Ursula Lindsey writes: The divisive constitution that the Muslim Brotherhood pushed through last year — over howls of indignation from the opposition — was one of the great mistakes of the Islamist organization’s short time in power. The Brothers and other Islamist parties were determined to give the country a more Islamic charter, and in doing so they ran roughshod over the concerns of many non-Islamists and their own promises of inclusiveness.

Last year’s constitution was suspended when President Mohamed Morsi was deposed by the army on July 3 after mass protests. The interim government appointed a 10-person legal panel to amend the charter, and now a 50-person committee is revising it further. They have two months to produce a new document, which will be put to a national referendum.

Egypt’s current authorities say they want to correct the Brotherhood’s mistakes and produce a truly representative, inclusive national charter. But some of the ways this constitution is being written inspire a sense of déjà vu.

The constitution drafted by the Islamist-dominated assembly was socially conservative and contained provisions that extended the role of Islam and the purview of religious institutions in public life. It seemed to open the door to the state and regular citizens enforcing a particular interpretation of Islamic values and behavior.

Much of that — except for an introductory article stating that “the principles of Islamic Shariah” are the basis of Egyptian law — is likely to be scrapped. There is also talk of reinstituting the ban on religious parties that existed under President Hosni Mubarak.

This is where the similarity between the previous and the current constitution-writing process lies: Both reflect and enshrine a particular imbalance of power rather than trying to represent the aspirations of all citizens.

The last assembly was drawn overwhelmingly from Islamist parties that had just performed well at the polls. Non-Islamists didn’t have the numbers to exercise veto power and complained about their marginalization; eventually almost all of them withdrew. The new drafting committee looks like a photo negative of the old one: It contains a single delegate from an Islamist party, and he has already walked out in protest over being ignored. [Continue reading…]

Hugh Roberts writes: Tamarrod, which means ‘disobedience, insubordination, revolt, rebellion’ (and ‘mutiny’), is the name of the group that organised first a nationwide petition against President Morsi and then the demonstrations of 30 June. It’s a new group, founded this April. The petition stated that its signatories called on the president to resign. The organisers announced their ambition to collect 15 million signatures and claim to have obtained 22 million, a figure I have never seen verified. But let us allow that they did obtain millions of signatures. To organise, let alone sign, such a petition is not an anti-democratic act: citizens have a right to call on an elected office-holder to resign, just as he or she may choose to stay in office until defeated at the polls. The petition said nothing about the army, let alone calling on it to act in the matter. The same was true of the mobilisation for the 30 June demonstrations. Several well-known groups that had played key roles in the demonstrations against Mubarak, notably the 6 April Youth Movement, the Revolutionary Socialists and the ‘We are all Khaled Saeed’ movement (formed to protest at the murder of a young man by the Alexandria police in 2010), did not hesitate to take part. They had reasons to dislike Morsi and his FJP and to want him out of office. But what happened at the demonstration itself was another matter, for many of those present did indeed call on the army to intervene. When the army deposed Morsi three days later, many of the demonstrators reacted as those on 11 February 2011 had reacted, triumphant that their point had been gained and inclined to see the army as the instrument of the people’s will. As one Tamarrod activist, quoted by the Observer on 6 July, exulted:

Sisi and the army took their cue from the people. They had many previous chances to do what they did but they didn’t take them. But once millions of people went out and started chanting for the army to step in, they took their orders from us. The army did not take over power. They were merely a partner in the democratic change we were seeking.

The element of wishful thinking, if not sheer delusion, in this is a pointer to Tamarrod’s real nature. But so is the statement of fact it contains. Why did the demand raised by Tamarrod’s petition, that Morsi step down and early presidential elections be held, mutate into the demand that the army ‘step in’? Clearly Tamarrod itself was happy with this development. Could it be that it was the Tamarrod activists themselves who, having got millions of Egyptians to sign a petition in support of one clear demand, then managed, during the demonstration itself, to convert this demand into something else? The organisers of demonstrations are usually the source of the slogans chanted by the participants and most demonstrators will happily chant the slogans they hear others chanting.

The target of 15 million signatories for the petition was clearly chosen because it exceeded the number of Egyptians – 13.23 million – who voted for Morsi in the presidential election of June 2012. It was subsequently claimed that at least 14 million marched against him on 30 June. This figure was soon overtaken by others: 17 million, 22 million. The veteran Egyptian feminist Nawal el-Saadawi even claimed that 34 million had been there, a majority of the total electorate. These figures were fairy tales, the tallest of tall stories. But the Egyptians who bombarded the world’s media with such whoppers can’t seriously be faulted for trying it on: the West made itself the gallery; they played to it. For them the stakes were immense and c’est de bonne guerre. The question we should confront is how and why our media was taken in by this nonsense and then parroted it back to us.

