As thousands celebrated the victory of the Freedom and Justice Party—part of the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood organization—in Tahrir Square, just a few blocks away a much more somber mood prevailed.

“Let me enjoy another bottle of beer,” said an old man as he plunked some coins on the counter at a local grocery store. “Soon the Jama’a (Muslim Brotherhood) will ban it.” The store owner, Mr. Ahmad, nodded. “Allah yastur al balad, [May god protect the country]—it will be like Sudan or Pakistan.” Clearly, anxiety and divisions still persist in Egypt. The pharmacists at the nearby El-Ezaby Pharmacy also looked disillusioned. This profession in Egypt is overwhelmingly dominated by the Coptic Christian community, who represent about 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people, but 90 percent of whom voted for Shafik according to exit polls.

Early in June my colleague Bruce Lawrence and I took some of our students to the African And Arab Research Center of Cairo, where a group of Cairo University professors welcomed us to a round-table discussion on the Egyptian elections. A colleague from Cairo University asked the group to help him decide who to vote for. He said he found it difficult to choose between the Muslim Brotherhood, who he said would “cloak the democratic process,” and Shafik, whose victory “would enable a second and more decisive round of the revolution because of his connections to the unpopular ruling military junta, known as the Supreme Council for Army Forces (SCAF).”

Ironically, only Professor Lawrence and I argued for Morsi while the rest, including the visiting students and the left-leaning Cairene professors opted for Shafik. Professor Lawrence cited eloquently the historical significance and momentous need for change in Egypt, and said Egyptians would never know the real Muslim Brotherhood unless they elected him. My hypothetical vote for Morsi was grounded in my overall philosophical belief in risk-taking as the most genuine path to human progress. It was and is still my belief that the economic ills of Egypt warranted assuming that risk. But many people’s justification for voting for Shafik reflected fear of the unknown. Reverting to a pre-revolutionary Egypt seemed to them a safe bet.

There has been wide speculation on the root causes of Shafik’s popularity; namely, how he carried the governorate of Cairo during the election or manage to get 48.3 percent of the vote despite his leadership status during the Mubarak years. This is not a new phenomenon for societies that have experienced radical transformations. Dispatching a message of ‘fear’ in an atmosphere of uncertainty always pays off in attracting politically-excluded minorities and business elites, as well as a large segment of the middle class. Just look at the results of South Africa’s presidential election of 1994, the US presidential elections in 2004, and Russia’s 2012 presidential election.

Shafik mobilized voters with his charismatic personality, savvy communications skills, and assurances of security by variously stating in interviews, speeches, and advertisements:

“I will clear Tahrir from the wandering kids because I love the revolution.”

“Egypt needs a leader and certainly not a sheikh.”

“Mubarak is my ideal person, but I happen not to agree with him.”

“I will give the young Tahriri revolutionaries chocolates as I love their graffiti around the cities.”

“I will bring law and order back to the streets of Egypt in 24 hours.”

There is another dimension to the popularity of Shafik. It’s psychological. He is a general, and Egypt’s modern history is a history of military leadership and war memorials. The four leaders since 1952—Muhammad Naguib, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak are all military figures, and proudly tapped into their roles in Egypt’s wars against Israel to solidify their patriotism and legitimize their leadership. It is no surprise that many of modern Cairo’s bridges and monuments are named after generals and dates of these wars.

Currently, Egypt’s political divisions are particularly evident in Cairo’s public spaces—literally the public squares. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) persisted in occupying Tahrir following the conclusion of the run-off election and managed, in this way, to re-invent Morsi as the symbol of the revolution. Preceding the election on June 12, the headline in the MB’s official newspaper Freedom and Justice introduced Morsi’s win in overseas voting as the “candidate of the revolution [who] leads throughout the Continents of the Globe.” Various groups affiliated with the Occupy Tahrir movement, mostly organized and transported by the Muslim Brotherhood, have gathered in Tahrir since the last day of the run-off campaign on June 15 and are now calling for the removal of the military Amended Constitutional Declaration, re-establishment of the dissolved parliament, and the immediate release of all political detainees.

Meanwhile pro-Shafik groups are looking for alternative physical spaces to express their views and make their voices heard. On the day of Morsi’s swearing-in ceremony, they called for a million man march of ‘Egypt above all’ in Nasr City at the Minassa Podium—where President Sadat was gunned down in 1981 during an annual victory parade by an Islamist fanatic and military infiltrator. Gathering in the Minassa and sometimes numbering in the thousands, these groups are calling for a civilian state and dissolution of the MB organization—this latter demand is in the hands of the Egyptian courts. And following Morsi’s presidential decree to re-establish the Parliament on July 8, they accused him of treason for not upholding his oath of office. While fewer women than ever before are gathering in Tahrir Square, pro-Shafik groups have been putting women at the forefront, displaying nationalistic songs and pro-military signs.

I am glad that the Egyptian people have chosen courage over fear, progress over retreat; and in the words of the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany in Al-Misri Alyawm newspaper on June 25, “the Egyptian revolution has achieved a great victory in dropping Shafik and electing Morsi.” But Morsi’s victory cannot be seen as a total mandate. The difference was only 883 thousand votes. Votes from the Egyptian diaspora might have put Morsi over the top. While Egyptians at home feel the weight and the pain of the continued revolution, the increase of crime and perturbance in their daily life, those who emigrated overseas might have voted for Morsi for other reasons. It can be argued that many votes for Morsi (in Egypt and from the diaspora) were votes against Mubarak rather than votes for the Muslim Brotherhood.

There is a beautiful painting on the wall of the American University in Cairo (see above)—“Tahrir Square” by the Egyptian revolutionary artist Omar Picasso in which Mubarak’s face is merged with the face of Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of SCAF, alongside the faces of Amr Moussa, the former Presidential candidate and former secretary general of the Arab League, and Shafik. Written beneath their colorful faces are the words of an Egyptian proverb, “He who left son behind is not gone yet.”

Mustafa Kamel, an Egyptian writer whose book, The Final Exit, was seen as predicting the revolt against Mubarak, echoes this view in our discussion of the matter. He said, “Shafik’s victory would have been shameful for all Egyptians, erasing all sacrifices made in the name of the revolution.”

In analyzing Morsi’s victory, however, it is not an overstatement to say that the MB’s marginal victory is worrisome for its leadership. It reflects diminishing popularity, narrowing constituencies, and a problematic connection to the young liberal revolutionaries.  The MB won roughly over 10 million votes in the November parliamentary election, carrying 37.5 seats of the total 508 parliamentary seats. The more conservative Islamist Salafi-affiliated candidates won roughly over 7 million votes, accounting for 27.8 seats. During the first round of the presidential elections the MB garnered 5,553,097 votes; representing only 25.30 percent of the 49 percent of voters who turned out for the poll, and only roughly 300 thousand votes ahead of Shafik. The populist revolutionary Hamdeen Sabahi, the favored candidate of the young revolutionaries, came in third place with 21.60 percent of the votes. Abd al-Moneim Abul Futuh, a more liberal Islamist, came in fourth with 17.93 percent of the votes. Numerically speaking, this means the MB lost fifty percent of those who had supported them in the parliamentary elections. In the presidential run-off, the MB’s candidate Morsi got less than a million votes more than Shafik, despite the direct support they got from many revolutionary groups, Salafi party sympathizers, and Futuh supporters. In a July 5 interview with the editor of Egyptian daily al-Shrooq newspaper, the visiting spiritual leader of Tunisia’s ruling Islamist Nahda party, Rashid al-Ghannushi, reminded the Egyptian public that Morsi has not won a political mandate, and that he should therefore rule through a unity government.

Morsi’s fist week in office demonstrates his acceptance of this limited mandate, but also his disposition to challenge the military establishment. He has so far been navigating it well. He has tackled major obstacles between the MB and other segments of civil society groups as well as the military junta. While the military establishment insisted in the Amended Constitutional Declaration of July 17 that the elected president must take the oath before the High Constitutional Court, civil society groups and the MB insisted on bringing members of the dissolved parliament to Tahrir Square and having the President take the oath before them. He avoided a clash by visiting Tahrir on Friday, June 29 and giving a nationally televised speech in which he pledged to protect the Constitution, defend the country, and elevate the Egyptian people’s power above all institutions in society. On Saturday, June 30, he paid a visit to the High Constitutional Court (HCC), where he took the oath before 18 black-robed judges of the HCC, chaired by Farouk Sultan, who, a few days earlier, was depicted by the Freedom and Justice newspaper as “corrupt felool, a reminiscent of the Mubarak era.” Further, Morsi thanked the HCC judges for their “role in fostering democracy in the country.” Two hours later, he was at Cairo University, where he met with the leading military junta, thanking them for their sacrifices and dedication to Egypt. In a nationalistic setting, interrupted by an outpouring of statements that “the people and the army are one hand,” he promised to support the army against external enemies morally and financially, praising the armed forces. An hour later, he was part of a military parade, signaling the final transfer of power.

Beyond these official ceremonies, Morsi’s domestic political personality is emerging while his regional intentions are not completely clear. On the domestic front, he is presenting himself as a populist Muslim leader, not a revolutionary, and so far, not exactly a nationalist either.

His religious image also stands in clear contrast to the secular Mubarak. He has memorized the entire Quran, which is a highly respected trait in traditional Muslim societies. He cites Quranic verses in all his speeches, projecting Egypt as a Muslim nation, who will support “Palestine and the Syrian people.” He chose to attend Friday prayer at the Al-Azhar grand mosque, and didn’t allow his security guards to disturb the crowd.

He has requested that his photos not adorn government buildings, and encouraged his supporters to give money to charity instead of spending it on newspaper ads congratulating him on his victory.

He cried at imam Qusi’s Friday sermon on June 29, when the imam pointed out to him that he must fear God and act like Umar Ibn Khattab, the second Caliph after prophet Muhammad, who many Muslim scholars idealize as the symbol of a just ruler.

Many journalists have poked fun at Morsi’s way of talking as being too religiously oriented, far from the norm of the promised non-religious state. On July 2, Emad Abdullatif of the al Tahrir daily newspaper wrote that “Morsi’s Tahrir speech disenfranchised non-Muslim Egyptians.” In the speech, Morsi used a traditional Muslim figure of speech: “I have been elected over you, but I am not better than you.” He demonstrated that he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest as a sign of his connection to the people on the street. When confronted by a group Egypt’s newspaper editors on June 28 on the imperatives of resigning from the MB if he is to be the leader of all Egyptians, he responded to the veteran journalist, Amr Hamzawy, that his resignation “was already done.”

