The Arab World Upended: Revolution and Its Aftermath in Tunisia and Egypt 9781626376311

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The Arab World Upended

THE ARAB

WORLD UPENDED

Revolution and Its Aftermath in Tunisia and Egypt

David B. Ottaway

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2017 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2017 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-62637-620-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5

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Contents

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Acknowledgments Introduction

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Part 1 The Context of the Arab Spring 1 Western and Arab Theories of Revolution 2 Arab Revolutions and Counterrevolutions 3 Political Causes of the 2011 Uprisings

4 Economic and Social Causes of the 2011 Uprisings

7 21 31 47

Part 2 Stages of the Tunisian Revolution 5 Fall of the Ancien Regime 6 From Dual Sovereignty to Restoration

67 93

Part 3 Stages of the Egyptian Revolution 7 Fall of the Pharaoh

119 141 163 185

8 The Thermidorian Reaction 9 Dual Sovereignty 10 The Restoration Part 4 Paradoxes and Challenges 11 Counterrevolution from Abroad 12 Postrevolution Prospects

209 223

Part 5 Conclusion 13 Revolutions Compared

243

Bibliography Index About the Book

253 259 269 v

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written were it not for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, which has been my principal intellectual workplace since retiring from the Washington Post in 2006. The center provides a wide variety of excellent services to help its many scholars bring their books, articles, and other projects to fruition. I wish to thank in particular its diligent library staff under the leadership of the indomitable Janet Spikes. Again and again, staff members answered my calls for help in tracking down books and sources. The center’s former director of publications, Joe Brinley, provided me with invaluable editing suggestions along the way. Also of enormous help were a number of the center’s visiting research assistants, particularly Jadyn Cherry, Alice Bosley, Ahmed Mohamed, and Haifa al-Sudairy. I wish to thank profusely Jamel Bettaieb, a Tunisian schoolteacher working in Sidi Bouzid when the uprising broke out there in December 2010. He became one of my most valued guides and interpreters of events there. Mondher Ben Ayed, a businessman, also provided me with incisive analyses of both the economic and political dynamics of the Tunisian revolution. In the case of Egypt, many scholars, journalists, and activists played a similar role. I wish to extend my thanks particularly to Ahmed Maher, a cofounder of the April 6 Youth Movement; Amr Hamzawy, political science professor and deputy in the short-lived 2011–2012 Parliament; and Amr el-Shobaki, astute political commentator and member of the commission that wrote the 2013 constitution. Bahgat Korany, a professor at the American University in Cairo, also helped me enormously to make sense out of the tumultuous events associated with the Egyptian revolution.

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Introduction

The idea for this book came immediately upon the explosion of popular uprisings across the Arab world in 2011 that led to the overthrow of four dictators and to civil war in Syria. Altogether they constituted the most profound upheaval the region has experienced in its contemporary history. I am a retired Washington Post reporter who had lived in Egypt and Algeria for seven years, and I was fascinated by these uprisings. I had begun my career as a foreign correspondent in Algeria at the time of its independence in 1962 and watched the war for liberation from French colonial rule transformed into a full-scale socialist revolution. I wrote a history of that period with my wife, Marina Ottaway, in Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution (1968). Nearly a half century later, I was watching millions of protesters in five Arab countries proclaim that they, too, were carrying out a revolution. But they hoisted no ideological banner, remained vague in their demands, and were notably leaderless. What were they all about, and after so many decades of political and economic stagnation in the Arab world, what had led to this sudden cataclysm? I became intrigued by Arab activists’ understanding of the term revolution, which they were using to describe their uprisings. I had lived through two revolutions—the first in Algeria and the second in Ethiopia, where a military revolt ended the long reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, scrapped the monarchy, destroyed the Ethiopian feudal system, and replaced it with a proto-communist regime. Marina and I had written about that transformation in Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution after being expelled from the country in 1977 in the midst of what was called the Red Terror. I felt I had had a fair amount of real-world experience with revolutions. 1

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Introduction

The Arab uprisings of 2011 took place, of course, in a different time, culture, and international setting. At first, I was not sure how to go about assessing whether they qualified as major revolutions and, if so, in what sense. I began by consulting the writings of my late professor at Harvard, Crane Brinton, who had spent his lifetime studying social upheavals and produced a groundbreaking study of four great revolutions in England, the United States, France, and Russia. In The Anatomy of Revolution, he had distilled a set of common causes and symptoms and mapped out a common trajectory in their evolutions. As events proceeded after the initial uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, I began detecting shades of the various stages Brinton had described, enough to convince me that his schema could provide a useful reference point and analytic tool for examining these new events. Brinton’s study had highlighted another aspect of the revolutions that had consumed the British Isles in mid-seventeenth century and France at the end of the eighteenth century and seemed relevant to those transpiring in Tunisia and Egypt: the central issue of religion and its relationship to the state, which in the Muslim Arab context meant the role of Islam and the struggle over an Islamic versus a civil state. Brinton was not my only guide, however. The literature on revolutions is long, rich, and always evolving regarding their causes, evolutions, and outcomes. I found four reviews of the field particularly helpful: those contained in Lawrence Stone’s The Causes of the English Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2002); Charles Tilly’s European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993); Jack A. Goldstone’s “Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory” (Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 4, 2001) and Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). As of early 2016, the study of the Arab uprisings as revolutions was still in its infancy. In fact, the only revolts that by then seemed ripe for analysis were those of Tunisia and Egypt; they were the only countries where an outcome of some kind was discernible. This was far from the case elsewhere. Civil wars had engulfed Syria and spread to neighboring Iraq and were still raging in Yemen and Libya. Even their survival as the same nation-states they had been before the Arab Spring was very much in question. A first attempt to examine any of these uprisings from a revolutionary and comparative perspective has been undertaken by a number of established scholars of social upheavals in The Arab Revolution of 2011: A Comparative Perspective, edited by Said Amir Arjomand (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2015). My own study fits into this general framework and focuses on the common internal dynamics around the hotly contested place of Islam in both the evolution and outcome of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.

Introduction

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I looked at the history of previous Arab revolutions as well as at the writings of Arab academics and religious leaders for additional insights into the causes and meaning of revolution. To my surprise, I discovered one of the most interesting Arab analysts to be an ultra-conservative Saudi Wahhabi cleric, Sheikh Salman al Oadah, whom I went to see and interview in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Another was Rached Ghannouchi, an Islamic scholar and spiritual and political leader of Tunisia’s revolution, whom I interviewed on multiple occasions. Since 2010, I have made numerous trips to various Arab countries to gather material for this study. The first was to Egypt, which I had visited precisely one year before its uprising in January 2011. I had found that keystone nation where I had lived from 1981 to 1985 roiling with economic, social, and political discontent. I wrote an essay at the time (published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) titled “Egypt at the Tipping Point?” in which I outlined the trouble President Hosni Mubarak faced in trying to transfer power to his son, Gamal. Since then, I have made five other trips to Egypt, five each to Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, three to Algeria, two to Morocco, and one to the Sudan and Iraq. My intent was to monitor over several years the course of events as they unfolded in countries where uprisings were taking place and those where little or nothing was happening. I chose Saudi Arabia for special attention because it is the Arab world’s richest and most influential monarchy and because it quickly began to lead the counterrevolution. I have relied heavily on my own observations and interviews during these trips, as well as media coverage in English, French, and Arabic, as primary sources. There were other questions to which I sought answers during my visits. For example, why had iron-fisted autocratic leaders of police states, like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, fallen from power so quickly? What role had the United States played in their fall after more than a decade of pressing its autocratic Arab allies to reform and spending millions of dollars on prodemocracy programs? Had President Barack Obama’s call on Mubarak to leave office really been a decisive factor, as Saudi Arabia believed? Yet another issue I became fascinated with was the conflict between “revolutionary legitimacy” and “constitutional legitimacy” as the basis for power and actions. Protesters in the streets of Tunis and Cairo appealed implicitly to the former to justify their overthrow of ancien regime rulers. But they subsequently assumed that revolutionary legitimacy remained a higher authority than new constitutions approved in referenda empowering democratically elected leaders to end the revolution. As one constitutional scholar has aptly noted, revolutionaries are digging their

4

Introduction

own graves in pressing for new constitutions because they amount to “an act of self-liquidation of the revolution.”1 The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 begins with a general discussion of various Western and Arab notions of the term revolution and earlier examples of what Arabs considered to be a revolution. In addition, I describe the economic, social, and political conditions prevailing prior to the outbreak of the 2011 uprisings. Parts 2 and 3 track the history the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions over their first years using Brinton’s schema of revolutionary stages as a reference point. I have noted where his framework has to be modified or discarded because of the specificities of conditions in a contemporary Arab setting and also to the conflicting narratives of secularists and Islamists regarding the meaning and goals of revolution. Part 4 looks at the impact of a counterrevolution from abroad and the challenges facing countries after the brief, chaotic rule of Islamic parties had collapsed. I have not attempted to present a day-by-day account of events, but included those I believe to have changed attitudes or provoked the passage from one stage to another according to the Brintonian schema. Finally, I have examined the postrevolution period (at least the first two years) in both Tunisia and Egypt to gauge the prospects for other uprisings to come. In the concluding Part 5, I summarize the similarities and differences between these Arab revolutions and the classic Western and contemporary ones, and I recap why the outcomes were so strikingly different in Tunisia and Egypt.

Notes 1. Ulrich K. Preuss, “Constitutional Powermaking for the New Polity: Some Deliberations on the Relations Between Constituent Power and the Constitution,” Cardozo Law Review, 14 (1992–1993): 641.

Part 1 The Context of the Arab Spring

1 Western and Arab Theories of Revolution

The popular uprisings that shook the Arab world starting in early 2011 certainly rank among the most important events on the world geopolitical landscape of the early twenty-first century. Their reverberations spread across the globe, and autocratic rulers as far away as China and Russia were set on edge in fear of similar rebellions. Within a year, four long-ruling Arab strongmen (regarded as impervious to street agitation because of their massive security apparatuses) were driven from power—Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen. A fifth, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, was struggling to stay in power. Crowds numbering into the millions forced Ben Ali from power in less than a month, and Mubarak was ousted in just eighteen days. The quick success was a romantic revolutionary’s dream come true—the embodiment of people’s power. Some analysts described these uprisings as the most consequential happening in Arab history since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Some saw them as heralding the end of the French- and British-dictated postcolonial order. Others went further back in time to compare them to the revolutions that shook the Habsburg Empire (Austria) and European monarchies in 1848. Another frequent comparison was to the explosion of new democracies in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Scholars, commentators, and journalists seeking to understand the meaning of this unprecedented political upheaval have given various descriptions of these events as “popular revolts,” “uprisings,” “revolutions,” 7

8

The Context of the Arab Spring

or a new “Arab awakening.” Arab activists themselves from the start called the uprisings “revolutions,” adding the month and first day of their protests or the day of the ruler’s downfall to that evocative phrase. Within a year, the overwhelmingly secular protesters who risked their lives confronting police bullets, tear gas, and batons were decrying the “hijacking” of their revolutions by Muslim militants, who had been latecomers to the street and their cause. The first elections in Tunisia and Egypt were won by Islamists demanding a revival of Islam and application of its religious laws. Tunisia and Egypt quickly became polarized between secularists and Islamists fighting over the role of religion and sharia law in society as well as the identity of state and nation. Secular women found themselves the target of Islamists demanding they don face veils and leave the workforce. Hard-core Salafis in Tunisia attacked bars serving alcohol and exhibitions of paintings deemed disrespectful of Islam. Secularists renamed their “Arab Spring” the “Islamic Winter,” while Islamists hailed the return of their traditional values to decadent, Western-inspired secular society. Few issues will be more hotly debated in the years to come than the import of these mass uprisings in Arab history. Yes, they overthrew four or five autocrats, but did they change the nature of their political systems? Were they deserving of the term revolution if the outcome was a restoration of traditional Islamic values and an Islamic state or of the old order? What did the word revolution mean anyway? Were these uprisings comparable to the British, French, or Russian revolutions that marked great turning points in Western history? If so, were they closer in similarity to these classical ones or to the abortive uprisings that swept across Europe in 1848? Was the more proper comparison to other revolutions around the world like those that had taken place in the twentieth century in China, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Iran? The next chapter reviews what Arabs have referred to in their own contemporary history as “revolutions.” I have not attempted a wider comparative study beyond the Tunisian and Egyptian examples partly for reasons of space but mostly because comparison to other Arab uprisings of 2011 seemed pointless in the absence of discernible outcomes to the civil wars still consuming Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya as of early 2016. The Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions evoke some intriguing parallels to the 1979 Iran revolution because the role of Islam in governance was also central to the revolutionary process there. The Iranian revolution toppled the shah, abolished the monarchy, and buried the aristocracy in the bin of history. It led to the establishment of an Islamic republic and creation of a whole new system of governance, Velayat-e-faqih, dominated by clerics, and with a Shiite ayatollah as the ultimate authority. There are rea-

Western and Arab Theories of Revolution

9

sons for not dwelling on a comparison to the Iranian revolution in this study, chief among them the very different outcomes and the narrower scope in the aims of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutionaries. Sunni Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia never argued for theocracy as the best form of governance, as did Iran’s Shiite Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers.

The Many Meanings of Thawra

How should we think about the major political convulsions that changed the lives of millions of Egyptians and Tunisians in profound ways for the first time in almost a century? Had thawra (the Arabic word for revolution) been confined only to “fire in the minds of men?”1 Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton coined the term “Democratic Awakening.”2 Another oft-heard description of the uprisings by Arab scholars in particular has been an “Arab Awakening,” a reference to the late George Antonius’s landmark book by that name about the birth of Arab nationalism at the start of the twentieth century.3 But have these uprisings gone beyond generating a new way of thinking, an Arab nahda, or renaissance, to change the course of history, or were they mostly just what one Saudi analyst called a “people’s coup” that ended up changing little of permanence on the ground?4 In Arabic, the word thawra has many meanings, from “uprising” and “insurrection” to “revolution” and even “civil war.”5 In any case, neither the Egyptian nor Tunisian revolution aspired to the breadth and depth of social and economic change of the 1952 July Revolution in Egypt.

Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution

The late Harvard historian Crane Brinton in his 1938 classic The Anatomy of Revolution wrestled with the thorny questions of a proper definition and common characteristics and trajectory of revolutions that had transformed the Western world. He included the US struggle for independence in his study, but mainly concentrated on the English, French, and Russian revolutions as his examples. He noted that the term revolution usually evoked “violence and terror, purges and guillotines.” But his main determinant was whether there had been a “drastic, sudden substitution of one group in charge of the running of a territorial political entity for another group.” This might come about as the result of a violent uprising, a coup d’etat, or “some other kind of skullduggery” in his view.6 Brinton’s definition constitutes one marker used in this study in tracking the transformation of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings into revolutions.

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The Context of the Arab Spring

Brinton was most interested in the path of revolutions as they unfolded. He detected distinct stages in the revolutionary process, leading to a similar outcome. After the ancien regime’s overthrow came a period of dual sovereignty as moderate and extremist revolutionaries fought for control of the state. The latter inevitably prevailed after setting up a secret parallel government to seize power. Once the extremists took over, they unleashed “reigns of terror and virtue.”7 But their excesses inevitably provoked a violent reaction from society and the losing moderate political elite, leading to the ultimate demise of the extremists. He called this the “Thermidor,” named after the month of July from the revolutionary calendar created by French extremists. July 1794 (Thermidor) witnessed the downfall of the extremists’ leader, Robespierre, who was guillotined just as King Louis XVI had been before him. The next stage of this Thermidorian reaction was the rise to power of another authoritarian figure, Napoleon Bonaparte in the case of France, Oliver Cromwell in England, and Joseph Stalin in Russia. The final phase was the restoration, exemplified by that of the Bourbon monarchy in France in 1814 and Charles II in England in 1660.8 It is these phases of Brinton’s revolutionary process— particularly those of dual sovereignty, Thermidorian reaction, and restoration—that we look for in analyzing how events unfolded in Egypt and Tunisia. Other prominent theorists of revolution have borrowed elements from Brinton’s description. For instance, Charles Tilly, in his epic study European Revolutions, 1491–1992, offered as a definition of revolution “a forcible change of power over a state in the course of which at least two distinct blocs of contenders make incompatible claims to control the state.” He describes revolutions as going through “a full revolutionary sequence” from the fall of the old sovereign through a struggle for power to the establishment of a new order.9 Like Brinton, Said Amir Arjomand draws inspiration from the history of European revolutions in his analysis of the Arab 2011 uprisings but turns to the example of the abortive ones of 1848. They were “strikingly similar,” he argues, in that they were all “constitutional revolutions,” saw a struggle for power between moderate republicans and conservative monarchists, and ended in the triumph of the latter.10 Brinton’s Anatomy begins with an analysis of various common causes of revolutions, some of which appear particularly relevant to the Tunisian and Egyptian cases. However, no aspect of revolution seems more disputed among theorists than a universality of causes. For example, Jack Goldstone, in his 2001 review of three past generations of revolutionary theories, found a veritable “laundry list of factors” capable of sparking a revolutionary outbreak,11 whereas Dmitry Ivanov came to the opposite conclusion. He argues that the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions “demon-

Western and Arab Theories of Revolution

11

strate that similarities and regularities” exist between them and the “historic revolutions” regarding their causes, namely, three concurrent crises: the ability of the old elite to govern, loyalty among young people from the lower middle class, and lowering living standards making fast and massive mobilization possible.12 Brinton had also examined the crisis in governance and social and economic factors promoting the outbreak of revolution. But he highlighted another kind of crisis that is particularly pertinent to this study: “the desertion of the intellectuals.” Their questioning of the old order’s legitimacy and demand for radical changes constituted “the most reliable of the symptoms.”13 Disaffected intellectuals, he wrote, were like “white corpuscles” in the bloodstream. When they began multiplying in great numbers, they provided a sure sign of “a diseased condition” inside the body politic.14 So did the appearance of what he called “pressure groups” as their agitation became “more and more directed as time goes on toward the radical alteration of existing government.”15 He had in mind both intellectuals and economic interest groups like the rising class of merchants and industrialists in Western Europe. Pressure groups played a similar role leading up to the Arab uprisings in 2011, but they were mainly human rights and prodemocracy associations denouncing the autocratic behavior of Arab governments and calling for democratic reforms. Brinton took seriously the impact of deteriorating financial conditions on a government’s ability to rule effectively as a casual factor of revolution. He found that governments in prerevolutionary England, France, and Russia had been nearly bankrupt, highly inefficient, and failing badly in their capacity to respond to the demands of their societies.16 At the same time, he noted that none of those countries had been in the midst of an economic depression or experiencing unusual widespread misery. On the contrary, they were enjoying economic booms and a sharp increase in “national income.”17 Already a century earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had noted this same phenomenon just prior to the onset of upheaval in France.18 But Brinton made much more of the social ramifications of an economic boom, noting that although a country’s gross domestic product might be growing rapidly, “someone does not get the benefit.”19 This perfectly captures Egypt’s condition on the eve of revolution, where 40 percent of the population was living on an income of $2 a day or less while the country’s GDP had more than doubled in seven years. Brinton did not identify the downtrodden as the main generators of revolutionary ferment, but pointed to various rising economic groups that had become blocked in their advancement by the existing political system.20 They became caught in a “cramp,” a term he borrowed from George Pettee, to describe their state of extreme economic frustration, giving rise

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The Context of the Arab Spring

to disposition for revolt.21 Another more recent analyst of revolutions, sociologist James C. Davies, has offered a refinement to these economic causal factors. He argued that it was not just that a boom was under way. The decisive factor was a sudden setback, like a recession, that dashed the expectations of those on the economic rise. This produced “an intolerable gap between what people want and what they get.”22 The relevance of these various economic theories will be examined in looking for answers to what provoked millions of Egyptians and Tunisians to take to the streets in early 2011.

Arab Theorists of Revolution

The Arabs have their own theorists of political transformation, one of whom is sometimes cited as a founding father of Western sociology. He was the social historian Ibn Khaldun, aptly born in the cradle of the Arab revolution, Tunisia, back in the fourteenth century. He is credited with propounding the first theory on the social causes for the rise and fall of Arab empires. Ibn Khaldun viewed Arab society inherently divided between urban denizens enjoying a rich but morally corrosive lifestyle and the noble, if poor, nomads of the desert. A faction of the latter was destined to rise up periodically and displace the decadent urban elite. Each dynasty depended for its cohesion on something he called asabiyah—“group feeling” based on blood ties or some other close affinity.23 Over time, this social and political glue dissipated while popular discontent increased as a result of overbearing rule, heavy taxation, and extreme injustice until that dynasty was overthrown.24 The new one replacing it would go through the same cycle, the symptoms and causes of pending revolt the same. In the waning days of each ruling dynasty, he wrote, “there will be coercion of the subjects and bad government” because its “revenues decrease.”25 Shades of the Khaldunian drama pitting urban dwellers against desert nomads could be seen in the struggle between secularists and Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia, with secularists concentrated in the capital cities of Cairo and Tunis and Islamists drawing the bulk of their support from rural areas. Two of the most interesting theorists of Arab revolution today are Islamists, and their notions of the phenomenon are not that much different from Western ones. One comes from Saudi Arabia, a monarchy espousing an extremely conservative brand of Islam known as Wahhabism. Taking inspiration from the Arab Spring, a rare free-thinking Wahhabi scholar, Shaikh Salman bin Fahd al-Oadah, published articles reflecting on the nature of revolts and revolutions throughout Islamic history, starting under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, in 656 A.D. Al-Oadah had spent five

Western and Arab Theories of Revolution

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years in jail in the 1990s for instigating his own Islamic “awakening” against the ruling Al Saud family and remained a dissident voice after his release. In 2014, he had a Twitter following of 4.5 million people and several million regular viewers of his YouTube broadcasts, making him “a significant thorn in the side of the Saudi monarchy.”26 Al-Oadah espoused his own cyclical theory regarding the rise and fall of rulers, basing it on Islam’s holiest scripture, the Quran, specifically verse 140 (Surah AlImran), which stated: “Such days (of varying fortunes) we give to various people by turns.”27 Al-Oadah began by examining the various meanings of revolution. He noted its common use to describe major technological changes in society, such as the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century or the Internet revolution of the twenty-first century. He turned to its political usage to cover major political upheavals, citing as examples the English, French, and Russian revolutions. He even considered the “color” revolutions of Eastern Europe in the wake of the Soviet Union’s disintegration.28 He grappled with the differences between a “revolt,” “war for independence,” “populist movement,” and “revolution.” The latter, he argued, stood out from the others because it involved “a transformation of society as a whole affecting both the political and economic systems, substantially changing the course of history.”29 Revolutions had to involve “the whole of society . . . not just one faction or political party.” Other major attributes included an attempt to establish a new order and a new social contract between the rulers and the ruled to ensure the “same just laws” applied to both. A revolution also had a distinctive tempo, marked by “a leap” rather than “a gradual process.”30 Al-Oadah cited the “color revolutions” in post-Soviet Eastern Europe to make his argument revolutions need not involve bloodshed or fighting, though he conceded armed confrontation was very possible in the struggle between those for and against change. He advised both sides to avoid infighting or killing civilians and noncombatants and limit their tactics to self-defense.31 His strong advice to rulers was to “do away with the underlying causes of social unrest” to avoid an uprising entirely. But his underlying message amounted to a call for radical change in Saudi monarchical rule. “There needs to be a rethinking of the relationship between the government and the governed,” he wrote. “The new basis of this relationship needs to be the will of the people, and this requires the assurance of their rights and human dignity.”32 When I interviewed al-Oadah in mid-2013, he was uncertain whether to describe what was under way in Egypt and Tunisia as revolution.33 At the time, President Mohamed Morsi, the first member of the Muslim Brotherhood to be elected in Arab history, was under enormous popular

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The Context of the Arab Spring

pressure to resign and about to be removed by the military. “It could be an incomplete revolution,” al-Oadah mused. The crucial indicator in his mind was whether “a really new system, a new regime” had emerged, and he seemed to doubt that one had. That goal might not be attained for “a hundred years,” he opined, noting that the French Revolution had taken almost that long to develop into the current French political system. “We Arabs do have problems with the word ‘revolution’ because we haven’t seen one for ages.” Al-Oadah said he would be satisfied to see “any movement that leads to a new country and a new regime evolving out of it.” Democracy was not a necessary outcome, however, and never had been historically. He cited as one example what he called the “Abbasid Revolution,” a military-led revolt in the eighth century that overthrew the Omayyad caliphate. He used another example from contemporary Western history: the communist revolution in Russia that ended by suppressing all the freedoms associated with democracy. Still, the more he filled in the outlines of his vision for a successful revolution, the more it resembled a Western-style democracy. The new regime had to be based on “the independence of institutions,” including a legislature, the courts, and military, and assure freedom of speech and full political participation. The army and security services should have limited authority and remain independent of each other to ensure “balance” in the political system. If the military was the leading actor, as in Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser or in Libya under Muammar Qaddafi, then it could only be regarded “a military revolution” but “not a real revolution.”34 The one question where al-Oadah equivocated was whether the establishment of an Islamic state and imposition of sharia law, then the two key issues in Egypt and Tunisia, were the sine qua non of a “real revolution.” For Arabs to feel a revolution was succeeding, they “must see the change they are asking for,” he said. But he urged secularists and Islamists to set aside their differences and accept an as-yet-unidentified compromise. “This conflict between liberals and religious people must be resolved for the benefit of all parties and the establishing of a new order.”35 Rached Ghannouchi, the chief Islamic theologian and political figure in Tunisia, was perhaps the most qualified Arab theorist to discuss revolution because he was at the center of one. He founded the Islamic Tendency Movement in 1981 and was imprisoned at home and then forced into exile for twenty-three years, much of the time in London. He compared a revolution to “an earthquake” hitting a country—one of such magnitude that it produced “a radical change in ideas, values, institutions and persons.”36 He echoed Brinton in focusing on a “total class, elite change” in governance of a country as the most important hallmark, citing the new leading role of

Western and Arab Theories of Revolution

15

his own Ennahda Party in Tunisian politics as proof positive a revolution was in process. Ghannouchi’s notion of revolution included a strong cultural dimension, namely, the restoration of Tunisia’s Islamic precepts and values. He decried its prevailing ones as militantly secularist, using the French term laïcité, derived from the French Revolution. These secular values had become deeply embedded in Tunisian society during seventy-five years of French colonialism. After Tunisia’s independence in 1956, Habib Bourguiba, the first president, embraced those same secular values and deliberately suppressed Arab and Muslim identity and culture. To Ghannouchi, Bourguiba represented “the fruits of the French revolution” not only in its cultural legacy to the country but also its political one. He considered himself “a Napoleon” and had ruled like an emperor.37 Ghannouchi’s goal was to uproot “the Bourguiba model” of French-inspired secularism from Tunisia and replace it with Islamic values and culture.

The Islamic Project

The Muslim Brotherhood is the Arab world’s oldest Islamic revivalist movement, dating back to 1928 when it was founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna. He called for a renaissance of Islam through a gradual reform process inside society, starting with the individual and then progressing outward to the family, community, and finally the entire society and government. His preaching combined with the more militant writings of another theologian, Sayyid Qutb, whose Milestones along the Way justifying the use of jihad and force to impose Islam became the guide for militant Islamists. These two writers represented the different tactics toward the pursuit and implementation of what Islamists generally referred to as “the Islamic Project.” (Qutb was executed in 1966 for his involvement in a Brotherhood plot to assassinate President Nasser.) The project’s main goals were the establishment of an Islamic state and the imposition of sharia law on society and government. Ghannouchi had been one of the project’s most ardent exponents prior to the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011.38 By then, Ghannouchi’s Ennahda (“Renaissance”) movement and the Brotherhood in Egypt had adopted the tactic of peaceful means to obtain these goals, and they had accepted participation in the democratic process as the way forward. In fact, the Brotherhood seized wholeheartedly on President Mubarak’s decision to allow its candidates to run as independents in parliamentary elections. In 2000, seventeen members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been elected, and in 2005 the number shot up to eighty-eight, turning the Brotherhood into the major opposition force in the country. Its strategy of building a popular base

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The Context of the Arab Spring

by providing welfare and health services, including hospitals and clinics for the poor, seemed to have paid off. According to a 2006 study, its charity, Gam’ia la-Shar’ia, had 450 branches nationwide, and it controlled 6,000 mosques, attracting two million Egyptians. The 2005 elections highlighted the success of its strategy of building a broad base in society and then tapping into it for electoral purposes.39 With the Arab Spring uprisings, the dream of seeing the Islamic Project implemented suddenly began to look like a real possibility. The slogan “Islam is the solution” became the election rallying cry of Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia. Morsi’s victory in the 2012 Egyptian presidential elections was widely viewed among moderate Islamists as vindication of alBanna’s gradualist strategy for Islamists to come to power by participating in the political process.40 The constitution, adopted under Muslim Brotherhood guidance that same year, marked the closest Islamists in Egypt came to fulfillment of their project. The religious agenda of the Brotherhood and Ennahda was vehemently opposed by secularists determined to maintain a strict separation of religion and government, ideals embodied in Atatürk’s Turkey after World War I and the secular ideologies of Baathists and Nasserites after World War II. But secularists realized they could not afford to be seen as hostile to Islam. So they adopted the expression dawla madaniya, or “civil state,” to avoid the word secular, which carried an atheistic connotation among Muslims.41 In Tunisia, secularism was detested by Islamists, who saw it as just another derivative of the French Revolution, what Ghannouchi called “the Jacobin model in French history.”42 As we shall see, this fundamental conflict over an “Islamic” versus a “civil” state became existential to both Islamists and secularists; in Egypt, the conflict ended by shattering their initially shared objective for the revolution—the necessity for democratic elections and an end to dictatorial rule. The deadly struggle between Islamists and secularists quickly became one of the most distinctive traits of the Arab thawra as it unfolded in Tunisia and Egypt. Another was its leaderless character and failure to produce any charismatic leader. After three years, no figure comparable to Cromwell, Robespierre, or Lenin had emerged. Worse, neither had any towering personage comparable to Fidel Castro, Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, Nasser, or Bourguiba. Perhaps more surprising, given their rise to power, Islamists offered no equivalent to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to unite them in their quest for an Islamic state and power. The only religious leader of any stature to come to the fore in either country was Ghannouchi, and his influence remained largely confined to Tunisia. Previous secular ideologies that had once put fire in the minds of Arab activists did not play any role in stirring these uprisings. There was

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no sign of Nasserism, Baathism, Arab socialism, or pan-Arab nationalism motiving any of the secularists who massed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and along Tunis’s Avenue Bourguiba. A common banner appearing in Cairo read simply “Bread, freedom and dignity” and in Tunis “Get out Ben Ali.” The slogans lacked ideological inspiration, and only after Islamists belatedly joined in the protests did some take on a religious aura with their mantra, “Islam is the solution.” Socialism seemed far from the minds of secularists and Islamists, although both voiced the demand for a new era of social justice. Generally speaking, capitalism as the ruling economic order went unchallenged, but not the massive corruption and cronyism that had become associated with the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes. As the preamble to the 2013 Egyptian constitution noted, the demands of protesters filling the streets “transcended class and ideology.”43 The main rallying cries were for the departure of autocratic rulers, an end to repressive police states, and freedom of speech and assembly. The most “radical” reform in governance focused on establishing an authentic multiparty democracy.

The International Setting

The international setting in which these revolutions unfolded was another factor in limiting their goals and options. The Islamic parties that first came to power found themselves with few friends in the East or West. Furthermore, they were locked into a Western-dominated international political and financial order that gave them little room for maneuver. Neither Russia nor China offered alternatives. Russia was ruled by the highly authoritarian Vladimir Putin, who looked with fear and loathing on prodemocracy uprisings that might inspire his own opposition. So did China’s communist rulers, traumatized by the 1989 student uprising in Tiananmen Square. Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia had no political or ideological affinity with Russia or China in any case. The same was true of their attitude toward the United States and Western European countries, which had backed the regimes they had just overthrown. Nonetheless, the economies of Egypt and particularly Tunisia were enmeshed in those of Western Europe. They depended heavily on tourism for millions of jobs and an important share of their foreign exchange earnings. The regional context in which Egypt’s Islamists had to pursue their cause was particularly confining; they were tethered to the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty forged by the United States. Abrogation of the treaty or even infringement of its terms risked an immediate end to the $1.5 billion in annual aid from the United States and a full-scale crisis with Israel.

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In addition, the newly established Islamic-led governments quickly discovered that without an agreement with the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF), there was no hope of obtaining the billions of dollars in loans it sought from the European Union and United States to cope with quickly deteriorating economies. IMF reform demands for a loan were so politically risky in Egypt that Morsi turned instead to the wealthy Arab countries. They were divided on whether to help or sabotage the experiment in Islamic rule under way in Egypt and Tunisia. The most powerful of them, Saudi Arabia, held a long-standing grudge against the Muslim Brotherhood. The Saudi kingdom immediately became a center of counterrevolutionary intrigue aimed at helping its secular enemies drive it from power, as I detail in a later chapter. Morsi’s inability to secure sufficient international financial or political backing became one important cause of his eventual downfall.

Notes 1. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980). 2. Hillary Clinton, “Remarks at the Kumpuris Distinguished Lecture Series: Audience Question and Answer Segment,” September 30, 2011, www.state/gov/secretary /rm/2011/09/174877.htm. 3. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939). 4. Abdulaziz Sager, “Reforms the Arab Monarchies Cannot Avoid,” Washington Post, April 22, 2011. 5. Hans Wehr, “Thawra,” in J. Milton Cowan (ed.) A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 109. 6. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 4. 7. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 198–214. 8. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 215–250. 9. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 8–9. 10. Said Amir Arjomand, “The Arab Revolution of 2011 and Its Counterrevolutions in Comparative Perspective,” in Said Amir Arjomand (ed.), The Arab Revolution of 2011 (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2015), 10–11. 11. Jack A. Goldstone, “Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science, 4 (June 2001): 173. 12. Dmitry Ivanov, “The 2017 Problem: A Next Revolutionary Situation,” in Said Amir Arjomand (ed.), The Arab Revolution of 2011 (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2015), 255–256. 13. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 265. 14. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 45. 15. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 41. 16. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 30. 17. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 31.

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18. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. Alan S. Kahan, eds. Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 220. 19. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 31. 20. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 36. 21. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution. See George Sawyer Pettee, The Process of Revolution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1971), 38–48. 22. James C. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review, 27 (1961): 6. 23. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, vol. 1, trans. Franz Rosenthal (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1967), 264–273. 24. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, vol. 2, 103, 117, 128–130. 25. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 135–136. 26. Robert F. Worth, “Leftward Shift by Conservative Cleric Leaves Saudis Perplexed,” New York Times, April 4, 2014. 27. Shaikh Salman bin Fahd al-Oadah, “The Idea of Revolution,” June 2, 2012, accessed July 26, 2012, http://en.islamtoday.net/artshow-415-4469.htm. 28. Shaikh al-Oadah, “The Idea of Revolution.” 29. Shaikh Salman bin Fahd al-Oadah, “History Need Not Repeat Itself,” May 5, 2012, accessed July 7, 2016, http://islamicstudies.islammessage.com/Article.aspx?aid=772. 30. Shaikh al-Oadah, “The Idea of Revolution.” 31. Shaikh al-Oadah, “The Idea of Revolution.” 32. Shaikh Salman bin Fahd al-Oadah, “Reform Is the Best Option,” May 27, 2012, accessed July 26, 2012, http://islamicstudies.islammessage.com/Article.aspx?aid=744. 33. Interview with Shaikh Salman al-Oadah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, June 4, 2013. 34. Shaikh al-Oadah interview. 35. Shaikh al-Oadah interview. 36. Rached Ghannouchi, interview with the author, Tunis, March 28, 2013. 37. Ghannouchi interview. 38. Rached Ghannouchi, “Is the Islamic Project Backpedaling?,” December 20, 2007, accessed October 4, 2013, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=14911&ref =search.php. 39. Noha Antar, “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Success in the Legislative Elections in Egypt 2005: Reasons and Implications,” EuroMesCO Paper 51, October 2006, 12. 40. Larbi Sadiki, “Egypt: The Triumph of Hassan al-Banna,” Al Jazeera, July 4, 2012. 41. Amer Katbeh, “The Civil State (dawla madaniya)—A New Political Term?,” February 24, 2014, accessed July 12, 2016, http://ifair.eu/think/the-civil-state-dawla-madaniya -a-new-political-term/; and Issandr el-Amrani, “Is It the Islamists vs. the Military?,” Egypt Independent, November 15, 2011. 42. Rached Ghannouchi, “Secularism and the Relation of Religion to the State from the Perspective of al-Nahdha Movement,” Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy conference speech, Tunis, March 2013. 43. Draft Constitution 2013, Arab Republic of Egypt, accessed July 31, 2014, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/20131206EgyptConstitution_Dec.pdf.

2 Arab Revolutions and Counterrevolutions

With the 2011 downfall of four leaders of supposedly progressive democratic republics, contemporary Arab history was stood on its head. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it had been the monarchs who stood in dire danger, starting with the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan in 1951, whose shaky regime just managed to survive through his sons. King Farouk of Egypt was less lucky. He was overthrown in 1952, and the Egyptian monarchy was soon replaced with a socialist republic. In 1958, King Faisal and the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq joined the dustbin of history. In 1962, Imam Badr in Yemen was swept from power in a civil war that gave birth to another Arab republic. That same year, after eight years of war against the French colonial power, Algeria became independent and founded yet another republic as well as a socialist revolution. The fall of the shah in Iran in 1979 led to predictions that the end was in sight for the six Arab monarchies on the western side of the Persian Gulf, led by oil colossus Saudi Arabia. More than thirty years later, however, all eight of the Arab world’s monarchies, including Jordan and Morocco, were still standing, while its ten republics were scrambling to reinvent themselves. With the uprisings of 2011, prodemocracy activists immediately called what was happening “revolution.” The simple fact that an unpopular dictator had fallen was sufficient for the label. There was little appreciation that revolutions involve bloody conflict, even civil war, leaps forward and steps backward, and go on for years. It did not help that the word had become so widely used since the 1950s to include simply a military coup. The term revolution has become almost meaningless. Few activists were prepared for a multiyear struggle like what had characterized 21

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the English, French, and Russian revolutions, and a good number of others for that matter. Many seemed to assume the downfall of long-established dictators would lead to quick gratification of demands for sweeping political and social changes. When this did not take place—in no small part because of their own internal divisions—they became enormously frustrated and disillusioned. Part of the problem stemmed from somewhat romantic expectations of a repeat of the quick results achieved by prodemocracy activists in the socalled color revolutions of Eastern Europe following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Egyptian prodemocracy activists had carefully studied the tactics used by protesters in the Ukraine, Georgia, and Serbia and applied some of them in their drive to unseat President Hosni Mubarak. Their main interest had been how to galvanize many people to turn out on the streets and nonviolently confront vastly superior and well-armed security forces. In some cases, they had been made aware of these tactics thanks to training courses offered by US democracy promotion groups like Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute.1 While interviewing activists in Cairo in January 2010 (a year before the uprising there), I found they were very familiar with the youth-led Otpor movement in Serbia responsible for the “bulldozer revolution” that forced Slobodan Milosevic from power in 2000.2 Otpor (“resistance”) had been organized in 1998 mainly by students and had grown into a nationwide movement with 70,000 members in just two years. It had many leaders to avoid a single one being targeted for arrest that might paralyze its activities. Using crisp slogans (“He’s Finished”), a clinched-fist logo, and public humor and ridicule of Milosevic, Otpor managed to foment a mass uprising, flooding the capital with 500,000 protesters and besieging (and partly burning) the parliament building on October 5, 2000. They even succeeded in winning over some police and army units. All this had convinced Milosevic to resign after thirteen years in power. Otpor’s success became a model of youth-led “people’s power” and thus had a lot of appeal to Egypt’s would-be revolutionaries. Egyptian prodemocracy activists were just as aware of the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in November 2003. There, opposition groups led by another youth group, Kamara (“enough”), used a petition campaign that attracted one million voters and then twenty days of around-the-clock protests in the capital’s Freedom Square to force President Eduard Shevardnadze to resign. One of the first national prodemocracy movements in Egypt was launched in 2004, and it chose as its name Kefaya, the Arabic word for “enough.” In November 2004, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution took place in a burst of public outrage over rigged elections. This led to the

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ouster of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych after seventeen days of nonstop protests centered around Kiev’s Independence Square. This particular example of people’s power did not go unnoticed, even in far-away Sudan, where leaders of the prodemocracy movement Girifna (meaning “fed up”) chose to print their protest pamphlets against the military regime in orange in deliberate imitation of the color associated with Ukraine’s revolution.3 Arab activists admired these Eastern European revolutions mainly for their successful tactics in mobilizing masses of people to overthrow dictatorial leaders like their own, not for lessons in how to go about engineering long-term social and political changes in their societies. Many of these changes had already taken place in Eastern Europe as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which had put the leaders of fifteen countries on their own, with no more political or military backing from Moscow. In the seven communist Eastern and Central European states, it provoked the overnight downfall of their ruling classes, the discrediting of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and the switch from single-party rule to multiparty democracy. The political situation remained profoundly unsettled and the rules of the game for staying in power were still being determined more than a decade later. Even the borders of some countries had changed. Czechoslovakia had split into two separate, ethnically based states and East and West Germany had been reunited. Yugoslavia, though outside the Soviet bloc, had splintered into five independent countries that left the once-dominant Serb republic greatly weakened. The new Russian state, afflicted with internal problems, could do little to bolster Milosevic against the massive crowds in Belgrade chanting for his ouster or those in Kiev demanding new presidential elections that ended in the resignation of proRussian Prime Minister Yanukovych.

Past Arab Revolutions

The historical and political setting for the uprisings that took place in the Arab world in 2011 was entirely different. No political changes of any significance had taken place for decades, and most Arab leaders had been in power for decades as well. The existing order was sclerotic. Even so, the region had experienced a few revolutions in contemporary times, several of which had far-reaching consequences. Prodemocracy activists who sparked the 2011 uprisings drew no visible inspiration from or made any mention of previous revolutionary experiences. Egypt and Algeria had lived through massive upheavals fully worthy of the name revolution. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s July 23 Revolution in 1952 revamped the entire political, social, and economic orders in Egypt. Nasser and his fellow Free

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Officers exiled King Farouk to France and buried the Egyptian monarchy. They confiscated most of the old aristocracy’s massive landholdings; in 1961 they nationalized all banks, insurance companies, and other major industries as well as small enterprises down to newspapers, cinemas, theaters, and department stores. Over a million acres of confiscated farmlands were redistributed among 320,000 peasant families.4 The Egyptian political order also saw radical change. Nasser outlawed or drove underground the Muslim Brotherhood and the nationalist Wafd and Communist parties to make way for single-party rule under the Arab Socialist Union. The landlords and business tycoons that had dominated the legislature were replaced with workers and peasants in whose name Nasser espoused an ideological mix of Arab nationalism and socialism. He was just as radical in foreign policy, nationalizing the Suez Canal, building the massive Aswan Dam with Soviet (rather than US) aid, and forming a short-lived union with Syria. Whatever one’s judgment of his eighteen years in power, Nasser certainly brought about enormous changes in Egypt’s ancien regime. The Nasser legacy weighed heavily on the thinking of Islamic and secular activists (other than residual Nasserites) about the role of the military in a revolution. For the Muslim Brotherhood, the Nasser era was remembered primarily for the imprisonment, execution, or exile of tens of thousands of its followers. The crackdown came after one of its militants nearly succeeded in assassinating Nasser in 1954. For secular liberals, the emergence of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) as the ruling power after Mubarak’s forced resignation revived the specter of Nasser’s Revolutionary Command Council, which had ushered in dictatorship and crushed freedom of speech, thought, and assembly. Thus it was on July 23, 2012, that Egyptians took note of the sixtieth anniversary of Nasser’s revolution in substantial discord over whether to applaud or denounce it. At that point, the SCAF had heeded the call of liberals and Islamists alike for the military to go back to its barracks and handed over its power to President Mohamed Morsi. Military intervention in politics was very much on the mind of all citizens. Ahmed Maher, a prime promoter of the uprising, called on his countrymen to not celebrate Nasser’s legacy because “the only true Egyptian revolution was last year’s January 25 Revolution.”5 Resurgent Nasserites fired back that there was no way Nasser’s “glorious revolution” could be erased from Egypt’s history or indeed from that of the entire Arab world.6 Morsi, himself a top Muslim Brotherhood leader, sought to straddle the controversy by describing Nasser’s revolution as the “beginning of Egyptian self-determination” that had seen the nation take its “first steps toward democracy” only to see it backtrack for thirty years “due to corruption and oppression.”7

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The second Arab revolution of real substance took place in Algeria immediately on its independence from France in July 1962, ending a bitter eight-year war that had taken a million Algerian lives.8 A new Algerian nationalist elite quickly took over from French colonial authorities, only to find itself faced with truly revolutionary circumstances—the mass departure of a million mostly French Europeans in just a few months. This left tens of thousands of farms, factories, and properties abandoned and up for grabs. The left-leaning nationalists who came to power immediately opted for the Yugoslavian brand of socialism based on worker self-management committees to run the properties, a solution proposed by foreign communists and Trotskyites who were flooding into the country. Within a year, the government had nationalized all abandoned properties as well as the land and most hotels, large stores, and many small enterprises. After three years of independence, the Algerian army under Col. Houari Boumediene ousted the first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, but this just led to the replacement of the worker self-management system with a highly centralized form of state socialism. Because of Algeria’s unique historical circumstances and geographic location far from the Arab world’s center, it never became a model of revolution for the region as did Nasser’s Egypt. Sudan offered another example of revolution. There, two successful civilian uprisings against military rule took place. The first occurred in 1964, just eight years after its independence from Britain. Protracted street protests by students, professors, lawyers, and workers marching under the National Front for Professionals forced President Ibrahim Abboud to resign in November of that year.9 Abboud had failed to deal successfully with the country’s deteriorating economic situation or an incipient uprising in the Christian-led, black African south of the country. His ouster has gone down in Sudanese history as the October Revolution. It was carried out long before cell phones, Internet, Facebook, and Twitter came into existence, when word of mouth was still the main means of communication and just as effective in mobilizing protesters. Events subsequent to Abboud’s departure are worth reflecting on in light of Egypt’s experience in the wake of its 2011 uprising. Sudan endured a very unstable period under civilian government that lasted for five years. It ended with a military coup in May 1969 led by Gen. Gaafar Nimeiry. The return of the military became known as Sudan’s May Revolution. Nimeiry lasted for sixteen years, until April 1985. Once again, a wave of street protests, strikes, and general chaos engulfed the capital, Khartoum, forcing Nimeiry to resign while he was on a visit to Washington seeking a multibillion-dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund for his bankrupt government. A government under civilian rule staggered along for another four years before Col. Omar al-Bashir seized

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power in 1989. Al-Bashir was still in power in 2016, even though the long-running secessionist struggle in the south had finally led to its independence in July 2011, and the central military government’s loss of 75 percent of its oil resources. It seems highly questionable to describe either Sudan’s failed civilian uprisings or repeated military coups as “revolutions,” particularly in the absence of any other substantive change and in the presence of prolonged civil war. Still, its political history of rotating military and civilian regimes looms as a possible scenario, particularly for the Egyptian revolution. Egypt’s activists never referred to the Sudanese experience, but evidence that the Sudan “model” might be replicated in Egypt emerged only two years after the 2011 uprising. In that short period of time, the military had come, gone, and returned to power because of the failure of the first democratically elected civilian government under the Muslim Brotherhood to deal with massive unresolved economic problems or win sufficient public support. Still another kind of revolution has marked contemporary Arab history—one combining ideology and mass mobilization. One example was Baathism (meaning “renaissance” or “resurrection” in Arabic), which tried to combine Arab nationalism and socialism under a Leninist-style vanguard party. It sought to be the main alternative to Nasserism throughout the 1960s and 1970s. One of its theorists and founders was a Syrian Greek Orthodox Christian, Michel Aflaq, the other a Sunni teacher, Salah alBitar. Both were French educated, and together they founded the Arab Baath Party in the 1940s (later the Arab Socialist Baath Party). By 1954, it had become the second largest bloc in the Syrian parliament, with al-Bitar serving in the government as foreign minister. But it did not begin its dominant role in Syria and Iraq until its militants successfully infiltrated the militaries and carried out coups in 1963. Subsequently, the Baathists pushed through significant changes converting both countries from multiparty systems with capitalist economies to one-party socialist states led by military-backed dictators.10 A second example of an ideologically driven vision of revolution was communism. It attracted the most support in Iraq but also produced Marxist-Leninist parties in Egypt and Sudan that attracted an extensive following for a time. Elizabeth F. Thompson in her book Justice Interrupted has documented in considerable detail the success of the Iraqi Communist Party in mobilizing the peasantry and working class against the colonial power, Britain, in the 1940s and then the landlord-backed government in the 1950s. But Iraqi communists failed to compete successfully with the Baathists, who after infiltrating the military used their muscle to crush the communists and establish Baathism as the ruling ideology.11 In Iraq and

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Syria, as in Egypt, the military under an Arab socialist ideology initially brought about considerable social and economic reform but ended by establishing dictatorial police states opposed to change.

The Arab Counterrevolution

Like the great Western revolutions, those in Egypt and Tunisia stirred powerful counterrevolutions from within and abroad. Within, the revolutionaries quickly became deeply divided between secularists and Islamists— with diametrically opposed objectives. Each side held a different view of who constituted the counterrevolutionary forces. For the secularists, the danger came from the Muslim Brotherhood and fundamentalist Salafi groups, whereas for the Islamists, it was centered in a secretive “deep state” composed of ancien regime die-hards still in control of the military, security services, and bureaucracy. But at times, as we shall see, secularists and Islamists united in viewing the deep state as a common enemy out to halt the march of the revolution toward a full-fledged democracy. Abroad, the situation was just as confusing. The secularists feared a counterrevolution coming from the eight Arab monarchies. They fully expected that Arab royals would band together to crush their budding democracies much as the aristocratic regimes within the Habsburg-Austrian Empire had done in response to the 1848 popular revolts. This did not happen except in Bahrain, where Saudi Arabia sent troops in March 2011 to help put down a Shiite revolt against the ruling Sunni monarchy. Elsewhere, the Gulf Arab monarchies actively worked to overthrow autocratic rulers in Libya and Yemen and helped organize, finance, and arm a rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. At the same time, the monarchies did everything possible to thwart similar uprisings at home. They handed out money to quell social discontent, and in some cases accelerated reforms in their realms. King Mohammed VI of Morocco moved the fastest and furthest, promulgating a new constitution, which was approved overwhelmingly in a July 2011 referendum. As a result, for the first time an Arab monarch committed himself to choosing his prime minister from the winning party in parliamentary elections. The king named the leader of the Islamic Justice and Development Party, Abdelilah Benkirane, his prime minister in November 2011. The slowest reformer among the monarchies was Saudi Arabia, which also became the personification of the Arab counterrevolution. The Saudi monarchy had long been viewed among secular activists as one of the main bulwarks against democracy in the Arab world. This assumption seemed fully justified after King Abdullah agreed to provide sanctuary to the fleeing

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Tunisian leader, Ben Ali, and then to champion Mubarak’s cause long after the Barack Obama administration in the United States had abandoned him. The ruling House of Saud was clearly worried about its own fate and that of the other monarchies. It not only came to the rescue with troops of the minority Sunni monarchy in Bahrain, it committed billions in financial aid to Bahrain and Oman. It pushed to include Jordan and Morocco, the two outlying monarchies, in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), composed of the six Arab Gulf monarchies. In a later chapter I show how Saudi Arabia’s general reaction to the Arab Spring uprisings was most often dictated by hard-nosed realpolitik aimed at settling scores with King Abdullah’s personal enemies and gaining leverage over the new Arab democracies in the name of a new order dominated by the monarchies. Contributing greatly to the confusion over defining counterrevolution was the conflict between Islamists and secularists over the meaning of revolution in the first place. The goal of the former was to establish a proto-Islamic state, and their campaign set off a violent reaction among secular liberals who viewed an Islamic state as counterrevolutionary. Two polar opposite narratives of what the revolution stood for eventually led to each side viewing the other as the enemy. This deadly battle between the two camps had been foreshadowed in their tense debate over the phrase “civil state.”12 A new phrase in the Arab political lexicon, it gained widespread currency shortly before the 2011 uprisings as the two sides proffered their conflicting visions of Arab governance. For the secular liberals, the key characteristic of a civil state was the separation of mosque and state. Amr Hamzawy, a German-educated Egyptian scholar turned politician, embodied the liberal viewpoint when he declared “only a civil state can legally prohibit the exploitation of religion” and “the monopolization of . . . religion by the few.”13 A civil state also had to adhere to international standards regarding human rights and freedom of speech, assembly, and religion as well as equal rights for women. In most respects, the secularist notion of civil state conformed to the principles and practices of Western democracy. Islamists were hardly of one mind, however, toward the civil state. The more fundamentalist among them denounced it outright as a Western-implanted aberration and called for the establishment of an “Islamist state” under sharia law. The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, asserted that they supported the idea of a civil state but argued, as did the former Grand Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa, that it had to be “compatible with Islamic provisions.”14 Rafik Habib, a scholar who studies the Muslim Brotherhood, put forth another caveat. The civil state had to be acceptable to “the whole nation.” In addition, he said, the Brotherhood intended to work for a national consensus “to restore the Islamic cultural reference as a means for revival, promoting the national identity and resisting foreign invasion.”15

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Notes 1. See Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?,” New York Times, November 26, 2000. 2. Interview with Ahmed Maher in “Egypt at the Tipping Point,” Occasional Papers Series, Middle East Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Summer 2010. 3. Interview with Nagi Musa Hasabalrsoul, Khartoum, October 21, 2011. 4. The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2, Modern Egypt from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. M. W. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 345. 5. “Hundreds Converge on Tahrir to Commemorate Egypt’s 23 July Revolution, Slain Activists,” English Ahram Online, July 23, 2012. 6. “Hundreds Converge.” 7. “President Morsi Pays Tribute to Egypt’s 1952 Revolution,” English Ahram Online, July 23, 2012. 8. For a history of this period, see David Ottaway and Marina Ottaway, Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). 9. For a history of Sudan’s “revolutions” and military coups, see Robert O. Collins, A History of Modern Sudan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 10. See Adeed Dawisha, The Second Arab Awakening (New York: Norton, 2013), 75–106. 11. Elizabeth F. Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 117–206. 12. For a good review of the term, see Amer Katbeh, “The Civil State—The New Political Term of the Arab World,” Columbia University, Peace & Collaborative Development Network, June 9, 2012. 13. Amr Hamzawy, “On the Necessity of a Civil State,” al-Sharouk, October 18, 2011. 14. Ahmed el-Behri, “Egypt’s Grand Mufti: Civil State Not at Odds with Islam,” Al-Masry Al-Youm, January 11, 2012. 15. Rafik Habib, “Understanding the Riddle of the Modern Civil State,” September 11, 2009, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=20968 (accessed July 7, 2016).

3 Political Causes of the 2011 Uprisings

The desertion by a country’s intellectuals—not just alienation but actively turning against a regime—is one of the most telling indicators of approaching revolution.1 In the decade leading up to the 2011 uprisings, Arab society was marked by the explosive growth of pressure groups whose activities were increasingly directed “toward the radical alteration of existing government.”2 Intellectuals turned dissidents, according to Crane Brinton, are like “white corpuscles” in the bloodstream of the body politics, their multiplication the sure harbinger of revolution to come.3 The desertion by Arab intellectuals and the growth of groups pressing for greater democracy were not just a symptom of pending political upheaval. They became one of its main causes, mainly because of simultaneous mounting pressures from foreign powers and international institutions on Arab government to reform their authoritarian regimes beginning in the late 1990s. The intersection of domestic and foreign forces eventually eroded the legitimacy claims of six long-entrenched Arab leaders, four of whom were eventually swept from power. Arab intellectuals, long silenced in their homeland, found a veritable bullhorn for their biting criticism of the stultified Arab state thanks to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). In 2002 it started publishing an annual Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) with the declared intent of highlighting “how far the Arab states still need to go in order to join the global information society and economy as full partners” and to boost “broad-based citizen participation in political and economic affairs.4 The initial report identified three key deficiencies in Arab societies—lack of freedom and respect for human rights, discrimination 31

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against women, and the disastrous state of education. As a result, the Arab world found itself far behind other countries in what the report called “human development.”5 Twenty Arab scholars and intellectuals contributed to the first report; the lead author, Nader Fergany, was an Egyptian who had obtained his PhD from the University of North Carolina and ran a research center in Cairo. The prime mover of the report, however, had been the UNDP’s regional director, Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, a toughminded Jordanian economist.6 The first AHDR provoked a huge uproar among Arab leaders, particularly the Gulf monarchies and Egypt, which collectively set about trying to stop its publication. Arab League foreign ministers drew up a motion of condemnation, but they failed to obtain the consensus they sought and finally gave up. Mark Malloch-Brown credited the failure to behind-thescenes maneuverings by the Arab League’s Egyptian secretary-general at the time, Amr Moussa, who secretly favored its publication.7 Seldom in United Nations annals had a report stirred so much controversy and still been published. There were more to come. Three years later the AHDR publised “Towards Freedom in the Arab World,” which hit the political nerve center of all Arab regimes, monarchies, and republics alike. It proclaimed the urgent need for a full-scale “Arab renaissance” and identified “the acute deficit of freedom and good governance” as the main obstacle.8 “No Arab thinker today doubts that freedom is a vital and necessary condition, though not the only one for such a renaissance.”9 Reviewing the political landscape for any signs of progress, the report concluded that reforms had been only “embryonic and fragmentary” and found “no significant easing of the human development crisis in the Arab region.” In fact, there had been a marked regression in political participation, increased restrictions on civil society groups, and widespread abuse of human rights, while press freedom ranked at the bottom compared with any region in the world.10 The report declared the main cause of the freedom deficiency to be “the convergence of political, social and economic structures that have suppressed or eliminated organized social and political actors capable of turning the crisis of authoritarianism and totalitarian regimes to their advantage.”11 Fergany was again the lead author, and twenty-two other Arab contributors worked on the report.

The Role of Human Rights Groups

This critique by Arab intellectuals of their rulers and their style of governance traces its origins back to the human rights and prodemocracy groups operating mostly in somewhat clandestine circumstances or exile

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starting in the mid-1980s. The initial spark seems to have come from the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, established at that time by Bahey eldin Hassan, a former journalist turned activist. In April 1999, the institute organized a first-ever gathering of 100 Arab human rights activists in Casablanca to assess the general state of their beleaguered cause. Not surprisingly, their final Casablanca Declaration denounced the double standards on human rights of the great powers, “most notably the United States of America, making a public issue of their deplorable state while continuing to support Arab leaders responsible for it. Overall, they found the picture of human rights “gloomy” across their region and went on to detail myriad abuses taking place in monarchies and republics alike, from the absence of constitutions, legislatures, and independent judiciaries in the former to the rejection of international human rights standards in both.12 The Casablanca meeting gave a huge boost to the human rights and prodemocracy movement, further strengthened and legitimized by the UN-sponsored human development reports that began appearing three years later. Arab governments began to feel the heat. President Hosni Mubarak set out to coopt the movement by holding his own human rights conference. In March 2004, hundreds of Arab and international activists gathered at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, to address “issues of reform in the Arab world.” Much of the time was spent discussing the various deficiencies in Arab society and governance pinpointed by the UN reports. In the final declaration, “Arab Reform Issues: Vision and Implementation,” conferees called for a “comprehensive reform project” to promote “genuine democracy,” allowing for freedom of expression, assembly, and media; elected parliaments; independent judiciaries; an end to states of emergency; and governments held to accountability.13 Not only did participants boldly assert the need for genuine democracy, they outlined a follow-up mechanism to promote discussion and implementation of reforms. Mubarak and his fellow autocratic rulers, of course, worked to make sure this never happened, but pressure was steadily building on Arab regimes to respond. At the next Arab League summit, held two months later in Tunis, they noted dutifully and duplicitously “the noble values of human rights” and committed themselves to “consolidating the democratic practice by enlarging participation in political and public life,” particularly for women.14 They committed to the pursuit of reforms aimed at consolidating democracy through “enlarging participation in political and public life.”15 They even adopted an Arab Human Rights Charter in which the very first article promised “to place human rights at the center of the key national concerns of Arab States.”16 Then the assembled Arab dictators and monarchs went

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home and quickly forgot about the charter. But the United Nations did not. The AHDR for 2009 reviewed the Tunis charter and found that Arab constitutions and government practices were still “inconsistent with international standards.”17 Even so, for the first time the state of human and political rights had been forced to the front and center of discussions even at a summit of Arab leaders.

The US Role in Promoting Uprisings

Arab human rights and prodemocracy activists gained the unprecedented support of the United States probably in no small measure because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which seemed to signal the triumph of Western democracy worldwide. President Bill Clinton had initiated a campaign to assure that outcome in the Arab world toward the end of his administration (1993–2001), and his successor, President George W. Bush (2001– 2009) made it a central tenet of his foreign policy, spending over $600 million on Middle East democracy promotion programs.18 Both presidents felt they had historic winds in their sails following the highly successful US effort to help the countries of Eastern Europe transform themselves into democracies in the wake of the Soviet bloc’s disintegration in 1991. The Clinton administration took the first step by organization an Emerging Democracies Forum in the least developed country of the Arab world, Yemen, in June 1999. Only two Arab governments, Yemen and Morocco, were present among the sixteen other countries in attendance. But for three days, the 200 delegates discussed what the final declaration called the “common challenges we face in the transition to full democracy.”19 The conference marked the first ever held in an Arab country at the instigation of the US government with the official blessing of any Arab state to air the need for free and fair elections and promotion of human rights, civil society, and freedom of speech. The Republican Bush administration took Clinton’s democracy campaign and turned it into a kind of crusade. This was particularly true after the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, in which nearly 3,000 people died. Republican neoconservatives, many of whom had served under President Ronald Reagan, urged the launching of a major democracy promotion drive similar to the one they had led in the 1980s in the run-up to the Soviet Union’s collapse.20 In 1997 these neocon ideologues had written the “Project for the New American Century,” which advocated the use of force to overthrow the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq with the aim of bringing US-inspired democracy to the autocratic Arab world.21

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Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” for the Arab World

Under George W. Bush, the neocon agenda prevailed. The “war on terror” proposed the promotion of democracy as a main antidote to Islamic extremism. Bush began making the case for his “freedom agenda” in the same speech in which he coined the term “axis of evil” in referring to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. In his January 2002 State of the Union Address, he listed his “nonnegotiable demands” for recognition of human dignity, the rule of law, women’s rights, free speech, and religious tolerance in the Middle East and pledged to support “the brave men and women who advocate these values.”22 At the end of that year, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the Middle East Partnership Initiative while speaking at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. Its goal, he said, would be to train prodemocracy groups and activists in a peaceful bid to push for change toward democracy throughout the Arab world.23 Put in charge of this initiative was Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, Elizabeth “Liz” Cheney.24 At a commencement speech at the University of South Carolina in May 2003, Bush took issue with the notion that democracy was impossible in the Middle East and committed himself to helping overcome the “freedom deficit” depicted so starkly in the AHDR of 2002. Citing Turkey and Indonesia, Bush argued that half of all Muslim people already lived under democratic rule. Thus, there was no reason to believe Arabs did not want the same thing. He conceded that the road to democracy would be arduous, but pointed to hopeful signs of reforms already, even in some Arab monarchies.25 Bush set about hammering home his message in every meeting with an Arab leader he met. At a summit at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt in June 2003, he lectured the monarchs of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Jordan as well as the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia, on their need to “recognize the importance of representative, democratic institutions” and promote “broader political participation” in their countries.26 In November 2003, he devoted most of his speech marking the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to arguing for an end to military dictatorships and theocratic rule in the Middle East to overcome the “freedom deficit.” For sixty years, the United States and other Western nations had made excuses for and accommodated autocratic rule there. “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export,” he said. “Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” He promised results.27 Bush’s democracy promotion drive reached its apex in 2004. In the State of the Union address that January, he portrayed his campaign not only as an integral part of his war on terror but as a US national security

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objective. “As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends.”28 Moreover, he put on notice “our friends” (Egypt and Saudi Arabia) that he expected them to take the lead in showing “a higher standard” in pursuit of democratic reforms.29 To show that his administration meant business, Bush doubled to $80 million the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy, which funded efforts to help prodemocracy activists in the Arab world. NED was ordered to focus on promoting “free elections and free markets and free press and free speech and free labor unions.”30 Egypt came in for special attention because, unlike Saudi Arabia, it had at least the rudiments of a democracy: a legislature and regular elections. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled a trip to Cairo in February 2005 to protest the arrest of opposition presidential candidate Ayman Nour. When she finally went in June, she lectured Mubarak publicly: “Egypt’s elections, including the parliamentary elections, must meet objective standards that define every free election,” she said. “Opposition groups must be free to assemble, and to participate, and to speak to the media. Voting should occur without violence or intimidation. And international election monitors and observers must have unrestricted access to their jobs.”31 The Bush administration had already made a veritable cause célèbre out of the prodemocracy activist, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian scholar with US citizenship, whom Mubarak had thrown in jail. Ibrahim had openly denounced Mubarak’s suspected intention to install his son Gamal as Egypt’s next president and derided his regime as a jumlukia, a “republican monarchy.” The US Congress, with the White House’s blessing, threatened to cancel $130 million in economic aid proposed for Egypt in 2002 unless Ibrahim was released. Ibrahim was repeatedly imprisoned and released until finally allowed to go into exile in the United States in 2008. Bush even elevated his democracy promotion campaign to the center of international attention by forcing it onto the agenda of the Group of Eight (G8), the world’s wealthiest nations (United States, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, plus Russia after 1997). The US working paper submitted prior to the G8 meeting in Sea Island, Georgia, in June 2004 referred to the three notable “deficits” in freedom, knowledge, and women’s empowerment that had been so fully documented by the authors of the AHDRs. The working paper repeatedly cited their dire findings and predictions to stir G8 leaders to action in support of free elections, independent legislatures, women’s rights, legal aid centers, education reform, and expanded media freedoms.32 The outcome was a watereddown version of the US working paper called “Partnership for Progress

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37

and a Common Future” to promote political and economic reform across the Middle East and North Africa.33 Bush had succeeded in making the acute lack of Arab democracy an issue of international concern. The impact of Bush’s democracy crusade on Arab leaders varied widely. There can be no doubt that the United States’ two most important allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, felt the heat as they strove to limit its impact. In late 2004 President Mubarak flew to Riyadh to coordinate a counteroffensive with Crown Prince Abdullah, then the de facto Saudi ruler due to King Fahd’s crippling illness. Mubarak publicly denounced Bush’s “ready-for-use prescriptions” to curing the Arab world’s problems “under the cover of what are called reforms and attempts to impose them on the region.”34 The Saudi cabinet issued a formal communiqué asserting that all Arab countries had the right to find and proceed on their own path to reform in keeping with their “Arab identity.”35 Perhaps most distressing to Mubarak and Abdullah was hearing Bush administration officials call for something akin to the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which the West had used to promote human rights and regime change inside the Soviet Union.36 “The results on the Soviet Union we all know,” said the distressed Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal. “It was broken up,” and that had generated “the unhappiest people for at least two decades.”37 Not surprisingly, these US allies had been in the forefront of the Arab lobby working to tone down the original working paper prepared for the G8 summit, which they decided to boycott even as invited guests.