The numbers question was investigated by Jack Brown, an American writer who has lived in Cairo for several years and who on 11 July published a detailed article in Maghreb émergent, an indispensable source of serious coverage of North African developments, republished in English on the website International Boulevard. Brown worked out from the actual area of Tahrir Square and the streets leading to it that on the most generous estimate the demonstration can’t have exceeded 265,000 people. If we assume for the sake of argument that the other big demonstration in Cairo, in Heliopolis, added a further 211,000, that gives at most 476,000. So where did the other 12.8 million needed to exceed Morsi’s election tally come from? Cairo is home to nearly a quarter of Egypt’s total population. Vague Western media references to ‘hundreds of thousands’ marching in other cities may authorise us to push up the overall tally, but we’re still looking at maybe a million, or at the very most two million across the country as a whole, less than the 2.85 million Morsi polled in Cairo and Giza. The phantasmagorical figures quoted to the Western media may, as Brown observes, have exploited a confusion between attendance at the demonstrations and Tamarrod’s claim for the number of petition signatories. But however many millions really signed the petition, none of them signed a petition calling for the army to depose the president.

As the violence of the army’s assault on Morsi’s supporters grew and grew, some of the participants on 30 June had second thoughts. Ahmed Maher, the leader of the 6 April Youth Movement, supported the anti-Morsi campaign but later dissociated himself from the army’s actions. The Revolutionary Socialists also eventually dissociated themselves. But the Tamarrod leaders did not. They saw no significant difference between citizens calling on a president to resign and the minister of defence ordering him to be removed manu militari and they were not only delighted with the outcome but claimed the credit for it. The Tamarrod activist quoted by the Observer was called Mohamed Khamis. On 16 August, two days after the massacres at Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque and Nahda Square, in which at least 628 protesters died, the Guardian quoted him: ‘“We agree with what happened at Rabaa and at Nahda,” said Mohamed Khamis, a spokesman for the Tamarrod (Rebellion) campaign, which mobilised public opinion against the democratically elected but deeply unpopular Morsi. “We don’t like what the Brotherhood did.”’

*

The activists who set up Tamarrod were veterans of an earlier protest movement, dating from 2004 and 2005, whose official name was the Egyptian Movement for Change but which rapidly became known by its main slogan, ‘Kifaya!’ (‘Enough!’). Kifaya was not an organised presence in the demonstrations of January and February 2011: it had petered out in 2006 and been superseded by more recently formed groupings. But as I followed the drama in 2011, it became clear to me that the young revolutionaries, with the exception of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialists, were Kifaya’s spiritual children and were bound to lose the initiative the moment their single, purely negative demand was conceded. I was a sceptic about the ‘revolution’ from that moment onwards.

A good account of Kifaya can be found in Holger Albrecht’s timely study of the opposition movements that existed under Mubarak. Contrary to the caricatures that became de rigueur once the balloon went up, Albrecht insists that Mubarak’s was ‘a liberalised authoritarian regime that provides [sic] limited – because entirely controlled from above – though surprisingly substantial degrees of pluralism’. This is more or less the way I saw it while living there. The press in particular was generally lively, with room for a wide spectrum of opinion, including plenty of criticism of the government. But there were definite ‘red lines’ and, as Albrecht explains, what was interesting about Kifaya is that it crossed two of them: the ban on unauthorised demonstrations under the Emergency Law and the ban on explicit criticism of the president and his family. Moreover, it did so with relative impunity: most of its demonstrations, while small (two or three hundred strong) and always massively outnumbered by riot police, weren’t suppressed or broken up but, strangely, tolerated, except when activists tried to demonstrate outside Cairo. Kifaya was essentially an agitation conducted by a dissident wing of the Egyptian elite against Mubarak’s ‘monopoly of power’ and the prospect of his son succeeding him. Although, under the very sober-sounding name of the Egyptian Movement for Change, it attracted a range of reformist viewpoints and published a lengthy shopping list of democratic-sounding aims and demands, the agitation it actually conducted was entirely negative in character.

In investigating Kifaya in 2005 I found that it was dominated by secularist Arab nationalists and Nasserists. Its steering committee included two liberals and the moderate Islamist Abu ’l-Ala Madi, the founder of the Wasat (Centre) Party, as well as two communists. But its co-ordinator and most prominent figure was George Ishaq, a Copt and veteran Arab nationalist, and its other main spokesman was Abdel Halim Qandil, the editor in chief of the Nasserist paper al-Arabi. Both men were impressive in their way: Ishaq, whom I interviewed, struck me as combative and engagingly forthright, and Qandil had shown admirable powers of resistance in enduring particularly thuggish harassment by the regime. In April 2005 I visited the offices of al-Arabi and interviewed its other editor, Abdallah Senawi. In addition to telling me that ‘Kifaya is the natural offspring of al-Arabi and its slogans were first put forward by al-Arabi; most Kifaya activists are Nasserists’ – claims that may have been exaggerated but certainly weren’t unfounded – he frankly outlined the Nasserists’ true vision, which was to look to the army to resolve the ‘Mubarak question’, citing the recent military coup against President Ould Taya of Mauritania as a possible model.