Not all Morsi’s days are so far consecrated in rhetorical speculations of his intention. There are systematic efforts to appear as a pragmatic and a get-the-job-done leader. On one hand, he has adopted a 100-day project of addressing the most pressing needs in ordinary people’s life: traffic problems, police and security issues, bread and fuel crises, etc. On the other hand, he has surprised the Egyptian public on July 8 by issuing a presidential decree ordering the return of the dissolved parliament, which is generally perceived by most Egyptian newspapers as defiant towards both HCC and SCAF. SCAF might not challenge the decree directly, but the HCC has, and the parliament, which has been very unpopular among Egyptians except with Islamist supporters, could become irrelevant as a respectful branch of government, and this could potentially weaken his presidency.

Regional figures see Morsi another way. Dubai’s top police chief Dahi Khalfan responded to his victory by tweeting that “the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood is a doom and disaster for the Egyptians, the Arab and the Muslim nation…and he will come to us crawling.”

In a June 30 statement, widely understood to be addressing his anxious Gulf neighbors, Morsi said “Egypt will not export its revolution” and “Arab national security is Egypt’s priority.” A more engaging step toward the monarchies of the Gulf was declared on July 8 that the President’s first international trip would be to Saudi Arabia. This is a clear contrast to President Nasser, whose presidency never masked his ambition in exporting his revolution.

Turkey’s foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, was the first non-Arab statesperson to visit the President. He informed many Egyptian newspapers on July 5 that, “he has a blank paper for the President to list his needs from Turkey.” Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan already contacted Morsi on Sunday, June 24 to express his congratulations. Islamists of the Arab Spring often speculate their eagerness to replicate the Turkish model of democracy. Morsi alluded to honoring the peace treaty with Israel, but refused to answer Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s phone call despite Netanyahu’s letter congratulating him on his historic victory. However, he accepted a phone call from the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but made no promise to accept his invitation to visit Iran. This is a complete departure from the legacies of Sadat and Mubarak, whose leaning toward Washington and Israel was equally replicated in their aloofness from Tehran.

As Morsi settles into the presidency, major questions still lurk in the minds of many Egyptians: What type of leader will he be? What will be his relationship with the military establishment? How will he address the issues of poverty and corruption? Will Egypt duplicate Turkey’s Islamist model of business-oriented government? Will it look like Pakistan’s ever-failing state’s institutions? Or will it curve its own model of Islamo-democratic state? As the Arabs say, Allah a’alam—only God knows.

For more on the Egyptian elections, please read our recent off the cuff discussion.—ed.

The first reality to appreciate is that, despite worries about the incompatibility of Islam and democracy, over 500 million Muslims live in Muslim majority countries that are commonly classified as democracies: Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Senegal, Mali and Albania. But, for almost forty years, not a single Arab majority country has been classified as a democracy. Thus, if Arab-majority Egypt and Tunisia become democracies, it would thus be of immense importance for the Arab world and, indeed, for world affairs.

I believe Tunisia’s chances of becoming a democracy before the year ends are surprisingly good. This is for six, largely political, reasons. Most importantly, the military is not complicating the transition to democracy.  Tunisia not only has a small military of only about 36,000 men, but since independence, in 1956, the country has been led by two party-based non-democratic leaders who strove to keep the military out of politics.

Also, the current civilian-led interim government engages in at least some interactive negotiations about the new democratic rules of the game with virtually all the major new actors who generated the revolution and who will contest the elections.

Tunisia’s interim government has announced that elections for a Constituent Assembly will be held on July 24, 2011, and, crucially, that as soon as the votes are counted, it will step down.

The newly elected Constituent Assembly will, as in the classic democratic transitions of Spain and India, immediately have the responsibility of forming the government.

The Constituent Assembly will be free to choose a presidential, semi-presidential, or a parliamentary system. A consensus is emerging among political leaders to choose the same system for which the ten post-communist countries that have been admitted to the European Union opted, parliamentarianism.

Finally, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who leads the largest Muslim-inspired political party, Al Nahda, went out of his way to tell me that he has signed an agreement with some secular parties that he will not try to change Tunisia’s women-friendly family code, the best in the Arab world. In the new democratic environment, while many party leaders do not fully trust Ghannouchi, they think the political costs to Al Nahda of trying to impose an Islamic state would be too great to risk. They also increasingly think the most democratically effective policy of secular parties toward Al Nahda is accommodation, not exclusion.

Democratization in Egypt in the long term is probable, but it does not share the especially favorable conditions that we find in Tunisia. One of the biggest differences between the two countries is that every president of Egypt since 1952 has been a military officer. Post-Mubarak, the interim government, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is led by eighteen generals.

These generals unilaterally issue statements about what they see as the rules of the game for future elections. Key civil and political society actors repeatedly told me that they had little access to, and almost no politically serious interactive negotiations with, SCAF. The recent clashes on Tahrir Square, on April 9-10, 2011, which lead to the deaths of two protesters, were the most serious to date between the young activists and the Army. The distance between the Army and young democratic activists grew further on April 11, when the first blogger since the fall of Mubarak was sentenced to prison by a military court for criticizing the military.

In SCAF’s March 30, 2011, Constitutional Declaration it became absolutely clear that, unlike Tunisia, the parliament to be elected in September 2011 will not form a government. Articles 56 and 61 stipulate that SCAF will retain a broad range of executive powers until a president is elected.   Instead of the Parliament itself acting as the sovereign body to write a constitution, Article 60 mandates that the parliament is to “elect a 100-member constituent assembly.” The big questions now are how many non-elected outside experts will in fact be in this “constituent assembly,” and how they will actually arrive there.

What is U.S. policy toward Egypt at this crucial time?  The U.S. government of course supports the long-term goal of democracy. But the priorities it tends to stress are maintaining good relations with the army, which currently receives 1.3 of the 1.5 billion dollars of U.S. aid; working with the military to maintain the status quo, especially the treaty between Egypt and Israel; and, finally, avoiding a hijacking of the revolution by fundamentalists. I see such a hijacking as improbable given the growing diversification of Muslim identities in the new context of political freedoms,  secular parties’ efforts to keep the Muslim Brotherhood inside electoral politics, and the profiles of the three leading candidates in the eventual presidential elections, none of whom want the Egyptian Revolution to be captured.

Are the defensive goals of the U.S. up to the opportunities of this historic moment?  For new approaches toward an Israeli- Palestinian peace, like the Israeli Peace Initiative proposed two weeks ago by former heads of the Israeli Defense Force, Mossad, and Shin Bet? For working with the European Union to help Egypt and Tunisia improve their economies and consolidate democracy the way the U.S. did for Europe after WWII, or as the Europeans did for post-communist countries after the fall of the wall?  I am convinced that we can, and should, do better.

I have been particularly interested in how the U.S. has been discussed in relation to the revolution. From my observations of events and numerous discussions with others, Egypt’s relationship with the U.S appears, in some ways, to be absent from most of the heated discussions going on today. But upon closer examination, this relationship has been present in the revolution, not only during and after the peak of events—from January 25 to February 11—but also, I would suggest, in the very anti-imperialist underpinnings of the revolution, a revolution that the mainstream American media has miscast as one generated purely internally.

The making of the Egyptian revolution

There is a joke among Egyptian bloggers, that “we Egyptians are the ones who have decided upon a time to make a revolution.” In most media circles, the Egyptian revolution is portrayed as the eighteen days that changed Egypt. The joke, like this portrayal, expresses, of course, a caricatural and ahistorical image of the revolution. Against this perspective, both Hossam El-Hamalway and Rabab ElMahdi argue that the Egyptian revolution has, in fact, been in the making for the past ten years. Many activists have suggested that we cannot explain this revolution unless we look closely at the different waves of protests that have occurred over the last decade. There have been three such waves. The first, which can be characterized as anti-Israeli and anti-imperialist, took place in 2000 and 2003, beginning with mass demonstrations in September 2000, in solidarity with Palestinians during the second intifada, and continuing in 2003, with mass protests against the Anglo-American war. These two major protests were the first in decades and, indeed, the first ever to be staged under Mubarak. (The previous instance was in 1977, with the “bread uprising,” protesting Sadat’s decision to raise the prices of basic food.) A famous slogan that began to circulate during the 2000 demonstration said: “Mubarak is like Sharon: both have many faces.” Young protestors in the streets questioned why the police were attacking them for demonstrating solidarity with Palestinians; they asked, “Are you with us or with the Israeli occupation?” In 2003, protestors were even bolder, chanting: “O’ Mubarak, you coward, you are an agent of America,” in criticism of his complicit role in the Anglo-American war of 2003. Of course, anti-imperialist sentiment in Egypt dates back to the era of Nasser’s era and did not suddenly emerge out of nowhere in 2000 and 2003. In these protests, protesters chanted, “Nasser said before, America is about colonialism.” Also, an activist friend told me that the slogan, “O’ Mubarak, you coward, you are an agent of America” appeared first aimed at Sadat, in opposition to his signing of the Peace Accord with Israel, and then was only modified for Mubarak.

These anti-imperialist and anti-Israeli-occupation sentiments provided a foundation, so to speak, for later rounds of pro-democratic protest. When these early mass protests were met by the repressive police apparatus, many activists from different political forces realized that the issue of empire could not be discussed and dealt with separately from the issue of democracy.

The second wave of protests took place unevenly between 2005 and the outbreak of revolution in 2011. During that time an Egyptian movement for change, Kefayya (Enough), a coalition of different political groups, ranging from Islamists to Marxists, took shape and began to call and protest for democratic reforms. In 2005, pro-democracy activists protested in solidarity with Egyptian judges who were organizing sit-ins calling for democracy and independence of the judiciary. Over the next five years, pro-democracy activists organized numerous sit-ins and protests throughout Egypt and suffered police attacks, harassment, arrest, and prosecution. Then, in 2010, Mohamed Elbaradie, the former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and other activists formed the National Association for Change, which called for radical democratic reform and an end to the state of emergency that had been in effect since 1981.