First Fruits of the US Democracy Campaign

In the 2005 presidential election in Egypt, Mubarak allowed opponents to stand for election against him, creating the first contested presidential vote in the country’s history. Thirty candidates put themselves forward to run, and ten were approved. The list excluded any Muslim Brotherhood candidate because the group had long been officially outlawed by the government. More important, Mubarak knew the Brotherhood was the best organized political group in the country and thus a real threat to his rule. To no one’s surprise, Mubarak won nearly 89 percent of the vote, giving him a fifth term in office. The nearest opponent, Ayman Nour, head of the alGhad (“Tomorrow”) Party, won only 7.3 percent on a campaign rallying cry of “Kifaya” (“Enough”). Voter turnout, however, was disturbingly low: just over 23 percent. Still, there was a sense of euphoria among much harassed prodemocracy groups, which had been allowed to monitor the election and report their findings freely. Mubarak had allowed his opponents to voice their

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grievances and civil society and prodemocracy groups to speak out, assemble, and protest freely. Ibrahim, the oft-imprisoned head of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, declared “the real winner [was] civil society.” Prophetically, he noted that the new freedom to campaign, protest, and monitor the election had given rise to a new generation of civil society activists and predicted “that will have an impact in coming years.”38 A lot more significant were the parliamentary elections at the end of 2005. The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) found itself seriously challenged by the opposition, most notably Muslim Brotherhood candidates running officially as independents. Eight parties were allowed to participate in the People’s Assembly elections. In the first round, the Muslim Brotherhood did extremely well, capturing thirty-four of the fortyseven seats won by independents. Secular liberal parties, like Nour’s alGhad Party, won hardly any seats. Nour, by then under fabricated charges of corruption, was defeated. The Brotherhood’s strong showing was perhaps the biggest shock because it had dramatically illustrated its ability to mobilize its constituency as well as its political astuteness. It had run only 161 candidates (for a 454-seat assembly) to avoid antagonizing the NDP excessively and coordinated with secular opposition parties so as to not compete with their candidates in a number of districts. Its slogan was “Partnership Not Dominance,” and as one European study concluded later, the Brotherhood had used the 2005 elections to integrate itself as a major player smoothly into the Egyptian political process.39 The results from the first round of elections frightened the government for another reason: a number of senior NDP officials were defeated, and the ruling party as a whole did extremely poorly. In fact, its ability to win its usual huge majority was suddenly in serious jeopardy. Mobilizing the powerful Interior Ministry and government bureaucracy, the NDP created roadblocks to stop the groundswell for Muslim Brotherhood candidates, including arresting hundreds of local activists. In the end, the Brotherhood managed to capture eighty-eight seats in the assembly, increasing its number of deputies sixfold to emerge as de facto opposition leader. The ruling NDP bloc, meanwhile, had been reduced from 404 to 311 deputies, just slightly more than the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution. Only the return of a large number of independents to the NDP fold after elections ensured its continued undisputed control. Secular liberal parties had been reduced to just nine seats. Egypt’s first experience with more or less free and fair elections had proven a disaster for the autocratic Mubarak government and secular parties alike. The Bush administration’s pressure on Saudi Arabia to take steps toward greater democracy also showed signs of having some effect, although this was a pale comparison to what had transpired in Egypt. In a

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country where political parties were banned and even mention of elections had been taboo for decades, in October 2003 the monarchy suddenly decided “to broaden the participation of citizens” in local affairs.40 For the first time since the 1960s, elections were held in early 2005 for the kingdom’s 178 municipal councils, although for only half the seats and with only men voting. Saudis were clearly skeptical as only 793,432 bothered to register out of a population of 16.5 million at the time. But 9,330 candidates competed for the 608 seats up for election. As in Egypt, the Islamist candidates triumphed after proving to be the most skillful in using social media and grassroots mobilization. Even in the Red Sea port of Jeddah, the most liberal city in the kingdom due to its centuries-long exposure to Western influence, the so-called Golden List endorsed by Islamic clerics swept the voting, taking all seven seats on the local council.41 If nothing else, holding elections in Saudi Arabia demonstrated the mounting pressure for more democracy from within Arab society and from foreign powers, especially the United States. Only after the victory of the militantly anti-Israeli Hamas faction in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections of January 2006 did the Bush administration back off its drive to promote democracy.

The Tunisian Exception

Tunisia, on the other hand, remained largely impervious to this first wave of democracy lapping against the Arab world’s autocratic barricades in the mid-2000s. There President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had been elected by up to 99 percent of the vote in previous elections, continued to manipulate the rules to exclude all serious opponents and preserve a sham democracy by mandating a ceiling for the opposition of thirty-seven seats. He had amended the constitution in 2002 to make himself president for life and increased the maximum age for running from seventy to seventy-five. Unlike Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali gave no space to his main challenger, the Islamic Ennahda Party. The party had been outlawed in 1989 and prevented from running candidates even as independents. In 1991, the government carried out a sweeping crackdown, imprisoning 25,000 of the Ennahda Party activists, including all of the leaders who had not succeeded in fleeing into exile already. Little surprise, then, when Ben Ali was reelected in October 2004 for a fourth term with 94 percent of the vote, and his ruling Constitutional Democratic Rally swept parliamentary elections with an 87 percent majority, giving it 152 out of 189 seats. Even so, Ben Ali felt obliged to make at least cosmetic changes to give his police state the figment of a democratic

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facade. He, too, allowed a truly independent opposition figure, Mohamed Ali Halouani of the Ettajdid movement, to run against him as well as two openly pro–Ben Ali candidates. Analysts noted that for once the president was reelected with less than 99 percent of the vote. Ben Ali had carefully tailored the presidential election law to eliminate the three most serious challengers to his rule. One of them, Mustapha Ben Jaffar, emerged after the 2011 uprising to lead the constituent assembly elected to write a new constitution.42 From Paris, another opposition leader, Moncef Marzouki, denounced the elections and called for democratic resistance to the Ben Ali regime. Marzouki later became the interim president of Tunisia after Ben Ali’s downfall. The third opposition leader, living in exile in London since 1991, was Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi, who called for an end to “the repetition of electoral masquerades.”43 He and his party ruled the country a little more than six years later. Marzouki, a doctor and admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, had been a longtime human rights activist. In the late 1980s, he led the one opposition civil society group allowed to operate legally and challenge the excesses of Ben Ali’s rule—the Tunisian League of Human Rights. As in Egypt, activists in Tunisia coming from the professional classes became the most outspoken opponents of Ben Ali. The league, founded in 1977, constituted the main pressure group for political reform together with the leftist labor unions. The league had developed into a nationwide organization by 1985 with 3,000 members.44 In 2001, Marzouki turned his interest from human rights to politics, founding the Congress for the Republic. After it was banned in 2002, he moved to Paris and became one of Ben Ali’s most vociferous critics. In retrospect, the mid-2000s elections in Egypt and Tunisia marked a turning point, particularly in Egypt. Not only were opposition parties allowed to compete in elections freer and fairer than ever before, in Egypt they were held at least under independent judicial supervision and in the presence of international observers. The ground under Mubarak’s police and military dictatorship was beginning to shake, and the vibrations spurred the ruling National Democratic Party into action. Party leaders launched a campaign to revitalize the weakened ruling body while suppressing (by all means possible) the rising Muslim Brotherhood; thousands of its local, regional, and national leaders were thrown into prison in a bid to cripple its activities. In May 2010, Mubarak renewed the Emergency Law under which his regime had enjoyed a free hand to imprison opposition activists. This time, he was denounced by thirteen different Egyptian human rights groups whose supporters had been steadily multiplying.45

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Egypt on the Cusp of Revolt

The Egyptian government’s campaign to crush the Muslim Brotherhood reached a climax during the next round of parliamentary elections in late 2010, the last before the uprising that finally toppled Mubarak. We deal with their impact on the unsettled political scene in far greater detail in Chapter 7. Suffice it to note here that the government’s rigging of these elections was so blatant that even the Barack Obama administration declared itself “dismayed by the tactics used to secure its victory.”46 Mubarak got the results he wanted: the Muslim Brotherhood was prevented from taking a single seat and his NDP secured 90 percent of the People’s Assembly’s 518 seats. The voter turnout, however, was extremely low: only 10 to 15 percent. Clearly, public support for the Mubarak regime was in sharp decline even though his party had won a resounding victory.47 In retrospect, the December elections stand out as a decisive factor in permanently alienating a large segment of the Egyptian political elite, both Islamists and secularists, from the Mubarak regime. It had made clear it would use any tactics to stay in power. Brotherhood spokesman Essam elArian warned Mubarak he had destroyed “any hope for change by peaceful means.”48 Even more indicative of the turning tide came in the far more dire warning from Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, who had returned home to challenge Mubarak and became an instant rallying point for disaffected prodemocracy and human rights activists. He declared the elections a “farce,” predicting “there will be violence” if the government also sought to impede peaceful demonstrations.49

Tunisia on the Cusp of Revolt

Tunisia had been edging toward the same breaking point since January 2008, which witnessed the onset of strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins, and disruptions of operations at the giant state-run Gafsa Phosphates Company, the country’s main mining industry. The disturbances dragged on for six months in and around three small mining towns in central and southwest Tunisia. Finally, Ben Ali sent in the police and army to crush the protests and arrest their leaders. The causes of the unrest are discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. Worth noting here is the widely diverse group of participants and its main movers and shakers. The French scholar Eric Gobe carried out a detailed study of what he called the Gafsa revolt and discovered that those in the streets were not just miners. They included a mixture of jobless youth, temporary workers, high school stu-

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dents, local labor union activists, and families of unhappy employees.50 Most interesting to future developments, Gobe found that the “key instigators” turning the strike into a revolt had been unemployed university graduates who formed their own illegal union the previous year.51 Here was a new category of Brinton’s alienated intellectuals emerging onto the political landscape. In the wake of the Gafsa revolt, Ben Ali carried on as if nothing had happened. Presidential and parliamentary elections in October 2009 proved to be a rerun of those held in 2004, causing Human Rights Watch to declare: “Tunisian authorities are sadly no more inclined to tolerate criticism during elections than they are between them.”52 Amnesty International was equally scathing in its criticism. “Beneath the façade, there is an entrenched climate of repression in which political parties opposed to the government remain banned or critically hamstrung by restrictions.”53 The election law had been tailored to prevent all serious opposition presidential candidates from standing, this time by requiring endorsement from at least thirty sitting deputies or two years as an elected leader of a legally registered party. These rules again eliminated all but three presidential candidates, two of them unabashed declared supporters of Ben Ali. The president and his ruling party of course scored landslide victories, the only notable difference being that for the first time Ben Ali was reelected by less than 90 percent of the vote (89.4 percent). The only semi-independent opposition candidate in the race garnered just 1.6 percent. The governing Constitutional Democratic Rally swept 161 out of 214 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. A chilling description of the Ben Ali dictatorship on the eve of its downfall can be found in the 2011 Human Rights Watch report covering the previous year. It declared the human rights situation “dire” after a decade in which the government had refused to give permission to any local watchdog groups to operate. Human rights activists and other dissidents lived under “heavy surveillance, arbitrary travel bans, dismissal from work, interruptions in phone service, physical assault, harassment of relatives, suspicious acts of vandalism and theft and slander campaigns in the press.” Only two truly independent civil society groups existed, both of them unauthorized and “regular targets for harassment by security forces.” One was devoted to defending political prisoners, the other to combating torture. The government had blocked all websites critical of its performance and sabotaged email accounts of prodemocracy and human rights activists. Also blocked was access to websites of international groups critical of Ben Ali. The extent of repression had reached the point that the government had sought to end all contacts between ordinary Tunisians and foreigners; it had officially decreed criminal penalties on anyone caught in

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contact with diplomats or foreign organizations affecting “the vital interest of Tunisia and its economic security” or providing human rights information.54 In the autocratic Arab world, Ben Ali was fully the equal of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq in suppressing all dissent and building a vast police state to ensure his personal security.

Notes 1. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 41. 2. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 45. 3. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 41. 4. United Nations Development Program (UNDP), “Arab Human Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations,” UNDP, Regional Bureau for Arab States, III. 5. UNDP, “Arab Human Development Report 2002,” VII. 6. Author’s telephone interview with Mark Malloch-Brown, July 23, 2013. 7. Interview with Malloch-Brown. 8. UNDP, “Arab Human Development Report 2004: Toward Freedom in the Arab World,” UNDP, 5. 9. UNDP, “Arab Human Development Report 2004,” 8. 10. UNDP, “Arab Human Development Report 2004,” 7. 11. UNDP, “Arab Human Development Report 2004,” 11. 12. “The First International Conference of the Arab Human Rights Movement: Prospects for the Future,” April 23–25, 1999, accessed July 14, 2016, http://www .africafocus.org/doc99/nafr9904.php. 13. “Alexandria Statement March 2004,” accessed July 14, 2016, http://www.bibalex .org/doc99/nafr9904.php. 14. “Tunis Declaration Issued at the End of the 16th Session of Arab Summit— May 22–23, 2004,” Al-Bawaba, May 24, 2004. 15. “Tunis Declaration.” 16. League of Arab States, Arab Charter on Human Rights, May 22, 2004, accessed July 14, 2016, http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/loas2005.html. 17. UNDP, “Arab Human Development Report 2009: Challenges to Human Security in Arab Countries,” UNDP, Regional Bureau for Arab States, 5. 18. US State Department, “The Middle East Partnership Initiative,” accessed September 29, 2015, http://mepi.state.gov/about-u.s.html. 19. “The Sanaa Declaration, 1999,” accessed September 29, 2015, http://www.al -bab.com/arab/docs/sanaa.htm. 20. Lorne Craner, “Will U.S Democractization Policy Work?: Democracy in the Middle East,” Middle East Quarterly (2006): 3–10. 21. See Institute for Policy Studies, “Project for a New American Century,” http:// www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/project_for_the_new_american_century. 22. George W. Bush, “Text of President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address,” Washington Post, January 29, 2002. 23. Secretary of State Colin Powell, “The Middle East Partnership Initiative,” speech at Heritage Foundation, December 12, 2002. 24. For details on Liz Cheney’s career, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth _Cheney.

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25. See http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030509 -11.html. 26. See http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/06/20030603 -1.htlml. 27. See http://www.ned.org/george-w-bush/remarks-by-president-george-w-bush-at -the-20th-anniversary. 28. George Bush, “Text of President Bush’s 2004 State of the Union Address,” Washington Post, January 20, 2004. 29. Bush, “2004 State of the Union Address.” 30. See http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/02 /20040204-4.html. 31. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, remarks at the American University in Cairo, June 20, 2005, http://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/rm/2005/48328.html. 32. Al-Hayat, February 13, 2004. 33. “Partnership for Progress and a Common Future with the Region of the Broader Middle East and North Africa,” Summit Documents, Sea Island, June 9, 2004, http:// dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/g8usa/d_060904c.html. 34. Hassen Zenati, ”Mubarak Takes Reins of Revolt Against Bush Mideast Initiative,” Agence France Presse, February 26, 2004. 35. “No Reforms under Foreign Pressure,” Arab News, February 25, 2004. 36. For more details, see David B. Ottaway, The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker, 2008), 221–222. 37. “Kingdom Warns US Against Imposing Reforms,” Arab News, February 20, 2004. 38. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Egypt: Focus on Presidential Elections,” IRIN News, September 12, 2005, http://www.globalsecurity .org/military/library/news/2005/09/mil-050912-irin05.htm. 39. Noha Antar, “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Success in the Legislative Elections in Egypt 2005: Reasons and Implications,” EuroMeSCo Paper 51, October 2006. 40. Pascal Menoret, “The Municipal Elections in Saudi Arabia 2005: First Steps on a Democratic Path,” Arab Reform Initiative, Arab Reform Brief, http://www.arab -reform.net/sites/default/files/EN_saudi__final.pdf. 41. For more on the elections, see Steve Coll, “Islamic Activists Sweep Saudi Council Elections,” Washington Post, April 24, 2005. 42. See Larbi Chouikha, “L’Opposition a Ben Ali et les Elections de 2004,” L’Annee du Maghreb, 2004, http://anneemaghreb.revues.org/322. 43. Chouikha, “L’Opposition,” 5. 44. Susan Eileen Waltz, Human Rights and Reform: Changing the Face of North African Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 138. 45. “Egypt: Twenty-Nine Years of Lies … and Now Two More Years,” Pambazuka News, May 17, 2010. 46. Jack Shenker, “Egypt’s Rulers Tighten Grip amid Claims of Election Fraud and Intimidation,” Guardian, November 30, 2010. 47. Associated Press, “Egyptian Elections: Opposition Alleges Fraud,” Guardian, November 29, 2010. 48. Shenker, “Egypt’s Rulers Tighten Grip.” 49. BBC News, Middle East, December 8, 2010. 50. Eric Gobe, “The Gafsa Mining Basin Between Riots and a Social Movement: Meaning and Significance of a Protest Movement in Ben Ali’s Tunisia,” Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman, Aix-en Provence, 2009, http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/58/26/pdf/tunisia_the_Gafsa_mining_basin _between_riots_and_social_movement.pdf

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51. Gobe, “The Gafsa Mining Basin,” 2. 52. Human Rights Watch, “Tunisia: Elections in an Atmosphere of Repression,” October 23, 2009, http://www.hrw.org/print/news/2009/10/23/tunisia-elections-atmosphere -repression. 53. “Final Results Give President Ben Ali a Fifth Term,” France 24, October 26, 2009. 54. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2011: Tunisia, Events of 2010,” http:// www.hrw.org/world-report-2011/tunisia.

4 Economic and Social Causes of the 2011 Uprisings

Many theorists of revolutions have focused on their economic causes, an approach first made popular by Karl Marx and often propounded as a primary factor today. One of Crane Brinton’s conclusions was that contrary to expectations, economic conditions were actually improving in America, England, France, and Russia prior to their revolutions. All of these revolutions had broken out in societies not beset by “widespread economic misery or depression,” but in those enjoying an improvement in their economic situation.1 Despite growing prosperity, their governments were all facing “unusually serious economic, or at least financial, difficulties.”2 At the same time, there existed within their societies some group or groups that were not benefiting from the new prosperity and felt caught in a “cramp” preventing their economic and social advancement. From this sentiment grew mounting frustration and a sense of being wronged by government, and this eventually led the people into the streets.3 These aggrieved elements varied from country to country. For example, in seventeenth-century England, they were merchants joined by the nobility and small landowning gentry who rose up against the king, while in eighteenth-century France, the Jacobin revolutionaries came from new middle-class elements.4 In twentieth-century Russia, the “liberal noble, banker, industrialist, lawyer, doctor, civil servant, kulak and workingman” together rose up to overthrow the czar.5 Some of these same actors, like lawyers, doctors, civil servants, workers, and alienated middle-class elements, were also prominent in the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. There was one very notable addition to the list of social agents of revolution in these countries: young people, led by jobless university graduates. 47

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The UN Arab Development Challenges Report of 2011 provides an excellent overview of the economic and social challenges Arab nations faced on the eve of the numerous uprisings. It put forth an analysis of the pressures building on Arab governments and societies that soon produced a perfect storm. The broad picture of the Arab economy was of one deeply flawed in structure and unable to cope with the social problems overwhelming society. The oil-led economic growth starting in the 1970s had provoked a “premature de-industrialization” of the whole region that had particularly impacted the non-oil countries. “As a result, entire segments of Arab societies have been left out of the growth process,” leading to across-the-region failure to generate sufficient productive jobs.6 Various socioeconomic distortions had added to rural poverty and broadened inequalities between rural and urban populations. Egypt was the prime example cited again and again, but the same was true for Tunisia. The result had been a “wide segment of Arab societies” enduring the “systematic exclusion from the benefits of economic growth and from decisions” alongside the “ostensible stability for elites oblivious to people’s social, economic, political, civic and cultural rights.”7 Another nefarious consequence cited in the UN study was the collapse of the prevailing social contract between governments and the people they ruled over, wherein the latter had forfeited political freedom in return for state-provided social services like public health care, education, and above all guaranteed jobs in the state sector. Arab governments had failed to keep up their end of the bargain. “In country after country since 1980, the public sector was no longer able to absorb ever-increasing numbers of graduates produced by the educational system.” Nor had governments been able to keep up with the adequate provision of social services for rapidly growing populations. So they had turned to “oppression and suppression of human rights and citizen’s aspirations” and a system of governance notable for the “ever increasing concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a few.”8 The collapse of the social contract had generated enormous tensions, the clearest manifestation of which had been the economic, social, and political exclusion of youth. The report backed up its conclusions with a barrage of human development and poverty statistics that were not as uniformly bleak as one might have expected. Arab countries had done fairly well in terms of human development between 1970 and 2010, and at least three—Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia—had made “remarkable progress.”9 Overall, the Arab region had also registered “respectable rates of decline” on the Human Poverty Index, led by the six monarchies of the Persian Gulf, which had reduced poverty by 45 percent. Algeria and Syria had also done well. Still, compared to East Asia, the Pacific, and South Asia regions, the Arab world lagged noticeably behind.10

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Overall growth rates (compared to human development) were unimpressive, however. Only Oman, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco registered positive results over the period between 1981 and 1990, after which most Arab countries had entered a period of “relatively stable” GDP per capita growth of 2.4 percent, hardly an impressive rate.11 In fact, an earlier UN Human Development Report from 2009 had concluded that for two and a half decades after 1980, “the region witnessed hardly any economic growth.”12 Meanwhile, a huge discrepancy had developed in the level of per capita income between rural and urban areas of many Arab countries. The prime example here was Egypt, where earnings of the peasantry had declined substantially relative to urban dwellers.13 When it came to moving away from an agriculture-based economy, the Arab region as a whole remained “the least industrialized among developing nations, including SubSahara Africa.”14 The UN study concluded that Arab countries were actually less industrialized in 2007 than in 1970. It attributed this to a “conspicuous decline” of productivity in nonoil sectors of their economies, specifically agriculture and manufacturing.15

Tunisia the Exception

Tunisia stood out as the notable exception in this UN study, especially in comparison with Egypt. The former country had seen “the most meaningful structural transformation” in terms of developing its manufacturing and service sectors which together had accounted for 20 percent of its economy every year throughout the 2000s. By contrast, Egypt had failed to move toward making its manufacturing sector a base for its growth and employment. Regarding industrial sector jobs, the number in Tunisia had steady increases between 1975 and 2010, whereas the share of the Egyptians working in manufacturing had declined.16 Tunisia had developed an important textile export business and become the leading Arab country for foreign sales of technology goods like transport, telecommunications, and electrical equipment. Between 1990 and 2006, Tunisia increased the share of technology-intensive products as a share of its manufacturing from 5 percent to nearly 13 percent. On the other hand, Egypt suffered from the decline of its textile industries and exports due to its lack of competitiveness on the world market.17 While Tunisia was well on its way to developing a modern economy, Egypt was struggling due to a failure to develop its manufacturing and services sectors. When it came to job creation, Arab countries generally had enjoyed a respectable average annual growth rate (3.3 percent) among developing regions worldwide between 1991 and 2009. But behind this encouraging fig-

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ure lay another alarming statistic, namely, that throughout the 2000s and up to 2011 they had seen the highest unemployment rates among these regions at 9.3 percent, particularly among those 15 to 24 years of age. In the 2005–2011 period leading up to the uprisings, the jobless rate had reached 24 percent counting both men and women, but 35 percent for the latter. This was more than double the world average.18 If there was any single issue demonstrating the failure of Arab economies, it was their inability to generate enough jobs, which the UN report called “an overwhelming task ahead” for all of them.19 Interestingly, the government that had done the best to create a social security system to alleviate unemployment was again Tunisia. The country was far ahead of others in extending benefits to the jobless, reaching two million people by 2001. It even had a small program to help the poorest with direct cash transfers provided to 115,000 families by 2005 and free hospital care for 717,000 (7 percent of the population).20 Here, too, Tunisia stood out as the exception in the Arab world, which ranked the lowest region worldwide in providing such benefits.21 The main support Arab governments provided for their poorest citizens had been subsidies for key food items, like vegetable oil, sugar, and bread, as well as for cooking gas, natural gas, and gasoline. These subsidies had helped keep the social peace for decades as part of the old social compact. Soaring food and oil prices in the years just prior to the 2011 uprisings, however, had created an enormous strain on budgets for all non-oil-producing countries. This burden on governments was only made worse because of their heavy dependence on food imports due to extremely low levels of local production of key items like wheat, vegetable oils, and sugar. As a result, the cost of food subsidies between 2005 and 2008 had skyrocketed— by more than 300 percent in Tunisia and 75 percent in Egypt. A few countries, including Egypt, had begun taking timid steps toward cutting food subsidies during the 1990s. Egypt had reduced the number of ration cards and decreased the quantity and quality of subsidized bread. Still, the cost of subsidies kept soaring even though, as the World Bank noted, the wealthy were benefiting from them more than the poor were.22 The UN Arab Human Development Challenges Report 2011 highlighted the crisis facing Egypt in particular. It had become the largest wheat importer in the world, and its government ranked among the highest in expenditures on food subsidies. Still food prices kept soaring, even for local products. Between 2000 and 2009, the cost of dairy products had gone up 82 percent; fruits, 139 percent; and vegetables, 102 percent. Yet these were all items in which Egypt was actually self-sufficient.23 Yet another troubling characteristic of many Arab economies concerned the glaring inequalities among different regions within the same

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country. Again, Egypt was the prime example. The same 2011 report calculated that the difference in the percentage of the population living below the income poverty rate (less than two dollars per day) in the richest and poorest of the country’s 29 governorates had reached 60 percent. When it came to “human poverty,” meaning living conditions, the gap ranged from 35 percent to 61 percent.24 Unfortunately, the report did not calculate regional inequality rates for Tunisia, where the issue became a major focus of national and international attention because the birthplace of the uprising was a depressed agricultural region whose main town was Sidi Bouzid. Residents had long complained of gross neglect by the central government and accused it of favoring the coastal areas. This accusation was supported by the UN challenges report, which had described how the government had chosen certain “growth poles” favoring the coast and practiced “politically motivated neglect” toward rural areas because of the persistence of opposition movements there.25 The coast had been favored for two other reasons. First, it was the homeland of the country’s political elite: Habib Bourguiba, the first postindependence president, came from Monastir and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the second one, came from from Sousse. Second, the sandy coast was the natural location for building scores of beach-side hotels to accommodate hordes of foreign tourists numbering close to seven million in 2010.26 (Tunisia’s total population then was 10 million.) Generally speaking, however, the economic causes of Tunisia’s uprising will not be found in its macro statistics. Indeed, Tunisia was a poster child of good economic governance for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The country’s vital statistics were very healthy, with a growth rate calculated at a respectable annual average of 5 percent over the preceding decade.27 Per capita income had risen steadily at 3 percent for a decade, from $2,713 in 2005 to $3,720 in 2010. It ranked as an “upper middle income” country in the lexicon of development agencies. The government’s budget deficit was projected to be no more than 2.5 percent of GDP the following year, exceedingly low by world standards.28

Impact of the 2008 Worldwide Recession

The Tunisian economy had its Achilles’ heels. It was heavily dependent on the economic fortunes of European Union countries for everything—exports, tourism, workers’ remittances, and foreign investment. A 2010 IMF study estimated Tunisia relied on the EU bloc for 75 to 90 percent of its foreign earnings from these sources. For better or worse, its growth rate seemed almost a derivative of those in France, Spain, and Italy.29 For many years, its links to their markets had been very much for the better, indeed,

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a major factor in propelling Tunisia toward a modern economy based on industrial exports and services, which together accounted for 50 percent of its GDP. The international tourism industry earned the country $3.5 billion in 2010 and provided 400,000 jobs.30 Thus it was that Tunisian and foreign economists alike initially feared for the worst when the recession hit Europe in 2008. At first the impact was very noticeable. Tunisia’s industrial production declined and its real GDP growth rate dropped from 4.3 percent in 2008 to 1.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009.31 But then its economy unexpectedly bounced back. The growth rate reached 4.5 percent for the same quarter a year later, thanks to a sustained demand for its manufacturing exports. This fast recovery caused the IMF, in its last report before the onset of the Tunisian revolution, to praise the economy’s “strong fundamentals” and conclude that “Tunisia weathered the global crisis well.” One caveat noted Tunisia’s high unemployment rate, “in particular among educated youth.”32 Only three years after the uprising did the World Bank decide that Tunisia was not the role model for developing countries the IMF and World Bank economists had once portrayed it to be. Instead, it discovered “serious flaws” behind the model’s “shiny façade,” including low productivity, misguided economic policies, and inadequate creation of jobs, “notably for university graduates.”33 If Tunisia’s economy was strong in macro statistics, there were nonetheless multiple signs of spreading social and labor unrest. A lot had been happening in the years leading up to the uprising that reflected deteriorating economic conditions for social groups like the educated youth and labor. In January 2008, thousands of workers had gone on strike in the Gafsa mining basin in south-central Tunisia. This quickly morphed into a regional revolt lasting for six months. According to Eric Gobe, the events surrounding the struggle against the state-run Gafsa Phosphate Company became “the most important protest movement seen in Tunisia since the Bread Revolt of January 1984.”34 It progressively drew in other discontented elements in the area, from jobless young men to high school students and unemployed university graduates. The latter had become “the key instigators” for turning the strike into a revolt, according to Gobe. They formed committees in the towns and villages around the mines to coordinate their uprising and helped the mine strikers negotiate with the big state company.35 The underlying cause of their strike had been a 75 percent reduction in the workforce, from 14,000 men in 1980 to 5,853 in 2006 due to the modernization of the company’s mining operations. At the same time, the phosphate company was enjoying huge profits due to exceptionally high world prices. The immediate cause for the strike had been a list of job openings for 380 workers and mine managers. Jobless graduates felt that those chosen

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discriminated against them and local townspeople in favor of friends and relatives of some local labor union bosses. Four of the graduates went on a hunger strike inside the labor union’s office in one of the small mining towns, Redeyef. The next day hundreds of high school students, other jobless workers, and their families held a demonstration there. The protest began spreading to other nearby mining towns until the whole region of the country was the scene of daily demonstrations, including sitins, road blockages, and marches. One of the roads closed down by protesters led into the company’s headquarters. This tactic stopped trains and trucks loaded with phosphates from reaching coastal ports for export, affecting one of the government’s main money earners. The strike had another interesting consequence. Jobless university graduates organized “defense committees” and even their own Committee of Unemployed Graduates of Redeyef. This later became a national union destined to mobilize unemployed graduates for the 2010–2011 uprising. High school teachers and human rights activists also became involved. So, too, did many local officials of the Tunisian General Union of Labor (UGTT), who in the end turned against the labor confederation’s national leaderships, which had been hand-picked by the government and remained loyal to it. The Ben Ali government did little to put down the movement until mid-March, when police began breaking up the protests, isolating the main centers of agitation, and arresting the revolt’s leaders. This sparked riots and violence until finally the inevitable happened on June 6, when the police opened fire on a street demonstration in Redeyef, killing one protester and wounding twenty-one others. The next day, the army intervened and occupied the town. Police and army together then hunted down protest leaders and broke the back of the movement by the end of June.36 Fortunately for Ben Ali, the revolt never spread beyond the Gafsa basin to garner any significant support elsewhere in the country. But the seeds for a wider revolt had been sown, and Tunisian prodemocracy activists later declared the Gafsa miners’ revolt as the starting point of their “Jasmine Revolution.”37 There were at least three interesting parallels. The starting point for both was the neglected interior of the country. Economic grievances ignited the initial protest, and the same disgruntled social groups were involved—teachers, students, jobless workers, local labor union leaders, and above all unemployed university graduates. University graduates constituted an example par excellence of a group whose economic advancement had been blocked and caught in what Brinton called a cramp. Before the mid-1990s, finding jobs for this elite of the Tunisian youth had not been much of a problem, thanks

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mostly to the promise of employment in the civil service or state-run enterprises. The lack of opportunities had thereafter increased dramatically, to the point where nearly 25 percent of Tunisian university graduates was unemployed in 2010. Indeed, the number of all unemployed with a postsecondary level of education grew from 20 percent at the start of the 2000s to 70 percent at the end. Moroccan economist Lachen Achy noted that there was a “fundamental change in the profile of new entrants to the labor market in Tunisia.”38 At the same time that the government stopped being both the first and last resort for jobs, the private sector was proving itself to be no substitute. By 2010, 60,000 new postsecondary-educated Tunisians were coming into the labor market, chasing 32,000 new job openings.39 The official overall unemployment level stood at 13 percent. The percent of Tunisians living below the poverty level had been cut by more than half over the decade of the 2000s. But even official government statistics conceded 15.5 percent were still living on two dollars or less a day in 2010.40 On the eve of the uprising, Tunisia’s social situation had become explosive. Brinton was right. It was not because of “widespread economic misery,” but the burning discontent among certain social groups, particularly unemployed university graduates but also unemployed or poorly paid workers, civil servants, and youth generally living in the interior.

Tunisia’s Greedy First Family

The economic factor probably most instrumental in making Tunisia ripe for revolution, however, was the business greed of the ruling family. The extended families of President Ben Ali and his second wife, Leïla Trabelsi, had built up an empire comprising 182 companies in the banking, telecommunications, tourism, real estate, and construction sectors, which collectively had outstanding debts to local banks of $1.75 billion.41 The First Family had connected with scores of other businessmen in a flagrant display of what has become commonly described as “crony capitalism.” The extended families of Ben Ali and Trabelsi together had muscled their way into the most lucrative businesses—real estate, plus information technology, telecommunications, transportation, and luxury goods imports. They owned or had an interest in construction companies, cement and sugar refineries, an airline, and a radio station as well as multiple hotels and restaurants. According to Transparency International, a European group monitoring government corruption worldwide, companies controlled directly or indirectly by the extended Ben Ali family may have controlled a third of Tunisia’s $44 billion economy in 2010.42 A

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later World Bank study outlined the vastness of this business empire after examining all the assets seized by the government: 114 individuals, including Ben Ali himself, owned 550 properties whose collective value reached $13 billion, or more than a quarter of Tunisia’s GDP in 2011.43 Many Tunisians had come to despise Ben Ali and his avaricious relatives, particularly the First Lady, because of their business tactics, corruption, and extravagant lifestyle. This was the assessment of the US embassy in Tunis, whose views became public after Wikileaks published a series of cables written by Robert F. Godec, the US ambassador there in 2009. In one cable, Godec noted that “even average Tunisians are now keenly aware of it [corruption], and the chorus of complaints is rising. Tunisians intensely dislike, even hate, First Lady Leila Trabelsi and her family.”44

Egypt’s Nouveaux Riches

Egypt bore similar characteristics of mounting discontent among the same social groups in the midst of rapidly growing prosperity just prior to the uprising. The nation had barely distinguished itself economically for decades but still managed to rank among only four Arab countries exceeding the average annual growth rate of 2 percent between 1970 and 2009.45 Egypt’s economic take-off came only toward the end of this period. Its economy grew as much as 7 percent annually in 2007 and 2008, the latter marking the onset of the recession in the United States and Europe.46 Its GDP more than doubled between 2005 and 2010 to reach $218 billion, growing better than 20 percent annually in two of those years.47 The main reason for this amazing growth spurt stemmed from a change in economic policy starting in 2004. That is when a probusiness group led by Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif came into office, backed by President Hosni Mubarak’s sons, Gamal and Alaa, both businessmen in their own right. Known as “Gamal’s cabinet,” the Nazif government carried out the privatization of the state economy; promoted a real estate boom, particularly in and around Cairo; and opened the doors wide to foreign private investment. Nearly half the 165 deficit-ridden state companies were sold off to private investors in four years. Practically the whole Egyptian economy had changed hands by the time of the revolution; whereas the state had controlled two thirds of it in the mid-1980s, by the end of the 2000s the private sector instead accounted for the same proportion.48 One consequence of Egypt’s “economic miracle” was the creation of a small class of super-rich industrialists, bankers, real estate developers,

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telecommunication moguls, and multinational company representatives. They rose up like Russia’s new oligarchs after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At the core of this Egyptian class of nouveaux riches were 100 families and below them “a few thousand” smaller entrepreneurs.49 Among the most famous of Egypt’s oligarchs was Ahmed Ezz, the “steel king” of the country who had bought up the privatized Alexandria National Iron and Steel Company and built Ezz Steel into an empire accounting for 70 percent of Egypt’s total steel production by 2010. Ezz held a top position in the ruling National Democratic Party, where he was a close associate of Gamal Mubarak in the project to transform Egypt’s state-run economy into a capitalist enterprise. Three other oligarchs came from the Sawiris family, a father-and-sons operation owning a telecom, construction, and hotel conglomerate called Orascom with a net worth of $6.2 billion in 2007. Onsi Sawiri and his two sons, Naguib and Nassef, were the only Egyptians to make the Forbes 2007 list of the Middle East’s richest individuals.50 Their success was all the more remarkable because they were part of Egypt’s minority Christian Coptic community, representing only 10 percent of the population, which complained constantly of religious, political, and economic discrimination.51 There is little evidence that Egypt’s economic boomlet of the mid2000s was trickling down to the middle or lower classes or helping reduce overall poverty. Even a report published by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2008 applauding the Nazif government’s economic reforms found scant signs of progress. It lavished accolades on Egypt for opening up its economy to the private sector, noting that the country had ranked as the “top business environment reformer” in the World Bank’s worldwide annual “Doing Business” assessment for 2007. Still, USAID could not ignore other disturbing statistics. Egypt’s per capita GDP of $5,272 in 2006–2007 “lagged behind all regional and income comparators like Jordan and Turkey.” The only good news was the rate of “extreme poverty,” those Egyptians living on less than one dollar a day—it had declined from 3 percent down to less than 1 percent by 2004. The bad news was that 44 percent of Egyptians were still living on less than two dollars a day, hardly an endorsement of the USAID trickle-down theory of poverty reduction.52 The inequality between rich and poor was particularly pronounced between rural upper (southern) Egypt, where more than half of all the country’s poor people lived, and urban lower (northern) Egypt dominated by its two largest cities, Cairo and Alexandria. One conclusion in the report came in the form of a prescient warning: “Accelerated growth juxtaposed with persistent poverty can generate social tension and instability as people become frustrated by insufficient opportunity for upward mobility.”53

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Egypt’s Middle-Class Crisis

Those most affected by Brinton’s cramp in upward mobility came from its urban middle class and more particularly from its best-educated young people. We owe it again to the UN Development Program (UNDP) that there exists an extensive study of Egypt’s “youth bulge,” published on the eve of the uprising. In that light, the report makes for particularly fascinating reading because its findings were not what one might have expected. It focused on the plight of 20 million Egyptians between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine who accounted for 90 percent of the country’s unemployed. The report found, however, that the number of unemployed men had actually fallen between 1998 and 2009 by one third to 24 percent. But the country’s seventeen universities were overflowing with 1.43 million students, and the country faced an “ever growing supply of unemployed graduates.” This was due partly to the mismatch between their degrees, mainly in the social sciences, and labor market needs for skilled workers. Even young Egyptians who had opted for vocational training schools were not finding jobs.54 The best and brightest generation of young people Egypt had ever seen was beset by social problems of all kinds, from lack of jobs to an acute housing crisis, resulting in reduced opportunities for marriage. In the mist of the 2011 uprising, 343,500 Egyptians graduated with university degrees, 117,000 of whom lived either in Cairo or adjacent Giza, the rebellion’s epicenter.55 Interestingly, in term of the pending uprising, the UNDP study also discovered a remarkable degree of apathy among the youth, who shared a general conviction of the futility of engaging in politics or civic activities. Young Egyptians held a perception of their society as one where the cards were stacked against them because of rampant nepotism, favoritism, and an array of economic and social obstacles. The attitude of 62 percent of those participating in the UNDP survey was that the state should solve their problems rather than the individual taking responsibility for his or her own fate. Interest in democracy took a distant back seat to finding a job.56 In fact, the Egyptian government had created a lot of new jobs. Unemployment and poverty rates had declined somewhat, at least until the recession hit in 2008, jacking up the unemployment rate to 9.4 percent in one year.57 In reaction, the government sought to relieve conditions for the unemployed, primarily through a 37 percent increase in food subsidies, grants, and social benefits.58 Whether despite or because of their economic and social plight, young Egyptians in general showed an amazing degree of political apathy on the eve of the uprising—except for jobless university graduates. The UNDP survey found just 4 percent of young people participated in any kind of

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civic, sporting, or political group, whereas membership in political parties attracted only 2 percent. Eighty-four percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-nine had not bothered to vote in the 2005 election. Use of the Internet among male youth was just 15 percent, and for women it was only 5 percent.59 Fully 86 percent of the 712 Egyptians aged eighteen to thirty had declared themselves “happy with their life.”60 The only sign of any interest in politics came from those holding a university degree; in this category, there were more than twice as many respondents (15 percent) as in the whole sample declaring a “strong interest” in politics.61 The survey concluded that men with a university degree living in urban areas without a job were the most likely to become a problem for the government. “The lack of employment of highly educated urban men (especially) can be one of the reasons that might drive participation in political opposition.”62

Growing Labor Unrest in Egypt

Another group, however, had taken the lead in pushing the limits of protest prior to the uprising. It consisted of an increasing number of disgruntled workers in state-run companies and privatized enterprises. Many in the latter had been been fired, made part-time employees, or forced to work at extremely low wages. An AFL-CIO report written in 2009 declared “the largest social movement Egypt has witnessed in more than half a century” was under way, pointing to an estimated 1.7 million workers who had engaged in more than 1,900 strikes or other protests between 2004 and 2008.63 The Egyptian equivalent of Tunisia’s Gafsa miners’ revolt took place at the state-owned Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in the city of El-Mahalla El-Kubra. “The Mahalla strike,” as it became known, took place at the same time as the Gafsa protests in 2008. Both stood out as the worst occurrence of social unrest prior to the general uprisings in those two nations. Unlike Gafsa, however, the Mahalla strike managed to attract support from some urban prodemocracy activists in Cairo who went on to form the April 6 Youth Movement in memory of the strike’s starting date. Unrest among the Mahalla textile plant’s 27,000 workers dated back to 2006, when they had held their first strike, demanding better conditions and higher wages. For years, they had been paid a monthly salary of $125 with no raises or improved benefits, and they had held periodic strikes and many negotiations with management without achieving any of their demands. What made the strike on April 6, 2008, a turning point was that it suddenly became a rallying cry for a small group of prodemocracy activists. They had taken advantage of Egypt’s newfangled means of communication on cell phones and the Internet to call for nationwide demon-

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strations showing support for the Mahalla workers. Several leftist opposition parties also jumped on the bandwagon, including al-Ghad led by Ayman Nour, who had challenged President Mubarak in the 2005 presidential election. The text of their appeal for support contained many of the same demands and complaints the world heard two years later from protesters in Tahrir Square: “We need salaries allowing us to live. We need work. . . . We need [a] just judiciary. . . . We want freedom and dignity. . . . We don’t want favoritism. . . . We don’t want torture in police stations. We don’t want corruption.”64 The day of the Mahalla strike, April 6, police moved in to break it up. They used teargas, rubber bullets, and birdshot; occupied the factory grounds; and even tried to force employees to continue working. Two people, including a fifteen-year-old boy, were killed in the ensuing mayhem. Only 1,500 of the 27,000 workers actually participated in the strike. In Cairo, police turned out in massive numbers to prevent or break up any street protests, particularly in Tahrir Square. In the end, there was no nationwide strike or noticeable show of public support in Cairo or anywhere else. Even the number of prodemocracy activists who had gathered in Mahalla was relatively small. Still, their efforts to organize a general strike and wider public protest had been a valuable training ground, and the Mahalla strike was later recognized as “a stepping stone to Egypt’s 2011 revolution.”65 More important, it had given birth to the April 6 Youth Movement, which used the momentum gained there to build its membership to 70,000 by early 2009.66 Clearly, the political apathy among youth noted in the UNDP study was coming to an end. Altogether, Egypt’s sudden economic growth spurt in the last half of the 2000s had contributed substantially to worsening the social and economic tensions in society and helped motivate thousands of protesters into taking to the streets. This writer had concluded after a visit in early 2010 that the country had reached a “tipping point” and that its newfound prosperity had “led to high inflation, serious industrial unrest and worsening social inequality; in short, the makings for real political trouble.”67 While more than 40 percent of the country’s 80 million people were living on less than two dollars a day, inflation had reached 13 percent while the official minimum wage had remained the same since 1984 at about seven dollars a day. Even the rising middle class was facing an acute economic and social cramp. Civil servants were struggling to make ends meet on $170–200 a month. The average starting salary of a middle-class worker was around $600 a month, far from sufficient to afford a home in any of the new communities springing up like mushrooms in the desert outskirts of Cairo. Villas with three to four bedrooms in Golden Heights or Sun City Gardens were selling for $250,000 to $350,000, while the

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most expensive mansions ranged from $2.5 million to $4.5 million. In the words of one resident US economist, there was “a lot of conspicuous wealth and a lot of conspicuous poverty.”68 On the whole, the role of economic factors in sparking the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia seems to have been secondary and to have stemmed less from any governmental financial crisis than from the economic and social consequences of rapid growth. Chief among these were a sudden widening gap in wealth between a class of nouveaux riches and the rest of society and a sharp rise in inflation and the cost of living. Although indisputably slow in dealing with the fallout from these developments, governments did not face serious financial crises. The fiscal deficit of the Tunisian government was only 1.1 percent of GDP in 2010, the lowest in years, and only rose to 3.7 percent the following year despite the onset of the uprising.69 That of the Egypt government was considerably higher; it stood at 8.3 percent, but the government had actually improved its collection of tax revenues in 2010 by $26 billion.70 Both countries had on hand respectable foreign reserves: Egypt $35 billion and Tunisia close to $10 billion. Since Brinton’s study, James C. Davies, another theorist of revolution, proposed a variation on the boom theory which he called the J-curve. This holds that revolutions are most likely to occur “when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal.”71 Visually, his J was turned on its side with the curve slopping downward to represent the sudden drop in prosperity. He argued that the consequences were considerable, causing serious disillusionment in those who suddenly found the new prosperity beyond their reach. The result was an “intolerable gap” between expectations and reality.72 The worldwide recession starting in 2008 seems a good example of his J-curve at work. But the IMF and other studies of the Tunisian and Egyptian economics cited herein do not appear to substantiate a sharp drop in economic activity. This only happened after the onset of the uprisings. Egypt’s economy had been expected to grow by 5.5 percent in 2011 but actually dropped to 1.8 percent, whereas Tunisia’s growth actually contracted by that same percentage that year.73 Brinton and Davies agreed that dashed expectations of social groups expecting to benefit from an economic boom in their countries were a motivating cause for turning them into agents of revolution. Brinton argued it produced a cramp, Davies an intolerable gap. For Tunisia and Egypt, these groups included low-paid government civil servants, teachers, and employees in state and private enterprises. But the social stratum most affected consisted of hundreds of thousands of university graduates who expected much from their degrees but found no jobs available.

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Notes 1. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 33. 2. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 30. 3. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 36. 4. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 100–104. 5. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 105. 6. United Nations Development Program (UNDP), “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011: Towards the Developmental State in the Arab World,” 2012, 2. http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/hdr/arab-development -challenges-report-2011.html. 7. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011.” 8. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 4–5. 9. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 17. 10. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 19. 11. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 29. 12. UNDP, “Arab Human Development Report 2009: Challenges to Human Security in the Arab Countries,” 2009, 9. http:////hdr.undp.org/en/reports/regional/arabstates /ahdr2009e.pdf. 13. UNDP, “Arab Human Development Report 2009,” 28. 14. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 33. 15. UNDP, “Arab Human Development Report 2009,” 10. 16. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 32. 17. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 36–37. 18. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 40–41. 19. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 45. 20. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 47. 21. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 46. 22. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 56–57. 23. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011.” 24. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 62. 25. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011.” 26. “Tunisia—International Tourism, Number of Arrivals,” http://www.indexmundi .com/facts/tunisia/indicators/ST.INT.ARVL. 27. “Tunisia: Staff Report for the 2010 Article IV Consultation,” IMF Country Report No. 10/282, September 2010. 28. Lachen Achy, “Tunisia’s Economic Challenges,” Carnegie Papers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 2011. 29. Joel Toujas-Bernate, Boileau Loko, and Dominique Simard, “Investigating Growth Spillover from Europe,” IMF Country Report No. 10/109, May 2010. 30. “Tunisia—International Tourism, Number of Arrivals,” and Lachen Achy, “The Tourism Crisis in Tunisia Goes Beyond Security Issues,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 26, 2012. 31. Toujas-Bernate, Loko, and Simard, “Investigating Growth Spillover from Europe.” 32. Toujas-Bernate, Loko, and Simard, “Investigating Growth Spillover from Europe.” 33. “The Unfinished Revolution: Bringing Opportunity, Good Jobs and Greater Wealth to All Tunisians,” Development Policy Review, World Bank, May 2014, Executive Summary, 16. 34. Eric Gobe, “The Gafsa Mining Basin Between Riots and a Social Movement: Meaning and Significance of a Protest Movement in Ben Ali’s Tunisia,” working paper, Institute de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman, 2010. https://halshs .archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00557826.

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35. Gobe, “The Gafsa Mining Basin Between Riots.” 36. Gobe, “The Gafsa Mining Basin Between Riots.” 37. Tristan Dreisbach, “Protests by Jobless Tunisians Threaten Phosphate Industry,” Tunisia Live, May 2, 2013. 38. Achy, “Tunisia’s Economic Challenges,” 8–9. 39. Achy, “Tunisia’s Economic Challenges.” 40. “Tunisia: Poverty Rate at 15.5 Percent in 2010 and 32.4 Percent in 2000,” Tunis Afrique Presse, December 10, 2012. 41. “Tunisian Banks Gave Ben Ali Clan Billions,” Agence France Presse, February 16, 2011. 42. David Gauthier-Villars, “How ‘The Family’ Controlled Tunisia,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2011. 43. Bob Rijkers, Caroline Freund, and Antonio Nucifora, “All in the Family: State Capture in Tunisia,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6810, March 2014. 44. Robert F. Godec, “Troubled Tunisia: What Should We Do?,” Guardian, December 7, 2010, accessed July 14, 2016, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy -cables-documents/217138. 45. UNDP, “Arab Development Challenges Report 2011,” 29. 46. World Bank, “GDP Growth (Annual %),” accessed July 14, 2016, http://data .worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?page=1. 47. Egypt GDP, http://www.indexmundi.com/egypt/gdp_(official_exchange_rate) .html. 48. For more details, see David B. Ottaway, “Egypt at the Tipping Point?,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Middle East Program, Occasional Paper Series (Summer 2010). 49. Ottaway, “Egypt at the Tipping Point?” 50. Ottaway, “Egypt at the Tipping Point?” 51. Ottaway, “Egypt at the Tipping Point?” 52. United States Agency for International Development, “Egypt: Economic Performance Assessment,” April 2008, accessed July 14, 2016, http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf _docs/PNADL399.pdf. 53. USAID, “Egypt: Economic Performance Assessment.” 54. UNDP and Institute of National Planning, Egypt, “Egypt Human Development Report 2010: Youth in Egypt: Building Our Future,” 6–7, accessed July 14, 2016, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/243/egypt_2010_en.pdf. 55. “Egypt Sees 343.5 Thousand University Graduates 2011,” English Ahram Online, December 18, 2012. 56. “Egypt Sees 343.5 Thousand University Graduates 2011,” 11. 57. “Egypt Sees 343.5 Thousand University Graduates 2011,” 28. 58. “Egypt Sees 343.5 Thousand University Graduates 2011,” 27. 59. “Egypt Sees 343.5 Thousand University Graduates 2011,” 41. 60. “Egypt Sees 343.5 Thousand University Graduates 2011,” 58–59. 61. “Egypt Sees 343.5 Thousand University Graduates 2011,” 65. 62. “Egypt Sees 343.5 Thousand University Graduates 2011,” 66. 63. Jane Slaughter, “Egypt: Today Strikers Took Center Stage,” Labor Notes, February 9, 2011. 64. For text of the strike call, see “2008 Egyptian general strike,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Egyptian_general_strike. 65. Osman El-Sharnoubi, “Revolutionary History Relived: The Mahalla Strike of 6 April 2008,” English Ahram Online, April 6, 2013. 66. Samantha M. Shapiro, “Revolution, Facebook-Style,” New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2009.

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67. Ottaway, “Egypt at the Tipping Point?” 68. Ottaway, “Egypt at the Tipping Point?” 69. International Monetary Fund, “Tunisia Faces Economic, Social Challenges amid Historic Transformations,” Tunisia Survey, September 5, 2012. 70. “Egypt Budget Deficit Beats Target as Tax Returns Rise,” Bloomberg Business, July 20, 2010. 71. James C. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review, 27 (February 1962): 6. 72. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution.” 73. IMF, “Tunisia Faces Economic, Social Challenges.”

Part 2 Stages of the Tunisian Revolution

5 Fall of the Ancien Regime

Sidi Bouzid, a modest farming center of just 40,000 residents, turned out to be the improbable starting point of the entire Arab Spring. Because of its central role in the multiple uprisings that led to the toppling of four leaders, Sidi Bouzid has become an icon for Arab activists. For historians of revolutions, it is likely to remain a tantalizing enigma as to why one particular suicide protest there—rather than similar ones elsewhere in Tunisia that same year—set off such a cataclysmic chain of events. Why and how this happened is the subject of this chapter. Sidi Bouzid lies among olive and almond tree groves in the center of Tunisia. An incident took place here on December 17, 2010, that triggered the unimaginable. It took just twenty-nine days for the Stalin-like police state built over two decades by Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to crack and crumble. The incident that eventually caused his regime’s undoing involved an affable twenty-six-year-old fruit and vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who had gotten into an altercation with a policewoman over his license to hawk goods in the streets of Sidi Bouzid. It was not his first confrontation with local authorities over the same issue, which previously had ended with him paying either a fine or a bribe. This time, it ended quite differently: Bouazizi doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire, triggering protests by family and friends and then tens of thousands of Tunisians who wove together a national uprising. His act of despair quickly became a cri de coeur for millions of Arabs suffering in police states and under autocrats. “His heroic action was the spark the Arab masses were waiting for to start their revolutions against oppression and corruption in almost all Arab states,” intoned the Qatar-based satellite tel67

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evision Al Jazeera, which played an instrumental role in spreading word of his self-immolation first throughout Tunisia and then the whole region.1 Bouazizi was not the first Tunisian to commit suicide in this manner that year. Another despairing citizen had done the same in the coastal town of Monastir the previous March. Then, in early October in Sidi Bouzid, a jobless youth who had been turned down for a small loan to start up a secondhand clothing shop killed himself by drinking hair dye.2 Neither event had sparked a larger reaction. Tunisia hardly seemed the most likely country to experience the first uprising. It is primarily known for its myriad tourist resorts, spectacular Roman ruins, and warm Mediterranean sun and hospitality that attract six to seven million European tourists each year. As discussed earlier, Tunisia had been regarded as pretty well off in the ranks of nonoil Arab states and an upper middle-income nation in World Bank rankings. However, as we also saw, the carefully cultivated image of Tunisia as a prospering nation promoted by President Ben Ali belied a lot of evidence to the contrary. Since 1984 Tunisia had witnessed periodic violence due to sharp food price increases, student and labor strikes, and confrontations with Islamic militants. In January 1984, rioting across the country over a bread price increase had led to the death of 89 people, more than a quarter of the 338 Tunisians who died in the uprising against Ben Ali in 2011. There had been episodes of political strife as well. Ben Ali had come to power in 1987 in a bloodless coup, removing the aging founder of independent Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba. Two years later, Ben Ali faced such a serious challenge to his authority from the Islamic Ennahda Party that he rounded up 5,000 to 6,000 of its officials and supporters, outlawed the party, and drove its leaders into exile. From the early 1990s, Ben Ali had found it increasingly necessary to rule with an iron fist to maintain control and stifle all signs of dissent and discontent.3

The Plight of Sidi Bouzid

How was it possible for a seemingly minor and certainly not unprecedented event in a backwater town in Tunisia’s sun-baked interior to grow into a national uprising capable of shattering a well-organized ubiquitous police state? Was there something significantly different about Bouazizi himself or conditions in Sidi Bouzid? I visited Sidi Bouzid five months after Ben Ali’s precipitous flight in search of answers to these questions. The town indeed embodied the economic and social malaise engulfing much of the nation’s neglected interior. It also reflected the disgruntlement among poorly paid teachers, suppressed union workers, and jobless

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university graduates—all caught in a “cramp” preventing their economic and social advancement.4 The town was still processing its newfound fame with few outward signs of its role as the epicenter of what had become known as the Jasmine Revolution, after the national flower. The name of its main street had been changed from Avenue Bourguiba to Boulevard Mohamed Bouazizi. Officials had erected a fifteen-foot statue of a dove enmeshed in wheat shafts where Bouazizi had set himself on fire in front of the governor’s office. A separate picture of him hung near the top of the statue, which was covered with posters and graffiti scrawled all over its base.5 Conversations with a number of townsfolk evidenced a highly ambivalent attitude toward Bouazizi because of the favors and fame bestowed on his family after his death.6 The family had been compensated and moved to a much bigger home in the upscale Tunis suburb of La Marsa.7 I discovered that Sidi Bouzid had been primed for a spontaneous explosion as a result of a series of protests over the previous year. Farmers had repeatedly demonstrated outside the governor’s office over the lending practices of the National Agricultural Bank, which imposed high interest rates on its loans.8 Official figures indicate 54 percent of the 37,000 farmers in the Sidi Bouzid governorate owned on average half a hectare of land, while only 1 percent held more than 100 hectares.9 The level of illiteracy among farmers stood at 45 percent. Several residents offered one explanation for Bouazizi’s despair: the seizure by the bank of the small plot belonging to his family after it had failed to meet interest payments. Others said that the three-hectare plot in question had not belonged to Bouazizi’s immediate family but to his uncle, Saleh Bouazizi. The bank had paid him a token sum, 2,000 dinars (about US$1,200) and immediately resold it for 124,000 dinars ($75,000).10 The problem for Sidi Bouzid farmers did not stop with the National Agricultural Bank’s exploitation of them. All residents shared a vexing common problem. Shortly after Tunisia’s independence in 1956, President Bourguiba had nationalized the vast French plantations surrounding the town, one of them stretching over 40,000 hectares.11 Little by little, small farmers and aspiring homeowners had encroached on state land without holding title to their properties or the ground under their homes. With no land as collateral, they faced great difficulty in getting bank loans. For example, Rachid Fetini, a local chamber of commerce official, explained to me that he “owned” ten hectares of land, but it remained officially classified as state land. “I have no ownership papers, so I cannot get a loan,” he said. “It’s the same for everybody here. The state owns 80 percent of the land.”12 This also meant that a lot of “homeowners” could not get loans because they did not hold clear title to their land.

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Another complaint was rampant corruption among government officials. Sidi Bouzid serves as the county seat of the governorate carrying the same name. The state-appointed governor’s office and residence are located in the downtown area. Whatever governor was sent from Tunis soon became involved in underhanded land dealings. Among those who had obtained valuable farm land for a pittance was Mohamed Sakhr El Materi, the son-in-law of President Ben Ali and the personification of the ruling family’s corruption. According to the online newspaper Nawaat, he and his wife had paid only $85,570 in 2005 for a 10.5-hectare plot whose real market value stood at $18.7 million.13 The other main source of corruption for governors was the local black market, particularly for gasoline smuggled in from neighboring Algeria, a major oil producer.14 Disdain for the central government among Sidi Bouzid residents had only been heightened by the constant turnover of governors just prior to the uprising—seven of them in the previous six months.15 The Sidi Bouzid governorate has generally been depicted as a prime example of the central government’s gross neglect of the Tunisian hinterland. Under Ben Ali, two-thirds of all public investments were poured into development projects along the coast, mainly to boost the tourism industry. The interior had seen little government spending either to build highways, hospitals, and schools or to stimulate the opening of new industries.16 Sidi Bouzid residents called their main health facility a “death hospital” because of its lack of services and doctors. The town’s officials complained of few opportunities for professionals of any kind. In 2011, the town had 13,000 university graduates unable to find jobs, according to the local chamber of commerce.17 According to a labor union study of economic and social conditions there, the overall unemployment rate was twice the national average and was 45 percent among women university graduates.18 It had 130 lawyers, “most doing poorly” according to the chamber’s officials.19 Still, Sidi Bouzid could hardly be described as dirt poor. Some new investments had been made just before the uprising. The government was building a new technology vocational school and had started clearing a tract of sixty-five hectares for 3,000 new homes. Work had also been under way for some months to enlarge and beautify the main highway leading into the town.20 Nor was the town bereft of all sources of income. The Sidi Bouzid governorate was the most important producer of vegetables in the country and one of its most important dairy centers. It boasted at least one important enterprise—the German Steiff toy company, which claimed authorship of the venerable teddy bear dating back to 1902. The company had come to Sidi Bouzid soon after independence to take advantage of low labor costs. In 2011, it employed 1,000 workers, mostly women, at its factory in the town’s center. Steiff alone accounted for one third of the total

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workforce of 3,000.21 Thus it was that the birthplace of the Arab revolution turned out to be the site of a major manufacturer of world-famous stuffed teddy bears and dolls.

Sidi Bouzid Explodes

The conventional account of what had happened on December 17, 2011, was the following. In great anger and frustration, Bouazizi had gone to the governor’s office on Avenue Bourguiba to retrieve the weighing scale that an overbearing municipal police inspector, Fadia Hamdi, had confiscated from his cart because he had not paid his vendor’s street license. Hamdi, a woman, was reported to have slapped Bouazizi on the face during their altercation, a particularly humiliating gesture for a Tunisian man, and this was blamed for driving him “over the edge.”22 By the time Bouazizi got to the governor’s office, it was 1:15 p.m. on a Friday, and it was closing. He was told to come back the next morning. Instead, he grabbed a container of gasoline and ran into the center of Bourguiba Avenue in front of the governor’s office. There, he set himself on fire. Bystanders rushed to extinguish the blaze, but not before it had burned more than 80 percent of his body. Bouazizi was rushed to the town hospital and then transferred to a specialized burn facility in Tunis, where he began an agonizing struggle for his life that ended eighteen days later on January 4. By midafternoon, several thousand irate residents gathered in front of the governor’s office to protest the way local authorities had treated Bouazizi, who after seven years of plying his trade had become a wellknown figure in the town. The crowd grew larger, and protesters began tearing up cobblestones from the side streets and hurling them at the police, who responded with teargas. The protests continued into the night and resumed early the next morning, by which time the government had sent in police reinforcements, provoking clashes with demonstrators across the town. From the start, primary and secondary schoolteachers were in the forefront. They quickly became the principal organizers of the demonstrations, together with local labor union officials. Three days later, other nearby towns began to erupt in street protests, and day by day they spread across the country until on December 27 they finally reached Tunis. There, the first demonstration took place outside the headquarters of the Tunisian General Union of Labor (UGTT) in the city’s center.23 Bouazizi never made public an explanation for his actions. He was hardly unique in living on life’s edge in Sidi Bouzid. Scores of similar vendors sold their wares in the streets, particularly around the town’s main market. Local merchants there loathe the competition. The main known irritant

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in Bouazizi’s life had been the municipal inspectors, who periodically levied a fine on him for not having a license that obliged him to pay the equivalent of $7 to get his weighing scale back from the municipality. There had been a running feud between street vendors and market merchants for some time, the latter pressing town officials to crack down on the former. This at least helps explain the behavior of police inspector Hamdi.24 Whether Bouazizi suffered greater harassment than other street vendors remains unclear. What does seem clear from various press accounts at the time was the sad state of his personal life that had become an unending struggle to keep his family afloat.25 His father had died when Bouazizi was three years old. His mother had then married the father’s brother and given birth to a total of six children over the years. Since his stepfather was unemployed most of the time, young Mohamed had become the family’s main breadwinner, working at odd jobs starting at fourteen. He had managed to make it through high school, but without taking the final exam that might have allowed him access to a university.26 At nineteen, Bouazizi had become a full-time street vendor, and this required him to travel regularly to a nearby town to get his fruits and vegetables without the benefit of owning his own car or truck. Many initial press reports reported that what caused Bouazizi to snap was the humiliation of being publicly slapped in the face by a female police inspector.27 The only problem with this psychological explanation for his behavior is that it probably never happened.28 The inspector, Hamdi, was later exonerated at her trial on April 19, after Ben Ali had ordered her arrest and she had spent four months in prison. Bouazizi’s mother, Mannoubiya, dropped all charges against her, probably because of conflicting witness accounts of her supposed slap. While one fellow street vendor claimed she had slapped him, six other witnesses at the scene said it never happened. Hamdi herself insisted from the start and repeated again in court, “I did not slap him.”29 She admitted that she had confiscated some of his bananas and peppers in retaliation for his grabbing her hand and hurting her fingers. She had also impounded his scale and cart and told him to retrieve his property at the governor’s office.30 These conflicting versions illustrate the hazards of searching for the historical truth about the origins of the spark that set off a nationwide uprising.