In a report I wrote for the International Crisis Group in 2005, I argued that its exclusively negative message – the lack of a single positive demand or proposal – was a major reason for Kifaya’s failure to gain a wider audience. I came to the conclusion that, as Nasserists or at least Arab nationalists, their real objection to Mubarak was not his authoritarianism but his abandonment, like that of Sadat before him, of the pan-Arab vision that Nasser had proclaimed, and that they were not capable of organising a genuine democratic agitation. But it’s possible that I got cause and effect at least partly back to front and that the refusal to canvas a positive demand that might mobilise ordinary Egyptians reflected a concern to keep the challenge to the Mubaraks within the closed world of the Egyptian elite, calling outsiders to witness the limits to the Mubaraks’ dominion but not wanting to involve the public in the settling of scores that they dreamed about.

The demonstration on 25 January 2011 and the historic drama it inaugurated were made possible by the shockwave of the Tunisian revolution and the emergence since 2008 of a new generation of young middle-class activists enthused by the series of workers’ strikes that began on 6 April that year (the raison d’être of Ahmed Maher’s 6 April Youth Movement) and outraged by the thuggishness that the regime increasingly exhibited, culminating in the murder of Khaled Saeed in June 2010, which prompted Wael Ghoneim to launch his ‘We are all Khaled Saeed’ page on Facebook. But while these developments supplied what had been so evidently absent in 2004 and 2005, a substantial reservoir of politicised energies that made mass demonstrations feasible at last, the degree of politicisation was limited. The young activists knew and could agree on what they didn’t want, but that was all. Kifaya’s negative agenda was what oriented them, whether they were conscious of its pedigree or not, and it was in these circumstances that the Nasserists’ dream of the army resolving the Mubarak question came true.

We shouldn’t reduce 11 February 2011 to a coup. It wasn’t a revolution, but it wasn’t just a coup either. It was a popular rising that lost the initiative because it had no positive agenda or demand. ‘Bread, freedom, social justice’ aren’t political demands, just aspirations and slogans. A social movement might have made these slogans into demands by pressuring the government to take specific steps. But a movement that wants these desiderata provided by government and, at the same time, wants the government to clear off has a coherence problem. The only demand that mattered politically was ‘Mubarak, irhal!’ The army commanders captured the initiative by co-opting that demand to make it work for them. Almost certainly they did so because it had been their own undeclared objective for some time.

What happened on 11 February 2011 was a renewal of the Free Officers’ state. Mubarak’s fall didn’t in itself amount to a revolution because the fundamental framework of the state established by the Free Officers following their coup in 1952 was still in place, as the emergence of the Scaf as the dominant political actor should have made clear to everyone. In this respect, the outcome in Egypt fell far short of that in Tunisia. The Tunisians didn’t merely force the departure of Ben Ali, they went on immediately to abolish the ruling party, the Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique (RCD). The RCD was the evolution of the nationalist party that, founded and led by Habib Bourguiba, had charted the course to independence. It was a genuine ruling party, the source of power and the principal instrument by which the state exercised its hegemony over society. It has had no counterpart in any other North African country. The abolition of the RCD signified the end of what French analysts called the ‘parti-état’. It meant that Tunisian society was heading into terra incognita, constitutionally and politically. But when the Egyptian demonstrators destroyed the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, they weren’t attacking the source of political power in the state, merely the regime’s façade. The army had been the source of political power since 1952. It had been marginalised by Mubarak and so took little part in the day to day business of government, but it hadn’t been displaced by an alternative source of power. And so the events of January and February 2011 that brought it back to centre stage were not a revolution.

The Nasserist tradition of hailing coups as revolutions was inaugurated in July 1952. Critics of the events of 3 July who have refused to endorse the ‘second revolution’ thesis have in some cases described what happened as a counter-revolution, a view with which I sympathise. Given that in June 2012 there was a real electoral contest in which people’s votes really counted, making it seem that a democratic line of development had begun, one can certainly regard 3 July as having destroyed that and therefore as being counter-revolutionary. But there is at least a germ of coherence in the claim made by General Sisi and by Tamarrod that 3 July 2013 restored the fundamental logic of 11 February 2011. We can see this once we accept, however reluctantly, that this logic was the reassertion and reclamation by the army of its historical political primacy and not a real revolution, let alone the revolutionary advent of democracy. But what, more than any other consideration, qualified the logic of the way the army surfed the wave of Tahrir Square to resolve the Mubarak question was the fact that the Muslim Brothers had been in Tahrir Square too and had earned their share of the opening that ensued. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Security forces backed by armored vehicles and helicopters on Monday stormed a town south of Cairo that had been held for over two months by militants loyal to the ousted Islamist president, swiftly taking control despite some resistance from gunmen.