But from 2006 to 2011, there was also another simultaneous wave of mobilization, which has generally been underrepresented in the Egyptian media, but which has had major significance for human rights and labor activists. This wave consisted of a series of labor strikes and sit-ins described by many unionists and leftists in Egypt as the longest and strongest wave of worker protest since the end of World War II. For example, in December 2006, around 27,000 workers at Egypt’s largest state-owned factory, Al-Mahala Al-Kobra Misr Spinning and Weaving, went on strike after learning that their annual bonus had been cut. Not only was the strike successful in reinstating the bonuses, but it also inspired approximately 104,000 other textile workers across the country to strike for the same demands. In 2008, despite repressive laws banning independent unions, property tax collectors formed an independent union, outside the state-backed and security apparatus-connected Egyptian Federation of Labor Unions, after staging an eleven-day sit-in at the Egyptian Cabinet in December 2007. In April 2008, Al-Mahala city witnessed a mass protest over bread prices. The protest was described by El-Hamalawy as a mini-revolt, because the protesters included not only workers but members of the general public as well, and it ended with protesters tearing down a billboard of Mubarak’s image. Unionists and experts on labor affairs in Egypt estimate that there have been an average of 500 yearly labor protests between 2007 and 2010. The demands of these protests have always centered on social justice and the critique of neo-liberal economic policies. For this reason, I refer to this third wave of protest as the “social justice” wave.

The activists with whom I have spoken in the last three weeks continue to debate which of these waves can be described as the true rehearsal for the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Regardless, they agree that all three waves were significant exercises in preparing and inspiring the youth, activists and non-activists alike, to begin their historic protest on January 25, 2011. In fact, the three waves are not separate. In January 2010, demonstrations took place against Mubarak’s plan to build an underground iron wall between Egypt and Gaza, which activists and political forces saw as further enforcing the siege on Gazans. These demonstrations included banners with slogans such as “Down with the Wall, Down with Mubarak.” The collective impact of the three waves of protest is that Mubarak had become a symbol, not only of dictatorship and attacks on workers and the poor, but also of complicity with imperial interests in the region. Despite some liberal tendencies in Egypt—and within Western media—to portray the protests of the last decade as having been motivated solely by pro-democracy and anti-corruption activism, a more accurate understanding of Egyptians’ protests during this period needs both to recognize the impact of each of these three waves and to understand their connection.

Anti-imperialism in the protest

Though the Egyptian revolution’s most visible mottos focused mainly on democracy, human dignity, and social justice, anti-imperial sentiment was also present in Tahrir Square and as an underlying pillar of the revolution. During the eighteen days of protest, Egyptian analysts emphasized the American administration’s efforts to walk a fine balance between protecting its ally (Mubarak) and claiming its commitment to and respect for the aspirations of the protesting Egyptians. Such efforts at balance were critiqued as another example of America’s imperial pragmatism. Many activists mocked the Egyptian media and the Arabic media in general for their overblown interest in analyzing the U.S. stance. Protesters saw the conflict as one between them and Mubarak, and as about the power of the people, not the stance of the U.S. Indeed, for many protestors, focusing on the U.S. position was only a distraction. Many protesters pointed out that the U.S. administration not only failed to recognize Mubarak’s rule as a dictatorial regime but had also supported the regime’s rigged election and repressive apparatus. American calls for restraint and reform once the revolution began were seen as disrespectful of protestors’ demands; some told me that reform meant nothing and would only give the dictator more room to maneuver and to attack them. “Unarmed protestors,” they said, “and a repressive regime are not equal sides; there is not an equal need for restraint! Pictures of American-made tear gas canisters used in attacks on protesters were circulated online, as were two sentences, particularly amongst Egyptian activists on Twitter and Facebook: “America, we do not hate you because of your freedom, but we hate you because you hate our freedom,” and, “America, you cannot be imperial and claim [to be] promoting democracy at the same time.”

On the ground, protesters’ signs also included anti-imperialist mottos. I saw many banners in which Mubarak was described as a traitor or an agent of America or of imperialism. Sometimes, banners included epithets such as “Gaza’s jailer,” in reference to Mubarak’s role in blocking aid to the Gaza Strip. When Mubarak, in his second speech, proposed to delegate part of his authority to Egyptian chief spy, Omar Suleiman, protesters waved banners denouncing Suleiman’s role in the Gaza siege and in pressuring Palestinians to participate in the so-called peace process. One of the slogans used by many protesters said, “Like Mubarak, we do not accept Suleiman; both are agents of the U.S.” Anti-torture activists in Egypt widely circulated reports about Suleiman’s role in U.S. extraordinary renditions in the context of the War on Terror. Sometimes protestors were very creative in linking economic issues with Mubarak’s role as a protector of U.S. interests in the region—a street vender selling tissues came to protest carrying a sign that read, “Leave, you agent! Under your rule, I survive by selling tissues.”

The irony is that during the revolution, the government-backed media used an accusatory discourse to describe the demonstrators, portraying them as infiltrators and agents of foreign countries, including the U.S. The government-owned television network aired stories—later identified as fabrications—that claimed that demonstrators were trained outside Egypt, and that each was paid $100 (the equivalent of 590 Egyptian pounds) by European and American agents to create chaos and damage the stability of the country. Protesters and independent media responded that the claim lacked any foundation and pointed out that the U.S. actually had no interest of getting rid of Mubarak, who served as one of the main watchdogs of U.S. imperialism in the region. (The government-owned media continued these stories in the last ten days of the protest, but expanded the campaign to suggest that protesters were connected with Hezbollah, Hamas and the Qatari government and Al-Jazeera!) It is important to note that such sensationalist anti-demonstrator stories were spread “deliberately” in the context of the Internet blackout in Egypt, which lasted five days, during which time cell-phone communications were also cut off.

And now . . .

The future of Egyptian-U.S. relations is not at the forefront of the public political agenda today. But many activists and writers have started to talk about changing Egyptian diplomacy and the role of Egypt in the region, moving towards greater autonomy. Activists, in particular, have emphasized Egypt’s need to end its role as a U.S. client state. The Coalition of the Youth for the Revolution declined an invitation to meet U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton when she was in Egypt on March 15, 2011. The main reason for their decision was the U.S.’s support for Mubarak over the last thirty years, and its support of repressive regimes in the region generally. One of the leaders of the Coalition told me, “Only now is the U.S. acting as supportive of our revolution; before, it stood against our demands through its support for Mubarak.”

Some activists have told me that they have concerns about a potential deal between the leaders of the Egyptian army—most of them U.S.-trained—and the U.S. The core of the deal, they say, provides that the U.S. continue its aid to Egypt, and to the Egyptian army in particular, as long as army leaders ensure that the transition of power in Egypt is done in such a way that the Egypt-U.S. partnership is not affected. Not only activists, but also several Egyptian analysts, have suggested that Egypt should revisit the question of U.S. aid. Some representatives from the youth of the revolution, in their meeting with Senator John Kerry, criticized Kerry’s suggestion that Egypt needs U.S. aid in the transitional period to improve its economy. Representatives of the youth told Kerry, we do not want aid that deters Egypt’s independence. Of course, one cannot speculate about the future of the U.S.-Egypt relationship based on anti-imperialist sentiments on the streets alone, and perhaps we should wait to see how the transitional period unfolds. This period will last until the Supreme Council of the Army, which as a collective body holds the authorities of the President and the Parliament, ends with the election of a new Parliament and President.

For the past thirty years, the jihadi movement has crested on a wave of popular unrest and been propelled by the moral legitimacy given by their violent interpretation of the Muslim notion of ethical struggle. Though jihadi activists such as those associated with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network have been regarded from outside the region simply as immoral terrorists, much of their popularity within the Islamic world has been their moral appeal.

The jihadi ideology has had two dimensions, political and ethical. The political attraction was the alleged necessity of violence to end despotic regimes. Before the protests at Tahrir Square that toppled the Mubarak regime last month, many Egyptian activists were convinced that bloodshed was the only strategy that would work against such a ruthless dictator. They imagined that their acts of terrorism—against the regime and against the “far enemy” of America that they assumed was propping up the Mubarak system—would eventually lead to a massive revolt that would bring the dictatorship to an end.

They also thought that only the jihadi ideology of cosmic warfare—based on Muslim history and Qur’anic verses—provided the moral legitimacy for the struggle. Ideologists such as Abd al-Salam Farad and  Ayman al-Zawahiri have written as if violent struggle—including ruthless attacks of terrorism on civilian populations—was the only form of struggle that was advocated by Islam.

These assumptions have been proven wrong. The dramatic popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Islamic world in recent weeks have demonstrated that protests that have been nonviolent in their inception (and have become violent only in response to bloody attempts to repress them) have been far more effective, and supported with a more widespread moral and spiritual consensus.

What brought down the tyrants in Egypt and Tunisia, as it turned out, was about as far from jihad as one could imagine. It was a series of massive nonviolent movements of largely middle-class and relatively young professionals who organized their protests through Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of electronic social networking. No doubt the passivity of the Egyptian military was also a critical factor; the army did not forcibly resist the protests, as the military has in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Libya.

Yet one cannot underestimate the importance of Tahrir Square, and similar protests in Alexandria and throughout Egypt. Clearly, they constituted the catalyst for change. Perhaps not since the peaceful overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines has the world seen such a dramatic demonstration of the power of nonviolent resistance. The protests were not the weapons of jihad, nor were the voices of opposition the strident language of Islamist extremism.

There was also a religious element to the protests. The peak moments came after Friday prayers, when sympathetic mullahs would urge the faithful into joining the protest as a religious duty. But theirs was not the divisive, hateful voice of jihadi rhetoric. In a remarkable moment when the Muslim protesters were trying to conduct their prayers in the Square and Mubarak’s thugs tried to attack them as they prayed, a cordon of Egyptian Coptic Christians who had joined the protests circled around their Muslim compatriots, shielding them. Later a phalanx of Muslim protesters protected their Christian comrades as they worshiped in the public square, an urban intersection that was for that time transformed into a massive interfaith sanctuary.

The religiosity of Tahrir Square is far from the religion of radical jihad. Rather than separating Muslim from non-Muslim, and Sunni from Shi’a, the symbols that were raised on impromptu placards in Tahrir Square were emblems of interfaith cooperation; they showed the cross of Coptic Christians together with the crescent of Egypt’s Muslims in a united religious front against autocracy.

Imagine what Osama bin Laden must have made of all of this as news trickled into the cave or cellar or whatever lair in which he is hiding. Imagine even more the puzzled chagrin of someone like bin Laden’s primary lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian medical doctor who joined the most extreme Islamist jihadi movement years ago, convinced that only violent guerrilla warfare would topple someone like Mubarak.

Tahrir Square clearly showed that Zawahiri was wrong. Does this mean that al Qaeda is finished, and the radical struggles of jihad will fizzle into history?