Revolt Spreads from Sidi Bouzid to Tunis

How Bouazizi’s self-immolation became a national cause célèbre is easier to explain. It involved a unique combination of social media, the labor unions, and an alienated middle class. The role played by the social media

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began at a small mobile phone shop located a few hundred yards from the governor’s office. Some of the townspeople who gathered that fateful afternoon took photos of the swelling crowd with their cell phones.31 They ran to the shop to relay their pictures to the Qatar-based satellite television station Al Jazeera, which had no correspondents in the country at that time. Al Jazeera posted the pictures on its website and relayed them back to Tunisia on its broadcasts. These “netizens” continued to document protests that took place the next day when the confrontation between protesters took on larger proportions. Soon the pictures were being posted on Facebook and thousands of blogs in a country where 3.5 million out of 10 million use the Internet and 1.6 million have pages on Facebook.32 Al Jazeera and Facebook were crucial enablers for spreading the news about what was happening in Sidi Bouzid and for bypassing the central government’s elaborate system of censorship through the state-controlled media. The labor unions, on the other hand, quickly became the main provider for a national network of activists who would become the principal organizers and coordinators of protests across the country. The UGTT had remained the only surviving semi-independent national institution in the country under the Ben Ali regime. It was actually a confederation of unions from nineteen different state and private sectors with twenty-four regional and twenty-one local branches with a total membership of 500,000.33 Although its national leadership was chosen by Ben Ali and followed his orders, many of its myriad branches were led by militant leftists who detested his rule and engaged in unauthorized strikes in defense of their members’ interests. The pivotal role played by the labor unions in Ben Ali’s overthrow stands out as probably the most unique feature of the Tunisian revolution in comparison with the Egyptian one or the other uprisings of 2011.34 Nor was there any parallel in the revolutions of Brinton’s study. In Sidi Bouzid, the local UGTT mobilized immediately. Its officials called a meeting the day after Bouazizi’s self-immolation and decided to form a “support committee” to organize sustained demonstrations in the following days. The union of secondary teachers began reaching out to other UGTT offices in towns around Sidi Bouzid, asking them to organize similar protests, according to Lazher Gharbi, principal of the French-Arab School there.35 The secondary teachers’ union with 50,000 members was among the most militant on economic and political issues. The most recent general strike of secondary teachers had taken place in October, just two months before the uprising began; they demanded higher wages and fixing the retirement age at fifty-five. In Sidi Bouzid, the teachers had defied police during the October strike and turned it into a political rally to denounce the government’s neglect of the region and demand steps to alleviate its chronic poverty.36

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Just as had happened during the 2008 Gafsa mining strike, Ben Ali’s first reaction to the outbreak of violence in Sidi Bouzid was to launch a harsh crackdown. According to Gharbi, 6,500 riot police troops were sent to suppress the demonstrations, and the town quickly became “a war zone” as thousands of protesters put up barricades, burned tires in the streets, and threw Molotov cocktails. Protesters held rallies during the day and clashed with police at night.37 Joining the protests in large numbers were high school students, who had begun their winter break on December 15. Gharbi said it took a full week before protests began to erupt in nearby towns, though another account of the uprising indicated that students began holding rallies elsewhere (Kasserine, Gafsa, and Sfax governorates) within three days.38 There was no dispute that the first protest in the capital did not take place until December 27. Held in front of the UGTT’s national headquarters, the demonstration was organized once again by teachers who were quickly disavowed by the national leadership. Its secretary-general, Abdessalem Jrad, declared the protest “only a passing cloud in the sky.”39 Not until January 4, the day Bouazizi finally died, did the UGTT’s national executive finally declare its “solidarity with the people of Sidi Bouzid and all the regions of the interior.”40 By then, many UGTT local and regional unions across the country were busy organizing daily demonstrations and strikes. The first UGTT-organized strike in Tunis, however, did not take place until January 14, the day Ben Ali fled the country. The day before, the president had pleaded for the UGTT to call off the strike, but by then even its subservient secretary-general realized he could do nothing to stop it, warning the besieged president, “Don’t count on me.”41

The Middle Class Abandons Ben Ali

Ben Ali could no longer count for support on Tunisia’s large middle class. The business community in particular was fed up with the Mafia-like First Family, which had come to view much of the economy as its private domain. As already discussed in Chapter 4, the extended families of Ben Ali and his wife, Leïla Trabelsi, had established a vast system of state cronyism with their favored business partners owning 182 companies and accounting for between a quarter and a third of the country’s entire GDP in 2011.42 The public extravagant lifestyle of the Ben Ali–Trabelsi families had provoked growing resentment within the country’s relatively well-off middle class, a swelling tide that had caught the attention of former US Ambassador to Tunisia Robert F. Godec. He had warned Washington of the smoldering discontent in his cables, obtained by Wikileaks and published

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by the Guardian in London and Al-Akhbar in Lebanon two weeks before the uprising. In the one dated July 17, 2009, he had summed up succinctly the dilemma facing both Tunisia and the US government in these words: “Ben Ali is aging, his regime is sclerotic and there is no clear successor.”43 It is difficult to determine whether disclosure of the Godec cables made any difference in convincing middle-class Tunisians to join the uprising en masse. They had not done so nine months earlier after a similar incident. In March 2010, another street vendor, Abdesselem Trimech, had died after setting himself ablaze in protest over the confiscation of his street wagon in the coastal town of Monastir. A large crowd—one report said 50,000—turned out for his funeral, news of which also reached YouTube and Facebook.44 But Trimech’s self-immolation had failed to touch off a larger protest. One possible explanation was that his act took place inside city hall rather than out in public, and thus there were few witnesses. Trimech died within a few days, while Bouazizi’s agony continued for eighteen days, and it gained nationwide media attention after Ben Ali himself visited Bouazizi at his hospital on December 28.45 UGTT officials in Sidi Bouzid offered another explanation: Monastir had long been favored for investment in the tourism industry because it was on the coast and happened to be Bourguiba’s birthplace. Monastir was well off, not a center of boiling discontent like Sidi Bouzid.46 Between March and December 2010, however, the public attitude toward Ben Ali was changing rapidly, even among Tunisian businessmen. Fares Mabrouk, a young entrepreneur and founder of the Arab Policy Institute in Tunis, cited as one cause yet another involving the First Family that came to light just a few days before Bouazizi’s act. This time it was Belhassen Trabelsi, the brother of Leïla Trabelsi, who intended to buy yet another company, this time for $600 million. “It was a reminder of the extremes of wealth and disparities in the country,” Mabrouk commented.47 Perhaps the answer to “why then” is that by December Tunisians of all social classes had reached the point of feeling that enough was enough and, like Godec, had come to the conclusion the country would be better off without Ben Ali, even if his successor was unknown.

Ben Ali’s Precipitous Flight

Why did a dictator with a seemingly ironclad grip on power decide to flee his country in such haste? Why did such a ubiquitous police state crumble so fast? One principal reason was the behavior of the army. One conclusion Crane Brinton drew from the classic Western revolutions he studied was that “No government has ever fallen before revolutionists until it has lost

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control over the armed forces or lost the ability to use them effectively.”48 This certainly proved to be the case for Ben Ali. A force of only 35,000, the Tunisian army had strictly maintained its tradition of staying out of politics ever since the country’s independence in 1956. Only about half of the army’s total manpower consisted of deployable troops, and it had only half as much equipment as other security services. Ben Ali had built up the Interior Ministry’s forces instead, and by the time of the uprising he had quadrupled the combined size of the National Guard and National Security Police to 150,000 men.49 In the end, ironically, Ben Ali turned to the army in a bid to quell the uprising and then save himself from the crowds in the capital. But he found that its chief of staff, Gen. Rachid Ammar, was an unwilling partner, particularly in the critical events of Ben Ali’s last days in power. On January 12, 2011, Ammar had finally agreed to Ben Ali’s request to deploy the army in and around Tunis, but he also declared he would not order his troops to open fire on protesters.50 Ammar had already begun detaching the army from the task of defending Ben Ali two days earlier, when he refused to take orders from Ali Seriati, commander of the 5,000-man Presidential Guard.51 As a result of his neutrality, Ammar emerged from the uprising a national hero, particularly after he publicly pledged a few days after Ben Ali’s flight to safeguard “the revolution.”52 A public opinion poll taken in May 2011 showed Ammar enjoying the highest approval rating of any Tunisian public figure at that time.53 The neutrality of the army was a main reason for Ben Ali’s downfall, but not the only one. The entire police state had crumbled before the rising tide of the uprising. By January 14, the day of Ben Ali’s flight, protesters engulfed the capital, and the UGTT called for a general strike. In front of the Interior Ministry, a crowd of 30,000 people chanted for Ben Ali to go. Some of the protesters had already invaded and sacked the homes of several of the president’s relatives and in-laws in the upscale suburbs of Tunis. Throughout the capital, law and order had broken down and the army refused to restore it. Ammar had also demurred when asked to protect the First Family’s private properties against looting. The president became desperate. On January 13, he delivered what turned out to be his last address to the nation, offering sweeping economic and political reforms, including a pledge not to run for president in 2014.54 But his conciliatory gesture was too little and far too late to save himself. There are three detailed accounts on what happened on the fateful day of January 14, including one written by Leïla Trabelsi Ben Ali.55 The other accounts are based on depositions by principal security and political officials made to a special government investigator set up later to determine who had done what that day. All three versions concurred that enormous

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confusion reigned among the myriad security forces Ben Ali had created to protect himself. They had all became highly suspicious that one or another among them was plotting a coup against the president, but none knew for certain which one might be involved. As a result, they misinterpreted each other’s requests, orders, and actions and ended up working at cross-purposes. The belief that a coup was under way apparently stemmed from the mysterious arrest of twenty-eight members of the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families at Tunis’s international airport as they were waiting to board a flight for France. The decision to detain them had been made by the head of a ten-man unit belonging to the Anti-Terrorist Brigade of the national police, Samir Tarhouni, who was sympathetic to the uprising and determined not to allow any Ben Ali family members to escape justice. Later, he admitted he had acted at his own initiative, but none of the commanders of the army, Interior Ministry, police, National Guard, or presidential security knew this at the time. Instead, each security service thought a coup was taking place and that a rival one was maneuvering to oust Ben Ali. According to Trabelsi’s account of events, her husband never intended to leave the country at all. He had been tricked by the head of his own security, Seriati, into boarding a plane that had been hastily prepared to transport her and a few other family members to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on the pretext that they were going on pilgrimage to Mecca. Not until the very last minute on the tarmac outside the departing plane had Ben Ali decided to join them after Seriati insisted that he should leave for his own safety and then return once order had been restored.56 The plane’s official manifest had not even listed Ben Ali as one of the passengers.57 The aircraft took off at precisely 5:47 p.m. with Ben Ali aboard. Trabelsi wrote that he had seemed at first bewildered at the sudden turn of events. But bewilderment turned into rage as he became aware over the next few hours that his most trusted aides, including Seriati and his prime minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, had no intention of seeing him return. The conclusion Noureddine Jebnoun had reached after a detailed study of all the official depositions seemed accurate: “Ben Ali’s decision to leave the country was improvised, unexpected and took many senior security forces by surprise.”58

The Revolutionaries Struggle for Power

After Ben Ali’s flight into exile, an initial struggle for power ensued between secular leftists and moderates that quickly gave way to a far more serious and permanent one between all secularists and Islamists. Moderate secularists won the first round, and the defeat of the leftists proved

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critical in shaping the character and aims of the Tunisian revolution, limited to changing the system of governance and leaving intact the social and economic order of the ancien regime. Of far more enduring consequence, however, was the emergence of the Islamic Ennahda Movement as a major political force. Ennahda and the even more fundamentalist Salafis were destined to replace Tunisia’s socialists and communists as Brinton’s extremists in the unfolding revolution, at least according to the secular narrative. The first indication of the extremely moderate course the revolution was to take came over the question of who would serve as interim president and prime minister. Protesters rose up against an attempt by Ben Ali’s prime minister, Ghannouchi, to remain in office. Caravans of youth coming from Sidi Bouzid and other towns of the interior invaded the capital and occupied the Place de la Kasbah outside the government’s offices twice. One hundred thousand people—the largest demonstration of the revolution after Ben Ali’s departure—took place on February 25 to demand that Ghannouchi leave, and two days later he resigned.59 But then revolutionaries readily accepted another stalwart of the old ruling elite, Beji Caid Essebsi, to take Ghannouchi’s place. Then eighty-four years old, Essebsi had served since independence in various high-ranking positions, first under Bourguiba and then under Ben Ali. He had been head of national security and alternatively the minister of the interior, defense, and foreign affairs as well as member of Parliament. His saving grace in the eyes of the country’s young revolutionaries was that he had retired from politics altogether and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before resurfacing after Ben Ali’s exile. This had given him at least the appearance of clean hands. More surprising was the lack of serious protest over Fouad Mebazaa becoming interim president for he, too, had been a stalwart of the ancien regime—president of the Chamber of Deputies (a house of Parliament) and a politburo member of Ben Ali’s ruling Constitutional Democratic Rally. The group that emerged as the first main interim decisionmaking body carried the awkward title of the “High Authority for the Achievement of the Revolution’s Objectives, Democratic Transition and Political Reform. It was established February 22, 2011, and became Tunisia’s de facto parliament for the following nine months. During that period, Tunisians of all political shades took to the street by the thousands almost daily to make known their demands and grievances. More than once, the country appeared on the brink of chaos.60 That prospect was frightening enough to convince twenty-eight political parties, a collation of youth groups, and the UGTT to agree on the formation of the High Authority with the intent of countering and neutralizing the distrusted interim government led by ancien regime figures. Had

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Tunisia’s power-hungry leftists had their way, the course of events might have taken on a far more radical and secular character.61 A week after Ben Ali fled, a coterie of these leftists formed the 14th of January Front and called for an alternative interim government under its authority, according to Yadh Ben Achour, the law professor drafted to lead the High Authority. The front’s bid for power was blocked by Prime Minister Ghannouchi just before he was forced to resign on February 27. Fearing a leftist coup, Ghannouchi had convinced these revolutionaries to merge with a group of more moderate lawyers and other activists he had appointed to draft political reforms in the immediate wake of Ben Ali’s ouster. Ben Achour, a highly respected university constitutional law professor, agreed to chair the High Authority, which soon grew to 155 members. The radicals thus found themselves in the minority, sharing power with a coalition that included representatives from twelve Islamist and secular political parties; the country’s twenty-four governorates; and sixteen human rights, women’s rights, and prodemocracy groups, plus UGTT delegates. Added to the mix were seventy-two leading national political figures, the Union of Jobless University Graduates, two members of the Bouazizi family, and a number of relatives from protesters killed by police during the uprising.62 This unelected High Authority, its legitimacy repeatedly challenged by Islamists, had to make some difficult decisions to steer Tunisia safely through very turbulent political waters prior to elections for a Constituent Assembly in late October. Ben Achour, who had had no previous experience in politics, found the task to be a jarring experience. The revolution had set loose “all kinds of irrational behavior.” Tunisians had gone from “nothing to an excess of everything” in their ways of thinking, acting, and speaking out. He found his office flooded with proposals for a new constitution, including several from “mentally unstable” people urging everything from “technological politics” to rule by three co-presidents. Ben Achour said he was quickly reminded that “often revolutions fail.”63 The first issue the High Authority resolved was an election law, published on April 11. It included an unusual requirement, namely, that half the candidates on each party’s electoral list had to be women. No other Arab country before or since has had anything remotely resembling such an electoral provision, but all parties, including Ennahda, endorsed it. Tunisian commentators were quick to note that men were likely to be placed at the top of the list, ensuring many more male than female deputies. (This indeed turned out to be the case with only 49 women finally winning seats among the National Constituent Assembly’s 217 deputies.) The second issue before the High Authority proved far more controversial and almost upended the whole transitional process: whether to post-

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pone elections for the assembly, initially scheduled for July. The debate immediately created battle lines between Islamists and secularists on some issues and between leftists and both Islamists and remnants of the ancien regime on others. Ennahda had been banned from Tunisian politics since the early 1990s. Even so, secularists immediately assumed it to be the best organized and financed party, and they wanted more time to organize, hoping to level the playing field. The High Authority found a pretext to postpone elections, namely, that the government could not recruit the 24,000 officials needed to oversee them by the original date of July 24. So they were postponed until October 23. The interim government, which had been left in the dark, at first rejected any postponement but then reversed itself. Ennahda was so disgruntled that it suspended its participation in the High Authority at the end of May, complaining that it had been excluded from the decisionmaking process and that the body had no legitimacy because it had not been elected.64 By June 2011, an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and deep distrust among contending factions had already settled across the political landscape.65 The interim government’s first Interior minister, Farhat Rajhi, who had been sacked in late March, warned on his Facebook page on May 4 that elements of the ancien regime were plotting a military coup should Ennahda win the elections.66 The military immediately made clear that it had no such intention, but by then suspicion of conspiracies led by either former regime figures or Ennahda supporters were rife. Secularists conjured up dire scenarios for Tunisia should the Islamists prevail at the polls, as was generally expected. Few seemed reassured by Ennahda’s SecretaryGeneral Hamadi Jebali that his movement was committed to a “civil state” in which state and mosque would be kept strictly separated.67

The Rise of Ennahda

Tunisia’s Islamists had played no role in the uprising because Ennahda’s leadership and most of its cadre were still in jail or exile. Only on January 30 did its leader, Rached Ghannouchi, return from twenty-three years of living abroad, most of the time in London. He had been cofounder in 1981 of the Islamic Tendency, which had been renamed the Ennahda Movement eight years later. He had gained stature among Tunisia’s Islamists similar to what Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, held among those in Egypt. During his long years in exile, Ghannouchi had established himself as one of the Islamic world’s most thoughtful moderate religious scholars. His movement had been tainted, however, by the August 1987 bombing of four hotels in Sousse and

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Monastir, which Ben Ali had used as a pretext to ban Ennahda from politics two years later. Ghannouchi, then sixty-nine years old, received a tumultuous welcome from his followers upon his return, stirring fears among secularists that Ennahda was mostly likely to win Tunisia’s first authentic democratic elections.68 A general amnesty of the 3,000 political prisoners from the Ben Ali era, at least one third of them Islamists, only came on February 19, more than a month after the president’s exit. Ben Ali had allowed the even more conservative Salafis to organize and preach on the condition they stay out of politics. So they did, even during the uprising that overthrew their benefactor. I had attended Ghannouchi’s press conference on June 6, 2011, marking the thirtieth anniversary of Ennahda’s founding, during which he said everything he could to assuage secularists’ fears. “Tunisians on every street are breathing freedom and we intend to preserve that,” he said. “We do not intend to be the only party and will not accept a one-party system ever again.” Ennahda would “refuse to allow our mosques to be taken over by political parties to give political messages as the old regime did.” There would be no going back, either, on the gains Tunisian women had made since independence. “Equal rights for women are guaranteed in the current constitution and we do not wish to change it. . . . You [women] have nothing to fear from us.” Furthermore, Ennahda intended to form a coalition with secular parties for the October elections and afterward if it won, in forming a government.69 Even in Ghannouchi’s assessment at that point, the revolution was not going altogether in the right direction. The formation of political parties was out of hand, with eighty-three officially registered as of early June. The High Authority had lost its credibility and succumbed to “authoritarianism.” Unidentified elements were working to derail the revolution by postponing elections “perhaps indefinitely.” Ghannouchi was referring to a proposal that had been put forth by seventeen secular parties, some associated with the ancien regime, suggesting that instead of electing a constituent assembly Tunisians should hold a referendum approving the existing 1959 constitution with a few amendments.70 Ghannouchi was also worried about plots from abroad seeking to block Ennahda’s march to power, mainly coming from France, whose government (then under President Nicolas Sarkozy) had been Ben Ali’s major foreign supporter. His foreign minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, had offered to send French paratroopers to help put down the uprising just before he fled the country. She resigned February 27 over her controversial remarks and the disclosure she had flown on a private jet owned by a Ben Ali business associate in the midst of the uprising. Early on Ghannouchi

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adopted a strategy to counter possible French machinations by seeking the support of the Barack Obama administration in the United States. To succeed, he had to convince Washington that he and his Islamist followers were committed to multiparty democracy based on the separation of religion and state. So it was that Secretary-General Jebali went to Washington in May 2011, the first of many Ennahda delegations that were to lobby the administration, Congress, and various think tanks over the next three years. Jebali’s message was that the United States had nothing to fear from his party. Ennahda firmly believed religion was “the affair of society, not the affair of the state.” He decried the “paranoia” among secular Tunisians over the prospect of Ennahda winning a plurality (if not a majority) of votes in the October elections. His party had every intention of forming a coalition government because “frankly, Ennahda is not ready to govern alone. It makes us fearful.” He foresaw a long period of “cohabitation” between his and various secular parties.71 Ennahda had accepted all the basic principles spelled out in the “Republican Pact” the High Authority had approved in June 2011, mainly to assuage the fears of secularist Tunisians. The pact turned out to be an important document that eventually shaped the writing of the new constitution. It contained a bill of rights and guarantees for various freedoms, including explicitly the “freedom of conscience,” which all parties agreed meant the right to practice the religion of one’s choosing. The document endorsed the separation of religion and state. It stated explicitly: “We are convinced that the Tunisian people aspire to build a civil society” as well as a republican form of government that preserves “the civil character of the Tunisian state.” Equality between men and women “without any discrimination” was also affirmed.72 There was no mention of making the sharia, the Muslim body of religious laws, the source for legislation. All parties agreed to preservation of the existing Personal Status Code of 1958, championed by secularist women in particular. “We accept the Republican Pact,” said Jebali explicitly. Ennahda’s only reservation was that the pact could not stand “above the constitution.” The political course his party intended to follow, he said, was the same taken by the AK Party in Turkey. It had gained power in 2002 by moderating its Islamic principles and winning the support of many secularists mainly because of its successful capitalist economic policies.73 Like secularist parties, Ennahda had its own fears for the future. Jebali singled out a repeat of what had happened to the movement in 1991, when the Ben Ali regime had aborted its bid to compete in elections that year by arresting 5,000 to 6,000 Ennahda members and officials and discrediting it as a “terrorist organization.” “We had a big setback,” he said, adding, “we have fear of another setback again.”74 With remarkable prescience, he in-

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cluded among his other concerns that Tunisians would come to identify Ennahda with the more militant Islamist Salafis and turn against both of them. He predicted that public pressure would push his party toward moderation and force the Salafis in the same direction or risk isolation. Farida Labidi, who headed Ennahda’s women’s organization in 2011, sought to dispel secularist fears of a reversal in the Tunisia family code, which was widely heralded as the most progressive of any Arab country other than the one Morocco had adopted in 2004. She believed fear of Ennahda in the minds of women secularists had been deliberately instilled by the former Ben Ali regime to gain support for its crackdown on Islamists.75 Yet her spirited defense of women’s right to wear the hijab seemed certain to complicate Ennahda’s efforts to reassure secularist women. She recalled the long struggle by Islamic feminists under the regimes of both Bourguiba and Ben Ali, whose secularist policies seemed reminiscent of those adopted by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, founder of the republic of Turkey on the ashes of the Ottoman caliphate after World War I. Since 1981, Tunisian women had been forbidden to wear veils in the workplace and were discouraged from donning them in public. She herself had begun wearing the hijab in 1983 only to find herself “at war” with the police. She recounted that she had been issued a fine and her hijab torn from her face while she was attending university in pursuit of a law degree. (At the time of my interview with her, she wore a bright red ankle-length robe and a black head scarf bearing a flower print but no face veil.) The authorities had strictly forbidden women from entering a police station or any government building while wearing a veil. Those who wore them while taking oral examinations at the university were automatically flunked. In reaction to these restrictions, she insisted, many women had decided in the post–Ben Ali era to wear a hijab, and not all were Ennahda members.76 Labidi, a lawyer, also argued that Tunisian women, Islamist or secularist, faced many of the same problems. Tunisia’s newfound freedoms had not changed the mentality of men even inside Ennahda. “We’ve got to push the parties to take women in and the government to give them top jobs.”77 Labidi also considered the Salafis a challenge not only for Ennahda but for all Tunisian women. The Salafis had fallen under the influence of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis, followers of one of the most puritanical Salafi sects. Ben Ali had allowed them free reign to multiply and spread the intolerant Wahhabi creed to compensate for his crackdown on Ennahda and show he was still a good Muslim. In the aftermath of Ben Ali’s downfall, they had found themselves free to press their fundamentalist beliefs and campaign against Western cultural influence in the country. These were themes all Ennahda leaders were to echo in an effort to separate the party

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from Salafi extremism. The Salafis indeed seemed to go out of their way to alienate secularists by holding prayer sessions along Avenue Bourguiba, the central boulevard of the capital. Labidi noted that although the Essebsi interim government had refused to allow the Salafis to form a political party, it had made no attempt to suppress their demonstrations of piety and attacks on Western-style music concerts, art shows, or bars serving alcohol. Labidi’s secular counterpart was Sonia Ben Achour, a fashionably Western-dressed woman and university professor who in June 2011 had just stepped down as head of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women. She immediately bristled at the mere mention of Ennahda, which for her was part of the Islamic fundamentalist current with the same goals as the Salafis. She compared the party’s spiritual leader, Rached Ghannouchi, to a two-tongued devil, preaching tolerance to the secularists and a revival of Islamic fundamentalist practices to his own followers. “Islamists have no vision for Tunisian women other than the veil and their going back to the house,” she declared. She agreed with Labidi on one point, however. Former President Ben Ali had deliberately “played the religious card” in the last years of his rule by allowing a Salafi renaissance in a bid to bolster his sagging popularity. He had restored the religious radio, Zitouna, and prodded the Sufi orders to become more active. “It was the political manipulation of Islam.”78 So how serious was the “Islamic challenge,” in her view? Ben Achour revealed herself to be of two minds. On one hand, she estimated only 15 percent of Tunisians could be counted as followers of either Ennahda or the Salafists. Women of her education and values were not about to let Islamists “push us around.” On the other hand, she anticipated “a lot of work ahead” to defend women’s acquired rights against the Islamists. It was also important that Tunisia recognize international declarations on women’s rights “because Islam can be used to restore discrimination against women.”79

Secularist Bulwark Against Islamists

In mid-2011, the largest political party defending Tunisia’s secular order was the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), which had been allowed to function during the Ben Ali regime, though its co-president, Ahmed Chebbi, had been blocked from running for president. The PDP’s other copresident was Maya Jribi, making it the only party with a woman standardbearer. Its spokesman, Maher Hanin, a philosophy professor, was bullish about the party’s prospects at the polls. In his view, the PDP reflected the country’s main “democratic centralist tendency,” comparable to European

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social democratic parties. The PDP, he boasted, was growing by leaps and bounds with 200 branches across the country and “hundreds” of requests to join. It was attracting youth, professionals, women, business owners, and the middle class generally. “We don’t understand why everybody [abroad is] interested in Islamists here rather than the secularists,” he said.80 He confidently predicted the two main contestants in the first post– Ben Ali elections would be the PDP and Ennahda. A public opinion poll published in May 2011, carried out by the US International Republican Institute, seemed to confirm this prediction. It showed PDP President Chebbi with a 32 percent approval rating compared with 44 percent for Ennahda leader Ghannouchi, though the vast majority of respondents (72 percent) said they had not yet decided whom they would vote for in the elections.81 The UGTT quickly emerged as the main civil society group defending the secular order Tunisia had inherited from Bourguiba and Ben Ali. After playing such a prominent role in the uprising, it seemed conceivable the organization might spawn its own political party to challenge the PDP and Ennahda. There was an initial attempt to do just that with the creation of the short-lived Party of Work, led by Abdeljelil Bedoui, a veteran union activist and one of three UGTT officials named to the first interim government under Prime Minister Ghannouchi. (All three had resigned one day after being appointed.) In the 1980s, Bedoui had drawn up a platform for a UGTT-based political party that had never materialized.82 Bourguiba had immediately quashed any movement toward the creation of a separate labor party by putting the UGTT under the wing of his own Destour Party. However, a new political era was dawning after Ben Ali’s departure, and this seemed to offer the very popular UGTT the occasion to form a workers’ party. Even Bedoui no longer saw the wisdom of such a move, and the failure of his effort illustrated the problems Tunisia’s leftists, including socialists and communists, faced in seeking to establish themselves as a political force in the post–Ben Ali era. Bedoui tried to broaden his party’s support by appealing to small entrepreneurs, lawyers, human rights activists, teachers, and doctors as well as UGTT activists. He deliberately named his organization the Party of Work rather than the Workers’ Party. Its ideology was not socialist, either, but what he called “Scandinavianstyle social democracy.”83 Bedoui’s attempt to launch a new leftist party on the momentum of the uprising failed for a number of reasons. One of the biggest obstacles was the varied composition of the UGTT. Its 500,000 members belonged to many different parties and political currents; they included communists, socialists, and Arab nationalists on the left and many Islamists on the right. Bedoui conceded that had the UGTT itself sought to launch a party, it would probably have fragmented into separate unions attached to different

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parties. But his gambit to form a new party did not work, either. The Party of Work was destined to become just one more of a number of leftist groups that sought a foothold on the crowded political landscape. By the fall of 2011, the government had authorized more than 100 parties to compete for delegates to the National Constituent Assembly.84 The UGTT did not back any of them, which would help explain why it was able to play an indispensable role of arbitrator and mediator between secularist parties and Ennahda later.

The Revolution’s Ephemeral Honeymoon

Another salient characteristic of Tunisia’s revolution was the near nonexistence of what Crane Brinton called the honeymoon period among revolutionaries immediately following the overthrow of the ancien regime.85 The visceral distrust between secularists and Islamists surfaced immediately and grew more public and bitter with each passing day. All sense of a common endeavor came to an abrupt halt June 27, 2011, when Ennahda announced it was pulling out of the High Authority. Ghannouchi challenged its claim to “popular legitimacy” or to proceed like an elected parliament when it was not. “Who are you to want to decide the essential laws for the people?” he asked.86 Ennahda’s complaints included the High Authority’s decision to postpone elections from July to October, which it had opposed, and the nonconsensual way the law on political parties had been approved. Then, too, its own proposal to allow outside financing of party activities had been rejected without debate in favor of a total ban on any foreign funding. Secularists, on the other hand, were alarmed by the onset of Salafi attacks on liberal artists, their shows, and their supporters. They targeted Western-influenced filmmakers like Nouri Bouzid, the trendy Afric’Art Hall in Tunis, and films considered disrespectful of Islam like Neither God nor Master and Persepolis. Over the weekend of July 16–17, a spate of violent incidents involving Salafis erupted across the country, mostly notably in Sidi Bouzid, where one fourteen-year-old youth was killed and four policemen were seriously injured. Secularists and Islamists blamed each other for the violence, the former charging that the Salafis were seeking to incite enough trouble to call off elections. The May public opinion poll conducted by the US International Republican Institute reflected the confused mixture of great hope and uncertainty Tunisians harbored about their unfolding revolution. Nearly 80 percent of Tunisians thought things were going in the right direction, though a growing number—32 percent in May versus 28 percent in March—said they were having trouble feeding themselves and their families. A lack of

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security was at the top of concerns, followed by unemployment. Excitement about elections was at a height, with 92 percent reporting they were either very or somewhat likely to vote in the upcoming elections. Over half of respondents said they favored a secular government, though 40 percent indicated the opposite, and 63 percent said they wanted Islam to serve as the underlying cultural base of society. They did agree on one point— whether Tunisia had a secular or nonsecular government was either “very important” or “important” to over three-quarters of them.87 Clearly Islam’s place in the identity of the new Tunisia was already at the forefront of concerns just four months into the search for a new president. After two delays, the first truly free and fair multiparty elections in Tunisia since independence (1956) took place on October 23, 2011. They were also the first in any of the five Arab countries that witnessed an uprising that year. Tunisians were called on to elect 217 delegates to the National Constituent Assembly, whose main task would be to hammer out a new constitution. Its mandate was supposed to last just one year, when new elections for a parliament and president were to be held. Tunisians faced a veritable cacophony of voices and choices: 100 parties, 34 coalitions, 1,500 electoral lists collectively offering nearly 11,700 candidates to choose from. Only the Constitutional Democratic Rally of Ben Ali had been formally excluded from running, together with its senior officials. Perhaps the biggest anomaly, given the historic nature of the occasion, was that only 52 percent of the 4.3 million eligible voters went to the polls.88 All pre-election polls had predicted Ennahda the likely winner, and indeed it was. But of great importance to shaping the future course of events, Ennahda fell far short of capturing an outright majority, winning only 37 percent of the vote.89 In the end, the Islamists held eighty-nine seats, forty short of an absolute majority. This meant that although Ennahda would be in charge of forming a government, it could not accomplish this on its own and would need partners. Since no other Islamic faction had participated in the elections, Ennahda had no choice but to turn to one or more of the secularist parties. The question became which party, or parties, would agree to work with Ennahda in what was certain to be a contentious process of deciding the place of Islam in the new constitution and whether the legislature or the presidency would be the center of power. The elections produced some other major surprises. The PDP had been the leading secular party in pre-election opinion polls but fared extremely poorly, coming in fifth with less than 4 percent of the vote, giving it only sixteen seats. Another surprise was the emergence in third place of the hastily assembled and awkwardly named Popular Petition for Freedom, Justice and Development Party led by Mohammed Hechmi Hamdi, a media tycoon living in London, where he owned a satellite television sta-

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tion. He, too, proved to be a popular son of Sidi Bouzid, where he was born. Though sympathetic to the Islamist cause, Hamdi had been associated with Ben Ali. But he had cast himself as a populist, using his TV station to reach the general public and propose demagogic reforms, such as financial support for the country’s half a million jobless and free health care. His strategy had worked. Hamdi’s party managed to capture almost 7 percent of the vote and secure twenty-six seats in the constituent assembly. The left, meanwhile, had splintered into a dozen parties and coalitions, the strongest of which, the Democratic Modernist Pole, won only five seats with less than 3 percent of voters.90 The Community Party won less than 2 percent, giving it just three delegates. As for Party of Work, it failed to gain a single seat, and Bedoui was even defeated in his home district. The results of these first elections of the post–Ben Ali era explained why the left would have to resort to extraparliamentary means, like street protests and UGTT-sponsored strikes, to gain any leverage at all in its dealings with Ennahda. Meanwhile, Ennahda proved extremely pragmatic and politically astute upon finding itself the country’s new leading party. It successfully convinced two center-left secular parties that had come in second and fourth to join it in forming a government—the Congress for the Republic (CPR; 9 percent of the vote and twenty-nine delegates) and the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties known as Ettakatol (7 percent of the vote and twenty delegates). Both CPR and Ettakatol had existed as tiny opposition parties during the Ben Ali era and were led by well-known figures. The founder and secretary-general of Ettakatol, Mustapha Ben Jafar, a radiologist, had tried unsuccessfully to run against Ben Ali in the 2009 presidential election, while the CPR was led by a human rights activist, Moncef Marzouki, who had lived in exile in Paris since 2002 after Ben Ali had banned his party. Thus it was that Tunisia came to be ruled for three years by a “troika coalition” of one Islamic and two secular parties, which found themselves again and again forced to cooperate and compromise. Ennahda immediately made manifest its intention to share power: the constituent assembly elected Marzouki as interim president and chose Ben Jafar as its own leader. Marzouki then appointed Ennahda Secretary-General Jebali as prime minister to form a government that was officially installed on December 24, 2011—a year and seven days after the uprising began. Its cabinet of ministers reflected the new spirit and practice of power sharing: only twelve of twenty-five came from Ennahda and included seven independents, most importantly the ministers of defense and religious affairs. It seemed an ideal formula for launching Tunisia’s pioneering experience in power sharing between Islamists and secularists.

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Notes 1. “Muhammed Bou‘Azizi: Hero of the Arab Revolution Against Oppression and Corruption,” Al Jazeera, December 17, 2010. 2. Information about this incident came from an exchange of emails with Jamel Bettaieb, a Sidi Bouzid high school teacher, April 1, 2013. 3. For a good description of Ben Ali’s police state, see Clement Henry, “Tunisia’s ‘Sweet’ Little Regime,” in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations (Cambridge: World Peace Foundation, 2007). 4. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 36. 5. This statue was subsequently replaced by a stone one featuring a simple peddler’s cart in Bouazizi’s memory. 6. Author’s visit to Sidi Bouzid, June 11, 2011. 7. Wyre Davies, “Doubt over Tunisian ‘Martyr’ Who Triggered Revolution,” BBC News Middle East, June 16, 2011. 8. Email exchange with Bettaieb. 9. Alif, Degage: La Revolution Tunisienne: Livre-Temoignages, 17 Decembre 2010–14 Janvier 2011 (Asnieres-sur Seine, France: Editions du Layeur, 2011), 9. 10. Interview with Rachid Fetini, director of Centre d’Affaires, Sidi Bouzid, June 11, 2011. 11. Fetini interview. 12. Fetini interview. 13. “Materi, 114,665 dinars pour son hectare a Sidi Bouzid!!!,” Nawaat, Feburary 23, 2011. 14. Interviews with Sidi Bouzid businessmen and other residents, June 11, 2011. 15. Fetini interview. 16. Lachen Achy, “Tunisia’s Economic Challenges,” Carnegie Papers, Carnegie Middle East Center, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 2011. 17. Fetini interview. 18. International Crisis Group, “Tunisia: Violence and the Salafi Challenge,” Report No. 107, June 6, 2011, 24. 19. Fetini interview. 20. Author’s visit to Sidi Bouzid, June 11, 2011. 21. Fetini interview. 22. Kim Sengupta, “I Have Lost My Son, but I Am Proud of What He Did,” Independent, January 21, 2011. Also see Elizabeth Day, “Fedia Hami’s Slap Which Sparked a Revolution ‘Didn’t Happen,’” Guardian, April 23, 2011. 23. For the best day-by-day account of the uprising, see Alif, Degage. 24. Fetini interview. 25. See Frida Dahmani, “Tunisie Sidi Bouazizi,” Jeune Afrique, February 20–26, 2011, and Sengupta, “I Have Lost My Son.” 26. Slah Weslati, Chronologie de la Revolution Tunisienne: Democratie ou Guerre Civile? (Tunis: Nirvana, 2011), 46–48. 27. For example, see Kareem Fahim, “Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia,” New York Times, January 21, 2011, and “How a Slap Sparked Tunisia’s Revolution,” CBS News 60 Minutes, Febuary 20, 2011. 28. Elizabeth Day, “The Slap That Sparked a Revolution,” Guardian, May 14, 2011, and Weslati, Chronologie de la Revolution Tunisienne, 48–50. 29. “Tunisia Revolt: Mohamed Bouazizi Police Suspect Freed,” BBC News Africa, April 19, 2011. 30. Day. “The Slap That Sparked a Revolution.”

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31. Fetini interview. 32. Carrington Malin, “Middle East & North Africa Facebook Demographics,” Spot On Public Relations, May 24, 2010. 33. Hela Yousfi, “Political Islam After the ‘Arab Spring’: Tunisia’s New Opposition,” Le Monde Diplomatique, English ed., November 3, 2012. 34. For a good account of the UGTT’s role in the uprising, see International Crisis Group, “Popular Protest in North Africa and the Middle East (IV): Tunisia’s Way,” Report No. 106, April 28, 2011. 35. Interview with Lazher Gharbi, UGTT official, Sidi Bouzid, September 27, 2013. 36. Email exchange with Bettaieb. 37. Email exchange with Bettaieb. 38. Alif, Degage: La Revolution Tunisienne. 39. “L’UGTT dans la Revolution Tunisienne (Document Provisoire),” Le Temps, December 28, 2010. 40. “L’UGTT dans la Revolution Tunisienne.” 41. Interview with Mouldi Jendoubi, UGTT National Executive Committee official, Tunis, September 24, 2013. 42. David Gauthier-Villars, “How ‘The Family’ Controlled Tunisia,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2011. 43. Robert F. Godec, “Troubled Tunisia: What Should We Do?,” July 17, 2009, Wikileaks, published in the Guardian, December 7, 2010, accessed July 15, 2016, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/217138. 44. Shadab Siddiqi, “Butterfly Effect Began with Tunisian Fruit Vendors,” Knoxville News Sentinel, February 27, 2011. 45. For a discussion of why Trimech’s self-immolation failed to ignite an uprising, see Weslati, Chronologie de la Revolution Tunisienne, 44–45. 46. Gharbi interview. 47. Author’s interview with Fares Mabrouk, Tunis, June 9, 2011. 48. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 94–95. 49. International Crisis Group, “Popular Protest in North Africa and the Middle East,” 11. 50. Alif, Degage: La Revolution Tunisienne.” 51. International Crisis Group, “Popular Protest in North Africa,” 11. 52. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Army Leader Guarantees Stability in Tunisia,” New York Times, January 24, 2011. See also “Tunisian Army Emerges Strong from People’s Revolt,” Agence France Presse, January 20, 2011. 53. International Republican Institute,“Survey of Tunisian Public Opinion, May 14–27, 2011,” Williams and Associates. 54. “The Last Official Address by Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali,” trans. Tony Badran, January 13, 2011, accessed October 8, 2014, https://msmunatunagb .wikispaces.com/file/view/The+Last+Official+Address+of+Ben+Ali.pdf. 55. See Noureddine Jebnoun, “In the Shadow of Power: Civil-Military Relations and the Tunisian Popular Uprising,” Journal of North African Studies, 19 (May 2014); Abdelaziz Belkhodja and Tarak Cheikhouhou, 14 Janvier: L’Enquete (Tunis: Apollonia Editions, 2014); and Leïla Trabelsi, Ma Verite (extracts), Babnet Tunisie, June 21, 2012, accessed October 7, 2014, http://www.babnet.net/festivaldetail-51018.asp. 56. Trabelsi, Ma Verite. 57. Jebnoun, “In the Shadow of Power,” 13–14. 58. Jebnoun, “In the Shadow of Power.” 59. International Crisis Group, “Popular Protests in North Africa and the Middle East,” 17.

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60. For an excellent detailed account of this period, see Weslati, Chronologie de la Revolution Tunisienne, 86–217. 61. Author’s interview with Yadh Ben Achour, June 8, 2011. 62. Y. Ben Achour interview. 63. Y. Ben Achour interview. 64. Rached Ghannouchi, press conference in Tunis, June 6, 2011. 65. The following information and analysis is based on the author’s visit to Tunisia, June 5–12, 2011. 66. Mona Yahia, “Political Firestorm Erupts in Tunisia,” Magharebia, May 9, 2011. 67. Hamadi Jebali, “Address by the General-Secretary of ‘Ennahda’ Party: Positions and Dimensions,” Sousse Business Forum, Sousse, June 11, 2011. 68. Abdelaziz Barrouhi, “Tunisie: Il Faut Sauver la Revolution,” Jeune Afrique, No. 2627 (May 15–21, 2011). 69. Ghannouchi press conference. 70. Ghannouchi press conference. 71. Author’s interview with Hamadi Jebali, Tunis, June 8, 2011. 72. “Republican Pact,” Commission for Achieving the Goals of the Revolution, TunisiaSAT Forums, accessed September 18, 2013, http://www.tunisia-sat.com/vb/showthread.php ?t=167806. 73. Jebali interview. 74. Jebali interview. 75. Author’s interview with Farida Labidi, Tunis, June 7, 2011. 76. Labidi interview. 77. Labidi interview. 78. Author’s interview with Sonia Ben Achour, June 8, 2011. 79. S. Ben Achour interview. 80. Author’s interview with Maher Hamin, Tunis, June 6, 2011. 81. International Republican Institute, “Survey of Tunisian Public Opinion.” 82. Author’s interview with Abdeljali Bedoui, June 9, 2011. 83. Bedoui interview. 84. “Tunisia: 111 Parties and 1,366 New Associations Recognized,” ANSAmed, September 21, 2011. 85. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 95. 86. Rached Ghannouchi press conference, Agence France Presse, June 27, 2011. 87. International Republican Institute, “Survey of Tunisian Public Opinion.” 88. “Tunisian Constituent Assembly Election, 2011,” Wikipedia, accessed July 15, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_Constituent_Assembly_election,2011. For other accounts of the elections and results, see “National Constituent Assembly Elections in Tunisia. October 23, 2011, Final Report.” The Carter Center. Atlanta, Georgia, and “Final Report on the Tunisian National Constituent Elections, October 23, 2011.” National Democratic Institute, Washington, DC. 89. “Tunisian Constituent Assembly Election, 2011.” 90. “Tunisian Constituent Assembly Election, 2011.”

6 From Dual Sovereignty to Restoration

In Crane Brinton’s model, revolutions inevitably involve a struggle for power between moderates and extremists after the fall of the ancien regime.1 The latter establish a parallel authority that challenges the official government, creating a state of dual sovereignty. Eventually, the extremists prevail, but their excesses inevitably end by provoking a Thermidorian reaction. The final outcome in the Brintonian schema: the rise to power of iron-fisted autocrats like Cromwell, Bonaparte, and Stalin and the restoration of much of the old order in a new guise. Though they begin as popular revolutions carried out in the name of freedom for a majority against a privileged minority, they end up producing dictatorships.2 Certainly the Tunisian uprising in 2011 was initially very popular and was carried out in the name of freedom against a privileged minority clearly embodied in the greedy, dictatorial rule of President Zine elAbidine Ben Ali and his extended family. It soon entered a state of dual sovereignty characterized by a struggle between secularists and Islamists, then the rise to power of the latter followed by a Thermidorian reaction among the former to Islamic rule. The outcome was the restoration of much of the old secular order. The Tunisian revolution also evidenced its own peculiar variations on these stages. Eventually, secularists and moderate Islamists found themselves challenged by militant fundamentalist Salafis, who chose to stay outside the political process altogether. The restoration did not produce a Bonaparte for reasons of a unique nature I explain later. Still, there was a bitter struggle for power initially between secularists and relatively moderate Islamists, each side holding a radically different vision of Tunisia’s identity and goals of the revolution. 93

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Tunisia’s secularists were deeply attached to what they called the “Bourguiba model,” after the first president who led the country to independence from France in 1956. Its main characteristics were deep attachment to a militantly French-inspired secular state, a Western-influenced lifestyle, and a very progressive family and personal status code favoring equality between men and women. In the view of secularists, the main goals of the revolution consisted of maintaining the secular Bourguiba model while replacing its authoritarian police state with a multiparty democratic system built on a vibrant civil society. Moderate Islamists of the Ennahda Party could agree with secularists on a multiparty democracy but were dedicated to replacing the secular Bourguiba model with one built on restored Islamic values, education, and culture. Their model of governance was inspired by the AK Party, which had come to power in Turkey in 2002 and worked to restore Islamic values in place of the secular ones implanted there by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk after World War I.

The “Civil State” Debate

Tunisia’s secularists and Islamists had debated the divisive issue of Islam’s role in society and government long before the uprising. From 2005 until 2010, within a group called the 18 October Collective for Rights and Freedoms, they had discussed the basic principles that should underlie a future constitution for the country. In a booklet of position papers titled “Our Road to Democracy,” they spelled out their common commitment to the separation of religion and state in what they called “the civil state.” One paper said: “The sought-after democratic nation can only be a civil state built on republican doctrines and human rights.”3 This fundamental notion of a civil state was reiterated in the Republican Pact adopted by the interim High Authority for the Achievement of the Revolution’s Objectives, which held the country together from the time of Ben Ali’s flight in January 2011 until constituent assembly elections in October of that year. Ennahda’s secretarygeneral, Hamadi Jebali, had even renewed his party’s commitment to a civil state as the election campaign was getting under way. The state should remain a “political and a civil entity for the care of civilian public affairs,” he told a business forum in Sousse. “No state has the right to intervene to impose particular life styles or beliefs and tastes.”4 The National Constituent Assembly, which first met on November 22, 2011, immediately became a stormy battleground between secularists and Ennahda. Sharing power between Ennahda and two secular parties in a troika government had initially seemed to bode well for reaching compromises. A two-thirds majority of the assembly’s delegates was required to

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approve a new constitution. Mathematically, there was no way Ennahda, even with the support of its partners, could impose its will as they felt short of commanding such a majority collectively by seven votes. In any case, the constituent assembly did not complete a first draft of the constitution until December 2012, and it was then submitted to lengthy debate across the country. A second draft was circulated in February 2013, and a third and final one came in June 2013. From the start of the process, secularists’ distrust of Ennahda ran deep and grew worse with time. This was due to a combination of controversial statements made by its leaders, efforts by its assembly deputies to enhance Islam’s place in the constitution, and Ennahda’s ambivalent attitude toward the excesses of militant Salafis. The first provocative comment came from Jebali, who told a gathering of party supporters in November 2011 that he saw Tunisia as being “in a divine moment in a new state” that would usher in “hopefully a Sixth Caliphate.”5 He quickly backtracked to assure Tunisians the party was still committed to a civil state. But his statement was enough to cause the center-left Ettakatol Party to suspend temporarily negotiations on joining an Ennahda-led government. What Jebali said was less important than what the party’s spiritual guide and real political leader, Rached Ghannouchi, said and did. Upon his return to Tunisia in January 2011 at age sixty-nine, Ghannouchi was immediately acknowledged as Ennahda’s supreme religious guide and political leader, wielding far more influence over its policies and decisions than any other figure in the movement. Yet he never joined the Constituent Assembly or held any post in the troika government. Instead, he remained preoccupied with holding together Ennahda’s feuding factions and making decisions in the name of the party. He remained an independent power center operating outside the confines of party, assembly, and government. Tunisian secularists quickly came to believe that Ghannouchi, far from being a moderate, personified the intentions of all Islamists in the nation. He made no secret of his deeply held aspiration to restore Islamic values and culture and eradicate the secular Bourguiba model. He spoke of Bourguiba disapprovingly as an example of “the fruits of the French Revolution, namely militant secularism, or laïcité, that he had willfully implanted on Tunisian soil while deliberately suppressing Islam.”6 Just as noxious in Ghannouchi’s mind, Bourguiba had been another Napoleon, whose autocratic rule reflected “the legacy of French Jacobism” in Tunisia’s “culture of [secular] extremism.”7 Bourguiba and then Ben Ali had deliberately prevented even moderate Islam from taking root by curbing theological studies at the eighth-century Al-Zaytuna Mosque in Tunis, which to this day houses one of Islam’s oldest universities. Ghannouchi blamed Ben Ali in particular for allowing a more fundamentalist Salafi school influenced by

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Saudi Arabia’s ultraconservative Wahhabism to take root and proliferate throughout Tunisia. “They got rid of moderate Islam in favor of extreme Islam,” he said. “We have to restore the Zaytuna Mosque and spread moderate Islam here.”8 For secularists, Ghannouchi’s attacks on the Bourguiba model made him deeply suspect. He confirmed their worst suspicions when he declared his unwavering support for the right of women to wear the full face veil known as a niqab. The issue flared up at Manouba University outside Tunis in November 2011, when a small group of Salafis demanded female students attending classes or taking exams be allowed to wear the niqab, a practice long banned by the government. Ghannouchi never wavered even after a small number of Salafi students at the university’s College of Letters and Arts began resorting to such tactics as taking its dean hostage. In March 2012, they replaced the national flag with the black Salafi banner, but Ghannouchi continued to defend the Salafi female students’ “freedom of behavior and dress,” blaming the controversy once again on the “French culture of secular extremism.” In all of Europe, he said, the right to wear a face veil was only a controversial issue in France, and in the Arab world, only in Tunisia.9 Secularists were equally disturbed by Ghannouchi’s backing of the National League for the Protection of the Revolution (NLPR), an organization founded initially by twenty-eight leftist groups in mid-February 2011.10 Its original raison d’être had been to fill the security gap at the local level created by the collapse of Ben Ali’s police and security forces. Made up of local self-appointed neighborhood watches, the National Council for the Protection of the Revolution, as it was first called, was never officially recognized by the state. It became involved in the power grab by a leftist coalition of communist, Arab nationalist, and labor union groups led by the January 14 Front that strongly opposed the first interim government under Prime Minster Mohamed Ghannouchi (discussed in the previous chapter). In late February, the National Council became the NLPR, and Ennahda supporters began infiltrating and taking over many of its local committees. The Ennahda-led government recognized the legal status of the NLPR in June 2012, further raising secularists’ suspicions of a secret link between the two, though Ennahda repeatedly denied any connection. Still, secularists looked on the NLPR as Ennahda’s private militia, particularly after a member of the right-wing Nidaa Tounes Party died in October 2012 during a demonstration. Nidaa Tounes blamed Ennahda supporters for his death, while Ghannouchi asserted the demonstrator had been accidentally trampled to death.11 The leader of the NLPR in 2013, Mounir Ajroud stoutly defended its cause and activities. Its main concern, he asserted, was the continuing

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strong influence of Ben Ali–era politicians as well as the government’s failure to prosecute 14,000 individuals on whom it had gathered evidence of serious corruption. At the same time, he was furious with the Tunisian General Union of Labor (UGTT), which he blamed for the endless strikes worsening the country’s economic situation. His views of the UGTT and Ben Ali regime holdovers closely echoed those of Ennahda, but Ajroud insisted the NLPR had no ties to the Islamic movement and had even expelled some of its members.12 Still, Ghannouchi steadfastly defended the NLPR’s right to exist, describing it as a collection of local “civil associations.” If some members resorted to violence, they should be put on trial and punished if found guilty. Otherwise, “how can we disband them?” he said.13

Ennahda and the Salafi Extremists

Ennahda’s failure to disassociate itself clearly from the Salafis was probably the single most important reason Tunisian secularists believed the two groups were working together to turn the country into an Islamic state. It was undeniable that Ennahda harbored hard-line Islamists within its highest ranks who were pushing for recognition of sharia law in the constitution and of Islam as the state’s religion. Most notable among these militants were two preachers, Sadok Chourou and Habib Ellouze, both Constituent Assembly members. Chourou publicly called critics of the Ennahda-led government “enemies of God and the Prophet” who should be “sentenced to death, crucified, or banished from the country.”14 The strength of this Salafist wing of Ennahda remained difficult to determine, but it made numerous attempts to insert articles in the new constitution to strengthen the role of Islam in society and the state. For a long time, Ghannouchi exhibited considerable leniency toward militant Salafis outside Ennahda. This became public knowledge after a secretly recorded seven-minute portion of a talk he had given to one such group came to light in October 2012. Ghannouchi had sought to reassure and warn them of the danger of pressing too hard and too soon for the application of Islamic measures. “Do not rush things,” he admonished. Otherwise, they might suffer the same fate as Islamists in Algeria who had been on the way to winning parliamentary elections in 1991 when the army intervened to prevent their victory. Ghannouchi urged his listeners to “present a reassuring discourse to people” and work for gradual changes, including the spread of Islamic schools and associations throughout the country. But the part of his speech most disturbing to secularists and often cited as proof of his collusion was the following: “We always say Salafists are our sons and daughters, the children of this country.”15

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Ghannouchi’s behavior hardened secularists’ convictions that he was secretly in favor of widespread Salafi attacks on their art shows, culture centers, films, plays, and artists, which started almost immediately after Ben Ali had fled the country. Salafi militants also went after bars and alcohol vendors, sometimes rampaging through towns like Jendouba in the northwest and Sidi Bouzid, as happened in May 2012.16 Even 400 police stations were targeted between February 2011 and February 2012.17 By March 2012, tensions between secularists and Islamists had reached the point where the government issued a ban on demonstrations on Avenue Bourguiba in Tunis after Salafi militants hoisted their black flag on top of the landmark clock tower there. This did not stop their campaign to turn Tunisia into an Islamic state; by early 2012, they had succeeded in taking over 450 of the country’s 2,400 mosques and steadily expanding their influence within the education system, partly by opening hundreds of preschool day care centers.18 Salafi violence in Tunisia gained international attention with the attacks on the US embassy and American Cooperative School in Tunis on September 14, 2011. The attacks were sparked by an amateurish film, Innocence of Muslims, which was deliberately derogatory of Islam and had been made by a Californian Islamophobe. At least 100 Salafis forced their way onto embassy grounds. Others, aided by teenage hooligans, ransacked the school across the road as a crowd of more than 1,000, some waving the Salafi black flag, cheered them on.19 The police, initially reluctant to intervene, ended by opening fire, resulting in two deaths and twenty-nine injuries. The Tunisian government immediately blamed Ansar al-Sharia, the most militant Salafi group in the country. It had ties to another group by the same name in Libya, which had been involved in an attack three days earlier on the US consulate in Benghazi ending in the death of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Ghannouchi proved exceedingly slow in coming to terms with the rising Salafi threat undermining his efforts to convince secularists of his party’s moderate Islamic intentions. In March 2012, he confidently predicted that Salafi extremists had “no future in Tunisia” and would soon be marginalized, comparing them to small urban terrorist groups like the defunct Baader-Meinhof Gang in former West Germany. Ghannouchi estimated the number of violence-prone Salafis at only 300 and their total numbers at 15,000. Were they to form a political party, they would get 5 percent or less of the vote.20 He blamed their rise on Saudi Arabia’s campaign to promote its ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Islam in the country; Wahhabi preachers were coming regularly to preach in person and made use of numerous religious satellite channels.21 Not until early 2013, however, did Ghannouchi begin to acknowledge publicly that Salafi vio-

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lence had become a “major challenge” for the government. Even then, he remained extremely reluctant to see a crackdown on their activities, arguing that “people should not be jailed for their ideas.”22 The government could go ahead and “dissolve the Salafi networks,” he said, but “we don’t want a police state under the pretext of defending modernity.”23

Secularists and Islamists Struggle in Dual Sovereignty

For Tunisian secularists, Ennahda and the Salafis together came to represent the extremists of the revolution. For Ennahda and its followers, on the other hand, the UGTT filled that role, looming as the main obstacle to their campaign for an Islamic revival. Ghannouchi described the labor confederation as dominated by an “extreme leftist leadership” while its activists were nothing less than “Salafis of the Left.”24 He compared their tactics to those of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, namely, “one of power from the street.”25 UGTT officials indeed saw themselves as the main bulwark to the Islamists because of their size, nationwide scope, and capacity to organize demonstrations and strikes. “Ennahda knows what the UGTT can do in terms of a general strike,” remarked its international affairs spokesman, Kacem Afaya. “We’re not going to accept a group of dictators in exchange for a single dictator.”26 The UGTT’s unusual role as the major counterweight to Ennahda stemmed partly from the weakness and fragmentation of the secular parties, which were constantly combining in various coalitions in their struggle to gain a voice and weight in the cacophonous political process. This was made more difficult by the clear tendency of most of these parties to rally around egocentric leaders rather than programs or ideologies. Few had many members or nationwide organizations capable of pressuring the government on any issue. Further complicating their predicament was the reality that the two largest secular parties to emerge from the first post–Ben Ali elections, Ettakatol and the Congress for the Republic, were part of the troika government, dividing the secularists into two opposing and often warring camps. Most striking about Tunisia’s secular leaders in this era was the absence of any new ones. Most of their leading figures were from the former opposition, individuals like Mustapha Ben Jafar, who was turning seventy-one when he became National Constituent Assembly president in 2011, and Moncef Marzouki, sixty-six years old when chosen as Tunisia’s interim president. The prize example of ancien regime figures remerging as power players in the new order was doubtlessly Beji Caid Essebsi, eighty-five years old when he became interim prime minister in 2011 and

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afterward leader of one of the most popular opposition secular parties, Nidaa Tounes (“The Call of Tunisia”). He had served alternately as foreign, interior, and defense minister under Bourguiba and then president of the Chamber of Deputies at the start of the Ben Ali regime.

Battle Over a New Constitution

For more than two years, the struggle between Islamists and secularists focused on writing a new constitution, mostly notably those articles both sides felt would determine the new identity of the nation and the nature of the state. Every word counted, particularly any mention of Islam or sharia as either “a” or “the” source of all legislation. Salafis from outside the constituent assembly, as well as like-minded Ennahda deputies inside, clamored for the word sharia to be included in one article or another, but secularists had the advantage because a two-thirds majority was needed to prevail. In the end, it wasn’t the Constituent Assembly that decided anyway, but Ghannouchi himself. He simply imposed his will on Ennahda’s eighty-nine deputies that they accept the same language found in Bourguiba’s 1959 constitution: “Tunisia is a free, independent and sovereign state. Its religion is Islam, its language is Arabic and its type of government is the Republic.”27 Later, Ghannouchi defended his controversial decision by saying he wanted to avoid “ideological polarization” “and “dividing Tunisia into Islamic and secularist camps.” For the same reasons, he insisted on leaving out any mention of sharia, and he added another one: there were too many conflicting interpretations of the term even within Islam. “It should be left out until it is clear what we mean by sharia.”28 Ghannouchi demonstrated the same pragmatism again and again when it came to resolving the most controversial constitutional issues. Another example was the debate on whether to criminalize blasphemy of religion, again a demand of Salafis and their allies within Ennahda. By October 2012, the debate was over. Ennahda dropped its demand at Ghannouchi’s insistence. At a conference nine months later, he explained his religious justification for his stand: “Blasphemy is not a crime. Freedom of choice is very clear in the Koran; it says, ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion.’”29 The related notion of freedom of conscience provoked a separate but equally acrimonious debate. Both sides agreed the term was code for the right to be an agnostic or even a nonbeliever. To the Salafis, this was outright apostasy, and apostates deserved execution. To secularists, it was one more inherent absolute right of all individuals to decide whether and what to believe. Once again, Ghannouchi intervened to settle the issue, arguing

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with the Salafis that Islam should be seen as “a liberating revolution” and freedom of conscience as “a central principle of Islam.”30 In the end, Article 6 of the final draft read: “The state shall protect religion, guarantee freedom of belief and conscience and religious practices.”31 Yet another struggle flared over an attempt by some Ennahda delegates to insert the word complementary in describing the correct relationship between Tunisian men and women. In August 2012 an assembly committee had approved, on a 12 to 8 vote (with nine Ennahda deputies in support), the draft of an article describing a woman as a “complement with the man in the family and an associate to the man in the development of the country.”32 Fearing the start of a rollback of the progressive 1956 Personal Status Code, secular women’s organizations organized demonstrations in Tunis and pressed their male allies in the Constituent Assembly to demand recognition of their “equality” with men. They prevailed. The wording that eventually emerged in the final draft of January 2014 stated in Article 21: “All citizens, male and female alike, have equal rights and duties and are equal before the law without discrimination.”33 In addition, Article 46 committed the state to “protecting women’s achieved rights,” a reference to the 1956 code, and to “achieving equal representation for women and men in all elected councils.”34 Perhaps the most contentious issue of all was defining Islam’s relationship to the state. Article 141 in the June 2013 draft of the constitution set off fears among secularists that Ennahda was still determined to establish an Islamic state. After losing the battle over the wording on this touchy issue in the first articles of the new constitution, Ennahda hard-liners sought to reinsert that tenet at the very end: Article 141 explicitly barred any amendment to the constitution that might “bring prejudice to Islam being the religion of the state.”35 Secularists were again up in arms and accused Ennahda of backtracking on its agreement to accept a civil state as the basis of governance.36 The article quickly became one of ten outstanding disagreements that had to be resolved before any constitution could be approved. Ghannouchi once again intervened to settle the dispute. “We eliminated it. Like sharia, it’s gone,” he said while assuring this author later that the civil state was still his guiding principle. Islam would not become the basis for governance, he said, “Parliament rules.”37 In the end, the bedrock principle that “Tunisia is a civil state” was embedded in Article 2 of the final draft of the constitution, while its first article kept the same language from the Bourguiba one, stating merely that Islam was the country’s religion. The preamble reinforced the same notion, stressing that Tunisia was “a participatory, democratic, republican regime under the framework of a civil state.”38 The final draft included a prohibition on ever amending these two articles.

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The Rise of Salafi Violence

Whether the inherent antagonism between Ennahda and Tunisian secularists might have been easier to overcome in the absence of a deteriorating security situation remains difficult to determine. In any case, it came to weigh heavily on the political debate as militant Salafis expanded their activities in mosques, schools, and streets and finally took to the mountains to form armed cells ready for jihad against the government. The growing involvement of outside terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Ansar al-Sharia only worsened the secularist-Islamist divide. In mid-June 2012, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a call to Tunisians from his hideaway in Pakistan to “arise to support the sharia,” setting off a spate of incidents starting with renewed attacks on art exhibitions, like the one in the wealthy La Marsa suburb of Tunis. The Salafis were incensed over paintings depicting nude figures, caricatures of Mecca, and the spelling of the word Allah with a string of ants. They also attacked police stations, UGTT and secular party offices, and public buildings. For three days, antiriot police and Salafi groups engaged in clashes that resulted in sixty-two deaths. In April 2011, AQIM had given rise inside Tunisia to the even more extremist Ansar al-Sharia under the leadership of Seifallah Ben Hassine, better known as Abu Ayadh. A veteran of the jihadi war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, he had been serving a prison sentence in Tunisia when he was freed under a general amnesty for political prisoners after Ben Ali’s departure. Terrorists belonging to Ansar al-Sharia had made their presence known on May 18, 2011. Nine of them, later identified to include several Algerians and Libyans as well as Tunisians, fought a battle with the Tunisian police and army near the border with Algeria, resulting in the death of two of the attackers and two soldiers. There appeared to be no shortage of Tunisian recruits for armed struggle, particularly after the government released 1,200 Salafis from prison in February that year. Among them were 300 who had fought in Afghanistan or elsewhere abroad. Probably the most thorough history of the Salafi movement in Tunisia at the time estimated the number of Ansar al-Sharia’s followers at “a few tens of thousands,” though not all were prone to violence by any means.39 Ansar alSharia was allowed to continue recruiting, demonstrating, preaching, and operating mosques and charities openly until the Ennahda-led government finally banned the Salafi group in August 2013. It took the assassination of a well-known and well-respected lawyer, Chokri Belaïd, on February 6, 2013, before a sense of national crisis took hold over the rising tide of Salafi violence. The leader of the small leftist Unified Party of Democratic Patriots was gunned down outside his home

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in a Tunis suburb by an assassin who escaped on a motorbike with an accomplice. Despite the rough police state tactics Bourguiba and Ben Ali had employed to silence their opponents, no public figure had been assassinated since May 1956. There was more than a little irony in the fact that Belaïd had been targeted. He had been a leading critic of the Ben Ali regime and repeatedly defended in court Islamists arrested by its security services. After Ben Ali’s departure, he had become critical and outspoken against the Salafis and Ennahda for the government’s failure to put a stop to their activities. The immediate assumption among secularists was that Salafis and their allies inside Ennahda were responsible for the assassination. His funeral saw tens of thousands of mourners chanting “Slaughterer,” referring to Ennahda and Ghannouchi.40

The Thermidorian Reaction

Belaïd’s assassination marked the onset of the Thermidorian reaction among Tunisians, not only to Salafi excesses but to Ennahda’s governance of the country. The tragedy triggered the first major crisis within the troika government and within Ennahda itself. Militant secularists took to the streets to attack, burn, and sack Ennahda offices across the country. They also verbally lambasted the government for having failed to crack down on Salafi violence, particularly Ansar al-Sharia, which was soon found to have indeed been behind Belaïd’s assassination. Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali, Ennahda’s secretary-general, announced his government’s resignation within hours of the killing, and on February 19, he officially resigned. His movement’s own leadership, including Ghannouchi, had first rejected his proposal to form a new interim government composed only of technocrats to see the country through the rest of the transition period. Such a government would have meant the end of Ennahda’s central role in government after only sixteen months in office. Ghannouchi later explained why even he opposed Jebali’s plan, saying, “we were elected to rule the country, not give it back to technocrats.” It would have amounted to a “civil coup d’etat,” he said.41 In the end, Ennahda kept control of the government by replacing Jebali with the interior minister, Ali Laarayedh, a senior party official who had taken the brunt of secularist criticism over the government’s failure to curb Salafi violence. After Belaïd’s death, Salafi violence grew worse and the security situation continued to deteriorate. The government’s decision in March 2012 to allow Salafis to form their own political party, Jabhat al-Islah or the Reform Front, had no notable impact on lessening the violence. Salafi extremists attacked the government and its security forces with renewed vigor or went off

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to wage jihad against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. In March 2013, Ansar al-Sharia fugitive leader, Abu Ayadh, threatened open warfare against the government “until he [Laarayedh] is toppled and dumped in history’s garbage bin.”42 The same month, the government announced the establishment of special “crisis cells” to monitor and combat Salafi terrorist activities.43 This came in the wake of a visit by the commander of the US Africa Command, Gen. Carter Ham, who publicly stated it was “very clear” to him that al-Qaeda intended to establish a major presence in Tunisia.44 In April, the government published the photos and names of five Ansar alSharia suspects thought to be responsible for Belaïd’s assassination. In midMay, it banned a congress the Salafi group planned to hold in Kairouan for 40,000 followers. Meanwhile, Salafi networks were recruiting thousands of young Tunisians to fight either in Syria or northern Mali, where AQIM was attempting to overthrow the central government. In October 2014, Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa disclosed that 3,000 Tunisians had gone to fight in Syria—the highest number of foreign jihadis from any Arab country. He also reported the government had arrested 1,500 suspected terrorists, 500 of whom were to go on trial that month.45 By then, hundreds of the jihadis who went to Syria had returned, and Ennahda leaders were conceding they had misjudged their ability to stem the rise of Salafi extremists.46 The sense of the government’s incapacity to deal with the security situation was brought home to the public by the discovery that al-Qaeda had established a camp along the Algerian border to train guerrilla fighters and organize terrorist attacks. The inexperienced Tunisian army and national guard took heavy casualties from mines and ambushes there while trying to find and destroy the mountain camps. They succeeded in unearthing numerous secret Ansar al-Sharia cells and arms caches across the country as clashes with terrorists became a frequent occurrence.47 Still, Ghannouchi hesitated to declare all-out war on Ansar al-Sharia even while readily acknowledging that it presented “one of the major challenges facing the Tunisian revolution.” “We fear the dangers ahead,” he said, prescient in his prediction that other assassinations of prominent political figures might follow. He even spoke of “plots to topple the government.” Yet he kept defending his policy of avoiding confrontation. “We could dissolve the Salafi networks, but we don’t want a police state under the pretext of defending modernity,” a reference to the Ben Ali era.48 Within months, Ghannouchi’s prediction of more political killings proved to be accurate. On July 25, another prominent leftist, Mohamed Brahmi, was gunned down outside his home by two terrorists using the same modus operandi of firing from and escaping on a motorbike. Three days later, the Interior Ministry declared the same Ansar al-Sharia cell that had organized Belaïd’s assassination was also responsible for killing

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Brahmi, even using the same gun. Though far less well known than Belaïd, Brahmi was a National Constituent Assembly deputy and came from Sidi Bouzid. He had founded the People’s Movement, another small leftist party infused with the Arab nationalism propagated by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser.