Local activists Adel Shafiq and Ezzat Ibrahim said a joint force of army and police rolled into the town of Dalga, about 300 kilometers (190 miles) south of the Egyptian capital, before dawn on Monday. They said there were about 10 minutes of intense gunfire, followed by sporadic shots as government forces began house-to-house searches to arrest militants.

A total of 88 suspected militants were arrested out of a list of 312 who were wanted, according to security officials in Minya, the province in which Dalga is located.

The Associated Press reports: Egypt’s interior minister escaped an assassination attempt Thursday when a suspected car bomb struck his convoy in a Cairo neighborhood, in the first attack on a senior government official since the country’s Islamist president was toppled in a coup two months ago.

The assassination attempt against Mohammed Ibrahim, who is in charge of the police force, fueled concerns over a possible wave of violence in retaliation for the July 3 ouster of Mohammed Morsi and the ensuing crackdown on Islamists.

The blast wounded at least 22 police and civilian bystanders and heavily damaged three vehicles in Ibrahim’s convoy — though he survived unhurt. Security officials said initial investigations showed it came from a parked car loaded with explosives in the trunk. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe was not yet complete.

The attack echoed the sort of insurgency-style methods that Islamic militants have increasingly used in Egypt’s tumultuous Sinai Peninsula. Last month, militants there attempted a suicide car bombing but were killed by police before carrying it out.

Mada Masr reports: An Administrative Court ordered on Tuesday to stop the broadcasting of a number of satellite channels including Al-Jazeera, local media reported.

Other channels banned from broadcasting include Al-Quds, Al-Yarmouk and Ahrar 25 January channels, the state-run Egynews portal reported.

The court also ordered the closure of their offices.

The cases were raised by Mahmoud Farghali, head of the Social Justice Party against the ministers of investment and information, as well as the heads of the channels. The case claimed that the accused have no licenses to broadcast while they have also been broadcasting false information that are conducive to destabilizing Egypt and causing divisions.

According to Al-Masry Al-Youm, a privately owned daily, permits are issued to channels by the ministers of investment, communication and information technology and information. In a joint statement issued last Thursday, these ministers said that Al-Jazeera has no legal document that justifies its work in Egypt. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi is to stand trial on charges of committing and inciting violence, a state prosecutor has decided in an escalation of the army-backed authorities’ crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood.

The prosecutor, Hesham Barakat, referred Morsi and 14 other Brotherhood members to a Cairo criminal court on charges of “committing acts of violence and inciting killing and thuggery”, the state news agency reported.

The charges relate to violence outside the presidential palace last December, after Morsi ignited protesters’ rage by expanding his powers.

Morsi is also being investigated over his escape from jail during the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak. He is accused of murder and conspiring with the Palestinian group Hamas during the prison break, though no formal charges have been brought in that case.

The Economist reports: Amid the tempest over Syrian chemical weapons, an irony stands out. After two decades of bloody struggle between the West and al-Qaeda’s global jihadist franchise, those bitter adversaries suddenly find themselves fighting on the same side. As Western countries threaten retaliatory strikes against Bashar Assad’s regime for its apparent use of poison gas, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch also promises a “volcano of revenge”.

Just another shake of the pieces in an increasingly baffling Middle East puzzle? No, says the pro-government press in Egypt, where conspiracy theorists have grown ever more strident since the coup in July that toppled Muhammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood. The apparent surprise-realignment over Syria, they claim, simply tears the veil from a long-standing Zionist-American-Muslim Brotherhood plot, exposing a diabolical plan to divide and weaken Israel’s most powerful Arab neighbours, one by one.

First, of course, say the conspiracy theorists, was Iraq, where the crippling result of America’s 2003 invasion is plain. Now Syria, riven by sects and falling to pieces, awaits air strikes set to deliver the coup de grâce. But the big prize for the wicked West in league with al-Qaeda is, beyond a doubt, Egypt.

Here, the cabal of Israeli, Western and Islamist plotters set out to foment sectarian strife, and to install a Muslim Brotherhood government that would divide the country into two, perhaps four, weakened micro-states. Only the Egyptian army’s timely intervention and the strong hand of the police and intelligence services have saved the ancient nation from a dismal fate. But the plotters have not given up: Egypt remains under threat. [Continue reading…]

Max Blumenthal writes: On July 26, a cable news host leaned across his desk, stared into the camera and let his audience in on what he believed was the Obama administration’s deepest, darkest secret. “The issue is not whether Obama is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or not,” he declared. “The issue is that it is a fact that Obama used the help of the Muslim Brotherhood in his administration.”