Perhaps, in part. It is unlikely, however, that the al Qaeda organization, such as it is, will be abandoned. The small group of people who comprise the inner circle of the bin Laden organization will no doubt harden its resolve. Like the followers of millenarian movements who become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs when the prophesied end of the world does not terminate on schedule, the true believers of al Qaeda will soldier on. They may become more extreme in their rhetoric, more desperate in using acts of terrorism to draw attention to themselves and their increasingly impossible view of the world. Yet the al Qaeda inner circle has never been large, and its organization—though capable of conducting horrible acts of terrorism—has never been a consistent and widespread threat.

So, although the hardened activists associated with al Qaeda will linger on, the fate of the global jihadi ideology—or rather the world view of cosmic war that the jihadi rhetoric promoted—is a different matter. This view of the world as a tangle of sacred warfare has been an exciting and alluring image among a large number of mostly young and largely male Muslims around the world for over a decade. It is an image that was brought to dramatic attention by the September 11, 2001, attacks, and stimulated by the perception that U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were wars against Islam. This jihadi vision of sacred warfare was propagated by the internet, through postings in chat rooms and the dissemination of YouTube types of videos showing graphic acts of U.S. military destruction in Islamic countries and calling on the faithful to respond.

Some did respond, and the response was a series of attacks during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These global jihad attacks—in Madrid, London, Bali, Jakarta, Mumbai, and elsewhere—were not orchestrated by any single terrorist command. Some were connected with sophisticated regional organizations, but they were not in any direct sense al Qaeda-conducted. But they were all united by the jihadi vision, a vision that provided the moral and strategic legitimation for the terrorist attacks. The jihadi image of warfare provided the moral justification by linking real acts of violence in the world with the divine struggle between the forces of good and evil, order and disorder, that lies within the mythology and symbolism of every religious tradition, including Islam. And the jihadi idea of cosmic war provided a strategic legimitization of violence by the implicit promise—as a leader of Hamas once told me—that if one is fighting God’s war, one can never lose. God always wins.

Yet, as Tahrir Square showed, God does not always have to fight, at least not in the terrorist ways that the jihadi warriors imagined. In a couple of weeks of protests, the peaceful resistors demonstrated the moral and strategic legitimacy of nonviolent struggle. And they succeeded, where years of jihadi bloodshed had not produced a single political change.

This is a profound anti-jihadi lesson, and the significance of Tahrir Square has quickly spread around the world. It has ignited similar nonviolent protests elsewhere in the Middle East, and it may also have altered the thinking of activists in other cultures as well. Intense discussion is underway in Palestine, where the Hamas-dominated strategy of strategic violence has been largely counterproductive; will a new nonviolent and non-extremist movement of young educated Palestinian professionals create a different kind of impetus for change in their region of the Middle East?

The rise of a new nonviolent populism in the Middle East may seriously undercut the viability of the jihadi image of violent social change. On the other hand, a significant number of failures of nonviolent resistance may lead to a violent backlash once again. Not all protests will end like Tunisia and Egypt. Others will be ruthlessly crushed, as was the Green Revolution in Iran, in 2009. The current protests in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Libya face an uncertain end. Failure of nonviolent revolution has, in the past, been the occasion for renewed acts of violence.

So the jihadi warriors may again have their day. For the moment, however, Tahrir Square has challenged both the strategic value and the moral legitimacy of the jihadi stance. The legion of young Muslim activists around the world have received a new standard for challenging the old order, and a new form of protest, one that discredits terrorism as the easy and ineffective path and chooses the tough and profitable road of nonviolence.

But it behooves us to think more deeply about what this regional stability is understood to consist in. It is clearly understood to include the maintenance of existing treaties and strategic military arrangements with Israel. And this is interesting, because Israel defines itself as a religious state. So, we have a situation in which Egypt’s becoming a secular democracy is thought to assure its continued diplomatic and military commitments to a religious state. One might object here that Israel is not a religious state and that it does not define itself in that way. This objection would be partly correct: Israel’s secular and religious identity constitutes a continual ambiguity, one with which it continues to struggle internally. Thus, although much of the population defines itself as secular, explicitly self-identified religious groups exert enormous power in government and society, well out of proportion to their actual numbers. This creates enormous controversy over central issues, such as the accepted criteria for deciding whether or not one is Jewish. Moreover, like Egypt, Israel’s personal status law is heavily rooted in religious law. Israeli religious authorities have so far successfully resisted the institution of civil marriage—a situation that forces non-religious couples in the country to choose options that provide them with fewer rights and guarantees. Unlike Egypt, however, Israel’s profound secular-religious ambiguities are not seen to threaten the existing treaties and security arrangements upon which regional stability is thought to rest. We might ask why this is so.

It is also unclear why it is assumed that if Egypt becomes a secular democratic state, it would be necessarily sympathetic to Israel. Egypt’s commitment to secular democratic ideals might well lead Egypt to distance itself from Israel on account of Israel’s ambiguous religious-secular character. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia maintain strategic relationships with Israel, but while Turkey is a country that imposes a particular brand of secularism on its people, Saudi Arabia is one in which a narrow version of Islam is imposed on the population. Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s Islamic character is not seen as a threat to the region’s stability, even though its Wahhabism has been cast by some (largely lay) commentators as an ideological source of terror.

These are some of the ways in which our discourses on the secular and the religious so often twist and turn, get entangled in, and finally confound, each other. What gets lost, however, in all of the talk of regional stability and of secularity and religiosity is the crucial issue of Palestine. Few have emphasized this link in the regional chain, with the exception of Rashid Khalidi, who, thankfully, continues to remind us of it. What matters here is not whether Egypt, or even Israel, is a secular or a religious state. What matters is how Israel treats—or continually mistreats—the Palestinians, denying them their internationally agreed upon rights, and whether Egypt will continue to support this ongoing mistreatment. Here, it is important to note that the repression of the last thirty years in Egypt has been allowed to grow unhindered—both tolerated and supported—by the U.S., precisely because of its interest in maintaining those political and strategic arrangements with Israel that enable the continual and increasing violation of Palestinian rights. And it is this repression that Egyptians have so powerfully protested against.

In the end, it may be doubted whether the regional stability that so many are concerned about, and which Egypt is hoped to help sustain, can really be counted as stability. After all, this “stability” has allowed both Israel and the U.S. to conduct a number of aggressive wars throughout the region, from Lebanon to Gaza to Iraq. If commentators are genuinely concerned with democracy in Egypt and stability in the Middle East, they should fear less the Muslim Brothers and more the U.S. funding and regional alliances that aim to enact American foreign policy in the region, and which have choked off democratic possibilities for so long.

Having made these points, important for our considerations of the present moment, I would like now to turn to some more broadly theoretical reflections concerning what the events in Egypt might teach us about questions of secularity and religiosity more generally.

The question of whether Egypt is or will be a secular or a religious state has been asked for a long time, because of both the country’s strategic geopolitical location and the genuine religious-political ambiguities that it exhibits. It is therefore a question that I have not been able to avoid in my own research. However, I have tried to approach it not by looking at the norms that secularism imposes but rather the questions that it obliges us to ask and answer. That is, I do not assess the norms found in Egypt by judging whether or not they conform to secular standards, because those standards are seldom clear, highly contested, and often changing anyway. What I explore instead are the underlying, longstanding questions against which those norms are continually adduced, established, contested, and transformed as answers. I see secularism as a problem-space—a historical ensemble of questions and attached stakes; the question that anchors this historical ensemble is where to draw the line between religion and politics and what the limits of religion in society ought to be; the attached stakes are those rights and liberties typically identified with liberalism—such as equality, tolerance, and freedom of belief. That these questions and stakes are longstanding is evident; that the answers to them have been changing and contested is equally clear. What is important to note, however, is that though the problem-space of secularism is relatively recent historically (in medieval Christian and Muslim times, for example, a principled distinction between religion and politics was not typically seen to be connected to a range of fundamental rights and liberties)—it has now become indispensable to the practical intelligibility of our ways of life and to many of the ethical positions we take. It is difficult to remain indifferent to it.

It has been historically, and remains today, the case that the state has the right to ultimately decide the central questions that constitute the problem-space of secularism. This right of decision is, and has been, an expression of the principle and practice of the state’s sovereign power. We can therefore say that the power of secularism is not the power of the norm but of the question and of the sovereignty that decides it. The question of whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state is but one manifestation of this power; that it has been continually asked both in and outside of Egypt is just one indication that the country is fully subsumed within the problem-space of secularism, as are Israel, the United States, England, France, Germany, and many other states that continue to exhibit secular-religious ambiguities and that stake fundamental freedoms upon their clarification. And this will remain the case until the question of where to draw a line between religion and politics is no longer deemed necessary to ask in relation to the range and distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. (I have discussed these points in greater detail here.)

The approach to secularism as a historical problem-space, and the central role of the state’s sovereign power within it, has consequences for some of the critical claims of political theology. It may also help to frame the recent events in Egypt in a particularly revealing light. The fact that it is state sovereignty that ultimately decides where to draw a line between religion and politics means that it is a power that stands, importantly, prior to religion and politics. Since it stands prior to both, it cannot be pinned down to either. In other words, pace Carl Schmitt, some significant political concepts are not secularized theological concepts. This is especially the case with state sovereignty, because it stands prior to religion and politics and decides the distinction between them. Importantly, however, while state sovereign power stands prior to religion and politics, it is not indifferent to the question of how to distinguish and separate them.

This conception of state sovereignty contrasts with the manifestation of sovereignty that we saw in the protests. From the vantage point of the tradition of democratic legitimacy, the protests were a manifestation of pure popular sovereignty. I will contrast this to state sovereignty by calling it “bare sovereignty.” Like state sovereignty, bare sovereignty stands prior to religion and politics. Unlike state sovereignty, however, this bare sovereignty is utterly indifferent to the question of where to draw a line between them. It stands apart from the modern game of defining and distinguishing religion and politics, and does not partake of it. Not surprisingly, the protests expressed every potential language of justice, secular or religious, but embraced none. In the sense that it stands prior to religion and politics, and that it is indifferent to the question of their distinction, the bare sovereignty manifested by the protest movement stands outside the problem-space of secularism. In that sense, it represents a genuinely asecular power.

(Bare sovereignty is therefore much more than, and significantly different from, the principle of “we the people” that is formally used to justify state sovereignty within the democratic tradition. That principle has been frequently used by the state to justify various impositions and exceptions upon the population it governs. Bare sovereignty, however, breaks through this principle of justification; indeed, bare sovereignty is not a principle at all, but an exceptional existential moment, an expression of power that arises from the potentialities intrinsic to a given mode of life. For more on this point, see the remarks of legal and political theorist Samera Esmeir.)