Electoral Versus Revolutionary Legitimacy

Brahmi’s death brought the political process to a complete standstill. The Thermidorian reaction took on new proportions, aided by the same phenomenon shaking Egypt at the same time. There, secular opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood government led by President Mohamed Morsi had organized a nationwide petition campaign calling for Morsi’s resignation. On June 30, millions of Egyptians took to the streets to demand Morsi’s removal after only one year in power. Three days later, the Egyptian army under Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi deposed Morsi, dissolved his government, and began a sweeping crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. Inspired by these events in Egypt and enraged by Brahmi’s assassination, Tunisian secularists set about trying to replicate the Egyptian counterrevolution to oust Ennahda from power. They launched the Irhal (“Leave”) campaign and took to the streets by the thousands in all the major cities while the UGTT held a general strike. They called not only for an end to the Ennahda-led government but the dissolution of the National Constituent Assembly. They organized demonstrations outside the assembly day and night and convinced 65 of its 217 deputies to walk out, forcing a suspension of its deliberations. The secularists lacked the decisive asset those in Egypt had counted on: the army. It remained totally preoccupied with fighting terrorists in the mountains along the Algerian border, and its leaders showed no interest in abandoning their long-standing tradition of staying out of politics. Thus it was that the Interior Ministry became the focal point of struggle for power between secularists and Ennahda. Both sought to gain control particularly of its antiterrorist and intelligence services to combat the other. Secular paranoia about suspected Ennahda machinations grew far worse after Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou disclosed that a CIA warning about Brahmi’s likely assassination had gone unheeded.49 Within a week of Brahmi’s death, a spokesman for the Union of Republican Security Forces, a unit within the ministry, alleged publicly that Ennahda had infiltrated the ministry and established a “parallel security apparatus” staffed by former agents of the Ben Ali regime. The union released the names of fifteen individuals it alleged were involved in past corruption

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and an attempt to “subjugate the security apparatus.”50 Ghannouchi claimed just the opposite: the UGTT had infiltrated its supporters into the ministry with the intent “to re-create the Egyptian scenario” of using its security forces to encourage a popular uprising against the Ennahda-led government.51 Ben Jeddou himself confirmed that a number of unnamed “political parties” had in fact established “a presence” inside the ministry’s security services and their rivalries were undermining the efforts to combat Ansar al-Sharia.52 The state of Tunisia’s security as described by Ben Jeddou in late September 2013 seemed cause for alarm. His ministry had arrested 20,000 people, including 300 “terrorists,” over the previous six months. It had discovered two cells with a total of twenty-eight terrorists, including Belaïd’s killer, operating from the mountains along the Algerian border. Ansar alSharia’s leader, Abu Ayadh, had escaped to Libya. (He was eventually killed in a US air strike outside Benghazi in June 2015.) The ministry had also uncovered an Ansar al-Sharia plan to divide Tunisia into three “Islamic emirates” and assassinate other leading politicians, including some from Ennahda. As a result, Ben Jeddou ordered his security services to provide protection for almost all of them, including fifty-eight opposition leaders. He also conceded that his ministry’s intelligence units had become so dysfunctional that he had not received the CIA warning of the threat against Brahmi’s life until after his assassination.53 A similarly alarming assessment of Ansar al-Sharia’s impact on the country came from a union representing religious workers attached to the Ministry of Religious Affairs. It had registered 1,300 “religious extremist speeches,” received 1,600 complaints from worshipers about “irregular practices” within their mosques, and estimated 216 of the latter were outside the ministry’s control.54

The Triumph of Revolutionary Legitimacy

Ennahda took its time before bowing to the mounting secularist pressure for resignation of its besieged government. For three months, the country remained frozen in political deadlock as Ennahda battled for survival. The daily demonstrations by tens of thousands of secularists outside the Constituent Assembly building in the Tunis suburb of Bardo continued through August and into September. The leftist Popular Front called for “civil disobedience in all locations of the country until the governing coalition resigned.”55 The front then joined a broader coalition of center-right parties gathered together in a National Salvation Front (NSF) whose dominant figure was once again the veteran politician Beji Caid Essebsi, leader of the Nidaa Tounes Party. The NSF demanded the Constituent Assembly be dis-

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solved and another interim government put in charge of completing the draft constitution and organizing new elections. In mid-August, Ghannouchi began holding discussions with UGTT leaders on a way out of the impasse. Once again, the labor confederation was cast into the role of a major political player, this time as the key mediator even though it was adamantly opposed to Ennahda. The UGTT first put together a broad alliance of civil society groups composed of itself, the Tunisian Union for Industry, Commerce and Artisanal Production (UTICA) the National Association of Lawyers, and the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this alliance was the collaboration between the UGTT and UTICA, the first time labor and business had found themselves sharing a common cause since the struggle for independence during the 1950s. This self-appointed mediation board soon became known as “the Quartet.” Ennahda initially sought to avoid recognizing the Quartet’s authority, rejecting its call to negotiate a resolution of the crisis because this meant recognition of a new kind of legitimacy outside the elected Constituent Assembly, giving power to nonelected groups like the UGTT and UTICA, which were vehemently opposed to Islamic rule. But Ennahda found it had no other option and on September 17 accepted the Quartet’s invitation to a “national dialogue” with twenty other parties. Its acceptance marked the start of the Islamic party’s political demise. Many of the ensuing talks took place at the headquarters of its sworn enemy, the UGTT, led by its secretary-general, Houcine Abassi, who emerged as the key mediator in Tunisian politics over the following three months. By the end of September, Ennahda had accepted (at least in principle) the Quartet’s proposed roadmap for a solution to the national crisis, and on October 5 all party leaders formally endorsed it except for one—Ennahda’s own partner in the government, the Congress for the Republic Party, led by President Moncef Marzouki. The roadmap laid out a fast-track timetable for the resignation of the government within three weeks of the resumption of the Constituent Assembly’s work followed by the completion of the draft constitution within a month from that date. The Assembly was also to finalize an electoral law and commission to oversee new elections by then. In addition, the timetable required parties to the national dialogue to select a new prime minister within one week and gave him two weeks to form a cabinet of technocrats. The roadmap’s timetable proved to be mission impossible. Ennahda and the NSF leaders could not agree on who should be the interim prime minister and remained deadlocked on that issue until the end of 2014. Meanwhile, Essebsi had begun private negotiations to see if he could strike a deal directly with Ghannouchi to become the new head of an in-

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terim government and postpone presidential and parliamentary elections for a year. An initial secret meeting of the two leaders in Paris in mid-August soon became public knowledge, leading to intense speculation of a separate deal negotiated above the heads of all other political players. But Ennahda kept to its position that it would not resign until after the Constituent Assembly had completed the draft constitution and preparations for new elections. The two sides could not agree on the powers of the interim prime minister, particularly whether he would be empowered to cancel thousands of appointments the Ennahda government had made in the local, regional, and central administrations. The leftist Popular Front asserted that Ennahda had named 4,500 new civil servants from among its followers as well as 236 out of 264 officials appointed to run local governments.56 It wanted the new prime minister to purge these appointees before elections were held, fearing that otherwise they would work to ensure another Islamist victory. Ennahda was incensed by the opposition’s tactics of mobilizing Tunisians in the streets with the intent of overturning an elected government, even though the same tactics had been used to bring down the Ben Ali regime. Ghannouchi viewed the demonstrations as an illegitimate attempt to negate the results of the October 2011 elections. Having lost those elections, secularists wanted to use the power of the street to seize control of the government. “The Islamists here are now the main force defending democracy and liberals, the main force that wants to rule without elections and institutions,” he remarked to this writer in late September 2013. “They try to create the same atmosphere here as in Egypt.”57 Two conflicting notions of legitimacy, electoral and constitutional versus revolutionary, were up against each other in this Thermidorian phase of the Tunisian revolution, Ennahda pointing to the elections it had won and secularist parties and civil society groups to the size of the crowds in the streets. As we shall see, these forms of legitimacy came into violent conflict in Egypt as well during its Thermidorian reaction to Islamic rule.

Ennahda Concedes Power

Ennahda’s downfall came in steps. On October 5, it signed a Quartet-negotiated agreement to step down in favor of a government of technocrats, although Ghannouchi insisted until the last minute it was still only a “basis for discussion.”58 On October 23, it agreed to enter the national dialogue to resolve the deadlock, including who was to become the next prime minister. It took until December 14 to reach a consensus on who would lead the caretaker government. The choice fell on Mehdi Jomaa, an engineer

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and an independent acceptable to Ennahda because he had served as industry minister in the Laarayedh government still technically in office. Jomaa took over as prime minister of a government of technocrats on January 9, 2014, marking the end of Ennahda’s two years as the dominant political force in Tunisia. Completion of the constitution was the next step in the roadmap. The fourth and final draft was approved on January 26, but not before several tumultuous sessions of the Constituent Assembly that saw Ennahda’s Salafis air their grievances over losing the constitutional battle. One deputy attacked his secularist colleagues for refusing to accept “the people’s choice to be governed under legitimacy and sharia law.” The wellknown Ennahda militant preacher, Habib Ellouze, accused a leftist deputy of being an “enemy of Islam.”59 In reaction, secularist deputies pushed through an amendment committing the state to preventing public use of the word takfir, the denunciation by one Muslim of another as an unbeliever, and any language inciting to hatred and violence.60 The one issue that had stirred relatively little controversy was whether Tunisia would have another presidential system or a new parliamentary one. Because of the long experience with presidential authoritarianism under Bourguiba and Ben Ali, Islamists and secularists agreed that the locus of power would remain in the legislature, which was in charge of choosing and overseeing the prime minister while the president would be mainly responsible for foreign policy and defense matters. There had been no disagreement that Tunisia would not have another president-for-life. Article 75 stated the presidential term could not exceed two five-year terms and could not be amended. The final vote on the new constitution was overwhelmingly in favor of it: 200 to 12 with 4 abstentions. This count easily passed the requirement for two thirds of the assembly to approve it to avoid a nationwide referendum. Despite Ennahda having been forced to make innumerable compromises and even to give up power, Ghannouchi still found reason to laud the outcome during a visit to Washington in late February 2014.61 The new constitution meant Tunisians had found a formula for overcoming the divide between Islamists and secularists that he dated back to the days of French colonialism. “Since the nineteenth century we [Islamists] struggled to achieve this dream,” he declared. Moreover, Islamists had learned numerous lessons in the arduous process of writing the new constitution. One was that they could not govern simply by virtue of commanding a plurality of voters. Another was the need to compromise with their secular opponents to craft “a constitution by consensus.” To achieve this goal, Ennahda had been willing to surrender power voluntarily and accept the authority of a nonelected government. The outcome demonstrated in his mind that

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there was no “Arab exception” to reconciling democracy and Islam. Tunisia was living proof of this and intended to hold itself up as a model for the rest of the Arab world to follow. He was fully cognizant, he said, that “one flower does not make an [Arab] spring.”

The Restoration

Ghannouchi’s goal of reconciliation with the country’s secularists at all costs led him to seek a permanent accommodation with the politicians of the ancien regime. Such a development had been predicted by Brinton in his diagnosis of the post-Thermidorian period, leading to what he described as an amalgamation of the old and new orders. “The politically proscribed are amnestied and come back, sometimes to be caught up again in the scramble of competitive politics.”62 So it happened in Tunisia, even with Ghannouchi’s blessings and connivance. First, he prevailed in the debate over any age restriction on presidential candidates, thus clearing the way for Essebsi to stand in the December 2014 presidential elections just as he was turning a venerable eighty-eight years old. But it took all of Ghannouchi’s political clout over Ennahda to open the door to the return of “the politically proscribed.” Initially, his party had supported a bill put forward by its partner in the troika government, the Congress for the Republic Party, aimed at the “political immunization of the revolution” by barring from politics all former members of Ben Ali’s ruling Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD) and anyone who had supported the fallen leader’s last reelection. Subsequently, the proposed Law for the Protection of the Revolution in Tunisia reduced the ban to seven years and restricted it to only former senior officials of both the RCD and all Ben Ali governments since 1987. It generated enormous controversy and considerable international attention from human rights groups because of its sweeping nature. Human Rights Watch argued the law would “set the stage for the near-total political exclusion of thousands of people based on their past political association.”63 With the assembly’s approval of the constitution, the controversy renewed and came to a head in a heated debate starting in April 2014 over the law regulating forthcoming elections. Article 167 included a provision excluding all leading ancien regime politicians, and on June 28, it was approved. But events in Egypt and at home were causing Ghannouchi to have second thoughts. In the wake of Brahmi’s assassination in July, Ghannouchi feared the exclusion law would only heighten tensions, and he was seeking to reduce them by holding talks directly with Essebsi, who would be excluded from running for office. Already after their meeting in Paris in

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August 2013, the Ennahda leader had called for postponing the exclusion provision in Article 167 indefinitely, to the dismay of many in his own party. Ghannouchi stood his ground, but he barely managed to prevail. When the final vote on the election law took place on May 1, 2014, the assembly agreed by only a one-vote majority to eliminate Article 167.64 The law itself was approved by a vote of 132 to 11, but also with 9 abstentions and 65 other deputies absenting themselves. Ghannouchi later explained the reasons for his opposition to what had become known as the exclusion law. In a veiled reference to Egypt, he said he had taken note of the negative consequences of similar legislation in other Arab countries that had overthrown their dictators. He had decided it was better “to leave it to the people to decide,” despite the dangers of allowing the revolution’s enemies back into the political process. He did not want to repeat the tactics of “those who oppressed, imprisoned and tortured us and spread corruption and despotism.”65 He also disclosed that it had been a difficult decision to open a dialogue with Nidaa Tounes, even though the party embodied the Bourguiba legacy his own party had so strongly opposed for its militant secularism. It had been his “personal choice” to do so, and he had finally convinced Ennahda to go along with it.66 The consequences were soon apparent. Senior figures from the Ben Ali police state responsible for trying to crush the 2011 uprising were soon freed from prison. These included Ali Seriati, head of the presidential security; Rafik Belhaj Kacem, the Interior minister; and Mohamed Ghariani, former RCD secretary-general. Seriati, who had played the key role in protecting and then ousting Ben Ali, saw his twenty-year prison sentence reduced to three years so he could be released. Altogether, about twenty leading members of the ancien regime were freed, leaving only one member of the fallen presidential family, Imed Trabelsi, still in prison. Police officers and soldiers who had been convicted of shooting protesters, over 300 of whom had been killed during the uprising, were also either released or given light or suspended sentences.67 The only solace offered to the revolution’s martyrs and victims of Ben Ali’s police state was the establishment of the Truth and Dignity Commission in June 2014; the commission was empowered to investigate human rights abuses all the way back to Tunisia’s independence in 1956. At the commission’s inauguration, President Marzouki simply declared that “there can be no sustainable democracy without acknowledgment and addressing mistakes of the past.”68 His statement seemed to suggest Tunisia would follow the example of postapartheid South Africa, which in 1995 had set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was empowered to offer amnesties to former officials who admitted their crimes. But as of late 2015, the Tunisian commission had failed to bring any to justice.

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Parliamentary and presidential elections held in late fall 2014 consolidated the amalgamation of new and old political figures coming together to form what Brinton called “the new-old order” characteristic of the restoration period of a revolution. Parliamentary elections on October 26 saw the triumph of the so-called Destourians, those who had belonged to Bourguiba’s Destour Party, like Essebsi. In June 2012, they had hastily formed Nidaa Tounes with the sole purpose of rallying all secularists against Ennahda. The new party came out on top, winning 37 percent of the vote and 86 of the 217 seats in the new parliament. By contrast, Ennahda’s share of the vote from the Constituent Assembly elections in 2011 dropped to 27 percent, and its number of deputies fell from eighty-nine to sixty-nine. Another secular party, the Union Patriotique Libre, came in third with 4 percent of the vote and sixteen seats. It was led by a populist tycoon who owned a soccer club and television station, Slim Riahi. Yet another secular party came in fourth: the leftist Front Populaire, which gained fifteen seats. Altogether, secularist parties now held a majority and could have isolated Ennahda from any role there. But this is not what happened. When the new parliament opened on December 4 to elect its leadership, it chose to establish a coalition secular-Islamist leadership: Mohammed Nasser, vice president of Nidaa Tounes, was elected speaker and Abdelfattah Mourou, vice president of Ennahda, first deputy speaker. Presidential elections just as powerfully reflected this confluence of new and old politicians. Twenty-seven candidates, representing a rainbow of political persuasions, entered the race, and at least four of them were wellknown ancien regime figures. In addition to Essebsi, they included Kamel Morjane, Ben Ali’s last foreign minister, and three others who served in one or another of his governments. There was also a number of former opposition figures from the Ben Ali era who emerged to play leading roles after the uprising, such as Marzouki, the interim government president, and Mustapha Ben Jafar, the Constituent Assembly leader. The most radical old opposition candidate was Hamma Hammami, head of the Communist Party and leftist Front Populaire. Ennahda, on the other hand, announced that it was abstaining from the presidential race to send “a positive message to the Tunisian people and politicians.”69 The race quickly boiled down to a two-way contest between Essebsi and Marzouki, the former posing as the Lord Protector (Oliver Cromwell’s title) of Bourguiba’s secular legacy and the latter as the standardbearer of the new order threatened by the return of politicians from the ancien regime.70 Ennahda chose officially not to back any candidate but was widely believed to be secretly urging its supporters to vote for Marzouki to stop Nidaa Tounes from controlling the presidency as well as parliament and the new government.71 As expected, the results of the first round of vot-

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ing on November 23 left Essebsi and Marzouki in the lead, the former capturing 39 percent of the vote to the latter’s 33 percent. The run-off held on December 21 delivered Essebsi a clear victory with 56 percent of the vote. Essebsi chose as prime minister Habib Essid, a senior security official from the Ben Ali era and interior minister in his interim government in 2011. Essid at first tried to form a cabinet composed almost exclusively of all Nidaa Tounes members. But he did not have the votes in parliament to overcome opposition from Ennahda and other parties. The outcome was a four-party coalition government that this time symbolically included Ennahda (one ministerial post). It was approved by 166 out of parliament’s 217 deputies on February 5, 2015. Two of the four parties—Ennahda and the Union Patriotique Libre—clearly represented political forces that had come to the fore as a result of the revolution and were now amalgamated into Tunisia’s new-old order. Certainly the biggest deviation from the restoration period of revolution as projected by Brinton was the absence of a really strong presidency in Tunisia due to a multiplicity of factors, with the advanced age and lack of energy of Essebsi top of the list. I leave to a later chapter a detailed discussion of various other issues that made such an outcome highly unlikely in Tunisia’s revolution.

Notes 1. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 139–144. 2. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 22. Brinton uses the less conventional spelling “Thermidorean reaction.” 3. 18 October Collective for Rights and Freedoms, “On the Relationship Between the State and Religion,” in Our Road to Democracy (Tunis, 2010). 4. Hamadi Jebali, Ennahda secretary-general, address to the Sousse Business Forum, Sousse, June 11, 2011. 5. Sana Ajmi, “Ennahda Discourse: The Sixth Caliphate or a Misunderstanding?” Tunisia Live, November 16, 2011. 6. Author’s interview with Rached Ghannouchi, Tunis, March 28, 2013. 7. Author’s interview with Rached Ghannouchi, Tunis, March 22, 2012. 8. Ghannouchi interview, 2012. 9. Ghannouchi interview, 2012. 10. For more details, see International Crisis Group, “Popular Protest in North Africa and the Middle East (IV): Tunisia’s Way,” Middle East/North Africa Report No. 106, April 28, 2011. 11. Roua Seghaier, “What Are the Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution?” Tunisia Live, January 23, 2013. 12. Author’s interview with Mounir Ajroud, Tunis, September 20, 2013. 13. Rached Ghannouchi, speech at Stanford University Conference Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Tunis, March 28–29, 2013.

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14. Frida Dahmani, “Tunisie: Ennahda, Blocage a Tous les Etages,” Jeune Afrique, No. 2667, February 19–25, 2012. 15. Roua Khlifi and Adam Le Nevez, “Secret Video Reveals Ghannouchi’s Vision for Islam in Tunisia,” Tunisia Live, October 11, 2012. 16. Associated Press, “Tunisia Salafis Riot to Protest an Arrest,” New York Times, May 26, 2012. 17. For more on these and other Salafi attacks, see International Crisis Group, “Tunisia: Violence and the Salafi Challenge,” Middle East/North Africa Report No. 137, February 13, 2013. 18. Author’s intervivew with Salahuddin Jorchi, March 22, 2012. 19. Jorchi interview. 20. Ghannouchi interview, 2012, cited in David Ottaway, “Tunisia’s Islamists Struggle to Rule,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Middle East Program, Viewpoints no. 1, April 2012. 21. Author’s interview with Mondher Ben Ayed, March 20, 2012. 22. Ghannouchi, Stanford University conference. 23. Rached Ghannouchi’s speech at conference, “Democratic Transitions in the Arab World,” Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Tunis, March 29–30, 2013. 24. Ghannouchi, “Democratic Transitions” conference. 25. Author’s interview with Rached Ghannouchi, Tunis, September 26, 2013. 26. Author’s interview with Kacem Afaya, March 22, 2012. 27. Constitution of Tunisia, http://confinder.richmond.edu/admin/doc/Tunisiaconstitution .pdf. 28. Ghannouchi, Stanford University conference. 29. Joelle Fiss, “Leader of Tunisia’s Ruling Party: Blasphemy Is Not a Crime,” Human Rights First, June 6, 2013. 30. Rached Ghannouchi, “The Freedom of Conscience,” speech at Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Tunis, July 19, 2013. 31. Constitution of Tunisia. 32. Alice Fordham, “Tunisia’s Draft Constitution Brands Women ‘Complementary’ to Men,” National, August 6, 2012. 33. Constitution of Tunisia. 34. Constitution of Tunisia. 35. Draft Constitution of the Tunisian Republic, European Commission for Democracy Through Law (Venice Commission), Opinion No. 733/2013, Strasbourg, June 20, 2013. 36. “Debate on Constitution Erupts over Fears of ‘Theocracy,’” Tunisia Live, July 3, 2013. 37. Ghannouchi interview, September 26, 2013. 38. Draft Constitution of the Tunisian Republic. 39. Draft Constitution of the Tunisian Republic. 40. Kareem Fahim, “Ruling Islamists, Under Attack, Reject Blame for Tunisia’s Woes,” New York Times, February 11, 2013. 41. Author’s interview with Rached Ghannouchi, Tunis, September 28, 2013. 42. Al Mounji El Saidani, “Leader of Salafi-Jihadism in Tunisia Threatens to Launch War Against Laarayadh’s Government,” Al-Sharq al-Awsat, March 22, 2013, published by BBC Monitoring International Reports, March 30, 2013. 43. Tristan Dreisbach, “Tunisia Creates Anti-Terror Cells to Fight ‘Radical Salafist Movement,’” Tunisia Live, March 29, 2013. 44. “Jihad des Jeunes Tunisiens en Syrie (1ere Partie): L’Envers du Paradis,” La Presse de Tunisie, March 28, 2013. 45. Tarek Amara, “Tunisia Cracks Down on Jihadists as Elections Loom-PM,” Reuters, October 11, 2014.

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46. David D. Kirkpatrick, “New Freedoms in Tunisia Drive Support for ISIS,” New York Times, October 21, 2014. 47. See Aaron Y. Zelin, Andrew Lebovich, and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, “AlQa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb’s Tunisia Strategy,” West Point Combating Terrorism Center, July 23, 2013, accessed July 15, 2016, http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/al-qaida -in-the-islamic-maghrebs-tunisia-strategy. 48. David Ottaway, “Violence Unsettles Tunisia’s Democratic Transition,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Middle East Program, Viewpoints No. 25, April 2013. 49. Farah Samti, “Minister of Interior Says Government Failed to Protest Brahmi,” Tunisia Live, September 19, 2013. 50. “Tunisian Police Union Unveils Existence of ‘Parallel’ Police Force,” Xinhua, July 30, 2013. 51. Ghannouchi interview, September 26, 2013. 52. “300 Terroristes Sont sous les Verrous,” La Presse de Tunisie, September 26, 2013. 53. “300 Terroristes.” 54. “Les Cadres Religiux s’en Prennnent au Minister,” La Presse de Tunisie, September 26, 2013. 55. Ben Bouazza and Paul Schemm, “Mohammed Brahmi Dead: Tunisian Opposition Leader Assassinated,” Huffington Post, July 25, 2013. 56. Author’s interview with Hamma Hammami, Tunis, September 23, 2014. 57. Ghannouchi interview, September 26, 2013. 58. Sarah Chayes, “How a Leftist Labor Union Helped Force Tunisia’s Political Settlement,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 27, 2014. 59. Robert Joyce and Safa Ben Said, “Assembly Floor Erupts over Constitution Article on Religion,” Tunisia Live, January 22, 2014, and “The Best and Worst of Tunisia’s New Constitution,” al-Monitor, January 29, 2014. 60. Constitution of the Tunisian Republic. 61. Rached Ghannouchi, speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, February 27, 2014. 62. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 219. 63. “Tunisia: Draft ‘Political Exclusion Law’ Invites Abuse,” Human Rights Watch, October 13, 2012. 64. “Tunisia Adopts Law for 2014 Elections,” Naharnet, May 1, 2014. 65. Rached Ghannouchi, “On Tunisia’s Democracy Transition,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, February 26, 2014. 66. Noureddine Jebnoun, “Tunisia at the Crossroads: An Interview with Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi,” Georgetown University, Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding Occasional Papers, April 2014. 67. Carlotta Gall, “Questions of Justice in Tunisia as Ousted Leaders Are Freed,” New York Times, July 17, 2014. 68. “Tunisia Launches Truth and Dignity Commission,” UNDP, June 9, 2014. 69. “Tunisia’s Ennahda Party Will Not Run a Candidate in the Presidential Election,” Middle East Monitor, September 8, 2014. 70. “Tunisia Vote a ‘Last Stand’ for Old Guard: Marzouki,” Agence France Presse, November 19, 2014. 71. “Ennahda soutient Marzouki et Son Contraire,” La Presse, November 9, 2014.

Part 3 Stages of the Egyptian Revolution

7 Fall of the Pharaoh

The overthrow of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had an electrifying effect on Egypt’s already unsettled body politic. It had taken twenty-nine days for the uprising in Tunisia to reach its culmination in Ben Ali’s flight to Saudi Arabia. It would take just eighteen days for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to give up power and flee to his resort villa in Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. In the Arab world, the impact of an Egyptian modern-day pharaoh fleeing before the crowds was substantial, because Egypt was the most populous country, with the most powerful military, and long the cultural and political center. The speed with which Mubarak’s regime melted away after nearly thirty years in power was evocatively reminiscent of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which also caught all of the participants by surprise. In both uprisings, crucial events happened in the capital and involved huge street protests by mostly urban dwellers, and the behavior of the military proved decisive. In Russia, the revolution began with a walkout by women from the factories around Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), who were celebrating the socialist international Women’s Day on March 8 (February 23 on the old Russian calendar). Their main slogan was “bread,” and the women came back to the streets day after day. Some of the soldiers from the local garrison began showing sympathy and mingling with the protesters, whose numbers grew as other discontented workers and political activists joined in. When the government sought to disperse the crowds by using the Imperial Army, various units called to duty rebelled and sided with the protesters instead. What followed was a week of total confusion in which “ob119

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scure leaders, sergeants, factory foremen and the like” suddenly arose from obscurity to lead small groups in the seizure of strategic points around the old imperial capital. Crane Brinton found that determining who did what precisely constituted “the despair of the historian.”1 What could not be disputed was the collapse of the old imperial order. Just eight days after the first protest, Czar Nicholas II resigned in favor of his brother, Archduke Michael, who in turn abdicated the next day, thus ingloriously ending the 304-year reign of the Romanovs. Whether the whole process took eight or ten days,2 it all happened with extreme rapidity, as was later the case in Egypt and for largely the same reasons: the refusal of the army to defend the ruler, even siding with the protesters, and the failure of the country’s leaders, totally disconnected from their people, to know how to react to the vast crowds in the street. I have already described the general preconditions favorable to an uprising in Egypt, beginning with the desertion of its intellectuals (Chapter 3) and the growing economic gap between the upper and lower classes affecting even the middle class during a sudden spurt in economic growth after 2004 (Chapter 4). The spurt in economic growth between 2005 and 2010 had given rise to the Egyptian equivalent of Russia’s oligarchs, a small class of super-rich industrialists, bankers, multinational company CEOs, and information technology promoters numbering around 100 families.3 Elsewhere I detailed the sense of pending upheaval prevailing in the country in early 2010, noting unsettling parallels with the tensions building up to those prior to President Anwar Sadat’s assassination.4 Workers, civil servants, and middle-class employees were coming under enormous economic stress due to low wages in a time of rising inflation. The possibility of food riots, like those that had occurred at the start of the Russian Revolution and in Egypt in 1977 and 2008, was again on the mind of government authorities. Egyptian universities were churning out thousands of graduates with dim or no prospects for employment. The children of the political elite were fed up with Mubarak and the prospect of his son, Gamal, running in the presidential elections scheduled for September 2011. Workers had moved their protests from the factories to the sidewalks in front of parliament and the cabinet building. Michael Slackman of The New York Times described in vivid detail one sit-in outside the legislature that April, where he found a mixture of factory and government workers, employees of a telephone company, and a group of people with disabilities who had all been there for forty-seven days demanding jobs and housing. Nearly every sector of the economy, including tax collectors, had participated in turning the sidewalks of Cairo “into a revolutionary door of protests.”5 Egyptian human rights and prodemocracy activists were also up in arms aided by the explosion in the use of the Internet and social media

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tools. Already by early 2009, one in nine Egyptians had access to the Internet and 800,000 were on Facebook, which ranked the site third after Google and Yahoo as the most frequently visited website.6 A 2010 Egyptian government report stated that 160,000 Egyptians were running blogs with half of the bloggers between the age of twenty and thirty.7 Activists were using the Internet to mobilize people for protests against everything from the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2009 to police brutality cases. The Al Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence ran a “torture diary,” which kept a chronicle of hundreds of allegations and detailed accounts from victims that it published on its website and sent on to the UN Human Rights Council.8 One case of police brutality that came to play a direct role in triggering the uprising occurred on June 6, 2010. Two undercover policemen arrested twenty-eight-year-old Khaled Said at a cybercafe in Alexandria and subsequently beat him to death. The police asserted Said was a drug dealer and claimed he had died from asphyxiation while attempting to swallow a bag of marijuana. But a cellphone picture taken by a witness showed he had been badly beaten, his face battered to a pulp. The picture set off a storm of protest on the Internet and within six weeks, a Facebook page set up to follow his case had 190,000 followers.9 Said’s death touched off demonstrations on June 20 in Cairo and five days later in Alexandria. The latter attracted 2,000 to 5,000 people, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, who had become an opposition leader and potential rival to Mubarak. ElBaradei used the occasion to call for an end to torture in Egypt and of the Mubarak regime.10 Obviously, Facebook served to mobilize protesters and spread pictures of the demonstrations afterward. Feeling the mounting public pressure, on June 30 the government ordered the arrest of two policemen who were involved. By November 2010, more than 225,000 Egyptians had joined the Facebook page “Kullena Khaled Said” (“We are all Khaled Said”).11 The mood of the country was clearly changing and not just toward police brutality. Mubarak was becoming a focal point of attention as well. On March 7, 2010, Egyptian state television disclosed that the president, then eightyone, had undergone an operation in Germany the previous day to remove his gallbladder and an undefined growth in his small intestine. The official statement reported he was in “stable condition” but gave no prognosis for his future.12 He remained in the hospital for three weeks and did not resume his presidential activities until March 19, making clear the seriousness of the operation. His illness immediately touched off intense speculation in the local and international press over whether he would be able to run for reelection in 2011, and if not, who might stand in his place. “Who will rule Egypt after Mubarak?” became the question of the day.13

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Gamal Mubarak Presidential Bid

The focus of speculation fell on the president’s ambitious son, Gamal, who since 2000 had been consolidating his position within the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). A graduate of the American University in Cairo’s business school, he had worked seven years for the Bank of America in London and then set up a private equity fund there before plunging back into Egyptian politics at the age of thirty-seven. He was put in charge of the party’s Policies Committee, tasked with rejuvenating the ossified ruling body and drawing up economic reforms. Gamal had engineered the 2004 government under Prime Minster Ahmed Nazif, dominated by businessmen like himself and dedicated to liberalizing the economy. By 2006, he had become NDP assistant secretary-general, leader of its reform wing, and the very apparent heir to his father. In August 2010, his promoters set up the Popular Coalition for the Support of Gamal Mubarak and began circulating a petition hoping to attract a million signatures. They plastered downtown Cairo with posters hailing Gamal as “the Hope of the Poor.”14 Preparations for Gamal to succeed his father had roiled the NDP leadership and earned no sign of support from the military, while the opposition was up in arms against the prospect.15 The party’s ruling six-person secretariat was divided evenly between an old guard led by NDP Secretary-General Safwat el-Sherif and its reformist wing with Gamal at the helm. The old guard continued to push for President Mubarak to run yet again, and on August 27 el-Sherif announced the party had “unanimously” voted to back him for a sixth term.16 Mubarak kept his options open, neither accepting nor rejecting the party nomination. Meanwhile, the military, which had no vested interest in Gamal, kept silent; Gamal had not done his military service and never bothered to cultivate ties with any of the armed forces’ leaders. As early as 2007, the US ambassador to Cairo, Francis Ricciardone Jr., had told Washington he saw the military as “a key stumbling block for a Gamal candidacy.” According to one of his cables from that year (made public later by Wikileaks), Defense Minister Mohamed Hussein Tantawi’s state of mind was one of increasing “frustration and disenchantment with Gamal.”17

Mohamed ElBaradei’s Return

Adding to the growing drama was the return of Mohamed ElBaradei on February 19, 2010. Then age sixty-seven, ElBaradei had ended his long stint as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and

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made known his intention to challenge the Mubarak regime. His appearance on the political scene galvanized the opposition around a truly serious challenger for the first time. Mubarak could not easily dismiss a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and holder of Egypt’s highest award, the Order of the Nile. Even before his return, ElBaradei had declared free and fair elections to be “the major question mark in Egypt” and demanded guarantees to make them possible.18 Once back home, he set about campaigning for changes to make such elections possible and for an amendment to the constitution to limit the president’s term in office to eight years. Another demand was an end to the state of emergency that had been in place ever since Mubarak had come to power in 1981. ElBaradei established a National Association for Change, which immediately attracted the support of a wide range of youth, human rights groups, and opposition political parties. He launched a petition campaign to gather one million signatures in favor of various constitutional and other reforms.19 To get around the statecontrolled media, he created a Facebook page that attracted 100,000 followers by the end of February 2010.20 He also took to using Twitter to communicate with and rally Egyptians to his cause. In mid-March, four leftist opposition parties holding collectively just 10 seats in the 454-seat parliament formally announced their support for ElBaradei’s campaign, while the Muslim Brotherhood, with 88 deputies, began negotiations to join the ElBaradei bandwagon. The following month, ElBaradei called for a boycott of parliamentary elections scheduled for November to “deprive” the Mubarak regime of its legitimacy.21 He warned that Egypt had become “a time bomb” and asserted that change, meaning real “democracy, freedom and social justice,” had become “inevitable.”22 By September, the previously staid diplomat was calling for peaceful street protests and open civil disobedience if the Mubarak regime refused to respond positively. “The decision to take to the streets if the regime does not agree to demands for change will be . . . the beginning of the end of this regime.”23 One of the paradoxes of ElBaradei’s petition campaign consisted of its heavy dependence on the Muslim Brotherhood for success. On July 7, Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie publicly declared his support for ElBaradei and his reform demands. He called on Brotherhood members to sign the petition to pressure the Egyptian government into changing its “autocratic behavior,” ending the “escalating waves of torture and abuse” and election rigging.24 Seven members of its Executive Bureau signed the petition in public to encourage others to follow suit. By early October, the Brotherhood announced it had collected 742,405 signatures on its own, in addition to the 114,166 signers mobilized by ElBaradei’s National Association.25 This brought the total close enough to the goal of one

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million to make clear to the Mubarak regime that it had a serious challenge on its hands, with Islamists and secularists uniting and gaining undeniable momentum. The reaction of Mubarak’s supporters only made the situation worse. They set about battening down the hatches, like a ship heading into a storm. In May, the government pushed through parliament yet another extension of the state of emergency over the opposition of civil and human rights groups, 103 deputies in the People’s Assembly, and the Barack Obama administration in the United States. On May 11, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement calling the extension “regrettable” because it continued to give the government “extraordinary powers to restrict the rights of Egyptian citizens.” The Obama administration had been urging Mubarak to replace the state of emergency with a counterterrorism law protecting civil liberties.26 In July, the ruling NDP dug in its heels and rejected any possibility of change. It belittled ElBaradei’s reform demands as a “personal request” and asserted that to give in to them would indicate “the weakness of the state.”27 The government’s propaganda machine also sought to discredit him with Brotherhood supporters, launching a Facebook page called “ElBaradei’s Family Secrets,” featuring a picture of his daughter, Laila, in a swimming suit at a party where alcohol was being served.28

The November 2010 Parliamentary Elections

At the same time, the NDP set about driving the Muslim Brotherhood out of parliament, starting with the first elections for one third of the 264 seats in its upper house, known as the Shura Council. On June 1, the NDP swept eighty of those eighty-eight seats, while the Brotherhood was blocked from taking even one. This set the scene for what was to come in the main elections for the lower house, the People’s Assembly, on November 28. These turned into a full-scale rout of the opposition, Islamists and secularists alike. Ignoring ElBaradei’s call for a boycott, the Brotherhood mounted a robust campaign aimed at increasing the number of seats it already held. So it had nominated 130 candidates. This time the government resorted to all means to ensure the defeat of all of them. Before the elections, it rounded up “at least 1,200” of the Brotherhood’s supporters, broke up its rallies, and barred a number of its candidates from standing.29 It also barred foreign monitoring of the elections and transferred oversight of them from the semi-independent judiciary to the Interior Ministry. It came as little surprise that in the first stage of the elections held on November 28 the NDP won 311 seats and not a single Muslim Brotherhood candidate emerged victorious. In reaction, the Brotherhood and the

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liberal Wafd Party decided to drop out. The final official results gave the NDP 424 seats, 86 percent of the total, a margin enhanced even further when the 65 so-called independents who normally aligned with the ruling party were added. All opposition parties combined won just sixteen seats, 3 percent of the total.30 The Brotherhood’s presence was reduced from eighty-eight deputies to one sympathizer, effectively reducing the Islamic opposition to “political nonexistence.”31 These massively rigged elections primed the country for the coming explosion, hardening the battle lines between the Mubarak regime and opposition groups. ElBaradei immediately called for a boycott of the 2011 presidential elections, denouncing the socalled parliamentary ones as a national “tragedy” and “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”32 The impact of the last elections of the Mubarak era could be measured in another way: a sudden sharp drop in readership of state-run newspapers and the meteoric rise in circulation of three private opposition newspapers—al-Masry al-Youm, al-Destour, and al-Sharouk. The person documenting this phenomenon was no less than Abdel Monem Said Aly, chairman of the al-Ahram publishing company. Al-Ahram was known as the government’s semi-official voice, and it distributed not only its own paper but 90 percent of all print publications in the country. Thus, Said Aly knew the circulation of the two other main state-run papers, al-Akhbar and alGomhuria, as well as those of the opposition. He decided to measure what he felt was growing public discontent by comparing sales of the three state-owned ones to those of the three private newspapers at the points where they were all delivered across the country. He marked on a map those outlets where the state papers sold more copies in green and those where the opposition was ahead in red. He discovered that up until September 2010, the majority of the points on his map were green. But as the November parliamentary elections approached, the number of red spots began to increase dramatically. “By January 2011, the map had become almost entirely red: The country was raging with anger.”33 The November elections also had a major impact on the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership, which had already been seriously divided over political strategy for a decade. A reformist wing had favored participation in the political process, setting up a political party, and making alliances with secularists, while a conservative one had argued for a withdrawal from politics to emphasize dawa (proselytizing). The Brotherhood’s success in electing deputies to parliament in the 2005 elections had given considerable momentum to the reformers. It had proven the group’s ability to mobilize its supporters to gain political power within existing institutions. However, in a bitterly fought battle over elections to its sixteen-man Guidance Council in December 2009, the reformers lost out to the conserva-

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tives. The latter had then elected Mohammed Badie to replace the retiring Mohammed Mahdi Akef as Supreme Guide in January 2010. At the time of his election, Badie was described as a pure theologian uninterested in political activism. Egyptian analysts had widely anticipated the Brotherhood would return to focusing on promoting Islam and social services.34 Thus, it came as a surprise to see them reject ElBaradei’s call for a boycott of the November elections and then run even more candidates than before. Badie’s deep distrust of political engagement seemed fully justified after the Brotherhood was driven out of parliament. This experience was the bitter lesson it had to weigh when choosing whether to join the uprising against Mubarak later.

Impact of the Tunisian Uprising

In the midst of this rising disenchantment with the Mubarak regime came news of the uprising in Tunisia. With President Ben Ali’s flight from the country on January 14, 2011, ElBaradei proclaimed that regime change in Egypt had indeed become “inevitable.”35 Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian activist behind the “Kullena Khaled Said” Facebook page, described in his book Revolution 2.0 the enormous impact of events in Tunisia, including an attempt by five Egyptians to imitate Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation had sparked the Tunisian uprising. One of the main obstacles to launching an uprising in Egypt had been the lack of self-confidence among activists because of “our exaggerated perception of the regime’s strength,” Ghonim wrote. Ben Ali’s fall broke that psychological barrier of fear. “Our pride had now been challenged: Tunisia had taken the lead in the quest for liberty. It was a shot in the arm.”36 Ghonim said the Tunisian uprising was also the inspiration for what he claimed was originally his idea of organizing a demonstration on National Police Day. This was the government’s annual ceremony held to mark the death of fifty Egyptian policemen killed fighting British colonial forces in 1952. Ghonim posted on his Facebook page the day of Ben Ali’s flight: “January 25 is Police Day and it’s a national holiday. . . . If 100,000 take to the street, no one can stop us. . . . I wonder if we can??”37

The Onset of the Uprising

No Egyptian activist or even Mubarak’s ubiquitous security services anticipated what occurred that day in Cairo, Alexandria, and other major cities. General Intelligence, under the all-powerful Gen. Omar Suleiman, had

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been carefully monitoring the exchanges among activists on Facebook and other Internet outlets and concluded that a maximum of 100,000 Egyptians would participate—only 20,000 in Cairo and another 10,000 across the Nile in Giza.38 Mubarak did not show even a hint of concern during three meetings Said Aly attended with him in the ten days prior to the uprising’s onset. He described the atmosphere around Mubarak and his “strategic elite” as “extremely relaxed.”39 Various activists, including Ghonim, admitted they had no expectation a full-scale uprising was about to erupt. The initial demonstrations were organized almost entirely online by leading activists of the April 6 Youth Movement, ElBaradei’s National Association for Change, and Ghonim’s “Kullena Khalid Said” followers and was carried out in a very haphazard manner. Ghonim was in Dubai, where he was working until January 23.40 Two key organizers, Ghonim and April 6 Youth Movement leader Ahmed Maher, had only met for the first time on January 19—in Doha, Qatar, while they were attending a conference there. Maher did not yet know that Ghonim was the man behind “Kullena Khalid Said,” and Ghonim did not reveal his role to him in Doha.41 The Internet proved a great facilitator for the uprising. Said Aly noted an incredible explosion in the number of “cyber-revolutionaries” on Facebook, Twitter, and hundreds of group blogs that had sprung up starting in mid-January. Between January 10 and February 10, people created 2,313 Facebook pages about the uprising with 34 million people participating in exchanges about it.42 One of the most effective cyberspace activists was Asmaa Mahfouz, a co-founder (with Maher) of the April 6 Youth Movement. She made video clips promoting the uprising that went viral and were later credited with convincing many Egyptians to take to the streets on January 25.43 On the ground, the April 6 Youth Movement played a key mobilizing role with five other small liberal or leftist groups like the ElGhad Party, led by the defeated 2005 presidential candidate Ayman Nour. Various accounts of the January 25 demonstrations seem to agree that no one foresaw the size of the turnout on that first day—probably around 20,000 in Cairo alone,44 or that it would touch off an upheaval sweeping Mubarak from power just eighteen days later.45

Fall of the Pharaoh

It is not my intention to recount the daily happenings of the uprising, though key events are included here. It is tempting to conclude that the tidal wave of protest was of such proportions that there was no way Mubarak could have saved himself or his regime without incurring enormous bloodshed. But he almost did save himself at one point, and had cer-

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tain events not turned violent he might have succeeded in completing his term in office that same year. The violence was key to the defection of his military, which refused to open fire on protesters. I cited in the last chapter Crane Brinton’s conclusion that the ancien regime is doomed once it loses control of the armed forces or fails to find a way to use them effectively.46 So it was for the Mubarak regime, just as it had proved true for Ben Ali in Tunisia. The breadth and depth of the Egyptian uprising was truly massive— unparalleled in the country’s history since that against British colonial rule in 1919 that had led to its partial independence three years later. The numbers involved were indeed impressive, particularly in Tahrir Square, which quickly became the political epicenter of the uprising. Said Aly calculated that 18 million Egyptians, out of a total population of 80 million, participated at some point in all of the country’s provinces.47 What started as the brainchild of tech-savvy university-educated activists quickly became an uprising embracing the whole society, with middle-class families and even some upper-class ones turning up in Tahrir Square to show their support. The level of violence spiraled out of control with the burning of offices belonging to the NDP across the country and most spectacularly its headquarters near Tahrir Square. Protesters attacked or destroyed dozens of police stations and broke into prisons, allowing 23,000 criminals and political opponents, particularly those from the Muslim Brotherhood, to escape. The most spectacular occurred on January 29 at the vast prison complex at Wadi El Natrun north of Cairo; 11,000 political prisoners gained their freedom, mostly notably 34 senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders including Mohamed Morsi, who later took Mubarak’s place as president of Egypt.48 The ill-equipped and totally unprepared antiriot Central Security Forces of 325,000 quickly disintegrated under the stress of daily combat, while most of the regular police (numbering one million) fled their posts, leaving law and order to neighborhood watch groups.49 Tahrir Square became a permanent encampment of protesters, the scene of daily bloody confrontations with police, party-paid thugs, and Mubarak partisans flashed around the world hour by hour thanks to a captivated international media. The official death toll between January 25 and February 16 reached 846, with another 6,467 wounded. Said Aly discerned four distinct stages in the uprising, each one bringing in more people until millions of protesters were involved, coming from all social classes. Their demands escalated from “Bread, freedom, dignity and social justice” to “The people want the overthrow of the regime.” Each stage became bloodier as a growing number of young Muslim Brotherhood youth and “ultras,” the infamous thuggish soccer fans, joined in the battles against police and Central Security Forces.50 After the first week of daily battles between pro-

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testers and security forces, the only force left preventing total nationwide anarchy was the army, which was finally called on to restore a modicum of order on January 31.

The Army Abandons Mubarak

There is good reason to conclude that Mubarak’s fate was sealed on January 31. On that day, the Egyptian armed forces issued a statement acknowledging “the legitimacy of the people’s demands” and assuring the millions of protesters they “have not and will not resort to the use of force against this great people.”51 The statement was issued without prior consultation with Mubarak, and it marked the military’s distancing itself from the president in two dramatic gestures, first by acknowledging the legitimacy of the uprising and then by Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi’s refusal to accept an offer to become either vice president or prime minister of the besieged government.52 In the first case, the military was reacting to the wide-scale violence on January 28, the so-called Day of Rage. This was the first instance in which the Muslim Brotherhood, to that point undecided what to do, formally engaged in the uprising. The government had done everything, including cutting Internet service, to head off protests that day, but they failed miserably. That same night, Mubarak dismissed Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif and his business-dominated government while promising “new steps toward more democracy and freedoms.”53 The extent of bloodshed during the Day of Rage also led the long-serving Interior Minister, Habib el-Adly, to inform the president that his security forces could no longer contain the uprising.54 El-Adly handed in his resignation on January 31, the same day the armed forces publicly declared their support of the uprising. It took another eleven days before Mubarak finally gave up power. The inner circle of advisers around the aging president proved increasingly divided about what he should do. Said Aly, who was part of that group, enjoyed an inside view of the conflicting advice coming from various sides. He identified four main contending cliques, each proposing different tactics. The first was composed of Mubarak and his immediate family—his wife, Suzanne, and sons, Gamal and Alaa—who tended to dismiss the uprising as “just another crisis.” A second faction was led by the powerful Minister of Interior el-Adly and the General Intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, both of whom had seriously underestimated the extent of popular support for the uprising or to convey “a sense of urgency” to the president. A third group gathered around NDP Secretary-General Safwat elSherif, who advocated suppressing the protesters in a “tough, even violent

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manner” the same way the Chinese had dealt with the Tiananmen Square riots in 1989. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) constituted the fourth faction, standing apart from the other three and showing no interest in being used by Mubarak to save himself and his family.55 Even after the military’s defection on January 31, Mubarak took steps to preserve his presidency by appealing directly to the Egyptian people for understanding and forbearance. In a highly emotional speech on February 1, he declared he would not seek reelection and for the first time in his decades in office named a vice president, Suleiman. This was meant to signal that he had given up hope of seeing Gamal take his place. Mubarak also called on the legislature to amend Articles 76 and 77 of the constitution to end unlimited terms for the president and facilitate independent candidates running for that position. His speech ended by asking Egyptians to allow him to finish his term and life in Egypt: “Hosni Mubarak who speaks to you today is proud of the long years he spent in the service of Egypt and its people. This dear nation is my country. It is the country of all Egyptians. Here I have lived and fought for its sake, and I defended its land, its sovereignty and interests, and on this land I will die and history will judge me and others for our merits and faults.”56 His appeal appeared to have a major impact in his favor. Ghonim admitted later that this speech proved “hugely divisive,” and that a large number of activists were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt and allow him to finish his term. Postings to his “Kullena Khaled Said” Facebook page made it clear that Mubarak “had won many hearts,” with more of his supporters signing up for the next demonstration than his opponents, 140,000 to 55,000.57 This surge of goodwill proved short-lived. The hard-line faction in control of the ruling party was determined to crush the uprising by any means. On February 2, pro-Mubarak demonstrators took to the streets, determined to drive protesters out of Tahrir Square. The NDP paid thugs and even mobilized camel riders engaged in the tourism business around the pyramids. The latter led what became known as the Battle of the Camels, which erupted into a wholesale onslaught on anti-Mubarak protesters defending the square. According to Ghonim’s account, the only thing that saved the day for its defenders was the action of a single army officer, who he identified as Capt. Maged Boulos. Acting on his own, Boulos had opened fire on the pro-Mubarak thugs, who then fled the square in disarray. This allowed the protesters to counterattack, capturing many of the thugs and all of the camels and their riders, whom they turned over to the army.58 As a result of this fiasco, Suleiman, who had taken over as chief strategist for the Mubarak family, sought to take charge and immediately moved to marginalize the hard-line NDP faction. Whether the president agreed with this move remained unclear, but Suleiman set about reforming the rul-

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ing party leadership, including sacking Gamal Mubarak on February 6 in an apparent effort to reassure the crowds he no longer had any chance of replacing his father. The NDP’s secretary-general, el-Sherif, was replaced by Hossam Badrawi, who had managed to gain a reputation for being sympathetic to the protesters’ demands. This gambit quickly failed. Badrawi discovered he was powerless and resigned four days later. He recounted later that he had tried to convince Mubarak that the only way to save his presidency was to prove to Egyptians he really meant to step down; he should delegate “all his authority” to his new vice president and remove himself “geographically somewhere else” until the election in September. In addition, he should immediately amend the constitution, ending unlimited terms for the presidency, and call for new parliamentary elections. Badrawi said Mubarak dithered endlessly about what to do. “Every response from the president was too little too late, all the time.”59 The extent of desperation gripping those around Mubarak was reflected in their last-minute attempt to win over leading activists. Ghonim, who had been kidnapped off the streets of Cairo and thrown into prison on January 27, lived through a somewhat surreal experience on being released on February 6. He had been blindfolded and kept in handcuffs for eleven days, then was suddenly freed and taken directly to a private meeting at the State Security’s headquarters with the newly appointed interior minister, Mahmoud Wagdy, and the new NDP secretary-general, Badrawi. They were desperately seeking his support. Badrawi even drove Ghonim back to his home after their meeting, using their time alone to try to convince him the party and new government under Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik were serious about reforming the political system. Over the next two days, Wagdy, Badrawi, and the State Security chief, Gen. Hassan Abdul Rahman, conducted secret negotiations with five activists they apparently regarded as the uprising’s prime instigators and thus capable of swaying the crowds in Tahrir Square. The activists included Ghonim, April 6 Youth Movement leader Ahmed Maher, Mostafa Alnagar from the ElBaradei campaign, film director Amr Salama, and journalist-blogger Khaled elBaramawy. The objective of Wagdy and Badrawi, according to Ghonim, was to obtain the support of the activists to help arrange the “honorable resignation” of President Mubarak.60 They were even offered a session with the president to advise him on what he should say in his resignation speech, promised for the night of February 10. Whether these negotiations were all a ruse to use the five activists or a sincere attempt by Badrawi to arrange a soft departure for Mubarak remained unclear. In any event, they never met Mubarak, but were taken instead to see Prime Minister Shafik, a former air force commander and minister of aviation close to the president. Shafik showed no knowledge of or

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interest in Badrawi’s plan for the activists to play a role in ushering Mubarak from power. Ghonim concluded they had been victims of a plot to use them in a “media stunt” to bolster the president’s fading fortunes.61 Badrawi at least seemed to have been sincere in his effort to orchestrate the president’s departure, warning Mubarak he was facing a “Ceauşescu moment.” This was a reference to the rapid fall and execution by firing squad of Romania’s last communist leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, in the bloody 1989 revolution there.62 On the night of February 10, Mubarak delivered his famous “sons and daughters” speech, his last to the nation, seeking to portray himself as the “father” of all young Egyptian protesters gathered in Tahrir Square. He appealed once more for public sympathy, citing his long, distinguished service to the nation. He reaffirmed that he would not stand for reelection and would make all the constitutional changes demanded of him. He would even delegate unspecified powers to his vice president.63 Yet he still strenuously avoided uttering the word resignation. Tahrir Square exploded in anger, and some protesters immediately started marching toward the presidential palace, several miles away in Heliopolis. The sense of an approaching bloodbath was suddenly in the air. Unbeknownst to the crowds, the military was already moving to unseat Mubarak. Prior to his speech to the nation, the SCAF had met without Mubarak and issued the first of many formal declarations to the nation: the military intended to defend “the legitimate demands of the people” and remain in continuous session to decide which measures to take next. The next morning, Defense Minister Tantawi warned Mubarak of “a possible bloody confrontation” in front of the presidential palace and counseled “that it would be better for him and the country if he and his family departed for Sharm el-Sheikh.”64 Mubarak finally agreed to a plan being drafted by Tantawi, Suleiman, and Shafik for him to transfer power not to his new vice president but to the SCAF. Suleiman informed Mubarak of the council’s decision and then he, not the president, announced it to the nation at 6 p.m. on January 11. In the end, it was his top military commander and intelligence officer who had forced Mubarak to resign to avoid the army from becoming involved in and held responsible for a bloody confrontation.

The US Role in Mubarak’s Demise

The role played by the United States in Mubarak’s precipitous fall was to become a highly contentious issue in its relations with Saudi Arabia and will be discussed in greater detail in a later chapter. Suffice it to say that the turning point in the SCAF’s attitude toward the uprising, and thus to-

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ward the Egyptian president’s fate, had come on January 31, when the military recognized “the legitimacy of the people’s demands” and vowed not to open fire on the crowds. The next day, Mubarak had announced he would not seek reelection and appointed Suleiman as vice president—but he had not said he would resign immediately. After listening to Mubarak’s speech, Obama called the Egyptian president, and the two held a thirtyminute conversation. The White House issued a statement saying that Obama pressed Mubarak to undertake a meaningful and peaceful transition that must “begin now.”65 In the context of Mubarak’s failure to mention any intent to resign, Obama’s words could only be viewed as a call for him to do so immediately. What is clear from various statements coming from the SCAF and Obama is that Mubarak found himself under simultaneous pressure to resign from the central pillar of his power at home and his main ally abroad.

Legacies of the Uprising

There are a number of salient characteristics to this initial phase of the Egyptian revolution that should be kept in mind for a later discussion of its similarities and dissimilarities with that in Tunisia or other examples. The absolutely central role played by the military in determining Mubarak’s fate—down to arranging the details for his peaceful departure—in many ways resembled a classical military coup. Brinton had observed that the behavior of the military made all the difference in determining whether initial uprisings turned into full-scale revolutions by ultimately backing the revolutionaries.66 This was the case for the 2011 Egyptian uprising. No one called it a military coup. At the time, no one envisaged that a little more than two years later Egypt would witness another military intervention, spurred by another popular uprising that its opponents immediately condemned as a coup. But in 2011 there was broad agreement among Islamists and secularists alike that Mubarak should go even though he had been a legitimately elected leader. Nonetheless, his removal by the military at the demand of the street introduced a new concept into Egyptian politics, that of “revolutionary legitimacy.” Of course, this is a hallmark of revolutions in general. It came into play again in 2013, challenging the notion of the “constitutional legitimacy” of another democratically elected president. Another salient feature of this first phase of Egypt’s revolution was its lack of leadership or preexisting revolutionary bodies like the Jacobin clubs of the French Revolution or Socialist Revolutionary Party of the Russian one. Ghonim described it as a “revolution without a leader and without an organizing body,” which is a generally accurate description.67 Established

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opposition parties like the Wafd, Tagammu, and El-Ghad played only a marginal role in launching and sustaining the uprising. Its leadership was ad hoc and constantly changing. To the extent there was any definable leadership, it came midway through the uprising on February 7, when five groups formed the January 25 Revolutionary Youth Coalition and specifically named ten individuals to provide a collective leadership.68 Only one of its members, Ahmed Maher from the April 6 Youth Movement, was involved in the talks orchestrated by Suleiman, the intelligence chief who became Mubarak’s short-lived vice president. The group of five activists, which included a film director, a blogger, and a Google executive, nicely reflected the disparate and ad hoc nature of the uprising’s leadership. They created no revolutionary party to lead the next phase of the struggle. Another distinguishing feature consisted of the absence of labor union activists in the leadership, despite an unprecedented outburst of strikes once the uprising got under way. Strikes broke out across the country, including one by public transport workers that crippled Cairo on February 7 and another open-ended sit-in by employees of Suez Canal service companies. Thousands of workers abandoned the government-controlled labor federation to organize their own unions. This led to the establishment of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), the first such organization in the country’s labor history. The EFITU quickly grew to encompass 1.6 million workers from 100 independent unions. On February 9, these independent unions held a nationwide strike.69 Striking workers were certainly among the throngs in Tahrir Square, but whatever their numbers and role, they were unnoticed in media reports. Their main grievances were labor-related ones over wages, job security, and union rights. Unlike the UGTT in Tunisia, the EFITU played no role in organizing the uprising, but disgruntled workers certainly seized the occasion to ride its waves and press their own demands. The meteoric rise of the Muslim Brotherhood at the center of Egyptian politics proved the most consequential outcome for the political struggle ahead. Its role before and during the eighteen days of protests became highly controversial. Secular activists later asserted that the Brotherhood had “hijacked” their revolution. In one sense at least, the Brotherhood did bear a similarity to the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution: they were the best organized, disciplined, and most capable of all political groups, and they could mobilize large numbers on a moment’s notice. On the eve of the uprising, the Brotherhood had been hunkered down after taking a battering in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Thirty-five of its top leaders were imprisoned in Wadi El Natrun Prison, together with thousands of its activists. Still, it had a depth of leadership and 600,000 members, which enabled it to gain the most from the opportunities opened up for opposition parties and groups.

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The Muslim Brotherhood’s attitude toward the January 25 National Police Day protest had been highly ambivalent. None of its leaders counted among the online activists promoting it, and Ghonim said he tried but quickly gave up trying to coordinate with them.70 Even so, its leadership was not totally indifferent. In a statement issued on January 20, the Brotherhood hailed the Tunisian uprising and said it was a warning “to all unjust and tyrannical powers.” Instead of calling for similar action, however, the statement urged the government to take “immediate reform” and listed ten specific changes Mubarak should implement or else “stability will not last long.”71 The Brotherhood’s youth wing, numbering over 200,000 of the organization’s 600,000 members, nonetheless pressed for permission to participate as individuals.72 Two days before the Police Day protest, Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie announced the Brotherhood would participate “in solidarity with the other political trends” despite threats of “arrests, violence and detention” from state security officials.73 Still, there were continuing doubts about its intentions, and the Brotherhood felt obliged to issue another statement on January 27, affirming that its members would indeed participate. The Brotherhood might be a separate “Islamic collective organization,” it said, but its followers were still very much part of Egyptian society.74 Many militant Brotherhood youth had already decided to disregard the leadership and joined the uprising from day one. Some of them later broke away to form their own separate Egyptian Current Party. The Brotherhood’s full official engagement began after prayers on Friday, January 28, when it ordered its followers into the streets en masse. Thereafter, its role became increasingly controversial among secular activists and middle-class Egyptians, so much so that on February 7, the Youth of the Revolution published a declaration reassuring Egyptians that the Brotherhood had not taken over Tahrir Square. It was just one of many diverse groups there and had “the right to participate, like any other political current.”75 In fact, the general assessment of the domestic and foreign media was that the Brotherhood, particularly its youth wing, had played a major role in organizing the defense of Tahrir Square, providing “the muscle” to ward off attacks from pro-Mubarak supporters.76 This had been particularly true during the tide-turning “Battle of the Camels” on February 2.77 Finally, there was definitely what Brinton called a honeymoon in this first phase of the Egyptian revolution, marked by the participation of widely different social, religious, and political groups in massive numbers.78 Islamists, Christian Copts, and secularists had come to demonstrate and camp together in Tahrir Square day and night. Such a public demonstration of social unity was unprecedented since the uprising against British colonial rule in 1919. The heroics of protesters gathered in Tahrir

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were later memorialized in the 2013 film, The Square, nominated for the Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards in the United States. One Egyptian activist described the experience in Tahrir Square as Egypt’s “Woodstock moment,” a reference to the 1969 counterculture musical festival in upstate New York, attended by 400,000 young people.79 Reporters especially noted the display of unity between Muslims and Christians to the point where Christians were seen protecting Muslims as they prayed in the square.80 Media reports also described the surprisingly large number of women participants inspired by bloggers like Asmaa Mahfouz, who had worked hard to promote the participation of women prior to the uprising.81 The uprisings had also brought in the best and the brightest of Egyptian society—professionals, tech-savvy students, unemployed university graduates, and children of the political elite like those of Egypt’s foreign minister in 2014, Nabil Fahmy.82 For a brief and seemingly magical moment, Islamic, Christian, and secular portions of Egyptian society were bound together in a common cause summed up in a one-word demand to Mubarak—Irhal (“Leave”).

Notes 1. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 79–81. 2. See John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966). The title refers to events that took place in November 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power. 3. See David B. Ottaway, “Egypt at the Tipping Point?” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Occasional Paper Series, Summer 2010. 4. Ottaway, “Egypt at the Tipping Point?” 5. Michael Slackman, “Labor Protests Outside Egypt’s Parliament Test Government,” New York Times, April 29, 2010. 6. Samantha M. Shapiro, “Revolution, Facebook-Style,” New York Times, January 25, 2009. 7. “Egyptian Blogs: New Social Space,” Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center, July 20, 2008, accessed July 18, 2016, http://startuparabia.com/2008 /07/idsc-releases-new-report-about-egyptian-blogs/. 8. Miret El Naggar, “‘Torture Diary’ Logs Charges of Police Abuse in Egypt,” McClatchy Washington Bureau, July 19, 2010. 9. Kareem Fahim, “Death in Police Encounter Stirs Calls for Change in Egypt,” New York Times, July 19, 2010. 10. Ellen Baugh, “Beating Death of Young Egyptian Leads to Protests, Trial of Policemen,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2010. 11. Baugh, “Beating Death of Young Egyptian.” 12. “Public Statements on Mubarak’s Health Fail to Allay Worries,” Agence France Presse, March 7, 2010. 13. Khalid al-Shami, “Confusion in Management of Dossier of Mubarak’s Health,” Al-Quds al-Arabi, March 18, 2010, reprinted in BBC Monitoring Middle East as

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“Analysis Highlights Egyptians’ Fears About Future, Mubarak’s Likely Successor,” March 18, 2010. 14. “Lawyer Starts Signature Campaign for Gamal Mubarak,” Egypt Daily News, August 11, 2010. See also Washington Post Foreign Service, “Group Tests the Waters for Mubarak Son Succession,” Washington Post, September 9, 2010. 15. For more details about the controversy surrounding Gamal Mubarak’s presidential candidacy, see Stephen Roll, “Gamal Mubarak and the Discord in Egypt’s Ruling Elite,” Arab Reform Bulletin, September 1, 2010, and Joshua Hammer, “The Contenders: Is Egypt’s Presidential Race Becoming a Real Contest?” New Yorker, April 5, 2010. 16. “Mubarak Nominated for 6th Term in Office,” UPI, August 27, 2010. 17. “Military Could Block President’s Son from Top Job: Wikileaks,” Agence France Presse, December 14, 2010. 18. “ElBaradei Rules Out Presidential Bid,” UPI, January 25, 2010. 19. The petition listed seven demands: (1) end to the state of emergency, (2) judiciary supervision of the whole election process, (3) monitoring of elections by both local and international civil society groups, (4) equal opportunity in the media for all presidential candidates, (5) right of Egyptians living abroad to vote in Egyptian embassies and consulates, (6) limiting the presidency to two terms only and ending “arbitrary restrictions” on presidential candidates, and (7) allowing Egyptians to vote only with their national identity cards, and amendments to the constitution to make these reforms possible. 20. Amro Hassan and Jeffery Fleishman, “Egypt’s Mohamed ElBaradei Creates National Front for Change,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2010. 21. “ElBaradei Urges Election Boycott, Says Activist,” Daily News Egypt, April 13, 2010. 22. Viviana Mazza, “ElBaradei Calls on ‘Mubarak Clan’ for ‘a Free Egypt,’ Predicts ‘Revolt,’” Corriere della Sera, reprinted in BBC Monitoring Middle East, May 18, 2010. 23. “ElBaradei Calls for Egypt Election Boycott: Report,” Agence France Presse, September 7, 2010. 24. “MB Launches Nationwide Petition in Support of ElBaradei’s Call for Reform,” July 7, 2010, accessed July 18, 2016, http://ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=25572. 25. Hussein Mahmoud, “MB and NAC’s Online Petition 7 Demands for Change Approaches 1,000,000 Signature Target,” October 5, 2010, accessed July 16, 2016, http://ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=26638. 26. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Egypt’s Renewal of State of Emergency,” May 11, 2010, accessed July 16, 2016, http://www.state.gov/md141736.htm. 27. “Egypt Ruling Party Official Says Constitution Not to Be Amended upon Pressure,” Excepts from Al-Sha’b, reprinted in BBC Monitoring Middle East, July 28, 2010. 28. Samer al-Atush, “Picture Politics: Egypt’s Rulers Accused over Photos of ElBaradei’s Daughter,” Daily Telegraph (London), September 6, 2010. 29. Robert Worth, “Fraud Charges Mar Egypt Vote,” New York Times, November 28, 2010. 30. “Official Results: 16 Opposition, 424 NDP, 65 ‘Independents,’” English Ahram Online, December 6, 2010. 31. Robert Worth, “First Round of Voting Ousts Islamists from Egypt’s Parliament,” New York Times, November 30, 2010. 32. Heba Fahmy, “ElBaradei Calls on Opposition to Boycott 2011 Presidential Elections,” Daily News Egypt, December 9, 2012. 33. Abdel Monem Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt: The Paradox of Change and Politics,” Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, Essay 2, January 2012, 3.