Reading from notes in a tone of total omniscience, the host began to name names. He cited six figures, all Muslim American activists or intellectuals, accusing them of operating a Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cell inside the White House. They were Mazen Asbahi, Arif Ali Khan, Eboo Patel, Salam Marayati, and Mohamed Elibiary.

“Write these names down,” the host told his audience, “look them up during the break and when I come back let me know if what I say is right or wrong.”

Though he sounded like Glenn Beck or any other Tea Party-style Islamophobe, the host was not American and did not even speak English. He was Yousef El-Hosseini, a popular and famously reactionary personality on the private Egyptian cable network, ONTV. Founded by Egypt’s wealthiest man, Naguib Sawiris, a key financial backer of the forces behind the overthrow of the country’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsi, ONTV has emerged as one of the country’s central instruments for spreading pro-military propaganda.

Since Egyptian security forces commanded by strongman Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi began massacring supporters of Morsi, arresting and disappearing activists in droves, and shutting down unsympathetic news outlets, the Obama administration has ratcheted up its criticism, canceling a joint military maneuver with Egypt while stopping just short of suspending aid. Fearing that external pressure could lead to a crisis in internal morale, Egypt’s military regime has cranked up its Mighty Wurlitzer.

During the past two weeks, pro-military networks like OnTV have begun blending footage of Egypt’s glorious security forces waging a “war on terror” with the kind of conspiratorial screeds familiar to far-right members of Congress like Michele Bachmann and Islamophobia hustlers like Pamela Geller. The propaganda blitz has successfully reinforced the view of many average Egyptians that if Obama cannot respect the heroic Sisi’s war on “terror,” it is because he is caught in the invisible tentacles of the Brotherhood – or perhaps he is an undercover Brother himself. [Continue reading…]

Committee to Protect Journalists: Egyptian security forces continue to detain and harass journalists working for news outlets critical of the military-led government, particularly Al-Jazeera and its affiliates. Journalists also still face physical threats from protesters, as tensions persist between the government and supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

“The Egyptian government is widening its censorship campaign against critical media in Egypt to undermine coverage of Muslim Brotherhood protests,” said Sherif Mansour CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa coordinator. “Like their predecessors, authorities apparently fail to grasp that the attempted suppression of dissenting voices only compounds the dissent.”

The Ministry of Investment on Thursday said it would ban Al-Jazeera Mubashir, the network’s Egyptian affiliate, because it lacked the required legal permits, according to news reports. The statement accused the channel of “spreading lies and rumors damaging to Egyptian national security and unity.” Today, the Ministry of Interior issued a statement saying it had confiscated two broadcasting cars and equipment from Al-Jazeera Mubashir.

On Tuesday, Egyptian security forces detained without charge four staff of Al-Jazeera English, including correspondent Wayne Hay, cameraman Adil Bradlow, and producers Russ Finn and Baher Mohammed, the station reported. Al-Jazeera Arabic correspondent Abdullah al-Shami and Al-Jazeera Mubashir cameraman Mohamed Bader had been arrested earlier this month while covering protests and held under charges of “threatening national security” and “possessing weapons,” respectively. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Having crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian authorities have begun cracking down on other dissenters, sometimes labeling even liberal activists or labor organizers as dangerous Islamists.

Ten days ago, the police arrested two left-leaning Canadians — one of them a filmmaker specializing in highly un-Islamic movies about sexual politics — and implausibly announced that they were members of the Brotherhood, the conservative Islamist group backing the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi. In Suez this month, police and military forces breaking up a steelworkers strike charged that its organizers were part of a Brotherhood plot to destabilize Egypt.

On Saturday, the chief prosecutor ordered an investigation into charges of spying against two prominent activists associated with the progressive April 6 group.

When a journalist with a state newspaper spoke publicly about watching a colleague’s wrongful killing by a soldier, prosecutors appeared to fabricate a crime to punish the journalist. And the police arrested five employees of the religious Web site Islam Today for the crime of describing the military takeover as a coup, security officials said.

Police abuses and politicized prosecutions are hardly new in Egypt, and they did not stop under Mr. Morsi. But since the military takeover last month, some rights activists say, the authorities are acting with a sense of impunity exceeding even the period before the 2011 revolt against Hosni Mubarak. [Continue reading…]

Mark Perry writes: In March 1986, a new and more potent form of hashish began to show up on the streets of Cairo. Called “Bye Bye Rushdie” by the drug lords who peddled it, the hashish was named for recently deposed Interior Minister Ahmed Rushdie, a reformer who had launched a nationwide anti-drug crackdown the previous year. Rushdie had not only declared a war on drugs, he had also sacked ministry officials implicated in the trade, including high-level commanders of Egypt’s Central Security Forces (CSF) — the baton- and shotgun-wielding police who are tasked with keeping public order. And he failed.