Why have I chosen the term “asecular,” and not, say, “non-secular” or “post-secular,” to describe the power manifested by these protests? The term “non-secular” is too easily confused with the notion of the religious. And unlike post-secularity, asecularity is not a temporal marker. It allows for the possibility that asecularity has, in different forms, always been with us, even from within the traditions from which state secularity arises. Explorations of post-secularity typically try to identify the emergence of new norms. Such attempts fail to recognize that the process of identifying and distinguishing secular from non-secular norms is part of what secularism is, and that this process is integral to its power. In contrast, the term asecularity specifies a situation not where norms are no longer secular, but where the questions against which such norms are adduced and contested as answers are no longer seen as necessary. It is a situation where we can be genuinely indifferent to those questions, the ways that particular stakes are attached to them, and their seeming indispensability to our ways of life.  As a result, such moments open up spaces for us to think beyond our current predicaments. Here, it is worth noting that the condition of asecularity manifested by these protests was also associated with a genuine ethos of democratic sensibility.

In regard to this connection, Talal Asad makes some important remarks, with which I would like to end. In an article entitled “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics” (forthcoming in Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Robert Orsi, ed.), he distinguishes between “democratic sensibility as an ethos” and “democracy as the political system of the state,” and goes on to say that:

the former . . . involves the desire for mutual care, distress at the infliction of pain and indignity, concern for the truth more than for immutable subjective rights, the ability to listen and not merely tell, and the willingness to evaluate behavior without being judgmental toward others; it tends toward greater inclusivity. The latter is jealous of its sovereignty, defines and protects the subjective rights of its citizens (including their right to ‘religious freedom’), infuses them with nationalist fervor, invokes bureaucratic rationality in governing them justly; it is fundamentally exclusive. My point is not to make an invidious comparison between sensibility and politics, not to argue that the two are necessarily incompatible. I simply ask whether the latter undermines the former—and if it does, to what extent.

Following Asad, we might say that the problem-space of secularism falls within the purview of the state, its sovereignty, and its expanding regulatory capacities. But what this manifestation of asecular, bare sovereignty shows us is that it may not be necessary to have a principled distinction between religion and politics to express an ethos of democratic sensibility. Or, to put it more precisely, one may not be obliged to ask and answer the question of where to draw the line between religion and politics in order to foster the mutual care, attunement to pain and distress, concern for truth, non-judgmental disposition, and tendency toward inclusion by which Asad characterizes this ethos. Indeed, the only way to obtain it might be to be indifferent to the question of their distinction and the set of stakes historically attached to it. This might be one way to construe Asad’s statement at the end of the essay, where he writes: “One might suggest, finally, that the modern idea of religious belief (protected as a right in the individual and regulated institutionally) is a critical function of the liberal democratic nation-state but not of democratic sensibility.”

I thank Samera Esmeir and Saba Mahmood for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this piece. I also thank Talal Asad, especially for his help in clarifying my ideas on bare sovereignty.

“I made a video asking people not to be scared, asking how long will we live in fear, that we should go to the streets and that there are plenty of men in Egypt, and we can protect ourselves from Mubarak’s thugs. Now I’m getting many threatening calls from Mubarak’s people ordering me not to leave my home, and saying that if I do I will be killed along with my family.”
——Asma Mahfouz, to BBC Arabic Television

A young Egyptian woman willing to put her life on the line used Facebook to issue this clarion call to her compatriots. On February 25, they went out by the thousands. During the following days, their numbers swelled into the millions. The Revolution of 2011 had started. On February 11, the eighteenth day of the Revolution, President Mubarak was ousted and the stage of building a new Egypt began.

The youth-driven Revolution of 2011, with its call for freedom and justice, is inscribing a new feminism, with a fresh lexicon and syntax. The new feminism—which does not go by the name “feminism,” but by its spirit—redefines the words freedom, liberation, justice, dignity, democracy, equality, and rights. It creates its own syntax, which, the dictionary reminds us, is the “arrangement of words to show their connection and relation.” It announces itself from deep within the Revolution, which aims to resurrect the fundamental principles and rights of citizens and human beings that were wantonly trampled down by the Mubarak government. The new feminism might be called, simply, “freedom, equality and justice for all.” It asserts itself in actions, straight-forwardness, and courage.

Over the course of eighteen days, Midan Tahrir, or Liberation Square, the geographical center of Cairo and the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, became a swirling kaleidoscope of images of freedom, equality, and justice in the making, with the whole world looking on. Saturday, February 12, the first day Egypt woke up without its harsh dictator of thirty years at the helm of a repressive regime, was the first day in the in the new life of this ancient country. Young women and men who had gone out to sweep away the tyrannies, inequalities, and injustices could be seen on this day with brooms in hand, now literally sweeping the streets clean. With bottles of detergent and brushes in hand, they wiped the walls around the square. They even scoured the pedestals of the lion statues at the Kasr al-Nil Bridge, where the “Battle of the Bridge” erupted on the first Friday of the Revolution, and where the police hurled tear gas at the peaceful demonstrators making their way to Midan Tahrir to practice democracy their own way, feet—not boots—on the ground, when all other avenues were blocked.

Embedded feminism

In the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the youth were joined by citizens of all ages—workers, students, professionals, women and men, Muslims and Christians. It was a populist movement mobilized in cyberspace and through local networks, and acted out on national soil. The new feminism is a feminism embedded in revolution. It is so fused with the revolution that to use the term “feminism” seems redundant or superfluous, even anachronistic, and we have just observed that the revolutionary actors themselves do not use it. Yet feminism possesses conceptual and explanatory power, and so we employ it analytically. At the core of feminism is a call for the practice of equality and justice for women, who as a group have suffered historically from systemic inequality and injustice. Women in different parts of the world—Egypt among them—have on many occasions organized to take for themselves the rights that have been withheld from them. They have done so both in their own feminist movements and within broader social and political movements and configurations. Early in the last century, for instance, Egyptian women formed the Egyptian Feminist Union, to fight for their rights as women while they worked simultaneously within the national liberation movement. In so doing, they set a precedent for multi-level activism. Egyptian feminists understood from the beginning that the equality and justice that they sought for women was of a piece with equality and justice for all.

Over the years, activists in Egypt seeking human rights, inclusive of women’s rights and social justice, pushed strenuously for reform. They tried to use classical methods—the vote, the press, television and radio, and public demonstrations—but elections were rigged, the media controlled, and public demonstrations met with violence, which for women often included sexual harassment, molestation, and rape. Reform movements typically involve campaigns focused on particular causes, including causes specific to women. In Egypt, as attempts to reform the existing political system were repeatedly thwarted—that is, brutally rendered impossible—by the state, revolution became the only way, and revolution demands a major overhaul of the political and social order, indeed, that the old system be swept away altogether.

In the twenty-first century, the tools of revolution have drastically changed, while the methods of state repression, as we have seen recently and vividly in Egypt, remain archaic and crude. The regime’s methods stemmed from the arrogant belief that an autocratic regime, with its vast power and violent means of repression, is unassailable. Autocrats take for granted that constitutions can be rewritten at will from on high to extend state power and impose their own rules for succession; that sham elections can produce compliant parliaments; and that the military, policy, intelligence, and security apparatuses possess limitless authority to muzzle citizens.

It is Egypt’s youth who have mastered the tools of the twenty-first century—information and communications technologies—and who are at home in cyberspace, a “country” in which they are free even while they remain shackled in their homeland. It is the youth who possess a belief in ideals, a vision, and a healthy impatience. Navigating the Internet, and with careful coordination on the ground, undaunted they mounted a peaceful assault upon the unmitigated, suffocating power of tyranny and oppression that had left no segment of society untouched.

Cairo’s Midan Tahrir has been called the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, whose topography extends to Alexandria, Suez, and cities and towns throughout the country, including even the oasis city of Kharga, deep in the Western Desert of Upper Egypt. The choreography of shouting, gesticulating, dancing young men and women, joined by Egyptians of all ages, was caught on live feeds and transmitted instantaneously across the globe. It was captured on film and videos and recorded on cell phones and digital cameras by demonstrators and reporters. This rich visual and oral album displays a gender pastiche of women and men side by side—clusters upon clusters of women amid seas of men, women and men shoulder to shoulder, and families with small children. The demonstrators and their supporters all craved the same thing: an end to the tyranny of the dictator and his corrupt regime, and the emergence of a free society with equal opportunity for all. They called for an end to the inequities of gender, class, and connection that formed the tight and insidious web of patriarchal hierarchy.

The downfall of authoritarianism and the building of a new egalitarian and just order

With the dismantling of the three-decade-old autocracy of Mubarak—itself a continuation of the previous autocracy—and the hierarchies that spawned spirals of injustice as people’s basic rights were hijacked, the people of Egypt, led by its youth, grabbed for themselves the chance to rebuild.

The builders of the new Egypt want nothing less than full equality in law and practice, justice, and dignity for all. As we speak, a special committee is drafting a new constitution (to supplant the previous one that was arbitrarily altered by Mubarak). Laws that undermine the equality, justice, and dignity of the citizens of Egypt must either go or be drastically overhauled. The Muslim Personal Status Code (also referred to as family law) structures a model of the family based on a patriarchal understanding of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This law, by formalizing male authority and power, shores up a system of gender inequality. The husband is cast as the head of family, with the attendant privileges and prerogatives, along with obligations of protection and support, while the wife, as subordinate, owes obedience to her husband and must render services in return for his support and protection, whether she wants it or not.

Feminists, as well as other reformers, have tried since the early twentieth century to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code. Over the years, they obtained only minor adjustments in the law, which did not disturb the patriarchal family model. A common excuse for this failure to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code is that it is religious law, part of the shar ‘iah, and therefore sacred and immutable. The confusion of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, which is man-made, with the shar ‘iah, which is the path to a virtuous life, ascertained from the Qur’an, has been a potent deterrent of change. However, it is possible to enact an egalitarian family law based in Islamic jurisprudence, as Morocco did in 2004, with the overhaul of the Mudawanna that recast husband and wife as equal heads of the family. It is also theoretically possible, if politically difficult, to enact into law a secular egalitarian model of the family that would reflect the spirit of religion and its ideals of equality, justice, and dignity, the ulemah, or religious scholars, in Turkey say their country’s secular family law does.