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34. Safaa Abdoun, “MB Elects New Supreme Guide,” Daily News Egypt, January 18, 2010. 35. “After Tunisia, Change in Egypt ‘Inevitable:’ Elbaradei,” Agence France Presse, January 18, 2011. 36. Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater than the People in Power (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 133. 37. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 134. 38. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 39. 39. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 5. 40. For a good description of preparations for the January 25 demonstrations, see Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 122–160. 41. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 148–149. 42. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 22. 43. See Essam Fadl, “A Talk with Egyptian Activist Asmaa Mahfouz,” Asharq AlAwsat, February 7, 2011. 44. “Revolution That Began 18 Days Ago Leads to Mubarak’s Ouster,” CNNWorld, February 11, 2011. 45. See the collection of interviews with various activists in “Inside Egypt’s Tahrir Uprising,” Cairo Review of Global Affairs (Spring 2011): 67–125. Also see Kareem Fahim and Mona el-Naggar, “Violent Clashes Mark Protests Against Mubarak’s Rule,” New York Times, January 25, 2011. 46. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 94–95. 47. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 21. 48. “Morsi Prison Escape Referred to Egypt Prosecutors,” English Ahram Online, June 23, 2013. 49. Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt (London: Verso, 2012), 194 and 235–238. 50. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 21–24. 51. For text of statement, see “Egyptian Army Statement Vowing Not to Use Force,” BBC News, Middle East, February 1, 2011. 52. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 42. 53. “Highlights: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s Speech,” Reuters, January 29, 2011. 54. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 39. 55. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 39–40. 56. “Full Text of Mubarak’s Speech,” Reuters, reprinted in Al Jazeera, February 2, 2011. 57. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 233. 58. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 234. 59. “I Didn’t See it Coming,” interview with Hossam Badrawi, Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Spring 2011, 79–87. 60. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 276. For a more detailed account of these negotiations, see Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 277–282. 61. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 281. 62. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 9. 63. “Full Text of Mubarak’s Speech,” CNN Wire Staff, February 11, 2011. 64. Said Aly, “State and Revolution in Egypt,” 43–44. 65. “Obama Says Egypt’s Transition ‘Must Begin Now,’” CNN, February 2, 2011. 66. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 94. 67. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 139. 68. The five groups were the April 6 Youth Movement, the Muslim Brotherhood’s youth wing, the Mohamed Elbaradei Support Group, the Young Freedom and Justice Movement, and the Democratic Front Party’s Youth Wing.

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69. For more details on the labor situation, see “Labour Unions Boost Egypt Protests,” Al Jazeera Engish, February 9, 2011; Jano Charbel, “Workers, Professionals Demand Independent Labor Unions,” Al-Masry Al-Youm, February 24, 2011; “Labour Unions Boost Egypt Protests,” Al Jazeera English, February 9, 2011; and Jano Charbel, “A Year in Review: The Labor Battle Continues,” Al-Masry Al-Youm, December 31, 2011. 70. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 170. 71. “MB’s Statement on Tunisia’s Uprising and the Demands of the Egyptian People,” January 20, 2011, accessed July 18, 2016, http://ikhwanweb.net/article.php?id =27890&ref=search.php. 72. Jeffery Martini, Dalia Dassa Kaye, and Erin York, “The Muslim Brotherhood, Its Youth and Implications for U.S. Engagement, ” National Defense Research Institute, Rand Corporation 2012, 10. 73. “MB Chairman Confirms Group Will Take Part in Day of Rage March Despite Threats,” January 23, 2011, accessed July 18, 2016, http://ikhwanweb.com/article.php /article.php?id=27905. 74. “MB Statement on January 25, Day of Rage and its Consequences,” January 27, 2011, accessed July 16, 2016, http://ikhwanweb.net/article.php?id=27937&ref=search .php. 75. “A Message from Tahrir Square,” Youth of the Revolution, February 7, 2011. 76. Charles M. Sennott, “Inside the Muslim Brotherhood: Part I,” GlobalPost, February 21, 2011. 77. Martini, Kaye, and York, “The Muslim Brotherhood,” 11–12. 78. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 95. 79. Shashank Bengali, “In the ‘Republic of Tahrir,’ Egypt Gets its Woodstock Moment,” McClatchy Newspapers, February 2011. 80. Justin [online ID], “Christians Protecting Muslims in Egypt and Reflections on a Revolution,” February 4, 2011, accessed January 30, 2014, http://peacetour.org /Egypt-revolution. See also “Egypt’s Muslims and Christians Join Hands in Protest,” BBC News, Middle East, February 10, 2011. 81. See Fatma Naib, “Women of the Revolution,” Al Jazeera English, February 19, 2011; Sonua Verma, “Coptic Christians Shoulder to Shoulder with Muslims in Tahrir Square,” Globe and Mail, February 6, 2011; Ahdaf Soueif, “Tahrir Square Protest: ‘For Everyone Here, There’s No Turning Back,’” Guardian, February 1, 2011. 82. See Nabil Fahmy, “A More Assertive Arab Foreign Policy,” Cairo Review of Global Affairs (Spring 2011): 102.

8 The Thermidorian Reaction

The Egyptian revolution witnessed a Thermidorian reaction, just as Tunisia’s did.1 The only problem was that the revolutionaries did not agree on “the extremists” against whose excesses they were rebelling. For Egyptian secularists, the Muslim Brotherhood was looked on as the extremists because this group was dedicated to establishing an Islamic state. For Egyptian Islamists, on the other hand, the extremists were those in favor of a civil state and in control of the state bureaucracy, the judiciary, and security services. In this chapter, the secularist notion of the term will be followed because their vehement opposition to the prospect of Islamic rule dictated the course the revolution took. The next chapter, dealing with the “deep state,” favors the Brotherhood’s notion of the extremists (some secular revolutionaries shared it). Another explanation of terminology is required here, namely, the controversy in Egypt over the word secularist. In Tunisia, opponents of the Islamic party, Ennahda, did not object to being described as such or even as laïcs, the more militantly secularist term. They were proud defenders of the Bourguiba model and Tunisia’s secular traditions. In Egypt, opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood strongly objected to being referred to as secularists because their society was devoutly religious and did not have the secular institutions and traditions prevailing in Tunisia. They felt the expression implied they were not devout Muslims and was thus detrimental to their image and cause. They preferred to be called liberals. Nevertheless, the term secularist is used here because liberal does not distinguish them clearly from their Islamic opponents or is justified in light of their connivance in overthrowing Egypt’s first democratically elected president. 141

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The four years following Hosni Mubarak’s ouster from power divide nicely into four distinct periods. The first began on February 11, 2011, when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) took power and lasted until June 30, 2012, when the Muslim Brotherhood candidate for president, Mohamed Morsi, came into office. The second period under Morsi’s presidency ended after only one year and three days, when the SCAF arrested him and took over again on July 3, 2013. The third period saw a military-backed interim civilian government run the country for ten months until Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was elected and sworn into office on June 8, 2014. This inaugurated a fourth period, which was still ongoing at the time of this writing in early 2016. During three of these years, Egypt continued to experience tumultuous and violent times as the revolution voraciously devoured its children, Islamists and secularists alike, particularly its young revolutionaries. The country saw two new constitutions, three constitutional declarations, three referenda, four presidents, and six prime ministers. It experienced the first truly fair and free parliamentary elections ever held in the country, their annulment five months later, the election of Egypt’s first ever Islamic leader, his overthrow after a year in power, the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood, the demise of the revolutionary youth movement, the opening of a deep societal split between secularists and Islamists, another popular uprising, the worst massacre of civilians by the military in Egypt’s history, and finally the demonization followed by the reglorification of military rule. It is no exaggeration to describe Egypt as a nation more or less in permanent revolution for three years. I begin in this chapter by concentrating on events that transpired during the first two periods outlined above, which led to the Thermidorian reaction against Islamic rule.

The First Attempt at Military Rule

The first period of SCAF governance proved rocky, secretive, and erratic. The military started out in an aura of being the revolution’s savior, but within a few months it had seriously alienated both Islamists and secularists. Its chairman and deputy chairman, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Anan, rarely appeared in public. Instead, the SCAF ruled mysteriously by fiat and made announcements on an official Facebook page it chose as its main tool of communication with the Egyptian public. One study found the SCAF had sent out ninety-three “letters” to the Egyptian people via Facebook during 2011, with its message changing from emphasizing its role as protector of the revolution to being a “safety shield” and “fortress of security” for the Egyptian people.2 Its

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first actions were aimed at appeasing protesters’ demands for dismantling the political empire Mubarak and his son, Gamal, had built. Both houses of the legislature were dissolved, and the 1971 constitution was amended two days after Mubarak left office. On February 17, the SCAF arrested the hated former interior minister, Habib el-Adly, and three close Mubarak associates including Ahmed Ezz, a National Democratic Party (NDP) stalwart. All were put under investigation for corruption, abuse of authority, or squandering state wealth. This was followed by the dissolution of the NDP in mid-April. El-Adly was the first of the ancien regime stalwarts to go on trial. On May 5, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for money laundering and profiteering while awaiting another trial for allegedly ordering police to open fire on demonstrators.3 Mubarak’s fate unfolded more slowly but just as inexorably toward prison. He was briefly left free at his vacation home in Sharm el-Sheikh, far from the turmoil in Cairo and demands from Tahrir Square for his trial and execution for the death of hundreds of protesters. His assets in Swiss banks, along with those of his sons, Gamal and Alaa, and sixteen close associates, had been frozen immediately after his ouster. Assumptions about the Mubarak family having amassed a fortune worth billions proved vastly exaggerated. The Swiss holdings of all those affected by the freeze came collectively to 700 million Swiss francs (US$767 million at the time), with Gamal and Alaa accounting for $340 million of the total.4 Mubarak’s portion of the frozen assets was never made clear and may have been mixed with those of his sons. The president’s freedom of movement in Sharm el-Sheikh came to an end on April 13, when Egypt’s general prosecutor ordered his arrest along with that of his sons. They were informed they would face trial for various crimes of misuse of power and office and corruption. In Mubarak’s case, the charges included “premeditated killing” of protesters, which meant he faced the death penalty. The fallen pharaoh went on trial in late May 2011 before a civil administrative court, together with his former prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, and former interior minister, el-Adly. They were charged and found guilty of cutting cellphone and Internet services during the uprising and were collectively fined $91 million, $33.6 million assessed to Mubarak alone. Mubarak was allowed to remain in a hospital in Sharm elSheikh, but he was moved to another hospital in Cairo for his criminal trial, which opened on August 3 and included his sons and el-Adly. It was an amazing spectacle for Egyptians and the world to see the most powerful man of Egypt for almost thirty years wheeled into the courtroom inside the Police Academy on a hospital bed and then locked in an iron cage. The trial dragged on for ten months until on June 2, 2012, Mubarak was found guilty, sentenced to life in prison, and taken to Tora

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Prison outside Cairo to begin serving his term. He had not been found guilty of ordering the bloody crackdown on protesters, only of being an “accessory to murder” for having failed to stop it, while other charges against him were dismissed. El-Adly was treated in the same manner, while charges against Mubarak’s sons were dismissed on legal grounds. Mubarak was in a state of shock over his life sentence. He was seen crying and refusing to get out of the helicopter that ferried him from the court to Tora Prison, while tens of thousands of Egyptians were in the streets to protest the verdicts and miscarriage of justice for the more than 800 protesters who had died during the uprising. Meanwhile, the SCAF took other steps to revamp Mubarak’s political system. On March 19, it held its first referendum on constitutional reforms proposed for limiting the presidency to two four-year terms, making it easier to run for president, and putting elections back under judicial supervision. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor, 77 percent to 23 percent, but the turnout was relatively low, only 42 percent.5 The SCAF issued its own “constitutional declaration” on March 30, which amounted to a whole new constitution and a roadmap toward a new political system starting with parliamentary and presidential elections. Its declaration basically superseded the referendum that had just been held. It declared the new parliament’s foremost task would be to select a 100-member Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution within six months, and it contained a number of controversial and contradictory articles. For example, while it declared Egypt “a democratic state,” it also stated “Islam is the religion of the state” and the “principles of Islamic law (sharia) are the principal source of legislation.”6 On the other hand, no political party could be established with a “religious referential authority” or on a “religious basis.”7 There were guarantees for all kinds of freedoms and human rights as well as for an independent judiciary, but no protection against military trials for civilians—a key demand of protesters. The powers and duties of the three branches of government were spelled out, but this was presumably what the Constituent Assembly was supposed to decide, not the SCAF. Finally, the declaration empowered the SCAF to make laws; appoint and dismiss the prime minister, cabinet members, and all senior officials; and govern the country until the election of a new president. The initial reaction of those who had filled Tahrir Square to demand Mubarak’s ouster was to continue demonstrations, particularly on Fridays after prayers. First, they demanded that Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik, who was still in office, be dismissed. On March 3, Shafik was replaced by Essam Sharaf, a US-educated highway engineer and scholar who had been among the protesters. The day after his appointment, he went back to Tahrir Square, declaring he was there to “draw legitimacy” from the

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demonstrators.8 He spoke with a Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohamed Beltagy standing at his side, apparently to signal a new era of legitimacy for Islamists as well as secularists in the nation’s politics. The January 25 Youth Coalition put forth its own demands. These included restructuring the Ministry of Interior, prosecution of its officials blamed for the death of protesters, the establishment of a “national dialogue committee,” and a three-member presidential council to replace the SCAF in overseeing the transition period.9 But the main focus quickly became another set of issues: military trials of civilians, the SCAF’s proposal to put parliamentary elections ahead of drafting a new constitution, and the military’s attempt to impose its own supraconstitutional principles. The effect was to alienate both Islamists and secularists from the military while dividing Islamists and secularists from each other.

The Secularists Turn on the Military

The beginning of the fallout between the SCAF and the secular opposition came less than a month after Mubarak’s removal from office. On March 2, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights discovered that the military had arrested, tried, and sentenced to five years in prison Amr Abdallah al-Beheiri. The thirty-two-year-old artist and activist had allegedly assaulted a soldier during a demonstration on February 26 while demanding the dismissal of Prime Minister Shafik.10 Protesters were already engaging in clashes with army soldiers sent in to clear them out of Tahrir Square. On March 9, the army, aided by civilian thugs, destroyed a tent camp there and took 190 resisting activists to a military prison. Some were tortured inside the Egyptian Museum adjacent to the square. In late April, the first posters appeared under the title “No to Military Trials for Civilians.” Activists began questioning the army’s role behind deadly attacks by pro-Mubarak elements on protesters in Tahrir Square during the eighteenday uprising and why the SCAF was continuing to arrest its supporters.11 By early May, the number of imprisoned demonstrators had reached 5,000. In reaction, 400 bloggers held a No SCAF Day in cyberspace on May 23 and called for a “second revolution” beginning in Tahrir Square the next Friday. For its part, the January 25 Youth Coalition joined in with its demand for Mubarak and senior officials from his regime be put on trial. It seemed no coincidence that just one day after the bloggers’ online protest, the Egyptian prosecutor-general announced that Mubarak would stand trial for his alleged role in ordering the use of force to crush the uprising. His sons were charged with corruption in obtaining five seaside villas in Sharm el-Sheikh in exchange for allowing a business associate to gain

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$714 million in a gas deal with Israel.12 Still, activists went ahead with their May 27 protests in Tahrir Square, and the military continued to enrage them by arresting many of them in an attempt to quell their protests. On September 5, the SCAF disclosed that between January 28 and August 29, military tribunals had tried 11,879 civilians and convicted 8,071.13 Furthermore, it said the trials would continue as long as the state of emergency decreed by Mubarak in 1981 remained in place, and they offered no date for ending it. Secular opposition to the military stiffened after a violent confrontation on October 9 outside the Maspero Building near Tahrir Square housing the state television and radio stations. Army soldiers guarding the building opened fire on a crowd of mostly Christian Copts protesting the government’s failure to protect their churches from attacks by Muslims. In the ensuing mayhem, several armored personnel carriers (APCs) ran into the crowd as well, a scene captured on television and broadcast live. All told, 28 protesters were killed, mostly Christians, and 300 others were injured. The SCAF first denied its soldiers had used live ammunition or killed any protesters with their APCs. It claimed those guarding the building had been attacked with Molotov cocktails, swords, and knives and that those crushed under the APCs had been accidental victims of drivers seeking to escape.14 The army arrested thirty-four Copts, of whom only two eventually were found guilty and then only of stealing a machine gun during the clash. Three APC drivers were also arrested and later tried and found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of fourteen protesters. For the first time, the SCAF had undeniable blood on its hands.

Secularists and Islamists Go Their Separate Ways

The May 27 demonstration against military trials marked the first major test for the still-undetermined relationship between secular activists and the Muslim Brotherhood. The two camps had begun drifting apart over the SCAF’s unilateral constitutional declaration issued on March 30, which the Brotherhood had supported ostensibly because of its endorsement of Islamic law. Secular activists had denounced it for the same reason. In addition, the Brotherhood had declared itself “very concerned” about the anti-SCAF protest scheduled for May 27 and refused to endorse it. Instead, it pointed to the revolution’s numerous victories and warned against activities dividing the military from the people. “A second revolution may cause unnecessary sedition and strife which in turn may trigger unnecessary clashes” with security forces, it warned.15 Evidence the Brotherhood had decided to play a different political game from secular activists first appeared on February 21, when it had de-

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clared its intention to establish the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). On April 30, it formally did so and delegated three members of its ruling guidance council to lead it—Mohamed Morsi as president, Essam el-Erian as vice president, and Saad el-Katatni as secretary-general. It also announced its intention to put up candidates for half the seats in the new legislature. Though the three men had resigned from the guidance council, the April 30 statement said “coordination” between the new party and the Brotherhood was likely. El-Erian argued that not to do so would “threaten its own chances” because it would not be able to take advantage of the organization’s national scope and historical role.16 A historic moment for the Brotherhood came on June 6 when the government officially recognized the FJP as a legal party and thus a legitimate player in the political system. It represented the fulfillment of a goal the Brotherhood had been pursuing since its founding in 1928. The division between the Muslim Brotherhood and secular revolutionaries deepened as they took opposite sides in the debate over whether parliamentary elections or the new constitution should come first and how soon the former should be held. The SCAF’s roadmap called for elections first and proposed they take place in September. The Brotherhood agreed because it had the best organized party and thus the best chance to gain control of parliament, which was to be in charge of drafting the new constitution. The secular parties, far weaker in organization and popular support, wanted elections delayed as long as possible, and they demanded that the constitution be written first and not by a legislature they feared would be dominated by Islamists. But the Brotherhood had the March referendum on its side as it had stipulated that an elected parliament should take responsibility for writing the constitution. This explained why secularists initially rushed to support a SCAF-backed compromise proposal made public in July for all parties to agree on a set of twenty-one supraconstitutional principles as a basis for drafting the document. These provided a set of unalterable principles that were to underlie the future constitution but also assured the military special powers and a protected status outside the legislature’s oversight. The liberals hoped thereby to ensure a civil state and block the Islamists’ push for an Islamic state.

The Supraconstitutional Principles Debate

Throughout summer and early fall 2011, secularists and Islamists fought over these supraconstitutional principles.17 Various attempts were made to straddle the political and religious divide threatening to split Egyptian society into warring camps. In June, both Mohamed ElBaradei, the lead-

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ing liberal presidential candidate at the time, and al-Azhar Mosque, the country’s main Islamic religious institution, put forth proposals aimed at finding a compromise. ElBaradei’s “Bill of Rights” dealt with both guarantees of political and human rights as well as the nature of governance; it pointedly excluded a role for the military but declared Islam the state’s religion and sharia the main source of legislation.18 ElBaradei invited the Muslim Brotherhood and the even more conservative Salafis to meet and discuss his proposal. At the same time, Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb outlined on national television the “al-Azhar Document,” which called for a “democratic and constitutional” state and attacked the notion of an “Islamic state” in very clear terms: “Islam has never, throughout its history, experienced such a thing as a religious or a theocratic state.”19 But the imam also avoided use of the term civil state so strongly supported by the secularists. On August 24, the SCAF issued an amalgam of supraconstitutional principles that at once declared Egypt to be a “civil democratic state” but also one having Islam as a state religion and the sharia the main source of legislation. The publication of these principles brought Islamists and liberals back into an anti-SCAF front for another brief moment. The JFP, the Wafd, and more than a dozen other parties of both Islamic and liberal persuasion, allied at the time in the so-called Democratic Alliance, rejected the principles, but for different reasons. Most opposed the SCAF attempt to determine the content of a new constitution outside an elected parliament, while Islamists feared “civil state” meant a “secular state,” as it did to secularists.20 On the other hand, all the alliance’s parties opposed parts of the principles that gave SCAF the authority to keep its budget outside parliamentary scrutiny, alter any articles in the new constitution it didn’t like, and dissolve the legislature if it didn’t produce a new constitution within six months. The issue did not go away. Weekly demonstrations continued to focus on rejection of the principles. Elections first set for September and then October were delayed again to give the SCAF more time to find common ground. Finally, on September 27, the military council issued its own timetable for parliamentary elections without having resolved the fate of its proposed constitutional principles. They would begin with voting for the 498 elected deputies to the People’s Assembly, which would take place in three stages between November 28, 2011, and January 4, 2012. The new body would hold its opening session on March 16. Elections for the 180 elected members to the upper house of parliament known as the Shura Council would also be held in three stages between January 29 and February 22, with its first session scheduled for March 24. What proved fatal to the validity of the People’s Assembly elections later was the SCAF-dictated

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electoral law; it stipulated that party lists would be used in two thirds of the districts while in the other third candidates would compete as individuals. The SCAF election diktat did not, however, resolve the fate of the SCAF’s supraconstitutional principles. So on November 3, the deputy prime minister called on 500 political leaders and politicians to sign the document anyway. They did not respond. On November 13, the Muslim Brotherhood–led Democratic Alliance along with many other parties and political notables collectively issued their own ultimatum to the SCAF, demanding it abandon its principles or face a “Million Man March” the following Friday.21 Tens of thousands of mostly Islamist protesters heeded the call and on November 19 held one of the largest demonstrations seen in Tahrir Square since Mubarak’s fall.22 Still, the fate of the much-contested principles remained undecided when elections began nine days later, creating a whole new political dynamic. By then, Brotherhood Secretary-General Mahmoud Hussein had declared the principles “dead” and warned that anyone who tried to revive them “would die with them.”23

The First Parliamentary Elections

The elections revealed a lot about the changed state of the political landscape as a result of the uprising. They uncovered the strengths of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists in general and the weaknesses of the secularists. Both sides formed opposing coalitions. However, both fragmented to expose internal religious and political fissures previously hidden. An unprecedented number of parties, more than forty, had registered initially, but by the time the polls opened on November 28 they had merged into four major coalitions: the Democratic Alliance, dominated by the FJP; the Islamic Alliance led by the upstart Salafi Al-Nour Party (Party of Light); the Egyptian Bloc under the leadership of Coptic businessman Naguib Sawiris, and the Revolution Continues Alliance of youth and leftist parties. The thinking and strategy of Egypt’s Salafis, making their debut in politics, was exposed for the first time. Their decision to engage in the political process set them off from their Tunisian counterparts, who had chosen instead to work for the violent overthrow of the Islamist-led government there. Salafis in Egypt had been allowed by the Mubarak regime to propagate their very conservative apolitical brand of Islam mainly to counter the Brotherhood’s influence. However, in 2008, the state Ministry of Religious Endowment adopted a new policy to curb their activities because the government feared they were becoming too strong.24 Still, the extent of their support remained a mystery until these first elections. The

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movement’s Call Society had decided to launch the Al-Nour Party in May and gained government permission to do so on June 12, 2011. The party distinguished itself from the Muslim Brotherhood by rejecting outright the notion of a civil state and insisting that Islam be recognized as the state’s official religion and sharia the guiding principles in all its matters. It also advocated religious freedom for Copts and separate personal status laws for all non-Muslims.25 Still, the appearance of Salafi leaders wearing long beards and insisting on the literal application of Islamic law and the face-covering niqab for women convinced secularists that this was what all Islamists including the Brotherhood really stood for. It was the same reaction Tunisian secularists had had in conflating the Salafis there with Ennahda. The FJP, by contrast, supported the notion of a civil state but qualified its endorsement by demanding Islam be recognized as the state’s religion and sharia the main source of legislation. It had to be a civil state “with an Islamic reference,” whose meaning remained undefined. The FJP was more specific than Al-Nour about its preferred system of governance, calling for a strong parliamentary system and a weak presidency.26 This fit in with the FJP’s calculation that it would win the elections and gain control of the new parliament. In the run-up to the elections, the Islamic rivals squared off in opposing alliances that revealed very different electoral tactics. The FJP’s Democratic Alliance included a number of liberal parties, twenty-eight initially, to help project its image of a broad coalition of Islamic and secular factions. On the other hand, the Islamic Alliance led by Al-Nour consisted of three Salafi parties only. One of them, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, had once been involved in terrorism, including President Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. After two decades in prison, its leaders had foresworn violence and embraced peaceful politics only. There were two other breakaway factions from the Muslim Brotherhood suddenly in the running as well. The Al-Wasat (Center) Party dated back to 1996 when reformist members had split away, founded their own party, and began working with liberal opposition groups. Never granted legal recognition under the Mubarak era, it was the first Islamic party to be legalized after the uprising, in February 2011. The second defection stemmed from the Brotherhood’s youth, who had defied their leaders to join the uprising right from the start and afterward formed the Egyptian Current Party. Many chose to back the highest-ranking Brotherhood “defector,” Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, in his run for the presidency in 2012. He had been a member of the Guidance Council for over a decade but was ousted by conservatives in the last elections before the uprisings, in December 2009.

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Last Hope for an Islamic-Secular Alliance Ends

As the November parliamentary elections drew near, the Democratic Alliance shattered. It was a harbinger of difficulties to come for the Brotherhood in convincing secularist parties to trust or work with it. From an initial alliance of forty-three parties, it had been reduced to twenty-eight in June and only eleven by late October. Of these, only two secular parties had any political recognition—Ghad El-Thawra of Ayman Nour, who had stood against Mubarak in the 2005 presidential election, and AlKarama of Hamdeen Sabahi, a follower of Gamal Abdel Nasser who later became a presidential candidate in the 2014 elections. The most consequential defection from the Democratic Alliance was doubtlessly the Wafd, Egypt’s oldest political party, dating back to the struggle against British colonial rule in the early twentieth century. Its leaders had initially hoped that working with the Brotherhood would provide an alliance binding not only the political formations but each representing the two main currents, one Islamist and the other secularist, in an unbeatable combination at the polls that would lead to a national unity government. As elections approached, the two parties became bogged down in a wrangle over how many candidates each would run in the elections. Finally in October, the Wafd decided it wanted to contest as many seats as possible on its own and left the alliance. In retrospect, this split probably marked the end of all hope of seeing Egypt follow the example of Tunisia in establishing an initial coalition between Islamists and secularists. Had the Brotherhood and the Wafd managed to maintain an electoral alliance, Egypt might have been spared the deep secularist-Islamist rift that came to engulf the society and political landscape in 2012. The Egyptian revolution might have stabilized in the stage of what Crane Brinton called “the rule of the moderates” rather than see the Brotherhood cast in the role of Islamic extremists who triggered the Thermidorian reaction.27 An alliance between the two did not appear beyond the realm of the possible. The Wafd and the Muslim Brotherhood had a history of cooperation dating back to the 1984 parliamentary elections. The Wafd had allowed Brotherhood candidates to be included on its own electoral list with the government’s permission, and at least eight of the fifty seats it won that year had been Brotherhood candidates. Essam Shiha, a senior Wafd official, explained that this coalition between Islamists and secularists had been part of Mubarak’s strategy to bring the Brotherhood back into the political process gradually.28 The two odd bedfellows stayed together for three years and later revived their alliance for the 1995 and 2005 elections, though the Brotherhood withdrew at the last moment in the latter one. After the uprising, the Brother-

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hood had turned to the Wafd again, and the two worked together in the short-lived Democratic Alliance. This time, however, it was the Wafd that dropped out. The main reason, according to Shiha, was that the SCAF had put pressure on its leader, El-Sayyid el-Badawi, to join the electoral battle against the Brotherhood by allowing former leaders of Mubarak’s defunct NDP to run some of its candidates. As a result, in the November 2011 elections 40 percent of Wafd Party candidates consisted of former NDP officials. Another factor, Shiha said, was the existence of a strong secular current within the Wafd worried about the Islamic ascendency in the country.29

The ElBaradei Option

Meanwhile, other secular leaders were scheming with the SCAF to postpone parliamentary elections altogether and install ElBaradei as prime minister. Their goal was to gain time for the secularists to organize on a nationwide scale in hopes of building a political bulwark capable of standing up to the Muslim Brotherhood at the polls. They wanted the SCAF to remain in power for two years before holding any elections and were pushing ElBaradei to step forward as part of their strategy.30 Their scheme had little chance of success after the bloody event at the Maspero Building on October 9, a turning point in alienating secularists from the military. More than any other event, this one helped crystalize secular opposition to the SCAF’s rule in the 2011–2012 period, touching off multiple demonstrations demanding that the military return to their barracks. The fragmentation among secularists proved even greater than among Islamists. The Egyptian Bloc represented the main effort of secularists to put together an electoral alliance to oppose the Muslim Brotherhood. At its founding in August 2011, one leader had declared: “Our goal is to say very clearly that we believe that new Egypt has to be a civil democratic state.”31 The coalition of parties and groups had thus endorsed the supraconstitutional principles to prevent Islamists from imposing an Islamic state. By election time, however, the bloc had lost all but three of its constituent members, only two of which had any following—the Social Democratic Party and the Free Egyptians Party. Allowing former Mubarak-era politicians to be included on the bloc’s list had proven highly divisive. On the left of the political spectrum, the Revolution Continues Alliance gathered another seven parties, including the Revolutionary Youth Coalition, while on the far right, former supporters of the NDP had spun off into seven new parties.

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The Revolution in Flames Again

The run-up to the elections saw an even worse spate of violence than the early October confrontation at the Maspero Building. Starting on November 19, protesters led by hard-core soccer fans known as “ultras” sought to attack the Interior Ministry, a short distance from Tahrir Square. The ultras had their own scores to settle with the ministry’s security forces, against which they had battled scores of times at soccer matches. Clashes between the police and protesters went on for a week and left fifty of the latter dead as the two sides fought up and down the street. Most were killed by police shotgun fire and rubber bullets or by snipers, one of whom became infamous for aiming at the eyes of demonstrators.32 Finally, the ministry built a concrete wall across the street to keep the protesters from reaching its headquarters. One political casualty of this latest turmoil was Prime Minster Essam Sharaf, who resigned on November 21, less than a week before parliamentary elections were scheduled to begin. The battles brought a new dimension to the Egyptian revolution. This time, many of the civilian protesters deliberately sought confrontation with the police. Many were of a different social background from the middle and professional classes dominant in the Tahrir Square demonstrations during and immediately after the uprising. A few were Islamic extremists acting out of religious conviction. But most of the street fighters were “socially marginal men,” or the wilad sis, from Cairo’s peripheral slums, who were jobless or underemployed and unskilled day laborers.33 This was as close as the uprising came to seeing the equivalent of the French Revolution’s sans-culottes playing a role in the Egyptian revolution. The Tunisian revolution did not see similar elements playing a notable role in demonstrations in the capital, but downtrodden farmers and jobless miners had fed those events in the interior. Nor did Tunisia have ultras. The phenomenon of football fans playing such a role in a revolution was unique to Egypt. They came from varying social classes and economic circumstances, united and motivated by another cause: hatred of the police.34 They appeared again and again as the shock troops for the opposition, starting from the first days of the uprising, then during the Battle of the Camels and on to the clashes near the Interior Ministry and many other antimilitary protests. Their motivation was revenge rather than any political goals like democracy, greater media freedom, or higher wages. They seized the opportunity to settle scores when they saw police attacking civilians. The ultras gained another reputation in February 2012 when those associated with the Al-Masry soccer team from Port Said, where the match was being played, attacked fans of the visiting Al Ahly club from Cairo, killing 79 people and injuring 1,000 others. This was the worst

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incident of violence in Egyptian football history, a strange diversion from the revolution under way in the country. As a result, all football matches were canceled for the rest of 2012, infuriating Egyptian soccer fans.

Islamists Triumph at the Ballot Box

The election results from the freest and fairest elections ever held in Egypt served to solidify the highest hopes of Islamists and the worst fears of secularists. The FJP came out in the lead, winning 216 seats on its own and 235 with its allies. The Salafi al-Nour and its Islamic allies took another 109 seats.35 Altogether, six Islamic parties held 71 percent of the elected 498 seats and won close to 70 percent of the 27 million Egyptians who had turned out (54 percent of registered voters). By comparison, the secular Wafd Party gained only forty-one seats, and the Egyptian Bloc an additional thirty-four seats, together making up only 15 percent of the elected deputies. The biggest loser was the leftist Revolution Continues Alliance, which won just eight seats, while the six parties formed out of the NDP came out with more than twice as many, a total of eighteen seats. The results revealed that the five small secular parties which had decided to remain within the Democratic Alliance had captured collectively only thirteen seats, a bad omen for the future of Islamic-secular cooperation. Women, who had won only four seats in the 2005 elections (Mubarak appointed another five) did better, winning nine (four Brotherhood members) at the polls plus three others appointed later by the SCAF. The Islamists’ decisive electoral victory terrified secularists and marked the onset of a full-scale Thermidorian reaction. Unlike the Tunisian elections for a Constituent Assembly, where Ennahda had scarcely won a plurality, the two Islamic parties in Egypt held an overwhelming preponderance of seats and power in the new legislature. The electoral outcome in Egypt did not require Islamists to make compromises as it did in Tunisia; Egyptian secularists were well aware of this and fearful that Egypt was on its way to becoming an Islamic state. Making matters worse, they were convinced that the Brotherhood had been deliberately deceptive in offering false reassurances about its limited goals prior to the elections. Initially, it had declared its intention to put up candidates in only half the districts, but then contested all of the 498 elected seats. The leader of the FJP, Mohamed Morsi, had explicitly stated that the party did “not seek a monopoly on power, nor do we wish to control parliament” because “this would not be in Egypt’s best interest.”36 But together with other Islamic parties, the Brotherhood now had a total monopoly. This meant it would control not only parliament but the committee it was supposed to choose to draft the new constitution. The strong showing

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of the Salafi parties only served to confirm secularists’ worse fears, as they were known to be far more dedicated to an Islamic state than was the Brotherhood. When the People’s Assembly held its opening session on January 23, the JFP’s secretary-general, Saad el-Katatni was elected its speaker by almost four-fifths of its members (399 out of 503 present and voting). The Brotherhood was in undisputed control of the only elected body in the country. At the end of January, it demonstrated its resolve to defend the institution when secularist protestors tried to march on the parliament building: Brotherhood members formed a human shield of their bodies around it, chanting, “The people and the army are one hand.”37

Secularists Turn Against the Military

At this point secularists were just as full of apprehension about the prospect of unending military rule. As the first anniversary of the uprising neared, they were further disheartened when ElBaradei, their great hope, announced on January 14 that he would not run for president and was bowing out of politics altogether.38 The excuse he offered for retiring was unconvincing: that the ancien regime was still running the country. He likened Egypt to a boat whose captain was “still treading old waters, as if the revolution did not take place.” He attacked the SCAF for resorting to the same repressive tactics Mubarak had employed, including putting “revolutionaries on trial in military court” while allowing those responsible for killing them to go free.39 He also assailed the Islamists’ electoral victory, declaring it “does not represent Egyptian society” and marginalized “those who made the revolution.”40 Because of his international credentials, ElBaradei had been the best qualified figure to become the equivalent of Beji Caid Essebsi in Tunisia, a politician from the ancien regime with sufficient credibility to play a leading role in the new order. But unlike Essebsi and many other secular Tunisian leaders who plunged wholeheartedly into the unfolding revolution there, ElBaradei had no stomach or stamina for the rough-and-tumble politics of the Egyptian one. He had launched the Destour Party but done little to help it becoming a credible force. He offered biting critics of the SCAF and Muslim Brotherhood, but did nothing to help the secularist opposition deal with either. He sought to remain above politics, expecting a leadership post to be bestowed on him without being elected or earning it by playing a bridging role with the Islamists as Essebsi had done in Tunisia. ElBaradei’s abdication from politics greatly accentuated the problem of leadership and fragmentation facing Egyptian secularists. Meanwhile, the young revolutionaries ElBaradei sought to inspire had launched a new campaign called “The Military Are Liars” (Kazeboon), and

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in an attempt to reawaken the uprising they were busy touring the country to show films of atrocities allegedly committed by the military.41 What sparked their campaign was the SCAF’s denial that soldiers had played any role in the death of seventeen protesters in four days of bloody clashes in and around Tahrir Square starting December 17. The mayhem had led to the burning of one of Egypt’s cultural crown jewels, the Institut d’Égypte library and seen soldiers attacking women, including one stripped of her clothing to expose her bra.42 While the SCAF blamed thugs for the violence, protesters had taken film of soldiers dragging the half-naked woman away and beating people in the streets.43 Celebration of the revolution’s first anniversary ended in a Friday of Rage on January 27 with tens of thousands of protesters chanting “Down with military rule.”44

Islamists Struggle to Rule

Egypt’s first parliament under the Muslim Brotherhood quickly turned into a highly contentious and acrimonious experience in democracy. Elections in late January and February for the Shura Council produced the same overwhelming victory for the Islamist parties, which won 150 of the 180 elected seats, the Brotherhood alone winning 105 of the total. The question of Islam’s place in the legislature came to the fore the opening day of the People’s Assembly on January 23. One Salafi deputy sought to change the standard oath required of new members to include in their pledge of allegiance that they would be faithful to parliament “so long as it does not oppose God’s law.” At another session in early February, the same deputy tried to interrupt proceedings with a call to afternoon prayers. This was too much for the Brotherhood speaker, El-Katatni, who rebuked him for disrupting the assembly’s work and ordered him to go pray in a mosque because “this chamber is for discussion.”45 The first issue for discussion immediately pitted Islamists against secularists: the composition of the 100-person body to draft the constitution that was finally appointed March 25. By prior agreement, half its members were to come from the legislature and the other half from a wide variety of political and cultural notables. Of the fifty chosen from among deputies, thirty-eight were either from the Brotherhood’s party or the Salafi al-Nour. Altogether, Islamists accounted for 65 out of the total 100 members, and women numbered just 6 and Copts 5. In reaction, twenty-five of the selected secularists refused to participate.46 They complained that the Brotherhood and al-Nour had alone decided who was to be a member of the drafting committee and called on the SCAF to establish new criteria for selecting delegates. Both al-Azhar and the Coptic Church withdrew their selected

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members, with Grand Imam el-Tayeb declaring that the body “fails to represent all sectors of Egyptian society” and favored “a single religious group.”47 The fate of this first constitution-drafting committee was settled by the Supreme Administrative Court. On April 10, it ordered the body dissolved on the basis that its selected members failed to reflect the diversity of Egyptian society, with Islamists too dominant and women and other minorities underrepresented.48 The role of the court in settling the issue proved a harbinger of things to come, namely, the judiciary intervening again and again to decide the course of the Egyptian revolution. They became an institutional pillar of the Thermidorian reaction, one whose authority was never seriously challenged even by the revolutionaries, whether secularists or Islamists, pressing for radical change in the old order. Efforts to establish the constitutional assembly stumbled forward. On June 5 the SCAF issued an ultimatum giving the parties just forty-eight hours to agree on new criteria for selecting members or else it would decide its composition. The threat provoked the Brotherhood into negotiating a compromise with secularist parties limiting Islamists to fifty delegates and reducing the number of assembly deputies from fifty to thirty-nine. Still, the two sides fought over who was to be classified as an “Islamist,” and fifty-seven secularists boycotted the parliament on June 13 when delegates were elected rather than appointed. The next occasion for judicial intervention came just two months later. This time it was the Supreme Constitutional Court. On June 14, it declared unconstitutional the law under which People’s Assembly members had been elected; it had permitted two different formulas for choosing them— parties selecting candidates in two-thirds of the electoral districts while individuals on their own were allowed to complete in the other third. In fact, this was the same rationale for its 1990 decision to order new parliamentary elections during the Mubarak era. But this time the political consequences were far greater because it stripped the Muslim Brotherhood of its control over the only body to have been elected since the uprising.49 The court’s ruling left up in the air how and when new elections would be held or a constitution written. The SCAF quickly moved in to fill the vacuum after decreeing that the Shura Council, elected on the same basis, must also be dissolved and that it was assuming all legislative authority.50

The June 2012 Presidential Elections

The presidential elections further crystallized the polarization of Egypt into two irreconcilable camps. Having first declared it had no intention of contesting the elections, the Muslim Brotherhood reversed itself on March

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31, announcing that its deputy leader, Khairat el-Shater, would run to fulfill “the demands of the revolution.” The leader of the FJP, Mohamed Morsi, said the Brotherhood had changed its mind because “we have a majority in parliament which is unable to fulfil its duties.”51 There was another undeclared reason, however: the popular dissident Brotherhood leader Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, who had made known his intention to stand for president as early as May 2011, a decision that led to his expulsion after serving on the Brotherhood’s Guidance Council for twentytwo years. Ironically, the rationale for his dismissal had been his disobedience of the Brotherhood’s earlier decision not to enter the presidential race. Aboul Fotouh had far better revolutionary credentials than any other Brotherhood leader because he had participated in the uprising from the first day and been a leader of the organization’s reformist wing. His reputation had earned him a strong following among young Islamists and secularists and made him a leading candidate. For a brief time, there were twenty-three presidential hopefuls. On April 16, the body overseeing the elections banned ten of them on the basis of “legal irregularities,” among them el-Shater. He was excluded on the grounds of being a convicted criminal because he had spent twelve years in prison during the Mubarak era. The secular al-Ghad Party candidate, Ayman Nour, was also barred on this basis, while the Salafi candidate, Hazem Abu Ismail, was banned because his mother held a US passport. Even Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s vice president, was excluded because he had not collected enough signatures to stand. The Brotherhood immediately replaced el-Shater with its party’s leader, Morsi, though he had little charisma and was immediately derided by secularists as the movement’s “spare wheel.” The bearded Morsi, then sixty years old, was indeed no orator. But he could reasonably claim an impressive political and academic resume: a doctorate in engineering from the University of Southern California, a professor at California State University, Northridge, and then a deputy for five years in the People’s Assembly from 2000 to 2005. Thereafter, he had been arrested several times for his political activities as he rose to become a member of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Council. Three days after the uprising began on January 25, he had been detained together with twenty-four other senior Brotherhood officials, all of whom had escaped from Wadi al-Natrun Prison in a mass breakout two days later. Morsi’s chief adversary in the presidential race, Ahmed Shafik, was as much a lightning rod for Islamists as Morsi was for secularists. He had been Mubarak’s last prime minister and resigned three weeks after the president’s removal. Shafik, a former air force commander, had served as Mubarak’s civil aviation minister for many years. He was an example par

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excellence of what Islamists and even many secular activists called feloul, remnants of the ancien regime. His ability to reemerge as a credible presidential candidate highlighted the prominence and resilience of the old order politicians. One of the few measures taken by the Brotherhood-dominated parliament before its dissolution had been the passage of the Corruption of Political Life Law. This had barred from public office for a period of ten years all high-ranking party or government officials who had served any time during the last ten years of the Mubarak era. Under pressure from the street, the SCAF had ratified the law on April 23, so Shafik should not have been in the race. But two days later, the Supreme Presidential Electoral Commission accepted Shafik’s appeal not to be held accountable to the law and allowed him to run. Despite the increasing polarization in the country, neither Islamists nor secularists were able to rally behind a single presidential candidate. Morsi had to contend with Aboul Fotouh, while Shafik faced a serious challenge from two very well-known secular figures, Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister under Mubarak, and Hamdeen Sabahi, a populist follower of Gamal Abdel Nasser. As a result of these multiple candidates, the first round of the presidential elections held on May 23–24 produced what was probably the best picture of the balance of political forces in Egypt in the immediate postuprising period: Morsi narrowly came in first, garnering 24.8 percent of the vote compared with Shafik’s 23.7 percent. Sabahi made a surprisingly strong showing and ranked third with 20 percent. Aboul Fotouh followed with 17 percent. In last place came the Revolution Continues Party, representing the young street activists. Whether because of an inability to organize or fading public support, their candidate attracted just 40,000 votes.52 The run-off on June 16–17 between Morsi and Shafik was so close it took the election committee a week to announce the result: Morsi won with 51.7 percent of the vote compared with Shafik’s 48.3 percent. The delay aroused enormous suspicions that the SCAF intended to fix the results in Shafik’s favor. But the Brotherhood had done its own tally and on the night of June 17 declared Morsi the winner with 51.8 percent of the vote, almost exactly the final official tally made public on June 24. Morsi made his victory speech that night, seeking to reassure Shafik’s secular supporters that the Brotherhood stood for a “civil, national, democratic, constitutional and modern state.”53 There was another reason for the Brotherhood’s deep suspicion of the SCAF’s true intentions. The same night Morsi declared his victory, the SCAF unilaterally issued a set of amendments to its March 30, 2011, constitutional declaration, allocating sweeping powers to itself and limiting those of the new president. The military council would continue to act as

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the country’s legislative body until a new parliament was elected; it would still be empowered to hold military trials of civilians, decide all matters involving the armed forces, and even oversee the writing of the new constitution. If the constituent assembly failed in its task, the SCAF would appoint a new one that would have three months to draft the document. It even laid out a timetable: the new constitution would be voted upon in a referendum fifteen days after completion of the draft, and parliamentary elections would take place one month later.54 The Brotherhood immediately challenged the military’s grab for power. It dispatched the speaker of the defunct People’s Assembly, ElKatatni, to confront the SCAF’s deputy chief, Gen. Sami Anan, informing him that the military council no longer had the authority to make such decisions now that the country had a duly elected president. El-Katatni defiantly declared that the dissolved People’s Assembly would meet again shortly to begin drafting a new constitution.55 Thus was the scene set for the coming struggle between the Muslim Brotherhood and military over which of them was to rule Egypt. And thus had the SCAF begun its own transformation from being the enemy in the eyes of secularists into becoming the central pillar of their Thermidorian reaction.

Notes 1. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958). 2. Rime Naguib, “A Year in Review: The SCAF Rules in 93 Letters,” Al-Masry Al-Youm, December 30, 2011. 3. “Egypt’s Ex-Minister Habib al-Adly Jailed for 12 years,” BBC News, May 5, 2011. 4. “Hosni Mubarak Sons Have 215 Million [Pounds] in Swiss Banks,” Telegraph, October 17, 2011. See also Maggie Hyde and Tom Dale, “Two Years On, Mubarak Money Abroad Remains Unattainable,” Egypt Independent, January 25, 2013. 5. “Egyptian Constitutional Referendum 2011,” Wikipedia, accessed July 18, 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_C_onstitutional_referendum_2011. 6. Egyptian Constitution of 2011, Wikipedia, accessed July 18, 2016, ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Constitution_of_2011. 7. Egyptian Constitution of 2011. 8. “New Egypt PM at Tahrir Rally,” Al Jazeera English, March 4, 2011. 9. “Youth Coalition’s Demands and Time-table,” English Al-Ahram Online, March 1, 2011. 10. “Military Tribunal Sentences Protester to 5 Years in Prison,” Al-Masry AlYoum, March 2, 2011. 11. “No to Military Trials for Civilians!!” Tahrir Documents, May 4, 2011. 12. David Kirkpatrick, “Egypt Is Moving to Try Mubarak in Fatal Protests,” New York Times, May 24, 2011. 13. Shane McGinley, “12,000 Arrested in Egypt Since January, Human Rights Watch Says,” Arabian Business, September 11, 2011.

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14. Omnia al-Desoukie, “SCAF Denies Live Ammo Used, Tells its Version of Maspero Violence,” Daily News Egypt, October 13, 2011. 15. “MB Confirms Will Not Participate in May 27 Protest,” May 25, 2011, accessed July 18, 2016, http://ikhwanweb.net/article.php?id=28633&ref=search.php. See also Jalan Zayan, “Egypt Activists Detained Ahead of Friday Protest,” Agence France Presse, May 26, 2011. 16. Noha el-Hennawy, “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Select Hawkish Leaders,” Egypt Independent, April 30, 2011. 17. See Zeinab el-Gundy, “Egypt’s Political Forces Battle for Constitution and Identity,” English Al-Ahram Online, August 22, 2011. 18. “ElBaradei Says Ready to Discuss ‘Bill of Rights’ with Brotherhood, Salafis,” Egypt Independent, June 18, 2011. 19. Mostafa Ali, “Al-Azhar Grand Imam Declares Support for a Constitutional, Democratic State,” English Al-Ahram Online, June 20, 2011. 20. “Constitutional Principles,” Sada, October 4, 2011, accessed February 6, 2014, http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2011/10/04constitutional-principles. See also, Zeinab el Gundy, “Egypt’s Political Forces Battle for Constitution and Indentity,” English al-Ahram, August 22, 2011. 21. Yasmine Fathi, “Egypt’s Political Forces Throw Down Gauntlet over ‘Supraconstitutional Principles,’” English Al-Ahram Online, November 13, 2011. 22. Matt Bradley, “Islamists Lead a Massive Protest in Cairo,” Middle East News, November 19, 2011. 23. “‘Supra-constitutional Principles’ Are Dead,” Says MB Official,” English AlAhram Online, December 5, 2011. 24. Nabil Sharaf al-Din, “After Years of Supporting Salafism to Counter the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jihadists, Egyptian Authorities Launch a Campaign to Counter a Salafi Tide Among Youths,” Elaph, December 11, 2008. Translated and published in BBC Monitoring Middle East Service, December 12, 2008, under the title “Egyptian Authorities Launch Campaign Against ‘Salafi Tide.’” 25. Al-Nour (The Light), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, accessed July 18, 2016, http://carnegieendowement.org/2011/09/21/nour-party/h414. 26. Al-Hurriya wa al-Adala (Freedom and Justice Party), accessed July 18, 2016, http://carnegieendowment.org/2011/09/22/freedom-and-justice-party/h3en. 27. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 128–152. 28. Author’s interview with Essam Shiha, Cairo, October 12, 2011. 29. Shiha interview. 30. Author’s interview with Osama al-Ghazali al-Harb, Cairo, October 10, 2011. 31. Yasmine Saleh, “Egypt Liberals Launch ‘The Egyptian Bloc’ to Counter Islamists in Nov. Vote,” Al-Arabiya News, August 16, 2011. 32. Patrick Kingsley, “Eye Sniper of Tahrir Square Is in Jail, but Has Anything Changed?,” Guardian, March 6, 2013. 33. Lucie Ryzova, ”The Battle of Cairo’s Muhammad Mahmoud Street,” Al Jazeera English, November 29, 2011. 34. See Sherif Tarek, “Egypt’s Ultras: Politically Involved but Not Politically Driven, Yet,” English Al-Ahram, January 16, 2012; and Mahmoud el-Wardani, “The Ultras and the Egyptian Revolution,” English al-Ahram, February 4, 2012. 35. For elections results, see “Egyptian Parliamentary Elections, 2011–12,” Wikipedia, accessed July 18, 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Parliamentary _Election,_2011%E2%80%9312. Also see, “Results of Egypt People’s Assembly Election,” accessed October 16, 2016, http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/51f6213c4.pdf. 36. “Freedom and Justice Party,” English al-Ahram Online, December 3, 2011. Reuters translated Morsi’s comments from a press conference on May 30, 2011,

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slightly differently: “The Brotherhood does not seek to control parliament. . . . We want a strong parliament . . . with different political forces,” Yasmine Saleh, Reuters, May 30, 2011. 37. Heba Afify, “Tempers Flare as Brotherhood Teams Up with Security Forces to Block Protests,” Egypt Independent, January 31, 2012. 38. For more details, see David Ottaway and Marina Ottaway, “Egypt’s Leaderless Revolution,” Cairo Review of Global Affairs, 17 (Spring 2015): 34–47. 39. “To Protest Military Rule, Elbaradei Will Not Run for Presidency,” Egypt Independent, January 18, 2012. 40. “ElBaradei: Military Council Tried to Dissuade Me from Withdrawal,” Egypt Independent, January 14, 2011. 41. Omar el-Sabah, “The Generals Are ‘Kazeboon,’” Egypt Independent, January 18, 2012. 42. David Kirkpatrick, “Mass March by Cairo Women in Protest over Abuse by Soldiers,” New York Times, December 20, 2011. 43. Rana Khazbak, “Activists Create Revolutionary Nuclei Beyond Tahrir,” Egypt Independent, January 17, 2012. 44. “Egyptians March to Honour ‘Friday of Rage,’” Al Jazeera English, January 27, 2012. 45. “Islamist MPs Clash in Egypt over Call to Prayer,” Reuters, February 7, 2012. 46. Mai Shams el-Din, “Secular Forces Slam Constituent Assembly, Debate SCAF Intervention,” Daily News Egypt, March 27, 2012. 47. “A ‘Stillborn’ Assembly,” al-Ahram Weekly, April 5–11, 2012. 48. “Egypt Court Suspends Constitutional Assembly,” BBC News Middle East, April 10, 2012. 49. Mara Revkin and Yussuf Auf, “Egypt’s Constitutional Chaos,” Foreign Policy, June 14, 2012. 50. “Egypt Court Says Whole Parliament Unconstitutional, Orders Dissolution,” Al Arabiya News, June 14, 2012. 51. Marwa Awad and Sherine el- Madany, “In U-Turn, Egypt’s Brotherhood Names Presidential Candidate,” Reuters, March 31, 2012. 52. For results and other details, see “Egyptian Presidential Election, 2012,” Wikipedia, http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_presidential_election_2012. 53. Sarah el-Deeb and Lee Keath, “Egypt Election Results: Muslim Brotherhood Declares Mohammed Morsi Victory,” Huffington Post, June 17, 2012. 54. “English Text of SCAF Amended Egypt Constitutional Declaration,” al-Ahram English, June 18, 2012. 55. El-Deeb and Keath, “Egypt Election Results.”

9 Dual Sovereignty

In retrospect, it seems clear that both secularists and the military worked in various ways right from the start of President Mohamed Morsi’s brief presidency to remove him and drive the Muslim Brotherhood out of politics. Initial secular enmity toward the military vanished with surprising speed before the specter of Islamic rule. Even before Morsi had won the election, two US political analysts detected signs that Egypt might be following the same path secularists and the military had taken in Turkey in 1996–1997 in working together to drive its Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan from office. In Turkey, the secularists were ardent followers of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish republic after World War I, who had imposed secularism with an iron fist on both government and society. Secular Turkish parties looked on Erbakan and his Islamic followers as a mortal threat to the Atatürk republic. They turned to the Constitutional Court to obtain a ruling that Erbakan was violating the nation’s fundamental principle of separation of state and religion. This Turkish model of secularists, the courts, and the military collaborating for a common cause gave rise to the expression “the deep state,” and analysts warned that a similar phenomenon might be occurring in Egypt in response to the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power.1 Egypt’s deep state operated like a secret parallel government during the year Morsi was in office. It provided a perfect example of dual sovereignty at work because “within the same society, two sets of institutions, leaders and laws demand obedience” in a struggle for supremacy between moderates and extremists.2 In the case of the Egyptian revolution, there were indeed two competing sets of institutions; in secular eyes, the “ex163

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tremists” had the upper hand: the Muslim Brotherhood had taken over the presidency and parliament, while secularists held on to the state bureaucracy, courts, the military, and security services. Crane Brinton had predicted the outcome would be determined by which set of institutions gained control of the military. “No revolutionists have ever succeeded until they have got a predominance of effective armed force on their side.”3 As we shall see, Morsi and his Islamic revolutionaries never won over the military. Nor were they able to convince it to remain on the sidelines, as had happened in Tunisia, where its neutrality had strengthened the imperative need for compromises between Islamists and their secular foes.

Role of the Judiciary

Secularists in Egypt found in the courts a willing partner to help them check the new power of Islamists over the newly elected legislative bodies. They initiated lawsuits challenging the legality of elections to the People’s Assembly, where they held just 25 percent of the seats (15 percent in the Shura Council) and then the legality of the Constituent Assembly, where Islamists counted sixty-five out of the one hundred delegates. They used civil administrative courts and the Supreme Constitutional Court to argue their case for the dissolution of the assembly and then the illegality of the composition of the Constituent Assembly. A total of twenty-nine secularists stymied the workings of the Constituent Assembly, which began its sessions on March 26, by refusing to participate or resigning while they were challenging its legality. The Supreme Administrative Court ruled in their favor on April 10, arguing that People’s Assembly delegates could not elect themselves to the constitution-drafting body and that in any case they did not represent all segments of society. Under military pressure, twenty-two secular parties negotiated a new makeup for the Constituent Assembly and announced an agreement on June 7, bringing in a wide variety of non-Islamist outsiders to create a rough balance between the opposing forces and a regulation requiring decisions by a two-thirds majority. Still, when the Constituent Assembly began work on June 27 after Morsi’s election, secularist representatives resorted to the tactics of boycotts and walkouts. They decried the attempt of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi al-Nour Party to establish a “radical” Islamic state.4

Morsi Bids to Take Control of the Military

The evolution of relations between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and President Morsi followed a different path but was

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just as confrontational. Morsi rushed to take advantage of the military’s acute embarrassment over an August 5 terrorist attack on one of its bases in the Sinai Peninsula that resulted in the death of fifteen soldiers. Three days later, he replaced the head of the General Intelligence Directorate, several Republican Guard and police commanders, and the Sinai governor. On August 12, Morsi executed his “coup” against the two top SCAF leaders, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and army chief of staff Gen. Sami Hafez Anan. He dismissed both and appointed Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, then head of military intelligence, as defense minister and commander of all armed forces. Whether Tantawi had been consulted beforehand or summarily fired became the subject of much speculation. The new deputy defense minister, Gen. Mohamed el-Assar, claimed the changes had been made “in consultation” with Tantawi and the SCAF, while a top Brotherhood leader described Morsi’s action as a move to “thwart the plans of the counter-revolution” and “preempt any moves against his decisions.”5 Given Tantawi’s advanced age at the time (seventy-six), his replacement was long overdue, and one report in November 2011 said he planned to retire as soon as presidential elections were held.6 Tantawi dismissed rumors that he might stand for president or that the SCAF had any intention of putting up a candidate.7 But he also stirred speculation that he might just do that by walking in the streets of Cairo in civilian clothes and allowing state television to broadcast the event. In any case, the US embassy in Cairo had learned that the SCAF was seething with intrigue and infighting. The two most divisive issues were who would replace Tantawi and whether the military should get out of politics. El-Sisi, the youngest SCAF member, was leading the faction pressing Tantawi to leave and for the military to return to its barracks.8 This assessment would help explain why Morsi thought he had an ally in el-Sisi and why the SCAF did not react adversely when Morsi appointed him defense minister on August 12. Furthermore, el-Sisi’s reported position that the military should withdraw from politics also seemed to have prevailed. The SCAF abrogated its June 16 decree giving itself legislative and some presidential powers. At the same time, Morsi took back those powers and gave himself the authority to “draw up a new [Constituent] Assembly if the current one was “prevented from doing its duties.” In imitation of the SCAF’s roadmap for completing the process, Morsi laid out his own timetable, giving the Constituent Assembly three months to write a draft followed by a referendum within thirty days and then parliamentary elections two months later.9 Clearly, Morsi had thrown down the gauntlet, and the SCAF was not picking it up. This gave rise to theories, soon proven false, that el-Sisi was fully in support of the new Brotherhood rule.

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Morsi Alienates the Military and Secularists

In his determination to demonstrate he was really in command, Morsi soon found ways to needlessly alienate both the military and civilian secularists. The process began even before his coup against Tantawi. On July 9, nine days after his inauguration, he issued a decree ordering the dissolved People’s Assembly, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, to resume its work. But the Supreme Constitutional Court immediately annulled it, and Morsi backed down. On July 21, he pardoned 572 military detainees, including 25 leaders belonging mostly to al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya or Islamic Jihad serving life sentences or awaiting execution. Some of those pardoned had been involved in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, and both groups had engaged in terrorist activities during the Mubarak era. AlJama’a al-Islamiyya had since renounced violence, and in the wake of the 2011 uprising it had established the Construction and Development Party to participate in parliamentary elections. Egyptian Islamic Jihad had not taken a similar path, and some of those freed went to the Sinai and became involved in attacks on the army there. Morsi’s pardon of Islamists was interpreted by secularists as an indicator of where he intended to expand his base of popular support. Activists were particularly angry because none of the more than 2,000 protesters whom the military had arrested during and after the uprising had been included in this pardon. Morsi went out of his way to irritate the military at the annual October 6 ceremony marking the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Instead of allowing the Defense Ministry to organize the celebration, he asked the Ministry of Youth under a Brotherhood member to take charge. He used the occasion to tout his own accomplishments during his first hundred days in office, rather than those of the military in routing the Israeli army along the Suez Canal. He managed to insult the memory of Sadat, Egypt’s ruler at the time of the war, by having the brother of one of those involved in Sadat’s assassination sit alongside him during the ceremony. El-Sisi later disclosed his bitterness at how Morsi had gone about excluding the country’s war heroes from the ceremony “while the killers [of Sadat] linked to the Brotherhood were invited.”10 Three days later, Morsi challenged the military trial of activists by issuing another pardon for all those convicted of crimes “committed to support the revolution and its goals” between the start of the uprising and his assumption of office on June 30.11 Morsi did initially try to appease the secular opposition by offering some of its leaders senior positions. For example, he asked Ziad BahaaEldin, a founder of the Social Democratic Party, and Wael Ghonim, a prime instigator of the uprising, to join the government; both refused.12 So did the leftist leader and presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi.

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They might have been willing to vote for Morsi in the presidential election (Ghonim did) against the old guard candidate, Ahmed Shafik, but serving as secular window dressing for an Islamist-dominated government was a step they were unwilling to take. Sabahi in particular was about to launch a secular alliance to challenge the new government. Morsi did convince Mahmoud Mekki, a noted opposition judge during the Mubarak era, to serve as his vice president, and he avoided overloading his government with Brotherhood stalwarts: only four of the thirtyfive ministers belonged to the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party while his prime minister, Hesham Qandil, was a technocrat who had been minister of Water Resources in the previous government. His advisory council was dominated by Islamists: ten of the sixteen were either fellow Brothers or conservative Salafis, like the al-Nour Party chairman, Emad Abdel Ghaffour. The prospects for any cooperation between Islamists and secularists seemed bleak right from the start of Morsi’s brief time in power. Unlike Tunisia, there was no troika government where at least two secular parties had agreed to join hands with Ennahda. This softened the conflict between the two camps, forced coexistence, and encouraged compromise. Ennahda had needed secular partners to get into power. The Brotherhood did not. In Tunisia, secularists outnumbered Islamists at the polls, whereas in Egypt the opposite was true. Within five weeks of Morsi’s inauguration, hard-core secularists made known their intentions. The Free Egyptians Party led by the Coptic billionaire Naguib Sawiris began organizing a movement to promote another popular uprising, this time against Brotherhood rule. He chose as its principal organizer Mohamed Abu Hamed, who had played the same role in the presidential campaign of Shafik. Hamed considered the Muslim Brotherhood a “cancer” and “the Great Satan” responsible for “the abortion of the revolution.”13 Hamed’s first attempt to hold a demonstration came on August 24, but it failed to galvanize much of a turnout—no more than 3,000 people. Even so, it was the portent of other, much larger ones to come. Meanwhile, Mohamed ElBaradei, who had returned from his self-imposed retirement from politics, was once again issuing dire predictions. Before the presidential elections, he had warned Egyptians against electing “a new emperor” in the absence of a constitution or an elected parliament. Now he was sounding the alarm against a full-scale Islamic takeover. The Brotherhood had begun by saying it wanted to be “part of a big cake” but ended by wanting to have “the whole cake,” and “scared people right, left and center” with its “extremist views.”14 For ElBaradei, Morsi’s sacking of Tantawi and seizure of legislative powers from the SCAF was proof he was seeking “imperial powers.”15 In early September, ElBaradei and Sabahi began form-

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ing a broad electoral alliance to challenge the Brotherhood in the forthcoming parliamentary elections.16 Among its constituent members was the Democratic Revolutionary Coalition, a grouping of ten mostly socialist parties also launched in September. The first defection among secular members of the Constituent Assembly occurred that month when human rights activist Manal El-Tibi resigned. She had done so, she said, to protest the way the new constitution was being drafted “to serve one particular group” and over Morsi’s attempt to create a “religious, authoritarian and corrupt state on what is called ‘Political Islam.’”17

Morsi’s November 22 Decree

The point of no return in relations between Morsi and the gathering secular opposition came ironically one day after the president had won international acclaim for helping arrange a cease-fire in the renewed fighting in Gaza between Israeli forces and Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate. On November 22, 2012, Morsi stunned secularists by issuing a decree putting himself beyond the writ of the courts and canceling all past and present presidential decrees. The concentration of executive and legislative powers in his hands was to remain “final and binding” until a new People’s Assembly could be elected and a constitution written. Nor could any court dissolve the upper house of parliament, the Shura Council, which was dominated by the Brotherhood and the al-Nour Party.18 He decreed no court could challenge the legality of the Constituent Assembly, which he gave an additional two months to finish drafting the constitution. In a bid to mollify secular activists, he fired the attorney general, Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, who had come under fierce criticism for his leniency in prosecuting Mubarak. Morsi replaced him with Talaat Ibrahim Abdullah, a judge who had led the struggle for the judiciary’s independence under the former regime. The president ordered Mubarak to stand trial again for the killing of civilian protestors during the uprising. Morsi’s spokesman sought to justify the president’s power grab by pointing to the political deadlock that blocked the drafting of a new constitution and holding new parliamentary elections. The process was just “going around in a vicious circle.” In any case, he argued, the period of exceptional presidential powers would only last until a new constitution was approved.19 Morsi’s November 22 decree galvanized the Thermidorian reaction as never before. Amr Hamzawy, a former People’s Assembly deputy and highly popular media commentator, charged that Egypt was headed toward nothing less than “an absolute presidential tyranny.”20 It was a widely shared view among secular activists, who two days later established the

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National Salvation Front (NSF) comprising all the major secular and leftist parties. The front was to be led by ElBaradei, Sabahi, and Amr Moussa, the latter two presidential candidates who had lost to Morsi. The NSF’s immediate objective was to stop the Constituent Assembly, dominated by Islamists, from drafting the new constitution. Six more of its members resigned, bringing the total to twenty-two original and seven reserve members to have quit the body, all of them secularists. The battle over the constitution had been coming to a head ever since the Brotherhood published a document on October 31 demanding that Islamic law be recognized as the guiding principle and fundamental law of the land. It described sharia as “the most important component of the Egyptian personality and the most important determinant of the Egyptian identity.”21 Therefore, “we cannot in any way compromise in demanding sharia” and having its “main bases” included in the constitution as “sources accepted by main Sunni scholars.” The main bases they referred to were the Quran and hadith, the recorded sayings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad. Such a precise definition purposely excluded Shiism and Ismaili Muslims, one of whose leaders, Aga Khan III, was buried in Aswan. As for equality between men and women, the Brotherhood statement said the principle had to be qualified by including the words “without prejudice to the provisions of Islamic law.” The constitution could not approve any international treaties that attempted to legalize homosexuality or sexual relations outside of marriage. The only solace offered to secularists was the rejection of “the concept of theocracy,” the “sanctification of the ruler,” and the monopoly of power by one party. The statement also affirmed the Brotherhood’s belief that the people, not God, were the basic source of authority established through elections.