On the morning of Feb. 26, thousands of CSF police had stormed the Haram police station and two nearby tourist hotels. The recruits were egged on by their commanders, who had spread a rumor that Rushdie planned to reduce their pay and extend their service. The rebellion spread. Within 24 hours the mutineers had captured most of Giza and loosed a campaign of lawlessness in parts of Cairo. When the CSF captured key installations at Assiut, on the Nile River, police Maj. Gen. Zaki Badr reportedly opened the Assiut channel locks — drowning nearly 3,000 CSF recruits and their leaders.

Stunned by these events, President Hosni Mubarak ordered the military to intervene to restore public order. Tank units took on the mutineers in street battles in Cairo, while Egyptian soldiers stormed three CSF camps — at Shubra, Tora, and Hike-Step. While no one knows for sure, it is estimated that between 4,000 and 6,000 CSF personnel were slaughtered, after which Rushdie was unceremoniously fired by Mubarak and replaced with Badr, renowned for his friendship with the president as well as his vicious anti-Islamist views.

Badr ruthlessly culled the CSF of its mutineers, while taking great care to leave in place the CSF’s most corrupt officials — and the drug trade they controlled. So the appearance of “Bye Bye Rushdie,” was a kind of celebration — a way of telling the Cairo drug culture that things had returned to normal.

Understanding the 1986 mutiny is particularly important now, because of what Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s newly installed interim government describes as a lawless campaign in the Sinai launched by a mix of Bedouin tribesman, criminal families, “jihadist terrorists,” and “al Qaeda-linked fighters.” Western reporters have attempted to get a grip on just who these criminal gangs and jihadists are, but without much luck. “It’s anyone’s guess because no one can get there,” a reporter for a major news daily told me via email last week.

But while American journalists may be confused about what’s happening in the Sinai, a handful of senior officers in the U.S. military have been monitoring the trouble closely. One of them, who serves as an intelligence officer in the Pentagon, told me last week that Sinai troubles are fueled not only by disaffected “Bedouin tribes” but also by “Sinai CSF commanders” intent on guarding the drug and smuggling routes that they continue to control nearly 30 years after Rushdie’s attempted crackdown. “What’s happening in Sinai is serious, and it’s convenient to call it terrorism,” this senior officer says. “But the reality is that’s there’s a little bit more to it. What Sinai shows is that the so-called deep state might not be as deep as we think.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The sounds made lately by curfew violators here are mostly not shouts or gunshots, but the clacking of dice on wooden backgammon boards, the clicking of dominoes on cafe tables crowded with hookahs and grumbling fueled by years of upheaval.

When the conversation turns to politics, the predominant topic is a surprise to American ears: the conspiracy between the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood to destroy Egypt.

However crackpot that view may sound, it is widespread among supporters of the military, which ousted the Muslim Brotherhood’s elected president, Mohamed Morsi, last month.

For journalists who ventured out Saturday night in violation of the curfew, the biggest danger was not from police officers and soldiers at checkpoints, but from angry men with a chip on their shoulders and a grudge against Al Jazeera, the Western press and America.

The “people’s committees,” which sprung up in Egyptian neighborhoods as a counterweight to the Muslim Brotherhood, in theory were disbanded last week. But that did not stop self-appointed guardians in the Zaki Street market of the Maadi neighborhood from repeatedly demanding identity documents, letters of permission and, especially, proof of not being affiliated with Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network, which is reviled because it is owned by Qatar, a strong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

As patrons of the Red Apple Cafe ignored the new 9 p.m. curfew, the presence of an American elicited bountiful conspiracy theories, all of them involving America’s plan to destroy Egypt through its paid Brotherhood confederates. Even innocuous questions about the curfew, which on Saturday was shortened two hours, became ideologically fraught. “What are you doing, why are you asking about curfew?” yelled one man. “It is something internal.” A group of other men surrounding an interpreter, their faces only inches from his, introduced themselves by saying, “We are not thugs,” before proceeding to threaten and berate their interlocutors.

Egyptians have always shrugged off curfews. Cairo’s night life continues pretty much as normal in places like Maadi and especially in poor and working-class areas, where street life provides some relief to people who live in hot apartments.

On Zaki Street, the cafes were full of smokers of shisha, the flavored tobacco burned in water pipes, and of backgammon players. Outside, the driver of a horse-drawn cart full of canisters of cooking gas clanged his cans to announce his presence, and Farouq, a middle-aged man making deliveries to supermarkets with a motorcycle-drawn cart, stopped to talk.

“Americans are with the Muslim Brotherhood,” Farouq stated in a tone suggesting that it was common knowledge. “O.K., you did something good when you killed Osama bin Laden, but now you are with Al Qaeda. You support the terrorists.”