With the overthrow of the authoritarian state in Egypt and the dismantling of the buttresses of its power, and with legal reform already underway with the creation of the committee tasked with drafting a new constitution, equality and justice in law and practice now have a renewed chance at realization. The harsh inequities that authoritarianism enforces were there for all to see, in their starkest, most extreme form, in the practices of the regime that the youth eventually took down. Will the youth now be willing to accept patriarchal authoritarianism sustained by the old family law, a law so out of sync with contemporary social realities—with their own realities? It is very hard to see by what logic they could do so. Freedom, equality, and justice cannot be reserved for some only. For the youth, female and male, who raised this revolution, freedom, equality, and justice are surely non-negotiable, and dignity, the order of the day. This is the essence of the new feminism, call it what you will.

Thomas Farr, in his recent post, links the mass protests in the Arab world, combined with the persecution of Christian minorities in the region, and what he called “the Obama administration’s striking indifference to America’s statutory policy of advancing international religious freedom.” In my view, if the Obama administration is to do anything with respect to the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), it should seek to repeal it and to dismantle the whole policy and institutional structure that it entails, because this statutory policy is an insult to and betrayal of victims of human rights violations throughout the world, including Christian minorities in the Arab world. As I argued earlier, “Religious freedom can neither be advanced in isolation of other fundamental human rights nor sustained by imperial imposition.” Farr recalls that I, among others, strongly oppose the IRFA, but he does not respond to the reasons I gave for my position.

In this post, I will attempt to clarify my position by offering a historical view of how our celebration of what we now call the American Revolution requires us to support the maturation of what are now “mass protests” into the Arab Revolutions. The primary role in that process must be that of Arabs themselves, with each society acting in its own context. But the role of citizens of the United States is a matter of individual personal responsibility, because it is immediately connected to our attitudes and behavior. To the question posed in Thomas Farr’s title—“Where lies wisdom, where folly?”—I say that the universal measure is always the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. My strong opposition to the IRFA reflects my opposition to the United States’ failure to uphold the Golden Rule in its foreign policies. If the United States wishes to preach to others the imperative of protecting human rights, it must first apply that injunction to itself. My point is not that civil rights are violated in the United States, though there is sufficient reason for concern on that count; rather, the point is that domestic respect for the civil rights of citizens is not the same as the protection of human rights for all human beings equally, by virtue of their humanity and not their status as citizens. The United States does not have the moral standing and political legitimacy to uphold human rights anywhere in the world, unless it is willing to be judged by the same standards that it claims to apply to others.

I speak here of the official and consistent policy, commonly referred to as the Bricker Amendment of 1953, of not ratifying any human rights treaty that would require changes in the laws and practices of the United States. The unmitigated folly of this policy is that the United States claims the right to tell other countries to change their laws and practices to conform with human rights standards when it has officially and publically declared that it will never do so itself. It is ironic, also, that the United States refuses to do so, when it has less reason to fear being found at fault than many states that have been willing to submit to judgment according to international human rights standards. Freedom of religion must be protected everywhere, not because it is “America’s ‘First Freedom,” as Thomas Farr calls it, but because it is one fundamental universal human right among others. Wisdom, for the United States, lies in being part a global joint venture to protect human rights, and folly lies in the pretension to dictate to others what it is not willing to apply to itself. It is this utterly untenable position that I called “the ‘White Man’s Burden’ to civilize the rest of humanity,” which Thomas Farr found to be a “highly provocative charge.” Incidentally, this phrase was coined by the English poet Rudyard Kipling in reference to the imperialist venture of the United States in the Philippine Islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As to the title of this post, history is what individual people do or fail to do, especially in purportedly democratic states like the U.S. What the Obama administration or Congress do or fail to do cannot be disassociated from the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the United States. My title is meant to emphasize that it is because of the success of the American Revolution over time that citizens of the United States can now change the policies of their country to a greater extent than Arabs are able to, at least in the short term. My point is not that Arabs are helpless victims who must wait for the United States to save them from their regimes; rather, the issue for me is our responsibility in making or changing the policies of the United States here and now, regardless of what Arabs or any other people can do for themselves in their countries.

In my view, our failure to support the capacity of Arabs to do what we take for granted will doom the American Revolution to failure over time. To briefly explain what some readers may find too provocative an assertion, nothing human can be perfect, and all human achievements will diminish and eventually come to an end. Just as it has evolved since its inception, the United States, as the outcome of the American Revolution, will also end in time. There will be a time when there is no United States, though people will continue to live and, I hope, thrive in this part of the world. How soon and complete the decline and fall of the United States will be depends on our ability to uphold the values and actions that sustain this political experiment in its historical context. It is also important to recall here that both the rise and fall of the United States, like any other human process, unfolds over time, that is, in history. So, the fact that we don’t see the demise of the United States as imminent does not mean that it is not in the process of happening. In fact, it is bound to happen, as with all things human.

The Golden Rule is also instructive in regard to the obsession of political and opinion leaders, the media, and the U.S. public at large with the risk of the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt and other countries in the Arab world. The unstated premise and conclusion of this obsession seems to be that we should not support democratization in the Arab world if the likely or even remotely possible outcome is the coming of “Islamists” to power in this strategically vital region for “American interests.” Although I am not able to prove my claim, I am confident that a very similar discourse was current in Britain at the time of the American Revolution. The imperial elite of Britain must have been worried about the negative impact of the American Revolution on their interests, without any consideration of what that Revolution meant for the freedom and well-being of the American revolutionaries and their society.

Let me try to explain further, in the hope of minimizing the risk of miscommunication, which is particularly serious when we deal with profound transformations that challenge our deeply held assumptions and prejudices. I personally am opposed to the Muslim Brothers and have struggled to challenge their views of Islam and politics since the 1960s. Their ideological confusion and devious politics have caused horrendous loss and pain in my home country, Sudan. I therefore have no illusions about the serious costs of their coming to power anywhere, especially in a country like Egypt. My concern, however, is how to effectively confront and combat that risk, because I realize how serious it is. This is not an attempt to downplay the drastic implications of the Muslims Brothers coming to power. But it is from this perspective that I call for unconditional commitment to equal liberty for myself and others, especially those who disagree with me. In fact, I am free only to the extent that my opponents are free. My friends do not need this commitment from me, because they have my love and support. It is my opponents who need my principled commitment. My primary focus here is on what Muslim societies need to do for themselves and for their own reasons, regardless of what the United States wants or needs.

The primary task of sustainable democratization and protection of human rights throughout the Muslim world is for local populations to expose and challenge the myth of an Islamic state—to realize that Sharia cannot, ever, be enforced by the state. When Sharia is enacted as state law, it becomes the secular political will of the state and not the religious law of Islam. Muslims must realize that a secular state is a necessary condition of the possibility of a Muslim person and society. It is equally clear, however, that only Muslims can do this by and for themselves, within their own societies. This is the only morally legitimate and politically viable source of democracy and self-determination. The failure of the United States to stand by this principle in the case of the Arab Revolution is a betrayal of the values of the American Revolution. It can also be reasonably argued that such “conditionality” of support for democratic transformation, dependent on the exclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a pretext for continuing neocolonial political domination and economic exploitation of the Middle East.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a coalition of social, religious, and political movements, which can assume a variety of organizational forms and operate through a range of strategies. Whether they operate openly and legally through “front” organizations or are forced to work underground, their religious and ideological appeal has several sources. One source, for instance, is their ability to present themselves as the “true voice” of their communities, the “authentic” expression of their people’s right to self-determination. More concretely, they have been able to present themselves, until very recently, as the legitimate and effective alternative to corrupt and oppressive regimes, like that of Mubarak in Egypt or bin Ali in Tunisia. Another source of legitimacy is their appeal to romantic and simplistic notions of Islamic history, as if it were a computer “software” program that present-day Muslims could simply “install and run” as a panacea to all of the social, political, and economic problems of the post-colonial condition. Moreover, Islamists thrive under conditions of political repression, because of their ability to operate through mosques and “Islamic centers,” while benefiting from popular sympathy as “victims” of secular oppressive regimes. As we have seen through decades of experience, in the Arab world in particular, Islamists tend to blame the lack of democratic freedoms for their failure to explain clear and specific programs for socio-economic and political reform.

In other words, having to operate under oppressive conditions enables them to continue to speak in vague, emotional terms about their being the “obvious and natural” alternative, without having to explain what they intend to do and how. As these and other possible factors clearly show, the response to the risk of Islamists coming to power in the Arab world must begin by allowing all Islamists, including the Muslim Brothers of Egypt, to operate legally and openly, in free and fair competition with all other political forces in the country. Ensuring democratic governance and protection of human rights for Islamists is the only way to expose and defeat their confused ideology and dangerous politics. As we have seen in the case of Hamas in Gaza, conditional support for democratic transition is counterproductive, because it enhances the perceived legitimacy and political efficacy of Islamists in their own societies.

It is therefore clear that both principled and pragmatic reasons unite in urging unconditional support for democratization, regardless of narrow, short-term calculations of the risks it may pose to our interests. After all, Muslims are by far the primary victims of Islamist violence and authoritarianism. Terrorism is a human problem, not an American or Western problem. In the same way that Israel remains democratic under constant threats to its very existence, Arabs states can and should be democratic despite the risks of Islamist politics. If Islamists come to power in any country, we will deal with that reality, just like the people of the country have to deal with it, though with fewer resources than we have and greater potential cost to their societies than we will have to cope with. In the final analysis, this is the only way to individual freedom, social justice, and sustainable political stability.

Much commentary on the recent events in Tahrir Square, throughout Egypt, and across the Middle East has inevitably recapitulated the compulsion of the political in relation to Islam. Despite the deeply ambiguous relationship between the Egyptian pro-democracy demonstrations and politically-oriented Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, pundits from across the political spectrum have seized on the relationship between Islam and politics as the crux of the matter. Arguments have crystallized around two poles, dystopian and utopian, respectively:  either the dismantling of Hosni Mubarak’s autocracy will yield the nightmare of a theocracy led by the Muslim Brotherhood (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali fulminated in the New York Times on February 3), or the post-Mubarak era will witness the triumph of pluralist, liberal democracy, with the Muslim Brotherhood as one prominent voice among a multitude (as Tariq Ramadan asserted in a recent interview on al-Jazeera).

A frequent refrain in the latter, more optimistic mode of argument is that of the “Turkish Example.” According to this argument, political Islam in Turkey—especially as represented by the current governing party, the AKP—offers an ideal model for the commensuration of Islam and democratic politics, one that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt would do well to follow in the transition away from the Mubarak regime. Ramadan himself articulates this position in his al-Jazeera comments:

Within the Muslim Brotherhood you have trends, you have people who are very close to the Saudis, when it comes to the literalist understanding of Islam, but you have also people very close to the Turkish interpretation of what it means to be faithful to Islam, with the AKP Party [sic.], and the ruling party now in Turkey, and these people for the last sixty years, they were not radicals, they were law-abiding, non-violent, anti-colonialists and they want freedom…If we have to take an example it’s not to go to Iran but also to go to Turkey, where you have people from . . . Erbakan to Erdoğan, people are changing, and there is nothing, nothing that can be said about, you know, Islam is against democracy.

