they share. It also refers
to a moral exemplar, Abraham (16:120), and to the world of natural creatures as
a paradigm of divine justice (6:38), but never—in the Qur’an at least—to a
polity. Ridwan as-Sayyid has traced the evolution of its meanings from
pre-Islamic usage, through the Qur’an and the “constitution of Medina,” and
into the classical period in al-Umma wa-l-jamā‘a wa-s-sulta (Beirut:
Dar Iqra, 1984), especially at pp. 19-87. The dominant secular sense that umma has
acquired in modern times is that of “nation,” as in al-umma
al-‘arabiyya, “the Arab nation”—and therefore of a nation-state—and as in al-umam
al-muttahida, “United Nations.”
[93] See Global
Democracy: Normative and Empirical Perspectives, edited by Daniele
Archibugi, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, and Raffaele Marchetti, Cambridge
University Press, 2012. Interesting though this collection is, its interest is
quite different from mine: not the ideal conditions of national and
international “democracy,” but the possibilities of fluid and overlapping
identities that may escape some of the dangers of the modern state.
[94] See Neil
MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State, and Nation in the
European Commonwealth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. The EU
parliament has very little power.
[95] In a
perceptive historical review David Scott has traced the changes underlying the
different ways sovereignty is conceptualized in international law and invoked
by strong Euro-American states when applied to weak Third World states. See
David Scott, “Norms of Self-Determination: Thinking Sovereignty Through,” Middle
East Law and Governance, 4, 2012.