A strong anti-American undercurrent has always existed in Egypt, but such views are more normally associated with radicals and Islamists, and in reaction to American support for Israel.

But now anti-American sentiment is being stoked by an outpouring of dubious pronouncements from both state and private news media. Anti-Americanism has even been given the ultimate imprimatur of state tolerance: billboards. One next door to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for instance, shows President Obama with a beard like those worn by the Brotherhood, alongside a more flattering picture of the clean-shaven military leader, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. [Continue reading…]

Rod Mamudi writes: Some revolutions mutate into war machines, like the the French. Others, by the defiance they represent, provoke war, like the American. Others have conflict visited upon them.

On 22 September 1980, within 18 months of the declaration of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded its nascent neighbour. The result was eight years of war, the most extensive use of chemical weaponry in several generations, and hundreds of thousands dead.

Less easily quantified is the effect the war had on the Islamic revolution. Certainly before the invasion there was little to suggest the revolution would enjoy anything like the longevity it has. In November 1979, the interim government of Mehdi Bazargan had resigned in opposition to the taking of the US embassy hostages.

An attempt to impose Islamic dress for women in March 1980 had sparked widespread protest, eventually leading to a humiliating climbdown for the government. Another such rule was promulgated in July, but this time only for government employees.

The Islamic republic’s first president, Abolhassan Bani Sadr, was falling into increasing conflict with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the Islamisation of universities was being widely challenged. Upward of 1,000 executions had taken place, to increasing outrage. The factions that had achieved revolutionary victory were splintering.

Then the war came. Islamic dress for women was imposed universally the following summer. Bani Sadr was impeached, and all political parties bar the Khomeini-ist Islamic Republican party banned. By the end of 1981, the political leadership that would see out the war had been established: Ali Khamenei as president, Mir Hossein Mousavi as prime minister. Senior clerics who challenged the revolution were stripped of their rank. Executions ran into the tens of thousands. But now there were others to mourn.

The immediate effect of war was twofold: it distracted from the regime’s consolidation and draconian exercise of power; and it provided a rally-around-the-flag effect, which the regime further exploited to facilitate its liquidation of the opposition en masse.

But the most pervasive effect would reveal itself over the course of the war. For all the power such ideas exercise, there are no tombs of the unknown Marxist, or the unknown liberal. These are political schools for the living. The warrior is different. From London to Rome, Arlington to Buenos Aires, Osaka to Baghdad, nations mourn and honour their war dead in a way to which only religion compares. [Continue reading…]

Ursula Lindsey writes: The man across the aisle was reading an article headlined: “No Turning Back and No Surrender Before the Forces of Darkness.” As our plane descended over night-time Cairo, the streets were blurry in the weak city lights, and eerily empty because of a military curfew.

Coming home from a summer vacation on Wednesday evening filled me with dread. It was partly fear for my personal safety. But mostly I was worrying about whether I would recognize the place where I have lived for the past 10 years, or find it hollowed out by the latest viciousness.

I had spent the last week online, reading the essays, news reports and interviews, tweets and blog posts of colleagues and public figures, acquaintances and friends. I looked at the pictures and the videos and saw my Facebook page turn into, as one fellow-blogger put it, “an obituaries page.”

There were no lines at passport control at the Cairo airport. At customs, officials were on the look-out for journalists with satellite up-link equipment. They inspected my husband’s digital recorder. “The Western media are not telling the truth about what’s happening in Egypt,” one official told us.

That view is echoed by presidential advisers and every talking head on state television’s around-the-clock stream of “Egypt Fights Terrorism” coverage. International condemnation of the new Egyptian authorities is the product — so the argument here goes — not of shocking state violence against protesters, but of foreign journalists’ tendentious omission of the context that justifies that violence.

In truth, there has been plenty of criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its failure was made starkly clear on June 30, when millions called for President Mohamed Morsi to step down. The rot of the Islamist movement was on display in the days that led up to the massacre at Rabaa al-Adawiya — when Brotherhood leaders pushed their supporters toward “martyrdom,” and after that Islamists attacked churches and innocent bystanders across the country in retaliation.

With a few shining exceptions, Egypt’s cultural and political elite — which celebrated Morsi’s downfall — has also failed spectacularly.

There was their intellectual failure to recognize two parallel truths: That the Muslim Brotherhood was intolerant and authoritarian, but that cheering its liquidation by the police and the army would bring Egypt no closer to freedom and pluralism.

There was a moral failure: the unwillingness to acknowledge that fellow citizens, however misguided their beliefs or criminal their behavior, still have rights — foremost the right to live. [Continue reading…]

Sherief Gaber writes: “You want to see the bodies? Ok then, here!” the man working at the morgue said, holding me and a friend by the arm and practically pushing us into a humid room filled with bodies, lying on slabs or on the floor and in various states of decay. We had been at the morgue for over an hour, coming from the tear gas and shooting in Mohamed Mahmoud Street to Zeinhom, Cairo’s only morgue, because we had heard that medical examiners were refusing to autopsy the bodies of those shot by the police and military in the clashes.