Similarly, the author of a February 6 article in The New York Times, titled “In Turkey’s Example, Some See Map for Egypt,” muses:

Arriving at a template that effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant economics has been a near-impossible dream for Middle East reformers stretching back decades. . . .

But no country in the region has come closer to accomplishing this trick, warts and all, than Turkey. As a result, diplomats and analysts have begun to present the still-incomplete Turkish experiment as a possible road map for Egypt.

It is understandable that analysts and commentators outside of Turkey have seized on the “Turkish Example”—the relationship between Turkish political society and Turkish Islam has undeniably changed remarkably in recent decades. Both the electoral and post-electoral achievements of the AKP, in contrast to its predecessor, the Welfare Party (which was effectively shut down by a soft coup in 1997), signal this transformation. Nonetheless, in what remains, I want to urge caution against the valorization of the “Turkish Example” of Muslim politics, for both historical and theoretical reasons. For scholars of contemporary Turkey such as myself, the contention that the AKP represents the successful adaptation of Islam to liberal democracy is odd indeed. The reason for this is simple: the recent success of the AKP has not hinged on the general relationship between democracy and Islam, but rather on the gradual erosion of illiberal Kemalist secularism in Turkey over the past half-century. While the full scope of this process extends beyond my purview here, it broadly concerns the gradual accommodation of Turkey’s political economy to broader neoliberal trends following the military coup of 1980 and the restoration of civilian government in 1983. The political horizons of pious politicians and parties, including Prime Minister Erdoğan and the AKP, have indubitably expanded in the quarter-century since then, but this expansion is only one facet of systemic political-economic change in Turkey. Suffice it to say that it is surely mistaken to glorify (or vilify) the “Turkish Example” of the compatibility between Islam and democracy without attending to the more intricate changes that Turkey has undergone recently—processes that bear a complex, often ambiguous relationship to “Islam” in any abstract sense.

My theoretical point concerns the compulsion of the political in discussing Islam more generally. What are the foreclosures of understanding Islam solely in political terms? Whether in Turkey, Egypt, or elsewhere, why does the analysis and assessment of Islam privilege, presuppose, and entail political argument? As Talal Asad has persuasively argued, the politicization of religion is a definitive feature of ‘the secular.’ From the secular perspective Asad describes, the supposedly fraught relationship between religion and politics (which secularism posits as necessarily problematic) exhausts the interest and importance of religion itself.  My final point follows directly from this observation—the compulsion to discuss and comprehend Islam in solely political terms is a political fact in its own right. The compulsion of the political is a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that compels Muslims to account for themselves and their faith in strictly political language, because it assumes that Islam is inherently political. Rather than continue to ask how Islam relates to politics—rather than repeat the compulsion—I suggest that we begin to interrogate the difficulty of thinking of Islam non-politically. It is this question that urgently demands attention and address. The goal of this interrogation should not be to demonstrate, in antithetical fashion, that Islam is essentially non-political—to do so would be to remain within the binary logic that essentializes both Islam and politics. Rather, we should endeavor to speak truth to the powers that insist that Islam is necessarily, monolithically political, and that thereby render Islam itself monolithic and homogeneous.

However, another wall is still standing: the widely perceived threat of the “Islamic state.” Observers in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East worry that these revolutions could morph into “religious revolutions” and lead to “Islamic states.” They invariably ask: “What is the role of the Islamists?” “Will they take over the state?” These fears are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the popular mobilizations in Tunisia and Egypt, of the relation between Islam and politics in the modern Arab Middle East, and on a narrow political imagination. These observers believe that Tunisia and Egypt can be one of only two things: a “secular” dictatorship or an Islamic republic on the Iranian model. This paradigm is plain wrong.

Firstly, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were based on demands that were deeply political—in a context of high unemployment, widespread corruption, and great economic plight—and that had little to do with the alternative between secularism and Islamism. Few if any slogans echoing Islamist, leftist, or secularist projects were heard during the demonstrations, even if members of the Islamist, liberal, and leftist oppositions participated. Like the rest of the world, Islamist movements were taken by surprise by the youth’s strong engagement in the streets. Islamists in both countries kept a low profile at the beginning of the demonstrations, partly for strategic reasons: they did not want to be cited as a pretext for the repression of the movement. “Work, freedom and national dignity” (shughl, hurriyya, karama wataniyya) was the slogan most repeated by protesters in Tunisia. Draped in national flags, the Tunisians, like the Egyptians, chanted their national anthem in the streets: “if one day the people desire life, destiny must answer the call.” Sung by men and women marching in the streets of Tunisian cities, the national anthem contributed to a widely shared narrative in which the people were both the subject and the object of a new national liberation, this time not from a foreign occupier but from internal oppression.

This narrative of liberation from oppression resonates deeply with the classical political vocabulary of Islam as well as with liberal views about freedom. The Islamic vocabulary of resistance to oppression uses the concept of nasiha, advice or admonition to the sovereign. Nasiha demands courage and determination for those who use it against an oppressive tyrant. The demands of the Tunisians and Egyptians can also be read in terms of the European conception of democracy, which recognizes the political significance of “the people” (al-sha‘b) as a sum of individual preferences. Tunisians and Egyptians have been living under the weight of authoritarian, inefficient, and corrupt modern state bureaucracies endowed with a pervasive and often brutal power over people’s private lives and bodies. In both countries, the hallmark institutions of liberal democracy—elections and political parties, in particular—have been emptied of their true meaning. Despite their chambers of representatives and frequent elections, which are all tailored for the continuity of authoritarianism, the only counter-power left in Egypt and Tunisia today is that of the people. Tunisians and Egyptians demand the end of oppression and corruption, and an ethical political life, but during the uprisings, they did not take pains to explicitly use one genealogy of freedom—Islamic or liberal—over the other, because, for them, resistance to oppression is not defined by its cultural origins. It is not that “secularists” and “Islamists”—who are typically seen as the two main political camps in Tunisia and Egypt—have built a temporary alliance for the sake of revolutionary success. Rather, a new generation has taken the lead of political protest and has directly confronted the state with narratives that transcend those usually used by these two camps. This does not mean that members of the secularist and Islamist constituencies will not emerge and re-articulate their old discourses. They have already done so. However, a younger generation has opened up the possibility of a new political order in which these two constituencies will be less salient.

Secondly, contrary to what is often assumed, the Egyptian and Tunisian states are not “secular.” Their constitutions (since 1923, for Egypt, and 1959, for Tunisia) state that “Islam is the religion of the state.” In Egypt, since 1980, Article 2 has also stated that “the principles of Islamic sharia” are “the main source of legislation.” These post-colonial regimes have always engaged with religion, producing and trying to impose on their people their own interpretations of Islam. They have controlled and reformed religious institutions and built their own religious establishments. The Tunisian and Egyptian regimes have accomplished this in different ways, according to their specific histories. However, both have used Islam as a tool for social engineering, and they have, at the same time, attempted to separate political dissent from religious inspiration, forbidding “the use of Islam for political aims,” in spite of their own instrumentalization of Islamic narratives and institutions. Nonetheless, these regimes are commonly seen as “secular.” Why? Because they have waged a war against Islamist movements who also seek to define politics on the basis of Islam but stand against the religious monopoly exerted by their authoritarian states. However, these states are not “secular”: they deeply and systematically engage with Islam and build an overlap between the structure of the state and religious authority. In a way, the famous formula devised by the Muslim Brotherhood, that Islam is “Din wa dawla” (religion and state), has actually been implemented at a practical level by the post-colonial state from its inception. The state is actually ahead of the Islamists in this domain. The difference, however, between the Muslim Brothers’ ideal vision of Islamic politics and the practical operations of state and religion in Tunisia and Egypt lies in the fact that these states have also organized specific regimes of secularity. They have delimited the domains that Islam is authorized to occupy, most often the “social” arena, while they have excluded Islam from the sphere of political competition—for instance, by making “religious parties” illegal. It is within and under the constraints of this regime of secularity—which instrumentalizes Islam, limits its reach and shapes its interpretations—that Islamist movements operate and express their political concepts. To give only one example, Rashid al-Ghannushi, the historical leader of the Tunisian Islamist movement al-Nahda, declared that his movement would not be a “religious party,” but a party whose reference (marja‘iyya) is Islam, using a language similar to the Turkish AKP or the Moroccan PJD. He has underlined his acceptance of the Tunisian Personal Status Code, imposed by President Bourguiba in 1956. This legal code makes polygamy and divorce by repudiation illegal, and Bourguiba took pains at the time of its drafting to articulate its content with an Islamic justification. Embedded in this general regime of secularity, the mainstreamed Islamists have shown their desire to be authorized as a political party and to take part in the electoral game in order to eventually participate in policy making. They are eager to take part in the political process, as evidenced by their cautious and ambivalent participation in the “negotiations” with the Egyptian regime before Mubarak stepped down, and by their current demands for a truly transparent and fair political system in Tunisia. This does not mean that the Islamists are necessarily willing to sacrifice their Islamic ideals in order to gain power—eventually experiencing their own “secularization”—or that their commitment to democracy is inauthentic.  Their desire for participation means that the post-colonial state’s regime of secularity, which includes Islam, has forcibly shaped the Islamists’ narratives and repertoires of action. Hence, in Tunisia and Egypt, the debate will not be one opposing a “secularist” camp advocating for separation of state and religion and an “Islamist” camp in favor of their overlap. Rather than being about whether the state can engage with Islam, the debate will be about how the state will continue to define its relationship with religion.

Thirdly, the hegemony of the state’s regime of secularity also explains why Islamists do not provide a clear description of what an “Islamic” state would be, in addition to the fact that their ruthless repression by the regimes in power has forced them to focus on strategies for survival. Sunni Islamist movements, unlike the Shi‘i mullahs who took over the state in Iran after the 1979 revolution, have not devised a precise description of Islamic governance. Based on the notion of the emulation of the religious reference (marja’ al-taqlid), Khomeini invented the concept of government by the jurist (wilayat al-faqih). In contrast, nothing resembling a clear theory of Islamic government appears in the writings of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers or the Tunisian Islamist movement (al-Nahda). They do not spell out precisely the operations that would be at play in an Islamic state. Admittedly, the elusiveness of the concept of an “Islamic state” in Sunni Islamist narratives does not mean that Islamists will be absent from the political scene in the near future. They form a strong political and social current and will participate in political competition if given the opportunity. However, they will have to come to terms with this new political power that has emerged in the region—the youth—organized on a totally different structure and focused on a critique and fundamental distrust of the authoritarian modern state. The indeterminacy of their vision for the state—when confronted with the youth’s fundamental distrust for the previous regimes—may create greater political potential than is currently imagined.

