A reply to a colleague about Egypt

(The original text of the email underwent some slight modifications, including taking out the name of the person).

Thanks for sharing this article. I finally had a chance to read it. I hate to mention this to you, but this article suffers from serious problems and the ideas contained therein look neither innovative nor sincere.

Here are the aspects that I find troubling:

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That he decided to speak 'sincerely' to the MB youth, who have just seen thousands of their friends either killed or injured and failed to address that is revealing of the pervasive illness that plagues a considerable segment of the Egyptian intelligentsia. That he would call the seismic events in Egypt (the culmination of a year of planning to undermine Egyptian democracy which led, among other things, to the kidnapping of an elected president, the dismissal of the higher chamber of Egypt parliament, the voiding of a constitution approved by 63% of the voters after mere 6 months of its passing without any return to the electorates, the shutting down of all the TV stations of--what any fair observer would call-- the representatives of the overwhelming majority of the population as attested by winning four elections in one year, the imprisonment without due process of thousands--15,000 so far--of political activists, the mowing down of thousands of peaceful protesters, the disregard to humans both living and dead) some confrontations is, for a lack of a better term, disgusting, and the fact that it came from a professor speaks volume to the depth of the moral crisis your country contends with. If a professor calls a massacre of largely (assuming that some used fire arms which has not been proven) peaceful protesters  ‘some confrontations’ and uses the passive (hasalat [happened]) to cowardly escape condemning the perpetrators, and if you (an educator and a young scholar) forward it as something you find good, then I am afraid that your country faces a moral dilemma not simply a derailment of a political process and deliberate burial of the hope of the masses for a better, more egalitarian Islamic and Arabic Egypt.  The false intent and false consciousness of some uneducated Egyptians can do very little to conceal that fact.

One symptom of this is the surreal world which your media presents to its viewers. The problem is not so much that the media and intelligentsia get things wrong, it is rather that they they deliberately lie to play with the emotions of their audience.This sometime went well beyond just falsifying information and misleading viewers to accusing grieving families of claiming their loved ones died just to make a political point.   A good example, a troubling one indeed, is the treatment of the story of the Asma al-Baltaji. The Egyptian press played for two consecutive days a fake testimony of someone  claiming to be the victim and proclaiming that her father concocted the story of her death to score points in a political struggle. Unfortunately, the 17 years old died with a sniper shot, some coward who saw her angelic face, zoomed in and fired. Your comment when I first met you after the incident was something I still can’t comprehend: “Her father should have died with her!” I hope that you have reexamined that.

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But let us forget the callous nature of his dismissal of the tragedy that visited the homes of thousands of his interlocutors (where entire households were either detained or killed or a combination like the story of this grieving Egyptian mother). A sense of bewilderment is bound to overcome any reader when s/he realizes that the article is devoid of any real discussion of the serious crisis that Egypt faces and the fundamental problem that had complicated its political life and turned it into the poor, and retarded third world country that it is today despite its long history and the enormous potential both in terms of natural and human resources.  This problem is the unholy alliance between an unprofessional military, dependent on foreign aid, which is mostly interested in political and financial gains, and opportunists hordes of secular munafiqin whose main concern-- it seems-- is maximizing their personal gains at the expense of the vast majority of Egyptians. The technical and economic retardation from which Egypt suffers has been compounded by a suppression of human rights and personal freedoms. Since late 1940s, Egyptians haven't enjoyed a period when freedoms are respected, save a short period in which Najib was partially in power and the one years of Morsi in power--Morsi who was demonized and cursed on the Egyptian media 24/7, and yet shut no single TV station and sent no assassins to take the lives of his ardent opponents. The violations of human rights in your country have been largely carried out during much of this period by a range of institutions, mostly acting on the behest of the military intelligence services, enjoying their protection and/or benediction. The fact that the hopes generated by the Jan. 25 revolution were shattered by the recent bloody coup is also not mentioned anywhere in the article. This is rather appalling.

Of course, absent from the article is any mention of the success of the MB in power which the current regime, aversive as it is and hostile to them, acknowledges. Absent as well any mention of the ill-conceived policies and self-destructive behavior of the current regime, which include, among other things, destroying thousands of homes in Sinai, tightening the Gaza siege (which is a part of a worrisome atmosphere of hatred of Palestinians and Syrians as well), threatening to attack it, silencing anyone who disagreed with them, turning Egyptian press and TV stations to an international laughing stock, denying hundreds of thousands of Egyptian orphans and poor the free medical care and learning opportunities that MB’s charitable organizations used to provide.

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Indeed, the article has something to say and it goes thus: The MB are not welcome in politics If they just kept praying in mosques we would have been fine with them and they wouldn’t have to go through the current phase. The quotation about Ahl al-Bayt says it all. You cannot have da’wa and politics. This is absurd. The article doesn’t mention, nor does any Egyptian--a Muslim one at least-- with a moducom of  sanity think that either one of the two activities is forbidden. And since that is the case who has the right to prevent people from participating in both venues. I am sure the MB are ok with the fine professor making da‘wa whenever and wherever he wishes. As a matter of fact, he is making one through this medium, but it is a very bad call/da’wa.  

Of course, the idea that the MB shouldn’t take part in the political life in Egypt and that it should sacrifice its islamic work if it wishes to be accepted, is the central platform of the Egyptian liberals and the corrupt institutions that nurse them. Their motivations are clear. The MB charitable work reveals the incompetency of the regime and its corruption. The MB political participation kills any chance of the corrupt and corrupting traditional class from continuing to monopolize the regime in Egypt.

The idea that they should chose between their charitable work, from which millions of the have-nots benefit (those left out with nothing from the economy of their country because of the shameful alliance of the Egyptian intelligentsia and military), and political activism is ludicrous and should be rejected by anyone with any sense of justice or any sense of love for Egypt and its people. The idea that they are power-hungry masks the plain fact that it is they who sacrificed resources, visited prisons, and died for many decades in the fight against tyranny in that country. If they were power-hungry, they would have amassed wealth, they would have embezzled, they would have forged strong alliances with the corrupt system in place. Neither of these is true and the fact that the government’s charges against them involve nothing about fiscal corruption (the allegations instead are absurd combination of conspiring with Hamas or inciting violence) shows that they worked for Egypt, not for their pockets. But also, and this should seal this section, let’s not forget that they didn’t come on the back of tanks or carrying machine guns to seize power. They won at the ballot box in an election largely deemed fair and transparent and was overseen by the military itself.

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Finally, the article is premised on the notion that the youth of the Muslim Brothers are wonderful but their leaders are corrupt and manipulating their youth for some twisted agenda. The other day Ali Jum'a issued a statement in which he charged that the MB failed to raise their youth except on a culture of takfir, mind you that he himself has contributed to the current racist atmosphere where the MB are depicted as something of a fringe. Of course, these two notions are contradictory, but the notion that the youths are good and the elders are terrorists/psychopaths is a travesty . In Arabic they say إنك لا تجني من الشوك العنب

If the leaders of the MB are horrible how come that they were able to raise the wonderful generation this fine professor addresses?

There are many things to be said about this and there are indeed some  mistakes that Muslim Brothers committed, although they are not mentioned here. I can continue this comment but for the sake of time, I will simply direct you to where I have tackled some of these issues, especially what I see to be the MB main mistake.  check my blog