The man was trying to mock us, to frighten us away, and as the overpowering stench of decay hit us he nearly succeeded. Several days and several further visits to this place later, I would sit in the rubbish-strewn courtyard outside the building listening to the mother of martyr Ahmed Sorour, rocking herself back and forth, saying, “Look at what’s being done to Egypt’s youth, look at what they’re doing to them, the ones thrown in the trash, the ones run over and thrown away, the ones that were crushed by the police trucks.”

Ahmed Sorour’s mother was not the only mother that week of November 2012, as countless other families came in, some having heard of their sons’ fates, others seeking a missing loved one and coming to Zeinhom as a place of grim last resort. It seemed the mothers, the sisters, the aunts, the daughters were always there before the men in the family, disconsolate and powerless not just in the face of death, of murder, but also unable to find any dignity or justice for their lost amid the trash, the bureaucracy, the waste of Zeinhom. All too often, once the men arrived, stern and disapproving fathers or uncles, these women were told to keep quiet, that there would be no autopsy or funeral procession, that they would take their troublemaking sons home and bury them quietly. Like a second death. [Continue reading…]

Bessma Momani writes: During the short-lived rule of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood complained bitterly about the “deep state” (the bureaucracy, military, security services) while liberal-secularists accused the Brotherhood of consolidating power throughout Egypt in order to push through its conservative social policies. In rebutting these claims, each side accused the other of sheer paranoia.

And now, the impending decision on former dictator Hosni Mubarak’s release from prison will only give further political ammunition to the polarizing narrative in Egypt – and ultimately tip the balance in favour of one of these opposing arguments.

For almost a year, liberal-secularists had spoken out against what they saw as the “Brotherhoodization” of Egypt, with the Morsi government and its Muslim Brotherhood supporters exerting greater control over Egyptian state institutions. They pointed to the removal of General Mohamed Tantawi and the appointment of General Abdel Fattah el-Sissi as head of the armed forces; the rushed constitutional process; the appointment of Islamist state governors; and the sacking of the Cairo opera house’s director. Most importantly, liberal-secularists have complained against Brotherhood attacks on the judiciary, which started with the overthrow of the prosecutor-general and lowering the retirement age of judges in order to remove old members of the bench. These decisions have been noted as evidence that the Brotherhood wanted to forever change Egypt into a “Brotherhood dominion.”

Meanwhile, the Morsi government and its Brotherhood backers claimed they were forced to fast-track the constitution last December and were unable to implement reforms and policies because of the “deep state” – where powerful Mubarak-era cronies continued to dominate key Egyptian institutions. Throughout Mr. Morsi’s time in office, his supporters claimed that at every turn, the isolated President was unable to change the country because of fervent resistance from the judiciary, bureaucracy and liberal media. After taking office, they realized that the civilian government was a mere fig leaf for democracy; the real power-brokers were Mubarak-era business elites, the military, security and intelligence forces. [Continue reading…]

Mada Masr reports: A recent poll has suggested that 67 percent of Egyptians are satisfied with the way the Rabea al-Adaweya and Nahda Square sit-ins were dispersed by security forces last week. This left 24 percent displeased with the way the sit-ins were dispersed, and 9 percent saying they cannot judge.

The poll, conducted by Baseera between August 19 and 21, surveyed 1395 people across Egypt’s governorates.

It said that 17 percent of respondents thought the protesters camped at Rabea al-Adaweya and Nahda were peaceful, while 67 percent disagreed.

Only 23 percent of those polled felt security forces used excessive force in dispersing the sit-ins, compared to 65 percent who felt otherwise.

On August 14, security forces forcibly dispersed the two sit-ins, set up six weeks previously by supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi. Six hundred people were killed and thousands injured during the dispersals and in the nationwide clashes they triggered.

The Washington Post reports: Deposed former president Hosni Mubarak was freed from prison Thursday and flown by helicopter to a military hospital in Cairo a day after a court ordered the release of the longtime strongman.

State-run news media said the frail, 85-year-old Mubarak was flown from Cairo’s Tora prison Thursday afternoon aboard a medically equipped helicopter and arrived at the Maadi Military Hospital, where he will remain at his request. Dozens of Mubarak’s supporters rallied outside the prison earlier as they awaited his release from more than two years in detention, the Associated Press reported.

But the court’s ruling to free Mubarak was greeted mostly with indifference here in the Arab world’s largest country — the most stunning sign yet of how outrage over Mubarak’s iron-fisted rule has faded since the Arab Spring revolt that swept him from power. [Continue reading…]