The Brotherhood’s Islamic Constitution

This view of Islam’s role in Egypt emerged in the constitutional draft rushed through the Constituent Assembly during the night of November 29–30 in the absence of twenty-two of its secularist and Christian members. This draft was the closest the Brotherhood and al-Nour Party would ever come to fulfilling their “Islamic project,” so it is worth examining its content to some detail. The first article described Egypt as “an independent, sovereign state, united and indivisible [and] its system democratic.” But the phrase “civil state,” demanded by secularists, was not there. Article 2 declared Islam “the religion of the state” and the principles of sharia “the principal source of legislation.”22 These principles were described later in Article 219 as those contained “in Sunni doctrines.” Furthermore, the

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country’s Sunni religious leaders were given a new role in ensuring they would be respected by parliament. The fourth article stated: “al-Azhar senior scholars are to be consulted in matters pertaining to Islamic law.” The state was also called on to foster Islamic values in the country. But Egypt would not become a theocracy like Iran, either. The source of sovereignty was the Egyptian people (Article 5), and the political system was to be based on “the principles of democracy,” multiparty pluralism, and separation of powers (Article 6). Incongruously for a constitution dictated by an overtly Islamic movement, the same article stated that no political party could be formed that “discriminates on the basis of gender, origin or religion.” The question of the status of women generally reflected the Brotherhood’s notions of their place in society. Although the preamble assured equality “for all citizens, men and women,” Article 10 stressed the state’s role in preserving the “genuine character” of the Egyptian family and its values and in reconciling “the duties of a woman toward her family and her work.” There were some elements associated with a civil state incorporated into the draft as well. Christians and Jews would dictate their own personal status laws, religious affairs, and choice of leaders (Article 3). Freedom of the media was guaranteed, and censorship was forbidden. To start up a new publication, notification to the state was required, not its approval, while the closure of a publication required a court order (Articles 48–49). Independent unions were now officially sanctioned, and they, too, could only be closed down by court order (Article 52). Egyptians were free to establish civil society organizations “subject to notification only” (Article 51). These new freedoms constituted major changes from the past, at least in theory since it was left up to parliament to define what they would mean in practice. In fact, the passage of laws to determine precisely what various articles meant was left up to the legislature in twenty instances. Until new parliamentary elections, the Brotherhood was left in control of this process since Article 230 stipulated that the Shura Council would assume “full legislative authority.” Other controversial articles included a ban from politics for all senior leaders of Mubarak’s ruling National Democrat Party for ten years as well as for any of its members who had held a seat in the People’s Assembly or Shura Council before the uprising (Article 232). The Brotherhood used the constitution to try to gain control over the judiciary, which was packed with Mubarak’s appointees. It reduced the number of judges on the Supreme Constitutional Court to its current president and the ten longestserving members, forcing seven of them to step down (Article 233). The very last Article 236 canceled all earlier constitutional declarations issued by the SCAF since Mubarak’s departure.

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The new constitution created more of a presidential than a parliamentary form of governance, which the Brotherhood had first championed. But now it held the presidency, and there was no People’s Assembly. The president was free to appoint as prime minister whomever he wished, and appoint someone new whenever he wanted; the constitution gave him a wide range of powers over determining the makeup and policies of government. There was one interesting new limitation. If the president’s choice for prime minister failed to win parliamentary approval, he had to appoint someone from the majority party (Article 139). If that person was also rejected, then the People’s Assembly, now to be called the House of Representatives, was empowered to name the prime minister. As for the relationship between the president and the military, the constitution said remarkably little. The most notable omission concerned parliamentary oversight of the military’s activities or budget. This was left to the prerogative of a National Defense Council, composed of seven civilians and eight top military officers led by the president (Article 197). Finally, despite strong public opposition to military trials of civilians, these were still allowed for crimes considered to “harm the armed forces” (Article 198).

Constitutional vs. Revolutionary Legitimacy

The Egypt revolution, like its Tunisian counterpart, saw the same confrontation play out between constitutional and revolutionary legitimacy. The secular opposition’s response to the proposed constitution was to take to the streets in protest again. The Muslim Brotherhood’s reaction was to put up barricades and push as quickly as possible for a referendum to approve the constitution and consolidate Morsi’s legitimacy. Another spasm of violence convulsed the country. The two sides fought it out on December 5 in a bloody confrontation before the presidential palace in Cairo. The night before, Morsi had fled the palace after discovering that the Republican Guard had refused to defend it from a relatively small demonstration. As a result, the Brotherhood called on its supporters to come to the palace to demonstrate their readiness “to impose their will” and “protect legitimacy.”23 Officially, 6 protesters died and another 450 were injured. For the first time, Brotherhood militants seized 130 anti-Morsi protesters and dragged them inside the palace grounds, where they were tied up and beaten. Later, Brotherhood officials defended their behavior, saying they could not depend on the police or Republican Guard to defend the palace. They claimed eight Brotherhood supporters had also been killed in the fighting.24 The protests spread to other cities with the offices of the Brotherhood’s party set on fire in Ismailia and Suez. ElBaradei, warning of more violence,

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called on Morsi to cancel his November 22 decree and postpone the constitutional referendum set for December 15.25 But the government went ahead, counting on its own supporters and those of two Salafi parties, al-Nour and the Building and Development of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, to gain approval. The opposition, led by the National Salvation Front, of course urged a “no” vote, thus setting the scene for anther direct Islamist-secularist test of strength at the polls. The results, announced on December 25, made clear that Islamists still had a far better ability to mobilize, but they also suggested they were losing public support. Although 64 percent of voters approved the constitution, only a third of the electorate had bothered to turn out. After the referendum, the struggle took on an added dimension of one between two forms of legitimacy, just as Tunisia’s revolution had witnessed. Islamists claimed they had constitutional legitimacy on their side, while secularists pointed to the crowds in the street as proof they had revolutionary legitimacy on theirs. The second anniversary of the uprising, January 25, 2013, witnessed yet another spasm of violence, this time centered in Suez but affecting the whole nation. Once again, tens of thousands of demonstrators filled the iconic Tahrir Square and spread out to attack Brotherhood offices throughout the city. Some battled the police before the Interior Ministry, presidential palace, and Maspero Building—all iconic battlefields of the revolution. Elsewhere, thousands took to the streets in twelve of the country’s provinces. The worst violence occurred in Suez, where on the first day seven protesters and two police officers died. The main cause turned out to be an ill-timed court decision imposing the death sentence on twenty-one “ultra” football fans found guilty in the death of seventy-four supporters of a visiting Cairo football club the previous February. After thirty more deaths and the takeover of the city by protesters demanding “independence,” on January 27 Morsi declared a state of emergency and dusk-to-dawn curfew in Suez, Ismailia, and Port Said. The army finally moved in to restore order.

The Salafis Abandon Morsi

Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood never recovered from this first major uprising against their rule. He sought both to rally other Islamists around his government and open a dialogue with the secularist National Salvation Front, but these gambits were too late. At the end of January, the secular opposition rejected Morsi’s call for a national dialogue and announced its own plans for continual demonstrations until the government agreed to resign. ElBaradei issued a statement on his Twitter account saying dialogue was “a waste of time.” He demanded that Morsi establish a “government of national salvation” and a committee to amend the new constitution.26 At

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the behest of the SCAF, Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb, also sought to initiate a dialogue, but that also failed.27 The SCAF openly voiced its disquiet at the turn of events, with el-Sisi warning that the violence threatened “the collapse of the state” and the “stability of the homeland.”28 The president’s creeping isolation grew worse in mid-February 2013, when the Salafis stopped supporting him. Morsi provoked the rupture by firing one of his advisers from the al-Nour Party, Khaled Alam Eldin, whom he accused of abuse of office. In response, another of his al-Nour advisers resigned, and the feud went public. Eldin publicly berated Morsi for his failure to bring Egyptians together in a national consensus on the way forward or to establish a “state of institutions instead of a state based on secrets, secret meetings and confused decisions.”29 Later that month, alNour disclosed and denounced Morsi’s decision to name dozens of Brotherhood members as deputy ministers and municipal officials. The president justified the appointments on the grounds that the Brotherhood’s members had been excluded previously from such high posts and that they were fully qualified to hold them.30 The appointments seem to confirm a trend of Brotherhood efforts to gain more control over the government begun with a cabinet reshuffle in early January. This saw the increase in the number of Brotherhood ministers from five to eight out of thirty-five. (It rose again in early May to twelve). Both the Salafis and secularists found themselves in agreement at least on one point: the Muslim Brotherhood was seeking a takeover of the state. Morsi attempted to break out of his isolation on February 21 by issuing a decree for parliamentary elections to go forward starting with the first round on April 27 and finishing by late June. Clearly, he was hoping such a step would show the Brotherhood still had the support of a majority and thus constitutional legitimacy. The National Salvation Front immediately announced it would boycott the elections because the electoral law had been drawn up by the Brotherhood-controlled Shura Council. It would only participate if a new law was passed guaranteeing the independence of the judiciary that was to oversee the elections. It also demanded the appointment of a new “neutral” government.31 Two weeks later, an administrative court annulled Morsi’s election decree and called on the Supreme Constitutional Court to review its legality.32 This put Egypt back into political limbo and gave more time for the opposition to mobilize.

The “Deep State” at Work

The campaign to unseat the Brotherhood president by revolutionary means began in earnest on April 22 with the launching of a new Facebook page

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titled “Tamarod,” or “Rebel,” with the aim of collecting millions of signatures on a petition demanding a new presidential election. There was much academic and media debate later about whether the SCAF, the Interior Ministry, or both acting together were orchestrating the campaign. By the time of Tamarod’s launch, it was clear the military, security forces, courts, and secular opposition were all of one mind and working to bring down Morsi. They had formed a parallel power in opposition to the Morsi government, illustrating precisely what Crane Brinton described as dual sovereignty. The interaction of these institutions to accomplish Morsi’s overthrow also provides a fascinating study of the workings of Egypt’s deep state. Only after Morsi’s ouster in July did a lot more became known about this period, thanks in part to a long interview el-Sisi gave to a Cairo newspaper. Even more important in shedding light on the machinations under way were investigative reports by the British news agency Thomson Reuters and the US Associated Press. Relations between el-Sisi and Morsi had initially seemed outwardly fine if not warm. The leaders appeared to have cooperated in removing Tantawi and Anan as SCAF leaders and to have reached a modus vivendi in dealing with each other based on the military staying out of politics and Morsi staying out of military affairs. SCAF members interviewed by this writer in October 2012 seemed genuinely sobered about the difficulties they had encountered running the country after Mubarak’s removal, especially their inability to communicate effectively with the public. They expressed no interest in returning to politics and complained about being unappreciated and misunderstood by the Egyptian public, despite having kept their word to return the country to civilian rule.33 Within two months, however, the military was back dabbling in politics. El-Sisi first attempted to act as a mediator among contending factions to dissipate the gathering political crisis. In early December, as the storm of secular protests against the constitutional referendum grew in intensity, the SCAF leader offered to host a national dialogue among the political parties to find a way out of the impasse. El-Sisi claimed Morsi at first accepted his proposal enthusiastically, but after consulting with the Brotherhood’s leadership, he had rejected it.34 According to el-Sisi’s account, Morsi’s submission to decisions taken directly by the Brotherhood’s leadership had become more pronounced, pushing their long-standing ideological and political differences to the fore. In his view, the Egyptian military and the Brotherhood had always held irreconcilable views about the state and nation. He called it a “historical disagreement” that dated back to 1954 when the Muslim Brotherhood had tried to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser, military leader of the first Egyptian revolution. El-Sisi summed up this disagreement in the following words: “While the armed forces are loyal to the nation and its borders, the

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Brotherhood is loyal to itself and the ideas of the caliphate which transcends borders.”35 El-Sisi fixed the turning point in his relations with Morsi to a contentious meeting sometime in February 2013 when he had told Morsi to his face: “Your project has ended, and the repulsion you have created among Egyptians is unparalleled by any former regimes.”36 In March, el-Sisi informed a senior US official visiting Cairo that he “knew the reign of the Brotherhood was over.”37 On April 12, Morsi held his last meeting with the entire military council. At the time, Cairo was already awash with rumors that the military was maneuvering to remove Morsi, sparked by a report that during a visit to the Sudan he had agreed to cede a portion of Egyptian territory, the so-called Hala’ib Triangle, on the Egyptian-Sudanese border. El-Sisi said the military was also alarmed about the national security impact of a development project along the Suez Canal being promoted by Morsi’s government without consultation with the military. This had apparently been one issue at stake during the SCAF’s April 12 meeting with Morsi where they had discussed “the relationship between the presidency and the military institution.”38 However, the Associated Press investigation found out that el-Sisi’s aides had learned from the Republican Guard that Morsi was seeking to change the SCAF’s top commanders and remove elSisi as his defense minister.39 Early April was also when the SCAF first drew up an emergency plan to “assert control of the nation” without removing Morsi if the security situation again seriously deteriorated, as had happened in Suez.40 These reports strongly suggested that the confrontation between the SCAF and Morsi had already reached nearly to a breaking point even before the Tamarod petition campaign was launched later that month.

The Tamarod Petition Campaign

The petition campaign was organized by five young activists from the Kefaya Party who were looking for a peaceful means to force Morsi into resigning. Two of them, Mahmoud Badr and Hassan Shahin, were aspiring journalists for the party newspaper, while another, Mohamed Aziz, was its youth coordinator.41 According to Badr, the idea for such a campaign originated with Shahin, who had noticed an article in the new constitution allowing for early presidential elections if the incumbent resigned, died, became disabled or “for any other reason.”42 Whether Shahin and his colleagues were the sole instigators of the campaign is questionable. There were multiple reports later that the Interior Ministry, in coordination with the SCAF, had been fully behind it right from the beginning. The Reuters investigation discovered that sen-

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ior intelligence officers had identified and then met with potential activists, encouraging them “to take to the streets and challenge Morsi.”43 It did not name these activists, but subsequent to these meetings, Tamarod’s petition campaign was launched. The same report said Interior Ministry officials and police officers “helped collect signatures for the petition, helped distribute the petitions, signed the petitions themselves and joined the protests.”44 The Associated Press investigation, on the other hand, concluded that the SCAF only began to take Tamarod seriously once it had gathered two million signatures in mid-May. At that point, the military began working through unnamed third parties to put Tamarod in touch with “liberal and opposition-linked businessmen who would bank it.”45 One of those businessmen confirmed to this writer that this linkage had been made, and he predicted as early as mid-April that Morsi would be removed shortly.46 Another aspect of the campaign consisted of provoking shortages of basic food items and gasoline for cars and trucks to raise the level of public discontent with the Morsi government. Starting in March, there was a marked increase in fuel shortages, electricity blackouts, and sudden inflation of basic food prices stemming from a foreign reserve shortage. It was true that Egypt’s reserves had fallen from $36 billion before the uprising in 2011 to only $13 billion in early 2013. It was also true that Egypt imported 75 percent of its wheat and some of its oil; it had even begun importing natural gas, even though it was exporting it to Israel and Jordan. The economic situation was serious enough that the government had begun negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for a $4.8 billion loan that would have required a reduction of food and energy subsidies then consuming nearly a third of its budget. This had provoked the government to launch a pilot project involving smart cards aimed at limiting the amount of fuel cars and trucks could purchase at subsidized prices. It had also begun cutting back on subsidized flour provided to bakeries whose owners had gone out on strike in March in protest. By May, long lines at gas stations and electricity blackouts had become common in Cairo and elsewhere in the country. There were other causes of the worsening situation stemming from a combination of declining natural resources and disruptions from the uprising. For example, Egypt’s already limited oil production had fallen 30 to 35 percent since January 2011, but part of this was attributed to the decline in its oil and gas deposits.47 There was at first strong circumstantial evidence, and then later official confirmation, that the shortages had been deliberately provoked by holding back deliveries of available supplies of food items and gasoline to stoke discontent with the government. As soon as Morsi was gone, gas station lines disappeared and power cuts stopped. Even the police, who had

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mostly disappeared from the streets of Cairo, just as suddenly reappeared. A Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade spokesman confirmed that there had been a coordinated effort by “different circles in the state” to produce the shortages as they were “preparing for the coup.”48 Those behind it, he said, included Brotherhood foes, businessmen, a dismissed Supreme Constitutional Court judge, and a close adviser to Shafik, who had narrowly lost out to Morsi in the presidential race.49 Morsi proved helpless to counter any of these various military, security, and civilian endeavors to unseat him. His attempts to gain even a toehold in the Interior Ministry ended in abysmal failure. In August 2012, he appointed Ahmed Gamal El Din to replace the unpopular Mohamed Ibrahim as minister of the interior, but both men had the same tainted reputation as ancien regime stalwarts. El Din carried out just one major turnover in the top ranks of the ministry that November, involving a hundred police generals, and he created a new human rights office to deal with complaints of police brutality. But the ministry remained largely beyond Morsi’s reach, an institution in and of itself, setting its own agenda, and answering to the minister rather than the president. Morsi also worked to gain control of local administrations dominated by the powerful appointed governors of the country’s provinces. But there, too, he made disastrous mistakes. His last appointments of seventeen governors in mid-June 2013 added fuel to the fire about to consume him when it became known that his choice for the tourist center of Luxor was Adel el-Khayat. He belonged to al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the terrorist group responsible for killing fifty-eight tourists there in 1997. This appointment proved too much for Morsi’s own minister of tourism, who abruptly resigned. Several of the other new governors were met by protesters who blocked them from reaching their offices.

The Second Uprising and Military Coup

The Tamarod campaign chose the first anniversary of Morsi’s rule on June 30, 2013, to unleash a new mass uprising. By then, it claimed to have collected 15 million signatures on its petition calling for a new presidential election, 2 million more than Morsi had obtained to become president. The question of what the military intended to do remained unclear until almost the last day. El-Sisi was sending mixed messages. At a meeting with reporters and scholars on May 11, the general had cautioned against expectations of a military takeover. At that point, he was still pressing Morsi to call a referendum on his own initiative. Ironically in light of subsequent events, the general said during this meeting that he was concerned about

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the military being viewed as the instigator of a coup, because “launching coups is not the role of the armed forces.”50 El-Sisi again pressed Morsi to hold a referendum at their meeting on June 21 and gave him seven days to respond. On June 26, the SCAF leader met with two other senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders, Saad el-Katatni and Khairat el-Shater, at their request. According to el-Sisi’s account, el-Shater spoke for forty-five minutes uninterrupted, warning that Morsi’s forced removal would trigger terrorist attacks throughout the Sinai and into the Nile Valley. The Brotherhood would not be able to control them. “He also kept pointing his finger like he was pulling a gun trigger,” el-Sisi later recounted.51 In reaction, el-Sisi said he finally “blew up” and, shouting, asked whether el-Shater expected the military to sit back and accept the devastation of Egypt to preserve Brotherhood rule. “Is it either you rule or kill us?” On June 26, Morsi delivered his last address to the nation, beseeching his opponents to rely on elections if they wanted to replace him. But he extended no offer to hold a referendum as he addressed a conference room filled with his supporters with el-Sisi also in attendance. The besieged president was openly defiant toward the military, declaring “all agreed” that he was the supreme commander of the armed forces and that all of the country’s institutions had to be “under the leadership of the head of state.”52 By then, Morsi had become desperate. According to one report, he even attempted a preemptive coup: two of his aides had contacted Maj. Gen. Ahmed Wasfi, commander of the Second Field Army along the Suez Canal, to see if he would be willing to replace el-Sisi. Wasfi immediately called el-Sisi to warn him.53 There were even reports Morsi had drawn up a list of army officers and prominent opposition figures to be arrested after his speech. El-Sisi dismissed the threat of a coup against him as fanciful. He had concluded Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders had become resigned to “letting the crisis take them whichever way.”54 The final showdown pitting constitutional legitimacy against revolutionary legitimacy came on June 30. All secular groups had called for demonstrations on that day, and the result was a massive outpouring onto the streets of Cairo and other cities. Just how many Egyptians took part quickly became a subject of heated controversy as did Tamarod’s assertion it had finally collected 22 million signatures. The secular opposition claimed as many as 33 million turned out, while the military put the figure at 14 million. A BBC investigation into these various claims found them all vastly exaggerated and well beyond what was credible given Egypt’s total population of 80 million. In Cairo alone, it concluded the most reliable figures were those of various foreign new agencies that had estimated about 500,000 people had gathered in and around Tahrir Square.55 Nationwide, probably millions had turned out to produce the largest public

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demonstrations since the 2011 uprising. They did not go without violence. Muslim Brotherhood offices across the country were attacked and burned, including its headquarters overlooking Cairo, which protesters ransacked and set on fire during an all-night battle. Brotherhood members trapped inside eventually resorted to using guns, killing five and injuring eighty others. Another five protesters were killed in Upper Egypt and 400 were wounded nationwide. Morsi remained defiant until the end, which as it happened was only three days away. He rejected holding new presidential elections and kept insisting on his “constitutional legitimacy.” In his last interview, with the British newspaper the Guardian on June 30, he once again excluded “room for any talk against this constitutional legitimacy.”56 For him, the “critical point” in resolving the crisis was “application of the constitution.” He warned against setting a precedent of ousting a duly elected president that might well come to haunt his successor. He admitted, however, that his November 22 decree had been a mistake and led to “some kind of misconception” among Egyptians about his intentions. He insisted the fault had not been all his. Secular politicians had turned down his invitation to participate in government and deliberately created an impasse. He repeatedly blamed forces from the old order, which had formed a deep state to impede change and undermine him. Morsi made no mention in the interview of his talks with el-Sisi. So we only have the general’s version of his last days in power, provided later to the Cairo newspaper al-Masry al-Youm.57 On June 23, el-Sisi said he had given Morsi seven days to resolve the crisis through a referendum, which he had refused. The day after the June 30 demonstrations, el-Sisi had issued a final forty-eight-hour ultimatum to the president. They met for the last time on July 2 to try to resolve the crisis, but el-Sisi had found Morsi completely out of touch with reality, still believing that only 120,000 had participated in the June 30 demonstrations. The general believed that Morsi was convinced the military would not act to remove him because it feared confrontation and would “step back at a certain point.” This judgment might not have been totally fanciful, as el-Sisi disclosed he had given Morsi an additional forty-eight hours because he saw “grave dangers” in military intervention and found any other way of resolving the crisis to be preferable. The night of July 3, el-Sisi crossed the Rubicon of Egyptian history to depose the first elected Islamic president ever to rule the nation. The military arrested not only Morsi but thirty-eight other top Muslim Brotherhood leaders; annulled the constitution; dismissed the government, and named Adly Mansour, the Supreme Constitutional Court head, temporary president. Even after his arrest, Morsi remained defiant in the last message he

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managed to send out on the presidential website, declaring he was still the country’s lawfully elected president. He sent emails to several journalists in which he referred to himself as “president of the republic and chief commander of the armed forces” despite “a complete military coup.”58 Meanwhile, el-Sisi was holding a news conference to assure Egyptians that the military had no political ambitions and had only been forced to take action because Morsi had failed to forge a national consensus. He promised the SCAF would work to achieve this goal, as demonstrated by the rainbow coalition of political and religious figures standing behind him. It included al-Azhar Grand Shaikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, Coptic Church Pope Tawadros II, al-Nour Party Secretary-General Galal al-Morra, and National Salvation Front leader ElBaradei.

The Brotherhood’s Last Stand

Unlike Ennahda in Tunisia, which had yielded power gracefully, the Muslim Brotherhood decided to go down fighting. It adopted the same tactics as those of the secular opposition: marches, street protests, and the takeover of the square in front of Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque in the Cairo district of Nasr City. The Rabaa sit-in became the Brotherhood’s last holdout together with a far smaller one in al-Nahda Square in front of Cairo University. Those leaders who had initially escaped arrest lived in the tent city that sprung up in Rabaa. Crowds sometimes numbering more than 100,000 gathered there throughout July and into August, defying military and police orders to disperse. Finally, on August 14, Interior Ministry forces moved to put an end to both sit-ins. The operation quickly provoked bloody battles at these locations and touched off scores of others around the country, resulting in the worst one-day death toll of the revolution even by the government’s own account: 638 nationwide, of whom 288 had died at Rabaa alAdawiya and 90 at al-Nahda Square, with nearly another 4,000 injured.59 The Interior Ministry said forty-three of its security people were among those killed. (The official toll was later reduced to 533 dead.)60 After conducting a one-year investigation into what had happened at Rabaa, Human Rights Watch published a report concluding that at least 817 had died, “likely more than 1,000.” It condemned “the indiscriminate and deliberate use of lethal force” by Egyptian security forces, which it asserted had resulted in “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.” By comparison, it noted that less than half that number of protesters had died over a twenty-four-hour period in the Chinese crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.61 The most dramatic comparison, however, was to the way Tunisia’s En-

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nahda had dealt with political defeat at the hands of its secular enemies. It had peacefully handed over power, eschewed street action, and accepted the challenge of new elections. Not a life had been lost.

Notes 1. Marina Ottaway and Nathan J. Brown, “Egypt’s Transition in Crisis: Falling into the Wrong Turkish Model,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 30, 2012. 2. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 139–144. 3. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 94–95. 4. Gamal Essam El-Din, “The Constitution-Drafting Assembly Faces Fatal Threats,” English al-Ahram, November 19, 2012. 5. “Egypt’s Morsi May Have Consulted Military on Sunday Surprise,” English alAhram, August 12, 2012. 6. Nashwa el-Hofi, “Tantawi Will Quietly Retire After Handing over Power, Says Source,” Al-Masry Al-Youm, November 2, 2011. 7. David Kirkpatrick, “No Presidential Candidate from Egypt Military, Officer Says,” New York Times, October 5, 2011. 8. Interview with US embassy officials, Cairo, October 1, 2012. 9. “English Text of President Morsi’s New Egypt Constitutional Declaration,” English al-Ahram, August 12, 2012. 10. “Egypt’s Armed Forces Advised Morsi to Be Inclusive: Defense Minister elSisi,” English al-Ahram, October 7, 2013. 11. Abdel-Rahman Hussein, “Mohamed Morsi Issues Wholesale Pardon for Egypt’s Political Protesters,” Egypt Independent, October 9, 2012. 12. Nur Laiq, Talking to Arab Youth: Revolution and Counterrevolution in Egypt and Tunisia (New York: International Peace Institute, 2013), 12. 13. “Abu Hamed: Shafiq Backs My Life of the Egyptians Party,” Egypt Daily News, August 4, 2012. 14. Jack Shenker, “Mohamed Elbaradei Warns Egypt It Is Letting a ‘New Emperor’ Take Over,” Guardian, June 15, 2012. 15. Alex Newman, “After Arab Spring, Fears of Islamist Tyranny Grow in Egypt,” New American, August 15, 2012. 16. “Liberals, Leftists United Against Islamists for Parliamentary Polls,” Al-Masry Al-Youm, September 2, 2012. 17. “Text of Manal el-Tibi’s Resignation Letter to Egypt’s Constituent Assembly,” Jadaliyya, October 10, 2012. 18. “English Text of Morsi’s Constitutional Declaration,” English al-Ahram, November 22, 2012. 19. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Citing Deadlock, Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power and Plans Mubarak Retrial,” New York Times, November 22, 2012. 20. Kirkpatrick, “Citing Deadlock, Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power.” 21. “Muslim Brotherhood Statement on Islamic Law and National Identity,” Cairo, November 4, 2012, accessed July 19, 2016, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/articles.php ?id=30353. 22. Narim Youssef, “Egypt’s Draft Constitution Translated,” Egypt Independent, December 1, 2012. 23. Hesham Sallam, “Morsi Past the Point of No Return,” Jadaliyya, December 8, 2012.

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24. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Morsi’s Opponents Describe Abuse by President’s Allies,” New York Times, December 10, 2012. 25. Edmund Blair and Marwa Awad, “Rivals Clash as Morsi’s Deputy Seeks End to Egypt Crisis,” Reuters, December 5, 2012. 26. Ayat al-Tawy, “Egypt Opposition Forces Gear Up for More Anti-govt Rallies on Friday,” English al-Ahram, January 31, 2013. 27. Zeinab el-Gundy, “Al-Azhar Unveils 10-Point Initiative to End Egypt’s Political Crisis,” English al-Ahram, January 31, 2013. 28. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Chaos in Egypt Stirs Warning of a Collapse,” New York Times, January 29, 2013. 29. Sarah el-Deeb, “Islamist Adviser to Egypt’s Morsi Quits,” Associated Press, February 18, 2012. 30. “Muslim Brotherhood Defends Rash of Govt Appointments,” Al-Masry AlYoum, February 28, 2013. 31. Yasmine Saleh and Tom Perry, “Morsi’s Opponents Say Will Boycott Egypt Elections,” Reuters, February 26, 2013. 32. Maggie Michael, “Court Suspends Egypt’s Parliament Election,” Daily Star, March 6, 2013. 33. Author’s interview with four SCAF officers, Cairo, October 2, 2012. 34. Al-Masry Al-Youm, “Interview with Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi (Part I),” English translation in Egypt Independent, October 9, 2013. 35. Al-Masry Al-Youm interview with Al-Sisi (Part I). 36. Al-Masry Al-Youm interview with Al-Sisi (Part I). 37. “‘I Informed a US Official in March That the Brotherhood’s Time Was Up’: elSisi,” English al-Ahram, May 6, 2014. 38. Al-Masry Al-Youm interview with Al-Sisi (Part I). 39. Hamza Hendawi, “Dispute Between Morsi, Military Led to Egypt Coup,” Associated Press, July 18, 2013. 40. Hendawi, “Dispute Between Morsi, Military.” 41. Ahmed Zidan, “How Did Tamarod Topple the Muslim Brotherhood?” Open Democracy, July 15, 2013, and “Meet the Three Young Men Who Decided to Oust Mohammed Morsi,” Le Monde, July 21, 2013. 42. Mahmoud Badr, “The Organization of a Rebellion,” video interview, June 26, 2013, accessed July 19, 2016, http:// www. mei.edu/video/tamarod-organization -rebellion. 43. Mahmoud Abdel-Ghany, “Force Behind Egypt’s ‘Revolution of the State,’” Reuters, October 10, 2013. 44. Abdel-Ghany, “Force Behind Egypt’s ‘Revolution of the State.’” 45. Hendawi, “Dispute Between Morsi, Military.” 46. Author’s interview with a leading Egyptian businessman, Washington, DC, April 17, 2013. 47. For a good description of Egypt’s economic problems, see Alexandre Goudineau, “Egypt’s Fuel Shortages Demonstrate Perfect Storm of Economic Pressures,” Egypt Independent, March 5, 2013. 48. Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick, “Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi,” New York Times, July 10, 2013. 49. Hubbard and Kirkpatrick, “Sudden Improvements in Egypt.” 50. Al-Masry Al-Youm interview with Al-Sisi (Part I). 51. Al-Masry Al-Youm, “Interview with Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi (Part 2),” Egypt Independent, October 10, 2013. 52. Hamza Hendawi, “Egypt President Defends 1st Year in Speech,” Associated Press, June 26, 2013.

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53. Hendawi, “Dispute Between Morsi, Military.” 54. Al-Masry Al-Youm interview with Al-Sisi (Part 2). 55. Ruth Alexander, “Counting Crowds: Was Egpyt’s Uprising the Biggest Ever?” BBC News Magazine, July 16, 2013. 56. David Hearst and Patrick Kingsley, “Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi Remains Defiant as Fears of Civil War Grows,” Guardian, June 30, 2013. 57. Al-Masry Al-Youm interview with Al-Sisi (Part 2). 58. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Army Ousts Egypt’s President: Morsi Is Taken into Military Custody,” New York Times, July 3, 2013. 59. Manar Mohsen, “Health Ministry Raises Death Toll of Wednesday’s Clashes to 638,” Daily News Egypt, August 16, 2013. 60. Rana Muhammad Taha, “Forensics Puts Sit-in’s Dispersal Death Toll at 533,” Daily News Egypt, September 14, 2013. 61. “All According to Plan,” Human Rights Watch, August 12, 2014.

10 The Restoration

Revolutions break down law and order, traditions, habits, and bonds of society and then burn themselves out as extremists wear out their welcome. A Thermidorian reaction spreads through an exhausted society that willingly turns to a dictator for relief and salvation. Crane Brinton observed that “dictatorships and revolutions are inevitably closely associated,” citing the prime examples of Cromwell, Napoleon, and Stalin in the classic revolutions of the Western world.1 It had taken eleven years from the start of the English civil wars in 1642 before Oliver Cromwell was acclaimed Lord Protector, and ten years after the onset of the French Revolution before Napoleon Bonaparte became First Consul and another five years before he assumed the title of France’s first emperor. Joseph Stalin had to await Lenin’s death in 1924, seven years after the Russian Revolution, before establishing himself as its absolute dictator for the next three decades. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions also experienced a restoration but much quicker and with starkly different outcomes. After three years, Tunisia had credible elections and ended up with a relatively benign civilian strongman, Beji Caid Essebsi. On the other hand, Egypt had seen the rise to power in just one year of a Napoleon-style military dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who had restored to revolutionary legitimacy through a popular uprising to overthrow a democratically elected president. Once in power, he quickly sought to create constitutional legitimacy by diktat for a new military regime. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) established a new interim government by fiat whose legality was based solely on a constitutional declaration issued by the military-appointed interim president, Adly Mansour. Initially, the SCAF did not intend to rule directly, the way it 185

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had immediately after Hosni Mubarak’s removal from power. A thin facade of civilian governance was maintained. Mansour held executive powers, and the prime minister and his cabinet held legislative ones.

Return of the Old Political Elite

The SCAF’s initial roadmap back to legality called for an appointed committee of ten legal experts to draft amendments to the existing constitution rather than an elected constituent assembly to draft an entirely new one. The committee was given thirty days to complete the task. Under pressure from secularists, however, on September 1 Mansour announced the formation of an expanded fifty-member constitutional committee to include representatives from secular political parties, civil society groups like Tamarod and the Revolutionary Youth Coalition, delegates from the unions and professional syndicates, Muslim and Christian community leaders, plus a number of “public figures.” Chief among the latter was Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister under Mubarak, one-time head of the Arab League, and a candidate in the 2012 presidential election. He was chosen to lead the new committee in drafting the document within two months. Restoration of the ancien regime and its old political elite was under way. Moussa was just one of many examples. Mansour had been a Mubarak appointee to the courts in 1992 and risen through the ranks of the judiciary to find himself chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court, appointed by Mohamed Morsi just a month before he was deposed. Given the role the courts played in bringing down the Morsi government, Mansour’s appointment sent a reassuring signal to the secular opposition that Islamists would not return to power any time soon. The SCAF named as vice president Mohamed ElBaradei, leader of the National Salvation Front and opposed to Morsi’s rule. (He resigned within two months in protest over the military’s bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood’s sit-ins, denouncing “decisions I do not agree with and whose consequences I fear.”2) Another stalwart from the old guard was the new prime minister: Hazem Al Beblawi, a well-known economist, banker, and a cofounder of the Social Democratic Party. The SCAF named another of its leaders, Ziad Bahaa-Eldin, vice prime minister. Nabil Fahmy, former ambassador to the United States under Mubarak, became foreign minister. The minister of information, Dorreya Sharaf el-Din, had been a member of the powerful policymaking committee of the National Democratic Party. The minister of planning and international cooperation, Ashraf El-Araby, had served in previous Mubarak-era governments, as had the minister of transportation, Ibrahim al-Demeri, and the new finance minister, Hany Kadry Dimian.

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The minister of justice, Mahfouz Saber, had been head of the Electoral Committee during the November 2010 parliamentary elections that had seen the elimination of Brotherhood deputies from the People’s Assembly. The new minister of housing was Ibrahim Mahlab, who had served as the head of Egypt’s largest construction company, the Arab Contractors, for a decade during the Mubarak era. Mahlab became Beblawi’s successor as prime minister in January 2014. But the éminence grise of the new government was clearly el-Sisi, who held the title of first deputy prime minister as well as defense minister.

Crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood

Resurrection of the old order required uprooting those who had sought to establish a new one. To achieve that goal, the SCAF did not hesitate to resort again to revolutionary legitimacy to crush the Muslim Brotherhood by whatever means necessary. In a speech to the nation on July 24, el-Sisi asked Egyptians “to take to the streets” to “mandate me to confront terrorism and violence.” Two days later, millions of Egyptians turned out to “delegate the military and police to confront violence in a suitable way” exactly as el-Sisi had requested.3 While the military made use of this revolutionary legitimacy derived from the street, the Brotherhood fell back on Morsi’s claim to continued constitutional legitimacy as the elected president of Egypt. Even before the June 30 uprising, the Brotherhood had prepared for the worst by forming a National Coalition for Supporting Legitimacy. In the aftermath of Morsi’s removal, this was the main group organizing demonstrations in Cairo and other major cities. Indeed, protests by thousands of Brotherhood supporters took place almost every Friday after prayers for months, and they often ended in violence and widespread arrests. The SCAF and Interior Ministry sought to discredit the Brotherhood by linking it to an upsurge in terrorist attacks by Islamic groups operating in or from the Sinai Peninsula. The truth was these groups had been active ever since the 2011 uprising. They had taken full advantage of the collapse of the police force throughout the Sinai to set up training camps for Egyptian and foreign jihadis. Their initial targets had been Israel and the pipeline transporting Egyptian gas there and on to Jordan. Ansar Beit al-Maqdis had first taken credit for one of these attacks in July 2012, just as Morsi was coming to power. By then, more than a dozen attacks on the pipeline had already taken place. Ansar took responsibility for firing rockets into the Israeli resort of Eilat in August of that year and then for an attack on an Israeli border patrol in September. Islamic jihadis began targeting the military’s presence in the Sinai as well. On August 5, 2012, thirty-five ter-

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rorists attacked an army base, killing sixteen Egyptian soldiers and stealing two armored vehicles, which they drove across the border into Israel, where six of them died in a firefight with the Israeli army. The brazen attack and high death toll shocked the nation, and Morsi used them as a pretext for carrying out his first and only shakeup of the Egyptian military’s leadership as I recounted in the previous chapter. The problem of terrorism grew much worse, however, after Morsi was deposed. It spread from the Sinai to the capital to become a direct threat to the government. On September 5, 2013, a suicide bomber drove his car into a convoy taking Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim from his home to his office in downtown Cairo, setting off a huge explosion. Ibrahim, a longtime senior security official during the Mubarak era, had been appointed minister in January 2013 with Morsi’s blessing. Miraculously, although twenty-two people were wounded, there were no fatalities other than the bomber, and Ibrahim escaped serious injury. Ansar Beit al-Maqdis immediately claimed credit for what it called a “blessed attack,” brazenly apologizing for having failed to kill Ibrahim and declaring “what is coming is worse and more bitter.”4 It named Ibrahim and el-Sisi as priority targets and warned Egyptians to stay away from the Defense and Interior ministries. The terrorist group said it had been “horrified” by the security forces’ bloody suppression of the Brotherhood’s tent camps in Cairo in mid-August and thus “forced to support our Muslim brothers in repulsing he who attacks their religion, souls, and honor.”5 The Muslim Brotherhood immediately denounced the attack, but a Cairo court used it as pretense to issue a ban on the Brotherhood’s activities and seize all its funds and real estate in late September. In late November, Ibrahim formally blamed the group, charging that it was using the international Brotherhood organization to mobilize “extremist terrorist elements, including ones from the alQaeda organization and the Gaza Strip, to carry out a series of terrorist attacks following the June 30 revolution.”6 Whether there was any truth to these allegations remained undocumented at the time of this writing. El-Sisi was doubtlessly convinced they were true. Khairat el-Shater, the Brotherhood’s deputy leader, had infuriated him during their meeting on June 25, warning that if Morsi was deposed uncontrollable terrorism would ensue beyond Brotherhood control. In his interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm in October 2013, el-Sisi said he had taken el-Shater’s comments as a threat and “show of force” by the Brotherhood, to which he had replied angrily, “Is it either we accept this or you kill us?”7 The most damning allegation against the Brotherhood came from a leader of Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian radical group in Gaza. He had claimed in an interview with another Cairo newspaper shortly after the attack on Ibrahim that Ansar Beit al-Maqdis

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was an affiliate of al-Qaeda and was being funded by the Brotherhood.8 His allegations conveniently served to justify and fuel the campaign being promoted by the SCAF and Interior Ministry, both determined to uproot the Brotherhood across the entire country. But the military and ministry remained hard-pressed to produce concrete evidence of the Brotherhood’s link to these terrorist groups. Nonetheless, on December 25 the Brotherhood was officially proclaimed a terrorist organization, one day after an attack on the police headquarters in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura that resulted in 14 deaths and injuries to 150 others, mostly policemen. The government immediately arrested scores of Brotherhood officials, seized its members’ funds and personal possessions, and shuttered all its charities, schools, and hospitals. By May 2014, funds of 702 Brotherhood officials had been confiscated and 1,050 of its charities put under a government trusteeship.9 Simply being a member of the Brotherhood could result in a five-year prison sentence. The horrendous toll exacted by the government’s crackdown on the Brotherhood intertwined with its war on terrorism has been documented in a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based on figures compiled mostly by the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights. Between July 2013 and March 2014, 2,500 civilians were killed and 17,000 others wounded in 1,100 demonstrations and clashes with security forces. The number of those arrested was just under 19,000, including 2,590 “political leaders” from the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. There had also been 180 terrorist attacks resulting in 281 deaths, all but 57 of them police officers or soldiers. The Carnegie report concluded that the extent of political violence, terrorism, and human rights abuse stood unprecedented in contemporary Egyptian history, the number of casualties in excess of its “darkest periods” since the 1952 revolution under Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser, too, had carried out a massive crackdown on the Brotherhood after an assassination attempt on his life in October 1954; over two years, he had arrested 20,000 people, mostly Brotherhood members but also his liberal critics—only 1,000 less than the number detained in just the first eight months after Morsi’s downfall. The Egyptian revolution could claim two dubious distinctions: “No Egyptian regime has been more repressive, and no regime in more than a generation has confronted a more intense terrorism challenge.”10 Exactly as in Nasser’s time, the new government moved from targeting the Brotherhood to silencing its secular critics. In late November, it issued what became known as the “antiprotest law” banning unauthorized gatherings of more than ten people and any overnight ones in Tahrir Square while requiring seven permits to hold a demonstration. Within days, three activists, two of them founders of the April 6 Youth Movement

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behind the 2011 uprising against Mubarak, tested the law by trying to organize a demonstration outside parliament without permission. The two leaders, Ahmed Maher and Mohammed Adel, were immediately arrested, as was another iconic figure from the uprising, the blogger Alaa Abd elFattah. On December 22, 2013, a court sentenced them to three years in jail as their supporters in the courtroom chanted “Down, down with military rule.” At the end of the month, police arrested four journalists working for Al Jazeera English, charging them with illegal contacts with a “terrorist” organization and distributing false information as a result of their coverage of the Brotherhood’s protests. The Al Jazeera satellite television station and its online publications were owned by the state of Qatar, which had been the most supportive among all Arab countries of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power and then most critical of the military coup against Morsi. The SCAF was determined to close down its operations in Egypt and arrested altogether twenty of its reporters and employees in Cairo. After enormous international pressure, three reporters were freed: Australian Peter Greste was allowed to return home in February 2015 and Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed were given a presidential pardon in September of that year. But the government still had not dropped charges against seven other employees as of that December and sentenced the others who had fled the country to ten years in absentia. The government’s iron-fist policy toward the Muslim Brotherhood was further made manifest in March 2014 when a judge in Minya sentenced 529 of its members (only 147 in custody) to death for the killing of one police officer. He had first appeared in court in early November 2013, loudly denouncing the “military coup” and insisting he was still the legitimate president of Egypt. At that point, he was being accused along with fourteen other Brotherhood officials of ordering attacks on the opposition outside the presidential palace on December 5, 2012. At least eleven people had died in the confrontation there. Morsi eventually became a defendant in three different trials facing charges for spying on behalf of the international Brotherhood organization, carrying out terror attacks on state institutions and officials, and masterminding his own jailbreak from the Wadi El Natrun Prison during the 2011 uprising. As of late 2016, a court had overturned a death sentence on Morsi, but he was still facing a life in prison on charges of espionage and inciting violence. Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie and forty-seven other Brotherhood senior religious and political officials did not appear in court until mid-February 2014, also charged with spying as well as instigating the killing of protesters outside the Brotherhood’s headquarters on June 30, 2012. The same Minya judge, Said Youssef, held another mass trial for 683 Brotherhood members (only 63 in custody) in late April 2014, and

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after a session lasting only eight minutes, he sentenced all of them to death, including Badie. He also announced he was reducing the number condemned to death in the first trial from 529 to 37. All these death sentences were subject to appeal and the consent of the grand mufti of Egypt as well, making it difficult to determine the defendants’ ultimate fate. At the end of 2016, Badie together with Morsi and half a dozen other senior Brotherhood leaders were still alive. But they had lost multiple appeals and been condemned either to execution or life in prison barring a presidential pardon.”

The New Constitution

Writing a new constitution proved a lot easier than combating terrorism for the interim government. The fifty-member committee completed its work in early December with a nearly unanimous vote of approval of its 247 articles. This time, there were no walkouts or boycotts as had plagued the writing of the 2012 constitution. The preamble offered a new official version of the political upheaval Egypt was undergoing and the military’s role in it.11 It sought to blend the popular uprisings of 2011 and 2013 into one single movement it called the January 25–June 30 Revolution, proclaiming it the “capstone of two great revolutions in our modern history.” This was a reference first to the 1919 uprising against British occupation of Egypt and then the 1952 military coup that ended the Egyptian monarchy. The preamble resorted to generous hyperbole, stating that in the pantheon of “major revolutions in the history of mankind,” the current Egyptian one stood out as “unique.” The criteria given for its uniqueness is interesting because it combined an accurate reflection of many of the revolution’s basic characteristics with a justification for the military’s intervention: massive popular participation, the role of youth, the transcendence of “class and ideology” as motivating forces, and the role of “the people’s army” in protecting the popular will.12 Regarding the latter, the drafters of the preamble dutifully noted that it had been another military figure, Muhammad Ali, who had founded the modern Egyptian state in the late nineteenth century by using the army as his main instrument of transformation. Now Egypt’s history was repeating itself—the army had “delivered victory” for the January 25–June 30 Revolution. The changes made in the 2012 constitution heavily reflected the conflicts the Brotherhood had engaged in against the SCAF and courts. An article-by-article comparison between the two documents published by the Egyptian state-run al-Ahram newspaper concluded the new one had ensured almost complete autonomy for the military and judiciary.13 It

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also made certain the next president would not be able to dismiss his defense minister as Morsi had. The new constitution formally gave the SCAF, not the president, the power to appoint and replace the defense minister for the next eight years, though he was its commander. In addition, the defense minister would continue to be a military figure, not a civilian. The only body having any oversight over the military and its budget was to be the National Defense Council, dominated by senior armed forces officers. Even more unusual, the SCAF had to give its approval in case the president decided to dissolve the new House of Representatives.14 The right of military courts to try civilians, so controversial during the SCAF’s rule in 2011–2012, was reaffirmed. The judiciary that had played such an important role in undermining the Muslim Brotherhood was also assured of autonomy from the state. Members of the Supreme Constitutional Court were chosen by its own general assembly of judges, not by the government. They could not be dismissed and were subject “to no other authority but the law.”15 Furthermore, the court was “exclusively competent to decide on the constitutionality of laws.”16 No religious authority like al-Azhar, which the Brotherhood had introduced as an arbiter, would play any role. Also changed as a result of Morsi’s struggle with the judiciary was a provision giving the Supreme Judicial Council (not the president) the power to appoint the state’s prosecutor general.17 Other notable changes included the establishment of a single-body parliament. The People’s Assembly was renamed the House of Representatives, and the Shura Council was abolished. In theory, the new House of Representatives had more powers than before. It could declare a vote of no confidence in the president and, if two-thirds of deputies supported it, call for a new presidential election.18 Although both constitutions had allowed for impeachment, the new one added a breach of any constitutional provisions, treason, or a felony as a cause.19 Regarding the highly controversial issue of declaring a state of emergency, the new constitution shortened the length of time it could last; instead of six months’ duration, it was now only for three months, unless two-thirds of the House agreed to extend it, but then only for three additional months.20 Both constitutions limited the president to two four-year terms in office. Other similarities included the prerogative of the president to name a prime minister who did not have to be an elected member of parliament. There was the same provision that if the House rejected the choice, the prime minister had to come from the party or coalition holding a plurality of seats.21 But the new constitution stated that in the latter case the president retained the right to appoint the key ministers of defense, interior, foreign affairs, and justice.22 Clearly, Egypt was headed for another presiden-

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tial system, but one where in theory a few more constitutional restraints were put on the president. The new constitution appeared to provide better guarantees for the rights of women, religious minorities, and the media. The state had to ensure equality between women and men “in all civil political, economic, social and cultural rights,” far different language from the previous constitution, which had emphasized “a balance between a women’s duty toward her family and her work.”23 But Egyptian women had already lost their quota of sixty-four seats in the People’s Assembly under the SCAF’s rule in 2011–2012 and did not get it back even with secularists in charge of drafting the constitution. Even so, women gained 89 seats in the 2015 elections (75 elected and 14 appointed), the highest number and proportion (14.7 percent) in the country’s history. Regarding personal and religious rights, freedom of belief was declared “absolute,” but the practice of it was guaranteed only for “followers of revealed religions” meaning Muslims, Christians, and Jews.24 Already, Article 3 had specifically guaranteed Egyptian Christians and Jews the right to be governed under their own laws in personal matters and religious affairs.25 Guarantees for wider political rights were at least written into the constitution. It became much easier to form a political party or a nongovernmental organization with only notification to the government required, and the new constitution made it more difficult for the government to block the start-up of a publication or close one down. How this would work in practice was left up to parliament to decide through future legislation, and already the government had shuttered the Brotherhood’s media outlets. Similarly, while Egyptians had “the right to organize public meetings, marches, demonstrations and all forms of peaceful protests,” what this meant in practice would be “regulated by law.”26 The government had already passed an antiprotest law making it extremely difficult to exercise any of these rights. Doubtlessly the most sensitive issue of all should have concerned the role of Islam in governance. But unlike in Tunisia, to a remarkable degree the new constitution reflected the Islamist viewpoint with two important changes. In deference to the Salafi al-Nour Party which had supported Morsi’s ouster, the “principles of Islamic sharia” remained “the main source of legislation.”27 Other provisions limited its application and interpretation. The Islamists had insisted on making clear that it was Sunni doctrines alone that would determine these principles. The secularists instead made the collected rulings of the Supreme Constitutional Court the main point of reference. It also deleted any requirement for al-Azhar’s religious scholars to be consulted on legislative matters, a power seen by secularists as a step toward creating a theocratic state. The new constitution, like the

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Brotherhood one, guaranteed the independence of al-Azhar from the state, including the right for senior scholars alone to choose its grand shaikh, who could not be dismissed. Most remarkable, however, was the absence of any basic change in the description of the relationship between religion and state. Article 2 in both the old and the new constitutions declared Islam “the religion of the state,” and conspicuously absent was any mention of a “civil state.”28 The term had originally been included quite explicitly and then removed secretly by the SCAF at the last minute, according to Social Democratic Party leader, Mohamed Abou El-Ghar. He said the drafters of the constitution had first used the phrase “civilian rule” in the preamble and changed it to “civilian government” in the final draft approved by the constitutional commission. But that wording was absent from the version sent on to Mansour. How did this happen? El-Ghar claimed that a “small group of people” including the commission’s head, had acted on its own “for the benefit of the Salafists to vote ‘yes’ on the constitution.”29 El-Ghar said he had become aware of what had happened two days after the final vote while attending a dinner hosted by the SCAF for the commission members. They had been given the final version of the draft, and he had noted only then that any reference to “civil government” or “civil rule” was gone.30 In any event, the al-Nour Party turned out to be the only Islamic one to campaign for a “yes” vote on the new constitution. All major secular parties, led by the National Salvation Front that had promoted the June 30 uprising, urged its approval. Even El-Ghar’s Social Democratic Party, upset by the deletion of “civilian rule,” gave its backing. So did the Tamarod Movement, which had sponsored the anti-Morsi petition in the months leading up to the June 30 uprising. Opposition to the new constitution was led by Muslim Brotherhood supporters and their allies in the Islamic National Alliance to Support Legitimacy, which called for a boycott of the referendum on January 14–15. The alliance’s Youth Against the Coup announced it would resort to civil disobedience to disrupt the vote. One other Islamic faction joined in denouncing it, the Strong Egypt Party, whose leader, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, had left the Brotherhood in 2011 to run for president. The only secular faction of any note to oppose the new constitution was the April 6 Youth Movement, which saw itself as the embodiment of the first uprising against Mubarak and had come out against military rule in principle.31 The outcome of the vote on the referendum as expected was overwhelmingly in favor, with 98 percent of those who went to the polls voting “yes.” But only 39 percent of the electorate had bothered to vote, slightly higher than the 33 percent turnout for the referendum on the 2012 constitution. The approval rate was much higher, however: 98 percent compared with 64 percent.

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War on Terrorism Silences All Opposition

Approval of the new constitution did nothing to quell the violence wracking the country. The third anniversary of the first uprising on January 25 saw opponents and supporters of the military back in the streets by the thousands. Clashes with the police and a new spate of terrorist bombings led to 49 more deaths, mostly in and around Cairo, and over 1,000 arrests. Ansar Beit al-Maqdis took credit for the bombings, declaring they were “only the first drops of rain” with a lot more to come.32 The anniversary also saw the military-backed government escalating its suppression of secular critics who had shown any opposition to the trend of events toward renewed military rule. Even a well-known media star like Amr Hamzawy, who had defeated a Muslim Brotherhood candidate in the 2011 parliamentary elections, was charged with “insulting the judiciary” and barred from leaving the country for nine months. He had denounced what he called “the grand design” to restore the military autocracy that had ruled the country since Nasser’s 1952 revolution and was intent on suppressing all dissent. He warned explicitly against retired generals who promised to be democratic presidents.33 Emad Shahin, a professor at the American University in Cairo and editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics, was abroad when he learned in mid-January he had been added to the list of top Brotherhood leaders charged with spying and “harming Egyptian interest.” He vehemently denied he had ever been a member of or provided material support to the Brotherhood. He had, however, always been “a fervent critic of authoritarian rule” in Egypt.34 The suppression of secular dissidents continued unabated throughout 2014. On April 28, the Court for Urgent Matters banned the April 6 Youth Movement. The court had ruled in favor of a lawsuit against the group by an individual person who accused it of defaming the image of Egypt and espionage. In response, the movement replied defiantly that there was no way to ban it because it was also “an idea” upholding “freedom of expression as a basic human right granted by the [new] constitution as long as it is done peacefully.”35

El-Sisi’s Rise to Power

Celebration of the revolution’s third anniversary marked the coming out of el-Sisi as a presidential candidate. On January 27, the SCAF issued a statement saying el-Sisi had a “mandate and an obligation” to run. It elevated him to the highest military rank of field marshal. El-Sisi thanked the SCAF for allowing him “to respond to the call of duty.”36 That “call” from any

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Egyptian civilian group could be traced back to March 2013, three months before Morsi’s ouster. There had been petitions circulated in Port Said and several towns in the Red Sea and Daqaliya governorates calling on el-Sisi to impose martial law and take over.37 Conflicting evidence obscures whether el-Sisi intended to run for president right from the start of the SCAF’s resumption of authority in July 2013. In the roadmap the general had laid out in announcing Morsi’s removal, he had assured Egyptians the military had no intention of taking over. It was acting solely in response to citizens’ cry for help, “not to hold the reins of power,” and had done everything possible to mediate a resolution of the conflict between Morsi and his opponents.38 In light of later disclosures, however, this disclaimer seems disingenuous. In December 2013, portions of el-Sisi’s long interview with the Cairo newspaper Al-Masry AlYoum that had been omitted were leaked to the media. El-Sisi had actually disclosed to the interviewer that he had had numerous “visions” over thirty-five years, predicting he was destined to become Egypt’s leader. In one of these visions, Anwar Sadat had appeared to forecast his own rise to power, and el-Sisi had responded, “I know I will be president, too.”39 El-Sisi was born in November 1954 into a lower middle-class family in Cairo, his father a shopkeeper in the central market.40 He avoided his father’s career by enrolling in a military-run high school that led him to the Egyptian Military Academy, where he graduated in 1977, four years after the last great Arab-Israeli war, and he never saw action on the battlefield. He had risen through the ranks of the military with exceptional speed and was clearly marked for a senior military position, according to another officer in his class at the academy.41 El-Sisi served initially in the branch of the army specializing in mechanized warfare, but he began training for a top post in the general command in 1987, taking advanced courses in both Britain and the United States. By the time the anti-Mubarak uprising got under way, el-Sisi had risen to become deputy head of military intelligence. He became its chief in February 2011 after the SCAF took power, becoming its youngest member at the age of fifty-six. El-Sisi had written a master’s thesis in 2006 while attending the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that has drawn a lot of attention in the search for clues to his thinking. His thesis was extremely revealing of his thoughts on governance as well as the compatibility of Islam and democracy. The latter issue was probably on his mind because Hamas had won the Palestinian elections in January that year. So the title he chose for his essay, “Democracy in the Middle East,” seemed to speak to the issue of the moment while addressing the underlying problem of what he saw as values of Arab society prejudicial to Western notions of democracy. His conclusion was that these ideas faced tough going in an Arab setting due

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to the low level of education, extensive poverty, and the challenge from Islamic extremism. He also cited the continuous involvement of outside powers in the region and the Arab-Israeli conflict as other factors detrimental to the emergence of democracy. He even included state control of the media as an obstacle.42 His discussion of the relationship between Islam and the state deserves special attention given el-Sisi’s future role in politics and the reappearance of Islam as the religion of the state in the new constitution. His writing helps explain why Morsi might have had initially high hopes that el-Sisi would be his ally, and thus why he chose him to replace Tantawi as chief of the armed forces. El-Sisi argued that Western-style democracy faced innate resistance in the Arab world because it was viewed as “secular,” while the majority Muslim population was deeply religious. Thus, the notion of separation of state and religion was fundamentally alien. Deeply embedded in the Arab mind instead was the Kalafa, the earliest form of Islamic governance combining political and religious leadership under the Prophet Muhammad. To make democracy acceptable, the major tenets of Islam had to be made part of any constitution and all branches of government guided by them in their actions. “This does not mean a theocracy will be established,” he wrote, “rather it means that a democracy will be established built upon Islamic beliefs.”43 There is a striking resemblance between el-Sisi’s thesis from 2006 and the new constitution regarding Islam’s role in state and society. Gaining the support of the Salafis may have been the immediate political reason for including the Islamic provisions, but these also seemed to correspond to elSisi’s own beliefs on the subject long before he came to power. Just as interesting in retrospect was el-Sisi’s strong defense of the right of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, to rule even if it was considered radical. He noted that it had won the elections in a vote regarded as legitimate by everyone and argued it was important that “legitimately elected parties be given the opportunity to govern.” Otherwise, Middle Eastern countries would question the motives and credibility of Western nations in promoting democracy. “The challenge that exists is whether the rest of the world will be able to accept a democracy in the Middle East founded on Islamic beliefs.”44 There was another reason Morsi might have believed el-Sisi would be his ally: the general had a reputation for piety, as attested to by the dark spot on his forehead from frequent praying. Then, too, he often cited verses from the Quran in his speeches, and his wife wore a head scarf as Egyptian Islamists deemed appropriate. El-Sisi’s defense of Hamas’s right to rule stands in flagrant contradiction to his eventual attitude toward the Brotherhood. He justified his change in thinking in his interview with Al-Masry Al-Youm. He said he had found Morsi to be unable to distinguish between the Brotherhood’s

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own narrow interests and those of the Egyptian state: “There is a big difference between the intellectual and ideological system of any group and that of the state.”45 Morsi had never seen himself as president of all Egyptians, only as the representative of one political faction. Furthermore, he had acted as if he were oblivious to the “historical disagreement” between the Brotherhood and the military over their opposing ideologies dating back to the 1952 revolution. “While the Armed Forces is loyal to the nation and its borders, the Brotherhood is loyal to itself and the ideas of the caliphate which transcends borders.”46 One lesson el-Sisi had learned from dealing with Morsi and the Brotherhood, he remarked, was that “power has to remain in the hands of a civil government and president.”47

El-Sisi’s Decision to Seize Power

The question remains of when exactly el-Sisi began considering a run for president in civilian rather than military clothes. On one hand, we now know of his early vision of eventually becoming president. But he had to deal with the backlash to the SCAF’s controversial first stint in power and public demand for the military to return to the barracks. This likely explained why he sought to reassure Egyptians upon deposing Morsi that the military had no intention to reimpose its rule and “will always declare that it stands distant from political forces.”48 El-Sisi also had an unsavory image problem to overcome. He had been the subject of harsh public criticism in April 2011 because of his defense of the military conducting “virginity tests” on a number of women protesters “in order to protect the soldiers and officers from rape allegations.”49 Nonetheless, his removal of Morsi had made him wildly popular among secularists, turning him into their national hero overnight. A campaign to draft him for president got under way in earnest in the fall of 2013 and quickly produced a nationwide “Sisi mania.” His picture began appearing all over the country, even on pastries, while the state-run media glorified him as the nation’s savior. Al-Ahram Weekly even published an article by actress Lobna Abdel Aziz defending Egyptians’ innate love for military rulers “for centuries,” citing Nasser as an example “even when he ruled with the firm grip of a military dictator.”50 It was also true that unlike Tunisia, no credible civilian figure emerged to rally the secularists as an alternative once ElBaradei faded from the political scene. Indeed, Egyptian secularists felt beholden to the military for having eliminated the Islamic threat to their way of life. They were gripped by the “hyper-nationalist euphoria” that swept the country, reluctant even to

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call what had happened on June 30 a military “coup.”51 Hamdeen Sabahi, the Nasserite who had come in third in the 2012 presidential elections, later offered another, related explanation. The “civil bloc,” as he called secular political parties and the “revolutionary youth,” had been too diverse in composition and divided over the military’s return to politics to be able to agree on a way forward. Had they been united on a civilian presidential candidate, Sabahi opined, el-Sisi would probably have stayed out of politics. Instead, virtually all political life had come to a halt after Morsi’s removal, and this had created a vacuum the military stepped in to fill.52 Sabahi, himself a supporter of a previous military leader, now argued that the army should stay out of politics to maintain its popularity and focus on restoring Egypt’s role in the Arab world. In early February 2014, Sabahi declared his intention to run for president against el-Sisi, making him the only other candidate. He warned, however, that if it became evident the election was going to be rigged as Mubarak had done to eliminate the Brotherhood in the 2010 parliamentary race, he would pull out of the race. Sabahi and el-Sisi were in agreement on their assessment of the Brotherhood and its abysmal failure to govern the country. They didn’t disagree, either, that it should be banned from politics or that its Islamic project had been dealt a “historic blow” by the June 30 uprising. They disagreed on what would be necessary to keep the Brotherhood from coming back and once again dominating the political scene. El-Sisi was determined to crush the Brotherhood by force, treating them all as terrorists and putting them in prison. Sabahi believed the answer lay in countering the Brotherhood’s Islamic project with a “democratic project” that would give rise to a “modern civil state,” by which he meant civilian rather than military rule. Such a state should be careful, however, not to exclude all Islamists “in the name of revolution or patriotism” as the Brotherhood had done to secularists in the name of the Islamic project.53

El-Sisi’s Tarnished Triumph at the Polls

The official results of the presidential elections of May 26–28, 2014, were as expected, but the unenthusiastic turnout was a surprise. A Pew Research Center poll published just before the election already found “limited” support for el-Sisi, with just a slim majority (54 percent) indicating they held a positive opinion of him.54 Still, he crushed his only opponent, winning 97 percent of valid votes, a margin reminiscent of past rigged presidential elections in Egypt. The huge turnout el-Sisi had called for as a show of popular support failed to materialize, and one million voters spoiled their

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ballots in protest. This was nonetheless 250,000 votes more than Sabahi had managed to obtain (755,000). After an extremely low turnout on the first day, estimated at only 15 percent by the Associated Press, the government panicked, mobilizing all local and regional government officials, tribal and village notables, and the state-owned media to get out the vote.55 The second day of voting was declared a public holiday, and the government announced it intended to impose a fine on those who didn’t show up to vote. The panic led to the government decision the night of May 27 to keep the polls open an extra day, which provoked Sabahi into pulling his own election observers out of the monitoring process in protest. One furious promilitary newspaper castigated el-Sisi’s campaign managers for what it called “the biggest failure in the history of presidential elections,” calling them “arrogant and condescending toward the people.”56 The final official turnout was put at 47.7 percent of eligible voters, but the figure was contested by the Egyptian Center for Media and Public Opinion Studies, which reported that only four million voters, 7.5 percent of the electorate, had shown up at the polls the first two days.57 In the end, the turnout—even according to the official figure—was less than the 52 percent of eligible voters who had elected Morsi in 2012, but el-Sisi could still assert that the 24 million Egyptians who had voted for him was nearly twice the 13 million Morsi had obtained. El-Sisi’s inauguration speech on June 8 revealed the emergence of a new Nasser on the Nile in the making (at least in aspiration) as outlined in his vision for “a new era in the history of the Egyptian state.”58 He spoke of building “a giant economy and mega national projects” like his plan to build a second channel for the Suez Canal to double traffic and vastly increase the amount of cultivable desert land along the Nile. Again and again, he returned to the imperative necessity to restore the power of the state and its institutions, battered by three years of political turmoil. He promised that the state would take the lead in relaunching the economy with mega projects and new industries. By contrast, his vision for the political future of the country focused on ending what he asserted was the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to create “a parallel leadership” to the state, what Brinton had called “dual sovereignty” in the struggle for power between revolutionary moderates and extremists. Twice he said, “I will not allow the creation of a parallel leadership to be in conflict with the state powers and prestige.”59 He seemed to repudiate the new constitution’s commitment to Islam as the state’s religion, which had been a key demand of Salafis in return for their support of Morsi’s overthrow. Instead, he referred to the document as “the constitution of our civil state and civil government.”60 He was all for a new era based on reconciliation, but he promised no tolerance or lenience for

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“those who resort to violence,” a reference to the Brotherhood, which he already blamed for the spread of terrorist attacks. His top priorities, he said, would be eliminating terrorism and establishing security to attract tourists, foreign capital, and industrial development.