The youth’s critique of the state denounces the confiscation of all opportunities: the opportunity to work, to participate in politics, to freely and fully express political opinions, as well as to express religious piety privately and publicly, and, more broadly, the opportunity to make their own choices. It is worth stressing that these demands go beyond Tunisia, Egypt, or Iran—some of the countries that have been recently swept by protests.  Indeed, it is not just authoritarian regimes that attract these critiques throughout the world, but also liberal democracies, whose states do not always allow all types of freedoms—such as the freedom of religious expression in the public sphere—and do not ensure political and economic opportunities for all their citizens without discrimination. In that sense, Muhammad Bouazizi is more than just Tunisian.

*  *  *

NS: What was the first thing that crossed your mind when you heard that President Mubarak had fallen from power in Egypt?

GS: That it can be done. In past years, there have been a lot of misconceptions about nonviolent action. People used to think that it was very weak and that only the violence of war could remove extreme dictators. Here was another example that shows this myth isn’t true. If people are disciplined and courageous, they can do it.

NS: Did anything surprise you about how the events unfolded? Did it teach you anything new?

GS: One thing that surprised me were the numbers, and the spread of people participating—that’s just amazing in itself. A second thing was that, in Egypt, people were saying they had lost their fear. That’s a step Gandhi was always calling for, and one that even I thought was a little too hopeful. But that seems to have been what happened in Egypt. When people lose their fear of an oppressor’s regime, the oppressor is in deep trouble. A third thing was how well they maintained nonviolent discipline. We heard reports on television that, when there was an area where things were getting a little difficult and might break out into violence, people were chanting among themselves, “Peaceful, peaceful, peaceful.” That was quite amazing too.

NS: How direct an influence do you think your ideas had on the organizers of the protests in Tunisia and Egypt?

GS: I would like to know! I don’t.

NS: Were you in any kind of contact with organizers there?

GS: No.

NS: Or with people who were in contact with organizers there?

GS: We might have—years ago—met with somebody. But no direct contact.

NS: To what degree do you think these revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were spontaneous and unexpected, as opposed to being planned and orchestrated in advance?

GS: One of my colleagues has been doing a study of the Tunisian case, so I know a little bit about that. It happened as a result of courageous action by somebody who died and inspired others to protest, and that aroused more protest. It spread from the poor areas far away from Tunis until it finally got up to the capital, without advance planning and apparently without too much detailed knowledge of nonviolent struggle. It appears that in Egypt it may have been a very different situation.

NS: Do you have a sense of what made the Egyptian people choose a nonviolent approach? Do you think it was necessity of the moment, or a prior commitment?

GS: It should have been a necessity. If a dictatorship or highly oppressive regime has all of the troops and weapons, and you’re in the opposition, it’s stupid to try fighting them on their own ground, with their own weapons. You must choose something else. But people don’t always do that—they sometimes try to use violence anyhow, which usually produces disasters.

NS: Were you concerned about the outbreaks of violence among protesters, like the throwing of stones and the burning of police stations?

GS: Yes. I think there has been a lot of mythology about stones—that they’re largely nonviolent. But they’re likely either to verge over into greater violence, which would be self-defeating, or to intimidate people back into passivity, because their stones didn’t bring down the walls of Jericho.

NS: Do you think that other governments in the Middle East—say, Bahrain, Yemen, and Jordan—will be able to adapt to these tactics and prevent them from being as effective?

GS: They will try, inevitably. And those governments will be consulting among each other, probably with the governments of Iran, China, and other places where they don’t like this kind of resistance. I would expect that there will be a lot of sharing of information about how they can get rid of this disease of people power.

NS: How significant a factor is internet technology? Do you think it has been over-emphasized by the media?

GS: I don’t know very much about technology, unfortunately—I’ve been busy with other things instead! All of the reports are that it’s played a major role in both Tunisia and Egypt. What matters, though, is not the technology itself, which is a tool of communication. It’s what you communicate. That’s where my work has been focused.

NS: How has media coverage in general about the revolutions seemed to you?

GS: It seems that it played a very large role. But there are still some problems with the journalism. For example, if there has been a violent repression, or if somebody gets killed, they call it a violent demonstration. But it wasn’t the demonstration that was violent—it was the regime that was killing people. Also, sometimes, they say something is a riot when it is actually a disciplined, nonviolent demonstration. The terminology is very important.

NS: While watching the coverage, many of us were struck by the images of Muslims and Christians protecting each other while praying. Do you think religion was a significant factor?

GS: Not from anything that I have found so far.

NS: Nonviolence and pacifism have often been historically associated with religions, like Jainism and Christian “peace churches”—

GS: Yes, that’s right.

NS: Is religion at all essential to motivating nonviolent movements, or can the ideas transcend their religious origins?

GS: It’s not even a question anymore. They have transcended religious boundaries. If people come from any particular religious group and are inspired to be nonviolent and to resist—not just to be nonviolent and passive—that’s fine. But don’t claim that they have to believe in a certain religion. Historically, for centuries and even millennia, that has not been true. Nonviolent struggle, as I understand it, is not based on what people believe. It’s what they do.

NS: But don’t cultural differences make some societies more likely to act nonviolently than others? Or is everybody equally equipped to do so, independently of their culture?

GS: Setting culture aside for the moment, not everybody is equally equipped to do anything. But when The Politics of Nonviolent Action was first published in 1973, the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead said in her review that what I was maintaining—without saying so, in so many words—was that this is a cross-cultural phenomenon.

NS: There have certainly been stereotypes suggesting that Muslims couldn’t do something like this, that they can only use violence.

GS: It’s utter nonsense. In the North-West Frontier Province of British India, the Muslim Pashtuns, who had a reputation for great violence, became even braver and more disciplined nonviolent soldiers than the Hindus, according to Gandhi. It’s a very important case. And when my essay “From Dictatorship to Democracy” was published in Indonesia, it carried an introduction by Abdurrahman Wahid, a Muslim leader who later became president.

NS: Are you concerned about whether Egyptian Islamist factions will be reliable partners in bringing about a more democratic society?

GS: I don’t really know Egyptian society, much less Egyptian Islamists. But I do know that the Muslim Brotherhood is interested in nonviolent struggle, and several years ago it became—to my knowledge—the first organization in Egypt to put “From Dictatorship to Democracy” on their website in Arabic.

NS: How about the military, which has now taken control in Egypt?

GS: Again, I would have to know the Egyptian military. I don’t.

NS: But, historically, when a military has taken control, has this purveyor of violence become a trustworthy caretaker of nonviolent revolutions?

GS: Not reliably. There’s always the risk that when they get control of the government, they’ll stay, thinking that they know better than the rest of the people. That’s why it’s really important to be prepared for the contingency that there will be either a military or political coup. We have a small booklet on how to prevent coups d’état, and how to resist one if it’s attempted: “The Anti-Coup.” It’s on our website. I’d strongly recommend that people worried about a military or political coup study that and act on it.

NS: What do you think the pro-democracy activists in the Middle East need to do now to ensure that the transition really happens as promised?

GS: Anyone in that situation would need to keep their eyes out and identify what might be danger signals—ways things are moving that are not good in terms of developing and protecting what democracy they’ve gained. They have to figure out in advance what to do when that happens. But we don’t give more specific advice than that.

NS: Why don’t you give advice?

GS: We don’t know these other societies in depth and, therefore, if we gave advice, it would probably be wrong. We do give a kind of advice about the need to think things through ahead of time. We have another booklet on our website, “Self-Liberation,” which is a guide for how people can become competent to plan their own strategies. They have to know their own society in depth: What’s the nature of the regime? Where is it strong, and where is it weak? That’s more complicated than it sounds. They have to know nonviolent struggle in depth, or they can’t plan competently. And, finally, they have to be able to think strategically. Like military strategists, they must plan carefully how to conduct their campaign—not just a battle, but a campaign, in the long term. Mostly, people don’t know how to think strategically, but they need to learn.

NS: How widely disseminated do you believe these ideas have to be? A large percentage of the population in Egypt, for instance, is illiterate.

GS: Sometimes people who are literate are a problem, because they can become tools of whatever propaganda is printed and circulated, and the people who are illiterate are not going to be able to read the propaganda. They’re a little safer!

NS: But do you think that a whole society has to know about nonviolent action before they’re able to undertake it, or can just a small group of leaders have that expertise?

GS: It’s basically very simple: either you do something you’re not supposed to do, or you don’t something you are supposed to do. It’s based not on turning the other cheek, but on basic human stubbornness. Anyone can do it. People don’t have to have a Ph.D. or anything like that to participate. But if you’re going to be planning a strategy for a whole nation, it requires you to know more than that simple principle. We have books that are very long and detailed, and heavily footnoted, and we have things that are maybe ten or fifteen pages, with very simple points. You’ve got to speak to various levels of interest and education.

NS: What do you think is going to be the legacy of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia for nonviolent action elsewhere in the world?

GS: I don’t know. I really don’t. Things spread, especially in the days of technology. But I really don’t know. We don’t have people doing research on the spot. We should have had researchers working full time on this for all these days and weeks, but we don’t have the money to do that, unfortunately. We’re not well-funded. We may have been attracting the world’s attention, but we’ve barely been able to scrape by and do our basic work, for lack of money. There have even been these rumors around that we’re CIA or something, but people who’ve visited our office hear that and burst out laughing—our office is so obviously poverty-stricken! This phenomenon needs more major research.

NS: What do you envision this research would like like? What questions would it take up?

GS: Can people power and nonviolent struggle consistently bring down dictatorships and other oppressors—and, if so, how? What are the key things they need to pay attention to and what are the key ways of acting? What must they avoid? It’s my research into this phenomenon that has enabled me to do all these things and write more practical treatises, like “From Dictatorship to Democracy.” Interdisciplinary studies of this phenomenon and of dictatorships and oppression are very important, and I hope that organizations like the SSRC will give grants to people to do that kind of study. Time after time, I’ve come across people who really want to do work in this field and are competent to do it, but they can’t because they can’t get support. If the SSRC could make this a priority for research, it would get the eternal gratitude of the future.