Restoration of the Old Political Order

In Tunisia, the Constituent Assembly cleared the way for the return of ancien regime politicians by rejecting the “exclusion provision” in the electoral law of May 2014. In Egypt, by contrast, the courts played that role. In mid-July, the Cairo Appeals Court overturned an earlier ban on former leaders of the National Democratic Party (NDP) from participating in elections. Even before el-Sisi’s inauguration, the way was clear to ensure the new parliament would be as pliant to the wishes of the president as it had been under Mubarak. One of the last decrees issued by Mansour before returning power to el-Sisi outlined how parliamentary elections would be conducted. Of its total 567 representatives, 420 of them had to stand as independent candidates. Only 120 deputies were to be elected on the basis of belonging to a party, amounting to just 20 percent of the total. (The president was empowered to appoint an additional twenty-seven members.) The net effect would be to greatly weaken the role of political organizations in parliament and strengthen the president’s ability to manipulate its members. Mubarak had used this tactic to reduce parliament to a mostly rubberstamp operation made even easier by ensuring the NDP remained the majority, made even larger after each election when scores of “independents” regularly rallied to its ranks. Unlike Mubarak and Sadat before him, however, el-Sisi wanted no party directly under his control. He already had the popular support of most of the secular parties vying for a place in the new parliament. He did seek a broad coalition that would unquestioningly support his policies in parliament. Moussa, head of the constitutional drafting committee, was the first to step forward to try to form such a coalition. By early August 2014, however, his would-be Alliance of the Egyptian Nation had collapsed after the Wafd Party refused to join, and Moussa resigned. In his place came a number of contenders for el-Sisi’s favors and government patronage. By fall 2015, the number of parties gearing up to bid for seats in the new parliament had surpassed one hundred, grouped within nine main coalitions. Only two—Nidaa Misr (Call of Egypt) and the Egyptian Popular Current of Hamdeen Sabahi—could be said to stand in real opposition to military rule. The main alliance of ten parties overtly backing el-Sisi called itself For the Love of Egypt and was led by a former

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army officer, Sameh Seif el-Yazal, who had served in its general intelligence service. The main financial backer was billionaire Naguib Sawiris, the Christian Copt tycoon who had founded the Free Egyptians Party in 2011 shortly after Mubarak’s fall and supported the Tamarod movement that had helped depose Morsi. Another alliance of politicians from the ancien regime had rallied around the Egyptian Front Coalition, one of whose cofounders had been Ahmed Shafik, the losing candidate to Morsi in the 2012 presidential election. It was hard to disagree with an Egyptian analyst who had concluded five months before the elections that former NDP figures were on track to make a strong showing at the polls.61

Restoration of the Mubaraks and Cronies

The fallen pharaoh had been the first and only Arab leader ever to stand trial for his alleged crimes in person. But Mubarak was mostly absolved in November 2014, though he still remained confined to Maadi Military Hospital outside Cairo as of December 2015, awaiting retrial. The principal charge against him had been conspiring in the death of protesters during the 2011 uprising. He had been initially found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in June 2012. But the court had found no evidence he had actually ordered police to open fire on the crowds and instead convicted him of “accessory to murder” on the basis that he had done nothing to stop the shootings. Appeals and retrials on this and other charges followed over the next three years with no prison sentence longer than four years. In June 2015, a court accepted an appeal to put Mubarak back on trial in November for his alleged complicity in the death of protesters during the 2011 uprising. Clearly there was little political or judicial will to see him executed and none to see him set free even after the military had returned to power. Mubarak’s sons, Gamal and Alaa, were slightly more fortunate. They, too, underwent an unending process of trials, appeals, acquittals, and retrials, but in their cases, just on charges of corruption or embezzlement. Freed from prison for a second time in October 2015, they still faced trial on charges of illegal insider trading. What remained unexplained for years was how the Mubarak family and nine of their business associates had collectively managed to stash away $700 million in Swiss banks that had been frozen at the Egyptian government’s request in 2011. Swiss authorities claimed $348 million of the total had been traced to Mubarak’s sons, but never disclosed how much belonged to the president himself.62 None of the funds had been returned to Egypt as of late 2015. The courts, still mostly in the hands of judges appointed under Mubarak, were just as lenient toward other senior officials and leading

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businessmen from the ancien regime.63 Habib el-Adly, his interior minister who had led the government’s bloody crackdown on the 2011 uprising, was also absolved of allegations of corruption, money laundering, and profiteering from his office. Ahmed Nazif, Mubarak’s prime minister for seven years, won all his appeals against similar charges in February 2015 after spending four years in prison. Ahmed Ezz, the steel baron and a dominant official in the NDP, had paid $14 million to the government to get out of jail in August 2014 after winning his appeal to a thirty-sevenyear prison sentence on various corruption charges. Ezz boldly tried to stand for reelection to parliament in October 2015, but the High Electoral Commission rejected his application. While stalwarts of the ancien regime were being absolved one after another, secular leaders of the 2011 uprising were being rounded up, tried, and sentenced, often to many years in jail. The el-Sisi government was just as determined to eliminate the challenge from the street by secularists as from the Muslim Brotherhood. Added to the antiprotest law of November 2013 was a decree issued in February 2015 that was far more draconian. It redefined the term terrorist group to include organizations threatening public order “by any means.” Public order was just one of many institutions and sectors to be safeguarded from disruption and violence. Others included the security forces and undefined state interests as well as the environment, antiquities, communications, transportation, and local and international agencies. Any group seeking to “disrupt the constitution, or law or harm national unity” would also qualify as a terrorist one.64 By early 2015, many of the uprisings’ leading figures had already been arrested, tried, and jailed for challenging the antiprotest law or allegedly resorting to violence. Among them were the well-known blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah, sentenced to five years in jail; Ahmed Maher, a leader of the April 6 Youth Movement, serving a three-year term; and Ahmed Douma, condemned to life in prison at his trial in February 2015. (The same court also handed down life sentences to 229 other protesters in absentia).65 In September, el-Sisi issued a rare pardon, freeing 100 prisoners on the occasion of the Muslim festival Eid al-Adha. Among them were two Al Jazeera reporters and twenty-one women who had been sentenced in October 2014 for violating the antiprotest law. Still, thousands of other activists remained in prison. Unlike in Tunisia, the Egyptian revolution’s version of the restoration featured a determined effort to extirpate all vestiges of the previous stages and revolutionaries, Islamists and secularists alike. El-Sisi made extensive use of “revolutionary legitimacy” to come to power and now appeared bent on extinguishing the concept and its associated tactics from Egyptian politics. Also unlike the Tunisian revolution, there was little sign of an amalgamation of the old and new political elite merging together in a hybrid new-

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old regime. Brinton had also foreseen this possibility. “The further the [Thermidorian] reaction moves to the Right, the wider its definition of revolutionists to be duly restrained,” he wrote, adding, “The Thermidoreans themselves are by no means unwilling to apply terroristic methods.”66 So it was in Egypt.

Notes 1. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 218. 2. Jeffery Fleishman, “Egypt’s VP Mohamed ElBaradei Resigns in Protest Against Crackdown,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2013. 3. “Excerpts from General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Speech,” Egypt Independent, July 24, 2013. 4. David Barnett, “Ansar Jerusalem Claims Credit for Assassination Attempt on Egypt’s Interior Minister,” Long War Journal, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, September 9, 2013. 5. Barnett, “Ansar Jerusalem Claims Credit.” 6. “Brotherhood Behind ‘Terrorist’ Attacks: Egypt Interior Minister,” English alAhram, November 23, 2013. 7. “Interview with Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (Part II),” Egypt Independent, October 10, 2013. 8. “Islamic Jihad Founder: Brotherhood Has Been Funding Ansar Bayt alMaqdis,” Egypt Independent, September 9, 2013. 9. El-Sayed Gamel el-Din, “Egypt Seizes More Brotherhood Funds,” Al-Ahram Online, May 12, 2014. 10. Michele Dunne and Scott Williamson, “Egypt’s Unprecedented Instability by the Numbers,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 24, 2014. 11. The Arab Republic of Egypt Draft Constitution 2013, English translation by Atlantic Council, December 6, 2013. 12. Egypt Draft Constitution. 13. Marian Rizk and Osman el Sharnoubi, “Egypt’s Constitution 2013 vs. 2012: A Comparison,” English al-Ahram, December 12, 2013. 14. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 152. 15. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 194. 16. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 192. 17. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 189. 18. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 161. 19. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 159. 20. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 154. 21. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 146. 22. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 136. 23. Ashraf el-Araby, “An Insider’s Perspective on Egypt’s Economy,” speech at the Middle East Institute, Washington, DC, April 10, 2014. 24. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 64. 25. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 3. 26. Egypt Draft Constitution, Article 73. 27. Egypt Draft Constitution. 28. Egypt Draft Constitution.

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29. Salma Shukrallah, “Egypt’s Constitution: Who’s Backing It and Why,” English al-Ahram, January 9, 2014. 30. “Egyptian Social Democratic Party Will Vote ‘Yes’ in Constitution Referendum,” English al-Ahram, December 22, 2013. 31. “Egyptian Social Democratic Party Will Vote ‘Yes.’” 32. David D. Kirkpatrick,“Clashes Kill 49 Egyptians on Uprising’s Anniversary,” New York Times, January 25, 2014. 33. Tom Perry, “Egyptian Liberal Finds Enemies on All Sides,” Reuters, January 26, 2014. 34. Emad Shahin, “Statement to My Students, Family and Friends,” January 23, 2014, accessed July 19, 2016, http://emadshahin.com/?page_id=1043. 35. Sonia Farid, “April 6: Egypt’s Latest Outlawed Group,” Al-Arabiya News, May 8, 2014. 36. “Egypt’s SCAF Empowers Field Marshal el-Sisi to Run for President,” English al-Ahram, January 27, 2014. 37. “Sisi Reaffirms Independence of Military; Citizens Petition for His Rule in Port Said, Red Sea, Daqahliya,” Al-Masry Al-Youm, March 1, 2013. 38. “Transcript: Egypt’s Army Statement,” Al Jazeera English, July 3, 2013. 39. “General al-Sisi Discusses His ‘Prophecies’ in Latest Leaked Recording,” Middle East Monitor, Feburary 5, 2014. 40. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Egypt’s Ruler Eyes Riskier Role: The Presidency,” New York Times, January 28, 2014. 41. Author’s interview with an Egyptian military official, Washington, DC, September 2013. 42. Brigadier General Abdelfattah Said El-Sisi, “Democracy in the Middle East,” US Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, March 2006, Judicial Watch, accessed July 19, 2016, http://judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1878_ool.pdf. 43. El-Sisi, “Democracy in the Middle East,” 5. 44. El-Sisi, “Democracy in the Middle East,” 6. 45. Al-Masry Al-Youm, “Interview with Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi (Part 1),” English translation in Egypt Independent, October 9, 2013. 46. Al-Sisi interview (Part 1). 47. Al-Masry al-Youm, “Interview with Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (Part 2),” English translation in Egypt Independent, October 10, 2013. 48. “Transcript: Egypt’s Army Statement.” 49. “Profile: Egypt Armed Forces Chief Abdul Fattah al-Sisi,” BBC News Middle East, July 2, 2013. 50. Liam Stack, “It’s ‘Sisi-Mania,’ as Nationalist Fervor Sweeps Through Egypt,” Lede Blog, New York Times, October 25, 2013. 51. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Egyptian Liberals Embrace the Military, Brooking No Dissent,” New York Times, July 15, 2013. 52. Salma Shukrallah, “Exclusive Hamdeen Sabahi Interview: The Army Should Not Be Burdened by Politics,” English al-Ahram, March 29, 2014. 53. Shukrallah, “Exclusive Hamdeen Sabahi Interview.” 54. Richard Wike, “Key Takeaways from Our Egyptian Survey,” Pew Research Center, May 22, 2014. 55. Hamza Hendawi and Maggie Michael, “Egypt: El-Sisi Wins Election by a Landslide,” Associated Press, May 29, 2014. 56. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Turnout Rises in Egypt, but the Vote Raises Doubts,” New York Times, May 29, 2014. 57. “Only 7.5% of Egyptians Voted During Initial Two Days: Takamol Masr Center,” Egypt Independent, May 28, 2014. 58. “Text of Egyptian Leader’s Speech on Inauguration Day in Qubbah Palace,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring, June 10, 2014.

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59. “Egyptian Leader’s Speech.” 60. “Egyptian Leader’s Speech.” 61. See Gamal Essam el-Din, “Former NDP Figures Prepare for Strong Showing in Egypt’s Parliamentary Polls,” English al-Ahram, October 26, 2014. 62. Jeanine Wurz, “Egyptian Assets in Swiss Banks at $700 million,” Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s Office, July 26, 2012, accessed November 19, 2014, http://www.swissinfo .ch/eng/egyptian-assets-in-swiss-banks-at—700-million-/33186582. 63. For a list of allegations, trials, and outcomes of former officials, see “Egypt Trials: Mubarak Officials’ Charges and Verdicts,” BBC News Middle East, February 24, 2015. 64. Sarah El Deeb, “Egyptian President Issues New Anti-Terrorism Law,” Associated Press, February 24, 2015. 65. David D. Kirkpatrick and Merna Thomas,“Egyptian Protest Leader to Be Jailed Five Years,” New York Times, February 24, 2015. 66. Brinton, Anatomy of a Revolution, 221.

Part 4 Paradoxes and Challenges

11 Counterrevolution from Abroad

The Arab uprisings of 2011 triggered bloody civil wars and provoked foreign intervention by various nations. Among the prime intervening forces were the Arab monarchies, which had survived the turmoil intact but felt under threat. Revolutions often beget counterrevolutions as an integral part of the revolutionary process, and foreign involvement has been common as witnessed in the histories of the English, French, and Russian revolutions and many others since. In the first two cases, foreign powers even helped restore embattled European monarchies. By contrast, monarchs were not the primary targets of the Arab Spring uprisings, and they did not always promote counterrevolutions as one might have anticipated. There were many different reactions to the uprisings. The tiny emirate of Qatar supported all of them wholeheartedly. In Morocco, wily King Mohammed VI chose to ride out, rather than suppress, the revolutionary wave threatening his rule. He adopted a new constitution and permitted an Islamic opposition party that won the next elections to take charge of the government and was still in power in early 2016. On the other hand, three of the Gulf monarchies actively assisted rebel forces seeking to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria. All six Arab Gulf monarchies worked together to force President Ali Abdullah Saleh to yield power in Yemen. It was also true that when any of the eight Arab monarchies was perceived to be in serious trouble, the others came running to the rescue. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) grouping six of the eight—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain— poured billions of dollars into bolstering the two monarchies of Morocco 209

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and Jordan, against the winds of change blowing across the region. The GCC even invited these two monarchies to join their group, despite their geographical distance from the Gulf. Later they granted Morocco and Jordan $2.5 billion each in economic and financial assistance. At the same time, the GCC committed to providing the two least wealthy of their members, Oman and Bahrain, $1 billion annually for ten years. In Bahrain, three GCC members sent troops to help put down a Shiite rebellion against the ruling Sunni dynasty.

The Saudi Role in the Counterrevolution

There can be no doubt that Saudi Arabia, a 260-year-old ultraconservative monarchy, stood at the forefront of the counterrevolution despite its support for several uprisings. Its opposition started at home with the draconian suppression of the very first protest. The showdown came over plans by prodemocracy activists to hold a Day of Rage on March 11, which happened to be one month after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had been forced to resign.1 Organizers had signed up 17,000 people on a Facebook page promoting street protests. When the day came, only one protester dared show his face in Riyadh, though several hundred disaffected Shiites in Qatif managed to hold a demonstration the day before. There were multiple reasons for the Saudi success in stifling the Day of Rage. First, the government had made participation a sign of disrespect for the popular King Abdullah, then eighty-seven years old. He had returned home on February 24 from a three-month-long stay in the United States, where he had undergone a difficult back surgery. The government used his return as an occasion to organize an exceptionally warm welcome for the aging king. It also announced that it planned to spend an additional $36 billion on creating new jobs for the growing number of unemployed people, particularly among university graduates, and on financing construction of 500,000 homes for the struggling middle class. At the same time, the powerful Wahhabi religious establishment issued a fatwa, or religious decree, condemning the Day of Rage as socially divisive, Western-inspired, and above all forbidden on religious grounds. Finally, the government made clear that any Saudi who showed up to protest would be arrested immediately, and this was indeed what happened to the one hapless individual who dared demonstrate in the streets of Riyadh. A few days after the aborted Day of Rage, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sent troops to Bahrain, a small island off the Saudi eastern coast. They were determined to prevent the Shiite majority there from

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overturning the minority Sunni monarchy under King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa. Daily demonstrations had paralyzed the capital, Manama, and the more militant Shiite protesters had begun calling for the overthrow of the ruling al-Khalifa dynasty. On March 14, at least 1,000 Saudi national guard troops poured across the sixteen-mile causeway linking Saudi Arabia to Bahrain to take up positions around key facilities, including the royal palace. The UAE sent 500 policemen and Kuwait sent several patrol boats to guard the coast from infiltrators coming from Iran, who were suspected of promoting the uprising of their Shiite brethren on the island. These reinforcements freed up the Bahraini police to concentrate on driving demonstrators out of Pearl Square, the epicenter of the uprising in downtown Manama. They also destroyed the 300-foot pearl monument standing in the middle of the square that had become the symbol of the Shiite revolt.

The Saudi Role in Promoting Revolutions

The Saudis followed a totally different approach toward the uprisings in Libya and Syria. The very same month they were busy suppressing protests at home and in Bahrain, they were masterminding a campaign to gain Arab and international support for the overthrow of Qaddafi. King Abdullah had a personal score to settle with the Libyan leader. Qaddafi had fomented a plot to assassinate Abdullah in 2003, when he was still crown prince, blaming Abdullah for the Saudi decision to support the US invasion of Iraq that year.2 The two leaders had then engaged in a personal confrontation at the 2009 Arab League summit in Lebanon, where Qaddafi publicly insulted Abdullah, blurting out, “You are propelled by fibs toward the grave and you were made by Britain and protected by the US.”3 In fact, Qaddafi had managed to alienate all the Arab monarchs, who were thus predisposed to see him fall when the uprising in Libya broke out in Benghazi on February 18. Within three weeks, Saudi Arabia and its GCC allies were agitating for the imposition of a no-fly zone to protect Libyan rebels fighting to topple the mercurial dictator. The GCC formally passed a resolution on March 7 calling on the UN Security Council to endorse such a measure, and four days later the Arab League backed it. On March 17, the UN Security Council also approved it, and two days later a NATO operation led by French, British, and US aircraft began to impose a no-fly zone and then bomb Qaddafi’s loyalist forces. Four Arab monarchies—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Morocco—participated in Operation Unified Protector, giving NATO’s destruction of Qaddafi’s regime a patina of Arab

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approval. After seven months of fighting, Qaddafi was captured on October 20 and immediately put to death by the rebels, finally bringing his forty-two-year-long dictatorship to an end. King Abdullah similarly exploited the uprising in Syria to try to right the regional balance of power with Iran in his kingdom’s favor as well as settle personal scores with President Bashar al-Assad. The Saudi king had other reasons of a realpolitik nature for his attitude: the uprising there had turned Syria into the flashpoint of the regional struggle for power between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. Syria was ruled by al-Assad’s minority Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot, and it had long looked to Iran for political and financial backing. For years the two countries had worked in concert to dominate politics in Lebanon through the Shiite Hezbollah Party and its powerful militia. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, supported the anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian opposition led by Lebanese Sunni and Christians. Both groups held al-Assad responsible for the assassination of Sunni Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in a massive truck bomb explosion in 2005. The Saudi-Syrian rivalry had grown worse, and far more personal, after al-Assad publicly denounced all Sunni Arab leaders who had not supported Hamas during the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2006, calling them “half-men.” So it was that Saudi Arabia came out in support of prodemocracy rebels after they rose up against al-Assad in March 2011. In August, Abdullah issued a statement condemning the Syrian government’s bloody crackdown on peaceful demonstrations as “unacceptable to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” and appealing to al-Assad “to stop the killing machine and bloodshed.”4 In February 2012, Abdullah declared all further efforts to engage al-Assad in negotiations “futile” after Russia vetoed a UN resolution critical of the Syrian leader.5 The Saudi king began pushing for Arab and Western nations to provide arms to opposition groups. Saudi Arabia and Qatar took the lead in clandestinely funneling arms and lobbying the US government to send antitank and antiaircraft missiles. This was what the Ronald Reagan administration had done to help rebels defeat Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. But President Barack Obama steadfastly refused to authorize similar weapons for the Syrian rebels and even opposed other Arab or Western countries sending them, at least until 2015 when Saudi Arabia begun sending US-made antitank missiles to some of the rebel groups. However, US policy was generally viewed by the Saudis as incomprehensible because providing only limited, mostly nonlethal support to the rebels during the first three years of their struggle was helping al-Assad survive indirectly. Still, the Saudis did not oppose Obama’s efforts to obtain a negotiated political settlement in several rounds of UN-sponsored

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negotiations held in Geneva in June 2012 and early 2014 between the Syrian government and the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. After all, GCC-led negotiations had worked to end the Yemeni uprising in November 2011 by convincing President Ali Saleh to resign and hand over power to his vice president. As of late 2016, however, all UN and other attempts to reach a similar peaceful negotiated solution to the Syrian conflict had proven futile.

The Saudi Role in Tunisia

While Saudi Arabia supported the uprisings in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, it stood squarely in opposition to those in Tunisia and Egypt. When Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled his country in January 2011, he had gone directly to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he was allowed to reside in exile once it became clear he could not return. But he was barred from using the kingdom as a base for organizing an opposition to the new Tunisian government. This was the same restriction the Saudis had imposed on Ugandan dictator Idi Amin when he was deposed in 1979 and fled to Saudi Arabia. Amin never again engaged in politics and gave no interviews throughout the twenty-four years he lived in Jeddah before his death in 2003. As of late 2016, Ben Ali has also not issued any statement or given any interview. At the same time, the Saudis rejected any attempt by the new Tunisian government to have him extradited to stand trial back home. Other than harboring Ben Ali, however, Saudi Arabia never sought to promote opposition to the new rulers of Tunisia. Neither did it offer any assistance. The Saudis regarded Ennahda as a fellow traveler, if not a formal branch, of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had helped the Egyptian military overthrow Mubarak, a close Saudi ally. The main Saudi “intervention” in Tunisia, according to Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi, came in the form of Wahhabi preachers sent there to spread the kingdom’s ultraconservative Salafi message. “They got rid of moderate Islam [in Tunisia] in favor of extreme Islam,” Ghannouchi complained.6 In June 2013, the Ennahda-led government banned eight Saudi clerics from entering the country, while thirty Sunni associations banded together to launch a campaign to combat Saudi religious influence. Qatar, though sympathetic to Ennahda, did not invest much to help it succeed, either. Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite station had played a crucial role in disseminating information about the 2011 uprising inside Tunisia and abroad. The Qatari government offered a $1 billion loan in April 2012, but took until November the following year before dispersing even half of it.

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The Saudi Role in Egypt

By contrast, the Saudi reaction to the uprising in Egypt was one of considerable angst and open opposition. President Hosni Mubarak had been a close personal friend of King Abdullah. The two leaders had consulted frequently to align their policies on various issues, including ways to counter US President George W. Bush’s aggressive democracy promotion in the Middle East. Abdullah viewed President Obama’s pressure on Mubarak to give up power not only as US ingratitude toward a longtime ally but as foreshadowing the administration’s likely response if the House of Saud found itself challenged in a similar manner. Abdullah called Obama on January 29, only five days after the onset of the uprising, to appeal to him not to “cast aside and humiliate” the Egyptian leader.7 Obama did just that three days later, demanding the start of an orderly transfer of power that “must begin now.”8 On the eve of Mubarak’s removal by the military, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal declared the kingdom “astonished” and “shocked” by the blatant US interference in Egypt’s internal affairs with the intent of “pre-empting the will of the Egyptian people.”9 Many Egyptians assumed Mubarak would seek exile in Saudi Arabia, just as Ben Ali had. However, the proud Egyptian leader refused to leave Egypt and instead went to his vacation home in Sharm el-Sheikh on the Red Sea. The Egyptian revolution caused endless headaches for Saudi Arabia. Saudi-owned companies became prime targets for labor and other disputes mostly over former state-run enterprises that had been privatized under Mubarak and sold off at prices below market value. Under pressure from angry workers, seven such enterprises were renationalized by court order, and two of them were Saudi: Nubaseed and the Tanta Flax Company. The Saudi billionaire Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal was forced to give back 75,000 acres of agricultural land his Kingdom Holding Company had purchased in 1998. The Saudi government faced just as many difficulties. In September 2011, protesters attacked the Saudi embassy in Cairo over the alleged mistreatment of Egyptian pilgrims in Mecca by Saudi authorities. In April 2012, the Saudi embassy closed its doors for several weeks after activists shouting “Down with al-Saud” demonstrated outside it. This time, they had been aroused by the Saudi arrest of a human rights lawyer suspected of drug smuggling. The Saudi government remained mute when Mubarak first went on trial in August 2012, but it did feel obliged to deny accusations that some of its promised $3.7 billion aid to the interim military government was contingent on the outcome of this trial.10 Still, Saudi aid was noticeably slow to materialize, and Egyptian officials, even under the first stint of military rule, publicly complained about it. Not until just before the May

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2012 presidential elections was the first $1 billion tranche deposited in Egypt’s central bank in support of the country’s rapidly depleting foreign reserves.11

Saudi Opposition to Brotherhood Rule

With the advent to power of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt in June 2012, Saudi Arabia became the foremost foreign backer of the Egyptian counterrevolution. The Saudi attitude was dictated mainly by a long-standing animosity toward this Islamic group. The kingdom had taken in thousands of its members fleeing Egypt after an attempt by the Brotherhood to assassinate Gamal Abdul Nasser in 1954. The Brotherhood members living in the kingdom had not been allowed to engage in politics. But they had succeeded in spreading the doctrine of political activism. This mission had been greatly facilitated by massive Saudi support for the mujahidin fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. Later, however, the Saudis blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for creating a new generation of highly politicized “neo-Wahhabis.” These religious activists had risen up to challenge Saudi authority inside the kingdom in the mid-1990s and given rise to extremists like Osama bin Laden, the Saudi founder of al-Qaeda. Saudi interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz had declared in 2002 that “all our problems come from the Muslim Brotherhood” and accused its followers of inflicting “great damage” on the kingdom.12 Making matters worse, the Brotherhood had come out in support of Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1990–1991. This bitter legacy explains why the Saudis viewed with extreme suspicion, even apprehension, the Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt. Still, they invited Morsi to come meet King Abdullah in an attempt at reconciliation. In fact, Morsi’s first trip abroad was to Saudi Arabia. It came just eleven days after his inauguration, during which he had promised not to “export revolution.”13 Reconciliation never came about. Morsi’s foreign policy immediately reinforced the Saudis’ worst fears. Practically his first initiative was an opening to Iran. In late August 2012, he traveled to Tehran, ostensibly to attend a conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, of which Egypt had been a cofounder in 1961. Morsi was nonetheless making history: no Egyptian leader had visited Tehran since Iran’s break in diplomatic relations in 1980 over President Anwar Sadat’s warm welcome to the fleeing shah. During the Tehran conference, Morsi proposed that Egypt and Iran work together with Turkey and Saudi Arabia to find a settlement to the

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Syrian civil war. Morsi offered to restore diplomatic relations if Iran would end its support for al-Assad. The four-party mediation proposal never got off the ground, partly because Saudi Arabia systematically boycotted all meetings to advance it. The next step in Morsi’s rapprochement with Iran saw President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited to visit Cairo in February 2013 for a red-carpet, three-day state visit. Aware of its implications, Morsi’s foreign minister, Mohamed Amr Kamel, declared that “Egypt’s relationship with Iran will never come at the expense of Gulf nations.”14 This seemed to the Saudis exactly what was happening. Ahmadinejad’s visit led to the resumption of air flights between Cairo and Tehran and then the arrival of Iranian tourists for the first time in decades. However, the public opposition to Shiite visitors was so strong, particularly among Salafi preachers, that the government had to suspend the program almost immediately. In the end, Morsi’s attempt to open lines to Tehran came to naught. He tried to reverse course and take a stand against Iran’s Syrian ally. Just two weeks before his removal, Morsi announced that Egypt was severing diplomatic ties with Syria, and he called on Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, who had gone to help prop up the al-Assad regime at Iran’s request, to return home. In this instance, Morsi had had to yield to pressure from his own Muslim Brotherhood demanding a show of support for Syria’s rebels, particularly the Brotherhood members among them.

Emirates Opposition to Brotherhood Rule

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) shared Saudi antipathy toward the Muslim Brotherhood. Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim, spoke out as soon as Morsi had been installed in office, warning of an “international plot against Gulf states in particular and Arab countries in general.” The Brotherhood, he said, had to realize that the Gulf Arab monarchies were a “red line not only for Iran but also for the Brothers as well.”15 In September 2012, the UAE arrested sixty members of Islah, the local Brotherhood affiliate, claiming they had formed a secret society with a military wing and were seeking the government’s overthrow. Over the next few months, UAE authorities also broke up a cell of eleven Egyptians they alleged were holding clandestine meetings, collecting money for the Brotherhood in Egypt, and stealing state secrets. By the end of that year, relations between the UAE and Morsi had become severely strained, and not just over the Brotherhood’s activities there; the Egyptian presidential candidate, Ahmed Shafik, whom Morsi had narrowly defeated, was living in exile in Dubai to avoid arrest on corruption charges. This had led to the Brotherhood in

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Cairo accusing Shafik of using Dubai as a base for promoting a “conspiracy” against the Morsi government.16 The UAE-Brotherhood animosity continued long after Morsi’s removal. In January 2014, a UAE court sentenced twenty Egyptians and ten UAE citizens to five years in prison for stealing information from the country’s security services and secretly establishing a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. By then, the UAE government had outlawed the organization altogether and seized all its properties and assets.

Monarchs at Constant Odds

The reasons for the lack of unity among the Arab Gulf monarchs were multiple. First, relations among them were exceedingly complicated due to a combination of personal rivalries, fear of Saudi hegemony, and competition for international stature. Second, some sought reconciliation rather than confrontation with Iran. Only Bahrain and the UAE followed Saudi Arabia’s hard-line stand. These three monarchies joined together to provide the bulk of Arab air and land forces sent to Yemen in March 2015 to fight Iranian-backed Houthis. All three saw the conflict as one aimed at standing up to Iran’s machinations to establish its hegemony over the Gulf and Levant. Even so, they took different attitudes toward the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni bulwark in the Sunni-Shiite regional struggle. Bahrain needed the support of its local branch against the Shiite uprising, and Saudi Arabia sought that of the Yemeni Brotherhood in its war against the Houthis. Other Gulf Arab monarchs exhibited a notably different attitude toward Iran as they had toward the uprisings. The ruler of Oman, Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said, had handled scattered prodemocracy protests adroitly and never flinched from maintaining good relations with Tehran. Qaboos and his father, Said bin Taimur, owed Iran a debt of gratitude for sending thousands of troops to help put down the fourteen-year-long Dhofar rebellion in western Oman. Nor did Oman have any sectarian stake in the Sunni-Shiite conflict; the vast majority of its citizens belonged to another Muslim sect espousing Ibadism. Kuwait also didn’t share the Saudi zest for confronting Iran or suppressing prodemocracy activists. The Al-Sabah ruling dynasty had dealt with a rebellious elected parliament for decades and won the support of Shiite deputies on numerous occasions. It saw no benefit from antagonizing Iran more than it already was by hosting US troops. The disarray among Gulf monarchies was most pronounced when it came to the Muslim Brotherhood. In March 2014, Saudi Arabia declared it a “terrorist organization,” in support of the Egyptian military’s campaign

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to crush it. The UAE followed suit that November. Bahrain, however, drew a distinction between the international Muslim Brotherhood and its local branch. The latter remained free to carry on its activities and even participated in the November 2014 parliamentary elections there. Still, Bahrain had bowed to pressure from its Saudi protectors and joined Saudi Arabia and the UAE that March in withdrawing ambassadors from Qatar to show displeasure with its support of the Muslim Brotherhood. Two other GCC members, Oman and Kuwait, did not withdraw their envoys and refused to label the Brotherhood a terrorist group. Qatar distinguished itself again and again as the odd monarchy out with its enthusiastic embrace of the Arab uprisings and the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt. This policy brought it into direct conflict with Saudi Arabia. A tiny emirate with only 250,000 nationals, Qatar is geographically an appendage of Saudi Arabia and shares the same Wahhabi religion. Politically, however, the two ruling families, the al-Saud in Saudi Arabia and the Al Thanis in Qatar, were far apart. Holding the world’s third largest natural gas reserves and ranked by Forbes the world’s richest country,17 Qatar had the financial wherewithal to compete with its big brother next door. Moreover, its ambitious rulers had long sought to carve out a place for themselves on the international landscape, winning the bids to become host for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. They had also offended some Arab governments by offering various dissident Arab Islamists refuge from their own governments, such as Shaikh Yusuf alQaradawi, the outspoken Egyptian-born Muslim Brother, preacher, and popular media figure. He had used his weekly program on Al Jazeera for years to criticize the un-Islamic behavior of various Arab rulers, including Mubarak and the al-Saud. After Morsi took office in June 2012, the Qatari ruler at the time, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, made no attempt to hide his sympathies for the Brotherhood’s victory. He went to Cairo that August to personally congratulate Morsi. Then he returned to see Morsi in October after becoming the first Arab leader to visit the isolated Gaza Strip and show support for the Brotherhood-affiliated Hamas, ruling there since 2007. The emir pledged an initial $2 billion to bolster the Morsi government and the country’s falling foreign reserves. And there was a lot more to come. During Morsi’s one year in office, Qatar extended a total of $8 billion in lowinterest loans, grants, and bank deposits while offering an additional $18 billion in investments in various tourism and industrial projects. Qatari financial aid made it possible for Morsi to avoid making cuts in subsidies for gasoline, cooking gas, and bread that would have been highly unpopular even among his supporters, although they were a requirement of the International Monetary Fund for a proposed $4.8 billion loan. But Qatar’s

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billions could not save Morsi from the groundswell of discontent among Egyptian secularists to Islamic rule.

The Arab Gulf States Act to Oust Morsi

Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE were the primary foreign backers of the Tamarod campaign to bring down Morsi.18 Their involvement was later confirmed when a Turkish TV station aired intercepts of phone conversations between several senior Egyptian military officers and a UAE official in which UAE financial support for the campaign had been specifically discussed.19 In any case, strong circumstantial evidence at the time pointed to both Gulf monarchies having assured General el-Sisi that they would replace Qatar’s financial aid and that they had been told precisely when the general planned to execute his coup. The same night the Supreme Military Council deposed Morsi, King Abdullah sent a ringing endorsement. “We strongly shake hands with the men of all the armed forces, represented by General Abdul-Fatah el-Sisi, who managed to save Egypt at this critical moment from a dark tunnel. God only could apprehend its dimensions and repercussions.”20 UAE Foreign Minister Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan sent a similar congratulatory message that night. Within just six days of the coup, Saudi Arabia had announced $5 billion in loans, grants, and oil and gas supplies, and the UAE had pledged another $3 billion, together equaling the same amount Qatar had pledged to the Morsi government. At the same time, Kuwait added another $4 billion in bank deposits, loans, and oil and gas deliveries. By March 2015, according to a UAE minister, the total from these three Gulf Arab countries had reached $23 billion in grants, oil shipments, and deposits in Egypt’s central bank.

The US Role in Morsi’s Downfall

The Muslim Brotherhood also accused the Obama administration of supporting the counterrevolution against Morsi.21 However, no convincing evidence has come to light confirming that allegation. Rather, the available evidence about US maneuverings just before and after the military’s coup leads to the opposite conclusion. The US ambassador to Cairo at the time, Anne Patterson, had come out publicly against the Tamarod street protests. She also defended her embassy’s numerous contacts with Muslim Brotherhood leaders, a stand the secularists interpreted as US backing of their rule. El-Sisi disclosed that he had delayed execution of his coup for fortyeight hours at Patterson’s behest, as she was still seeking a last-minute ne-

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gotiated solution for Morsi’s peaceful departure. Later, the general lamented that Washington had opposed the military’s intervention, saying, “You turned your back on the Egyptians and they won’t forget that.”22 There was certainly little display of sympathy in Washington for the military coup but also a lot of dithering about how to react. Within hours of Morsi’s ouster, Obama issued a statement expressly emphasizing that the United States remained committed to the democratic process and to respect for the rule of law. Thus, it was “deeply concerned” by the elected president’s removal as well as by the military’s suspension of the constitution. Obama advised el-Sisi to avoid “any arbitrary arrests” of Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood members and urged him to restore “a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible.”23 On the other hand, he pointedly avoided describing the military’s action as a “coup” to sidestep a congressionally mandated cutoff of US aid to any country where the military had seized power. Nonetheless, under pressure from Congress, Obama ordered a review of the $1.5 billion program earmarked mostly for the Egyptian military and purchases of US arms. The review led to a partial and then total suspension of aid to the military despite statements by Secretary of State John Kerry suggesting the administration had reconciled itself to the coup. In early August 2013, scarcely a month after Morsi’s ouster, Kerry declared that “the military did not take over” because it had appointed a civilian government. “In effect,” he argued, “they [the military] were restoring democracy.”24 In November, while lauding the prominent role played by youth in the 2011 uprising, Kerry declared the Egyptian revolution had been “stolen by the one single-most organized entity in the state which was the Brotherhood.”25 Still, it was not until the fall of 2014 that the first batch of suspended US arms was finally released and not until July 2015 that the first eight of twelve F-16s on order were delivered.

Notes 1. For more details on the Saudi government’s campaign to suppress the planned uprising, see David B. Ottaway, “Saudi Arabia in the Shadow of the Arab Revolt,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Middle East Program, Occasional Paper Series (Summer 2011). 2. David Ensor, “Alleged Libyan Plot to Kill Saudi Ruler Investigated,” CNN, June 10, 2004. 3. Adel Darwish, “Muammar Gaddafi Accuses Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah of Lying at Arab Summit,” Telegraph, March 30, 2009. 4. “King Abdullah’s Speech on Syria,” Diplomat, September–October 2011. 5. “Saudi King Tells Medvedev Dialogue on Syria ‘Futile,’” Al-Arabiya News, February 22, 2012.

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6. Author’s interview with Rached Ghannouchi, Tunis, March 22, 2012. See also David Ottaway, “Tunisia’s Islamists Struggle to Rule,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Viewpoints No. 1, April 2012. 7. “Report: Saudis Warned Obama Not to ‘Humiliate’ Mubarak,” Fox News, February 10, 2011. 8. Mike Dorning and Julianna Goldman, “Obama Says Egypt’s Transition to New Government ‘Must Begin Now,’” Bloomberg Business, February 2, 2011. 9. Angus McDowell, “Mubarak’s Departure Deals Blow to Saudis,” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2011. 10. “Saudi Ambassador: ‘Aid Not Conditional on Mubarak Trial Outcome,’” Egypt Independent, March 1, 2012. 11. Sarah el Deeb, “Egypt Secures Financial Aid from Saudi Arabia,” Associated Press, May 10, 2012. 12. David B. Ottaway, The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker 2008), 178. 13. Ellen Knickmeyer and Matt Bradley, “Egyptian Leader’s Visit Sends Signal to Saudis,” Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2012. 14. “Iran’s Ahmadinejad on Historic Visit to Cairo,” Associated Press, February 5, 2013. 15. “Dubai Police Chief Warns of Muslim Brotherhood, Iran Threat,” Reuters, July 26, 2012. 16. Kareem Fahim and Mayy el-Sheikh, “Growing Strains for Muslim Brotherhood and Emirates,” New York Times, January 3, 2013. 17. Forbes, “The World’s Richest Countries,” accessed May 21, 2014, http://www .forbes.com/pictures/egim45egde/1-qatar. 18. See Lina Khatib and Ellen Lust, “The Transformation of Arab Activism,” Project on Middle East Democracy, May 14, 2014. 19. “New Leaks Allege UAE Involvement in Egyptian Military Fund,” Daily News Egypt, March 2, 2015. 20. “King Abdullah Congratulates New Egyptian President,” Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, Washington, DC, July 3, 2013. 21. “Muslim Brotherhood Accuses US of Supporting Egypt’s Coup,” Middle East Monitor, November 22, 2013. 22. Lally Weymouth, “Rare Interview with Egyptian Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi,” Washington Post, August 3, 2013. 23. “Statement by President Barack Obama on Egypt,” White House, July 3, 2013. 24. Matt Bradley and Saeed Shah, “Kerry Lauds Egypt Military for ‘Restoring Democracy,’” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2013. 25. Catherine Chomiak, “Kerry: Egyptian Revolution ‘Stolen’ by Muslim Brotherhood,” NBC News, November 20, 2013.

12 Postrevolution Prospects

After five years of political turmoil, the fate of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions remained uncertain. They went through strikingly similar revolutionary phases, fracturing in the same way over Islam’s role in the revolution, but ended in very different outcomes: Tunisia governed under a multiparty democracy, Egypt by a new military dictator. They were threatened from Islamic insurgencies and terrorism and even shared borders with a disintegrated Libya, which had become a permanent hothouse of Islamic extremist groups. Before attempting to answer the question of where these revolutions are headed now, I begin by examining the major events that have taken place since the ouster of the Islamic governments to understand the immediate challenges likely to influence their fate. Finally, I assess the prospects for more uprisings in these countries.

The Challenge from New Islamic Extremists

The contrasting outcome of the two revolutions has made no difference in the similarity of challenges they have faced under the rule of secularists, whether military or civilian. Both found themselves seriously threatened by a new generation of Islamic extremists determined to establish the ultimate Islamic state (a caliphate) on Arab soil and ready to impose “reigns of terror and virtue” to achieve that goal.1 This dream had started to become reality after partisans of the self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr alBaghdadi, took over Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, in June 2014. He proceeded to set up his Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant with its capital 223

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in Al-Raqqah in eastern Syria and to spread its rule across a third of that country and as much of Iraq. It immediately attracted thousands of Arab and foreign jihadis to fight for its cause, including 5,000 from Tunisia. In November 2014, militants of the Ansar Beit al-Maqdis group, who had already spread their terrorist attacks from the Sinai Peninsula to Cairo, declared their allegiance to al-Baghdadi and renamed themselves the “Sinai Province of his Islamic State. In Tunisia, one group of militant extremists that had belonged to Ansar al-Sharia did the same in May 2015. Their aim was to create political instability in which to push forward the Islamic State’s cause, initially by shaking secularist confidence in military governance in Egypt and civilian rule in Tunisia. To achieve their goal, they attacked security forces in both countries and set about undermining these countries’ economies through terrorist attacks targeting the most vulnerable sector: the tourism industry.

Tunisia Under Islamic Attack

On March 18, 2015, three Tunisian Islamic terrorists belonging to the Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade, a splinter group of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, shot and killed twenty-two European tourists visiting the Bardo National Museum in Tunis. Two of the three had received training in Derna, a center of Islamic extremist groups in eastern Libya. On June 26, a lone Islamic terrorist roamed through a beachfront hotel in Sousse, randomly shooting foreign tourists, thirty-eight of whom (mostly British) were killed; even more were injured. The latter was the worst terrorist incident in the country’s history, and the shooter was later identified as a member of Ajnad al-Khilafah, or “Soldiers of the Caliphate.” Tunisian security forces had not responded for thirty-five minutes, allowing the shooter to return to kill some of those who had been injured.2 It later turned out that despite the government’s awareness of a terrorist threat, it had provided no serious security for hotels catering to foreign tourists. Earlier, secularists had decried the inability of the Ennahda-led government to cope with terrorism, but the secularist-dominated one of Prime Minster Habib Essid had proven just as incompetent. The dire implications of the attack were spelled out by President Beji Caid Essebsi, who declared a state of emergency and warned that “the country would collapse” if another attack occurred.3 The magnitude of the security challenge was made clear when Essid disclosed before parliament on July 10 that the government had arrested 1,000 terrorists and prevented 15,000 other Tunisians from leaving the country to join external Islamic groups.4 Finance Minister Slim Chaker, on the other hand, outlined the impact the

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insurgency was having on the country’s economy. He estimated the growth rate in the GDP that had picked up to 2.3 percent the previous year would be reduced to just 0.5 percent in 2015. Extra spending on defense of $155 million would cut planned investment on economic development projects by 20 percent, and the government would not be able to fulfill its promise to add 40,000 new jobs.5 While Islamic extremists inflicted major blows on the government and economy from the outside, political instability and social unrest paralyzed it from within. Since taking office in February 2015, the Essid government has faced unending industrial and public sector strikes and constant UGTT pressure for higher salaries. Unemployment among youth stood at 35 percent, university graduates at 30 percent, and women 22 percent. Adding to the government’s woes, according to the International Monetary Fund, had been “coalition politics,” which had slowed decisionmaking on the implementation of “difficult reforms.”6 One reform in particular had opened a major postrevolution fissure in the new political elite, namely, over how to deal with resurgent elements from the ancien regime. This split was provoked by the draft of the Economic Reconciliation Law issued by the Essid government in mid-July 2015 and sent to parliament for its approval. The proposed measure touched off street protests in September 2015 reminiscent of those that had taken place during the 2011 revolution as leftist parties and civil society groups including the UGTT mobilized to block it. The declared objectives of the measure were to facilitate the process of transitional justice, accelerate badly needed private investment, and “boost trust in state institutions.”7 The intended method for achieving these goals was to offer amnesty to thousands of Tunisian businessmen accused of cronyism and economic crimes during the Ben Ali era in return for a restitution to the state of their ill-gotten assets. The proposal appeared to undermine the work of the Truth and Dignity Commission, which had been launched in June 2014 to investigate serious human rights crimes (though not specifically economic ones) committed by the state all the way back to Tunisia’s independence in 1956. Although the commission had no power to punish alleged perpetrators, it could refer them to special courts set up by a transitional justice law. As of October 2015, the commission had received 16,000 complaints (only 250 of them involving alleged financial corruption) and none had been resolved.8 The commission was in a state of internal crisis and its chief investigator had been accused of corruption by seven deputies, effectively stymying its work.9 In this atmosphere, the new economic reconciliation bill only served to remind leftist and human rights activists that the businessmen who had been involved in the corruption and cronyism surrounding the Ben Ali family had escaped trial and punishment five years later.

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As of late 2015, the fate of the economic reconciliation bill remained unresolved. But the controversy had highlighted once again how easy it was for the new democracy to produce polarization and gridlock because of the acute fragmentation of power among multiple centers—political parties, parliament, the government, presidency, the UGTT, and vibrant civil society groups. Though only a junior member of the Essid government, Ennahda had nonetheless supported the Economic Reconciliation Law in the name of peaceful coexistence between the old and new orders. The controversy had not pitted Islamists and secularists against one another again. But it had exposed a new fissure within the country’s postrevolution amalgamated ruling elite over the still festering issue of social justice regarding reemerging stalwarts from the old order.

Tunisia’s Ruling Secularist Party Fragment

Tunisia’s postrevolution secularists faced yet another highly divisive issue: the fragile unity of its largest party, Nidaa Tounes, a coalition of incompatible leftist and conservative factions whose only common goal had been defeating Ennahda at the polls. In late 2015, the party became sharply divided over who was to be anointed as the probable heir to Essebsi. The president was attempting to promote his son Hafedh as party leader, but he was fiercely opposed by a sizable faction led by the party’s secretary-general, Mohsen Marzouk, a former human rights activist. Supporters of these two contenders literally came to blows at a meeting of the party executive board. On November 9, thirty-two of Nidaa’s eighty-six deputies resigned from the party after they were unable to force a meeting of its executive body to resolve the leadership dispute. Marzouk went on to establish his own breakaway party on March 20, 2016, called the Tounes Movement Project, which gained the support of twenty-five former Nidaa Tounes deputies. Technically, this meant Nidaa was no longer the leading party in parliament, and Ennahda, holding the second largest bloc with sixty-nine seats, was in position to form a new government. As of late March 2016, this had not happened, but the bitter split within the leading secularist party did not bode well for its claims to be able to govern more effectively than the previous Islamist-led government.

Egypt Faces a Full-Scale Islamist Insurgency

Egypt faced a far worse challenge from Islamic extremism in the postrevolution period. This served to accentuate and accelerate the dictatorial ten-

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dencies of governance that had been widely anticipated under another military ruler. One study of the Islamic insurgency called it “the deadliest and more complex in Egypt’s modern history.”10 Egypt had faced a similar insurgency under Mubarak from 1986 to 1999. But the death toll among security forces in just the first two years of the el-Sisi regime reached 700 soldiers and police officers, nearly twice the number as during the past thirteen years of Mubarak’s rule.11 Attacks on army bases, drive-by killings of police officers, and assassination of judges and state officials became common events. The government’s top prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, was killed in a bomb explosion in Cairo in late June 2015. The northern Sinai Peninsula became an open battleground between partisans of the Islamic State and the Egyptian military, which launched Operation Martyr’s Right in September, focusing on the Islamic strongholds in Rafah, el-Arish, and Sheikh Zuweid, resulting in the death of more than 500 militants. A Human Rights Watch report in September 2015 calculated that 3,600 people, including civilians, soldiers, and militants, had died in the fighting there since July 2013. The destruction of property was extensive. Seeking to seal the border with the neighboring Gaza Strip, the military created a halfmile-wide, no-man’s-land buffer zone that included the evacuation of the entire 78,000 residents and demolition of 2,715 homes.12 The el-Sisi government sought to focus on the Muslim Brotherhood as the main source of the Islamic insurgency, rounding up its officials and members by the thousands and confiscating the financial and material assets of 1,345 of its members.13 According to the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, 41,000 people had been arrested or faced criminal charges by mid-2014, and the Brotherhood claimed 29,000 of them were its members.14 Among them, according to a Brotherhood delegation that visited Washington in June 2015, were between 170 and 175 Brothers who had been deputies in the 2012 People’s Assembly.15 The el-Sisi government was convinced the Brotherhood was behind a plot of twenty-six military officers who were convicted in August 2015 of plotting to overthrow the regime. Twenty were active officers, including a brigadier general and two colonels, and they were alleged to have been working with two Brotherhood senior officials, one of whom was reported to be a member of its ruling guidance bureau.16 It was becoming increasingly obvious that the most deadly attacks originated from the Sinai-based Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which had declared its affiliation with the Islamic State in November 2014.17 In Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt, numerous small groups had sprung up as well, as described in great detail in the study “Egypt’s Escalating Islamic Insurgency,” which had tracked how Islamic extremist groups had metastasized across the country since el-Sisi’s short time in office. One example it cited

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was the Revolutionary Punishment Group, which since its creation in January 2015 had claimed to have carried out 150 attacks in sixteen governorates and killed 157 security force members.18 Within the Brotherhood, disenchanted youth and even some senior officials left to set up a splinter faction in the midst of a fierce debate over whether to adopt new means of creative nonviolence or openly embrace violent tactics. Under intense pressure from the Egyptian security forces and their own radicalized youth, the badly fragmented Brotherhood leadership began making its calls to resistance sound more and more like overt approval of a resort to violence. For example, on the fourth anniversary of the January 25, 2011, uprising, Brotherhood spokesman Mohamed Montasser affirmed “the revolutionary option” was now the “correct strategic path” to face the military, although he insisted this was “a new phase in the non-violent struggle.”19 Throughout the spring and early summer of 2015, numerous reports appeared of a sharp split between radicalized Brotherhood youth ready to embrace violent tactics and the old leadership, many of whose members were in prison either condemned to life sentences or awaiting execution.20 Following the killing of thirteen Brotherhood members on July 1 in a police raid, the organization called on its members to “rise in revolt” and “destroy the castle of injustice and tyranny.”21 The Islamic State, however, mounted the most devastating of terrorist attacks during the first eighteen months of el-Sisi’s presidency. As in Tunisia, the Islamic militants took aim at the most vulnerable sector of the economy—tourism. On October 31, 2015, an explosion occurred on a Russian airliner flying from Sharm el-Sheikh to Saint Petersburg, crashing into the Sinai desert and killing all 224 tourists and crew members aboard. The choice of a Russian plane for a target ensured the maximum damage to the tourism industry as Russians had accounted for fully one-third of all 9.9 million visitors in 2014. Both the Russian and UK governments immediately suspended all flights to Egypt. The Islamic State’s Sinai Province took credit, declaring its “soldiers of the caliphate” had acted against “Russian crusaders” in retaliation for their country’s intervention in the Syrian civil war in September on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad.22 Within days, first the United Kingdom, then the United States, and finally Russia came to the conclusion that terrorists had placed a bomb aboard the plane. But not until late February 2016 did el-Sisi finally acknowledge that terrorists were responsible for the crash.23 The incident immediately halved the number of tourists in November and December 2015, causing a monthly loss in revenues of $283 million. Altogether, Egypt’s earnings from tourism declined another 15 percent that year to $6.1 billion from 9.3 million visitors. In 2010, 14.7 million tourists had visited the country and generated $12.5 billion in revenues.24

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El-Sisi’s main justification for military intervention into politics relied heavily on his claim that the military alone was capable of restoring stability and relaunching the economy debilitated by years of unending political turmoil. In May 2015 he established the Military Production Company for Engineering Projects, Consultancies and General Supplies to promote and oversee the government’s new push for economic development and a boost in its growth rate from a projected 4 percent in 2015 to 12 percent by 2030.25 An initial show of the military’s mettle was its supervision over the digging of a new forty-five-mile stretch of canal parallel to the old Suez Canal to allow a doubling of traffic and thus a hoped-for big increase in transit revenues. (Revenues, already in slight decline since February, continued to drop in September and October.)26 The project had been financed entirely by bonds worth US$8.5 billion offered only to Egyptians, and it had been completed (as el-Sisi had promised) within one year, opening on August 6, 2015. It was the first in a series of grandiose development schemes el-Sisi had unveiled at an investors’ conference that included building a new international industrial zone along the Suez Canal, a new administrative capital twenty-eight miles east of Cairo, a million new housing units, and recuperation of a million acres of new farmland from the desert. Altogether, Egypt had fifty investment projects in its ambitious 2030 development plan and was counting on billions of dollars in foreign, particularly Arab, investment. “You will find Egypt safe and secure,” el-Sisi had told the 2,500 potential investors from nearly 100 countries attending the conference, seven months before the bombing of the Russian airliner.27 Aside from battling the Islamic insurgency, el-Sisi focused almost exclusively on relaunching the economy while ignoring politics. For eighteen months, he ruled alone, issuing 175 decrees with the status of law. His notion of good governance seemed to be a country freed of competing political parties. In a meeting with some of them on May 27, he suggested that all parties unify in a single coalition for parliamentary elections scheduled for late 2015.28 The idea seemed to ignore the main rationale for elections in the first place—to allow contending political forces to compete for public space and support. El-Sisi had already crafted an electoral system with the deliberate intention of weakening parties and favoring independent candidates; three quarters of the 596 seats were reserved for the latter. In the end, 5,420 individual candidates stood for election, and the government allowed the parties to name their independent candidates as well as those on their lists. But the government also made sure it would keep control of the legislature. The strongest of seven participating party coalitions, For the Love of Egypt, quickly gained the reputation of being el-Sisi’s choice since its leader, Sameh Seif el-Yazal, had been a major

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general in the army and a military intelligence officer like el-Sisi. In addition, the main youth leader in the For the Love of Egypt coalition was Mohamed Badran, a founder of the military-backed Tamarod movement that had led the drive to oust Morsi and the creator of the Nation’s Future Party. El-Yazal openly declared that the For the Love of Egypt coalition would seek to curb the new parliament’s constitutional powers to make the presidency stronger.29 After the elections, an investigative report by the online newspaper Mada Masr exposed in great detail the extensive role played by the military’s General Intelligence Agency in engineering the entire process, including the launch of For the Love of Egypt and the creation of the Nation’s Future Party.30

The House of Representatives Elections

The outcome of the first round of elections held October 17–28 in fourteen of the country’s twenty-seven governorates confirmed expectations that the For the Love of Egypt alliance would emerge victorious. Its candidates were ancien regime businessmen, remnants of Mubarak’s defunct National Democratic Party, local notables, and declared el-Sisi supporters.31 For the Love of Egypt won all 60 seats elected on the winner-take-all party lists, and 105 of the 213 reserved for independent candidates. Among the twenty parties competing, the Free Egyptians, financed by billionaire businessman Naguib Sawiris, emerged in first place with thirty-six seats. It was followed by Nation’s Future with twenty-one individual seats, twelve of them held by representatives under twenty-five years of age. In third place had come the New Wafd Party with sixteen.32 Also among the main beneficiaries were Christian Copts and women, the former winning sixteen seats and the latter thirty-two.33 The only Islamic Party participating, the conservative Salafi al-Nour, won just eight seats. It had been allowed to run despite its clear religious base and appeal, which the new constitution prohibited in theory. The main explanation seemed to be that it had been the sole Islamic party to support the military coup against President Morsi. Other Islamic parties boycotted the elections. So had eleven secularist parties associated with the 2011 uprising. Chief among these were the Destour Party, founded by Mohamed ElBaradei and the Egyptian Popular Current led by Hamdeen Sabahi, chief rival to el-Sisi in the 2014 presidential elections. There was little indication of any potential opposition emerging even from among the 213 independent candidates elected. One analyst was able to identify just ten “new bloods,” by which he meant individuals who would likely dare challenge el-Sisi or his government.34

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Most remarked about the results of this first round, however, was the low turnout of voters, officially only 26.7 percent of the electorate and down even lower to 21.7 percent in the run-off on October 17–28. Even a personal appeal from el-Sisi failed to move Egyptians to turn out to show their interest and support. One Cairo political analyst opined that the elections announced “the death of politics” in the country, the “defeat of the revolution,” and a time for “repentance and rest” among its former activists.35 Hanaa Ebeid, editor of al-Ahram’s Democracy magazine, detected in the low participation a reflection of the new public mood that looked to el-Sisi rather than parliament to solve the country’s problems. Egypt had reached the stage where “those who support the regime are placing all their bets on the president personally, and those who oppose the regime are simply disillusioned about the political process.”36 In any case, the elections demonstrated that el-Sisi’s ability to rally Egyptians was “not high.” Ebeid predicted his fate would depend on his success or failure in dealing with the country’s pressing social and economic problems. In her assessment, even the crucial support of businessmen for el-Sisi was only conditional and dependent on whether he embraced economic policies favorable to their interests. The second round of elections in the remaining governorates took place between November 21 and December 2 and consolidated the trends already in evidence during the first one. Overall, For the Love of Egypt swept the 120 seats allocated to party lists, with the coalition’s Free Egyptians Party emerging with 65 seats, the highest of any party including party candidates running as independents. The upstart Nation’s Future Party came in second with fifty-three and the New Wafd Party with thirty-six. The Islamist alNour Party ended with only 11 seats compared to the 111 it had won in the 2011–2012 parliamentary elections. The official government turnout rate from both rounds of 28 percent (15.6 million out of 56.6 registered voters) only confirmed the pervasive lack of public interest in politics. The biggest surprise of the elections was the number of women elected: seventy-five. Together with an additional fourteen from the twenty-eight deputies el-Sisi was empowered to name, women held eighty-nine seats in the legislature, the highest ever in Egyptian history. The most unhappy with the results were Christian Copts, who managed to secure just thirty-six seats, twentyfour of them only because party lists were required to include a quota for them under the electoral law. As of early 2016, whether el-Sisi had achieved his goal of a compliant parliament composed of weak parties and subservient independents remained to be seen. It certainly seemed so at first. On January 10, it overwhelmingly approved Ali Abdel Aal as its speaker. A law professor, he was a well-known el-Sisi supporter who had helped draft the new constitution

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and three election laws. He made sure the body approved within the fifteen-day limit mandated by the constitution all but one of the 342 decree laws issued first by Interim President Adly Mansour and then el-Sisi. These included the antiterrorism decree expanding police and military powers to crack down on protesters and suspected terrorists; it has been vigorously opposed by nineteen human rights groups. The one decree that had aroused a storm of protest and been rejected by a majority of 332 deputies had involved reforms of the civil service, halting bonuses, and limiting promotions and wage increases. Still, Egypt’s new unicameral House of Representatives remained an unruly body, unpredictable in its behavior. The parties had managed to elect 237 deputies compared with the 318 independents despite el-Sisi’s best efforts to curtail the political weight of the former. The For the Love of Egypt coalition failed to transform itself into a presidential party to control parliament. Its leader, el-Yazal, tried in late December to set up a new coalition, the pro-Egyptian State, aimed at commanding the loyalty of 400 deputies, an overwhelming majority of the total 596. But first the Free Egyptians Party and then the military-engineered Nation’s Future Party broke away with Badran accusing the president of trying to “divide the parliament like a cake.”37 Almost immediately, a number of deputies spoke out against government plans to devalue the currency and cut food and energy subsidies, warning that such measures risked triggering violent food riots similar to those that had occurred in 1977. After two months in session, parliament was already the brunt of ridicule over the misbehavior of its members even in the most important government-controlled newspaper, Al-Ahram. Noting the lack of discipline, fist fights, and shoe throwing among deputies, the daily paper described the body as “a parliament of chaos.” It noted Abdel Aal’s warning that it might well be dissolved by a presidential decree.38 Even before the elections, el-Sisi had made clear his dim view of any parliament in his vision of the new political order in Egypt. He criticized what he called its “vast powers,” mandated by the new constitution to the House of Representatives, and warned that “countries cannot be managed by good intentions alone.”39 After the first round of elections, a number of newly elected pro-Sisi deputies said they intended to push for a constitutional amendment extending the president’s tenure in office to a total of ten years (two five-year terms) rather than eight (two four-year terms).40 AlYazal, leader of the For the Love of Egypt, promised to propose other amendments, stripping parliament of its power to reject the president’s choice for prime minister and right to oust a sitting government with a noconfidence vote.41 In early 2016, Egypt seemed well on its way to restoring an all-powerful president free of any serious parliamentary constraints.

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Prospects for New Revolutions

A final consideration in assessing these two Arab revolutions is whether they have run their course or we should expect to see subsequent convulsions. Certainly there is the expectation of more turmoil. Tunisian President Essebsi predicted in December 2015 that “there will be another revolution if the social and economic circumstances do not change.”42 That same month, Egyptian President el-Sisi warned restless Egyptians of the dire consequences of another uprising. “Destroyed nations cannot be rebuilt,” he intoned, promising not to stay in office against the will of the people.43 Yet even the preamble of the new constitution had heaped praise of what it called the “January 25–June 30 Revolution,” describing it as “a good omen” for the future because of the high participation rate by the country’s youth.44 Above all, el-Sisi could not deny he owed his rise to power to the June 30 revolution he had helped engineer. Certainly, there is ample precedent for repeated uprisings in the history of Western revolutions, particularly those of France as it made its painful way toward democracy over two centuries. It had taken three republics and two empires after its 1789 revolution to produce democracy. The First Republic, from 1791 to 1804, saw the destruction of the French monarchy and the advent of a military dictatorship. Then came the abortive 1848 revolution that birthed a second republic lasting only three years before Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon, took power to establish a second empire. Not until 1870, eighty-one years after the initial revolution, did France reach the semblance of a real democracy under the Third Republic. Will another revolution in Egypt end in another military dictatorship, repeating in historical context the example of Sudan? Periodic civilian uprisings there had produced brief periods of multiparty democracy but mostly military dictatorships. The Arab world of the twentieth century was filled with examples of revolutions ending in a similar outcome. Prime examples were the 1952 revolution in Egypt and the Baathist ones in Syria and Iraq in the 1960s; they all involved radical social and economic changes, but under dictatorships lasting for decades. The same was true for a good number of other twentieth-century revolutions like those in China, Russia, Cuba, Algeria, and Ethiopia. Was Tunisia destined to remain the outlier of the Arab world? Even the fate of its relatively successful revolution in producing a democratic outcome hung in the balance in early 2016. Whether led by the military or civilians, the governments in Tunisia and Egypt remained politically and economically fragile and extremely vulnerable to attacks by Islamist extremists. In Tunisia, secular parties were struggling to rule just as Ennahda had, and their core conflict with

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moderate Islamists over Islam’s role in the country was far from resolved. Though defeated in the 2014 parliamentary elections by Nidaa Tounes, Ennahda remained the country’s second largest party. After Nidaa’s split in late 2015, it regained its stature as the largest party, though showing no interest in taking over government reins again. Still, secularists and Islamists remained at odds over the Bourguiba model. The fate of Egypt seemed even more unsettled. El-Sisi’s policy of extreme repression of the Muslim Brotherhood had been extended to all secular critics of his regime. The tactic was reminiscent of that Mubarak had turned to for salvation in his last months, only to find it had helped provoke an uprising and his downfall. Would el-Sisi face the same fate, particularly if he was unable to relieve the festering economic and social problems facing the nation? Support for his regime even among secularists seemed lukewarm, as reflected in the low turnout for parliamentary elections. By early 2016, there were occasional bursts of audacious public criticism in the government-controlled press such as that by Ibrahim Eissa, a wellknown columnist and newspaper publisher. In a front-page column in late February 2016, he compared el-Sisi to his fallen Islamic predecessor, Morsi, in seeking to establish a “theocracy.” “Say what you will, Mr. President,” he wrote, “Your state violates the constitution, harasses thinkers and creators, and jails writers and authors.”45 In both Tunisia and Egypt, the economic situation was equally troubling, and reforms needed to fix it were slow in coming and highly risky. The main fiscal one, reductions in huge budget deficits, required deep cuts in energy and food subsidies. These were steps that had served as detonators of street protests in the past. Already both countries were witnessing seemingly unending protests and strikes. Democracy Index, a research project of the Cairo-based International Development Center, counted 14,270 protests throughout 2013, over 3,000 of them related to labor rights and another 1,000 to demands for wage hikes. However, 9,000 of them had been “political” in nature, many stemming from the military overthrow of Morsi that year.46 The military’s best efforts to quash protests after el-Sisi took office in June 2014 failed to end the economic and social unrest bubbling in the country. Democracy Index reported 647 demonstrations that took place in August 2014, most held by Muslim Brotherhood supporters but 35 percent related to economic or social demands.47 Tunisia experienced the same phenomenon even after the Ennahda government was replaced by secular party rule—some 5,000 protests in 2015.48 Crane Brinton had concluded that one of the most lasting changes brought about by revolution occurred in the minds of people where “the ideas born of revolution” became irrevocably imprinted. What’s more, they left behind “a tradition of successful revolt.”49 One Tunisian analyst

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made a similar observation, noting that “the revolutionary spirit has now become part of the Tunisian identity.”50 This spirit could be seen roiling the troubled political and economic waters as Tunisia and Egypt marked the fifth anniversary of their respective revolutions in January 2016. Speculation of yet another uprising was rife, and even some of the same warning signs evident in 2011 reappeared. On January 17, 2016, an unemployed Tunisian university graduate, Ridha Yahyaoui, committed suicide by climbing a telephone pole and electrocuting himself on its wires. His home town, Kasserine, was located not far from Sidi Bouzid, where another suicide had touched off the 2011 uprising. Once again Tunisians, mostly jobless youth like Yahyaoui, were shouting “Work, freedom, and dignity!” Their protest spread to other towns of the interior, including Sidi Bouzid, and finally reached the capital. Kasserine had the same hallmarks of government neglect as did Sidi Bouzid. The unemployment rate in the region was 30 percent, the country’s highest. The poverty rate was 32 percent, double the national average. One in three homes lacked drinking water.51 But the issue of youth unemployment was not confined to the interior. The national jobless rate was relatively low at 15 percent, but among youth it was nearly 38 percent and among university graduates above 30 percent.52 Even the employed were unhappy: doctors, teachers, civil servants, and police officers were all striking for higher wages. Suicides, the most dramatic sign of despair, had become common—sixty-nine in the month of September alone in 2015.53 In slow decline ever since the 2011 revolution, the Tunisian economy was in serious trouble, registering negative growth the last two quarters of 2015 and only 1 percent for the entire year. Revenues from tourism had been cut 35 percent from 2014 after terrorist attacks on two tourist sites. The fallout from the revolution had included the flight of 60,000 young Tunisians from the country, 4,000 of whom became jihadis in Syria and Iraq and another 1,000 in Libya. “Meanwhile, our political elite are preoccupied with elections, party-identity issues and divvying up the available government posts and benefits among themselves,” noted an embittered Tarek Belhadj Mohamed, a sociology professor and education specialist.54 Small wonder that over half of Tunisians believed the country was worse off than under the Ben Ali regime.55 Given the dire straits in which Tunisia found itself in early 2016, why didn’t Yahyaoui’s suicide trigger another uprising? There seemed to be multiple reasons. In the first place, protests over pay, jobs, and many other issues had become so routine that another one clearly had not provoked Tunisians to rise up en masse again. Even protest suicides had become common. The lack of interest was reflected in the inability of civil society groups to stage any major demonstration in the capital. One that did take

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place there on January 20 had been organized by the Tunisian General Students’ Union, the Union of Unemployed Graduates, and a Facebook group Mnich Msameh (“I Will Not Forgive”). Once again, protesters were marching down Avenue Bourguiba, the iconic site for protests in the capital during the 2011 uprising. But this time, only a few hundred bothered to turn out. Furthermore, none of the political parties had risen to the occasion. Probably the single most important factor, however, was the failure to engage the powerful Tunisian General Union of Labor (UGTT), which had been instrumental in the success of the earlier uprising. As it happened, the UGTT had been busy defending the interests of job holders. The day before the march, it had signed an agreement with the Tunisian Chamber of Commerce and Industry for a general increase of wages for the 1.5 million workers the federation represented in the private sector.56 By early February, protests had petered out. Essebsi and his government survived the first major attempt to spark another revolution in the name of the downtrodden. In Egypt, fears of another revolt haunted the regime of President elSisi. Activists launched a campaign on Facebook to encourage Egyptians to take to the streets on January 25, the fifth anniversary of the start of the uprising that brought down Mubarak. There were reports that 45,000 Egyptians had indicated willingness to participate.57 The previous year’s anniversary had led to the death of eighteen protesters, and the government was apparently expecting more violence. It took unprecedented steps to quash all efforts to mobilize Egyptians to take to the street. First, it shut down Free Basics, a service providing access to text-only messages on Facebook. Then in early January, the government arrested five administrators of Facebook accounts who were calling for demonstrations, accusing them of being members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sisi, who had already begun resorting to religion to bolster his authority, turned to the Ministry of Religious Endowments for more help. On January 8, the ministry ordered all mosque preachers to condemn the planned protests as a “crime” because they would incite “sabotage, murder and destruction.”58 Dar al-Ifta, the country’s supreme body for issuing religious decrees, put out a fatwa forbidding participation in the protests. Most indicative of the government’s nervousness, however, was the action of its security forces; they went to the homes and apartments of 5,000 suspected activists in downtown Cairo to warn them against taking to the streets. On January 25, the government put on a show of force, flooding the streets of Cairo and other major cities with police and security personnel ready to snuff out any sign of protest. There was hardly any: a few flash protests in downtown Cairo. Just one demonstrator paraded across Tahrir Square in a T-shirt with the words “It is Still the January Revolution” imprinted on it.59 But authorities allowed 300 pro-Sisi supporters to gather in

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the square to mark the sixty-fourth National Police Day in memory of the policemen who died defying British occupation forces in Ismailia in 1952. Nationwide, police arrested 150 demonstrators, most of whom were charged with belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood.60 El-Sisi had succeeded in preventing a new uprising, but the warnings of discontent among secularists who had helped bring him to power were multiplying. Moderate politicians like Ziad Bahaa-Eldin, a former deputy prime minister and leader of the centrist Social Democratic Party, noted a shift in public opinion against el-Sisi, urging him to adopt other tactics than “threat of repression” and “incitement and exclusion” to govern the country.61 Lawyers and journalists were up in arms over the brutal behavior of the security forces, and various parties, nongovernmental organizations and professional syndicates announced they were establishing a “Front to Defend Freedoms.”62 Activists were particularly upset by the government closure of one organization in particular, the Al-Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, which had documented hundreds of cases of “enforced disappearances.”63 Another sign of growing moderate distrust of el-Sisi came in early March 2016. Amr Moussa, chairman of the fifty-person committee that had written the new constitution, announced the creation of the Egyptian Institution to Protect the Constitution, aimed at stopping any amendment giving el-Sisi more powers or a longer time in office than eight years.64 I discussed the prospects for another uprising in early December 2015 with Amr el-Shobaki, a well-known Cairo political analyst and another of the Egyptians on the constitutional-drafting committee.65 He was also a charter member of Moussa’s group and was struggling to defend it. Like many secularists, el-Shobaki had backed el-Sisi’s ouster of Morsi and crushing the Muslim Brotherhood only to become disenchanted by his grandiose economic schemes and drive to establish not just a presidential but a “pharaonic” system. He outlined four scenarios for Egypt’s evolution over the next few years. The first assumed el-Sisi would stay in office for eight years, the maximum allowed under the constitution. The second projected the eventual rise to power from within the existing system of a civilian reformer to replace a discredited el-Sisi and military rule. The third possibility foresaw the replacement of el-Sisi by another general because the military had lost faith in his ability to govern. The fourth scenario envisaged an “implosion” of the regime sparked by intolerable economic conditions and food riots. There would be a “spontaneous outbreak” of discontent as had happened on January 25, 2011. But it, too, would probably end in another military dictatorship. Given the weakness of political parties and long-term threat to stability from Islamic terrorism, the prospect for civilian governance in Egypt did not seem promising any time soon.

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In early 2016, both Tunisia and Egypt seemed ripe for another uprising if one took account only of their perilous economic conditions and the bubbling discontent with the performance of new leaders, whether military or civilian. However, there were several offsetting circumstances working against such a happening: public fear of Islamic terrorism at home and abroad and of political chaos in neighboring Libya plus disillusionment with the bitter fruits of revolution and with revolutionaries. The most likely prospect seemed repeated outbursts of protests, such as had become common in Algeria in the wake of a decade of bloodshed fighting an Islamic insurgency, or of occasional small uprisings, such as had occurred in Tunisia in January 2016. Still, the possibility that the revolutionary tradition now ingrained in the political culture of these countries could give rise to another upheaval of 2011 proportions haunted their civilian and military leaders alike.

Notes 1. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 185–214. 2. “Tunisia Attack: Sousse Police Slow to Respond-PM Essid,” BBC, July 4, 2015. 3. Ray Sanchez, “Tunisian President Declares Emergency: New Terror Attack Would Cause ‘Collapse,’” CNN, July 4, 2015. 4. Ewan Palmert, “Tunisia: 1,000 Arrests and 15,000 Prevented from Leaving in Counter-terrorism Operations,” IBTimes, July 10, 2015. 5. “Tunisia Cuts 2015 Growth Forecast after Militant Attacks,” Reuters, July 30, 2015. 6. International Monetary Fund, “Tunisia: Staff Report for Their 2015 Article IV Consultation,” September 16, 2015. 7. Farah Samti, “In Tunisia, a New Reconciliation Law Stokes Protest and Conflict Instead,” Foreign Policy, September 15, 2015. 8. “Analysis: Amnesty for Corrupt Businessmen of the Ben Ali Era?,” Middle East Eye, October 13, 2015. 9. Chris Stephen, “Attacks by ‘Deep State’ Leave Tunisia Truth Commission in Crisis,” Guardian, September 11, 2015. 10. Moktar Awad and Mostafa Hashem, “Egypt’s Escalating Islamist Insurgency,” Carnegie Middle East Center, October 2015. 11. Awad and Hashem, “Egypt’s Escalating Islamist Insurgency,” 5. 12. “Look for Another Homeland,” Human Rights Watch, September 22, 2015. 13. “Assets of 1,345 Brotherhoods Confiscated: Justice Ministry,” Egypt Independent, December 12, 2015. 14. Joe Stock, “Egypt’s Political Prisoners,” Human Rights Watch, March 6, 2015. 15. Conversation with Amr Darragh at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, June 10, 2015. 16. Hossam Baghat, “A Coup Busted?: The Secret Military Trial of 26 Officers for Plotting ‘Regime Change’ with the Brotherhood,” Mada Masr, October 14, 2015. 17. David D. Kirkpatrick, “ISIS Ally in Egypt Emerges as Key Suspect in Russian Jet Crash,” New York Times, November 9, 2015.

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18. Awad and Hashem, “Egypt’s Escalating Islamist Insurgency,” 12–14. 19. “Muslim Brotherhood Spokesman Montasser: No Retreat from the Revolutionary Path Till Coup Defeat,’” Ikhwanweb.com, January 26, 2015. 20. For more detail, see Omar Said, “No United Front: Mixed Messages from the Muslim Brotherhood on Violence,” Mada Masr, April 8, 2015; “The Many Battles of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood,” Al Jazeera English, June 7, 2015; and “Muslim Brotherhood’s Youth Wing Reaffirms Leadership After Failed Egypt ‘Soft Coup,’” Middleeasteye.net, May 29, 2015. 21. “Egypt’s Brotherhood Calls for Uprising After Killings,” Al Jazeera English, July 2, 2015. 22. Neil MacFarquhar and Merna Thomas, “Russian Airliner Crashes in Egypt, Killing 224,” New York Times, October 31, 2015. 23. “In Extensive Speech, Sisi Lays Out Solution for Egypt’s Challenges,” Ahram Online, February 24, 2016. 24. “Updated: Egypt Tourism Receipts down 15% on Back of Security, Currency Woes,” English Ahram Online, January 19, 2016. 25. For details of the military’s growing involvement in the economy, see Marina Ottaway, “Al-Sisi’s Egypt: The Military Moves on the Economy,” Wilson Center Middle East Program, Summer 2015. 26. “Despite Expansion, Egypt’s Suez Canal Revenue Drops for 9th Consecutive Month in October,” Egypt Independent, November 19, 2015. 27. “Sisi Announces Development Plan for Egypt Through 2030,” Albawaba News, March 13, 2015. 28. Rasmi Galal, “Sisi Calls for Unifying Egypt’s Electoral Lists,” Al-Monitor, June 3, 2015. 29. Lin Noueihed, “Interview—Former Egyptian General Sees His Bloc Leading New Parliament,” Reuters, October 8, 2015. 30. Hossam Baghat, “Anatomy of an Election: How Egypt’s 2015 Parliament Was Elected to Maintain Loyalty to the President,” Mada Masr, March 14, 2016. 31. Gamal Essam el-Din, “Diehard Mubarak-era Figures Gain Ground in 2nd Stage of Egypt’s Parliamentary Polls,” English al-Ahram, November 28, 2015. 32. “Independents, For the Love of Egypt Dominate Elections Runoff,” Mada Masr, November 1, 2015. 33. Gamal Essam el-Din, “Egyptian Copts, Women Make Record Gains in 1st Stage of 2015 Parliament Elections,” English al-Ahram, October 31, 2015. 34. Author’s interview with Amr Shobaki, Cairo, December 3, 2015. 35. Hani Shukrallah, “Egypt: Revolution, Repentance and Rest,” English alAhram, October 21, 2015. 36. Dina Ezzat, “Princes over the Ballot Box,” al-Ahram Weekly, November 5, 2015. 37. “Future of a Nation Withdraws from Seif el-Yazal’s Parliamentary Coalition,” Daily News Egypt, December 21, 2015. 38. Mona el-Nahhas, “A Parliament of Chaos,” English al-Ahram, March 28, 2016. 39. “Sisi’s Constitution Remarks Spark Controversy on Possible Amendment,” Egypt Independent, September 16, 2015. 40. Gamal Essam el-Din, “Egypt’s Newly Elected MPs Vow to Amend Constitution,” English al-Ahram, November 3, 2015. 41. Noueihed, “Interview—Former Egyptian General.” 42. Karem Yehia, “After Kasserine, What Is Next for Tunisia?” English al-Ahram, January 31, 2016. 43. “Updated: President Sisi Says He Would Not Stay in Office Against the Will of Egyptians,” English al-Ahram, December 22, 2015.

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44. The Arab Republic of Egypt, Draft Constitution, December 2, 2013, unofficial translation by International IDEA, accessed July 20, 2016, http://constitutionnet.org /Egypt-drafr-constiution-dec-2013. 45. Hamza Hendawi, “Egyptian Columnist Delivers Stinging Attack Against elSisi,” Associated Press, February 21, 2016. 46. “Democracy Index Releases Report on 2013 Protests,” Daily News Egypt, May 19, 2014. 47. “Egypt: Almost One Protest per Hour in August: Democracy Index,” Aswat Masriya, September 13, 2014. 48. Maha Yahya, “Great Expectations in Tunisia,” Carnegie Middle East Center, March 2016. 49. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 261–263. 50. Tarek Belhadj Mohamed, “Youth Protests an Uncomfortable Reminder of the Revolution That Gave Politicians Power,” Tunisia Live, January 26, 2016. 51. Yahya, “Great Expectations in Tunisia.” 52. Najwa Younes, “Unemployed Group Calls for Ministers to Step Down,” Tunisia Live, February 2, 2016. 53. Yahya, “Great Expectations in Tunisia.” 54. Mohamed, “Youth Protests an Uncomfortable Reminder.” 55. Yahya, “Great Expectations in Tunisia.” 56. Zeineb Marzouk, “Tunis: Demonstrators March in Support of Kasserine Protests,” Tunisia Live, January 20, 2016. 57. Marina Ottaway and David Ottaway, “Egypt’s Durable Arab Spring: A Third Revolution Haunts President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi,” Foreign Affairs, Snapshot, January 24, 2016. 58. Declan Walsh, “Egypt’s President Turns to Religion to Bolster His Authority,” New York Times, January 9, 2016. 59. Declan Walsh, “Police Presence in Egypt Mutes Most Protests on 5th Anniversary of Uprising,” New York Times, January 25, 2016. 60. “At Least 150 People Arrested Nationwide on Jan. 25 Anniversary,” Mada Masr, January 26, 2016. 61. Ziad Bahaa Eldin, “Egypt in 2016: An Opportunity for a New Consensus or More Strife?” English al-Ahram, January 6, 2016. 62. “Parties, NGOs, and Syndicates to Form ‘Front to Defend Freedoms,’” Daily News Egypt, February 8, 2016. 63. Amina Ismail and Declan Walsh, “Hundreds Vanishing in Egypt as Crackdown Widens, Activists Say,” New York Times, January 26, 2016. 64. Zeinab el-Gundy, “Prominent Egyptian Figures Launch Institution to ‘Spread Constitutional Culture,’” English al-Ahram, March 8, 2016. 65. Author’s interview with Amr Shobaki, Cairo, December 3, 2015.

Part 5 Conclusion

13 Revolutions Compared

George Pettee and Crane Brinton published books at the same time seeking to establish criteria for various kinds of revolutions, an endeavor that continues among theorists today. Pettee was the first to coin the term “Great Revolutions,” by which he meant those in which “all of the planes on which a society is organized, economic, social, political and moral, are changed at once.”1 His primary examples were the French and Russian revolutions, which were two of the case studies in Brinton’s work as well. But Pettee was less demanding of a threshold definition of revolution than was Brinton, whose definition focused on the “drastic sudden substitution of one group in charge of the running of a territorial political entity for another group.”2 Historian Lawrence Stone, in his study of the English Revolution, began with a historiography of various theories and definitions, but he ended by stressing “a major restructuring of government or society” and “the replacement of the former elite by a new one.”3 For philosopher Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, the most important criteria was a clear sense of a new beginning and new order inculcating “the idea of freedom.”4 Finally, Jack Goldstone, after examining decades of changing definitions of revolution, distilled in his 2014 study three common denominators—mass mobilization leading to the forcible overthrow of a government, a change of institution, and “a driving ideology carrying a vision of social justice.”5 From these definitions, it seems safe to conclude there at least has to be a change in the ruling political elite and a sense of a new order in the making. The two main Arab theorists of revolution referenced in this study, Shaikh Salman al-Oadah of Saudi Arabia and Rached Ghannouchi of 243

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Tunisia, have also put forth criteria that overlap to a remarkable degree with those of the Western social scientists and historians cited here. Shaikh al-Oadah believed a revolution had to involve “the whole of society,” not just one faction or one political party. Above all, a revolution had to produce a “new regime” and a “new country” to be worthy of the title.6 Ghannouchi put more emphasis on the change in the political elite running the country and pointed to the “new class” making up the Tunisian constituent assembly as evidence that had already happened. Both thinkers were preoccupied with the issue of social justice for the poor and downtrodden, as was Arendt, who referred to “the rights of the Sans-Culottes” in her discussion of “the social question.”7 Not surprisingly, where the two Islamic thinkers differed most from Western theorists was in their emphasis on a religious dimension to the notion of revolution; they pressed for an enhanced role of Islam in society and government, as did the Muslim Brotherhood and fundamentalist Salafis in Egypt and Tunisia. They agreed with Western scholars on other criteria such as the sense of birth of a new order and new country. In Egypt, this sense prevailed initially but proved short-lived as the Muslim Brotherhood rose and fell within two years and much of the ancien regime was restored under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The Tunisian revolution, on the other hand, has resulted in a seemingly more permanently changed order; Ennahda remained a permanent part of a new political system characterized by considerable freedom and independence of political parties, the media, and civil society group.

Shades of the Great Revolutions

It remains to be discussed where in the panoply of world revolutions those of Egypt and Tunisia stand. Clearly they do not meet the criteria for ranking as “great revolutions.”8 Neither saw a radical economic or social upheaval. No landed aristocracy was stripped of its wealth. Peasants and workers were not promoted at the expense of their capitalist exploiters. In fact, the capitalist economic system already dominant in these countries remained largely untouched, though a coterie of corrupt cronies around the fallen rulers was stripped of its wealth temporarily. Neither their Islamist nor secular leaders ever advocated a goal of remaking the existing economic and social order. Overall, these two Arab revolutions had been confined to the political and moral planes, if by “moral” one understands the fierce cultural war between Islamists and secularists over Islam’s role in revolution. Nonetheless, these revolutions bear evidence of many intriguing resemblances to what Pettee and Brinton had in mind. I have argued, as does

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Dmitry Ivanov, a contemporary Russian theorist, that there are “similarities and regularities” between them and earlier revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.9 Some were superficial, such as the use of rallying cries like “Freedom, bread, and dignity” so reminiscent of the famous “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” of the French Revolution. True, there were many other chants heard in the streets of Cairo and Tunis. One study found that 400 different slogans had been used of widely varying lengths, from the single Arabic word Irhal, meaning “get out,” directed at Presidents Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to the longer one of Ash-Sha’b Yurid Isqaat il-Nizam, or “the people want to overthrow the regime.”10 Still, the three-word chants seem to have come closest to describing the social and political goals of the protesters and certainly were reminiscent of the classic one of the French Revolution. Another outward similarity was the assault on prisons. To this day, the French celebrate the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, in memory of the onset of their great revolution. Similarly, one of the first indicators that the uprising in Egypt was taking on a revolutionary dimension was the brazen storming of the Wadi El Natrun Prison. Over 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood activists, including the future Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, escaped in the breakout. The Bastille had been sacked and burned to become a symbol of the destruction of the old order in France. The equivalent landmark of the Egyptian revolution was not a prison but the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. Located on the bank of the Nile River near Tahrir Square, the towering building was ransacked and set ablaze on February 28, the same day as the attack on the Wadi El Natrun Prison. Fires seem to be another signature characteristic of revolutions. Military analyst Mark Perry has noted their role as both “the symbol of revolution and its most potent weapon.” He traced its prominence throughout history from the American and French revolutions to that in Tunisia, where a street vendor started a nationwide uprising by setting himself ablaze.11 Finally, Princeton University Professor David Bell reminds us of yet another similarity—the chaos, zigzags, and setbacks of these Arab revolutions over their first two years. He observed that the same twists and turns had distinguished the “inglorious revolutions” of America, France, Russia, and China.12 Beyond these outside similarities can be detected some substantive internal ones as well. I have referenced Brinton’s view of revolution as an organic, multistaged process in analyzing those in Tunisia and Egypt, pointing out the numerous parallels in each case. Egypt in particular seems to have already gone through all of his phases, including a Thermidorian reaction and the restoration under a Bonaparte-like national savior (at least for Egyptian secularists). Tunisia, too, had its Thermidor

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but escaped a new dictatorship thanks to some unique twists and turns that saw the military stay in its barracks, Ennahda relinquish power peacefully, and Islamists and secularists were forced to live together in a new-old political order. In some aspects, the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions seem most reminiscent of the English one of the mid-seventeenth century because of the centrality of religion. The English Revolution of 1640 to 1660 had Protestant Puritans demanding recognition of the Bible and Scriptures as the source of all authority. Those in Egypt and Tunisia had their puritans, too—fundamentalist Salafis insisting on the Quran and sharia for supreme guidance. For secularists, even the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda qualified as Islamic puritans as the two sides fought over the role of religion in an “Islamic” versus a “civil” state.

Comparisons to Contemporary Revolutions

Closer in time and location for comparison are Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 and Afghanistan’s Islamic Emirate, which existed from 1996 to 2001. The emirate of the deeply conservative Taliban movement was aborted by the US invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2011. But Iran’s Islamic revolution was still alive and well into 2016 and had overcome massive protests in 2009 by secular-minded Iranians fed up with theocratic rule. By comparison, secularists prevailed in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, limiting their similarities to those in Afghanistan and Iran. On the other hand, the religious factor was notably absent from most other contemporary revolutions like those in China, Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia or the mainly anticolonial ones in Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. Even the earlier Arab revolutions discussed in Chapter 2 were not motivated by religious zeal.

Relevance of the Brintonian Model

I have evoked Brinton’s study of four revolutions not to suggest those of Tunisia and Egypt were of the same scope but because I believe it helps put some order in the chaotic cascade of events that gripped those countries after their 2011 uprisings. I have argued that the stages of revolution he outlined were visible in those of Tunisia and Egypt, some more obvious than others. Egypt did see an initial brief honeymoon period when the army and crowds in the street were “one hand” united in overthrowing

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Mubarak. This period also saw Egyptian secularist and Islamist revolutionaries collaborating in opposing the military’s attempt to remain in power immediately after Mubarak’s departure. This brief unity was followed by a period Brinton called “dual sovereignty” as moderates and extremists—secularists and Islamists in the Arab context—fought for power, and decision-making was often outside formal state institutions. Then came the Thermidorian reaction of secularists against Islamic rule, and this led to the restoration of the ancien regime and the emergence of a military dictator. This sequence of events followed the course of the French and English revolutions, which had ended in the rise to power of Bonaparte and Cromwell. In Tunisia, where French history and culture were still deeply inculcated in the national psyche, the French Revolution was often referred to openly. However, two stages in Brinton’s schema were noticeably absent. To begin with, there had been no initial honeymoon. After Ben Ali’s flight, the uprising had continued against other political stalwarts of the old order who tried to take his place. Even the person chosen as interim prime minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, had been a charter member of the ancien regime with a political career dating back to Tunisia’s independence in 1956. Nor did the Tunisian revolution result in a military Bonaparte or Cromwell. The outcome was the opposite: a geriatric civilian ruler, though one with considerable authority among secularists. Three other stages of the Brintonian schema were apparent in the evolution of the Tunisian revolution—the power struggle between moderates and extremists (secularists and Islamists), the stage of dual sovereignty, and the Thermidorian reaction. The forms embodying extragovernmental power centers varied. The first example was the High Authority for the Realization of the Revolution’s Objectives. There followed the Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution, a network of local and regional committees that operated outside all government authority until outlawed in May 2014. The clearest example of dual sovereignty was the National Constituent Assembly. It had been mandated to draft a new constitution but was soon making all other important decisions, rather than the government. The assembly found itself deadlocked by the struggle between secularists and Islamists and surpassed in its authority to decide key constitutional and governmental issues by two towering figures, Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi and Nidaa Tounes’ founding father Essebsi. Neither was a member of the assembly or government. Ghannouchi used his status as supreme religious and political guide to impose numerous compromises on his party, demoting the role of Islam in the state and society. He also convinced his party to relinquish power to an interim government of technocrats. On his own authority, he carried out secret nego-

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tiations with Essebsi to help resolve the political deadlock in which Tunisia found itself in mid-2013. Thus it was that two unelected politicians outside the Constituent Assembly came to play decisive roles in determining the revolution’s course. Ghannouchi was obsessed with the French Revolution’s lasting legacies on Tunisian culture and values. He blamed them for the deep attachment of so many Tunisians to a secular state and laïcité, hallmarks of the “Bourguiba model.” For him, the country’s first president was a perfect example of “the fruits of the French revolution” in both the cultural and political spheres.13 Bourguiba “considered himself a Napoleon. He embodied Napoleon,” he once remarked.14 Bourguiba was also responsible for having made the militant secularism of the French Revolution the hallmark of his regime, perpetuated by Ben Ali. “We cannot achieve modern Islam without eradicating the colonial legacy [of laïcité],” Ghannouchi said to an international conference in Tunis.15 Given his strong commitment to reviving Islamic culture and values, it was all the more remarkable that Ghannouchi pushed Ennahda into dropping from the constitution any mention of the sharia or Islam as the state’s official religion. Secularists depicted Ennahda as a parallel decisionmaking body outside the control of all state institutions. But they had organized their own extragovernmental one, too, one that became an even better example of dual sovereignty. Four civil society groups led by the labor federation ended up playing an even more important role than Ghannouchi and Essebsi in leading Tunisia out of its political impasse mid-2013. This self-organized National Dialogue Quartet was the most powerful political body in the country for nearly six months because all others had become paralyzed. It organized painful negotiations between secular parties and Ennahda that eventually led to an agreement allowing the Constituent Assembly to finish its work, forcing the Ennahda-led government to resign, and ensuring parliamentary and presidential elections in 2014. The role of the labor federation in particular remains unique in the annals of the Arab Spring uprisings and indeed in those of the earlier classic Western revolutions or most other modern ones. The National Dialogue Quartet has been the only such group to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Because of its central role in the 2011 uprising and its ability to carry out a general strike, the labor federation became at once the key mediator in the national dialogue and the main counterweight to Ennahda; it gave secular parties a political clout they otherwise did not have in the Constituent Assembly or government. Similarly, there is no parallel to be found in the earlier revolutions for the role that Arab youth, particularly unemployed university graduates, played in stoking the flames of revolt and then keeping them burning.

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Why Different Outcomes in Tunisia and Egypt?

The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions clearly led to a “drastic, sudden substitution” of one ruling elite by another at some stage of the process.16 Ghannouchi cited the composition of the National Constituent Assembly (elected in 2011) as proof that a different political elite had come to power. “There is no one from the former regime. There is a total class, total elite, change,” he remarked in response to my question of whether Tunisia had undergone a real revolution.17 For him, the most extraordinary change was Ennahda’s reversal of fortunes. Its leaders and a good number of its followers had come back from prisons and exile in countries where they had lived for decades and were now part of the ruling elite. To be sure, Ennahda’s presence in the new ruling class lessened after the 2014 parliamentary and presidential elections. But it had done well enough to convince secularists that Ennahda was destined to remain a central part of Tunisia’s new political landscape and ruling elite. Ghannouchi was right on a related point: the revolution had brought about “a radical change” and a new beginning in Tunisia’s history.18 The emergence of a multiparty system and coalition governance indisputably constituted a major break from past governance of the county. If anything, Tunisia seemed to have gone too far in the opposite direction—a coalition government, dozens of political parties, a vibrant legislature, an assertive civil society, and multiple power centers. There seemed to be a consensus among all parties and institutions to maintain this system of governance, born of three years of painful negotiation and compromises. Among the most consequential of the latter had been the decision to allow ancien regime politicians to form parties and even put forth candidates for the presidency. The result was the emergence of what Brinton called a “newly amalgamated ruling class” and a “new-old regime.”19 By contrast, the Egyptian revolution ended in starkly different outcomes. The uprising there did produce a new political elite, but one that enjoyed a remarkably short life span because it never succeeded in consolidating its power. The 2012 elections saw the Muslim Brotherhood gain control of parliament and the presidency for the first time in Egypt’s history. Surely here was another example of a new beginning, but it never evolved beyond an embryonic stage after the courts dissolved the parliament and the army removed Morsi a year later. The Abdel Fattah el-Sisi government brought back the businessmen, professionals, former military men, and local elites who had constituted the old ruling class. Emblematic of its restoration was the emergence of the Free Egyptians Party, led by a billionaire businessman, as the largest party in the legislature. The only new political blood representing the youth came from the Nation’s Future

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Party, led by Mohamed Badran, just twenty-four years old in 2015. He was president of the national students’ union in 2013 and represented his peers on the constitution-drafting committee. Badran and his party were propelled to the forefront of political life by the military, and Badran was anointed by el-Sisi himself at the inauguration ceremony for the Suez Canal’s expansion in August 2015. What were the principal factors explaining the very different outcomes of the two revolutions? The single most important one was the nonpolitical role of the military in Tunisia before, during, and after the uprising. No “man on horseback” rode onto the stage.20 The Tunisian armed forces leader, Gen. Rachid Ammar, became a national hero precisely because he stayed out of politics. By contrast in Egypt, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces took over immediately from Mubarak, while its youngest member, General el-Sisi, quickly emerged as the éminence grise of the revolution. There were many other factors responsible for making Tunisia an exceptional case. Chief among them was Ennahda’s failure to win a clear majority of votes in the first post–Ben Ali elections. This had been true as well for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but the Salafists there had formed a separate party, run in the parliamentary elections, and come in second; their two parties together held 70 percent of seats in the legislature. In Tunisia, on the other hand, the Salafists had mostly rejected the democratic process and claimed no seats in the Constituent Assembly. This meant Ennahda had to find partners among secular parties to form a governing coalition, a built-in brake on Islamists’ efforts to impose an Islamic state. A third important variable was the unique nature of Tunisian civil society in the Arab world. Despite a repressive police state under Bourguiba and Ben Ali, Tunisia still had embryonic independent power centers, especially in the labor unions, which were particularly strong at the local and regional levels. Of the five Arab countries where major uprisings happened in 2011, Tunisia was the only one where the unions played a critical political role. To be sure, there were many other independent political actors that sprang to action as a result of the uprising—scores of political parties, human and political rights groups, and various syndicates of professional groups like the lawyers, journalists, and businessmen. The result had been a cacophony of power centers with no one of them able to impose their will on the others. Unlike the Egyptian revolution, the Tunisian one led to progressively greater fragmentation of power rather than consolidating it in the hands of one party or individual. By contrast, the struggle in Egypt over the revolution’s course quickly became a polarized one between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. No other power center comparable to the labor federation in

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Tunisia existed there before the uprising or emerged afterward. The revolutionary youth in episodic control of the streets disdained the idea of forming political parties; its leaders feared dirtying their hands by becoming part of a compromising political process. Meanwhile, the multitude of independent labor unions that sprang up like mushrooms didn’t coalesce into a national organization willing or able to play a political role. Indeed, the government used state-controlled unions to slowly stifle the independent ones.21 As the battle between the Muslim Brotherhood and military intensified, no secular bloc similar to the quartet in Tunisia emerged to mediate between the two antagonists. One or more of the secular parties that might have played that role had been reduced to bit players as the result of the parliamentary and presidential elections. In any case, nearly all the secular parties chose to rally to the side of the Supreme Military Council to prevent Islamists from imposing their rule. Instead of working to establish a viable parliamentary democracy, the secularists welcomed restoration of authoritarian military rule with open arms. A final variable in explaining the different outcomes was the vastly different quality of leadership. One of the greatest advantages of Tunisia over Egypt was in leadership. Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi stood out as the only figure of distinguished stature to have emerged from any of the Arab uprisings. This soft-speaking Islamic theorist was never a national unifying figure like Nelson Mandela proved to be for South Africa. In fact, he was deeply distrusted by Tunisia’s secularists because he was an avowed opponent of the secular Bourguiba model. Rather, his indispensable contribution was to persuade the Salafist wing of Ennahda to accept compromise time and again during the painful process of elaborating a new constitution. He proved to be a political pragmatist par excellence, far more than an Islamic ideologue. This also made it possible for him to initiate a dialogue with the chief symbol of the ancien regime, Nidaa Tounes Party leader Essebsi, in the search for a way out of the political impasse gripping the nation. He had the wisdom and authority to convince Ennahda to give up power to break that deadlock. The contrast between the unyielding Morsi and the ever-compromising Ghannouchi could not have been more stark. The contrast in political acumen these two demonstrated in moments of crisis went a long way toward accounting for the success of Islamists in Tunisia and their failure in Egypt to bring about lasting political change and a new beginning to governance. In fact, the Egyptian revolution failed to produce any charismatic civilian leader—a shortcoming embodied in Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize–winner who proved a disaster as a rallying point for secularists.22

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Notes 1. George Sawyer Pettee, Process of Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 24. 2. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 4. 3. Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3. 4. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 19–24. 5. Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4. 6. Author’s interview with Salman al-Oadah, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, June 4, 2013. 7. Arendt, On Revolution, 51. 8. Pettee, Process of Revolution, 24. 9. Dmitry Ivanov, “The 2017 Problem: A Next Revolution Situation,” in Said Amir Arjomand (ed.), The Arab Revolution of 2011 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 255. 10. Fawwaz al-Abed al-Haq and Abdullah Abdelhameed Hussein, “The Slogans of the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions,” accessed June 30, 2014, http://media.leidenuniv .nl/legacy/fawwaz.pdf. 11. Mark Perry, “A Fire in the Minds of Arabs: The Arab Spring in Revolutionary History,” Insight Turkey (Winter 2014): 27–33. 12. David A. Bell, “Inglorious Revolutions,” National Interest, January–February 2014. 13. Author’s interview with Rachid Ghannouchi, Tunis, March 28, 2013. 14. Ghannouchi interview. 15. Ghannouchi’s speech at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law conference in Tunis, March 28, 2013. 16. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 4. 17. Ghannouchi interview. 18. Ghannouchi interview. 19. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, 255 and 219–221. 20. Samuel Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988). 21. Jano Charbel, “Whatever Happened to Egypt’s Independent Unions?” Mada Masr, May 1, 2015. 22. See David Ottaway and Marina Ottaway, “Egypt’s Leaderless Revolution,” Cairo Review of Global Affairs, 17 (Spring 2015).

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Index

Abassi, Houcine, 107 Abboud, Ibrahim, President of Sudan, 25 Abdel Aal, Ali, 231 Abdel Aziz, Lobna, 198 Abd el-Fattah, Alaa, 190, 203 Abdullah, King of Jordan, 21 Abdullah, King of Saudi Arabia, 28, 210, 211, 212, 214 Abdullah, Talaat Ibrahim, 168 Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Sheikh, 219 Aboul Fotouh, Abdel Moneim, 150, 158, 159, 194 Abu Ayadh (a. k. a. Saifallah Ben Hassine), 102, 104 Abu Ismail, Hazem, 158 Adel, Mohammed, 190 el-Adly, Habib, 129, 143, 144, 203 Aflaq, Michel, 26 al-Ahram publishing company, 125 Ajroud, Mounir, 96 Akef, Mohammed Mahdi, 126 Algeria, 21, 25 Al Jazeera, 73, 190 Alliot-Marie, Michèle, 81 Al-Masry Al-Youm (newspaper), 188 Alnagar, Mostafa, 131 Amin, Idi, 213 Ammar, Rachid, 76, 250 Anan, Sami Hafez, 142, 165 Ansar al-Sharia in Libya (ASL), 102

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Egyptian Islamic extremist group), 187, 188 April 6 Youth Movement, 58, 59, 189, 194 AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), 102 Arab Gulf monarchs, 217, 219 Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), 31–32, 34 Arab Human Rights Charter, 33 Arab nations: economic development, 48, 49; human development, 48; human rights movement, 32–34; regime changes, 21; regional inequalities, 50–51; social contract, 48; unemployment, 49–50 Arab revolutions: assault on prisons, 245; Brinton’s theory and, 246–248; Bush’s “freedom agenda,” 35–37; common factors, 1, 10–11; in comparative perspective, 8, 243–251; vs. contemporary revolutions, 246; economic and social causes, 47–60; fall of dictatorships, 21–22; vs. Great revolutions, 244–246; historical overview, 23–27; human rights groups and, 32–34; intellectuals and, 31; international setting, 17–18; Islam and, 8–9; labor federation, role of, 248; outcomes, 249–251; perspectives on 2011 uprisings, 7–8; po-

259

260

Index

litical causes, 31–32; revolutionary vs. constitutional legitimacy, 3–4; romantic expectations of results, 22; secularists vs. Islamists, 8; slogans, 17, 245; US democracy campaign and, 34, 37–39. See also Egyptian Revolution; Tunisian (Jasmine) Revolution Arab Spring: foreign reaction on, 28, 209; leadership, 16–17; role of social media, 13; Sidi Bouzid and origin of, 67; US role in, 3 Arendt, Hannah, 243 al-Arian, Essam, 41 Arjomand, Said Amir, 2, 10 al-Assad, Bashar, 7, 27, 104, 212 el-Assar, Mohamed, 165 Ataturk, Mustapha Kemal, 83, 94 Baath Party (Arab Socialist Baath Party), 26 el-Badawi, El-Sayyid, 152 Badie, Mohammed, 123, 126, 135, 190, 191 Badr, Mahmoud, 175 Badran, Mohamed, 230, 250 Badrawi, Hossam, 131–132 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, 223 Bahaa-Eldin, Ziad, 166, 186, 237 Bahrain: foreign intervention in, 27, 28, 210–211; member of Gulf Cooperation Council, 209, 210; Muslim Brotherhood and, 218 al-Banna, Hasan, 15 Barakat, Hisham, 227 al-Bashir, Omar, 25–26 Al Beblawi, Hazem, 186 Bedoui, Abdeljelil, 85 al-Beheiri, Amr Abdallah, 145 Belaïd, Chokri: assassination of, 102– 103 Bell, David, 245 Beltagy, Mohamed, 145 Ben Achour, Sonia, 84 Ben Achour, Yadh, 79 Ben Ali, Leïla, 54, 55, 74, 76 Ben Ali, Zine el-Abidine: address to the nation, 76; business empire, 54–55; coming to power, 68; corruption, 55; elections, 39; escape, 74, 75–77, 213; fall of, 3, 7; foreign supporters, 81–82; home town, 51; middle class

and, 74–75; political regime of, 42; religious policy, 84; reputation, 43 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 25 Benghazi attack on US consulate, 98 Ben Jafar, Mustapha, 88, 99, 112 Ben Jeddou, Lotfi, 105, 106 Benkirane, Abdelilah, 27 al-Bitar, Salah, 26 Bouazizi, Mohamed, 67, 68, 69, 71–72 Boulos, Maged, 130 Boumediene, Houari, 25 Bourguiba, Habib, 15, 51, 95 Bouzid, Nouri, 86 Brahmi, Mohamed, 104, 105 Brinton, Crane: Anatomy of Revolution, 2, 9; on causes of revolutions, 11, 60; definition of revolution, 9–10; on intellectuals, 31; on lasting changes brought by revolutions, 234–235; on military’s role in revolutions, 75–76, 133, 164; on Russian Revolution, 120; theory of revolution, 2, 9–12, 245, 246–248 Bush, George W.: democracy crusade, 36–37; freedom agenda, 34, 35–36 Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, 33 Casablanca Declaration, 33 Chaker, Slim, 224 Chebbi, Ahmed, 84, 85 Cheney, Elizabeth, 35 Chourou, Sadok, 97 Clinton, Bill, 34 Clinton, Hillary, 9, 124 color revolutions, 13 counterrevolution from abroad: Arab Gulf states, 27–28, 217–219; Emirates oppositions to Brotherhood rule, 216–217; foreign interventions, 209–210; Saudi opposition to Brotherhood rule, 215–216; Saudi role in counterrevolution, 210–211; Saudi role in Egypt, 214–215; Saudi role in promoting revolutions, 211–213; Saudi role in Tunisia, 213; US role in Morsi’s downfall, 219–220 Davies, James C., 12, 60 al-Demeri, Ibrahim, 186 Democratic Alliance, 154 Dimian, Hany Kadry, 186

Index El Din, Ahmed Gamal, 177 Douma, Ahmed, 203 dual sovereignty in Egypt: anti-Morsi protests, 171–172; Arab-Israeli war commemoration ceremony, 166; battle over constitution, 163–164, 169– 171, 172; Constituent Assembly, 164, 165; constitutional vs. revolutionary legitimacy, 171–172, 178; economic situation, 176–177; ElBaradei’s call for government of national salvation, 172–173; Islamist movement, 166; local administration, 177; mass uprising, 178–179; military coup, 179–180; ministerial appointments, 167, 173, 177; Morsi and military, 164–165; Morsi’s isolation, 166–168, 173, 178; Muslim Brotherhood, 167, 169, 173, 175, 180–181; National Salvation Front (NSF), 169, 173; November 22 decree, 168–169; parallel power in opposition, 174; pardon of military detainees, 166; Rabaa sit-in, 180; secular opposition, 166–168; Tamarod petition campaign, 173– 174, 175–177; violence, 171, 172, 179, 180–181 dual sovereignty in Tunisia: anti-Ennahda protests, 106–107; arrest of religious extremists, 106; attack of US embassy, 98; civil state debate, 94– 97; constitutional debates, 101–102, 109, 110–111; election law debates, 110–111; elections, 110–111, 112– 113; electoral vs. revolutionary legitimacy, 105–106; Ennahda movement during, 94–95, 96, 97–99, 107, 108– 110; freedom of conscience debate, 100–101; Islam-state relationships, 101; Jomaa’s interim government, 108–109; National Dialogue, 107, 248; National League for the Protection of the Revolution (NLPR), 96– 97; National Salvation Front (NSF), 106; “Our Road to Democracy” paper, 94; power sharing, 94–95; restoration period, 110–113; revolutionary legitimacy, 106–108; rise of al-Qaeda, 102; roadmap for solution to national crisis, 107; Salafi violence, 98–99, 102–103; secularists-

261

Islamists divide, 99–100, 102; secularists vs. Ennahda, 94–95; secular parties, 99; security situation, 102– 103, 105–106; status of women debates, 101; Thermidorian reaction, 103–105; Truth and Dignity Commission, 111; UGTT’s role in, 99, 105, 107 Eastern European revolutions, 22–23 Ebeid, Hanaa, 231 Egypt: April 6 Youth Movement, 58, 59; civil state doctrine, 28; civil war, 2; construction projects, 24; economic development, 49, 50, 55–56, 60, 229, 234; Emergency Law, 40; end of monarchy, 21, 24; foreign policy, 24, 215–216; foreign private investment, 55; future development scenarios, 237; gap between rich and poor, 55– 56, 120; government job creation, 57; House of Representatives election, 229–232; human rights movement, 33; Internet and social media, 120–121; Islamic Constitution, 169– 171; Islamist insurgency, 226–230; labor unrest, 58–59, 58–60; middle class, 57–58, 59; military intervention in politics, 24, 229; Muslim Brotherhood, 38, 41; nationalization of the Suez Canal, 24; police brutality, 121; political apathy of young generation, 57–58; poverty, 56, 59; prodemocracy activists, 22; prospects of new revolution, 233– 234, 237, 238; protests against elSisi regime, 236–237; real estate property, 59–60; revolution of 1952, 23–24; single-party rule, 24; Tahrir Square protests, 59; terrorist attacks, 228; tourist industry, 228; women, status of, 193; working class, 58; youth unemployment, 57 “Egypt at the Tipping Point?” (Ottaway), 3 Egyptian constitution of 2012, 169–171, 191–192 Egyptian constitution of 2013: comparison to 2012 constitution, 191–192; on judiciary, 192; on mass media, 193; on military appointments, 192; opposition to, 194; preparation of, 191; on presidential power, 192–193;

262

Index

provisions on Islam, 193–194; reference to civil rule, 194; referendum on, 194; on religious rights, 193; on single-body parliament, 192; on women’s rights, 193 Egyptian elections: of 2005, presidential, 37–38; of 2010, parliamentary, 41, 124–126; of 2011, parliamentary, 148–149, 149–150; of 2014, presidential, 199–201; of 2015, parliamentary, 201–202 Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), 134 Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, 145 Egyptian political parties: al-Ghad Party, 38; al-Nour Party (Party of Light), 150, 156, 230, 231; Al-Wasat (Center) Party, 150; Destour Party, 155, 230; Egyptian Bloc, 149, 152, 154; Egyptian Current Party, 150; Egyptian Front Coalition, 202; Egyptian Popular Current, 230; Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), 147, 149, 150, 154–155; Free Egyptians Party, 152, 167, 202, 230, 231, 232, 249; For the Love of Egypt alliance, 201–202, 230, 231, 232; National Democratic Party (NDP), 38, 122, 124–125, 201; Nation’s Future Party, 230, 231, 232, 249–250; Revolution Continues Alliance, 154; Social Democratic Party, 152; Strong Egypt Party, 194 Egyptian Revolution: attack on Saudi embassy, 214; Battle of the Camels, 130; Day of Rage, 129, 210; economic factors, 60; ElBaradei’s political campaign, 122–124, 137n19; Gamal Mubarak’s presidential bid, 122; government tactic, 129–130, 131; honeymoon phase, 135–136; as incomplete revolution, 14; Internet and social media, role of, 121, 123, 126, 127; labor unions, 134, 251; leadership, 133–134, 251; legacies, 133–136; military’s role in, 128, 129, 133; Muslim Brotherhood in, 134– 135; November 2010 elections, 124– 126; official death toll, 128; opposition newspapers, 125; outcomes, 249–251; parallels with Iranian revolution, 8–9; phases of, 246–247; pop-

ular uprising, 127–129; preconditions, 11, 41, 120; pro-Mubarak demonstrations, 130; Revolutionary Youth Coalition, 134, 138n68; secularists vs. Islamists, 8–9, 12, 16; state of emergency, 123, 124; Sudan “model” for, 26; Tahrir Square protests, 128, 132, 135–136; Tunisian uprising and, 126; US role in, 124, 132–133; violence, 129. See also Thermidorian reaction in Egypt Eissa, Ibrahim, 234 ElBaradei, Mohamed: “Bill of Rights,” 148; career, 122–123; constitutional debates, 147–148; criticism of Morsi regime, 126, 172; electoral alliance, 167–168; leader of opposition, 121; Muslim Brotherhood and, 123; personality, 155; petition campaign, 123, 137n19; political activity, 123– 124, 155, 186; response to November 22 decree, 171–172; return to Egypt, 41; on threat of Islamic takeover, 167 Elbaramawy, Khaled, 131 Eldin, Khaled Alam, 173 Ellouze, Habib, 97, 109 Emerging Democracies Forum, 34 Ennahda (“Renaissance”) Movement: 2011 elections, 87, 88; 2014 elections, 112–113; in coalition government, 88; foundation of, 80; leadership, 15; in local administration, 108; loss of support, 249; peaceful tactic, 15; political agenda, 82, 107–108, 110; religious agenda, 16; “Republican Pact” and, 82; Salafists and, 95, 97; secularist fears of, 82–83; surrender of power, 108–110, 248; withdrawal from High Authority, 86 Erbakan, Necmettin, 163 el-Erian, Essam, 147 Essebsi, Beji Caid: leader of Nidaa Tounes Party, 106; negotiations with Ghannouchi, 107–108, 110, 247– 248; political career, 78, 99; prediction of new revolution, 233; President of Tunisia, 112–113, 224 Essid, Habib, 224 Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution (Ottaway), 1 Ethiopia’s revolution, 1

Index Ettakatol Party, 88, 95, 99 European Revolutions (Tilly), 10 Ezz, Ahmed, 56, 143, 203 Fahd, King of Saudi Arabia, 37 Fahmy, Nabil, 186 Fahmy, Mohamed, 190 Faisal, King of Iraq, 21 Farouk, King of Egypt, 21, 24 Fergany, Nader, 32 Fetini, Rachid, 69 For the Love of Egypt alliance, 201–202, 230, 231, 232 Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), 147, 149, 150, 154–155 Free Egyptians Party, 152, 167, 202, 230, 231, 232, 249 French revolutions, 10, 14, 233, 245, 248 Georgia’s “Rose Revolution,” 22 Ghannouchi, Mohammed, 77, 78, 79 Ghannouchi, Rached: attitude to Salafis, 95–96, 97–99, 100, 104; constitutional ideas, 100–101; criticism of Ennahda, 86; influence, 95; Islamic values, 95–96; leadership, 247–248, 251; as opposition leader, 40; personality, 3, 14; political views, 81, 110; position on elections law, 110– 111; pragmatism, 100; on reconciliation with secularists, 109–110; return from exile, 80–81; theory of revolution, 14–15, 16, 243; on Tunisian revolution, 213, 249; visit to Washington, 109–110 El-Ghar, Mohamed Abou, 194 Gharbi, Lazher, 73 Ghariani, Mohamed, 111 Ghonim, Wael, 126, 127, 131, 166 Girifna (“fed up”) prodemocracy movement, 23 Gobe, Eric, 41–42, 52 Godec, Robert F., 55, 74, 75 Goldstone, Jack, 2, 10, 243 Gomaa, Ali, Grand Mufti of Egypt, 28 Great Revolutions, 243 Greste, Peter, 190 Group of Eight (G8) meeting in Sea Island, 36 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 28, 209–210

263

Habib, Rafik, 28 Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, 1 Halouani, Mohamed Ali, 40 Ham, Carter, 104 Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of Qatar, 218 Hamdi, Fadia, 71, 72 Hammami, Hamma, 112 Hamzawy, Amr, 28, 168, 195 Hanin, Maher, 84 Hariri, Rafic, 212 Hassan, Bahey Eldin, 33 Hechmi Hamdi, Mohammed, 87 human rights movement, 32–34 Hussein, Saddam, 34 Ibn Khaldun, 12 Ibrahim, Mohammed, 188 Ibrahim, Saad Eddin, 36 Innocence of Muslims (film), 98 Iran: Arab states and, 217; Islamic revolution, 8–9, 21, 246 Iraqi Community Party, 26 Islamic Jihad, 166 Islamic Project. See Muslim Brotherhood Islamic State, 223–224, 227, 228 Islamic Tendency, 80. See also Ennahda (“Renaissance”) Movement Ivanov, Dmitry, 10–11, 245 Jabhat al-Islah (Reform Front), 103 al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (Sunni Islamist movement), 166, 177 Jasmine Revolution. See Tunisian Revolution Jebali, Hamadi, 80, 82, 88, 94, 103 Jomaa, Mehdi, 104, 108 Jordan, 21, 28, 210, 211 Jrad, Abdessalem, 74 Jribi, Maya, 84 Kacem, Rafik Belhaj, 111 Kamara (“enough”) youth group, 22 Kamel, Amr, 216 El-Katatni, Saad, 155, 156, 178 Kerry, John, 220 Khalaf Hunaidi, Rima, 32 Al Khalifa, Hamad bin Isa, 211 el-Khayat, Adel, 177 Laarayedh, Ali, 103

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Index

Labidi, Farida, 83, 84 Libya, 2, 211 Mabrouk, Fares, 75 Maher, Ahmed, 24, 127, 131, 134, 190, 203 Mahfouz, Asmaa, 136 Mahlab, Ibrahim, 187 Mahmoud, Abdel Meguid, 168 Malloch-Brown, Mark, 32 Mansour, Adly, 185, 186, 201, 232 Marxist-Leninist parties, 26 Marzouk, Mohsen, 226 Marzouki, Moncef, 40, 88, 99, 107, 111, 112, 113 Mekki, Mahmoud, 167 Milestones along the Way (Qutb), 15 Milosevic, Slobodan, 22 Mohamed, Baher, 190 Mohammed VI, King of Morocco, 27, 209 Montasser, Mohamed, 228 Morjane, Kamel, 112 Morocco, 21, 28, 49, 83, 209–210, 211 Morsi, Mohamed: advisory council of, 167; alienation from military and secularists, 166–168; arrest, 142, 179–180; attempt to control military, 164–165; coming to power, 24; court appearance, 190; downfall, 105, 219–220; education and career, 158; el-Sisi and, 174–175, 179; financial policy, 18, 218–219; foreign policy, 168, 215–217; interviews with, 179; last address to the nation, 178; leadership, 251; military and, 166; November 22 decree, 168–169; presidential race, 13, 16, 158–159; Salafists and, 173; secular opposition and, 166–167; trial, 190 Mourou, Abdelfattah, 112 Moussa, Amr, 32, 159, 186, 237 Mubarak, Alaa, 202 Mubarak, Gamal, 3, 55, 56, 122, 202 Mubarak, Hosni: arrest, 143–144; confinement, 202; confrontation with SCAF, 160; downfall, 7, 119, 131– 132; elections, 37–38, 41; foreign relations, 36, 37; human rights conference, 33; illness, 121; immediate family, 129; Obama’s conversation with, 133; political crisis, 3, 41, 131; speeches to the nation, 130, 132; trial, 143–144, 168, 202

Muslim Brotherhood: adherence to violence, 228; allegations of terrorism, 188–189; arrest of leaders, 179–180; ban of, 24; division within, 228; in Egyptian revolution, role of, 15–16, 129, 134–135; ElBaradei and, 123; elections, 37–38, 41, 124–125, 157– 158; el-Sisi government and, 227; foundation of, 15; idea of civil state and, 28; Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait and, 215; prosecutions of, 188–189, 190–191; protests against military coup, 180–181; religious agenda, 16, 169; Saudi Arabia and, 18, 215–216; SCAF and, 178; United Arab Emirates and, 216–217; youth wing, 135, 150 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 14, 23, 24, 174 Nasser, Mohammed, 112 National Association for Change, 123 National Democratic Party (NDP), 38, 122, 124–125, 201 National Endowment for Democracy (NED), 35, 36 National League for the Protection of the Revolution (NLPR), 96 Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 215 Nazif, Ahmed, 55, 122, 129, 143, 203 New Wafd Party, 230, 231 Nidaa Tounes (“The Call of Tunisia”) party, 96, 100, 112–113, 226, 234, 251 Nimeiry, Gaafar, 25 Nour, Ayman, 36, 37, 59, 127, 151, 158 al-Oadah, Salman bin Fahd, 3, 12–14, 243, 244 Obama, Barack, 3, 133, 212, 214, 220 Oman, 209, 210, 217 Otpor movement, 22 Ottaway, David B., 1, 3 “Our Road to Democracy” paper, 94 “Partnership for Progress and a Common Future” working paper, 36–37 Patterson, Anne, 219 Perry, Mark, 245 Pettee, George, 11, 243 postrevolution prospects: in Egypt, 226– 232; Islamic extremists and, 223– 224; in Tunisia, 224–226

Index Powell, Colin, 35 “Project for the New American Century,” 34 Putin, Vladimir, 17 Qaddafi, Muammar, 7, 14, 211 Qandil, Hesham, 167 Qatar, 209, 213, 218 Qutb, Sayyid, 15 Rahman, Hassan Abdul, 131 Rajhi, Farhat, 80 restoration in Egypt: “antiprotest law,” 203; comparison with Tunisian restoration, 203–204; constitutional committee, 186; el-Sisi’s rise to power, 195–201; fate of Mubarak family, 202–203; interim government, 185; ministerial appointments, 186–187; Muslim Brotherhood, prosecution of, 188–189, 190–191; new constitution, 191–194; pardon to prisoners, 203; political elite, 186– 187; political parties, 201–202; political repressions, 189–190, 195, 203; presidential elections of 2014, 199– 200; return to old political order, 201–202; role of courts, 201; secularists’ support of military, 198–199; terrorist attacks, 187–188; violence, 189, 195 revolutions: Arab theorists of, 4, 12–15; Brinton’s schema of, 9–10, 246–249; common causes, 2, 10–11, 47; comparative view of, 4, 8, 47, 185, 243– 251; contemporary, 246; counterrevolutions and, 21–30; definitions of, 9, 10, 243; in Eastern Europe, 22; economic causes, 11–12, 47; Great Revolutions, 244–246; intellectuals in, 11; lasting changes of, 234–235; meanings of, 13, 21–22; outcomes of, 14, 233, 249–251; overview of studies of, 243–244; phases of, 10, 185; political factors, 11–12; repeated uprisings, 233; restoration phase, 10; scholarly literature, 2, 243; social factors, 11; thawra vs., 9; Western theorists of, 4, 9–12 Ricciardone, Francis, Jr., 122 Rice, Condoleezza, 36 Russian Revolution of 1917, 119–120

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Russia’s authoritarian rule, 17 Sabahi, Hamdeen, 159, 166, 167, 199, 201, 230 Saber, Mahfouz, 187 Sadat, Anwar, 150, 166 Said Aly, Abdel Monem, 125, 128 Sakhr El Materi, Mohamed, 70 Salafi movement, 83–84, 86, 98–99 Salama, Amr, 131 Saleh, Ali Abdullah, 7, 209 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 81 Saud al-Faisal, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 37, 214 Saudi Arabia: 2005 elections, 39; Bush administration’s pressure on, 38–39; in counterrevolution, role of, 210– 211; economic reforms, 210; Egyptian revolution and, 18, 210, 214– 215; intervention of Bahrain, 27, 28, 210–211; opposition to Muslim Brotherhood, 215–216, 217; political and economic influence, 3; promotion of revolutions, 211–213; Shiite revolts, support of, 27; support of elSisi regime, 219; Syrian rebels, support of, 212; Tunisian revolution and, 213; uprising in Libya, support of, 211–212; Yemeni uprising and, 213 Sawiri, Onsi, 56 Sawiris, Naguib, 167, 202, 230 Serbia’s “bulldozer revolution,” 22 Seriati, Ali, 76, 77, 111 Shafik, Ahmed, 131, 144, 158–159, 167, 202 Shahin, Emad, 195 Shahin, Hassan, 175 Sharaf, Essam, 144, 153 Sharaf el-Din, Dorreya, 186 el-Shater, Khairat, 158, 178, 188 el-Sherif, Safwat, 122, 129 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 22 Shiha, Essam, 151 el-Shobaki, Amr, 237 Sidi Bouzid city: black market, 70; Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation, 71; corruption of officials, 70; mobilization of labor unions, 73; police clash with protestors, 74; social conditions, 68–69; starting point of Arab Spring, 67; statue of Mohamed Bouazizi, 69; Steiff toy company, 70–71; street

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names change, 69; street protests, 71; unemployment, 70 Sinai Peninsula: battleground with Islamists, 227; terrorist attacks, 187–188 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah: Arab Golf countries’ support of, 219; defense of Hamas, 197; economic development projects, 229; education, 196; election as president, 142, 200; House of Representatives election and, 231– 232; image of, 198; inauguration speech, 200–201; interviews with, 188, 196; life and career, 196; military coup, 105, 179–180; ministerial positions, 165, 187; Muslim Brotherhood and, 197–198, 234; political views, 196–197; popular support of, 198, 201; prevention of popular uprising, 233, 236–237; relations with Morsi, 174–175, 178, 179; restoration of religion, 236; rise to power, 185, 195–199; speech to the nation, 187; on state-religion relationship, 197; terrorist threat, 188 Slackman, Michael, 120 social media, 173–174, 236 Square, The (film), 136 Stevens, Christopher, 98 Stone, Lawrence, 2, 243 Sudan: independence of South, 26; revolution in, 25–26 Suleiman, Omar, 126, 130, 133, 134, 158 Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF): confrontation with Morsi, 164–165; “constitutional declaration,” 144, 146; creation of, 24; formation of interim government, 185– 186; Muslim Brotherhood and, 149, 160, 178; political power of, 142, 157, 159–160; Tamarod campaign and, 176 Syria: civil war in, 212; political settlement negotiations, 212–213 Tamarod petition campaign, 173–174, 175–177, 178 Tantawi, Mohamed Hussein, 122, 129, 132, 142, 165 Tarhouni, Samir, 77 el-Tayeb, Ahmed, 148, 173 terrorism: attacks in Tunisia, 224–226; Islamic State, 223–224; in post-revo-

lutionary Egypt, 188, 226–230; Russian plane explosion, 228; in Sinai Peninsula, 187–188; targets, 188 thawra (revolution), 9 theories of revolution: Arab perspective, 4, 12–15, 243–244; Brinton’s, 2, 9– 12, 245, 246–248; “Democratic Awakening,” 9; dual sovereignty, 10, 93; J-curve theory, 60; military revolutions, 14; restoration stage, 93, 185; Thermidorian reaction, 10, 93; Western perspectives, 4, 9–12, 60 Thermidorian reaction in Egypt: “alAzhar Document,” 148; constitutional debates, 143, 144, 147–149, 156–157; democratic alliance, 150, 151; ElBaradei’s “Bill of Rights,” 148; extremists, 141; Islamic-Secular alliance, 151–152; Islamists struggle for power, 154–155, 156–157; liberals, 141; Maspero Building, confrontation at, 146, 153; military rule, 142–145; ministerial appointments, 144; Mubarak’s arrest, 143–144, 146–147; Muslim Brotherhood vs. secular revolutionaries, 146–147; overview, 141–142; parliamentary elections, 148, 149–150, 154–155; phases of, 142; political coalitions, 149, 150; presidential elections, 157– 160; Salafist activities, 149; secularists, 141–142, 145–146, 151, 155– 156; Supreme Administrative Court, 157; Tahrir Square protests, 145– 146; “The Military Are Liars” campaign, 155–156; violence, 142, 146, 153–154, 156; Youth Coalition, demands of, 145. See also Egyptian Revolution Thompson, Elizabeth F.: Justice Interrupted, 26 El-Tibi, Manal, 168 Tilly, Charles, 2; European Revolutions, 10 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 11 Tounes Movement Project, 226 Trabelsi, Belhassen, 75 Trabelsi, Imed, 111 Trabelsi, Leïla. See Ben Ali, Leïla Trimech, Abdesselem, 75 Tunisia: armed forces, 76; civil society groups, 42, 250; constitutional

Index amendments, 39; corruption, 70; economic development, 49, 51–54, 60, 225, 234, 235; elections, 39–40, 42, 87–88; first family, 54–55; food subsidies, 50; government spending, 70; industrial production, 52; Islam, status of, 95–96; leftist groups, 85–86; legacies of French Revolution, 248; National Constituent Assembly, 249; National Dialogue Quartet, 248; nationalization of land, 69; political parties, 39, 68, 84–85, 86, 88, 233– 234; postrevolutionary development, 225–226; poverty, 54; private sector, 54; prospects for new revolution, 233, 235–236, 238; recession of 2008, 51–54; regional inequality, 51; secularists, 94, 226; secular values, 15; social protests, 41–42, 52–53, 69, 235–236; strike in Gafsa mining basin, 41–42, 52, 53; terrorist attacks, 86, 224–226; Truth and Dignity Commission, 225; unemployment, 50, 52–53, 54, 225, 235; university graduates, 53–54; violence, 68; women, status of, 83 Tunisian General Union of Labor (UGTT): political activity, 85, 99, 107, 236; Sidi Bouzid uprising and, 71, 73; strikes organized by, 53, 74, 97, 105 Tunisian (Jasmine) Revolution: 14th of January Front, 79; amnesty to political prisoners, 81; armed forces, neutrality of, 75–76; beginning of, 41– 43, 67–68; Ben Ali’s escape, 74, 75–77; Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation, 71–72; Brintonian schema of, 247–248; dual sovereignty, 93; economic factors in, 60; election laws, 79; Ennahda Movement, 78, 80–84; Ghannouchi’s resignation, 78; High Authority, 78, 79; honeymoon period, 86–88; interim government, 78–79, 80, 88; Islamists, 79–80; labor unions, 73, 74; leadership, 251; media coverage, 73; middle class, role of, 74–75; moderate course of, 78; outcomes, 249, 250; parallels with Iranian revolution, 8–9; phases of, 247; public opinion poll about, 86–87; “Republican Pact,” 82;

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restoration stage, 185; revolutionaries struggle for power, 77–80; Salafists, 83–84; Saudi Arabia and, 213; secularist parties, 84–86; secularists vs. Islamists, 8–9, 12, 16, 80; social protests, 72–74, 75; Trimech’s self-immolation, 75. See also Sidi Bouzid Tunisian League of Human Rights, 40 Turkey: military coup of 1997, 163 Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, 22–23 United Arab Emirates (UAE): intervention of Bahrain, 210–211; opposition to Muslim Brotherhood, 216–217 United Nations Arab Development Challenges Report (2011), 48 United Nations Development Program (UNDP), 31 United Nations Human Development Report (2009), 49 United States: aid to Arab states, 17, 220; Arab Spring and, 3; democracy promotion, 34, 35–39; Egyptian affairs, 214, 219–220; Syrian civil war and, 212–213; Tunisian affairs, 74– 75 Uthman ibn Affan, Caliph, 12 Wafd Party, 151, 152, 154 Wagdy, Mahmoud, 131 Al-Waleed bin Talal, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 214 Wasfi, Ahmed, 178 Yahyaoui, Ridha, 235 Yanukovych, Victor, 23 el-Yazal, Sameh Seif, 202, 229–230, 232 Yemen, 2, 8, 34, 209, 213, 217 Youssef, Said, 190 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 102

About the Book

After the autocratic regimes in the seemingly unassailable police states of Tunisia and Egypt suddenly collapsed in 2011, the Islamic parties that took over quickly succumbed in turn to further massive uprisings, this time by disaffected secularists and, in the case of Egypt, with the support of the army. What explains this? And why do the current regimes in both countries remain so fragile? Addressing these questions, drawing on years of first-hand, in-depth research, David Ottaway explores the causes of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the reasons for their radically differing outcomes, and the likely trajectory of the two countries’ political development. David B. Ottaway, after receiving a Ph.D. in public law and government

from Columbia University, worked as a foreign correspondent and then an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. for 35 years. At present, he is a Middle East Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

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